MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
How do I quit my 9-5 and work on my startup fulltime?
by Optimist_Prime | 2025-07-11 17:51:10+00:00
I've been at a Fortune 500 company for a little over a year now. Got promoted twice, and I am starting to struggle. Not because the job is necessarily difficult but because my heart is else where. I've been working on a side project that's giving signs of life. Spoken with potential customers who came to me with a problem and asked for a solution. I've tried building startups in the past and have failed because my prior projects were solutions in search of problems but this is different. For the first time I feel I have something tangible in my hands. What do I do? How do I go about this?
by duxup | 2025-07-11 17:51:15+00:00
Ok so the US sent some dude's to cut a deal with the leader of the Congo.

One of them previously had secretly told the leader of the Congo that his head of the presidential guard was a member of a group who were going to start a coup ... and that head of the presidential guard was still in power when they decided to show up in the Congo?

Is this just amateur hour all across the US government now?
by drcongo | 2025-07-11 17:51:23+00:00
It's always weird when two worlds collide - I listen to Caroline's podcast "Shedunnit", a lovely warm hug of a show about the golden age of detective fiction, so I was a bit surprised to see her on HN. I highly recommend the podcast - it's not a subject I have a great deal of interest in, I just love listening to people talk about a niche that they're deeply interested in, and Caroline's love for the subject matter is contagious.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-11 17:51:37+00:00
> Practicing religion yields a lot of net-positive effects, particularly mental anguish and internal turmoil.

True, being religious would cause me a lot of anguish and turmoil. Just the idea that I'm not in control of my life. I don't consider that a positive of any kind. That scene from the Matrix really speaks to me and always has :)

I think for people that like it it could have positive effects. Just like team sports would have negative effects for me but positive ones for others (I'm totally not a "team player")
by perihelions | 2025-07-11 17:52:12+00:00
No, it's definitely in the US supermarket supply chain (though it's not nearly as bad as in SEA),

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb... ("[Consumer Reports] tested 126 products from McCormick, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and other popular brands. Almost a third had heavy metal levels high enough to raise health concerns")

You may (or not) be surprised that there's actually no general testing for heavy metals in US foods, even in categories seriously affected by them—neither by the FDA, nor the private sector.

> "Currently, about two dozen spice companies from 11 countries are subject to import alerts for lead contamination, which signal to regulators that they can detain those products. But that represents a fraction of the herbs and spices shipped to the U.S. In addition, the limited testing the FDA has done on spices has been focused on harmful bacteria, such as salmonella, not heavy metals, Ronholm says."

> "The lack of regulation leaves much of the monitoring of heavy metal levels to companies. [Consumer Reports] contacted all the ones with products in our tests to see how they limited heavy metals."

> "Of the companies that replied to our questions—Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Costco, Bolner’s Fiesta, Gebhardt, Litehouse, McCormick, Roland Foods, Spice Islands, Target, and Whole Foods—a few said they require their suppliers to have a program for controlling or testing for heavy metals. But only three—Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Bolner’s Fiesta, and McCormick—specifically said they test products in their manufacturing plants for heavy metals."
by osigurdson | 2025-07-11 17:52:12+00:00
>> but they should just migrate to an Oracle Database

No big tech companies or unicorn type startups are using Oracle. Is your claim that they are all wrong?

>> Some startup builds on Postgres then spends half their eng budget at the most critical growth time firefighting around its limits instead of scaling their business

This is why I suggest starting with some kind of normal queue / stream mechanism and columnar DB if needed. It isn't even harder than using one DB, particularly if you are using niche features.
by footlose_3815 | 2025-07-11 17:52:39+00:00
$1200 for 4TB upgrade is so ridiculous. Manufacturers holding RAM for ransom is very annoying. Esp when the lowest setting isn't even meant to be purchased, and the specs are so low they will underperform, or be obsolete in a few years.

This is kind of why people start cloning macs in the 90s. They were too expensive straight from the factory.
by nsingh2 | 2025-07-11 17:53:01+00:00
> It is completely typical, but at the same time abnormal to have tools with such poor usability.

The main difference I see is that LLMs are flaky, getting better over time, but still more so than traditional tooling like debuggers.

> Programming languages are notoriously full of unnecessary complexity. Personal pet peeve: Rust lifetime management. If this is what it takes, just use GC (and I am - golang).

Lifetime management is an inherently hard problem, especially if you need to be able to reason about it at compile time. I think there are some arguments to be made about tooling or syntax making reasoning about lifetimes easier, but not trivial. And in certain contexts (e.g., microcontrollers) garbage collectors are out of the question.
Ask HN: What makes you keep coming back to Hacker News?
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-11 17:53:17+00:00
I've been active on GitHub and tried sharing my work on Twitter, but it often felt like shouting into the void. Memes get likes — but meaningful tools often don’t reach anyone.

Then I rediscovered Hacker News. Even with a new account and a small project, the feedback was real. People cared, engaged, and it felt like being heard — not scrolled past.

I realized that HN is more than a dev forum. It’s like a daily newspaper of thoughts and discoveries. Some users share research, others ask life questions, some post side projects — and it all fits.

> After 18 years, HN didn’t change its design — just evolved with its mind. Twitter is for memes. Hacker News is for thinking.

What keeps you coming back to HN every day?
by bhollis | 2025-07-11 17:53:25+00:00
The pattern I've always used for this, which I suspect is what they landed on, is to have an optimistic notification method in a separate message queue that says "something changed that's relevant to you". Then you can dedupe that, etc. Then structure the data to easily sync what's new, and let the client respond to that notification by calling the sync API. That even lets you use multiple notification methods for notification. None of that involves having to have the database coordinate notifications in the middle of a transaction.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-11 17:53:38+00:00
No, it doesn't. You think in a very static manner. Yes, you can fit websites in RAM, but you can't fit the databases powering them. Yes, you can fit some part of the videos or images you're working on or serving on RAM, but you can't store whole catalogs in RAM.

Moreover, you again give examples from the end product. Finished sites, compacted JS files, compressed videos, compiled models...

There's much more than that. The model is in RAM, but you need to rake tons of data over that GPU. Sometimes terabytes of data. You have raw images to process, raw video to color-grade, unfiltered scientific data to sift through. These files are huge.

A well processed JPG from my camera is around 5MB, but RAW version I process is 25MB per frame, and it's a 24MP image, puny for today's standards. Your run of the mill 2K video takes a couple of GBs after final render at movie length. RAWs take 10s of terabytes, at minimum. Unfiltered scientific data again comes in terabytes to petabytes range depending on your project and instruments you work on, and multiple such groups pull their own big datasets to process real-time.

In my world, nothing fits in RAM except the runtime data, and that's your application plus some intermediate data structures. The rest is read from small to gigantic files and written in files of unknown sizes, by multiple groups, simultaneously. These systems experience the real meaning of "saturation", and they would really swear at us at some cases.

Sorry, but you can't solve this problem by buying more RAM, because these workloads can't be carried to clouds. They need to be local, transparent and fast. IOW, you need disk systems which feel like RAM. Again, look what Weka (https://www.weka.io/) does. It's one of the most visible companies which make systems behave like a huge RAM, but with multiple machines and tons of cutting edge SSDs, because what they process doesn't fit in RAM.

Lastly, oh, there's a law which I forget its name every time, which tells you if you cache 10 most used files, you can serve up to 90% of your requests from that cache, if your request pattern is static. In cases I cite, there's no "popular" file. Everybody wants their own popular files which makes access "truly random".
by zerkten | 2025-07-11 17:53:59+00:00
It might not be fully clear to the reader, but many of these Post Office franchises are co-located with a Spar, or other shop. People have to go to the Post Office (IME to a greater extent than here in the US where I now live) and they then shop for other items. Obviously, other businesses tend to cluster around as well.

There are situations where franchisees don't offer other services. These folks tend to be older and for most of the life of the franchise haven't had the need for additional income earlier in the life of the franchise. They don't have the energy and don't want to take on the risk of expanding now. When they retire, they'll probably close up shop as their children have other jobs.

The rural Post Office where I grew up in the 80s and 90s was accessible to a wide area just off the main road. It served a wider area than the current one. The Postmistress' family also farmed. When that closed the natural place to setup was in the closes village because that was projected to grow in population. That development would result in the old Post Office building being knocked down to make way for a dual carriageway. Eventually a few more Post Office franchises appeared with their shops in that part of the county.

People can read more at https://runapostoffice.co.uk/.
by whodidntante | 2025-07-11 17:54:32+00:00
The BBB will add $4.5T (this is the largest estimate) in addition to the $15T-$20T that would have happened without the BBB

The debt would have been about $52T+, now it will be $56T+, if projections are accurate.

While I do not agree with the BBB for many reasons, and I do agree that it increases the debt, it is not the primary driver of the debt.

The largest driver of our debt is our "health" system. We spend $5T a year on our "health" system, which is twice the amount per capita that western European nations spend, and we have outcomes that are, across the board, worse.

We spend $2.5T more per year than we "should" be spending on "health", which is by far the largest waste of our resources.

If we would "simply" find a way to spend as much as western Europe does (even keeping our poorer outcomes), we would save $25T over the next 10 years. Our entire national debt could be eliminated in 20 years by doing this, even with the BBB.
by andrewla | 2025-07-11 17:54:34+00:00
Now we're wandering a bit far afield, but estimates and measurements like this are fine if they are designed for an operational purpose. If I want to know the unimproved value of my land so that I can evaluate whether to buy a similar property and build a similar house on it, then it's fine for me to use whatever estimation protocol is going to help me make a decision. If my protocol is bad then my estimates will be bad then <shrug emoji> it's my problem.

Similarly trying to measure the value of the dollar -- what is the operational purpose of that measurement? This is a real problem in any sort of macroeconomic analysis, and Goodhart's law makes it far far far worse when trying to apply it for practical purposes. Mostly you have to accept that there is not going to be a quantitative metric that captures the underlying squishy concept so better not to think about the problem of, say, inflation, in purely quantitative terms.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-11 17:55:04+00:00
I'm not a big fan of social security, but social security revenue is supposed to be "off books"... wanting to cut the payable, but still keep the receivable is more than a little dishonest. And if we look at what's happened, I didn't see much in the way of "social services" that escaped the axe other than social security. There are, of course, cuts that could make a difference (the DEA alone is $10bil/year... and there's another $5-10bil used for DEA shit in the state dept. budget), but those are the ones that no one's willing to touch. We don't even immediately have to go after the military, though there's half a trillion per year there (or more) that could easily be cut. And guess what? Just as things are about to get desperate, world events are unfolding that will even make the most cowardly pacifist hesitate to take slices out of that.
by mandown2308 | 2025-07-11 17:55:30+00:00
What I got by reading the paper: loose tumeric powder and polished tumeric root are the main "culprits" because they are contaminated with Lead Chromate (chemical used in paintings for yellow color.)

If you're using branded/packaged tumeric powder, or natural unpolished tumeric root, you're still good as a tumeric consumer in South Asia (though the paper differentiates branded vs packaged tumeric in Table 2, but does not explicitly explain the difference.)

Also, Patna in Bihar is the major source of Lead-adulterated tumeric (in the forms mentioned above) in India, and any exports of tumeric to other places from Patna could be harmful. Lead contamination in Guwahati, Assam is mostly found in imported tumeric from Patna.
by itake | 2025-07-11 17:55:40+00:00
I've definitely heard of cnc using a plural of domains for this reason. the bots have a list of domains they reach out to, searching for one that is valid.

I believe one issue with this strategy is many corporate VPNs block fresh domains. I guess if the software was pinned to use encrypted DNS instead of whatever the OS recommends, then the DNS blocking could be avoided...
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-11 17:55:42+00:00
stego-tech is the equivalent of an anti-tech influencer ("zealot") on HN. Pretty much all they post about on here, and they post a lot on here, is about how tech is ethically bankrupt.

HN is big enough now imo that it's worth starting to tag users so you can know where they're coming from.
by ac794 | 2025-07-11 17:56:11+00:00
It's worth keeping in mind that the budget for scientific funding in developed nations is typically ~1-2% of the total budget. Most of that money usually goes to medical research (as it should), which directly improves the quality of life for millions of people. The remainder goes into R&D which drives progress, yielding benefits across many different industries. Slashing the science budget and investing that money in homelessness instead would probably not fix homelessness in HCOL areas (issues are structural) and would end up being a major net negative for the rest of society.
by dogma1138 | 2025-07-11 17:56:21+00:00
Israel has arguably the worst income to house price ratio in the OECD at 160 monthly wages (~13 annual salaries) which is more than twice the US at 68 but they have also the highest TFR in the developed world even when you exclude the Orthodox Jews…

So it’s not as simple as housing is not affordable… it does feel like it’s very much cultural/social I can more than afford to have children but I’m at almost 40 and I don’t. And speaking from the pool of a rented villa in Greece I got on whim for 2 weeks because I got annoyed at work I can’t even begin to think about having them…
by phendrenad2 | 2025-07-11 17:56:34+00:00
I think this NPR article is too quick to put a positive spin on this. They have made a nice little story here with a happy ending. Farmers had blackened turmeric -> they used a random yellow die they found -> massive lead spike in everyone's bloodstream -> Americans came in with a xray gun and saved the day -> no more lead in the blood.

But if you ascribe even the slightest but of agency to any of the non-Americans involved, you have to wonder if this problem will come back.
by Nasrudith | 2025-07-11 17:56:38+00:00
They are aware - they just believe in things like fundamental human rights which make what those idiots want matter about as much as the price of tea in China.

And good grief the lack of understanding of the basics of consent is downright appalling! It is literally the same logic as a rapist's defense that their victim was promiscuous so they couldn't have been raped!
by shpongled | 2025-07-11 17:56:50+00:00
N,N-DMT is very intense and not to be taken lightly - but you could say the same with LSD, psilocybin, etc. Personally, I am much more wary of large doses of LSD/psilocybin than DMT, in part to the substantially longer duration of the former. Ego death and the complete dissolution of reality makes it harder to have a bad trip
by g42gregory | 2025-07-11 17:56:58+00:00
What do these turbines do to Marine life? Fish, dolphins swimming next to the spinning blades. Krill, other micro marine life in the water, disrupted water currents affecting every forms of life?

Because we are not "allowed" to ask these questions, I suspect these environmental efforts are just the vehicles to make money for certain political groups. Just as "freedom on the march" is a vehicle to make money for other groups.
by tuukkah | 2025-07-11 17:57:58+00:00
How about like this? "We determined the accident's probable cause: The in-flight separation of the left MED plug happened because Boeing had failed to provide adequate training, guidance, and oversight. These would have been necessary to ensure that manufacturing personnel could consistently and correctly comply with Boeing's parts removal process. The securing bolts and hardware had been removed during manufacturing to facilitate rework, and the process intended to document and ensure proper reinstallation."
by lanfeust6 | 2025-07-11 17:58:07+00:00
> Calling yourself a rationalist is just branding. It means that your opponents aren't rationalists. It's dishonest.

Consider, are you exceptional in the sense that you would not place yourself in any camp whatsoever, ascribe to any ideology? You're neither left or right? Actions dictate identity.

Having an interest in something is not the same as having a superiority complex.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-11 17:58:55+00:00
A better measure would be how much work has been made unnecessary.

The asymptote approached by software engineering is GDP=$0 because all problems are solved by maximally efficient automation. Never gonna happen, but progress on that path is a decent proxy for efficiency.

Too often the job is about introducing problems that are good for some company's bottom line, but that's the opposite of efficiency.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-11 17:59:17+00:00
>> On 2 May 2013 a robbery occurred at the Post Office which resulted in a net loss to the Post Office of £38,504.96, which was reduced to £15,845 after some of the money was recovered. Mr Griffiths was injured during the robbery; he was present in the branch when it occurred. The Post Office Investigator advised the Post Office that Mr Griffiths was partly to blame for the loss sustained by the Post Office and that he should be held responsible for part of the loss. [1]

This is hilarious... in the land of "you can't defend yourself or especially your property", he was partly to blame. That one is hilarious.

>I disagree that anything similar could happen at this scale in the US or France.

In the US, the US Mail is sacred, so I agree it could never be attacked like this. But other industries, other scenarios? That level of prosecutorial malfeasance isn't unusual at all. I will concede that the scale of it may differ, but only because I have no ready examples, not because I believe that there is some sort of safeguard that would prevent it.
Should LLMs ask "Is this real or fiction?" before replying to suicidal thoughts?
by ParityMind | 2025-07-11 17:59:22+00:00
I’m a regular user of tools like ChatGPT and Grok — not a developer, but someone who’s been thinking about how these systems respond to users in emotional distress.

In some cases, like when someone says they’ve lost their job and don’t see the point of life anymore, the chatbot will still give neutral facts — like a list of bridge heights. That’s not neutral when someone’s in crisis.

I'm proposing a lightweight solution that doesn’t involve censorship or therapy — just some situational awareness:

Ask the user: “Is this a fictional story or something you're really experiencing?”

If distress is detected, avoid risky info (methods, heights, etc.), and shift to grounding language

Optionally offer calming content (e.g., ocean breeze, rain on a cabin roof, etc.)

I used ChatGPT to help structure this idea clearly, but the reasoning and concern are mine. The full write-up is here: https://gist.github.com/ParityMind/dcd68384cbd7075ac63715ef579392c9

Would love to hear what devs and alignment researchers think. Is anything like this already being tested?
by johnnyjeans | 2025-07-11 17:59:22+00:00
"Worse is better" is an extremely misleading phrase. It's supposed to be ironic, not sarcastic. Unfortunately, the authors of "Unix Haters Handbook" exercised terrible judgement used it as a sarcastic pejorative. Now nobody understands what anybody is actually saying when they use it. I mean it in the original sense, where it's basically another way to express "Less is more."

SML is borderline minimalist, it's "worse" because it doesn't try to solve everybody's problems with a bunch of ad hoc language features and a stdlib and formalization larger than the entire legal code of the United States. It's "worse" because it comes with "less". You can't just import solution and start writing AbstractFactoryManager2 garbage. It's not actually worse to anybody but beancounters.
by GloriousKoji | 2025-07-11 17:59:56+00:00
I don't follow youtube links during work hours as a personal policy but an India government webpage outlines the water test for whole tumeric: https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/

> Test 14 : Detection of lead chromate in turmeric whole > Testing Method: > * Add small quantity of turmeric whole in a transparent glass of water. > * Pure turmeric will not leave any colour. > * Adulterated turmeric appears to be bright in colour and leaves colour immediately in water.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-11 18:00:19+00:00
Yes exactly that "religion by default" is what bothers me too. Good way of putting it. It's like seeing atheists as a bit disabled, and the praying as something necessary in life that atheists can do with a workaround.

All that groveling, the idea of putting your life in the hands of this entity, humbly improving my connection with them etc. There's no way I will do that.

I'm more than atheist, I'm anti-religious. I don't care what other people do, if it makes them happy that's cool for them, but I don't want any of that stuff in my life.
by amluto | 2025-07-11 18:00:54+00:00
> We're seeing the net result of your desired policy right now where retired boomers sit on 4 bedroom houses with 3 empty bedrooms while anything resembling this type of family home is unaffordable for actual families.

Some of this is due to tax policy, at least in the US. If you own an oversized house that you’ve had for long enough, then most of the value is a capital gain. If you sell it, you pay taxes on all but $500k of that gain, even if you promptly buy a new, smaller house that costs almost as much. If, instead, you hold the house until you die, the tax is waived completely.

California has additional perverse incentives due to property taxes.