MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by osigurdson | 2025-07-11 18:11:31+00:00
>> To be fair that might still be the best solution for some situations.

It is arguable. Let's say your team knows Postgres well from a relational standpoint. Now they need to do something messages and require some type of notification / messaging. There is a learning curve here anyway. I'd argue they should spend it on more standard approaches which are not harder to start with. Of course, if you know that your site / service will only be used by yourself and your grandmother do whatever you want (just use a text file or better yet just call her instead).
by wiradikusuma | 2025-07-11 18:11:42+00:00
I've only started using Claude, Gemini, etc in the last few months (I guess it comes with age, I'm no longer interested in trying the latest "tech"). I assume those are "non-agentic" models.

From reading articles online, "agentic" means like you have a "virtual" Virtual Assistant with "hands" that can google, open apps, etc, on their own.

Why not use existing "non-agentic" model and "orchestrate" them using LangChain, MCP etc? Why create a new breed of model?

I'm sorry if my questions sound silly. Following AI world is like following JavaScript world.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-11 18:12:13+00:00
https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ if you need funding, if you don't need funding, spend whatever time you can to get traction/product market fit as fast as you can. When you're not at day job, you're building to reach revenue escape velocity with your own venture so you can move from day job to venture to continue to scale. Make sure you've done your legal homework so your day job can't make any claim to what you're working on.

https://www.startupschool.org/ might also be relevant, free to consume.
by ricardo81 | 2025-07-11 18:12:16+00:00
There may be already existent threads covering my thoughts

Big tech algorithms are filled with absolute dog shit. What were previously information discovery algorithms have been replaced by, basically dog shit.

I have gave up on Facebook, Twitter, and most recently LinkedIn as a millennial. All I see is fantastical nonsense and spam. The rate it's going, if you want to reach someone over 40 in the UK, try Ceefax.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-11 18:12:25+00:00
I’m not sure it is a slippery slope. With a slippery slope we expand the scenario through a sequence of “if X, when what’s to stop Y,” right?

Motorcycle cops are an obvious subset of people who ride motorcycles. It isn’t an extension at all to include them in your logic.

ATVs might be more of an extension. But, I bet if we wanted to we could find all sorts of jobs that are more dangerous than motorcycle riding.

(Edit: just to be specific, you say we have to draw the line somewhere. Well, then where?)
by csours | 2025-07-11 18:12:36+00:00
With Vera Rubin's Large Synoptic Survey Telescope coming online, we'll likely see many more of these. It seems like it would be very difficult to physically intercept any large percentage; what is the next best alternative to physical interception? Lasers? Masers? Comet trail sampling? Pre-staged interceptors?(Interstellar Interloper Interceptor? I'd be interested in entertaining the possibility)
by em-bee | 2025-07-11 18:12:46+00:00
I consider German upbringing to be that of a defeated people

i don't know what you are trying to imply here. how should the feeling of defeat affect the upbringing? (i mean,i am sure there would be an effect, but how would that look like?)

what i can tell you is that the sentiment i experienced was not defeat. after all this is neither our, nor our parents, (and for the current generation also not their grandparents) experience. the feeling we were taught was that of embarrassment, of how could we let that happen and consequently the need to understand how we can avoid that from ever happening again. except for a minority or right wing sympathizers that we keep a close eye on.
by strbean | 2025-07-11 18:14:25+00:00
> No, but thanks for the spot-on imitation of an entitled foreign visitor. The insinuation that somehow it's the local people's fault that they don't want their quaint neighborhood restaurants to become McDonald's is indeed part of the problem.

This seems a little unfair. I think the parent was talking more about restaurants in big cities.

In Tokyo, lines down the block are extremely common, and the lines are primarily Japanese people, not foreigners. Maybe there are Japanese tourists visiting Tokyo, maybe they are Tokyo locals. But it happens with or without foreign tourism.
by itsdrewmiller | 2025-07-11 18:14:41+00:00
The author is quite clear that they are just pointing out that the LVT has some downsides, and are not trying to make any case about its overall value. It's good for LVT supporters to understand the counterarguments and be able to weigh them and rebut them (or change their mind! but hopefully not in this case because the counterarguments are very weak).

I don't understand your "fundamental rule of economics" claim - carbon taxes are a clear counterexample, I would think.
by jfengel | 2025-07-11 18:14:46+00:00
The proposed platform:

* Stop big companies that receive tax dollars from laying off workers who pay taxes.

* Guarantee everyone who wants to work has a decent-paying job, and if the private sector can’t provide it, the government will

* Raise the minimum wage so every family can lead a decent life

* Stop drug company price-gouging and put price controls on food cartels

So... the Democratic party platform, then?

And then these Rust Belt voters vote for Republicans, who despise these goals, and scream epithets at Democrats when they espouse them.

People can say that these are things that they want, but they don't actually vote for them. Democrats have many failings, but they at least know that what people tell pollsters is not the same as the way they vote.
by II2II | 2025-07-11 18:14:56+00:00
> Can anybody steel man the practical value of this kind of research for me? It seems to me that almost all astronomy, particularly the sort studying very large scale phenomena like this, is essentially useless for humanity.

The funny thing is: this science with few direct application to human affairs is one of the oldest sciences. Those few applications, as a standard of time and use in navigation, have had a far greater impact upon the establishment of human civilization than any other scientific discover.

It would be easy to argue that those are things of the distant past and that other branches of science have a more direct impact today. That's true. Yet it is also true that our curiosity of the heavens has been a constant. While our early notions were pure nonsense, they shaped society. While our initial discoveries of its true nature had little immediate impact upon everyday life, it formed the basis of future scientific development. For example: the Copernican model of the solar system was more true to the actual form of the solar system, but it was less accurate than the more refined Ptolemaic model. Kepler figured out the ellipses bit, through the extensive observations of Tycho Brahe. Observations of planetary motion provided evidence for Newton's theory of gravitation. Ironically, observations of planetary motion also lead to the refinement of the classical model by Einstein. The understanding of gravity has been fundamental to engineering. While it is plausible that much of that would have been discovered without astronomy, the development of special and general relativity depended upon astronomy. One of the most important applications of that is GPS.

Now it would be easy to argue almost all of these discoveries have their basis in the study of the solar system, but that's not really the point. In the times of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, the utility of studying the motions of the planets would appear to have about as much relevance as the study of the CMB does today. They certainly would not have been able to predict what we have discovered due to the foundations they laid. The same can be said of modern astrophysics. We can claim that it may help us detect and understand the nature of gravitation waves. We can claim that it is a handy tool since "the universe" is better at building particle accelerators than we are. Yet even if we made astounding discoveries along those line, people would still ask: what use is it? We can't really provide an honest answer for that since we have yet to travel that path through time (i.e. we don't know what the future holds).

If you ever have a chance, I suggest reading a book on the history of astronomy. You will find many names that you will probably know from other branches of science, and learn of the many discoveries that have been made or facilitated through astronomical research. (That's particularly true of physics and mathematics.)
by uxamanda | 2025-07-11 18:15:29+00:00
This is so fun. I built this into a live performance tool I am using this weekend. Thank you for sharing!

Minor UX feedback

- I find the internal scroll of setting up the presets limiting. Because the whole top half is fixed it is hard to see all my settings at once. Could either the whole panel scroll?

- In dark mode, the "Save" button is black on dark grey and looks disabled.

- The delete button is scarily prominent and no confimation. Can that be moved inside the preset panel so i dont accidently hit it while performing?
by ashwinsundar | 2025-07-11 18:15:44+00:00
I am not impressed with Next.js or Lee's evangelism (yes, in the religious sense) of their platform. Being forced to develop in Next.js for a major project was the last straw, and convinced me to abandon the Javascript/Typescript/Node.js ecosystem entirely for future web projects (where I have the choice). Dev-fluencers and Next.js evangelists who gish-gallop and provide (non)-responses to serious developer problems with Next.js convinced me that Vercel is building an elaborate cash grab, on the enterprise scale, and securing vendor lock-in for many years to come. Don't tell me that Next.js is easy to deploy in Docker either - it's not, I wrestled with that implementation for months and it was fragile/broken in a way that I suspect a native Vercel-deployment is not.

The current stack I'm using is Django/Python, HTMX, Alpine.js, and TailwindCSS. Yes I know the middle two use Javascript under the hood, there is no way around that for client interactivity. But they do support the HATEOAS principal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS) which has been a breath of fresh air imo. The book "Hypermedia Systems" is also a great way to achieve the mental reset needed to abandon modern web frameworks and go back to things that actually work, in terms of web development.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-07-11 18:15:45+00:00
i commented on reddit (and got promptly downvoted) but since i think jank's author is around here (and hopefully is receptive to constructive criticism): the CppInterOp approach to cpp interop is completely janky (no pun intended). the approach literally string munges cpp and then parses/interprets it to emit ABI compliant calls. there's no reason to do this except that libclang currently doesn't support any other way. that's not jank's fault but it could be "fixed" in libclang. at a minimum you could use https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/clang/lib/Cod... to emit the code based on clang ast. at a maximum would be to use something like

https://github.com/Mr-Anyone/abi

or this if/when it comes to fruition

https://discourse.llvm.org/t/llvm-introduce-an-abi-lowering-...

to generate ABI compliant calls/etc for cpp libs.

note, i say all this with maximum love in my heart for a language that would have first class cpp interop - i would immediately become jank's biggest proponent/user if its cpp interop were robust.

EDIT: for people wanting/needing receipts, you can skim through https://github.com/compiler-research/CppInterOp/blob/main/li...
by gandalfian | 2025-07-11 18:15:46+00:00
Mothers mac mini 2014? Slow as a dog, 30 second pauses, became unusable. Extremely tricky to reach the 5400rpm hard disc. Found a third party adaptor could bodge an nvme under the easily removable base flap. Suddenly transformed it to a fast nippy useable machine. (She paid up for the 8gb ram originally). But still rather annoyed that Apple essentially crippled their own product and it could only be fixed by chance. Wasn't a cheap pc...
by fpoling | 2025-07-11 18:16:17+00:00
Have you used 4K sectors with cryptsetup? Many distributions still defaults to 512 bytes if SSD reports 512 bytes as its logical size and with 512 sectors there are heavier load on the system.

I was reluctant to use BTRFS on my Linux laptop but for the last 3 years I have been using it with 4K cryptsetup with no issues.
by mlyle | 2025-07-11 18:16:23+00:00
There are perfectly rational things that qualify as higher powers even if one doesn’t have religious belief. Those vast physical laws, the trajectory of the universe, the grand story of humanity, our quests for understanding.

Rejecting religion doesn’t mean rejecting wonder, and doesn’t make it too much harder to find something more significant than myself.

You will find AA chapters with religious overtones, and you will find many more that take those steps to set perspective about things bigger than you and beyond your complete understanding.
by ozten | 2025-07-11 18:16:29+00:00
It is not a silly question. The various flavors of LLM have issues with reliability. In software we expect five 9s, LLMs aren't even a one 9. Early on it was reliability of them writing JSON output. Then instruction following. Then tool use. Now it's "computer use" and orchestration.

Creating models for this specific problem domain will have a better chance at reliability, which is not a solved problem.

Jules is the gemini coder that links to github. Half the time it doesn't create a pull request and forgets and assumes I'll do some testing or something. It's wild.
by AFlemming | 2025-07-11 18:16:41+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with writing science stories for curious, non-specialist readers, blending real research with a bit of humor and storytelling.

This piece is based on a recent study where researchers discovered that Aspergillus flavus (yes, the mold blamed for the “Pharaoh’s Curse”) produces a molecule that may help treat leukemia. I framed it as an interview with the mold itself. Because why not.

It’s part of a broader effort to make STEM feel less like an lecture and more like a conversation.

Would love to know what this crowd thinks, especially if you work in science, storytelling, or have thoughts on how to reach skeptical or overwhelmed readers.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-07-11 18:16:52+00:00
I subsidize all you power users: with my own $20 Claude Code subscription I use it for a few days per month for maybe a few hours. For my day job it's pay-by-token for the same thing.

So, I am not sure it is as bad as the article says. And there is a huge advantage to capturing developer mindshare worth burning millions on.

And isn't Anthropic backed by Amazon?
by daxfohl | 2025-07-11 18:17:37+00:00
I'd add, if feature A can't be shipped 10x faster, ask the same question about features B, C, and D and then redo your ROI calculations, before deciding to invest in feature A.

That keeps the team consistently delivering and motivated, and gives you more time to think about feature A. Some features are really important to get right and take the appropriate time, and some are just important to ship. Having that distinction explicit allows the team to maintain good shipping velocity without accruing "high interest" tech debt.

Also there's obviously no single correct ratio here. Newer companies, services, teams, products will probably lean toward shipping fast since architecture is still being defined (and too much architecture could be more detrimental than tech debt / too little architecture, if it doesn't match future requirements), whereas more mature ones will be more willing to sacrifice shipping velocity for better fit with the existing domain model.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-11 18:18:01+00:00
X-ray fluorescence detects elements based on their characteristic electromagnetic spectrum when irradiated with x-rays.

Not very much like a mass-spectrometer which creates a characteristic pattern of masses resulting from the test material as it is manipulated by the electron ionization or chemical ionization process. Where ions are detected across the atomic mass range of the particular spectrometer, forming a characteristic pattern or "spectrum" across that range.

Actually more jewelers and gold dealers than ever are using the x-ray guns professionally for bulk assay on an everyday basis. There are some handhelds which may be sensitive enough for trace analysis in food, but that requires a whole nother level of dedication beyond identification of metal objects, not just in technique and training but "laboratory" preparation as well.

The first obstacle would be convincing an owner of an instrument having capable specs, to embrace usage for things other than gold and silver assay. Then seriously pursue mastery of the instrument more so than ever to accomplish decent detection of low levels of lead and other metals like chromium, mercury, cadmium, etc.
by ssl-3 | 2025-07-11 18:18:06+00:00
What unused land? Where?

In my part of Ohio, everything big enough for a meaningful solar farm is "prime" farmland or coveted and necessary forest or wetlands -- unless it's already used for business, or housing, or infrastructure to support civilization.

Perhaps my perspective is simply very limited, but: In my estimation, there is no unused land to use.

Even the big pile of dirt I drive by twice a day: It does stuff. It gets bigger and smaller as some pay to get rid of extra dirt from their project, and others pay to buy some of that dirt for a different project. Someone somewhere manages that pile of dirt.
by itsdrewmiller | 2025-07-11 18:18:08+00:00
I don't think very many LVT supporters think it should be the sole or even primary source of taxation. The main point I see being made is that property taxes as designed today discourage development, whereas a LVT would encourage it. Property taxes are only about 10% of overall US taxation, and a switch to LVT would have its intended effect even if they became a smaller piece of the pie.
by mc32 | 2025-07-11 18:18:10+00:00
Alex Jones has a credibility problem. While he has used thinktank & other quasi-governmental institutions's papers to find nuggets of information he contaminates that with "interdimensional beings" blah... So yeah, frogs's hormones were out of whack and he predicted aspects of 9-1-1, government spying on citizens and some other things, he also has whoppers like sandyhook.
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-11 18:18:39+00:00
I understand your reaction — I really didn’t mean to come off as pushy. I’m still new here and learning how to share my work in a way that fits the community. It’s not about promotion, just hoping to get feedback from folks who might find lightweight, dependency-free tools interesting. Thanks for pointing it out — I’ll be more careful with reposting
by itake | 2025-07-11 18:18:49+00:00
My employer uses Zscaler. I don't know exactly how they implement this, but my educated guess is the corporate DNS server doesn't resolve domains that were created recently.

In technical terms, the device asks the private corporate DNS server for the IP address of the hostname. The private DNS server checks the requested domain against a threat intelligence feed that tracks domain registration dates (and security risks). If the domain is deemed a threat, either return an IP address which points at a server that shows a warning message (if http traffic) or return an invalid IP (0.0.0.0).
by yorpinn | 2025-07-11 18:19:03+00:00
You need not get that information. Other people have different needs and priorities. What if the reason they are so concerned about getting updates on this kid is that they have serious medical issues? What if it brings a ray of sunshine on stressful days to see pictures of them? What if missing these updates means missing family functions and becoming more isolated and lonely? (Note that they confirmed my last speculation.)

What if, instead of berating people for using social media, we discussed how we might build a healthier alternative?
by tiahura | 2025-07-11 18:19:04+00:00
The FTC failed to comply with 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(1), which states that the agency “shall issue a preliminary regulatory analysis” whenever it proposes a rule expected to have a significant economic impact.

After its own ALJ found the rule’s effect would exceed $100 million annually, the FTC was obligated to publish an analysis of the “projected benefits and any adverse economic effects and any other effects” and the effectiveness of alternatives, as required by § 57b-3(b)(1)(C).
by BrenBarn | 2025-07-11 18:19:06+00:00
The fact that the blog was created just to post this is somewhat understandable if the author really believes they're in the situation they're in. It definitely sounds like a desperate cry for help. I agree there is a lot of speculation in the post, but that's also understandable if the person is experiencing something scary. I hope they're wrong and it sounds like there's a decent chance they could be.
Ask HN: How would you build SaaS to $5k per month?
by foolishgame | 2025-07-11 18:20:13+00:00
Building is super cheap now. Granted, LLMs are not perfect but they are accelerating development.

If you have start again, what would be core of building saas that makes $5k per month?

Remember, most niche are already saturated. Community building and social posting does not yield to immediate revenue.

Assume you have 90 days to archive this goal.

What would you do?
by tonymet | 2025-07-11 18:21:12+00:00
every tax discussion i've ever read treats taxes in the abstract without spending. The assumption is "how do we raise as much tax as possible".

When you actually learn about public agency spending, you'll see that 2/3 of it is completely unnecessary.

I'm not saying companies are any better, but they generally don't have the mandate to take your house from you if you are not a customer.

Focus on the spending first, and make sure it's essential. Then figure out how to fund it.

If you can get spending scope reduced by 90% (where it was before FDR) , you'll find the tax situation solves itself. You won't have to invent taxes on every activity.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-07-11 18:21:26+00:00
Your problem is money. If it's not a problem for a period of a year's time, then pull the pants up and just quit. But you must be sure, it works out. May be try to engage with your customers upfront ("I'll build it for you. Look that's how it could be.. bla bla Marketing and selling speech. Would you like to support the development? ... Otherwise it would take longer, as a full-time job is making the living."

Or, work & work over time on your thing. It'll take longer then, if course, but if it solves an isolated problem - I don't think you'll get much competitors. As long no one knows what you're solving..

I tried to do something while being on regular 9-5-5 job - it's a big big pain and slow as f*. But then I got fired/laid off. Now I'm wasting my time without earning money, as doing my idea doesn't really advance. But some day... Some day...

So, check if you can do everything in your leasure time. If yes, keep your job for money. If money is enough, quit and build. Or, may be you're lucky as me and get laid off..

Keep building your future.
by didibus | 2025-07-11 18:21:35+00:00
What I understand they did is.

You have two tasks:

- Task 1 - 3h - Task 2 - 1h

You ask the dev to estimate both.

Then you randomly tell the dev, ok do Task 1 without AI, and Task 2 with AI.

Then you measure the actual time it took.

Their estimate for AI task missed the mark by 19%, but those without AI were done 20% faster then estimated.

At the time of estimating they didn't know if the task would need to be done with AI or not.