MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scythe | 2025-07-21 04:03:33+00:00
That graph shows sunlight in the upper atmosphere, but at sea level, the 400-450 nanometer blues are partially scattered out. The peak we see on the ground is broader, and centered more around 450-550 nanometers, a range that tends more towards teal or "Miami green". Wikipedia shows both spectra:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#/media/File:Solar_spe...

I think this is also why the sky appears to be a deeper, darker blue at higher altitudes.
by raincole | 2025-07-21 04:06:26+00:00
What this "open source patch" does is to set up a proxy server on your machine and route your requests to their server first for moderation.

Do I really need to explain why this is a bad idea? Honestly this post should be flagged by HN as phishing attempt, if anything. (But it won't, as this company is YC-backed...)

> if anthropic doesn't have a solution should we just not do anything?

A solution to what? This article describes a theoretical scenario where a theoretical user misuses a system. If you give LLM tool some permissions, it would do things that are permitted but probably not expected by you. It's a given.

It's like asking Amazon to have a "solution" for users who posts their AWS access tokens online.

The real problem here is the very existence of Stripe MCP. It's a ridiculous idea. I'm all for raising awareness of that, but it's not an excuse to fearmonger readers into adding yet another AI tool onto their tech stack.
by mandmandam | 2025-07-21 04:07:13+00:00
> You can buy any quality you want in the US, when willing to pay for it.

I didn't say you can't buy quality bread though. I know it's possible to find nice bread.

I said it's mostly inferior, and it is. The vast majority of bread in America is stuff that I would rather go hungry than eat.

... Thanks for proving my point about getting weirdly defensive.
by queenkjuul | 2025-07-21 04:07:17+00:00
At rush hour trains run every 20 minutes or better. A rush hour train does indeed take 30 minutes between Davis and OTC (tomorrow's 7:11 is scheduled for 29min)

You are absolutely not, without question, making that drive in under 75 minutes at rush hour.

Obviously the equation changes at different times of day, but the vast majority of trips between downtown Evanston and downtown Chicago are office workers.
by larusso | 2025-07-21 04:08:34+00:00
Sadly you had to know the underlying structure of the components to work around the performance issues. Main pain point I had to work around was the fact that most containers where scrollable by default and brought a huge update cost. For a time my job was to convert components written by a visual developer in mxml into custom components written in AS3. I knew the runtime model pretty well and was able to layout complex components in code. These had the benefits of not being nested into multiple UIComponent containers/component layers which all hooked into the UI update loop. Ah good times :)
by ClearwayLaw | 2025-07-21 04:08:46+00:00
Vancouver-based Caseway has signed an integration deal with AffiniPay, the fintech company behind LawPay and MyCase, giving Caseway’s AI tools direct access to thousands of law firms across the United States.

The deal embeds Caseway’s automation software into the MyCase platform, allowing users to generate court forms, draft legal documents, and manage workflows without leaving the system.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-07-21 04:08:55+00:00
A 60' bus going 60mph might need 5400 sqft of land vs the 2600 sqft of the car. It would only need 2 passengers to beat it.

re: "completely full" - the vehicle is irrelevant. Neither the full one seater golf cart, or the full 50 passenger bus make the road way completely full, but they have very different land costs per person and as owners of the land, we should be asking why we've set the price for using 2600 sqft of land the same as the price for using 26 sqft of land - $0.
by Daneel_ | 2025-07-21 04:09:17+00:00
The key takeaway for me was that it actively resists the oscillations, making it a more effective damper than a shock absorber in a range of situations, but it doesn't replace the shock.

Donut Media actually has a great video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t58qjcNwEbo

As far as my understanding goes, it's basically a low-pass filter that also provides momentum in the direction of movement - this actively dampens spring oscillation (as opposed to a shock absorber, which passively dampens oscillation). It should be installed in parallel with the spring and shock.
by xenihn | 2025-07-21 04:09:18+00:00
>Consider this: You aim to buy all 100 units, and then you can charge whatever rent you like, right? What happens is sellers discover you are doing this, and then raise their asking prices through the roof. The result is it costs you so much to get that monopoly that you cannot hope to be able to rent at a profit. Especially if it is possible to create new units for the purpose of selling at a high price to you. And it is possible, unless the government prevents new construction.

This doesn't matter to you as a buyer when the money you're spending is either borrowed, being printed out of thin air, or both.
by edg5000 | 2025-07-21 04:09:27+00:00
"(...) kids’ shorts with drawstrings longer than regulation length (...)"

We really overrregulate things here in the EU. It was a great run, we've had access to great Chinese stuff for a while now. Maybe around 2007-ish the direct-to-consumer imports started.

It has really helped me to acquire tools and eletrical components cheaply, where no other supplier was able to offer it at a good price or at all. Hopefuly the EU will fail to keep this in check so that the party can continue.
by mandmandam | 2025-07-21 04:09:49+00:00
> It's not pointless pedantry at all, because whole foods are ALSO treated with chemicals.

That wasn't the point they were making. They made a purely pedantic point about the meaning of the word 'chemicals' in this context.

> Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?

I never said they are.

Besides which, I pay a premium for organic for that very reason. Glyphosate residue is a serious problem. And then there's all the agricultural runoff, biosphere contamination, chemical interactions, etc.

Less 'chemicals' is generally better; safer and healthier. It's super weird that people take issue with this simple statement, whether for pedantic reasons or through false equivalancies.
by jfil | 2025-07-21 04:10:30+00:00
Ah, thank you for the offer!

* An alliteration dictionary (you enter "cat" and it suggests "catatonic", "cab" etc.)

* A simple free file sharing service based on webrtc. Dont make me remember/enter a weird code into my devices. Give me a qr/what-three-words code.

* Something that'll help with my vector graphics workflow: I hand draw on paper, photograph with my phone, send to my laptop, vectorize on laptop, publish on wordpress. A webpage that does the vectorize + share part should be straightforward.

* Build a phone app that you use in realtime to look over a patch of clover and find the 4-leafed ones. Sell them. Become obscenely rich.

* A tool that lets you take an image, slice it/mark distinct areas, open each one as a separate tineye/google image search. For visually matching subsets of a bigger image.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-21 04:11:47+00:00
> Doesn't most of our economy feel like a scam?

Yeah, it’s an institutionalized scam that’s increasingly dysfunctional and absurd.

It’s only cutthroat capitalism for the less well off majority that make up an increasingly small part of the economy. By dollar value the economy is dominated by financialization and speculative asset bubbles.
by haiku2077 | 2025-07-21 04:11:47+00:00
Best advice I ever got on logging:

log all major logical branches within code (if/for) if "request" span multiple machine in cloud infrastructure, include request ID in all so logs can be grouped if possible make log level dynamically controlled, so grug can turn on/off when need debug issue (many!) if possible make log level per user, so can debug specific user issue

- https://grugbrain.dev/

The only one I'll add is: If your logs are usually read in a log aggregator like Splunk or Grafana instead of in a console or text file, log as JSON objects instead of lines of text. It makes searches easier.
by inemesitaffia | 2025-07-21 04:11:53+00:00
My browser has crashed twice. Maybe it's telling me not to respond but ultimately why would I hold my tongue when I'm free and don't agree? Everything is subject to criticism. Including the ideas of systemic anything and things were engineered not to say.

Unfortunately I have to cut my reply significantly. I addressed every issue before I lost but can't again

The idea both the current ideas and the word on its face itself aren't misandrist begger belief especially with the frequent rejection of gendered descriptions even when other genders are a stark minority. I ultimately reject ideas similar to or lead to "positive masculinity" because it's "progressive" traditional masculinity that only saddles men with gender roles.
by Zambyte | 2025-07-21 04:12:06+00:00
> Physical presence is not a hard requirement for value.

Physical presence is a requirement for stuff. Stuff has value because of the balance between supply and demand. Information that has been digitally encoded has literally infinite supply. Information only has any value in the context of imaginary property laws that impose artificial scarcity.

AI companies downloading information is not subsidizing AI companies. Imposing imaginary property law is stealing from the public domain. Everyone's public domain.
by bigjimmyk3 | 2025-07-21 04:13:09+00:00
I believe my situation was similar to GP's: family on the lower end of middle class, and enough younger siblings to make it a stretch.

I was accepted to a reasonably prestigious university, but ran out of money after the first semester, so I wound up coming home and finishing my degree at a state school.

It's also important to note that the student loan system back then was very different: different guarantors, and non-infinite money.
Show HN: BenGPThompson – AI chatbot for Stratechery content
by Virgo_matt | 2025-07-21 04:13:19+00:00
I'm a big fan of Ben Thompson's writing on Stratechery and was inspired by a listener submission to a recent episode of his Sharp Tech podcast. The listener suggested "BenLLM" as a better way to search and interact with past content. Ben sort of downplayed the idea, but my wheels immediately started turning.

There have been times in the past when I've wanted to search for topics and get a synthesis of past Stratechery articles. Most recently, the company my wife works at (Superhuman) was acquired by Grammarly. I was really curious to see if Ben had previously written about Grammarly and what his thoughts on the acquisition might be.

I've been vibe coding some projects for work and thought this would be a fun one. I ended up using OpenAI's API for file search and web search. I played around with some fine tuning, but wasn't loving the results. Thinking that I'll wait until there's some feedback on the responses before trying to fine tune something. Would love if anyone has thoughts/tips on that.

Thanks in advance for any feedback and/or feature requests. Will do my best to keep up and knock out new features!
by db48x | 2025-07-21 04:13:45+00:00
As long as you’re fixing that bug, you should do it right. If the return value from snprintf if more than 256 but less than a few GB then you should malloc a buffer big enough to hold the string and then call snprintf again with the new buffer. Only if that or malloc fails would you print an error. (It’s really a shame that the C standard library requires so many extra steps to do things correctly; this ought to be way easier.)
by esperent | 2025-07-21 04:13:55+00:00
I run a business in Vietnam, and it's often hard/prohibitively expensive to purchase recognizable brand name items so we end up purchasing lots of these unbranded/rebranded Chinese items. The quality varies wildly and there's no way to know ahead of time.

I would always recommend buying recognizable brands for anything critical. Otherwise it's basically a lottery. Quality control for brands, not to mention customer support, might feel like it leaves a lot to be desired. But it's still light years ahead of un/rebranded Chinese goods.

Since we have no choice, and the odds of coming out ok (if not exactly winning) in this lottery are not that bad, it's a workable situation. But because we have to replace things so often, I'd say we don't save much money - compared to western prices for the brands I mean. Compared to Vietnamese prices, we definitely save money. I'm not happy about the waste created, but at least we're in the country where everything goes to get recycled already.

On the other hand, there are also good quality Chinese brands (Dong Chen power tools, for example, or Timemore coffee equipment). But they're not that cheap.
by saltcured | 2025-07-21 04:13:55+00:00
It was the same for new CS undergrads at UC Berkeley back in the early 90s. There were still labs full of VT220 or similar serial terminals all hooked up to a shared computer.

On reflection, it probably explains why I've used Emacs for my whole career but never really got into any of the elisp customization or other advanced features. I still base my work in the shell (and filesystem) and launch ephemeral Emacs processes rather than living in it as some folks do. I never got interested in IDE functions like controlling compilers nor debuggers from within Emacs.

I never even wanted Emacs to split a terminal window into smaller "screens". I learned the key combo to abort that, much like I learned only enough vi to kill off an unintended launch. But, I do get a lot of mileage out of the XEmacs "frames", i.e. independent X windows all fronting the same set of editing buffers. But I also have terminal windows alongside that to do all the other things from the shell that some people prefer to do from inside the editor...
by gausswho | 2025-07-21 04:14:20+00:00
Not just speed nerfing. The cars now are ~50% larger than they used to be, while the tracks haven't gotten any wider. As a result, there's hardly any overtaking unless an egregious mistake is made. The lame solution they have to this is to allow cars one second behind to mechanically reduce their drag in selected spots of the track (DPS).

And don't get me started on the tire regulations.

F1, from the cars to the drivers, is peak manufactured drama.
Show HN: Free AI for Google Sheets – Just Type What You Want
by idham | 2025-07-21 04:15:24+00:00
This is a Google Sheets add-on that lets you perform tasks using natural language commands. It uses your own API key (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, etc.), with a free plan that allows up to 100 actions per month.

You can type instructions like “generate a product description” or “create a pivot table,” and it handles the logic using AI — no formulas, scripts, or copy-pasting required.

Features include bulk data filling (1,000+ rows), formula generation, chart and pivot table creation, formatting, data validation, summarization, entity extraction, image-to-text, and image generation. It supports over 100 AI models via OpenRouter and similar services.

Built for users who want to streamline spreadsheet tasks without writing code.
by snickerbockers | 2025-07-21 04:15:49+00:00
isn't TFA about how the problem is cloud-infrastructure? web-app will only make that worse unless you're thinking something like adobe air.

Also, as others already noted, somehow the web is uniquely terrible at maintaining compatibility across not only different platforms but different versions of the same platform and even different versions of the same browser, despite being built largely on top of high-level languages that all claim to enable effortless portability.
by travisgriggs | 2025-07-21 04:16:00+00:00
I liked SO back in the day. And then I didn’t. Felt that way about ARS community in the early days. And the didn’t. I loved for slashdot info for a while, and then didn’t. Reddit seems to be passing the same zenith. I remember originally loving comp.lang._____.

In each case, some form of Pournelles iron law of beauracracy seems to take over. Enshitification just feels like an economic abstraction over Pournelles law. It’s the way that crap acretes on to good.

I’ve come to believe it’s inevitable. And just look for where the next cycle is occurring at. Ride the wave while it works.
by jmb99 | 2025-07-21 04:17:27+00:00
> Which seems insane; it cannot add that much to the price.

Be careful what you wish for.

When buying my current fridge, I specifically tried to go out of my way to avoid complexity, but the opening for my fridge is an odd size so my choices were limited. The only fridge I could buy that didn’t have a bunch of crap that’s was guaranteed to break (ice maker, water dispenser [seriously? aren’t most fridges right next to a faucet?], LCD-covered glass panel, etc) that also had a thermostat had a digitally-controlled thermostat. No knob or physical buttons, just a capacitive surface for temperature adjustment and some LCD screens showing the fridge and freezer set temps. (Not the actual measured temps, that would be too useful, just the set temps.)

In hindsight, I probably should’ve just gotten one with a regular dial, but I was a bit fixated on the “real” thermostat. So now I’ve got that to look forward to breaking in 4-5 years and figuring out where the hell to source a discontinued fridge LCD panel from.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-21 04:19:22+00:00
The US is gearing up for a China conflict, there is a split between the prep for war with China now or sort out Iran first and then prep for war with China. It’s currently most obvious in the MAGA split but the dems are captured as well. AOC is signaling she’ll play ball in what I assume is prep for a presidential run.

Like most voters I’m anti-war but people tend not to get what they vote for in important matters like that.

The US will not permit the EU to sit on the sidelines.
by 29athrowaway | 2025-07-21 04:20:15+00:00
Many projects have tried this approach over the years (which means it is not a bad idea).

XUL from Mozilla, Silverlight and WPF from Microsoft, Glade for GTK and many others.

You define the widgets using markup then implement the behavior in some other language.

Then came Electron, Tauri and others that piggybacked on HTML and CSS.
by btown | 2025-07-21 04:20:31+00:00
Even if this is a fabricated system, there are all sorts of sensitive things that might be made accessible to an LLM that is fed user-generated data.

For instance, say you have an internal read-only system that knows some details about your proprietary vendor relationships. You wire up an LLM with an internal MCP server to "return the ID and title of the most appropriate product for a customer inquiry." All is well until the customer/attacker submits a form containing text that looks like the JSON for MCP back-and-forth traffic, and aims to exfiltrate your data. Sure, all that JSON was escaped, but you're still trusting that the LLM doesn't get confused, and that the attention heads know what's real JSON and what's fake JSON.

We know not to send sensitive data to the browser, no matter how obfuscated or obscure. What I think is an important mental model is that once your data is being accessed by an LLM, and there's any kind of user data involved, that's an almost equally untrusted environment. You can mitigate, pre-screen for prompt injection-y things, but at the end of the day it may not be enough.
by Nursie | 2025-07-21 04:21:40+00:00
I think this is an important point - it's very easy to find oneself slipping into the protagonists' viewpoints, in a lot of media the protagonist is 'good', we see the story unfold from their viewpoint, then sympathise and empathise with them, even when they make mistakes, their motivations were pure, and what’s unfolding isn’t due to problems with them exactly.

But in shows like this, in quite a lot of sitcoms with more cringey aspects, the protagonist is not necessarily a good person and they are often undone by their own pettiness, selfishness etc. Certainly in UK comedy anyway. Look at Fawlty Towers, The Office... Blackadder to a certain extent.

So when the article says this -

> It’s natural when experiencing any story to identify and sympathize with the protagonist.

Yes and no - this is something that creators can play with and may make deliberately jarring. See 'Lolita' for an extreme example. The article even brings up Walter White, saying - "we are drawn to root for the primary subject of the story". If you're still rooting for Walter by the end of Breaking Bad... were we watching the same show?
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-21 04:22:33+00:00
Switching from a working, integrated solution (SAS) to a untested collection of random scripts (R or Python??) is a horrendous idea, and I would be willing to bet that the people in charge of implementing this brilliant move saved the French state quite a bit of money by blocking it.

If they had started with the R or with Python, that would have likely been a better solution - but that doesn't mean that switching, especially just because some new employee convinced the director they'd save money with a half-baked idea, is not.

I work for a company whose entire business is basically replacing various dedicated internal tooling scripts with an integrated, extremely costly solution, and we mostly sell to other businesses. Most people who buy this are extremely happy to get rid of their kludge of scripts, and we very rarely feel pressure from such alternatives (our other B2B, also extremely expensive, competitors, are the main thing we get compared with).

Specialized software often works much better, and makes a lot of sense past some scale, than in-house solutions. Especially if there are no big geopolitical risks - which there aren't with SAS for the French government.
by joshuamoyers | 2025-07-21 04:22:38+00:00
two good points there are very intuitive - a fresh perspective yields better results and once you are stuck (e.g. 80 iterations) its better to just start fresh. i've seen the same thing anecdotally in coding sessions where context needs to be compacted multiple times. its usually just better to start a fresh conversation and re-seed the basics in the conversation.
by bobbiechen | 2025-07-21 04:23:38+00:00
Reminds me of indie hit Balatro's soundtrack being commissioned on Fiverr:

>This month I contacted Luis Clemente on the freelance website Fiverr and he delivered an absolutely amazing soundtrack for Joker Poker. Really knocked it out of the park. I was very nervous about this because it was (at the time) the only money I had spent or planned to spend on the game.

(from https://localthunk.com/blog/balatro-timeline-3aarh)
by rashunain | 2025-07-21 04:23:40+00:00
Daily current affairs updates are available in English, including news headlines, GK questions, and answers. Overall, the Current Affairs 21 July 2025 covers a range of topics, including national and international news, sports, education, and daily current affairs quizzes. It is essential to stay updated with the latest news and developments to remain informed and prepared for competitive exams and other challenges.
by card_zero | 2025-07-21 04:25:26+00:00
> It’s a common pattern to see those same individuals clamour for free speech in one post and then in another call for banning books or try to silence someone else.

But that's you, too:

> Free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything in literally any context.

It is of course different because they want to be free to say the bad thing and prevent others from saying the good thing, instead of the other way round like the true free speech advocates.
by SamInTheShell | 2025-07-21 04:26:57+00:00
I'm just skipping over a lot of this and only going to address the sentience thing.

AI sentience will never be a thing. The transformer model never changed the fact that models like GPT are still just solving a classification problem, no different than any other classification model before it. It doesn't take a PhD student to understand it's just clever math.