MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I made a file-first plant care database
by alexanderameye | 2025-05-27 09:30:18+00:00
Hey, I wanted to share my hobby project: a file-first houseplant and plant care database.

I originally built it with a fully-fledged API (using Rust Axum) + Postgres database to store and serve plant care data to a frontend. It worked, but quickly felt like overengineering for a read-only reference site.

So I rebuilt it as a file-first static site: each species/genus/family is a markdown file with structured metadata. This is the 'database'. A static site generator then builds all pages from these files.

For example a plant genus may have the following fields:

--- name: Impatiens

familia: Balsaminaceae

common_names: impatiens, jewelweed, touch-me-not, snapweed, patience, balsam or busy lizzie.

etymology: The word Impatiens comes from the Latin word impatiens, meaning impatient/intolerant. This refers to the seed capsules of this plant which burst when mature, dispersing seeds up to several meters away.

tags: - balsaminaceae

---

The project is open source, easy to extend (just add a markdown file), and designed to stay simple: no accounts, no user data, no monetization, no roadmap with tons of features. Just a clean, free, searchable houseplant reference with open data.

This project was a lesson to myself to keep things simple! On to the next one.

Repo: https://github.com/plant-base/houseplantguide.org
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-27 09:30:25+00:00
Joking aside, this is Marvin Minsky's paper "Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious", published in Cognitive Constraints on Communication, Vaina and Hintikka (eds.) Reidel, 1981. More fun than a barrel of an infinite number of monkeys.

https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt

>Abstract: Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden" thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay I argue that the different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we recognize the importance of knowledge about knowledge and, particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and suppressing bugs -- ineffective or destructive thought processes. When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or mysterious, becomes more understandable.

>A gentleman entered a pastry-cook's shop and ordered a cake; but he soon brought it back and asked for a glass of liqueur instead. He drank it and began to leave without having paid. The proprietor detained him. "You've not paid for the liqueur." "But I gave you the cake in exchange for it." "You didn't pay for that either." "But I hadn't eaten it". --- from Freud (1905).

>"Yields truth when appended to its own quotation" yields truth when appended to its own quotation. --W. V. Quine

>A man at the dinner table dipped his hands in the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. When his neighbor looked astonished, the man apologized: "I'm so sorry. I thought it was spinach."

>[Note 11] Spinach. A reader mentioned that she heard this joke about brocolli, not mayonnaise. This is funnier, because it transfers a plausible mistake into an implausible context. In Freud's version the mistake is already too silly: one could mistake spinach for broccoli, but not for mayonnaise. I suspect that Freud transposed the wrong absurdity when he determined to tell it himself later on. Indeed, he (p.139) seems particularly annoyed at this joke -- and well he might be if, indeed, he himself damaged it by spoiling the elegance of the frame-shift. I would not mention this were it not for the established tradition of advancing psychiatry by analyzing Freud's own writings.

>ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: I thank Howard Cannon, Danny Hillis, William Kornfeld, David Levitt, Gloria Rudisch, and Richard Stallman for suggestions. Gosrdon Oro provided the dog-joke.
by krapp | 2025-05-27 09:31:22+00:00
A lot of people claim that but I've never seen evidence of the existence of a vast number of people who would be using Hacker News if only it had more bells and whistles. Craigslist is "ugly" too, and plenty of people use it.

I think it's more likely that most people (even most tech-adjacent people) simply don't know this place exists, or don't care, since no one is sharing links to Hacker News on mainstream social media and nothing goes viral here outside of already established HN-adjacent circles.
by metalman | 2025-05-27 09:31:29+00:00
He did and end run around saftey, and just put the whole system in a shed, which in any real emergency situation , dramaticaly reduces risk to life and property. Also each battery bank is.air gapped , which will significantly reduce any fire from spreading to adjacent banks. The system looks well made, and has 8 years up time. I live off grid and am useing lead acid batteries, but would like to switch to sodium.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-27 09:31:34+00:00
It's a hack I started doing after a friend's home almost burned down from a vape battery gone bad.

In any case, dry sand is one of the methods firefighters use to put out battery fires, the other being dumping it in a giant vat of water (that's what's done for electric cars) or class D fire extinguishers which are extremely fine powdered salt.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-27 09:32:35+00:00
Problem is, the mental model of what user wants to do almost never aligns with whatever security model the vendor actually implemented. Broadly-scoped access at least makes it easy on the user; anything I'd like to do will fit as a superset of "read all" or "read/write all".

The fine-grained access forces people to solve a tough riddle, that may actually not have a solution. E.g. I don't believe there's a token configuration in GitHub that corresponds to "I want to allow pushing to and pulling from my repos, but only my repos, and not those of any of the organizations I want to; in fact, I want to be sure you can't even enumerate those organizations by that token". If there is one, I'd be happy to learn - I can't figure out how to make it out of checkboxes GitHub gives me, and honestly, when I need to mint a token, solving riddles like this is the last thing I need.

Getting LLMs to translate what user wants to do into correct configuration might be the simplest solution that's fully general.
by jobigoud | 2025-05-27 09:33:46+00:00
Have you tried image generation? It can easily apply high level concepts from one area to another area and produce something that hasn't been done before.

Unless you loosen the meaning of statistical average so much that it ends up including human creativity. At the end of the day it's basically the same process of applying an idea from one field to another.

Most humans are not Da Vinci, Einstein, Kant, etc. Does that make them not valuable as humans?
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-05-27 09:34:14+00:00
I'm supposing Safari's SVG implementation when moved to supporting favicons meant there were security holes, probably scripting exploits, but also potential XML exploits, so they removed until they could fix these, with a probable low priority.

on edit: ok evidently that was a stupid assumption on my part, as it got a downvote - why is it stupid though? SVG inline needs to support scripting, SVG is XML - if Safari's SVG implementation meant that SVG favicons were open to either XML exploits or scripting exploits that were not adequately handled in the first release (because sitting in the browser chrome part of code instead of web site part of code) then they might have pulled it back quickly until they could fix that.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-27 09:34:39+00:00
If the batteries catch fire the acrylic bottom will melt and automatically dump the sand onto the fire.

This is a questionable setup though. You'd need massive amounts of sand dumped evenly, which requires more design and verification. Acrylic is also itself flammable.

A basic water based fire suppressor would not extinguish a battery fire but it will cool it and the room, limiting spread.

Let the experts design this kind of thing.
by omcnoe | 2025-05-27 09:35:27+00:00
Whether the employer or the employee is contributing to a defined contribution or defined benefit plan, ultimately it's all coming out of the same "employee costs" bucket on the employer side.

Maybe they can work well with proper oversight, but the status quo for the majority of defined benefit plans is to be mismanaged and underfunded. See the role (union negotiated) defined benefit plans had in the US auto industry collapse. 60 out of the 100 largest corporate defined benefit plans in the US are underfunded, more than half! Chart in that article shows that 40% being funded is actually unusually high, historical trend is 15-20% of plans meeting funding levels. https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-u-s-pension-plans-are...

Funding a defined benefit plan for lower wage workers vs paying lower wage workers more and contributing more to a defined contribution plan has exactly the same costs on the employer side. The only way the defined benefit plan appears to work out better for both parties is because we have legalized the employer not funding these plans to the appropriate level and hanging the supposed beneficiaries of the plan out to dry when it goes south.

Even ignoring the rampant underfunding issues defined benefit plans are a classic example of the principle agent problem where the interests/risk appetite of the fund manager and the fund members don't line up perfectly.
by dino222 | 2025-05-27 09:35:38+00:00
MCP is just one protocol, there are already others like A2A etc which will do similar. And there is a raw form of this, tell the LLM to read the GitHub API docs and use it as needed, using this auth token). I don't know if any LLM is powerful enough to do this yet, but they definitely will be. I don't think there is really a way to secure all these tool registration mechanisms, especially when it's the LLM at fault in the end of leaking data.

People do want to use LLMs to improve their productivity - LLMs will either need provable safety measures (seems unlikely to me) or orgs will need to add security firewalls to every laptop, until now perhaps developers could be trusted to be sophisticated but LLMs definitely can't. Though I'm not sure how to reason on the end result if even the security firewalls use LLMs to find bad behaving LLMs...
by gommm | 2025-05-27 09:36:06+00:00
Outside of charities, I donate to a few projects: - Openbsd foundation (I use openssh all the time :))

- Corejs + babel (donated after reading this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34859766

- Magisk . I root my Android phone because I believe that if I buy a device I should actually own it.

- Scummvm I believe in preserving computing history and scummvm does great work making older games accessible

- MisterFPGA. Instead of giving my 3 years old son a tablet, I've decided to set up MisterFPGA for him with an Amiga core for him to do kidpix and scummvm to run Adibou and the humongous games. I like the idea of him having access to a relatively simple system like the amiga where he can learn how computer work without having access to internet and learning to passively consume.

- Valetudo. I love having a robot cleaning my house. I do not love having something with a camera that's not purely local. Thanks to valetudo, I can use it without worrying about my privacy.

- Not directly a donation but I buy a yearly license to crossover to support wine development

- Calibre

- Syncthing

- The developer of Karabiner

- Internet Archive

- Free Software Foundation

I used to give to the following:

- Wikipedia (but stopped when I realized that they have more than enough donations and that I should focus on other worthy causes)

- Mozilla (but stopped when I saw the CEO increase her salary while firing and stopping important projects. I do not want a repeat of the IE monopoly with Chrome and as such I want Firefox to succeed but I have completely lost trust in Mozilla's management)
by ho_schi | 2025-05-27 09:36:19+00:00
You sound like someone purchasing a new ThinkPad and

"Why they added a camera bump? Sticking out of display lid. A thing nobody ask for".

followed by

"Why the made the base flat. But removed the rounded palm rest? Adding a sharp corner."

followed by

"Why the removed the dent which allowed to open the display lid, which didn't protruded out of the device?"

I appreciate nice design. But if it doesn't follows function, it is harmful.

PS: I'm frustrated about the new ThinkPads with a camera bump sticking out of the display. Everybody hates camera bumps. The display lid is broad and provides much space for adding multiple cameras, microphones and sensors of all kind. I know...this topic is about software UI. The change for the sake of the change itself is not beneficial.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-27 09:36:29+00:00
That link says... exactly the same thing as wikipedia, still directly contradicting you. There is a question mark here that I'll take up later.

But the example goes:

1. A vertically integrated helmet producer produces helmets out of nothing and sells a batch of them to a mine for a total price of €240. This producer has added "€200" of value, despite the sale price of €240, and owes VAT of €40 at a "20%" rate, which it pays out of the revenue from the sale of helmets.

2. The mine has purchased €240 euros of helmets and converts that purchase into €1200 of ore. This might look like adding €960 of value, but it isn't. It sells the ore for €1200, and since it has added "€800" of value, it owes VAT of €160, 20% of €800, which it pays out of the revenue from the sale of ore.

3. Because the ore sold for €1200, the government is owed "20%" of that, or €200, which it receives in one payment of €40 (when the helmets are sold) and another payment of €160 (when the ore is sold).

So far the terminology here is deeply stupid but logically coherent.

The question mark I mentioned before is what happens if the helmets fail to be consumed in the production of this batch of ore. Presumably they'll be reused to produce more ore. It would be odd if they still counted against the mine's "value added" for the second batch of ore.

I tend to suspect that the mine is considered to have added more value to the second batch of ore, but the page doesn't address the issue. This would mean that capital goods depreciate in full immediately.

Now, your original comment:

>> For example, if a distiller buys a tank, income tax is immediately paid. But VAT only generates revenue many years later for the country when the beverage leaves the store.

This is clearly false. Both of your links say it's false. The taxing authority receives revenue on exactly the same schedule that it would if the VAT were an income tax. Try running all the same transactions again with a VAT of zero and an income tax of 17%.
by SuchAnonMuchWow | 2025-05-27 09:36:44+00:00
Soldering dump a ton of heat into the cell, which has chances of destroying the cell. That's why most of the cells are spot-welded: its similar to soldering, but its much quicker and is localized only on the part of the metal that need to be melted, so the heat don't have time to reach the cell itself.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-05-27 09:37:13+00:00
> shoving that ugly ass flat style down everyone's throat

the correct term is ugly flat ass actually

That and the other thing I hate / despair over is the monumental space they now leave between list items. In some applications I get scrolling drop-down menus because of that. Yes, they'll rather have users scrolling through a menu that doesn't fit on the screen rather than compressing space between items.
by falcor84 | 2025-05-27 09:37:37+00:00
I really like your take on this, but disagree with your conclusion. I do think that trying to "make life more fair" is essentially the main goal of civilization, codified as early (and probably much earlier) as The Code of Hammurabi.

My take is that we need to tread a thin line such that we teach young people to accept that life is inherently unfair, while at the same time doing what we can as a society to make it more fair.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-27 09:38:23+00:00
Acrylic is itself flammable, massive amounts of sand would be required to fully submerge and cool all cells (and therefore hefty acrylic sheets less likely to give), and it's likely that the sand will not spill correctly and evenly.

Please only use properly designed and tested fire suppression systems, as hack jobs might not help at all and do harm from the false sense of security leading to lack of actually effective mitigations.
by PedroBatista | 2025-05-27 09:38:44+00:00
There have been rumblings and attempts years prior. Now it only takes another attempt, an industry darling ( it used to be Apple) and a big hype boom on the Internet.

There is one problem tho: flat design is cheap to produce. Not sure if AI is there yet to be capable to produce good enough slop to become an industry trend that sticks.
by RemainsOfTheDay | 2025-05-27 09:41:29+00:00
I don't think that Europeans have language advantages over Americans. America is way more multinational than Europe, by design. There are few European countries with multiple official languages; most only have one, like the US.

It's just that most Europeans' native language is not English or some other language spoken by hundreds of millions or billions of people. So they have to learn at least one foreign language to function in the modern world. And many European countries require children to learn two of them. Some require passing language exams as part of the high school graduation.

I studied English and French in school. My native tongue is spoken by about 15 million people in the world, the official language of my native country (which I also speak fluently) is spoken by about 20. One gets a lot of motivation from knowing that, by learning English, one will be able to speak to billions.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-05-27 09:42:12+00:00
This already happened in R W Fassbinder's Welt am Draht (1973) where when you are visiting the hotel in the simulation and your time's over, a bell boy with a chalked notice on a portable blackboard will walk through the hall to alert you to answer the phone in a specific telephone booth. We had a future to look forward to!, and now it's come to this—flat interfaces.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-27 09:43:17+00:00
The banks are "air gapped" by just a few cm, are all interconnected with excellent heat conductors (the bus bars), is insulated with flammable plastic, and sit on a flammable shelf in a flammable shed.

There is no fire safety there. Let's just hope the shed is very far from a house, fences, trees, bushes, or anything else that could catch fire and close any "air gaps" and cause harm.
by lukan | 2025-05-27 09:44:34+00:00
I rather think it is a elitist concept of "I am a highly respected professor at a elite uni, how dare you bother me with your profane questions!"

I was at a Uni aiming for and then gaining "Elite" status in germany and I did not liked the concept and the changes.

I like high profile debates. As high as possible. But I don't like snobism. We all started as newbs.
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-27 09:45:11+00:00
> For me, peak UI was Windows 89/2000 -- largely uniform

The UI back then was sometimes janky, but it was so much more useful. Icons were meaningful and easy to recognize despite the low resolution. Quite often interfaces were customizable, they were not afraid of users becoming power users. Peak UI for me was probably Winamp 2.

Nowadays it is just a bunch of flat glyphs, things hidden in hamburger menus, arcane submenus, etc. Probably done to increase "engagement" or whatever bullshit metric they want to minmax for.
by falcor84 | 2025-05-27 09:45:53+00:00
Yes, LLMs have had API access to terminals for quite a while now. I've been using Windsurf and Claude Code to type terminal commands for me for a long while (and `gh copilot suggest` before that) and couldn't be happier. I still manually review most of them before approving, but I've seen that the chances of the AI getting an advanced incantation right on the first try are much higher than mine, and I haven't yet once had it make a disastrous one, while that's happened to me quite a few times with commands I typed on my own.
by nextaccountic | 2025-05-27 09:45:58+00:00
Is there a more compact format that is bidirectionally compatible with lottie? (not just zipping it, some binary format that can be quickly parsed)

Maybe just storing it as JSONB, or reading the json and converting to another format using some serialization library (like Rust's serde) is enough?

I'm asking because Lottie integration is very widespread, and tooling interoperability is important
by dunyakirkali | 2025-05-27 09:46:09+00:00
If you're an engineering manager looking to make your 1:1s more impactful, this article is for you. I share a practical framework to help you turn routine check-ins into powerful conversations that drive growth, trust, and team success. Whether you’re managing one engineer or twenty, you’ll find actionable tips on agenda-setting, feedback, and meeting your engineers where they are. Read on to learn how to make every 1:1 count!
by NalNezumi | 2025-05-27 09:46:46+00:00
For robotics, "make robot OS" the first (most popular) donation target would be Open Robotics [1] that develop Robot operative system ROS/ROS2. De-facto standard at least in academia, some startups (for MVP), and institutes.

If you are more keen about the hardware side (imo this side probably require more funding if you really want to keep Robots OS, software can come later) I like Robot Studios work by Rob Knight [2], it's OS afaik, with projects such as DexHand [3]. Recently someone posted K-scale labs [4] as robot OS, but imo looks more like a well-funded SV startup that will go full OpenAI and close everything off as soon they hit R&D traction. (just my own impression from reading their docs & focus, happy to be proven wrong)

[1] https://www.openrobotics.org/

[2] https://www.therobotstudio.com/

[3] https://www.dexhand.org/

[4] https://www.kscale.dev/
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-27 09:49:32+00:00
This article somehow doesn't manage to explain the difference between "blue books" and "blank paper". Is there one?

An ordinary math exam, say, is printed on some 8.5" x 11" paper and then filled in with the writing tool of your choice. What would be different if it was in a little bound booklet?

What were people supposedly doing before blue books made their comeback?
by gchamonlive | 2025-05-27 09:51:28+00:00
It's how you approach it.

You tell it to act as a tutor, it'll act as one. Tell it to solve your homework in the form of a poem, it'll do that.

That's not just a calculator, even though it's just calculating, just as much as a computer isn't just a voltage switcher, even thought it's just switching voltages.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2025-05-27 09:52:03+00:00
folks forget, or never figured out, that community-building is a thing that requires a degree of curation; you wouldn't want your sloppy alcoholic uncle showing up to your business brunch (or whatever the hep cats do these days...) but he may be a welcome addition to your new years eve party. That doesn't mean you are "gatekeeping"