MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brudgers | 2025-07-19 21:24:23+00:00
It forces players to remember different positions for the same chord transposed to start at different notes.

The piano was developed well before equal temperament came to dominate tuning. [1] So each musical key would have different harmonic relationships between the intervals within it. And musical keys were not thought of as equal.

Generally, the musical keys based on “black keys”/“sharps and flats” would be farther from an ideal tuning and there were better and worse sounding keys depending on which musical keys a piano was tuned for.

Historically in Western European music, there were preferred keys and intervals inherited from Plain Chant (roughly C,G, & F and octave, perfect 4th, perfect 5th, and the 6th).

Of course using an electronic instrument that can be electronically transposed up and down by half steps might be an easy way to avoid learning lots of fingerings.

[1] https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~mrubinst/tuning/tuning.html
by spwa4 | 2025-07-19 21:24:26+00:00
There's different taxes for individuals and for companies. Hence different countries are tax havens for individuals vs companies. Ireland is worse than UK for individuals' tax, but under the minimum tax for companies (despite signing more than one treaty (one at OECD, one at EU) to raise company taxes, then not doing it, in other words: the Irish government simply lied, with the net result that the EU is talking about reintroducing taxes when money crosses any border, including any EU border. It is, predictably, turning into a complicated disaster, like EU VAT tax. Thank you Ireland)

Companies evade EU taxes in Ireland, these days without Netherlands. Individuals evade EU taxes in London, Monaco or Luxembourg.
by zh3 | 2025-07-19 21:24:26+00:00
Going back a few years (from 1998), it was all dial-up and I was working in London on a stand-by. Happened to be paired with someone I respct, so I showed him "the internet" - pretty much Pat Sharp and mtv.com back then.

Headline story on mtv.com was Kurt Cobain was dead - I was like "Wow!". Guy I was working with was "yeah, it was in the papers a few days ago.".

It's an abiding memory, maybe has coloured my view of the rise of the internet, just sharing a dusty anecdote.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-07-19 21:24:32+00:00
Many web developers make applications that are expected to work on every platform, every screen size, load instantly for new users, sync user state between every device instantly, and work offline (in some cases). All this takes place in an execution environment that perfectly sandboxes it, allowing users to download and run any application without any fear of viruses. Yes, the stack is complicated, but it's a complicated problem. The fact that people are making libraries to make web development simpler... well, no platform other than the web has even attempted to achieve everything I've listed, so we don't really have a point of comparison.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-19 21:24:47+00:00
See how this compares to what you got from o3: https://chatgpt.com/share/687bf8bf-c1b0-800b-b316-ca7dd9b009...

It convincingly argues that Gemini's answer was wrong, and Gemini agrees ( https://g.co/gemini/share/aa26fb1a4344 ).

So that's pretty cool, IMO. Pitting these two models against each other in a cage match is an underused hack in my experience.

Another observation worth making is that (looking at the Github link) OpenAI didn't just paste an image of the question into the prompt, hit the button and walk away, like I did. They rewrote the prompts carefully to get the best results, and I'm a little surprised people aren't crying foul about that. So I'm pretty impressed with o3-pro's unassisted performance.
by creata | 2025-07-19 21:25:37+00:00
> The issues the author highlights can be annoying, a smarter borrow checker could maybe solve them

I don't think a smarter borrow checker could solve most of the issues the author raises. The author wants borrow checking to be an interprocedural analysis, but it isn't one by design. Everything the borrow checker knows about a function is in its signature.
by inemesitaffia | 2025-07-19 21:25:59+00:00
>United's issues with Starlink are a known problem

Delta had the same issues at the same time. United has had the same issues before with Sattelite Internet.

It's fixed. It's gone. If you're having issues and your device isn't common, you should let the people at United know. Else, it's your device.

It's not an Internet Quality issue that United is having, it's an interference issue with the radios used to communicate with ATC.

The old provider was significantly slower (<50Mbps ATG)

BTW, if you paid for it, it's not Starlink.
by rconti | 2025-07-19 21:26:13+00:00
No, it's not. I just checked into 6 hotels across 5 countries in both Eastern and Western Europe last month, and every single one needed a tapped physical credit card for a deposit on top of my pre-paid booking (sometimes via booking.com, sometimes direct with the hotel).

I can't remember ever NOT having to leave a CC for a deposit in any hotel I've ever stayed at in any country in my life. I'm sure it's happened, but it sure isn't remarkable when they DO require a card.
Show HN: FishSonar – Real-Time Crypto "Fish" Detector for Binance
by swampus | 2025-07-19 21:26:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I built FishSonar, an open-source real-time scanner that detects “fishy” trading activity on Binance (BTCUSDT). Think of it as a meme-grade, poker-inspired market HUD: it highlights questionable trades, impulsive all-ins, and clusters of weak hands — but in the order flow of crypto.

It’s fully working (Go, Clean Architecture), exposes a REST API, and is perfect for streams, dashboards, or just watching the chaos unfold. No database, no overkill — just connect and spot the fish!

Why? Because the market is full of “leaks”, and it’s both fun and a bit scary to see how much weak play happens every minute.

GitHub: https://github.com/swampus/FishSonar

Features: - Real-time detection of suspicious (“fishy”) trades on Binance - Several “fish” archetypes (THICC, SLEEPY, DUMB, LEVERAGE, etc) - REST API for your bots/stream/analysis - Easy to run: no setup, no secret keys, works out of the box - Clear, modular Go code — hack away

Caveat: This is a hobby project for research and fun — not a replacement for pro risk engines or quant research. But if you want to visualize the never-ending stream of “questionable trades”, or just like market memes, give it a try!

Would love feedback, ideas, or memes! (And yes, real sharks are still too smart for this algorithm.)
by kldg | 2025-07-19 21:27:24+00:00
I'm banking on Space Emperor Elon. If he can form a Musk Sphere around Mars, he should be able to generate enough energy to push Deimos into Earth reasonably fast. Of course, he doesn't have to actually do it. Instead, he could extract tribute and demand we push 50M people into a volcano each year in exchange for not extincting us. In just a few decades, most all our issues resolve.
by ctoth | 2025-07-19 21:28:06+00:00
We've hit the limit of 'our current training techniques'? This result literally used newly developed techniques that surprised researchers at OpenAI.

Noam Brown: 'This result is brand new, using recently developed techniques. It was a surprise even to many researchers at OpenAI.'

So your thesis is that these new techniques - which just produced unexpected breakthroughs - represent some kind of ceiling? That's an impressive level of confidence about the limits of methods we apparently just invented in a field which seems to, if anything, be accelerating.
by cluckindan | 2025-07-19 21:28:06+00:00
Quantum models tend to require mathematical interpretation before they are in any way empirically testable, as in verifiable against observations.

In that sense, one could call most models in quantum mechanics ”empirically unjustifiable”.

Would you say models like QCD and QFT are ”not even wrong”, too, even though the Standard Model is based directly on QFT, which lacks a formal, generally agreed-upon mathematical foundation, and has multiple competing interpretations?

Textbook-thumping zealotry has no place outside a church.
by drewg123 | 2025-07-19 21:28:08+00:00
> Early Alphastations were VME based machines.

No, they most emphatically were not. The early 3000 series, like the MIPS based DECstation and VAX based VAXstation, were based on Turbochannel[1], which was DEC's primary bus technology at the time. Later Alphas used PCI as their primary bus. There were Tubochannel to VME adapters, and PCI to VME adapters, but VME was never a primary bus used in alpha.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TURBOchannel
by johaoalvarado24 | 2025-07-19 21:28:32+00:00
hi,im building a web that use openai api to respond docs that users upload, docs will be save in user database, and then in the chat will response all question about the document, this is amazing for companies that pay a support to respond thinks. Im hope to work this projects with other devs to escalated to a software as a service in the future
by lblume | 2025-07-19 21:29:45+00:00
I would not subscribe to your certainty. With LLMs, even empty or nonsensical prompts yield answers, however faulty they may be. Based on its level of comprehension and ability to generalize between languages I would not be too surprised to see LLMs being able to communicate on a very superficial level in a language not part of the training data. Furthermore, the compression ratio seems to be much better with LLMs compared to Wikipedia, considering the generality of questions one can pose to e.g. Qwen that Wikipedia cannot answer even when knowing how to navigate the site properly. It could also come down to the classic dichotomy between symbolic expert systems and connectionist neural networks which has historically and empirically been decisively won by the latter.
by scoofy | 2025-07-19 21:29:53+00:00
Oh, god, this tired nonsense. Yes, obviously, it's ruled by the people. We have parties, we vote, anyone can run for office. Anyone can vote third party, and they occasionally even win. That your neighbors don't share your views does not make it undemocratic. It's not perfect, but it's democratic.

It's like people can no longer imagine living under a totalitarian state... where you don't even get a vote, and if you don't like what's happening and you say something about it, you're shot. That's literally the way things were done before democracies and republics existed... it's still the way things are done in places like North Korea.
by rapnie | 2025-07-19 21:29:54+00:00
I recently found Datastar [0], another hypermedia project. It was originally inspired by htmx, but they are fully on their own (hypermedia) course. According to the devs, who had a bunch of discussions with maintainers of htmx, the htmx project considers itself finished and no new features forthcoming. It is laudible, a project considering itself complete.

Datastar considers its library v1.0 release [1] to be complete, offering a core hypermedia API, while all else consists of optional plugins. The devs have a hot take wrt htmx in their release announcement:

> While it’s going to be a very hot take, I think there is zero reason to use htmx going forward. We are smaller, faster and more future proof. In my opinion htmx is now a deprecated approach but Datastar would not exist but for the work of Carson and the surrounding team.

When you think of adopting htmx, it may be worth making a comparison to Datastar as well.

[0] https://data-star.dev/

[1] https://data-star.dev/essays/v1_and_beyond
by BrianCripe | 2025-07-19 21:30:02+00:00
I don't think I disagree with you here, but I'm not sure I fully understand your position.

I agree that if the human is "driving", they should be able to use the Tool directly (IE: make test). If you put an agent in the middle and ask it "please run make test" that's just silly and costs extra for no benefit.

Where you get benefit is if you design tools like "just test" as an MCP tool called "mcp__just-mcp__test" and give a fully-autonomous agent instructions like: "Whenever you feel like you've completed a task, run mcp__just-mcp__test and fix errors and warnings until it passes, then you may commit changes locally". LLM's have 'congitive load' as well, so why not offload the deterministic logic to Tools in the same way we do?
by buran77 | 2025-07-19 21:30:05+00:00
> The main benefits are entirely around transistor density increases which allows for things like bigger caches

SRAM is probably the the worst example as it scales poorly with process shrinks. There are tricks still left in the bag to deal with this, like GAA, but caches and SRAM cells are not the headline here. It's power and general transistor density.
by seszett | 2025-07-19 21:31:04+00:00
> France as I discovered does this at the gas stations where they put $200 or so authorizations on your card for absolutely no good reason.

It's the same here but I'm not sure how it could work another way? They have to make sure you have the money to pay for the fuel you're pumping, it doesn't seem weird to me.

I can't imagine a pump that allows you to pump as you wish and then just begs you to pay. That works for the manned stations with low traffic only.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-19 21:31:11+00:00
> The function does not claim to parse strings

But it's entirely reasonable to think it would. I honestly don't understand why it wouldn't, because:

>>> int("35") 35 >>> float("3.5") 3.5 >>> bool("False") True

If casting from a string to a type works with ints and floats, why not with bools? What possible justification is there?

And of course it doesn't need to work for "no" or "heckno!", that's silly. But it sure seems like it ought to work on whatever the official string representation is. And not produce:

>>> bool(str(False)) True

I'd honestly much prefer bool() threw an exception on receiving a string, rather than act the way it does now.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-07-19 21:31:18+00:00
Why does it matter where the paint came from if it looks pretty?

Why does it matter where the legal claims came from if a judge accepts them?

Why does it matter where the sound waves came from if it sounds catchy?

Why does it matter?

Why does anything matter?

Sorry, I normally love debating epistemology but not here on Hacker News. :)
by daneel_w | 2025-07-19 21:32:03+00:00
My valuable data is less than 100 MiB. I just tar+compress+encrypt a few select directories/files twice a week and keep a couple of months of rotation. No incremental hassle necessary. I store copies at home and I store copies outside of home. It's a no-frills setup that costs nothing, is just a few lines of *sh script, takes care of itself, and never really needed any maintenance.
Ask HN: Where is Git for my Claude Code conversations?
by lil-lugger | 2025-07-19 21:32:07+00:00
I’m a graphic designer who has dropped everything to build a SaaS app with a bunch of different ai coding tools and now exclusively Claude Code. I’ve been working on this project long enough that I have to re-explain business logic over and over, or I find the agent has done stuff I missed like added a new db column and I don’t know why so I revert it - but then realise it was the right thing. I keep hitting this same frustrating wall.

Then it hit me: we’re tracking version history wrong in the AI era. Or I guess, we’re not tracking it at all.

Let’s consider prompting Claude Code as its own programming language. When I write “modify out user authentication system to handle edge case X and constraint Y,” that’s not just a request - that’s source code. The actual JavaScript it outputs is the ‘compiled’ result.

But, we’re then only tracking the git history of the code base at the “assembly” level. It’s like if you could only git fetch your compiled binaries and were always throwing away all your original C code. Every time you wanted to modify your program, you’d have to reverse-engineer what you originally meant to write from the assembly output.

Why don’t we track the original inputs? The conversation contains the real logic: * Requirements and constraints * Edge cases discovered through iteration * Why we rejected certain approaches * Business context that shaped decisions

Right now, all of that reasoning just… disappears. We’re both (Me and Claude) left with just the code and have to guess at the intent.

The scale problem is real - you can’t just dump entire conversation threads into version control. A single coding session might be 50k tokens of back-and-forth. But most of that is noise. The signal is in specific moments: the user prompt, and the agent reasoning that led to each code modification.

What if we tracked it line by line? Claude Code already works line by line - when it edits code, it rewrites entire lines. We could tag every line of code with conversation IDs. Store all Claude code conversations as JSON where each prompt and agent reasoning gets its own ID. When a prompt makes the agent think and produce a tool call to edit lines -> those lines of code have its own metadata of conversation ids that directly relate to why it was written.

Imagine browsing your codebase and seeing that line 23 has 4 conversation tags. Click to expand and see: “I want to make this page only allow users who… [P_001], The user wants me to X, I should change the server file… [P_047], make sure we also include… [P_089], All tests passed but we still haven’t solved x edge case…. [P_156].”

You can trace the entire decision history behind every single line.

I’m sure there are implementation challenges I’m not seeing as a coding newcomer. We’ve figured out how to make AI write code that works - but we’re losing the most valuable part (the why) and only keeping the output.

Has anyone experimented with conversational version control? Are there technical reasons this wouldn’t work that I’m missing?
by brudgers | 2025-07-19 21:32:41+00:00
I agree, the white keys on a piano represent a diatonic scale, but because today’s pianos are rarely tuned to anything other than 12TET, there are few interesting mathematical relationships between notes in practice (and pianos are normally tuned with high notes sharp and low notes flat because that’s how piano strings tend to produce their partials anyway).

Also worth noting the black keys represent a major pentatonic scale and the major pentatonic scale is how many of the earliest bone flutes are tuned.
by jwr | 2025-07-19 21:33:37+00:00
I'd say this isn't just an AI overview thing. It's a Google thing. Google will sometimes show inaccurate information and there is usually no way to correct it. Various "feedback" forms are mostly ignored.

I had to fight a similar battle with Google Maps, which most people believe to be a source of truth, and it took years until incorrect information was changed. I'm not even sure if it was because of all the feedback I provided.

I see Google as a firehose of information that they spit at me ("feed"), they are too big to be concerned about any inconsistencies, as these don't hurt their business model.
by linguae | 2025-07-19 21:34:25+00:00
Something to keep in mind is available software for NeXT computers versus for platforms that NeXTstep got ported to (x86, PA-RISC, SPARC). Many later software written for NeXTstep and its successor OPENSTEP had “fat binaries,” meaning that they contained machine code for multiple platforms. However, there are noticeable software packages released before NeXT’s transition away from their own hardware that only have a 68k binary. I believe WordPerfect, Lotus Improv, and Adobe Illustrator fall in this latter category.

I own a NeXT Cube and three NeXTstations.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-07-19 21:34:32+00:00
Interestingly people have to be trained in logic and identifying fallacies because logic is not a native capability of our mind. We aren’t even that good at it once trained and many humans (don’t forget a 100 IQ is median) can not be trained.

Reasoning appears to actually be more accurately described as “awareness,” or some process that exists along side thought where agency and subconscious processes occur. It’s by construction unobservable by our conscious mind, which is why we have so much trouble explaining it. It’s not intuition - it’s awareness.
by gpm | 2025-07-19 21:34:33+00:00
Do you have a citation for this?

What google turns up when I google this is this statement by google [1], which attributes the low point to 28nm (as of 2023)... and I tend to agree with the person you are responding to that that doesn't pass the sniff test...

[1] https://www.semiconductor-digest.com/moores-law-indeed-stopp...
by zahlman | 2025-07-19 21:35:55+00:00
> Why don’t we track the original inputs?

My suggestion is that you try using actual, literal Git for this, and then evaluate for yourself. Git doesn't care about programming language syntax. It cares about being able to feed text files to a diff algorithm.

Aside from saving versioned conversations as text files, if you have e.g. an entire commit generated from a prompt, you can include the prompt in the commit message.
by ofalkaed | 2025-07-19 21:37:01+00:00
Equally divided octave (EDO) with no tempering which is distinct from Equal temperament. Tempered scales are generally EDO with tempering. Other methods like just intonation don't really need to be tempered and generally are not in my experience, but it has been years since I was into just intonation and may just not remember. Historically speaking, the advantage of justly tuned scales is there is no need to temper it because it is already just and perfect, things may have changed in 20th century as far as just intonation is concerned and tempering, don't recall.

Edit: ET and EDO are essentially the same in the case of most fretted instruments, I am dredging long forgotten stuff from memory here and somewhat off above.

Edit2: Refreshing my memory some and seeing how much things have become muddled in my head over the years. Clearly I did not even consider what came out of my memory and just regurgitated it verbatim. ET scales are not tempered but do not mean EDO. Guitar and the like are both ET and EDO. ET and EDO are untempered in the sense that notes are not shifted slightly away from the EDO/ET as they are on the piano and many instruments.
by Danieru | 2025-07-19 21:37:43+00:00
It is important to keep in mind how this "Report Card" is a lobbying tool. A wishlist meant to influence, not an independent assessment meant to inform.

The prognosis is to spend more money building more things. This has been the prognosis every year since the lobbying started. Prior projects built based on this excessive lobbying have since reached end of life this scheme is so old. Now the reports include horror stories of this federal lobbied over building which got poorly maintained: as if the poor maintenance is not the expected result of building more than can be maintained.

Infrastucture funding in the US typically operates such that the federal government gives money to build new stuff, while local governments are left attempting to pay for the maintenance.

Try to find a single page dedicated to identifying over provisioned infrastructure which could be downsized to reduce maintance costs... The ASCE's solution to all problems is to spend more money building more.
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-19 21:38:22+00:00
`is` is more like doing this in C:

char* s1 = "wtf!"; char* s2 = "wtf!"; if (s1 == s2) { ... }

They may or may not be stored in the same place depending on your compiler (clang and gcc yes, msvc no, at least with just a quick default build). If you actually want to do an equality check, you need to use `==` (in Python) which would be like using `strcmp` in C.

> "wtf!" not being equal to itself

It is equal to itself, but multiple variables referencing that string may not hold references to the same (literal, in memory) string.
by robotresearcher | 2025-07-19 21:38:36+00:00
“More fuel per seat‑km means higher CO₂ if sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is scarce. Supersonic NOₓ and water vapour are emitted directly into the lower stratosphere, affecting ozone and radiative forcing . Methalox rockets also inject large quantities of H₂O and NOₓ at >30 km.”