MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gus_massa | 2025-04-23 14:24:58+00:00
> will academia ever trust plebs like me?

What do you want to do?

Get a billion dollar to get a new particle collider? Buy 1000 lab rats and try some experiment? Get 3 graduate students to expand your personal theory? -> The answer is no. But even someone with credentials will have a hard time getting that unless they have a good team and track record in similar task.

A position as a collaborator in a research group? -> Perhaps. As a full researcher is difficult but not impossible. The main problem is to ensure you know everything that "everyone" already know. You must start with a small collaboration in a side task. Also, there are many positions in helper task, like sysadmin or lathe expert or ... that don't require a Ph.D. but they require someone who really knows what is doing and can understand both the requirements of the team and the tools.

Publish your own research? -> Possible, if you pay for the 1000 rats yourself. The main problem is that what is "useful", "interesting" and "interesting for academia" may have a weird intersection. So you may get something that is useful or interesting but nobody in academia may care about it. Or you may reinvent the wheel with another name. Or the theory is "obviously wrong". Do you have a control group? There is a finite time to read new ideas, so people in academia has to filter too weird theories (even weird theories published in papers). Sometimes the theory that is obviously wrong is correct, but most of the time is just wrong. Does the new theory has at least one experimental prediction?

In some cases is like wanting to be a F1 racer. Nobody will give you a position unless you are an expert F2 racer (or something).

On the other hand, pg published "A plan for spam" in a blog post. No new academic research. No new weird structure. Nothing new. Just useful when nobody knew how to deal with spam. Also, cperciva made a comment a few weeks ago telling that his most cited "paper" is only a "preprint" that was never accepted for publication, because nobody care about a weird side channel timing attack (or something like that, I can't find the comment).

There is definitively a problem, but a few years ago got we got in our university like 5 independent persons that solved the Goldbach conjeture. Each one got a voluntary graduate student to talk and explain the ideas. After a few month of meetings, the conclusion was that none of them had good ideas to prove the Goldbach conjeture.

What do you want to do?
by adra | 2025-04-23 14:25:00+00:00
The two OS kernels and API are super close (outsider perspective). I used win2k for like 10 years mostly on the back of applications and games supporting XP for so long. I can't recall the big API differences. Maybe XP has UAC and there were APIs to check for it? Anyways, I still have fond memory of manually patching out API calls hard coded into EXEs to bypass XP only parts which were almost always superfluous.
by close04 | 2025-04-23 14:25:12+00:00
I pay for Youtube and see in the results a lot of irrelevant videos that have nothing to do with my search or viewing history.

But it gets so much worse. I leave the "smart downloads" feature enabled in Youtube Music on my phone because sometimes it discovers and downloads some gems for me. Again and again it downloads "artists" and music genres that I went out of my way to never have to listen to. To add insult to injury it sometimes refuses to delete those playlists for hours after I click the button. One time I had to clear all the downloads just to remove that trash.

There is no "organic" explanation for this as much as I'd dig for one. This is Youtube taking money to push a product.
by andsoitis | 2025-04-23 14:25:17+00:00
Spatial computing is to interact with and manipulate 3D space—blending the physical and digital worlds. It enables users to understand, interpret, and respond to the geometry, position, and movement of real-world environments.

I fail to see that as a future mode of user/computer interaction that competes with or augments mobile/laptop computer usage in any meaningful way.

Even movie watching, the most successful application of visionOS / Vision Pro, has limited use because it forces a solitary experience. While it can be useful (eg on a plane or in bed while your SO sleeps), you also already carry your phone and earbuds with you so it isn’t a compelling enough use case. Nobody is creating games for vision either and it I think it’s unlikely to become a favored general computing device or mode.

I can probably say more succinctly: spatial computing appears to be a classic case of a solution looking for a problem.

Prior art by Microsoft (HoloLens) and Google (Glass) are interesting because they occupied very different positions on the spatial computing spectrum, but in both cases they surfaced headwinds like the fact that people are unlikely to put glasses or headsets on the face/head juts in order to “compute”.

If there was a path to direct neural input or contact lens delivery, now we might be talking, but even then, you’ve solved the physical impediments but still don’t have a compelling general purpose computing use case.

Some would argue an addictive use case like porn can tip the scales, but I’m doubtful and, besides, I think we can be sure that Apple would never position themselves to depend on porn to advance their business interests.

It seems safe to predict that within 3 — 5 years Apple gives up on this vision. They might come back to it in the future but I think they’re more alarmed by the other computer interaction paradigm that is getting a lot more traction: GenAI/LLM, which subverts the need for a rich visual display and fits and extends all our other computing models more elegantly.
by mohamedY | 2025-04-23 14:26:43+00:00
nsurance is supposed to protect us, but for millions, it doesn’t.

Freelancers, gig workers, students, and underserved communities are often priced out, excluded, or denied when they need help the most. Traditional insurance profits by not paying claims. It’s opaque, centralized, and misaligned with the people it claims to serve. A freelancer had knee surgery denied because of a “pre-existing condition” from years ago. And another case, is when a student, skipped treatment due to a $5K deductible. She ended up with emergency bills and long-term health issues. Thats why I want to build an decentralized, community-owned P2P insurance platform that puts people before profit. No middlemen. No fine print. Just transparency. if you guys think it's a cool idea. I've placed a waitlist signup on the URL.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-23 14:27:02+00:00
Strikes me as fad-chasing. The EVM is already well-suited for writing smart contracts as it has many affordances for that

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/evm/

particularly the cryptographic primitives which would be error-prone to code up from scratch. Granted EVM is not so great for general purpose programming, but Ethereum isn't a good environment to write video games, compilers, neural network trainers, gas costs and all.
by photon_rancher | 2025-04-23 14:27:14+00:00
No, unplugging works because cables are antennas. Power cables being disconnected dramatically reduces the ability for the lightning to couple into the device

The device itself usually has shielding, capacitors, transient suppressors, etc… as well as usually designed to make a poor antenna so on it’s own it will be affected much less than when charging

Surge protectors do work, mind you - but only for weaker storms or pulses coming in from the outside power lines. Just by physically being separated from the final device they are limited in how much they can protect from direct coupling
by calibas | 2025-04-23 14:27:26+00:00
If you want a good example of what happens when you treat pixels like they're just little squares, disable font smoothing. Anti-aliasing, fonts that look good, and smooth animation are all dependent upon subpixel rending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering

Edit: For the record, I'm on Win 10 with a 1440p monitor and disabling font smoothing makes a very noticeable difference.

People are acting like this is some issue that no longer exists, and you don't have to be concerned with subpixel rendering anymore. That's not true, and highlights a bias that's very prevalent here on HN. Just because I have a fancy retina display doesn't mean the average user does. If you pretend like subpixel rendering is no longer a concern, you can run into situations where fonts look great on your end, but an ugly jagged mess for your average user.

And you can tell who the Apple users are because they believe all this went away years ago.
by haglin | 2025-04-23 14:28:02+00:00
Yeah, Windows 2000 was probably the best operating system Microsoft ever produced. It had no crashes, a snappy/intuitive/sleek user interface, and DirectX support for games. I am currently running Mac OS X because I never liked Windows XP/Vista/10/11.

In hindsight, the progress Microsoft made in the ten years between Windows 3.0 (1990) and Windows 2000 seems incredible. They transitioned from a 16-bit shell running on top of DOS to a fully-fledged operating system with a hardware abstraction layer, preemptive multitasking, permissions, a registry, proper device drivers etc.

Twenty-five years later, there has been basically no progress.

At a minimum, I would have expected something like the Knowledge Navigator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0
by kayo_20211030 | 2025-04-23 14:28:46+00:00
A very good piece, that I enjoyed. But, I do get the impression that many of these more esoteric features, when reading a code-base, actually end up obscuring the developer's intention, and impair understanding. Without very competent IDE tooling, trying to work out what's happening in a piece of code is extremely difficult. It's turtles all the way down, and there's a lot more turtles now. A number of the new features, appreciated by many for good reason, tend to work against the Zen of Python which at some level explained the meteoric rise of Python as a bona fide implementation language over the last 30 years - simple, obvious, effective and practical.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-23 14:28:47+00:00
> Their problem is they have to leave things like WhatsApp available, or their citizens will go nuts

WhatsApp would be displaced in a matter of days if not hours if made unavailable. You are far overestimating the amount of disruption a closure would provoke.

> They just want to punish the americans for having had the foresight that led to their success.

This is not about punishment. The DMA is about setting ground rules for a level playing field in the digital market space. It is at its heart a law about competition.

Europe wants the American companies to stop abusing their dominant positions and the closed markets they built. This is a prerequisite to a competitive market as it's basically impossible to foster competition when a few players have spent a decade entrenching themselves and building barriers to entry.

Thankfully, there are no rules which say American companies should reap unlimited benefits from their market manipulations and the overall laissez-faire attitude of the American regulator.

> As an example, just look at how the europeans have failed to come up with something equivalent to WhatsApp, Signal or even Telegram.

All of them have ready to use Asian competitors which would be more than happy to work with European regulators if American companies won't.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-23 14:29:33+00:00
Thank you! :(. It is also referred to as wristdrop.

> If you sleep in a position that causes radial nerve compression, you may wake up experiencing numbness and tingling along the back of your arm, forearm, and hand. With more severe compression, you may also experience “wrist drop”. With wrist drop, your wrist becomes limp, and is unable to extend up.

This is what happened. It happened to me before 2 times, but this time it was only about 30 mins long compression so it is not THAT severe as it was the previous 2 times.

The reason I expanded on it is that just mere 30 minutes of sleeping on your arm may damage the nerves which results in radial nerve palsy. I would have never imagined it would happen to me, heck, I had no idea it was a thing. I had limp arms before from compression but that was related to only blood circulation, not nerve damage.

Radial nerve palsy is a nightmare for programmers. The first one was so severe that I lost my muscle memory, meaning I could not access some of my accounts.

Treatment is rest, selective electrical stimulation, and B1-B6-B12 combination, ideally injected IM. The faster the better. The first incident took months to recover, this one may only last 3 weeks.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-23 14:29:35+00:00
When most people say "local" what they mean is "i'm running something on my laptop". That is to say, it's a random operating system, with a randomly set-up environment, with randomly installed tools. Could be different tools that have the same name but incompatible options. Could be any version (version 3 might be incompatible with version 4, but it's the same name for the command). And it will definitely change over time.

This will lead whatever steps you've recorded to 1) stop working on the existing "local" machine, and 2) be incompatible with other people's "local" machines. So the instructions have "rotted".

To avoid this you could write Ansible/Puppet to install and configure all the same tools, but that will break too over time too, and be a maintenance hassle. The only reliable solution is to use containers to run it all in; that guarantees the same version of everything. But at that point it's not really "running locally" anymore, it's running in the container, which is sort of its own bag of issues.

At that point you might as well have a SaaS tool to run your runbook in a cloud environment in containers or something, as that's way easier to set up and manage than either ansible/puppet, or Docker on everyone's machine (there's still a million tech "engineers" out there who don't understand containers).
by akadeb | 2025-04-23 14:30:23+00:00
The Elato toy is currently not aimed at children. The current version has adult characters that are entertaining and fun to engage with like the Chad Brew Barkley character in the videos. I put up more such funny videos on my tiktok tiktok.com/@elatoai

However, while testing it with a friend who has a 5-year old daughter, I added a `Story mode` feature to create dynamic stories for her which she enjoys.

I think what would be even cooler is if each character in a story has unique voices (like voice of an ogre, voice of an elf etc.) which is currently unsupported in the single websocket connnection.
by 13years | 2025-04-23 14:30:48+00:00
> GPT o3 is a better writer than most high school students at the time of graduation.

All of these claims, based on benchmarks, don't hold up in the real world on real world tasks. Which is strongly supportive of the statistical model. It will be capable of answering patterns extensively trained on. But is quickly breaks down when you step outside that distribution.

o3 is also a significant hallucinator. I spent quite a bit of time with it last weekend and found it to be probably far worse than any of the other top models. The catch is that it its hallucinations are quite sophisticated. Unless you are using it on material for which you are extremely knowledgeable, you won't know.

LLMs are probability machines. Which means they will mostly produce content that aligns to the common distribution of data. They don't analyze what is correct, but only what is probable completions for your text by common word distributions. But when scaled to incomprehensible scales of combinatorial patterns, it does create a convincing mimic of intelligence and it does have its uses.

But importantly, it diverges from the behaviors we would see in true intelligence in ways that make it inadequate for solving many of the kinds of tasks we are hoping to apply them to. The being namely the significant unpredictable behaviors. There is just no way to know what type of query/prompt will result in operating over concepts outside the training set.
by the_af | 2025-04-23 14:31:01+00:00
I dislike the sentiment in general, like you ("don't play god" holds no truck with us atheists), but in this case I think the article's skeptical view is not misplaced.

The root causes must be addressed, this is just a bandaid (if it works at all). Whatever put Northern Rhinos at risk will still exist. They don't breed easily, what will change for the new hybrids, if they live at all? And if these Rhino hybrids don't behave (mating-wise) like a Northern Rhino, then what exactly has been achieved, other than breeding a look-alike?

Plus there's a whiff of marketing/publicity for these businesses like Colossal that I'm not thrilled about. Their "direwolf resurrection" project seems to me an entirely marketing-driven effort (as well as misleading), as is their mammoth project.

I admit I like the idea of "resurrecting" extinct species Jurassic Park-style for the sake of coolness, but is it wise and is it where our efforts should be spent? Instead of these "spectacular" efforts shouldn't we focus on conservation of species which can still be saved, and in changing the conditions that put them at risk?
by tlb | 2025-04-23 14:31:37+00:00
DRAM will also normally hold most of its data for 1000x longer than the rated (usually 60 ms) refresh time. This has sometimes been used to recover secrets from powered down computers. The rated refresh time is chosen to give near-zero errors over years of operation, accounting for worse-case leakage from any bit, but most bits leak much less than that.
by mrj | 2025-04-23 14:31:48+00:00
Instead of comfort I feel constantly annoyed that the language gives me so little that I have to produce more lines and very little in the way of convenience. It's a language that benefits a lot from AI completion, at least. Yeah, old code still looks the same as new code but that is due to a lack of progress on the language though.

I write an unfortunate amount of Go code.. because Go supports 2(?) of the features in this post (structural typing and generics, sort of, if you're feeling generous).

For example, circular imports aren't supported in Go at all. I run into this from time to time even if using an interface sometimes consts or other types are defined in the package as well and the whole thing has to be refactored. No way around it, has to be done.

Circular imports aren't encouraged in Python but Python never leaves you without options. Code can import types only while type checking or move imports out of the module level are quick workarounds. (I hope for typescripts `import type` someday.) That's what gives me a "comfort" feeling in Python, knowing that the language isn't likely to force me to work around the language design.
by hairama | 2025-04-23 14:31:53+00:00
At the end of 2023 Sony & Steam informed me that I spent hundreds of hours playing games.

“Hundreds of hours?!? With that much time I could learn to play the piano or speak Spanish! Hell, I could learn to code!”

I stumbled across Scrimba on a Reddit thread and signed up for the paid version after a few lessons: it was unlike anything I had tried in the past.

Now I’m able to build basic react apps but I have a much better understanding of what’s going on “under the hood”.

Have you thought about using it to introduce new hires to a codebase?
by Hamuko | 2025-04-23 14:32:09+00:00
Phil Schiller has actually made some comments about being less greedy, like possibly ratcheting down the 30% cut once the App Store started making serious revenue or not shaking down developers if they use external payment methods. Not that Schiller has actually made any changes at Apple to do any of the less greedy things.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22418828/apple-app-store-c...

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/25/apples-phil-schiller-co...
by ziofill | 2025-04-23 14:32:11+00:00
I’ll keep asking my ignorant questions since I found informed people: what about a basis of wavelets or some heterogeneous bag of functions (which could include linear, polynomial times Gaussian, and why not some harmonic functions too)? At the end of the day a functional basis might not need to be “well formed” like Fourier or some polynomial family. It just needs to do the job.
by fluoridation | 2025-04-23 14:32:31+00:00
Well, "what a digital image is" is a sequence of numbers. There's no single correct way to interpret the numbers, it depends on what you want to accomplish. If your digital image is a representation of, say, the dead components in an array of sensors, the signal processing theoretic interpretation of samples may not be useful as far as figuring out which sensors you should replace.
Show HN: Annotated Paper – Easily read, annotate, and understand research papers
by sabakhoj | 2025-04-23 14:32:48+00:00
Heya HN! I've been working on this side project for a few weeks and I decided to do a soft launch to share. It's open-source, so link to code below.

This is Annotated Paper. I mainly built this for myself as I was reading up on AI safety research to read research papers more effectively. I'm sharing it because it could be useful to anyone reading a decent amount of papers.

It allows you to: 1. Read your paper in a split-pane view, with some actions available in the right panel. 2. Ask questions with an AI copilot & get grounded responses that link back to the source PDF. 3. Add highlights & annotations to the PDF (hence, annotated paper). Highlighting any text also gives you a neat inline menu with quick actions. 4. Take notes in markdown format, quickly extracting snippets from the PDF 5. Tune the AI response - pick from concise, normal, and detailed response lengths. 6. Search over your knowledge base of uploaded PDFs.

Citations generation was somewhat complex. I setup a syntax I've called the citation protocol. It pushes the LLM to ground its response in footnote syntax, providing inline citations to any claims it's making about the paper. The response is streamed with grounded references, which I then use for reverse lookup in the source PDF.

Reverse-lookup from the citation to location in the PDF has been tricky, because the LLM-extracted text isn't always a match to the client-extracted text layers. So I do some fuzzy matching.

I created a split-pane view with the PDF, because I wanted to actually read the paper, not just upload it and treat it like a black box. For humans to gracefully _learn_ with AI, we should still read the source docs, rather than give up control.

It's not been super stress-tested, but should work decently on PDFs < 50 pages. No paywall at the moment, so give it a spin :). I'd love some feedback.

Note: I haven't yet developed a mobile view, because I don't think people meaningfully are reading papers on their phones. I may get to it eventually if there's demand.

Model: `gemini-2.5-pro`, because it's quite decent with reasoning & technical work. I do think adding model switching would be useful for diversity, depending on subject matter.

-----

GitHub repo: https://github.com/sabaimran/annotated-paper

Overall vision: https://annotatedpaper.khoj.dev/blog/manifesto

Citations protocol prompt: https://github.com/sabaimran/annotated-paper/blob/master/ser...

Request: Try out the app and let me know any feedback you might have. It's a pretty rough prototype at the moment!

If you've built anything similar for document processing, I'd love some advice on the reverse reference look-up or processing PDFs with images.

If you are reading a decent amount of papers, I'd love some insight into what your reading workflows look like currently, and which tools are already useful.

Thank you!