MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-28 14:59:28+00:00
As far as emergency vehicles go, we have had a system in place, around here, for years, where the vehicles have some kind of infrared device that forces the light green.

Bit annoying, when you are in a cross street, and you know it's about to turn green, then an ambulance comes by, and it skips your turn.

I think there's also a black market for the devices for impatient drivers.
by Macha | 2025-07-28 14:59:51+00:00
It's one thing to charge for bags that are gate checked because you knew in advance you couldn't bring the bag.

However, another thing that happens is you pay for (or the ticket includes) a carry on bag but because the airline has insufficient carry on space to allow all passengers to bring a carry on, they collect bags at the gate to be checked as cabin bags instead (even if you hadn't paid for a cabin bag).

It's the latter that would be surprising to see airlines charge for, as it's a solution to a problem for the airline that the airline created itself by overselling the carry on space.
by norir | 2025-07-28 15:00:02+00:00
There is a straightforward technique for writing unambiguous recursive descent parsers. The high level algorithm is this: parsing always consumes one character, never backtracks and is locally unambiguous.

You then construct the parser by combining unambiguous parsers from the bottom up. The result ends up unambiguous by construction.

This high level algorithm is much easier to implement without a global lexer. Global lexing can be a source of inadvertent ambiguity. Strings make this obvious. If instead, you lex in a context specific way, it is usually easy to efficiently eliminate ambiguities.
by scott_w | 2025-07-28 15:00:03+00:00
> Russia is very similar to the rest of western democracies, so I won't comment further on that.

Ah yes, I recall that famous incident where Keir Starmer had his political opponents thrown out of a window. Oh, wait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_Russia-related_deat...

> Changing parties matters only a little bit in the grand scheme of things.

It's part of the package but clearly not all, as many organisations focused on improving democracy and governance will clearly point out.

> Japan, that has been ruled by a single party for all of his modern existence

Whoops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Japan#Result_in_h...

---

In any case, I think all the replies have made my point for me that your dismissal of our rhetoric as based on "western arrogance" are simply nonsense. It's in fact you who's displayed a lack of understanding of those you argue against.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-07-28 15:00:15+00:00
How does immigration boost productivity? It's labor-saving automation and machinery investments that boost productivity. I would expect these to be driven mainly by labour scarcity. Growing the labour pool seems like it would drive exactly the opposite. As two examples, Japan has low immigration and an aging population and despite that its productivity has never been higher. By contrast Canada has had extremely high immigration and rapid population growth, and its productivity has flatlined since 2019.
by sponrad | 2025-07-28 15:00:31+00:00
At my day job we have an MCP server and had to spend quite a lot of time setting up extra monitoring and validation for it so I'm building a tool to do those things. Pretty much a regular server uptime checker, but also with some extra's that an MCP client gets access to tool and resource calls.

Our MCP server at work relays most of it's calls over to our API so we wanted to be sure something was testing and validating the whole flow.

https://healthymcp.com/
by zamadatix | 2025-07-28 15:00:54+00:00
The last I looked into this these were the conclusions I reached (depending on individual situation):

- If you're looking to do this 100% to the letter, then you'll need to enter some form of VL agreement with an authorized reseller. This will come with a minimum purchase of 5 licenses.

- If you're looking to do this with a "real" key, but not by the book, then one of the gray market sites.

- If you're looking to do this morally (by paying Microsoft), but don't care if the actual activation is completed with the license you purchase, then purchase a Windows 11 Pro license but use https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts/ to activate your Windows 11 LTSC. The ISO itself can still be sourced from Microsoft.

- If you don't care about any of this, then the same as the above except don't buy the Windows 11 Pro License

- If you absolutely want to buy a single license "by the book"... there is no official offering available.
Show HN: FocoDo.Work – A distraction-free focus timer and to-do app
by sreeragnandan | 2025-07-28 15:00:57+00:00
Hey HN

I deployed one of projects: *FocoDo.Work* — a minimal, distraction-free focus timer and to-do list app.

I built this to help myself stay focused without the clutter of most productivity tools, and thought others might find it useful too. It’s privacy-first, super simple, and works right in the browser.

Features: Add tasks and track time with a built-in timer See the total time you spent working on each task All data is stored locally on your device — no sign-up needed Share your tasks with a quick link across devices or with friends/colleagues Keep the timer visible in a floating picture-in-picture window Full-screen mode for deep work

Would love to hear your feedback or suggestions. I’m planning to keep iterating on it!

Try it out here: https://focodo.work
by korse | 2025-07-28 15:01:06+00:00
This is what has continually killed it in my experience. Orgs run microsoft software and have basically no business case to switch.

People have said this before, but how much frustration does it cause when microsoft moves a default ribbon around? Try moving those people to a program with different icons. Yikes. Now do it across a giant organization and try to justify the resulting performance hit to a board.

This isn't even getting into all of the arcane business logic that keeps processes moving built on excel sheets, fucking macros and who knows what else. Sure, most of it works fine but when it doesn't and people don't know how, why or where...
by imtringued | 2025-07-28 15:01:14+00:00
I have to agree that this is problematic in the sense of ascribing malicious intent, but it is actually a useful concept when performing an honest/truthful analysis and trying to acquire new knowledge and perspectives so you can compare them. i.e. the analysis of what it ought to do versus what it actually does.

Given a software product, there are often marketers/advertisers telling you what use cases they envisioned for their product, but you as the customer actually know more about your core business and your own needs. Hence you choose the products not based on what the vendor claims about the product i.e. the intended/prescribed purpose, you care more about what the product can do for your business and that includes discovering ways to use the product that the vendor could have never imagined in the first place.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-28 15:01:30+00:00
> One of these seems like the solution to the other.

If the per capita spending is exceeding per capita taxation, increased immigration does not solve the problem. More people requires more spending.

> The UK has always been an empire in decline

I find this fatalistic attitude to be very unhelpful in determining good policy decisions. If you start with the assumption that the empire is in decline then it doesn’t seem as bad to add policies that contribute to decline, as long as you get some short-term win out of it.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-28 15:01:33+00:00
The content easily available on the internet in the 00's is way far far far beyond what is available today.

Liveleak was an everyday video host and they had terrorist beheadings on the front page. Once the masses moved online and the power players consolidated everything into modern social media (reddit, facebook, youtube), it kinda sucked all the air out of the room and killed all the small sites, of which there was no shortage of "test the limits of free speech" content.

That being said, the modern incarnation of social media has probably caused far more youth mental destruction than rotten.com or faces of death.
by inversetelecine | 2025-07-28 15:01:50+00:00
Does Linux have a stable and reliable remote desktop server yet? Using Wayland.

I love being able to remote into my home PC and experience near lag-free use via RDP. I've tried the Gnome and KDE implementations but they aren't that great as a user who just wants to connect and use the PC.

I found the gnome one confusing, as it had two options. One had to be logged into locally and unlocked first. The other didn't I believe but there was some other gotcha. Maybe having signed in once but then locked the session. I do remember not being able to RDP from a fresh reboot which made me think the machine failed to boot. KDE's implementation I think also suffered from having to log in locally first.

I've made use of Sunshine and Moonlight for now. It works, but it's meant more for gaming. No copy and paste, more bandwidth or more cpu/gpu cycles, etc.
by gruez | 2025-07-28 15:02:39+00:00
>It's also probably cheaper than the extra physical infrastructure needed for inductive loops, given that all the necessary equipment (phones, GPS, cell infrastructure) is already in place for most people.

Assuming the procurement/contracting for said app is done competently, which seems questionable for most governments. Moreover even if it's cheaper, surely some sort of camera/sensor setup would be safer than drivers fiddling with an app?
by Silhouette | 2025-07-28 15:03:35+00:00
It really makes you wonder what's gone wrong in the UK, considering how much taxes British people pay.

Unfortunately the main problem is chronic underinvestment by successive governments of all political inclinations. We tend not to fix our roof in the summer because we hope the other guys will be in government by winter when everyone inside is getting wet and they'll get blamed for the consequences of our decision. We've also made some poor choices historically around selling off national assets and questions of privatisation or public ownership.

This isn't unique to the NHS and ironically among the current Labour government the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is one of the few people suggesting significant changes that actually do make sense for the long term future of our country. Unfortunately a lot of them will probably require more than 5 years to implement and that puts the results over the horizon beyond the next general election. So the price for trying to "do the right thing" might be that he won't get re-elected to see it through. This enables the cycle of short-termism and lack of consistent investment to continue even though its horrible results are increasingly clear for all to see.
by mbowcut2 | 2025-07-28 15:03:38+00:00
The problem with embeddings is that they're basically inscrutable to anything but the model itself. It's true that they must encode the semantic meaning of the input sequence, but the learning process compresses it to the point that only the model's learned decoder head knows what to do with it. Anthropic's developed interpretable internal features for Sonnet 3 [1], but from what I understand that requires somewhat expensive parallel training of a network whose sole purpose is attempt to disentangle LLM hidden layer activations.

[1] https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticit...
by foldr | 2025-07-28 15:03:42+00:00
I’ve had too many circular discussions of this issue on HN already, but arrests are a low bar. You can find examples of people being arrested for stupid reasons in pretty much any country if you google for it. The exact reasons might vary, but any individual police officer being a moron at any moment can lead to someone being arrested.

There are also some examples of people being convicted for questionable reasons, but the UK is far from the only country with laws against hate speech. It is really the US that is the outlier in having a fundamental legal guarantee of the right to hate speech.
by throwaway39381 | 2025-07-28 15:04:55+00:00
> This is a huge problem for banking and music apps that absolutely rely on this capability.

In the case of banking, unlocking the bootloader usually requires a full device reset and leaves a very obvious message when you boot up the phone—you can't grab someone's locked device, root it, and grab their financial data just like that.

As for music apps and other apps that download copyrighted content to the user's device, leaving the moral aspects of stripping the user of control of files on their own device aside, preventing their use on rooted devices just loses them users since

- Those are by no means essential apps

- If you know how to root your phone, you probably know how how to pirate media as well

- People can just use computers to exfiltrate copyrighted media instead since most of those apps have PC versions

It "doesn't make total sense", it never has. It's just a kneejerk reaction that conveniently aligns with stripping the user of control.
by kazinator | 2025-07-28 15:05:09+00:00
Check out the harpejji.

It's a stringed instrument with numerous strings that are uniformly spaced a whole tone apart. It also has numerous frets. So you play on a grid.

There are numerous videos of various people making amazing performances on the harpejji.

They caught the attention of Stevie Wonder, who uses them.

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

It is an electric instrument played with touch technique: you just fret the note by hammering on it with a finger, like right hand tapping on an electric guitar.

Unlike most electric guitars, the harpejji has a separate pickup for each string. Furthermore, it electrically senses the contact between the string and fret. So any unfretted string is not heard, even if it happens to be vibrating. This gives the instrument superb clarity, like hitting keys on a synthesizer. All the players demonstrating the instrument have good articulation, free of unwanted sounds.

Harpejjis have black and white markings on the fretboard to identify C major scale notes. When you look at a horizontal strip of this (across the strings) it is reminiscent of the isomorphic piano.
by taeric | 2025-07-28 15:05:42+00:00
I'm curious why you need a graphical remote experience? Note, I'm specifically not trying to dissuade you. My guess is that what is driving your need will likely lead you to specific solutions.

Though, I do have to hazard a guess that Wayland will be a bit of a hiccup. Remove graphical desktops were niche enough that a lot of the good solutions for them in the past have not been high on people's radars.
by robenkleene | 2025-07-28 15:05:47+00:00
Couldn't this be said for any creative software, e.g., After Effects, IDEs, DAWs, NLEs, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc... and even a few non-creative applications like Word and Excel? (To your point, I do think 3D modeling software is the most complicated of all of these, but I think as a general rule, the complexity is more similar between these software categories versus other categories like Mail, Notes, etc...)

For my part, I think this is because to do good creative work you need minute control, and minute control essentially just means adding lots of controls to software. Sure you can mediate this with AI, the learning curve especially, but that only really helps unskilled workers and hinders skilled workers (e.g., a slider is a more efficient way for a skilled user to get an exact exposure, rather than trying to communicate that with an AI). And I don't really think there's a need for software where unskilled users have a high-degree of control (i.e., skill and control are practically synonyms).
by vidarh | 2025-07-28 15:06:14+00:00
The UK has NHS trusts that run hospitals etc. For a limited period of time - just a few years -, the trusts in England were reporting to NHS England. NHS England is being abolished.

These ca. 200 trusts operate with a great degree of operational independence, though they are public entties.

The distinction is important because they are what makes the scale manageable, and it also provides resilience.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-28 15:06:22+00:00
If you go back in history you can find examples of people making the same claims about too much television. Prior to that, too much radio. Prior to that, too much newspaper consumption.

A common thread is that when people complain about too much media consumption, they’re always talking about other people consuming other media. Few people believe their own consumption to be a societal level problem. Almost nobody believes that their sources of media are the bad ones. It’s always about other sources that other people are consuming.

This is why age verification has the most support of these topics: Adults see it as targeted specifically at a group that isn’t them (young people) whose media they dislike the most.
Ask HN: Best way to keep users interested? as my search takes time
by debrajpal | 2025-07-28 15:07:09+00:00
Hey,

so on my product Minar we search in real time across site on the internet for what sites have the product you want. on average for a product you have asked for we search in 10-20 stores, and some stores are faster to response, while others may be slower. Irrespective, the full search takes between 8-10 seconds which is when we serve all the results to the frontend. Now, I have wanted to stream this for a while, where as we collect products for a site, we send that over to the frontend. Essentially serve the results to the API.

But how will the streaming work, in terms of how it is presented to the user is what I am wondering for the next update. Any ideas people?

For reference, you can take a look at the product and search at: https://www.theminarnet.com
by pardnchiu | 2025-07-28 15:07:09+00:00
## Features

### Custom Dependency Timeout - Specify timeout via `Wait{ID: taskID, Delay: duration}` - Default timeout is 1 minute when not configured

### Dependency Failure Handling Strategy - Added `Stop` and `Skip` handling modes - `Stop`: Halt entire dependency chain on failure (default) - `Skip`: Skip failed dependency and continue executing current task - Configure failure behavior via `Wait{ID: taskID, State: Skip}`

### Examples ```go // Failure handling strategy taskID, _ := scheduler.Add("@daily", func() error { return processData() }, "Data processing", []Wait{ {ID: taskA, State: Skip}, // Skip if taskA fails, continue execution {ID: taskB, State: Stop}, // Stop if taskB fails (default) })

// Custom timeout + failure strategy combination taskID, _ := scheduler.Add("@daily", func() error { return processData() }, "Data processing", []Wait{ {ID: taskA, Delay: 30 * time.Second, State: Skip}, // Wait 30s, skip on failure {ID: taskB, Delay: 10 * time.Second, State: Stop}, // Wait 10s, stop on failure })

// Legacy version (deprecated in v2..) taskID, _ := scheduler.Add("@daily", func() error { return processData() }, "Data processing", []int64{taskA, taskB}) ```

## Refactor

### Compatibility Guarantee - Legacy code runs without modification - Maintains `[]int64` dependency support (deprecated in `v2..`) - `WaitState` zero value is `Stop`, ensuring default behavior unchanged

## Deprecation Notice

### Features Removed in `v2..` - `[]int64` format: Migrate to `[]Wait` format for full feature support ```go // Old format []int64{taskA, taskB}

// New format []Wait{{ID: taskA}, {ID: taskB}} ```
by nathan_douglas | 2025-07-28 15:07:10+00:00
I've had a few chromatic button accordions but never got gud. The layout is a delight to me... you can freeze your fingers in some position that sounds good and then just scoot it around and it sounds great anywhere. Such a cool instrument. Unfortunately, I have a fairly well-damaged right shoulder from RA and just wearing the damned things was too much for me. Maybe in another lifetime I'll learn that solo from "Cold Cold Ground." (which I think was on a diatonic, but whatever)
by inversetelecine | 2025-07-28 15:07:16+00:00
I use various versions of Windows 11, mostly LTSC because I'm lazy. Otherwise I'll do a light debloat with something like ShutUp10 to turn off the majority of the annoyances. I'm able to deal with any snafus from this so it's not an issue for me.

No real issues to report. Various OEM and custom machines run fine. Ever since Windows 7 I'd say I haven't ran into major issues or even many minor ones.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-07-28 15:07:29+00:00
I'm guessing they wouldn't need to fiddle with an app; the software would just automatically signal their approach based on GPS/navigation info.

I agree theoretically a camera + machine-learning based system could work just as well; I've always wondered why that wasn't standard on traffic lights these days given that the hardware would probably cost a few hundred dollars (if procurement for said hardware were done competently, which I suppose as you said, it probably wouldn't be).
by MarkusQ | 2025-07-28 15:07:48+00:00
There is also a sort of blindness to the same sort of processes Hyde is quite reasonably (and evocatively) gobsmacked by: if Darwin could be said to have invented a sort of integral Calculus to grapple with deep time, a differential version is just as needed to look at changes in the rate at which the rate at which changes are changing, and perhaps on to even higher derivatives.

Too many of these melancholy (or as you say, nihilistic) takes are rooted in a model of the form "we are here, now, and if things go on as they have been will inevitably wind up there, by then" and fail to acknowledge that things are not going to "go on like they have been". Things are changing, but the rate, manner and even direction of changes are also changing, and we need to recognize that as well.
by spacebanana7 | 2025-07-28 15:08:05+00:00
The only employment related categories on that report are the skilled worker visa and the health & care worker visa. I presume nurses would come under the latter.

For cleaners it's a little less clear which employment visa they'd have been more likely to use. Potentially either depending on the specifics of their job, their income and the precise definition of skilled worker.
by afavour | 2025-07-28 15:08:58+00:00
I think a great many countries have problems with healthcare. I think if you went hunting for anecdotes of healthcare failures you'd be rich in examples in a lot of countries. That said, I think in the UK it's a result of inefficiency and chronic underfunding for, at this point, decades.

I've lived in both the UK and the US and there are issues with healthcare in both. Maybe the model your country uses could scale up to populations the size of the UK and the US, maybe it wouldn't. Difficult to know.
by Silhouette | 2025-07-28 15:09:36+00:00
We certainly have this issue in the UK right now. In dentistry in particular there is a problem that basically everyone agrees on which is that the NHS dental contract makes little sense for the dentists providing the care. In many cases they would literally lose money by performing routine treatments on NHS patients and then claiming what allowances they can back from the government. So of course many don't do that and in large areas of the country it is now literally impossible for someone moving there to register with a local NHS dentist because 100% of the surgeries within a reasonable distance are only accepting new private patients. Meanwhile I can register with a private dentist based just a few minutes from my home who offers a full range of treatments and excellent service with near instantaneous responsiveness - at a price that many people in normal jobs can't afford to pay.