MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by escherize | 2025-07-28 04:16:39+00:00
Experimenting with exhaustive tagged-union support based on Clojure's defmulti.

I think it might be better to go the other way, and have a pattern-matchey form generate the defmethods instead, but I need to gain tacit knowledge about it first.

https://github.com/escherize/clj-multimatch
by kdinn | 2025-07-28 04:17:59+00:00
Quick, clear, non-partisan analysis of government actions

https://sivic.life

When I read social spaces like Reddit or X, if the government has done anything contentious you get nothing more than strident left takes, or strident right takes on the topic. Neither of which is informative or helpful.

So I am setting up a site which uses AI which is specifically guided to be neutral and non-partisan, to analyse the government actions from the source documents.

It then generates: - a summary, - expected affects, - benefits, - disadvantages, and - ranks the action against 19 "things you care about" (e.g. defence, environment, civil liberties, religious protection, etc.)

The end result is quite compelling. For example here's the page that summarises all the actions which are most, and least, beneficial to individual liberties:

https://sivic.life/tyca/tyca_individual_liberties/
by Leftium | 2025-07-28 04:18:40+00:00
This successful B2B SaaS was (originally) developed by a single person who didn't know how to code (without any investors): https://www.paperlesspipeline.com

The key insight was: marketing was the most important part. And the most important part of marketing was finding (and validating) a painful problem businesses would pay for.

- It is important to talk directly with real prospects: real business owners. You can use stuff like Gartner reports to help find a niche, but it is essential to talk directly with real people who have the problem.

- Validation involved getting a prepayment even though the software did not exist. Not even a design. Prepayment got the initial 10 or so "champions" a lifetime discount and personal input into how the app would be developed.

- The prepayments served as a much stronger validation than a verbal "yes." Also it funded development of the initial version. The 10 champions' input also made the initial version much better.

- Generally, a "painful" problem will result in at least a 10X ROI (additional revenue, saved expenses, saved time, etc). If you describe the painful problem better than the prospects themselves can, they will assume you have the solution and jump straight to "how do I pay you? (sign up)"

- The market research math is roughly: find a niche with at least 10,000 prospects. Plan to capture 1% of this market, or 100 customers. If you can find a painful problem whose solution is worth paying $100-200/month, you should be able to achieve $80K profit/year.

(The Paperless Pipeline origin story is slightly different. For example, there was really only a single true "champion." But this champion was the happy customer of another SaaS that was built with the same process. This champion kept asking for this other SaaS that turned into PaperlessPipeline.)

---

So I think the resources below provide the most risk-free (highest chance of success) way of achieving your goal (I think YC targets "unicorns" with much higher potential ROI with the understanding at least 90% will fail):

- The founder of Paperless Pipeline has been teaching his method: https://startfromzero.com (Specifically "Idea Extraction" is the most important part)

- Apparently he is going to start a YouTube channel where he teaches his stuff for free.

- https://30x500.com is another great course that teaches a similar method, and more geared toward engineer-types.

- https://shop.stackingthebricks.com: Kind of like the a-la-carte version of the 30x500. The two most valuable parts are probably "Sales Safari" and "Just F*ckin Ship."
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-28 04:18:41+00:00
What "things" are going to depend on this Android-locked age check? What about Apple users? What about accessing it via a laptop or desktop (shock horror: running Linux!)?

My dad gets by in his "my dad" way of life without a mobile phone at all, I wonder how much longer this will be possible. I was about to rant about being forced to have a mobile if you want to participate in society, but then he uses a desktop for some of the services for which the rest of us use a mobile, so my rant falls down in that, for a while now, to participate in society you've needed either a computer or a mobile.

Hopefully computer-only can eke out some kind of base-adequate participation for a while longer.
by davidsojevic | 2025-07-28 04:18:56+00:00
We have ASIC (Australian Securities & Investments Commission) that handles company registrations, notices, etc. and they maintain a register of insolvency notices and liquidations.

This can be a reasonable place to go to look for distressed businesses/assets too and I've considered using them as a source with my aggregation/search engine, though they don't really have the same type of information as a business for sale listing so they fall somewhat outside of the main type of results that I otherwise display.

Other reasonable places I've seen too, though in incredibly low volumes (think 0-3 listings a month), are commercial auction houses/sites where they'll list a business for sale or the full assets of a business. The main issue with that it is that they're so low volume that I'm not sure it's worth spending the time ingesting them this early on while there's still many other larger listing sources.
by KnuthIsGod | 2025-07-28 04:20:04+00:00
The Defence of Duffer's Drift is an early example of this genre.

In the first story in the book you learn how to do platoon level tactics badly( and lose most of your men )

In each subsequent story, a few tactical parameters are tweaked and the story is recounted again, with improved results.

The same approach is used in newer tactical books like Musicians of Mars 2.

The first Team Badger story in Musicians is very similar to the first story in Duffer's Drift, allowing for changes in location, equipment and techniques..

Warning: PDFs below:

The Defence of Duffer's Drift https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-ins...

Musicians of Mars 2 https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/2023/01/19/5a01ae1c/16-1...

"The lingering sulfur odor of gunpowder, mixed in the haze of the dust and smoke of battle, dominated the senses of CPT Fred Morris, commander of Team Badger. He sat amid the wreckage of what used to be some of the world’s finest combat machines, M1A2 Abrams tanks and M2A3 Bradley fighting vehicles.

Now most of his company’s tanks and Brads were mere smoking hulks, emanating the distinct smell of burning electronics to add another element to the senses of the dismal scene before him.

He sat, quietly reflecting on the sequence of events that led to the destruction of his beloved team. His mind raced as he recounted how the enemy force, so much more formidable than he had expected, employed assets, capabilities, and tactics that he had not taken into account. At the same time, he wondered why he was unable to bring to bear his own extensive combat power to earn decisive victory. He had felt so ready, so confident, and believed that his team had prepared so diligently.

Yet, still they had been defeated so soundly. How could that be? LTC Joe Milner, the task force commander, had given Team Badger the task to defend the center of the task force main battle area (MBA) in an area defense to destroy the attacking enemy motorized rifle brigade. Specifically, CPT Morris and Team Badger were to defend against the enemy’s main effort motorized rifle battalion in Battle Position (BP) Badger, along the enemy’s most likely avenue of approach.

That motorized rifle battalion plowed through Team Badger as if it were not even there."
by subhajeet2107 | 2025-07-28 04:21:18+00:00
Currently working on https://exitfox.com/. After recently switching jobs, I became frustrated with the handover process to the new joiner. This experience inspired me to start building a tool that uses Gemini/Claude to ask relevant questions about the project being handed over, streamlines the exit process in a structured format, Now I am adding more features for HR managers and employees around Clearance, FnF etc

Interestingly I found Claude Code to be the only LLM good at designing frontend, asking it to make it look better actually helps
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-28 04:23:11+00:00
> The initial platform where this idea will be tested is the Apple iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, followed by Android and other graphic tablets in the future.

Asus has been releasing year after year two performance beast, with a very portable form factor, multi-touch support and top of the line mobile CPUs and GPUs: the X13 and Z13

https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow-series/?items=20392

Considering the Surface Pro line also gets the newest Rizen AI chips with up to 32Gb of RAM, having them as second class citizen is kinda sad.

PS: blender already runs fine as-is on these machines. But getting a new touch paradigm would be extremely nice, and would be a better test best than a new platform IMHO.
by hoherd | 2025-07-28 04:23:14+00:00
I was about to talk about how online help files are forgotten these days, and should guide you to the right information to set up an ad-hoc network, but I was disappointed three times over by macOS.

macOS does not have any offline documentation like pretty much every OS used to. When I turn off my WiFi and then open "Mac User Guide" or "Tips for your Mac", they both tell me they require an internet connection.

When I re-enable my internet connection, neither of those apps have information about how to set up an ad-hoc wifi network.

When I looked up how to create an ad-hoc network in other sources, I discovered that the ability to create an ad-hoc network was apparently removed from the GUI in macOS 11, and now requires CLI commands.

I hate how modern tech companies assume that everybody always has access to a high speed internet connection.
by mrangle | 2025-07-28 04:25:40+00:00
Demanding the conflation of opinion with expert instruction is one reason why Media is in terminal decline.

A large part of credibility in expertise is the ability to naturally lead. People tend to follow who reads as credible. If someone doesn't read as such, it isn't the fault their missing audience.

If they are credible and yet lack the ability to communicate that, I'd suggest that's both rare in-practice but would be a dire skill issue. Examining what is wrong with them and why better people aren't employed would be the logical next step.
by mancerayder | 2025-07-28 04:25:42+00:00
For price discovery and matching buyers and sellers? Maybe. The financial considerations still control decisions. Without much technology needing to be involved, you still have insane bidding wars in hot markets and decisions have to be made quickly (hence cash/no financing contingency being so popular). And if there's too much inventory or an area where people are exiting from, the opposite.
by skydhash | 2025-07-28 04:28:02+00:00
I may remember wrongly, but I don't believe the expanse was depicting AI. It was more powerful computation and unobtrusive interfaces. There was nothing like Jarvis. Rocinante was a war vessel and all its feature was tailored to that. I believe even the mechanical suits of the Martians were very manual (no cortana a la Master Chief).
by fipar | 2025-07-28 04:28:08+00:00
I spent some weekends and after-work evenings tidying up some ambient and electronic recordings both new and old, and today I finally decided to publish it on bandcamp: https://semicolony.bandcamp.com/

It’s all downloadable for free since I make a living off databases so I don’t need to make money off this. I did this to give some closure to ideas I started working on 30 years ago.
by userbinator | 2025-07-28 04:29:10+00:00
AFAIK there are still cracks available, although it's been getting more difficult over time.

This is another one of the reasons why I'm opposed to the current trend of "memory safety" that the megacorps are so enthusiastic about. When insecurity is freedom, and security means securing against the user's control, attacking insecurity will only close off paths to freedom.
by culopatin | 2025-07-28 04:29:40+00:00
It’s not just the stove that you need to change. You need to get power to the stove. Cutting the wall open, conduit, drywall if you’re lucky, in SF you’ll most likely have the old lath and plaster then electrician and paint.

If rent is 3k, inflation say 3%, that’s 1k. The change is at least 3x that
by somenameforme | 2025-07-28 04:31:22+00:00
I agree in general, but the person I was responding to was implying the equal but opposite in that claiming he "often" faced the argument of "why are you railing against this, you have no privacy anymore anyway."

People are usually quite interested to learn about ways to can work against the dystopia to some degree. For a specific example I've converted numerous of people to Brave users just by demoing the ad-block and privacy features. People who have never used ad-block are often in borderline disbelief. Not once has a person ever been like 'oh why bother.' That is just literally unbelievable.
by ogogmad | 2025-07-28 04:31:39+00:00
Have people heard of the following top-down parsing algorithm for mathematical expressions:

1. Replace any expression that's within parentheses by its parse tree by using recursion 2. Find the lowest precedence operator, breaking ties however you'd like. Call this lowest precedence operator OP. 3. View the whole unparsed expression as `x OP y` 4. Generate a parse tree for x and for y. Call them P(x) and P(y). 5. Return ["OP", P(x), P(y)].

It's easy to speed up step 2 by keeping a table of all the operators in an expression, sorted by their precedence levels. For this table to work properly, the positions of all the tokens must never change.
by onecommentman | 2025-07-28 04:32:50+00:00
Physicists have had and have options at DoD and DoE Laboratories and military contractors, at minimum. Whatever industrial labs that are still around as well. “Certainly”?

That pesky word “career”, what a sorry substitute for an actual life. Perhaps people would be better off without it.

The title of the article is a bit off-putting. Makes the scientists sound like they are holding their breath until they turn blue unless they get that new doll. Professionals for many decades have started their lives outside of the US and done just fine. If they return to the US, as they most often do, they return with unique skills and experiences that makes the US stronger.
by deathanatos | 2025-07-28 04:33:29+00:00
…Google, …and? Who are the other two?

Maybe you're thinking like Facebook, but AIUI, login with Facebook is proprietary. The problem there isn't the protocol, it's that companies are massive. If anything OIDC lowers the barrier to entry, assuming RPs properly support it (which is a huge if, but if these were 3 proprietary protocols instead of 1 standard one, there would have never been a chance…)
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-28 04:33:45+00:00
> ISO 8601 - Not sort-friendly as a string (unless zero-padded)

The zero padding is in fact part of the format.

> ISO 8601 - Verbose

It's an extra few characters but I can also tell what date it is and what time of day it is by looking at it.

Also you can remove the separators to make it only 4 characters longer.

On the other hand if you really want it to be compact, AlphaDec doesn't do the job. To go from year down to second you need 8 characters, and then 3 more for milliseconds. Base32 would need 5 and then 2 more.

There's probably a good middle ground here but I think AlphaDec sacrifices too much. I'd much rather have something that encodes month, day, and hour into one character each so even if I didn't memorize which is which I can at least truncate by them instead of periods, arcs, and bars.

I think the pure 4-character version has some good appeal, but both truncating it and extending it for better precision lose most of that appeal.

> ISO 8601 - Not great for filenames or embeddings

I guess, but using a different character from colon is a very simple tweak you can make.
by cornfieldlabs | 2025-07-28 04:34:17+00:00
Me and my brother are working a social network with chronological feed and private profiles.

Goal is to build a social network that doesn't harm the user in any way and provides full control over their data.

Here's the waitlist: https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev

Let me know if you have any questions. Email is cornfield.labs@gmail.com
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-28 04:34:26+00:00
France has some history in being disappointed by the US, so it doesn't really surprise me that France is beating the independence drum the loudest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px9qhDGv300&t=150s.

(the entire video is interesting and informative, I've skipped it to the France-US specific part, up to about 11:02 where Australia is introduced as the US sycophant it is)

Whether it's logical or not, offences past, even those thought forgotten, are easily recalled when under similar pressures.
by jfil | 2025-07-28 04:34:35+00:00
Taking a long break, but also working on the following:

What plants you should grow if you want a "second harvest" of beautiful dried seedpods, to decorate your home.

Decorating ideas for the round concrete pillars that many new condominium units have nowadays.

"Juicy" text editor ideas - making the most gamified text editor. The absolute opposite of the zen editor at https://enso.sonnet.io/
by derektank | 2025-07-28 04:35:17+00:00
I mean, there is also the strategic benefit of not having your capacity to wage war in the stranglehold of a potential adversary. Not to say that politicians won't vote for graft that helps their districts, but there is a legitimate argument for employing only Americans in wartime industries.

But yes, that's a big source of the expense. Even on the IT side of things, the government (especially the military) pays sometimes up to 50% more for FedRAMP versions of SaaS products that have their servers based in the US and which are only administered by US citizens.
by terminalshort | 2025-07-28 04:35:25+00:00
The "supply chain disruptions" explanation was always complete garbage. When there's a supply chain disruption, the price goes up and then comes back down when the disruption ends. It's very easy to see that the money supply barely increased from 2008-2014 and jumped massively during covid. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS
by altairprime | 2025-07-28 04:38:11+00:00
There’s no way to prove you aren’t MitM-proxying a reply from a device not paired to your phone in that scenario, because the kernel ‘says’ it’s USB to the app but a patched kernel can lie about that unless the kernel is attested-unmodified-secured — and anyways USB can itself be mitm’d at the phys layer without the kernel knowing at all.
by energy123 | 2025-07-28 04:38:14+00:00
The designers of 6th gen fighter jets are confronting the same challenge. The cockpit, which is an interface between the pilot and the airframe, will be optionally manned. If the cockpit is manned, the pilot will take on a reduced set of roles focused on higher-level decision making.

By the 7th generation it's hard to see how humans will still be value-add, unless it's for international law reasons to keep a human in the loop before executing the kill chain, or to reduce Skynet-like tail risks in line with Paul Christiano's arms race doom scenario.

Perhaps interfaces in every domain will evolve this way. The interface will shrink in complexity, until it's only humans describing what they want to the system, at higher and higher levels of abstraction. That doesn't necessarily have to be an English-language interface if precision in specification is required.
by tombert | 2025-07-28 04:40:04+00:00
Not really, no. I was a bit underwhelmed by the whole thing; it didn't feel like "computer science", it felt like light software engineering, and since I've been doing software engineering for awhile I was able to fly through the work.

I did have a bit of fun learning about some of the more "platform as a service" parts of AWS, that has been something I've been putting off at learning more about for awhile, but overall I don't feel like I learned a ton.

I registered for another masters degree from a different online school to start in October that I think I'll enjoy and learn more from.
by altairprime | 2025-07-28 04:41:59+00:00
Yeah, this future sucks, and we’ve had twenty years to push back and utterly failed to do so. I’ve tried for years to interest people in learning about attestation so they can curb it before it swings hard authoritarian, but no one wanted to listen b/c Linux is about having root and anything that challenges that belief is anathema to consider. Welcome to the party, the sky is falling just as it has been for years; someone else can be the harbinger for a while, I’m tired of watching people try the same old arguments that have failed for years.
by terminalshort | 2025-07-28 04:42:28+00:00
No economy of scale. The cost to build one car is ~$100 million. The cost to build the second one is ~$20K. The only reason you can buy a car for $40K is because they build millions of them to spread the initial investment. The military buys missiles in units of 100s and there are no other buyers, so the cost per missile is massive.
by inetknght | 2025-07-28 04:43:43+00:00
> it’s hard to argue that you benefit from the tool you use being sidelined or defunded because corporate thinks nobody uses it.

Let the corporation suffer then. With an open API, a third party will make a better one. Microsoft can buy that; corporations have a habit of doing that.

> “Talk to your users” doesn’t solve this because there are millions of computers running scripts

Why are you worried about the problems that scripts face? If the developer encounters issues in scripts, the developer can work to fix it. Sometimes that might mean filing a bug report... or a feature request for better documentation. Or the developer might get frustrated and use something better. Like bash.

> there are millions of computers running scripts and no way to know who they are or contact them

Why do they matter to you, or a corporation then?

> they would not remember how often they launched it.

If your users aren't interacting with you for feature requests and bug reports, then either you don't have users or you don't have good enough reachability from the users to you.