MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shae | 2025-05-03 22:09:35+00:00
I'd say this many sensors in a wireless package can do many things.

My first project would be exercise monitoring. You can measure heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and body temperature in one place.

I would then add something fun like comparing beats per minute of the music to heart rate.

I like the creators' suggestion of using the shape of the ear canal for authentication, I bet that's harder to steal off a video recording than fingerprints or a retinal pattern.

I'd also use this for voiceless speech, as the creators suggest.

I could think of more, but I won't be able to afford the dev kit, sadly.
by MillironX | 2025-05-03 22:10:05+00:00
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9403981/

The article you referred to (and I've seen linked elsewhere in this thread) is about "regular" screwworm (Chrysomya bezziana). The recent outbreak is of New World Screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax). The article I've linked suggests that it is much harder to kill than regular screwworm (29% of calves developed myiasis even when treated with ivermectin).
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-03 22:10:53+00:00
The reason bureaucracies seem efficient is that they must be able to (1) complete the mission reliably over long periods of time, in the face of (2) staff churn and loss, without (3) collapsing the first time a critical mass of experts leaves the org. This means you have to sacrifice systems that rely on the enthusiasm of "10x experts" in favor of systems that can reliably recruit talent (at GS salaries.) And this is before you get to the mountains of political crap placed on an org by elected leaders.

It is incredibly challenging to create orgs that reliably stay on-mission over many years.
by Etheryte | 2025-05-03 22:10:57+00:00
While cool as a shower thought, in reality, having a 1200HP car jump and go airborne while you're swerving to avoid a pothole is just about the last thing you want it to be doing. Traction control is pretty good these days, but not that good that you want to lose all traction at 120km/h (75mph, the speed shown in the video).
by mhandley | 2025-05-03 22:11:18+00:00
When I used to do gliding (sailplane, not hang gliding or paragliding) many years ago, it was not classed as a dangerous sport for insurance purposes. Don't know about the other fields of gliding. General aviation was classed as riskier - I guess glider pilots are more used to the fact that they don't have a working engine!
by jessriedel | 2025-05-03 22:11:59+00:00
> Cleanliness doesn't seem that related to how expensive the tech is either - if anything it would only go down if it ceased to affect willingness to pay.

If a service is necessarily expensive, it will more by wealthy people, who have a higher willingness to pay for cleanliness.

> As it stands, clean cars are important to their customers.

This varies depending on the customer.

> If usage increases, cleaning can ostensibly increase too, no?

Greater usage can lead to economies of scale that push down the cost of cleaning, but I think we're already at the scale (hundreds of cars) where most of the economies of scale have been reached. I expect it's close to linear from now on.
by Supermancho | 2025-05-03 22:12:18+00:00
> And now after decades of stock buybacks, quantitative easing and other mad financial manipulation, comes again the time for value investors

These are things that have happened in the past. Mad financial manipulations? Like what is "mad"? "Comes again the time." How is it different than any other day?

> Pretty clear and funny to me.

You're making up your own interpretation of nonsense then calling it obvious. Good luck with that.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-05-03 22:12:30+00:00
Yep. It’s ASP.NET. Arguably ASP.NET’s ORM is better than ActiveRecord even. With Blazor SSR you can use components on the server. IMO Blazor SSR needs a bit more time to bake and not reload is a huge mess currently. But the stack is great and will probably be undervalued simply due to the fact it is in C#.
by maxxen | 2025-05-03 22:12:32+00:00
I think a big part is that duckdbs spatial extension doesnt have any transitive dependencies (except libc). It statically packages the standard suite of foss gis tools (including a whole database of coordinate systems) for multiple platforms (including WASM) and provides a unified SQL interface to it all.

(Disclaimer, I work on duckdb-spatial @duckdblabs)
by maxloh | 2025-05-03 22:13:36+00:00
I doubt their choice of implementing something so performance-critical as a DNS server in JavaScript. It seems like a slow language for that purpose.

When I was looking for ad-block solutions on Android, Rethink DNS was actually on the top of my list. However, when I found out that their server was written in JavaScript, I did some benchmarking.

Rethink's server processed DNS requests in 400-500ms, which could potentially make a new webpage render up to half a second slower the first time:

~ > curl -w "DNS Time: %{time_namelookup}s\nConnect: %{time_connect}s\nTotal: %{time_total}s\n" -H "accept: application/dns-message" -H "content-type: application/dns-message" --data "<binary-data>" -o nul -s https://sky.rethinkdns.com/1:6AcDACIBLIDAAFQwIAAACA== DNS Time: 0.004995s Connect: 0.142332s Total: 0.462496s

While the Cloudflare's server took just 5-10ms, as seen below:

~ > curl -w "DNS Time: %{time_namelookup}s\nConnect: %{time_connect}s\nTotal: %{time_total}s\n" -H "accept: application/dns-message" -H "content-type: application/dns-message" --data "<binary-data>" -o nul -s 1.1.1.1 DNS Time: 0.000026s Connect: 0.006273s Total: 0.008822s

In the end, I chose AdAway and have stuck to that choice.
by websap | 2025-05-03 22:13:54+00:00
Crazy to see him just bury their DB provider. I wonder how many SaaS-infra providers that aim to provide a more managed infrastructure experience over AWS would share the same fate if one of their users blew up like Cursor!

At least for now the large cloud providers are effectively the best place to run workloads at scale, so all these smaller SaaS providers are probably trying to gain customers by advertising the simpler and more productive dev experience. With the lure to smaller teams not needing to understand the full blown complexity of managing infrastructure on AWS, but in-actuality the profits are probably solely driven by overcommitting compute resources on shared fleets, and clever capacity management.

I wonder if the cost of software development reduces, which side of the equation will give out first. Will there be more new software developers, so managed experience providers like Yugabyte will have a bigger target market thus continuing to grow, or will dev tools get so good that smaller teams will directly be able to use AWS and bypass the UX benefits some of these SaaS companies provide.
by FiniteField | 2025-05-03 22:14:25+00:00
"The current times" are a direct result of decisions like that of Merkel to throw open the borders of Germany to a million unchecked foreign men. If there's one reason that the AfD is the largest party in Germany today, it's because of that decision Merkel made a whole decade ago. How was that "based in facts, truth and science", or "slow and steady"?
by scotty79 | 2025-05-03 22:15:07+00:00
Buy your steak, toss in a pot of unsalted water. Cook for a while to make it edible. Eat it when hungry. Tell me again how tasty the meat is.

Do the same with rice, potatoes or lentils and you'll have completely different experience. Pick any fruit. There's even no need to boil. Tasty from the get go.
by epolanski | 2025-05-03 22:16:13+00:00
He's not a politician, he doesn't have to.

Still, he's given dozens of billions in charity, given important counsel to the government during the 80s and 2008 financial crisis.

During 2008 financial crisis he essentially saved Goldman and General Electric both preventing further escape of capital and an even worse situation for the US and potentially world economy.

In any case, he's a capitalist who likes making money for himself and his shareholders, he ain't a medical researcher or your mayor.
by dbreunig | 2025-05-03 22:16:31+00:00
Author here: the beauty of DuckDB spatial is that the projections and CRS options are hidden until you need them. For 90% of geospatial data usage people don't and shouldn't need to know about projections or CRS.

Yes, there are so many great tools to handle the complexity for the capital-G Geospatial work.

I love Felt too! Sam and team have built a great platform. But lots of times a map isn't needed; an analyst just needs it as a column.

PostGIS is also excellent! But having to start up a database server to work with data doesn't lend itself to casual usage.

The beauty of DuckDB is that it's there in a moment and in reach for data generalists.
by fsckboy | 2025-05-03 22:16:56+00:00
>In a tale as old as time, the mega-rich get richer

no, they don't. what is mega-rich keeps price inflating, but who is mega-rich are always new names.

if you are young, afauk Brin and Page have always been mega-rich, but just a little older and you remember when nobody knew who they were, nor had anybody heard of Zuck, or Musk, etc. and Jobs was a washed up has-been
by omneity | 2025-05-03 22:16:57+00:00
I started seeing results as early as 5-10k pairs, but you want something closer to 100k, especially if the language has a lot of variations (aka morphologically rich, agglutinative, or written in a non-standardized way).

Manual proof-reading (and data generation) was a big part of it, it's definitely not a glamorous magic process. But as I went through it I could notice patterns and wrote some tools to help.

There's a way to leverage LLMs to help with this if your language is supported (my target wasn't at the time), but I still strongly recommend a manual review part. That's really the secret sauce and no way around it if you're serious about the translation quality of your model.
by HPsquared | 2025-05-03 22:17:00+00:00
Mercedes does this with hydraulic rams, it's called Active Body Control (or Magic Body Control for the version that scans the road in front too).

That system uses hydraulic rams in series with the usual suspension springs and dampers, and can handle up to 5 Hz (i.e. it controls the lower frequency part of the spectrum so softer springs etc can be used, improving both ride and handling)
by joshvm | 2025-05-03 22:17:04+00:00
I haven't used duckDB but the real comparison is presumably postgis? Which is also absent from the discussion, but I think what the author alludes to.

I have no major qualm with pandas and geopandas. However I use it when it's the only practical solution, not because I enjoy using it as a library. It sounds like pandas (or similar) vs a database?
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-05-03 22:17:49+00:00
I absolutely loathe that. State is the source of most bugs. If the page crashes then refreshing it should clear out the state and let me try again.

Anecdotally, it seems like I encounter a lot more web apps these days where refreshing doesn’t reset the state, so it’s just broken unless I dig into dev tools and start clearing out additional browser state, or removing params from the URL.

Knock it off with all the damn state! Did we forget the most important lesson of functional programming; that state is the root of all evil?
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-03 22:18:35+00:00
"Ordinary European household" will change even lower :

Crisis of 2008 made EU to think about resiliency so they asked all kinds of economists, physicist, other science people what should be done to provided that and one of those things implemented was building energy efficiency directive [https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/energy-efficiency/energy-...]

which progressively increased demands on building sector to provide citizens with "low energy" housing. and currently most states of EU have requirement to build houses where defacto energy need for yearly heating of a house is lower then energy yearly demand for hot water (hot ater can not be lowered significantly without heat pumps - COP3+)
by cardanome | 2025-05-03 22:19:00+00:00
If I plan out how to kill someone, get the right weapon and execute on my plan, yeah that is murder.

If I see a donation stand for children in Africa and decide to rather buy a video game from that money, well some children are going to starve because of my decision but I haven't exactly killed them.

Blaming Mao for a famine is completely insane if you are not super brainwashed. He was a human not a god.

But considering you took the highest death toll estimation you could find already shows you are not interested in facts but in pushing a narrative.
by agurk | 2025-05-03 22:20:12+00:00
An engine failing on an aircraft, especially a light aircraft, is not a guaranteed crash landing. It is a serious situation, however aircraft usually glide well. This means you have opportunities to find somewhere that is adequate for landing. Many aircraft with engine failures have landed safely on airstrips. Interestingly this is also the case with helicopters due to their ability to autorotate.
by dalanmiller | 2025-05-03 22:20:41+00:00
Similar story but Melbourne.

I just don’t see _as much_ self-directed ambition or obsession? Going to a meetup in Seattle or SF in the early 2010s there were serious obsessives. Masters of domains like Go or JavaScript and someone from Sequoia at the Startup Weekend. Always flocks of folks looking to start their next business. That same bug just never hit here?

This I find weird, surely there are people who can sense opportunities unlockable by tech and Australia is not at all easier or any less expensive than the U.S., I still can’t quite put my finger on it. For me there’s still a magical cultural element to a place like SF, and to an extent – Seattle, when it comes to creating new opportunities.
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-03 22:20:42+00:00
They're also quite inefficient (75% ish, which is not horrible, but still something) as you lose energy both in pumping and generation.

So the more you use them, the more energy you need in the first place, so you try not to use them too much. And the worst thing for a capital intensive business is to not get used much. Even with the arbitrage advantage, it takes a long time to pay it off. The grid may pay a "retainer" to sweeten the deal but you can't just build more and expect them all to get that benefit.

It's similar to the problem that "use excess energy to electrolyse water into hydrogen" has: no-one running a multi-billion electrolyser really wants to run it a few hours a day only when the grid is oversupplied. And in top of that, risk being cut off at the knees decades before breakeven if someone comes along with a cheaper/more profitable way to deal with the oversupply.
by lolinder | 2025-05-03 22:21:39+00:00
And the rest of the questions?

My understanding is that the idea that Christians destroyed vast numbers of ancient texts was heavily exaggerated by anti-Christian polemics during the Enlightenment. There were some isolated instances, but even some of those, like the Library of Alexandria, were much less significant than the polemics assumed. The Library of Alexandria had already largely fallen into ruin and disuse by the time Christians are supposed to have gotten to it, and the works left there had already been copied all over the Mediterranean anyway.

The other problem with this line is that it ignores the enormously important role that Christians had in preserving large numbers of texts. Did they selectively preserve texts while allowing others to disappear to time? Probably. But when each copy has to be transcribed by hand, it's to be expected that what survives is the stuff that the people responsible for preserving texts thought was most important.

It would be very unfair to accuse someone of burning books just because they didn't manually copy everything that had ever been written and instead only copied their favorite texts.
by bediger4000 | 2025-05-03 22:21:41+00:00
We've seen ads destroy many ad-supported media - newspapers got corrupted by their advertisers, radio's payola scandals, TV, CATV (a.k.a. cable), Google's search business itself, Amazon marketplace. How will Google attempt to avoid the same fate that search suffered at the hands of SEO and adtech? Which raises an interesting question: how would we tell the difference between a pitiful AI and an advertiser-corrupted AI? Bogus results either case.
by dbreunig | 2025-05-03 22:21:54+00:00
Yes. The difference between provisioning a server and running 'install spatial' in a CLI is night and day.

Docker has been a big improvement (when I was first learning PostGIS, the amount of time I had to hunt for proj directories or compile software just to install the plugin was a major hurdle), but it's many steps away from:

``` $ duckdb D install spatial; ```
by seabass-labrax | 2025-05-03 22:22:38+00:00
Not yet; Thunderbird is going to release such a feature in the near future:

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/04/thundermail-and-thunder...

> Assist is an experiment, developed in partnership with Flower AI, a flexible open-source framework for scalable, privacy-preserving federated learning, that will enable users to take advantage of AI features. The hope is that processing can be done on devices that can support the models, and for devices that are not powerful enough to run the language models locally, we are making use of Flower Confidential Remote Compute in order to ensure private remote processing (very similar to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute).

> Given some users’ sensitivity to this, these types of features will always be optional and something that users will have to opt into. As a reminder, Thunderbird will never train AI with your data. The repo for Assist is not public yet, but it will be soon.
by omneity | 2025-05-03 22:23:17+00:00
Marian was a good starting point and allowed me to iterate faster when I first started, but I quickly found it a bit limiting as it performs better for single pairs.

My goal was a google translate style multilingual translation model, and for that the BART architecture proved ultimately to be better because you benefit from cross-language transfer learning. If your model learns the meaning of "car" in language pair (A, B), and it knows it in language (B, C), then it will perform decently when you ask it to translate between A and C. It compounds very quickly the more you add language pairs.

One big limitation of BART (where LLMs become more attractive) is that it becomes extremely slow for longer sentences, and is less good at understanding and translating complex sentences.

> Any special processing needed for Arabic compared to Latin-script-based

Yes indeed, quite a lot. Especially for Moroccan Arabic which is written in both Arabic and Latin scripts (I made sure to support both and they're aligned in the model's latent space). For this I developed semantic and phonetic embedding models along the way that helped a lot. I am in the process of publishing a paper on the phonetic processing aspect, if you're interested let's stay in touch and I'll let you know when it's out.

But beyond the pre-processing and data pipeline, the model itself didn't need any special treatment besides the tokenizer.
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-05-03 22:24:01+00:00
I don't think it's recent. I think it comes and goes. Maybe you've noticed the newest wave.

As for why, there's a lot of reasons. The big one that I'll note is what I call the "PHP effect" - an easy to use language has the most beginners, and beginner work product attracts negative attention.
by grgbrn | 2025-05-03 22:24:15+00:00
Oh I wasn't trying to reverse-engineer his network from that comment, just saying that this was a thing that was possible and that people did at the time.

I agree it's highly unlikely that the AT was running slirp. Wikipedia says an AT was a 286, so it wouldn't have been linux. Not even sure what the options would have been. Minix? Xenix?
by jajko | 2025-05-03 22:25:14+00:00
North Korea? Pretty sure some central apartments or houses in Pyongyang are accessible only for the elite (which may have different mechanism to obtain than just having enough cash but logic is same - many many want to live there, only the top gets them). There are few other countries.

The point is, it doesn't matter. Jobs and services are centralized to cities or their outskirts, thus folks move in. The only reason why properties cost there so much. Not sure what are you even trying to say with your last sentence, pretty self-contradictory. If all could work 100% from home we would see suburbia explode in prices and development. Not happening in way I mean this century, cities are growing as fast as possible (and some more, thanx to also people like you).
by jparishy | 2025-05-03 22:25:34+00:00
I think we're mostly making the same point about complexity, ya.

To me, I think it's mostly a frontend problem stopping the spread of mapping in consumer apps. Backend geo is easy tbh. There is so much good, free tooling. Mapping frontend is hell and there is no good off the shelf solution I've seen. Some too low level, some too high level. I think we need a GIS-lite that is embeddable to hide the complexity and let app developers focus on their value add, and not paying the tax of having frontend developers fix endless issues with maps they don't understand.

edit: to clarify, I think there's a relationship between getting mapping valued by leadership such that the geo work can be even be done by analysts, and having more mapping tools exist in frontend apps such that those leaders see them and understand why geo matters. it needs to be more than just markers on the map, with broad exposure. hence my focus on frontend web. sorry if that felt disjointed
by tmpz22 | 2025-05-03 22:27:16+00:00
I've been researching DuckDB - while it has many technical merits I think the main argument will be ease of use. It has a lot of the operational advantages of sqlite paired with strong extensibility and good succinct documentation.

Folks who have been doing DevOps work are exasperated with crummy SaaS vendors or antiquated OSS options that have a high setup cost. DuckDB is just a mature project that offers an alternative, hence an easy fan favorite among hobbyists (I imagine at scale the opportunity costs change and it becomes less attractive).
by gilli | 2025-05-03 22:27:20+00:00
I'm a designer who codes with over 14 years of experience in FinTech, Journalism, Media, Health, Science, and more. I've worked with clients like JPMorgan Chase, Santander Bank, Rob Walling, Trello, Peter Diamandis, Syncthing, SimplyCredit, and others. I love working on complex products, while iterating and shipping fast.

Location: Iceland

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, JavaScript, TypeScript, Vue.js, React, NodeJS, Django, Python, PHP, Laravel, Phoenix framework, Quasar, Hugo, SASS/CSS, UX/UI Design, Git, REST APIs, GraphQL

Résumé/CV: https://gilli.is

Email: gilli@hn.gilli.is
by analog31 | 2025-05-03 22:27:38+00:00
Even before the advent of AI, I already realized that most of what's written by people isn't worth reading. This is why I don't read most of the e-mails that I receive.

Before AI, it was hard for many people to write literate text. I was OK with that, if the text was worth reading. I don't need to be entertained, just informed.

The thing that gets me about AI is not that what it generates is un-original, but if it's trained on the bulk of human text, then what it generates is not worth reading.
by deivid | 2025-05-03 22:27:49+00:00
How big are the models that you use/built? Can't you run them on the browser?

Asking because I built a translator app[0] for Android, using marian-nmt (via bergamot), with Mozilla's models, and the performance for on-device inference is very good.

[0]: https://github.com/DavidVentura/firefox-translator
by joshvm | 2025-05-03 22:28:46+00:00
We use chicanes (of a sort) and single lane bottlenecks in the UK. Forcing the vehicle to turn is a pretty easy way to get people to slow down and people complain less because it's friendlier on their suspension. In my home town there's one road that was clearly experimental? where the whole (one way) road gently zigzags for maybe 500m.