MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 99fk | 2025-05-19 12:51:07+00:00
I built a collection of small web-based tools, all bundled into a single self-contained HTML file. Everything runs locally in the browser — no external dependencies, no tracking, no server, no cloud.

The tools include stuff like KeeWeb (a KeePass-style password manager), file converters, local script runners, IPFS utilities, links to applications I programmed earlier and more. All data is stored in a single file, and the interface is optimized to stay compact and distraction-free.

I made this for myself to reduce friction in everyday tasks, but maybe it's useful for others who prefer lightweight, portable tools that just work — especially in low-trust or air-gapped environments.

I plan to keep adding more tools over time as new needs come up.

I’d love any feedback or feature ideas. Everything is modular and extensible — feel free to fork or suggest improvements!
by nmcfarl | 2025-05-19 12:51:57+00:00
My stepmother (in her 60s) inherited or rather lot of furniture from her parents, enough to furnish most of a house. It’s spectacular and at this point it has to be well over 100 years old. She both wanted it and has lived with it daily for coming on 40 years.

And my wife inherited three pieces from her parents and they make up much of our dining room, and her uncle gave her two pieces that he made by hand, and that did not fit into his new house. I was dubious about the stuff from her parents, but it’s beautiful if dated and we’ve gone with a very “eclectic” decorating style, no room has to look like any other room. And now I’m very grateful for all of it.
by jvanderbot | 2025-05-19 12:52:07+00:00
Defending TFA a little ... the rest of the article builds up context around the word "Completely", so that the single example of "Highway zipping" is not just what is being discussed.

"Completely" here should be expanded to include all the unique and unforseen circumstances a driver might encounter, such as a policeman directing traffic manually or any other "soft" situation that is not well represented in training.

Not to mention the somewhat extreme amount of apriori and continuous mapping that goes into operating a fleet of AVs. That is hardly to be considered "Completely autonomous".

This isn't just pedantry, the disconnect between a technical person's deep understanding and a common user's everyday experience is pretty much what the article hinges on. Try taking a Waymo from SF to NYC. This seems like something a "Completely autonomous" car should be able to do given a layperson's understanding of "Completely", without the experts' long list of caveats.
by rep_lodsb | 2025-05-19 12:52:41+00:00
The "hack" needed to be there for the emulator to reproduce the effect as it happens on real hardware, before the author managed to fix those last few bugs.

>Historically, many famous emulators have relied on title patches to work around bugs or inaccuracies to get games to play. As emulators have improved in accuracy and research has uncovered more details about how systems work, gradually these title hacks became less necessary.
by kvemkon | 2025-05-19 12:52:51+00:00
HDD controller calculates and checks ECC either and en/decodes the user's 0/1-bits to the 0/1-bits actually to be written on the platter but at much smaller speed (0.3 GB/s vs 14 GB/s SSD max). HDD has an extra servo controller. HDD has an extra 512 MB - 1 GB DRAM.

WD HDDs 20 GB+ have some FLASH inside for metadata offload.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-05-19 12:52:57+00:00
> in alphabetical order

Well, it's in an order, but I don't know about alphabetical. I clicked on today's English featured article and looked at the languages: "中文", "Italiano" are "suggested", then the remainder are grouped by geographic region, and aren't particularly alphabetical. They appear to be in groups which are still not alphabetical. Europe seems to have a Cyrillic group but "Қазақша" is shown after "Українська" which isn't accurate in Kazakh and probably also unexpected for anybody who isn't familiar with the letter Қ (Қ isn't a letter in Russian, this is probably why this happens). The Chinese languages don't seem to be in stroke order (no expert here), although Korean is below them (because of course, K for Korean alphabetizes after C for Chinese).

Anyways, no hate for Wikipedia; they do a great job of localizing. Just a bit of nuance/pedantry about how you can't "alphabetize" language names in their own language.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-19 12:54:58+00:00
I once had a list similar in time and length. It was a great portfolio, but I slowly realized I just made it to remind myself I'm not a perpetually incapable imbecile. Deleting it and giving away those projects was so freeing. I had nothing left to prove to myself or anyone else. Now I can just write code for fun, code that I believed in. Not saying this is OP's motivation or anyone else's, but it was definitely mine.
Show HN: From Dopamine Detox to Enlightenment
by Sscortescu | 2025-05-19 12:55:41+00:00
Two months ago, realizing my intelligence might soon become a commodity threw me into a quiet existential crisis.

If intelligence doesn’t differentiate me from AI, what does?

We die, AI doesn’t. Our attention is sequential, AI’s is parallel.

Curious to test this theory, I spent 10 days at a Vipassana retreat to reset my dopamine and intentionally train my attention.

What started as philosophical became vividly physical. Some tangible results from these past two months:

- Lost most of my torso fat (–0.5kg/week), without dietary changes

- Improved VO₂ max from 53 to 58

- Released chronic muscle tension (neck, back, hips)

- Need one hour less sleep, same energy

- Zero procrastination—flow state on demand

It’s like switching from black-and-white to full-color vision.
by mauvehaus | 2025-05-19 12:56:51+00:00
Two things:

One, there are things you can do with veneer that you cannot be done in solid wood. You can resaw a board to get a book matched panel in solid wood, but you generally cannot get a four-way match because of either pattern shift, not enough thickness to start with, or basically creating veneer the hard way. This generalizes to radial matches with more pieces. That's the most basic example. There are many other things you can do with veneer that are impossible to execute in solid wood. See here[0] for more examples.

Two: professional equipment is not usually built to the customary dimensions of a private residence. A commercial range is a hell of a lot deeper than standard counter depth (about 24" in the US, probably 60cm or thereabouts in Europe because it's based off of how far you can comfortably reach). I looked into this after getting spoiled cooking on a commercial range once. It's not the cost of the range that kills you; it's the cost of the kitchen renovation to accommodate it.

There are vendors that build closer to professional quality appliances sized to residential standards. We lucked into a used Capital range a year ago for a number of dollars we could afford. It's built a lot better than a strictly residential unit and has a weight to match.

[0] https://ctfinefurniture.com/ I am unaffiliated other than owning his excellent book, which I regularly consult when I'm doing veneer work.
by bambax | 2025-05-19 12:57:42+00:00
> To me it would be interesting to know where has the driver got the driver license from. Or if they have a medical condition. Or maybe they have a stiff neck on the day of the accident. Were they distracted by children?

Sure, but that's an information that is difficult to create; it will result from a police investigation (and even then, may or may not be accurate).

Mark, model and age of the vehicle is 1/ incredibly easy to get and 2/ 100% reliable.

It's not the end-all be-all of road safety, but it's interesting; and the fact that all it took to not publish it was some lobbying effort from car makers is incredible.
by tough | 2025-05-19 12:57:55+00:00
Miele is a pretty well known standard german brand no? I'm sure they have higher-end stuff but i dunno, maybe you could have researched it, or just didnt find the need before?

There's a pretty good saying about 10$ boots that last a year or 100$ ones that last 10 years

If you're well enough, you can probably afford more things that you can use anyways, so it makes sense to optimize for those that give you the most kicks for your bucks, even if they're technically more expensive.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-05-19 12:57:55+00:00
The other responses are correct, but they left out one important thing. People like to feel important. People like to go places other people can't. People get off on exclusivity. If you have an empty field no one will care. You put a big wall up and signs saying keep out all of a sudden people will risk their life climbing the wall just to get to that empty field. It's human nature.
by cjohnson318 | 2025-05-19 12:58:08+00:00
I had a similar experience. I did some back of the envelope math and my wife suggested I run it through ChatGPT. After actually doing the math, I felt a lot better about my understanding of the problem and I just... don't trust an LLM to understand algebra. Yeah, they're awesome most of the time, but I don't want to trust it with something important, be wrong, and then have to explain to someone that I trusted the opinion of a couple of big matrices, over my own knowledge and experience, on a high school word problem.
by TFYS | 2025-05-19 12:58:49+00:00
The wealth should be going to the people who create it, which is the people who do the work and the customers that use the product. The only reason owners get to take a part of it is the power that ownership of capital gives them. Using power to take what others create is quite close to stealing. It's no different from some feudal lord taking what his peasants create. Legal within our system, but that doesn't mean they deserve it.
by PurpleRamen | 2025-05-19 12:59:00+00:00
> In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.

Not really.. This problem runs far deeper than most are willing to see. First, Obsidian is using a personalized flavour of markdown, and seconds, for many heavy features it's leaning strongly on plugins which are prone to break or even die. Obsidian has a vibrant plugin-community, which also seems to die really fast. This becomes even more critical by plugins dying from changes in Obsidian itself. So while Obsidian is in theory a nice open app, it's longevity-aspect is really awful. I already had many features and plugins dying in the last years, and who know how much more will break in the next 20 years. Simply switching to another text-editor will not do, because they won't offer the missing features. So at best, you are just not losing your data, but you still won't have the tooling to use them.

Someone creating their own system, where they have full control over everything, even if they will have to sacrifice some benefit in the short run, just makes sense in a bigger picture.
by caust1c | 2025-05-19 13:00:26+00:00
This anecdote corroborates my theory that it will still be critical to become an expert in your field. Everyone is treating AI like it's a zero-sum game with regards to jobs being "lost" to AI, but the reality is that the best results will come from experts in the field who have the vocabulary and knowledge to get the best answers.

My fear is that people treat AI like an oracle when they should be treating it just like any other human being.
by sublinear | 2025-05-19 13:00:52+00:00
Ok still sounds like junk to me though. I think stage 5 (1%) is a little too much the "galaxy brain" meme. How does one even achieve level 4 without also accepting the truths of level 5?

I think most people would accept that a majority of people blindly follow rules and accept toxic nonsense (your 2/3rds) while a smaller, but still substantial portion (roughly 1/3?) do what's in the best interest of themselves and the world they live in.

This is so self-evident that I don't think it needs a theory. Those who want this to be a theory are by its own definition "level 3" or something :^)
by Daril | 2025-05-19 13:00:55+00:00
I think an PKMS is strictly related to how each of us thinks. It's similar to project management/organizer tools. I also created my own (https://brainminder.it/) based on how I think: I prefer to organize items by type with different fields that I can add and search. Instead of simply collecting ideas and thoughts, I'm trying to build a system that can help me evaluate leveraging what I've entered.
by latexr | 2025-05-19 13:00:58+00:00
> I think it’s a successful creative endeavor

Fair. But I wouldn’t say that automatically translates to “absolute great” or that it “by all accounts be called art”. Though there is a high degree of subjectivity there, which why I simply said I disagree.

> actually fun short film

Sure, you like what you like, no judgement. But again, “it’s a short exaggerated parody and we have a high tolerance for flaws in comedy”. Had they tried to make something more substantial, serious, provocative, emotional, or slower paced, I believe they would’ve fallen flat.

> I think it shows that AI can be a tool that empowers creativity and creative work

Plenty of actual artist disagreed, though. And the backlash wasn’t just limited to the end product, but Corridor Crew’s attitude to it (creator intentions matter a lot when defining something as art) and lack of understanding on the very real and very negative impacts on the industry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOwxXj1EIXM
by pbalau | 2025-05-19 13:01:15+00:00
> For example, while researching new monitors today, I told Gemini to compare $NEW_MODEL_1 with $NEW_MODEL_2.

But this feature was a staple of most online shops that sell monitors and a bunch of "review" sites. You don't need a highly complex system to compare 2 monitors, you need a spreadsheet.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-19 13:01:24+00:00
> I wish I had this energy again.

I used to think my youthful energy was gone forever. Then about 3 months ago I had an idea for a project I truly believed in. I was able to write code for 16 hours straight, day after day, for most of the last 3 months. And it's not exhausting, it's rejuvenating. I feel like a young man again, despite my gray hairs! (I was planning on releasing it today actually, but this weekend I had an epiphany that requires a half rewrite for significant gains, which might add another few weeks.)
by diggan | 2025-05-19 13:02:26+00:00
> without becoming an expert at least in the tool

Yeah, we're basically repeating the "search engine/query" problem but slightly differently. Using a search engine the right way always been a skill you needed to learn, and the ones who didn't always got poor results, and many times took those results at face value. Then Google started giving "answers" so if your query is shit, the "answer" most likely is too.

Point is, I don't think this phenomenon is new, it's just way less subtle today with LLMs, at least for people who have expertise in the subjects.
by rsynnott | 2025-05-19 13:02:59+00:00
> A person with 100 billion in 1998 could not have bought one despite it being a decade away for the entire population.

Oh? What d'you call this, then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator

Now, granted, most very rich people would probably not have _wanted_ one of these.
by skrebbel | 2025-05-19 13:03:26+00:00
Here in NL stone is the traditional building material too, so it's not uncommon to see houses built of wood, but covered in a thin layer of "wallpaper" ("gevelbekleding") that's made of thin sides of real stone bricks. This way the houses look like regular brick houses, but are actually mostly made of wood. The brick-wallpaper means you don't need to paint all the time like in traditional wooden houses (eg in the Nordics), extra bonus. Personally I think it's a bit weird to build a house and fake the building material, but my only point is, you might have seen a lot more wooden houses than you knew!
by autobodie | 2025-05-19 13:03:47+00:00
Profit and income are two different things. Jobs make income, not profit.

Aggregate profit and income from curation (both) have dropped off a cliff, so I'm not sure what your point is. Of course a select few will always be rewarded by the wealthy for hand-made delicacies, including curation, and the demand will correlate with wealth accumulation but remain scarce. There is nothing new or novel about it either way.
by eyegor | 2025-05-19 13:05:21+00:00
That costs money to maintain, even if it's just a few bucks a month. I've seen plenty of Chinese companies using mega/gdrive/etc just because it's free. I used to think it was just cheapness, but depending on the company it can be a huge hassle to set up recurring small bill items. At my current company for example, it's much easier to pay $5-10k once than pay $5/mo.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-19 13:05:34+00:00
I think the Irish are a great example. We often think it was some huge migration because they had a really tough time integrating in spite of being near to completely culturally compatible. But the interesting thing is that that migration was negligible in size. The largest impact probably came after the Great Hunger in Ireland after which about a million migrants came to the US. [1] So that's a million migrants in a population of 31 million - 3.2%.

In fact for all the talk about the US being a nation of migrants we never had a foreign born population exceeding 14.8%. [1] And that was in 1890 after which a large number of anti-migration bills began being passed, culminating in a low of 4.7% in 1970. It's now up to 14.3% and once again issues are emerging at almost the exact same threshold. Go figure.

---

So now let's consider your idea. South Korea is trending towards a scenario where they will eventually be losing 62% of their population every 20 years. And obviously that is exponential - it's not like it slows down, not unless they start having babies again. To maintain this decline with immigration would require literally just replacing just about the entire former population of South Korea with migrants.

You're talking about migration on a scale unimaginably larger than anything before, with what by necessity would be an extremely low quality of migrant, simply owing the massive numbers needed. So the idea of using immigration to "solve" this is essentially just proposing populating an 'abandoned' land with whoever wants to come. And of course that's possible, but obviously this is not a solution to anything by any reasonable meaning of the word 'solution.'

[1] - https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Co...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
by emporas | 2025-05-19 13:06:02+00:00
> Removing some lignin allows you to compact the wood more.

Yes, lignin puffs up the wood, when some of it is removed by boiling and then heated up and pressed at the same time, carbon molecules bond with each other exponentially more.

I was researching this subject two - three years back. Anything that needs to be able to move at some point, benefits a lot by being 6 times lighter. Also buildings are always constrained by their weight when trying to make them as tall as possible.
by MadVikingGod | 2025-05-19 13:06:19+00:00
I appreciate that people have started to think about this already, but could I propose an alternative system. Borrowed from Warhammer 40k The Long Now was founded in 998.M1. It's a little jarring at first, but that would easily get us to the 999th Mellenium and wouldn't be too hard to reference BCE dates as 005.M-0
by edent | 2025-05-19 13:06:45+00:00
The problem is, unless you expand every point then some jerk on HN will nit-pick your "logical fallacies".

I find myself writing longer and more defensively because lots of people don't understand nuance or subtext. Forget hyperbole or humour - lots of technical readers lack the ability to understand them.

Finally, editing is hard work. Revising and refining a document often takes several times longer than writing the first draft.
by cloverich | 2025-05-19 13:06:50+00:00
As one who has spent years off and on building one, kudos for getting yourself out. I agree with your assessment. I think there's still room for more markdown based note apps and ideas, but it needs to be either a (long term) passion project or have a viable funding strategy. There's an endless slew of not only edge cases and base behaviors, but enhancements and design decisions, on top of maintenance. Obsidian w/ some customization is going to hit a sweet spot for most hackers.

Also, the biggest thing I've appreciated is just how hard it is to tackle a side project while juggling life. Things that would take 2 weeks (80 hours) at work easily ballon into 3 months; things that would take a month end up taking well over a year. Suddenly an idea that is only a few weeks of full time work, is half-way done years later.
by loveparade | 2025-05-19 13:07:17+00:00
If you don't know how to ask a human doctor a good question you can't expect to get a good answer either.

The difference is that a human doctor probably has a lot of context about you and the situation you're in, so that they probably guess what your intention behind the question is, and adjust their answer appropriately. When you talk to an LLM, it has none of that context. So the comparison isn't really fair.

Has your mom ever asked you a computer question? Half of the time the question makes no sense and explaining to her why would take hours, and then she still wouldn't get it. So the best you can do is guess what she wants based on the context you have.
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-19 13:08:14+00:00
I've built one for the US Amateur Radio exam pools (which are public) as I'm trying to sit for both my Technician and General in the same volunteer exam session.

Mixing the questions between both pools and studying as a unit I've found has had two great benefits: 1) I'm not focusing on Technician first and then going for General as a "bonus" and 2) it helps me see the connections between the material.
by immibis | 2025-05-19 13:08:17+00:00
That doesn't hold.

FSF declined to make a statement either way - citing the fact that very little software uses this license and it all has xGPL alternatives, so there's no urgent need to make an official decision.

Debian didn't call it free or unfree, but rather decided not to include SSPL software in their distribution, which is an orthogonal issue, due to it having a higher risk of being incompatible with all the other stuff when used a certain way, which does not make it non-free.

Fedora calls it non-free, but just calls it their own belief, not something based on solid reasoning about meeting guidelines or not. Note that Fedora is a project of one of those open source reseller companies.
by IAmBroom | 2025-05-19 13:08:42+00:00
The worst example I've ever encountered was a book claiming to teach the leadership principles of Genghis Khan.

Apparently the Mongol who butchered and enslaved the largest land area in the history of conquest, was a tolerant and forgiving leader who promoted "can-do" self-motivators and... endless honeyed BS about what a good leader is.

Nothing in the book whatsoever about the benefits of slaughtering all the male adults of newly acquired companies, and giving their wives as presents to underlings and the acquisition team lawyers. 0/10 for historical accuracy.
by fragmede | 2025-05-19 13:08:48+00:00
That's European rich though. If you're American rich, you're Reed Hastings who co-founded Netflix, so you can buy up a ski resort in Utah for you and your pals so you don't have to ski with the poors.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/everettpotter/2023/09/17/netfli...