skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Sudoku website with unique hint function. Need your advice
Hello!

We built a website to play Sudoku online. It seems users like it. Now we need some ideas on how to increase the number of users. Can you guys give us some advice?

A little more details. First of all, why we decided to create Sudoku website if there are so many already. We noticed 2 problems that virtually every Sudoku website has and decided to solve them.

The first problem, is the quality of the puzzles. You can solve Sudoku puzzle with pencil notes or without. Solving without pencil notes is, naturally, more difficult. Some people prefer to solve with pencil notes, some - without. What we noticed is that most Sudoku websites don't take that into account. The puzzles they offer may be fun and reasonably challenging when solving without pencil notes, but as soon as you start using pencil notes it turns into a trivial puzzle. Or, the puzzle may be of adequate complexity when solving with pencil notes, but is almost impossible to solve if you prefer to not use the pencil notes.

We've put a lot of efforts and eventually managed to build an algorithm that can create puzzles that are interesting and reasonably challenging to solve both with pencil notes and without. This is, however, the feature most users won't notice. I guess it's one of those things you notice only when it's not there.

The second problem we noticed is a poor hint function. Some websites offer you a pseudo hint function - they just allow you to reveal an arbitrary digit on the grid. Some websites can only show hint if you use pencil notes. And some try to show more intuitive hints, but can only do that if there is a simple move available and, ironically, when you need hints the least.

We have implemented a unique visually oriented hint function. It shows you the short summary of the next move on the grid, and if you are interested you can see step-by-step explanation accompanied with animated visualisations on the grid.

Unlike quality of the puzzles, users do notice and love our hint function. No other Sudoku website we are aware of has such hint function.

The website seems to have a good potential for growth, the number of users grows steadily. We'd like it to grow a little faster, though. Do you have some ideas?

Feedback about the website itself is highly appreciated as well.

P.S. Animated hints are shown only for those puzzles that a designed to be solved with and without pencil notes (Easy, Medium and Hard levels). Expert and Extreme levels are designed to be solved only with pencil notes, so hints for these levels are not animated. If you'd like to see a good example of our animated hint, open this puzzle and click on a light-bulb button https://www.sudokumood.com/?puzzle=4030200802060040078000100....
I had the exact same thought. My luggage was lost by Lufthansa the other day and my first thought to the headline was "and now I can have that bad experience in VR".
RAM signalization is very sensitive to data line length, more so if you use low power RAM modules.

This is not a "bigger number in a useless benchmark" thing, if you can standardize the shortest and fastest routing possible with a socket, everybody can use faster RAM for less (RAM command waits are the biggest killer of responsiveness), and everyone can enjoy faster, more responsive systems.

Moreover, bigger RAM means bigger caches in any OS, and having these caches on faster storage means snappier, faster systems. Lastly, games and other engineering software use great amounts of RAM and moves tons of data between GPU RAM and system RAM. Having faster pipes helps.

It's not about benchmarks, it's about real world performance.
Anyone know how this compares to Electron? Is that even the market this tool is in?
Maybe. A more significant risk is being hassled or throttled by an ISP if (and essentially only if) you're doing (not necessarily illegal[1]) P2P file transfers on their network.

At least given the lack of alternative ISP options in my area, I'd rather pay Mullvad €5/month than assume this risk.

[1] https://i.redd.it/jzf5jegdyb171.png
Technically correct about the balance, but practically people overestimate the amount you can burn with extra activity. The main reason to exercise while losing weight is that if you do resistance training, you preserve more of your muscle and lose predominantly fat - it’s not to burn more calories.

And I disagree about emphasising “better” instead of “less”. “Better” than doesn’t lose weight.
> But I might be willing to make an exception for people who write CSS that requires you to read the MDN article on Specificity to understand it.

May I ask you, are you a front-end developer?
AI Is Driving 'The Next Industrial Revolution.' Wall Street Is Cashing In.
And here we see this strange thing that data science people does in forgetting that 6TB is small change for any SQL server worth it's salt.

Just dump it into Oracle, postgre, mssql, or mysql and be amazed by the kind of things you can do with 30year old data analysis technology on an modern computer.
This is lame. Was expecting an actual "inflight experience", but got a VR tour app of the cabin along with the same 'ol silly avatars.
LibreLogo: Logo-like programming language for LibreOffice
Big data is there so that it can justify Databricks and Snowflake valuations /s
What did you gather as 'needed domain' from that comment. 'needed domain' is often implicit, its not a blank slate. candidates assume all sorts of 'needed domain' even before the interview starts, if i am interviewing at bank I wouldn't suggest 'load it on your laptops' as my 'stack'.

OP even mentioned that it his favorite 'tricky question' . It would def trick me because they used the word 'stack' which has specific meaning in the industry. There are even websites dedicated to 'stack's https://stackshare.io/instacart/instacart
It does not fall into the trap:

“Granted some things are relatively new, and others might be sort of niche-y.”
The seeming lack of vision of everyone who is both connected to XR and has the money to actually make something is kind of demoralizing.
> I'm not sure if this is true. All kernels rely on stacks and queues to manage processes and scheduling. They're all implemented as arrays.

It's not true AT ALL. Show me a kernel that doesn't deal with buffers. Buffers clearly have array semantics. Even microkernels with a minimal API surface map and copy between buffers.
dupe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40489250
https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ai-is-driving-the-next-in...
A click on “Cobalt on partner site”, the second link on the page, leads to a 404. Great job guys.
Yet schizzos have fewer offspring.
None of the measures mentioned in the article — lower interest rates, lower transaction fees, down payment subsidies — will lower costs. Every one of them will raise prices. You can only fix this with supply: build homes.
You mean like search under safari?
Post-Open: What Comes After Open Source
I flew with them a few times as well as KLM, Emirates, and Singapore. Lufthansa's customer service, on-board experience (i.e. food & entertainment), is not on par with the others. When a flight got canceled last minute, we were left hanging with a number to call and a long waiting line, and we are still waiting for our reimbursement. On the need to reschedule due to a positive coronavirus test, it took 16 minutes with KLM to reschedule and almost 3 hours with Lufthansa and a bunch of (online) paperwork.

On top of that, some strange management decisions like completely stopping pilot training and laying off the ones that started during Covid while getting financial assistance from the state and 2 years later struggling with a pilot shortage.
> Tesla though has a strong story of broken promises on Automated Driving.

While that is true, it is also noteworthy that Jensen Huang thinks Tesla is far ahead in self-driving cars. https://autos.yahoo.com/nvidia-ceo-says-tesla-far-110000305....
What stats?
Good question. I am not an expert but here’s my take from my time in this space.

Big data folks typically do sampling and such, but that doesn’t eliminate the need for a big data environment where such sampling can occur. Just as a compiler can’t predict every branch that could happen at compile time (sorry VLIW!) and thus CPUs need dynamic branch predictors, so too a sampling function can’t be predicted in advance of an actual dataset.

In a large dataset there are many ways the sample may not represent the whole. The real world is complex. You sample away that complexity at your peril. You will often find you want to go back to the original raw dataset.

Second, in a large organization, sampling alone presumes you are only focused on org-level outcomes. But in a large org there may be individuals who care about the non-aggregated data relevant to their small domain. There can be thousands of such individuals. You do sample the whole but you also have to equip people at each level of abstraction to do the same. The cardinality of your data will in some way reflect the cardinality of your organization and you can’t just sample that away.
The quantum (those dots and lines) part of my tattoo is stick and poke: https://s.h4x.club/jkupYOrX
Those look like sufficient sample sizes to me. How many samples would it take to convince you?
C-Section Rates Are Way Too High
I believe many LLMs have this training. It is becoming increasingly difficult to get the foundation models to output just a JSON object, without the ```json ... ``` around it.

It's certainly a convenient format to output, simple for the LLM, easy to parse, render, and style for UIs
genocide trigger warning. interesting…
I agree, but I it's important to understand why.

If/when someone dies of something FDA approved, it becomes a big scandal. Heads might roll, funding constrained.

If 10,000 people die from something that an unapproved treatment could cure, it's not news at all. People have always been from that.

FDA, like any organization, responds to incentives and does what's best for it.
How to Make Tattoo Equipment in Prison
when they say the ocean temperature rises 1 degree, they should really put it in terms of joules it would take to do that, which is a really big number, rather than 1 degree, because people read more into bigger numbers.
The damage to the top of the wire terminal blocks suggest a lot of force was applied with a screwdriver to tighten them - straight onto the PCB near the breakage. I wonder if physical stress was also a factor.
> I already qualified my statement quite well by stating my background

No. You qualified it with "blows my mind" . Why would it 'blow your mind' if you don't have any data background.
Parquet is columnar storage, which is much faster for querying. And typically for protobuf you deserialize each row, which has a performance cost - you need to deserialize the whole message, and can't get just the field you want.

So, of you want to query a giant collection of protobufs, you end up reading and deserializing every record. For parquet, you get much closer to only reading what you need.
This, and the other stalkerware linked to in the article, is what everyone on iOS can look forward to thanks to the EU.
One big difference with the Middle East is that the present day borders were largely drawn up by foreign powers (England, France) rather than evolving organically as they did in post-Roman Europe. This is also a source of much of the ongoing conflicts in the region including Israel/Palestine.
> The slow part of using awk is waiting for the disk to spin over the magnetic head.

If we're talking about 6 TB of data:

- You can upgrade to 8 TB of storage on a 16-inch MacBook Pro for $2,200, and the lowest spec has 12 CPU cores. With up to 400 GB/s of memory bandwidth, it's truly a case of "your big data problem easily fits on my laptop".

- Contemporary motherboards have 4 to 5 M.2 slots, so you could today build a 12 TB RAID 5 setup of 4 TB Samsung 990 PRO NVMe drives for ~ 4 x $326 = $1,304. Probably in a year or two there will be 8 TB NVMe's readily available.

Flash memory is cheap in 2024!
This is a great example of a good idea that absolutely doesn’t depend on the technology at hand. In fact it might make it worse: in the middle of most flights you’re above the clouds. Any battle details would be infinitesimally small. And looking at the floor for extended periods of time would be very uncomfortable.

Why not take the same idea and just… show it on a screen?
> Meet is just so much better than Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, WhatsApp Video, etc.

So much better? Does Meet have instruments for whiteboarding or on-screen annotation?
Same here in the Netherlands.
I currently rent a 130m3 house for 2500 euros. 500 energy. 2500 euros daycare (4 kids). I think I spend around 6000, 7000 euros after taxes on fixed costs. I wont complain. My life is good, but for most peope here impossible to pay those amounts. Result is that lots of my friends with "normal" jobs end up living in small apartments far outside the cities or even move to a completely different part of the country. Its very hard now to start a life now. Unless you make a shitton of money. Everything became so expensive these days. Its unsustainable imho.
And then you have a bottle of what is colloquially termed “bang-gas”, which is happy to release all the gathered energy in a joyous millisecond detonation.
I would guess MS-DOS. Back then, there was no UTF-8, and the character encoding depended on your language. People using English normally were using CP437 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP437), while people using other languages would be using something like CP850 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP850). Take a look at the encoding tables in these two articles, and notice that CP437 has lots of line and box drawing characters in the high half, while CP850 replaces many of them with accented letters.

If the file was written on a system using CP437, and used these line/box drawing characters, then someone on a system using CP850 would see random letters where the author intended fancy boxes around their text.

(This was due to a limitation of the text modes used to run MS-DOS: each character on the 80x25 fixed-size grid shown on the screen was described in memory by a single byte which was a index into the font table, plus another byte for attributes like color and intensity. That means there could be at most 256 distinct characters, and no way to combine separate characters into one. To add all the accented letters necessary for many languages, something had to be removed; and what was removed were the less important line and box drawing characters. That is very different from the graphical modes common nowadays, which store the color of each pixel separately in memory, and allow infinite variation on the character shapes.)
Nobody is forcing you to use a single Parquet file.
Does anyone know how fast the big ring in the sky keeps on turning?
Git has its quirks, but the underlying model is good.

There's some naming problems, like I just had to explain lightweight tags vs annotated ones to some newbies.

The lightweight ones should have had a different name, like "bookmarks" or something.
You're grossly underestimating the bandwidth needs of the site. You're not going to replace a cluster of fiber optic cables with Starlink.
> No need to act smug and superior

I responded with the same tone that gp responded with. "blows my mind" ( that people can be so stupid) .
Care to elaborate? I thought Chat Control laws and similar were deemed "unconstitutional" by the ECHR
I found an interesting example of an equal but opposite problem. After this game:

1. e4 c5 2. Nc3 g6 3. f4 Bg7 4. Nf3 d6 5. Bb5+ Bd7 6. Bc4 Nc6 7. O-O Qb6 8. d3 Nf6 9. e5 Ng4 10. Bxf7+ Kxf7 11. e6+ Bxe6 12. Ng5+ Kf6 13. Nxe6 Kxe6 14. Qxg4+ Kf7 15. f5 Ne5 16. fxg6+ Ke8 17. Qe6 Rf8 18. Nd5 Rxf1+ 19. Kxf1 Qd8 20. Bg5 Nxg6 21. Re1 Kf8 22. Nxe7 Nxe7 23. Bxe7+ Qxe7 24. Qxe7+ Kg8 25. Qxb7 Rf8+ 26. Kg1 Be5 27. Rxe5 dxe5 28. Qd5+ Kh8 29. Qxe5+ Kg8 30. Qxc5 Rf7 31. d4 Rf8 32. d5 Rf5 33. Qe7 Rf7 34. Qe8+ Rf8 35. Qe6+ Kg7 36. d6 Rf6 37. Qe7+ Rf7 38. Qe5+ Kg6 39. h4 Rf5 40. Qe8+ Kf6 41. d7 Rd5 42. d8=Q+ Rxd8 43. Qxd8+ Kf5 44. Qd7+ Kf4 45. Kf2 Ke4 46. Qxh7+ Kd4 47. Qd3+ Kc5 48. Ke3 Kb6 49. Qd6+ Kb7 50. Kd4 Kc8 51. Qe7 Kb8 52. Kc5 Ka8 53. Kc6 a6 54. Qb7#

The LLM has decided I'm rated 1784 in what was probably the most one-sided game I've played against it.
Structured finance is a math gig where the only constraint is legality. And as history shows, math nerds have no clue how to constrain the runaway damage their structured instruments can cause.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that AI development appears to be heading the same way.
I want to be able to customize a route in desktop Google Maps and send it to my phone.
What's the upside?
The Global Loss of the U-Shaped Curve of Happiness
It's likely analogous to scar tissue.

Ancient population suffers from massive viral load, causing such catastrophic damage that the whole surviving population carries some of the viral DNA fragments with it to this day.

Being alive is the reward.
> Your entire post reeks of "I'm smarter than you"

unlike "blows my mind" ?

> As stated the question didn't require any of what you outline here.

Right. OP mentioned it was "tricky question" . What makes it tricky is that all those attributes are implicitly assumed.
I wouldn't interview at google and tell them my "stack" is "load it on your laptop". I would never say that in an interview even if I think that's the right "stack" .
Actually, this is completely false. It is extremely easy to over hydrate to a life threatening degree if you do physical activity. It is quite trivial in fact to become hyponitremic.
The good ol' "subsidize demand" approach to reducing prices. And if prices continue to climb? Well, just subsidize demand harder and in more diverse ways. I assure you, eventually price will fall. You just haven't subsidized the demand side enough yet.
and off-by-one errors.
Dual Frames of Mind in Product Thinking
And Qatar and Deutsche Bank can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that their next few quarterly interest payments will be coming through after all.
Avoid someone profiting from someone's else work and providing the world with some good music
Why is this happening everywhere right now? On Reddit I see this in so many places (US, UK, Europe, not sure about Asia)
I was just explaining this to my mom today. Our generation has a lot of luxuries cheaper but also a lot higher fixed costs (housing, education, childcare, healthcare, etc). Even adjusting for inflation my college and rent were a few times what she paid when she was in her 20s so my experience is that people now who are doing well are doing really well but people who are struggling are really struggling.
Am I missing something here... When you sign up for Netflix, they take your money... Watching something costs them money for bandwidth, etc... So... If you watch 1 film a month, they "make" more money from you, since you haven't used too much bandwidth... The more you watch, the more bandwidth you cost them... so, the less you watch, the more money they get out of you... so, why would they want to make you binge more?
OMG, Elon’s simps are so fucking delusional. No, being wrong about a deadline is not fraud. Selling something with a promised deadline attached to it, and being wrong about that deadline for 6+ years is fraud.
That's not the main source of the problem, it's governments printing money that's causing this.
Make home ownership and renting them back to single families by corporations illegal. Seriously. It's the corporations doing ALL this. The people don't have the money.
some critiques of parquet by andy pavlo

https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol17/p148-zeng.pdf
No, just A16z, Sequoia and Prince Alwaleed Holdings.
Related: a flock of 100 feral chickens living in the woods is "tormenting" a village in the UK:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/26/out-...
The international business class is simply inferior to most of its competitors. Other airlines offer larger seats (4 seats per row vs. 6 seats per row). Their onboard entertainment systems use more modern hardware, provide a better selection of content, and sometimes even integrate better with personal devices. The culinary options are less refined. Additionally, Lufthansa still charges $27 for in-flight Wi-Fi. Their lounges are also subpar — smaller, more crowded, and with fewer culinary options. This is based on my personal experience flying with Lufthansa, Austrian, Swiss (all part of the same group), British Airways, Singapore Airlines, and Turkish Airlines. However, other business travelers echo these sentiments. It's noticeable that they enjoy a lack of competition in their home country of Germany, since some healthy competition would force them to actually improve their business class offering.
I’ve been wanting an obsidian plug-in that deprecates text and it doesn’t exist.

Simple idea: mark entire notes or portions of notes as “deprecated” and then have a toggle button that shows/hides deprecated text.
It's quite likely not ex-locals who own it, and in any case if they no longer live locally, they're not paying local taxes, or supporting local business.

I agree, income from property should be heavily taxed, it's essentially private profit from the land value, and that value derives directly from it's location and the strength of the local economy, rather than any effort or contribution from the owner.
Too few houses, too many landlords (commercial and "investment properties")
https://archive.ph/Lm6or
One of the key factors is the increased migration for China and India. While people did emmigrate before, it was much lower. So effectively they were walled off into their own pocket. Now, most of my co-workers are immigrants from India. It's like the rest of world's population is jumping by 2 billion. That is going to change the value of everything related to populations and living.
The Quest is pretty limited in hardware. The article mentions they use both Quest 2 and Quest 3; the Quest 2 is a $250 device that runs on a 5 year old mobile chip (about the same as the one in the Galaxy S20 Plus). The Quest 3 is much better (about on the level of a $500 phone), but they might just use the same games on both.

And in VR/AR low latency and high framerate are much more important than visual fidelity. Your brain just kind of accepts those low fidelity representations, but reacts very badly to latency spikes or frame drops.
CompCert isn't about a safe C, it's a verified C compiler. This means it has proofs that verify that the compiler correctly implements the C standard and that the binary code it produces is a faithful implementation of the original program as determined by C's semantics. This is used, for example, as part of the verification for the high-integrity, high-security seL4 microkernel.
Alaska was sparsely populated and had no (as of then discovered) natural resources. It was also not strongly tied to ethnic identity and religion as Palestine is both to Jews and Muslim Arabs. And it did not have a huge influx of people needing land which immediately set the scene for conflict with established inhabitants.
I'd say the main reason why there's a phobia of using C would be that it is a language that requires skilled programmers. C programmers are not interchangeable cogs which means corporations that are dependent upon C code have to hire the best programmers not the ones with the best "soft skills" or the ones with the "right" physical appearance.

The one thing corporations wanted, above all, was to increase the supply of programmers who won't break everything. This explains the trends towards safety in programming languages and it also explains why OOP became so popular. It also explains the push over the last 10-15 years or so for everybody to learn to code. Anything that is hard reduces the number of potential programmers which is bad for business's bottom line.