MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chrischen | 2025-05-26 07:02:22+00:00
I've been working on a pickleball/badminton (or really any doubles type sport) event manager which integrates an Elo-style statistical rating system (OpenSkill) into the client-side UI. By simply logging the win/loss of every match that happens, it can real-time update and estimate skill ratings in only a few iterations of matches. Its use cases are to manage open play events even with a wide spread of levels, balance the teams of a match, and enforce fair turn-taking.

I implemented a simple first-come-first-serve event RSVP system, and from the event RSVPS it will pull the players into an event management UI from which the organizer can place players into the available courts and arrange matches balanced by level automatically.

The app does ratings calculations fully locally in the browser so it not only works offline but every new match is based on the last rounds' updated player ratings immediately. There is an option to submit matches to be persisted in my hosted service (pkuru.com) so player ratings are retained. The goal isn't to rank players like existing popular systems (DUPR, UTR, etc) but to do matchmaking within an organized session, or before a session.

The web UI and session management app, which is tentatively named FairPlay, is open source on my github. The version I host at Pkuru.com is free to use as well, and currently used by the #1 club (by average skill) in central Tokyo, as well as the highest level club in Thailand.

I don't plan to commercialize it as it is merely a side project but I can't promise the service will always be free to use due to potential operating costs at scale. However, the front-end UI including the session manager is and will be open source.

There's no fundamental reason the system cannot be easily adapted to other sports such as volleyball, soccer/football, or even a 100-person race since the rating system was designed specifically for team based competitions. It can do everything from ranking players in game like PUBG (100 teams of 1-4 players), to 5v4 futsal (asymmetric teams), to classic 1v1 duels as well.

If any clubs or even businesses are interested in using it to manage open play or rec play sessions where people can just drop in and out and be put into a balanced match of the appropriate skill level, please feel free to contact me. The hosted version on pkuru.com is free to use, but I can also assist in my free time on a volunteer basis if you wish to adapt the front-end open source code.
by permo-w | 2025-05-26 07:02:23+00:00
I think the overarching theme that I glean from LLM critics is some kind of visceral emotional reaction, disgust even, with the idea of them, leading to all these proxy arguments and side quests in order to try and denigrate the idea of them without actually honestly engaging with what they are or why people are interacting with them.

so what they don't "understand", by your very specific definition of the word "understanding"? the person you're replying to is talking about the fact that they can say something to their computer in the form of casual human language and it will produce a useful response, where previously that was not true. whether that fits your suspiciously specific definition of "understanding" does not matter a bit.

so what they are over-confident with areas outside of their training data? provide more training data, improve the models, reduce the hallucination. it isn't an issue with the concept, it's an issue with the execution. yes you'll never be able to reduce it to 0%, but so what? humans hallucinate too. what are we aiming for? omniscience?
by AngryData | 2025-05-26 07:03:37+00:00
I don't know if I would so easily conflate necessity to political legislation. Both politics and politicians are very commonly out of touch with average citizens and what they need, and often ignore the policies that would benefit the state the most in favor of pursuing personal ideals and maintaining political positions and power. If a policy is good for a state 20 years down the line, but will cost them political positioning in the meanwhile or challenges their notions on what they are "suppose" to do either ideologically or socially, or results in their often substantial personal investments having lower returns, I wouldn't often bet on them choosing the state over themselves.
by alonsonic | 2025-05-26 07:03:49+00:00
Sounds like you asked Claude for a fix and it gave you a proper fix to your badly designed api endpoint. If it's an operation that's taking that long then yes, implementing it asynchronously is a good idea.

If what you wanted was a simple ductape quick fix I'm sure you could have asked for that and Claude would have recommended what you did, increasing the timeout window which I guess "fixes" the problem.
by aaiiggcc000 | 2025-05-26 07:03:53+00:00
Author here. We put together two practical tutorials:

1. Image Compression 101 – quality %, lossy vs lossless, real LCP numbers 2. 3 Ways to Remove EXIF Metadata & Protect Privacy (browser-only, CLI, upload hook)

Both guides include a live *client-side demo tool* — everything runs in your browser, no uploads or tracking.

Feedback welcome! Tell us your edge-cases, compression tricks, or privacy horror stories.
The Most Underrated Mindset Shift AI Has Sparked-its how we think about progress
by soorajsanker | 2025-05-26 07:04:18+00:00
I feel one of the most powerful changes AI has brought into our lives isn’t just about automation or speed—it’s how we think about progress.

Before AI became mainstream, we mostly expected software to work 100% of the time. If it didn’t, it was broken. But AI isn’t deterministic. It’s conversational, contextual, and, most importantly, iterative.

Now, more people are willing to try—even when they know the first attempt might not be perfect. We’re okay with rough drafts. We know how to refine. We’re getting better at asking sharper, more contextual questions. We’re learning to co-create.

This shift—from expecting perfection to embracing progress through iteration—is quietly transforming how we work, create, and think.

AI has made us better drivers of our own ideas. And that’s a big deal.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-05-26 07:04:21+00:00
About 30 years ago there was a computer shop that initially carried a lot of equipment, so it was popular among the enthusiasts. Then they decided to optimise things, drop less popular choices and only sell to the general public.The enthusiasts left. Then left the general public . Turned out that when a layman wanted to buy something they usually seeked advice of a local expert, a computer enthusiast.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-05-26 07:04:55+00:00
Thanks for sharing that. It was a surprising statement—that they haven’t heard of any problems.

Personally, I really struggle with the way computers are used in schools. Seems to be all the worst aspects, little of the good. Ie, reading jpgs of textbook pages in learning management systems—and no coding or digital skills time/training. My son is in an IB school in the Netherlands.
by skrebbel | 2025-05-26 07:06:12+00:00
Actually I think I'm just old. To me "Firebase" still means the "Firebase Realtime Database" but after they got acquired by Google, they took the Firebase brand and started building all kinds of features that would let non-backend engineers ship apps without needing a backend, including an improved version of the realtime database (Firestore).

Somehow I've always read "Firebase alternative" as "alternative to Firebase Realtime Database" but now I see that what Supabase & co mean is "stuff you can put on a server once and then you won't need to do any backend stuff anymore", ie the current positioning of the Firebase brand.

I stand corrected.

(sidenote, Google's Firebase acquisition has to be one of the best-executed devtool acquisitions right? Nobody would've been surprised if they had just gobbled Firebase up, spread the team across GCP, put the product on life support and after a year told customers to just move to GCP proper, somehow. Instead they realized that "GCP Easy Mode" was worth having a separate brand for and they executed excellently on that)
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-05-26 07:06:43+00:00
Perhaps not, but the same input will lead to the same distribution of outputs, so all an attacker has to do is design something that works with reasonable probability on their end, and everyone else's instances of the LLM will automatically be vulnerable. The same way a pest or disease can devastate a population of cloned plants, even if each one grows slightly differently.
by Duanemclemore | 2025-05-26 07:07:30+00:00
There's an often missed distinction between the complex and the complicated. Complexity can emerge from the interaction of two (or more) simple things. Think of the double slit experiment[0] or Penrose's observations of quasitiles[1].

I practice and teach computation within design - mostly architecture. When talking to my students I make sure to highlight this distinction. Creating complicated things is one way to create complexity. But complexity as an outcome of carefully chosen simple ideas, techniques, or phenomena is another, arguably more powerful way.

Brooks' ideas of essential and accidental complexity are precisely in line with this. Managing complex effects is itself a challenge (an exciting and rewarding one). And the more "complicated" a system, the more difficult this becomes - and exponentially so I would argue. So both in my own work and in helping students understand how to design for managing complexity but minimizing complicated-ness.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Murray Gell-Mann's notion of Plectics, which combines simplicity and complexity in one[2].

This is a really awesome subject area to explore, and I look forward to more discussions around it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th3YMEamzmw

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cplx.613001...
by threeducks | 2025-05-26 07:07:30+00:00
Definitely readable. A stronger blur would not have helped the situation either. It is absolutely insane how well information from a blurred image can be reconstructed. For example, consider the "Data" column of the following image, which basically looks like a gray image without any content, but neural networks can recover most of the blurred characters: https://fips.fi/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/HDC_result_exampl...
by Tistron | 2025-05-26 07:07:31+00:00
Spent a little time on wiktionary:

> Unlike its neuter synonym wódr̥, h₂ep- is always gendered in descendants. This may reflect the same animate–inanimate (or semantically active–passive) distinction in early PIE that is often supposed for the nouns meaning “fire”, such as h₁n̥gʷnís m and péh₂wr̥ n respectively.

> Two main terms for “fire” are reconstructible for Proto-Indo-European: h₁n̥gʷnís and péh₂wr̥. They are usually considered in semantic opposition. The first term is usually masculine and refers to fire as something animate and active (compare Agni, the most prominent Old Indic deity), whereas the second term is neuter and refers to fire as something inanimate and passive, i.e. as a substance.
by allenleee | 2025-05-26 07:07:48+00:00
AirPosture: Turn your AirPods into a posture coach on macOS

A macOS app that uses your AirPods' sensors to catch bad posture in real time.

How it works:

Real-time tilt tracking – Your AirPods already have the tech Customizable alerts – Adjust sensitivity so it nudges you only when needed Prevent strain before it starts – Stop neck pain and headaches at the source

Demo:

https://youtu.be/UEOla3WBy1g
by cookiengineer | 2025-05-26 07:08:58+00:00
This is what happens when Google isn't sue-able by private entities.

In Germany, lieferando (subsidiary of takeaway.com) registers domains in the form of restaurantname-city.de, points them to their lieferando cloudflare account, and claims ownership for the google business entry where they set the phone number to their own call center.

Then they call the business owner and _force them_ to sign the contract with them, because effectively the owner knows they cannot be found anymore via google, and everyone that wants to order something will reach the call center hotline and leave a negative review after the hotline tells them wrong number, effectively destroying their business. And the people working for lieferando via Zeitarbeitsfirmen know this, and mention this in the call to pressure the restaurant owners to get their sales provision.

Crimeflare before it got taken down had around 130k domains that were pointing to the lieferando website using this kind of scheme, I helped provide the dataset for a couple of local business owners that were extorted this way and refused to abide by that scheme.

Guess what happened, nobody could be sued and the financial damages were too small to escalate it on the European court level. Sadly, class-action lawsuits don't work the same way as in the US, apparently.

Effectively Google does not abide by the laws and gets away with it due to their financial structures of their holding companies.

And they certainly know about this, they just don't give a single fvck.
by 2048johndoe | 2025-05-26 07:09:48+00:00
Hey, this looks pretty neat! I've been looking for something just like this – quick, private image compression without uploading stuff. The fact that it's all done in the browser is a huge plus for privacy. Love the sound of the adjustable compression and EXIF stripping. Definitely gonna check out slimimg.tools. Thanks for building and sharing!
by Dan-Q | 2025-05-26 07:10:45+00:00
Blog owner here. You're welcome to unblur it: I swapped the number out in the screenshot for one of Ofcom's list of official never-to-be-assigned telephone numbers for drama (e.g. film & TV) use (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/phone-numbers/...) before I applied the blur.

That number isn't mine, and will never belong to anybody!
by worthless-trash | 2025-05-26 07:10:48+00:00
The problem is that some vendors don't participate or care about the KABI program. They have their reasons, maybe the cost is too high to maintain RHEL compat and upstream compatability, so they simply choose the one that is the least pain to adhere to when a customer requests a fix.

If companies talked to partner engineering about their kABI requirements, I think there would be a lot less breaking however I'm sure that i'm oversimplifying the reason that they cant or wont do this.

I completely understand that the work is non-trivial and that they have many environmental pressures that affect their choices. The KABI is the olive leaf, they can take it or not.
by pravj | 2025-05-26 07:12:30+00:00
I'm working on restoring my website/blog.

I stopped writing right after college when I moved to full-time work, but I want to change that now.

Just as I started, I realized the website was hosted on Forestry CMS, which has been discontinued, so I will have to figure out how to maintain the URL structure, etc. (this is important since there are a few popular/top-10 pages for certain queries/searches [1]).

[1]: https://hackpravj.com/blog/solving-semantris-opencv-word2vec... (for "Google Semantris")
Ask HN: How did you connect with early adopters?
by cornfieldlabs | 2025-05-26 07:12:44+00:00
I am building a niche private social network and ~100 people have joined the waitlist.

I want to speak with them all and let them give feedback, suggestions, bug reports etc. I want it to build it with them - sharing mock ups, polls like “which design do you prefer”, feedback on new features etc. I need a tool where I don’t have to enter my users’ emails.

How can I do this?

Is there a platform where I can add my users and let them participate ? What do you use for this?

1:1 email might not scale for this many people since we are only 2 developers - me and my brother.

If I can’t find something, I will go with google forms and then follow up with each user individually.

Maybe I should throw together a basic Django app for this?

I have asked on Reddit, Twitter etc and got no responses and I don't know any founder in real life or online.

Thanks

My email: cornfieldlabs@gmail.com
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-26 07:12:59+00:00
There are computer techniques that can be used to de-blur sensitive information, so the expert advice is not to use simple blurring effects.

But in this instance, it’s trivially easy to read the numbers even without any fancy software.

@author, if your reason for blurring was to protect your identity, then you should update that image asap because you’re not succeeding at hiding your number.
by fifticon | 2025-05-26 07:13:08+00:00
I have a random idea regarding compromised tokens, which may not hold water. What if you put things like the client's IP address in the token? Then the server can reject (and mark for compromise) as soon as they receive any request from a different ip address? I realise this will also invalidate people who somehow roam between ip addressses, say DHCP/wireless in a larger building.
by n_u_l_l | 2025-05-26 07:13:17+00:00
There is a phone number on your website, and the same one is also part of the public info on the business's Google Play developer profile. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but both are published by you.

I don't think it's unexpected when you use one phone number as both personal and business number.

Initially I still felt like it wasn't correct of Google to publish this as public phone number, but I think Google Play clearly asked what phone number customers can use to contact you.
by josephcsible | 2025-05-26 07:14:13+00:00
No, I don't have access to Tesla's source code. The point I'm trying to make is that the claim in the lawsuit is totally unsubstantiated. For example, it says this:

> Specifically, Tesla Odometer System are integrally linked to Tesla Vehicles’ energy consumption metrics and range estimation algorithms, as evidenced by Tesla Inc.’s patents and internal methodology detailed in Patent US8054038B2. This patent confirms that Tesla Odometer System readings are not direct measurements of distance traveled, but are instead derived from energy consumption data, driving behavior patterns, and predictive algorithms. The patent explicitly describes a “miles-to-electrical energy conversion factor” that varies dynamically based on road and traffic conditions.

But https://patents.google.com/patent/US8054038B2/en says nothing about being used for an odometer.

And the other evidence it cites is literally Reddit posts such as this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/1au6y1l/tesla_...

The entire suit is basically "I don't think I drove my car as many miles as my odometer said, and a few people on Reddit said vaguely similar things, so Tesla must be systematically rigging their odometers to over-report mileage".
by usgroup | 2025-05-26 07:14:27+00:00
x ~ Binomial(N,p) and you wish to estimate p.

Here are a whole collection methods for how to estimate p and calculate a confidence interval for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution#Confiden...

One of the methods is Bayesian; the rest are not.

Not mentioned in the list, but you can also use likelihood ratio intervals calculated from a likelihood profile: another Frequentist method.

None of the methods -- including the Bayesian, requires an informative prior.
by nobody9999 | 2025-05-26 07:14:41+00:00
>...In this paper, we present Vending-Bench, a simulated environment designed to specifically test an LLM-based agent's ability to manage a straightforward, long-running business scenario: operating a vending machine. Agents must balance inventories, place orders, set prices, and handle daily fees - tasks that are each simple but collectively, over long horizons (>20M tokens per run) stress an LLM's capacity for sustained, coherent decision-making.
by kergonath | 2025-05-26 07:14:53+00:00
TL;DR: the analogy is helpful at a high level, but has limitations when you look closely.

> Ok, it's different in that liquid flows through pipes and electrons flow through crystal lattices or whatever, so electrons go between and around the material while liquid is bounded by it.

This is not perfect, but it works at a high level.

The main difference with e.g. water flows is that what restricts electron flux is traps. Electrons are not limited by walls that prevents them from going outside channels, instead they are held in place by atoms’ nuclei.

In a conductor, the “force” holding them is effectively zero, so when an electron comes in on one side, another one comes out of the other.

In a semiconductor. An electron needs some energy to get out of its trap before it can move. Then, “freed” electrons hop from trap to trap and the current is the overall effect of this. Electrons do not have to move far to create a current, there just needs to be enough of them. There is no real macroscopic analogy for this.

In an insulator, electrons just don’t get out of their traps because the energy required is too large.

This ignores a lot of details and quantum effects, but it is still a useful way to think about this.

> It makes me speculate that electron flow through a metal is sort of like liquid flowing through a compressible boundary tube, whereas flow through a non-metal has rigid walls.

Not really. Electrons moving in a metal are slowed down by a lot of different phenomena but this cannot really be considered as a compressible fluid. The effect is more similar to viscosity than compressibility.

In non-metals, electrons just don’t move unless they are made available, for example by doping or with a source of energy.

> Non-metals reject the electrons, metals allow them to play Spiderman and hitch a temporary ride

The general model is that metals let electrons flow and non-metals hold on to them.

> If resistivity is determined by the equivalent of turbulence, though, I've no idea what the graph against temperature should be. Do electrons travel faster when there's less resistance?

The analogy kind of breaks down here. There are competing effects and conductivity as a function of time is often highly non-trivial. In general, the number of electrons available increases with temperature, but scattering by other electrons, vibrations and defects also increases. Overall, resistivity tends to increase with temperature in metals and decrease in semiconductors, but there are exceptions.
by dahcryn | 2025-05-26 07:15:36+00:00
To me the interesting idea is the followup question: Can you do complex reasoning without intelligence?

LLM's seem to have proven themselves to be more than a one-trick-pony. There is actually some resemblance of reasoning and structuring etc.. No matter if directly within the LLM, or supported by computer code. E.g it can be argued that the latest LLMs like Gemini 2.5 and Claude 4 in fact do complex reasoning.

We have always taken for granted you need intelligence for that, but what if you don't? It would greatly change our view on intelligence and take away one of the main factors that we test for in e.g. animals to define their "intelligence".
by ncounter | 2025-05-26 07:15:58+00:00
Thanks for sharing this! Sounds like a super useful tool, especially with all the AI and automation you’re integrating. Quick question: Have you thought about adding features like real-time collaboration or multiple people editing the same video, kinda like Figma or Canva? Could be pretty cool for teams working on social videos or product demos.

Also, curious how you’re thinking about handling heavy lifting for video exports or AI features (like auto-captions, scene detection, etc.). Will those run in the browser, or do you plan to offload some of that to the cloud (like with your AWS Lambda and S3 export)?

And one more thing – are you planning to support version control for video edits? Could make it easier for people to try different versions or go back and forth.
by mindhunter | 2025-05-26 07:16:14+00:00
While MP4s don't support transparency, both HEVC and VP9 do and their support is very good these days. I just recently used these formats to add a complex After Effects Animation to a website. It's a bit of extra work to encode two videos instead of just one but the result is great. I used this tutorial: https://rotato.app/blog/transparent-videos-for-the-web