MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by immibis | 2025-08-30 09:02:02+00:00
It's still a thing. The US thinks it's hot shit, wants banks all over the world to comply with extra requirements for US citizens, which no other country does. Banks don't want to deal with it. Ordinarily they'd just ignore stupid requirements coming from stupid countries like China, but when it's the US they don't want to be sanctioned.

Thankfully, the US is now trying to delete its special position so we may soon be in the situation where stupid requests from the US are treated the same as stupid requests from Russia.
by pydry | 2025-08-30 09:02:34+00:00
>People need to start getting specific about their grievances

No, people need to start understanding the root causes of their problems.

History is replete with examples of rapacious elites trying to take peasant pitchforks and redirecting them.

>For Americans the big ones are: a health problem can destroy your life

Which is a problem because that destruction of your life is immensely profitable.

Which is a problem that wont be fixed while American government is plutocratically run.

Which is a problem that wont be fixed until wealth inequality is.
Ask HN: How to Connect Without APIs?
by Jeff9James | 2025-08-30 09:02:42+00:00
OK so I am building a general AI agent similar to manus.im and genspark.ai or saner.ai.

I want to add Integrations like GMAIL, NOTION, CALENDAR, GITHUB, YOUTUBE, Twitter, Reddit, Google Workspace, Microsoft Workspace,

—almost 2K Integrations.

This would be almost impossible through APIs, as a solo dev.

Anyone got a solution?

(Looking for FREE or Cheap or Pay-As-You-Go solutions)
by Rotundo | 2025-08-30 09:03:17+00:00
I'm not tired of AI itself.

What does get old is the barrage of hyped-up projects that are a veneer-thin layer over an existing AI of one of the big players. Everybody is rushing to get something, anything out there. Nothing of value, but the hype, oh man, it's insane.

This is blockchain all over again. In the end there will be a few useful applications for AI, but at the moment it is the wild west in attention grabbing.
by jbreckmckye | 2025-08-30 09:03:29+00:00
I think you're accidentally conducting a motte and bailey fallacy here.

It's making an ambitious risky claim (make things simpler than you think they need to be) then retreating on pushback to a much safer claim (the all-encompassing "simplest thing possible")

The statement ultimately becomes meaningless because any interrogation can get waved away with "well I didn't mean as simple as that."

But nobody ever thinks their solution is more complex than necessary. The hard part is deciding what is necessary, not whether we should be complex.
by mna_ | 2025-08-30 09:05:23+00:00
This year wasn't bad at all. I live in London and we had 1 week of 29-31C weather during which internal temps were around 27-28C. Then the "heatwave" passed and internal temps went down to around 24-25C. The obsession Americans have with Europe embracing AC is strange. Do they want to sell us AC units? Is that why? Is this a business opportunity that they're trying to push?
by frognumber | 2025-08-30 09:05:57+00:00
John describes exactly what I'd like someone to build:

"To make something really different, and not get drawn into the gravity well of existing solutions, you practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers."

As a thought experiment:

* Pick a place where cost-of-living is $200/month

* Set up a village which is very livable. Fresh air. Healthy food. Good schools. More-or-less for the cost that someone rich can sponsor without too much sweat.

* Drop a load of computers with little to no software, and little to no internet

* Try reinventing the computing universe from scratch.

Patience is the key. It'd take decades.
by ath92 | 2025-08-30 09:06:35+00:00
Interestingly Shannon did write about entropy relating to the English language, and how given a sequence of tokens, the next token can be predicted using the probabilities of finding that token after a certain sequence in other bodies of text: http://medientheorie.com/doc/shannon_redundancy.pdf

This is from 1950. I wonder what he would have to say about today’s LLMs.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-30 09:07:32+00:00
I think there's a natural rhythm to complexity. After a tech crash, everyone abandons what are generally regarded as best practices, and just writes scrappy code, I.E. the "simplest thing". Then, there's a backlash against it, and consultants make a lot of money teaching people how to avoid "code smells". Then a bubble forms and code quality stops mattering much relative to marketing and sales effectiveness.
by troupo | 2025-08-30 09:09:08+00:00
> You can't just test every possible set of rules and object that you want to check, even though this is, of course, all that matters.

If it matters, why can't you check? Will your product/app/system not run into these possible sets eventually?

> So ultimately we write tests at a lower level to deal with the combinatorial explosion of possible inputs at the edge.

Don't you have to write the combinatorial explosion of inputs for the unit tests, too, to test "every possible combination"? If not, and you're only testing a subset, then why not test the whole flow while you're at it?
by znkr | 2025-08-30 09:09:11+00:00
> Even if something does align better with real numbers, it's still just x+0i

Beware, it’s not always useful to work in complex numbers, you sometimes want to do something different for reals and complex numbers. The prime example here is complex analysis. Defining differentiation is based on limits, on the complex plane there are a lot more directions to approach a limit vs just two on the real line. This has some interesting implications. For example, any function differentiable on the complex plane is infinitely differentiable.
by nils-m-holm | 2025-08-30 09:09:32+00:00
LISP in Small Pieces discusses very sophisticated techniques, while LISP From Nothing is more about the quirks and implementations of early LISP. Of course you can write a modern LISP based on the things covered in LFN, but if you are planning to write more than a toy, then Queinnec's book is the one to read.
by arcfour | 2025-08-30 09:10:34+00:00
Same here! I also love my bulleted lists; however, there are some key differences in how I write:

- *Less formatting*: I don't start every bullet point with bold text

- *Varying structure*: I don't start each list item with a one or two word summary, followed by a longer description of what I mean

- *Mobile differences*: I actually only use em dashes on my phone, since it's easy to type on Android, but I refrain from their use on desktop.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-30 09:10:48+00:00
That's genuinely exactly how it works. There are companies that provide that offloading-as-a-service who make good money on this concept and the grid isn't anywhere near falling over. Your 'grid melting' comment upthread is nonsense. Nothing is melting.

Melting would imply that currents exceed rated capacity of the lines that is entirely impossible due to how the grid is set up. What does happen is that loads that are otherwise not economical to run get turned on and that sources that are remote controllable (which is all wind installations > 2 MW and all solar farms > 10 KW except for residential) are switched off. This is a fascinating subject and worth some study, the thing you want to read up on is called grid balancing.

Typically the day-ahead and the 15 minute ahead markets take care of this with pricing alone and there have been no meaningful excursions due to overproduction of renewables, that's just FUD and it does not contribute to the discussion.

What you could argue if you had read up on this is that there are market operators that do both sides of the market, which sets you up for an Enron like situation because they can make money by front-running. After all, they have a little bit of time between the moment where they know what they're going to do and the moment when they actually do it. Market makers that are also traders is always a dangerous combination and this has already led to some trouble, especially early on in the energy balancing market process. Now it is much better.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-30 09:10:54+00:00
If it's even a rumor then I started it, I just can't imagine Fuchsia serves any other purpose. I don't even usually give Google a lot of credit, but I just can't imagine they made something this useless and misunderstood the feasibility of such an OS this badly. It would be like Hewlett-Packard in the early 2000s levels of incompetence.
by oytis | 2025-08-30 09:12:42+00:00
There aren't universally good teachers. A teacher who can help a good student achieve exceptional results will not necessarily be good at making sure an unmotivated student gets a bare minimum and vice versa.

Unmotivated students need predefined structure, repetition, simplification and gamification. Talented ones need discussing first principles, being challenged, working at the edge of knowledge
Show HN: Invitor – friends for coffee/bars/movies via a city feed (not dating)
by Invitor_app | 2025-08-30 09:13:12+00:00
We’re testing Invitor, a feed-first way to find company for local leisure (coffee, bars, concerts, movies, city walks). Post in seconds, browse a city activity feed, coordinate in group chats. For convenience, there is a map to see who is looking for a company nearby. Not a dating app. Would you use this? Thank you!
by vasco | 2025-08-30 09:13:51+00:00
Consider this, everyone at whichever skill level they're at, benefits from applying simplicity to their designs. Also, everyone at any skill level will have a tendency to think the work they are doing is actually deep enough to require the complexity when it reaches the border of their intelligence.

I dont know if you only have genius friends but I can tell you many stories of things people thought warranted complexity that I thought didn't. So whatever you consider hard enough to warrant complexity, just know there's another smarter guy than you thinking you're spinning your wheels.

Also it's an impossible conversation to have without specific examples. Anyone can come and make a handwavy case about always simplifying and someone can make a case about necessary complexity but without specific example none can be proven wrong.
by troupo | 2025-08-30 09:14:35+00:00
> This I/O might be crafted in ways that never trigger a failure scenario or expose a bug within the lower-level components.

You mean just like unit tests where every useful interaction between units is mocked out of existence?

> Furthermore, the fact that, by their nature, integration and E2E tests are often more expensive to setup and run, there will be fewer of them

And that's the main issue: people pretend that only unit tests matter, and as a result all other forms of testing are an afterthought. Every test harness and library is geared towards unit testing, and unit testing only.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-30 09:15:24+00:00
I am a little bit worried, for sure. But I think that's small extra risk on my side, for small extra gain for me personally, but large extra gain for the wider group I belong to (ultimately - all of humanity) in the sense of working towards ameliorating the "tragedy of the commons".

On the personal side. Given the LLM-s have not got the ground truth, everything is controlled hallucination, then - if the LLM tells you an imperfect version of my email or chat, you can never be sure if what the LLM told you is true, or not. So maybe you don't gain that much extra knowledge about me. For example, you can reasonably guess I'm typing this on the computer, and having coffee too. So if you ask the LLM "tell me a trivial story", and LLM comes back with "one morning, LJ was typing HN replies on the computer while having his morning coffee" - did you learn that much new about me, that you didn't know or could guess before?

On the "tragedy of the commons" side. We all benefit immensely from other people sharing their data, even very personal data. Any drug discovery, testing, approval - relies on many people allowing their data to be shared. Wider context - living in a group of people, involves radiating data outwards, and using data other people emit towards myself (and others), to have a functioning society. The more advanced the society, the more coordination it needs to achieve the right cooperation-competition balance in the interactions between ever greater numbers of people.

I think it's bad for me personally, and for everyone, that the "data privacy maximalists" had their desires codified in UK laws. My personal experience in the UK medical systems has been that the laws made my life worse, not better. Wrote here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066321
by KaiserPro | 2025-08-30 09:15:34+00:00
I think the issue is, Carmack didn't talk like a "normal" facebook engineer.

Supposedly you were meant to have you disagreements in private, and come to support what ever was decided. "hold your opinions lightly" The latest version of it was something like "disagree and commit".

This meant that you got a shit tonne of group think.

This pissed off Carmack no end, because it meant shitty decisions were let out the door. He kept on banging on about "time to fun". This meant that any feature that got in the way of starting a game up as fast a possible, would get a public rebuke. (rightly so)

People would reply with "but the metric we are trying to move is x,y & z" which invariably would be some sub-team PSC (read promotion/bonus/not getting fired system) optimisation. Carmack would basically say that the update was bad, and they should feel bad. This didn't go down well, because up until 2024 one did not speak negatively about anything on workplace. (Once carmack reported a bug to do with head tracking[from what I recall] there was lots of backwards and forwards, with the conclusion that "won't fix, dont have enough resources". Carmack replied with a diff he'd made fixing the issue.)

Basically Carmack was all about the experience, and Facebook was all about shipping features. This meant that areas of "priority" would scale up staffing. Leaders distrusted games engineers("oh they don't pass our technical interviews"), so pulled in generalists with little to no experience of 3D.

This translated in small teams that produced passable features growing 10x in 6 months and then producing shit. But because they'd grown so much, they constantly re-orged pushed out the only 3d experts they had, they could then never deliver. But as it was a priority, they couldn’t back down

This happened to:

Horizons (the original roblox clone)

video conferencing in oculus

Horizons (the shared experience thing, as in all watching a live broadcast together)

Both those horizons (I can't remember what the original names were) Were merged into horizons world, along with the video conferencing for workplace

originally each team was like 10, by the time that I left, it was something like a thousand or more. With the original engineers either having left or moved on to something more productive.

tldr: Facebook didn't take to central direction setting, ie before we release product x, all its features must work, be integrated with each other, and have a obvious flow/narrative that links them together. Carmack wanted a good product, facebook just wanted to iterate shit out the door to see what stuck.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-30 09:15:34+00:00
For datasheets that's normal. Might even be leaning towards smaller than average for the device in question.

For comparison, a data sheet for a single transistor can be around 12 to 30 pages. A data sheet for a tiny microcontroller is probably a few hundred pages.

I once wrote a driver for a flash chip and that had a data sheet of around 80 pages.
by kemyd | 2025-08-30 09:16:43+00:00
Hey! The components you’re seeing come from the libraries included in our tool. Each UI library typically has around 10 variations of a feature in a coherent style, such as hero sections or pricing, but with different UX. If you want to explore more, you can use CMD+F to quickly search for sets by name (try searching 'Zospace' as an example). This way, you’ll uncover more options to work with.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-30 09:17:17+00:00
'Too much electricity in the grid' is a wrong way of expressing it, just like you can't have 'too much fluid in a pipe'. What happens is that the line voltage creeps up because loads are lagging further behind compared to generation.

And like you wrote, that's controlled. Agreed with the rest of your comment, especially the bit that pricing is mostly controlled by the worst parties, not by the best. What we are simply finding out is that a grid designed mostly for baseline loads needs fast response generation (for instance: half of the UK putting their kettle on during half time requires so much extra power that pumped storage becomes a good alternative). And conversely, that if you change the mix considerably that you're going to have to have more control over the cumulative effect of many smaller generators.

But there are already standards for dealing with that even absent remote control of resources: as soon as the local grid voltage that the inverters in modern wind and solar plants see exceeds a very specific maximum for a proscribed period of time they fully autonomously back off their capacity until they are well below those maximums again, and then slowly ramp up to avoid causing grid instability due to oscillation.

What grid balancing is all about is to make this all financially optimal, it has relatively little to do with the safety of the grid, it is simply a way to extract maximum capacity without affecting that safety. A coarser mechanism would simply incur some more waste, but given the amounts of money involved it pays off to tune this.
by KaiserPro | 2025-08-30 09:18:39+00:00
> This is Meta. Let the kids build their operating system ffs.

the problem was, it was holding back products. Because if youre going to make your own OS, it changes what chips you put in. If you don't know what chipset you're going to have, you don;t know what your pixel budget is, you can't plan features.

It takes about 2 years to get hardware out the door, and another 1.5 years to iron out the bugs and get a "finished" product.
by xelxebar | 2025-08-30 09:18:59+00:00
> I think this works in simple domains.

Business incentives are aligned around incremental delivery, not around efficient encoding of the target domain. The latter generally requires deep architectural iteration, meaning multiple complete system overhauls and/or rewrites, which by now are even vilified as a trope.

Mostly, though, I think there is just availability bias here. The simple, solid systems operating at scale and handled by a 3-person team are hard to notice over the noise that naturally arises from a 1,000-person suborganization churning on the same problem. Naturally, more devs will only experience the latter, and due to network effects, funding is also easier to come by.
by Ygg2 | 2025-08-30 09:19:18+00:00
I mean it doesn't seem to be a really well designed or effective influence campaign.

If sowing division is the goal of KGB, they don't need to do anything. Americans are way better and have been way longer in that game. Honestly just pretending to give people money would be most cost effective.

If getting to own/buy Trump is the goal, they fucked up in that department. Ukraine is still getting support. China and India are getting tariffs, etc.
Show HN: Insane new search engine just for SHOPPING
by debrajpal | 2025-08-30 09:22:12+00:00
Hi Guys - can you please try my product out - theminarnet.com

We have an insane new search for shopping - search for a product - we instantly search across multiple places and platforms and sites for the product and give it to you

Helps in price comparison, features and specs comparison, helps you discover new sites which are pretty great, and more. Essentially much better decision making through this.

Please do give it a try - let me know what you think. Currently gives products only in India - going global soon hopefully.
by kripy | 2025-08-30 09:22:47+00:00
Ever wonder much the meeting is costing? The clock is ticking. Head hours around the room. Wonder no more.

Introducing Meet Calc.

"Can everyone see my screen?", "You're on mute.", "Sorry, I was on mute.", "Let's circle back on that.", "I'll send a follow-up email.", "We're running over.", "Quick question...", "Let's take this offline.", "Can you repeat that?", "Sorry, you cut out.", "I have a hard stop at...", "Let's park that for now.", "Who's taking notes?", "Can we get five minutes back?", "I think we lost Esk.", "Before we wrap up...", "Action items?"

Select the number of participants, drop in the individual hourly rates, and hit Start meeting. Then start sweating.

You're welcome.
Show HN: Yet another Minecraft server written in Rust
by TheTxT | 2025-08-30 09:23:00+00:00
Hello HN!

For the past year I've been working on Oxide, a Minecraft server written from scratch in Rust.

Currently supported features include:

- Multiple players with basic interactions (see item in hand or armor and their position) - Chat (without encryption) and some basic commands - Placing and breaking blocks (very few block state rules implemented) - Loading and saving vanilla worlds - Creative mode

You can try it out by just joining play.oxide.thetxt.io with a Java 1.21.8 Client. You don't need an account, because I haven't implemented online mode login yet ;) The server restarts at the beginning of every hour, so in case you can't connect because it crashed, you can just try again later.

You can also spin up your own with docker, see my example docker-compose.yml[1]

Because this is supposed to be a learning opportunity, I have opted to use as few external dependencies or LLM help as possible. At the moment, the only crate I depend on is flate2 for compression/decompression and jzon in my tooling.

I'm also making videos about the progress and how different features work and are implemented.[2] My favorite so far is about how Minecraft stores worlds to disk.[3]

While I'm of course not the first one to make a Minecraft server in Rust[4], its still been a great learning opportunity! I look forward to implementing more features, like block entities, entities, multiple dimensions and online mode.

I also just released the first version 0.1 a couple of days ago. Of course I also made a video about that[5], which I also adapted into a blog post[6]. In there I explain more about what this project is.

[1] https://git.thetxt.io/thetxt/oxide/raw/branch/main/docker-compose.yml [2] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLht_DnAZ_Av4UZwQGhz7aNDMH9pfI0ein [3] https://youtu.be/P3SBNN_b7-Q [4] https://dayssincelastrustmcserver.com/ [5] https://youtu.be/z4tAE1xLB3o [6] https://thetxt.io/blog/2025-08-29-releasing-oxide
by Invitor_app | 2025-08-30 09:23:47+00:00
Hi HN! Thanks for taking a look at Invitor. An invitations feed from nearby people looking for company for everyday leisure (coffee, bars, concerts, movies, city walks), not dating.

What to try (2 minutes):

Open the app and browse the invitations feed for your city.

Join an invite or post a quick one (“Walk in the park?”, “Who’s up for a movie?”).

Coordinate details in the built-in group chat.

Optional: switch to the map if you want to see what’s nearby.

Questions we’d love your honest take on:

Would you use this? Why/why not?

Did you download it (iOS/Android)? Any install or sign-in friction?

First run: was it clear what to do next? Time to first join/post?

What’s missing for you (e.g., distance controls, RSVP caps, trust signals, moderation tools)?

Any trust/safety or “this feels awkward” concerns?

Bugs, slow parts, or empty-city experience?

service@invitor.com Website: https://invitor.com

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/invitor-meet-friends-nearby/id...

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.invitor.cl...

Privacy: https://invitor.com/privacy