MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cbolanos79 | 2025-07-02 13:53:38+00:00
Currently, in a side project to keep track of pricing in the supermarkets, as since the start of the war of Ukraine, the prices have raised, event skyrocketed in some cases, without any real explanation. In some cases, I've seen how a product has raised up to 1€ in some months. The way to keep the pricing changes is to take a picture of a supermarket receipt, store the information, and calculate the pricing diff for each article. For extracting the information, I use Textract from AWS, as it fits my needs, however, it could be possible to replace it with any other OCR which can extract structured information. My purpose is to improve the project gradually and add statistical information, like charts showing the pricing changes along the time, show the most bought products in a period of time, etc

As the project relies on AWS service, I have decided to not publish a free demo, as it would be exposed to abuse by sending all kind of images, not to talk about crazy billing. However, here is a screenshot on how does it display the receipt details:

https://ibb.co/pv2ksRhH

There is a raise on one article, and a down on some others

The project is built using Ruby on Rails and runs on docker. It is light enough to run on a cheap VPS.

Feel free to take a look on it: https://gitlab.com/cbolanos79/sbt_rails

Any constructive opinion/collaboration is welcome :)
by bArray | 2025-07-02 13:54:25+00:00
> This is very much from a sighted person's point of view. When you use screen readers, you can switch to a 'links' navigation mode and only go through links, in which case all you'd hear would be "click here", "Amaya website" and "Amaya".

I think this is a UX problem with screen readers, and actually probably something LLMs might massively help with. If I was designing something for screen readers, I would probably have interactive elements within a context window, i.e.:

<context>To download W3C's free editor/browser Amaya, go to the <a href="..">Amaya Website</a> and select the latest version on the home page.</context>

The user would hear "Amaya Website" and would then have some ability to also hear the link context. For pages missing the context windows some attempt could be made to create one automatically.

> See also https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/link-purpose-in-... , also keeping in mind that since June, the underlying WCAG guideline is a EU-wide legal requirement for company websites.

On this page itself, within the box "Success Criterion (SC)" the listener would hear "purpose of each link", "programmatically determined link context", "ambiguous to users in general". The last one is, well, ambiguous to users in general. Even as a sighted person, without selecting it, I wouldn't know what it is actually going to link to.

I would say that the web is generally actively hostile towards screen readers, and not because of a lack of WCAG adoption. You have text in images (not just static, but also GIFs), JS heavy components, delayed loading, dependant interactions (such as captchas, navigation drop downs, etc), infinite scrolling - the list just goes on. The web is primary a highly visual space and likely will remain so.

I don't think the EU's accessibility act is actually enforceable [1]. Unlike cookies, some of the changes required are massive, to the point where it may not even be worth existing in the EU market if it's enforced.

> Incorporating captions into video content, as well as providing audio descriptions and transcripts

Even proving you are compliant is a lot of cost, which includes audits and training staff. You can always trust the EU to regulate itself out of being competitive.

[1] https://www.wcag.com/compliance/european-accessibility-act/
by jerf | 2025-07-02 13:54:26+00:00
50MB feels like "all the 'ancient' text we have" maybe, as measured by the size of the original content and not counting copies. A quick check at Alice in Wonderland puts it at 163kB in plain text. About 300 of those gets us to 50MB. There's way more than 300 books of similar size from the 19th century. They may not all be digitized and freely available, but you can fill libraries with even existing 19th century texts, let alone what may be lost by now.

Or it may just be someone bloviating and just being wrong... I think even ancient texts could exceed that number, though perhaps not by an order of magnitude.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-02 13:54:47+00:00
The difference is that in one case you care if the result is right and in another case you don't. If your "complex problem solving" was being used to "design a manufacturing process" or "diagnose a disease and come up with a treatment plan" or something that has consequences if it is wrong you're going to be unhappy.

On the other hand there is a lot of high social-status work that has no consequences like "write a college commencement address" and people will be impressed no matter what comes out.

Perhaps the likes of Sam Altman and Satya Nadella are so excited for AI because it can do their job but it can't fold towels or be the final assembly programmer for software that users actually use.
by jandrese | 2025-07-02 13:54:59+00:00
> Post WW2, we had gradually managed to build a less violent society,

I don't think this is an accurate assessment. More of the violence was swept under the rug, but it was still there.

Post WW2 the US did well because a lot of old incumbent industries were disrupted by the war and swift technological advancements in many areas that opened up a lot of opportunities for scrappy startups. Also, the baby boom meant the workforce was skewed young and entitlements were not a major factor in the economy. Finally, the US had a federal government that was willing to tax the rich and not yet fully infiltrated by moneyed interests as well as an independent news media. Well, more independent than today's news media at least.

The primary problem with capitalism is that once you accumulate enough money it is easy to create a feedback loop where that money creates more money with little to no input on your part. This causes money to accumulate at the top where it has nothing to do but make more money. The primary advantage of capitalistic economies is that the power is pushed down to the edges closer to where the information is, but when allowed to run unchecked that advantage is lost as the power accumulates at the top, just like a command economy. This is why it is so important to tax the rich and to avoid creating billionaires, they can't efficient spend the money they have for the same reason communism doesn't scale well: the information bottleneck.
by kiselitza | 2025-07-02 13:55:58+00:00
TL;DR Voiden, a free, offline API workspace, decided to say no to SaaS "Teams" features because they're: 1) bloated, 2) expensive, and 3) break developer workflows.

Git is the real collaboration engine. It's free, familiar, and tied to your codebase.

Read more on the link in the title.
by lumost | 2025-07-02 13:56:05+00:00
At some point Americans became convinced that the process of organizing hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure and millions of people on the task of manufacturing products was “easy.”

50 years on, and fthe generation that knew how to manufacture is gone - their children never built up the same skills at the same scale. Their children’s children didn't bother to learn the STEM and Craft skills required to work at scale.

Restoring manufacture will be a generation away outside of “dark factories”
Ask HN: How do you handle internal event webhooks without spamming Slack?
by gabezn | 2025-07-02 13:56:42+00:00
I’ve been routing internal product events, backend signals, and 3rd-party notifications into Slack channels using webhooks, but it’s starting to feel wrong — hard to search/filter, and overloading channels.

How are you dealing with this?

Do you have a better system to collect and review these?

Any tools you like for this purpose?

I'm a solo dev working on a product and trying to figure out how others deal with this:

I have a bunch of non-critical internal events that I want visibility on:

Product updates: new signups, conversions, upgrades

Backend events: migrations finished, cron jobs completed, some errors (but not urgent ones)

Third-party integrations: like when my SEO tool posts a daily summary

Right now, I’m using Slack channels to receive webhook notifications from everywhere — it kinda works, but it’s starting to feel wrong:

Hard to filter or search

Feeds get noisy fast

I miss stuff because it blends with team chat

I know tools like Sentry, PagerDuty, or full observability stacks exist — but for a tiny team, they’re overkill. I just want a better way to organize and review these internal “status” events.

So I’m wondering: how do you handle this?

Do you send webhooks somewhere structured?

Are you using Airtable, Notion, email, or something else?

Have you built your own webhook dashboard or log viewer?

Curious how others in the same boat (indie hackers, small teams, solo devs) are solving this. Looking to learn how others manage this kind of internal “status” noise.
by bitbasher | 2025-07-02 13:56:51+00:00
People don't reply because they don't feel the pain you remove. Timing is everything.

You can monitor socials for individuals complaining about the pain point or about a competitor and reach out when you got a proper "signal".

I also avoid saying things like "free trial". Instead, I offer to give them access to the paid product to try it out.

It sounds less car salesman-y and as a receiver it feels nicer to get access to a paid product rather than a free trial everyone can have. Semantics most of the time, but it helps.

You can write organic content about how to solve those pains (and hope people searching for solutions find it).

When you do get customers you should always include a form that asks _why_ they are unsubscribing. I have learned a lot from it and it also offers a chance to turn customers back around. If someone complains about the price, I can give them a discounted rate. If someone complains about a specific quality issue I can give them free credits to make up for used ones, etc.

Always respond quickly. I have landed many customers simply because I respond quickly to emails. I've had customers tell me they chose my service over "big competitor Y" because I respond to their emails (even though my service is more expensive).

If you have an entire vertical, don't undervalue the small fish. I target ~3 different types of customers and the bulk of my revenue comes from one specific type of customer. I almost got rid of the other two customers, but realized my largest customer ($1XX,XXX/year) started off as a small fish for a year before becoming a big fish.

That may go against some of the traditional advice, as the small fish tend to account for most of the support... but in my case it works out.

A lot of the small customers end up being a channel on their own. A person leaves company A and goes to company B. They introduce your product at company B because they used it at company A.

When I speak with people I always ask how they found out about my product. Nine times out of ten it's a "coworker used your product at a different company".
by jjice | 2025-07-02 13:56:51+00:00
Discord also has a kind of culture I don't love connecting to for misc environments. I'm sure most are fine, but I've joined software related discords where people are having oddly NSFW chats. They've always been in different channels, but why does this software project need a NSFW channel?

I think it's _too_ social for bug reports and questions. I'd prefer a forum or GitHub issues for that kind of thing.

Or maybe I'm just getting old.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-02 13:56:55+00:00
You have to assume a grand ends is achievable through some knowable means. I don't see any real reason to think this is the case, certainly not on any sort of a meaningful timeframe. And I think this is even less true when we consider the typical connotation of Machiavellianism, which is through 'evil' actions.

It's extremely difficult to think of any real achievements sustained on the back of Machiavellianism, but one can list essentially endless entities whose downfall was brought on precisely by such.
by scosman | 2025-07-02 13:56:57+00:00
There's a section with a nice header making it's clear it's about X, a paragraph with details about X. Adding redundant text in the button isn't improving design. "Learn more about Synthetic Data Generation" is a truly gnarly button. I have played with making the entire section the link, which makes lighthouse stop complaining, but is lousy for providing an affordance to the user that it's an action.
by llm_nerd | 2025-07-02 13:56:58+00:00
But that's precisely why Meta are the "good guys". They specifically called China the good guys in the same way that Meta is the good guys, though in this case many of the Chinese models are extremely good.

Meta has open sourced all of their offerings purely to try to commoditize the industry to the greatest extent possible, hoping to avoid their competitors getting a leg up. There is zero altruism or good intentions.

If Meta had actually competitive AI offering, there is zero chance they would be releasing any of it.
by rekabis | 2025-07-02 13:57:08+00:00
> lots of folks get car loans because they can't afford to buy a car, even a cheap car, without one.

Then they shouldn’t get a new car, full stop. Older used cars can be perfectly serviceable with some research into lemon patterns and a pre-purchase inspection by a trusted mechanic. I have found the vlogger Car Wizard to be particularly accurate in his assessments of which used vehicles are great buys and which ones you need to stay the hell away from.

None of my cars are less than two decades old, and none of them cost me more than a new one would, even after the purchase price and all repairs, maintenance, and fuel are added up. If you manage to choose wisely, it is unlikely that you would ever pay more on a used vehicle, even over literal decades, than you would with a new car.

Now sure, you will never be able to own a new shiny. You will never be able to peacock around in a brand-new vehicle. But trying to impress people via copious displays of wealth is a fool’s errand. Intentional attempts at external validation always are.
by mattmaroon | 2025-07-02 13:57:32+00:00
It’s not really punishment if you don’t care what your share price is. A lower share price doesn’t hurt a company unless perhaps they are trying to do a secondary offering or something.

It does, however, hurt the Wall Street investors. If they have enough power to do so, they will replace the CEO if a share price is too low for too long.

That’s what creates the short term incentive that is a trouble and a lot of public companies. If the CEO has control of the voting shares, that pressure is relieved.
by crowcroft | 2025-07-02 13:57:40+00:00
If current LLMs hit a scaling wall and the game becomes about efficiency, I wonder if there's going to be space in the market for small models focussed on specific use cases.

I use Gemini to extract structured data from images and the flash model is great at this. I wonder how much effort it would be to create a smaller model that would run on something like a NUC with an AMD APU that is good enough for that one use case.

Or perhaps you end up with mini external GPU sticks that run use case specific models on them. Might not be much of a market for that, but could be pretty cool.
by quacked | 2025-07-02 13:58:13+00:00
The market has not decided on anything; to employ Americans, you have to pay huge amounts of extra taxes and provide all sorts of legally mandated protections, and to operate an American business, you have to follow all sorts of operational and environmental laws that foreigners don't have to follow. Yet they're allowed to sell their goods in the same venues as Americans.

If there are two ice cream vendors at the park, and the park charges one ice cream vendor a $350/day license and the other one doesn't have to license itself at all, has the "market" decided that the unlicensed business is superior?
by Roark66 | 2025-07-02 13:58:51+00:00
This is a bit silly. Slowing down, yes, but blocking? People who *really* want that content will find a way and this will hit everyone else instead that will have to do silly riddles before following every link or run crypto mining for them before being shown the content .

I recently went to a big local auction site on which I buy frequently and I got one of these "we detected unusual traffic from your network" messages. And "prove you're human". Which was followed by "you completed the capcha in 0.4s your IP is banned". Really? Am I supposed to slow down my browsing now? I tried a different browser, a different OS, logging on,clearing cookies, etc. Same result when I tried a search. It took 4h after contacting their customer service to unblock it. And the explanation was "you're clicking too fast".

At some point it just becomes a farce and the hassle is not worth the content. Also, while my story doesn't involve any bots perhaps a time will come when local LLMs will be good enough that I'll be able to tell one "reorder my cat food" and it will go and do it. Why are they so determined to "stop it" (spoiler, they can't).

For anyone who says LLMs are already capable of ordering cat food I say not so fast. First the cat food has to be on sale/offer (sometimes combined with extras). Second it is supposed to be healthy (no grains) and third the taste needs to be to my cats liking. So far I'm not going to trust a LLM with this.
by javier123454321 | 2025-07-02 13:58:54+00:00
Start with cutting the subsidized loan programs, that means that banks will have to give those loans and they will only do so for programs that make sense in terms of the ROI. That means that only the best programs that make the most exclusive admissions will have a shot. I'm not sure if humanities ever made sense to be a sort of 'default' option. I know more people that I can count that did something along the lines of this (all financed through debt):

Go to college without knowing their major, take two years of gen ed classes, realize they have to choose a major, choose the one which they happened to have more credits towards.

In a better system, studying english would be difficult, it would be for people that are passionate about it and excel at it. Not the default option because its the best way to capture money from subsidized 18 year old.

We probably agree on a lot, but disagree on solutions.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-02 13:58:56+00:00
Sounds very human. I experienced some junior devs who grew up with TDD and would often just tweak their code to pass their tests without stopping to understand their code at a fundamental level - essentially development through trial and error. Since they were also the ones writing the tests the core assumptions went into both and because they did so without thinking they were more likely to have errors. The test being wrong was more than likely and in those cases it would make sense to fix the test output.
by bakigul | 2025-07-02 13:59:23+00:00
Anthropic has shared their documentation in a `.txt` format that large language models (LLMs) can understand, such as [https://docs.anthropic.com/llms-full.txt](https://docs.anthropic.com/llms-full.txt). Is there an existing standard directory structure or format for `llm.txt` files? Are there any known resources or guidelines about what rules or structure such files should follow and how they should be prepared?
by btown | 2025-07-02 13:59:25+00:00
The headline is somewhat misleading: sites using Cloudflare now have an opt-in option to quickly block all AI bots, but it won't be turned on by default for sites using Cloudflare.

The idea that Cloudflare could do the latter at the sole discretion of its leadership, though, is indicative of the level of power Cloudflare holds.
by postalcoder | 2025-07-02 13:59:28+00:00
> When you enable this feature via a pre-configured managed rule, Cloudflare can detect and block verified AI bots that comply with robots.txt and respect crawl rates, and do not hide their behavior from your website. The rule has also been expanded to include more signatures of AI bots that do not follow the rules.

We already know companies like Perplexity are masking their traffic. I'm sure there's more than meets the eye, but taking this at face value, doesn't punishing respectful and transparent bots only incentivize obfuscation?

edit: This link[0], posted in a comment elsewhere, addresses this question. tldr, obfuscation doesn't work.

> We leverage Cloudflare global signals to calculate our Bot Score, which for AI bots like the one above, reflects that we correctly identify and score them as a “likely bot.” > When bad actors attempt to crawl websites at scale, they generally use tools and frameworks that we are able to fingerprint. For every fingerprint we see, we use Cloudflare’s network, which sees over 57 million requests per second on average, to understand how much we should trust this fingerprint. To power our models, we compute global aggregates across many signals. Based on these signals, our models were able to appropriately flag traffic from evasive AI bots, like the example mentioned above, as bots.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...
by pydry | 2025-07-02 13:59:45+00:00
They created an environment to expose LLMs to problems and test their performance which were immune from benchmark hacking using puzzles.

Your comment was about how this was unreasonably hard (for coding challenges).

Anecdotally Ive seen LLMs do all sorts of amazing shit which was obviously drawn from their training set and fall flat on their faces doing simple coding tasks which are novel enough to not appear in the training set.
by mattmaroon | 2025-07-02 14:00:07+00:00
There are certainly downsides to it, but you’ll notice that most of the biggest companies of the last 20 years had a dual class stock structure that gives the founders a high level of control.

The most efficient government is a benevolent dictatorship, the problem, of course is that benevolent dictators don’t live forever and sooner or later you get a non-benevolent one.

These sorts of dual class share structures avoid that issue by generally becoming common stock on transfer so it turns into a democracy with the end of the dictator.

With an IPO you at least got to spend several years seeing how the dictator did.
by ashleyn | 2025-07-02 14:00:15+00:00
Back in the days when Google was still driven largely by Pagerank, I remember googling the phrase "click here" for shits and giggles. The top links were for Flash player, Silverlight, and Java. Meaning that these were the most common links for the text "click here" - i.e. "Need Flash? Click here." Relic of a dark age where nothing was accessible and the performance didn't matter.