MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: How Many Cigarettes You Smoked Being Exposed to Air Pollution
by ahaucnx | 2025-07-15 17:38:37+00:00
I coded this small calculator to create more awareness on your lifelong exposure to air pollution by comparing it to cigarettes smoked.

Future improvements might be to select several cities in case you moved around.

Let me know if you have suggestions!

By the way, done with Claude Code Sonnet 4 and I spent around an hour on it. I think small programs like this is where AI tools really shine as you don’t need to ensure that the code fits into a larger architecture.
by sgc | 2025-07-15 17:38:41+00:00
ublock origin filter example, removes post, post actions/stats, and spacer:

news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission:has(:has-text(/LLM|agentic/)) + tr + tr

news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission:has(:has-text(/LLM|agentic/)) + tr

news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission:has(*:has-text(/LLM|agentic/))
by ReaperCub | 2025-07-15 17:39:09+00:00
I have one of these. However it is connected to a VPN 24/7 in my own home. It can't access the net without the VPN being connected and I've checked for IP leaks.

https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun

However at some point I will have a machine setup in a foreign country as a jump box.
by nagaiaida | 2025-07-15 17:39:51+00:00
perhaps some sort of society could be envisioned where even people who have demonstrated they cannot be trusted with their professional responsibilities don't have to worry about a place to sleep and food to eat as a result of such evidently necessary ostracization. if you take care of everyone in your society as a matter of course and principle, you gain the ability to simply remove people from positions they abuse without doing ongoing violence to them by preventing them from immediately finding further positions to abuse. under capitalism, these are linked, which is to everyone's misfortune.
by scoofy | 2025-07-15 17:39:57+00:00
I say this about Reddit all the time. If you’re on Reddit (or HN) to just consume, then you’re doing it wrong.

Threads that are “my feed isn’t what I want” are exhausting. Sure, cool, but unless someone is breaking some rule, you’re looking for an algorithm to feed you content, which is all well and good, but it’s a different type of site.

Reddit (and HN) are designed exactly so that you can share something interesting you found.
by cgriswald | 2025-07-15 17:40:15+00:00
I’m a Gen Xer. Voltron and Robotech were the big ones for me and my friends but these Americanized shows didn’t lead us to anime in general. We weren’t really exposed to real anime and to the degree we were (Akira comes to mind) we couldn’t get our hands on it. Even as a teen when I could finally buy it on VHS selection and availability were very limited. (Manga was somewhat more available.) It’s not surprising to me most of our peers don’t watch it. I still watch it now and almost have the same problem from the opposite angle: There’s so much available finding the good stuff that isn’t just yet-another mediocre shonen or isekai, or is cringey soft porn is difficult.
by Plutoberth | 2025-07-15 17:40:16+00:00
I don't understand. Wouldn't it only be possible to find out by comparing two identical clocks that were at different altitudes for some larger number of ticks, allowing you to then compare the elapsed ticks? How would you conduct such an experiment? My mental model is that I have a black box that outputs an electrical signal every tick, and then maybe we could just figure out which clock ticked first with a simple circuit. But that seems like we would need to sync them, and that it's fundamentally wrong due to the fact that the information of the tick is also subject to the speed of light. I don't know much beyond high school physics, fwiw.
by azath92 | 2025-07-15 17:40:16+00:00
For myself, i often want to be able to just "shift views" on an existing community, rather than wholesale move to somewhere else that fits better.

I find I can do that with granular enough subreddits, or the (maybe old) feature in Twitter where you could group people you follow into lists and see multiple "homepages".

This for me has solved the issue of dividing community, which at the least from a practical level can be tricky.

Ive been exploring how to achieve this effect "on top" of HN lately, rather than by controlling followers, by popping a very simple AI filter on top that re-ranks it for me, and found it quite satisfying, but not sure what the ultimate value/usecase might be.
by sagarkava | 2025-07-15 17:40:18+00:00
Hey

I’m Sagar, co-founder of VideoSDK.

I'm beyond excited to share what we've been building: VideoSDK Real-Time AI Agents. Today, voice is becoming the new UI.

We expect agents to feel human, to understand us, respond instantly, and work seamlessly across web, mobile, and even telephony. But, to achieve this, developers have to stitch together: STT, LLM, TTS, glued with HTTP endpoints and, a prayer.

This most often results in agents that sound robotic, hallucinations and fail in product environments without observability. So we built something to solve that.

Now, we are open sourcing it!

Here’s what it offers:

- Global WebRTC infra with <80ms latency - Native turn detection, VAD, and noise suppression - Modular pipelines for STT, LLM, TTS, avatars, and - real-time model switching - Built-in RAG + memory for grounding and hallucination resistance - SDKs for web, mobile, Unity, IoT, and telephony — no glue code needed - Agent Cloud to scale infinitely with one-click deployments — or self-host with full control Think of it like moving from a walkie-talkie to a modern network tower that handles thousands of calls.

VideoSDK gives you the infrastructure to build voice agents that actually work in the real world, at scale.

I'd love your thoughts and questions! Happy to dive deep into architecture, use cases, or crazy edge cases you've been struggling with.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-15 17:40:23+00:00
It was a fancier theatre, but I saw Elio a few weeks back and each ticket at a Burbank AMC was $22 (this was on a Wednesday Night). That's just California for you.

the local theatre I normally go to is $12 off-times and $20 on-time. A nice special kick to the head that they need to separately specify a $2 "convinience fee" for saving their time and ordering online.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-15 17:41:05+00:00
Donated to most projects we find useful, and also tried a few Blender paid plugins.

The other problem is people Cowing anyone that may not agree with their personal opinions how projects should mature. QED: Our karma scores... lol =3

These plugins made Blender usable for a few projects, and I have personally found value in supporting for asset creation:

https://tinynocky.gumroad.com/l/tinyeye

https://sanctus.gumroad.com/l/SLibrary

https://polyhaven.com/plugins/blender

https://artell.gumroad.com/l/auto-rig-pro

https://fbra.gumroad.com/l/Faceit (for Unreal face mocap app with iPhone Pro Lidar)
by Nasrudith | 2025-07-15 17:41:33+00:00
At the same time few things are as suspicious as an antipathy to the competent being in charge, especially when it comes from the existing elites. It just screams "How dare you interfere with my ordination by connections by being better!".

There are essentially multiple levels of meritocracy. A level 1 meritocracy would judge only by current skills - for better or worse. This may be less than impressive even if technically a meritocracy. It may say, result in most knights coming from noble families trained from birth, but exceptional individuals would not be barred just from their background. Strictly better than a hard caste system but not something to brag about. A level 2 would try to ensure some degree of access to skills and education to all and be more meritocratic. Public education of unequal qualtity would qualify. A theoretical level N would involve completely equal starting points and would thus have pure 'merit' as the decider, even if it only accumulated from luck and the normal curve. Which highlights another issue - the distribution of quality is never perfectly even, it tends to follow a normal curve of some sort.

As for 'solving' the issue. Ability begets ability - this is called education and practice and I doubt there is a true alternative. We would call it rightfully barking mad to ban education for the sake of equity despite education contributing greatly to disparate outcomes. I think that is one of those imperfections of the universe we must accept for now.
by myrmidon | 2025-07-15 17:41:53+00:00
Time dilation from general relativity is approximately gh/c^2 (1e-18 -ish), which is an order of magnitude bigger than the uncertainty on your clock frequency (1e-19 -ish).

But you would need a more precise characterization of the clock to answer this.

There might be significant noise on individual measurements, meaning that you need to take multiples to get precise enough (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_variance).

Edit: If you just have clock output in ticks, you also need enought time to elapse to get a deviation of at least one tick between both bot clocks you are comparing. This is a big limitation, because at a clock rate of 1GHz you are still waiting for like 30 years (!!). (In practice you could probably cheat a bit to get around this limit)
by outworlder | 2025-07-15 17:42:19+00:00
> "how is this research going to be useful in the long run ?"

We don't know.

However, black holes are close to the limit of our scientific knowledge. We don't know what happens on the other side of an event horizon (and we may never know, at least not experimentally). Learning more about them means learning more about the universe, and every once in a while we make a breakthrough that leapfrogs our technology. There's nothing else that we can do with so much potential.

Most of the time though, the progress is quite 'boring', at least if you are not in a related field.
by int_19h | 2025-07-15 17:42:51+00:00
Back in the day, the reason why people kept targeting Flash is because all the other alternatives were worse. If you recall, the only thing that made a difference was mobile, where Flash ended up being a liability due to performance and battery lifetime issues. And even then it took a company like Apple, which could rely on its cult status to draw the hard line on mobile Flash, ship iPhone without it (unlike Android which had it, warts and all), and steadfastly refuse to even consider adding it, forcing everybody else to choose between using Flash and supporting the lucrative iPhone ecosystem.

I'm not even sure what the equivalent would be for CUDA tbh.
by devmor | 2025-07-15 17:42:54+00:00
I think "block" is a misnomer here.

Cloudflare has said pirate sites as clients - they are not (and cannot) block any pirate sites that are not their clients. The remedy is for those sites to no longer be patrons of Cloudflare.

If an analogy helps anyone understand better - imagine you have a lemonade stand. You use your neighbor's yard to set up the stand for some reason (maybe since its closer to a main road, the why doesn't really matter). The city tells your neighbor that they will be fined if they continue to have a lemonade stand in their yard, so your neighbor parks their truck in front of the stand, hiding it from the street.

In that analogy, cloudflare is the neighbor and your lemonade stand is the pirate site. You aren't prevented from selling your lemonade, but you can no longer freely use your neighbor's yard unless you want to direct people around the truck ahead of time.
by koistya | 2025-07-15 17:42:54+00:00
Cool project! Been messing with AI agents for code stuff, and this Kanban setup for parallel tasks looks super handy—gonna try it on my next hack. Quick Q: handling token tracking per user/org? Got tons of experience from building UsagePilot (open-core lib for AI metrics). Happy to chat if you need a second pair of hands on that front!
by gurmitteotia | 2025-07-15 17:43:08+00:00
While building harsil.com, I built a GIS service to find job locations on a noisy html page. I integrated GIS with a transformer model and it gave good result. Happy to share a demo video of GIS if you like?

My GIS service can be used-

- like a normal GIS where you pass addresses and it resolve them to lat, lng - to find location in a noisy data. Unlike other GIS you can pass whole document to it. - to design single text box search like Google. You can try searches on harsil.com

My GIS will be very cost effective. If people are interested then I can make it available to try it out and develop it further.

PS: I've shutdown harsil.com as of now, you will see stall data in searches.
by eddieh | 2025-07-15 17:43:51+00:00
Yet the Jurassic Park franchise is just as strong as ever.

Thinking Machines CM-5 in Jurassic Park (1993):

https://www.starringthecomputer.com/appearance.html?f=11&c=1...

Jurassic World Rebirth passes $500 M in revenue:

https://www.koimoi.com/box-office/jurassic-world-rebirth-wor...
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-15 17:44:22+00:00
1. Here is the subset: any algorithm, which is learning based, trained on a large data set, and modifies or generates content.

2. I would argue that translation engines have their positives and negatives, but a lot of them are negative, because they lead to translators losing their jobs, and a loss in general for the magical qualities of language learning.

3. Predictive text: I think people should not be presented with possible next words, and think of them on their own, because that means they will be more thoughtful in their writing and less automatic. Also, with a higher barrier to writing something, they will probably write less and what they do write will be of greater significance.

4. I am against all LLMs, including wildlife camera trap analysis. There is an overabundance of hiding behind research when we really already know the problem fairly well. It's a fringe piece of conservation research anyway.

5. Visual impairments: one can always appeal to helping the disabled and impaired, but I think the tradeoff is not worth the technological enslavement.

6. My problem is categorically with AI, not with how it is applied, PRECISELY BECAUSE AI cannot be applied in an ethical way, since human beings en masse will inevitably have a sufficient number of bad actors to make the net effect always negative. It's human nature.
by simonw | 2025-07-15 17:44:36+00:00
I released the source: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/hacker-news-filter... (Apache 2 licensed) and a commit history listing the prompts I used. https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits/main/hacker-news-fil... - also displayed on the site here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon#hacker-news-filtere...

I don't think I need a privacy policy since the app is designed so that nothing gets logged anywhere - it works by hitting the Algolia API directly from your browser, but the filtering happens locally and is stored in localStorage so nobody on earth has the ability to see what you filtered.

The API it uses is https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=front_page - which is presumably logged somewhere (covered by Algolia's privacy policy) but doesn't serve any cookies.

> Why do you do these demos if you aren't upfront about all the things the LLMs didn't do?

What do you mean by that?
by ogurechny | 2025-07-15 17:44:47+00:00
> almost always

Well, you've just revealed which kind of “content” you watch (by revealing which kind you don't). A lot of well known films were shot on full frame, and never had any other variant.

Frankly, seeing them in theatres “as intended” would require inventing a time machine, or not missing some special film screening event, as they were made quite some time ago.

Also, back then, when they still had to make film prints for distribution, and had to deal with wide screen theatres and regular screen theatres (you couldn't just ignore the other half, and lose a potentially significant share of income), both filming and editing took that into account. Shots in one aspect ratio were usually composed to look god when cut to the other, and professional cameramen (working with both types) constantly kept that in mind anyway. Same for possible TV screening versions later.

Now compare that to the modern nameless editors working for giant corporations which pretend that it's an impossible task that has never been done, and either crop automatically, or let the “smart computer” toss a coin to shift responsibility.

Edit: By “theatres” I've meant types of film projectors installed in their halls. Some had multiple, switchable lenses, etc., some had only one. Keep in mind that to show a multi-reel movie without pauses you need at least two projectors (or a special feeding system for spliced together film if the number of screenings is worth the work), and a third one is often added for redundancy and required maintenance work, so there's a lot of investment to make already.
by Kirby64 | 2025-07-15 17:44:52+00:00
> What evidence is there for this? All the things that calculate approximate calories burned for various exercises tell me that it's not minimal.

Minimal meaning that the amount of exercise you need to do to burn substantial amounts of calories is quite high. Your example of 500cal would be something like an hour of moderate intensity jogging, which would be a lot of exercise for someone to do every single day.

Meanwhile, eating 500cal takes like... 5 minutes? Less?

> Obviously diet is the biggest factor, but if you just eat less and sit around all day, you body will adapt to the lower calorie intake and slow your metabolism down too and you will have to eat so little that you will never feel full or satisfied (so you will probably not be able to keep that up for long) and you will feel like crap and have no energy if you don't combine with exercise, at least in my experience.

Metabolic adaption is largely overblown. You definitely will burn less calories as you lose weight, but that would happen exercise or not. The only difference there is that exercise tends to build muscle, which would burn more calories and offset some of that loss. The fact of the matter is, if you end up losing substantial amounts of weight, you will need to eat fewer calories to maintain that same lower weight forever.

In my experience, if you're losing weight then you are often going to feel not full. It's just a natural human reaction to caloric deficit. There's tricks to making it not be as impactful (e.g., eat more whole foods, less junk, etc) or medication to make it less of a problem (i.e., GLPs), but expecting to be able to lose weight and always feel full just by adding exercise is wishful thinking.
by lazide | 2025-07-15 17:45:11+00:00
That is because those problems aren’t being fixed not because they are not technically fixable, but because as a society we would need to agree on what ‘fixed’ means.

And that triggers the culture war, because Urban/Rural and other major factions have wildly different experiences, incentives, and goals on these fronts. And anyone trying to tackle those real problems who is noticed by one side or the other will inevitably get attacked.

And rather than sit down and really consider what we (as a nation!) want overall, make compromises, and agree to work together, we’d rather sit in our comfortable air conditioned places and stab each other in the back over the internet - or just check out into a comfortable bubble.

And unfortunately that means that the real problems are escalating.
by joshuabaker2 | 2025-07-15 17:45:18+00:00
I was surprised it pinged gpt-4o. I was expecting it to use something like https://github.com/apple/ml-fastvlm (obviously cost may have been a factor there), but I can see how the direction he chose would make it more capable of doing more complex behaviours in the future w.r.t adding additional tentacles for movement and so on.
by tracker1 | 2025-07-15 17:45:33+00:00
While I'm a big proponent of web based applications... there are a LOT of places where a static site generator and even a management interface over the top makes more sense than the CMS systems that many choose to use, which IMO shouldn't ever be public facing (or at least without a login, and separated from displayed content).

Blog content in particular. It amazes me that anyone actually uses the likes of Wordpress day to day.
by ohyes | 2025-07-15 17:45:45+00:00
Had someone put up a project plan for something that was not disclosed as LLM assisted output.

While technically correct it came to the wrong conclusions about the best path forward and inevitably hamstrung the project.

I only discovered this later when attempting to fix the mess and having my own chat with an LLM and getting mysteriously similar responses.

The problem was that the assumptions made when asking the LLM were incorrect.

LLMs do not think independently and do not have the ability to challenge your assumptions or think laterally. (yet, possibly ever, one that does may be a different thing).

Unfortunately, this still makes them as good as or better than a very large portion of the population.

I get pissed off not because of the new technology or the use of the LLM, but the lack of understanding of the technology and the laziness with which many choose to deliver the results of these services.

I am more often mad at the person for not doing their job than I am at the use of a model, the model merely makes it easier to hide the lack of competence.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-15 17:46:03+00:00
Advertising is so integrated into the American way of life, I don't know if that will ever happen. The powers-that-be won't give up their toys. This one guy single-handedly did more by running ads than anyone else until probably Google, then Facebook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

> His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. Critics argue that his involvement in Guatemala facilitated US imperialism and contributed to decades of civil unrest and repression, raising ethical concerns about his role in undermining democratic governance.

> He worked for dozens of major American corporations, including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations. His uncle was psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

> The Century of the Self is a 2002 British television documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis. It focuses on the work of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, and PR consultant Edward Bernays. In episode one, Curtis says, "This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04&list=PLktPdpPFKH...
by azath92 | 2025-07-15 17:46:11+00:00
Its pretty easy to do the user-loyal bit, with a bit of prompting to give an llm your preferences/profile. Not ideologically loyal, but i mean acting in accordance with your interests.

The tricky part is having that act across all sites in a light and seamless way. Ive been working on a HN reskin, and it only is fast/transparent/cheap enough because HN has an api (no scraping needed), and the titles are descriptive enough that you can filter based on them, as simonws demo does. But its still HN specific.

I dont know if llms are fast enough at the moment to do this on the fly for arbitrary sites, but steps in that direction are interesting!
by superdickduck | 2025-07-15 17:46:59+00:00
The discovery of interstellar objects over the past decade raises an important question that could shape the future of humanity: how to distinguish extraterrestrial spacecraft from interstellar asteroids? Both types of objects reflect sunlight. However, no telescope on Earth can resolve a hundred-meter object — the scale of our largest rocket — Starship, from a distance of about a billion kilometers — the distance where 3I/ATLAS was discovered on July 1, 2025.