MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Woolean – Pairwise comparisons without any LLM features
by rfarley04 | 2025-08-15 10:25:30+00:00
Hey HN,

We've got something that 1) isn't an AI whirlygig and 2) has hit a certain usability threshold that seems like it could fill a handful of niche needs.

Woolean is a minimalist pairwise comparison app. Add a list of items (text, HEX codes, images, audio files, etc) and click Start Comparing to cast votes on all the possible 1v1 matchups.

@maguay and I built this for our own use cases (him for picking the best photograph when they all look too similar, me for ranking microcopy variations). It feels so much easier to chunk lists into a handful of this-or-that votes instead of attacking everything everywhere all at once. If that doesn't make sense to you, try a pre-made comparison, like Apple Bootup Sounds: https://woolean.com/?id=ZvR6aq2q

There are other apps that do this, but they're mostly Do-Everything suites of features when all we wanted was the pairwise framework.

Consider Woolean in beta. It likely has bugs, but should be MVP level. You can create text comparisons without logging in, or can upload photos/audio/spreadsheets (and keep track of the comparisons you’ve made) if you signup with Google auth, which is 100% free.

If there's enough interest in building out more features (while retaining the minimalist, pairwise focus), we would love to keep hacking on this. Let us know what you think!
by crinkly | 2025-08-15 10:25:56+00:00
If it was a police state, JD Vance wouldn’t be getting it on his holiday here from protesters and video vans driving around and being refused service in a pub.

It could end up that way but we’re not there yet. If we do get there we tend to make the French look like amateur protestors (look up poll tax riots).

I’m less worried about a police state than a corporate dystopia. The attendee list at Trump’s inauguration would be far scarier to me than the OSA is.
by biorach | 2025-08-15 10:26:01+00:00
> the specific terminfo needed for ghostty isn't installed anywhere on the boxes you ssh into ... you need to manually install it on every single one of them.

Yeah this is going to be an issue with any of the newer terminal emulators. No big deal. Updating terminfo is easy. If you can't then just set TERM=xterm

> Not ready for prime time by a mile IMO.

Nah, the issue is your lack of experience and understanding of the basics is terminals.
by jononor | 2025-08-15 10:27:59+00:00
The TinyML niche, doing ML on microcontroller grade hardware (usually for sensor data analysis), is close in terms of constraints. Models measuring in kilobytes of RAM/FLASH. But usually missing the flair and showmanship of demoscene, and the just-because-we-can attitude. So I agree, need more demoscene style! As the maintainer of an open source library in this space (emlearn), I would be interested in contributing to such an effort.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-15 10:28:00+00:00
I am reminded of when Google attempted to kill MathML a few years ago because it was complexity and no one was using it (… because Chromium didn’t support it—all others did). There was widespread rebellion, and it actually led to Igalia implementing it and Google accepting and shipping it.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see a resurgence of interest in XSLT after this, if only for formatting Atom/RSS feeds.

(BTW, prefer Atom unless you’re operating in podcasting, it’s far more sane in ways that occasionally actually matter, and everything supports it except in podcasting which Apple ruined. If you want a featureful stylesheet to look at for reference, mine is the best I know of: https://chrismorgan.info/atom.xsl, https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2022-05-10-rss.xsl.)
by perching_aix | 2025-08-15 10:28:02+00:00
> OK, so what makes you the arbiter of when an emotion is "in excess"?

The ability to form their own opinion.

And I take you meant to say, "the display of an emotion" being in excess.

> This is a normal feature of human language. This is how humans have communicated for millennia.

Really? An appeal to tradition?

As if people trying to control their emotions and trying to deescalate and debate it out wasn't a millennias old tradition...
by motorest | 2025-08-15 10:30:00+00:00
> how so? programs might use english words but are decidedly not english.

I pointed out the fact that the concept of a language doesn't exist in token predictors. They are trained with a corpus, and LLMs generate outputs that reflect how the input is mapped in accordance to how the were trains with said corpus. Natural language makes the problem harder, but not being English is only relevant in terms of what corpus was used to train them.
by IntraVybe | 2025-08-15 10:30:11+00:00
Creators post amazing content every day, but on today’s big platforms, it gets buried in algorithms that favor the biggest accounts. IntraVybe changes that.

It’s a new social platform where every post has a real shot at visibility, no “shadow” algorithms. Users can share videos, images, and audio, connect directly with others, and grow their presence organically.

I’ve been a content creator for years and saw great posts from small creators vanish before anyone could discover them. I built IntraVybe so creators like me — without massive budgets or existing fame — can grow and connect without fighting the algorithm.

We'll be launching on Samsung and Huawei stores in exactly a week from now and on the Google play store at the month's end and we are already seeing early adoption. Our mission is simple: bring back the internet’s original promise — a place where everyone can be heard, seen, and valued.
by pilif | 2025-08-15 10:30:24+00:00
those toolkits do not support smooth scrolling.

The issue comes from XInput2 (https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/inputproto/XI2proto.t...)

So I guess the "fix" would be to have two completely separate input handlers on X11, one of which supporting smooth scrolling and multitouch, the other not and then offering users a toggle in the style of

[ ] do not ignore the first scroll input after focus loss, but disable smooth scrolling and multitouch

Plus handling all the potential issues by having two separate input handlers.

That's asking a bit much for this particular issue und greatly smells like a case of XKCD 1172
by dotancohen | 2025-08-15 10:30:31+00:00
KOReader user here, very happy to try something new. I use annotations very heavily, on a KDE based Debian system, on a Samsung Ultra device with the S-Pen, and with a large E-ink tablet with an EMR stylus. I use many mixed LTR and RTL text. I work with code and with documentation and with scientific articles.

If you want a demanding user with diverse use cases to test on diverse devices, you are invited to contact me. My Gmail username is the same as my HN username.
by motorest | 2025-08-15 10:31:53+00:00
> They aren't, despite marketing, really hallucinations.

They are hallucinations. You might not be aware of what that concept means in terms of LLMs but just because you are oblivious to the definition of a concept that does not mean it doesn't exist.

You can learn about the concept by spending a couple of minutes reading this article on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_inte...

> Now I understand why these companies don't want to market using terms like "extrapolated bullshit", (...)

That's literally in the definition. Please do yourself a favour and get acquainted with the topic before posting comments.
by alexisread | 2025-08-15 10:33:15+00:00
For the most part I'd agree, but the Iraq war had a million people (1/60th of the country) who made the effort to protest in London (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2765041.stm), and similarly every month supporting Palestine (150K-800K).

The legal mechanisms in place don't appear to be adequate as when that number of activists are ignored. Certainly in parallel with the online regulation, the legal right to protest has been restricted by the previous Tory government, and this current one.

What's also concerning is the lack of oversight with MPs, they follow guidelines, which seem to let them off from regular laws (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68503255 using taxpayers money in a private dispute- fraud) (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68841840 reads like fiction).

Why MPs are not FCA regulated is beyond me, corruption should be stamped out.
by vitonsky | 2025-08-15 10:34:37+00:00
> The old URL redirects to the new one, so in theory existing posts/backlinks keep working. We also agreed the original creator wouldn’t reuse the “unity-mcp” repo name under his GitHub profile, which could break redirects.

Why?

A lot of times I faced with page 404 when clicked GitHub links that have been moved.

Isn't it good idea to do it like that - Move repo to new org (to move stats and activity) - Create repo with the same name that are fork of a target repo - Update readme to explain repo was moved - Archive the repo to place a warning on top of the repo

This way make users have to click link in original github repo, to go on your repo.

So it would be a problem if you need to show a numbers and you need to fake activity. But if you don't need fake activity, it is not a problem, because a real people who really looking for solution will be able to click one more link.

On the other hand, this way ensure that whole content will be available by indexed links.

How to prevent 404 and why people still faces with it on GitHub?
by lucideer | 2025-08-15 10:35:28+00:00
Toshy makes Cmd-C copy in all Linux apps: both GUIs & Terminals. This avoids any clashes with Ctrl in terminal as you're using Cmd for shortcuts everywhere instead.

> there is no secret third option

I assume you're thinking of trying to use Ctrl-C in terminals? The secret third option is never using Ctrl at all outside of terminals.

> I guess a better place for copy/paste would be WIN+C/V

Yeah that would likely be the equivalent of Cmd if you're using a Windows keyboard. That is how it's configured across all apps by default in macOS & Toshy just ports that sensibility over to Linux.
by matthewmacleod | 2025-08-15 10:35:47+00:00
There are very significant concerns about the actions of the Westminster government recently no doubt – this is stupid legislation, and it compounds with other stupid legislation (see the recent arrests for supporting proscribed groups). Everyone should be protesting this nonsense.

That said, there is equally a clear and obvious effort to distort what is happening. And I don't think anybody should really be taking lessons about "totalitarian oppression" when current US government policy is to send gangs of masked thugs to round up brown people.
Show HN: Serverless MCP Servers (Use All Your Fav. MCP Server in 1 Click)
by ankitladhania | 2025-08-15 10:35:57+00:00
Hi Hackers, I had been struggling to install and use local MCP Servers, setting up auth, env, etc. seemed so non-intuitive. And getting it adopted by non-tech colleagues was harder.

So, I hacked around and built Oppie.

1. it works in the serverless model, you just select which MCP servers you want to use and start using it, no deployments required.

2. authenticate using OAuth (even STDIO based MCP servers are OAuth enabled).

3. No more local setup, its hosted in cloud so usage for non-tech community members is easier.

4. Powered through community MCP servers (Be it SSE or STDIO servers, we support all).

As we are still in Preview, you can use the Platform for free.

Sign Up: https://oppie.ai
Show HN: PgHook – Docker image that streams PostgreSQL row changes to webhooks
by enadzan | 2025-08-15 10:35:59+00:00
I needed real-time updates in a web UI whenever PostgreSQL table rows change, so I built PgHook. It's a 23 MB Docker image (10.1 MB compressed), .NET9 AOT-compiled, that streams logical replication events and sends them to a configurable webhook.

In my setup, the webhook converts events to SignalR messages that push updates to the UI.

I know about Debezium but I needed something minimal, and I like playing with csharp.
by thrance | 2025-08-15 10:36:46+00:00
I had an awful, terrible experience with GPT5 a few days ago, that made me remember why I don't use LLMs, and renewed my promise to not use them for at least a year more.

I am a relative newbie to GPU development, and was writing a simple 2D renderer with WebGPU and its rust implementation, wgpu. The goal is to draw a few textures to a buffer, and then draw that buffer to the screen with a CRT effect applied.

I got 99% of the way there on my own, reading the guide, but then got stumped on a runtime error message. Something like "Texture was destroyed while its semaphore wasn't released". Looking around my code, I see no textures ever being released. I decide to give the LLM a go, and ask it to help me, and it very enthusiastically gives a few thing to try.

I try them, nothing works. It corrects itself with more things to try, more modifications to my code. Each time giving a plausible explanation as to what went wrong. Each time extra confident that it got the issue pinned down this time. After maybe two very frustrating hours, I tell it to go fuck itself, close the tab and switch my brain on again.

10 minutes later, I notice my buffer's format doesn't match the one used in the render pass that draws to it. Correct that, compile, and it works.

I genuinely don't understand what those pro-LLM-coding guys are doing that they find AIs helpful. I can manage the easy parts of my job on my own, and it fails miserably on the hard parts. Are those people only writing boilerplate all day long?
by perihelions | 2025-08-15 10:36:51+00:00
In the Oxford philosophy-exam thread from yesterday, I was distracted by question #3: "Should anonymous posting online be forbidden?"[0] Never mind the quality of essay you (or your machine surrogate) could write about that. The striking thing is this is now within firmly within the Overton Window in British academia—this is what they seemingly teach their cultural elites in their elite schools. In place of Enlightenment* values, they're normalizing the inversion of them—normalizing thinking as an autocrat, in viewing the general public as an unsafe factor and as an adversary.

[0] https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/c...

*(A not-small body of which were famously published anonymously in order to escape ostracization. Were these Oxford philosophers to take their own advice, they would forbid all volumes mentioning Voltaire or Spinoza from their libraries).
by tomatocracy | 2025-08-15 10:36:59+00:00
I think the most effective solution is to work to ensure that people who have sensible views and are able to think in a reasoned way on topics like this stand for election themselves.

As much as many people have distaste for the existing parties, a few people getting involved and changing the parties from the inside on one or two topics like this (which are not party political in nature) is likely to be much more effective than standing as or voting for an independent, complaining or protesting.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-15 10:37:15+00:00
The English article is incomplete. The banner is there. I guess I could try to complete it but it’s highly my work would be struck out by an angry editor feeling territorial for a reason or another so maybe not.

The French article is a bit better - I don’t understand German sadly.

The controversy stems from the protagonists values. They put their love for each other and their search for fulfilment above other commitments which was seen as dangerously non communist. The film was cleared by the head of East Germany but the censors still imposed a tragic ending.
by abibb | 2025-08-15 10:37:22+00:00
Kids loved jumping things back then, but typically the jumps were sad, not that high, and no one was going to lie down in front of them unless they were idiots.

I can believe some kids potentially could have jumped high in the 70s, but more often a high jump would’ve been off a dirt ramp.

Somehow there were more undeveloped areas (up until maybe the mid-80s) where kids would dig foxholes, have BB gun fights, etc. Shoveling dirt was our version of Minecraft. Kids got hurt regularly. Digging was fine if things held together, but I later heard in some places where it didn’t, some died from cave-ins.

By early/mid 80s, there would be dirt biker racers with helmet and other protective gear on constructed dirt tracks. There was that in the 70s, but less organized in more natural less confined areas and more for motorcycles where you just had jeans and a fat helmet.

Skateboarding became a bigger thing by roughly mid-1980s than biking; the 1970s skateboards were skinny flat banana boards with trucks that couldn’t turn, so they weren’t very maneuverable- the scene from the original BTTF where Marty makes a skateboard out of a scooter was funny, but how he used it seemed unrealistic- it would’ve been a pita to get around on that.

Back to 70s bike ramps...

The ramps were usually just a piece of wood with anything you could find under it, and the Napoleon Dynamite bike ramp scene was close to the normal result.

Jumping as high as in these pictures was not normal. A nice curved plywood ramp would take work, time, tools, and money, kids wouldn’t expect parents to help them out, so you’d more often have shitty ramps and minor jumps.

Some of these pictures look physically impossible given the orientation of the ramp or non-existence of a ramp. I wonder if AI generated those.
by eviks | 2025-08-15 10:37:53+00:00
> Swedish keyboards have å, ä and ö in addition to English ascii

That counts against you because now you have even fewer keys to work with to add copy/paste, shouldn't that extra physical key be instead used for those extra useful letters?

> First we have a large caps lock key and two alt keys.

My "Status quo" is using them for other better things. And right alt is also currently use for those non-ascii Europeans, so that's not an easy win. Caps lock might be, the current default is a disgraceful waste. So that only leaves Paste

> Even if in the scroll lock/pause-break region

Again, you don't have it on laptops, that's the main source of space constraints, so now you don't have universal muscle memory experience.

> With this option you could keep Ctrl+C/V

Hm, yeah, I thought of a universal replacement.
by zer00eyz | 2025-08-15 10:38:15+00:00
You're talking about two products and two companies with (initially, and still core) well defined domains.

The languages, the architectural choices, that were made by these orgs early on were allowed to "stick". There was no move fast break things, there were no pivots, there wasn't a massive cycle of "market discovery", no figuring out "product market fit".

They could have built in PHP, or Ruby, Or brain fuck and been successful I suspect. Talent and a steady hand at the helm are playing the outsized roles here.
by phire | 2025-08-15 10:38:17+00:00
If the notch bothers you so much, then why not disable it?

It's actually optional, the functionality is built into Mac OS (just check "show all resolutions" in display setting and pick the notchless resolution). You get that bezel you want, along with the full menu bar.

> Yes, it does. In this case with thinness of bezels.

Device thickness is not the same thing as bezel thinness. If you make a phone/laptop thinner, all you get is less battery life. If you make bezels thiner, you get more display area.
by NalNezumi | 2025-08-15 10:39:16+00:00
Don't worry it's common for natives too.

Not born & raised in Japan but went to Saturday school for Japanese in Europe and I was excited to be able to read (and understand) the newspaper for the first time at middle school, because my Kanji caught up. From there it's usually very quick how much Kanji you can learn.

But now, 20 years later? When I need to go to fill forms I flip up my phone and search for Kanji all the time. And I know I'm not alone (although probably very bad by Japanese standards), but I can navigate Japan just fine.

I always struggled to explain this to my European friends. "I can read and talk fluently without any issue, but writing not so much. Unless on keyboard".

The best analogy I've come up with is "If I ask you to imagine an apple or a Motorbike, you can do it right. When you see one, you'll instantly recognize what it is. But if I ask you to paint an apple, or a motorbike, you might not fare too well; people might mistake your painting of a motorbike for a bicycle. It's something like that. Using keyboard is like googling for images and copying it in to your PowerPoint slides"
by benjiro | 2025-08-15 10:39:48+00:00
> With $1k you can build a pretty good system

1. The hardware you buy for these activities, has still residual value after 1, 2, 3 year. Unlike the streaming service you pay for.

2. Its cheap to upgrade / expand over time (if its not a all in one solution)

3. It opens a door to not just store movies/music/images, but as emulator, streaming service, or game streaming to one or multiple.

4. The content will not arbitrarily vanish.

5. Your bookmarks / last viewed / ... will not arbitrarily vanish. Do not get me started on this and how annoying it can be when a services removes content!

6. It serves not only as a device for "linux isos" or other gray zones but also as a legit backup of your own personal data.

7. Saves you from needing "cloud" storage or other cloud services.

8. Can be enhanced with programs that offer image conversion, pdf conversion etc, all private!

9. Run your own chat server for the family, no US/EU "we want to know what you are saying" issues.

10. Can act like your own VPN, to route data from your phone or other devices outside your home.

11. Provides service if you are in area's with horrible internet connection with its ability to "cache isos" at night slowly.

12. Your control over the media means you can stream 4k to your PC. Netflix kuch kuch ... No, its not 4k.

13. You can gain the FULL bitrate of the media. You do not get a washed down version of the supposed media based upon how busy a streaming service their servers are or other limitations.

14. It can be used for so many other activities like programming.

15. Did i mention home automatization?

And so much more ... People are probably doing things with NAS setups that i can not even think about.

Your not investing into a machine for "illegal" stuff, your investing into a machine that frees you as the end user from all those cloud, streaming, and other services their lackluster service. And then provides all the added benefits on top, that a 24/7 running PC can provide.

Lets also not forget the future where LLM's are a thing. Having your own open source LLM that runs at home, can be a major benefit.

But ... it does require more knowledge, especially as you step up beyond simple storage. So that is the real downside, not the money, the time and knowledge buildup.
by h2zizzle | 2025-08-15 10:40:02+00:00
I find myself having trouble remembering the spelling of certain words, now that autocomplete is almost ubiquitous. It sometimes takes writing them out and looking at the result ("Is it 'beleive'? No, definitely 'believe'.") to remember the correct spelling. Chinese character recall is probably closesly associated with that than with romaji recall.
by minraws | 2025-08-15 10:40:23+00:00
I am not sure have CEOs gone insane over AI? I wouldn't even agree to Sex Ed with AI for kids this is getting insane.

Can we not stick to coding stuff I know you folks aren't making profits, but please try to think about the consequences dammit.

Edit: I don't like AI code but atleast it can't harm anyone if we have decent guardrails.
by Chris2048 | 2025-08-15 10:40:25+00:00
ASOF now, your comment is no longer flagged, and I just upvoted it, so maybe it will recover.

I wouldn't underestimate the role of bots, or bot assisted socks, rather than the HN community. You last sentence just sounds like sour grapes in this context.

FYI, this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44901875

"Yes, conservative Latin American men like the male supremacy aspect of it"

is currently flagged. There is indeed a difference of opinion on HN, but also, sadly, rampant abuse of the flagging system.