MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by twic | 2025-07-28 14:03:34+00:00
There's some funny square bracketing in here.

> “We don’t do things like that here at all. So, Vauxhall [MI6] will almost never outsource meaningful intelligence work to the private sector,” they said.

That one explains that "Vauxhall" is a metonym for MI6, whose headquarters is in Vauxhall.

> Still, trading in knowledge is commonplace. The same person added that there is a “lot of frustration from both sides of the river [Thames] that the old boys’ network was getting a bit too informal, with people telling their clients that they can call their old buddies.”

That one completely fails to explain that "both sides of the river" means MI6 and MI5 (whose headquarters are on different sides of the Thames).
by cesarb | 2025-07-28 14:03:50+00:00
> But humans we can feed ascii, whereas LLMs require token inputs.

To be pedantic, we can't feed humans ASCII directly, we have to convert it to images or sounds first.

> My original question was about that: why can't we just feed the LLMs ascii, and let it figure out how it wants to encode that internally, __implicitly__? I.e., we just design a network and feed it ascii, as opposed to figuring out an encoding in a separate step and feeding it tokens in that encoding.

That could be done, by having only 256 tokens, one for each possible byte, plus perhaps a few special-use tokens like "end of sequence". But it would be much less efficient.
by pflenker | 2025-07-28 14:04:40+00:00
I have two separate points to add to this. Point 1. During the pandemic, I learned that meetings also support team cohesion. We experimented with less meetings, but quickly got to a point where we restored at least _some_ meetings to ensure we'd stay functional as a team. This still matters given that we're still working from home 60-80% of the time.

Point 2. The meeting host needs to be able to answer the following questions for every invitee, and in turn, every invitee needs to know the answer to the following questions: 1) What is it that this person can _contribute to_ the meeting? 2) What is it that this person can _learn from_ the meeting?

With these two questions in mind, everything else becomes less important. For example, if everyone is clear about these two things, the meeting doesn't even need a description (or the other way around: if the answers to these questions are unclear, the meeting description can help answer them)
by AmariahKam | 2025-07-28 14:04:43+00:00
Hey HN, I just released v0.6.1 of `commit-checker`, a terminal tool to:

Track GitHub commit streaks across local repos Save “Today I Learned” entries Unlock ASCII levels & gamified achievements Analyze commit trends and languages

No GitHub token needed. Works offline. Cross-platform. Install with: curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AmariahAK/commit-checker/m... | bash

New in v0.6.1: – Clean uninstall now fully nukes everything – Smarter wizard validation – Fixed duplicate repo bugs – Better path detection – Full feature parity with curl install

2-min setup demo: https://youtu.be/1b3yN4mYpGY

GitHub: https://github.com/AmariahAK/commit-checker Would love feedback or collab ideas!
by the-rc | 2025-07-28 14:05:11+00:00
None of that is announced yet, but there are two open source datasets for gestures and typing:

https://github.com/facebookresearch/emg2pose

https://github.com/facebookresearch/emg2qwerty

Infer what you will.

(I helped with their release and last month gave a presentation on the project's original research infrastructure, but I'm no longer on the team and I definitely never was allowed to talk about final products.)
by cpetersen | 2025-07-28 14:05:37+00:00
I've been working on Red Candle, a Ruby gem that runs LLMs (Llama, Mistral, Gemma, Phi) directly in your Ruby process through Rust bindings (based on the candle crate from Hugging Face). No Python, no servers - just FFI with Metal/CUDA acceleration.

It's been useful for adding AI features to Rails apps without the complexity of managing separate services. Would love feedback from anyone working with LLMs in Ruby.

GitHub: https://github.com/assaydepot/red-candle
by lucasRW | 2025-07-28 14:05:43+00:00
Do you know of other western countries that send cops to your house because you posted memes on X ?

Saying that illegal migrants should be sent back home can literally land you at the police station. A hotel worker was arrested for testifying to what he saw in his hotels, ie. migrants being hosted, given a phone, meals, and NHS visit once every two weeks.
by tweetle_beetle | 2025-07-28 14:05:54+00:00
The sugar tax is a strange example to pick as an example of British decline.

As of 2022, the WHO reported on SSB (sugar-sweetened beverages):

> Currently, at least 85 countries implement some type of SBB taxation.

It feels to me like this was a rare step in the opposite direction - recognising that industry is the driving cynical force and pushing back on its over reach where it has failed. Most manufacturers reformulated their drinks immediately to avoid the tax, with what net loss? (The class-targeting comments were a straw man)

https://www.who.int/news/item/13-12-2022-who-calls-on-countr...
by prithsr | 2025-07-28 14:05:56+00:00
An iOS app to help manage Yard Sales. There's a lot of clutter at home that we don't need or use; using that as inspiration to work on an app that can help with cataloguing and selling in-person, and in v2 turn into some sort of facebook marketplace where users can 'find yard sales' near them (and potentially even look up all items being sold at x yard sale, prior to showing up).
Show HN: A browser extension to export tables to CSV, JSON and Markdown
by llagerlof | 2025-07-28 14:06:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I made a browser addon called Website Table Exporter for Firefox and Chrome. It lets you export any HTML table on a page to CSV, JSON and Markdown, straight to your clipboard with one click.

Why?

Because copying tables from websites is surprisingly annoying. I kept running into mangled formatting or weird extra markup when trying to grab data for research or personal use. So I built something small, open, and fully client-side. No tracking, no network calls, no nonsense.

Features:

- Export any HTML table to CSV, JSON or Markdown.

- One-click export via a small button in the first cell of each table.

- Automatically strips inner HTML tags.

- Warns if the table has merged cells (which can mess up the output).

- 100% local, no telemetry, no ads.

How to use it:

Install the addon, visit any page with a table, and click the little button that appears in the top-left cell. You can toggle the export buttons visibility clicking the addon button on browser's top bar.

Links:

- Source on GitHub: https://github.com/llagerlof/websitetableexporter

- Firefox Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/website-table-expor...

Would love any feedback, ideas, or bug reports. Thanks!
by okokwhatever | 2025-07-28 14:06:19+00:00
Internet has become a commidity that needs to be reinvented with a focus in the real human interactions and the privacy.

How?, who?, Where? I'm afraid it is too late to find a group of people interested in creating a real network outside of the system. The best that i found was the LoRa communities but are useless for anyone submerged in the Tiktokian distopy.
by motohagiography | 2025-07-28 14:06:32+00:00
it's pretty clear there exist vehicles that are inconsistent with our understanding of physics. by example, anyone who has worked in cryptography also works at the edges of classified maths and computer science, where it's also pretty clear there is a funnel in place that reduces the number of people who are capable and cleared to work on the classified stuff, and that this funnel or cone at the entrance to classified maths and comp sci topics has been very effective so far. I'd bet there is a similar scheme for the physics behind UAP propulsion.

by analogy in cryptgraphy and security, remember that people used to get isolated and discredited as conspiracy theorists for believing-in or talking about ECHELON and any suggestion about a program like BULLRUN to backdoor algorithms would get you laughed out of rooms. somehow there was always someone within a degree of security projects to spread a rumor that someone was some kind of unstable or paranoid lunatic if they spent any effort trying to discover surveillance instrumentation.

I'd suggest that these UAP craft are protected by similar social mechanisms in physics.

Further, I think we're going to see many more of these limited hangouts of advanced propulsion and energy tech because as AI reasoning capability increases, it's going to discover classified maths and physics (ask it about cryptographic attacks now), and the establishment that manages that advantage is going to need to stay ahead of that.
by coldcode | 2025-07-28 14:07:17+00:00
Funny, I wrote a recursive descent parser in 1982, in Fortran, to parse the syntax of the Jovial programming language. That was my first ever professional programming project, with no university degree in CS, or job experience. Note, Fortran (78) is a terrible language to write a parser in.

I wish I could have save the source. It would be fun to see it.
by timedout_uk | 2025-07-28 14:07:18+00:00
Sorry about that, the screenshots were taken after I'd already done everything and was writing up the blog, since I didn't have the original data to hand. I forgot to include this in the post, but at some point after rebooting the washing machine (I still can't get over how insane that sounds) while writing my notification script, the machine started returning unencrypted yet still encoded data, which is why in the script's poll loop attempts to deserialize the bytes as JSON first, only on failure trying to run it through decryption. Sometimes it's returning encrypted data, sometimes it isn't, and sometimes it's just spitting actual garbage down the wire. I did also modify the screenshots to blank out some bytes, but you can probably see where that is. None of this was faked, it's just an incredibly dumb smart appliance. If I can capture it sending encrypted data again, I'll update the post with corrected screenshots.
by tw04 | 2025-07-28 14:07:34+00:00
When it costs several hundred million dollars to produce gold that is measured in protons and neutrons it is functionally snake oil.

The fact you can technically create gold from smashing particles together is completely irrelevant to the money being spent here.

> the collision-induced reactions had removed anywhere from six to 15 neutrons, producing a range of gold isotopes from gold 190 (79 protons and 111 neutrons) to gold 199 (79 protons, 120 neutrons)
by dlojudice | 2025-07-28 14:07:57+00:00
The real tragedy isn't IRC clients, but that IRC missed its chance to become the dominant decentralized protocol before Slack/Teams took over. The core issue wasn't just tooling. IRC's protocol fundamentally lacked what modern teams need: native multimedia support, seamless file sharing, persistent searchable history, and rich formatting. While IRCv3 improved extensibility, it didn't address these feature gaps. It seems that IRC's simplicity was both its strength and fatal weakness. Great for tech communities, but too bare-bones for mainstream adoption. I feel that we traded decentralization for features, and now we're stuck with proprietary silos
by zamadatix | 2025-07-28 14:08:12+00:00
I had never run across this and it didn't work for me when I tried it. After some reading it looks like the HISTCONTROL variable needs to be set to include "ignorespace" or "ignoreboth" (the other option included in this is "ignoredups").

This would be really killer if it was always enabled and the same across shells but "some shells support something akin and you have to check if it is actually enabled on the ones that do" is just annoying enough that I probably won't bother adopting this on my local machine even though it sounds convenient as a concept.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-28 14:08:14+00:00
> Again, this is a radical internet-libertarian-freedom-at-all-costs view

The current global status quo is “radical” and the U.K. is the only country doing it right?

You were accusing others of being U.S. centric a few posts back, but now you’re pushing the U.K.’s unique laws as the only valid solution.

> We’ve been doing it for decades with credit cards

Age checks for credit cards are required because minors legally couldn’t be forced to pay their debts.

If companies issued credit cards to minors then the minors could spend as much as they want and the bank would have no recourse to collect.

I don’t think you understand these issues if you’re using this as a comparison. Either that or you’re not even trying to have an honest conversation.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-28 14:08:20+00:00
The UK spends about 18% less per capita on the NHS than the EU14 countries do on their health systems.

A lot of that money has gone on stealth privatisation through inefficient outsourcing of contract staff and PFI of infrastructure.

So the actual standard of care is far lower than the funding suggests. And it has been deliberately run down so a US-style system can be implemented.

So yes, the organisation should be improved, but in the exact opposite direction to the one you're suggesting.

The UK's real problem is that it's run by an out-of-touch inbred aristocracy with vast inherited wealth, working through a political system which prioritises stealth corruption over public service.

They don't see why they should contribute anything to the welfare of the peasants. The obligation is all one way - from the peasants to the gentry.

And there's a layer of middle class professionals who have convinced themselves they're the gentry, even though they can't afford to pay their school fees, never mind maintain a huge estate.

So - private ownership good, public spending bad. More sensible countries don't have this attitude problem, and are proud their public services actually benefit the public.
by tmdetect | 2025-07-28 14:08:41+00:00
I’m working on https://tempmaildetector.com and more specifically a Wordpress plugin to support it: https://wordpress.org/plugins/temp-mail-detector-block-tempo...

The plugin offers users a way to input their own block lists, a pre-existing one, or make use of the API which is constantly getting updated.

As a first time Wordpress plugin developer, the approval process was a bit slow but it’s like that for a good reason.
by spacebanana7 | 2025-07-28 14:09:09+00:00
iCloud Private Relay has the benefit of more accepted by payment processors etc, but the downside is that because it doesn't mask your country of origin the UK censorship rules still apply whilst using it.

I've found that Mullvad generally has the best privacy reputation, but I've also been blocked by a lot of sites whilst using it.

The mainstream consumer VPNs like Nord, Proton etc aren't as great for privacy but I suspect they're less likely to be blocked. I'd love to have more data to justify this though.
by Sesse__ | 2025-07-28 14:09:12+00:00
The absl tables (the canonical Swisstables) are good, but not the fastest. Of course, everything will depend on your hardware, compiler and usage patterns, but if you look at an all-round benchmark like https://martin.ankerl.com/2022/08/27/hashmap-bench-01/, they're about in the middle of the pack even when picking the best-working hash functions (and really bad if you happen to have a bad one). This mirrors my own experience.

Of course, absl tables will have been improved since 2022, but there are many competitors that have improved as well. And you could argue “well, who ever copies or iterates over a map”, but even if you take away those categories, they're not a clear leader really anywhere else either.
by wongarsu | 2025-07-28 14:09:54+00:00
"All architectures other than i386 ..."

So Trixie does not have 64-bit time for everything.

Granted, the article, subtitle and your link all point out that this is intentional and won't be fixed. But in the strictest sense that GP was likely going for Trixie does not have what the headline of this article announces
by tim333 | 2025-07-28 14:10:18+00:00
If most of the public are in favour of the Online Safety Act, then how is it a failure of democracy to have it? I give you the top FT comment:

>I, for one, am glad that porn is being age-restricted online. It gives young people false ideas. You'll never get a plumber to come around to your house that quickly in real life.
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-07-28 14:10:36+00:00
> Don't need "copy" here for that. They can just do the verification on your device without any technical tricks

Yeah. that's where this system fails. It only stores a single attribute that you wouldn't mind putting on someone else's phone. In the full EU wallet the 'over 18' attribute is part of a larger set of credentials that is basically your entire digital ID. If you were to put that on someone else's phone they would be able to identify as you to numerous government and adjacent services. You'd be a fool to share that.

This whole scheme feels a bit rushed and not thought through.
by elite_barnacle | 2025-07-28 14:10:36+00:00
absolutely. the first time i learned more deeply about embeddings i was like "whoa... at least a third of the magic of LLMs comes from embeddings". Understanding that words were already semantically arranged in such a useful pattern demystified LLMs a little bit for me. they're still wonderous, but it feels like the curtain has been rolled back a tiny bit for me
by Akronymus | 2025-07-28 14:11:01+00:00
Yes, those are reasonable metrics. But ive seen too many people outright dismiss using a library that has been stable for a long time for not having had an update in like half a year and rather go for one that is only half baked but had one in the last few weeks.

Thats why I push back against the notion that no updates = abandoned. Personal, painful, experience.
by MeetingsBrowser | 2025-07-28 14:11:07+00:00
I also like using Claude Code as a simple version of RAG.

It knows how to browse and grep files. I just dump a bunch of relevant data into a folder and let Claude Code figure out what is relevant.

It’s decent at searching through local docs for libraries, so I figured it would be decent at searching through other types of files as well, and it is!
by jampekka | 2025-07-28 14:11:10+00:00
When asked in a way where the opinion can't be identified, the support numbers do drop significantly, but the approval is still estimated to be about 50-70%. In western countries governments with clear minority support start to be almost the norm.

UK government approval has surpassed 50% in a handful of polls in over 10 years, and approval peaks are typically immediately after elections before the government starts to implement its policies. The approval is currently 14%.

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/government-app...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/arti...
by chasd00 | 2025-07-28 14:11:10+00:00
I’ve spent probably 60-70% of my day in meetings for the past 5 years. Article makes some good points. An agenda in the invite, moderator+the authority to tell _anyone_ on the call to stfu, minutes, and ending on time.

Some things I’d add: 1. Written next steps/follow-ups for what happens after the meeting 2. Due dates for next steps and the consequences for missing due dates 3. A log of decisions made and by whom 4. And just a general observation that if there are more than 10 people in the meeting it should be more like a webinar (one way information flow) vs a discussion with decisions/solutions expected.

Edit: 99.9% of my meetings are teams calls. Maybe 20 in person meetings in the past 5 years so consider that when reading my suggestions above.
by edelhans | 2025-07-28 14:11:52+00:00
I just unlocked the bootloader on my Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 today (which was a nightmare to do btw.). Why did I unlock it? The device has nice hardware, but is stuck with Android 13 and does not get any security updates either, so flashing a custom ROM is my only chance of having an up-to-date device.

Next step will be to try PostmarketOS and see how that goes
by stillsut | 2025-07-28 14:12:11+00:00
Working on a script to let people launch claude code, gemini cli, and aider agents on the same task and compare results. Handles all the git worktree stuff for you so they can run in parallel. Kind of like OpenRouter but for CLI agents.

What feels really cool is using the framework to build framework, I've got 150 ai generated commits stacked on top of each other, you can see every prompt and accepted solution in the dev logs I produce: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/dev-summary-v1...
by soulofmischief | 2025-07-28 14:12:43+00:00
Whew.

Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in '98. Bush took over and then launched a ridiculously false campaign about WMDs stockpiled in Iraq. We never found a single one. It's extraordinarily naive and ignorant of basic facts to think Bush invaded Iraq out of the kindness of his heart and to support a true democracy, especially given Bush signed the extremely undemocratic, unconstitutional Patriot Act domestically right after 911 (a bill Biden claims to have originally written... noticing a pattern?)

Let's back up even further. We were "liberating" Iraq from Saddam's government, right? After we tried teaching him a lesson in the Gulf War?

Except declassified circumstantial evidence suggests that Saddam rose to power after a collaborative period between US and Egyptian intelligence agencies including a failed assassination of Qasim, and that he maintained alleged continued contact with US agencies through the 60's. But at some point the US decided it did not like Hussein's objectives and turned on him just like we'd intervened in Qasim's Iraqi government.

This is literally just US military interventionism and you should not proscribe good intent when history shows us otherwise.
by mort96 | 2025-07-28 14:13:27+00:00
Linking together thousands of object files with the object paths to the linker binary as command line arguments is probably the most obvious example of where the command length limit becomes problematic.

Most linkers have workarounds, I think you can write the paths separated by newlines to a file and make the linker read object file paths from that file. But it would be nice if such workarounds were unnecessary.
by soraminazuki | 2025-07-28 14:13:47+00:00
Then you get this:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 20 -map 0 -c:v libaom-av1 -b:v 1M -c:a libopus -map -0:s -y output.mp4

It overwrites files without confirmation, needlessly re-encodes audio, drops all subtitles, and sets the average bitrate instead of the maximum. So with your example, someone else is doing damage control while you're enjoying your lunch.

I'm kind of surprised it got this many things wrong to be honest.
by Neurrone | 2025-07-28 14:14:04+00:00
Oh yes. It was one of my formative childhood experiences. My first mud was Alter Aeon, but I haven't played in almost 10 years. I enjoyed myself during the 5 years or so that I played and got to know a lot of people. The first first thing I ever programmed was a bot to automatically heal group members.

Then Empire Mud, but I left due to disagreements with the admin. I loved the concept but it didn't really have the playerbase to support it.

More recently, I was on Procedural Realms. But I was affected by 3 separate instances of data corruption / loss, the last of which resulted in an unplanned pwipe since there were no offsite backups and the drive on the server failed. Years of progress gone due to lack of backups, so I'm never going back.

Ever since, I've been trying to find something else. Perhaps I'm just getting older but I don't have the patience to grind that I once had, which rules out most hack and slash muds. These days, I prefer something with interesting quests, places to explore and mechanics.

What muds do you play?