MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Brian-Puccio | 2025-11-11 23:14:17+00:00
Can I ask why it will produce terrible color rendering? In addition to commercial scanners that used narrowband trichromatic (RGB) light sources, hobbyists are creating their own RGB light sources to digitize color negative film claiming superior results and putting forward arguments why this is better:

https://jackw01.github.io/scanlight/

(NB: Most film I shoot is slide film, which I’ve been told doesn’t benefit from RGB light sources because it’s intended viewing was projected with a broad-spectrum white light [likely a warmer than daylight (but color temperature isn’t much of a concern for digitizing slides)] so I haven’t dug into this much.)
by culi | 2025-11-11 23:14:30+00:00
The Paleozoic peak in coal deposition was not due to white rot fungi evolution lagging behind lignin evolution. In fact we have plenty of evidence that fungi were pretty much always able to decompose lignin

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517943113

> Here, we demonstrate that lignin was of secondary importance in many floras and that shifts in lignin abundance had no obvious impact on coal formation. Evidence for lignin degradation—including fungal—was ubiquitous, and absence of lignin decay would have profoundly disrupted the carbon cycle. Instead, coal accumulation patterns implicate a unique combination of climate and tectonics during Pangea formation.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-11-11 23:14:37+00:00
Sure there is some content that is obviously not appropriate, but I'm not seeing it in the OP link. Meanwhile the comments here are filled with a thinly veiled anger over seeing rainbow flag stickers. These are the people I'd be quite happy to self filter themselves out in the workplace. Though I've never met someone like this in the office. Or at least they keep their thoughts to themselves offline.
by red_hare | 2025-11-11 23:14:44+00:00
Having tried a few of these agent frameworks now, ADK-Python has easily been my favorite.

- It’s conceptually simple. An agent is just an object, you assign it tools that are just functions, and agents can call other agents.

- It’s "batteries included". You get a built-in code execution environment for doing math, session management, and web-server mode for debugging with a front-end.

- Optional callbacks provide clean hooks into the magic (for example, anonymizing or de-anonymizing data before and after LLM calls).

- It integrates with any model, supports MCP servers, and easy enough to hack in your existing session management system.

I'm working on a course in agent development and it's the framework I plan to teach with.

I would absolutely take this for a spin if I didn't hate Go so much :)
Show HN: Cursor Cost Explorer
by dlojudice | 2025-11-11 23:15:48+00:00
Hi HN — I built Cursor Cost Explorer after my monthly Cursor bill started creeping up and the official dashboard gave me almost no clue why.

I use a mix of models across sessions, sometimes one long thread, sometimes lots of tiny requests with different models, and one month my usage just ran wild. The Cursor dashboard showed not the patterns that matter: which models I used for which tasks, when cache wasn’t helping, or whether I’d be cheaper on a different plan.

So I exported my Cursor CSV and built a small analyzer that runs locally. The first time I loaded my CSV I could see a bit inside the data: a handful of expensive "thinking" model calls sprinkled across many tiny tasks. That single analysis pointed to a few concrete changes I could make that immediately cut my projected monthly spend.

What it does (short) - Parse Cursor CSVs and show where money is actually spent (by model, by day, by request) - Highlight model inefficiencies and cache patterns and give prioritized, actionable recommendations (plan change, model migrations, simple workflow fixes) - Runs entirely locally — open the demo in your browser or run `npx cursor-cost-explorer` on your machine and your CSV never leaves you, also great for agents.

UIs: - Web demo: `https://dalssoft.github.io/cursor_cost_explorer/` - CLI: `npx cursor-cost-explorer <your-cursor-usage.csv>`

Would love feedback.
by cmpalmer52 | 2025-11-11 23:17:00+00:00
Only if the goal is to run the result and never have to update it or add features. Several of the good test projects I’ve made from scratch with AI (my title at work needs to be “Speaker to Silicon” because I’m usually tasked with experimenting with AI tools) have worked and looked great. Then someone wants a new feature. No problem, it adds it. Then you say, add that feature to this other part of the program, and it does it, but if you don’t look at the code, you realize it re-implemented it, so if you go back in a month and request a change, it only gets applied to the first place it finds. I had to constantly say “DRY! Don’t implement it twice, share the code!”

I mean, it’ll get better, but it ain’t there yet.
by AniseAbyss | 2025-11-11 23:17:48+00:00
The Trabant was a normal car if you look at what the rest of Europe was driving at the time. In fact the DDR did not economically collapse until the late 1970s.

Ofcourse the real problem was they could not actually make enough of them. You could go to a Citroen dealer and pick up a 2CV the same day.
by stackskipton | 2025-11-11 23:17:59+00:00
Most of time, this delay is in peacetime, it makes sense to do a ton of testing, wait until testing results then go to full production. Your primary concern is not spending a ton of money and not getting a bunch of people killed. It's basically waterfall in fighter development.

Wartime is more agile, you quickly close the loop but downside is sometimes does not work and when it does not work, there might be a people cost. US has done it with fighters before, F-4U Corsair was disaster initially in carrier landings and killed some pilots in training. However, this was considered acceptable cost to get what was clearly very capable fighter out there.
by atonse | 2025-11-11 23:18:03+00:00
Until recently, I was fully on board with wanting CarPlay. But I'm not really sure what would change (apart from me being able to use Apple Maps).

Because the console already uses Google Maps, and I've seen release notes saying they're releasing support for 3d buildings (which I like from Apple Maps)

Anyone have good ideas of things that are truly missing?
by zmmmmm | 2025-11-11 23:18:49+00:00
The main issue with IaC is most of the IaC tools (looking at you Terraform) actually want to do Infrastructure as Data where everything is completely static. So you will quickly run up against multiplying complexity as you try to DRY things or even just dynamically configure things with tools that are philosophically opposed to you doing that. Eg: want an optional component deployed for test environments? you are treating it as an array of them where the count is zero or 1 and this will ripple through everything as awkward syntactic distortions and bugs everywhere.

I would like to use tools like Pulumi but it seems for now the IaD people are winning the mindshare battle.
by marcus_cemes | 2025-11-11 23:19:47+00:00
Perhaps I was a little harsh, this was a few years back when I was evaluating Elixir for a client, but ended up going back to a TS/Node.js stack instead. While the Phoenix documentation is stellar, I found it difficult to find good resources on best practices. I was probably doing something stupid and ran into internal and difficult to understand exceptions being raised on the Erlang side, from Cowboy if I recall. In another case, I was trying to validate API JSON input, the advice I got was to use Ecto (which I never really groked) or pattern match and fail. In JS, libraries like Zod and Valibot are a dream to work with.

The result was a lot of frustration, having been thoroughly impressed by Elixir and Phoenix in the past, knowing that I already knew how to achieve the same goal with Node.js with less code and would be able to justify the choice to a client. It didn't quite feel "there" to pick up and deploy, whereas SvelteKit with tRPC felt very enabling at the time and was easily picked up by others. Perhaps I need another project to try it out again and convince me otherwise. Funnily enough, a year later I replaced a problematic Node.js sever with Phoenix + Nerves running on a RPi Zero (ARM), flawless cross-compilation and deployment.

> Ports are not network transparent

I stand corrected, thank you for the explanation!
by hansvm | 2025-11-11 23:20:14+00:00
Yep. My heart-rate is normally pretty low (45bpm or so, 55 if I'm walking around), and my BP is on the high end of normal, but white-coat syndrome reliably brings it up to a fluttery 110bpm and 155/125 pressure. I was just in a wreck last week, so I got to see the before-and-after measurements from a few medical providers, and it's shocking how the act of talking to a new person in an unfamiliar environment spikes my BP even when I "know" that it's fine, and also how quickly it falls back down to normal.
by kloud | 2025-11-11 23:20:46+00:00
Great thought provoking article! Indeed, typing commands on the command line feels primitive like typing code into interactive interpreters (python, irb, etc.). Those are primitive REPLs.

With lisp REPLs one types in the IDE/editor having full highlighting, completions and code intelligence. Then code is sent to REPL process for evaluation. For example Clojure has great REPL tooling.

A variation of REPL is the REBL (Read-Eval-Browse Loop) concept, where instead of the output being simply printed as text, it is treated as values that can be visualized and browsed using graphical viewers.

Existing editors can already cover the runbooks use case pretty well. Those can be just markdown files with key bindings to send code blocks to shell process for evaluation. It works great with instructions in markdown READMEs.

The main missing feature editor-centric command like workflow I can imagine is the history search. It could be interesting to see if it would be enough to add shell history as a completion source. Or perhaps have shell LSP server to provide history and other completions that could work across editors?
by db48x | 2025-11-11 23:21:09+00:00
You still believe that lie? The riot had already started before he gave his speech. How then could the speech have instigated the riot? The people who were rioting never even heard it. In fact, most of the people there planned in advance to be there. How could Trump incite them when they had been planning to do that for months?

And you also “misquoted” Trump, because what he actually said was “… and we’re going to go down to the capital and cheer on our brave Senators and Congressmen and women…”. The “…and I’ll be right there with you…” was from a completely different part of the two hour speech.

Also, the article you quote repeats quite a few other lies from the testimony at the hearings, such as the tall tale of Trump grabbing the wheel of the car and assaulting a secret service agent. The commission never actually interviewed the driver of that car until after the 2020 election, months after the testimony in question. Why? Because he refutes the entire story. It never happened. Cassidy Hutchinson wasn’t even in the car at the time and her testimony was at best hearsay, if it wasn’t simply a lie.

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/trumps-secret-se...
by senfiaj | 2025-11-11 23:21:20+00:00
This is just for generation of sudoku image. The actual solver doesn't do this this expensive operation (the sudoku generator just reuses the solver function to fill with random numbers). From my experience for just generation it works good enough and fast enough. Yes I know how to efficiently shuffle by swaps in O(n) time with the correct distribution of probabilities (I didn't know that algorithm name BTW), I'm just too lazy =).
by the_gipsy | 2025-11-11 23:21:22+00:00
I don't understand anything of what you're saying. But I do know that it was quite noticeable that most applications expect a bigger screen on small iPhones. Most UI elements are either too small and hard to use, or taking away too much space feom elsewhere.

There's nothing you can do with scaling here, if apps are made for big screens. It is a feedback loop. It would require a whole new ecosystem to break out by now. Impossible.
by culi | 2025-11-11 23:22:40+00:00
Wood has always been decomposable by fungi. The idea that there was a lag in evolution is a once-prominant myth that has since been disproven.

Plastics are not a single chemical. If anything it's more of a characteristic of a wide variety of polymers which are typically synthetically derived from petroleum are extremely varied. Even if fungi/bacteria eventually evolve the correct enzymes to break down some of the plastics, it's foolish to think all plastics will be solved by evolution. Especially since many of these enzymes result in other microplastic compounds instead of full decomposition.

It's also a little rash to hope for it given how much of the world's infrastructure would be threatened by such a development.
by andy99 | 2025-11-11 23:23:26+00:00
I feel like I’ve seen this with code too, where it’s unlikely to scrap something and try a new approach a more likely to double down iterating on a bad approach.

For the svg generation, it would be an interesting experiment to seed it with increasingly poor initial images and see at what point if any the models don’t anchor on the initial image and just try something else
by stackskipton | 2025-11-11 23:23:31+00:00
Sure because we decided to gut manufacturing in this country. It was deliberate decision made not by DoD following Federal Acquisition rules but by beancounters who didn't want to spend money on keeping manufacturing alive. Since we don't have civilian manufacturing base in this country and military does not want to buy a ton of artillery shells just for them to go idle, here we are.
by saulpw | 2025-11-11 23:23:32+00:00
Regardless of the legal protections of free speech, the general notion worldwide is that corporations are allowed to create and post whatever nonsense they feel like with utter impunity. It's one thing for a single person to write the timecube, it's another entirely to promulgate fact-checker robots which completely obscure the real facts with utter bullshit. We could all see this coming from miles away. I see definite need to worry.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-11-11 23:24:28+00:00
More fantasy. Presumes the bug only exists in some part of ffmpeg that can be disabled at all, and that you don't need, and that you are even in control over your use of ffmpeg in the first place.

Sure, in maybe 1 special lucky case you might be empowered. And in 99 other cases you are subject to a bug without being in the remotest control over it since it's buried away within something you use and don't even have the option not to use the surface service or app let alone control it's subcomponents.
by dctoedt | 2025-11-11 23:24:58+00:00
> We also don’t have real adversaries, that’s war propaganda.

Granting for the sake of argument the (gravely-unrealistic) premise, we have to "skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is" — the father of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, a.k.a. The Great One.
by arcfour | 2025-11-11 23:26:11+00:00
It's funny, I am in cybersecurity but I have always liked keeping my laptop free of stickers. Always seemed like "trying too hard" to me. And as much as I love my laptop, much like my Fluke 87V, I value it as a tool, not a means of self-expression.

Maybe I am just boring, lol. I did use an original copy of the PGP source code book as a monitor stand though!
by art-w | 2025-11-11 23:27:15+00:00
Two interesting projects in that space:

- https://arcan-fe.com/ which introduces a new protocol for TUI applications, which leads to better interactions across the different layers (hard to describe! but the website has nice videos and explanations of what is made possible)

- Shelter, a shell with reproducible operations and git-like branches of the filesystem https://patrick.sirref.org/shelter/index.xml
by spudlyo | 2025-11-11 23:27:23+00:00
Emacs also has Org-mode and org-babel, which can work a lot like a Jupyter notebook, and can even talk to jupyter kernels. I do a lot in Emacs, especially now that I'm comfortable with GPTel.

I open a poorly aligned, pixelated PDF scan of a 100+ year old Latin textbook in Emacs, mark a start page, end page, and Emacs lisp code shells out to qpdf to create a new smaller pdf from my page range to /tmp, and then adds the resulting PDF to my LLM context. Then my code calls gptel-request with a custom prompt and I get an async elisp callback with the OCR'd PDF now in Emacs' org-mode format, complete with italics, bold, nicely formatted tables, and with all the right macrons over the vowels, which I toss into a scratch buffer. Now that the chapter from my textbook in a markup format, I can select a word, immediately pop up a Latin-to-English dictionary entry or select a whole sentence to hand to an LLM to analyze with a full grammatical breakdown while I'm doing my homework exercises. This 1970s vintage text editor is also a futuristic language learning platform, it blows my mind.
by collegehelpai | 2025-11-11 23:27:30+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Alex, and I'm excited (and honestly, pretty nervous) to share CollegeHelpAI with you. The Problem (My "Why") I was a history major in college, and I loved it, but I was terrible at the process of writing academic papers. My workflow was always a nightmare: I'd spend 8 hours in the library's online portal, ending up with 30 open tabs and a folder of PDFs I wasn't even sure were relevant. Then, I'd stare at a blank Google Doc for another two hours, completely overwhelmed, before writing a terrible first paragraph. When modern AI tools came out, I tried them, but they felt like blunt instruments. They either gave generic, unusable fluff or produced text that felt like pure plagiarism. They didn't help me think; they just offered to replace my thinking. The Solution I built CollegeHelpAI to be the tool I wish I'd had. It's not an "autopilot" to cheat the system; it's a "copilot" to handle the most tedious parts of academic work. It's a platform that helps students: Summarize Anything: You can upload a dense 50-page academic PDF, paste a URL, or even drop in lecture notes, and it will give you a concise, accurate summary with key takeaways. Get Past the Blank Page: You can provide a topic or an essay prompt, and it will help you brainstorm arguments and generate a structured outline (Intro, Thesis, Arguments, Conclusion) that you can then use as your scaffold. Improve Your Own Writing: It includes a "smart rephraser" that's not just a synonym spinner. It helps you rewrite clunky sentences to be more clear, academic, and professional, and it's great at catching common grammar mistakes. Tech Stack (For those interested) This has been my side-project for the last 6 months. It's built with: Frontend: Next.js / React (hosted on Vercel) Backend/DB: Supabase for database and auth AI: A Python (FastAPI) backend that manages the AI logic, using the OpenAI API (GPT-4) with RAG pipelines for document analysis. The Ask This is very much a version 1.0. I'm here for honest, direct feedback. I know this community doesn't hold back, and that's exactly what I need. Is the tool intuitive? What features are critically missing? Does it actually solve a real problem for students? There's a free trial (no credit card required) so you can test it out properly. Thanks for taking a look! Alex
by cade | 2025-11-11 23:27:54+00:00
With all my heart, I want to cheer you on. Making stuff is damn hard, and shipping is even harder. You did that, and I applaud you for it.

I do a lot of NYT puzzle stuff every day and some other random puzzle sites before I get out of bed. That said, I'm over 40, love puzzles, love complicated board games, went through your brief explainer, and could not get a sensible handle on how to even start this thing. A new player has to really care about how to even try to begin to figure out whatever this is. I gave it about 20 seconds after the "how does it work?" Honestly, I gave up. I'm really not trying to rain on your parade. You might find a niche audience, and it'll be what you're going for, but I think you need a much, much better rules explainer if you want to be even remotely in the vicinity of a Wordle-level banger.

This thing might be really awesome, but not being able to figure out how to use it is a hard out for me.
by jamesdutc | 2025-11-11 23:28:13+00:00
It's also very easy to complain about how employees have résumé-focus in their approach to their work: “why should I bother to learn some internal-only tooling that I'll never use anywhere else (for a task that I don't really even care that much about…)?”

But, to borrow a line from Warren VanderBurgh's ‘Children of the Magenta’: “(in the industry) we created you like this.”

Another key flaw of precomposed automations for rigidly-defined work-flows is that they usually exist in precisely the circumstances that give rise to their own subversion. (I might even go so far as to suggest that the circumstances are the cause of both the mistake and the maladaptive behaviours that address the mistake…)

Ultimately, deep stacks of tightly-integrated components forming a precomposed automation that enacts some work-flow—“vertical integration” as the post frames it—is obvious enough that it seems every big company tries it… only to fail in basically the same ways every time.
by layer8 | 2025-11-11 23:28:15+00:00
> Do you not think if someone can remember those four words, they’re less likely to get it wrong?

Only if they remember the words in the right order, which isn’t a given. There is nothing in the phrase that helps remembering the order, unless you already know how it has to work. What it probably does at least is remind you that the order matters.

Maybe find something that emphasizes that the master data (the data in the system of record) has the shortest storage duration (since its writes happen last and its reads happen first). Something like “keep central data central in time” (and peripheral data peripheral in time).

As a side note, while I know that “system of record” and “system of reference” are existing terms, they are a bit unfortunate in that they sound very similar, both abbreviating to SOR, and “reference data” having semantic overlap with “master data”, so “system of reference” could be taken to mean the system to be used as the reference, i.e. master data.
by natenethercott | 2025-11-11 23:28:57+00:00
> Actually, you can implement HNSWs on disk, even if there are better data structures from the point of view of disk access latencies

I built a KV-backed HNSW in Rust using LMDB to address this exact usecase (https://github.com/nnethercott/hannoy). The trickiest part for sure is being clever with your IO ops since HNSW search requires tons of random reads to find the nearest neighbours. Especially if you're not on NVMe's (think EBS-based HNSW) you really start to feel the cost of those reads, even with all the fancy SIMD.
by sib | 2025-11-11 23:29:19+00:00
"I don't think anyone" - means zero, not "almost no one" - you yourself should probably study English some more.

And... let's put it this way - there are far fewer than 80,000 people who drive the growth of either the US or EU economy in non-linear ways. If 80,000 of the "wrong" (most positively impactful) people move from the EU to US, that's a big deal.

I'm pretty sure that I didn't implement any such policies. Did you implement the Third Reich's policies, sir?

There are apparently also stories that I've made up. Interesting. How's that mind-reading technology coming along?