MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-01 14:28:39+00:00
IRS Direct File on GitHub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182356 - June 2025

https://chrisgiven.com/2025/06/saying-goodbye/

https://chrisgiven.com/2025/05/direct-file-on-github/

https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file

(In the latest version of the bill being negotiated in Congress, the language to sunset Direct File has been removed, but this of course could change due to the fluidity of the situation; regardless, we are all better off having learned from this and having access to the source code)
by phkahler | 2025-07-01 14:29:04+00:00
Years ago I was making a diagram editor with the intent of doing code generation from diagrams (like simulink, not stateflow). I started with splines for the connections and decided straight lines and junctions would be better for complex diagrams. I realized that a better way to internally define the connecting wires is via a set of lines and their connectivity (vs their endpoint coordinates). Imagine each line segment is defined by a direction (vertical or horizontal) and a position (perpendicular distance from the origin) Like ax+by=d where a and b are either 0 or 1. You also need to define which other lines it connects to. Given the list of connections you can then calculate the intersections at rendering time. By sorting the list of connections you can render the line without features at the start and end, and then draw junctions for any intermediate connections. The beauty of this would be to allow dragging blocks around and having the lines follow with the junctions passing through each other as needed. There is some housekeeping with this data structure (merging colinear segments that connect, breaking segments when needed) but the UI for dragging should be much better than anything out there.
by ordu | 2025-07-01 14:29:40+00:00
> Touch gives pretty cool skills, but language, video and audio are all that are needed for all online interactions. We use touch for typing and pointing, but that is only because we don't have a more efficient and effective interface.

It may be, that we are not using touch for anything important as adults. But babies rely on touch to explore their surroundings. They stick anything into their mouth, why? Because a tongue is the most touch-sensitive organ. They are exploring things by touching them with their tongues.

I can only guess what people get from that, but my guess is they get understanding of geometry and of surface properties of objects, which you'll have problems to get by processing photos or texts.

> your comment was specifically about intelligence.

Talking about intelligence, I do not believe that LLMs can match humans without deep understanding or 3d-space and material science^W intuition. It needs touch and temperature sensitivity at least. Probably you can replace it with billions of words of texts describing these things, but I doubt it.
by roryirvine | 2025-07-01 14:29:42+00:00
Good point about avoiding the distracting break.

In fact, there must be an incentive here for Google to auto-translate a video only when it can sell an ad in the translated language for more than one in the original.

I suppose we should be glad that they've not (yet!) gone that far, or it would become even more of an unpredictable mess from the end user's point of view.
by jfengel | 2025-07-01 14:30:09+00:00
Since then, Java has incorporated a lot of the syntactic sugar from Kotlin. Not all of it; they're still very judicious about trying to keep the language tight. But things like the lambda features have even made it down into the JVM (which is actually incredibly stable).

Kotlin's one big advantage is having avoided the "billion dollar mistake" of null pointers. Or at least, mitigated it. But in my opinion it's not sufficient to install a whole new language into your stack.
by mathfailure | 2025-07-01 14:30:15+00:00
Have you actually read the article?

The author's assertion came out from his ass: he concluded that "more than a billion users" in MicroSoft's presentation means "exactly about 1 billion users".

No, 1.5 billions is "more than a billion users" as well.

The author is a speculating bitch, not a journalist.
by ticulatedspline | 2025-07-01 14:30:56+00:00
"The reason is simple: increasingly we aren't consuming originals, we're consuming derivatives."

It's a bit interesting that AI is what finally boiled-over this paradigm. For years before ChatGPT hit seems most articles were copy-pasta from some other source. Many a time I would see some article posted about maybe a new law or study and going out to try and find an article that actually linked to the source law or study. when you look through a dozen articles reporting on the same thing it becomes clear that many are just marginally updated copies of others in a long chain of garbage reporting.

We've been largely consuming derivatives for ages now but the field of copy-cats was wide so lots of sites were getting their crumbs.
by spider-mario | 2025-07-01 14:31:14+00:00
> How so? As far as I can tell, the ICCv2 spec is very agnostic as to the gamut and dynamic range of the output medium. It doesn't say anything to the extent of "thou shalt not produce any colors outside the sRGB gamut, nor make the white point too bright".

That’s precisely what makes it unsuitable for HDR. With PQ, (1, 1, 1) means 10 000 cd/m² – if you simply create an ICC profile with the PQ transfer function, an image that looks right on a hypothetical 10 000 cd/m² monitor will look way too dim when naïvely scaled down (as ICC-type colour management would have you do) to the 300 cd/m² of a typical monitor. HLG, meanwhile, has a transfer function that depends on the peak luminance, which is not possible to do with ICC (the profile would have to assume a specific peak luminance), and the reason that it does that is to preserve the subjective perception of the image.

So, sure, you can prepare an HDR image so that it looks right on a monitor with a 1000 cd/m² peak luminance, describe the colorspace in relative terms using an ICC profile, and you will have “done HDR using ICC”, but that’s arguably a very low bar for “supporting HDR”.
by b0a04gl | 2025-07-01 14:31:29+00:00
this is another layer of abstraction on top of an already broken system. you're running html through an llm to get markdown that gets rendered in a terminal browser. that's like... three format conversions just to read text. the original web had simple html that was readable in any terminal browser already. now they arent designed as documents anymore but rather designed as applications that happen to deliver some content as a side effect
by boroboro4 | 2025-07-01 14:31:44+00:00
Please start a party, I’ll vote for you all day every day. IMO all of the current US issues stem from wealth inequality getting over politics, fixing this (with taxes and antitrust) and all of a sudden rest will get better to.

This being said party built on “tax the rich” wouldn’t be perceived as centrist, taxes-are-for-socialists is too ingrained in people’s minds.
by DamnInteresting | 2025-07-01 14:32:07+00:00
Those elements certainly amplify the awfulness, but I am old enough that I remember reading magazines, and I despised the ads there was well. I'm trying to read this OMNI article about colonizing Mars, and this stupid full-page ad for calculator wristwatches is getting in my way. *shakes fist*

I'm sure glad that the inline ads model never caught on in novels.
by focusedone | 2025-07-01 14:32:59+00:00
That's the impression I get from Cloudflare - it seems like a group of highly skilled people attempting to solve real problems for the benefit of the web as a whole. As both a paid business user and a free user for home projects, I deeply appreciate what they've accomplished and how generously they allow unpaid users to benefit from their work.

I worry about what happens someday when leadership changes and the priority becomes value extraction rather than creation, if that makes sense. We've seen it so many times with so many other tech companies, it's difficult to believe it won't happen to Cloudflare at some point.
by card_zero | 2025-07-01 14:33:05+00:00
Either the alleged super-intelligence affects us in some way, directly or indirectly by altering things we can detect about the world/universe, in which case we can ultimately detect it, or else it doesn't, in which case it might as well belong to a separate universe, not only in terms of our perception but objectively too.

The error here is thinking that dogs understand anything.
by jfengel | 2025-07-01 14:33:28+00:00
I'd be reluctant to place a bet just because Musk is aware of the market and has the ability to manipulate it.

I'd want some kind of qualifier that the service has to last at least a month without being canceled or degraded below the point of the launch condition. Musk could rush something out and then be forced to pull it, and I wouldn't consider that making the deadline.
by al_borland | 2025-07-01 14:33:58+00:00
Proton also offers subscriptions through the Play Store. If the issue is the 30% cut hurting non-ad-funded businesses, shouldn’t this be against all these companies charging 30%, not just Apple? Or not have subscriptions in the Play Store, if Google doesn’t have the same requirements against linking out to other payment options?

The outrage against Apple in this regard has never felt consistently applied based.
by andrepd | 2025-07-01 14:34:00+00:00
That's an excellent point. I use Android LineageOS with no google apps. The amount of bullshit that I, a literal computer science PhD, have to put up with to somewhat avoid the more pernicious parts of the monopoly, is insane. Critical and even mandatory parts of my life (banking, government services) require me to engage with google in one way or another.

Non-technical people have absolutely no hope.
by wavemode | 2025-07-01 14:34:05+00:00
> However, what if we raise the abstraction boundary and make the ORM part of the language? This means that we could formulate rewrite rules for the ORM, allowing it to eg merge the N queries into a single query.

It's correct that abstraction boundaries are optimization boundaries, but I don't think you need to make queries part of the language itself to raise the boundary.

To give a concrete example, take the Django ORM in Python. If you write a function which returns a single database record, then calling that function many times in a loop is naturally going to result in an n+1 query. However, if you instead return a QuerySet, then what you're returning is a lazily-evaluated sequence of records. Then, the caller can make the choice on whether to immediately evaluate the query (when they only need one record) or collect together a bunch of QuerySets and union them into a single query.

In other words we give the caller more control and thus more opportunity to optimize for their use case.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-07-01 14:34:15+00:00
Was wondering about this as well. Might fly under the radar for a while but if your project grows you might draw attention from Stripe and having to rebrand later on will become difficult.

Also, what if you want to support this type of migration for other payment processors in the future? This name ties to just Stripe.

Also, tiny grammatical nitpick: the subheading should use the word seamlessly, not seamless there I think.
by boston_clone | 2025-07-01 14:34:16+00:00
Idk what you’re even defending with that article, but that’s your cross to bear.

Mimicking my speech pattern then trying to say I’m being the ass is not going to hold up, however.

Elsewhere I posted that I used to work in this space and have first-hand knowledge that the majority of people do not use third party modems. That is a fact.

Just because people can go out and purchase a new modem and then additional wifi gear, doesn’t mean that they do or even should to shield themselves from the potential privacy violations happening here.
by objcts | 2025-07-01 14:34:29+00:00
Anonymously send someone a rainbow, one postcard at a time:

https://slowmorainbow.com

I got 4 rainbows running now with 34 postcards sent so far. Use the code "HN" at checkout to save 20% (until Friday, July 4th).

Would love some feedback! Stay gold, keep making & sharing!
by michael_forrest | 2025-07-01 14:34:34+00:00
This is a fast tour through the implementation of a fadeIn(duration:) modifier in the SwiftUI-style video rendering framework I’ve been working on.

1. How modifiers are implemented 2. How image processing works 3. How the realtime audio works

Still feeling my way through, and I didn’t even touch on how much time it took to get everting into Swift packages before I could even start with the audio. But yeah this was a couple of days’ work last week and feels like huge progress.
Show HN: Lifp – A Lisp Built on Bun
by shikaan | 2025-07-01 14:34:40+00:00
A silly summer break project where I played around with Bun, which I hadn't had the chance to yet.

It's not super lisp-y, there's no car, no cdr, nor macros.

It's a Lisp-Inspired Functional Programming language that ideally doesn't require a paradigm shift when you come from C-like languages.
by nextaccountic | 2025-07-01 14:35:02+00:00
In your cleanup step, after cleaning obvious junk, I think you should do whatever Firefox's reader mode does to further clean up, and if that fails bail out to the current output. That should reduce the number of tokens you send to the LLM even more

You should also have some way for the LLM to indicate there is no useful output because perhaps the page is supposed to be a SPA. This would force you to execute Javascript to render that particular page though
by jdvh | 2025-07-01 14:35:04+00:00
Rule of thumb: every 10% increase in complexity cuts your potential user base in half.

This is why people make backups by copy-pasting files. This is why Excel is so dominant. This is why systems like hypercard and git are not mainstream and never will be.

There is a large universe of tools people would love if only they would bother to learn how they worked. If only. Most people will just stick to whatever tools they know.

For most people the ability to go back and forward in time (linear history) is something they grasp immediately. Being able to go back in time and make a copy also requires no explanation. But having a version tree, forking and merging, having to deal multiple timelines and the graphs that represent them -- that's where you lose people.
by Ray20 | 2025-07-01 14:35:55+00:00
>pick two

And if you pick wrong, you get nothing.

>Rich people buy laws.

A totalitarian government does not need to buy laws. Imposing punitive taxes on wealth - it's like express line to what you want to avoid with it.

Breaking the backs of rich people and megacorporations or not, is not a choice about your chances of being wealthy, it is a choice about will you die from starvation or not.

People choose not to break the backs of megacorporations because they don't want to starve to death in totalitarian regimes, not because they hope to get a corporation of their own some day.
by LunaSea | 2025-07-01 14:36:39+00:00
> Most governments and large companies should want to be crawled, and they get a lot in return.

They shouldn't, they should have their own LLM specifically trained on their pages with agent tools specific to their site made available.

It's the only way to be sure that the answers given are not garbage.

Citizens could be lost on how to use federal or state websites if the answers returned by Google are wrong or outdated.
by mmarian | 2025-07-01 14:36:46+00:00
I'm not sure it'll work though. Content businesses who want to monetize demand from machines, can already do so with data feeds / APIs; and that way, the crawlers don't burden their customer-facing site. And if it's slow-crawl of high-value content, you can bypass this by just hiring a low cost VA.

Is there anything I'm missing?
by jfengel | 2025-07-01 14:36:47+00:00
I rather enjoy previews, though not a full half-hour of them.

At least it's not ads. There are ads before start time. I'll even tolerate a "go get a soda" ad. But I can consider a preview to be entertainment, and an ad is clearly not.

I'm surprised that they want to devote so much time to it. I guess it makes sense on week nights, when you really only get in two or three screenings a night. But on weekends, you could squeeze in a whole extra screening if you reduced the previews.
by kerblang | 2025-07-01 14:36:50+00:00
> an assault on science and scientists anywhere is an assault on science and scientists everywhere

No, actually, it isn't, and that kind of hysterical catastrophizing hurts our case. I'll readily agree that science funding is good, necessary, and even a matter of national security, but you need rhetorical limits. Really, it's that kind of howling and shrieking that led to the whole mess and turns public opinion the other way. Talk like a scientist.

And yes I'm sure I'll get downvoted to heck on behalf of hysterical catastrophizing anyhow.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-01 14:38:11+00:00
I've thought about carbon pricing. $100 a tonne sounds like a nice round number and it is in the ballpark where it is claimed that carbon capture and storage is affordable for coal burning power plants, oil refineries and such.

That comes to about $1 a gallon on gas, which I have two thoughts about: (1) I don't think it would change people's behavior that much -- gas has been $1 higher at times in the past and it didn't discourage me from driving and I'm not rich, I wouldn't consider spending more than $25k on a car whereas I know people who think nothing of buying an $80k truck. (2) I think Americans are highly sensitized to price increases right now and I think it would politically impossible to add $1/gallon to the price of gas, people would complain they are all out of spoons or it is the straw that breaks the camel's back or something. I think even 10 years ago it might have been easier, but right now, forget about it.
by jrm4 | 2025-07-01 14:38:24+00:00
Man. Reminds me when many years back I had about 10 friends collaborating on a movie and I needed something between asynchronous and synchronous, so I stripped Wordpress down to just titles and little avatars on a front page feed thing.

About 2 years later Twitter came out and I was like "oh, I guess I was on to something." :)
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-01 14:38:32+00:00
It's not a bad play, like PE rollups but arguably with more potential for success from a "founder/startup friendly" perspective. PE, historically, is very good at stripping/optimizing/etc (think Bending Spoons), but I think there is magic in startups PE simply does not have that allows for a different, yet more successful, outcome (growing vs cutting your way to financial success).

We should see more of this as large, profitable startups have grown into long term private companies with no need to go public.
by GiorgioG | 2025-07-01 14:38:54+00:00
When we model systems and data models, we model them for the problem we're solving today, and with enough experience you can anticipate some future problems...but not all. Business is dynamic and software data models are relatively rigid. That's why business users love Excel - it's the javascript of the database world...you can slap something together without too much fuss and 60% of the time it'll work every time.
by vel0city | 2025-07-01 14:39:04+00:00
I do agree some of these claims are pretty extreme. I wonder if it does work what the reliability of things like breathing and heartbeats. FWIW, some of these systems do incorporate 60GHz signals in their analysis, but as you mention dealing with 60GHz is incredibly challenging even in something like a residential building.

I'd really like to actually see it in person to really grasp the limitations.
by ddingus | 2025-07-01 14:39:18+00:00
They do love it. I have been, nicely and as helpfully as I can, educating people on the nature of LLM tools.

I personally have little hostility toward the AI search results. Most of the time, the feature nails my quick search queries. Those are usually on something I need a detail filled in due to forgetting said detail, or a slightly different use case where I am already familiar enough to catch gaffes.

Anything else and I typically ignore it and do my usual search elsewhere, or fast scroll down to the worthy site links.
by diggan | 2025-07-01 14:39:29+00:00
> I didn’t realize how much of a headache switching countries can be

Indeed, and in some areas, it's easier to make the move with the government, than getting all the for-profit services to accept your country change.

For example, Sony/Playstation straight up refuses to change the country on your account, so even though I lived in Spain for more than 10 years, Playstation Store is still in Swedish and using SEK, and when I reached out to support they told me to create a new account if I wanted to change the country.

Google is another company where moving countries is really disorganized. I still get emails in Swedish, and a "payment/billing account" (different from "payment method") is still somehow locked to Sweden and cannot be changed or removed.

To actually get the residency with the government, I basically had to queue at the police station for some hour, then go to the bank and then I'm 100% done with my move. I'm surprised how much easier it was to deal with the government about this move, than companies that I actually pay money to...
by toss1 | 2025-07-01 14:39:53+00:00
Yes supercomputer time is scarce and expensive.

Physical laboratory time, materials, and workers are also scarce and expensive. And physical lab tests can consume a lot of calendar time.

So, even with the constraints and costs, using the supercomputer to run 1,000 or 10,000 tests and then physical lab tests on only the few most promising results can still less costly in both funds and especially calendar time than the costs and time to run a similar number of physical lab tests to produce the results.

It is literally a balancing of the scarcity and costs of each mode of getting to the results, and those experts in the field, with their own labs, are making the claim that this is the way their research should proceed. Do you have actual information and specific knowledge that in fact proves them wrong (b/c that comment seems a lot more hand-wavey vs theirs)?
by graerg | 2025-07-01 14:40:07+00:00
I’ve implemented Temporal activities that pull content for each supported platform/content type and then feed that into an LLM with the bounty requirements. It’s not very elegant but for an MVP it seems fine.

Now that tool calls and structured outputs are more baked into LLM APIs, I have some refactors planned, to make the Workflow more “agentic”, but I don’t expect the user experience to change all that much; the biggest improvement will be being able to dive deeper into the content, assess images, etc.
by hubraumhugo | 2025-07-01 14:40:45+00:00
We all agree that AI crawlers are a big issue as they don't respect any established best practices, but we rarely talk about the path forward. Scraping has been around for as long as the internet, and it was mostly fine. There are many very legitimate use cases for browser automation and data extraction (I work in this space).

So how will Cloudflare detect bots and get them to pay? And how many humans and legitimate bots will get blocked as a side effect? We're somehow still stuck with CAPTCHAs, a 25 years old concept that wastes millions of human hours and billions in infra costs [0].

How can we enable beneficial automation while protecting against abusive AI crawlers?

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10911
by danaris | 2025-07-01 14:41:06+00:00
Hm. I hadn't understood the Tragedy of the Commons to be an inevitability, merely a phenomenon—something that does happen sometimes, not something that must happen all the time.

And unfortunately, in our current culture, at least in the US, it's much more likely than not when the circumstances allow it. We will need generations' worth of work firmly demonstrating that things can be better for everyone when we all agree to share in things equally, rather than allowing individuals to take what's meant for everyone.