MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by weeb | 2025-06-12 08:34:54+00:00
Nice to see people getting interested in eye gaze. There are two things that you might like to look at that can help the UX.

1 - Calibration. Looking at static dots is BORING. The best idea I've seen is Tobii's gaming calibration where you look at dots to make them wobble and pop. This makes the whole process feel like a game, even when you've done it a hundred times before. I would love to see more ideas in this space to give a much more natural-feeling calibration process - even better if you can improve the calibration over time with a feedback loop, when users interact with an element.

2 - Gaze feedback. You are absolutely right that seeing a small, inaccurate and jumpy dot does more harm than good. Again, Tobii have led the way with their 'ghost overlay' for streamers.

For an example, see the following video. After calibration the ghost overlay is used to give approximate feedback. This is enough that some naive users are able to make small adjustments to a constant calibration error, or at least give feedback that the gaze is wrong, not that the UI is not responding.

https://youtu.be/mgQY4dL-09E?feature=shared&t=36
by _joel | 2025-06-12 08:35:01+00:00
for ns in $(dig NS deSEC.io +short); do for ip in $(dig +short $ns); do echo "$ns -> $ip"; whois $ip | grep -i -E "(country|city|netname|orgname)" | head -3; echo; done; done

ns1.deSEC.io. -> 45.54.76.1 NetName: NETACTUATE-MDN-01 OrgName: NetActuate, Inc City: Raleigh

ns2.desec.org. -> 157.53.224.1 NetName: NETACTUATE-MDN-04 OrgName: NetActuate, Inc City: Raleigh
by unstppbl | 2025-06-12 08:36:30+00:00
I met a Korean classmate while studying Chinese together in China. We really hit it off, and on our first date she unexpectedly asked how old I was. When I told her I was a couple of years older, she gently explained that we couldn’t be together. Well.. I couldn’t understand it, feelings were mutual, it was like we were meant for each other, and all that was thrown because of age difference, how stupid.
by aa-jv | 2025-06-12 08:37:00+00:00
>(definitely the most pompous and self-important part of this post)

What compels you to say this? Would you be more satisfied if he'd suggested the reader acquaint themselves with Thomas Aquinas or Augustine of Hippo? Are you familiar with al-Ghazali, the scholar, or is he new to you?

You have, rather literally, proven the philosophers point - while remaining, it seems, ignorant of it.

Or perhaps, you mean to imply that /u/akoculu was doing a good deed not because he cared, but to show off?

The irony is, al-Ghazali asked his readers to question their pomp and self-importance, and to do good deeds because they truly cared, not because it would result in social acknowledgement by the mass collective, whose motives should always be questioned, effectively.

Perhaps, then, your position is more of a reflection of your own condition? One would hope your disdain is borne on an actual understanding of al-Ghazali's position, vis a vis self-doubt ... or rather, one would hope your current position is based on an ignorance of his works, actually.

One should never feel so compelled to deny the enlightenment of others, especially if by doing so, you resort to personally-motivated obscurantism in response.
by lawn | 2025-06-12 08:37:41+00:00
It's just the fact that renewables aren't enough (since it's not always windy or sunny) and storage just isn't cheap or plentiful enough. They're great in many ways, but they alone won't provide enough power and stability.

So you're left with water power (which is only applicable in few areas and they destroy the nature), coal/oil/gas (which are much worse for the environment) and nuclear energy.

Nuclear might not solve everything itself either, but it's definitely part of the solution.
by eru | 2025-06-12 08:37:54+00:00
Let me give you an example: reputation can solve the 'market for lemons'.

If you build a reputation for honest dealing and high quality, then people can trust that you don't sell them lemons (ie bad used cars in the original example). This reputation is valuable, so (most) companies will try to protect it.

And that's exactly what's happening with some used car dealers.
by nasretdinov | 2025-06-12 08:38:19+00:00
I do agree with the statement that in GC languages concurrent structures are easier to implement (and I actually quite like that about Go too), however, fundamentally, GC languages also implement GC itself somehow :), so the only real difference I guess is that for some (complex) data structures you _need_ GC to implement them cleanly, and that's what RCU does
by bodge5000 | 2025-06-12 08:38:56+00:00
Brainstory was trying to do something similar, but using AI to kind of prompt you using Socratic questioning. Seemed like a neat idea, but unfortunately it got shut down.

https://github.com/brainstory

Looks like it got turned into a VSCode extension by one of the people working on it though, so that's something. Might be interesting to try if you already use Copilot:

https://github.com/cassidoo/brainstorm-buddy-extension
by schoen | 2025-06-12 08:39:23+00:00
Isn't there a less-conceptual (but still conceptual) problem that correctness of software is commonly abrupt rather than continuous? You don't get a series of almost-right programs gradually approximating the right program, you have a correct program and variations on it may fail completely.

Of course, whether this is literally true depends on what sort of algorithmic problem you're approaching.

But there must be many real-world problems in which the very-nearly-correct program produces completely wrong behavior that doesn't resemble the correct behavior at all. In those circumstances, you couldn't expect to find the correct program empirically through iterative improvements.

Edit: Maybe the incremental test-driven approach would work in cases where you have an externally given specification or design that already breaks the algorithmic part up into smaller, easier, and more verifiable pieces.
by komali2 | 2025-06-12 08:39:51+00:00
The comment asking for more details died.

I chased up the old email. First, apologies, it was a Cruise driverless car, not Waymo.

I informed them of the incident, and here was their response, about 24 hours after my email to them:

> Copy of CUSTOMER SUCCESS (2)

> Hi Caleb,

> I'm sorry to hear you experienced this. At Cruise we take safety very seriously and this is not the experience we’d like you to have. This issue is being escalated to the appropriate team to be looked into further. Your input is greatly appreciated as we grow our ride-hail service, We appreciate your assistance.

> Best Regards,

> Jamilla

> Cruise Support

I never heard back from them again. The incident was on sep 4, 2023, at just about exactly 4pm, in San Francisco around potrero hill, perhaps Mariposa street. The vehicle was named "Bruschetta," I believe I saw that on the back or something.
by eru | 2025-06-12 08:40:06+00:00
Businesses with a reputation for honest dealing and good quality attract repeat business.

Why are you so pessimistic that customers can't go anywhere else?

The classic market for lemons example is about used cars. People can just not buy used cars, eg by buying only new cars. But a dealer with a reputation for honesty can still sell used cars, even if the customer will only learn whether there's a lemon later.

Another solution is to use insurance, or third party inspectors.
by mft_ | 2025-06-12 08:40:14+00:00
I'm with you. I hate Microsoft more and more with every day using their software, but sadly working in most industries, you're tied to Microsoft Office for a large proportion of business tasks.

I'd very much like to switch to Linux to lose some of the Windows awfulness, but (as you say) the reality of getting a particular computer working sufficiently well is somewhere between non-trivial and ulcer-inducingly complicated, and anyway the absence of native Microsoft Office makes it a non-starter.
by calrain | 2025-06-12 08:40:38+00:00
For me, this is a hard 'No'.

This design requires far too much visual processing of my own brain to separate the 'liquid glass' animations from the content of the button.

I find my eyes tracking content sliding under the controls and not looking at the objects in the controls.

I was thinking of moving from Google to Apple with the next generation, but this new feature for me is a hard pass.

Even watching the video about it from Apple is not a relaxing experience for my eyes.
by maaaaattttt | 2025-06-12 08:41:11+00:00
It makes sense to me... I think. And I like this vision as well. It would explain the big bang (initial black hole formation), why the universe is expending (at probably non constant rates over time) which would be the black hole "ingesting" matter and growing and maybe also why time and space are one. Same as you, a take from complete uneducated pop-sci fueled imagination.
by sailingparrot | 2025-06-12 08:42:01+00:00
> We're well into the diminishing returns at this point

Scaling laws, by definition have always had diminishing returns because it's a power law relationship with compute/params/data, but I am assuming you mean diminishing beyond what the scaling laws predict.

Unless you know the scale of e.g. o3-pro vs GPT-4, you can't definitively say that.

Because of that power law relationship, it requires adding a lot of compute/params/data to see a big jump, rule of thumb is you have to 10x your model size to see a jump in capabilities. I think OpenAI has stuck with the trend of using major numbers to denote when they more than 10x the training scale of the previous model.

* GPT-1 was 117M parameters.

* GPT-2 was 1.5B params (~10x).

* GPT-3 was 175B params (~100x GPT-2 and exactly 10x Turing-NLG, the biggest previous model).

After that it becomes more blurry as we switched to MoEs (and stopped publishing), scaling laws for parameters applies to a monolithic models, not really to MoEs.

But looking at compute we know GPT-3 was trained on ~10k V100, while GPT-4 was trained on a ~25k A100 cluster, I don't know about training time, but we are looking at close to 10x compute.

So to train a GPT-5-like model, we would expect ~250k A100, or ~150k B200 chips, assuming same training time. No one has a cluster of that size yet, but all the big players are currently building it.

So OpenAI might just be reserving GPT-5 name for this 10x-GPT-4 model.
by divan | 2025-06-12 08:42:16+00:00
In my experience, two things makes a big difference for AI agents: quality of code (naming and structure mostly) and AI-friendly documentation and tasks planning. For example, in some repos I have legacy naming that evolved after some refactoring, and while devs know that "X means Y", it's not easy for AI to figure it out unless explicitly documented. I'm still learning how to organize AI-oriented codebase documentation and planning tools (like claude task master), but they do make a big difference indeed.
by mft_ | 2025-06-12 08:43:13+00:00
That's not most people's reality.

99.999%+ of people out there in the world don't start with a desire for a Linux setup; and so many of the small proportion who at some point want to consider it start with pre-existing hardware. And yes, having tried and largely burnt out trying to use Linux on several different computers on different occasions, it can be hugely frustrating, if not ultimately impossible.
by dahauns | 2025-06-12 08:43:24+00:00
> Apps were always important, yes, but wayyy less so outside the tech blogger circle for everyday users.

From the perspective of a European carrier back in the day: This would probably have been true in the early iOS/Android days, but by then we were wayy in the "There's an app for that" era. All metrics we had back then showed potential app availability being the tie-breaker and the "WP has no apps" perception the biggest reason for consumers to avoid it.
by Sweepi | 2025-06-12 08:43:44+00:00
"the example confuses by making the group sizes different" But isn't that also realistic, since there a lot more people with little income and "small" problems than ultra-wealthy potential art patrons?

Today, if I get 1000 people to give $10 to the local library or public sport place, I have $10.000. (1000xsqrt(10))² are $10.000.000.

For me, an obvious fix for potential exploitation would be to cap the individual contribution to 10k or 100k. However, as I said I know nothing about qf and this has prob. already been discussed to death.
by funnym0nk3y | 2025-06-12 08:43:54+00:00
Which is a myth. Renewables can in fact supply most requirements if they are coupled with battery storage. Then the price would be cheaper than nuclear still.

Also, natural gas is much much better than coal for the environment. And more responsive too so dark and calm times can be handled as well.

So, why are we not doing it? Lobbyism, lock in, politics, nimby.
by soapdog | 2025-06-12 08:43:57+00:00
I was there. Firefox OS devices outsold all predictions in target markets in South America. They were a lot cheaper than the competition and worked well enough. What caused it to fail was, I kid you not, the lack of WhatsApp. People in South America rely heavily on that messaging app for everything. SMS and other messaging apps were not viable options cause the people whom Firefox OS users needed to message were all on WhatsApp.
by penteract | 2025-06-12 08:44:18+00:00
I disagree. Any particular descision problem can be seen as an instance of an NP-hard problem. If you know you're looking at a subset of some NP-complete family, you should try to work out whether that subset is NP-hard (which you could show by finding an NP-hard problem such that any instance can be converted to an instance of your problem).

See entanglement chess ( https://entanglement-chess.netlify.app/help.html ) for an example of a problem that is not NP-hard despite looking that way at first glance.
by dTal | 2025-06-12 08:46:37+00:00
>not a single one achieving any sort of visual integration across at least the major applications because there's like a dozen UI frameworks

I beg to differ. GTK and Qt cover 99% of applications. If you run Plasma, you get a pleasant GUI for theming which lets you set them both to a matching theme. Look and feel consistency is on par with Windows 95 (and far superior to modern Windows), and I can't even tell which UI framework is being used a lot of the time.
by paulmooreparks | 2025-06-12 08:46:45+00:00
> There shouldn't actually be anything special about falling through the event horizon when looking at yourself.

If you went in feet-first, you'd perhaps find it quite odd that your feet never seemed to cross the horizon, as they would have red-shifted so dramatically.

> you wouldn't notice anything weird.

Maybe you wouldn't notice that you never saw your feet cross, since you wouldn't have much time to ponder it before your head crossed as well, but at that point, you surely you would notice that everything below you is black, since all light (and everything else) is now destined for the singularity. That's the very definition of the event horizon. There wouldn't be any reflected light.
Show HN: rust based orbit calculations for asteroids/comets
by ddahlen | 2025-06-12 08:47:38+00:00
Hi all,

Here is a library which enables high precision orbit predictions of all known asteroids and comets. Its designed to calculate the entire catalog of known objects at once on a laptop.

The core math is written in rust, with a python wrapper.

I began writing it while I was at Caltech working on the NEO Surveyor project. I open sourced it and have since left Caltech to start a PhD in comet research.

I have used it to accurately predict every observation of asteroids and comets seen by WISE/NEOWISE and ZTF telescopes over 14 years of data. That is 10s of millions of observations. I actually used it to validate the observations, as there had been a number of submission errors over the years, which have been mostly corrected.

An earlier version of this code is being used to identify known objects in images taken by the SphereX telescope, and will be used for that on NEO Surveyor.

Some fun things you can use it for:

Someone gave me a 70 year old slide from the palomar observatory where an asteroid was noted, but no one knew what it was. I used this code to identify it:

https://dahlend.github.io/kete/tutorials/palomar.html

Given a image of the sky, mark where the known asteroids are:

https://dahlend.github.io/kete/tutorials/kona.html

Calculate the direction that dust from a comet will move:

https://dahlend.github.io/kete/auto_examples/plot_comet.html

This is the first version release where I am building a single binary for all python version 3.9+. If anyone has pip install issues please let me know!
by raffael_de | 2025-06-12 08:48:11+00:00
After years of being stuck with iPhones I'm also eager to soon switch back to Android. iOS always just felt like a polished compromise. Have been a happy customer of LOS using OnePlus devices. But LOS always also seemed a little opaque and casual. Hence I set my eyes on GrapheneOS and in consequence on a device from the Pixel lineup.
by Galanwe | 2025-06-12 08:48:15+00:00
> The still use Czech Republic for Czechia

Naive question but is Czechia a new name? The UN lists "Czech Republic" as official name and "Czechia" as the short name.

> Republic of Ireland for Ireland

To be fair, I don't think this is partisan, but rather just a way to differentiate the state from the island.
by molf | 2025-06-12 08:48:46+00:00
The points about visual hierarchy are spot on, in particular on macOS. I think Apple has two realistic paths forward to resolve this mess:

1. Double down on the aesthetic and gradually redesign apps to improve the hierarchy. That would mean adapting UX across countless apps to serve the new look.

2. Tone down the glass effects and shadows drastically. Preserve existing app layouts without compromising usability as much. We'll be left with shimmering buttons and panels, a bit more blurred transparency than in the 'current' design language.

My guess is they will end up choosing option 2, simply because it’s cheaper.
by vbezhenar | 2025-06-12 08:49:05+00:00
I tried to switch from iPhone to Pixel and switched back. Modern Pixel is absolutely not clean android. It's a mess of misfeatures. There's no clean android. iPhone is lean and compact compared to Android. GrapheneOS is solid, but built by security freaks, so unless you're a fan of OpenBSD, it makes little sense to use it. And any custom ROM locks you out of many important apps, like banks apps, NFC payments, etc (unless you want to actively combat integrity system).
by adrian_b | 2025-06-12 08:49:06+00:00
There are already many years since I have abandoned MS Office, so I do not know how this works for recent MS Office versions, but before that I have used for many years native MS Office Professional running on Linux (via CrossOver; both MS Office Pro and CrossOver were paid, so choosing Linux was done for better performance and features, not for lower cost).

The funny thing was that at least those older versions of MS Office ran much better on Linux than on the contemporaneous Windows (XP and Vista), i.e. faster and with no crashes, presumably due to the faster file system and due to the lack of interfering antiviruses or other corporate garbage.
by bluebarbet | 2025-06-12 08:49:14+00:00
This is my take, too. I'm surprised by all the skepticism here, it looks to me like another case of techies not being able to see the wood for the trees.

These companies believe that AI puts them in an existential battle for survival. They're battening down the hatches. Concepts like open source and community collaboration can only look like unaffordable luxuries in such a context. Quaint, even.

IMO the last remaining hope for free software is going to be an entirely separate hardware-OS ecosystem, plus funding and lobbying to ensure that the web platform remains competitive.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-12 08:49:22+00:00
I'm using 'index fund' broadly to refer to the cost structure - very low management fees, very "dumb" wide market tracking. Plenty of these already exist in the EU, for EU citizens, you are correct.

But yes, they are taxed differently. A US-domiciled fund is much easier for US expats to invest in without risking losing over 100% of their return (I am not exaggerating), but only if you can actually find one which will accept money from you while resident in the EU. None do, to my knowledge, An EU-domiciled fund would probably be classed as a PFIC and have to fill out reams of paperwork to avoid messing up people's taxes. One that US expats love is possible in theory, but no one has brought one to market yet because it requires dealing with a lot of US taxation errata.
Automatic Migration for SQLite
by vlad_kuiantsev | 2025-06-12 08:50:28+00:00
We have built automatic migration for SQLite schemas.

You can define schema files of what you want your SQLite database to look like and the CLI will generate required migration files for you.

It’s for BaaS but can be used for free no strings attached locally.

https://github.com/Calljmp/calljmp-cli
by gloxkiqcza | 2025-06-12 08:51:06+00:00
YoY percentages are usually presented with one decimal place of precision. This makes the number drop by one whole percentage point. It impacts net profit margin and profit numbers even more. Literally everyone up to the C level executives, board of directors and shareholders will notice and care about this. The missing money could have been invested into making more money in the future or payed out as dividends. Instead it’s gone.

This also means all employees feel this because it affects the prospects of their raises, management pressure and in the end whether they get to keep their job or not. (I’m not saying the recent layoffs were caused by this but it sure as hell didn’t help.)

Every single penny matters to a capitalist corporation and this was not pennies.
by joshjob42 | 2025-06-12 08:52:05+00:00
Well, Altman is also investing in Helion, which projects to get the price of electricity to ~$10/MWh, but for whom, much like solar, wind, and actual nuclear the cost structure is overwhelmingly dominated by capital costs and non-varying capital costs (the cost of uranium or Helion's fuel will be negligible vs capital and manpower). So there's actually a pretty good reason to think long term electricity will be marginally so cheap that it isn't metered but instead basically bought in chunks of capacity or availability.

Another way for intelligence to get too cheap to meter is for the cost to fall so low it becomes hyperabundant. If you were to, for instance, take AI2027 as a benchmark and think ultimately we'll achieve something like the equivalent of John von Neumann in a box with a 2T dense equivalent parameter model and it will match such a Nobel prize winner's productivity when running inference at say 15 tokens a second (as fast as people can read) then you only need in principle 60 teraflops of AI infernce compute, which is roughly 2x the current Apple Neural Engine. So plausibly by the time you get to the 2030s, every laptop, smartphone, etc will be easily able to run models as powerful as the smartest people.

Somewhat longer term, I'm sure Altman expects the entire process to be automated and for the computational efficiency to rise significantly. If you take recent estimates from various players in the reversible computing space, you'd guesstimate that you ought to be able to do 60tflops by the late 2030s using under 0.1W or ~1kWh/yr which Helion could produce for ~1¢. I do feel like 1 year of cognitive labor from the smartest person a penny or two renders intelligence too cheap to meter out on a per-hour basis.
by AAAAaccountAAAA | 2025-06-12 08:52:19+00:00
Don't know about that.

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/so-can-pfs-be-enabled-in...

According to this, it by default implements it for batches of 100 messages or something. And for slow-paced messaging, it is quite a lot. No idea why, maybe doing it somehow else would make the already bad performance even worse.