MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runarberg | 2025-05-25 20:42:30+00:00
I am restarting my free and open source SRS kanji learning app https://shodoku.app which is based on free and open source dictionary data and Anki’s FSRS algorithm.

What I have is a basic flash card app with double sided cards (for writing (i.e. drawing) the kanji, and reading). What sets it apart is that each card contains all the relevant dictionary data, and users are encourage to bookmark a couple of words to help them remember the writing or the reading of the kanji.

What I am working on now is the database backup/sync system. I store all the user’s progress in indexeddb store in their local browser. To sync I am writing a simple patch system, so they can pick a remote somewhere (e.g. a gist on github) and push their latest patches, when syncing progress I would check the hash of the patch and apply the relevant patches.

After that I am planning on turning it into a progressive web app so users can download the app onto their devises.

https://shodoku.app/

https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku
by nichol4s | 2025-05-25 20:42:43+00:00
Wow - indeed. I see you made something like this already back in 2012. Impressive: https://github.com/Lerc/notanos That is more than 13 years ago when websockets where about to become generally available. Impressive!

Don't be discouraged by people that argue what you should or should not do. The world is full with people with their own agenda or that simply have a too narrow view of how their world should operate.
by kryptoncalm | 2025-05-25 20:42:52+00:00
Building on that, instead of viewing retirement (age) from a cost perspective (i.e. we have x budget and y lifespan, hence retirement age is z), it would be refreshing to see a high-quality and long retirement as starting point, and then figure out how to organize for that. One way would be to reduce burden on services indeed. A low retirement age (for those who want it) is a sign of a wealthy nation and something to strive for.
by isthatafact | 2025-05-25 20:43:00+00:00
Why would that be a bad thing?

I guess I do not really understand the comment.

I think science is a good thing for society, and I think giving interested volunteers the chance to participate in science is good, and maybe it also helps keep science accessible and accountable. If it enables science to happen that would otherwise not happen, then that is even better.

And not all citizen science is about crowd-sourcing data analysis--some of it is simply observing your backyard.
by layer8 | 2025-05-25 20:43:18+00:00
Not sure about the drummer analogy, because we don’t type in a rhythm. Hands and feet can maintain the same rhythm, and that has the effect that their actions can coincide with high precision. For arhythmic actions, my experience is it’s more difficult to synchronize to the typical subsecond precision for typing. For example, drum your fingers on a table in sequence, and then try to replace one of the fingers with your foot. It is magnitudes slower. While training will improve it, I don’t think it will be able to match the finger drumming, unless you introduce a longer-running rhythm. Keyboard shortcuts are similar.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-05-25 20:44:07+00:00
Yah. Maybe I can't be helped. Shrug. I got aware of this, I don't know exactly when anymore, has to be about 15 years ago now, or even longer.

I wondered about why there were almost always cuban medics, doctors, nurses etc. in action, when there has been some larger catastropic event in the world, and you could see them in the media.

Why is that, I thought? That doesn't fit being sanctioned by the US(and vassals), being poor in general, and so on.

That's how I became aware of ELAM.

And made up my mind the way I described. Can't help it :-)
by trailbase-alt | 2025-05-25 20:44:08+00:00
I think it's fair criticism and certainly an area where TrailBase can improve (it's still young). FWIW, I used to avoid the "Firebase" comparison and be more descriptive with a long list of features. That confused a lot of folks. Firebase-like seemed to get the rough product-ballpark across more effectively. If I had to guess, I'd say Supabase probably arrived at a similar conclusion.

Either way, they are all rather broad products and many users only use subsets. Thanks for speaking up, appreciated.
by zacharycohn | 2025-05-25 20:46:46+00:00
https://www.moviemixup.com

A wordle-like game based on a road trip game my friends and I used to play. It serves you up a mashup of two different movie plots, and you have to guess the combined movie title. There's always some sort of shared word or wordplay between the two movie titles.

An example from the tutorial: the day after tomorrow never dies.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-25 20:47:13+00:00
The solution is, as always, simple: regulation. In this case:

- break up Ticketmaster, Live Nation and their European friends. Ban vertical integration. And for good measure (and to placate the public who is out for blood, and I mean that one in the literal sense - ask a random on the street about what they'd do to scalpers and TM, I'd bet good money on at least 50% going for one or another form of violence), place their execs behind bars for a decade.

- mandate that a ticket holder has the right to transfer a personalized ticket for free (plus, in the case of actual paper tickets, a reasonable small service charge for postal fees)

- in conjunction, ban the sale of tickets above face value, including any sort of deals, and place significant fines on violators of both ends. This completely eliminates the "second hand" scalper market. Of course, black markets will still crop up, but when both sides cannot be certain the opposing trade partner is a cop...

Unfortunately, this would also kill a lot of income for the big players - chiefly, the ticket sale platforms that currently make an insane amount of money on bogus charges for name changes on tickets as well as running their own resale markets where they can double or triple dip on fees (depending how often that specific ticket gets sold back for whatever reason). And that is why such a movement will probably never happen during our lifetime.
by meowtimemania | 2025-05-25 20:47:34+00:00
I'm guessing the type of immigration each country receives is very different.

e.g. some examples from this list (% immigrant population): - Qatar (76%) - Australia (30%) - Canada (23%) - Belgium (20%) - USA (15.2%) - Denmark (14.2%)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_im...
by prmph | 2025-05-25 20:47:40+00:00
Since I had so much trouble managing my entire digital information universe [1], I decided to scratch my itch and solve it for myself and maybe others as well. Here are my ideas about my product:

- Manages the entire range of personal (and maybe business) information/content: Documents, Media, Messages (email, instant, etc.), Contacts, Bookmarks, Calendar, etc.

- Is tag based, so that where to put and find content is easy to answer. Think of a set of flat folders, on one or more devices, within which the files are stored with tags attached. Since people often find navigating/browsing files more natural than searching, virtual folders will be dynamically generated to guide navigation. Also, entire folders can be treated as atomic, and tagged/managed as one object (useful for repositories & projects). And, heuristics (and maybe AI) will be used to automatically tag files when they are imported into the tool, greatly reducing the tedium of adding tags.

- Is file based, so that all information is physically stored as individual files. This allows information to be more easily managed on a physical level: moved around, backed up, exported/imported, searched, navigated, etc. So in addition to docs, each email/instant message, contact, scheduled task/event, bookmark, etc. would ultimately be stored as a file, unlocking all the things you can do with files.

- Has a local web-based UI launched from a local agent, so actual file content does not usually need to move across the network and stays local, and the tool is also easily multi-platform, with consistent UI irrespective of platform.

- Provides a cloud web UI as well, that communicates with content devices through the local agent, so that content stored across multiple devices can be managed in one central location, even without direct access to those devices, team/org features can be provided. However, file content still stays local, except when shared.

- Provides tools for exporting data as file from the data islands of various apps and service, and backing up as files to cloud storage services.

My vision is a situation where I am in charge of my own data irrespective of whatever device, app, or service I use, can ensure that it is always available and will not be lost, and that I can easily navigate and search through it all to find whatever I want, no matter how scattered and massive it is.

[1] Here are some of my issues with personal information management affordances of current tech, which is driving me to work on a solution:

- Our data is too bound to device and vendor islands. Can't easily move my information across Apple/Google/Whatsapp, etc accounts. Can't easily merge and de-duplicate either. I almost always somehow lose data whenever I have to move to a new phone, etc.

- Hard to own your data on many services: Discord, Slack, etc. Can't easily export, search.

- Hard to have a 360 overview and handle on all your data assets and query them in a consistent manner.

- Files as a unit of information storage and management is very ergonomic; we shouldn't allow that concept to be buried by vendors for their own gain.
by benhoyt | 2025-05-25 20:47:43+00:00
A program that will play chess (written in Go). My 18yo daughter can now beat me at chess (not that I'm any good). I figured if I can't beat her, I'll see if I can write a program to beat her instead. My idea for v1 is that I'd write the algorithm myself, without looking up anything about how to write a chess program (I'm sure such literature abounds). I've just about finished v1; still a few bugs to iron out. To be honest, I didn't find it all that fun, mainly because of all the special cases (all the castling rules and the like).
by rkagerer | 2025-05-25 20:47:48+00:00
I feel this take on it is a little over-dramatized. I empathize with the first part - connections are priceless when you're staring out - but in time you can and will build a reputation for your quality of work, interactions with (and then capability to manage) others, and achievement of results. All these can be developed at a no-name startup as well as at a FAANG.

I went to university but only apply maybe 5% of what I learned there in my day job. I founded and grew a company, also worked in senior roles at others. When I interview for engineering positions, I'm much more interested in other factors than what school you went to or who you've brushed shoulders with.

I recognize parent commenter's experience may be different, and give solid props for their self-taught journey. (In fact someone who can figure things out without having to be spoon fed is exactly the kind of person I want on the team).
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-25 20:47:52+00:00
Here's an X11 window manager, with pie menus and tabbed windows, entirely written in object oriented NeWS PostScript, from around 1991:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/owm.ps.txt

And some design notes and emails on that NeWS based window manager for X11 windows:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/i39l.txt

It incorporated NeWS tabbed windows written in PostScript, which could wrap around X11 windows (and frame NeWS windows too of course):

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/win/tab.ps

And NeWS pie menus written in PostScript, which you could pop up on tabbed window frames and manage X11 windows (and use in NeWS apps too of course):

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/win/pie.ps

There was also a virtual large scrolling desktop, and virtual multi-screen "rooms", both purely written in PostScript, which all plugged together with the tabbed windows and pie menus and X window manager seamlessly. They were all independent of each other and could be used separately, but worked together synergistically. Take that, ICCCM! ;)

Also here's a (pre-ICCCM, pre-X11) X10 window manager with pie menus, written in C and scripted in Forth, from around 1986:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/uwm/fuwm-main.f

And some of my thoughts on X-Windows and ICCCM window management in general:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

>In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry’s standard naked emperor.

>Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes." -Jamie Zawinski
by overgard | 2025-05-25 20:48:51+00:00
I mean, I'm not a mathematician but I don't expect that I should be able to write a proof.

You talk of memorizing syntax like its a challenge but excluding a small number of advanced languages no programmer thinks syntax is hard. But if you don't understand the basics how can you expect to be able to understand if the solution an LLM presents is decent and not rife with bugs (security and otherwise)

I guess my issue is people are confusing a shortcut with actually being able to do the thing. If you can't remember syntax I don't really want your code anywhere I care about
by cedws | 2025-05-25 20:49:33+00:00
I also wouldn’t disregard the experience of university itself. I went the self-taught route, left school at 16, built a career for myself to get to where I am now at 24, but I do have regrets. Going into working in an office basically terminated my youth right there and I haven’t had a social circle since. Not having debt is nice but if you can afford university both in terms of time and money, and come from a family you can fall back on, I’d say just go. Once you start work there’s no going back. You’re in the cold hard world.
by aleksiy123 | 2025-05-25 20:50:32+00:00
I feel like all these articles have this issues.

The hard part is in knowing which is which and I don't think anyone real has a tried and true solution for it.

I think because its really about correctly predicting the future in a n continually evolving environment.

Those "simple" solutions can be piled on top of each other turn into an absolute monstrosity over time.

And then engineered solution can be overengineered and overly complex when it turns out the problems it solves never ended up happening.

On top of that people don't even think of simplicity in the same way. One person's simple is another's overly complex.

What seems to work for me is try give yourself outs/alternative paths.

Hedge your bets by overengineering slightly on where you think there is more risk. And keep it simple where there is less risk. Then reevaluate.
by acidburnNSA | 2025-05-25 20:50:34+00:00
I recently quit my salary job after 16 years and am consulting in nuclear engineering now. I have a few passion projects that I'm working on (between the somewhat substantial consulting work that came out of the woodwork):

- Nuclear Reactor Starter Kit --- an open source set of procedures, processes, templates, and maybe even some IT advice that should help newcomers start companies with nuclear quality assurance programs easily and quickly while also making a new format in which nuclear companies can share lessons learned in efficiency.

- Reactor Database --- similar to the iaeas PRIS but focused on reactor development rather than power reactors. Will include nuclear startup company tracking with details gleaned from statements and maybe extrapolated where necessary from simple simulations. Will include things like fuel cost and licensing progress. This way people can more easily separate vaporware from real nuclear, and keep track of promises vs delivery.
by brookst | 2025-05-25 20:50:35+00:00
Yep. That 30% is a bad use of statistics.

28 degrees Celsius is not 30% warmer than 21 degrees Celsius. This same stat rendered in Fahrenheit would say 70 degrees -> 82 degrees, or 17%. In kelvin it would be 294 -> 301, or 2.3%

Or we could invent a new measure indexed to Celsius but offset by 20 degrees, and declare a 1 -> 8 change, a whopping 700%.
by hatmatrix | 2025-05-25 20:51:02+00:00
> At the time it was more or less taken for granted that AI work was done in Lisp. C++ barely existed. Perl was brand new. Java was years away. Spacecraft were mostly programmed in assembler, or, if you were really being radical, Ada.

Given the choices, Lisp made a lot of sense when they started. After 2001-2004, there were other options - not to say they were necessarily better, but a mainstream language that enables a large number of people working together (interchangeably) has its value. Lisp is indeed "one-of-a-kind, highly dynamic applications that must be developed on extremely tight budgets and schedules" - but has a reputation for fostering lone geniuses and bad for large teams working together and maintaining legacy codebases.

(I write this as a big fan of Lisp.)
by trailbase-alt | 2025-05-25 20:51:14+00:00
Sorry to hear. The beauty of giving folks admin access and that's why we can't have nice things :). Excuses aside, in case you're still interested maybe try a bit later. The demo resets regularly. If you still run into issue, please don't hesitate to send a quick, low-key bug report: https://github.com/trailbaseio/trailbase/issues . Strong wording welcome
by dang | 2025-05-25 20:51:37+00:00
I don't want to ban you! I hope to persuade you to stop using personally pejorative language in your HN comments, which you've unfortunately been doing a lot of.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089951

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089808

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088236

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088105

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040448

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040666

If you don't like the phrase "personal attack" we can call it something else, but the point is you can't treat other commenters this way on HN, regardless of how wrong anyone is or you feel they are.
by AndyKelley | 2025-05-25 20:51:56+00:00
This is factually incorrect. While some operating systems use libc as the syscall ABI, this is not the case for Windows or Linux. On those systems, by default, Zig programs do not link libc; they make DLL calls or syscalls directly.

The project in question, however, does seem to link libc in the build script for no reason, as well as create a static library for no reason (it doesn't export any functions). As Loris pointed out to me today, this is likely caused by the `zig init` template highlighting static linking rather than modules, which is unfortunate since modules are the preferred way for Zig code to import other Zig code. We'll be adjusting that accordingly.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-25 20:52:10+00:00
And because it's permanently warmed up, the long term consequence is the line becomes a health hazard and has to be closed for increasingly long periods.

When wet bulb > body temp people start getting heat stroke, which leads to fainting and potentially death - a bad look for a public transport system.

The likely remedy is to install gigantic refrigeration units in the ventilation shafts and pump in cold air. This will be hugely expensive to build and run.

But the alternative is a tube line that can't be used. So there may not be much choice.
by hiq | 2025-05-25 20:52:13+00:00
I honestly didn't think anyone in the US considered healthcare socialized (same for housing and a big chunk of university-level education), so I've learned something today.

I personally find it hard to reconcile the concept of socialized healthcare with UnitedHealth Group being apparently the 7th company by revenue in the world, at least I don't think that's what Europeans would mean by "socialized".
by conditionnumber | 2025-05-25 20:52:17+00:00
Papers with code for quantitative finance. Still just thinking about it. Replicating research is a great way to learn a field.

>90% of the work to replicate academic research in quant finance is data collection and cleaning. Academics have WRDS, Bloomberg, and research assistants. Others need to find cheap vendors of acceptable quality. Write scripts to fetch and clean. Actual algorithms and analysis (the fun part) are a tiny fraction of the total effort.

Project objective is "good enough" data collection & cleaning for daily frequency equities, futures, and FX. In that order. Annual data budget target < USD 500. Cheaper is better.
by nradov | 2025-05-25 20:52:22+00:00
The broken pilot training pipeline is mainly a US problem. Airlines got spoiled because the military trained thousands of pilots every year for "free", then some would go on to get civilian flying jobs. Now the military is smaller and there aren't enough experienced pilots coming out. But there's nothing preventing airlines from hiring pilot candidates with zero experience and paying them to go through flight training. Some other countries do this and it works fine.
by neilv | 2025-05-25 20:53:04+00:00
I certainly agree that there are many important aspects to software development, other than just code.

But I don't want to confuse the point, and accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" (or the limiting factor).

For one reason, code is important, and valuable...

There's plenty of evidence throughout many types of software development to suggest that a lot of money has to be plowed into simply producing bulk of code -- excluding domain or market understanding, requirements analysis, holistic system design, etc.

A typical growth startup wasn't in a hiring frenzy for great analytical minds, but simply to scale up production of raw bulk of code (and connecting together legally-obtained off-the-shelf pieces). And they were often tracking quantitative metrics on that bulk, and consciously aware of how much all those code-monkey salaries were costing on the balance sheet. They paid it because code bulk was very necessary, the way they were working.

There's also plenty of evidence of the popularity of copy&paste reuse for many years. Including from StackOverflow.

Copying entire projects and subsystems has been much-much less common, partly due to the aforementioned not wanting to get caught doing it. But "AI" laundering is paving the way. See all the blog posts and videos about "I created an app/game/site in an hour with AI".

We can also look at startup schools of thought, where execution is widely regarded to be everything (ideas are a dime a dozen). There is plenty of thinking that churning out code is one of the most time-consuming or frequently-blocking parts of execution.

In both startups and established corporate environments, there are normally big lags between when a need for specific code is identified, and when that code can be delivered. Doesn't that look like a limiting factor, or at least it must be important.

I think that's enough reason that we not dismiss the value of code, nor dismiss the importance of plagiarism of code.
by cryptoz | 2025-05-25 20:53:16+00:00
The plan: You are a PM and Engineer - and so is the AI. You both write tickets and you both complete them to iterate on your code.

https://codeplusequalsai.com

You can build webapps very quickly, especially AI-enabled ones, and deploy them on a subdomain. Other users can sign up and use your webapp, and any tokens they use will be billed to them and you will get a large cut (80%) of the margin earned on the tokens billed - as I bill 2x OpenAI API token costs to create this margin.

So ideally you can validate your idea by rapidly building a prototype and evening earning revenue to boot.