MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by englishcat | 2025-11-10 03:53:13+00:00
Hi HN,

We built Lingoku, a Browser extension that helps professionals improve English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese naturally while browsing the web. Instead of drills or switching to dictionaries, it offers two modes:

- Translation mode – Instantly translate and explain phrases in context, free translators to use.

- Learning mode – Tracks what you read and provides personalized review sessions with bilingual examples from real websites.

Supports mutual translation and learning across EN ⇄ JP ⇄ KR ⇄ CN.

Motivation: Many friends in Asia struggle to use English (or other languages) confidently at work or while reading foreign-language content in daily life. Constantly switching tabs breaks the flow. Lingoku is lightweight, lives right in the page, and helps you learn passively but effectively.

Built with TypeScript, React, LLM, Chrome Extension MV3.

Try the beta: https://lingoku.ai?c=BetaV1 – free for early users.

Would love feedback from HNers, especially anyone learning languages or building language-related tools.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-10 03:54:22+00:00
A union is functionally a business which sells labor. It's usually structured so that sales are indirect, with their customers paying the workers directly, but that's just accounting.

There's no fundamental reason that a union should seek to prevent anyone from ever getting fired, anymore than any other business would see to prevent any of their employees from being fired. Likewise, there's no fundamental reason that unions should be bad for the businesses that hire their members. A prosperous client is good for business.

Some unions are badly run and hurt themselves. Americans especially tend to assume all unions are this way, partly because of some high-profile examples, partly because of a culture of individualism and association of unions with communism, and partly because of propaganda. But they definitely do not have to be like that.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-11-10 03:54:33+00:00
TP-Link bribe/lobbying in 3, 2, 1...

I recently bought a TP-Link Omada ceiling mountable access point, which has been working great. My Ubiqiti APs are due for an upgrade and the Omada (for a separate network), at half the price of roughly equivalent Ubiqiti APs, is impressing me so far.

(The Ubiqiti's have been rock solid for years though, no complaints whoatsoever).

Netgear (US) and D-Link (Taiwan) were consistently disappointmenting enough that I swore off them many years ago, and buyers-remorse-PTSD prevents me from reconsidering them ever again.
by chairmansteve | 2025-11-10 03:55:22+00:00
"The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong".

That's the conventional wisdom, but is it true?

It was the Thatcher government that shut down those industries. Maybe they didn't need to. There was a lot of collateral damage, privately owned suppliers that went bankrupt etc. A lot of countries have state subsidised industries, including the USA. GM was bailed out by the Obama government. Boeing and Tesla and SpaceX get tons of government money..

There is an interesting book by Tim Lankester, who was the chief economist in the Thatcher government. He has mixed feelings.

If you are interested, the book is:

Inside Thatcher's Monetarist Experiment by Tim Lankester
by alricb | 2025-11-10 03:55:57+00:00
Erm, British management is also famously terrible.

Coal has horrible externalities and its demise is a good thing.

British iron ore is not very rich, and it never was; Britain has imported iron ore since the 19th century. Given how cheap it is to ship iron by sea, it's very hard to justify using low-grade ore that has to be moved by rail.

Because of the large size of the manufacturers, a medium-size country will only have a couple of them, leaving it vulnerable to mismanagement like what happened at British Leyland, AMC, Chrysler, Nissan, ...
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-11-10 03:56:25+00:00
I don't think that's true at all. I had prefect vision up until I graduated college and started spending 10hr a day behind a screen - within two years I ended up getting glasses, although they are a mild prescription and I don't really need them other than driving at night. My friend was in a similar position and they also ended up getting almost the same prescription.

My eye doctor said it was my eyes optimizing for what they do the most. And that makes sense, I have no eye strain using a computer.

Interestingly my vision is better in the summer, and when I take holidays during the summer and spent time away from the computer my eyes essentially fix themselves. It takes a couple months back behind a screen to need my glasses again.
by Barrin92 | 2025-11-10 03:56:29+00:00
>Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency.

The biggest problem with this thinking is that nationally mandated production is fundamentally unable to reduce dependency because national economic policy cannot increase aggregate output. That's to say when you politically prioritize to build ships the question always is what you aren't building instead, because all allocation consists of trade-offs.

Britain does not have a gigantic army of reserve labour to deploy that's doing nothing. It's a relatively small country compared to its competitors (as is Australia), it has limited capital. To recuperate the costs of a large industry in particular you need to be internationally competitive to export at scale. Is that even achievable and worth it at the cost of any other place you could put that capital?

It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is. Free trade is good because it gets you more stuff, autarky does not necessarily diminish your dependence because you're necessarily getting less. North Korea is very autark and still dependent because it's also poor.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-11-10 03:56:35+00:00
Yeah, whenever I post a comment you can just prepend "In my humble opinion.."

Perhaps more interestingly, as a younger person, I felt very differently.

I used to think that military spending was very wasteful. I was ashamed of our countries involvement in the invasion of other countries without UN approval. I had assumed the world was more civilized and peaceful that it was before nukes.

We have free trade all over the world now! Our governments seemed to be actively dismantling manufacturing - the information economy was the future for us.

Now the world descends into chaos, and it will be very slow and expensive to restart those heavy industries.

But actually, I don't really know how expensive it will be to get things started again. Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.
by memset | 2025-11-10 03:56:39+00:00
Nice! Some feedback from my wife, who is into all manner of word games: she found it a little bit brute-forcey: needing to try all different combinations in order to get the right configuration of the word. In contrast to a crossword where there is already a layout, which gives her a hint for how to proceed with the rest.

(She finished today's puzzle, and I gave up.) From a UI perspective it is very slick - very smooth, and I like how it kind of "gets" what you were trying to do when providing corrections/hints.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-10 03:56:59+00:00
This is what happens when there is hyper-optimization of capital rate of return at the expense of cruelly suppressing the rate of labor wage increases. The middle class shrivels up to nothing and the precariat explodes with millions of under-counted homeless and functionally-homeless people. I guess billionaires really want to live in fortified gated communities in otherwise poor countries surrounded by favelas, criminal street gangs, and abject suffering.
by urlahmed | 2025-11-10 03:57:45+00:00
Hey all, OP here (author of the blog post, someone else submitted it ).

I wrote this a few days ago mostly out of frustration and honestly did not expect it to go anywhere. It is pretty surreal to wake up and see it on HN with so much discussion.

Thank you for reading and for all the comments, messages, and thoughtful critiques!

I am currently looking for roles that sit at the intersection of ML, product, and research. I like open ended work where you figure out what to build as much as how to build it. I am a builder, and I also enjoy PM type work and being close to users and the product. If you are working on something in that space and think I might be a fit, I would love to chat.

Also, thank you to Daniel Han for sending me the link and bringing this to my attention.

In any case, thanks again for reading and for the conversation.
by busymom0 | 2025-11-10 03:58:28+00:00
I built something similar for my own personal use case where it allows any LLM to float on top of all windows and chat with it. And I do not collect such info. Your data only goes to the LLM company which you are interacting with:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/select-to-search-ai-assistant/...
by urlahmed | 2025-11-10 03:58:39+00:00
Hey all, OP here (author of the blog post, someone else submitted it ).

I wrote this a few days ago mostly out of frustration and honestly did not expect it to go anywhere. It is pretty surreal to wake up and see it on HN with so much discussion.

Thank you for reading and for all the comments, messages, and thoughtful critiques.

I am currently looking for roles that sit at the intersection of ML, product, and research. I like open ended work where you figure out what to build as much as how to build it. I am a builder, and I also enjoy PM type work and being close to users and the product. If you are working on something in that space and think I might be a fit, I would love to chat.

Also, thank you to Daniel Han for sending me the link and bringing this to my attention.

In any case, thanks again for reading and for the conversation.
by ericpauley | 2025-11-10 03:58:46+00:00
My two cents: As someone who is actively hiring and looking at a lot of résumés from fresh grads (albeit looking for more systems programming experience), I would personally not move forward with an interview for this CV.

Red flags for me:

* Talks a big talk on AI but it’s inscrutable if any of it goes beyond “I installed PyTorch and ran example code/prompted an API”

* Multiple projects but from demos it’s very unclear what they actually did. (Not “very legible technical work”)

* No GitHub on résumé despite claiming it on “skills”

I can get a good engineer onboarded to AI tooling quickly (heck, some of the referenced techniques have existed for only months), but I can’t reliably take someone from AI consumer to engineer.

These issues are very widespread. I’d say under 10% of junior résumés I look at give me confidence that they’d show up and know how to write real systems instead of just gluing things together.
by Nursie | 2025-11-10 03:59:10+00:00
> Namco had a patent on the idea of "a minigame playable during a loading screen".

When does that date from?

Because I remember playing "Invade-a-load" on the C64 in the 80s, while waiting for (I think) Slimey's Mine to load off tape. It was fun enough that sometimes I would stop the tape and just play space invaders for a while.

(edit - ah, and there it is, at the bottom of the fast-loader article on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_loader

"In 1995, Yoichi Hayashi of Namco Ltd. invented a variant of the Invade-a-Load technique for use with optical disc based platforms such as PlayStation and applied for a patent. U.S. patent 5,718,632 was granted in February 1998 and assigned to Namco despite the Invade-a-Load prior art."

Hey, I guess that means...

Edit again: got my timelines wrong, 1995 was 30 years ago, this thing is long-expired. Ugh, I am old...)
by georgemcbay | 2025-11-10 03:59:22+00:00
Just anecdata, perhaps, but same.

I did nerdy kid stuff like read lots of books and use computer screens (uncommon back then, I'm 52)... but I also played outdoors for hours nearly every single day.

Ended up with vision at -6.00 by the time I was a young teenager (don't remember the age it started to slide that way but would estimate around 7-8 or so). Hasn't gotten any worse (or better) since then.
by wilg | 2025-11-10 04:00:33+00:00
I use the GitHub Desktop AI commit message generator, which is often better than a bullshit commit message, especially for small projects. It is often sufficient (though too verbose) for simple changes, but does regularly miss the point.

But I do agree that you want the commit message to encode your reasoning for the change.

If anybody who works on one of these commit message generators is around, some requests:

1. just allow it to take any existing commit message I've already written and expand it based on the diff. that will let me have a starting point or give a crappy but directionally accurate intention explanation

2. look at surrounding code agentically

3. make the commit messages shorter and less fluffy
by charcircuit | 2025-11-10 04:00:42+00:00
I can't stand localizers. The famicom didn't need to be completely redesigned in order for it to succeed. There was clear market success in Japan already, so they knew the software would be capable to sell systems. I feel like there are other strategies to get stores to stock the product that don't involve redesigning everything. For example they could give guarantees to purchase back unsold stock, and if the famicon failed in America they could ship the units back to Japan to sell them there.

Also, revealing they were doing illegal price fixing with Sega is not surprising.
by frontendstrong | 2025-11-10 04:00:58+00:00
I'm working on a performance review (PR) management platform that doesn't require a steep cost and deep integration into HRMS platforms.

It's a need I have for myself and the teams I run – It offers direct PR's, 360º reviews, recording of wins and lessons (something often overlooked), and aims to be a platform for team and individualised growth, that is accessible to small and large businesses alike.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-11-10 04:01:08+00:00
SPLADE-easy: https://github.com/dleemiller/splade-easy

I wanted a simple retrieval index to use splade sparse vectors. This just encodes and serializes documents into flatbuffers and appends them into shards. Retrieval is just parallel flat scan, optionally with reranking.

The idea is just a simple, portable index for smaller data sizes. I’m targeting high quality hybrid retrieval, for local search, RAG or deep research scenarios.

SPLADE is a really nice “in-between” for semantic and lexical search. There’s bigger and better indexes out there like Faiss or Anserini, but I just kinda wanted something basic.

I was testing it on 120k docs in a simple cli the other day and it’s still as good as any web search experience (in terms of latency) — so I think it’ll be useful.

We’re still trying to clean up the API and do a thorough once over, so I’m not sure I’d recommend trying it yet. Hopefully soon.
by somenameforme | 2025-11-10 04:01:17+00:00
In some ways I'm starting to enjoy this. Do you remember the 419 scams? 'Hi, I'm a Nigerian prince named Michael Jordan. Give me $50 so I can buy some chemicals to clean a bunch of money I secretly stowed away and I'll send you $5000.' People actually used to fall for that. Of course some people probably still would (and a lot more certainly gets blocked by spam blockers) but I think overall society grew less substantially less gullible over time.

But in general I think most people still remain excessively gullible and naive. Social media image crafting is one of the best examples of this. People create completely fake and idealized lives that naive individuals think are real. Now with AI enabling one to create compelling 'proof' of whatever lie you want, I think more people are becoming more suspicious of things that were, in fact, fake all along.

---

Going back to ancient times many don't know that Socrates literally wrote nothing down. Basically everything we know of him is thanks to other people, his student Plato in particular, instead writing down what he said. The reason for this was not a lack of literacy - rather he felt that writing was harmful because words cannot defend themselves, and can be spun into misrepresentations or falsehoods. Basically - the argumentative fallacies that indeed make up most 'internet debates', for instance. Yet now few people are not aware of this issue, and quotes themselves are rarely taken at face value, unless they confirm ones biases. People became less naive as writing became ubiquitous, and I think this is probably a recurring theme in technologies that transform our abilities to transfer information in some format or another.
by rzerowan | 2025-11-10 04:01:37+00:00
I think on a similar scale would be the Chinese South–North Water Transfer Project , which has taken several decades to eventually move 44.8 cubic km of fresh water via canls/aqueducts etc through some mountanious terrain.

Or the undground Great Man-Made River Project of Libya moving 6.5 million cubic meters over 2,820 km.

Main issue ther though is the first is from already present freshwater sources and the latter from underground aquifers. With both having been done over multilpe decades to reach that capacity. Finding the water to move would be the main challenge, een though the Caspian is less saline than ocean water - there are probably water usage agreemets with the neighbourign countries preventing a massive undertaking of such size.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-11-10 04:01:40+00:00
> believing that you (and whatever group you identify as “us”) are able to deterministically identify AI text

I think you will find the OP said no such thing. They instead said they identified a mixture of writing styles consistent with a human author and an LLM. The OP says nothing about deterministically identifying LLMs, only that the style of specific sections is consistent with LLMs leading to the conclusion.
by usemojoapp | 2025-11-10 04:03:09+00:00
I'm working on a _boring_ business - a CRM for pilates and yoga studios (https://www.usemojo.app/en). Most tools in this space are bloated or built for gyms, not for someone juggling reformer classes, cancellations, and back-to-back privates.

It started when a friend who runs a studio showed me her system: printed calendars, WhatsApp messages from clients at midnight, and sticky notes for who paid. I'm trying to make something quieter. It should feel like an assistant, not another tool to manage.
by jmyeet | 2025-11-10 04:03:50+00:00
Some years ago I read the Neal Stephenson book Anathem. SPOILERS: it has a version of the Internet called the Reticulum and one thing I remember is that it was filled with garbage. True information subtly changed multiple times until it was garbage. And there were agents to see through the garbage. I imagined this to be a neverending arms race.

Honestly, this is kind of where I see LLM generated content going where you'll have to pay for ChatGPT 9 to get information because all the other bots have vandalized all the primary sources.

What's really fascinating is you need GPUs for LLMs. And most LLM output is, well, garbage. What did you previously need GPUs for? Mining crypto and that is, at least in the case of Bitcoin, pointless work for the sake of pointless work ie garbage.

I can see a future in our lifetimes where a significant amount of our capital expenditure and energy consumption is used, quite simply, to produce garbage.
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-10 04:04:01+00:00
In stuff I maintain I hardly get anything at all, whether using LLMs or not, so it does not affect me much. Furthermore, I exclusively use the API, so the UI will not try to make you use Copilot and those things either (that is not the reason I use the API, although it is a side effect).

I do not use Copilot, Claude, etc, although I partially agree with one of the comments there, that using LLM for minor auto-completion is probably OK, as long as you can actually see that the completion is not incorrect (although that should apply to other uses of auto-completion too, even if LLM is not used; but it is even more important to check more carefully if LLM is used). I think it would be better to not accept any LLM generated stuff otherwise (although the author might use LLM to assist before submitting it if desired (I don't, but it might help some programmers), e.g. in case the LLM finds problems with it, that they will then have to review themself to check if it is correct, before correcting and submitting it; i.e. don't trust the results of the LLM).

It links to https://github.com/lxc/incus/commit/54c3f05ee438b962e8ac4592... (add .patch on the end of the URL if it is not displayed), and I think the policy described there is good. (However, for my own projects, nobody else can directly modify it anyways; they will have to make their own copy and modify that instead, and then I will review it by myself and can include the changes (possibly with differences from how they did it) or not.)
by inemesitaffia | 2025-11-10 04:04:09+00:00
To control their destiny.

The truth is most Telcos don't have the leverage to extort the hyperscalers as the value goes more and more to them.

In the end the money they are asking for isn't even a lot 20MM from META to DTAG for example.

But you don't pay the Danegeld.

The Telcos are still getting money for landing and transport. Just not IP transit.

Ultimately the Telcos want to share the cost burdens of connectivity. This is what the companies have decided to share.
by amarant | 2025-11-10 04:04:22+00:00
I've found the ubiquiti devices to be somewhat overly complex and generally overkill for all home-networks I've ever used them for. All the graphs and stuff tickles a nerdy nerve somewhere in me, but honestly I can get equally stable networks for less than a quarter of the price, but without all the fancy bells and whistles that I only enjoy four about 2 hours after installing anyway
by djtango | 2025-11-10 04:04:40+00:00
I'm pretty sure steps count when you get up and go to the toilet...

When I did my masters, we were in a Chemistry wet lab 8 hours a day and during the first month I would come home completely exhausted. I realised later that this was because I wasn't used to being on my feet all day walking around even though it didn't feel like I was being active shuffling from machine to machine, fume hood to sink etc
by chairmansteve | 2025-11-10 04:04:40+00:00
There are lots of manufacturers in the UK right now who have fantastic quality. Rolls Royce aero engines. Lots of pharmaceuticals. Airbus wings and landing gear. Lots of cars as well. Medical devices. The list is endless.

The UK manufacturing sector was worth $279 billion in the last year.

https://www.makeuk.org/insights/reports/uk-manufacturing-fac...
by openinfrared | 2025-11-10 04:04:49+00:00
I left my job to work with the technologies (embedded rust, SQL, custom PCBs, typescript & angular, more rust server side) and practices I'd been dying to use and build a solution for a problem I had. A big part was also the desire to control complexity and lead product direction instead of taking assignments knowing they were the wrong direction for the products and their consumers.

It's an instant remote control built for shared spaces. Anyone can use the remote with a QR code on their mobile device. Since its IoT there are lots of interesting features including permissions, various remote interfaces, universal remote capabilities and more.

https://openinfrared.com
by jawon | 2025-11-10 04:05:04+00:00
I'm building my take on a low-touch task completion assistant designed to counter distraction and hyper-habituation.

It's starting off as a MacOS app because that's the machine I have. I didn't know Swift or SwiftUI when I started. I now know them somewhat, but the entire app has been vibe-coded. This has made it slow going. Very "1 step forward 2 steps back" until I switched from Claude Code to Codex and GPT-5.

I'm hoping to start an initial beta within the family in the next week or two, and then a wider round in January.