MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by michaeld123 | 2025-09-01 20:48:02+00:00
Location: Takoma Park, MD, USA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, JavaScript, Swift, React, PostgreSQL, Data pipelines, LLMs/AI, Game engines, Real-time systems Site/Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com Email: m5@inotherwords-studio.com

I was #1 on HN last month with my semantic analysis of English. That analysis mapped 110M+ semantic connections across 1.5M+ words. I've turned that data into a daily word game about pathfinding through the multidimensional universe of language.

I transform complex systems into experiences users want to use, and bring 10 years of indie puzzle gaming insights to both gaming and non-gaming software:

* Design onboarding where users learn by doing, revealing features as users are ready

* Create products people use because they want to, not have to; make the 100th use as rewarding as the first

* Build "aha!" experiences into routine workflows, and crafting features worth showing off (no forced virality)

Track record of making complex systems intuitive: SpicyNodes (40M users), time.gov (2M monthly), medical AI for 1.5M patients. PI on $295K NSF SBIR. Led diverse teams up to 40 people - engineers, designers, artists, writers, operations - plus managed 200+ contractors. I excel at uniting creative and technical talent.

Seeking: VP Product or Head of Product at companies building AI products, knowledge tools, or creative applications. I architect systems and lead teams that ship products people love.

Latest: https://www.inotherwords.app LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/
Ask HN: Tools for Crossword Puzzle Generation?
by ekorbia | 2025-09-01 20:48:38+00:00
Hi,

I'm big fan of crossword puzzles such as the New York Times daily crossword and I'd like to build my own crossword puzzle game.

Has anyone had any luck using AI or other tools to speed up the process of building crossword puzzles?

I've used the Phil crossword puzzle maker to export crossword patterns with a few clues and answers in JSON format. Then I've tried various prompts with Claude Sonnet 4 to fill out the rest of the puzzle but I haven't been able to produce a valid crossword puzzle with the across and down words intersecting properly.

Any advice on tools or prompting would be appreciated. Thanks!
by teekert | 2025-09-01 20:48:53+00:00
I can never remember if AM is After Midnight or After Midday or PM is Post Meridian or Post Midnight, or it's something like that, not to mention when 12:00 is... is it 12:00 or 0:00?. But ah well, I'm lucky to be in a place where we use 24h clocks (but hey, max we see is 23:59:59!) (unless they have arms). Btw, the iOS calendar is (was probably) also pretty "broken" [0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER1a6jgW1Gs
by lotsoweiners | 2025-09-01 20:49:03+00:00
The point is you never pay tax on that money. 1. Your contribution is pre-tax 2. Your growth is tax free 3. Your withdrawal is tax free as long as you have receipts for qualified expenses. I personally don’t have an HSA because it seems like a hassle and I don’t want a HDHP but I can see the appeal.
by shihab | 2025-09-01 20:49:40+00:00
I’m a big, big fan of acquired podcast, listened to every single of their episodes.

But I remember their entire Microsoft episodes felt like a lengthy defense of Steve Ballmer. There were too many instances of “here’s why this bad decision of Steve made sense given the circumstances” or “ here is how people underestimate the contribution of Steve on this good decision.” They were all well argued points, of course, but so numerous that I found myself wondering if the hosts does not have a relationship with Steve.

The existence of this interview does not help with that suspicion.
by pcrh | 2025-09-01 20:50:23+00:00
>They perform at least as well as the hard-pressed unpaid human reviewers who spend 6 hours with you application if you are very lucky, and who will definitely not be perusing your latest 10 papers.

Isn't this the fundamental problem with the grant review process? That is, that the reviews are often rather cursory, despite the lauded credentials of the reviewers and panels? How could current LLMs conceivably improve this?
by martin-t | 2025-09-01 20:50:28+00:00
> They don't capture your entire value.

Explain.

> They don't decide what fraction you deserve - that's what the market decides.

No, they decide based on what they can get away with given the market situation. Do they pay the maximum the company can afford? No, they pay based on a negotiation in which they have more power and more information.

> False, they don't all do the same work.

You open a shop, you do the restocking, you man the cash register. Then you hire your first employee. He does the same thing. You own the entire company, he doesn't even a fraction.

You start a software company with a few friends. You write code, do marketing, talk to customers. You hire your first employee. He does one or more of those things. You own 100% of the company, he owns 0%.

> Some people do more valuable work than others.

Yeah, sure, how many times more productive can one person be than others doing the same job? Jobs doing real positive-sum productive work are typically within low multiples, maybe one order of magnitude. Jobs of people who are in positions of power which allow them to capture a percentage of their "underlings" output pay orders of magnitude more.
by echelon | 2025-09-01 20:50:38+00:00
I'm predicting that Grok fails simply due to half (?) the software engineering populating not wanting to use anything Musk has developed.

Grok has to be more than n-times (2x?) as good as anything else on the market to attain any sort of lead. Falling short of that, people will simply choose alternatives out of brand preference.

This might be the first case of a company having difficulty selling its product, even if it's a superior product, due to its leader being disliked. I'm not aware of any other instances of this.

Maybe if Musk switches to selling B2B and to the US government...

If you piss off half of your possible user base, adoption becomes incredibly difficult. This is why tech and business leaders should stay out of politics.
by Animats | 2025-09-01 20:51:01+00:00
What they seem to want is fast-read, slow-write memory. "Primary applications include model weights in ML inference, code pages, hot instruction paths, and relatively static data pages". Is there device physics for cheaper, smaller fast-read slow write memory cells for that?

For "hot instruction paths", caching is already the answer. Not sure about locality of reference for model weights. Do LLMs blow the cache?
by tialaramex | 2025-09-01 20:51:14+00:00
Which, to be clear is: Not in Scotland, and, is in fact very far from Scotland.

In terms of countries, it's closer to France, or Belgium, or the Netherlands than to Scotland.

It is in the UK though, so, if your model of where "Scotland" is just means vaguely "the United Kingdom somewhere" and thus also includes London then yeah, close enough.
by rickdeckard | 2025-09-01 20:52:45+00:00
Ah, it's all still part of a big master plan!

Stupid me thought that this (CAR!) company is severely constrained by lack of leadership for over a year now, with the major goal being reduced to keeping shareholder-value inflated by all means necessary...

Here's me thinking that e.g. the EV Semi truck should be the next big milestone, and not some humanoid robot of questionable practical value...
by mrsmrtss | 2025-09-01 20:53:04+00:00
Sorry, but there is absolutely nothing you gain with Node.js here in server side at least, it's clearly inferior choice for this job. You loose performance, type safety and in about two weeks there are hundreds of security issues found in your dependencies etc. Looking at the code, there are also clear security red flags for me and also the error handling is not to my taste, but that is not related to the tech. Maybe he wanted to use same language for the backe-end and front-end, but I think it's not a good argument here.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-01 20:53:06+00:00
These router papers are popping up hard now. I have a gradient boosted router I've been playing with that ties into retrieval to provide adaptive routing. The truth about these routers is that you have to tune them on your workloads to get the full benefit, otherwise they test way better than they work in production. That was why I added the retrieval aspect to mine, otherwise your top line slice and reality are very different.
by amluto | 2025-09-01 20:54:01+00:00
> It's never been clear to me where such a type is actually useful. In what cases do you really need to restrict it to valid UTF-8?

At the protocol (or disk, etc) boundary. If I write code that consumes bytes that are intended to be UTF-8, I need to make a choice about what to do if they aren’t UTF-8 somewhere. A strict UTF-8 string forces me to make that choice in a considered location. In a language where a “string” is just bytes, I can forget, or to pieces of code can disagree on what the contract is. And bugs result.

Check out MySQL for a fun example of getting this wildly, impressively wrong. At least a Rust or a type checked-Python 3 wrapper around some MySQL code enforces a degree of correctness, which is much better than having your transaction fail to commit or commit indirectly was down the stack when you get bytes you didn’t expect.

(MySQL can still reject strictly valid UTF-8 data for utterly pathetic historical reasons if you configure it incorrectly.)
by divan | 2025-09-01 20:54:21+00:00
> What are we talking about exactly?

About your claim that ownership as a concept is black and white, and no middle ground should be allowed.

> I don't understand what's so complicated about this, or why anyone would argue against this.

It's hard to understand the world if you see things through a binary lens - no ownership vs full ownership, or total support vs outright rejection. A more useful framework is to see what people support, reject, and tolerate.

For example, I totally support open-source hardware and software, and would love to see more of it. But I also tolerate proprietary hardware and software stacks, for many reasons. I'm definitely not rejecting the concept of private companies making hardware that runs their proprietary software and taking control over decisions about what software should run on their hardware.

From your comments, I see that you also support what I support, but you're totally rejecting the idea of hardware that runs proprietary software or not allowing you to run your own. So these calls for the government to step in and force private companies to disallow that concept are something I definitely can't support.
by blahedo | 2025-09-01 20:54:26+00:00
I believe that 10- and 12-bit bytes were also attested in the early days. As for "why": the tradeoffs are different when you're at the scale that any computer was at in the 70s (and 60s), and while I can't speak to the specific reasons for such a choice, I do know that nobody was worrying about scaling up to billions of memory locations, and also using particular bit combinations to signal "special" values was a lot more common in older systems, so I imagine both were at play.
by fsflover | 2025-09-01 20:54:32+00:00
Didn't older cars rely on open standards making it possible to go to any repair shop? Or maybe it was effectively open stanards, i.e., nothing prevented you from learning how they worked and modifying them.

Nowadays, all cars became hostile to users thanks to the closed software: https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/06/mozilla_vehicle_data_... I wouldn't call it "better competition".
by Mathnerd314 | 2025-09-01 20:54:34+00:00
Linux has become the dominant operating system for a wide range of devices, even though other options like FreeRTOS or the BSD family seem more specialized. The widespread adoption of Linux suggests that a single, versatile operating system may be more practical than several niche ones. However, the decision to drop support for certain hardware because it complicates maintenance, as seen here, would seem to contradict the benefit of a unified system. I wouldn't be surprised if it really just results in more Linux forks - Android is already at the point of not quite following mainline.
by m4rtink | 2025-09-01 20:55:16+00:00
The reasonable countries, such as for example Czech Republic stopped using Russian gas and now also oil while the ones corrupted by Russian interests did not & could not be expected to until either their government realigns with the res of EU or the stuff stops flowing.

Guess what happened with the pumping stations once the last reasonable countries stopped importing & the transfer contracts were no longer valid. Yes, boom.

And of course there was much wailing from those corrupted countries that did nothing to get ridd themselves from dependency on Russian energy - how very expected.
by natmaka | 2025-09-01 20:55:30+00:00
> OK, so the answer to my question is “No”.

So what? Something which hasn't been done yet must not be attempted? Or is it doomed to fail?

The transition of many electrical systems is a work-in-progress. A complete re-haul of such heavy industry branch cannot be quickly completed, especially during a global crisis.

> You can safely ignore all the households, they barely use any power compared to commercial and industrial facilities.

Nope.

USA: Residential customers (139.894 million) directly consumed 1,509.23 TWh, or 35.23% of the total.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

> What is the office tower going to do, use backup batteries from 500 cars in the basement to run dozens of pumps and fans?

A continental mix of renewables can cope most of the time. The point is the 'backup' (when a geographical zone doesn't produce enough and cannot be helped by another zone): dams, batteries, green hydrogen...

> Supplying 30% of California’s power is not 100% backup of the grid with batteries

This is a work-in-progress. 15 years ago some said that renewables will never be able to generate more than a few percent of the current running on national grid.

> We are a ridiculously long ways away from an exclusively solar + wind + batteries grid.

To each is own opinion.

Production trend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
by ohdeargodno | 2025-09-01 20:56:18+00:00
And thus grows the ever increasing list of reserved keywords in Swift. All for a badly designed feature. Along with another pile of crap on top, approachable concurrency, that will still work weirdly and be prone to so many bugs and impossible to understand behaviours.

Swift's insistence on having NIH syndrome made them ignore all proper concurrency management systems of the past fifteen years. What's that, structured concurrency, Erlang's lightweight processes, Project Loom, goroutines? all better concurrency systems than anything Apple has ever put forward, all publicly available in the form of implementation or research paper years before.
by measurablefunc | 2025-09-01 20:56:32+00:00
If the goal is to recreate the training data set then all functional approximations are extensionally equivalent modulo biases introduced by the architecture. What I mean by architectural bias is how missing pieces of the data manifold are imputed, i.e. given some point x (w/o a matching output in the optimization corpus) different algorithms will give different results based on how x is encoded into the interal/latent representation of the data manifold. But even this difference is essentially averaged away by the users b/c the goal is to create something that will please the most number of users so it all eventually converges to the average agreed upon sentiment of a large enough sample of people.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-01 20:57:02+00:00
There are something like 50 million people in the world whose occupation is software developer. Hundreds of millions, maybe billions, who are some other kind of engineer or scientist or teacher or just curious enough to want to learn things or stubborn enough to not want someone else taking away their choices. Every kid should have a device that lets them experiment rather than one that locks in them in a cage -- it's not like they're doing banking or dealing with national secrets to begin with.

That market is half the world. It's not small.
by kaeruct | 2025-09-01 20:57:04+00:00
--

Location: Berlin, Germany Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: TypeScript, Kotlin, Java, Node.js, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, AWS, CI/CD Résumé/CV: https://andres.villarreal.co.cr/cv Email: andres <at> villarreal.co.cr

Staff-level Software Engineer with 12+ years of experience across fintech, energy, e-commerce, and enterprise software. Skilled in building scalable, reliable systems and driving projects from design to production. Strong focus on execution, ownership, and mentoring engineers.

Looking for a staff backend/full stack role where I can build impactful systems and elevate developer experience.
by lacy_tinpot | 2025-09-01 20:57:15+00:00
You noped out because you might have to travel to India?

It just occurred to me that perhaps the world isn't deglobalizing, it's just that America/Americans are deglobalizing. Globalization is here to stay, even increase, with or without American. Unfortunately it seems America is writing itself out of that future.

A bit ironic when we consider that not long ago America forced countries open, to increase trade and globalization. American companies relied on these new markets to sell their goods.

But maybe we no longer have anything to sell to the world.
by em3rgent0rdr | 2025-09-01 20:58:15+00:00
Not just more power-efficient, but also a little more memory efficient because pointers are only half as big and so don't take up as much space in the cache. Lower-bit chips are also smaller (which could translate into faster clock and/or more functional units per superscaler core and/or more cores per die).

Part of the problem with these discussion is that often when people say "64-bit" vs "32-bit" they are also considering all the new useful instructions that were added to the new instruction set generation. But a true "apples-to-apples" comparison between "32-bit" and "64-bit" should be using almost identical whose only difference is the datapath and pointer size.

I feel that the programs and games I run shouldn't really need more than 4GB memory anyway, and the occasion instance that the extra precision of 64-bit math is useful could be handled by emulating the 64-bit math with the compiler adding a couple extra 32-bit instructions.
by ArnavAgrawal03 | 2025-09-01 20:58:27+00:00
We use a BSL for our product (https://morphik.ai) and usually stay away from calling it anything. We'd just say "repo is public at: https://github.com/morphik-org/morphik-core". I like the term fair source, though.

Is it correct to assume that software than eventually becomes open under something like Apache or MIT is fair source? Or is there more subtlety to it?
by jmclnx | 2025-09-01 20:58:49+00:00
FWIW, Linux is not the only OS looking into dropping 32bit.

FreeBSD is dumping 32 bit:

https://www.osnews.com/story/138578/freebsd-15-16-to-end-sup...

OpenBSD has this quote:

>...most i386 hardware, only easy and critical security fixes are backported to i386

I tend to think that means 32bit on at least x86 days are numbered.

https://www.openbsd.org/i386.html

I think DragonflyBSD never supported 32bit

For 32bit, I guess NetBSD may eventually be the only game in town.
by cube2222 | 2025-09-01 20:59:16+00:00
Spacelift | Remote (Europe) | Full-time | Senior Software Engineer | $80k-$110k+ (can go higher)

We're a VC-funded startup (recently raised $51M Series C) building an infrastructure orchestrator and collaborative management platform for Infrastructure-as-Code – from OpenTofu, Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Kubernetes, to Ansible.

On the backend we're using 100% Go with AWS primitives. We're looking for backend developers who like doing DevOps'y stuff sometimes (because in a way it's the spirit of our company), or have experience with the cloud native ecosystem. Ideally you'd have experience working with an IaC tool, i.e. Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, or SaltStack.

Overall we have a deeply technical product, trying to build something customers love to use, and have a lot of happy and satisfied customers. We promise interesting work, the ability to open source parts of the project which don't give us a business advantage, as well as healthy working hours.

If that sounds like fun to you, please apply at https://careers.spacelift.io/jobs/3006934-software-engineer-...

You can find out more about the product we're building at https://spacelift.io and also see our engineering blog for a few technical blog posts of ours: https://spacelift.io/blog/engineering

Additionally, we're hiring for a new product we're building, Flows[0]. Mostly the same requirements and tech stack, without the devops bits. If you'd like to apply specifically for that, just mention "new product" in the cover letter field.

[0]: https://events.spacelift.io/devops-next
by owenversteeg | 2025-09-01 20:59:56+00:00
I can't stand the conflation of "satisfied" and "happy." It's insane. There is more happiness in one Zimbabwean (country "happiness" rank: 143) than in one hundred Icelanders (country "happiness" rank: 2, worldwide antidepressant consumption rank: 1.) Go stand in a crowd of people and count the fucking smiles and the fucking laughter.

It is all part of this broader wave of newspeak. If you can quite literally redefine happiness, you can redefine anything. Nothing has meaning anymore. You will live alone, you will consume antidepressants, you will be protected from the sunlight, you will not smile, you will not laugh, and you will be happy.
by hakfoo | 2025-09-01 21:00:46+00:00
An alternative would be to provide broad grant opportunities to make it possible to have a lot of people exploring creative endeavours at modest scale.

Very few creative works require kazillion-dollar budget, and presumably many of the current ones are subject to technical improvements making them accessible (you could probably produce a film/series with "1995 broadcast TV" production quality with consumer equipment today).

Copyright enables the runaway success "I made enough selling records/prints of my painting/copies of my novel that none of my children for five generations have to work." But we only say that to a handful of people per year. A reasonable grant programme could say "I can spend a couple years touring the country playing small town ampitheatres, writing my dream novel, or trying to put together a movie with friends and still be able to eat at the end of the day", to thousands of creative types every year.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-09-01 21:01:07+00:00
> Is it correct to assume that software than eventually becomes open under something like Apache or MIT is fair source? Or is there more subtlety to it?

The concrete definition we came up with and published:

> Fair Source is an alternative to closed source, allowing you to safely share access to your core products. Fair Source Software (FSS):

> - is publicly available to read;

> - allows use, modification, and redistribution with minimal restrictions to protect the producer’s business model; and

> - undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP).
by kiitos | 2025-09-01 21:01:13+00:00
you're simply not understanding the behavior of the code you've written

it's fine, we all went thru these gauntlets, but, if you're interested in learning more, take all of this feedback in good faith, and compare/contrast what your tool is doing vs. what sound/valid load testing tools like vegeta and hey and (maybe) k6 do. (but definitely not ab or wrk, which are unsound)