MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why doesn't HN have dark mode yet?
by schappim | 2025-06-04 14:14:48+00:00
Hacker News could benefit from native dark mode support. For users who spend significant time reading here, particularly during evening hours or in low-light environments, a dark theme option would reduce eye strain. Currently, users seeking dark mode must install browser extensions that sometimes require broad permissions ("Read and change all your data on websites"). While these extensions work, they introduce an unnecessary dependency and potential privacy concern for what could be handled natively.

The web standard `prefers-color-scheme` media query has been widely supported since 2019, allowing sites to automatically respect users' system preferences. Implementation would involve straightforward CSS additions.

This feature would serve users with light sensitivity, those working in dimly lit spaces, and anyone who simply prefers dark interfaces. Given that many developers already use dark themes in their editors and terminals, there's likely meaningful demand within HN's user base.

The absence of this option stands out among text-heavy sites that have adopted dark modes. While not urgent, it represents a quality-of-life improvement that would cost little to implement but provide genuine value to a subset of the community.

Here are the current styles with dark mode support:

https://gist.github.com/schappim/d688c7090ea2e946e9379e2678d4d820

Previous requests:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=hn%20dark%20mode&sort=byPopularity&type=story
by Supermancho | 2025-06-04 14:16:15+00:00
> Trump, in contrast to historical fascists, neither wants a strong welfare state nor commands uniformed paramilitaries

Except, where he does. ICE+DHS+fragments of others are used as a paramilitary for specific and sweeping purposes. The welfare is pardoning away fines and liability for donors who enrich him. He's growing his base power, without being in full command of the nation. He's a populist. When it suits him, he'll hand out free bacon to the masses, while he supports porkbarrel for his oligarch friends.
by JdeBP | 2025-06-04 14:16:27+00:00
Really? Is that actually really true that they cannot get past the spec?

Because I followed the Wikipedia article to the article on The Register. Whoever wrote Wikipedia summarized El Reg's entire article as how gemini has been critized for excluding people. 1 sentence. But that's only what the headline says, for clickbait. The actual article body paints a very different picture, including the rather subtle (by Register standards) rebuttal of that criticism by pointing out that WWW browsers and the Internet are not in an everything-is-a-nail-and-I-have-this-hammer situation.

So I wonder how true it really is that there's this wave of criticism, and how much that is rather inferred from people reading headlines and nothing else beyond them. Like the Wikipedia author did.

That said, having discovered the existence of Gemini today, I am now wondering how much of a doddle it would be to add a gemini UCSPI-TCP server (which would obviously have to sit behind something like Hoffmann's sslserver) to Bernstein publicfile. The publicfile way would of course have a separate off-line tool to turn index.gopher into index.gemini, once at content generation time instead of over and over at runtime.

Hmmm.

Stop giving me distractions, people! I'm supposed to be getting the next djbwares running on NetBSD. (-:

P.S. I have had the GOPHER server that I added to publicfile running for some time. I use it to publish a not-very-secret list of packages and source archives. It gets some quite odd requests in its logs.
by jrockway | 2025-06-04 14:17:03+00:00
I agree with that. Modern Unix is a 6-of-one-half-dozen-of-another type situation. Yes, terminal emulators and the termcap database are improved. But now, the traditional Unix user might be surprised at how things are done. I have accepted that ... systemd ... manages my networking now (ok, it's networkd or something I guess?). But if you can't accept that, it's good to have some option that just uses ifconfig.
by GoatInGrey | 2025-06-04 14:17:48+00:00
Treating aging is not the same as treating death. The reason the two are colloquially linked is because aging has been by far the dominant driver of death for all of human history. To your point, aging has never failed to kill a human.

There are a couple reasons to believe that aging is malleable.

One is that we know how to de-age human cells using the same factors that fertilized oocytes use to de-age the underlying egg cell (typically many decades in age). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell

The second is that nature has examples of biological immortality. Planaria are a fascinating one as they have among the trashiest, most mutated genome on the planet. They're even polypoid, where they have multiple sets of chromosomes, but they're simultaneously the best regenerators on the planet. Despite having a discrete nervous system and centralized brain, you can slice a planaria into hundreds of pieces, and each of those will regenerate into a full, functional adult. They don't age, they don't get cancer. The issue is that we have no idea how this happens. So there is still a lot for us to learn about the fundamentals of aging and regeneration overall.
by amluto | 2025-06-04 14:17:54+00:00
> This is a self inflicted problem. They're programmed for fuel economy (we're talking a small fraction of an MPG here) at the expense of drivability.

I find it hard to believe that the Smart car I rented once shifted terribly for fuel economy reasons. It just sucked. I’ve never been so worried that I’d get rear ended leaving a stop sign (during the unbelievably slow shift from first to second), and putting the pedal to the metal didn’t make any difference.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-06-04 14:18:00+00:00
Worth adding to the list are osteoporosis, secondary infection, hearing loss, macular degeneration (need more advancement here), hypothyroidism, chronic kidney, acute consequences of heart disease/ stroke prevention.

Not all of the solutions can be called "cures" but a solution nonetheless is better than nothing and calling it "old age, shit out of luck."
by alex_c | 2025-06-04 14:18:08+00:00
I don't know anything about Cord beyond this article, but my team has worked on many projects over the years where we had to add chat / commenting / notifications functionality.

I can see this being a tough market.

One - it's a crowded field, with many solutions in each of those three categories. I don't think we've actually come across Cord while evaluating solutions, which just shows how noisy it is.

Two - I struggle seeing "chat / commenting / notifications" as a unified category. Every project we've worked on had unique requirements for each of these (whether justified or not...) so every implementation ended up being different.

It's definitely a pain to roll out these features from scratch, and we always preferred using something off-the-shelf where possible.

But by the time you finish evaluating options, pick one, implement and customize it, deal with its limitations and bugs - plus projecting several years of usage costs, and uncertainty dealing with an outside vendor - I can easily see how the balance might tip to doing it in-house in many cases.

Not trying to armchair quarterback - I know how hard startups are, and respect to the Cord team for being in the trenches! Just sharing my experience.
by roenxi | 2025-06-04 14:18:56+00:00
> Many historians consider the term “fascism” to have become vague and worn out by polemical overuse...

There is no definition of facism and as far as I know there almost never was. The reason the term is so popular in politics is because it can be used to label anything without being falsifiable.

Trump probably is facist, but the tricky thing to define is what properties a politician would need to have to be not-facist because a lot of his opponents also appear to be facists. All the bad things that characterise facism also characterise non-facists systems. Nationalism is not facism, nor are hierarchies. Nor is violence. Nor are cults of personality. Lots of systems have those things individually or in combination (like communism, for that matter).

In practice facists are precisely the people who self-identify as facists. People have stopped doing that because facist ideologies lost to liberal ones in literal and metaphoric senses.
by hkpack | 2025-06-04 14:18:57+00:00
I would not provide you with links, sorry. I follow different drone manufactures and over the last years they all had periodic issues sourcing components from China including chips for flight controllers so they found alternatives (i.e. not manufactured in China) for all major components AFAIK .

I've heard that the most difficult to replace is the camera sensor. Drone cameras are produced now in Ukraine as well, however non-Chinese sensors as far as I know are very expensive.
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-04 14:18:58+00:00
Many years ago I tried Tabbles (https://tabbles.net/en/), apparently it still exists, but it just didn't work out so well. The main concern is compatibility. I tag up my stuff meticulously and then the project is killed and I'm left with wasted effort.

I think the idea will go away, similar to how ontologies and Semantic Web, manual knowledge graphs etc gave way to processing unstructured data with LLMs. Instead of tags, we should have source/creation-context-based metadata and embeddings computed with language models. Then you can do natural fuzzy search.
by obscurette | 2025-06-04 14:19:26+00:00
I suspect that responses are altered/corrected based on what people query from popular online models. I have had several occasions that I ask some "How do I ... in X software?" question some day and model keeps hallucinating nonexistant config options regardless how many times I keep saying "This option doesn't exist in software X". But if I asked the same question some days later, the answer was completely different and made even some sense.
by codeflo | 2025-06-04 14:19:51+00:00
I can't shake the feeling that this a dream that was pursued by people who (at least for a time) didn't need the income, and not technology that was under any pressure to actually work. Something like a lifestyle business, but in this case, maybe a lifestyle charity.

The article is full of "community" this and "local people" that, and very low on details. The little that is there raises red flags. For example: The fact that their rented machine shop had to close down is given as an explanation for them having to sell all their machines below cost and then not having the money to buy the machines back when they found a new place. That doesn't add up: temporary storage spaces exist and aren't even expensive, given that you can choose a remote location. It seems like a crucial detail was left out, maybe one that would paint them in a bad light.

I gather that they sell (apparently unsafe?) wood chippers, presses and some injection moulds, probably at cost. I don't understand what else is there. The "version 4" release thing mentioned in the article might be their open-source "academy" [1, 2] that's supposed to teach you how to start your local recycling shop. It includes valuable tips like "add all your expenses" and "don't forget to include taxes" and comes complete with an empty Excel sheet -- I'm sorry, a "Business Calculator". No commits since 2020, so the "version 5" of this guide that they claim to have been working on for five years must be hosted somewhere on a private GitHub fork instead. I'm sure it's awesome. Best of luck.

[1] https://community.preciousplastic.com/academy/business/works...

[2] https://github.com/ONEARMY/precious-plastic-kit
by CuriouslyC | 2025-06-04 14:20:01+00:00
I use APIs for coding with Aider (gemini 2.5 pro is my preferred model), but still subscribe to ChatGPT plus because being able to use better models like O3 and 4.1 in chat, plus unlimited image generation, Realtime voice/video, Deep Research and Codex (as a backup agent while I'm manually driving Aider) ends up being worth the price.
by K0balt | 2025-06-04 14:20:14+00:00
>>This "government issued fiat currency" garbage needs to die yesterday: a lot of people are going to lose their shirt when the first one blows up.

What you are saying is a risk endemic to all fiat currencies, including stablecoins.

All symbolically represented forms of value quantization are subject to a failure of confidence. Cryptocurrencies are nothing new in this regard. All money is memetic in nature.
by TuringTourist | 2025-06-04 14:20:18+00:00
You could try the thing that made it click for me, long after x86 was dominant.

Show them a CPU running on Logisim (or the like, such as the newer Digital) and show how when you plug a program into a ROM, it turns into wires lighting up and flipping gates/activating data lines/read registers etc.
by toast0 | 2025-06-04 14:20:38+00:00
Hardware issues happen, but if you're lucky it's a simple failure and the box stops dead. Not much fun, but recovery can be quick and automated.

What's real trouble is when the hardware fault is like one of the 16 nic queues stopped, so most connections work, but not all (depends on the hash of the 4-tuple) or some bit in the ram failed and now you're hitting thousands of ECC correctable errors per second and your effective cpu capacity is down to 10% ... the system is now too slow to work properly, but manages to stay connected to dist and still attracts traffic it can't reasonably serve.

But OS/thread hangs are avoidable in my experience. If you run your beam system with very few OS processes, there's no reason for the OS to cause trouble.

But on the topic of a 15ms pause... it's likely that that pause is causally related to cascading pauses, it might be the beginning or the end or the middle... But when one thing slows down, others do too, and some processes can't recover when the backlog gets over a critical threshold which is kind of unknowable without experiencing it. WhatsApp had a couple of hacks to deal with this. A) Our gen_server aggregation framework used our hacky version of priority messages to let the worker determine the age of requests and drop them if they're too old. B) we had a hack to drop all messages in a process's mailbox through the introspection facilities and sometimes we automated that with cron... Very few processes can work through a mailbox with 1 million messages, dropping them all gets to recovery faster. C) we tweaked garbage collection to run less often when the mailbox was very large --- i think this is addressed by off-heap mailboxes now, but when GC looks through the mailbox every so many iterations and the mailbox is very large, it can drive an unrecoverable cycle as eventually GC time limits throughput below accumulation and you'll never catch up. D) we added process stats so we could see accumulation and drain rates and estimate time to drain / or if the process won't drain and built monitoring around that.
by fuelled6532 | 2025-06-04 14:20:51+00:00
You know these people are volunteers, right?

Even the ones getting paid, are making a tiny fraction of what they could in the private sector doing something more greedy with their time.

Life is not all startup exits and stock options. Some folks are actually trying to do good in the world.

Sure, they should have kept the 100k, but giving it away was well aligned with their mission.
by mhordynski | 2025-06-04 14:21:01+00:00
Hi all,

Today we’re releasing ragbits v1.0.0 along with a brand new CLI template: create-ragbits-app — a project starter to go from zero to a fully working RAG application.

RAGs are everywhere now. You can roll your own, glue together SDKs, or buy into a SaaS black box. We’ve tried all of these — and still felt something was missing: standardization without losing flexibility.

So we built ragbits — a modular, type-safe, open-source toolkit for building GenAI apps. It’s battle-tested in 7+ real-world projects, and it lets us deliver value to clients in hours.

And now, with create-ragbits-app, getting started is dead simple:

uvx create-ragbits-app

Pick your vector DB (Qdrant and pgvector templates ready — Chroma supported, Weaviate coming soon)

Plug in any LLM (OpenAI wired in, swap out with anything via LiteLLM)

Parse docs with either Unstructured or Docling

Optional add-ons:

- Hybrid search (fastembed sparse vectors) - Image enrichment (multimodal LLM support) - Observability stack (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo) Comes with a clean React UI, ready for customization

Whether you're prototyping or scaling, this stack is built to grow with you — with real tooling, not just examples.

Source code: https://github.com/deepsense-ai/ragbits

Would love to hear your feedback or ideas — and if you’re building RAG apps, give create-ragbits-app a shot and tell us how it goes
by andrewingram | 2025-06-04 14:21:02+00:00
I don't work for Tiptap, but I'm curious as to what your expectations are here.

They're providing tools for integrating Tiptap with AI, including ones for reviewing suggested changes that come from LLMs. I don't really see something that Tiptap should be accepting liability for. As the developer working with Tiptap, I'd argue it's your responsibility to make sure (a) the prompts are giving generally good and useful output, and (b) that you incorporate any necessary UI to put a human in the loop of accepting the AI output. On the latter point, their AI Changes extension is one such example, but there are any number of ways of achieving this.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-04 14:21:06+00:00
I agree, but in the GCP world, a lot of these things are merging. My understanding is that Cloud Run, Cloud Run Functions (previously known as Cloud Functions Gen2) and even App Engine Flexible all run in the same underlying cloud run infrastructure, so it's essentially just some interface differences that to me now seem more like historical legacy/backwards compatibility reasons than meaningful functionality differences (e.g. Functions can now handle multiple concurrent requests).
by skissane | 2025-06-04 14:21:43+00:00
The Gregorian calendar is essentially non-Christian in origin. Yes, it is named for Pope Gregory, but he just tinkered with the leap year rule, other than that it is essentially the same as the Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar

Now, the common AD/CE year numbering is obviously Christian in motivation, but that’s technically distinct from the Gregorian calendar-the Julian calendar historically used other year numbering systems too (ab urbe condita, anno Diocletiani aka anno martyrum, anno mundi), and the Gregorian calendar itself doesn’t care what numbers you assign to years beyond modulo 400 - you could replace 2025 with 2425 or 12025 and it would still work fine. But that’s the thing, Unix time doesn’t care whether 1970 is called 1970 or 1570 or 2370 or 11970, only how distant you are from it - so it isn’t really tied to our Christianity-inspired year numbering, only to 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z as an instant

I think CE + 10,000 - called “Holocene Era” (HE), also sometimes expanded Human Era or Historical Era - is a good proposal - high compatibility with CE (you can just pretend 2025 is missing the leading digit), makes all dates from recorded human history positive. Okay, is ambiguous in that 2025 CE might get confused with 2025 HE (= -7975 CE = 7976 BCE), but in practice that’s unlikely since that’s prehistorical and essentially nothing (outside astronomy) from that long ago can be dated to a year’s accuracy anyway
by a4isms | 2025-06-04 14:21:48+00:00
p.s. I said it wasn't easy, do I have any suggestions for selling to Enterprises where there may not be trust between the users of your product and their leadership?

Yes I do, here's one that is very well-suited to startups who want to sell to the enterprise: Product-Led Growth ("PLG"). This is defined as building a product and customer acquisition strategy around people trying the product for themselves and then buying the product without interacting with a human.

To make this work, you have to strategize which feature or features will close people using the product, as opposed to leaders looking at a PowerPoint with estimated ROI numbers. You have to make them discoverable, and you have to find a way to surface the value to users... In the product, not in a white paper or on a marketing web site.

You also have to have someone own PLG and ruthlessly experiment with user experience design and product design to drive better and better PLG. Yes, you have to track it and prioritize it.

PLG can't be your only strategy, you still need Enterprise Sales. For most enterprise products, PLG will never generate as much revenue as sales. It will be tempting to ditch it as wasteful compared to just building whatever the C-Suite demands from salespeople. BUT!

If you have any traction at all with PLG, your product will also be an easier enterprise sale. The problem the author listed is greatly mitigated by a product that has even modest success getting individuals and/or small businesses to buy it based on their trial experience only.

PLG can be the key to unlocking enterprise revenue, you just have to play the "long game" with PLG and treat it as a particularly honest way of obtaining user feedback, which must be coupled with a mechanism for improving the product based on that honest feedback: Someone must own PLG, must be held accountable for driving PLG, and they must have enough authority not to be swept aside by prioritizing top-down features.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-04 14:21:54+00:00
Well, it's at least enough to make the future dark for us. If you believe that there isn't any future worth having, and act on that belief, then your future is likely to be fairly crummy.

And, if enough people in a society believe and act that way, the future is likely to be crummier for the society as a whole, too.
by taeric | 2025-06-04 14:21:58+00:00
I think the main counter-argument is that people like to organize in static systems? Even if you use tags, you almost certainly want to restrict the specific tags that you allow so that you don't have a data science/cleanup task of normalizing things later.

Tags also fail because people then want to categorize their tags. Which tag is the author's name, versus the editor's? Publish year, versus year I read it? I suppose we could say that people want "slots" not "tags"?
by jannes | 2025-06-04 14:22:42+00:00
They must have sold the domain to the job portal cord.co. I got an email about it in February:

> We're becoming cord­.­com

> Hi,

> Over the next few weeks cord­.­co is becoming cord­.­com. Adding an "m" to the end of our URL is one of the smaller things we've done. But it represents something much bigger: that cord has become the trusted source for tech hiring in the UK.
by smrtinsert | 2025-06-04 14:22:56+00:00
My mid life has been by design and its going great. My father had a lucrative career at the significant cost of family time. I'm around and engaged in being a dad and husband. I got into software because it offered great work life balance and its relatively easy and fun. That said, I'm the type of person who has a hard time not working into the early hours if I get caught in a problem. Sometimes I wonder if that's truly nature or nurture from watching my father. I take issue with companies that force that lifestyle on me though.

The other day we went for ice cream after dinner out and movie. I can't tell you fine people enough how much of an accomplishment that felt to me. It's something so simple it must seem ridiculous. I never wanted big money. The cost is simply too high.
by vikingerik | 2025-06-04 14:23:15+00:00
"Galaxies would be destroyed" is extremely misleading hyperbole. Nothing gets destroyed; at most a relatively tiny proportion of the mass hits the central black holes or gets flung out.

They'll get "destroyed" as much as pouring two drinks into the same cup "destroys" them. Nothing gets destroyed, you just get an intermingled mix.