MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Qem | 2025-05-02 18:09:37+00:00
It surely helps. Take for example History, if I space out for whatever reason in the class and botch my examination on the Aztecs, that doesn't preclude me doing great in the classes about the Roman empire. History is like a sparse suburb, where a single house catching fire does not necessarily propagate and destroy the others. On the other side Math its like a skyscrapper, one floor build upon the other. If someone living in a lower floor botches a home renovation in his unit and damages a pillar, it risks taking down the whole building. In math if you botch a prerequisite, you'll ending messing your learning of subsequent concepts 95% of the time. So it is more unforgiving to people with problems like ADHD, that struggle to keep unbroken focus and discipline.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-05-02 18:09:42+00:00
> Funding research grants is absolutely not political favoritism.

It's political favoritism in the same way that giving LMH or BA contracts is political favoritism. There's nothing magically "special" about science. And having been there, its just as corrupt, just as wasteful, and generally not in the public interest. It's mostly in the interest of professors that want to fuck around on their pet topics. look up leo paquette and homme hellinga, if you doubt my insider knowledge on this matter (they are just the tip of the iceberg and easily verified in terms of what I've seen). that's not even getting into more touchy subjects like the maze of conflicts of interest in an actually "politics-al" topic like lab leak investigation. whether or not you believe in the lab leak hypothesis you HAVE to acknowledge that the gatekeepers in the investigation are so entangled that it makes good faith truthseeking basically impossible.
by whizzter | 2025-05-02 18:09:46+00:00
The difference is that Redis is single-threaded, the value proposition of Redis was/is a fast (in-memory) simple (single-threaded) server to serve things so much faster than a traditional DB. It was a perfect fit and became popular with the Ruby/Rails community,etc since those environments combined with traditional SQL servers are slogs compared to what a fast server like Redis could do.

As good as Redis is, modern computers with multiple cores potentially leaves a lot of performance on the table. Garnet seems to be a well designed multithread KV-store (though sadly the benchmark page doesn't list benchmark for more complex objects even if the simple cases looks good).
by flustercan | 2025-05-02 18:10:19+00:00
"None of that shit matters" in purely thermodynamic sense, but it matters immensely to the actual goal of getting people to be healthier by having less body fat. In that sense, CICO is an oversimplification.

I personally don't think that anyone without enough will power and discomfort tolerance to feel hungry for long periods of time when surrounded by limitless food should be forced to live a shorter more painful life.

The key to getting people to quit smoking is for them to stop smoking. Very simple. Why on earth do we have nicotine gum and patches?
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-02 18:10:23+00:00
This article and the comments here are kind of scary. It feels like Google's only supporting apps that "drive engagement". That sounds like they want to force developers into producing stuff they can show ads in because they need more ads, not like they need more apps.

It also feels a bit like how software people STILL haven't figured out how to deal with a product that has a finite development cycle. Which is to say, a piece of code that is done and doesn't need any changes. You don't have Hardware stores forcing supply companies to come out with a new version of shovel every year right? A shovel is a shovel. There are probably 8 different types for various uses and within those perhaps two or three variants. So 24 or 30 variant of 'shovel' and your done. Some software can be like that too.

The subtext though that Google is actively hurting their developers for unspecified goals which look like they are desperate to make more money but it certainly could be some other thing. It reminds me of all the wailing about people whose web pages fell in the rankings because they hadn't been "updated" but when you've got the most useful description of say the scientific method on the web, why should you need to update that? It hasn't changed. And yet the 'older' your page got, the lower and lower it ranked.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-05-02 18:10:51+00:00
That's... not weird at all, actually. If they think the right wing politicians having power would be beneficial to them in some way, why would they not donate to them in the hypothetical context that they are a propaganda arm for an adversarial government to those right wing politicians' government?

It's worth nothing that the parent comment didn't call them a "communist" propaganda arm and you seem to have added that so you could say it wouldn't make sense for "communists" to donate to RIGHT WING politicians, which is a rather weak argument that ignores decades of geopolitics.
by TheTaytay | 2025-05-02 18:11:39+00:00
Cool!

I read through the docs and want to try this. I couldn’t figure out what you were using g under the covers for the actual webpage “use” I did see: “ What we’re not focusing on is building a better Browser-Use, Notte, Steel, or other vision LLM. Our focus is serving these systems in a way that is optimized under constraints”

Cool! That makes sense!but I was still curious what your default AI-driven browser use library was.

If I were to use your library right now on my MacBook, is it using “browser-use” under the covers by default? (I should poke around the source more. I just thought it might be helpful to ask here in case I misunderstand or in case others had the same question)
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-05-02 18:11:40+00:00
Incredible. Was going to suggest tossing up a github page with it, but looks like one is currently in-progress? (https://nathan-barry.github.io/gpt2-webgl/) but doesn't seem to load for me currently.

Looks like it's trying to load the typescript directly / hosting the source files: `<script type="module" src="src/main.ts"></script>` - instead of hosting the dist folder.
by rtlo9962 | 2025-05-02 18:12:06+00:00
Location: New Haven, CT

Remote: Preferred, open to NYC-based hybrid roles

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, AWS (CDK, Lambda, API Gateway, S3), Docker, React, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, REST APIs, Jest

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16nrhQCyyxCNrE5kId6PUZcZ0Nvd...

Email: rtlo9962@gmail.com

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-loricco-esq/

Hey all! I am a full-stack dev who recently co-created NimbusNLP, an open-source framework for deploying lightweight NLP models to the cloud. Nimbus provisions secure, serverless infrastructure using AWS CDK and Dockerized Lambdas, turning trained models into production-ready API endpoints with a single CLI command. If that resonates with your work, I’d love to connect!
by OJFord | 2025-05-02 18:12:08+00:00
Is there a term for this (bad) style of writing or linguistic device where you mention the thing ('purple dragon') in the title/first paragraph and then really force a synonym in the second?

> Federal Magistrate Judge Ray Kent of the Western District of Michigan was unamused by a recent complaint (PDF) that prominently featured the aubergine wyrm.

(Emphasis mine.)
Show HN: I built a synthesizer based on 3D physics
by humbledrone | 2025-05-02 18:12:15+00:00
I've been working on the Anukari 3D Physics Synthesizer for a little over two years now. It's one of the earliest virtual instruments to rely on the GPU for audio processing, which has been incredibly challenging and fun. In the end, predictably, the GUI for manipulating the 3D system actually ended up being a lot more work than the physics simulation.

So far I am only selling it direct on my website, which seems to be working well. I hope to turn it into a sustainable business, and ideally I'd have enough revenue to hire folks to help with it. So far it's been 99% a solo project, with (awesome) contractors brought in for some of the stuff that I'm bad at, like the 3D models and making instrument presets/videos.

The official launch announcement video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYX_eeNVIEU

But if you REALLY want to see what it can do, check out what Mick Cormick did with in on the first day: https://x.com/Mick_Gordon/status/1918146487948919222

I've kept a fairly detailed developer log about my progress on the project since October 2023, which might be of interest to the hardcore technical folks here: https://anukari.com/blog/devlog

I also gave a talk at Audio Developer Conference 2023 (ADC23) that goes deep into a couple of the problems I solved for Anukari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb8b1SYy73Q
by moped | 2025-05-02 18:12:47+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Remote | USA. DevOps | Cloud Architecture | Infra | Platform | SRE. Electrical engineering grad with 10+ yrs exp, comfortable as equally with code as with people. US Citizen.

My strength is empowering code to run at scale, helping scaling products from 1 to 10, incident management, building a DevOps/SRE practice, and driving improvements in your existing infrastructure. Cloud architecture in AWS and Azure.

I've supported clients in the Fortune 500 (healthcare and finance), US Federal Government, and several startups scaling after achieving PMF.

Former startup founder - I am now focused on contract engagements as a sole practitioner. You can contact me directly at mjmoped+hn@gmail.com
by hnuser123456 | 2025-05-02 18:13:05+00:00
You are putting way too much thought into this. Some people are just extremely emotionally vulnerable and insecure, and will look to ANYTHING to try to satiate that anxiety, and accept any answer. Look at how huge and fervent communities around astrology are. There have been countless studies showing that self-proclaimed "skilled astrologers" have no better chance than random of predicting someone's sign (based on birth month) given a detailed description of that person's life and personality. But that literally doesn't matter, because it's too much fun to these people to divide everyone into groups and stereotype them, regardless if there's no evidence at all behind the stereotypes. And then invent causality for fun, just to feel like they understand why people are they way they are without doing any of the actual work of understanding their life story. Literally, they do not care about the proof of causality, they already fully believe it and fully believe that anyone who doesn't "just doesn't get it." They just want to say "oh I'm an Aries, you can't blame me for being like this." and "Of course he did that, he's a Leo."

These people are going to exist with or without chatgpt. Maybe we should adjust the instruction training to tell people that you can't make worldly predictions from the arrangement of coffee grounds in a cup, other than the quality of the coffee machine and filters, no matter how creative and fantasy-like the users want the model to be.
by necovek | 2025-05-02 18:14:14+00:00
To be fair, the original study uses "numeracy", and the correlation numbers are almost exactly like the ones for "language aptitude".

At the same time, the study excluded "five participants ... due to attrition (not completing the training sessions), and one participant ... because he was an extreme outlier in learning rate (>3 sd away from the mean)." I mean, if you are to exclude 15% of your subjects without looking at their aptitude (maybe they didn't do it because it was too hard to pass the training tests to move to the next lesson, yet their language aptitude is high?), with only 36 subjects of which 21 are female (it's obvious programming is male dominated, so they only had 15 males: maybe it doesn't matter, but maybe it does), how can you claim any statistical significance with such small numbers?
by r00fus | 2025-05-02 18:14:22+00:00
"needs to" and "should not" are idealistic words.

What will happen is either a collapse of the US economy or a collapse of the Trump administration.

Even if the administration grows a brain and reverses course, we are on course for a COVID-like supply chain shock that will cause major pain. Not to mention the loss of trust that will absolutely depress the needed regrowth.
by calebhwin | 2025-05-02 18:14:39+00:00
Maybe more of a legal than ethical consideration but web browsing AI makes scraping trivial. You could use that for surveillance, profiling (get a full picture of a user's whole online life before they even hit Sign Up), cutting egress cost in certain cases. Right now CAPTCHA is actually holding up pretty well against web browsing AI for sites that really want to protect their IP but it will be interesting to see if that devolves into yet another instance of an AI vs AI "arms race".
by apeescape | 2025-05-02 18:15:15+00:00
Finland tried teaching maths to children using Group Theory in the 70s [1], but the results weren't that good; it proved to be too abstract for young kids.

Ultimately, I believe basic algebra and geometry are the most important takeaways from math classes for most people.

[1]: https://www.hs.fi/tiede/art-2000004823594.html (sorry, it's in Finnish and behind a paywall)
by godelski | 2025-05-02 18:15:54+00:00
I understood it.

> The conclusion of the study was that linguistic aptitude seemed to be more correlated with programming aptitude than mathematical aptitude

And this is what I'm pushing back against and where I think you've misinterpreted.

> They found that how well students learned Python was mostly explained by general cognitive abilities (problem solving and working memory), while how quickly they learned was explained by both general cognitive skills and language aptitude.

I made the claim that these are in fact math skills, but most people confuse with arithmetic. Math is a language. It is a language we created to help with abstraction. Code is math. There's no question about this. Go look into lambda calculus and the Church-Turing Thesis. There is much more in this direction too. And of course, we should have a clear connection to connect it all if you're able to see some abstraction.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-05-02 18:16:04+00:00
I guess it depends on what is meant by "everyone can learn to program". It's a bit like saying everyone can learn to write, or to do math, or play tennis, etc.

I'm sure everyone is capable of learning some basic level of programming, just as they are able to learn a basic (high school) level of any subject. However, not everyone is going to have the aptitude to take that to an advanced professional level, however hard they try. We're not all cut out to be artists, or writers, or doctors, or scientists, or developers, etc.
by pwil30 | 2025-05-02 18:16:16+00:00
> I think vaticanobservatory.org is run by the Vatican Observatory Foundation (a private foundation supporting some aspects of the VO's work) whereas vaticanobservatory.va is run by the Vatican Observatory in the strict sense (the government department of the State of Vatican City.)

This exactly. When our agency was working with them, there was some initial hope that we could consolidate the websites on the .va property, but we quickly realized that was not going to happen, primarily due to the separation required with the foundation wing.

Also, it is in general very difficult for an outside vendor to get clearance to build on a .va domain, and you need someone internally to apply a lot of leverage to get the wheels spinning with Vatican IT. Our agency was able to do this with building out the migrants-refugees.va website, thanks to the help of (now Cardinal) Michael Czerny who ran the M&R Section at the time and was given a lot of direct executive power from Pope Francis, but boy, that was still not easy.
by darkwizard42 | 2025-05-02 18:16:38+00:00
If you are going slower you can make up for missing details, missing a brake signal, missing a pedestrian.

Speed is the underlying reason accidents happen. No one is creeping at 2 MPH and just running into things, they have time to stop.

This doesn't even take into consideration that speed results in significantly larger impact (and thus damage to passengers, environment, and vehicles)
by linkregister | 2025-05-02 18:17:24+00:00
> Fines impacting net revenue are dealt with seriously by companies when they are adequately large, e.g. 10% of net revenue.

That's financial risk.

For criminal risk, a change to existing laws would have to be made; they currently carry only civil penalties to the organizations involved. I think that those laws would be popular. They would have to be carefully crafted to narrowly target behavior without unacceptably impairing capital investment and business formation. That would negatively impact the quality of life of the countries' residents.
by smeg_it | 2025-05-02 18:18:08+00:00
I had to look and skim to re-familiarize myself with SeL4. It's and older project that really never made it, from just a quick glance. It seems to basis or at least inspirational to more modern kernels. From the wiki, that seems to include Redox. I couldn't find much about sculpt, but it was submitted to distrowatch in 2018 and is still under the "not ready" section of their waiting list. I don't think there is really any usable FOSS OS using a microkernel. Last I remember reading, the ones most in use are highly specialized commercial projects. As far as I know Redox was the closest but it really hasn't been really actively developed (again, correct me if wrong). It hasn't been abandoned i.e. there seems to be development, but it's a long way from an end user OS at this point, from what I remember reading and no big strides have been made (again, maybe wrong)
by corimaith | 2025-05-02 18:18:24+00:00
It's a great twist of irony perhaps that it is media that takes cultural appropriation (albeit from a point of admiration) often ends up reaching further than the original.

It's not just for americana, many staples for european-inspired or gothic fantasy are made by the japanese, even if most of these creators don't speak english. Well in a sense perhaps it's the unique feature of the Western legacy that it's virtually transcended for everyone to use, rather than just a single group.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-05-02 18:18:29+00:00
Carter told America it faced hard problems, and that it has soul searching to do, that it had to keep improving its moral and spiritual (and economic) fiber.

Reagan stood up and said, "It's Morning again in America", that all the hard and bad was behind, economically but also spiritually. We didn't have to do anything other for the future, for other people, for social wellbeing: we can just enjoy right now however we want. https://youtu.be/pUMqic2IcWA

The American temperament alas resoundingly went with option #2.

It'll be interesting to see if Dear Leader today inspires a fanaticism or belief willing to make people sacrifice today. The tariff test will surely shake a lot of people. I'm not sure what or how Carter sold the difficulties faced, and how tough times were necessary, but I sure don't see much but bluster anger and vague gesticulation as we are being steered directly into extreme hardship today. Sorry but like, factory jobs are shit servitude, and the American cost of living forever make us incredibly uncompetitive, and now trying to build the factories is fantastically expensive because of tariffs.
by HideousKojima | 2025-05-02 18:18:43+00:00
>"absolutely everyone can learn to program"

Personally I've always considered a solid grasp of algebra to be the minimum bar for being able to program, at least for anything that isn't utterly trivial. Being able to take a word problem and turn it into a system of equations and solve it is a pretty close analog to being able to take some sort of problem or business requirement and turn it into code.

And the sad truth is that a huge percentage of the population struggle with just arithmetic, let alone algebra.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-02 18:19:04+00:00
You still need to know what questions to ask. You might as well say, "Why bother to learn anything? I can just look it up in a book."

Once the models learn to ask original questions (which probably isn't too far off), that might change things a bit. But for now, the old Zen koan applies. ("Before enlightenment, I chopped wood, fetched water, and gathered food for my family. After enlightenment, I chop wood, fetch water, and gather food for my family.")
by 77pt77 | 2025-05-02 18:19:04+00:00
> "looks shiny but is lacking in any real creativity or artistic expression."

My experience with that is that artistic milieus now sometimes even explicitly admit that the difference is who created the art.

"Human that suffered and created something" => high quality art

"The exact same thing but by a machine" => soulless claptrap

It's not about the end result.

A lot could be written about this but it's completely socially unacceptable.

Whether an analogous thing will happen with beautiful mathematical proofs or physical theories remains to be seen. I for one am curious, but as far as art is concerned, in my view it's done.
by blackjack_ | 2025-05-02 18:19:32+00:00
> Gaining weight and keeping it is a choice.

You are taking an anabolic androgenic steroid. Of course it will help you have muscles and be in "better" shape that when you weren't taking it. Same with the GLP1 drug and weight. You are literally taking drugs to lower your weight and drugs improve your muscle mass. I'm glad you are happy with the way you look now, but setting the bar to "must take drugs to make your body look a specific way that most bodies do not / have not at 45+" is literally part of the problem (or transhumanist). But calling it a choice everyone can make (hundreds of dollars per month plus all the doctors / etc plus all the gym time) is a bit far fetched.
by resters | 2025-05-02 18:19:42+00:00
I've noticed that the people who initially grok programming language syntax are often better at learning new symbolic systems, but I think this is actually due to a persistent type I error their brains make that is OK for early learning.

People who end up being the best programmers have a deeper appreciation for semantics and information flow, but tend to commit more type II errors early on, making them inferior intro CS students.

Much of the CS curriculum (and typically also the required maths curriculum) in universities still favors the first type of student over the second, driving out the most capable and creative minds.
by Kon-Peki | 2025-05-02 18:20:01+00:00
If all the free-to-download apps move to 3rd party payment providers to reduce the 15/30% fee that Apple collects, I wonder how Apple responds. It pretty much blows a hole in the business model.

Will developers have to pay a per-GB charge for downloads from the store for free apps? For all apps? Maybe close down the store altogether and say you have to sideload everything. Focus on the sandboxing, system permissions, and notarization only?

Until we know how this plays out it’s hard to know who comes out of it a winner. We just know Apple lost.
by florbnit | 2025-05-02 18:20:05+00:00
> It think this is silly on multiple accounts. I'll claim that there's not real thing such as a "language brain" or "math brain."

It seems plainly obvious that this language just means “areas of brain that activate when dealing with math problems” vs “areas of brain that activate when dealing with language problems” and yes there is hard evidence that there is a difference between them.
by dharmab | 2025-05-02 18:20:45+00:00
Please link to where I said not to use copyleft licenses. Check the usernames carefully.

Note that I don't agree that GPL and MIT are equivalent, or that GPL becomes a non-copyleft open source license if not enforceable. IANAL but it might revert to the regular copyright law for wherever you publish software, not an open source license.