MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cwillu | 2025-07-06 03:37:17+00:00
I have never looked at a fan that isn't running and been confused by the switch being set to “on”. The affordance is that it immediately tells me that the switch is on, so the problem is somewhere else. Compared to the typical phone's “hold for 3 seconds to turn on, hold for 10 seconds to enter some debug mode”, this is a breath of fresh air when anything unusual is going on with the device.
by panzi | 2025-07-06 03:40:35+00:00
There was such a confusing toggle at the ticket machines for the train here in Austria many years ago. It was for immediately validating your ticket, which is a potentially costly mistake.

About the scroll bars: Also stop making them so thin that I have to have FPS skills to hit them! Looking at you, Firefox! (And possibly what standard CSS allows?) Yeah, I can scroll, but horizontally the scrollbar would be more convenient than pressing shift with my other hand.
by cfata | 2025-07-06 03:42:00+00:00
A new study finds that for students on aid the biggest motivator was a simple reminder of the rules to keep their scholarship. This leads to more credits and fewer dropouts compared to the other school of thought that assumes what motivates college students to succeed is the future salary.

I came across this on the research paper feed widget on https://get-alfred.ai and thought it was interesting and worth sharing
by stahtops | 2025-07-06 03:42:57+00:00
Climate change is the source of negativity? In the 90s there was the hole in the ozone layer. Instead of acting like the slack jawed idiots in the current administration and basically saying “LOL FUCK YOU NERDS”, we banned CFCs.

Nothing you listed actually helps most people.

AI? Another way for untalented people to fake it and profit.

Self Driving Car*. Waymo, everything else is trash. Mostly putting a human out of a job.

Access to space? Great for academics and strategic defense. Maybe the common man will get some transport benefit out of it? Not yet.

Autonomous drones? So we can kill each other better. Oh and the drone shows, definitely worth it.

Flying cars? Ha. Hahaha. Ok. A trained pilot got crashed into while landing at an airport, this year. It’s not going to be a thing without being fully autonomous. But killing people probably makes more money.
by chubot | 2025-07-06 03:43:38+00:00
I like this framing! Personally, I'd like to see the Unix shell evolve into a system with a GUI. Where text and graphics are integrated, and the shell isn't "trapped" in the terminal.

There is a historical, path-dependent conflation in this area -- a text-based UI doesn't necessarily imply a terminal-based UI

Some links to work in that direction: https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/12/screencasts.html#headl...

Excel is pretty good at combining the two paradigms -- it has the textbox where you can type (almost like a URL bar), and it has the GUI part. But for all its power, I don't want to use Excel ... I like spreadsheets, and use LibreCalc a bit, though it's limited.

And I'd like if there were multiple GUI/graphical paradigms combined with text, not just the grid of cells (as useful as it is)
by mattigames | 2025-07-06 03:44:09+00:00
Exactly, another instance where perfect can be the enemy of good, many times you are better out deploying something to prod, have some fairly good logging system and whenever you see an spike in slowness you try to replicate the conditions that made it slow, and debug from there, instead of expecting to have the impossible perfect measuring system that can detect even missing atoms of networking cables.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-06 03:46:37+00:00
> It was indeed, and I spent much time wailing and gnashing my teeth as a Perl programmer that nothing similar existed in Perl.

mod_perl2[0] provides the ability to incorporate Perl logic within Apache httpd, if not other web servers. I believe this is functionally equivalent to the cited PHP Apache module documentation:

Running PHP/FI as an Apache module is the most efficient way of using the package. Running it as a module means that the PHP/FI functionality is combined with the Apache server's functionality in a single program.

0 - https://perl.apache.org/docs/2.0/index.html
by Marsymars | 2025-07-06 03:46:43+00:00
> This reminded me of Roger Federer, who has won 82% of all matches but only 54% of all points.

This is in large part just a function of the way the rules of tennis work. e.g. consider gambling games, where there are games where the house only has a 1% edge, but if you play long enough, the casino will get 100% of your money.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-06 03:47:58+00:00
That depends on how optimized the AGI is for economic growth rate. Too poorly optimized and a more highly optimized fast-follower could eclipse it.

At some point, there will be an AGI with a head start that is also sufficiently close to optimal that no one else can realistically overtake its ability to simultaneously grow and suppress competitors. Many organisms in the biological world adopt the same strategy.
by fracus | 2025-07-06 03:48:11+00:00
Seems to me the biggest problem relating the Big Bang to people is the definition of space. How can you define space if there is no known boundary? How can you say there is no central point for certain? The rising loaf of bread analogy has a center of mass. What is the Universe if it has no defined boundary? And what do we call what is outside the Universe? If we take a small box and sample a total vacuum of mass and energy in the vast space between galaxies then wouldn't that be the same nothingness outside the Universe. This reminds me of the Richard Feynman interview where he relays the "why" conundrum when trying to explain scientific principles to laymen. Analogies made in the effort to ELI5 will never be perfect and any further explanation to resolve the inconsistencies will just be too complicated.
by hilbert42 | 2025-07-06 03:48:12+00:00
It's a shame you aren't better informed.

Suzuki is not just a local phenomenon, nor is he a mumbling hysterical ideolog but a well-known and well-respected science writer of longstanding who bases what he says in science.

I'm not local but come from the other side of the planet and even the opposite hemisphere and I first heard Suzuki speak over 40 years ago. Neither am I an hysterical ideolog, as mentioned I agree with xnx's point that the climate change Movement's messaging is bad, misguided and counterproductive.

I'd add the reason why it's so is that for some within the Movement the environment is more than just politics, for them it's essentially morphed into a religion and it's their constant proselytizing that has annoyed the shit out of many, myself included.

Suzuki is not one of those but a science communicator who works with scientific facts.
by sergico | 2025-07-06 03:49:03+00:00
Location: Mexico Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: C#, Python,Typescript, Azure, AWS, K8s, ReactJS, PostgreSQL, CosmosDB, etc. Resume/CV: Upon request Email: sergioco19@outlook.com

Full-stack Software Engineer with a strong backend preference, experienced in designing, implementing, and maintaining robust, high-performance systems. Proficient in a wide array of technologies including Python, C#, TypeScript, ReactJS, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, and observability tools like OpenTelemetry. My focus is on scalable solutions, inter-service communication, API design, and system modernization

About 4 years of experience working in big companies such as Paypal and Microsoft
by yupitsme123 | 2025-07-06 03:50:17+00:00
Coming up with a plan would be squarely in the hands of scientists and engineers and passionate individuals. Perhaps the government and the public would help in enacting that plan, but not in creating it.

I'm led to believe that the scientists and activists are all led by the same empirical research and share a broad consensus. So why then is there no plan or even a concept of a plan after 30 years of talking about all this?
by ehnto | 2025-07-06 03:51:45+00:00
There are multiple economic enclaves, even ignoring the explicit borders of nations. China, east asia, Europe, Russia would all operate in their own economies as well as globally.

I also forsee the splitting off of nation internet networks eventually impacting what software you can and cannot use. It's already true, it'll get worse in order to self-protect their economies and internal advantages.
by am17an | 2025-07-06 03:52:52+00:00
Typically you want to measure both things - time it takes to send an order and time it takes to calculate the decision to send an order. Both are important choke points, one for latency and the other for throughput (in case of busy markets, you can spend a lot of time deciding to send an order, creating backpressure)

The other thing is that L1/L2 switches provide this functionality, of taking switch timestamps and marking them, which is the true test of e2e latency without any clock drift etc.

Also, fast code is actually really really hard, you just to create the right test harness once
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-06 03:53:14+00:00
If I had to pin most of this on anything I’d pick two:

- Dribbble-driven development, where the goal is to make apps look good in screenshots with little bearing to their practical usability

- The massive influx of designers from other disciplines (print, etc) into UI design, who are great at making things look nice but don’t carry many of the skills necessary to design effective UIs

Being a good UI designer is seeking out existing usability research, conducting new research to fill in the gaps, and understanding the limits of the target platform on top of having a good footing in the fundamentals. The role is part artist, part scientist, and part engineer. It’s knowing when to put ego aside and admit that the beautiful design you just came with isn’t usable enough to ship. It’s not just a sense for aesthetics and the ability to wield Photoshop or Figma or whatever well.

This is not what hiring selects for, though, and that’s reflected in the precipitous fall in quality of software design in the past ~15 years.
by kiyotakao1 | 2025-07-06 03:54:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm the creator of PiTutor. I built this to solve a personal frustration: reading technical papers or textbooks is an incredibly passive and lonely experience. I would read pages and retain very little.

PiTutor is my attempt at a solution. It's a web tool that takes a document and adds a conversational AI layer. As you read, you can ask it to explain a section, highlight key points for you, or speak it aloud. One feature I'm particularly interested in feedback on is the 'Whiteboard It' mode, which tries to visualize equations from the text.

The long-term idea is to build a more adaptive system that personalizes explanations based on a user's specific interactions, moving beyond a simple stateless Q&A model.

It's a very early beta, so I fully expect there to be bugs and rough edges. I'm here to listen and would be grateful for any feedback—especially the critical kind—on the concept, the UI/UX, or the implementation itself.

The front end is built with Next.js, and the AI backend uses Python with FastAPI.

You can try it here: https://pitutor.pi4wear.com/
by Mockapapella | 2025-07-06 03:54:58+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Remote | AI Infrastructure & Performance

Location: Wisconsin

---

Last September I built an AI inference tool that hit #3 on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620530). It processed 17.3M messages in 24 hours and only cost $17 to run.

I specialize in:

- LLM inference optimization (FastAPI, proper batching, memory management)

- CI/CD pipelines for ML deployments

- Making AI systems cost-effective at scale

Recent work: FrankenClaude (reasoning injection experiments, https://thelisowe.substack.com/p/frankenclaude-injecting-dee...), self driving Rocket League (https://thelisowe.substack.com/p/building-an-ai-that-plays-r...), diffdev (AI-powered code modification tool, https://pypi.org/project/diffdev/).

Previously at Sprout Social where I built their ML inference platform - reduced deployment time from 6 months to 6 hours and cut AWS costs by $500K/yr.

Looking for interesting problems in AI infrastructure, performance optimization, or building products from scratch.

Tech: PyTorch, FastAPI, K8s, Docker, AWS, ONNX

---

Resume: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qO8XdisNTFq_wmrQGDKnu6eWDi2... GitHub: github.com/Mockapapella Blog: thelisowe.substack.com

Contact: My email is in my bio or on my resume
by kelnos | 2025-07-06 03:55:11+00:00
It depends on what your moral code looks like, though.

While I agree that taxes provide for a lot of useful, wonderful things, taxes also provide for things I find morally repugnant.

So yes, we should all pay our taxes. But at the same time, I'm fine taking advantage of any legal methods available to me to reduce my tax burden.

The only thing that sucks about that is that tax avoidance generally becomes easier as you get wealthier, which is unfair.
by mjcohen | 2025-07-06 03:56:02+00:00
(This has nothing to do with the post, but the title is so similar that I had to include it. Written a few days after seeing "Inception".

Inception Rejection

(Why the dreams-within-dreams in the movie "Inception" could never happen as shown even if the technology worked as described.)

((Though this would have been a lot easier to do as an essay, the poeming was challenging and fun.))

The basis of "Inception", although it may leave you confused, is that in the brain while waking only five percent is used.

To process things in daily life this certainly has been plenty. That mental surplus means our dreams go faster by a factor of twenty.

The magic device that drives the film (the idea's at least sixty years old) allows dreams not only to be observed but changed as they they unfold.

When this device is dreamt of, unlikely as it seems, if used like in the real world, the result is dreams within dreams.

Inception's filled with dreams in dreams, each twenty times faster than before. Unfortunately, here's the problem this movie does ignore:

Level one's dream factor is twenty; four hundred at level two. Level three's factor's eight thousand - two hours there is less than a second for you.

In the first dream at twenty times the brain goes at full speed; there's no excess capacity that the next dream down would need.

A dream in a dream can only be dreamt by the real brain at the top. The faster brain that's in the dream is no more than a prop.

To go faster by four hundred, the dream at level two would need a brain twenty times as fast as the one you carry with you.

So the speed of the dreams that are further down could be no faster than the dream that's first. A quite ingenious plot device here has its bubble burst.
by viksit | 2025-07-06 03:58:20+00:00
great point, appreciate the comment. totally agree with your framing, though i think there’s still a gap in how tool use is handled today.

quick note: it doesn’t have to be an rnn. i’ve got a follow-up example coming that uses a transformer-style ToolController with self attention, more expressive routing, etc.

but here’s the thing — when you rely on few-shot bootstrapping the LLM, you never end up updating the model's priors. even after 100k tool calls, you’re still stuck in the same polluted context window and its all stateless.

this gets worse fast with more than 3–4 tool calls, especially when there’s branching logic (e.g., if api1 > 5, go left, else right).

what this approach offers is: backprop through tool calls. you can tune prompts and update priors across the full workflow, end to end. trying to develop this intuition a bit more, and would love feedback.

thanks for the suggestion on the eval — will post that comparison soon.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-06 03:58:48+00:00
That’s thanks to third party devs, not Apple. If you look primarily at proper native UIKit/SwiftUI apps, there’s a lot more consistency, but there’s a lot of cross platform lowest common denominator garbage out there that pays zero mind to platform conventions.

You see this under macOS, too. A lot of Electron apps for instance replace the window manager’s standard titlebar with some custom thing that doesn’t implement chunks of the standard titlebar’s functionality. It’s frustrating.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-06 03:58:55+00:00
> I believe but cannot cite that fork() got a lot cheaper over the last 30 years as well ...

The fork[0] system call has been a relatively quick operation for the entirety of its existence. Where latency is introduced is in the canonical use of the execve[1] equivalent in newly created child process.

> ... cgi bin works really well if you don’t have to pay for ssl or tcp connections to databases or other services, but you can maybe run something like istio if you need that.

Istio[2] is specific to Kubernetes and thus unrelated to CGI.

0 - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=fork&apropos=0&sek...

1 - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=execve&sektion=2&a...

2 - https://istio.io/
by cameldrv | 2025-07-06 04:00:42+00:00
This is a dude who saw a a dead bear on the highway and decided for some reason to pick it up and put it in the back of his van. Then he realized that he'd forgotten he was supposed to have dinner in Manhattan, so he dumped the bear in Central Park. People that expect anything reasonable from someone like this are absolutely delusional. It's just going to be chaos.
by jiveturkey | 2025-07-06 04:02:08+00:00
not exactly. you have to acquire the stock at a time before the assets ever exceeded $50M. If the balance sheet is $51M and then goes down to $49M and then you exercise, you are not QSBS eligible.

it's that ever part that the GP got confused about. the company assets have to have never exceeded $50M before you acquire the stock, not just at the time you acquire it.
by nine_k | 2025-07-06 04:02:54+00:00
Some people complain about "visual clutter". Too many stimuli in the field of view assault their attention, and ruin their concentration. Such people want everything that's not in the focus of attention be gone, or at least be inconspicuous.

Some people are like airliner pilots. They enjoy every indicator to be readily visible, and every control to be easily within reach. They can effortlessly switch their focus.

Of course, there is a full range between these extremes.

The default IDE configuration has to do a balancing act, trying to appeal to very different tastes. It's inevitably a compromise.

Some tools have explicit switches: "no distractions mode", "expert mode", etc, which offer pre-configured levels of detail.
by wizardforhire | 2025-07-06 04:03:41+00:00
Regardless of the moral and ethical implications brought up in response to the individual in TFA, you’re spot on. One of my favorite reasons for creating is that it’s me against myself vs reality. Theres not an endeavor I find myself in that this is not true… of course I have the privilege of having accomplished all of my life goals from childhood at an early age, which only led to depression. So I set loftier goals only to complete them. It was only the third time around and confronting failure did it finally click that it wasn’t about accomplishing things and it was all about the journey. I was a latch key kid, so basic stuff like this and everything else that people from well adjusted families that are not poor af I’ve had to learn the hardest way possible. Which I guess in a way is a super power because now whatever I want to do I know what the learning curve looks and feels like and I know that failing a lot is the only way to crawl out of the trough of disillusionment.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-07-06 04:03:42+00:00
Microsoft pulls the same BS. Look at Edge. Absolute mess. No menu. No title bar. What application am I even using?

This stupidity seems to have spread across Windows. No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to.

And you can't even bring all of an application's windows to the foreground... Microsoft makes you hover of it in the task bar and choose between indiscernible thumbnails, one at a time. WTF? If you have two Explorer windows open to copy stuff, then switch to other apps to work during the copy... you can't give focus back to Explorer and see the two windows again. You have to hover, click on a thumbnail. Now go back and hover, and click on a thumbnail... hopefully not the same one, because of course you can't tell WTF the difference between two lists of files is in a thumbnail.

And Word... the Word UI is now a clinic on abject usability failure. They have a menu bar... except WAIT! Microsoft and some users claim that those are TABS... except that it's just a row of words, looking exactly like a menu.

So now there's NO menu and no actual tabs... just a row of words. And if you go under the File "menu" (yes, File), there are a bunch of VIEW settings. And in there you can add and remove these so-called "tabs," and when you do remove one, the functionality disappears from the entire application. You're not just customizing the toolbar; you're actually disabling entire swaths of features from the application.

It's an absolute shitshow of grotesque incompetence, in a once-great product. No amount of derision for this steaming pile is too much.
by ameliaquining | 2025-07-06 04:04:53+00:00
Escaping isn't always straightforward. Or rather, it is in simple languages or in languages that are designed to make it straightforward, like HTML, but in SQL it's surprisingly tricky, and subtle bugs in escaping routines are an occasional source of vulnerabilities. E.g., https://stackoverflow.com/a/12118602. This is why modern best security practice is to use parameterized statements instead.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-07-06 04:05:46+00:00
> I know that HN is basically an SV FAANG echo chamber, so when I read a question like this I assume it’s asked from that standpoint

I mean, this is a message board unwritten by YC. It be strange expect anything else.

> Glad I am a decade or less away from retirement, as the past decade of over privileged devs has made this profession a joke.

I write this through the prism of someone 20 years younger than you (35) will be curious to see the state of the industry when I’m where you are. Looking for ways to take my tech skills and leverage them in less tech savvy industries (I never want to work for a company that makes SaaS tools and sells them to SaaS companies)
by viraptor | 2025-07-06 04:05:57+00:00
It is bad though. The tone is really similar on all the tracks, the solos are closer to guitar noodling, the structure is extremely predictable, etc. Ok, maybe not strictly bad - but definitely not good. Like, I'm not good and I feel like I could write a lot of similar stuff given enough effort and trying to sample bits of Led Zeppelin, Omega and others.
Show HN: Listing Vibes – Rate and rank homes while scrolling Zillow
by eddelage | 2025-07-06 04:06:28+00:00
I recently went through the house hunting process and was frustrated by how hard it was to stay organized while scrolling Zillow. It was too easy to forget what I liked, what I didn’t, and how different listings stacked up.

So a friend and I built Listing Vibes — a lightweight iOS app that runs on top of Zillow and lets you: • Rate listings with a simple 5-icon system • Drop private notes while you scroll • Rank your favorites in one place to stay organized

It’s still early (MVP stage), but it’s live on the App Store now. We’d love feedback from anyone — especially if you’re actively in the market or have searched recently. Any thoughts on features, UX, or use cases we’re missing?

Thanks for checking it out!