MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by egruy | 2025-07-27 20:41:54+00:00
I am building Tracelake - a data quality solution for SAP replications.

https://tracelake.com/

Why? SAP holds the most important data for companies that use it, but it's notoriously difficult to replicate this data consistently into a data analytics platform (think Snowflake, Redshift, etc...).

Couple of companies specialize in the SAP replication, but it's hard to validate the correctness of the replicated data, because:

- the SAP data is changing continuously and rapidly

- there are hundreds of tables and TBs of data

Usually it's the consumers of data downstream who notice that the data just "doesn't feel right".

Tracelake adds a validation layer on top of the SAP to X replication, which periodically compares the data between source and target and informs you about any missing / incorrect data, so you can tackle data quality issues proactively.
by permo-w | 2025-07-27 20:42:18+00:00
the second someone like Trump gets hold of a voter exam setting process, they're either going to abuse it to their advantage, or abolish it entirely, after having used it as a wedge issue to set the working classes against "elites"

also, in the US, taking exams in order to vote is a massively sensitive issue as it was one of the ways that blacks were restricted from voting even when they legally had the right

more technically, where do you draw the line? if it's too easy, you're going to insult people without even getting the desired effect. if it's too hard, then the demographic will skew towards people who work in the industries affected by the policy. for a second that sounds good, and when it comes to something like culture or maybe health, then sure, but there are many industries that would burn the world to the ground if it ensured them 20% annual growth. can you imagine if the only people able to vote on financial regulations were people who know a lot about finance? there'd be famines within the year
by rpdillon | 2025-07-27 20:42:37+00:00
I approach this dichotomy with two tiers of software: "core functionality" and "nice to have". For items that have become core, I have a fallback I can use that is something I have a high degree of control over. This is typically something like freehold software, although I'm more extreme and very strongly prefer libre software.

But in cases where the functionality is quite compelling (like multi-hundred billion parameter models) and also hard to run on hardware I control, I tend to relent, and work with the "nice to haves" so I can learn about them and leverage them, but I routinely practice with my fallback software.

One example: I use Google Maps for search because it's so darn good at it, but I regularly use OsmAnd~ or Organic Maps with offline maps and on-device routing for actual navigation (despite the lack of traffic insights!) so I'm proficient with them in case I need to ditch Google Maps entirely (due to policy change, technical issue, or something else).
by tolerance | 2025-07-27 20:43:10+00:00
If what you're saying could be considered valid, I'm not sure whether this should be an insult to how the average Indian or African speaks English, or a compliment.

I mean cmon:

> Nestled within the breathtaking region of Gonder in Ethiopia, Alamata Raya Kobo stands as a vibrant town with a rich cultural heritage and a significant place within the Amhara region. From its scenic landscapes to its historical landmarks, Alamata Raya Kobo offers visitors a fascinating glimpse into the diverse tapestry of Ethiopia. In this article, we will explore the unique characteristics that make Alamata Raya Kobo a town worth visiting and shed light on its significance within the Amhara region.

If this is how you imagine the average Indian or African who trained AI models to generate prose speaks...well, you may not be too far off because some of them do have a way with words that dwarfs the average American, the banality of AI writing not withstanding.
by darzu | 2025-07-27 20:45:36+00:00
Take a broader view of what "building secure systems" means. It's not just about the code being written by ICs but about the business incentives, tech choices of leadership, the individual ways execs are rewarded, legacy realities, interactions with other companies, and a million other things. Our institutions are a complex result of all of these forces. Taken as a whole, and looking at the empirical evidence of companies and agencies frequently leaking data, the conclusion "we cannot build secure systems" is well founded.
by foopod | 2025-07-27 20:47:12+00:00
Talking out of my ass, but since epubs often target mobile devices (kindle, kobo, etc - with limited storage) - publishers probably find that their books do better if they tend to be smaller in size. And images take up far more diskspace than text does in a digital copy.

Then when a user needs to delete books from a device they will start with the largest files. The longer the book is on the device the more likely they are to engage with it, etc.
by QuantumGood | 2025-07-27 20:48:54+00:00
Thanks, that's good information. What is your relationship to the company, if any? I wouldn't ask, but it's common when the answer is "none" to provide that info before anyone asks.

I believe eGFR (via creatinine testing) and sometimes HbA1c (if diabetes screening is ordered) are the only things listed may be part of a routine health check from a common/inexpensive blood test.
by nomel | 2025-07-27 20:49:07+00:00
Ever org I've worked for slowly became unable to innovate because of "institutional knowledge".

I think it's important to forget, to some extent, every once in a while. It forces a new traversal of the problem space, but in a modern context, with modern tools, fresh eyes, and a better understanding of what's needed. Thus we have Space X.

There are some great interviews with Jim Keller, who has a similar perspective: you need to restart every some years, to not stagnate.

From what I've seen, if you want to stamp out a young engineers creativity, start them working in a big org.
by lynndotpy | 2025-07-27 20:49:33+00:00
I don't have any ideas to help you there. I was a TA in a university, but that was before ChatGPT, and it was an expectation to provide answers in English. For non-native English speakers, one of the big reasons to attend an English-speaking university was to get the experience in speaking and reading English.

But I also think it's a different thing entirely. It's different being the sole reader of text produced by your students (with responsibility to read the text) compared to being someone using the internet choosing what to read.
by clearleaf | 2025-07-27 20:49:37+00:00
The incredible technology you're describing was possible on the Nintendo DS without wires and no need for a LAN either. It's a problem that's been solved in hundreds of different ways over the last 40 years but certain people don't want that problem to ever be solved without cloud services involved.

This dumb pipe thing is certainly interesting but it will run into the same problem as the myriad other solutions that already exist. If you're trying to give a 50MB file to a Windows user they have no way to receive it via any method a Linux user would have to send it unless the Windows user has gone out of their way to install something most people have never heard of.
by goodthink | 2025-07-27 20:49:49+00:00
I took July off. ()!_!() Having implemented [2] in [1], a long time goal, the accomplishment of which has made me very happy, I felt the need to step back and take a break, sort out what I want to do with it next. A little bit about the journey can be gleaned from [3].

[1] https://newspeaklanguage.org [2] https://multisynq.io https://chalculator.com/primordialsoup.html?snapshot=Amplefo...
by tolerance | 2025-07-27 20:50:21+00:00
I sniff that guidelines like this are going to disenfranchise the language of marketing copy and other consumer-orientated lingo.

The advertisement wave of the future will be similar to when Nike and Virgil Abloh were putting out sneakers that said "SHOE" on them. Or something like that.

The working title of this trend is "Bruxism".
by rcy | 2025-07-27 20:51:54+00:00
I am working on a site that allows kids to chat and play online with other kids. To connect, kids must have their parents sign up and connect with the parents of their friends. Kids can chat with their parents and family as well as other kids in their network. Messages can be monitored by parents. There are also other activities like a bot workshop where simple llm bots can be "programmed" by creating system prompts (kids create video game helper bots, ice cream shop bots, adventure/dungeons and dragons style bots, etc). There is a sticker book (cartoon image search), and a quiz creator. Many other things are planned!

The guiding principles are to create a fun, positive, safe space for kids and families to socialize and interact as well as empower kids to explore and understand technology as a creative tool and not just as something to consume content.
by SilverElfin | 2025-07-27 20:51:58+00:00
Is there any consequence? I’ve seen now a new practice where companies won’t even tell you what was compromised. For example a big one last year (?) was at the University of Washington. I had family receive vague letters saying some other place called Fred Hutch cancer center got hacked, and for some reason, the patient data of the university’s own hospitals was shared with this other place (even though they aren’t patients of Fred Hutch). Both Fred Hutch and UW refuse to tell individuals what data of theirs was compromised, but just say it can include all personal info including medical records and test results and social security numbers. It’s infuriating to just see a vague letter with free credit monitoring from companies that should be doing more and fined more.
by barrell | 2025-07-27 20:52:17+00:00
Why do you need a beautiful UI? Because you need something to use for thousands of hours.

Why have a visual interface at all? It’s more convenient to use, is way more engaging, and just better for learning. There is an audio component to the app, and I’m sure more and more audio components will be added, but I would be surprised if in-app audio ever exceeds half of my usage.

For example there is a shadowing exercise that is purely audio based (put in headphones and press play). But what if you want to see what a word means? Or see its gender/case/tense? Mark it as easy or hard, remembered or forgotten? I can look all this information up, plus read a few paragraphs of explanations in less time than I would take me to formulate a question.
Ask HN: Engineers deserve better recognition. Can a protocol change that?
by mzk_pi | 2025-07-27 20:54:57+00:00
Many engineers contribute significantly to open source, infrastructure, civic tech, and social impact—but rarely get recognition beyond GitHub stars or token mentions.

What if we had a protocol that could quantify and validate such contributions—not in money, but in trust, transparency, and long-term social value?

Could such a structure change how engineers are valued, or is reputation still bound to institutions and capital?

Curious to hear your thoughts. Has anyone tried designing or experimenting with such systems?
by marcosdumay | 2025-07-27 20:55:08+00:00
> I’m not talk about people sitting in a chair doing nothing.

Aren't you taking about public attendants at a DMV?

> If you’re just choosing not to believe that a DMV office could be run poorly

I suggest you read my post again. Or... by "run poorly" you mean "the management not constantly punishing people"?
by asacrowflies | 2025-07-27 20:55:10+00:00
Yes we need to study the longer term changes but the short term changes are undeniable. And focusing on geologic timescale for these improvements is inane when you look at the scale of destruction of the industrial revolution in less than a blink of an eye on the geological timescale...

This is like triage, and concern trolling the 40 or 50 year side effects of triage treatment when someone is bleeding out is negligent bordering on criminal and treasonous imo
by scoreandmore | 2025-07-27 20:56:06+00:00
And did you stick around to see what happens after they go full tabula rasa? I have: they fall so far behind they close up shop. The proper response is to move slowly and intentionally and use indicators. Like ‘design thinking’, with prototyping and feedback and incremental feedback, not burn shit to the ground because planning is too hard mentality. But I realize that’s what shareholders demand. And now that gov’t is being run like a business, prepare to see bankruptcies.

Fortunately other, more rational countries, will fill the gaps. They’ve just been complacent because the US was on its game for so long. Especially the ESA.
by bjoli | 2025-07-27 20:56:17+00:00
I am no fan of racket's for loops. It is frustrating, because it fells like an almost-goosd looping facility.

I do use racket, but for scripts I prefer guile. Guile-fibers is a lot neater than the racket parallelism situation, for example. And I can usually find the code responsible for what IAM trying to achieve in the implementation. I never became friends with racket. I remember trying to fix a bug, but I never found what I was looking for.

Getting superficially familiar with the guile codebase takes about an hour.

Then again, I am a classical musician and not a programmer.
by godelski | 2025-07-27 20:56:17+00:00
> debuggers

Parent mentioned

>> DAP

Here's the docs[0]

> popup context windows for docs

These are called "balloon"s[1]. Plenty of people have setups for things like docs (press "K") or other things (By default "K" assumes a man page)

> contextual buttons on a line of code

I don't know what this means, can you explain?

> minimap

Do you mean something like this?[2] Personally, I use tagbar[3] as I like using ctags and being able to jump around in the project.

The "minimap" is the only one here that isn't native. You can also have the file tree on the left if you want. Most people tend to use NerdTree[4], but like with a lot of plugins, there's builtins that are just as good. Here's the help page for netrw[5], vim's native File Explorer

Btw, this all works in vim. No need for neovim for any of this stuff. Except for the debugger, this stuff has been here for quite some time. The debugger has been around as a plugin for awhile too. All this stuff has been here since I started using vim, which was over a decade ago (maybe balloons didn't have as good of an interface? Idk, it's been awhile)

[0] https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/debugger.html

[1] https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/options.html#'balloon...

[2] https://github.com/wfxr/minimap.vim

[3] https://github.com/preservim/tagbar

[4] https://github.com/preservim/nerdtree

[5] https://vimhelp.org/pi_netrw.txt.html#netrw
by bayindirh | 2025-07-27 20:56:47+00:00
Eclipse (as in ecosystem) is fairly popular in Enterprise, but since it exposes all the knobs, and is a bona fide IDE which has some learning curve, people stay away from it.

Also it used to be kinda heavy, but it became lighter because of Moore's law and good code management practices all over the board.

I'm planning to deploy Theia in its web based form if possible, but still didn't have the time to tinker with that one.
by tombert | 2025-07-27 20:56:55+00:00
I have been unemployed for the last few months, and there's only so much TV and YouTube I can watch without going utterly insane between interviews,

Since WGU just started doing masters degrees in CS, I decided it would be a way to kill large amounts of time while getting at least a little out of it, so I registered for it.

I've been a professional software person for like fourteen years, so I was able to knock it out extremely quickly due to WGU's competency based stuff, so now I finally am able to put "MS" after my name.
by brewdad | 2025-07-27 20:57:01+00:00
Until you can give consumers an AppleTV type box that they can buy at Walmart, plug in and maybe spend 5 minutes setting up, then never have to think about again, you simply aren't going to get 90% of the population to self-host anything. Most don't have the knowledge to make it happen and won't be able to understand the documentation needed to acquire that knowledge. The rest simply can't be bothered with it.
by LinguaBrowse | 2025-07-27 20:57:31+00:00
Author here – the return on investment will be modest, no doubt. I started the newsletter in order to share any thoughts on various topics without having to please a social media algorithm to get seen. Winning a few new readers for my efforts is all I'm really looking!

As for the article getting regurgitated, I am not too worried. It is simply an awfully long, awfully dense article for any LLM to synthesise more than a handful of bullet points out of, so I think any derivative product is going to make for a far less engrossing read. Indeed, if you try asking ChatGPT about runtimes right now, you'll get a pathetically shallow and mainstream analysis.

There may well be clickbait articles spawned from this, but I'm optimistic that people will find the source and be able to tell in an instance that it's the Real McCoy.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-27 20:57:36+00:00
We learned one simple lesson, the past 10 years: if you want good ARM support, it has to come from the vendor. Nobody else can reverse-engineer devicetrees or GPU drivers with a remotely comparable release cadence. Linux has supported new x86 chipsets on day-1 since forever now; compare that to Broadcom or Apple Silicon's "best effort" community support that often takes years to boot into a graphical environment. Forget about stability or regression testing, it's a tinkertoy.

This is a shame because all the ARM licensees worth buying hardware from always have higher margins on smartphones or services. They have no commitment to supporting the PC or server market, let alone the software they use or featureset they depend on. It's no wonder that ARM adoption is stalling on the runway while Power11 gets upstream kernel support and RISC-V displaces integrated ARM ICs. Their only stakeholder is making their money off iPhone apps, not professional software.
by abhishekpandey | 2025-07-27 20:57:53+00:00
If someone never moved into web development and still coding C++ on Windows, do they survive? Maybe they did, having some job somewhere in a legacy company, or maybe they are doing some real cool stuff at Google etc. But for the majority of the people web is the default now. IMO, it will be the same for AI. You can probably survive and hold some legacy jobs in some legacy companies but majority of the people would have moved to AI (and it will be faster than desktop -> web migration). But why even worry about he hype. Leave the hype aside (stop browsing LinkedIn if that helps) and start learning a little bit every day/week.
by derektank | 2025-07-27 20:58:18+00:00
Excess LDL and VLDL cholesterol have absolutely been shown to be harmful. We know from studies of familial hypercholesterolemia, a disorder caused by single mutation in the LDL receptor gene, that too much LDL cholesterol directly leads to artherosclerosis and early death from heart disease.

There's a pretty direct analogy to type 2 diabetes and metabolic disease generally. The human body naturally produces blood glucose and we would quite quickly die if our blood glucose levels went to zero. That doesn't mean that hyperglycemia is healthy and in fact, we know it directly causes all kinds of bad health outcomes. We absolutely need some LDL cholesterol, and in our evolutionary history when we faced famine there was probably some selection for people whose livers didn't aggressively metabolize LDL particles from the blood (an energetically costly process), but that doesn't mean that high LDL cholesterol today is safe if you're hoping to live a long life.
by mandmandam | 2025-07-27 21:00:21+00:00
> are rapidly moving towards the sixth ones by all accounts

The scientific consensus isn't that we're "moving towards" a mass extinction. It's that we're deep into one, and accelerating.

"Current extinction rates are estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates [13][14][15][16][17] and are accelerating."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
by kocial | 2025-07-27 21:00:31+00:00
Working on SAAS Community Builder - https://kocial.net

We saw an increase in demand for individuals willing to build their own HackerNews, Product Hunt, or Reddit-like Community.

So, we built a SaaS platform for them, where they can launch their own community with their custom domain in just a few seconds.

Demo community - https://kocial.co

Get your own community here - https://kocial.net
by QuantumGood | 2025-07-27 21:00:37+00:00
You are formally documenting for all future processes that you have filed a complaint, and should include relevant contracts, receipts, correspondence, and support materials. This can be enough to encourage the business to be more responsive.

So it's a low-cost first step that can trigger mediation or settlement and help resolve your dispute (and contribute to broader consumer protection). It's a quick way to signal to the business to work with you.

Submitting a letter or formal complaint can prompt the AG (sometimes) to contact the business in an attempt to mediate or resolve the issue informally. The AG also often offers informal mediation services though some division. The AG’s office sometimes starts investigations based on complaints from the public.
by godelski | 2025-07-27 21:00:55+00:00
> I install vscode from scratch, install a few extensions I need, set 3 or 4 settings I use regularly, and bang in 5 minutes I have a customized, working environment catered for almost any language.

Weird, I'd say that's my experience with vim. I just carry around by dotfiles, which is not that extensive.

Hell, I will even feel comfortable in a vi terminal, though that's extremely rare to actually find. Usually vi is just remapped to vim

Edit:

The git folder with *all* my dotfiles (which includes all my notes) is just 3M, so I can take it anywhere. If I install all the plugins and if I install all the vim plugins I currently have (which some are old and I don't use) the total is ~100M. So...
by davidpolberger | 2025-07-27 21:01:00+00:00
I'm working on an engine for Excel-like formulas, which will be available both as a library and as a service (which I've mentioned on HN a few times before). I originally started work on the engine back in 2008, when our app builder needed it.

This is a wheel I see people reinventing all the time, often for use in SaaS applications. The implementations are often underwhelming: function support is limited, documentation is sparse to non-existent and errors are typically only communicated at runtime -- if at all. Formula editors usually lack autocomplete, making them frustrating to use.

I've spent years solving all these problems (with a statically-typed language), and I'd love for others to benefit from the work. I have extracted the formula engine from our app compiler, so the library is nearly complete. The runtime part (evaluating formulas) has been rewritten in TypeScript. Next, I'll build a service around it to validate, compile and evaluate formulas -- which should be fun.

I'm planning to do a Show HN once I have a preview up and running.
by rorylaitila | 2025-07-27 21:01:24+00:00
I'm digitally cataloging all US vintage print advertisements I can get my hands on (https://adretro.com). The backend is built on MySQL and Lucee and the full page ads published with Notion and Super.so. I'm using OpenAI vision to extract entity data from the images.

So far I've cataloged about 1500 advertisements out of the ~100,000 in my possession. Of which that is probably only 0.1% of all the major material out there. It's going to take a long time! I'm going at a rate of about 10,000/year. I'm going to have to speed this up :) But I've gotten the process to catalog a full magazine down from a week to a few hours.

I'm thinking of ways to support the archive. I am doing original art from the ads I may sell, or sell really nice copies of rare ads.