MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-11-09 21:43:22+00:00
I’ve recently written ImapGoose, a daemon which keeps a remote IMAP mailbox in sync with a local tree of Maildir: https://whynothugo.nl/tags/imapgoose/

It relies on “modern” (2009) extensions to minimise traffic and avoids polling entirely (relying on the server to notify of new messages or changes as they happen).

It’s currently quite stable. The only known issue is that it can take a while to detect a timeout when the system is suspended and woken up again (there’s no portable API to detect suspend/resume).

Since then, I’ve been working on a simple TUI email client based on notmuch and maildir. So far it works really well for processing email, but lacks any capabilities for handling attachments, composing, sending (these are obviously on the roadmap).
by daxfohl | 2025-11-09 21:44:02+00:00
I'd say it's more "cost reduction" overall. And it makes sense to me. From my experience over the last few years, features are increasingly lower marginal ROI, and seem to take longer and longer to launch because the amount of coordination required keeps going up. Plus generally expected revenues in this economy are trending downward, so it only makes sense to reduce staffing and focus on only the highest priorities.
by tptacek | 2025-11-09 21:44:06+00:00
If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl.

Be specific. What specific research questions are you claiming have been slowed, and in what ways?
by dang | 2025-11-09 21:44:12+00:00
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've been doing it repeatedly lately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-11-09 21:44:21+00:00
Boeing was also pressured to outsource world wide, to spread around the grease to countries with large aircraft orders. They they didn't outsource because it made sense. They outsourced to get the sales guy his sale, and management their numbers to unlock compensation.

My buddy refused to work there just because of the nightmare of trying to certify it all/ensure compliance at every point.
by oulipo2 | 2025-11-09 21:44:32+00:00
Shameless plug: we're building a repairable e-bike battery where you can use your own cells at https://infinite-battery.com

We worked on a very sturdy casing, with some specific features to release pressure and limit the fire event propagating cell to cell, you can check it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NXXfCA2CY
by gymbeaux | 2025-11-09 21:45:02+00:00
She's right about everything, but nothing is going to change.

The elephant in the room is that the industry (made up of mostly men) sees a talk or blog post with this exact information every year or two, and chooses again and again to completely ignore it. I have to therefore conclude that the reason leetcode is still popular is because there's more truth to that joke answer "D" than we'd like to admit. Gatekeeping in this industry is real. It's a male dominated industry, and what you see across SPECIES on this Earth, is that the males of a society are constantly in competition with one another- for better or worse.

I've had a surprising number of interviewers (all men) who seemed higher ranked than they should have been- and they always, ALWAYS knew it (think "Architect" with only 8 YoE at a large company). You could tell they knew they were frauds by how they interviewed and what kinds of questions they asked. These engineers are incredibly dangerous because they will prevent the best talent from joining your organization by giving their thumbs down on candidates who they perceive to be threats... Of course if this person made it to Architect, that means someone even higher green-lit their promotion so it's probably an indicator of rot (e.g., cronyism and nepotism) that reaches the highest levels of leadership and you wouldn't want to work there anyway. Our industry is broken, our hiring is broken.. but it's willful ignorance at this point.
by sharadov | 2025-11-09 21:45:06+00:00
I disagree - I was a value investor for a number of years from the Ben Graham/Buffett school of thought.

But the last 5 years or so - with the ramp up in tech stocks, I know enough people who've done really well with indidividual stock picking.

In fact there was a paper out that said 10% of retail investors can consistently beat the market - it's a mixture of skill, discipline and luck.
by ssiddharth | 2025-11-09 21:45:22+00:00
I’m building Sink It for Reddit (https://gosinkit.com), a browser extension to make Reddit usable on the web. It’s similar to RES with broader support for all the different Reddit UIs (there are 4).

It’s mostly free with only old Reddit features gated behind a one time $5 fee. The app has a few hundred thousand users on the Apple platforms but recently it was invited to join Mozilla’s Recommended Extensions program so I’m hoping to grow the non-Apple user base.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-11-09 21:45:36+00:00
> The reality is so much more complex than the headlines people chase. One couple who I spoke to who were considering this were afraid of the opposite of the intelligence chase. The mother was concerned ...

The problem here is a tragedy of the commons - the people you describe are avoiding a certain kind of pain (a child who will die early, or who will have a condition that the parent already has) and exchanging it for both

1) the uncertainty that the child will have unknown other issues, either due to the genetic sampling process or due to whatever genetic interventions are made, and

2) the chance that future humans will need to support the changes that the parents have introduced to the human germline

I work in this area of biology, and, as far as the editing tools go, none of these tools are as foolproof as they are described.

I recognize the human sorrow of not being able to have the particular kind of family one always wants, but I feel we forget the significant downside potential to the rest of humanity.

---

lastly, regarding trisomy 21 - I have more sympathy around 'repairing' individual single-nucleotide variants and I suspect that it will be attainable at levels nearing perfection in our lifetimes (so error rates below 1E-11 if we want 1% chance of any off-target lesions).

I do not see how this is ever going to happen for trisomy 21 repair - the only realistic possibility is screening to avoid it.
by mlindner | 2025-11-09 21:45:45+00:00
> It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.

Yeah and that's obviously problematic, because the common way that's implemented is a either a whole lot of strange brainwashing courses or active discrimination against "old white guys".
by SL61 | 2025-11-09 21:46:06+00:00
This is a big issue for young people, too. Every white collar career path is very on-rails now - you're expected to get a degree in XYZ and then get a fresh grad job as a Level 1 XYZer and so on.

So the stakes are drastically higher for 18 year olds picking their college majors. It's effectively a life commitment for a specific career path, and there's a lot of anxiety among students because they don't know if the career path they're betting the farm on will still be be viable by the time they graduate. There's also a sense that if you can't manage to find work in the field you majored in within a year or two of graduating, you've fallen off the track and are condemned to DoorDashing forever.

I'm always amazed at how many older people I know (especially 60+) spent their twenties directionless and then started a decent paying career in their 30s, often by simply learning how to do something and getting a job doing it. I'm not sure what policy platform would make that possible again, but accomplishing it would alleviate a ton of the anxiety that young people have today.
by mattkevan | 2025-11-09 21:46:06+00:00
A Mac-based video manager that automatically transcribes, translates and summarises videos. I process information best through reading, so I built it to manage my growing collection of training course videos, webinars and meeting recordings. Currently working on adding RAG search to make it easier to query content.

Also building a CMS and static site generator that runs entirely client side in the browser. Pick themes, model content an publish to clean HTML. It also makes content available beyond just the browser, eg in a command line TUI.

https://www.sparktype.org
by huijzer | 2025-11-09 21:46:32+00:00
> As a result of the educational trend away from intellectual discipline, the last decades have shown in the Western world a sharp decline of people's mastery of their own language

Dijkstra already wrote this in the 80s and today many teachers still complain about this fact. I also know that, at least in the Netherlands, the curriculum is judged based on the percentage of students that pass. If too few students pass, then the material is made easier (never harder!), so you can imagine what happens if this process continued for half a century by now.
by captainkrtek | 2025-11-09 21:47:19+00:00
> 'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up half a year after development' - well if it was good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs can fix it.

From my time at AWS, and in light of the recent DynamoDB dns race condition bug, this is a line of thinking that is problematic.

There is so much complexity in the inner workings of any one of those services. Many of those services are now composed of many teams, each having turned over completely multiples of times.

Yes there are runbooks and knowledge passed down from each generation, to some extent. But when you hit some critical outage, edge case, etc., those people running the systems have such a different relationship to the system having simply maintained it vs. built it.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-11-09 21:47:23+00:00
I'm working on https://yap.town - an SRS based language learning app.

I would say it combines the best parts of Duolingo and Anki. Anki is great for memorizing words, but you don't see the words in the context of novel sentences. Duolingo is great for exposure to new sentences, but it's oriented around "lessons" and SRS is an afterthought. (Duolingo is also not designed for people serious about learning a language IMO, it's too easy and goes too slowly.)

Had to do quite a bit to get it to work well.

1. At first you would think that if you know all the words in a sentence, that should be enough to understand the sentence. But it doesn't work like that. For starters, words can have multiple meanings. The french word "bois" can mean "(you) drink" or "wood". You want to learn these separately. I trained an NLP model (a gemma3 finetune) that I use to understand the manner each word is used in each sentence: https://huggingface.co/collections/anchpop/lexide-nlp-models

2. Even then, what about a sentence like "you'd better not"? Even if you know the words "you" "had" "better" and "not", you still won't really get this. So I use the wiktionary "multiword terms" category for each language to get a huge list of terms like "'d better" , "you better believe it", etc, and teach these in addition to individual words. And then I only show sentences where you know all the individual words as well as all the terms.
by kawsper | 2025-11-09 21:47:36+00:00
Maybe it is nostalgia speaking, but the SMS had a great sound chip, and some amazing composers.

My absolute favourite song is from Ninja Gaiden "Escape in a forest" (starts at 03:36) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFoA0OICiB4&t=207s

Someone played that song with real instruments, and it's also amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arun9KuXImk
by k9294 | 2025-11-09 21:47:43+00:00
Building https://ottex.ai - a native MacOS app to solve repetitive micro tasks on a computer.

- Transcribe voice to text (especially useful when you need to explain something to Claude code )

- (soon) select text to instantly Check grammar / Improve writing / change tone of text

- (soon) select text to Translate between languages

I discovered that I have a few 10/20$ subscriptions (grammarly, raycast, wisperflow) that do embarrassingly simple stuff I can one shot with cheap SLM. So I decided to build a one app specialized in small repetitive tasks on computer.
by Exadra37 | 2025-11-09 21:48:12+00:00
I am working on a repository for AI Intent Driven Development at https://github.com/Exadra37/ai-intent-driven-development/.

An Intent is a self-contained document that describes a user request. It is composed of three main sections: WHY (the motivation), WHAT (the requirements, often in Gherkin language), and HOW (a detailed, step-by-step implementation plan defined with tasks). This approach ensures clarity and alignment before any code is written.
by Arathorn | 2025-11-09 21:49:03+00:00
I'm resurrecting peer-to-peer Matrix (https://arewep2pyet.com) thanks to the Dutch government, who started funding it in October.

The main question is which P2P overlay network to use, if any: the prior incarnation used Pinecone (a variant of Yggdrasil), whereas this time we're pondering keeping it simpler and more scalable and using Matrix itself as the backbone to connect together smallish local P2P meshes - so by default you try to route via Matrix, but failing that you look on your LAN or BLE to see if you can talk directly to whoever you're addressing. Time will tell if this works :)
by getpost | 2025-11-09 21:49:09+00:00
> you take that at sunset and let it reinforce your normal cycle

Yes, the way Michael Grandner explains it in this podcast[0], melatonin is an ancient molecule that signals, "it is dark." If you give it to nocturnal species, it wakes them up!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQF_eopP1ys
by heavyset_go | 2025-11-09 21:49:55+00:00
You aren't thinking low enough for firmware.

All modern WiFi APs require closed firmware blobs that run below or parallel to OpenWRT.

You replacing the router OS with OpenWRT does nothing when the radio has full DMA access and runs its own OS on its own processor. The OpenWRT layer will have no idea what it's running/infiltrating/exfiltrating.

I say this as someone who has been running and building OpenWRT forever. It's great but it isn't a panacea.
by Veserv | 2025-11-09 21:50:18+00:00
That is inanely pedantic. The municipal government of Monowi, Nebraska probably can not buy a RCE in any OS as they only govern a single person. That is also utterly meaningless to argue as it bears no effect on the core thrust of the argument that COTS operating systems in use by military and critical infrastructure are easily and cheaply hackable by potential adversaries. They are demonstrably grossly inadequate for purpose.
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-09 21:50:22+00:00
"But I think you need to realize that people will be trying to breed extremely skinny girls with huge breasts, or extremely skinny boys with huge breasts, or that a trend will catch fire about girls with eyes really far apart because of some movie star, and there will be a generation with a million girls with brain damage and constant migraines. All because we couldn't tell wealthy people "no.""

No wonder that you are calling yourself "pessimizer".

Maybe your confident assessment of the horrors of the future is wrong?
by WillAdams | 2025-11-09 21:50:28+00:00
I miss the old Travelsmith shirts which had pockets sufficiently large to comfortably hold a Sony PRS-505/600 ebook reader. Since then, I did get a pair of shirts which have similarly large pockets which will accept my Kindle Paperwhite and/or Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, but really wish I'd bought more of them, and am kind of stumped for replacing them when they wear out.
by ahazred8ta | 2025-11-09 21:51:50+00:00
Franklin held Gosling back from collaborating with Wilkins, which probably would have moved up the discovery of the structure of DNA by a year.

Photo 51 was Gosling's work, which Franklin had looked at briefly in May 1952 and had been ignoring ever since. She never worked on it. Gosling writes: "Rosalind was going to leave, so she suggested that I go down the corridor and give this beautiful structure B pattern, this photo 51, to Maurice." [Wilkins] This was in the context of Gosling returning to Wilkins, who was his original DNA-structure supervisor before Franklin began working with DNA.
by BSTRhino | 2025-11-09 21:52:06+00:00
Ah interesting theory, yep could be. A broken bot. Interestingly there is only an email address field and nothing else, so maybe it's failing to recognise that it's not a comment section/forum.

Interestingly it always visit the homepage, and within 1 second sign up to the newsletter, and then it does a random walk through about 5-10 pages (always different links) before stopping. So maybe it is looking for a forum or something.
by ttruong | 2025-11-09 21:52:29+00:00
https://www.ottoclip.com - Create product-focused content that stays in sync with your product.

Create a script for a product demo or tutorial for your app using an extension. The script is used to generate your product content in multiple formats (narrated video, interactive demo, looping animation, and in-app guide). Whenever your product changes, just update the script and regenerate everything. No manual re-recording of video, syncing of audio, or any other post-production steps.
by fabiancook | 2025-11-09 21:52:54+00:00
On and off working on the Navigation API for Node, Bun, Deno, & as a browser polyfill.

Has 90% test coverage, makes use of web platform tests to verify compatibility, and is in use by some larger companies already with the Navigation API soon to become a baseline in evergreen browsers.

The Navigation API effectively is async state navigations. The likes of React has recently added Navigation API support to make use of the browser reload indicator.

https://github.com/virtualstate/navigation

Along with working on a startup day to day :)
by sothatsit | 2025-11-09 21:53:09+00:00
The cost, complexity, and logistics of genetically engineering millions of people, and raising them, is astronomical. That's not to mention the level of backlash someone would receive for this would be unbelievable. This genuinely feels like something people would go to war over.

It just doesn't make sense. It is much cheaper and easier to just pay already-living people to work for you, instead of waiting decades and spending millions of dollars genetically engineering and raising each person, just in the hope that they then decide to work for you. That's just ridiculous.

The appeal of robotics is that the robots cost $30,000, you can build them on an assembly line, and they do not have emotions so will happily complete repetitive tasks over and over again all day and night. Comparing that to the cost of raising children, genetically engineering them, and coercing them into working for you is just insane. The maths do not work out at all, never mind the fact that it would require a logistical marvel to actually make this happen, and you would require immense amounts of power to not be stopped.

From every single angle this just doesn't make any sense at all.
by Agraillo | 2025-11-09 21:53:21+00:00
I think GP by mentioning "knowledge transfer" meant, for example, he benefits from the embedding space and semantic equivalence of LLMs when you want to know more about a fact, an entity, a law, or something else. Yes, hallucinations can spoil this transfer, but I see no issue in using this tool to get quicker to the prior art or what is on the "shoulders of giants."

Though, when we try to use it as a synthesizer of new knowledge (software, article, review), that's when the OP's thinking about protection makes sense.
by elpakal | 2025-11-09 21:53:27+00:00
Working on adding Apple Intelligence to my macOS app built to analyze iOS app size metrics. I'm hoping to have a locally running assistant that can act like an iOS build engineer to provide optimization opportunities and more: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dotipa/id6742254881.

Right now my app allows users to export build metadata as JSON which can be interpreted by LLMs for analysis, but I'd like to have this work on-device.
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-09 21:53:30+00:00
"It feels too much like playing god."

Everything that is on the leading edge of medical science feels like playing god and some people will loudly protest against it, but the next generation will consider the very same thing absolutely normal and expected.

IVF was once "playing god".

Heart transplants were once "playing god".

Resuscitation was once "playing god".

Surgeries of inner organs were once "playing god".

Vaccination against smallpox was once "playing god".
by Luker88 | 2025-11-09 21:53:35+00:00
> If every dentist did this, the genepool would improve.

Not really, especially since this is widely regarded not as much of a genetic problem, but as a difference in diet of modern society.

I am also unsure if eugentics *necessarily* brings monoculture. We did it for hundred of years to dogs, and while some races are definitely worse off than others, we literally created more than any here care to remember, and many absolutely love races I find truly ugly.

So the problem with eugenetics lies in understanding what culture lies behind it, imho. While there is a pull to uniformity, people don't like too much of the same, because instinctively you understand it loses value. No difference == no worse, but == no better too.
by chatmasta | 2025-11-09 21:53:56+00:00
The TP-Link option was great. If it was for myself, I'd build my own with OpenWRT but my goal was to minimize the chance of downtime in case I'm not available to help debug issues. They already had a TP-Link range extender running for 4+ years without ever needing to touch it, so I figured their mesh network was a good option too.
by parineum | 2025-11-09 21:54:06+00:00
Sometimes I wonder if people talking about corruption in the US have ever been to a country that is as corrupt as they say the US is.

Pardons are not being openly sold. There is absolutely not great stuff going on with them but, really, the major difference I see is that it's happening during the administration, rather than in the last few hours.

The US is moving the wrong direction when it comes to corruption but let's not act like we're bottom of the barrel ir that this slide just started in 2024 (or 2016, if you'd like).