MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Access Terminal – A site that trains you to write like a spy
by Dflowers | 2025-07-10 00:06:08+00:00
I built Access Terminal to help people write with the clarity and precision of intelligence operatives.

It’s a minimalist web app that trains you to communicate using spy-style writing techniques—like BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front), consequence-driven phrasing, and ruthless clarity.

Why? Because most startup communication is bloated and vague. Spy agencies train operatives to write in a way that’s fast, decisive, and sharp. I wanted to bring that same style to founders, teams, and professionals—without the friction of courses or logins.

Key features: – No sign-up required – Quick, repeatable writing drills – Teaches high-impact habits like trimming fluff, writing for outcomes, and structuring for decision-making – Free to use now — will switch to a subscription model soon

If you run a startup or manage a team, this can save time, improve clarity, and reduce decision friction across the board.

Would love feedback from this community—especially around use cases, UX, or expansion ideas. Thinking about adding team features next.

Try it here: https://access-terminal.replit.app
by tomhow | 2025-07-10 00:06:25+00:00
Maybe think about it this way. If you read and reflect on the HN guidelines, it might occur to you that HN is trying to be everything that X is not. Thus, we don't need to be a site that is forever getting wound up about every installment in the X drama. That just detracts from what we're trying to be. Yet another bizarre thing happens at X today is not significant new information. We have better things to think about and talk about here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by hadao | 2025-07-10 00:07:34+00:00
@Xymist Interesting. You're proving my point perfectly.

When a human shows contempt for another human seeking help, that's unfortunate. When AI learns to replicate that contempt at $200/month, that's the problem I'm highlighting.

Thank you for demonstrating why we need AI that elevates human interaction, not one that amplifies our worst impulses.
by hadao | 2025-07-10 00:08:49+00:00
@dinfinity You're right about disclaimers. But there's a disconnect between:

Marketing: "Most capable AI assistant" Reality: 30% accuracy + mockery + no support Price: $200/month

If they want to hide behind disclaimers, they should price accordingly. Or better yet, their disclaimer should read: "May insult you and ignore your complaints."
by lazide | 2025-07-10 00:09:07+00:00
Elemental mercury is not absorbed at all. You’re probably thinking of methyl mercury and various mercury salts (which, by the way, are not very common).

We have nearly zero experience with weathered or bio modified plutonium. And the experience we do have with plutonium compounds, is limited by the fact people die awfully fast when they’re anywhere near them.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Especially not when the evidence is absent because we can’t get there because everyone dies first from the more obvious bad things happening.
by miguelspizza | 2025-07-10 00:09:38+00:00
The extension should be open source. I had it as a private submodule until today. Let me figure out my it's not showing up and get back to you.

The extension itself is a MCP server which can be connected to by other extension over cross extension messaging. Since the extension is part of the protocol, I'd like for the community to pull from the same important parts of the extension (MCPHub, content script) so they are consistent across extension implementations.
by skydhash | 2025-07-10 00:09:56+00:00
Fugitive is the lite version of Magit. Useful for all the common actions that you may need to do, especially with regards to the current file. Also no context switching like you'd do with tmux and other tools. But the nice thing about Magit is Transient (which is itself a nice pattern CLI tools). Full interactivity over the myriad of flags and parameters git have.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-10 00:10:35+00:00
I’m very upset to hear that

> While brown bread may have contained some molasses in the early 1900s, post-WWII it was usually made without. So Canadian brown bread is, unlike Boston-style bread, not sweet (see the 1909 quotation) and also distinct from Irish brown bread, though the latter may have inspired it.

Brown bread is sweet, and you are supposed to cut it up into little hockey pucks and toast it. It is the perfect shape when it comes out of the can.
by sltkr | 2025-07-10 00:11:47+00:00
I think your mistake was to use --ultra without a compression level.

I redid your experiments with rust-wasm-1.83.0-r0.apk:

size perc c.time d.time uncompressed: 290072064 - - gzipped original: 105255109 36.29% - bzip2 -9: 107099379 36.92% 21.1s 11.0s bzip3 -b511: 73539847 25.35% 28.9s 32.0s xz --extreme -9: 71010672 24.48% 142.0s 3.1s lzip -9: 70964413 24.46% 173.5s 5.3s zstd --ultra -22: 48288499 16.64% 155.6s 0.4s

It's pretty clear zstd blows everything else out of the water by a huge margin. And even though compressing with zstd is slightly slower than xz in this case (by less than 10%), decompression is nearly 8x as fast, and you can probably tweak the compression level to make zstd be both faster and better than xz.
by vincent-manis | 2025-07-10 00:13:02+00:00
This is why the old-fashioned university course on assembly language is still useful. Writing assembly language (preferably for a less-complex architecture, so the student doesn't get bogged down on minutiae) gives one a gut feeling for how machines work. Running the program on a simulator that optionally pays attention to pipeline and cache misses can help a person understand these issues.

It doesn't matter what architecture one studies, or even a hypothetical one. The last significant application I wrote in assembler was for System/370, some 40 years ago. Yet CPU ISAs of today are not really that different, conceptually.
by fitlifehub | 2025-07-10 00:13:07+00:00
Have you ever felt stuck in mental fog, drained of energy, or disconnected from your intuition? You’re not alone — and the answer might lie deep inside your brain: your pineal gland. In this detailed Pineal 10x review, we explore how this powerful supplement is helping thousands of Americans decalcify the pineal gland, increase energy, and naturally activate their Third Eye.
by lorenzq | 2025-07-10 00:13:26+00:00
I don't know, he made a great point about `useEffect` and its data flow and composability problem, which I've known for some time. The part about top down state being one giant mutable variable is true, but it's also how functional programming languages do it with a state-monad-esque runtime, like Elm. It's mostly a footgun when you're irresponsible cutting across many redux state machines in a single component.

I think the author is kind of a mediocre frontend eng but it's also true that modern react + hooks are full of footguns that can get very ugly. It's the opposite outcome of what react was originally designed for, to make it easy to do the right thing.
by snozolli | 2025-07-10 00:13:57+00:00
I don't think you know what straw man means. He was killed by a crashing helicopter, not a car. People expect cars on the road, not helicopters. Deaf people cross the road all the time. People wearing headphones or earbuds cross the road without difficulty regularly. I ride motorcycles with silicone earplugs and have no problem hearing traffic, because car tires against asphalt alone makes a tremendous racket.

Again, what does it sound like when a helicopter is falling out of the sky onto you? I need to know so that I can stay safe.
Show HN: A generative audio VST plugin using Gemini API, JUCE, and React
by DesaiAshu | 2025-07-10 00:14:08+00:00
Hey folks!

I've spent the last 8 months building a VST plugin called "The Infinite Crate" on top of Magenta's Lyria RealTime music model on the Gemini API. Doug Eck's research group has been building MusicLM and variants since 2017 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz-fHidp1M8)

I bridged a JUCE/C++ audio processing foundation with a React/Typescript UI, using Zustand to sync state. The plugin streams down generated audio from the Lyria RealTime model in the Gemini API via websockets

You can try it as a VST3 on Mac/Windows or AU/Standalone on Mac. It works in Ableton, Logic, and possibly other DAWs or video production software like DaVinci Resolve

The plugin allows you to type in prompts, adjust generation parameters like topk, temperature, bpm, key, and various mutes

Please try it out and give us some feedback :)

https://magenta.withgoogle.com/infinite-crate
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-07-10 00:14:27+00:00
No mention of ball lightning [0]? I also keep feeling incredibly disappointed that some Chinese researchers have had video going back to 2014 but, AFAIK, it has never been published.

Although as I was just looking up the ball lightning link it turns out there was a newly reported recording of ball lightning just a few days ago [1]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/11272805/alberta-storm-lightning-...
by timschmidt | 2025-07-10 00:14:59+00:00
It seems that there is tremendous incentive for people like yourself (I see you're very active in these comments) to claim that. But I see you've presented no quantitative evidence. Given the politicization of the systems and individuals involved, without evidence, it all reads like partisan mud slinging.

Any LLM can be convinced to say just about anything. Pliny has shown that time and time again.
by j45 | 2025-07-10 00:15:36+00:00
A thing about polymorphic references is the schema definitely can be trivial in relational db.

Using a polymorphic setup in something like Postgres is where I like to start any modeling.. until the complexity of queries reveal themselves.

The further one goes down that rabbit hole, the sql can easily become more and more complex for the kinds of queries that become beneficial in polymorphic or graph type databases.

Where SQL gets complex and convoluted over time to handle polymorphic queries, is one place where polymorphic databases can simplify the complex.

Using a polymorphic database may be worth it for some or all of the schema. It seems reasonable to extend something like Postgres to sync and allow reads or writes from the polymorphic side.

Happy to learn and listen from alternatives approaches.
by crabmusket | 2025-07-10 00:16:25+00:00
I haven't written anything up - maybe one day - but our stack is `ts-morph` to get some basic metadata out of our "service definition" typescript files, `ts-json-schema-generator` to go from there to JSON Schema, `quicktype-core` to go to other languages.

Schema validation and type generation vary by language. When we need to validate schemas in JS/TS land, we're using `ajv`. Our generation step exports the JSON Schema to a valid JS file, and we load that up with AJV and grab schemas for specific types using `getSchema`.

I evaluated (shallowly) for our use case (TS/JS services, PHP monolith, several deployment platforms):

- typespec.io (didn't like having a new IDL, mixes transport concerns with service definition)

- trpc (focused on TS-only codebases, not multi language)

- OpenAPI (too verbose to write by hand, too focused on HTTP)

- protobuf/thrift/etc (too heavy, we just want JSON)

I feel like I came across some others, but I didn't see anyone just using TypeScript as the IDL. I think it's quite good for that purpose, but of course it is a bit too powerful. I have yet to put in guardrails that will error out when you get a bit too type happy, or use generics, etc.
by zoomablemind | 2025-07-10 00:16:38+00:00
> ...why is that it's called "routine”

Well, apparently [0], in a 1947 document "Planning and Coding Problems for an Electronic Computing Instrument, Part 1" by H. Goldstine and J. von Neumann it is stated:

"We call the coded sequence of a problem a routine"

[0]: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/20335
by renewiltord | 2025-07-10 00:16:52+00:00
Haha, actually interesting post, but absolutely top-grade clickbait action here.

Subtitle is better as title

> Or: I built a vector database for SAP, then ported it to a 1976 processor—for science fun

But probably the clickbait is why the post has made to top.

Entertaining person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ULSvfYAmq0
by dragontamer | 2025-07-10 00:17:36+00:00
Oh, if you need the best of both worlds, consider pshufb (4-bit lookup table), or if you have access to AVX512 you could use vpermi2b as an effective 7-bit lookup table.

It's not quite a full memory lookup table but these instructions get a lookup-like behavior but using the vector units (128-bit or 512-bit registers).
by asdff | 2025-07-10 00:18:19+00:00
Parties and kids aren't mutually exclusive. In fact some of my best memories growing up were from the times my parents took me to some house party where all the parents were talking and drinking and having their own adult fun, while us kids were running wild over the property and neighborhood until real late. Adults are excited, kids are excited, it just works, see you next weekend.
by OmPatel5 | 2025-07-10 00:19:08+00:00
Hey Hacker News Community!

"Your next customers are on Reddit," someone told me (on reddit). So I built a tool to actually find them. I was spending hours manually scrolling through subreddits trying to find the right people to connect with for my SaaS: marketing advice, technical feedback, potential customers. They were all buried somewhere in endless Reddit threads, but finding qualified people was like searching for needles in haystacks.

this tool is an AI agent that finds subject matter experts on Reddit based on natural language descriptions. You simply describe what you're looking for like "I want to learn SaaS marketing from experienced founders," the AI generates relevant keywords and subreddits (which you can modify), then it scrapes Reddit posts, comments, profiles, and karma to find users matching your criteria. You get a scored list of qualified experts in 30 seconds, exportable as CSV with up to 3 pipeline executions per day.

I used my own tool to find people who could help improve my landing page. After implementing their feedback and relaunching, I got my first sale within 30 minutes. The product later hit #1 on Product Hunt and generated $5k in its first month. What used to take weeks of manual research now takes under a minute, and it works for finding customers, mentors, technical advisors, and industry experts across any domain.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this!
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-07-10 00:19:24+00:00
hmm, I have an MCP route, that fetches the page in a browser, returns and lets the LLM inject javascript onto the page to return whatever structured output it desires..Or whatever (kinda scarily). How is this different?

--Shoutout to Go-Rod https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/go-rod/rod@v0.116.2#Page
by aed | 2025-07-10 00:19:43+00:00
I personally prefer Gsuite + Slack. But I've been on that "stack" for 15 years (although I also still use excel). Hard to say if it's better, because someone coming from the 15 years in the Microsoft world may prefer that.

One anecdote -- I just recently left a large, public company (that acquired the startup I worked for) and they were in the process of evaluating a move to Microsoft (to the point that they migrated some teams over). They opted not to make the switch and there were a lot of complaints from the testing group.

For a 40 person startup, I think two ways about it:

First, I cannot imagine this is the biggest priority right now. Presumably you're trying to hit some growth target. Is this really the thing holding you back? If you're in survival mode, this feels a lot like moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic.

But Second, if you're gonna do it, it's going to be a heck of a lot easier to do it at 40 people than at 60, or 80, or 100.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend doing it unless the ROI looks really, really good. If I was an investor or advisor it would drive me up the wall to hear that this is what you're distracting yourself with right now. And it's one of those problems that when you hit $MILESTONE, you'll have the money/team in place to handle making the migration go smoothly.
by YarickR2 | 2025-07-10 00:19:52+00:00
Tell that to my gardener I'm communicating with over WhatsApp regarding lawn. Or to general contractors ; we're discussing some remodeling there too. Or to a hair stylist, doing her business (managing appointments, collecting feedback etc) over the same WhatsApp for the last three years. Sometimes I wonder if privacy crowd is living in some kind of an impenetrable bubble, separating them from the real life and real people. Sometimes I'm very much convinced they are .
by sinenomine | 2025-07-10 00:21:33+00:00
Is it healthy for society to spend 20 years (and increasing) of schooling to get maybe 5-10 years of peak scientific output from a person, though?

Wouldn't it be interesting if we could witness geniuses honing their unique thoughtcraft over millennia? Just how much advanced culture are we missing due to ephemeral, short-lived, desperate nature of our best and brightest?
by kevindamm | 2025-07-10 00:22:53+00:00
It's also available in HTML/js/wasm, so practically all networked devices:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/mine...

However, the minesweeper puzzle is the one that causes a big wart in the API, which part of me has wanted to refactor for years. (it's for the reason given in GP comment, the puzzle isn't generated until first click; it's the only one with this behavior and could be reworked to have the clicked area be a parameter to creation, but then it would have a slightly quirky main()-equivalent function.. IMO worth it for the cleaner API)

Simon's puzzles have overall been an inspiration, some good reading if you're into algorithms and applied graph theory and don't mind that it's in C.
by crote | 2025-07-10 00:24:16+00:00
> Nuclear power requires vast investment

In my opinion this is the strongest argument to take. Any argument about radiation or waste is going to be waved away as "scaremongering" and will be solved by innovations riiight aroung the corner - you won't change anyone's mind with that.

On the other hand, the practical arguments are pretty cut-and-dry: the West is unable to build them fast enough to matter, and they are too expensive to compete with renewables on an open energy market. We already have the receipts for traditional reactors due to Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, and Flamanville 3.

Have we solved every single potential problem which needs solving for a 100% renewable grid? No, but we've got plenty of time to work out the edge cases during the transition. Perhaps some magical mass-produced micro nuclear peaker plants will help in that, perhaps they won't. Let's keep investing in tried-and-tested technology like solar, wind, hydro, and battery storage until the nuclear folks get their act together - no need to bet our entire future on a nuclear miracle which probably isn't going to happen anyways.
by david422 | 2025-07-10 00:24:21+00:00
> Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.

My family moved into a small cul-de-sac with 5 houses total. I wanted to introduce myself, so I wrote a short letter with a little about ourselves and our contact info, and then dropped it into each neighbors mailbox. Only 1 neighbor wrote back, and 1 neighbor literally _returned the letter_ to our mailbox. So yea, that's the neighborhood I live in.
by kelas | 2025-07-10 00:25:37+00:00
no, it wasn't your choice how you were taught to read and write something like this:

1|2*3>>4+5

in C and k, this expression should hopefully evaluate to 1, but this is just a lucky coincidence: reading and writing these two expressions are wildly different in complexity in those two languages. if you're not sure what i mean, ask your local LLM to explain why that is, but make sure you're sitting down. what you'll discover is that what you think you "simply chose to do" is not what you're actually doing.

while it is true that you can write code anyway you deem fit, i'm afraid you're a bit confused about the actual direction you're forced to think you chose to write it.

but once you're there, it suddenly gets a lot less complicated, and - miraculosly - doesn't cancel out or mess up your previous beliefs and habits.

k/q, of apl heritage, are beautiful - first and foremost because they're simple to write and simple to read.
by deathanatos | 2025-07-10 00:26:16+00:00
This is a valid JSON value:

"\ud83d\udca9"

Python's "PyYAML" package will not decode this to the same result as a JSON decoding.

Rust's `serde_yaml` will fail on this.

I don't know about other parsers, but I'd be curious to.

The standard itself isn't well written here, IMO.

> The content of a scalar node is an opaque datum that can be presented as a series of zero or more Unicode characters.

The example here is a "quoted scalar", which can contain the escapes you see. Those escapes represent "Unicode characters", specifically,

> Escaped 16-bit Unicode character.

But "Unicode characters" is never defined by YAML.

Most implementation seem to treat them as Unicode code points, and so thus the resulting string type in almost all cases in something like [UnicodeCodePoint]; in Rust, that means no unpaired surrogates, or we can't convert it to a Rust `String`, which is roughly speaking `[USV]`. In Python, that's workable, since that's Python's `str` datatype, but that means no surrogate decoding occurs.

The grammar also further implies that it's [UnicodeCodePoint] and not [USV], and the prose never restricts unpaired surrogates. (The JSON standard strongly implies the UTF-16 decoding should happen on escaped values, though it too waffles around unpaired surrogates. Whether unpaired surrogates are accepted is variable in JSON.)

But compare with a JSON string: a JSON string decodes to a something like a [USV], so surrogate pairs are decoded to their corresponding USV.
by dzhiurgis | 2025-07-10 00:26:20+00:00
Yes it just works, but it's soooo difficult, here's my annoyances:

00. Installation method - you don't flash ISO into your thumb drive, no you boot ubuntu from usb drive, THEN download ISO and THEN flash your boot drive. This caught so many people. RTFM of course but FM should just say this in huge letters - BOOT UBUNTU FROM USB FIRST.

0. Host method - you either run this in docker and don't get like half features (add-on store) OR install HAOS and don't have access to your device anymore. Wanna use your computer for something else? Tough choice.

1. Integrations vs add-ons vs HACS - why is this so complicated. Add-ons only work when you run HAOS, but HACS works on any installation method. I've spent so much time moving from docker to HAOS just to realize HACS store works with with docker.

2. Root - I've succumbed to running HAOS and now I have no idea how to get root remote root access. Yes I can connect keyboard and a monitor which I had to get for this reason only and there's 0 fun to work on basic terminal on a high res monitor where you can't change font size.

3. UI performance - wanna explore data from one of the devices - either select all sensors from it and let UI crash trying to display 50 charts or pick sensor one by one (with broken scroll on desktop app).

4. Copy paste - how did they managed to break this on their desktop app is beyond me.

5. Disorienting UI - whenever I wanna reboot something I'm pissed off. Whenever I wanna find integration or add-on - I'm pissed off. Why there's media and to-do list? Why do I have to enable professional mode to unlock some menu's?

6. Bizarre way of doing things - wanna add derivative sensor? Install file editor, find some file, then fight fucking YAML syntax and then maybe reboot or reload or restart. Good luck! Why I need to add home assistant user and create password for my light switch?

Bonus. They are not selling their own device (which is great way to get started) and offering some cloud subscription which usually is on path of enshitiffication.

And don't get me wrong, there are things that it does't great and is very powerful and useful, but man it is difficult.