MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neom | 2025-05-31 21:37:46+00:00
Neural activity begins around 6 weeks gestation, electrical patterns help establish basic neural circuits, activity dependent neural development shapes connectivity before any sensory input, critical periods where electrical activity literally sculpts brain architecture. Motor patterns get programmed before birth (why babies can suck, grasp, etc.), language processing areas develop structural biases before hearing language, visual cortex develops orientation maps before seeing anything, basic learning algorithms get "wired in" through developmental processes. If a human emerged, was able to function in the world, do things, but had zero electrical activity in the brain, that would be... normal? No: extraordinary.

Humans arrive out of the VJJ with innate neural architectures to be filled and developed - not literal blank slates, there is an OS. The electrical activity during development is literally the biological process that creates our "base programming." LLMs have architectural inductive biases (attention mechanisms, etc.), human brains have evolved architectural biases established through fetal development. We're both "pre-programmed" systems, just through different mechanisms.

Your response about "electrical activity decreases over time" is irrelevant - you weren't talking about adult brain activity, you were talking about the developmental process that creates our initial neural architecture.

tbh: I can't tell if you're engaging in good faith or not.
by princevegeta89 | 2025-05-31 21:38:25+00:00
Well, let me tell you: jobs and independent/solo projects are very different. Jobs run on the idea of extreme commercialization and some politics. When you're building small products though, 90% of your ideas are engineering-centric. I think this is where the juice lies.

Small companies are great - but in the general job market, when you propose an idea that is not inline with the higher ups in the company, it quickly becomes a matter of ego and hate, even if it is the right idea.
by owebmaster | 2025-05-31 21:38:47+00:00
Artificial intelligence. Many people expect advances in artificial intelligence to provide the revolutionary breakthrough that will give order-of-magnitude gains in software productivity and quality. I do not. To see why, we must dissect what is meant by “artificial intelligence” and then see how it applies. Parnas has clarified the terminological chaos: Two quite different definitions of AI are in common use today. AI-1: The use of computers to solve problems that previously could only be solved by applying human intelligence. AI-2: The use of a specific set of programming techniques knows as heuristic or rule-based programming. In this approach human experts are studies to determine what heuristics or rules of thumb they use in solving problems. . . . The program is designed to solve a problem the way that humans seem to solve it. The first definition has a sliding meaning. . . . Something can fit the definition of AI-1 today but, once we see how the program works and understand the problem, we will not think of it as AI anymore. . . . Unfortunately I cannot identify a body of technology that is unique to this field. . . . Most of the work is problem-specific, and some abstraction or creativity is require to see how to transfer it

great read: https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.p...
by arh68 | 2025-05-31 21:39:19+00:00
Exactly. By GP's logic, time zones are absolutist, and every town could & should observe solar noon independently.

I think folks are averse to "world time" (for reasons, largely inertial), so maybe the baby step is try 1 timezone per country (like China's done for .. 75 years ?).

I'd even argue Local Time has only ~4 useful times: dawn, daytime, dusk, & nighttime. Where I grew up, the parks closed at dusk every day. Nobody complained

If I take a walk at 7:05:35 PM every day, it seems very precise but doesn't indicate whether I need sunglasses or a flashlight. It's meaningless precision, like 0.6235 slices of pizza. If I'm coordinating a walk with you, I might as well use UTC: it still won't tell light from dark, but at least nobody'll be waiting for an hour due to DST. It'd make more sense to schedule our walk at `1 hour before dusk`, or "just" settle for UTC, IMO.
by tel | 2025-05-31 21:39:45+00:00
The quantification over T is still kind of weird, though. In a formulation like `for all T, (T and P consistent and T and neg P consistent)` is trivially false, just take `T = {neg P}` and now `{P, neg P}` is inconsistent.

We're never trying to show P is independent of all theories, just some specific one.
by the_pwner224 | 2025-05-31 21:40:08+00:00
Congratulations!

As the other commenter mentioned, this seems like an extremely competitive space. But I did a quick Google for speech-to-text and your solution is a few times cheaper than most others.

I know you may not want to share your secret sauce, but I'm curious as to how you managed that. I'm guessing you use Whisper, is the trick to just run it on your own hardware instead of paying AWS prices for compute?
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-05-31 21:40:44+00:00
For some reason I was thinking earlier today of Gibson's "Jackpot" -- a cross-lashed, polycausal catastrophe: Lots of bad little things accumulating, building up a certain momentum.

Getting rid of Isaacman and appointing a flunky Air Force General, while at the same time cutting NASA's budget to the bone, is a very bad thing. (Though still little, in the scheme of things.)
by pydry | 2025-05-31 21:41:24+00:00
>You reconsider your life choices and hire the Finnish to run your nuclear power plants instead.

The French made Finnish plant or the Moscow made Finnish plant?

It would be a cool party trick if Finland tried building its own nuclear power plants instead of just suing the French for cost overruns.

>It’s not even just the economics that rule out batteries and pumped storage

The economics dont rule them out - not unless you treat the environment as disposable.

They're much more cost effective when paired with solar and wind than nuclear power, they just dont get the subsidies.

>Where are you going to put all that pumped storage?

You might be confusing it with river dams for which the geography is actually scarce. There was actually a paper that identified a truly enormous number of potential sites globally for pumped storage. Google can easily find it for you if you have an ounce of curiosity about this.

>Where are you going to get all the batteries you need?

Make them? Did you think theyd fall out of the sky?

>The jury is still out on syngas

Syngas only makes economic sense once natural gas is banned/made cost prohibitive and solar+wind are regularly overproducing what can be otherwise stored or used.

It'd still be cheaper to only use syngas made with solar and wind than to use nuclear energy just coz nuclear energy is that absurdly, fantastically, stupidly expensive.

>Why on earth would you run a nuclear power plant as a peaker? That’s inefficient and wasteful.

You wouldnt it's even more economically hemmoraging than using it for baseload but some people think it's a substitute for natural gas because technically it can peak.

Nuclear almost always pairs itself with natgas for peaking just like solar and wind currently do during dark, windless days.

>This seems to be a wonderful idea, as long as you assume nobody lives above the 60th parallel

A) Not many do live up there and B) there is NO shortage of available wind and hydro power options up there.

So I guess you admit it is a wonderful idea.

Of all of your critiques this is the oddest.

>don’t mind on relying on CO2 producing power sources.

Did you read the link I posted at the top? It was written before you responded to me but it was meant for you.

The straw man I referred to in that post was the one you just made.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-05-31 21:41:49+00:00
What do you think the barriers are between the two? Why would anyone pick items off a list for minimum wage when they could make six figures in the trades? Is it simple credentialism and gatekeeping?

Someone just quoted me 60k to renovate by backyard. I have been doing it myself and there is certainly a lot of skill to doing even simple tasks like seeding a lawn effectively
by scotty79 | 2025-05-31 21:42:55+00:00
It's a problem for those students. But it's self inflicted by their choices.

EDIT: sorry, I misread your question....

I think it's a problem for the university because it might mislead universities into keeping terrible teachers on the payroll because too many of their students are getting too high grades because they copy because teacher was unable to teach them or motivate them.

This problem is solved cheaper and easier just by monitoring teachers directly.

Another problem I can see is that if a lot of particularly terrible students graduate suddenly it might spoil the reputation of the university, but it's a problem with increase of the cheating level, not with the cheating level itself, it's already calculated into university's reputation.

It really doesn't matter all that much because the main source of university graduates success and as a result university's reputation comes from how picky they are when admitting students. Good freshmen usually make good graduates.

When students are taught nearly every university does similarly good as long as they try to do a decent job and not just scam people.

I don't see any other problems. And I see zero incentive for the university to reduce cheating. This would just reduce the number of graduates and they can already do that on admission if they want that. Unless they can somehow earn money from catching cheating students.

Heck, top universities even admit more on the affluence of the student's family not on how smart they are. And that's because affluent graduates are also sought after by the business so this works for everybody.

I think the person who wrote that article is cynical enough to understand the incentives to not care about cheating too much at the level of individual teacher but they are not cynical enough to understand that at institutional level there's also lack of incentive to care about that because university is not really about teaching and grading. It's for selecting and it doesn't need to be 100% accurate to be useful and valuable.
by HenryBemis | 2025-05-31 21:43:17+00:00
Having been the guy who got a couple of F's, and retook the exams in Sept and passed them to continue to my next years of studies and eventually my BSc I can say.. no! Do the work. Deserve the A/B/C. Get the A/B/C. I don't believe I'm the only one that suspects how the test will go, knows what the test result will be once I see the question, and know what I should have done to get that A/B/C mark.

I get it that shit happens in life (imagine someone having exams two days after they buried a father/mother/brother/sister), now THAT person, yeah, boost their results by 'one step' because if they got a 40% going through THAT, then they would have gotten 60% in a normal/BAU situation.

But don't hand out degrees to people who don't deserve them. It dilutes the degrees of those who do.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-05-31 21:43:20+00:00
> you’ll likely be surprised at what you find.

I very much doubt it. My day job is writing symbolic-numeric code. The result of 0.1+0.1+0.1 != 0.3, but for rounding to bring it up to 0.31 (i.e. rounding causing an error of 1 cent), you would need to accumulate at least .005 error, which will not happen unless you lose 13 out of your 16 digits of precision, which will not happen unless you do something incredibly stupid.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-31 21:43:28+00:00
> you need to live in VHCOL city to earn enough and have a high savings rate

Yes to the latter, no to the former. The states with the highest savings rates are Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota, Massachussetts and Maryland [1]. Only Massachussetts is a top-five COL state [2].

> then after living at the center of everything for 15-20 years be mentally prepared to move to “nowhere”

This is the real hurdle. Ultimately, however, it's a choice. One chooses to work harder to access a scarce resource out of preference, not necessity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_savings...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_savings...
by thruflo | 2025-05-31 21:43:36+00:00
This is the VM behind Popcorn https://github.com/software-mansion/popcorn, a project aiming to run OTP and Elixir in WASM:

> Popcorn is a library that allows you to run client-side Elixir in browsers, with Javascript interoperability

Recent ElixirConf keynote introducing it: https://youtu.be/ep--rQO1FRI
by yowzadave | 2025-05-31 21:44:18+00:00
I agree with this; I think part of the societal problem is one of poor urban planning. I’m lucky to live in a neighborhood in New York (Sunnyside) that has a park that is the hub of everyone’s social life—most nights of the week, people show up, bring some food, and chat/share dinner and drinks while the kids run around playing unsupervised. This is extremely rare in the US, which is dominated by suburban typologies that feature individual homes and relatively few communal spaces. The shared spaces, like restaurants/bars/etc. tend to be places you have to drive to, and therefore have less of a connection to their community and less of a regular clientele. Everyone wants to have their own backyard…which is fine, but leads to people hanging out alone in their own backyard rather than with their friends and neighbors.
by TheHideout | 2025-05-31 21:44:44+00:00
Maybe all homework could come in two parts with a 70/30 split in the grade. Everyone gets assigned the first 70%, if their solution trips a plagiarism detector then they are automatically assigned the second 30% of the work. Better yet, it's communicated that it intentionally randomly selects some people for the second part of the work, even if they didn't plagiarize. Like random airport screening.

As long as it's clearly communicated in the syllabus, should be fine. If identical code submissions are so common then everyone should be doing the same quantity of work on average and it shouldn't be an issue if you automatically get assigned bonus problems.
Show HN: Watch by Team – Movie/Show Discovery through their creators
by MCtheperson | 2025-05-31 21:46:15+00:00
So I've been waiting a decade for someone to make a tool like this, and finally just decided to make it myself. I'm a UX/Product Designer by trade, but have always dabbled in code.

I have a great appreciation for writers, film editors, cinematographers, etc. and tend to follow some of my favorites to make sure I catch their stuff. I've also noticed that some of the best projects come out of a great team reuniting.

This project is a pretty simple concept, just an easy way to browse movies and shows that were made by some of the same people who created ones you love.

I've always found imdb and other services to be frustrating when trying to accomplish this fairly basic task, but this is created for that specific purpose.

The project is a pretty humble v1, fresh out of the oven, but I've been using it just for myself and already discovered some amazing stuff.

It's totally ad-free and costs nothing, and isn't saving or tracking any user data (one of those may change if I need to cover api/hosting costs).

I'd love any feedback, advice, or thoughts you may have.
by dvh | 2025-05-31 21:46:53+00:00
First semester, programming in C. We are submitting the assignments to the assistants. Female student in front of me hands out her floppy disk (this was early 2000). Assistant opens the single file that is on it, containing this single line:

#include <stdio.h>

Assistant: you did this completely yourself? Her: yes! Assistant: nobody helped you? Her: no! Assistant: are you sure? Her: well, they helped me a little. Assistant: gimme your index!

During the exam professor asked me why I called arguments of main argv and argc and if they can be called something else, I did know the answer, but I didn't know exactly what continue does because I wasn't using it in my code.
by duskwuff | 2025-05-31 21:47:39+00:00
That's the number of unique combinations of clues for all 2^25 puzzles. There are 13 possible clues for each row/column (0 1 2 3 4 5 11 12 13 21 22 31 111), but not all 13^10 possible combinations can appear together - for instance, 5 5 5 5 5 / 0 0 0 0 0 is obviously impossible.

(I wrote a program to calculate this by generating all 2^25 puzzles and their clues, then sorting by the clues. I also verified the count of 25,309,575 clues with unique solutions.)
by Panzer04 | 2025-05-31 21:48:22+00:00
Fair enough. I guess it's all about degrees - I work at a place where we use FPGAs for our hardware, and I find it really hard to imagine an LLM being remotely capable of solving the problems our FPGA guys do.

If the FPGA is mostly doing simpler stuff with lots of boilerplate, I can see current LLMs offering a lot for someone who doesn't regularly write code for them; I guess that's similar to the current case for software.

Using them to set up the initial flow is not a bad idea either - I know coworkers who use them to write the early code for a new system or driver, where it seems to work pretty well (probably because that's a huge part of the training set - loads of tutorials out there)
by egberts1 | 2025-05-31 21:50:42+00:00
Programming done in closed network lab.

This is why homework are NOW being done in-class: no takehomes.

In short, weekly exams, on-paper, in-person, in-class, on teacher's test form paper.

No phone. Calculator permitted. Some allow open-book.

I too welcome back the 1980s.

Mimograph, anyone? * sniff * sniff *
by e40 | 2025-05-31 21:50:48+00:00
Yeah, free is a bit of a odd take. ! ZIRP + section 174 was a huge simultaneous blow to tech.

I would add one more: me too-ism from CEOs following Musk after the twitter reductions. I think many tech CEOs (e.g., Zuck) hate their workforce with a passion and used the layoff culture to unwind things and bring their workforce to heel (you might be less vocal in this sort of environment... think of the activists that used to work at Google).
Show HN: Purpose Reminders – One simple, positive act emailed monthly to all
by skrid | 2025-05-31 21:51:12+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Purpose Reminders (https://purposereminders.com). Our first monthly action – "Leave a positive review for a local business" – goes out June 1st (very soon!).

The core idea: What if thousands of us did the same small, positive act each month? You get one email, choose to act or skip (no pressure), and then see the collective, anonymous impact.

It's 100% free, built with Next.js/Supabase/Resend. My attempt at a simple way to foster some collective goodwill.

What do you think of the concept?
by therealpygon | 2025-05-31 21:52:41+00:00
It doesn’t? Reasoning is not an analysis; it is the application of learned patterns for a given set of parameters that results in higher accuracy.

Permit my likely inaccurate illustration: You’re pretty sure 2 + 2 is 4, but there are several questions you could ask: are any of the numbers negative, are they decimals, were any numbers left out? Most of those questions are things you’ve learned to ask automatically, without thinking about it, because you know they’re important. But because the answer matters, you check your work by writing out the equation. Then, maybe you verify it with more math; 4 ÷ 2 = 2. Now you’re more confident the answer is right.

An LLM doesn’t understand math per se. If you type “2 + 2 =”, the model isn’t doing math… it’s predicting that “4” is the next most likely token based on patterns in its training data.

“Thinking” in an LLM is like the model shifting mode and it starts generating a list of question-and-answer pairs. These are again the next most likely tokens based on the whole context so far. “Reasoning” is above that: a controlling pattern that steers those question-and-answer sequences, injecting logic to help guide the model toward a hopefully more correct next token.
by Henchman21 | 2025-05-31 21:52:54+00:00
I don’t believe money should ever be a factor for students. In any way. Yet, when I was a student I was incredibly loud about “I am a paying customer of this institution and you’re gonna teach me. Late to class and not allowed in? Great, I paid for this class and I’ll take it up with whomever has the ability to reprimand you/fire you if you aren’t tenured/generally make your life hell.”

Money in education perverts everything. More generally money is the root of all evil, eh? But if you took my cash and I get nothing? Thats a very loud complaint and/or lawsuit.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-05-31 21:53:22+00:00
The amount we can extract is tiny compared to the volume of energy put into the air every day by the sun. At a certain scale it could definitely become an issue and change the local environment and reduce wind speeds, we have seen that with some of the biggest solar farms where the air temperature is changed and the shade increases vegetation and wildlife so presumably wind speed reductions will have some effect. But compared to the CO2e it saves from being emitted its absolutely worth it currently.
by Nevermark | 2025-05-31 21:54:57+00:00
Nothing, nothing at all, is more abhorrent than someone willing to make a change only to leave more work for someone else to clean up!

Yes, one universal time zone, used universally! Bravo, finally, indeed.

But with metric time:

• 1 metric hour = day/25

• 1 metric time minute = day/1000 = hour/40 = 1 mday

• 1 metric time second = metric minute/1000 = 1 µday

And while we are at it, since this is all about rotation, lets fix that too:

• 1 metric rotation degree = rotation/100 = 1 centi-rotation

• 1 metric rotation minute = rotation/1000 = 1 milli-rotation

• 1 metric rotation second = metric degree minute/1000 = 1 µrot

Notation: instead of '°', metric degrees use a filled circle '•'.

Now we have conceptual correspondence between 1 minute of time and 1 minute rotation of the Earth.

If you know your metric longitude, you know the local time shift, and vice versa.

Finally, a metric "milette" distance is defined as 1/1000 of the Earths circumference, or ~40km. The Earth's surface moves 1 millete distance -> in 1 minute of time -> over 1 minute of rotation

Ok, open for suggestion period.