MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jsheard | 2025-04-23 09:27:51+00:00
> WebGPU is still in progress in Safari

That's kind of the point, Chrome shipped it across multiple platforms two years ago, while Safari still has no timeframe despite having a much narrower set of APIs and hardware to support. Firefox at least has the excuse of needing broad compatibility like Chrome but with a fraction of the development resources. Apple are just dragging their feet.
by godelski | 2025-04-23 09:28:03+00:00
> not dependencies for your own Python projects

I'm not doing that. Honestly I'm not sure how to do that and it sounds like a real pain.

> the Python version does not matter

This is incorrect. Go check what versions of Python brew has installed for you. It's definitely not your system version...

It's not "what works" it is "what the maintainer specified". And according to the brew devs this is supposed to be /the latest version that works/. Which was my point. People don't update just on a Python change. That's not going to happen without automation. (I even suggested we be allowed to specify the minimum version and I was told it's maintainer's responsibilities). You can trivially find packages that can be used with newer versions of Python than their brew formulas specify.
Show HN: Body Controlled 3D Dino Game
by NikoNaskida | 2025-04-23 09:28:13+00:00
Hey HN, I am Niko.

I've built this 3D Dino Game In browser using tech like three.js and MoveNet (tensorflow).

Basically, it's a normal 3D dinosaur game with a twist: you need to actually perform actions irl to avoid obstacles.

Duck to crouch, jump to jump, raise left hand - go left, raise right hand - go right.

Game is using your phone/laptop camera to track your body movements and perform in-game actions.

PS. Game is 100% client side and I don't record/track/use/save any of your data

Hope you find it worth playing. (better play on PC)

It's a 100% FREE browser game with no login! Please feel welcome to DM feedback or reply or anything!
Show HN: SuperAPI – API Caching with Automatic Invalidation (No Code Changes)
by adithyak | 2025-04-23 09:28:30+00:00
Hey HN

We built SuperAPI (https://trysuperapi.com) to solve a pain many devs know too well: API performance and caching are hard, especially when dealing with dynamic data and invalidation logic.

SuperAPI is a plug-and-play caching layer that: - Sits in front of your load-balancer - Caches responses out of the box - Automatically invalidates relevant cache entries when your database changes - Requires zero code changes

This interactive playground shows exactly how it works: - Run real queries against a sample API - Watch cache hits and misses live - Update the DB and see the cache invalidate — automatically

Would love your feedback on anything that isn't clear on how SuperAPI works.

Thanks — Ayush, Hrithik & Adithya from SuperAPI
by constantcrying | 2025-04-23 09:28:32+00:00
>The entire scientific and spectral differential equations community knows there are no numerical issues working with high degree polynomials over arbitrary intervals.

This is totally wrong. Of course there are enormous numerical problems with high degree polynomials. Computing large powers of large numbers is enormously unstable and needs to be avoided under basically all circumstances, that is what makes dealing with those polynomials difficult and cautioning people against this is obvious correct.

What you described are the ways to deal with those problems. But this isn't what the article does. My problem with the article is the following:

- Does not mention the most important issue with high degree polynomials, namely their numerical instability.

- Gives examples, but does not explain why they circumvent the numerical problems at all. The most important choice made (the interval of 0 to 1) is portrayed as essentially arbitrary, not an absolute necessity.

- Concludes that there are no problems with high degree polynomials, based on the fact that the experiments worked. Not based on the fact that the actual issues were circumvented, leaving the reader with a totally wrong impression of the issue.

This is terrible scholarship and makes for a terrible article. Not acknowledging the issue is a terrible thing to do and not explain why seemingly arbitrary choices are extremely important is another terrible thing to do. The whole article fails at actually portraying the issue at all.

To be clear, I am not saying that this approximation does not work or that with appropriate scaling and the right polynomials these issues can't be mostly circumvented. Or that high degree polynomials "in general" are incalculable. I am saying that this article completely fails to say what the issue is and why the examples work.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-23 09:28:43+00:00
>Have you tried using google earth and checking the elevation at different points in the area?

According to Plato, there should be an inner island about 1km in diameter, a ring of water about 200m wide, a ring of land about 400m wide, another ring of water about 400m wide, an outer ring of land about 600m wide, and then water.

I don't see that in the structure. I don't see the center island; the structure seems flat in the middle. And if we assume that there was an island there once, and I engage my Pareidolia engine, there's now one ring too many.

Not to mention that this is way bigger than what Plato describes.

>The innermost circle is about 9km in diameter

Plato describes the innermost circle of Atlantis as 900 meters in diameter ("The island in which the palace was situated had a diameter of five stadia").

>The full concentric ring structure is about 50km

Plato describes the size of the whole city as 5km in diameter. He also claims there were walls around all the rings and bridges connecting the rings. This is somewhat plausible based on his measurements, but not the structure's size.

>I don't understand where your confidence in "there is nothing there" comes from.

People find pottery and other artefacts everywhere humans used to live, even if they don't run archeological digs. Plato describes Atlantis as incredibly rich and powerful—there would be stuff there. People would be looting that place like crazy, and we'd see evidence.
by jbverschoor | 2025-04-23 09:28:50+00:00
Theory first

The is THE limiting factor of many fields. Bioscience etc. even car mechanics for that matter.

It all starts to click when you have a practical and physical application. A garage is readily available and not expensive.

A lab on the other hand… imo there should be more low cost options to produce chips. There are a few projects trying to do that. Some universities have some cooperation with fabs for dead/spare space.
by Torn | 2025-04-23 09:30:28+00:00
We are 100% going to get 'hey remember when LLMs were pure and not explicitly (or more dangerously: subtly) recommending things' nostalgia in years to come.

There are parallels to early web here I'm sure of it.

I think I'm a little more worried about AI being subtly influenced in its training data -- they can't explain why they give the tokens they do, and even chain of thought / explain your working thinking is similarly made up and hallucination-prone
by raverbashing | 2025-04-23 09:30:50+00:00
Agree a lot with the article

Especially 1 and 3

EE education has absolute dog-crap didacticism.

EEs also have an awful "holier-than-thou" attitude in Engineering.

And then you make it only worse by requiring "Masters only or above". Well guess why, because your graduation was spent going around stuff that goes from nowhere to nowhere else.
by sylware | 2025-04-23 09:31:02+00:00
One key element is noscript/basic (x)html interop for the web, where _reasonable_ of course. And tons of online services can be provided like that as they were a few years back. At least the critical/"very utility" online services (for instance online shopping) should have interop which is actually working and tested.

The benchmark is the critical/"very utility" online service should work with a noscript/basic (x)html text browser, then you could add a simple CSS stylesheet for the noscript/basic (x)html CSS renderer (for instance netsurf), then if it is really unreasonable to do otherwise <troll but not so much>you could have an wayland/alsa ELF RISC-V binary running on JSLinux itself running in apple/gogol Big Tech web engines</troll but not so much>.

Don't forget that developping the software of the public web site/online service is not the main activity, timewise... the main activity, and by far, is the permanent monitoring and related development, security wise, and availability wise (in the end, the really really hard part is manufacturing state-of-the-art silicon hardware :) ).
by whstl | 2025-04-23 09:32:11+00:00
I feel however that trendy tech is moving closer to the browser.

Previously we had things like CoffeeScript, HAML, Pug, SASS/SCSS.

Tailwind is just plain CSS classes and the code generation step is just an optimisation.

For TS there is a proposal for adding type annotations to Javascript. Dunno how far it is, though.

JSX is the odd one out but still closer to HTML than things like HAML, which also had embedded logic but looked nothing like HTML.
by listenallyall | 2025-04-23 09:33:09+00:00
I find it pretty amazing that so many people have a positive view of AI, when the plus side is that it perhaps makes writing code faster and easier (although too fast and easy and you'll be put of a job) while the downside is, as you point out, widespread scamming at infinite scale, destruction of trust in photos and videos as reality, spamming, cheating, harming, and who knows what else once not-so-nice people get creative on its uses. Automated internment camps? Dynamic pricing to extract the absolute maximum from every consumer transaction? Families unable to trust each other? I expect them all and more.
by mvATM99 | 2025-04-23 09:33:16+00:00
Good list. Some of these i knew already, but the typing overloading and keyword/positional-only arguments were new to me.

One personal favorite of mine is __all__ for use in __init__.py files. It specifies which items are imported whenever uses from x import *. Especially useful when you have other people working on your codebase with the tendency to always import everything, which is rarely a good idea.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-04-23 09:33:46+00:00
The market exists at a far lower valuation. 90% of the sales will go to Walmart/Costco/Target/Amazon/Aliexpress/Kroger/etc, 10% will go to the remaining businesses.

You might go to the local toy store every now and then and pay 2x or more for the same toy just so your kid feels the ambiance of shopping in a toy store or supporting a local business, but the majority of your purchases will not happen there, certainly not enough to supporter the huge Toys R Us stores of the past.
by npodbielski | 2025-04-23 09:34:25+00:00
IMHO just an API would be enough, tool could be written on top of that. My ideal world would be every service, tool and application to have API that I can use i.e. if fridge is open too long (API polling or API webhook) I can send roomba to close it (using API of roomba). Because why not?!

World of API...
by red_admiral | 2025-04-23 09:34:56+00:00
This sounds fun if you have 10x programmers or at least IQ > 140 programmers in charge. Last place I worked, I was told never use "smart" tricks if you can do the same thing in a simpler way. For-else and f-strings and := sound like harmless enough (though the last one is controversial); "with" is useful for resources that need to be deallocated but "yield"? Really? "more readable" when you slap a decorator on the thing? Why are we packing the enter and exit operations into a single function?

Playing with the typesystem and generics like this makes me worry I'm about to have a panic attack.

Give me code that I can understand and debug easily, even when I didn't write it; don't do implicit magical control flow changes unless you have a very good excuse, and then document both the how and the why - and you'll get a product that launches earlier and has fewer bugs.

Sometimes, a few more if statements here and there make code that is easier to understand, even if there's a clever hack that could cut a line or two here and there.
by FabHK | 2025-04-23 09:36:52+00:00
Not at all.

Imagine two roads, parallel mostly, but then one takes a detour, like this:

____ ____/ __ \____ -> _____/ \______ _______________ -> _______________

Now imagine them full of cars, bumper to bumper.

Now imagine the cars move, at the same speed, on both roads. Same number of cars will come in on the left as go out on the right.

The cars will be bumper to bumper, both on top and below (there'll just be more cars on top).

Why should cars that come in at the same time on the left exit at the same time on the right?
by runeks | 2025-04-23 09:36:58+00:00
> E.g. the CHIPS act is a strategic thing in case TSMC is disrupted for some reason. How valuable is insurance?

What do you think the odds are that the CHIPS act will make the US capable of building TSMC-level chips?

Calculating the value of an insurance isn't complex. First, you calculate (1) the cost of the insurance, then (2) a rough idea of the probability that you'll need it, and (3) the cost of the insured-against-event occurring.

The problem here is that no one in their right mind believes the CHIPS act will make the US capable of producing chips on par with those of TSMC, so it's not actually an insurance. More like a political show — see, we doing something!
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-23 09:37:20+00:00
> seems to be no alternative

That feeling (you invoke "seems" and thus the realm of appearances) is now common in all walks of life. It has rather little to do with the reality of change. Mostly it means when change comes it's as a surprise. One of the ways to unblocking is to challenge assumptions.

I think as entrenched tech people we get even more stuck in a set of assumptions that the world is moving beyond.

Like the idea of "an OS that becomes popular" Does anybody (except us tech sorts) want that? If API interoperability exists then popularity is actually undesirable and is the root of many failure modes. Why care about popularity? People want and need at least adequate functional utility.

In many ways tech never got off the starting blocks.

50 years of commercial IT and has significantly failed to achieve many of the basics. If being able to copy a simple text file from one computer to another in 2025 is still a struggle, that's failure by any reasonable standards, and BigTech companies are right at the heart of that failure.

I've got decent challenges to many of the other seemingly "no alternative" stuckness I see in this thread, but no need to labour the point - which is to clear ones mind of unexamined assumptions.
by randunel | 2025-04-23 09:37:43+00:00
> 2 users in 2 years having an issue

See, this is what makes Cloudflare's practises work. You are under the impression that 2 users in 2 years have had issues when, actually, 2 users in 2 years have bothered to jump through lots of hoops to finally contact you about your issues.

Your SaaS business seems profitable, so keep it up! But don't go around claiming only 2 users have had issues, you most definitely don't have a 100% support contact rate for Cloudflare related issues.
by tomhow | 2025-04-23 09:38:33+00:00
I mean not to be difficult: just to try and understand exactly what your claim is.

If you have an example of a moderation action that you disagreed with (E.g., a particular story about DOGE or the administration that wasn't adequately discussed on HN), please share a link or something else concrete and we'll explain it or investigate it. You can post it here or email us (we have had email threads going back years with users who want to share feedback and learn about how we think about these things [1]).

There are plenty of ways of examining the data:

- https://github.com/HackerNews/API

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40644563

- https://hn.algolia.com/

- https://news.ycombinator.com/front

If you have concerns about any future stories being hidden, you could set up your own API listener, monitor for new stories and then see which ones are flagged or killed.

For the record, I routinely undertake practices for evaluating and improving my own judgement, and am happy to do so regarding any specific case. But you haven't provided me with any specific feedback to respond to.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
by division_by_0 | 2025-04-23 09:40:24+00:00
I totally agree about Svelte and the benefits of layer separation. I would say that philosophically, Svelte not only separates the layers, but gives HTML a special place among them, calling it "The Mother Language". [0]

Will check out Nue and Datastar.

[0] https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/discussions/10085
by spwa4 | 2025-04-23 09:40:44+00:00
Just don't.

This is a horrible summary. It is both too complex and to simple at the same time. This summary spends about half it's time talking about pass@k while failing to explain what it is and giving a great deal of good-sounding but misleading statements, making me think Claude completely misunderstood (it is absolutely not like majority voting). Pass@k means you get k attempts to answer a question. Right? You passed. Wrong? Well, you've got k (for example 10) attempts.

The paper itself is much better. Hell, the conclusion of the paper is so much better than what you have here.

Here's a decent summary, directly from the paper's conclusion:

1. RL-trained models perform worse than base models in pass@k at large k values. (note that Claude's explanation of what pass@k is in the parent post is extremely wrong)

2. RL boosts sampling efficiency but reduces the reasoning capacity boundary.

3. RLVR algorithms perform similarly and remain far from optimal.

4. RLVR and distillation are fundamentally different.

And here's a one-line summary from me:

This paper claims that RL(VR) training is like improving the model's search algorithm: it becomes (a lot) better at locating a good answer within the model, but also pushes the model too hard to give only this answer.

Before Claude makes another absurd claim RL = reinforcement learning (for example, for safety. Say, trying to get the model to explain breaking into a car, if it ever does, that's bad), RLVR = reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (meaning you get to think as much as you want, as long as your final answer is correct. But you get to reminisce/think as much as you want before giving a final answer, and that thinking does not have to be relevant)

And a comment: this is exactly what you'd expect to see from mild overtraining of the model. It could be that the current big players are pushing the models to be right/helpful/safe too hard, and taking away too much "freedom" in the process.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-23 09:42:34+00:00
Gotta love the casual "anything I don't like must be rooted in racism" attitude.

Ancient civilizations had fairly thin survive or starve margins. Civilizations that sit atop the best agricultural land and build vanity projects instead of armies and practical infrastructure don't tend to sit atop that land for long. While we don't have precise records nobody is perplexed about how they moved stones nor how they mobilized the population, we have many well understood examples of ancient civilizations doing these things. It's largely a question of what other special circumstances let them engage in these projects so prolifically when Baybylon and China built <checks notes> walls.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-23 09:42:36+00:00
security issue was Apple thing, they say security, privacy but have tb, firewire with posibility of "TSA" agents cloning your drive in 3 minutes. has nothing to do with any product segmentation. also they HAD icloud backups not encrypted, but had big public fight with FBI about unlocking ones iphone... good old days.
by sohkamyung | 2025-04-23 09:43:19+00:00
I use iNaturalist to log my observations and I think one benefit of such platforms is the large number of eyeballs available: casual observers see things not captured in more formal scientific field work.

This happened to me: I saw an unusual bee while walking in a nature reserve. I posted it on iNaturalist and it got identified as a seldom seen bee. A bee researcher contacted me to get the location for a field study, resulting in a paper that documented the bee's natural behaviour.

Other iNat observers have spotted moths and insects that haven't been seen for decades, for example. In this way, citizen scientist are helping scientist to find out more about nature.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-23 09:43:40+00:00
As the netbooks wave has proven, followed by Android and ChromeOS one, is that when you go to the shop, you will be getting a laptop with Asus Linux, Dell Linux, HP Linux, naturally branded with cool names from their marketing department, and full of usefull apps as differentiation factor, and naturally the related Linux drivers are only available from their respective support pages for the usual support timeframe.

They might eventually add support to something like Ubuntu, alongside their own OEM specific distribution, but naturally folks will complain they cannot install NixOS, and eventually they will remove those devices from the shops, as their sales become a rounding error.

However I do agree BSD and Linux distributions seem to be the only way to get independence from USA powered OSes, especially if we get back into the export regulations with the current ways of the administration in power.
by frereubu | 2025-04-23 09:45:04+00:00
This is definitely thought-provoking, and a correct use in many of the examples, but the Wikipedia example doesn't feel right because I don't think it's deliberate there. I suppose you could argue that we've been conditioned into accepting the Gruen Transfer and take that behaviour over into Wikipedia. But I remember back in the days of physical encyclopedias that I could spend a long time just flipping through them in a similar way to the way I browse Wikipedia. (My favourite description of the Wikipedia hole was a tweet from around 10 years ago about "snapping out of a Wikipedia trance at 2am while reading the early educational history of Meatloaf's guitarist").
by ta12653421 | 2025-04-23 09:45:21+00:00
even if im buying eggs from the most expensive farm here (a local bio/organic farm syndicate which delivers only the city here), i pay only 80 euro cents, and these are coming from a farm where you can literally select that one specific chicken to produce "your eggs".

where do you you live? this would be aronud 1,60EUR - this is not cheap but by far the highest quality you can buy across the whole conutry.
by cess11 | 2025-04-23 09:45:28+00:00
No, they don't.

"It is hard to make any sweeping conclusions that software pays more than hardware, or vice versa. The myth of software always being more lucrative may be unfounded, but the sentiment does exist among young professionals looking to choose career paths."

I.e. there surely exist hardware positions that pay better than some software position.

One has to be careful with statistics, you can't start with the aggregate and predict the individual case.
by rafaelmn | 2025-04-23 09:45:33+00:00
Nice, I didn't see this is small scale grants, this is great, like Blender case. Unfortunately I don't know that this scales to serious budgets.

My experience being involved in applying on a "digital transformation" funded project was that it was basically pointless to do it without an agency because it will cost you more to figure out everything on your own and you'll likely fail anyway at some random step - and that the people applying to these kind of calls are basically there to gobble government money with appalling delivery history, but the only thing that gets reviewed is credentials.