MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rkagerer | 2025-12-18 05:54:25+00:00
I make checklists for myself and they're enormously helpful. Because my brain can't always remember every single little detail of every complex task every single time.

I've also seen checklists made by morons that are enormously unhelpful.

IMO it's paramount for whoever is making the checklist to have familiarity with the task at hand (both how to do it properly, and what steps people tend to miss or get wrong), investment (is this tool something you'd find indispensable for yourself if you were placed in the role of executing it?), a sense of pragmatism and conciseness.

The ability to recognize what things will be obvious or flow naturally from A to B helps eliminate redundant fluff. e.g. I train volunteer firefighters and in most canonical steps for calling a Mayday, one is basically "Tell the person on the other end what's wrong". You don't need a checklist item for that. When something goes seriously sideways and you need help, you will be very inclined to convey what is the matter.
by advael | 2025-12-18 05:55:27+00:00
This quote gives me such pause. I came back to read it again several times today. Conversations about echo chambers and filter bubbles are everywhere, and it's hard to sort into real data-driven arguments that there is an upward trend in the tendency to consume information that reaffirms our beliefs, but it does seem like our mechanisms for doing this have gotten a lot better, and that one could stay in a bubble indefinitely and never run out of content. I wonder if Murch is even still right to assume that we search for balance and harmony with an outside world we more often interact with through our abstractions, many chosen by us, most at least chosen by something. I wonder how many glaciers to read of restraint, how many volcanoes read of passionate abandon today, whether the feedback loop of escalation of flattery drives people to disappear into cages of their own making, or to burn themselves out, to use only this one dichotomy. I wonder how many of these feedback loops anyone is in about how many things. I wonder if I can even know which ones I'm in. Even if anyone succeeds at questioning everything they believe all the time, are they actually better off being a leaf on the wind, unable to form opinions?

I guess in short, this quote brings into sharp focus how brainrotting all this information and curation is, automatic and pervasive as it's become
by tombert | 2025-12-18 05:56:22+00:00
It wouldn't bother me as much if you could still buy media, but as far as I can tell most TV shows don't get Blu-ray releases anymore. The media companies realized that it's more profitable for them to make you pay for the same media forever instead of a lump cost, I guess preferably with you watching corporate brainwashing to buy products.

I suspect once the heat on this settles down, every streaming service is going to start forcing ads on us at all times, and then the only way to fight back on this will be bittorrent.
by furyofantares | 2025-12-18 05:56:52+00:00
At least right now it's mostly in AI-related articles. Scroll any AI article and have a look at the number of topic headings as well as how many start with the word "The". I have my defenses up on any AI articles and can quickly avoid the are LLM-output with aesthetic clues. An upfront disclosure would of course be better.

Unfortunately other topics are still catching me off guard, like the article about complex numbers posted today which I managed to get through a third of before realizing all the grating bits I was reading were because it was from an LLM.
by nuuuwan | 2025-12-18 05:57:22+00:00
Sri Lanka’s Railway Network, 1865 to the Present

A diagrammatic timeline of Sri Lanka’s railways, from the first Colombo–Kandy line under British rule, through expansion for plantations and ports, to post-independence decline, war-time destruction, and reconstruction.

Includes damage and disruption following the Cyclone #Ditwah, and the proposed recovery plans.

YOUTUBE: https://youtube.com/shorts/rFfo37GQyak

CODE: https://github.com/nuuuwan/harry_beck_diagram/blob/main/exam...

ORIGINAL VIDEO: https://github.com/nuuuwan/harry_beck_diagram/raw/refs/heads...

#SriLanka #Railways #History #Infrastructure
by greatgib | 2025-12-18 05:57:43+00:00
I don't like it but could almost understand ad before content.

But what I don't understand and find the most stupid is when you are forced to watch ad for the internal content. It gives me an aweful experience instead of pushing me to watch more. So makes me want to stop using the service.

The worst offender is Disney+, not only the app is the shitiest one with great pain to seek in content, but you have systematic 30 or 40s long as for content of the platform you don't care like the last woke show. The worst of the worst in that case is that they will not care to show you 100 times the exact same ad as for the same movie or show sometimes. It has no good effect except totally wasting your time and frustrating you!
by catoc | 2025-12-18 05:57:52+00:00
If you ask two humans to explain a problem to you, and human 1 takes an hour to explain what human 2 explained in 5 minutes… everyone would consider human 1 LESS ‘productive’ than human 2.

But what if human 2 was wrong?

What if both were wrong and human 3 simply said ‘I don’t know’.

LoC is a measure ripe for ignorance driven managerial abuse.

We’ve all seen senior devs explain concepts to junior devs, increasing their understanding and productivity while they themselves ‘produced’ zero lines of code.

Yes zero LoC maybe point to laziness; or to proper preparation.

All this is so obvious. LoC are easy to count but otherwise have hardly any value
Show HN: Kling O1 – Creates AI videos and images from any input
by Zach_HE | 2025-12-18 05:58:07+00:00
Kling O1 (Omni One) is a unified multimodal AI model by Kling AI for creating and editing videos and images from any input. Kling Video O1 enables text-to-video, image-to-video, keyframe-to-video, and reference-based generation. It supports stylization, inpainting, background edits, camera changes, and multi-subject fusion. Kling Image O1 supports precise image detail editing and highly consistent style control. This all-in-one AI workflow is ideal for flawless, professional creative production. Feedback welcome!
by yannyu | 2025-12-18 05:58:11+00:00
Or maybe companies turned products that were one-time purchases into monthly subscriptions. Or companies made it incredibly hard to cancel monthly subscriptions. Or companies will continue to charge and auto-renew us even when we clearly don't use the product. Or companies will unilaterally degrade our service or push us to lower tiers in order to better serve customers who aren't you. Or companies will have us pay a monthly subscription, and then also sell our data to the highest bidder anyway.

Maybe many of these companies have never had our interest at heart, and people are tired of feeling constantly screwed over and seen as a revenue stream instead of customers.
by safety1st | 2025-12-18 05:58:21+00:00
I totally get this sentiment and I think it applies equally to the actual dating apps, these apps are all garbage fires that you don't really want in your life, but they do have utility if you want to date.

So an idea I've been thinking about lately, is that evolution didn't produce humans that were wired to date forever. These app publishers undoubtedly would prefer that you keep using their apps until you die, so they're happy to see you also keep dating until you die. But that shouldn't really be how things go and it's not how most of us are wired. Most humans throughout history went through a brief courtship period and then they settled down with someone, even if that person wasn't perfect.

The app has utility in that courtship period, but the activity itself is meant to be temporary, possibly even brief, and ultimately give way to something else. The app publisher has an incentive to make you forget that.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-18 05:59:09+00:00
"Cancer" is a term that covers a lot of diseases. So there is a lot of research going into a lot of different things, and hence lots of announcements.

"Chemotherapy" again is a loaded term covering a lot of different drugs, drug combinations, protocols and so on. So yeah, a lot of cancer treatment us "chemo" - but today's chemo is far removed from 2000 chemo.

5 year survivability has increased tremendously over the last decades. We're not talking 0.5% here, breast cancer for example has gone from 72% to 93%. Early detection of prostrate cancer has near 100% survivability.

But you're right, improving survivability doesn't make for sexy headlines. Yes there's a social media appetite for "breakthroughs", but the underlying "boring" stuff is doing well, and getting better all the time. It's just not "news".
by katzenversteher | 2025-12-18 05:59:42+00:00
I also use niche questions a lot but mostly to check how much the models tend to hallucinate. E.g. I start asking about rank badges in Star Trek which they usually get right and then I ask about specific (non existing) rank badges shaped like strawberries or something like that. Or I ask about smaller German cities and what's famous about them.

I know without the ability to search it's very unlikely the model actually has accurate "memories" about these things, I just hope one day they will acutally know that their "memory" is bad or non-existing and they will tell me so instead of hallucinating something.
by protocolture | 2025-12-18 05:59:53+00:00
I use firefox for work, and I am pretty cool with that. The other "approved" browser we have is edge which is fine, and edge actually replaced Chrome entirely when it was approved. I cant remember what caused Chrome to be dropped, but I imagine it was less impressive than a boatload of opt out AI features.

Now I am going to have to propose the canonisation of one of Firefox's forks, which will be difficult because we are sensitive to supply chain issues.
by alessandra140 | 2025-12-18 06:00:39+00:00
My parter and I made a fun erotic story generator called Smitten (https://smittenstories.com ) during the valentine's day weekend as a way for couples to spice things up.

Initially it was running on donations, but with model costs rising we had to add a paywall. I have a full time job but it's still fun to run this on the side by spending few hours on it over the weekends!
by Smileyferret | 2025-12-18 06:00:44+00:00
Interesting article, but in the full paper their key figure (Fig 2) shows their treatment group of n=3 mice completely responded to the bacterial treatment, but their methods say they treated n=5 mice? Could be an honest mistake but that’s a little concerning for data manipulation.

Also agree that using a PD-L1 mab feels like it’s for show especially considering the cancer model they’re using (Colon-26) was shown to be substantially less responsive to PD-L1 inhibitors…

Not the world’s best paper imo
by agotterer | 2025-12-18 06:00:47+00:00
A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.

Since 2023 we’ve been to 44 restaurants. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.

https://www.deadchefssociety.com/
by Squeeze2664 | 2025-12-18 06:00:48+00:00
I was going to switch to Waterfox in light of this news, but a cursory search revealed that it, too, was sold to an advertising company not long ago. While they have published a blog post opposing Mozilla's AI stance, I'm really past the point of giving ad companies any benefit of the doubt. I'm looking into Librewolf now.

The browser situation grows more grim by the day.
by bitpush | 2025-12-18 06:01:52+00:00
> Apple’s most interesting value proposition was ignoring all this AI junk

Did you forget all the Apple Intelligence stuff? They were never "ignoring" if anything they talked a big talk, and then failed so hard.

The whole iPhone 16 was marketed as AI first phone (including in billboards). They had full length ads running touting AI benefits.

Apple was never "ignoring" or "sitting AI out". They were very much in it. And they failed.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-18 06:03:54+00:00
Those exist in the USA as well. We have large, medium, and small software shops. You hardly ever hear about the medium or smaller ones though, you’ll find the, splattered all over the place in office parks as well as downtown (at least here in the Seattle area). It didn’t feel very different when I lived in Europe, even the large orgs were present (Google has lots of offices in Zurich and Stockholm among others, for example, and when I was in China my wife worked for a German big tech called SAP).
by grimblee | 2025-12-18 06:04:10+00:00
I make less then 70k€ yearly and I live in a capital and sure I'm not wealthy as fuck but it's perfectly fine.

People need to stop this obssession with getting rich, I know it's because our system glorifies it (and greed), but most people won't get rich (value isn't created magically, if one has a lot, a lot have nearly nothing) and being wealthy is immoral in any cases.
by b3ing | 2025-12-18 06:05:03+00:00
Part of me thinks its to see what the competition is doing, see how others are using ai, to train ai, steal ideas/clients (common in the ad/marketing/design) world, train staff to hire, get free consulting.

Some say it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators or motivate employees that they are replaceable, but I think those 2 are just partially the case.
by aborsy | 2025-12-18 06:05:26+00:00
If I’m not wrong, a hetzner VM by default has no firewall enabled. If you are coming from providers with different default settings, that might bite you. Containers that you thought were not open to internet have been open all this time. Two firewalls failed: They bypassed ufw and there was no external firewall either.

You have to define a firewall policy and attach it to the VM.
by safety1st | 2025-12-18 06:06:05+00:00
Look at them all downvoting us for saying it. It's like a force of nature, the reaction to comments about it proves that it's true - the complainers sure enough come onto the free forum and blast down comments about it :)

I like free stuff as much as the next guy but I think this is just some fundamental aspect of psychology, like you don't value something as much if you didn't pay for it. Within our business we see this all the time, customers who pay a lot tend to be satisfied and limit their criticism to the things that really matter, customers who pay a little or are just proposal shopping will take up a huge amount of time and have a lot of minor complaints. I have heard about this at many other businesses
by pilaf | 2025-12-18 06:06:08+00:00
I'm also still a FF user, but I'm eyeing Waterfox [1] and Floorp [2], both FF forks. Waterfox has the stronger privacy focus out of the two, but Floorp doesn't strike me as being any less private that vanilla FF.

1: https://www.waterfox.com/

2: https://floorp.app/
by dang | 2025-12-18 06:06:09+00:00
(I'm a mod here)

It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks.

But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are links to past explanations about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

We try to elevate things that gratify curiosity: creative work, surprising discoveries, deep dives, technical achievements, unusual personal experience, whimsical unpredictability, good conversation, etc. And we try to demote things that run against curiosity, especially repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion.

It gets complicated because you'll also see plenty of repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion on HN—alas! This is the internet after all. But the site survives because the balance of these things stays within tolerable ranges, thanks to two factors: an active community which cares greatly about preserving this place for intended purpose (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html); and an owner (Y Combinator) that pays us to work on the site full time and mainly just wants us to keep it good, to the extent possible.

If you really want to figure this place out, the way to do it is as a reader. Hang out on the site, look at the mix of articles that make the frontpage, spend time in the discussion threads (hopefully the interesting sectors and not the flamey ones!), and over time your eyes will adjust.

What doesn't work—and this is good because we want it not to work—is approaching HN as a platform for promoting content. If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, but anyone) mainly care about "how can I use this thing to get attention for my startup/blog/project/newsletter", then you're operating in 'push' mode rather than 'pull' mode (or 'idle' mode, which is even better). In that case you won't be curious because you're too focused on what you're wanting for extraneous reasons—and if you aren't in a state of curiosity, this place won't make sense. At least we hope it won't!
by b112 | 2025-12-18 06:07:31+00:00
Amusing comparative to today's mores.

What always strikes me these days, is how old film is now. This "attractive young lady" is likely in her 80s or 90s, if she's still among us. EG, let's take 2025 vs 1965 + 25 years.

There was a time when paintings were the best we knew of the past. Then blurry photos, but we're now over 100 years of motion pictures. Our ancestors had no capacity to see the past, as we have.

I do my best to not blame the past, for most in it were simply ensconced in the culture and mores of the time. And it makes me think that quite surely, many things we do today will be seen as quaint, or improper 100 years from now. Certainly our descendants will think us uncouth, and over things we imagine as proper today. Things we think of as "doing the right thing", will be seen as uncouth, horrible, perhaps vile to our descendants.

Take this out of context statement about the young lady (the context being "the era of the 60s"). Back in the day, women expected such complements. They also expected doors to be opened for them. Chairs pulled out. For a man to stand whenever a woman was to be seated.

In this film, the gentleman says "why are we looking at this woman", yet also felt obliged to couple that with a conditional "she's attractive", for it could be misconstrued as "OMG, why am I looking at this hag!". Societal politeness dictated he do so. He would be doing the young lady a disservice, and seen as impolite by his peers did he not. And further, she'd expect it as her due.

I find today that often people take so many things out of context, from the past. Judge without knowing the circumstances (not saying the parent is judging here). We should understand context, culture, history, before pointing I think.
by hxtk | 2025-12-18 06:07:32+00:00
Many fail if you do it without any additional configuration. In Kubernetes you can mostly get around it by mounting `emptyDir` volumes to the specific directories that need to be writable, `/tmp` being a common culprit. If they need to be writable and have content that exists in the base image, you'd usually mount an emptyDir to `/tmp` and copy the content into it in an `initContainer`, then mount the same `emptyDir` volume to the original location in the runtime container.

Unfortunately, there is no way to specify those `emptyDir` volumes as `noexec` [1].

I think the docker equivalent is `--tmpfs` for the `emptyDir` volumes.

1: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/48912
by dbgrman | 2025-12-18 06:09:35+00:00
Launched Standly, a standing desk companion app on iOS and Max in Feb 2025. Steadily grew it by talking to people on reddit and in person. Mostly word of mouth sales and ASO. Initially it was only for mac but launching iOS has been good. Most downloads coming from organic search. Most people like it to build stamina for standing and stretching while working, especially those with lower back pain. Most customers are from EU.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/standly-standing-desk-timer/id...
by wahnfrieden | 2025-12-18 06:09:36+00:00
Manabi Reader - learn Japanese by reading

More than $500/month. It currently sustains my full-time focus

https://reader.manabi.io

I quit my job a couple years back to work on this app full-time, as well as its companion flashcard app, Manabi Flashcards. The goal is to help you learn through immersion and eventually replace some of your flashcard reviews time with reading (once I finish auto-reviews for flashcards)

What's special about it? Manabi Reader became popular as an Japanese-focused alternative to services like LingQ in that it locally tracks and analyzes all the words and kanji you read and study. It shows you which words are new and which you're currently learning via flashcards, so you can easily find content that suits your level and see what flashcards to prioritize adding.

It also passively accumulates an on-device (and in your personal iCloud) corpus of example sentences from your reading. It’s also one of few ways to mine sentences including pitch accent directly into Anki on iPhone.

I had built this part-time while working over many years (starting with flashcards and then the reader app) but going full-time gave me the time to do a full rewrite: SwiftUI, native iOS + macOS, and an offline-first architecture that syncs with iCloud and my server in the background.

Although it has a companion SRS algorithm (FSRS) flashcard app, it's also excellent for mining Anki cards. This works with AnkiMobile on iOS and AnkiConnect on desktop.

You can use it like a web browser for the web, or subscribe to RSS feeds. It comes with a bunch of curated content by level. Recently I added EPUB support, pitch accents, and note-taking with todos.

I'm now almost done adding a manga mode via Mokuro, and Netflix/streaming video support via realtime captioning of audio streams.

To scale this with UGC/influencer market I need to make it more beginner friendly. Currently it assumes you can read kana at least.