MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cjflog | 2025-09-29 21:10:22+00:00
Currently a one-man side project:

https://laboratory.love

Last year PlasticList discovered that 86% of food products they tested contain plastic chemicals—including 100% of baby food tested. The EU just lowered their "safe" BPA limit by 20,000x. Meanwhile, the FDA allows levels 100x higher than what Europe considers safe.

This seemed like a solvable problem.

Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent testing of specific products you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports meets Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid's snacks, whatever you're curious about.

Here's how it works: Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, get detailed lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn't reach its funding goal within 365 days, automatic refund. All results are published openly. Laboratory.love uses the same methodology as PlasticList.org, which found plastic chemicals in everything from prenatal vitamins to ice cream. But instead of researchers choosing what to test, you do.

The bigger picture: Companies respond to market pressure. Transparency creates that pressure. When consumers have data, supply chains get cleaner.

Technical details: Laboratory.love works with ISO 17025-accredited labs, test three samples from different production lots, detect chemicals down to parts per billion. The testing protocol is public.

So far a couple dozen products have received some funding, six products have been fully funded (five product results published, the sixth is at the lab as I write this!)

You can browse products, add your own, or just follow specific items you're curious about: https://laboratory.love
by armada651 | 2025-09-29 21:10:50+00:00
> This is much less of a deal than it might appear. It also isn't an accidental victory for the right-to-repair. The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module".

I don't think right-to-repair folks would have much use for anything more than that hardware-wise. You can give a technician the HDL or lithography masks to Apple's A17 chip, but it's not like he has an EUV lithography machine in the back of his repair shop.
by ewoodrich | 2025-09-29 21:11:13+00:00
Gemini 2.5 Pro seems to have a tic where after an initial failed task, it then starts asserting escalating levels of confidence for each subsequent attempt. Like it's ever conscious of its failure lingering in its context and feels the need to over compensate as a form of reassuring both the user and itself that it's not going to immediately faceplant again.
by yeutterg | 2025-09-29 21:11:15+00:00
Working on the Restful Atmos Sleep Lamp, a smart bedside lamp that automatically shifts throughout the day and night for the circadian rhythm, reducing blue light at night and maximizing blue light during the day. There is a machine learning layer that learns your preferences and automatically adjusts the intensity of the light, similarly to the Nest Thermostat [0].

Also, shipping Bedtime Bulb v2 next month. This is a hybrid LED-incandescent design meant for the evening that is the best of both worlds: low blue light, high color quality, perfect compatibility with dimmers, 10x less flicker than incandescent, includes near infrared, low energy use, long lifespan [1].

[0]: https://restfullighting.com/products/restful-atmos-preorder

[1]: https://restfullighting.com/products/bedtime-bulb-v2-preorde...
by airhangerf15 | 2025-09-29 21:11:33+00:00
Purism is a shit company. It took 6 years to get a refund for my Libem 5 order (it was ready to ship after 3 years). I had to file a complaint with my credit card company.

Other people who paid over $1,000 got their shit out of date phones before me! Fuck Purism. They can go die in a fucking cesspit.
by MountDoom | 2025-09-29 21:11:51+00:00
> In other words, we have two different inflations happening at once

CPI is just an index of consumer prices. It's like saying that we have two stock markets because Nvidia is going up faster than Costco.

> People who happened to own the right assets getting richer and everyone else getting poorer

It's not a zero-sum game. Almost everyone is more wealthy than their peers 30-40 years ago.

Wealth disparities widen, but the reasons for this are complex and go beyond inflation. And frankly, many of them are self-inflicted. Every single housing development in my neighborhood is thoroughly protested by everyone. And most of what my city officials do is inventing new rules and regulations. They're not working for big corporations or the federal government.

> I don't think that's what an efficient market would do

Sounds like you spotted an arbitrage opportunity?
by aperrien | 2025-09-29 21:12:06+00:00
An Aeon ago in 1984, I wrote a perceptron on the Apple II. It was amazingly slow (20 minutes to complete a recognition pass), but what most impressed me at the time was that it did work. Since that time as a kid I always wondered just how far linear optimization techniques could take us. If I could just tell myself then what I know now...
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-09-29 21:12:08+00:00
the infohash isn't copyrighted, so it's not illegal information in and of itself. serving the infohash isn't serving the torrent, and serving the torrent is also not serving copyrighted material. I believe that downloading is still illegal absent a fair use exemption but it's rarely prosecuted because you have to prove the absence of the exemption. It's uploading copyrighted content that's actually illegal and also easy to prosecute, so it's seeders that usually get bopped.
by jeswin | 2025-09-29 21:12:37+00:00
1. A port of linq-to-sql for Typescript (https://github.com/webpods-org/tinqer) allowing queries like:

const activeAdults = from<User>("users") .where((u) => u.age >= 18) .where((u) => u.active === true);

It mostly works.

It'll go into webpods (https://github.com/webpods-org/webpods), which is like firebase but with hash chains underneath.
by ramoz | 2025-09-29 21:12:45+00:00
Deterministic guarantees, and corrective behavioral monitoring for ai agents (starting with claude code, and ADK). Think security + performance bumper rails. At the cost of 0 context.

I was the feature requestor for Claude Code Hooks - and have been involved in ai governance for quite awhile, this is an idea I'm excited about.

Ping below if you want to early beta test. everything is open source, no signups.
by Szpadel | 2025-09-29 21:13:11+00:00
that's kind of expected for me, but codex feels more like vibe coding tool and Claude code more like ai assisted development.

And I actually like Claude more because of that.

codex will indeed work more independently but you will have hard time when it isn't what you want. It will use python script just to do simple edits in files ( niesearch and replace for unique code snippets in small files) when it's wrong good look convincing it (it already have some outdated info like on latest docker image releases and convincing it that Debian base changed was challenging) it uses context more effectively but it will lack explanation why it is doing what it is doing, asking it to explain will just cause it to do something else without any word.

and of course lack of proper permissions for running commands. sandbox is cool but I do not want it to be able to commit, I want it to just edit files or I want to have some more control over what it does.

you can run codex as mcp server, I prefer adding it to Claude and ask to do cooperative plan, codex will do great analysis and plan and I can comfortable work with Claude on the code that matches my style
by scrumper | 2025-09-29 21:13:23+00:00
Irrelevant even if true, which it isn’t, so you’re both mean-spirited and wrong. Does this kind of comment soothe some wound?

Your characterization doesn’t make any sense anyway. A nepo baby how? He wasn’t in the construction business, working a cushy job in dad’s company. He sold cars and did PR work while trying to write. His family’s past seems to have conferred him no advantage whatsoever.
by Cyphus | 2025-09-29 21:14:19+00:00
In regards to the tenting not staying in place, put some threadlocker on the bolts. It does wonders. I got some threadlocker to stop my adjustable bar stool feet from slowly unscrewing themselves and getting wobbly every week and it's easily the best purchase I've made all year. Anytime I see a loose door knob, chair leg, tripod mount, or adjustment screw, I throw some threadlocker on there and never have to tighten it again.
by skydhash | 2025-09-29 21:14:22+00:00
I'm close to you on that opinion, but there's another factor: Life and its sustenance. There's a lot of mechanisms in the body to ensure that life continues, including pain and desire. But the fact is resources that sustain life are finite. There's a lot of proxies for the act of acquiring such resources and laws like copyright is the legal framework for these proxies.

It's basically creating value out of nowhere in lieu of resources that are truly valuable, but inconvenient to trade directly. But then like a metrics that got corrupted (I forgot the name of the law for that), there are other that are trying to game the system (and succeeding) so that they can maximize their share.
by tadfisher | 2025-09-29 21:14:23+00:00
The problem it solves is providing any sort of baseline framework for lawmakers and the legal system to even discuss AI and its impacts based on actual data instead of feels. That's why so much of it is about requiring tech companies to publish safety plans, transparency reports and incidents, and why the penalty for noncompliance is only $10,000.

A comprehensive AI regulatory action is way too premature at this stage, and do note that California is not the sovereign responsible for U.S. copyright law.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-29 21:14:43+00:00
I'm trying to get my agentic software specification tool Arbiter to release (UI polish/debugging is so slow :/, browser shenanigans are harder than Rust fr). It's basically a tool that AI agents can use to construct a project specification. The twist to Arbiter is that the specs are structured and validated, and you can compile them to get:

Services with stubbed endpoints, UIs with placeholder components, Dockerfiles/Terraform/K8s infra, E2E tests (via declared flows), Github/Gitlab epics/issues/subissues

It's also got github/gitlab webhook integration, so you can do stuff like trigger agents reactively when events occur on a repo, it includes cloudflare tunnel support so you can set up webhooks even in a local dev environment, and the project generator is fully customizable.
by abduhl | 2025-09-29 21:14:45+00:00
You are conflating upper class income with being wealthy in the Bay Area (and not just wealthy, uber wealthy; I know plenty of comfortable wealthy people who aren’t meeting congresscritters and making VC/PE calls). They’re different metrics. GP said $260k/yr was BARELY middle class. That statement is farcical: 260k/yr is a top 10% income in America. It is upper class income under all but the most ludicrous of definitions.

By the way, the solution to your “I want to buy a house in SF” problem isn’t to move to SF and pay an insane amount of rent for 5-10 years, it’s to keep living like you did and doing your normal job that you were doing before you won 260k/yr for 2 years while you save.

I won’t even bother digging into how warped your view of what it means to be upper class is, I’ll just say stay on that hamster wheel and keep chasing that dream dude.
by atonse | 2025-09-29 21:14:49+00:00
Why is this getting downvoted? It was hilarious!

I actually added a fun thing to my user-wide CLAUDE.md, basically saying that it should come up with a funny insult every time I come up with an idea that wasn't technically sound (I got the prompt from someone else). It seems to be disobeying me, because I refuse to believe that I don't have bad ideas. Or some other prompt is overriding it.
by saithound | 2025-09-29 21:15:02+00:00
This piece seriously misrepresents Vonnegut's career just to make a dubious point.

Sure, Slaughterhouse Five was Vonnegut's big financial breakthrough, but by that time he was a very well-known writer with several classics, including Player Piano and Harrison Bergeron, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and made a decent living from writing full time. Not glamorous for sure, but in line with most very good writerd.

Far from demonstrating the author's thesis that "failure can ripen into art", his story is the story of a man that had no notable failures in writingy, who consistently produced great work, and continued to do so until he made it big.
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-29 21:15:09+00:00
The problem is that I care about X, but I also care about Y and Z. And there are only two candidates.

If we switched to approval voting (a checkbox next to each candidate, can check multiple candidates, whoever gets the most checks wins)...then we wouldn't need primaries and I'd be able to vote for anyone I'm "okay" with. Then my vote for X would still count.
by parshimers | 2025-09-29 21:15:31+00:00
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~dbbook/ is a great overview, specifically chapters 13 and 14 on query optimization. it is difficult to reason about though, and every compiler is different. it takes time and enough examples to look at a query and have an intuition for what the plan should look like, and if there's something the compiler is not handling well.
by elicash | 2025-09-29 21:15:37+00:00
Working on a chess / poker hybrid.

There was "choker" back in the day, which I actually never heard about since I wasn't into chess back then. But (1) there was no web version, and (2) it had a specific gameplay that seems too slow for my taste. My version is highly customizable on the setup/rounds/rules, too. From my research, the original was also overrun by bots.
by ethanseal | 2025-09-29 21:15:57+00:00
Absolutely. Though I don't recall seeing multiple sequential scans without a self-join or subquery. A basic filter within a sequential scan/loop is the most naive/simplest way of performing queries like these, so postgres falls back to that. Also, fwiw, BitmapOr is only used with indexes: https://pganalyze.com/docs/explain/other-nodes/bitmap-or.
by chaiDrinker | 2025-09-29 21:16:31+00:00
I remember an article on Slashdot (IIRC, can't find it now) that examined big discoveries in science and they found there are either child prodigies or old masters that make them. Prodigies make a big splash by their early twenties, and then you get people who don't make big contributions until after middle age.

Some solutions require an entirely new perspective while others require a lifetime's worth of information and experience to be properly collated I guess.
by sandeepkd | 2025-09-29 21:17:09+00:00
Trying to build a secure, configurable and easy to use authentication system (relative to my understanding)

I have experienced knowledge gaps and blind spots that I am attempting to fix. For example most users worry about security of hashed passwords and yet they do not realize that the TOTP (eg Google Authenticator) use symmetric encryption and quite a lot of the authentication providers store the private key in plain text in their database. List goes on...
by rockercoaster | 2025-09-29 21:17:25+00:00
"Comes from money" (often, but not always, coupled with family having an "in" with people in whatever artistic business their kid goes on to succeed in) is the secret to the success of an enormous proportion of artists in general.

Taylor Swift works hard and has talent and all, but also her parents could afford both the money and time required to get her to music and acting lessons in NYC, get her to auditions in Nashville to try to get a foot in the door, et c. They were a rich enough family that they "summered" in an expensive shoreline New Jersey zip code and her dad had a Christmas tree farm as a hobby. One wonders how many might-have-beens as good as her, or better, are instead waiting tables at Waffle House because they grew up in a mobile home and their parents couldn't even afford once-a-week piano lessons from the old lady who plays for services at the local Methodist church. I don't mean to knock her—it's not like it's her fault she had advantages. Parents with money are a key ingredient in tons of stories like hers, is all, and she's a good example of that in action.

Tons of successful actors are children of parents who were in the business. Actors themselves, directors, producers. Money, connections, and maybe existing name recognition go a long way. You can see the extreme (and extremely forced) version of this pretty often, with famous and/or rich parents playing key, credited roles in financing and putting together lead role debut vehicles for their actor kids.
by alecco | 2025-09-29 21:17:35+00:00
I would bet something like EO6102 + Corralito. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace ("brought to you by Palantir (tm)" with digital ID).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito
by johannes1234321 | 2025-09-29 21:17:37+00:00
> And I am at a loss to imagine security guards checking invitations at a church door and giving heave-ho to the unworthy.

Especially with churches in most cases nobody will be shown the door especially as in (Christian) church tradition the wedding is before God and the community, which traditionally is the village. Nonetheless many cultures will see it as somewhat private. Especially the reception or a non-church ceremony.
by reactordev | 2025-09-29 21:17:41+00:00
40 is the new 30s and life really starts after 50. Until then you’re spinning your wheels trying to pay back loans, raise kids, work, save, and not fall victim to vices.

Colonel Sanders started KFC in his 40s and didn’t come up with the signature recipe until he was 50. KFC as we know it didn’t exist until he was 65.

Truth is, most successful business owners start in their mid 40s or around 40.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-09-29 21:18:55+00:00
Understood. This is collecting the various developments.

However, this isn't some isolated story that happened a week ago and nobody knows what's happened in the days since. As evidenced by the many discussion comments many have been following the developments/commentaries. Each of those posts were appearing as the story developed and/or referred to the initial overarching incident. Some even reference the other posts as part of the development. My thing of course when we get to this 'long-form' coverage is must we then repeat all of the prior discussions? Perhaps, but there's the prior discussion links anyways.
by rossjudson | 2025-09-29 21:19:00+00:00
When asking for change, there are the choices you know about and the ones you don't. I've gotten in the habit of describing some of the current state as well as my desired state, and using that to focus the LLM on the areas I'd like to have a stronger voice in.

Of course, I definitely appreciate when it makes choices that I don't know I need to make, and it chooses reasonable defaults.

I mean, I could say "make the visualization three columns", but there's a lot of ambiguity in that kind of thing, and the LLM is going to make a lot of choices about my intent.

Instead, "each team/quarter currently has a vertically stacked list of people assigned to that team, with two columns (staying on team, leaving team). change that to being three columns (entering team, staying on team, leaving team)."

As a bonus, it's much, much clearer to somebody reading the history later what the intent was.
by anyfoo | 2025-09-29 21:19:04+00:00
Isn't it crazy how the image where every other pixel is black (labeled "Without interpolating, we can clearly see we only have half the pixels") sort of looks to have higher fidelity than the one after it, where the black pixels have been removed, which now looks pixelated?

And yet both images have the exact amount of information, because all pixels that have been removed are simply black.

The effect is so pronounced, that I wonder whether there wasn't any additional processing between the two images. Compare the window with the sky reflection between the two: In the image without black pixels, it looks distorted and aliased, while in the one with, it looks pristine.

If actually only the black pixels have been removed (and the result nearest-neighbor scaled), I think the black pixel grid is a form of dithering, although neither random, nor the error diffusion kind one usually thinks of when hearing "dithering". There is no error being diffused here, and all added pixels are constant black.

Maybe the black pixels allow the mind to fill in the gaps (shifting the interpolation that was also removed, prior to the black pixel image, to our brain, essentially). It is known that our brain interpolates and even straight makes up highly non-linear stuff as part of our vision system. A famous example of that is how our blind spot, the fovea where the optic nerve comes out, is "hidden" from us that way.

The aliasing would "disappear" because we sort of have twice the amount of samples (pixels), leading to twice the Nyquist frequency, only that half of the samples have been made up by our vision system through interpolation. (This is a way simplified and crude way to look at it. Pun unintended.)

But before jumping to such lofty conclusions, I still wonder whether nothing more happened between the two images...
by jltsiren | 2025-09-29 21:19:15+00:00
The number of new PhDs in the US ballooned in the 1960s. It went from 4.9 new PhDs / 100k people in 1960 to 14.5 in 1970 and 17.1 in 2024.

While the growth in the number of new PhDs has been modest, the number of published papers has grown much faster. I would attribute that to changes in administrative culture. Both the government and the universities have become driven by metrics, which means everyone must produce something the administrators can measure.
by Geekette | 2025-09-29 21:19:55+00:00
Javice’s attorneys told Hellerstein that JPMorgan’s failure to conduct proper due diligence should weigh in favor of her receiving a more lenient sentence. ... “We would never ask you to punish JPMorgan Chase’s stupidity,” said Ronald Sullivan, one of Javice’s lead attorneys. “But we submit that it’s a relevant factor.”
by michaelt | 2025-09-29 21:19:56+00:00
> every single person really did have a different 20% they cared about.

I have always wondered what would happen if someone had to invent spreadsheets from scratch, today.

Would conditional formatting and pivot tables get removed, because only 1% of users use them?

Would they feel supporting column, bar, line, area, pie and X/Y charts was just too complicated? That being able to customise the chart styles and colour schemes was just going to confuse users?

Would they think obscure jargon like 'vlookup' was too confusing, and difficult to localise internationally? Would they think formulas were too complicated to ever be a mass-market feature, as well as too difficult to input on mobile?

Would they discover 80% of office suite users don't use the spreadsheet beyond shopping lists, and replace it with a shopping list tool?

My theory is the modern software industry couldn't produce such a product. I don't think I've seen the industry produce a mass market product that requires a comparable level of user expertise in 20 years.