MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: BufferTab – minimal Markdown editor that lives in the browser's URL
by surrTurr | 2025-05-26 11:58:46+00:00
Hi HN!

I just wanted to share this little website I built (mainly for myself).

It's a tiny markdown editor in your browser! The content gets persisted in the url of the page, which means you can easily share it with others or send it to your other devices.

As someone with many tabs open all the time, I find having such a scratchpad really valuable in my daily workflow.

Furthermore, it offers Speech-To-Text via OpenAI Whisper. Simply enter your OpenAI API key (it get's stored locally in the browser) and you can start talking!
by gemanor | 2025-05-26 11:58:46+00:00
You answer is just about a discussion we had yesterday about the race between 'let build a standard that will allow the LLM to get programmatic decisions' and 'let build something that works'

Most of the standard and implementation is focused in the vision of models and clients that automatically handle the tool overhead, while in reality everything that is related to MCP requires tons of boilerplate/middleware/garbage code.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-05-26 11:58:54+00:00
> Holy shit, so you are uh building a search engine from scratch.

Yup

> Do you crawl yourself?

Yup

> What is your infrastructure?

All custom built in Java, sitting on a rack server in a basement in Sweden.

> What is your goal for search.marginalia ?

I'm basically building what I feel is lacking in internet search and discovery, which is tools for finding stuff based on something other than a popularity metric, as those tend to feed into themselves to make the web seem so small.
by brylie | 2025-05-26 11:59:11+00:00
Finntegrate: AI-powered multilingual assistant for immigrants to Finland

https://finntegrate.org

My co-founders and I are building an AI assistant that helps immigrants navigate Finnish bureaucracy. As immigrants, we've experienced firsthand how fragmented and inaccessible essential information can be, scattered across Migri, Kela, the tax office, and municipal websites, often only in Finnish and Swedish.

We're using RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to create a multilingual chat interface that connects people to official resources rather than replacing them. The system reduces "failure demand" - support requests that arise because people can't achieve their goals through existing resources.

The technical approach is a multi-agent system in which specialized AI agents handle different domains (immigration law, employment, housing, healthcare, etc.). We've named the agents after Finnish mythological figures (such as Tapio, Ilmarinen, and Sampo) to create a cultural connection while providing practical assistance.

Interestingly, this addresses a systematic problem - government agencies spend significant resources on repetitive support that could be automated. At the same time, immigrants get frustrated trying to piece together information from multiple sources.

We're exploring B2B opportunities (companies relocating employees, municipalities, healthcare systems recruiting internationally) and EU funding for integration technology.

Happy to share more details or get feedback from anyone who's worked on similar multilingual AI systems or government-facing tools.

GitHub: https://github.com/finntegrate/tapio
by NiloCK | 2025-05-26 11:59:24+00:00
I'm working on a modular OSS stack for creation of interactive tutoring systems. Think anki + wikipedia + mathacademy + duolingo, but with very generic interfaces that allow for all sorts of interactive content (eg, one working prototype is an ear training / site reading course with midi keyboard hookup).

I want to sand away the roughest edges of the SRS user experience, and to enable individuals and organizations to easily spin up courseware that's aligned with best pedagogical practices and fits naturally into the hands of educators.

And, in the current wave, also think bolt.new or lovable.dev, with 'agentic' workflows for both content (scouring source material for ) and for user-authored bespoke interactive, via LLM authored artifacts.

Optimistic for some ShowHNs or more general shilling this week.

- https://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder - https://patched.network
by kragen | 2025-05-26 11:59:55+00:00
In Lisp you can write

(compile-bunny '(setq x (+ (aref y i) x)))

and it looks just like normal code, but really you are just passing a data structure to the compile-bunny function. The direct equivalent in Python is awful:

compile_bunny(['setq', 'x', ['+', ['aref', 'y', 'i'], 'x']])

but you can build up a pretty decent EDSL in Python for this sort of thing with operator overloading, similar to what Sympy does:

x.set(y[i] + x).compile()

That looks a lot more like normal Python code, but getting it working is a bigger hassle than in more conventional Lisps where you can just quote whatever S-expression. (Of course, your compiler has to handle each type of expression sooner or later, so this isn't as big a deal as it might sound.)

But neither one of these is compiling your Python code. Python's bytecode may give you a head start on that if you do want to do it.
by generj | 2025-05-26 12:00:04+00:00
Idk about Toyota moving away from Kaizen, but they certainly have moved away from JIT. Toyota pioneered Just In Time (JIT) part inventory which dramatically lowers inventory costs and makes balance sheets look far more attractive.

What Toyota realized in 2011 due to the Fukushima disaster however is that this completely fails for computer chips because the pipeline is too long. So they kept JIT for steel, plastic parts etc but for microcontrollers, power supply chips, etc they stockpile large quantities.
by rikroots | 2025-05-26 12:00:32+00:00
I've spent the past week overcoming my fear of Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT. Things I've learned:

- Using an AI for strange tasks like using a TTS model to turn snippets of IPA text (for a constructed language) into an audio file (via CLI) - much of the task turned out to be setting up stuff. Gemini was not very good when it came to giving me instructions for doing things in the GCP and Google Workspace browser consoles. ChatGPT was much clearer with instructions for setting up AWS CLI locally and navigating the AWS browser console to create dedicated user for the task etc. The final audio results were mixed, but then that's what you get when trying to beat a commercial TTS AI to doing something it really thinks you're mad to try.

- Working with ChatGPT to interrogate a Javascript library to produce a markdown file summarising the library's functionality and usage, to save me the time of repeating the exercise with LLMs during future sessions. Sadly the exercise didn't help solve the truly useless code LLMs generate when using the library ... but it's a start.

- LLMs are surprisingly good at massaging my ego - once I learned how to first instruct them to take on a given persona before performing a task: <As an English literature academic, analyse the following poem: title: Tournesols; epigraph: (After "Six Sunflowers, 1888" by van Gogh / felled by bombs in 1945); text: This presented image, dead as the hand that / drew it, an echo blown to my time yet // flames erupt from each auburn wheel - / they lick at the air, the desk: sinews // of heat shovelled on cloth. Leaves / jag and drop to touch green glaze - // I want to tooth those dry seeds, sat / by the window caught on the pot's neck // and swallow sunshine. So strong / that lost paint of the hidden man.>

I still fear LLMs, but now I fear them a little less ...
by belter | 2025-05-26 12:01:03+00:00
You can always guess how shady a company is, if by looking at the whole web site...there is no mention easily found anywhere of who the directors or management team are.

You have to follow the track to their owner who ultimately is nothing more than some Dutch managers saved of their mismanagement by a buddy Dutch Investment fund ....owned by a South African base...that is a front end to Chinese investments via Tencent Holdings...

But hey...they have a Ethics hotline and can think of multiple ethnics violations to report here:

https://app.convercent.com/en-gb/LandingPage/d8e86634-ec59-e...
by rgabrielsson | 2025-05-26 12:01:26+00:00
Great question! It's three things: 1) Data. Every next event can be one out of billions of potential actions, so our vocabulary are in billions instead of in 100K as for LLMs 2) Architecture. Every action is multimodal, it consist of images, text, and numbers, so we need an architecture that is optimized for that. 3) Loss function. Learning efficiently on behavior where the data, downstream tasks, and bottlenecks are different requires different loss functions for it to work well
by xeonmc | 2025-05-26 12:01:49+00:00
Cory Doctorow described this cart-before-the-horse arrangement as Reverse Centaurs[0][1]

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize...

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/
by Quarrel | 2025-05-26 12:01:56+00:00
In Australia, all companies must have a registered address, available on the register of companies (which isn't quite as open as I'd prefer, it isn't nearly as good as the UK's Companies House, for instance). This physical address must then have a plaque showing the registered company name roughly at the door.

In reality, just like in the Paradise Papers leaks etc, an individual accountant's office might have 4000 of these lined up next to their door.

Of course, for the vast majority of businesses, this is not much of a hurdle, and for most consumers it isn't all that helpful either, but end of the day, scammers are gonna scam, whatever the obstacles are. Even those that aren't outright scammers, will be paying accountants to have a plaque on their door to show that this is their "physical office" ...

Hopefully such efforts at least help courts assign some blame when the time comes.
Why don't more people claim flight compensation they're legally owed?
by eitanno | 2025-05-26 12:02:58+00:00
I recently built a tool to help people claim flight compensation with AI. What surprised me most wasn’t the legal side - it was how few people even know they’re entitled to money when their flight is delayed or canceled.

Billions go unclaimed each year. The process is confusing, slow, and buried in bureaucracy.

Curious to hear: • Has anyone here actually claimed compensation? • What stopped you (or others you know) from trying? • Why haven’t airlines been forced to simplify this?

Would love to hear your thoughts.
by thrance | 2025-05-26 12:03:37+00:00
Fully agree that they should get back to their roots and start being actually pro-working class on economical matter. Alas, the establishment is too afraid of alienating their wealthy donor class to appeal to the "poor". Maybe after a democratic tea party?

But I don't believe that they need to be "centrists" on identity. What even is centrism anymore? This country has shifted so far right recently. I think the issue is that their "rainbow capitalism social justice" sounds hollow (because it is) if they don't consider economical class as an important matter. Start there and you can keep fighting against -phobias and -isms, just don't make them the center-piece of your messaging.
by unscaled | 2025-05-26 12:04:54+00:00
I don't think status lists solve the requirement for near-realtime revocations. The statuslist itself has a TTL and does not get re-loaded until that TTL expires. This is practically similar to the common practice of having a stateful refresh token and a stateless access token. The statuslist "ttl" claim is equivalent to the "exp" claim of the access token in that regard, and it comes with the same tradeoffs. You can have a lower TTL for statuslist, but that comes at the cost of higher frequency of high-latency network calls due to cache misses.

The classic solution to avoid this (in the common case where you can fit the entire revocation list in memory) is to have a push-based or pub/sub-based mechanism for propagating revocations to token verifiers.
by maratc | 2025-05-26 12:05:11+00:00
Where I am, we have personal pension plans. You can check "what kind of pension is waiting" by going to the pension fund website and checking. Gov't doesn't play any role in any of that -- except (a) prescribing mandatory monthly payments and (b) determining the retirement age. (You only get small gov't pension if you haven't collected enough in your personal plan.)
by strken | 2025-05-26 12:05:13+00:00
> Is there any actual evidence that one stack is better than another? No, not really.

It is not controversial to say that any two stacks will have advantages and disadvantages over each other. There is absolutely evidence that Go compiles code faster than C++, or that C++ can call C code with less overhead, or that Rust eliminates certain classes of bugs, or that Postgres supports LISTEN/NOTIFY and SQLite doesn't, or that SQLite excels at storing a database in a single file.

Choosing a given stack means picking which particular advantages you want and/or need. I agree that there's no evidence that one stack is always "better", but this is like asking for evidence that a hacksaw is better than a table saw: they don't do the same thing! You can probably use either of them to cut through a skinny tree branch, though.
by ctbellmar | 2025-05-26 12:05:23+00:00
WhatSignal, WhatsApp <-> Signal relay, written in Go

https://github.com/bikemazzell/whatsignal

I'm working on a WhatsApp to Signal relay. I.e.: whenever someone sends a WA message to you, it appears in your Signal. You can reply and it will go back to the original sender.

Why? I'm privacy conscious and don't fancy using a Meta product. But some of my friends/associates/family still insist on WhatsApp only. Running this WhatBridge service on my micro server behind a VPN allows me to communicate without having WhatsApp on my mobile.

Behind the scenes, it connects WAHA (https://github.com/devlikeapro/waha ) and Signal CLI (https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli). Still early stages, but getting closer to a workable state.
by TrackerFF | 2025-05-26 12:05:31+00:00
So let's say you own a restaurant joint. Bob's Asian takeaway.

You enter your phone number and opening hours; phone number 123-45-789, open 12.00 - 22.00, mon - sun

One day the phone goes suspiciously quiet. A customer stops by your shop, and orders something. He mentions that he tried calling, but the number he got on google must've been wrong because some automated robot message.

You decide to google your own restaurant, and sure enough, the phone number that shows up is 800-00-123. But your keen eye also spots that the link to the restaurant isn't www.bobsasiantakeaway.com, but rather www.bobsasiantakeaway-food.com

Any way you try to search, the top results only point to that website, phone number, google maps location, etc.

Suddenly a sales rep from some company calls you, and offers you a deal - if you pay [x€ month], they will help with increasing your sales. You say OK, I'll try.

Not too long after, calls and orders start coming in a before. You try to call 800-00-123 from your private cellphone, and sure enough - the phone at work starts ringing. You click on the link www.bobsasiantakeaway-food.com, and you're redirected to www.bobsasiantakeaway.com

If you stop the payments, no more phone calls and no web traffic.

You change the name of your restaurant? A new version of the above pops up immediately. You report it to the relevant authorities, but you're told it could take months and months for them to look at your case...you can't survive 6 months with minimum sales.

For some unfortunate small fish, that's sort of how it works.
by ahofmann | 2025-05-26 12:05:31+00:00
This is only anecdata, but it happened to me more than once, that I typed in google the name of the restaurant and was couldn't find the real website of the restaurant over the fold, because the ads and the results are spammed with lieferando, and others.

As a restaurant in a situation like this, you now have to compete for the search results, which isn't your main business. You want to sell pizza, not do SEO, or SEA. And then lieferando calls and tell you something like "hey, it's a shame that nobody is buying from you, right? Well, we can help for 10% of your revenue..."
by rollcat | 2025-05-26 12:05:40+00:00
Holy heck. Exploring this uncovers so many little gems.

- Winamp. With skins.

- SWFs. Badger.

- A bunch bootable ISOs with OSs like Kolibri. Kinda nuts to have a real OS in a browser OS on a real OS. Also: Windows RG.

- Web-self-inspector. <https://malleable.systems/> anyone?

- Games. Doom. Keen 4. Quake 3. What the heck- Quake 3!?
by bombcar | 2025-05-26 12:05:53+00:00
The whole point of a CDP is to push some liability onto the limited liability shareholders.

Basically, make it so there are crimes that the shareholders will themselves police the company, because they don’t want to risk losing it all.

Part of a CDP would be NOT paying back bondholders, etc. it’s spreading the pain around so nobody will lend or support a company doing activities that open the door to CDP.
by 9dev | 2025-05-26 12:06:23+00:00
The issue with DNS isn't that it's too complex; from a purely technical standpoint, it's a fairly simple technology, no more complicated than email, or http. People have created all kinds of abstractions over technology to make it accessible over time. An instagram handle hides a mindbogglingly large amount of complexity going on underneath, and people find that simple enough.

It's the administrative part that makes it hard: The registration, the expiration, the distributed responsibility of needing a NIC, registrar, DNS operator, hosting platform, Certificate Authority—we're all used to the bullshit, but getting from "I'd like to present my business under this domain" to presenting your business under this domain requires way too much bureaucracy.

The whole process is still stuck in the 90ies: It shouldn't require more than picking a name and providing payment details to get running. Delegation of anything could happen easily via OAuth grants; TLS should just work, given ACME; all other details can be customised if necessary, but normal users should never have to bother with DNS records at all.
by vitus | 2025-05-26 12:06:43+00:00
Right. I thought about part-timers or people working reduced schedules bringing the average (mean) down; I just wasn't sure if I was missing something systemic or not.

It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.

In particular, counting unemployed labor force participants feels wrong, even if you're counting how many hours a week they're spending on job seeking activities (applying to jobs, prepping resumes, interviewing, etc). I know I would burn out if I spent even 5+ hours a day doing just that, 5 days a week, even if I didn't have a full-time job.

There's also a pernicious thing that certain companies do (I'm thinking retail) where they just won't schedule you for enough hours to qualify you as full-time, since if they exceed that threshold, then (gasp) they have to pay benefits like health insurance. I also would prefer not to count that in the discussion of "how much does a typical employee work?"

On the flip side, I'm also less interested in considering the workaholic lawyers and consultants who are putting in 60-80 hours a week (or more!). There are far fewer of them, but they still skew the numbers.

From my perspective, the stereotypical US workweek is and has been 9 to 5 (whether you count that as 35 or 40 hours after accounting for lunch) for the past 50+ years. We certainly fall behind when it comes to vacation, since we still have no legally mandated minimum (I think 2-4 weeks is typical; anything higher is good but not unheard of).
Ask HN: State of the Art in Simulated Cells?
by duttish | 2025-05-26 12:06:50+00:00
If I took a different thesis topic, I had two options to choose between, I'd have worked on DNA simulation at the university rather than a documentation system at a company. That was...many...years ago but I can't quite let go of the thought.

I've taken a virology course on Coursera which was fascinating, they're tiny molecular machines and last weekend I began to doodle on a kind of hierarchical simulation architecture to try and simulate a cell or even a C. Elegans, but I have only a basic grasp of computational biology and not even that in computational chemistry. I've read somewhere that we can simulate a elegans worm but it's at like 0.5fps.

Does anyone have books or articles to recommend to get me started a bit more properly?
by suddenlybananas | 2025-05-26 12:06:55+00:00
>That being said, the minimalist program of Chomsky lead to nowhere, because just like programming, it found edge case after edge case, reducing it further and further, until there was no program anymore that resembled a real theory

As someone who has worked in linguistics, I don't really see what you're talking about. Minimalism is not full of exceptions (please elaborate on a specific example if you have one). Minimalism was created to make the old theory, Government and Binding, simpler.
by throw310822 | 2025-05-26 12:07:49+00:00
On this subject, I think it's wrong to use "nazi" as a synonym of "antisemitic". Yes, Nazism was ferociously so, but it was primarily a suprematist nationalistic ideology, based on the cult of superior strength and hell-bent on conquering the lands of "inferior peoples" because it was in their "historical destiny" to settle them. In this, there is a strong resemblance between nazism and zionism, and I am not surprised that the staunchest supporters of Israel are to be found in the hard right. Frankly, I'm not sure why a nazi today would oppose Israel rather than look at it as an example to imitate.
by maz1b | 2025-05-26 12:07:49+00:00
Working on MedAngle - the world's first Super App for premed/medical/dental school. tens of billions of seconds spent in our family of Super Apps, 100m+ questions solved, ~100k users (invite only, doctors+med studnts). We personalize to the curriculum of any school we launch at.

https://medangle.com

We're looking on scaling further internationally. I myself am a US-Pakistani, the first medical doctor + full stack engineer and technologist in Pakistan's history (~250m people). Would love to chat with anyone interested!
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-26 12:08:19+00:00
I doubt they go out of their way to pretend to be the restaurants they target. That would make for a very quick and easy fraud case.

It'd be much safer if Google were to just take the first plausible website for truth unless proven otherwise, and the first plausible website happens to be the one Lieferando registers.

If Google were a responsible company, this wouldn't even be possible. You'd need to enter something they send you over the physical mail to verify that you do indeed do business from a specific address. From there on you'd be able to verify the phone number as well. Google's tendency to display scraped data as facts is what empowers companies like Just Eat Takeaway/Lieferando/Thuisbezorgd in their abuse.
by jdiff | 2025-05-26 12:08:19+00:00
GIF is a format from the 1980s that has not changed or improved one bit since. It's limited to a 256-color palette per frame, which on top of looking bad, will massively bloat your file size as a common strategy to make it look less bad is to re-select a new palette each frame. It's massively worse than a modern lossless (or perceptually lossless) video codec and there are no real benefits to it except backwards compatibility on account of the whole "unchanged in 40 years" bit.

Most sites and platforms silently swap out uploaded GIFs for re-encoded MP4s with no loss in quality due to how awful GIF is as a format. Telegram reports saving 95% on storing GIFs by doing that instead.

https://telegram.org/blog/gif-revolution