MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Thank you HN: Your democracy discussion shaped our building
by ff12wq111 | 2025-08-02 12:52:17+00:00
Yesterday's discussion about democracy in online tech communities was absolutely brilliant. The depth of insights from this community never ceases to amaze me.

Special thanks to PaulHoule for the theoretical framework connecting Habermas's deliberative processes to modern electronic communications. Your point about the tension between early adopter quality and scalability is exactly what we're wrestling with.

To orionblastar for championing Aaron Swartz's vision of truly free information and transparent governance. Your reminder that "moderation compromises the ideal of true democracy and free speech" resonates deeply.

To ethan_smith for introducing Discourse's trust levels as a practical example, conception for the crucial insight about community attrition, and zeroCalories for sharing that Discord democracy experiment failure case.

Every comment influenced how we think about these challenges. The consensus was clear: developers are hungry for better community governance, but the problems are complex and real.

Thank you for proving that authentic intellectual discourse still exists on the internet. This is why HN remains special.
by kacesensitive | 2025-08-02 12:53:39+00:00
Ivermectin has a surprisingly interesting origin, it was discovered in soil near a Japanese golf course and developed from a bacterium that kills parasites. It went on to treat diseases like river blindness and became widely used in both human and veterinary medicine. Despite all that, it’s definitely not some miracle drug or cure-all like some would have you believe. Though that didn’t stop my grandpa from stockpiling it after watching too many Fox News ads.
by Zambyte | 2025-08-02 12:53:44+00:00
Locking the helmet to the scooter with a cable definitely sounds like an interesting option! I'll have to look more into that. Unfortunately I can't store gear under the seat on my scooter because it is a standing scooter :D

I'm actually not too worried about the scooter itself being stolen - I have two kryptonite locks, one of which includes an insurance policy covering the vehicle from theft if it is taken by cutting the lock. Also for long term storage (like in the bike room at my apt) I remove the battery, which I believe is another layer of theft deterrence.
by AdrianB1 | 2025-08-02 12:55:06+00:00
This is one of the few articles where F9 makes statements not supported by any science or experiments. Cow hides are strong, but they were not built for the purpose of protecting people from road rash. I had slides on asphalt at 60 km/h in textile suits (Klim) and I am still wearing that suit as a secondary one, it got stitched back and partly cleaned and it is just fine, it just has the scars to tell the stories. In 20 years on bikes the only leather items I bought are gloves and boots; this is because this is the only option (not talking about MX/enduro boots that are mostly plastic). Never had a problem with textile equipment and never felt the need for leather. Modern Cordura and kevlar layers are fine.
by DougHaber | 2025-08-02 12:55:06+00:00
Years ago, I made one of these at an hackathon style event for developing HTML5 gamedev tools. I didn't know much about audio programming at the time, so I read descriptions of what parameters were and then wrote code that I thought would work similarly. I got enough wrong where the end results sound a bit different than other tools, occasionally in a good way.

This predates the WebAudio API, and so it builds data URLs as WAVs instead. Every sound can be represented as a short string, and the tool can be used as a library that procedurally generates the sounds from the strings. It also has a "song mode" where notes can be provided to guide the sound, which makes certain types of more complicated sounds possible to make, including jingles and short songs.

It's definitely dated now, but if anyone is interested, you can find it here

https://www.leshylabs.com/apps/sfMaker/

See the "Example Sounds" at the bottom of the page to hear what it can do.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-02 12:55:22+00:00
You have that backwards. WinRT is the managed languages runtime for Windows, introduced in Win8. Its sort of the replacement for COM/OLE but also defines the ABI dialect in a way that allows managed languages to call unmanaged code without an FFI penalty.

UWP is built on WinRT, and acts as a fully managed app container, similarly to how phone apps exist on your phone. It allows WinRT apps to be deployed to any Microsoft platform, Windows, XBox, Windows Phone, etc, but also Android and iOS, and also as PWA, and are guaranteed to run identically on any of those platforms. UWP apps must be written a fully managed language that runs on the CLR (ex: C# runs on the CLR, but C++/WinRT does not). UWP also uses the second generation of WinUI-family XAML UIs, which means all UWP apps use completely native UIs, instead of slow non-native Javascript shit in a web canvas.

The WinUI family of XAML UIs started with WPF, and a slightly incompatible version of it also appeared in Silverlight (WPF = WinUI 1.0), then was brought to UWP (= WinUI 2.0), and is now its own stand alone thing that any app can use, managed or not, as 3.0.

WinRT is not an attempt to move beyond .NET, instead it is their way of allowing .NET to natively call code, and make .NET languages first class in Windows.
by ndiddy | 2025-08-02 12:55:43+00:00
Out of curiosity, where are you located where large companies are desperately trying to snap up every available Rust developer? Everywhere I've looked, the few Rust job postings I've seen have mainly been from cryptocurrency startups. All of the non-crypto Rust job postings I've seen are from companies trying to get experts in a particular niche. Must have 8 years of Linux kernel development experience plus 3 years of Rust experience, must have 5 years of network driver development experience plus 4 years of Rust experience, that sort of thing. Even including crypto startups, I see far more C++ jobs than Rust jobs.
by kjellsbells | 2025-08-02 12:55:48+00:00
There used to be a phrase in UK politics: "Something Must Be Done", expressing the incredible momentum to be seen to be doing something for noisy constituents...and not worrying too much if it fixes the problem or not.

Technological solutions against humans' sex drives seem to be doomed to failure. For one we're largely talking about teenagers who are infamously horny and tech savvy, but even if we weren't, one glance at the history of MPs utterly failing to keep their trousers on (even when they know the stakes for being discovered arr ludicrously high) would put paid to that idea that people won't do stupid things for their libido.

However...porn does damage young minds. It does move the overton window to dangerous places (witness the rise in nonconsensual sexual choking, for example). Coupled with a generalized incapacity (or sense of hopelessness in the face of 24x7 algorithms?) for parents to keep their kids away from this stuff, what should be done? For Something Must Be Done.
by thrance | 2025-08-02 12:55:56+00:00
Heh, take a look at her paper [0]. It is much more complex that TFA makes it out to be: once you have the intuition you need to prove it actually disproves the theorem.

Also, it's probably a not very well known conjecture that people wouldn't care too much about. Also also, it was a conjecture: people were probably looking to prove it rather that disprove it, failing and then giving up.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06137
by HomeCloud | 2025-08-02 12:56:12+00:00
HomeCloud | Senior React Developer; Senior Cloud Engineer (AWS/Node/TS) | Remote (US & EU, UTC−6 to UTC+2) | Full-Time (Contractor)

HomeCloud is a prop-tech startup rethinking home inspections, onboarding, and management with cloud-native systems and AI. Seed stage ($3.5M) and growing.

--------------------------------------------------

Senior React Developer

- Work: Ship AI-powered homeowner workflows and data-heavy UIs; complex data fetching; performance tuning; collaborate closely with product/CTO.

- Stack: React 18+, TypeScript, TanStack Query, Jotai/Context, component systems/design systems (Radix UI, styled-components).

- You: 7+ years in React; strong with hooks, state management, and performance; comfortable integrating LLM/AI features.

Apply: https://app.dover.com/apply/HomeCloud/48792b6e-cecd-45ee-a3e...

--------------------------------------------------

Senior Cloud Engineer (AWS / Node.js / TypeScript)

- Work: Design/build event-driven services on AWS; own reliability/observability; integrate AI services (OpenAI, Bedrock).

- Stack: AWS Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge, DynamoDB, API Gateway, DDD, Serverless & EDA patterns.

- You: 5+ years building on AWS serverless; fluent in Node.js + TypeScript; pragmatic builder who values ownership.

Apply: https://app.dover.com/apply/HomeCloud/24919848-66d7-48c0-bf5...

--------------------------------------------------

Why HomeCloud

- Small, senior team; high impact and ownership

- Remote-first; overlap with CET preferred

Learn more: https://gethomecloud.com/about-us
Show HN: Easily match your traffic sources to paying customers
by Lrodd | 2025-08-02 12:57:00+00:00
When I built my last startup, I got traffic from AI tool directories, news articles, Reddit, organic search, email, and more. But I could never tell which sources were actually driving conversions to paid users, or how valuable those users were in terms of LTV, churn, etc. It was a black box.

So I built a lightweight tool for SaaS founders to connect sources of traffic (from UTM/custom referral params) to Stripe revenue. This lets founders answer questions like:

- “What traffic sources drive revenue? Where should I double down?” - “Where do my most/least valuable users come from?”

It gives founders the signal they need to understand what marketing efforts actually work. I wanted to keep setup simple and geared towards solo founders/small teams that don't have the time or resources for complex data stacks. It involves:

- Adding a JS snippet to your site to capture UTM/referral data - Connecting your Stripe account - The tool matches Stripe customer emails to attribution data when revenue events occur

You get a dashboard showing traffic sources alongside revenue, LTV, churn, and weekly insights like:

- Spikes in churn for a specific channel - New traffic sources that are driving outsized revenue

A few challenges I ran into while building this:

1. Scope creep — There are so many analytics and insight use cases. It was tough to boil this down to a minimum version that still delivers value. I'm looking for feedback on how to evolve the dashboard and insights from here, but scoping a shippable MVP with value and holding myself to it was a real challenge.

2. Cold start problem — The product’s value is in attribution, but attribution data takes time to accumulate after embedding the JS snippet. As a PLG adherent, I couldn’t afford a long time-to-value, so I also built a minimal set of Stripe revenue metrics and insights that aren't available in Stripe's default dashboards. This gives users immediate value as soon as they connect Stripe.

I’m looking for SaaS founders who want more clarity on which marketing channels to lean into. If you'd like to be an early design partner as I build this out, please sign up and I’ll reach out directly: https://www.getboone.com/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=s...
by lorenzo1860 | 2025-08-02 12:57:08+00:00
Location: Innsbruck, Austria

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (EU, UK, Switzerland, Norway)

Technologies: Python, PyTorch, C/C++, Java, Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Transformers, LSTMs/CNNs, Reinforcement Learning, Docker, AWS, NixOS, LangChain, Spring Boot

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/cesipy/cv

Email: cesispam0815 (at) gmail (dot) com

github: https://github.com/cesipy/

Recent CS graduate (Sept 2025) with strong ML/AI background and practical experience. Bachelor thesis on alignment in multimodal transformers with dual-stream architecture (ViLBERT). Built legal research assistant with LLMs, cryptocurrency market analysis with autoencoders/LSTMs, distributed computer vision systems, and Deep Q-Learning Tetris AI from scratch. DevOps experience with infrastructure-as-code and monitoring systems. Passionate about deep learning theory and practical implementations.

Looking for ML Engineer, AI Research, DevOps, or Software Engineer roles with ML focus. Particularly interested in transitioning toward MLOps.
by so-cal-schemer | 2025-08-02 12:57:29+00:00
Hal Abelson

InfiniteHistoryProject MIT (2011)

https://youtu.be/r8k8o7zkA1o?t=2532

Abelson:

But Fano did say the key thing. So I talked about what you're doing is making a language and how you make languages to make languages. The technical term for that is an interpreter. So an interpreter is something that effectively takes the description of a language and lets the computer effectively speak that language. And Fano was very-- I mean he would say this in his lectures. I don't think any of the students got it. I didn't get it until like the third time through, where he sort of said the really, really key thing is that you build up complexity by constructing an interpreter. And again, that's the core idea of 6.001, said in a slightly different way.
by BSOhealth | 2025-08-02 12:57:57+00:00
These figures are for a very small number of potential people. This leaves out that frontier AI is being developed by an incredibly small number of extremely smart people who have migrated between big tech, frontier AI, and others.

Yes, the figures are nuts. But compare them to F1 or soccer salaries for top athletes. A single big name can drive billions in that context at least, and much more in the context of AI. $50M-$100M/year, particularly when some or most is stock, is rational.
by thrance | 2025-08-02 12:58:45+00:00
“There was this inescapable sameness, in a way. No matter what I did, I was in the same place doing mostly the same things,” she said. “I was very isolated, and nothing I could do could really change that. I’d wake up on certain days and realize, I’m just older.”

I don't think they're omitting it, but yeah. A lot of homeschooled kids don't fare nearly as well.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-02 12:59:16+00:00
Forgetting that C now has threading capabilities, and some of it can get exposed via ABI?

C89 was long time ago.

We are not talking about what gcc, clang do in their specific implementations, we are talking about C.

All those examples with compiler flags are exactly workarounds around the one true ABI that C doesn't actually have.
by breadwinner | 2025-08-02 12:59:28+00:00
You are right, SomeMethod().Fire() has the problem too. But typically you write

Employee e = SomeMethod(); e.Fire();

This does NOT have the same problem as var. When you use var you reduce the opportunities for the compiler to catch your bug. So the best practice is to explicitly state the type when possible. It makes the code more readable too.

What's more, Microsoft recommends using implicit typing for local variables only when the type of the variable is obvious from the right side of the assignment. See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/fundamentals...

But that's not what the community is doing, and some tools (JetBrains Rider) recommend using var whenever possible.
by bimals | 2025-08-02 12:59:35+00:00
Location: Berlin, Germany

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Inside Germany

Technologies: Python, FastAPI, Django, Typescript, Next.js, PostgreSQL, OpenAI SDK, AWS, Docker, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS

Résumé/CV: https://bimals.net/resume.pdf

Email: ibimalp@gmail.com

I am a Software Engineer with over three years of experience, proficient in AI-powered web applications development, passionate about creating optimized and scalable solutions. Recently completed my Masters and now looking for a full-time position where I can contribute to meaningful and innovative projects.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-02 13:00:16+00:00
Thank you for the voice or reason.

It's silly to say that EU is better jut because people don't see the government interfere with universities in the EU, when EU universities would never go against the central government to begin with, because that's where all their money comes from. Why would you bite the hand that feeds you?

Meanwhile universities like Harvard have so much private money they can publicly tell Trump to shove it. EU universities don't have this privilege so they exercise a degree of self censorship based on how the government tells them to dance.
by kevinventullo | 2025-08-02 13:00:39+00:00
I mean which hype cycle?

We talk about the dotcom bubble, in which there were of course growing pains in figuring out what makes a viable internet-based business, but at the end of the day that era did produce multiple trillion-dollar companies.

Then you have the crypto bubble which really seems to be shaping up to be a nothing burger.

As for today, I think LLM’s are already pretty clearly useful, and they seem to be getting more capable with each passing year. In principle, these models are just the core foundations, while a wide variety of applications are in the process of being fleshed out. I think the jury is still out on how disruptive and effective these applications will be, both from a business/PMF perspective, but also in terms of the raw capabilities.

So take something like Harvey AI. They just raised a round at a $5B valuation, despite having an annualized revenue of just $75M as of April. So is that overinflated? Well, the total Legal Services market has a valuation of about $1T, and given how much legal work is incredibly laborious reading, analyzing, and writing text, (things which LLM’s are already pretty good at), it doesn’t seem ridiculous on the face of it that a Legal-focused LLM product couldn’t add 0.5% worth of efficiencies/value.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-08-02 13:02:34+00:00
Sadly yes. And all the platforms are to blame. Microsoft and their 1000 half-working frameworks made writing a wrapper that was any better than wxWidgets impossible.

But also Apple "totally not deprecating" AppKit and pushing everyone to the mess that is SwiftUI, Gnome breaking backwards compatibility as a sport, and Qt messing around with QML, meant "native UI" became quicksand.

Even going HTML, CSS and JavaScript wouldn't be too bad if the browser engines provided by the OSes were any good, but it took Microsoft giving up and switching to rebranded Chromium as a browser for Windows to provide a usable one in WebView 2.

WebKitGTK is also terrible compared to the macOS version of WebKit, which hurts projects like Wails and Tauri. So everyone bundles a freaking copy of Chromium with their applications.

I should have studied mechanical engineering.
by davrosthedalek | 2025-08-02 13:03:11+00:00
Unfortunately, very true. I think Canada ranks last in the G7 on GDP-percentage science funding. Salaries seem to be OKish, maybe similar to Germany, but cost of living (mainly housing, food is comparable cheap) in Vancouver and Toronto is very high.

UK salaries are atrociously bad. Not sure about funding, but it doesn't seem to be great.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-02 13:03:22+00:00
They already do, though. The big UI refresh in Win10 is all XAML, and the new Win11 taskbar (the one we all hate) is now a totally normal XAML app.

WinUI 3's big changes (to get a 3.0 version number) is not with the XAML stack itself, but its new ability to be called by unmanaged apps as a normal UI toolkit, so it can finally be used by all apps. No more using Shell UI like we're writing Win 3.1 apps.

And yes, some stuff in Win11 still isn't WinUI, which is kind of annoying, but some of those dialogs hidden away in Windows are at least 20 years old, and probably would need to be entirely rewritten, not merely have their UI's updated.

Also, fun fact: The Win8/10 taskbar's code predates Avalon (the prototype/codename for WPF), and trying to change/fix it at all usually ended up breaking it. It's one of the few binaries on Windows that would not be recompiled to build a new release image in fear of breaking it. Rewriting the taskbar made sense, GETTING RID OF SMALL MODE DID NOT, GODDAMNIT MICROSOFT.
by InterviewFrog | 2025-08-02 13:04:16+00:00
Here is the uncomfortable truth. Only a small group of people are capable of operating at an elite level. The talent pool is extremely small and the companies want the absolute best.

It is the same thing in sports as well. There will only ever be one Michael Jordan one Lionel Messi one Tiger Woods one Magnus Carlsen. And they are paid a lot because they are worth it.

>> Meta seem to be spending so much so they don't later have to fight a war against an external Facebook-as-chatbot style competitor

Meta moved on from facebook a while back.It has been years since I last logged into facebook and hardly anybody I know actually post anything there. Its a relic of the past.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-08-02 13:05:08+00:00
I saw the ‘forgetting about money, moving on to other challenges’ thing happen about 30 years ago. A childhood friend sold his company for about 300 million (a billion in today’s dollar devaluation?). My friend and his wife continued to live in their same house. The only thing he did was to purchase eight houses for extended family members who didn’t own their own homes, he also got his daughter expensive horse back riding lessons and a horse, and he said he and his wife drank more expensive wine. He did continue to play “The Infinite Game” by staying in the tech industry - it seemed like he loved the game, the money was only to help other people in his life.
by byryan | 2025-08-02 13:05:22+00:00
I think it definitely has been like this for a long time now at least. The most obvious example that comes to mind is Facebook. They harvested millions of users data and used it for political manipulation (Cambridge Analytica) without users consent. I suppose now its more out in the open with the recent verdicts on allowing these companies to scrape the entirety of the web stealing millions of IP's to use for their models, among other things.
by pegasus | 2025-08-02 13:05:41+00:00
If we're going by anecdata, here's another data point: I subscribe to NYT and don't play any of their games. Yes, I read it for the articles but also, to a large degree, for the subscriber comments as well. Similarly to the reason I frequent Hacker News. And to stay up to date with what has been my home for a long time. And also NYT Cooking, though I only access that once in a blue moon.
by Enginerrrd | 2025-08-02 13:07:14+00:00
I think the AI is only as good as the person wrangling it a lot of the time. I think it's easy for really competent people to get an inflated sense of how good the AI is in the same way that a junior engineer is often only as good as the senior leading them along and feeding them small chunks of work. When led with great foresight, careful calibration, and frequent feedback and mentorship, a mediocre junior engineer can be made to look pretty good too. But take away the competent senior and youre left pretty lacking.

I've gotten some great results out of LLM's, but thats often because the prompt was well crafted, and numerous iterations were performed based on my expertise.

You couldn't get that out of the LLM without that person most of the time.