MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-27 11:47:53+00:00
> Do they really need to redact the instructions for making a Molotov cocktail..?

In some jurisdictions such as Germany, not doing so might land you actual jail time - §52 Abs. 1 Nr. 4 WaffG [1] is very explicit. A punk song containing the (alleged) lyrics ended up with legal youth-protection censorship, for example [2].

With anything that's deemed a weapon of war, of terrorism or mass destruction, one should be very very careful.

[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/waffg_2002/__52.html

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wir_wollen_keine_Bullenschwein...
by perihelions | 2025-06-27 11:48:11+00:00
I wonder if there could be some way to photolitograph compute circuits directly onto a radiator substrate, and accomplish a fully-passive thermal solution that way. Consider the heat-conduction problem: from dimensional analysis, the required thickness of a (conduction-only) radiator plate with a regular grid of heat sources on it shrinks superlinearly as you subdivide those heat sources (from few large sources, into many, small ones). At fixed areal power density, if the unit heat source is Q, the plate thickness d ∝ Q^{-3/2}. (This is intuitive: the asymptotic limit is a uniform, continuous heat source exactly matched to a uniform radiation heat sink; hence heat conduction is zero). So: could one contemplate an array of very tiny CPU sub-units, grided evenly over a thin Al foil—say at the milliwatt scale with millimeter-scale separation? It'd be mostly empty space (radiator area) and interconnect. It'd be thermally self-sufficient and weigh practically nothing.
by gwd | 2025-06-27 11:48:34+00:00
> wrecklessly

<pedantic>

It's "recklessly". "reck" is a very old word meaning "to care, heed, have a mind, be concerned about"; so "reckless" means "without taking heed".

I actually thought it was directly related to "reckon" (meaning "to think or calculate"), but when I looked it up it turned out not to be the case (except much further back in the etymological tree).

</pedantic>
by adrian_b | 2025-06-27 11:48:56+00:00
Many kinds of aborigines in various parts of the world where the Europeans have arrived only relatively recently have been praised for the sustainable and efficient ways in which they were exploiting their local resources.

Nevertheless, this assessment is true only for their more recent history, i.e. for the last few hundreds or few thousands of years before the contact with Europeans, depending on the place.

Everywhere, their more distant ancestors had not practiced a sustainable way of exploiting the local nature and they had hunted to extinction many of the bigger animals, or even all of them. Even many smaller animals and plants may have become extinct as a consequence of human activities. Only later, the aborigines have eventually learned to practice a sustainable way of living, otherwise they would have become extinct themselves.

This is also true for Australia, which was very different by the time of the arrival of the first humans.

Unfortunately, while indeed many aborigines had learned by necessity to be not greedy in order to have a society based on equilibrium, not on growth, this did not happen for the more "civilized" humans, because for a long time they were able to expand over the rest of the world and now they continue to hope for miracles that would allow unlimited growth in the future too.
by mattlondon | 2025-06-27 11:50:19+00:00
Indeed - and I would argue that despite that a lot of comments here and elsewhere anecdotally say that physical exercise helps to prevent signs of aging, some of these people who spend their entire time doing hard physical work do not look younger or healthier. They often look like they've lived pretty hard lives with really battered looking complexions and wrinkles etc - they almost certainly do NOT look "youthful" or "young for their age" - the opposite in fact, at least in my experience.

We in this industry live in quite a bubble in many ways. One of them is we get to chose when we go outside and exercise (mostly), but if you're a builder or a farmer or whatever you are usaully out there doing things, rain or shine.
by sailingparrot | 2025-06-27 11:50:38+00:00
> For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture that allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete servers. If launch costs are low enough to allow for launching a datacenter into space, they'll be low enough to allow for launching replacement modules.

This is hiding so, so much complexity behind a simple hand wavy “modular”. I have trained large models on thousands of GPUs, hardware failure happen all the time. Last example in date: an infiniband interface flapping which ultimately had to be physically replaced. What do you do if your DC is in space? Do you just jettison the entire multi million $ DGX pod that contains the faulty 300$ interface before sending a new one? Do you have an army of astronauts + Dragons to do this manually? Do we hope we have achieve super intelligence by then and have robots that can do this for us ?

Waving the “Modular” magic key word doesn’t really cut it for me.
Show HN: A Chrome extension that converts formula images to LaTeX
by abagh999 | 2025-06-27 11:50:56+00:00
Hey everyone,

I recently built a free Chrome extension called Formula to LaTeX that lets you convert any formula from an image, screenshot directly into clean LaTeX code.

No signup. Just: 1. Paste or drag & drop an image of the formula 2. Get the LaTeX code instantly 3. Copy it with one click

It works great for math, physics, and chemistry formulas, super helpful if you're working on problem sets, papers, or presentations and don’t want to retype complex equations.

Would love any feedback! I'm still improving it, so feel free to roast it or share ideas
by throw0101c | 2025-06-27 11:50:57+00:00
> I live in Ireland, in a village of a few thousand people a few km outside the city, what you might call a "suburb" in the US.

Whatever villages that used to exist in the US have been drowned out by car-centric suburbs that were build around them. The 'village' is now the downtown-ish area of the community that tourists go see.
by p3rls | 2025-06-27 11:51:43+00:00
I'm nearly done after seeing the nonstop indianization of my topics on google.

Niches from motorcycles to tech to music have become a punjab yellowpages and no one is even talking about it.

Google the most popular korean boyband in the world "BTS"

6/7 of my results are indian domains. What's the point of even trying anymore when ESL slop like that gets a massive SERP advantage for years now and is only getting worse?
by diggan | 2025-06-27 11:52:09+00:00
> Do they really need to redact the instructions for making a Molotov cocktail..?

I don't even understand how/why things like that are OK in some contexts/websites while forbidden in others? Even YouTube, who seems needlessly censor-happy and puritan in the typical American way, allows instructions for how to make molotov cocktails to stay up, why is it somehow more dangerous if LLMs could output those recipes rather than videos with audio or text?
by jcmeyrignac | 2025-06-27 11:52:38+00:00
There are 2 main problems with XSLT. The first one is that manipulating strings is a pain. Splitting strings, concatenating them is verbose like hell and difficult to read. The second one is that it quickly becomes a mess when you use the "priority" attribute to overload functions. I compare XSLT to regular expressions, with great flexibility but impossible to maintain due to poor readability. To my knowledge, it's impossible to trace.
by asimpleusecase | 2025-06-27 11:56:21+00:00
My vision had started to decline in my 30’s. Not a ton but needed glasses for distance vision to be crisp. When I hit 60 I started to operate without my glasses more. It forced my eyes to work more. I just had an eye exam and I can legally drive without glasses. My eyesight improved. It’s not crisp at distance but I can grab my glasses when I feel the need ( use when driving at night for extra layer of safety)
by leeoniya | 2025-06-27 11:56:26+00:00
> There's no magic in tagged templates that somehow make them immediately better for some custom non-standard syntax compared to JSX.

they're marginally better since they have a platform-defined way to deliniate static from dynamic parts. ivi _can_ work without a runtime or build-time JS parser, while JSX cannot (because jsx has to be parsed out of full blobs of js)

on the dx/ide side, sure there's not a huge amount of difference if both had the same effort invested.
by api | 2025-06-27 11:56:31+00:00
Look at the thermal shield design for the JWST. Could you have a data center that unfolds into a multi-layered plane where the outer solar collector layer faces the sun, an intermediate layer shields infrared emissions from the back side of that, and the final layer that always faces away from the sun holds (or is) a bunch of chips? Park it in an orbit where it can stay oriented this way or an L point. Free compute for the life span of the chips powered by the sun.

A lot of these is a supercomputing Dyson swarm.

Also do chips in space need casing or could the wafers be just exposed on that back layer?
by sixpackpg | 2025-06-27 11:57:10+00:00
The final stretch is not the same as the first 90%. You don't know what you don't know at the start, you don't have formed ideas or boundaries to butt up against and so progress is easy. As you create, you have gained more knowledge and now have to consider you surroundings, the problem space becomes less open. The closer you get to completion the less space to work in, you likely have greater taste, ideas which are good enough for the first 90% are no longer good enough. So better taste and far less acceptable solutions due to increased dependencies. You also can see parts which were previously acceptable as now not so.

To top it off you have the emotional and ego side at play near the finish line. Is this good enough? This could be done better, etc.

I think that mixture of better taste, more dependent parts and ego make the last part the hardest. I also feel that the finish line being close isn't a strong of a motivator as ego is a demotivator. Whereas, at the start ego has no effect as you don't know anything, you can't be mad because you're new, it's all one big playground.
by sevensor | 2025-06-27 11:57:48+00:00
My observation from internal C projects I’ve worked with is that they often end up doing the wrong thing very fast, because the right thing is so hard to express in C. If you do the wrong thing ten million times, it can start to approximate the right thing. The best of all worlds is using a low level language for speed and a high level language for dealing with complexity. I very much doubt there’s one right language for everything.
by ssivark | 2025-06-27 11:58:11+00:00
If I have decent autocomplete where I type half the characters and the AI predicts the other half that technically satisfies this metric.

Notice the loophole: there’s no qualification of how much problem context the AI started from. Most of the problem -> code “work” would still be done by a human in that situation — even if technically 50% of the code is “AI generated” [because the human did all the hard work of generating the context necessary for those tokens, including the preceding tokens of code].

As the saying goes… lies, damned lies, and statistics.
by deadlightreal | 2025-06-27 11:59:29+00:00
Hello dear people,

I’m working on SwiftNet, a small and easy-to-use C library for making networking communications in C straightforward. It’s a wrapper over Berkeley sockets with a simple API, readable, and easy to integrate.

Right now, it’s only been tested on macOS, so I’m looking for contributors to:

Test it on Linux Suggest improvements Help refine the design/API The codebase is pretty small, and while the API is straightforward, the internals are admittedly a bit rough right now. I’m still learning and improving!

Why I built this:

I wanted to create a C library that makes sending data over the network reliable and easy, while learning more about low-level networking and systems design. Everything is written in pure C, built with a basic CMake setup, and has no external dependencies.

Example usage:

// Server sends "hello" to every client that sends a message void server_message_handler(uint8_t* data, SwiftNetPacketServerMetadata* metadata) { swiftnet_server_append_to_packet(server, "hello", strlen("hello")); swiftnet_server_send_packet(server, metadata->sender); swiftnet_server_clear_send_buffer(server); }

How you can help: Test on Linux: clone, build with cmake, and run the tests in /tests Suggest improvements to the overall library or code clarity Share ideas for future features

Thanks for checking it out! Ask me anything.

Repo: https://github.com/deadlightreal/SwiftNet
by mytailorisrich | 2025-06-27 11:59:31+00:00
It's hard to take this "looming war" with Russia seriously when WWIII didn't happen during the USSR times when Russia was much stronger. It's hard to believe that Russia would want to start WWIII now when they didn't then and when they have shown that they were highly struggling in Ukraine (and they struggled in Chechnya, too).

Along the same line, during the Cold War Sweden was literally facing the Warsaw Pact and yet stayed out of NATO. Now it is surrounded with friends and needs to join NATO.

I am just old enough to remember the end of the Cold War and the fall of it all. To me it is very difficult to consider that the situation now is riskier than then.

A reasonable conclusion is that we are being led up the garden path...

Russia has a stockpile of nukes for defense because they are worried of invasion (history has shown this is warranted). But they know that the military might of the US and NATO would obliterate their conventional forces.

My theory is that there has always been push-back against an EU power-grab to full "statehood" and involvement in military matters, and that this is a pretext to "manufacture consent" in European public opinion.

Now, specifically for the UK, again I think this is largely pandering to the US to attract favours (tariffs, etc)
Show HN: Wayland Speech-to-Text Tool
by artur_roszczyk | 2025-06-27 12:00:11+00:00
I vibe-coded a speech-to-text tool for Wayland that works for me. You trigger it with a keybind, speak into your mic, and it transcribes using OpenAI Whisper or Google STT (local is coming), then either types it directly into your active text field or saves it to the clipboard.

It uses PipeWire for audio capture and works signal-driven, so there's no background process running. Just on-demand transcription when you need it. I've tested it on Niri and it should work on Hyprland, though I haven't tested GNOME or KDE yet.

This was a one day Rust project and probably has some bugs since I just implemented it. It's definitely rough around the edges, but it serves its purpose for quick dictation. I'm open to feedback and input from anyone who tries it out.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-06-27 12:00:11+00:00
Not really. That's how inattentive type of ADHD looks like from the outside, but it's not how someone with it would usually describe it. It's the PoV of a parent of a kid with ADHD and a reason it took me so long to figure out that I may have it myself.

I can concentrate on tasks very well, perhaps too well sometimes. My problem is that it's not my decision what I concentrate on.

I do feel like doing something productive pretty much all the time, perhaps even too much. It's just that there's a long road between "feeling like doing" and "actually doing".

Procrastination implies choice. It's not my choice to do things last minute, it's just that it's often the only moment when panic manages to override my lack of executive function. Sleep deprivation helps too, for the same reasons.
by wonderwonder | 2025-06-27 12:00:31+00:00
You are 100% right, I don't see it as a negative though. Almost everyone in their 70's is on some form of medication. I'm mid 40's and have been on testosterone for ~4 years. Best shape of my life both physically and blood work wise. Testosterone (at sane doses), GLP-1s, etc are miracle drugs that dramatically improve ones' quality of life. While you are absolutely correct that "those dudes are almost certainly on some kind of testosterone" I see it as very positive.

My FIL, in his 70's is on a cocktail of pain killers, blood pressure medication and a hundred other things and has a hard time even getting out of a pool. I'll take being an old jacked dude over that any day
by robertlagrant | 2025-06-27 12:00:49+00:00
> what about when we’re making multi-year journeys to Mars and we need a relay network of “space data centers” talking to each other, caching content, etc?

How would this work? Planets orbit at different speeds, so you can't build a chain of relays to another planet. I can imagine these things orbiting planets, but is that worth it compared to ground-based systems?
by muglug | 2025-06-27 12:00:54+00:00
> I've also found that high IQ correlates -- at least in my sample -- with authoritarian political beliefs

I think that’s just a side effect of being told “you’re very smart” a lot as a kid. You think that you can understand facts about the universe that others cannot, which steers you away from (boring, unthinking) normie positions.
by diggan | 2025-06-27 12:01:01+00:00
Last time I checked, these were some of the substances I found in American food/drinks/candy that are outlawed in EU:

- Titanium dioxide (E171)

- Potassium bromate

- Azodicarbonamide

- Propylparaben

I'm sure there is more, and there is probably also stuff that is banned in the US but not in Europe.
by lproven | 2025-06-27 12:01:16+00:00
Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851992

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44359454

No comments on any of them.

It sounded of interest to me, but I read it and closed the tab within a page or so as it wandered off into tech arcana. Shame. There may be an interesting idea in here but it's phrased in terms I think few will be able to follow and understand.

I did not finish it but I saw no mention of the lambda calculus or of currying, both of which -- from my very meagre understanding -- seem directly relevant to what I understood to be the core point, which seems to be about anonymous functions.
by rinawarpt25 | 2025-06-27 12:01:29+00:00
I've been working on an AI-powered terminal emulator that aims to make developers more productive. Some key features:

- Context-aware AI suggestions for commands and troubleshooting - Integrated Git workflows with smart commit message generation - Cross-device cloud sync - Beautiful, customizable themes

It's built with Electron and works across platforms. The AI integration helps with everything from suggesting the right commands to analyzing error messages.

Looking for feedback from the HN community - what would make your terminal experience better?
by delegate | 2025-06-27 12:01:35+00:00
It's interesting how people always try to find some kind of number to race against.

Here's a simple theoretical situation. A brilliant mathematician with very high IQ crashes in the jungle, but is unhurt.

Not far from the crash site, there's a tribesman who lived in the jungle all his life. He doesn't know how to read or write.

The jungle is filled with predators, spiders and snakes. The sun is setting, the night starts soon.

Who has bigger chances of surviving ? I guess most people would bet on the tribesman. Why does nature select the person who would most likely score lower on the IQ score ?

The point is - intelligence is contextual and circumstantial. It's not one number, like width or length. Not sure why people still try to squeeze some sort of conclusion from it..
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-27 12:03:05+00:00
Laws definitely still apply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

> Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty deals with international responsibility, stating that "the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty" and that States Party shall bear international responsibility for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities.
by danielbln | 2025-06-27 12:03:22+00:00
while I probably won't need pokemon knowledge from an llm, I still think broad pre-training enables unpredictable cross-domain knowledge transfer - seemingly irrelevant data can contribute to reasoning abilities that improve specialized tasks. and most developers work across domains anyway, so better to start general and post-train than lose emergent capabilities from narrow foundations.

even within 'coding' there's huge breadth. you might need to understand database schemas, api documentation, domain-specific algorithms, legacy system constraints, or business logic from completley different industries. a narrowly-tuned model might excel at leetcode problems but struggle when you need to build a financial trading system or whatever.
by supplied_demand | 2025-06-27 12:03:38+00:00
I don’t see an Open Borders policy in any of those links. Most of them are about how the countries are tightening their rules for allowing migrants. You cannot tighten rules unless they already exist, they wouldn’t exist if the policy was Open Borders.

Invoking “socialists” over-and-over doesn’t prove anything about Open Borders and kind of undercuts your point. There’s also no mention of right-wing leaders like Ronald Reagan or George Bush. They both pushed policies that increase immigration and asylum seekers.
by dgb23 | 2025-06-27 12:04:44+00:00
> If Zig somehow got more popular than C/C++, we would still be stuck in the same CVE bog because of memory unsafety. No thank you.

Zig does a lot of things to prevent or detect memory safety related bugs. I personally haven't encountered a single one so far, while learning the language.

> ~80% of them memory-related.

I assume you're referencing the 70% that MS has published? I think they categorized null pointer exceptions as memory safety bugs as well among other things. Zig is strict about those, has error unions, and is strict and explicit around casting. It can also detect memory leaks and use after free among other things. It's a language that's very explicit about a lot of things, such as control flow, allocation strategies etc. And there's comptime, which is a very potent tool to guarantee all sorts of things that go well beyond memory safety.

I almost want to say that your comment presents a false dichotomy in terms of the safety concern, but I'm not an expert in either Rust or Zig. I think however it's a bit broad and unfair.
by v5v3 | 2025-06-27 12:05:28+00:00
>What other industries can try this?

I've never understood the Arts and royalties.

If you write a software program for a client, you get paid. If a actor works for a day on a TV show he may get cheques forever.

If you hire a photographer for a wedding, you will pay him the same rate as a contract developer. But you won't own the rights to the photos and keep having to pay the guy if you want copies.

I can understand the owner of the TV show or owner of a song charging for commercial use, in the same way if you work for Gmail Google will sell the product forever.

Gmail developers past and present don't get cheques every year.
by em-bee | 2025-06-27 12:05:37+00:00
that's the server side html generator i already mentioned. ok, this one is not large, but it still ties me to a limited set of server platforms that support running php. and if i have to write code i may as well write javascript and get a platform independent solution.

the point is, none of the solutions are completely satisfactory. every approach has its downsides. but most critically, all this complaining about people picking the wrong solution is just bickering that my chosen solution does not align with their preference.

my preferred solution btw is to take a build-less frontend framework, and build my site with that. i did that with aurelia, and recently built a proof of concept with react.