MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by piva00 | 2025-11-17 13:15:05+00:00
> This isn't a problem that municipalities with "better in the landfill than the river" policies have. This is the kind of problem you get when a bunch of the let them eat cake crowd run amuck. It's literally the "why is our city covered in trash". "I don't know Karen, maybe because you voted to have everyone pay per bag so nobody picks up litter the blows into their yard because it literally costs them" problem but in truck sized increments.

Yes, dumping trash costs money, as it should, how else do you wish to account for the externality of creating trash? Either through taxes or paying per disposal.

It seems to work pretty well here in Sweden (it's free at the point of collection, paid by taxes), it's a bit annoying to go to the proper recycling center for anything that isn't normal household trash but people still do it, it's not perfect but bigger recycling stations accepting tyres, furniture, electronics, etc. are properly used to dispose of anything that isn't paper/plastics/metal/glass from day-to-day usage, for those there are always a nearby recycling station to dispose at.

Also looks like it works well in the Netherlands, in Denmark, and other countries with similar wealth to the UK. Perhaps it's culture the problem, not policy, fix the culture.

It's very easy to screech about overregulation as the cause of anything, like a boogeyman you can use for all sorts of issues, this issue in particular is quite properly solved in similar countries so stop with the screech, please. If the regulations in place do not work, change it, do away with paying for collection and use taxes for it so people don't feel the pain when they need to throw the trash out, it's already "paid".

The biggest environmental scandal in Sweden in the past years was the Think Pink[0] case where a company ("Think Pink") lied about properly disposing of the trash they were responsible for, founder and directors of the company are in jail for that.

[0] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Pink-skandalen
Show HN: An AI nutrition coach you can text on iMessage/WhatsApp
by itaydressler | 2025-11-17 13:15:50+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with messaging-native AI agents and built an early prototype of an AI nutrition coach that works through iMessage (WhatsApp support coming soon). You send it a meal photo or a voice note, and it estimates calories/macros and logs everything automatically. It also builds a daily plan and sends weekly summaries based on your actual behavior.

The goal is to explore whether messaging can reduce the friction and drop-off that happens in traditional food-tracking apps. Early testers seem to stick with this format much more consistently.

Some technical details for context:

Vision & reasoning powered by a combination of Gemini and Perplexity

Agent runtime using the Vercel AI SDK

Gateway layer with Vercel’s GW

Image → nutrition estimation via serverless functions

iMessage integration through a local relay setup

WhatsApp Cloud API integration in progress

Still very early, and I’m trying to understand if a chat-first UX can make nutrition tracking feel effortless instead of a chore. Happy to hear feedback on the approach, concerns I should think about, or any similar systems worth studying.
by redwood | 2025-11-17 13:16:30+00:00
Has anyone actually seen verification? (other than lot's and lot's of press release type collateral I don't see any evidence of anyone publicly stating that they work for this company. The press releases claim they have 50 employees many of whom were experienced frok semiconductor equipment companies but can anyone actually put their hand up and claim to be one of those people? Also the list of companies is a little suspicious as if designed to pass a sniff test for a naive audience and the careers page is particularly misaligned with what you would expect they're looking for. The only scientist they're hiring is an "AI" scientist?)
by vel0city | 2025-11-17 13:16:45+00:00
I take my small kids on public transit often. Why can't kids ride a bus or a train? Don't we even have special forms of mass transit for little kids (school busses?)

How are cars better with little kids? If I'm in the car with my kids and one kid suddenly really wants a snack, there's nothing I can do. They're strapped in the back, I'm in the front driving. On the train, I just grab a snack from my bag and give them a bite. Or if they're bored I can play with them, etc.

> it fundamentally just can't do the "last mile", pretty much ever.

I live in a suburb in North Texas. I walk out my door with the stroller and my kids. There's a bus stop super close by that can easily load a stroller (all busses are wheelchair accessible). I take that to the train station or the bus goes to the library or several other parks and rec centers. The train stops a very short walk to several museums, the convention center, the airport, the zoo has its own train station, the hockey/basketball arena has its own stop, etc. And this is all in an area where the mass transit isn't even that great.

The transit doesn't go everywhere we want to go. I agree that's the biggest pain point. But I truly don't understand the logic that it's bad for kids. My kids ride often, and they love it. What kid hates trains?
by djoldman | 2025-11-17 13:17:17+00:00
> The difficulties in search are almost entirely dealing with the large amounts of data, both logistically and in handling underspecified queries.

Large amounts of data seem obviously difficult.

For your second difficulty, "handling underspecified queries": it seems to me that's a subset of the problem of, "given a query, what are the most relevant results?" That problem seems very tricky, partially because there is no exact true answer.

marginalia search is great as a contrast to engines like google, in part because google chooses to display advertisements as the most relevant results.

Have you found any of the TREC papers helpful?

https://trec.nist.gov/
by loup-vaillant | 2025-11-17 13:17:39+00:00
> I'm baffled as to why you would want to use macros to emulate c++.

I like the power of destructors (auto cleanup) and templates (generic containers). But I also want a language that I can parse. Like, at all.

C is pretty easy to parse. Quite a few annoying corner cases, some context sensitive stuff, but still pretty workable. C++ on the other hand? It’s mostly pick a frontend or the highway.
by daveguy | 2025-11-17 13:17:42+00:00
You are absolutely correct. There are multiple algorithmic advances required in addition to hardware advances.

Parrots have hundreds of millions to a few billion neurons, which are just as much parallel-local state-proceasing units as the ones in the mammalian brain. We haven't done a great job of simulating a ~300 neuron c. elegans worm. Not that simulation is required for equivalent intelligence. I'm just saying these analog machines are much much more complex and powerful than the average AI aficionado gives credit. So complex that we are nowhere near AGI.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-11-17 13:17:59+00:00
Thanks!

The Enigma-cracking Bombe (on display at the extraordinary Bletchley Museum of Computing) also used relays

https://www.tnmoc.org/bh-10-bombe-description

And the Z3 as well!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
by nchmy | 2025-11-17 13:19:36+00:00
Debezium published this doc on Exactly-once delivery with their most recent 3.3.0 version. They dont support it natively, but say it can be achieved via Kafka Connect

https://debezium.io/documentation/reference/stable/configura...

You could probably achieve something similar with the NATS Jetstream sink as well, which has similar capabilities - though I think it doesnt have quite the same guarantees.

I switched to using Debezium a few months ago, after a Golang alternative to Debezium + Kafka Connect - ConduitIO - went defunct. I should have been using Debezium all along, as it is clearly the most mature, most stable option in the space, with the best prospects for long-term survival. Highly recommended, even if it is JVM (though they're currently doing some interesting stuff with Quarkus and GraalVM that might lead to a jvm-free binary at some point)
by matt_s | 2025-11-17 13:20:31+00:00
Cloud is not losing ground but also Cloud computing is also not suitable for every business problem. Its killer feature for businesses with fluctuating usage profiles and "busy" seasons. Think like a tax related application for businesses, in the US, they have to file quarterly and annual. There are probably busy seasons where there would likely be more activity so a cloud compute environment where you can scale up to handle the load with a couple commands is ideal and then scale it down (and lower your costs) during slow times.

Indie hackers and small < 10 people startups don't need cloud. However its easier to get moving and scale up and you can just tie in all sorts of other services to make your life easier. If you're on-prem or managing VMs you need to figure out a lot of infrastructure things, networking, security, logging, failover, etc.

Then there is transferring risk. If you host your own infrastructure and you have an outage unrelated to HW or data center, that is entirely on you and to be honest will probably happen more frequently than using cloud. When your cloud provider is down, if its a household name, everyone already knows because everything else they use is probably having issues too. Much easier explanation to customers, they likely won't leave over a cloud outage.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-11-17 13:21:01+00:00
Amazing! I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone owning many..!

1) Are any of them for sale? :)

2) Would you be open to recording a clean sound of one of its relays turning on and off? And helping me figure out some specifics about the motor wheel (its speed and whether it experiences any speed up)

Thank you! My email is:

hi at greg.technology
by mythz | 2025-11-17 13:21:16+00:00
The wider .NET ecosystem is lacking when trying to step out the mainline. I don't bother hunting for unused, partially implemented .NET libraries anymore and just call out to a process or API call when needing to get something done.

It's not ideal, but when there isn't a good option isn't available in .NET it's usually available in Python/npm. Typically I'll use background jobs when calling out of process for added resiliency/replayability and observability.
by tamnd | 2025-11-17 13:21:41+00:00
My use cases similar to this https://blog.afoolishmanifesto.com/posts/golang-zig-cross-co...

need to bundle a lot of C libraries, some using dynamic linking and some using static linking, and I need to deploy them on different operating systems, including some that are difficult to work with like RHEL. Right now the builds are slow because I use a separate Dockerfile for each platform and then copy the binary back to the host. With Zig CC I could build binaries for different platforms and architectures without using Docker.
by JustExAWS | 2025-11-17 13:22:43+00:00
You realized there has been a complete overhaul in equipment since 2017?

In your citation: In the public hearing today on Capitol Hill, members pushed for the full implementation of a program using new scanning equipment that creates a 3-D image of bags, giving screeners better ability to spot possibly dangerous items

Those new scanners are in 255 of the nations 432 airports

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/07/19/new-airport-scanner...
by Yokolos | 2025-11-17 13:23:18+00:00
If we see a war between Russia and the EU, we're going to have to deal with them learning from Israel and using the same idea of decentralised drone hubs attacking military and civilian targets across the entire continent. We're woefully underprepared to deal with something like this. Western Europe still thinks that if a war breaks out, it'll be tanks and soldiers going into the Baltic states, and we'll crush them with our advanced arsenal. It'll be more like when Russia took eastern Ukraine. A hard push, then months of digging in as they proceed to genocide the Baltics, gaslight the West into thinking it'd be easier and safer to just hand over the Baltics without a big fight and wage asymmetric warfare across Europe and severely hamper any military response by hitting the logistic chains at every point.
by mike_hearn | 2025-11-17 13:23:25+00:00
It's not disingenuous, the problem is you're not doing the comparisons correctly. Goods exports are down to both EU and non-EU countries. Look at the graph on page 10:

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...

There is no divergence between goods exports between EU and non-EU after the end of the transition period. They continue to move in sync and certainly haven't "fallen exponentially". Therefore, this slight fall isn't due to Brexit. If you look at the graphs in (1) you can see that the big falls are things like textiles, footwear/headgear and "raw animal hides", which haven't been big exports from the UK for over a century!

Imports did diverge immediately after leaving, but got back in sync in around Jan 2023, so any effect was temporary (p11).

Services exports were totally unaffected by leaving. They continued to grow strongly on their prior trends after the hit caused by lockdowns (p13).

So the commentary in (1) is thus very misleading, but it's an academic paper so what do you expect. You can't rely on commentary from academics to understand this issue, they are driven by ideological agendas.

> the promise that free movement would continue is not true

Who do you think promised free movement would continue? Ending it was one of the goals of leaving.

> There is a stagnation and decline in speciality medical jobs in the UK post Brexit

The UK has been giving out visas to medical staff nearly for free for decades, there are tons of non-EU medical workers in the UK. What does this have to do with Brexit?

> The UK is now paying the EU £6.4bn a year for no benefit

I think that's not per year, it's an estimated total remaining intended to cover things like pension payments, and once paid (over a period of many years) it will stop being required. This number is much lower than what the UK paid as a member!
by flanbiscuit | 2025-11-17 13:23:30+00:00
I needed this post a year ago when I was looking for this exact thing. I did end up going with Puppeteer because I needed it for something else that I couldn't avoid. I use a large list of flags with it to launch the most minimal version of headless Chrome that I can.

I am going to look into switching to MigraDoc and see if i can drop puppeteer

Thanks for this great research!
by phyzix5761 | 2025-11-17 13:24:18+00:00
Usually, but not always, investors buy something when the price is at a point where they believe the asset is undervalued. They sell when they believe the asset has reached its fair market value or is overvalued. I haven't followed Thiel closely enough but for sure this is what Buffett is doing. Assuming Thiel is doing the same then he believes NVidia is currently at fair market value or overvalued. I would agree with the latter.
by gus_massa | 2025-11-17 13:24:24+00:00
I get the Spanish version. Is it reading the browser configuration or there is only a Spanish version?

Are the answer of the form read by humans or AI? How private is it? When I have to pay?

It looks hard to get long term customers. It looks more like a single time use, when the guy/gal is in the last year of high school.

Do you want to sell this to schools? To the parents?

I usually recommend to read the post by patio11: https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/ The problem is that I can't find one that is relevant for you. So take a look in case you can find one. They are very interesting anyway.
by Simulacra | 2025-11-17 13:24:24+00:00
I would never assume that you live in a "poor shit hole" of a country, I don't think any country is a "shit hole" and respectfully, no country should be called that. But I do think some societies dismiss waste as a fact of life because of poverty and corruption. Maybe it is a "societal" problem, or a "cultural" problem, but I think it's a lot more complex than that.
by fuzzy2 | 2025-11-17 13:25:06+00:00
Oh yeah, PDF. In a past project I created a monster solution:

* Scriban to fill in templates (LaTeX) * Custom Angular SSR to reuse frontend components (charts etc) * Playwright to convert SSR output to PDF * LuaLaTeX to convert LaTeX document + stuff to PDF

Super slow, but very high quality results. Do not try this at home!

Scriban is totally awesome though.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-11-17 13:25:11+00:00
I salute your desire to run a tight ship. If there were a leak in the nix store, I'd never know until I my garbage collection stopped solving the problem and I'm sure it would be at the worst possible time. If such a leak exists and is found, it'll be by someone running a tight ship.

Instead of running a tight ship I spend a lot of time dreaming about alternate computational universes, and one I particularly like is where new hard disks come pre-loaded with a fragment of bits deemed culturally valuable. Wikipedia and a well curated subset of nixpkgs would be a fine start to such an archive. In this world your files don't grow/shrink to consume/yield empty space, but rather the boundary between your data and that drive's shard of the public archive shifts in one direction or another. This way you or somebody in your neighborhood is likely to already have the file you need, so you can get it from them instead of the internet. Better for being able to roll with the punches if the internet is partitioned.

I don't worry about the size of the nix store because according to this weird fantasy of mine it's on the side of my disk that shrinks when I add files to it; it's not the contained object, but the gas that expands to fill the rest of the container. Not by accident, but as part of a redundant worldwide distributed cache that we put together after deciding that servers controlled by people we don't know are not to be relied on.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-11-17 13:25:18+00:00
From the article: 4 marines go into a house, kill 24 iraqis including 6 children the youngest 3 years old. A single 13 year old girl survived.

> "I saw that children were in the room kneeling down. I don't remember the exact number but only that it was a lot. I am trained to shoot two shots to the chest and two shots to the head and I followed my training,"

This is crazy.

What I don't understand - surely the US military not bringing these people to justice is intentional, but what is the reason? It's a stain on the brand of America, and what's the benefit?
by khaledh | 2025-11-17 13:25:46+00:00
The problem with macro-laden C is that your code becomes foreign and opaque to others. You're building a new mini-language layer on top of the base language that only your codebase uses. This has been my experience with many large C projects: I see tons of macros used all over the place and I have no idea what they do unless I hunt down and understand each one of them.
by thiago_fm | 2025-11-17 13:25:47+00:00
I'd guess about 20-50% overall productivity, given that only a fraction of my work is writing code.

We have to spend a good amount of time organizing the requirements, as it never comes perfectly from product management, as well alignments and weighting tradeoffs from the architecture.

Reviewing code also became a very daunting and time-consuming task.
Show HN: Blue Divide – Nurikabe puzzles with procgen islands for Mac and iPad
by chribog | 2025-11-17 13:25:49+00:00
Hi HN,

I made a small game in Swift to visualize Nurikabe puzzles in 3D, using SceneKit and Metal shaders with some SwiftUI on top for buttons and hints. It's currently available for free in App Store.

I've tried generating islands like this a few times before, where the whole board is just one big mesh, but I struggled with the shorelines (especially in corners) and also to make the islands somewhat unique and interesting. This time I got inspired by Oskar Stålbergs "dual grid" approach (https://x.com/OskSta/status/1448248658865049605) which made it a lot easier I think. Happy to provide more details if anyone is interested.

Anyway, I would love to get some feedback on the game: Is it understandable? Too easy or hard? What should I focus on to improve it? Thanks!
by nedimdauti | 2025-11-17 13:26:07+00:00
The true cost of manual data entry isn't just salaries, it's the 2% error rate and the constant cycle of rework that damages compliance and delays cash flow. Parsemania is the end-of-life solution for this archaic process.

Our Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) engine uses proprietary AI and NLP to instantly extract, validate, and structure data from any document: invoices, receipts, legal forms, and more, with 99.99% accuracy.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-17 13:26:08+00:00
I tend to avoid auto-cashiers. It's mostly because I find they don't save any time, and just exist to fire cashiers.

One place that they basically force you to use it, is my local drug store (big chain, that I won't call out by name).

Their auto-cashier absolutely sucks. It's almost impossible to avoid having an issue that requires you waiting around for the poor schulb to come over and fix.

They recently set up touchscreens, at the prescription counter.

I have not once had success with the touchscreen. It can never find me, or my wife. They always have to just take my information manually.

I suspect that the backend (the algorithm and main engine) is good. I think almost all the problems are with shoddy frontend stuff. For example, I think the touchscreen issue is capitalization, and the old system cut off our surnames, so I actually have to type in about half my name, in all caps, to have it find my prescription.

I feel personally offended, when I encounter stuff like that.
by chamomeal | 2025-11-17 13:27:01+00:00
I saw the post on the clojure subreddit! I’m stoked to try it out.

Ever since I saw Martin Kleppman’s “Turning the database inside out” talk I’ve wanted an easy way to hook into a transaction log. Apache samza/kafka is very cool but I’m not going to set it up for personal projects. It’d be VERY cool to make materialized views straight from the log!!
by kstrauser | 2025-11-17 13:27:13+00:00
I meant the collective bulk of legacy C code running the world that we can’t just rewrite in Rust in a finite and reasonable amount of time (however much I’d be all on board with that if we could).

There are a million internal C apps that have to be tended and maintained, and I’m glad to see people giving those devs options. Yeah, I wish we (collectively) could just switch to something else. Until then, yay for easier upgrade alternatives!
by tamnd | 2025-11-17 13:28:58+00:00
I was half joking. Folks keep saying everything will get rewritten in Zig, so I played along with that. Nothing serious behind it.

With only half serious intent, I think only the real wizard types, like Jarred Sumner (Bun) and Mitchell Hashimoto (Ghostty), who understand both low level systems and higher level languages, should be writing big tools in Zig. The tough part in the next few years will not be building things, it will be keeping them alive if the authors step away or the ecosystems move in a different direction.
Interesting websites I found on the internet
by 01-_- | 2025-11-17 13:29:01+00:00
Hello Hacker News!

I have created a list of the most interesting websites I have ever visited and would like to share it with you here. The list is still open so you can add any other sites you know that are not listed here. <https://wishtogether.xyz/insertgif?id=691af602b7>
by woodruffw | 2025-11-17 13:30:01+00:00
Intentionally or not, this post demonstrates one of the things that makes safer abstractions in C less desirable: the shared pointer implementation uses a POSIX mutex, which means it’s (1) not cross platform, and (2) pays the mutex overhead even in provably single-threaded contexts. In other words, it’s not a zero-cost abstraction.

C++’s shared pointer has the same problem; Rust avoids it by having two types (Rc and Arc) that the developer can select from (and which the compiler will prevent you from using unsafely).