MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-10-07 18:44:43+00:00
> I weirdly actually trust Google's interests in surveillance more than I trust the government's

I don't think this is weird at all. Corporations may be more "malicious" (or at least self centered), but governments have more power. So even if you believe they are good and have good intentions it still has the potential to do far more harm. Google can manipulate you but the government can manipulate you, throw you in jail, and rewrite the rules so you have no recourse. Even if the government can get the data from those companies there's at least a speed bump. Even if a speed bump isn't hard to get over are we going to pretend that some friction is no different from no friction?

Turnkey tyranny is a horrific thing. One that I hope more people are becoming aware of as it's happening in many countries right now.[0]

This doesn't make surveillance capitalism good and I absolutely hate those comparisons because they make the assumption that harm is binary. That there's no degree of harm. That two things can't be bad at the same time and that just because one is worse that means the other is okay. This is absolute bullshit thinking and I cannot stand how common it is, even on this site.

[0] my biggest fear is that we still won't learn. The problem has always been that the road to is paved with good intentions. Evil is not just created by evil men, but also my good men trying to do good. The world is complex and we have this incredible power of foresight. While far from perfect we seem to despise this capability that made us the creatures we are today. I'm sorry, the world is complex. Evil is hard to identify. But you got this powerful brain to deal with all that, if you want to
by triceratops | 2025-10-07 18:45:02+00:00
> [you] are essentially making a hand-waving argument

I'm not the only one.

"In Elisabeth Rosenthal’s excellent book, An American Sickness, she notes:

'The median cost to a hospital for each full-time resident in 2013 was $134,803. That includes a salary of between $50,000 and $80,000. Federal support translates into about $100,000 per resident per year. Researchers have calculated that the value of the work each resident performs annually is $232,726. Even without any subsidy, having residents is a better than break-even deal.' "

And

"In the old days, hospitals paid for resident training by building those costs into the bills they sent patients. But in 1965, Congress acknowledged resident medical training as a public good deserving of public investment, and firmly established federal funding for graduate medical education costs with the Medicare Act.

(What’s interesting is that Congress intended for the public funding to be temporary, with language in both the House and Senate reports noting that the funds were intended to last only “until the community undertakes to bear such educational costs in some other way.” Unsurprisingly, once governmental funds became available, hospitals have had little interest in undertaking how to bear these costs any other way.)"

https://thesheriffofsodium.com/2022/02/04/how-much-are-resid...

> they generally have to be directly supervised by an attending physician, which is expensive

The blog post argues that they also free up attending physicians to focus on the highest-compensated doctoring activities.
Show HN: Convert between Mermaid, draw.io, and Excalidraw diagrams
by Redkee | 2025-10-07 18:45:03+00:00
Hi HN, I built a diagram converter that translates between Mermaid, draw.io, and Excalidraw.

What it does: 1.Converts between Mermaid, draw.io, and Excalidraw formats 2.Currently supports: Flowcharts and graph-based diagrams 3.Preserves semantic structure and layout in most cases.

Why I built it: Honestly, I was tired of copy-pasting and redrawing diagrams when switching contexts. Plus, many AI coding tools (Claude, Cursor, etc) only generate Mermaid diagrams inside the chat, and sometimes I want the diagrams to be more verbose.

Current state: Working MVP with Flowcharts and graph-based diagrams support

What I'm asking: 1.Does this solve a problem you actually have? 2.What formats/features would make this essential for your workflow? 3.Any issues/bugs/potential improvements you observe?

I'd love honest feedback—even if it's "this isn't useful because X." Trying to validate if this is worth building out further or if I should pivot to something else.
by sschueller | 2025-10-07 18:45:05+00:00
Yes, regardless if you are using a pre-certified module/parts or not you need to CE certify your product as a whole. However if you use pre-certified modules the testing is cheaper/less complicated.

I do my certification testing in China by a reputable lab which is much cheaper than doing it here in Switzerland (at least 15k USD). At a minimum expect to spend 1000-2000 USD if all goes well.

There is a workaround for CE but it's a bit of a dirty trick. If you are not expecting to sell very many and your target audience are tinkerers then you can sell your device as a kit. There must be assembly that the end user has to do but they are then the ones "putting the device into the market" and they take on that responsivity of CE. That basically means they can't sell it unless they get a CE. Such an example is https://www.clockworkpi.com/ which sell their products a kits.
by Theodores | 2025-10-07 18:45:07+00:00
I don't think you need AI but you do need to think about the audience for the printed catalogue.

A few years ago I did the website for a retailer of clothes for the elderly, and they were doing it old school with the catalogue, printed order form and excellent customer service by phone. Their niche was the demographic every other clothing retailer avoided. Unless you have a similar niche, you have to ask about whether a printed catalogue is worthwhile.

AI could potentially help but how do you plan and budget time for that? It could take anything between two minutes and two years to get right. Meanwhile you could do it old-school with artworkers slaving away. Alternatively, you could automate the process to use print stylesheets where you specify the page size and then populate the content with CSS grid layout. The printed catalogue could then be created on demand (and cached) so that it automatically updates itself. This could be a manageable process that you could plan and budget for.

In your product database you could have fields for layout preferences so that you can specify the featured product for each page and what to downgrade in the presentation. I would say this is definitely viable and one reason this is not done is that any company still invested in print catalogues will have an artworker department and nobody in such a department would invest time into automating their job.
by Akranazon | 2025-10-07 18:45:09+00:00
I'm not interested in debating the grab-bag of ways life is better in Sweden than in California.

I've said this before, but every "US vs Europe work" debate ends with the European patronizingly scolding the American for thinking money is the most important thing in life. I'm also not interested in that.

I am only interested in the labor market.

You can say the numbers don't matter, but then you've adopted essentially an unfalsifiable position.

Another factor to consider is the ease of quitting your job. In the US (at least, I have found), it is quite easy to quite your job and find a new one.

This matches the logic under which it's easy to fire in the US. Every cost of a regulation has a side-effect. If it's easy to fire, it's easy to hire. The article explains how American companies are more willing to hire for positions which wouldn't otherwise exist.

If you are not interested in that, then quit your job and don't work in a position which involves innovation. Which in America, is easy to do.
by awesome_dude | 2025-10-07 18:45:16+00:00
For some reason your reply (which I think is quite good) makes me think of the adage "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send" (Postels law).

Speaking as someone that's drunk the Go kool aid - the (general) advice is not to panic when it's a user input problem, only when it's a programmers problem (which I think is a restatement of your post)
by pbahra | 2025-10-07 18:45:26+00:00
Turkey’s first flying cars are nearing takeoff, with 100 prototype vehicles ordered and due for delivery in 2027.

AirCar Technology and Aviation, a Turkish tech business founded by Eray Altunbozar, announced last week it was taking pre-orders for its first run. All 100 cars sold within days, despite the $99,000 price tag.

The electric-powered vehicle will have a range of 80km, a flying speed of 130km/h and a recharge time of as little as 15 minutes.
by hahahacorn | 2025-10-07 18:45:27+00:00
I think the fundamental misunderstanding (for the majority of devs who dont "get hotwire") is that you can very often delegate the statefulness of a given interaction to A: The Server via the database or B: The Browser via localstorage.

If your page can be written with it's state being "reasonably" delegated to one of these two, hotwire is _all you need_. (To be clear, it's more common that you're just doing a bunch of work to duplicate state that already exists in the database/on the server, or handled natively by the browser, and by "delegate" I mean don't-duplicate-for-no-good-reason.)

There are many (but fewer than those who "don't get" hotwire believe) cases where it's more of a headache to delegate state to A or B. In which case you should absolutely pull in react/vue/<insert_js_framework>/etc. My go-to is: https://github.com/skryukov/turbo-mount + react because it minimizes it's footprint on the "omakase-ness" of your rails app.
by elevation | 2025-10-07 18:45:29+00:00
How many people actually earn minimum wage?

In my low cost of living region you’d be hard-pressed to find any entry level positions (fast food, retail) below $15/hour. Panera (which needs staff at 4 or 5 AM to prep food for the day) are starting at $20/hour. Local restaurants and grocery stores can and do lose employees when a corporate chain raises their rates, so they have to keep up.

We could eliminate the federal minimum wage and very little would change.
by flobosg | 2025-10-07 18:46:01+00:00
> There is no bottom-up building of a living cell.

There is currently no bottom-up building. The article proposes some potential strategies.

> All those building blocks you speak about come from DNA and genes (edited or not) can only come from existing living cells

Many of the macromolecules found in a cell can be generated abiotically. In fact, that is how the initial M. laboratorium genome cassettes were built. No living system was involved in the synthesis of their DNA (cassette recombination was done in yeast, though)[1]:

> Synthetic genome assembly strategy. The designed cassettes were generally 1080 bp with 80-bp overlaps to adjacent cassettes (11). They were all produced by assembly of chemically synthesized oligonucleotides by Blue Heron (Bothell, Washington)

[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1190719
by kenhwang | 2025-10-07 18:46:28+00:00
We had vm-per-app before docker, so it was still build the image, test, and ship, but it actually had everything it needed inside the vm.

Docker helps with the portability due to it's ubiquitous it is now, but it's not like the vm requirement went away, the docker image still generally runs in a vm in any serious environment, and a lot more attention has to be paid to the vm:docker pairing than the previous hypervisor:vm pairing.
by mholt | 2025-10-07 18:46:28+00:00
Cool, yeah, the finance use case seems very relevant. Someday it'd be cool to have a Finance exploration page, like we do for other kinds of data.

Real-time/polling imports aren't yet supported, but that's not too difficult once we land on the right design for that feature.

I tinkered with a "drop zone" where you could designate a folder that, when you add files to it, Timelinize immediately imports it (then deletes the file from the drop zone).

But putting imports on a timer would be trivial.
by xp84 | 2025-10-07 18:46:35+00:00
> ...payments less than my last rental

for 3 or 5 years though. That's part of the terms. Nothing outside of that was promised to them on paper.

It's reasonable to expect someone looking at a 5/1 ARM or an 'Interest only for X years' loan to ask "What can I be guaranteed in writing will happen at the end of that period?" The right answer was "Nothing. Interest rates have historically moved between 3% and 22%. Your new payment could be 4x your old rent, or it could get even cheaper. The value of the home could go up or it could go down. By taking this loan you are betting your house, the down payment, and your credit rating on not just one but multiple assumptions: Low rates and continuing appreciation."

That's setting aside the systemic risks that I agree nobody not in the financial world ought to have been expected to understand.
by donatj | 2025-10-07 18:46:38+00:00
> But to my eyes, this PR does look like spam

Your spam detector is broken. It was opened by an account that's clearly human with more than 10 years of history. It was closed by the author themselves 2 hours after they opened it. It's got WIP commits that were clearly written by a human thinking through the process.

What about this reads as spam to you? They just forgot to fill the description portion of the PR
by nullpt_rs | 2025-10-07 18:46:39+00:00
Thanks for sharing some examples! Someone shared a similar project in the other thread. I didn’t realize this at the time of writing haha.

FWIW I still think modifying the browser has some positives wrt stealth and hooking out of process frames (could be wrong on the second part, haven’t actually tested!)

Still good to know though will leave a note in the article :-)
by ModernMech | 2025-10-07 18:47:03+00:00
Foreign money coming in will have to be made up elsewhere. It will be made up by raising tuition on remaining students. Schools that have a small enough applicant pool will price out their applicants and close. Likely they will be replaced by for-profit grifts that are much more affordable but don't actually do anything for the students except bilk them. The largest most international most diverse most administratively bloated schools will be fine. It's the small mostly-white rural colleges that will suffer the most.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-07 18:47:06+00:00
> but it's the fastest way I've seen to get from zero to functional GUI

I think Qt Creator is still the best option I've used there. It has a very good GUI form editor (probably the only one I've ever used that is good). You can have a basic GUI up and running in like 5 minutes tops. And C++ is a much better language than TCL, and Qt is a much better GUI toolkit than Tcl/Tk.

Just steer clear of QtQuick and QML. It's kind of trash. QtWidgets is still supported though.
by jama211 | 2025-10-07 18:47:24+00:00
Many of these comments are pretty funny. Only on HN would people think the public cares about avoiding having a MS account. Sure, many here may care, but I’m not silly enough to think most people do, or that this has any chance of “killing” the OS like many here seem to claim it will. Just a crazy thing to say.

Sure, I’d love it if one day Linux got proper support and started to become widespread and Microsoft’s bloatware was impacted. But a lot more has to change before this can actually happen, obviously.
by freehorse | 2025-10-07 18:47:31+00:00
Even when going to a shop, I prefer to look into the options myself first. Explaining a salesperson what I need can take much more time, and then I am never sure if they just try to upsell, if I can explain my use case well etc. The only case where I opt for a salesperson first is when I cannot translate my use case to specification due to high degree of technical or other knowledge needed. I can imagine eg somebody who knows nothing about computers ask "I want a laptop, with good battery, I would use it for this and that", the same way they would ask a salesperson or a technical friend. But I cannot imagine using such an LLM to look for a table where I need it to fit measurements etc, or anything that is not inaccessible in terms of product knowledge. If I know the specifications, opting for an AI chatbot is inefficient. If not, it could help.
by mwkaufma | 2025-10-07 18:47:36+00:00
Recalls old turn-of-the-century Japanese typewriters with a 2D mechanical "picker" and a single hammer lever, instead of individual keys.

More Info: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_typewriter

Notable Example: - https://typewriterdatabase.com/1928-ohtani-japanese-typewrit...
by zknicker | 2025-10-07 18:48:43+00:00
Solid insight - I actually tried implementing an AI chat into my app. It's just an internal app for my own productivity purposes with my eCommerce business, but I felt I had a credible use case for having it there. At the end of the day, the work required to get it to a spot where it was useful and not janky was just too much (even with the AI tooling provided by Vercel's AI SDK). And, even though I got it working, I never found a reason to use it that I didn't feel like could just be achieved more smoothly with some buttons and text inputs.
by phoehne | 2025-10-07 18:48:57+00:00
Be a little careful on those. It depends on what you're doing. Some of them are not suited to be used with the high data rates for I2C, or I2C only at 100khz. I found out the hard way with some of the SparkFun level shifters, years back.

You need to do a little research. It will usually tell in the spec sheet. Which is why the Arduino is useful. You don't have to buy a level shifter. You don't have to read a level shifter spec sheet.
by zer00eyz | 2025-10-07 18:49:10+00:00
> Anyone wanna start a club?

You would not be the first, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Funny thing is that we still have hand made fabric today, and were still employing a frighting number of people in the manufacturing of clothing. The issue is that we're making more lower quality products rather than higher quality items.
by mholt | 2025-10-07 18:49:24+00:00
> I want it to also be a nextcloud and zotero replacement, storing all my documents and books and documenting when I added, opened, edited them. I want it to store all notes that I write.

Sounds in-scope so far. Long-term, perhaps, and maybe optional add-on features rather than built-in, but we'll see.

> I want it to record and display all browser tabs I open, when I do so, everything I copy and paste, every key I press.

That is possible in theory, but for me personally that's just too detailed. :D I wouldn't need all that granularity, myself.

But hey, the vision is pretty similar. We are generating all sorts of data to document and understand our lives -- we don't even have to deliberately write a journal -- but we have no way of comprehending it. This app is an attempt to solve that.
by i1856511 | 2025-10-07 18:49:26+00:00
The problem is entirely due to the labor and compensation for mechanics. The Mechanics get a shit proposition. If you are smart, you do not do it. Exhibit A, mechanics are paid a fraction of revenue but are 100% responsible for warranty. Imagine if you shipped a bug, you are told to work without pay to fix it. That is what a mechanic does.
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-07 18:49:26+00:00
I get the spirit of the dialogue. And feel quite similar. But I have some quips over things that are blatantly misconstrued:

- you wouldnt use vite then also add next or remix

- if you're using vite, next.js, etc. you're not going to need to add nor configure babel

- vite, next.js, etc. starters come with pretty much all of these separate things he mentions included. typescript, prettier, eslint, tailwind, react etc. You know, like a batteries included framework.
by juanmiruadev | 2025-10-07 18:49:46+00:00
Hhi,

I’m building Rescathena, an open initiative that uses Hyperledger Fabric to bring transparency and trust to animal rescue donations.

Every action in the process — from NGO registration and donation tracking to publishing evidence of impact — is recorded and validated on a private, non-tokenized blockchain. The goal is to ensure that every contribution truly reaches the animals while strengthening trust between donors and NGOs.

The project is still in its early stages, and I’d love feedback from the HN community on both the technical implementation (Fabric architecture, validation flow, governance) and the social impact side of applying blockchain responsibly.

Learn more: https://rescathena.com

Thanks for reading — and for any insight or advice you’re willing to share.
by michaelbuckbee | 2025-10-07 18:49:54+00:00
I dug down trying to get the actual paper and it appears it's a pre-print with only the abstract available (but maybe I wasn't looking in the right spot).

That being said, the quotes from the author were more to the point of it being a milestone that in the UK that Solar+Battery systems were now less expensive than gas/coal.

To my understanding, this is a milestone vs "raw" production numbers, which you're correct in saying have had solar as the cheapest option for years.
by floundy | 2025-10-07 18:50:12+00:00
I'm interested in seeing how long I can make it. I have gotten up and left restaurants in the past when they had nothing but QR code menus. I'm sure I'll face some insurmountable obstacle at some point (e.g. on vacation in a foreign country with no laptop, and need to access a website to book tickets or find information on my phone) but I'm curious how often events like that come up and if I'd have the self-discipline to just re-disable the browser after.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-07 18:50:20+00:00
I would ask them “why bother with DUI laws if some people will drive drunk anyway?”

If the only way we can have rules is if they are 100% followed 100% of the time, then we wouldn’t have any rules to begin with. Very publicly revoke the licenses of people who break your rules. You can’t stop everybody, but you can do something. This is just a lame excuse for in action.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-07 18:50:22+00:00
Super cool! What I am wondering is if there is any interest in lets say having a smartphone that has this tech(see my other comment wishing for a open source phone somewhere on hackernews or the internet really)

So lets say we can just have a really lightweight customizable smartphone which just connects over wifi or wire to something like raspberry pi or any really lightweight/small servers which you can carry around and installing waydroid on it could make a really pleasant device and everything could be completely open source and you can make things modular if you want...

Like, maybe some features like music/basic terminal and some other things can be seen from the device too via linux x and anything else like running android apps calls up the server which you can carry around in a backpack with a powerbank

If I really wanted to make it extremely ideal, the device can have a way of plugging another power bank and then removing the first powerbank while still running the system so that it doesn't shut down and you literally got a genuinely fascinating system that is infinitely modular.

Isn't this sort of what stadia was? But just targeted more for gaming side since Games requires gpu's which are kinda expensive...

What are your thoughts? I know its nothing much but I just want a phone which works for 90% of tasks which lets be honest could be done through a really tiny linux or sun ray as well and well if you need something like an android app running, be prepared for a raspberry pi with a cheap battery running in your pocket. Definitely better than creating systems of mass surveillance but my only nitpick of my own idea would be that it may be hard to secure the communication aspect of it if you use something like wifi but I am pretty sure that we can find the perfect communication method too and it shouldn't be thaaat big of a deal with some modifications right?