MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Instant Calculus: frozen, function-agnostic, arbitrary-precision GPLv3
by purrplexia | 2025-11-30 15:19:16+00:00
pip install phi-engine

Source code and Mathematical Proof: https://github.com/Purrplexia/LettersToMyHeroes

PyPI package: https://pypi.org/project/phi-engine

Hi HN,

You are the first public audience to see this project. It has not been posted anywhere else yet. I chose to release it here first because Hacker News consistently rewards rigor, originality, and open-source tools built for ideas rather than for marketing.

This project contains entirely original mathematics. The core theory is proven in a rigorous 34-page proof titled "LetterToCantor.pdf" included in the repository. It builds a constructive continuum and a gridless analytic calculus from factorial moment laws and golden-ratio scheduling.

Derivatives and integrals of any analytic function can be computed *exactly* by a *frozen*, function-agnostic operator composed of exact rational coefficients (a "β-stream"). No grids, no step size, no limits, no symbolic math. Once synthesized, these operators work globally for every analytic function. β-streams can be synthesized on-the-fly in milliseconds for thousands of digit accuracy, precompute is only needed if you want to push the boundaries of digits to comical scale. Once a β-stream is synthesized or loaded, it is cached and reused on all future functions. No recompute, no wasted cycles, no dependency on the function.

To make this reproducible and verifiable, the project includes phi-certificates: canonical JSON/gz files that store these global calculus operators as exact rationals, sealed with canonical SHA-256. Anyone can load a certificate, verify its key material, and use the operator forever on any analytic function. The certificate is the calculus rule itself. A phi-certificate is a canonical, global, arbitrary-precision analytic instruction, sealed by a 32-byte hash.

All code is GPLv3-or-later. All math documents are CC-BY-SA 4.0. Everything is permanently free and open.

The repo includes: - the full mathematical proof (LetterToCantor.pdf) - the phi-engine (exact rational contraction engine) - phi-certificates (deterministic, hash-verifiable analytic operators) - demos of extreme derivatives and integrals (sin(googol x^2) in 400ms to 6000 digits) - demos of engine logic - demos of certificate loading and emission - full reproducibility scripts and PGP verification

Every artifact in this repo is hashed and PGP signed, ensuring bit-for-bit reproducibility.

If you want to see the math, start with: Cantor_GoldenContinuum/LetterToCantor.pdf!!! It is a crafted experience for those who love mathematics.

If you want to try the engine immediately: pip install phi-engine (see examples/ after install)

If you care about reproducible, verifiable mathematics and globally reusable analytic operators, I hope you enjoy exploring this. I welcome questions, critique, and adversarial tests from the HN community — you are the first eyes on it — I will post it elsewhere later.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-30 15:19:25+00:00
I'd agree with you 100% if these were Leetcode mediums and hards. They were not, these were quite literally the easiest LC easies I could find.

While my career involves writing code, I am not a SWE, I have never done any formal leetcode prep, and I have no formal education in technology beyond a high school CS class. I have no college degree whatsoever, not even an associate's degree.

I had a rule I stuck to when doing these interviews (which were for a SWE role) that felt very fair to me - I would not give these candidates any problem I couldn't solve in the same circumstances.

For reference, in the allotted time, one such candidate spent a good chunk of their time reading up on JS if/then syntax on w3schools. As I watched, I reminded them they could use any language they wanted, if they were more comfortable or familiar with others, and this Harvard CS grad declined, stating JS was their "strongest" language.

My best guess about these cases were rich kids / legacy admissions that weren't allowed to be failed for political reasons.
Show HN: MGCoupon – Cashback and coupons in one place for major brands
by RobertChin | 2025-11-30 15:19:27+00:00
I’m experimenting with combining coupons + cashback info on the same page (Expedia, Foreo, Jackery, Temu, etc.). Goal: you don’t have to open 5 tabs to stack deals. Curious what HN thinks about: – UI for showing both coupon and cashback rates – Any obvious privacy / dark-pattern traps I should avoid – Monetization ideas that don’t degrade user trust
by homebrewer | 2025-11-30 15:20:20+00:00
Ease of maintenance is an even bigger difference. We've been using gitea for a bit over five years now, and gitlab for a few years before that, and gitea requires no maintenance in comparison. Upgrades come down to pulling the new version and restarting the daemon, and take just a few seconds. It's definitely the best solution for self-hosters who want to spend as little time as possible on their infrastructure.

Backups are handled by zfs snapshots (like every other server).

We've also had at least 10× lower downtime compared to github over the same period of time, and whatever downtime we had was planned and always in the middle of the night. Always funny reading claims here that github has much better uptime than anything self-hosted from people who don't know any better. I usually don't even bother responding anymore.
by jleyank | 2025-11-30 15:20:24+00:00
There are some things which rely on their software for safety (space shuttle, perhaps cars, ...). For these cases, I really, really hope they're being coded in a way that looks like engineering, not like vibe.

Nobody probably dies if/when hearing aids crash. But then, I've not had to reboot any of them in the 20+ years I've had them.
by TheCraiggers | 2025-11-30 15:20:52+00:00
I'm not a geophysicist but it doesn't seem like impermeable rock would "inflate like a balloon" and even if it did, that seems like it would be a pretty bad thing for the surrounding countryside. Given that water infamously doesn't like to compress, I'm at a loss for how this thing actually works.

Does anyone have a better explanation than this article?
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-30 15:20:54+00:00
> the human rights they're referring to is that Microsoft was caught providing Azure services to the Israeli army's unit 8200, which used them to surveil millions of hours of Palestinian calls.

That's what I thought initially too, but seems this is about a different human rights issue, particularly in Saudi Arabia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097244
by mzajc | 2025-11-30 15:21:18+00:00
It is incompatible with all widely adopted definitions of Free software. If you restrict who can use your software, how, or for what purpose, it's fundamentally unfree.

The term that doesn't make any claims about whether a piece of software respects user freedoms is source-available, which these "everyone except the bad guys" licenses are commonly categorized as.
by shagie | 2025-11-30 15:21:41+00:00
> "One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal."

Minor quibble - radiators are white in the visible spectrum.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8851/why-arent-the...

> The radiators on the ISS are a high-emissivity white paint, meaning that they are dark in the infrared spectrum where the heat is emitted. They are white in the visible spectrum to reflect sunlight.

> The radiators on the shuttle are have a two-layer coating: a silver reflective layer covered by a thin Teflon film. The Teflon layer is opaque to infrared light, so the high emissivity of Teflon dominates. Visible light passes through the Teflon layer and is reflected by the silver layer, so the solar absorbance is low.

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/473486main_i... - page 14 shows them extended and testing at Lockheed.
by baq | 2025-11-30 15:21:56+00:00
Noctua, but $20 might not be enough for the cheapest one depending where you live.

I’m not buying anything else and I’m also swapping out any non-noctua fan in my parts when possible (e.g. bought a scythe cooler due to ‘interesting’ dimensional constraints and swapped its fan with a noctua one.)
by powerclue | 2025-11-30 15:22:18+00:00
Better? No absolutely not. Capable? Without a doubt. I have a multi bay nas and it's like 1/6the the size of my pc case. My nas also makes removing and replacing drives trivial. There's a million guides online for my particular nas already and software written with it in mind. It also draws a lot less power than my gaming pc and has a lot quieter operation.

It's difficult for me to accept it's better given all the above.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-30 15:22:19+00:00
GitHub pull request pushes you a notification/e-mail to handle the merge, and you have to handle the pull request mostly online.

I don't know how you can download the pull request as a set of patches and work offline, but you have to open a branch, merge the PR to that branch, test the things and merge that branch to relevant one.

Or you have to download the forked repository, do your tests to see the change is relevant/stable whatnot and if it works, you can then merge the PR.

---

edit: Looks like you can get the PR as a patch or diff, and is trivial, but you have to be online again to get it that way. So, getting your mails from your box is not enough, you have to get every PR as a diff, with a tool or manually. Then you have to organize them. e-mails are much more unified and simple way to handle all this.

---

In either case, reviewing the changes is not possible when you're offline, plus the pings of the PRs is distracting, if your project is popular.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-30 15:22:23+00:00
Kotlin won Android on internal Google politics, zero technical merit.

Feel free to write another long reply on how Kotlin is somehow special, going to replace Java, while the first iteration of Kotlin Native was a failure with a broken design on its reference counting memory approach, and there is still no KVM to replace the JVM in sight, despite such greatness as pointed out in Android circles.
by mrkeen | 2025-11-30 15:22:42+00:00
I grabbed the code from the article and annotated it with the different cases from the famous picture*

switch (expr.kind) { case "number"/"string"/"var": ... [Var] case "call": ... [App] case "function": throw new Error("...[Abs]") case "let": ... [Let]

Looks like most of the hard work's done, and probably wouldn't be too tricky to get [Abs] in there too!

* https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/10d6...
by rayiner | 2025-11-30 15:23:05+00:00
The U.S. was already the richest country in the world per capita by 1880–even at the peak of the British Empire. Most of its military achievements during the war—building up the world’s largest Navy and airforce from almost nothing within a couple of years—was a product of the industrial economy that already existed before the war.

America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people. And you need some of those people, but you don’t want your society to be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion.

The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-30 15:23:39+00:00
I don't know where you're getting your ideas. None of what you say is true. You're taking some kind of bizarre ideological stance ("tiny group of lazy parasites"?) that isn't supported by any kind of evidence. You can look up the great success of many anti-collusion laws, and your solution would be economically harmful and inefficient in a large number of ways. All I can say is, I think you need to study economics more. Landlords provide a valuable service (making rental properties available to people who prefer to rent rather than buy), and they're not making extraordinary profits relative to other industries. Remember that as demand goes up, so too does the price they have to pay to acquire their properties, and therefore the mortgages they are paying to banks. If landlords made extraordinary profits relative to other businesses or investments, everybody would be rushing to become a landlord. But they aren't, because it's hard work and involves significant financial risk.
by Havoc | 2025-11-30 15:24:02+00:00
Reusing existing hardware is a great gameplan. Really happy with my build and glad I didn't go for out of the box.

>In general, you want to get the fastest boot drive you can.

Pretty much all NAS like operation systems run in memory, so in general you're better off running the OS from some shitty 128gb sata ssd and using the nvme for data/cache/similar where it actually matters. Some OS are even happy to use a usb stick but that only works for OS designed to accommodate this (unraid I think does). Something like proxmox would destroy the stick.

Also, on HDDs - worth reading up on SMR drives before buying. And these days considering an all flash build if you don't have TBs of content
by BeFlatXIII | 2025-11-30 15:24:38+00:00
> Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today.

I love to point this out to anti-welfare people and make them blue screen. Especially when they're not willing to acknowledge unethical solutions, such as euthanizing the stupid or acknowledging that not having welfare for an unemployable population shits things up for the rest of society.
by machomaster | 2025-11-30 15:25:00+00:00
They JUST changed it (probably due to the HN feedback). Now the title on tip reads "The operating system for the next generation of gamers" while just yesterday it was simply "The next generation of Linux gaming".

The change is for the better, but I would still like to have words like "Linux" and "distro/distribution/pack" be used.
by jerf | 2025-11-30 15:25:18+00:00
Any such license is basically impossible to work with. It amounts to "I reserve the right to sue anyone who uses this software in the future for effectively random reasons". Because I could go on about the lack of a universally agreed-upon "good" or "evil" and the fact that what you call evil is people who think they are being good (the number of people who outright identify themselves as evil is a rounding error), but there's an even bigger problem, which is that who you think is evil today may change over time. How is anyone supposed to keep up with that? If you put a license like this on your software and you decide eightteen months from now that actually $POLITICAL_STANCE, which you previously thought was evil, has a point, and then you-four-years-from-now comes around to the idea that what they thought was good when they wrote the license is actually quite evil, what is any user of your code supposed to do with that?

In general, $YOUR opinions are too flighty to be basing licensing decisions on.

There's a generally established exception for military use, which works anyhow because even if you are hypothetically perfectly morally fine with military use you may not want to permit them to use it on the grounds you haven't tested it enough. See also the perfectly well-established "not to be used on medical devices" exemption. But if you want to conditionalize your license on, say, "whether or not you're willing to sign this petition about $POLITICAL_TOPIC", that's not something anyone can build on. It'll be a terminal license in the code tree.

If this means you don't want to contribute to open source because you are unwilling to accept this... by all means! If you don't like a contract, don't sign it. Nobody's forcing you to write open source software for free. But there isn't a practical "well, what if only people I agree with are allowed to use it" option, because then even the people you agree with today really can't base any significant decisions on that sort of foundation.

(And, in general, anyone who lives, say, 25 years, and has absolutely no changes of political opinion in that time period... yeah... that's probably a bad sign. I don't hate 25-year-ago-me or anything, but I've got a lot of disagreements with him, and I don't expect 25-year-from-now-me to completely agree with me today either. Certainly not enough to write anything into a license agreement.)

Finally, as another practical manner, this license is also signing up to someday appear in some court of law to litigate the matter of whether or not some person or other does or does not agree with you on some political matter, in a situation where it will be a judge deciding that and not you, and wow am I just not being paid enough for my free contributions to open source to go through that under any circumstances.
by noinsight | 2025-11-30 15:26:09+00:00
Windows is not limited to accessing partitions through drive letters either, it's just the existing convention.

You can mount partitions under directories just like you can in Linux/Unix.

PowerShell has Add-PartitionAccessPath for this:

> mkdir C:\Disk

> Add-PartitionAccessPath -DiskNumber 1 -PartitionNumber 2 -AccessPath "C:\Disk"

> ls C:\Disk

It will persist through reboots too.
by hocuspocus | 2025-11-30 15:26:12+00:00
Scala CLI should have happened 5 years before, but honestly sbt has improved a lot, the DX is mostly fine since the 1.0 release and it's maintained plugin compatibility for 8+ years.

Gradle is worse on several dimensions, which didn't really hurt Kotlin's adoption, nor seems to fundamentally bother Android developers (ok, they have little choice here).
Show HN: Gossipdle – Daily Logic Puzzle with a New Timed Challenge Mode
by Qpphello | 2025-11-30 15:26:22+00:00
I built Gossipdle, a daily logic puzzle where you decide who is guilty or innocent in a 5×5 grid of 20 characters, using only logical clues (no guessing allowed).

Each correct mark reveals a new clue, so you solve the puzzle as a chain of small deductions. Themes change daily (office gossip, campus drama, nightclubs, etc.), but the underlying puzzle is a clean Einstein-style logic grid.

I’ve just shipped a Timed Challenge Mode:

A separate puzzle from the main daily one (so you effectively get two puzzles per day) Difficulty-based time limits (Mon–Tue easier, Sat–Sun hardest, with more time) 3 attempts per day; when the timer hits zero, that run is over No hints in timed mode – pure reasoning under pressure State persists across refresh/close, and there are checks around New York midnight so you don’t start a run when there isn’t enough time left in the day If you like structured logic puzzles (Einstein riddles, nonograms, Sudoku-style deduction) and want a daily “thinky” game with a speedrun variant, I’d love feedback on:

How the difficulty feels Whether the timed mode is fair/fun Any rough spots in the UX

Link: [https://www.gossipdle.com]
by reactordev | 2025-11-30 15:26:30+00:00
Isn’t it though? When AI is used against the people and fake media is used to cover up war crimes, what’s not to stop there? When your feeds have been polluted with outside foreign influencers that you explode from within, what’s not to stop there? It’s war alright. Just not the kind of war Spielberg thinks would make a great film.
by c-hendricks | 2025-11-30 15:26:31+00:00
When I self hosted gitlab I never found the maintenance to be that bad, just change a version in a compose.yml, sometimes having to jump between blessed versions if I've missed a few back to back.

Like others, I've switch to Gitea, but whenever I do visit gitlab I can't help but think the design / UX is so much nicer.
by jlouis | 2025-11-30 15:26:39+00:00
It's usually easy enough for Go you can just roll your own for the problems at hand. It won't be as elegant as having access to a combinator-parser, but all of the AoC problems aren't parsing problems.

Once you have something which can "load \n seperated numbers into array/slice" you are mostly set for the first few days. Go has verbosity. You can't really get around that.

The key thing in typed languages are to cook up the right data structures. In something without a type system, you can just wing things and work with a mess of dictionaries and lists. But trying to do the same in a typed language is just going to be uphill as you don't have the tools to manipulate the mess.

Historically, the problems has had some inter-linkage. If you built something day 3, then it's often used day 4-6 as well. Hence, you can win by spending a bit more time on elegance at day 3, and that makes the work at day 4-6 easier.

Mind you, if you just want to LLM your way through, then this doesn't matter since generating the same piece of code every day is easier. But obviously, this won't scale.
by epistasis | 2025-11-30 15:26:46+00:00
For there to be democracy, there must be accountability. For there to be accountability, there must be some sense of truth, and under that some sense of trust of each other.

What we have seen happen over the past decade is quite similar what happened in Russia in decades before it: complete dismantling of trust, of the idea of truth, of the idea of honesty or integrity. And in that space of uncertainty, a new sort of ruling class is enabled to control the population.

Anti-vaxxers used to be a tiny minority, and living in a crunchy leftish area, they were concentrated around me, and I got into arguments with them all the time. Now, they are no longer leftists, they are MAHA/MAGA, because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority. Vaccines were rejected as much because of the idea of an authority "knowing stuff" as it is about the ickiness of something impure being injected into the body, as much as they love the idea of "everything natural" including "natural" infectious disease.

We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn, and replaced it with authority that exists merely because it hated the past authority, and became what it hated.
by Jare | 2025-11-30 15:26:55+00:00
I never had any hope or interest to compete in the leaderboard, but I found it fun to check it out, see times, time differences ("omg 1 min for part 1 and 6 for part 2"), lookup the names of the leaders to check if they have something public about their solutions, etc. One time I even ran into the name of an old friend so it was a good excuse to say hi.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-30 15:28:37+00:00
> and right now the Chinese companies catch up shortly after the models are released…

This'll be the big one: if ChatGPT has ads but $service does not yet provides a similar service, they have nothing to stand on.

ChatGPT isn't unique, unlike Google at the time which was miles ahead at the time - and no (western) search engine has been able to catch up, even if they have less ads or better search results.