MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SteveNuts | 2025-09-03 02:04:46+00:00
I swear to god, every single day I have at least one app with a pop up tooltip asking if I'd like a guided tour of all their new features and latest UI shuffle musical chairs. Bonus points if I'm presenting my screen at the time.

Honestly software is almost infuriating to me on a daily basis to me nowadays, I don't know if I'm just curmudgeonly or if software just sucks now but I want everything to just get out of my way when I'm trying to do something.

I guess you could say I want to be left alone...
by randycupertino | 2025-09-03 02:08:16+00:00
My friend who is single says that if people don't reconfirm the date the day of then it's presumed to be cancelled. She had a guy just not show up because she didn't confirm the day of the date or the day before. She was like... we just set the date on Wednesday!

I think because flaking/bailing has become so common people this is expected now. Maybe with appointments this carries over, although I'm sure with high cancellation fees and strict policies they can mitigate a bit.
by lisper | 2025-09-03 02:08:25+00:00
This story has something I've never seen on HN before: underneath the title and the subsequent "X points by colesantiago N hours ago | flag | hide ..." line, there is a link to https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...

No other story on the front page has this, and I've never seen it before. How did that link get there? It is not the link to the story itself. That is on cnbc.com.
by monkeyelite | 2025-09-03 02:09:18+00:00
Companies do have an ego-centric view of relationships. Of course our customers want to know what's happening. Of course they want to sign into our website and see their account.

And all of the measures that the article is complaining about do help with usability metrics - especially when measured in a fake corporate study.

It's much harder to consider the role we want technology to play holistically as a part of an entire life.
by el_memorioso | 2025-09-03 02:09:50+00:00
Yes, we can. A couple of years ago I drove through Maine and Vermont, and it was absolutely beautiful. Not only because of the natural beauty of those places, but because of the lack of billboards anywhere. It was nice to just enjoy the scenery without being constantly bombarded by ads. The city of São Paulo also banned ads a while back and it made the city a nicer environment to live in and revealed the beauty of some of the architecture that was previously hidden by masses of billboards.
by ragequittah | 2025-09-03 02:09:58+00:00
Is this article investigative? Summary of the court case pdf is trivial for an LLM and most will probably do a better job than the linked article. Main difference being you won't be bombarded with ads and other nonsense (at least for now). Hell I wouldn't be surprised if the reporter had an LLM summarize the case before they wrote the article.

Content that can't be easily made by an LLM will still be worth something. But go to most news sites and their content is mostly summarization of someone else's content. LLMs may make that a hard sell.
by jltsiren | 2025-09-03 02:10:22+00:00
I'm from Helsinki, where winters are longer and a bit colder than in Chicago, but we get less snow. My main takeaway from that article was that Chicagoans are more willing to tolerate disruptions due to weather. In Finland, people are generally expected to go to work/school even during a blizzard. And some then complain that their morning commute took longer than usual, because snowplows could not be everywhere at once.
by varenc | 2025-09-03 02:12:28+00:00
> why not wifi?

I'm not the author but can speculate. WiFi is higher latency and a bit probabilistic. Like the slowest 1% of requests to the server may take an additional 1000ms or so. And if I was running a blog from a phone I'd want it to be impressively fast. Also an old Android phone may not be able to use modern WiFi standards and it could struggle with the traffic from being on the HN homepage.
by bccdee | 2025-09-03 02:12:52+00:00
I don't think so. If you run a server that won't respond to unencrypted requests, I think that would be considered a form of forcing people to use encryption. That's the only way I can interpret "they'll need to make it a crime to force or trick anyone into using stronger encryption than they consent to, no matter how that might be done."

Refusing to respond to unencrypted requests is honestly the only thing I can think of that would really constitute "forcing someone to use encryption." (Unless they mean forcing via threats, but why would they mean that? Who's going around forcing people at gunpoint to encrypt messages?)
by photonthug | 2025-09-03 02:13:03+00:00
Open-source / noncommercial isn't exactly a cure for the steady drip of "like and subscribe" type of harassment these days. Probably just because commercial interests have pushed user-harassment so hard for so long that the window has shifted and now users expect harassment, and because at least some makers actually feel their work is less professional if they don't engage in harassment.

Open your laptop, dismiss ubuntu wanting to update stuff; open firefox and have your adblock extension popup to tell you how many ads it blocked and to give you a helpful advertisement for updating your adblock; open a web page, any webpage, dismiss at least 3 popups for cookies, decline to signin in google/facebook, decline the newsletter. Get another browser extension to solve these problems, it will probably have pop-ups to tell you about "what's new". Open github to look at some code, get asked to star the project above the fold in the documentation. Forget what you even wanted to do with a laptop, close it, dive into much more productive work by figuring out the best way to feed your laptop into the kitchen garbage disposal in small pieces. Just another Tuesday
by anonymousiam | 2025-09-03 02:13:29+00:00
I'm with you 100%.

I'm typing this on a computer that came with Windows 11. I booted it a few times, and reserved a terabyte of my (8TB) SSD for it, but I never use it at all. I've got some Windows VMs, from XP through 10 that I rarely use, but I use them when needed for things that require those platforms.

I got an email from Intuit two weeks ago informing me that they weren't going to support Windows 10 anymore, so I guess I'll be deleting my Windows 10 VM soon, but I have no intention of ever creating or running a Windows 11 VM, or installing anything important on the soon-to-be-deleted Windows 11 partition I have, so I guess I'll quit using TurboTax after 40 years of using it.

I looked into the possibility of running TurboTax with Wine (or CrossOver, for which I have an eternal license), but apparently it doesn't run at all there.
by dvt | 2025-09-03 02:14:55+00:00
> just sounds like you have an axe to grind

An axe to grind? I'm just commenting on the article, my guy. It seemed a bit misanthropic and gave my reasoning. Literally all of those things are occasionally useful to people and are commonly known as "customer service."

Have you seriously never used a coupon you got via text? Have you never signed up for a credit card deal? I mean, some stuff I get (time share deals or annoying notifications or whatever), but agreeing to a terms of service has got you all up in arms? Really?
by neilv | 2025-09-03 02:15:02+00:00
> This isn't malicious. It's structural, driven by several interconnected forces:

An additional reason is religion. People were told that these are the interview rituals you should do, they spent a lot of time rehearsing for it (to the exclusion of learning or doing useful things), and they think everyone should have to do it, or they are bad people.

An additional reason is that some people don't know much about the field, other than particular interview rituals.

An additional reason is that most people who know how to do their jobs, still don't know how to interview, so just mimic what they've seen.

An additional reason is justifying your existence/status. Sometimes, when I see a job description with requirements seemingly puffed up to sound impressive, I get the impression that it's not by someone who doesn't understand the role, but rather by someone who wants to make the role look impressive to their boss, for their own status or that of their team. Similar with interview practices.

An additional reason is frat hazing, for the sake of frat hazing. When easy upper-middle-class money entered the field, it attracted some baggery.

Not all organizations or interviewers have all the above reasons, but you can probably guess at least one of these is at play any time you get an ineffective/counterproductive interview "loop".
Show HN: Undatas.io – A pay-on-accept document parsing API
by jojogh | 2025-09-03 02:15:22+00:00
Hey HN, Alex here, founder of undatas.io.

Our journey started from a place of deep frustration with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). I was helping companies build internal knowledge bases on their own data, and the promise was huge. But in practice, the results were often mediocre. Important information was frequently missed during retrieval, and we kept hitting dead ends.

After endless debugging, we realized the problem wasn't the LLM; it was classic "garbage in, garbage out." We traced the retrieval failures back to the very first step: document parsing.

Whether we used open-source libraries or expensive paid APIs, the story was the same. Precision was lost. Key phrases, critical numbers, and entire table rows would just vanish during the parsing process. We spent countless hours manually comparing the original PDFs to the parsed output to find what went wrong. It was a soul-crushing, time-consuming nightmare.

The biggest pain points were:

1. Complex Tables: Most tools collapsed when faced with real-world documents. Borderless tables, cells merged across rows and columns, or tables containing handwritten notes were consistently mangled.

2. Lack of a Feedback Loop: When the parser got something wrong, there was no easy way to manually annotate and correct it. You were stuck with the bad output.

I got so frustrated that I decided to build the tool I wished I had: a parsing engine obsessed with precision, that makes the entire data extraction process transparent. That’s what undatas.io is. And today, we're launching our API.

We built our API around a simple principle: you only pay for results you actually accept.

To solve the transparency problem, every piece of extracted data in the JSON response includes its positional coordinates (bbox). This allows you to build your own "glass box" validator, mapping the data directly back to the source document, making the data prep stage for RAG completely transparent.

Our goal is to build the best and most trustworthy parsing tool for developers. We're just getting started and would be grateful for your feedback.

You can check out the docs and try it out here: https://doc.undatas.io/

I’ll be here all day to answer any questions. Let me know what you think.
by wordglyph | 2025-09-03 02:15:23+00:00
It worked well! Super handy to have a looper in my pocket! I do wish I could play a riff one time and just say loop it. I think you could use TarsosDSP for onset/beat detection, aubio for more advanced tempo and onset analysis and Superpowered for high-quality time-stretching and actual loop creation.
by rootusrootus | 2025-09-03 02:15:44+00:00
> Remember when cars started beeping until you put on your seat belt?

Yes, that was ... this morning? I guess now that I think about it, maybe it does stop after a moment. Though if I start moving, it definitely starts beeping again.

No maintenance for 200K miles though, so I'm hoping to avoid any messages about bringing it in. I'll find the magic keys to turn that off if I must.
by techpineapple | 2025-09-03 02:16:24+00:00
I assume you mean violent crime? One of the reasons this is so hard is that everyone disagrees on what crimes should be.

Drinking and Driving? Not i a libertarian utopia. https://youtu.be/2xcQIoh3FQQ?si=wRhIKdQOpklwcjIK

Kids? Hope they don’t have wild teen years.
by StephenHerlihyy | 2025-09-03 02:16:55+00:00
What's fun is that I have had Anthropic's AI support give me blatantly false information. It tried to tell me that I could get a full year's worth of Claude Max for only $200 dollars. When I asked if that was true it quickly backtracked and acknowledged it's mistake. I figure someone more litigious will eventually try to capitalize.
by linsomniac | 2025-09-03 02:17:51+00:00
For existing Fi users, it's $450 off, plus another $200 in store credit for the Pro models (not money off since it's parked in Google Store, but if you're buying accessories or other items over the next year it's like money). Selling my old phone brings the price of a 10 Pro down to around $400 (not counting the $200 store credit).

If you sign up for Fi when buying the phone, the deals are pretty enticing: $300 off right away, $500 more in Fi bill credits over 24 months. I think you also get the $200 store credit too.
by TristanBall | 2025-09-03 02:20:25+00:00
I suspect part of it is licensing games, both in the sense of "avoiding per core license limits" which absolutely matters when your DB is costing a million bucks, and also in the 'enable the highest PVU score per chassis' for ibm's own license farming.

Power systems tend not to be under the same budget constraints as intel, whether thats money, power, heat, whatever, so the cost benifit of adding more sub-core processing for incremental gains is likely different too.

I may have a raft of issues with IBM, and aix, but those Power chips are top notch.
by gnatman | 2025-09-03 02:20:28+00:00
I know you have boomeritis, and I’m sympathetic. But! In the US, no-show rates for medical appointments can exceed 20%. In practices that have a waitlist, which is also common, that’s a lot of unnecessary waiting for folks further down the waiting list, and a lot of money off the table for the practice for that day. Appointment confirmation messages, while annoying, are practically a necessity.
by creatonez | 2025-09-03 02:21:10+00:00
There's more than you might think...

- Probably thousands of large chatrooms, and hundreds of millions of small chatrooms

- Probably hundreds of millions of messages that include a media upload like an image or video, including countless re-posts of random memes

- Overhead from ratchet algorithm cryptography, as well as additional message metadata that is likely in JSON format

- Huge excesses of messages from bridge bots, spam bots, and malfunctioning utility bots. To give a sense of scale... the entirety of Libera.chat (formerly Freenode IRC) used to be bridged to matrix.org, meaning almost every single message from Libera would be copied to matrix.org automatically.

- Everything from other homeservers that federate with matrix.org and have been joined by at least one matrix.org user, including homeservers that no longer exist
by Aurornis | 2025-09-03 02:21:36+00:00
> I think it should be adopted as standard journalistic practice in fact -- reporting on court rulings must come with the PDF.

Bafflingly, I’ve found this practice to continue even in places like University PR articles describing new papers. Linking to the paper itself is an obvious thing to do, yet many of them won’t even do that.

In addition to playing games to avoid outbound links, I think this practice comes from old journalistic ideals that the journalist is the communicator of the information and therefore including the source directly is not necessary. They want to be the center of the communication and want you to get the information through them.
by apitman | 2025-09-03 02:21:41+00:00
> This is the mechanism by which the Austrian government, for instance, prevents you from using an Open Source or any other software-based authenticator to sign in to do your taxes, access medical records or do anything else that is protected by eID. Instead you have to buy a whitelisted hardware token.

When the time comes to support passkeys on my services, I think I might use attestation in the other direction, ie only offer passkeys to users if I detect they are using a cross-platform password manager like Bitwarden or 1Password. There are simply too many moving pieces (including ad-hoc Bluetooth connections!) to guarantee a good UX when trying to move between the big tech implementations.
by bongodongobob | 2025-09-03 02:21:49+00:00
I definitely am. But this is a very solved problem. It just adds brittleness to the system. Maintenance for this is going to suck. It's going to break in less than a year because you forgot to set a static IP address, or a Python library changes, or the SD card in the PI gets corrupted, or the jack on it fries, or its cheap PSU died and fries the board, etc. Then you're going to have to try to remember how the damn thing works, then figure out what other tiny change somewhere broke something. You should never add more failure points to infra, ever.

I guess everyone has to go through it.
by psidebot | 2025-09-03 02:21:51+00:00
Disk hardware may be faster relative to RAM, but if you're using typical serverless PaaS offerings to run a hosted application at modest operational scale, it's a heck of a lot cheaper to get a node with "normal" RAM and CPU, than it is to get decent IOPS. If you're a big iron company with big iron problems, you may need to think in different scaling terms, but for the SaaS hoi polloi the economics of hosting have somewhat preserved traditional notions of performance.
by theamk | 2025-09-03 02:22:13+00:00
By "trick question", people usually mean the questions that won't occur in real job. This does not seem the case here.

I have no idea what the OP's actual questions was, but as a made-up example: If the problem is solvable with static sqlite database copied to every node during deployment, but candidate suggests master-master postgres cluster instead, I would not want them. I shudder just thinking what kind of monstrosity they'd build if hired.
by kazinator | 2025-09-03 02:22:43+00:00
There are some differences.

- You can check indices that are out of bounds without running into formal undefined behavior. ISO C does not require pointers to distinct objects to be comparable via inequality, only exact equality. (In practice it works fine in any flat-address-space implementation and may be regarded as a common extension.)

- Indices are implicitlyl scaled. If you have done a range check that index is valid, then it refers to an entry in your array. At worst it is some unoccupied/free entry that the caller shouldn't be using. If you have checked that a pointer points into the array, you don't know that it's valid; you also have to check that its displacement from the base of the array is a multiple of the element size; i.e. it is aligned.
by halfcat | 2025-09-03 02:23:06+00:00
> not wanting to learn how to use it

I kind of feel this. I’ll code for days and forget to eat or shower. I love it. Using Claude code is oddly unsatisfying to me. Probably a different skillset, one that doesn’t hit my obsessive tendencies for whatever reason.

I could see being obsessed with some future flavor of it, and I think it would be some change with the interface, something more visual (gamified?). Not low-code per se, but some kind of mashup of current functionality with graph database visualization (not just node force graphs, something more functional but more ergonomic). I haven’t seen anything that does this well, yet.
by cinimodev | 2025-09-03 02:23:10+00:00
So, uh, hi. This is my blog post. I'm just some guy that blogs and gets like 5 reads per post, so I'm a fish out of water here. I didn't even have a HN account until today.

To answer a some questions: 1. Still running on the Pixel. I never had a reason to change it. 2. It is on a residential internet connection because, well, I never planned on having any volume of readers. 3. I'm just some dude that does random projects at home after work. I'm not even in tech. I actually own a construction contracting biz.
by JBits | 2025-09-03 02:24:05+00:00
A good use of linear algebra that I'm working with at the moment is the use of splines as a basis for real (vector) functions. After obtaining the matrix/vector representations you can solve for the spline coefficients (and then plot them).

Linear transforms (such as rotations and displacements) in GPU graphics.

Fourier series in signal processing.

JPEG compression.

Obtaining the best fit element in a vector space of curves given data or other constraints.

Understanding autodiff in JAX.

The mathematical definition of a tensor helps develop intuition for manipulating arrays/tensors in array libraries.

Transition matrices of a Markov chain.

PageRank.
by stavros | 2025-09-03 02:24:08+00:00
> Something that my wife will insist has no or little seafood in will taste like I am eating the entire ocean.

I can relate, I'm the same with coffee and alcohol. Coffee just tastes like I'm eating/drinking charcoal, and alcohol tastes like bleach.

People always go "oh but you can't taste the alcohol in this cocktail!". No, you can't taste the alcohol, it tastes like lemon-flavored bleach to me.
by freetime2 | 2025-09-03 02:24:11+00:00
> I don’t drink coffee because in a month I’ll be neck deep in forums about the proper way to grind beans.

This was me last week. I was looking to buy a new coffee grinder, and I just could not believe the way that people on the Internet talk about these things. One popular coffee YouTuber recommended a $200 hand grinder as an entry level grinder [1]. There's also a widely repeated concept in the community of the "end game" grinder - as if working your way up to a $1000 coffee grinder should be the goal of every coffee drinker rather than just being satisfied with a $200 - $300 grinder (or even a $100 grinder, god forbid).

And I decided not to go down the rabbit hole because I really doubt whether spending more and obsessing more would actually increase my enjoyment of coffee. I currently use a $23 hand grinder [2] that makes a tasty cup of coffee (I am looking for a new grinder not because I am dissatisfied with the results, but rather because grinding by hand can be annoying). Now that I know there are $200 grinders out there, it makes me wonder what I am missing out on. And I'm sure if I had a $200 grinder, I would be wondering what $500 would get me, etc. And how am I ever going to be able to enjoy a cup of coffee at a restaraunt, or at a friend's house, if I allow my standards to get so high?

So I guess to bring this back to the original article: try to find enjoyment in the basic, no-frills version. If you're a coffee snob, can you still enjoy a cup of Nescafe instant coffee? If you're a wine snob, can you enjoy a glass of Yellow Tail? If you're a music snob, can you enjoy listening to Taylor Swift?

[1] https://youtu.be/1t8qUbZ6nSs?si=JrpezhykYAm2lZoq&t=705

[2] https://a.co/d/aIqZtw1