MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: ChartHN – Hacker News' daily top 10, but in diagrams
by cxumol | 2025-05-26 21:49:15+00:00
For those who are interested in ChartHN's tech stack, here's a brief list:

- HTML to markdown: Jina AI Reader

- Markdown to Graphviz DOT: LLMs

- Graphviz DOT to SVG: Viz.js

- Data Storage: TSV files

- Document updating: GitHub Actions

- Frontend: HTML + CSS + Vanilla JS

There are also side tools linked at the bottom of the ChartHN page:

- a web tool to convert any page to a diagram

- a visual benchmark to compare the performance of LLMs in generating Graphviz DOT data

To fit Graphviz DOT data within a TSV file and reduce file size, I have also developed dot-minify (https://github.com/cxumol/dot-minify) as a sub-project. This is likely to be the world's first tool to minify Graphviz dot format data, according to my research.
by codethief | 2025-05-26 21:49:47+00:00
Ubuntu user of 15 years here (+ a couple years of tinkering with RedHat, Arch & Gentoo before that).

I tried to learn Nix (the language) a couple years ago, didn't like it and got nowhere. Now, two months ago I heard I would be getting a Windows machine at my new client, so I really wanted a way to deterministically generate a Linux VM that worked & felt exactly the same as my usual setup. So I thought back to Nix(OS) and this time I skipped trying to learn Nix and just tried to absorb it from examples and code snippets I would find online (very reminiscent of my experience with Emacs many years ago). Often I would also ask Gemini to explain things to me. Only a few afternoons later I had a working VM[0] that looked and felt exactly as the desktop environment I have carefully curated over 15 years. Now, several weeks later, I also have built a live CD image with that same config and will soon roll out my Nix config to all my Ubuntu machines & Debian servers. I won't look back.

I won't deny, though: I still don't like the language too much and I think it is tied too much to building an OS, as opposed to anything else. Documentation is sparse and mediocre at best. But overall it's alright! Things are usually not that complicated, and most of the time they just work! (And if they don't, it's surprisingly easy to navigate the nixpkgs source code and look up what's happening under the hood.) In any case, my new Nix config is so much better than the set of bespoke Bash scripts I've written over the years to (reproducibly?) configure my Ubuntu desktop with i3wm for me.

[0]: nixos-generators is magical when you first try it! https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators (Fine print: Of course with the benefit of hindsight I now know that it's merely a dumb wrapper around things that Nix provides out of the box but oh well.)
by nchmy | 2025-05-26 21:50:49+00:00
Genuine question:

If Duolingo was being started today by a solo developer, and they essentially just created some sort of wrapper over [insert LLM] to be a language tutor, would there be outrage? I suspect not. So, this seems to be more about getting rid of workers than it is about AI.

Would people use it? Probably, and I think it would VERY well - at least in comparison to current options. ChatGPT is a fantastic Spanish tutor (though I'm largely self-taught, through immersion). So, something that actually has some sort of structured curriculum and the LLM assesses your progress, gives guidance, explains why things are the way they are and how they compare (eg particular verb tenses and conjugations, order of words/syntax etc...), could surely be enormously useful. It probably wouldnt even be that hard to open-source some system prompts for a curriculum...
by dotancohen | 2025-05-26 21:50:49+00:00
Duolingo does not need a moat. They are already an established incumbent and have market inertia on their side. They can afford to experiment and make mistakes, and then to backtrack those mistakes.

For what it's worth, I also stopped using Duolingo when the human forums closed. I often found as much value in the forums as in the actual course. And like GP, the hardest part was relinquishing my nearly 1000 day streak.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-26 21:52:03+00:00
Grading homework has two reasonable objectives:

Provide an incentive for students to do the thing they should be doing anyway.

Give an opportunity to provide feedback on the assignment.

It is totally useless as an evaluation mechanic, because of course the students that want to can just cheat. It’s usually pretty small, right? IIRC when I did tutoring we only gave like 10-20% for the aggregate homework grade.
by cassianoleal | 2025-05-26 21:52:21+00:00
> the reality is that a lot of development work doesn't necessarily rely on the strong engineering methodology (e.g. measurement, material properties, tolerances, modelling, etc.)

It's probably true that a lot of development work doesn't rely on those. It's probably also true that the work other kinds of engineers do also don't.

That said, when engineering software systems, those are very important. Measurement: resource sizing, observability; tolerances: backoffs, back pressure, queues, topics, buffers; modelling: types, syntax, data analytics...

There's a whole class of developers out there that are not aware or very good at those. And that's fine. There's a place for them in the market. You don't need an engineer to work on your floor joists or your plumbing. Sure you can have one, but you can also hire a builder or DIY it all yourself.
by globie | 2025-05-26 21:52:23+00:00
They only need to pay off or install a single employee to get total or near-total access. Consider this chart from 2013 showing when various tech companies were added to PRISM:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Prism_sl...

A lot of the companies embattled in the "constant litigation" mentioned by the GP are featured in this very chart.
by dogmatism | 2025-05-26 21:52:35+00:00
wait what?

CHS lost millions of records, was fined a few million (out of profit of 1.2 billion) UCLA similar. Bunch of others I don't think even got fined like Ascension recently lost all data in a ransomware attack

It's useful going after a rogue employee, but on an org level it's security theater
by mxfh | 2025-05-26 21:53:26+00:00
I just don't get why it's reinventing the whole wheel here – try using an off-the-shelf codec and tack on a sparse correction. For example, encode frames with a modern lossless/near-lossless codec (AV1 with QP=0) and then append a tiny bitmask+delta residual for perfect reconstruction. These codecs already exploit motion compensation, intra-prediction and DCT-like transforms to minimize frame-to-frame deltas.

In practice you’d likely get better compression (and faster progress) by piggybacking on AV1 strengths – then use Bloom-filter trick just on the leftover sparse differences – rather than building a new codec from scratch.

The residuals can be expected to be quite noisy and will likely not profit from any intra frame predictability anymore.

JPEG XL’s lossless engine already improves on PNG by ~35%, that and other general purpose compression methods would then be the per frame benchmark here on the residuals to beat.

In short: use the proven gear (motion-compensated blocks + modern transforms) to do the heavy lifitng, then let the bloom filter chase the hopefully comparably small residual.

As a showcase of what bloom filters are this would be still worthwhile, but I don't see any practical benefit here yet.

Not to forget, there is a reason visually lossless is the de facto the norm now, even in production grade environments, storage space is still not free while the average uncompressed display stream easily reaches way north of 5Gbps now easily, there is only so much lossless can resonably do here.
by __loam | 2025-05-26 21:53:43+00:00
Most of the college courses I took had the bulk of the grade be based on exams or projects. Homework was usually a small proportion to give students a little buffer and to actually prepare them for the exams. AI might have helped on coding projects but a lot of my grades were based on exams using pencil and paper in a room of 30-200 other people. It also just seems like a waste of your own time and money to avoid the act of learning by skipping all the hard parts with a corporate token generator.
by ark296 | 2025-05-26 21:54:01+00:00
I'm kinda shocked by how people thought DuoLingo was ever going to be any different. They are a high-growth startup, through and through.

The founder gets on podcasts and extolls the virtues of relentless A/B tests. They very openly admit that their primary value add is gamification (otherwise people churn from language learning apps).

I suppose the lesson here is that the words you say to Silicon Valley types you want to impress are sometimes overheard by your core audience, who may not like your opinions.
by rgleaves | 2025-05-26 21:54:34+00:00
To address various misconceptions posted by commenters here:

>> I think this just a standard Raspberry Pi Linux distro with an emulator for "Project Oberon 2013" preloaded.

No, it's the standard Oberon 2013 with nontrivial changes made to the UI, to make it significantly easier to learn and use than Oberon 2013. Oberon Pi runs as an app on the standard Raspberry Pi OS, using the standard Oberon RISC emulator written in C.

>> Are there any "guided" walkthroughs for someone who has never used Oberon

Yes. The Oberon Pi System User Guide was specifically written to address this learning gap in the existing Oberon doc universe (though it is specific to Oberon Pi). Note that the system user guide is included in the Oberon Pi release as an integrated help document.

>> limited Unicode support, limited graphics support, no XML, no JSON, no HTTP.

Oberon is a historical software system which predates all these features – to judge it by contemporary software standards is ahistorical.

>> Go has several significant differences that made it far more useful >> I'd love to to see a true bare-metal port

Because Oberon is historical, upgrading it to compete with contemporary software entirely misses the point. But teaching Oberon in computer science education would be entirely apposite, for the same reasons as teaching algebra and geometry.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-26 21:54:45+00:00
> can opt in and explicitly provide consent for their code to be used as training data.

I guess if you count users explicitly opting in, then that part is true.

I also covered the case where someone opts-in to a “free” LLM provider that uses prompts as training data above.

There are definitely ways to get your private data into training sets if you opt-in to it, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone.
by cirosantilli | 2025-05-26 21:55:16+00:00
Nowadays at least, wonder if they could just pick a few of the most popular unblocked HTTPS websites with a private messaging system a la Twitter DM. Email possibly too. A GitHub private repo would be perfect for that as dictatorships relaly hate to block it and lose all the IT value. Maybe at the time things weren't so simple with less HTTPS adoption.

I suspect the agents knew little about the comms tech and were deeply reassured of their security.
by account-5 | 2025-05-26 21:55:24+00:00
> Are you arguing that the fault for being on the wrong side of the powerful lies with the people who could have just decided not to be on the wrong side of the powerful?

No.

I saying that people are responsible for their actions.

In western society (democratic) laws are implemented by people put in a position of authority by the very people those laws apply to.

I'm not really sure I understand the rest of what you're talking about, so I do t want to assume anything, but it sounds like you're after perfects laws no one can misinterprete? I don't think that's possible. Bug free software will likely come first.

Either way the conversation about power and who has it and who doesn't doesn't strike me as helpful.
by anal_reactor | 2025-05-26 21:55:36+00:00
I'd like to limit my online time, but I'm so addicted to the internet, even though it's pure garbage nowadays. Any practical tips? It's not about putting away the phone, it's about... the hope that maybe this time I'll read something funny or informative, as I have absolutely no other sources of information or social interaction. "Go out and talk to people" isn't valid advice. It's never been, but in 2025 finally even the mainstream is slowly admitting that this doesn't work.
by overgard | 2025-05-26 21:55:49+00:00
I think as a culture we've fetishized formal schooling way past its value. I mean, how much of what you "learned" in school do you actually use or remember? I'm not against education, education is very important, but I'm not sure that schooling is really the optimal route to being educated. They're related, but they're not the same.

The reality is, if someone wants to learn something then there's very little need to cheat, and if they don't want to learn the thing but they're required to, the cheating sort of doesn't matter in the end because they won't retain or use it.

Or to put it simpler, you can lead a horse to water but..
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-26 21:56:26+00:00
Near the top:

> to set complex custom backgrounds on an element

Basically the same reasons you might need draw() in traditional GUIs.

Do this in CSS: https://camo.githubusercontent.com/b6c45f60f6e450574c4087589...

(image taken from the other guy's comment's gh repo)
by 93po | 2025-05-26 21:56:36+00:00
ive accepted i need to be in a really different field doing something really different. ive struggled my entire career due to some severe ADHD/'tism issues to hold a job for more than a 1-1.5 years, and have recently failed a couple times trying to make software work because my coping mechanisms just aren't where they need to be to be successful as a senior engineer that doesn't need some hand-holding that no one wants to do when someone has 15 years of experience already
by marginalia_nu | 2025-05-26 21:56:49+00:00
If an AI correctly guesses the outcome of a dice roll, it does not mean it knows the outcome in advance. Being correct is a necessary element of knowledge, but far from sufficient.

It's probably helpful to reach for epistemology to make sense of knowledge as a concept. While something like "true justified belief" is far from a perfect definition of knowledge, it a least is at least correct to a good approximation.
by mrshu | 2025-05-26 21:56:50+00:00
OpenAI does not provide many details about their models these days but they do mention that the "Advanced voice" within ChatGPT operates on audio input directly:

> Advanced voice uses natively multimodal models, such as GPT-4o, which means that it directly “hears” and generates audio, providing for more natural, real-time conversations that pick up on non-verbal cues, such as the speed you’re talking, and can respond with emotion.

From https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8400625-voice-mode-faq
by maratc | 2025-05-26 21:57:03+00:00
It’s not a savings account. My employer and me both pay monthly installments to the pension fund which are tax free. The money is under my name, and is not used to cover any pension of someone else. I can decide where it is invested, and change it at will. Once I go into retirement, the accumulated amount is converted to monthly payments which I will receive until I die. If I die before the retirement, my children will inherit the whole sum.
by mppm | 2025-05-26 21:57:04+00:00
> I could see a highly hydrophilic capillary restricting a vapor enough to where it has better entropy in a liquid state.

My other comment here (and and a reply to a similar question) has more detail [1], but in short: this is true for capillaries and pores, it is not true for "collectable" droplets on a flat surface.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099078
by AlexCoventry | 2025-05-26 21:57:20+00:00
I think a better approach might be to get students to use AI as a writing coach. Get them to commit to a short handwritten essay during class, then use AI give them feedback on the essay. Their interaction with the AI and how they respond to the feedback becomes the assessment material. That's not compatible with the authors "Butlerian Jihad" ideology, though.
by bradly | 2025-05-26 21:57:29+00:00
Here ya go! https://birdymusic.com/

BirdNET-PI posts detection notifications via Apprise interface to a little Rails app running on a tiny vps. Sound generation is done through the wonderful Tone.js library which wraps the WebAudioContext API.

I'd like to continue building more generative sound structures like adsr graphs from sparklines of detections and things like that. Trying to keep it generative, but without AI blackboxing things.
by cycomanic | 2025-05-26 21:58:03+00:00
The problem is intensity/power, as discussed previously photon-photon interactions are weak, so you need very high intensities to get a reasonable nonlinear response. The issue is, that optical matrix operations work by spreading out the light over many parallel paths, i.e. reducing the intensity in each path. There might be some clever ways to overcome this, but so far everyone has avoided that problem. They said we did "optical deep learning" what they really did was an optical matrix multiplication, but saying that would not have resulted in a Nature publication.
by pedalpete | 2025-05-26 21:58:39+00:00
When looking at any of these studies in CPAP, and sleep in general, we need to be looking deeper than just the AHI (hypopnia index, how many times you stopped breathing), and directly at EEG measures of restorative function and other biomarkers.

This shows an improvement in AHI, but no change in any markers of actual sleep restorative function (I'd use the term "quality" but the sleep health industry has stolen that term to mean measures of sleep time).

When looking at sleep time the study shows no change in most of the sleep architecture, but a significant decrease in REM time, which can have effects on emotional wellbeing, irritability, and potentially depression.

This study showed no change in ESS (subjective measures of daytime sleepiness), but did show a change in PROMIS, which is a longer term measure of fatigue.

I've been recommending to anyone on CPAP that they give mandibular splint, which is a biteplate which shifts the jaw in order to hold the airway open, and is much easier, lower cost, and effective for many people. It also does not show a reduction in REM.

However, I also don't believe there is any reason that a sleep study which has full PSG relies only on sleep time, and none of the bio/neurological measures of health which are easily available, such as HRV, delta power, spindle activity, etc. etc.
by skissane | 2025-05-26 21:58:41+00:00
Interesting that it is available for OS/2 and not Windows.

If you are already supporting Linux and OS/2, it isn't much more work to support Windows too–and will likely attract many more users than OS/2 support will

The FAQ [0] says:

> Iron Spring PL/I is free for non-commercial and hobbyiest use. The price of the commercial version has not yet been determined, but will be approximately two orders of magnitude less than IBM's compiler for Windows. Academic, Government, and Volume licenses will be available. A CD will be available at additional cost.

I'm sceptical the commercial version is ever going to happen now. This is a very small and shrinking market, 20 years ago selling it would have been a tough gig but you might have had some success, the same success today is going to be orders of magnitude harder. If you had a time machine to take this product back to the 1990s, it probably would have done much better, though even there it would have been a decisively niche product.

> The compiler is currently closed-source.

I wonder why people do this – I get why you want to keep your software closed source if you have realistic plans to commercially exploit it – but if you don't, why not just let people have the source code?

I've heard before stories about solo closed source developers who suddenly and unexpectedly die, and they'd left the source code on an encrypted disk, and even if their family gives some technical friend permission to try to retrieve it, turns out to be impossible because nobody knows the password. Open source, not an issue.

[0] http://www.iron-spring.com/faq.html
by anonymousDan | 2025-05-26 21:59:04+00:00
Not sure I agree with either/or. In person assessments are still pretty robust. I think an ideal university will teach both with a clear division between them (e.g. whether a particular assessment or module allows AI). What I'm currently struggling with is how to design an assessment in which the student is allowed to use AI - how do I actually assess it? Where should the bar actually be? Can it be relative to peers? Does this reward students willing to pay for more advanced AI?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-05-26 21:59:21+00:00
The Chevron Ecuador story is a great example of how impossible discussions on corporate misconduct can get. Chevron has successfully argued in both the US and an international tribunal that the Ecuadorian judgment was procured through corruption and bribery. But oil companies are very unpopular, so many people who encounter the case assume that Chevron must have been in the wrong, and the lawyer who was disbarred and jailed for his role in that corruption must be right.
by jumploops | 2025-05-26 22:00:13+00:00
A bit off-topic, but I think AI has the potential to supercharge learning for the students of the future.

Similar to Montessori, LLMs can help students who wander off in various directions.

I remember often being “stuck” on some concept (usually in biology and chemistry), where the teacher would hand-wave something as truth, this dismissing my request for further depth.

Of course, LLMs in the current educational landscape (homework-heavy) only benefit the students who are truly curious…

My hope is that, with new teaching methods/styles, we can unlock (or just maintain!) the curiosity inherent in every pupil.

(If anyone knows of a tool like this, where an LLM stays on a high-level trajectory of e.g. teaching trigonometry, but allows off-shoots/adventures into other topical nodes, I’d love to know about it!)
by smcin | 2025-05-26 22:00:19+00:00
Some (but not most or all) of Duolingo's social and gamification features/social nags/upsells/"reminders" default on but can be turned off in the settings. But yes it's out of control and a strong reaason to disable Auto-update on the Duolingo app to not constantly the ever-more-AI-driven-nags/upsells. DL is becoming its own antipattern in the quest for revenue $$$ growth at all costs, e.g. reducing the actual amount of language being learned, beyond a certain plateau. I've been saying that here for a couple of years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297240

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35679783
by schwartzworld | 2025-05-26 22:00:21+00:00
> 40% of patients don't tolerate it

Tough to know how much of this is patients not being able to tolerate vs doctors giving people barely calibrated machines and next to no support or training. It’s very common to be given your cpap at the default pressure range (4-20). When I told my doctor I still wasn’t sleeping, she offered to refer me to a shrink.
by brian-armstrong | 2025-05-26 22:00:28+00:00
With the current admin I don't think they really have any legal exposure here. If they ever do get caught, it's easy enough to just issue some flimsy excuse about ACLs being "accidentally" omitted and then maybe they stop doing it for a little while.

This is going to be the same disruption as Airbnb or Uber. Move fast and break things. Why would you expect otherwise?