MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fabian2k | 2025-05-19 11:18:11+00:00
It's entirely ridiculous when you're abroad. Also annoying when in your home country, but the localized versions are not equivalent like e.g. programming documentation. Even in the ideal case you'd probably prefer the English original, but often they're machine-translated anyway and much worse.

Another extremely annoying thing I've noticed more often now are machine-translated versions of content in the search results. Reddit for example does this now, and it's just terrible. One of the main reasons I use non-English search terms is to get non-English results, e.g. because I'm looking for information on topics that is not globally applicable.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-05-19 11:18:17+00:00
So much this. I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley. Else I can't explain why youtube only lets you set one language. Heck, even google allows you to configure all spoken languages in your account, the very same google account you use for youtube. Yet youtube ignores it and has its own settings.
by domenicd | 2025-05-19 11:18:24+00:00
I've thought about this problem myself a lot. I don't have a great answer.

The easiest thing I can think of is just grab https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/369908962 , and schedule everything you've already seen in WaniKani for immediate review, heavily relying on pressing easy to try to get things into a longer interval if you already feel you know them. This probably works best if you're relatively low-level on WaniKani. You might be able to use the WaniKani and Anki APIs to automate this to some extent.

Googling around, it seems others have run into this, e.g. https://community.wanikani.com/t/export-wanikani-srs-progres... and https://community.wanikani.com/t/userscript-wani-kani-export... look promising. https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/n1pihp/why_y... also seems good.
by greatgib | 2025-05-19 11:18:43+00:00
If you can connect to "node1.mydomain.com" and your web browser believe that the server is legitimate because of the CA signature, why a server that would receive a request from "node1.mydomain.com" as certified by the CA signature of the client certificate would worth less than the other one?

For a simple example, let's suppose that you would want to use "client certificate" who can access webhooks API that will be pushed to your server.
by hnfong | 2025-05-19 11:19:04+00:00
Every couple months, Facebook's web interface glitches out and displays the geolocation-based language instead of my preferred language in parts of the UI.

I don't know how that happens. Like, do individual teams within Meta have to re-learn that users in their own system have a language preference? (Not even talking about Accept-Language, it's a Facebook user setting.)
by xnorswap | 2025-05-19 11:19:13+00:00
It doesn't stop specialized malware, but it stops clipjacking.

Security isn't an absolute. You're not trying to stop all vectors, you're just trying to put up a barrier to trip up by far the most common and easy method.

In a world where everyone leaves their doors open all day, you're asking "Why shut and lock your door when an attacker could just smash your windows?"
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-19 11:19:20+00:00
Looks interesting; my klunky script for doing something similar has been something along the lines of

printf 'started: %s\n' "$(utcdate)" ( trap 'kill 0' SIGINT for REMOTE in "${REMOTES[@]}" do ssh -- "$REMOTE" "$COMMAND" "$@" & done wait ) printf 'ended: %s\n' "$(utcdate)"

but twiddling with it has been quite annoying, so I'll look into this tool.
by deanc | 2025-05-19 11:19:34+00:00
I live in Finland where they have two native languages: Finnish & Swedish. In a lot of places you'll see both the Finnish & Swedish place name on road signs. Without getting into politics, it's a good assumption to assume that Finnish is the mother-tongue of most of the population - with some areas having Swedish as their native language but also perfectly capable of speaking Finnish fluently.

I have my phone's language set to English as a native English speaker. Google maps reads me the Swedish road signs, in English.
by strogonoff | 2025-05-19 11:20:37+00:00
It’s remarkable how every market where Apple makes itself at home basically has no real luxury bracket anymore.

Almost every visible accessory or piece of functional equipment has luxury models that may be only slightly functionally better (sometimes not even better, sometimes actually worse) but also charge massive margins.

Not so much with phones, tablets, or laptops. It’s as if the world has collectively decided that you simply can’t beat Apple, which astoundingly in the meantime completely ignores the luxury market. Even if you charged $50K+ per unit—I’m sure Samsung and every other maker would love to charge exorbitant prices for end-game devices—you’ll make a fool of yourself: iPhone will objectively be more premium, work smoother, have all the high-end apps, etc. There’s no choice but to tighten your belt and thin your margins to stay competitive.

I’m not sure how this (undoubtedly impressive) achievement makes me feel. Maybe it’s the feeling of finally being able to afford one, or the ability to say “it’s a cute expensive toy, but it’s objectively worse for X and Y reasons”, but there is something about the Leicas and Ducatis of the world.
by notsydonia | 2025-05-19 11:20:54+00:00
You know how a person on 'average' income might sometimes browse retail sites as displacement activity, while waiting for something/someone or a side-quest etc?

Ultra-wealthy people also do that but they're trawling through Sothebys or Christies - eg: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/luxury/books-&-manuscripts/b...

They don't have time to read - say - a lengthy biography about a Civil War general but they can purchase their diary or letters - people who are interested in wealth preservation, especially across generations, are trained to disdain the ephemeral. They like primary documents and depending on their age/interests, cool stuff like first edition comic books or vintage niche Chanel clutch bags.

As impulsive or indulgent as it may seem - eg: I just saw a counterfeit version of Dante's Le Terze De Rime on there for $159,000 USD - the purchase are all investments and as such treated as a tax deductible by your team of accountants. If you purchase a bottle of Romanee St Vivant as an investment but (whoops) drink it - that $16,000 is a business loss. Or maybe a trust fund loss.

And once you start spending at a certain level on sites like those and others, there are extremely nice people who would like nothing more than to invite you to private showings, arrange a private briefing to bring you up to speed with whatever topic you'd like to learn more about or help you select the right gift with which to blow the mind of a business rival or someone you're courting.

I thought that reddit piece was weird. Why would the ultra-wealthy mess around with 'masstige' kitchenware appliances? They wouldn't even have a brand on their dishwasher - it would be commissioned by an architect or interior designer quietly maintained at regular intervals by an appliance engineer who has been either supplied-by your core op-secs team or thoroughly checked out by them etc etc.
by lorikmor | 2025-05-19 11:21:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently launched securevibing.com, a tool designed to help indie developers catch security issues before they ship.

It does two main things:

Website Security Scan - Instantly scans your deployed site for common security issues like leaked API keys, missing HTTP headers, public environment files, etc.

SupaCheck Widget - A small script you can run to simulate authenticated users accessing your Supabase backend. It tests whether users can read or modify sensitive data like credits, has_access, or other fields, helping you catch RLS and auth misconfigurations.

I built this because I kept seeing (and making) small security mistakes that aren’t always caught until it’s too late. Would love your feedback, suggestions, or ideas on what to add next.

Thanks!
by skissane | 2025-05-19 11:21:16+00:00
It isn’t just doctors, my father isn’t a doctor (chemistry degree + MBA => pharmaceutical company executive) and I’m not sure if he’s worked this year, but he was definitely working last year (when he was 74/75). And a big reason why he’s cut back on working is his partner has dementia and she’s now deteriorated to the point he can’t really leave her at home alone any more.

And his dad was a tax accountant, and he had “trouble fully retiring” too. He retired from his job at a mining company, then started an unpaid job doing accounting for a charity. Then he retired from that, but still did the accounting for his church for a few more years thereafter. Yes, he wasn’t getting paid, but that was his choice, I’m sure he could have done the same work for somebody else and gotten paid for it.

If I’m still alive and healthy in my 70s, I imagine I may well follow both my parents’ examples and still be working too-having a job can be good for your health
by Aachen | 2025-05-19 11:21:27+00:00
They're right. Try to find a Dutch IT person with a laptop not set to English. Only a small fraction will realise you can set more than one language and put Dutch as a second, even though many struggle beyond basic reading comprehension in English. They're not picking it because they're just as good, much less better, at English compared to Dutch

We definitely pick languages that work as opposed to languages that we speak. Setting it to Dutch is just worse: UX doesn't fit, english search results wouldn't show up (way fewer results/content/info), and translations often don't make sense (imagine a button called "you shut it" on a modal window, it's a literal translation of one interpretation of the string "close it" but you'll be confused as to what that button will do)
by yowzadave | 2025-05-19 11:21:49+00:00
I’m familiar with the Grasshopper visual scripting environment for the Rhino CAD system, and what you’re describing happens there as well…but I don’t really perceive it as a negative. Users who aren’t comfortable with text programming continue to use the visual method, and users who are tend to migrate their more complicated functions to single blocks. There’s a limit of complexity beyond which the visual programming becomes an impediment to understanding. It’s OK if moving things to a text-based block will make the internal logic of that block inaccessible to some number of users, given that those users would struggle to understand the visual version of the function as well.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-05-19 11:22:37+00:00
On desktop yes, but on iOS at least, i can choose between iCloud, local or Obsidian Sync.

Simply "plugging in" to an iOS File Provider interface would be a better experience from a user perspective, but i realize it would sell fewer Sync licenses, which appears to be the business model after they removed the requirement for purchasing a license for commercial use.

iCloud and local are less problematic, but Obsidian Sync introduces a governance / compliance hell i'm not prepared to face, and OneDrive / SharePoint is the preferred, pre approved, company file syncing platform. Getting Obsidian Sync approved requires GDPR audits and other niceties from ISAE 3000.
by JulianWasTaken | 2025-05-19 11:22:46+00:00
To me GNU parallel is the top of the line here (as it is for most things parallel).

For the most common cases I have it aliased to just `p`: https://github.com/Julian/dotfiles/blob/main/.config/zsh/com...

Or https://github.com/Julian/dotfiles/blob/4d36e6b17e9804a887ba...
by rmnclmnt | 2025-05-19 11:23:41+00:00
Truly hope that catches on, and not only for the « datalab » (incubation startup-like inside the gov doing cool stuff).

As a citizen, if only the first rule could become true for new and existing online public services such as « URSSAF », « Les Impôts » and « AMELI », that would be a great step forward (but I guess that will never happened as the hugh consulting firms developing these won’t have the same view on the matter)
by donohoe | 2025-05-19 11:23:45+00:00
When we added translation features to our news site I went down this rabbit hole and wholly agree with the author. I checked what others were doing and very often there was this ip lookup happening, and then a redirect or other unnecessary behavior.

In our case, less is more. We decided to not do any of that, and were a bit paranoid that maybe we were going against a 'best practice' somehow?

All we do is look at navigator.language to get the language code:

const userLanguage = navigator.language.split('-')[0]

and if we support that language then we will change the "Translate" button label to that language and default behavior to shortcut to that language version (you can still get the full list).

Thats it. Keep it simple.

Example: https://restofworld.org/2024/filipino-ai-chatbot-launches-20...

(translation UI in the byline area, under lead image)
by enugu | 2025-05-19 11:24:21+00:00
> we can keep on building theorems on top of theorems with increasing complexity

This is a somewhat bleak picture of math. We also have the other phenomena of increasing simplicity. Both statements and proofs becoming more straightforward and simple after one has access to deeper mathematical constructions.

For example : Bezout's theorem would like to state that two curves of degree m, degree n would intersect in mn points. Except that you have two parallel lines intersecting at 0 instead of 1.1 =1 point, two disjoint circles intersect at 0 instead of 2.2=4 points, a line tangent to a circle intersecting at 1 point instead of 1.2=2 points. These exceptions merge into a simple picture once one goes to projective space, complex numbers and schemes. Complex numbers lead to lots of other instances of simplicity.

Similarly, proofs can become simple where before one had complicated ad-hoc reasoning.

Feynman once made the same point of laws of physics where in contrast to someone figuring out rules of chess by looking at games where they first figure out basic rules(how pieces move) and then moves to complex exceptions(en passant, pawn promotion), what often happens in physics is that different sets of rules for apparently distinct phenomena become aspects of a unity (ex: heat, light, sound were seen as distinct things but now are all seen as movements of particles; unification of electricity and magnetism).

Of course, this unification pursuit is never complete. Mathematics books/papers constantly seem to pull a rabbit out of a hat. This leads to 'motivation' questions for why such a construction/expression/definition was made. For a few of those questions, the answer only becomes clear after more research.
by Moto7451 | 2025-05-19 11:24:45+00:00
I’ve spent most of my career in Job Tech and HR Tech so I can give you some insight.

LinkedIn lost a lawsuit about specifically trying to prevent scraping of their job content. This was a big deal at the time as all the major job sites were scraping jobs either because a customer lacked technical capabilities or to add jobs that were not part of the corpus. It’s a routine part of how the industry works in the same way that not many complain about Google scraping the Internet.

Secondly, and actually more importantly, a lot of the industry exchanges jobs using feeds. This is where CPC job distribution generally exists. These can contain “free” jobs which do not get any CPC credit but would let you build something like this site without any scraping infrastructure. You can ask some major job boards for just the free jobs if you wanted that for some reason. Most job specific scraping services like Aspen and Feedonomics will deliver you scraped jobs in the your preferred feed format.

In practice where I’ve worked we just blocked scraping sites when we get a complaint and respected robots.txt. It was rare for someone to complain since we were good sources of traffic wherever I worked. I am not a lawyer but my understanding is that as long as you’re not otherwise breaking the law by respecting legitimate takedown notices then scraping is fair use.
by zinekeller | 2025-05-19 11:25:54+00:00
Actually, yes. Google and Facebook invests in translation significantly more than Microsoft in languages in Africa and Asia (to the point that you cannot set Windows do not have that language in question), for example, the various non-colonial languages in the African continent. In those countries, the computer is set to English/French because not of practicality but of significantly broken/no translation by Microsoft.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-05-19 11:26:04+00:00
> run "make" for many C projects.

This generally fails miserably, in my experience. It's normally a dance of error: libfoo missing, followed by install (which is generally only straightforward on linux), followed by libbar is missing etc.

Don't get me wrong, I have built lots of non-trivial C projects, but it's not straighforward at all (maybe if you always work in C it's easier).
by thrance | 2025-05-19 11:26:12+00:00
Hear! Hear! It enrages me. They also automatically turn the subtitles ON, making you constantly have to disable them. There is no way for multilingual users to add a list of the languages they understand, which is an insane limitation that's been driving me crazy for years at this point. Wtf are they even working on at youtube's HQ? Making video thumbnails larger still?
by credit_guy | 2025-05-19 11:27:15+00:00
China installs about as much new solar capacity each year as the rest of the world combined. They manufacture the most PVs and have access to the cheapest PVs for that reason. Yet, they also have installed more new nuclear capacity (by far) than the rest of the world combined. Not only they do that, but they also have more nuclear plant being built right now, and more being already approved. Nuclear power is expensive because of the initial construction cost, and that is expensive because we forgot how to build. China didn't.
by nulld3v | 2025-05-19 11:27:55+00:00
> First, Accept-Language is an ordered list, and most daily-multilingual people don't have an absolute order of preference, and more a topical list of preferences.

Technically Accept-Language allows you to specify a "quality value"/weight for each language... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

IMO there is a lot of improvements that can be made by both the browser and websites:

Websites should probably allow users to override the browser-requested language. But browsers should also allow users to choose between "Site default", "Request system default language", "Request English", "Request Chinese", "Request Spanish", etc. on a per site basis.

Most optimally however: sites should expose a list of supported languages, maybe in the manifest.json: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web... Format would be something like: `Map<iso639Code: string, Tuple<translationQuality: float, comments: string>>`

Language selection should be done on the client side, not on the server.
by Semaphor | 2025-05-19 11:28:27+00:00
> Looking around in my parents' house (retirement age), there's no furniture from their parents (post-WW2). I don't remember whether my grandparents had any furniture of their parents in use either.

My parents are both 70+, they have 3 big cabinets from their parents, made from solid wood. I’d not mind having them in the right place. They look and handle great, only the drawers could use some finetuning ;)
by Vinnl | 2025-05-19 11:28:32+00:00
Unfortunately, that just specifies which languages you prefer, regardless of what the original language is.

I speak Dutch and English, but have English set as my preferred language, because most of the time that multiple languages are available, that is the original language. However, sometimes I'll be visiting a Dutch site that has a (usually badly-)translated English version available, and I'd rather get the Dutch version.
by strogonoff | 2025-05-19 11:28:34+00:00
You are free to abandon iPhones and live under a rock. Just, please:

0) don’t speak for all humankind,

1) when there is no extractive behavior—defined as taking a fee without producing even remotely proportionate value in return—do not misuse the word “rent” (as I said: landlords don’t innovate), and

2) when innovation is actually innovation, don’t put it in quotes.

Unless your hammer comes with a team of security engineers that work round the clock pushing security updates against zero-day vulnerabilities, or a selection of millions of expansions that expand its functionality in various ways, etc., no amount of mental gymnastics would make your hammer anything like a supercomputer that fits in the palm of your hand. The analogy you decided to repeat works against you; the fact that such a supercomputer costs only 20x more than a really good hammer costs today is amazing.
by elzbardico | 2025-05-19 11:28:50+00:00
Put some cups of water surrounding the oven in multiple directions from its front (assume that leakage from the back is less likely and that unless you have metal walls, it won't reflect in your direction).

Measure their temperature and take note in your notebook. Put another cup away from the microwaves but in the same environment to serve as control. Measure its temp and put in a notebook

. Turn off any air-conditioning or fans in the kitchen, any sources of heat, you know the drill.

Turn on your microwave oven for a long cycle (10, 15 minutes) measure temperatures in 1 or 2 minutes interval.

Plot everything and compare against control.
Show HN: Open-Source AlphaEvolve Clone Using GPT-4.1 and Genetic Programming
by Sai_Praneeth | 2025-05-19 11:28:55+00:00
Everyone saw the AlphaEvolve hype. I got obsessed with how it might work under the hood and decided to just build it myself.

My setup uses GPT-4.1 to mutate matrix multiplication code, guided by a bunch of hand-crafted mutation strategies (loop reordering, tiling, Strassen, etc.). Each candidate is evaluated on both speed and accuracy. Then I apply Pareto selection with crowding distance to evolve better ones over generations.

I ran into all the usual LLM reward hacks-returning the input, calling np.dot, etc. So I forced primitive-only implementations and tightly constrained the mutation space.

After some struggle (and OpenAI credits vanishing), I ended up with a system that can actually evolve fast, correct implementations starting from a naive baseline.

Full story here (with all the failures and design hacks): https://saipraneeth.in/ml/building-evolve

Code’s public. Roast it, fork it, or try evolving your own. https://github.com/think-a-tron/evolve
by esperent | 2025-05-19 11:29:16+00:00
> They wouldn't even have a brand on their dishwasher - it would be commissioned by an architect or interior designer quietly maintained at regular intervals by an appliance engineer

I'm not sure that I buy this. It's not simple to make a bespoke appliance like a dishwasher that's better than a very high end mass produced one. Where did you get the idea that this happens from?
by elric | 2025-05-19 11:29:42+00:00
Not accepting Accept-Language is one of my major pet peeves. What makes it worse is that many multilingual websites translate their language-switching buttons and the list of languages to the current language .... which is beyond fucking stupid and defeats the purpose. Wikipedia does this right. The button to switch languages is clear, using a universal multilanguage icon, and a list of languages (using the name of the language in that same language) in alphabetical order, with the most likely candidates on the top (presumably based on geoip).

E.g. an English Wikipedia page will present me with the following language suggestions:

Suggested languages Deutsch Français Nederlands

When you assume a language, you make an ass of you and of me. Don't be an ass. Be like Wikipedia.