MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Technical diagrams were slowing me down, so I built a faster way
by SamiCostox | 2025-07-16 07:53:20+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been working on a side project called RapidChart for the past few months — a tool for generating technical/system design diagrams more easily.

Over the years, I’ve had to create countless diagrams for companies and personal projects. Every time, it’s the same story: fiddling with layout tools, dragging boxes, aligning arrows… It adds hours of work for something that should be fast and clear.

So I built RapidChart to speed things up.

How RapidChart works:

It’s completely free

It uses a cursor-like interface for diagram generation

It’s 100% customizable

You can iterate with AI and choose your favorite LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, etc.)

This originally started as part of my research project at Imperial College London, and I’d love some honest feedback.

If you think it’s terrible, please tell me why. If it’s useful or interesting, I’d love to hear that too!

https://www.rapidcharts.ai/

Thanks!
by miki_oomiri | 2025-07-16 07:53:29+00:00
This all started with the "Engagement Team" like … 15+ years ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with mascots, being cute, having this infantilizing attitude towards users.

They killed the dino logo:

- https://imghost.online/GBswvjTZ38PtAnf

- https://imghost.online/0HTX7YVnImu49qc

We were hackers, we became "cute and inclusive" (nothing wrong about inclusive… it just became the brand).

Fuck this.

Edit: I said 10+ years… but actually, it was more like 15 years ago.
by blueflow | 2025-07-16 07:54:28+00:00
I have not yet seen AI doing a critical evaluation of data sources. AI willcontradict primary sources if the contradiction is more prevalent in the training data.

Something about the whole approach is bugged.

My pet peeve: "Unix System Resources" as explanation for the /usr directory is a term that did not exist until the turn of the millenium (rumor is that a c't journalist made it up in 1999), but AI will retcon it into the FHS (5 years earlier) or into Ritchie/Thompson/Kernigham (27 years earlier).
by brabel | 2025-07-16 07:55:09+00:00
Hm I can guarantee that the frameworks I listed above will be well maintained for a long time and are much more “battle tested” than Dropwizard itself (though some of the libs that it includes are actually independent and used in other frameworks, those are sure to survive long time). You make it sound like Dropwizard is the more established framework when in reality it’s rather the opposite.
by HelloNurse | 2025-07-16 07:55:25+00:00
Interestingly, punch cards and early terminals in the 80-132 columns range reached the limits of readable line length and early programming languages were obviously pushed to the limits of human comprehension, making the shape of text in old and new programming languages strikingly consistent (e.g. up to 4 or 5 levels of 4 characters of indentation is normal).
by jakozaur | 2025-07-16 07:56:00+00:00
This feels similar to TurboBuffer, which is also built on top of S3 storage. TurboBuffer has been a leader in this space, powering vector search for major companies like Cursor, Linear, and Notion.

It seems AWS is leveraging its strong S3 brand to compete directly in the vector database market.

For more context, check out the TurboBuffer architecture docs and Notion’s presentation from the Data Council:

https://turbopuffer.com/docs/architecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yb6Nw21QxA

(anti-disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with TurboBuffer in any way.)
by petesergeant | 2025-07-16 07:56:38+00:00
2024 my wife and I did a startup together. We worked almost every hour we were awake, 16-18 hours a day, 7 days a week. We ate, we went for an hour's walk a day, the rest of the time I was programming. For 9 months. Never worked so hard in my life before. And, not a lick of burnout during that time, not a moment of it, where I've been burned out by 6 hour work days at other organizations. If you're energized by something, I think that protects you from burnout.
by blitzar | 2025-07-16 07:57:03+00:00
The 30/50/100gb of random numbers that is a trained LLM is basically worthless - if it has any value at all on day 1, that value depreciates at multiple percentage points per day.

Anthropic more than OpenAi are going for the integrations, verticals and MCP - I think that is the right play. "OpenAi Inside" can replace the "Intel Inside" sticker but their marketcap needs to go 1/100x
by mieses | 2025-07-16 07:57:13+00:00
extremely subjective. the damage of allowing schoolmarm types to determine laws based on what they think is parasitic or deceptive is more dangerous than the unambiguous and coherent concept of property. PuTTY owns https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ There are a number of strings in this domain that cause me great distress. Should I be allowed to seize their property?
by superice | 2025-07-16 07:57:23+00:00
And I know how to tell any story, it's called lying. Whether you are lying with statistics or lying in a story does not matter. In the end it all comes down to whether you can validate what you've been told. Most people however will skip validation in favor of 'this sounds reasonable' and most people have a worse intuition for statistics than for stories. That's on them though, let's not blame statistics for that shortcoming.
by porcoda | 2025-07-16 07:57:45+00:00
Yeah, I saw that and was tempted to say the same thing. Ocaml is alive and well, and SML still is in active use. Ocaml has a relatively broad application space, whereas SML is more or less limited to the world of theorem provers and related tools (e.g., PolyML is used to build things like HOL4, and CakeML is a pretty active project in the verified compilers space that targets SML and is built atop HOL4). SML is likely regarded as irrelevant to industrial programmers (especially those in the communities that frequent HN), but it's still alive. F# is still alive and kicking too, and that's more or less an Ocaml variant.
by thelastgallon | 2025-07-16 07:57:48+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...

As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[4][5] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[4][6] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.
by cturner | 2025-07-16 07:57:54+00:00
I came here to write - I think awk would fit in the list.

Awk is sold on pattern matching, and there are earlier technologies that do pattern-matching - ML, SNOBOL.

But awk's historic significance is something else: it was the embryonic scripting language. You could use it in an imperative manner, and in 1977 that showed a new path to interacting with a unix system. It allowed you to combine arithmetic, string manipulation, and limited forms of structured data processing in a single process without using a compiler.

Two language schools grew from imperative awk. (1) The scripting language that expose convenient access to filesystem and OS syscalls like perl/pike/python/ruby; (2) The tool control languages like tcl/lua/io.

It may also have influenced shell programming. Note that awk was released before the Bourne shell.
by lucianbr | 2025-07-16 07:58:03+00:00
This reflection seems very unlikely to be authentic because it is full of superlatives and not a single bad thing (or at least not great) is mentioned. Real organizations made of real humans simply are not like this.

The fact that several commenters know the author personally goes some way to explain why the entire comment section seems to have missed the utterly unbalanced nature of the article.
by iregina | 2025-07-16 07:59:09+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Regina, technical comms from Shopify. wave

I am so, so thrilled to see this piece published as the first story in Applied Intelligence, the new publication by First Round. Their team spent countless hours learning and chatting with our Engineering team, and it's the first time we're publicly talking about some of the projects mentioned in the article.

Pop in your questions here — if I can't answer them, I can try to pull in someone who can!
by jajko | 2025-07-16 07:59:59+00:00
Not sure whats your problem, why can't we have both?

Those are definitely not money wasted - for waste look at things in ballpark of trillions like meaningless wars for made up reasons that destabilized whole parts of world and killed millions of civilians, look at various ways ultra rich and their companies avoid paying even bare minimum taxes and contributing back to societies form which they siphoned those vast amounts of cash.

These are peanuts which keep giving back to whole mankind and our future, instead of destroying it.
by thelastgallon | 2025-07-16 08:00:36+00:00
Directly from their website: https://www.fema.gov/flood-insurance. This encourages everyone to build in places that shouldn't be built in the first place.

"Floods can happen anywhere — just one inch of floodwater can cause up to thousands of dollars' worth of damage. Most homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. Flood insurance is a separate policy that can cover buildings, the contents in a building, or both, so it is important to protect your most important assets — your home, your business, your possessions.

The NFIP provides flood insurance to property owners, renters and businesses, and having this coverage helps them recover faster when floodwaters recede. The NFIP works with communities required to adopt and enforce floodplain management regulations that help mitigate flooding effects.

Flood insurance is available to anyone living in one of the 22,600 participating NFIP communities. Homes and businesses in high-risk flood areas with mortgages from government-backed lenders are required to have flood insurance."
by sbergot | 2025-07-16 08:01:20+00:00
I work on the SSO stack in a b2b company with about 200k monthly active users. One blind spot in our monitoring is when an error occurs on the client's identity provider because of a problem on our side. The service is unusable and we don't have any error logs to raise an alert. We tried to setup an alert based on expected vs actual traffic but we concluded that it would create more problems for the reason you provided.
by stingraycharles | 2025-07-16 08:01:27+00:00
I disagree, the target audience is also going to be less technical people, and the gist is clear to everyone: they just deploy this config from 0 to 100% to production, without feature gates or rollback. And they made changes to the config that wasn’t deployed for weeks until some other change was made, which also smells like a process error.

I will not say whether or not it’s acceptable for a company of their size and maturity, but it’s definitely not hidden in corporate lingo.

I do believe they could have elaborate more on the follow up steps they will take to prevent this from happening again, I don’t think staggered roll outs are the only answer to this, they’re just a safety net.
by porcoda | 2025-07-16 08:02:38+00:00
No. Just google for NVIDIA and Adacore to see how Ada is quite alive in NVIDIA land. Ada is quite a nice language that more or less anticipated a lot of the current trends in languages that the safe languages like Rust and friends are following. Spark is quite a cool piece of work too. I think the perception of old-ness is the biggest obstacle for Ada.
by basisword | 2025-07-16 08:02:53+00:00
>> The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting.

I think this is just changing with the times. Go back a bit further and the idea of communities around products is the new cool thing. Personally I find that a bit weird. We have a whole generation of people who find social media managers talking to each other hilarious.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-16 08:03:22+00:00
I want to scream Jesus F Christ, but I guess that would be making your point for you :).

Still, it's not what you're saying. Vibes are present, too, but so are concrete effects like one-off utilities conjured in 2 minutes of prompting instead of 10 minutes of searching or 1 hour of coding, or research questions answered swiftly (and answers verified by me), that I normally wouldn't consider tackling due to up-front effort being greater than my discretionary time. And so on.

This is not vibes, but hard, empirical evidence, immediately retrievable as it just accumulates in the chat history, so I can always go back to check if I wasn't misremembering things.
by jltsiren | 2025-07-16 08:05:05+00:00
Software is a common skill, especially among military-age men. Probably around 5% of those employed in that group have software-related jobs. Doctors are rarer, and they also need more training to become productive, which makes them harder to replace than software developers.

You can argue that a specific individual has specific skills and experience that make them more valuable to the country in a non-fighting role. But software developer is just another common job.
by timeon | 2025-07-16 08:05:27+00:00
> I think what is going to come of this will be an alert system

Now is better then never. However this was already evaluated and dismissed before. Tragedy described in the blog could be prevented. Here is example from Kerr county commissioners' court:

> COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: You know we had a baby flood a couple weeks ago, a month or so, whatever it was. And I keep hearing these reports of the old, old system, and I know we're not going to deal with that though. Expect that to be gone where the Jones call the Smiths, and the Smiths call Camp Rio Vista, and Rio Vista blah, blah, blah, along down the line. But it's still there and it still works. The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I'm going to have to start drinking again to put up with y'all.

-- (2016) https://legacy.co.kerr.tx.us/commcrt/minutes/2016/062716CC.t...
by mort96 | 2025-07-16 08:06:33+00:00
The one I can think of is Google Meet, where some GPU-thing is used to add background effects such as blur. However I'm not sure this actually uses WebGPU; it used to use on Firefox until Google added a browser check, and AFAIK, if you could fool Meet to think Firefox was Chrome, it would still work.

This might still be a semi-legitimate thing, i.e maybe they kept around a WebGL implementation for a while as a fallback but moved the main implementation to WebGPU and don't want to maintain the fallback. It certainly fits well into their strategy of making sure that the web really only works properly with Chrome.
by knorker | 2025-07-16 08:07:46+00:00
I did say 10x better alloca. I'm saying that's not good enough, and seems very narrow.

You could do this in C++, with RAII stacked arena allocators. Though it's unclear to me from the blog post if C3 would prevent returning a pointer to memory in the top most pool. C++ probably wouldn't help you prevent that.
by interloxia | 2025-07-16 08:08:18+00:00
Change in births, by age of mother, United States

Estimated number of births each year by the age of the mother. 1950-2023 relative change. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-by-age-of-mother?s...

Birth rate by women's age group, United States https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertility-rate-by-age-gro...
by aucisson_masque | 2025-07-16 08:08:19+00:00
Let’s be honest, the only advantage Firefox has over other browser and especially chrome is its extension support. And it’s not even Mozilla merit, it’s Google who removed MV2 support.

Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.

They hang on by a thread.

The web need Firefox to be thriving but it’s been a sinking ship since a while.

They know perfectly what users want, what makes a good browser : speed, good user interface, low on energy, block ads,.. These are universal things.

Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.

And it’s not even that I want to see the url every second, but it just looks and feel bad.

On computer, there are 4 different browser history. The traditional one that opens in an outdated window, the « recent one » that shows only the 10 or something last links , a better looking browser history when you go in the top left button where there are synced browser tabs, synced history ,.. and an history in the sidebar.

Seriously ? 4 different history.

There need to be one clear, working history.
by TechTonic-Hub | 2025-07-16 08:08:21+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with AI writing tools to automate parts of my content strategy — specifically around ad copy, email funnels, and landing pages. Most tools like ChatGPT or Claude can output text, but results vary wildly unless the prompts are dialed in.

I recently wrote a detailed guide that shares how I structure prompts to:

Generate Google/Facebook ad copy variations with emotional triggers

Build email sequences with persuasive CTAs and segmented tone

Create sales page wireframes using frameworks like PAS & AIDA

Chain prompts to refine tone, format, and brand voice accuracy

Avoid hallucination while improving human-likeness & trust signals

The post is non-promotional and includes a full breakdown of prompt templates + tips for customizing them for different tools (GPT-4, Claude, Jasper, etc.). There's also a section on using feedback loops to iteratively fine-tune AI copy toward conversion goals.

Here’s the article: https://www.ttonichub.com/2025/07/ai-powered-copywriting-pro...

Would be curious how others here are using LLMs for conversion-oriented writing or marketing automation. Has anyone used LangChain or RAG for dynamic prompt workflows?
by jstrebel | 2025-07-16 08:08:51+00:00
I absolutely love this paper and it's a shame that this research does not receive more attention. Everybody is raving about LLMs, but also everybody is ignoring the shaky foundations on which they are built (just think of training data poisoning). It is also a shame that there are no real software applications to my knowledge that really implement the iconic and categorical representations and try to build an AI system around it.
by dns_snek | 2025-07-16 08:09:09+00:00
I use this method personally and it works great on GNOME and KDE. First set `toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets` to true in `about:config` then find your profile directory in `about:profiles`.

cd $FIREFOX_PROFILE_DIR cd chrome git clone https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks touch userChrome.css

The contents of userChrome.css should be:

@import url('firefox-csshacks/chrome/hide_tabs_toolbar.css'); @import url('firefox-csshacks/chrome/window_control_placeholder_support.css');

Then restart the browser. If anything breaks the repository will likely be updated soon and you just have to pull the changes.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-07-16 08:10:16+00:00
I'll add my name to the list of people who like the idea and were very curious about it when they first heard about it but now don't think about it as much.

It's very fun to develop for. The simplicity of the protocol means that writing a server, client or "web app" (equivalent) is a weekend project. So there is a proliferation of software for it but that doesn't necessarily translate into content.

There is content, though. My favourite aggregator is gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/ and I do still drop by there regularly enough to have a browse. It's no longer all meta content which is good (people used to just use Geminispace to write about Gemini). It's still quite tech/FOSS focused, unsurprisingly.

I agree with the other comments that are saying that a simple markdown would have been better than gemtext.

Whenever Gemini gets mentioned on HN there are a lot of commenters who seem to have an issue with the "views" or "values" of some people within the community. They never go into detail. I can honestly say I'm not sure what the issue is. As a very middle-of-the-road centrist I have never had much of an issue with the content I find on Gemini. Sure, you had a few interesting "characters" on the mailing list (back when it existed) but they were a minority and it was nothing you don't also find on the web. I guess people there tend to be more dogmatic about sticking to FOSS and keeping the internet non-corporate, which can rub people the wrong way, but again you can find similar views on the web (and IMO it makes for interesting discussions even if I don't agree with the dogmatism).
by snthpy | 2025-07-16 08:10:44+00:00
Thanks. For this that don't want to have to click through:

Gemini is an application-level client-server internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between hosted files. Both the protocol and the format are deliberately limited in capabilities and scope, and the protocol is technically conservative, being built on mature, standardised, familiar, "off-the-shelf" technologies like URIs, MIME media types and TLS. Simplicity and finite scope are very intentional design decisions motivated by placing a high priority on user autonomy, user privacy, ease of implementation in diverse computing environments, and defensive non-extensibility. In short, it is something like a radically stripped down web stack. See section 4 of this FAQ document for questions relating to the design of Gemini.
by rom1v | 2025-07-16 08:11:39+00:00
On Android, in Settings, Network & internet, Private DNS, you can only provide one in "Private DNS provider hostname" (AFAIK).

Btw, I really don't understand why it does not accept an IP (1.1.1.1), so you have to give an address (one.one.one.one). It would be more sensible to configure a DNS server from an IP rather than from an address to be resolved by a DNS server :/
by ReaperCub | 2025-07-16 08:11:50+00:00
On this particular issue, that something can't be political. Assuming anything can be done at all.

There is no support from the public and I don't be believe there ever will be, and there is no/very little support from any of the political parties.

Even in places where you would think they would be against such legislation, the disagreement is often how it is worded.

I would rather this not be the case. But I have to accept reality and exist within the confines of it.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-07-16 08:11:57+00:00
And after. Women live on average 3 years longer than men, at least in the U.K.

In theory male retirement age should thus be 3 years lower, but until very recently in the U.K. female retirement age was 5 years lower, meaning women had 8 more years of claiming a pension.

When this was equalised there were massive protests.
by anovikov | 2025-07-16 08:11:57+00:00
It was also 92 years before Ben Franklin's kite experiment.

Middle Ages arguably, were done with the Black Death of 1346, when a third of agricultural labor was wiped out making land rents much cheaper and in many cases, nil. It ended feudalism because just controlling land was no longer enough to make money - and peasants got plenty of disposable income that they used to spend on rents - enabling consumption of industrial goods - and capitalism began; by the time peasants multiplied again some 150 years later to reverse the situation, America was discovered and those extra people started to emigrate there to make use of those free lands (and also, well, exploit and sometimes genocide locals... but that is another story), so feudalism never returned. By 1660, it was a distant memory.