MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Lil digi – play a platformer game as yourself
by sunnyba | 2025-04-27 13:21:56+00:00
I've been monitoring some of the image generation progress for game sprites for a while and was really impressed by Gemini Flash. This demo lets you upload a picture and turns it into an animated pixel character (a lil digi gif that you can download). I chain together the pixel art frames and insert the player into a tricky platforming level.

video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK7z-HltssE

api usage: Unfortunately Gemini Flash 2.0 image Gen has really tight API limits that don't scale up for paid tiers -- if anyone on the team sees this and wants to help me out, my email is in my profile or you can reach me at hello@lildigi.me

level stats: For the speedrunners out there, the fastest glitchless times I've seen around 17-18s.

stack: cloudflare pages + aws lambda + gemini

happy to answer any questions!
by superkuh | 2025-04-27 13:23:41+00:00
I'm saying kids talk about subjects kids are interested in. And in the vast majority of cases, they're not going to be talking about the explicit sex stuff these adults were. Sure, there's going to be precocious kids, some exceptions, but as a rule, yes. Kids aren't going to be doing this because kids don't have the biological motivations to do so. I remember being a kid.

And just to head off the obvious response, yes, I guess a 17 year old is still technically a kid. But that's not what people are worried about here. Let's not conflate.
by roenxi | 2025-04-27 13:24:49+00:00
> By comparing the variability in house sizes, scientists could compare the degree of inequality in each society and how it related to population size and political complexity.

I suspect the study is interesting but that rather undermines the conclusions as relevant in the modern era. The wealth inequality is because house construction isn't a particularly important store of wealth. It is quite difficult to consume a billion dollars worth of house construction; that is skyscraper or Great Pyramid of Giza territory.

You'd miss most of a contemporary billionaire's wealth if you looked mainly at their housing.
by shakna | 2025-04-27 13:24:57+00:00
V [0] aims for something along those lines, but I've had a few issues with the safety aspects of the language. Breaking through the checker isn't that difficult.

I absolutely adore Ada [1], but the Pascal-syntax isn't for everyone.

I haven't used it yet, but have been hearing rumblings about Odin [2] a fair bit in these kinds of discussions. I tend to avoid too many symbol-heavy langs, but it's probably still less than Rust (I use a screenreader half the time).

[0] https://vlang.io/

[1] https://ada-lang.io/

[2] https://odin-lang.org/
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-04-27 13:25:00+00:00
> C# has been used as the primary language in various hobby/research kernels.

That's quite the oversimplification...

C# is not a systems-programming language: it's an application-programming language that is heavily dependent on the CLR runtime environment. While those research-kernels certainly do bring a-kind-of-CLR into the kernel it's far from being like the CLR in .NET; but they don't use C# - at least, not the same C# you use in Visual Studio: those research kernels: Singularity, Midori and Verve - used not only the Sing# and Spec# extensions to C#, they had their own compiler (Bartok) which itself enabled other language-extensions.

That said, those extensions are fascinating reads:

Sing# concerns message-passing ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... )

Spec# added Ada-style (i.e. compiler-enforced) invariants and pre/post-conditions (this was the basis for the Code Contracts feature which was annoyingly/tragically killed-off during the .NET Core reboot in 2016); see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/spec/

Bartok: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
by Snow_Falls | 2025-04-27 13:25:18+00:00
Thank you for politely explaining what I am too filled with incoherent rage to do myself.

The sexism of HN is astounding sometimes, here we have men politely debating whether women deserve rights. Everytime women are brought up on HN I am only disappointed further.

If GP had said that men deserved to be enslaved no one would think this was something deserving of a thought-out rebuttal, they would be told to leave. But it's fine when women are in the firing line!

Genuinely despicable.
by cirego | 2025-04-27 13:25:23+00:00
You bring up an interesting question -- I think Tilt works best for those that find themselves in an environment where product is delivered using a service-oriented architecture deployed to Kubernetes. It's also easy to get started within a small team in a big company.

To your other point, Tilt is to development as ArgoCD is to deployment. Tilt enables on-demand, reproducible development environments that are sufficiently high-fidelity that you can often replace your shared and/or long-lived testing clusters.

With Tilt, I test my application using the same Kubernetes specs / Kustomizations / Helm Charts that you use to deploy into production. When it comes time to deploy my application, I supply these same specs / kustomizations / charts to ArgoCD.

Because I can reuse the specs for both testing and production, I enjoy far greater testability of my application, improving quality and time to market.
by fennecbutt | 2025-04-27 13:25:34+00:00
Apathetic voters who'll still vote for a terrible party just because they hate the same people the politicians say they do?

MIB put it so succinctly, large groups of humans are exceedingly dumb. It's almost like our individual intelligence drops, perhaps we evolved those effects from tribalism so that organising larger groups was more effective. And perhaps that effect is broken now that we organise in much larger groups than we ever evolved for.
by pron | 2025-04-27 13:25:49+00:00
If you love Rust -- use Rust. Trying to find a language that's just right for you risks it being just that: right for you and few others.

Just remember that even if writing memory-safe programs is your goal, using a memory-safe language is just a means to that goal, and even Rust isn't really memory-safe. Many Rust programs try to achieve memory safety while using a non-memory-safe language (be it C or unsafe Rust), and there's an entire spectrum of combining language features that offer sound guarantees with careful analysis and testing of unsafe code to achieve a safe program. On that spectrum, Zig is much closer to Rust than to C, even though it offers fewer guarantees than Rust (but more than C).
by a_cardboard_box | 2025-04-27 13:25:52+00:00
Rule 110 is only Turing-Complete if you have an infinitely large array of cells, and are able to initialize it with an infinite repeating pattern. If I'm not mistaken, HTML+CSS can only do a fixed-sized array.

With a Turing-Complete language, if a program runs out of memory on one machine, you can run the same code on a bigger machine without modifying it, and it can use the additional memory. With fixed-length rule 110, you need to modify the code if you want to use more memory.
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-27 13:26:37+00:00
I owned one of these lights before it went viral and it was a nightmare to install. The thing doesn’t screw into the ceiling like every other light figure does. Instead you install a hook and dangle the damn thing off the hook. Which means the plastic surround never goes flush with the ceiling.

Even when you do finally get it flush after several painful iterations of hanging it, gravity stretches the cord causing the base to come slightly away from the ceiling again.

If you’re OCD like me, it made the light a horrible reminder of that OCD. So in the end I gave up on the light.

Pity because it’s a really cool looking light.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-04-27 13:26:55+00:00
It’s missing in most European places because there’s little need for it.

When there is a need, Europe does pretty well. At least relative to the U.S.

For example, Europe built the completely novel floodgates for Venice. It’s been very successful as far as I’m aware when it was heavily doubted before and throughout its development.

On the other hand, the U.S. won’t even contemplate building something similar to protect NYC, despite the fact that Europe has already done it and proven the concept, and that the region this would protect is orders of magnitude more economically valuable than Venice.

Similarly consider high speed rail. Italy completely revolutionized domestic travel by setting up excellent high speed rail over a few years. They did it not by government fiat but intelligent regulations paired with privatization and market rules.

While it’s not China scale, it’s more than sufficient for Italy’s scale.

At the same time the U.S. is completely incapable of creating high speed rail and to the extent it has its done so by redefining it down.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-04-27 13:27:01+00:00
Patents at one time were a way of sharing technology while still compensating the inventors, and licenses were fairly easy to source.

The majority of modern patents are the equivalent of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP), and if you want rounded corners on a phone that will be $23m + 7% of retail sales.

This is why some people have gadgets from 10 years in the future, and others get toys from 17 years in the past. Ask yourself who has a spare $140k to file global patent these days... the list has shrunk. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl...
by exabrial | 2025-04-27 13:27:10+00:00
There's 'x' number that is effective and practical. You have to have x1 number of submarines deployed at any time, x2 in ICBM silos, x3 on carriers, x4 on destroyers, x5 stationed at air bases. Of that pool, probably 50% have to be rotated off for maintenance, etc.

Whatever that number is, the 31,000+ we used to have was stupid. 3,500 in a historical context is a relief.

The real conundrum these days is that you can't test more. You want to be 100% certain it goes off when needed, but it's pretty hard to test that theory without... testing one.

If all that could be done with 1,500 I'm all in. Just a lot of 'practical' considerations that go into whatever 'x' number is.
by atiedebee | 2025-04-27 13:27:43+00:00
Skimming through the pages, there is some things that aren't really accurate.

> Integers - whole numbers which can be either positive or negative. Defined using char, int, short, long or long long

char is either signed or unsigned depending on the platform/implementation. Use signed char if you want signed integers.

Telling people who are new to C to define booleans with macros is not a good idea, as they have had a proper implementation since c99.

It also feels weird to treat structs and pointers as advanced topics. They are basically required to be productive in the language.

stdint.h was introduced in c99, not c11.

Explaining bitwise operators as "bitmasks" is also quite weird. Bitmasking is just one of the few things you can do with them.

> In C, functions must be first defined before they are used in the code. They can be either declared first and then implemented later on using a header file or in the beginning of the C file, or they can be implemented in the order they are used (less preferable).

This paragraph reads weird. I haven't found any place where the tutorial mentions how to properly write header files. It might be because of the interactive part, but if that is the case then this tutorial doesn't really teach you how to program in C because the tooling around it is an important part of actually using the language. It is also fairly common to declare functions in order of use. Discouraging that is like telling people they need to use tabs over spaces instead of actually focussing on language semantics.
by conductr | 2025-04-27 13:29:05+00:00
Agree. I think this is nearly an imaginary problem. Although plenty of crappy restaurant owners and the economics of the industry make scamming employees an occasional occurrence. Thankfully all those employees usually have the ability to pick up a new job anytime anywhere. So, it’s not like we have a perpetually entrapped underclass of people getting paid peanuts and being exploited
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-04-27 13:29:40+00:00
It is an insight into human irrationality to see a country where hundreds of millions have been lifted out of crushing absolute poverty, that has built one of the world's best infrastructure from nothing...in the 70s, China was poorer than every country in Africa bar one.

...the problem is that some people are concerned only with how things are done, this is feudal government, this is pre-industrial economic growth, who does things, how they do it, make sure nothing new is every tried because that is dangerous and might lead to the elite losing control. China (and much of East Asia) succeeded because they are concerned only with outcomes, and this is all that people care about anyway. Unfortunately, the West is now controlled by people who see change as dangerous, and nothing is more dangerous than a country leapfrogging them in development because it proves that their leadership is bankrupt and incompetent.
by fweimer | 2025-04-27 13:30:54+00:00
If I recall correctly, ZFS error recovery was still “restore from backup” at the time, and iCloud acceptance was more limited. (ZFS basically gave up if an error was encountered after the checksum showed that the data was read correctly from storage media.) That's fine for deployments where the individual system does not matter (or you have dedicated staff to recover systems if necessary), but phones aren't like that. At least not from the user perspective.
by gruez | 2025-04-27 13:32:22+00:00
>To me, “suicidal empathy“ (if that exists) is a lack of empathy (for self) — not “too much of it“. It’s not zero sum.

"Empathy" in the form of thoughts and prayers might not be zero sum, but that's probably not the "empathy" that Musk is talking about. He's probably about government spending on refugees or foreign aid, which is zero sum.
by TipsForCanoes | 2025-04-27 13:33:34+00:00
I think this could be solved with two small legal changes.

1. Abolish lower minimum wages for so called "tipped" workers and raise it to a fair value.

2. Make it illegal for any business to solicit tips.

If a customer wishes to tip then they certainly can but no business should be allowed to pressure you (and just asking is pressure) into paying more than the price they are listing for an item.
by tusharsharma09 | 2025-04-27 13:33:41+00:00
Not at this time, apologizes. As we move along, we intend on releasing data and images through publications.

However, if you are into reading scientific papers, you can look up microsurgical anastomosis for varicocele treatment by Belgrano and Flati (separate bodies of work). That should give you an idea and good visual picture of the procedure.
by api | 2025-04-27 13:34:54+00:00
This is a kind of conservatism that seems borderline extinct, for reasons that might intersect with the thesis of the article.

Still, I like trying to "steel man" the opposing argument.

Without the use of governmental power that the article describes, would things like segregation, red lining, or extreme marginalization of LGBTQ people have ever ended?

Consider that left-handed people were stigmatized for thousands of years for reasons that seem absurd and ridiculous to almost everyone now. In some cultures being left-handed and failing to "convert" could get you killed. Traditional cultural taboos can be unbelievably sticky. It's probably something humans evolved to do as a survival strategy since some taboos, particularly those involving hygiene or practices for ensuring food supply, have extreme survival value. Abandon a taboo that kept a disease at bay or ensured next year's crops will grow, and you all die. But it's a bias that also allows very irrational pointless and cruel taboos to persist forever.

Now imagine that you are a member of one of these groups. Are you going to read some Hayek and decide that it is more prudent and wise to forego the use of government power to improve your lot? Are peopler really going to do that?

I think one of the reasons that this kind of libertarian conservatism has fallen far out of favor not just in the US but globally is that the answer is no. Whether the sphere is cultural or economic, when people run out of options to improve their lot they are never content to just sit around and wait out of some prudent respect for the balance of power. At some point the desire for action wins and the balance of power is broken.

... and with things like cultural taboos, what other levers are there?

I suppose there are economic ones. If you don't like social conservatism, vote with your dollars. Ultimately this includes moving away from places that are too rigid in their thinking, which ultimately harms these places economically.

But the counter-argument there is: people tend to cling so hard to their cultural taboos that they will endure economic hardship to preserve them. So then what you get are large impoverished regions of the country and sectors of the economy, and that too is recipe for discontent and revolt.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-04-27 13:35:22+00:00
"Patents are mostly theoretical"

Not really, one often needs to prove how the innovation works even if algorithmic (for example a gene sequence identifying itself was justifiable for many companies, and proved they weren't making stuff up.)

Patents sound vague on purpose, but I assure you real money and mountains of expensive studies were done prior to publishing any claims. =3
by hardwaregeek | 2025-04-27 13:35:35+00:00
If performance is not ultra critical, I'd use Go. It's simple and a small-ish language. Otherwise there's not many options. Not to belittle your question, because it's a good one, but it's a little like asking if there's a simpler aircraft. There can be, but there's a certain amount of required machinery to keep it in the air. Rust's memory safety rules are as simple as we can get it for now. Maybe in a few years it'll be different!
by prhn | 2025-04-27 13:36:06+00:00
A price tracker should be more sophisticated than just pulling a single listing from Amazon and dumping whatever price a random 3rd party reseller is listing it for.

The prices here are not indicative of the market at all. They're a single sample from the most egregious offender.

More data points for a 5090 Founders

- Amazon $4,481 - StockX $3,447 - eBay $3,500-$4,000

I hope whatever product "United Compute" is selling is more thoughtfully constructed than this.
by joshstrange | 2025-04-27 13:36:16+00:00
Not OP but I work in food festival payments and my suggestion that they raise their alcohol prices by a dollar or two and pay that to the bartenders instead of tips was shot down immediately and it was explained that they could not hire bartenders without tips.

I can’t speak to if that’s true but what I can tell you is that on credit card transactions they saw a 7.6% tipping rate. The drinks at this festival ranged from $8-15/ea so depending on the price, a $1-2 increase that was shared with the bartenders would net them _more_.

One missing data point here is cash, cash payments accounted for half of the credit card payments and I don’t track cash tips (it would be worthless to try). Maybe people are dropping $20/$50/$100 bills in regularly that blow out my calculations.

All that said, I assume the truth is somewhere closer to this being a collective action problem. Individual server might think that they can beat the curve (perhaps correctly, my numbers are averaged) which causes them to advocate for tips instead of more consistent wages.

Either way, it's a sad state of affairs further complicated by bringing drugs (alcohol) into the mix. I'm sure tips flow more freely when people are cognitively impaired, which is a gross thing to prey on IMHO. Also add in the "I'll make this a heavy pour if you tip me more" (aka stealing).
by hdivider | 2025-04-27 13:36:17+00:00
It's complex, for sure. I look back to the JFK era and how those folks handled far larger nuclear arsenals -- and then created the space program as we know it today. Peaceful exploration of space during the Cold War, with much of the same technology as ICBMs.

We're a far cry from that at the moment. In my view, US democracy is being contested (to say it with understatement), and US and Allied security also -- both more than probably any time in the Cold War. Worse than this is the threat to the alliance system.

The difference is now, China is ramping up its nuclear arsenal and has the economic backing to make it happen. The Russians can't be ignored either as their systems are very advanced and quite numerous. So I think to get past our internal problems in the Western world, we need a time margin of maybe 20 years.

Seen in this light, $956B over 10 years is not extreme, assuming it will indeed produce many other economic effects and technological breakthroughs (not just more graft for the billionaires). It's just I'd rather also see a massive increase in NASA funding with clear programmatic goals (instead of 'worship SpaceX'), international cooperation, and tie it to restoration of funding at the civilian agencies. We're far from that being viable at this point, however.
by imtringued | 2025-04-27 13:36:49+00:00
While the idea is obviously correct, the paper itself suffers from extremely sloppy writing.

They discretize the integral with a discrete sum, but then forget to discretize the variables by substituting x with x(t_i) or at least x_i, same for dot x. They put the objective function x hat = argmin S(X) last, when it is the most important aspect.

In the equation where x hat must fulfill the Euler lagrange equation for all t, they butchered the application of the derivative with respect to a constant point.

It should look more like this:

https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/6efe...

You need to explicitly pass in the x(t), dot x (t) and t as arguments into the derivative. Their notation implies that you have to take the derivative with respect to a constant (not at a point) which always returns zero (a blatantly banal property) or that the function (=the laws of physics) behind x(t) varies over time (shudder).

Overall this was extremely unpleasant to read even though the approach is neat.
by LetMeLogin | 2025-04-27 13:36:54+00:00
Pretty much when I tried to grab a taxi, and it was pretty much every day two times, I could see Taxi were free(no people inside, and now I can't remember if I was the light on or off, but meaning they're just free to take you) no one would stop for about 10 minutes. Sometimes 1 passed and I was able to get it, but usually it was 5-7 cars passing me by.... Someone mentioned people were not accustomed to males with long hair.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-04-27 13:37:06+00:00
Yeah I thought as much. Sorry for the bad joke, it was not my intention to accuse or offend anyone. The discussion on fonts continued into cool technical areas like bitmapping!

My point was: I would not expect such a response anywhere else but HN :)

Someone in the crowd was already there and is wearing the t-shirt - that’s why I come here <3
by thih9 | 2025-04-27 13:38:59+00:00
The part about “combining sensitive data from across the federal government” reminds me of China’s Social Credit Score, only real and for punishments.

> There has been a widespread misconception that China operates a nationwide and unitary social credit "score" based on individuals' behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low. Media reports in the West have sometimes exaggerated or inaccurately described this concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
by Jensson | 2025-04-27 13:40:12+00:00
> It's weird to me that we organise our lives based on one social science and ignore all the others.

40-50% of most countries production goes to government projects, so no we don't ignore everything else than capitalism. We are about 50-60% capitalist at most.

Note that government projects also need you to work, work is a part of every system, it isn't capitalism that forces you to work people are forced to work in socialist and communist states as well.