MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by markvdb | 2025-05-18 17:03:56+00:00
Solar has won the market's backing. Whatever Pennsylvania politicians decide, they better take that into account.

In most places, solar is perfectly competitive without subsidies. Take my prosperous corner of the EU. No direct subsidies, nor the indirect subsidy net metering is. .37€/kWh average residential all-in electricity price caused a solar boom anyway.

The short term result of that solar boom is an ever steeper duck curve [0]. Negative electricity pricing more frequently and longer. Lots of creativity aligning production and demand. Think dynamic pricing, energy storage both as heat and electricity, and more. Great to see these products and services springing up.

I see early signs of much larger actors adjusting to the changed electricity landscape. Ever larger scale industrial scale clients are embracing the entire spectrum of solar, electric steam generation, heat pumps and battery storage. Exciting things with the market providing a strong tail wind.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-18 17:03:56+00:00
The macOS services model seems like a good fit for this kind of thing. Services are little bits of context-aware functionality that apps expose to enable integration between apps without active developer involvement. An example, in most Mac apps if you select text, right-click to open the context menu, and open the Services submenu you’ll see a number of services that do something with the highlighted text.

Ideally the SRS app would make services available to facilitate quick creation of new cards, so for example one might highlight some text, right-click, and select Services → New SRS Card… which then opens an in-place lightweight card creator dialog.
by nanook | 2025-05-18 17:03:57+00:00
The thing that helped me tame YouTube was creating separate channels for my various interests. This keeps all my relevant subs in one place and really helps the algorithm. I turn off all the feeds on my main computer using https://socialfocus.app/. This prevents me from going down a YouTube hole when I don't want to but my searches and views still tune the respective algorithms. Occasionally, a stray recommendation will show up in the feed and I try to mark it "Not Interested".

Now its a real joy checking my channel feeds on the weekend and queueing things up to watch later. I have excellent stuff to chew through when I feel like it - in the gym, cooking, cleaning etc. I really look forward to doing these things now.

Switching profiles takes a few clicks but the upside has been totally worth it. It's a shame they don't make this workflow more obvious (You have to go to Account -> Switch accounts -> View all channels -> Create a channel) to set this up.

I wish more social media allowed you to bucket your feed into "interests". Maximizing clicks/views doesn't have to come at the cost of scattered attention.
by spwa4 | 2025-05-18 17:04:33+00:00
Yeah but it's still amazing just how much Trump wants to give to himself and the rich. The "tax cuts" (which aren't tax cuts, they're entirely debt financed, which republicans keep telling me isn't a tax cut) he already did in 2016 were, per year, slightly less than social security + medicaid. If this Moody's report is to be believed the now-planned tax cuts will be more than social security + medicaid.

So Trump wants to TRIPLE social security and medicaid expenses ... with just 2/3 going to him and the rich.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-05-18 17:04:57+00:00
I’ve heard other people say that.

I think there are more musicians with reach than ever.

I would say it’s very likely there are far fewer musicians making a living out of their music than there were in the last. That’s the key difference.

And the truth is that for most people incentives matter, so not being able to make a living from music means very talented people who are financially motivated (ie most of them) do something else instead.
by brig90 | 2025-05-18 17:04:58+00:00
Totally fair — I defaulted to paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 mostly for speed and wide compatibility, but you’re right that it’s long in the tooth by today’s standards. I’d be really curious to see how something like all-mpnet-base-v2 or even text-embedding-ada-002 would behave, especially if we keep the suffixes in and lean into full contextual embeddings rather than reducing to root forms.

Appreciate you calling that out — that’s a great push toward iteration.
by beyarkay | 2025-05-18 17:05:07+00:00
(author here) If you haven't watched the Factorio head developer's bug-fix videos on youtube, you really should. They're a goldmine of insight. Also the second video is a very strong case in favour of peer-programming.

> novice drives, expert advises

I've not heard this explicitly recommended, but it's so clearly the best way to do things if learning is the goal.
by f_devd | 2025-05-18 17:06:27+00:00
> There is also a new NFC proposal ( again my google fu is not helping ) that allows multiple NFC card / tags to be read at the same time

This is already in standard NFC-A/B, usually just called the 'collision avoidance' or 'select' protocol, effectively doing a binary search over the uid space (iirc) asking particular bitmasks of uids to respond. The main thing is that it used on the reader side, not the (emulated) card side so I'm not sure what the support for multiple emulated cards is like (and if there is a different proposal for that).
by blindriver | 2025-05-18 17:07:47+00:00
There needs to be a better way to deal with trillion dollar companies that have the power to remove essential parts of your life based on bugs or incompetent processes.

Companies like Apple. Microsoft, Google, Meta, et al. have the money to spend on better customer support, but they don't because they have a monopoly. They know they can do whatever they want and there's nothing we can do. But even worse, they have absolute and total control and then hide behind their lack of customer support.

I think there should be a law that states that once you become large enough or important enough, you MUST reach a certain level of competent customer support or you will get fined the amount of money it will cost to pay for this competent customer support.

The reason why they get around bad customer support is because they are large enough so that they can bully billions of people by threatening to cut off access. Talk to Youtubers that get mysteriously cut off with no customer support to talk to.

This is all because of customer support. Smaller companies need to invest in customer support because of competition but not these larger companies because they don't have real competition, and something needs to change to force them to do it.
Show HN: Racketmeter – Measure Badminton String Tension Using Sound Frequency
by zhacker | 2025-05-18 17:08:38+00:00
Racketmeter lets badminton players measure string tension using the sound frequency produced when tapping the racket strings. It's 100% free, works in your browser on mobile and desktop, and requires no sign-up or installation.

I built it to solve a personal problem. I started playing badminton regularly in 2016 and quickly learned that players often ask stringers to string rackets at specific tensions (like 22 or 26 lbs). But after a few stringing jobs, I began to feel like the tension was inconsistent. Other players told me they just tap the strings and go by ear where "sharper sound meant higher tension."

One day while tuning my guitar, I could see exact sound frequencies on my tuner app. That’s when it clicked. It should be possible to build a tuner for badminton strings as well!

I searched online and found some tension-frequency data shared by professional stringers, but it wasn’t clean or comprehensive. So I visited 5 or 6 local stringers, gave them a frequency measuring app, and asked them to record racket head size, string thickness, tension, and sound frequency for each job. Some asked for a small payment, but most helped for free. Within a week, I had over 200 solid data points.

I trained a simple regression model using that data and validated it with newly strung rackets. It turned out to be surprisingly accurate. I shared it with friends and fellow players, and it started to spread in badminton forums.

There was another app that launched a few months later with big celebrity endorsements, but it was less accurate, harder to use, and required in-app purchases. Mine wasn't built to compete, but it ended up being more useful.

I originally released it as a mobile app, but constant changes in Google Play policies kept taking it down. So I rebuilt it as a simple browser-based tool.

Would love feedback, suggestions for improvements, or ideas on how to sustain it without cluttering it with ads or paywalls.

Let me know what you think.
by pm215 | 2025-05-18 17:08:39+00:00
You seem to be reading more into the phrase "human failing" than I intended by it. All I meant was the ordinary variations in human behaviour where we sometimes fall a little short of what we hoped we would or could do.

We seem to agree on the substance: that the SRS system should be able to work more humanely with and for the kind of entirely normal situations you describe, by for instance being able to adjust to variations in available time and picking the "best" cards to review rather than assuming the user will get through the whole lot, and in suggesting to them when they should do fewer new items to avoid difficulties in a month or two.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-05-18 17:09:06+00:00
I'd say it really depends on the mentality of the very rich person

The very wealthy are going to fly private. Upper middle class could swing this on a case-to-case basis, but not regularly and especially if not if they frequently travel

Other than that, the main difference is the very wealthy having a mentality of getting people to "take care of problems" to a much larger extent. For example, routine tasks like cleaning. An upper MC person might have a weekly cleaner at best. But they still have to load/unload dishwasher, do their own laundry, etc. A very rich person has a full-time housekeeper.

The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems. Like having "a lawyer" who they go to for and have known for years. There seems to be much more of a sense of personal relationships / loyalty. Almost like the old feudal oaths.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-05-18 17:09:16+00:00
My personal approach with A levels was to strictly learn content through classes, then organise things (which teaches you a lot on its own!) and make my own flashcards. Then I used the flashcards to keep it fresh till exam season. It was crazy, during revision lessons everyone else in the class would be going "uhhh I have no clue, that was two years ago" while I'd just know it.

I have tried different approaches, including using other people's flashcards (not as good - objectively they were high quality, but you gain a lot from writing your own + tailoring to your own way of looking at things) and learning from them (for my driving theory - terrible idea!). That hybrid approach is the best I've found, and the one I intend to use for my degree.
by stackskipton | 2025-05-18 17:09:30+00:00
Ops type here who deals with this around Kafka.

It comes down to how much you use Kubernetes. At my company, just about everything is in Kubernetes except for databases which are hosted by Azure. So having random VMs means we need to get Ansible, SSH Keys and SOC2 compliance annoyance. So the workload effort to get VMs running may be higher than Kubernetes even if you have to put in extra hacks.
by jzb | 2025-05-18 17:10:26+00:00
"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did."

I think this is two claims -- AFAICT kids do have a shared cultural experience, but it is true it's not like yours, or mine. The Spotify playlists are one way they find new music, TikTok being another, movies/TV shows, or word of mouth.

What some folks may have found useful about radio playing gatekeeper and music directors choosing 40 songs per week (they didn't) others of us found stifling.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a small town on outskirts of St. Louis. We could get a few classic rock/AOR stations (KSHE, KSD) and starting in the early 80s there was "hit radio" KHTR which almost quite literally followed the 40 songs per week model...

There's tons of music I didn't* discover in the early 80s, such as The Smiths, that I only happened on later because of strong gatekeeping via radio.

In the 90s we got KPNT ("the point") which was alternative rock and more adventurous than KHTR, and by then I also had a car and access to the good record stores in St. Louis. I amassed a large CD collection and stopped listening to the radio almost entirely excepting some college radio, and kept up with new music via Rolling Stone, Spin, etc. Even bought some albums based entirely on their reviews without having heard them at all.

All of that long and rambly comment to say... I like music discovery today far more than I did in my youth, 20s, and early 30s. I skim Bandcamp regularly for new music, watch questions about music on Ask Metafilter, and have found YouTube Music's algorithm to be decent. (e.g., pick a song, make it a "radio" station and add songs I haven't heard before but like to my library.)

It is true that I rarely find folks to discuss music with because I am not listening to mainstream music much. That part sucks -- but few people my age seem to care about music deeply.

* Almost certainly the music director for your local station was subscribed to a service that provided a weekly list of songs to program, rather than choosing them themselves. I worked part-time in radio while in college, taking weekend and evening/midnight-6 a.m. shifts, in Washington MO and Kirksville MO. KSLQ (adult contemporary), KRXL (classic rock/AOR), KTUF (country) and KIRX (talk, sports) were all largely getting program direction from national syndicated programming. The local music director might have used some discretion in choosing / filtering out some songs, but they were likely getting the direction from a service.
by sasjaws | 2025-05-18 17:10:31+00:00
I'm building a reader app that tries to solve this exact problem by providing a range of gradually simplified versions of each article to match your proficiency. So you can stay in the sweet spot, or work your way up version by version.

If your target language happens to be Chinese then you can give it a try at https://reader.longyan.io/landing

No login required, love your feedback.
by ndileas | 2025-05-18 17:10:41+00:00
Are you implying that was, somehow, good? Because it was bad. Most major religions / ethical paradigms agree on this.

People, individually, should take risks if that's what they want, and it's not going to hurt others. I'm totally fine with skydiving, base jumping, rock climbing, whatever. I'm not fine with pumping chemicals into the local water table because that's the way Grandpa do.
by florbo | 2025-05-18 17:10:50+00:00
Just guessing here, but I think the vertical scaling might be for translating some of the top-down images they have. If you take a look at the photo below, Pluto appears to have pretty rough terrain. I didn't find anything about post-processing for this particular image, sorry in advance if I missed it.

https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19947
by vunderba | 2025-05-18 17:11:19+00:00
Good article but as a heavy user of Obsidian (and previously Evernote), I would offer some counterpoints:

> After some mental gymnastics weighing if I should continue with Obsidian, I found solace when asking myself "Can I see myself using this in 20 years?". I couldn't. The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel tired.

In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.

> Obsidian was a great tool for me personally for a long time. But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature.

Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device. All my notes sync up to Gitea hosted on my VPS and it works relatively seamlessly.

I'm glad the author had fun. Personally, I'm very happy with Obsidian and the plugin architecture has made it easy for me to extend it where necessary.
by ZeroCool2u | 2025-05-18 17:11:42+00:00
This looks really cool. I will say my default solution for this, and the default across my org, is Data Wrangler in VS Code[1]. My only wish list item is if the low code solution wrote polars instead of pandas. Any thoughts on how hard that might be to accomplish?

1: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-tools...
by pondemic | 2025-05-18 17:11:51+00:00
Apparently one of the old school decentralized RPC providers (pocket network) has pivoted into being a way to access open data sources in a permissionless way. I think this is what you’re talking about?

https://pocket.network/case-study-building-a-decentralized-d...

I don’t disagree that it would be nice to be able to do this, but barring some black swan-esque event that changes how people see these things, it’ll probably always be somewhat niche compared to more permissioned or centralized systems. That or the decentralized systems will need to be VERY competitively priced to make the value-prop a bit more of a slam dunk for making this more widespread outside of philosophically-aligned hardliners and idealists
by trust_bt_verify | 2025-05-18 17:11:56+00:00
I guess you are right, this thread is filled with low effort, emotional posts which clearly illuminate biased views. [0] Hopefully some one with years of experience in ‘forum talk’ will be able to realign this misguided soul. Until then, let’s flag anything that makes Elon look bad so we never have to talk about it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44009199
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-05-18 17:13:24+00:00
The main thing being complained about here is that you have to pay for device sync. But instead of setting ups FOSS alternative like with a-shell and git you decided to… checks notes… build a less featureful obsidian without getting all the benefits of the obsidian ecosystem?

I’m all for doing projects like this as an intellectual exercise. It’s just that the motivation behind doing so in the article is a bit more “huh?”
by travisjungroth | 2025-05-18 17:13:56+00:00
> All the SRS systems I've seen essentially assume the user is a perfect robot who will do their reviews every day without fail.

This reminds me of GTO (game theory optimal) play in poker.

There’s a perfect way to do things, so we should just try to do something as close to that as possible, right? The reality is that you can’t actually do things in this perfect way. In GTO’s case it’s that it’s too complex for a human to have memorized and in SRS many (not all) people will fail to follow the algorithm for one reason or another.

The problem is these strategies aren’t very resilient. If you miss the implementation by a bit, it can cause big losses. An algorithm that’s less theoretically optimal but more attainable by actual humans can end up much stronger in the real world.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-18 17:14:14+00:00
> Aren't these marketed as "NAS" i.e. aimed at consumers and presumably not enterprise/data center clients

It would still be targeted at MSP or an internal team use case - think like an MSP who provides file share services for local car dealerships or an ML team building their own in-house cluster.

That mid-market usecase doesn't exist at the scale to justify immediately launching the 24TB N300 in the EU market, especially as WD and Seagate already provide a comparable product as you pointed out, which makes the scope of market expansion much weaker.
by beyarkay | 2025-05-18 17:14:58+00:00
> I agree that mentoring is hard, and I want to read your take.

Thanks for the vote of confidence (: I'm kicking myself for not figuring out a mailing list before this essay went viral, but I'll cross-post the essay on my substack (https://beyarkay.substack.com/) when it comes out, so you can sign up there to get an email.

> I wonder if we agree on expert aesthetics or not. You write:

So I'm coining "expert aesthetics" as a relatively unused phrase that I can put my own connotations onto. There'll be more in the essay (; but at a high level, I've observed that, as someone becomes an expert in a field, their sense for what's "beautiful" in that field changes, and _generally_ it starts to focus on things that are technically challenging. That is, experts (IME) tend to find technically difficult things _aesthetically_ beautiful, even though novices might not care one bit about the technical skill required.

Examples might help: Wine connoisseurs preferring wine from specific regions or made using specific techniques, while casual drinkers just want something that tastes good. Fashion designers preferring something that's different from last year and riffs off of the current styles, while the general public just want the same old same old. Painters taking delight in still lifes that perfectly capture the reflection of light through a wine glass, while most people just want a pretty sunset or portrait for their wall.

This is all still in flux, but that's the gist of what I'm calling "expert aesthetics".
by quesera | 2025-05-18 17:15:12+00:00
> There was a tiny amount of it played on college radio, but it would be something like one show a week from 2 AM to 3 AM on Sunday morning

> We found things. ... No one curated it for us.

I think you're getting to the essence of good curation.

That college radio show is exactly curation. The record label that put out the hardcore 7"s is curation. The record store is curation. The kid who bought a record and made copies for friends is a curator.

Word of mouth is the strongest curation.

What's missing today is the human. The college radio DJ is a human curator, and is much more idiosyncratic and humanely engaging than an optimized-for-content-or-cost algorithmic curator.

Algorithms might work for very mainstream (or nonspecific) tastes -- and actually it is self-reinforcing on that level. But it fails badly for nichier stuff. And it is in direct opposition to those of us for whom "different" is/was part of our personal or group identity. :)
by aaldrick | 2025-05-18 17:15:21+00:00
I've tried Fresh Cards so thank you for developing that app, and trying to add cool new software into the space.

Great question. Here's one way to do it:

The first is how clunky the process of going from X to flashcard feels to the end user. One way to deal with the fact that we are crossing software border is to add an extra step where highlighting something allows you to go into an "inbox" before any cards are made. It is clear what the user has to do. They read something interesting, and add it to the inbox. When they are ready, they can head over and only then use some sort of automation (either via custom prompt for an AI or otherwise) to make the cards. This gives them another step, or interface, at which they can decide whether or not the thing they highlighted (since highlighting is easy) is actually worth something. It segments the process into clear easy sections: highlighting, deciding which highlights to flashcardify (and therefore keep), and flashcard review.

It definitely is an open-ended process, and I appreciate that apps need to have a strong opinion on how to direct users from start to finish; but I feel this is definitely possible now with cheap and quick AI.

I didn't answer every question but hopefully that helps somewhat.