MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A Socratic teaching tool that follows curiosity, not curriculum
by nic_seo | 2025-09-24 16:13:31+00:00
As a student, I was trained to play the formal education game—flashcards, diagrams, fastidiously organized notes. But as a 32-year-old, I’m disappointed by the knowledge and understanding I’ve retained over time. And without the familiar game of formal education to play, I’m often at a loss for how to learn new topics that are interesting but intimidating to me.

AI has the potential to change the way people learn, and existing tools show promise. But I’m still dissatisfied—these tools often dump knowledge on me without helping me integrate it into my understanding.

---

I built Stella to explore how thoughtful UX can transform AI interactions into genuine learning experiences. Instead of optimizing for information delivery, Stella optimizes for learning through curiosity.

Some key design decisions that emerged from testing:

1. Separated thinking spaces: Most AI chats blur the line between user and AI thoughts. Stella's chat interface creates distinct spaces for communication, encouraging users to reflect on their own thinking before engaging with AI responses.

2. Socratic dialogue patterns: Rather than just delivering answers, Stella guides users to discover knowledge gaps and build on existing understanding. This creates more durable learning moments.

3. Interest-aware conversations: Users can highlight interesting concepts, and Stella adapts the conversation to explore these areas more deeply. Learning follows natural curiosity rather than a predetermined path.

Early users have reported unexpected learning moments—from a Computer Science PhD finally understanding “weak form” to a doctor exploring what it is about Quaker philosophy that inspires her work.

---

Technical implementation focuses on thoughtful UX that extracts practical value from existing LLM capabilities. Stella uses Claude for dialogue but innovates in how these interactions are structured and presented. The interface is built in React, with a backend that adjusts to user interest and existing understanding.

Some interesting challenges solved:

- Balancing guidance vs. independent thinking

- Tracking the user’s level of interest and curiosity

- Creating meaningful conversation paths that lead to new understanding

---

I’m currently looking for feedback from:

- Educators interested in AI learning tools

- Developers exploring new UX paradigms for AI

- Curious minds who enjoy deep learning conversations

Currently opening Stella for limited beta testing. Looking for 20–30 people who want to explore topics deeply and provide feedback on the learning experience.

If you're interested in trying it out, sign up here: https://krelb9yoq56.typeform.com/to/Ild6JaQD

I'm particularly interested in hearing how the interface affects how much you actually learn and retain compared to traditional LLM chatbots. Happy to discuss more in the comments!
by basisword | 2025-09-24 16:13:39+00:00
How would this solve the disparate NHS systems issue? The NHS id exists and is used by all of them. It's the various systems with no central data repository that is the problem. Throw in the fact that Scotland and NI have completely separate NHS's again and I don't see how another id ever solves it. The solution is bringing the NHS in all regions into the 21st century - which costs money they don't have.
by Rebuff5007 | 2025-09-24 16:13:50+00:00
I think the problem is that too many people do not know or care or respect how institutional knowledge works. And how to build it, and why so many of the things we take for granted is the result of subject matter experts iterating on real world problems for decades.

No one is defending the NIH or Fauci or the math department at UCLA in a way that makes sense to a majority of Americans... Why these are even under attack in the first place is beyond me.
by tsimionescu | 2025-09-24 16:14:17+00:00
The title of the NYT article is "Cache of Devices Capable of Crashing Cell Network is Found Near U. N.". The 35 mile radius is not some cherry picked number buried deep in the article, it is the explanation of the propagandiatic title. And the other parts of the title are also bullshit: it wasn't a "cache", which would suggest the devices were stockpiled waiting for some nefarious purpose - they were actively used devices. And describing SIM farms as "devices capable of crashing the cell network" is also bullshit - it's like finding a box of knives in a kitchen drawer and describing it as "a cache of implements capable of tearing human flesh".
by saghm | 2025-09-24 16:14:24+00:00
I'm not sure about other sports, but for the MLB, there are some very strange policies that make it difficult to watch games even if you want to pay for it, mostly stemming from the local broadcasters of the games. Even if you sign up for the subscription service to stream games, they'll "black out" the games that they expect you to be able to watch by getting a cable subscription, which not only is ridiculous (since one on of the main selling points for streaming is to not have to pay for a bundle of things you mostly don't want to be able to get the few things you do), but it assumes that people will never be traveling and unable to watch the games locally even if they do normally have access to it. My dad frequently travels for work, and he pays for the streaming service mostly to be able to watch Phillies games despite living in the Boston area, but the blackout rules mean that he can't even watch the Red Sox games with the streaming service if he's traveling outside of Boston. He also can't watch the Phillies games when they play the Red Sox in Boston, which is mostly fine, but it's still a little weird since he'll be have to watch the Red Sox broadcast (and therefore their commentators) rather than the Phillies one he's used to seeing for their games. The games that are given special slots on ESPN also tend to be blacked out for everyone, so that also causes issues for people wanting to stream them even if it's not a local game. The whole model seems to be more about trying to railroad people in paying for a less convenient, more expensive product even when they actively want to pay for something that's actually available but artificially limited. I don't get why anyone would be surprised that people just turn to "piracy" when things work like this.
by nic_seo | 2025-09-24 16:15:06+00:00
An unexpected use case emerged during testing: Stella works really well for brainstorming because she introduces relevant concepts that deepen your thinking. While brainstorming marketing strategies for Stella herself, she introduced me to the 'Zone of Proximal Development' concept, which helped clarify my target audience.

This got me thinking about how learning and ideation are naturally intertwined. Would love to hear the community's thoughts on tools that enhance thinking through teaching, or vice versa!
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-09-24 16:15:54+00:00
Snopes sets a weird standard of "he didn't say that Americans should go inject bleach."

Regardless, saying that injecting bleach might work and should be studied is an incredibly stupid thing to say.

Snopes is only saying that he didn't say a very specific stupid thing. He still said a (very slightly) different stupid thing. It's not much of a defense.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-09-24 16:15:59+00:00
I would argue that the strict typing in Fortran is actually a significant hindrance. there's nothing about any of these algorithms that requires double precision (or even contiguous storage), so why should the algorithm randomly restrict it? Annotations of rank (e.g. AbstractMatrix in julia) help document what the code does, but the strict annotations of Fortran are restrictions without value.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-09-24 16:16:20+00:00
Interesting, I really prefer the font rendering in Ghostty! I'm with you on the first two items, though.

Despite these shortcomings I still use it daily since the first time I tried it, and have come to really love the project in general. I often won't hop to new software if it offers friction like this, but Ghostty pulled me in despite some snags.

Zed is also wonderful software, though it took me way longer to commit to using it daily.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-24 16:16:32+00:00
That story was overblown. But it wasn't bogus. SIM farms exist, this was one of them and it definitely wasn't put there for the general good of the population. They're common enough that the UK has specific legislation targeting acquisition and use of these devices.

Which parts of the story were embellished and who they were embellished by is an interesting question but the degree to which the original story being bogus is balanced out nicely by the degree to which this article (and the overblown title) itself is bogus.

The facts: a SIM farm was discovered. It had a very large number of active SIMS. It was found in NYC. It was active when it was found.

What is speculative/hard to verify:

It was used for specific swatting attempts. It was put there by nation state level actors rather than just ordinary criminals.

What is most likely bullshit:

That it had anything to do with the UN headquarters being close by.

But that still leaves plenty of meat on the bone.
by simonw | 2025-09-24 16:16:52+00:00
Yes but it works only in the browser - running Pyodide outside of a browser is a lot of extra work.

My previous attempts are described here:

- https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/pyodide-sandbox

- https://til.simonwillison.net/webassembly/python-in-a-wasm-s...
by HankStallone | 2025-09-24 16:17:04+00:00
Governments are always looking for better ways to track (and control) their subjects. The idea of a national ID[1] has been floated by various US politicians since before it would have been digital. Many Americans oppose it because they fear a government using it to round up dissenting citizens, and others oppose it because they fear it would be used to more effectively identify illegals (some oppose it on both grounds), so between them it's never gotten started.

The UK government does seem especially keen on the idea of a digital/video dystopia, though. Weird, like they're trying to prove Orwell right.

[1] Social Security numbers aren't unique and you aren't required to carry your SS card, so it doesn't work for that purpose.
by astarstartup | 2025-09-24 16:17:17+00:00
This is a must read. A giant thank you & big ups for the brave people who got this information. This document is extremely important public record of the censorship of the CCP that has been used to brainwash people to hate America. The technical run down I watched said the Great Firewall of China is not that good. Here is a way back machine link. It's the original source. https://web.archive.org/web/20250921160229/https://intersecl...
by bschne | 2025-09-24 16:17:19+00:00
Not proof, per se, but the term to look up is "inbound marketing".

HubSpot was very big on pushing companies to publish lots of content like blog posts and then having calls to action for people to submit their info in exchange for a whitepaper download or similar. Predictably if your main goal is to consistently publish blog posts and whitepapers to generate leads, and you don't have a strong culture of quality and good writing, it's going to lead to lots of slop (even before you could automate writing it with AI).

That being said, I'm not sure how much to blame HubSpot vs. this just generally having been a marketing approach/idea that was "in the air" while it sort of worked (for some definition of "worked"). I sort of remember a handful of companies at the time doing pretty good blog/content marketing by writing useful and thoughtful stuff, and then lots of companies going „got it, make blog and profit!“. But possible that the HubSpot push accelerated that a lot — I don‘t feel like I have a good intuition about that part.

See e.g. https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing
by embeng4096 | 2025-09-24 16:17:33+00:00
Wow, I really relate to this. It got to the point where I was reading self-help about social skills and such, and tried to follow the "always say yes" like you did and "never eat alone" type fluff advice. People had lots of good things to say about me, and I even tried doing things like writing those things down in a gratitude journal or taking screenshots of the texts, etc, to help shift my mindset (unsuccessfully). I still have the low self-confidence and people-pleasing you talk about to this day.

To your last point, I'm feeling much better when not pushing myself so hard to be social but the question I'm grappling with now is somewhat selfish but about how to make sure I have support? E.g. I had a friend who just went through a cancer diagnosis and a lot of us friends and his community rallied for him. It also made me wonder about what happens if I get very sick, or lose my job and don't have a professional network to reach out to or personal/friendship support, or just if my car breaks down at 1am or something, or just being very lonely without real close friends.

How are you reconciling this sort of thing in your own life?
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-24 16:18:02+00:00
> Because of Goldwater thing people don’t discuss it, but really there should be a legislation for mandatory mental evaluation for people in positions of power.

No, the reason people don’t discuss this is that the next question is “so you have a mandatory evaluateion, what are the consequences, and who selects the evaluator?” And you very quickly realize that any proposal is either:

(a) adding nothing substantive that isn't already covered by existing provisions allowing for removing people for incapacity, or

(b) creating a new and unaccountable seat of power, or

(c) designing a replacement (which may be an improvement!) for the processes discussed in (a) to which the evaluation mandate is a jumping off point that turns out to be superfluous.

Also, you realize that to effect anything with any consequences for the Presidency and some other offices, legislation doesn’t work, you need a Constitutional Amendment.
by aendruk | 2025-09-24 16:18:15+00:00
The most recent offender I’ve encountered is some SaaS called Termly which barfs out full terms of service, privacy policies, etc. with this human-hostile “feature”. Good luck actually using the contact information they contain.

I added this uBO filter just yesterday:

app.termly.io##*:style(user-select: unset !important;)

Of course all the links are `target=_blank` too. I really don’t understand the mentality of whomever makes these.
Show HN: Galerion – Minimal app to organize and play your media
by Zifnap | 2025-09-24 16:18:25+00:00
Hi HN!

I built *Galerion* because I was tired of messy galleries and complicated media managers.

With Galerion, you can: - Organize photos, videos, and audio into playlists - Play them offline, even without internet - Share easily, all in a minimal, privacy-friendly app

Important: *Galerion never uploads your files or creates copies*. It simply reads from your device’s gallery. If you delete a file there, it disappears in Galerion too.

It's live on [Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.berk.galer...) and [App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/galerion/id6752312342).

I'd love your feedback on UX, performance, or ideas for new features. Ask me anything!
Show HN: Snapser Starter Tier – modular back end with isolated K8s "own cluster"
by aapte | 2025-09-24 16:18:45+00:00
Hi HN — I’m AJ, Co-founder of Snapser.

We built a modular backend for apps/games with an “own cluster” feel (strong isolation), implemented on Kubernetes namespaces under the hood. Today we’re launching our free Starter Tier.

Highlights: • 33 “Snaps” (Auth, Storage, Leaderboards, Analytics, A/B Tests, etc.) • Bring your own containerized services (any language) • Your own isolated environment (namespaces + bin-packing + auto-scaling) • Starter Tier: 1 dev cluster, 2 admin seats, 5 Snaps free, no credit card

What we learned: isolation over giant shared control planes; smart multi-tenancy to keep dev affordable; backends are more than tables; we baked enterprise ops defaults into day-one settings. Full article: https://snapser.com/resources/posts/starter-tier

Signup (no CC): https://snapser.com/register

Happy to go deep on the architecture or trade-offs. Feedback welcome!

— AJ
by jason217 | 2025-09-24 16:18:50+00:00
I also purchased the lifetime no-ads option, and now get ads. Support says you have to buy a subscription. This is a widespread issue that seems to be affecting most if not all users. If you check the reviews on the play store there are many hundreds of 1 start reviews over the last few days and the app rating has dropped from 4.2 to 3.7.

A thread was also pointing out in the google support forums for another app that did the same thing, ignoring a no-ads purchase and forcing a new subscription, and google asked to report the app from the store as this violates their terms of service
Show HN: We built Atono because we kept losing context
by troy55_yort55 | 2025-09-24 16:19:16+00:00
We kept asking "why did we build it this way?" and spending 20 minutes hunting through Jira, Slack, and GitHub for answers. It was a symptom of a bigger "Jira-problem".

So we built Atono (https://atono.io).

The idea: Stories that don't die when you ship. Everything - requirements, code changes, bugs, decisions - stays in one place.

Our take (might not be for everyone): -Feature flags live in the story, not another tool -Feature engagement for you to see if people use what you built -Context > process

What's in it: -Toggle feature flags right in the story -See usage graphs without another analytics tool -One-click bug reports that actually capture everything -Free forever for 5 users

We use Atono to build Atono. Works for us, but we're pretty opinionated about Product Teams.

Need your take: Does this match how you work?

What's missing? What's wrong with our approach? Try it at https://atono.io
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-24 16:19:24+00:00
Sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life on their income in the US [1] [2]. They cannot "choose to invest in tech companies." They barely have enough cashflow to survive, let alone seek exposure to securities. They need their wages to go up, full stop. A stronger currency is actually a curse, not a benefit, for the American people. If the US cannot borrow inexpensively anymore due to currency weakness, it would rein in tax cuts for the wealthy [3] and spending almost $1T/year (and roughly the same for debt service) on a military unnecessarily [4] funded with debt. It would also make US exports more attractive.

Amazon, Citi, JP Morgan Chase, FAANG, Walmart, Tesla, Oracle and the other usual suspects will be fine if the H-1B program is materially impaired [5] [6].

Most Americans are not benefiting from this system, and so, there is little value in protecting it in my opinion. If another country or company invents the next big thing, copy it. "You can just do things." China has almost mastered reusable space vehicles, for example, no SpaceX required. India can use Zoho instead of Microsoft today if they wish [7] (and probably should).

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-o...

[2] https://lisep.org/mql

[3] https://www.crfb.org/blogs/cbo-estimates-3-trillion-debt-hou...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-k...

[6] https://www.pewresearch.org/?attachment_id=201754

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45361713
by tsimionescu | 2025-09-24 16:19:37+00:00
You seem to not understand how propaganda puff pieces work. You are taking the anonymous sources and the SS agents' words at face value as if they are good faith normal language. But given the clear propagandistic nature of the piece, you should instead immediately suspect every statement as being the most weasely possible "technically true" statement that could have been made. When someone is willing to call 35 miles away from NYC as "close to the UN", you should absolutely expect that they would be willing to call "a known fraudster and a corrupt official from Kazakstan" as "nation-state threat actors and individuals known to federal law", which they technically are.
by matwood | 2025-09-24 16:20:09+00:00
Your final point is exactly it. PE is better, but the cost difference is generally too high above EP. At that point I tend to just go BC.

To your other points, at the end of the day, it's an airplane. And since I'm usually flying US airlines, even business class isn't that special outside of laying flat. I do fly back and forth to the EU enough though, that being able to work for 4ish hours is pretty useful.
by rhines | 2025-09-24 16:20:10+00:00
I could be mistaken, but my read is that years of dealing with cat turds day in day out has numbed the author to their stench. His once prized chocolates now have become themselves cat turds, and he lacks the senses to even realize it. Note how dusty the container was - the author didn't care to maintain his chocolates, and now here he is. The forgotten side projects, the tech we wanted to learn... things we lost the motivation for or now execute with the same cat turd quality as we've grown accustomed to.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-24 16:20:33+00:00
> The castle has been ransacked, the draw bridge is down, and you've no army left.

Well, no, not that either. You're making the same mistake from the other side. The side you say has "no army left" also is half the country. And that half of a country will not be ignored either.

Both sides demand to be listened to, but neither side is willing to compromise or to admit defeat, even temporarily.

So I expect that power will continue to swap back and forth, that when in power both sides will do their best to implement their plans, and when they are out of power they will suffer the other side's vengeance for their obstinacy. I don't see it improving soon. I suspect we'll see at least another two election cycles of this viciousness.
by toast0 | 2025-09-24 16:20:34+00:00
There's rules for passengers and airlines... but enforcement is limited, because who wants to slow down boarding by checking.

And compliance is hard for passengers, because you have to call in to book the special case, and who wants to call in?

But theoretically, a passenger that will encroach on an adjacent seat can pay for the extra seat (I don't know if they need to also pay for seat assignment to get two seats next to each other), and then if the flight doesn't actually sell out, the extra seat fee is refundable. But when you actually board, people will see the 'empty' seat and try to sit in it, even though you paid for it. Etc.
by kg | 2025-09-24 16:20:55+00:00
One of the main problems with refcounting is that unless your compiler/JIT are able to safely, aggressively optimize out reference increment/decrements, you can spend a ton of CPU time pointlessly bumping a counter up and down every time you enter a new function/method. This has been a problem for ObjC and Swift applications in the past AFAIK, though both of those compilers do a great job of optimizing that stuff out where possible.

There are some other things that would probably be improvements coming along with refcounting though - you might be able to get rid of GC write barriers.
by Twirrim | 2025-09-24 16:21:03+00:00
It's pretty common. GNOME's terminal does, as does Kconsole for KDE, and so on. I've got Gnome terminal bumped up to 100,000 lines.

There are definitely some that don't, or don't make it configurable, which for me just gives me pretty strong incentive not to use them.