MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eitally | 2025-08-06 15:23:44+00:00
Fwiw, I was hired by Google in 2015 to help answer questions like "if Google were to add a CRM to the GSuite portfolio, should they build one, buy one or partner with key players". My team's charter was to create business cases with various options and run them up to chain (at the time, Prabhakar was running product for "Google for Work"). On more than one occasion we presented cases with 3 year ROIs in the $xxxM range and were shot down every time with a "too small" comment. A couple years later, Google had partnered with Copper CRM and supported extension builds into Workspace/GSuite, but had also begun a major enterprise rationalization project to consolidate a multitude of Salesforce instances into a single one, at the same time as adopting standard enterprise features & processes of Anaplan.

This led to consolidation of a number of back office IT teams that ultimately ended up with far more enforcement clout than they'd historically had. By the time Ruth changed roles, most of the "normal" business processes had been fairly standardized. Fwiw, the Cloud instance of SFDC, which is by far the most complex & customized, has been in full use for almost five years now and is the canonical source of truth for sales data.
by andrepd | 2025-08-06 15:24:13+00:00
"Too much thought into whether they could, and not enough thought on whether they should" could be the motto of the vast majority of AI products.

Algorithmic social media has already destroyed our attention spans. ChatGPT is in the process of destroying the the rest. People read less than ever and have difficulty engaging with anything that takes more effort than "grok is this real?". Do we really need to put AI into the """reading experience"""?
by tkdb | 2025-08-06 15:24:19+00:00
Open source performs better, but is less convenient/accessible than a polished consumer product with inferior technical chops?

Even ignoring the broken display, which I think is a red herring here (it would be relevant if this unit had a pattern of quality issues or failures indicating systematic production issues), I think that's the story here.

I appreciate the response from airgradient, assuming it's all true.
by chao- | 2025-08-06 15:24:31+00:00
Observing the progression of DHH's Linux journey has been entertaining, and I don't mean that in a condescending way! A mix of lighthearted enjoyment, and anticipation of which part of the tech tree is next for him. Will the next rabbit hole he stumbles into be immutable distros? If so, will he take the Silverblue path or the NixOS path?

And so on.
by focusedone | 2025-08-06 15:24:37+00:00
This one blows my mind.

Discovery was kept in as close to as-flown condition as possible to be the vehicle of record for future research. No museum on the planet is better equipped to handle things like that than the Smithsonian.

Hopefully the title transfer is enough to protect it from moving. Certainly 80 million isn't enough to restore an SCA and construct a building to house the orbiter.
by renewiltord | 2025-08-06 15:24:44+00:00
Amusingly, SF’s planning commission shut down a bustling cafe that did this. The approval was for a cafe not a coworking space. So in the end Workshop Cafe had to shut down and a bustling corner became a blighted empty spot for 5 years.

Ah, but perhaps they were just protecting the neighbors from the noise? Well, it was in the financial district. On the ground floor of a bank, which never had a problem with all this.
by seanw265 | 2025-08-06 15:24:47+00:00
Coffee shops are fine for a change of scenery, but they get expensive fast if you're there all day. I also switched to a coworking space but mainly for these two reasons:

1. It’s much cheaper if you’re regularly working 8-hour days outside your apartment.

2. I hated having to pack up my stuff just to use the bathroom or step out for a call.

The ones near me are secure and have free (passable) coffee, which is all I really need.
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-06 15:24:51+00:00
> From my experience with sales/PM people at google, they refuse to use internal tools and try to get Jira and other shit installed. Regardless of the tool quality, just because that's what they learned already.

That's when you're supposed to pull the smooth-talking people that are usually in those roles and ask them a very simple question:

"Do you want this tool more than you want to be employed?"
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-06 15:25:05+00:00
I like the DOM. I think people keep forgetting all the small details, like being responsive (working on mobile and desktop) and many other issues related to privacy and usability. IMEs, dictionaries, spelling correction, etc... All of these happen in text areas. If you implement things yourself, say in canvas on a webpage, you can't provide these. For example if I misspel somethng the browser can lookup that word in the user's dictionary but your page can not as looking through a user's dictionary would be a privacy issue.

That said, if you want a non-DOM framework, surprisingly Google already provides it. It's called Flutter and it has the option to use a canvas, no DOM. You can see a large complex example at

https://earth.google.com

Go there and type in NYC. You'll see text and images popup over the earth, etc. You'll see a toolbar and menus and a status bar etc... Click settings. The stuff that appears is all canvas. Click the Data Layers icon. The stuff that appears as all canvas. I think they finally made the search input box an input element for the reasons above but the rest is canvas.

Also note that canvas based input is also why Google Docs has so much trouble with emoji and non-English input.
by ptaffs | 2025-08-06 15:25:21+00:00
>>The laptop workers using Badge pledge a minimum spend. Badge gets a commission of that minimum spend. Cafe owners get more people and revenue, so they are happy to pay that.

A user books a space using Badge, and promises to spend, and the Cafe owner pays Badge a commission on a pledge. This seems ripe for a disputes process (the customer didn't spend) and Cafe owner actually not being "happy to pay that."
by dismalaf | 2025-08-06 15:25:52+00:00
> Extracting money out of everyday life to make our world less friendly and more expensive.

Ever done the napkin maths for a coffee shop? It's not good. Especially with the way rents have been going...

In Canada a ton of Starbucks locations have closed. Other brands too.

You need to sell a ton of $5 coffees to pay rent, nevermind anything else... This idea that businesses are a common good and business owners should feel bad for not being destitute is why fewer people are opening them (at least here, in Canada).
by gchamonlive | 2025-08-06 15:25:56+00:00
The analogy is just that, an analogy. The Airbnb case can be tragic for some cities but for specific reasons that aren't going to affect cafés. I for one haven't seen anyone staying overnight and sleeping in a café.

The project could be catastrophic for cafes for unforeseen reasons, but those are surely not going to be the same as for Airbnb. You'd have to come up with a plausible threat scenario, otherwise your extrapolation of the analogy has no substance.
by afavour | 2025-08-06 15:26:06+00:00
A much simpler option here (as many cafes near me have done) is simply put a sign up saying "no laptops". If someone is using one you tell them to leave.

> You are always going to be better off catering to people who are just dropping in for 5-10 minutes over someone who spends several hours and maybe buys 2 things and jeopardizes a table which could have been used by 10 people.

I assume there's a balance. Never run a coffee shop but it seems that a lot of the sales are takeout, so exactly what does and doesn't go on in your seating might well be a secondary concern. If you prioritise folks staying for 5-10 minutes you might just end up with a lot of empty tables.
by watwut | 2025-08-06 15:26:07+00:00
My point is, I never encountered this. Literally never. I am not particularly young and it is not even the case that I would work in startups all that much. My friends did not complained about having to write paragraphs essays for stuff like this either.

I am open to the idea that there is some bureaucratic workplace where it works like that ... but everywhere I have experience with, they preferred the short version.
by pwg | 2025-08-06 15:26:27+00:00
> For example, "My Favorite Air Quality Monitors" rather than "The Best Indoor Air Quality Monitors". The title sets reader expectations for objective evaluation with consistent methodology.

Unfortunately, that ship has sailed. There have now been so many review articles for so very long titled "Best X" when the nature of the review is "... in the subjective opinion of the review author" that it is unlikely anyone views a "best X" article as having any objective evaluation or rigor behind it at all.

Your suggestion would be nice to enforce, but there's no way to get that ship back to port to change its course now.
by okucu | 2025-08-06 15:26:41+00:00
Can only speak for Germany and the mass deportations here are done by liberals. They also let 40k+ people drown in the Mediterranean, support literally every single war, support multiple genocides and export weapons to all dictatorships known to man. At this point I'm not sure the actual Nazis would be worse than liberals.

Also very weird how whenever "liberals/centrists" are in power the (ultra) right gain lots of momentum. Must be the weather

Almost forgot: we're also in our third year of recession and the only investments are made in the military industry to prep for starting the next world war
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-06 15:26:43+00:00
Use nixos. I install updates maybe every few months and it's fine. My desktop experience has been completely solid for almost a decade.

My work computer with Windows on the other hand requires restarts every day or two after WSL inevitably gets into a state where vscode can't connect to it for some reason (when it gets into such a state it also usually pegs the CPU at 100% so even unlocking takes a minute or more, and usually I just do a hard power off).
by dayjah | 2025-08-06 15:27:00+00:00
I found the syncing process in chezmoi to be so hard to mentally model.

I’d often change a file, forget that it was backed by the chezmoi store, later find myself trying to reconcile the differences, just so I could commit and share w/ another computer. nix + home-manager and snowfall lib, once over the multi month ramp up, have been such a breath of fresh air in multi system management
by incomingpain | 2025-08-06 15:27:08+00:00
> How does the LLM know it has the right answer?

Realistically it doesnt.

This is why "reasoning" or "thinking" llms are coming along; or chain of thought. Essentially it's talking to itself to determine the right answer first before answering.

>How is it rewarded!

By continued existence?

>In nature evolution rewards right answers by alowing the gentic algorithm to pass its code into the future. How does this work with computer based AI? I think until we simulate something similar to biological life we are not going to get true intelligence from computers because there is no internal motivation.

You're describing the "reinforced learning" and that's part of how a model comes into existence. Not for when it's being used as a tool.
by yoshuaw | 2025-08-06 15:27:41+00:00
Hey all, today the Azure Core Upstream team has open sourced Wassette: a WebAssembly-based runtime that allows Wasm Components to connect to AI agents using the Model Context Protocol. Wassette’s main contribution to the MCP space is efficient sandboxing: because if you’re going to run untrusted third-party tools locally, it’s probably a good idea to proactively restrict which system resources it can access.

In this post we explain what Wassette is, how to set it up locally, and finally walk through an example that exercises Wassette’s capability system. What we don’t cover in the post is how to write Wasm Component-based tooling for Wassette, but we have some docs for that in the README [1].

Anyway, I hope this interesting to folks here! I’ll be around for a couple of hours here to answer questions folk might have. And if I don’t know the answer, I can probably find an engineer who does. Thanks!

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/wassette#building-for-wassette
by Guthur | 2025-08-06 15:27:54+00:00
You clearly misunderstood the problem.

The entities he is so adamant against are not benign or passive, they actively try to capture your freedom for rent seeking behaviour.

Microsoft, Apple, Amazon etc, have not got to where they are without this behaviour and they are so powerful that they have in many cases captured even public money from large governments for decades and are exceptionally sticky once allowed in.

LLM provide an exceptional opportunity for us to free ourselves from these captor interests, but we need to looking to develop them.

RMS has been proven correct on so many things from standard Microsoft behaviour, and planned obsolete to the licensing rug pulls of so called open source projects.

The question is not about stopping non free, that's a ridiculous objective, but if you don't have any principles you are going to have nothing solid to stand on in response to their nefarious and extractive behaviour.
by dangus | 2025-08-06 15:28:10+00:00
The logic is more like “this is the only company that shipped us a broken review unit.”

The transparency of this company is nice but you can’t control what other people think about your products based on their experiences. It isn’t really “unfair” at all, at least not 100% unfair. They are essentially upset that the press is allowed to have an independent opinion.

If I buy a laptop and the screen is broken (warranty issue!) that’s still a lot worse of an experience than a desktop PC that has everything working. The excuse that a desktop PC doesn’t include a screen isn’t relevant, the idea is that the competition shipped a fully functioning product.
by tpoacher | 2025-08-06 15:28:23+00:00
At the risk of explaining something to someone who doesn't want it explained:

The original comment to which you replied, called Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, a ghoul, for saying “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,”. You understood that as them being offended by the truth, implying the relevant truth here was that talking to an AI is an "abhorrent act", and thus being faced by that truth makes them offended.

To which I replied, they're not offended by the implication that people will have to interact with an AI; they're abhorred by the callousness with which a CEO of a company that distributes AI interviews would so cavalierly dismiss any ethical and moral concerns on such a serious topic affecting real humans, and implicitly doing so out of personal gain with no consideration for the humans affected by this tool.

So what makes him a ghoul is that he's willing to peddle an immoral and unethical poor quality solution which causes grief and unemployment and is a faceless system without recourse, while pretending that it is inevitable and thus there's no need for concern or ethical oversight.

As an analogy, if someone sold guns to both factions and when interviewed portrayed themselves as a hero because "war is inevitable", you wouldn't be offended about the truth of war, you'd be abhorred that this guy is facilitating war and death for personal gain.
by twright | 2025-08-06 15:28:25+00:00
They are not necessarily mutually exclusive terms, you could have a fascist monarchy as much as you could have a liberal one. Monarchy describes the system of government as ruled by a regent. Fascism describes the attitude of a government (or movement) to conserve an existing social order, or regress to one. This is done with mechanisms of direct power e.g., single-party rule (totalitarianism), military power (military-dictatorship/police state), or via the commands of a single individual (dictatorship).
by card_zero | 2025-08-06 15:28:35+00:00
Earlier, even. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...

The first coffeehouses established in Oxford were known as penny universities, as they offered an alternative form of learning to structural academic learning, while still being frequented by the English virtuosi who actively pursued advances in human knowledge. The coffeehouses would charge a penny admission, which would include access to newspapers and conversation.

That's in the 1650s. Then 60 years later in London the coffeehouses were involved in the rise of printed daily newspapers, they distributed them. (Several of these had advertiser in the name, and were more ads than news, because access to adverts in the early days was desirable and worth paying for.)
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-06 15:28:57+00:00
> Governor Newsom has his eye on the 2028 prize it seems

This makes me feel dread. I just don't see him dragging moderates in the middle of the country to the polls, or getting people in the leftist part of the Democratic Party to not "but but but" their way out of voting against fascism again.

Oh well.
Show HN: Vectorwrap: one line vector search for Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, DuckDB
by mihir_ahuja | 2025-08-06 15:29:12+00:00
Over the past few months I kept switching between pgvector in production and SQLite-VSS / DuckDB in notebooks. Every swap meant spending time in the syntax land.

Vectorwrap hides those differences behind one tiny Python adaptor: create a collection, upsert, query — then change only the connection string when you switch databases.

Here, I have tried to solve my direct pain point, so curious if this has application beyond my usecase.

What’s inside

Backends: Postgres 16 + pgvector, MySQL 8.2 (Vector Store), SQLite VSS, DuckDB VSS

Same filter dict syntax on every engine (SQLite uses adaptive oversampling internally)

Repo https://github.com/mihirahuja1/vectorwrap

I’d love some feedback on API design, missing edge cases, or reasons you wouldn’t adopt something like this. Thanks for taking a look!
by BobaFloutist | 2025-08-06 15:29:29+00:00
If you're asking why software has more frequent rebuild cycles than, say, buildings, or roads, or plumbing, it's because it's way cheaper and easier, can be distributed at scale for ~free (compared to road designs which necessarily have to be backward compatible since you can't very well replace every intersection in a city simultaneously), and for all the computerification of the modern world, is largely less essential and less painful to get wrong than your average bridge or bus.
by randomcarbloke | 2025-08-06 15:30:12+00:00
>or at least not in the selfish sense

Wasn't a requirement, self interest doesn't imply malice.

>capitalism only allows selfish self-interest to flourish

How's that then?

>Capitalism is a form of authoritarianism in that it really only serves a few

You're cooked, market liberalisation has led the world from >80% in poverty to <10% in under 40 years, even removing huge entities like China.
by akprasad | 2025-08-06 15:30:25+00:00
What is the strategy, in your view? Maybe something like this? --

1. All government employees get access to ChatGPT

2. ChatGPT increasingly becomes a part of people's daily workflows and cognitive toolkit.

3. As the price increases, ChatGPT will be too embedded to roll back.

4. Over time, OpenAI becomes tightly integrated with government work and "too big to fail": since the government relies on OpenAI, OpenAI must succeed as a matter of national security.

5. The government pursues policy objectives that bolster OpenAI's market position.
by bikeshaving | 2025-08-06 15:30:27+00:00
I tried these, and they seem to mainly be opening Claude Code in a pane in Vim, along with commands to open the pane. It’s missing the features added to the Emacs version like open file awareness, access to text selection, and integrated diff for changes.

It would be really interesting to see a version which exposes Vim as an MCP. I would love to see Claude Code work on the active file, reading from open buffers, typing Vim motions, and taking advantage of Vim features like find/replace and macros. It would be closer to the real pair programming experience, whereas the read and write experience is slow and disjointed from editing.
by benreesman | 2025-08-06 15:30:47+00:00
They weren't called LLMs, but they had neural networks and hardware optimizations for AI and huge teams of people tirelessly labeling stuff to make it look smarter than it is :)

There is some surprise factor at the GPT-3 -> gpt-4-1106 jump for people who know the history of AI generally and who were around a lab during the ImageNet days, but not as much as everyone is acting like.

The last two years are a notable but by no means unprecedented rush towards the next wall. There's even a term for it: AI Summer is short and AI winter is long and its about as predictable as the seasons in Game of Thrones / ASOIAF.
by Bender | 2025-08-06 15:31:09+00:00
The real problem is convincing people you want to chat with that this it's important and worth all inconveniences

During peace time I would agree but when the screws are tightened enough and one makes a zero-friction anonymous chat instance it might just get some use. Zero friction or near zero meaning click a URL, enter a temporary name and hit the "Start" button. [1] Channels do not really matter in this example as private chats would be the primary use case.

Set up a simple IRCD on the backend that cloaks IP addresses. ngIRCD [2] takes 5 minutes to set up and one second to mask all IP's. There are many web front-ends [3] to make it happy-clicky. All of this can run from a ram-disk and deployed with automation and/or containers to low memory and low CPU servers.

CloakHost = temp.chat CloakHostModeX = temp.chat CloakUserToNick = yes MorePrivacy = yes

[1] - https://web.libera.chat/#hackernews [this instance does not cloak IP addresses, use a VPN]

[2] - https://github.com/ngircd/ngircd/

[3] - https://ircv3.net/software/clients#web-clients
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-06 15:31:20+00:00
The anti-porn lobby has been going crazy with this study since its release.

I guess when you are desperate for any grain of data backing your totally failed "porn is bad" hypothesis (porn has been a click away for hundred of millions going on 30 years now), you'll latch on to anything.

Ironically if you read the study, it's basically "People enjoyed the act and consented to it, but it's bad because not breathing can be fatal and it's also illegal in Australia". It's also a singular study (rather than a long term trend meta-study) with an online survey data collection method, so about as low of a rigor as you can get.

Of course though, it's gone around heavily marketed as "Record levels of boys are watching porn and going around violently choking out young women because of it".
by jorgen123 | 2025-08-06 15:31:54+00:00
My (American) brother in law calls me cheap. Which is what frugal sounds like to me. As a native Dutch I call myself cheaper than the Scottish. When I go out shopping, I will spend hours looking and not buying anything.

I don't think stingy fits the bill per se since that would be saving money at the expense of others. Almost like the coffee shop customers who are not buying anything?
by kelseyfrog | 2025-08-06 15:32:05+00:00
> how agencies handle issues like hallucinations

That's the crux. They won't. We'll repeatedly find ourselves in the absurd situation where reality and hallucination clash. Except, with the full weight of the US government behind the hallucination, reality will lose out every time.

Expect to see more headlines where people, companies, and organizations are expected to conform to hallucinations not the facts. It's about to get much more surreal.