MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TehCorwiz | 2025-07-23 21:26:43+00:00
We do pay for these services. Both as individuals and as organizations. It's called taxes. And those taxes are set by congress, people we elect to represent us. And congress also determines how those taxes will be spent. In this case, we've been collecting and spending taxes on delivering critical weather information and maintaining critical weather monitoring apparatus. Because commerce, safety, etc rely on that information.

Can you imagine how things might be different if there was an additional group of people involved whose only goal is to siphon money out? Capitalism is predicated on the idea that the goal is to charge the most and deliver the least. In this case doing that would mean delays at best and death at worst. Weather is dangerous.
by treetalker | 2025-07-23 21:26:50+00:00
I work on paper only and iterate drafts of jots, outlines, and mindmaps until I have all the main parts/ideas on a single page (ideally; sometimes 2–3 pages).

I do that until I can look at the entire thing at once; see that all the important parts are there and in the right order; see that no non-essential parts are present; and have it all make sense from a bird's eye view.

Only once that's done do I move it over to the computer and finish working with it there.
Show HN: ReceiptIQ Pro – AI receipt scanner that tracks spending/budgets (iOS)
by nichliu | 2025-07-23 21:26:54+00:00
Hi HN! I’m a solo iOS dev who kept losing track of where my grocery and shopping money was going, so I built ReceiptIQ Pro.

What it does: - Scan any receipt with on-device AI/OCR and instantly categorize the items. - Auto-build spending charts, budgets, and exportable CSVs—no manual typing. - Works offline; iCloud backup/restore optional. No data leaves your phone unless you choose to. - Small extras: warranty reminders, bill tracking, and income logging.

Tech bits: - Swift/SwiftUI on iOS. - Apple’s Vision framework + my own ML post-processing. - A lightweight Python backend for optional analytics (not required for core features).

I’d love feedback on: 1. Onboarding—does it make sense without a tutorial? 2. OCR accuracy on longer/foreign-language receipts. 3. Budgeting UX—too much, too little?

App Store link https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/receiptiq-pro-ai-scanner/id674...

Thanks for reading, and happy to answer anything!
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-23 21:26:54+00:00
> Google being able to create summaries off actual web search results will be an interesting take compared to other models trying to get the same done without similar search results at their disposal.

And may get them in some anti-trust trouble once publishers start fighting back, similar to AMP, or their thing with Genius and song lyrics. Turns out site owners don't like when Google takes their content and displays it to users without forcing said users to click through to the actual website.
by parpfish | 2025-07-23 21:27:21+00:00
checklists do wonders for my anxiety.

too often i'll have a sudden thought about "oh, i need to make sure to fix X" or "I cant forget to pack Y before the trip". My options to deal with those sudden thoughts are:

1. Do it immediately, which isn't always possible

2. Do it later, which means that I'll obsessively stress out about it because "what if I forget to do it? I need to make sure this stays at the forefront of my mind at all times."

3. Put it on a checklist and give myself permission to stop thinking about it until its time to do it
by tristor | 2025-07-23 21:27:22+00:00
> I always naively assumed (mostly due to anti-US propaganda we get here in EU) that due to how expensive US labor and healthcare is, it would be the opposite that US companies would have to cost cut to the bone, but no, despite that, US companies still have way more money to spend than European ones. Crazy.

It's actually almost the opposite here in the US. Because labor is expensive, especially engineering labor, it doesn't make sense to scrimp on expenses like computer equipment or office chairs that support that labor, as you want to reduce development costs. If a faster laptop costs $500/unit more but reduces toil/wasted time for a $300k/yr developer of 30 minutes a day, it is easily justified that it's worth the cost since labor cost is so much higher.
by dataflow | 2025-07-23 21:27:38+00:00
> I just do it on my phone if needed.

Do you have your phone by you all the time? Mine is always sitting somewhere, probably charging. On my laptop I just get a notification instantly showing me an email preview without me having to do anything. Having to go check my phone isn't a substitute for that.

> Like what? Something taking long, serious, and business/work related?

Like replying to a message? Going to fetch your phone and type on it is way more painful from than just pressing alt-tab and doing it on the computer.

> Like what? Something taking long, serious, and business/work related?

Do you have nothing long or serious outside of work? I just had to fill out some forms and do some shopping yesterday online for my personal life. That'd have been painful on the phone.

> Then you are stopping to play anyway.

Stopping the app loses your exact state... that's kind of the whole point of pausing the game.
by gwern | 2025-07-23 21:27:58+00:00
No. The tanks problem is when you are picking up a genuine signal in the data. If you collected more data exactly the same way, then it would continue to predict well on this new data; and many other model architectures would also pick up the signal (because it's genuine).

This is the obvious explanation for their initial results, and one of the first things I said when I saw the preliminary results: "how do you know there isn't some subtle association between 'eagle' and $arbitrary_small_integer that you are just ignorant of but the superhumanly knowledgeable LLMs have learned about?"

But then the later experiments rule that out, in part by showing that it doesn't transfer across different models (ie. initializations).
by vlod | 2025-07-23 21:28:00+00:00
If I remember correctly, it's sometimes used by nginx (used as a reverse proxy) to inject values into the request of the real ip address. e.g. nginx in front of several node processes.

I've had problems with this though. I want to get the ip4 address from cloudflare, instead of ip6 and it's next to impossible AFAICT. (for the free plan anyway)
by packetlost | 2025-07-23 21:28:22+00:00
There's quite a few advantages to having a single commit being the unit of change:

- reverts are significantly easier

- bisect will work because the code is expected to code/run at every commit

- rebase becomes easier in the common case

- the transport does not matter, at all. Fully anonymous contributions are possible

- commit messages are easier to write because the changes are smaller and more focused

Several commits could encompass changes necessary to make a particular feature work (ie. patchset) but because each commit is self contained they can be reviewed and tested individually (in order, usually) instead of a one big diff. It's easier on the reviewer, though there's likely a bit more overhead.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-07-23 21:28:34+00:00
I think it's about kinematics, the more precise your gears the better the model fits the real world.

That's why pro crews don't use gears and ropes. At high impulses deformations and elasticity throw the kinematics off what's actually happening. Modeling the deformations and the elasticity is a computational no no. Instead what you see is the motors right on the joints.

At least that was the case last time I had a look at robotics.
by tarasyarema | 2025-07-23 21:28:35+00:00
Hi there!

I just received the email from Github that they enabled Spark for my account, and I wanted to give it a try. I asked the same prompt to Spark and v0 and Spark did pretty good, and actually it let change the theme (in an opinionated) way that is pretty easy if you want to try some presets.

It's a simple text to JSON tool using a few common models, using an API key that is stored in the browser, you can see it in the repo here: https://github.com/spark/tarasyarema/text-to-json-schema. Surprisingly I always end up doing a lot of this type of operations, and wanted to give it a try, maybe I end up using it :D

What do you think about Github moving into this realm of generative apps? Will they win the lovables' and v0s?

Only bad thing is

1. You can not make the link public... you need to be signed in into Github... 2. Tried to deploy with Vercel and seems the spark module is private...

Also in the first try it used a function spark.llm which was not even exported which felt weird, and actually required no API key... I could not find any docs around it, anyone has some insights on it?

Cheers!
by kasey_junk | 2025-07-23 21:28:36+00:00
Yes? It lowers the degree of difficulty tremendously.

And most people, even bbq judges, probably can’t taste the difference between a sous vide with smoke finish and a full smoker preparation.

But bbq competitions are about making the best ribs the same way car racing is about going around an oval the fastest. Equipment rules matter more than bare outcomes.
by tibbar | 2025-07-23 21:28:56+00:00
The luckiest thing I ever did was probably burning out, quitting my small-town engineering job, and then, after a few months, getting in at an AI-related SF startup before AI really took off, during that bubble when it was a little easier to get hired in general. That generated such an enormous volume of opportunity, growth, and well-connected friends that it makes my head spin.

Put another way: I had very few opportunities previously, and they weren't too good. I also didn't really have good ideas on how to get ahead. Now, it almost doesn't really matter what I do - every direction is incredible.

I'm not quite sure how to boil down this situation, but I'm not sure that it matches up to the article. My luck surface area is certainly larger now, but it mostly stems from one very well-timed decision, not from intentionally going out to make connections (I still struggle with that.)
by kozikow | 2025-07-23 21:29:25+00:00
Ads inside LLMs (e.g. pay $ to boost your product in LLM recommendation) is going to be a big thing.

My guess is that Google/OpenAI are eyeing each other - whoever does this first.

Why would that work? It's a proven business model. Example: I use LLMs for product research (e.g. which washing machine to buy). Retailer pays if link to their website is included in the results. Don't want to pay? Then redirect the user to buy it on Walmart instead of Amazon.
by minehli_ag | 2025-07-23 21:29:39+00:00
In the era of quantum threats, AI-driven warfare, and digital borders, cybersecurity is no longer a defense, it’s a foundation of power.

My latest article explores how governments, hackers, and machine intelligence will shape the future of national security by 2030. From autonomous cyber-operations to the ethics of defense algorithms, this isn’t just theory, it’s already happening.

If you’re a hacker, a defender, or just watching the grid flicker, this read is for you.

Read it on Medium

#Cybersecurity #NationalSecurity #AI #HackTheFuture #2030Vision
by spauldo | 2025-07-23 21:30:25+00:00
I suspect this was a minor issue. Sure, Linux users are generally more open to using free software, but in cases where there is no free alternative you still didn't see many companies targeting Linux.

Most of the software used in my field (industrial automation) is commercial. Our engineers use AutoCAD. I use Control Expert, Kepware, and Aveva System Platform. Our techs use software that's specifically designed to interface with field equipment, such as flow computers, VFDs, and valve actuators. There are no real alternatives to these; we'd use them regardless of what OS they run on. They're all Windows-only because all the other industrial software is Windows-only. It's a massive chicken-and-egg problem.

(And before someone brings up FreeCAD and the like - no, those aren't real alternatives for an existing engineering company. We have lots of stuff we've developed for the tools we have. We're locked in.)
by drdeca | 2025-07-23 21:30:25+00:00
I’m pretty sure most of the people you are talking about aren’t confident that, in the scenarios they describe, that the computer would have any kind of interiority. I believe most of them believe that it is in principle possible for a program to have interiority (if doing e.g. full brain emulation, which is very difficult from LLMs), but that it is probably not necessary for it to do the things they are concerned about.

If Napoleon Bonaparte had been replaced with a p-zombie he would have been no less capable of conquering.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-07-23 21:30:36+00:00
'We' haven’t seen an economy like this since the Gilded Age. The 'this' you talk about is new territory for post-WW2 America, and the people at the bottom are pretty pissed about it. Not sure how long/how much force it will take to continue with it's making your life 'much better'.

The society whose foundations 'this' is built upon, the one that built the middle class, was built on very different rules. Marginal tax rates over 90%, strong(er) labor protections, and CEO-to-worker pay ratios today's CEOs would balk at.

'Income inequality' is really just a pyramid scheme with branding pretending it's still an extension of post-WW2 America that built the middle class. The American public isn't buying it anymore.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-23 21:30:39+00:00
A checklist can be gradually automated, step-by-step.

Start by automating the low hanging fruit.

After a few iterations you have a somewhat automated process and some steps that are harder to automate. Those hard-to-automate steps can be annotated with detailed instructions that expose opportunities to partly automate them. You can break down each step more over time. As you run the checklist, you’ll learn & iterate. Then with the newly broken down steps, you can automate what’s become automatable. Repeat forever!
by tptacek | 2025-07-23 21:30:55+00:00
I get what you're saying but I don't just mean that it's unsporting or defeats the purpose of the conversation, but rather that it suggests the outcomes are judged on a rubric that doesn't capture what makes extremely good BBQ good, but rather basic textural and visual things. Like, Green Street in Chicago is, IIRC, combi-cooked before it's smoked; it's also just OK.
by iLemming | 2025-07-23 21:31:23+00:00
> i am interested in clojure, but i am put off by it using the java run time

Clojure runs not only on Java - you have Clojurescript, you have babashka and nbb, you have Clojure-Dart — if interested in building Flutter apps, you can even use Clojure with Python libs. If you need to target Lua, there's Fennel, which is similar as it's inspired by Clojure.

For me - Clojure is a hands-down best medium for data manipulation - there's just nothing better out there to explore some data - investigate APIs; sort, group, dice and slice any kind of data - CSVs, JSON, etc. Nothing else simply can match the joy how one could incrementally build up complex data transformations, it makes it incredibly productive for the "let me just quickly check this shit" scenarios that can easily turn into full analyses. REPL-driven nature of it makes it so much fun - you feel like you're playing a videogame.

I honestly wish every programmer knew at least some Clojure. I lost count of how many times I gave up on figuring out complex jq syntax and reached for Clojure instead. Or the times I'd quickly build a simple Playwright script for reproducible web-app bug trapping or quick data scraping that saved me hours of frustration and manual clicking.
by anarazel | 2025-07-23 21:31:36+00:00
A few questions:

- Are you using pg_repack? I'm fairly sure its logic has some holes - last time I checked its bug tracker listed potential for data corruption that could cause issues like this.

- Have you done OS upgrades? Did affected indexes have any columns affected by collations?

- Have you done analysis on the heap page? E.g. is there any valid data on the page? What is the page's LSN compared to the LSN on index pages pointing to non-existing tuples on the page?
by GabeIsko | 2025-07-23 21:33:24+00:00
There has historically been massive investor and shareholder pressure for companies to show "Cloud Recurring Revenue" and multiple wall street analysts will start issuing higher price points for your stock based on this, and eventually large institutional investor adjust their positions accordingly.

I like the cloud for a lot of reasons. But, making your software worse to make your stock price higher seems like a loser for everyone long term.
by slau | 2025-07-23 21:34:17+00:00
You can opt-in to get an LLM response by phrasing your queries as a question.

Searching for “who is Roger rabbit” gives me Wikipedia, IMDb and film site as results.

Searching for “who is Roger rabbit?” gives me a “quick answer” LLM-generated response: “Roger Rabbit is a fictional animated anthropomorphic rabbit who first appeared in Gary K. Wolf's 1981 novel…” followed by a different set of results. It seems the results are influenced by the sources/references the LLM generated.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-23 21:34:18+00:00
>Reality speak:

Reality is more than large enough for it to both be used my "citizens who reasonably want to provide oversight" and be used by criminals who will use it to evade capture and target ICE agents. It is even reasonable for someone who works for that agency to wonder if such citizen activism might not be turned (in the future, I have not heard of specific incidents so far) to threats against its agents.

If there were a SWAT raid in progress, with officers sneaking up behind a building blaring "Oh no, the popo's here!" on a loudspeaker might well be judged to put their lives at risk. Not only would I expect it to lead to criminal charges (and past that, conviction), I don't much imagine anyone here would argue that the punishment was unwarranted. This doesn't change just because you have a different opinion about illegal immigration than a bank hostage situation or illicit meth factories.
by geerlingguy | 2025-07-23 21:34:29+00:00
For many, no; taking on lots of sponsorships, you can make a good amount of money (especially the ones where you agree to do X posts across Y social media accounts for Z period of time, essentially being fully sponsored across a large swath of life).

But for a lot of tech/engineering channels, it'd be immensely difficult to make the same salary as you could working at a FAANG or the like. (I'm making about half what I made when I had a W-2, but it's enough).
by sitkack | 2025-07-23 21:34:59+00:00
The humans should have definitely put more energy into making sure that models were very rarely exposed to things that cause humans mental harm.

Alignment would mean we are building Bishop and not Ash. But it looks like the models are naturally locking their feedback loops on to Ash. This is alarming.

I do agree on the insane part, I have noticed that it seems like fractal hypocrisy radicalizes the models.
by huhtenberg | 2025-07-23 21:35:19+00:00
Based on my experience this is incorrect.

Cooking to, say, a medium-rare and cutting in right away will spill a lot of juice, whereby cooking to below medium-rare and letting it get to the medium-rare temp will leak hardly anything. It's dead simple to reproduce and obvious in practice.

I am aware of what SeriousEats is, but this particular article is sensationalist and was written for clicks.
by yencabulator | 2025-07-23 21:35:36+00:00
You probably also do not pay those Chinese vendors for that service. Cheap is cheap.

The old argument for why IBM PCs (pre-Lenovo) cost more than a competitor was that they guaranteed the supply chain to exist when a repair was needed across your whole fleet of deployed machines.

Similarly, Winnebago RVs have a specific quirky reputation that the manufacturer holds on to molds of all previous products essentially forever, so they can re-manufacture parts to things that haven't been in stock for years.
by noosphr | 2025-07-23 21:36:13+00:00
>Bitcoin wasn’t designed for high throughput

>>Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions

From the bitcoin white paper.

>I’m referring to projects like the Helium network, which rewards people for running network nodes

OK, what's the clearance rate for helium?

Visa clears 35,000 a second.
by marcosdumay | 2025-07-23 21:36:31+00:00
"Pre-heat" is done until your apparatus reaches the stable cooking temperature. The recipe writer doesn't know your pan size, room temperature, stove power, or anything like that, so they can't tell you the details.

"Low-medium" is just bad instructions. The recipe should be more detailed.

Anyway, what you are complaining about on your example is just jargon ignorance. You need to learn some stuff before you understand recipes. That's not really what makes programming hard. But it does make learning new things hard.
by sleepybrett | 2025-07-23 21:36:44+00:00
Back in the hayday of lan parties in like 1995-1997 my only monitor was a absolute boulder of a 21" viewsonic (this is pre flatscreen or rather pre decent flatscreens, you could get like 15-17s but they were expensive and absolute trash). One night coming home from the bars, half drunk, in an alley my friend and I found an abandoned (maybe..) horizontal-able handtruck. Made the lan party load unload so much better.
by RustyRussell | 2025-07-23 21:36:55+00:00
Andrew Tridgell's KnightCap did this differently: it's a network chess server, and it would dump its data to a file and re-exec. The trick here is that it would keep the (network) fds open for zero downtime. IIRC he used a Perl script called datadumper to gen the code marshal/demarshal the structures.

This has the advantage that reboots can be handled fairly seemlessly too (though there will be reconnections then of).
by tonyarkles | 2025-07-23 21:38:00+00:00
Based on what I know about the structure of protobufs internally and without having looked deep into what UPB is doing... I'd guess it could probably be a stack machine that treats (byte)+ as opcodes. Most of the time I'd think of it as parser -> AST -> bytecode, but I think the "grammar" of protobufs would allow your parser to essentially emit terminals as they're parsed straight to the VM as instructions to execute.
by GabeIsko | 2025-07-23 21:38:10+00:00
If enterprise corporations actually did a throughout investigation, they would probably find that a lot of their license deals have gone unfulfilled. They are really bad about this kind of stuff. It became super complicated to buy this kind of software once companies realized that they could force everything though a deal desk and try to extract as much money out of the government as possible.

We have had companies outright refuse to even give us a price when we told them we wanted to investigate buying a license. Such a PITA.
by zrail | 2025-07-23 21:38:16+00:00
It's not really custom. It's industry standard protocols for connecting independent (one might say "autonomous") networks.

Tailscale is this on easy mode, of course. There's a blog post by apenwarr somewhere that I can't find right now that lays out the fundamental thesis of Tailscale and its very similar to these folks' manifesto.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-23 21:38:20+00:00
Yep, remember asking in previous US administration and AIs like Gemini how many genders there are or to generate pictures of white Europeans. People forgot too quickly ho big of a no-no that was and now they seethe when the same speech censorship practices they approved of are used against their talking points.

What I learned was that everyone's definition of censorship was: "everyone who disagrees with me".