MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dcminter | 2025-08-20 09:24:01+00:00
Setting aside the scam aspect, I find it depressing that places that used to be visa free for residents of certain countries have now instituted visa-but-not-a-visa with a fee across the board.

Visiting the US from the UK I used to have to fill in the green "Visa waiver" form, but it was free, short, and blanks were handed out on the flight in. Now I must file an ESTA ahead of time and pay a fee. Visitors to the EU and UK (and even between the EU and UK) will have similar advance paperwork.

It feels like a huge step backwards with very dubious advantages compared to the unwelcoming "fuck you pay me" feel of the encounter. There's nothing I like more when choosing a holiday destination than filling in a multi page bureaucrat-designed form and paying a fee for the pleasure.

A minor blip in the greater scheme of things, but it saddens me.
by reify | 2025-08-20 09:24:04+00:00
Excerpt:

Over the past three years similar reports have circulated of rising bacterial infections, flare-ups of old viruses becoming more common, and children landing in hospital with diseases not usually seen in young, healthy people. One explanation offered by public health leaders has been “immunity debt”2—the idea that precautions taken in the covid pandemic suppressed routine exposures to circulating pathogens, leaving people more vulnerable to them when restrictions were lifted.

The theory landed in the public consciousness at the right moment. A simple idea that sounded like science, it soothed a public seeking answers just as the world was returning to a semblance of normality. And it served a policy function, allowing governments to focus on economic recovery.

Absolutely no mention whether the participants have had the covid jab or were jab free.

How do we know whether or not the the covid virus was the cause and not the covid jab.

The study needs to be more exacting, as science should be.

The study should include and compare outcomes of:

those injected

Those injected who caught covid

those uninjected

those uninjected who caught covid

How can we say that the covid virus is responsible for all those disgnoses, when there are a cohort of people who are left out of, and not included in the study.

I am still not convinced
by mathieuh | 2025-08-20 09:24:49+00:00
In the UK this happens with tax rebates. For the vast majority of people your tax is calculated by HMRC and taken out of your pay and if they make a mistake you just tell them and they will adjust your tax code so you pay less/more tax until it works out.

Some shady companies set themselves up as middlemen and pocket a large proportion of the rebate when you can do it yourself in minutes through an online portal.
by scott_w | 2025-08-20 09:24:58+00:00
I have a number of issues with your statement.

Firstly, most humans who ever lived didn't do those things. Are they not exceptional? Are they lesser in some form? Did human exceptionalism only start when we invented computers or science? I assure you, many prior civilisations saw humans above animals (source: The Bible), yet hadn't done the things on your list.

Secondly, you listed outcomes. These are value judgements. As the article points out, humans did those things but we can't do basic things like smell water from miles away or see internal organs by just clicking. Animals don't value LLMs or mathematics, in fact many humans don't!

The challenges to human exceptionalism aren't based on outcomes (because that's subjective) but tries look at what makes humans unique in a way that can't be replicated in any form. This has to be more than "we're better at X" or "we can combine X and Y to achieve Z" because, unless trait X or Y only exist in humans, then another species could conceivably replicate it given enough time for evolution.

So problem solving wouldn't make us exceptional because we see it in other species. Language might but we do see rudimentary communication in other animals like corvids and cephalopods so perhaps humans just hyper-specialised in that. Hell, scientists have observed orca pods being unable to communicate across regions, hinting that there is a form of language.

Just being better at these traits doesn't suffice because there are plenty of things other animals are better than humans at. We don't consider that exceptional in the same way.
Show HN: Capshot – AI app that generates perfect captions for your photos
by kyoagun | 2025-08-20 09:25:58+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a side project called *Capshot* – a mobile app that automatically generates short, catchy captions for your photos and videos using AI.

The idea came from noticing how much time people spend thinking of a "perfect one-liner" before posting on Instagram, X, or TikTok. Most apps help with editing visuals, but captions are usually left up to the user.

*Key features:* - AI-powered caption suggestions tailored to the content - Multiple styles (casual, witty, professional, etc.) - One-tap sharing to social platforms - Currently available on Android, iOS version coming soon

I’d love to get feedback from the community on: - Potential use cases beyond social media (marketing, content creation, accessibility, etc.) - How to better evaluate caption quality - Concerns around dataset bias or ethical use of AI-generated text

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.capshot.app Website: https://capshot.ai

Thanks for reading, and I’m happy to answer any questions!
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-20 09:26:14+00:00
> I'm not sure how Google can't be held responsible for this. They're literally advertising scams. They're taking money for putting up an ad for a scam site.

The thing I don't understand is why people keep expecting them to. Who even wants Google to be the police? To actually act as a deterrent you need the ability to impose penalties, and for that you need the actual police.

All Google can do is close their account, and then there are no real penalties so they just make new ones until they figure out how to beat the fraud detection system.

And if you try to impose penalties on third parties for not being able to solve a problem they're structurally unable to solve, all they can do is crank up the false positive rate and mess things up for innocent people.

Stop even asking for this. It's a dystopia. Put the actual scammers in prison instead.
by xg15 | 2025-08-20 09:26:55+00:00
Agreeing with your distinction. Also, you could "issue the same warning" by growling like the dog, too - or by waving your hands frantically or shaking your head, etc. This would absolutely convey the same information and count as an act of communication, but we wouldn't describe it as using language.

But the information in that example is also relatively simple. There are other kinds of information that are much harder to convey without language, talking about future or hypothetical events or abstract concepts, etc.

There seems to be evidence that dolphins use sounds to identify each other and to coordinate tasks that involve a number if animals. I think this is much more interesting and strongly hints that something language-like is going on there.

https://www.ecowatch.com/dolphins-language-communication-evi...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8074934/
by _Algernon_ | 2025-08-20 09:27:11+00:00
>We can live without bateria if we add with some food supplements.

Citation needed. I would strongly doubt that this is true, because microbes also play a very important role in eg. immune defense. Remove all the mutualitic microbes from a human (eg skin, digestive tract) and the parasitic and pathogenic bacteria will take their place immediately.
by close04 | 2025-08-20 09:27:33+00:00
> so it could never be brought back to life in an environment where nothing is already alive

I always thought of a virus as purely a "modifier", not having the characteristics of "life" independently. If this was a game, the virus might be a runestone or skin for your character.

Anything that doesn't need external "life" to come alive, I would consider as "life" in various states. Maybe it's in hibernation, or stasis, or dormant but the life is there. Maybe to keep the silly game analogy, this might be the extra character on your roster.
by etherealG | 2025-08-20 09:28:01+00:00
Because once you figure out the correct way to handhold, you can automate it and the tediousness goes away.

It’s only tedious once per codebase or task, then you find the less tedious recipe and you’re done.

You can even get others to do the tedious part at their layer of abstraction so that you don’t have to anymore. Same as compilers, cpu design, or any other pet of the stack lower than the one you’re using.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-20 09:28:36+00:00
"at scale" is the issue here.

Yes, you can't vibe code a full-ass enterprise level product fit to sell as SaaS for a Fortune 500 company.

But what you can vibe code is a bunch of small _bespoke_ tools that fit your exact use-case. Stuff you could buy (or rent) as SaaS, but they'd have 80% too many features and a constant monthly cost.

Just last week I converted a bunch of docker compose -based containers to run on Opentofu, took me maybe an hour or two with Claude Code while watching TV.

Would've been a week easy if I went for the artisanal route of reading Terraform documentation and digging through forums and Stack Overflow.

Not a world-changing thing, I could've lived with the compose setup, but now the whole system is declarative. I set the state and the state is applied, no drift.
by kotri | 2025-08-20 09:28:59+00:00
> How is traffic controlled inside PRC?

Unknown. I haven't seen any injected fake DNS or reset packets so far to domestic hosts. But there are rumors that Google's servers in Beijing (AS24424) was once black holed.

> Is GFW a central hub for all traffic between all hosts?

It's supposed to has centralized management system, but not a single hub.

> Or between residential ASNs and commercial ones only?

Yes, the injecting devices are deployed in IXPs, the AS borders. See <Internet censorship in China: Where does the filtering occur?>.

> In the UK and Iran a lot of censorship was implemented by leaning on ISPs at IP level (eg BT Cleanfeed) and with DNS blocks but I haven’t kept up to date with how networks might handle residential hosting.

I believe Iran has more centralized system like China controlled by Tehran.

> Maybe internal traffic is just all banned?

No, internal HTTPS traffic is not banned in that hour.
by ghuntley | 2025-08-20 09:29:33+00:00
hi, one of the folks behind this. Back in May, @sqs acquired the domain and launched the website above, committing to relocate if the agents.md domain could be acquired. In July, I put out [1] RFC 9999 as a call to the industry that we need to fix this mess. Shortly afterwards OpenAI was able to obtain the domain and thus we (Amp) followed through on the commitment and worked with other vendors to move from AGENT.md to AGENTS.md.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250708160846/https://ampcode.c...
by threeducks | 2025-08-20 09:31:08+00:00
What makes it so that this kind of precision is required? I have little knowledge of the physics behind it, but a few decades ago, a local university had an open day where they bounced lasers off of a retro reflector on the moon to measure the distance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment...

The moon is 700 times farther away than the starlink satellites (or twice that, if you consider the bounce), so I find it hard to imagine that it would be impossible to communicate with much closer satellites over laser when both sides can have an active transmitter.
by Shank | 2025-08-20 09:31:29+00:00
Anyone operating in/around China who needs a real VPN has a service they pay for and use that isn't mainstream that isn't blocked (using V2ray or similar). There's a reason why Shadowrocket is the number 1 app on the app store. I'm sure there are a lot of cases of people using e.g., off-the-shelf VPN apps and have trouble, but power users in China are always running a VPN, usually to Japan, that doesn't have this problem.
by wtmt | 2025-08-20 09:31:33+00:00
> The hardest part of learning to drive on the left is not turning on your windshield wipers every time you turn a corner.

This is something to learn the very first time when getting into a (new/unfamiliar) car before getting the vehicle moving.

Come to India and drive a few cars from different brands. [1] The rule is to drive on the left side of the road (so the driver is on the right side of the vehicle). But the sticks/levers to turn on the windshield wiper may be on the right side of the steering wheel or on the left side (and vice versa for the turn indicator sticks/levers), depending on the manufacturer. If you don’t check it in advance, you may end up wiping the windshield when you want to signal a turn or end up signaling a turn when you want to get water off the windshield.

[1]: Actually, it’s not recommended for foreigners to attempt to drive in India. The traffic is chaotic and one needs a different way of thinking to drive.
by Sabinus | 2025-08-20 09:31:47+00:00
We have more options than just (instantly) stop using oil and gas and those options would have been far more easy to implement had we been doing them for the last 50 years instead of arguing about if climate change is happening, and now, if humans have caused climate change.

These other options require resources and time to implement, and the political capital required to make that happen has been and will be increased because of the aforementioned 'debates'.
by mnw21cam | 2025-08-20 09:32:13+00:00
The aim doesn't need to be that accurate. Laser beams diverge due to diffraction. You can't break the laws of physics - a non-divergent laser beam would need to be infinitely wide. A 1cm wide laser beam of 700nm light will have a divergence width of approximately asin(0.0000007/0.01) which is 0.004 degrees, which is 14 arcseconds, which is very easily aimable using off-the-shelf components. People get a tracking accuracy around 1 arcsecond using standard hobbyist telescope mounts.

However, this solution is going to stop working when a cloud drifts past.
by bawolff | 2025-08-20 09:32:20+00:00
> Of course. And yet none of the people from Google even seem to be aware of

I don't see any reason to assume that. I don't think anyone from google is claiming the literal number of sites is 0, just that it is insignificant.

I am very sure the people at google are aware of the rss feed usage.

Don't confuse people disagreeing with you with people not understanding you.
by therealpygon | 2025-08-20 09:32:39+00:00
I’d say all three in the and “finally” category are relevant. This does cause more harm than good because it is more likely to be weaponized by the government when they start to carve out more exceptions to free speech. It is also solving a symptom (where kids go when they are curious about adult topics) rather than the problem (parenting…not providing a safe space for your kids to ask those questions).
by k3vinw | 2025-08-20 09:32:49+00:00
This speaks to me. Lately, I’ve encountered more and more anti patterns where the project’s build system was bucked in favor of using something else. Like having a maven project and instead of following the declarative convention defining profiles and goals, everything was a hodge podge of shell scripts that only the Jenkins pipeline knew how to stitch together. Or a more recent case where the offending project had essential build functionality embedded in a Jenkins pipeline so you have to reverse engineer what it’s doing just so you can execute the build steps from your local machine. A particularly heinous predicament as the project depends on the execution of the pipeline to provide basic feedback.

Putting too much responsibility in the ci environment makes life as a developer (or anyone responsible for maintaining the ci process) more difficult. It’s far more superior to have a consistent use of the build system that can be executed the same way on your local machine as it is in your ci environment. I suppose this is the mess you find yourself in when you have other teams building your pipelines for you?
by sjw987 | 2025-08-20 09:32:59+00:00
Self controlling your screen use and media consumption is entirely within your remit.

Companies have no power to force you to use their products/services, and despite the millions they spend trying to hook you, you always have the option to simply stop using their product/service, delete their app and/or stop visiting their website.

You don't have systemic failures in your psychological defense system. We are adaptable creatures.

Using technology to protect us from more technology works right up until the prior technology fails, the latter technology adapts, or you lower your guard and fall back into old routines. Like many things in life, such as eating healthily, exercising regularly, managing finances and relationships well, you need to assess the situation you're in, note the advantages and disadvantages it gives you, assess a plan for action to use it for the good parts only, and stick to it.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-20 09:33:59+00:00
The fact that maintaining any Jenkins instance makes you want to shoot yourself and yet it's the least worst option is an indictment of the whole CI universe.

I have never seen a system with documentation as awful as Jenkins, with plugins as broken as Jenkins, with behaviors as broken as Jenkins. Groovy is a cancer, and the pipelines are half assed, unfinished and incompatible with most things.
by gambiting | 2025-08-20 09:34:46+00:00
I don't want them to be the police. I want them to give me the thing that I'm searching for first, not whoever outspent everyone else on SEO this year. If I'm searching for "Canadian visa application" then the first result must be the official government website for this. No policing involved - just good old accurate search, like Google used to be known for.
Show HN: CLI to generate MCP servers with OAuth2 included
by JianYangbachman | 2025-08-20 09:35:08+00:00
We built a CLI to scaffold MCP servers with OAuth2 built-in.

The idea is to remove the boilerplate and make deployment faster.

Demo video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eVfHBhnwH7M

Code: https://github.com/granular-software/mcpresso
by tovej | 2025-08-20 09:35:39+00:00
The human biomass and its byproducts do grow at an exceptional rate, that's true, we are exceptional. But being exceptional in one way should not be mistaken for being supreme or better, which I feel like a lot of commenters are suggesting.

This growth is clearly unsustainable, and the bubble, so to speak, will eventually pop. Other species have managed to survive for an exceptional time, e.g. the horseshoe crab, or most species of moss. There are species whose individuals might be older than human civilization, like the glass sponge. There are species that will survive in extreme conditions where humans would perish, such as tardigrades. Are we better than them?

Another point: evolution has caused living beings to reach equilibria where the whole system can thrive, where each species has a role. These systems have reached self-regulating states, where e.g. an overpopulation of predators will be cut down due to an absence of prey during the next generation.

Is human society better than that? Because humans are destroying this balance through unprecedented growth, which these systems cannot respond to. Our growth is not only unsustainable from the point of view of human survival, but unsustainable from the point of view of the earths ecological systems as a whole.
by alfiedotwtf | 2025-08-20 09:35:45+00:00
lol, logged in to say the same thing!

I found for me that the epiphany came when I realised three things:

1. Key bindings are just calling Emacs functions in the current runtime, which you yourself can call from Elisp

2. Holy shit, you mean every keystroke is ALSO just a function that you can call yourself meaning you can automate everything with Elisp?!!

3. Wait. Emacs is just an Elisp runtime where some of the functions can edit text buffers!!!!

Why is this cool? Because it means that Emacs is NOT an editor - it’s a virtual machine holding libraries of functions that do useful things, which YOU then customise into YOUR editor.

In other words - Emacs is a toolkit that allows you creator your own editor/environment, customised to your specific workflow. And if you don’t like it, you have the power to fix it yourself, which is in contrast to every other editor I know of which was built by the editor developers with their own idea of how you should edit text
by qalmakka | 2025-08-20 09:35:46+00:00
If this were the case, we would have stopped eating those dishes. But we didn't, we still make eggplant parmesan, pasta and beans, pasta al pomodoro, pizza marinara, bean soup, minestrone, ...

My point was that you _don't need_ stuff to taste like meat in order for them to be good. People couldn't afford meat so they had to invent tasty food without it, and they largely succeeded at that. Meat got so popular and common not only because it tastes great, but because it's easy to prepare and was associated to a higher status compared to more humble dishes. Several food historians theorised that the birth of many Italian-American dishes can be explained with the extreme poverty most emigrants were escaping from. people got euphoric from finally being able to afford all of the meat they wanted, so they started putting it everywhere just because they could.

The problem is that for too many people having meat is a necessary condition for something to be tasty, which isn't the case. And no, fake meat doesn't really taste like meat unless you haven't ever had meat before. It tastes good, but definitely not like meat. There are other traditionally vegan things that taste way better to be honest.

> great nutritional value

as a meat eater, this is somewhat debatable tbh. Sure meat contains lots of protein, but you can easily get it from other sources both plant and animal based (like eggs, for instance). Red meat is also pretty unhealthy, too; I eat it because it's tasty and convenient, not for the nutritional value it provides.
by dgfitz | 2025-08-20 09:35:50+00:00
+1 for Jenkins.

At $dayjob they recently set up git runners. The effort I’m currently working on has the OS dictated to us, long story don’t ask. The OS is centos 7.

The runners do not support this. There is an effort to move to Ubuntu 22.04. The runners also don’t support this.

I’m setting up a Jenkins instance.
by troupo | 2025-08-20 09:38:34+00:00
> I am very sure the people at google are aware of the rss feed usage.

No. No they aren't. As you can see in the discussion: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 where the engineer who proposed this literally updates his "analysis" as people point out use cases he missed.

Quote:

--- start quote ---

albertobeta: there is a real-world and modern use case from the podcasting industry, where I work. Collectively, we host over 4.5 million RSS feeds. Like many other podcast hosting companies, we use XSLT to beautify our raw feeds and make them easier to understand when viewed in a browser.

mfreed7, the Googler https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-315... : Thanks for the additional context on this use case! I'm trying to learn more about it.

--- end quote ---

And then just last week: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-318...

--- start quote ---

Thanks for all of the comments, details, and information on this issue. It's clear that XSLT (and talk of removing it) strikes a nerve with some folks. I've learned a lot from the posts here.

--- end quote ---

> Don't confuse people disagreeing with you with people not understanding you.

Oh, they don't even attempt to understand people.

Here's him last week adding a PR to remove XSLT from the spec: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/11563

Did he address any of the issues? Does he link to any actual research pointing out how much will be broken, where it's used etc.?

Nope.

But then another Googler pulls up, says "good work, don't forget to remove it everywhere else". End of discussion.