MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Veteran-built iPhone steadiness tracker to help people avoid falls
by jimlucas95338 | 2025-12-11 01:16:26+00:00
Hi HN — I’m a veteran founder working on something deeply personal: helping people (including a lot of veterans and aging adults) stay on their feet longer.

We’re building PinkSteady — an app that uses the iPhone’s IMU data to estimate steadiness and deliver adaptive balance training in short daily sessions.

The problem: Falls destroy independence, cost the healthcare system billions, and most “fall prevention” solutions exist only inside clinics. There are balance exercises online, but compliance is extremely low. We’re trying to make steadiness training simple + habitual + measurable.

Technical challenge: Consumer-grade IMUs are noisy. Gait patterns vary wildly. Most people do not want to strap on sensors or buy devices, so we’re trying to extract useful low-frequency stability features from phones people already have — placed inconsistently in pockets, belts, hand, etc.

We’ve found:

– gravity vector drift matters – window length selection changes user trust – feedback timing affects behavior more than raw scores – older adults ignore alerts but respond to gentle signals

We’re also experimenting with pink-noise audio and subtle cues (vibration or auditory scaffolding) to help people self-correct without scolding them.

What we’d love feedback on from HN:

– thoughts on fusing IMU signals in unconstrained device placement – experiences with vestibular / gait signal modeling – if anyone has insights on adherence mechanics in apps for older populations – ethical considerations in giving people “scores” about their mobility

We just opened a small founding-member cohort to gather usability data and iterate.

Happy to share models, heuristics, failures, and learnings.

Jim Lucas, Co-founder of PinkSteady
by akersten | 2025-12-11 01:16:53+00:00
> I think being sheltered from regular TV, TV ads, and TV news, has been tremendously positive for my mind and life. Not being exposed to "social" media sites, which are often not actually social, and often unhealthy when they are, is a great win.

Incredibly, you were able to do that without the government's help! I suppose people just aren't built the same these days, so we need laws instead of letting people decide on their own.
by mothballed | 2025-12-11 01:16:53+00:00
Yes, American Revolution. More recently, Battle of Athens[0]. Also see the Bundys who are still (as far as I know, to this day) ranching on the land they had an armed standoff over the BLM with in Nevada [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff
by Eisenstein | 2025-12-11 01:17:39+00:00
> Legit assuming that everything is as simple as it can be, that the most obvious idea to occur to any untrained observer is the most accurate, is literally a guaranteed way to go though life without understanding anything, at all.

That's a misunderstanding of Occam's razor. Occam's razor says that if you don't know the answer then when you have a choice between competing explanations, pick the one that requires fewer assumptions.

The explanation that they are using incorrect grammar on purpose to screen out intelligent people is logically questionable, unproven by any evidence, and relies on a bunch of assumptions: sophistication, time is worth more than leads, good enough education and experience in English to write it well, and coordination between scammers.

The 'being bad at speaking a language or dialect they are not native in and having poor access to education' explanation is logically complete and requires far fewer assumptions.
by dijit | 2025-12-11 01:17:43+00:00
It’s a bit hidden, for example if Apple Music isn’t working it will act as if my device is having an issue with the app playing; it doesn’t look like its a service problem because it hangs and freezes the UI for play- and pretty often I will force my mail to refresh and it will say the imap server is unreachable.

Regardless, these kinds of things tend to be somewhat regional. I’m based in Sweden.
by aners | 2025-12-11 01:18:17+00:00
We have very few alternatives to driving in the US so we have very lax driver training and testing.

Across the US we have roads and infrastructure that encourage speed right next to decaying pedestrian infrastructure. It's very difficult to get state DOTs to roll back or do traffic calming. They often prohibit the use of bollards or barriers near these roadways.

In a lot, not all, physical changes to the environment could drastically reduce traffic fatalities without surveillance.
by fsckboy | 2025-12-11 01:19:26+00:00
serif vs sans serif is not "a vague aesthetic reason", it's the most fundamental typeface choice you can make, moreso than monospace (which is an artifact of some 19th century technology) Rubio is an attorney, and there are many stylistic conventions in the legal and judicial space, why ruffle those feathers by flouting them? if you are given a style guide for your PhD thesis, do you follow it or do you futz endlessly with the fonts to show them what an independent thinker you are?
by uplifter | 2025-12-11 01:20:11+00:00
Edit: I'm wrong on my first reply, as pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226602

LLVM is free software, and it is a confusion to equate copyleft and free software, though I still maintain that free and open source are very distinct concepts which refer to different categories of licenses. That contrast is better stated by RMS in the article on the subject above which I linked above.

Original reply:

Primarily its this first line here:

>LLVM is free software. You appear to be making the common mistake of confusing the permissive vs. copyleft distinction with the open source vs. free software distinction.

LLVM is NOT free software because it is released under the Apache license, which is an open source license but not a free software license. This is opposed to the linux kernel and GCC which are free software because their source is available under the GPL license. Further it is not really a confusion to equate permissive licensing with open source as distinguished from copyleft and free software. In this context, free is equivalent in meaning to copyleft, as distinguished from the more permissive open source licenses.
by stephen_g | 2025-12-11 01:20:16+00:00
For now at least - for H.264 AVC, the patents are expired in most countries and most of the final US patents that may apply to AVC High profile will expire in the first half of 2026 [1].

Except in Brazil, where there are even MPEG-4 patents still in effect (expiring later in 2026) and the H.264 patents will last until the early 2030s, I think because of a rule that gave 10 years extra but is now changed but not retrospective for these patents [2].

1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

2. https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-eve...
by cons0le | 2025-12-11 01:21:04+00:00
NYC should have been the model to follow. Instead of flock cameras, cities should have bounty systems: record a video of a speed violation with a plate, and get 10% of the ticket revenue. Enforcement would explode.

We could of had a system where we used the technology we already had in our hands to democratize speed enforcement, instead of corporatizing it
by Aunche | 2025-12-11 01:21:51+00:00
That has nothing to do with online identification. Do you believe that those operating a vehicle that can easily kill people shouldn't require registration to prevent this from happening again?

Also, that a was few dozen truckers who were actively blocking major highways, and the banking ban lasted less than a week for most people. Several orders of magnitude more people get arbitrarily unbanked for less. I had a credit card and bank account permanently banned while traveling and they refused to give me an explanation.
by jokoon | 2025-12-11 01:22:30+00:00
The problem is that software distributors might break laws if the said drivers lands on unlicensed hdmi hardware, so they should be liable to check if the hardware is properly licensed, which might generate headaches.

Or maybe lawyers cannot anticipate everything that happens in court, so it just feels better to do things properly and not try to circumvent laws, especially when you're valve. It's better to not take risks.
by IceDane | 2025-12-11 01:22:37+00:00
Look, buddy. You propped yourself up as an Experienced Dev doing cool stuff at Profitable Startup and don't understand Advanced Programming, and your entire argument is that you can keep doing the same sort of high quality(FSOV) work you've been doing the past 10 years with AI, just a lot faster.

I'm just calling spade a spade. If you didn't want people to comment on your side project given your arguments and the topic of discussion, you should just not have posted it in a public forum or have done better work.
by skydhash | 2025-12-11 01:22:39+00:00
> but you'll have to sit and read those docs, potentially for hours (cost of task switching and all).

That is one of the assumptions that pro-AI people always bring. You don't read the new docs to learn the domain. As you've said, you've already learn it. You read it for the gotchas. Because most (good) libraries will provide examples that you can just copy-paste and be done with it. But we all know that things can vary between implementations.

> Even as a skeptic of the general AI productivity narrative, I can see how that could squeeze a week's worth of "ever postponed" tasks inside a day.

You could squeeze a week inside a day the normal way to. Just YOLO it, by copy pasting from GitHub, StackOverflow and the whole internet.
by no_wizard | 2025-12-11 01:22:49+00:00
Looking at both of these I'm struggling to understand why AI exponentially increased the productivity and quality of either of these examples. Especially since I don't see open source code anywhere, I can't get a good gauge of quality either.

I've built tools like this on the web in the past. They were never more than a weekends worth of work to begin with.

I am looking for exponential increases, with quality to back it up.
by addaon | 2025-12-11 01:23:55+00:00
The article, and many of the responses, are hinting at the fact that bubblesort is an example of an anytime algorithm. This is a wide class of algorithms which provide a correct answer after some amount of time, but provide an increasingly good answer in increasing amounts of time short of the completion time. This is a super valuable property for real time systems (and many of the comments about games and animations discuss that). The paper that introduced me to the category is "Anytime Dynamic A*" [0], and I think it's both a good paper and a good algorithm to know.

[0] https://cdn.aaai.org/ICAPS/2005/ICAPS05-027.pdf
by eru | 2025-12-11 01:24:07+00:00
> Storing the data in nodes doesn't work if the given structure may need to be in multiple linked lists, which iirc was a concern for the kernel?

That's a great point! A language almost like C plus a smart enough compiler could do the unboxing, but this technique doesn't work for multiple structures.

> And generally I'd imagine it's quite a weird form for data structures for which being in a linked list isn't a core aspect (no clue what specifically the kernel uses, but I could imagine situations where where objects aren't in any linked list for 99% of time, but must be able to be chained in even if there are 0 bytes of free RAM ("Error: cannot free memory because memory is full" is probably not a thing you'd ever want to see)).

I think you are right in practice, though in principle you could pre-allocate the necessary memory when you create the items? When you have the intrusive links, you pay for their allocation already anyway, too. In terms of total storage space, you wouldn't pay for more.

(And you don't have to formally alloc them via a call to kmalloc or so. In the sense that you don't need to find a space for them: you just need to make sure that the system keeps a big enough buffer of contiguous-enough space somewhere. Similar to how many filesystems allow you to reserve space for root, but that doesn't mean any particular block is reserved for root up-front.)

But as I thought, that's about in-principle memory usage. A language like C makes the alternative of intrusive data structures much simpler.
by skydhash | 2025-12-11 01:24:51+00:00
Pretty much the same. And it's not even about improving the code (which I did), but mostly about removing dead code and duplicated code. Or worse, half redesigns of some subsystem which led to very bizarre code.

When people say coding is slow, that usually means they're working on some atrocious code (often of their own making), while using none of the tools for fast feedback (Tests, Linters,...).
by no_wizard | 2025-12-11 01:25:32+00:00
Here's the lede they buried:

>The key is to not be one of the investors whose wealth is destroyed in the process of bringing on progress.

They are a VC group. Financial folks. They are working largely with other people's money. They simply need not hold the bag to be successful.

Of course they don't care if its a bubble or not, at the end of the day, they only have to make sure they aren't holding the bag when it all implodes.
by jaimex2 | 2025-12-11 01:25:34+00:00
The government isn't helping you, they just pushed every child in Australia to un-moderated and decentralised social networks. Complete free for alls.

4chan, Mastedon, BlueSky, PeerTube, Pixelfed

They have millions of users. They're about to get more.

No, you can't block these. No, you can't order these to do anything.
by koopuluri | 2025-12-11 01:25:51+00:00
i agree there are a lot of concerns with allowing teens / children to use social media as it is today without any sort of way to help them benefit from these tools instead of being harmed by them (which is sadly far too common).

but my concern is that will lead to a less educated population. there is positive, life changing learning that can happen on social media. kids finding their tribe by connecting with people like them in other parts of the country / world. kids discovering skills / crafts they become passionate about. heck, even learning how to communicate effectively with others. i think social media is a treasure when it is used correctly.

ofc, i agree with the concerns and ofc the right "solution" is one that enables the positives and minimizes (and ideally eliminates) the negatives. and having social media as a closed, proprietary, centralized product that can't be tweaked (e.g, choose your own custom algorithm, or filter out a "type" of content that you don't want to see, etc.) is the core problem here. a decentralized social media would allow even regulators to apply much more fine-grained controls so that they don't have to remove access entirely.

but sadly bec. we don't have a good way to apply fine grained controls to how we use social media, it seems blanket banning entirely for an entire group of people is the best approach. like, i get why it may be necessary (it seems like most / many australians are currently on board), but i really hope this inspires people to build better social platforms that give more control to users.
by Gigachad | 2025-12-11 01:25:53+00:00
What I’m seeing in Australia is most parents know it’s bad, and want their kids off social media. But it’s a Herculean task when the social media companies have such a grip on their kids and when all the other kids have it.

It’s the same story with banning phones in schools. Everyone knows it’s the right thing to do but individual parents or teachers don’t have the power to do it alone.
by rchachra | 2025-12-11 01:26:59+00:00
Thrilled to share the newest episode of 8Spotlight from Eight Capital Management featuring Jin Kim Founder & CEO of Miracle, and former USA Olympic Archery Team athlete.

Jin’s journey is one of the most unique we've seen: from elite archery, where precision and mental discipline are everything, to becoming a solo-founder in biotech...an industry where nearly everyone says “you can’t build this alone.”

Yet he has. And Miracle is now quietly becoming foundational infrastructure for clinical trials.

In this episode, we dive into:

How Olympic-level focus and pressure translated into the way Jin builds Miracle

What it takes to sell into biotech: compliance hurdles, and navigating constant policy shifts

How Miracle is turning messy clinical-trial data into plug-and-play intelligence

What keeps him going as a solo founder in one of the toughest sectors to break into Jin’s story is equal parts discipline, conviction, and execution...and we're so excited to share it.

hashtag#startups hashtag#biotech hashtag#clinicaltrials hashtag#founders hashtag#YC hashtag#AI hashtag#datascience hashtag#lifesciences hashtag#entrepreneurship hashtag#innovation hashtag#miracle hashtag#8spotlight hashtag#podcastlaunch hashtag#healthtech hashtag#founderjourney hashtag#archery hashtag#olympics
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-11 01:27:12+00:00
>This is a cool idea. I would install a Chrome extension that shows a score by every username on this site grading how well their expressed opinions match what subsequently happened in reality, or the accuracy of any specific predictions they've made.

Why stop there?

If you can do that you can score them on all sorts of things. You could make a "this person has no moral convictions and says whatever makes the number go up" score. Or some other kind of score.

Stuff like this makes the community "smaller" in a way. Like back in the old days on forums and IRC you knew who the jerks were.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-11 01:27:44+00:00
That’s not what he’s aiming at “generic personal note taking”. Let’s say I am a small business with 1 on 1s. Should I as a manager put my one on one notes - Employee Jane Doe was discussing how she needs a raise because she’s going through a divorce and a bitter custody battle and just found out that she is pregnant and may need time off” - on his site?
by tomhow | 2025-12-11 01:27:49+00:00
Please stop. HN is not a place for political/ideological battle, including about this topic. What HN is for is curious conversation, including about difficult topics, but the guidelines apply, particularly these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by eru | 2025-12-11 01:29:00+00:00
Haskell's GHC partially does it. LLVM can do it in principle, if your frontend gives enough information. Some JVMs can partially do some of it.

The above is about the optimiser figuring out whether to box or unbox by itself.

If you are willing to give the compiler a hand: Rust can do it just fine and it's the default when you define data structures. If you need boxing, you need to explicitly ask for it, eg via https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/boxed/struct.Box.html
by tavavex | 2025-12-11 01:29:51+00:00
I'm not an American, but I'm doubtful there's 100 millions Americans out there who think this is wrong, let alone to an extent where they would be willing to do anything about it. If you look at it in terms of scenarios that can actually happen, the US has already decided about a year ago - now they and the rest of the world are along for the ride. Something truly momentous would have to happen now for an agency as powerful as the CBP to change course, barring an unlikely sudden mood change from up top.
by johnwheeler | 2025-12-11 01:29:56+00:00
Some of us don’t mind government regulation as much as your parents told you not to like it. I just say this because it’s usually those types of parents that instill this kind of stuff and their children not to trust the government but some of us actually do. We are pretty happy with the way things are. It’s not naïve either. It’s seriously a problem when people talk like the government is meant to be not trusted.
by lmm | 2025-12-11 01:30:36+00:00
I think allowing the definition of open source to be muddled would be a big mistake, especially now that some entities are trying to whittle away users' rights while continuing to benefit from the positive vibes of open source. The OSDI/DFSG/FSF definition is a clear, simple line in the sand that has served the movement very well; there's no reason to change it. Yes some entities actively participate in their community and others do the bare minimum, but it's always going to be possible to be more or less communitarian.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-11 01:31:22+00:00
If you are a manager and having 1-1s the very use case he called out, you may have 1-1s with 15+ people every two weeks.

I am a staff consultant. I am constantly in meetings with customers, sales, my management for high profile clients, people working on projects I’m leading, internal strategy go to market meetings.
by titanomachy | 2025-12-11 01:31:22+00:00
Ok, I guess you’d be the first in ~100 years. Crazier things have happened. But the much more likely outcome of meeting government violence with lethal violence of your own is that you are now dead. That’s a scenario that plays out all too often in this country; no need to reach into the distant past for examples.

Kudos for engaging civilly and earnestly on this even though the majority here seem to disagree with you. It’s rare that I encounter someone coherently articulating a belief system so wildly divergent from my own.
by AuthAuth | 2025-12-11 01:31:30+00:00
Its not parenting as a service. Its not even in the same world as rock in roll. Do you think its ok to have smoking, gambling and sex ads shown on tv during the afterschool 3pm-5pm timeslot? Social media is effectively that x100 because TV ads followed advertising restrictions.

On social media kids will be subjected to undisclosed advertising for all kinds of products legal and illegal. They will be directly targeted and manipulated into real world harm situations and mental manipulation into harmful mindsets.

Most of this cannot be prevented by "being a watchful parent". If your kid watches andrew tate and you see and put a restriction youtube will recommend them a tate adjacent channel or one of the 1million alts that posts clips. Same for tiktok, X and Instagram.The only control you have is to ban them from using the platform which is a roundabout way of achieving the same thing.
by manquer | 2025-12-11 01:31:39+00:00
IaaC code is one of those use cases just throwing LLM is painful for a refactor.

In my experience claude/codex to wrangle CDK constructs be complicated, it frequently hallucinates constructs that simply do not exist, options that are not supported etc.

While they can generate IaaC component mostly okay and these problems can be managed, Iterations can take a lot of time, each checkpoint, goes the deploy/ rollback cycles in CF. CloudFormation is also not particularly fast, other IaaC frameworks are not that different.

Running an agent to iterate until it gets it right is just more difficult with IaaC refactor projects. Hallucinations, stuck loops and other issues, can quickly run the infra bill up not to mention security.
by shakna | 2025-12-11 01:31:53+00:00
Derivatives inherit.

Public domain in, public domain out.

Copyright'd in, copyright out. Your compiled code is subject to your copyright.

You need "significant" changes to PD to make it yours again. Because LLMs are predicated on massive public data use, they require the output to PD. Otherwise you'd be violating the copyright of the learning data - hundreds of thousands of individuals.