MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deng | 2025-06-02 10:12:59+00:00
> Not sure how the Midronome can solve the problem of midi notes coming inaccurate from a modern DAW?

Here's a review from a nice scotsman explaining how this works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCZqkSH9peI

or a walkthrough from the creator:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkw9dmLfkZQ

Note that this is an old version, I just saw the there's now the "Nome II", and at least for Mac, he has actually developed a USB protocol to provide a stable clock (which as you've already written is totally possible via USB, it's just nobody cared enough):

https://midi.org/innovation-award/u-sync

For Windows, the sync is still done via audio through a special VST.

The YT channel by the creator has many more interesting stuff, he also has done very precise jitter measurements, see for instance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGU336yKyEM
by submeta | 2025-06-02 10:12:59+00:00
What a wonderful text. I have seen soo many colleagues who do solid, if not extraordinary work, yet they get paid mediocre salaries. And then there are people who create an aura, as if they can walk on water. And get promoted constantly, get new roles, new opportunities. But when you scratch the surface, they are not necessarily doing much better work, but they are informed, know latest trends, use the right buzz words, bring a fresh air into the team, new models, mindsets, paradigms. And they think very highly of themselves. Unlike the others who do their job well, but are treated not like rock stars, and do not signal that they are ready to leave the company. So they always stay where they are, get paid the same. And management does not feel like treating them special to keep them.
by account42 | 2025-06-02 10:13:25+00:00
The whole point of the free market is that you don't have to figure out what it actually costs to provide a good/service in order to determine a fair price because if a price isn't fair then someone else an provide the same good/service for cheaper and win all the customers. In practice of course there is no such thing as a free market but a buyer being able to figure the lowest price a vendor will accept was never part of it.
by necovek | 2025-06-02 10:14:01+00:00
If someone is valued, they will at least get pulled into private, 1-1 conversations with one of those people pulling all the strings.

No matter if their suggestions would be followed, their opinion would be heard, which ultimately establishes how valued one is.

I've seen this happen more than once, and most often, that person was recommended as the successor for who they advised.

I've been on both sides, and I like being "valued" that way: otherwise, I just feel like I am not contributing with the best I can provide, and not enjoying the ride.

It's just who I am, and it's not about "never being happy" — we all aspire to some things, and this beats compensation to me.
by tempaway43563 | 2025-06-02 10:15:08+00:00
There's a weird 'blogging is good' mentality around here but the truth is writing a decent blog post takes a lot of time and gives very little return.

Highlighting people who unexpectedly rose to fame is no use, thats just survivor bias, for every Mike Posner there's millions of musicians who spend years trying to make it with no success.

'Write content for your future fans' is also survivor bias advice. In the attention economy most blogs will just be ignored forever.

So here's my advice: Its ok to give up. I think 'never give up' is terrible advice. People can waste years of their lives due to 'never give up'. There is wisdom in knowing when to give up and spend your time on something else. For most people, blogging is a waste of time and they'd be better off going for a nice walk.
by pmg101 | 2025-06-02 10:15:17+00:00
Stepping back... maybe this could work out fine over the medium term?

1. Lack of junior positions means people stop training for SW Dev as a career

2. Therefore software is written by a slowly shrinking band of senior people in collaboration with increasingly-powerful AI tools.

3. By the time the last senior person retires, AI is sufficiently powerful enough that no humans are required

Of course, for this to work painlessly for everyone all the parameters need to be perfectly matched, and they won't be... But maybe something like this COULD happen
by hagbard_c | 2025-06-02 10:15:37+00:00
The system is bankrupt and needs an overhaul. The post-WWII era is over, the petrodollar has lost steam and the world - as in regimes and countries, not 'the planet' - is ready for a re-shuffle. I'd like 'The West' to remain one of the driving forces in whatever 'new world order' we'll end up with because we - my children, my wife, my family, myself - live there and I think 'The West' has the potential to lead this 'new world order' to a direction preferable over some of the competing alternatives [1]. For that to happen 'The West' needs to get its bookkeeping in order. The 'unique advantage' of having a world reserve currency which allows you to essentially tax the world by artificially devaluing that currency in order to finance your national debt is not sustainable.

If you don't agree with this I'd like to hear your reasoning on how the system is sustainable.

[1] ...and I am not going to apologise for whatever warts that 'Western culture' has since all cultures have them.
by osener | 2025-06-02 10:15:55+00:00
For simpler use-cases I've used both https://dataflare.app/ and https://tableplus.com/ with success. They are much quicker and lighter to start-up, browse some tables and run some queries.

Free versions are generous enough for daily use as well. For example for TablePlus "The free trial is limited to 2 opened tabs, 2 opened windows, 2 advanced filters (filters are not available on the free TablePlus Windows) at a time."
by pjc50 | 2025-06-02 10:15:56+00:00
Interesting. I had no idea the melting point of sodium was so low. The usual considerations for skepticism of battery technologies apply:

- mention of a membrane. This is present in all sorts of battery technologies and tends to have weak points around cost and lifetime.

- poor passive safety. Standard lithium cells are usually tested to be puncture-safe. A tank of molten sodium cannot be puncture-safe, it will catch fire when exposed to air. So if something breaks off a plane and gets fired through the wing, the plane will become a fireball in the air.

- alkali rain. The touted benefit of being able to dump sodium hydroxide into the air omits to mention that you shouldn't get it on your skin. Yes, it will be dipersed if it's dropped from high altitude, but what about the rest of the flight?

- the chemtrail people would then be literally correct
by yetihehe | 2025-06-02 10:16:08+00:00
> A stream of its chemical byproduct is given off, and in the case of aircraft this would be emitted out the back, not unlike the exhaust from a jet engine.

> But there’s a very big difference: There would be no carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, the emissions, consisting of sodium oxide, would actually soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This compound would quickly combine with moisture in the air to make sodium hydroxide — a material commonly used as a drain cleaner — which readily combines with carbon dioxide to form a solid material, sodium carbonate, which in turn forms sodium bicarbonate, otherwise known as baking soda.

Remember acid rain? Now we will have alkaline rain. Using fuel for planes, that makes exhaust that dissolves the planes might not be a smart idea.
by rubzah | 2025-06-02 10:16:56+00:00
It's not just the spiritual side either. Traditional knowledge is also about stuff like exactly how much to use, how to prepare it, what to use it with (and not to use it with), what time of day, beneficial activities before and after, and so on. The human body is a complex system where all of these things cause complex interactions that can influence efficacy. Traditional medicinal use is full of these kinds of 'full package' treatments, a lot of which is lost when you just bottle some ingredient.
by MaulingMonkey | 2025-06-02 10:16:57+00:00
Spelling mistake in the "about us" section of your continuously deployed website? Production or pre-production matters little if it's a developer catching the bug. Maybe if it's caught by a customer, you have some overhead as it's triaged through QA, product leads, routed to someone with commit permissions, etc.

Spelling mistake in the "about us" section of your program baked into ROMs of internationally sold hardware? 100x is a vast underestimate of the cost multiplier to "fix in production", which would likely involve recalls, if not trashing product outright, and ROMs were a lot more common in the era this 100x figure supposedly came from. You might fix it for the next batch, or include the fix if you had a more critical bug that might make the recall worth it, but otherwise that bug lives in production for the life of the hardware.

Spelling mistake in the HTTP 1.x referrer field? You update the world's dictionaries, because that's significantly cheaper than mutating the existing bits of the protocol. Any half measures that would require maintaining backwards compatability would cause more problems than fixing the spelling "fixes", and any full measure that would fix all the old software for everyone might require a war or three after bankrupting a few billionares. That bug isn't just in software now, it's burrowed into books and minds.

"Same" bug, but different contexts lead to wildly different multipliers. If you want useful numbers for your context, you probably don't need or want a generic study and statistics - I'd bet even a dataless wild guess would be more accurate. Alternatively, you can run your own study in your own context...
by darkwater | 2025-06-02 10:17:25+00:00
> since we cannot directly observe consciousness, we are forced to concede that we will never really "understand" it outside of observing its effects.

Why? You are using a definitive term ("never") to something that we might achieve in a future. We might observe consciousness in a future. Who knows? Consciousness is a known unknown. We know there is something but we don't know how to observe it properly and how we could eventually copy it.

In the meanwhile, we are not copying consciousness, we have a shallow replication of its output. When cavemen replicated the fire that they observed as the output of a lightning, did they master electricity?
by 0xEF | 2025-06-02 10:17:27+00:00
That's also perfectly valid.

Maybe it's a saturation thing. The people I call my friends are plenty ready to chat about philosophy, psychology, politics, money, television or books they like, maybe play some games...but they kinda just glaze over when I want to talk about computers or some silly electronics project I'm futzing with. I could see the opposite being true, as well.

Balance in all things, I suppose.
by katsura | 2025-06-02 10:17:36+00:00
I've been thinking about building a robot that can use a camera to look around, use motors to go in different directions, and when it sees a human, it could also ask if they've seen John Connor, and if the person is being "difficult" then press a button to terminate them.

The interesting thing is that the three laws of robotics says that robots shouldn't harm humans, but I don't really see a way for an AI agent to understand that by "pressing a button" they actually hurt the human.
by UltraSane | 2025-06-02 10:19:19+00:00
Nuclear plants have high capital costs but extremely low operating costs once built. The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) calculations that discount future cash flows still show nuclear becoming highly competitive over extended lifespans because the fuel costs remain so low.The claim about 26-year average operating life is misleading because it includes many plants shut down prematurely for political reasons, not economic ones. Currently operating US reactors average over 40 years and many are getting 20-year license extensions to 60+ years.

The discount rate argument cuts both ways. While future revenues are discounted, so are future costs including decommissioning, waste storage, and replacement generation capacity. When you properly account for the full system costs of replacing ~90% capacity factor nuclear with variable renewables plus storage/transmission/backup, the economics shift considerably

On baseload the grid still requires inertia, frequency regulation, and firm capacity. While renewables provide energy, they don't inherently provide these grid services. The costs of synthetic inertia, grid-forming inverters, and massive overbuild/curtailment to achieve reliable capacity aren't captured in simple LCOE comparisons.

The CSIRO report's 10% figure assumes a specific discount rate and doesn't account for carbon pricing, grid stability services, or land use constraints that become critical at high renewable penetrations. Real-world grids like France (70% nuclear) demonstrate sustained low electricity costs over decades, while high-renewable grids like Germany and California show increasing costs and reliability challenges.

The government regularly funds long-term infrastructure with decades-long payback periods - highways, bridges, airports. Nuclear reactors are strategic energy infrastructure with 60-80 year lifespans no different to a bridge.

You complain about "handouts" to the nuclear industry but renewable subsidies per MWh have been substantial, and nuclear provides energy security benefits that pure market calculations don't capture.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-02 10:19:36+00:00
I agree that ultimately both are just notations. I do think the fractional notation has some definite advantages and few disadvantages, so I think it's better to regard it as more canonical.

I disagree though that it's necessary or even useful to think of 0.99... or 0.33... as sequences or limits. It's of course possible, but it complicates a very simple concept, in my opinion, and muddies the waters of how we should be using notions such as equality or inifinity.

For example, it's generally seen as a bad idea to declare that some infinite sum is actually equal to its limit, because that only applies when the series of partial sums converges. It's more rigorous to say that sigma(1/n) for n from 2 going to infinity converges to 1, not that it is equal to 1; or to say that lim(sigma(1/n)) for n from 2 to infinity = 1.

So, to say that 0.xxx... = sigma(x/10^n) for n from 1 to infinity, and to show that this is equal to 1 for x = 9, muddies the waters a bit. It still gives this impression that you need to do an infinite addition to show that 0.999... is equal to 1, when it's in fact just a notation for 9/9 = 1.

It's better in my opinion to show how to calculate the repeating decimal expansion of a fraction, and to show that there exists no fraction whose decimal expansion is 0.9... repeating.
by ashvardanian | 2025-06-02 10:20:38+00:00
Rule of thumb: Medium = primers, Substack & corp blogs = mid-depth, hand-curated personal blogs = deep dives.

Would love to see more Jepsen-grade explorations (<https://jepsen.io/consistency/models>) that include code snippets and highlight both implementation details and real-world usage caveats for different consistency models.
by elliotec | 2025-06-02 10:20:49+00:00
Maybe usually it’s just for personal fun or learning. I think “your audience” can be you and that’s enough. I’ve personally written articles for nobody but myself and “the world” and I’m shocked by how much traffic they get over a decade later. Sometimes the little esoteric things you record for nobody in particular shows up for those particular nobodies and it matters.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-02 10:21:09+00:00
You're absolutely right - there's so much content out there, that any contribution of any of it to a model individually is going to be minuscule (which is why I don't believe one is entitled rent for it). Still, I claim this is more than most content would contribute to society otherwise, because that minuscule value is multiplied by the breadth of other things it gets related to, and the scale at which the model is used.

One thing is, most of that content eventually goes into obscurity. Our conversation might be remembered by us for a while, and perhaps a couple hundred other people reading it now, and it might influence us ever so slightly forever. Then, in a couple of days, it'll disappear into obscurity, unlikely to be ever read by anyone else. However should it get slurped into the LLM corpus, the ideas exchanged here, the patterns of language, the tone, etc. will be reinforced in models used by billions of people every day for all kinds of purposes, for indefinite time.

It's a scale thing.

FWIW, I mostly think of this in context of people who express a sentiment that they should've been compensated by AI companies because their content is contributing to training data, and because they weren't, they're going to stop writing comments or articles on the Internet and humanity will be that much poorer.

Also, your reply made me think of weighing the impact of some work on small number of individual humans directly, vs. indirect impact via being "assimilated" into LLMs. I'm not sure how to do it, or what the result would be, so I'll weaken my claim in the future.
by ktallett | 2025-06-02 10:21:47+00:00
I would disagree. They maybe don't teach in the way that would be ideal for each individual student (because that isn't possible when classes are in the 10's of students), and some of course are fundamentally terrible as is the same in every single profession, however they provide lots of other value than just teaching. They provide comfort and care and security for those children who have a poor home life. Even if they don't teach the child more than 40 % of what they should teach, what they offer in other ways is more valuable.
by brabel | 2025-06-02 10:23:42+00:00
To add to that: people like some messed up things, or truly inaccessible things. And while you can try to focus on "some good stuff" that you like, you can't really pick the things you like the most! If you could, wouldn't the world be a much easier place (just like the things that make the most money, or are the most accessible, in other words, the things offering the best cost-benefit... but of course no one can really do that... no one would ever suffer heartbreak - just like the person who likes you, and if they change their mind, just stop liking them and like someone else! Such genius!)?!
by DiscourseFan | 2025-06-02 10:24:57+00:00
It takes some guts to be in management, but being a good worker-bee will only get you so far. You have to know how to work with others, you have to be able to make critical decisions at the right moment. Not everyone has the talent for it. And if you don't have it, you don't have it. Will you, as this author has described, find a comfortable position in life, be able to afford whatever you need? Absolutely. And you'll never have to be responsible for impactful decisions; you'll never have to fire anyone.
by red_admiral | 2025-06-02 10:25:04+00:00
I presume there is said opportunity, after all that's what company-hired "headhunters" are for.

But you also need to find people who are useful, undervalued (in the sense of the article, not in the sense of pay), and who are also willing to take the risk of jumping into a new environment even if that's uncomfortable at first. That means they need somehow to check that they'll be really valued at the new place, not just given a fancy title but no real decision-making involvement.

My guess is there's a positive correlation between useful-but-not-valued people and ones who are risk-averse and/or not the best social climbers, because the people who are both technically and socially brilliant or risk-taking are either valued already, or have already left your organisation.
by westcoast49 | 2025-06-02 10:25:14+00:00
I'm just arguing that there has been no qualitative shift. The skills you need to produce pop music today are different than the skills that you needed before. Now you need to be able to operate a MIDI sequencer or a program like Ableton, which is not necessarily easier in and off itself, than for instance learning how to play a guitar. I think it's the same with AI tools and programming. We're just talking about a different set of skills that you need in order to be competitive. I don't think there has been any real shift from "skill needed" to "judgement needed". I think this relationship remains the same, both for pop music and programming, but also for the example of playing an instrument in a symphony orchestra.
by andyferris | 2025-06-02 10:27:23+00:00
One thing I never understood in this context here (fast JIT/debug builds/hot reloads/-O0) is why you would need much static linking. Generally your modules are going to have a DAG relationship. Even code inside a large compilation unit could potentially be factored out (automatically) into smaller modules. Could you not just generate a bunch of small dynamically linked libraries? Would the system dynamic loader become the speed bottleneck? Even if so, wouldn't reloading just a portion of the DAG in a hot-reload context be much faster than linking everything beforehand?
by phh | 2025-06-02 10:28:16+00:00
Cool cool. I'm a bit put off by calling it "reasoning" /"thought". These RL targets can be achieved without "thinking" model but still cool. Gotta love the brainfuck task.

I personally think that Gemini 2.5 Pro's superiority comes from having hundreds or thousands RL tasks (without any proof whatsoever, so rather a feeling). So I've been wanting a "RL Zoo" for quite a while. I hope this project won't be a one-off and will be maintained long term with many external contributions to add new targets!
Show HN: Aruko – Plan group travel without the chaos (no app download needed)
by ankit21j | 2025-06-02 10:28:29+00:00
Hey HN,

We’re two engineers who built Aruko, a lightweight but powerful tool for planning group travel.

After organizing too many messy group trips ourselves, we realized the process was broken — endless group chats, scattered spreadsheets, and someone (usually us) stuck being the planner.

So we built Aruko to fix it: Collaboratively build a shared itinerary Track shared expenses Centralized comments and decisions Mobile-first (works great on phones, no app install required) AI-powered itinerary suggestions (optional but helpful)

We focused on making it frictionless: no sign-up needed to view or participate in a plan, and it’s optimized for speed and collaboration.

Why we built this: We love travel, but planning with friends felt like project management hell. We built Aruko to make group planning fast, clear, and — dare we say — fun.

We just launched a public beta and would love your feedback — especially if you’ve ever had to herd friends across time zones and budgets.

Try it: https://aruko.world

Happy to answer anything and hear your wildest trip planning stories
by drakonka | 2025-06-02 10:29:07+00:00
I feel a little stupid (or naive, maybe) each time I read one of these types of posts, because I've always just taken for granted that people don't need convincing to write if they feel like it. And if they don't feel like it or don't think it brings value to them, it's really not that deep - maybe they simply shouldn't force themselves to do it. Then I pause and realize we need instructional blog posts on how to "persevere" or explainers on why writing is valuable even without an external audience.
by 47282847 | 2025-06-02 10:29:43+00:00
“ I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.“ - General and Commander-in-Chief Weimar Republic https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord