MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by microtonal | 2025-07-01 05:52:55+00:00
WhatsApp gained popularity in Europe when non-early adopters started switching to smartphones (2010-2012 ish). The difference was that, in contrast to iMessage, you could install it on pretty much any smartphone. In the pre-Meta days they even supported many then dying ecosystems like Symbian, Nokia S40, etc.

They had a yearly subscription fee, but most people never got the request to pay it.

Nobody cared that it was incompatible with SMS, because everybody hated SMS because of the insane prices. In 2009 I got an iPhone 3G with an unlimited data plan, but I was still paying something like 0.20 or 0.25 Euro per SMS.
by jesterson | 2025-07-01 05:53:40+00:00
> Email is a hodgepodge of terrible protocols that have progressively had more and more technical debt laid upon them for decades and decades.

May I know what is so "terrible" about those protocols ans what "technical debt" are you talking about?

> Vendor quirks are everywhere, and it’s incredibly unreliable

That has nothing to do with actual email protocols. Generic email protocols are extremely reliable and resilient to any sorts of disruptions. I wish any of modern protocols exhibit similar simplicity and reliability.

But of course if vendor would like to add their quirks and you would like to buy that - that's your choice innit.
by graemep | 2025-07-01 05:54:18+00:00
Its a lot more complex than period tracking, and requires a higher level of trust.

The existence of free software has never been an insurmountable barrier to selling software.

People sell both hardware and software. From one of the sites another comment replying to me linked to: "Unless you have a health savings account or a flexible spending account, Mira is expensive. A basic starter kit retails at $199, which includes 10 LH and E3G wands, and then a resupply of those wands costs just under $60 per month with a subscription. If you want to go with the “Max” starter kit, which also includes PdG wands, the price goes up to $229 for the kit and $80 per month for the subscription."

https://naturalwomanhood.org/femtech-device/
by tomhow | 2025-07-01 05:54:33+00:00
> Aww, does it hurt when your favorite multi-trillion dollar company is taken to court?

Please don't sneer or mock like this on HN. It's not what HN is for and it destroys what it is for. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by monica-guli | 2025-07-01 05:54:39+00:00
Great question — and I completely agree with your experience. Most flow-based tools like Node-RED or n8n are great for simple, event-driven tasks — but once you try to model anything non-trivial, like search algorithms or puzzle solving, they tend to fall short.

OOMOL takes a different approach.

Each node is a fully programmable unit — you write full Python or Node.js code, import pip/npm libraries, manage state, and do whatever logic you want. The flow just connects these pieces in a modular way.

So when it comes to problems like solving Sokoban or the 15 puzzle, it’s not about drawing a visual BFS graph — instead, you might structure it like:

- One node to define the state structure - One node to generate next states - One node to manage a queue (e.g. in memory or Redis) - One node to evaluate whether the goal is reached - And inside the node code: your BFS or A* logic

In this sense, OOMOL doesn’t force you to express logic visually — the *code is the logic*, and the *flow is how you organize and compose that logic across tasks*. Think of it as “wiring together programmable building blocks” rather than trying to drag-and-drop logic trees.

That said, you raise an important point: *for many simple tasks — like batch processing images using ImageMagick — scripts or shell commands are 100% the right tool.* OOMOL isn't trying to replace that.

Where OOMOL helps is when: - You have multiple steps to coordinate (e.g. conditionally processing based on metadata) - You need to integrate with APIs, databases, or cloud storage - You want to track, retry, or debug failed tasks - You’re composing reusable automation pipelines that grow in complexity over time

In short: > *Not every task needs a workflow engine — but once you start composing real logic across systems, code + flow gives you both power and structure.*

We’re still early and figuring out how to best serve developers like you — really appreciate you pushing on this distinction. Would love to hear what types of things you’ve tried to automate, and where tools like Node-RED started to fall short.
by hakfoo | 2025-07-01 05:55:10+00:00
TBH, I'm hoping we have front-view cameras that maybe kick in at under 20kph or something.

Front visibility is famously poor on SUVs and trucks, and even aside from pedestrians, I suspect there are a lot of small but very expensive bumper taps because you mis-judged the distance to the crap at the back wall of your garage.
by xp84 | 2025-07-01 05:55:57+00:00
I think I’m kind of on your side in general, but I have more of the opposite feeling about legal versus technical solutions. If we had no idiotic EU cookie laws, no “consent” bs required, a technical solution would be easy: default segmentation of cookies by what site you are actually visiting, plus all non-first-party ones silently expired after 60 minutes or whatever. It seems like this would be very easy, except for the fact that the number one ad network is also the only browser vendor that matters.

But the attempted legal solutions suffer from being inside the sandbox, meaning all the “cookie management” software is a pile of hacks that barely work, and rely on browsers, as you’ve noticed, to allow their cookies in the service of…limiting cookies. And of course they also suffer from the politicians who wrote them having no clue how any of this works. I suspect if they did, they’d see how dumb it is to regulate that 10,000,000 websites each implement a ton of logic to self-limit their cookies they set (hard to police, buggy) instead of telling 2-3 companies they have to make their browsers have more conservative defaults with how they keep and send cookies back. (easy to prove it’s working with testing).
by IGPT8 | 2025-07-01 05:56:26+00:00
Current AI conversations are often linear, making it hard to explore complex ideas deeply without losing context. We've all felt the frustration of trying to hold a nuanced discussion with an AI, only for the thread to become unmanageable.

This paper proposes a "Major & Minor Conversation Split" – a dual-pane interface designed to mirror human cognition. Imagine a primary discussion on the left, and a dynamic, collapsible sidebar on the right for auxiliary inquiries, clarifications, or deep dives into sub-concepts. A simple right-click on any phrase could trigger specific AI actions like "explain deeper" or "provide a counterargument," all without derailing your main line of thought.

This isn't just a UI tweak; it's a blueprint for a cognitive workspace. It allows for unparalleled contextual precision, leverages user intent for elevated AI responses, and optimizes AI resource management by providing clearer prompts. It's a challenging engineering feat, but one that promises to transform AI from a reactive tool into a true intellectual partner for analytical thinkers and professionals.Authorship: Conceptualized and written by (I)GPT∞. If referenced or expanded upon, a nod to the original idea would be appreciated.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-01 05:56:57+00:00
It has a lower symmetry than cylindrical, but it still has axes of symmetry and planes of symmetry and a center of symmetry.

The equilibrium condition only forces the symmetry condition that the points of intersection between any straight line that passes through the center of rotation with the surface of the body must be equidistant to the center of rotation.

This symmetry condition is satisfied by the symmetry group of the rectangular parallelepiped, which is also the symmetry group of the triaxial ellipsoid.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-01 05:57:02+00:00
Okay, this has been a ride.

Reverted to 0.8.0 of ollama, switched to gemma3:12b-it-qat for the model, set the seed to 42 and the temp to 0, and used my old prompt. This way I was able to get consistent results everywhere, and could confirm from old screenshots everything still matches.

Prompt and output here: https://pastebin.com/xUi3bbGh

However, when using the prompt I used previously in this thread, I'm getting a different response between machines, even with the temp and seed pinned. On the same machine, I initially found that it's reliably the same, but after running it a good few times more, I was eventually able to get the flip-flopping behavior you describe.

API wise, I just straight up wasn't able to get consistent results at all, so that was a complete bust.

Ultimately, it seems like I successfully fooled myself in the past and accidentally cherry picked an example? Or at least it's way more brittle than I thought. At this point I'd need significantly more insight into how the inference engine (ollama) works to be able to definitively ascertain whether this is a model or an engine trait, and whether it is essential for the model to work (although I'm still convinced it isn't). Not sure if that helps you much in practice though.

I wouldn't make a good scientist, apparently :)
by alexei_led | 2025-07-01 05:59:34+00:00
Query AWS Spot pricing from your terminal, automate instance selection, and connect to AI assistants - all with one static binary.

*Problem*: No programmatic access to AWS spot instance advisor data without web scraping.

*Solution*: - Single Go binary with embedded AWS data - Works offline - important for CI/CD - Implements MCP for AI assistant integration - No runtime dependencies

*Usage*: ```bash spotinfo --type="c5." --region=us-west-2 --sort=interruption ```

*Design choices*: - Data embedded via `go:embed` for offline use - Regex support for flexible instance matching - Human and machine readable outputs - Same binary serves CLI and MCP modes

*MCP integration*: ```json {"mcpServers": {"spotinfo": {"command": "spotinfo", "args": ["--mcp"]}}} ```

Enables natural language queries while maintaining data accuracy.

Code: https://github.com/alexei-led/spotinfo

What spot instance selection challenges haven't I considered? How could this better fit your automation workflows?
by sandspar | 2025-07-01 06:00:04+00:00
Sorry, it depends on the person. Elyn Saks is a law professor at USC who gives speeches to international audiences when she's not writing books - and she has schizophrenia. Her fame gives her a unique position: many people write letters to her. She's said that she's surprised by how many highly successful people confide in her that they have schizophrenia. There are schizophrenic CEO's, lawyers, doctors, founders. You just don't hear about them because they don't publicize their condition. Possibly because they fear judgment. Possibly because they want success on their own terms, to be simply a "successful person", not a "successful person with schizophrenia".
by defrost | 2025-07-01 06:00:30+00:00
The punchline:

Washington is so worried about Beijing developing hypersonic weapons that the Trump administration cited the possibility as one reason for banning another 27 Chinese organizations from doing business with US suppliers of AI and advanced computing tech. The flight of Feitian-2 was therefore a further demonstration of China’s ability to develop advanced technologies despite US bans.

This pairs well, for discussion at least, with another headline from today:

China Used to Emulate America. Now the Reverse Is True. aka America and China Are Becoming More Alike Every Day

In the great dance between the two rivals, it’s getting harder to tell which of them is leading and which is following.

- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/opinion/america-china-sim...

- https://archive.md/iDI2x

( The first headline is the NYT RSS feed headline for the article, the second is the web headline for the same article )
by tlarkworthy | 2025-07-01 06:01:18+00:00
We recently migrated from RDS to Iceberg and the savings have been mind-blowing. That said, it's like a deconstructed database and everything you took for granted is now on the outside. Sometimes it's cool, like instead of a Cron inside the database you have a cloud Cron on the outside which is more natively monitor able. Some of it sucks like write contention on inserts so you need a write coordinator lock, and external vacuums. However, the savings are extreme. Better cost per byte stored. Better compression. Less table bloat.

The universal compatibility has not materialised yet. We are still waiting for duckdb and click house predicate pushdown but if that appears we will be able to have specialized query engines over a generic storage layer which would be amazing. Tools like Nimtable underline what compatability unlocks.
by ckwalsh | 2025-07-01 06:04:00+00:00
> I am also wondering if Meta still uses PHP or Hack

Meta’s WWW codebase is its oldest, and still written in Hacklang. Lots of internal tooling is also written in Hack.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more committed lines of Hacklang than any other language (although, a good chunk of that is codegen, vs other core languages where codegen is part of the build process).
by ModernMech | 2025-07-01 06:04:51+00:00
"Pluto aspires to be a version of Lua with a larger feature-set, that is all. Pluto is not a Lua-killer, an attempted successor, or any of that. Many people (rightly so) love Lua precisely because of the design philosophy. And fundamentally, Pluto is a major deviation from Lua's design philosophy. Some may prefer this, some may not."
by hakfoo | 2025-07-01 06:06:07+00:00
This is a belt-and-suspenders thing.

The gas pedal on an EV isn't connected to a passive rheostat gating the entire power output of the vehicle.

It's a low-voltage sensor. A capacitor can swallow a transient of a 0.1v signal bursting to 5v for ten milliseconds, and then software converts it into whatever "sport mode acceleration curve" the marketing department calls for.
by lovich | 2025-07-01 06:07:30+00:00
I don’t expect the law to prevent the crime. Much like my comment you replied to, I recognize different tools are for different situations.

The law is there to enforce the “rule of law”

It’s a little ambiguous because the phrase is in English and doesn’t match up 1:1 with the common vernacular, but I want the “rule of law” to enforce that the rules are real, not to prevent someone from testing their existence
by nxobject | 2025-07-01 06:07:45+00:00
To be frank? I can't justify paying for a single-purpose LLM service subscription: Cursor has have a 1-year free educational plan, and for general-purpose multimodal reasoning model work (e.g. OCR, general knowledge reference, math computations, prose processing), I already have a ChatGPT Plus subscription. It's the streaming service dilemma all over again.
by tompark | 2025-07-01 06:07:47+00:00
Chris Crawford's tools for interactive storytelling may have failed, but he was a huge inspiration for me in my game dev career, and I still harbor aspirations in "interactive storytelling" due to his influence.

I first attended CGDC in 1994. It was two years after his Dragon Speech (which I knew nothing about), but the highlight of the conference was his talk about the challenges of story-based games. The part I remember is how he modeled stories as branching trees with fan-out, foldback, tree-of-death, etc (he covers this in the "Architecture" chapter of this book "The Art of Interactive Design"). I didn't really follow Crawford's work on Erasmatron or later, but by the late 90's it sounded like his story model had changed from a tree to a graph network structure, like a finite state machine. While it was an improvement, I was a bit skeptical that this model was enough. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time thinking about the problem. You see, he'd already infected me with his dream of interactive storytelling.

By the time I moved to California and took a job at EA/Maxis on The Sims 2.0 team, I had decided that true interactive storytelling (as I saw it) was not possible until game AI was sophisticated enough to enable autonomous NPC chatbots. So I put that dream aside while I pursued a career in software development.

Here we are, over a quarter of a century later, and that AI technology is here now. For those of us who have been waiting for this moment, it is almost miraculous. It might be the end of an era for Chris Crawford, but it is just the beginning of the AI-based interactive storytelling era.
by phatskat | 2025-07-01 06:07:48+00:00
Idk, Doubleya wasn’t “smart” but he was “smart”, ya know? I wouldn’t want him making complicated calculations, and to his credit he knew that you get people better at counting, or with more fingers, to do that work.

But for getting us into a ridiculously drawn out war, and another war, and…oh and paving the way for drone strikes, for helping lead the country into a recession, for being - at the time - really good at embarrassing the office, he still pretty much gets to just paint or whatever and fuck off.

A bit mad to think about how much I miss him compared to gestures at everything. “Mission Accomplished”, vomiting on (iirc) the Japanese PM, being oddly good at dodging shoes to the head, this is like seeing a toddler destroy a car and going “cuuuuuute”.

Cheney, on the other hand, shot a guy in the head “on accident” and by my count has no redeeming qualities unless…nope, just checked and he’s still alive.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-01 06:09:09+00:00
>>does not, in practice, bring any advantages.

> It does.

Well, what are they?

> You queue ALL of these side effects (simply tasks whose exceptions don't rollback your own task) until the end.

Yes, but what are the advantages of doing this?

> Then you can perform them all, in parallel if you wish.

I can do that without queuing them up first.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-01 06:09:30+00:00
They will classify the data as necessary for business purposes and collect it under a different name. They will be obligated to pass full take information if necessary, and it will be tapped at any point by employees who are given NSLs and asked/told to do things under penalty of law where applicable, and on threat of arrest or dismissal if not, or by federal agents themselves or their deputies or other approved third parties. Your modem may be intercepted in the mail and reflashed if necessary or over the wire, and that functionality is part of the operating standards of the modems. You could find a way to secure this on your own maybe, which is perhaps just another signal which flips a bit somewhere and may be logged. You can’t close Pandora’s box. It doesn’t matter if Comcast has the WiFi data to sell because they will have access to the information due to how the WiFi signals propagate. It’s diagnostic data. It’s the signals themselves. So all this is perhaps a misdirect, as any third party in range of the WiFi network can likely do the same thing passively, so it is a moot point. The data being gathered and sold should be legislated, but I don’t think that it will affect any of the actual concerns raised, because feds will still legally do whatever they are authorized to do, the justification and doctrine may not be public information. You probably won’t know, so you won’t object. Third parties who lack principles will gather the data regardless of legality. I don’t know how you could even legislate against passive monitoring unless you could demonstrate intent to harm or violate FCC regulations and applicable laws about harming people or computer systems like CFAA, which is a whole other issue.
by bradhe | 2025-07-01 06:09:37+00:00
Ah this looks great. Whence been doing a lot of work with Iceberg lately and a lot of the basics are still missing in the ecosystem. Like, for instance, a really easy way to explore your tables.

It’ll be interesting to see how table maintenance works out. Everyone is implementing their own. Turns out storage engines have been doing a lot of work for us for the past 50 years…

Anyway, seems like pairing this with Lakekeeper would be great.
by craftkiller | 2025-07-01 06:10:18+00:00
> Why would a network known to the device not be connected to the network?

I think they're referring to when you leave your home. Your device(s) will be constantly broadcasting probe requests for the hidden network.

The away-from-home probe requests wouldn't be that useful for mapping, but your AP/router is equally useful for mapping with or without broadcasting the SSID. Hiding your SSID just means it sets the SSID to null in the beacon frames but it's still sending out beacon frames with its far-more-unique MAC address (BSSID). If you're on linux you can see this pretty easily by running `sudo iw dev wlan0 scan`. The "hidden" wifi networks will have their SSID as "SSID: \x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00" but all the other information including MAC address is still there. Personally it seems there are two "hidden" wifi networks within range of my bedroom.
by x3ro | 2025-07-01 06:10:19+00:00
Ah finally someone coming to the rescue of criminally underrepresented multi-billion dollar companies and their inevitable tactics of building monopolies, because how else do you 10% revenue growth every year. I hear Shell is also in need of some help, maybe you can find a thread on them? /s

But seriously though: why do people argue that „investing money“ leads to „I can do whatever the hell I want to my client base“? Even if this argument were to hold for all future customers, companies change their TOS all the time. Can I ask for all my money that I paid them back, to exit their ecosystem?..
by el_pollo_diablo | 2025-07-01 06:10:34+00:00
If, by "situation", you mean the development of a small program with so many constraints that using existing libraries is out if the question, then yes.

Otherwise, that seems unwise to me. Not every user of a generic type has to be generic. A major selling point of generic types is that you write a library once, then everyone can instantiate it. Even if that is the only instance they need in their use case, you have saved them the trouble of reinventing the wheel.

No colleague of mine may need 10 different instances of any of my generic libraries, but I bet that all of them combined do, and that our bosses are happy that we don't have to debug and maintain 10+ different implementations.
by Nursie | 2025-07-01 06:11:22+00:00
> You are free to pay ~30% extra for your preferred customer experience. The rest of us can leverage discounted pricing. Customer Choice for the win!

People say this stuff, but recently I re-examined my subscription to a multi-platform VPN service through the App store and found that they priced it cheaper than getting the same package through their website or through their windows client.

No idea why.
by geminiboy | 2025-07-01 06:11:34+00:00
Thanks for your comment!

AI and specifically the summarization capabilities of the LLMs is what made this product feasible.

This is still a side project with no plans of monetization. There is no moat (yet) that an internal team in a legal tech company cannot replicate. There are still a few interesting problems to solve in the roadmap, which I am eager to work on. Then will let life take its course
by cess11 | 2025-07-01 06:11:51+00:00
Apple has around 60% market share. The US does not have global jurisdiction.

Competitive markets have enough similar suppliers that they are forced to adapt to customers instead of the other way around.

This happens to be incompatible with capitalism due to phenomena like the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and fascism (as well as other corporativist ideologies). Capitalism survives and reproduces through monopolies and oligopolies, i.e. undemocratic forms of rent seeking and price cartels.