MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stanko | 2025-08-06 11:52:34+00:00
Author here. Didn’t expect to see this post on HN. The idea has been on my mind for a few days, so I had to finally code it.

I feel that for these small experiments I should write shorter, more to the point posts. But somehow they always end up longer than I planned. I would appreciate feedback on this matter.

Anyway, it was fun to play around and I’m glad to see people like it enough to share it.
by wongarsu | 2025-08-06 11:53:19+00:00
Yet women have a longer lifespan despite shorter reproductive years.

If in a hunter-gatherer society most people stop reproducing after 40 (not entirely realistic, but bear with me), me being alive and fit at 45 can still improve the survival of my genepool. I can hunt meat and gather plants to make sure my children and grand-children are well-fed and able to produce plenty of offspring, carrying my genes on. I can build shelter, care for the young (improving their survival chances and freeing up the parents to do more physically demanding work).

And my siblings share half of my genes, and my cousins a quarter (assuming no inbreeding at all, otherwise the numbers go up). So helping their children survive and proliferate is a win for the proliferation of my genes. Evolution gets less effective the more indirect the effect and the lower the gene contribution, but it doesn't completely stop working. If there is one clan where everyone dies at 30 and one where people stop reproducing at 30 but stay useful members of society until 60 then then the second clan will do better and outcompete the first
by immibis | 2025-08-06 11:53:54+00:00
This is also a good opportunity to remember that MIT is not a strong enough open source license, and if you want to prevent corporations making money off your work, make it AGPL or even SSPL, plus a statement that AI training creates a derivative work (the latter may or may not have any legal effect).

MIT is a donation of your labour to corporations. With a stronger license, at least they're more likely to contribute back or to pay you for a looser license.
by jvanderbot | 2025-08-06 11:54:26+00:00
Honestly I feel the same.

I'm holding out hope that there will always be boutique/edge software to be written, which requires enough design and care to be mentally challenging and engaging - the craftsmanship kind.

When AlphaGo was announced, I had to keep telling people that "It's not like computers win at Go, it's just that we now have a tool that makes us way better at Go". If an alien race showed up and challenged us to Go to save the species, would we use a Go player or a AlphaGo, if we had to choose?

The problem is LLMs aren't like that, because software isn't like Go. And, they really are annoying to use, frustrating to redirect all the time, and generally cannot do what you want precisely, without putting in more mental energy to provide context and decompose further than you'd need to do the damn thing yourself. And then you lose an hour/two of flow, which is the reward for the whole process.

But at certain times they are a godsend and they have completely replaced some of the more boring parts of my job. I wouldn't want to lose them, not at all.

Like the author, I don't think we're heading to a healthy balance where LLMs help us be better at our job. I do think the hype is going in the wrong direction, and I do worry for the state of our field (Or at least the _ideals_ of our field). Call me naive, but I also thought it mattered what the code was.
by specproc | 2025-08-06 11:54:54+00:00
The Government of Israel, as it currently stands, is absolutely a threat to Europe.

It has brought genocide, concentration camps and forced starvation back into the Overton window for state actors pursuing security objectives. This should terrify everyone, whether inside Europe or not.

In the UK, simply expressing support for a protest group is now imprisonable under anti-terror legislation. Germany is dishing out fines and deportations for as little as holding up signs.

Post-war Europe is ostensibly built on rules and norms around human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. The behaviour of the state of Israel, and our governments' craven support for it, is causing rapid democratic backsliding and laying the groundwork for our next round of atrocities.

Whatever one's moral perspective, or position on the middle east, this concerns everyone.
by pbronez | 2025-08-06 11:54:59+00:00
Huh. Sounds perfectly intelligible and definitively artificial. Feels weakly feminine to me, but only because I was primed to think about gender from the branding.

It’s a good choice for a robot voice. It’s easier to understand than the formant synths or deliberately distorted human voices. The genderless aspect is alien enough to avoid the uncanny valley. You intuitively know you’re dealing with something a little different.
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-06 11:55:00+00:00
These ideas are all decent in the abstract but all rely on the assumption that there are auditors of some kind. There aren't.

Example: pre-registration does happen sometimes today, and it always happens for corporate clinical trials. It's a good idea that works. In the private case the FDA is the auditor and there's some circumstantial evidence that pre-registration may be the reason why pharma productivity flatlined around ~2000. But in a surprising number of cases in academia a study is pre-registered, the final paper doesn't match the pre-registration and nobody notices. Why? Well, who is responsible for systematically checking these things? It'd have to be auditors, but universities point the finger at journals and journals point the finger back at universities.

Papers calling out problems: it's been done for much longer than I've been alive. Doesn't work. People nod their head and say something should be done, then go right back to the bad old ways.

The only thing that can help is external force. Governments have to either defund academia and let science be done by the private sector, or they have to tie funding to passing rigorous external audits (by private sector actors paid to find fraud, not academics themselves). The latter has been tried a few times, the US ORI is an example of that, but it doesn't work. The ORI was set up on the assumption that academic malpractice is rare so its methods don't scale.
by agust | 2025-08-06 11:55:14+00:00
Yeah other reasons I've heard of include the obligation to adopt iOS-specific APIs for features like scrolling and text inputs; developing a separate app for these markets and therefore loosing their existing userbase; and signing a pretty crazy contract, among other things.

But the bigger the market they can reach, the bigger the reward, and so at some point it may justify investing resources to work around those roadblocks and accept the drawbacks.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-06 11:55:20+00:00
AFAIK the main reason is that only the EU+UK cared about these rules and their market share is too small for companies like Google or Mozilla to invest into.

Because of the way the App Store works, browser engines segregated by region need to be two different apps. That means maintaining two source trees (EU+UK+JP vs worldwide) and two releases with two reviews.

I expect niche browsers to have a go at porting to iOS at some point (I'd love to see a project like Ladybird be the first non-Safari browser on the app store!) but for the major companies it seems like too much of a hassle at the moment.
by strken | 2025-08-06 11:55:36+00:00
I agree with this criticism in the case of sleep apnoea, since the respiratory system is complicated. By intuition, it seems like the evolution of a complicated trait should require significant genetic changes, and thus be more likely to get stuck in a local maximum. I'd expect the respiratory system to be quite resistant to change: what if you've got an SNP that reduces sleep aponea but also prevents peristalsis, speech, weakens your neck, etc.? You might need a number of SNPs to all change at once in order to fix the problem.

I don't think the argument holds so strongly for questions like "why don't we produce GLP-1 hormone at a 20% higher level?" Increasing GLP-1 production levels seem like a smoother transition with fewer side effects. If higher production is better, and you've got an SNP that increases production by 5% on its own by increasing the number of L cells in your intestines (or something), that sounds like it should make you more reproductively viable in today's world and shouldn't have as high an impact on everything else as changing the shape of a throat.

Most of this is just my intuition, and I'm absolutely not an expert.

Edit: final note that I think in today's world is the key gotcha here, per the original text: "getting fat in times of plenty was a feature and not a bug", meaning that it was evolutionary advantageous for most people to put on weight until very recently, evolutionarily speaking.
by jongjong | 2025-08-06 11:55:50+00:00
This is a good discussion to have. I spend a lot of effort on evaluating dependencies. I look for a number of things like how popular/widely used it is, who the author is (if I recognize them) and I also look at code quality and number of sub-dependencies.

If I see a library which is solving a simple problem but it uses a lot of dependencies, I usually don't use that library. Every dependency and sub-dependency is a major risk... If a library author doesn't understand this, I simply cannot trust them. I want the authors of my dependencies to demonstrate some kind of wisdom and care in the way they wrote and packaged their library.

I have several open source projects which have been going for over a decade and I rarely need to update them. I was careful about dependencies and also I was careful about what language features I used. Also, every time some dependency gave me too much trouble I replaced it... Now all my dependencies are highly stable and reliable.

My open source projects became a kind of a Darwinian selection environment for the best libraries. I think it's why I started recognizing the names of good library authors. They're not always super popular but good devs tend to produce consistent quality and usually gets better with time. So if I see a new library and I recognize the author's name, it's a strong positive signal.

It feels nice seeing familiar niche names come up when I'm searching for new libraries to use. It's a small secret club and we're in it.
by ben_w | 2025-08-06 11:56:31+00:00
Why the US and not Germany or UK?

Two reasons:

1. Because whichever country does go in, it gives everyone else in NATO an excuse to do nothing in response to Russia subsequently going to full war with whoever it was that went in. Strategic vs tactical response in local political sphere, short-term tactical benefit of using such an excuse comes at long term strategic cost.

2. Right now, each individual European power is in a state of "Oh no, Russia's probably 3-5 years away from attacking us if Ukraine falls, and it will take us 5-8 years to be ready to defend ourselves". The UK, for example, has a 136k active and 32k reserve personnel in total, while Ukraine forces have suffered ~400k wounded and ~50-100k fatalities.

Both points become "we can only intervene directly as a joint act from multiple nations".

That said, if the USA were to leave NATO, I wouldn't be overly surprised if rest of NATO may issue a joint declaration that Ukraine is now under their combined protection, nor would I be overly surprised by an alternative outcome such as NATO being functionally replaced with Article 42 of the Treaty on European Union: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...

And also, much of Europe is, in fact, sending aid (and arms) to Ukraine. All the other stuff is about troops on the ground.
by unglaublich | 2025-08-06 11:57:01+00:00
An LLM is effectively a compressed model of its input data.

Inference is then the decompression stage where it generates text from the input prompt and the compressed model.

Now that compressing and decompressing texts is trivial with LLMs, we humans should focus - in business at least - on communicating only the core of what we want to say.

If the argument to get a new keyboard is: "i like it", then this should suffice, for inflated versions of this argument can be trivially generated.
Show HN: Header-only ASCII font renderer for embedded/SDL/terminal
by Den1996 | 2025-08-06 11:57:41+00:00
I built a minimal, header-only ASCII font renderer for embedded systems and microcontrollers. It requires zero dependencies, supports monochrome and RGB565 displays, and uses an 8×8 pixel ASCII font (chars 32–126).

Useful for low-power devices, debug UIs, console demos, or any resource-constrained environments.

Single header (embedded_ascii.h)

Callback-based & buffer-based rendering

No heap allocation, <800B font footprint

Includes basic text measurement & demo mode

GitHub: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/ascii-render
by a5c11 | 2025-08-06 11:58:52+00:00
You don't quite understand the meaning of "symptom" and "illness", do you?

Obesity - symptom. Usually the illness is a bad diet, lack of movement, or very rarely some serious health condition. Instead of targeting obesity, fix your habits or see a doctor to see why your body accumulates excessive amounts of fat.

Dopamine issues, lack of concentration, etc. - symptoms. The illness is ADHD. By taking medicines you are targeting illness, which is correct. Targeting symptoms would be me standing behind you with a metal pipe and hitting you every time you lose focus.
by codingdave | 2025-08-06 11:59:07+00:00
This is the kind of question where asking for anecdotes on HN is inferior to just looking up the answers. Just one example: https://www.aao.org/eye-health/diseases/what-is-eye-strain

Searching or asking AI will give you more answers, and they will all sound quite similar, because this is a known problem with known solutions.
Show HN: I made a tool to create faceless influencers and UGC videos
by nplus1th | 2025-08-06 11:59:56+00:00
I built this after struggling to consistently create content for my own projects without being on camera or hiring creators.

With Adcraftify, you can:

Create a consistent faceless influencer for your brand

Generate UGC-style videos with multiple avatars (we’re adding new ones daily)

Make and refine static ads until you're happy with them

Export short-form videos for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts — no editing needed

It’s ideal for indie founders, solo marketers, or brands that need content but don’t want to deal with filming, freelancers, or agencies.

Would love your feedback or questions! Happy to share how it works under the hood too.
by dspillett | 2025-08-06 12:00:01+00:00
Depending on the site it might be practical to detect JS on first request and set a cookie to indicate that the new format (and polyfill) can be sent on subsequent requests instead of the more common format.

Or for a compiled-to-static site just use <NOSCRIPT> to let those with no JS enabled to go off to the version compiled without support/need for such things.
by cushychicken | 2025-08-06 12:00:04+00:00
I find myself deeply skeptical of much of the open source FPGA movement.

Most of those efforts stem from the underlying notion that “…this is all a problem with the tooling!”

This approaches the problem space from a very software-centric lens. Fundamentally, gateware design isn’t software. It’s wiring together logic gates if you really boil it down to fundamentals. Treating it as a tooling problem is to misconstrue how much you know. Plainly: no open source toolchain is going to have insight into Xilinx’s internal fanout or propagation delay specs. You’re reliant on Xilinx to encode these into their tools for you.

As a result: “Vendor tools are God in FPGA land. You don’t go against God.” (Quoted from the staff FPGA engineer on my team.)
by EagnaIonat | 2025-08-06 12:00:26+00:00
Nice write up!

One test I do is to give a common riddle but word it slightly to see if it can actually reason.

For example:

"Bobs dad has five daughters, Lala, Lele, Lili, Lolo and ???"

The 20B model kept picking the answer of the original riddle, even after explaining extra information to it.

The original riddle is:

"Janes dad has five daughters, Lala, Lele, Lili, Lolo and ???"
by jhbadger | 2025-08-06 12:01:01+00:00
I'm not sure there's a point to doing that with a lot of pop music, which is often written by committee to give to a pop star whose personality and looks are likewise crafted by other committees to attract a particular audience. The point is to make a successful product. It's romantic to imagine a tortured composer who creates music to express their damaged soul to the world and the like, but that's not what most music is.
by ahaucnx | 2025-08-06 12:01:47+00:00
Achim from AirGradient here. Good to see that my post has been submitted here. Happy to answer any questions you might have.

I spend quite a long time writing this post and it actually helped me to see the bigger picture. How much can we actually trust tech reviews?

I am already getting very interesting results from the survey I posted and already planning to write a follow up post.
by skeezyboy | 2025-08-06 12:01:50+00:00
> Let claude take over, and risk losing the only skill I had to differentiate myself in this harsh world?

the good times are over, it happens. i remember watching that Dall-E come out and feeling sorry for graphic designers, gloating in the knowledge programming was too complex to automate. then they automated it.

a human is still required in the loop for vibe coding, as its fairly fuckin useless without guidance, but i can see that changing too
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-06 12:01:57+00:00
These were too strong a sleeping pill to be safe for driving, if you stayed awake or didn't wait for it to wear off all the way the next day. You could feel it was kind of a goofy intoxicant, but if you took one and laid down you slept like a log.

I think there were some early incidents that would keep it from becoming a legitimate blockbuster, other sleep aids became more widespread and Quaaludes ended up more for retired people who didn't drive or didn't drive as much any more.

Naturally the condos of South Florida were packed with those type residents like nowhere else.

Mostly the old folks would take the first one and the next day feel like it was more potent than they thought. They were potent and most people wouldn't really need one the next night even if they took it for insomnia the night before.

These patients weren't taking them every night, just the opposite, only occasionally, if ever again when they felt like they really needed it.

One day, after a few years, some wild high-school kid with nothing else but pure rebelliousness and unruly behavior in mind, who will take any pill they find, finds out that grandma has a forgotten bottle in the medicine cabinet with 99 of them still in it.

Tries it and likes it. Tells his friends.

Within a few weeks hundreds of kids were finding vast repositories, selling them for $1 each and that's when they first started flying off the shelf.

They probably cost about $6 a 100 for the prescription at the pharmacy, in 1970's dollars.

Interestingly, they became a blockbuster only after it was no longer legitimate.

This is also when pharma started to jack up their prices on a per-pill basis, before that the medical world was still like it really had never crossed their mind until then.

For a number of years afterward new "patients" started preferring them too, on the black market a renewed prescription yielded over 10x the money the drug company made on the same bottle. Pharma was just cringing about it until they eventually got their skyrocketing underway. Still caught them again with opiates, especially Oxycontin.
by Pixxelle | 2025-08-06 12:02:05+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Remote | France (UTC+2)

Hi, I’m Christa. A freelance software engineer with 10+ years of experience, currently based in France and open to contract or freelance roles.

Background: I’ve worked at companies including Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, CashApp, Edume, and Northrop Grumman. My experience includes frontend and full stack development across climate tech, healthcare, education, and public sector projects.

Technologies: React, TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, Python, SQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker, HTML/CSS, Flutter, Vue, Django, Java, Android

Recent work: Developed and maintained internal tools for climate and CDC data visualization at JHU APL

Built Android apps for research projects in neural engineering

Fine-tuned LLaMA language models using climate-related datasets

Added new features to a Teams-style collaboration app using Next.js and Node.js

Released a production Flutter app and provided bug fixes, testing, and stabilization

I’m available for remote work in European time zones, up to 40 hours/week. I invoice through the French micro-entrepreneur system and do not require visa sponsorship.

Contact: christadcooke@gmail.com GitHub: https://github.com/christacode Website: https://christacooke.com/
by aanthonymax | 2025-08-06 12:03:36+00:00
Hello! HMPL differs from HTMX quite seriously in that HTMX uses the outdated XMLHTTPRequest in requests, and is also almost not customizable at all. HMPL focuses on customization, which is done through more complete integration via JavaScript. It differs from Alpine.js in that it is a highly specialized tool, not a general one.

Alpine.js, HTMX and HMPL - represent the same idea (if we are talking about the server), but differ in details.
by cushychicken | 2025-08-06 12:04:30+00:00
> these new age HDLs aren't really HDLs in the strictest a sense but rather languages that let you cleanly write RTL generator programs

At what point does the abstraction start to help your productivity in developing gateware, rather than hamper it?

I’ve heard more than a few horror stories from gateware devs trying to untangle HDL generated by something like Matlab, Simulink, or even HLS tools like Vitis.

> It's exactly I love most about Chisel

Would love to hear more about your experience with Chisel. I’ve learned just a bit about it from going to conferences at MIT LL. Seems interesting, but at the same time, I’m also an avowed skeptic when it comes to adding more gateware abstractions on top of raw HDL.
by ozgung | 2025-08-06 12:04:35+00:00
That's also because of seeing them as technology under development. The overblown expectations are because of their potential in the future. The glass is half full today. It was almost empty just a few years ago. The water level is rising with an unprecedented rate. But we shouldn't forget it's still half empty right now. More importantly, we are bad at predicting how actual people use the technology.
by Fluorescence | 2025-08-06 12:04:47+00:00
> to retain body heat

Heat retention would benefit an ambush hunter in a cold climate whereas heat exhaustion is one of the ways endurance hunters catch their prey in hot climes.

> Humans are also hairless endurance hunters

It's something we can do but the diversity of habitats, prey and techniques humans feed themselves with is far greater than what feels like an over-indexing on specific extant savannah tribes as if they are proto-human relics. Do you need to out run a fish or an oyster? Why would you run after a rabbit instead of waiting for it near it's burrow? etc.

Personally I bear little resemblance to an endurance runner so one might assume no shortage of forest/mountain dwellers in my genes given short thick legs. Built for sprinting, climbing and carrying but, to my despair, incurably injury prone at endurance running.