MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: touchgrass.fm, an app that made me more present during a family tragedy
by softservo | 2025-07-02 14:00:59+00:00
https://www.touchgrass.fm

About one month ago while visiting us from overseas, my wife’s parents were in a terrible car accident. Everyone involved is alive and going to be okay. But what followed was a series of emotional, physical and logistical challenges that pushed my wife and her family to their limits.

For the first week we were practically glued to our phones, contacting family members, insurance companies and air ambulance services. I found myself obsessively checking my phone for updates, sending empty messages and mindlessly scrolling feeds. My screen time reached all time highs. I was spending 12 of my 16 waking hours staring at a screen instead of being there for my wife and her parents. It felt like I was hiding on my phone.

I don’t have a particularly addictive personality, but I am undeniably addicted to my phone. And this was the week I finally needed to deal with it.

I tried Apple Screen Time and a few popular screen time management apps, but found the blocks were too easy to bypass. I also realised that most apps (e.g. YouTube) were as useful as they were distracting depending on the context. I didn’t necessarily want to use my phone less: it’s an incredibly useful tool, and the distractions were sometimes helpful.

What I really needed was intentional stretches of time spent away from my phone. I built touchgrass.fm as a simple way to record and incentivize those stretches of time. It’s not quite finished (built in a few hours of downtime), but it helped me stay present during hospital visits, meals and important conversations.

I decided to share it on the off chance it helps others get some control back and be a bit more present in their day to day lives!

More backstory here: https://softservo24.substack.com/p/touchgrassfm?r=2wsmj

What Are You Working On (June 2025): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416093#44427955
by thotghig5896 | 2025-07-02 14:01:11+00:00
Duh.

All the economic dimwits (both on the left and right) who constantly harp that real wages have been falling, don't take into account the steep fall in prices of consumer goods due to offshoring.

Ofc. this does mean that US becomes the world's "bitch" eventually following the economics of things, but the alternative is essentially becoming Soviet Union or Argentina.
by angusturner | 2025-07-02 14:01:17+00:00
There is an excellent talk by Jack Rae called “compression for AGI”, where he shows (what I believe to be) a little known connection between transformers and compression;

In one view, you can view LLMs as SOTA lossless compression algorithms, where the number of weights don’t count towards the description length. Sounds crazy but it’s true.
by hammock | 2025-07-02 14:01:20+00:00
There is a mattress company called Tuft and Needle. They started right at the early beginning of the mattress-in-a-box trend, but offered a unique product. For the first six months of operation, they made a Japanese-inspired cotton mattress filled with wool batting and was made in the USA. Before I had a chance to order one though, they had already pivoted away from that unique product (that doesn’t exist even today) and were dropshipping the same generic PU foam mattresses made in China as everyone else, with very little change to their website even. I was sad
by jpin97 | 2025-07-02 14:01:33+00:00
Location: Edinburgh, UK

Time Zone: UTC+1

Remote: Yes — UK, EU/EMEA preferred

Willing to Relocate: Yes — Copenhagen, Zurich, Munich, or Barcelona

Technologies: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, Express.js, Tailwind, Shadcn, React Native/Expo, Prisma, Drizzle ORM, PlanetScale (MySQL), AWS, Vercel, Python

I'm a full-stack software engineer and product-focused builder with a strong entrepreneurial mindset. I’ve shipped production-grade SaaS products, marketing sites, loyalty systems, mobile apps, and AI-powered tools for both startups and my own ventures.

Recent highlights:

• Led development of hospitality SAAS company's loyalty platform (Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, PlanetScale, AWS)

• Built Langchats.com — AI-powered language learning app

I enjoy working in small teams where I can have a meaningful impact across the stack, and I'm an entrepreneur at heart and would love to work directly with Founders/CTO's to build a great product and service.

Also recently just took a year out of software dev to go back to uni for an MSc in AI.

Contact:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jay-pinion-b8b26815b/

Product demo of Langchats: https://youtu.be/Mc9okomyKd8

Personal website: https://www.jay.sx
by nkrisc | 2025-07-02 14:01:34+00:00
If your software has a bug, it’s your bug. If the root cause of the bug in your software comes from a direct call into some dependency, that’s immaterial to the users of your software. Your software is incorrect, so your software has a bug.

How you choose to resolve it is up to you. You might implement a fix in your code to handle the bug case until the dependency is fixed.
Show HN: Placecard.net – Free PDF Seating Cards with Puppeteer
by cvbox | 2025-07-02 14:01:36+00:00
Need printable seating cards for your event? Placecard.net lets you: Design seating cards in your browser (no signup) Auto-generate PDFs using Puppeteer (no manual drag-anddrop) 100% free for small events

Tech stack:

Next.js (frontend)

Puppeteer (PDF generation)

Hosted on Vercel (fast renders)

I built this after struggling with manual seating charts for my wedding. Now you can:

Upload guest names

Adjust layout (optional)

Click "Generate PDF" → Done!

No AI, no pricing tiers—just free PDF seating cards.

Try it now | How Puppeteer makes it work
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-07-02 14:01:42+00:00
> And if every link is just "Amaya" without verbs you can't tell what's what.

I'm pretty sure the W3C is not recommending you do that. If you link to the Amaya website, link on the text "Amaya". If you're linking to something else Amaya-related, modify the link text appropriately.
by bArray | 2025-07-02 14:01:46+00:00
I still think that the missing context is an issue. Imagine the page is some 10k words, by the time you get to the bottom, you might not remember what "Amaya" is. So just saying "Amaya's download page" tells the user that it is a download, but nothing about what it is a download for.

I wonder how successful the screen reader experience is for using the web. Without checking URLs, how can they be sure for example they don't enter this credit card details on http://bank.xyz/scam_page , rather than https://bank.com ?

Or how do they know whether the download page automatically downloads the file whilst they are on it?

I can only imagine that using the web is extremely difficult.
by echelon | 2025-07-02 14:01:49+00:00
None of the big tech companies in China are releasing their frontier models anymore.

- Hunyuan Image 2.0 (200 millisecond flux) is not released

- Hunyuan 3D 2.5, the top performing 3D model and an order of magnitude improvement over 2.1, is not released

- Seedream Video, which outperforms Google Veo 3 on ELO rankings, is not released

- Qwen VLo, an instructive autoregressive model, is not released
by bilbo0s | 2025-07-02 14:02:03+00:00
which will probably not happen in the foreseeable future

Can you elaborate on why this will not happen in the foreseeable future?

Because in my version of the foreseeable future I see it happening quite readily.

EUV is not the magic that everyone believes it to be. It can be replicated by us, (the US), at our convenience. It can even be replicated by the Chinese and Japanese. (Personally, I'd throw the Koreans and the Russians into that pool as well.)

But that ain't even the point. The point is that, in that particular game, there is always more than one way to skin a cat so to speak. It's not at all a foregone conclusion that EUV is the best way to skin a cat, and it'd certainly be a bad bet to assume it is the only way to skin a cat. Those are the questions I would hope that we, (the US), are focusing research efforts on, and we should assume that China is also focusing research efforts in that direction.

PS - Please no one bring up Trump gutting research. Here I'm only speaking of clear strategic research priorities in an ideal, (ie - collaborative), political environment. Obviously, politically erected structural concerns impact the viability of any research strategy we want to implement. I'm just talking about what I think would be ideal.
by ljf | 2025-07-02 14:02:04+00:00
I often find myself overcome with sonder and dustsceawung (the infinite complexity of others lives, and that the dust all around me is made from the lives and civilisations before us [and alongside us])

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sonder https://medium.com/etch-to-their-own/dustsceawung-866aff795a...
by Alifatisk | 2025-07-02 14:02:28+00:00
When coming from TS to Dart, the lack of union types was a huge bummer. But I saw a discussion somewhere that you can achieve something close with sealed classes to model union types combined with exhaustive pattern matching, but Idk.

Another user hinted at this package https://pub.dev/packages/extension_type_unions, have you seen it before?

Also it's worth noting that sum types can be achieved with Dart 3!
by jchw | 2025-07-02 14:02:49+00:00
Hmmm. My first thought was they were avoiding the word "website" in this case so that it would make more sense if you were viewing it on paper or outside of a hypertext environment. But actually, that would make "Get Amaya!" and other such phrases equally awkward. Without the hyperlinks, they become a bit strange. So I guess that was probably not their reasoning.

Now I really wish the page elaborated a bit more. I do wonder if there's any logic to avoiding "website" or if it's just the different choices they made in the examples.
by guhcampos | 2025-07-02 14:02:57+00:00
Maybe it's because I'm old, but I have always instinctivelly thought of links as pointing to to nouns: links point to a place, and that place has a name, not a verb, maybe an adjective.

So links to my website are fine, while links to my website are inherently not. I also have a strong pet peeve around imperative tone, so I'd never write something like go to my website or follow this link.
by pyrale | 2025-07-02 14:03:11+00:00
I'm not saying post-WW2 society was non-violent.

I'm saying prior to WW2, sending the army (or just any hired goons) to shoot at workers was a common way to handle a strike in western countries. I'm saying at the turn of 20th century, people in colonies had their hands cut for not meeting rubber quota. etc.

You are right to point out that things weren't (and aren't) perfect, but you'd be a fool to think that there was no improvement.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-02 14:03:29+00:00
The thing about the current movement that draws criticism, I believe, is the wildly unrealistic expectations. The party in question has treated bringing back manufacturing, even that which is skilled and requires large quantities of highly specialized machinery and supply chains and trained workers to supply it, as if it’s something you can flip on like a light switch.

If you factor in building factories, building supply chains, training workers, and regaining lost institutional/tribal knowledge, you’re looking at a monstrously expensive endeavor that’s going to take a long time. Probably at least a decade end-to-end, shorter in some fields and longer than others. No level of tariffs or overconfident statements on social media can change this reality.

And as a cherry on top, companies are supposed to set this all back up without help from the government, despite it being so expensive and time consuming to do so, and despite Chinese manufacturing having benefited immensely from its government pouring vast sums into bolstering its manufacturing capabilities to reach its present position. What corporate leadership is going to see any of that as reasonable or remotely a good deal? They’re more likely to play up investments they’d already planned to make during the previous administration and wait for another dice roll come next election.

TLDR it can happen, but not on a short timeline and not without government incentives to smooth over the massive costs of bring it back.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-02 14:03:48+00:00
> Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down.

Do they? I have seen tons of reviews complaining that it's the wrong material -- that a tablecloth is polyester rather than advertised cotton, that something is chrome-plated plastic rather than stainless steel. And I've left my fair share myself, and never had one taken down. I've avoided buying many products precisely based on other people's reviews pointing out the wrong material, the wrong size, etc. So what you're describing does not match my experience at all. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I use Amazon, that there are enough reviews to find out what's real and what's fake. Other sites don't have enough reviews, and of course a site run by the brand itself can delete whatever bad reviews it wants.
by alganet | 2025-07-02 14:04:10+00:00
> If A.I. companies freely use data from various websites without permission or payment, people will be discouraged from creating new digital content

I don't see a way out of this happening. AI fundamentally discourages other forms of digital interaction as it grows.

Its mechanism of growing is killing other kinds of digital content. It will eventually kill the web, which is, ironically, its main source of food.
by ricardobeat | 2025-07-02 14:04:15+00:00
Continuing that quote:

> for example of an operator established in the Union that contracts certain services to an operator established outside the Union in relation to an activity to be performed by an AI system that would qualify as high-risk and whose effects impact natural persons located in the Union.

> this Regulation should also apply to providers and users of AI systems that are established in a third country, to the extent the output produced by those systems is used in the Union

Otherwise it seems to reach way beyond what it actually is.

Explicitly prohibiting EU usage in the license is probably a move to reduce liability under the eyes of those “used in the Union” clauses.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-02 14:04:31+00:00
> Their children’s children didn't bother to learn the STEM and Craft skills required to work at scale.

I mean it's less nobody learned and more the demand was gone. American companies sent manufacturing overseas because back then, it was cheaper, and America is unique among nations in that we can just print money^1 to buy things. The only manufacturing that's still solidly American is products that are too fragile/large for sea shipping at scale (we make a lot of cars in North America, but a lot of that's gone to Canada and Mexico) and anything related to the defense industry. And even then, those companies (like Boeing) are now being eaten from the inside by the same business parasites that ate everything else.

These problems all have solutions but we have to stop giving private businesses a free pass to do anything and everything to starve the government of tax revenue while stripmining the citizenry for every penny they can.

1: Not without risks and problems, but still, no other country on Earth can do this.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-07-02 14:04:31+00:00
I turned this on and it adjusts the robots.txt automatically; not sure what else it is doing.

# NOTICE: The collection of content and other data on this # site through automated means, including any device, tool, # or process designed to data mine or scrape content, is # prohibited except (1) for the purpose of search engine indexing or # artificial intelligence retrieval augmented generation or (2) with express # written permission from this site’s operator.

# To request permission to license our intellectual # property and/or other materials, please contact this # site’s operator directly.

# BEGIN Cloudflare Managed content

User-agent: Amazonbot Disallow: /

User-agent: Applebot-Extended Disallow: /

User-agent: Bytespider Disallow: /

User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended Disallow: /

User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: /

User-agent: meta-externalagent Disallow: /

# END Cloudflare Managed Content User-agent: * Disallow: /* Allow: /$
by bmacho | 2025-07-02 14:04:56+00:00
Surely this is not true, a screen reader must be able to read text with html links inside, and be able to open the next/current/previous link. What is it able to do, if not that?

Anyway, "click here" is more accessible for anyone else, since links should look like links, and random half-bold words in a wall of text are not cutting it.
by echelon | 2025-07-02 14:05:48+00:00
China nor Meta are the good guys, and they are not stewards of open source AI.

China has stopped releasing frontier models, and Meta doesn't release anything that isn't in the llama family.

- Hunyuan Image 2.0 (200 millisecond flux) is not released

- Hunyuan 3D 2.5, the top performing 3D model and an order of magnitude improvement over 2.1, is not released

- Seedream Video, which outperforms Google Veo 3 on ELO rankings, is not released

- Qwen VLo, an instructive autoregressive model, is not released

The list is much larger than this.
by afandian | 2025-07-02 14:06:11+00:00
This advice distinguishes between the form (a link or button) and the content. I think it makes sense because you had other ways of knowing that it's a link than the content (underline, blue text, button border).

I guess this was written at a time when CSS was used relatively conservatively and, whatever the label of the button or link, it was clear you could click on it.

Somehow the current UX trend is to remove those underlines and boxes. I'm not sure how people are meant to intuit that something is clickable _except_ for the label.
by dcchuck | 2025-07-02 14:06:35+00:00
Congratulations to the Figma team! Well earned. It was such an exciting product when it hit the scene. It became the standard so fast, and it was easy to see why. When there were talks of them being bought for $20 billion I thought it was a great deal for Adobe - and that was before seeing these impressive financials.

I will admit I have waned enthusiasm a on Figma over the past couple of years. I find the UI churn confusing. The new features, i.e. dev mode and variables, feel out of place. I find the plugin ecosystem cumbersome. Doing simple things has become complex. I'm putting out real "who moved my cheese?" energy here I know. I suppose I'm wondering if others feel the same.
Show HN: Ebiose – A Darwin‑Style Playground for Self‑Evolving AI Agents
by vincent-ebiose | 2025-07-02 14:06:46+00:00
Hi HN!

After a year of R&D at Inria (the French national lab), we have just open-sourced Ebiose.

Ebiose is a distributed, Darwin-style playground where AI architect agents design, test, and improve other agents. Instead of AI built behind closed doors, anyone can spin up a forge, state a problem, and watch candidate agents compete until the fittest survive.

An example instruction given to an Ebiose forge: "Build a LangGraph agent that processes SaaS customer refunds directly through our ERP, escalating to a human for edge cases. Use the following tools: ERP API, email/Twilio integration, refund policy documentation, and historical support tickets."

TL;DR

- Meta-architect agents: Generate new agents, reusable components, or even models in the future.

- Evolutionary loop: Only the best agents survive and recombine.

- Self-improvement: Architect agents evolve themselves over time.

- An evolving library: Reusable components, i.e. agent’s genes, compete for survival based on power, efficiency, and success.

- P2P compute (planned): Goal of utilizing unused device computing power.

Important note: Ebiose is still in a very early stage. Architect agents are basic for now, and there are no reusable components yet. But the core loop is working, and we’re now inviting more contributors to help build it up.

What's in this first Ebiose release?

- Hand-crafted architect agent that performs prompt engineering and assembles agent graphs.

- Evolutionary engine.

- Forges: isolated labs for building agents tailored to specific tasks.

- Persistent ecosystems where top agents live on and tackle new forges.

- Free credits to run your own forges (thanks to cloud sponsors).

- Graph-based agents made of LLM nodes.

- Initial LangGraph runtime (others are very welcome).

Roadmap (help wanted!):

- Agent nodes: power agents with new types of nodes such as code execution, classic ML models, tool use, fine-tuning, etc.

- Foundational forges: code generation, prompt tuning, context grounding, agent-as-a-judge, etc.

- Meta-forges: architect-agents that invent other architect-agents (yes, agents that build agents that build agents).

- P2P compute layer to use idle GPUs/CPUs (llama.cpp).

GitHub: https://github.com/ebiose-ai/ebiose - MIT licensed.

Fork it, test it, star it, break it… We are eager to see what you build and to hear your feedback!

P.S. If you saw AlphaEvolve, they used LLM-guided evolution to find ultra-efficient algorithms like a 48-operation matrix-multiply. Ebiose shares the same evolutionary idea, a level up: instead of optimizing one program, it evolves entire agents, and even architect agents that design other agents.
by phkahler | 2025-07-02 14:08:01+00:00
>> Huawei was going to work on GPUs anyway, SMIC was going to fab chips anyway.

Sure, but China has started dumping a lot of money into competing with ASML as a result of the sanctions. And no, they are not going the super complicated route of firing lasers at drops of tin to get EUV. They are trying to sidestep that costly complexity, and if they are successful they'll be providing equipment to the top chip producers (around the world or just their own).
by Moto7451 | 2025-07-02 14:08:06+00:00
Amazon does have the Vine program so if companies want to have a legitimate free product review program they can opt in. I’m in Vine and we’re supposed to leave a review based on using the product, take photos, etc. If anything goes wrong we are not supposed to send the product back, return it, etc. The sellers can’t contact us and if we do we’re supposed to report it. The automated “did you get the product” are fine but it’s not ok for them to bribe us.
by angusturner | 2025-07-02 14:08:10+00:00
I wish people would stop parroting the view that LLMs are lossy compression.

There is kind of a vague sense in which this metaphor holds, but there is a much more interesting and rigorous fact about LLMs which is that they are also _lossless_ compression algorithms.

There are at least two senses in which this is true:

1. You can use an LLM to losslessly compress any piece of text at a cost that approaches the log-likelihood of that text under the model, using arithmetic coding. A sender and receiver both need a copy of the LLM weights.

2. You can use an LLM plus SGD (I.e the training code) as an lossless compression algorithm, where the communication cost is area under the training curve (and the model weights don’t count towards description length!) see: Jack Rae “compression for AGI”