MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Prostir: Planning doesn't have to feel like pressure
by skreep | 2025-05-23 14:10:01+00:00
Create a space where your to-dos don’t create pressure. This app is made for those who want to plan without the stress.

Inside, you’ll find: - To-do list with time, repetition, and importance options.

- Notes with checklists and reminders.

- Folders to organize everything.

- A soft, supportive interface – no harsh red warnings, no pushy notifications, no guilt.

- No pressure to complete everything right now – your well-being comes first.

This is a space where planning adjusts to you, not the other way around.

AppStore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/daily-planner-prostir/id653569...
by ordu | 2025-05-23 14:10:08+00:00
> The student is under stress due to their struggle with the passage, which the author isn't taking creative liberties to describe as that's how most people will react.

It doesn't look for me as a satisfactory explanation. Were they stressed because they were forced to think hard, or were they stressed because they were afraid to show their incompetence to a professor? Or maybe some other reason?

If the process of thought makes students stressed, then I don't know what can be done. But if they were afraid of a professor, then this stress factor could be and should be removed. For example, I can imagine how they chose to guess instead of thinking things through because they felt that a long thinking can look bad in professor's eyes. If so then students didn't even tried to read carefully, they were guessing, and the question arise: what the study had measured in this case?

> And, with all due respect, I think you're probably giving yourself more credit for your ability to perform better than these students than what might be the actual result

Why do you think so? I have read the text, I really spent some time on it, because it was hard for me (I mentioned specifically that I was confused for a minute by "but newly" stuffed inside of "had retired"). Then I read samples of students interpretations of the text. I believe that this is enough by itself to believe that I was better. For example, I understood that there was no megalosaurus despite being confused by "but newly". Still I had looked into the original article and had found the interpretation of a "single proficient reader", to compare it with what I've got from the text. The most interesting finding: they completely ignored megalosaurus like I did.

The only catch is I've read just one paragraph, while students were reading more of them, but I don't think it will change the results significantly. I can become bored or overconfident and students can get hang of Dickens' language after a couple of paragraphs so they will show better performance than me, but I don't believe it.
by neom | 2025-05-23 14:10:55+00:00
That's a really interesting perspective that I hadn't considered!! Per the first link, a lot of these ideas are based on how well a human can manage in their head what another human knows/doesn't know/is doing/isn't doing/etc. We can only manage so much of that. I still don't think a human can manage more than 6/7 complexities, and so I don't know if I think 1 human would be able to work with say 30 AI agents as 1 team, for example. Could 1 human work with 1 agent who controls 1000s of AIs, I think so, is this the part you think changes?
by thesuitonym | 2025-05-23 14:11:26+00:00
That holds if we assume a frictionless digestive tract that performs no action on the cereal. Since the cereal will be crushed in the mouth, and all parts mushed together, it's reasonable to assume that the inner radius of the torus will touch the tongue, and what's more, the original claim was never about touch the tongue, but delivering more glaze in the same volume.
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-23 14:12:15+00:00
I remembered there was some kind of "more efficient" coin system. I searched for "ternary coins" and "radix coins". Both are some crypto scams. Fun times.

Apparently I misremembered how it worked and it's actually 1, 5, 18 and 25 (or 29) for a 4 coin system: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/Papers/change2.pdf
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-23 14:12:15+00:00
And they're irreplaceable, I take it. The not-quite-bright grad student doing scutwork in the lab... an unsung genius and the power behind this research that churns out magical doodads. No one else could substitute.

Sounds pretty fucking racist, really. In the other comment someone was claiming that foreign students pay full price, and so they subsidize domestic students... in other words, university administration prefers them because they're more lucrative. Not because they're of a higher academic caliber. This is a nest of nasty, perverse incentives that hurts our own citizens and we have all sorts of propagandists telling us it's really for our own good.

Nothing about this is straightforward. Even if (and for me it's a big if) you were correct, pretending that this is straightforward is just disingenuous.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-23 14:13:13+00:00
for systems that learn in real-time, is there a way for the humans to know/understand how/why the system came to the conclusion it has? there are examples of where humans ran experiments that came to a conclusion for the wrong reasons. if an AI system thinks it knows the answer for the wrong reason, wouldn't that then poison its reasoning later as well? can an AI system learn its reasoning is wrong and then update it when provided better evidence? that seems to be something a vast majority of humans cannot do.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-23 14:13:53+00:00
> while being horoscope-vague enough that almost any possible development will fit into the "predictions" in the post for the next decade.

This is a recurring theme in rationalist blogs like Scott Alexander’s: They mix a lot of low-risk claims in with heavily hedged high-risk claims. The low risk claims (AI will continue to advance) inevitably come true and therefore the blog post looks mostly accurate in hindsight.

When reading the blog post in the current context the hedging goes mostly unnoticed because everyone clicked on the article for the main claim, not the hedging.

When reviewing blog posts from the past that didn’t age well, that hedging suddenly becomes the main thing their followers want you to see.

So in future discussions there are two outcomes: He’s always either right or “not entirely wrong”. Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee. Combine that with the almost parasocial relationship that some people develop with prominent figures in the rationalist sphere and there are a lot of echo chambers that, ironically, think they’re the only rational ones who see it like it really is.
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-23 14:13:54+00:00
> Who is Mullin?

A blowhard who shouldn't be in the Senate. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/stand-your-butt-up-gop-sen-m...

> When did Qatar start the process of gifting that jet from Boeing?

As far as anyone can determine, very recently. There's no evidence backing Mullin's transparent effort at redirecting blame.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/19/politics/trump-adminstration-...

"The Trump administration, however, wanted a replacement plane much faster, and the Air Force was exploring different options for doing so. At the same time, Trump tasked his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff with finding a list of viable planes, a senior White House official told CNN."

Trump publicly bragged about being the one to decide to accept it, as well.

> Cancel your NYT sub.

I don't have one.
by bwfan123 | 2025-05-23 14:14:03+00:00
At one time we had to switch our service out of DB2 into psql. We had to do this with minimum downtime !! ORM helped us since it abstracted the DB (to the orm the sql dialect was a plugin). The application was largely untouched. Also, not all developers can roll their own sqls and sqls embedded in code make it harder to refactor or reason with and eventually sqls will be abstracted into a crud library of sorts anyway.
by thicknavyrain | 2025-05-23 14:14:05+00:00
Urban heat island analysis. The physical volumes of buildings is an essential input parameter into calculating the estimated impact of the built environment and possible interventions (e.g. greening, reducing traffic) against local temperature rises. It is notoriously difficult to obtain that data at fine spatial resolution. This would be a game changer. True to a lesser degree for air pollution modelling as well, building volume is a significant input for land use regression models.
by sgarland | 2025-05-23 14:14:16+00:00
> they're clearly struggling with this single-master setup and trying to keep it afloat while migrating off ("no new workloads allowed").

TFA states they’re at 1 million QPS, in Azure. 1 million QPS with real workloads is impressive, doubly so from a cloud provider that’s almost certainly using network-based storage.

EDIT: they have an aggregate of 1 million QPS across ~40 read replicas, so 25K QPS each, modulo writes. I am less impressed.

> That doesn't quite solve all the same problems. It's quite frequent that an index is in use, but is not _needed_: another index would also work (eg you introduced a new index covering an extra column that's not used in this query). Being able to disable an index would allow checking that the query plan does use the other index, rather than praying and hoping.

Assuming your table statistics are decently up to date and representative (which you can check), this basically comes down to knowing your RDBMS, and your data. For example, if it's a text-type column, do both indices have the same operator class (or lack thereof)? Does the new index have a massive column in addition to the one you need, or is it reasonably small? Do the query projections and/or selections still form a left-most prefix of the index (especially important if any queries perform ordering)?
by pentaphobe | 2025-05-23 14:14:25+00:00
IANAP so got curious about how ZX Calculus related to Feynman Diagrams (if at all)

Search landed on this neat summary [^1] (2024) from the lab(?) which also has a link to the original paper [^2]

[1]: https://www.quantinuum.com/blog/quantinuum-scientists-have-p...

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10896
by skydhash | 2025-05-23 14:14:29+00:00
> Even if my product is fully open source and free to fork, it's my reputation on the line when things don't work as intended

I think that everyone who is worrying about that wants to apply corporate thinking on the open source model. Meaning they want to be a special thing where everything is supposed to be interchangeable. Just yesterday, I was compiling a program that hard depends on the GNU C library for just 2 functions and not even critical one. To be fair, the author said that they only test on Debian.

While the linux world may be fragmented, the true differences are mostly minimal (systemd vs other init system, glibc vs musl, networking manager,…) So it’s possible to decouple yourself from these concerns if you want to. But often the developer hard depends on decision made by their preferred distro team, and create a complicated build script that only works there.
by victorbjorklund | 2025-05-23 14:14:40+00:00
It does not matter if you open a PR if the project is not open to that solution. You can't just add any random thing to Postgres as an outsider. You first have to convince the people in the project that X is a good thing to add and only after that does it make sense to actually implement it (and even then unlikely that OpenAI has a developer on staff with enough Postgres experience to actually write it. More likely they will then just sponsor a dev from the project).
by MagneLauritzen | 2025-05-23 14:14:53+00:00
I have reached a terrible point on my project: I now have to market it.

Until this point, I was happily working away at the technical side: Designing, manufacturing prototypes, talking with suppliers and other people who contributed to the product, learning how to write firmware. All fun stuff.

Now that I actually have to reach people who can benefit from the product, I am feeling entirely sick and tired of it.
by toast0 | 2025-05-23 14:15:04+00:00
The article shows an add-in board and says it's $10.

If that's retail price, it's not much more than a 1G add-in nic. That gives it potential for mass adoption.

Realtek also makes some low cost 10g and 2.5g/10g switch chips that are reasonable cost if you shop on aliexpress.

Having another vendor should help drive down retail pricing as well.
by jvanderbot | 2025-05-23 14:15:17+00:00
Depth from ML was all the rage for a short bit, and I think most people filed it under "Things we can do with ML that we could already do better other ways". E.g., with a second image.

Certainly it will find a niche use, but during that time the headlines in robotics papers were all about replacing traditional depth /range sensing with it, which doesn't seem plausible.
by bluGill | 2025-05-23 14:15:45+00:00
What type of windmill of old? They look like a scaled up Jacobs wind system from the 1920s. No surprise, Jacob's wind got a lot of things right back then.

If you mean the old water pumps used in the American west (they are still made today!), those are good for water pumping because they produce high torque in low winds, but they make less horsepower and that is what we care about.

If you mean the Dutch style windmills/houses, we could do that, but the big house blocks a lot of wind and so it is not efficient.

I can't think of any other style of old windmill. However if you can the answer to your question is likely because that style is much less efficient.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-23 14:15:47+00:00
Consumers don't need to detach/attach the actual modules. They can just plug in their ethernet cables like normal, except they'd also have the option to switch to something better in the long run.

It's more expensive but hardly an impossible fit. My router comes with an SFP+ port on the fiber side, it's just not labeled as such.

Combining SFP+ with fiber in consumer spaces is going to be more of a challenge (although I'll gladly accept it if it somehow makes it to market somehow).
by kbolino | 2025-05-23 14:16:35+00:00
Yeah, the difficulty with glyph caching IMO is handling things like combining diacritics. Really, you'd need to do proper Unicode grapheme cluster segmentation [1] to even decide on what is a valid cache key in the first place, at least if you intend on supporting all major languages. But if you only want to support most languages, you could get by without it, or just with Unicode normalization [2].

[1]: https://unicode.org/reports/tr29/

[2]: https://unicode.org/reports/tr15/
by bigyabai | 2025-05-23 14:16:45+00:00
It is a marketing term. That's it. Trying to exhaustively define what AGI is or could be is like trying to explain what a Happy Meal is. At it's core, the Happy Meal was not invented to revolutionize food eating. It puts an attractive label on some mediocre food, a title that exists for the purpose of advertisement.

There is no point collecting definitions for AGI, it was not conceived as a description for something novel or provably existent. It is "Happy Meal marketing" but aimed for adults.
by rocky_raccoon | 2025-05-23 14:16:51+00:00
I believe it's because the actual text behind the font would say "Here's a statementam-and here's a diversionam-and back to the original statement."

Problem is, it's only useful if you're using those specific fonts. Now I've gotta teach my grandpa how to install a font and switch to using it on every single device and application.
by the__alchemist | 2025-05-23 14:17:06+00:00
Great read! I'm a bit surprised the author (and others?) didn't get a bro-level warning from others who'd done this. Oops; hindsight is 50/50. I suppose this post is just that, and I bet no one else will walk into this with expectations otherwise! Granted, rapidly-changing field with the war...
by Matl | 2025-05-23 14:17:14+00:00
I have also been building a personal collection of exclusively FLACs, be it for a lot less than 25 years. It's past 1TB but https://www.navidrome.org as the server and https://symfonium.app as the client has been great.

Granted, 2TB sd cards are now a thing so once they come down in price, I'll probably get one.
by IAmBroom | 2025-05-23 14:17:15+00:00
> >A sadistic and cruel business owner would not have hundreds of healthy Oompa-Loompas

> Were they compensated for their efforts? Slave labour. (please don't be offended, it's a joke)

In at least one of the movies, Wonka reveals that he saved the entire race of Oompa-Loompas from some sort of ecological disaster, giving them a new home, and jobs.

Personally, I don't recall any of them seeming to resent their work, peeing in a bottle, or being sniped at in performance reviews. Reasonable labor for reasonable compensation is quite fulfilling (although that sentiment is often twisted sadistically by those in power into a caricature of 'reasonable').
by singron | 2025-05-23 14:18:11+00:00
> Glitch’s 14-person staff will all make the move over to Fastly. However the Glitch union, which made history last year when it signed the white collar tech world’s first collective bargaining agreement, won’t be coming with it.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/19/23126349/glitch-fastly-ac...

[This had substantially less coverage than forming the union, so I wanted to link it here]
by astura | 2025-05-23 14:18:18+00:00
>If you want a cold drink that isn't sweet, your choices are pretty much alcohol, alcohol-free alternative, water.

Uh, no.

There's also seltzer, flavored seltzer, flavored water, iced tea, iced coffee, herbal infusions (like hibiscus, rooibos, honeybush, etc), broth, milk and plant based milk alternatives, and fermented drinks like kombucha + kefir. That's just off the top of my head.

Hibiscus even has the benefit of helping regulate blood pressure.

I almost never drink sweet drinks or plain water and rarely drink alcohol. My fluid consumption is almost entirely: hot tea, iced tea, kombucha, and hibiscus infusion. Sometimes seltzer. Sometimes coffee.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-23 14:18:56+00:00
True in the current context.

But this really should have been a web standard, loooong ago. User sets a couple of settings once, browser & webserver send a few packets back & forth, done. No need for users in that loop on every single website (not to mention traffic for downloading scripts to show dialog boxes, list of vendors or whatever).

The whole cookie thing (as we have it now) is one big waste of resources & user's time.
by zzzeek | 2025-05-23 14:19:12+00:00
he lost me here:

> As soon as something is known, it will be exploited until the knowledge becomes useless. In the past, our knowledge accumulated, and our actions were limited. Now, it is exactly the opposite: Our actions can achieve unlimited outcomes, but knowledge decays rapidly.

i dont understand "knowledge decays rapidly". He seems to mean, "knowledge that is novel and may give someone some kind of advantage over other people now decays rapidly", as though knowledge that "everyone has" is somehow useless. that was slippery slope number one, and then

> This might sound paralyzing, but it's actually liberating.

I dont know this author but that kind of phrase is where someone who seemed like a thoughtful philosopher type starts sounding like a techbro declaring "hear me out". no, bad changes that are actually bad are possible and this is sounding a bit like one of them.

> If rigid plans and lasting knowledge are illusions, we are freed from the burden of needing perfect prediction. Instead of trying to master a fixed landscape, the challenge becomes mastering the art of movement on a dancing one.

hoo boy I can just see whole societies being purged with that kind of attitude, and in fact, we are

> And finally, we must hold dearly to what doesn't change: the value of being kind and generous, the benefits of fresh air and sunshine and a nice walk, the importance of friends and family.

This is a nice sentiment but falls pretty hollow with the author's prior ebullience over "the end of knowledge".... as the US government spends every day working to dismantle more and more STEM education and research, all in the name of "science is woke"

it may be the case that humans require some degree of stability, and as possessors of "free will" (deterministic nature of the universe notwithstanding) we have the choice to maintain institutions that are beneficial to humans. we dont actually have to do "everything that's possible no matter what it is immediately right now".
by peteri | 2025-05-23 14:19:19+00:00
There are additional traffic lights on the blackwall tunnel further in and a slip road out that can be used for overheight vehicles. I do remember having a 10-15 minute wait once while they sorted things out when a lorry driver got caught.

I'd have a feeling there are automated signs prior to the tunnel (or at least used to be) but I've not been through the tunnel for a year or so and things will have changed with the Silvertown tunnel opening.

I have seen someone not paying attention at the Rotherhithe tunnel and the roof of their van was a mess (and they're going to pick up a fine probably due to restrictions, the 2 tonnes gross weight limit is lower than a lot of van drivers expect)

Edit there were: https://maps.app.goo.gl/MP7fkhS394DJPQaZ9 If you zoom in you can see the overheight vehicle warning.
by jbms | 2025-05-23 14:19:49+00:00
"Steel is very strong per volume, so steel is a good choice when strength per volume is one of the main constraints. However, wind turbine towers are essentially empty inside so there is room to increase the volume by making the walls thicker. The Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL) material in a Modvion tower has higher strength per weight and higher strength per cost than steel alternatives."

Strength per volume versus strength per weight is an interesting trade-off. They're arguing this could let towers get taller.
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-05-23 14:20:08+00:00
Often, these protests were overtly supporting an organization officially classed as "terrorist" (HAMAS). The Americans making foreigners who are found to openly support a known terrorist organization leave is par for the course, I would say. If you showed up at the German border and told them you were a HAMAS supporter, my guess is you wouldn't get in.

Now, the Trump admin is not this careful, and many people who are not overt HAMAS supporters have probably been affected. But I wish to make the point that there is a substantial group of students (non-citizen HAMAS supporters) for whom punishment is not crazy.
by orochimaaru | 2025-05-23 14:20:47+00:00
That is what open ai’s non-profit economic research arm has claimed. LLMs will fundamentally change how we interact with the world like the Internet did. It will take time like the Internet and a couple of hype cycle pops but it will change the way we do things.

It will help a single human do more in a white collar world.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130
by kilpikaarna | 2025-05-23 14:20:57+00:00
I'm sure there were offline rendering and 3D graphics workstation people saying the same about the comparatively crude work he was doing in the early 90s...

Obviously both Carmack and the rest of the world has changed since then, but it seems to me his main strength has always been in doing more with less (early id/Oculus, AA). When he's working in bigger orgs and/or with more established tech his output seems to suffer, at least in my view (possibly in his as well since he quit both Bethesda-id and Meta).

I don't know Carmack and can't claim to be anywhere close to his level, but as someone also mainly interested in realtime stuff I can imagine he also feels a slight disdain for the throw-more-compute-at-it approach of the current AI boom. I'm certainly glad he's not running around asking for investor money to train an LLM.

Best case scenario he teams up with some people who complement his skillset (akin to the game designers and artists at id back in the day) and comes up with a way to help bring some of the cutting edge to the masses, like with 3D graphics.