MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tdeck | 2025-05-18 20:08:40+00:00
The quality of a card isn't absolute, it's personalized to the learner. There are ways to make an almost universally bad card (e.g. putting way too much information or a misleading image), but a really "good" card comes from the learner engaging with the material first before making the card.

The program doesn't know what's in the learner's head and what associations the learner will make. That's the benefit of making your own card.
by accrual | 2025-05-18 20:09:20+00:00
While we're sharing simple note taking functions, here's mine that I used for a few years. :)

function nod { mg +-1 "/home/user/notes/$(date "+%Y-%m-%d").txt"; }

* 'nod' stands for "notes of (the) day" and was quick to type.

* 'mg' is micro emacs, my first shell-based editor thanks to OpenBSD. The '+-1' syntax means "open at end of file" so I could easily append.
by bitwize | 2025-05-18 20:10:43+00:00
I had a Cyrix 6x86MX and it was good enough for Quake (I played Quake originally on a Pentium-60, and it was fine).

The Quake code was designed to take advantage of the fact that the Pentium could have one integer and one FPU instruction in flight at the same time, thanks to optimizations by an even bigger space-alien wizard than John Carmack -- Michael Abrash. The Cyrix CPUs... couldn't dual-issue instructions like this, so clock-for-clock their performance suffered compared to Intel.
by sam890306 | 2025-05-18 20:11:20+00:00
Most RAG systems die not because of hallucination or bad vector DBs — but because no one owns the semantic loop.

This post breaks down how most orgs accidentally build RAG as a “feature project,” and why it can’t succeed without architectural + organizational alignment.

Curious how others have approached the semantic closure problem. Would love feedback from folks working on Copilots, LLM infra, and search-adjacent systems.
by danjl | 2025-05-18 20:11:36+00:00
If only it was exponential in the beginning, as word-of-mouth spreads. Sigh. The reality is that you need to claw and scrape your way to your first customers. The numbers vary depending on whether your product is b2b, consumer, or more niche, but the first customers are the hardest. You rarely get word-of-mouth in the beginning. Instead, it comes much later, typically after a long period of slow growth as you learn more about your customer's workflows and problems and adjust the product to get closer to PMF.
Show HN: DeepShot – an open-source NBA predictor with ML, EWMA, and live UI
by saccofrancesco | 2025-05-18 20:11:55+00:00
Hey everyone, I’m an NBA fan and Python dev, and I recently built DeepShot — a machine learning model that predicts NBA game outcomes with about 71% accuracy based on historical stats and rolling performance metrics (EWMA).

It features:

Real NBA data from Basketball Reference Exponentially Weighted Moving Averages to track momentum Interactive NiceGUI interface with team comparison and predictions Full Python stack and open-source (MIT license) Here’s the GitHub repo: https://github.com/saccofrancesco/deepshot And if you like it, here’s my Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/saccofrancesco

Would love any feedback — especially from folks who’ve built sports models or worked on real-time stat tools. Also open to ideas on where to take this next (player-level modeling? betting advice dashboard?).

Thanks!
by versiqcontent | 2025-05-18 20:11:57+00:00
Cicero complained about youth losing their way 2000 years ago. Today it’s TikTok or AI or attention spans. But is the world really changing, or are we just haunted by how vivid life felt when we were new to it?

This essay explores that idea, without nostalgia bait or rage farming. Just a quiet take on why memory often feels more real than the present.
by HSO | 2025-05-18 20:12:23+00:00
Now I wanted it for myself and just made it. So at least I can confirm this works.

Only difference is I don´t actually use the sharesheet much so I do it with clipboard content: Step 1. Take screenshot or copy text. Step 2. Make a request to AnkiConnect and have it create a new card with clipboard in Anki.

Works flawlessly on Mac/Desktop but if you want to do it from mobile devices, you have to muck around with network permissions. Too much for this evening but this alone opens up possibilities.

Thanks for the stimulating question! :)
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-05-18 20:12:44+00:00
You can add my https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki script to the space, in a similar position to subs2srs.

The big thing my script does differently is run Whisper locally to actually generate the subtitles from the video themselves. Most videos out in the real world don't come with convenient little SRT files bundled with them.

It doesn't yet shell out anywhere to automatically provide a translation, but that's more because I was already past that stage for most of its output reading-wise. It's explicitly tuned to make listening practice SRSable.

(I originally built this for learning Finnish. For the other 2 people here on that journey, https://finbug.xyz/ is where I've collected the other software I've built over the years for this.)
by Mate4 | 2025-05-18 20:13:02+00:00
This article touches on something that we may all feel intuitively, but it cites studies too. I think my work days do end up averaging around four hours of actual, creative, programming work. The rest is filled with reading hn, waiting on pipelines, chatting with colleagues, meetings... As much as I would enjoy being paid the same but being able to log off after lunch, I'm not sure we'll be able to see these elusive four hour work days anytime soon.
by nis251413 | 2025-05-18 20:13:12+00:00
Sigmoid (or the logistic function specifically rather) is exponential until you get close to the "turning point" (or rather, its growth bounded from below by an exponential). It's as you approach that point that it becomes linear, and after that its growth decays.

However you are sort of right that "churn" does not necessarily have to do with it being sigmoid because it will be anyway. It may be bring it earlier if the churn rate surpasses the user growth, but that's probably not important here.
by potholereseller | 2025-05-18 20:13:12+00:00
You can modify the styling of elements in Javascript with modern browsers, but I'm not sure it is exactly "standard", in the way that CSS is "standard". A modern form of JSSS might look like this: an HTML document with no styling/CSS, but some JS that styles each element when it is loaded. This might cause some flicker [0], because the HTML would be rendered un-styled and then re-styled by your JS code. You can mask that flicker with a sort of "loading screen" -- oh, now I know why I see those tacky pre-loaders on so many websites.

The Internet is a flat circle, in which old technology is constantly re-invented by semi-literate people. This will surely be the sole Horseman of the Internet Apocalypse: a black-and-purple checkered horse, the rider wearing a hoodie that says "my prompts bring all the ladies to the yard" and wielding AR goggles. He speaks a dozen words to command his AI legions -- they do his bidding in a thousand-thousand jobs: getting hired, attending meetings, writings emails, getting fired; each in a cycle fast enough that he is ever employed, ever influencing, ever disrupting. We have assuredly earned all that he does to the Internet.

[0] = This is alluded to in TFA: "You'll also want to be careful with your style-setting functions: get too complex and it will take your document forever to render itself in the user's browser."
by vel0city | 2025-05-18 20:14:09+00:00
The popularity of the mini-ITX board size really shows this along with alternative mounting locations and risers for GPUs.

The old ATX power supply standard really needs to get phased out. I'm hopeful to see progress on ATX12VO become more common.

But even separate from that I see things like the Ryzen Z series opening even smaller devices while still offering a lot of graphical punch. I love the Z1 Extreme on my Legion Go, it's an awesome platform. And yeah, having that plus an external GPU could be cool but as noted it's $$$.
by kulahan | 2025-05-18 20:14:28+00:00
> That's a video games logic

No, it’s science. There are about a million ways to protect your own troops if that’s actually what you want to do.

It feels like you’re arguing against the idea of chemical weapons from the 1940s, rather than nearly a century later.

You don’t need protective gear. You can create sprays, lotions, inhalants, and other countermeasures that don’t stop working the second a piece of cloth rips. Shit, You could make a biological agent that avoids a DNA marker created with an mRNA vaccine. Likely not nearly as fast, but perfectly lethal.

Modern chemical weapons and biological weapons are absolutely incomparable to their Vietnam counterparts.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-18 20:15:56+00:00
What I can't understand are those videos of 20-something year old nobodies, who apparently got plastic surgery to look like waxy, sticky 40 year old ladies with huge lips, sitting in their car, talking about nothing. No matter what history and features I turn off, no matter how many times I click "No, I don't want this" they end up in my feed. These videos must make a fortune to these companies somehow.
by wpm | 2025-05-18 20:16:33+00:00
As someone with those "special" needs (if 10Gb/25Gb Ethernet and HDMI-capture are that special), it is incredibly frustrating.

The CPUs all come with enough PCIe lanes for a single dGPU at x16, x4 for the PCH/chipset, and maybe another x4 for a single M.2 SSD. If you aren't building a bog standard gaming PC with one SSD, one huge GPU, and nothing else, you get a configuration that doesn't match what you need. Bifurcation is hit-or-miss, if you can even physically get to the second PCIe slot, if that slot is even big enough. Random M.2s are linked to the PCH with random modes and bandwidths that change based on other configuration options.

All due to the stingy lane count on consumer platforms, again, targeting the lowest common denominator. It was even worse before Ryzen came out and offered a generous 24 lanes (16 for a GPU, 4 for the PCH, and 4 for an SSD) vs Intel's 20.

Of course, PCIe lanes aren't free, but somehow, having "I/O" targeted workloads means you also must go and spend 2-5x as much for "workstation" or server class motherboards, which also are engineered to a common "usual needs" spec that add in a bunch of shit I don't need, and usually require sacrificing single-core speed unless you get top of the line $10K+ server CPUs that draw 5x the power.

What I'd really like is instead of 4 lanes going to the chipset, I wish all of them did. Or at least, all of them went from the CPU to some switch chip that would allow me to set which lanes go to what slots, and have a software configured lane/bandwidth allocation. 24 lanes of PCIe 5.0 is 48 lanes of PCIe 4.0 is 96 lanes of PCIe 3.0, which is more than enough, but trying to actually unlock all of that bandwidth is still limited to the hardware configuration of the motherboard, and no way to reallocate unspent bandwidth. Instead of it all being hardwired for specific configurations, to the CPU directly OR to the chipset, I wish they were all wired for x16 (or x4 for the M.2 slots) direcly to some switch chip, which is then fully wired to the CPU's remaining lanes after PCH/chipset connections. If I need to stuff 4 slots with x16 cards, but they only run at 3.0 speeds, that would still leave 8 lanes of PCIe 5.0 I could allocate elsewhere.

I'm sure this is probably technically impossible, or would be incredibly expensive, but a man can dream.
by bitwize | 2025-05-18 20:17:00+00:00
Bisqwit is a nearly Carmack-tier programming genius. For a time he drove a truck to make a living and just programmed in his spare time.

https://www.youtube.com/@Bisqwit/

I'm a "senior software engineer" by title (I need to make more money than I would working at a gas station or driving a truck, and programming is what I'm relatively good at), I love things like this, and I fight for simplicity and lack of bloat whenever I can, sometimes putting myself at odds with my colleagues and Management.
by fpoling | 2025-05-18 20:17:39+00:00
Rust provides file!, line! and column! macros that expands into a compile-time constants that the compiler embeds then into the executable. This way no source map at runtime is necessary as the relevant errors are constructed from those constants.

Presumably StackError just uses those macros.

But for debugging a source map is still necessary and is a part of various debug formats.
by Jarwain | 2025-05-18 20:19:35+00:00
Trillium looks great! I'm curious if it has an outliner mode or something similar? I currently use logseq and the two features I love are how each bullet/block is its own thing that can be cross-referenced and embedded in other blocks and pages, and that my workflow is essentially to have daily journal pages I dump everything into and tag and references/crossreferences are automatically handled and linked to build out a network of things.

I've noticed that trillium has hierarchical notes; is there a view to look at an item higher on the tree and have it also have the contents of all its children?
by palata | 2025-05-18 20:19:39+00:00
One question being: if you were asked to only work 4h per day, would you "work hard" on those 4h, or would you effectively work less because you HN would still be here, you would still wait on pipelines and chat with colleagues, and you would still have meetings?

Disclaimer: I'm all for working less of course :-). But that's a genuine question.
by tasuki | 2025-05-18 20:20:40+00:00
> The most commonly used PKMS or note-taking apps today are Notion, Obsidian, Evernote and Logseq. The problem is that PKMS come and go.

Uh oh. I wouldn't use those. Of course they come and go - they're made by companies.

> Could you see yourself using your note-taking app you use today in 30 years?

Yes of course. Otherwise I wouldn't be using it.

> Do you ever have concerns around the privacy of your notes?

Not really.

> Are you spending more time setting up your notes system rather than managing your notes?

No.

> What does an effective and timeless PKMS even look like?

I use VimWiki[0]. There's a possibility it will go away, but I doubt it. There's a possibility both vim and neovim will go away, but I doubt it.

It stores everything as Markdown files. Should Markdown ever go away, it's all still very readable plain text files. I use UTF-8. Perhaps that'll go away at some point?

I version everything with git, I doubt git will fully go away, but I'm ok migrating to a different VCS if need be.

I bet the longevity of my setup is way better than the longevity of a backend written in TypeScript, backed by a SQL database, running in Docker, based on a CMS I've never heard of (Directus).

[0]: https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki
by dep_b | 2025-05-18 20:21:41+00:00
Could be a fun exercise:

- Commodore 128 with dual floppy drive vs my tape-only C64 - Maxed out Amiga 1000 with a bunch of sampler and MIDI extensions vs my A500 + 512kb - B/W PowerMac G3 fully expanded just because - Dual Celly 300A @ 450 with Dual Voodoo II vs my 450 with single Voodoo II

Nothing after that had this "I really want this, but I can't get it" thing. I just bought what I wanted.
by ezst | 2025-05-18 20:22:07+00:00
For the record, it's not forcing you in this or another way, you can just dump all your notes on a flat level and later browse a network of backlinks in Trilium like other similar systems.

Where I find Trilium to shine though, is when, after linking notes to one other for a little while, you realise "Well, I have a bunch of them that relate to `People`, others to `Products`, and, oh, a bunch of `Customers` as well, wouldn't it be nice if those were sharing the same properties?" (like People:{"Lives in", "Date of birth", "Partner of"…}, Customer:{"Address", "Contracts":-Multiple-, …}).

When you reach that point you can use Inheritance (from the hierarchy) and/or Composition (from Template notes) so that all your "People"-like or "Customer"-like notes share the same properties, and you can then easily manage them as data, giving the same organisational and queryable power of a RDBMS without having to commit on a data model from the get go (it evolves with you as you refine the inherited or templated attributes).

I think any sufficiently large collection of notes eventually reaches a point where it self-organises around a set of "Reference notes" more often linked to, and this is where Trilium saves you a ton of time instead of giving you more house-keeping work (good luck maintaining those "Reference notes" in sync with each-other in a system like Logseq or Obsidian, been there, done that).
by codingdave | 2025-05-18 20:22:31+00:00
We already do see those four hour works days, though. You said it yourself - your days average around four hours of work. The rest is idle. It gets burned in odd ways at the office, but if you were at home, and burned those same amounts of time with walks and naps and whatnot, you would have the same level of productivity.

This article really makes it hit home that offices and the modern meeting culture that stems from them are the problem, not our output of work. Remote work with async communication is exactly what the article describes.
Show HN: Python Simulator of David Deutsch’s “Constructor Theory of Time”
by SandroG | 2025-05-18 20:22:33+00:00
Hi HN,

I turned the freshly published paper “The Constructor Theory of Time” by David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto (arXiv, 13 May 2025) into an executable Python library.

What you’ll find • One-to-one translation of the paper’s formalism: Substrates, Attributes, Tasks, Constructors, and task-algebra operators • Possibility / impossibility predicates and counterfactuals encoded exactly as defined • Test suite that mirrors every lemma and example (>95 % coverage, mypy-typed) • Reproductions of key results: time-keeping substrates, irreversibility proofs, quantum branching tasks, and a self-replicating constructor

Why share? Reading the paper is tough going; expressing each definition in code clarified the ideas and surfaced a couple of questions for discussion. Hoping it helps others and sparks extensions.

Looking for feedback: • Did I miss any subtleties in the formalism? • Which additional theorems or examples would you like implemented next?

Repo: https://github.com/gvelesandro/constructor-theory-simulator

Thanks for taking a look—issues and PRs welcome!
by skeledrew | 2025-05-18 20:22:45+00:00
I find it just a bit crazy that this is still an issue. I too jumped from Evernote when they did their rug pull in 2016, landed on Emacs+org-mode, and never looked back. Since then I've adopted Orgzly for org-mode on my phone, and syncthing to keep it all synced. The only real issue I ever had was the occasional conflict, which I resolved by splitting one of the files further into things that got modified on the laptop (primarily write-ups and my cheatsheet collection) vs things that got modified on mobile (primarily repetitive tasks).

I haven't found use for plugins yet since I'm really just searching, updating tasks and archiving. But if I do need extra functionality, Emacs is the most versatile editor out there, and org-mode is native to it.
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-05-18 20:23:09+00:00
The distance between the US coasts is very roughly Amsterdam to Ankara. How often are Europeans doing this journey by train? Coast to coast travel is very common in USA.

Also the idea of scheduling a trip and then a not uncommon European transit strike cancelling it sounds like just what the USA needs. I am delighted our country has defended the rights of interstate travel because I was in Asia during Covid and I quickly realized how scary it was to be on the other side of the state barrier from the airport when interstate travel was essentially halted

Arguments about European transport are tired and fail to account for the geography and population distribution differences between our continents.
by hijodelsol | 2025-05-18 20:23:31+00:00
I had that same intial reaction but I think it makes sense if you think of it in terms of software development. There are many different MCP clients being developed that are just that - clients. They don't take care of hosting the LLM or any other functionality of the application but are meant to be plugged into existing applications to enable MCP support. So from that perspective, the difference is useful, as it refers to code developed by different people.
by numpad0 | 2025-05-18 20:23:31+00:00
There was a news story few days ago that Sony is launching an Ethernet controlled smart motor with integral reducer for robotics applications, and it has encoders on both sides of the reducer plus torque on output shaft. There's nothing so far on the English side of the public Internet about it, at all.

... so I doubt motor torque be end all be all. Especially when Sony does it like that.
by Snawoot | 2025-05-18 20:25:21+00:00
> What ever happened to providing a good service?

I'm getting an impression it's just not profitable enough. For many years I get a feeling that business is considered sound only if it is superprofitable (not exactly the right term, but still) in order to cover all losses.

Probably it's because of market competition required to be at least noticed. Some companies' spendings for marketing are greater than for R&D, production and operations combined. Maybe we got ourselves into a situation where everywhere competing for low-hanging fruits or trying to make customer believe it's the service they need while all of it doesn't really overlap with real society needs.
by braden-lk | 2025-05-18 20:26:14+00:00
Big obsidian fan, but I will say: notes being “just markdown” is not entirely true depending on how you use obsidian. If you are a plug-in heavy user, and those plugins introduce new syntax and lots of JavaScript functionality, you are accumulating a bespoke custom syntax that only works on your copy of obsidian with your set of plugins. Obsidian and those plugins are still free and are a huge benefit, but just something to keep in mind regarding data hygiene and longevity.
by komali2 | 2025-05-18 20:26:14+00:00
This is why I didn't like Obsidian, half the plugins I tried didn't work despite them being in the top 20 downloaded ones. Meanwhile I'll use like 15 year old emacs plugins that haven't been updated in like 5 years and they'll work fine (I think org-diary or something along those lines was what I tried).
by codesnik | 2025-05-18 20:26:15+00:00
what I'd expect from a handwritten book like that, if it is just a gibberish, and not a cypher of any sorts - the style, calligraphy, the words used, even letters themselves should evolve from page 1 to the last page. Pages could be reordered of course, but it still should be noticeable.

Unless author hadn't written tens of books exactly like that before, which didn't survive, of course.

I don't think it's a very novel idea, but I wonder if there's analysis for pattern like that. I haven't seen mentions of page to page consistency anywhere.
by flysand7 | 2025-05-18 20:26:26+00:00
There's been a recent Veritasium video about worldwide PFAS contamination, which TBH kinda scared me and got me thinking about where all waste goes, like at the end. I guess there's really nowhere but our planet that we can dump this stuff. If we were a little bit smarter maybe we could find ways to preprocess it into something safer for our environment, or like idk just send cargo rockets outside of the solar system or straight into the sun
Show HN: Engine.codes – read OBD-II codes in the browser, no app, no cost
by matthiasq | 2025-05-18 20:26:33+00:00
Most OBD scanners hide the basics behind pricey hardware or subscriptions. My free, browser-only OBD-II tool lets you plug in a $10 BLE dongle, tap Connect, and instantly:

* auto-detect your VIN

* read Mode 03 / 07 trouble codes

* keep your data private—no cookies, no VIN tracking

Give it a spin and let me know which BLE adapters work (or don’t) for you!