MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vb-8448 | 2025-07-31 12:28:22+00:00
Hi, thank you for your feedback.

I think in the past, I've already had a look at your repo, but it's a little bit different from my idea. Your is build around BPMN (and, if I'm not wrong, it's basically a easy way to create custom finite state machines) while I'm working on a "lower level".

I have 3 concepts: tasks, links and workflows(a collection of tasks). Links can be created between task of the same workflow or task from different workflows. Workflows can be scheduled based on calendar rules(cron like or "2nd working day of the month" and similar) or external events(api call, new file on s3, ecc ecc). Normally workflows are DAGs, but loops can be created if needed.

The other idea is that it's just the orchestration layer, the task needs to be executed by specific "agent", that can be written in any language (there is a very simple protocol build on top of http to get the tasks from the orchestrator or to send the results) and can be installed on local or remote server.

Just some context: in the mainframe era, businesses used to be orchestrated by a unique "scheduler" running all day long(it was so flexible that basically any business from banking to insurance to manufacturing to industry were able to adapt it to their needs). Bigger companies used to have >100k (or even millions) of tasks per day with very well-defined dependencies. The "good" part was that it was very easy to monitor and manage your batch operations. My idea is to reproduce something similar, but also to add a better support for distributed envs and "human" tasks.
by codingdave | 2025-07-31 12:28:30+00:00
This is going to land on the everlasting "build vs. buy" question. The standard answer to which is you build processes and tools for your core value and buy everything else. But you are throwing a wrench in the works - if you can build it in a few hours, so can they. And their version will be exactly what they need, with easy changes as their business changes.

So for you to win that "build vs buy" equation, you need to be exceedingly flexible, easy, and cheap, in order to be a better choice vs just spending a few hours themselves. And you need to be a generic enough solution to a common enough problem that many companies need your solution. Which adds in one more challenge: any problem as common as that already has solutions.

So it is possible? Sure, maybe. But you are fighting a ton of headwinds, so it is not as easy as just packaging up a few hours of work and putting a price on it.
by rayiner | 2025-07-31 12:29:17+00:00
But then you’ll just get median americans for the job. And even median americans don’t want to be governed by other median americans. They want to be governed by exceptional people who share their values and whose judgment they trust. That’s what makes representative government difficult.

(You see this in juries for example. They select the smart or authoritative person among them to be the foreperson and look to that person for direction. This is how humans naturally form hierarchies.)
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2025-07-31 12:30:43+00:00
This comment represents a lack of understanding of human nature.

You can't effectively represent the interests of others when your own needs are barely covered. I want my elected representatives paid quite well so that they have fewer excuses to succumb to the various temptations of holding such a position.

You can wish all you want that people with incredible power and responsibility should live like spiritual monks and possess only the purest and noblest of intentions, but that's not how people work, and it sure as hell isn't how politics works.
by mstaoru | 2025-07-31 12:31:07+00:00
That's the truth, there are whole agencies specializing in removing bad reviews in Germany. The laws are really skewed against consumers in this respect.

I was looking for a gym and went to several, multiple times, paying outrageous amounts for single visits. Then I reviewed them on Google. None of my reviews survived the "defamation" steamroller.

I guess soon we'll be like Chinese people, inventing parables to say the truth without getting censored. "This was an amazing gym for a relaxing afternoon of crowd watching", or "I very thoroughly enjoyed the company of my friends while waiting for food in this restaurant, it also left me with an overrwhelming lightness in both my stomach and my wallet"...
by jvanderbot | 2025-07-31 12:31:20+00:00
Do you see the danger in introducing this dichotomy? A stock ban is not bad even if you believe that it won't help. Many do believe it is a good idea, and therefore is worth a vote.

But stopping it by saying we should tilt at another windmill? I don't see the benefit of that, I only see it being used as a tactic to stop good legislation in favor of the impossible great.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-07-31 12:32:00+00:00
https://archive.is/E11LL

> I treat everyone with great respect.

Literally called Donald Trump a nazi. First lady shouted "fuck you" to Elon Musk in public. Truly the most respectful brazilian president with his bar table manners.

He should be ecstatic Trump decided to exempt 600+ brazilian products from the tariffs.

> His social media pages have suddenly become filled with references to Brazil’s sovereignty.

Comical. He did everything he could to destroy brazilian nationalism. He openly disdains the brazilian armed forces. Now he wants to rely on both these things in order to support Brazil's "sovereignty". Absolutely delusional.

It's my sincere hope he gets impeached before his mandate ends, just like his predecessor.
by notorious_pgb | 2025-07-31 12:32:12+00:00
tl;dr: Yes; at least some of us are. I deeply am.

I wouldn't normally post a link to my blog in the comments of another thread -- I'm really not trying to shamelessly plug here -- it's just _incredibly_ relevant, and I've already poured my heart and soul into writing out exactly what I think here, so I think it's germane:

https://prettygoodblog.com/p/the-big-secret-that-big-ai-does...

> I cannot write the necessary philosophical screed this deserves, but: there are things which make us human and in our individual humanity unique; these things are art and skill of any kind; and it so greatly behooves one to strive to master art in any and all its forms.
by koolba | 2025-07-31 12:32:18+00:00
> Congressional salaries should be exactly the median US salary.

Congressional salaries should be $1m+. It would only half a billion dollars a year. A pittance of the $6.75 trillion federal budget.

Combine that high salary with mandatory life sentences for accepting any form of graft and you have a recipe for honest people to enter government. Pretty much the Singapore model for compensation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Singapore

The problem with low or median salaries for politicians is the ratio of power to compensation. It directly encourages the griftiest of grifters to accept the low salary and abuse their positions of power.

With a high enough salary, you will attract honest people who will do the job functions knowing that any deviation from working on behalf of the people will not only make you broke, it will land you in prison for life.
by alzoid | 2025-07-31 12:32:47+00:00
I ran into an AI coded bug recently the generated code had a hard coded path that resolved another bug. My assumption is the coder was too lazy to find the root cause of the bug and asked the LLM to "make it like this". The LLM basically set a flag to true so the business logic seems to work. It shouldn't have got past the test but whatever.

In another code base, all the code was written with this pattern. Its like the new code changed what the old code did. I think that 'coder' kept a big context window and didn't know how to properly ask for something. There was 150 line function that only needed to be 3 lines, a 300 line function that could be done in 10 etc. There were several a sections where the LLM moved the values of a list to another list and then looped through the new list to make sure the values were in the new list. It did this over and over again.
by ptero | 2025-07-31 12:33:39+00:00
> Gimp is an awful app with terrible UX.

Yes, and it's not clear that those startups will fare better than gimp.

Adobe spends inordinate amount of effort to understand the problems that users are solving and make UX that users love. As the result Adobe has tons of money to improve the product. Users curse its business practices, white an occasional "goodbye Adobe" or "FU" messages but keep buying subscriptions.

The moat around this should not be underestimated. My 2c.
by Isamu | 2025-07-31 12:33:39+00:00
>It occurs to me that this is Trump's way of trying to get back to "the good old days" when the Federal Government was almost entirely funded by tariffs (aka import taxes/duties).

That’s exactly it, he wants to eliminate income taxes. In particular his own taxes. Everyone else is along for the ride.

Because tariffs won’t be enough, he needs to cut the federal budget in ways that don’t affect him personally.
by jmclnx | 2025-07-31 12:34:50+00:00
>I think it's a shame it never carried over to QT or GTK+

Same here, but we know why. NIH Syndrome, or people did not realize how great it worked so they did their own thing, making things far more complicated then necessary.

I remember that time period, people were begging Motif/CDE to open up the source. Back then if that happened, many people would have jumped in and fixed a lot of issues. Now is a far different time :(
by tome | 2025-07-31 12:34:55+00:00
There seem to be a few strands getting entangled here. If you look earlier in the thread you'll see I'm asking for justification of the claim of "collective punishment". So far I haven't seen any, and indeed I haven't seen any direct responses to that request at all.

An observer following the thread (and maybe this applies to you too) might think "But what I am seeing as so egregious, why does it matter if it's technically 'collective punishment' or not? That's just nitpicking, splitting hairs, and a really awful thing to engage in when such suffering is occurring". Well then, if someone has such a strong argument that it easy for them to make it without leaving hairs that can be split, without leaving anything that could technically be nitpicked then let them make that argument. But so far I haven't found that argument. The arguments that I have found so far have loose ends, and when I pull on the loose ends I find invariably that the whole argument unravels.

So, the number of fatalities is not really relevant to this particular thread of discussion, but if you want to have a discussion on that topic, maybe we can check up front whether we have a reasonable basis for such a discussion: Do you believe that absolute numbers of civilian casualties determine morality in war? I don't.
by ben_w | 2025-07-31 12:35:02+00:00
Carrots and sticks.

Now don't get me wrong, given how often legislation in the USA and the UK seems to get rubber-stamped by members of the legislative body who did not (and in some cases could not have) actually read it, I think there's something structurally wrong with at least these two governments, where the senators and MPs are more like overpaid customer support agents and less like the legal/constitutional equivalent of software engineers doing code review or maintaining system architecture, but conditional on if we actually want the elected representatives to be the people's preferred choices amongst the best legal minds available, we have to pay enough to encourage… actually, even before that, even just to get the attention of the top m=contested_seats candidates whose views allow them to comfortably be members of each of the n=num_parties.

Now, I don't know what that pay rate is, and ChatGPT's guess would be better than mine, so the best I can do is link to a page that I only found because ChatGPT gave me a searchable phrase, "magic circle law firm": https://www.allaboutlaw.co.uk/school-leaver-law-careers/beco...

That suggests >>£1M/year in the UK. I assume the USA is more.

Consider: would you take a 90% pay-cut to do your current day job but for the public good?
by aidenn0 | 2025-07-31 12:35:14+00:00
Since it's almost on-topic, anyone know if/how these tools emulate sustained irrational behavior?

Example:

For over a decade, the freeway on-ramp nearest my work had two main ways of getting to it from downtown. One of them involved a stop-sign crossing a road that had the right-of-way (i.e. a two-way stop). The other had timed traffic signals. Every evening around 5pm, the traffic would backup from the stop-sign for multiple blocks. Meanwhile the route with lights was completely smooth.

Eventually the stop-sign was replaced with a signal, but I marveled at how many people persisted in making their daily commute much worse than it needed to be.
by ahdanggit | 2025-07-31 12:35:20+00:00
I'm tired of getting thrown AI slop, but I think its a people problem not an AI problem.

"Hey, I made this doc, can you just make sure it looks OK, maybe add a couple things to it?" - Only to find out its completely useless AI slop and barely any details are correct and everything essential is absent.

Same situation with:

- "Hey, can you take a look at this script to see if it's ok"?

- "Hey, do you know why this code isn't working?"

- "Hey, I created that diagram..."

slop, slop, slop. Low effort people will put in low effort with these tools. I bet there's lots of people I work with that use AI and I don't know because they're high effort people.

And in all cases I've fixed the problems and helped them but I've realized two things and stop doing that recently:

When these folks use AI to generate artifacts, they take even less accountability "I dunno, that's just what the AI did..."

The also have no interest in learning. They get AI to do the thing they don't want to learn, then when that fails just try to get someone else to do it for them.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-31 12:35:32+00:00
Also Google raked in about 100 bil based on a quick search last year.

Surely some of that could be redirected to an engineering team to do what's listed here, and while they're at it, maybe make the Apple TV YouTube app not suck industrial quantities of ass.

I think the only one I've used that's worse than YouTube's is Nebula but it's not a direct comparison, Nebula just lags quite a bit, it does function. The YouTube app in comparison frequently just... breaks in incredibly bizarre ways.
by Xeamek | 2025-07-31 12:35:56+00:00
core (as in kernel) is running linux kernel which is C, yes.

But java is not 'just UI' - majority of user space apps run java (or jvm, to be precise), as well as tons of system services, to the point where you can't actually do a lot of android API calls from native code, because a lot of logic is written in java(or kotlin) code, and not just java being wrapper around native code.
by silentpuck | 2025-07-31 12:36:57+00:00
Absolutely fair.

If I needed to ship a product quickly and prove something to investors or customers, I would choose a higher-level language too.

For me, C programming is not about speed, it's about deep understanding, intention, and creating things that I truly understand and can control.

But I get it - at the end of the day, we all have bills to pay. Thanks for sharing your insight.
by derdi | 2025-07-31 12:37:39+00:00
Rocq used to have a "mathematical proof language". It's hard to find examples, but this shows the flavor (https://stackoverflow.com/a/40739190):

Lemma foo: forall b: bool, b = true -> (if b then 0 else 1) = 0. proof. let b : bool. per cases on b. suppose it is true. thus thesis. suppose it is false. thus thesis. end cases. end proof. Qed.

So the idea was to make proofs read more like "manual" proofs as you would find them in math papers. Apparently nobody used this, so it was removed.

Isabelle's Isar proof language is similar, and AFAIK the standard way of proving in Isabelle (example from https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/cs576/sp2015/doc/isar-...):

lemma "map f xs = map f ys ==> length xs = length ys" proof (induct ys arbitrary: xs) case Nil thus ?case by simp next case (Cons y ys) note Asm = Cons show ?case proof (cases xs) case Nil hence False using Asm(2) by simp thus ?thesis .. next case (Cons x xs’) with Asm(2) have "map f xs’ = map f ys" by simp from Asm(1)[OF this] ‘xs = x#xs’‘ show ?thesis by simp qed qed

You spell out the structure and intermediate results you want, and the "by ..." blocks allow you to specify concrete tactics for parts where the detains don't matter and the tactic does what you want. In this proof, "simp" (a kind of simplify/reflexivity tactic) is enough for all the intermediate steps.

I don't know if there is anything like this for Lean, but maybe this provides some keywords for a web search. Or inspiration for a post in some Lean forum.
by physicsguy | 2025-07-31 12:38:00+00:00
I find it a mix of really frustrating (mostly it not doing what I want it to do, making random changes alongside perfectly good changes of the type I want) and amazing when it works. With that said, I think it works best in an unconstrained environment, and when you start adding constraints (don't do it via this method, don't use this library or import any new dependencies) you find much less good results. This inevitably means it works better at the start of projects rather than coming on to something that's been around for a while and has it's own patterns.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-31 12:38:00+00:00
Naming laws after people who did bad stuff you're trying to legislate away or their victims is at least a hundred years old. Only a rabid partisan would complain about a law about insider trading being named after one of the politicans most notorious for it.

Personally I think they names should be more humorous and creative but I think this one is way, way better than stupid contradictory names like the PATRIOT act.
by salawat | 2025-07-31 12:38:00+00:00
In the Lion King, the Hyenas were an alternate pack with loyalty to Scar, Mufasa's (the previous king) brother. The Pridelands of the lions suffered greatly for everyone after Scar ascended to power through murdering his brother with a stampede induced with the hyenas backing, and running off Mufasa's son through psychological manipulation, clearing the way for his own ascension to the throne.

Ultimately, Scar was undone by the very pack that helped him ascend to power, and everyone lived happily ever after after the return of the rightful King's son, blah blah blah... You get the picture.

Point being, the hyena comment is not terribly flattering in any dimension. It implies both a fundamental weakness of character in terms of being willing to be led by the most degenerate and awful type of person willing to tell one what one wants to hear, and promise to deliver what one wants while simultaneously being ultimately opportunistic in alignment/loyalty, and only rising up/breaking from an inept or cruel charismatic pack leader only on after another external force has done most of the work in making the need to switch apparent.
by waldopat | 2025-07-31 12:38:31+00:00
I've been thinking more about the Base44 breach, which gave unauthorized users open access to any private application. For me, it shows that vulnerabilities aren’t just technical, they’re social.

Trust models fail. Governance gets hand-waved. And suddenly the whole ecosystem inherits a backdoor.

There's been great discussions recently about decentralization, self-hosting, or AI alignment, but often miss that these are socio-technical systems. Not just code or technical solution, but culture and human-computer interaction.

Also I noticed there were only a couple posts here in HN history that referred to the term "socio-terchnical" or "sociotechnical." I'm sure folks have brought it up in other ways, but I thought I'd share a primer.

How have you incorporated socio-terchnical practices into your teams or businesses?
by specialist | 2025-07-31 12:39:41+00:00
Best as I can tell, (wannabe) investor types celebrate his accumulation of wealth. I appreciated his public statements about tax policy, rising inequity, etc. Otherwise, I was ambivalent about Buffet.

Until I listened to Acquired's episodes.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/berkshire-hathaway-part-i

Buffet is a rentier. He does not create wealth; he merely transfers it.

His most successful strategy is to find tranches of underutilized capital, and buy a controlling interest. Which he then ladders up to buy yet more tranches. Most famously Geico.

It's fair to say that I'm far less impressed by this strategy than Acquired's hosts.

Rentier is distinct from the raider (aka private equity) play of buying controlling interest in a corporation, looting it, loading it up with debt, and then unloading the resulting dumpster fire.

So at least Buffet isn't actively destroying jobs and wealth. As far as I know.
by nicoburns | 2025-07-31 12:40:35+00:00
> Does having experience implementing a web browser engine feature change the way you write HTML or CSS in any way?

I think I'm more concious of what's performant in CSS. In particular, both Flexbox and CSS Grid like to remeasure things a lot by default, but this can be disabled with a couple of tricks:

- For Flexbox, always set `flex-basis: 0` and `min-width: 0`/`min-height: 0` if you can without affecting the layout. This allows the algorithm to skip measuring the "intrisic" (content-based) size.

- For CSS Grid, the analogous trick is to use `minmax(0, 1fr)` rather than just `1fr`.

(I also have a proposal for a new unit that would make it easier to get this performance by default, but I haven't managed to get any traction from the standards people or mainstream browsers yet - probably I need to implement it and write it up first).

> Do you still google "css grid cheatsheet" three times a week like the rest of us?

Actually no. The process of reading the spec umpteen times because your implementation still doesn't pass the tests after the first N times really ingrains the precise meanings of the properties into your brain
by senko | 2025-07-31 12:40:48+00:00
> As a user I want the agent to be my full proxy. As a website operator I don’t want a mob of bots draining my resource

The entire distinction here is that as a website operator you wish to serve me ads. Otherwise, an agent under my control, or my personal use of your website, should make no difference to you.

I do hope this eventually leads to per-visit micropayments as an alternative to ads.

Cloudflare, Google, and friends are in unique position to do this.
Show HN: I built a free, private sound app for focus and sleep
by yinuncork | 2025-07-31 12:41:01+00:00
Hi HN, I built Auraninja because I was frustrated with the countless meditation and sleep apps that are either loaded with ads, require a subscription, or collect personal data. My goal was to create a simple, no-fuss tool that respects user privacy and works without a login. It’s a completely free app that offers high-quality soundscapes and binaural beats. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what I can improve.
by notahacker | 2025-07-31 12:41:02+00:00
Yep. Perversely it probably increases the chance of them being out of touch with the average citizen, because the average person doesn't have the connections or drive or paper credentials to run for Congress anyway, and if the people that do are sacrificing the chance to earn much higher salaries it's probably because they're rich enough to be completely indifferent to their paycheck.
by anthk | 2025-07-31 12:41:11+00:00
A lot of ports are pledge/unveiled; and there are malloc settings which don't let rogue/badly written operations misbehave as they would do in the rest of BSD's or any GNU/Linux distro.

https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.3/man5/malloc.conf.5

Hint: https://richardlupton.com/posts/openbsd-malloc-options/

Detox might crash. A lot.