MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Flight search that shows aircraft and airline safety records
by boshjerns | 2025-04-19 11:47:48+00:00
I built this flight safety search tool because I've always been nervous about flying. Like actually very nervous every time I fly even if its unwarranted. I've always been told the chances of any incidents on planes are extremely unlikely but after looking into this further it seems like airlines and models play the most important factor. Some airlines and plane models have had a lot more problems than others... Recent aviation incidents and quality concerns only heightened those feelings. The app lets you check detailed safety records for specific aircraft and airlines before booking, helping make informed decisions about your flights.

Looking ahead, I'm working on adding verified pilot profiles - imagine being able to see your pilots' experience and safety records before takeoff. It's something that doesn't exist today but could really change how we think about flight safety.
Voice Flight – A voice-controlled flying game
by 1Sankalp | 2025-04-19 11:48:31+00:00
Voice Flight is a browser game where players control a flying plane using just their voice. No login, no setup, just open and play.

Players control the plane using the loudness and duration of their voice. The louder the voice, the higher the plane flies.

https://voiceflight.vercel.app/
by lurk2 | 2025-04-19 11:48:49+00:00
There was a lot of insistence that the indigenous method was better, but no actual evidence that it was, nor even arguments as to why it would be (besides some vague allusions to it being “more flexible”).

A lot of these noble savage narratives emerge from Latin American studies (history, archaeology, literature, etc.), particularly among Mexican and American-educated academics. There is truth to the idea that the complexity of indigenous systems is unappreciated by the general public, but there’s always this underlying fetishization of a pseudo-magical indigenous “way of knowing” contrasted with the (historically far-better performing) European scientific method. Indigenous cultures are redeemed from European military conquests by insisting that the European way of knowing is myopic and selfish (being focused on profit over sustainability, the individual over the community, etc.) in contrast to the indigenous way of knowing, which is holistic and communitarian.

The author does have publications related to these irrigation systems, though, so maybe she has a valid point to make and the article just didn’t land for me.
by thebruce87m | 2025-04-19 11:49:31+00:00
> This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!

England and Britain are not interchangeable, unless you specifically mean that all Brits take it for granted that this is only the case in England or something like that?

Edit: for the downvoters: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/difference-between-britai...
by _heimdall | 2025-04-19 11:49:42+00:00
Any code base lives or dies by how well it defines and then sticks to conventions. We can enforce it in different ways, or outsource the defining of convention to other tools and libraries, but we still have to use them consistently in the codebase.

I think the OP here is basically proposing that the developer should be directly responsible for the conventions used. IMO that's not a bad thing, yes it means developers need to be responsible for a clean codebase but it also means they will better understand why the conventions exist and how the app actually works. Both of those are easily lost when you follow convention only because a tool or library said that's how its done.
by redczar | 2025-04-19 11:50:35+00:00
It’s not ok to allow easy access to hardcore pornography by minors. There is already virtually no privacy in these matters in the sense that Google and others already track us so the argument against age verification on privacy grounds is weak. As with most things there are tradeoffs and there is no perfect solution. I favor age verification being the law. You don’t.

The choice between you and others keeping the belief that your porn viewing habits are completely anonymous vs. allowing minors unfettered access to hardcore pornography I choose the latter as the more important issue.
by giantg2 | 2025-04-19 11:51:41+00:00
You're referencing a book that is specifically written to convince people of the good parts of that generation. I highly doubt it's giving a balanced view or objectively looking at rights/freedoms expanding or contracting.

Let's just take some examples. What about interment camps during WW2, deporting communist supporters shortly after, racial segregation, performing human subject experiments on black people and biological weapons research on the public without consent, and much higher abuse of power or corruption in politics and in policing. Which freedoms existed then that don't exist today?
by theandrewbailey | 2025-04-19 11:51:51+00:00
> Public health officials often mislead the American people through conflicting messaging, knee-jerk reactions, and a lack of transparency. Most egregiously, the federal government demonized alternative treatments and disfavored narratives, such as the lab leak theory, in a shameful effort to coerce and control the American people’s health decisions. When those efforts failed, the Biden Administration resorted to “outright censorship—coercing and colluding with the world’s largest social media companies to censor all COVID-19-related dissent.”

I remember when lab leak was officially considered a conspiracy theory, and everyone who mentioned or even referenced it should be canceled and shunned.
by metalman | 2025-04-19 11:53:22+00:00
ummmm, hmmmmmmm, It's high time we realised that we are the largest single niche, and animal biomass, that possibly, has ever existed, and it is a law of biology, that each niche will be filled. This means that any peicemeal approach is going to lagg, and uncontrollable epidemics become more and more likely. Confounding factors are that our diets and lifestyles are converging into a more homegenous whole, and all in all we live longer, but are less fit ,while dependent on our haphazard use of "medicine" to provide cheap health care. My personal experience is that I now notice a lot more fungal smell in otherwise good looking food, and have stopped buying certain foods, not that I worryed about catching anything, but that it tastes bad, and is alarming only because it is a "stealth" fungus, often showing as just a tiny bit of black stuff, rather than an obvious fuzzy mess.
by epolanski | 2025-04-19 11:53:57+00:00
I have been writing recently an application in plain "vanilla" TypeScript with vite, no rendering libraries, just old-style DOM manipulation and I have to say I more and more question front end "best" practices.

I can't conclude it scales, whatever it means, but I can conclude that there are huge benefits performance-wise, it's fun, teaches you a lot, debugging is simple, understanding the architecture is trivial, you don't need a PhD into "insert this rendering/memoization/etc" technique.

Templating is the thing I miss most, I'm writing a small vite plugin to handle it.
by elcritch | 2025-04-19 11:54:13+00:00
I've found that I need to point it to the right bit of logs or test output and narrow its attention by selectively adding to it's context. Claude 3.7 at least works well this way. If you don't it'll fumble around. Gemini hasn't worked as well for me though.

I partly wonder if different peoples prompt styles will lead to better results with different models.
by polytely | 2025-04-19 11:55:28+00:00
I would suggest you start looking into independent games.

Just this month Blue Prince came out, a puzzle game à la mist but mixed with elements from modern rogue-lite games like Binding of Isaac. It is designed and directed by one guy, Tonda Ros, and it is thoughtful and rewards playing slowly and taking plenty of notes.

>I can't even dare to look at the title imagery of these new games on xbox while scrolling through list of games on app store. It's gory, weirdness and insanity being portrayed as high quality.

>I guess, humanity in the West craved for some excitement in their lives, due to post-war peace time being devoid of any survival struggle. And the media - movies, music, internet - kept on dumping loads of it. Even the music, which is supposed to flow with soft, pleasant and melodious tunes and beats, has turned into a cacophony of loud shouting and hysteric expressions and acts of the artists.

This is just plain wrong, and a sign you are not looking good enough. Never in the history of the world have we been producing the amount much art and culture as we are doing right now, the only problem is that the good stuff will not passively reach you, you will have to take initiative and seek it out.
by croemer | 2025-04-19 11:59:49+00:00
Here is the equivalent map for German: https://language.mki.wisc.edu/essays/high-and-low-german/

Here's a similar one from Wikipedia that includes Dutch dialects as an example of dialect continuum: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialektkontinuum#/media/Datei:... probably based on this historical map: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/11kvga1/an_1894_ma...
by hylaride | 2025-04-19 12:00:57+00:00
They can (and do) have room if they're designed from the ground up for it. The engines for diesel electric trains are so large because they need to be sized to drive power for peak energy (usually accelerating and hills). If the energy can be stored, the engines for hybrid locomotives themselves can (and are) smaller.

So far you're only seeing hybrid locomotives for trains that stop/start a lot (shunting trains and passenger rail). The cutover for freight will likely take decades because A) locomotive lifetimes are measured in decades and B) longer range freight usually has less stop/start, making it's economical delta less.
by dzdt | 2025-04-19 12:01:18+00:00
The most recent peer-reviewd survey I can find on the topic is [1], which is the 2nd followup by the same author doing survey reviews of the scientific literature on origins of Covid-19.

His summary conclusion: "There is much greater scientific support for the [zoonotic hypothesis]. Conclusion: The main gap in the zoonotic hypothesis is the lack of a detected intermediate host, which has not been found yet. In turn, although the hypothesis of a laboratory leak has not been supported by sufficient scientific evidence, it cannot be definitively discarded."

The weight of scientific evidence is AGAINST the lab leak hypothesis, but the waters are so muddy from politicization of the topic that consensus or proof will likely never be achieved. This is the same conclusion at [2]:

"The consensus among scientists is that, although a lab leak origin is possible, the scientific evidence points to a natural, zoonotic origin from wild animals."

[1] JPMCHR 2024 https://doi.org/10.38207/JCMPHR/2024/JAN05020519 https://www.acquaintpublications.com/article/four-years-late...

[2] BMJ 2024; 386 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q1578 (Published 09 September 2024) https://www.bmj.com/content/386/bmj.q1578
by siliconwitch | 2025-04-19 12:01:55+00:00
Completely understand. This is really good feedback. I can start off by saying that there will absolutely be a free tier within the platform where you can buy a board and that’ll include some amount of data allowance per month. It’ll also include some amount of AI usage too (even if that’s not so relevant for your application)

We’re modelling the hardware pricing such that the cost of the AI isn’t baked into the board cost. I understand that for some users, they might not necessarily need these features and it makes no sense for them to have to pay for it.

I’m expecting that we can have the boards competitively priced around the ~$70 mark, but often the distributors will try to price it in line with similar products they carry. I didn’t want to mention it in the video as we’re still negotiating this with them.

Going up from there, the subscription pricing will be split into several tiers that allow for higher data usage, AI usage and the ability to connect higher numbers of boards to one deployment.

It’s interesting that you mentioned that you’d like the data forwarding as a base feature. Our initial thoughts around that was to fulfil the requirement for companies who need to own their data. Ie we can’t store it for them. To be clear, you’ll still have access to the data via an API even in the free tier, and you’ll also be able to send data to devices via a REST API. It was just the live data forwarding from devices to your server that was intended to be limited to companies
by isthatafact | 2025-04-19 12:02:27+00:00
Even if we take the generous view that the science director is a poet who does not understand science enough to speak coherently about it (and hence the weird poetry containing misleading technical phrases), the situation is not normal.

With a non-scientist as science director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Science Advisor to the President, and the drastic cuts to science and research pushed by the white house, it seems likely that malice is involved.
by dmurray | 2025-04-19 12:02:37+00:00
Is that true? I think a dialect needs to have at least some of its own words.

If people in your town use the same words as the town across the river, but you pronounce your R's and the others do not, I would say you speak the same dialect but with distinct accents.

Maybe the point is moot because any two populations separate enough to develop distinct ways of pronouncing words inevitably also create words of their own.
by quitit | 2025-04-19 12:04:27+00:00
Not ruling it out, but this would mean both ChatGPT to put the metadata in the file, and then Midjourney read that metadata and put it into the img2txt output. (Midjourney produces 4 sets of text outputs from the single input image, two contained location information, naming the specific mountain chains it "saw" in the caricature image.)

Assuming it's not the metadata, it's a powerful use of AI, but also not one that I would not be too surprised about. It can be a useful investigative tool, or simply a fun way to hide clues for a puzzle.
by nullc | 2025-04-19 12:04:57+00:00
Even where the training data does say "I don't know" (which it usually doesn't-- people don't tend to comment or publish books, etc. when they don't think they know) that text is reflecting the author's knowledge rather than the models... so it would be off in both directions.

One could imagine a fine tuning procedure that gave a model better knowledge of itself by testing it and on prompts where its most probable completions are wrong fine tune it to say "I don't know" instead. Though the 'are wrong' is doing some really heavy lifting since it wouldn't be simple to do that without a better model that knew the right answers.
by ath3nd | 2025-04-19 12:06:45+00:00
No, as you can see by the beautiful and very appropriate visuals (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Frame-...), he is coming out towards us, the viewers, with his back to the Lab Leak letters. He is poised, he's not looking back (suggesting that maybe the letters will explode?).

If we know anything about American fiction, it's that:

- The person walking with their back on the scene is the hero

- The hero is totally justified in whatever they are doing, no need to question their motives, morale or veracity

- An explosion or sunglasses (or both) is imminent

If this wasn't tragic, it'd be actually some (low) quality entertainment.
by siliconwitch | 2025-04-19 12:07:42+00:00
Voice is possible over LTE-M but it’s sort of the wrong technology for it. It’s designed for low power so the data rate is quite slow and the latency won’t work for two people trying to talk to each other.

It’s a similar speed to Bluetooth LE (not Bluetooth audio which headphones use). Sub 100kBps

NTN will be even slower. Few kBps. Really intended for sensor data or machine related actions
by thisisnotauser | 2025-04-19 12:08:47+00:00
I'm curious how folks imagine this relates to legal issues, such as the perennial section 702 battles. Is it possible that a future functional Congress might be able to finally end warrantless wiretapping by pointing to this massive intrusive criminal activity? It seems evident that this exercise can only ever lead to leveraging that system to further harm Americans.

https://www.intel.gov/foreign-intelligence-surveillance-act/...
by serial_dev | 2025-04-19 12:09:07+00:00
It’s a great demonstration how unrealistic it is to use it.

If it is this complicated for a demo project for the purposes of the book, in my opinion, it shows it’s completely inadequate for handling anything remotely real.

Project ongoing for five years, 10 devs on the team, each year two resigns and two joins, some good, some mediocre, can you imagine them mess this will be? And that’s not even a large project, it’s just an average but real project size.

KISS / YAGNI goes a long way.
by upofadown | 2025-04-19 12:09:32+00:00
My take is that the Signalgate thing was mostly about usability[1]. Which I suppose could be considered an implementation thing but is something that should be explicitly addressed. So a possible NSA based conspiracy theory here is that NSA is working in the background impairing usability.

Cryptographic libraries are not always documented as well as they should be. In the case of something like Python, it is not always easy to map library documentation to the resultant Python.

[1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg
by jbverschoor | 2025-04-19 12:10:28+00:00
> - It's really perfectly ok if you use competently.

That's the case with assembler too. It's exactly my point.

I love how lua works, is easy to embed, fast, and can compile to bytecode. But I really miss "compile time" checks, but my biggest issues are:

- You have to kind of invent your own modules / class-system. It's a lot of boilerplate and error prone - The 1-based indexing is horrible - Looping over 'arrays' would require sorting the keys first. i.e. there are no arrays.

It's been little over 10 years since I've done lua (gaming). Oh, and I used lua in an nginx handler after that
by Rayid | 2025-04-19 12:10:44+00:00
Totally understand the concern — I’ve thought a lot about that.

I'm not encouraging illegal use; it's designed for privacy-conscious developers, teams, and individuals who want simple, disposable file transfers. And like with any tool, it depends on how users choose to use it.

That said, I'm keeping an eye on best practices (and legality) around hosting this kind of service. Appreciate you bringing it up!
by chrismorgan | 2025-04-19 12:10:58+00:00
A couple of issues that will arise from this:

• Using DOM attribute or text nodes limits you to text only. This is, in practice, a very big limitation. The simple cases are Plain Old Data which can be converted losslessly at just an efficiency cost, like HTMLProgressElement.prototype.value, which converts to number. Somewhat more complex are things like classList and relList, each a live DOMTokenList mapping to a single attribute, which needs unique and persistent identity, so you have to cache an object. And it definitely gets more intractable from there as you add more of your own code.

• Some pieces of state that you may care about aren’t stored in DOM nodes. The most obvious example is HTMLInputElement.prototype.value, which does not reflect the value attribute. But there are many other things like scroll position, element focus and the indeterminate flag on checkboxes.

• Some browser extensions will mess with your DOM, and there’s nothing you can do about it. For example, what you thought was a text node may get an entire element injected into it, for ads or dictionary lookup or whatever. It’s hard to write robust code under such conditions, but if you’re relying on your DOM as your source of truth, you will be disappointed occasionally. In similar fashion, prevailing advice now is not to assume you own all the children of the <body> element, but to render everything into a div inside that body, because too many extensions have done terrible things that they should never have done in the first place.

It’s a nice theory, but I don’t tend to find it scaling very well, applied as purely as possible.

Now if you’re willing to relax it to adding your own properties to the DOM element (as distinct from attributes), and only reflecting to attributes or text when feasible, you can often get a lot further. But you may also find frustration when your stuff goes awry, e.g. when something moves a node in the wrong way and all your properties disappear because it cloned the node for some reason.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-19 12:11:07+00:00
During the winter, melt water is piped from mountain springs. This water is gravity-fed into a vertical pipe, forming a fountain. The water is forced through a narrow nozzle, spraying water droplets into the air. These droplets cool down rapidly and freeze into conical structures which resemble temples known as “stupas.” The ice melts throughout the spring and summer, providing water to irrigate fields.
by nullc | 2025-04-19 12:11:17+00:00
Hallucinations are what make the models useful. Well, when we like them we call it intelligence "look it did something correct that was nowhere in the training data set! It's intelligent!" and when we don't like them we call it hallucinations "look, it did something that was nowhere in the training dataset because it was wrong!".

But they are the same thing: the model is extrapolating. It doesn't know when its extrapolations are correct or not because an LLM doesn't have access to the outside world (except via you and whatever tools you give it).

If it was free of extrapolations it would just be a search engine over the training data, and that would be less useful.
by a2128 | 2025-04-19 12:11:39+00:00
Chat LLMs are becoming mirrors. It's bad user experience when you say something and they double down, it gets downvoted and RLHF tunes it out.

I asked a question about Raspberry Pis one time and it mentioned they're great low-cost computers for education or hobby. I responded saying they're so expensive these days and it went "You're absolutely correct" and changed its stance entirely saying they're focusing on enterprise and neglecting the hobby/education market. I edited my response to instead say something in agreement and ask a followup question, and it responded completely opposite of before, talking about how it's revolutionizing education and hobby computing in 2025 by being affordable and focused on education and hobby. Try this sometime, you'll realize you can't have any serious opinion-based discussion with chat models because they'll flip-flop to just mirror you in most circumstances.

This bleeds into more factual discussions too. You can sometimes gaslight these models into rejecting basic facts. Even if it did use physical features to deduce location and the image had no EXIF, there's a high chance the same reply would get it to admit it used EXIF even if it didn't. Meanwhile if it did use EXIF, you could have a full conversation about the exact physical features it used to "deduce" the location where it never admits it just checked EXIF
by wolfram74 | 2025-04-19 12:13:24+00:00
My impression is it's auto and fuel companies putting out this unworkable alternative to current technologies so they can appear to be concerned about climate change without having to actually stop making money, also if it does work they can crack the petro chemicals to get hydrogen out and people who point out it's basically as dirty as ICE engines will look like pedants.

The scientists are just there because if you give them the opportunity to work on hard technical challenges, they'll take it. The morality is much greyer than the ones being paid to contrive models with the initial goal of "higher CO2 is actually good for everybody."