MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hilbert42 | 2025-06-22 09:23:46+00:00
"Polyethylene only rarely contains plasticizers, and it doesn't harden or crack unless continuously exposed to sunlight"

I beg to differ, and I'm familiar with polyethylene (I spent too many years studying o-chem not to know something about it).

I have hundreds of polyethylene storage containers ranging in size from 20 to 80 litres and their ages range from around 20 years old to new. They are stored in rooms with temperatures ranging from 15 to 25°C and an average RH of 55-65%.

They are mostly stored in the dark (lights off) and they mostly contain old paper files although some contain books.

For ages I couldn't figure out where the greasy, almost sticky film was coming from given the rooms are dry and the air is clean. (Mind you at first I didn't give it much thought.)

After washing some to remove the film with just dishwashing liquid they were repacked and several years later the film was back and that's when the brittleness was noticed. Container lids were cracking on the bottom containers in stacks of only four to six high (max height 1.5m).

Note, the washing had no noticeable effect, as containers of a similar vintage that were not washed were also brittle.

When I checked I could easily crack the plastic of older containers with little bending. That wasn't possible with the newer units—they would deform out of shape but not crack—not without a lot of effort.

That's a précis of a much longer story. Incidentally, there were several brands involved and all experienced similar problems with the greasy film.

Note I'm not mixing products either, new units of brand A were compared with old brand A.

I'd suggest my sample size is not insignificant, since the late 1990s I've had around a 1000 of these polyethylene containers and the evidence points to the fact that for this type of product polyethylene of that type is not fit for purpose.

BTW, I ought to let you know I'm familiar with polyethylene from my work in RF engineering. And HDPE and that standard polyethylene does not behave that way. Moreover, some of the polyethylene I've used in recent years was manufactured in WWII and is still a viable insulator although (new old stock) coaxial cables with PE dialectic from that era are no longer as pliable as they once were (plastic jacket insulation taken into account).
by mycatisblack | 2025-06-22 09:24:45+00:00
One of the projects I intend to make some day is a metal detector with 2 pickup coils(*), one in or around the sole of each shoe. Instead of an auditory signal, a vibrating element strapped to my leg or ankle. That way you can metaldetect difficult terrain/non-stop/inconspicuously.

(*) they each work independently, like two metaldetectors. Not the detector type with an RX and TX coil.
by globular-toast | 2025-06-22 09:25:05+00:00
It's 80% of what you want and it's installed everywhere.

You could go for something closer to exactly what you want, but now you've got an extra set up step for devs and something else for people to learn if they want to change it.

I would say if you're looking for cli args then you shouldn't be using any wrapper like make at all. Just call the underlying tool directly. Make is for doing big high level things in the standard way, nowadays quite often in CI pipelines.
by ggm-at-algebras | 2025-06-22 09:25:17+00:00
Absolutely the best fictional story of the genre. Lovingly made, with nuance and some sadness: Diana Rigg, real life mother of Rachael Stirling, (who was cast as her daughter in this series) died during its later series, reflected in plots.

The theme music by Johnny Flynn and Dan Michaelson is perfect.
by rvnx | 2025-06-22 09:26:45+00:00
You also have to weight the benefits versus the "risk".

For example, if you use FreeTube with SponsorBlock to improve your privacy and block ads, in fact you are sending to Cloudflare 100% of your YouTube watch history, and to SponsorBlock ("sponsor.ajay.io").

With Piped instances it's even worse, essentially escaping Google's tracking just to give our data to random strangers.

If you are worried, just run a second Chrome session with NordVPN and uBlock Origin in a loose jurisdiction and browse YouTube unlogged.

It's easy, simple, and you have the benefits of an audited platform and that reasonably legally confirm they don't store logs unless the court forced them: "we never log their activity unless ordered by a court never log their activity unless ordered by a court", but for that, the court has to find you as a user, which can be very complicated in practice.

So much better than random strangers.
by LAC-Tech | 2025-06-22 09:27:20+00:00
How's your Persian?

"Marg Bar <noun" appears to a ritualistic phrase, meaning 'down with':

https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/69301/what-do-t...

Here they are saying "Death to Khamenei" over power outages:

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/iran/2021-07-06/ty-...

Here's a story of a taxi driver saying "Death to traffic":

https://blog.ricksteves.com/blog/death-to-israel-death-to-tr...

It's also worth pointing out that wanting Israel (the state) destroyed is not the same thing as wanting everyone who lives there to die. I'm glad the Third Reich was destroyed, I'm also glad the German people survived it.
by roenxi | 2025-06-22 09:28:21+00:00
One of those videos is literally titled "Iran's Ahmadinejad Keeps Up Bluster Against Israel" and another is about treaty negotiations. If countries are going to launch a military response every time a leadership figure starts blustering or negotiations don't go well we're going to be in a lot of wars.

Bluster isn't a threat that the military are going to respond to. Imagine I used the word "credible" above if you want.
by perihelions | 2025-06-22 09:29:23+00:00
There's indeed a lot of transport happening in plain sight,

https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-has-attacked-irans-nuc...

> "Prior to tonight’s airstrikes on the three Iranian nuclear-associated facilities, Maxar collected high-resolution satellite imagery on June 19th and June 20th of the Fordow fuel enrichment facility that revealed unusual truck and vehicular activity near the entrance to the underground military complex. On June 19th, a group of 16 cargo trucks were positioned along the access road that leads to the tunnel entrance of the facility. Subsequent imagery on June 20th revealed that most of the trucks had repositioned approximately one kilometer northwest along the access road; however, additional trucks and several bulldozers were seen near the entrance to the main facility and one truck was positioned immediately next to the main tunnel entrance."
by pndy | 2025-06-22 09:29:59+00:00
Overall it works but the problem lies in instances that tend to die-off pretty fast. There were homebrew "hubs" solely providing redirects out of pure kindness to many big sites and services but now it seems it's hard to find one that works without being blocked/rate limited. Big sites and services fight back, which isn't really surprising.

Privacy Redirect was prob the first extension that introduced this idea. It did the job as well but up until bad-actors figured out they can redirect people to their dangerous sites.
by int_19h | 2025-06-22 09:30:18+00:00
The "right click menu" keyboard button is surprisingly useful if you ever happen to be in a situation where you need to deal with a GUI app without a mouse.

Although these days, chances are good that some things will not be accessible at all, because many devs these days just don't care to do even the basics like submitting dialogs on Enter properly. Historically, though, Windows at least was very thorough in making sure that everything GUI could be operated entirely from keyboard. Much of that is still there, just increasingly obscure - e.g. few people know that Alt+Space will open the same menu that you can get by clicking the window icon in the title bar (the one with Maximize, Minimize, Move, Size etc). Even fewer know that when you pick Move or Size from that menu, you can use the arrow keys to move and resize the window.
by EliRivers | 2025-06-22 09:31:30+00:00
If we're chucking in on these, which seems to be the case, also Black Arrow; the UK's nascent space programme which in 1971 put a satellite into orbit (which is small beans now but in 1971 was still a serious achievement) and was then cancelled because the US said they'd give the UK discount pricing on their own launches, and then when it was cancelled the US said "Ha! Suckers! Of course you're not getting a discount!" (accounts of this may vary)

I think the UK might be the only country that developed, and then fully abandoned, its own capability to launch satellites. Now being slowly recreated, fifty years later.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-06-22 09:32:46+00:00
Well I am in Europe and people don't always drive everywhere.

I see it most days at the supermarket near my local train station: people get off the train and stop by to buy stuff. I see a good number of people buying "reusable" bags because they don't have any bags with them... it is ridiculous not to be able to have access to single use bags in this scenario. Mandate that they be paper or compostable if needed but "no it's banned" is not pragmatic at all.
by dhrm1k | 2025-06-22 09:33:49+00:00
Hi HN!

We built Depict (https://github.com/dhrm1k/depict) - an AI-powered search engine that lets you find Indian museum artworks using natural language descriptions like "painting of fruit" or "blue sculpture."

The project uses OpenAI's CLIP model to understand both text and images, creating embeddings that enable semantic visual search across collections from major Indian museums (National Gallery, National Museum Delhi, Indian Museum Kolkata, etc.).

Key technical details: - Scraped data from Museums of India government portal - Generated CLIP embeddings for artwork images - Built React frontend + Python backend on Modal AI - Similarity search using cosine distance in 512-dimensional space

The live demo currently includes ~2 museums due to compute costs, but the full pipeline is built to handle all 6 major collections. It was inspired by @ekzhang's dispict but focused specifically on making Indian cultural heritage more accessible.

Would love feedback on the search experience and any ideas for improving discoverability of museum collections!

Tech stack: Python, React, CLIP (ViT-B/32), Modal AI, h5py Repo: https://github.com/dhrm1k/depict
by ajuc | 2025-06-22 09:33:51+00:00
> Under this belief system, it might be okay to enslave or even kill humans

This is actually what most christians believe (see Abraham's sacrifice). God is the ultimate source of morality, so if God wants you to kill your son - it's the morally good thing to do.

Which shows nicely that morality does not, in fact, come from God or Bible (if it did - we wouldn't care about Isaac - we'd consider it good that he'll get killed by his father). Instead we can't help but feel it's wrong to kill your son.

It's the conflict of the actual "natural law" vs the artificial religious "natural law" nicely wrapped up in one short story.
by LAC-Tech | 2025-06-22 09:34:26+00:00
How far back do we want to go? We could go back to 1948 when the precursor to the IDF poisoned the wells of the Arab villages they captured, so if the Arabs returned they'd get typhoid.

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

So yes, there's quite a lot I am glossing over.
by aberoham | 2025-06-22 09:37:19+00:00
The irony is even deeper than it appears. According to current US copyright doctrine, if Claude genuinely did all the work with minimal human creative input, the Salt Bae dash of ASL2.0 is essentially decorative - you can't license rights that don't exist.

The research shows the US Copyright Office hasn't caught up with `claude` code: they claim that prompting alone doesn't create authorship, regardless of complexity. Without "substantial" human modification and creative control over the final expression, the code lands in public domain by default. Not that it matters here, but anyone could theoretically use Ronacher's library while ignoring the Apache 2 terms entirely.

What makes this fascinating is that Ronacher knows this ("Is that even valid when there's barely a human in the loop?") but published anyway. It's a perfect microcosm of our current predicament - we're all slapping licenses on potentially unenforceable code because the alternative is.. what exactly?
by FpUser | 2025-06-22 09:38:17+00:00
>"With a heftier backing from the US the Russo-Ukrainian war would be over by now."

And you know this how? Accordingly to all those initial predictions Russia should be already disintegrated and fallen under heavy sanctions, Putin's regime replaced etc. etc. I suspect all these analytics and think tanks should be cleaning toilets instead.

Also there is a line in that backing crossing which may lead to an all out nuclear war. Rational countries that matter understandably do not want to test it unless their existence is really threatened.
Show HN: I'm a doctor and built a responsive breathing app for anxiety and sleep
by lukko | 2025-06-22 09:40:15+00:00
Hey HN!

I’m an NHS doctor and the founder of Pia (https://www.piahealth.co) which developed Lungy (https://www.lungy.app). Lungy is an iOS app that responds to breathing in real-time and was designed to make breathing exercises more engaging and beneficial to do. It’s been two years since Lungy launched (here’s the original ShowHN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34534615) and it's had a huge update and complete redesign. We rebuilt the whole app, and added a real-time 3D soft body solver which gives some really cool interactions like blobs / objects that inflate as you breathe. We also made a version for Vision Pro, called 'Lungy Spaces'.

My background is as a surgical trainee and I started building Lungy in 2020 during the first COVID lockdown in London. During COVID, there were huge numbers of patients coming off ventilators and patients are often given breathing exercises on a worksheet and disposable plastic devices called incentive spirometers to encourage deep breathing. This is intended to prevent chest infections and strengthen breathing muscles that have weakened. I noticed often the incentive spirometer would sit by the bedside, whilst the patient would be on their phone – this was the spark that lead to Lungy!

Since making the first version we’ve made exercises fully customisable (you can dial in exact timings for each breath phase), added new breathing indicators, learning modules, e.g. self-care for anxiety symptoms, and lots of new visuals. The free version gives you access to a new breathing exercise each day, whilst premium unlocks the full library of exercises, exercise data and visuals..

The visuals are mostly built using Metal (a couple use SpriteKit) and there are lots to choose from - boids, cloth sims, fluid sims, a hacky DLA implementation, rigid body + soft body sims - each one reacts to breath and touch. The audio uses AudioKit with a polyphonic synth and a sequencer plays generated notes from a chosen scale (you can mess around with the sequencer and synth in Settings/Create Music). The nice thing about the visuals + audio being generative is that the download size is relatively small with no other downloads. We’re still working on improving the breath detection, using ML - currently, it uses microphone input, with optional camera input to guide positioning.

We’re also close to finishing the medical device version - http://lungy.health - designed as a pulmonary rehab platform for patients with asthma, it should hopefully undergo early trials in the UK in 2026.

Thanks for reading - would love to hear any feedback!

https://www.lungy.app

Lungy Version 2 here: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1545223887
by IceDane | 2025-06-22 09:40:27+00:00
This is not unavoidable in typescript at all. It really depends a lot on how you have structured your application, but it's basically standard practice at this point to use e.g. zod or similar to parse data at the boundaries. You may have to be careful here (remember to use zod's .strict, for example), but it's absolute not unavoidable.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-06-22 09:40:42+00:00
Make allows you to specify dependencies for you targets, which are also targets. As such you do not need to rely on brittle string concatenation approaches. It is a tool build for this.

I personally like going to a project folder and run "make run", no matter what language or setup I have, to run the project. It enables me to unify access to projects.

I also take great care to make these runs reproducible, using lock files and other things of the ecosystems I am using, whenever possible. I work on another machine? git clone, make run. Or perhaps git clone, make init, make run.
Show HN: Go-mapper – AutoMapper-style struct mapping for Go
by davitostes | 2025-06-22 09:41:31+00:00
I’ve worked a lot with C# and .NET, and one tool I really missed when using Go was AutoMapper.

So I built go-mapper, a lightweight Go package that helps map between structs — useful for converting DTOs to domain models, etc.

Uses Go generics (1.18+) Supports shallow copy of fields Custom field transformations with fluent API Optional interface for struct-level control

Example:

type CreateUserDto struct { Name string Password string }

type User struct { Name string PasswordHash string }

mapper.CreateProfile(CreateUserDto{}, User{}, mapper.ForMember(func(u *User) any { return &u.PasswordHash }, mapper.MapFrom(func(dto CreateUserDto) (string, error) { return bcrypt.GenerateFromPassword([]byte(dto.Password), bcrypt.DefaultCost) }), ), )

GitHub: https://github.com/davitostes/go-mapper

I’d love any feedback, suggestions, or contributions. Thanks!
by simonask | 2025-06-22 09:41:58+00:00
It's enthusiasts - hobbyists willing to invest in metal detection gear, spending their free time doing this. If their aim was to get wealthy, they would be doing basically anything else.

Digging for gold artifacts and treasure is not a great strategy to become rich - these people are obviously much more interested in the history, and maybe the recognition. Of course they will turn it in.
Ask HN: Hands-On Guide to Writing Parsers?
by not-so-darkstar | 2025-06-22 09:42:33+00:00
Do you know any practical books that show how to implement a parser starting from a CF grammar (preferably in C)?

All compiler books lack the practical part. I would like to see how to build a LL parser algorithmically in a language like C that doesn't abstract things away (I could use OCaml but I feel I wouldn't learn as much since it's so high level).
by inglor_cz | 2025-06-22 09:43:19+00:00
"He could have been overthrown in the next elections"

Let me see if Erdogan can be overthrown in the next elections in Turkey. No US involvement either.

If you live in a stable Western country, your trust in the next elections being fair and free is understandable, but in that case, refrain from any authoritative talk ("your arguments don't matter") about other places. In recent democracies that transitioned from totalitarian rule just a decade or two ago, elections are far easier to hijack than in the UK or Denmark.

"no-one would have batted an eye"

You cannot really make such a strong prediction about places like Ukraine, the Balkans, the Middle East etc. These are places where empires collide, and several crises in a century are almost a given.

Anyway I am fairly glad that Ukraine didn't end up like Belarus did, a satellite state of Moscow. Anything is better than becoming a satellite state of Moscow. Most of us from behind the Iron Curtain would rather fight a war than submit to Moscow again.

Interestingly, the Western leftists, who otherwise preach anti-colonialism from breakfast to sunset and then some, don't understand the same dynamic among white-majority nations. But it is still there.
by Ciantic | 2025-06-22 09:43:31+00:00
The only way out of this in the long term is via negotiations.

The US and Israel were lucky that Iran built their Fordow plant only 50 meters underground. What will the US do when Iran rebuilds it far deeper? They have a coal mine going 1200 meters deep.

Iran is technologically far more capable than North Korea, which ultimately succeeded in building the bomb. The US knows this and wouldn't have started this war if Israel hadn't done it first.

The first Iran deal in 2015 was not perfect, but it would have provided some guarantees for 15 years. If Iran is determined, how many years has this bombing bought? If I had to guess, Israel is back calling doom ~3 years when the US is having new elections.

Israel doesn't want the removal of the Iran sanctions, why would they? This means whatever deal the US makes with Iran, it's not going to be good enough for Israel.
by handfuloflight | 2025-06-22 09:43:32+00:00
Exactly. You're literally making my point while trying to argue against me.

Whether it's because humans can't handle the pace or because it would make you a jerk to try: either way, you just agreed that humans can't/shouldn't handle unlimited questioning. That's precisely why LLMs are valuable for deep exploratory thinking, so when we engage teammates, we're bringing higher-quality, focused questions instead of raw exploration.

And you're also missing that even IF someone were patient enough to take every question you brought them, they still couldn't keep up with the pace and consistency of an LLM. My original point was about what teammates are 'willing to take', which naturally includes both courtesy limits AND capability limits.