MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by muzani | 2025-06-24 07:50:48+00:00
Talking is a skill. Skills are improved with usage and practice. Not everyone wants to practice on another human. Honestly, it's a bit of a jerk move to date people to practice dating someone better.

When people say they're unattractive, often it's not because they're ugly. Ugly is a disadvantage, but not the biggest one.

For both men and women, it's usually because they lack confidence. Or they're boring. Or sleazy. If you're getting into a first date and not a second, you're likely attractive enough on the 'resume', just messing up on the actual date. You might be saying something wrong. You might be delivering a good joke the wrong way. Sometimes it's just saying things in the wrong order.

The longer they go without some form of success, the less confident they become.

I thought the diagnosis was fairly clear; sorry for jumping straight to pitching a cure. This is a good example of saying things in the wrong order.
by tetha | 2025-06-24 07:52:33+00:00
And shapes, though you can get that with some ASCII art as well.

I've had a few scripts some time ago that took a long time to run, so I wanted a progress indicator I could see from across the room - that way I could play some guitar while monitoring the computer doing stuff in the evening.

Hence, the log messages got prefixed with tags like:

> ] >> ] # normal progress /!\/!\] # it had to engage in a workaround x_x ] # if it had to stop.
Ask HN: Why do so few tools import data from their competitors?
by sigalor | 2025-06-24 07:53:26+00:00
Let's consider Bluesky for example. When you sign up there, your timeline is empty. But many people are switching to Bluesky from a platform like X.

It would be super simple for Bluesky to add a "Import your X account data", where you log in with X and then it reads out all your profile data (e.g. profile picture, bio, all posts etc.) automatically. Step by step, the users themselves would "reconstruct" X within a technologically more advanced (e.g. federated or peer-to-peer) platform. Not an external tool, but an official importer developed, built-in and promoted by Bluesky.

I've seen the same thing in so many other regards, that there seems to be a strange aversion to importing data from competitors (or it's just not been done), even though it would improve usability and ease of transition to something better soooo much. Why is this?
by murshudoff | 2025-06-24 07:55:16+00:00
Thanks for sharing so much detail. I am the CTO & Co-Founder of https://turbotable.ai (landing is outdated, will be updated soon), similar product in the space, but mainly focused on more general automation and data analysis for non-technical teams. OCR is one of the tools in our arsenal and our bet is that LLMs will get better at it. 2 limitations with this approach I can see: - No reliable grounding, bounding box (for now) - Context length (we have a solution for this, similar to Zerox by Omni)

Even if in the long run foundation models will not solve OCR completely and reliably, we still have option to develop custom solutions or to integrate with mature players.

I’d love to connect with other founders as well.
by Defletter | 2025-06-24 07:56:50+00:00
You say that like governments, like the British government (since you brought them up), didn't finish paying off its debt to slave owners in 2015 (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...) for debt created decades before the American civil war over slavery. Are you okay with this? And if so, why is paying off this debt okay when slavery is so far removed, but the concept of reparations isn't?
by IlikeKitties | 2025-06-24 07:57:03+00:00
Fairphone has yet to figure out how to deal with updates in a timely and stable matter and we are 5 phones in. And all their phones consistently had hardware issues of some kind or another.

I wish them good luck, their phones are the kind of device i'd like to buy but i'll do that after they have proven that they can actually deliver what they promise.
by lrvick | 2025-06-24 07:57:14+00:00
Remember that Whatsapp belongs to Mark Zuckerburg, not you, the users, or the developers. They can ban anyone for any reason at any time, and it does not need to be a good reason. There is no appeals court for corpotech.

This is a great lesson on the fragility of building businesses on private, centralized, and proprietary platforms.

It is a lesson I wish I learned a lot earlier in my career.
by bramhaag | 2025-06-24 07:57:16+00:00
Micay did not fully leave the project [1]. AFAIK he is the only senior developer left, after their other senior developer was forcibly conscripted earlier this year [2].

[1] https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/12565-is-gos-development-sl...

[2] https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/21819-impact-of-ongoing-war...
I built a gamified app to help you quit bad habits – feedback wanted
by skyzouw | 2025-06-24 07:57:22+00:00
I recently launched StopAddict, a lightweight and gamified app to help people quit their addictions (dopamine, nicotine, social media, etc.) and rebuild self-discipline one day at a time.

Every day you resist a bad habit, you earn XP and level up your character. If you relapse, your streak and level reset — it’s brutal, but effective. There’s also a journal and daily review to reflect on your progress and triggers.

Why I built it: I struggled for years with compulsive phone use and unhealthy routines. None of the solutions I tried really worked. So I built the tool I wish I had — minimalist, fun, and designed to make progress visible.

I’d love feedback from the HN community — especially if you’ve ever tried to build self-discipline or quit something hard. Happy to share the tech stack, roadmap, and open up access if anyone’s interested.

Live here : https://www.stopaddict.net/
by isaacfrond | 2025-06-24 07:57:33+00:00
Mathematics isn't monolithic—it depends heavily on the axioms you choose. Change the axioms, and the theorems change. ZFC, ZF¬C, intuitionistic logic, non-Euclidean geometry—each yields a different “math,” all internally consistent. So it’s not right to say math “just is” in some absolute sense. We’re not just discovering math; we’re exploring the consequences of chosen assumptions.

For instance:

Under Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the Axiom of Choice (ZFC), every set can be well-ordered, but we do get the Hahn–Banach paradoxes.

Under ZF without Choice, analysis as we know it no longer holds.

In constructive mathematics, which avoids the law of the excluded middle, many classical theorems lose their usual formulations or proofs.

Non-Euclidean geometries arise from altering the parallel postulate. Within their own axioms, they are as internally consistent and "natural" as Euclidean geometry. Do non-intersecting lines exist in this universe? I've no idea.
by MohamedMabrouk | 2025-06-24 07:58:46+00:00
I think the modular proposition is to solve the AI infra problem using a modern systems programming language but with a python syntax (to keep the mental overhead low) it is mainly trying to replace C++/CUDA. I am not sure Julia is suitable for such endeavour. Julia is not marketed as a systems programming language and I find it hard to believe that it can be one as dyamically typed langauge with GC and JIT. Could Julia replace python in the high-level dynamic code space used in research and training? maybe. but I find it really hard to believe that it can replace CUDA/ROCm/C++ .. etc.
by cbolton | 2025-06-24 07:58:49+00:00
> Even in more literary sci-fi, for example Dune, the appeal is because it's basically just a medieval story transplanted into space. The focus is on politics and the human experience, not "what if storms lasted longer".

Yeah well if you dismiss more literary SF because it focuses on human experience rather than vibranium or whatever, it's not surprising that what remains has flat characters. Don't you see the circular logic?

It reminds me of Sturgeon's law.
by close04 | 2025-06-24 08:00:00+00:00
Most of the bad paths are usually taken by engineers with little or no experience being audited. After going through the ringer a few times (learn not to answer questions that aren't asked, or that they have a say in what that control should be) the pendulum swings in the other direction, where the answers are always good-path, not necessarily the real-path. At least until the practical part of the audit starts to look at what they really do, not what they say they do.

There's another giant pothole to navigate in many organizations, related to this:

> when they could have just said (...) and leaned on the fact that auditors expect management to make risk assessments

When management has decision paralysis and fear of accountability the engineers feel the need to compensate for the tight spot and solve problems the way they know how to solve them. With technical measures. And a technical measure that fixes the organizational problem tends to be complex and fidgety. Doubly hard for the auditors to properly take in.
by onli | 2025-06-24 08:00:15+00:00
Last I checked he announced his departure only to rescind that announcement later. For example in the discussion about the shutdown of the Mozilla location service he was active and spoke for the project, completely derailing the issue with versions of the accusations the video depicts as well, which was afterwards.

I am always a bit sorry when I have to bring this up, that is why I only mentioned it when prompted. Mental health is a sensitive topic and hammering the problem won't help him, but it is just so relevant when users rely on the security of their system, even pick Graphene because of heightened security needs.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-06-24 08:00:25+00:00
Yeah, this is like if you asked your friend how much more productive they think coffee makes them, and they replied with a four hundred thousand degree polynomial over the milliliter. Reality is never that predictable; reasonable people can recognize when they have run out of significant digits. Something has gone severely wrong in your data-modeling, your invocation of the model, or both. If it actually is doing compute for 15s, then to the extent that this works, it is wrapping a vastly simpler function, which I would suggest you graph and use going forward instead. It will save you the runtime, its outputs will be more reliable, and you will get actual insights.
by kobenni | 2025-06-24 08:01:24+00:00
This post reminds me of myself in the past.

One thing I found very helpful was to regularly practice mindfulness meditation, as it reduces my desire for entertainment and generally seems to improve my executive function a lot. It also caused other improvements to my well-being in general.

Regarding a technological solution to blocking, I did the following (on Android, I can handle myself on non-portable devices):

1: Use adguard to block the relevant addresses on DNS level. I chose adguard specifically because it allows setting regex-like patterns on what addresses to block, eliminating loop holes.

2: Use applock (I haven't informed if applock specifically is better or worse than alternatives) to require a passcode when opening settings, when opening adguard, and when opening applock itself. Store this passcode in a way that it's cumbersome but possible to reach. Ask a friend or relative to set and store it for you if necessary.

3: Remove the icons of adguard and applock from the home screen, so that they are only reachable through settings -> apps.

This has worked well for me. It's cumbersome enough to discourage me from deactivating it. It's not so cumbersome that I can't update the block list if necessary. It's flexible enough that I can very precisely choose what to block and what not. And it's specialized for (android) smartphones, which are the worst scrolling addiction drivers.

You could also throw in Google parental controls to stop yourself from downloading apps if necessary, but I found that DNS blocks are enough for me.

If you struggle with other devices as well, like TVs, consider whether you can get away with not owning these devices at all.

All that being said, professional psychological help for addiction and executive dysfunction exists. That would have been my last resort if the methods mentioned above hadn't turned out to be sufficient for me.

Good luck, don't give up.
by Defletter | 2025-06-24 08:01:59+00:00
I agree, the fact that the UK government was still paying off slave-owner debt in 2015 (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...) instead of freeing itself from that debt because the idea of giving the descendants of slave owners who were "harmed" in the loss of their "property", is completely bonkers.
by lis | 2025-06-24 08:02:02+00:00
We've forked excalidraw a while ago to allow running excalidraw without firebase as a backend. This can already be self-hosted. It needs some love, but it's a good starting point:

* https://github.com/b310-digital/excalidraw * https://github.com/b310-digital/excalidraw-room/ * https://gitlab.com/kiliandeca/excalidraw-fork * https://gitlab.com/kiliandeca/excalidraw-storage-backend
by _Algernon_ | 2025-06-24 08:03:27+00:00
The fact that the tools have survived and are still used today is at least somewhat indicative of their quality though. A lot of worse designs have likely been selected away due to nobody even bothering to use them.

P(old thing being good | old thing still being used after N years) is pretty high. Certainly higher than the base rate of P(new design fad being good).
Show HN: I made PromptForge – Generate perfect GPT prompts from structured input
by FabianJani | 2025-06-24 08:04:02+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently built PromptForge — a minimal, developer-first web app that helps you generate high-quality GPT prompts from just a few structured fields.

Why? As a developer, I often found myself rewriting similar prompts manually. I wanted a faster and more reliable way to generate optimized prompts for various tasks — coding, debugging, idea generation, etc. So I built a tool that combines structure, speed, and simplicity.

What it does: Select a use case (e.g. summarization, code explanation)

Fill out a few fields (context, tone, output format)

Get a clean, optimized prompt

Save, reuse, and iterate with prompt history

Fully responsive UI + API-ready output

Tech Stack: Frontend: Lovable

Backend/Auth: Supabase

AI: OpenAI GPT-4o (via API)

The app is currently in public beta. You can try it here: https://forge-ai-interface.lovable.app/

Would love your feedback on:

Prompt generation quality

UI and workflow for devs

Features you'd expect in an AI prompt builder

Happy to answer any questions!

– Fabian
by dns_snek | 2025-06-24 08:07:20+00:00
> electric cars are a dog and for shit. Specifically the batteries, they're hyper-expensive, the range is for crap, and they need to be replaced every X years.

They are expensive, that's true, but the range is such a non-issue for anyone who can charge at home and drives a reasonable commute (i.e. doesn't need to stop to charge on their way home every day), and battery degradation is less than 2% per year.

> Let market forces decide, legislating what people ought to purchase is what is called a command and control economy and evidence shows that's bad

Equating regulation with communism is really tired rhetoric.
by croisillon | 2025-06-24 08:08:28+00:00
related:

- with SMT (11 days ago, 47 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44259476

- with APL (10 days ago, 1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44273489 and (8 days ago, 20 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44275900

- with MiniZinc (1 day ago, 0 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44353731
by seanhunter | 2025-06-24 08:08:35+00:00
Well the details in the article are sparse, but given what we are told, it seems highly likely that instead of using their ML model directly, they could use their ML model to fit a regression or a piecewise polynomial (eg a linear interpolation or spline) over the result. So the user input is not driving the ML model it is simply an input into a polynomial giving a calculation that is trivial for a modern computer.

Then they wouldn’t even need to cache anything and the result would be instantaneous with no real loss of accuracy.
by reify | 2025-06-24 08:09:32+00:00
Yes they have.

Take washing machine drum bearings.

you used to be able to remove the drum and install a new bearing without any problems.

The bearing was usually in an external housing so rarely deteriorated.

In modern machines the drum bearing is inside the drum leaving it to the mercy of living in continual water and detergents.

The one very small pathetic rubber seal hardens over a short period of time. The bearing dries out, no more grease, rust develops, leaving an extremely loud washing machine that sounds like a 747 taking off.

you cannot replace the bearing.
by CJefferson | 2025-06-24 08:10:07+00:00
It's a hard problem, for a bunch of reasons :)

1) It's not too hard to make a problem with at least one solution (just put the queens down first, then draw boxes), but there isn't any good way of making levels with unique solutions.

2) Once you've accomplished that, it's hard to predict how hard a level will be, and then it's hard to make levels easier / harder.

I happen to be currently researching this topic (well, I'm doing all kinds of these grid-based puzzles, but this is an example). The algorithm tries to make "good" levels, but there is a good probability it will end up with something useless we need to throw away, and then try again.

It's easy to make levels which are trivial, and similarly easy to make levels which are far beyond human ability, but hitting things in the 'human tricky but solvable' sweet-spot is where most of the difficulty comes from.

I should probably try writing up a human-readable version of how I do it. It involves a bunch of Rust code, so I can hit a whole bunch of trendy topics!
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-24 08:10:37+00:00
Details matter! Medieval quarantine ships worked against plague and cholera because those pathogens spread very differently to aerosolized coronavirus, and had very different mortality profiles. You can't just lump every possible pathogen into one bucket labelled "contagion" then claim you now understand it. That's exactly the kind of broken thinking and fake expertise that led to so much loss of trust.

Your choice of papers is an example of this problem in action:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2966666/ - it's about school closures+flu, but people got upset about school closures because unlike flu COVID overwhelmingly affected the very old and very sick, so it didn't make sense to close schools to protect kids. It's also the kind of analysis that's likely to be P-hacked.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1929395/ - a mortality report on Asian flu. What point are you trying to make with this paper? If it's about school closures again, it gives attack rates of 59% for asian flu in schools, but attack rate for SARS-CoV-2 in schools was measured at more like 4% (again, with mild cases that didn't endanger the kids). You can't reduce infectiousness and impact by 10x+ and say they're the same.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2808319/ - SARS-1 this time, which is at least a coronavirus! But it's also one that had very different mortality/spread profiles to SARS-CoV-2 (I don't personally think it should have been called SARS-2 because of this difference, even though they're closely related otherwise). It's an observational regression analysis again, so low quality evidence, but what it shows is that even for SARS-1 where quarantine was more effective the number-needed-to-quarantine was uselessly high, with 7.5 infected needed to be quarantined to eliminate just one case. That's completely unworkable especially as social distancing isn't even close to the same thing as an actual quarantine. This paper is the sort of analysis that led to the pre-2020 WHO recommendations against quarantine and travel restrictions for RV epidemics, and supports what I'm saying: they could easily have known social distancing wouldn't work, and probably did know.
by sweetjuly | 2025-06-24 08:10:47+00:00
I don't disagree that the tools are rough, but to the person you're replying to's point, would perfect tools and languages actually solve the underlying problem?

As much as I love FPGAs, GPUs really ate their lunch in the acceleration sphere (trying to leverage the FPGA's parallelism to overcome a >20x clock speed disadvantage is REALLY hard, especially if power is a concern) and so it seems the only niche left for them is circuit emulation. Of course, circuit emulation is a sizable market (low volume designs which don't make sense as ASICs, verification, research, etc.) and so it's not exactly a death sentence.
by vintermann | 2025-06-24 08:13:42+00:00
I found out my son is a descendant of slaves. I am not, but his mother is from a family with a few upper class connections, and in one of them there was a Danish slave ship captain, who married a "free woman of color" on St. Croix and moved to Norway. "The Creole Woman" was a family legend told to me by his great-grandmother, but I checked, and it was completely true.

Apparently it's really common in Denmark to be a descendant of slaves in a similar way.

I think it's obviously ludicrous that my son should be entitled to corrective action for this. Yes, his ancestor was subjected to an injustice, but it completely drowns in the sea of other injustices or unfair advantages his ancestors have had.

If you want to sum up the historical injustice and unearned privilege someone's ancestors had, it's much better to look at their bank account than their pedigree. DoS-restitution suggests that but for transatlantic slavery, the present distribution of resources would have been just. The further back you are willing to go in asserting the right to restitution, the more forcefully you are asserting it.

As a practical matter, you have to have some level of material comfort and/or solid family relationships to be able to document your ancestry. That already biases it away from those who would need it most.
by klabetron | 2025-06-24 08:16:00+00:00
I think you’re missing the power plant/damn: https://maps.app.goo.gl/dy3wfsnHPQDys1Fo6?g_st=com.google.ma...

I visited Snoqualmie Lower Falls with a friend a few years ago and had this weird feeling I’d seen the place before… and then it hit me: it was clearly modelled in the game.

(It’s a bit of a drive to get there but so worth it.)
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-24 08:16:05+00:00
You're claiming healthcare advice is an emergent phenomenon and also agreeing that people who spread "verifiably false" misinformation lost their license - a totally non-emergent phenomenon. I get that your faith in authority is so strong you don't really believe there were any mistakes made there, and thus that the people who were fired for opposing public health mandates weren't really part of the healthcare system at all in some sense. But they were a part of it, and mistakes were made by public health officials, many of which they later admitted to.

Again: pick your side. Advice motivated by career-ending penalties for non-compliance cannot be said to be an emergent phenomenon.