MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sondr3 | 2025-07-10 11:51:42+00:00
If you've never been exposed to a Hindley-Milner type system[1] it can seem a bit magical, but it essentially works by trying to figure out the types from the inside and out by inferring usage all the way to the top. The type of `n` however is `&str`, but I take it you mean the matching. `n.parse()` can be anything that implements `FromStr`, but `Token::Operand` can only take a `u32`, so it can immediately infer that the result of `n.parse().unwrap()` must be `u32` (`n.parse()` is a `Result<u32, Err>`).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner_type_sy...
by josters | 2025-07-10 11:52:09+00:00
Intrigued by the World Tension Index (you can enable it in the settings under the Experimental tab) which currently reads Mild/24°:

> The world is simmering gently, marked by active regional conflicts, deadly protests, and a severe flood, yet tempered by budding Gaza ceasefire talks and cooperative diplomatic meetings.

> While trade disputes and political probes contribute to tension, no large-scale escalations or catastrophic events push the situation beyond the usual range of global unrest.

I wonder how this is calculated and what would push the meter from normal over elevated to serious/extreme.
by VGHN7XDuOXPAzol | 2025-07-10 11:53:19+00:00
Yeah, if `main` returns an error I think it exits with an error code and prints it out, so quite similar to a panic.

I think the blog post is not focussing on error handling too much, but in any case this is 'safe', just could likely be handled better in a real-world case.
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-10 11:53:48+00:00
This is an entirely new claim - that the Terminal should try to understand what its input means. You can go ahead and try to implement this - I think you'll easily see that it's extremely hard to do so.

A terminal is basically a function foo(char_stream) = formatted_char_stream. It has no idea whatsoever what the input means, or what the output is supposed to mean. Your Ctrl-S example is completely in line with this: it's one control code that the Terminal chooses to display/interpet in a certain way (older terminals would just stop, newer terminals display some warning text and wait for user input). Recognizing that the start-red-output control sequence should not be interpreted as a control sequence if it's coming from the output of `ls` is a fundamentally different type of change.

Would it be nice to have a different concept, a CmdDisplayer that takes as input (commands, command text, control text) and outputs formatted text while understanding its input? Maybe. But it wouldn't be a terminal, and it would require a fundamental redesign of every single program that wants to meaningfully interact with it - especially all shells and any TUI program that might make the most use of such a tool.
by cesarb | 2025-07-10 11:54:07+00:00
> A coal plant actually generates 1GW, 24/7, while "a gigawatt's worth" of solar panels is theoretical peak capacity at noon on a cloudless day.

This is called "capacity factor". Other things like maintenance also affect it, no power plant actually generates "24/7". A simple back-of-the-envelope estimate would put solar power's capacity factor at around 25%, so that "gigawatt's worth of solar panels" would generate an average of 250MW. Which is still an impressive number.
by mittensc | 2025-07-10 11:54:23+00:00
> "Images are analysed locally on the phone, with nothing transmitted to Apple’s servers."

unless of course they add an update to send the sensitive content to remote servers either by their will or forced by some government.

They have proven they can detect, now it's a matter of getting them to report.

- saudi arabia can try to force apple to report any such content where parties are of the same gender. (death penalty)

- china can try to to force apple to report calls where narcotics are detected within their borders with exact location (death penalty).
by zelphirkalt | 2025-07-10 11:55:40+00:00
For a small business that simply displays an informational site, but occasionally needs to add content, a post on a blog or a change in the text or similar, it is sufficient to build a simple infrastructure of reading some markdown files and let them SFTP some markdown files and have periodic backups. One could also go as far as automatically committing those user uploaded files to a repo. None of which is difficult to do. It does get more complicated, if the small business wants users to be able to message them through the website, not just via e-mail. Or if the business suddenly wants to have a shop functionality on the site. Then CMSs start to slowly become an option.

Many medium businesses don't even need that btw. In many instances marketing people just want to have control over websites, that they should not be given control over, since they usually are incapable of knowing the impact of what they are doing, when they add something like Google tagmanager to their site. They also tend to often break things, when using Wordpress, because they do not understand how it works under the hood, so that side of things is also not without hassle. And then the devs are called to fix what marketing broke. Even with Wordpress. At that point it would often be easier to let the devs build a non-Wordpress site, and any ideas about things that are not just content in markdown files need to be requests for the dev team to evaluate, and possibly work on, when deemed safe and lawful.

Sadly the power dynamics in businesses are often stacked against conscientious developers.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-10 11:55:51+00:00
There doesn't seem to be anyway to use this without a real verified google or github account.

Not sure that a product which is pitched as an alternative to current big incumbents is going to benefit from forcing users to first be logged into current big corporate.

What's the rationale here? That there are google users who are looking to stay with google for everything but forms? That must be an awfully niche market, no?
by seuros | 2025-07-10 11:55:57+00:00
No offense taken—you're absolutely right.

In fact, I even added an em dash shortcut to my Logitech POP keyboard. That’s dedication. See? — — — — —

I’m not just writing like this—I’ve industrialized it.

If it sounds like a chatbot, maybe it's because I have spent too much time training them and not enough time pretending to be a chaos monkey in HN threads.

Appreciate the feedback though.

Now excuse me while I reboot into Windows just to add and to my custom shortcuts.

I have still got one more slot—what do you think I should add?

Go wild. Bonus points if it makes someone uninstall the gem out of pure emotional confusion.
by pbmonster | 2025-07-10 11:56:19+00:00
> Grok's updated voice mode is indeed impressive. I wish there was a way to disable automatic turn detection, so that it wouldn't treat silence as an end of the response.

You can circumvent that by instructing the model to use "radio etiquette" - only respond after the other part says "over". It will still be compelled to answer when it detects silence, you can't prevent that, but you can instruct it to only reply with a short "mhm" until you say "over". Feels very natural.

Like most models I've used with this old hack, it will immediately start role-playing and also end its own responses with "over".
by naikrovek | 2025-07-10 11:56:31+00:00
> All you need to get at that is cables

I don't understand your point. Power grids are a thing, and these enormous battery banks are attached to them.

It's true that power grids are independent from each other, but it's not a simple matter to just connect them all and observe a huge benefit as solar farms in Africa power the US or something. When everything is working that is certainly a possible outcome, but when things break, the operators of these grids need to know what the other grid operators are doing, and supply must be routed to demand correctly or you'll just create more outages. power grids aren't a simple mesh where any substation can power any home.
by mittensc | 2025-07-10 11:57:08+00:00
the medium article you linked tells you to format your hard drive, so it's obviously not how to set up an encrypted file that can be mounted.

> Yes, thankfully. The man page for cryptsetup isn't exactly palatable.

The man page is the source of truth and quite good, that it's not one of the first links or even on the first page is a problem.
by baroquetaxers0s | 2025-07-10 11:57:36+00:00
Resonates, and this discussion deserves way more airtime.

Living in Silicon Valley, I see so much short-term thinking disguised as “ambition.” Even the founders working themselves to the bone often have surprisingly little agency. It’s not always their vision they’re chasing, it’s someone else’s returns. Feels less like bold ambition, more like puppetry.
by anenefan | 2025-07-10 11:57:39+00:00
Like many terms in regard to food types, such a term (gluten, inulin) can cover a broad range of like or similar biological products, and lead to inaccurate understanding of what foods might not play well with various individuals who are experiencing food intolerance symptoms.

In regard to inulin, there certainly are different versions. My gut for decades played well [1] with the inulin from sweet potato, some varieties contain as much as 4% [2] without the slightest hint of trouble.

When consuming foods that add in inulin - be mindful of that source. My experience is the food stuffs adopting it to make the food sweeter, don't list the source and may be any version which is economical. My introduction to inulin was finding a version (a brand of soft wrap that used it) that made my body very sensitive to most inulins and as a result it was months avoiding any great amount of inulin for my gut to be able to tolerate the inulin from sweet potato once more.

It is probably far cheaper to use a small amount of lactulose daily (it is generally sold as a liquid laxative / stool softener) to promote Bifidobacteria [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inulin#Possible_side_effects

[2] https://www.myfoodresearch.com/uploads/8/4/8/5/84855864/_24_... [pdf]

> Sweet potatoes can also be used for diabetics because it has a low glycemic index (Allen et al., 2012). White sweet potatoes have the potential to become a source of inulin. Arfiani (2016) found that yellow sweet potatoes have 4.6% inulin, purple sweet potatoes have 4.3% inulin, and white potatoes have the highest inulin level of 5.5%. Inulin refers to a carbohydrate that belongs to the fructan group and is included in the water - soluble fiber which helps to reduce blood lipids and stabilizes blood sugar (Marzeline and Annis, 2017). Inulin belongs to prebiotics which cannot be digested by digestive enzymes, but it can be fermented in the colon by Bifidobacterium bacteria which provide many health benefits to the body (Dewanti, 2013). Morreale et al. (2018) reported that inulin is a soluble dietary fiber that becomes an attractive material to be added to various food

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37845315/ (Bifidobacteria metabolize lactulose to optimize gut metabolites and prevent systemic infection in patients with liver disease )
by zokier | 2025-07-10 11:58:17+00:00
> We’re paying a cost for each split_whitespace call, which allocates intermediate slices.

This part seems bit confused, I don't think `split_whitespace` does any allocations. I wish there were few intermediary steps here, e.g. going from &str and split_whitespace to &[u8] and split.

The tokenizer at that point is bit clunky, it is not really comparable to split_whitespace. The new tokenizer doesn't actually have any whitespace handling, it just assumes that every token is followed by exactly one whitespace. That alone might explain some of the speedup.
by naikrovek | 2025-07-10 11:58:29+00:00
right, because there's no other way to prevent modification. no other way. also it's not possible for a single operator to have 51% of the compute in a blockchain.

both of those are obviously false and both have already happened.

blockchain is stupid. it is insanely inefficient, it burns power solely so you can say that you've burned power. it is stupid beyond belief.
by nerdjon | 2025-07-10 11:59:36+00:00
I get where you are going and I do agree with you, but I think there is some validity to still calling it an echo chamber.

For example, I live in Boston and very liberal. I did not grow up in this area though, and I have noticed that among some of my friends that have... they have zero idea what most of this country is actually like. Even just other more moderate liberal people that don't have the "luxury" of living in a big city that largely shields us. Something that I feel like we saw in particular during the last election.

I totally get not caring about, and not wanting to see, the alt-right hate. I don't want to be constantly reminded that people hate me just for existing.

I am not sure what an alterative word for this is, and I think it goes farther than just trying to tune out the alt-right hate.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-07-10 11:59:54+00:00
And then come the WP plugin license fees, which easily quadrupel that cost, if not more. Just the other day I have seen a WP instance, that has >50 plugins installed, some of which cost 800 Euro per year. They are lock-in traps for hapless marketing and other non-technical people, who are convinced that they definitely need this super-duper plugin.

And then come the legal fees for making the site actually conforming with the law, such as GDPR. Those fees are increased, because of people wanting to do stuff they need to declare to visitors of the site, for which they want reassurance, that all is well.

And then come the costs for paying a dev anyway, to fix things that they break or that become broken over time.

So no, 9.99$/month are very very far from a realistic price these businesses pay.
by lr4444lr | 2025-07-10 11:59:55+00:00
Isn't that basically one of the ways doing innovation? Instead of saying "No, that's not possible" when someone asks if they can build something faster than a horse and carriage, a bunch of people get together to see if there any way of doing that, trying to avoid any per-concieved ideas about if it's actually possible or not.

Yes, but if people graduate from engineering schools that explicitly teach the concepts of the combustion engine, and the carriage manufacturers claiming to be engineers are unaware of basic principles like the 4 stroke cycle, you have a completely different kind of problem.
by jraph | 2025-07-10 12:00:17+00:00
I would not want my email client to be relying on such brittle and incorrect heuristics.

A better workaround would be to keep deleted emails around for some time so users have the option to restore them if the bug triggers. But this has drawbacks such as potential privacy breakage (you meant to delete mails you don't want the chance that anybody sees it) or free disk space management (your local drive is overloaded and you want to urgently free up space) or ux confusion (this is a de facto trash but Thunderbird already has such a feature)

Ultimately, what needs to be done is make the code robust, make sure there are no race conditions, etc.
by lemming | 2025-07-10 12:00:20+00:00
I'm very interested in this, I'm a long term kagi subscriber with the free t-shirt!

One thing that would be interesting to explore would be a feed that integrated over a longer timeframe. For example, I subscribe to the guardian weekly, and I like it much more than the daily homepage. News that survives a week tends to be more newsworthy, and there's more scope for the beginnings of retrospective analysis. It would be interesting to be able to play with that timeframe - what does a 3 day window look like, or a 1 month one?
by Brendinooo | 2025-07-10 12:00:35+00:00
> when people start talking about "echo chambers" it's usually because they are upset that I won't listen to bigoted alt-right hate.

Funny, I think usually see it in the context of people who are upset that people are stuck listening to what they perceive as bigoted alt-right hate.

> Alternative viewpoints, fine. But there are limits

I've found that, in my Twitter feed curation anyways, I like having people around who I agree with on some things but disagree on other things. Or, I need to have some kind of a personal connection to them. Either way, there needs to be something to bridge who I am now to the stuff I disagree with. If it's not there then the stuff I disagree with will never make sense or land, and hanging around it will either turn me off even more or just stress me out, like you're saying.

I think that's a fair way to strike the balance.
by mvdwoord | 2025-07-10 12:01:00+00:00
I have used Thunderbird in the past, but ultimately gave up.

I am currently on google for my private email, and for other reasons tied into MS / Office365 anyway for my business so decided after having my business email at my internet provider initially, it all was just not worth the hassle.

95% of my business dealings is with companies that are on office 365, and especially the calendaring and RSVP'ing just kind of works in outlook.

I am still keeping an eye out and hope to be able to move to some solution which unifies it all, preferably on a nice open standards, open source solution for email, calendaring, and contacts.. but the fact is that customers pay my bills, and I grew tired of all the account issues, syncing issues etc with trying to have it all in Thunderbird.

I find it a sad state of affairs though, the amount of engineering time, energy, and money spent on building semi-walled gardens and at the same time building ladders to climb those same walls, all while never achieving an actually smooth experience between my various email accounts, my calendars, on my laptop and phone alike.

Maybe some day.
by jjcob | 2025-07-10 12:01:19+00:00
Your logic seems to assume that there two disjoint groups of people:

1. Developers who work on the open source project

2. Developers who work on proprietary software based on the open source project

In reality these groups overlap. Developers contribute to the open source project, and they also work on their own software based on the open source project. If you look at the git logs of successful permissive open source projects, you'll see that a lot of the development time comes from developers who work for proprietary software companies.
by OneFriend2575 | 2025-07-10 12:01:38+00:00
So many teams struggle with “fake Agile”: standups that feel pointless, Kanban boards that stay outdated or sprints that are just mini-waterfalls.

There’s an interesting write-up on what a real Agile environment looks like, covering principles, common pitfalls and ways to create conditions for true ownership and collaboration.

What have you seen really make or break an Agile team’s environment?

Any stories or hard-earned lessons?
by brookst | 2025-07-10 12:02:59+00:00
There an argument that he paid $44B to get a Us administration that would hugely advantage him and his companies. Certainly he’s made billions from contracts initiated by this administration and seen many regulatory difficulties removed.

Of course it may all fall apart because everyone involved has the temperament of a five year old on a meth bender, but the basic “buy media to influence politics to multiply wealth” approach seems to have worked well.
by ysavir | 2025-07-10 12:03:27+00:00
Hammering can get loud. But not louder than any motorized tool. And hammering being limited by the energy capacity of flesh and blood doesn't last for long bursts, maybe a few minutes at a time. In contrast, motorized tools let out an egregious, sharp hum that can last for an hour or two without pause. Both might draw someone's attention and frustration, but when comparing them objectively, one is clearly worse than the other.

On top of that, carpentry is done on site and isn't mobile. Someone doing carpentry as a hobby will likely be in a garage or some enclosed space that absorbs and muffles the sound. Carpentry being done professionally is temporary and will stop once the construction is finished. Landscaping, though, is everywhere and without end
by daniellax | 2025-07-10 12:03:59+00:00
I built a comprehensive web developer toolkit that I wish I had when starting out. Everything runs client-side, so your data never leaves the browser.

Tools included: - SVG to React/JSX converter with optimization and color extraction - Password generator with strength indicators - URL shortener - Base64 encoder/decoder for files and text - Color palette generator from images - JSON formatter with YAML conversion - CSS minifier with auto-prefixer - QR code generator for URLs, WiFi, email, etc.

Tech stack: Next.js 14, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui

Why I built this: I was tired of switching between different online tools, some with ads, some requiring registration. Wanted something fast, private, and free.

Key features: - No registration required - No ads - No data leaves your browser - Modern, responsive UI - SEO optimized for each tool

Built this over the past few months and learned a ton about performance optimization, UX design, and making tools that developers actually want to use.

Would love feedback from the HN community! What tools do you find most useful? Any features you'd like to see added?

Link: https://www.konverter-online.com
by serbuvlad | 2025-07-10 12:04:27+00:00
> These prices seem to keep increasing while we were promised they'll keep decreasing.

A Ferrari is more expensive than the model T.

The most expensive computer is a lot more expensive than the first PC.

The price that usually falls is:

* The entry level. * The same performance over time.

But the _price range_ gets wider. That's fine. That's a sign of maturity.

The only difference this time is that the entry level was artificially 0 (or very low) because of VC funding.
by grafmax | 2025-07-10 12:04:48+00:00
First off, if you change something as an engineer you are responsible for testing it before deploying it to production. Besides they intentionally changed the system prompt to make it more politically incorrect. (It’s because they hold a unnuanced ideology that conflates political incorrectness with objectivity - thus it’s logical that Grok is going to slide into racism.) In any case their stupidity on multiple fronts doesn’t deserve a free pass.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-10 12:06:10+00:00
Who said "successful in business?" No one except you, right here.

I said he was "off the rails", you said he is "doing remarkably well," and GP listed reasons he seems like a deeply unhappy and psychologically damaged person.

Now you're moving the goal posts to "successful in business". I guess your reflexive need to defend the world's richest person is rubbing up against the reality of the situation?
by myrmidon | 2025-07-10 12:06:16+00:00
I don't believe in world-war as byproduct of climate change yet.

I think capability to wage war internationally will probably decrease thanks to climate change; it is much easier for a state to prevent the peasants from starving than to feed/equip/fuel an army.

I also don't really see the incentives working: Countries like Bangladesh that are gonna suffer disproportionally are mostly not in a position to wage war offensively, and famines/heatwaves are not gonna make it any easier.

My admittedly cynical outlook is that it will just be business as usual: More affected/poor nations struggling, while wealthier western states moan about refugees, use their wealth as buffer and proceed to not care about people dying elsewhere.
Ask HN: Is there a coming dev boom for agent tools?
by rlawson | 2025-07-10 12:06:33+00:00
I lived through the internet transition where suddenly every company had to have a website, then again the same with mobile apps. I am busy currently writing agent tools to allow llms to have access to my company's internal data/processes. I feel like soon every company will realize they want agent tools specific to their business and much like the previous booms it will go from cutting edge to must have. Thoughts?