MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-27 08:13:06+00:00
> It's a "you should" kind of rule not a "everyone follows this with no exceptions" kind of rule.

It's not a "you should" kind of rule either. It's something someone made up and wants to persuade other people of for no particular reason, similar to "don't split infinitives".

There is no benefit to having people be able to draw the flag accurately. A flag has two purposes:

1. Be easy to recognize.

2. Be visually impressive.

Two good flags are the flag of California and the flag of Saudi Arabia. You'd have a hard time drawing either one, but that's not a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_California

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Saudi_Arabia

(Note also that I've seen a Spaniard claim her flag was easy to draw. She meant that it's easy to draw if you don't bother to draw the coat of arms.)
Show HN: I built Libris.fm – 10000+ free, human-narrated audiobooks
by krishnasangeeth | 2025-04-27 08:13:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm the creator of Libris.fm. I've been a long-time fan of audiobooks, especially classic literature found in the public domain. I wanted a simple, dedicated app to listen to these works narrated by real people, without any distractions.

Libris.fm brings together over 10,000 human-narrated audiobooks, primarily sourced from LibriVox and the Internet Archive.

Key points:

Completely Free: No subscriptions or paywalls.

No Ads & No Tracking: Built with privacy in mind. Just the books.

Human Narration: Focused specifically on volunteer-read recordings, not synthetic voices.

Simple Interface: Includes essentials like background playback, speed adjustment, and skip controls.

Content: Lots of classic literature, poetry, history, drama, etc. Please checkout the discover screen and see for yourself.

This was a passion project born out of my love for literature and a belief that these public domain works deserve to be easily accessible. It's not trying to be an Audible or Spotify competitor, but rather a focused tool for enjoying these specific types of audiobooks.

It's currently available here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/h-for-hacker-news/id6744145932

I'm actively developing it and would genuinely appreciate any feedback from the HN community – feature requests, bug reports, or general thoughts are all welcome!
by antirez | 2025-04-27 08:14:45+00:00
The idea of CSS Zen Garden, that was: to show that you can produce server side simple and semantic HTML, and CSS will be enough to do the rest for the presentation of the content, was an incredible innovation of 200x that was totally forgotten, and that now, younger generation of programmers that grown up with big web frameworks no longer "get". They see CSS as something complex and impossible to handle, exactly because of what modern HTML is (because of such frameworks), without realizing that this is indeed the same problem: that modern web sucks, not that CSS sucks.
by exsomet | 2025-04-27 08:15:41+00:00
I don’t think real life is that squeaky clean, though.

Humans are emotional creatures. We don’t (usually) operate logically. The identity of the arguer and our perception of them (e.g. as a bot or not) plays a role in how we perceive the argument.

On top of that, there are situations where the identity of an arguer changes the intent of the argument. Consider, as a thought experiment, a know jewel thief arguing that locked doors should be illegal.
by pavlov | 2025-04-27 08:19:07+00:00
What changed was that “web 2.0” happened. Web design’s focus changed from documents to applications.

CSS Zen Garden was about styling “web 1.0” HTML documents.

But dynamic UIs have completely different styling needs. People started building JavaScript applications, and they started needing UI layouts similar to those provided by desktop UI frameworks. And CSS was never designed for that. Concepts like “float” were entirely derived from the word processor universe. CSS had to add several complex new layout engines over the following decades.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-27 08:19:48+00:00
> LLMs apologize and then proudly present the exact same output as before, repeatedly, forever spinning their wheels at the first major obstacle to their reasoning.

So basically like a human, at least up to young adult years in teaching context[0], where the student is subject to authority of the teacher (parent, tutor, schoolteacher) and can't easily weasel out of the entire exercise. Yes, even young adults will get stuck in a loop, presenting "the exact same output as before, repeatedly, forever spinning their wheels at the first major obstacle to their reasoning", or at least until something clicks, or they give up in shame (or the teacher does).

--

[0] - Which is where I saw this first-hand.
by sephalon | 2025-04-27 08:20:18+00:00
Thanks for letting me know about the video playback issue, I used the following script to create the timelapse:

ffmpeg \ -pattern_type glob \ -framerate 30 \ -i "img/*.JPG" \ -i "star_wars_style_march.mp3" \ -s:v 1920x1080 \ -c:a libopus \ -c:v vp9 \ -shortest \ deathstar_timelapse.webm

I actually thought that VP9 and Opus are well supported everywhere by now, but maybe that is not the case…

Regarding GitLab, as a general rule, I try to avoid products dominating the market, and I quite like their OSS policy…
by Matumio | 2025-04-27 08:20:30+00:00
Other people do, though (not mine): https://github.com/facundoolano/feedi

I'm not using that one yet, but I very much like their idea to highlight infrequent sources. If I hand-added the feeds, I feel they should by default have at least an equal chance of me noticing a post in them, without clicking through all the feeds.

I also like the idea of subscribing to everything and then privately filtering the for special-interest keywords. I'm not doing that currently, but I subscribe via RSS to some searches or tags. E.g. here via hnapp.com, or on StackOverflow you can subscribe to tags, or the RSS feed of low-traffic subreddits.
by Probuin | 2025-04-27 08:21:18+00:00
What gives you the right to claim that or police that, though?

May I decree that women do not need social media to have love or happiness so it's ok to ban it, under threat of imprisonment if they access it?

Is anything arbitrarily open to prohibition if it doesn't meet your extraordinarily high bar of being the "keystone of mental wellbeing"?

What sick joy do you derive from depriving peaceful lonely desperate men this one small outlet? It's misandry.

All porn disgusts me and yet your cruelty and total lack of empathy is so repugnant that, unbelievably, I'm here batting for coomers. Bravo.
by sjoedev | 2025-04-27 08:22:09+00:00
Look around the world at how many “landslide” election victories are won in places that do not truly have elections. Those with authoritarian intent are notorious for controlling the narrative.

All around the world, we are seeing many examples of consolidation of power through populism. Yes, populism is popular by definition. But history is not usually kind to those who consolidate power.
by perching_aix | 2025-04-27 08:24:15+00:00
> Pixel phones have a built in background audio fingerprinting service called "Now Playing" which can operate constantly.

That's interesting. Although can and does are very different things - appears to be a feature you turn on yourself. Upon a surface level research, I also found it to rely on an offline music fingerprint database, suggesting it doesn't retain and send off the audio it records, or metadata it extracted from them.

> Shazam has an "auto shazam" feature you can enable for constant background listening, since 2016 at least!

This is again a can vs. does difference.
by n_ary | 2025-04-27 08:24:20+00:00
> "One example I heard: Microsoft integrated AI into Word and other Office tools--and the first thing most users tried to do was figure out how to turn it off. That tells you something. These companies aren’t necessarily in touch with what people want or need."

I mean, the people who spend most of their time in MS Word and other office tool are the majority group who are not incentivized to do resume-driven-development, and less tool they have to master, less overall mental stress they need to bear. This group is interestingly also very difficult to train unless they are forced to, as this group is often protected by job security due to being government worker, regulatory duty(banks/insurance/audits/finance/medical etc.), union/work-council member, basic necessity, or employer lacks any incentive to invest in automation because re-training a biological being is much less expensive and more fail proof in the long term.

Microsoft is aware that, given the opportunity, they can replace a vast majority of these group in a heart-beat, but manipulating the incentive is difficult as of now. However, they are prepared and will continue collecting data(by adding these features and having data to show how someone was doing basic tasks and how someone taking the time to learn has delegated their duty to these tools) to be ready once they can deploy the automation.
by hbogert | 2025-04-27 08:24:54+00:00
I once installed Linux in 2006. Kinda fell in love with it despite the many rough edges but i realised it was "libre" and that's worth something

Nowadays most stuff just works. sometimes I need to do something on windows and I'm just aghast at the user unfriendlyness. Forced signups, the public secret of spying on you. Why would you do this to yourself?
by oliwarner | 2025-04-27 08:25:16+00:00
I disagree. Most websites are a "fixed target". Creating markup that clearly reflects this and then styling that isn't hard.

Maintaining CSS is easier than picking through markup trying to catch all the class names, especially if you use a preprocessor with nesting.

Admittedly in my professional experience, CSS-only refreshes are rare, but in my case only because it's been more common to change the content at the same time.
by int_19h | 2025-04-27 08:26:05+00:00
It's a similar experience, but the library of natively supported games is fairly small, and ports are often poor quality - especially older games that haven't been updated in a long time and are broken in various ways on newer Mac versions. The most common problem I run into is the lack of high-DPI support, which means that you can't run the game at full 4K even if your display supports it.
by tails4e | 2025-04-27 08:26:22+00:00
I thought this was going to talk about how printf is implemented. I worked with a tiny embedded processor that had 8k imem, and printf is about 100k alone. Crazy. Switched to a more basic implementation that was around 2k, and ran much,much faster. It seems printf is pretty bloated, though I guess typical people don't care.
by saurik | 2025-04-27 08:27:48+00:00
I mean... how about "example"? I feel as if I were to give what you just said to someone a hundred years ago, with no context of AI training or even of the discussion, the very form of what your response leads to the answer "example" ;P.

The issue with "shot" is that it is a term and part of an idiom that has been used for a very long time and, critically, is relevant to the same problem space in a much more intuitive way: to count the number of shots shot, not shots seen.
by Shorel | 2025-04-27 08:28:15+00:00
> The Go argument that it's popular because it's simpler is absurd in the sense that no one really forces you to write complex code and use classes or other advanced OOP features in D.

The same argument applies to C++. No one is forcing you to create complex nested templates or other difficult features.

Yet many criticisms to the language are in the form: "But it is possible to write very complex code that no one understands!"

It is absurd.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-04-27 08:31:36+00:00
No, it is NOT a lie. Latino men had a HUGE shift. Trump won 54% of latino men. This was an over 20 point shift in ONE election. He won 39% of latino women. YOU are lying by even implying that it was a "minor" change. Please educate yourself before spewing lies on the internet. 46% of latino voters in general voted for Trump.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls

The reality is that the sheep voted for the wolves - mostly because the sheep hate the other sheep, and wanted the wolves to eat those other sheep - hoping they'd ignore themselves.

The only group who voted more for Harris than biden, demographically, was white women - specifically old white women.
by strogonoff | 2025-04-27 08:32:15+00:00
I observed a clean experiment that showed a friend’s Google Pixel phone listening to us and adjusting news stories on Google app’s home screen.

However:

— IIRC the phone was unlocked,

— this only affected the news feed, and

— this was 5–6 years ago.

We 1) noted how Google app shows some selection of news after opening, 2) talked clearly for a minute about a very random and conspicuous topic in presence of the unlocked phone, and 3) demonstrated that the Google app showing an article relevant to the topic within a few minutes. The article was a few days old, too, so it was clearly boosted out of more recent stories.

The only reason it could be something other than the phone microphone is if I was misled by my friend steering us towards a predefined topic. However, that would require some extensive preparation to rule out the story appearing in the first step and would be very atypical for that person.

I recall seeing an article about Google admitting this and changing their policy to stop, but can’t seem to find it now. I imagine it was bad publicity, though to my friend it was a feature to see personalized content.
by serhack_ | 2025-04-27 08:32:37+00:00
I was wondering: does anybody know if there are any good resources for writing a good text adventure? Any nice tips and tricks? Mainly related to the content. I guess it overlaps with "writing a good novel", but I bet there're some specific advices that can be applied to the text adventure.

I wanted to write my text adventure, but I'd offer reader to have multiple options, especially for those who are not really practical with english (includes myself ^-^).
by tromp | 2025-04-27 08:33:33+00:00
The article presents a false dichotomy:

> Gold is relatively scarce, with an annual inflation rate of 1.5%. However, the supply is not capped.

> There will never be more than 21,000,000. It is designed to be deflationary, meaning there will be less of it over time. Bitcoin’s annual inflation rate is currently 1.75% and will continue to decrease.

Supply does not need to be capped in order to have a continually decreasing inflation rate [1]. Without any block subsidy halvings, Bitcoin would still have a decreasing inflation rate. It would just decrease much slower.

But it would also be much fairer. Each 20 year generation would be able to mine the same amount of coins, rather than only a small (1/32) fraction of what the previous generation could mine.

And it would not face a potential crisis once the security depends almost entirely on having a constant backlog of high fee paying transactions.

[1] https://tromp.github.io/blog/2020/12/20/soft-supply
by woolion | 2025-04-27 08:34:37+00:00
The paper "Making Turing machines useful (Or, how I got Doom to run on a Turing machine)" builds a Turing machine to run Doom (duh), by implementing a RISC-V (RV32I) emulator. While in Sigbovik fashion the utility of the exercise is far outshined by its complexity, there's a number of interesting choices regarding much of what are usually handwaved away regarding tape and state management. To be fair, TM have far less utility as real programming languages than lambda-calculi do, so it's common for professors to dismiss any attempt to optimize TM programs -- which is a root of evil. Since evil is also the source of doom, everything converges here.
by dr_kiszonka | 2025-04-27 08:35:05+00:00
I like old-school UIs but I wonder if that look doesn't do the product a disservice. I think most people would find it much more appealing if it looked at least as good as tad and rowzero mentioned in other comments. My first impression was that it is some old, slow software from 30 years ago, and the plots are not what I would show to anyone (especially the 3d bar plots). But that's just the looks. Otherwise, the product is solid.

(Yes, I know that there is plenty of old software that is super fast.)
by einpoklum | 2025-04-27 08:35:40+00:00
While "newlib" is an interesting idea - the approach taken here is, in many cases, the wrong one.

You see, actually, the printf() family of functions don't actually require _any_ metal, bare or otherwise, beyond the ability to print individual characters.

For this reason, a popular approach for the case of not having a full-fledged standard library is to have a fully cross-platform implementation of the family which "exposes" a symbol dependency on a character printing function, e.g.:

void putchar_(char c);

and variants of the printf functions which take the character-printing function as a runtime parameter:

int fctprintf(void (*out)(char c, void* extra_arg), void* extra_arg, const char* format, ...); int vfctprintf(void (*out)(char c, void* extra_arg), void* extra_arg, const char* format, va_list arg);

this is the approach taken in the standalone printf implementation I maintain, originally by Marco Paland:

https://github.com/eyalroz/printf
by xlii | 2025-04-27 08:37:17+00:00
IMO the „thought” process is completely fake.

I wanted o3 to succeed so I gave more and more details. Every attempt was approx. 8 minute and it took 1h in total.

The extra input I provided (in order):

- belt of location of width of 40km (results and searches were made outside of the range)

- explicitly stated cities to omit (ignored instruction)

- construction date (wasn’t used in searches)

- OSM amenity (townhall) - streetnumber (it insisted that it’s incorrect and keep giving other result) - at that point there were only 6 results from overpass

- another photo with actual partial name of the city

- 8 minutes later it correlated it found using flag colors in front of the building

As others stated this „thought” process is completely hallucinating. IMO you either fall into bucket or good luck finding it.

On the other hand I decided to tryout Gemini for some personal project and I found responses much better than GPTs. Not about correctness but in „attitude” form.
by TipsForCanoes | 2025-04-27 08:38:49+00:00
One of the reasons often given for why one must tip in US restaurants is the rampant wage theft in that industry.

In law the restaurant must make up the difference if tips fall short of the minimum wage but, we are told, wage theft is so common that most restaurants simply don't pay it. Some will even fire staff for falling short on tips.

Why are we supposed to just look the other way while we tip to support criminal wage theft?

Fair and honest pricing would remove a huge enabler to this wide spread criminal activity.
Show HN: An online 2d shooter game in development
by andreamonaco | 2025-04-27 08:39:35+00:00
I started writing a little online 2d shooter game. There's a demo already available.

Any number of players can move in the same map and shoot at each other until they die; they can shoot at zombies too; they can collect rotten meat in their inventory. Meanwhile they must keep fed and hydrated.

I tested in a LAN, but it should work in any network. You can even start multiple clients locally if you don't have other people. Let me know how many people you manage to handle!

I will keep adding stuff to this game and will keep you updated.

Make any question down here!
by numpad0 | 2025-04-27 08:40:32+00:00
It's just across-modal. The list of components are linear list, connections between components are graphs, placements are geometrically constrained, and overall shape is both geometric and external to the board. So you can't just mechanically derive the board from mere linear textual descriptions of it.

A lot of automagic "AGI achieved" LLM projects has this same problem, that it is assumed that brief literal prompt shall fully constrain the end result so long it is well thought out. And it's just not how it - the reality, or animal brains - works.
by closewith | 2025-04-27 08:41:17+00:00
> However women would have to give up a lot of their hard won rights.

That's nonsense. Across the developed world, economic pressure on young people is reducing the options available to them. Many more couples would have more children if the economic barriers were removed, including the impact on career and cost of childcare.

Of course, developed nations will (hopefully) never return to the 5+ children per woman which sustained and grew the world population for millennia.
by PoignardAzur | 2025-04-27 08:41:24+00:00
> There are plenty of illegal immigrants with a criminal record.

Assuming that all the people who will be negatively impacted by a blanket policy will be criminals is also a failure of empathy.

Trump explicitly, repeatedly said he would deport all undocumented immigrants. That explicitly means migrants without a criminal record. Yes, he sometimes claimed that most of them were bad or criminals or eating pets, but believing that isn't a failure of epistemology! Trump didn't craft some deviously clever lie here, he just said a bunch of bullshit and people bought it because they needed a bogeyman.

As sibling comments point out, the reason these "Oh, we didn't know!" excuses from Trump voters ring hollow is that given a choice, they'd still vote for him today. They'll still vote Republican next election, the primaries will still pick the most Trump-like candidate for the party. Nothing was learned.

Because learning anything would require admitting that, yes, Trump's lies were extremely easy to see through, yes, any blanket measures against immigrants will also hurt the "good ones", and yes, Trump voters are morally responsible for the things Trump does.
by kappasan | 2025-04-27 08:41:48+00:00
Haven't been to Chongqing in a while, but the vertical nature of the city is fascinating [1]. It's like they layered multiple cities on top of each other! Curious how that affects social interactions in daily life.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CityPorn/comments/8kqwnf/chongqing_...
by colesantiago | 2025-04-27 08:42:07+00:00
The best thing about tech is that technology becomes a commodity very quickly.

Now you don't need to pay huge sums of money to these consultant grifters any more as now AI tools like Cursor, Windsurf, Devin, Bolt, Lovable and Replit can build these apps and websites for you almost for free.

I nearly signed off a six figure deal for someone to make an app for us and we instead went down the AI tools route after some evaluation and prototyping and we saved a lot of money on this to get it built.

This was very sad to read and I wish these people found these tools at all or even sooner rather than plowing their money into scammers.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-27 08:46:26+00:00
If you ever think the solution to a problem is to remove agency and freedom from an entire group of people, you have not found a workable solution, you're just trying to push away blame from those who are ultimately responsible.

I sincerely hope your comment is satire or sarcasm. It doesn't land that way, it just reads as misogynistic, uncaring and divorced from the modern world.
by boredhedgehog | 2025-04-27 08:47:56+00:00
This seems to introduce a lot of ambiguity to the concept of being public, in the sense that physical presence is being distinguished from a mediated, virtual presence, and the latter is considered somewhat tainted.

The same peculiar notion was present in the moral panic around Google Street View in Europe, where the exact view anyone can have from a public street was considered dangerous once digitized and copied.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-27 08:48:00+00:00
Even back in its heyday what helped C take off was AT&T not being allowed to profit from their Bell Labs research.

Do you think UNIX was sold at VMS, MVS, System/360 prices, even with university discounts, every university on the planet would have been rushing to adopt it on their timesharing systems?

The lawsuits done by AT&T years later, the prohibition of Lion's book, and Sun introducing the concept UNIX developer license, shows how it would have gone.