MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aprilnya | 2025-04-23 08:02:38+00:00
I still don’t understand why I see people saying Vision is an unsuccessful and failed platform.

Vision Pro is very clearly an early adopter version of a platform that has yet to truly get started. Obviously, a huge $3500 headset on your head is not the actual intended final form of this platform. The actual intended final form is glasses.

And until those glasses are out you can’t say it failed, because it hasn’t even started yet.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-23 08:02:49+00:00
The EU and member states are currently putting in quite a bit of money trying to limit their exposure to US tech companies.

Looking at the list of projects you can see that they support a huge variety of projects, with all kind of different scopes and intentions.

While I think that the overarching goal is good and I would like to see them succeed, I also think that they fail to address the single most important issue. Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.

The funding goes to many, but small projects, but this means the single biggest issue, actually deploying an open source system over an entire organization remains unaddressed.
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-23 08:04:14+00:00
You’re not looking very hard then because there are loads of new games released both with VR support and also exclusively for devices like the Oculus Quest.

What we’ve seen less of is AAA games bolt on VR support as an afterthought - and the reason for that is because it’s almost always a terrible way to play a game that was originally designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse, or traditional game controller.
by Peroni | 2025-04-23 08:04:34+00:00
>In order for that to happen we need to have stable Gaelic communities to sing the ballads and tell the stories, with formal and informal education that invites new generations into the tradition.

Whilst this has been true for centuries, you can actually see it happening right now in real time with Kneecap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneecap_(band)) and the incredible impact they are having on popularising the Irish language.
by JR1427 | 2025-04-23 08:05:12+00:00
I have a PhD in cell biology, as well as post-doctoral research experience. I'm now a software engineer for a big chip designer.

> Is there a 'hacker news' for biology that I'm missing out on?

Not that I know of. Could be cool. I produced a prototype platform that was a searchable DB of all papers published on PubMed, with a comment and karma system. The idea was to incentivise continued debate on published papers. Currently discredited papers continue to get cited for many years, because almost no-one publishes their critiques once the paper is published.

> Where do you get your biology news from?

Back in the lab, we would mostly just closely follow our small field with automated searches of PubMed. We'd find out about wider stuff by attending talks and speaking to other scientists. Often new and exciting things will take years to publish, so you would often find out before publication via talks.

> Is bio harder than other STEMs?

Only because the traditional high-school and university education in biology does not prepare people for the realities of cutting-edge bio research. I did a load of coding, image analysis, complex microscopy, chemistry etc etc, during my PhD and post-doc, none of which was taught during my degree or high school.

To thrive in biology research, you have to be comfortable not knowing about a thing, but figuring out how to do the thing, which likely no-one has done before.
by mrweasel | 2025-04-23 08:06:20+00:00
In some sense I'm more surprised that someone spend time and money on building a new steam locomotive, rather than the fact that you can fit ETCS on one.

Sure, fitting modern signaling equipment on a steam train isn't easy, but it also doesn't feel impossible. Building a brand new steam locomotive, again, sure you can probably do it, but it seems like a lot of expensive work, requiring skills that hasn't been employed in decades and it's probably not really worth doing, financially speaking.

Edit: Apparently it is not uncommon to build steam locomotives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotives_of_the_21st_...
by Tepix | 2025-04-23 08:06:26+00:00
Here's what the license states:

You do not sell or otherwise commercialise the Work or Derivative Works as a Game Engine Product. "Work" shall mean the work of authorship, whether in Source or Object form, made available under the License, as indicated by a copyright notice that is included in or attached to the work "Derivative Works" shall mean any work, whether in Source or Object form, that is based on (or derived from) the Work and for which the editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications represent, as a whole, an original work of authorship. For the purposes of this License, Derivative Works shall not include works that remain separable from, or merely link (or bind by name) to the interfaces of, the Work and Derivative Works thereof.

If you write your own map editor, it's neither Work nor a Derivative Works so this restriction doesn't apply.
by 1dom | 2025-04-23 08:06:45+00:00
It's a perfect representation of CSS: it looks and feels like it should do what you need, but it doesn't _technically_ do what it's supposed to do, so you spend a few hours _trying_ to make sense of it, falling back to just random fuzzing and trial and error, before concluding it's all broken and finally accepting it in its current wonky form, trusting that in some browser, somewhere, it works.
by AymanJabr | 2025-04-23 08:08:45+00:00
Would a simple solution, like demanding that anyone who isn't in your contact list pay a relatively substantial amount (like $5, or even $0.5), in order to contact you, and you are the one that decides if to return that money when the call ends or to keep it for yourself (send it to a charity/pay taxes).

This would also cripple a lot of business in advertising, but not a big loss, if someone really wants to talk to you, they can pay the price.

What am I missing? Why would this not work? What side effects on other industries could there be?
by Deukhoofd | 2025-04-23 08:09:05+00:00
Note that this funding round was from applications up to October last year. The last couple of months have really accelerated the desire of European states and organizations to decouple from US tech, so we might see very different funding rounds soon.

As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this. It'd need stable and secure funding, and I think the only real way to do so is to start out either private with good backers, or public, with the EU directly funding it (and not through intermediate backers like NLNet, that's more for small but important projects).
by zapzupnz | 2025-04-23 08:12:34+00:00
It no more smells of desperation than when Apple contributed modern ScreenCaptureKit support to OBS Studio. They want great experiences for their own platforms and sometimes that means reaching out to other projects.

It's true that the Vision Pro hasn't seen the uptake that Apple's other platforms did at launch, like the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc. — but it's nearsighted to think that Apple can't play a long game. It has the patience (and money) to play it all the way to the eventual release of their glasses; by that time, the platform will already have plenty of fantastic software ported from iOS and, eventually, other platforms through ventures like this.
by 6figurelenins | 2025-04-23 08:12:39+00:00
Layman's guess: wings push air down, air pushes wings up.

An everyday experiment is sticking your flat hand out the window of a moving car. With slight wrist rotations, you'll find even slight deviations from neutral (parallel to the ground) cause your "wing" to rise or fall, with a force that seems proportional to the angle.

We can hypothesize that a symmetric wing, with zero angle of attack, should experience no lift:

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/35139
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-23 08:13:54+00:00
William Fraser over on YouTube has a video[1] on aerodynamic lift which I found interesting.

In it he briefly touches on the equal transit time explanation, and how the steady-state snapsot presented doesn't really have enough information to tell how the flow field developed.

He's been writing a particle-based simulator which he wants to use to show how lift develops from that perspective[2], still a work in progress.

Just sharing as I found them interesting and cleared up some confusions I had.

[1]: https://youtu.be/ZUBwc67c5_Y

[2]: https://youtu.be/IVLpbOQUdqU
by JetSetWilly | 2025-04-23 08:14:07+00:00
Really the article - despite the headline - spends a long time on the literary history of gaelic in scotland, with a short paragraph at the end on the current status. I doubt the author had time to expand to a review of minority language measures globally, and it didn’t seem to be the main point of it anyway.

And, the situation and standing of gaelic in Ireland and Scotland are quite different. In Ireland, gaelic is strongly associated with the primary, and successful ethnonationalist movement. In Scotland, at the end of the day gaelic is a remnant of a foreign invasion, and is also historically associated with catholicism, so is often seen as the “other”. This makes it more difficult to whip up enthusiasm to learn it, even among die hard Scottish nationalists. This whole situation is quite unlike Ireland and even Wales, it would be at best a distraction in the article.
by HPsquared | 2025-04-23 08:14:13+00:00
Bicycles are another commonly-misunderstood system covered on cam.ac.uk. A lot of people seem to think they stay upright by gyroscopic effects. It's more a case of the rider making corrections, and when there is no rider (or hands-free) it works by a feedback loop involving the geometry of the forks.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/opinion-how-does-a...

Gyroscopic effect is very minor unless you're going very fast, i.e. motorbike speeds and motorbike weight wheels/tyres.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-23 08:17:15+00:00
>As for an entire integrated systems provider, I don't think it'd fit a funding round like this.

I agree. But it is the single most important thing there is, if you want to limit exposure to US tech companies.

The EU has the monetary resources to fund this. But it obviously does not know how, so we have these distributed system, where funding trickles down through multiple layers into many different small projects, which then get some funding for some time.

I think the EU funding these many small projects is nice, but we should not pretend that distributed funding like this makes any meaningful difference, as long as most government and corporate institutions are running Microsoft products everywhere.

A new system vendor needs to be created, it needs to be well funded, it needs to attract really good people and it needs to be deployed, millions of people need to be trained to use it, EU wide. This is a decade long project, but it is the only way to create an EU independent of Microsoft.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-23 08:17:55+00:00
I'd say 60 years. As you implied one can't just dismiss the heartbreaking necessity of the CuRev

Even after considering the alternate pathway called ROC[tm]-- after all you may argue Morris Chang et al gave up lifestyles-- & I hear Rationalistic Daoism is having a resurgence on the mainland (vs Confucianism)--

Because (sadly) it's all still about morale & spiritual
by weird-eye-issue | 2025-04-23 08:18:10+00:00
I think there is much more to it than just your location. Based on the cursor and UI, are you using Linux on Firefox? I'm not saying it shouldn't be supported, but I just think that there's definitely more factors at play here than "3rd world countries"

And depending on your definition of third-world country, I'm in one as well, and I don't have this sort of issue
by martin8412 | 2025-04-23 08:18:41+00:00
Indeed. All these issues with scam calls from spoofed numbers should lead to BCP38, but for phones. Someone calling shouldn’t be allowed to set their own number in the first place, but we could start by limiting country codes. There’s no reason that a phone should be able to spoof the country of origin. If you want a phone number in France, you can go get a number from a French provider.
by jpgvm | 2025-04-23 08:18:57+00:00
Full reproducibility isn't easy, there is a cost to it.

However the payoff is rather significant so if you can temper that cost a bit and make it less inconvenient to achieve then you have a winning solution.

I have cooked this up based on Bazel, rules_oci and rules_distroless: https://github.com/josephglanville/images Specifically this file is a busybox based image with some utilities included from a Debian snapshot: https://github.com/josephglanville/images/blob/master/toolbo...

More difficult than Dockerfile? Sure. However better in pretty much every way otherwise including actual simplicity.
by pickledoyster | 2025-04-23 08:19:17+00:00
> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.

This is just a thought that ignores all the economies of scale etc., but what if monopolistic tech conglomerates were seen as a negative vs interoperable, modular systems? If that were the case, simply repeating US tech's blunders wouldn't be a true alternative, just more of the same with garden walls made of a different material.
by _hao | 2025-04-23 08:19:30+00:00
4 years of experience in ruby on rails. Value for years down the line? Where were you for those years of working on a single project/product that will benefit from that?

Tech stack doesn't matter? IT does matter! The tech stack shapes not only the platform, but the way people think about the problem and the possible solutions given the constraints. Beauty in code does exist, but you don't get anything done when the only thing you do is pontificating on things like that. It's an iterative process.

Honestly dude, check yourself. You're a junior. Any experience will be good for you. Nothing wrong with that, but unless you put in the hours in the grind you'll never be good. To realize that you need true humility, not the stuff you've written about "architecture" and whatever. What have you actually done?

If this is what I get in an interview I will terminate it quickly.
by mmsimanga | 2025-04-23 08:20:53+00:00
Windows still runs on 71% of the desktop and laptops [1]. In my experience a good number of applications start life on simple desktops and then graduate to servers if they are successful. I work in the field of analytics. I have a locked down Windows desktop and I have been able to try out all the other databases such as MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and DuckDB because they have windows installers or portable apps. I haven't been able to try out ClickHouse. This is my experience and YMMV.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
by jonathanstrange | 2025-04-23 08:22:30+00:00
There is still an application barrier. If you want to make a OS that becomes popular, it needs to have better applications than other operating systems. Making the OS compatible with existing ones is bound to fail and violate IP rights. Making it Linux-based doesn't help because existing Linux applications are not competitive enough. They could be improved with consistent OS-level services and APIs but that requires developers to actually use them.

Nobody is interested in an OS without killer applications.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-23 08:22:39+00:00
I think that is a question of architecture.

What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you. Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare. That you can get all in one from Microsoft is one of their biggest strengths in the market and you must compete with that.
by netsharc | 2025-04-23 08:23:09+00:00
I had (have?) the idea that one could have an off-band signal that "Yes it's actually my number trying to call your number". Anyone who wants to steal it, feel free, but I have a feeling Google/Apple could implement it and eat your lunch.

So before I call the number (say the phone number is 9), my phone app will log into a central server and say "My number is 7, and I'm trying to call 9". The phone 9 will check the server and see that "Oh I'm getting a call from 7" and then ask the server, "Is 7 trying to call me?", and will get a confirmation.

There'll be different warnings if 7 currently doesn't have data connection, or got a new phone and hasn't logged on for a while, or 7 doesn't even have an account on the server. If 7 has recently pinged the server and then tries to call 9 without notifying the server, the server can say "I can't see any sign from 7 that he's trying to call you." then 9's phone can warn her. There'll be different warnings for different situations.

And we can use certificates and do tricks like not needing an account for each phone number, but send a message "Yes this number from Microsoft tech support is actually trying to reach you.", signed with Microsoft's certificate. But then the scammers will get a certificate for "Micro5oft", etc.

Looking forward to a reply moaning about centralized authorities monitoring people's calls. Although as I write this I realize telcos can do this already. Perhaps it can be a P2P solution...
by whstl | 2025-04-23 08:23:50+00:00
PostgREST creates the same type of CRUD endpoint that one would create when writing a traditional backend with an (eg) MVC framework, and it does this without requiring a developer and with complete consistency.

If "letting the client formulate queries" you mean "filter posts by DidYaWipe, sorting by date", this is also what traditional CRUD backends do.
by silasjohn | 2025-04-23 08:24:45+00:00
I built The Moving News because I was tired of sitting through endless news broadcasts just to catch the few stories that actually matter to me. With The Moving News, you get a fast, headline-first overview and can instantly watch short video clips from news sources around the world — no more wasting time on full-length shows or being limited to a handful of outlets.

Browse today’s top headlines in seconds

Watch only the clips that interest you

Access a global mix of news sources, not just the usual suspects

Works as a progressive web app on iOS & Android (add to home screen for instant access)

Try it out and let me know what you think!
by tialaramex | 2025-04-23 08:25:32+00:00
Historically steam locomotives have a bad record with actual use of safety systems. IIRC accident investigators found that one locomotive retrofitted with the current minimum allowable safety equipment (TPWS) was routinely being operated in a "cut out" mode intended only for service use but in passenger service. In this mode no actual safety is achieved, the locomotive can (and does) for example pass danger signals without action - which is why accident investigators were looking at it, it had been involved in an accident which should have been impossible because it simply sailed through red lights like a distracted driver playing Candy Crush as their SUV rolls through a busy intersection.

On a typical "modern" (ie late 20th century) train like the mainline EMUs I would normally catch when I was a commuter decades ago, the equivalent "cut out" is a glass sealed MCB in the cab, a driver who wants to get rid of this safety feature has to destroy a tell-tale glass seal and company regulations will make them write up why it was necessary then replace it - and of course the automation records each occurrence because why wouldn't it. The paperwork is a faff, so is getting a new unique numbered seal, so drivers actually choose the non-risky option when it's available.

On the steam loco, that "cut out" is operated by cutting a cable tie. The cable ties aren't unique of course, and so investigators found countless broken ties littering the dirty cab of the steam locomotive, because you just cut the tie, do what you want and before signing off try to remember to fit a new cable tie. No actual safety delivered.
by ssl-3 | 2025-04-23 08:25:39+00:00
Mine works OK as long as presence detection (using people's phones and Google Home) is operating correctly.

Everyone leaves, and the thermostat adjusts.

Someone comes home (or walks in front of it), and it goes back to the normal setpoint.

Sounds easy. Isn't always easy.

The reliability of this seems to be highly dependent on the phone(s) themselves simply succeeding at not killing useful processes.

Overall, I'm not entirely displeased with it. I procured it very inexpensively by buying it from one of my energy provider's online store in conjunction with a substantial rebate from my other energy provider. I'm confident that it paid for itself very quickly, and it's nice to be able to set the thermostat remotely.

My lament is that there seems to be approximately nothing I can do to improve the presence detection function without gymnastics or spending real money. What I want is a local API that I can enable and do stuff with; what I get is "Good luck! Have you tried buying Nest Protect subscription motion detectors? (Oh lol, we stopped selling those.)"

(I'm OK with the privacy and security aspects of what I'm trying to do. I'm not OK with having a connected device that I can't bend to my will. I'm even less OK with more recurring expenses. The next thermostat I buy will have local control over the LAN, but it probably won't pay for itself quite as quickly as this one did.)

[note: I've never played with the auto-schedule "learning" function at all. It always seemed like a complete waste of time, since I for one do not have a regular schedule.]
by LunaSea | 2025-04-23 08:26:17+00:00
> ...and how did that help solve the "european version of carribian crisis"?

Well it didn't, and that's my point. This was the diplomatic route and it completely failed. There was never going to be a diplomatic solution.

> there were attempts to make safeguards - to allow Ukraine into EU, but not NATO. Those failed

Yes, in 2013 Ukraine signed a trade deal with the EU and already at that time Russia pressured Ukraine to renounce this deal. Russia showed their hands at that point and clearly displayed to the world that it had nothing to do with NATO but rather about total control of Ukraine.

> War is the result of those failures

War started 11 years ago, after Euromaidan, at a time where Ukraine wasn't talking about joining NATO yet. NATO became a priority for Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion in 2014.
by PandaRider | 2025-04-23 08:26:36+00:00
Hmmm what is a simple "hello world" project in chip design?

In computer science courses, that's as simple as a println().

In machine learning courses, that's training on mnist dataset to do character recognition.

In electrical engineering, that's buying a raspberry pi to blink led.

In chip design ... Chatgpt says to design a 1-bit full adder using verilog?

...

I understand why the article thinks the market is looking for graduate education. To design a simple chip requires an *initial investment* (as with all hardware startups really). This is different from software where one can simply launch a web app with a container hosted on your preferred cloud provider...

... That said, with the rise of LLMs lowering the barrier of entry of software even lower (e.g. vibe coding), may we see more rise of hardware startups/innovations?