MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Free Email Validator – Verify emails in the browser (no signup)
by slonik | 2025-09-27 14:00:43+00:00
Hi HN – Kristyna here.

I built this free, online email validator and would love to share it with you.

What it checks:

- Syntax – Confirms correct proper email format. - Domain & DNS – Verifies the domain exists and resolves. - MX records – Verifies the domain can receive mail. - SMTP handshake (optional) – Checks the mail server accepts the recipient (no message is sent). - Disposable domains – Flags temporary inbox providers that can hurt deliverability lists. - Common typos – Catches mistakes and suggests fixes.

How it works:

Paste an email > click Validate > get a clear result with reasons. You can copy the result and validate more if you'd like.

I built it because most validators hide behind signups or credits. I wanted a no-signup, in-browser checker you can use fast. It’s free and online.

Thank you for taking a look. Let me know what do you think!
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-27 14:00:58+00:00
The small eyes version is freaky for such a logo. With Big eyes it looks friendlier, but still not cute...

For something neutral and scalable, having a side perspective could perhaps work better ? Like this one for instance, with very few lines yet looks good.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRMINEP...
by mbanerjeepalmer | 2025-09-27 14:01:14+00:00
I've used Typst to produce books (for https://printstack.net) and it's been excellent.

I started with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42271078

But wouldn't recommend going via Pandoc, for example for this reason: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/discussions/10438

Some things like #show rules can be a bit confusing. And obviously LLMs can't really help you.
by chongli | 2025-09-27 14:01:24+00:00
It's really funny to me as well. All this effort put into low level performance seems like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. The operating system (and core business software such as Office) is overflowing with bloat that absolutely tanks the performance and responsiveness of the system. On a fresh boot I might as well go for a 15 minute coffee break lest I end up with multiple hung applications blocked on the UI thread.
by drob518 | 2025-09-27 14:02:11+00:00
Agree that everyone should play Zork to get an appreciation of the original genre and history. IIRC, the three Zorks were actually all part of the original Zork on the PDP and it had to be chopped into three parts to make it fit on the 8-bit micros of the 1970s-1980s.
by ricardobeat | 2025-09-27 14:02:26+00:00
Articles like this are the evidence. The news is not the specific number, but the growing trend [1] of academics looking to leave the US due to turmoil, cancelled grants, visas and the general political climate.

There are at least a half dozen other EU countries with right wing governments. Austria’s current chancellor is centre-right, and thank god most “far right” parties in Europe are still kilometers away from their US counterparts, and would not dare interfere in academia in any way similar to Trump’s doings.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00938-y
by Theodores | 2025-09-27 14:02:26+00:00
That is a fascinating article and definitely something to bear in mind.

To some extent we all have fragile egos. Speaking personally, if I upset someone then I will be devastated for days, even if it was just a misunderstanding rather than me deliberately trying to hurt. Yet in social media world, it is a world of pain, with people getting brutal comments every day, for them still to post the next day and the day after that.

To some extent, negative attention is still attention, and, presumably for some, if you can't get positive attention, any attention will do. Cue 'rage-baiting', where the goal is to incite lots of negative comments.

Anyway, I am of the opinion that in the last century 'the camera never lied' but in today's world, the camera is always lying. On social media everything needs to be considered a lie first until proven otherwise. Add to that, the posters are likely to have psychiatric disorders, and I think I am now outta there!
by rconti | 2025-09-27 14:02:58+00:00
I initially didn't understand it at all, the "it's because DEI" complaints made no sense to me. So they took a dude off the logo, and suddenly it's diversity run amok? It felt like too much of a stretch.

And then after being exposed to the controversy for a bit, I saw an article quoting the _female_ CEO, and suddenly the line of thinking made sense.

I wonder if the botnets are primarily driven by legit grassroots-ish political actors, moneyed interests, or something else. Could be generic foreign influence/destabilization groups. Could also be effectively be a convenient bot/LLM training ground.
by b1c837696ba28b | 2025-09-27 14:04:03+00:00
I also had problems with MathML verbosity, and the culprit is the markup for the individual character classes (mi, mn, mo, ms.) I wrote a little filter that pulls apart character sequences and applies the respective character markup tags using a lookup table, so I can write MathML without using character markup. If any character markup is already present then it is skipped, so the automatic behavior can be bypassed by explicitly tagging characters and symbols as needed. This drastically reduces the character markup and makes it quite readable, even to my dyslexic eyes. As a bonus I'm not tied to some other tool that I have to game from time to time to get a particular MathML expression, I can say exactly what I want. BoBW.
by aeon_ai | 2025-09-27 14:04:18+00:00
If you're just using prompts it's almost always just scratching the surface when it comes to creative AI use.

With Suno, using your audio uploads to effectively 'filter' your ideas into something usable, compositing in the DAW, and putting a full song together -- that's going to be a much different experience than "make me a song"
by MillironX | 2025-09-27 14:04:29+00:00
> scientists have uncovered a mechanism that could help explain this connection, finding that bacteria can travel through swallowed saliva into the pancreas

Except, this study didn't do that. It did shotgun sequencing and found a correlation between certain microbial species (some were fungal, not bacterial) and cancer risk. It *did not* demonstrate anything about mechanism.

Based on the way it's phrased, maybe this article is saying that previous studies have found a mechanism, and this study found the microbial culprits. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the full study to see if that's the case in its introduction or discussion. Even so, that's an incredibly misleading opening to the article.
by rconti | 2025-09-27 14:04:30+00:00
Also, the tone of the posts might be quite different. Maybe the non-bot critical posts have more nuance or say "this new logo is boring, bring back the new one" and the bots say "this is DEI run amok, boycott Cracker Barrel!" and a bunch of other invectives I don't even want to post as an example.
by leakycap | 2025-09-27 14:04:32+00:00
OK :) As an individual who mostly produces visual output from what I write on computers, I did not expect AI to be a huge shift in my industry

Adobe Illustrator can now rotate a vector object that you paste in

AI tools in Adobe Photoshop makes previously-useless client-provided materials amazing, and lets me create things from scratch when clients provide nothing - and the output is commercially usable in the hands of a designer who can finish the small finishing touches

I have also been using an airgapped/100% offline AI with a few models to work on client projects that I want to be certain don't get fed back into the machine, so to speak.

I have a few areas where things that used to be impossible as a small department, or at least take 1/2 a real workday meaning a disruption to whatever was planned, now are very doable 15 minute tasks on top of my saved prompts/agents from last time I did the thing

As motivated corporate employees continue to lean in on AI, I can't imagine that AI won't change every job we can currently think of

-Not a CEO
by diego_moita | 2025-09-27 14:04:35+00:00
I am not sure the term is so strict and applies only to "controls" in GUIs.

Case in point: the Wikipedia page on skeuomorphism refers to objects outside of the domain of GUI language. It also covers physical objects referencing other physical objects (e.g.: skeuomorphic pottery, wood architecture imitating stone, plastic objects imitating metal, etc.)
by ThinkBeat | 2025-09-27 14:04:51+00:00
The biggest killer are all the specific changes each city decides they need. If a standard feature set could be achieved mass production would be easier to arrange.

Perhaps with a module system to remove or add some subset of feature that are easily to adapt to it.

The 80% of federal funding¹ should be based on a "universal common standard", and cities pay 20% plus the city pays 100% for various customisations they need.

¹ I have not made any effort to verify this data but it's in hte article. It seems more generous than the federal government tend to be.
by anal_reactor | 2025-09-27 14:05:11+00:00
I wish I had friends, but I also wish I had a Ferrari, the latter one might be reachable within my lifetime if I work hard for it.

Wait, with a budget of €100 000 I could actually get some second-hand old shitty Ferrari. That's... surprisingly affordable. I mean buying this shit right now would be highly irresponsible, but I can see myself potentially buying one in far future.

I just checked Lamborghini Murciélago, the dream sportscar of my childhood, and it goes for like €300 000. Hmmm... that's like, a lot of money for what is basically a toy, but if I really really really wanted that, it would be achievable within my lifetime without completely ruining me financially.

https://suchen.mobile.de/fahrzeuge/details.html?id=432670758...

Look at this shit, it's beautiful. €260 000. Not now and not tomorrow, but totally achievable as a lifetime goal.

What a day to be alive. Having a luxury sportscar is more realistic than having friends. Send immaterial help.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-09-27 14:05:53+00:00
When I first got a keyboard with a thumb cluster that had 6 keys I was originally a bit overzealous and had a bunch of relatively frequently used keys assigned to them. I actually ended up developing a little bit of what I think was some tendonitis in my thumbs when I first started using it quite a bit.

Ever since then, I primarily only use two of the keys of each thumb clusters with frequency, and they both require very little movement to reach (the two large keys on a kinesis 360). The others that require a little bit more extending of the thumb are more infrequently used keys that don't ring all the time.
by notmyjob | 2025-09-27 14:06:02+00:00
Yrs, it’s real. People collect coke stuff as a … hobby? Lifestyle? Disney too. While they seem as bizarre to me as adults who collect toy anime figurines or those who go to opening night of superhero/comicbook based movies, they do exist. I suspect such people are not that rare amongst Cracker Barrel’s demographic.
by Jimmc414 | 2025-09-27 14:06:46+00:00
Actually, research implies the opposite conclusion may be true and overcleaning your mouth may increase disease risk.

I’m guessing it might be explained by the hygiene hypothesis.

The oral microbiome needs balance, not sterilization.

[0] Mouthwash ≥2x/day → 55% increased diabetes risk Nitric Oxide journal, 2017

[1] Mouthwash ≥2x/day → 117% increased hypertension risk Blood Pressure Journal, 2020

[2] 7 days chlorhexidine mouthwash → 90% reduction in oral nitrite, BP increased 2-3.5 mmHg Free Radical Biology & Medicine, 2013

[3] Daily mouthwash → OR 1.31 for head/neck cancer European Journal of Cancer Prevention, 2016

[4] Listerine Cool Mint increased Fusobacterium nucleatum and Streptococcus anginosus (bacteria linked to colorectal cancer) Journal of Medical Microbiology, 2024
by input_sh | 2025-09-27 14:07:51+00:00
inMusic is just a different conglomerate owning Akai, Alesis, Moog, M-Audio, Denon DJ, Numark, Rane...

If Samsung buys them as well (which didn't happen right now, but I'm sure it's what they're aiming for), the monopolization will be complete and the Live Nation-ification can truly begin.

A similar story is happening to festivals (especially across Europe), with KKR-owned Superstruct Entertainment now having majority stake in like a hundred or so music festivals.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-09-27 14:07:55+00:00
Its a generalization. I don't mean to imply that every conservative feels that way about every aspect of the past.

I'm just saying that, in general, conservatives exist in opposition to change.

EDIT: I checked the dictionary. It literally means "a person who is averse to change and holds traditional values."

It's literally in the name.
by regularjack | 2025-09-27 14:08:08+00:00
Completely agree with this. "The audience comes last" is a phrase that perfectly encapsulates this sentiment (can't recall who said it).

Somehow it's assumed that artists make music for the audience, but many make it for themselves, because they enjoy the process.

Contrary to other comments in this thread, typing prompts on a keyboard is not the same as picking up a guitar and playing it.
by tom_ | 2025-09-27 14:08:42+00:00
Seconded. They're pretty good and I've found them a decent replacement for the MS Ergonomic 4000 keyboards that I used to use. Full size keyboard with keys in the normal places, reverse tilt, manageable F lock, and a cable to connect it to your computer.

I've got one with clicky blue switches, which is fun to type on but a bit loud, and one with silent red switches, which is pleasant to use but the key activation is perhaps a bit too light. I sometimes find myself pressing the keys when I thought I was just hovering my fingers.

The folding stands are a weak point. The MS 4000/Sculpt sort of design, whereby the riser is a solid piece of plastic that the keyboard rests on, is much better.
by danaris | 2025-09-27 14:08:53+00:00
While I don't entirely disagree here, it is very much the case that the kind of "Americana nostalgia" that Cracker Barrel's once and future look epitomizes is much more something that the American right cares about than the left, in and of itself.

That doesn't mean that the left doesn't care about the corporate blandicization of everything with any personality, nor that the right was actually going to Cracker Barrel in droves. But it does mean that it's very easy for those who wish to stir up more polarization to paint the original rebrand as an attack on the right.
by jim-64 | 2025-09-27 14:09:15+00:00
This is my project. I’ve only built 915MHz ones since I’m in the USA but I could provide 868 too. Thanks, I should note this! BASIC works well for parsing strings, printing to the screen, and using the Kernal serial routines. I do have some ideas of helper code using assembly that may get added, but plan to keep the main code BASIC.
by throwaway_7274 | 2025-09-27 14:09:21+00:00
Yep, I'm a CS researcher in a top-3 department. (Hate to be all credentialist like that, but I'm guessing it does mean something to this audience.)

I think a lot of the reason is that, ok, LaTeX is extremely complicated. We all know this. Its partisans tend to believe that this is because typesetting is a hard problem. Typesetting is a hard problem! We know this, too. But I think that a substantial fraction of the complexity of LaTeX is accidental complexity stemming, ultimately, from the inherently loosey-goosey nature of the system.

See, there is no real abstraction in TeX. There are no real mechanisms for encapsulation/information hiding/whatever. It's all just characters that eat characters and turn into other characters. Anything can do anything. Anything can be anything. As a result, the whole "theory" of what a TeX program "is" (like in the sense that Peter Naur used that word?) is conventional.

This means that even to reuse other people's code, you have to imbibe decades of convention that's maybe semi-documented, maybe folkloric, or maybe perfectly sound but requires you to read a 230-page manual. I can only speak for myself, but for me, it's no way to live.

Now, again, TeX-lovers tend to claim that its high degree of loosey-gooseyness is necessary, that it's what makes TeX "powerful." I don't know, that sounds to me like the same old "you can't handle writing assembly" story. Sure I can. I'd just rather not if I can help it.

Maybe it's the PL person in me.
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-09-27 14:10:33+00:00
I don’t really find that so surprising or particularly stupid. I was hoping to learn about serious issues with bad logic or reasoning not missing dots on i’s type stuff.

I can’t remember the example but there was another frequent hallucination that people were submitting bug reports that it wasn’t working, so the project looked at it and realized well actually that kinda would make sense and maybe our tool should work like that, and changed the code to work just like the LLM hallucination expected!

Also in general remember human developers hallucinate ALL THE TIME and then realize it or check documentation. So my point is I feel hallucinations are not particularly important or bother me as much as flawed reasoning.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-27 14:10:54+00:00
> being personally invested in corporate branding has got to be the saddest

I think you misunderstand.

It's about growing up, going to a restaurant with your grandparents, it becomes a kind of comfort and home. It's not just branding, it's the entire experience, of which the logo serves as a central symbol. What you see from the highway, what you see when you arrive.

And then the company is taking away something you love. When you go back, it's not the same. They were completely changing the interiors too. It wasn't where you went with grandma and grandpa anymore. They did a total 180° on it's atmosphere and personality.

From that perspective, can you find more empathy for people's emotional connections to a place and its symbols?
by pessimizer | 2025-09-27 14:11:24+00:00
Beer connoisseurs don't love IPAs. Modern IPAs are the most like Budweiser rice beers that you can get in the fancy beer world, so that's what people who aspire to look like connoisseurs prefer. They prefer them to be very bitter, and/or flavored with exotic fruits, because they can't judge quality and rely on distinctness.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-09-27 14:11:28+00:00
Not to be a Debbie Downer, but even if you use all of the correct postures, correct movement, and everything is done correctly, you can still end up with issues if you just do the same thing over and over.

It's relatively agreed upon nowadays that there actually is no "correct posture". The issue is primarily exacerbated by being in the same posture all of the time, doing the same movements all the time, and especially so in positions that aren't so natural for our body - and typing is not a natural movement/position for the wrists.

I developed issues despite always standing or sitting on a supposed ergonomic char, moving my hands a lot while typing, working out and exercising consistently, etc.

Until I started having issues I probably would have also been in the same camp that "oh this is ridiculous". Now I take anyone with chronic pain much more seriously.
by tummler | 2025-09-27 14:11:32+00:00
Skill is nature's way of gatekeeping.

If you're too lazy to put effort into learning how to create an art so you can adequately express yourself, why should some technology do all the work for you, and why should anyone want to hear what "you" (ie: the machine) have to say?

This is exactly how we end up with endless slop, which doesn't provide a unique perspective, just a homogenized regurgitation of inputs.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-27 14:11:51+00:00
I don't think you really understood what I was saying, or what you're even talking about. I've got nothing to "gatekeep" and a defense of skill over automated regurgitation in creating things certainly isn't gatekeeping. People can use whatever tools they like, but they should keep in mind what distinguishes knowing how to create something from having it done for you at the metaphorical push of a button.
by bloomingeek | 2025-09-27 14:14:13+00:00
This is a big "hell yes" for me! Some seem to think that mortgaging themselves up to their eyebrows with huge houses and the latest vehicles is a good idea. As an example: I needed a pickup truck back in 2021. I settled on a ram and purchased the base model. The only options were a towing package and the medium level smart audio/display system for a cost of $27K. I could have easily spent $50K and got a whole lot of other options, but determined the extra cost was too much and the options weren't needed. (The only reason I purchase a new one is people tend to drive like maniacs in trucks where I live, so I didn't trust a used one.)

I digress, the numbers alone are the reason for the base model, because I could use the extra money somewhere else. And yes, new vehicles do depreciate too much. However, if you keep the vehicle for it's entire lifespan, the hit isn't so bad.
by kcplate | 2025-09-27 14:14:45+00:00
Social media and “bots” didn’t exist in 1985 when Coca Cola did their formulation and branding changes, but it still managed to get amplified by outrage alone.

Cracker Barrel had some of the same qualities that Coca Cola did. Loyal customer base, distinctiveness—I don’t think it’s unreasonable to conclude that even without bots and social media that this brand change wouldn’t have made news especially east of the Mississippi and ultimately stalled the conversion. May have happened quicker with the amplification, but would have happened all the same with out it.
by coffeefirst | 2025-09-27 14:15:19+00:00
Yeah, and to make matters funnier the Seventh Day Adventists bought the brand and added themselves to the list.

But… there is one thing that seems to hold up. One of Buettner claims is that as western ultra processed diets came to these enclaves and displaced traditional diets, incidence rates of obesity and metabolic disease has spiked. That’s real.

I bet we could measure a parallel effect on social media displacing real social activity wherever it goes.
by jijijijij | 2025-09-27 14:15:38+00:00
Bring people together IRL.

I think one possible technical solution would be inherent bandwidth, range and commercial exploitation limitations. E.g. I think in a LoRa mesh network, you find those naturally. RNodes and Reticulum come to mind: https://unsigned.io/

Basically, through these hardware/physics restrictions abuse and enshittification doesn't scale, but genuine information does, and social communication patterns and scope resembles human nature/biological legacy better than the global web. Artificial software limitations can be cheated always, like with GPS spoofing, VPNs and so on. I presume, you could build communities around people, whose fates are actually connected significantly. A "killer app" to start off, could be dating, or blackboards, get the cool kidz aboard by using it to exclusively advertise the next rave, etc.. It is hard to censor and will be used for illegal activities, too, but it won't enable anything that's not happening on messengers anyway.
by tempodox | 2025-09-27 14:15:57+00:00
> But we should be ruthless and merciless towards people who try to turn "Be kind!" into a weapon. Indulging them never ends well.

Indeed, this is how cancel culture started (not just in OSS), and look where it got us.

"If you are more annoying to work with than your contributions justify, you'll be ejected." should be all that is required, if it really needs to be said at all.
by watwut | 2025-09-27 14:16:40+00:00
If it is too slow paced for you, then you are not looking for duolingo alternative. You are looking for something entirely different. The whole Duolingo deal is fun, relaxing, low effort learning in exchange for slower progress.

And of course there are competitors, many of them. There are also many free language learning resources. But, you did not said which language you are learning and whether you are beginner or not. And most of free resources are made for specific language.