MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CuriouslyC | 2025-12-31 21:25:57+00:00
What is the inherent value of being able to write well?

Is it not possible that people consider their craft to exist at a higher level than the written word? For example, writing facile prose is a very different from being a good storyteller. How many brilliant stories has the world missed out on because the people who imagined them didn't have the confidence with prose to share them.
by suralind | 2025-12-31 21:26:25+00:00
What’s the value proposition? I mean the fact that you have

- frontend
- backend
- website

is already confusing to me.

I understand that one commit seems nice, but you could have achieve this with e.g. 3 repos and very easily maintain all of them. There’s a bit of overhead of course, but having some experience working with a team that has a few „monorepos” I know that the cost to actually make it work is significant.
by nej24swei | 2025-12-31 21:26:28+00:00
Everything is a slippery slope. Better nothing be done than keep inventing new ways to oppress humanity. Why does something need to be done anyway?

You can’t nerd harder and solve this problem. You have to fight these ideas at the root, and you my friend are being the so called “useful idiot” by raising and supporting such oppression and censorship.
by igouy | 2025-12-31 21:28:03+00:00
Disks and manual were mailed across the pond.

> but, it didn't have very good documentation on getting "your first app" up

I thought the "Smalltalk/V 286 Tutorial and Programming Handbook" [0] was OK for that. (I hadn't seen the ParcPlace books back then.)

[0] http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/SmalltalkVTutorial...
by leobg | 2025-12-31 21:28:19+00:00
Thanks for sharing.

I often have this problem in Google Sheets. So far, i’ve resorted to copying the formula into Sublime Text and then splitting it into multiple lines. Your editor looks much more intuitive.

As demo, it would be nice if one could press a button to load some real data abd formulas. I’m reading HN on my phone. I guess many people do. Coming up with a formula and example data is an extra hurdle, and doing it using just a thumb and dumb autocorrect doubly so.

I did see the screenshots on GitHub. Thumbs up for those!
by keeda | 2025-12-31 21:28:22+00:00
I think we will enter some novel legal territory with cases like this. Intent is a crucial part of the law, and I wonder if we will see "Yes we built this thing, but we had no idea it could do THIS" as a legal defense.

Or, more formally, "these machines have an unprecedented, possibly unlimited, range of capabilities, and we could not have reasonably anticipated this."

There was a thread a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45922848) about the AI copyright infringement lawsuits where I idly floated this idea. Turns out, in these lawsuits, no matter how you infringed, you're still liable if infringement can be proved. Analogously, in cases with death, even without explicit intent you can still be liable, e.g. if negligence led to the death.

But the intent in these cases is non-existent! And the actions that led to this -- training on vast quantities of data -- are so abstracted from the actual incident that it's hard to make the case for negligence, because negligence requires some reasonable form of anticipation of the outcomes. For instance, it's very clear that these models were not designed to be "rote-learning machines" or "suicide-ideation machines", yet that turned out to be things they do! And who knows what weird failure modes will emerge over time (which makes me a bit sympathetic to the AI doomers' viewpoint.)

So, clearly the questions are going to be all about whether the AI labs took sufficient precautions to anticipate and prevent such outcomes. A smoking gun would be an email or document outlining just such a threat that they dismissed (which may well exist, given what I hear about these labs' "move fast, break people" approach to safety.) But absent that it seems like a reasonable defense.

While that argument may not work for this or other cases, I think it will pop up as these models cause more and more unexpected outcomes, and the courts will have to grapple with it eventually.
Show HN: I built an AI tool to automate property tax appeals for $29
by todaycompanies | 2025-12-31 21:28:40+00:00
Hi HN, I built this tool to help homeowners generate official appeal letters without hiring expensive lawyers or spending hours on research. It analyzes your property data to write personalized arguments and offers a certified mail option via Lob. It supports 3,000+ US counties. Would love to hear your feedback on the workflow or the pricing model.
by lizknope | 2025-12-31 21:28:56+00:00
I had never heard of the company RevenueCat. It looks like a system for mobile app developers to make in app purchases. A few Internet sources say that RevenueCat has about 120 employees. I'm in a completely different field so I'm not going to claim to understand all of that but I have worked for 2 startups.

The author talks about himself and his co-founder Jacob and they went back and forth on whether to sell or not.

I am very interested in what the other 118 employees thought. Did they want the co-founders to sell? What was their equity in the company? What kind of deal would they get? Accelerated vesting? Much larger than normal RSU stock grant at the acquiring company compared to a normal new hire there? Nothing?

I post this link in many threads about startups about how the normal employees often get nothing. The author says "So we decided to raise another round" and I wonder if the co-founders share the liquidation preferences and captables with the other 118 employees.

https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/a8f6xz/why_didnt_...

I posted this comment in a different startup related thread last month but I really wish the CEOs of both startups would have accepted these lower offers.

I don't know what the captable was at the first startup but at the second I would have got around $300K. This would have been a large amount of money for me but the founders wanted more so they rejected the offer.

Almost every "normal" level employee thought we should have taken the deal and then we would have also gotten jobs with normal RSU grants and bonuses at the acquiring company which was a well established company.

It made me decide to never work at a startup again. I don't want a single person to be able to control my financial situation that much. I'd rather have the relatively guaranteed yearly raise, bonus, and RSU grant, and not have to drink the Kool-Aid of the founders.

> I worked at 2 startups. Both failed.

> The first had been around for about 4 years when I joined and had products that made money. They were trying to get acquired. They had partnered with 2 companies making products specifically for them. One of them offered to buy the company for $30 million but the founders thought their company was worth $300 million. They said no and then money started to run out and people started leaving. In the end the assets were sold for $2 million.

> The second startup was created by former coworkers and I joined after it had existed for 4 months. We worked like crazy for the first year and got our prototype out. We had a lot of interest but it took me a while to realize that the 3 founders already had net worths from $5 million to billionaire level. When I heard about offers in the $30 million range they just weren't interested in selling for so little. I left after 3 years and the company floundered another 2 years until they shut it down as people left.
by gamblor956 | 2025-12-31 21:29:03+00:00
Historically, donations to charities drop when tax rates go down. As a percentage of income, donations were highest when tax rates were highest.

The best example that low tax rates don't increase giving: in 2017 the TCJA reduced tax rates for most people, and increased the standard deduction (but reduced the charitable deduction). Even though they were being taxed less and had more money to donate, Americans donated several billion less to charities each year (estimates very, but they're all between $15 and $20 billion less each year).
by nehal3m | 2025-12-31 21:29:25+00:00
The system is always on and moving air as a whole, and the water closet and bathroom have an intake duct that sucks in humid air that goes to the heat exchanger for exhaust. I have a little humidity sensor hooked up to Home Assistant that kicks the fan in the exchanger into a higher gear and returns to auto when humidity returns to baseline.

All rooms in the house have an intake or exhaust duct depending on requirements.

There is also a small control panel next to the thermostat in the living room that controls the whole system for when, ahem, your number two's are particularly odorous (or you're using the kitchen to cook for 6).
by movpasd | 2025-12-31 21:29:56+00:00
If your required logic separates nicely into steps (like "fetch, compute, store"), then a procedural interface makes sense, because sequential and hierarchical control flow work well with procedural programming.

But some requirements, like yours, require control flow to be interwoven between multiple concerns. It's hard to do this cleanly with procedural programming because where you want to draw the module boundaries (e.g.: so as to separate logic and infrastructure concerns) doesn't line up with the sequential or hierarchical flow of the program. In that case you have to bring in some more powerful tools. Usually it means polymorphism. Depending on your language that might be using interfaces, typeclasses, callbacks, or something more exotic. But you pay for these more powerful tools! They are more complex to set up and harder to understand than simple straightforward procedural code.

In many cases judicious splitting of a "mixed-concern function" might be enough and that should probably be the first option on the list. But it's a tradeoff. For instance, you then could lose cohesion and invariance properties (a logically singular operation is now in multiple temporally coupled operations), or pay for the extra complexity of all the data types that interface between all the suboperations.

To give an example, in "classic" object-oriented Domain-Driven Design approaches, you use the Repository pattern. The Repository serves as the interface or hinge point between your business logic and database logic. Now, like I said in the last paragraph, you could instead design it so the business logic returned its desired side-effects to the co-ordinating layer and have it handle dispatching those to the database functions. But if a single business logic operation naturally intertwines multiple queries or other side-effectful operations then the Repository can sometimes be simpler.
by NovaX | 2025-12-31 21:29:59+00:00
That is just a normal JVM with optional Graal components if enabled, but not being used. The default memory allocation is based on a percentage of available memory and uncommitted (meaning its available for other programs). When people mention Graal they mean an AOT compiled executable that can be run without a JVM installed. Sometimes they may refer to Graal JIT as a replacement for C1/C2 available also in VM mode. You are using a plain HotSpot VM in server mode, as the optimized client mode was removed when desktop use-cases were deprioritized (e.g. JWS discontinued).
by lbotos | 2025-12-31 21:30:22+00:00
100% right. I buy lots of Japanese cookbooks secondhand. I found an Okinawa cook book for $8. When I received it, it was clear the author was just a content farmer pumping out various recipe books with copied online recipes. Once I looked up their name I saw hundreds of books across cooking baking etc. there was no way they even tried all of the recipes.

So yes, review and “narrative voice” will be more valuable than ever.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-31 21:30:26+00:00
I think we have barely scratched the surface of post-trained inference/generative model inference efficiency.

A uniquely efficient hardware stack, for either training or inference, would be a great moat in an industry that seems to offer few moats.

I keep waiting to here of more adoption of Cerebras Systems' wafer-scale chips. They may be held back by not offering the full hardware stack, i.e. their own data centers optimized around wafer-scale compute units. (They do partner with AWS, as a third party provider, in competition with AWS own silicon.)
by theobr | 2025-12-31 21:30:51+00:00
I can't believe you're accusing someone of plagiarism because they had a similar idea that "claude code would be safer if it couldn't do destructive git calls". They also added much more protection, implemented it as a plugin, wrote thorough docs and have shipped many updates since.

You wrote a markdown file. Shut up.

My analysis:
https://x.com/theo/status/2006474140082122755
by mjr00 | 2025-12-31 21:31:19+00:00
I don't think you're an imbecile. People just like living differently. "Work to live" vs "live to work" and all that.

Some people like working a stable but boring 9-5. Some people like working a challenging job, even for longer hours and lower pay. Some people like building things; some people like coordinating teams and managing people; some people like maximizing financial returns and seeing numbers go up.

As to why this specific person didn't take a 9-figure cashout (assuming it's true); I would imagine it's at least partly because this person thinks it could be worth more in the future. Crazy as it sounds, he may not be wrong. Remember that Larry and Sergey tried to sell their "Google" research project to Yahoo for a life-changing amount of $1 million (in 1998, they could have each bought a house!). Or a million-dollar sale that did happen, Roy Raymond selling Victoria's Secret for a million in 1982. (Multiple houses!)

Obviously 9 figures is a lot different than 7, especially in 2025. But he's also the CTO and has access to financials and company strategy. Who's to say that the $100,000,000 he would get won't be $250,000,000 in an acquisition next year? Even "just" a 25% bump in a year would be an extra $25 million, which in itself is life-changing. It's obviously a risk, but saying "this guy is crazy and/or an idiot for not taking a 9 figure cashout" isn't fair unless you can peer into the future.
by todaycompanies | 2025-12-31 21:31:37+00:00
OP here. I built this because the standard property tax appeal process feels broken—you either spend hours deciphering government forms yourself or hire a firm that takes 50% of your first year's savings.
Under the hood, the app ingests property data (assessments, recent sales) and uses LLMs to draft arguments based on local statutes. For the fulfillment layer, I integrated the Lob API to handle the printing and USPS Certified Mail so users don't have to visit the post office.
I’m currently testing a flat-fee model ($29/$49) rather than the industry-standard contingency fee. I'd love to hear your feedback on the pricing structure or the "comparable sales" search flow.
by godelski | 2025-12-31 21:32:20+00:00
I often have the question: how much money do we waste on selfishness.

It's a clear example here. Meta is wasting good customer's money by showing them alongside scams and just devaluing ads by decreasing user trust. But also we only have these regulatory agencies because of this type of selfish behavior in the first place.

It sucks that these regulatory agencies cost so much money. But why do we blame the government? It's completely a problem we create. If people and companies didn't act like shit we wouldn't need those expenses in the first place. Let's not blame the regulators (for existing, but do for being ineffective) and blame the "bad apples" that are spoiling the barrel.

But what I do appreciate is that other countries are stepping up and not just waiting for the US to fix things. Real progress is being made because of this even if it still has a long way to go.
by gregors | 2025-12-31 21:32:32+00:00
Dell offers several models with Ubuntu. Other smaller manufacturers also support linux, for example Framework and System76. A tiny minority to be sure.

Microsoft's EOL for Win10 means a lot of people are either going to e-waste their old laptop or just run without patches if they can't afford new hardware.

I'm actively helping people convert to Ubuntu if they want to give it a try. Their computer is effectively EOL so the risk is quite low. Especially when you can save several hundred or thousand dollars on a new box. The risk/value ratio is properly aligned. It's different to try out a new OS on new hardware - too much risk for your average user.
by lefra | 2025-12-31 21:32:42+00:00
US grid carbon intensity is 0.384 gCO2/kWh (source: ourworldindata). US datacenter energy use in 2023: 176 TWh (excluding crypto, source US congress). How much of that is AI, I couldn't find.

So that's 67Mt CO2, I hope I haven't misplaced my decimal point, please double check. That would be 1.3% of the 5Gt of CO2 the US emits per year.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48646#_Toc207199546

For global emission and future trends the IEA estimates about 500TWh/year globally today, and 1000TWh/year in 2030 (base scenario). Assuming these use the current US grid carbon intensity, that would be about 200MtCO2 today, 400 in 2030. Global CO2 emissions today are 40Gt/year, so that would be 0.5% today, and 1% in 2030 (if global emissions stay stable).

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-data-c...
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-31 21:32:55+00:00
It's not a good analogy at all, because of what they said about mundane hardware. They're specifically not talking about any kind of ridiculous wattage situation, they're talking about single GPUs that need fewer watts than a human in an office to make text faster than a human, or that need 2-10x the watts to make video a thousand times faster.
by supermdguy | 2025-12-31 21:33:03+00:00
That's a good point, thinking about it some more, I think the business logic feels so trivial that it would make the code harder to reason about if it were separated from the effects. Currently, I have one giant function that pulls data, filters it, conditionally pulls more data, and then maybe has one line of effectful code.

I could have one function that pulls the wallet balance for all users, and then passes it to a pure function that returns an object with flags for each user indicating what action to take. Then another function would execute the effects based on the returned flags (kind of like the example you gave of processing a pending charges table).

The value of that level of abstraction is less clear though. Maybe better testability? But it's hard to justify what would essentially be tripling the lines of code (one function to pull the data, one pure function to compute actions, one function to execute actions).

Additionally, there's a performance cost to pulling all relevant data, instead of being able to progressively filter the data in different ways depending on partial results (example: computing charges for all users at once and then passing it to a pure function that only bills customers whose billing date is today).

Would be great to see some more complex examples of "functional core imperative shell" to see what it looks like in real-world applications, since I'm guessing the refactoring I have in my head is a naive way to do it.
by bob1029 | 2025-12-31 21:33:44+00:00
> Cooking bigger batches

This is also one of the central ideas around making computers go really fast.

> Throw away all cutting boards not made of wood or plastic

https://www.johnboos.com/collections/cutting-boards

> Garbage bowl

I have one of those rubbermaid tall/thin trash cans where my kitchen island used to be. Sometimes I will pull my fridge into the middle a little bit so it's easier to get at. That's the kitchen optimization advice that I would offer - The kitchen island is often a productivity & convenience scam. It took me a long time to learn this. From a simple geometric & topological perspective, being able to walk directly between everything without having to always pick a direction around some obstruction will reduce your cortisol levels by a scientifically-quantifiable amount.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-12-31 21:34:01+00:00
Proving even negligence may be hard, but I definitely think they are negligent.

A) This is not the first public incident on people being led down dark and deranged paths by talking with their AI.

B) They record and keep all chat logs, so they had the data to keep an eye out for this even if the AI itself couldn't be stopped in the moment.
by pvtmert | 2025-12-31 21:34:15+00:00
I find it funny because;

1. Amazon reports 250bn$+ revenue for entire EU in 2025. (of course, revenue != profit) while all 250bn$+ evaporates to somewhere. Their own page [1] reports 225k employees across EU, meaning that each employee returns whopping 1 million plus dollars! While being compensated less than 10% of their value!

2. In their own article [1], they boast how they invested (translated; smuggled money out) and enabled SMEs 20bn$+ revenue. (Like seriously, less than 10%?! actually goes back into the economy...)

3. Amazon says that they have invested 250bn$ in EU since 2010. It is completely unknown what or where that was invested. I do not see my street lightning being improved by the Amazon's investment or garbage being collected better.

4. Luxembourg's GDP is ~95bn$ in 2025. Amazon has contributed to that with the 0$ corporate tax. Obviously they employed about 4.5k people which they've decided to let go about 10% of them. Where the median/average yearly gross salary stands somewhere around 80k eur, it is hardly anywhere near 1mm+$ total income. I am guessing that they heat up the offices with burning the remaining cash...

[1]: https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/job-creation-and-investment/...

For the date of the verdict for Amazon vs EU, apologies. The article date was November 2024 in the source [2].

[2]: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/308509/20241129/amazons-2...

For the Ireland, I only knew similarities between Luxembourg and specific laws allowing such loopholes pre-brexit period. The source is certainly interesting and I need to dive deeper to understand better.
by johndough | 2025-12-31 21:34:21+00:00
In 2021, only the top 8 % of games sold 10k copies or more, so if you were among them, you were quite successful.

Source: https://app.sensortower.com/vgi/insights/article/video-game-...

In addition, a large fraction of those 8 % were probably games by AAA studios, so your chances as an indie dev are even lower.
by analogpixel | 2025-12-31 21:34:29+00:00
It uses up the preview in amazon, so you can't actually see the recipes in the book or if the recipes actually have pictures. All you can see is the default, here is my pantry.

Another bonus feature, would be to remove: breakfast, appetizers, and salads from all cook books, or put them in the back where no one needs to look at them.

Although I have found that cookbooks that don't include the useless fluff to pad the book out are usually much better, like the cookbooks from Milkstreet or Love and Lemons, So I guess it's actually a decent way to just filter out all the crap books.
by CupricTea | 2025-12-31 21:35:12+00:00
>Further down the article, the author suggests bubbling up the error with a result type, but you can only bubble it up so far before you have to get rid of it one way or another. Unless you bubble everything all the way to the top, but then you've just reinvented unchecked exceptions.

Not necessarily. Result types are explicit and require the function signature to be changed for them.

I would much prefer to see a call to foo()?; where it's explicit that it may bubble up from here, instead of a call to foo(); that may or may not throw an exception my way with no way of knowing.

Rust is absolutely not perfect with this though since any downstream function may panic!() without any indication from its function signature that it could do so.