skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, they are "encrypted", but not end-to-end encrypted. Encryption does not really mean much if someone else has the keys. So it is reasonable to treat non-secret chat messages as if they were unencrypted.
The acquisitions that PayPal management doesn't talk about
PayPal spent $5.3 billion to acquire Zettle, Hyperwallet, and Paidy businesses, and now hardly mentions them on the earnings calls
Is it safer to use an app or a website on your phone?
Why not just build a nice small sustainable company in that case?
Is the font rendering any better on other platforms? On Windows it's so poorly hinted that the top and bottom of the lowercase 's' are disconnected
Why I Prefer Unconferences to Conferences
Inception (2010), Matrix (1999 was the best), John Wick series, Fast Furious 1, 2, Tokyo Drift.
Saved our developers working from 2476 B.C. to 2024 A.D. (4,500 Years of Developer Work)
I built a simple teleprompter web app to help record talking head videos with the front camera of my MacBook this week.

Link: https://camprompter.app

The insight is that if you read text from a tiny enough box right below the front camera on the MacBook, it appears as if you're talking to the camera.

Boom! Easy Eye Contact With Camera.

I scrunched up the Notion app and placed it as well as I could in the safe area to test it out for a couple of videos, but then I just wrote a web app because it seemed like the next logical step.

Once you paste the script and hit play... you can only see the text in the safe area so your eyes don't wander.

Fire up PhotoBooth and try it out!

PS: Press F for fullscreen.
I'm working on Xona AI (https://xona.ai). I want to democratize the generation of 3D visualizations for interior and exterior design. We will launch next week on ProductHunt :)

Very excited.
Reference to what? Didn't I just coin it?! Aw, it sounded so good, too...
> If you call me wrong, at least give it hands and feets.

\|/ \|/
\ /
You're wrong!
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^^^ ^^^

Sorry, couldn't help myself. There's an obscure Polish joke it made me think of (punchline being, thankfully you didn't ask for it to "hold its shit together").
I discovered this myself when I attended a data science summer school, a 2-day bootcamp. I knew Python and Jupyter. I know basics of Operations Research, though I barely passed the class back in time. I took classes on optimization classes thanks to industrial engineering classes. But at the end of the boot camp, I was as illiterate on data science as I was at the beginning. I was just more confused. Then, I understood that I was missing the mathematical prerequisites for the understanding. I still felt dumb though.
I'm sorry this was downvoted. It is probably a bit too pithy for HN.

I think you raise a good point even if there are some "technicalities" about it.

Real question: I'm not an aerospace geek. The term "first stage" has probably changed at lot in rocket science in the last 50 years. From the NASA Space Shuttle to SpaceX Falcon 9, has the definition changed? From my elementary school memories, the Space Shuttle used a giant center rocket and two booster rockets that we expendable, but you are definitely right that the Space Shuttle "thing" (no idea how to call it) was used over and over again, (somewhat) safely. Something that I don't know: Where Apollo programme capsules reusued? I assume no.
I have watched The Lord of The Rings trilogy- extended edition many times, something like 7/8 times.

There are two series that I have watched 2/3 times- The Wire and Narcos first two seasons with Wagner Moura.

I have also watched 3 idiots quite a few times. I also remember watching Inception and Inglorious Bastards multiple times. I have also watched Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Casino Royale and Skyfall multiple times.
A lot of people hate rote learning - but elementary math classes, meaning all the way up to calculus (or prior to more rigorous proof based classes), do require a bunch of memorization. That's on top of getting an intuition...the "Aha!" moments.

I've observed that many math students in those types of elementary classes struggle because they're unable to recognize identities. They get some problem which involves substituting hard parts with easier parts using identities, but don't recognize them. So they try to solve the problem directly, and end up writing pages upon pages, before either getting stuck or doing some error that follows them until they get stuck.

Once they're showed what identities to use, they say "of course, I should have known that!" - but they never put in the time to solve all the problems.

And I was like that, too. I always thought that math would be a nifty because you'd "only" need to learn the various theorems, and if you understood those, then that should have been enough. It didn't really hit me that I'd need to put in hard work solving problem sets until I started recognizing patterns and knowing what to use, and where to use it.

Same goes for those that don't really understand the theory. Lots of math problems later will be of the type "Here's a difficult looking problem, is [statement x] true or false?" - and because they don't understand what math theorem to use, and all its properties, they'll try to brute force it by jumping into calculations.

You see it all the time in calculus, where students are asked to solve some nasty looking integral problem, which is much simpler if you know and use properties regarding symmetry and stuff like that.

I'd say for most people, there's no free lunch when learning math. You'll need to understand it, and you'll have to practice.

There's always going to be some extremely high-IQ individuals that can do pretty advanced math purely by logical deduction - but for the vast majority, it comes down to hard work.
Do you believe everything that is written down?
An open source alternative to Strava (a fitness tracking app that allows users to share their running, cycling, and other workout activities using GPS data).

https://cubetrek.com
Don't forget the ports! I have had a blast playing this on my PS vita.
Black Hole in Orbit Around a Planet Could Be a Sign of an Advanced Civilization
Can you teach me? When you say "The new Raptor engine", do you mean version 3? I needed to read Wiki to learn there are multiple versions. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor#Raptor_3
No, I am very far from agreeing with you. I am saying that if you keep all other conditions the same, you will still see vast differences in the ease of understanding mathematics. This is borne out both by science - there is strong consensus that intelligence is highly heritable, and everybody's experience.

So even if we limit "aptitude" to a strictly genetic sense, it will still explain most of the difference in math ability at 7. All other factors related to growing up will add up to less than half of that.

Regarding practice compensating for genetics, I am not talking about having more supportive parents or more demanding pre-school, I am talking about Asian level hardcore drilling. That can certainly make up for most of the difference, at least when it comes to basic mathematics. But that means that the concepts that a child with math aptitude will pick up in 5 minutes will take 5 hours of drilling for another child.
Let me introduce you how 1-1 chats are not encrypted by the default, that this option is quite hidden, that many/most Telegram users don´t even know about "private chats", and that their particular hand-rolled encryption scheme has been questioned by encryption experts for many years.
Why would they? It's mostly just a couple of thousand people following those channels. Analyzing their meta data and behavior is worth much more than restricting reach of these channels or forcing them to go elsewhere.
If our democracy is as robust as our leaders advertise it, it should easily cope with extremism, anti-vaxxers and system opponents.
China has at least one Falcon 9 clone in testing stages (that one that accidentally launched during static fire a while ago) and many new-space rocket companies have reusable vehcles in pipeline (eq. Rocketlabs Neutron). Even Europe is going to do that - eventually. :P
The title is far too generous. They've only launched a single spacecraft so far which failed due to communications issues. They're planning to launch a second spacecraft in Q4 this year which will fly by an asteroid and take pictures. They're planning a third spacecraft which they say will dock to an asteroid using magnets because it's "likely iron rich" and basically take measurements.

Nothing about actually mining resources and returning those materials to Earth. So they've gotten funding from investors? In the past, even dumber endeavours have gotten even more funding than this, it really doesn't mean anything.
my list of features needed for a usable audio player:

for audiobooks the ability to skip forward and backwards a few seconds. the best way to do that i found is to swipe left and right. short swipe is a short skip, swipe across the whole screen is maybe a minute. also the ability to quickly jump to a certain manually chosen timestamp.

also for audiobooks, the ability to bookmark positions. not all audio books have chapter markers.

for audiobooks and podcasts: list files by their names in storage sorted by timestamp or name. many podcasts and chapterized audiobooks don't set chapter or episode titles correctly. i have seen players where the title was always the title of the book or the name of the podcast, making it impossible to identify which file was which episode or chapter. also author names and even podcast titles are sometimes inconsistent, because spelling errors, different authors or multiple names for a podcast.

do not assume that the file metadata is consistent or correct and make it easy for the user to work around inconsistencies.
It's either strategic incompetence, technical incompetence, or both at this point.
Worse than that, it had a negative learning effect. Nuclear did have some learning but over the course of it positive effect (Wright's law) was more than counterbalanced with discovering many, many things that can go wrong, requiring very expensive design changes and even more expensive retrofits to existing reactors, and eventually required designers to become so paranoid about new designs they became prohibitively expensive to implement because of extended safety measures even in areas where they were probably unnecessary. Simply put: too many things can go wrong, price of mistake is too damn high, and any mistake is probably unfixable because even if a reactor is fine, retrofitting an existing reactor to accommodate safety-related change is frequently impossible because it's guts are forever radioactive even after a short runtime.

It was a political mistake to ever move with the nuclear power to outside of it's initial role: production of plutonium for nukes. Ironically, plutonium-producing reactors are much much safer because they don't need to produce high-pressure steam so can remain at atmospheric pressure cooled by vast amounts of cooling water, and they never develop too much radioactivity within themselves because fuel is irradiated there for 20x-100x shorter durations than in energy-producing reactors (to ca. 1 MW thermal*day per kg) because doing more increases posioning with Pu.240, so even a potential accident on an industrial reactor is much less dangerous, and much less likely.
I remember UFO sightings being super common before smartphones. Celebrities always talking about every once in a while, a maid when I was a kid swearing she could see lights in the sky, etc.

I even remember some people in my small town getting together to talk about it.

(It seems aliens have wised up to the ubiquity of cameras, though!)
Thank you! This was initially a startup idea but it was very hard to sell a cyber security solution with a very bare bones product to companies large enough to have this problem. Because the required features of such large orgs are just too much for such an early stage team.

So I'm now doing it a bit as a side project but I hope to at some point also offer a paid version to fund development long term.
Maybe useful in some cases, but this calendar has a heading saying the lessons are "every other week" so you don't have to make 13 calendar entries. It takes a few seconds but you can make a calendar entry on September 13, tell your calendar app that it repeats every two weeks, and then you delete the six "vacation" slots. This is much faster.
I completely agree. If correctness matters, then it’s probably better to use LLMs to write the code than to let LLMs be the code.
I'm working on a library and accompanying notebooks to process secondary school exam results (UK). My father has been doing this for years for his trust and has a fantastic spreadsheet that spits out loads of data for each school.

I've recently taken a new job working closely with some data scientists so wanted to skill up a little. So far I've got an elixir library which can calculate Attainment 8 and Progress 8. They're formulas provided by the DfE to understand individual student progress, and the schools ability to progress students.

It's just a bit of fun, and is letting me experiment with some of the various elixir data libraries and livebook. At the end of it, his trust is going to plug in some anonymous data and see if they can get more insights than this mega spreadsheet.

It's also nice to be doing a side project which isn't aimed at being a business.
I doubt you’re the only user of the Ruby documentation though.

I’m not a (frequent) Ruby user, but I routinely check the Go documentation, the MDN, the Python documentation, and several other language documentations on mobile. Because sometimes I will think of something while I’m walking my dog, or while I’m in my couch, or before sleeping, or at any other moment.

Mobile UX is exactly as important as desktop UX. And for a text only website (ie. not a web app) you don’t even need to spend time to make it work, it’s almost the default behavior. You have to go out of your way to make a text website that doesn’t render well on mobile.
> Saved for the movie recommendations in the comments.

As an alternative to that approach, consider:

Upvoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/upvoted?id=L0in

Favorites: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=L0in

In your case, this second one would be less to skim through later, and the post title would remind you of the topic.
> LLMs are good at predicting the next word in written language. They are generative; they make new text given a prompt. LLMs do not have base sets of facts about how complex systems work, and do not attempt to reason over a corpus of evidence and facts.

Not wanting to advocate for using LLMs for RCA, which is a dumb and dangerous idea for all the reasons the OP mentioned - but I am getting allergic to the phrase "it just predicts the next word".

Yes, that is how the "API" of an LLM works, but on itself, it says nothing about how the LLM does the prediction and how complex the internal model is that it uses for that task.

It's obvious that the task of predicting has a huge variance in complexity, depending on which word has to be predicted.

E.g. the sentence "The apple does not fall far from the" could be completed by a decently trained Markov chain, whereas (correctly!) completing "sqrt(153847)=" would either require an impossibly large training set or an internal model that can parse integers and perform square root calculations.

Yet both are on the surface "predict the next word" tasks.

The actual complexity of LLMs' internal models seems to still be poorly understood. That's not to say the model has superhuman ability or even reaches human abilities. But the point is that it's still really hard to make predictions how complex the reasoning is that an LLM performs for a task.

In the OP's example, we can't really say if the LLM "has base sets of facts about how complex systems work", because we don't really know if and how "facts" would be represented inside the model. If enough in-domain examples were in the trainset, there is no fundamental reason why it wouldn't have learned such a set of facts.

Just saying "it can't reason at all because it's just a next word predictor" is mixing up different layers of meaning and, I believe, does not lead to more insight.
Understood. Thanks for considering it and the cool project
It's not the "access" to those books that gave you an edge, 95% of children would be completely uninterested in those books. As you know, today 100% of Western children have free and instant access to the best math teaching material you could imagine, right from the phones, but math grades keep falling.
And yet the current Swedish government appointed her again to the European Commission.
Couldn’t you “just” create a nullable distance column and update anything that’s null and reachable by Bacon and set it to 1. Then update anyone still null and reachable by 1 to 2, etc. Then you have a materialized view of everyone’s Bacon number.

Not a generic solution of course, but seems extremely effective for the Bacon case.
In my tests, if you operate over diverse forms or documents the information extraction rate is around 90%. It's especially hard for complex forms.
Show HN: Vidu AI Video – Seamless Visual Consistency in Video Creations
While working on various video projects, I noticed a recurring challenge: maintaining visual consistency across multiple video clips, especially in secondary video creation. Whether it's for brand marketing, combining footage from different sources, or ensuring a uniform look across different scenes, achieving this consistency often requires significant time and effort.

### Understanding the Demand
I realized that this issue not only hampers efficiency but also limits creative potential. After discussing with fellow creators and researching the market, it became clear that there's a strong demand for a tool that can automate the process of maintaining visual consistency, allowing creators to focus more on the content rather than the technical details.

### The Development Journey
Driven by this need, I embarked on developing an intelligent video tool. Over the course of 6 months, through numerous technical challenges and iterations, I finally brought Vidu AI Video to life.

### Key Features
- *Intelligent Consistency Algorithm*: Automatically analyzes and adjusts video clips to maintain a consistent visual style.
- *Seamless Secondary Creation Tools*: Whether you're merging clips, editing, or adding effects, Vidu AI Video ensures a uniform output.
- *User-Friendly Interface*: A clean, intuitive interface that makes it easy for users to get started and enhances creative efficiency.

### Try It Out
I invite you all to try out Vidu AI Video and share your feedback. Your insights will be invaluable in helping us refine the product and make it even more beneficial for creators everywhere.
Telegram Founder Arrested in France
"risk of a wind turbine is, and always was, zero" seems like you need to check on how many people die a year while maintaining wind turbines.

Fukushima accident: corruption

Chernobyl: incompetence

Three mile island accident: that's a bit more nuanced than just human error, but nothing we haven't fixed already

SL-1: suicide-murder/human error

Those are the serious accidents. As you may see, all are perfectly fixable. Plus, current nuclear plants are more advanced. Now while you have on your mind these 4 accidents, consider that currently there are 403 in use plants and oldest one is over 60 years. All working with no issue.
Sure, but you presumably don't put up a bad/old-looking web UI to not use as well? That was my point, given that it's hosted somewhere, why so poorly.
No dark mode? Seriously?
Currently working on game development in Godot. We're making Dice'n Goblins, a dungeon-crawler RPG inspired by classics like Etrian Odissey and Wizardry VII, with a cartoon aesthetic similar to Paper Mario. The twist is that you have to collect and use dice to beat the monsters that crawl inside the dungeon.

A demo should be available very soon, meanwhile you can wishlist it on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2945950/Dice_n_Goblins/
https://github.com/anacrolix/possum

concurrent disk-backed cache supporting efficient direct file I/O, transactions, and snapshots using file cloning and sparse files
Chat Control isn't pushed by a "handful of EU MEPs", but the European Commission.

Notably, it can be agreed upon in the EC using qualified majority, unilateral veto doesn't apply.

The last time they tried (in June), the qualified majority wasn't reached, but the difference was slim.
I'm not sure being "gifted" has anything to do with it. High school is easy, and they keep dumbing it down over time. Little to zero effort is required to pass. This can fool people with a minimal amount of intelligence into thinking they're Very Smart. Especially since everybody keeps telling you that you're the smartest kid around and treating you like a nerd. I was able to get near max grades with little study in the subjects I cared about, and passable grades with zero effort in the ones I didn't. It can seriously warp one's perception of reality.

When I got into medical school I straight up failed a class for the first time in my life right in my first semester. I got my ass kicked so hard it's not even funny. I had to put in actual effort into learning stuff for the very first time in my life. I had to spend all of my waking hours in the laboratories to learn this stuff. I met people who had zero issues studying 5-10 times as much as I did. In the middle of it all I got diagnosed with ADHD by the neurologist I was shadowing.

This is when I finally understood the point of school. One of the most bitter complaints from students is the fact most people don't use the knowledge they learn. That's not really the point of school. The point is to just show that you can learn. The point is teaching you how to study and apply yourself so that you don't get your ass kicked later in life when the really difficult stuff starts. Perseverance and mental resillience.

I'm not really a "gifted" person but people treated me like one and in retrospect it was quite detrimental to me. If anything they probably need to identify the "smart" kids and kick their asses harder because the existing classes aren't getting the job done. But if teachers do that people accuse them of tracking...
Oh I'm the one who ported Julius to the PS Vita[1]. I'm glad you enjoy it :)

[1] https://github.com/bvschaik/julius/pull/110
From the article:

“Y Combinator, the San Francisco start-up incubator that launched Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe and Coinbase, is backing a weapons company for the first time, entering a sector it has previously shunned.

“Ares Industries, which launched last week, has pitched its “low-cost cruise missiles” as suited for use in a potential war between the US and China in the Taiwan Strait. The start-up claims that US weapons stockpiles would be exhausted within weeks in such a conflict, and that “recent conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have shown that our weapons are too large, too expensive for the wars of today”.

”Ares’ founders, Alex Tseng and Devan Plantamura, say their $300,000 anti-ship cruise missiles “will be 10x smaller and 10x cheaper” than today’s alternatives. On the YC website, Tseng’s biography consists of a single sentence: “Missiles are cool.”

Yeah… a couple million people in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and elsewhere might have different feelings about the inherent coolness of missiles.

Is it inevitable that the startup heroes of twenty years ago become absorbed into the worst aspects of the old system? The creator of Mosaic and Netscape is now a crypto-peddling Trump supporter, and Paul Graham’s YC is part of the military-industrial complex.
Doesn’t iOS or android tell you when an AirTag is in the vicinity and following you?