MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by picardo | 2025-09-20 20:05:06+00:00
I use NotebookLM everyday. The simplicity of the design is much appreciated. However, there are real issues scaling the design and keeping it user friendly as the team keeps adding new features.

The most recent example of this is with the addition of 2 new capabilities (Flashcards and Quiz), "Artifacts Button Container" now has 6 large buttons, and is 328px in height! There are users who are accessing the site from small screen devices in India and they have been asking for help on Discord forums because they cannot see their notes anymore. So I had to create a Tampermonkey script to let users collapse it.[0] I heard the team is fixing that soon, but they should have done more testing before releasing it.

There are other issues like this that I've fixed with scripts. The strangest one is the "notes." Why force the users read a 2000 word essay in a 360px sidebar? So I wrote a script I wrote to let you pop it into full screen mode.[1]

Another example is the chat input field. The follow up questions are hardly usable at all. And they're not stable after you select them.

I can go on all day, but I think it's better to fix things than to complain.

[0] https://gist.github.com/volkanunsal/94db50629cad816eca84c836...

[1] https://gist.github.com/volkanunsal/fded9124d62422c0d2672b8a...
by DonHopkins | 2025-09-20 20:05:13+00:00
I'd love to have a database of once-annoying but now-nostalgic TV commercials to intersperse between the shows, and insert into commercial breaks. (Those dramatic pauses in Star Trek TOS just aren't the same without a Crazy Eddie interruption.)

HEAD ON: Apply Directly to the Forehead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_SwD7RveNE

W.E.T. P.E.T.S.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMbsZU83ajc

Fine Corinthian Leather:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0diMFShiUU

Bic Banana Ink Crayon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv5O2zwyQGo

Flea Market Montgomery:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ3oHpup-pk

Crazy Eddie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml6S2yiuSWE
by drnick1 | 2025-09-20 20:05:14+00:00
What's the point of trying to introduce Rust everywhere? Git is a mature piece of software and I doubt a lot of new code needs to be written. Also, Rust is very complex relative to C. If you really need classes, templates, etc, you can stick to C++ 98 and get something that is still clean and understandable relative to recent C++ standards and Rust.
by stouset | 2025-09-20 20:05:41+00:00
Honing is 1,000x more important than sharpening.

When it does come time to sharpen, I constantly see places offering knife sharpening services, and they’re usually cheap enough. Or you could get a gizmo that does a mediocre job (and shaves away far too much material) if you just want to get it done. Or you could learn to do it yourself which isn’t that hard or time-consuming but is somewhat of a labor of love.
by neilv | 2025-09-20 20:05:53+00:00
> My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all,

That would be a showstopper for now, IMHO. Doing it with maintainable open source Linux drivers is the hard part of having a viable device, from everything I've seen.

Another concern are that I can't find who the developers are, nor even definitively what country they're based in. (I don't see it on their About Us page, ~~and the GitHub repo contributors are hidden.~~ I saw a reference to Sydney, but unclear.) (Edit: my mistake regarding GitHub contributors; they aren't hidden)

Also, it would be nice to have the option of a better hardware provenance than a generic whitebox(?) phone from some unidentified manufacturer in China. Even for individual hobbyist users, and certainly for corporate ones. (This is why I'd like hardware options combinations like Purism for the premium device, and a cheaper device that runs the same software but is still from a brand that at least has a reputation to preserve, like Pine64 or (ha) Google.)
by stevepotter | 2025-09-20 20:06:00+00:00
No, I don't want to underpay imported people. I'm not talking about teams of low-skilled people. You don't know my situation, so I'll explain. I work in a startup that requires a specific ML computer vision skillset. And we are in the surgery space. I found a brilliant person who is a master at computer vision, loves the medical field, and is willing to take a +6 figure salary and equity. I tried to find someone like that stateside and couldn't. He wants to live here and would be a great addition to the country. He's in Canada now, has been for years. Unfortunately he's still there now because of the recent travel ban for those born in certain countries.

Thing is, I would pay $100k extra to have him in office. In my case it's moot because of the travel ban. My point was, this whole thing simply benefits the companies that can afford it - google, meta, amazon etc, who happen to be big contributors to the administration. $100k will not stop them from hiring foreign talent, but it may stop companies like mine. Flagship companies might be psyched about this.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-09-20 20:06:01+00:00
If you already know a word, just mark it as "already known". If you already know all the words it's showing you, that will cause the difficulty to ramp up very quickly as it starts skipping ahead to find words you might not know. (If you scroll down to the bottom of the page and open the "graphs" section, you can see the logic behind it.)

The app "only" includes about the 3,000 most common words, so if you're past that level, I don't know how helpful it will be to you. I can easily extend this in the future, I just need bigger corpus with more data.
by deployor | 2025-09-20 20:06:51+00:00
Hack Club, a teen supporting non-profit, was suddenly told by Slack/Salesforce that their workspace would be deactivated unless they paid $50k this week and $200k/year going forward—despite a signed $5k/year contract. This meant years of teen friendships, projects, and history would vanish. The internet outcry (including a viral HN post) forced a reversal: the Slack CEO apologized and gave Hack Club 5 years of Enterprise+.

I was inside Hack Club when this happened. This is my diary of the week, what it felt like, what we almost lost, and why I’m still uneasy even with the “happy ending.”
by gus_massa | 2025-09-20 20:06:59+00:00
The amount of electricity is tiny, probably less than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezo_ignition and difficult to isolate because it will like to partially melt and the electricity will go in unexpected direction.

The idea to use this to explain some of the electricity generated in thunderstorms looks less impossible, but the new discovery is for temperatures below -113ºC (160K) (-171ºF), so probably too cold for Earth but may be there are some weird thunderstorms in Pluto.
Hiring Developers: 2010 vs. 2025
by andrewstetsenko | 2025-09-20 20:09:01+00:00
When I started as a tech recruiter in 2010, it looked very different:

In 2010:

- Hard to find candidates

- Many had no online footprint

- I sourced only in my city for local clients

- LinkedIn wasn’t popular yet

- Contacting the same candidates every 2–3 months

- Ghosting was almost non-existent

- I spent time figuring out where to find candidates and how to approach them

- Recruiters asked candidates about OOP concepts and frameworks

- Interviews were always in the office

- Candidates wrote JavaScript functions on paper in front of the interviewer

In 2025:

- Too many applicants, not too few

- AI helps candidates fill out applications and tailor resumes

- Sourcing is global — from Brazil to Japan

- LinkedIn is a must-have tool for every recruiter

- As a recruiter, you most probably won’t contact the same candidate twice

- Ghosting is normal

- Fake candidates using AI try to pass interviews

- Recruiters mainly try to figure out your motivation and company fit

- Interviews are fully online

- Coding tests replaced everything (and you can even cheat them with AI)

Yeah, it seems like hiring in tech has changed.

Or maybe I changed, too?
by timr | 2025-09-20 20:09:44+00:00
> They are filling every power vacuum they create with direct executive power. Pure authoritarianism.

I just gave you a correct definition of authoritarianism, and that isn't it. It's also untrue -- this administration has rather aggressively moved to deregulate a number of areas that prior administrations had regulated. For example, not even a week ago, people here were complaining about the administration's move to deregulate PFAS:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45239803

Say what you will about the wisdom of the change, they aren't replacing that power vacuum with direct executive power. This administration is not canonically left, nor right, and it certainly isn't "authoritarian" by any traditional definition.
by geye1234 | 2025-09-20 20:10:38+00:00
> Even if it's implemented, how do you rise tariffs on intangible works?

If you are an American company (or a subsidiary thereof), and you have an employee resident in another country who does IT work, then you pay a tax to the US Treasury on that employee's salary. This tax can be varied depending on the country of the employee's residence.

Alternatively, if you pay OutsourceCo or whomever to provide you with IT services, then, depending on OutsourceCo's incorporated location, either you pay a tax on the services you buy from OutsourceCo, or OutsourceCo pays the tax on salaries just described.

All this can be avoided by hiring American workers, of whom there are many currently looking for work (mainly because of offshoring and immigration).
by lioeters | 2025-09-20 20:10:56+00:00
From his "Open Letter to Everyone I've Butted Heads With":

> My friend - it's not personal. I care about you. I actually do value your opinion. I'm interested in your thoughts and feelings. I want to make you happy. I'm sad that I can't serve you better with my open source project. I want to. I wish I could.

> I'm hustling. I'm playing the game. I'm doing what it takes to make this thing mainstream and a viable, practical choice for individuals and companies. If you talk shit about Zig in public, I'm going to fight back. But I respect you. I see you. I understand you. I don't hate you. I would literally buy you a drink.

https://andrewkelley.me/post/open-letter-everyone-butted-hea...
by Yizahi | 2025-09-20 20:11:02+00:00
So, for a normal case where multiple people want to trade with multiple other people/merchants we would need a centralized node with connections to every single one of the clients and every single one of the merchants (so a "bank"). Both clients and merchants need to open a channel on L1 (so it's goddamn slow or expensive) to that node and freeze in the channel the full amount of tokens they would wish to spend with every single peer or merchant in the future (so basically a "deposit" of all or at least a lot of the funds in a "bank"). And every merchant would need to do that too for the full amount of anticipated transactions. And then this system will work on L2 somehow, if the system will correctly calculate paths and and sums in all the channels there are. To exit the system, channels must be closed on L1 (slowass or expensive) and if there are not enough funds in the channels, create new channels with more funds, again on L1.

Even in the most absurdly centralized scenario, the system is practically unusable as soon as there are more than a handful users. Or people just stop pretending and use custodian tokens, aka bullshit IOUs.
by nis0s | 2025-09-20 20:11:12+00:00
Except the U.S. right now is nothing like what the USSR was under the Soviets, at least not for people who are in the U.S. via proper and lawful immigration protocols. The bent towards Christian nationalism may covert the US into an unviable USSR-like environment for a majority of its population, including whites and Christians. But I don’t think that scenario is likely given the range of leadership available to the U.S. I guess it depends on how the next two years unfold, maybe I’ll stand corrected.

Regarding brain drains, why is it so bad if the best and most productive of another country stay in their home states, or go else where? The fact is that there are a lot of nations which experience relatively low rates of immigration, but are at the forefront of science and tech, such as China or Japan or Singapore. Maybe brain drains are not the main concern here, if anything the idea is a distraction.
by GenerWork | 2025-09-20 20:12:14+00:00
That's not how it works. The idea is that the sites will hold your spot for X minutes before they release the seat, so what they're doing is booking the flight, choosing seats (or not), getting to the payment page, and sitting there while the timer counts down. I believe that once it gets to 5 minutes or so there's an alert that asks if you're still there, and if you say yes, they'll either reset the timer or add some additional time on.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-09-20 20:13:08+00:00
Shocker. Socialist decries market pricing while neglecting to mention that below market tickets will simply be rationed by other means.

I mean it’s fine if you feel that’s sports tickets should be rationed a different way, but then just say it - when there are fewer seats than sports fans who want to fill them at an “affordable” price, then some form of rationing will be required. It can be price, it can be random, it can be waitlist, it can be whatever you want. Just don’t pretend that by dropping the price, rationing is magically no longer necessary.
by stackskipton | 2025-09-20 20:13:13+00:00
As someone who worked with mulitple H-1Bs making less than their peers, I believe his statement.

This visa is very two faced. One hand, it's been used to import some really smart people into the United States who have gone on to do incredible things. Other hand, it's been used for job replacement by "native" workers who can do the job but were "too expensive".
by godelski | 2025-09-20 20:13:14+00:00
> don't act like I'm being unreasonable for asking what reasons you have for making it.

You are though. You never had any intention of talking in good faith, and it was my mistake for engaging.

You've constructed a setting where no matter what level of planning I suggest you'll be able to say that this already is performed.

You've constructed a setting where I must make a suggestion for YOU, when I've made a note about a generalization I've observed. Did I say "all"? Of course not. I'm a programmer too, right?

You've ignored my generalization while attempting to weaponize it against me by seeking high precision.

You then use precision to argue the variability and importance of adapting to differing settings.

You've moved the goalpost multiple times.

You've actively worked against requests to help refine the conversation to settings more appropriate for you, to determine if you are included in the initial generalization or not.

So yeah, you are being unreasonable. I see that all you wanted to do was pick a fight. I want no part in your dumb game.
by YZF | 2025-09-20 20:13:19+00:00
I just read through all the questions again.

There are questions about people present in the US illegally but not about people being allowed to come to the US illegally.

When I say illegal immigration I'm mostly thinking of the question of whether people should be allowed to come into a country illegally and generally immigration laws that govern people immigrating to the country. The question of how to deal with people who are present, maybe for a long time, in the country illegally is a different one. But I can see how in the US those are sort of mashed together. There's an obvious relationship, e.g. if you say that someone present in a country illegally should be allowed to stay and become a citizen that basically means new people arriving (let's say as tourists or not entering via official entry points) can just stay and become citizens. But I think in the US it's generally debated as two separate questions, i.e. people that are present (especially for a long time, families, etc.) should have a path to become legal immigrants. I'm not here to really debate this but more to point out those are somewhat different questions.

Let's review everything just to make sure we're not missing anything:

"Thinking now about immigrants — that is, people who come from other countries to live here in the United States — in your view, should immigration be kept at its present level, increased or decreased?" -> legal immigration (presumably, or at least ambiguous)

"On the whole, do you think immigration is a good thing or a bad thing for this country today?" -> legal immigration (again, presumably)

"Please tell me whether you strongly favor, favor, oppose or strongly oppose each of the following proposals. " -> This one is more of a mix but the question of whether people support illegal immigration isn't really addressed. There are questions about how people who are present in the US illegally should be treated and about things like border security which has some tangents to illegal immigration (presumably a border is there to stop illegal immigration, but also to stop smuggling and other reasons, but why not just ask if people want open borders?)

"Figures represent percentages who favor or strongly favor each policy." -> similar to the above, dealing with the question of those present in the US illegally not the question of more people coming into the US and whether that should be via current legal means or "open border everyone is welcome with no process".

"Do you strongly approve, approve, disapprove or strongly disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling the immigration issue?" -> not really clear enough but feels like another permutation of the above. dealing with people present illegally and not general immigration policy questions (who should be able to come and who shouldn't).
by pornel | 2025-09-20 20:14:02+00:00
Rust is over 10 years old now. It has a track record of delivering what it promises, and a very satisfied growing userbase.

OTOH static analyzers for C have been around for longer than Rust, and we're still waiting for them to disprove Rice's theorem.

AI tools so far are famous for generating low-quality code, and generating bogus vulnerability reports. They may eventually get better and end up being used to make C code secure - see DARPA's TRACTOR program.
by austin-cheney | 2025-09-20 20:14:28+00:00
This phenomenon of bad software isn’t new. Vernor Vinge mentioned this in passing in A Deepness In The Sky.

I do agree with the nature of self sufficiency. That is the start of durability. Most people find this revolting though. The goal, for most people, isn’t stuff that works properly. The goal is inclusion and comfort, a social baseline opposed to a utility baseline.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-09-20 20:14:37+00:00
Idiomatic "low level" rust clocks in at about 10-50% slower than hand-coded C every time I try it. It is also about 10x easier to write the Rust code. Unsafe is just required a lot of the time. Sometimes it's code size or struct size just being larger to express a similar concept. To get back your performance you have to do things that are un-idiomatic (but you have to do in C anyway).
by krishkumar5599 | 2025-09-20 20:14:40+00:00
Virio is a B2B revenue engine that allows enterprise execs and founders to generate more revenue and pipeline through specialized content. They've gone from 0--> $500k in 30 days, and we're hiring founding engineers in San Francisco, in person for $150k - $200k / year + equity. If you apply and impress us, I'll give you $250 for going further in the process. Feel free to email viriohiring@gmail.com if interested, and I'll set up a call. Learn more here: Eric Lay (CEO): https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericlay-virio/ Emmett Chen-Ran (CTO): https://www.linkedin.com/in/echenran/ Website: https://www.virio.ai/
Ask HN: Why don't Americans hire human assistants for everyday tasks?
by parpfish | 2025-09-20 20:15:22+00:00
in the US, there doesn't seem to be much of a demand for "domestic labor". the idea of personal assistants or housekeepers is seen as something exclusively for the ultra-wealthy, but i'm not sure why.

in particular, i'm curious about what this says about the potential for the adoption of AI-based assistants.

for example: there's all sorts of stuff that I have to do outside of work that eat into my free time ( grocery shopping, simple meal prep, light housecleaning, running random errands). I'd love to be able to outsource all that to a trusted assistant that I pay a fair wage to.

back of the envelope math makes something like this seem like it should be financially plausibly for a lot of folks:

- ask a mid-career software engineer making 150k if they'd trade 10k/year to get an additional 10hrs/week of free time back, and I think a LOT would say yes.

- at that rate an assistant would get 4 clients to work a 'normal' 40hour week and make a ~median salary of 40k/yr.

So why don't we see arrangements like this? is there something about American class psychology where it feels wrong to employee somebody to do this? or are people just unwilling to trust somebody to do things on their behalf?
by throwaway95914 | 2025-09-20 20:15:54+00:00
I'm absolutely not a lawyer, so may be mistaken, but the fees for I-129 / DS-160 are not explicitly mentioned anywhere. Instead the fee seems to be an entry fee, which is orthogonal to the actual visa (meaning ; you can have a visa but not be granted entry, or maybe be granted entry under a different program but then with no lawful work permit).

Personal Experience: H1B/Work PERM/Personal PERM/EADs/Naturalization
by ddtaylor | 2025-09-20 20:16:28+00:00
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

and

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by bigyabai | 2025-09-20 20:16:38+00:00
> but they get extra energy from this objecting-to-the-objections quality.

Should they not? It would be unfair "extra energy" if the comments were fair criticisms, but they're not in the spirit of hacker or entrepreneurial culture. The parent seems to be arguing that most of these comments are entirely ignoring who the product is for to leap to hardware comparisons pre-hoc. And I agree with that conclusion; there is nothing intellectually stimulating or helpful in a discussion about how a dev kit appeals to the broader consumer market.
by yobibyte | 2025-09-20 20:17:24+00:00
I agree! However in many cases, these edge cases (I'm not speaking of curl now) are not needed for my personal use. E.g. if I use linux/windows/os, I do not care about how my tool behaves on the other os, I do not want to support all kind of hardware etc. If I am the only users, I can prune these use-cases (and features I mentioned in the post) significantly. E.g. I reimplement a subset of vim at the moment, I do not use LSPs or syntax highlighting in my work, I do not need to implement support for them in my editor.
by thisisit | 2025-09-20 20:17:26+00:00
Big tech can get waiver from DHS.

Cheap labor exists because there is a demand for it. Body shops don't pay those wages - companies who hire those bodies from body shops do. So, body shops are going to raise prices accordingly.

"You need someone to manage your Oracle/SAP ERP systems and do a horrible job of it? And that person needs to be here locally? That will be an extra $60k from our last contract because we cannot bring in cheap bodies now." (assuming they eat $40k of the costs)

In the meantime rural medical centers will be devasted because many teams are made of H1B doctors.

H1B certainly requires more government oversight. But doing their jobs or applying critical thinking skills isn't a criteria for this administration.
by chatmasta | 2025-09-20 20:17:34+00:00
Wait until you find out that the client who signed the contract, the lawyers who wrote it, the pre-sales who designed it, and the account executive who started it… also all used NotebookLM for their stage of the deal.

(btw, it’s “NotebookLM” – one “L” – not “Notebook LLM”)