MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phaser | 2025-10-13 08:16:50+00:00
Public transport is the next thing I wanna work on. Will start with buses, which I have an idea on how it will be implemented, but for metro I will want to start learning about how it can be simulated faithfully.

This weekend I have plans to start playing a lot Subway Builder (https://www.subwaybuilder.com) which I'm really excited about, and maybe get some books on the subject, in order to get it right
by slightwinder | 2025-10-13 08:17:10+00:00
> Because it lets us build an app that works well across all major platforms with the resources we have available. Building an email/contacts/calendar app is a huge undertaking. Doing it from scratch on each platform is just not feasible for us.

Just to be clear, does this mean the app is mainly reusing the already existing codebase of the web-app? How much additional work went into the desktop-app?
by benrutter | 2025-10-13 08:17:28+00:00
The glamourous world of data testing! A lightweight flexible data contracts library called Wimsey[0].

The main pitch is you have minimal dependencies and overheads and can run tests natively on pandas/polars/pyspark/dask/duckdb/etc (thanks to the awesome Narwhals project)

It's mostly there for v1 right now, but kean to add a tiny bit more functionality, and well a lot more docs. Working on something that's automated alongside the test suite, which should keep things reliable and fresh (I'll find out soon enough)

[0] https://github.com/benrutter/wimsey / https://codeberg.org/benrutter/wimsey
by jph | 2025-10-13 08:17:29+00:00
Devices sending data that is anonymized, encrypted, and signed by the device is a must-have for some medical studies.

For example, imagine a medical study that looks at heart rate variability versus an intervention. The data analysts won't need to know each patient's name or email address, but will need to know each patient's heart rate variability when you're having the intervention. The study may span many physical locations, such as at multiple medical providers across a country.
by keiferski | 2025-10-13 08:18:36+00:00
I've done a lot of street photography, and yeah I think the fundamental skill is scanning the environment, then predicting what will happen in order to snap the perfect shot. For example, you might see a fence making an interesting shadow, then figure out how to position yourself such that passers-by fit into the scene.

In practice, you end up standing around and waiting a lot. Moving quickly through a city is almost guaranteed to result in missing some great shots. (Saying this from experience.)
by denkmoon | 2025-10-13 08:18:49+00:00
People sometimes pay for these things like email and search which they can get for “free” because they want to conduct business with reasonable people who will provide good custodianship of their data and be a reliable partner long term. I don’t want to have to change email provider when my next invoice comes up because they put 6 devs on building an electron app for a year. Hyperbole obviously but their actions are an important indicator of how sane and grounded management is and will continue to be into the future.
by guessmyname | 2025-10-13 08:19:06+00:00
I guessed it was built with Electron (or at least a WebView) even before seeing the screenshots.

Creating a fully native desktop app takes a huge amount of engineering effort. When you factor in their target platforms (Windows, macOS, and Linux) you’re looking at multiplying that effort several times over. No one in their right mind would build a fully native desktop mail app these days, unless that’s the one thing that sets them apart from the dozens of other web-based mail services out there.

The only real benefit I see in this Electron app is system notifications for new emails, assuming people keep the app running in the background or minimized most of the time. Other than that, the web version will almost always be better and more up to date, since it’s clearly the main product.

I can totally picture people buying MacBook Pros with 128GB of RAM just to run a bunch of Electron apps, hehe.
by phaser | 2025-10-13 08:19:41+00:00
> Brutally honest? I hope it shows the huge amount of land needed for parking lots :P

Parking space simulation is coming soon. I feel I will completely miss the point if I leave that out. The idea is to have street parking (with configurable profit for the city) parking lots, and buildings with underground parking, that should conflict, of course, with metro lines.
by kode95 | 2025-10-13 08:21:24+00:00
If you do multiple projects for each client, stall the work you're presently doing for every client that pays late. Let them know upfront that unpaid invoices immediately make you halt all work on the next stages of the client's project.

As for the AI solution you're suggesting, it's probably too easy for people to automate that kind of thing, so it might be a tough sell if you're charging $49 for it. But who knows.
by jychang | 2025-10-13 08:21:55+00:00
Nope, "just placing a bet" is still illegal if you’re trading on material non-public information (MNPI). Even if you don’t disclose anything, U.S. regulators can treat a prediction-market wager as a derivatives trade made with misappropriated confidential info.

Prediction-market contracts are either CFTC or SEC territory. Many "event contracts" are regulated as swaps (CFTC). If a contract references a single security/issuer, then it falls under security-based swap rules (SEC). Either way, trading them with MNPI risks liability under the applicable anti-fraud rules. (CFTC Rule 180.1 is guided by SEC 10b-5 case law on misappropriation.)

The CFTC uses the misappropriation theory: trading while breaching a duty to keep information confidential is prohibited, even if you never "tip" anyone. They’ve brought cases on this theory. CFTC enforcement and guidance explicitly cite misappropriation cases (Ruggles 2016, Motazedi 2015, EOX, etc) as "insider trading" analogs for non stock trading.

> They still called it a market.

I'm saying you can pivot your hypothetical company to a website-that-pays-for-news-like-TMZ. Last time I checked, they don't call TMZ a market.
by polymonster | 2025-10-13 08:22:37+00:00
A music discovery app for record diggers.

It’s an instagram style UI but for scrolling through record releases and snippets, worked on making it responsive as possible with low latency audio playback so you can browse a lot of stuff quickly.

Wrote about it on my blog: https://www.polymonster.co.uk/blog/diig

And GitHub repo: https://github.com/polymonster/diig
by pbarondadditude | 2025-10-13 08:22:40+00:00
(you could fix your link so it's clickable) 1. thanks for building this. I will get back on my iron deficiency diet. I now understand it takes over 7 weeks to reliably fix 2. when doing data input, I'm lazy, especially for the blood age calc. So my process is: upload list + my blood results to the LLM and spit out the list of values I need (terrible privacy job right here for me) but anyway, I wonder if you could offer another route for data input, like a text field, with the full list and empty values, that I could copy to an LLM and ask to populate with my results and then spit back to paste into the form. Keep up the good work!
by jacquesm | 2025-10-13 08:23:08+00:00
That will not happen. But yes, you are right that this decision was not taken lightly, I've only heard of one other such move in the last 50 years or so.

The Chinese propaganda machine is already making lots of waves about how NL is no longer a democracy and how this dings NL reputation abroad.

The Dutch have put restrictions on Wingtech to not make certain changes (sale or move of assets, intellectual property, company activities, employees) for a year. That should give you enough to chew on I think (and it is public knowledge). Specifically the IP and assets bits are in focus here, more so because the parent company is on a watchlist. Note that they not only kicked out the CEO - which in itself is an earth shaking move for a company this big - they also took control over the shares.
by ale42 | 2025-10-13 08:23:45+00:00
This is using Twilio, but given there's an Asterisk server behind, you can actually use any VoIP provider that allows outgoing calls over SIP right? Depending on the country you live in and/or where you want to call, you might get simpler & cheaper options (although for emergency service if you want to have it, which I think is important unless there's an alternative way to call emergencies around, it's more complicated).
by daemin | 2025-10-13 08:25:56+00:00
These days banking is one of the things for which a phone is required for. It is used as the primary banking device for most people, and for the rest it is required for two factor authentication when logging in on a PC or to verify online transactions.

Maybe some bank would allow you to use some third party two factor authentication device to log in sometimes, but most (if not all) would require you to use their "app".
by friendzis | 2025-10-13 08:25:56+00:00
While this is a good general rule of thumb, this terminology has nothing to do with how these terms are formally defined.

Verification first and foremost concerns design and development stage, a formal definition would be something like "outputs of design and development step meet specified requirements for that step". For example, you could verify that a formal specification for a module actually implements imposed requirements. Especially in software this can get murky as you cover different phases with different tests/suites, e.g. unit, integration, e2e implicitly test different stages, yet are often part of the same testing run.

Validation first and foremost concerns the whole system/product and fitness for market availability.

For example you would verify that e.g. for a motor vehicle ABS functions correctly, airbags deploy in a crash and frame meets passenger safety requirements in a crash, and you would still not be able to sell such vehicle. You would validate the vehicle as a whole with corresponding regulatory body to get vehicle deemed fit for market.

TLDR: Verification is getting passing grade in a lab test, validation is submitting all relevant lab test protocols to get CE certified.
by phaser | 2025-10-13 08:26:01+00:00
> I wonder if you simulate at individual level or group? Would be cool at individual level each one making decisions individually and see some emerging behavior.

If you are referring to the citizens, yes, at individual level. However for traffic I'm using a sampling rate.

> Also if no job maybe they could try uber/food delivery crappy jobs like that or start their own business.

That's an awesome idea, I added it to my backlog :)

> less money less likely to have kids?

This is mega tricky, because it happens very differently across the world. Yes, can be expensive computationally that's why the city is so small (for now) but as I start to distribute the simulation into many cores, players with high core CPU will be able to choose a bigger city size :) I agree that individual level simulation is what makes it interesting and I plan to keep it like that.
by eloisius | 2025-10-13 08:26:31+00:00
I appreciate you taking the time to engage with your customers here. I’ll say this announcement doesn’t thrill me, as a long-time customer. I’ve been paying for Fastmail for at least six years. It may be as many as eight but I can’t find my oldest receipt.

I use Fastmail because of the excellent mail service, customer support, sieve rules to keep my inbox manageable, and because of the little details like WebDAV that I have unexpectedly found useful for things like syncing browser bookmarks. I pay for Fastmail because it has been excellent, not because I’m captive.

This app signals to me that there may be a change coming in our relationship. One in which you may start to neglect IMAP or make it harder for me to choose my own mail client. It tells me that Fastmail might be pivoting into “growth” and treating me like a “user” rather than a paying customer. It won’t surprise me, and I can’t really say I’d be mad. Most companies get to that point. There’s probably a lot more money to be made from vendor lock-in than happy, $50 per year customers. As for me and mine, I will switch to the next small-to-medium-sized mail provider the second I get a sense that this is the direction.
by Hayatoo | 2025-10-13 08:26:33+00:00
I'm working on ServBay, a local development environment I built to end the constant pain of juggling different versions of program languages like Python, PHP, Node.js, Golang, Rust and so on, databases, and local SSL certificates.

It's an all-in-one toolkit with one-click version switching, automatic HTTPS for local domains, and an integrated mail catcher.

I've just rolled out some major updates: 1. Local AI Deployment: Now can run models like Llama 3 & Code Llama directly within ServBay. 2. Built-in Tunneling: Share the local sites with anyone on the internet, ngrok-style or frp or Cloudflare. 3. Windows is Live! The new Windows version is out and quickly reaching feature parity with our macOS app.

Next up is ServBay 2.0. I'm currently gathering feedback on features like deeper Docker integration and more flexible site configurations. I'd love to hear what the HN community thinks is important.

Check it out at: https://www.servbay.com
by vinhnx | 2025-10-13 08:26:36+00:00
Thank you for your very kind-words. I love building and agentic coding is my current curiosity.

> I’m curious though, how significant do you think it is for the agent to have semantic access through Tree-sitter?

For this, I'm really not sure, but since the start of building VT Code. I just had this idea to use tree-sitter to assist the agent to have more (or faster/more precise) semantic understanding of the coding, instead of relying them to figure out themself. For me, naively I think this could help agent to have better language-specific and accurately decision about the workspace (context) that they are working. If not having tree-sitter, I think the agent could eventually figure out itself. For this aspect, I should be research more on this topic. In VT Code, I included 6 language: Go, Python, Rust, TypeScript, Swift... ) via rust-binding crates, mostly when you launch the vtcode agent on any workspace, It will show the main languages in the workspace right way.

> Also what model have you had the most success with ?

I'm having mainly limited-budget so I can only use OpenRouter and utilize its vast amount models support. So that I can prototype quickly, for different use-cases. For VT Code agent, I'm using mainly x-ai/grok-code-fast-1, in my experience, it most suit for building VT Code agent it self because of speeds, and versatile in function calling and have good instruction following. I also have good successes with x-ai/grok-4-fast. I have not tried claude-4.5-sonnet and gpt-5/gpt-5-codex though. I really love to run benchmarks for VT Code to see how it perform in real world coding task, I'm aiming for Aider polygot bench, terminal-bench and swe-bench-lite, it is in my plan for now in my GitHub issues.

For VT Code itself, I instruct it to strictly follow system-prompt, in which I take various inspiration from Anthropic, OpenAI and Devin guide/blogs on how to build coding agent. But, for a model-agnostic agent, the capability to support multi providers and multi models is a challenge. For this I think I need help. I'm fortunately to have support from open-source community suggesting me to use zig, I have had good success with it so far, for implement LLM calls and implement the /model picker.

Overall in my experience building VT, the most important aspect of effective coding agent is context engineering, like all big-lab has research. A good system prompt is also very important, but not context is everything. https://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode/blob/main/prompts/system.md

// Sorry, English is not my main language, so pardon the typo and grammar. Thank you!
by lylo | 2025-10-13 08:27:09+00:00
I’m building Pagecord to make blogging as effortless as posting on social media, but without the doomscrolling.

https://pagecord.com

It’s minimal in design, but packed with features.

The USP that customers seem to really value is posting by email. It massively reduces the friction required to blog and is surprisingly enjoyable.

Launching next week is custom home pages with dynamic variables. It’s in beta already, see https://iamgregb.io.

Pagecord is free and source available with an unbeatably priced premium plan of $29/year.

Follow along on GitHub: https://github.com/lylo/pagecord

Feedback welcome! :)
by librasteve | 2025-10-13 08:28:06+00:00
Yes, the evolution of Raku multilines is from shell (heredoc) > perl > raku, and a LOT of experience went into the design. Not sure I understand why that's a bad thing?

Some benefits of the Raku solution are:

- multiline is just a superset of the standard quoting method (with the "to:/CLOSER/" adverb) - indent level is set by the left edge of the closer, in the example 'END' ... so you can consistently indent / unindent your source and do not have to crowd all your heredoc to the left margin - you can pick any delimiter or closer to avoid conflict with the text content - there's a large selection of quoting adverbs - q (like single quotes), qq (like double quotes), qw (quote word), qx (shell quoting), etc.

This usually means that any text can be cut and pasted as is into the multiline and you can adjust the adverbs to match the original quoting pattern.

Even with perverse patterns (which you cannot guarantee against in variable text), there is a way to gracefully handle:

q«say '''hi"""» #say '''hi"""

https://docs.raku.org/language/quoting
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-13 08:28:42+00:00
Robots installed now will be obsolete and broken by 2050. Demographic change is the sort of thing where market mechanisms work fine. You don't build out assets like those ahead of demand, you wait until you need them at which point you get the latest tech with economies of scale as demand ramps up everywhere.

The most optimistic reading of this move is that it's just more of the same old communism: robotic factories seem cool to the planners because they're big, visible and high-tech assets that are easily visitable on state trips. So they overinvest for the same reason they once overinvested in steel production.

The actually most gloomy prognosis is that they're trying to free up labour to enter the army.
by mikewarot | 2025-10-13 08:29:57+00:00
Metamine had a amazing demo[1], which is only still with us on the Internet Archive. I've fawned over it before[2], but suffice it to say it was a normal programming language plus a magical equals which kept the left side of an assignment updated after the fact, for the life of the program. (Along with the normal non-magical one) The amazing part is that the author, Ymte Jan Broekhuizen, had coherent rules figured out for mixing declarative and imperitive programming. Figuring those out is a minor miracle in my mind.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20201014024057/https://www.youtub...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by wolvesechoes | 2025-10-13 08:29:59+00:00
> But seriously, use a local bank and try solving human problems by dealing with human’s. Quit trying to tech everything… if the open source community would get unified and actualize… thats a fuck ton of people!

Wise, and thus downvoted. Many FOSS enthusiasts are antisocial, sometimes even misanthropic, fragile snowflakes ("I should be able to run any software I like, on any device I like"), so any call for collective political action, that actually could achieve something more, is disregarded.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-13 08:30:00+00:00
On a very very large average, and assuming that Spotify pays out now in precise proportion to the total plays (just as you wrote - if 0.1% of plays, then 0.1% of payouts), then changing to your proposed system would literally change nothing. Average number of plays in total versus average number of users listening to an artist would be exactly the same statistically, starting from several tens of thousands of users, and Spotify has millions of them.
by beeflet | 2025-10-13 08:30:38+00:00
Like all permissively licensed software, it certainly will win what many in the free software world are trying to win: a bunch of nerds will do a ton of free work for corporations in exchange for absolutely nothing. Not even the drivers they need to run their own software on their own hardware. See: BSD, Minix, etc.

Permissively licensed software is everywhere. It's winning. What exactly it's winning, I'm not sure. Permissively licensed software is in my hypervisor. It's in my ankle monitor. Permissively licensed software will power the terminator drone that kills me in WW3. But it isn't in my laptop because the drivers don't work.
by gp | 2025-10-13 08:31:28+00:00
I have been building a mostly free website and API to interact with sec EDGAR filings, get realtime new filing alerts (and preview those alerts), and see the historical impact of financial filings.

Right now I am working on adding historical tables extracted from filings, as well as historical financials and their calculations.

https://www.secblast.com

Still a work in progress, but please check it out
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-13 08:31:42+00:00
Sure, why would they? COM was rendered irrelevant by the move to the web. Microsoft lost out on the app serving side, and when they dropped the ball on ActiveX by not having proper UI design or sandboxing they lost out on the client too. Probably the primary use case outside of legacy OPC is IT departments writing PowerShell scripts or Office plugins (though those are JS based now too).

COM has been legacy tech for decades now. Even Microsoft's own security teams publish blog posts enthusiastically explaining how they found this strange ancient tech from some Windows archaeological dig site, lol. Maybe one day I'll be able to mint money by doing maintenance consulting for some old DCOM based systems, the sort of thing where knowing what an OXID resolver is can help and AI can't do it well because there's not enough example code on GitHub.
by nebula8804 | 2025-10-13 08:33:06+00:00
I don't really know. I think a lot of them migrated off of Bush. I don't have the clip right now but I had old interview videos showing how high and mighty Bush supporters were and how they supported the Iraq war all in going into his second term. They went so far as to act like Trump supporters against anyone who didn't support the "commander in chief" (ie. those people should be put in jail or kicked out).

The GFC really set those people straight. Enough of them got desperate enough that they switched sides and voted for Obama.
by cess11 | 2025-10-13 08:33:23+00:00
Well, at least it's a good reason to re-read his infamous exchange with Derrida.

When I studied in Ulaan Bataar some twenty years ago I met a romanian professor of linguistics who had prepared by trying to learn mongolian from books. He quickly concluded that his knowledge of russian, cyrillic and having read his books didn't actually give him a leg up on the rest of us, and that pronounciation and rhythm as well as more subtle aspects of the language like humour and irony hadn't been appropriately transferred through the texts he'd read.

Rules might give you some grasp of a language, but breaking them with style and elegance without losing the audience is the sign of a true master and only possible by having a foundation in shared, embodied experience.

There's a crude joke in that Searle left academia disgraced the way he did.
by dn3500 | 2025-10-13 08:33:43+00:00
You might consider joining the Citizen Weather Observer Program. It's a great way to share your data with other station owners.

http://www.wxqa.com/

I had a station for a few years. The receiver had a usb interface so no software radio required. I used weewx to import the data. I even had a water temperature sensor off the end of my dock so I could see if the lake was warm enough to swim in.