MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flir | 2025-07-18 11:47:58+00:00
I find it telling that I have (mostly) good experiences with the GPT family and (mostly) bad experiences with the Claude family.

I just wish I could figure out what it tells. Their training data can't be that different. The problems I'm feeding them are the same. Many people think Claude is the more capable of the two.

It has to be how I'm presenting the problems, right? What other variable is there?
Show HN: Presentations at the Speed of Markdown
by jceb81 | 2025-07-18 11:48:43+00:00
Quick update on slidesdown: we've just passed the 1.0 milestone. Highlights since the previous submission to HN are the reimplementation of the CLI in Nushell, integration of Apache ECharts library, support slide multiplexing via cloudflare tunnels, and tailwind / unocss support.

Previous submission to HN in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34750839
by SpaceL10n | 2025-07-18 11:49:24+00:00
The things they don't prepare you for in school...

I was working at my first job and we had a ColdFusion app that was displaying some data from the database. I get a ticket one day saying our search page would crash when searching for a very specific document. The other 1 million+ documents all loaded fine to our knowledge, so why this one?

I was pretty junior back then and feeling mighty defeated as to why I couldn't figure it out. I debugged every single line and condition, trying to find some reason. After ruling out the code as a culprit, I took the data we were loading and placed it into Notepad++. Don't remember why exactly. I was wracking my brain trying to come up with explanation and lazily moving the text cursor left and right through the text, mostly out of boredom and despair.

That's when I noticed that I had pressed the right arrow key in my keyboard and the text cursor position hadn't changed! I pressed it again and nothing. Again, nothin. It took eight key presses to move the text cursor from one letter in a word to the adjacent letter. I was utterly bamboozled. Why was the text cursor getting stuck in the middle of this word?!

Shortly thereafter, I discovered "Show all hidden characters" setting in the menu. I toggled it and sure enough there were little black boxes with weird three letter strings in them. NUL, ESC, and others - right where my cursor was getting hung up.

That was the day I learned about ANSI control characters and the importance of data sanitization.
by al_borland | 2025-07-18 11:49:25+00:00
One thing to keep in mind is that to move to macOS you need to be willing to do things the Apple way. The people I’ve seen have a lot of trouble with macOS, and Apple’s ecosystem in general, is they are used to doing something one way and they stubbornly want to keep doing in that way on the Mac. This leads to a lot of pain. If you’re this kind of person, you’re going to have a bad time. If you’re open to change and learning how Apple does things, it will likely be OK.

Apple tends to like to deliver solutions, while others tend to deliver a toolbox and that has you cobble your own solution together. If you don’t like the way Apple solves a problem you care about, swimming against it can range from easy to painful, depending on what it is.

I switched to a Mac in 2003, and this is the most common issue I see with people having a hard time. I switched after I was bored with Windows, and Linux wasn’t ready for prime time (especially on laptops), though I made attempts with several distros over the course of many months… and still ran my laptop on Linux after getting a desktop Mac as my first). I was seeking out a change, so doing things a little differently was what I wanted and I enjoyed that process. It was also the early days of OS X, so I got to learn a little more each year over more than 20 years now. Jumping straight in today would probably take me more time than it did back then, as there is a lot more in the OS.
by raresAIQ | 2025-07-18 11:49:33+00:00
Just 6 days after launching my SaaS project, DeadliQ, I’m back to share the first major update, driven directly by early user feedback: Outlook Calendar Integration.

For those who missed the first post, DeadliQ is an AI-powered app that automatically finds and tracks deadlines in your documents so you don't have to. The initial feedback was fantastic, but a recurring request was to bridge the gap between manually uploaded documents and existing calendar events.

What's new: You can now connect your Outlook account, and DeadliQ will automatically sync your upcoming calendar events and create trackable deadlines for them in your dashboard. The goal is to further reduce manual data entry and create a single source of truth for all your deadlines, whether they come from a contract or a calendar invite.

The backend service runs a periodic job that uses the Microsoft Graph API to fetch events, checks for duplicates, and adds new ones to the user's most recent project.

The Offer: The Outlook integration is a feature of our Business plan. To celebrate this update and get more feedback, the first 20 new users to sign up starting now will automatically get a free 5-day trial of the Business plan.

You can check out the live site here: https://www.deadliq.com

I'm here to answer any questions and would love to hear your thoughts on this new direction.

Thanks for your support!
by hoppp | 2025-07-18 11:50:23+00:00
Yes but with FHE it also depends on the use-case and how valuable the output is and who is processing it and decrypting the final output.

There are plenty of viable schemes like proxy re-encryption, where you operate on a symmetric key and not on a large blob of encrypted data.

Or financial applications where you are operating on a small set of integers, the speed is not an issue and the output is valuable enough to make it worth it.

It only becomes a problem when operating FHE on a large encrypted dataset to extract encrypted information. The data extracted will need to offset the costs. As long as companies don't care about privacy, this use-case is non-existent so its not a problem that its slow.

For military operations on the other hand, it might be worth the wait to run a long running process
by vlovich123 | 2025-07-18 11:51:21+00:00
> Presumably not for much longer though. Unless there has been a major upset recently?

I’m not aware of any major slowdowns for spinning disk capacity as compared to flash.

> Alongside this, we saw the price-per-GB of flash drop towards the level of spinning disk hard disk drives (HDDs) then rebound rapidly as memory manufacturers chased profitability. Meanwhile, the keenest of flash storage advocates predicted the demise of the hard drive and the imminent victory of the all-flash datacentre.

Supply/demand keeps hard drives more expensive because flash is more desirable and thus those vendors are leaving money on the table otherwise. I don’t know what the true manufacturing cost is but spinning disk will always be cheaper purely because of how pricing works.

https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Storage-technology-ex...

> An entirely empty statement. I was suggesting that unpowered retention time is almost certainly not what led to the failure

As I asked, can you provide any evidence this is the case? This is a bold claim to make vs the more likely boring explanation. I could find no actual claim that they lost data very quickly when unpowered for extended duration.

Also, the unit cost basis does not relate to failure rates so you’re mixing concepts.

> So again I'll ask, is there any reason to expect this new type of magnet to be able to compete with flash memory on a unit cost basis? Because if not I assume it's doomed.

Well by your own statements you clearly seem to think durability is an important make/or/break factor and magnetic tech will have a longer lifetime (both in terms of active MTBF and unpowered storage) as compared with flash, so regardless of the accuracy of that, you’ve already admitted that competition isn’t solely on unit cost basis. Indeed, that’s obviously true or tape storage wouldn’t be around.

Others in this thread have also indicated that they are probably this could reach the same speed of flash with the density of spinning disk which would be competitive for all sorts of reason. And the price point will likely be wherever it makes sense for the manufacturer to become the price/demand curve.
by ben_w | 2025-07-18 11:52:36+00:00
Around? Perhaps.

When I was a kid, I had a typewriter. Was even still possible to buy ink ribbons for it in a local stationary store, not that I could afford them on pocket money, but I've not seen ink ribbons in a stationary store since the early 90s.

Despite that, typewriters are still around: https://www.amazon.com/Royal-79101t-Classic-Manual-Typewrite...
by kcplate | 2025-07-18 11:52:41+00:00
> I should point out that IT is less intellectually demanding than software engineering

In those roles I lead development teams that were producing software products used both for internal and external customers. In my current role which sits product-side, I work directly with SWEs to produce a successful complex software product.

I am pretty sure I understand the complexities of software engineering and can speak to my experience with different developers from different educational paths considering it’s been a big part of my vocational journey for the last 27 years.

You may not have chosen a self-taught path and that’s ok for you. You may not be bound by a pattern bias because of educational rigidity like some others, but watch out that you don’t fall into elitism.
by 627467 | 2025-07-18 11:53:40+00:00
The bottle neck for AI adoption - particularly in the type of companies the Economist is surveying - is the management structure, the "chain of command".

As a manager you have to strike a balance between absolute productivity/efficiency and accountability diffusion: lose enough people to spread accountability and it ends up on your plate when things go wrong. "AI f*cK it up" does not sound like as good an argument for why your chain of command messed things up as "joe doe made a mistake".

Also, AI agents don't make for great office politics partner.

As much as AI is being portrayed as a human replacement there are many social aspects of organizations that AI cannot replace. AI don't vote, AI don't get promotions for siding with different parties in office politics. AI can't get fired
by Youden | 2025-07-18 11:54:18+00:00
This is from 2016, a lot has happened since then:

- The FDA recognized psilocybin as a breakthrough therapy for treatment-resistant depression: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/compass-pathways-re...

- Some more studies, such as https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27909164/

- More widespread use in medical treatment, such as approval in Australia (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-66072427) and limited approval in Switzerland

Very much anecdotal but I can say that psychedelics helped me and several friends a lot with depression. They don't just magically make you feel better - at least not long-term - but they give you the neuroplasticity you need to adjust your internal filters and behaviour. As such, if the purpose is truly healing and recovery, they're best paired with professional therapy, preferably from somebody who's experienced with psychedelic-assisted therapy specifically.
by benaubin | 2025-07-18 11:54:35+00:00
I work at Notion. We don't ship code that would let us listen in until users explicitly click start recording. We don't want to, we aren't in the business of selling data and this would be incredibly expensive - and destroy trust. We are cash flow positive so we can sustain our values for the long term. We build useful software and get paid by our users for it. It's pretty simple. Agree that operating systems should display prominent indicators when the microphone is in use.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-18 11:55:04+00:00
There are a lot of brainstormable scenarios about how an increase in spending on consumption would make society more productive without causing inflation. I think a lot of those fall into fanciful or wishful thinking, but the way to know what happens is to craft and execute experiments to learn about people's actual behavior and extrapolate only as we must rather than positing scenarios and arguing without data.
by wink | 2025-07-18 11:55:45+00:00
It all depends what libraries you are using and if they are properly documented and thought through.

I half remember a recent problem in the AWS TypeScript CDK. I don't know what exactly the Type was, but it was like: You get a SomeFoo from (their) API1 and a BarFoo from (their) API2 - they are called nearly the same, they expose basically the same fields, and you are only interested in one of the fields but there are zero convenience functions and you somehow have to convert between these 2 interfaces for no discernable reason and all you want is a `new BarFoo(someFoo.value)` but value is private. That's when you lose all hope because it's functionally identical to just pass `{"value":someFoo.value}` :)
by mejutoco | 2025-07-18 11:55:58+00:00
> Sure, but I still think this is preferable to sending the password in clear text even over HTTPS. You're trusting the server doesn't do anything with the password

My point is in both cases the server has access to the password. As I mentioned, without salt the server can get the original password (by checking the pre-computed rainbow table of hashes up to n length), so the trust issue is the same.

If this is slightly better (more obfuscated) or the same thing + a false sense of security is debatable, but I could agree.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-07-18 11:56:20+00:00
Maybe the perception is because of the larger percentage in each group.

Self Taught -> Already is curious, be default, so 99%-100% are curious. Just by the nature of going out of the way to learn something.

Educated -> Also has a curious % in the group, but also has the large group of complacent "i heard software makes money so i'm hear to learn it, but i don't know what i'm doing". So when you do find complacent, they mostly came from the educated path.
by falitjain | 2025-07-18 11:56:28+00:00
I’m Falit, founder of SyncMyGroup. After years of copy-pasting CSVs just to keep Slack user-groups, Google Groups, GitHub teams, Jira groups, and on-call schedules aligned, we built a tool that keeps every group in sync—automatically.

What SyncMyGroup does

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Create, archive, or mirror groups & members so your destination platform always reflects the source—no manual clean-up.

Granular filters & previews let you exclude sensitive groups and see exactly what will change before you hit “Sync.”

Real-time notifications & CSV audit logs land straight in Slack/Teams for instant visibility and compliance.

Why it matters

A single missed group update can block a CI/CD pipeline, drop someone from on-call, or expose a private repo. SyncMyGroup eliminates that risk and saves hours every week.
by Retr0id | 2025-07-18 11:56:58+00:00
SGX on consumer client devices is sucky for that reason, but SGX on the server can be used to defend user interests.

If I put my sensitive customer data inside SGX (such that I can operate on it but not extract it), and the nation-state adversary says "we have a warrant for your customer data, hand it over", I can reasonably say "I can't".

I could also produce attestations that my code really is running inside SGX, verifiable by clients (this is a weak proof since it assumes SGX is not compromised, but it's better than nothing).

The adversary may demand physical access to the server pwn SGX themselves, but like bypassing ASLR or NX, that's an extra step. They're only going to bother if they really care about that data.
by tronster | 2025-07-18 11:57:40+00:00
This is a fantastic web util; bookmarked for the future.

I wish I had this when I was making, [Dragon's Oven](https://tronster.itch.io/dragon). It was a lot of nights and weekends of tinkering with ANSI codes in Typescript. I learned a lot that surprised me, such as: most modern OS's still don't support 16m colors out of the box and that the default Linux shell doesn't support beyond 16 colors. Also no really good modern ANSI editors out there. I tried bringing back "TheDraw" in DosBOX for some art, but ended up using a mismatch of more modern utilities, false starting one of my own, and working on an image to ASCii/ANSI converter.

Maybe it's growing up in the BBS days, but something about ANSI is really charming.
by 9rx | 2025-07-18 11:57:46+00:00
> This shows that dropouts have a lower income as graduates

Obviously. The aforementioned crippled autist doesn't have the ability to be a graduate. And will suffer economically because of the same life challenges. In other words, people aren't the same. But you are playing the same silly game colleges love to, pretending that all people are exactly the same, which is obviously not the case.

It is telling that you avoided presenting a report that breaks income down by equivalent (to the extent that is reasonably possible) people. The report you offer is valid for what it is, but doesn't support your claim as it is made within the context of this discussion.

> The dropouts in the top 1% are outliers.

To be in the top 1% requires being an outlier[1] full stop. The dropouts are disproportionately represented, though. There are surprisingly, on the surface, few "bachelor only" members in the top 1%. But when you think about it, it isn't all that surprising. It's hard to reach 1% status with other distractions going on in your life. There is only so much time in the day.

[1] Granted, the data suggests that the top 1% is more like 20% of the population. It does not require being the extreme outlier that it may originally seem. How can 20% be 1%? Time. The top 1% is not fixed membership.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-18 11:57:55+00:00
The "real value" is in the name, stability; people quickly stopped using Bitcoin for buying pizzas because its value was so unpredictable, making it more suitable for an investment than a currency, which made its value even more unpredictable because it wasn't spent predictably anymore.

Like, there was a webshop that accepted BTC, doing real-time ish price conversion between USD and BTC; if I was that webshop, I wouldn't have sold the BTC for fiat as it came in, but just let it accumulate until the BTC price went up favorably. A $100 purchase would become $200 with the BTC price appreciation over time.

Anyway yeah. Killer use case is a digital currency whose value is stable and predictable, so actually usable as a digital currency.
by al_borland | 2025-07-18 11:58:10+00:00
Sure, what’s not reasonable is expecting Siri to be a modern LLM, when they know it’s not. They asked a question they knew Siri couldn’t handle just to slam it. I’m not critical of a 5-function calculator for not one-shotting complex equations like a computer.

While Siri only does one thing at a time, I trust the answer more, because it’s doing the actual math and not just guessing what the most likely answer is, like an LLM. We need to pick the right tool for the right job. Frankly, I don’t think an LLM is the right tool for conversations like this, and jumbling multiple questions into a single question is something people do with LLMs to get more use out of them during the day, this is an adaptation to a limitation of the free tier (and sometimes speed) of the LLM.
by wink | 2025-07-18 11:58:44+00:00
I've not used cursor but if it's one where every request costs token where do you draw the line? 1 retry? 3 retries? Configurable? Bases on what?

I mean, I'm 90% with you but this is at least one where I could imagine a good reason and not just laziness or stupidity on the service's side.
Google Took Everything Back
by scorpiock | 2025-07-18 11:59:39+00:00
Today I had to let go of the last of our content team. It hurts.

I started Geekflare in 2015, and Google recognized our work and started ranking. I won’t rant much, as Google ranked us without doing much SEO work. It was entirely based on quality, but in 2023, everything changed.

Flash back: pre-HUC, we were getting ~6 million pageviews monthly, we were 33 full-time and ~20 freelancers. We had a great, happy team. Our articles were performing well, and one day Google rolled out the algo updates, and everything started going upside down.

At first, we thought it was a general ranking correction, but Google had a different plan altogether. We listened to their guidelines, spent many months improving stuff, and hired industry leaders to give us some ideas, but nothing worked. Soon, it became obvious that Google HCU was not a typical search improvement algo but a plan to keep Google healthy financially.

Whatever it was, it impacted us in a hard way. We had no other options than to start downsizing. I was optimistic and planned to do it in phases, thinking if we see some recovery, we will stop it, but the ringmaster didn’t show any mercy.

Today, we are left out with just 2 people in the content team and have completely lost trust in Google.

I wish Google had been transparent, instead of implying 'just improve your content.' It would have saved us money and heartbreak.

Future: We are going to focus on building products where reliance on Google is less.

That’s the end. Chandan
by jorvi | 2025-07-18 11:59:48+00:00
Re: the "white page problem", that is just known as motivation inertia. You can overcome it by training yourself to agree with yourself to "just do it" for 5 minutes, even if you really, really don't want to. If you're still demotivated after that, fine. But 9 out of 10 times, once you've started, it's surprisingly easy to keep the momentum up. This is also great for going to the gym or cleaning up your home, where an LLM can't come to the rescue :)

Re: usage of LLMs, that is honestly the way I like to use LLMs. That and auto-complete.

It's great for creating a bird's-eye view of a project because that is very fuzzy and no granular details are needed yet. And it's great at being fancy autocomplete, with its stochastic bones. But the middle part where all the complexity and edge cases are is where LLMs still fail a lot. I shudder for the teams that have to PR review devs that jubilantly declare they have "5x'ed" their output with LLMs, senior or not.

What is even more worrisome is that the brain is a muscle. We have to exercise it with thinking, hence why puzzlers stay sharp at old age. The more you outsource your code (or creative writing) thinking, the worse you get at it, and the more your brain atrophies. You're already seeing it with Claude Code, where devs panic when they hit the limit because they just might have to code unassisted.
by richrichardsson | 2025-07-18 12:00:19+00:00
> I guess if you need to plug in an ancient beamer or something?

Slightly off-topic, but I wonder if "beamer" is a "real" German word or one they borrowed from English in a weird way.

The first time I heard it completely threw me for a loop, as in the UK, "beamer" is shorthand for a BMW car.