MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wahern | 2025-08-21 19:46:47+00:00
It was first added to the Single UNIX Specification (SUS) in 1997. Perhaps there was some oddball non-conformant implementation at the time, but in those cases the standard would usually use a different name.

There's the infamous strncpy, of course, which understandably could cause some confusion. And various non-vendor faux-snprintf implementations, like uprintf, that have different semantics. It's hazardous to reuse a standardized name like snprintf, even as a suffix, in an API but not implement the same fundamental semantics.
by at-fates-hands | 2025-08-21 19:47:25+00:00
Just in case someone has no idea what Anki is like me:

Anki (US: /ˈɑːŋki/, UK: /ˈæŋki/; Japanese: [aŋki]) is a free and open-source flashcard program. It uses techniques from cognitive science such as active recall testing and spaced repetition to aid the user in memorization.[4][5] The name comes from the Japanese word for "memorization" (暗記).[6]

The SM-2 algorithm, created for SuperMemo in the late 1980s, has historically formed the basis of the spaced repetition methods employed in the program. Anki's implementation of the algorithm has been modified to allow priorities on cards and to show flashcards in order of their urgency. Anki 23.10+ also has a native implementation of the Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler (FSRS) algorithm, which allows for more optimal spacing of card repetitions.[7]

Anki is content-agnostic, and the cards are presented using HTML and may include text, images, sounds, videos,[8] and LaTeX equations. The decks of cards, along with the user's statistics, are stored in the open SQLite format.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anki_(software)
by K0balt | 2025-08-21 19:47:38+00:00
It works well enough so that little people have a hard time dodging taxes. It creates some friction for criminals, but only in ludicrous concentrations of wealth like pablo Escobar managed.

Other than that it is largely ineffectual, it’s just not that hard to work around, for a percentage of course.

Its main function is to protect existing power structures from usurpment by potential up and comers. Oligarchs have no significant issues if they hire the right people, but small organizations can face cash crisis and limited maneuvering room.
by rnikander | 2025-08-21 19:47:39+00:00
I'm working on an app similar to Anki, where I can make my own cards for spaced repetition, organize them by folders and tags, and can run different queries to get groups to practice from. I'm curious what features people wish Anki had. I didn't love it when I tried it.

I want to use my app mainly for language learning, but as a demo, I also have some geography cards that zoom in on a country on the world map, for the front side.
by sarchertech | 2025-08-21 19:47:48+00:00
But then you have to keep all those tasks in your head and be ready to jump into any of them.

The check-ins are much more frequent and the instructions much lower level than what you’d give to a team if you were running it.

Do you have an example of a large application you’ve released with this methodology that has real paying users that isn’t in the AI space?
by stockresearcher | 2025-08-21 19:48:05+00:00
I remember reading that crews paint the Golden Gate Bridge from one end to the other, and by the time they get to the end they have to start over again.

That's a 1.7 mile bridge and this is a 650+ mile wall, which will continue to increase in length. So this indicates that they will need 300+ full-time paint crews working continuously to keep the wall black. Unfortunately, painting a hot surface in direct sunlight is really not good for the paint. The crews are going to need to wait until the sun goes down and the wall cools off enough to be able to receive the paint, and it needs to dry before the wall gets too hot again. So realistically you've got a window of maybe 3AM-4AM where you can paint and expect the paint to last more than a week or two. I don't see how you could do this without 1000 paint crews, and if you're going to put that many people along the wall, you might as well give them binoculars, radios, and handcuffs instead of paint brushes.
by doctoboggan | 2025-08-21 19:48:17+00:00
When building a project from scratch using AI, it can be tempting to give in to the vibe and ignore the structure/architecture and let it evolve naturally. This is a bad idea when humans do it, and it's also a bad idea when LLM agents do it. You have to be considering architecture, dataflow, etc from the beginning, and always stay on top of it without letting it drift.

I have tried READMEs scattered through the codebase but I still have trouble keeping the agent aware of the overall architecture we built.
by jasperry | 2025-08-21 19:48:28+00:00
I'm not the parent poster, but to me it's not about C# in particular, but that there is basically no other well-supported gamedev framework in a language that's 1) statically typed, 2) garbage-collected for safety and productivity, 3) has decent performance, and 4) has good tooling/IDEs. JavaScript, C++, and Python/GDScript are all missing at least one of those. Java could possibly fill the gap, but it's still clunkier to program in than C#, and no Java game framework has much traction.

I'd be ecstatic if there were something checking those boxes that wasn't owned by Microsoft.
by underlipton | 2025-08-21 19:48:28+00:00
>Maybe we should have max enforcement in both?

You can't, resources are limited.

>Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded.

I don't know that that's true. Shoplifting was down in most cities compared to pre-pandemic levels.

https://counciloncj.org/shoplifting-trends-what-you-need-to-...
by oceanplexian | 2025-08-21 19:49:03+00:00
Both sides will use AI and it will ultimately increase economic productivity.

Imagine living before the invention of the printing press, and then lamenting that we should ban them because it makes it "too easy" to distribute information and will enable "low quality" publications to have more reach. Actually, this exact thing happened, but the end result was it massively disrupted the world and economy in extremely positive ways.
by penteract | 2025-08-21 19:49:26+00:00
Could you explain your claim that ANNs are nothing like real neural networks beyond their initial inspiration (if you'll accept my paraphrasing). I've seen it a few times on HN, and I'm not sure what people mean by it.

By my very limited understanding of neural biology, neurons activate according to inputs that are mostly activations of other neurons. A dot product of weights and inputs (i.e. one part of matrix multiplication) together with a threshold-like function doesn't seem like a horrible way to model this. On the other hand, neurons can get a bit fancier than a linear combination of inputs, and I haven't heard anything about biological systems doing something comparable to backpropogation, but I'd like to know whether we understand enough to say for sure that they don't.
by tick_tock_tick | 2025-08-21 19:49:27+00:00
> There is also IP taint when using "AI". We're just pretending that there's not.

I don't think anyone who's not monetarily incentivize to pretend there are IP/Copyright issues actually thinks there are. Luckily everyone is for the most part just ignoring them and the legal system is working well and not allowing them an inch to stop progress.
by torium | 2025-08-21 19:49:33+00:00
> Anki’s fatal flaw is that you think you are learning content, but you’re actually just memorizing rectangles.

I totally believe this. It's 100% in line with my observations about Duolingo. I know people who put in a lot of time into Duolingo and learned nothing. I gave it a try and despite the fact that I put maybe 50 hours into Italian (estimate) I learned nothing. I could get all the cards right, but I didn't learn any Italian (Over the years I've learned 3 languages in addition to my native language, so I know it's not my problem.) Eventually I realized that I did learn something but it wasn't the language. Somehow I just knew the right answers.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-21 19:49:40+00:00
>I lived ON a four lane 55mph road that was a heavily trafficked arterial road and crossed it all the time at 7.

And you just waltzed across it when it looked clear or you used marked crossings, timed it with the lights after practice with your parents, etc.?

I'm not saying there aren't ways to cross this road and that a 7yo can't be taught a couple of them, but to just turn a 7-10yo pair loose-ish on it seems foolish.

>Roads 100% are community killers,

There were a bunch of contributory factors leading to this kid's death. You're just as ignorant and wrong as the prosecutor who thinks this is all the parents fault.

>It's insane that people put up with such extreme infantilization and isolation,

Surely you see the irony here (by which I mean you are unwise for having a self-contradictory opinion)? You're basically saying that "people can't handle these roads". They clearly can. 4-lane boulevards with medians are all over even the most walkable cities in Europe. And some of America's worst cities for walking are grids that lack bigger roads (i.e tons of 2-lane grid). The devil is in the details.
by vdqtp3 | 2025-08-21 19:49:41+00:00
At my last job I worked in professional services, and after reporting multiple issues over and over and over through the normal process I finally wormed my way into a friendship with engineering and product leadership. A conversation with someone they trust was THE ONLY WAY to get them to take seriously a Jira report from the field saying "this is annoying/broken at every customer. Yes there is a workaround, but can we get it fixed?"

Product at every company I've worked for only ever cared about prioritizing shiny new features or bugs that have people screaming at them.
by doubleorseven | 2025-08-21 19:49:52+00:00
I've never done QA. Just thinking about doing QA makes my head swirl. But yes, because of LLMs I am now a part time QA engineer, and I think that it's kinda helping me be a better developer. Im working on a massive feature at work, something I can't just give to an agent and I already feel like something changed in how I think about every little piece of code im adding. didn't see that coming.
by time4tea | 2025-08-21 19:50:38+00:00
You can run docker swarm easy peasy. Its not that trendy, but anyone can manage it, and you can migrate to k8s later if you need to. Of course it doesn't do some of the things that k8s does, and thats why its less complicated...

Edit: you can run a lot on one or two hetzner servers for almost no money. Compare €60/month, vs about $1000/month for a couple of replicated fargate services.
by dothereading | 2025-08-21 19:50:43+00:00
So I definitely agree that this is 100% the best way to use Anki, that's why I wrote the line about "Writing cards that trigger memories of experiences I had in the real world always produced better cards."

I couldn't give you a percentage, but I made most of my own cards, including all of those 2000+ kanji cards. There's lots of debate in the language learning community about vocab cards or sentence cards, and generally the ideal is the sentence cards, as it provides the context that helps you use is naturally (as opposed to literal translations from your native language).

> I still need to work out different variations of the concept to understand it, and that's not something that Anki can help with.

But imagine if it could!
by gwd | 2025-08-21 19:51:00+00:00
Weird, someone posted something here talking about an API that would track individual words and then feed them into an LLM; I wrote a response, but it seems the comment was deleted? At any rate, hope you all don't mind if I post my comment here, as I think it's relevant and potentially interesting.

8<----

I think I've already built what you want:

https://api-dev.laleolanguage.com/v1/docs

I started working on this system before LLMs were a thing, but its purpose was specifically to address the problem described in this article -- "flashcard blindness", I've heard it called.

The idea was to solve this, instead of with an LLM, but with a giant corpus of native input. The algorithm tracks all the "language building blocks" separately, assigns each of them a difficulty and a study value, and then calculates the total difficulty and total study value of each selection in your corpus. Using that you can find material to read (or listen to, but I haven't gotten that far yet) that balances difficulty and impact on your learning. This way you're actually reading new material, rather than "memorizing rectangles".

There's a public beta for Biblical Greek [1]; I learned Koine Greek entirely through my own system. But I initially developed it for myself for Mandarin; and it's got experimental ports to Korean and Japanese (all three of which are not yet public).

But yes, this could definitely be integrated with an LLM:

1. Using the API, the LLM could ask for the top 40 words to learn or review

2. The LLM could then generate something using something from those words

3. The LLM could send the generated content to the API, to have it graded for difficulty. If the overall difficulty was too high, it could rephrase things to make them simpler (or perhaps even rephrase things to make them more complex, if the difficulty were too low).

4. The LLM could then show the content to the user, and log that the user had seen it.

The API isn't public yet, but if you're interested in trying it out, drop me a line:

contact@laleolanguage.com

[1] https://www.laleolanguage.com
by K0balt | 2025-08-21 19:51:12+00:00
Out in the developing world you’ll see all kinds of things that make no sense commercially, because they were really just a way to park a few million dollars in a way that slowly trickles out under the guise of legitimacy. Buildings with rent ROI> 100 years. A motorcycle dealership with 3000 motorcycles in stock, slowly selling them off , many > 10 years old and zero miles…. Etc.
by novok | 2025-08-21 19:51:21+00:00
If you knew the attitude those people had towards having "illegal small arms", you'd realize that isn't much of a barrier. It's kind of like the equivalent of bit torrent for them. Often it's easier to buy an illegal gun even if they are legally allowed to than to buy it legally used or new. They only avoid it because it's a conviction escalator if caught.

Also you can own guns on a non-immigrant visa as a resident if you have a local hunting license that are pretty easy to get and maintain. Even non residents can with hunting trips.
by dsjoerg | 2025-08-21 19:51:32+00:00
You haven't addressed the primary stated rationale from the linked content: "I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so."
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-08-21 19:51:34+00:00
My observation is that anybody who engages a lot on social media is at a very high risk of losing their mind over time. They get caught up in these weird bubbles of constant controversy and group think bubbles . I have seen this with friends but also with more famous people.

For content creators there is a lot of economic incentive. Real science is kind of boring and mundane while controversy is exciting and sells.
by PseudoNumbers | 2025-08-21 19:51:45+00:00
Hi guys, about three weeks ago we posted about our project, LuxPDF.com, to try and solve the problem of bad PDF WebApps in 2025, by creating an open-sourced, completely free & client side application.

Since then we've made a lot of progress and received so much feedback. We never thought as college students we would ever get 250 stars on GitHub, $20 in donations, or 10,000 unique visitors in just 2 weeks building such a boring project. We've worked hard adding new features, fixing bugs (and man there are/were so many bugs when we first launched haha), and even though it's a small project it's been so fun.

But yea, we just wanted to post an update, we now offer over 25+ tools (we launched with about 10), we fixed some bugs, made UI changes, fixed problems with Mobile Users etc. We're still in early-stage development, so obviously expect some features to be a little buggy, but we hope you enjoy the new update!

Our source of monetization is still the same, donations and sponsorships. All we're asking simply is, if you value what we do, we warmly welcome your support, whether it's just recommending our site to a friend or colleague, finding bugs, suggesting new features, or donating through BuyMeACoffee. Any donators/sponsors will have their names/banner and a custom message of their choice listed on the webapp, as a Thank You. Absolutely feel free to email us for any questions (Admin@LuxPDF.com)

Have a good one :)

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by tracker1 | 2025-08-21 19:51:49+00:00
Just to add, I literally meant sidetracked... started searching for the "-Zscript" feature in cargo, apparently in progress since 2023 with an open issue that's close to complete. Along with looking back into ZomboDB's repo, where I saw Rust being used for the build pipeline stuff, not that I completely understand it in context.

Not to mention how useful the cargo front-matter handling is in terms of portability for these kinds of scripts... one file to share, and no extra "install/init" step to bring in dependencies (such as with say Python or Node.js).
by J_Shelby_J | 2025-08-21 19:52:04+00:00
> the list of concepts you have to learn at once is basically as long for Python, the quintessential "beginner" language

IMO, Python is great. But deploying Python is more work than learning Rust, oh and the tooling is something that requires continual education: I hear UV is what all the serious python teams are using now. Better learn it or be left behind!

Meanwhile, vanilla Rust has everything you need. I'm glad I understood sunk cost fallacy and got out of Python after many months of coming up to speed with it.
by llm_nerd | 2025-08-21 19:52:14+00:00
>FWIW, the article above links directly to both the paper and a GitHub repo with PyTorch code.

Neat, though the paper and the Github repo have nothing to do with Apple's VO2Max estimations. It's related to health, and touches on VO2Max and health sensors, but the only source claiming any association at all is that Empirical site. And given that this research came out literally years after Apple added VO2Max estimates to their health metrics, it seems pretty conclusive that it is not the source of Apple's calculations. Neat research related to predicting heart rate response to activity (which might come into play for filling in measurement gaps which happen during activity when a device isn't tight enough, etc).

>What’s your source on Apple not using the neural network for VO2Max estimation?

You're asking me to prove a negative. Apple never claims that they do any complex math or deep neural networks to derive VO2Max, and from my own observations of its estimates of mine, it seems remarkably trivial.

Trivial can still be accurate. But it hardly seems complex. Like, guess people's A1c based upon age, body fat percentage, demographic and you'll likely be high-90s accurate with trivial algebra.

>even for seemingly simple metrics like heart rate

Deriving heart rate from a green light imperfectly reflecting off skin, watching for tiny variations in colour change, is actually super complex! Doing it accurately is actually pretty difficult, which is why wearable accuracy is all over the place, though Apple is one of the leaders and has been for years. Guessing a number based upon HR and activity level isn't quite as complex.
by antics | 2025-08-21 19:52:15+00:00
I do actually really like this, but there it is a little ironic that the website advocates for straightforward, unpretentious UI (e.g., one should make a button "look like button" not, say, a kitschy bird), but this idea is expressed not through plain-spoken words, but a kitschy caveperson gimmick.

I think this kind of undermines the point, and goes a long way to showing that sometimes the best way to communicate actually is in a way that is unique.
by DiskoHexyl | 2025-08-21 19:53:02+00:00
Anki helps the best when you are at the beginning of the language journey. With a vocabulary of 0 words you won't be able to read anything at all, and there's nothing to talk to an LLM about yet.

Those 'useless' static cards are extremely efficient for learning the 1st 2000-3000 words, which is key to start reading. After about 4000 there's little sense in using SRS anymore, and then I'd rather spend more time with an actual book, but getting there with anki felt like using a cheat code compared to how I learnt my first foreign language. It's not exciting, it's pure toil, but it does work.

And when it comes to the next stage, I can't imagine how random llm-generated texts are better than, say, graded readers or real books. Most people would likely find it more interesting to spend an hour or two a day following an exciting story and characters they care about, and it's (based on a sample of one) way easier to memorise all of those new words when there's an emotional connection for each one (just how we form associations between words and experiences while growing up).

As for the app itself- I have tried it with my native language, and at the advanced level it produced a sterile and slightly unnatural text with a complexity of a typical fiction. If someone could read this, then I don't see why they would bother. At the beginner level the app generated a couple of news stories which, though simple grammatically, had a vocab that I would never have recommended to a novice. Local news of a "a firefighter saved a kitten stuck on a tree" variety are much more useful for that kind of learning, and you get this from any free newspaper.

LLMs are extremely useful for learning foreign languages, but I feel like this isn't the way to go
by pjmlp | 2025-08-21 19:53:07+00:00
Because I am firm believer in managed languages, and while I am also big into C++, I would like to still see the Xerox computing vision become reality on my lifetime.

Game developers usually are the last ones to move, and tend to do so due to external factors, mostly pressed by platform owners.

It was like that when we moved from Assembly in 8 and 16 bit platforms, slowly into Object Pascal (Mac/PC) and C.

Then it took until Watcom C/C++ on PC, and PlayStation 2 SDK, for C++ to finally start being taken seriously by game devs, then XBox did the rest on console space.

C# had a first victory in 2004 with Arena Wars, in OpenGL

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_Wars

Managed DirectX was already around, then XNA on XBox Live Arcade was the needed push.

When Microsoft killed in name of C++ and replaced it with DirectX TK, as usual in Windows in their territorial attitude, Mono project came up with MonoGame as rescue.

This is what enabled them to eventually join efforts with Unity, when they were rewriting the engine to be cross platform, and go beyond OS X.

Eventually Unity alongside C#, use to have a certain Flash like vibe, and for many, the entrypoint into the .NET ecosystem.

So it is kind of sad see this go away.

I don't believe in the one true language for everything, other than Timex BASIC, the moment I learned Z80, I have been a polyglot ever since.

A cool designed game, even in PyGame, has probably more entertainment value, than yet another remake in Unreal running on a PlayStation 5 Pro.