MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scythe | 2025-05-12 13:42:55+00:00
It is a little jarring to hear "data-driven" and "nonperturbative" in the same sentence. It sounds a little bit like saying you designed a boat with a better lift-to-drag ratio. "Wait, is it a boat or a plane?". So, I opened the paper fully expecting to not understand anything, and I was pleasantly surprised.

> First we deduce formally-exact non-perturbative guiding center equations of motion assuming a hidden symmetry with associated conserved quantity J. We refer to J as the non-perturbative adiabatic invariant.

Simply: this is not just some kind of unsupervised ML black-box magic. There is a formal mathematical solution to something, but it has a certain gap, namely precisely what quantity is conserved and how to calculate it.

> Then we describe a data-driven method for learning J from a dataset of full-orbit α-particle trajectories. [...] Our proposed method for learning J applies on a per-magnetic field basis; changing B requires re-training. This makes it well-suited to stellarator design assessment tasks, such as α-loss fraction uncertainty quantification.

With the formal simplification of the dynamics in hand, the researchers believe that a trained model can then give a useful approximation of the invariant, which allows the formal model, with its unknown parameters now filled in, to be used to model the dynamics.

In a crude way, I think I have a napkin-level sketch of what they're doing here. Suppose we are modeling a projectile, and we know nothing of kinematics. They have determined that the projectile has a parabolic trajectory (the formal part) and then they are using data analysis to find the g coefficient that represents gravitational acceleration (the data-driven part). Obviously, you would never need machine learning in such a very simple case as I have described, but I think it approximates the main idea.
by mnky9800n | 2025-05-12 13:43:23+00:00
I think to put what you are saying a different way, we have optimized the system to reward ambition at the expense of creativity and curiousity. This rewards careerist scientists over curious ones because the careerist scientist makes all of the safe bets, exploring things that are well known or alternatively exploring things that they think are "hot" and thus will attract funding and citations. I have been in more than one meeting where someone says things like, "uhh, how can we stick digital twins, machine learning, and this lab apparatus i have together? that will be a compelling application." There is no research questions in that statement, no curiousity about the universe, only ambition to attract funding. I don't think ambition is inherently bad, it is a useful trait to have as a scientist. But we have optimized the system to the point where being ambitiously curious does not seem to be rewarded.

I think what you have written here is very well connected to how academia currently functions and disfunctions. Thanks.
by NoSalt | 2025-05-12 13:43:26+00:00
I know I am in the VAST minority, or perhaps the only one, but I cannot stand frameworks. Sure, there may be a lot of power in them, but there is also a lot of bloat and complexity. IMHO, this "power" can easily be achieved with libraries instead of an IOC framework. After you learn a, typically terse and confusing, framework language, you have to know that framework language along with the base language (Java, C#, JavaScript, Python, etc.) I feel like frameworks are only as popular as they are because product owners and managers like to tick-off the number of tools their developers use; makes them look important, knowledgeable, and efficient.
by int_19h | 2025-05-12 13:43:45+00:00
I'm pretty sure your estimate is wrong by at least several orders of magnitude. Lots of iPhone users also own MacBooks, for starters, and iPhone will nudge you to set backup when you connect it to any Mac. And of course they are going to be on the same Wi-Fi network most of the time, too, when that person is at home. I'm not sure how sleep plays into it exactly, but MacBooks do wake up on their own to do their backups and things like app updates, so I wouldn't be surprised if an iPhone can actually wake up a sleeping MacBook to back up to it.

So the only case that is relatively unusual is having the Mac back up to a local NAS, but that's only because NAS themselves are a power user thing. Still, turnkey ones like Synology etc are much more common than "triple digits worldwide", and if you have a Mac and a NAS, why wouldn't you set up Time Machine to backup to said NAS?
by kordlessagain | 2025-05-12 13:46:08+00:00
Seyfarth admits he might’ve crossed a line, but he always wraps it in some version of “yeah, but look what they did first.” That’s textbook rationalization. He can’t be wrong if he was provoked. Reading more of his stuff, it’s clear the guy has a serious fixation on procedural control. As long as the system works in his favor, he’s its biggest fan. But the second it doesn’t validate him? He flips the table, blames everyone else, and rebrands it as a systemic failure. What starts as a disagreement turns into a legal crusade every time.
by apercu | 2025-05-12 13:46:11+00:00
Many psychiatrists only prescribe, some also do psychotherapy, and of those, some do EMDR. This is less common today than it used to be due to insurance and time and how they get paid, but some of those in private practice or academic settings still provide physiotherapy.

Sorry, I should a put a source: partner is a therapist.

Edit: autocorrect changed psychotherapy to physiotherapy.
by lobotomizer | 2025-05-12 13:46:14+00:00
Don't know about Florida but oil & gas companies in Pennsylvania regularly dump toxic waste on public roads.

> A Grist review of records from 2019 to 2023 found that oil and gas producers submitted more than 3,000 reports of wastewater dumping to the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP. In total, they reported spraying nearly 2.4 million gallons of wastewater on Pennsylvania roads. This number is likely a vast undercount: About 86 percent of Pennsylvania’s smaller oil and gas drillers did not report how they disposed of their waste in 2023.

https://grist.org/regulation/roadspreading-pennsylvania-frac...
by TheDong | 2025-05-12 13:46:27+00:00
Reading through the github issues, the author of this article comes off as very rude and entitled.

I'm on the side of the CoC committee who told the author they engaged without enough consideration or kindness.

Reporting bugs is nice. It's less nice if, when a maintainer asks for a clearer reproduction, you respond with "I already gave you a reproduction, even if you have to edit it a little. I'm not a programmer, all I can give you is some AI spam. I'll leave it up to you to do your jobs" (edited only lightly from what the author really wrote).
by nlh | 2025-05-12 13:46:30+00:00
I use Cursor as my base editor + Cline as my main agentic tool. I have not tried Windsurf so alas I can't comment here but the Cursor + Cline combo works brilliantly for me:

* Cursor's Cmk-K edit-inline feature (with Claude 3.7 as my base model there) works brilliantly for "I just need this one line/method fixed/improved"

* Cursor's tab-complete (neé SuperMaven) is great and better than any other I've used.

* Cline w/ Gemini 2.5 is absolutely the best I've tried when it comes to full agentic workflow. I throw a paragraph of idea at it and it comes up with a totally workable and working plan & implementation

Fundamentally, and this may be my issue to get over and not actually real, I like that Cline is a bring-your-own-API-key system and an open source project, because their incentives are to generate the best prompt, max out the context, and get the best results (because everyone working on it wants it to work well). Cursor's incentive is to get you the best results....within their budget (of $.05 per request for the max models and within your monthly spend/usage allotment for the others). That means they're going to try to trim context or drop things or do other clever/fancy cost saving techniques for Cursor, Inc.. That's at odds with getting the best results, even if it only provides minor friction.
by tails4e | 2025-05-12 13:46:44+00:00
SystemVerilog is a much better language than verilog. You can get pretty strong typed behaviour now, if you use the language parts that allow that. It's like C, if you use it poorly/the 'verilog way' it's got some serious footguns, but you can use it quite safely if you use the more modern features.

That said, I'm all for better languages, of they really are better and as expressive
by belthesar | 2025-05-12 13:47:11+00:00
The dynarec systems in QEMU aren't as efficient as the native dynarec systems in Windows and macOS (Rosetta 2). You can definitely run x86 Windows with UTM, and it works, but the performance characteristics are pretty poor. From a utility perspective, I've found that running an ARM Windows VM and using Windows' dynarec system to run x86 apps, or using WINE (both using native compiled subsystem code) is a much better experience. It's one of those things where it's okay if you need to run a workload in a pinch.

I'm not sure if performance characteristics are part of what the OP considers "sane", but if it is, I get the position.
by chrsw | 2025-05-12 13:47:19+00:00
I don't get that feeling. There are so many papers and so many avenues of research. It's extremely difficult for me to predict what's going to "pop" like the diffusion paper, the transformer paper, AlphaZero, Chat GPT-3, etc. But even these research or product advances that seem like step functions are built on a lot of research and trial-and-error. Can all 3 of these you listed be combined somehow? Hopefully, but I have no idea.
by nicpottier | 2025-05-12 13:48:32+00:00
I've contributed a few trivial fixes to OrganicMaps and I found them to be pretty responsive and reasonable in their opinions. That doesn't mean I agreed with all the decisions or priorities they make but that's to be expected. Their leadership seemed sane enough to me. It certainly felt like close enough to a BDFL situation to me.

In the research I did, OrganicMaps was the only viable open alternative to something like Gaia and it wasn't particularly close. It does a pretty good job of that, though their map styles leave some things to be desired and meter only topo lines is a bummer.

My limited experience playing around with the codebase made me appreciate that this isn't a small or simple project. It is a huge mixed codebase of C/Java/etc to share rendering across platforms and even just the map file generation is no small thing.

Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground, this seems more likely to me that both projects will struggle for a good while longer. Announcing a fork is easy, delivering something with enough value beyond rhetoric that will draw users over is another.
by derekzhouzhen | 2025-05-12 13:48:38+00:00
You can use shadow-dom without using web-component. web-component and shadow-dom are orthogonal to eachother:

* web-component is a way to attache javascript to certain elements. There are other ways to do it, but sometime this way feel cleaner, like when you do server-side rendering and not using any javascript framework.

* shadow-dom is a way to organize your styles. As you said there are other ways to do it, but I find it useful because it offers full isolation, and is compatible with browsers 3 years back.
by tw04 | 2025-05-12 13:48:48+00:00
There's just no way a guy with that much money sells out of the controlling stake in his own company without knowing it was going to happen.

The billoin dollar question is why? Seems it could only be a handful of things:

Major health problem so the controlling stake won't matter.

Major unannounced issue that would cause the stock to drop precipitously (on paper he'd be facing prison time, but I think we all know he won't even if true).

Outside pressure, presumably from a government entity because I don't know what private party would have the juice to push him out.

Outside of that, unless he's just done with the rat race, planning on retiring and just not working anymore I've got a lot of nothing. When you have as much money as he has, I don't see why you'd give up control of your baby willingly as part of "normal estate planning" at his age.
by IAmBroom | 2025-05-12 13:49:09+00:00
Only certain sections of the spectrum kickstarts photosynthesis. The rest heats the leaf, increasing Earth temperatures.

The plant wouldn't survive if it reflected the 400-500 and 600-700 nm light. Note that I said "and"; there are plants that rely on a less-efficient 600-700 band; they are often reddish in appearance even when fully functioning. (The reddish color of dead autumn leaves is because the chlorophyll is more volatile, leaving only the red pigmentation responsible for the less-efficient means of photosynthesis.)
by hbbio | 2025-05-12 13:49:18+00:00
Somehow yes, and it's quite sad.

The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

But these scammers. So many of them... Easy to smell though, but the problem we need to fix is these scammers get most of the online traction/attention, taking it from truer builders.
by dks8eksls | 2025-05-12 13:49:35+00:00
The CEO of WebSprix, a private sector ISP startup competing with state-run Ethio Telecom, has been jailed since December 26, 2024 on baseless charges.

The CEO is Dawit Birhanu (CCIE #5602), an American citizen and former Cisco leader. He left a lucrative career in the U.S. to found Ethiopia’s first private ISP, WebSprix. The company has an impressive track record, providing internet service to underserved communities of Addis Ababa and Bahir Dar:

29,600 active customers 440,000 homes passed 4100km fiber buried

It was projected to grow to 5-7 million homes passed by 2030, however, with the CEO in jail without access to digital devices and WebSprix assets frozen, major projects have been paused.

The charges against him stem from a dispute about "unpaid" taxes (despite having been awarded Taxpayer of the Year multiple times), ultimately a civil issue that could have been resolved out of court. He has since been denied bail, has had 6 hearing continuances, and meanwhile he is imprisoned without due process in Aba Samuel prison in Ethiopia. The heavy-handedness of imprisoning the CEO seems to suggest other motives and has a chilling effect on investment in developing markets like Ethiopia.

For more information, please watch Ray Mota's podcast at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZV3GA-c-Uo , and stand up for justice and digital inclusion—help secure a fair trial and release for Dawit, the visionary entrepreneur detained in Ethiopia. Share his story, sign the petition, and urge your representatives to act.
by erewhile | 2025-05-12 13:49:59+00:00
Not the original poster, but:

- Theoretical Neuroscience Computational and Mathematical Modeling of Neural Systems - Peter Dayan, L. F. Abbott (2001) is quite good, more mathematical than computational.

- Neuronal dynamics, available here: https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/ is also quite good, and free to read. Has python exercises as well. If I recall correctly, it mostly goes into simulations of singular neurons, and not so much entire networks and what we can do with them, but it does a good job at bridging the chemistry / biology / math to computation.

If we're talking about papers, one I mentioned in my other comment:

- Real-Time Computing Without Stable States: A New Framework for Neural Computation Based on Perturbations, https://doi.org/10.1162/089976602760407955

- Dynamics of Sparsely Connected Networks of Excitatory and Inhibitory Spiking Neurons, by Nicolas Brunel (Don't have a DOI on hand for this one)

- Spiking Neural Networks and Their Applications: A Review, https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci12070863 , is a very nice review of methods and does some nice explaining on concepts.

If you're looking for keywords on the topic:

- Leaky Integrate and Fire (LIF) neurons

- Spiking neural networks

- Liquid State Machines (LSM)

- Synaptic plasticity (Models of synaptic plasticity)

- Spike-based synaptic plasticity
by myfonj | 2025-05-12 13:50:09+00:00
This is quite fair point, yet I'd argue that still most so called web apps could (and should) use basic old-school HTML forms as the underlying technology, and progressively enhance from that baseline, up to the "app-y" look and feel we know and ~~ha~~__love__.

Obviously, there are some limits where application built with bog standard HTML forms becomes too cumbersome or makes no practical sense, as you say, but I think that that threshold is far higher than what current web-app landscape exhibits. I think the threshold is around video editing software, or real-time multi-user collaborative spaces perhaps. But for the rest, following three old steps

Make it work — just HTML. Make it nice — add some CSS. Make UX slick — add JS.

still makes sense to me. In context of the plainvanillaweb.com it would mean just moving the content from non-semantic attributes of custom components to their semantic initial content, such as adapt

<x-avatar src="https://i.pravatar.cc/150?u=a042581f4e29026024d"></x-avatar>

to get the data from its contents:

<x-avatar><img src="https://i.pravatar.cc/150?u=a042581f4e29026024d" alt></x-avatar>
by ativzzz | 2025-05-12 13:50:19+00:00
I've found it useful for doing simple things in parallel. For instance, I'm working on a large typescript project and one file doesn't have types yet. So I tell the AI to add typing to it with a description while I go work on other things. I check back in 5-10 mins later and either commit the changes or correct it.

Or if I'm working on a full stack feature, and I need some boilerplate to process a new endpoint or new resource type on the frontend, I have the AI build the api call that's similar to the other calls and process the data while I work on business logic in the backend. Then when I'm done, the frontend API call is mostly set up already

I found this works rather well, because it's a list of things in my head that are "todo, in progress" but parallelizable so I can easily verify what its doing
Show HN: Upper – Manage S3-Compatible Storage from Apple Shortcuts
by berrysauce | 2025-05-12 13:50:26+00:00
Hey everyone!

I built a little tool called Upper that lets you control S3-compatible storage right from the Shortcuts app on iPhone, iPad, and M-series Macs. You can automate things like uploading/downloading files, publishing static sites, or grabbing logs – basically anything you’d usually do in a web UI or terminal.

Credentials are kept safe using the device's Keychain (and sync via iCloud Keychain if you’ve got that on).

I’ve tested it with AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, and Scaleway so far. If you use something else or are missing a specific action, let me know – I'd love to hear what you'd want added.

This is my first time building something with Swift and SwiftUI, so any feedback or suggestions would mean a lot!
by yCombLinks | 2025-05-12 13:50:37+00:00
Yes, my first GUI apps were about 20 years ago in visual basic. It was far easier than laying out webpages (assuming you're targeting desktop users). It's just far harder to get users to download and run something (and should be). But the browser's layout system (the DOM) has 0 to do with that, there is nothing but inertia locking us into that.
by 9283409232 | 2025-05-12 13:50:56+00:00
Fans of AI see artist like icemen complaining about refrigeration but it is not the same thing. Generative AI doesn't exist without their prior work and it is used to copy it 1 to 1. Make them say things they didn't say or make art they didn't make. It is fair that they want transparency, consent, and payment.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-12 13:50:56+00:00
> the project blew up quite a bit and gained ~1.5k stars, after that the developers of the antivirus I was using filed a DMCA takedown request

I got really, really confused after that statement, because I don't understand what "the antivirus I was using" means and why they would have a reason to send the author a DMCA.

I think it means the author reverse-engineered another antivirus and put parts of it in their open-source project. But it could also mean other things. Skimming I see a heading with "Impersonating WinDefend".

So is the jist that the author somehow broke some kind of copyright law?
by ktallett | 2025-05-12 13:51:04+00:00
I'm not talking about consumer products, I'm talking about academic research. Most research has no patent attached nor any contents that is patent worthy. Most methods in most papers are based on the very basic building blocks coming from ones fine motor skills.

The fact these methods are omitted has numerous problems. One key issue this provides is reproducibility. All science has to be reproducible and a building block for future science. Omitting key details makes this unfit for purpose.

Secondly, it also means research can not be checked for accuracy and truth, which I do sometimes wonder if thats on purpose. Perhaps they are only presenting the most successful attempt, but not the average situation.

Lastly, this fully goes against the spirit of academic research. I want anyone out there to develop either a brand new usage for my work or adapt and improve my work, either building on it, or finding a new way of doing it that's easier, or more repeatable/reliable. It saves me having to do it, and as I am still working in that field, I will benefit from it.
by watusername | 2025-05-12 13:51:34+00:00
Looking at the whole interaction as well as the AI patch (https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/125602#issuecommen...) the author submitted, I have to disagree. It removes the flag setting altogether and adds useless code. It demonstrates that the author really has no understanding of the code, which may be okay for your weekend SaaS but definitely not for build system code in critical compiler infrastructures. To put it bluntly: This _is_ AI slop.

There's no denying that AI is helpful, _when_ the human has some baseline knowledge to check the output and steer the model in the correct direction. In this case, it's just wasting the maintainers' time.

I've seen many instances of this happening in the support channels for Nix/NixOS, which has been around long enough for the models to give plausible responses, yet too niche for them to emit usable output without sufficient prompting:

"No, this won't work because [...]" "What about [another AI response that is incorrect]?" (multiple back-and-forths, everyone is tired)
by dangus | 2025-05-12 13:51:47+00:00
> If Windows won't allow use of the filesystem as a database or cannot heuristically detect when a folder is being used as a store of data, Windows is wrong, not the developer.

I guess Nintendo is wrong for not giving you a file system at all on the Game Boy. The analogy may be extreme but that’s part of the point here: who are we to dictate Microsoft’s design goals and choice of compromises?

It’s really not Microsoft’s fault if their product doesn’t meet the specific needs of someone’s specific software use case.

I do agree that my first suggestion is the more sensible one, but my second one was more of a philosophical point. Windows has been the same old Windows for a long time and developers that don’t understand its limitations and requirements for deploying applications are more in the wrong than Microsoft in this scenario.

If Microsoft felt like the best design decision was to remove windows defender and that there was no negative impact to doing so they would have done it by now.