MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Math4Fun – Generate kids' math worksheets from their favorite topics
by johngorse | 2025-08-09 23:08:53+00:00
I built a small tool called Math4Fun to make math practice more engaging for kids.

The idea came from watching my own kids (8 & 10) lose interest in generic worksheets but stay focused when the problems were about something they cared about — soccer, dinosaurs, space, etc.

How it works: – Choose grade level – Choose an interest/theme – Instantly generate printable math word problems around that theme (PDF format)

It’s not meant to replace full curriculum, but rather to get reluctant kids to practice math without the usual groans.

Stack: Angular (frontend), .NET 8 (backend)

Right now it’s free to try: https://app.math4fun.io

Would love feedback on: – Other features that would make it worth paying for (tracking, adaptive difficulty, editable problems) – Ways to expand into digital interactive mode without losing the printable option – Any pitfalls to watch for in marketing to both parents and schools

Happy to answer any questions about the build, tech stack, or approach.
by wonderwonder | 2025-08-09 23:09:39+00:00
Good thing we are considering approving military force against the cartels. Optimally those large scale criminal enterprises will soon find themselves to be of much smaller scale after we start drone striking them. The cartels are already being hurt by the increased security along our southern borders as well as the large crackdown from Mexican authorities as they seek to appease Trump.

Incredible that we could have been doing this the whole time, we just chose not to. We just chose to allow the cartels to act in whatever way they saw fit and to cross our border with their poison and violence whenever they wanted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/world/americas/mexico-car...
by fzeroracer | 2025-08-09 23:11:16+00:00
> Never was minimum wage equivalent to a living wage.

“It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." - FDR, who signed for and pushed for the initial minimum wage legislation in the US.

It's really sad to see people repeat this take which is historically completely false.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-08-09 23:11:31+00:00
It would require you to change the definition of reasoning, or it would require you to believe computers can think.

A locally trained text-based foundation model is indistinguishable from autocompletion, and outputs very erratic text, and the further you train it's ability to diminish irrelevant tokens, or guide it to produce specifically formatted output, you've just moved its ability to curve fit specific requirements.

So it may be disingenuous to you, but it does behave very much like a curve fitting search algorithm.
by smoothdeveloper | 2025-08-09 23:11:36+00:00
Never under-estimates wrong defaults in a language, for example:

C++, const modifier, verbose for more correct code (less mutable state, etc.) Rust, mut modifier, verbose for less correct code

C/C++, bothersome to have tight scopped values, due to split of expression & statement ML languages, nesting of let bound values, everything is tight scoped, even recycling local names non destructively via shadowing.

C#: mostly, all flaws of C/C++/Java F#: mostly all right things of ML, OCaml, Rust

F#: Structural comparison of ML types from day 1 C#: just adding records recently; most of libraries, idioms, and semantics geared towards reference comparison

idioms

C#: mainly OO, noisy syntax, low expressivity (constructing immutable values out of generators or expressions), lots of navigation due to adhoc things needed to be named, poor type inference F#: data & functions, concise end non noisy syntax, high expressivity (list expressions, computation expression values), less scrolling & navigation, object expression rather than defining type used once, great type inference (less noisy diff on refactorings)

etc.

So average F# codebase is by construct, more sound, than average C# codebase, however F# code quality may be poor, and C# great, still, more soundness in F#, IMHO.
by nullc | 2025-08-09 23:11:57+00:00
I think you could still compromise on 2. by requiring legacy or other discriminatory admissions practices to be a small percentage of the students they give full ride merit scholarships on, or similar.

This is particularly so because the advantage of this kind of school is networking, and it's in the interest of the disadvantaged to give them opportunity to network with the advantaged.

But it's also no big deal if we don't make that compromise.

Public money is precious, and we should think really hard about taking money from the general public just to give it to wealthy institutions any time we do it.
by jcims | 2025-08-09 23:12:06+00:00
Just asked ChatGPT5 "Are you told to 'think' when someone asks you how many of a certain letter are in a word?"

>Yes — when you ask something like “How many r’s are in blueberry?” I’m basically told to slow down, not just blurt out the first number that pops into my “mind.”

Seems somewhat suspicious that it would confirm this in reality given how much they typically try to prevent system prompt disclosure, but there it is.
by SmellTheGlove | 2025-08-09 23:13:11+00:00
I agree with you in principle, but 30 years is probably the wrong number. I have a house in coastal Maine, built in 1997. It's coming up on 30 years. I assure you, it's vastly different than the my first house (1941) or my last (1953), in good ways.

But to your point, we consider way too much to be "historic" and I'd like for that to change. You really should be able to tear down almost anything you'd like and rebuild as long as it's to code/zoning, and zoning needs to be cut back to things like dimensions and use, not appearance. Being old shouldn't make something eligible for historic preservation on its own.
by adastra22 | 2025-08-09 23:13:42+00:00
Doing an SAT prep course is cheating, fyi. These tests were meant to be a fair assessment and that required not teaching to or training for the test. That, of course, went out the window, but when I was in high school there was at least lip service to it and statements from administrators that we shouldn’t be taking SAT prep courses. We were instructed to take the official prep exam to know the format, but otherwise go in blind.

My wife is Asian (born there) and when I told her and her family this they were literally speechless.
by corimaith | 2025-08-09 23:14:00+00:00
>The current system is what caused those, why do you think that is much better?

I don't think it's better. But I don't think it's worse either. It's exchanging one elite for another with the similar incentives. But what I would object though is how the education system has been essentially appropiated as a system of elite differentiation (and social mobility) rather than improving the 80% as function of overall social welfare. Why are we caring about a handful of colleges compared the hundreds of others we have? The opportunity cost really is to better spend our resources and time pushing up the average, mediocre student rather than focusing on all these unproductive signalling mechanisms. And I think from there, that's where the real saviours will emerge.
by smoothdeveloper | 2025-08-09 23:14:16+00:00
C# can't fix the wrong defaults, still lots more mutable by default, and statement oriented, as an example.

average C# codebase looks different depending language version idioms, not so in F# (because initial release already had >80% of things that C# today doesn't even have and won't be able to fix).

But C# is great too, nonetheless.
by visarga | 2025-08-09 23:14:20+00:00
Understanding is always functional, we don't study medicine before going to the doctor, we trust the expert. Like that we do with almost every topic or system. How do you "understand" a company or a complex technological or biological system? Probably nobody does end to end. We can only approximate it with abstractions and reasoning. Not even a piece of code can be understood - without execution we can't tell if it will halt or not.
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-08-09 23:14:22+00:00
That because you don’t say

“Think hard about this” and the OpenAI router layer routed you to the cheaper model.

GPT5 seems to violate Rich Sutton’s bitter lesson. As GPT5 makes a lot of human knowledge assumptions about whether to send your prompt to the cheap model or to the smarter more expensive model.
by Findecanor | 2025-08-09 23:14:26+00:00
The way HAM works, a pixel can be either one of only 16 colours, or the colour of the pixel to the left and change one component: red, green or blue.

Back in the day, I used a program that loaded GIFs in 256 colours and converted them to HAM. The resulting images had lots of edge artefacts, and that is what I would expect out of that too.
by abnercoimbre | 2025-08-09 23:14:34+00:00
> The data center has been under discussion by local officials since at least 2023, according to emails between county administrators and real estate investment firm Diamond Ventures. The county has been under a non-disclosure agreement since at least June 2024.

That is insane. An NDA that the county was forced to sign? No wonder residents were outraged. I’m surprised this is legal.
by RatchetWerks | 2025-08-09 23:14:57+00:00
It was already answered, but conventional AC systems have resistive heating elements which have a a max efficiency of 100 percent.

Heat pumps run an AC in reverse which can give a COP of 3-4. (300 to 400 percent efficiency)

or if actually burning fuel for heat. Could just remove the need for direct fuel burning altogether. Highly dependent on area, and associated costs. I recommend that you run the numbers for your area
by musbemus | 2025-08-09 23:15:31+00:00
If they do start to become unsustainable you might see more companies moving to a BYOK or usage-based billing model. If they do that, I don't know if the use cases for AI would justify the cost for consumers (but perhaps so for businesses). There's been a ton of build out of data centers so I do think the cost reduction we've seen so far may extrapolate but at the expense of more performant models. Hard to tell right now though
by hansvm | 2025-08-09 23:16:03+00:00
Common misconception. That just means the algorithm for counting letters can't be as simple as adding 1 for every token. The number of distinct tokens is tiny compared to the parameter space, and it's not infeasible to store a mapping from token type to character count in those weights.

If you're fine appealing to less concrete ideas, transformers are arbitrary function approximators, tokenization doesn't change that, and there are proofs of those facts.

For any finite-length function (like counting letters in a bounded domain), it's just a matter of having a big enough network and figuring out how to train it correctly. They just haven't bothered.
by codingdave | 2025-08-09 23:16:43+00:00
> when it comes to tasks rooted in logic like number crunching or data processing, where it is more obvious how AI can do the tasks...

Assuming they are talking about LLMs, this statement makes me suspect the authors do not know how LLMs work. Their blurbs at the bottom of the article say they are all marketing professors so perhaps they are a bit out of their element here.
by m4rtink | 2025-08-09 23:16:47+00:00
I think this might have changed for the worst since the soviet times (or at least is now less covert ?). IIRC when someone interviewed one of the warlords from Chechnya he mentioned he would probably be a high ranking officer in the soviet military by this point if the soviet union still exiated. With this no longer being possible, they ended up doing other things.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-09 23:16:54+00:00
After a long walk, I often have the experience of standing still on pavement, and watching the paving continually expand away from me.

Obviously a simple example of fatigue of neurons encoding one perceptual quality enabling the over expression/perception of its opposite. But it just demonstrates how fragile our conscious perceptions are to every day minor sensory/perception deviations from their nominal correspondence.

After/during a traumatic experience, my mind disassociated from a basic aspect of reality. I knew what I perceived was completely nonsensical and misleading, but that didn't attenuate the very dramatic and warped perception in the slightest, for months.
by voytec | 2025-08-09 23:17:04+00:00
> the country is the recipient of a huge amount of EU funds

What shaped Poland into something acceptable as a NATO member was USAID - the program Musk and Big Balls axed.

USAID allowed Poland to join NATO and later the EU. I've snatched the 188-pages long PDF[0] (English/Polish) before it was publicly erased.

[0] https://sysartist.com/usaid-and-the-polish-decade.pdf
by homebrewer | 2025-08-09 23:17:36+00:00
> systemd

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530

> like systemd-resolved and timed

They're not forced on anybody, they're not required by systemd, and many distributions use more feature-rich alternatives (including, afaik, RHEL — last time I looked at it, they used dnsmasq and chrony). They're also often shipped as separate optional packages:

$ apt search 'systemd-timesyncd|systemd-resolved' systemd-resolved/testing,now 257.7-1 amd64 systemd-timesyncd/testing 257.7-1 amd64

> podman, buildah

Still not anywhere near as popular as Docker. Although technically they're far better than Docker, and if anyone is using them, it's for that reason.

> dnf

Only used by RHEL and its upstream Fedora?

---

All of this makes very little sense.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-09 23:18:30+00:00
California's has some similarity to Wisconsins: state routes are numbered (e.g., S.R. 99 through the Central Valley), while county routes, instead of just letters like in Wisconsin, generally have a single-letter prefix (the prefixes vary by regions within the state) followed by a number.

(There are exceptions, though, as Lake and San Bernardino county routes are also just numbered, like state routes.)
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-09 23:18:38+00:00
FTA:

> We do have bad aluminum-framed windows, and we also have no insulation in our ceiling, so maybe all the heat goes to our upstairs neighbors. I also have various fans sucking air out of the apartment non-stop, one in each bathroom and one from the clothes dryer (when I hold an incense stick up to it I can see it pulling in air even when it’s not running), plus I have an elevator that opens into the apartment which might have a chimney effect.

They not only have zero insulation, they have negative insulation. They would have saved more money/energy by simply stopping all the heat/cold loss. And (at least in my state) they'd still get rebates for installing new insulation.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-08-09 23:19:11+00:00
Almost every gen-Z I have met who owns a house got a loan from the bank of mommy and daddy.

You pull back the veneer and you find out that mom put down $50k on the house. There was a new coffee shop nearby to me and it had a really cool space, warehouse type, and I was talking to the young owner how cool their business is until they divulged that the space belongs to their dad - ok I guess daddy is just throwing money at you to keep you busy.

With the gap between capital income and labor income widening, it is becoming more difficult to obtain capital with your income at a young age.
by lisbbb | 2025-08-09 23:19:34+00:00
Went to a computer fair circa, gosh, 1989? My Dad bought me a 386 DX 25MHz with like 4MB of RAM and a whopping 40MB hard drive. This was a remarkable upgrade from the Tandy 286 16MHz that I was using. The 386 we got was not the standard 20MHz or 33MHz, 25MHz was some kind of hype thing, as I recall. The 33MHz was the bomb, but of course that cost more bones $$$$. The computer fairs were cool.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-09 23:20:02+00:00
Now remember these dimwits are bragging that 30% of their code is now written by AI; and have mandated Microsoft Accounts, set up OneDrive backup by default, and are providing infrastructure to OpenAI who is currently required to preserve even deleted chats. They also own LinkedIn.

This totally has no foreseeable potential consequences. It would be a real shame if some foreign hostile government with nuclear weapons managed to connect MS Account, LinkedIn Profile, and OpenAI accounts together by shared emails and phone numbers. Is it really worth starting a war for the crime of depantsing the nation?
by RatchetWerks | 2025-08-09 23:20:19+00:00
Great question. The unit is pre charged for 25 feet of lineset . I was right at the limit for my install.

I installed the lines, did all the vacuum related work. Then just cracked the valve on the unit to distribute the refrigerant.

I had a bottle of refrigerant on standby from a buddy. Didn’t need to use it . I was going to get the EPA cert, if my buddy didn’t exist. I heard it’s super straightforward
by abxyz | 2025-08-09 23:20:56+00:00
They paid about $50k for ch.at. I have a single letter country code domain (3 characters total, x.xx). There are still some single letter country code domains available to register, you could get one for under $1k USD if you want one.

Here’s a reseller with a variety: https://1-single-letter-domains.com/

These guys run a bunch of services on x.xx domains: https://o.ee/services/ like c.im, r.nf, p.lu.
by balfirevic | 2025-08-09 23:22:54+00:00
> A heat pump is an air conditioner that can run in reverse

Is this really the correct terminology? I'd say every AC is a heat pump, whether or not it can run in reverse, because that's how it works. It pumps heat from a colder place to a warmer place.

If it has been crippled so that it can't run in reverse, that's crappy and unfortunate, but it makes it no less of a heat pump.
by pron | 2025-08-09 23:23:27+00:00
The vast majority of catastrophic problems - nearly all of them, in the grand scheme of things - including those that can cause total system failure or theft of all data are not considered memory safety issues (which is one of the reasons that memory safety is overestimated or at least misunderstood, IMO, and why I prefer to talk about correctness in general). Memory safety refers to a specific kind of problems that correspond to undefined behaviour in C or C++. Memory safety issues are not neessarily any more or less sever than any other program weakness, it's just that for a long time they've been associated with low-level programming.

I'm not aware of any popular language - even a high level one - that prevents memory leaks with any kind of guarantee (although these come in different flavours too, and some kinds are prevented in Java). C/C++/Rust/Zig certainly don't.
by codingdave | 2025-08-09 23:23:55+00:00
At some point AI providers will need to break down profit/token and price accordingly. Right now, they are losing money to gain market share. Also, AI consumers will need to get the expense of AI into their own profit calculations.

Hard to say how it will play out, aside from both sides are going to strive to maximize their own benefit, and time will tell how the actual numbers balance out.

This is one reason why it matters whether or not the AI bubble is all hype. There is a non-trivial chance that once people truly figure out the monetary value of AI's help on their processes and cut out all hype-based use cases... their spending limits to reach that value might not match what the providers need to run the platforms.
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-09 23:24:25+00:00
I see this regularly in large enterprise. My favourite example is getting a 20-30% discount on rack-mount server hardware purchased up-front for the next 3 to 5 years of growth requirements. Invariably, the executives that signed this "great deal" treat themselves to a champagne lunch to celebrate the savings.

Never mind that most of that capacity will sit around unused for years. The real problem is that by the time they get around to filling the last half of the capacity, the exponential march of Moore's law -- or the equivalents for storage and networking -- will have discounted the cost of that capacity by 50% or more anyway.

Similarly, I saw a corporation "lock in" a sweet discount for the WAN network provider for 7 years where they got an upgrade from 1 Mbps to 2 Mbps and a discount of 40%. At the same time, residential broadband was already 25 Mbps minimum and business-grade fibre had three-digit Mbps speeds within months. The sales rep that got that deal signed probably laughed his ass off.

It's a fundamental misunderstanding that it's easier or better to purchase things in big stair-step increments when following an exponential curve. The waste will be exponentially higher the longer the steps. Ideally, one would want to purchase hardware in the smallest possible time-steps, following product release cycles exactly. That's one of the benefits of the public cloud, you can switch CPUs (or whatever) with a button-press.

The example of this that's burned into my mind is that a vendor (Dell or HPE, I can't remember) convinced a government department to buy a 48-core AMD EPYC server for bioinformatics. This is one of those problems where you want the biggest possible single box because of the way the algorithms scale ("up", not "out"). They're stuck with that box for the next five or so years. Meanwhile the cloud public cloud is making available these monsters: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azurehighperformanc...

Check out that beautiful exponential curve! If you "lock in" just 2 or 3 generations back, you're missing out on 90% of what you could be using.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-09 23:24:44+00:00
There is no model of conscience or reasoning.

The hard truth is we have no idea. None. We got ideas and conjectures, maybe's and probably's, overconfident researchers writing books while hand waving away obvious holes, and endless self introspective monologues.

Don't waste your time here if you know what reasoning and consciousness are, go get your nobel prize.
by wonderwonder | 2025-08-09 23:24:47+00:00
Yeah, as morbid as it sounds, I have no intention of my wife and children having to watch me degrade or to suffer that indignity myself. My plan is of course to never suffer from this disease but if I do, as soon as I know its spiraling I would check out. Would probably do something like attempting to climb a very tall mountain in the winter without oxygen. At least give myself a goal to distract myself as I head towards the inevitable. If I make it to the top I'll just take a long nap. That or just a massive Heroin overdose where a security guard will find me in the morning so my family doesn't have to deal with that. Big apologies to the security guard ahead of time.

While I have lots of guns, the thought of putting a bullet in my head is not something I could follow through on, would not want my family to have to identify me looking like that.
by cwmoore | 2025-08-09 23:25:53+00:00
He makes the point that it may not always be applicable, eg. the purpose of internal combustion is not to ruin the air.

Pretty obtuse on law enforcement, who don’t honestly do much regarding crime that doesn’t incarcerate people, and does not close the circuit on his similes, but entrenches behind the strawman projection “the system must have been designed by evil people who were deliberately trying to hurt you, and so you should become really paranoid and hate everyone involved.”

I usually like that author’s train of thought but this is insufficient reasoning.
by pxc | 2025-08-09 23:25:57+00:00
If you look at the "reasoning" trace of gpt-oss when it handles this issue, it repeats the word with spaces inserted between every letter. If you have an example that you can get the dumber model to fail on, try adjusting your prompt to include the same thing (the word spelled out with spaces between each letter).

This isn't a solution or a workaround or anything like that; I'm just curious if that is enough for the dumber model to start getting it right.