MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FjordWarden | 2025-04-16 14:46:50+00:00
> unpublished study is finding that adding prosody to text improves children’s comprehension.

As a dyslexic software engineer who knows by heart a good number of the 50 tables in the open font type specification, I'd like to look into this in more detail but there is no code or paper published about this (yet).

In the mean time, it would be nice for people stop using dyslexics as an excuse to motivate for their own special interests. I've suffered my entire formative years under this low-key Munchausen by proxy from all sort of educators gass-lighting me into believing I should use some technology that in the fullness of time proved to be counter productive.

But ok, the variable speed HOI animation looks cool, I'll give you that.
by ferguess_k | 2025-04-16 14:47:13+00:00
Now the problem is, how do we jailbreak? Or, if we can't, how do we study the host environment from within a simulation?

My thoughts are:

I'd assume the creatures who created the simulation would create it based on the same environment they are living in. That means, they probably look like us, even behave like us, but are far more intelligent than us.

I'd also assume that some Physics laws are different. For example time most likely passes a lot slower outside of the simulation than within.
by breadwinner | 2025-04-16 14:47:18+00:00
I switched to Chrome after noticing severe problems with Edge: The laptop's fan would turn on and task manager shows no processes consuming high CPU. Eventually I found that Edge is the culprit. Killing every Edge process quiets the fan.

Another problem with Edge is intrusion into the web page. Curved corners for example. Every pixel in the page belongs to the application, and Edge is intruding. When you select text Edge shows its own menu, and you're confused as to whether the application is showing the menu or Edge.
by daveguy | 2025-04-16 14:47:25+00:00
There is no technological path to AGI, much less intelligent robots, in the next 10 years. Everyone underestimates the massive amount of parallel processing going on in a single human brain. That doesn't even consider how massive the sensor array is. The doublings required for our artificial technology to catch up is about 25-35 years, maybe more depending on how much Moore's Law slows down.
by PixelForg | 2025-04-16 14:47:33+00:00
And thats exactly what I don't like, there's no good reason why the internet has to be like this. It's simple, just be the same online like how you'd be irl. Tired of all these people that would talk shit online but become weak irl.

Then again this is just my opinion, I don't like 4chan because of the mentioned reasons so I don't visit it. Nothing trollworthy about that.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-04-16 14:47:50+00:00
Yes, so in my first example in the GP, this happens first. Humans do the work. The calculator double checks and gives me a list of all errors plus 5% of the non-errors, and I only need to double check that list.

In my third example, the calculator does the hard work of dividing, and humans can validate by the simpler task of multiplication, only having to do extra work 5% of the time.

(In my second, the unreliablity is a trade-off against speed, and we need the speed more.)

In all cases, we benefit from the unreliable tool despite not knowing when it is unreliable.
by univacky | 2025-04-16 14:47:52+00:00
When Jordan Mechner wrote Karateka for the Apple ][, he used an array of pointers to rows. A team member realized that by inverting the order of the array, all graphics would appear upside down. Broderbund agreed to ship that "upside down" version on the backside of the single-sided floppy, so that if you booted it upside down it played upside down.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/5/22564151/karateka-apple-ii...

https://archive.org/details/wozaday_Karateka_Side_B
by DoneWithAllThat | 2025-04-16 14:48:07+00:00
This is a pet peeve of mine: yes there are unskilled jobs. Lots of them. The term is maybe slightly misleading, but there absolutely is a class of jobs that any able-bodied person could perform given at most a few hours or a few days of training, and they are qualitatively distinct from jobs that require education, specialized training, and/or months or years of experience to be considered proficient and productive in them.

That doesn’t mean people who work jobs in the former category deserve ridicule or disrespect. But the distinction is important because finding workers to fill an unskilled role is just a matter of finding said able-bodied person, while for the latter you need some kind of system of education, training and/or apprenticeship (either explicitly or effectively) to be set up and functioning to even have an industry that depends on those jobs.

Not everything is some silly game of political fighting through language. Some things we actually need terms distinguishing “this” from “that” so we can have real world conversations about them.
by abanana | 2025-04-16 14:48:33+00:00
> the problem with startups is that they're ego-driven

100% agree. This looks like another case of nothing more than arrogance - another case of somebody thinking they know it all, can revolutionise an industry, even though their experience within that industry is basically zero. Some of the choices of wording in there, e.g. "potential for venture-backed disruption", say it all.

It's not far from being that typical problem where someone, without domain knowledge, has that common simplistic thought: "why don't they just..." because it's always so obvious from the outside! In this case, why don't they just buy our software? Turns out it wasn't so obvious after all.

It feels like I've seen several stories on HN from people seduced by the idea of being called an entrepreneur. (Or more accurately, wanting to call themselves an entrepreneur.) Sometimes they keep failing, and just try a different industry instead of taking stock and changing their approach to one that starts with some real learning. Their blog posts make it clear that creating a startup is/was their goal. No understanding that to be successful, your business is supposed to be a means to an end, not the end in itself - do enough research first to create a viable solution to an actual problem. Though it seems in venture capital funding, businesses tend to get funding regardless... it's another world.
by duckmysick | 2025-04-16 14:49:04+00:00
I don't know, an estimate spanning three orders of magnitude doesn't seem useful.

To continue your example of 5-7 days, it would turn into an estimate of 5-700 days. So somewhere between a week or two years. And fair enough, whatever you're estimating will land somewhere in between. But how do I proceed from there with actual planning or budget?
by adamsch | 2025-04-16 14:49:07+00:00
Indeed, RECs are known to have very little additionality and there is a ton of research questioning their role in decarbonization.

"A number of studies have zeroed in on the influence of voluntary RECs—those purchased by private customers—on renewable energy production and have gathered significant evidence to suggest that these certificates have had little to no impact. One of these studies, led by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and UCLA, for example, found that if the power market for voluntary RECs did not exist, “the amount of electricity generated by wind power in the United States would be little different than what we actually see today.”

A paper published in 2022 in Nature which received significant attention from the media argued that due to the drop in the prices of RECs in recent years, the revenue associated with these certificates is insufficient to promote an increase in green energy production. The paper concludes that while the group of companies being analyzed reported a combined 30.7% reduction in emissions resulting from their REC purchases, the actual reduction was closer to 9.9%."

https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/renewable-e...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01379-5
by RKFADU_UOFCCLEL | 2025-04-16 14:49:16+00:00
Including this as a prime example, the overall trend seems to be that we're going back to the bad old days where a kid gets to code the entire security infrastructure because the CEO thinks he's smart and then the bugs are covered up with legal threats (because they were able to mislead the courts), obfuscation, while being easily discoverable by 3rd parties. Another example is the way the bug bounty gimmick is run and most researchers never disclose their findings nor are they patched in any consistent manner, plus the companies threaten to sue you for disclosing even if it's 100 years later.
by sollewitt | 2025-04-16 14:49:33+00:00
I’ve never seen one that worked long term. The basic premise is “what was done for $X dollars with no profit motive can be done for <$X dollars with profit motive doesn’t hold up - you make something private, it wants to make more profit.

Just for the most ready to hand example for me, PG&E in SF vs public electricity utilities on the peninsula - the privatized electricity costs twice as much per kWh - and of course it does because the PG&E CEO needs to make $17M from somewhere, the share price needs to go up etc. the rich need to skim from the top, that makes the cost higher.

If you have an essential industry the cynical play is to privatize to save cost, then do a bad job and then effectively make your losses public through bail-outs while still making profit.
by dzaima | 2025-04-16 14:49:56+00:00
It may theoretically be false, and probably false in some cases, but (at least temporarily) there are cases (not all! but some) where some of the current C compilers currently will never result in bad behavior even if UB actually happens, for now, and those do include some of those mentioned in the article. (not all though; e.g. the actually-used cases of signed overflow could behave badly; of course if one looks at the assembly and makes sure it's what you want, it will be,..as long as the code is always compiled by the specific version of the checked compiler)

For example, in clang/llvm, currently, doing arithmetic UB (signed overflow, out-of-range shifts, offsetting a pointer outside its allocation bounds, offsetting a null pointer, converting an out-of-range float to int, etc) will never result in anything bad, as long as you don't use it (where "using it" includes branching on or using as a load/store address or returning from a function a value derived from it, but doesn't include keeping it in a variable, doing further arithmetic, or even loading/storing it). Of course that's subject to change and not actually guaranteed by any documentation. Not a thing to rely on, but currently you won't ever need to release an emergency fix and get a CVE number for having "void *mem = malloc(10); void *tmp[1]; tmp[0] = mem-((int)two_billion + (int)two_billion); if (two_billion == 0) foo(tmp); free(mem);" in your codebase (..at least if compiling with clang; don't know about other compilers). (yes, that's an immense amount of caveats for an "uhh technically")
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-16 14:49:58+00:00
> 2) probability is rarely truly uncorrelated

Without having fully digested how the Unsure Calculator computes, it seems to me you could perhaps "weight" the ranges you pass to the calculator. Rather than a standard bell curve the Calculator could apply a more tightly focused — or perhaps skewed curve for that term.

If you think your salary will be in the range of 10 to 20, but more likely closer to 10 you could:

10<~20 (not to be confused with less-than)

or: 10!~20 (not to be confused with factorial)

or even: 10~12~20 to indicate a range of 10 to 20 ... leaning toward 12.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-16 14:50:17+00:00
> What you are saying is the fantastical kool-aid Fox News and alt-right media spin to you.

What I'm replying to is the fantastical Kool-aid MSNBC and alt-left media spin. I'm pretty sure the Republicans are not going to be rounding up and killing minorities despite hyperbolic descriptions like "people who literally want to kill me and deport my good friends to guantanamo bay cuba".

Wait, you're saying El Salvador is a dictatorship? From briefly glancing at Wikipedia I don't see any evidence of that. Why the need to smear another country just to make Trump look worse?
by alexvitkov | 2025-04-16 14:50:35+00:00
The Windows API uses this scheme for one of its 50 string types [1].

I"m not very fond of this design as it's easy to pass a "normal" C string, which compiles because BSTR is just a typedef to it.

You can allocate the exact same data structure, but store a pointer to the size prefix, instead of the first byte - you avoid that issue, and can still pass the data field to anything expecting a zero-terminated string:

struct WeirdString { int size; char data[0]; }; struct WeirdString* ws = ...; fopen(ws->data);

[1] BSTR - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
by thyristan | 2025-04-16 14:50:41+00:00
Building a new factory needs a few years from idea to start of planning to production. 2 years if you are really really quick maybe, 4 to 6 years might be more realistic. The term for the current administration ends in 3.5 years and the next one probably won't be lead by Trump, so things will change.

This means that nobody will even start moving production back yet, they will pay lip-service, do the minimum to get along for this term, and hope for the best for the next one.
by arjf | 2025-04-16 14:50:52+00:00
It only requires more computation if you really need to compute the full FFT with all the bins, in which case the FFT is more efficient... With this approach you only compute the bins you really need, without having to pre-filter your signal, or performing additional computations on the FFT result. Some sliding window FFT methods compute frequency bands independently, but they do require buffering and I really wanted to avoid that.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-16 14:51:32+00:00
> Still, both cohorts' language and behavior evince continuous cultural cross-pollination from around 2012 (at least; I wasn't paying serious attention much sooner), at a rate and scope both well in excess of broader culture's adoption of same as substantially attributable to either source.

Do you have any evidence or anecdotes to explain why you believe that?

> you'll almost certainly prefer to keep trying to indict the factual claim.

Because the claim isn’t convincing. I saw plenty of content from Tumblr in 2014 despite not actively using it, and I could probably pass an ideological Turing test for a user of the era, but that doesn’t mean I was using both websites. You obviously have to have someone taking screenshots of these posts for each community to be aware of the other in the first place, but the core demographic of users on each site did not substantially overlap.
by jongjong | 2025-04-16 14:51:53+00:00
Nonsense. Bringing manufacturing back to the US will be easy. Economists will probably call it "Miracle on the hudson river".

Economists are full of bs. They keep framing everything as impossible and when something good happens later, going against all their predictions, they call it a miracle... Maybe these economists are just projecting by assuming everyone else is just as incompetent as they are.

Of course if society was made up only of economists, we'd still be living in caves, worrying about the difficulty of bringing firewood back to the cave.
by srveale | 2025-04-16 14:52:11+00:00
That's a good point, and maybe I was preaching the gospel of flipping too hard. It is by no means a silver bullet.

Should we let the kids who cheat using AI drop by the wayside, never learning a thing for themselves? Or should we do the same for kids who, for whatever reason, just will not do school work outside a classroom? Maybe it works really well for some subjects and not others? Or only for some age ranges? What about the students like you, and there are probably a lot of them, where it would be unfair to judge their abilities at specific times in specific settings?

I guess the reason I bring it up now is that AI has tipped it over the edge, where cheating is now so easy and effective that it is starting to tempt kids who would not otherwise cheat.
by Herring | 2025-04-16 14:52:18+00:00
lol you think .666 is a lot? The entire South has been stuck on this point for generations. They keep voting for tribalism/racism/nepotism, and the poorer they get the angrier and more aggressive they get.

Voting is just one big popularity contest, and 54% of American adults read at or below 6th grade levels.

I'm just not a good bootlicker. I call stupidity wherever I see it. You can keep your "caution", I'm moving on from this conversation.
by kachnuv_ocasek | 2025-04-16 14:53:17+00:00
Same background here. I finally got into stochastic calculus last year thanks to a local college course (after several unsuccessful attempts on my own).

You need at least

1. a basic grasp of classical calculus, measure theory and topology

2. solid understanding of probability theory

3. basics of stochastic processes

I believe you should be able to dive in from there. It's good to have an idea where you're heading as well (mathematical finance and modelling and pricing derivatives? Bayesian inference and MCMC? statistical physics?).
by barrkel | 2025-04-16 14:53:19+00:00
The alternative really is as Dan says: you end up with a bunch of REST endpoints that either serve up too much, or have configuration flags to control how much they serve, simply to satisfy front end concerns while avoiding adding round trip latency. You see this in much smaller apps than Google scale. It's a genuine tension.

Usually the endpoints get too fat, then there's a performance push to speed them up, then you start thinking about fat and thin versions. I've seen it happen repeatedly.
by throwaway652368 | 2025-04-16 14:53:29+00:00
Why do people think 4chan is unmoderated? It is moderated, spamming an unrelated board with gore or porn will certainly get you banned, and illegal porn will get you banned and reported to federal agencies. It's unmoderated in the sense that you're allowed to say things that are against the status quo, but that's a good thing.

>absolutely reprehensible political views

Also known as thoughtcrime
Show HN: LibreAI – Private AI chat app with open-source models (no ChatGPT)
by annrap1d | 2025-04-16 14:53:32+00:00
I built LibreAI to provide a private, self-hostable alternative to ChatGPT using open-source models like Mistral, LLaMA 3, and Phi via Ollama. It's fast, streams responses in real-time (via HTMX), and has zero telemetry.

There’s a free tier to try it out and a paid option to support development. Would love feedback, feature requests, or model suggestions!

Built with Go Fiber + HTMX, hosted on my own infra. No JavaScript frontends here :)

Live at: https://libreai.app
by bluGill | 2025-04-16 14:53:49+00:00
Quit turning the argument around. forget about "them" - what does it say about you when you cannot talk nice about people you disagree with?

People who voted for Trump are not stupid. They have real concerns that they do not see being met and so they are turning to something that while maybe not ideal is at least a promise of maybe better. Maybe it will be worse, but they don't see things on the right track as they were either.
by mdorazio | 2025-04-16 14:54:00+00:00
Uber had EBITDA of $6.5B for full year 2024: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000154315125...

I agree with the rest of your comment, though. The US public markets reward creative accounting and mortgaging the future for quarterly gains. GE and Jack Welch are a great historical example.
by robertlagrant | 2025-04-16 14:54:07+00:00
> The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point.

I think this is because China is an autocracy, so they can make long-term plans. Democracies that swing as wildly as the US currently does is no place for that, and that's not limited to the new administration.
by maxsilver | 2025-04-16 14:54:32+00:00
> So paying everyone living wages doesn’t really do anything to solve the problem because the products created by people who are paid living wages are by definition more expensive due to labor costs.

They aren't though. In America, "Paying living wages" always means "pay way more", because America underpays labour and overcharges for literally everything (products, services, basic cost of living -- every product on American soil has a insane profit margin on it)

In China, "Paying living wages" doesn't necessarily mean "pay labor more", because they have stronger control over pricing and margins, so it often actually means "make orgs charge way less".

You end up with Chinese folks living in a major city in China, with a 2bed apartment that costs $200USD/month, and a meal out cost $2USD/each, cars that start at like $6k, and they get paid $5USD/hr, but they feel like they're living well, despite only making around $640USD/month, because they can save 10% of their income each month, and have like 40% of their income as discretionary spending, and still get to own their apartment.

But in the US, a 2bed apartment in a big city like that costs at least $2,000/month or more, a meal out there costs at least $20/each, and a basic starter car starts at like $26k, so you can pay someone in a ostensibly-"high labor cost" job of $20/hr, and they feel like their constantly underwater, and have zero chance of ever owning a home, because they only have like 20% of their income as discretionary spending, and they can't save anything at all. (and that's before we even mention differences like how you don't have to worry about being hit with a crazy bill for an ER visit or an Ambulance in China, but Americans have to worry about that 24/7/365).

(It's the same reason many American's dream of getting a job in Europe and leaving the US, because despite making less money-on-paper, you get to generate more real wealth and do so with less life risk and life stress)

The Factories and the labor pool and the infrastructure being absent in the US is hard to solve for, of course -- but it isn't even the hardest part of any of this. The American view of capitalism would have to be completely rewritten to be more diverse, more equitable, and more inclusive to Americans who do actual labor, before Americans could be anywhere close to competitive with most of these Chinese industries.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-16 14:55:09+00:00
> but the Orange in Charge's supporters seem to hew to the "well if you didn't do anything wrong you've got nothing to worry about" angle because it's something happening to people they think deserve it.

This is literally the left wing reply when people complain about losing their job or their family for voicing the wrong political belief. "They deserve it, they should 'do better'."
by p0w3n3d | 2025-04-16 14:55:13+00:00
Quite surprising for me as a long time Atari 65XE user is that those PRG were starting with a basic command. On Atari all binary programs were loaded without BASIC in memory. If you forgot to disable basic, there was a chance the program wouldn't run or would hang. I guess this must have been due to different memory layout?
by rurp | 2025-04-16 14:55:29+00:00
The national debt is a complete red herring here. It's a real problem, sure, but that is completely unrelated to these cuts. The party implementing these cuts is currently debating how many trillions of dollars to increase the national debt by. They are completely unserious about reducing federal debt payments and there is zero ambiguity about what they are saying, drafting, and voting on.

That is also the same party that is actively attacking every single institution they deem too liberal. That's what they are doing here too: trying to destroy something they don't like, regardless of the consequences. The money being cut here is a drop in the bucket and the economic costs will almost certainly outweigh the savings. We shouldn't believe flimsy pretexts that are obviously lies.