MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-07-10 05:00:54+00:00
Does anyone here have access to Grok 4 yet? If so, could you please try asking it to solve this basic word search problem [0] and share the results? It's just a simple grid of letters where you have to find the position of each word, the kind of problem that any young child can easily solve.

[0] https://imgur.com/VxNP5jG
by bitmasher9 | 2025-07-10 05:01:56+00:00
> I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded.

Safeway had a leveraged buyout in the 80s, and was so successful the merger/acquisition with Kroger was blocked due to monopoly concerns. Hilton also had a leveraged buyout.

PE exists to buy bargain bin companies and extract maximum value from them. Sometimes that’s actually rehabilitating the company. Usually they are just the best at milking a dying cow.
by motorest | 2025-07-10 05:02:04+00:00
> Well the competition is REST which doesn’t have a schema or required fields, so not much of a problem.

A vague architecture style is not competition to a concrete framework. At best, you're claiming that the competition to gRPC is rolling your own ad-hoc RPC implementation.

What I expect to happen now is an epiphany. Why do most developers look at tools like gRPC and still decide it's a far better option to roll their own HTTP-based RPC interface? I mean, it's a rational choice for most. Think about that for a moment.
by gronpi | 2025-07-10 05:02:31+00:00
>There is no reason a language like Rust can't be designed with much more sensible strict aliasing rules.

The aliasing rules of Rust for mutable references are different and more difficult than strict aliasing in C and C++.

Strict aliasing in C and C++ are also called TBAA, since they are based on compatible types. If types are compatible, pointers can alias. This is different in Rust, where mutable references absolutely may never alias, not even if the types are the same.

Rust aliasing is more similar to C _restrict_.

The Linux kernel goes in the other direction and has strict aliasing optimization disabled.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-07-10 05:02:32+00:00
I can see with my prophetic/logic eyes that free models will start to require captcha because of people start using MCP to automate browsers to use free LLMs. But captchas are ineffective against LLM so LLMs will fight automated LLMs from using them...

Sounds like a very strange world of robots fighting robots
Show HN: Toolbox: Run FFmpeg, Imagemagick, 7Zip and Friends in the Browser
by Pharaoh2 | 2025-07-10 05:03:46+00:00
I got sick of sketchy online converter sites that phone home and may keep your files and walking non-technical friends through brew/apt/choco installs every time they need ffmpeg or imagemagick and telling them what command to run.

So I built Toolbox, a 100% open source site that compiles my most-used command-line tools to WebAssembly and runs them fully client-side: - FFmpeg (video + audio) - ExifTool (metadata) - 7-Zip (archive/zip/rar/7z) - ImageMagick - Pandoc

Roadmap: - Batch mode - Shareable presets. Complex commands can be saved as URLs so you can send a one-click recipe to a friend, inspired by cyberchef - GPU acceleration via WebGPU someday? (mostly looking at ffmpeg, maybe with WebCodec)

Source: https://github.com/akshetpandey/toolbox (MIT licensed)

I’d love feedback, bug reports, and requests for other tools. If it helps you ditch shady sites or long install docs, mission accomplished.
by Voultapher | 2025-07-10 05:03:50+00:00
Sigh, can't wait for someone to break it. Same way secure enclaves and anti-crack tools always are. What an awful product, I can feel my food coming back up when reading manipulative garbage like:

> In 2025, the popularity of ad blockers, VPNs, and privacy browsers continues to grow and disrupt how websites and web apps operate.

Is a bit like saying "We are proud to present the performance collars 2.0. Many mining operations are increasingly affected by employees managing to break free of their performance collars, especially younger employees below the age of 12. With the new and improved performance collars 2.0 you can improve site productivity by 15-50% depending on your employee demographics."

Building tools to give the more powerful parties in an interaction, i.e. corporations even more power against users sucks, and speaks of an utter lack of moral character.

And before anyone comments, saying, no no analytics are good for users and the benevolent companies with great track records will use this power for good, go and read [1], a small excerp:

> There's plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It's a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination. Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread.

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
by Brajeshwar | 2025-07-10 05:05:47+00:00
Aldus PageMaker is considered a failure! I thought it was neck-in-neck competition with QuarkXPress. I was good with PageMaker. Well, I can make it sing.

PageMaker and CorelDRAW paid for my high school and college education, and almost all of my earnings at that time. I wanted to try QuarkXPress, but I had never seen a Mac before I moved away from my hometown.
by gronpi | 2025-07-10 05:06:11+00:00
It requires that the libraries you use do not have UB. If you have no unsafe, but your library does, you can get UB.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/139553

This is why it may be a good idea to run MIRI on your Rust code, even when it has no unsafe, since a library like Rust stdlib might have UB.
by nucleardog | 2025-07-10 05:08:13+00:00
Huh, that makes sense given "all dressed" came from French and New Orleans' French history.

I'm not sure why we both ended up with "dressed" given the French is literally "all garnishes / toppings" or "wholly garnished / topped". I'm sure some linguist could probably do a dissertation on this or something. And hopefully also cover how Saskatchewan ended up with using "all dressed" because I'm really curious about that outlier.
by atoav | 2025-07-10 05:08:44+00:00
Yes theoretically. The issue if people just go to ChatGPT is that a therapist would have clear objections, caveats or other negative feedback ready on the correct situation. Most LLM chatbots go out of their way to never say a critical word at all.

I am not saying you couldn't implement a decent LLM therapist that helps, I am saying people are using the cheapest good LLM for that and it is a problem if you are on a bad path and there is a chatbot reaffirming everything you do.
by queenkjuul | 2025-07-10 05:09:18+00:00
Why wouldn't the distro ship the patch, then? What distro is shipping vanilla rc kernels to causal users? Why are casual users using such a distro?

And genuinely, _genuinely_, who is using Linux and can't type three commands into a shell?

Life for them is already not as easy as possible, they've chosen to run an experimental filesystem without backups! If they need to run the recovery today, then getting into the rc doesn't help. If they're waiting for their distro to build the rc, they can't wait a few more weeks for the next release? If they really can't wait, Kent can send them a 5-line bash script to build them a new kernel.

Bottom line: if operate without backups, you've earned your data loss. People being stupid doesn't need to be the Linux kernel's problem.
by gronpi | 2025-07-10 05:11:00+00:00
The new borrow checker is not yet all that fast. For instance, it was 5000x slower, according to a recent report.

https://users.rust-lang.org/t/polonius-is-more-ergonomic-tha...

>I recommend watching the video @nerditation linked. I believe Amanda mentioned somewhere that Polonius is 5000x slower than the existing borrow-checker; IIRC the plan isn't to use Polonius instead of NLL, but rather use NLL and kick off Polonius for certain failure cases.
by gardaani | 2025-07-10 05:11:05+00:00
> Oklab is a nightmare in practice - it's not linked to any perceptual color space, but it has the sheen of such in colloquial discussion. It's a singular matmul that is supposed to emulate CAM16 as best as it can.

Oklab is perceptually uniform and addresses issues such as unexpected hue and lightness changes in blue colors present in the CIELAB color space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklab_color_space

Oklab is used in CSS because it creates smoother gradients and better gamut mapping of out-of-gamut colors than Lab. Here's a picture how Oklch (on the left) creates smoother gamut mapping than CIE Lch (on the right) ("Explore OKLab gamut mapping in oklch"): https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/9449#issuecomment...
Built Podflyy.com, a NoteBookLM Alternative – Is There PMF?
by alexreysa | 2025-07-10 05:12:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Alejandro. For the past year, I've been building [PodFlyy.com](https://podflyy.com), an audio-focused alternative to Google's NotebookLM with simplicity, speed, and a better learning experience at its core.

I started PodFlyy long before NotebookLM was a thing, but now I'm hitting some tough realities. API costs, especially for text-to-speech, have grown significantly. Being an iOS app, I won't get paid until after Apple's 45-day payout period, creating a large cash flow gap. I've bootstrapped up to this point and currently have zero budget left.

My original vision was to empower anyone to instantly create audio content they'd love to listen to themselves, without setup or friction. Along the way, though, I've added several education-focused features like mindmaps, quizzes, and synchronized transcripts, which now complicate how I position the app clearly.

Here's what's unique about Podflyy at this point:

1. Single voice hosting No awkward multi-character interactions. Similar to a clear, natural audiobook or solo podcast.

2. Very fast audio generation Generates up to 60 minutes of content in roughly 60 seconds.

3. Zero setup required Just tell PodFlyy what you want to learn about, and it takes care of the rest. No need to upload or input documents.

4. Designed for effective learning Episodes include quizzes, mindmaps, and (soon) personalized audio tutors to help information retention.

5. Community-powered content discovery Episodes are categorized and searchable through a public community library, making it easy to discover topics others are exploring.

6. Visual storytelling Automatically generated visuals to supplement audio episodes, ideal for visual learners and easy content sharing.

7. Multilingual at its core The entire content creation process is natively multilingual. Ask something in Spanish, and PodFlyy researches, plans, and produces it entirely in Spanish. Same goes for French, German, Portuguese, and others.

8. Word-level synchronized audio transcripts (initially built for language learners) Text syncs word-by-word with audio playback, making pronunciation practice and learning new languages easier.

Despite all this progress, I'm currently feeling overwhelmed and unsure about next steps. I'd appreciate the community's candid perspective:

- Am I onto something promising here, or am I missing the mark? I feel strongly about PodFlyy's potential, but I struggle to effectively position and communicate it.

- How can I best overcome the cash flow challenge? Should I consider actively seeking investment, or continue bootstrapping somehow?

- Am I just losing time by trying to compete against NotebookLM? Google can afford to offer their version for free—I can't directly compete on pricing for long.

- Should I simplify messaging and fully embrace the education angle, given the educational features I've built (quizzes, mindmaps, language support)? Or should I stick closer to the original vision of user-created, instant audio storytelling?

Honest insights and advice would be massively helpful. Thank you!
by potamic | 2025-07-10 05:12:40+00:00
The point of status codes is to have a standard that any client can understand. If you have a load balancer, the load balancer can unhealthy backends based on the status code. Similarly if you have some job scheduler or workflow engine that's calling your API, they can execute an appropriate retry strategy based on the status code. The client in most cases does not care about why something failed, only whether it has failed. Being able to tell apart if the failure was due to reverse proxy or database or whatever is the server's concern and the server can always do that with its own custom error codes.
by switchbak | 2025-07-10 05:13:00+00:00
Nova Scotian here: it’s definitely made with molasses. It’s really moist and doughy when it’s fresh. Goes very well when dipped in a chowder.

Or do like my Mom did: mix a little peanut butter with molasses into a slurry on top.

All of this will kill you, of course, but it does taste good!
by phendrenad2 | 2025-07-10 05:13:17+00:00
I think that all of the unemployed CS grads are rediscovering the "best practices" of the last 40 years in lieu of working. Well, just remember, every HATEOAS-conforming REST API, every chaos-monkey-enabled Microservice-Oriented Architecture, every app that someone spent tone of time hacking down the cyclomatic complexity score, every meticulously UML-diagrammed four-tier architecture, has had their main engineers laid off and replaced by a crack team of junior engineers who adulterated it down to spaghetti code. In the post-AI world, features talk, architecture walks.
by mistermann | 2025-07-10 05:13:21+00:00
I joined it about 6 months ago and absolutely love the ~uncensored free for all nature of it!

And while the format and content varies in many ways from other sites, one thing they all have in common is millions of humans who cannot distinguish facts from personal opinions. I do not know why but I am absolutely fascinated by the phenomenon, and on Twitter/X you can discuss such things fairly seriously, at least with some people.
by rtpg | 2025-07-10 05:13:33+00:00
As an emacs user I'm often writing small snippets of elisp for my own needs, and for snippets it's fine. But I dislike what most lisp's scoping strategies do to "normal" indentation of code. Any function with even a single intermediate value, indented due to a `let`! It's noticably more symbols compared to my Python stuff.

On top of that, being unable to just slap in big docstrings in my code makes me sad. Docstrings are useful.

This isn't the end of the world, but it's something that bugs me.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-07-10 05:14:46+00:00
the windows kernel executes a self extracting 7z archive, java.exe extracts and executes .jar files. If the 7z self extractor was .net CLR bytecode it would operate very much the same as .JAR files. to your point though, the primary purpose of JAR files is not to compress and transport other files, they're supposed to be executables only. From a user's perspective, abuse potential is the main difference.
by benatkin | 2025-07-10 05:15:02+00:00
You're accusing the article of being one sided, while espousing a view that to most on here is going to seem one sided. "They want to contract it out to a contractor." This completely leaves out that the contractor is also trying to get the transaction to happen, or at least to improve the likelihood.

So if some article offends your sensibilities enough to call it stupid, maybe give a more balanced take.
by masklinn | 2025-07-10 05:15:09+00:00
> Fielding won the war

It’s a bit odd to say fielding “won the war” when for years he had a blog pointing out all the APIs doing RPC over HTTP and calling it REST.

He formalised a concept and gave it a snappy name, and then the concept got left behind and the name stolen away from the purpose he created it for.

If that’s what you call victory, I guess Marx can rest easy.
by eloisius | 2025-07-10 05:15:52+00:00
Evangelicals presumably don’t want their children to be influenced by the environment that having those materials present would foster. They’d much rather have their children influenced by real-life sexual predators present within their church, who upon being discovered (multiple times) choose to address the situation with prayer and allow the predator to remain within the church and around children without ever reporting them to law enforcement. But that’s just my experience.
by mlyle | 2025-07-10 05:16:27+00:00
Metallic mercury doesn't really exist as something one could ingest unless you break a thermometer or something. People get mercury poisoning, but they get it from inhaling fumes (not too much like the plutonium risk) or from ingesting salts.

When we talk about mercury in the environment, we talk about the forms that it exists in-- just like we'd be talking about plutonium oxide.

> Why do you dodge the question?

I'm sorry-- I assumed we were talking about something useful or that made sense-- not to say, it's more dangerous than mercury (when choosing the form of mercury that's not implicated in toxicity events too often).

Why are you moving the goalposts? We have animal and, unfortunately, a lot of human data on plutonium exposure.
by coffeebeanHH | 2025-07-10 05:16:49+00:00
Hhhh I actually opened the link to truth social. It's fun how stupid a letter from a world 'leader' can sound. Feels a bit like being back in school.

Anyways. Fun would be if Lula goes for the run imposed by trump. Just tax imports from US by 200%, then trump goes 250. Add another 250% and so on.
by apparent | 2025-07-10 05:16:56+00:00
Were any of these books in the kids' section? That could be one reason.

Also, we shouldn't dilute the meaning of the term "book banners" to refer to anyone who doesn't want a particular book in a particular place (even if that place is a public library). In the US, we are spoiled to have zero actually banned books. Anyone who wants to is free to purchase any book they want, as long as it's for sale somewhere. People who don't want books that have sexual content (which a disproportionate number of sexuality-focused books do) in the kids' section might be fine with those books existing in a different section, or in a private bookstore. True "book banners" would want to enforce a ban on them existing anywhere. This is a subset — and quite possibly a small one — of the former group.
by jcranmer | 2025-07-10 05:16:56+00:00
There have been a few recent instances where Grok has been tuned to spew out white supremacist dreck that should be political anathema--most notably the "but let's talk about white genocide" phase a few months ago and more recently spewing out Nazi antisemitism. Now granted, those were probably caused more by the specific prompts being used than the underlying model, but if the owner is willing to twist its output to evince a particular political bias, what trust do you have that he isn't doing so to the actual training data?
by ok_dad | 2025-07-10 05:17:13+00:00
Read up!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act

Regan was the reason I had to sell most of my guns when I was in the military and was moved to California.

Edit:

Anyone who says “democrats did x” these days is probably not worth conversing with anyways, 99% you’re a facist loving troll who will just waste my time.
by energy123 | 2025-07-10 05:18:00+00:00
Advertising works well on local races. But for POTUS, I don't believe it moves the needle much.

The bigger factors are whether the large media players back you (Murdoch, Musk), whether social media personalities back you, and whether the foreign intelligence agencies back you in their spamouflage and information ops (e.g. via the Internet Research Agency).
by Szpadel | 2025-07-10 05:18:58+00:00
description from openrouter:

> Grok 4 is xAI's latest reasoning model with a 256k context window. It supports parallel tool calling, structured outputs, and both image and text inputs. Note that reasoning is not exposed, reasoning cannot be disabled, and the reasoning effort cannot be specified.

unfortunately no requests are passing because of some rate limits
by hannob | 2025-07-10 05:19:39+00:00
> 3) Syngas fills in that last 2-5%

Just one note, I believe what you mean is some form of gas made from renewables, most likely hydrogen.

"Syngas" is a term that has a relatively specific meaning in the chemical industry, notably it is a gas mixture of mostly Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen. I do not think that this is what you mean.
by georgemcbay | 2025-07-10 05:21:25+00:00
Windows' source code has leaked to the public several times, though afaik the latest version with a full leak was Windows XP, but there have been several partial leaks of newer versions.

And a lot of the underlying technical aspects of how Windows functions at its core are largely unchanged since the XP/Windows 2000 era.

So people that really want access to this code can find it without an LLM's help.
by unpaydijk | 2025-07-10 05:22:23+00:00
>One game i have didn't run even run when i was on windows, but the windows version worked in Linux..

Was it an old game? Those tend to do that

>My anecdotal experience with the steam and steamOS has been that the windows versions of games run better via proton than their native linux versions.

This is very interesting, does anyone have insights into why? I can only guess the games/their engines are more mindful of optimizing their calls to the native windows APIs, which when translated turns out to be pretty efficient on the output side too
by natmaka | 2025-07-10 05:23:52+00:00
> the power plants are delivering precisely what was planned

No. The load factor of the pair of EPRs built in China (5 years late and 60% above the budget) at Taishan is quite bad (.55 and .76).

In France the EPR isn't even producing electricity, while it was to be delivered in 2012 (budget 3.3 billions €, real cost > 23.7 billions €)

> delay and cost overruns caused by local political opposition and lack of vision

Source? An official report (dubbed the "Folz report") explains why the EPR project in France (Flamanville) was a failure, I cannot find "local political opposition" among the causes.

French ahead: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/media/organes-parleme...

> In France all historical reactors worked so well that we did not feel the need to build more.

The context was quite different: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl... ... and the real total cost of this "nuclearization" is already huge.

> This lead to talented engineers going to retirement without having a chance to pass on their knowledge and experience

The Civaux-2 reactor was delivered in 1999.

In 2000 the French nuclear sector (at the time "Areva") was trying to sell EPRs (even in France).

In 2003 Finland ordered an EPR and work began in 2005.

How exactly are we supposed to believe that all knowledge vanished, without anyone in the industry to act accordingly, especially while the existing French fleet of reactors (56 at the time) had to be maintained?

> our decision to put it aside for a while

Cause: oil counter-shock (~1985), which (sadly) reducing electricity competitivity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?ta...

Even EDF, as early as 1986, considered the nuclear fleet too large: "We will have two to four too many nuclear reactors by 1990," ( https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1986/01/17/nous-auro... ) and this was confirmed by the 1989 Rouvillois-Guillaume-Pellat report. The reason is well known: after the oil price shock, hydrocarbon prices had fallen significantly and sustainably, and they were competing with electricity.

However, reactors were built until the end of the 1990s. Three of them were started after 1985, and four were built in the 1990s. Some were ready to go in 1999 but did only diverge the generate electricity in 2002...

> certified for a lifespan of 60 years

Subject to a successful technical in-depth inspection every 10 years.