MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tannhaeuser | 2025-05-04 08:38:49+00:00
The "semantic" part was what eventually became W3C's RDF stuff (a pet peeve of TBL's predating even the Web). When people squeeze poetry, threaded discussion, and other emergent text forms into a vocabulary for casual academic publishing and call that "semantic HTML", that still doesn't make it semantic.

The "strict markup" part can be (and always could be) had using SGML which is just a superset of XML that also supports HTML empty elements, tag inference, attribute shortforms, etc. HTML was invented as SGML vocabulary in the first place.

Agree though that Google derailed any meaningful standardization effort for the readins you stated. Actually, it started already with CSS and the idioticy to pile yet another item-value syntax over SGML/HTML, when it already has attributes for formatting. The "semantic HTML" postulate is kind of just an after-the-fact justification for insane CSS complexity that could grow because it wasn't part of HTML proper and the scrutinity that goes with introducing new elements or attributes with it.
by genewitch | 2025-05-04 08:39:26+00:00
I'm allergic to all cillins and had a spate of issues that required antibiotics 15 years ago, 3 treatments in 17 months.

I'll have to take probiotics the rest of my life. Because I'm not doing a fecal transplant, thanks. Those three times of antibiotics completely wrecked my intestines.
Show HN: Visualizing web server activity using gource
by fimdomeio | 2025-05-04 08:40:46+00:00
I just want to share this little weekend experiment. I used gource (usually intended to show git repo changes over time) with web server logs.

Video is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqV8wqy0v7w

It's showing the web server activity for a non profit, requesting and receiving payments, accepting new members, as well as having the two admins making changes around. This is actually surprisingly easy to do with gource by just providing a log file in a pretty simple format instead of providing the git repo. This is a low traffic server but I find it quite interesting as a way to visualize server activity. I wonder why do visualizations like these aren't seen more often.
by Barrin92 | 2025-05-04 08:40:51+00:00
>it’s that perceived savings from using AI are nullified by new work which is created by the usage of AI:

I mean, isn't that obvious looking at economic output and growth? The Shopify CEO recently published a memo in which he claimed that high achievers saw "100x growth". Odd that this isn't visible in the Spotify market cap. Did they fire 99% of their engineers instead? Maybe the memo was AI written too.

Are there any 5 man software companies that do the work of 50? I haven't seen them. I wonder how long this can go on with the real world macro data so divorced from what people have talked themselves into.
by jjani | 2025-05-04 08:41:49+00:00
Besides the many factors (e.g. reserve currency) others have already mentioned, here's another one:

Digital services not being taxed/tariffed when exported whereas physical goods are, is purely a historical artifact. The US has managed to get the whole world addicted to their doomscrolling dopamine algorithms, raking in trillions of dollars. If these were physical goods, this would've been entirely different.

The heroine dealer of the world. So far they've been allowed this position, which is incredibly privileged. And now that the EU sometimes takes a (paltry) step towards slightly taxing the drugs, the dealer screams and kicks, "it's unfair! They're targeting just me!".
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-04 08:42:05+00:00
For a democracy to make sense, the people need to be educated enough to understand policy that affects them and they need access to accurate and timely information (a functioning 4th estate). If either of those two are false, then full democracy becomes a force of destruction and harm. Partial democracy where local governance is democratic but provincial and national level governance cannot be directed by the voice of the people is more tenable.

Contrary to common sentiment, there is nothing about democracy that makes it inherently correct. democracy isn't a religion and the form of governance a nation chooses should be adjusted and tuned over time.

I won't comment on current matters, but I will say that education and press should have been fundamental institutions of the American republic, the same way the supreme court and the house of reps are. It isn't enough that the freedom (and responsibility!) of the press is a right, an organization to manage and protect it should have been established, as should have an organization to maintain and police education.
by sidkshatriya | 2025-05-04 08:42:54+00:00
I don't use Elvish daily (I use fish) but writing scripts in Elvish is a great experience. The elvish executable can serve as an LSP server and that makes writing Elvish scripts a bit easier.

I don't care much for the Elvish shell experience, rather I like the Elvish scripting language. The documentation is top notch and the language evolves slowly and feels stable.
by squarefoot | 2025-05-04 08:42:57+00:00
https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/RVPC/open-so...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfXWs4CJuY0

This was covered last year; some users however wished for a more powerful version like ESP32 based, which does exist and probably was an inspiration as both use PS/2 input and the pcb factor is quite similar.

https://lilygo.cc/products/fabgl-vga32

https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/VGA32

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ewkBGOnL1k
Ask HN: Qwen3 – is it ready for driving AI agents?
by morisil | 2025-05-04 08:43:39+00:00
It seems that Qwen3 is not capable of driving independent reasoning - it lacks the quality needed to power fully autonomous AI agents.

Initially I was quite impressed with it's problem solving capabilities, when outputting the code through the chat interface. It addressed certain problems much better than Claude or Gemini. However, as soon as I switched to Alibaba Cloud's API to provide Dashscope based implementation of cognizer interface of my new generation of AI agents (chain of code), the whole charm was gone.

Qwen3 struggles with structured generation attempts, quite often falling into an infinite loop when spitting out tokens.

It has troubles crossing boundaries of languages, which is crucial for my agents which are "thinking in code" - writing Kotlin script, containing JavaScript, containing SQL, etc., therefore it will not work well as automated software engineer.

It is "stubborn" - even when the syntax error in generated code is clearly indicated, it is rather wiling to output the same error code again and again, instead of testing another hypothesis.

It lacks the theory of mind and understanding of the context and the environment. For example when asked to check the recent news, it is always responding by trying to use BBC API url, with non-filled API key as a part of the request, while passing this url to the Files tool instead of the WebBrowser tool, which obviously fails.

And the last, but not least - censorship, for example Qwen3 will refuse to search for the information on the most recent anti-governmental protests in China. I wouldn't be surprised if these censorship blockers were partially responsible for poor quality of cognition in other areas.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, and you are getting much better results with this model for fully autonomous agents with feedback loop?
by pjmlp | 2025-05-04 08:47:21+00:00
We have, yet

> Propeller requires specific software and hardware support to do its job

WASM AoT is nothing special, we have had plenty of those since UNCOL (1958).

Two of the oldest systems using bytecode as distribution format are Burroughs from 1961, nowadays Unisys ClearPath MCP, and IBM AS/400 from 1988, nowadays IBM i.

This while not bothering to actually list all the products and attempts between 1958 and 2025.

Naturally on the magpie developer culture it is easier to sell shinny new, than having people caring about our history.
by cjfd | 2025-05-04 08:48:55+00:00
Appointing a dictator for a period of a year in case of emergency is compatible with democracy. Appointing a dictator for life is not. Mainly because the dictator for the period of a year is, after that year, still accountable. Orban, Erdogan, and Maduro are on various stages of the road from democracy to non-democracy. Regarding the Romans another matter is of course that only a small part of the population has any influence on the senate, so it is in fact clearly not a democracy.

If I have to judge what is a democracy, I am going back quite a while to what I learned in high school as the definition of a democracy. "A democracy is a form of government where the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch are separated and the legislative branch is in the hands of representatives elected by the people."
by risyachka | 2025-05-04 08:50:58+00:00
In the world of abundance you don’t have to pay for this.

If theres nothing for people to do a new economy will arise where government will supply you with whatever you need at least at basic level.

Or the wars will start and everything will burn.

Obviously if there are no jobs no one will sit on their ass starving. People will get food , clothes, housing etc either via distribution or via force.
by bsaul | 2025-05-04 08:51:00+00:00
senior dev, rust very recent onboarder : my personal experience is that LLM are super helpful at the very very beginning, because they show you the very common rust pattern, and help with the verbose syntax by reducing the amount of typing ( which isn't usually a problem, but in rust it can be).

Then once you start reaching for a bit more complex problems (like ffi, or building your own lib), llms are actually making waste time spitting nonsense.

However, once your patterns are back on track, and you start to know a bit better what you're doing, you can easily dismiss those bad advices, and immediately give the llm hints that will make them useful again.

At least that's my experience.
by HPsquared | 2025-05-04 08:51:11+00:00
I find LLM coding reduces the "activation energy" required to get started. It's like a "knowledge catalyst" for these kinds of tasks. I've leveraged them to make a few scripts (talking 100 lines out less) that added a lot of value to our little data processing team.

Funnily enough, a lot of the time some huge expensive software tool is purchased or even built to order, but all you really need from it can be done with some small scripts. It completely changes the economics of small tasks.
by sethammons | 2025-05-04 08:51:40+00:00
My movers took our pre-packed boxes, loaded them up, and were to meet us three days later six states over, in Montana. We couldn't use PODs because they wouldn't deliver to anything closer than about 90 minutes away.

Dumb us. Should have done that. It took the company two months to finally deliver our possessions. They filed bankruptcy during the situation and lost the truck for a while and we were about to have to go through the courts when they finally found some guy with a bad neck to drive and nobody to unload. They wrote our names with permanent marker on some things, broke others, a few boxes were never seen again. But the damage was within some contract provision I missed that said something about up to $1k to be submitted to them for coverage which half they denied.

Subcontractor movers. One of the worst "professional" experiences of my life.
by kmarc | 2025-05-04 08:53:33+00:00
I assume this is the same "problem". Most people (not the HN cohort) don't want to transfer "files", the abstraction of the file is either outdated for them or maybe even unnatural / unknown (younger generation).

They might want to transfer (a better word: share) photos/videos, documents, etc. And for those they use specific apps and "the cloud". No "files" (for the sake of files), and barely any hierarchy of (folders etc).

As long as the entity they want to share magically shows up on the another device or at the other person they want to share with, they are happy. They just skip two levels of abstraction ("this photo is a FILE and I will use USB to transfer it"). Maybe a far fetched analogy but this is why most of the drivers of an automatic don't really think about clutches and how the torque of the engine's output is converted.

At least this is my perception (outside the IT bubble)
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-04 08:56:01+00:00
I’ve never seen a collection like this, it’s quite amazing.

It’s worth pointing out that due to the x1 probe there’s an input capacitance of about 50-60 pF, which would result in a 200 kHz low-pass for opening and dampen high speed oscillations in general. You can see this in the graphs with the rising transitions being slightly rounded. MCUs have much lower capacitance in their pins, so reality would tend to look even messier than this, especially zoomed in.
by aravindkumarv | 2025-05-04 08:56:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently launched Revisitly, a tiny tool designed to increase user engagement and trust through subtle, personalized messages.

Revisitly shows friendly notes like: • “Welcome back!” • “You're on a 3-day streak!”

These small nudges help build emotional recall and encourage return visits — similar to techniques used by big platforms, but simplified for any website.

Why I built it: Too many sites lose casual visitors. I wanted to create a lightweight way to turn one-time visitors into loyal users — no complex onboarding or analytics needed.

It’s just a one-time $5 payment for lifetime access. Easy to set up with a small script. Fully customizable. No subscriptions.

Try it here: https://revisitly.vercel.app

Would love to hear your feedback or ideas on how it can be improved!
by jsemrau | 2025-05-04 08:56:51+00:00
Accurate memory access across memory types is still not really solved. That is the issue. Most agent frameworks from the main model providers are still quite spotty.

Image of a table outlining where the major frameworks are: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_...

Here is also an article I wrote last year on the different types of memory: https://open.substack.com/pub/jdsemrau/p/memory-and-knowledg...
by HappMacDonald | 2025-05-04 08:57:31+00:00
I could cite dozens of times a society has gone 80 years (4-5 generations) without serious threat from foreign parties. How is our case unlike those?

The entire world has seen greater technical advances in the past 80 years than any time before, but zero percent of that is related to the politics of any one nation: either causally or effectually.
by unfitted2545 | 2025-05-04 08:57:54+00:00
You can take the panpsychic view if you want (with no actual evidence), but it doesn't change the fact that we know non human animals suffer. Countlessly exploiting their entire population, for what?

> all the living things I eat deserve such respect and reverence

How does that help them when you're consuming their flesh without consent? Let's all fornicate with these animals, just make sure to show respect after!

I can kinda understand how factory farming is the bad bit as opposed to a traditional farming, but you have to stop and think, who are we to decide these other beings lives?
by HPsquared | 2025-05-04 08:58:33+00:00
The ABC system does more than the earlier hydropneumatic systems of Citroen etc. Those earlier systems have a slow response that can compensate for things like ride height, not to actually move the struts up and down rapidly like the ABC system.

For example see the "rodeo test" where the car moves each corner up and down to test the system. ABC involves active feedback control of the body and rapidly adjusts force/displacement of individual struts, just like what the Bose system does with electric actuators.

https://youtu.be/391IPl3LJOs
by raffraffraff | 2025-05-04 08:58:39+00:00
My father is 98. His health has declined gradually but visibly over the last 10 years. He's taking a mouthful of pills each day to keep himself alive. However, he's able to get up, walk, use the bathroom, feed himself etc. He can remember things that happened 5 minutes ago, last week and in his childhood. He keeps up to date with all the family affairs, and watches the news. Also my mother (his wife) is still alive and healthy, and they don't hate each other.

That's more than most people can expect if they even make it to their late 80s.

Frankly I'm astonished at people like Warren Buffet and David Attenborough (a hero of mine).
by pm215 | 2025-05-04 08:59:10+00:00
But how often do you boot a modern laptop in the first place? I feel lke the time I save in not waiting those 5 seconds occasionally is all going to be spent again in the minutes wasted having to look up how I stop the instant autoboot (or failing to stop the autoboot and having to reset and try again) the first time I need to actually interact with grub...
by kergonath | 2025-05-04 09:01:20+00:00
It’s fine for any use of a keyboard or mouse besides a niche in gaming. It also uses less energy than most RF dongles, which results in better battery life (something I could check using a couple of mice that could do both).

The fact that Logitech’s current dongles are just BLE with a fancy encryption scheme tends to indicate that they really want their proprietary hardware, and bandwidth is not the reason.
by tankenmate | 2025-05-04 09:01:23+00:00
"Finally, it seems to me that none of my correspondents recognizes the innovativeness of my essay. If the use of a computer is a new idea, then a newer idea is not to use one."

Hardly a new idea, I'm fairly certain that Berry had heard of the Luddites, maybe he didn't realise he was hewing as close a course as he was.
by philjohnson | 2025-05-04 09:01:26+00:00
Thanks!

> trust All fair points that you're making. I see no reason I would change my mind to send PDFs to the server, but I understand your concerns. If I'm reading in between the lines of what you're saying, that the way to alleviate these concerns is to make it open source?

I think that's a compelling argument, but to play devil's advocate if most people realistically working with PDFs aren't developers and thus wouldn't go to GitHub to host it themselves, then what would change for them to have a self-hostable option? If I released a desktop version, might the average person would see that as "private" and have any privacy concerns relieved, whether it was open sourced or not?

There is always a degree of trust you put in any company's software you use, and it's up to the company to be good stewards of that trust. If they break it, it's always bad for business anyways. But there is a point that if it was open source, those who have the desire to do so can continue using it without any concerns, which is fair.

> anyone can see the html/javascript Yes minified javascript is not the same as open source, but mine is not minified. Plain HTML, CSS and vanilla JS. So given that and since all the editing happens in the browser, the entire source code is inspectable for anyone who wants to see.

Given that the average person editing PDFs is not tech savvy, and as you said they don't really know the difference between software options, then given that what do you see as the utility of open-sourcing, from a business or even public good perspective? Genuine question.

> Though, maybe I'll add something where you can pay to get the desktop version I can see why someone would think that, but really at this point I'm figuring out what/if there is a monetization method here, and I'm not set on a particular path. I don't have any agenda to just make it free then close it off. That'd probably be a bad business decision anyways. I'm not sure if desktop is something to charge for, or if desktop and the whole thing is better to be free and open-source along with premium features that people can optionally pay for that are outside the core scope. I'm still thinking through it.

Ideally, I'll make all core features open-source while there are also some extra features people are willing to pay for. I'm just still wrestling with even just from the public good perspective, for the vast majority of people that won't host it themselves how would they benefit from open-source versus the core features just being free?

Curious if you have any response to what I've laid out here.

Appreciate your thoughtfulness!! You've given me a lot to think about.
by dgfl | 2025-05-04 09:02:08+00:00
I wonder if you could make deployment / installation even cheaper by making big “rolls” of panels and unfolding them directly on the ground. No ground pillars of any kind.

If you built a zigzag pattern into the panel, possibly with some ultra-cheap alternating cylindrical ground support, you could easily deploy them in this East-West configuration.

You will have to drive some pillars into the ground to secure them anyway, but it might be much faster and require little labor.
by timonoko | 2025-05-04 09:02:17+00:00
Erh. What?

Here is my infamous 1976 Nokolisp-compiler at work:

c:\ nokolisp (comp-debug t) (ncompile (macroexpand '(+ 1 2 a))) $36E8:$5CC8: MOV BX,$02 $36E8:$5CCB: MOV AX,$01 $36E8:$5CCE: ADD AX,BX $36E8:$5CD0: PUSH AX $36E8:$5CD1: MOV AX,[$0190] $36E8:$5CD4: CALL $0F1D ; CALL NUMVAL $36E8:$5CD7: MOV BX,AX $36E8:$5CD9: POP AX $36E8:$5CDA: ADD AX,BX $36E8:$5CDC: CALL $05C9 ; CALL MAKNUM $36E8:$5CDF: JMP $1DA7 (subru: eval=$5CC8, compile=$3B6F)
by sidkshatriya | 2025-05-04 09:02:51+00:00
nushell vs Elvish

The Nushell and Elvish scripting languages are similar in many ways. I personally find the "shell" experience better in Nushell than Elvish.

Nushell

- Bigger community and more contributors

- Bigger feature set than Elvish

- Built in Rust (Yay :-)! )

Elvish

- Mostly developed by one person

- Built in golang

- Amazing documentation and general attention to detail

- Less features than Nushell

- Feels more stable, polished, complete than Nushell. Your script written today more likely to work unaltered in Elvish a year down the line. However this is an impression. Nushell must have settled down since I last looked at it.

For "one off" scripts I prefer Elvish.

I would recommend both projects. They are excellent. Elvish feels less ambitious which is precisely why I like it to write scripts. It does fewer things and I think does them better.

Nushell feels like what a future scripting language and shell might be. It feels more futuristic than Elvish. But as mentioned earlier both languages have a lot of similarities.