MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-01 02:15:14+00:00
Struggling with insomnia since 2018 but coping well enough until a few months ago.

One Fri morning I woke up the freaky-est, most intense vertigo I'd ever had (had lots). It was so intense I couldn't raise my head. Freaky because there was no nausea; I didn't feel it with my eyes closed. Truly spooky. 24h later it abated.

That night no sleep. Makes sense, slept previous 24h. Next night, same until 5am. Next night until 6am and I'm fretting because there's nothing there. Next, nothing until 7am. Sleep is completely broken and I'm panicking.

This kind of mirrors the author's story. Mine was more pronounced but I'm 20y older and that counts.

Where me and the author differ is that I'm a Better Living Thru Chemistry guy and they're way not. But I read their Dr went right to Ambien which is kind of nuts.

There are a number of more sustainable (and non scheduled) meds which are much better first line options. This is besides the usual OTC and supplements like melatonin, benadryl, valerian, etc.

Mirtazapine (antidepressant) Smallest dose daily. A wonder drug for me. Hydroxyzine (antihistamine) Secondary med. Part of my stack and rotate. Tizanadine (muscle relaxer) Good for some, awful for others. Phenibut (soviet era tranq) Not recommending. Only informing. A good fit for me 1x week max. A poor fit for many/most because insanely bad withdrawal and immediate tolerance. Why bother? 1) Full night of good strong REM. 2) I need to rotate my meds to keep them effective.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-01 02:17:23+00:00
Working with business people, solving XYProblems and figuring out the “what needs to be done”. Telling computers what to do has always been the easy problem for 90% of what software developers do.

That’s why if you look at the leveling guidelines for any well known tech company, “codez real gud” only makes a difference between junior and mid level developers. After that it’s about “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”.

Yes I realize that there are still some “hard problems” that command a premium for people to be able to solve via code - that’s the other 10% and I’m being generous.
Ask HN: What features would make a Hacker News Chrome extension indispensable?
by dataviz1000 | 2025-07-01 02:17:33+00:00
I’ve started developing a Chrome extension that displays comments in a side panel adjacent to any Hacker News-linked page you visit, but similar tools already exist. In previous versions, users also raised privacy concerns about sending information about their active page to third-party servers. Do you have any suggestions for additional features I could implement?

Currently, the Chrome extension uses https://hn.algolia.com/ to get information about pages in other tabs. Also, I can run huggingface transformers.js with models like Openai Whisper or ocr image to text inside a Chrome extension side panel. Any feature ideas for a Chrome extension to interact with Hacker News and all the webpages linked?
by zahlman | 2025-07-01 02:18:41+00:00
I would say the downvotes are primarily because you are inferring a political purpose to the OP that isn't in evidence, and railing against it in a way that appears simply off topic.

"So, if I may be editorial as a Canadian: No." is a strange, nonsensical way to respond to a post titled "Price of rice in Japan falls below ¥4k per 5kg".

Complaining about it and sarcastically ascribing ideological positions to downvoters is probably not helping, either.
by jonstewart | 2025-07-01 02:18:54+00:00
I've been playing with Claude Code the past few days. It is very energetic and maybe will help me get over the hump on some long-standing difficult problems, but it loses focus quickly. Despite explicit directions in CLAUDE.md to build with "make -j8" and run unit tests with "make -j8 check", I see it sometimes running make without -j or calling the test executable directly. I would like to limit it to doing certain essential aspects of workflow with the commands I specify, just as a developer would normally do. Are "Hooks" the right answer?
by godelski | 2025-07-01 02:19:19+00:00
For those that don't know, he is a HIGHLY respected researcher and well known for effectively communicating complex topics. He really makes it fun. Often as visually entertaining as 3B1B while diving into more depth. I'd highly recommend people poke through his site and YouTube channel

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/

https://www.youtube.com/user/keenancrane

https://x.com/keenanisalive?lang=en
by chevman | 2025-07-01 02:20:32+00:00
What's left to conquer in email land?

Most of the large marketing ecommerce/enterprise market was captured via ExactTarget/Salesforce, Oracle/Responsys/Eloqua, IBM/SilverPop/Acoustic, Adobe/Neolane/Marketo by the mid 2010's.

SendGrid/Twilio was another a few years later, Amazon SES is ok, then you have some of the smaller market players (MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc).

Hard to scale/grow a startup in any real way when there are so many fairly well entrenched solutions across industries and company sizes.
by skhr0680 | 2025-07-01 02:20:36+00:00
> The fact the average Japanese person won't even consider trying imported Japonica rice from Australia or USA is madness if budget is a consideration.

Domestic rice is a national security concern, not a financial one. Being fed by another country, even an ally, can turn pear-shaped very quickly. Is it that hard to imagine Trump threatening to starve Japan if they don't bow to his demands?*

> But also, the average Japanese eats around 1kg of uncooked rice per week. That's ¥800 at the rates in the article (~USD$300/year). Japan's cost of living is generally pretty low, but I doubt +/- $100/year is effecting many people.

Why the doubt? The average price of rice literally doubled YoY. For families that can be hundreds of dollars per month (yen equivalent) that they have to pull out of thin air, and that's in a country where the median wage is half of Australia.

* Yes, Japan already imports over half of its food, but rice is where the government decided to draw the line in the sand.
by dcow | 2025-07-01 02:21:12+00:00
We suffer from a problem that engineers want nothing to do with politics. I 1000% agree we need a digital bill of rights. It pains me every time a “well behaved” website pops up a cookie consent banner for the billionth time after I already consented because the browser wiped all the persistent user identifiers available to it. For my protection -_-

I want privacy codified in human law. I didn't vote for standards bodies to pave the road to hell by removing every goddamned persistent handle we can find from existence. I didn't vote for the EU to reinvent an internet worse than popup ads by attacking the symptoms not the cause. I would rather have the internet of the 2000s back in a heartbeat than keep putting up with shitty “technical solutions” to corporations having too much power at scale. I don’t care if people break the law: prosecute them when they do and make the punishments enough to deter future law breakers.

There is absolutely something civilized beyond a lawless advertising wild west where the technical solution is to all be masked Zorros.

Why is it that if someone said “we need a legal solution to gun violence” the people that say “no we need a technical solution all people should wear kevlar and carry 9mm pistols” are considered the lunatics but when we ask for a legal solution to rampant non-consensual tracking for the purpose of indoctrinating the consumer class with propaganda we all laugh and say bah the solution must be technical? I don’t get it.
by jamiehon | 2025-07-01 02:21:40+00:00
I'm building a platform to help people—especially students and young adults—design meaningful, intentional lives with balance, courage, and an entrepreneurial mindset.

In Singapore, the system is heavily academic. You're expected to follow a rigid path (PSLE → JC → Uni → job), but no one teaches you how to think about what kind of life you want to live—or how to create it. That leaves many people feeling lost, even if they’re “on track.”

This platform flips that. It starts with the big picture: *“When you’re 90, what do you want your life to have looked like?”*

From there, users create a personal timeline of milestones across life domains: health, relationships, learning, impact—and now, *financial freedom.*

The app helps users:

1. Set long-term visions, then break them into clear, visual milestones

2. Use an AI assistant to suggest weekly actions and recalibrate as life evolves

3. Voice journal instead of typing; the AI transcribes and flags patterns (“You mentioned burnout 5x this week. Want to add a rest week or revise your work goals?”)

4. Track basic finances and align spending/saving to long-term goals (“You want to take a year off at 30. At this pace, you’ll have the runway by 32. Want to adjust?”)

5. Get matched with mentors or peer circles for guidance and accountability

The goal is not to “optimize” life like a spreadsheet. It’s to help people reflect, take control, and become someone they’re proud of.

If you’ve worked on anything in this space—journaling, goal tracking, financial wellness, coaching—I’d love to learn:

A. What made your tool stick long-term?

B. How did you balance simplicity with depth?

C. Any design or product traps I should avoid?

Appreciate any thoughts, questions, or brutal feedback.
by invalidname | 2025-07-01 02:21:50+00:00
Cloud companies will charge you if you use their features without limits: news at 11...

Observability solutions of this type are for the big companies that can typically afford the bill shock. These companies can also afford the routine auditing process that makes sure the level of observability is sufficient and inexpensive. Smaller companies can just log into a few servers or a dashboard to get a sense of what's going on. They don't need something at this scale.

Pretty much every solution listed lets you fine tune the level of data you observe/retain to a very deep level. I'm personally more versed in OneAgent than OTel and you can control everything to a very fine level of data ingestion.
by Dylanlacey | 2025-07-01 02:22:45+00:00
I'm not sure tarrifs have a huge impact; Japan is Australia's largest buyer of rice, importing $63.8MUSD worth in 2023 per the OEC: https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/rice/reporter.... That's a lot of rice to buy, if it's more expensive and less desirable then domestic rice.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-01 02:23:19+00:00
(The Russian's were not but,) the Ekranoplan is hypothetically more efficient than boat or plane.

Not being in the water radically decreases drag versus a boat, massively boosting efficiency.

Compared to a plane, the wing-in-ground / ground effect radically boosts lift, which can be used to greatly increase efficiency. Takeoff is energy intense, but compared to climbing to 40,000 ft it's nothing.

Reducing the need for fixed land infrastructure is another colossal perk.

This article here didn't go into lots of details. But there's a lot of write-ups on DARPA's Liberty Lifter ekranoplan program, and efficiency is a key reason for the effort. As well as versatility. See also Boeing's Pelican ULTRA idea. https://www.twz.com/air/liberty-lifter-ekronoplan-demonstrat... https://hn.algolia.com/?q=liberty+Lifter

Also see Regent craft, for a smaller electric hydro-foil lifted wing-in-ground ekranoplan style vehicle. https://www.regentcraft.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36051831
by wahern | 2025-07-01 02:23:56+00:00
This is gonna haunt me.

Digging through some old code of mine (circa 2009) I found this bit:

#elif _MSC_VER >= 1310 #define typeof(type) __typeof(type)

So somehow I had the impression Visual Studio .NET 2003 (7.1)[1] added __typeof. I'm still holding out hope someone will come to my rescue and reply that once upon a time MSVC had __typeof, but removed it. But for now it seems past me is gaslighting present me.

[1] See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/overview/compiler-vers... for mapping between Visual Studio versions and _MSC_VER.

EDIT: Ah ha! It seems Microsoft did support __typeof, but perhaps only for "managed" C++ (aka C++ .NET)?

> One thing to watch out for when using the __typeof operator in managed C++ is that __typeof(wchar_t) can return different values depending on the compilation options.

Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2002... (See also https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2005...)
by quitit | 2025-07-01 02:25:46+00:00
There is a consequence to shifting to LLMs. Despite Siri's reputation, it is a well used product(1), and despite HN's constant noise, Siri actually works very well for the purposes of controlling other apple devices in ways that I've noticed to be far better than Alexa (the other digital assistant that I regularly use).

Switching that to an LLM-based represents a massive increase in computational requirements without pushing the needle for most requests. While fancy, users don't want to sit and have a verbose ChatGPT style conversation with Siri, they just want the command run and done. So this means any advertised change to Siri will need to be sufficiently large such that Siri could seemingly decode any request with minimal or no follow-up questioning, anything short of this will be largely derided, and face the same backlash as current-era Siri.

At the moment siri answers many trivial requests without the use of an LLM. Yes you can speak to siri with relative terms or needs based requests, e.g. saying "It's dark in here" will result in siri turning on the lights in just the room where the request was made(2), even if other receivers in the house heard the request. It's also smart enough to recognise that if you label a room as something like the "office" but later made a request for the "study", it will prompt if actually meant the "office".

The big caveat here is that Siri's abilities change based on the language selected, non-english languages appear to have less flexibility in the type of request and the syntax used. Another factor is that requests during certain peak periods appear to be handled differently, as if there are fall-back levels of AI smarts at the server level. To get around that new Siri will need to be largely offline, which appears consistent with Apple's new AI strategy of local models for basic tasks and complex requests being sent to private cloud compute.

Like Apple Maps, I anticipate the pile-on to Siri will go on far longer than deserved, but what does seem certain is that change is coming.

(1) Apple have stated that Siri is the most used digital assistant. However I have not found any supporting data for this claim other than Apple's own keynote address where the claim was made.

(2) Requires that rooms are set up in homekit and there are per-room based receivers, such as a homepod in each room.
by transpute | 2025-07-01 02:26:55+00:00
15 years of research and 5 years of HN discussion. It can always get worse, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901979

We could use terahertz spectrum to detect specific molecules and in turn use terahertz frequencies and radios as a way to track specific ingredients in food or pollutants in the air

Is there a PKD sci-fi story about terahertz-radar smart lock breathalyzer (substances, viruses) with conditional door entry/exit rules?
by Dylanlacey | 2025-07-01 02:30:09+00:00
Yeah, I've seen a fair amount of "but what will we eat?!" Netsuke-clutching and like... Y'all already have a trend towards bread for breakfast and you love your wafu pasta. Do that a couple of times a week.

But it's Japan, so I imagine there's plenty of Showa who think all change is to be valiently fought and that not eating rice prevents you from being "proper" Japanese.
by ksec | 2025-07-01 02:30:21+00:00
Slightly Off Topic: I have always wanted (old) Apple to make Time Machine / Personal Cloud where Data is stored and processed in my property. While only offering Subscription based storage as long term storage Cloud backup and software update.

For Features. I dont know why there's isn't a tag for Screen Caps. I made lots of them and I want to group them together.
by Art9681 | 2025-07-01 02:31:05+00:00
RoPE scaling is not an ideal solution since all LLMs in general start degrading at around 8k. You also have the problem of cost by yolo'ing long context per task turn even if the LLM were capable of crunching 1M tokens. If you self host then you have the problem of prompt processing time. So it doesnt matter in the end if the problem is solved and we can invoke n number of tools per task turn. It will be a quick way to become poor as long as providers are charging per token. The only viable solution is to use a smart router so only the relevant tools and their descriptions are appended to the context per task turn.
by guiambros | 2025-07-01 02:31:09+00:00
Exactly. Dried fruits (and dried mangos in particular) may seem healthy, but you should treat them like candy. In fact it's worse than candy - at least chocolate has fat, which makes you feel full, while dried mango is pure sugars and carbs.

You can easily eat 100g of dried mango, not realizing it packs 80g of carbs (!). That's enough to create a huge glycemic spike, followed by an immediate crash half hour later.

In the end of the day, fructose and sucrose are sugars after all, so treat them accordingly.

ps: same for fruit juices. Outside of a few vitamins (which you probably don't need, if you eat a healthy diet), juices are not much better than sodas, and pack a tremendous amount of sugar.
by Daub | 2025-07-01 02:31:13+00:00
For visual art I feel that the existing approaches in context engineering are very much lacking. An Ai understands well enough such simple things as content (bird, dog, owl etc), color (blue green etc) and has a fair understanding of foreground/background. However, the really important stuff is not addressed.

For example: in form, things like negative shape and overlap. In color contrast things like Ratio contrast and dynamic range contrast. Or how manipulating neighboring regional contrast produces tone wrap. I could go on.

One reason for this state of affairs is that artists and designers lack the consistent terminology to describe what they are doing (though this does not stop them from operating at a high level). Indeed, many of the terms I have used here we (my colleagues and I) had to invent ourselves. I would love to work with an AI guru to address this developing problem.
by dcow | 2025-07-01 02:32:40+00:00
I thought we were talking about a solution that the tech industry could implement and deploy en masse to users, because it’s just, like TLS and browser standards. That’s usually what is being discussed when these give everyone privacy topics come up. The people that care enough to ground their antenna are already using their own hardware. And the ISP will deter hardware modification by charging you for damaged leased hardware. Or you’ll be in an arms race where the ISP’s firmware will flag the unit as defective because the radio doesn't work and cut off access till you fix it.

I guess you could put it in a cage. Maybe I should go door to door selling privacy cages. Do people pay for tinfoil hats these days?
by skhr0680 | 2025-07-01 02:32:54+00:00
> now-unpopular legacy of deregulating and wrecking the Japanese postal service

Unpopular with who? In hindsight, the post office was a bandaid that needed to be ripped off before it became the next JNR. If he didn't do that, the tax payer would be on the hook for its final implosion, which is happening right now.
by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u | 2025-07-01 02:33:10+00:00
I don't think so, because there are too many things, but not enough time in life to find out your true preferences for them all, so we all are (to varying degree of) indifferent to most things, and focus on only a few things we truly care about. For you, it's coffee and rice; for others, it may be monitor latency and keyboard switches.

I'd used coffee as an analogy, because it's something that almost everyone drinks, has many varieties, but most generally aren't too picky about it. Alas, I'd underestimated the population overlap between HN readers and picky coffee drinkers. :-P
by woodruffw | 2025-07-01 02:35:21+00:00
Nice write up. “Good” CLI semantics are pretty devilish, and overall I think clap does a pretty great job of picking the right (or at least most intuitive) behavior.

(One edge case that consistently trips me up, which other argument parsers similarly struggle with: an environment variable fallback has the same “weight” as its option counterpart, so any CLI that makes use of grouping/exclusivity will eventually hit user confusions where the user passes `--exclusive` and gets a failure because of an unrelated environment variable.)
by iamwil | 2025-07-01 02:35:52+00:00
Anyone know if editing a prolly tree requires reconstructing the entire tree from the leaves again? All the examples I've ever seen in a wild reconstruct from the bottom up. Presumably, you can leave the untouched leaves intact, and the reconstruct parent nodes whose hashes have changed due to the changed leaves. I ended up doing an implementation of this, and wondered if it's of any interest or value to others?
by devmor | 2025-07-01 02:36:54+00:00
Well said. Detractors specifically whinging about the tone and appeal of the piece are exactly who the piece is criticizing.

They want to be catered to. To have their hype built up. Negatives must not be allowed in their worldview, and if reality has negatives then to hell with reality.

It’s bleak, as the author so eloquently describes.
by Dylanlacey | 2025-07-01 02:38:09+00:00
Yes, it is, and no, it's very much to the Japanese taste.

There's no absence of non-rice main meals in Japan; Wafu pasta is an entire category of Japanese pasta dishes whose name literally means Japanese Style Pasta. Udon, Ramen and Soba abound, and Kansai in particular has a large number of Konamon, flour-based meals and snacks (resulting from Allied food aid after the bombings).

In some ways, the reaction to suggestions of swapping out rice are like that redneck uncle of yours who is mad his Cardiologist told him to cut down on red meat because "what else am I supposed to eat?!" even though his wife does all the cooking and they already have pork/chicken/fish 3 nights out of 7. It's an identity thing; in some ways to eat rice is to _be_ Japanese.
by felipeerias | 2025-07-01 02:38:43+00:00
If someone asked you about the usages of a particular element in a codebase, you would probably give a more accurate answer if you were able to use a code search tool rather than reading every source file from top to bottom.

For that kind of tasks (and there are many of those!), I don't see why you would expect something fundamentally different in the case of LLMs.
by brunker2 | 2025-07-01 02:39:47+00:00
Incidentally, I'm in Victoria myself. When I bought my house, the inspector did the works. Multiple roof spaces, got under the house and had a look, full report with photos, phone call consultation to explain everything he saw to me. He even notified the sellers of an urgent issue and they had it fixed that afternoon.

I guess it depends who you hire (and whether or not you want to know about any issues, which is the most compelling reason I've seen in the replies so far for why this was "missed").
by JimDabell | 2025-07-01 02:41:33+00:00
This is a weird article. Email is a hodgepodge of terrible protocols that have progressively had more and more technical debt laid upon them for decades and decades. Vendor quirks are everywhere, and it’s incredibly unreliable. Its defining quality – it’s decentralisation – has been beaten out of it by IP reputation so everybody ends up sending through a handful of providers.

The article kinda acknowledges that it’s a shitheap that’s awful to implement, but somehow still champions the idea that it all works fine.

And what’s with the repeated jabs at the “terrible” exit rate that actually seems pretty good?