MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Rastion – Autonomous Monitoring Systems
by ileonidas | 2025-07-17 16:34:36+00:00
I built a collection of live monitoring systems that connect to your business data and continuously send optimization recommendations via email. No dashboards to check, no software to install – just automated insights delivered to your inbox.

What it does: • Workforce Scheduling Monitor – Connects to employee databases, optimizes shift assignments, emails scheduling recommendations (20-25% labor cost reduction) • Inventory Optimization Tracker – Monitors stock levels, calculates optimal reorder points using EOQ algorithms, emails purchase recommendations (15-30% inventory cost reduction) • Route Optimization Monitor – Analyzes delivery routes, solves Vehicle Routing Problems with Time Windows, emails route improvements (10-20% fuel cost reduction)

The key insight: Most optimization tools require you to log in, check dashboards, and manually act on insights. These systems flip that – they actively monitor your data and proactively send actionable recommendations when opportunities are detected.

Technical approach: Mathematical optimization algorithms (integer programming, constraint satisfaction, genetic algorithms) n8n workflows for automation and data pipeline orchestration Google Sheets integration for easy data connectivity Email delivery for zero-friction consumption of insights Continuous monitoring with configurable alert thresholds

Built this after realizing that most optimization solutions gather dust because they require too much manual intervention. These systems make optimization truly passive – they work in the background and only interrupt you when there's money to be saved. Would love feedback from the HN community, especially from anyone running operations where these types of optimizations could help!
by lotsofpulp | 2025-07-17 16:34:38+00:00
The financial numbers paint a grimmer picture of Portland than they do of the other west coast cities.

The city, the county, and the state all spend increasing proportions on debt service, and the rewards for earning a lot of money are much less than the neighboring state.

The total fertility rate is also one of the lowest in the country. And Portland lacks a flagship university to bring in young talent.

It might be a nice place to visit during the summer months, but I don’t foresee many high paying jobs or highly profitable businesses being made there.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-17 16:35:04+00:00
> I as a layperson can often do bette

Except often times you can't because of all the regulations. First there's the code which you can't possibly understand sufficiently if it's not your day job. If you do figure out what you need to do you'll then find plenty of things you can't do without a license that you need to put in years for, not just pay and pass a test.

The only stuff that's not subject to exclusionary regulation is the "average homeowner" type renovation stuff and even then only because there isn't political will to tolerate it, not because the government and trades wouldn't try if they could.

But what do I know, I'm just someone who's been told he has to pay for $50k of engineering studies to assess the runoff impacts of converting forested former pasture back to the latter because a bunch of useful idiots 40yr ago heard some politicians talking points and thought it sounded good.
by jsnell | 2025-07-17 16:35:05+00:00
But they're not asking for your consent for that.

They're saying that if you use these features, they have a legal basis (legitimate interest) other than consent to use your data for product improvements.

The only thing they're asking for consent is for providing the features. Which you appear to want to use, and which genuinely can't be provided without access to the data, so where is the problem?

(I don't think it is as unbounded as you claim. They'd still be limited by their other policies, which for Workspace are quite restrictive, and by what EU DPAs would actually find reasonable to be covered by legitimate interest. It is not a free ticket to do anything you want.)
by pornel | 2025-07-17 16:35:10+00:00
There may be lots of uninformed post-hoc rationalizations now, but it couldn't have started with everyone collectively deciding to irrationally dislike Ada, and not even try it. I suspect it's not even the ignorant slander that is the cause of Ada's unpopularity.

Other languages survive being called designed by committee or having ugly syntax. People talk shit about C++ all the time. PHP is still alive despite getting so much hate. However, there are rational reasons why these languages are used, they're just more complicated than beauty of the language itself, and are due to complex market forces, ecosystems, unique capabilities, etc.

I'm not qualified to answer why Ada isn't more popular, but an explanation implying there was nothing wrong with it, only everyone out of the blue decided to irrationally dislike it, seems shallow to me.
by mcv | 2025-07-17 16:35:25+00:00
I'm probably easy to mistake me for being self-taught, considering I was programming as a kid, and never finished university, but I didn't really learn to program until I went to university. I wanted to, as a kid, but unlike my brother, I could never figure it out, until I got my hands on something better than Basic, and some good guidance and teaching.

I. Recent years I've only been getting more and more passionate about it, but that's probably mostly because I'm finally getting the opportunity to tackle some really hard and interesting problems.
by tsunamifury | 2025-07-17 16:35:42+00:00
Dude, lets be real here. You join early, take a risk, get a solid slice, maybe build your own thing later. That era produced a lot of good outcomes for smart people willing to bet on themselves.

That’s not the game anymore.

Today, most of these companies lock the cap table before engineers show up. The infrastructure costs are massive—bootstrapping isn’t just hard, it’s often structurally impossible in AI unless you’re rich or already plugged in. The story everyone’s still selling—about meritocracy, about “just take the risk”—doesn’t match the way power and ownership actually work now.

The people building the models aren’t getting meaningful equity. The platforms are licensing them behind closed doors. The upside is flowing to founders, corporate partners, and late-stage investors who shape the game long before most people touch it. And yeah, a few still break out. But the vast majority? They’re just very clever labor with a better kitchen.

If you made it work before, that’s awesome. But let’s not pretend the system hasn’t shifted underneath the next generation.
by jschveibinz | 2025-07-17 16:36:21+00:00
This is a nice short piece of writing.

The author sets the stage: uncoordinated and unathletic. Then they introduced their challenge: kayaking (or similar) which for them was a hard thing. Then they described the process: practice and improvement over a long period of time. And they closed with a personal success and take-away: it's worth the effort because of the experience regardless of the scale of the outcome.

Nice.
by JohnFen | 2025-07-17 16:36:26+00:00
That was the conceit of the movie, yes, but the reality is that the conceit is not a realistic one. Intelligence is not strongly correlated with heredity.

Thinking is hard work, and people are generally disposed to avoid it to the greatest degree they can. If genAI even comes close to fulfilling the promises, then more people will be able to get by with less thinking than ever before.
by Aeroi | 2025-07-17 16:36:43+00:00
I've been building a voice+vision AI assistant for tradesman, industrial services, and DIY consumers the last 8 months.

It streams vision+voice+text+spatial data to a multimodal llm, to help users solve problems on the job. Basically a "Cursor" for tradesman. Most of my work now has been figuring out what to put in the context window, when, and how to provide the best deterministic response.

This assistant is a bridge between where we are now (little to no tech for these guys) and where the future will be (robotic automation). I think the in between stage will be a significantly longer timeframe than people realize, and I hope my app can provide value to these guys while they work. www.camerasearch.ai
by epicureanideal | 2025-07-17 16:37:11+00:00
Folks may not know about the jobs, or there might be other details that aren’t mentioned here that make them less interested, for example are there occasionally big chunks of being unemployed, is the work dangerous, is the work stable, etc.

20 years ago, before I started making good money as a software engineer, if someone had offered me a similar opportunity, and training, I would’ve taken it assuming there were no big gotchas.
by swores | 2025-07-17 16:38:06+00:00
"You can vibe this" means getting an LLM to create it, not writing the code yourself. That's what people mean when they use the term "vibe coding" (or just "vibing" in their comment).

Though vibe coding doesn't prohibit the human from making the decision on which weather API to use, so of all the criticisms to make about LLM use I don't actually agree with the person you replied to who suggested it has to mean "accepting any random LLM suggestion for a random endpoint".
by mnw21cam | 2025-07-17 16:38:12+00:00
Every weekly newsletter I get at work is sent from an external spam-sender, containing links to an external hosting site that have a unique ID for tracking clicks. Those links are then munged by Outlook which makes them hard to identify. I searched on the company web site for any confirmation that the external sender or external hosting site were legitimately being used by the company and found none, so I refuse to click on those links. I should also report them as phishing scams really.
by jajuuka | 2025-07-17 16:38:13+00:00
It's not a narrative. It's what the research tells us. https://www.nhs.uk/better-health/quit-smoking/ready-to-quit-... The "protect the children by banning products" is a very common narrative though that has no scientific basis.

Kids were using nicotine before vaping, they were smoking cigarettes. And these companies absolutely are investing in a growing market for adults who either want to quit smoking entirely or want a healthier option to cigarettes. As cigarettes prices have continued to soar and laws have become more and strict on where someone can and cannot smoke, vaping offers an alternative to get nicotine and an oral fixation. So it's not surprising that more and more adults have switched to it.

That's not a study that's a meta-analysis. You seem to have seen the one ad Juul put out to minors and assumed that is the entire industry and its purpose. This is objectively divorced from reality.
by helix90 | 2025-07-17 16:38:23+00:00
If I were interviewing you for an Embedded position I would ask questions about how your skills with .NET and React applied to your embedded projects. I would review your github repo and ask about the embedded projects there and what lessons you learned, and how they were different than a .NET project.

Changing specialties is rough, but I have done it more than once. Embedded is a strange space, but you can break in.
by steveklabnik | 2025-07-17 16:39:19+00:00
People over-index on "formal" here, the Rust reference and Ferrocene (which will end up being adopted as the official spec) is just as "formal" as the C++ specification.

There are other compilers in development, and they're able to coordinate with these documents. There is of course always more work to do, but it's really not as far away as some people believe.
by willtemperley | 2025-07-17 16:39:24+00:00
Swift is coming to Android. That may improve traction. [1]

Having just ported a small library from Rust to Swift, it’s fairly clear that Rust is ridiculously fast but Swift is just so much more readable. Much easier to debug too.

Also - why would Rust only have a max-heap? In the library I ported, the authors had to reverse the algorithmic logic in the entire library for this.

Even though it’s only about half as fast as Rust, Swift performance does start to shine with concurrency.

[1] https://www.swift.org/android-workgroup/
by infecto | 2025-07-17 16:39:35+00:00
I responded in the exact same format as yourself and adding my additional thoughts. If that counts a being rude then were you being rude? I don’t believe in the US market Vincent is considered the best tool. That said I don’t believe a lot of the tools in the legal space that try to do everything are that powerful and the ones on my lens that are going well have focused on specific domains and problems. Even Harvey tried to do too much from the start.

As for valuations, when looking at current VC multiples and equity markets, I don’t see the same bubble from a qualitative perspective. Absolutely there is over hype coming from CEOs in public markets but there is a lot of value being driven. I don’t believe the giants are going to do well, maybe the infrastructure plays will but I think we will see a carve out of a new generation of companies driving the change. Unlike ‘99, I am seeing a lot more startups and products with closer to the ground roadmaps to profitability. In 99 so many were running off of hopes and dreams.

If you would actually like to converse I would love to see your perspective but if all you can be is mad please please don’t respond. Nobody is having a courtroom drama other than what’s playing out in your head.
by beAbU | 2025-07-17 16:39:43+00:00
The human hand is arguably the best general purpose gripper of human-scale objects. Only took evolution a couple of hundred million years to figure it out.

If you can limit the scope of things to be gripped, e.g. a sheet of paper, a baby chicken or a 100x100mm square steel girder then no doubt there is a better design out there.
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-17 16:39:44+00:00
I don't know exactly what problem they solve, but for example, my PIT project is 150kb in size and works everywhere. My friend ran it on "zsh with powerlevel10k configuration and MesloNGF font." That is, it is platform-independent and convenient, in my opinion this is enough and this is its feature and difference, for example, over tiv.
by gosub100 | 2025-07-17 16:39:49+00:00
This is a bit like saying "if everyone was just honest and a good person, we wouldn't need police or jails or criminal judges". All these things exist for a reason (except for kickbacks). We have labor unions because of worker exploitation. We have zoning to protect personal freedoms of existing property owners. We have environmental impact studies because corporations have proven they are willing to freely dump toxic materials wherever they feel like.
Show HN: ClueWing: 100% private, on‑device meeting coach (free lifetime license)
by johnnybilliard | 2025-07-17 16:40:26+00:00
Only available for Apple M-series. Soon for non-M and PC.

Hi HN,

I built ClueWing to help us suck less at meetings. It worked well with me :)

* 100% local AI. All processing happens on your system. There are no recordings, no cloud uploads, no data leaving your machine - your audio stays yours.

* Non-intrusive. ClueWing never joins the call as a bot, it just floats beside Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack Huddles, Discord, or any other meeting tool.

The goal is to help you contribute confidently, spot hidden objections, and wrap up with clear action items, not to store transcripts on someone else's server.

To try it:

Download via https://gumroad.cluewing.com

Use code MACAPPS25 at checkout for a free lifetime license (expires end of this week).

Looking for feedback on:

* Does the real-time "traffic light + cue" format actually help you in live calls?
by jcranmer | 2025-07-17 16:40:29+00:00
Recently, I've been trying to teach myself some numerical thing I don't have prior experience on (building a sparse LU solver, if you're curious). What I've found is that the single most useful resource I've found is not trying to build one myself (because where do you begin?) or by ripping apart the internals of existing solvers to see how they work. No, it's stumbling across the lecture notes of a course that covered that material, in no small part because by stepping up a level and looking at the other lectures, I can discover the other relevant things I didn't know were relevant. And this property has held true in my experience for other topics I've had to research on my own: the highest quality materials are invariably university lecture material.

If your main thesis is that university instruction isn't worth it, why is all the best material university instruction? Sure, there's an argument that learning how to build something is best done by actually building it... which is why university courses invariably have "build what we're teaching you to build" as a course project that is a significant portion of the grade.
by AI_beffr | 2025-07-17 16:40:38+00:00
maybe not true for all of us but by 2008 i was done developing. 0-12 is basically when you are created as a person -- molded by your environment. crime may have been higher back then but it was a much better environment to be raised in. society has waned quite a bit since then. public schools have waned a lot. all of our institutions. nobody feels like they can speak candidly or help another person without risking being taken to trial. yes, xkcd make a comic where he makes fun of people who say that things have gotten worse. but the crazy, unbelievable reality is that xkcd was wrong shock horror!
by waldopat | 2025-07-17 16:40:38+00:00
Totally agree. Passion is the key ingredient. For me, as a self-proclaimed self-taught dev, I learned the most on side projects because my main jobs didn't always offered job training or clear paths towards advancement or eventually the product went into maintenance mode and became boring. Maybe it's splitting hairs, but I still consider that on the job experience, even if it wasn't paid many times, and it gave me a deeper understanding of problem solving in addition to programming chops than tutorials or portfolio projects or bootcamps could provide.
by franga2000 | 2025-07-17 16:40:48+00:00
I'm well aware, but I'm not sure what the point here is.

The OP was complaining that the author of the page wants "stock android". On a production device, you can either have 1) the manufacturer's custom version of Androi, 2) a near-stock Android, or 3) your own custom version but with all the usual issue that brings. There is no secret fourth option. So I don't see what the OP's complaint is trying to achieve.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-17 16:41:08+00:00
>A good electrician would tell you to change the cord on your dryer and that anything else is a code violation.

It would be a code violation for me to take my exiting 120yo retaining wall and extend it by copying it in exact detail despite the fact that the details of its construction are provably satisfactory.

The code isn't there to ensure results. The code is there to make the subjective quantifiable so it can be bickered over and litigated in a fairly deterministic manner.
by ajkjk | 2025-07-17 16:41:31+00:00
I can't believe that in 2025 it is still hard to find documentation for basic functionality in languages as ubiquitous as, say, Python.

If I google something simple I get 100 junk sites of garbage (GeeksForGeeks, W3Schools, etc), a bunch of AI-generated crap, a bunch of archaic out-of-date stuff, the official documentation which is a wall of dense text, some tutorials that mention the basics, a bunch of shitty bootcamp blogspam (they make you write blog posts about crap to get your brand out there, you know), some stackexchange posts with twenty different answers from 2010, etc. And I'm thinking of, like, Python here, cause that's what was pissing me off this week. God help you if what you're looking for is made by Apple.

Sure we're using AI to look up documentation now but that should never have been necessary. Just like now we use AI to google things because google is so shitty. It's not that AI is great, it's that search engines and documentation are more dogshit than ever and AI is a bandaid.

also it is amazing to me that shells still exist in more-or-less the same form. dear god can I just get a terminal that runs something like Python directly?
by lxgr | 2025-07-17 16:42:51+00:00
robots.txt seems to be an irresistible attractor for some, most recently in a crusade against all kinds of GenAI.

I get not wanting to have our data serve as training data, but I've also seen moderately large newspapers throwing literally all LLM bots in there, i.e. not only those that scrape training data, but also those that process users' search requests or even direct article fetches.

The obvious, but possibly not expected, result was that this newspaper became effectively invisible to user searches in ChatGPT. Not sure if I'm an outlier here, but I personally click through to many of the sources ChatGPT provides, so they must be losing tons of traffic that way.
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-17 16:42:57+00:00
That's the problem, kids were using nicotine less and less often before vaping, and vaping reversed that trend.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10741819/

Here's the statistical breakdown from that: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10741819/table/t1/

Between 1991 and 2021 tobacco use among young people dropped precipitously. Again, this shows up again and again in the data comparing ALL products containing nicotine.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

So with all due respect this isn't really up for debate, it isn't a subtle signal in the data. Nicotine use (especially smoking) has been on the decline across ALL age groups, especially children, for decades, and vaping starkly reversed that trend.
by J_McQuade | 2025-07-17 16:43:14+00:00
I always feel really grotty about evangelising for products, but I switched to Kagi about six months ago and it really is a better experience. In almost all cases, the search results are as good as or better than Google, and I don't have to scroll through an increasing number of misleading ads to see them. I'm a happy customer.

When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted (rather than go through the next few pages of results), but invariably I wouldn't find it there either. I think that's what gave me confidence that Kagi's results were at least as trustworthy as anything else. (to compare, I did the same thing in my multiple abortive attempts to switch to DDG and it always came up wanting).
by lloeki | 2025-07-17 16:43:24+00:00
> since browsers started to set it to "1" by default without asking

IIRC IE10 did that, to much outcry because it upended the whole DNT being an explicit choice; no other browser (including Edge) set it as a default.

There have been thoughts about using DNT (the technical communication mechanism about consent/objection) in correlation with GDPR (the legal framework to enforce consent/objection compliance)

https://www.w3.org/blog/2018/do-not-track-and-the-gdpr/

The GDPR explicitly mentions objection via technical means:

> In the context of the use of information society services, and notwithstanding Directive 2002/58/EC, the data subject may exercise his or her right to object by automated means using technical specifications.

https://law.stackexchange.com/a/90002

People like to debate as to whether DNT itself has enough meaning:

> Due to the confusion about this header's meaning, it has effectively failed.

https://law.stackexchange.com/a/90004

I myself consider DNT as what it means at face value: I do not want to be tracked, by anyone, ever. I don't know what's "confusing" about that.

The only ones that are "confused" are the ones it would be detrimental to i.e the ones that perform and extract value from the tracking, and make people run in circles with contrived explanations.

It would be perfectly trivial for a browser to pop up a permission request per website like there is for webcams or microphone or notifications, and show no popup should I elect to blanket deny through global setting.