MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-10 15:29:52+00:00
The trouble is the effect it has on the community. Ezra Klein has caught up to where I was two and a half years ago and has done some great interviews with the theme that 'Twitter activism really cooked the left'

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... (https://archive.ph/e1KnM)

Musk did the left a real favor by evicting them but he may never have the self awareness to realize that he scored an own goal. It's not a left-wing vs a right-wing thing, it's a high-D vs a low-D thing

https://darkfactor.org/

or rather a system or a culture that rewards superficial narcissistic interactions (e.g narcissism is a developmental arrest according to Kohut and Kernberg) and avoids any real listening, discussion or deliberation that might build empathy and produce lasting change. (Look how Black Lives Matter turned a major concern of black people in America across space and time into a... flash in the pan)

Given that the likes of George Will and William Kristol were driven away by Trump long ago and even Rudy Giuliani and Elon Musk thrown under the bus it's not clear the right is even going to realize it got cooked by Twitter. Where are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nisbet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._I._Hayakawa ?
by jmcqk6 | 2025-07-10 15:30:38+00:00
> Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.

Having a hard and fast rule that can always be applied about this is impossible. We're just too interconnected and interdependent, and there are too many unknowns.

That doesn't mean we can just ignore it and not think about it. We owe it to each other to still do our best, even if it's not going to be perfect.
by carlosjobim | 2025-07-10 15:30:40+00:00
My philosophy in life is that if nobody else does it better, then I'm not going to complain about the people who are doing something.

Would I prefer they do only the search engine? Sure, but until anybody else makes something equivalent, I'm not going to complain.

Same for Apple. Are they wasting time and money on things which doesn't make sense? Sure, but in the past 20 years no other of their billion dollar competitors have even tried to make a decent laptop.
Show HN: I built an AI tool to retrieve technical achievements from your GitHub
by davidngugi | 2025-07-10 15:31:06+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been a developer for years and always struggled with one thing: underselling my technical achievements on resumes and in interviews. I often find myself being shallow on a project like "Built a web app in React for an ecommerce platform" vs "Architected React/Node.js microservices with PostgreSQL, Redis caching, and Docker deployment"

I decided to automate this process and help keep track of things I've worked on. So I built Git Achievements, an AI-powered GitHub repository analyzer. It extracts technical achievements, complexity, and tech stack. It also generates professional summaries and interview talking points from your project and you can export to PDF, Markdown, or JSON

It uses your own API keys (OpenAI/OpenRouter), zero data storage on my end.

A Real example from my own repo: Instead of "Built a web app in React," it found: - Implemented real-time data processing with WebSocket connections - Integrated Google Analytics with custom event tracking - Built responsive UI with Framer Motion animations - Created automated deployment pipeline with rate limiting Tech stack: - Next.js 14, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS - Clerk for auth, Zustand for state management - Framer Motion for animations - Export utilities for PDF/Markdown/JSON

Plus it gave me some good talking points

I love Privacy-first products, so your API keys stays encrypted in your browser It never stores repository data and I never get to see anything you worked on. All analysis happens on your browser!

Built this in 24 hours because I needed it out the door ASAP. The AI analysis is surprisingly good at picking up architecture decisions, performance optimizations, and integration complexity.

It will only get better. I'm still cooking and have already built the next version with improved analysis, better UI and actual project references (commits, PRs etc)!!

Would love feedback from the HN community! What features would you find most useful?

Try it free at https://git-achievements.com/
by Aurornis | 2025-07-10 15:31:12+00:00
No, the legacy social media platforms are more popular with older generations.

Facebook is the canonical example of a social media platform that arrived after Gen X was young, but it now heavily used by Gen X while nearly completely shunned by Gen Z, with millenials somewhere in the middle.

Reddit and even Twitter are legacy social media platforms for Gen Z, especially younger Gen Z. The very oldest Gen Z people would have been too young to even use the internet when Reddit was launched.
by amelius | 2025-07-10 15:31:28+00:00
I think I bought mine for $150 including the battery and charger. Money well spent, if you ask me (certainly cheaper than hiring a plumber). Before that I had a manual version similar to the one you linked to, but it just didn't cut it in my last case of a clogged kitchen drain.

The nice thing about the automatic version is that you can go in/out and clockwise/counterclockwise independently and with a simple switch, which makes it easy to route through complicated pipe geometries without getting stuck, and you don't even have to apply much force because the machine does that for you.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-07-10 15:32:20+00:00
> A significant part of the reason why I avoid GPL software like the plague is all of the horrible schemes owners of GPL software have come up with in order to monetize their supposedly "free" software.

These schemes wouldn't be necessary if industry would start paying for the stuff they use. And I wouldn't call it a "scheme" when the deal is clear - you either pay by giving money to the author or by giving source code to your users. Choice is yours, and since you are developing proprietary program you shouldn't really have any qualms with the first approach, unless you are a leech.
by thrance | 2025-07-10 15:32:24+00:00
You're a victim of capitalist realism (we all are tbh).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism

Neoliberalism is unable to address the growing inequalities of our societies (in fact, it is often to blame for them). This, in turn, is driving us toward right-wing authoritarianism as populists are taking advantage of the growing frustration of the middle class.

Fascism is the logical end point of neoliberalism. It is the time when things are so bad you need to find scapegoats to prevent the rise of class consciousness and continue financial liberalization.

My view is that neoliberalism is not the "least bad" ideology, it is a slow and sinister destruction of our society for the benefit of the capital owners, hiding behind a mask of humanism that slips off the minute it becomes inconvenient to keep wear it.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-10 15:33:01+00:00
This is an active area that is exceedingly difficult if not outright impossible to do.

The nature of any project is inherently fractal, and trying to assign a impact to each part is all over the map, and anyone with any agenda or bias can move the 1000 little sliders enough that it adds up to what they ultimately want to see.

You get stuff like:

"Lets assume all the trucks are old and need to drive up hill to deliver the panels"

"Lets assume that the solar panels are installed in a place where it never is cloudy"

"Lets assume the coal plant only burns coal from this one deposit on earth that has the lowest NOx emissions"

"Lets assume the solar panel factory never bother putting panels on their roof, and instead run on coal"
by bigyabai | 2025-07-10 15:33:19+00:00
Then leave. Take your big, beautiful American business and walk it the fuck out of the European economic zone. It's that easy!

That said... it will be awfully hard for Americans to wriggle their way out of the $125 billion annual trade deficit they run with the EU. If the US stops trading to defend "principled" economic development, then the citizens will be paying down America's debt with their income taxes.

No biggie. It's only like ~$800/taxpayer/year when you run the numbers.
by EGreg | 2025-07-10 15:33:33+00:00
What messages can’t be sent as sealed sender?

I arrange to tell Alice in an encrypted chat that I will be doing a drop on X url after Y time and to watch it.

Alice comes picks up the drop. Done.

PS: This is another great use for cryptocurrency. When you don’t want to use account-based charging, then you allow anyone to prepay for the resources with crypto.
by alwa | 2025-07-10 15:33:39+00:00
Bizarre that this category of touring show continues after all these years. It seems like such self-consciously guilty behavior on the part of the organizers: you don’t accidentally end up with human corpses (that you’re selling as entertainment on the basis of being human corpses!).

They came by them somehow. If the nature of someplace’s justice system is that a death sentence comes with a “turned-to-plastic-and-paraded-around-for-selfies” enhancement, so as to trouble the offender’s eternal soul as well as their life, then just.. say that. “They’re ’bad guys’ and we as a company believe that’s what bad guys deserve.” Or even, “we weren’t involved in the circumstances of their death, but we figure if we’d had a chance to ask them they probably would be fine with it.”

As morally repugnant as I find the entire endeavor, I bet it wouldn’t even hurt ticket sales: people in the West have, in the not-so-distant past, treated hangings and beheadings as social occasions.

But like, there’s a right way to do informed consent—why not just do it and say “yeah we did it the obvious way”? Come to think of it… the ambiguity sure is a reliable path to free attention. It wouldn’t be the first marketing strategy to rely on provocation…
by davedx | 2025-07-10 15:33:44+00:00
I did some reading about this yesterday:

* this is a record for the time a turbine has been under the sea without any maintenance, which proves its commercial viability

* because it generates powers during high/low tide, and because the lunar cycle is different to the solar cycle, it could help fill in the parts where solar falls off in a predictable way

BUT:

* Tidal energy is valuable but geographically constrained

* Only a few countries have suitable locations for it (UK, Canada, France, South Korea)

* The Global Technical Potential (in TWh/year) is 1/10th of offshore wind
by punmechanic | 2025-07-10 15:33:48+00:00
I was so excited when generics were going to release, and, tbh, I've barely used them. It's made some code easier to express correctly in the type system in rare cases.

I don't think I'd agree it's made the language "Java-like". That sounds like more of an indictment of the author of the code you're reviewing ;)
by arkwin | 2025-07-10 15:34:00+00:00
I was a teenager in high school around 2005 and living in the Midwest. There were lots of underage drinking and parties going on during that time.

That being said, most of it was "cool parents" that allowed such behavior because we didn't own anything as teens.

We would have rules like, if you're drinking there, you have to stay the night or call your parents to pick you up.

I think it was just a different time; it seemed more forgiving. Now, a cop will pull you over and give you a DUI and mess up your life for a while. But I heard stories back then ~ '70s, where cops would make sure a drunk person got home safely at night instead of throwing the book at them.

I am sure it is harder for kids today who mostly live online in their algorithmic bubbles. And harder for parents to condone such activity, because who wants to be the parent where cops come knocking on your door and charge you with supplying alcohol to minors?
by bonoboTP | 2025-07-10 15:34:24+00:00
There's an argument to be made that at least the bachelor's level should be taught by specialist lecturers who focus on improving didactics and teaching. On the other hand, interacting with someone who is working at the forefront of the field can be helpful when you have a question where a cookie-cutter answer doesn't suffice and expert thought is needed. But it's indeed peculiar that profs are mostly hired based on their research not on their teaching ability (though it is also considered).

But either way, since you mention the US, it's a very common experience for American exchange students in European universities that in America they learned to expect much more handholding and pampering than it's provided in Europe. In the US, there is more individual attention from faculty to students, there are all kinds of counseling and guidance services that basically nudge them through the whole thing, reminding them of deadlines, explaining processes etc. In the US, college students ("college kids") are not seen as self-reliant adults. So depending on what kind of "support" you mean, it might be already too much for their own good instead of little.
by Hilift | 2025-07-10 15:34:31+00:00
"Experts differ on when Polynesian inhabitants first reached the island. While many in the research community cited evidence that they arrived around the year 800, a 2007 study provided compelling evidence suggesting their arrival was closer to 1200."

"By the time of European arrival in 1722, the island's population was estimated to be 2,000 to 3,000."

That implies a huge boom and near-total depopulation crash in only 500 years.

The total area is 163.6 km2 (63.2 sq mi), but usable area is only about 1/2 of that. It is 2,300 miles west of South America and 1,100 miles from the nearest island.

"... new findings by archaeologist Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii may indicate a different version of events. In 2000, Hunt, archaeologist Carl Lipo of California State University, Long Beach, and their students began excavations at Anakena, a white sandy beach on the island's northern shore. The researchers believed Anakena would have been an attractive area for the Rapanui to land, and therefore may be one of the earliest settlement sites. In the top several layers of their excavation pit, the researchers found clear evidence of human presence: charcoal, tools—even bones, some of which had come from rats. Underneath they found soil that seemed absent of human contact. This point of first human interaction, they figured, would tell them when the first Rapanui had arrived on the island.

"Hunt sent the samples from the dig to a lab for radiocarbon dating, expecting to receive a date around 800 A.D., in keeping with what other archaeologists had found. Instead, the samples dated to 1200 A.D. This would mean the Rapanui arrived four centuries later than expected. The deforestation would have happened much faster than originally assumed, and the human impact on the environment was fast and immediate."

"Hunt suspected that humans alone could not destroy the forests this quickly. In the sand's layers, he found a potential culprit—a plethora of rat bones. Scientists have long known that when humans colonized the island, so too did the Polynesian rat, having hitched a ride either as stowaways or sources of food. However they got to Easter Island, the rodents found an unlimited food supply in the lush palm trees, believes Hunt, who bases this assertion on an abundance of rat-gnawed palm seeds."

"Under these conditions, he says, "Rats would reach a population of a few million within a couple of years." From there, time would take its toll. "Rats would have an initial impact, eating all of the seeds. With no new regeneration, as the trees die, deforestation can proceed slowly," he says, adding that people cutting down trees and burning them would have only added to the process. Eventually, the degeneration of trees, according to his theory, led to the downfall of the rats and eventually of the humans. The demise of the island, says Hunt, "was a synergy of impacts. But I think it is more rat than we think."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/the-mystery-of-easter-...
Show HN: Optiverse – Evolving Code with LLMs
by larose | 2025-07-10 15:34:32+00:00
Hi HN,

After seeing DeepMind's AlphaEvolve [1], I wanted to try building something similar. This isn't the first open-source attempt [2] [3] [4], and it won't be the last, but I focused on making mine more modular and customizable to make experimenting with different evolution-based approaches or prompting strategies easier (e.g. balancing exploration and exploitation).

The vision is to make it easy to swap components and experiment, though there's still work to do.

I'd love any feedback.

GitHub: https://github.com/larose/optiverse

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43985489

[2] https://github.com/codelion/openevolve

[3] https://www.saipraneeth.in/ml/building-evolve

[4] https://github.com/paperswithbacktest/pwb-alphaevolve
by brudgers | 2025-07-10 15:34:32+00:00
[phenomenological questions with today’s first mug of coffee]

then sitting and waiting for it to finish. If it fails…

I could not help but think that sounds like the old days of batch processing and even somewhat recent compilers.

¿Maybe waiting is an ordinary part of programming?

¿And maybe LLM’s fill a vacuum created by desktop systems with abundant memory and fast bulk storage?

¿Could it be that waiting is a fundamental dimension in our relationship to machines and when we change the mechanism to remove one cause of wait, another wait often whack-a-moles itself up? [1]

——

Anyway, my empathy on your job frustration. My advice is programming, no matter how much you love it, is still a day job when programming is your day job. What matters most are the things your day job allows you to do, e.g. Friday night pizza for your children, vintage rollerblades, or a trip to Guam.

And if your mental health is suffering, there’s nothing wrong about talking to a clinical therapist. In fact there can be a lot right about it.

Or not. Good luck.

[1]: We might do something else while we wait for the laundry to finish the dryer cycle or microwave popcorn to pop. Often this can be just filling time and the completion interrupts us with buzzers and beeps.

[2]: The nature of machines is that we tend to eat more popcorn and have cleaner clothes ^and^ spend more time cooking popcorn and washing clothes because it is less bother. Particularly when it comes to our day jobs…the machines of the call center increase the number of calls the call center handles per employee.
by rkomorn | 2025-07-10 15:34:42+00:00
My anecdotal take: I paid for GamePass for years and it saved me money every year. Since I stopped paying for it, I've spent an equivalent amount of money on Steam but spend fewer hours playing on a smaller count of games (and I've requested refunds on multiple games).

I'm probably not an average gamer in the sense that I don't particularly care about playing games when they come out, and I've played many "big title" games months or years after their release because they became available on GamePass, but in general, I feel like my GamePass experience was better value than Steam and I'm considering resubscribing.
by theozero | 2025-07-10 15:35:45+00:00
Right now, you can use any provider that has a CLI to fetch a single secret. In the near future, we'll be adding native plugins to make these integrations even easier.

Vault can be a huge lift and doesn't make sense for many projects - we wanted to build a tool that makes sense from day one, even when there is no backing provider, but can grow with your team and change providers seamlessly.
by exoverito | 2025-07-10 15:36:37+00:00
The Roman Empire engaged in genocide and slavery against many of their adversaries, yet Rome is still viewed as the peak of ancient civilization. The USSR imprisoned millions and caused the deaths of tens of millions more, yet leftists try focusing on the free healthcare and education. The United States engaged in ethnic cleansing of the native Americans, yet given enough time, such crimes have faded in saliency. Manifest Destiny was actually the inspiration for Hitler's ideas of lebensraum, invasion of Russia, and genocide of the Slavs. If Hitler had won he probably would have been considered more akin to Caesar or Napoleon. History is written by the victors and all that.
by NotAnOtter | 2025-07-10 15:37:04+00:00
As cool as this sounds, I'm not sure I'm as enthused with stuff our oceans full of more tech, which inevitably will wear down, break, and pollute.

It's better than oil (duh), and something that provides power when solar/wind can't is great (duh). I just wish we would give up on approaches that are basically "If we had a few million of these giga-ton structures all over the ocean, they would provide power equivalent to a few dozen nuclear plants"
by DonnyV | 2025-07-10 15:37:20+00:00
I can't believe that Typeform is the standard in the industry. Is it me or does the whole product have a constant delay to the UI? Also the form building part seems really bad. Nothing is intuitive. Not a fan of one question per page. Also why is it so hard to add multiple questions per page. I had to Google how to do that just to find the option.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-10 15:37:34+00:00
The inevitable side effect of the financialization of the human experience. People are in constant competition with each other and the amount of time they can spend not competing is proportionate to the amount of slack in the economic system. Keeping slack costs money, removing it makes money, it's very hard to almost impossible to stop something that makes money. It would take an Amish level of zealotry.

I think the focus on short term gains by sacrificing long term viability is in part due to the inability to accurately measure future prospects, whenever there is doubt shot-termism prevails. The bird in the hand wins over the two in the bush. I think maximizing long term gains would be directly tied to human flourishing so if we could accurately measure long term externalities we could align capitalist and human interests. Convincing those who gain from short-termism to agree to use more accurate metrics is impossible when not using it makes them more money.

I don't know how to fix this. A society will not allow itself to undergo 'creative destruction' in an era where we bailout corporations. And socialism certainly is not going to fix it, socialists have their own kind of rather destructive short-termism.
by cryptonector | 2025-07-10 15:37:46+00:00
> the only clients that are evolvable enough to interface with a REST API can be categorized to these three types

You mention swagger. Swagger is an anti-REST tech. Defining a media type is the REST equivalent of writing a swagger API description.

If you can define an API in swagger, you can define one via a media type. It's just that the latter is generally not done because to do it requires a JSON schema (or similar) and people mostly don't use that or think of that as how one defines an API.

Boss: we need an API for XYZ

Employee: sure thing boss, I'll write it in swagger and implement by Friday!