MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by exasperaited | 2025-08-01 15:28:33+00:00
> I've heard of MPs making (moronic) suggestions such as selling kitchen knives without the point on it. I've literally seen this advertised as a solution on the news.

As someone who is clumsy and easily distracted, I have such a kitchen knife. They are commonly available. It works absolutely fine and it has three times minimised an injury that would have been nasty because I am an easily-distracted tired old idiot.

The point of a knife is only needed in a handful of kitchen applications. Most knives do not need to be able to stab at all. Only cut.

And combined with rules on the sales of longer blades that do have a point, this idea could genuinely be part of reducing knife crime (especially among the very youngest).

Because it does reduce access to knives that would be useful for stabbing, and it reduces the severity of injuries caused by the youngest in knife crime incidents. Without meaningfully affecting the kitchen usefulness of most small blades at all.

If I go to a supermarket and buy a long enough knife with a point on it, in theory I am asked to prove my age (in practice they laugh at the idea that I might not be young enough). The same is true for many (not all) products on Amazon, in fact.

The knife without a point on it did not trigger age verification. Nor does a boxcutter type thing, in practice; only retractible blades that don't snap off are on the list, AFAIK. (And only flick-knife-type mechanisms are banned).

I anticipate being downvoted for simply writing about this, but harm reduction through knife sales controls is not something that just stupid MPs think: it is supported by expert opinion.

Knife crime in the UK is a problem. It is still not a problem as severe per-capita as it is elsewhere, but we are trying measures to dissuade it.

Behaviour modification is not always stupid or evil; cultures do it all the time.
by alganet | 2025-08-01 15:28:38+00:00
You're looking for "something to fight for", the discussion is just a way of doing that. Your a person that has a fight, you need to have it.

I'm not that, so I can't understand your argument. I don't need to have something to fight for to have meaning in life, to understand justice, to have feelings. I can do it without belonging to a group, or having an agenda.

In other words, I will not join your quest.
by SilasX | 2025-08-01 15:28:48+00:00
I often see the claim that it would be above board/legit/not a circumvention of employment laws if they ran a bidding system like that. But ... that's exactly how Sidecar worked (Uber competitor, shut down Dec 2014), and I never saw anyone distinguish them from Uber in their criticisms (until people forgot that model existed).
by svantana | 2025-08-01 15:28:49+00:00
> get everyone on the planet to subscribe to their $200/month plan

Not necessarily. Google is valued 7x that and most people don't pay them anything. They just make ridiculous money from ads for insurance and loans. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is the #1 app and the #5 website, which should really worry google (and it does by all accounts).
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-01 15:28:49+00:00
Tech people and their friends are like 1% of the population.

Go out on the the street of Anytown in any western country, and people know "ChatGPT".

A friend of mine is a teacher, and told me that at a recent school board meeting there was discussion about implementing AI into the learning curriculum. And to the board, "AI" and "ChatGPT" were used interchangeably. There was no discussion of other providers or models, because "AI" is "ChatGPT".

That's why OpenAI has these huge projections. When average people are asked to reach for AI, they reach for ChatGPT.
Show HN: Pontoon – Open-source customer data syncs
by alexdriedger | 2025-08-01 15:28:53+00:00
Hi HN,

We’re Alex and Kalan, the creators of Pontoon (https://github.com/pontoon-data/Pontoon). Pontoon is an open-source data export platform that makes it really easy to create data syncs and send data to your enterprise customers. Check out our demo here: https://app.storylane.io/share/onova7c23ai6 or try it out with docker: https://pontoon-data.github.io/Pontoon/getting-started/quick...

While at our prior roles as data engineers, we’ve both felt the pain of data APIs. We either had to spend weeks building out data pipelines in house or spend a lot on ETL tools like Fivetran (https://www.fivetran.com/). However, there were a few companies that offered data syncs that would sync directly to our data warehouse (eg. Redshift, Snowflake, etc.), and when that was an option, we always chose it. This led us to wonder “Why don’t more companies offer data syncs?”. It turns out, building reliable cross-cloud data syncs is difficult. That’s why we built Pontoon.

We designed Pontoon to be:

- Easily deployed: we provide a single, self-contained Docker image for easy deployment and Docker Compose for larger workloads (https://pontoon-data.github.io/Pontoon/getting-started/quick...)

- Support modern data warehouses: we support syncing to/from Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and Postgres.

- Sync cross cloud: sync from BigQuery to Redshift, Snowflake to BigQuery, Postgres to Redshift, etc.

- Developer friendly: data syncs can also be built via the API

- Open source: Pontoon is free to use by anyone

Under the hood, we use Apache Arrow (https://arrow.apache.org/) to move data between sources and destinations. Arrow is very performant - we wanted to use a library that could handle the scale of moving millions of records per minute.

In the shorter-term, there are several improvements we want to make, like:

- Adding support for DBT models to make adding data models easier

- UX improvements like better error messaging and monitoring of data syncs

- More sources and destinations (S3, GCS, Databricks, etc.)

- Improve the API for a more developer friendly experience (it’s currently tied pretty closely to the front end)

In the longer-term, we want to make data sharing as easy as possible. As data engineers, we sometimes felt like second class citizens with how we were told to get the data we needed - “just loop through this api 1000 times”, “you probably won’t get rate limited” (we did), “we can schedule an email to send you a csv every day”. We want to change how modern data sharing is done and make it simple for everyone.

Give it a try https://github.com/pontoon-data/Pontoon. Cheers!
by mock-possum | 2025-08-01 15:29:22+00:00
Languages are not monoliths though - a Java programmer might spend ten years focusing on one area of development, invested in one particular library or framework, or specific to one particular device - and then might spend time prepping for something different, still solely using Java.

In short - unless you really are just moving to ‘same job different company,’ not just same title, but same actual work - you’re gonna need to brush up while you’re trying to find your next gig. It helps you stay engaged with your profession, anyway.
by bradly | 2025-08-01 15:29:27+00:00
Location: San Diego, CA, USA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Ruby on Rails, Tailwind, Turbo/Hotwire Résumé/CV: Rails at Shopify, Apple, Intuit, and a bunch of startups. Email: bradlyf@gmail.com

Hi there. Long time Rails engineer open to full-time work for the right position. Have a ton of experience growing teams and products and codebases while keeping things maintainable and of quality. Could be open to eng manager roles as well. See HN profile for contact info. Thank you.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-08-01 15:29:28+00:00
A classic example of worse is better. The Lisa was better in every way except price, but improving the underpowered Mac over time was a better business strategy than finding economies of scale with the Lisa.

It's true that the latter approach was never actually tried, but looking back on the tech trends it seems clear it would have taken at least 10 years before the Lisa became affordable. (Next is a reasonable proxy for Lisa-level technology.) By that time the market would have forgotten about it. The Mac captured a market from day one.
by nunoarruda | 2025-08-01 15:30:06+00:00
Location: Portugal

Remote: Yes, remote only

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, RxJS, Angular, Ionic, Cordova, Capacitor

Résumé/CV: https://nunoarruda.com/resume.pdf

Email: nuno@nunoarruda.com

Frontend Angular Developer and Ionic Developer Expert
by arp242 | 2025-08-01 15:30:08+00:00
> I mean, there are already a raft of tools available to stop children accessing harmful content online. There are filters and protections and safeguards on almost every device on the market today. If children are constantly accessing harmful content, it’s because these settings haven’t been enabled by parents or guardians.

These parental controls rather suck though; see e.g. [1]. This basically matches my own experience.

I do agree with the general gist of it, but it's not as simple as "these tools already exist, we just need to educate people". There is real work to be done here before this is usable.

And why isn't there a "Content-Rating: sex" or "Content-Rating: gambling" HTTP header? Or something along those lines? Why isn't there one easy "under 12" button on a phone to lock down tons of stuff, from PornHub to gambling sites to what-have-you? All of this is also a failing of the technical community to actually build reasonable and usable standards and tools, too.

[1]: Parental controls? What parental controls? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38314224 - Nov 2023 (archive, since site is down: https://web.archive.org/web/20231119003608/https://gabrielsi...)
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-01 15:30:27+00:00
From wikipedia:

> Slim's investments in the company included large purchases of Class A shares in 2011, when he increased his stake in the company to 8.1% of Class A shares,[43] and again in 2015, when he exercised stock options -- acquired as part of a repayment plan on the 2009 loan -- to purchase 15.9 million Class A shares, making him the largest shareholder.

[my emphasis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Company ]
by nunoarruda | 2025-08-01 15:30:29+00:00
SEEKING WORK

Location: Portugal

Remote: Yes, remote only

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, RxJS, Angular, Ionic, Cordova, Capacitor

Résumé/CV: https://nunoarruda.com/resume.pdf

Email: nuno@nunoarruda.com

Frontend Angular Developer and Ionic Developer Expert
by wand3r | 2025-08-01 15:30:41+00:00
I am speaking more about American society. 60+ percent of people don't own homes or meaningful stock portfolios, they have almost no participation or skin in the game. The current administration is doing some horrible stuff (IMO), the previous administration did nothing and there is absolutely no vision. AI is going to take away all the jobs and opportunities. I really don't think this is a symptom of being "always online". The government is putting people in black bags, corruption is extremely blatant, trust in everything is at an all time low.

To turn this around on you, if you think society is doing well and has almost no chance of collapse you probably have a net worth/assets of at least 1 million dollars.
by octo888 | 2025-08-01 15:30:50+00:00
https://www.plumplot.co.uk/City-Bradford-crime-stats.html it is the 2nd most violent city in the UK

It's a city, by the way, not a town. What took you as an Australian to Bradford? How long did you spend there?

I've lived nearby for over 5 years.

It's reassuring to know none of the crime issues are the fault of anyone but successive governments! What lefty, university nonsense
by beaconai | 2025-08-01 15:30:58+00:00
Beacon AI | https://beaconai.co/ | San Carlos, CA | Full-Time | Hybrid

Beacon AI builds R2-D2 for pilots. We are on a mission to make flight safer, more efficient, and accessible for commercial and defense aircraft operators by applying technology to the flight deck. We are building a modern technology stack with a data platform and web application (Lighthouse), and in-cockpit assistant (Murdock).

With new contracts in both defense and commercial aviation, and a $15M Series A in Q3 2024, we’re scaling quickly! We're backed by Costanoa, Scout, Sam Altman, and JetBlue Ventures - and we’re hiring across engineering to support our next phase of growth.

Open Roles:

- Edge/Autonomy Engineer – C++, Python (includes tracking, prediction, route/path planning)

- Backend Engineer – TypeScript, Python

- iOS Engineer – Swift, SwiftUI

- Frontend Engineer – React, TypeScript

- Cloud Infrastructure Engineer – IoT/Edge

Apply at https://beaconai.co/careers and mention HN. Let’s build the future of flight, together!
by jurajmasar | 2025-08-01 15:31:07+00:00
Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Backend) Engineer$/i | Europe remote in UTC ± 3h

We are software builders at :heart: CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too. We are engineers, making the tools we always wanted. If you love building amazing software, you're at the right address.

We are looking for software engineers who, if given enough time, could build Better Stack on their own = looking for Full-Stack/Product Engineer/Generalist to help us create high-quality software with exceptional UX—end to end.

Apply at https://betterstack.com/careers/fullstack-engineer

How we operate: https://betterstack.com/careers https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering https://juraj.blog
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-08-01 15:31:14+00:00
You can just go to their press releases [1].

> For years Aylo has publicly called for effective and enforceable age assurance solutions that protect minors online, while ensuring the safety and privacy of all users. The United Kingdom is the first country to present these same priorities demonstrably.

At least according to their release, the UK worked with them on it.

They also have an updated statement on France [2].

[1]: https://www.aylo.com/newsroom/aylo-upgrades-age-assurance-me...

[2]: https://www.aylo.com/newsroom/aylo-suspends-access-to-pornhu...
by radiofreeeuropa | 2025-08-01 15:31:16+00:00
They're usually better for the deficit (yes, really, if you just looked at the data and not rhetoric Republicans are who you'd vote for if you wanted to make the deficit worse) and sometimes do stuff like effective consumer protection enforcement, do a lot less of things like trying to sell off public land to extractive industries, haven't tried to use the civil service as a captured partisan tool & loyalist-reward program since like the 19th century, and occasionally get us at least baby-steps in the right direction like this now-removed direct filing program and the ACA (god knows what they might accomplish if those baby steps didn't keep getting completely wiped out every few years, perhaps they'd move beyond that! But I guess we'll never know because we keep electing Republicans)
by vessenes | 2025-08-01 15:31:21+00:00
Startup-land valuations are for PR. The real negotiation is in the discount and the cap, warrants, etc.

That $8.3b came in early, and was oversubscribed, so the terms are likely favorable to oAI, but if an investor puts in $1b at a $300b valuation (cap) with a 20% discount to the next round, and the company raises another round at $30b in two months; good news: they got in at a $24b price.

To your point on Anthropic and Google; yep. But, if you think one of these guys will win (and I think you have to put META on this list too), then por que no los quatro? Just buy all four.

I'll call it now; they won't lose money on those checks.
by DanielVZ | 2025-08-01 15:31:23+00:00
I mean there’s a limit to the kind of leet code easy questions you can make. At some point they are all pretty similar. This was also the tech screening, after that there were other interview rounds with harder stuff, but in the end it was so frustrating to see qualified candidates being rejected due to easy leet code interviews.

I tried to push back against the criteria we used for screening but it was hard to convince upper management that the method that FAANG used for screening wasn’t working.
by jononor | 2025-08-01 15:31:26+00:00
They have started. Their strategy is just for others to build it on top of their platform. And not build one, but hundreds of businesses. Much faster way to grow. Why retain 100+ internal product/integration teams when you can have 100+ external teams that will pay you and do the building, the trying and failing, in each niche.

The things that actually work out you can just buy or outcompete later. But that is another phase, perhaps 1 decade from now. Right now it is about starting alll the snowballs.
by Daishiman | 2025-08-01 15:31:39+00:00
> There are certainly jobs where you need someone who is cool under intense pressure, where what happens inside an hour matters. That's what these interviews are revealing. But I think this is a tiny minority of dev jobs.

I disagree. Every software job I've ever had has involved times where the rubber meets the road and production software has crashed, deadlines fall behind or difficult decisions have to be made under pressure. The fact that it might be 5-10% of the work at most doesn't change the fact that it's the most critical 5-10%.
by panarky | 2025-08-01 15:31:52+00:00
In my experience with chat, Flash has gotten much, much better. It's my go-to model even though I'm paying for Pro.

Pro is frustrating because it too often won't search to find current information, and just gives stale results from before its training cutoff. Flash doesn't do this much anymore.

For coding I use Pro in Gemini CLI. It is amazing at coding, but I'm actually using it more to write design docs, decomp multi-week assignments down to daily and hourly tasks, and then feed those docs back to Gemini CLI to have it work through each task sequentially.

With a little structure like this, it can basically write its own context.
by cnst | 2025-08-01 15:31:59+00:00
There's always a "later" or equivalent button in all of these setups, sometimes it does have a few prompts.

I personally have iPhone, Google Pixel, OnePlus, Motorola and Samsung devices, without any accounts on them. The iPhones are very limited without an account, obviously, but I never feel that way on Android.

All that I did to set them up, is click on the screen a few times, no extra tools or anything. Then just go into the browser, and follow the instructions for F-Droid installation; which can be done entirely on the phone, without a computer or any other phone, or any username/password.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-01 15:32:05+00:00
I'm sure there's a little tribalism on the (D) side, too, but I don't know anyone who decorates their house, yard, and truck with Democrat merchandise and flags, wears Democrat political shirts and hats, has a shrine at home with a life-size figure of a Democrat politician, or brings up Democrat politics in social settings that are not even remotely political like a kid's birthday party. I've seen real life examples of all of these from the (R) side.
by ColonelPhantom | 2025-08-01 15:32:06+00:00
I don't think you understood what a "copilot" and a "HUD" is. Confusingly, GitHub Copilot (the original one that suggests completions) is basically a HUD. On the other hand, agents that you give a task are clearly copilots that work via a natural language interface.

The article also mentions that agents are copilots:

> Here’s another personal example from AI coding. Let’s say you want to fix a bug. The obvious “copilot” way is to open an agent chat and ask it to do the fix.
by deltarholamda | 2025-08-01 15:32:10+00:00
>You don't need to worry unless you're having sex with your mentees.

"He exhibited problematic behavior. He touched me inappropriately. He cornered me in an elevator. He used demeaning language and made me feel unworthy."

Zero sex involved, and these accusations can be completely true or untrue, depending on undefinable intangibles and individual interpretations.
by wulfstan | 2025-08-01 15:32:14+00:00
> But this is not the case at all, unless you intended "these kinds of accusations" to mean both making formal charges and writing accusatory blog posts -- but the whole reason for this article is to point out the massive amount of damage that the latter can do at almost no cost to the accuser. Absent further evidence, it's clear that in this particular case, the two accusers' lives were not at all "torn apart" by making these life-destroying accusations -- do you agree?

Absolutely not! Assume the alleged victims are telling the truth, and read their statements again, carefully. Do they sound to you like people whose lives weren't torn apart by the experience? They needed counselling, therapy, time off work. These sound to me like traumatised people. You can argue that what they had to deal with wasn't "as bad" as what the accused had to deal with, but I don't accept that women make public accusations of sexual exploitation casually without any personal consequences, and certainly not in this case.

The "1 in 100" statistic is to remind people of a few things: firstly, knowing that you will have to expose your sex life to the police and there is only a very small probability that anything will actually be done about it, some women are still brave enough to try, and secondly, that underneath these 1 in 100 accusations are many others who just cannot bring themselves to the point of talking to the police about what they have experienced.

I think we should give women who make these accusations the benefit of the doubt while establishing the facts, acknowledging that coming forward to raise your voice about these things is extremely difficult. If men can by and large rape women - commit a crime against them - with relatively little risk of successful prosecution, then I think it's pretty obvious that non-criminal sexual exploitation is even less likely to have any consequences for the perpetrator.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-01 15:32:19+00:00
I just tried Mullvad again on Android. It says "out of time" and that I have no more VPN time left on the account. I would have to "add time" (i.e. buy it). I thought Mullvad was free. I am not going to pay for it. Why would I when there are many free ones out there?
by RaftPeople | 2025-08-01 15:32:29+00:00
> I admit my feeling is that neurons/synapses probably have less than 100 bytes of memory, and also that a byte or less is more plausible, but I would like to see some more rigorous proof that they can't possibly have more than a gigabyte of memory that the synapse/neuron can access at the speed of computation.

Based on lots of reading about brain research and the relentless flow of new and unknown things that need further research, my personal gut feel is that the estimates in that paper about brain computational ability don't really have a valid foundation. There are too many things discovered since then and too many things still not understood.

Some interesting items:

1-Astrocytes are computational cells which need to be included in the math. They have internal calcium waves localized in their processes as well as across the entire cell and inter cell.

2-Recent research showed neuron signal timing down to the millisecond level carries information.

3-Individual cells (neurons and non-neurons) learn, they don't require a synapse and external cell for that capability

4-Neurons are influenced by the electromagnetic field around them and somehow that influence would need to be included in a calc on information flow
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-01 15:32:43+00:00
There will always be stronger incentive to create higher level entities.

It’s just you need to create an initial set of primitives such that those higher level entities can be formed as a composition of the initial set of primitives.

So maybe not even start with html. Create the set of primitives such that I can create custom tags that does exactly what html does.

Like react is the sort of a framework that allows for composition of tags. But the problem is we have too many primitives.