MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-30 19:06:14+00:00
> I don't think we should be adding toxins to the water supply for any reason.

What, no chlorine to kill bacteria?

Water is a toxin! https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/water-intoxic...

> How do you know some poorly run, underfunded water department doesn't have a malfunctioning fluoride mixer until after you have brain damage from it?

Regular daily testing (and sometimes hourly), as mandated by law. https://www.cityofrochester.gov/2024-water-quality-report "To ensure optimal dental protection, the State Department of Health requires that we monitor fluoride levels on a daily basis."

Hell, we do daily testing of the beach water in my state, let alone the drinking supply. They close them if stuff like E. coli is too high.
by rjst01 | 2025-06-30 19:06:19+00:00
Yes, but once that access is revoked, that is enough to be certain that the attacker can no longer issue certs. With your proposal, I would then have to audit my TXT records and delete only attacker-created records.

(Which in general would be a good practise anyway, because many services do use domain validation processes similar to what you propose)
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-30 19:06:21+00:00
It comes across as weird to me that it's so hard to get an actual NetMD deck which isn't portable since my mental image is that I make cassette tapes with a deck plugged into my stereo/computer and play them back on a walkman or car deck. But yeah, at some point I just started recording MD's off my computer the same way I record cassettes.
by jfengel | 2025-06-30 19:07:15+00:00
't Hooft has been arguing for superdeterminism for quite some time. And it is a valid alternative to other interpretations of quantum mechanics.

But I don't think it really solves any of the problems people care about. It replaces superposition with a set of predetermined outcomes which you cannot possibly know. Instead of a random number generator, you have a list of numbers duplicated at every point in the universe -- but whose values cannot be read except by doing the thing and finding out the result.

It works, and it is different. But I'm skeptical that it will actually lead to the kind of genuinely novel insights that 't Hooft suggests it will.

Obviously, he's got a Breakthrough Prize and a whole passel of others, and I got nuthin', so I'd believe him over me. But I think that the "right track", if we ever find it, is going to be found in some completely different direction.
by 0xWTF | 2025-06-30 19:07:18+00:00
Whenever I hear a critique of the US academy I'm reminded of Rodney Dangerfield and Sam Kinison's bit in Back to School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeeL-U7cbpE

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read (I believe on this very forum though I can't find the link, but also see 1, 2, and 3) that the European universities are often closely aligned with local industries. A challenge here in the US: outside Silicon Valley, what are the manufacturing industries in the US cities with universities? What are the major industries in Kansas City? Are those companies funding research at UMKC? What are the major industries in Dallas? Are those companies funding research at Southwestern?

Ronny Chieng actually breaks down the larger problem quite nicely: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/i1Hi_hacvN4

So now we do in fact have an incredible university system supported in part by a mess of underskilled labor in fly-over states that dropped out of college after saddling themselves with significant educational debt.

Wildly, the one industry that is a major economic driver in most cities is healthcare, which is a pretty dead-end industry in terms of economic output, that is, outside of certain world-reknowned institutions like the Mayo Clinic, healthcare doesn't really generate a significant exportable commodity.

(1) https://education.ec.europa.eu/education-levels/higher-educa...

(2) https://www.jstor.org/stable/24118541

(3) https://sciencebusiness.net/news/universities/deepening-coll...
by boroboro4 | 2025-06-30 19:07:28+00:00
It creates imbalance of power: the executive can keep making orders which are clearly unlawful, but because of this they are still gonna be applied to most of the people (apart from ones who can afford going to court) until SC will reach the orders on merits meaning not soon. Meaning by that time executive can make new orders.

I think you’ll see this playing out very soon.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-06-30 19:07:31+00:00
> Yes, and get bombarded with 20 ads

It's wild that people don't see that LLMs are following the same playbook as streaming etc. and in time will predatorily monetize in every way possible. If you think people are trapped as customers because they can't do without tv shows, imagine five years from now when it's general thinking that people have become dependent on the tech giants for.
Show HN: DXT registry (one-click MCP install)
by tanmay-gala | 2025-06-30 19:07:43+00:00
DXT got released by Anthropic on Friday as the next step to MCP

But no one had a unified registry of good DXT ready MCP servers

So I've set up a GitHub list!

To get ahead of questions: - Could this be done in existing MCP registries? Yes, but it hasn't - Hasn't Anthropic already got a registry? Yes, but it's already stale. - Is this even worthy of a post? Probably not, but its the best way to get folks to add their servers.
by JdeBP | 2025-06-30 19:07:50+00:00
As noted when this has been submitted in the past, this history pretty much stops in 2008, even though the copyright year has been changed since.

It also confuses, as computer people are prone to doing, a disclaimer with a disclosure.

But that disclosure does explain why it completely misses DocBook XML, many things things like pod2man, ASCIIDOC, slashdoc, and a lot more. There have been many developments in the 21st century. If you pick up NetBSD 10, for example, you'll find that it comes with its manual pages in parallel HTML versions, with html[1-9] subdirectories paralleling the man[1-9] subdirectories.

I have parallel DocBook XML subdirectories on some of my systems, and a DocBook XML viewer analogue to the mdless that was mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347893 half a decade ago.
by photonios | 2025-06-30 19:08:18+00:00
I work remotely. I drive a 8y old BMW 2 series (manual). Ran 230k KM (142k miles). Has been very good to us. Bought it outright for €11k 4 years ago.

I'll probably drive it into the ground because I drive like a maniac. A new car is wasted on me.

Con: I pay my ass of in taxes because its a diesel. Pro: I imported it for free.
by voxleone | 2025-06-30 19:08:38+00:00
> Language and vision are just the beginning — the parts we were able to digitize first - not necessarily the most central to intelligence.

I probably made a mistake when i asserted that -- should have thought it over. Vision is evolutionarily older and more “primitive”, while language is uniquely human [or maybe, more broadly, primate, cetacean, cephalopod, avian...] symbolic, and abstract — arguably a different order of cognition altogether. But i maintain that each and every sense is important as far as human cognition -- and its replication -- is concerned.
by seydor | 2025-06-30 19:09:01+00:00
There are new ideas, people are finding new ways to build vision models, which then are applied to language models and vice versa (like diffusion).

The original idea of connectionism is that neural networks can represent any function, which is the fundamental mathematical fact. So we should be optimistic, neural nets will be able to do anything. Which neural nets? So far people have stumbled on a few productive architectures, but it appears to be more alchemy than science. There is no reason why we should think there won't be both new ideas and new data. Biology did it, humans will do it too.

> we’re engaged in a decentralized globalized exercise of Science, where findings are shared openly

Maybe the findings are shared, if they make the Company look good. But the methods are not anymore
by n8cpdx | 2025-06-30 19:09:33+00:00
I was wondering the other day about something like this for retro computing hardware, including game consoles.

You can buy a device that looks perfectly good, but has rusty parts, leaking capacitors, shoddy/counterfeit replacement parts, and who knows what else. And if it wasn’t previously opened (they seemingly always are), you don’t know what was done to it.

I don’t think you can really solve that through tech, it’s really more of a record keeping issue. Which actually seems to be mostly how carfax works?

I’ve thought about fixing up consoles and selling them (more for cost recovery and to free up space than for profit), but I wonder about how to share information about the work and the risks in a way that the purchaser is likely to understand and appreciate.
by alok-g | 2025-06-30 19:10:03+00:00
Partly for my own use but largely for learning purposes, I developed a multi-platform note-taking app using Flutter and Dart. It's a bare-bones mobile-first app that stores notes as *.md files to support SyncThing-based synchronization. The UI is inspired by Android apps like Omni Notes, Material Notes, Noteless, etc., which however are either not multi-platform or not aimed at SyncThing-based synchronization. Obsidian's mobile app, in my opinion, is not as mobile-friendly as these apps. Joplin is the closest I could find but which I did not like.

It's tested only on Android 10 and Windows 11. Bring done with Flutter, it should work on iPhone, Mac and Linux too but would need building, testing and fixing various issues found.

Had I known this would take me 3.5 weeks (dedicated time) and 6100 lines of code (including comments), I would not have done it. Ideal would have been just a week.

Currently closed source.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-30 19:10:38+00:00
> There’s been a lot of news in the past couple years about LLMs but has there been any breakthroughs making headlines anywhere else in AI?

Yeah, lots of stuff tied to robotics, for instance; this overlaps with vision, but the advances go beyond vision.

Audio has seen quite a bit. And I imagine there is stuff happening in niche areas that just aren't as publicly interesting as language, vision/imagery, audio, and robotics.
by mmastrac | 2025-06-30 19:11:05+00:00
This is a much better experience than the previous Qualcomm debug experience, which was a hand-rolled set of read/write/execute primitives exposed over USB. It was hilariously undersecured, allowing a few of us to continually get root on various Qualcomm models.

In seriousness, these debug ports are seriously lacking in most mobile chipsets. MediaTek still has the old-style approach in many of their devices, requiring some incantations which expose serial over USB, but not in the way you think -- it's serial over USB pins!

I've done tonnes of work with mobile chipsets and security and this seems like they've finally started down the road to making this functionality accessible. Don't be surprised if you don't see this supported out of the box in most places, though. Most OEMs will certainly disable this once they've adapted their bootloaders to it. The big G doesn't like debuggability in end user devices.
by LeFantome | 2025-06-30 19:11:08+00:00
Is that really it? To cut off Xlibre at the pass?

Because I am struggling to understand what the advantage of this over just using Xorg. I think 90% of desktops will be Wayland as we leave 2027 (and more than 50% are now). I also think installing even Xwayland may be niche in 5 years.

That said, Xwayland will be maintained by Red Hat until 2040 at least (minimum required for even RHEL 11). Xorg itself will be maintained intil at least 2032 and, by others, probably a decade or more after that.

Xorg already uses lininput, DRI, KMS, and Mesa and shares a lot of code with Xwayland. So keeping it going will not be hard.

So, what is the advantage of this approach over just using Xorg? I mean, if your goal is to run a legacy X11 window manager that is.
by johncole | 2025-06-30 19:11:20+00:00
For a long time we setup a raspberry pi with screen and monitor for our kids to use. It was perfect, the gpu wasn’t strong enough to watch YouTube but it was fun to play some basic games and get curious about coding.

We have banned YouTube on our house, without an adult watching. But I make a private playlist that has interesting videos I see, mostly educational, so when we have time to watch we watch something of quality.
by poolpOrg | 2025-06-30 19:11:25+00:00
We will publish a comparison but I'm cautious as it can easily look like an attack over what others do and I feel strongly about not being hostile to other open-source projects :-)

Long story short: we provide multi-source/multi-destination/multi-storage (ie: backup S3 to disk, restore to SFTP), we have a nice UI, we reimplemented our own database over CAS allowing us to have a virtual filesystem + a ton of nice features on top of the snapshots, + an archive format of our own and other nice features.

All of this is in the free version, what's going to be paid is plugins to backup commercial services, enterprise features like multi-user support, ACLs, or compliance related features (ie: GDPR / sensitive data detection, ...), backup orchestration over a pool of machines, and more.
by chrisgd | 2025-06-30 19:11:29+00:00
This is my dream. I started building something that would upload all my photos from my phone to my desktop, back them up somewhere and then present them 6 at a time on a local website solely so you could look at them again and decide if you wanted to keep them. Heart any you wanted to keep, favorite some, and delete the rest then show me 6 more.

The addition of an AI tool is a great idea.
by fxnn | 2025-06-30 19:11:31+00:00
No, it did not mostly refer to to-do lists. At least that's not what I understood.

It was an example, yes. But he also referred to Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, a huge collection of notes, systematically interconnected, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann#Note-taking_sys.... Looks like the author followed a similar approach in Obsidian, a tool to store markdown notes in an interconnected manner.

He wrote: "Roam Research turned bidirectional links into a cult. Obsidian let the cult go off-grid. The lore deepened. You weren’t taking notes. You were building a lattice of meaning. ... A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on."

But it didn't work out: "the insight was never lived. It was stored. ... In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. ... The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold. That self never arrived."

Hence, what he mostly wrote down were thoughts, ideas, quotes, hoping that insights and value will come from this huge collection. Turns out, it wasn't so easy for him. I believe he'll need more focus, more curation, a more targeted and heartfelt approach.

Well, it sounds like it did work out back then for Niklas Luhmann. He said that all his famous publications wouldn't have been possible without his structured note taking approach. His 90,000 cards were digitized and are now available online, see https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel...
by SpecialistK | 2025-06-30 19:11:59+00:00
I can only assume Sony thought that most people wouldn't keep a hifi deck near an early 00s desktop PC. And by the NetMD era, portable MP3 was the hot new thing so that got most of the attention. There were some cool Vaio PCs and laptops with NetMD drives built in that I would like to play with...
by dekhn | 2025-06-30 19:12:24+00:00
DAT was popular in the jam-band-taping community around the time this device was released. Folks would go to shows, and either record the show with their own mics and tape deck, or by plugging a line directly into the soundboard and then taping. I think back in the 70s, people used reel-to-reel tapes, and many tapers upgraded to DAT (IIUC, not very many used regular analog cassettes). Tape copies were distributed in a tree fashion and each generation was degraded compared to the original.

I wasn't able to do DAT because of the extremely high prices. So I mainly ended up with copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy analog cassette, which usually sounded terrible (lots of tape hiss and distortion).

Analog cassettes had their own issues: dual tape decks made very poor copies (I think this was some sort of copy protection feature) although you could use two decks. I was really glad to see analog go- these days, nearly eveyrthing is digitally recorded, with all the conveniences of digital, and many old reel to reel tapes and DATs have been captured with high quality devices.

It's also kind of funny that I lived through the entire CD era- from the first obscenely expensive CD readers to an age when everybody could buy a cheap blu-ray recorder to CDs being obsolete.
by jerf | 2025-06-30 19:13:12+00:00
This isn't really about the validity or utility of BitCoin.

It's about the financial wisdom of:

1. Buy some BitCoin. 2. Valuate that BitCoin as an asset at well over 100% in value, because the market lets you. 3. Issue stock against your supposed new valuation. 4. GOTO 1

Strategy (previously MicroStrategy) has been taking advantage of the fact that owning 1 BitCoin has caused the market to increase the value of their company by more than one BitCoin's worth, which they then issue stock against.

It doesn't matter if BitCoin is the future, this is still going to end in tears.

It wouldn't matter what the asset is or how valuable or useful it is... if the market is bonkers enough to value something $YOU buy at 200% of what you paid, simply because $YOU bought it (it's not like the actually become any more valuable when purchased by this company, it's not like an acquisition where there could be synergy of some kind), and then you repeatedly turn that overvaluation into leverage to buy more, the scheme will eventually collapse when the market returns to even a sane 100% valuation.

The only thing relevant about BitCoin is that it's on the short list of assets that a good chunk of buyers is willing to valuate at well over 100% just because someone bought it. A number of people are getting in on this game now too and that's going to further dilute this play.
by jpc0 | 2025-06-30 19:13:36+00:00
I liked where you started.

Any ASYNC operation, whether using coroutines or event based actors or whatever else should be modelled as a network call.

You need a handle that will contain information about the async call and will own the work it performs. You can have an API that explicitly says “I don’t care what happens to this thing just that it happens” and will crash on failure. Or you can handle its errors if there are any and importantly decide how to handle those errors.

Oh and failing to allocate/create that handle should be a breach of invariants and immediately crash.

That way you have all the control and flexibility and Async error handling becomes trivial, you can use whatever async pattern you want to manage async operations at that point as well.

And you also know you have fundamentally done something expensive in latency for the benefit of performance or access to information, because if it was cheap you would have just done it on the thread you are already using.
Show HN: I built a minimal site to quickly check Excel formulas
by coolpool | 2025-06-30 19:14:00+00:00
I got tired of digging through bloated sites just to remember Excel formula syntax, so I built a clean, fast alternative: https://excelformulas.co

It’s a simple site where you can search for Excel functions and see their syntax alongside plain-language explanations. You can also browse common formulas by category to quickly find what you need.

I originally built it for myself, but figured others might find it useful too — especially anyone who uses Excel a lot and doesn’t want to wade through docs or YouTube tutorials every time.

Would love your feedback — especially if you spot bugs, UX annoyances, or have ideas to make it more helpful!
by kayodelycaon | 2025-06-30 19:14:32+00:00
Since I was specifically talking about Toyota hybrid, let me elaborate…

The gas engine has a timing chain and chain-driven oil pump. Everything else runs off the DC-DC converter.

The transmission is two motor-generators and an ICE directly connected by fixed gearing. This is used to start the engine.

The ICE in a hybrid doesn’t need any accessories beyond what the electric drivetrain already provides. Therefore, it does not have a starter or alternator.

There are a lot fewer moving parts that can break or wear out.

It’s a pretty elegant system that bolts a bare ICE to what is otherwise an electric car.
by bitpush | 2025-06-30 19:15:49+00:00
Isnt that how the system is supposed to work, unless you think Apple would be always benevolent? I think HNers make a mistake (and believe Apple's marketing) that Apple always stands for users, cares about design, pushing the boundary, "think different" etc.

It is painfully obvious, but Apple's singular goal is to make money (profit for shareholders) and THAT IS A GOOD THING. They'll cut corners, test the boundaries in pursuit of that, and sometimes cross over it.

Suing them is the right way to fix those behaviors.
by standeven | 2025-06-30 19:16:08+00:00
It probably varies between EV manufacturers, but my Tesla Model 3 has been the easiest vehicle to self maintain that I’ve owned yet. Mostly due to how little maintenance there is, but also because of the completely open and online factory service manuals and parts manuals.

It’s ridiculously easy to look up a part number, order it online from wherever is most convenient, and follow the steps in the manual to replace it.
by gman2093 | 2025-06-30 19:16:46+00:00
I would have considered this article as overly grandiose a year ago. Part of me wonders if there is some possibility that this is becoming a more prevalent thinking. Even if bitcoin crashes to $0.01 USD, it still has some usefulness as a way to transfer value (Western Union's market cap: $2.77 billion). If the mighty dollar eventually falls out of favor, is the volatility enough to drive people away? Can it become a collective delusion to rival gold? For the near and medium term, I think giz user 'curry for breakfast' had a relevant comment:

"Money? No, not money, just dollars, and specifically dollars because that's all that are at stake here.

The bitcoin bubble could burst tomorrow and the rest of the world, and their currencies, which are backed by their nation's economies, will trundle on as happily as they've always done.

The only real losers would be the unlucky crypto gamblers. Wrong bet, wrong time. "
by languagehacker | 2025-06-30 19:17:16+00:00
I've been waiting for bitcoin to collapse since it started, and books like Number Go Up make an excellent case for why the whole thing is built on a house of cards. And yet, empires are bought and sold off of questionable financial vehicles all the time. Most of it is a ponzi scheme or some other mean grift.

The question mostly becomes, how much do you trust the creator of Inspector Gadget and a bit child actor with the guaranteeability of every Tether? The first full-scale run on it that shows an exchange can't be fulfilled in a timely fashion brings the whole enterprise to its knees, right?

The problem has now become that enough people think these instruments are legitimate that, like most questionable financial vehicles, when they collapse, some government entity will be required to bail the bad guys out and shift the cost onto anyone who was unlucky enough to be within the blast radius of the whole thing. Which is pretty much all of us at this point, either directly or indirectly.