MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bibinprathap | 2025-09-07 16:22:03+00:00
Hi Hacker News,

I'm the founder of pmspace.ai. For over a decade, I worked in the architecture and construction world, and I was constantly frustrated by one thing: information chaos.

Every project generates a mountain of documents—hundreds of drawing sheets, 800-page specification books, endless reports, emails, and change orders. The critical data needed to make a decision was always somewhere, but finding it felt impossible. Using Ctrl+F across dozens of PDFs was a nightmare, and the ambiguity often led to expensive mistakes on the job site.

One night, after wasting an entire afternoon looking for a specific fire-resistance rating, I thought, "Why can't I just ask my project a question and get a direct answer with a source?"

That question led me to build pmspace.ai. I started with the feature I desperately needed myself: an intelligent document processing engine. You can upload all of your project's unstructured documents, and the system uses embeddings and LLMs to create a unified, queryable knowledge base. You can perform semantic searches ("find all walls with a 2-hour fire rating") or have a conversation with a specific document ("summarize the requirements for structural steel in section 05 12 00").

This document intelligence is the core of a larger platform we're building to be a true single source of truth for project teams. It connects directly to our workflow automation, BIM viewer, and other modules, all designed specifically for the AEC industry. Unlike generic AI wrappers, it's built to understand the complex, cross-referenced nature of construction documents.

We're a small, bootstrapped team. Our business model is a standard SaaS subscription, with pricing based on the number of users and data storage. There's a 14-day free trial with no credit card required so you can test it out properly.

This is still early, and there is so much more to build. I would be incredibly grateful for your feedback. I'd love for you to try uploading a complex document and see how it performs. What works? What's broken? What's the most frustrating information management problem you face in your own work?

Thanks for taking a look!
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-07 16:22:04+00:00
That has always been a feature of having free speech. If only "good" free speech is allowed, it's not free speech. Much of it is going to be disagreeable to some people's views and/or objectively harmful in some ways. There is allowance for a red line, but it only covers a sliver of the universe. That of course begs the parallel to social media being harmful and over the red line - the equivalent of "yelling fire in a movie theater" - and this worthy of a ban within a free speech framework, but I think that is disingenuous, and it's more like banning harmful political tabloids and misinformation (which is at the root of the history of free speech itself).

Moving the red line of acceptability back essentially results in a China style state controlled system, where maybe social media is allowed, but "harmful" aspects are banned by the state. (An outright band of all social media would be quite a bit more extreme than China).

I'm not saying that the latter is necessarily a bad solution, to be clear. There are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches. I certainly don't have the authority or cultural knowledge to project views onto Nepal. On the other hand, I do feel quite confident in saying that the Chinese state control approach to social media is incompatible with any western democracy that is built with values of freedom and free speech. There are other good options for western democracies though, such as Britain and the BBC (before they went through the privatization wave specifically) - state sponsored options don't have to be the only option, stronger regulations for children, and even strong legal restrictions in certain specific areas like dangerous misinformation on public health (which quite arguably passes the red line test even in a liberal free speech framework) or knowingly making up disparaging statements about other people that hurts them. Of course sanctity of the democratic process itself has always been an area where democracies have tighter regulations, and necessarily so. Now for a country like America especially, most of that may be idiologically "off the table" in the views of some, but if we take a more moderate European democracy for example, when I'm ultimately getting out is that there is a lot of middle ground to explore. Ban vs allow is too black or white, especially after being realistic about the fact that bans don't work - people will move to the next paradigm after TikTok/after VR gains mass scale, etc.
by exe34 | 2025-09-07 16:22:05+00:00
> But, I don’t think the idea of just stopping charging works.

I'm sorry but this is complete bullshit. they can set a default limit of 1 trillion dollars and give us the option to drop it to $5. there's a good reason they won't do it, but it's not this bullshit claim that's always bandied about.
by comrade1234 | 2025-09-07 16:22:22+00:00
In the last ten years: - roof replacement (replaced with metal so hopefully a longer-lived roof) - repaint and repair cabin, garage, shed - replace rotting deck - had to dig out a creek to replace a culvert and did proper landscaping as part of it - redo a big part of the landscaping to redirect water runoff away from the cabin while also installing drain tile - re-level the cabin and a shed where the ground had settled - converted from gas to all-electric (it's only a summer cabin so no need for gas) and so had to upgrade the electric connection (this change wasn't completely necessary but I just didn't like using gas) - replace the pump

Coming up: - convert kitchen lighting to led from halogen tubes (ballasts are failing so may as well redo it all) - repair/replace parts of the fireplace outside because it was built with indoor bricks instead of outdoor so it's breaking apart

That's just off the top of my head... I have a list of projects but I'm not getting out of my chair to get it :)
by renewiltord | 2025-09-07 16:23:03+00:00
I come from poverty relative to the United States and never want to let go of things, electronics having been the hardest to acquire in my childhood. My wife comes from being middle-class America and correctly perceives these fast outdated things as pure carrying cost, worthless in the near future.

A lot of 10 ipads from 2015, e-waste from her employer paying to get rid of them? I greedily ask for it and she indulges me but with a warning that I have six months to find utility.

Funny. I'm the one who played so many strategy games where buildings have carrying cost. Less is more. She is right of course. It's what we do with the thing that matters more than what it is. At the Goodwill Donation Centre when I falter she says "Take a picture and give it away". Good advice.
by randallsquared | 2025-09-07 16:23:53+00:00
> They refunded you $100k with few questions asked, and you hate them for it?

They exposed him to 100K of liability without any way to avoid it (other than to avoid AWS entirely), and then happened to blink, in this case, with no guarantee that it would happen again. If you don't happen to have a few hundred thousand liquid, suddenly getting a bill for 100K might well be a life-ruiningly stressful event.
by furyofantares | 2025-09-07 16:24:08+00:00
CC is so good with grep that I'm half expecting to clutter its context with bad results from semantic search. But also half optimistic at this just improving its search.

If you're getting useful results from hybrid mode that's very interesting to me since well-constructed grep that claude executes don't really look like they'd work great for semantic search to me! But intuition is often wrong on this stuff.

I am very curious your thoughts on speed. I'd rather any tools claude invokes be as fast as possible so it can get feedback immediately and execute again.
by petralithic | 2025-09-07 16:24:25+00:00
> this is exponentially more difficult when you don't have the backing of some ostentatious pedigree.

This has not been the case these days, to be honest. While a pedigree helps, the playing field for investment has been much more level than, say, a few decades ago. Harder, sure, but exponentially more so, definitely not.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-09-07 16:24:56+00:00
I was going to say something similar. Obviously I was just taking a visual look and not doing any rigorous analysis, but California certainly sticks out like a sore thumb. It has many areas in the Central Valley and Southern California with very high PM2.5 levels, but no "purple" areas with high dementia levels in the state. I also just read the article and not the study but I'd hope they give an explanation for that glaring outlier.

I'd be interested to compare the disease map with a map of average income, because at first glance the disease data looks to be correlated with wealth, and we already have tons of research that shows that wealth is one of the biggest determinants of health outcomes in the US.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-07 16:25:07+00:00
The people who wrote PB clearly knew ASN.1. It was the most famous IDL at the time. Do you assume they just came one morning and decided to write PB without taking a look at what existed?

Anyway, as stated PB does more than ASN.1. It specifies both the description format and the encoding. PB is ready to be used out of the box. You have a compact IDL and a performant encoding format without having to think about anything. You have to remember that PB was designed for internal Google use as a tool to solve their problems, not as a generic solution.

ASN.1 is extremely unwieldy in comparaison. It has accumulated a lot of cruft through the year. Plus they don’t provide a default implementation.
by ac29 | 2025-09-07 16:25:28+00:00
I know some people in the US government who definitely need a hardware key to access computing resources including email. They work for the Dept of the Interior on science stuff, nothing related to national security or otherwise sensitive info.

They mentioned this was a pain in the ass, and a very weird restriction since technically any member of the public can ask for a copy of their emails via FOIA.
by quantummagic | 2025-09-07 16:25:29+00:00
> Historical situations like our own might be a good place to start to look for solutions.

If you have a suggestion about something practical, that can actually help, please speak up. Offering more platitudes is just way too easy; it feels good, maybe, but it's really just an admission that we don't have a good outlet for our outrage. Which is why so many of us spend our days venting online, because apparently (judging from the lack of concrete ideas offered) it's about as effective as anything else we could do.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-07 16:25:56+00:00
I think the respective parties are consistently welcoming and hostile to immigrants regardless of who's in power, I don't really know what you mean. Biden would have been hated by the left for doing this.

People are so both-sides poisoned they come out with these nonsensical takes reflexively just to virtue signal being "above" having a (public) stance.
Show HN: I remade Homer's Web Page into an app [video]
by YalebB | 2025-09-07 16:26:01+00:00
Hey all,

So Showcase is an app where you can store your Tweets, websites, articles, Instagram posts, YouTube videos etc. all together in one space, rather than keeping all your bookmarks on 10 different platforms where they just get buried.

And I've just got collaboration done, so you can now store and share everything with your friends too. You can use it to create shared information hubs of content, so great for projects or for holidays (airbnb info, youtube recommendations, pictures etc together in one space)

Free to use! Do check it out and let me know your thoughts

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/showcase-co/id6740991352?platf... Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.showcaseapp... Web app: showcase-app.co
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-09-07 16:26:14+00:00
As the saying goes, when you owe the bank $100 you've got a problem, when you owe the bank $100k the bank has a problem...

On serverless, I can enter numbers in a calculator and guess that running my little toy demo app on AWS will cost between $1 and $100. Getting hit with a huge $1000 bill and a refusal to refund the charges (and revocation of my Prime account and a lifetime ban from AWS and cancellation of any other services I might otherwise run there) would be totally possible, but I have zero control over that. Expecting to go on social media begging for a refund is not a plan, it's evidence of a broken system - kinda like those "heartwarming" posts about poor people starting a GoFundMe so their child can afford cancer treatment. No, that's awful, can we just be sensible instead?

If a server would have cost me $20 at a VPS provider to keep a machine online 24/7 that was at 1% utilization most of the time and was terribly laggy or crashed when it went viral, that's what $20 buys you.

But, you say, analysis of acttual traffic says that serverless would only cost me $10 including scaling for the spike, in which case that's a fantastic deal. Half price! Or maybe it would be $100, 5x the price. I have no way of knowing in advance.

It's just not worth the risk.
by simne | 2025-09-07 16:26:33+00:00
From second view, looks like good way using ECMA-6 (for example) with Babel and some things added into browser debugger.

So, technically, high-level ECMA-6 language transpiled (more traditional word translated) to ordinary Javascript, and supplied file with structures, similar ideologically to C symbols tables, and within browser debugger (Chrome work) you could see not target JS but sources and debug on high level.

And when your code become mature, you just remove symbols tables and as usual, target optimized code become very much like obfuscated, and you could provide it as closed source.

So, as summary - must have all from list:

1. high-level language translator (may be into assembler, may be into some lover level language, as with ECMA-6 and JS)

2. some sort of debug support (as mentioned symbols tables)

3. good enough debugger, as much close to client platform as possible (Chrome is good example).
by isaacremuant | 2025-09-07 16:26:37+00:00
What freedom of speech? The "first world countries" in Europe are slowly turning up the surveillance state to not let people online if they don't provide their IDs, they want to surveil every private conversation you have at home, if it uses the internet in any way, they'd love banning encryption, VPNs, etc... but you have freedom of speech? Except when talking about thinks that are deemed "pro enemy" (Russia or whoever it is this time around).

Come on, we're living in extremely authoritian governments that pretend to be something else.
by phkamp | 2025-09-07 16:26:41+00:00
"fairly standard" is a bit of an understatement in this particular case.

The machine actually has both an ALU as we know it, called the "VAL" board, but it also has a second unit, which runs in parallel on the "TYP" board, which does checks and operations on the data types of the data on the VAL board.

That means that the compiler can just emit a "ADD" instruction, and leave it to the microcode to figure out if it is adding two floating point numbers, two integers or a floating-point plus an integer and if the numeric type has a range, the result will be checked to fit inside that range.

So the comparison to the Itanic is not helpful. Itanic was a pretty standard CPU which forced a lot of constraints and complexity into the compiler.

The R1000 does the opposite: The compiler gets to emit code which operates on the types as the Ada language defines and knows them, and the hardware+microcode translates that into action.

Grady Booch donated some internal documents to us, and they contain a couple of references to "Incredibly Complex Instruction Set Computer" and they're not half wrong about that.
by mdp2021 | 2025-09-07 16:26:45+00:00
I was referring to the interpretation of «ridiculous» as "it is preposterous", not at that which means "it is frustrating".

And personally, in front of "UFO: Enemy Unknown" I lived the pleasure of the masterpiece, not the balanced game - some of us have little taste for the win-and-lose. We learnt assembly when we were kids to make those sides of the gameplay adapt to our will - and went on hacking since.

Of UFO/XCOM, one particularly stubborn subsystem to change was having the "radars" not missing any new alien ship.
by conditionnumber | 2025-09-07 16:27:12+00:00
> would be a rounding error above absolute zero anyway

Kind of joking: unless there are nonlinear effects near 300K? Fig 4 [1] seems to suggest that the thermal diffusivity of the mantle grows very fast as temperature declines past 300K... but the data stop at 200K.

Reason for initial comment: we could probably set up a spherical heat equation to guess how crust cooling would change heat conduction at the outer core. But I have absolutely no idea how to reason about changes in heat conduction affecting the convection dynamics that generate the field. I was silently hoping for one of the domain experts lurking this forum to see it and share wisdom. (But overall it was a silly question, I know).

[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...
by cloverich | 2025-09-07 16:27:26+00:00
Social media causes active harm to people, we know that. Social media has also been demonstrably used to help overthrow authoritarian governments. Thus you have a context-dependent dichotomy in how we view it, and if you eschew the context (and pretend it is purely nationalistic / ethnic), it feels a bit like you are intentionally trying to derail an otherwise productive conversation that could be had instead.
by ben_w | 2025-09-07 16:27:32+00:00
Yes, but not only economics, I think.

Russia cannot be allowed to win.

But also, Putin cannot loose so hard that he actually reaches for the nukes (meaning either he needs to die or those weapons are first removed from use), and even without Putin there's a fear a collapsing Russia would disperse nukes on the black market and/or oligarchs would fruit into atomic warlords.

This does mean Ukraine destroying Russian nuclear delivery systems a while back was directly useful, makes it easier for everyone else to help them.

But even so, I have no idea how this plays out: Russia's death throes spraying nukes at the west is still entirely possible; as is Ukraine developing a nuke, pointing it as stuff Russian oligarchs like, and getting them to defenestrate Putin without Ukraine even launching the weapon.

-

Other things to consider: qhich power grids, if any, can cope with a single nuke triggering a high-altitude EMP? Most extreme estimate I've heard says it would take only one to kill 90% of the USA in a year just from loss of electricity in too many places at once to repair fast enough.

How sure can we be that all post-Russian nukes get accounted for?
by rayiner | 2025-09-07 16:27:41+00:00
Your country has detention centers as well: https://www.government.nl/topics/return-of-foreign-citizens/.... The U.S. is an outlier in allowing deportable people to remain free pending their deportation proceedings.

For deportation the only "due process" is checking that someone is not in the country legally.

Many European countries use the military for policing, including your own.

As a lawyer, what horrifies me is six decades of non-enforcement of our immigration laws.
by cycomanic | 2025-09-07 16:27:49+00:00
Optical repeaters are 1R repeaters, I.e. they regenerate power. Inside the repeater "boxes" (they are actually cylinders) there is an optical amplifier. For typically these are Erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA). I other words a piece of fibre doped with Erbium (a rare earth). The amplifiers are pumped with laser diodes (typically 1-4 per EDFA) at 980 nm and 1480 nm wavelength. By pumping the doped fibre with these wavelength you provide high gain to the telecom channels which are usually in the optical C-band (~1525-1565nm). This way you can reamplify signals over a large bandwidth (~4 THz) without having to do detection and retransmission (which would be unscalable). Repeaters are typically spaced at 60-80 km in submarine, with a "transparent" design (the gain compensates for the transmission loss of the 60km fibre).

Power delivery to the laser diodes is done through the metal jacket of the cable. The whole submarine cable is essentially a very long DC transmission line. Which is a fascinating topic in itself, E.g. What is ground in such a line, it will differ by 1000s of Volts between continents.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-09-07 16:29:03+00:00
> don't write CLI programs in languages that don't compile to native binaries. I don't want to have to drag around your runtime just to execute a command line tool.

Well that's confused me. I write a lot of scripts in BASH specifically to make it easy to move them to different architectures etc. and not require a custom runtime. Interpreted scripts also have the advantage that they're human readable/editable.
by procaryote | 2025-09-07 16:29:36+00:00
I've seen so many singletons that just exist because java lacks conditional compilation, and you need either a test-something or a real-something.

Of course I've also seen heaps of singletons that exist for no reason and could just have been a static class, sometimes because of cargo cult, sometimes because "what if we want to make it configurable later?"

Such a waste of energy
by hereme888 | 2025-09-07 16:29:55+00:00
You think 90% of the world cares to follow what scientists said in the 1970's? All they care about is "They said 'global warming', but now some news report it's actually colder, and I've heard several scientists give presentations that it's all fake and not true. They just want to push their green agenda and are part of a conspiracy to [something]. And btw the earth is actually flat. All those satellite images are CGG, says all the youtube videos I've watched. And yea, vaccines cause autism because I've read a bunch of blogs online proving it."

It's why governments try to curb online disinformation. Did you know conspiracy theories thrive among the less successful? Insulting them will only push them further away towards groups that gladly open their arms to them.
by flotzam | 2025-09-07 16:31:07+00:00
"No tags were pushed to AOSP for the July 2025 monthly release of Android. We asked about this on the android-building group but each of our posts was rejected. We emailed people at Google we've previously contacted about mistakes pushing tags but received no response this time."

https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/1952413110947430786

"July monthly release was not pushed to AOSP and then neither was the August monthly release. September quarterly release hasn't been pushed yet."

https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/1963812920673861981
by johnisgood | 2025-09-07 16:31:43+00:00
You can have a timer and unit conversions using your phone, but perhaps not hands-free. It might work for you, I am not sure. I wonder if one could make it hands-free though. If it is in very high demand, I might just make an application. :D If it does not already exist, of course. What about using an LLM though? You can talk to them, so that could be considered hands-free.