skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was at least partially artificial. The GI Bill post WWII introduced millions of families who otherwise wouldn't have gone to college the ability to go to college. This set off two cycles, one of which is now those folks who went to college on the GI bill wanted to encourage their kids to go to college, which is well and good, but it also showed the economic value to a bigger mass of the country of going to college. Now that made its way into government policy as a result, so the government took steps in the 1970s and 1980s in particular to expand collegiate enrollment, which drove up the price of college which lead to Clinton signing a bill that gave us the student loan system as it exists today, which then fed even more enrollment as a matter of policy, but now universities too were in on the game, as that money is guaranteed which lead to bigger recruitment drives.

I'm giving a very high level synopsis here, but the snowball effect wouldn't have happened without the policy interventions by the government, in particular the student loan shenanigans
I prefer fringe than stupid.
Be able to work as part of a team to do all of that. No Lone Rangers can do it by themselves.
It is that and that the acidity of the fruit juice is pretty bad for the enamel of your teeth.
Couple of years ago, they were doing this to me every... single... day... at 4am. Nothing really scares them off. I would go outside and try to wave them off. They go just far enough to get out of your reach, or just hide on the back side of a tree trunk. Then they do that stupid Woody Woodpecker laugh, and fly right back when you go inside. I now see where Woody Woodpecker got his personality from. What a dick.
I'm vibe-coding a vibe-coding platform.

I'm going to speak this update because that way I can have the text written more naturally. So, let's do that. So, since October last year, this means about six months, I've been using Cursor as a non-coder. Actually, I've been coding the last time, I guess, back in the days of Flash in ActionScript. So, I used Cursor for the past six months, maybe around 12 to 15 hours a day on average, you know, some days off, more hours in other days. And I've been working together with my co-founder, who's a developer, but he's also using AI, except he's using AI less than I do. So, we've been working on several things, of which one of them is closest to being released, maybe 80% done, which is, as I said, a vibe coding platform.

So this particular vibe coding platform will actually not compete with the likes of Replit, Bold, Loveable and about 40 other platforms that are basically the same: chat + IDE + preview area. What we're doing is actually different because we are rewriting a project that we built about 10 years ago. And I guess in a way similar to how Replit and Bolt had completely pivoted because of AI. The same thing is happening with this project of ours. So the project was actually about offering interactive widgets to people for their websites, but we had to build those manually. So now we have rewritten the platform from scratch using AI. And we offer zero widgets because with AI we are able to offer an infinity of widgets. That's exciting.

So this was supposed to stay a side project and frankly I'm pretty surprised that there's so much demand and the growth is amazing for all these AI code gen platforms. And if that happens to us, to this project, I don't know exactly what we are going to do because our plan is actually to tackle a bigger project that we are also working on. And the strategy here is to do what we call compounding startups. So instead of building a larger project with many features, we actually split that in several projects and we are doing them one at a time and giving each the ability to actually generate revenue. At some point we are likely going to raise capital. We had this plan before but with AI things have completely changed. We are able to do now in a week what five developers were doing in six months.

So the other projects are Talbo, Reclona and Tradul. Talbo is the what they compound into. But I am not ready to talk too much about them right now. :)
Deep Research is great for specific stuff like this.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67f5b165-b7c0-8000-b81c-4dc869e163...

It did take more than a few minutes to do the research, looks thorough though.
Ironically, it's not that LLMs have become super useful, it's that the dominant search engines have become significantly worse, while at the same time they peddle AI results. It almost feels as if it was better for them if you used LLMs.

I won't deny LLMs can be useful, but they're like the news: double-check and form your own conclusions.
Well sure, but if the premise is that we're going to replace everything with solar and batteries, that one's the hard one.

Whereas heat pumps powered by nuclear reactors work pretty well, if you could get the cost of nuclear reactors under control by getting mass production going.
You don't have a no international transaction fee card? They're trivial to get
> The US has by far the world's strongest economy no matter how you measure it.

Strong, yes. Strongest by nominal, yes. But not strongest by PPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
Years back, I had someone interviewing in person for a low-level, bit-twiddling, C++ role without knowing what hexadecimal is (no clue how they got that far; the external recruiter was given "feedback"). Pretty much lied about everything, tried to bullshit his way through questions. I have no idea how they thought they'd manage the job.

Just like with semi-personalized phishing/spam, it's not that these things didn't happen already, it's that people are empowered and emboldened to cheat by it becoming easier. The difference is in quantitative not qualitative.
I use ChatGPT for queries like, "translate XYZ to English," particularly for short phrases where I don't care if it's exactly right; good enough works.

For everything else, I still use search.
We've tested almost every visualization library under the sun when building Briefer (https://briefer.cloud) and I can confidently say that Apache ECharts is the best.

The main issues with other libraries is that they're either:

(a) ugly
(b) difficult to use (i.e. having to do things imperatively)
(c) not flexible enough

Apache ECharts solve these 3 problems. It's pretty by default, it allows us to mount/calculate the declarative spec for the graphs in the back-end and then only send the desired spec to the front-end so it can render, and it's also extremely flexible to the point we can support everything that traditional BI tools can do.

We've never had to extend the lib to do anything new, everything we need is already there.

Glad to see this great piece of work on top of HN.
You’re comment was talking about performing under pressure and failing to perform with people watching them.

In this context when you say perform I assumed (as would most people) that you’re talking about technical/work sample interviews not culture fit tell me about a time you did x interviews.

If you’re talking about those, then yes every job in every industry does that. If you’re talking about stand at this white board and solve a problem that I know the answer to to while I watch.

No one outside of software engineering does this for anyone but new grads.
right, but as others have pointed out the amount of money invested in Cyc is approx 2 orders of magnitude less than what was invested in LLMs. So maybe the method was OK, but it was insufficiently resourced.
And gone, evidence wiped.
"Cyc has failed to reach intellectual maturity, and may never will."

'may never will'?
Here's the actual decision: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/AP...

What would it take to make it a norm for news articles to actually link to the thing they are reporting on?
Oh it absolutely does!

"Which one's the donation to the rebels?"

"The Monero, obvously..."
For context: this article came out around noon eastern, when the market was delusionally optimistic. TQQQ closed down 13% from its noon price. It is down 18% from its noon price in after hours trading.
I also do this for monospace text, but in proportional there's perfect "fill" justification which for some reason gets ignored.

Here's how you do it in advanced layout systems like CSS: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6205109/justify-text-to-...
Flyover Country: What a future where iPhones are made in America would look like
Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_related_to_the_COVID...
I'm a big fan of VisX for the level of control it gives.
I agree you need a variety of skills and jobs, but "learning how to build machines" is just as white collar as learning to code. Particularly since the functionality of any modern machine involves just as much code as it does mechanical engineering. Don't get me wrong, mechanical and software engineering are completely different fields and we need both of them. But they're both unarguably college educated white collar jobs.
For fuck sake, stop trying to find a 4d chess angle. There isn’t one! Trump likes tariffs on an instinctual level going back to the 80s! He’s just dumb!
My favorite part about this (and all GenAI) comments section is where one person says, "This is my personal experience using AI" and then a chorus of people chime in "Well, you're using it wrong!"
hah i use llms for that now too - "option-space 'link to <foo> lang'" and chat returns faster than the whole endeavor of opening google or putting stuff into the nav bar.
People don't change because a state is democratic. There are still authoritarians getting voted into power and present in the government; they just get voted out if the damage they are doing gets too visible.
Agreed with this. A lot of people seem to think they suck, and sometimes they do, but I find them to be more useful than not. It’s actually really nice having a prose digest of the most plausible links for my search query.
I really don’t know what to do with posts like these — a startup announced today supposedly beats all other OSS models out of the gate??

I mean, they have screenshots of tables and stuff so they’re presumably not outright lying, but I’ve been burned before in this space. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see if others start freaking out about them…

Tech-wise the IDA algorithm seems promising! Aiming for “superintelligence” is a little bold considering that counts on an (inherently-unpredictable!) intelligence explosion from a human-level model, but I’m sure it helped them raise at least.

Thanks for posting! Keeping my eye on y’all :)
Why is this Hacker news?
LLMs and search engines have different use cases, albeit having overlap. Kind of similar to traditional computing vs machine learning.
It’s not just medicine. No other job does solve this question on a whiteboard style interviews for anyone other than new grads.

The closest thing you’ll find is actors and musicians auditioning. But performing is an actually a part of their job.

Nurses only have 4 years of school and they don’t have whiteboard interview equivalents. Medical technicians don’t either and they don’t even have degrees in most cases.

Also one minor correction most residencies are 3 years, although some are longer.
Show HN: Anschreibenai.com – an AI coverletter generator. it's free. no account
Hey Guys,

this is my little pet project. The motivation was: i hate writing cover letter and i want to automate is so much, that 9 out of 10 coverletters will be ai generated in the future.

Let's flood the market and recruiters will simply stop asking for a cover letter. I don't want to make any money out of it. It's free. You don't need an account and it's available in 32 languages. Would love to hear your feedback.
This sounds more like a problem with you specifically not seeing value in art. Why would you want the incentives not to work in their favor?
the reductive, absurd version of something is reductive and absurd, but that doesn't mean that the nuanced, appropriate version is wrong
So applying this to China and the USA - the USA has a median household income of ~$80k, and China, in terms of purchasing power parity, has a median household income of $32k. China has a workforce of ~775M people vs 163M people in the USA. The USA has ~7M unemployed people. For the USA to stop importing goods from China, we would need to 1) stop consuming those goods altogether (even if they're intermediate goods that go into things we do manufacture), or 2) employ US workers to make those goods instead of whatever they're currently doing (either employed or unemployed).

Employed Americans largely earn a lot more than employed chinese people, and there just aren't very many unemployed Americans. Based on the value of imports to the US from China vs Chinese GDP($440B vs $17.8T), we import about 2.5% of their output, or the equivalent of ~20M people's output if we naively scale. I don't think there is any way around the fact that significantly reducing imports from other countries means we significantly reduce our consumption in absolute terms (i.e. we have a poorer standard of living), just out of spite for other countries.
"Their topmost distinction was between things with souls and things without souls. And large trees were in the former category, whereas small trees were in the latter category…"

This reminds me deeply of Borges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...

To me, that bit of Borges is a reminder that all human taxonomies are limited and provisional. But it seems to me that Cyc and its brethren are built around the notion that a universal taxonomy is important and achievable. I guess it's possible that a useful kind of cognition could happen that way, but it's patently not how people work. If I had gotten to the point where I was forced to define exactly when a tree got a soul, I hope I'd realize that I was barking up the wrong tree.
Yep. I ask LLMs the XY questions since they don’t get annoyed, and when my question is very concrete and reduced to its essence, I ask the search engine and usually get a better answer than the LLM would give me.

Basically, there’s a lot of good and specific information on the web, but not necessarily combined in the way I want. LLMs can help break apart my specific combination at a high level but struggle with the human ability to get to solutions quickly.

Or maybe I just suck at asking questions haah
GWB did indeed harm US's standing in the world, quite a bit. It's remarkable how far we've fallen, to be at all nostalgic for that regime.
I think this is mainly a symptom of poor alignment between search engines and their customers. ChatGPT works well now but the plan there seems to be to monetize search-like queries. I fear it won't be long until chat AI agents using this model bring us back to the same frustrations we have today with Google et all.

There is some room for optimism, though. There's been a rise in smaller search engines with different funding models that are more aligned with user needs. Kagi is the only one that comes to mind (I use it), but I'm sure there are others.
Computerphile did a nice video on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzdugwr4Fgk

The Kindle Text Problem - Computerphile
I certainly don't disgagree that Xi won't back down soon, nor will Trump. Nor that global trade will continue: When China and Australia entered a dispute, Australia found substitutable markets for most of its sectors exporting in bulk to China, and in the end they came to rational terms quietly. We all feel much better about the diversified markets now. And in like sense while the whole US beef thing is very annoying it's actually under 10% of our total beef exports.

But I think you underplay how much damage the US could do to the Chinese economy, if (for instance) they repudiated the debt. Or, if they heavy trading partners to drop favourable trade terms to gain back US markets. I think people would be insane to give in but from time to time this kind of thing happens for a short term win. We recently pumped a shitload-and-a-half of money back into the pacrim island economies, to displace China as a trade and security partner having taken our eye off the "backyard" as it is disparagingly called.
"Listen to how loud your babies will be"
Ask HN: AI Piano Teacher?
Looking for an AI piano teacher which adaptively teaches me, gives me lessons, connects to my keyboard.

Please share any links, thoughts. Thank you.
This is not just used for folks in the medical fields, it's something that lots of businesses use! In the US, it's often called a "DBA (Doing Business As) Name" or a "Fictitious Name".

You can read about California Fictitious Names here: https://calosba.ca.gov/for-small-businesses-and-non-profits/...
Pix isn't a CBDC.

The deployment of SCT inst is mostly complete and Wero (EPI) was launched in 3 countries already. Things take a bit more time when you need to push standards and regulations to 11/27/36 countries. Overall banking and payments in the EU/EEA are pretty advanced and evolving at a decent pace given the market size and number of entities involved, the PSD is world-class.
The US can barely get basic medical supplies to much of its population outside of a health crisis - not because of direct supply chain issues, but because the system is designed to put corporate profits over adequate service provision.

And in the not so general case, over national security.

Is manufacturing the real problem here? Or is it a symptom of decades of systemic mismanagement of opportunity by a culture that values short-sighted opportunism over strategy?
How did you score that domain?
*an exponent of 64 bytes

If it can be kept to a exponent of 64 bytes you even get page aligned again.
Growing in Grace – Substack
22.7MB to download the latest release from Github (87.3MB unzipped). That's an insane amount of JS to download and compile (people often complain about React being ~50kb).

The default recommended way to use it is `import * as echarts from 'echarts'` which means you are getting the WHOLE thing.

Does anyone with experience know how big is it when you pick and choose modules?
I'd rather have a list of links with text ads I can ignore...
You know what's stagnating? Being dead forever.
LLMs do use dashes "properly"; it could just as well be argued that you don't: The very article at the start of this discussion mentions that, while thy don't use spaces, using spaces is a valid alternative.
Bingo. At this point the biggest cost to owning EV (in NZ) now is taxes and insurance, not fuel and maintenance.
Also, "cheating" is common in many species, including other birds, and it doesn't seem to affect their reproduction enough to justify evolving cheater powers; as spicy as that hypothesis may be.

I also agree that it makes more sense that pressure to become smarter is linked to prediction and preservation, as they're fragile creatures. A wounded mammal could crawl inside its nest and heal, a wounded bird is likely a dead bird.
If you put a suet cage out, they'll usually go for that and leave your house alone.

I used to joke that they'll let you know when they're out of suet, by hammering your gutters to wake you up at 6am.
For a micro-moment before giving in it was a chair, then it broke. Now its no longer a chair. Its a broken chair.
The Illusion of Time, the Overflow of Being
This is cool, I immediately did 4 puzzles in a row.

In addition to saying congratulations, I wanted to ask, since you say you're the one writing the puzzles: how do you define a puzzle? What does it look like from your perspective? Do you literally just write all the nested clues out with brackets and everything, and then validate that it works—because that would drive me nuts, I think—or is there some tool you wrote to help?
I feel setting this up and maintaining is far more expensive than extra batteries. Maybe it does enable some new possibilities tho so might be worth it.
Yes. I did not mean India, so I chose a broader label.
I don’t employ leet code questions in my hiring process, but I do think they can provide value or signal.

If a candidate is taking the time to practice and master leetcode it does show the candidate is motivated, demonstrates their ability to learn and internalize knowledge, and to utilize that knowledge under pressure.

If those are things you want to screen for and have a high volume of talented candidates I can see a use for them.
TIFF is almost an multidimensional array serialization format. Obviously is centered on images but it can have many layers. Usualy RGBA but they can be have other interpretations. It supports some level of streamed writting and random access over HTTP or other ranged protocols.
Implementations like these are incredibly useful for understanding how something like HNSW works, and being able to make derivative work.

I put together a tiny little implementation a while ago, the key thing being, it writes the index as a few parquet files, so you can host the index on a CDN and read from it via http range requests (e.g. via duckdb wasm).

Definitely isn't beating any benchmarks, but free (or wildly cheap) to host, as you serve it directly from a CDN and processing is done locally.

https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/portable-hnsw
This is what I'm talking about: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/08/fake-job-seekers-use-ai-to-i...
libgen is far from an archive of "most" books and publications,
not even close.

The most recent numbers from libgen itself are 2.4 million non-fiction books and 80 million science journal articles.
The Atlantic's database published in 2025 has 7.5 million books.[0]
The publishing industry estimates that many books are published each year.
As of 2010, Google counted over 129 million books[1].
At best an LLM like Llama will have have 20% of all books in its training set.

0. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...

1. https://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand...
> made increasingly irrelevant as open alternatives to it are developed instead

Certainly interesting what these projects are going for, but it's unlikely an "open alternative", given that the degree of formalization and rigor achieved by Cyc's higher-order logic specification is likely not achievable by statistical learning, and a symbolic approach is barely achievable in a shorter time than Cyc.
Recycling a comment from the past few "explanations":

Hahaha--no. Such a devious long-term plan wouldn't be taxing specific US military bases or populations of penguins, for starters.

I see such a huge outpouring of energy being spent right now trying to develop mutually-incompatible 4D chess explanations for Trump taking a dump onto the chessboard, borne from different flavors of denial.

For some, it's because the first rule of Cult Club is that the cult-leader can't be fallible. For others, it's because they don't want to believe that stupidity sometimes wins.
1. The race animation adds no information, but better communicates the idea that we're looking at a series of moments in time, each with its own history and emotional impact. Watching the lines race shows us what it would've felt like looking at this graph during each year.

2. The Chartjunk wiki cites Adolf Loos's idea "ornamentation is a crime". But I think we're done with modern minimalism and in the process of rediscovering the joy in ornamentation. This is an aesthetic choice and you may disagree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
I also have an old TV and guess what? Netflix stopped working last year. The application is not supported anymore. Beats me why.