MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pixelesque | 2025-04-19 20:04:23+00:00
As someone who co-incidentally started dabbling in Astrophotography as a hobby in early 2019 before Starlink launched, back then you literally could capture a single 20-second exposure (on a very wide lens, so no obvious star trail/blur at that focal length due to the Earth's rotation), and get images with no satellites.

Now (and even in 2021 it was getting hard to do that) it's impossible to do that, even with 10 second exposures.

What's needed now is multiple exposures, and merging/integrating them in something like Siril (https://siril.org/) to remove the obvious satellite trails.

However, arguably, integrating multiple exposures, while annoying and time-consuming workflow-wise (i.e. can't just look at images directly from camera, and currently need to convert to TIFF first) is often the better way to get slightly-less-noisy images anyway, and integrate effectively longer exposures without star-trails, so it's a tricky one.
by westurner | 2025-04-19 20:05:06+00:00
Multiplication algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplication_algorithm

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40519828 re: LLMs and matrix multiplication with tensors:

> "You Need to Pay Better Attention" (2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01643 :

>> Our first contribution is Optimised Attention, which performs similarly to standard attention, but has 3/4 as many parameters and one matrix multiplication fewer per head. Next, we introduce Efficient Attention, which performs on par with standard attention with only 1/2 as many parameters as many parameters and two matrix multiplications fewer per head and is up to twice as fast as standard attention. Lastly, we introduce Super Attention, which surpasses standard attention by a significant margin in both vision and natural language processing tasks while having fewer parameters and matrix multiplications.

From "Transformer is a holographic associative memory" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43029899 .. https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#story-43028710 :

>>> Convolution is in fact multiplication in Fourier space (this is the convolution theorem [1]) which says that Fourier transforms convert convolutions to products.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41322088 :

> "A carbon-nanotube-based tensor processing unit" (2024)
by cyberax | 2025-04-19 20:05:34+00:00
> I'm not so convinced that I'd prefer to live isolated and "just" get a robotaxi for every excursion anyone wants to do. I'd rather my kids walked about a quarter mile to school with several neighbors. Exercise and being outside are good!

I believe that robotaxis will enable totally new behaviors. For example, if you don't live immediately near a park, you won't often go there. It's just too tiresome to use public transit to visit a park just for a short walk/run/play. And personal cars are not available for children.

With robocars, you'll be able to text your friend: "hi, meet you at the park corner in 10", jump into a car, and arrive there. This will have zero friction, so it's far more likely to become a habitual behavior.

> Even assuming we turned smarter and built clean nuclear plants everywhere, just all the paving of roads, tires etc. takes a lot of resources.

Ha. One line of Manhattan subway now costs as much as 1500 miles of modern 6-lane freeway. Urban construction is EXPENSIVE.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-19 20:06:19+00:00
>With the free trade agreement with the EU

There is no such agreement.

>more producers moving to the US

How many will follow through with these announcements? During Trump's first term, announcing huge projects in the US and then not following through was a common tactic for companies dealing with Trump. Foxconn, for example, announced a new $10 billion factory in Wisconsin. They made some initial investments and stopped when people stopped paying attention. Instead of the promised 13.000, they now employ about 1.000 people there.

And what about all the companies that will have gone out of business by then? This mainly affects small companies, which are exactly the companies you need for a healthy economy. In some cases, they have shipments already paid for that they can't accept because they don't have the liquid assets to pay the unexpected tariffs, so these companies are now at risk of going out of business completely unnecessarily.

It never makes sense to use tariffs for economic reasons. It just does not work. Tariffs can make sense for strategic reasons if you're willing to take an economic hit to lower dependence on other countries for critical industries or technologies. However, the idea that taxes are ever "a good disruption" for the economy does not bear out.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-04-19 20:06:40+00:00
> So I have been using Cursor a lot more in a vibe code way lately and I have been coming across what a lot of people report: sometimes the model will rewrite perfectly working code that I didn't ask it to touch and break it.

I don't find this particularly problematic because I can quickly see the unnecessary changes in git and revert them.

Like, I guess it would be nice if I didn't have to do that, but compared to the value I'm getting it's not a big deal.
by mojifwisi | 2025-04-19 20:07:01+00:00
It's syntactically more straightforward to resolve the issue of clashing definitions through namespacing with functions compared to operators.

The following is pretty standard:

foo::plus(a, b) // or foo.plus(a, b) bar::plus(a, b) // or bar.plus(a, b)

Whereas this is more awkward:

a foo::+ b // or a foo.+ b a bar::+ b // or a bar.+ b
by elpocko | 2025-04-19 20:07:30+00:00
This HN post is seven days old but displayed and ranked as if it was posted 9 hours ago, with all timestamps falsified. The déjà vu effect is disconcerting and an absolute mind fuck. Please stop doing this, ffs. The person who thought this would be a good idea is a madman.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Silicon%20Valley%20crosswalk%2...
by chewz | 2025-04-19 20:07:54+00:00
Try SDGLBL/mcp-claude-code or ezyang/codemcp. They are both very good (better then Claude Code in my opinion).

Using aider is another option. Or Assistant in Zed. - diferent approaches but both very effective.

https://github.com/SDGLBL/mcp-claude-code

https://github.com/ezyang/codemcp
by pogue | 2025-04-19 20:08:09+00:00
It's really very outsated in terms of modern browser features and options. It's really an incredibly minimalist version of Firefox that looks like it could have come out of the Netscape era. My main gripe is lack of DoH support.

Having said that, I keep it installed when I need a webpage to work that will load every It's meant to and will filter out nothing. It works, but you'll quickly be missing a lot of the more modern features & conviences quickly.

They have also had an ongoing problem with Cloudflare hosted pages outright blocking PM. I haven't kept up with how that's going.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-19 20:08:13+00:00
GLP-1s and their successors for type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and addiction (to counter Western disease from diet) and vaccines and immunotherapy for cancers (many cancers appear to be caused by viruses [1]). How you incentivize the scaled production of “healthy” foods in this macro seems intractable unfortunately, but patching reward centers around food macro and quantity consumption and cancer prevention via vaccines takes us a long way [2] [3].

Eli Lilly is seeking FDA approval for orforglipron, a once daily pill that is as effective, safe and tolerable to take as injectable semaglutide [4]. "Just think about the idea of having a pill that can be distributed anywhere in the world, that doesn't need to be refrigerated," Aronne told CBS News. "It's as effective as one of the injectable drugs we have now: Semaglutide. That is a big deal."

[1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/infections/inf...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-disease/data-research/facts-stat...

[3] https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...

[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eli-lilly-glp-1-pill-trial-fda-...
by woodruffw | 2025-04-19 20:09:30+00:00
Sure, but that’s the general maintenance risk. I don’t think native code changes that dynamic, particularly in ecosystems where it’s the norm. And doubly so for cryptographic code, where native is the norm for performance and certification reasons.

It’s my impression as a maintainer of many projects that native compilation hasn’t been a driving issue in Python packaging for a while now. Most users download wheels and sidestep the entire problem. Whether or not they should trust random binaries from the internet is of course a bigger question.
by dhosek | 2025-04-19 20:10:18+00:00
There was an article I read by Keith Gessen about contacting his 3rd grade teacher as a parent during Covid and the thing that stuck out with me was the teacher talking about how some kids entered kindergarten able to read and some didn’t learn until second grade and in third grade, you’d be hard-pressed to know which ones were which.

This helped calm me as a parent of kids who entered first grade in the fall of 2020 not able to read (I was one of those early readers). My daughter picked up reading during the course of first grade but her twin brother not so much. Then, during the first month of second grade, he went from refusing to read “the” in a chapter title when I would read to them at bedtime to being a self-sufficient solo reader pretty much overnight.

Both of my kids are pretty dedicated readers now. When we go on vacation, if they spot a library, they want to visit it. I’m always happy to oblige.
by lwakeling | 2025-04-19 20:10:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I started a small jewelry studio last year. I loved the work, broke even, and had some happy customers, but I kept thinking about scale. I wanted to build something that could grow beyond me (and grow quicker).

So I built a discovery app: describe what you're looking for ("jewelry that feels like sea glass", "a sci-fi-looking chair") and get results from niche/indie makers. I launched a barebones version, shared it, got some early feedback…

Then I watched the "Tarpit Ideas" video, and shut it down. (https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Ij-tarpit-ideas-what-are...)

The problem was clarity of purpose. It felt clever but not compelling ...

Now I’m reevaluating. I still love the intersection of search, niche products, and design. But I want to build something that matters, and has the potential to scale.

If you’ve been through a similar pivot or killed your own MVPs, I’d love to hear how you found your next direction. What helped you figure out what to build next?
by curtisblaine | 2025-04-19 20:11:00+00:00
Unfortunately that's not my experience. The places I've been just point you to the menu, which normally is quite complex and with many choices.

> If you really want a basic coffee with the cheapest beans you can find

Doesn't have to be cheap, it has to be plain. Just the coffee that, in average, the average disinterested client would like. We had a similar concept - now almost disappeared - with wine. The wine of the house was an average non-fancy wine that you could drink with your dinner without spending time deciphering the wine list.

> If you really want a basic coffee with the cheapest beans you can find, why would you go to a fancy shop?

Because cities are migrating en masse to fancy shops. Selling lifestyle is apparently more profitable & glamorous, so everyone wants to be the fancy shop rather than the humble bar.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-04-19 20:11:44+00:00
> They sold just under 2 million vehicles --- about 12% of the global total of 14 million.

https://wardsintelligence.informa.com/wi967636/global-vehicl...

"Global Vehicle Sales Top 92 Million Units in 2023"

So it seems like Telsa in their best year had about 2% of global vehicle sales.

BTW I'm not arguing that the stock price is justified. I just think it's based primarily on exuberance over their breakout success in selling actually usable EVs and actually scaling it and actually achieving profitability, and not based primarily on exuberance over their more questionable long term goals.

A well executing breakout company in the physical goods space is a breath of fresh air, and I think that is mostly what the market is reacting to and speculating on. The other explanation requires a lot of investors to be very stupid, which I don't like accepting lightly when there are alternate explanations.

I personally don't believe Elon is lying about any of this stuff. He is probably wrong, but he's not lying. He has had the ego-expanding experience of proving the haters wrong in a big way multiple times, and it has made him hubristic. This would probably happen to a lot of us in his shoes.
by i80and | 2025-04-19 20:12:26+00:00
My mom when I was growing up found any expression of same sex relationships to be outright pornographic.

I find it is best to be deeply deeply skeptical of anybody defending book censorship because frankly the most common pro-censorship movements in the present US use words like "sexualization" to mean things like "gay couples and trans people exist".

Normal people wouldn't agree with that definition, but they'll nod along with "kids shouldn't have access to sexual material", so that's the code word that pro-censorship camps used.
by toast0 | 2025-04-19 20:13:01+00:00
It's like every other debugging issue. First you need to figure out what it's doing and what it's supposed to be doing.

Then you work forward and backward until you find a spot where you can see a transition where the inputs are as expected and the outputs are not.

The more you know about the ciruit the easier it is. Arcade circuits tend to have a lot of documentation from the maker as they were expected to be serviced. But machines with small production runs are harder; the manuals may be lost or less detailed. Makers also tend to leave out details of protection mechanisms, some of these have been reverse engineered and documented by the community, but more work happens on higher production systems. In this case, they had three player boards that should work the same, but only one worked, and they were able to narrow it to communication (by using an undocumented test switch). They got lucky finding a missing ground, and then looked at communication with a sillyscope and replaced a standard communication chip.
by westurner | 2025-04-19 20:13:02+00:00
> Their process, which uses saltwater and iron oxide instead of carbon-heavy blast furnaces, has been optimized to work with naturally sourced materials. By identifying low-cost, porous iron oxides that dramatically boost efficiency, the team is laying the groundwork for large-scale, eco-friendly steel production. And with help from engineers and manufacturers, they’re pushing this green tech closer to the real world.

ScholarlyArticle: "Pathways to Electrochemical Ironmaking at Scale Via the Direct Reduction of Fe2O3" (2025) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.5c00166 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.5c00166
by amanaplanacanal | 2025-04-19 20:13:12+00:00
Wow. This is like complaining about going into my local pub for a beer and discovering they have a dozen taps. Well sure, different people like different things, and sometimes I might want a creamy stout, and sometimes a West Coast IPA, and sometimes a light lager on a hot summer day.

I guess life was better for those behind the iron curtain that only had one brand?
by Retric | 2025-04-19 20:13:53+00:00
One tonne of fuel is more like 5.5 MWh. You did a mathematical calculation while ignoring engine efficiency.

The reality of large internal combustion engines is you still pay for every single kWh. These ships already have extremely complex electrical systems with multiple redundancies and load balancing etc.

The dealbreaker is R&D as unlike a house or sailboat you can’t just yolo where panels are placed and wires run etc, this is all bespoke engineering with few of any give design being manufactured and little available space.
by somat | 2025-04-19 20:15:41+00:00
the tape may last 30 years. but do you really expect the tape drive to last that long, or, to even be able to get a tape drive that works in the future.

That was my big problem with the economics of tape. the drives are expensive and don't really last that long. At some scale factor tape makes sense, but it is larger than you would naively think.

As there is no good solution for personal scale long term archive type storage, I have sort of given up on it. Actual long term archives take the form of human readable printed documents. However this is very low density. so only the most important stuff. long term bulk storage is live, hard drives based arrays and backups, requiring an active maintainer it will die when I do, but no great loss, it is mostly junk anyhow.
by accrual | 2025-04-19 20:16:34+00:00
> I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

Agree! My first thought while reading the article was that it would be very easy to do this on OpenBSD as well, either with USB floppies or normal 34-pin drives as well.

OpenBSD's softraid stack doesn't care much about what the underlying hardware is as long as it looks like a disk and talks like a disk.
by dhosek | 2025-04-19 20:16:54+00:00
Where I live now, a large fraction of the suburban libraries are part of a consortium (SWAN—covering mostly south and western suburbs of Chicago). They have a shared catalog and any book/CD/DVD/etc.¹ can be requested right out of the catalog for pickup at my local library.

In California, I think you can get a library card at any public library system as long as you’re a California resident. At one point I had cards for L.A. County, Orange County, Beverly Hills, L.A. City and Santa Ana.

Many public libraries will do ILL for books outside their system for free, although that’s generally funded with money from the federal government which Musk and his band of hackers have decided it’s vital to eliminate.

⸻

1. Well, mostly. A few libraries won’t send out CDs or DVDs but you can still check them out with your card if you go to that branch and then return it at your home library.
by pessimizer | 2025-04-19 20:17:08+00:00
In my experience, there's only a small subset of people who will get their accent from the mass media rather than their parents and the people around them. That accent will also almost always be an vapid pseudo-American one, mysteriously bicoastal, combining LA valley girl, 90s NY highly-commercialized hip-hop regionalisms, and barely enough of their local accent to keep from getting punched. Also, since 2008, the word "folks."

This is mostly I think wealthy and upper-middle class people, but there are also definitely a lot of strivers who just think they're better than everyone local, and don't want to sound like they come from where they come from, but like American surfer-artist-activists.

Same thing happens in the US, through. A lot of Americans relating to the television more than their neighbors. Even worse, since the accents in US media have become terrible and authentic local accents rarely heard, young US media addicts are often imitating British and Australian people who are imitating US accents.

I honestly rarely hear any authentic southern US accents in TV and movies, only imitation ones. Imitation of the representations created by a highly centralized media might ultimately and gradually turn all of us into caricatures, even of ourselves.
by deathlight | 2025-04-19 20:17:28+00:00
My understanding is that Mao was a rural peasant from the distant Countryside who was looked down on and marked by his more (self declared) socialist Coastal betters along China's Coast who were contesting with the kmt and later Japanese invasion. The idea that Mao invented the communist or socialist revolution in China is laughable because that revolution had been ongoing prior to Mao's entrance into it. My understanding is that Mao was the guy that stood up and said look, the peasants in the Hinterlands are an Unstoppable Army that is going to come flooding from distant and Central China on to the coast and push all opposition aside and so Mao was basically saying that that the Communists should be attempting to position themselves as favorably as possible in relation to the rising peasant tide of discontent in China. If anything the concern is that if you say anything that the modern Chinese Communist party does not like or agree with they will disappear you to all the corners of the Earth. It is probably only in Taiwan that you could speak openly and honestly about the nature of modern Chinese history from let's say 1900 to the current day. They probably have a better accounting of what was actually going on, and that will soon be deleted by the now dominant Communist Party of China. You can see how they have treated their assimilation of Hong Kong, and Macau before them to imagine what awaits Taiwan.
by GregDavidson | 2025-04-19 20:20:17+00:00
When the UC sold the UCSD P-System the profiler and native code compiler were abandoned. With P-Code optimized for size and hot spots native compiled, small P-System programs ran comparably to programs fully compiled to native code and large programs ran thousands of times faster by reducing (usually eliminating) swapping and paging on those early memory-starved systems. I too migrated to Sun-2s but I purchased them myself. I'd learned the hard way that software developers need to own the means of their production!
by code_Whisperer | 2025-04-19 20:21:10+00:00
Lots of positive points here, especially on things that are commonly overlooked (security headers, SSL configuration, compression, etc.), so congrats!

Some quick comments:

1) Under the tools listing on the home page, I'd make the entire block of each tool (name, icon, description) the clickable link, not just the words "Use Tool"

2) When in dark mode (which was auto-sensed, good job), every time I choose a new page it starts in light mode (flash-bang!) and then fades into dark mode.
by dventimi | 2025-04-19 20:21:14+00:00
People and scientific instruments are made of "normal" (non-Dark) matter, which makes it easy to detect other "normal" matter (electrons, protons, quarks, photons, neutrinos, what-have-you). It's hard for us and our instruments to detect or even be aware of Dark matter at laboratory scales, which operate over the electromagnetic and nuclear forces which Dark Matter feels little or not at all.

At astronomical scales, however, things are different. At those scales, gravity wins out, and is one of the dominant things we observe in astronomy. Dark Matter may not feel the electromagnetic and nuclear forces the way normal matter does, but it feels gravity the same as every other particle does. Nobody gets a pass from gravity, not even Dark Matter.

Consequently, it's relatively easy to observe the gravitational effects of Dark Matter at the astronomical scales of the rotation of galaxies and the dynamics of galaxy clusters, even while it's difficult or impossible to observe the non-gravitational effects of Dark Matter at laboratory scales.