MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshvm | 2025-04-29 07:46:54+00:00
Translated stories are sometimes called Graded Readers, you can buy them aligned with most common language levels (CEFR, JLPT, etc)

Subtitles though, tricky. The sites that sync with Netflix are probably better than whatever Netflix offers, or whatever you can get that comes with your video files. Subtitles for entertainment are often abbreviated, which is fine for your native language, but it doesn't help if you want to look up a sentence. You need the crowdsourced ones. YouTube can be better in this regard, especially if they're automatically generated. There are also lists of video games floating around that rank games based on the availability of a script, replayable dialogue, that sort of thing. See Game Gengo for a Japanese example [1] (great channel, he also does lessons with all the vocab + grammar in context using games).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXICXCSIfrQ
by makingstuffs | 2025-04-29 07:47:01+00:00
Yeah, I really don’t get all the hate towards DuoLingo on this site. Granted, it isn’t going to make you fluent alone but it is very good at keeping you sharp and getting your feet wet.

Name one sole app/course which will teach you absolutely everything there is to know about a given subject. There are none. All learning needs multiple avenues in order to be effective.

Even if you take part in a course with tutors they will you to practice out of the course and in your own time. Personally I found DuoLingo to be extremely helpful in getting the basics of Hindi down.
by sofixa | 2025-04-29 07:47:08+00:00
The top (in the world) 2 airline reservation system Amadeus have ported everything to Kubernetes for years now. In fact they were among the top contributors to the project a few years back.

It's all a matter of age and maturity. Nobody starting an airline, or financial company, or "hardcore data processing" today even bothers considering a mainframe or COBOL.
by rikroots | 2025-04-29 07:47:24+00:00
I code at work so they can give me money so I can buy the stuff I need to carry on living. I have very generous employers who pay me a lot more money than I need to live on. The code I write at work is not very creative code - I contribute bugfixes and incremental improvements; I advocate for better accessibility of our products; I spend time code reviewing for colleagues. Standard work.

When the working day ends I switch from my work laptop to my personal laptop and start doing fun stuff: creative coding; curious-itch-scratch coding; etc. I'll also spend time doing the other fun stuff like writing poems, inventing languages, drawing maps, watching reaction videos - there's all that family and friend stuff too which can (often) be fun.

It's a choice: "live-to-work", or "work-to-live". I choose living. Recently my employers had a promotion round (the first in a few years) and I told my manager not to put my name forward for consideration. I'm comfortable at my current level and don't need the worries and stresses that come with increased work responsibilities - that would just get in the way of the fun stuff!
by hdjrudni | 2025-04-29 07:47:38+00:00
I think it's rather unpleasant for her use-case actually. I rainbow looks quite nice but when used in a dashboard like that... I don't know, the big solid blocks don't look nice to me. I think they're too saturated. They're nicer for the (outlined) squares and lines, not so nice in the donut graph and for the header backgrounds.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-29 07:47:59+00:00
"Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality."

This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.

It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)
by switch007 | 2025-04-29 07:49:22+00:00
Exactly. Duolingo is a dopamine-delivery, feel-good game app for people who want to waste time but not feel too guilty about it. It's not for learning a language.

Intermediate and advanced language learning requires interaction with humans.

It's great for those who don't want to interact with humans or feel awkward during a human exchange. It's a safe space
by dsego | 2025-04-29 07:49:28+00:00
The same type of scams now exist for almost anything, I know you have to be careful when buying digital vignettes for motorways across europe. There are official websites and then there are these official looking 3rd party websites that try to trick you into paying several times more for the same thing. Of course, the scummy ones spend more on SEO and ads to get to the top.
by Tangokat | 2025-04-29 07:49:31+00:00
Are these LLM models going the way of search and social media? Optimize them for selling product, optimize them for engagement (to sell products). They become ad machines - and it's gonna be really hard to tell. There is already evidence [1] that you can optimize LLMs for engagement. Hopefully open source can keep this in check... but I'm not optimistic.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.06135 - Rewarding Chatbots for Real-World Engagement with Millions of Users
by Ezhik | 2025-04-29 07:51:38+00:00
Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".

I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.
by beingfit | 2025-04-29 07:51:44+00:00
Congrats on this launch! I love that there is no data tracking and collection outside of the device (it’s always a plus point). However, after downloading the app, I don’t understand the following in the Setup menu screens. Please look at these from a newbie perspective.

1. Time Period — not sure what this refers to. Why is the maximum only 30 days or one month? I think some text to explain that screen would help.

2. Resting Heart Rate — I don’t know what to choose and there is no information or link to sources that could help decide.

3. Metrics and Goals — what time period are those goals over? Is that related to the Time Period setting? Or is it weekly? Why are there goals and toggles for “Vigorous Exercise” and “Moderate Exercise” in addition to the zone wise toggles? How do these overlap with the zones? Again, reducing the goals and toggles and/or adding text and/or reorganizing this may help (for example, “Vigorous Exercise” could just be a heading for zone 5 and zone 4, “Moderate Exercise” could just be a heading for zone 3 and zone 2 — I don’t know if this even makes sense).

As someone else said, an onboarding flow with explanations and choices for settings could really help (and the user could be instructed that if needed, they can change these in settings later).

Looking at my “Vigorous Exercise” number on the main screen, I don’t know if I should aim to increase it or not. Some guidance on what goals to aim for, with the caveat that the user should consult a medical professional to decide on exercises appropriate for them, would also be useful.

Edit: I see that there’s some information in the Help & FAQ and About pages linked from the i (information) button, but it doesn’t cover everything from my feedback above. I still think these should be in the onboarding flow and easily accessible again within the app (without opening a web page).
by exar0815 | 2025-04-29 07:52:21+00:00
Can't answer for aluminium, but I can answer for window glass: One of our plants was threatened by massive flooding 2021, threatening the float glass oven (which doesn't float itself despite the name). It was closed off with insulation, turned off, and everyone hoped for the best and no steam explosion. In the end, only the cellars with the control equipment flooded and it could be gradually (as the control cabinets were checked and restarted) brought up again without loosing too much heat a day later.

In short: Heat Inertia of large molten bodies is massive with good insulation. If the time is too long tho, only dynamite will dismantle a solid chunk of material again.
by JimDabell | 2025-04-29 07:52:42+00:00
I didn’t mention any of that because none of it is relevant to the point I was making about design.

> You wrote the story as it is being told instead of how it happened.

I did the opposite of that. I was very clearly and specifically recounting an aspect of the situation that is not being told today. When was the last time you heard somebody talk about how CSS could only create “boring, boxy” designs? It’s got to be about twenty years for me. It’s practically forgotten. Pointing that out was the whole purpose of my comment.

Both of your replies to me in this thread are about that chip on your shoulder, not about what I am saying. You should post your own thoughts as a top-level comment like I did, not get angry with me for not talking about what you want to talk about.
by eden-u4 | 2025-04-29 07:53:56+00:00
I dunno, these reasoning models seems kinda "dumb" because they try to bootstrap itself via reasoning, even though a simple direct answer might not exist (for example key information are missing for a proper answer).

Ask something like: "Ravioli: x = y: France, what could be x and y?" (it thought for 500s and the answers were "weird")

Or "Order from left to right these items ..." and give partial information on their relative position, eg Laptop is on the left of the cup and the cup is between the phone and the notebook. (Didn't have enough patience nor time to wait the thinking procedure for this)
by bob1029 | 2025-04-29 07:54:01+00:00
In some cases they don't have any practical ability to.

The Texas winter storm resulted in a lot of scrap at semiconductor lines due to power loss. There are industries that are completely dependent on grid power. You can't generate enough on site to back up 100% of your operation. Think about how much power one EUV source consumes.

The only reason Samsung is building additional factories in Texas is because the local utilities are effectively treating them as a critical load. The new plants are right by the ERCOT operation center and likely have access to the same cranking paths that the grid uses for black starts.
by snorremd | 2025-04-29 07:54:17+00:00
I love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them. This means I'm much less likely to click on Medium.com links and other monetized blogs and sites. Often times the good content is on some personal website where the creator doesn't really care about earning money off it.

Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.

Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.
by camillomiller | 2025-04-29 07:54:47+00:00
Try not living in the US/UK and looking for results in languages different than English. The sad, sad, sad reality is that Google is still best at these type of searches. That comes, alas, with a ton of useless and often half-scammy sponsored links on top of any SERP, plus now also some awful AI-overview results that are even worse than English (but there's the cheat code for that, at least).

So the only doable thing here is Google + Ublock + Anti-AI Konami Code.

Possibly the best ever depiction of Enshittification in practice.
by peterbecich | 2025-04-29 07:54:57+00:00
It is a privilege to attend college and learn there. It exists on a different plane than strictly meeting job requirements; I think it is unfortunate when people reduce it to merely that. Young people are under a lot of pressure and these statements may just be venting. That being said, it is a privilege that is getting very expensive for many people.

If the claim is that all of the knowledge can be gained online, I will counter that is the difference between popular-ABC and real-ABC for any given subject ABC. The college forces you to round out your skill set into subjects you might otherwise ignore.
by nicbou | 2025-04-29 07:56:59+00:00
It's niche and boring, but I help immigrants pick German health insurance.

The existing information is mostly blogspam from non-experts who try to make a quick buck. They only recommend the two brands with an affiliate program.

I wrote a better guide with help from competing insurance experts. The information is clear and succinct without oversimplifying things. It addresses the specific needs of immigrants.

Then I turned the advice into an interactive recommendation tool. People get clear, specific advice in a few seconds.

The best advice is "don't choose yourself, talk to a broker". The problem is finding a honest one. It took me years to vet a good one. After testing him for a year, I have set up an affiliate partnership from scratch with him. The partnership incentivises honesty and neutrality, because he has a lot of skin in the game.

I'm super excited about it. I can't overstate how much of an improvement it will be. Readers get far better advice and easy access to an expert. The broker gets a steady stream of well-informed leads. I get a commission for my trouble. It's a win-win-win situation.
by zsoltkacsandi | 2025-04-29 07:57:35+00:00
> Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. ... It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages

No it's not. It's not even an approach, it's a method to improve a subset of skills, you need to complement it with other methods to improve your other skills in a given language.

While I agree that Duolingo can be counterproductive for language learning, but it's not because of the "translation", but that they do not communicate two things clearly:

- this alone won't make you a fluent speaker (or reach your goal, whatever it would be), you need to complement it with other methods/materials

- at what point you should move on from Duolingo
by lodovic | 2025-04-29 07:57:50+00:00
I was inspired by this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43745615 and built a simple workflow to process all my photos: for each photo it generates a text description, a list of keywords, and the mood.

My plan for the next step is to detect faces, ask the user to label the most occurring faces, and then label all images accordingly. This step seems a bit harder than just feeding the image through Gemini and asking it to create labels.
by roflmaostc | 2025-04-29 07:58:26+00:00
I recently switched to the Kagi ultimate plan.

Since I almost considered getting a paid AI service, with Kagi I get the freedom to choose different models + I get a nice interface for search, translate, ... With Kagi the AI service also does not know who I am.

I'm quite happy so far, also the Android app works fine. 95% of the time I don't open a browser but instead the app to answer my questions.

The privacy feature somehow did not work in my firefox browser yet.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-04-29 07:58:43+00:00
Or maybe I'm better at selecting the right keywords? Or maybe I search like a real person and not like a researcher that is only talking about product reviews?

> They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.

Besides "signs of lower text quality", this doesn't in fact say much about the quality of the results at all. Seems like their research is pretty low quality too.
by sshine | 2025-04-29 07:58:48+00:00
How so?

I have Kagi set as the default search engine in the Orion browser.

The main problem I experience on iOS is that apps that open websites will pick Safari, and not my default browser. I'm sure they have some legitimate excuse, like "the app developer made that choice", or "that other browser doesn't support the right API" or whatever bullshit that makes the default browser not the default.
by kaoD | 2025-04-29 07:59:26+00:00
Personally (anecdata) I haven't experienced any practical progress in my day-to-day tasks for a long time, no matter how good they became at gaming the benchmarks.

They keep being impressive at what they're good at (aggregating sources to solve a very well known problem) and terrible at what they're bad at (actually thinking through novel problems or old problems with few sources).

E.g. all ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini were absolutely terrible at generating Liquidsoap[0] scripts. It's not even that complex, but there's very little information to ingest about the problem space, so you can actually tell they are not "thinking".

[0] https://www.liquidsoap.info/
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-04-29 07:59:52+00:00
I managed to break production before vibe coding was cool.

20 years old me had rm -fr root access to way too many systems.

I don't think it's much different today.

If anything, I think the youngsters will learn faster from their mistakes because they already have good mentor for the easy stuff and will get grinded on the hard stuff sooner.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-29 08:00:06+00:00
> love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them

One of the things I love about Kagi is it isn't overly opinionated. I'm not particularly sensitive to this issue. You are. Yet until this comment, I didn't notice that Kagi was doing this. It informed you. It didn't get it in my way. That's good design.

> Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.

The ad-driven search engines refusing to implement this really drives home their conflicts of interest.
by senko | 2025-04-29 08:00:56+00:00
Hello from Croatia. While most of my searches are in English, I just did a few searches for local topics, in Croatian, and find the results comparable.

I do assume Google is faster to index and has a larger index, so finding very new, or obscure, pages in non-english languages will probably be worse in Kagi. For those niche cases I have !g
by mrweasel | 2025-04-29 08:01:12+00:00
When trying the "travel to UK." in Google I get the same result as suggested in the article. The issue is the "Sponsored" results (which is a stupid name for scams). They take up the entire page and are obviously not what you're searching for, but some of them seems official enough, if you don't know that everything from the UK government follow a very specific design language and will alway be under gov.uk.

My parents ran into the same issue trying to cancel a subscription, some scammer buys the first results, makes it look decent enough, but then charges you €100 for an otherwise free service. The real result is down below the "Sponsored" links.

Trying the same search on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will yield ads for hotels, AirBNB and organized tours, which are related to travelling to the UK, but it's clearly not related to ETA.

In the article there's a quote: "Google has worked hard to eliminate truly fraudulent websites from ending up in its results," ... Yes, from their search results, if you want to run your scam on Google you have to pay them, but if you do they'll move your page to the top.

Google is actively enabling scammers at this point, don't support them, switch to basically ANY other search engine. I don't care if it's Bing, that still way better than Google at this point.
by booi | 2025-04-29 08:04:06+00:00
Yah it's BART that uses an odd track gauge. Although I did read a report saying they did it to make the trains both lighter and also able to withstand wind shear in certain parts of the system.

To be honest though, I didn't find that report very compelling and they didn't back it up with actual load calculations. You really don't hear standard trains being blown over and the Bay Area isn't exactly famous for "high winds" anyway
by shoo | 2025-04-29 08:04:35+00:00
It's unclear if increasing the dimensionality is in itself a challenge, provided that the objective function is still convex with a unique global minima -- like these somewhat problematic Rosenbrock test objective functions used in examples in the article.

On another hand, if the objective function is very multimodal with many "red herring" local minima, perhaps an optimiser that is very good at finding the local minima might do worse in practice at globally optimising than an optimiser that sometimes "barrels" out of the basin of a local minima and accidentally falls into a neighbouring basin around a lower minima.

I ran a few numerical experiments using scipy's "rosen" test function [1] as the objective, in D=10,000 dimensions. This function has a unique global minimum of 0 which is attained at x* = 1_D. I set the initial guess as x0 := x* + eps_i, where for each element i=1,...d, eps_i is noise sampled from N(0, 0.05)

Repeating this over 100 trial problems, using the same initial guess x0 across each method during each trial, the average number of gradient evaluations required for convergence was

'cg': 248 'l-bfgs-b': 40 'm-001-99': 3337

All methods converged in 100 / 100 trials.

m-001-99 is gradient descent with momentum using alpha=0.001 and beta=0.99 . Setting alpha=0.002 or higher causes momentum to fail to converge. The other two methods are scipy's cg & l-bfgs-b methods using default parameters (again, under the hood these two methods rely on a port of MINPACK2's dcsrch to determine the step size along the descent direction during each iteration, they're not using momentum updates or a fixed step size). I used l-bfgs-b instead of bfgs to avoid maintaining the dense D*D matrix for the approx inverse Hessian.

One point in momentum's favour was robustness to higher noise levels used to generate the initial guess -- if the noise level used to define the initial guess x0 is increased to N(0, 1) then I see the cg & l-bfgs-b methods fail to converge in around 20% of trial problems, while momentum fails a lower fraction of the time provided the fixed step size is set small enough, but still requires a very large number of gradient evaluations to converge.

[1] https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.o...
by arnsholt | 2025-04-29 08:05:05+00:00
Classical Greek is well outside my field, but one of the things I love about SpecGram when it deals with things I do know, the jokes also have a kernel of truth to them. And in other classical languages I'm more familiar with, there is (IMO) an argument to be made that the texts should be translated more "orally" than they frequently are. There are probably many reasons for this, but I think one of them is that because they are Classical and Important there's a sense of reverence that makes us want to translate them Seriously(tm).

Of course you're entirely right that Greek particles are not some unfathomable mystery. The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles).
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-29 08:06:10+00:00
> Recently I rewrote the b-tree to simply use a vec of internal nodes

Doesn't this also require you to correctly and efficiently implement (equivalents of C's) malloc() and free()? IIUC your requirements are more constrained, in that malloc() will only ever be called with a single block size, meaning you could just maintain a stack of free indices -- though if tree nodes are comparable in size to integers this increases memory usage by a significant fraction.

(I just checked and Rust has unions, but they require unsafe. So, on pain of unsafe, you could implement a "traditional" freelist-based allocator that stores the index of the next free block in-place inside the node.)