MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-04 13:52:34+00:00
> Whereas if you take the extraordinarily difficult step of opening Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox), you understand the real paradox. Jevons observed that when steam engines get more efficient and individually use less coal, we end up deploying many more steam engines in many new industries and use cases, increasing coal consumption overall.

What difference do you see in this paragraph compared to the one before? Steam engines get more coal-efficient and that means there are more of them burning more coal. This is two observations:

- The cost of steam engines goes down, and the quantity sold goes up.

- The value of coal goes up (it produces more energy per ton), and the quantity sold goes up.

Those results are just as basic as "the cost of coal goes down, and the quantity sold goes up", which is the statement you open by criticizing. I agree there's nothing surprising about it. But there's nothing surprising about the other statements either. The paragraph two statements are both demand increases†, while paragraph 1 is a supply increase, but they all happen on the same X-shaped graph from economics 101. (Or rather, two of them happen on an X-shaped graph measuring supply and demand for coal, and one of them happens on an X-shaped graph measuring supply and demand for engines.)

† "The cost of steam engines goes down" might sound like a supply increase, but the cost that's dropping here is the operating cost and not the manufacturing cost, meaning that, at a given price, more people are willing to buy a steam engine than previously.
by entropyie | 2025-11-04 13:52:45+00:00
Excellent piece, captivating. I found many parallels here to managing IT. So much of control theory and systems engineering is relevant to developing and deploying cloud systems, improving performance etc...

Many times I've seen engineers polishing and optimizing the code of an existing system without ever questioning the process itself or indeed the paradigm. I myself was in that position, spent 5 years optimizing the parameters of a complex system, only to realize that system was put in place based on faulty assumptions that were never questioned. The whole thing could have been removed and performance sped up 200%.
by Balgair | 2025-11-04 13:52:47+00:00
Two use cases with my corpo are:

1) Enhanced User guides/manuals.

We sell some very complicated and expensive instruments. As such, making them work is quite hard. One of our biggest expenses is our engineers that go out, physically, to help customers. Company policy is that the first visit is always free. These customers can be very remote (Deep sea oil platforms, Australian outback, quite nice ski country ;) , etc). Often their issue is simple but they can also be very complex. We have phone trees, email, texts, iridium phones, etc. to talk customers through things to avoid these first visits and then hep them afterwards. So adding in AI chatbots is a natural way to help out. People don't feel quite the same 'shame' in asking really dumb questions to a chatbot that they do to a real person. So, to make these chatbots smarter, we use some of this AI mumbo-jumbo (RAG), to help them out. So far, it seems successful and the customer and engineers like the enhanced/AI manuals.

2) Making said manuals

We support 35 languages and many regulatory environments. Our instruments are all compliant with whatever version of a government agency you've got (modulo a lot of time, money, ITAR regulations). As such, making all that paper (manuals, compliance docs, contracts, etc) takes a lot of time and effort and has to pass the legal tests too. So AI is really helpful with it. Most of the work for these large stacks of paper is essentially boilerplate, but all subtly different so that literal copy-pasting doesn't get you quite that far. AI systems have been able to, last I checked, get that team about 5x faster, as it cuts out ~85% of the process and drudgery. Since these documents get hauled into courts, they can't just be blindly AI made, and a human always has to go over everything with a sharp eye still, but AI helps out there a bit too. Last lunch I had with them, they were saying that they were actually working on their burn-down charts now and not just going from panic to panic. As in, they could actually do their jobs.
by smt88 | 2025-11-04 13:53:28+00:00
His administration admitted to lying about weapons of mass destruction in order to invade Iraq.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians died, thousands of Americans died, and trillions were wasted.

He was a traitor to his country, not a patriot.

I don't care one way or another that he's dead, but let's not whitewash his legacy.
by bryangrigorie | 2025-11-04 13:53:56+00:00
Location: Florida, United States

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No (currently), Yes (Jan 2026 -)

Technologies: Python, Flask, Django, SQLAlchemy, jQuery, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Git/GitHub & Actions CI/CD, MySQL, SQLite, Docker/Compose, Jira, Nginx, Rust, Linux, Cloudflare, WireGuard, scikit-learn.

Résumé/CV: https://cloud.bryangrigorie.com/s/aC9TkQzDRrDgYya?dir=/&edit...

Email: bryangrigorie@gmail.com
Show HN: API-first approval workflows and smart routing (SignumFlow)
by signumflow | 2025-11-04 13:55:07+00:00
Hi HN!

I built SignumFlow — an API-first engine for approval workflows + smart routing.

Most approval + e-signature tools are UI-first. SignumFlow is developer-first: you call the API, bring your own UI, and keep everything inside your product.

Highlights • Create + execute approval workflows (sequential/parallel) • Smart routing • E-signatures • Webhooks + audit log • Templates

Docs → https://docs.signumflow.com

Early build — would love feedback on the API + use cases.
by bilekas | 2025-11-04 13:55:07+00:00
>He kept repeating that non-deterministic and remove human in the loop is the way to go.

For an "Architect" this is extremely troubling..

> He lamented that no one was fully unleashing AI

More than likely he will never be the one cleaning up the mess, probably he will be the one contracted to design proper systems though so maybe it's a genius move.
by shirokuma | 2025-11-04 13:55:34+00:00
It's insane to me how making the technically worse choice is okay to you because some company out there is "making it work"

Also what could you do in 3 mere days that would pay off more than having the code in a language that the team is much more efficient with, one which doesn't need hacks to "make it work"?

It would save you several days on features forever, compared to doing one thing for just 3 days.
by lproven | 2025-11-04 13:55:39+00:00
The point of the article is that if you attempt to find

> "the framework that best supports the business case and problem you are working on"

by asking the people who will be using it, then the answer will almost certainly be wrong.

The whole point here is working out which is the best tool is almost impossible because of natural human cognitive biases.

TL;DR summary:

No. No, that isn't the answer. It's not even an answer. It's the answer to a different question.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-04 13:56:03+00:00
It’s natural for people to care more about things that directly affect them.

Castro was in a foreign country I’ve never been to, and did most of his stuff before I was even born. His death was largely a realization that somebody from the history books had still been alive.

Cheney, in contrast, fucked with my home while I was an adult. He and his cabal did massive damage to my country very recently. I’m not going to make travel arrangements to visit his grave so I can piss on it, but I am tempted to.
by bena | 2025-11-04 13:56:04+00:00
First of all, Data never willingly jeopardized the crew.

Second, they work alongside actual aliens. Being different is not a disqualification. And Maddox isn't callous, he just doesn't regard Data as anything more than "just a machine". A position he eventually changes over the series as he becomes one of Data's friends.

Data is also not a stand in for the neurodivergent. He's the flip of Spock. Spock asks us what if we tried to approach every question from a place of pure logic and repressed all emotion. Data asks us what if we didn't have the option, that we had to approach everything from logic and couldn't even feel emotion. I also feel that equating data to someone who is neurodivergent is kind of insulting as neurodivergent people do have feelings and emotions.

But Data was capable of being fully autonomous and could act with agency. Something a rock can't. Data exhibits characteristics we generally accept as conscious. He is not only capable of accessing a large corpus of knowledge, but he is capable of building upon that corpus and generate new information.

Ultimately, we cannot prove a rock is not conscious. But, as far as we are able to discern, a rock cannot express a desire. That's the difference. Data expressed a desire. The case was whether or not Starfleet had to respect that desire.
by saberience | 2025-11-04 13:56:18+00:00
You've missed the point entirely.

People argue that humans have had the equivalent of training a frontier LLM for billions of years.

But training a frontier LLM involves taking multiple petabytes of data, effectively all of recorded human knowledge and experience, every book ever written, every scientific publication ever written, all of known maths, science, encylopedias, podcasts, etc. And then training that for millions of years worth of GPU-core time.

You cannot possibly equate human evolution with LLM training, it's ridiculous.

Our "training" time didn't involve any books, maths, science, reading, 99.9999% of our time was just in the physical world. So you can quite rationally argue that our brains ability to learn without training is radically better and more efficient that the training we do for LLMs.

Us running around in the jungle wasn't training our brain to write poetry or compose music.
by atrus | 2025-11-04 13:56:20+00:00
I see a lot of complaints about the font, and I'm just curious what makes it so hard to read? Is English your second language, I know reading Japanese for me in different or (worse!) handwritten makes it 10x harder for me to read. Are you just not used to a handwritingish font, and only read more typewritery fonts? Older than me (35+)?

It just feels weird that a perfectly legible font has multiple complaints, and I don't understand why or how?
by ihm | 2025-11-04 13:56:35+00:00
Castro led a revolution that abolished an essentially colonial regime of sugar plantation labor. Under Batista "most of the sugar industry was in U.S. hands, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land"[^0]. Rural men endured hard labor in poor conditions, for extremely low wages for half the year for the harvest and were left to languish without work for the rest of the year. Rural women were bound to their homes as domestic servants. There was no hope of a life beyond this for either. The revolution abolished this precarious existence, provided universal free healthcare, and gave everyone the opportunity to education through university. And that's just the effect of the revolution on rural life.

Cheney was a war profiteer who engineered wars that killed at least hundreds of thousands and probably over a million people.

I'd say the assessments are accurate. [^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista
Show HN: Clear Mail for Gmail – Clean up your Gmail inbox locally, no OAuth reqd
by raghukumar | 2025-11-04 13:56:36+00:00
Hi everyone,

I built this app to scratch my own itch, as I always struggled with a cluttered Gmail inbox and sometimes missed important emails within my Updates or Social tab.

I always felt jittery about using other apps, because almost all of them use OAuth for gaining access to a user's Gmail account. The OAuth token essentially means the app owners could do anything with my emails - read, delete, send on my behalf. I wanted to build something that worked without OAuth and created Clear Mail that simply executes javascript locally to declutter user's Gmail inbox.

I would love to hear your feedback/comments on my app.

The burning question I have is: How important is privacy for you when it comes to your email? Would you prefer something that runs locally, or do you trust the established apps that use OAuth, since they’re already widely used? Thanks!
by epolanski | 2025-11-04 13:56:45+00:00
> "In our nation's 248 year-history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump

And yet, the same person has advocated and pushed for greater powers to the presidency increasing the risks of such individual threats.

It's no coincidence that in the list of countries in the last 50 years that drifted from democracies to authoritarianism the tier of those that succeeded (the likes of Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, Philippines, Turkey) are ALL presidential republics.

Poland, Hungary, India, Israel, while not being shy of power hungry smart individuals? None of them is a presidential republic. The play in such countries is the party-state identification, where the party takes control of key institutions, press and in the right situation can also grab more. But it's never as simple or easy as in presidential republics.

In fact, I think that Sri Lanka is the last fully parliamentary democracy to shit into full authoritarianism, and that happened almost 50 years ago.

I can't but wonder whether US citizens realize that the constitution is dated, written for different times and with much less experience and lessons to learn from other democracies. It shows all the cracks of presidential democracies:

- constitutions where 2 or more branches of government can claim public mandate through elections (in US case president + congress) which unavoidably clash, for no greater good.

- hard to impeach/remove branch. Say what you want about many democracies in Europe for changing governments frequently, but you're always one single majority vote away from having to resign.

- cult of personality. Presidential republics, by electing an individual instead of a parliament/coalition are much more prone to personality cults.

US has all of those ingredients and Cheney made sure to make these problems worse.
by nkurz | 2025-11-04 13:56:48+00:00
After a quick glance at your submissions, you seem to be submitting things mostly to promote your own projects or your own writings. Posting things primarily to generate traffic to them generally isn't accepted here.

The "AI Guide" looks to have been automatically marked as dead, probably because so many of your earlier posts were flagged to death. I vouched to revive it because it seems like it might be of interest, but it's still another self-submission.

Overall, I don't know. It's on the edge. My guess would be that HN might not be a great fit if your goal is primarily self-promotion. You might email 'hn@ycombinator.com' and ask for their opinion.
by fouc | 2025-11-04 13:56:53+00:00
"A status page is used to communicate real-time information about a company's system health, performance, and any ongoing incidents to users. It helps reduce support tickets, improve transparency, and build trust by keeping users informed during outages or maintenance."

By definition, status pages should reflect reality, and be real-time, it makes sense to get worked up over because we rely on the company's status page to be the ultimate arbiter of the reality of their servers. It's not always easily obvious if it's on our end or theirs. Even if some other third party checker is showing problems, it doesn't mean they're 100% accurate either.
by bluGill | 2025-11-04 13:56:58+00:00
I don't know about UK, but my experience is the signs for EU and non-EU point different directions, but either way you just go through a door that leads to the exact same place. I've been told that when they are looking for "something" they will put extra checks at the non-EU door, but if you have a US passport (I presume other countries like Canada) in hand they will send you through the EU door.
by JAlexoid | 2025-11-04 13:57:03+00:00
> Until this mechanism is recognised as the cause of asset appreciation

What do you mean "until"? It's the core of many of European "dreams".

Take UK for example, where there's a concept called "property ladder". This property ladder is the promise of ever increasing property values, to build wealth(it's a pyramid scheme). This "always appreciating" promise is not just subtextual, it's literally the core of the method for becoming wealthy.

Whole economies in Europe are built around this constant real estate appreciation and first-home-buyers' support.

This is becoming the case in US as well, to lesser extent. US has a much more dynamic property market, than the wealthy Europe.

Politicians will bend over backwards to protect this "dream"... and at this point it is screwing over the new generation.
by a4isms | 2025-11-04 13:57:07+00:00
If we look at this as a system with work flowing through it, the "theory of constraints" quickly tells us that code review is the bottleneck, and that speeding up code generation actually lowers system throughput.

This is not new stuff, Goldratt warned us about this twenty+ years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints
by jpalawaga | 2025-11-04 13:57:53+00:00
For me factorio is a one playthrough kinda thing. I don’t get off on endless optimization and making it bigger for the sake of bigger, feels like work.

That said, I was more than happy to build the base back from scratch in space age, and I find the expansion to be every bit as fun as the base game. So I endorse it. Especially as you already know how to do some things quicker.
by tcfhgj | 2025-11-04 13:57:58+00:00
> Take for example an unexpected divide by zero, that's a classic invariant violation. The entire process should blow up right there because:

> - it knows that the data in memory is currently corrupted,

> - it has no code to gently handle the corruption,

are these conditions or implications?

- corruption isn't necessary: it could be the consequence of a bug

- corruption can be handled sometimes: fetch the data from the source again, apply data correction algorithms

- you know and control what the graceful stop does; maybe not save the corrupted data to disk? or maybe save it to disk and ask the user to send it to you
by fguerraz | 2025-11-04 13:58:02+00:00
While I truly admire how much progress they’ve made, and respect that everyone should pursue whatever they feel like doing with their time, it still feels to me like such a waste that it’s not written in a modern memory safe language.

I fear it’s ultimately going to be the most promising, least safe browser to use.

But hey, I want to be proven wrong, so I still gave them some money…
by melicerte | 2025-11-04 13:58:19+00:00
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by ph4rsikal | 2025-11-04 13:58:38+00:00
It might appear so, but then you could validate it with a simple test. If the LLM would play a 4x4 Tic Tac Toe game, would the agent select the winning move 100% of all time or block a losing move 100% of the time? If these systems were capable of proper reasoning, then they would find the right choice in these obvious but constantly changing scenarios without being specifically trained for it.

[1] https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/nemotron-vs-qwen-game-theory...
by ModernMech | 2025-11-04 13:59:01+00:00
> the people who created the most value leave your country

You mean the workers? Why would they leave if inequality is reduced, that would mean their standard of living would increase?

Anyone who wants to leave is free to, people are tired of the threats, just do it already. The people who leave will be spiting their own faces, and the people who stay behind will fill the demand vacuum.
by bluGill | 2025-11-04 13:59:14+00:00
> the electorate really doesn’t want immigration

Is that the case or is there just a significant minority that cares and the rest are happy enough as things are and would get mad if there was change - thus making their approach rational: get the votes of those who care but don't do anything because then you will be voted out next term.

I don't know myself, but this is something that I've wondered about a lot of issues that I care about where nothing happens. (I've long been on the side of more immigration)
by 47282847 | 2025-11-04 13:59:41+00:00
+1

We hired someone from Syria as a small and newly formed company in Germany, and all we had to claim is that yes it is a high skill job above a certain salary threshold and no we cannot find a person available with the required skills in Europe. The visa application process from our side was simple and straightforward, no forms, no fees, just a short letter where they told us beforehand via phone what to write to get it accepted, and it was processed very quickly, a few weeks maybe. We didn’t even advertise the job before, it was a position/role created specifically for that person (so from that perspective there was truth behind the statement that we cannot find anyone else suitable for it.)
by ndiddy | 2025-11-04 13:59:43+00:00
> Too many people have the "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote internalized to a degree they won't even think about any criticisms or suggestions.

Yeah I find it frustrating how many people interpret that quote as "don't bother optimizing your software". Here's the quote in context from the paper it comes from:

> Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

> Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3 %. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.

Knuth isn't saying "don't bother optimizing", he's saying "don't bother optimizing before you profile your code". These are two very different points.
by caravel | 2025-11-04 13:59:58+00:00
So I built “Figma for AI coding” to stay sane while coordinating agents across projects, git worktrees, AI sessions and my team. Called it Agor the, "AGent ORchestrator". Built it in a month using Agor to build Agor, plus an army of agents. Open sourcing it today. It's a 2D spatial canvas where you can coordinate an infinity of agents (managed git worktrees, shared dev environments, comments+reactions, m-site, + a proper scheduler). Solid docs at https://agor.live . Pretty stoked about this one.