MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluGill | 2025-09-30 14:37:34+00:00
Does it NEED to? perhaps I need a special robot to clean my stairs, if there is any clutter on it, it just dumps it at the top/bottom. Then a different robot puts the clutter away. My robot vacuum/mop does a great job with floors already, so I don't need the clutter robot to handle floor cleaning. I likewise need a robot to fold my laundry, but maybe it turns the folded laundry over to the clutter robot to put away or something?

The point is I don't need a general purpose robot of any form. I have various specific tasks I need done, I don't care how many robots are involved. I do care that the total is affordable. I do care that the total doesn't take up "too much" space. I do care that the job is done well. I don't want to think about any of it unless I want to think about it (sometimes it is fun to watch my robot vacuum work. Sometimes I want a specific mess cleaned up first and then go away before guests arrive). Maybe a general purpose robot is the best answer, maybe not - since I'm not [currently] designing such robots I expect those who are experts to figure out the best form - which is probably a compromise.
by dilap | 2025-09-30 14:37:34+00:00
Duolingo is terrible†, but proper gamification combined w/ LLMs for real conversations could be an incredible learning tool. (I might build this if no one else does.)

†It can be useful for going from absolute 0 to epsilon, just to kind of get familiar with the language, but if you're using it more than like 2 weeks, you're seriously wasting your time (vs. reading material in the target language, watching TV in target language, trying to talk w/ people in target language). Anki, too, can be a trap that feels like learning but isn't, really, in my experience.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-30 14:37:59+00:00
Why do you think GCCs now exist?

The leadership in a GCC are all ex-US EMs, PMs, PMMs, and FP&As who are given the option to take a haircut on their US salary and build a hiring pipeline within India while meeting the company's hiring requirements.

Tech salaries in India have already converged with much of the EU, especially for top talent.
by MostlyStable | 2025-09-30 14:38:31+00:00
Duolingo's marketing of "learn a language in 5 minutes a day" or whatever their similar slogan is, is bad. Duolingo won't teach you hardly anything at all in only 5 minutes a day, and even with considerably more time (30 minutes to an hour a day), on it's own it is unlikely to teach you a language. However, in combination with other learning tools like classes, immersions, comprehensible input, etc. It is a very valuable tool. I finished the German class in about 2 years, and I found it helpful, and wished that the Duoloingo German class continued further than it did.

Yeah, I agree, I don't like aspects of the league, and I think that the way they apportion XP encourages less-than-idea ways of spending your time. Basically, if you use Duolingo exactly the way they encourage you to use it, and only that way, you won't get much out of it. But if you are self directed, recognize the ways in which it is useful, and use it as another tool alongisde the rest of your learning, it's really helpful.
by numpad0 | 2025-09-30 14:38:35+00:00
yeah, it's like exporting guns from US knowing it's going to locally-illegal hands. Maybe not as bad as guns, more like alcohol to a highly religious country, but still. The destination countries kind of has full rights to prosecute personnel involved, should they ever fly there.

They don't care because their employees are never going to fly to those [whatever series of expletives] countries, and that's not um ... not nice.
by matvix90 | 2025-09-30 14:38:58+00:00
I’ve been working on a proof-of-concept AI-powered robo advisor.

See it in action: https://youtu.be/nqZikwHkLlo

The idea is to see how far an agent can go in replicating and automating the work of a hedge fund.

The project is for educational purposes only, not for real investment.

Here’s what it currently does: - Runs a user survey to understand investment goals. - Creates a personalized strategy. - Builds a portfolio aligned with that strategy. - Analyzes the portfolio using financial APIs, tax diversification, and client alignment. - Provides a detailed portfolio analysis.

Code: https://github.com/matvix90/ai-robo-advisor
by Cornbilly | 2025-09-30 14:39:29+00:00
I completely understand people that are just doing it for the paycheck and that's totally fine.

However, I do feel that our team needs both types of people to be effective. People that have passion will try new things and explore possibilities more frequently. The "just a paycheck" folks tend to be a good moderating force to the "passion" people. They will generally bring focus and keep the end goal in perspective.

My goal is to avoid having too many of either. Too many "passion" people and you end up slowing progress because they're getting bogged down with everything they want to do. Too many "paycheck" people and the team/system starts to calcify (and usually accrues a ton of tech debt).
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-09-30 14:39:33+00:00
It's not an empirical science, but it is a science, where "science" means any systematic body of knowledge of an aspect of a thing and its causes under a certain method. (In that sense, most of what are considered scientific fields are families of sciences.) Mathematics is what you'd call a formal science with formal structure and quantity as its object of study and deductive inference and analysis as its primary methods (the cause of greatest interest is the formal cause).
by Analemma_ | 2025-09-30 14:39:42+00:00
I’m guessing that Imgur happily accepted the ad revenue from UK users while it served them images. If you genuinely were “not providing services” to UK users, you wouldn’t do that.

I’m not happy with extraterritorial assertions over internet services either, but you can’t wish them away with sophistry about “we’re not providing services to them!” if you’re happy to take their money and serve them a page in exchange. That’s the definition of a business providing a service to a customer.
by dathinab | 2025-09-30 14:40:36+00:00
> Certainly not enough to fund all the ad supported service currently in operation through out the web.

I'm not fully sure about this, an ad network which does that very reliably can probably charge the ad provisioning companies extra due to it being on more high quality sides/locations and pay out extra little due to having "high quality low disturbing" ads.

But with the Google being a quasi monopoly for ad networks on any open platform and most people either blocking all adds or no adds there is just little room for alternatives. I do use uBlock Origin for some custom filters, but I which instead of "on" / "of" there where "on but more like privacy badger" / "on full" / "off" with the first being the default so that users can create an insensitive for better ad handling.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-30 14:41:15+00:00
I can understand that but these are open source projects and the author might have valid feelings if he wants to bring back the joy of shell scripting because maybe that's why he created yet another shell scripting language...

I can definitely understand both points of view but my pov is that we shouldn't avoid projects solely because of these and that there are greater merits to choose from. We are more similar than different :) in foss community I suppose

Another thing is that sometimes, people don't like taglines telling how good the project is, like I searched fish and I love fish but fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell for Linux, macOS, and the rest of the family.

Maybe its me as I could only vouch for the user friendly part of fish from my small time using it (and the time I mimicked every aspect of fish for my zsh config file). I truly loved fish but I might not be sure about its smartness and what it means by that and that might be a nitpick but I still love fish and would recommend it to some people

Maybe I can be wrong, I usually am and someone please feel free to correct me to make me understand what they mean by smart, I know that somethings scripting in fish can be more pleasant than bash and it has some nice features but just smart is really vague, I hope everybody gets it :)
by everdrive | 2025-09-30 14:41:35+00:00
Autocratic regimes also do still have to care what the populace thinks, it's just that the thresholds are totally different. They can get torn apart by widespread revolt even if they cannot be voted out of power, and most autocratic regimes spend a lot of time in fear of just this sort of threat. In other words, they pick their battles, and some of these low level violations might not make sense to crack down on broadly, unless the regime really, really cares about the issue. (eg: the hijab in Iran)

It's also the case that if nearly everyone is breaking some minor law then nearly everyone is vulnerable, which could also be a more comfortable place for such a regime. Even if this is not the intent behind the current permissiveness, this fact might help keep it in place all the same.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-09-30 14:41:37+00:00
Another aspect is test cases constrains the domain of possible correct codes by a lot ( a randomly picked number will never solve a quadratic equation, by having many such quadratic equations [test cases] simulatenously, we are imposing lot of constraints on the solution space). Let's say I want LLM to write a regex but by having it run on test cases, I can gain confidence. This is the thesis of Simon Willison. Once LLMs continuously learn about what a code "means" in a tight REPL internal loop, it will start to gain better understanding.
by hans_castorp | 2025-09-30 14:41:44+00:00
I did not explicitly evict the Postgres buffer cache, but using pg_buffercache to evict all buffers for the table, yields a runtime of 23ms for me (still going for the BitmapOr).

https://notebin.de/?ac3fcf55e6850f47#ERXndRrqp3X4zEWX5EC3dZU...

Which plan does Postgres choose in your case that results 100ms?
by mackopes | 2025-09-30 14:41:49+00:00
Hey community!

SOGS compression keeps coming up here as a go-to method for reducing Gaussian Splatting model sizes. I put together a deep dive into how SOGS actually works under the hood, with some practical insights on how it can be used in production.

The article stays fairly high-level, but I'm happy to dive into specifics in the comments. I learned quite a bit from implementing my own version of SOGS compression.
by aarroyoc | 2025-09-30 14:41:53+00:00
> As a mathematician doing a fair amount of numerical analysis, I must know several programming languages, all of which do roughly the same sort of thing.

But Mercury is not a language of the same paradigm as those (imperative, array oriented maybe). It's a logical programming language which I must guess, you probably never used any language of this category. In fact many features of logic programming languages never made to mainstream programming languages or they're behind some uncommon libraries.
by kakacik | 2025-09-30 14:42:41+00:00
You can get quite far with consistent long term approach with stuff like Duolingo. The problem is, its just one or very few... vectors or dimensions in which you progress, specifically aligned with how the material is done. I have a friend, he is doing DL for French for maybe 2 years, every day. He can talk some stuff pretty well, freezes on some other situations. Passive understanding works quite well for him too.

Real use of language has many dimensions, changing also ie the ways you think in that language for example.

Nothing beats real use where you have to express yourself and not skip to other languages as a shortcut, no way around this.
by graerg | 2025-09-30 14:42:55+00:00
There was a post on HN a few weeks ago about natalie.sh replacing blog comments with Bluesky threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826164

I was inspired by that and wrote up my experience integrating with my Hugo based blog here: https://brojonat.com/posts/bluesky-hugo-comments/
by orwin | 2025-09-30 14:43:03+00:00
Why isn't a replica enough then? it will hit the same for people who go to museums to "feel" how it is (that's my case), and for people who wants to see the original without degradation, a museum is great.

I've been aboard the Hermione replica, the Santa Maria replica, a greyhound replica, a Uboot replica in the last two years (and a 1800 steamboat, and a lot of others), honestly for people who like to imagine how it feels like, a replica is better, as you can really visit it.

Keeping the originals safe but still observable is different, and address different people.
by barrkel | 2025-09-30 14:43:05+00:00
It's hard to take those benchmarks too seriously. ZFS, btrfs and I guess bcachefs - which I've never used and don't have any opinion on - do things XFS and EXT4 don't and can't do.

I know more about ZFS than the others. It wasn't specified here whether ZFS had ashift=9 or 12; it tries to auto-detect, but that can go wrong. ashift=9 means ZFS is doing physical I/O in 512 bytes, which will be an emulation mode for the nvme. Maybe it was ashift=12. But you can't tell.

Secondly, ZFS defaults to a record size of 128k. Write a big file and it's written in "chunks" of 128k size. If you then run a random read/write I/O benchmark on it with a 4k block size, ZFS is going to be reading and writing 128k for every 4k of I/O. That's a huge amplification factor. If you're using ZFS for a load which resembles random block I/O, you'll want to tune the recordsize to the app I/O. And ZFS makes this easy, since child filesystem creation is trivially cheap and the recordsize can be tuned per filesystem.

And then there's the stuff things like ZFS does that XFS / EXT4 doesn't. For example, taking snapshots every 5 minutes (they're basically free), doing streaming incremental snapshot backups, snapshot cloning and so on - without getting into RAID flexibility.
by inerte | 2025-09-30 14:43:10+00:00
Yahoo made a $1b investment on Alibaba early on, and Alibaba was growing a lot, investors couldn't directly buy Alibaba, so they bought Yahoo hoping to eventually cash in.

Yahoo was valued at $44b at one time, and the $1b it put in Alibaba was valued at $40b. So 90% of Yahoo was the Alibaba investment. There was a whole spin off core business to separate it from the investment part drama, years and years of distraction and investors and board people who wanted their ~40x instead.
by Fraterkes | 2025-09-30 14:43:22+00:00
The thing that sorta gets me about Duolingo: If it became mainstream for everyone to do what is essentially 5 minutes of anki every day (which is kinda the Duolingo pitch), language learning would be kind of a bad candidate. If you spend 2 years memorizing 400 words you still aren't close to knowing a language. But there are many situations where memorizing 400 distinct things is pretty useful: countries, capitals, recipes, history etc.
by samat | 2025-09-30 14:44:03+00:00
Thank you for sharing this unpopular opinion.

Idea of people caring about money above all else and money being sole measure of things and 'more money is always better' is a huge delusion of our modern societies.

I think we are taking this idea to an extreme and we are already bearing consequences. I am afraid there will be more to come until the bell swings back. I hope it does not break the civilization as we know on it's way forward.
by namibj | 2025-09-30 14:44:08+00:00
Think of them as (glass) fence panels with a convenient mounting frame. Just respect their dislike for partial shading from objects that are "near" (cast a hard shadow with wel defined borders relative to the cell/grid size on the panel), and it'll be fine. If they are arranged to have substantially different sun intensity and/or timing, run them through separate MPPTs or use "power optimizers" that do the same effort but without requiring more wires back to central than the simple "one single string of panels" has.

Due to recent issues out there: calculate worst winter peak voltage and make sure there's a healthy margin to the peak allowed safe/no-damage input voltage to the MPPT/charge-controller/inverter.

Panels eat less of their own current at any given operating voltage, the colder they are. And winter mornings after soaking in night cold are worst case conditions for that as they had no time to heat up yet for the first minutes past sunrise.
by p_l | 2025-09-30 14:44:28+00:00
It wasn't designed to be hostile to Linux - insider claims they expected integration within weeks, the license kerfuffle was a surprise.

The choice of creating a new license was because of two reasons:

- Internally people wanted for the code to be usable by not just Linux and Solaris (lots of BSD fans, for example)

- Sun was insisting on mutual patent protection clauses because GPLv2 didn't support them, and GPLv3 was not yet available to discuss viability at all.
by redsparrow | 2025-09-30 14:44:49+00:00
The All The Music project is something like that, but for melodies. They created all possible melodies of a 7 note diatonic scale and wrote them to disk as MIDI files, copyrighting them in the process. The melodies were dedicated to the Creative Commons Zero so that people could freely use them without worrying about being sued by someone else who had used that melody previously.

More details here: https://allthemusic.info/faqs/
by guywithahat | 2025-09-30 14:44:49+00:00
Having interviewed at a few industrial robotics startups, I am concerned a bit for the short-term future of industrial robotics. Lots of companies by founders who have no real robotics experience, who seem to have lots of funding with no real customer base.

Not to long ago I interviewed with an embodied AI company who's founders were from the Google DNS team and had no real robotics experience. They were obsessed with graph theory which, while cool, is solved problem in the context of robotics and their startup. Another pitched itself as advanced AI but was just a camera and YOLO object detection. I worry there is going to be a harsh market readjustment.
by parineum | 2025-09-30 14:45:00+00:00
> You're saying that like it's some obvious truth, and only exists because of capitalism, yet you provide no proof it is actually like that.

You're statement about EA and capitalism implies that the current market is a result of capitalism. If the market is a capitalist market, as you a state, then all the products of that market can be equally attributed to capitalism, can they not?

Capitalism (the free market, more accurately) is what led to those games existing and your ability to choose to play them. You can easily imagine a world where software engineers were subject to licensing requirements (like lawyers, doctors, etc) and software that was run on your PC was subject to a state approval process.

The ability of a single person to use their time and money how they see fit to create products that other people can choose to use (or not use) based on their own personal choice is the ideal of capitalism.
by 100th_Coin | 2025-09-30 14:45:02+00:00
The conversion from 16 bits to 7 bits was using rounding.

My method of downsampling was complicated. Since the creation of the TAS was being automated, and since I also needed to stream in graphics data occasionally, I ran into the issue of needing to know exactly what byte to read from the .wav file at any given moment. I used a custom NES emulator to emulate the generated inputs, and I had it count CPU cycles so I can convert that into seconds, then parse the .wav file with that info.

To be completely honest, this project was my first time directly reading the contents of a .wav file like this, and I had no prior experience writing code for audio conversion or playback. If I were to do this project again, I'd look into noise dithering + noise shaping, as well as filtering methods. I know at the very end of the TAS, there's certainly some weird audio artifacts that I couldn't figure out how to fix at the time.
by alexpotato | 2025-09-30 14:45:20+00:00
Was listening to the Dwarkesh Patel podcast recently and the guest (Agustin Lebron) [0] mentioned the book "A Deepness In The Sky" by Vernor Vinge [1].

I started reading it and a key plot point is that there is a computer system that is thousands of years old. One of the main characters has "cold sleeped" for so long that he's the only one who knows some of the hidden backdoors. That legacy knowledge is then used to great effect.

Highly recommend it for a great fictional use of institutional knowledge on a legacy codebase (and a great story overall).

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BBNG0TlVwM

1 - https://amzn.to/42Fki8n
Hosting for Starlink / Hosting on Starlink
by qdotme | 2025-09-30 14:45:38+00:00
Finding my customer base (I run a consultancy with some niche products) almost entirely on Starlink, I am exploring the opportunity space of building for that cohort, specifically.

Hosting for Starlink:

If customer is on Starlink /stationary or limited roaming (trucking, shipping)/ - where should I host my services for best outcomes (latency, bandwidth, costs?). For me - its mostly vehicle monitoring, video streaming etc.

Any ISPs for that? Any plans? Any ideas to collaborate on?

Hosting on Starlink:

If I find myself in control of some climate-controlled trailers on a Starlink with ample power - my stationary clients are remote, small (500kW-ish) storage-backed renewable generators - any good ways to make money with it? Other than mining crypto / sell to grid arbitrage? Is there any advantage to hosting out of such locations?
by johngossman | 2025-09-30 14:45:49+00:00
I think the title is a little tongue in cheek. The rest of the blog post develops the Foundations of arithmetic in a clear, well-grounded manner. This is probably a really good introduction for someone about to take a Foundations course. I say this having just Potter's "Set Theory and it's Philosophy" which covers the same material (and a lot more obviously) in 300 some pages. Another good introduction is Frederic Schuller's YouTube lectures, though already there you can start to see the over abstraction.
by retsibsi | 2025-09-30 14:45:52+00:00
> you don't hate capitalism, you hate crony capitalism

What distinguishes this from 'you don't hate socialism, you just hate every so-called socialist government'? I know this seems like lazy smartarsery, but I'm genuinely curious whether you think we have real-world examples of countries doing capitalism right -- and, if not, why that's not a bad sign in the same way that a dearth of examples of socialist success stories is a bad sign.
by bluGill | 2025-09-30 14:46:14+00:00
What you have achieved is astounding. However I agree that you don't have good governance, it isn't the worst by any means, but it is still pretty bad in ways. It has been getting better, and that is something I hope you keep working on - the world needs more good governance.

BTW, while I would call the US or EU better, both have very significant governance issues that they need to work on. This shouldn't be seen as a game of who is better it should be seen as a game of how can I improve, looking at others only to see what areas they are better you can copy, and what areas they are worse you can avoid.

Since I live in the US that is where I focus most of my efforts, and I'm constantly stopped by people who have their heart in the right place but are doing something that because of complex factors they refuse to acknowledge is worse than what we have now. I'm also constantly being informed of something I didn't think of and having to readjust what I advocate for. If you are not in the same situation you are making things worse!