MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antifa | 2025-04-28 12:37:44+00:00
> Hasn’t RFK Jr spent his entire life trying to find the cause and cure for autism?

He was an environmental lawyer, not a doctor or scientist, so no.

> RFK Jr is giving a voice to parents who are scared, confused and fully aware that nobody is listening to them

It's far more likely (and reasonable to believe) that his brainstorm is an alien entity attempting to weaken the human race for an upcoming invasion, or he's a foreign asset for geopolitical reasons, or he's the biblical Pestilence Horseman of the Apocalypse, than that he's a voice that represents people in the autism community.

Just look at his history. He's caused/causing multiple measles outbreaks. He's already a massmurderer.
by bilekas | 2025-04-28 12:38:16+00:00
> Maybe it's more like Joe Boggs uses the Hubble telescope to find a new galaxy and moaning because the telescope gets a mention.

Maybe I've underestimated the impact the AI tooling has had then, because seems to me that your example wouldn't be an issue as it's literally the entire tool to discover.

> I'm hoping the AI modeling allows some breakthroughs.

I'm actually on board with you on this, I think it can be extrememly useful and really speed things up when dealing with such huge amount of complex data that needs to be worked with, my only gripe here was the title itself. It's seems forced when it could have been "Amazing breakthrough discovered to unravel cause of Alzheimer’s" - From here the main body of the article would match the title, with a nice shout out to a really creative use of AI.
by siva7 | 2025-04-28 12:38:21+00:00
It really baffles me that people here don't realize that co-founders should be multi-disciplinary, so all should be able to do some kind of (!) business and/or tech part at least. A clear separation of skills would be a red flag for me that this team operates in an outdated mode. It's not 1990 anymore. If you're the business guy but don't value enough or even hate the tech work, I wouldn't believe in the company.
by dijit | 2025-04-28 12:38:48+00:00
I don't buy this argument, it's the pinnacle of selection bias.

`any != all` after all.

Your argument is essentially; because some Russian people send some of their children to be educated or buy some property in the west (as a portfolio of how many?) that the argument that the state of Russia dislikes the EU holds no water.

To me, it's hardly evidence of anything, just like how some people in the UK fetishise Russia- yet the UK government is actively hostile and condemns without hesitation- Russias actions towards Ukraine.
Ask HN: Building in a crowded space – how to stand out?
by mattgloss | 2025-04-28 12:38:51+00:00
I'm building a startup in a crowded space (consumer finance) and trying to figure out how we can stand out.

The options I see are:

1. By features: We are truly differentiated relative to our peers in a few key areas (users don't have to transfer their assets to us, every investment portfolio is truly customized from the ground, and we use institutional investments to build portfolios). I get that we need to emphasize these aspects, but I don't know if they are tangible enough for users to feel compelled to go with us vs. a competitor.

2. By brand: We're aiming to brand ourselves as "the approachable friend" - someone our users (young middle-income American casual investors) were already going to for financial advice. This isn't night and day different from other brands in the space, but it's a step away from the heavily analytical tone a lot of them use. It needs to be someone reliable since people are trusting us with financial guidance, but we're more approachable than other platforms thanks to completely tailored communication and simple language.

3. By direct comparison: There is an opportunity to contrast against incumbents in the space, calling them out (without naming names) for their false claims of personalization, as they're really just slotting people in pre-built investment portfolios and giving generic advice.

What do you guys think? Combination of the three? Emphasis on one in particular? A route I'm missing?

Thanks!!
by martinald | 2025-04-28 12:39:00+00:00
Yes, something similar happened in the UK a while back. Full info here: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/docs/2020/01/9_...

Key points that started it were (you can see the chain of events in the doc):

2.4.1. At 16:52:33 on Friday 9 August 2019, a lightning strike caused a fault on the Eaton Socon – Wymondley 400kV line. This is not unusual and was rectified within 80 milliseconds (ms)

2.4.2. The fault affected the local distribution networks and approximately 150MW of distributed generation disconnected from the networks or ‘tripped off’ due to a safety mechanism known as vector shift protection

2.4.3. The voltage control system at the Hornsea 1 offshore wind farm did not respond to the impact of the fault on the transmission system as expected and became unstable. Hornsea 1 rapidly reduced its power generation or ‘deloaded’ from 799MW to 62MW (a reduction of 737MW).
by Bjartr | 2025-04-28 12:40:24+00:00
I wonder if this is similar to how that experiment[0] where they attempted to domesticate foxes led to traits like floppy ears.

Which is to say, even when attempting to objectively select for "well aligned" behavior, human tendency to favor non-material signals of "friendliness" still leaks in.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
by alok-g | 2025-04-28 12:40:33+00:00
I am in a similar stage.

In brief:

25 years of experience including FAANG. Recently got divorced (complex litigations, fought hard, very satisfied with the outcome).

Now rethinking myself. Want to do something useful for humankind in the rest of my life. Having big ideas for the future. Trying some research-focussed 'side' projects. Considering writing a book. Learning new things. So on.
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-28 12:40:44+00:00
Thanks for the question.

HDL: Verilog

Assembly: The processor executes a custom instruction set called PySM (Not very original name, I know :) ). It's inspired by CPython Bytecode — stack-based, dynamically typed — but streamlined to allow efficient hardware pipelining. Right now, I’m not sharing the full ISA publicly yet, but happy to describe the general structure: it includes instructions for stack manipulation, binary operations, comparisons, branching, function calling, and memory access.

Why not ARM/X86/etc... Existing CPUs are optimized for static, register-based compiled languages like C/C++. Python’s dynamic nature — stack-based execution, runtime type handling, dynamic dispatch — maps very poorly onto conventional CPUs, resulting in a lot of wasted work (interpreter overhead, dynamic typing penalties, reference counting, poor cache locality, etc.).
by ClearAndPresent | 2025-04-28 12:41:29+00:00
One that comes to mind was the manuals and bits and pieces that came with Infocom text-based adventure games. They were nice bits of cruft to have alongside the actual game but in certain instances puzzles within the game could only be solved by referring to something on the card, or booklet, supplied with the game. I can't recall if it was The Hitchhiker's Guide, or Leather Goddess of Phobos, but the requirement popped up quite deep into the game.

They weren't license keys, persey, as all the printed material was the same, but a tacit test as to whether you had bought the actual game, or just copied the disk.
by leomca | 2025-04-28 12:42:06+00:00
Spain loses around 15GW of demand at the same time: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...

I don't think we're able to tell from the data if one is the cause of the other, are we? Since if production was lost, load would have to be shedded to balance the grid, and if load was lost (e.g. due to a transmission failure), production would have to be disconnected to balance the grid.
by fsckboy | 2025-04-28 12:42:13+00:00
>I also need an IC to convert the I2S signal (currently sent to the MAX98357A) to a headphone output. I haven't researched options yet. The motherboard will need additional routing to send the I2S signal from the ESP32-S3 to both the MAX98357A and this new IC. Suggestions welcome!

isn't a headphone just a high impedance speaker? you just grab the same output that goes to the speakers and reroute it through a big resistor to the headphones.

did a little searching, here you go (the extra resistance isn't that great)

https://samtechpro.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-to-use-speaker-o...

i suggest put efforts into stereo for speaker and headphones, more pleasing, and wouldn't stereo set the stage for truer brain development?
by myself248 | 2025-04-28 12:42:28+00:00
If their networks are built like the ones I've worked on, everything has at least a little battery, but only some of it has generators to keep going after that.

So some or most cellular towers will have generators, and their fibers will backhaul through repeaters, some or most of which will have their own generators. When it gets back to the MTSO, that will definitely have large diesel turbines on site and at least 24 hours of fuel with priority refueling contracts.

I'd expect there to be a lot of outages, for instance where all the towers in a region end up backhauled through a site where the generator fails or was never installed for some reason. But there will also be a lot of places that stay up in some capacity because, more or less by happenstance, all the fuel tank permits got approved and all the equipment actually worked.
by ryao | 2025-04-28 12:42:38+00:00
I cannot speak for other states, but NY requires a driving test and has police regularly enforce traffic violations too. None of this supports the idea of setting highway speed limits below the 85th percentile or even having high way speed limits. It instead suggests that we should copy the Germans.

As for gruesome accidents, there will always be Darwin Award recipients. Trying to prevent them from earning their rewards is a foolhardy task. I believe the maxim is that the moment you make something idiot proof, the world makes a better idiot.
by snowwrestler | 2025-04-28 12:43:09+00:00
The Fast Company article says “Republicans in Virginia just passed a law to make it a punishment for repeated traffic violations.” But the Virginia legislature is currently controlled by the Democrats. And the delegate quoted in this local news story is a Democrat:

https://wjla.com/news/local/anti-speeding-device-car-reckles...

That story is probably more useful than the Fast Company one. It clarifies that the new law gives judges the option to require an ISA device to be installed at the defendant’s expense.

> Before the legislation, judges only had the power to suspend a driver’s license, issue fines, or sentence to jail.

It does not require manufacturers to pre-install them, and it does not use the electronics built into the car. It sounds analogous to the breathalyzer devices that are an option for judges in some jurisdictions.
by K0balt | 2025-04-28 12:43:23+00:00
The german driving culture is largely responsible for the lack of spectacular fatalities on the autobahn.

In general, German culture has more respect for the “correct” way to do things, cars tend to be better maintained, and there is a much higher level of driver education going on.

Comparatively, American drivers are a bunch of filthy savages. (I say that as an American driver, currently driving in a country where the locals, in comparison with American drivers, are a bunch of filthy savages)
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-28 12:43:29+00:00
You're close: It's currently running on an FPGA (Zynq-7000) — not ASIC yet — but yeah, could be transferable to ASIC (not cheap though :))

It's a custom stack-based hardware processor tailored for executing Python programs directly. Instead of traditional microcode, it uses a Python-specific instruction set (PySM) that hardware executes.

The toolchain compiles Python → CPython Bytecode → PySM Assembly → hardware binary.
by skydhash | 2025-04-28 12:43:42+00:00
Why the hyperbolic about 100s of components? Because if that exists somewhere, then it's just plain bad design to me.

Let's say you writing templates for a website and you have a partial named "main-navbar", it has a search input field that looks like the other input, but needs some alteration. Are you going to name all these alteration like "margin-x-2px", "font-small". Or just add a new style block with ".main-navbar .search-input" as the selector.

> you're basically taking the worst part of CSS (hunting down the meaning of a selector) and duplicating it for every component.

Why are you hunting it down? If I need to find the styles that are applied to an element, I just open the web inspector. More often than not, from bottom to top, it's the reset style, the component style, the variant style, and the styles derived from its relation with its parent and siblings.

With tailwind

<div class="mx-auto flex max-w-sm items-center gap-x-4 rounded-xl bg-white p-6 shadow-lg outline outline-black/5 dark:bg-slate-800 dark:shadow-none dark:-outline-offset-1 dark:outline-white/10"> <img class="size-12 shrink-0" src="/img/logo.svg" alt="ChitChat Logo" /> <div> <div class="text-xl font-medium text-black dark:text-white">ChitChat</div> <p class="text-gray-500 dark:text-gray-400">You have a new message!</p> </div> </div>

With "traditional css"

<div class="alert"> <img class="alert-icon" src="/img/logo.svg" alt="ChitChat Logo" /> <div> <div class="alert-title">ChitChat</div> <p class="alert-message">You have a new message!</p> </div> </div>
by sybercecurity | 2025-04-28 12:43:51+00:00
Well, sex and looting, and maybe inventing new music genres.

The legend is that hip hop and sampling started after the blackout in NYC. Some electronic and music stores were looted and the recording equipment eventually ended up in the hands of musicians looking to make a new sound: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/new-york-c...
by LandR | 2025-04-28 12:43:57+00:00
Man, I work 8-4 Mon-Fri.

As soon as 4 rolls around, I'm done with the money making portion of the day and the rest is just entirely fun stuff. I couldn't care less if what I'm doing isn't ever going to make money, it's just fun / interesting / satisfying curiosity.

I run - but I know I'm never going to make money running. I climb - but I know I'm never going to make money climbing. I code for fun on my side projects - same deal.

That work mindset gets turned off hard at 4pm.
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-28 12:44:43+00:00
SimCity had a hard to copy (at the time) red/black card with city populations, and during the game it would ask you for the population or name of cities based upon a graphical indicator lookup. If you failed the check it would inflict an unending series of disasters on your city.

There have been a couple of times even in modern games like Civ 6 where everything goes so wrong I wonder if somehow it erroneously flagged itself as pirated for some reason.
by leomca | 2025-04-28 12:45:12+00:00
The best source for data seems to be the European grid operator themselves: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/dashboard/show

Spain's demand: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...

Spain's generation: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...

Spain's import/export with France: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF...

The filters can be used to see similar data for Portugal
by philistine | 2025-04-28 12:45:13+00:00
Those have nothing to do with losing copyright. Forgetting to file for copyright, sure. But not losing copyright you have.

If you have standing and you don’t sue for lack of money, of course the infringer gets away with it! Your right was not extinguished though. You don’t have the right to bludgeon others, you have the exclusive right to copy.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-28 12:45:17+00:00
It was effectively a "distributed" license key, broken into a large number of parts and structured as a challenge-response, so that it would be difficult to answer without a full photocopy of the manual.

My favourite variant of this was F-19 Stealth Fighter asking you to do aircraft identification, which you could get from the manual .. or any library book on US warplanes.

Least favourite was some game (TMNT?) which printed the codes in gloss black on matte black.
by XorNot | 2025-04-28 12:45:31+00:00
If a city has an extended power outage such that the battery backed cell network goes down, then everything else will be failing too and payments are the least of your problems.

Without electricity the water system depressurized, which contaminates it. After about a week the sewage pumping stations have backed up so the sewer system is starting to fail.

Modern cities cannot operate without electrical power given their scale and density.

It is bizarre to think the biggest problem is "how do we keep a transaction of value?"

Like, just declare an emergency and let business owners be reimbursed by the government.
by immibis | 2025-04-28 12:45:32+00:00
The grid is not just an aggregation of individual sources and sinks; it takes active effort to keep them all working together in a useful way without just collapsing again into another cascading failure. For that reason, your solar inverter doesn't come on until the grid operator wants the solar inverters to come on in your section of the grid.

It's tempting to think of the grid as something grid operators control, feeding power from point A to point B, but the grid is actually largely uncontrolled - the power just flows wherever it wants to - and the only controls they have are turning on and off generators, adjusting their throttle, disconnecting loads (rolling blackouts) and sometimes opening circuit breakers (though this is not normally useful). They don't even have precise real-time monitoring of the whole grid - only specific measurements in specific locations, from which the rest is estimated using lots of maths (which is how you would design it too, if measurement devices cost $100,000 apiece). That's why it's not a trivial task to keep it working.

However, you're able to have your own, private miniature grid, on which you can power your own loads from your own generators. It's even possible to do this with solar inverters! You will need to specifically seek out this capability, and get extra hardware installed, which is probably why you don't have it. You need a "transfer switch" to definitively disconnect your private grid from the main grid when you're using your private grid capability - it's not allowed (and not safe, and will blow up your equipment anyway if you force it) to just feed power onto your local unpowered section of the grid.
by red_admiral | 2025-04-28 12:46:36+00:00
The EHRC [1] (Equality and Human Rights Commission) has issued guidance [2] that suggests public toilets could be affected. In practice I think life will go on as usual in any organisation that's not explicitly anti-trans, but there's a risk that someone will make a statement by suing a venue for sex discrimination.

As far as I know, the judgement affects much wider issues than just the women's "quota" on boardrooms in Scotland. It seems like a lot of major employers and their lawyers are trying to understand the implications and promising they'll have a update for everyone "soon".

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/equality-and-hum... [2] https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/media-centre/interim-upd...
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-28 12:47:05+00:00
Oh boy, I definitely considered that — turning PyXL into a RISC-V extension was an early idea I thought of.

It could probably be adapted into one.

But I ultimately decided to build it as its own clean design because I wanted the flexibility to rethink the entire execution model for Python — not just adapt an existing register-based architecture.

FPGA is for prototyping. although this could probably be used as a soft core. But looking forward, ASIC is definitely the way to go.
by Reason077 | 2025-04-28 12:48:00+00:00
"The “Razor1911” crack (1991)

Finally, we get to the only crack that actually works properly. Congratulations to Razor1911 for being the only ones not fooled by the game’s trickery."

No surprise here! I was never all that deep in the Warez scene, but every nerdy kid in the early 1990s knew that Razor 1911 were the most l33t game crackers around. It was kind of a mark of quality on any game. If Razor 1911 released it you knew that not only was it cracked competently, it was probably a good game too!
by vv_ | 2025-04-28 12:48:48+00:00
> Even though most of us don't speed.

I visited California once and was going from LAX to Kings Canyon National Park. I was driving the speed limit (I wasn't in any hurry) and got passed by literally everyone on the road. The vast majority of people drive faster than the speed limit. The question is "how much" over the speed limit you can comfortably go before you run the risk of being stopped and fined.

Repeat offenders should choose between not having a license to drive and having a mandatory speed limiter installed in their car. The issue is that it is not trivial to do on all vehicles.
by cgadski | 2025-04-28 12:49:09+00:00
In little bits of free time I get here and there, I've been working on using reinforcement learning to build some better bots for my favorite multiplayer game. Project is up here: https://github.com/cgadski/autotude

So far all my work has gone into the technical side of setting up the game (a Java app written in 2010) to work as a reinforcement learning environment. The developers were nice enough to maintain the source and open it to the community, so I patched the client/server to be controllable through protobuf messages. So far, I can:

- Record games between humans. I also wrote a kind of janky replay viewer [1] that probably only makes sense to people who play the game already. (Before, the game didn't have any recording feature.)

- Define bots with pytorch/python and run them in offline training mode. (The game runs relatively quickly, like 8 gameplay minutes / realtime second.)

- Run my python-defined bots online versus human players. (Just managed to get this working today.)

It took a bunch of messing around with the Java source to get this far, and I haven't even really started on the reinforcement learning part yet. Hopefully I can start on that soon.

This game (https://planeball.com) is really unique, and I'm excited to produce a reinforcement learning environment that other people can play with easily. Thinking about how you might build bots for this game was one of the problems that made me interested in artificial intelligence 8 years ago. The controls/mechanics are pretty simple and it's relatively easy to make bots that beat new players---basically just don't crash into obstacles, don't stall out, conserve your energy, and shoot when you will deal damage---but good human players do a lot of complicated intuitive decision-making.

[1] http://altistats.com/viewer/?f=4b020f28-af0b-4aa0-96be-a73f0... (Press h for help on controls. Planes will "jump around" when they're not close to the objective---the server sends limited information on planes that are outside the field of vision of the client, but my recording viewer displays the whole map.)
by card_zero | 2025-04-28 12:49:41+00:00
Some kind of exoskeletons to control people just walking around in public, too. Stop them doing bad things.

Wait, no, that's an excessively extreme level of control, while seatbelt laws are an acceptable level of control because, actually I don't know why, but anyway speed limiters are somewhere between these two levels of control, and therefore acceptable. Or not. One of those.
by Ayesh | 2025-04-28 12:49:46+00:00
Not a DOS game, but one of the early Prince of Persia (circa 2007) had an evil DRM trick: after a few hours into the game, there is a pressure pad activated door that does not work on cracked versions. So if you are in a cracked versions, and if the crack is not good enough, you will spend a lot of time frustrated unable to go past that door.

It is possible that the crack itself broke the game, but I want to believe it's some genius evil idea someone from Ubisoft came up with.