MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Share Cool Ideas
by jack_pp | 2025-04-04 20:32:06+00:00
Ever think of a cool idea but you either don't have the time or the energy to build it?

Or maybe there's no money in it. There's lots of nice solutions to problems that are very hard to monetize. For example I got pissed off playing ping-pong because some guy was either consciously or unconsciously stealing points by saying a serve was illegal when it wasn't and I jokingly said I'll film it next time so there's no more argument. Then I thought about it and wouldn't it be cool to automatically film a friendly game and automatically cut clips of each point with some ML magic? Could also auto-referee small tournaments or something.

You get the idea, share ideas you had that you think would be nice if someone else would build it.
by chongli | 2025-04-04 20:32:46+00:00
She's right up there Cattelan's banana duct-taped to a wall. In other words, she's in that grey area where you're not sure whether her art is sincere or some kind of fraud.

But that's par for the course with much of modern art. It's a vast movement occupying this Poe's Law-style zone of artistic ambiguity.
by prewett | 2025-04-04 20:33:34+00:00
In all their cities they could see buildings that they did not know how to build. And before that, public services would have broken down. It would have become impossible to find people who knew how to repair your heated floor (if you were rich), etc. The city of Rome declined from 1 million people to something like 20,000. In the late 500s, Pope Gregory the Great thought that the world was ending because of all the trouble (including vicious barbarian invasions). Monks (and presumably anyone educated) had access to a lot of ancient texts, it was only some that got lost in the West. I think they would have had a distinct sense that that past was more advanced.
by thinkcontext | 2025-04-04 20:33:41+00:00
Universities typically only spend about 5% of their endowments per year, since it has to last forever. And much of it comes with restrictions on what it can be spent on, those come from the donors wishes. So money in the endowment that's for the theater department or to support an econ professorship can't be repurposed to support federal funds that supported cancer research.
by dartos | 2025-04-04 20:33:48+00:00
I asked if you would be willing to share your work and workflow.

You could say nothing. You could just say “I can’t, it’s for my job, but my workflow looks like this…” or something.

You could say you’re not comfortable sharing.

You could share a snippet and how you reached that result… idk anything.

But instead you went for some weird statement about flying and people writing articles.

Didn’t respond to any points in Dijkstra’s essay, just some platitudes.
by maxrmk | 2025-04-04 20:34:13+00:00
I think it could show up in those other places, but probably isn't fully captured?

Imagine an airbnb that's great for most guests but absolutely terrible for 1 in every 5, so bad that they quit airbnb. Maybe it's next to a music venue, so every once in a while it's very loud.

It's possible it could maintain a decent average star rating and LTV as described in the article but actually have negative (real) lifetime value for airbnb if the 1 in five that they lose would have spent a lot of money on the platform otherwise.
by monkeyfun | 2025-04-04 20:34:31+00:00
Out of curiosity: how come only LGB? I'm trans, and I'd be quick to complain about how bad the narratives are there. Especially in terms of people over-focusing on such a small issue when hardly any trans people are in competitive sports and there's issues 1000x more important to our daily lives and safety that need to be handled sooner than "competitive sports teams".

I'm not the only trans person like this, so it seems odd to exclude a whole group from even the possibility of agreement.
by anigbrowl | 2025-04-04 20:35:21+00:00
I bet you're thinking you're really clever with that context switch. I was actually talking about nazis, because posts above were complaining about left-wing cancel culture getting people fired from their jobs which is the sort of consequence that happened to quite a few extremely online nazis over the last decade.

Who taught you to argue like this? They didn't do you any favors.
by nyrikki | 2025-04-04 20:35:29+00:00
Even Russel and Norvig is still applicable for the fundamentals, and with the rise of agenic efforts would be extremely helpful.

The updates to even the Bias/Variance Dilemma (Geman 1992) are minor if you look at the original paper:

https://www.dam.brown.edu/people/documents/bias-variance.pdf

They were dealing with small datasets or infinite datasets, and double decent only really works when the patterns in your test set are similar enough to those in your training set.

While you do need to be mindful about some of the the older opinions, the fundamentals are the same.

For fine tuning or RL, the same problems with small datasets or infinite datasets, where concept classes for training data may be novel, that 1992 paper still applies and will bite you if you assume it is universally invalid.

Most of the foundational concepts are from the mid 20th century.

The availability of mass amounts of data and new discoveries have modified the assumptions and tooling way more than invalidating previous research. Skim that paper and you will see they simply dismissed the mass data and compute we have today as impractical at the time.

Find the book that works best for you, learn the concepts and build tacit experience.

Lots of efforts are trying to incorporate symbolic and other methods too.

IMHO Building breadth and depth is what will save time and help you find opportunities, knowledge of the fundamentals is critical for that.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-04-04 20:35:33+00:00
Yeah, Python or Javascript should be first languages for most people.

People like flashy things, and Python and Javascript are just 10x easier to get that working. Console I/O doesn't really cut it anymore.

Later on you can deal with memory allocation, bit-twiddling, 2's complement arithmetic, lower level OS details etc.
by janalsncm | 2025-04-04 20:35:55+00:00
Depends on what your goal is. If you’re just curious about ML, probably none of the info will be wrong. But it’s also really not engaging with the most interesting problems engineers are tackling today, unlike an 11 year old chemistry book for example (I think). So as interview material or to break into the field it’s not going to be the most useful.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-04-04 20:36:18+00:00
> Given that the Jews were forcibly expelled from their homeland by the Romans

2000 years ago.

You're saying that events from millennia in the past mean that the Palestinians should have had to cede the land they lived on to a group of outsiders from Europe.

People can make of that what they may (I think it's ridiculous), but you at least have to admit that it completely invalidates your argument that Zionism is just like any other demand for self-determination. We're talking about a demand for other people's land, based on appeals to events from thousands of years ago.
by beyond_gravity | 2025-04-04 20:36:57+00:00
Hi Friends,

Do you ever feel like you're constantly busy, but making slow progress on what matters most?

Priority Model: - Impact (double) - Effort (double) - Urgency (double)

Return: Priority (double)

I'm an Engineer with a stamp, but this is my first store release as a self taught developer / entrepreneur.

Opper is a non-linear prioritization algorithm that continuously relates the inputs of impact, effort, and urgency and output a single scalar (priority).

This can do all kinds of cool stuff, but our "fastest path to revenue" was to release a mobile app built in Flutter. It's a normal reorder-able checklist, but with three sliders. Opper's algorithm automatically ranks your task and thus your most important item is always at the top of your list!

A social feature allows sharing your lists with others - with a twist. After you rank it, the other peoples rankings are also visible so you instantly know if you're aligned.

We're currently building our B2B desktop product, purpose built for desktop environments.

I'd love any feedback cheers!
by tracker1 | 2025-04-04 20:37:00+00:00
I can say it isn't any better for JS/Node/Deno/Bun projects that I've seen or tried. About the only case it's been helpful (GitHub CoPilot) is in creating boilerplate .sql files for schema creation, and in that it became kind of auto-complete on overdrive. It still made basic missteps though.
by kibwen | 2025-04-04 20:37:18+00:00
Again without trying to make an overall value judgment on emotion vs. reason, one of the things that is attractive about reason is that it has built-in capacity for self-correction, i.e. we can use logic to prove that our own logic is faulty, and this is an ordinary and non-traumatic event. In contrast, self-correcting an emotional process is something an individual might spend a lifetime struggling with, if they can even identify a problem in the first place. To suggest that people are fundamentally emotional animals is to suggest that individuals cannot be expected to improve themselves.
by joshcsimmons | 2025-04-04 20:37:20+00:00
I worked with Travis on the Electromagnetic Warfare Team at Anduril and he's one of the most phenomenal engineers I've had the pleasure of working with. Nix is already such a niche software it's absolutely baffling they'd prevent one of the few companies hiring Nix experts from advertising jobs because of a few loud individuals with anime avatars.
by nabla9 | 2025-04-04 20:37:32+00:00
KITE Insta-analysis (Kiel Institute Trade Policy Evaluation) shows that US

real output -1.92% price index +9.16% exports -24.52%

If inflation is going to jump 9 percent, that's not time for rate cut.

The US may enter stagflation--Stagnant economic growth (or a recession) and High inflation (rising prices) and rising unemployment.
by taylodl | 2025-04-04 20:38:42+00:00
It's getting harder for Congress to deflect and defend, especially as the economy enters a severe recession as a result of Trump's tariffs. You can get away with a lot as long as you keep the money rolling in. Drain those 401k accounts and raise prices significantly at the stores and people will come at you with pitchforks. You need to keep people fat, dumb, and happy to have a chance at establishing an authoritarian regime. Trump and his merry band of idiots are doing the exact opposite.
by djmips | 2025-04-04 20:39:21+00:00
Fixed point is where the number has a predetermined number of bits for the integer and fraction like 8.8 where you have 0-255 for the integer and the fraction goes from 1/256 to 255/256 in steps of 1/256

Floating point at it's simplest just makes that a variable. So the (.) position is stored as a separate number. Now instead of being fixed - it floats around.

This way you can put more in the integer or more in the fraction.

The Microsoft Basic here used 23 bits for the number, 1 sign bit and 8 bits to say where the floating point should be placed.

Of course in practice you have to deal with a lot of details depending on how robust you want your system. This Basic was not as robost as modern IEEE754 but it did the job.

Reading more about IEE754 is a fascinating way to learn about modern floating point. I also recommend Bruce Dawson's observations on his Random ASCII blog.
by nfc | 2025-04-04 20:39:31+00:00
Something I ponder in the context of AI alignment is how we approach agents with potentially multiple objectives. Much of the discussion seems focused on ensuring an AI pursues a single goal. Which seems to be a great idea if we are trying to simplify the problem but I'm not sure how realistic it is when considering complex intelligences.

For example human motivation often involves juggling several goals simultaneously. I might care about both my own happiness and my family's happiness. The way I navigate this isn't by picking one goal and maximizing it at the expense of the other; instead, I try to balance my efforts and find acceptable trade-offs.

I think this 'balancing act' between potentially competing objectives may be a really crucial aspect of complex agency, but I haven't seen it discussed as much in alignment circles. Maybe someone could point me to some discussions about this :)
by twic | 2025-04-04 20:40:10+00:00
> The dot in the name has no semantics it's just a separator.

That's not true of all module systems. It's true in Java, but not in Rust, where it establishes a parent-child relationship, and in which context [1]:

> If an item is private, it may be accessed by the current module and its descendants.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/visibility-and-privacy.h...
by btilly | 2025-04-04 20:40:35+00:00
The fact that it is a good explanation, doesn't mean that hypocrisy is missing. It is quite common for us to do things for one reason, while actually being motivated by a second, unacknowledged, reason.

For example consider this case. When we become dependent upon another's largesse, it is easy to emotionally deal with it by holding the other in contempt. Thereby making it emotionally comfortable to accept the largesse, and hiding from any potential feeling of guilt. For example Ayn Rand did an excellent job of portraying this dynamic on a personal level with the example of Lillian Reardon. Who holds Hank in contempt exactly because it keeps her from having to face how much of a parasite she has become.

I've seen Objectivists fall into exactly this dynamic. When their contempt for the government becomes a way to avoid thinking about how dependent they have actually become on said government, continuing to spout Ayn Rand's justification becomes hypocrisy. And as long as the underlying emotional reality is ignored, it remains hypocrisy no matter how logical and reasonable the explanation may be.
by anigbrowl | 2025-04-04 20:40:50+00:00
I have to laugh (bitterly) at the administration's claim they have no way to retrieve the people (there's more than one) that they illegally sent to CECOT.

It's not like they flew them to El Salvador and then released them at the airport, subsequently losing track of them. They know exactly where those people, and who call - after all, they had to cut a deal with El Salvador to use their prison in the first place.
by _wire_ | 2025-04-04 20:40:51+00:00
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - Adam Curtis

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines...

See ep-1 "Love & Power," on contradictions of Ayn Rand's life versus her philosophy; can be found on yt / vimeo

Series supplies interesting history for any nerd interested in systems analysis and provides a survey of California Ideology.

His documentary on the legacy of Henritta Lacks' immortal cells and biology, "The Way of All Flesh" is also interesting food for thought on systems analysis.
by mrob | 2025-04-04 20:41:17+00:00
I think adventure games were doomed because their success depended on hardware restrictions limiting the competition. The main selling point of adventure games was graphical spectacle. Adventure games had better graphics than any other genre because the lack of action meant they could show the most impressive static images. For the bulk of the audience, puzzles were secondary to this, serving mostly to ration out the graphical spectacle so the players felt they got value for money. Look at the success of Myst. I would be very surprised if more than 10% of people who bought it completed it. Myst simply looked better than any other game and that was enough for it to sell. Even King's Quest 1 was considered graphically impressive at the time; it was advertised as "3D" because the characters could be partly obscured by foreground objects and this was an important selling point.

Once you could get the same kind of spectacle in action games, and I'd claim Half-Life as the first notable example, there was no longer any need for mass-market adventure games.

EDIT: Thinking about it, Metal Gear Solid beat Half-Life to market, and that has the same kind of visual spectacle in an action game I'm talking about.
by Devasta | 2025-04-04 20:42:50+00:00
Atlas Shrugged was one of the most important books I ever read.

A society where the rich destroy the entire world fighting stupid battles against each other, even witholding technology that would aid all humanity because someone other than them would benefit, all the while ordinary men like Eddie Willers are left to die in the desert?

Marx couldn't have laid it out so clear to me as Rand has.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-04-04 20:43:05+00:00
This isn't an LTV model, it's a regression model. Is it even good? Doesn't seem so.

Maybe their folks need to punch "LTV" into Google Scholar.

And also, is it even actionable?

> For example, suppose we run a marketing campaign that provides hosts with tips on how to successfully improve their listings

Right guys. “Marketing-induced incremental LTV” indeed.
by I_complete_me | 2025-04-04 20:43:33+00:00
I'm no expert regarding the shell. I guess I've only spent 0.01% of my life in it. But I want to say "Hear the guy out". IMHO, there's _got_ to be room for incorporating new stuff, however good the old stuff is. The horse and cart were great, but the car, the automobile wow!
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-04 20:43:38+00:00
The real issue is context size. You kinda need to know what you are doing in order to construct the project in pieces, and know what to tell the LLM when you spin up a new instance with fresh context to work on a single subsection. It's unwieldy and inefficient, and the model inevitably gets confused when it can effectively look at the whole code base.

Gemini 2.5 is much better in this regard, it can make decent output up to around 100k tokens compared to claude 3.7 starting to choke around 32k. Long term it remains to see if this will remain an issue. If models can get to 5M context and perform like current model with 5k context, it would be a total game changer.
by kcplate | 2025-04-04 20:43:40+00:00
My guess is that the stock market losses will be a greater driver than any cost increases on goods. And stock market losses will not necessarily push the middle class much, but will push GOP politicians into contention with Trump.

Ultimately Trump needs GOP in congress to be friendly…more than he needs the public at this point. He cant (and wont, despite the trolling) run again.
by somethingsome | 2025-04-04 20:44:45+00:00
I was teaching python long ago to very beginners in programming.

Honestly, the language became kinda harsh for newcomers, what we see as developpers is 'it's like pseudocode that runs'.

But a beginner is often left behind the billions of methods in each class. He is not used to documentation, and spend quite a huge amount of time learning by heart stupid things like 'len()' in this case it's '.len()' here it's '.length',etc.. For many meany methods that all have their idiosyncracies.

At least in c/(easy)c++, you need to build yourself most of it, helping the understanding.

I'm not completely against python as a first language, but it need to be teached well, and that could include working with a very minimal set of functions on every objects. Then you can expand and incorporate more and more methods that make life easier.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-04-04 20:44:55+00:00
> The ironic thing is that becoming a better thinker is not done by studying logic, but instead by learning to recognize and respect your own emotional responses.

This is the single thing that in my opinion both the young and also the naive miss. But people who are wise usually seem to understand.

Not everyone learns it with age, but it usually takes some amount of life experience for people to learn it.
by pavlov | 2025-04-04 20:45:00+00:00
I also learned English mostly by Space Quest.

I remember being nine years old, sitting in front of SQ1 with my best friend, and trying to survive the escape pod early in the game. How do you avoid dying when it crashes on an alien world?

Our only hope was my neighbor who was a few years older and seemingly infinitely wise. I called him up, and patiently he spelled out the magic words to type before launching the escape pod:

“FASTEN SEAT BELT”

What do those words mean? We had no idea, but we lived on to explore another world.

A few years later I could read and write English just fine, but had no idea how anything was pronounced. Sierra English was a real thing among my generation.
by dfxm12 | 2025-04-04 20:45:14+00:00
It probably helps tourism too. Foreigners in Japan can get a rail pass at a huge discount. I might not have left Tokyo if not for it. It would be fun to pop around the country, from Munich to Stuttgart (for Oktoberfest and Volksfest?), then onto Frankfurt and Nuremburg. It looks like it pays for itself after 2 trips.
by vladms | 2025-04-04 20:46:04+00:00
There is no claim that each drug costs 1$ billion. If you stop after 1-2 years of development you might have wasted some millions, if you stop after 3-4 years you wasted tens of millions and so on. The 10% success is still very low, because you can still fail after 10 years (potentially investing a lot)

If you are interested in the topic, for example for oncology: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... , to quote "Failed drug development in oncology incurs substantial expense. At an industry level, an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion is spent annually on failed oncology trials."

There is no "oracle" that says invest 50 million (or 100 million or 1 billion) in X or Y and it will succeed (in pharma or other domains). And this is not exclusively because of capitalism, it is because doing some things is hard.
by settrans | 2025-04-04 20:46:56+00:00
You're changing the topic. Nobody is talking about ceding land, we're talking about re-establishing a nation in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. And besides, no Zionist demanded land or induced anyone to cede their land prior to 1947 anyway, since all Zionist land acquisition was through voluntary purchases and legal land transfers.

So are you arguing that the Jews are not a people that merit self determination? Or are you saying that because they were expelled from their homeland so long ago, they forfeited the legitimate claim to self determination?
by qwertox | 2025-04-04 20:47:09+00:00
So do I. But it's not like ChatGPT isn't flexible, the code it generates for small tasks is really good, and the site is faster than AI Studio.

For example, if I want to quickly create a Python script to list all VMs via libvirt and output their attached drives and filesystems, that's a task for ChatGPT.

But for the things where I don't want an AI to "suck up" to me and instead "stay professional", that's Gemini.