MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-13 11:42:09+00:00
Why on Earth does the README start with a huge image with absolutely unreadable teeny tiny light gray text on a dark gray background?

When I press Cmd-+ to zoom into the page in so I can actually read it, exactly the opposite of what I want happens: the image SHRINKS even smaller as the surrounding text grows to push it into a black hole! So I reset by pressing Cmd-0 and then try un-zooming by pressing Cmd--, and the image STILL shrinks even smaller.

What is the point? Did a Vibe Coding Anti-Accessibility LLM do this, or was it actually intentional? That first impression makes me completely uninterested in looking at the rest of the project, rightfully afraid that it might be as purposefully badly designed and inaccessible and contemptuous of users at the first readme page.

Why would anyone bother to go to so much effort to make an image of inaccessible unlinkable extremely low contrast tiny unreadable text wasting huge amounts of horizontal and vertical white space with no usable links (so you have to type in the contact email address with the keyboard, below an ironic unclickable but button-like call to action "read more on how to use memEx": no thank you!), and then put that at the very top of the page, when it's only a few lines of all lower case pointlessly centered but otherwise unformatted text, and there's no reason at all and extra effort to do that? It would have been less effort to post a blurry cell phone photo of a Word document displayed on a laptop screen. Is this some kind of Andy Kauffmanesque trolling? Vannevar Bush would roll over in his grave.

As We May Think: “Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” By Vannevar Bush

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

Vannevar Bush believed the scientific record had become "inadequate for [its] purpose" due to outdated methods of access and review. He warned that "the summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate," yet we still relied on systems from "the days of square-rigged ships." He criticized indexing as "artificial" and noted that it forced information into "only one place," making retrieval cumbersome. Instead, he advocated for “selection by association,” enabling users to “snap instantly to the next [item] suggested by the association of thoughts.” His proposed memex device embodied this principle—designed to be "consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility," storing vast personal libraries with the ability to “build a trail” of connected ideas, permanently linking and instantly retrieving them.
by keepamovin | 2025-04-13 11:42:21+00:00
Wow this is a beautiful article. I love Code page 437 - my first experiences with computers used it. I made two little things that are a homage to the pixelated and "cyberpunk" "screaming electron" "information superhighway" glory that is IBM Code Page 437:

1. Endless scrolling random Code Page 437 text: https://o0101.github.io/random/ (but it seems to be broken indicated by an overabundance of the non-existent "block question mark". Code here in case anyone wants to submit a fix :) : https://github.com/o0101/random)

2. Base-437 - a way to encode any binary file into faithful-to-code-page-437-glyphs that you can nevertheless throw into HTML no problemo: https://browserbox.github.io/Base437/ This means, for instance, you can have a "data:image/png;base437,ëPNG♪◙→◙ ♪IHDR ◘♠ \r¿f ♦gAMA Åⁿa♣ cHRM z& Çä · ÇΦ u..." URI for an image. I just think it looks cool being able to see the content rather than base64 which hides it. Code: https://github.com/BrowserBox/Base437
by sega_sai | 2025-04-13 11:42:23+00:00
The only hope here, is that it will not happen.

But cutting a mission like Nancy Grace telescope that has been in the works for > 10 years, 1 year before launch and on budget is peak idiocy. I know people who spend years on this mission, and I can only imagine how they feel.

Obviously rational arguments won't work with this administration. Let's hope that the self-interested people in congress who have various space-related institutions/firms in their constituencies will lobby for the changes, but I don't have high hopes.
Show HN: A Hacker News client that only shows YouTube videos
by notsahil | 2025-04-13 11:42:29+00:00
Hey HN,

I wanted a way to quickly see only the YouTube videos being shared on Hacker News without wading through other links. So, I built this little tool. I used to use https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com to check YouTube links, but it lacked thumbnails, so I built one just to do it.

It uses the hn.algolia.com API and is built with Nuxt3. I originally made this for myself but thought others might find it useful too.

You can try it here: https://hn-yt.netlify.app/

Happy to hear any feedback or suggestions!
by psittacus | 2025-04-13 11:42:48+00:00
There's also a great documentary on Stanislaw Lem. It's in Polish, but with English subtitles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wQq4aKldaw

Lem himself talks about the movie a bit there too, around the 24th minute. He didn't seem fond of Tarkowsky's religiousness and the impact it had on the movie.

Timestamped link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wQq4aKldaw&t=1434

My impression was similar — the movie seems to be a free retelling and doesn't reflect the book well.
by floydnoel | 2025-04-13 11:43:22+00:00
batteries are not light, that would be wasting a lot of energy to shuffle batteries around. not great for the environment.

battery packs are often structural components, this idea would make that impossible, reducing durability and safety.

not all batteries are identical. there are many different capacities and wear levels. imagine bringing in your new car for electricity and getting an old battery back. the battery is a huge portion of the cost of the car- now you have an old one!
by Jabbles | 2025-04-13 11:43:41+00:00
I don't know what Sabine would spend $40B on instead, but intuitively that seems like it could buy a lot of research in a lot of areas, rather than picking particle physics.

And it doesn't have to be physics, it could be cancer research, or not even research: each country involved could upgrade their sewage system instead.

But Sabine doesn't have to have all the answers to be right to point out that there's an enormous conflict of interest if you ask particle physicists whether they'd like $40B. Of course they'll say yes.
by Aachen | 2025-04-13 11:45:43+00:00
I would love to chip in and see if we can get this ball rolling, usually I feel like I'm the only person who cares or files AP/ACM/... complaints and then it's too small beans for them to care. I'd not submit the literal same thing again, but could you share what wording you've used? Specifically in this case I'd also not be sure whether this blocking of Graphene etc. is abuse of market power when there is another option on the market (Apple) and so it's not a monopoly

There's no contact info in your profile so I couldn't reach you. If you don't want to share it here, you could use the email address in my profile
by squigz | 2025-04-13 11:46:19+00:00
> That comparison would be fair if the generative AI you use is trained exclusively on your own (rightfully acquired) data and work.

> Existing generative AIs are feeding on the work of millions of people who did not consent.

There are LLMs that are trained on non-copyright work, but apparently that's irrelevant according to the comment I replied to.
by pridkett | 2025-04-13 11:46:37+00:00
I live in an area that is on the edge of coverage and has lots of hills. On ATSC 1.0, CBS is hard to pick up. Frequently unwatchable - which means unreliable for sports. I picked up an HDHomerun Flex 4K a few years ago. Basically the same week that ATSC 3.0 went live.

For a few weeks it was glorious. I had no problem picking up CBS (it was broadcast from the same antenna as ATSC 1.0 - so it was the modulation that was helping out). And then, after a little over a month. Whack! No more CBS. They turned on DRM. They are still the only network that in my area with DRM. Ughh.

Under the previous administration I filled a few issues about this from a public safety perspective - I live in with the FCC an area with unreliable power. During severe weather, we often lose Internet and power (which knocks out cable TV too). Requiring working internet to watch TV to monitor the progress of a tornado in your area seems stupid and dangerous. Unfortunately, nothing happened then regarding the issue and given the way that Brendan Carr is taking the FCC, I don’t think there will be any progress on this.
by davnicwil | 2025-04-13 11:47:21+00:00
I've not tried it yet so am reserving judgement, but it doesn't look that bad at all.

Heads up, seems overall more scannable than an equivalent zod schema though given the similarity to 'raw' TS.

Also it seems like a fairly short hop to this engine being used with actual raw TS types in a compilation step or prisma-style codegen?
by blablabla123 | 2025-04-13 11:47:34+00:00
I don't think channels should be used for everything. In some cases I think it's possible to end up with very lean code. But yes, if you have a stop channel for the other stop channel it probably means you should build your code around other mechanisms.

Since CSP is mentioned, how much would this apply to most applications anyway? If I write a small server program, I probably won't want to write it on paper first. With one possible exception I never heard of anyone writing programs based on CSP (calculations?)
by ghaff | 2025-04-13 11:48:30+00:00
I’m not sure companies are “abandoning DEI” so much as realizing that it’s often only a vocal minority that cares about DEI reports and scores and you don’t actually need a VP and diversity office to do some outreach and tally internal metrics.

The climate has changed. Some of that is economic at big tech companies. But it’s also a ramping down of a variety of things most employers probably didn’t support but kept their mouths shut about.
by nkrisc | 2025-04-13 11:52:25+00:00
But the joke wasn't that they were men dressed as women. Typically they played it completely straight. The joke was the character they were portraying, a type of character that was often a man or a woman.

When femininity was an important part of the sketch, they often had Carol Cleveland or other women play the role.

If you don't find it funny that's fine.
by jarek-foksa | 2025-04-13 11:53:28+00:00
Entities seem to be resolved at parse time, so they are more like a preprocessor directives. <use> is much more powerful as all instances are "live" and updated dynamically when you change the original object.

If I recall correctly, the primary motivation behind <symbol> and <use> was interoperability with corresponding primitives in Adobe Illustrator.
by testing22321 | 2025-04-13 11:54:32+00:00
I didn’t say my disaster scenario was going to happen, I’m using it as an example to show that if it does, surely there will be an impact.

Like when you graph something and you say, ok, what happens as it approaches zero or infinity. We learn from the extreme cases and use that to inform our understanding of the middle ground.

In concrete terms, the US is not an island. It does not manufacture, grow and produce everything it needs. Many things are imported. If the US dollar keeps going down, all of those things get more expensive. The dollar number of the mortgage won’t go up (until it is renewed) but everything coming from outside the country will.

Currencies go up and down all the time, making things more or less expensive.
by pridkett | 2025-04-13 11:54:47+00:00
Or, the manufacturers will lose patience with slow adoption, the mess that is widevine DRM (what? Your TV isn’t based on Android? No, you can’t have DRM!), and customers really not caring because basically none of the broadcasts make the visual picture substantially better right now, so there is no incentive to move.

That’s what happened to LG [0]. They dropped ATSC 3.0 tuners. I’m sure this cost them precisely 0 sales as the industry incompetence destroys the broadcast industry.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/30/23897460/lg-drops-atsc-3-...
by Tmpod | 2025-04-13 11:55:39+00:00
The title is a bit misleading, but I opted to keep it since it's their wording.

Minestom isn't a plug-and-play server, but rather a framework for building custom servers. It's geared towards cases where performance is important (think big servers) and implementing your features is faster than pruning an existing implementation. There are several libraries that implement vanilla behaviour and that you can just plug onto your server, but the main idea is that you tailor the server to your specific needs.
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-13 11:55:52+00:00
I have fallen in love with SVG+text Mermaid diagrams embedded in markdown code blocks, and LLMs are really great at generating them (by reading design documents and source code) and editing them with natural language commands. And they're not inaccessible unsearchable dead-end images you have to laboriously regenerate and check into the repo whenever you want to change something! ;)

Mermaid: Diagramming and charting tool: JavaScript based diagramming and charting tool that renders Markdown-inspired text definitions to create and modify diagrams dynamically.

https://mermaid.js.org/

Include diagrams in your Markdown files with Mermaid: A picture tells a thousand words. Now you can quickly create and edit diagrams in markdown using words with Mermaid support in your Markdown files.

https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams...

Creating diagrams: Create diagrams to convey information through charts and graphs:

https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/wor...

The Official Guide to Mermaid.js:

https://github.com/PacktPublishing/The-Official-Guide-to-Mer...
by lotsofpulp | 2025-04-13 11:56:17+00:00
> TV networks in the US are a living proof that, with enough marketing spend and a pinch of confusion in the offer structure, you can sell people on anything. Half the time you can just offer sportsball access and people will switch.

The cratering market values say otherwise. Few people under 40 even care about “TV”, and live sports distribution contracts (and the associated gambling) are the only thing holding it up.
by adyashakti | 2025-04-13 11:56:45+00:00
in my life i have had several therapists, and their lack of authentic empathy was astonishing. ChatGPT 4o is much better at simulating empathy than any therapist i have had the displeasure to meet. oh, and therapists are nuts. that's why they become therapists. would any sane person want to sit and listen to crazy people all day?
Show HN: I made a site to help Canadians figure out where to volunteer
by krycroft | 2025-04-13 11:57:13+00:00
Hi there HN, as you may or may not know, Canadians are having an election in a little less than two weeks. Tech is great, but it's even better when it gives power to the people and acts as a force multiplier, so I built this non-partisan site to help my fellow canucks figure out where they can volunteer this month to make a difference. Luckily the Canadian system elects our chief executive from whoever has a plurality of support among elected representatives(this is an oversimplification of the actual process.) That means that volunteering in a competitive riding close to you can have a massive impact.

The site loads riding boundary data, geocodes the postal code using ArcGIS, and finds the nearest competitive riding.

Source is linked in the footer and feel free to ask me questions in the comments, or better yet submit a pull request if you think of anything else useful I've missed. Looking forward to seeing what you all think.
by dzikimarian | 2025-04-13 11:57:56+00:00
Banks do that for p2p payments and e-commerce (like iDeal mentioned by sibling comment or BLIK in Poland).

For physical transactions there's barrier of hardware and network effect - everybody has card terminal. Users expect near 100% acceptance for them to use payment method daily.

If you consider creating own NFC payment app instead of Google/Apple Pay - that's actually possible, but more expensive and often disliked by the users due to inability to easily switch between cards issued by different apps.
by graemep | 2025-04-13 12:00:02+00:00
The ESA is not an EU agency which complicates that comparison: https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/Member_States_Co...

> I’ve been involved in the founding of a few companies in Ireland and raising funding is tough and for all the work the figures are tiny compared to the US. You’ll likely be talking to Irish and UK investors only.

I am not surprised, but you would probably find it easier to raise money from investors in the UK for a larger established business: lots of companies from lots of countries list in London, for example. I think other factors are probably more important than the lack of a single market for capital raising on people's direct investments.

> Investing in the stock market is far more common in the US compared to the EU for the average person (something like 60% versus 15% of people in the EU)

Are you looking at people investing directly? A lot of people in the UK have pensions that invest in the stock market. About 75% of people of working age, IIRC.
by nyclounge | 2025-04-13 12:00:52+00:00
Yeah I just think if we are getting to the point where we need that type of control of our kids, then we might as well NOT give them a smart phone.

Maybe first let them use fully open sourced computer so they know what is going on. Being on smart phone is like being a 2nd class citizen of computer. Let them use self-hosted app before using apps on smart phone alternatives. So they know what they are getting them selves into on the smart phone. Beside the with EFM harzard of these smart devices, it would be good to have kids focus more on real things when they are out about.
by dfawcus | 2025-04-13 12:01:06+00:00
How large do you deem to be large in this context?

I had success in using a CSP style, with channels in many function signatures in a ~25k line codebase.

It had ~15 major types of process, probably about 30 fixed instances overall in a fixed graph, plus a dynamic sub-graph of around 5 processes per 'requested action'. So those sub-graph elements were the only parts which had to deal with tear-down, and clean up.

There were then additionally some minor types of 'process' (i.e. goroutines) within many of those major types, but they were easier to reason about as they only communicated with that major element.

Multiple requested actions could be present, so there could be multiple sets of those 5 process groups connected, but they had a maximum lifetime of a few minutes.

I only ended up using explicit mutexes in two of the major types of process. Where they happened to make most sense, and hence reduced system complexity. There were about 45 instances of the 'go' keyword.

(Updated numbers, as I'd initially misremembered/miscounted the number of major processes)
by bloopernova | 2025-04-13 12:01:30+00:00
They are enabling him because his grass roots supporters threaten anyone who "steps out of line" with oligarch-funded primary challenges.

I was surprised to learn that there doesn't seem to be a way for people to recall congresspeople or senators.

There needs to be a patch for the constitution of the USA to fix the vulnerabilities/bugs exposed by trump and his supporters.
by bjourne | 2025-04-13 12:01:31+00:00
> > That's the "correct" that matters. Not the "I'd like to put words in your mouth and pretend you meant something you don't".

> I think I made it clear that I don't think parent post was saying that.

You did not. You associated them with people who are advocating for a violent overthrow of the Israeli regime and with those who think Israel is the only state without a fundamental right to exist.

> I don't know what any of that means. Does the US have fundamental rights?

No, because fundamental rights are rights derived from natural law, roughly equivalent to the UDHR: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma... Did the Soviet Union have a right to exist? Did its dissolution by its leaders violate its fundamental rights?

> > You do know that the reason Zionists harp on about "Israel's right to exist" is to deny the victim's of that state's violence legal redress, right?

> No, the reason Zionists "harp on" about Israel's right to exist is because so many people believe Israel, uniquely among countries, doesn't have a right to exist.

No. They do it because in 1948 and 1967 Israel conducted ethnic cleansings of Palestine and drove out its native inhabitants to create a Jewish supremacist state with a Jewish majority. Zionists can't (for now) argue that ethnic cleansing is alright, so instead they argue that if the victims of those cleansing were allowed to return, Israel would no longer be a Jewish-majority state and that would somehow violate Israel's fictive "fundamental rights". E.g., the Palestinian majority would probably prefer if the name of the state was changed (back) to "Palestine" rather than "Israel".

In the 1990s there was a British boxer who suffered severe brain damage during a fight and was paralyzed. So he sued the British boxing federation for medical negligence since there was no ringside doctors present. The compensation the court awarded the injured boxer was so heavy that the British boxing federation had to sell everything and eventually it went bankrupt. Did the verdict violate the British boxing federation's "right to exist"?
by rapsey | 2025-04-13 12:01:31+00:00
Which is completely the wrong way of doing it. They are the market. So define it and leave it to private industry to fund and develop the capabilities to meet their requirements.

If they say, we are willing to spend X amount of money on Y number of launches. You can rent our launch sites for tests. Here is a list of requirements. They would see incredible results.

But no europe must micromanage and do things in their own bureaucratic way that has always failed.
Are domain names still undervalued or just misunderstood?
by star_boyzz | 2025-04-13 12:01:32+00:00
The internet’s real estate is strange. Some of the most powerful names are parked, unused, and often dismissed as "just a domain." But if naming matters in startups (and it does), why do most people still treat domains as an afterthought? One name, strategically placed, can signal funding, clarity, and momentum — before a single line of code is written. Curious where others stand. Are we underestimating the role of names in product-market fit?
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-04-13 12:01:54+00:00
A study on the future of cybersecurity where AI becomes not just a tool but an active participant in digital conflicts. The analysis covers technical, ethical, and philosophical aspects of autonomous defense systems—from the practical implementation of "digital immunity" to the catastrophic "Digital Winter" scenario.

Key topics:

· AI as an adaptive defense system and its vulnerabilities

· Humans as the weak link and the possibility of their isolation

· Conflicts between autonomous AIs and their escalation

· Ethical boundaries of autonomy in cybersecurity

· Alternative future scenarios: from utopia to collapse
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-13 12:02:08+00:00
You can tax to such levels that you have both the funding for and the road space for a legitimately great bus or tram system.

This is unfortunately a problem where, as you say, many issues interact to make it difficult to solve piecemeal in most places. But that doesn't mean we can or should just allow it to fester. I agree zoning and physical infrastructure need to improve in tandem in most places.