MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atombender | 2025-07-26 18:22:18+00:00
Inverted indexes are what databases call indexes. It's used in the IR field to differentiate from forward indexes, which are less common, so you're right that we could just say "index's.

But when we talk about inverted indexes, they are almost always term -> posting list, and most index data structures lay these out so that posting lists are sorted and compressed together. Traditional database indexes like B-trees are optimized for rapid insertion and deletion, while inverted indexes tend to be optimized for batch processing, because you typically deconstruct text into words for a large batch and then lazily integrate this batch into the main index.

Part of this is about scale; a row in a database typically has a single column or maybe 2-3 columns in a composite index; but a document text may tokenize into thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of words. At this scale, the fine-grained nature of words mean B-trees aren't as a good a fit.

Another part of it is that inverted indexes aren't for point queries, which is what B-trees are optimized for; you typically search for many words at a time in order to rank your search results by some function like cosine similarity. You rarely want a single posting; you want the union or intersection of many posting sorted by score.
Ask HN: Why did my free tools site with 600 tools make almost $0 after 2 years?
by KodyBerns99 | 2025-07-26 18:22:56+00:00
I launched a free tools site called Kody Tools (https://www.kodytools.com/) almost two years ago as a side hustle. It features over 600 tools, a clean and responsive design, and I invested a lot of effort into promotion. I assumed monetizing with ads or selling ad space would be straightforward.

But despite all that, it only pulls in about 7-10k visitors a month, and the revenue is practically zero. Hosting costs me around $20-$40 monthly, making me seriously reconsider my approach.

I’m curious to hear how you’d tackle this kind of situation. What worked for you when monetizing a free tools site without driving away users or ruining the experience?

Any tips or strategies would be hugely appreciated!
by slashdev | 2025-07-26 18:23:10+00:00
There's more to that story: https://x.com/HilzFuld/status/1948097196055810061

> Do we have to literally wait for these people to starve to death before admitting that maybe this rings of ethnic cleansing, just a little?

I don't mean to sound callous, but that would make it a genocide. Until it happens, it is not. The current truth of the matter is shrouded by the fog of war.

Maybe a couple months from now there has been mass starvation in Gaza and I'm on your side. But I don't think Israel is either stupid or evil enough to let that happen.
by microtonal | 2025-07-26 18:24:08+00:00
Garmin is really good when it comes to open maps. I can still put new OpenStreetMap maps on an old Garmin 62s like it's 2010. I recently replaced my Apple Watch by a Garmin Fenix 7 Pro and even though it's not really advertised, it just accepts good old map .img files. I put on the Dutch cycle network overlay without any issues, just like I did with my Garmin GPSr units.
by adabyron | 2025-07-26 18:24:27+00:00
As an older dev, I think it's a great natural evolution.

We had css, then SASS/LESS/etc, now Tailwind.

In the days of just CSS people would create variables/functions for their CSS in their server side language & have the server side language create the CSS. SASS/LESS allowed us to do that in stylesheets.

Now we have Tailwind (and of course CSS variables). Tailwind (and the code editor plugin devs) have done an amazing job at making a great workflow to handle CSS, especially in component type UI designs.

* Shout out to Foundation and Bootstrap for also helping us get to where we are today. Foundation is underrated in the history.
by eastbound | 2025-07-26 18:24:27+00:00
> Why would I contribute free dev work to a billion dollar corporation?

The billion dollars company contributed more to your startup than you do to them. Microsoft provides:

- VSCode,

- Hosts all NPM repositories. You know, the ones small startups are too lazy to cache (also because it’s much harder to cache NPM repositories than Maven) and then you re-download them at each build,

- Typescript
by tlogan | 2025-07-26 18:24:32+00:00
This is an excellent way to solve the housing crisis in San Francisco: sarcasm fully intended.

Stories like this just reinforce the obvious: the housing crisis is a problem of our own making. Wealthy residents and NIMBYs consistently show they have no interest in helping the poor, the homeless, or working-class people who simply want a place to live. The ones hit hardest are usually younger generations.

This should not be a political issue. Whether on the left or the right, rich people will always find a reason (legal, aesthetic, environmental, religious, etc.) to avoid fixing the housing problem. The excuses vary, but the outcome is the same.
by nine_k | 2025-07-26 18:26:00+00:00
The idea, as far as I was able to understand it, is that you want your core models as dependency-free as possible. If you, for whatever reason, were to drop Pydantic, that would only affect the way you validate inputs from API, and nothing deeper.

This wasn't mentioned, but the constant validation on construction also costs something. Sometimes it's a cost you're willing to pay (again, dealing with external inputs), sometimes it's extraneous because e.g. a typechecker would suffice to catch discrepancies at build time.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-07-26 18:26:03+00:00
The economics aren't a mystery, people build concrete plants on site for large buildings for the same reason. That said, it makes me wonder if there are things you could do with this sort of approach that would be even more daring. You would be unlikely to fabricate glass on site, but glazing should be doable. Making the windows on site could save time and transport costs. Duct work? We had gutters done which were rolled and welded on site. I could imagine ducting could be similarly created. Custom cabinetry would be another thing I'd wonder about. We've got a neighbor that does custom cabinetry in his 2 car garage, but that setup could be reproduced in a couple of containers. Not that you're going to put that on site at a remodel and block the street, but if you would doing a full housing development? And if you didn't need to lease space for your factory when it wasn't producing would that make for better economics?
by Rygian | 2025-07-26 18:26:08+00:00
I've been rightfully downvoted above. My comment was not perceived as pH-neutral as I was imagining it.

HN is a place where people come to get exposed to a very diverse list of topics, from seismic faults to quantum computing.

As such, my expectation is that an article linked on the front page has a minimum of context for those coming from far away. In this case, the article that was chosen onto the front page not only lacks that context, but also is blissfully unaware of this expectation. Which is perfectly fine and normal for the author and for the intended readership.

I found that mismatch fun to read, in the "frequent questions" part of the article, and did not anticipate that my remark would be taken as caustic.
by grg0 | 2025-07-26 18:26:11+00:00
"commonly" is an understatement; that's literally what a book index is by definition.

The only thing "inverted" here is the context. The author even admits themselves that the word->doc mapping is an index:

"If user wants to search by words - then words should be keys in our "database" (index)"

It's a pointless debate of semantics. An inverted map is still a map.
by landl0rd | 2025-07-26 18:26:15+00:00
Because the odds of something 5x the average that's more or less normally distributed are really, really low.

It's the same as how although you can occasionally get a "natural" person over seven feet tall, it's very rare. Most really tall people have gigantism or some other form of pituitary abnormality, and I believe every recorded person to break eight feet has had such an abnormality.

It's like asking why we've never had someone with 500 IQ. There's a hard limit where anyone with enough of a mutation to enable that would probably also not survive long at all. And indeed with the height thing we see a lot of super-tall people dying younger due to cardiovascular strain and other issues. You get the picture.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-07-26 18:27:03+00:00
There's a lot of hype around age verification by letting AI look at the user's face. But everyone has met someone who was 28 and looked 16, or vice versa. It's not exactly uncommon. A few genes go wrong and you get some weird facial features that throws off our perception of age. Guess what? Our brains are just neural nets trained on data. So AI will fail in exactly the same way.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-07-26 18:27:37+00:00
This reminds me of that one time after working at a company for 4 months they informed me they were in a middle of an IP lawsuit which is part of the reason they hired me to rewrite the front end without knowing that was going on. That was f*(ked for reasons.

Whatever the case, the only time people look at your social media history is to look for attacks and the only reason they will look at a company's slack messages and emails are to look for attacks during discovery.

I would argue that company secrets are mostly useless for the company but very, very useful to other companies. For this reason, there should be retention policy of a day or two for almost all communication unless it is important, required by law, or documentation. And, definitely do not share that information with the public without good reason.
by johnmaguire | 2025-07-26 18:27:44+00:00
> And BW film even today is still MUCH sharper, even if just perceptually, than color film.

Maybe perceptually - due to stronger contrast and perhaps also the fact that B&W film often comes in higher speeds and probably incurs less motion blur of the subject overall.

But I don't think it's actually objectively sharper per se?
by bbuut | 2025-07-26 18:27:45+00:00
The criticisms have the same lack of information problems.

So modern anecdotes make the most sense. I grew up in 80s dairyland. None of the farmers worked a 9-5 but they rarely worked 40+ too.

We worked much much less in rural-landia before the last few decades gave rise to "service and knowledge" work with no concrete goal but "make line go up".

Knowledge work comes along with zero concrete termination points. Programmers grinding code 80+ hours are not stopping to see if it's useful or just repetition.

Sure from a physics perspective they're doing "work". From a lived experience, to real needs of biology, economy perspective they're just sitting at a computer juicing their hormones, while exploiting farmers labor, who now works more hours as more knowledge workers contribute less real outputs essential to biology. Same with why carpentry and other trades services are so expensive; supply and demand. Millennials wanted 24/7 office jobs.

While I grew up in farmland I later went into EE, and have a good sense for who is moving the ball. It isn't software people. Their biology is addicted to a stupid loop of zero real productivity. Playing abstract snake games in one's head, to count initialized memory registers and recording their data is some basic bitch work marketed to the point of fostering delusion it's cutting in 2010-2020 to use 1960s style syntaxes to manage machines.
by gambiting | 2025-07-26 18:28:49+00:00
All I want to say I am genuinely scared to express any opinion on this topic online or in any group outside of my closest friends as it seems you can get into a whole world of trouble for just stating certain obvious facts. Even right now I feel the need to tip toe around it, rather than just saying it outright.

I don't understand how we got to this point as a society.
by microtonal | 2025-07-26 18:29:10+00:00
The nice thing about real GPSr units and things like Garmin watches is that they (depending on the model) can last a week to even weeks. E.g., if you use a GPSmap 67s for 8 hours per day, it lasts 3 weeks. In the older units you can even put AA batteries.

Cycling with a phone with the screen on and at full brightness (which is what you need on a sunny day), a phone will last a few hours at most. The magic of good GPSr units is that they use a transflective display, the sun is your 'backlight'. (And of course using something more akin to a microcontroller than a smartphone SoC.)

Also, in contrast to smartphones, these things are really rugged. Like last year I was cycling through the alps and accidentally dropped my GPSmap at ~30km/h (without a case or protection, who puts them on a GPSr?). It only has some scratches.
by orev | 2025-07-26 18:30:13+00:00
> Occasionally someone (usually at work) will ask “why do you know that?” or “how did you learn how to do that?”

This comes up a lot from business people, and I think at least one answer is because learning to program is a master class on how to break down a problem into actionable parts, while also considering as many failure and unexpected scenarios as possible. For many business jobs, that might be a full time job for one person who focuses only on one specific area. When someone trained in programming just “gets it” right away, it can be unnerving.

I think this is one reason there can be so many disconnects between IT and Business—the stuff IT does is just so magical they can’t understand it at all, and as a result don’t care if that magic comes from a local employee, an overseas one, or an AI.
by jacobolus | 2025-07-26 18:30:25+00:00
An arcsecond is 1/60 of an arcminute; an arcminute is 1/60 of a degree (°); a degree is 1/360 of a full turn. A "milliarcsecond" is probably an unfamiliar unit (an angle so slight will only be used in extremely specialized contexts), so if you like you could decimalize this to an angle of 0.000001°.

The measure of distance on earth is probably more easily comprehended by almost everyone though.
by pastage | 2025-07-26 18:30:37+00:00
Being such a person that fixes lots of stuff for other people nothing I do is secret but learning to do it seems too hard for most. What I do is try to delegate if I find people that do want to learn.

If someone shows me they are good at something they are going to have to expect being sent trickier problems.

Sometimes it might seem like I keep things a secret. I am probably just having a bad day.
by sensanaty | 2025-07-26 18:31:07+00:00
I'm sorry but that just sounds like a tooling and skill issue? Adding a new form field takes me a grand total of 5 minutes in the Vue app I maintain at work, and I'm a mostly backend focused fullstacker. We have the form/input components, adding a new field to a type is trivial (and we generate those automatically based on our BE schema anyway), error handling is handled by our form/input components.

Also, I'm not the biggest fan of React and think there are options that are a million times better like Vue & Svelte, but React is not heavy. Yes, JS frontends pull in a lot of libraries, but React (or any other framework except for probably Angular and Ember) is far from being the biggest or heaviest dependency in any project. In fact, especially React does this amazingly, React itself has 0 external dependencies. Usually people will also want react-dom, so for the simplest possible application, that's a grand total of 2 very lightweight dependencies, and for usecases like yours of a few forms, that's literally all you'd need.

Sure, maybe your 3 forms don't need React, but it sounds like you're actively adding stuff to it (and even caught a type issue from the sound of it). The non React version of this work would've entailed targeting a querySelector's inner `.value` key, and then having to parse it if it's not a simple string and safe guard against the element not being there, or targeting a shifting ID or class or all the other numerous and tedious problems that arise. Or, you stick a `v-model` on it, send it as JSON and call it a day, I categorically refuse to pretend the old universe pre-SPA frameworks was in any way a good way of working.
by tastyface | 2025-07-26 18:31:33+00:00
This is an unsourced and contextless video from somebody who was literally banned from australia for islamophobia. We are too quick to trust social media randos these days. Show me some actual reporting.

Meanwhile, regarding past disinfo on a similar subject: “USAID analysis found no evidence of massive Hamas theft of Gaza aid” https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/usaid-analysis-fou...

“I don't mean to sound callous, but that would make it a genocide. Until it happens, it is not. The current truth of the matter is shrouded by the fog of war.”

How convenient. Well, the purpose of labeling something genocide isn’t to wag your finger. It’s to incentivize action, such as withdrawing military support. In a couple of months it may be too late.
by Animats | 2025-07-26 18:32:20+00:00
There's a video of the robotic building woodworking system for building components.[1] (This article is from their VC firm.) The video is so bad that, if weren't from ABB, a legit robotics company, it would clearly be a scam. They never show the robot at work for more than 1-2 seconds at a time. It's not clear how much of the job it does. The video is about 90% filler - quick cuts, talking heads, scenery. It's not even clear what they're making. All they show is a robot moving some wood around.

Assembling building panels with robots in factories with has been done, but it takes a bigger factory, because what's being made is large.[2] That's a legit video showing the whole process of making housing panels.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMC-Ls0vI14

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3al52UWoc0
by anonymars | 2025-07-26 18:32:51+00:00
I don't consider it turning a blind eye, quite the opposite. I don't think that not interacting with "bad people" will make the problem go away. Just telling people they are wrong for thinking something doesn't generally change one's mind (https://pbfcomics.com/comics/deeply-held-beliefs/)

I'm not saying kumbaya, why can't we all get along, let bygones be bygones. I'm not naive, I am saying a very simple truth: folks will go where they are accepted and listened to. You may not agree with them and they may think stupid and bad things. Too bad! Those are the facts on the ground and we must deal with them. If we just plug our ears and shun them, guess who are the only people who will listen to and accept them (very basic human needs, after all)?

Again, this is not a value judgment, and no one is saying everyone should go proselytize in the lion's den. But given that people do exist with beliefs we don't like, what then, do we just skip to "civil war" to solve the problem?

I'm also not so naive to think that we can just empathize our way out of this. It's not a fair fight, so to speak, there is a ton of money flowing the opposite way, amplifying falsehoods and exaggerations. In fact I do think it's a losing battle. But when the opportunity presents itself in the right circumstances I cannot turn away

And so then, why the hell shouldn't we blame those who are cynically and stoking feeding this hate, knowingly trafficking in falsehoods? (As in your example of eating the pets)
by modulovalue | 2025-07-26 18:33:08+00:00
NIT: That's not quite correct if your first statement is meant to imply an equality rather than a subset relation.

The idea of an index is more general, as an index can be built for many different domains. For example, B-trees can index monoidal data and inverted indexes are just an instance of such a monoid that a B-tree can efficiently index.

Furthermore, metric spaces (e.g., levenshtein distance) can also be efficiently indexed using other trees: metric trees. So calling inverted indexes just indexes would be really confusing since string data is not the only kind of data that a database might want to support having efficient indexes for.
Doing Something X Times
by zavg | 2025-07-26 18:33:17+00:00
One friend of mine said that the best concept that he learnt is the idea of "doing something X times".

X could equal to 10 or 100, e.g.:

- send 100 emails to check the conversion

- do 100 cold outreach connections to evaluate the effectiveness

- launch 10 projects to see which one runs better.

- try 10 different marketing channels to figure out the best one

- etc.

I found the idea quite useful. Do you use the same technique?
by teamonkey | 2025-07-26 18:33:20+00:00
I feel that it’s fine that businesses are charged for heavier use of a tax-funded service, especially when it would increase the running cost of those services, and where there’s no obvious benefit to the taxpayer.

I get the argument about using taxpayer services to leverage a more competitive business environment, and I agree that’s important, but I don’t think an advertising newsletter is a good example.

And honestly the data’s fairly cheap for high-accuracy weather data. You get a lot of API calls for not very much money.
by mindslight | 2025-07-26 18:33:48+00:00
The real galling thing is after you set aside your outrage about the fascism, and have the sober realization that Trump is not even going to deport most of the illegal immigrants. The underlying truth the entire time is that many industries are wholly reliant on cheap labor with no legal protections, which is why businesses that hire illegal labor only ever get slaps on the wrist. Trump only talks big, and he always backs down when met with the demands of big business. Furthermore, Trump's own business empire depends on illegal immigrants to do landscaping/housekeeping/remodeling. And he has already made rumblings about allowing them to remain in such "critical" fields. The arc is literally just the exact same con as the past few decades where the Party drives outrage over the situation, does some token actions, and then sells out their constituents behind their backs. The only change that Trump brings is even more unaccountable fascism and performative cruelty to create even more of a spectacle.
by pharrington | 2025-07-26 18:33:58+00:00
It's called "I use the software, I already want to improve the software I'm using, so after I improve it I'll contribute the improvements I've already made to the broader community."

Granted, I myself have been guilty of not giving back to the open source community this way in the past, but I won't pretend that was reasonable or ethical of me!

edit: after reading some commemnts, i realize i may have meant to say "free software" instead of "open source"
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-07-26 18:35:11+00:00
They could easily get more public support if they pushed this as a seismic retrofit initiative rather than continue to gaslight the public and doubling down on their environmental foolishness. A direct-vent natural gas-fired water heater is probably the simplest, most reliable appliance you could own. It requires no electricity. And now bureaucrats (not plumbers) made them illegal.

SF is probably the only place in the country where this makes sense, solely because of the earthquake problem. (Do you know how to shut off your gas meter in an emergency? Probably not.)

Yet same people who insist hopscotching amongst piles of human feces is part and parcel to living in the city, not the public health hazard it is, want you to believe your gas stove is killing you.

As a wok owner, I'll take that chance.