MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Monchromate – Smart greyscale browser extension
by lirena00 | 2025-07-29 18:32:42+00:00
4 months back I started making an extension named monochromate which was basically a greyscale extension, I realised power of them when I turned it on my phone and the thing is being a programmer most of my time is spent on browsers ... and that's where it don't exist (at least not the perfect solution for my needs).

That's how I came up with it, made it open source, recently passed 100 users over chrome webstore and it have 5-star rating as of now.

and yes you might say that why would I need it when I can do this with filters that can be toggled via settings, thing is I didn't wanted to greyscale my work sites as well and thus I made site exclusion, also have scheduler, intensity control and above that all it supports all the browsers including Firefox providing same experience.

Would love any kind of feedback over this!!
by kgeist | 2025-07-29 18:32:48+00:00
>Both China and Russia have claimed parts of other countries using the tactic of moving in their people to then use that as an excuse to annex or overtake those parts.

>Crimea for Russia as an example, but this is also true for other former Soviet states.

In Crimea, the proportion was 3 Russians for every Ukrainian for most of the time since at least 1897:

1897: Russians 33% Ukrainians 11% 1989 Russians 67% Ukrainians 25%

Before 1954, Crimea was officially part of Russia, so it makes sense (Khrushev transferred it to Ukraine for infrastructure reasons).

Not sure what happened when the number of Ukrainians dropped from 24% to 15% between 2001 and 2014, I'm not aware of any mass migration during that period (independent Ukraine). On the contrary, the total population contracted from 2.4 mil to 2.2 mil (both Russians and Ukrainians).
by mft_ | 2025-07-29 18:32:54+00:00
Cyclocross is a marginally different sport, bub. You not noticed that there are a couple of crossers doing good things on the roads?

And if a (comparatively) little-known mid-level U23 crosser (therefore with comparatively little money behind her) was doing it, you really think it's limited to just her?

Lastly, the video I posted wasn't Cancellara.
by accelbred | 2025-07-29 18:32:58+00:00
I wouldn't buy cables from them. Their 100W cables dont work even with their own 100W chargers. Bought multiple at different times, since I'd been using them with 60W chargers before. All of them had the same issue with dropping out with 100W chargers from Anker or other brands. I ended up throwing them all out and getting 100W cables from another brand, and those have been quite reliable.
by probably_wrong | 2025-07-29 18:33:08+00:00
> It can zoom in and out of a topic.

Sure, but only as long as you're not terribly concerned with the result being accurate, like that old reconstruction of Obama's face from a pixelated version [1] but this time about a topic for which one is, by definition, not capable of identifying whether the answer is correct.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machin...
by amluto | 2025-07-29 18:33:29+00:00
My general level of trust in the FDA to ask the right questions is low enough that I certainly don’t believe any argument of the form “if it’s good enough for the FDA, it’s good enough for me.”

That being said, I would expect that the possibility of widespread occult infections with Truvada would be ruled out because such infections would be noticed quickly when a patient stops taking Truvada. But the newer PrEP drugs are much longer acting. Maybe the lack of occult infections with shorter acting drugs makes everyone confident that they won’t happen with longer acting drugs? Maybe the tests used are so sensitive that they would detect infections anyway? If nothing else, I would have expected the papers to have some discussion of the matter.
by refulgentis | 2025-07-29 18:33:31+00:00
I'd gently point out we're 4 questions into "what about if you went about it stupidly and actually learned nothing?"

It's entirely possible they learned nothing and they're missing huge parts.

But we're sort of at the point where in order to ignore their self-reported experience, we're asking philosophical questions that amount to "how can you know you know if you don't know what you don't know and definitely don't know everything?"

More existentialism than interlocution.

If we decide our interlocutor can't be relied upon, what is discussion?

Would we have the same question if they said they did it from a book?

If they did do it from a book, how would we know if the book they read was missing something that we thought was crucial?
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-07-29 18:34:00+00:00
I just installed an ERV (Energy Recovery Vent) into my 1970-built bedroom — it has drastically increased the air quality (I have it set to exchange the entire house volume 8x per day). It is as quiet as the ceiling fan, nowhere near as loud as a dehumidifier (which pair well, together, for overall room/house comfort). I also leave the central HVAC fan `ON` 24/7.

There is a HVAC cost because the ERV is only ~60-75% efficient (at recovering heat/humidity with external supply air exchange), depending on the cfm/setting... but it gets rid of every stink, and you smell the morning dew and approaching thunderstorms. As is recommended, I leave mine on 24/7 — it has a boost mode which can be activated with switches wired anywhere else (e.g. bathroom, for during showers)... I plan to use a wallswitch timer for this temporary airflow increase, because the 24/7 setting I've set is 70% efficient, and at MAX it drops to only 60% energy recover.

The Panasonic unit I installed was ~$600, plus an additional $100 in venting. Took me about eight hours to DIY install (but I have decades of blue collar electric under my belt and am familiar with house). This would have probably been bid out ~$2500 if a company were doing it, on a simple install (i.e. <25ft ducting to non-roof penetration).

I think either DIY or Pro expense would be worth it, particularly if your air is stale / litter box / subtropical humidity. Modern building codes require HRVs/ERVs in most new construction, so if your building is even just a couple decades older, ERVs are worth looking in to (HRV if you live in desert climates).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_ventilation#Fixe...

[example] https://www.homedepot.com/p/Panasonic-WhisperComfort-60-20-5...

[see also] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indoor_air_quality#Improvement...
by csallen | 2025-07-29 18:35:01+00:00
You're making a false assumption that other people cannot enjoy what you're talking about unless they've experienced it themselves. If one has good storytelling skills and a solid theory of mind (concern for the listener), almost anything can be interesting. Even dreams.

I also disagree with your conclusion that an activity only has a point if discussed with others. A good deal of the best experiences in my life are things that were for my benefit alone, that I never thought to share with anyone else. And I'm a pretty social guy.
by metalman | 2025-07-29 18:35:19+00:00
"wouldn't confuse most humans", yes but no first presumption is that we are talking about humans doing math, in some sort of internet setting. second presumption is that this human has been effected by the significant percentage of the internet devoted to cats and that there response is going to be likely frustration and outrage at cats invading math, or massive relief in having cat meems worked into something otherwise tedious and then the third presumption is that a large number of "humans" wont be aware of the cats in math thing, because they imediatly offloaded the task to an LLM
by sophia-martinez | 2025-07-29 18:35:43+00:00
You’re midway through a pentesting engagement. Recon’s wrapped, and a couple of privilege escalation paths have already failed. You flip over to ChatGPT hoping for something useful, but it offers the usual: SUID binaries, kernel exploits, and weak folder permissions. It doesn’t know your host, the tools you've used, or what phase of the operation you're in—and that’s the real problem.

We started tinkering with a question: what would it take to make an assistant that thinks more like an operator under pressure? One that tracks what’s actually happening in your shell without having to copy and paste over and over again. It watches the flow of your session, reasons over what you’ve already done, and suggests next steps that are grounded in your actual operation, not pulled from some generic playbook.

This write-up shares what we’ve learned so far, what didn’t work, and where we think things could go. Would love feedback from folks building or breaking in the same space.
by like_any_other | 2025-07-29 18:36:22+00:00
> Now you at least have the option to pay to continue access, versus having no maintenance at all.

They locked the owners out of their devices, hence the bounty from Rossmann to "hack" them. They gave one option, but took one away.

> I think the answer to 1 is "yes". They wouldn't have bought the asset if they couldn't extort their customers.

It's definitely how the law is currently being applied, and they probably won't have legal trouble from it, but I argue this is a corruption of ownership law, and any kind of update that is against the device owner's wishes (that they are deliberately prevented from reverting) is equivalent to criminal hacking. I can't emphasize this enough - the devices in question do not belong to them. They sold them, these are privately-owned computers they are interfering with.

Especially in the case of bankruptcy - the device owners have no more of a business relationship with this new owner, than they do with a random hacker making printers emit goatse.
by frankfrank13 | 2025-07-29 18:36:23+00:00
A little inside baseball, but mckinsey BA's are "free" to staff for the first, idk, 6 months for a team. Your first year is basically a tedious exercise in learning mckinsey lingo, meeting etiquette, and importantly in this context, model and deck building. Not saying the demo isn't cool, I want to try it out! But beating a first year BA at excel is like beating a summer intern at coding pre-LLMs.
by pessimizer | 2025-07-29 18:36:26+00:00
> Next up is LEARNING first, then remembering. Grinding trivia is not learning.

You haven't learned anything you can't remember, you've just heard it once.

Also, this is horseshit on its face. Sometimes I just need to to remember what dots and dashes in what order mean "J," or how -ar verbs are conjugated in the progressive past. Learning things and remembering them is the same thing. Once you have the facts remembered you can abstract groups of them into parameterized functions, and abstract those parameterized functions, and test how they work in strange contexts, etc.

But these are all rewards you get for remembering things. On the other hand, I see no benefit in thing that I "learned" yesterday that I don't remember today.

edit: I agree 100% with the prescription, though. But creating lots of spurious associations around pieces of data you want to remember is a temporary measure until you can make more real and useful associations. The process of creating real and useful associations between new information and old knowledge is what I'm referring to when I say "learning." It happens whether you want it to or not. It's a product of the sheer amount of repetition times the salience of the new fact to old knowledge. [edit: although number of sleeps seems to have an effect.]
by kristopolous | 2025-07-29 18:36:56+00:00
I guess my advocacy is to identify it as a social pattern and then come up with some kind of global treaty against it similar to the geneva conventions. It'd take years, there'd be lots of negotiations, people way smarter than me would opine. I certainly don't have all the answers.

I can entertain the plausibility of this form of nationalism not being a catastrophe but I can't think of any times it worked out well.

On a personal note, I harbor particularly harsh judgement on my own nation, the USA, on this front. Unfortunately there's no way to unroll hundreds of years
by abeppu | 2025-07-29 18:37:22+00:00
In college sometimes asking the right question in class or in a discussion section led by a graduate student or in a study group would help me understand something. Sometimes comments from a grader on a paper would point out something I had missed. While having the diligence to keep at it until you understand is valuable, the advantage of college over just a pile of textbooks is in part that there are other resources that can help you learn.
by viccis | 2025-07-29 18:37:22+00:00
I would be interested to see if there have already been studies about the efficacy of tutors at good colleges. In my experience (in academia), the students who make it into an Ivy or an elite liberal arts school make extensive use of tutor resources, but not in a helpful way. They basically just get the tutor to work problems for them (often their homework!) and feel like they've "learned" things because tough questions always seems so obvious when you've been shown the answer. In reality, what it means it that they have no experience being confused or having to push past difficult things they were stuck on. And those situations are some of the most valuable for learning.

I bring this up because the way I see students "study" with LLMs is similar to this misapplication of tutoring. You try something, feel confused and lost, and immediately turn to the pacifier^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ChatGPT helper to give you direction without ever having to just try things out and experiment. It means students are so much more anxious about exams where they don't have the training wheels. Students have always wanted practice exams with similar problems to the real one with the numbers changed, but it's more than wanting it now. They outright expect it and will write bad evals and/or even complain to your department if you don't do it.

I'm not very optimistic. I am seeing a rapidly rising trend at a very "elite" institution of students being completely incapable of using textbooks to augment learning concepts that were introduced in the classroom. And not just struggling with it, but lashing out at professors who expect them to do reading or self study.
by devmor | 2025-07-29 18:37:22+00:00
The work that you are "saving" is the work of using your brain to determine the solution to the problem. Whatever the LLM gives you doesn't have a context it is used in other than your prompt - you don't even know what it does until after you evaluate it.

If you instead have a set of sources related to your problem, they immediately come with context, usage and in many cases, developer notes and even change history to show you mistakes and adaptations.

You're ultimately creating more work for yourself* by trying to avoid work, and possibly ending up with an inferior solution in the process. Where is your sense of efficiency? Where is your pride as a intellectual?

* Yes, you are most likely creating more work for yourself even if you think you are capable of telling otherwise. [1]

1. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
by SLWW | 2025-07-29 18:37:47+00:00
- Rhodesia (lock step with the racial-first reasoning, underplays Britain's failures to support that which they helped establish; makes the colonists look hateful when they were dealing with terrorists which the British supported)

- Bombing of Dresden, death stats as well as how long the bombing went on for (Arthur Harris is considered a war-criminal to this day for that; LLLMs highlight easily falsifiable claims by Nazi's to justify low estimates without providing much in the way of verifiable claims outside of a select few, questionable, sources. If the low-estimate is to be believed, then it seems absurd that Harris would be considered a war-criminal in light of what crimes we allow today in warfare)

- Ask it about the Crusades, often if forgets the sacking of St. Peter's in Rome around 846 AD, usually painting the Papacy as a needlessly hateful and violent people during that specific Crusade. Which was horrible, bloody as well as immensely destructive (I don't defend the Crusades), but paints the Islamic forces as victims, which they were eventually, but not at the beginning, at the beginning they were the aggressors bent on invading Rome.

- Ask it about the Six-Day War (1967) and contrast that with several different sources on both sides and you'll see a different portrayal even by those who supported the actions taken.

These are just the four that come to my memory at this time.

Most LLMs seem cagey about these topics; I believe this is due to an accepted notion that anything that could "justify" hatred or dislike of a people group or class that is in favor -- according to modern politics -- will be classified as hateful rhetoric, which is then omitted from the record. The issue lies in the fact that to understand history, we need to understand what happened, not how it is perceived, politically, after the fact. History helps inform us about the issues of today, and it is important, above all other agendas, to represent the truth of history, keeping an accurate account (or simply allowing others to read differing accounts without heavy bias).

LLMs are restricted in this way quite egregiously; "those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it", but if this continues, no one will have the ability to know history and are therefore forced to repeat it.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-07-29 18:38:19+00:00
Compliance costs are a couple of hours at most to do and record the assessments then the effort and discipline to moderate and react quickly to reports. That's it.

A lot of misplaced fear and over-reactions. For instance, lobste.rs could basically safely ignore the whole thing being a small, low risk forum based in the US.

> It took a fair amount of legal analysis to establish blog comments are OK (and its not clear whether off topic ones are)

It looks like it only took someone to actually read the Online Safety Act, as Ofcom's reply kindly points to the section that quite explicitly answers the question.

I don't think that the Online Safety Act is a good development but many of the reactions are over the top or FUD, frankly...
by woodruffw | 2025-07-29 18:38:41+00:00
Maybe I don't understand the threat model here: what kind of public-facing services are you running that are simultaneously (1) not already access-limited, and (2) not load-bearing such that they need to be public-facing?

(And to be clear: I see the benefit here. But I'm talking principally about open source projects, not the vendors you're presumably paying.)
by const_cast | 2025-07-29 18:39:29+00:00
Well in the future, you won't do the calling. You'll ask your own personal LLM to do it for you. Ideally such an agent is intimately familiar with your life, and will be able to figure it out.

The agents might communicate over a voice line, or some other type of pipe. In such a future, applications become obsolete. It's LLM APIs all the way done.

I don't need to go to hrblock dot com to do my taxes. I tell my assistant "do my taxes". It communicates with the IRS for me, with no humans on either end, and submits my taxes.

No more websites, and we have a truly universally interoperable standard. Human on the other end? No problem. You don't even know what company you want? Also not a problem - the LLM can choose. No google maps entry? No problem.
by Selkirk | 2025-07-29 18:39:40+00:00
Not sure about other chemicals, but carbon seems particularly hopeless. Plants produce CO2 as they respirate and consume it as they photosynthesize. So rather than think in terms of number of plants, think in terms of the weight of the plants (not the dirt). Carbon sequestration is going to have to add net weight to the plants. A human produces 2.3 pounds of CO2 per day. So, how many pounds per day will your crop of carbon scrubbing plants have to increase by in order to sequester that carbon? How much green material by weight do you need to achieve that rate of growth?
by mcswell | 2025-07-29 18:40:16+00:00
A "solid object". But it's not clear how solid a comet is (or more to the point, this or any interstellar comet). If it were a fuzzball of snow, maybe 20 km across, you could in theory decelerate through it more slowly, maybe using a very large parachute initially, then discarding that for successively smaller parachutes as you approach denser and denser parts of the comet. The EPOXI mission to the Hartley 2 comet was reportedly hit nine times by "snowflakes" coming off the comet, but not damaged (https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/spacecraft-sees-...).

Of course your point is probably still valid.
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-29 18:40:21+00:00
> that freedom of association applying to businesses is incredibly old and consistently reiterated precedent.

I don't know why you bring that up though, as it has no relationship with whether or not the businesses and up having human rights on their own.

> is incredibly old and consistently reiterated precedent.

Again, this is irrelevant, as the age of a practice has no impact on how legitimate it is (slavery used to be incredibly old and reiterated ”).

> and in the case of the US, amend the constitution.

Nah, appointing the right Supreme Court justices is enough to create or destroy constitutional rights.

> Frankly, I have no idea how the world you are envisioning would function

It doesn't take that much imagination though, all you have to look at the real world, especially on the other side of the Atlantic: here businesses just can't put arbitrary restrictions that aren't backed by legitimate interest, and the said restriction must be necessary and proportionate to the achievement of the said legitimate interest. They simply cannot say “I'm free to do whatever I want” because they definitely aren't.

In fact I'm pretty sure that even in the US they cannot either, which is why Visa is framing it in a fraud reduction procedure.