MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2025-05-26 23:46:16+00:00
"Signatures of chiral superconductivity in rhombohedral graphene" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09169-7 :

> Chiral superconductors are unconventional superconducting states that break time reversal symmetry spontaneously and typically feature Cooper pairing at non-zero angular momentum. Such states may host Majorana fermions and provide an important platform for topological physics research and fault-tolerant quantum computing [1–7]. Despite intensive search and prolonged studies of several candidate systems [8–26], chiral superconductivity has remained elusive so far. Here we report the discovery of robust unconventional superconductivity in rhombohedral tetra- and penta-layer graphene without moiré superlattice effects. [...] We also observed a critical B⊥ of 1.4 Tesla, higher than any graphene superconductivity and indicates a strong-coupling superconductivity close to the BCS-BEC crossover [27]. Our observations establish a pure carbon material for the study of topological superconductivity, with the promise to explore Majorana modes and topological quantum computing.
Show HN: I built an MCP to help build Cursor for Video Editing
by misbahsy | 2025-05-26 23:47:25+00:00
Hi HN! I spent the last weekend exploring Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) and wanted to share a starter kit for anyone who wants to build a cursor for video/audio in minutes.

Backstory I realized it’d be neat to have a “batteries-included” MCP server that could handle common video and audio tasks. So I used Claude 3.7 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, vibe coded to scaffold the repo, bake in automated tests, and pushed to Smithery.

This Python-based MCP server exposes tools for:

Core Video Operations extract_audio_from_video – Extract audio tracks from video files

trim_video – Cut video segments with precise timing

convert_video_format – Convert between video formats (MP4, MOV, AVI, etc.)

convert_video_properties – Comprehensive video property conversions

change_aspect_ratio – Adjust aspect ratios with padding or cropping

set_video_resolution – Change resolution while preserving quality

set_video_codec – Switch codecs (H.264, H.265, VP9, etc.)

set_video_bitrate – Tweak bitrate for quality vs. file size

set_video_frame_rate – Modify playback FPS

Audio Processing convert_audio_format – Convert between audio formats (MP3, WAV, AAC, etc.)

convert_audio_properties – Full audio property conversions

set_audio_bitrate – Adjust audio quality/compression

set_audio_sample_rate – Change sample rates

set_audio_channels – Convert mono ↔ stereo

set_video_audio_track_codec – Change a video’s embedded audio codec

set_video_audio_track_bitrate – Adjust embedded audio bitrate

set_video_audio_track_sample_rate – Change embedded audio sample rate

set_video_audio_track_channels – Adjust embedded audio channels

Creative Tools add_subtitles – Burn styled subtitles into video

add_text_overlay – Overlay dynamic text with timing cues

add_image_overlay – Insert watermarks or logos

add_b_roll – Splice in B-roll footage with transitions

add_basic_transitions – Apply fade-in/out effects

Advanced Editing concatenate_videos – Join multiple clips (optional transitions)

change_video_speed – Create slow-motion or time-lapse effects

remove_silence – Auto-trim silent segments

Diagnostics health_check – Verify server is up and all tools respond

All of these live in a single server.py, backed by a full pytest suite in tests/.

Try it Out!

Github: https://github.com/misbahsy/video-audio-mcp Smithery: https://smithery.ai/server/@misbahsy/video-audio-mcp
by bradly | 2025-05-26 23:47:54+00:00
Very impressive!

As I've hit my mid-life slide and (regressed|progressed) back to my youth-self, I've found myself just writing a bunch of apps and sites in html and css and really enjoying it.

One thing I still would like to see cracked is a random-like number in pure CSS. You can almost us there with some of the math functions and browser attributes, but I haven't found anything reliable.
by linsomniac | 2025-05-26 23:48:17+00:00
I have ChatGPT, Claude, and Google subscriptions and play around with them. Lately I've been using Claude 3.7 Sonnet (and 4.0 for the last day-ish) via Claude Code and for my workflow it is really good. I'm mostly creating or modifying Python programs.

I'm not sure what their trial situation is, I just pay for the API accesses. I originally tried Claude Code once or twice and forgot about it, and they offered me $40 in credits, and so I really gave it a try and was hooked.
by aaplok | 2025-05-26 23:48:40+00:00
Yes I think the issue is as much that open tasks make learning interesting and meaningful in a way that exams hardly can do.

This is the core of the issue really. If we are in the business of teaching, as in making people learn, exams are a pretty blunt and ineffective instrument. However since our business is also assessing, proctoring is the best if not only trustworthy approach and exams are cheap in time, effort and money to do that.

My take is that we should just (properly) assess students at the end of their degree. Spend time (say, a full day) with them but do it only once in the degree (at the end), so you can properly evaluate their skills. Make it hard so that the ones who graduate all deserve it.

Then the rest of their time at university should be about learning what they will need.
by skissane | 2025-05-26 23:50:06+00:00
MBR and GPT can coexist on the same disk - MBR goes in sector 0, GPT starts in sector 1. Normally the MBR in sector 0 is “protective” (it just marks the whole disk as in use), but in theory you can create a “hybrid” disk in which the MBR and GPT both describe the same partitions. I suppose you could even reserve most of the disk as one big GPT partition and then split that up into multiple MBR partitions. You’d have to be very careful editing the partition table on such a disk because standard tools might break it.
by const_cast | 2025-05-26 23:50:11+00:00
After a certain point we have to force consumer's hands and tell them to get the fuck over it.

The level of inconvenience added to my life by not using plastic bags is so unbelievably small it's not even worth the oxygen I would need to spend to express my discomfort. It's really, really not a big deal.

The fact that some people are extraordinarily high-stress and enjoy making problems out of nothing should not be our concern. Let's not optimize for those people, they'll never be happy anyway.
by NikolaNovak | 2025-05-26 23:52:13+00:00
I wish I had your optimism; given how many people enjoy, praise and share AI content today, I'm worried.

* Completely unrealistic fake rescue videos * Drawings and photos and paintings presented as own * Videos which are AI voices from an AI script with AI animations * And let's not get into the news/"news" aspect of it all

I fear Idiocracy is more in our future, but here's hoping you're right :)
by michaelmrose | 2025-05-26 23:52:31+00:00
A friend of mine got out of the military before we started working together. He is permanently partially disabled and most of the people he directly served with killed themselves because kicking down doors and shooting people is psychologically destructive.

Also present inductees will basically serve under a fascist dictator who wants to use the military to murder people.

That said the idea that poor people ought to move somewhere cheaper deserves attention.

1. Poor people who aren't literally homeless are the least mobile folks. They have difficulty moving in town because they can't come up with 3 months rent let alone money to move across the country and they are incredibly risk intolerant as they often can't afford for even one partner to be out of work for any length of time. Furthermore losing access to local resources might itself be calamitous. There is no replacing moms babysitting with paid for childcare.

2. Entanglements. People have connections, friendships, family, love interests. Without these people often fare worse.

3. Wages descend almost as fast as rent, job opportunities go down faster and most everything else stays about the same. Nobody invests 5000 and risks becoming a hobo in hopes of netting 150 a month in another minimim wage job in a shittier City.

4. Low wage jobs are in fact done by all sorts of people in all sorts of stages of their life and cities depend on those people to function. It's not clear how any tier one city should continue to function after all the people who should not be there leave

5. The idea hardly scales. People live where the jobs are now and those places are only cheaper now because they lack those economic opportunities.

The advice is not grounded in logic.
by djhn | 2025-05-26 23:52:44+00:00
I’m sceptical this could ever work politically.

There are still people watching television on 1980’s hardware. Full HD televisions have been essentially feature complete for over 20 years and should remain relevant for another 20 years, since the vast majority of broadcasts are still 480p and 720p. There are now hundreds of millions of 4k and 8k televisions and projectors with expected service life and lifecycles extending into 2050s.

Bricking those devices en masse is a PR disaster and invites legal scrutiny from regulators, and any individual service suddenly requiring special hardware is shooting itself in the face financially.
by codebje | 2025-05-26 23:52:50+00:00
On running code at compile time, what this reads as to me is evaluating constant expressions at compile time. We're thoroughly used to compilers optimising constant expressions away for us: "if 4 < 2 then a else b" will usually result in identical compiler output as just "b": "4" is constant, "2" is constant, "<" is constant, and the application of "<" to "4" and "2" is constant.

What about "factorial 8" ? Assuming the compiler knows that "factorial" is a pure function, it also knows that "factorial 8" is a constant, and in theory it could evaluate that function and substitute in the result. In practice this won't generally happen automatically, because compile times would blow out something fierce.

But in, say, C++, you can do this:

constexpr unsigned factorial(unsigned n) { return n == 1 ? 1 : n * factorial(n - 1); } constexpr unsigned fac8 = factorial(8);

And it will compile to the static int value. This looks very much like the author's proposal; reading the various rules around constant-initializer probably will help expose pitfalls.

More interesting for me is partial evaluation. Constant folding evaluates fully static parts of a program to produce a static result, shifting that execution cost from run time to compile time. Partial evaluation also allows some of the program's dynamic inputs to be fixed to a static value, slaps a virtual "constexpr" on everything that now only has static inputs (and is a pure function), and reduces everything it can.

Partial evaluation gets fun when you start applying it to certain types of program: partial evaluation of an interpreter with a given program's source as an input acts just like a compiler. Partial evaluation of a partial evaluator with an interpreter as fixed input produces a compiler. Partial evaluation of a partial evaluator with a partial evaluator as fixed input produces a compiler generator: feed it an interpreter for any language, get a compiler for that language.
by kenjackson | 2025-05-26 23:52:50+00:00
The idea with calculators was that as a tool there are higher level questions that calculators would help you answer. A simple example is that calculators don't solve word problems, but you can use them to do the intermediate computations.

What are the higher level questions that LLMs will help with, but for which humans are absolutely necessary? The concern I have is that this line doesn't exist -- and at the very best it is very fuzzy.

Ironically, this higher level task for humans might be ensuring that the AIs aren't trying to get us (whatever that means, genocide, slavery, etc...).
by busyant | 2025-05-26 23:52:53+00:00
> If students using AI to cheat on homework

This is not related to "AI", but I have an amusing story about online cheating.

* I have a nephew who was switched into online college classes at the beginning of the pandemic.

* As soon as they switched to online, the class average on the exams shot up, but my nephew initially refused to cheat.

* Eventually he relented (because everyone else was doing it) and he pasted a multitude of sticky notes on the wall at the periphery of his computer monitor.

* His father walks into his room, looks at all the sticky notes and declares, "You can't do this!!! It'll ruin the wallpaper!"
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-26 23:54:15+00:00
>You can derive #3 from first principles of how the underlying gradient descent and backpropagation work. They approximate functions, therefore when it gets something wrong it means something went wrong with either the gradient descent or back propagation, or the training data.

Then derive it from first principles. Use mathematical notation. You can't even draw this curve... it has so many dimensions. The crazy thing is you started hallucinating to me AFTER you told me you can derive it from first principles. You claimed you can derive it, then proceeded to NOT derive it.

>We're not talking about getting a certain math question wrong (humans make mistakes like this). We're talking about ridiculous mistakes that are completely random and that humans would never make. I would even go as far to say that calling them mistakes is a stretch. The algorithm simply did not capture some mapping between the prompt and the output answer.

Humans make plenty of ridiculous mistakes. Even so humans can lie. How do you know it's not lying? Again. Prove it.

>This is not how humans make mistakes. Humans build knowledge in some kind of logical knowledge tree, and mistakes arise from how this mechanism works (which we don't know exactly how, but we can certainly conclude it is completely different than transformers and LLMs). Most humans don't make random mistakes but rather something like logical mistakes.

Please derive how humans reason from first principles. I mean this by showing me experimental evidence that shows me the genesis of a signal traveling through the human brain and branching through billions of neurons to produce "reasoning".

Oh you can't? Well it looks like you're just making an approximation here? Possibly an Hallucination. Sound familiar?

>tl;dr; It's clear to me LLMs make mistakes in such a way that exposes their simple underlying mechanism, as oppose to humans who make mistakes that contain rich layers of logical reasoning.

You had to do make several assumptions and leaps in creativity to arrive at your conclusion. It's an hallucination through and through.
by proc0 | 2025-05-26 23:54:39+00:00
Well no, most people can reason without writing or speaking. I can just think and reason about anything. Not sure what you mean.

Reasoning is something like structured thoughts. You have a series of thoughts that build on each other to produce some conclusion (also a thought). If we assume that the brain is a computer, then thoughts and reasoning are implemented on brain software with some kind of algorithm... and I think it's pretty obvious this algorithm is completely different than what happens in LLMs... to the extent that we can safely say it is not reasoning like the brain does.

There is also a semantic argument here, if we say that since we don't know what humans are doing then we can also stretch the word and use it for AI, but I think this is muddying the waters and creating all the hype that I think will not deliver what it's promising.
by stephen_g | 2025-05-26 23:55:05+00:00
Exactly, I did the free Language Transfer audio courses in Spanish and French and actually learnt some real useful basics of the language (they're very much introductory courses but very good).

Previously I'd spend far more time in Duolingo trying to learn and hadn't really learnt any useful language skills at all. I can see it being helpful for drilling some vocab if you were learning elsewhere, but it just doesn't work to actually learn a language.
by antihipocrat | 2025-05-26 23:55:34+00:00
Pretty sure the people creating the best models understand how these things work. Plenty of papers explain the process and you and I can create our own basic model ourselves from scratch with enough aptitude and drive.

There is a lot of art involved with the best models. We aren't dealing with determinism with regard to the corpus used to train the model (too much information to curate for accuracy) nor the LLM output (probabilistic by design) nor the prompt input (humans language is dynamic and open to multiple interpretations) nor the human subjective assessment of the output.

That there is a product available that manages to produce great results despite these huge challenges is amazing and this is the part that is not quantifiable - in the sense that the data scientists decisions made with regard to temperature settings etc are not derived from any fundamental property but more from an inspired group of people with qualitative instincts aligned with producing great results
by abe_m | 2025-05-26 23:55:38+00:00
Natural gas wells go dry eventually, and new sites need to be developed. Slowing down the consumption is still a win on reducing the environment disruption of both land filling, and running new facilities to get to new natural gas deposits.

For a CO2 emission stand point, there is still a lot of trucking of waste if it is getting land filled, plus land filling needs to burn a lot of diesel for creating and operating landfills. Burning plastic also likely more energy positive than going through the washing cycle to get food residue off containers to get them clean enough to use. You can just burn the food residue.
by landl0rd | 2025-05-26 23:55:45+00:00
Did you miss the part where I specified the Met Police often do the same. Let me give you an example of "gross offense": "commentary from you regarding the rainbow flags which represent the LBGT community." https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fl4VM7VXkAM8-km.jpg:large

"Offending someone" being a crime is basically immoral.

Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Conservative Party councilor, was the one jailed for her comments around mass deportation. 31 months. These statements wouldn't get someone investigated, let alone jailed, in America.

Due process isn't worth a damn morally if we are discussing unjust laws. Saying "but he got due process" doesn't matter if the law that is being applied is deeply, fundamentally, and inexcusably reprehensible.
by squeedles | 2025-05-26 23:56:46+00:00
Recently read The Man Who Broke Capitalism by David Gelles which is an excellent review of the Welch years, how he worked, and how he sent his minions out across the corporate world to wreak havoc. Wonderful read and really provides perspective on why modern corporate America is what it is.

Light Out by Gryta and Mann follow up by focusing on the Immelt years and how he tried to keep the ball rolling despite the hole that Jack left him in. Also an excellent read.

Sounds like Power Failure covers a lot of the same material as these two earlier books perhaps with some historical material.
by lurking_swe | 2025-05-26 23:57:17+00:00
the difference is using my calculator in real life works ALL the time and is cheap. I can depend on it. And i still need to think about the broader problem even if i have a calculator. The calculator only removes the mindless rote memorization of the steps needed to do arithmetic, etc.

My calculator doesn’t depend on a fancy AI model in the cloud. It’s not randomly rate limited during peak times due to capacity constraints. It’s not expensive to use, whereas the good LLM models are.

Did i mention calculators are actually deterministic? In other, always reliable. It’s difficult to compare the two. One gives a false sense of accomplishment because it’s say 80% reliable, and the other is always 100% reliable.
by fn-mote | 2025-05-26 23:59:39+00:00
Variations in this system are in active use in the US as well.

Do you feel it is effective?

It seems to me that there is a massive asymmetry in the war here: proctoring services have tiny incentives to catch cheaters. Cheaters have massive incentives to cheat.

I expect the system will only catch a small fraction of the cheating that occurs.
by tombert | 2025-05-27 00:02:53+00:00
Anti-AI people are kind of weird.

I got put on probation on SomethingAwful because I created a thread talking about an AI project I was working on (An Icecast radio station that uses OpenAI to generate DJ chatter and commercials), and everyone acted like I was simultaneously a completely uncreative moron also also somehow stealing work from people I would have hired, like I was somehow depriving a DJ of a job by not hiring one. I am an unemployed software person who is building something for fun, "hiring a dedicated 24 hour DJ" was never on the table.

In this thread, I noticed a lot of assertions that were just being accepted as axiomatically true, like asserting the AI is worse for the environment than humans doing the equivalent labor (which is not nearly as cut and dry), and that AI can't reason and that anything that involves any AI is inherently "theft". These assertions are completely unqualified and people just eat it up.

I don't know if LLMs "reason" by any consistent definition of the word. They might, they might not, I'm not going to pretend to know, but I find it a little irritating how people just assert that they don't and people just gobble it up.
by cycomanic | 2025-05-27 00:03:53+00:00
That's chromatic dispersion, mode dispersion is spatial "path" dependent phase changes. Vibration is actually somewhat more relevant because if it wasn't for that we could theoretically undo mode dispersion (we would need phase information though).

That said all of that is irrelevant to what the previous speaker said, vibration induced phase variation as an impairment. Thats just not an issue, vibrations are way too slow to impair optical comms signals.
by const_cast | 2025-05-27 00:03:59+00:00
> OpenAI is selling the fact that you could potentially generate copyrightable material as a subscription, because the artwork is somewhere in the compressed data?

Yeah, that's the express and sole purpose of the tool. You use OpenAI image generation because you want something that looks like a stock image for your website. But you don't want to pay for a stock image because you're cheap. So you'll get a close enough approximation for free. Or, uh, less.
by mplanchard | 2025-05-27 00:04:15+00:00
I think it’s “only” that yeah. Both have fundamentally the same capabilities. Nixpgs may provide more out of the box library functionality than guix, I’m not sure, but as far as I know there’s nothing possible in one that isn’t possible in the other. Would be glad to be corrected by anyone with more experience, though. I’ve run NixOS for years now, but have only dabbled with guix.
by Cogito | 2025-05-27 00:04:16+00:00
Just reiterating what cogogo stated in a sibling, but the thing that threw me was the 'review' in the title. I was expecting some critique or comparison but instead saw summary and highlights.

I enjoyed the summary and highlights, and learnt about some details I would likely have never otherwise seen, so I think it's just the framing that seemed 'off'.

Depending on your intent consider reframing or adding critique, but I think the content is good and I appreciate you making it.

[edit] There is some critique and comparison in the opening: "Shakespearean tragedy" and "The result is equal parts invention history, boardroom knife-fight, and forensic accounting thriller." but I think these are the only ones. I would love to know why you think this, and what you like about your "favorite ideas" (and any things you didn't like!)
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-27 00:05:43+00:00
Stupid comment, sure. That's always true with me.

Shill for my app? I don't even know what shill means.

Plug for my app? Not really. It's pretty much dead atp. I'm just discussing my own experiences with the topic in the thread.

But yes, please downvote me. It helps remind me that this place isn't for me.