MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Lurnall – A website to learn anything efficiently
by hoodlsin | 2025-05-07 17:50:30+00:00
Hey guys, Just wanted to share the website I’ve been working on the last few months. It's a platform that makes learning any topic much more efficient and effective. I found myself often getting lost in tons of resources online, endless videos, articles, and tutorials without a clear path or easy way to revisit key information. It felt inefficient and overwhelming. So, I started building something to fix that. The core idea is to give you a powerful tool that understands the content you're engaging with, whether it's an article or a video. This AI guide helps you learn effortlessly by pointing out key takeaways, summarizing content so you can quickly decide where to focus, answering your specific questions to refresh your memory, and even helping you practice concepts until they stick. You get clear summaries to grasp main points and timestamps to jump right back to crucial parts of videos or articles. Right now, I've launched with lessons and resources focusing on AI, as it's a highly requested area. But the goal is to cover lots more topics soon! You can check it out now at lurnall.com. Would love for you to try it out and share any feedback! Also, are there any specific topics you'd love to see added to the platform next? lemme know!!
by toast0 | 2025-05-07 17:51:28+00:00
> Just like people who own riding lawn mowers don't really have difficulties driving their car afterward.

My riding mower is tank-steer (zero turn)... pretty hard to use those skills on a car. But steering wheels basically work the same on all the equipment I've got with those; some easier to turn than others depending on geometry and power assist. The pedals are more likely to be different --- the mower has a friction lever on a panel to set the throttle / engine speed and levers you hold to go forward and back on right and left (so this does steering too); the tractor has similar throttle level, and then a pedal that you rotate to go forward or back with both wheels (all wheels if you put it into 4x4) and it has a splitable brake pedal if you want to brake on one side or the other.

But yeah; none of that makes it hard to go back and drive a car. Other than sometimes it'd be nice to do some tight turns at the expense of my tires if I could control each side individually.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-05-07 17:51:37+00:00
Factorio is black magic fuckery as far as I'm concerned.

Maybe it's because my factory hasn't gotten big enough or I'm playing a MOSTLY vanilla install, but all that's happening and the game is still only using 2% of my CPU.

I can't imagine the immense size of a factory you'd need before the game started stuttering.
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-07 17:51:40+00:00
Gathering user consent is what makes the difference between malware and not. If you click "Yes, upload this crash report" or "Yes, upload stats on what buttons I click", that's the program acting according to your wishes. If the program gathers and transmits that data without you asking or reviewing it and against your wishes, that's malware (i.e. malicious software that causes the computer to undermine its owner). Basically, does the computer obey the owner or not?
by buildsjets | 2025-05-07 17:52:00+00:00
Sounds like Bowie was really a late-comer to online music distribution, by a few years at least.. I think the first mover award goes to Aerosmith for releasing and distributing "Head First" online-only in 1994. No one was using MP3 yet, so it was WAV encoded using a proprietary compression codec that was a separate download. The WWW had only just barely been invented and only a few physics nerds in Switzerland were using it, so it was released on Compuserve only. I signed up for a trial account to download the song. I only had a 9600 baud modem at the time and recall waiting overnight for the download.

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1994/06/15/Aerosmith-Head-First...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/go-aerosmith-how-head-first-...

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/aerosmith-head-first-music-d...
Ask HN: Early career burnt out at Big Tech, what to do?
by overwhelmedTA | 2025-05-07 17:52:09+00:00
Hi HN, posting on a throwaway. I’m an early career engineer at a Big Tech company.

I joined two years ago after graduating. It felt like a dream: opportunities like this, you can’t say no. However, over time it feels like I’m reaching a point where work is deteriorating my health. I had a panic attack yesterday.

I feel drained every day. Not tired, exhausted. I don’t have the energy to follow my passions after work. End of day I’m in a trance state where even the slightest thought is too energy consuming.

Early morning meetings are draining. Even just half hour earlier than usual throws me off. (I’m neurodivergent)

Major projects overlap—there’s no calm moment to focus on smaller things.

I’m very productive but the work is never ending. I’m trying to slow down but sometimes the pressure is intense.

I look at others managing so well, achieving their responsibilities and I feel inadequate.

This job is a great opportunity that enables me to do so many things. Save for retirement, new experiences, etc. Simultaneously, I see the long term horizon and all I see is many more years of this…

How can I take control of this situation? Leaving is not an option. Does anyone have strategies on how to manage for a young engineer?
by ladyanita22 | 2025-05-07 17:52:15+00:00
I don't know what's going on in your specific case but:

1. It's never out of time, for sure. If you want to make a specific change, study the pros/cons and decide whether to do it or not! But you can for sure make the change you want to.

2. Don't fall into the trap of idealizing a life you don't have. The grass is significantly less green than you might think at the other side of the fence.
by baranul | 2025-05-07 17:52:45+00:00
When transparency to the public is no longer important, it looks like being able to secretly abuse others has become more important for such agencies.

It's back to the public not actually knowing what really happened, except in situations where its recorded by a 3rd party or there is a whistleblower from their own ranks. And we have to hope these people are brave enough to step forward and handle the pressure placed on them because they did, in order for justice to prevail.
by belmarca | 2025-05-07 17:53:02+00:00
Hey, I'm writing this from Pr Feeley's lab :)

I understand your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but we certainly have an interest in cross-language interoperability! You can check out our work here:

- https://try.gambitscheme.org is Gambit compiled to JavaScript with the universal backend. Evaluate \alert("hello!") at the REPL to see the JS<->Scheme Syntactic FFI in action.

- https://codeboot.org is our own Python interpreter running in the browser. It has a Python<->JS FFI. Evaluate \alert("hello!") at the REPL to test it out. You can even import JS libraries using the standard Python syntax by replacing the identifier with a string: import "https://mycdn.com/mylibrary.js".

- https://github.com/gambit/python is a Gambit module that integrates Gambit with CPython, using the same syntactic FFI. You can import PyPI modules from Gambit.

References to conferences/papers describing these features can be found on my GH profile (https://github.com/belmarca). AMA if you wish!
by BeetleB | 2025-05-07 17:53:16+00:00
> That's not working in any IDE is it? The crux of the matter is the level of integration, with Cursor (and others) I can apply the suggestions via autocomplete and see git diffs with agent code.

Would a simple VSCode plugin for Aider not be able to do that? I haven't tried it out, but Aidermacs (https://github.com/MatthewZMD/aidermacs) is an Emacs plugin that supposedly mimics some of Cursor's feature - but by using Aider.

I'm not saying Cursor is bad or anything. It may well be as good as Aider or a bit better. But it's not vastly better. If you had $1M to spare, would you risk investing in Cursor? Especially knowing that open source solutions are as good or at worst not far behind?

In the long run, some open source solution (Aider or something else) is going to eat Cursor's lunch.

BTW, I too initially wanted something that worked in my IDE. Then I just gave Aider a try and realized I prefer it being an external tool.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-07 17:53:55+00:00
We spent several billions of dollars rebuilding a supply chain in automotive, energy, and semiconductor inputs (not just chips but the associated materials, processing, and gases used in fabrication) via the IRA, IILA, and CHIPS Act.

We need to incentivize American manufacturers to utilize that supply chain instead of co-mingling foreign inputs in an attempt to maximize margins while having taken advantage of the tax and cash incentives used when availing the aforementioned benefits during the Biden admin.

Tariffs are the easiest way to allow the American ecosystem to actually redevelop and stick, instead if wisping away due to malicious compliance. The Biden admin even considered adding similar barriers, but decided against it because they didn't want to risk a protracted trade war during a competitive election cycle.

Furthermore, most consumer goods and a number of industrial goods that would hurt the "average American's" pocketbook have alternative supply chains like Philippines, Brazil, Turkiye, India, Mexico etc that have now been made cost competitive compared to Chinese inputs.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-07 17:53:59+00:00
I turned 50 last year. I'm biased to glass half full rather than half empty. I noticed a lot of my friends mentally checked out around their forties already. I've been trying to not do that. Fifty is just a number. It doesn't mean anything. There's less left of your life every day after you get born. Some die young, some die old. I could die tomorrow, I could go on existing for another fifty years. I'm an optimist. So, glass half full and plenty left to do and experience. There is a bit of urgency to get shit done because the clock is ticking. You do get more aware of that as you get older.

You don't really get wiser as you age. Just scarred by experience. It takes me longer to do some of the things I used to do quicker. And I'm also doing things that I wouldn't have been able to do earlier in my life because you learn a lot as you progress through the years. It's a mixed bag.

I actually like what I do professionally. So, I'm not looking forward to retiring. I'm actually kind of dreading having to do that because of physical limitations or being regarded too old by others. I plan to stay active as long as I can. Regardless of financials. What comes after that is basically waiting to die. Nice if you can make that enjoyable and stretch it a bit. But for most people that's not a huge part of their life, or the best. Or what defines them for others when they are gone.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-05-07 17:54:30+00:00
Exponential in how useful LLM APIs and LLM based products like Google AI Lab, ChatGPT, etc. are to me personally. I am the data point I care about. I have a pet programming problem that every few months I try to solve with the current tools of the day. I admit this is anecdotal, just my personal experiences.

Metrics like training data set size are less interesting now given the utility of smaller synthetic data sets.

Once AI tech is more diffused to factory automation, robotics, educational systems, scientific discovery tools, etc., then we could measure efficiency gains.

My personal metric for the next 5 to 10 years: the US national debt and interest payments are perhaps increasing exponentially and since nothing will change politically to change this, exponential AI capability growth will either juice-up productivity enough to save us economically, or it won’t.
by K0balt | 2025-05-07 17:54:50+00:00
True enough, but I would take it one farther and say that a properly executed hand splice is arguably preferable to solder if vibration is a factor. Also, even less tools needed, though not everyone carries a little tube of conductive grease with their electrical tape. (But they should, it makes a decent splice immune to corrosion and a solid, “permanent” repair. )

I have had many, many soldered splices fail on generators, marine engines, other long running equipment.

They just break where the copper meets the solder joint. Copper generally has poor fatigue characteristics, depending on the alloy.
by netbioserror | 2025-05-07 17:55:23+00:00
My point is that the point of contact listed at the beginning of the room is almost certainly the one reading out and dictating messages on the device, where the titled cabinet member is keeping the screen out of their hands and attention on the moment. That is proper opsec so long as the PoC is trusted, so there was a break in the trust chain.

The point being: Far from being an issue of improper use of a personal device, a piece of application software, or anything the commentariat suddenly believes they're absolutely an expert in, this is much more an issue of trust breach in the chain of command and staff in the given offices. Hence why Waltz was fired: This scenario is functionally equivalent to a leak.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-07 17:55:35+00:00
Many cultures would regard the content of the painting to be inappropriate though.

Offense doesn't need to mean that it's meant to shock.

I suspect most mainstream AI art generators would refuse to replicate it. Doing so would "offend" the original art.

But a human artist could, perhaps a talented woman flips the gender.

Humans will always be able to challenge us in ways AIs can't.

At home and around close friends I often speak in AAVE. It's apart of my culture and at a core level, me.

When an AI rap generator decides it can't do AAVE, it's saying the very identity that created rap in the first place is offense. I don't expect a masterpiece like Illmatic, but I've yet to hear anything decent from an AI rap generator.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-07 17:55:42+00:00
You have to be careful how you define metabolic disorder, do you mean entirely genetic of which there are not many, or do you mean auto-immune of which there are very many. To the point I'd even suggest that it's the dominant factor. Also there are no places in Latin America which has 5% obesity - it's more like 5 to 20%. Really only leaves Sub Saharan Africa, and parts of South East Asia. Additionally Europe is 5-10% so it's not a 1st world 3rd world split as you are presenting.

Anyway, if you are interested in researching check out the field of dysautonomia - there are many good books on the topic. It's an established science but not well known so people are unlikely to come across it by chance.

The main problem is that these conditions are severely underdiagnosed, thankfully people can now access GLP-1As without diagnoses so are no longer reliant on the competence of doctors.
by nine_k | 2025-05-07 17:56:16+00:00
If enough of the market participants act stupid, or at least in predictably irrational ways, it may be profitable to capitalize on that behavior.

If you look at previous fads, all the way to be dotcom boom of late 1990s, this very approach seemed to work well for a number of buzzword-compliant pre-revenue "businesses", and their founders / owners. There was a crash after that, but the wisest were able to shield some of the money from it.
by jancsika | 2025-05-07 17:57:10+00:00
> Of the 40 students enrolled in her popular introduction to real estate course, Pugh said she’d normally drop three to five from her roster who don’t start the course or make contact with her at the start of the semester.

Key word: "popular."

A dean's most important question: "How are we gonna pay the bills?"

Well, if the number of ghost students in a department's popular class just doubled and eventually get dropped from the roll, that means the number of bona fide students completing that class also went down.

If you're the professor of that class, you want to make it crystal clear to the dean that this is an otherwise popular class getting hit by a scam, and not a class that's organically becoming less popular year over year.

Communicating this distinction to the dean is paramount-- the prof's pay and job stability depends on the scam being addressed for next quarter/semester. And those concerns bubble up from dept dean up the administration.

I mean, as I write this I start to wonder the opposite of you-- how could anyone in this chain of authority not prioritize addressing this issue?
by skeeter2020 | 2025-05-07 17:57:11+00:00
They are a big company that has taken a lot of investment over the years. They make good stuff and their audience (a lot of them developers) LOVE the product - willing to pay their own money for them. Rather than complain that they're shut out of the system we all apparently don't like, shouldn't we celebrate that they're making it with an alternative approach?
by anarazel | 2025-05-07 17:57:49+00:00
> Do you think there's a possibility of Direct IO being adopted at some point in the future now that AIO is available?

Explicitly a goal.

You can turn it on today, with a bunch of caveats (via debug_io_direct=data). If you have the right workload - e.g. read only and lots of seqscans, bitmap index scans etc you can see rather substantial perf gains. But it'll suck in any cases in 18.

We need at least:

- AIO writes in checkpointer, bgwriter and backend buffer replacement (think bulk loading data with COPY)

- readahead support in a few more places, most crucially index range scan (works out ok today if the heap is correlated with the index, sucks badly otherwise)

EDIT: Formatting
by TrufiAssoc | 2025-05-07 17:58:04+00:00
A group of high school students from Duitama, Colombia—known as the Duitama Mapping Stars—have been quietly making a global impact. Through OpenStreetMap, they’ve digitized informal public transport networks across cities in East Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Their data contributions help power open source apps and tools that improve urban mobility and make transportation more equitable.

Now, there’s an effort to get them to State of the Map LATAM 2025, the leading regional event for the OpenStreetMap community. It's a chance for these students to share their work, connect with global contributors, and see the value of their community-led innovation on an international stage.
by connorb-coder | 2025-05-07 17:58:39+00:00
Coder | https://coder.com/ | Multiple roles | Multiple locations | Full-time unless specified otherwise

Coder is on a mission to build enterprise software that makes software developers’ lives easier and keeps them in flow. Our cloud development environment enables customers to securely spin up ephemeral workspaces where developers and AI coding agents can do real work together. Across our open-source portfolio, we have over 95,000 GitHub stars and support developers at leading enterprises like Discord, Square, and Mercedes-Benz. We are a remote-first company with offices in San Francisco, Austin, and London. This is what we have open currently, with more to come later in May.

[1] Senior Software Engineer, back-end Go, multiple openings (US/Canada, Remote)

[2] Senior Software Engineer, back-end Go, multiple openings (Poland, Remote)

[3] Staff Software Engineer (Front-end), TypeScript/React (Poland, Remote)

[5] Software Engineer (Contractor), TypeScript heavy (US/Canada, Remote)

[6] Senior Customer Support Engineer (Australia)

[7] Product Operations Engineer (US)

Careers page w/ more information + salary bands: https://coder.com/careers?utm_source=O2n5Ew72WD

I support all recruiting for our global team, you can reach me directly with any questions at connor.brim@coder.com.
by jorvi | 2025-05-07 17:58:43+00:00
That is my point though. Gemini got it wrong for me. Which means it is inconsistent.

Say you and I ask Gemini what the perfect internal temperature for a medium-rare steak is. It tells me 72c, and it tells you 55c.

Even if it tells 990 people 55c and 10 people 55c, with a tens to hundreds of million users that is still a gargantuan amount of ruined steaks.
by leptons | 2025-05-07 17:58:57+00:00
I was just about to launch a small business based on a circuit I designed and had manufactured in China. The business also relies on LEDs that are simply not available outside of China. I could have had a $50,000 tax credit to start my small business if the other side won, but no, now I have to pay so much more and it just doesn't work for me as a very small start-up. The tariffs have killed my business before it even really started.
by WalterBright | 2025-05-07 17:59:13+00:00
> do you mostly enjoy media and activities particular to a time when you were younger, or do you have a penchant for novelty despite your age?

I have negative interest in the superhero movies, so there's that. I don't care for the modern style of shifting the colors to blue/orange. Movies from the 70's have a natural look to the colors.

I prefer 1970s music. Autotune is for whippersnappers.

I yell at clouds a lot, too.
by foofoo4u | 2025-05-07 17:59:14+00:00
I attended a Japanese elementary school in California. It served food just as you described. Fresh and made onsite.

I then transitioned to a typical American public school. I was disappointed to find my only option was cheap, factory made, mass produced, strangely flavored and textured food. This stark contrast and downgrade has made me forever passionate about the topic of improving school lunches.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-07 17:59:28+00:00
Is discipline why some other countries have a lot more skinny people than the US?

Do they lose that discipline when they move to the US, and typically pack on weight? Like, is there a an anti-discipline barrier they have to walk through to get in?

It really doesn't look like discipline's a major factor in how a population stays in a healthy weight range, so it'd be surprising if it merits being the main focus of any effort to make a fat country skinnier.
by zoogeny | 2025-05-07 18:00:09+00:00
I've noticed this has gotten a bit better lately, they have obviously been making a lot of UI changes to studio. But yeah, the scroll-jacking as response chunks are streamed in is incredibly frustrating since the model is pretty wordy.

I should add as well, on long complex threads the UI can become completely unusable. I'll hover over the tab and see it using over 2Gb of memory in chrome. Every so often I have to open a completely new tab, cut-n-paste the url and continue the conversation in that new tab (where the memory tends to drop back down to 600MB).
by lostmsu | 2025-05-07 18:00:21+00:00
I graduated from a top Russian university 13 years ago. I absolutely cheated on a few exams I considered non-essential for whatever I imagined my future would be, including some that are directly part of CS/AM major like stats, after minimal studying effort (for humanitarian requirements, I would not even flinch with 0 effort beyond typing an assignment into the chatbox). Thinking about it, I would do it again with ChatGPT today if for some reason I had to go and pass them again because employment requires a formal diploma.

This is because I know my responsibilities would not involve stats, they know it, I don't enjoy stats, and I feel confident in my ability to learn if the need arises with the rest of the math as the basis, but the university requires stats for a diploma.

To solve the problem, universities just need to streamline the requirements in their programs. Or find another way to accommodate for slightly more focused people.
by minimaxir | 2025-05-07 18:00:23+00:00
Of note is that the per-image pricing for Gemini 2.0 image generation is $0.039 per image, which is more expensive than Imagen 3 ($0.03 per image): https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing

The main difference is that Gemini does allow for incorporating a conversation to generate the image as demoed here, while Imagen 3 is a strict text-in/image-out with optional mask-constrained edits but likely allows for higher-quality images overall if skilled with prompt engineering. This is a nuance that is annoying to differentiate.