MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Feeling Emptiness Inside
by throwaway_owe98 | 2025-08-19 09:26:32+00:00
I'm in my mid thirties and I approach two decades in tech as a software engineer.

This could be depression, or simply mid life crisis, but for the past year(s) I feel empty inside. I feel no sense of purpose, no direction, no goals and no desires. Looking back at my life and career, I did everything "by the book": finished school, attended college, secured a tech job, got promoted, made more money, never took debts, and have a good savings. I moved early from my parents house, was independent, had social circle of very good friends, supportive family, found a girlfriend who became my wife. I quit jobs that I did not like, was always eager to learn and grow together with the companies I worked at.

Eventually I felt stuck, and so I followed the next steps in "the book": I took a sabbatical, went to travel, relocated to a different country, moved to a different style of tech company. Throughout my life and career I had followed all the supplementary steps of "the book": I worked with different therapists, was hitting the gym, started martial arts, was (mostly) healthy, never obese, never abused alcohol and never touched drugs. I have read all the classic books of finding meaning (stoicism, Man's search for meaning, philosophy, psychology etc). I go outside, spend time in nature, with people I love. I have by all definitions a "successful life". I have made it. I live in a very good country, I make decent money, I live below my means, have savings, and am surrounded by people I love and who love me. I'm privileged to travel and see the world, try different hobbies.

And yet, I feel empty inside. I feel dead inside. Every day is the same. The week is just an intermediary step between weekends, some of which are somewhat exciting, while most of them just pass in a blink of an eye, and the cycle repeats. Once every few months I take a bigger vacation, which ends way faster than it should, and eventually throws me into a bigger rut (post-vacation depression?).

I often think about starting from zero, but this is not realistic because of fear and because this means also breaking relationships. I think about quitting tech, but I don't know anything else, and I'm kind of dependent on my current work for my work permit. I know I'm not the only one, and I've read many people here who had similar feelings. I often ask myself "is this it? Is this what life has to offer?", and maybe it is, and I should just be grateful for what I have, but I'm not sure how to cope with the emptiness.

Any advice?
by snthpy | 2025-08-19 09:27:20+00:00
Wonderful! Thank you. Looking forward to trying this out.

Now can you do Excel next? I'm aware of [calamine](https://github.com/tafia/calamine) but that doesn't render as beautifully as doxx. Presumably a lot of the MS XML schema ontology is shared? Ideally you could just use some of their readers and add your UI flare.

Also really nice list of tools in your previous submissions. Awesome work!
by Frummy | 2025-08-19 09:27:20+00:00
Hmm maybe, anyways what I read was shantidevas way of the bodhisattva and some other texts like dhammapada and some tibetan texts and art It speaks of merit that is good and that spinning the mani korlo generates merit, and many tibetan monks like shantidevas text But yeah you got me I've copypasted from many separate things it's the result of a big cultural and literary melting pot
by shawnzetzuens | 2025-08-19 09:27:22+00:00
I've been thinking about what kind of 3D world can be created through vibe coding.

Where is the limit of 3D modeling in the web technology stack?

It's very difficult, I'm not familiar with the technology stack for rendering and modeling within the web.

But to create an incredible, realistic 3D world, I tried using vibe coding.

I roughly know there's a technology called three.js, which can build 3D.

So I entered the first prompt:

"Generate a 3D forest where users can add their own painted birds, transform them into 3D birds, and allow users all over the world to participate in this forest."

After extensive modifications, he achieved it! Very good.

demo is at this URL: https://06de2moijpv5.space.minimax.io/

And its data is connected to Supabase.

That is, everyone can see the bird you draw.

It can be any shape! Color! Position! As long as you want.

Then I had a wild idea:

Can "Minecraft" be created with three.js?

After a lot of vibe coding, my conclusion is: this is very difficult.

It's almost impossible to achieve, and I consumed a lot of tokens without completing it.
by Etheryte | 2025-08-19 09:27:25+00:00
LLMs aren't only about knowing answers to questions, it's also understanding the question to begin with that's tricky. What questions you ask combined with what followup questions you asked is a very valuable dataset, because if there are common threads across your users, you can train your LLM to understand the first ambiguous question better. This applies to pretty much every other interaction you have with LLMs too, the quicker you can deduce what the majority of the users actually want, the less tokens you need to generate to make them happy, the wider you can make your profit margins.
by hildolfr | 2025-08-19 09:27:50+00:00
Would you respect being eaten as part of the circle of life? What about your family?

Where is the line drawn?

Explain to me the difference between disrespect and being cattle-bolted through the skull.

When the fish is yanked out of the factory farm and suffocated in air or chilled and frozen alive do you think they experience this respect we're talking about? If so, where?

Does the operator say thanks to each fish before their brutal, agonizing, often prolonged for market death?

'respect' is about the most stupid thing I can think to bring up when referencing loss of life in animals.

It's a meta human concept that means nothing other than the mans approval of method -- it means nothing with regard to the animal or the suffering.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-19 09:28:08+00:00
Einstein, Ramanujan, and Newton were boosted by existing networks of review and promotion. A lot of core engineering math was invented by aristocrats and government functionaries around the French Academy. Germany developed its own equivalent scene somewhat later.

All of these followed the model of a relatively small number of smart people bouncing ideas off each other, reviewing them, building on them, and promoting the good ones.

The difference between that and modern R&D is that modern R&D tries to be industrial rather than academic. Academia is trapped in a bullshit job make-work cycle, where quantity gets more rewards than quality and creativity. There isn't room for mavericks like Einstein. Even if they're out there having great ideas, there's no way for them to be discovered and promoted.

Industry focuses more on fill-in developments than game changer mathematical insights, which are the real drivers of scientific progress.

So there's a lot of R&D-like activity in CS, and occasionally something interesting falls out, like LLMs. But fundamental physics has stagnated.

One of the biggest reasons is that the smartest people don't work in research. They work in finance, developing gambling algorithms.
by 0xCE0 | 2025-08-19 09:28:37+00:00
First thing I'd say is to figure out if the kid has real interest and willingness to learn programming/computers at all. If you want to find motivation, figure out what topic/hobby the kid is interested in, and code together something useful/fun/inspiring in that domain. After all, all real world programs are used for some specific domain.

Second thing is the young age of 11 (of course depends on invividual). "Real" programming requires understanding very abstract concepts (like memory, objects, functions, variables, loops, program state/execution model etc.). I remember when I was young (maybe ~13 yo), and I struggled alone with C++ and Delphi. I could copy and paste some code, but I couldn't really understand what make them work (or didn't). Of course it was different time then (no youtube tutorials, no AI, no good quality open source stuff etc.).

Third thing, if the kid is interested to learn, is good environment/language to start with. I'd start with plain vanilla HTML5 (HTML + CSS + JS). It's relatively easy to get feedback and interactivity with it, and it runs on every computer and mobile device. And the whole program - content (HTML), layout (CSS) and interactivity (JS) - can be in a single file and "recompiled" just by clicking refresh button. I wouldn't use any JS frameworks, because then it becomes learning something else than real basics. With couple of lines JS, you can draw graphics, play sounds based on keyboard/mouse/touch interactivity etc. But of course, even if its just handful of HTML5 APIs, to teach someone why/how they work is a big task.

Fourth thing, now with AI, for many, learning seems to have become a process of collecting random factoids here and there, and then trying to make some sense of the whole mess. I'd say a great book that presents an overview of a topic from start to end is overly underrated at this point of time. When book(s) stops giving lessons, use LLM(s)/professional(s). When LLM(s)/professional(s) stops giving you lessons, you are at the frontier of knowledge, and you have to figure it out yourself by teaching yourself :)
by piva00 | 2025-08-19 09:28:44+00:00
Having to run in k8s doesn't change that much, the description of a whole Cassandra + Kafka stack to deliver the ingestion of articles already says there's a lot more architecture astronaut-ing going on than simply deployment.

I cannot imagine why you'd need a reactive pipeline built on top of Kafka and Cassandra to deliver some fanservice articles through a CMS, perhaps some requirement about international teams needing to deliver tailored content to each market but even with that it seems quite overblown.

In the end it will be a technical solution to an organisational issue, some parts of their infrastructure might be quite rigid and there are teams working around that instead of with that...
by yladiz | 2025-08-19 09:30:12+00:00
Paid access is okay, so is showing advertising, and even requiring that you pay to access a service (they don’t have to give it away for free). What isn’t okay is requiring either paying or selling your data (selling away privacy) for advertising.

So yes businesses are doing something okay by offering a paid version, but it doesn’t matter if they’re saying “pay or let us sell your data” as the latter is illegal.
by Zealotux | 2025-08-19 09:30:17+00:00
Now you will need an ID check for using a VPN service, and it won't stop the children, so next you'll need an ID check to access your device, face ID will become mandatory except every access will be logged and sent to a Government Compliant Service® for possible review.

If only parents could start parenting, but we know by now this has nothing to do with the children.
by atombender | 2025-08-19 09:30:20+00:00
Great show. If you liked it, Ruth Goodman and Peter Ginn has made several shows together along with another archeologist, Alex Langlands, which I think are even better.

Of these, I think my favourite is Victorian Farm (2009), where the gang has to bring a real Victorian-era farm back into working order and then live like the Victorian farmers did. Unlike the castle show, it benefits from the gang having to research and learn the old ways on their own, whereas the castle is a big project where they're being taught or directed by the crew who's already working there.

The other shows — Tudor Monastery Farm, Edwardian Farm, Wartime Farm, Tales from the Green Valley, etc. — are all thoroughly excellent.

A minor point, but Goodman is not an archeologist or historian, but she's very good!
by yamifyafrica | 2025-08-19 09:33:40+00:00
Hi HN! We’re Yamify, building plug-and-play AI infrastructure for African businesses. Small businesses can automate WhatsApp customer support, banks can detect fraud, and law firms can extract insights from documents. Platform runs on local GPU infrastructure, deploys in minutes, and scales seamlessly. We’d love your feedback: usability, new AI tools you’d like to see, and how to make it easier for small teams to onboard.

Techcabal : https://techcabal.com/2025/08/13/yamify-raise-100k-pre-seed/

Techpoint: https://techpoint.africa/brandpress/ex-silicon-valley-cloud-...
by netsharc | 2025-08-19 09:35:03+00:00
> You can be authentic and still respect boundaries and be considerate towards other people.

From the point of view of the douche: why should they do that, for what gain? I suppose if they care about social cohesion they'd care, but on the flip side, people nowadays can seem to violate social norms and still get through life just fine, in the old days they might suffer if society shunned them.

Makes me think of the cafe sign that listed prices: "Coffee $5; A coffee please: $3; Good day, I would like a coffee please: $1", being pleasant helps when doing business as well, people will even avoid doing business with you if you're unpleasant (except maybe if your soup is really really good). Maybe the "loneliness epidemic" means that people are developing a tolerance to the unavailability of pleasant social interactions.

Now it makes me think maybe the Black Mirror social scoring ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcspUD0kF7g ) is a useful way to punish douches after all.
by zenmac | 2025-08-19 09:35:37+00:00
Interesting article. For myopida, there is also this Ortho-K and a specialized version of it from a Canadian optometrist, where one get a K test and then they make a set of customized lens based on the test, and there are these daily exercise that one needs to do while wearing them the lens. Many testimonies claim that they corrected their vision after 6 months.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-19 09:35:40+00:00
The code appears to use in some places GK2M, which is the Newtonian constant of gravity, and in other places SQRDK, which is inappropriately described as a "gravitational constant", but it actually is the mass of the Sun expressed in some special units.

Newton's constant is known only with a very high uncertainty, i.e. a very low precision.

For the great bodies of the Solar System, e.g. the Sun and the planets, one knows with a high accuracy the product between their mass and Newton's constant, because that can be measured by the force with which they attract a body of known mass, e.g. an artificial satellite or an interplanetary probe.

Computing their mass in kilograms would be pointless in most cases, because that would introduce great uncertainties in the computations. So for the Sun and the planets one expresses their masses by the products between their mass and Newton's constant, whenever that is possible, i.e. whenever one needs to compute their attraction force exerted upon a small object.

Wikipedia names the product mass-Newtonian constant as "the standard gravitational parameter of a body", but I believe that this is a misleading name, because this product is just the mass of the body expressed in different (non-SI) units. Expressing a mass by its product with the Newtonian constant is not different from expressing the mass in pounds instead of kilograms. Using the Newtonian constant instead of some random unit conversion factor just has the advantage of removing the uncertainties from some expressions computing forces of gravity.
by seszett | 2025-08-19 09:35:47+00:00
I don't know how it is in the UK or other countries, but mainstream information sources in France have been reporting on this for decades, I think mostly everyone is aware. Granted, the opinion in France has always been quite sympathetic to the Palestinian cause (see Chirac with "do you want me to go back to my plane?" in the 90s) although the media and politics have apparently shifted towards more support of Israel in the last few years.
by xelxebar | 2025-08-19 09:36:36+00:00
It's not so much a matter of exhaustively listing pros and cons, but more a matter of appropriateness to the desired goal or goals IME. I seriously doubt that a comprehensive pro/con list can even be coherent. Is dynamic typing a pro or a con? Depends on to whom and even in what decade you ask. List comprehensions? Interpreted language? First class OOP? Any cost-benefit anaylsis will be highly context-dependent.

> I'm not here to defend tiresome strawmen.

I won't point out that you already tried to (contradiction intended). Perhaps a more interesting discussion would result if we defaulted to a more collaborative[0] stance here?

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
by thrance | 2025-08-19 09:37:43+00:00
AFAIK, from my atheist's understanding of Buddhism, you don't get out of the cycle of life and death, samsara, with good karma. Quite the contrary, you're almost guaranteeing your next life will be that of some kind of angel that lives for millions of years, and delaying your eventual enlightenment by that much, since you can only get enlightened on Earth.

Not that it's a bad thing, people are allowed to enjoy reincarnation, and it probably beats being reincarnated in hell.
by mrgaro | 2025-08-19 09:39:09+00:00
I'd love to find a tool which could recognise a few different speakers so that I could automatically dictate 1:1 sessions. In addition, I definitively would want to feed that to an LLM to cleanup the notes (to remove all "umm" and similar nonsense) and to do context aware spell checking.

The LLM part should be very much doable, but I'm not sure if speaker recognition exists in a sufficiently working state?
Show HN: Thinking about building AI-personalized cold email outreach
by ivyiscool | 2025-08-19 09:40:06+00:00
I run a small cold email tool. It’s pretty simple right now: connect inbox, send sequences, track replies. Growth is flat, and honestly it feels like just another tool in a saturated space.

The idea I’m testing: make AI-powered personalization the core feature. Instead of {{firstName}} placeholders, each email would be rewritten based on recipient industry, role, and company context — aiming for a 1:1 feel, but at scale. Think Apollo-level data + AI rewriting + automated follow-ups.

Potential value: • higher reply rates • less manual research • less generic spammy outreach

Questions I’m struggling with: • Is “AI personalization at scale” actually a strong enough wedge in this crowded market? • Would teams pay more for it, or is it just another nice-to-have? • From a growth perspective, what would be the best entry point: solo founders, small sales teams, agencies?

Would love to hear your take — especially if you’ve built or scaled something in the cold outreach space.
Help Trying to find proper credit management for AI app
by aman_madhukar02 | 2025-08-19 09:40:20+00:00
Been trying to build a decent credit system for our AI application for the past 6 months and still didn't get any good end to end solution from managing user credits to payments.

Here's is the list of services I've tried :

- Stripe: good for reg. subscription but had to implement to whole credit system on my own.

- Lemonsqueezy: Looks goods but their credit system feels like it was designed for traditional saas apps not for ai apps where i have to for credits for tool calling, llm credits.

- Lago: I tried this open source metering based as well but still not upto the mark for ai llm credits + tool calling.

what i actually need:

- Credit-based billing both recharge and post-paid

- Plan upgrades/downgrades with handling proration period

- Credit expiration

- Overage protection

- Team/organisation credit pooling

I'm literally considering building this from scratch at this point, which feels insane in 2025. There HAS to be something out there that handles AI app billing properly.

would love to know what are you actually using that doesn't suck? Please tell me there's a solution that works and I'm just too stupid to find it.
by sneak | 2025-08-19 09:40:59+00:00
If your friends can’t install a free app and type in their phone number and an auth code (literally takes 30 seconds) to talk to you privately, they aren’t your friends.

(I have no other messengers and have recruited about a hundred people to use Signal, including much of the Vegas cash game poker scene.)

Quality over quantity is important always, but is of utmost importance when it comes to personal associations.

Delete your Meta accounts, find out who your real friends are.
by sylens | 2025-08-19 09:41:49+00:00
Absolutely. I talk all the time about how I miss server browsers. Perhaps similar to the self hosting movement, we will see a similar movement in gaming to reclaim multiplayer games. The fact that a game can "die" and become unsupported now if it fails to find an audience at launch is crazy - just let people run their own servers if they want!

We also don't need content roadmaps for these games if you give the community modding and map tools.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-08-19 09:41:53+00:00
> When people only pay taxes indirectly, they are tourists. Digital nomads pay _much_ less tax overall than other people, because people who pay income tax pay indirect taxes as well

Bad argument, as the alternative is the DN (just as the tourist) simply not coming to the island. If a DN spends 2000€ a month, that is 2000€ taxable income for someone else. If the DN doesn't come someone else makes 2000€ less of income. This does not compare to people living in the place, as they are there no matter what. Every cent of foreign money flowing into your economy ON TOP is a bonus. It is only bad if it removes someone else who would spend that money, but that is not the case.

And if you would argue that the economy does not need more foreign money and you do not want productivity and wealth increase and have stay things as they are, you are advocating socalism - look at cuba, venezuela or argentina how that worked out.
by notrealyme123 | 2025-08-19 09:43:28+00:00
"by the books" seems like a recurring pattern for you. It feels for me like it is about time for you to acctually make your own decissions and also fail while doing so.

Social Pressure can be a bitch and a half. Its not like you are pushed to do something directly by others. It is just there.

And get help. Try to find a therapist who really(!) understands you. I think you will always "know the right answer" to say to make the therapist happy. Find someone who can actually look through it.
by Nextgrid | 2025-08-19 09:43:54+00:00
This occurrence has nothing to do with AI? The reason AI doesn't want to grant you the refund is because it's not been given the ability to do so. It would be no different with a human.

If Amazon wanted to give you the ability to get a refund for unused Prime benefits, it would allow the AI to do it, or even give you a button to do it yourself.
by nake89 | 2025-08-19 09:46:11+00:00
> the library ecosystem is a nightmare I agree.

> Just keeping a project from falling apart takes a huge amount of effort I think the culture of importing libraries with lots of dependencies is a big contributor.

> Libraries are either abandoned when the author moves on This applies to any OSS project. Generally speaking popular abandoned libraries get forked.

> or they push major releases almost every month This sounds like a very bad library to use. I would not recommend having this type of library as a dependency in Node or even in Python for that matter.

> Python libraries are much more stable and reliable. Not sure what would make python libraries magically more stable and more reliable. Maybe libraries with minimal dependencies would could be the reason. That is why I recommend 0 or minimal dependecy libraries for node.