MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by orionsbelt | 2025-08-04 05:37:44+00:00
The administration seems to be deliberately making the deportations as cruel and scary as possible (CECOT, Alligator Alcatraz, etc) as a means of deterring future illegal immigration and encouraging self deportation. I haven’t looked into the numbers to see how well that’s working or not, but focusing on deportations alone is missing two thirds of the picture.

I’m not sure if this is accurate, but for example: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/07/31/migrant-crossings-darien...
by hvb2 | 2025-08-04 05:37:46+00:00
Not every job can be automated. Picking crops for example or cleaning hotel rooms.

The US will find out the hard way how much of their undesirable work is done by people that "steal their jobs". Jobs that no American wants to do.

The UK already has seen this with Brexit https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44230865
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-08-04 05:38:07+00:00
Sure. At that time, I was in my early 20s and I was single. Currently married and one small kiddo. And I'd argue that I'd easily take 1/3 pay cut to go back from my current hybrid job to full remote right now. Days are so much easier for both of us when I'm working from home. Being able to quickly go afk and change a diaper, or take care of the kiddo for 10 mins when mommy takes a dump (real life heh) is incredibly valuable.

Or at least that's my point of view.
by SlowTao | 2025-08-04 05:38:47+00:00
Ignoring the hyperbole of the title and that I cannot access most of the article, all I have to say is this. Mark, if that is the case, do it. I don't mean that in a mean spirit or as an accusation. Just that there is a lot of talk in the industry and not always to most action. I know it can be fun to talk about the future but at a certain point it has to actually be done.

And to compare anything to the iPhone, at least when Job's got on stage to show off the latest iWhatever, at least they knew they were 90% of the way there for release. G5 Laptops excluded and even then they acknowledged the mistake.
by nickm12 | 2025-08-04 05:39:11+00:00
> The goal of a design document is to convince the reader the design is optimal given the situation.

This is a nitpick, but I don't think the goal of a design is to be optimal so much as sufficient.

Software systems design, like any design, is about coping with constraints and tradeoffs. The design doc should clearly lay out these out and present an approach that meets the requirements and constraints with acceptable tradeoffs. Where multiple reasonable alternatives exist, they should be make explicit along with a justification for why one option was chosen over the others.

Will it be perfect? Probably not, unless it is an easy problem or you over-designed. And even if it's a good design, it can hit unforeseen issues during implementation. The goal of design is not to eliminate all possibility of such issues but to mitigate risks and communicate to the stakeholders what we're building and why we're building it that way.
by Ballas | 2025-08-04 05:39:58+00:00
>The rest of us are dealing with old code that is a hodgepodge of older standards and toolchains, that has to run in multiple environments, mostly old ones. It's like yeah, this C++26 feature will come in handy for me someday, but if that day comes then it will be in 2036, and I might not be writing C++ by then.

Things seem to be catching up. I had the same view up until recently, but now I'm able to use most of the C++23 features in an embedded platform (granted, some are still missing (limited to GCC 11.2).
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-04 05:40:36+00:00
Thought this was for plants, womp womp.

We should have already made super-seeds that you can plant in concrete and grow all the tomatoes you'll need in a month with a single LED. Why be dependent on Big Ag or imports from Chile for tasteless nutritionless environment-poisoned overpriced veg if you could grow it in a closet? Saves water, saves power, saves the environment, tastes better, better for you, cheaper. We just need a lot of bio nerds (and a few billion $) to develop it.
by motorest | 2025-08-04 05:42:19+00:00
> Except the devil is in the details as usual, the way linalg is specified doesn't guarantee numeric stability across library implementations or compilers.

I think this criticism is silly. You're complaining about the C++ standard not enforcing something that is virtually impossible and no implementation under the sun even suggests it would conceivably support. And we should just assume C++ would be able to force it across implementations, target platforms, and even architectures? Ridiculous.

> Just like the std::random mess (...)

The comments I've seen regarding std::random mainly refer to gotchas, such as std::rand returning values in [0, RAND_MAX] and the latter being a platform-specific constant.

There is a reason after all why you only throw vague complains of "mess" instead of pointing out specific concerns or grievances. You need to complain, regardless of merit.

Overall, this blend of criticism is no different than the cliche criticism targeting the STL. Sure, some niche applications can and do have better ways to scratch their niche itches. In the meantime the STL perfectly serves the need of 99.9% of all common usages. Is this not the point? Doesn't linalg and rand achieve this?

Of course vapid nitpickers can still pull out the last resort card of complaining that the implementation is too complicated, a grievance also directed at the STL. But that's just the extent where this silliness goes.
by farkin88 | 2025-08-04 05:42:25+00:00
Anthropic still relies on quotas (5-hour rolling + weekly coming at the end of the month) so the next step is dynamic per-token pricing. But, even with transparent off-peak rates only batch jobs will shift and history suggests variable pricing usually smooths rather than sharpens peaks. The long-term fix stays the same: route 100 MB PDFs, repo refactors and other whale jobs through retrieval or analysis pipelines and keep the flagship chat model for real-time conversation.
by throwaway4496 | 2025-08-04 05:43:25+00:00
We process invoices from around the world, so more PDF generators than I care to count. It is hard a problem for sure, but the problem is the rendering, you can't escape that by rastering it, that is rendering.

So it is absurd to pretend you can solve the rendering problem by rendering it into an image instead of a structured format. By rendering it into a raster, now you have 3 problems, parsing the PDF, rendering quality raster, then OCR'ing the raster. It is mind numbingly absurd.
by jayd16 | 2025-08-04 05:43:34+00:00
Something my doctor friends remind me of from time to time is how disconnected their actual workflows are from whatever system the money folks decided to buy.

People making the purchases are not the ones using the system and they hate it because it doesn't serve them... A tale as old as time.

For example, one of my doctor friends mentioned he has to scroll past an "order birthday cake button" at the top menu level so he can get to the order tests section and drill down to actually order tests.
by weinzierl | 2025-08-04 05:44:31+00:00
This and for the use case from the article we will hopefully gain pattern types in Rust soon.

They do not solve every problem that constructive data modeling does but in my opinion a large portion of what actually occurs in everyday programs. Since they are zero-cost I'd say their cost-benefit ratio is pretty good.

Ada and Pascal also had handled the "encode the range in the type" nicely for decades.
by vander_elst | 2025-08-04 05:45:18+00:00
It might sound absurd, but on paper this should be the best way to approach the problem.

My understanding is that PDFs are intended to produce an output that is consumed by humans and not by computers, the format seems to be focused on how to display some data so that a human can (hopefully) easily read them. Here it seems that we are using a technique that mimics the human approach, which would seem to make sense.

It is sad though that in 30+ years we didn't manage to add a consistent way to include a way to make a PDF readable by a machine. I wonder what incentives were missing that didn't make this possible. Does anyone maybe have some insight here?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-04 05:45:18+00:00
> you have to start somewhere

There has been no start. You don’t build a factory because the President announced a tariff that he is also negotiating a trade deal around.

> what is this reason?

I’m remodelling my deck. I had orders into a steel mill in Utah. Tariffs mean their steel inputs are pricer than competitors in Vietnam. So I switched the order. And I paid with a cheque—if I paid cash I could skip taxes altogether. That wasn’t a thing six months ago.

Meanwhile, software and services aren’t tariffed. Just goods. Guess whose cost of capital has sunk.
by maegul | 2025-08-04 05:46:26+00:00
Salient quote under the “AI” question in the FAQ:

> we aim for a computing system that is fully visible and understandable top-to-bottom — as simple, transparent, trustable, and non-magical as possible. When it works, you learn how it works. When it doesn’t work, you can see why. Because everyone is familiar with the internals, they can be changed and adapted for immediate needs, on the fly, in group discussion.

Funny for me, as this is basically my principal problem with AI as a tool.

It’s likely very aesthetic or experiential, but for me, it’s strong: a fundamental value of wanting to work to make the system and the work transparent, shared/sharable and collaborative.

Always liked B Victor a great deal, so it wasn’t surprising, but it was satisfying to see alignment on this.
by Dagger2 | 2025-08-04 05:49:22+00:00
Overkill is good! It's impossible to get the size exactly correct; your only options are "too small" or "too big". Given how difficult it is to deploy a new L3 protocol, why wouldn't we pick the size that ensures we don't have to turn around and do it again immediately afterwards?

> backwards-compatible would have gotten us there that much sooner

v6 is already backwards compatible. Between dual stack, Teredo, 6to4, 6rd, 6over4, ISATAP, 6in4/4in6, NAT64/DNS64, 464xlat, DS-lite, MAP-T/E, 4rd, LW4over6 and probably other things I'm forgetting, you could make a reasonable argument that it's too backwards compatible, even.

If you meant "v4 being forwards-compatible would have gotten us there sooner", then yes, I agree. It's unfortunate it's not. That's entirely v4's fault though, not v6's.
by strogonoff | 2025-08-04 05:50:01+00:00
Unexpectedly related to the problem of perfect classification is McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. It shows that human mind is a duet where each part exhibits a different mode of attending to reality: one seeks patterns and classifies, while the other experiences reality as indivisible whole. The former is impossible to do “correctly”[0]; the latter is impossible to communicate.

(As a bit of meta, one would notice how in making this argument it itself has to use the classifying approach, but that does not defeat the point and is rather more of a pre-requisite for communicating it.)

Notably, the classifying mode was shown in other animals (as this is common to probably every creature with two eyes and a brain) to engage when seeking food or interacting with friendly creatures. This highlights its ultimate purposes—consumption and communication, not truth.

In a healthy human both parts act in tandem by selectively inhibiting each other; I believe in later sections he goes a bit into the dangers of over-prioritizing exclusively the classifying part all the time.

Due to the unattainability of comprehensive and lossless classification, presenting information in ways that allows for coexistence of different competing taxonomies (e.g., tagging) is perhaps a worthy compromise: it still serves the communication requirement, but without locking into a local optimum.

[0] I don’t recall off the top of my head exactly how Iain gets there (there is plenty of material), but similar arguments were made elsewhere—e.g., Clay Shirky’s points about the inherent lossiness of any ontology and the impossible requirement to be capable of mind reading and fortune telling, or I personally would extrapolate a point from the incompleteness theorem: we cannot pick apart and formally classify a system which we ourselves are part of in a way that is complete and provably correct.
by levocardia | 2025-08-04 05:51:41+00:00
Interesting...my experience has been that LLMs are generally better at more common languages (not surprising: more data exists in those languages!). So, my admittedly amateur vibe coding experiences have been best in Python and pretty vanilla web development setups. When I push LLMs to, say, fit advanced statistical models in R, they fall apart pretty badly. Yet they can crush a PyTorch or SciKitLearn task no problem.
by worthless-trash | 2025-08-04 05:51:52+00:00
Not OP but that's the thing right, you've talked a lot about feels which means there will never be an answer that overcomes the emotion built in your head.

I wonder what it would take to win you over, and i don't mean the rational you, which i'm sure you can justify, i mean the irrational 'i'm in love with the product' you.
by nickm12 | 2025-08-04 05:52:24+00:00
The structure I prefer for a technical design document is like a three-layer onion.The first layer is the problem statement, goals, non-goals, and requirements, both functional and non-functional. The next layer is the functional specification, which describes precisely how the system will work from an external perspective. The third and final layer is the technical specification, which describes the internals.

Each section should follow from the previous. The design doc should justify to the reader (and author) that the problem is understood, the requirements are necessary and sufficient, the functional spec meets the requirements, and the technical spec implements the functionality and non-functional requirements.

As a corollary, if one section has a fatal flaw, there is no need to read on. If the problem is misunderstood, then the functional spec is likely wrong. If the functional spec doesn't meet the requirements, then the implementation is moot.

The issue I see very frequently is technical design documents that provide only the final section—a simple description of the system that will be built. As a design reviewer, there is limited feedback I can provide on such a design. Sure, it's a system, but will it solve the problem? Does the team even agree on the problem to be solved?
by safety1st | 2025-08-04 05:52:24+00:00
You can move to somewhere that has a lower cost of living. It's not unusual at all for people to move when they retire. There's a whole big amazing world out there and one of the best decisions I ever made was squeezing in enough travel when I was young, that it totally altered my mindset.

(That, and reading The 4 Hour Workweek. Once Tim Ferriss became famous, legions of people picked it apart and called him a bullshit artist. I took inspiration from that book, and went and lived it. 20 years after he published it I bumped into him completely by chance in a cafe in Phuket Thailand, which was an incredible moment, here were two guys, for decades just doing the thing that everyone had said was impossible or impractical, and we were two of the first to have the exact same idea and end up in the exact same place once Covid restrictions started to relax around the globe.)

I'll grant that kids significantly alter the numbers.
by gond | 2025-08-04 05:53:18+00:00
Okay, here we go: No, I am not saying anything you said.

This was not about a gentleman's agreement at all - that was a rhetorical figure to demonstrate that it is not the game which is at fault, it’s both. The behaviour of the game and the behaviour of the actors in that game, and almost in any other game is not an input -> output scenario, but instead, the output of the loop will be the input of the exact same loop. That is the definition of a feedback loop. It’s all recursion.

By shifting the responsibility to the ominous “game”, which is just another term for a system, you exclude the elements of a system from being part of the system itself.

There is a whole branch of science occupied with this. System Dynamics, Cybernetics, Chaos Theory, Systems Theory and whatnot. The argument that actors in a system are decoupled from the system or the environment as in a closed system approach is factually wrong. Apart from laboratories, there is practically no closed system on this planet.

The phrase “hate the game not the player” is cybernetic nonsense with the sole purpose of giving up responsibility. It does not matter that it gets repeated more often than not. It won’t be correct, no matter how many times the figure is used.
by ta20240528 | 2025-08-04 05:54:01+00:00
Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.

Not a family. Especially not families with - for other reasons- only one breadwinner.

The problems of poverty (to the extent the US even experiences it) are broader than demanding someone make uneconomic decisions with their investors capital.
by andrewrn | 2025-08-04 05:54:27+00:00
To clarify, the frequent encounters of a housemate situation hasn't been required to sustain friendships for me, but instead to get "escape velocity," if you will. The great friends I made of former housemates still keep in frequent contact with via phone calls, etc.

You said "doing things together without forcing it" is important. That's precisely what I mean with housemates. In the storm of people's busy lives and moods, living with someone just provides so much more effortless surface area for bonding than pre-arranged, formal events to do sports or a hobby.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-04 05:54:50+00:00
They can give just you a job at any time.

But if it's the entire team, and that team is the backbone of a company, and acquiring that company would be blocked by the government, all three of those things, then your income is already being suppressed by not allowing acquisitions. Sorry about that, but the extra boost you'd get during monopoly forming would only be temporary anyway. In the long term it's better for both employees and customers to avoid too much consolidation. Extending that rule to stop team buyouts will have almost no effect on the status quo. It's allowing the team buyouts that could potentially change the status quo, and it would be a change for the worse.
by digitaltrees | 2025-08-04 05:56:34+00:00
This is very wrong because monopolies destroy the very competitive and innovative landscape that is necessary to unseat them, and in the process impose massive social harm in the form of higher prices, worse products or services, increased concentration of wealth, reduced employee compensation, political corruption.

America experienced uncheck monopolies during the Gilded Age. Most thought that rapid industrialization, economic growth, and technological advances would have resulted in enough competition to create an economic utopia. Instead, even while the United States experienced a surge in wealth and prosperity, the underlying reality of political corruption, social inequality, and labor unrest created a nasty, brutish existence that was only solved when the Trust Busting Roosevelt's transformed America by breaking up the monopolies.

If you like free market capitalism you can't be in favor of monopolies, and if you dont want monopolies you need STRONG enforcement of antitrust M&A regulation. We are well past a correction since Regan stopped antitrust enforcement. I would argue that all of our political chaos since the 1980's can be traced primarily back to that single decision.
by quinnjh | 2025-08-04 05:57:34+00:00
I don’t think people are suggesting : Build a renderer > build an ocr pipeline > run it on pdfs

I think people are suggesting : Use a readymade renderer > use readymade OCR pipelines/apis > run it on pdfs

A colleague uses a document scanner to create a pdf of a document and sends it to you

You must return the data represented in it retaining as much structure as possible

How would you proceed? Return just the metadata of when the scan was made and how?

Genuinely wondering
by Den_VR | 2025-08-04 05:58:12+00:00
Picking crops or cleaning hotels rooms cannot be automated… for less than it costs to hire seasonal/migrant workers, today.

Both farms and hotels have an increasing number of jobs being automated where it makes economic sense, or for pure novelty’s sake.

https://www.farmprogress.com/technology/tethered-drones-can-...
by ashton314 | 2025-08-04 05:58:28+00:00
I take it you didn’t read the whole thing, as the next example is NonEmptyList, which is a good compelling example. It’s also not hard to think of other examples from my own work: I can imagine a URL type that only exposes constructors to create well-formed URLs. Etc etc.

Really good examples will be rather domain-specific, so it’s perfectly understandable why Alexis would trust her readers to be able to imagine uses that suit their needs.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-04 05:58:37+00:00
The government tries hard to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand, but so far has failed 100% of the time. The government can implement wage and price controls, but those still do not set the actual value.

For example, in the USSR, the price of bread was fixed by the state. But the real price of bread was how long you were willing to wait in line for it.

BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay your workers whatever you want to. Workers can choose to work for you, or not.
Show HN: An AI that hallucinates Italian Brainrot memes
by kuzej | 2025-08-04 05:59:38+00:00
Hey HN,

This does pretty much what the title says: it's a simple AI I trained to hallucinate "Italian Brainrot" memes.

If you're not familiar, it's that weirdly specific genre of surreal memes, often with "Tralalero Tralala" characters. This tool lets you generate your own.

It's just a for-fun project. Curious to see what you can create.

Link: https://italian-brainrot.space/
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-04 06:00:18+00:00
If a competitor gets too big and is using its money to remove competition before it can be challenged, that's a problem.

In normal competitive situations this rule wouldn't apply. If one company wants the assets and employees of another company they can go ahead and buy it. And any company can offer better jobs as plain old jobs. The negotiation here was not just some high end job openings.
by margalabargala | 2025-08-04 06:01:19+00:00
Still, none of that outweighs the inflationary pressure.

Increasing automation and therefore productivity means an increase in profits to the owners, not a drop in prices, except in the most competitive industries.

Unemployment is already extremely low. There aren't tons of Americans waiting to step into these jobs. If unemployment were 10% that would be a different story, but we're close to full employment. So instead of the jobs going to Americans, the produce rots in the fields, and prices go up.