MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Mathpad, a hardware keypad for typing math symbols (24 hours left)
by MagneLauritzen | 2025-09-10 19:37:56+00:00
After three years of development, my hardware project Mathpad is in its final 24 hours on Crowd Supply. I built this because I was tired of hunting for mathematical symbols every time I needed to type equations outside of specialized software.

What it is: A specialized USB-C keypad with 120+ mathematical symbols accessible via keypresses. Greek letters, calculus operators, set theory symbols, logic operators - everything you need for mathematical notation. Works anywhere you can type text.

Technical details: - QMK-based firmware (fully open source) - Unicode composition for universal compatibility - Multiple output modes (Unicode, LaTeX, Office equation codes) - Hot-swappable mechanical switches - Anodized aluminum case, custom UV-printed keycaps - Works on Windows, macOS, Linux

Why hardware vs software? Universal compatibility. Works in any text field - code editors, chat apps, documentation, even command lines. The development process was fascinating - from ugly $20 macropad prototype to custom PCB design to working with specialized keycap manufacturers. Weekly campaign updates document the entire journey if you're interested in the hardware development story.

Current status: 71 backers, final 24 hours remaining. All the hard engineering work is already done. This is just about getting enough orders to justify the production run.

Live demo video and complete technical documentation available on the campaign page. Would love feedback from the HN community on both the product and the development approach.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-09-10 19:38:07+00:00
I don't, and I never said that.

I'm not dumping on the ops person, but the ops and security team's processes. If you as a developer showed up to a new workplace and the process was that for every code change you had to print out a diff and mail a hard copy to the committee for code reviews, you would be totally justified in calling out the process as needlessly elaborate. Anyone could rightly say that your processes are increasing friction while not actually serving the purpose of having code reviewed by peers. You as a developer have a responsibility to point out that the current process serves no one and should be changed. That's what good security and ops people do too.

In the real world case I am talking about, we can easily foresee that the end result is that the exemption will be allowed, and there will be no security impact. In no way does the process at all contribute to that, and every person involved knows it.

My original post was about how people dislike security when it is actually security theater. That is what is going on here. We already know how this issue ends and how that can be accomplished (document the false alarm, and click the ignore button), and have already done the important part of documenting the issue for posterity.

The process could be: you are a highly paid developer who takes security training and has access to highly sensitive systems so we trust your judgment, when you and your peers agree that this isn't an issue, write that down in the correct place, click the ignore button and move on with your work.

All of the faff of contacting different fiefdoms and submitting tickets does nothing to contribute to the core issue or resolution, and certainly doesn't enhance security. If anything, security theater like this leads to worse security since people will try to find shortcuts or ways of just not handling issues.
by ThrowawayB7 | 2025-09-10 19:38:55+00:00
Back in the real world, "Microsoft Layoffs Continue Into 5th Consecutive Month": https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-la...

There's no reason to covertly plot convoluted "backdoor layoff" schemes when they're openly doing layoffs on a regular basis. "Backdoor layoffs" is a silly meme loved only by the sort of people prone to falling for conspiracy theories.
by zdragnar | 2025-09-10 19:40:15+00:00
...for 10 years. After that, you're back in the hole that you were in before, but without anything to draw on. They're currently taking in the equivalent of $500 billion but spending $1.8 trillion, with a GDP of $3 trillion.

Understand that the non-wealthy wouldn't get anything new, it would just be a continuance of their current services and benefits. They've have 10 years to increase their GDP by 50% to get the tax revenue to get to a balanced budget. That's simply not happening without obscene inflation, with the corresponding increase in government spending on goods and services, keeping them out of whack.
by Aunche | 2025-09-10 19:40:38+00:00
Gallerists always act like having a professional framer is given, but maybe their typical clientele are rich enough to just treat that as a mandatory tax. I framed my art with a diy LevelFrames kit for 10x cheaper which took less than an hour. The frame itself isn't particularly good quality, so for now, boutique framers have a strictly superior product, but this advantage could easily be commoditized away.
by tkiolp4 | 2025-09-10 19:40:49+00:00
As I work more with AI, I’ve came to the conclusion that I have no patience to read AI-generated content, whether the content is right or wrong. I just feel like it’s time wasted. Countless of examples: meeting summaries (nobody reads them), auto generated code (we usually do it for prototypes and pocs, if it works, we ship it, no reviews. For serious stuff we take care of the code carefully), and a large etc.

I like AI on the producing side. Not so much on the consuming side.
by omnimus | 2025-09-10 19:41:13+00:00
Aaron Swartz downloaded big part of JSTOR to make a statistical model for some research, was charged with hacking felony and committed suicide because of it. Sam Altman downloaded all of JSTOR and then rest of the internet to make a statistical model to make a commercial product. He is praised for it.

The lesson is clear. Don't make things that don't make money to the already rich.
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-10 19:41:15+00:00
Just to be clear, that's Kirk's own position.

"I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational." - https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-says-gun-deaths-worth-...
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-10 19:41:58+00:00
Companies are mostly doing layoffs because interest rates went up and using AI hype as cover. The anti-inflationary force is the higher interest rates. And if AI was actually lowering the cost of that sort of thing then you still have to contend with the Jevons paradox.

Meanwhile the hype is causing things to be converted to "AI" even when it isn't any more efficient, which lowers labor demand (suppresses wages / increases unemployment, bad) and increases power demand (higher electricity prices, bad) and to the extent that hype causes adoption of inferior solutions, lowers efficiency (worthless AI customer service, bad). Some of the AI stuff is useful but the hype is causing folly.

Migration isn't particularly deflationary, especially with respect to housing prices since the new residents then increase housing demand, which is fine when construction isn't constrained by zoning but bad when it is, and right now, it is.

Most of the outsourcing that can reasonably happen already has, in large part because the US housing market (and therefore cost of living) has been out of whack for a long time, which makes US workers less competitive despite what would otherwise be various countervailing advantages. Things are made in China because they fit on a container ship, but that happened decades ago. Nurses and landscapers and firefighters and plumbers are still domestic and that isn't likely to change.
by Yeroc | 2025-09-10 19:42:02+00:00
Imagine running an MCP server inside your network that grants you access to some internal databases. You might expect this to be safe but once you connect that internal MCP server to an AI agent all bets are off. It could be something as simple as the AI agent offering to search the Internet but being convinced to embed information provided from your internal MCP server into the search query for a public (or adversarial service). That's just the tip of the iceberg here...
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-10 19:42:27+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_Point_USA

> TPUSA has been described as the fastest growing organization of campus chapters in America, and according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, is the dominant force in campus conservatism.

They've been quite influential, and those campus efforts likely contributed to the Gen Z turnout that helped win in 2024.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-09-10 19:42:29+00:00
The second amendment fundamentalists are decidedly thawing. I expect at least some of them are thinking, “we need to ban guns from those people” for some value of “those people.”

The response to the last high-profile public shooting was, if you’ll recall, noise in the DoJ about taking gun rights away from transgender people. So some kinds of gun control are apparently on the table.
by tgbugs | 2025-09-10 19:42:29+00:00
One science museum that is not like that is the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, at least when I was there (shudder) about a decade ago.

It was a museum that was designed for parents to explain to children. The written material for any given piece in an exhibit went into sufficient detail and successive sections of writing would build on each other without necessarily requiring that the previous section had been read.

Back then the museum had an exhibition on the longitude problem and time keeping, precision, drift, etc. that walked you through the development of increasingly accurate chronometers, the practical reasons why, etc. It was an absolute masterwork exhibit, and it expected the adults to be actively engaged with helping digest the material with the kids.
by boroboro4 | 2025-09-10 19:43:22+00:00
> even with 0.0 temperature due to MOE models routing at a batch level, and you're very unlikely to get a deterministic batch.

I don’t think this is correct - MoE routing happens at per token basis. It can be non deterministic and batch related if you try to balance out your experts load in a batch but that’s performance optimization (just like all of the blogpost) and not the way models are trained to work.
by nunobrito | 2025-09-10 19:43:45+00:00
Delphi was the only compiler where the Help documentation was really helpful and used without needing internet. For each library they provided real-world examples on the documentation so we could learn how to use them.

I've never found bettern tool for building desktop GUI apps so easily. I've dropped Delphi back in 2010, moved to Java and tried the web/mobile world but nothing comes close to that top-notch quality.

Irony of destiny: Any app compiled with Borland Delphi is instantly multiplatform because they run beautifuly on Linux and OSX when WINE is installed there.
by evelant | 2025-09-10 19:43:51+00:00
It does not pick an arbitrary order for operations. They happen in total (known at the time, eventually converging) order across all clients thanks to hybrid logical clocks. If events arrive that happened before events a client already has locally it will roll back to that point in time and replay all of the actions forward in total ordering.

As for the specific scenario, if a client sets a task as COMPLETE and another sets it as CANCELLED before seeing the COMPLETE from the other client here's what would happen.

Client1: { id: 1, action: completeTask, taskId: 123, clock: ...}

Client1: SYNC -> No newer events, accepted by server

Client2: { id: 2, action: cancelTask, taskId: 123, clock: ...}

Client2: SYNC -> Newer events detected.

Client2: Fetch latest events

Client2: action id: 1 is older than most recent local action, reconcile

Client2: rollback to action just before id: 1 per total logical clock ordering

Client2: Replay action { id: 1, action: completeTask, taskId: 123, clock: ...}

Client2: Replay action { id: 2, action: cancelTask, taskId: 123, clock: ...} <-- This is running exactly the same application logic as the first cancelTask. It can do whatever you want per app semantics. In this case we'll no-op since transition from completed -> cancelled is not valid.

Client2: SYNC -> no newer actions in remote, accepted

Client1: SYNC -> newer actions in remote, none local, fetch newer actions, apply action { id: 2, action: cancelTask, ...}

At this point client1, client2, and the central DB all have the same consistent state. The task is COMPLETE. Data is consistent and application semantics are preserved.

There's a little more to it than that to handle corner cases and prevent data growth, but that's the gist of it. More details in the repo.

The great thing is that state is reconciled by actually running your business logic functions -- that means that your app always ends up in a valid state. It ends up in the same state it would have ended up in if the app was entirely online and centralized with traditional API calls. Same outcome but works totally offline.

Does that clarify the idea?

You could argue that this would be confusing for Client2 since they set the task to cancelled but it ended up as complete. This isn't any different than a traditional backend api where two users take incompatible actions. The solution is the same, if necessary show an indicator in the UI that some action was not applied as expected because it was no longer valid.

edit: I think I should improve the readme with a written out example like this since it's a bit hard to explain the advantages of this system (or I'm just not thinking of a better way)
by stevenjgarner | 2025-09-10 19:44:13+00:00
“After a year of review, they have come back and they said, listen, we can’t find another explanation,” said Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “So this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.” [1]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/10/science/nasa-mars-sapphire-fa...
by nowittyusername | 2025-09-10 19:44:47+00:00
I suppose I have issues with the way "determinism" is used in the title of this article. It can mean different things to different people and in my mind stating that "Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference" frames it as an actual issue with LLM inference. But its not, its an issue with LLM inference when you start using large scale inference with more complex parts such as systems which use multi gpu inference systems or batching processes and other mechanisms. It is not an issue when using an LLM without those more complex parts. Stating it this way muddies the signal and gives a false sense that this is a fundamental issue with architecture, where its an issue of the systems at scale...
by ACS_Solver | 2025-09-10 19:45:05+00:00
As another multilingual person, I keep getting reminded how bad software "features" can be for us. First, from early computers up to at least the Windows XP era, things sucked due to code pages and all that, but that was understandable, technical limitations after all. Now things suck due to what's supposed to be convenient UX.

Google Chrome broke Ctrl-F functionality for my native language ages ago and it's still broken because the breakage is apparently by design.

The Amazon website for my country appears to mostly auto-translate the English product pages into the local language. Product titles sometimes mean totally ridiculous things because of course the translation is poor.

Nobody cares about the Accept-Language header. Way too many websites like to use GeoIP and switch to the local language. Sometimes the geolocation is wrong, sometimes their location-language mappings are, and even when everything is working "correctly" it's a pain if I'm traveling. I have my browser set up with a correct Accept-Language list, but during travel I definitely see websites switch to a language I can't read.

Then of course there's the huge problem, related to autodetection, that you cannot deduce a user's language from their residence. Countries don't have a surjective mapping onto languages.
by Aerbil313 | 2025-09-10 19:45:13+00:00
Dude...

> I get the feeling that the “just be disciplined” comment often comes from people who didn’t have these addictive habits seared into their minds from an early age

I had the exact same mentality as you. I wrote the exact same stuff right here on HN, you can check my older comments. I did the same stuff, the lengths I went to lock down my devices...

That's not the case, older people are not immune because they grew up with less tech or anything. It's (probably) just you.

Turns out I actually objectively had far worse self-control than other people. Turns out I was living life really in hard mode while everybody else were coasting with ease. Turns out I had undiagnosed ADHD all my childhood, nobody noticed because my school grades were mostly fine.

Go get checked. My life turned over completely with treatment.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-09-10 19:46:04+00:00
When my kid was going to start preschool, we went to see a relatively posh private school in the neighborhood. The first thing they showed was a photo of a 3-year-old kid solving a jigsaw puzzle in a big touchscreen. A jigsaw puzzle, you know, that thing where 80% of the challenge for a kid that age is physically inserting the pieces the right way. In a touchscreen! They also boasted about not having any books until age 8 or something like that, I don't remember exactly.

We left appalled. We sent him to a public school instead, where they use screens much less (although they do use them, sadly) and they have books. I don't know to what extent this is a voluntary choice or just because they have less money to buy gadgets, but the result is better anyway.
Show HN: Package Search MCP – enable agents to search dependency source code
by HammadB | 2025-09-10 19:46:46+00:00
Hi all - Hammad here, CTO of Chroma.

We’ve been working closely with teams building AI systems for the software engineering stack - autocomplete bots, PR review agents, and code assistants. One common pain point we see: these systems hallucinate about dependencies.

While most companies index the primary codebase with grep, semantic search, and AST-based tools, dependencies are often overlooked. Even though they typically make up the bulk of running code. Maintaining source ingestion into agents is often difficult: fetching tarballs, caching, and avoiding latency spikes.

So we built Package Search MCP. It ingests and indexes public dependencies from NPM, PyPI, Go, and Crates.io at distinct versions. We:

1. Use Tree-sitter to parse and chunk the code

2. Embed the data with Qwen3-Embedding

3. Index each version into its own fork on Chroma Cloud

4. Expose grep + semantic search tools for agents via MCP

Just add this MCP server to your coding agent or AI SDK (Cursor, Claude, Codex, OpenAI etc.), and your agent immediately gets smarter about dependencies. Prompt it with “Use package search” and it’ll know where to look.

We’re excited to see what people build with it - try it out and let me know what you think!
by morganvenable | 2025-09-10 19:47:13+00:00
Svalboard Lightly is a re-invention of the Datahand keyboard that saved my career 20+ years ago. Join the Discord! www.svalboard.com/discord

Unique 20gf magneto-optical key mechanism, integrated dual trackballs (one for scroll, one for pointing), 5-axis-per-finger anatomical fitment system, fully configurable via QMK.

All mechanical components can be reproduced on a hobby-grade 3D printer, and customers get access to the full repo of STEP files for all parts.

All the SW is FOSS and supported by a lovely Discord community.
by lovich | 2025-09-10 19:49:33+00:00
Anyone who says violence is _never_ the answer is frankly, naive to history and power.

Violence and politics are both on a spectrum and means to the same end of asserting your will. Vom Kriege is obviously not the forefront of philosophy anymore but it’s a good place to start if anyone reading this hasn’t come across that idea and wants to learn more.

Even your non violent examples of King and Ghandi has very violent wings on the side showing society that if a resolution wasn’t achieved by peaceful ends then violence it is. Remember that the civil rights act didn’t get enough support to be passed until after King was assassinated and mass riots rose across the nation
by loeg | 2025-09-10 19:49:37+00:00
> That deduction was worth $100K to a $1M/year income in a 10% State income tax state earner.

What? Income deductions are only worth the marginal tax rate on that income -- ~40% on $100k of income deducted is worth ~$40k. (With the $10k SALT cap, he can still deduct $10k, worth about $4k.) The top bracket being reduced from 40% to 37%, and starting at a higher income threshold, likely saved the same high earner more than $36k.
by bluGill | 2025-09-10 19:49:46+00:00
Cost is already paid is important. We need to get freight around. Roads because they are flexible are the best way to do that. When the roads are not congested (which if we are only talking freight they are not even in the densest cities) sharing with other users makes sense (in a dense city cars quickly turn into congestion, but we are only adding buses to the existing freight system so we can ignore that). Sure a bus does more damage than a car, but there are other freight users doing a lot of damage so you need to build for that use anyway. Thus we will have the roads anyway, the question is do we build something else as well and is that worth the costs - here buses are a lot cheaper.

What is the weight of that bus and tram when they only have 20 people on though? Similarly what is the cost of the driver or a bus vs tram when there are only 20 people you need to move on the vehicle? Because this is a problem you should be aiming to have: getting transit to those less dense areas that will never have 200 people on board with 5 minute frequencies. You should prioritize high frequency service over larger vehicles until you are running something every 5 minutes because that high frequency is the best way to kill complaints that transit is not convenient. It is of course expensive, if you are getting enough riders to need a bigger vehicle you should have the money from those riders to give them better service.

There are places in the world where you need the capacity of a tram. However I submit that most places should be building a fully automatic metro system anyplace they are thinking about a tram. Only after you have that comprehensive system can we ask if there really is enough demand to also run a tram for shorter trips. The down side of a metro is the grade separation means very short trips are not feasible because of the need to get to the tracks - but most areas can live without that additional service and they need the additional speed a metro can give.

> however the problem in practice often is that a bus network is planned and installed based on very conservative estimates, induced demand hits and the buses are overcrowded, but no one wants to put up the money and upgrade to a tramway because "we just got buses, they aren't even paid off yet".

Nothing you can do about bad planning. Though really if the buses are that full and not paid for you should have already had them anyway, and there are plenty of other places you that don't have service yet (because if you did you would see this coming and the buses would be paid for) that you can move the buses. The only issue is the cost of building the tram - buying a lot of buses is cheaper than building a new tram line. (I'm assuming you are not talking about Bus Rapid Transit - that has a place but it is rarely a good answer)
by mmulet | 2025-09-10 19:50:09+00:00
Behold! running on the iPad! Screen Recording - https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resource... A video of it on the iPad - https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resource...

Absolutely no mouse support though, anyone know of an iPad ssh client with mouse support?

(still working on getting vscode to run smoothly)