MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Martin_Silenus | 2025-09-18 21:40:51+00:00
There is nothing cultural about an individual's ability to write with their right hand. Studies have been conducted on this subject: it is a physiological/neurological factor (which also applies to other parts of the human body).

I know this because, well... I'm a left-handed writer and it interested me at one point (strangely enough, I find it very difficult to throw something with my left hand; and I'm right-handed at tennis, and I kick with my left foot in soccer).

Culturally, there has been pressure in the past to use the right hand for writing. But this has been considered harsh for decades and is now seen as an archaic practice.
by nradov | 2025-09-18 21:41:40+00:00
Golf courses use a minuscule fraction of California's total water supply. Many of them are now irrigated by gray water.

The major fresh water use is mostly agriculture. We need to eat, but on the other hand a lot of that water ends up getting used to grow alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia: profitable for certain farmers, not great for the rest of us.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-18 21:41:48+00:00
Mining is industrial chemistry. If you dig up a bunch of lead or arsenic that is mixed with some other metal you actually want, you have to put that arsenic or lead somewhere. You can covert it to different forms of lead or arsenic but they will always contain those elements. At which point, the only question is how much money you want to spend to convert those toxic waste products into a specific form that may be more manageable or slightly less toxic when you dump them. When we talk about "downsides" to mining, this is the elephant in the room because we can't make those elements not exist and mining will always produce them.

Most metals commonly occur together with specific other metals in nature. For example, it is rare to find silver and zinc without a lot of associated lead. You can't make that lead disappear and we still need silver and zinc.
by chatmasta | 2025-09-18 21:41:59+00:00
I've been hearing "cluely" everywhere, or at least on a bunch of infosec podcasts about various insane bugs and exploits in their software. And when I heard the description of it, "an AI assistant that sits in meetings with you," and the emphasis on "nobody knows it's there," with the subtle wink-wink in the marketing... I was like, "hang on... this sounds a lot like the guy who got expelled from Columbia for making an app to do this in his Amazon interview..."

And now I realize it's the same guy! I don't know if he intended this from the beginning — he probably didn't, considering nobody forced Amazon to email Columbia and advocate for his expulsion. And maybe he wasn't even expelled. But damn. Love him or hate him, this is a masterclass in viral marketing and playing the hand you're dealt. Good for this dude. I wish him the best but personally the whole concept of a silent meeting participant gives me the creeps, even before considering the ethics of the "interview cheating" use case.

Roy, if you're reading this... if you succeed it will not be due to your engineering skill. Focus on marketing and put some funding towards engineering brains who can make a robust product that passes enterprise muster. Build some corporate growth hacks into the core product (e.g. SSO + calendar invite pathogen + Figma trick of inviting anyone with same corporate email and charging per seat in a post-facto "true up" at end of billing period). Then go hunting for sales people who have no ethical qualms with silent meeting participants taking notes and helping them look less clueless to their prospects.
by limagnolia | 2025-09-18 21:42:08+00:00
Answering those two questions depends a bit on the "you" in the question. If "you" refers to the open source project/code, then both can be answered with a resounding "yes". If on the other hand "you" refers to you individually or as a company, then the first can be answered with a resounding "no" and the second a solid "maybe, that depends on how much you are willing to pay us for a 5 year support contract" (though you should probably word it a bit differently when talking with potential clients).

As far as working with source available components, suggestion one is to look for others int he community that you can cooperate with to maintain a fork, and option two, if you really can't get the community to support a fork, is to make it a plugin/optional component, preferably with an API so that other solutions can be integrated as options, or at least a fallback to the old version that was open source.
by earthnail | 2025-09-18 21:42:23+00:00
I remember seeing tons of mockups for how KDE 4 should look like. One was absolutely stunning but I can’t find it anymore. I remember a mostly flat theme with the idea that an app’s settings could be on the backside of a window. The dock was also brilliantly made.

Oh gosh I wish I could find those old designs again. Unfortunately they didn’t go for it and went with tons of silvery gradients instead.
by zmmmmm | 2025-09-18 21:43:05+00:00
> I've been a senior dev for a while now, a lot of my job _is_ reviewing other people's pull requests

I kind of hate that I'm saying this, but I'm sort of similar and one thing I really like is having zero guilt about trashing the LLM's code. So often people are submitting something and the code is OK but just pervasively not quite how I like it. Some staff will engage in micro arguments about things rather than just doing them how I want and it's just tiring. Then LLMs are really good at explaining why they did stuff (or simulating that) as well. LLMs will enthusiastically redo something and then help adjust their own AGENTS.md file to align better in the future.
by incr_me | 2025-09-18 21:43:48+00:00
Right, in my experience it's a distinction that's offensive to the "Northern" camp that thinks about the disparity in terms of each country's independent "growth"/"progress"/development". It also offends "would-be Northerners", i.e. comprador/petty bourgeois individuals located geographically in the "South", for similar reasons. To complicate matters, dependency theorists were themselves petty bourgeois apologists of the Non-Aligned Movement. It's just that times have changed, just like how "American Indian" is preferred by the older generation because "Native" and "Indigenous" are impositions of liberalism, even though the newer generation may prefer the latter labels.

Personally I don't care what language is being used as long as the real conditions are being brought to light. Persecutory investigations into psychology on these matters are dead ends. The successful adoption of "Native" and "developing" did not liberate.
by pndy | 2025-09-18 21:44:28+00:00
> Coming from GNOME, I was pleasantly surprised that many GNOME extensions I would rely on had equivalent feature functionality built into KDE

Recently I changed distro along with DE and ho boy, my initial customization and polishing in KDE was way shorter to anything I did before in Gnome or Xfce. In order to have a "regular" desktop paradigm workflow there I had to get variety of extensions to revert back or patch up doubtful design, usability decisions.

The only place I was satisfied with Gnome was on laptop - there it surprisingly fit perfectly. Not the vanilla version of course because it still needed some extensions.

Looking across the years, I don't know what's the big masterplan of Gnome devs but it seems it's not building a desktop environment for users but some weird convergence solution that they probably aim at corporations. Not sure for what purpose tho. People here mentioned on a few occasions how hostile that team is against users, their suggestions and complains.
by rick_dalton | 2025-09-18 21:44:29+00:00
I have the same problem with KDE, which is why is use gnome. I've tried a lot of the mainstream KDE distros like KDE neon, kubuntu and Fedora KDE and a few times I've had it break within a day of installing. Most of the time SDDM was at fault. I should switch it out but I can't be bothered, especially with gnome working flawlessly.
by bpt3 | 2025-09-18 21:45:51+00:00
Sure, but claiming they have literally just started is completely inaccurate.

They've been making discrete GPUs on and off since the 80s, and this is at least their 3rd major attempt at it as a company, depending on how you define "major".

They haven't even just started on this iteration, as the Arc line has been out since 2022.

The main thing I learned from this submission is how much people hate Nvidia.
by zmmmmm | 2025-09-18 21:46:14+00:00
ah, they are holding it wrong.

I am always so skeptical of this style of response. Because if it takes hundreds of hours to learn to use something, how can it really be the silver bullet everyone was claiming earlier? Surely they were all in the midst of the 100 hours. And what else could we do if we spent 100 hours learning something? It's a lot of time, a huge investment, all on faith that things will get better.
by gaws | 2025-09-18 21:46:36+00:00
> ... they get their point across -- you don't know ...

>... a "venial sin" -- you won't be going to hell ...

It hurts to read people use em dashes to break up the flow mid sentence. You're better off using a semicolon.

> I do judge spelling errors harshly, since most modern OSes will give a nasty red squiggle

Delete the comma to fix the comma splice and use because instead of since because you're not talking about a difference in time.
by adrianmonk | 2025-09-18 21:46:53+00:00
I wouldn't mind help with grocery orders. I like to check which apples are on special and maybe buy a different variety from normal depending on the price.

My grocery store makes this really tedious because they don't have a feature to sort by price per pound. So I have a stupid ritual where I ctrl-F "($0." and repeatedly ctrl-G to see all the apples under $1/pound. Then I do it again with ctrl-F "($1." to see the ones in the $1-$2/pound price range. And there are several other products with similar annoying processes.

If an AI could just do that for me, it would save me time. I don't actually think present-day AI would do it reliably enough, but the concept sounds fine.
by parenwielder | 2025-09-18 21:46:57+00:00
> Like a LLVM but for type systems instead of compilation / interpreters / JIT.

This would be a very cool project, but depending on what you actually want out of it is basically open research in programming languages. Racket #langs and their general approach to type-checking are one sort of answer to this: it's basically a "language-building lab" with an underlying philosophy that we should all be approaching programming in a language-oriented way, that is, by building domain-specific languages that raise the level of abstraction for what you're talking about. That's probably the most developed approach to this sort of thing, but it's still very much something that the Racket folks continue to iterate on and design further.

If you want more conventional _static_ type systems with a much harder delineation between "compile-time" and "runtime" than exists in Racket, you start getting into a sort of compiler-generator-framework territory with the type system, and you'd probably want a language for metatheory to program the type system in, and that starts to look like compiler-generator frameworks embedded into proof assistants like Agda or Rocq. There's some research in that space as well, but certainly nothing that has anything near universal agreement that it works well.

Right now, the state-of-the-art for designing type systems for any language is essentially "employ a bunch of people with very, very deep specialization in this subject matter to painstakingly design and implement the type system with careful consideration of the runtime semantics of the language it's being built for." It's not easy, and it's not cheap, which is why the successful instantiations of this kind of thing are all massive corporate-backed projects. As someone who is really a type system designer first and a corporate-tech-worker a very distant second, I'd love to be able to democratize building type systems more (or to see that be democratized), but it feels very, very far away from being solved.
by xyzelement | 2025-09-18 21:47:00+00:00
I can tell you're not familiar with religious approaches so I can share my own experiences. I come at this from the Jewish perspective but I don't represent all branches of Judaism obviously and likewise I am sure there're Christians whose approach is further or closer to what I am describing.

You're right that if you started shouting about evolution during prayer time, you'd be just an asshole - same as if I interrupted my biology lecturer to talk about the book of Genesis.

There's a time and place. The most proximate example is when we read the Torah and the reader (whether that's the rabbi or someone else) makes a mistake, the community corrects him. There are certain things we take as tenets of faith, and it's not up to the reader - or any in-the-moment leader - to mis-state them.

But closer to the spirit of what you're saying - attending a church service is not the sole religious experience. For example, there are lots of classes on interpreting scripture on ever-deeper levels, and finally the Talmud itself which is basically a narrative of logical and philosophical debate. Questioning and challenging "what this means" is an expected, welcome, and necessary element of engaging with those things.

For Jews especially, exploring and questioning our religion is part of the experience. There are things we take as tenets that form our basic understanding and from those axioms it's all built via logic and subject to examination.
by aeturnum | 2025-09-18 21:47:06+00:00
Sure - it's an expansive essay on the authors' experience around their grief. I never said that this was their thesis, but I do think the way they talk about medicalization is worth critiquing. They put their experience in tension with medicalization in a way that I don't quite see.

Edit: I specifically think it's wrong to say we medicalize grief because we fear it. We medicalize it because some people would like a medical intervention with their grief. It's great and right that the author does not want that - but also they shouldn't write in a way that suggest that medical interventions in grief are wrongheaded.
by tadfisher | 2025-09-18 21:47:09+00:00
I just installed Pinta to check it out. That implementation is just bad, you are not supposed to just migrate your menu bar into submenus under the hamburger menu.

If I were to assist with their design, I would eliminate everything that already has a headerbar icon or an on-screen affordance; so most of Files, Edit, View, and Layers is taken care of.

The stuff that remains:

- Quit: superfluous, not present in Gnome apps

- View: borrow the Ephiphany (gnome-web) zoom controls, move Grid, Show/Hide, and Ruler units into a preferences dialog

- Add-ins: Move to a preferences dialog

- Window is useless, they have tabs

- Help can stay

So no surprise that the laziest implementation of a hamburger menu is not good.
by codemonkey-zeta | 2025-09-18 21:47:29+00:00
The absolute best resource I've found for educating myself about this topic is John Vervaeke's free online course "Awakening from the meaning crisis". You can search it in YouTube or Spotify.

He explains in detail exactly why a "nostalgic return to religion" cannot save us from, not just nihilism, but the entire set of crises western society is undergoing.
by amsilprotag | 2025-09-18 21:48:08+00:00
I have used the quiz-making learning tool within gemini. It is very good for things that would exist in a typical K-12 textbook. The first 30 or 40 multiple choice questions on a subject are usually pretty good and useful. But then it will tend to repeat multiple choice answers, give strictly wrong answers, repeat questions, or offer multiple valid answers. The answer explanations are what you'd expect with little human QA. Still a useful tool for people who sanity-check the given answers, but it might do more harm than good if people don't follow up on their confusion.
by jumploops | 2025-09-18 21:48:22+00:00
"North" is better correlated with the direction of travel that our planet/solar system is moving within[0]

Given the context in our movement compared to the milky way, maybe it's better to have East/West for top/bottom, with the poles on each edge of the map ;) [1]

Or better yet, let's make the top of the map Galactic North, instead of Celestial North :P

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jHsq36_NTU

[1]https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/orientation-of-the-ear...
by bediger4000 | 2025-09-18 21:48:42+00:00
Regrettably, I was unclear.

You're certainly correct, thank you for noting this. Yes, Trump can hammer away, although Biden ultimately withdrew from the race, and politics in general, so this seems uncivil and unnecessary.

My point was that news media as a whole was thorough about covering Biden's Age Problem, and almost completely ignored similar problems in Trump's appearance and behavior, thus falsifying Trump's premise that news media only denigrates Trump. Some have gone so far as to say that a lot of mass media was very charitable towards Trump during his 2024 campaign, and very hard on Biden.
by arkmm | 2025-09-18 21:48:59+00:00
This misses the forest from the trees IMO:

- The datacenter GPU market is 10x larger than the consumer GPU market for Nvidia (and it's still growing). Winning an extra few percentage points in consumer is not a priority anymore.

- Nvidia doesn't have a CPU offering for the datacenter market and they were blocked from acquiring ARM. It's in their interest to have a friend on the CPU side.

- Nvidia is fabless and has concentrated supplier and geopolitical risk with TSMC. Intel is one of the only other leading fabs onshoring, which significantly improves Nvidia's supplier negotiation position and hedges geopolitical risk.
by pdonis | 2025-09-18 21:49:49+00:00
No, it's much less of a risk, because companies that sell domain hosting services have an actual financial relationship with you and have much better support infrastructure in place because you're a paying customer. The risk is not zero--no risk is ever zero--but compared to your risk of Facebook doing something stupid and unwarranted and you being unable to get it fixed, the risk with a domain hosting company is pretty small.
by zmmmmm | 2025-09-18 21:51:18+00:00
I prefer small units of work. It really surprises me how fast people have leapt from the 2x speedup (mind blowing level of productivity increase) to full agentic coding without really questioning if it's a good idea.

When I have let Claude loose and vibe coded up hundreds of lines at a time that I have no familiarity with, I viscerally feel how I no longer understand or can maintain the app I've built. If I can't get Claude to do the next change I need, I'm screwed.

I'm very satisfied at the moment to be wielding LLMs as a tool at the individual function / microfeature level and getting a very satisfying productivity improvement.
by nharada | 2025-09-18 21:51:40+00:00
> While conventional lithium-ion batteries are limited to a maximum range of 600 km, the new battery can achieve a range of 800 km on a single charge

I know it's a mass-market site but this level of reporting is just insulting. Here are the actual numbers from the paper:

> We demonstrate lithium metal batteries achieving a 5–70% state of charge (SoC) within 12 min over 350 repeated cycles at a 4C (8.4 mA cm−2) charging rate, as well as high-energy designs delivering projected energy densities of 386 Wh kg−1 reaching a 10–80% SoC within 17 min over 180 cycles.
Show HN: Illustria – AI illustration generator with free downloadable gallery
by atulnair2202 | 2025-09-18 21:51:54+00:00
Hi HN

I built Illustria – a simple tool to generate custom illustrations on demand

Why I built it: - I was frustrated spending hours browsing stock sites for the right visuals. - Free illustrations often didn’t match the style I needed. - I wanted a faster way to get usable illustrations for landing pages, pitch decks, and side projects.

What it does today: - Generate illustrations instantly based on your input (first generation is free). - Explore different looks/styles without needing design skills. - Download and use them right away. - Browse a free gallery of ready-made illustrations: https://arcanvia.com/illustria/gallery

I’d love feedback on: - Would you actually use this for your side projects? - What features would make it more valuable for you?
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-09-18 21:51:58+00:00
Getting someone to endorse you on arXiv is easy if you have work to show. (If you don't get endorsed, it's theoretically possible that the endorser might plagiarise your work, but you'll have a paper trail to prove it; I've heard more stories of PhD supervisors plagiarising their students' work than of arXiv endorsers doing so.) It's hard for us plebs who don't yet have work to put on the arXiv to get endorsements, but that's not actually much of a problem.
by xyzelement | 2025-09-18 21:52:55+00:00
I think I just replied to you on a different thread, but I'll also comment here.

It's a matter of priorities. ~4 years ago I moved from NYC to the burbs to have room and a high quality of life for my (now 3) kids. It lengthened my commute and increased my housing costs but I perceive it as unquestionably WORTH it, and I suspect your friends do too.

If your friends were given the choice to not have a HELOC and not have one of their kids - they'll take the HELOC and the kid. It's not an unreasonable choice.

Kids shunning video games and probably less device addiction in general and more face-to-face engagement with friends and family -- weird to talk about that as a negative in this day and age. I suppose you were the same guy that saw it as negative that your religious friends sang songs around the piano?

>> Does the congregation provide cheap daycare? Or cheap college ? Lack of both was the main reason me and my wife have only 1 child.

frankly if it was important you'd figure it out. I have a cop friend who had 7 kids (3 own, 4 adopted). How do they make it work on a cop's salary? They make it work. He's got a long commute and a beater car but there's no part of him that'd trade those things for a nice car but only 1 kid.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-09-18 21:53:41+00:00
FWIW, I find the classic texts of certain fields much more intelligible than the intellectually shoddy 56th iteration of some overpriced glossy Pearson textbook. Compare a typical chemistry textbook with something like Pauling's "General Chemistry" which you can get from Dover, modulo any dated information. You will walk away with a far more solid grasp of the basic principles.

A lot of the failure of learning is a failure of teaching. Incompetent teachers throw disconnected information at you instead of trying to explain or lead you to an understanding of what something is about. I attribute part of this to a loss of solid philosophical coursework where you are taught to think from first principles, taught within a larger integral context, and taught to reason clearly. It used to be the case that everyone with a college degree had at least some basic philosophy under their belts (compare a Heisenberg to a Feynman to a Krauss; the progression is clear). And don't forget the success of the trivium and quadrivium or some variation of them that was often presupposed and prepared students for intellectual work.
Show HN: I created a small 2D game about an ant
by aanthonymax | 2025-09-18 21:54:06+00:00
Hello everyone! I created a short game in just a few days, just for fun, where you play as an ant and feed it apples

This game also features random landscape generation, with clouds and trees arranged in a chaotic pattern across all coordinates. This is what took me the longest time :)

I would appreciate your feedback ^ ^