MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by slooonz | 2025-04-20 11:55:23+00:00
Yes. This is partly why this article is crap. k*G is never defined, and is the core operation in ECC (also: the article insist on using an elliptic curve in R, but you need to do it on a finite field, because on a smooth curve you can just use a smooth interpolation to solve the logarithm — and obviously once you go on a finite field the curve no longer looks nice, it’s just a seemingly random cloud of points).

Very roughly speaking, putting the complication of "point at infinity" problem under the rug, a characteristic feature of a EC is that a straight line passing through two points on the curve will pass through a third point on the curve (yes, unless you take a vertical line, point at infinity). So you can define an "addition of points on the curve" : take two points A and B, draw a straight line passing through them, name the third intersection point between the line and the curve C, declare A + B = C (actually there’s a symmetry around the x axis involved for the usual properties of addition to hold, another complication, let's sweep it under the rug too).

(for A = B, take the tangent of the curve at A ; in R you can see that it works because you can take the limit as B goes arbitrarily close to A : that gives you the tangent ; in a finite field that’s less obvious but the algebraic proof is the same)

So k*G is just G + G + ... + G, k times.

If you want more details, your favorite reasoning LLM can do a better job explaining what I’ve swept under the rug.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-20 11:55:40+00:00
This reminds of a quixotic quest I undertook once - implementing enough of a SLIP and TCP/IP stack to send mail with SMTP and retrieve it with POP3, all in PC BASIC (the kind that still required line numbers).

Amongst other problems, it wouldn't work properly (dropped characters) at anything faster than 9,600 baud, and on an original PC needed to go a bit slower than that; computing things like checksums was exceedingly painful; there wasn't enough RAM (it was limited to 64K for program plus data, which in practical terms meant a PC with at least 96K of RAM); it would have to drop the connection if it shelled out to an external editor. But it did work.
by gcanyon | 2025-04-20 11:56:46+00:00
> superior alternatives for anesthesia

Two of my kids were born using nitrous as anesthesia. This was years ago in San Diego, CA. I very clearly remember leaning in to my struggling wife and trying to motivate her: "Honey, remember, you need to breathe for the nitrous to work. Don't just hold your breath and bear down. You've got to breathe."
by martindbp | 2025-04-20 11:58:30+00:00
Many kids will do difficult stuff, just not the stuff you'd have in mind. Sometimes parents are right in what the kids should be focusing on, but I'd guess more than not they are wrong. For example, all the parents who discouraged heavy computer use or video games, when this is how most millennials came into programming and IT. Then there's the thing where a kid who is interested, obsessed even, learns SO much faster. I recall a story of a parent who wanted their child checked for learning disabilities and the psychologist exclaimed "Your son has memorized 350 Pokemon! It's not a question of learning ability, it's a question of motivation".

In my view, if we let our children do what interests them, to some degree (of course anything taken to the extreme will likely fail, and it depends on the child), they are likely to cover way more territory, and probably more useful territory, than a child that is being forced and coerced. One of the many things my 7 year old has learned from Minecraft is an entire language (English), to a level which in the past (my generation) we didn't reach before perhaps 18 (and that was due to watching TV, not school). The other day I caught him taking notes on a piece of paper that said single = 1, double = 2, triple = 3, quadruple = 4, quintuple = 5, sextuple = 6. This is a child who should not be speaking English, but now he can write and spell it better than his native language, because we let him follow his passion. He's also learned a ton of engineering concepts and vocabulary, and has the ability to install mods, debug when they don't work, has a basic understanding of networking, IP addresses and on and on.

He has no interest in playing an instrument right now, why should we force him? If the time comes and he wants to, he will learn it so much faster because he wants to get better.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-20 11:59:12+00:00
It varies by state, but in some Medicaid is some of the best coverage you can get. (I have a personal mission to dispel the myth that poor Americans can't access health care, because often they can - and spreading the idea they can't leads to adverse health outcomes.) Specifically, patients aren't ever charged for anything.

Uterus transplants are still experimental. The only ones I could find in the U.S. are in clinical trials and are being paid for by the institution to people accepted into the program, such as the one at John Hopkins.

There are not gynecologists (yet) charging $200,000 for uterus transplants in America.
by jfengel | 2025-04-20 12:00:12+00:00
Because the cone isn't really a "blue" cone, and neither is the "red" one. The curves overlap in complex ways. A pure violet photon also slightly stimulates the long wavelength cone.

That's why red+blue=purple feels a bit like violet. It creates a similar double firing.

(And why red plus green gives an even more accurate yellow. The long and medium cones have a lot of overlap.)
Ask HN: 15 Years, 9 Startups, 0 Big Wins – Should I Quit or Keep Going?
by bibinmohan | 2025-04-20 12:00:48+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm Bibin Mohan, a 37-year-old founder from India. I started selling firecrackers at 15 and jumped into entrepreneurship full-time at 22. I’ve been at it ever since — 15 years, 9 different startup attempts, and still grinding.

I dropped out of college in 2009 to co-found a web and digital marketing agency with three friends. They left within a few years, but I kept it going and still run it today. It pays my family's expenses, but not much more.

In between, I got lucky — in 2014, I became the social media consultant to India’s former Central Minister of Shipping & IT through my agency. It was a proud moment, but also a reminder that consulting doesn’t scratch the startup itch for me.

Here’s my startup timeline:

1. Quadregal (2009–Present): Web & digital agency. 500+ projects completed. Bootstrapped and sustains my living.

2. Likebids (2010–2011): Social bidding platform using Facebook Likes to win products. It went viral, featured on Mashable. FB changed its ToS and killed the model right before a possible investment.

3. Facebook Apps (2011–2012): Built viral apps like “My Best Chat Friend” (used FB APIs to calculate your most chatted friend). One app hit 1M users in 6 months. All were shut down when FB banned auto-publishing.

4. Glist (2020–2021): A 10-min grocery delivery startup in India (like Zepto). Interviewed at YC, didn’t get in. Got an offer of $120K for 70% equity — we declined and shut it down due to lack of capital.

5. Ippow (2021): 20-minute medicine delivery. No cofounders, no capital, no traction.

6. Healthy (2022): EMI-based healthcare package booking. Stalled due to disinterest and funding issues.

7. 5mino (2023): Mental health + time-focused app. Built it, no downloads. Learned a lot though.

8. Flowstate (2024): Simple app that plays relaxing music. Got 2K+ downloads organically. Growth stalled.

9. Tillit (2024–Now): My current project with two cofounders. It's like Faire for India. We’re turning local homes into mini-warehouses, enabling faster wholesale delivery and giving shopkeepers credit-based inventory. Retailers save money, time, and space. The idea works — I’ve validated it in the field. But we’re constrained financially, funding everything from my agency income. And we need to offer credit, which is hard to scale without capital.

Now here’s my dilemma:

My wife asked me today if I’m crazy to keep chasing these ideas instead of just taking a job. I’m 37, married, with a child. I've built multiple products, none have "made it", and I'm still hustling every day, believing the next one will.

So — do I need more motivation, or should I finally quit?

Have you seen someone like me turn it around this late? Am I just being stubborn, or is there still hope if I keep going?

Would really appreciate some honest advice from this community.

Thank you, Bibin Mohan
by bibinmohan | 2025-04-20 12:01:31+00:00
Thanks for reading this long post!!

Just to add — I’m not looking for sympathy or praise. I genuinely want honest advice from fellow builders and thinkers here. If you’ve been in a similar place — hitting walls, pivoting endlessly, with family pressure mounting — what helped you decide to keep going or step away?

Also, if you think there’s a smarter way I should be leveraging my skills or experience, I’m all ears. I’m not married to any single idea — I just want to build something that works and helps people.

Thanks again.
by bawolff | 2025-04-20 12:02:07+00:00
Perhaps i should say why i think this.

In math (i am not a mathematician), abstractions are a base to build on. You define some concept (e.g. a group, a set, whatever) then you prove things about it, building ever more complexity around your abstraction.

This works great because in math your abstractions don't change. You are never going to redefine what a group is. If you need something different,maybe you define some related concept, a ring, a semigroup, or whatever, but you never change your original abstraction. It is the base you build on.

As a result you can pack a lot of complexity. E.g. if something is a group, what are all the logical consequences of that? Probably so many you can't list them all, and that's ok. The whole point of math is to pick out some pattern and figure out what that entails.

In contrast in computer programming, the goal of abstraction is largely isolation. You want to be able to change something in the abstraction, and it not affect the system very much. The things the abstraction entails should be as limited as reasonably possible as everything it entails is a potential depedency that will get messed up if anything changes. Ideally you should be able to understand what the abstraction does by only looking at the abstraction's code and not the whole system.

Just think about the traditional SOLID principle in OOP design. Its all about ensuring abstractions are as isolated as possible from each other.

To summarize, i think in math abstractions are the base of the complexity pyramid. All the complexity is built on top of them. In computers its the opposite. They should be the tip of the complexity pyramid.

P.S. my controversial opinion is that this is the flaw in a lot of reasoning haskell fans use.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-20 12:02:15+00:00
One thing I appreciate at (some) YMCAs is that their childwatch is TV screen free, including my one locally and the one that's next door to my doctor's office. (We like to combine doctor visits or checkups with a trip to the YMCA if we're well enough to go.)

I avoid the childwatch at the YMCA that has a couple of screens, although it's otherwise excellent.

A trend in (some) libraries is to put technology everywhere - iPads for example (which I consider a very clunky way to search the library catalog). I'm assuming these things get bought via grants. If I go to the library, I want to deal with books, not computers which access the exact same stuff I could get at home. A separate computer room with actual, real, desktop computers available for people to use is fine.
Show HN: I built a financial report assistant using Llamaindex
by geekbing | 2025-04-20 12:05:14+00:00
This is the first SaaS application I developed (based on RAG), which can quickly gain insights from tens of thousands of financial reports from thousands of companies. https://ch2report.com

I am looking for 5 early users. If you would like to try this application, please send your registration email to my email (from my profile), and I would be happy to set up a free trial for you.

I would love to hear all the feedback/suggestions. Thanks!
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-04-20 12:05:55+00:00
> I have continued to read philosophy over the years. Next on my list is the new translation of Maimonides, which on first glance seems like a big improvement. However I read much less philosophy in refereed journals than I used to. Frankly, I think most of it is not very philosophical and also not very interesting. It is not about real problems, but rather tries to carve out a small piece that is both marginally noticeable by an academic referee and also defensible, again to an academic referee. That strikes me as a bad way to do philosophy. It worked pretty well say in the 1960s, but these days those margins are just too small.

> Most professional philosphers seem to me more like bureaucrats than philosophers. They simply do not embody philosophic ideals, either in their writings or in their persons.

There are various reasons for this, but one of the really big ones is the retreat from metaphysics and the decline in influence of the Church. All of the great old names in philosophy were interested in the metaphysical and ineffable -- in questions that only philosophy, theology, and perhaps physics can answer -- even if it wasn't always their focus. Today's academic philosophers recoil from those questions as though they were radioactive.

I'd add to Cowen's list (which I mostly disagree with, lol at Douthat and Callard,) that physicists and mathematicians like Stephen Wolfram, Gregory Chaitin, and David Deutsch are outstanding contemporary philosophers. They're the ones still trying to answer the big questions.
by pettycashstash2 | 2025-04-20 12:09:28+00:00
At 37, you're actually at a prime age for entrepreneurship. Research from the Harvard Business Review found the average age of successful startup founders is 45, with the highest-growth startups founded by entrepreneurs with an average age of 45-50. Your accumulated experience is an asset, not a liability.

Rather than seeing this as a binary choice between continuing or quitting, consider a third path: being more selective and focused. What if you committed fully to Tillit for 18-24 months with clear milestones and decision points?
by gcanyon | 2025-04-20 12:09:32+00:00
I used nitrous oxide just one time, and it wasn't to get high: this was before the web, and I had read somewhere that the feeling of the need to breathe is not a result of lack of oxygen, but a buildup of carbon dioxide. My friends were doing whippits, and I figured that nitrous oxide wouldn't allow for the production of carbon dioxide, so if I breathed it -- no sense of need to breathe, right?

So I breathed out as much as I could, breathed in a full lungs-full of nitrous, and held my breath. I wish I had timed it, because I have no idea how long I held my breath, but at least 15-30 seconds, because I held my breath for a bit, then I was talking a bit (not breathing in, just out) somewhat, then holding my breath again and thinking.

My whole body went numb. I was giddy. My vision closed in and started to dim. And through it all I felt no need to breathe at all. As my vision was going away I was idly thinking, "Hmm, still no need to breathe. But my vision is going away, so I should probably breathe. What was I thinking? Oh yeah, no need to breathe but I should breathe anyway. What was that? Oh yeah, breathe before I lose consciousness because these idiots are all high and if I just died here, they'd let me. What? Oh, breathe, moron." And I breathed.

Like I said, I didn't time it, so I don't know how long it lasted. I idly breath-hold for fun, and I can easily go two minutes with no prep, but obviously that's with oxygen in my lungs, so it could have been anywhere from 20 seconds up to a minute or more?

I did the counter-experiment a bit later: we had dry ice, so I put some in the sink and let it build up to a foggy unspecified concentration. I breathed all the way out, carefully lowered my face in, and breathed in.

Or, I tried to. My entire body was instantly on fire, and I violently coughed it out in a split second. Hypothesis confirmed! :-)
by nneonneo | 2025-04-20 12:09:39+00:00
Looking at elliptic curves over the reals makes for pretty pictures, but really fails to convey why ECC should be secure at all.

As an example, the function m => m^65537 is a completely useless encryption function over the reals because it's trivial to take 65537-th roots over R (even if the numbers are unwieldy in size), but it's a surprisingly strong encryption function when computed over certain finite groups (i.e. RSA).

Similarly, any ECC scheme defined over real numbers is pretty useless. It only gets interesting when you use a finite field. Unfortunately, the math is less simple that way.
by yapyap | 2025-04-20 12:10:12+00:00
> We all kind of know this is true, but it’s always really eyeopening to see to what extent these companies know everything about us.

I agree, if you have a Spotify account I implore you ( and anyone reading ) to download their Spotify data [1] and just look through it, it’s really interesting. I hear news about how big companies are collecting all our data and got kinda desensitized to just the news but to see it applied to you and your specific music experience is pretty eye (re-)opening.

1. https://support.spotify.com/us/article/data-rights-and-priva...
by trollbridge | 2025-04-20 12:10:52+00:00
Well, not quite. The U.S. house currently has 220 Republicans, and to pass a bill takes 218 votes. If 3 Republicans decide they don't like something, the bill won't pass, and this is happening quite frequently right now. (The Democrats could decide to join the Republicans and pass it anyway, but so far this has not happened.)

The current President keeps wanting to pass bills which simply don't pass.

Likewise, the Senate realistically needs 60% votes to pass controversial legislation, and that just isn't happening either.

You're right that the U.S. congress used to vote far more upon regional lines or other non-party interests than it does now. There is something studied in political science (I can't remember its name) that predicts that well-funded, important elections will eventually converge on being 50/50, with the winner essentially being statistical noise.
by hug | 2025-04-20 12:10:57+00:00
The entire problem of the article is summed up this paragraph:

> The ECDLP involves finding the integer k such that P=k⋅G, where P is a point on the curve, G is a known point (the generator point), and k is the ephemeral key. The difficulty of this problem is what makes ECC secure.

So uh. What is P? Why do I want to work it out? What’s G? Why do I know it, or not know it? Also k. I assume I know maybe one of these values, but maybe I know none.

Why does any of this make anything secure? I get, in general, that knowing numbers that someone else doesn’t know is good for me to be good at security with someone else, but is it?

… just not good.
by teruakohatu | 2025-04-20 12:12:00+00:00
This is a good first effort. You asked for feedback:

ChatGPT is a nice interface/UI to the GPT models, but the models themselves are available via. an API and industry users will be using it via. the API.

Your report is very light on details. Your methodology is so short I do not know what you actually did.

This is probably sufficient for high school but a ML/AI report or paper would have a short introduction, maybe a review of existing research, a detailed methodology and a conclusion. It should also include references to external research. Ideally it would have an appendix that includes or references and links to the data (in the release?)

When doing research create a notebook documenting everything you did and the results. The notebook could just be a Google Doc.

You mentioned that you used ChatGPT to write the report. It is better to learn to write it yourself with assistance (grammar etc.) from ChatGPT.

I think the reply you got from OpenAI support was also generated by ChatGPT.

I want to commend you on taking the initiative to run experiments that allowed you to have some insight into what ChatGPT was doing on the backend. I have graded university students with far less initiative than you.

Keep experimenting and have fun… but if you have school exams coming up focus on studying for them rather than optimising your study using ChatGPT.
by cushychicken | 2025-04-20 12:12:27+00:00
Answers like this are sort of what makes me wonder what most engineers are smoking when they think AI isn’t valuable.

I don’t think the outright dismissal of AI is smart. (And, OP, I don’t mean to imply that you are doing that. I mean this generally.)

I also suspect people who level these criticisms have never really used a frontier LLM.

Feeding in a whole codebase that I’m familiar with, and hearing the LLM give good answers about its purpose and implementation from a completely cold read is very impressive.

Even if the LLM never writes a line of code - this is still valuable, because helping humans understand software faster means you can help humans write software faster.
by andrewfromx | 2025-04-20 12:12:37+00:00
oh this video is for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeuRKAsW__E

"How To Know If You Should Work Harder"

He talks about exactly this. Has a great line something like "you just want to be able to say I gave it my all and mean it."

If you stop now do you mean it?

I'm a little order, 49 and I recently "gave up" and took a W2 job. But I was definitely done. Could not go on with my make it big ideas one day longer.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-20 12:13:51+00:00
A couple states (notably California) simply have a primary election to determine who the 2 candidates will be in the general election. They're often both from the same party in "one party" districts where people overwhelmingly prefer one of the parties.

California's voting districts are gerrymandered along party lines, so the districts are about 75% safe seats for one party, and 25% safe seats for another party, despite the last Presidential election only being 58% for the one party and 42% for the other.

Despite this, California has some of the most egregious pandering to extremes within the parties (due to the safe seats) and has a reputation for having "extreme" candidates.
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-04-20 12:14:45+00:00
Yikes I hope lit.money doesn’t go the way of Mint: bought out by giant corporation, enshittified, neglected and finally subsumed/killed.

Personal finance apps need to be trustworthy and be around for the long haul - I need them to just hum along and not take me on a venture-backed roller coaster.
by annerxox | 2025-04-20 12:16:06+00:00
I think much can be learned from modern American kids sports vs the Soviet youth sports system.

Kids specialize almost immediately now in a sport that is most likely because the parent likes that sport and wants the kid to be good at it.

The Soviet system was the athlete as a kid should try as many different sports as possible until 12 or 13 because you don't know what the kid will have natural talent at for before then.

That is not pushing the kid to practice something they hate but it is also not letting the kid be free to not do anything besides play on the phone.

Kids ultimately like what they are good at. If I had a kid, I feel like my job would be to figure out what they have some talent at and then fan the flames so that talent turns into a passion. I think many parents though are trying to live out their own dreams through the kid, if the kid has talent for the activity or not.