MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A web typewriter where backspace only strikes through
by faxmeyourcode | 2025-08-19 00:33:56+00:00
This is "typewriter". A little POC I built with the help of claude code. I wanted something that had similar constraints as a typewriter (with some modern affordances here and there). These constraints have been argued to help get people into the flow state easier.

- No formatting choices. You get monospace black and white fonts, no italics, no bold, no formal headings, and no images or tables.

- Most importantly, no backspace key. Only a -strikethrough- option.

In a world dominated by A.I. generated text, it is more important than ever to get the rough draft of your own thoughts down yourself, before they're interpreted and twisted in subtle ways by a large language model. A typewriter-esque experience like this, with no backspace allowed, frees yourself from the endless self-criticism and rewriting things before they're ready. By all means edit your writing, but don't do that until you've got _something_ *ANYTHING* down on the page.

This is the number one mistake I make myself. It's the best procrastination tactic. So here it is, an app to help avoid that. :-)
by tombert | 2025-08-19 00:34:21+00:00
I'm saying what you're suggesting isn't even analogous; the main appeal of YouTube is user generated content. Netflix and cable TV are competitors in the sense that they are competing for your time, but so are video games and blu-rays and books.

Something like Bitchute or Rumble or Odyssey are more analogous to YouTube specifically because they're designed around user generated content. This is not a pedantic detail; the appeal of YouTube is the sort of "infiniteness" of it; there's millions upon millions of videos on the site and a lot of them are appealing to specific niches and subniches.

With curated content like Netflix or cable TV, you cannot have nearly the diversity of content.
by kazinator | 2025-08-19 00:34:22+00:00
Anything can be resized without touching the document, if you don't care whether it looks like shit.

The TeX philosphy rejects that. When TeX can't format a paragraph beautifully, it emits diagnostics like "overfull \hbox".

That's totally incompatible with being able to dictate a width, and expecting things to fit without having to get involved.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-19 00:34:53+00:00
That's not the only way it could be done.

But sure, sending that extra tidbit of information specifically to servers that they can verify won't track you would be a good tradeoff.

Even worse is that they probably do try to detect if you're in an incognito session, but only for their benefit.

Edit: Here's an easy thing they could do. Even if we accept or pretend to desire cross-browser correlation at all, new-seeming browser profiles could have their information siloed for a few days and if they disappear in that time it all gets treated as an incognito session.
by taeric | 2025-08-19 00:35:05+00:00
But "more columns than there are tables" is also why I put the thing about, "the total number of columns most people would need autocomplete for are rather limited?" I could see an argument on how this mattered back at the origin of SQL, but today? It is entirely conceivable that you can autocomplete the column names with it updating the from as necessary for the columns you have selected. You could then tab to the from and pick alternative tables with natural joins prefilled between the tables. With very minimum effort.

I actually seem to recall this was done in some of the early dedicated SQL tools. It is rather amusing how much we handicap ourselves by not using some things older tools built.
by platevoltage | 2025-08-19 00:35:16+00:00
Ranked Choice - absolutely. I would be much more enthusiastic about voting if I wasn't forced to vote for the empty garbage dumpster in order to keep the garbage dumpster full of baby diapers thats been set on fire from winning.

I really think people are too uninformed for compulsory voting. I envy these people. It would be nice not to care. I don't need them looking at a list of candidates and being like "Oh I remember that guy, he made a cameo in Home Alone 2, check"
by maximus_01 | 2025-08-19 00:35:39+00:00
I get all that. Still doesn't mean there isn't some things worth paying for that are created in real time and aren't out of copyright. Something like Stratechery, as an example most people would be familiar with.

Picking on my use of the word content is a bit silly. I think you know what I meant. Use whatever word you want there - best book, best textbook, whatever.
by scotty79 | 2025-08-19 00:35:50+00:00
I really don't like how modern games are played on just a handful of fixed maps where players go through the same memorized motions thousands of times. The way we used to play Quake back in the day was that we had hundreds of maps and played one after the other maybe for few rounds at most. We were coming back only to very few bizarre and fun ones. Game involved finding yourself out in your new environment. It engaged spatial intelligence.

Give me any team vs team games that are played on procedurally generated maps.
by shoo | 2025-08-19 00:36:51+00:00
> However, if I reflect on how much time I spent in the game in order to receive that much money it's laughable as it was easily 2 thousand hours of game play.

but, you weren't playing the game as a job to make money, you were playing to have fun (hopefully?) so arguably the extra surprise money is a bonus.

for me, playing a game in order to make real world money would turn it into an awful grind and sap all the joy out of it
by isaacremuant | 2025-08-19 00:36:53+00:00
It's another pseudo intellectual article to thinly criticize "the other side in US politics" claiming populism and shamelessness.

The mafia/werewolf example is certainly a bad analogy and maybe there'd be more consequences to labeling if labeling wasn't used all the time as a political maneuver to destroy an opponent.

It's also ridiculously all over the place claiming Paris Hilton somehow popularized being out there. In the US, Fame and "larger than life" attitudes have always been successful provided they come together with money or power.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-08-19 00:37:10+00:00
You are confusing election fraud with voter fraud. Voter fraud is a non-issue, but election fraud is something that absolutely needs to be worried about.

One thing I have asked a handful of R friends and family is this: after 2016 Trump claimed 3M+ illegal votes were cast. Not only did he have a personal interest in rooting out such illegal voting, but he was duty-bound to do something about it. He formed a committee, headed by Kris Kobach (which is its own significant story) to investigate ... and nothing came of it. So, which is it: was Trump negligent in not stopping this massive amount of illegal voting, were they incompetent in that they didn't find any, or were they just lying?

Another recurring news item every two years is about how some eagle-eyed county registrar has found hundreds of dead people enrolled to vote. Huzzah, voter fraud proved once again! The fact is that people die all the time (and move away) and one of the routine duties of the registrar is to use official records to scrub the voter rolls. When my folks died I didn't go to the registrar and ask them to remove their names. In the half a dozen times I've moved I've never notified the registrar that I've moved. Such reports are a non-story. The next time someone brings it up I'd love to ask: hey, what is the breakdown on that list? How many of them are not citizens? How many are affiliated with each party. I'm sure it would show that there is no conspiracy going on, just people moving and dying.
by metalman | 2025-08-19 00:37:14+00:00
the history of thibet is full of endless raiding and invasions by the thibetans on there low land niehbors, though they have been conquored themselves and the very title of dalai was created by a mongol emperor who controlled most of inner aisia in the late 1500's and so depending on where in history someone chooses to begin there arguments as to legitemacy is of course less meaningfull than the facts on.the ground, same with borders attempting to magicaly change demographics, if you dont have both, you have nothing.
by ack_complete | 2025-08-19 00:37:16+00:00
> And on Intel C with intrinsics definitely isn't it, because their stuff was invented by Microsoft, who were famous for having absolutely no aesthetic taste in anything.

Wouldn't Intel be the one defining the intrinsics? They're referenced from the ISA manuals, and the Intel Intrinsics Guide regularly references intrinsics like _allow_cpu_features() that are only supported by the Intel compiler and aren't implemented in MSVC.
by snvzz | 2025-08-19 00:40:02+00:00
The HURD has been around for a while, and its architecture is archaic. It was designed in a world where Mach is the microkernel, and thus microkernels are slow.

There's many more options[0] these days. I'd like to highlight Genode[1], its general purpose distribution Sculpt[2][3], and its community, Genodians[4].

Genode has a much more advanced design and supports a range of modern microkernels including the formally verified seL4[5], which is also the fastest kernel out there.

0. https://www.microkernel.info/

1. https://genode.org/

2. https://genode.org/download/sculpt

3. https://genodians.org/nfeske/2025-01-30-sculpt-os-walkthroug...

4. https://genodians.org/

5. https://sel4.systems/
by mrangle | 2025-08-19 00:40:28+00:00
Your individual opinion of Australia, name calling, appeal to group behavior, and vague "things that work everywhere" doesn't negate the fact that not voting is a form of protest (or often just a simple preference) that a healthy democracy shouldn't have an issue with.

After all, if nine months of partisan rioting in an election season is kosher before a "free and fair election", which leads to over twenty five deaths, then not voting shouldn't be a big deal.

Unless, of course, a compulsory level turnout has value in lending legitimacy given the the broader context of antidemocratic events.

Democratic governments should not have the political protection of citing the compulsory turnout. Whether the political currency lent by the compulsory turnout is implied or overtly cited.

The political currency that the turnout lends is something that needs to be earned via the legitimate practice of government.

If the government processes become corrupt, then the voter turnout should be one avenue of reflecting that opinion by the populace.

The choice to withhold a vote is as democratically "sacred" as the right to vote.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-08-19 00:40:54+00:00
I don't know but I would imagine the settings are sometimes new. Not everyone is a systemd nerd, and even if they were you may actually break stuff for old versions of systemd if you try to turn them on.

We could also ask why nobody seems to use SELinux or AppArmor, or any other random security feature. Most distros have these things available but most developers and users are not familiar, don't truly need it, etc.
by derefr | 2025-08-19 00:41:06+00:00
I don't know about that.

Buying some filtered animal-derived blood plasma on the open market and letting the tissue grow/soak in it, would likely be a lot cheaper than precision mixing+dispersing of thickeners + reverse-pressure-gradient tissue impregnation of those thickeners. Food-grade blood plasma is the lowest-demand animal byproduct there is — it's what gets rejected out of even blood-sausage manufacture.

Same with collagen vs., specifically, carrageenan — collagen's cheap in bulk and works great for getting animal cells to stick to it; carrageenan's expensive, finicky to work with, and there are concerns about the carcinogenic effects of its long-term consumption. Many food-product manufacturers have moved away from previous formulations containing carrageenan; companies are only sticking with carrageenan at this point if there's nothing else that works within their constraints. Judging by other carrageenan-containing products, those constraints are probably something like "plant-derived; solid at room temperature; melts in your mouth; decent compressive strength, yet tears easily under tension."

And vegetable oils would be cheaper than animal fats... but vegetable oils with the same set of health guarantees as salmon (i.e. "omega-3 rich" vegetable oils) are not. And their product does claim to have the same health benefits as real salmon; so presumably they are aiming for that omega-3:omega-6 ratio target, since it's usually the headline "health benefit" of eating salmon. Which means they're probably buying, continuously-measuring, and mixing different oils to hit that ratio — similar to what orange-juice processors do to create a homogeneous juice.
by danans | 2025-08-19 00:41:08+00:00
> Nope. I'm in PG&E territory. Electricity is too expensive and natural gas is too cheap.

Yes, the electricity rates in the IOU territories (PGE, SCE, SDGE) are horribly high.

But in publicly owned LADWP or SMUD, the average rate is around $.22/kWh, depending on usage patterns. Not Pacific Northwest cheap, but definitely better than PGE.
by jodrellblank | 2025-08-19 00:41:34+00:00
Hint: he's not broadcasting a lack of understanding, he's boasting, posturing, that people who think titles mean something are dumb and he is too smart to be taken in by it. Ideas like "titles look better on a resume to future employers" or "titles make my extended family proud when they know nothing about my job or industry" or "bigger titles get a default level of respect from distant employees within the company" are lost on him.

It's not like when people tell you about their low maths ability, that's generally not boasting it's more trying to make a social connection. Like "I'm humbling myself and admitting flaws, not putting myself above anyone else (which would be rude)" or "you computer guy must be a math person, don't hate me because I'm dumb, please be kind" or "I've never liked <those> people, you're like me, right?" where <those> is book-smart people (or any <other_people> target group).
by whimsicalism | 2025-08-19 00:41:42+00:00
I simply do not agree that you are making a real distinction and I think comments like "If you don't understand why, you don't understand AD" are rude.

AD is just simple application of the pushbacks/pullforwards from differential geometry that are just the chain rule. It is important to distinguish between a mathematical concept and a particular algorithm/computation for implementing it. The symbolic manipulation with an 'exponentially growing nested function' is a particular way of applying the chain rule, but it is not the only way.

The problem you describe with symbolic differentiation (exponential growth of expressions) is not inherent to symbolic differentiation itself, but to a particular naïve implementation. If you represent computations as DAGs and apply common subexpression elimination, the blow-up you mention can be avoided. In fact, forward- and reverse-mode AD can be viewed as particular algorithmic choices for evaluating the same derivative information that symbolic differentiation encodes. If you represent your function as a DAG and propagate pushforwards/pullbacks, you’ve already avoided swell

https://emilien.ca/Notes/Notes/notes/1904.02990v4.pdf
by firefax | 2025-08-19 00:41:47+00:00
Newgrounds taught me about the "fair use" defense when parodying wayyyyy back when their "Teletubby fun land" got them the ire of the BBC's lawyers.

I can't find anything documenting that saga -- in fact, it looks like a lot of the early content from before the "auto portal" an early precursor to video portal like Youtube -- called such because for a spell you had to email Tom your work to be featured in the "portal" -- clicking it took you a random user contribution, and below it was a hand curated list.

People forget how innovative, on a technical level, games like "Pico's School" were in the 90s.

I still remember a computer camp counselor admonishing me "you shouldn't know what that is, you're a kid" when first shown Linux and told to "open pico" and blurted out "I didn't know Tom Fulp made linux too".

Anyways thanks for the blast to the past OP -- I had no idea the site was still thriving, happy to hear it.

(And I hope one day they can resurrect the old school "Assassin" games)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico%27s_School
by joegibbs | 2025-08-19 00:42:00+00:00
You could have a society where there's one single spreadsheet package made by a team of 20 people, a few operating systems, a new set of 50 video games every year (with graphics that are good enough but nothing groundbreaking so they'll run on old hardware) created according to quota by state-run enterprises, Soviet style.

This would be very efficient in avoiding duplication, the entire industry would probably only need a few thousand developers. It would also save material resources and energy. But I think that even if the software these companies produced was entirely reliable and bug-free it it would still be massively outcompeted by the flashy trend-chasing free-market companies which produce a ton of duplicated outputs (Monday.com, Trello, Notion, Asana, Basecamp - all these do basically the same thing).

It's the same with AI, or any other trend like tablets, the internet, smartphones - people wanted these and companies put their money into jumping aboard. If ChatGPT really was entirely useless and had <10,000 users then it would be business as usual - but execs can see how massive the demand is. Of course plenty are going to mess it up and probably go broke, but sometimes jumping on trends is the right move if you want a sustainable business in the future. Sears and Blockbuster could've perfected their traditional business models and customer experience without getting on the internet, and they would have still gone broke as customers moved there.
by np1810 | 2025-08-19 00:43:20+00:00
> Time in the video: 1:51

Thanks

> It looks like Gaussian blur. Probably "deconvolution" can fix it. Random link from Google: https://www.ianmorison.com/deconvolution-sharpening/

After a quick search, the Smart Sharpen I used along with setting the remove dropdown to Gaussian Blur, does indeed deconvolution sharpening.

Will try the same in Lightroom & CameraRAW which the author suggests may have better results. [1]

[1]: https://gregbenzphotography.com/photography-tips/what-is-dec...
by medhir | 2025-08-19 00:45:04+00:00
I feel like it’s not technically difficult to achieve this outcome… but the incentives just aren’t there to make this interoperable dream a reality.

Like, we already had a perfectly reasonable decentralized protocol with the internet itself. But ultimately businesses with a profit motive made it such that the internet became a handful of giant silos, none of which play nice with each other.
by phonon | 2025-08-19 00:45:41+00:00
Well, oral will be less effective (not a triple agonist like retatrutide) and might have greater side effects (the dose is larger since it goes through your digestive system) and you have to take it daily. But in any case, that will further box out semaglutide. Of course Novo has its own drug pipeline, but not clear if any of them are better than (or even equal to) retatrutide.
by platevoltage | 2025-08-19 00:46:55+00:00
You're not wrong. Biden, who is basically an unwrapped mummy at this point would have won easily if he handled Israel/Gaza with any sort of grace.

All Harris had to do was challenge Biden's position on the issue, and not parade Liz Cheney out on stage like the "disillusioned Republican vote" was a real thing.
by hardolaf | 2025-08-19 00:47:10+00:00
I get 1 mile of walking in a day at a minimum just going to and from the train in Chicago. I hit the 6K steps minimum that my watch wants by default every day by around 1-2pm if I take the bus transfer from the train to my office. I usually end around 8-10K steps just doing my commute and walking around the office. Going to the grocery store is another 2K steps roundtrip. Going out to dinner is another 1+ mile of walking minimum unless I get fast food.

When I lived in suburbs, I had to go out of my way to get even 6K steps in a whole day.
by const_cast | 2025-08-19 00:47:21+00:00
The problem with the complaints is that they're all made up. Well, except maybe developer interactions - assholes can be assholes.

systemd isn't opaque, it's open-source. systemd is objectively less opaque than init scripts, because it's very well documented. Init scripts are not.

Sure, you can read them. But then you'd realize that glued together init scripts just re-implement systemd but buggier and slower, at which point you might as well just read the systemd source. Or, better yet, the documentation.

systemd ALSO does not constantly change. The init system has been virtually untouched in a decade, save for bug fixes and a few new features. Your unit files will "just work", across many years and many distros. Yes, systemd is more portable than init scripts.

systemd ALSO does not have any scope creep. Here, people get confused between systemd-init, and systemd the project.

systemd-init is just an init system. Nothing more, nothing less, for a long time now, and forever. There is no scope creep, the unix principle is safe, yadda yadda yadda.

systemd coincidentally is also the name of a project which includes many binaries. All of those binaries are optional. They aren't statically linked, they're not even dynamically linked - they communicate over IPC like every other program on your computer.

systemd is also not complex, it's remarkably simple. systemd unit files are flat, declarative config files. Bash is a turing-complete scripting language with more footguns than C++. Which sounds more complex?
by sublinear | 2025-08-19 00:47:36+00:00
> organizations such as Blender, Godot, or Ladybird and...

So you want an open source project to really succeed? It's not money, but real passion for the work.

Write better documentation (with realistic examples!) and fix the critical bugs users have been screaming about since over a decade ago.

Sure fine pay a few people real wages to work on it full time, but that level of funding has to deliver something more than barely documented functionality.
by mapt | 2025-08-19 00:47:59+00:00
Imagine a world where you have to take whatever "heart" a pioneering lab can produce for under $100. Are you gonna be in the first group of recipients to risk it, knowing that these labs are largely unregulated startups?

I can cherish the research path and value the intended endpoint, but knowing what I know of agribusiness, early approval to market seems a mite reckless. Particularly in 2025. Particularly with "sushi-grade fish".

We produce millions of tons of affordable meat from industrial production of animals THAT HAVE immune systems, swimming in antibiotics, that the FDA tells you to cook thoroughly because it's definitely full of salmonella. We chop it up using child labor on production lines that would make you a vegetarian if you saw them.
by obsidianbases1 | 2025-08-19 00:48:55+00:00
I prefer not using git the plugin, but still commit to a repo.

Sometimes you'll have to push a big ugly commit.

But other times the manual diff review can save you from a headache, like if you have some obscure syncing going on, like syncing READMEs and other markdown files to external repos to manage all markdown with the same Obsidian interface.

Also if you need to maintain a high-standard for the contents of your notes while still utilizing AI tools, the manual diff review can prove invaluable in ensuring trusted resources don't turn into slop
by borroka | 2025-08-19 00:49:08+00:00
I tried to write a sentence in the same spirit.

"I love my partner more than any other person in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize them perpetually".

Why doesn't my sentence work, except for the lunatic? Because America is not a person or an object, it is an idea and praxis. He loves the idea, but perpetually criticizes the praxis.

But I find it inappropriate to use the pronoun “she/her,” as Baldwin does. It is an “it,” an idea/praxis (in this case, in other cases it can also be a geographical location).