MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rbrownmh | 2025-05-02 16:32:34+00:00
Aside from my main project, ʻŌlelo Honua, I'm working on an air/hydro foil simulation (just for fun). Currently using rudimentary physics and in it's early stages. Would like to add more particles and incorporate Navier-Stokes equations.

[1]ʻŌlelo Honua:

https://www.olelohonua.com

[2] Foil Sim:

https://foil.olelohonua.com
by disqard | 2025-05-02 16:32:36+00:00
The world's smartest and dare I say, wisest (for the tech space) people attacked this problem in the 90s: Jaron Lanier, Randy Pausch, etc.

No one was able to come up with a mass-appeal killer app back then, and no has managed to do that this time around, either. No, "Beat Saber" is not it.

I imagine we'll see Apple throw in the towel first (like how they got out of the self-driving car space), and then Meta will be left holding the bag.

I want to clarify that the tech has improved, plus lots of us geeks will continue to buy and enjoy such devices, but it is not a Visicalc, nor an iPhone. Thus, the Gartner hype cycle hump is gonna tank very soon, and big players hoping to sell millions of units every month will have to exit this space.
by lgiordano_notte | 2025-05-02 16:32:37+00:00
Makes sense that verbal ability would line up more with success in CS, especially when math scores are already high across the board. A lot of programming leans on language-type skills: reading and understanding code, navigating docs, naming things clearly, writing maintainable logic etc.

The field probably does itself a disservice by overemphasising math. That framing can push people away who might actually do really well, especially those strong in reasoning, abstraction, or communication. Linked study is a good reminder to rethink how we present programming imo.
by austinl | 2025-05-02 16:33:04+00:00
"Be careful… about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind."

- Seneca, Letters

I was surprised to learn that the temptation to read too many things was also a problem 2,000 years ago. This inspired me to work on a short list of books that I know deeply.
by gs17 | 2025-05-02 16:33:22+00:00
I agree, you can make stupid ideas happen without having to make a huge investment in something you want to hear as a joke. There was a metal song I thought had lyrics that would also work as pop-country and I did quick cover of it on Suno to see if I was right.

I'm pretty sure that I actually could, if I really wanted to, create this cover legitimately and even put it on Spotify with royalties going to the original artists (it seems they have a blanket mechanical license for a lot of works). But it was a "gag" song that probably has a market of just me, so hiring a team of people would be a lot of time and money for 3 minutes of a giggle. I also would have to worry about things like if it's changed too much to be a cover and getting sued for putting in extra effort.
by slau | 2025-05-02 16:33:24+00:00
For context, this is made by the Norwegian broadcaster. They’re not speaking anything close to Danish—it’s just a skit on Danish pronunciation.

While written Danish is relatively close to both Swedish and Norwegian, the pronunciation is significantly removed. This is most likely due to the printing press arriving too early and locking down the orthography rules while the spoken language was still evolving massively (similar to the GVS in English).

It takes a significant effort for foreigners to understand the relationship between written and spoken Danish.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-02 16:33:26+00:00
> the presence of this kind of technology makes it easier for governments to say things like "all ___ content online must be restricted to ages 18+ or 21+" and actually have a way to implement that across Discord and TikTok and gaming chatrooms and everything inbetween

There will still be sites that don’t GAF. Given the damage social media has done to our polity, particularly our youth, I’m all for age gating these services at a fundamental level.
by dhosek | 2025-05-02 16:33:55+00:00
A lot of it comes down to set theory and the idea of mappings between sets. So countably infinite sets are those for which there exists a bijective (one-to-one and onto) mapping f:ℤ→X which is an extension of the idea of counting a finite set by showing that there’s a mapping of the set {1, 2, …, n}→X for a set X of size n. From this, we’re able to find larger infinities like |ℝ| where there is no bijective map from ℤ to ℝ. David Foster Wallace (yes, that David Foster Wallace) wrote a reasonably readable book about infinity that could be a good starting point in exploring the subject.
by pdimitar | 2025-05-02 16:34:26+00:00
Similar to @zeroq, I don't really need a K/V store. I need a full relational database that I can also use for analytics and time series, and I want it embedded. And as strict as possible -- PostgreSQL is doing this really well.

I don't mind that there are databases that can be forced into all that and work alright but I admit I am not willing to put the plumbing work if I can avoid it. If I can't avoid it at one point then, well, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

DuckDB and ClickHouse(-Local) are amazing candidates but I have never evaluated their normal OLTP performance. For now.

(EDIT: let that not stop you however. Please publish it and announce your thing on HN as well.)
by saurik | 2025-05-02 16:34:27+00:00
The EU app store--even as a separate legal entity--doesn't operate independently: it takes its marching orders from Apple, Inc., and Apple, Inc. has been required to not do this thing to developers, not merely directly but indirectly even by persons (which includes corporations) they are merely "in active concert or participation with". The EU app store doesn't even have a separate submission portal or a separate approval process, much less any autonomy in its operation: it is certainly covered by this injunction.
by Jtsummers | 2025-05-02 16:35:01+00:00
How much math is in a typical CS program these days? Calc 1-3 (maybe 3, varied by school), Linear Algebra, Statistics (inconsistent across programs), Discrete were pretty much it when I was in school 25+ years or so ago. That's only 4-6 courses depending on the university, though some where the CS dept was more strongly associated with an engineering college might have added Diff Eq and others. (I got interested in CS education and reviewed a lot of curricula in the US at the time, this is from memory.)

Some schools like MIT might have required more, but on average what I wrote was about it. Has it increased since then? Based on the new hires I've seen the last decade I'd have guessed the math requirements were mostly the same.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-05-02 16:35:08+00:00
Weird that a "communist propaganda arm" would donate millions upon millions to RIGHT WING American Politicians/Parties who oppose almost all leftist beliefs, and have a board made up partly of Western Capitalists.

[0]: https://www.barrons.com/articles/trump-campaign-donations-ti...

[1]: https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/tiktok-ceo-tr...

[2]: https://mezha.media/en/2025/01/17/tiktok-to-be-the-main-spon...

Seems pretty dumb if you're a Chinese Propaganda wings to fund foreign political opponents who literally want your society to fail. But I guess if Western Intelligence sources tell you they are a propaganda wing IT MUST BE TRUE!
by jlarocco | 2025-05-02 16:35:10+00:00
Honestly it's more nuanced than that, and probably not such a big deal.

It's kind of like building in Debug mode in other languages. Internally and for testing, use (safety 3). If the code in question doesn't trigger any errors or warnings, then in most cases it's safe to turn (safety 0) and get the tiny performance boost.

I wouldn't recommend (safety 0) globally, but it's probably fine locally in performance critical code that's been tested well, but I do agree it's probably not worth going to (safety 0) in most cases.

The best solution is a compiler who's (speed 3) optimization level is smart enough to optimize out the unnecessary safety checks from (safety 3). I think SBCL can do that in some cases (the safety checks get optimized for speed, at least).
by jbverschoor | 2025-05-02 16:35:16+00:00
Sure they can. But at least they cannot do that without me knowing and without me being able to cancel it. No questions asked and no weird calculations. Apple also sends you renewal or expiry notifications. So a lingering subscription can be cancelled on time.

Most developers don’t do that (don’t wake up a sleeping dog, if that’s a saying).

One missed cancellation, and you’ve actually saved on all that “Apple tax”
by arghwhat | 2025-05-02 16:35:28+00:00
You're mixing things up. A web app does not ship a web browser, the user brings their own. You're thinking of electron apps.

When using web apps, the browser you bring is no different than, say, having to install Qt. It's a static entity shared by all apps, with each app "just" being anywhere between kilobytes and tens of megabytes.

Electron brings a browser, but even then what makes the app bloated is still design Theres a baseline amount of bulk included, but it's mostly inconsequential to the actual app behavior - similar to how a standard system has god knows how many libraries and functions available but mostly unusued.

You could easily have an app written with PyQt that's way more sluggish, bloated and complicated despite using a fraction of the disk space. Shitty apps, that's the issue.
by tomrod | 2025-05-02 16:35:38+00:00
I divide my time into 4 sets.

Based on an area of interest I:

1. Find interesting people or projects that are interesting (discovery)

2. Identify the things I don't know how to do yet, or where I don't have enough information (information consumption with plan as output)

3. Execute on the plan (creation and delivery)

4. Evaluate on the outcomes -- modified ikigai is the framework I use: (1) does the world need it? (2) what is the world willing to pay for it? (3) did I enjoy it? (4) could I be good at it
by binary132 | 2025-05-02 16:35:48+00:00
It’s very different to ask for that from a language like Go or Python vs a language like C++. C++ is for interacting with system APIs and resources, on ANY system. Standardizing networking would require that every targetable host must have a common interface. Merely bridging win32, macos, bsd, android, and Linux is hard enough, without regard to all the possible platforms a C++ user might be interested in targeting.

The more you add to the standard, the narrower the platform support gets. Should we also force C++ to only be able to target 64-bit hosts? How about requiring hardware vector support? See what I’m getting at?

If you just want to make an async nw call, there are lots of things you can do that in already. If you want to write an async nw driver or library, then maybe you should use C++.
by jmward01 | 2025-05-02 16:35:52+00:00
Questioning why something gets down voted is a great way to get more down votes, but I gotta ask, why did this get down voted? Is this just a bot going and down voting anything that appears against the current administration? I am now taking a stand so I really don't care about karma points. If you down voted my comment, or this one, tell me why. Democracies die without discussion so share you disagreement and discuss it. That would actually be a great feature for HN, no down vote without a comment or you loose a karma point yourself.
by zatfer17 | 2025-05-02 16:36:34+00:00
I’m working on Linearama, a minimal note-taking app for iOS that supports both markdown and handwritten notes. It’s local-first, distraction-free, and lets you organize notes with folders (books) and tags (bookmarks).

Only 50 early access spots are available.

Join the Discord to get access: https://discord.com/invite/8XntcJpg

See screenshots here: https://linearama.app
by kaishiro | 2025-05-02 16:36:47+00:00
If "everything is political", then eliminating federal funding from NPR and PBS doesn’t solve the problem - it guarantees that only corporate and ideological interests shape the narrative. Public funding exists not to claim perfect neutrality, but to create a space where journalism isn’t entirely driven by profit motives or partisan agendas. Strip that away, and you’re not removing bias - you’re institutionalizing it.
Show HN: Exhibit and Site on Mechanisms for Students
by sturbes | 2025-05-02 16:37:00+00:00
Just finished a super-nerdy amateur hobby project: An exhibit and website to show kids how cool mechanisms are!

Sadly, kids don't get much tangible experience with machines anymore. Ideally, this exhibit will inspire some to explore engineering, even if they are not "book learners". The website provides content to back up the exhibit, with videos and 3D printing files.

The project is inspired by engineering exhibits from the past. Check out the research page for more. The project will be open-sourced to enable people to make their own and extend it. If you want to collaborate, LMK.

--Steve
by foxyv | 2025-05-02 16:37:09+00:00
Have you seen the documentaries on that. It was BONKERS. They would show up every day to these people's homes and give them tickets for literally anything. That bush is too tall, or whatever. Then they would threaten family members and stalk/harass them.

John Lang did a little video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfD_2fVqEMk
by ivape | 2025-05-02 16:37:16+00:00
Societally we made that association, so it's not the programs fault, they simply live the same world we live in.

Kurt Vonnegut: See, I came up through a chemistry department.

Charlie Rose: Yeah, right.

Kurt Vonnegut: And so I wrote and there was nobody there to tell me whether it was any good or not. I was just making my soul grow, writing stories.

There's some stuff about his opinion on training for writing that could be relevant:

https://charlierose.com/videos/25437

I don't think it's fair to attribute anything to anything. Stuff comes from all over the place. In other words, attributing programming prowess to math was a mistake, and we are making the same mistake again attributing it to language.

---

Just one more:

Kurt Vonnegut: --consider himself in competition with a world's champion. And this is one reason good writers are unlikely to come from an English Department. It's because the English Department teaches you good taste too early.

I think his main point is when we put something on a pedestal, we actually limit people, whether that be math or language.
by fpgaminer | 2025-05-02 16:37:23+00:00
Maybe this is an insane idea, but ... how about a spider P2P network?

At least for local AIs it might not be a terrible idea. Basically a distributed cache of the most common sources our bots might pull from. That would mean only a few fetches from each website per day, and then the rest of the bandwidth load can be shared amongst the bots.

Probably lots of privacy issues to work around with such an implementation though.
by deeThrow94 | 2025-05-02 16:37:28+00:00
100% agree, I've been saying this for years. I'm terrible with arithmetic but great with symbols and relations. Recursion is also fundamentally linguistic, and although our internal "stacks" for processing it naturally are quite small, language remains the easiest demonstration of recursion in our daily lives.

Oddly, I also use spatial intuition when thinking about stuff like stacks and the shape of data structures.
by myth_drannon | 2025-05-02 16:38:53+00:00
I also thought about October '23 but also October '73. Iron Dome made the government (not idf) captive of "conception" and the multi billion dollar fence... The whole system was so fragile. Also the Yom Kippur war and the Bar-Lev line, same belief in powerful defence lines and captive of old concepts.

At least an attack on Hizbollah was out of the box thinking, which gives some credit to the establishment.
by generationP | 2025-05-02 16:39:25+00:00
The actual article (OA!): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00029890.2025.2...

This is about solving polynomial equations using Lagrange inversion. This method, as one might have guessed, is due to... Lagrange. See https://www.numdam.org/item/RHM_1998__4_1_73_0.pdf for a historical survey. What Wildberger is suggesting is a new(?) formula for the coefficients of the resulting power series. Whether it is new I am not sure about -- Wildberger has been working in isolation from others in the field, which is already full of rediscoveries. Note that the method does not compete with solutions in radicals (as in the quadratic formula, Tartaglia, Cardano, del Ferro, Galois) because it produces infinite sums even when applied to quadratic equations.

Phys.org has gotten no part of the story correct.
by cameldrv | 2025-05-02 16:39:29+00:00
I see this with the U.S. military today. If you look at what has happened in the last year in Ukraine, the Ukranians are building about 250,000 drones a month. I'm not sure the U.S. military would prevail against such a force. The U.S. has some very nice drones, but in quantities that are hundreds of times less, due to extremely expensive military procurement.
by Lammy | 2025-05-02 16:39:45+00:00
> Because they need to hide some of what they know about you.

My favorite example of this is in the desktop web version of Google Maps. If you search for some place and try to plot directions from “Your Location” it will prompt for the browser's Geolocation API and will refuse to give directions at all if you don't consent to the prompt: https://i.imgur.com/fIQswnD.png

This is despite the fact that it opens the map with a perfectly-centered and reasonably-sized window around my current location. I have never seen this fail when not using any sort of VPN that moves my GeoIP. They could totally give a reasonable mix–max time estimate based on that window just like the one they show for variable traffic.
by rogerrogerr | 2025-05-02 16:39:49+00:00
“Years of life saved” is the wrong metric - the one we need to optimize for is sum quality-of-life * years across the population.

We stole a few years of young people’s _highest_ quality of life, and in many cases saddled them with long term academic deficits, to save a few years of older people’s lowest quality of life. It’s a morally reprehensible decision when looked at from a high level.
by armchairhacker | 2025-05-02 16:39:54+00:00
Good code doesn’t just solve a problem, it solves it in a way that’s readable and modular.

I think the problem-solving part of coding requires math skills, while the organization part requires writing skills. The organization part affects the problem-solving part, because if you write messy code (that you can’t reread once you forget or extend without rewriting) you’ll quickly get overwhelmed.

Writing large math proofs also requires organization skills, since you’ll refer to earlier sections of your proof and may have to modify it when you encounter issues. But to me, math seems to have more “big steps”: sudden insights that can’t be derived from writing (“how did you discover this?”), and concepts that are intrinsically complicated so one can’t really explain them no matter how well they can write. Whereas programming has more “small steps”: even someone who’s not smart (but has grit) can write an impressive program, if they write one component at a time and there aren’t too many components that rely on each other.
by postexitus | 2025-05-02 16:40:17+00:00
I actually am of the exact opposite opinion. With image / text / video, I am much more able to differentiate between AI vs human.

However in music - there is so much badly done human music as well, for me it's nearly impossible to understand the difference between a badly done human music and a high fidelity AI music (the chord progression, happens as often in human music). Moreover, I have put Suno AI on playlist mode before and it's actually been enjoyable, and I am a big AI sceptic! Sometimes even more so than Spotify's own (although they've been accused of putting AI music on playlists as well - but I am fairly sure the weak stuff that put me off was by humans - did I say I cannot differentiate?).

Especially some music genres - like Japanese Vocaloid ; Power Metal, some country, where certain genre specific things overwhelm the piece, AI does a very good job in mimicking those from the best of the best and put meagre efforts to shame.

Here is one AI song I generated in an earlier version of Suno - let me know if anything stands out as AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5JcEnU-x3s

and another I recorded in my studio with an artist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6mJcXxoppc
by swagasaurus-rex | 2025-05-02 16:40:20+00:00
People stating their preferences are often at odds with what they actually prefer, especially when there’s social expectations.

If you had a dating profile of both, you could more directly test people’s true preferences. Anecdotally, for every woman who says she prefers a dad bod, there are ten who would swipe right on the muscled gym rat.

I’ve also heard anecdotally that for a woman in a relationship, dad bods means there’s less attention from other woman so it reduces competition, whereas for women who aren’t in a relationship they actually prefer a man who is popular with the ladies. Both sexes have differences in preference for when in a relationship vs single.
by ck2 | 2025-05-02 16:40:27+00:00
Does it even matter anymore what Congress funds if administration is just going to illegally order everything defunded?

Everything with them is just for the spite, has nothing to do with logic or savings.

The next super space-telescope is already paid for at $3.5 Billion and is READY TO LAUNCH and they are trying to kill it out of spite

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-next-major-...

Everyone that gave them power is the problem, they are exactly as advertised.
by finkin1 | 2025-05-02 16:40:47+00:00
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by AlexB138 | 2025-05-02 16:41:08+00:00
It's a few things. 1. Sales people see the exact dollar amount they are making for the company. This is different than almost any other role. Most people can't quantify how much value they generate. A lot of people here are arguing that the reason is that there is a direct quantification, but that's not it. The reason is that there is a direct quantification AND they know exactly what it is.

2. These are people that convince others of things for a living. The skills that allow them to be good at their job also allow them to negotiate for extremely favorable compensation mechanisms.

3. At this point, it's how their industry works. If you try something else, you won't be able to hire sales people. They are very competitive, and not idealistic like engineers. You're not going to convince them to take a flat comp structure that is the same as every other employee's.