MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajb | 2025-08-03 21:04:15+00:00
Amazon is worse than this, though the AWS bait and switch is that you are supposed to save over the alternatives. So it should be worth switching if you would save more than the dev time you would invest in doing so right? But your company isn't going to do that. Because of opportunity cost. Your company expects to get some multiple of a the cost of dev time back, that they invest in their own business. And because of various uncertainties - in return, in the time taken to develop, in competition, etc - they will only invest dev time when that multiple is not small. I'm not a business manager, but I'd guess a factor of 5.

But that means that if you were conned into using infrastructure that actually costs more than the alternative, making your cost structure worse, you're still going to eat the loss because it's not worth taking your devs time to switch back.

But tokens don't quite have this problem -yet. Most of us can still do development the old way, and it's not a project to turn it off. Expect this to change though.
by missedthecue | 2025-08-03 21:04:26+00:00
It doesn't prove it. Khan attempted very fiercely to block Amazon's purchase of iRobot and she, along with the EU authorities, succeeded in preventing it and now iRobot is about to file bankruptcy. We don't have the counterfactual and founders (nor regulatory agencies) can see the future.

Someone made a good analogy on twitter that Khan essentially cut off a genius pianist's right hand, the pianist persevered and somehow succeeded in retaining their talent in spite of having one hand, and now Khan is taking credit for the feat. In the same way, the fact that Figma still exists is not proof that she was right.
by bshzzle | 2025-08-03 21:04:49+00:00
We went with Zoekt because it is full-featured (it's fast, supports regex, search filters, streamed search, etc.), and is a mature project. Sourcegraph, GitLab, and other large companies use it, so it felt like a safe choice. Overall our experience has been positive - maybe I'll write a blog post about it :)
by terminalshort | 2025-08-03 21:04:56+00:00
> If you care about market cap? She was right.

None of the FTC's business

> If you care about employee comp? She was right.

None of the FTC's business

> Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right.

None of the FTC's business x3

> If you care about consumer choice, she was right.

Ok, so this is the FTC's business. But does Figma compete with Adobe in any major areas? I'm not aware of any major Adobe products like that.
Time to upgrade my laptop – need advice please
by zyruh | 2025-08-03 21:05:58+00:00
Looking for a high-performance PC (non-Mac) for data-heavy workloads — suggestions?

It's time to upgrade. I'm looking for a Windows/Linux-compatible machine (no Mac) that can handle:

Large spreadsheet workloads (think multi-GB Excel/CSV files)

4K+ video editing and exports

Possibly some ML experimentation later on

I was considering a high-end gaming PC for the GPU + RAM benefits, but not sure if that’s the best tradeoff for thermals, noise, and form factor. Open to desktop or laptop, though portability is a plus.

What builds or machines would you recommend in 2025 for blazing speed + stability?
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-03 21:06:06+00:00
Problem is, there’s a lot of needs that private industry will not fill (or cannot be trusted to fill well). We’ve seen this play out repeatedly. If you want a functioning society, a certain degree of government spending is unavoidable.

Now there is something to be said for making sure that spending is effective, but this must be engaged with in good faith; that is, changes should be made with a scalpel after gathering plenty of data supporting the change in question. Proclaiming ineffectiveness without data to ground the claim and then using that as an excuse to make broad cuts is a great way to make any dysfunction even worse.
Show HN: I built a tool that replies to emails for you
by Thyrdev | 2025-08-03 21:06:48+00:00
I launched ReplyFast, a small tool that helps solopreneurs and small teams reply to emails instantly using smart, customizable templates generated from the incoming message.

The goal is to save time, stay professional, and never let a lead go cold again.

So far, the site has had 14 visitors. I'm still working on marketing and distribution.

I'm open to all kinds of feedback — especially on positioning, UI, or ideas to get the word out.

Would you use this? Why or why not?
by intended | 2025-08-03 21:07:23+00:00
Competition improves consumer welfare if the competition is on features that improve consumer welfare.

Without referees, competition can simply be on lowering costs and providing cheaper service.

If demand is in-elastic (there’s only one Yosemite) then simply invoking competition isn’t going to be a solution.

Without referees with teeth, the market can easily optimize for profit without giving a damn about anything else.
by jamesog | 2025-08-03 21:08:22+00:00
> I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run".

Hi, that's me! There were definitely a lot of fun conversations.

I liked that a culture of internal blogs became a thing too. It was good to see people brain dumping their experiments and findings. I think people learnt a lot from following all the internal blogs.
by medvezhenok | 2025-08-03 21:09:46+00:00
It's because of the effects of technological progress on wealth accumulation.

Tech allows winner-takes-all effects in many different markets (and runaway situations where labor cannot catch up at all) - you either have to have very strong antitrust (which is still not possible in some places), or basically strong redistribution (i.e. taxation of wealth in order to redistribute) to maintain a reasonable (note: not equal, but a reasonable degree of inequality - closer to the model that existed from the 1940s-1970s) distribution of wealth in society.
by nostromo | 2025-08-03 21:09:48+00:00
Having billions of low-skill "prime age workers" is not a good thing in the AI era. Africa's population surge is a liability as much as it is a benefit, especially considering they already have to import a large portion of their food supplies. Africa is 20% of world population but just 2% of world GDP... Maybe they will turn into China at some point, but I wouldn't bet on it yet.
by alphazard | 2025-08-03 21:10:06+00:00
I'm not even sure if this is a serious post, but it indicates a significant misunderstanding.

There is an asymmetry between a government's revenue and its expenses. Revenue can increase arbitrarily if the government is allowed to take out unlimited debt. The amount a government can tax is limited first by the size of its country's economy. There is a maximum amount of revenue you can collect via taxation, and after a certain point increasing taxation decreases revenue. Countries also exist in the context of the rest of the world and there is a market for business. If the tax rate is not competitive businesses and people will leave, although this is over a longer time horizon.

In terms of the possibilities overspending is far more likely than undertaxing because you can spend an infinite amount, but you can only undershoot your optimal tax rate by a finite amount. Both are probably happening right now. The amount that the US government is undertaxing compared to its theoretical optimum might not even balance the current budget.
by regnull | 2025-08-03 21:10:09+00:00
I think this argument suffers from the same problem as many arguments of similar kind. It goes like this: if A then B. If B then C. If C then D. It all makes sense. Every single one of these steps makes sense. Except, if you have a chain with five steps and every one of them has a 90% likelihood, the whole chain has only 60% likelihood. And it’s probably less the 90% for each step, in reality. So, you can come up with an entirely plausible reasoning chain, where each step is highly likely to come true, and yet be completely wrong with your overall conclusion.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-03 21:10:23+00:00
AI era remains to be proven to not be bullshit. If it turns on to be something of value and not pets.com and webvan 2.0, prime age workers should be provided training and hiring pipelines for jobs AI cannot do: healthcare, construction, infrastructure, housing, agriculture scaling, etc. Knowledge/white collar jobs are most at risk with LLMs, not work building society up and operating it in the physical world.
by estearum | 2025-08-03 21:10:28+00:00
You're describing mainstream Democratic policies.

There is not a single national-level Democratic politician who advocates for open borders. If there is, please tell us who.

The feeling of an open border is due to a confluence of our asylum laws, the Constitution, and a surge in relative desirability of the United States vis-a-vis the rest of the world. The President cannot directly change any of these factors.

The reason it feels like some of that has changed is because we have a President who is flouting our asylum laws [1] and the Constitution [2], having the net effect of making our country less relatively desirable [3]

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/court-limits-trump-asylum-crack...

[2]: https://www.gwlr.org/kilmar-abrego-garcia/

[3]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/american-dream-migration-us-slows-...

In any case, did you identify any good GOP policy ideas here?
by Esophagus4 | 2025-08-03 21:10:58+00:00
Meh… it’s easy for someone to string together a few charts and make a dramatic prediction. It’s telling that he hasn’t disclosed his positions or portfolio.

If “Skin in the Game” has taught us anything, it’s that if you want to know what a person really believes, don’t read their blog, look at their investment portfolio.

Ok… you think the dollar is going to “melt away in a fire”? How much do you believe that? Enough to put your own money on the line and place your bets? Is your money in real estate, then? Gold? BTC?

Because if you don’t believe a financial projection enough to put your own money into it, do you really believe it?
by danielschreber | 2025-08-03 21:12:10+00:00
The article does not seem to say a whole lot except general doubt.

In particular, I don't see anything about whether there is a discrepancy in the heat index formula being used, as opposed to a bad sensor.

I tried the first formula I could google for heat index and relative humidity, and got a heat index of 178, rel. humidity of about 80% assuming 104 F temps and 97 F dewpoint.

Then I asked Bing Copilot and it emphatically said 80% humidity in 104 F weather is very plausible, but the corresponding heat index is not reasonable and my formula was likely outside its range of validity.

I looked at Copilot's reference, at https://www.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/2022-05/heatindex_c... and it appears that, no, 180 F is about the right index.

I wonder if Copilot made the same mistake I did, looking at the relative humidity scale as if it were the dew point and therefore off the scale...

So I'm wondering if people now sit around asking chatbots things and writing "articles" that launder the resulting slop.

I berated Copilot for its inconsistencies until it wrote this:

Reassessing the AccuWeather Article AccuWeather’s claim that the 182°F heat index reading in Iran was likely due to instrument error hinges on skepticism about the dew point of 97°F. But: Nearby stations reported dew points in the 90s, which supports the plausibility. Dew point sensors can be finicky, but dismissing the reading outright without strong evidence seems premature. The NOAA chart confirms that 104°F + 97°F dew point = ~180°F heat index, so the math checks out. So yes—the simplest and most scientifically consistent conclusion is that the AccuWeather article was wrong to dismiss the reading. It may have been an extraordinary event, but not an impossible one.
by robwwilliams | 2025-08-03 21:13:25+00:00
Confused arguments. H1B visa holders are not “off shore”. They live and pay taxes in the USA. The big tech companies are hungry for talent and compete world-wide to hire the best. It is not about shafting older US engineers. The AI angle may be a distraction they use but the main argument in this article is likely to be just wrong.
by al11588 | 2025-08-03 21:13:58+00:00
Location:New York but open to remote

Remote:Yes Willing to relocate:No

Technologies:Python, Java, Swift, .Net, JavaScript

Résumé/CV:https://www.linkedin.com/in/alvin-lawson-b8300635

Email:al11588@gmail.com

My name is Alvin. I am looking for a developer advocate role, Developer relations, Support engineer role, Backend engineer role, Systems engineer role, DevOps role, Solution Engineer role.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-03 21:14:14+00:00
Federal receipts as a percent of GDP:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Basically unchanged for 70+ years, and far lower historically. Meanwhile significant growth in real GDP per capita and therefore real government receipts per capita.

The change isn't that the government is collecting less money. They get more than ever. But growth in government spending has outstripped it, and it has been getting worse rather than better.
by fidotron | 2025-08-03 21:15:03+00:00
This is very timely for me, because I've just come into possession of a 4D/60 "buttons box" (which normally would go with the dials). It is quite unlike the later button boxes since it's a giant cheese wedge with the power supply integrated, which seems to be very rare as there's no reference to this on the net anywhere. It even has a display where when the unit powers on it says it's rev A. I'm hoping the DB-9 on it is RS232 and can be spoken to by a modern machine, but my one RS232 cable is the wrong gender, of course.

Many years ago I had an Indigo, and even 25 years ago that was an exercise in difficult interfacing with modern equipment. The monitor was amazing.

Edit to add: the notes here about 20A power requirements remind me of when a VR company I was consulting for hired a notable CTO from the VFX business and all he cared about was making sure there was enough electricity supplied to the office. That was in about 2015 and I remember thinking he was clearly scarred by previous events and was long out of date.
by mk_stjames | 2025-08-03 21:15:07+00:00
> speed when accounting for loading/unloading and security

Try to book a train trip from Brest, Bretagne, France to Vienna, Austria. Just halfway across western Europe. You'll wind up having to take four trains and likely change stations in a way that involves a metro or a bus, book on two or three different websites, if it goes perfectly it will take anywhere from 15-18 hours of travel time and if any single part gets delayed you will be staying in a very expensive overnight hotel and be out hundreds of extra euros.

Or you can take an Air France booking for literally half the cost, with a single plane change that is guaranteed, and it will take about 6 hours including the airport security and loading time.

Seriously, people constantly talk about train travel (in europe) like it is amazing and it's only true for very short distances. Otherwise it is a travel nightmare. And I hate airports too, but, things have gotten worse train wise in the last 20 years, I swear.
by zahlman | 2025-08-03 21:15:14+00:00
> it looks like some high school student who got a c in their physics and chemistry classes then used some psychoactive chemicals and believe that they had a mind expanding moment that thousands upon thousands of PhDs have suddenly missed.

I mean, I was going to just say that it reads as blatantly LLM-generated, and that I'm also suspicious of OP's responses ITT. But that's not unreasonable as a description either.
by dmix | 2025-08-03 21:15:21+00:00
In a Taiwan type conflict I'd be more worried about all the advanced Chinese anti-ship ballistic/cruise missiles if I was in the US Navy (not to mention submarine torpedoes and drone ships). That stuff can be launched from land/air even without the hundreds of new ships. I'm not convinced the Navy could operate anywhere close to China in a true conflicts. Those US ship VLS cells will empty out pretty fast trying to shoot them down and submarine detection would heavily slow them down plus limit any logistic chains to resupply. But admittedly I'm no modern expert on the topic, just like reading military wikipedia and twitter.
by vbezhenar | 2025-08-03 21:15:47+00:00
Old Sci-Fi AI used to be an entity which have a hard facts database and was able to instantly search it.

I think that's the right direction for modern AI to move. ChatGPT uses Google searches often. So replace Google with curated knowledge database, train LLM to consult this database for every fact and hallucinations will be gone.
by patrickmay | 2025-08-03 21:16:03+00:00
Two quotes from the article stand out. First, from the X screenshot: "something about the process of writing makes your ideas 10x better". Second from near the beginning: "The most important person to convince is the author."

Design documents are so essential that even after mumble years in the industry, I am amazed when people, including putative "Product Managers" push back on the idea. As Leslie Lamport noted, "Writing is nature's way of telling us how sloppy our thinking is."

For those wanting to learn how to improve the quality of their technical writing, see Write Like an Amazonian: https://medium.com/@apappascs/write-like-an-amazonian-14-tip...
by nostromo | 2025-08-03 21:16:12+00:00
That's pretty average (which is a good thing).

Japan: 20%

China: 20%

India: 13%

UK: 24%

Italy: 26%

Germany: 26%

France: 30%

Then there's Canada of course... 50% with a proposal to make it 66% in 2026. Let's see how that works out!
by wswope | 2025-08-03 21:16:33+00:00
My ¢2 as someone who works in the space: EHRs are currently mandatory for compliance, reporting, and billing reasons — but completely unnecessary for the practice of medicine.

The first big step towards untangling the gordian knot in my book is pivoting the industry to a capitated payment model, so compensation doesn’t require tying everything back to CPT & ICD codes, or tracking super-anal quality metrics for CMS. Once you make that jump, it’s pretty easy to imagine a lightweight note-taking + file-hosting platform that lets providers document summary data on a patient profile wiki-style, and attach notes to the profile in any arbitrary format using customizable templates. (I’m basically picturing a mashup of Google Drive + Wiki.js + Obsidian features.)

Handling meds, orders, and referrals in a cross-platform way is starting to become a solved problem with FHIR. Tack on modular plugins for each of the above to the patient profile page, and you’ve reinvented the functionality of an EMR in a way that sucks far less and lets users get shit done.
by 827a | 2025-08-03 21:17:00+00:00
Agreed, that would be interesting to see if the methodology were sound. The problem is naturally that measuring "confidence in the courts" is almost inherently a methodologically difficult thing to do.

Additionally: shortage of confidence in the US Courts isn't a new thing. The reality of the US Courts system is: Money wins, and its been like this for the entire life of essentially all Americans alive today. This is, actually, rather convenient and good if you take the view that faith in the US courts system is a critical component of the US Dollar's global reserve status. If money controls the courts, and courts support the money, that's a pretty nice virtuous cycle. But, for the People; its been hit-or-miss for a long, long time.
by dehrmann | 2025-08-03 21:17:22+00:00
My person pet peeve for insurance is dental insurance. Here's what Delta Dental offers for its own employees:

https://www1.deltadentalins.com/content/dam/ddins/en/pdf/car...

If you get the PPO, you have an in-network annual benefit cap of $2,500. So you're paying your insurance company to pay your dentist for you? And as soon as the bill gets large enough that you'd actually need insurance, they tap out?
by cornholio | 2025-08-03 21:17:25+00:00
Solar energy has achieved such a cost reduction that nuclear can't compete even if the actual nuclear reactor part is free. Just the classical, steam turbine parts are becoming more expensive than solar, and this is evident for new natural gas plants, who don't even have any radiation concerns. Sure, fusion energy would be dispatchable, unlike solar, but momentum is building towards large scale interconnections, perhaps even at intercontinental levels, spanning many time-zones and climates and achieving highly reliable solar.

While it's unclear when all this will be achieved, nobody is ready to bet 10 billions that it won't happen in the next two decades they need to recover costs.
by terminalshort | 2025-08-03 21:17:43+00:00
It makes perfect sense if you think about it from Thiel's perspective. Other than legal technicalities like marriage, the consequences of being gay are mainly determined by societal attitudes and not electoral politics. No legal changes that the Republicans would make do anything to stop a powerful billionaire from being openly gay. So it makes perfect sense that he would favor his business interests when he takes sides in politics.
by awesome_dude | 2025-08-03 21:18:03+00:00
I've been thinking about this - you're right that LLMs are not going to be deterministic (AIUI) when it comes to producing code to solve a problem.

BUT neither are humans, if you give two different humans the same task, then, unless they copy one another, then you will get two different results.

Further, as those humans evolve through their career, the code that they produce will also change.

Now, I do want to point out that I'm very much still at the "LLMs are an aid, not the full answer.. yet" point, but a lot of the argument against them seems to be (rapidly) coming to the point where it's no longer valid (AI slop and all).
by maxbond | 2025-08-03 21:18:14+00:00
> > Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right.

> None of the FTC's business x3

> > If you care about consumer choice, she was right.

> Ok, so this is the FTC's business.

You don't think there's relationship between consumer choice and a large number of acquirers? These are basically equivalent statements, they're both saying "markets remain competitive".
Show HN: NameFast – Instantly generate brandable names for your SaaS or startup
by skyzouw | 2025-08-03 21:18:47+00:00
Hey HN

I built https://www.namefast.me/ , a tiny tool that helps you find creative, brandable names for your SaaS or startup, instantly.

You just describe your idea in one sentence, and it returns a list of name ideas that are: • Short • Easy to pronounce • Mostly available as .com • Not just “GPT mashups” or generic name junk

⸻

Why I built it:

Every time I start a new side project, I lose hours stuck on naming. Tools like ChatGPT often give boring, inconsistent or unusable results. So I made something focused, minimal and fast — made for indie makers, not corporations.

⸻

How it works: • No signup • Enter your idea in plain English • You instantly get 8–15 curated name ideas • Refresh for more

⸻

Would love your feedback on: • Are the names actually helpful? • Would you want filters (like “funny”, “edgy”, “one-word”, etc.)? • Is this useful beyond first-time use?

Feel free to roast it or suggest improvements – open to any ideas

Thanks,

You can try it here : https://www.namefast.me/ — Viggo
by llimllib | 2025-08-03 21:19:13+00:00
I have a blog post[1] and accompanying repo[2] that shows how to use SEA to build a binary (and compares it to bun and deno) and strip it down to 67mb (for me, depends on the size of your local node binary).

[1]: https://notes.billmill.org/programming/javascript/Making_a_s...

[2]: https://github.com/llimllib/node-esbuild-executable#making-a...