MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: The Polyglot's Atlas – Interactive world map for language learners
by lapdem | 2025-06-16 11:44:22+00:00
I built a website (using NextJS) that let's you create a mop of the languages you speak/are learning. Data is mostly pulled from the CIA world fact book via python (package worldfactbook). Any feedback and ideas for features that would make it more useful to you are most welcome :)
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-16 11:44:53+00:00
Yea another dumbass behavior is using words nobody can understand because they sound trendy. This doesn't make plato magically interesting unless you're living 2500 years ago. At least I can understand plato because he, and especially his successor, made comparisons quite explicit. He would not have used "guy like you or me" as an implied insult....
by moffkalast | 2025-06-16 11:45:06+00:00
It's interesting how we're generally headed towards general self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power with batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it electricity, mesh networks and satellite internet to get around lazy local ISPs. All we need is a field where robots grow food and we're back in the middle ages but with modern tech. We've even got tech billionaires to stand in as feudal lords and crazy right wing populists instead of inbred kings with weird chins.
by evrflx | 2025-06-16 11:45:13+00:00
I like the idea! We use it actually for a financial application we develop for a bank. We use spring test docs with tests to create example api calls with answers, run reference calculations as part of the test and record the outcome and decisions Both become part of the documentation rendered with asciidoc. We added custom annotations to add documentation snippets thorough the code in addition to using drools and recording the ruleset as well. Feedback is great! But it is no generic approach and involved quite some effort for infrastructure and ongoing maintenance. But well worth the effort given the stakes involved.

Perhaps this helps you as feedback. I am curious how your approach will turn out.
by miningape | 2025-06-16 11:45:39+00:00
I've been writing a Queens clone, while I haven't gotten to the solver part I haven't been able to think up a good/clean way to write said solver. So this is super helpful for me to get some ideas on how a solver should work, and what are the minimum number of rules that the solver should obey (in Queens there are multiple rules that could apply to the same blocks and result in the same decision, but not all rules can be applied in all situations, so narrowing them down to the "axioms" seems difficult).

More of a Math question: I'm also wondering if there's any way to prove that all Queens boards have exactly 1 solution? In other words, is it possible to create a board that has multiple valid solutions?
by dugmartin | 2025-06-16 11:45:42+00:00
My dad was a telephone engineer/manager with GTE in the US. As a kid in the mid 1970s he used to take me with him to the local exchange building to deliver donuts to the guys on duty (he was that kind of boss). The security was interesting - there was a tube built into the masonry with a 90 degree angle that had a mirror. He would pick up the phone on the outside wall and say his name and an identifying number and then the door would buzz open. The building was a few stories tall and had no windows, which I think was a Cold War thing.

We would deliver the donuts to the break room which usually had at least one guy smoking in it (it was the '70s). A couple of times we went into the switching room which still had rotary dial switches clacking away as people dialed in numbers. There was an overwhelming smell of ozone in the room. It was all very cool to 5 year old me.
by disintegrator | 2025-06-16 11:45:45+00:00
It's somewhat disappointing to see a bunch of "well, duh" comments here. We're often asking for research and citations and this seems like a useful entry in the corpus of "effects of AI usage on cognition".

On the topic itself, I am very cautious about my use of LLMs. It breaks down into three categories for me: 1. replacing Google, 2. get a first review of my work and 3. taking away mundane tasks around code editing.

Point 3. is where I can become most complacent and increasingly miscategorize tasks as mundane. I often reflect after a day working with an LLM on coding tasks because I want to understand how my behavior is changing in its presence. However, I do not have a proper framework to work out "did i get better because of it or not".

I still believe we need to get better as professionals and it worries me that even this virtue is called into question nowadays. Research like this will be helpful to me personally.
by glenneroo | 2025-06-16 11:46:27+00:00
OTOH we are one of today's "lucky" 10,000? And future searches will possibly lead to this post, further reducing friction to using this acronym. Also newly trained LLMs will also be able to answer quicker. Yay?

I wonder how acronyms such as OTOH even become so well known that they can be used without fear or not being understood? When is that threshold reached? Is using OH now the beginning of a new well-known acronym? I guess only time will tell...
by lucianbr | 2025-06-16 11:47:17+00:00
> Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications.

I think the subject of the thread is pretty clearly how to deal with interruptions that won't resolve themselves in a short time. It's on you that you choose to ignore that and focus on "was it pretty for a milisecond?"
by mucahitgurbuz | 2025-06-16 11:47:31+00:00
Hi HN! I built AI Code Context after getting frustrated with how much time I spent trying to understand unfamiliar codebases and my own old code.

The problem: Studies show developers spend 30%+ of their time just figuring out what existing code does. We've all been there, staring at a function wondering "what was I thinking?" or diving into a new project and spending hours understanding the architecture.

AI Code Context automatically generates contextual documentation for your code changes using AI. It integrates with your git workflow and creates human-readable explanations that actually help you understand code faster.

Key features: • Analyzes git diffs and generates smart documentation • Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, or local AI models (privacy-focused) • Language agnostic – works with any programming language • Git hooks integration for automatic documentation • Zero config setup

Example: `ai-context analyze --commit HEAD~1..HEAD` analyzes your recent changes and explains what they do, why they matter, and how they fit into the broader codebase.

It's open source (MIT), built with TypeScript, and ready to use: `npm install -g ai-code-context`

Would love to hear your thoughts and get feedback from the community!

GitHub: https://github.com/mucahitgurbuz/ai-code-context
by al_borland | 2025-06-16 11:48:41+00:00
The power grid went down in a large area of the US about 20 years ago. The biggest issue I saw was the gas pumps didn't work. Cars were lined up, many abandoned, just waiting for the power to come on some they could get gas. I was in college at the time, but home for a few days. I heard rumors that the power was on west of us (where my school was), so I just started driving west, hoping I found where the power was on before I ran out of gas. Thankfully, that worked out.

But if the power, and the gas stations, don't work anywhere. It won't take long before we start running out of food and other utilities start to fail.
by rickdeckard | 2025-06-16 11:49:18+00:00
It sounds more like a result-code shared to the terminal to inform it that i.e. "ACCOUNT_DISABLED - The Starlink account has been suspended or permanently disabled" or "UNLICENSED_COUNTRY – The terminal is located in a country where Starlink lacks regulatory approval."

I doubt that the decision to act upon that is left to the terminal instead of the Starlink network.
by ahartmetz | 2025-06-16 11:49:28+00:00
There are other people in the world.

Similar to not caring at all about the rest of society when you're alive, not caring at all about the rest of society when you're dead makes for a shitty society. You are not the world, there is an external reality (with people in it!), and you have obligations to it. I'm not a religious person, but it seems to me that religion helps or used to help with such things.
Tell HN: Please stop using "Tragic Links" and ruining our flow
by neon_me | 2025-06-16 11:50:39+00:00
There have already been a few discussions on HN about this topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42627453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680597

First world problems, but I'll emphasize it one more time. There are several annoyances with magic link authentication:

- No email access: People might not have access to their email on the current device or at that moment (using a public computer, phone without email configured, etc.)

- Context switching: I deliberately avoid checking email to maintain focus. Being forced to open inbox breaks concentration and exposes us to distractions I was trying to avoid

Technical friction: Logging into email can be slow (especially with 2FA, etc), mail delivery can be delayed or end up in spam, links often open in a different browser/app, breaking the session Using a different device to check email means you can't continue on your original device.

- Clipboard disruption: Users might have something important copied and don't want to replace it(just to paste your magic link in the right tab)

The ask is simple: Give us at least one "normie" option! Every sane person nowadays uses a password manager anyway. (Yes, if you don't - you should be using one!)

I believe this trend stems from Auth0/Okta/etc/"modern" auth providers pushing their preferred patterns, combined with a "move fast and break things" mentality that prioritizes developer convenience over user experience.

Please - reconsider it.
by throwaway287391 | 2025-06-16 11:50:52+00:00
As someone who used to write academic ML papers, it's funny to me that people are treating this academic style paper written by a few Apple researchers as Apple's official company-wide stance, especially given the first author was an intern.

I suppose it's "fair" since it's published on the Apple website with the authors' Apple affiliations, but historically speaking, at least in ML where publication is relatively fast-paced and low-overhead, academic papers by small teams of individual researchers have in no way reflected the opinions of e.g. the executives of a large company. I would not be particularly surprised to see another team of Apple researchers publishing a paper in the coming weeks with the opposite take, for example.
by spacechild1 | 2025-06-16 11:51:46+00:00
> The author explained a concrete way in which the std::function abstraction leaks:

But that's not an issue with std::function at all! His comment is really about lambdas and I don't understand why he conflates these two. Just don't put the actual code in a lambda:

std::function<void()> cb([widget]() { widget->onButtonClicked(); });

Here the code is in a method and the lambda is only used to bind an object to the method. If you are old-school, you can also do this with std::bind:

std::function<void()> cb(std::bind(&Widget::onButtonClicked, widget));
by kgwgk | 2025-06-16 11:51:46+00:00
> Physical entropy governs real physical processes

> the measure is not the same thing as the phenomenon it describes.

There is some tension between those claims.

The latter seems to support the parent comment’s remark questioning whether a “fundamental physical interaction could follow from entropy”.

It seems more appropriate to say that entropy follows from the physical interaction - not to be confused with the measure used to describe it.

One may say that pressure is an entropic force and physical entropy governs the real physical process of gas expanding within a piston.

However, one may also say that it’s the kinetic energy of the gas molecules what governs the physical process - which arguably is a more fundamental and satisfactory explanation.
by K0balt | 2025-06-16 11:52:19+00:00
This article proposes a premise based on yet another variety of human exceptionalism, which it purports to eschew: that somehow we evolved and existed in a kind of existential vacuum, apart from animals and nature in our identity even while utterly enmeshed in the natural environment.

It’s ridiculous.

Animals and humans have cultures. Many animals are intelligent enough to create some form of language, many quite advanced. If a group of animals has a mutable language, that is inherently an artifact of culture.

We did not learn culture from animals. We had culture long before we were “human”, picking it up along the way alongside other species as our brains developed sufficient complexity to support mutable symbolic communication.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-16 11:53:23+00:00
It’s the responsibility of individuals to continue learning. Choosing, and to be clear, it is a choice, to stop learning can have dire consequences.

We are now a few years into LLMs being widely available/used, and if someone’s chosen to stick their head in the sand and ignore what’s happening around them, then that’s on them.

> I think workplaces will have to allow people time to adapt.

This feels like a very outdated view to me. Maybe we are worse off for that being the case but by and large that will not happen. The people who take initiative and learn will advance, while the people who refused to learn anything new or change how they’ve been doing the job for XX years will be pushed out.
by devmor | 2025-06-16 11:53:55+00:00
You’re missing some deeply important context there, which is that those measurements are for outdoor atmospheric CO2 only.

Average indoor air quality ranges from 400-1000 ppm CO2, with adverse mental effects starting to appear close to 2000 ppm.

In that context, you can see why a 50 ppm difference is marginal. This is why asking an LLM is not generally a great idea for understanding something - you need to follow it up with more research.
by Asraelite | 2025-06-16 11:54:15+00:00
Years ago when online discussion around this topic was mostly done by small communities talking about the singularity and such, I felt like there was a pretty clear definition.

Humans are capable of consistently making scientific progress. That means being taught knowledge about the world by their ancestors, performing new experiments, and building upon that knowledge for future generations. Critically, there doesn't seem to be an end to this for the foreseeable future for any field of research. Nobody is predicting that all scientific progress will halt in a few decades because after a certain point it becomes too hard for humans to understand anything, although that probably would eventually become true.

So an AI with at least the same capabilities as a human would be able to do any type of scientific research, including research into AI itself. This is the "general" part: no matter where the research takes it, it must always be able to make progress, even if slowly. Once such an AI exists, the singularity begins.

I think the fact that AI is now a real thing with a tangible economic impact has drawn the attention of a lot of people who wouldn't have otherwise cared about the long-term implications for humanity of exponential intelligence growth. The question that's immediately important now is "will this replace my job?" and so the definitions of AGI that people choose to use are shifting more toward definitions that address those questions.
by simiones | 2025-06-16 11:55:37+00:00
> You are absolutely right that entropy is always fundamentally a way to describe are our lack of perfect knowledge of the system [0].

> [0] Let me stress this: there is no entropy without probability distributions, even in physics.

The second item doesn't entail the first. Probabilities can be seen as a measure of lack of knowledge about a system, but it isn't necessarily so. A phenomenon can also be inherently/fundamentally probabilistic. For example, wave function collapse is, to the best of our knowledge, an inherently non-deterministic process. This is very relevant to questions about the nature of entropy - especially since we have yet to determine if it's even possible for a large system to be in a non-collapsed state.

If it turns out that there is some fundamental process that causes wave function collapse even in perfectly isolated quantum systems, then it would be quite likely that entropy is related to such a process, and that it may be more than a measure of our lack of knowledge about the internal state of a system, and instead a measurement of the objective "definiteness" of that state.

I am aware that objective collapse theories are both unpopular and have some significant hurdles to overcome - but I also think that from a practical perspective, the gap between the largest systems we have been able to observe in pure states versus the smallest systems we could consider measurement devices is still gigantic and leaves us quite a lot of room for speculation.
by larksimian | 2025-06-16 11:57:06+00:00
It's not really random. Disease development in the Old World was a combo of long term urbanisation and animal husbandry. Urbanisation in the New World existed but wasn't as old and obviously there was way less animal husbandry. Also assuming the Bering straight crossing hypothesis humans probably left almost every freaking old world parasite and disease behind by the time they got into the americas. Hundreds of thousands or even millions of years of eveolution of diseases that evolved in Africa/Eurasia pretty much gets purged during that migration.
by sjducb | 2025-06-16 11:57:59+00:00
How do you agree a protocol to encrypt the message to agree the protocol?

This is the message that returns a list of supported ciphers and key exchange protocols. There’s no data in this first packet.

Alice: I’d like to connect Bob: Sure here is a list of protocols we could use:

You modify bob’s message so that bob only suggests insecure protocols.

You might be proposing that Alice asks Trent for Bob’s public key … But that’s not how TLS works.
by lambdaone | 2025-06-16 11:58:49+00:00
Mesh radio bandwidth is pretty poor. Firstly, you have to compete with many interferers (albeit this might get better if the power goes down), including other LoRa radios, but more to the point, long-distance connections consume bandwidth and aquire delay and delay variation at every intermediate hop. It might be reasonable to use it for text messaging, but with per-hop bandwidth ranging from 0.3 kbps to 27 kbps, which will get divided down further over shared multi-hop links it will be impractical to use it for anything else except perhaps very-low-bandwidth telephony over short distances or visiting minimalist text-only websites.

It might make more sense if augmented by fixed multi-megabit point-to-point microwave radio links to act as a backbone, with LoRa only functioning as an access network.

I'd be interested to hear what experiences people have had with doing this for real.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-16 11:58:53+00:00
There should be nothing surprising about this. Any physiological characteristic of a human being, -subject as it is to thousands or millions of morphological variations caused by the fuzziness of biological creation- can quickly become a unique identifier. All you need is a method for quantifying it. We started with fingerprints in the 19th century, now we have man others, and especially DNA. Respiratory "fingerprints" aren't useful in the sense that they're left behind like DNA or fingerprints, but as a biometric marker, they make sense.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-16 11:59:04+00:00
There should be nothing surprising about this. Any physiological characteristic of a human being, -subject as it is to thousands or millions of morphological variations caused by the fuzziness of biological creation- can quickly become a unique identifier. All you need is a method for quantifying it. We started with fingerprints in the 19th century, now we have man others, and especially DNA. Respiratory "fingerprints" aren't useful in the sense that they're left behind like DNA or fingerprints, but as a biometric marker, they make sense.
by simeonmiteff | 2025-06-16 12:00:10+00:00
This is very cool. Nice work! At my day job, I have been using a Go library[1] to build tools that require seekable zstd, but felt a bit uncomfortable with the lack of broader support for the format.

Why zeek, BTW? Is it a play on "zstd" and "seek"? My employer is also the custodian of the zeek project (https://zeek.org), so I was confused for a second.

[1] https://github.com/SaveTheRbtz/zstd-seekable-format-go
by mediumsmart | 2025-06-16 12:01:25+00:00
I am not a programmer and I am still working on my first rails project using AI and the guides. With that, my experience is mostly positive. I want it to be as simple as possible so not devise, no cable or actiontext or mail etc. (subset) - then I want sqlite for production since I will have max 8000 users - mostly read operations. Importmaps (takes time to get the AI to write js that passes jslint.com), plain css, deploy on apache proxy using systemd. What made me comment was that a while ago I was considering to use VIPS because I heard that its much faster and scales better. But since there was the default minimagick I stuck to that, so I was not disappointed when I read the audit.

A seasoned rails developer would know how to do what I want but I only have the chatgpt which keeps trying to push me to use all these Gems so I can scale to my 2 Billion users when I go IPO...

tl;dr working on my little rails site and learning is a joy.
by fatnoah | 2025-06-16 12:01:33+00:00
> And most importantly you have to write. A lot. Writing allows our brain to structure our thinking. Enables us to have a structured dialogue with ourselves.

I feel like to goes beyond writing to really any form of expressing this knowledge to others. As a grad student, I was a teaching assistant for an Electrical Engineering class I failed as an undergrad. The depth of understanding I developed for the material over the course of supporting students in the class was amazing. I transitioned from "knowing" the material and equations to being able to generate them all from first principles.

Regardless, I fully agree that using LLMs as our form of expression will weaken both the ability to express ourselves AND the ability to develop deep understanding of topics as LLMs "think" for us too.
by dethstrobe | 2025-06-16 12:01:36+00:00
That's great to know. I was thinking about tackling this from the highest level of abstraction first, so the user interface. I plan on supporting Playwright first for MVP, and then expanding in to Cypress, and maybe even unit testing frameworks.

I feel like backend API documentation is kind of handled with things like Swagger.

How do you think your in house solution compares to something like Swagger or Javadoc?

One of my personal fears (which might be a bit unfounded) since Swagger and Javadoc are generated based off of code comments, and not tests, and there is a possibility that they could get out of sync with implementation. But that might be unfounded. When I worked on Java and wrote unit tests and generated Swagger docs, we never actually ran in to the problem of these things becoming out of sync.

I theorize that the front end isn't as well disciplined as it is in the backend world as well. Which is where I think this idea of Test2Doc will really shine.