MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chgs | 2025-05-04 10:30:53+00:00
It amazing how the wealthy and powerful try to twist a tale of the life of someone so openly socialist to instead claim it’s a story championing wealth.

The general theme of “don’t worry about injustice now, things will be right after you die” is of course very strong to preserve the wealth. If you believe you will get your just rewards after you die, there’s less need to fight for an equitable world today.
Show HN: My New Startup – Minimus
by dimastopel | 2025-05-04 10:31:14+00:00
We create minimalistic and secure container base images. All images only contain the relevant package (e.g. python) and its dependencies. We even created our own Linux distro, called MinimOS, to be in control of all packages and build a new version as soon as it is available upstream. As opposed to Alpine Linux we mostly use glibc. Images are re-built daily and we continuously add more of them. By using our base images you can easily reduce the number of vulnerabilities by more than 90% (compared to Docker Hub). You can use our images for free (the 'latest' line) here: https://images.minimus.io. Have a wonderful day you all!
by gruturo | 2025-05-04 10:31:20+00:00
I'm frankly baffled at all these reports of IR being unreliable and slow. It... wasn't. Not for the file sizes of the day. I exchanged plenty of files back in the day, even at 115200bps a picture would be 2-3 seconds tops (pictures were small!). And when devices started supporting 4Mbps, even a large-ish MP3 would go in 5-6 seconds. All without setup or pairing, beautiful. Huge files (like full resolution pictures from an SLR camera) would take a while - but frankly they took almost the same time with a cable! You'd just have to plug their memory card directly into your computer if you were in a hurry.

The only really clunky use case for me was internet access - keeping phone and laptop positioned and aligned for 30 minutes was limiting.

And yes there IS plenty of bandwidth at those frequencies. In fact latest IR standards reach 1Gbps, but it's pretty much extinct. There was an attempt called Li-Fi to use it for as a wireless networking but I don't think it went far.

What I really miss is OBEX (Object Exchange), which worked also over Bluetooth, and which Apple sadly chose not to implement: simplest protocol to just ship a file or a contact vCard over, no setup, just worked - and it's been a standard for 20+ years. Early Android had it too, it was since dropped I think. Sigh.
by lambdaone | 2025-05-04 10:31:45+00:00
Doing it right (via the algorithm above) is a trivial few lines of code. The thinking behind the state machine that gives both high reliability and low latency isn't trivial. It is, however, obvious once you know the trick of maintaining an extra auxiliary variable in addition to counter/timer variables, and understand that you don't need to wait for the bouncing to finish before registering a change. Think sort algorithms; everyone comes up with bubblesort first, but you can do much, much better with only tiny changes after a bit of thought.
by nneonneo | 2025-05-04 10:32:26+00:00
I mean, you are literally reading the first chapter of the tutorial for beginners (“Beginner's Guide to Elvish is for you if you haven’t used shells a lot or want to brush up on the basics”).

They have a separate set of docs for people who do have some experience with other shells (https://elv.sh/learn/); you may find the quick tour more suitable for your speed: https://elv.sh/learn/tour.html
by ParthMadaan | 2025-05-04 10:32:57+00:00
During my work with vector databases, I encountered a common pain point: there wasn't a straightforward way to extract data from traditional search engines, vectorize it, and store it efficiently in vector databases.

So I built a solution!

ES to Pinecone is a Python package that creates a seamless pipeline between Elasticsearch and Pinecone, handling all the complex parts: Multi-threaded document processing Vector embedding generation (OpenAI, HuggingFace) Efficient batch transfers Comprehensive error handling

The best part? It's extremely simple to use - just import, initialize, and run! Check out the GitHub repo for full examples and documentation.

Whether you're exploring semantic search capabilities or transitioning to vector-based retrieval systems, I hope this tool helps accelerate your projects!
We cut CI emissions by up to 90% – by choosing where code runs
by drydenwilliams | 2025-05-04 10:33:21+00:00
We’ve been experimenting with running CI/CD jobs multi-cloud, across AWS, Azure, and GCP — but with a twist: each job gets routed to the lowest-carbon region available at the time (among other weightings like latency, performance, and provider preferences).

There’s a surprising amount of variability between cloud regions. Some run on hydro, nuclear, or wind — others are still coal- or gas-heavy. By choosing where code runs based on carbon intensity, we’ve seen up to 90% reduction in emissions per job, without changing app logic or infrastructure. Also 25% cheaper too.

For example:

We’ve been tracking the average grid intensity of jobs run by GitHub Actions and Azure (when region is unspecified), and we’ve seen an average of ~285 gCO₂/kWh.By contrast, when we set a hard limit of 100 gCO₂/kWh max, our jobs averaged just 48 gCO₂/kWh — with some running as low as 24 gCO₂/kWh.

It’s been eye-opening to see how much of a difference regional scheduling can make — especially for something like CI/CD, where latency is often a lesser concern.

It’s made us wonder:

- Should developers be thinking about this, or should platforms abstract it away? - Where’s the right tradeoff between performance, carbon, and cost?

If anyone else here is exploring carbon-aware infra, cloud sustainability, or multi-cloud scheduling

We built this into tool called CarbonRunner that automates this process. It pulls live grid intensity data and applies weighted logic to select the best region for each job across providers — would love to hear what you're seeing or thinking about.
by yurishimo | 2025-05-04 10:33:30+00:00
They don’t care about you. You are a number on a screen that happens to pay their company money sometimes. But by using recorded voices, the company hopes to tap into the empathetic part of your human brain to subconsciously make excuses for their crappy service.

When I get stellar customer service these days, I’m happy and try to call it out, but i don’t expect it anymore. My first expectation is always AI slop or a shitty phone tree. When I reframed it for myself, it was a lot easier not to get frustrated about something that I can’t control and not blame a person who doesn’t exist.
by praptak | 2025-05-04 10:33:51+00:00
It probably doesn't make sense to cram a whole Lisp into a constrained environment like a microcontroller. What some people do instead is define a smaller Lisp which acts as a DSL and is compiled to run on the constrained platform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp is an example of this approach.

"GOAL does not run in an interpreter, but instead is compiled directly into PlayStation 2 machine code to execute. It offers limited facilities for garbage collection, relying extensively on runtime support. It offers dynamic memory allocation primitives designed to make it well-suited to running in constant memory on a video game console. GOAL has extensive support for inlined assembly language code using a special rlet form, allowing programs to freely mix assembly and higher-level constructs within one function."
Show HN: Science-backed men's health tracker to boost energy, mood and hormones
by bustylasercanon | 2025-05-04 10:33:54+00:00
A lot of friends in their 30s were getting bloodwork done and realising their testosterone was low. Energy, mood, libido — all below baseline. But outside of Reddit threads and sketchy supplements, there’s no simple, science-backed way to actually track and improve the habits that affect it.

So I built Mojo — a minimal, private iOS app that helps men log the key lifestyle factors that influence testosterone and overall vitality.

Each day, you check in with a few quick sliders: sleep, stress, libido, energy, workouts, diet, alcohol, supplements, etc. It takes under 30 seconds.

From that, Mojo generates a daily vitality score based on your inputs and shows weekly trends across pillars like physical recovery, hormonal balance, and mental state. Over time, it surfaces meaningful correlations (e.g. poor sleep → lower libido → reduced score), helping users understand what’s dragging them down or lifting them up.

You also get concise, referenced tips and articles — designed to cut through the noise and explain how sleep, stress, and training actually affect hormones. No fluff, no bro science.

The app is fully local: • No account creation • No server • No third-party data collection • Optional Apple Health integration (for syncing workouts and sleep)

Mojo is designed to be low-friction but genuinely useful — a tool for building consistency and insight over time.

It’s available now on the App Store for a one-time £4.99.

Would love feedback from the HN crowd — especially anyone into quantified self, mobile UX, or digital health.
by timthorn | 2025-05-04 10:36:08+00:00
> Just a reminder, if you ever look at England on a map and try and guess where the middle of it is, that is where the tree stood, alone, surrounded by fields.

The tree was located about 30 miles from the northern border of England. It could possibly be described as on the middle by longitude but it's far from the middle of England as a whole.
by morisil | 2025-05-04 10:36:16+00:00
I would support every political and social movement progressing us on the spectrum from patriarchy to matriarchy. In particular I would put pressure on the legal system of countries where women are still not allowed to inherit land and property.

The next biggest problems to tackle:

- the way we are producing proteins - the way we are producing energy

Short term problems to address:

- adoption of cognitive AI in scientific research

I am building very potent autonomous AI agents now, so soon I will be able to unleash them to crunch all these problems, hopefully. :)
by msp26 | 2025-05-04 10:36:47+00:00
The linked blog is down. But agreed, I would especially like to see this particular thing fixed.

> Property ordering

> When you're working with JSON schemas in the Gemini API, the order of properties is important. By default, the API orders properties alphabetically and does not preserve the order in which the properties are defined (although the Google Gen Al SDKs may preserve this order). If you're providing examples to the model with a schema configured, and the property ordering of the examples is not consistent with the property ordering of the schema, the output could be rambling or unexpected.
by tmtvl | 2025-05-04 10:37:48+00:00
I am only really familiar with Arch and OpenSUSE, so I don't know how other distros do it, but OpenSUSE keeps the (I believe) latest 5 kernels, so I just have to delete snapshots older than the oldest kernel in my /boot. I like that system so I do the same thing on Arch (but don't tell anyone, otherwise I'm gonna get yelled at).
by timonoko | 2025-05-04 10:39:10+00:00
I found 50 pages manual for the Noko-Pascal. Finnish Army paid for it, because nothing comparable was available. Writing the manual was 10 times bigger task.

The army used Nokopaskal for testing radio modems. Looks like the language was heavy with low level constructs like PORT.

I truly did not remember any of this until today.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/uibbTgCQmm4XCa9c6
by tialaramex | 2025-05-04 10:41:03+00:00
> IIRC, Oracle team did have a lot of telemetry data and they are good engineers. Do you have any insights proving that their approach is wrong?

Time's arrow

Java is a Sun (Microsystems) language, Oracle just bought the entire company much later. So one problem here is that you're imagining this like it's a decision somebody made this century but it isn't, it's a decision from the early 1990s.

Computer Science is a young discipline. In the early 1990s the Open Addressed hash tables do exist but it's very usual to write the simple chained hash table with Closed Addressing and as I understand it that's exactly what is provided in Java 1.0. This data structure is today known to be a bad idea, and I've criticised the choice in say C++ to standardize the exact same data structure (as std::unordered_map) in 2011. But that's twenty years later.

At some point (I believe this century?) Java engineers went back and improved their hash table to use trees not chains, but they were constrained by the baked in hash, so they could not have picked radically modern data structures which require a different hash strategy without significant disruption.

When I got a CS degree the Introspective sort was so new I'd have to have read bleeding edge research papers to know about it. Today it's very silly if you claim you provide a standard library sort and it's not at least as good as Introsort.

The Swiss Table is from the 2010s, it's new enough that there's a Youtube video of them introducing this data structure, not because they did that specifically on purpose but because they're giving a talk and obviously all talks are filmed and uploaded to Youtube these days. Hopskotch hashing - another popular Open Addressing strategy - is from 2008.

So, the question isn't "Is this the best idea today?" but only "Given what they knew 30+ years ago, was this reasonable back then?" and yeah, of course it was reasonable back then but that doesn't magically mean it's the best choice now.

Edited: Added paragraph about the later choice to use trees.
by cheschire | 2025-05-04 10:42:34+00:00
It seems to me that extortion is incredibly difficult to prevent. I imagine most people have weak spots that are potentially exploitable with only a few weeks of effort.

So I have to wonder why it isn’t more common, and why spam emails and spam callers are still widely used when it clearly has greater exposure risk.

Is it that the punishment for spam is more relaxed than the punishment for targeted extortion? Or maybe targeted extortion would reveal more about the criminal? Perhaps spam emails, while highly exposed, do offer some level of anonymity that is greater than extortion. Or perhaps the thieves prefer to live stable lives and extorting people in a specific area would make them a greater target.

Just trying to figure out why spam emails is still a thing.
by marchie_uk | 2025-05-04 10:42:45+00:00
It is absolutely not “regrowing with vigour”. When I visited six weeks ago, there was one very small sprout a few inches in size.

For comparison, we had to fell a mature sycamore on our land last year; this now has more than a dozen shoots growing from its base, ranging between six and ten feet tall, all with lots of leaves on them.
by int_19h | 2025-05-04 10:42:49+00:00
I don't think it's a particularly good comparison. RAD made many things easier, but it still required you to understand coding. Nor were all those things that you list universal. E.g. Delphi was arguably the pinnacle of 90s RAD, yet it was compiled and statically typed (and stricter about it than e.g. C++). VB6 could be compiled and was opt-in typed. And so on.
by lambdaone | 2025-05-04 10:43:26+00:00
A bit of analog low-pass filtering and electrical hysteresis definitely helps reject EMI - but you shouldn't use these alone to do debouncing as if you do, you introduce substantial latency for both up and down transitions. The (very simple) software algorithm described above gives you both low latency and complete resistance to bouncing. Combining the two is a complete solution.
by progbits | 2025-05-04 10:43:31+00:00
A bad switch will simply put contacts together at the same rate as the human pressing it, so it's very random and variable as you press with different strength and speed.

A good switch will decouple your finger from the contact by some nonlinear/bistable linkage, so once you accumulate a fixed amount of travel distance it will snap the contacts with the same speed/force. But of course even that isn't perfectly decoupled nor perfectly deterministic.
by numpad0 | 2025-05-04 10:43:47+00:00
per [0]:

> Put differently, English-language videos comprised just 17% of the videos that were published by popular channels during the week, but they received 28% of all of the ...

or [1]:

> Of the top 250 YouTube channels, 66% of the content is in English, 15% in Spanish, 7% in Portuguese, ...

There's quite a distance between "all the best content in STEM field and on YouTube is in English" and "all the content is in English" and a lot of qualifiers gets in there.

0: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/07/25/popular-yout...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet
by schwartzworld | 2025-05-04 10:44:02+00:00
An app on glasses would also not be a great way to learn. There’s a reason we don’t color code piano keys or right the names of the notes on them.

> the app is much cheaper and should work with any real instrument.

Maybe if your instrument has keys or frets. Even if it was a good way to learn, it wouldn’t do much good for a trumpet.
by pazimzadeh | 2025-05-04 10:44:13+00:00
If a receptor is used as an entry point by a common virus and disabling it prevents infection but evolution has kept it around (cells spend energy actively expressing it, not having it encoded in the genome) then you can assume that there is a function provided by the receptor.

Turns out, CD163 already has a known function.

A spandrel not only has to have obvious function but removing it has to not be detrimental. I'm questioning the bar that is being used to say that it's not detrimental.

Unless humanity was on the brink of starvation and this was the only known way to increase food production then no it's not dangerous to be cautious.

On the other hand, I think it's dangerous to assume that a protein only has one function

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_moonlighting
by fragmede | 2025-05-04 10:44:50+00:00
Democracy is more fundamental than that. It simply means rule by the people. The three branches of government was a later invention, and not all democracies feature it. Political theory surrounding the definition of democracy is more concerned with who has power and how they have it, and has less to do with how it is structured, as much as a US-centric definition may take it to be. Eg parliamentary systems are considered democratic despite a different structure.
by Belsonsan | 2025-05-04 10:46:58+00:00
Totally fair — it's not meant to be a “tool” in the traditional sense.

The idea is to help founders, builders, or even curious observers sharpen their instincts by exposing them to real startup ideas and outcomes. A lot of people (myself included) get caught up thinking “this idea has to work,” and this game shows how often that intuition is wrong — and why.

It’s lightweight, educational, and honestly a bit humbling. Kind of like flashcards for product thinking.

Appreciate the honest feedback!
by volleyball | 2025-05-04 10:46:58+00:00
Is that the type of shredder they used though? It seems too slow especially when considering live squirrels. I imagine it would be more like the one used to kill male hatchlings in the poultry industry[1]. Quicker and bit more humane.

[1] -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udSiluTAOaQ (warning : potentially disturbing footage)
by sim7c00 | 2025-05-04 10:48:54+00:00
you could use IO which BIOS also uses. BIOs provided basically some library or api to make it easier, and did some init of platform.

you can also program the vga outside of bios if its PCI. not sure about agp and older stuff tho as i never really got to play with it.

bios essentially is just some software running in CPL 0. it doesnt have special access or privileges.
by userbinator | 2025-05-04 10:50:38+00:00
However, since GPUs tended to vary widely when going beyond VGA modes (although I believe even the original VGA controller was capable of 800x600x4 with a suitably lenient autosync monitor), VESA VBE was introduced to make that much easier again.

Windows actually runs the VBIOS in an emulator / VM for switching modes with the default GPU driver.
by amarcheschi | 2025-05-04 10:51:05+00:00
At least here in italy subcontracting has worse conditions than the regular workers as well, both for wage and safety. We're having a referendum where that, if passed, could make the parent company liable if they subcontract and a worker gets injured. It absolutely makes sense to me to hold a company accountable if it knowingly subcontracts to shady shell companies so they don't have to care about safety and can pay workers less
by safety1st | 2025-05-04 10:51:37+00:00
I'm as big a critic of Google as anyone, but I'm always surprised at modern day takes around the lost semantic web technologies - they are missing facts or jumping to conclusions in hindsight.

Here's what people should know.

1) The failure of XHTML was very much a multi-vendor, industry-wide affair; the problem was that the syntax of XML was stricter than the syntax of HTML, and the web was already littered with broken HTML that the browser vendors all had to implement layers of quirk handling to parse. There was simply no clear user payoff for moving to the stricter parsing rules of XML and there was basically no vendor who wanted to do the work. To my memory Google does not really stand out here, they largely avoided working on what was frequently referred to as a science project, like all the other vendors.

2) In subsequent years, Google actually has actually delivered a semantic web of sorts: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...

A few things stand out as interesting. First of all, the old semantic web never had a business case. JSON+LD Structured Data does: Google will parse your structured data and use it to inform the various snippets, factoids, previews and interactive widgets they show all over their search engine and other web properties. So as a result JSON+LD has taken off massively. Millions of websites have adopted it. The data is there in the document. It is just in a JSON+LD section. If you work in SEO you know all about this. Seems to be quite rare that anyone on Hacker News is aware of it however.

Second interesting thing, why did we end up with the semantic data being in JSON in a separate section of the file? I don't know. I think everyone just found that interleaving it within the HTML was not that useful. For the legacy reasons discussed earlier, HTML is a mess. It's difficult to parse. It's overloaded with a lot of stuff. JSON is the more modern thing. It seems reasonable to me that we ended up with this implementation. Note that Google does have some level of support for other semantic data, like RDFa which I think is directly in the HTML - it is not popular.

Which brings us to the third interesting thing, the JSON+LD schemas Google uses, are standards, or at least... standard-y. The W3C is involved. Google, Yahoo, Yandex and Microsoft have made the largest contributions to my knowledge. You can read all about it on schema.org.

TL;DR - XHTML was not a practical technology and no browser or tool vendor wanted to support it. We eventually got the semantic web anyway!
by pmdr | 2025-05-04 10:53:17+00:00
The problem is CEO worship. You should worship Rails, not DHH. It's okay that he sometimes has other opinions, we don't have to agree with them to benefit from Rails. And there are a couple of things differentiating him from Musk: first, Rails is a byproduct of his business, not his business. 37Signals isn't even shilling some cloud service like Vercel is with NextJS. Second, DHH isn't involved in government.
by tgv | 2025-05-04 10:53:36+00:00
Airdrop works. Ok, it's platform bound, but I'm sure it could be ported.

It's not such a big thing, though. I hardly use it, and young people don't seem to use it either. The stuff on their phone and laptop seem separate worlds, just like mine are. Might be because they don't know about it, though.