MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wat10000 | 2025-05-29 13:45:32+00:00
This really rubs me the wrong way. You're not that special. You're not an educational genius who has cracked the code for teaching kids how to read at years above their grade level. You put some effort into it and you have a kid with a great deal of natural ability. This is their achievement, not yours. The title should be "My 3-year-old learned to read like a 9-year-old."

Too many smart parents have smart kids, avoid completely neglecting them, and then talk about how great they are at teaching kids and how stupid The System is for failing to do this. Good on you for being there, and no doubt your effort helped out, but don't kid yourself. Your main contribution here is your DNA.
by thesuitonym | 2025-05-29 13:45:42+00:00
> You (and everyone else in the street), will get a notification that its outside for the next 30 minutes - miss it, and it'll go get delivered to a nearby pickup site.

That sounds terrible from just about every perspective. What about people who work during that 30 minutes? Or who have mobility concerns? What about a parent who's young child just fell asleep? Should they all have to go to the pickup site? And let's not kid ourselves, it's not going to be nearby. Especially if you live in a rural area. And how do you open the locker when you get there? Do you need another app that tracks your every movement? No thank you, please just leave the package at my door.
by amitu | 2025-05-29 13:46:03+00:00
So let's see, I am Amit Upadhyay, I am the (solo) founder and CEO of FifthTry, which is YC W21 company (we also have some other seed investment). We started with a documentation tool, the Notion like you mentioned, caveat: it was not WYSWYG, it was always based on a "language". The language was initially called ftd (FifthTry Document), and eventually fastn.com. fastn started as markdown++, but became a full stack web development language. We moved from being just a documentation tool to general purpose website building tool. FifthTry.com is now a hosting solution for fastn powered websites and webapps.

fastn is done in Rust, and has relatively small foot print. It is language, compiler, package manager, web server, wasm runner, all in one, and technically can run on say a mobile device, on a "Amazon Fire Stick" like mini TV module, you webcam and so on. fastn is probably the only web server you can run on those devices (not yet tested, but it should be).

The issue is those web servers do not have public IPs (nor should they, as that can expose them to security risks), so we are building a peer to peer network, an identity based network, so you do not have to have accessible IP/port to access the web service.

The network we are calling Kulfi net, and malai is a network toolkit for kulfi net, it exposes various services (TCP/HTTP) over kulfi net.

Kulfi itself is going to be a browser, that can talk kulfi protocol natively (as currently we need a "http bridge", eg kulfi.site that we are running, or you can install malai and run on your server).

Kulfi "browser", will also come with fastn built in, so you can run a web server on your phone and someone else can access that web server from another phone, talking http over kulfi protocol, and we can get near ideal networking solution (no intermediary, no need for public IP, etc).

Does this make sense?
by wltr | 2025-05-29 13:46:08+00:00
That actually looks like forcing their view, censoring you just because they might not like your position. Useful, you cannot do a thing. Your comment is simply gone. I might wanted to save it, but it’s no longer.

Yet, they did not bother to remove my useless neighbouring comment, only flagged it. I’m not surprised anymore. Not the first time I see this behaviour.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-29 13:46:20+00:00
> > Musk saw it coming with Twatter

> And although it's been turned private and delisted, it's estimated to be worth just a fraction of what he paid for it.

I'd just stick with "he tried to back out of it and had to be sued to buy it" as evidence that musk didn't forsee anything. It is a bit (darkly) amusing that the document required him to buy the company buy not pay the severance listed in it when firing people.

Although if Grok was a standalone company I think it's hard to argue it'd valued less than 44 billion so Musk really lucked into a great deal. He also really lucked into Biden not stepping down earlier so the Democrats would run an actual competitive primary.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-29 13:46:30+00:00
There is a 'human' process 'somewhere in the middle' as you say.

I'm not anti-capitalist, I just acknowledge this as a fundamental part of the human process. It might even be the case the businessman's incentive don't fully align with the stockholder/owner's incentive, in many case the businessman can profit at the expense of the company by capturing higher commission with side-effects that the company won't understand.

A clever businessman will get the better end of that, while still leaving his customer better off than if he hadn't transacted at all, as many witness at the car dealership.
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-05-29 13:47:14+00:00
What a stupid thing to say. If he's bored the teacher can advance his grade faster or at least give him personally more challenging material.

Should we never teach anyone anything, just to avoid they'll be bored when they see something they already know? Is starting to learn at 6 objectively "better" than at 2? No, that's just how our system currently works. And what you're saying is you want your kid to be mediocre. Great, but the rest of us are aiming higher.
by sampullman | 2025-05-29 13:47:29+00:00
What do you mean? I use AI plenty and am aware of the capabilities.

AI will give good surface level advice and sometimes point to decent sources. If I'm looking for e.g. a good hike in a specific area near me, I know the blogs that will have directions, pics, and GPX data for all the routes. These are found via word of mouth, search, and local forums.
by avidphantasm | 2025-05-29 13:47:34+00:00
Came here to say this. Well said. Also language skills and reading have a complicated relationship. My daughter was saying sentences like “no suppository for me!” when she was two (she had constipation issues). But is now seven and while she still has excellent verbal skills, reading is coming slowly for her, though she can read and is making progress, it’s just slower than her classmates. Her school district has high standards (students on average read at two years above grade level). However, I wonder if this push to have kids read at younger and younger ages is not appropriate and harmful at some point. We were warned by our OT upon entering kindergarten that the curriculum will have the kids do things that are not developmentally appropriate. Also, my daughter has a mid spring birthday, so she’s 6 months younger than many of her classmates, which at this age still matters I think.

I think the theory is that it’s okay if the bucket overflows, at least it’s full. However, I worry that pushing kids to do too much too early can make it hard for them to build confidence and enthusiasm for reading and learning in general.
by dasil003 | 2025-05-29 13:47:45+00:00
I always had more respect for Nielsen’s lineage of human-computer interaction than I did for Nielsen himself. At the time I remember thinking how neither designers nor classic HCI people (or programmers) really got the web. Nielsen was at least focused on the web, but the problem is that he was fixated on user expectations for a brand new medium without recognizing that it was early days and would inevitably evolve. He would say stuff like “hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined” because that’s what users expect, without realizing that at that point in time we were still so early in the adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply such rigid rules.
by throwaway5028 | 2025-05-29 13:47:47+00:00
Datapoint from a late-twenties Ph.D. student in AI:

During my formative years studying pure math, I learned that the hard work of _caring to understand_ is rewarded---for example, by your internal sense of beauty and by the enthusiasm of other mathematicians.

For my Ph.D. I decided to try bringing the mathematical toolbox to the field of artificial intelligence, which seemed to be facing some interesting problems. Overall, the message I've received loud and clear is that understanding is _not rewarded_ in this field, and actually discouraged.

The work of an outwardly successful machine learning scientist is to make incremental improvements to well-established methods and package the results in easily marketable papers. Learning about and using previous work is rewarded to the extent that it improves marketability (for example, by improving Greek alphabet or \displaymath density) but is discouraged if standing on the shoulders of giants in this way renders the paper incomprehensible to a goldfish with a knowledge of high school algebra.

I think it's clear that our current paradigm on deep learning is struggling to make scientific progress. The hard work of reshaping a paradigm must involve looking back and _caring_ about the perspectives that have been developed over the last 60-odd years. Learning other points of view is hard work, but it's what you're supposed to do as a scientist! Unfortunately, it's hard to overstate how little people care about anything beyond their diminutive research niche. (I had one colleague who said their work hasn't been intellectually demanding ever since LLMs got good at writing pytorch code and others who seem to feel that LLMs are "experts on math.") Every day I look at my own research group and the boatload of "top conference papers" and feel sad and angry that we call this science.

It's certainly poetic that LLMs---the emblem of people who don't care---is backed by a "research community" that, on average, doesn't know what it means to care about science.
by lynndotpy | 2025-05-29 13:48:12+00:00
Yeah, I thought this was one of those critiques of the enshittified web.

I think this website is bad, but I also think it is very funny to have:

(1) a banner about print editions (2) a cookie consent u (3) a header 'Good Internet' peeking through the now-familiar modern hallmarks of the bad internet, and (4) the first four words of the headline, which is being eclipsed by the cookie popup (5) Once you remove the cookie banner, there is now also a persistent cookie settings button, and a persistent "+ Become a Member" button.

taylor.town is a very good internet website by comparison
by Coeur | 2025-05-29 13:48:28+00:00
"Lane-departure detection, front-collision avoidance, adaptive cruise control, emergency break assist—all of these features are powered by lidar."

That's not true. Lane-departure detection uses mostly radar and cameras, adaptive cruise control usually uses radar and sometimes cameras, and emergency break assist is often just a brake pedal sensor. Front-collision avoidance uses lidar in some cars from the last 2 years.

Lidar might very much be needed for full self driving, but it not yet used in many cars on the road today.

The writer does not have all his facts straight.
by programjames | 2025-05-29 13:49:16+00:00
This is the same reason people don't take calculus in ninth grade, or organic chemistry in tenth. "What will you do if you run out of classes?" I don't know, learn on your own? And once you run out of learning, do your own reseach? You cannot simultaneously view school as a place to advance your child's learning, and also a place you need to hold off on their learning for. Pick one, and if you pick the latter, admit to yourself that they're not going to school, they're getting babysat.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-05-29 13:49:20+00:00
You conceivably need more than that. You need to know the location (NOT just the time zone) where it will occur, the time zone that location was in when the meeting was created, and the time zone that location is in when the meeting actually happens. The users' systems or whatever does final display need to know their own time zone(s), and how to convert.

Say, for a somewhat annoying-case example, you want to store a meeting date/time that's in the future, in January, in the city of New York, New York, USA, with remote participants elsewhere in New York state. Sometime in between when the calendar invite is created and the meeting the city of New York decides to change to be on permanent Daylight Savings Time, but the rest of New York state doesn't change. If you stored only the UTC time and "America/New York" you now have an ambiguous meeting date/time, since the "America/New York" time zone split and the city of NY is an hour off from the rest of NY for part of the year, and your remote participants could get the wrong time.

There's probably an even worse case involving the death of a Japanese emperor, since the "period" portion of a Japanese date is the imperial name of the emperor who ruled at that time, and that gets retroactively applied to dates between when the new emperor's coronation and when they took their new imperial name.
by amitu | 2025-05-29 13:49:32+00:00
Looks like you got sucked into the fastn world. It's an open source full stack web development programming language we have created: fastn.com. We are building some fastn powered full stack, reusable apps, that you can plug in any fastn powered website at https://github.com/fifthtry-community.

The website, kulfi.app and malai.sh, and fastn.com itself, and FifthTry.com as well are all built using fastn.
by exceptione | 2025-05-29 13:49:49+00:00
janjones, can you please advocate inside your team for taking F# seriously? It should have been a first class language inside .net.

I dread the moment C# introduces sum types (long overdue) and then have them incompatible with F#. On a general note, the total disregard towards F# is very much undeserved. It is far superior to the likes of Python, and would easily be the best in the areas of machine learning and scripting, but apparently nobody inside MS is that visionary.
by jorvi | 2025-05-29 13:51:18+00:00
> Assuming you mean Neil Postman?

Yes, my bad. Edited!

> I just want to remove my compulsive internet usage. Even if I'm reading The New Yorker, it's still because I've defaulted to consuming media on the internet in an empty moment.

That's the skill of allowing yourself to be bored. Another thing you can learn, with enough effort.

Making your browser much less accessible on your phone helps a lot. Either lock the use to 30m per day with digital wellbeing settings, or just make it a chore to get to it (always force close, put it a screen away / in a folder / in another profile).
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-05-29 13:51:53+00:00
I think the use of batteries installed for renewables when renewables are low is an underappreciated win so good to see that discussed.

However, I don't understand how letting the batteries charge from gas turbines can increase the gas burned by 10x compared with building enough turbines to do it without using the batteries.

Surely it would just be the percentage round trip loss from storing it in the battery? So more like 10% extra than 10x more.

The footnote #6 suggests the model might just be blindly running the gas turbines once batteries are at 70% rather than predicting based on weather that the batteries would empty so maybe that explains it?
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-29 13:52:13+00:00
Obviously, but 2 beers per day has significant health risks, not to mention the other risks such as becoming alcoholic and all the societal costs that come with that. And seems like an odd habit to cultivate for a country that wants to pay for its citizens’ healthcare.

The same reasoning applies for daily consumption of high amounts of calories from sweet drinks and snacks.

There is a large spectrum between this and rabbit food.
by WillAdams | 2025-05-29 13:52:28+00:00
The problem of course is how does one continue such a trajectory?

Dividing classes up by reading level is a major factor in reducing problems in a classroom --- but it's only feasible where the number of classes offered and class sizes and school size/budget allow.

The best school system I ever attended extended that to dividing classes betwixt academic and social --- social classes were attended at one's age level (homeroom, civics/social studies, PE, &c.), while academic classes (math, science, English/reading) were attended at one's ability level, with a 4 grade cap until 8th grade --- after that, the school had faculty who were accredited by a local college and there was a mechanism to either bring professors from that college to the school, or to take students to the college for classes --- it was not uncommon for students to graduate and be simultaneously awarded a BS or BA or BFA along with their high school diploma.
by the_af | 2025-05-29 13:53:02+00:00
> From your POV and mine yes. From their POV no. Clearly that's why they did it.

No. You're confusing what someone mistakenly believes with the quality of the idea.

In this case, the POV doesn't change that this was a bad idea. Someone can think at the time something was a good idea, but this doesn't make it so, especially if it was demonstrably a bad idea. Few cases are clearcut, but this was.

The Heaven's Gate cultists thought their souls would get uploaded, that's why they killed themselves. Their souls weren't uploaded; therefore by their own logic committing suicide turned out to be a bad idea. They just aren't here anymore to reconsider, which demonstrates it was worse than a bad idea: it was a terminally bad idea.

Another example that POV doesn't necessarily change the quality of an idea: a toddler finding and handling their parent's loaded gun is objectively a bad idea (as is the parents leaving loaded guns within reach of toddlers, if they did it on purpose out of carelessness). The toddler may not know, from their POV, that this is dangerous; but this doesn't make it a good idea.

Some ideas can change with the POV, but you're mistaken in believing every idea does.
by n2d4 | 2025-05-29 13:53:22+00:00
"All rights reserved" no longer means anything anymore. In the past, you had to state that you want to reserve copyright, but now this has become the default even if you say nothing.

Either way, this does not conflict with GPLv3; if the author decides to reserve all rights, and then use their reserved right to license the work under a certain license like GPLv3, that is totally fine. Notably, the phrase "All rights reserved" does not recapture any rights that you don't have. It is the same logic under which you're allowed to license your own GPLv3 code under a proprietary, non-FOSS license, but that doesn't revoke the GPLv3 license itself.
by MBCook | 2025-05-29 13:53:48+00:00
It could be used electron more of party X, which could be used to get enough votes to make new laws to try to effect voting on a national level.

It is more tenuous than the others in the list, but I suspect it could be used.

And either way it had the psychological effect of people knowing their vote may not count because they vote for the wrong party in their district and have no chance of their candidate winning.
by amitu | 2025-05-29 13:54:36+00:00
It's open source. Or not depending on any company[1]. The overall malai/kulfi project is quite different than these projects, malai itself can be compared with these two maybe.

[1]: we are built on top of https://www.iroh.computer so their caveats apply, and while we do run a http-over-kulfi over http-over-tcp bridge, you do not have to use it, you can run your own, and soon when kulfi browser is ready, you will not need the bridge. Checkout this work in progress kulfi browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_GmbtxCHw
by teleforce | 2025-05-29 13:54:48+00:00
AI has an unpopular but really clever cousin namely intelligent automation (IA). They're already helping the humanity since we know how to automate [1],[2],[3],[4].

[1] Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming: A Fruitful Collaboration - John Hooker - CMU (2023) [video]:

https://www.youtube.com/live/TknN8fCQvRk

[2] "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman - MIT (2011) [video]:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI

[3] Google OR-Tools:

https://developers.google.com/optimization

[4] MiniZinc:

https://www.minizinc.org/
by layer8 | 2025-05-29 13:55:00+00:00
The talk about pixels is misleading. The research paper doesn't mention pixels. They attached a 3x3 array of piezoelectric elements (roughly 3 cm in diameter each) behind a 13" OLED panel (one picture also shows a 5x4 array), using a sturdy frame structure to minimize interference of acoustic vibrations between the 9 (or 20) elements of the array.

Not to say that this isn't interesting, but it’s not display pixels emitting sound.
by devilbunny | 2025-05-29 13:55:02+00:00
Rebreathers may feature slightly elevated oxygen levels vis-a-vis standard air (you need a lot of knowledge to use one safely, so presumably anyone diving a rebreather has done the far simpler courses for nitrox or trimix, both of which are used for limiting nitrogen narcosis), but for military divers it's much more about the lack of bubbles and noise.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-29 13:55:12+00:00
I dunno about obsoleting LINQPad yet. Half the power on LINQPad is its UI; I'd like to see how comparable VSCode / VS are with dotnet run vs LINQPad.

IE: LINQPad has a great way to visualize results. If dotnet run only outputs text, or otherwise requires a lot of plugins to visualize an object graph, there will still be quite a niche for LINQPad.

In contrast, if all you're using LINQPad for is to double-check syntax, then dotnet run might be a better option. (Sometimes if I'm "in the zone" and unsure about syntax that I use infrequently, I'll write a test LINQPad script.)
by WillAdams | 2025-05-29 13:55:26+00:00
I actually attended a school system which had a system in place for that --- see my post elsethread.

Unfortunately, the Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it to be an unfair and illegal educational system which conferred undue benefits to the students able to take advantage of it and that the lack of a commensurate compensation for students who were unable to do so was manifestly inappropriate.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-29 13:55:33+00:00
> all stand-ins for a lack of BE engineering.

Well, yes, any dependency is technically a "lack of engineering". That's kinda the point - engineering capacity is limited and should be directed towards core business differentiators, not generic infrastructure.

That said, Auth is not really like all the rest of the services. It's special in that it controls all access to everything else making it the load-bearing stone in your entire architecture. Fundamental mistakes in your user auth model tend to be very very hard to unwind. So take the time to do the engineering work (thinking) even if you eventually outsource to a hosted provider - at least you'll know what you're outsourcing and the implications.
by bobsingor | 2025-05-29 13:55:38+00:00
I just open-sourced EmbedPDF, a modern JavaScript PDF viewer that uses PDFium compiled to WebAssembly — not PDF.js.

If you've ever tried to deeply customize PDF.js or needed high-fidelity rendering, you’ve probably hit its limits. And when looking for alternatives, most roads lead to Apryse (formerly PDFTron) or Nutrient (formerly PSPDFKit) — both powerful, but closed-source and expensive.

There hasn’t really been a good middle ground — until now.

GitHub: https://github.com/embedpdf/embed-pdf-viewer

Demo & Docs: https://www.embedpdf.com
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-29 13:55:44+00:00
Not always. I love it when people offer me a much simpler solution to a problem I overengineered, so I can throw away my solution and use the simpler one.

Half the time people are suggested a better way, it's because they're actually doing it wrong, they've gotten the solution's requirements all wrong in the first place, and this perspective helps.