MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toss1 | 2025-04-28 13:31:55+00:00
>>monitoring everyone all the time and eliminating the ability to move from Point A to Point B privately

That is a 100% strawman argument. NO ONE is proposing such measures

No proposal, even the blanket EU requirements eliminate privacy in travel. The devices all work entirely locally with GPS to monitor speed vs local limits, and upon exceeding local limits, output an audio/tactile alert and/or limit accelerator input. I have never seen any mention of reporting speeds or positions, and would be very alarmed if I had; if you've seen any, please provide citations.

Again, no one is proposing monitoring everyone all the time. The proposal is only for temporary monitors/limiters to be placed on cars of people convicted o related offenses after due judicial process, and only for the time of their sentence. Again, if you have citations on more extensive restrictions, please post them.
by Loughla | 2025-04-28 13:31:55+00:00
The quote that really has stuck with me was also from Pratchett:

"What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?"

This caught me in two ways:

1. Death is the release. Whatever suffering you're undergoing, it won't follow you into whatever comes next, even if that is absolute oblivion. The relief would be welcome, I assume. So that's at least one positive way to look at it.

But moreso:

2. Everyone's death is individual and special. The process of getting to it is different for everyone, and the journey is just as much a part of the process as the destination. It isn't something to fear, because you cannot stop it, but it is something to consider as you move through your life.

Cancer is the fucking devil. I, myself, have been lucky enough to avoid it for now, but we spent the last year with my father and lymphoma. It's a fucking nightmare of cancer treatment and chasing side effects from the cancer treatments until the end. He chose to die with hospice on the family farm; it wasn't the most dignified death due to the symptoms of his cancer, but it was peaceful and with family/friends. So that's something.

His treatment didn't really bother me, and his process didn't really depress me; it was the people like the older lady in your write-up that really stuck with me. In his first month on the cancer floor, his across the hall neighbor was just like that. Her only lucid moments were either screaming in pain, or nonsense phrases on repeat from what I assume was her childhood.

Terrifying.

I hope that your life goes well all the way to the end. I genuinely do not know what to say other than that.
Show HN: Albums Backup – USB tool to back up iPhone photos
by piaoying | 2025-04-28 13:32:44+00:00
Hey HN,

I built a tiny offline tool to help back up iPhone/iPad photos and videos to PC or Mac via USB. No iCloud, no accounts, no cloud storage — just straight device-to-device transfer.

Originally made it for someone close to me who had tens of thousands of photos but didn't want to deal with subscriptions or cloud storage.

Thought it might be useful for others too, so putting it out there.

It keeps Live Photos, 4K videos, RAW files, and transfers quickly without compression. Works on both Windows and macOS.

Site (simple landing page): https://albumsbackup.framer.website/

Would love any feedback, ideas, or just to know if anyone else needed something like this.
by johnwheeler | 2025-04-28 13:32:44+00:00
Hey thank you so much for this feedback. What are your use cases for a tool like this?

Right now, there is a button with scissors on it that doesn't work. I apologize for not removing that, but I didn't think this post would even make the front page. (as an aside - I've tried several times posting this without success, but a change to the landing page much have done it)

I am definitely going to add the ability to add cards and title screens - and nice ones! I'd love for you to be a part of that conversation.

If you're willing and you have time, I'd love to connect for ongoing feedback. Like some of the other comments have surmised, I will eventually want to charge for it, and I could give you free service (I don't want to say lifetime, because I don't know what that implies, but it would effectively be lifetime or something very generous). I don't want to pretend that means to much right now - as you've stated, it needs a lot of work. But I am determined! And the features you mention are on my roadmap.

This offer extends to anyone willing to provide useful feedback over time, which would mean responding to one or two e-mails a month probably. I don't know what it looks like. I just want help. Thanks!
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-28 13:33:13+00:00
Thanks — it’s definitely been incredibly satisfying to see it run on real hardware!

Right now, PyXL is tied fairly closely to a specific CPython version's bytecode format (I'm targeting CPython 3.11 at the moment).

That said, the toolchain handles translation from Python source → CPython bytecode → PyXL Assembly → hardware binary, so in principle adapting to a new Python version would mainly involve adjusting the frontend — not reworking the hardware itself.

Longer term, the goal is to stabilize a consistent subset of Python behavior, so version drift becomes less painful.
Show HN: Iammusicfont.com – Generate Playboi Carti "MUSIC" album style text
by zhangchengzc | 2025-04-28 13:33:30+00:00
I built this tool to let anyone create text in the distinctive layered typography style of Playboi Carti's 2025 "MUSIC" album cover. It combines a bold background font with a stretched foreground layer to create that unique aesthetic. Just type your text, customize if needed, and download as PNG. Works on mobile too. No account required, completely free to use.
by bluGill | 2025-04-28 13:33:51+00:00
Unfortunately academic resource doesn't seem to be focused on the hard problems of today. A fast algorithm is nice, but we need to be able to maintain code long term, understand code, and fix bugs. I have 15 million lines of code I'm supposed to maintain and I know many others reading this work on larger projects. There is no way one human can write that much software. There is no way we can afford to throw it away even if there is a better way (well we could, but based on the last time we did that the cost would be over 1 billion dollars and 8 years - not a useful investment since there is no reason to think anything will make those prices go down). We need to keep it working.

This is a shock to many of our leaders - who were writing 8 bit assembly to do similar things. They commonly did throw away all the work of the last version since it only took them a few months to rewrite it for the exact features they needed. (having experience because they wrote it just a year ago means the rewrite as much faster, and the limitations of 8 bit means it was worth rewriting since they had to remove one feature to add a new one).
by internetter | 2025-04-28 13:34:12+00:00
I think you skimmed too fast. Widgets, allegedly, are eagerly evaluated when an app is opened, and the system keeps trying failed attempts:

> After restarting, as soon as SpringBoard was initialized, the extension would be woken up by the system, since it had failed to produce any widget entries before, which would then start the process all over again.
by ryao | 2025-04-28 13:34:44+00:00
Do you apply the same logic to backdoors in encryption? I am sure you could say no one is proposing implementing and using back doors on the general public as a whole, as they would only be for criminal elements. The reason that people oppose this is because the shift from only affecting criminal elements to affecting everyone is so easy to do that nothing would stop it once the infrastructure is in place.
by apothegm | 2025-04-28 13:35:00+00:00
I keep separate lists of actionable and not-yet-actionable to-dos. I check the latter daily to update the former.

If I’m waiting for input from someone, I immediately create a future to-do that’s of the form of either “do stuff with input received from X” or “follow up with X if I haven’t received their input on Y”.

Their actual input can be either attached to the to-do on receipt, searched up in email/slack/meeting notes/etc as needed, or entered in a notetaking app on receipt — depending on what my current getting stuff done stack looks like.
by SnazzyUncle | 2025-04-28 13:35:03+00:00
No it isn't the other way around. Some young men (in the UK) in high crime areas will carry them illegally because it makes them feel safer. UK has strict gun and knife laws.

https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/london-knife-crim...

https://www.barnardos.org.uk/blog/what-young-people-say-abou...

https://theconversation.com/why-so-many-young-british-men-ar...
by nchmy | 2025-04-28 13:35:08+00:00
I've spent the past 8 years focused on this theme, more or less, because my conclusion after finding things like internet on a box (and various similar projects) was that they offer too much information (and also present it in a useless manner).

I've lived in many deeply impoverished communities, and they don't need a full version of Wikipedia, or a medical encyclopedia. They need to know how to easily and cheaply implement basic sanitation and hygiene, basic first aid and nutrition, efficient sustainable cooking and agricultural practices etc... Plenty of effort was spent on that stuff in the Appropriate Technology movement, but all I ever see from it all is wiki articles or 70 page pdfs (which many can't even read, even even if they were in their native language). No one is learning anything from those resources.

I brought this up with some orgs similar to IIAB, and they were just bewildered. So, I made it my life's work to address this in a genuinely useful, accessible, practical way. Hopefully I'll be able to share something in the next year or two...

This, of course, is not to say that they don't have the current or future potential to learn these things, let alone that such info should be withheld. But it's just a matter of practicality of time, resources, efficacy etc. If they can get out of extreme poverty - which many basic things can very much help with - maybe they'll have more time, health and money to pursue academic education, etc

The proof of this, of course, is that we have access to all of humanity's knowledge, and have self-evidently done very little with it.
by johnwheeler | 2025-04-28 13:35:09+00:00
Thank you! If you're willing to provide feedback over time, I'll implement features you're looking for if you have legit use cases for this tool and are willing to use it. I'll give you free service in exchange once I begin charging.

The aspect ratio issue you mention has not been well tested, and your feedback is already very valuable. I will fix this.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-28 13:35:12+00:00
> if we build a society where inequality ceases to be an issue

Looking back through history, there's always jerks who ruin this, being equal isn't enough: either they want to have more money than, and power over, everyone else; or they explicitly want others to suffer, usually people who look different.

Dealing with those personalities has cost us trillions of dollars throughout human history, but it keeps happening, because you can't evolve better brains in the few thousand years humans have been civilized.
by blenderob | 2025-04-28 13:35:32+00:00
Of course you can. (I mean many of us can.) I've been doing it for years. I'm surprised that because you find it hard to "turn off" that part of your brain, it must be so for everyone else. It isn't. There are many of us who code for fun and do it with a totally different mindset with no "business thoughts" in mind.
by falcor84 | 2025-04-28 13:35:38+00:00
> they always veer in a wrong direction after a few steps

Arguably that's the case for humans too in the general case, as per the aphorism "Beware of a guy in a room" [0]. But as for AIs, the thing is that they're exponentially improving at this, such that according to METR, "The length of tasks that AI can do is doubling every 7 months"[1].

[0] https://medium.com/machine-words/a-guy-in-a-room-bbbe058645e...

[1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
by rich_sasha | 2025-04-28 13:36:37+00:00
Grids are tricky, because the electric socket is kind of a leaky abstraction for heavy plant machinery in turbines of thermal plants, load balancing, synchronisation, and a gazillion other things I really don't understand.

Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient? Solid state things tend to be less fiddly, hence my question.

I remember reading at one point in the past that renewables were actually worse for the grid due to less predictable power generation or something, but that was a long time ago, certainly pre-battery storage.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-28 13:37:12+00:00
I have never understood the chronic war on travel velocity. Its like the war on drugs, but far more pointless.

Speed is just one of many factors, and perhaps the least significant, in the frequency and probability of traffic accidents. Speed is absolutely a factor in the severity of an accident, but not the probability of one after accounting for all other variables. For example, if you leave sufficient distance between your vehicle and the vehicle in front of you then speed is almost completely eliminated as a factor of accidents on most freeways.

I really think municipalities go to war on speed just as a means to retrieve extra tax revenue.
by leomca | 2025-04-28 13:38:00+00:00
I think it's ENTSO-E, here's their most recent report into an incident on 21 June 2024: https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/system-operations-reports...

For that incident, an expert panel was set up in July, the interim report was published in November, and the final report in Feburary 2025: so it'll take a few months.
by input_sh | 2025-04-28 13:39:03+00:00
A similar thing happened last June, with Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro, and most of the Croatian coastline losing power simultaneously.

Definitely felt surreal to first lose power to the degree that even traffic lights were no longer working, and then to hear it's also happening across the region just before mobile networks also went offline.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/power-blackout-hits-mon...

~90 page report: https://eepublicdownloads.blob.core.windows.net/public-cdn-c... (beware: PDF)
by Rygian | 2025-04-28 13:39:13+00:00
A power outage in 2021 was ultimately traced to a firefighting hydroplane that damaged a high-voltage transmission line in southern France.

The similarity between that event and this early-on report is striking.

[es language]: https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/espana/2021/07/24/aver...
by imtringued | 2025-04-28 13:39:20+00:00
This is correct. The model context is a form of short term memory. It turns out LLMs have an incredible short term memory, but simultaneously that is all they have.

What I personally find perplexing is that we are still stuck at having a single context window. Everyone knows that turing machines with two tapes require significantly fewer operations than a single tape turning machine that needs to simulate multiple tapes.

The reasoning stuff should be thrown into a separate context window that is not subject to training loss (only the final answer).
by oulipo | 2025-04-28 13:39:35+00:00
There's no standardized format, but:

- we ship with a mounting piece that is easy to put on any bike frame to mount our battery

- our app and communication protocol is open-source, and we provide code for compatibility with the major bike controllers, meaning we're compatible with 90% of the e-bikes!

so in practice we're the perfect battery for e-bike enthusiast who want to change their battery to a repairable and fireproof one

and we also do B2B deals with some brands who want custom design etc

but basically if you are running Bafang / Shimano / Bosch controllers, it will work with our battery
by cometapi | 2025-04-28 13:39:50+00:00
The GPT-Image-1 API is a cutting-edge tool developed by OpenAI that enables developers and businesses to integrate advanced image generation capabilities into their applications. Leveraging the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence, GPT-Image-1 allows for the creation of high-quality images based on textual prompts, revolutionizing the way we approach content creation, design, and more.
by smittywerben | 2025-04-28 13:40:07+00:00
I don't understand how everyone hates Kafka I use it as a typed write-ahead JSON log with library support for most languages. Yes the systems I've built with this were overengineered but it worked and was reliable. I just bought a larger disk instead of using whatever remains of the great battle of the zookeeper. I just assumed the fact it has any integration support with standard RDBMs must be a byproduct of being Java as purely an accident.
by lillecarl | 2025-04-28 13:40:08+00:00
I don't think anyone was looking at the kJ numbers and going "ah that makes sense". I put 3 examples to show the relativity, it's still squared to the relative crash speed.

What matters is keeping speeds especially low where humans without cars/trucks can be involved.

But people are also scrolling their phones and might miss a panic brake, and while that's an issue in itself it would also be safer at lower speeds.

Considering the time gained is going to be relatively low unless you're traveling extremely far at consistent speed it makes little sense to increase speeds, it also makes for more brake dust and emissions both being at speed and getting up to speed.

Funnily enough the air resistance also increases by the square, so think about that if you think that petrol is expensive.
by rldjbpin | 2025-04-28 13:40:09+00:00
being critical about the messaging and the timeline of achieving these goals is fair. however the rest of the thesis seems too harsh, despite the author's credentials.

there is nothing wrong with "shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land amongst the stars" aspect about these literal moonshot projects. regardless of what you think about the people running them, but these initiatives tend to bring out a lot of innovation.
by acc_297 | 2025-04-28 13:40:23+00:00
You require inertia in the grid to maintain frequency and other stability stuff.

Solar PV is great but is mostly grid-following so cannot operate on it's own. As I understand it you need a minimum fraction of power generation to be large spinning turbines.

I think this problem can be mitigated with add-on rotational mass style kinetic energy batteries or something like that. I don't think variable energy pricing will help if it's an issue with over-demand the grid managers can do rolling blackouts to manage while fixing the supply problems. The grid is just broken at the moment and the solar can't maintain the grid alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-28 13:40:58+00:00
Goal: Yes — the main goal is to bring C-like or close-to-C performance to Python code, without sacrificing the ease of writing Python. However, due to the nature of Python itself, I'm not sure how close I can get to native C performance, especially competing with systems (both SW and HW) that were revised and refined for decades.

Performance comparison against C: I don't have a formal benchmark directly against C yet. The early GPIO benchmark (480ns toggle) is competitive with hand-written C on ARM microcontrollers — even when running at a lower clock speed. But a full systematic comparison (across different workloads) would definitely be interesting for the future.

Main challenge: Yes — memory management is one of the biggest challenges. Dynamic memory allocation and garbage collection are tricky to manage efficiently without breaking real-time guarantees. I have a roadmap for it, but would like to stick to a real use case before moving forward.

Software emulation: I am using Icarus (could use Verilator) for RTL simulation if that's what you meant. But hardware behavior (like GPIO timing) still needs to be tested on the real FPGA to capture true performance characteristics.
by addandsubtract | 2025-04-28 13:41:15+00:00
> For people who are thinking about getting into electronics: that project is very complex for what it does.

For people who want to get into electronics, I can recommend getting started with an LED strip, an ESP32 and WLED. You can dip your toes into soldiering, and using an ESP32, for very cheap and with a large margin of error.
by pc86 | 2025-04-28 13:41:36+00:00
100% - my friends who have only ever written code think it's a "hard" job in the objective sense. That among all possible jobs, it is on the difficult side of the spectrum.

I've been an EMT, a line cook, a dishwasher, a waiter, sold insurance, and worked on political campaigns. The easiest of all those is 10x harder than the hardest day of writing code.

It's frustrating at times, sure. There's office politics, sure. We probably have to deal with a disproportionate percentage of weaponized autism, sure.

But it is a cushy job and the "money per unit of effort" metric is off the charts compared to basically every other job I can think of, and definitely every other job I've ever had.
by maxsilver | 2025-04-28 13:41:49+00:00
> Stadiums are pretty much the only place where mmWave in phones makes sense.

And Airports, and Parks, and Ampitheateaters, and Malls, and Theme Parks...

mmWave isn't a general solution, sure. But mmWave is great for anywhere crowded enough to benefit from a DAS setup, and there are a lot of DAS setups around.
by replwoacause | 2025-04-28 13:42:05+00:00
No it doesn’t. And that’s a strange take and simply untrue. I don’t judge anyone for looking at porn or having tastes I can’t relate to, but I’ve seen first hand what the damaging effects of regular porn watching can be and don’t want any part of it. I think it’s odd you take issue with my usage of the word perversions, I’m referring to things like humiliation, violence, objectification, abuse, exploitation, etc. I don’t think you can argue successfully that porn doesn’t have these problems.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-28 13:42:08+00:00
>That has got nothing to do with the political franchise.

Until you consider getting resident visa is by far and away the most common way to franchise for immigrants, barring some exceptions like Argentina and citizenship by investment countries. It actually haze EVERYTHING to do with political franchise.

>The assumption that these privileges would be voted away implies an eventual equal distribution of such thing. Then all would have equal skin in the game which would justify democracy under this bizarre definition of skin in the game.

The implication is yours. We have had eminent domain, civil and criminal forfeiture, and fractional taking (property tax) for a long time, all of which has resulted in quite a bit of land seizure, although not significantly in the direction towards 'equal distribution' despite nearly universal franchise of citizens. Although admittedly mass-scale redistribution of land has happened some places.

>No. It means that they want people with means. Same basic reason why some nations may want people with advanced degrees. Or for that matter poor people who are willing to work for low wages. They want to import people who will benefit the nation state.

Yes of course nations choose the residency path that leads to franchise for immigrants with skin that they can put in the game.