MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a tool to make quitting your goals socially impossible
by kalashvasaniya | 2025-08-19 10:13:33+00:00
Public Task Timer: Create, Track, and Share Your Goals with the World

Set public tasks with custom timers and personal links. Share your progress with friends, family, and the community. Get motivated by public accountability and inspire others with your achievements.

Track Progress: Monitor your journey with visual progress tracking

Watch your progress unfold with beautiful visual tracking and milestone celebrations. Set checkpoints, log daily activities, and see your advancement in real-time. Every step forward is celebrated, keeping you motivated and focused on your goal.

Stay Accountable: Share your journey publicly and let community support drive your success

Make your commitment public with your personal link. Share your progress with friends, family, and the community. Receive encouragement, celebrate milestones together, and let the power of public accountability push you toward your goals.
by fooker | 2025-08-19 10:14:00+00:00
> wasnt impactful at all to the physics community

There are two reasons why Hinton got the prize.

A good majority of modern physics research depends on ML in some aspect. Look at the list of talks at any physics conference and count the number of talks that mention ML in the title.

And the 'physics community' has not produced any fundamental physics for a while. Look at the last several years of physics nobel prize. You can categorize the last ten years of prizes into two categories: engineering breakthroughs, and confirming important predictions. Both are impportant, but lacking fundamental physics breakthroughs, they are not clearly ahead in impact compared to ML.
by balfirevic | 2025-08-19 10:15:19+00:00
My impression was the parent poster was talking about order of operations like projection and selection, where you might more commonly write:

Π(σ(R)) instead of σ(Π(R))

and not about whether relational algebra uses prefix or postfix notation:

Π(σ(R)) vs. R > σ > Π

SQL's WHERE statement (and others) works totally differently from SELECT in that regard, so it doesn't make much sense to say that "SELECT comes first because relational algebra".
by faxmeyourcode | 2025-08-19 10:15:51+00:00
Yeah it's not truly a typewriter simulator, more of just a constrained editor that forces you to either live with mistakes or think more deeply about your words as you type.

I played around with overlapping letters and got it working somewhat well, but everything else like printing got more complicated.

It's also got auto word wrap that wouldn't be available on a conventional typewriter. I think some electronic typewriters that had a buffer of letters to fill before it "printed" them had word wrap, but that's not what people usually think of.

You'd also be able on a typewriter to do more creative things like type literally anywhere on the vertical axis, not just in lines like I've enforced here.
by fillest | 2025-08-19 10:16:23+00:00
Services should be decoupled from OS distro dependencies as much as possible, otherwise you will be bitten at an unexpected moment (e.g. upgrading your distro packages) by some problem like this https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Locale_data_changes

This can be solved by building statically (or using something like Nix) or by at least using containers.
by imtringued | 2025-08-19 10:17:05+00:00
That sounds absolutely nonsensical.

So you're telling me if I have 10 researchers and an economy of 1 billion people, the growth rate should be constant? If I have 20 researchers the growth rate should double? Remember, growth is measured as a percentage increase, not a linear increase

Even if the concepts of what you're talking about make sense when they are being properly elaborated, the way you have elaborated them is extremely poor.
by lm28469 | 2025-08-19 10:19:04+00:00
I'm on the scythe team, it's quite relaxing and a good workout, 0 noise, almost no insect/animals killed. Sure it's slow, but you can skip the gym for a few days after mowing, it hits my abs harder than 200kg dealifts or a day of rock climbing. < $100 for a top of the line that will serve you, your kids and their kids
by pogue | 2025-08-19 10:19:06+00:00
You definitely want to be following yokoffing's NextDNS Configuration Guide [1] to set it up. You basically only want to be using one of the Hagezi blocklists [2] and a possibly a few other options based on your preferences.

I have it running on every device in my household and it works absolutely fine. I keep it on Hagezi Pro++, and that requires me to go through and whitelist some sites I use. That can be annoying, so in that case Hagezi Light or Normal should work just fine to block ads/trackers and not break things you have to go in and manually fix.

OTOH, Control D offers free DNS [3] that includes using the Hagezi blocklists and other lists, but it's just a set and forget type setup as you can't look at log files to see if it's blocking stuff you don't want or anything like that. Scroll down to "3rd Party Filters" to see their offerings.

[1] https://github.com/yokoffing/NextDNS-Config

[2] https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists

[3] https://controld.com/free-dns
by wahern | 2025-08-19 10:20:18+00:00
> Why would long lived VMs be better if they're also using old versions of software?

It's more difficult to break out of a VM and take over the host, unless a container has a very strict seccomp policy that limits the exposed kernel surface area. The Linux kernel's high rate of feature churn has resulted in an endless parade of root exploits. Locking down a container takes effort as you risk breaking the application by removing access to fancy kernel features du jour. VMs have bugs, too, but it's a better situation, especially if the interface between guest and host is limited to a few virtio drivers. Firecracker, for example, takes this minimalist approach; relative to containers it's more of a "secure by default" situation as far as host protection goes, and unless the guest environment requires direct access to peripheral hardware, everything will still work as intended.
by biosboiii | 2025-08-19 10:20:58+00:00
Great work!

I was working on something similiar, using ReVanced(1) Framework, which allows you to distribute fuzzy tweaks to regular APKs with their ReVanced Manager(2) which can persist multiple version updates.

They have their own DSL (3), kinda.

My target was Instagram Reels, I did not come that far with JADX in finding the appropriate methods/attributes to overwrite because I kept getting stuck scrolling reels on my Android Emulator.

Novel obfuscation technique by Meta :/

(1) https://github.com/revanced

(2) https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager

(3) https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-patcher/blob/main/docs/...
by flanked-evergl | 2025-08-19 10:21:06+00:00
Food prices in Norway are going up because the government keeps importing people who do not want to work, and then they give those people our tax money so that they can compete with us in the labour and food markets, which are heavily restricted. It has 0 things to do with the weather or some disease.

The main change is that the central bank dropped interest rates while inflation was already way above target (about twice the target inflation rate), and they did that to help the socialist party in govenment win the election, the problem is that dropping interest rates while inflation is already high and then while you still import more tax leeches results in a massive spike in inflation.
by wscott | 2025-08-19 10:21:36+00:00
Dataview can generate all of the data from Bases (and a whole lot more), but Bases is a lot easier to use as you can build queries in the GUI and the data comes out in nicely formatted table where you can edit the fields directly in the table rather than needing to load each data item one by one to make changes.

And still after using and making changes in the GUI the query is stored in a nicely formatted and editable YAML file.
by noirscape | 2025-08-19 10:25:47+00:00
The problem with game pass is that it takes the Spotify model to games. In practice, it doesn't seem to scale well - Microsoft has seemingly hit a market cap of ~35 million users because of a lot of existing aversion to subscription services in games, which isn't enough customers to actually amortize the cost of development, even at an indie scale.

Indie developers in particular don't like Game Pass because it apparently pays Spotify-tier rates, which is pretty bad. Spotify gets away with it because it took a deal with all big music labels for more favorable payouts, but your average indie band on Spotify makes absolutely zilch from your Spotify subscription, even if you listen to them 24/7 every year. Indie bands typically compensate with concerts and brand merchandise, but that isn't an option for games - secondary income sources are typically reviled (microtransactions in paid games) or don't sell to expectations (merchandise). The Spotify model only "works" because they shifted the music industry to rely primarily on those "side" sources (and even then there's a lot of disgruntled musicians who are unhappy with the Spotify model devaluing their craft).
by praptak | 2025-08-19 10:25:54+00:00
Flash is proprietary(#), so nobody bothered. When I contributed to Ruffle I think buying a second hand Adobe Flash Professional CS 6 was the recommended way. Also some subscriptions that you can buy from Adobe cover producing Flash format.

(#)Some exclusions exist which made Ruffle possible (for example https://github.com/adobe/avmplus is open sourced) but it's not like everything is fully open.
by hinkley | 2025-08-19 10:26:49+00:00
That was the show that pointed out to me that Henry VIII had much bigger problems than divorce to deal with. By his reign the Crown owned about a third of England. And so did the Catholic Church.

Now maybe the story about him breaking with the Church over their stance on divorce wasn’t completely bullshit, but he was dealing with an existential threat to both the Crown and his family line and they were both being authored by the Church.
by rvz | 2025-08-19 10:26:55+00:00
> As much as this website could be very trafficked I have the feeling they are overcomplicating their infra,

That is because they are and it seems that since they're making billions and are already profitable, they're less likely to change / optimize anything.*

Netflix is stuck with many Java technologies with all their fundamental issues and limitations. Whenever they need to 'optimize' any bottlenecks, their solution somehow is to continue over-engineering their architecture over the most tiniest offerings (other than their flagship website).

There is little reason for any startup to copy this architectural monstrosity just for attention on their engineering blog post for little to no advantage whatsoever.

* Unless you are not profitable, costs of infra continues to increase or the quality of service is sluggish or it is urgent to do so.
by dns_snek | 2025-08-19 10:27:00+00:00
Genetics/randomness must play a significant role. When I was a teenager I could hold my breath for ~1.5 minutes without even trying. With a bit of technique I got it up to 2 minutes with relative ease, I think my max was around 2.5 minutes. The odd thing is that I had no reason to be able to do that, I was pretty out of shape, I didn't play any instruments, or have any other hobbies that would help build that kind of stamina.

On the flip side, out of all the genetic benefits one can get, this might be the lamest one. :(
by subscribed | 2025-08-19 10:28:11+00:00
Paying for media in iTunes store/Amazon Prime, streaming something off Netflix, buying a CD or even going to the cinema is also unfair to the creators.

Looks like the only ethical way to consume the music is to buy it off the creator's website and go to concerts, yes?

You are kind of moving the goalpost.

The comment I replied to was suggesting downloading is unethical because it leads to the loss of sale (which was countered by the study results in another comment).

I replied to it saying that in many countries citizens (residents really) pay special tax (levy) that is compensating for it, at least in the name.

They have compensated the creators in the easy and legal way for the media they now can legally download.

I used to live in one of these countries. I still purchased odd CDs, I was still going to the cinema, I was still buying books and going to concerts, but I also had a very extensive digital library of the media legally downloaded from the Internet.

Because I was taxed so I could do exactly that.

The later story? This is for the creators/copyright owners/lawmakers to argue.
by leononame | 2025-08-19 10:28:39+00:00
Well, that only counts if you see the DN as a net positive. Similar to tourists, a lot of people see DN as a net negative because they spend some money, sure, but they also raise rent and hospitality prices. This can harm local communities and economies because it may benefit few people over many or change where people have to go live.

Places relying on tourism as economic activity are very susceptible to economic crisis and it can even go as far as suppressing generation of jobs in other sectors and people leaving because you only find jobs in tourism or you can't afford to live in the city because Digital Nomads live there already. This is obviously exaggerated to make a point, but I think the point still stands in smaller scale.

Foreign money flowing in does not need to be a bonus. DN have the potential to change the microeconomy and in ways that affect your macroeconomy much more than just money flowing in.

Take a place like Barcelona, a famous example for people not being able to live there anymore due to high prices. On top of that, a lot of digital nomads don't interact much with local culture. When people start leaving, is the influx of DN money really still a net positive? Especially considering some of them don't even pay income tax?

I don't want to demonize immigration, but people moving somewhere and treating it like a cheaper version of their hometown is not a positive in any way, culturally or economically.

I am not arguing for socialism by saying that people coming and spending some money (not even that much) is not a sustainable way to do economy. I've got no problem with foreign investors building things that are actually valuable to the economy by building up industry, creating jobs or whatever. Cuba, Venezuela and Argentina have a whole lot of different problems and the reasons they are in the positions they are are much more nuanced than "socialism bad".
by mkl | 2025-08-19 10:29:41+00:00
I agree with the main ideas of this article. Context-first left-to-right seems like it would be easier for LLMs to write and autocomplete well too.

This line, though, seems like it's using the wrong tools for the job:

len(list(filter(lambda line: all([abs(x) >= 1 and abs(x) <= 3 for x in line]) and (all([x > 0 for x in line]) or all([x < 0 for x in line])), diffs)))

To me it's crying out for the lines to be NumPy arrays:

sum(1 for line in diffs if ((np.abs(line) >= 1) & (np.abs(line) <= 3)).all() and ((line > 0).all() or (line < 0).all()))

There's no need to construct the list in memory if you're just counting, and dealing with whole lines at once is much nicer than going element by element. On top of that, this version is much more left-to-right.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-19 10:30:23+00:00
Very interesting, but this article is kind of a mess and all over the place.

I would expect a shipping lane to have more or less than baseline amounts of lightening regardless of soot on the basis of it being generally more churned up and therefore having slightly different potential than the rest of the ground (which just happens to be liquid water in this case).

It's not clear to me if the study is isolating the variable they're measuring properly.

Surely there's a "control" shipping lane somewhere that was cleaner to begin with or never cleaned up.

Additionally, it's well known that having a bunch of crap (including water) suspended in the air to bridge the gaps makes it easier for electricity to arc so it's not clear if and/or to what extent this the change a result of sulfer emissions or particulate generally.

It's also well known that particulate facilitates condensation (the article talks about this).
by Ygg2 | 2025-08-19 10:31:13+00:00
> Another datapoint that supports your argument is the Grand Theft Auto Online (GTAO) thing a few months ago.[0] GTAO took 5-15 minutes to start up. Like you click the icon and 5-15 minutes later you're in the main menu. Everyone was complaining about it for years.

I see this is a datapoint, but not for your argument. This thing sat in the code base didn't cause problems and didn't affect sales of the game pre or post GTAO launch.

This sounds a lot like selection bias. You want to enhance airplanes that flew and returned. Rather than those that didn't come back.

Let's say they did the opposite and focused on improving this over a feature or a level from GTA. What level or what feature that you liked could you remove to make way for investigating and fixing this issue? Because at the end of the day - time is zero-sum. Everything you do comes at the expense of everything you didn't.
by nmeofthestate | 2025-08-19 10:32:24+00:00
It's not at all clear to me how this "traffic bean" works from looking at the linked page.

Is it just a free-for-all zone that makes drivers slow down due to being confused? This seems to be a philosophy that's gaining ground - make no-rules areas and cars will be forced to slow down to navigate the zone, and this makes things safer (I'm skeptical about that bit).
by PickledJesus | 2025-08-19 10:32:40+00:00
Great software, I've been using this since the start of this year, I use it every day, initially as a frustration with ChatGPT and Claude not having proper voice support in their desktop versions and then everywhere.

When you are in an environment where you can dictate, it really is a game changer. Not only is dictating much faster than typing, even if you're a fast typist, I find that you don't have the sticking problem of composing a message quite as much. It also makes my typing feel more like natural speech.

I have both the record and cancel actions bound to side buttons on my mouse, and paste to a third, the auto-paste feature is frustrating in my opinion.

I do miss having a taskbar icon to see if I'm recording or not. Sometimes I accidentally leave it running and sometimes the audio cues break until I restart it.

Transformations are great, despite an extreme amount of prompt engineering, I can't seem to stop the transformation model occasionally responding to my message rather than just transforming it though..
by ramonga | 2025-08-19 10:33:57+00:00
> how do they check whether the contestant is conscious?

already answered but they'll apply pressure on your hand (or similar) and you need to apply pressure back

> How does the contestant know what his limits are before passing out?

When you hold breath for a long time your body will have muscle contractions. The time that needs to pass for each contraction to happen varies from person to person but it is quite consistent for each person. So free divers can know that they are good up to X contractions which will take after X minutes in certain conditions. The fun part is you can train to experience your first contraction by holding your breath while laying down in bed.
by Pooge | 2025-08-19 10:35:30+00:00
The Doctor clearly saw that my eye hadn't fully healed and therefore diagnosed that it was the reason I wasn't seeing perfectly. Don't get me wrong, it is still far better than when I didn't wear my glasses. So even if it doesn't go back to normal it would still be an improvement.

As I understood it, the procedure in itself won't make you blind—ever. If you get complications—like an infection—then that's another story. I didn't have any.

So I didn't think about the risk-reward as everyone around me just had eye dryness or halos at night. Both of which are very easy to live with.
by slightwinder | 2025-08-19 10:35:40+00:00
> Yes, but the average Obsidian user may or may not know what a database

You can't constantly optimize your communication for the least educated recipient. Obsidian is full of technical, specialized terms. If you don't know a word, research it.

And database as a concept is common knowledge today. Everyone will have the word heard in news at least, most will have a rough understanding of its purpose. And people using obsidian are usually not the most uneducated, there have a certain level of technical expertise. Most will also know and understand the dataview-plugin.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-08-19 10:37:47+00:00
That is a very odd error to make and I hope the author has merely misremembered the content of the story but I carried out a short test and the results are not promising for full human authorship.

Prompting "Which Ted Chiang story depicts a universe where thermodynamics works differently" led to hallucinating that Exhalation is the answer (instead of correctly stating that no story does this) with high logprobs by GPT 4.5, 4.1, o3, Claude 4 and DeepSeek R1.

Only GPT 5 and Claude 4.1 gave correct answers repeatedly (on repeated sampling in their case instead of logprobs).
Show HN: Learn any language or dialect through humanlike conversation
by kalujo | 2025-08-19 10:38:35+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Bhada and I learn languages as a hobby but recently grown burnt out from learning them using flashcards and games. I’m starting my PhD in Switzerland in a month so I plan on learning German.

I made a non-judgemental bot (Dai) that speaks to me at my level and is never judgemental. I've always felt that I learn languages best when talking to someone in somewhat unstructured, casual conversations, like, talking about your day and stuff. I wanted to create some(agent) that would entertain that, basically 24/7.

My hope is for people to use Dai in a way that doesn’t replace human relationships, but instead use it to help them gain the confidence to build new ones. With the added bonus of not feeling ashamed of sounding like a textbook.

Oh and one note: I tested Day in Korean (my first language) and I definitely notice that it sometimes makes mistakes (or dated remarks) or has pronunciation errors, especially when mixed with English-like Konglish. But I think it’s just about accurate enough for me to look past it, but please tell me your thoughts if you notice Dai is not useful in a certain language.
by subscribed | 2025-08-19 10:38:42+00:00
I was firmly in the anti-audiobook camp until I heard the Dune (don't remember whose adaptation). Amazing experience. I still much prefer books (ebooks, because I can carry thousand to choose from when I inevitably finish the one I read), but I have since listened to several audiobooks and I really like how different yet oddly familiar it is, compared to reading.
by heldrida | 2025-08-19 10:38:56+00:00
Yeah, LinkedIn always looked fake to me! But maybe they're fake because it's worth it for them.

I always refused to have a LinkedIn account (before the 2010s), and I still don't have one (2025). However, based on other people's experiences, it seems that you miss a lot of opportunities. Applying to jobs manually is a full-time job; maybe being found by a recruiter is easier to get a job?

Do recruiters even check manual applications? I can see that some people do, and as long as the application happens just a few minutes after being posted. For example, for "Who's hiring", if you don't apply immediately, you won't hear back!

Although I don't like it, LinkedIn seems to be very important if you don't want to waste your time. If you had an account 10 or 15 years ago, opportunities might have come knocking. Nowadays? Not very clear with so much noise out there.

So, maybe the fake LinkedIn people know much better than I do.