MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: HeartLens – phone-camera blood-pressure and calorie checker
by regnull | 2025-07-03 15:27:08+00:00
Built a small Flutter app called HeartLens that turns your iPhone into a pocket health kit: take a picture of your blood pressure monitor a BP reading, snap your meal for calories & macros, and quick-log water and weight. Everything syncs to Firestore (and Apple Health if you enable it) so your history’s backed up and shareable across devices. It’s live on the iOS App Store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/heartlens-bp-tracker/id6747299...). Would love feedback—accuracy vs a real cuff, food-detection fails, UI nitpicks, feature requests, anything. Cheers!
by GreenWatermelon | 2025-07-03 15:27:23+00:00
> state run businesses of old communist regimes, how wasteful they were, how mismanaged they were, how they produced stuff nobody wanted

I'm increasingly convinced that this is pure western capitalist propaganda. From what I observed in the 8 or so years I've been an adult, Western Capitalist economies (especially US) are much more bloated and wasteful. Nothing demonstrated this more clearly than Crypto/Web3 Hype-Bubble.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-07-03 15:27:38+00:00
> JavaScript used to be a nice prototype based programming language

"this" binding depending on the call site never made sense to me. Why do you think it became worse with arrow functions and Function.prototype.bind?

In case I'm not misunderstanding you. Tbh I haven't read the article so I'm only responding to your first sentence, since the CSS hyphens thing has been cleared up already.

By the way, CSS hyphens have been my most-wanted feature ever when I was working for a web design agency. So glad to see it gain traction over the years.

There are JS libraries for this, and of course they cause ugly page reflow and/or overhead.

Prime example of what should be in the CSS domain, and such a frequent problem when putting real content into design templates.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-03 15:28:04+00:00
> The problem is these meetings are so low information density even an AI summary is not worth my time.

I've been in my share of useless meetings.

However, I've been fortunate enough to be able to cut down the useless meetings at most of my jobs (with one exception, which was awful).

The problem now is that the AI note takers are turning even the good meetings into useless exercises. It's obvious that the AI note taker participants have no intention of participating during the meeting. Then 3 hours later you start getting follow-up questions that they should have asked in the meeting.

Everyone knows "This meeting could have been an e-mail" but fewer people recognize when "This 50-response e-mail conversation spanning 3 days could have been solved in the 30 minute meeting"

The root problem is people trying to transform their own work into async at the expense of forcing everyone else to accommodate them.
by rapind | 2025-07-03 15:28:06+00:00
So I run my own business (product), I code everything, and I use claude-code. I also wear all the other hats and so I'd be happy to let Claude handle all of the coding if / when it can. I can confirm we're certainly not there yet.

It's definitely useful, but you have to read everything. I'm working in a type-safe functional compiled language too. I'd be scared to try this flow in a less "correctness enforced" language.

That being said, I do find that it works well. It's not living up to the hype, but most of that hype was obvious nonsense. It continues to surprise me with it's grasp on concepts and is definitely saving me some time, and more importantly making some larger tasks more approachable since I can split my time better.
by hearsathought | 2025-07-03 15:28:25+00:00
Please study some philosophy and logic because cavalierly using "logical fallacies" incorrectly. It's not genetic fallacy. It's not non sequitur. I'm surprised you didn't shout "whataboutism". I've found that political activists tend to use "logical fallacy" to shout down uncomfortable truths. It's almost a reflex with you people.

> It's not black and white; there is a continuum between "more free" and "more repressive", and where you are on it really matters.

Oh dear. "Black and white" argument. Did the original commenter mention degrees? Is china burning people at the stake yet? Maybe then they'll produce a galileo or copernicus.

> The rest of the post is just more flawed logic that I don't have the energy to trace through.

Why not just write, "my political beliefs makes me angry that someone points out obvious truth and I felt the need to mindlessly attack with "logical fallacy" arguments.

The greatest scientists, thinkers, philosophers, etc of our time came from repressive regimes. Almost all of them more repressive than the current chinese regime. Also, the article ( the portion that was available ) was about scientific research. Pretty sure the chinese government isn't "repressing" scientific research. But neither you nor the original commenter read it because you read "china" in the article and immediately went into political agenda mode. Right?

I'm not saying "china good, west bad" or vice versa. I'm just pointing out that "repression" doesn't necessarily mean universities are good or bad. Especially when it comes to science.
by dismalaf | 2025-07-03 15:29:19+00:00
Egypt is an Arab country. They're literally called the Arab Republic of Egypt. Before that the United Arab Republic. Official language Arabic.

Arabs came from Arabia, not Egypt.

Copts are a bit closer to ancient Egypt (their language especially) but their religion is Orthodox Christianity which influences their culture, which came out of the Greek/Roman culture of Ptolemaic-Roman Egypt.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-03 15:29:22+00:00
So the U.S is number one in several largely irrelevant and in any case partly ambiguous rankings of X and Y, and this is your counterpoint to the very hard facts of it still being the world's richest, largest, most dominant economic and political power, and continuing to stay that way for the foreseeable future due to how hard it is for any other major country to just magically supplant such positions?

The quality of reasoned political and economic debate on this site, so full of self-congratulatingly intelligent people, continues to be generally absurd, deplorable and full of cliched foolishness passing for opinion.
by hobozilla | 2025-07-03 15:29:46+00:00
Sorry in advance for bringing AI into this but... this is context engineering in a nutshell. DRY and SoC really mess with an agent's ability to efficiently gather context. If you limit all layers of a feature into a small area (e.g. folder) it's much easier to work with. Vertical Slice Architecture is a good example of this too.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-03 15:30:26+00:00
I see it as mattering at a higher level.

I worked on a system (Themis) for creating ML training sets for big corporations which would basically show a screen that has the user make a judgement and then show them another screen and so forth.

We had to develop this thing at a breakneck pace and if it was successful, I'd have the expectation that we (or the customer) would always be developing new models and new tasks.

As it was this system had a React front end and a "microservice" back end in Scala. Everything was packed up and deployed with Docker. The engineering manager didn't believe me when I said that it took 20 minutes to turn around the smallest change in this system so we timed with it with a stopwatch and we measured 18 minutes. Notably if you want to add a new task you have to change more than one back end process and update the SPA. You had to be a skilled front end and Scala developer to change things yourself and if you're working on a team you are going to have a lot of back and forth which slows things down.

I had a counterproposal (Nemesis) that I've been using for Centaur processes [1] that I develop on my own account which is an old-school site enhanced with HTMX.

A task is implemented in a Python file using the flask API with a class that has a few flask methods for HTTP endpoints and a small number of Jinja2 templates which draw the HTML. [2] Adding a new task is a matter of adding a new class and a new template and deploying it is super-easy, turnaround on a flask server is instantaneous, it's just a few seconds with a production gunicorn server. It takes less programming skill than Themis, a new task can be created by cut-and-paste-and-modify or be vibe coded without risk of breaking other tasks.

Since it doesn't have lots of images, chrome, Javascript, metadata in the <head>, ads, trackers and crap it is crazy fast. On my tablet, going the wrong way on an ADSL connection, over wireless and my phone's hotspot, it feels like using a desktop application. The app has plenty of screens that do visualization with d3.js and other things with Javascript where necessary. If I had a task that required a very complex interaction then I could write an tiny SPA just for that task with React, Svelte or whatever I wanted.

[1] Human processes some tasks, AI processes some tasks, AI gets trained based on human performance

[2] The exact same architecture would work in Java with JAXB
by hellojesus | 2025-07-03 15:30:37+00:00
There is bias in all media. I used independent media to mean the plethora of single or small member operations that publish their findings on their own blogs, where they are not beholden to shareholders or investors.

There are also many emerging podcasts which either directly interview candidates or at least discuss the impacts of policy beyond the nonquestions presented by mainstream journalists. For example, how many times have journalists allowed Powell to say that he can't comment on proposed legislation like the BBB? Not once have we seen a follow up asking Powell why he has no comment on the bill considering his job is to offset its effects? His literal job is to comment on policy.

> events like Bezos forcing the Washington Post to issue no endorsement rather than endorsing Harris.

The Washington Post is independent media. It's just dependent on its owner like all media. I have no problem with Bezos' move concerning endorcements; he's maximizing his utility.
by ben_w | 2025-07-03 15:31:16+00:00
Which US policy do you think caused Russia to invade Ukraine?

Was it the one where the USA, along with the UK and Russia, all jointly signed an agreement to respect Ukraine's (and several other post-USSR nations') independence and sovereignty in their existing borders (as of 5 December 1994), including an obligation to seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used", so that Ukraine would give up the nuclear weapons it had accidentally inherited from the USSR?

Put it another way: given your stance on the US mil-ind complex, do you think this war would stop if the USA completely vanished from the international scene?

Because the EU is right next door and also doesn't want Russia thinking it can do stuff like this.
by mbrumlow | 2025-07-03 15:31:30+00:00
Oh. The cry of due process.

Do you even know what the process is? Or even have a clue how many people deported had a process but it resulted in an outcome they and maybe you did not like?

I don’t have time to investigate everybody, but of the sampling I did all had orders active to be deported.

The part most of you are missing is there was a process. And failure to comply is what results in people showing up at your house and putting you on a plane.

This is no different than if I murder somebody and and escape after the trail before going to jail. 10 years later I am at a coffee shop. Maybe I have a good job a wife a new born and I have been a functional member of society. You better bet that I’ll be arrested and the Jane to go to jail once somebody finds out.
by techexec22 | 2025-07-03 15:32:01+00:00
> Would be interesting to look at the real world impact of the rise of outsourcing coding to the cheapest lowest skilled overseas body shop en mass, around the 2000s.

Tech exec here. It is all about gamed metrics. If the board-observed metric is mean salary per tech employee, you'll get masses of people hired in india. In our case, we hire thousands in India. Only about 20% are productive, but % productive isnt the metric, so no one cares. You throw bodies at the problem and hope someone solves it. Its great for generations of overseas workers, many of whom may not have had a job otherwise. You probably have dozens of Soham Parekhs .

Western execs also like this because it inflates headcount, which is usually what exec comp is based on "i run a team of 150.." Their lieutenants also like it because they can say "i run a team of 30", as do their sub-lieutenants "i run a team of 6"
by ajmurmann | 2025-07-03 15:32:05+00:00
Excellent list! I want to add a point about keeping people aligned. One thing that becomes very apparent when you lead a group of more than one small team is how you need to communicate everything multiple times, phrase it in multiple ways and blast it through multiple channels. As a former boss of mine once said "if nobody is rolling their eyes you need to say it more often". Even though I intellectually know this I've still had cases that blew my mind where is repeat something I've been saying for weeks and one person is genuinely surprised and calls out how helpful it was to hear this (one might think this was a prank but the person was definitely the opposite personality type for that and sometimes struggled a little with English). This makes that portion of the meeting or email boring and a waste of time for many attendees but there is no getting past it.

Similarly I've had so much feedback that people wanted to have a better idea of what everyone else in the department was working on. So various things were tried. Summary emails, brief section in monthly all-hands, yet many of the same people who asked for it didn't pay attention in the meeting and didn't read the email.
by dingnuts | 2025-07-03 15:32:21+00:00
but if I know enough about the service to write examples, most of the time I will know the command I want, which is less typing, faster, costs less, and doesn't waste a ton of electricity.

In the other cases I see what the computer outputs, LEARN, and then the functionality of finding what I need just isn't useful next time. Next time I just type the command.

I don't get it.
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-03 15:32:56+00:00
The end of the Motorola MC68000 architecture killed a whole lot of platforms around that same time. Amiga was just one of them among many, but the fact that Atari ST also died, NeXT was ported to x86, the Mac was ported to PowerPC, Sun Microsystems went SPARC etc. etc. all pretty much simultaneously, is not a coincidence.
by actionfromafar | 2025-07-03 15:33:02+00:00
Memory protection was basically impossible or at least "Research Level Hard" on the Amiga, because of how the OS was designed with linked lists and message passing of pointers. This was what made it so fast, but at a cost. (They would have needed something like Rust to balance that.)

Everything could have been fixed with the March of Moore. The OS could have gotten a hypervisor and been running each program in its own "VM" thinking it was the only program on the machine.
by MarkusQ | 2025-07-03 15:33:13+00:00
That argument always struck me as vacuous. Dump a barrel of ball bearings on the top of a craggy hill. Wait as they all bounce around, some getting stuck in local minima and some bouncing over obstacles and covering large distances.

Would you claim that they all traveled the same distance because they all traveled for the same amount of time?

Evolutionary space is very high dimension, which makes the argument that just projecting onto the (1d) time axis is misleading even stronger.
by blackhaz | 2025-07-03 15:33:39+00:00
In my part of the woods all those consoles were frowned upon, back in the days when we had 386s, 486s and Pentiums. Yes, PS1 could display some interesting games, but you couldn't do anything creative on it.

As to what killed Amiga - I think it's in the article - the lagging behind the x86 performance, especially when 386DX-40 came about, and please allow me to propose one additional, if not the primary, factor - that our fathers suddenly began to require Word and Excel to do their work at home.
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-07-03 15:34:09+00:00
Because that depends on your motivations, which I don't know. If you want to prevent your content from being used to train an LLM, CF is not going to prevent that. If you want to protect your site from heavy traffic, CF will do that just like it always has. If you absolutely don't want to your content used to train an LLM, you're basically out of luck if your site is public. So no you shouldn't abandon CF because you get other benefits from it if you need them, but don't expect that you've done anything to prevent your content fro training any given LLM.
by remus | 2025-07-03 15:34:14+00:00
Trying to be more charitable, I would say that it's not so much that people don't like reading and writing but that they are saturated with it.

Reading is a chore because, in a typical corporate job, you have to do so much of it and the material is generally pretty bland. There's the hundreds of emails per day, the meeting notes, the presentations, the endless stream of messages. Not to mention the code, the docs and all the role specific stuff you'll encounter along the way.

Perhaps we should be pushing people to be more succinct and thoughtful in their writing? Perhaps AI could do that ;)
by louthy | 2025-07-03 15:34:17+00:00
> computers built on closed architecture

Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures?

The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games. People completely misremember how little interest the general public had in computers (for serious tasks) at the time.

The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn’t have an open architecture either. For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it.
by nico | 2025-07-03 15:34:23+00:00
> LLM in a sandbox using tools in a loop, you can brute force that problem

Does this require using big models through their APIs and spending a lot of tokens?

Or can this be done either with local models (probably very slow), or with subscriptions like Claude Code with Pro (without hitting the rate/usage limits)?

I saw the Mandelbrot experiment, it was very cool, but still a rather small project, not really comparable to a complex/bigger/older code base for a platform used in production
by Arnt | 2025-07-03 15:34:36+00:00
Government isn't what?

Government provides a large number of services, from education to firefighting. I can see why one might see education as a drain on the economy on any timescale up to a decade, but if you want to have an educated workforce in 30-50 years you can't really escape paying for education now, even if it is costly.

Which of the services provided by government do you see as a net drain on the economy?
by sota_pop | 2025-07-03 15:34:40+00:00
I agree here. The magic word you’re looking for is liability. The world will always need people to hold accountable for when things don’t meet expectations… and while they seem to be pretty good at holding their own in court, I wouldn’t count on OpenAI’s or MSFT’s legal reps sitting in on your behalf when your chatGPT-food-critic startup, coded with co-pilot, tells someone with a shellfish allergy to “try the shrimp”.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-07-03 15:35:10+00:00
The article misses even more nuance, independent from classes.

If you define

const o = { a: "Hello", b() { return this.a;} }

then

o.a()

will return "Hello"

while

const b = o.b; // not a.b ... b();

will throw an error.

This predates generator functions and classes (which are only syntax sugar AFAIK).

And it seems like a glaring omission giving the submission title.

I'm ashamed though if it's in there and I missed it.

The behavior is called "late binding".
by TMEHpodcast | 2025-07-03 15:35:10+00:00
Closed-loop systems like on the ISS already reclaim water from humidity, sweat, and urine, and could be scaled up for larger habitats. Air works similarly: CO₂ is scrubbed, oxygen is regenerated from electrolysis, and trace gases are filtered. I realize you still need an initial stock of oxygen and nitrogen, but isn’t this a problem that could be solved eventually with science?
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-07-03 15:35:25+00:00
I suspect there's some accounting magic where salaries and software licenses are in one box and "Diet Coke in the fridge" is in another, and the latter is an unbearable cost but the former "OK"

But yeah, doesn't explain non-payment for AI tools.

Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for it.
by riskable | 2025-07-03 15:35:48+00:00
Your comment reminds me of people complaining about how using emoji in communications/text has become normalized. Generating images with AI is pretty fun and seems like an appropriate thing to do for a personal blog. As in, this is the exact sort of place where it's most appropriate.

It's not like this person was ever going to pay someone to make a cartoon drawing so nobody lost their livelihood over it. Seems like a harmless visual identifier (that helps you remember if you read the article if you stumble across it again later).

Is it really such a bad thing when people use generative AI for fun or for their hobbies? This isn't the New York Times.
Show HN: RingtoneSmartKit – Kotlin Library for Android Ringtones
by AmjdAlhashede | 2025-07-03 15:36:28+00:00
I built RingtoneSmartKit – an open-source Kotlin library for managing Android ringtones in a simple and reliable way.

It supports: - Setting system ringtones: alarm, notification, and incoming call - Assigning custom ringtones to contacts - Working directly with audio from assets or content URIs - No need for Context or Activity — making integration easier anywhere in your app

The goal is to provide a clean, reusable solution for ringtone handling without relying on messy platform code.

Feedback, testing, and suggestions are very welcome!
by pjmlp | 2025-07-03 15:36:45+00:00
The point being those are very niche cases that still don't keep the hardware busy as it should 24h around the clock.

Most consumer software even less, hence why anyone will hardly see a computer on the shopping mall with higher than 16 core count, and on average most shops will have something between 4 and 8.

Also a reason why systems with built-in FPGAs failed in the consumer market, specialised tools without consumer software to help sell them.
by shrumm | 2025-07-03 15:36:58+00:00
The ‘with evidence’ part is key as simonw said. One anecdote from evals at Cleric - it’s rare to see a new model do better on our evals vs the current one. The reality is that you’ll optimize prompts etc for the current model.

Instead, if a new model only does marginally worse - that’s a strong signal that the new model is indeed better for our use case.
by noelwelsh | 2025-07-03 15:37:02+00:00
I think of a spectrum of RPG participants. At one end you have the mini-maxers, who want to squeeze every advantage possible out of the rules, and at the other end you have the story tellers, for whom the rules are a just framework to hang a story on. I've always been at the story teller end and while I appreciate the ingenuity in the peasant railgun I'm not very interested in playing a game where it features. If I'm going for slapstick I'd rather have a setting that explicitly encourages and handles it (e.g. Paranoia). OTOH, navigating different player desires is one of the big challenges of RPGs, and if people at the table really want to play a certain I think it has be allowed to an extent.