MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tialaramex | 2025-04-13 19:18:31+00:00
Level 3 is not useful. Humans can't do the rapid task switch that's imagined, so in practice you're still supervising the car at all times even though notionally SAE says that's not what you're doing. Or, likely, you aren't supervising (e.g. you're looking at your phone) and so each such transition is incredibly dangerous.
by paganel | 2025-04-13 19:18:35+00:00
> What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west.

That's highly debatable, and it most certainly depended on the writers. I can speak for Romania (from where I'm from), where the works of Faulkner or Hemingway were held in very high esteem starting with the early 1960s, when translation of most of the stuff they were famous for started to be translated. The same goes for most of the Anglo (and Western) literature. Yes, in the second half of the '80s stuff was less rosy in that domain, but that mostly because of the self-imposed austerity we were going through, almost nothing of note was getting published anymore, with rare exceptions (such as a wonderful translation of Proust in 1987-1988, something like that).
by overu589 | 2025-04-13 19:19:48+00:00
Yes. In the 80s I was a little over half your age. A local library gave me a pile of old Byte and Compute magazines. I had been checking out the latest regularly for months. Every one.

What taught me was debugging and good examples of compact form and function. There were no IDEs (for me) and I didn’t have the ability to write out from ROM BASIC for years.

I remember those years!

I went on to intuitively automate batch production systems and develop enterprise this and that, without any formal education (I was usually the most eager and practical at every turn.)
by asadotzler | 2025-04-13 19:19:59+00:00
The structural panels never happened. That idea was shitcanned when they dropped the exoskeleton design for a unibody. Now the extra heavy panels are a stupid vestige of a design that never came to fruition. The truck is a damned unibody auto structure, hardly worthy of being called a truck, much closer to a Hyundai Santa Fe than a Ford F-150 and worse for having to carry all those heavy bolt on panels that do absolutely nothing for the truck functionality of the vehicle.
by pwg | 2025-04-13 19:20:58+00:00
Sometimes. Circa 1982/1983 I picked up a trick for right justifying numbers (space padding them) when printing them with Atari BASIC from some program listing in some magazine article. I forget now which listing or which magazine (although "Compute!" [1] is a likely possibility).

But, mostly, one wanted the "end result" (play some game) not the learning experience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_magazine
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-13 19:21:10+00:00
> That's how it always worked?

Not really. Yes, the state department has always been the say on who gets visas.

But the Supreme Court has also previously ruled that non-citizens enjoy the same constitutional protections as citizens, and that includes free speech. No other previous administrations have been so blatant about revoking visas simply for the "crime" of voicing one's opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The case of the Turkish student who was abducted in Massachusetts is particularly egregious, because as far as anyone can tell all she did was right an op ed, and not a very controversial one at that.

We're in uncharted waters here because previous administrations have generally followed constitutional norms when it came to making visa decisions.
Sort Symphony: A SwiftUI Rebuild of "The Sound of Sorting"
by nhubbard | 2025-04-13 19:21:53+00:00
Hey HN,

This is a full open-source rewrite of The Sound of Sorting — the classic algorithm visualizer — built entirely in Swift with SwiftUI for macOS and iPadOS.

Originally intended as a straight port, it quickly became a much deeper project: a ground-up redesign focused on code quality, educational value, and cross-platform Apple support.

Highlights:

Real-time visual and audible sorting animations

Detailed explanations of each algorithm

Time & space complexity breakdowns

Code implementations in 10 different languages (and growing)

A fully custom syntax highlighter written in Swift

Modular architecture for adding new algorithms or languages easily

This has been my longest-running personal project — I started it in late 2021 as my first Swift app, and it’s now become a platform for exploring everything from AVFoundation to SwiftUI best practices.

Why I’m sharing: I’d love feedback, ideas, and especially contributions. There’s plenty of room for improvements: better performance, more algorithms, expanded language support, accessibility enhancements — you name it. Even reviewing the Swift code and helping improve the idiomatic use of the language would be hugely appreciated.

If you’re into open-source, visual learning tools, Swift, or just love making things better — I’d be thrilled to collaborate.

The code is available here: https://github.com/nhubbard/sort-visualizer-swift

And the app is available for download from the Mac and iPadOS App Store here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sort-symphony/id6477886990

Thanks!
by UncleEntity | 2025-04-13 19:23:04+00:00
> ...it’s extremely unlikely that Europe will be successful at this. The future is US-China dominated.

I think the events of the last few weeks have been a wake-up call to many people around the globe who now see the value of not having their entire economy (or telecommunications &etc) be vulnerable to the whims of one person, be that the richest person in the world or a president nobody in Europe voted for.

I suspect there's a lot of really smart people who were previously happily living/working in the US who are now looking to emigrate to other lands, Europe could easily allow them to go over there and practice their skills on a Europe First initiative. Could also rope in the Chinese to help as they also aren't too happy with the current state of affairs.
by unusualmonkey | 2025-04-13 19:23:08+00:00
> Not spending all the wealth you before you die would be irrational if your children won't inherit it.

Sure, but that's only one small aspect of the economy.

Maybe younger generations would earn more with all the spending and save more knowing there is no inheritance coming.

You only look at one aspect, claim you know what would happen, and the proclaim yourself right.
by asadotzler | 2025-04-13 19:24:18+00:00
Right, because it's not actually a real truck. Real trucks are body on frame, a structure that doesn't distort under load. The CT is a unibody (monocoque) which can't support a real load from above or behind without deforming or snapping into pieces. It's a joke. It's a Hyundai Santa Fe that's been jacked up and weighed down with overthick steel panels that bring no value to the vehicle as a truck. It's a car pretending to be a pickup truck, which is fine for the suburban family that needs to grab a few bags of lawn fertilizer at Home Depot once a year, but it's not a real pickup truck and any comparison to even a 20 year old F-150 would be a crushing defeat in all normal pickup tasks.
by Reasoning | 2025-04-13 19:25:03+00:00
"By the 1940s, the image without the groom had become the standard version, and it created the enduring visual signs of the strongman leader – when Nigel Farage makes a speech atop a tank, or Vladimir Putin displays his bare chest, both are drawing on iconography developed by the Italian fascist."

Ah yes, equestrian portraits, something famously invented by the fascists. Someone should dig up Jacques-Louis so we can tell him he's a fascist now.
by chihuahua | 2025-04-13 19:25:06+00:00
As far as I'm concerned, there are only 3 fonts: serif, sans serif, and wacky. All serif fonts look the same to me, and all sans serif fonts look the same to me. The wacky fonts - no one would use them for anything except for a birthday party flyer.

I am greatly amused whenever someone rants about how Helvetica is beautiful and Arial is terrible. They're the same thing.
by roxolotl | 2025-04-13 19:25:48+00:00
One thing I've found that's really nice with Fennel + Love2D is you can even do hot reloading with nvim+conjure[0](I assume emacs too). I assume there's a way to hot refresh with just straight Lua but it feels very natural to do with a lisp.

0(example config): https://github.com/TheBlob42/love2d-fennel-neovim
by dang | 2025-04-13 19:25:52+00:00
Related:

Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37044792 - Aug 2023 (2 comments)

Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language (1981) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22222117 - Feb 2020 (62 comments)

Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language (1981) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19221143 - Feb 2019 (55 comments)

Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language – Current Status - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8273608 - Sept 2014 (1 comment)

Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language (1981) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8260694 - Sept 2014 (64 comments)
by qeternity | 2025-04-13 19:25:58+00:00
DeepSeek probably would have done this anyway, but they did release a Llama 8B distillation and the Meta terms of use require any derivative works to have Llama in the name. So it also might have just made sense to do for all of them.

Otoh, there aren't many frontier labs that have actually done finetunes.
by artificiology | 2025-04-13 19:27:41+00:00
Elon University 2025 report: Experts predict significant change in the ways humans think, feel, act and relate to one another in the Age of AI.

A sample of compelling ideas from the essays: -The first multi-trillion-dollar corporation will employ no humans except legally-required executives and board, have no offices, own no property and operate entirely through AI and automated systems. – Paul Saffo -“AI advisors and companions will increasingly vie for people‘s time, attention and allegiance. … Affinity blocs will form among AI devotees and among AI conscientious objectors.” – Eric Saund -“Individuals will face a stark choice between remaining ‘classic humans,’ who rely on innate biological faculties, or embracing technological augmentation to enhance or replace certain abilities. This may involve surrendering some human traits to machines – raising ethical and existential questions about what it means to be human.” – David Vivancos -“Proof of humanity” will be required: “We may find it hard to distinguish between artificial personalities and real ones. That may result in a search for reliable proof of humanity so that we and bots can tell the difference.” – Vint Cerf
by mistrial9 | 2025-04-13 19:28:04+00:00
that's a fine example - of what I am not thinking of.. BBS are online, low-res, signal not content.. whereas print fonts are high-resolution, content in themselves, and not replaced by smart phone users in 7pt squint sessions.. lacking delivery context in the discussion invites easy dismissal.. btw- support cash, coins and stamps.. you will miss them when they are gone, and the replacement can get very toxic, very quickly.
by fpoling | 2025-04-13 19:28:17+00:00
And Java has non-trivial advantage over Go of being arch-independent. So one can just run and debug on Mac Arm the same deployment artifact that runs on x86 server.

Plus these days Java GC has addressed most of the problems that plagued Java on backend for years. The memory usage is still higher than with Go simply because more dynamic allocations happens due to the nature of the language, but GC pauses are no longer a significant problem. And if they do, switching to Go would not help. One needs non-GC language then.
by chipotle_coyote | 2025-04-13 19:28:39+00:00
In the fiction publishing world, authors generally do make up their own titles. The editors at the publishing house might exercise veto power and/or make their own suggestions, but I don't think I've ever heard of novelists and short story authors not being allowed to title their own work, with the exception of work-for-hire jobs, e.g., writing a book in a series whose "author" is actually a pseudonym or writing for a book packager.
by rad_gruchalski | 2025-04-13 19:28:40+00:00
Sure. Because windmills and photovoltaics grow naturally from seeds. You need quite a bit of an equipment to put up one windmill. They are usually built in some distance from an existing road. So you need special service roads. Those need to be wide and take heavy load because the equipment like cranes need space and are themselves heavy. Then you need special transport because main components like propellers are oversize load. Then you need to transport them hundreds for kilometres…, and then you need the rest of the infrastructure to distribute generated electricity. Yes, let’s compare apples to apples.
by celsoazevedo | 2025-04-13 19:29:10+00:00
A lot of this is correct if you're renting servers or something like that, but what a lot of people in those subs seem to end up doing is renting their storage via services like Storj or Sia, their GPUs to services like NiceHash, and so on. Users don't visit their network directly, user data is small parts of files (encrypted), there's no need for public IPs, etc. The risks are much smaller.
by beloch | 2025-04-13 19:30:30+00:00
A better comparison would be the AMC Gremlin.

The DeLorean was not a particularly good car, but it featured prominently in a movie series that remains a cultural touchstone.

The AMC Gremlin was just endearingly ugly. Today, it has a bit of a cult following, but that has not made it a particularly valuable car.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-13 19:30:49+00:00
I am quite skeptical of how viable this is.

For these devices to be useful at all so many things would have to go right. The emergency must be reported, the van driver informed, he then has to drive (presumably without breaking any traffic laws, which EMS would do) to the affected person and correctly connect the device. The driver needs to be somewhat trained (although the devices are largely automated), but he also has to be prepared for some serious emotional distress. Having a person die right in front of you while you are fiddling with the medical device that could save his life is a terrible task. This is hard on EMS personell, but they are trained for this, have experience and self selected into that role. A van driver has none of that.

All in all this seems of dubious value. From the article: "Amazon confirmed that more than 100 contract drivers took part in the experiment, with several receiving alerts from citizen responder apps and arriving on site, where rescue services were already treating the victims." Meaning there was exactly zero value in the program.
by brudgers | 2025-04-13 19:30:57+00:00
can anyone tell me if my idea to try to strike out on my own as an Cloud Infrastructure Consultant is a stupid idea?

If posting to HN represents the level of effort you are willing to expend, you have nothing but slimmest luck between you and failure.

Building a business is more work than working for someone else, not less.

Building a business is almost entirely about sales and customer development and doing the thing the business sells is pretty much rounding error...you can hire people to do "the thing," you have to sell "the thing yourself."

culture of intense micromanagement from the senior level

Senior executives are more constrained in regard to micromanagement than clients...with the added problem of clients ability to not pay you.

believing that the people above me are buffoons

If you can't navigate people, you will struggle with sales because sales is a people business.

To put it another way, assume the market for what you want to do is efficient. Good clients have working relationships with consultants and those consultants are working hard to retain their good clients and are better capitalized socially through established relationships and possibly better capitalized financially because they have good clients. So nobody is likely to beat down your door just because you hang a shingle.

meetings (60-70% of the week)

Starting out, sales will be 100% of the week and the mental space of the week will be close to 24/7/365. Good luck.
by KallDrexx | 2025-04-13 19:33:19+00:00
Author here.

One thing it potentially buys you (besides things mentioned in other posts) is faster iteration cycles.

The C stubbed methods can potentially be populated with logic that sets up a fake SNES logic in it, and makes calls to a custom rendering and input handling (monogame calls for example).

This means you can test a bunch of your logic in a monogame app for easier logic debugging, then use the transpiler to test it on a real system.
Show HN: I made a free tool that analyzes SEC filings and posts detailed reports
by GodelNumbering | 2025-04-13 19:33:24+00:00
(* within a few minutes of SEC filing)

Currently does it for 1000+ US companies and specifically earnings related filings. By US companies, I mean the ones that are obliged to file SEC filings.

This was the result of almost a year long effort and hundreds of prototypes :)

It currently auto-publishes for 1000 ish US companies by market cap, relies on 8-K filing as a trigger.

e.g. https://www.signalbloom.ai/news/NVDA will take you to NVDA earnings

Would be grateful to get some feedback. Especially if you follow a company, check its reports out. Thank you!

Some examples: https://www.signalbloom.ai/news/AAPL/apple-q1-eps-beats-desp...

https://www.signalbloom.ai/news/NVDA/nvidia-revenue-soars-ma...

https://www.signalbloom.ai/news/JPM/jpm-beats-estimates-on-c... (JPM earnings from Friday)

Hallucination note: https://www.signalbloom.ai/hallucination-benchmark
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-04-13 19:34:06+00:00
Installing to /usr/local is not only simple and convenient—it's also what most build scripts do by default unless you specify otherwise.

For a lot of tools, I find that writing a port can be almost as little work and installing it manually. With the added bonus that the package manager will then track its dependencies and that I can share the port with other users of the distro.

Alpine makes this particularly easy thanks to the simplicity behind its APKBUILD files. BSDs usually have relatively simple recipe format too (although not as simple as APKBUILD or PKGBUILD tbh).
by grzm | 2025-04-13 19:35:59+00:00
I stand corrected:

% git remote -v origin https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/fennel (fetch) origin https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/fennel (push) % git log --reverse commit 9afe4338ed1816a759cb4b120f89e8f67159ce16 Author: Calvin Rose <calsrose@gmail.com> Date: Sun Aug 7 18:50:34 2016 First commit. commit b62a24853e24662f76932a2a81bb77cc25704491 Author: Calvin Rose <calsrose@gmail.com> Date: Sun Aug 7 19:05:40 2016 Add some examples. commit 5e3e0fe11e4f56007b3523e54d81d55280ef2204 Author: Calvin Rose <calsrose@gmail.com> Date: Tue Aug 9 08:27:43 2016 Update README.md
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-04-13 19:36:23+00:00
Most colors are mixtures of wavelengths of light. Our eyes have sensors that are sensitive to specific ranges of wavelengths, with relatively broad overlapping response curves. Orange can refer to a spectral color, but (as you say) the arbitrary nature of the names means it also refers to several mixtures of spectral colors of varying wavelength and intensity. "Brown" doesn't refer to any spectral color, it's always a mixture which could be referred to as a "dark orange".
by dmix | 2025-04-13 19:36:39+00:00
I tried to buy Lighthouse and it was a headspinning experience, took me a while to figure out it was a very overpriced subscription version with a confusing sign up experience I didn't trust. I felt like I was going to be scammed if I clicked the wrong button. So I ended up using Luminar Neo, even though I don't like it.

Reminds me of using one of those awful Microsoft maze websites like Azure.
by delichon | 2025-04-13 19:36:53+00:00
> Yeah, but there are actually autonomous cabs rolling out to my metro

The economic difference is that a level 2 cab requires much higher remote labor costs than a level 3 cab to achieve the same productivity, almost by definition of "level 3". As long as a cab company has that advantage they can undercut the competition by price and still make a profit. That advantage is definitely not yet a given. It could even be achieved by open source models and go global for everyone at once. In that scenario Tesla still starts with a large advantage in cost per cab over everyone but BYD.
by chipotle_coyote | 2025-04-13 19:37:14+00:00
I think you might be better off getting rid of the "AI slop" entirely. Without getting into the whole ethical debate (it's worth having, but not here), putting it front and center on the website for a new retrocomputing magazine is kind of like putting an article about new features in Microsoft Word front and center on a website for mechanical typewriter enthusiasts.
by monomers | 2025-04-13 19:37:26+00:00
I like Janet a lot, and have been using it for small personal projects for about a year.

But it does come with some design decisions that I'm a bit ambivalent about and for which I haven't found a good explanation:

- No persistent data structures. I guess this has something to do with limitations of the GC?

- unhygienic macros combined with lack of namespaces. XOR those two choices would be fine, but the combination is janky

- Somewhat peculiar choices in syntax. It's neither Scheme, nor is it Clojure. # starts comments, ; is splice, @ marks literals as mutable...
by fragmede | 2025-04-13 19:37:42+00:00
Yes and no. I had my mom type one in for me. Obviously didn't learn much from that other than I love you mom! But typing in a Basic program exposed you to the syntax involved, which, you're typing the thing in. It was a slow process. So while you were typing it in, your mind would absorb things from it, and how you could modify. So yes I'd say it was educational.

On the other hand, vibecoding today, I can get shockingly far before needing to dig into the code itself. I'm working on a swift app but haven't needed to really get into learning Swift the way I did C++ or Java, back before Google.
by hikarudo | 2025-04-13 19:37:56+00:00
I used a similar setup for a while: Obsidian for taking notes in markdown, and vscode for coding.

Eventually I moved to using vscode for both. My gigantic notes.md file is always open in tab 1, so I can go to it immediately with Ctrl + 1.

Finding notes in a single file is easier for me than finding them in a bazillion tiny files. And there's less friction whenever I need to make a note (no need to create and name a new file).
by asadotzler | 2025-04-13 19:39:15+00:00
I hear ya, but I think 50 years is wildly generous. I give it 20 years before they're entirely gone except for a few novelty chasers. It's the Yugo of the 21st century, except at luxury prices, actually, then maybe like combining a Yugo with the Cadillac Cimarron or the Pontiac Aztec. Garbage in every way that won't survive a human generation.
by mrighele | 2025-04-13 19:40:06+00:00
That has nothing to do with the interface being a terminal, but with the primary input method being a keyboard instead of a pointing device.

You could get the same result with a graphical interface, as long as you provide proper keyboard based navigation. The web browser provide all the capabilities that you need for that.

The nice part of a text based ui is that you have a simpler device to use for rendering, so things like layout is easier, as long as you remain in the domain of what the device allows for.