MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rsynnott | 2025-04-10 07:44:33+00:00
There’s a plan to build a Cork-Dublin-Belfast high speed (300km/h standard) line, but it seems unlikely to happen. There’s a more feasible-looking plan to upgrade Dublin-Cork to 200km/h (high-ish speed?) via improvements to the existing line (which currently caps out at, at best, 160km/h or so, but much worse in many parts); that seems likely to happen now.

This would bring it from 2h30m to maybe 1hr30, which would be a big improvement. There’s an argument that Ireland just isn’t physically big enough for ‘true’ (TGV/ICE-type) high speed, though I’m not totally convinced by it; with a 300km/h line it’d be less than an hour journey, making commuting borderline feasible.
by aborsy | 2025-04-10 07:45:29+00:00
Nonsense. First, the money is pretaken from your salary under several categories (taxes, social changes, public transportation tax, and occasional taxes for specific lines).

Then, a metro monthly pass is around $100 in Paris and $130 in NYC. In other words, after paying through taxes, you have to pay for tickets at market rates. That’s $1200 for city transport, not covering outer zones or intercity travel (unless you live in densely populated cities that have sufficient transportation, in which case you pay in rent).

Then, you pay through wasting time, and other factors I mentioned in my other comment.
by reify | 2025-04-10 07:45:45+00:00
The wonders of brexit on both sides of the channel.

I am pro europe, it used to be so easy to buy from Germany or France or the Netherlands.

12 keys @ £3 each, All that fuel, time, wages, packaging and staff that have handled those tiny little keyboards keys. The obscene costs of capitalism and every middle man earning his share.

I just bought a brand new keyboard for my old and still running Arch perfectly lenovo T450, £20 with delivery, a bargain.
by reassess_blind | 2025-04-10 07:45:51+00:00
Any examples of the silent GRUB setup? Sounds interesting.

I left a comment about Veracrypt offering the Hidden OS feature, with two passwords - one for the dummy OS and one for the real OS. However it doesn't seem to be supported anymore on Windows 11 or modern hardware, the option is greyed out on my laptop with no explanation.
by dxrko619 | 2025-04-10 07:45:53+00:00
having worked in professional setting for more than 7 years, I've given up on getting a job. I'm starting my own venture (although ive been trying to get that up since I was in school) with full commitment and almost no alternative of getting into the job market.

The job market is skewed and gamed.

You should change the way you're applying to jobs, and on the side, try to find cofounders who are starting some startup.

You can also join new ones who recently got funded. Some of the MIT folks work at windsurf, you can find similar startups that are need of engineers.

1. new founded startups 2. start one yourself (although this is risky, only reliable if you can get funding) 3. networking and meeting folks from your college 4. get a job you're overqualified for to keep your visa, (given you talk about going back to home)

Me personally have given up on jobs so im starting something of my own, although i dont have the pressure of going back home cuz thats already done, i'm back to my "toxic environment".
by matt-dev | 2025-04-10 07:46:40+00:00
haha, Mr. Thorne shows up again in the Gemini 2.5 samples.

I have played around with creating long form fictional content with Gemini 2.5 the last week, and I started adding "no one named 'Thorne'" to my prompts, otherwise it always creates a character named Mr. Thorne. I thought it was something in my prompts trigger this, but it seems to be a general problem.

However, despite the cliches and slop, Gemini 2.5 can actually write and edit long form fictional pretty well, you can get almost coherent 10-20 chapter books by first letting it create an outline and then iteratively write and edit the chapters..

I also used Gemini 2.5 to help me code a tool to interactively and iteratively create longform content: https://github.com/pulpgen-dev/pulpgen
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-10 07:46:48+00:00
>For Austria the answer for instance is "the alps" and urban sprawl.

There are no Alps between Vienna and Graz, the second largest city yet it takes 2.5 hours to get to Vienna from Graz, while the same ~200km journey is faster by car on the highway and that's accounting for traffic and you sticking to the 100-130kmph highway speed limit which plenty of drivers do not to shorten their journey. My ex-CEO would floor it to get home much quicker than the train and have his secretary pay the speed-cam fines on his company's dime.

When you monitor the trains' speed on the internal screens, you can see the average speed on the straights is somewhere around 100kmph, slower than cars on the adjacent highway.

What's the excuse there for such slow ass trains? And Austrian train tickets aren't cheap either.
by jjav | 2025-04-10 07:46:55+00:00
> I’m petrified of the restore being imperfect in some way.

A lot of this is from anchoring important things to your phone. I practice, and strong recommend, avoiding that as much as possible. Your phone should be entirely disposable. If you drop it in the ocean, would you care (other than the monetary loss)? If yes, find way to detach those things from the phone. There should be nothing important on a phone.
by 9rx | 2025-04-10 07:47:04+00:00
> there's a difference between solving problems _with_ LLMs, and having LLMs solve it _for you_.

If there is a difference, then fundamentally LLMs cannot solve problems for you. They can only apply transformations using already known operators. No different than a calculator, except with exponentially more built-in functions.

But I'm not sure that there is a difference. A problem is only a problem if you recognize it, and once you recognize a problem then anything else that is involved along the way towards finding a solution is merely helping you solve it. If a "problem" is solved for you, it was never a problem. So, for each statement to have any practical meaning, they must be interpreted with equivalency.
by Yoric | 2025-04-10 07:47:16+00:00
I don't think that anybody is going to forget the damage caused Trump.

I'm willing to bet that negotiations are underway between pretty much everybody outside of the US-Russia axis to try and come up with a new world trade order. Lowering the tariffs from an insane level of 20% to a slightly less insane level of 10% won't change that.
by maaaaattttt | 2025-04-10 07:48:15+00:00
An explanation I once read, and I think makes total sense, is WWII. Europe was heavily destroyed after WWII with no exception to railway tracks. They needed to be rebuild. They were, but with a much better technology than what was there in the 1800s. This allowed faster trains, better technology overall to be "deployed" and ultimately better initial adpotion which started a positive feedback loop. Meanwhile railway tracks were never bombed and never needed to be rebuilt like they were in Europe, so the infrastructure didn't allow for the technological improvements and the positive feedback look never started.

What they forgot to mention in the article (or I missed) is that train is extremly expensive and has gotten more expensive over the years. I cannot do it right now but I'd bet the price per km is much higher that what it is for a plain ride or even a car ride (if the car is full, meaning 4 train tickets vs card ride) which very frustrating when the consensus is "we need to take the train more often, driving is not good" while salaries stagnate and inflation is having the time of its life.
by Incipient | 2025-04-10 07:48:55+00:00
Taking an extreme example, if I go to France, I don't expect government announcements to be provided in English for me. I'm in France, their official language is French, I need to figure out the French myself.

I don't think anyone would debate that point (feel free to swap France for any other country).

While for some reason it does feel more borderline in the case of Spanish in the US, I'm not sure why?
Show HN: Free tool to view multi-cloud resources and costs in one place
by grvag1 | 2025-04-10 07:49:01+00:00
Hi HN,

We’re building a lightweight tool to help you understand what’s running across your multi-cloud infrastructure — and what it’s costing you.

It gives you a clear overview of resources (VMs, databases, containers, networking, etc.) and cost breakdowns in a single dashboard.

We built it because managing across providers was a mess — scattered tools, fragmented views, and no easy way to see everything without switching tabs.

This is just our MVP — it’s free, quick to set up, and focused on clarity over complexity.

If you're dealing with cloud sprawl or want better visibility across environments, happy to share the link. Would love your thoughts!

Thanks!
by mentalgear | 2025-04-10 07:49:28+00:00
I was thinking the same about consistency, which is useful for many contexts, but if you let another LLM do the extraction, you are again at the mercy of that LLMs quality/hallucinations.

Of course mitigation strategies were using many different LLMs and comparing results (voting) or using a highly trained/specialised model for only entity / context extraction. An interesting benchmark would be when those extraction techniques/models would exceed what a human professional is able to do.
by oerdier | 2025-04-10 07:49:31+00:00
Critical thinking is not a generic/standalone skill that you can practise targetedly. As in, critical thinking doesn't translate across knowledge domains. To think critically you need extensive knowledge of the domain in question; that's one reason why memorizing facts will always remain necessary, despite search engines and LLMs.

At best what you can learn specifically regarding critical thinking are some rules of thumb such as "compare at least three sources" and "ask yourself who benefits".
by asQuirreL | 2025-04-10 07:49:56+00:00
This is a false dichotomy -- regexes and parsers both have their place, even when solving the same problem.

The troubles start when you try and solve the whole thing in one step, using just regular expressions, or parsers.

Regular expressions are good at tokenizing input (converting a stream of bytes into a stream of other things, e.g. picking out numbers, punctuation, keywords).

Parsers are good at identifying structure in a token stream.

Neither are good at evaluation. Leave that as its own step.

Applying this rule to the example in the article (Advent of Code 2024 Day 3), I would still use regular expressions to identify mul(\d+,\d+), do(), and don't(), I don't think I need a parser because there is no extra structure beyond that token stream, and I would leave it up to the evaluator to track the state of whether multiplication is enabled or not.
by jjav | 2025-04-10 07:50:14+00:00
> Loosing a $1k anything would not be something I could just shrug my shoulders and just turn around and immediately replace it.

I'd suggest that if $1K is a big deal to lose, one should not spend such an ungodly amount on a phone.

Perfectly adequate phones can be had for $100-$200. I couldn't imagine wasting more than that on a phone.
Show HN: Docsingest – Turn developer docs into clean, LLM-friendly Markdown
by swiftlysingh | 2025-04-10 07:51:57+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Pushpinder, and I built Docsingest (https://docsingest.com/) to solve a common pain point when trying to prepare online developer documentation for LLM workflows, like RAG or fine-tuning.

Scraping developer doc webpages is always messy— you often end up with navigation menus, footers, sidebars, and even ads mixed in with your core content. Worse, extracting code blocks and preserving the document’s structure (headings, lists, tables) is challenging, and manually cleaning it up is tedious.

Inspired by tools like [GitIngest](https://gitingest.com/) that effectively process code repositories, I wanted to build a similar tool focused on dev docs directly from the web. Docsingest takes a URL as input and:

1. *Isolates the main content:* It intelligently strips away the boilerplate (like headers, footers, and sidebars) that you don’t need. 2. *Preserves rich formatting:* It retains code formatting, proper heading hierarchies, lists, and tables to ensure that the Markdown output is structured and LLM-friendly. 3. *Handles JS-rendered pages:* To accurately capture content from modern sites, we use a headless browser (powered by [Browserless](https://account.browserless.io/)) to render JavaScript before extraction.

I built this after spending far too much time fighting with generic scrapers that failed to produce clean, usable Markdown. With Docsingest, you can quickly transform a messy developer docs webpage into a clean, structured format optimized for LLM ingestion.

I'm eager for any feedback from the community.

Thanks for taking a look!
by mrkeen | 2025-04-10 07:52:35+00:00
> You could almost build an entire parser combinator library from scratch from memory, because none of the individual components are complicated.

I do this every now and then. Usually in the days leading up to advent of code.

"A parser is a function from an input to either failure or a (remaining input, result) pair" is all you need to remember to build the rest.
by ekianjo | 2025-04-10 07:52:37+00:00
> I think Japan changed, but not so much.

I have read a book written in the early 20th century by an American at that time who had spent most of his life in Japan and who described what life was life was in Japan at the time. If you remove the technological change, culturally and traditionally, Japan is pretty much the same country as several generations back, and I was struck by that.
by halayli | 2025-04-10 07:53:29+00:00
intereresting read. I might be wrong but I think the central limit theorem is what's contributing to the binomial distribution of arrivals approaching a normal distribution due to the summation of qi-1 + arrivals().

Over many iterations (minutes, hours), you accumulate the effects of these random additions. As a result, even though the distribution is binomial (or approximated Poisson), its behavior for large enough values and sums of multiple minutes becomes approximately gaussian due to CLT.
by demonno | 2025-04-10 07:53:49+00:00
Software Engineer specialised in backend technologies.

Location: Europe, Tbilisi, Georgia Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, Typescript, Solidity, Flask/FastAPI, Django, Postgresql, CI/CD, K8S, AWS, AI. Résumé/CV: https://demonno.github.io/resume Email: demur.nodia@gmail.com Email me or Schedule a call via https://calendly.com/demur-nodia

I’m a backend-focused Software Engineer based in Tbilisi, Georgia, open to remote opportunities. I specialize in Python with frameworks like Flask, FastAPI, and Django, and have solid experience with PostgreSQL, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and AWS. I enjoy building scalable systems and contributing to clean, maintainable codebases. I’m not looking to relocate but fully open to collaborating with distributed teams.
by dxrko619 | 2025-04-10 07:53:50+00:00
for now, if you get a job you're overqualified for OR even its not upto your "standards", I would suggest to take it.

I had one such offer that I thought was not worth my time because I presumed I'll get more offers, Sike, I didn't. Now I think about if had taken that up, I would atleast have some stability while I plan my next steps.

food on the table > rocket on mars

stability > ambition

Pickup anything you can get, dont stay stuck on the old ways of getting a job, they are not working anyways. Cold call business owners and ask them if you can bring some technical value and potentially convert that into a long term relationship. This doesn't have to be this way for years but alteast you'll be able to get into the workspace and use YOUR SKILLS to create impact in OTHERs company/industry.
by successful23 | 2025-04-10 07:54:16+00:00
I’ve noticed the same contrast - technical writing from LLMs often needs trimming for clarity, but creative writing can lean too far into either bland or overly flowery language.

Most LLM benchmarks lean heavily on fluency, but things like internal logic, tone consistency, and narrative pacing are harder to quantify. I think using a second model to extract logical or structural assertions could be a smart direction. It’s not perfect, but it shifts focus from just “how it sounds” to “does it actually make sense over time.” Creative writing benchmarks still feel very early-stage.
by zaptrem | 2025-04-10 07:54:58+00:00
I work on music models, and this is a very cool paper! There are no papers that go into depth on how token-based AR music models (that aren't absurdly inefficient like Yue) are trained. I'm particularly interested in your semantic tokens. I tried reproducing the CTC loss part but my curve was very spikey and didn't seem to actually figure out any characters. The semantic tokens gave great acoustic info but gibberish lyrics. What did your CTC loss curves look like and did you see anything similar at any point?

As a semi-aside, I feel like semantic tokens in general may end up being a bottleneck on how interesting model outputs can be.
by anthk | 2025-04-10 07:55:10+00:00
Risc OS it's still alive, it works great under an RPI B+ and up. Just get some industrial graded SD.

I suggest you to get the Risc OS Direct 'distro' and then the update which has wireless support. Read the documentation first, of course.

Risc OS it's very similar to Windows in usage (more like an Amiga), once you read the docs you will get it ready in no time. You have the old Netsurf browser on its native plataform, it's fun.

On plan9, 9front superseded it.
by Sesse__ | 2025-04-10 07:55:20+00:00
Well, immediately after that, they say they inverted the entire curve (through a naïve 1/|X| and then un-FFT, presumably) and saved it as an impulse response. I think the 300Hz slope is to _keep_ the rolloff in that area, so that the system doesn't try to boost bass by 40 dB and just end up clipping madly.

Since these operations sort-of commute, it is easier to understand if you invert the order of operations:

1. Invert the spectrum (ideally through something less sensitive to noise than what's done here). Now you have an impulse response that will, in theory, give you a perfectly flat frequency response.

2. Apply a 300 Hz slope. Now you gave up some of that flatness, but you have something that's physically realizable without murdering your speakers.
by CalRobert | 2025-04-10 07:56:41+00:00
It's agonizingly slow (I used to take it to college in SLO) but between SF and LA you could take the Coast Starlight (you'd BART to Oakland first). It's 12 hours though. https://www.amtrak.com/coast-starlight-train . I used to take the Chinatown busses and they were faster, or ride share on Craigslist (or, really aging myself here - remember Zimride?)
by neerd | 2025-04-10 07:57:49+00:00
I’m not the only one who gets a chill down their spine when they hear this, right?

I hate to invoke Godwin's law on the very first comment on a post, but the industrialization of deportations seems to have alarming parallels to the mass murder Jews and other minority groups in 1930’s and 40’s Europe. I read “Ordinary Men” by Christopher Browning a couple months ago and the thing that stuck out to me is that when the Nazi’s started killing people, they didn’t immediately jump to death camps. The initial steps of the holocaust began as a “deportation” scheme and it was a continual ramping up of the scale of murder.

They initially claimed they were going to deport these people to Madagascar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan

I’m not American so I may be missing some nuance here, but this seems a little terrifying to me.
by bkor | 2025-04-10 07:58:07+00:00
> if I go to France, I don't expect government announcements to be provided in English

In Netherlands they'll translate things in various languages. If you get stopped by the police and they need to communicate they'll get a translator; pretty much doesn't matter which language you're speaking (within reason). Easily 50+ languages.

The French are really particular. The USA often used the phrase "melting pot". So I find the comparison with France quite odd.
by seszett | 2025-04-10 07:58:27+00:00
3 phase for ovens? That seems totally overkill to me.

In France even though they're not usually plugged into a standard socket, all the ovens I've used ran on standard single phase current. Houses are almost never wired for 3 phase anyway.

Parent was talking about toaster ovens though, and those are (as far as I know) always plugged to normal sockets.
by CalRobert | 2025-04-10 07:58:28+00:00
That depreciation number is extremely suspicious, unless your car is very old/cheap in which case your service number is suspicious (or you value your time at close to 0 GBP per hour).

Also, your car has to park somewhere presumably, which uses land, and I assume your car uses fuel (or electricity, but unlikely if your car is that cheap)
by aetherspawn | 2025-04-10 07:58:31+00:00
More often than not the people you are working for will just go bankrupt at some point if they can’t pay you. They will have loads of other bills they can’t pay, and probably if they engaged you knowing they can’t actually pay you then you need to understand that they are narcissistic and dishonest and treat them accordingly (ie don’t make additional deals with them)

Chances are your revenue sharing agreement might not hold up in court (ie veto/not approved by shareholders) or they might scam you by selling the IP for $1 to a shell P/L company and just reincorporating.

So yeah don’t jump for this option unless you think they’ll never pay you anyway… chances are if you keep the debt you can sell to a debt collector for 10% of its value (they’ll go after the director and usually succeed), or wait for liquidation and grab a bunch of their stuff. You might end up with choice pick on a few company cars or something like that you can sell.

Startups operating on unpaid invoices is a very common and real scam that you need to be aware of and avoid. I hear founders casually make comments such as “I’ll try xxx project on unpaid invoices and see if it works” all the time.