MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by axelsvensson | 2025-09-01 09:50:55+00:00
A sibling and me constructed a con-lang, and we tried reverse polish order where you say the terms before the connectives.

It failed badly. While it's easy to construct sentences that way, it puts immense cognitive load on the receiver. Probably because you don't have any structure in which to put all these terms thrown at you, we reasoned, so we reversed the order to get structure (connectives) first, followed by the terms.

It wasn't better. Turns out, receiving a structure with a bunch of holes to be filled later also results in high cognitive load.

Why? My guess is that the cognitive load mainly comes from the number of unfinished structural connections. To minimize that, you need to transmit a tree in such a way that the terms come as close as possible to the connective. In other words, not bottom or top first, but "side first".

I believe this is why infix notation is so popular. While you parse "A and B" or "X + Y" you never have more than one open connection. When you parse "(+ X Y)" you have two open connections after reading the "+". Five levels deep that begins to matter a lot.

I like the purist lispy idea of operation-first expressions, but I struggle to make my mind actually work like that. If you like clojure-type threading macros, consider that they do something similar to infix notation: they reduce the number of open structural connections during parsing.
by Levitz | 2025-09-01 09:51:18+00:00
>There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future.

I wouldn't call it utopian, but I'd say we are way past "peak democracy" at this point.

There was a time in which corporations did get broken up when too large, when we did understand that it's about serving the population first and accumulating wealth after that, when corporations influencing politics was widely seen as a negative. It does seem to me we are now way past that.
by TuxSH | 2025-09-01 09:51:33+00:00
> That's the fundamental limitation of modules systems that supposedly prevents this scaling?

Not the person you're replying to but I can see a problem with some dependency chains.

Let's say you have: stdlib <- A.hpp <- B.hpp (small header) <- C.hpp (likewise) <- many .cpp files.

If you only precompile A.hpp (as is commonly done), the many .cpp files can be compiled in parallel once A.hpp is precompiled, and you get a nice speedup.

If on the other hand you need to precompile everything, then all these cpp files must wait on A, then B, then C to be precompiled
by noirscape | 2025-09-01 09:52:30+00:00
As a rule, yes. Both Apple and Google are horrendous stewards of their respective storefronts. Their review processes are infamously capricious and black boxes, in the case of Apple they put additional moral rules on what the app is allowed to do, and in spite of that capriciousness, scamware still regularly makes it's way onto the App Store. (Scamware defined here as having a specific set of anti-features[0] that a user would ordinarily pay to remove.)

This one isn't even hard to argue against; Apple being a good steward for its storefront was true in 2011. It is no longer true today. I'd consider a tech-illiterate user less likely to randomly lose a lot of cash by using different storefronts from the Apple App Store (or again, the Google Play Store), if only because those different storefronts actually do a bit of curation instead of focusing on quantity over quality.

[0]: Most of the ones listed here apply that aren't "non-free dependency" or are meant to be a category filter like NSFW. I'd also throw in "microtransactions to unlock basic functionality", but F-Droid effectively bars those with other inclusion rules. https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/
by Gud | 2025-09-01 09:52:31+00:00
Frankly it’s not really great even for that, but they have captured the audience and now we are stuck with it.

Every time I boot into Manjaro to do some gaming, almost always there’s a new update for Discordavailable and guess what? The updates to Manjaro are always lagging behind a few days to a week, and Discord won’t run with a slightly out of date client.

The only way to get is working is using the snap, and who doesn’t want use some 3rd party package manager just to send some kbit/s voice data?

Additionally the interface sucks and is really bloated
by jongjong | 2025-09-01 09:52:34+00:00
This sounds very optimistic. A more realistic interpretation is that the companies which control governments don't have moral principles and don't pick sides. In the case of weapons manufacturers, they may sometimes back both sides. It may also be profitable for banks to back both sides of a war if they don't currently have much collateral in the affected countries. Providing loans to rebuild countries is a great way to profit from war and establish a presence there.

Big companies like to lobby governments into creating problems for which they have solutions to sell.

I mean just look at what happened with companies like Mercedes Benz and Hugo Boss which were selling tanks and uniforms to the Nazi government... Still very successful today, didn't even change their names. They didn't have any problems finding customers or investors. Clearly it means that nobody who matters economically cared about the war. Quite remarkable when you realize that we're talking about WW2. In the business world, it's as if WW2 didn't happen.
by Llamamoe | 2025-09-01 09:52:43+00:00
Top athletes are essentially by definition genetic outliers, and I'm willing to bet that if you looked hard enough you'd find genes far more important than SRY. This entire thing is just silly.

I can see why it might be best to exclude transgender women from most disciplines, at least untill we have more science about whether they have any advantage in them, but as a whole this debacle just feels silly.
by lxgr | 2025-09-01 09:52:45+00:00
> EPR even supports up to 240 W! Plenty of power for any device you'd reasonably power with USB-C.

I feel (or rather hope) we'll see more than that at some point. Being able to replace device-specific wall adapters would be a huge win. This has largely already happened for everything that needs 10 watts or less, but between that and things that actually need a lot of power (i.e. kilowatts, not watts) and/or benefit from AC (mostly motors), there's still an annoying valley of power bricks.

I especially hate the type that's hard-wired to the power plug that blocks 1-2 other outlets due to its bulk and inevitably gets lost during a move or trip to storage and back.
by hvb2 | 2025-09-01 09:53:07+00:00
Even better, the system that Rabobank has.

They make you use this separate device to scan a color qr code generated by the app. The details of the transaction you're authorizing are then displayed on this completely decoupled device, no internet, nothing. After keying in your pin you're given an OTP to put back into the app to authorize.

And I haven't checked, but I'm sure the 'payload' the qr code conveys is signed.
by hermet | 2025-09-01 09:53:58+00:00
A CPU-only demo of ThorVG, a high-performance 2D vector graphics engine

I’ve built a demo app to showcase the performance of the ThorVG engine. Key features:

- Each enemy consists of 86 particles, with up to ~300 enemies on screen.

- Full-size (2K) subtle halo glow background bitmap image and 4 × 100 star layers.

- Real-time DropShadow and BlurEffects for ships, missiles, GUI, and outlines.

- At peak load, ~25,000 drawing objects rendered together.

- Runs fully stable at 120+ FPS with the Software Renderer on 2K resolution (tested on Apple M2 Pro).

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdnnzmtHy9k

Repo: https://github.com/thorvg/thorvg.janitor

This demo specifically highlights the Software Renderer (CPU only). GPU backends (OpenGL/WebGPU) are supported, but optimization work is ongoing.

ThorVG is an open-source high-performance 2D vector graphics engine designed for embedded, mobile, and web systems. This demo is intended as a performance showcase and stress test. Feedback and contributions are welcome!
by extraisland | 2025-09-01 09:54:15+00:00
No I am not. The example given was ridiculous and absurd and you are doing exactly the same thing.

There is a big difference between basic memory protections and what was being discussed.

This is the issue with a lot of people that work in software. They take the most ridiculous interpretation because "that is technically" correct while not bothering to try to understand what was said.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-09-01 09:54:17+00:00
Woa. Hold on. I'm talking about "the future" in the context of history. You can predict the future state of some systems, e.g. we can make fairly accurate weather predictions, from past observations of weather events, for sure. As far as I can tell that's what the authors are trying to do.

But if you want to know when the next big technological leap will happen then you won't learn that by looking at what happened last time: last time is not this time, that's my point.
by pavlov | 2025-09-01 09:54:48+00:00
This happiness survey tells us something about people’s expectations for their own life, which is not completely without value.

Note that the scale is calibrated by what the respondent considers possible:

”Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

In some other countries, the bar for that personal “top of the ladder” is set extremely high by more visible income inequality and concepts like the American Dream which suggest that everyone could/should be a billionaire.

In Finland, a prevailing pessimism keeps expectations in check. (You can see examples of this pessimism in sibling comments here.) Good things are a happy surprise, not something you were promised.
Show HN: Indie10k – An AI Coach That Guides Indie Developers to $10k MRR
by soasme | 2025-09-01 09:54:56+00:00
I built Indie10k ( https://indie10k.com ) because I found coding projects fun, but turning them into actual revenue was always messy. I’d start with energy, then lose track of what to do next, or waste time spinning my wheels.

The idea: instead of another community or OKR tool, Indie10k acts like an AI coach. 1. Daily Missions → small, concrete tasks to keep momentum 2. Weekly Strategy Check-In → AI looks at what you did, summarizes momentum, adjusts next week’s plan 3. Progress Dashboard → a clear path from $0 → $1k → $10k MRR

It’s meant to be single-player first (works even if you don’t join a community) but can integrate with others later.

I have a working prototype now and I’d really appreciate feedback on:

1. Does this sound useful to you as an indie/side-project builder? 2. Do you want such a tool to guide your side projects to MRR $10k? 3. Is the daily/weekly cadence helpful, or would you want it looser/tighter? 4. Which integrations (Stripe, GitHub, GSC, Notion, etc.) would actually matter for you?

Curious to hear what HN thinks.
by GistNoesis | 2025-09-01 09:57:40+00:00
We should have solved chess already.

We should be aiming to solve chess, but we are not even trying.

If the complexity of chess is finite this is possible.

Chess AI have become so good that maybe there is no more progress to be made.

We must abandon the concept of "valuation".

Here is the criterium for solving chess.

A chess engine is a constant (or bounded) time, (and memory bounded) function f which takes any position and return either 1 "white win", 0 "draw", -1 "white lose".

A chess engine solve chess if we can't find any violation in the Bellman equation :

f(gamestate) = max over legal moves of ( -f(gamestate+move) ) if there are legal moves or f(gamestate) = result if there are no legal moves

This function f can be encoded either by a neural network or some code, but it must be computable in constant (or bounded) time.

The whole problem of solving chess is now simplified to mining the gamestate space for counter examples.

Like in math you can conjecture that your chess engine has solved the game and it stands until someone else find a violation of your game engine (either it doesn't compute in bounded time, or the bellman equation is invalid).

To verify a chess engine you can just sample a random gamestate, or a known to be difficult gamestate and check if the equation holds, that's at most max number of legal moves + 1, function evaluation.

You can try applying this concept to simple games like tic-tac-toe, or trying to compress endgame table with a neural network.

We can find such a candidate function by training a neural network by minimizing the current expected number of violation in the bellman equation over various dataset of gamestate. Once we "grok" it to zero we are done. To soften the problem you can train an auxilliary continuous function g which output the probability of 1, 0, or -1 (with a softmax) and add a discount factor like in Reinforcement Learning, but the final result is the discrete argmax of it (like in "deterministic policy gradient") with no discount factor.

Once you have this finite time oracle, playing chess is just wandering along the graph of drawable position to push your adversary into a position where his engine will have a violation of the bellman equation aka a mis-evaluation of the position where if he goes into it you will get into the winnable positions where you stay until the end. (Not all violations can be exploited as the adversary can sometime avoid going into "uncertain" positions).

A simpler (less strong) chess strategy may avoid going into "uncertain" positions as long as the position is unreachable because previous legal positions have a preferred choice. (4 state logic with win, draw, lose, uncertain). Or ordered list of moves. They make the problem easier but complexify the corresponding bellman equation.

So the game becomes once again exploring the space of "drawable" game positions in order to find positions which the adversary can't escape going into a uncertain (and losing) position. Aka playing the adversary and not the board which is an harder problem except if the adversary can play perfectly. Aka playing for the win.
by myrmidon | 2025-09-01 09:58:40+00:00
> They seem to be playing both sides.

They are (arguably) playing for themselves first.

Actual EU action in this conflict has been pretty well aligned with citizen/voter interests in my opinion; this is not strictly a good thing, you could uncharitably call it "emergent unprincipled EU hypocrisy".

Many voters want energy safety, inflation to be kept in check and to minimize spending on foreign conflicts and national defense. Lots of Europeans agree with keeping Russian expansionism in check, but they don't really want to pay for it nor risk escalation.

Generally, sacrificing trade for ethical/moral reasons sounds like an easy sacrifice to make, but this comes at a real price (getting overtaken by "immoral" nations that don't, possibly ending with ethically worse global situations in the long term), and things like this get fierce opposition in a democracy where you have to balance ideology with the economical well-being of your voters (ideological voting is much more achievable if you can at least pretend that it aligns with economical self-interest somewhat).

To me, EU feet dragging in the Ukraine war is a bit sad but unsurprising.

Morality wise, I'd say several middle-eastern petro-states are significantly worse than Russia (non-democratic government, human rights violations at large scale epsecially against foreign workers), and trade with those has been going on for decades...
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-01 10:00:04+00:00
> self-sustaining moon base

The advantage of the moon is that it doesn't have to be entirely self-sustaining - chucking a few hundred tonnes of "vitamins" (as Greg Bear called them in Eon) like microchips, food and so on over on a Starship or other ultraheavy rocket may go a long way.

The real question will be what the lunar colony is even for. It's unlikely a lunar colony is economically sustainable if it doesn't do anything. Research only needs a fairly small crew and no self-sustaining expectation, just as in Antarctica. Same for a bragging-rights flag-planting base. If it provides a low-delta-v staging site and a supply of aluminium, iron, fuel and (looking a bit iffy these days) water supply, it may make sense as a shipyard. Or an He3 mine, if (big if) that's useful for fusion. None of these things promise quick payback.

> excitement to skepticism ratio seems... extremely naive.

I don't think anyone is really expecting anything major to happen any time soon. It's just more fun to think about than grey AIs taking grey jobs writing grey web frameworks for writing grey apps to shovel grey adverts for grey products to people who have grey jobs selling grey consulting services to the grey companies selling the AI
by spwa4 | 2025-09-01 10:01:22+00:00
Finally, here we are "that's not real socialism, my version is much better". I would like to point out that EVEN NOW marxists don't see any reason to disavow Chavez.

> Venezuela is a progressive reformist state ...

That's not how Chavez grabbed power and amassed billions. Not at all.

Chavez, the billionnaire drug-cartel supporter, hero of marxist communism. If it didn't destroy so many lives it'd be a sickening joke. Then again, people still see Arafat or Guevara as heroes of communism too, and compared to them Chavez is ... well, a lot smarter, but at least in Chavez's case I'd be reluctant to call him a mass murderer, whereas Arafat and Guevara definitely are mass murderers. Arafat was a billionnaire when he died too.

https://marxist.com/chavez-capitalism-transcended-socialism....
by imtringued | 2025-09-01 10:01:25+00:00
99% of the work in testing is coming up with test scenarios and test cases. 95% of the code is just dealing with setting up input and output data, 4% is calling the code you want to test and the final assert is often just a single line of code.

I'm not sure what depth of experience has to do with any of this, since it is busy work that costs a lot of time. A form with 120 fields is a form with 120 fields. There is no way around coming up with the several dozens of test cases that you're going to test without filling out almost all of the fields, even the ones that are not relevant to the test itself, otherwise you're not really testing your application.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-01 10:01:27+00:00
I’m not angry. You have asked me to make an effort but you refuse to genuinely engage with the topic.

You are pretending to have no opinion while clearly pushing that New Caledonia should legitimately be given back to the Kanak but at the same time pretend you don’t which makes discussing difficult.

It’s pretty clear to me that you come at the issue from a postcolonial, anti-imperialist view point somehow rooted in post-structuralism. That doesn’t make the question of the legitimacy of said viewpoint less central. I will be clear that I don’t myself adhere to it at all but it’s definitely part of what needs to be considered if a solution is to be found for New Caledonia.

> why should people have the right to self determination of a land they have occupied for thousands of years.

Why should people who have been there since their birth leave the only place they have ever called home and where their grandparents were living to satisfy the idea that the legitimate owner of the land are population whose ancestors somehow came before?

Don’t they also have a right to self determination?

> So, now they're relevant, but not Fiji and the Indians.

They are not more or less relevant. I’m simply pointing that if you use the argument of a supposed rightful ownership of the land and applies it equally to other places than Fiji, it’s obvious that the question is not as simple as you make it seems.

I’m not proving your point - accepting you actually have one something I’m not at this time completely convinced of. I’m merely pointing to you that you refuse to engage with the problem in its full complexity and that there can be no simple answer to complex situation.
by AaronSwift1 | 2025-09-01 10:02:40+00:00
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by rsynnott | 2025-09-01 10:02:42+00:00
> but when I reported it to the responsible authorities, they didn't feel like doing anything about it.

One problem with EU regulation (or at least most regulations; a few have union-wide regulators) is that you're really quite dependent on whether your national responsible body is any good.

For something like this (assuming it's sold union-wide and not just in your country), it might actually be useful to notify the responsible bodies on _other countries_ (once it's actually investigated and recalled the recall should be union-wide).
by kragen | 2025-09-01 10:04:41+00:00
I had estimated upwards of 90% given that the article is targeted at English-speaking adults, but https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/iej.13822 suggests that I may have overestimated—across Europe only 60% of people had had a root canal, with less variation between countries than I had expected.

So maybe only 75% of the people reading the article have gutta percha in their mouths.
by TheCapeGreek | 2025-09-01 10:06:08+00:00
I almost want to disagree with you out of emotional pleading, but I think for most situations you're right.

The unsaid part of your post I think is that you actually have to be good at the job and be capable of networking, if you want to be taken seriously and keep getting jobs - as well as getting paid a decent amount in the first place.