MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryandrake | 2025-09-04 10:57:32+00:00
The EE component of my CSE degree felt like a math degree in disguise. Calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, discrete mathematics... It was a long time ago but I remember it as three years of math prerequisites and Maxwell’s equations and then finally we could learn what a MOSFET is. Absolutely terrible. I just want to learn how circuits work and how to build a guitar amp! But noooooo I need to learn how to solve partial differential equations, which I’ve done zero times in the field.
by prmoustache | 2025-09-04 10:57:48+00:00
Does-it have a lockscreen and is it reasonnably good in term of security? That would be the only incentive for someone who want to keep handwritten notes without having to lock the notebook in a safe every time it is left unattended.

I am not thinking security against state actor, rather people within same household/office who might have too much curiosity.
by highfrequency | 2025-09-04 10:58:04+00:00
> We manage to dominate the world mainly by using brute force to simplify our environment and then maintaining and building systems on top of that simplified environment. If we didn't have the proper tools to selectively ablate our environment's complexity…

This is very interesting and I feel there is a lot to unpack here. Could you elaborate on this theory with a few more paragraphs (or books / blogs that elucidate this)? In what ways do we use brute force to simplify the environment, and are there not ways in which we use highly sophisticated leveraged methods to simplify our environment tools? What proper tools allow us to selectively ablate complexity? Why does our intelligence only operate on simplified forms?

Also, what would convince you that symbolic intelligence is actually “harder” than embodied intelligence? To me the natural test is how hard it is for each one to create the other. We know it took a few billion years to go from embodied intelligence (ie organisms that can undergo evolution, with enough diversity to survive nearly any conditions on Earth) to sophisticated symbolic intelligence. What if it turns out that within 100 years, symbolic intelligence (contained in LLM like systems) could produce the insights to eg create new synthetic life from scratch that was capable of undergoing self-sustained evolution in diverse and chaotic environments? Would this convince you that actually symbolic intelligence is the harder problem?
by reticulated | 2025-09-04 10:58:25+00:00
I was sceptical at first too then gave their 100-day test a try with the bigger Pro and have the Move on order.

I see the benefits over paper as:

- Search. Still in beta, but you can now search handwritten notes. Seems to work well even with my scrawl.

- Integrations. Just "send to Slack" for now but rumours from YouTuber Kit Betts that more are coming.

- Working at night. The backlight, whilst lacking in temperature control, is handy at night or when ambient lighting is poor.

- Backups. Annoying it's a paid subscription, but I consider it more like insurance against data loss at $3 per month.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-09-04 10:58:35+00:00
EE encompasses a lot of "engineering that takes hard math" at a professional and research level (similar to "hard CS," just different fields of math), so it is very hard to do as an undergrad, when your background in complex analysis and E&M is weak.

Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. The abstraction underneath the field of analog circuits is extremely leaky, so you often learn to ignore it unless you absolutely need to pay attention.

Hobbyist and undergrad projects thus usually consist of cargo culting combinations of simple circuit building blocks connected to a microcontroller of some kind. A lot of research (not in EE) needs this kind of work, but it's not necessarily glamorous. This is the same as pulling software libraries off the shelf to do software work ("showing my advisor docker"), but the software work gets more credit in modern academia because the skills are rarer and the building blocks are newer.

Plenty of cutting-edge science needs hobbyist-level EE, it's just not work in EE. Actual CS research is largely the same as EE research: very, very heavy on math and very difficult to do without studying a lot. If you compare hard EE research to basic software engineering, it makes sense that you think there's a "wall," but you're ignoring the easy EE and the hard CS.
by jakehop | 2025-09-04 10:58:53+00:00
AbbVie | AI/Software Engineer | Remote, UK/US/Canada ONLY | Full-time Are you a great coder (Python/Typescript, but great skills are usually transferrable), who enjoys close collaboration with end-users in solving their hardest problems?

Do you have a solid foundation in the AI/LLM-world - or are you great at the above and willing to learn?

Are you well versed in data engineering concepts, and excited to work with the latest GenAI models and bring these solutions into production? Then I'd love to hear from you!

We are a small team who care deeply about our work as well as about each other. We iterate fast, and err on the side of prototyping and presenting something real, rather than spending hours in meetings and only producing slides.

Our vision for this project is extremely ambitious, and you will be a crucial part of making this a reality. We've been expanding the team over the past 6 months, and are currently looking to fill a few extra roles only in UK/US/Canada (location, not timezone).

If you fit the above description, hit me up at jakob.hoppermann@abbvie.com with your resume + a little bit about yourself!
Show HN: SHAde – A tool that turns Git Commit Hashes into deterministic Art
by palashlalwani | 2025-09-04 10:59:03+00:00
Understood. Hacker News requires a different approach. The audience is technical, skeptical of hype, and appreciates conciseness. The tone should be direct and informative, letting the project's technical merit speak for itself.

The convention is to post a link with a title, and then add a comment immediately with more details. Here are the two components for your post.

1. The Hacker News Title Use the Show HN: prefix. The title needs to be a factual, one-sentence summary of what the project is.

Title: Show HN: SHAde – A tool that turns Git commit hashes into deterministic art

2. The First Comment (from you, the OP) This is where you provide the essential context. No fluff. Get straight to the motivation, the technical details, and the link.

Comment:

Hi HN,

I created a command-line tool called SHAde. I was looking for a more aesthetic way to represent the history of a software project than the standard git log and was inspired by the idea of procedural generation. The goal was to create a unique, deterministic 'visual fingerprint' for every commit.

Here's how it works: It takes the SHA-256 hash of a Git commit and uses it to seed a pseudorandom number generator. This PRNG then drives the generation of geometric patterns (currently bars and spirals) and the selection of colors.

A key detail was the color generation. Instead of picking random RGB values, which often results in harsh combinations, it generates palettes in perceptually uniform color spaces (CIELAB/LCH). This helps ensure the results are more visually coherent. The entire process is stateless and deterministic, so a given commit hash will always produce the exact same image.

The tool can:

Render single commits to SVG or PNG.

Generate a browsable HTML gallery of a repository's recent history.

Create an animation showing the visual transition between two commits.

It's written in Python and is open-source on GitHub: https://github.com/LalwaniPalash/SHAde

I'd be interested to hear any feedback or answer any questions.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-04 11:02:03+00:00
More people should get into EE and see it all the way through. And, rather than getting a masters degree or PhD, go straight into industry. Why? Because just beyond what you learn in your BSEE degree lies one of the most fascinating topics ever: Signal integrity.

I understand why a lot of people bail out of EE, and why a lot go to web dev specifically. EE relies so heavily on simple calculus that there's a distinct moment where you have to go "what the heck am I actually learning?". And seeing that software has this apparent depth (design patterns, OOP principles, Haskell, ORMs, Fieldingian REST, GraphQL, 10,000-word blog posts on vim vs emacs, etc.), they naturally get drawn there.
by Fluorescence | 2025-09-04 11:02:28+00:00
The time pressure is probably more important than you realise.

The guests are often pretty eminent academics, feted in their field and used to being indulged. There have been some I know that very much enjoy the sound of their own voice as they tediously ramble for hours, bending any topic to their own pet themes, with colleagues and students obediently hanging on their words. Melvyn has the stature to get testy "Enough about his wife, you still haven't answered the question, get on with it!" and the Oxford emeritus professor complies.

The after show chat works because it's post-time-crunch. It's pressure release and reflection. If you do recruitment this is something to learn. You will have a much more valuable interaction after you have scraped off interviewee armour.
by conradev | 2025-09-04 11:02:45+00:00
I agree with Mitchell.

Gaussian blurs are some of the most expensive operations you can run, and Apple has been using them for a long time. They’re almost always downscaled because of this.

The first retina iPad (the iPad 3 if I recall) had an awfully underpowered GPU relative to the number of pixels it had to push. Since then, the processors have consistently outpaced pixels.

Your device is easily wasting more time on redundant layout or some other inefficiency rather than Liquid Glass. Software does get slower and more bloated over time, often faster than the hardware itself, not in the ways you might expect.

The GPU has so much headroom that they fit language models in there!
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-09-04 11:03:58+00:00
Fight misinformation with verifiable factual information. We should never accept censorship.

> This in turn is leading to fascism rising here as it has in the US. Like AfD in Germany , PVV in Nederlands, Front National in France.

These parties are gaining momentum because the parties in power are completely ignoring the will of the people and are cheerfully destroying Europe as we know it.
by arghwhat | 2025-09-04 11:04:54+00:00
Blur is expensive because it propagates damage and has to wait for all previous rendering to be complete.

When one pixel changes underneath a blur the entire blurred area needs to be redrawn, meaning that all elements on top needs to be redrawn. As the blur cannot render before the underlay is finished, the graphics pipeline is stalled. Fancy blur look past the area immediately underneath to more accurately lens effects, meaning each output pixel reads a lot of input pixels.

When it comes to power and heat management, the goal is to be able to power the GPU down again as fast as possible, and this kind fo thing prolongs it quite a bit. There may be a point where efficiency makes the result acceptable, but it's always going to be much worse than not doing that.
by dns_snek | 2025-09-04 11:05:02+00:00
> If you enter into an agreement with someone

Upon review, it looks like you don't have to enter into an agreement with anyone in order to use this software, except its authors under the terms of the AGPL.

> exploitative behavior

Even if you want to frame it like that, it doesn't look good for you unless you assume we're imbeciles who don't keep score. You do not have any right to complain about exploitative behavior when you willfully exploit hundreds of millions of people by 1000 units and they "exploit" you by 1 unit in return. You're still a net exploiter in the relationship.

> when you know that they will continue to hold up their end

That's a lie, corporations unilaterally alter the terms of service without offering compensation all time.
by np1810 | 2025-09-04 11:05:03+00:00
UI Feedback - I was having trouble figuring out what to do with the website, possibly due to the lack of text. I was tapping everywhere just to find the interactive areas (invisible buttons: who invented flat UI without shadows to hide all the interactivity?), and it took me some time to realize the website was scrollable (invisible scroll bars: who thought hiding the scrollbars without any indication of scrollable content was a good idea?). These issues are typically not the fault of the website, but rather the general UI/UX trends we have accepted nowadays. I’m using Firefox on Android.

Regarding social media - it has created more gaps rather than making us more social. It's ultimate goal is to capture our attention for as long as possible rather than connecting us. And lately, with the celebrities populating it, it has become a showoff/bragging machine.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-04 11:05:36+00:00
Again, I wasn't defending him.

Also, shouldn't you be more concerned with little girls in the UK needing to carry knives and axes to defend themselves from migrant rape gangs, than with what Elon is saying?

Especially since he's not causing those issues, he's just reading the room and calling it out as it is.

I feel like you're getting worked up for the wrong things.
by wzdd | 2025-09-04 11:06:37+00:00
Except that you also learnt about 10 concerts you didn't want to go to, 10 sales you don't care about, etc. And it's not even (necessarily) 10 good concerts or sales, it's just the ones that someone managed to thrust in front of your face. Filtering the barrage of information is mental effort and distracts you from other tasks.

I'd certainly like to know when my favourite bands are playing or get an alert when something I'm after is on sale. There are better and more focused solutions to these than advertising.

> When done right, [advertising] does not have to be intrusive or annoying

Citation needed.
by Hackbraten | 2025-09-04 11:07:32+00:00
> My gripe with software engineers sometimes, they're often too divorced from real users and real use cases

I agree. In my current job, no developer ever talks to users. Projects involve multiple layers of subcontractors, and cross-vendor APIs are part of the bid/spec. Each layer’s purchasing department is in perpetual Bidding Mode while dev teams are already in the middle of doing the actual work. So by default, everyone is Strongly Discouraged From Talking To $VENDOR | $SUBCONTRACTOR | $USER.
by n4r9 | 2025-09-04 11:08:12+00:00
One of the functions of government is to ensure the health of its citizens. Potential harms have to be weighed against individual liberty. Parental choices can affect the health of their and other children. The line has to go somewhere. Some parents don't even believe in feeding their children: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62v59621dro
by bluGill | 2025-09-04 11:08:43+00:00
most of the cash costs are time counting it not moving it to the bank. Those seconds add up. There is also loss to crime since you will get managers stealing from the safe, and clerks form a till - both done in ways you cannot prove. And outright robbery.

Having been the manager at a place that handled a lot of cash, I spent several hours every shift counting all those tills. The clerks might only need a few minutes for their part, but then the till goes to a backroom where the manager counts it again. Then all that cash is combined into piles and counted again.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-09-04 11:08:51+00:00
> We have the same problems: gilded elites, crushing poverty, persecuted minorities, illusory participation in governance, terrifying police, rampant corruption.

Who is "we" here? United States? If not, would Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Norway, (South) Korea, Japan, and Taiwan agree with that sentence? I doubt it. They are all doing very well -- highly functional (democratic) government and very high human development. (To be clear, there are lots of developing countries not yet a part of OECD who are also doing pretty well in those categories.)
by mbreese | 2025-09-04 11:09:55+00:00
I like using my iPad better than my RM2 for similar reasons (I have both, but really only use the iPad anymore). The pickup is much better on the iPad, in my opinion.

However, one thing that I think makes the biggest difference is adding a screen protector. I particularly like the ones from https://paperlike.com/. It adds a layer that makes it less like writing on glass and more like writing on paper. For me, this was the biggest increase in usability for taking notes.
by quantum2022 | 2025-09-04 11:10:19+00:00
You're missing the forest for the trees. It speeds up people who don't know how to program 100%. We could see a flourishing of ideas and programs coming out of 'regular' people. The kind of people that approach programmers with the 'I have an idea' and get ignored. Maybe the programs will be basic, but they'll be a template for something better, which then a programmer might say 'I see the value in that idea' and help develop it.

It'll increase incremental developments manyfold. A non-programmer spending a few hours on AI to make their workflow better and easier and faster. This is what everyone here keeps missing. It's not the programmers that should be using AI; it's 'regular' people.
by cassepipe | 2025-09-04 11:10:38+00:00
I was the same and kept using vim for C/C++ development. vim-plug, gutentags (ctags manager), ALE did their job pretty well and I didn't bother to learn another way.

All that changed with web dev where you have to juggle with different syntaxes and tools... I decided I would just use a neovim distribution. I have tried many but Lunarvim (now inactive) and now Astronvim have served me well so far.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-04 11:10:47+00:00
I think that most active, current Linux users see fragmentation as a good thing, because they absolutely don't want consolidation of power. Many will point to a time when GNOME reigned supreme, and how did they use that power? To repeatedly completely redesign the GUI in ways that the community hated, because "we know better".

There is a much larger group of people who would support "One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All", but they aren't as loud, so they don't get heard.
by tim333 | 2025-09-04 11:11:01+00:00
I don't have a strong opinion if LLMs can reason or not. I think they can a bit but not very well. I think that also applies to many humans though. I was stuck that to my eyes GPT5's take on the question seemed better thought out than Garry Marcus's who is pretty biased to the LLMs are rubbish school.
by 3uler | 2025-09-04 11:11:12+00:00
Working with LLMs has fundamentally changed how I approach documentation and development.

Traditional documentation has always been a challenge for me - figuring out where to start, what syntax conventions are being used, how pieces connect together. Good docs are notoriously hard to write, and even harder to navigate. But now, being able to query an LLM about specific tasks and get direct references to the relevant documentation sections has been a game-changer.

This realization led me to flip my approach entirely. I’ve started heavily documenting my own development process in markdown files - not for humans, but specifically for LLMs to consume. The key insight is thinking of LLMs as amnesiac junior engineers: they’re capable, but they need to be taught what to do every single time. Success comes from getting the right context into them.

Learning how to craft that context is becoming the critical skill.

It’s not about prompting tricks - it’s about building systematic ways to feed LLMs the information they need.

I’ve built up a library of commands and agents for my Claude Code installation inspired by AgentOS (https://github.com/buildermethods/agent-os) to help engineer the required context.

The tool is a stochastic parrot, you need to feed it the right context to get the right answer. It is very good at what it does but you need to use it to its strengths in order to get value from it.

I find people complaining about LLMs often expect vibe coding to be this magic tool that will build the app for you without thinking, which it unfortunately has been sold as, but the reality is more of a fancy prompt based IDE.
by Waterluvian | 2025-09-04 11:12:05+00:00
That’s very cool. There’s a science museum in Sudbury Ontario that has something pretty much identical to this, albeit with slightly less cool colouring. Beside it was a sand table that projected the topography of the sand. Both were so awesome to play with. My youngest kept wanting to bring the blocks to the sand table to make buildings.

A small thought: if your hand affects the flow and it seems cool, add a small fan to simulate the blowing and see if that has a meaningful impact on the sensation of the experience.
by aatd86 | 2025-09-04 11:12:07+00:00
Any third party UI frameworks which does NOT reuse the platform. There are different views on this. Perhaps that in the long run, that may make more sense since you may want to facilitate the same user experience across devices anyway. Especially for branded apps. So Liquid glass or not would not matter that much, especially if this is simply a design fad like the numerous ones before it.

Now my personal inclination is to integrate with the platform still, as someone currently in the process of building such 3rd party frameworks. Less work for me as the platform handles rendering, keyboard events etc.

The only issue is that on iOS, UIKit is far easier to interact with than SwiftUI. And Swift is too large a language and SwiftUI not simple enough for my taste. Just too bad it is difficult to piggy back on what exists in SwiftUI and is not available in UIKit (yet). There are ways to bridge in a tripartite way perhaps.. But I digress...
by cogman10 | 2025-09-04 11:13:15+00:00
Only the most extreme authoritarians will attempt to silence all dissonance. Most will have a controlled opposition as the illusion of choice and a release valve for anger.

Russia, for example, runs elections and up until recently allowed the opposing party on the ballot. Same with Belarus. China and Iran also have elections, but the candidates are vetted through the state party. I know now Americans from each of these countries (except Iran). One who still votes in the Belarus elections even though they know it won't change anything.

NK is about the only modern regime I know where all opposition is punished. And even then, there's been reports of a loosening of enforcement.
by jsheard | 2025-09-04 11:13:44+00:00
> Doesn't MacOS already render as 2x resolution and downsize in order to do font smoothing?

It's not for font smoothing, their fonts are rendered with anti-aliasing in the first place. The 2x scaling thing is due to how they handle non-integer scaling factors, or rather how they don't, instead they render at a higher resolution with an integer factor and then downscale the result to fit the display.

e.g. if you set a 3024x1964 Macbook to a virtual resolution of 1680x1050 (1.87x scale), it'll actually render internally at 3360x2100 (2x scale) and then squish that down to 3024x1964.