MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dlubarov | 2025-10-12 14:44:22+00:00
Actually there's a Wikipedia guideline (WP:BIASED) along the lines of "bias doesn't necessarily make a source unreliable", which in practice is taken to mean that bias doesn't matter.

Of course in practice, editors have their own biases and decisions come down popularity contests. Wikipedia's own biases seem to get worse over time, as more neutral editors give up, so we end up with some weird things like

- Almost all conservative news sources having low reliability ratings.

- Daily Mail for example is deprecated, the lowest possible rating outside of literal spam.

- Al Jazeera, which seems largely controlled by the Qatari monarchy, has the highest reliability rating and is the most-used source in Israel-Palestine. Even their blog is the top source on many articles, despite news blogs being against policy.

- Al-Manar, the Hezbollah mouthpiece which is very unashamedly biased (e.g. refering to their terrorists as "men of god"), has a somewhat low reliability rating, but still higher than several conservative sources like Daily Mail.

(See the list here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...)
by floundy | 2025-10-12 14:46:36+00:00
Might sound elitist but the average person isn’t curious enough to figure this stuff out, and above all else they’re lazy. If it’s not a one click install and does something better than what they’re using, why would they switch?

The average person is fine giving up their data and time in exchange for entertainment and convenience. Free software is good but it comes at the cost of time, you have to learn and be at least semi-competent with a terminal and/or Linux to truly use most FOSS stuff and it’s just beyond the average person. They either don’t have the interest, or don’t have the capability to learn it and for all intents and purposes those are fundamentally equivalent.

Honestly, nothing “bad” has happened to most people as a result of data harvesting. The Equifax breach got a ton of people, including hardcore privacy nerds. There’s just some stuff you can’t turn off to participate in modern society.
by la_mezcla | 2025-10-12 14:47:50+00:00
Or one could look it the the other way around: the 50 countries, more or less, (Europe + US), that fight with the hands of Ukraine, as proxies, still haven't been able to defeat ONE Russia.

And despite of 23k of sanctions they've imposed on Russia, which is the absolute record by a looooooong margin on its own.
by blindriver | 2025-10-12 14:48:08+00:00
This is why having a benevolent dictator sometimes results in better progress than committees. It’s a double edged sword obviously if the dictator has limited skill but having someone like a Steve Jobs or Linus clears the way for progress when things like “consensus” causes decisions to take years or die from inertia. I’ve seen this first hand at FAANGs where bureaucracy kills great ideas because bureaucrats in key areas don’t want to lift a finger to make changes.

The big counter example is c++ which I feel is too productive and should slow down their decisions by a factor of 3.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-10-12 14:48:46+00:00
> unfortunately they hadn't quite reached the image quality needed for professional photographers.

I always wondered about that - since it works by interleaving pixels at different focal depths, there's always going to be a resolution tradeoff that a single-plane focus camera wouldn't.

It's such a cool idea though, and no more difficult to manufacturer than a sensor + micro lens array.
by jmclnx | 2025-10-12 14:49:22+00:00
A wrangler using software just does not "compute" to me. But I guess this is our new world.

I drove a CJ for many years until it rusted out from under me and the engine seized, but I thought it was great, I went everywhere with it.

I would like to have a wrangler but it is too expensive, too many bells and whistles and to large, I would never get one.

Now I an driving an 18 year auto and hope to keep it going for another 18 :)
by carlesfe | 2025-10-12 14:49:28+00:00
I built a chatbot startup in 2015. It integrated with Whatsapp (which was possible at the time with some hacks), and had:

- Multimodality: Text/audio/images input and output. Integrated OCR.

- Connection with an asterisk server, it could send and receive voice phone calls! I used it to call for pizzas to a local place via whatsapp. This was prior to Google's famous demo calling a hairdresser to book a haircut.

- It understood humor and message sentiment, told jokes and sometimes even chimed in with a "haha" if somebody said something funny in a group chat or sent an appropriate gif reaction

- Memory (facts database)

- Useful features such as scheduling, polling, translations, image search, etc.

Regarding the tech, I used external models (Watson was pretty good at the time), plus classical NLP processing and symbolic reasoning that I learned in college.

Nobody understood the point of it (where's the GUI? how do I know what to ask it? customers asked) and I didn't make a single dime out of the project. I closed it a couple years later. Sometimes I wonder what could've been of it.
by Retric | 2025-10-12 14:49:41+00:00
Those California Wildfires were difficult to control due to the extreme wind. Weather was a direct cause of well over 95% of the damages.

Inflation isn’t enough to actually measure what you care about here. A paper should account for individual homes increasing in value faster than inflation and the overall population increase.

Without that it’s far better to just convey the raw numbers and link to an more in depth analysis.
Show HN: I built a simple ambient sound app with no ads or subscriptions
by alpaca121 | 2025-10-12 14:49:50+00:00
I’ve always liked having background noise while working or falling asleep, but I got frustrated that most “white noise” or ambient sound apps are either paywalled, stuffed with ads, or try to upsell subscriptions for basic features.

So I made Ambi, a small iOS app with a clean interface and a set of freely available ambient sounds — rain, waves, wind, birds, that sort of thing. You can mix them, adjust volume levels, and just let it play all night or while you work. Everything works offline and there are no hidden catches.

It’s something I built for myself first, but I figured others might find it useful too. Feedback, bugs, and suggestions are all welcome.

https://apps.apple.com/app/ambi-white-noise-sleep-sounds/id6...
Show HN: GitHub-native prediction markets using Issues (no DB)
by _1tan | 2025-10-12 14:50:31+00:00
I built a tiny prediction market that lives entirely in GitHub Issues—no external database. Each market is a concrete question about repo work, e.g., “Will Issue #123 be closed by 2025-11-15?” Collaborators buy YES/NO shares to express beliefs, and the price (0 - 1) reflects the team’s collective forecast. This helps with planning, prioritization, and making expectations transparent - without real money.

Under the hood: signed JSON snapshots (market and ledger) embedded in issues, LMSR pricing, seq-based optimistic concurrency with retries, and collaborator-only trading.

I haven’t deployed a public instance yet for the repo - planning to do so after incorporating initial feedback. Repo: https://github.com/philippnagel/gantt

I’d love feedback on governance (caps per user, conflicts of interest), which questions are most useful (deadlines, PR merges, releases), and the UX of comment-driven trading.
by sph | 2025-10-12 14:51:27+00:00
My uninformed impression of the Python steering committee has always been like the C/C++ one. Ponderously bureaucratic, trying to find solutions that work for every competing interest, by the time they get to an agreement the real world has already moved on and solved things in their own way, which makes fragmentation and intercompatibility worse.

I know that Guido isn’t around any more, but this is what a BDFL is useful for. To have the final say when, inevitably, the squabbling parties are unable to find a compromise.
by jasode | 2025-10-12 14:52:53+00:00
>, then you wouldn't put an ad on your site that wasn't valid XHTML,

You're overlooking how incentives and motivations work. The gp (and their employer) wants to integrate the advertisement snippet -- even with broken XHTML -- because they receive money for it.

The semantic data ("advertiser's message") is more important than the format ("purity of perfect XHTML").

Same incentives would happen with a jobs listing website like Monster.com. Consider that it currently has lots of red errors with incorrect HTML: https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.monster.c...

If there was a hypothetical browser that refused to load that Monster.com webpage full of errors because it's for the users' own good and the "good of the ecosystem"... the websurfers would perceive that web browser as user-hostile and would choose another browser that would be forgiving of those errors and just load the page. Job hunters care more about the raw data of the actual job listings so they can get a paycheck rather than invalid <style> tags nested inside <div> tags.

Those situations above are a different category (semantic_content-overrides-fileformatsyntax) than a developer trying to import a Python library with invalid syntax (fileformatsyntax-Is-The-Semantic_Content).

EDIT reply to: >Make the advertisement block an iframe [...] If the advertiser delivers invalid XHTML code, only the advertisement won't render.

You're proposing a "technical solution" to avoid errors instead of a "business solution" to achieve a desired monetary objective. To re-iterate, they want to render the invalid XHTML code so your idea to just not render it is the opposite of the goal.

In other words, if rendering imperfect-HTML helps the business goal more than blanking out invalid XHTML in an iframe, that means HTML "wins" in the marketplace of ideas.
by mikewarot | 2025-10-12 14:53:25+00:00
I remember talking with someone well over a decade ago who predicted this over Thanksgiving Dinner. The politicians decided to let Magnequench, an Indiana company that made the small, very high torque rare-earth magnet servomotors you need if you want to steer missile fins, etc. get sold to China.

He used to work incorporating those motors into other gear, and predicted this would come back to bite us.

My understanding is the main thing keeping us from ramping up the US domestic rare earth supply chain is the cost of environmental compliance. A long term thinking DOD would have kept this in mind for National Security reasons, and funded things just to keep our supplies viable. As it is, we have vast national security stockpiles of various raw materials, but you know how well central planning worked out for the Soviets.
by sarcasticsiri | 2025-10-12 14:54:03+00:00
Their own example of Claude being able to "reason" is rather funny-

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jIxjzUWG-6xBVIa2ay6y...

First it says that if you ask a logic problem without any system prompt it will not get it. But if you add a system prompt that "You are a logic bot designed to answer complex logic problems.", it will get it right.

It gets "a married person (Jack) is looking at an unmarried person (George)" which is simply incorrect!

They also add "Although notably not for all the right reasons", is it to justify the logic?
by bobmcnamara | 2025-10-12 14:54:06+00:00
> IBM MicroChannel. Early minicomputer and microcomputer designers thought "bus", where peripherals can talk to memory and peripherals look like memory to the CPU. Mainframes, though, had "channels", simple processors which connected peripherals to the CPU.

TIL: what microchannel meant by micro and channel.

Also it had OS independent device-class drivers.

And you could stuff a new CPU on a card and pop it right in. Went from a 286+2MB to a 486dx2+32MB.
by ungreased0675 | 2025-10-12 14:54:51+00:00
I’d like somewhere where I can read about flat-earth beliefs in a neutral, non-advocacy perspective.

My train of thought goes something like “wow, people actually think the earth is flat? That’s crazy.” > “Is this an internet meme thing or 4chan astroturf thing?” > “I wonder why and how many people actually believe that?”

At no point am I confused or persuadable about the shape of the planet. I’ve looked out an airplane window before. Maybe that’s what feels off about it. There’s an underlying feeling of protecting a gullible public from bad information, a process with a high risk of being corrupted by ideologues.
by tpm | 2025-10-12 14:55:14+00:00
It's about a passport field than can represent anything the issuing country wishes. So for example a traveller that has the value of this field changed according to a German law [0] to anything different than M or F (most probably other values will be represented with an X) will be denied entry to the US.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesetz_%C3%BCber_die_Selbstbes...
by rPlayer6554 | 2025-10-12 14:55:53+00:00
I’m going to Japan in a week and I’m doing 1 week Tokyo, 2 days Nakasendo trail, 1 week Kyoto, 2 days Hiroshima. (Plus a day leftover I haven’t decided what to do with)

Do people have tips to find less touristy but still worthwhile places to go. Tourists go for these big places because traveling to Japan costs quite a bit and I’m using limited vacation time. Planning the trip in a location where the language doesn’t even have the same characters and I don’t have many familiar geographical reference points that coordinate with known cultural themes (unlike Europe) is already a bit overwhelming.
by EdiX | 2025-10-12 14:56:06+00:00
Version 1 was never licensed to anyone. Version 2 was only licensed to universities for an undiscolsed price. Version 3 was sold as a book, I think this is the version you are referring to. However note that this version contained a license that only allowed non commercial uses of the source code. It also came with no support, no community and no planned updates (the project was shelved half a year later in favor of inferno)

More than the price tag the problem is that plan 9 wasn't really released until 2004.
by abpavel | 2025-10-12 14:56:27+00:00
Nobody is 100% right or 100% wrong. There is no "side" that talks about the size of the world population, and the fact that the scientific advances are the reason for the ability of entire human race to exhaust available resources. There is also no "side" that ranks the global climate change truly globally, and focuses on top priorities. There are no global "sides". There are only people. People do care, but people also don't want to make hard choices. Finger pointing is just too easy.
by tgv | 2025-10-12 14:56:29+00:00
That was not the point. One of the ancestors said we're flooded in foreign news, to which another one replied "something something supply chains". While there used to be relevant info in the papers, there no longer is. Foreign news consists of Trump, wars, and some spectacular crimes. Politics, economy, trade, let alone culture is no longer reported on. Reporting nowadays is click-baity, less relevant, even for such a narrow topic as "supply chain" than it used to be, yet the good old days is what people have in mind when they think about foreign news.

Actually reading the foreign news ... how many papers are you going to check? And quite a few of those will only contain government approved news. Good luck getting info on Covid from Chinese news papers.

Journalism has been murdered.
by PKop | 2025-10-12 14:57:36+00:00
> A wrangler using software just does not "compute" to me.

In the case of this Jeep bug causing engine shutoff and power failure, it was an update to the infotainment system! It's easy to compute that these infotainment systems run software; what's crazy is updates to them can cause catastrophic failure to powering the car and ability of the car to drive.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-12 14:57:49+00:00
This is chilling (from https://www.jlwranglerforums.com/forum/threads/2024-4xe-loss...):

> On my drive home I abruptly had absolutely no acceleration, the gear indicator on the dash started flashing, the power mode indicator disappeared, an alert said shift into park and press the brake + start button, and the check engine light and red wrench lights came on. I was still able to steer and brake with power steering and brakes for maybe 30 seconds before those went out too. After putting it into park and pressing the brake and start button it started back up and I could drive it normally for a little bit, but it happened two more times on my 1.5 mi drive home.

If that happened on the highway I could easily see people being killed.
Show HN: Pyversity – Fast Result Diversification for Retrieval and RAG
by Tananon | 2025-10-12 14:58:08+00:00
Hey HN! I’ve just open-sourced Pyversity, a lightweight library for diversifying retrieval results. Most retrieval systems optimize only for relevance. This often leads to top-k results that look almost identical. Pyversity efficiently re-ranks results to balance relevance and diversity, surfacing items that remain relevant but are less redundant.

Main features:

- Unified API: one function (diversify) supporting several well-known strategies: MMR, MSD, DPP, and COVER (with more to come)

- Lightweight: the only dependency is NumPy, keeping the package small and easy to install

- Fast: efficient implementations for all supported strategies; diversify results in milliseconds

Re-ranking with cross-encoders is very popular right now, but also very expensive. From my experience, you can usually improve retrieval results with simpler and faster methods, such as the ones implemented in this package. This helps retrieval, recommendation, and RAG systems present richer, more informative results by ensuring each new item adds new information.

Code and docs: github.com/pringled/pyversity

Let me know if you have any feedback, or suggestions for other diversification strategies to support!
by marliechiller | 2025-10-12 14:58:23+00:00
Im not sure if this is a comment generated by a bot, a troll or something else to try and generate disinformation or something. I've seen a few comments on this thread which seem out of line from the usual sort of good natured discourse seen on HN. Not sure if its this particular topic or a sign of the times.

Anyway, having had long covid myself for over 15 months, there are many, many people suffering with it, we are just discovering the tip of the iceberg
by kbolino | 2025-10-12 15:00:36+00:00
Windows containers are interesting. Windows--like most other operating systems--mediates interaction between applications and the operating system though libraries (specifically, user32.dll and kernel32.dll). Whereas, Linux provides a stable syscall ABI that applications can directly interact with. This makes Linux containers fairly insensitive to host kernel version, as long as they don't use experimental features and the host kernel isn't older than the stable features needed by the container processes.

I would have expected Microsoft to address this issue in Windows containers by supplying the correct version of the system DLLs at runtime. However, it seems that they decided to bake them in at build time instead. This makes Windows containers similar to Linux containers but it could have made them quite kernel-version-sensitive. According to MSDN, newer kernels are able to run older images, implying to me that they've begun to stabilize the kernel interface, potentially enough to enable proper static binaries. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscont...

For the topic at hand, though, Windows containers run Windows software, and a lot of software that gets containerized never runs on Windows normally and so can't easily be containerized for that platform. Even when the language and libraries are cross-platform, the build process often isn't.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-12 15:01:24+00:00
100% agree that most people aren't curious about it.

but still, that is why I mentioned some priorities in sharing open source. If I share some niche golang/rust tool, I am sure most people wouldn't care but if I share something like f-droid/signal. I feel like that can help out a lot of people instead.

The result of data harvesting is not a breach. but the whole system that it is right now, for all such data harvesting imo, the most common fraction seems to be hate which gets the most engagement which is why to me most social media feels hateful off the start and why its linked to some of the issues we have right now. Its definitely escalated.

There are some genuine problems in economies all around the world yet if those nations leaders try to scapegoat, trying to create a us vs them, its not a good fix and shit might break and we would all be too invested in watching yt shorts.

What I am advocating with foss is also federation/curated social media with no algorithms but that is the step two imo. The step one to mass adoption for such things might be to have people more familiar/comfortable with open source.

Overall, we need to fight on both fronts if we want change. Both algorithmic and open source apps based. Some open source apps are predatory, they will charge you recurring and hope you forget. Some cheap/quickly built games which can be open source for android for all purposes aren't open source right now and they exploit children's lack of financial knowledge in that sense(scams of sorts).

I think people will create 10$ subscriptions to a local text editor in this world. I just wish instead of people spending those 10$ there or somewhere else, why can't we donate to open source as a society so that the software can be more complete/helpful to even more people and so on and so on...

What are your thoughts?
by cjbgkagh | 2025-10-12 15:01:32+00:00
I got pericarditis bad enough that I thought it was going to kill me but not bad enough to show up in any test. Thankfully the cardiologist accepted my description of what I felt and prescribed me colchicine which worked. I guess it would be called subclinical pericarditis and it would be good to have some stats on how often that happens.
by AngryData | 2025-10-12 15:02:42+00:00
Its an unusual solution but you can train cold acclimation to your hands. Ice climbers do it to prevent their hands from freezing up during a climb. It essentially boils down to sticking your hands in ice cold water for long enough periods of time, like 30-45 minutes once or twice each day is what I remember reading for a week or two before a climb/cold weather. And after you do it enough times your body learns to increase blood flow to your hands along with increasing your base rate of metabolism as a response to cold hands, versus the default unacclimated response of slowing blood flow to your hands to preserve core temperature. And the effect will get stronger the more often and longer you do it.

The effect will diminish over time if you don't use it, but not completely until over a year or more of not using it, and you can do it before cold weather hits. It probably happens somewhat to you already if you are experiencing it enough, however you might not really get the effects naturally until we are already nearing spring, or if you only ever experience it for 15 minutes at a time and then go roast your hands on a heater, versus training it in the fall so when deep winter hits you are already very well acclimated to it.

Its the same effect that lets people wear shorts or kilts or whatever in the winter and snow. They aren't unusual or weird or got warm blood, they just exposed their legs often enough to cold for the body to learn and adapt until it no longer bothered them. It can even go pretty extreme to people being barefoot in the snow for hours at a time, when someone unused to it would have frost bite in 20 minutes.
by sph | 2025-10-12 15:03:08+00:00
I never thought about it, but yeah, the concept of “fetch a repository of packages, resolve dependencies, download a tarball and put it in a special place on disk” is such a common operation that it should have been solved once and reusable across languages or anything else that needs this process (editor plugin, font management, gamedev and audio assets, OS packages, app store, etc.)

Yet any language has to reinvent the wheel and write yet another archive downloader.