MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xtiansimon | 2025-08-07 12:32:51+00:00
> “Billing isn't just about sending an invoice to your customer. It's the lifeblood of your business.”

Oh. You don’t say?

Continues to say billing is “tough”, but this text seems aimed to wrap it all up in one blog post.

This reads like what you write to convince a small business to hire you as an independent contractor to do their website—sympathize to the emotional pain, then write a survey of challenges to convey knowledge and competence.

Something is still missing as a marketing piece. First, what’s the context—compared to what? Second, this reads like a rational discussion of complexity, but not of difficulty. So what is the author’s challenge? Write the whole code base? Integrate different solutions? What can’t be done with time and diligence?

Not for nothing, this is a timely topic for me. I was chatting with someone about outside service versus custom built solutions. This reads like someone I might be asked to consider to hire, but this isn’t the text that makes me interested to learn more.
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-07 12:33:13+00:00
This is still the argument for software copyright. And I think it's still a pretty persuasive argument, despite the success of FLOSS. To this day, there is very little successful consumer software. Outside of browsers, Ubuntu, Libre Office, and GIMP are more or less it, at least outside certain niches. And even they are a pretty tiny compared to Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android, Office/Google Docs, or Photoshop.

The browsers are an interesting case. Neither Chrome nor Edge are really open source, despite Chromium being so, and they are both funded by advertising and marketing money from huge corporations. Safari is of course closed source. And Firefox is an increasingly tiny runner-up. So I don't know if I'd really count Chromium as a FLOSS success story.

Overall, I don't think FLOSS has had the kind of effect that many activists were going for. What has generally happened is that companies building software have realized that there is a lot of value to be found in treating FLOSS software as a kind of barter agreement between companies, where maybe Microsoft helps improve Linux for the benefit of all, but in turn it gets to use, say, Google's efforts on Chromium, and so on. The fact that other companies then get to mooch off of these big collaborations doesn't really matter compared to getting rid of the hassle of actually setting up explicit agreements with so many others.
by jvanderbot | 2025-08-07 12:33:34+00:00
The up to 18km/s is from the linked shield.

Up to 0.1c is from the interstellar spaceship competition "cruise" speeds (also used 0.01c) as presented in their deck.

They're a few orders of magnitude difference.

Also, there's plenty of resources around on interstellar travel that shows interstellar dust/debris is going to be a huge problem.

For example Atomic Rockets, which has a bunch of good reference materials (albeit poorly organized), or the Astronomy Cafe

https://sten.astronomycafe.net/at-what-speed-does-the-inters...
by Aurornis | 2025-08-07 12:34:00+00:00
> Basic pizza is just wheat,

No, it’s flour, which is a heavily processed wheat product.

> mozzarella

Which is a heavily processed food that differs greatly from the input products.

> tomato sauce

Also processed. Likely has added sugar.

It’s interested to read these conversations and see that the frame of reference has shifted so much that obviously highly processed ingredients aren’t tripping people’s processed food detectors. Then the language used isn’t picking up on the processing (calling it wheat instead of flour).
by soulofmischief | 2025-08-07 12:34:06+00:00
When I was in high school, the police illegally body searched my entire school as a racist flex after tackling, beating and tasing a student over a pack of cigarettes one foot outside the door of my math class. A student responded by filming them and handing it over to a local news station, who ran the story and footage.

To retaliate, the next day administrators had metal detector wands waiting for us right off the busses, took every single cellphone they found and locked them up at the school board office for the rest of the year.

That school was absolute hell, a battleground between students and teachers. I am not exaggerating at all when I say that being spotted outside your classroom was an immediate expulsion, with not even enough time between classes to pee or use your locker (two minutes, we had to run). As part of the escalation, the fire alarm began being pulled at least twice a day. Any student who had even a moment alone with one would pull it immediately. Absolute chaos and a direct result of power collapse due to a racist, authoritarian school board that only knew how to wield institutional violence.

For this reason, my kid will always have a phone in order to protect themselves from administrative abuse. I will fight for that tooth and nail. I had over 40 write-ups in just elementary school for refusing entertain abuse from authoritarian staff, and I'll be a failure if my kid doesn't walk the same path.
by aredox | 2025-08-07 12:34:42+00:00
Lots of people were very happy to pay for NFTs.

Lots of people were very happy to pay for 3D TVs / VR headsets.

Lots of people were very happy to pay for "full self-driving[0]".

[0] you need to have your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road at all times

Also, OpenAI is not cash-flow-positive and is not expected to be until 2029 (!). Which means tthat, like AirBnB, like Uber, at their beginnings, you are not paying the real cost yet, it is heavily subsidized by investors - who expect double-digits returns on investment one day.

Now, in many places, AirBnB prices are close to hotels and Uber to taxis - if not higher.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-07 12:35:17+00:00
Your entire argument hinges on the claim that Europe is choosing to do these things which I think can be plainly falsified by looking at what they're agreeing to. Here are the notes [1] on the recent trade "agreement" with the US.

------

US gets:

- EU investment of $600 billion in the US, invested at Trump's sole discretion

- guaranteed sales of $750 billion in US energy resources at a nice fat premium

- guarantee sales of an unstated other than "significant" amount of US military equipment

- elimination of all EU tariffs in many sectors, including on all US industrial goods

EU gets:

- Pay new and increased tariffs to the US, ranging from 15-50%.

------

Claiming anybody is choosing this is simply unbelievable.

[1] - https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-th...
by techpineapple | 2025-08-07 12:35:42+00:00
I’m curious if this problem can be solved. I suppose on the one hand, if some universities can prove that a harder curriculum leads to better outcomes, then yes, but our entire culture is moving away from say inherent respect for the institution to a customer-orientation.

And given what I think was something of a debacle in the entire concept of code schools, can you blame people?

But do I want to pay, I dunno, $60k a year for a degree that might fail me out and even if I succeed is only tangentially related to a job?

In my older and wiser years I might pay a few thousand dollars to take a literature course, but a funny thing about credentials is…. I would take a literature course because of the hope that it might provide some inherent value that would make me a better leader/thinker/etc. not to get me a job. And the credential in some weird way is almost an anti-pattern. Really (very ideally) the measure of a university program shouldn’t be the ability to get a job, but the ability to thrive once there, particularly for the liberal arts.

It makes me wonder, I love watching movies about conservative educational institutions. But I love watching them because they're a fantasy. I wonder if they were always a fantasy. Were universities better? Or was there just less competition. Will a harder english curriculum produce higher quality graduates? Or just filter out the lower quality graduates.
by estearum | 2025-08-07 12:35:51+00:00
Why would that change anything? Apple already got the exemptions it wanted. If Trump changes his mind and comes back, they just need to give him another shiny object and a headline.

The tariffs themselves obviously do not have the requisite durability to justify actual high scale capex. It would be quite literally stupid to invest much in US manufacturing just to get undercut in either 1) a few months when courts rule the entire endeavor unconstitutional or 2) a few years when Trump is out of office.
by ryoshu | 2025-08-07 12:35:51+00:00
With Gemini CLI I blow through Pro requests in < 10 minutes and it switches to Flash. I can't trust either to be autonomous. Pro will write unit tests, get a test to 100% coverage and then delete the test. Flash will get stuck in endless loops where it replaces a string in a file, doesn't realize the string has been replaced, and keep failing to recognize that fact getting stuck in a doom loop.

Glad I didn't add an API key. I've had friends who did and ended up with $xxx in charges because the models can't think or use tools properly.
by wink | 2025-08-07 12:35:54+00:00
I know I'm the complete majority here but I kinda don't go to cafes on my own - so the only chance I'm a customer at all (unless with company) is if I have to kill an hour waiting for something when I also have work to do.

It's unfortunate I have to completely stop going to some cafes with a no laptop policy for three times one hour per year.
by ffsm8 | 2025-08-07 12:36:02+00:00
Debouncing correctly is still super hard, even with rxjs.

There are always countless edge cases that behave incorrectly - it might not be important and can be ignored, but while the general idea of debouncing sounds easy - and adding it to an rxjs observable is indeed straightforward...

Actually getting the desired behavior done via rxjs gets complicated super fast if you're required to be correct/spec compliant
Show HN: Knowthemat.com a free site I vibe-coded to help you learn BJJ rules
by vcarrico | 2025-08-07 12:37:03+00:00
Hey HN,

Any fellow BJJ folks around? o/

So, last week I registered for my first BJJ competition, and while reading the IBJJF rulebook, I realized I’m not as familiar with it as I thought. So, I decided to “vibe-code” this app to generate quizzes based on different rulesets (IBJJF, ADCC, AJP).

It’s very simple: 1. You choose the ruleset (example: IBJJF) 2. Pick the topics you want to focus on (Points Scoring, Advantages) 3. Select the number of questions 4. That’s it — it gives you a quick quiz with multiple-choice questions pulled from the official rulebook.

If you try it out, I’d love to hear some honest opinions. Just letting me know if you find it useful.

Some technical details: * All the questions are pre-generated by AI, not created on the fly. I’ll probably keep adding more and maybe focus on situational type of questions. * I completely vibe-coded this using vscode and copilot in agent mode with Claude Sonnet 4. It’s impressive how fast it could prototype and make it grow until the point I was almost lost in my own project!

[]s
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-07 12:37:13+00:00
> have a shadow board member who gets to dictate company policy

This will happen sooner than you think if the US continues on its current path. Already Trump is asking for something similar for universities. He can use the same hammer for companies as well; deny them all government funding/contracts until they 'voluntarily' give in.

The 'c' word for this is not communism, but corruption. The special thing about corruption is that it can happen in any political 'ism'.
by marcodiego | 2025-08-07 12:37:26+00:00
> My Christian Catholic education made and still makes me think that everybody should have a mission that extends beyond their personal interests.

I remember this same guy complaining investments in the MPEG extortionist group would disappear because they couldn't fight against AV1.

He was part of a patent Mafia is is only lamenting he lost power.

Hypocrisy in its finest form.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-07 12:37:32+00:00
Conversations about processed, heavily processed, and ultra-processed foods always trigger people who recognize that it’s an imperfect measure. It should be interpreted as a heuristic, not a perfect 1D measure of a food’s healthiness.

As a heuristic it correlates quite well to many measures. The more someone’s diet falls on the ultra-processed end of the spectrum and the less they eat of unprocessed foods, the higher the rate of health problems.

A simple example of the effects of processing would be considering an apple: Eating a whole apple is the healthiest because you consume all of the fiber and the digestion process is slowed because you have to break it down. Crushing it into something like apple sauce preserves much of the structure but now it absorbs faster and it’s easier to overeat it before your body can recognize it’s full. Processing it further to apple juice removes the fiber and now makes it spike your blood sugar and it’s easy to consume a lot of sugar.

Ultra processed would take this even further, packaging it in a container with added sugar and some preservatives for shelf life. This is where it enters kids (and adults) diets, where it is far removed from the unprocessed Apple it started as.
by blibble | 2025-08-07 12:37:50+00:00
> If we give companies unending hype, near unlimited government and scientific resources, all of our personal data including thoughts and behavior patterns, how do we know their leaders will do what we want them to, and not try to subvert us and… take over the world? How do we know they stay on humanity’s side?

I've been saying this for a while

malevolent unaligned entities have already been deployed, in direct control of trillions of dollars of resources

they're called: Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sam Altman

"AI" simply increases the scale of the damage they can inflict, given they'll now need far fewer humans to be involved in enacting their will upon humanity
by p_l | 2025-08-07 12:37:53+00:00
Motorola 68k is a curious case because it originally was supposed to be a 16bit cpu, not 32bit, and the 24bit addressing that ignored upper 8 bits didn't help the perception.

Ultimately, 68k being "16bit" is a marketing thing from home computers that upgraded from 8bit 6502 and the like to m68k but didn't use it fully.
by jvanderbot | 2025-08-07 12:38:22+00:00
Are you just casually handwaving away sending a dockable resupply ship at 0.01c to somewhere in interstellar space, then doing some kind of rendesvous with it at 0.01c with a spaceship measured kilometers in length?

There's no free lunch. Every gram of mass that you want to get to interstellar space requires exactly as much fuel to get there as you'd have to add to the original spacecraft to just carry it.

(thought experiment - have them fly side by side, then connect them by string, then shorten the string until they touch, then weld them together - the fuel required doesn't change at any point).

And a shield + a resupply ship has a lot more grams than just adding the shield to the original thing.
by aredox | 2025-08-07 12:38:24+00:00
>Has anyone really been saying that we're going to replace doctors or teachers?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/30/microsoft...

https://people.com/bill-gates-ai-will-replace-doctors-teache...

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/goo...

Artificial Intelligence still can't beat natural idiocy...
by thinkingQueen | 2025-08-07 12:38:38+00:00
It’s a bit like developing an F1 car. Or a cutting edge airplane. Lots of small optimizations that have to work together. Sometimes big new ideas emerge but those are rare.

Until the new codec comes to together all those small optimizations aren’t really worth much, so it’s a long term research project with potentially zero return on investement.

And yes, most of the small optimizations are patented, something that I’ve come to understand isnt’t viewed very favorably by most.
by m4rtink | 2025-08-07 12:38:39+00:00
Should be doable with beamed propulsion. Basically give each package a lightsail & you can have it maneuver when illuminated by laser arrays either in the home system or on the interstellar craft itself.

The beauty of this setup is that if you are really good at keeping the schedule, this can be all pre-computed. With time slots being allocated beforehand when the laser arrays send beams in a given direction & the packages (or the craft itself) just making really sure they stay in the beam & properly oriented when it arrives at the planed place and time.
by AlexandrB | 2025-08-07 12:39:00+00:00
This attitude has got to stop. Is it not enough that there's no customer service and it's almost impossible to sue these companies thanks to arbitration clauses? Now they need to have control over our computing to keep themselves safe? And how many recorded incidents of losing an account because someone had their "password in a text file" are even out there? The most common scenarios one hears about are either phishing or social engineering.
by fragmede | 2025-08-07 12:39:12+00:00
Fundamentally the bottleneck is on data and compute. If we accept as a given that a) some LLM is bad at writing eg rust code because there's much less of it on the Internet compared to say react js code but that b) the LLM is able to generate valid rust code and c) the LLM is able to "tool use"the rust compiler and a runtime to validate the rust it generates, and iterate until the code is valid, and finally d) use that generated rust code to train on, then it seems that barring any algorithmic improvements in training, that the additional data should allow later versions of the LLM to be better at writing rust code. If you don't hold a-d to be possible then sure, maybe it's just AI CEOs talking their book.

The other fundamental bottleneck is compute. Moore's law hasn't gone away, so if the LLM was GPT-3, and used 1 supercomputer's worth of compute for 3 months back in 2022, and the supercomputer used for training is, say, three times more powerful (3x faster CPU and 3x the RAM), then training on a latest generation supercomputer should lead to a more powerful LLM simply by virtue of scaling that up and no algorithmic changes. The exact nature of the improvement isn't easily back of the envelope calculatable, but even with a laymen's understanding of how these things work, that doesn't seem like an unreasonable assumption on how things will go, and not "AI CEOs talking their book". Simply running with a bigger context window should allow the LLM to be more useful.

Finally though, why do you assume that, absent papers up on arvix, that there haven't and won't be any algorithmic improvements to training and inference? We've already seen how allowing the LLM to take longer to process the input (eg "ultrathink" to Claude) allows for better results. It seems unlikely that all possible algorithmic improvements have already been discovered and implemented. Just because OpenAI et Al aren't writing academic papers to share their discovery with the world and are, instead, preferring to keep that improvement private and proprietary, in order to try and gain a competitive edge in a very competitive business seems like a far more reasonable assumption. With literal billions of dollars on the line, would you spend your time writing a paper, or would you try and outcompete your competitors? If simply giving the LLM longer to process the input before user facing output is returned, what other algorithmic improvements on the inference side on a bigger supercomputer with more ram available to it are possible? Deepseek seems to say there's a ton of optimization still as of yet to be done.

Happy to hear opposing points of view, but I don't think any of the things I've theorized here to be totally inconceivable. Of course there's a discussion to be had about diminishing returns, but we'd need a far deeper understanding is the state of the art on all three facets I raised in order to have an in depth and practical discussion on the subject. (Which tbc I'm open to hearing, though the comments section on HN is probably not the platform to gain said deeper understanding of the subject at hand).
by SeanDav | 2025-08-07 12:39:55+00:00
What the article seems to have glossed over is this:

>>> A court ordered eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological evaluation and 20 days at an alternative school for the girl.

If one assumes that the court did take into consideration context and age, it appears to largely validate the follow up decision once flagged. (I don't agree with lack of parental contact, to be clear.)
by quantified | 2025-08-07 12:40:11+00:00
> Tech giants are using a vast storehouse of capital to build out data centers to power AI, a 12-figure capital expenditure that is propping up the U.S. economy almost by itself.

Uhhhhh, no. It's propping up Wall Street by itself. That flow of spending does not recirculate particularly to other manufacturing, shipping, agriculture, health care delivery, or most other sectors.

Godzilla became sympathetic once Mothra (or Ghidra, or the Smog Monster, or others showed up). That's where the simile fails.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-08-07 12:40:12+00:00
> We say some stupid things as kids, because they're just words and we're missing greater context at that age.

I think the problem is that people send kids to public schools and just hope for the best. Imagine you have a brand new child, and you send it to school, and the child ends up saying something offensive, is this the child's fault? I think not. The child was trained on harmful data, it's not surprised the child exhibited undesirable behaviours.
by em-bee | 2025-08-07 12:40:13+00:00
Speaking of SSH, Tailscale has special support for it whereby it handles any incoming connection to port 22 from the Tailscale network, and deals with authentication itself. No public keys or passwords: if you’re logged into Tailscale you can be logged into the machine. This is particularly handy when you SSH from a phone, as proper credential management is a bit of a nightmare there.

this has me worried. i would not want that. i use zerotier, not tailscale, but the principle is the same. i have my laptops and my phone connected to my servers. given that all of those machines are already on the internet, connecting them into a virtual network does not add any risk in my opinion. (at least as long as you don't use features like the above). all i get is a known ip address for all my devices, with the ability to connect to them if they have an ssh server running. when i am outside the primary benefit is that i can tell which devices are online.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-07 12:40:14+00:00
"can't really blame the school for jumping to conclusions"

Of course you can blame the school. They were too lazy to look at context and determine if the threat was real and credible. They took the determination of a complex tool as an unquestionable fact. The system supplies the fact that the user's account made the comment. All other facts need to be made by investigation. This statement provides a reasonable suspicion to investigate, but should not exhibit probable cause for an arrest as it requires a threat be credible, incite panick, etc per the specific terrorist threat law. This requires investigation and thought.
by scotty79 | 2025-08-07 12:40:44+00:00
> 13-year-old girl

> When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s.”

> Taken to jail, the teen was interrogated and strip-searched, and her parents weren’t allowed to talk to her until the next day,

> She didn’t know why her parents weren’t there.

> A court ordered eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological evaluation and 20 days at an alternative school for the girl.

Wow, 2025 is wild. Police and court should have psychological evaluation instead and maybe some time off without pay to cool off. Protecting children, no matter how many of them they have to traumatize and incarcerate.