MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DannyBee | 2025-12-15 00:03:08+00:00
Osmo topoil is actually mostly what it says on the can - wax + oil. The wax part will melt/degrade very quickly at cooking temps. the oil portion will not.

If you are exposing it to cooking temps, and want something very natural, i'd just use an oil and not a "hardwax". The wax part is not going to buy anything.

"hardwax" is just a made up term that means nothing for real, some of them are harder waxes (carnauba), some of them are not. In any case, none of them will survive heat, because the wax won't.
by simonw | 2025-12-15 00:03:18+00:00
> What made it worth it for you?

Opportunities. You don't need many readers, you just need the right readers. I'm a big believer in making your own luck - putting things in place that make luck more likely to strike. Having a collection of writing online that people might stumble onto is very effective way of doing that.

> What kinds of posts actually worked (for learning, career, network, opportunities)?

I've written a bunch about this in the past. TLDR version:

- Stuff I've learned: TIL style posts that describe something I've learned recently

- Stuff I've found: links to things that are useful, with an explanation of why they are useful

- Stuff I've built: descriptions of projects I've completed

What to blog about: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/

My approach to running a link blog: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/

> Any practical format that lowers the bar (length, cadence, themes)?

TILs are an incredibly liberating format. You don't need to be describing something that's never been written about before - just something that's new to you today.

> If you were starting today, what would you do differently

I'd use static publishing on GitHub Pages on myname.github.io so I don't even need to run any web hosting or buy a domain name.
by mc32 | 2025-12-15 00:03:31+00:00
>like a Ford Pinto with an exploding gas tank"

This bit of libel needs to be put to bed. The Pinto did not have a greater propensity to explode than other "in-class" cars and arguably had a better safety record than Beetles or Corollas of the time. Nader made himself a nice career of this libel, but it does not make it true. Of course, other cars didn't have a "memo" but that's beside the point.
by zharknado | 2025-12-15 00:04:01+00:00
The clearest example I’ve seen of this effect is with dental hygienists in the U.S.. Big labor crunch as lots of industry veterans left the labor force during COVID, wage and career growth prospects are weak vs. alternative options for newcomers, very difficult to automate in practical terms, and the way they produce revenue is usually per-procedure, with a ceiling largely fixed by insurance reimbursement rates, so the offices that employ them see a profitability issue when contemplating a raise.

Sounds like some other places use capitation to break the tight coupling between hourly productivity and profitability. Sounds interesting but politically very challenging. Would be interested to hear some perspective from consumers in e.g. the Nordics with experience.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-15 00:04:11+00:00
It's common on services that are attractive targets for spammers or bots.

Creating a new GMail account will require a phone number now, except maybe through a few avenues which are rapidly being closed.

Signing up for popular social media services often requires a phone number.

Signing up for free trials on a lot of platforms requires a phone number.

Everyone knows it's not a perfect measure, but it substantially slows down bot and spammer signups. Even spammers who use these verification services may get an account created, but internally it will be assigned a higher index of suspicion and be more likely to be flagged. When services operate at Facebook or Google scale, they can start to notice when 30 accounts have used the same SMS verification phone number through one of these services in the past N days.
by tremon | 2025-12-15 00:04:14+00:00
there's even a question of how much the 12.25% of known test regressions actually matter.

I would think that the regression tests are actually the most worthwhile targets for the new project to validate against: they represent real-world usage and logic corner cases that are evidently easy to get wrong. These are not the kind of bugs that Rust is designed to eliminate.
by lugao | 2025-12-15 00:04:17+00:00
I made a comment earlier that was rightly flagged for its tone, and I would like to restate the technical point more constructively.

The post author, Dan Piponi, clearly knows about fractals, but his post raises the question of whether asking Fermi questions in interviews is actually effective. I am skeptical that such questions would have prevented this type of bug.

I suspect the issue stems from small measurement imprecisions accruing over long distances, which is—in my view—tied to the fractal nature of roads traversing natural landscapes.

However, as others have pointed out, it may also be tied to road closures: if closed segments are set to a higher length internally (to discourage routing), these values might be getting summed up blindly over longer distances.

None of these issues would have been prevented by being good at estimating quantities alone.

Apologies again for the unconstructive tone of my previous comment.
by jjpones | 2025-12-15 00:04:22+00:00
I agree that the technology is fine, and I also appreciate the breadth of tools I can fiddle with and how surprisingly approachable they've become for me (mdn docs are amazing to explore). But I miss the community spaces of the old internet. Different forums for the different games I played. The non-profit driven youtube / twitter. Truly the biggest pandora's box of the internet is the addition of profit incentives for posters. It was fine for a while, I liked it when video makers who put effort into their creations were compensated. But then it got gamed into becoming the worst self-fueling internet hate machine. Rewarding those who put out vapid and inflammatory content for the sake of serving ads to enraged (and engaged) viewers.
by bit1993 | 2025-12-15 00:04:57+00:00
Ah. I agree with you. When unsafe is used the borrow checker cannot check for memory safety, the programmer has to provide the guarantees by making sure their code does not violate memory safety, similar to programming in C.

But unsafe Rust is still far better than C because the unsafe keyword is visible and one can grep it and audit the unsafe parts. Idiomatic Rust also requires that the programmer provides comments as to why that part is unsafe.
by josephg | 2025-12-15 00:04:59+00:00
> Many people call Ubuntu flavors distributions. This includes Ubuntu developers.

You seem mad that a Linux distribution (Ubuntu) is trying this software out. Why do you care so much? Do you expect some of the programs you use to break? Have they?

If you don’t want to use uutils, I have good news. You can opt out. Or use Ubuntu LTS. Or use a different distribution entirely. I suspect you’re mad for a different reason. If all the tests passed, would you still be mad? Do you feel a similar way about angry projects like alpine Linux, which ship code built on musl? All the same compatibility arguments apply there. Musl is also not 100% compatible with glibc. How about llvm? Do you wish we had fewer web browsers?

Or maybe, is it a rust thing in particular? Like, if this rewrite was in C, C++ or go would you feel the same way? Are you worried more components of Linux will be ported to rust? (And if so, why?)

Ultimately the strength (and weakness) of Linux is that you’re not locked in to anything. I don’t understand how the existence of this software could make your life worse. If anything it sounds like it might be helping to clarify your stance on OS stability. If you want to make a principled stance there, there’s plenty of stable Linux distributions which will mirror your values. (Eg debian, Ubuntu lts, etc). Or you can just opt out of this experiment.

Given all of that, the tone I’m inferring from your comments seems disproportionate. Whats going on? Or am I misreading you?
by hurturue | 2025-12-15 00:05:05+00:00
I do to. Except I can't be burnt since I start each claude in a separate VM.

I have a script which clones a VM from a base one and setups the agent and the code base inside.

I also mount read-only a few host directories with data.

I still have exfiltration/prompt injection risks, I'm looking at adding URL allow lists but it's not trivial - basically you need a HTTP proxy, since firewalls work on IPs, not URLs.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-15 00:05:05+00:00
The Indo-Soviet Treaty in 1971 [0], Soviet tech transfers to India starting in 1972 [1] that made India a semiconductor exporter to the Eastern Bloc [2] and become a mini-Taiwan before Taiwan [3], and support for India's military modernization initiative [4] under Indira Gandhi that surprised Western observers in the 1980s [5].

Finally, the NAM movement began fading from 1962 following the Sino-Indian war and died by the late 1970s with the US pivot to China [6]

[0] - https://www.mea.gov.in/Portal/LegalTreatiesDoc/RU71B1557.pdf

[1] - https://www.mea.gov.in/Portal/LegalTreatiesDoc/RU72B1581.pdf

[2] - https://www.cpushack.com/2021/08/02/the-6502-travels-the-wor...

[3] - https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/economy/story/19831015-se...

[4] - https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA089122.pdf

[5] - https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/06/world/on-india-s-border-a...

[6] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2757064
by detectivestory | 2025-12-15 00:05:31+00:00
Working on a visual language learning app called Snapalabra!

The idea is simple: You look at an image and describe what you see in your target language. That's basically it!

My reason for building it was that even though I can understand a lot of spoken spanish, I really struggle to construct sentences on the fly when speaking. Doing a few minutes of active learning like this each day really helps remap my brain a little, and I quickly run into situations where I hit a wall and realize I actually don't understand something as well as i had thought.

The app also gives a little feedback on what i have written from an llm, and it also provides clues that I have mapped to each image.

At the moment I am using it mainly for intermediate Spanish and beginner Irish, and personally I find it really helpful for both. Basically learning vocan for Irish, and more serious sentence structure etc. in Spanish.

I know a lot of people absolutely hate the idea of mixing LLMs with language learning, and I can kind of see why, but I personally find it really helpful in certain cases. If you are already doing classes, and consuming content in your target language I think something like this will be really helpful for a 5 minute coffee-break type activity in the morning. Its not a language course and I have not intention for it to be one. Its just a supplementary little tool that helps with getting your brain thinking in a new language and it is free to use.

Here are a few links if anyone thinks it might be interesting:

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snapalabra/id6747401847

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whatever55....

Website: https://snapalabra.com
by jcbhmr | 2025-12-15 00:05:41+00:00
JSDoc works great for buildless application setups! One downside is that if you publish a library to npm you still need a build step to generate .d.ts files from your JSDoc type annotations so that npm shows a "TS" badge on the npm package page. This also seems to apply to VSCode's intellisense which keeps trying to poke you to "try to install @types/jsdoc-typed-package to get type information". Other JS ecosystem tooling also doesn't seem to process JSDoc types at all such as jsdocs.io or tsdocs.dev. So for libraries we're stuck with .d.ts generation via "tsc --allowJs --checkJs --declaration ..." even if it's all JS.

npm displays packages with bundled TypeScript declarations https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-16-npm-displays-packag...

JSDoc-typed node modules require special configuration in consumers to be useful https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/19145
by culi | 2025-12-15 00:06:33+00:00
Care to give an example? In another reply I pointed out how advanced JSDoc syntax's support for generics is.[0] Even allowing for `extends` and default values for generic slots.

The clunkiest part is in the way you "pass in" a generic to a slot. But this is solved by typing the return type.

I use generics pretty extensively and I've not yet come across a use-case JSDoc couldn't handle

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46267810
by reliablereason | 2025-12-15 00:06:39+00:00
Well it is largely genetic, but it could still be behaviourally linked for sure.

As i see it the fundamental issue in dyslexia has to do with tokenization and embedding.

The dyslexic brain uses a embedding space that is not very fit for purpose.

Some stuff that is dissimilar get embedded close to each other and some things that should be far from each other gets embedded close to each other.

Downstream networks that try to use these embeddings has a hard time trying to counteract the bad embeddings. The final result is a dyslexic person.
by mattkevan | 2025-12-15 00:06:51+00:00
- Building a micro-learning platform that uses AI-powered role plays and conversational assessments to gauge learner understanding instead of eg. a multiple choice questionnaire.

- I’ve just started designs and initial setup for a personal productivity system heavily inspired by the Newton & HyperCard and built in Rust. Idea is to use LLMs to build GraphRAG-like connections between content & break out of the standard app+document model. My current thinking is having ‘frames’ of content (notes, sketches, events etc) that are acted on by capabilities and displayed in views (timeline, calendar, stack, knowledge graph etc).

- Also working on a static site generator and CMS webapp that creates sites that can be viewed on anything, from web browser to TUI. Like if Gemini or Gopher also rendered to html.
by tomcam | 2025-12-15 00:07:13+00:00
Not sure I agree? I made some famously (in my family) weird mistakes in writing when I was young. They were obvious dyslectic issues. Mostly that changed because I haven't shown any traits for years in reading & writing. I had an amazing teacher for reading (my mom, who was a teacher).

OTOH while I was educated in music for a long time, I have some kind of problem reading music that disappears when it's projected on a big screen. Yes, I have corrected vision. If I had been smarter I would have just memorized everything I played, which is what I have to do now because projecting music isn't too practical ATM.

So while I think for some people it's intrinsic, I think you're onto something. Never actually considered it as a cause.
by deivid | 2025-12-15 00:07:30+00:00
I've been writing on my blog for 9 years. Still feel the same blockers you do on every new post.

For me, the main motivation is that I enjoy reading other people's blogs, and hopefully my posts give someone ekse a similar enjoyment

I had a few attempts to lower the bar (tags for low effort, short and shitpost so far), but it feels like a crutch and hasn't worked long term for me.
by bennydog224 | 2025-12-15 00:07:44+00:00
I'm working on Ward, a Chrome extension that detects browser scams/phishing using lightweight LLM models. Our target persona is elders, young children, and anyone who's not as tech savvy. When explaining it to people, I call it a "modern antivirus", because it can detect anything from malicious scripts on a page to grey-area misinformation on social media.

I'm bootstrapping and covering LLM costs for Ward's first couple hundred users (got about 50 users at the moment) to improve it. We have a local mode for added privacy and are dipping our feet to gauge biz. interest (client-side phishing protection is unparalleled).

I've recommended it to friends, colleagues and loved ones. I dogfood my own product, and it even surprises me every day how much more mindful it makes me of my browsing of harmful content. Would love to get feedback and testers from HN.

On the Chrome Web Store -> https://tryward.app
by amomchilov | 2025-12-15 00:07:45+00:00
FWIW, AoC is very non-representative of real-world string manipulation problems.

The AoC format goes out of its way to express all problem inputs and outputs in simple strings with only basic ASCII text, just for compatibility with the most programming environments. This is very different from almost all real-world problem, where the complexities of human language are huge.
by sibeliuss | 2025-12-15 00:07:52+00:00
The docs situation continues to be hilarious and bad, for the gem they have created.

It's the unfortunate situation where those who know, know, and those who do not, blasphemy the whole thing based on misunderstanding.

Super unfortunate, which could be solved by simply moving a little money over to Relay's docs, and working on some marketing materials.
by Triphibian | 2025-12-15 00:08:00+00:00
I find it funny and sad that people get so excited about those Wrapped year-end things on Spotify when these companies are basically withholding all this data all year long and then pretend like it's a special treat when they doll out a peek at it once a year.

It feels to me like "dark mode" (which is a merely single color of customization for an app). We expect so little from our software and services that even these little, previously common features are supposed to be a treat.

Anyway, Last.fm was great -- I never used it that much for discovery, but rather to get insight into what I was listening to. Largely, it didn't say THAT much about my habits because I mostly just listened to my collection on random. My top bands were, for the most part, the bands I had the most of.
by CSSer | 2025-12-15 00:08:30+00:00
> For packages typed with JSDoc, CTRL/CMD clicking on a function will take you to actual code rather than a type declarations file. I much prefer this experience as a dev.

More broadly, this is the default behavior of JS even without JSDoc blocks, and it ought to be the default behavior everywhere, including TS. I'm not alone in this sentiment, but it's incredibly contentious. There's been an open GH issue about it with hundreds of replies for years. I have no idea why they can't just pick a different shortcut for viewing types and call it a day. They'd be doing the entire ecosystem a favor.
by vldszn | 2025-12-15 00:08:45+00:00
Probably just a matter of preference imo =)

I was using another paid tool my accountant suggested. Then I decided to build my own tool, but free and open-source. It gets the job done at least for me plus I have some ideas how can I improve it further. For example I built a simple automation where an invoice is generated every month, emailed to me for review, and then I forward it to the client.
by badcryptobitch | 2025-12-15 00:09:14+00:00
Working on an MPC stack to make it easier for devs to integrate privacy into their stacks. As normal folks increasingly value the privacy of their data, developers will need to think about how they can build apps while guarding their users' data. We provide tooling for them to do this.

Still WIP but we are getting our first audit in the coming days!

Stoffel-Lang:https://github.com/Stoffel-Labs/Stoffel-Lang StoffelVM: https://github.com/Stoffel-Labs/StoffelVM MPC protocols: github.com/Stoffel-Labs/mpc-protocols Website: stoffelmpc.com
by mylons | 2025-12-15 00:09:38+00:00
last.fm was so promising when it came out but i have to say i didn’t discover anything using their platform.

chatGPT is incredible, just giving it a single song and some context, it can recommend at a rate of something like 85-90%.

the only place i’ve gotten the BEST music recommendations were the oink and last.fm forums. humans, still, are the best recommendation infrastructure.
by ChristopherDrum | 2025-12-15 00:10:03+00:00
I shared this last month, and it seemed to resonate with people, so I'll share again and maybe new eyeballs will see it this time. I'm continuing to build a body of work on my retro productivity software blog, Stone Tools.

https://stonetools.ghost.io

Previous articles which resonated with HN were on Deluxe Paint and VisiCalc. The latest post, "HyperCard on the Macintosh," seems to be making the HN rounds currently. Bret Victor himself chimed in on the HyperCard article over on Mastodon, filling in some nice historical footnotes. https://posts.dynamic.land/@bret/115716576717006637

Unlike many (most?) other retrocomputing explorations, I specifically do not look at games nor do I tie myself to any particular machine, though I'm focused on the 1977 - 1995 period. I spend a minimum of two weeks with each productivity title, trying to learn it, building things with it, and generally trying to understand its approach to solving problems. I'd characterize my writing tone as casual, conversational, and decidedly light-hearted.

Each piece of software (so far, knock on wood) gets me thinking about some other aspect of related computing history, so I explore that as a tangent. With the Superbase article, I talked about "the paperless office." With the VisiCalc article I considered its impact on less obvious industries, notably hog farming.

I hope the passion and effort I put into the articles comes through. If you're interested in computing history beyond just the games I think you'll find something of interest on my blog. "This Week in Retro" did a segment about me and my various projects as well, if you're curious to get an overview of what I'm all about (link is queued up at the start of the segment) https://youtu.be/UHYscl1Ayqg?si=7JM1sZagjoqvPjk2&t=2137
by baranul | 2025-12-15 00:11:24+00:00
The amount of Zig and Rust stories that Hacker News helps push is mind-boggling, while stealth censoring and limiting the presenting of stories about other languages.

Based on search for this site, one could be led to believe these two languages were #1 and #2 in the world. Guess there must be lots of money involved to be that level of dastardly.
by dr_faustus | 2025-12-15 00:11:31+00:00
Your statements about Germany are not correct: Factur-X is not common in Germany at all, the German version of this standard (albeit very closely related to Factur-X) is called Zugferd and it is by no means mandatory in Germany.

Actually, most governmental agencies (which have required e-invoices for many years), only accept the pure XML files. Zugferd is a bit of an interim solution until everybody is familiar with an e-invoice visualizer. There are already many free (as in beer and source) solutions available for that. Zugferd (X-Factur) is a problematic standard, because there can be discrepancies between the PDF and the embedded file and its unclear, which is authorative. Concerning the platforms: I don't know about France, but in Germany, sending e-invoices by e-mail is explicitly permitted by the government.
by skeledrew | 2025-12-15 00:11:48+00:00
Even if it's a placebo, that it got the job done is what matters. But how would I even test Ig it was a placebo effect? I already have the experience of not being able to go the lengths I did with it, without it. Like I really drove myself to meet some bad deadlines, and paid for it several days after; I couldn't drive myself like that otherwise (I don't drink coffee, energy drinks, etc).
by pogue | 2025-12-15 00:12:37+00:00
I hear that a lot, but I think this is becoming very different than the crypto grift.

Crypto was just that, a pure grift where they were creating something out of nothing and rugpulling when the hype was highest.

AI is actually creating something, it's generating replacement for artists, for creatives, for musicians, for writers, for programmers. It's literally capable of generating something from _almost_ nothing. Of course, you have to factor in energy usage & etc, but the end user sees none of that. They type a request and it generates an output.

It may be easily identifable slop today, but it's getting better and better at a RAPID rate. We all need to recognize this.

I don't know what to do with the knowledge that it's coming for our jobs. Adapt or die? I don't know...