skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: My 6-Year Journey to Building a Social Media App from Scratch
In 2018, after completing my computer specialist training and just before starting university, my best friend and I came up with the idea for a social media app. We were driven by our frustration with how major platforms prioritize profits, often at the expense of user experience. These platforms have increasingly cluttered user feeds with ads, reducing the visibility of content that users genuinely follow and are interested in. This shift seems designed to keep users scrolling longer, not necessarily more meaningfully engaged. We felt this could be approached differently, aiming to build something more community-focused, free from external investor pressures.

One of the key features of the app is its focus on discovering local events and spots, which is particularly handy for users who are traveling or looking to explore their own city more deeply. This feature supports offline community engagement by encouraging users to meet up and share experiences.

I chose Flutter for development to ensure a consistent and efficient user interface across both Android and iOS devices. Keeping up with Flutter's updates over the years demanded continuous adaptation and optimization to maintain high performance.

For the backend, I used AWS and leaned heavily on its serverless offerings like Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB for data storage. I managed user authentication with Cognito, which, despite initial challenges, now runs smoothly thanks to several workarounds. The backend was built to be scalable and resilient, using an active-active multi-region setup through Infrastructure as Code, which allows me to expand to new regions quickly as needed.

After six years of sustained effort, the app has launched. It operates without ads or premium fees and includes features that facilitate user connections around shared interests and local events.

I'm keen to get your feedback and insights on how we can continue to refine and expand our app’s features. For those interested, I'm also happy to discuss more about the technical challenges and solutions I encountered.

Thank you for taking the time to read about my experience. It's been a long road, and being able to share this moment with you means a lot to me. If you're a fellow developer or someone dreaming of starting your own project, I hope my story shows that with enough determination, you can turn your ideas into reality, step by step. It's not easy, but it's definitely possible, and every small step counts.
GoDaddy's Founder, Bob Parsons: How He Brought Domains to the Masses
Are we seriously calling someone else’s server „serverless“? Serverless would be local compute for me, not calling an API I’m paying someone else for.
Our local shop has a section for goods expiring that day, which are cheaper. It's good.
Nifty! The preprint behind the article: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.20438

Skimming the article I wonder how extensible the approach would be to other context-sensitive translations - the silly example that came to mind is whether to use tu or vous and the corresponding verb conjugations in French - as the algorithm described isn't limited to binary categories
Much of nuclear physics was effectively “high energy physics” (or more appropriately named elementary particle physics) back in the day. They ceased to be elementary or high energy at some point. My very loose categorization is everything on the microscopic path towards the fundamental theories; and there’s another macroscopic path, cosmology.

Edit: Expanded a few times.
I very much hope my 14 year old is accessing things I'm not aware of. I consider it a rite of passage.

I'm not solving for my 14 year old. I'm solving for the other 11 million middle school students in the US who don't have access to used book stores and epubs and are very definitely impacted by school library censorship.
There are plenty of abridged versions of Les Misérables that includes all the parts relevant to the student reader and retains the appropriate level of challenge in leveling up the student's ability to engage with higher level writing.
Iunno, I think the only way to do that would be to ban all textile imports in those places, which would make every non-textile worker poorer.

Lots of places try to ban 2nd hand imports, but I think that just leads to poor quality “new” imports from even cheaper countries that have industrialized textile manufacturing.

Unsure what it would take for them to become competitive textile producers but that’s what would work the best in the end.

Maybe I’ve taken too many (one) economics courses…
Because I enjoy historical factoids, geography, history,... same reason people watch history channel.

Also, when authors go on these tangents, it can inspire a passion, and it will move worlds. The hunchback of the notre dame saved the church from demolition and became a totem, and it was precisely because of Hugo waxing lyrically for hundreds of pages on end about the atmosphere and architecture of medieval paris. If he had stuck to just the plot, the novel would've been, maybe more readable sure, but nonetheless poorer for it.

And lastly, because if you're in a class on western literature these long winded 19th century reads are a rite of passage. you have to do your part to carry forward a shared reference, one that transcends time and space. school is as good a time as any to make that effort, unwillingly even.
The distinctions between experimental-theoretical scientific disciplines are fairly arbitrary, e.g. where does one draw the line between physics and chemistry and biology? Mathematics is something of an exception but there's no Nobel for that, nor for astronomy, planetary science, etc.

The Nobels are grossly overrated and the idea that one can follow the most important scientific developments of the past century by just listing off the Nobel Prizes since 1905 is one best abandoned.
> Which is why personality analysis is entirely the wrong tool here

I mean its not really. What is his attitude to risk, how well does he understand people's motivations? what narrative is he selling his investors? what is he aiming for? what's his personal goal?

All of this shape the outcome of the company, and those are dependent on his personality.

In the same way that Musk is short sighted and thin skinned, means that twitter is the way it is. Zuck is happy to burn billions so long as the research looks promising. Bezos is all about market share.
That's hyperbolic nonsense. Germany today is a liberal democracy.
Do you really intend to argue that "better than Nazism" is subjective?
Apparently threadreaderapp.com now requires an account now, and twitter shows only the first message without an account. Twitter thread is simply not a good way of spreading information (assuming one wants this info to be read by the most people) - it was never good, and it only got worse unfortunately.
The sysadmins at my job frequently find malware artifacts on our servers, because we exclusively use Windows server. And the expectation is you RDP in to get stuff done, which means there's a big potential for human failure.

Also most Windows software is just taken off the web and installed with administrator privileges. Sure, there are package managers. In practice, they're rarely used on Windows.

From a technical standpoint, Windows isn't "that bad" at allowing malware. From a culture standpoint, almost nothing has changed since the 90s. Linux and Mac have a different culture.
That applies to the superb rocket scientists.

Others were hired for their expertise as spies, secret police and worse:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-age...

"Some spies for the United States had worked at the highest levels for the Nazis.

One SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews."
> because we have become amazingly good at distributing textual information.

Have we?

The costs to doing so have certainly gone down, but the entire de facto system is much more centralized than its physical-based precursor was.

Once a physical book was created, it existed until it was destroyed.

In contrast, all digital destruction takes is a takedown notice to the centralized host and ambivalence on the part of anyone else having archived it.

Physical books were persistent by default.
The SS was, generally, a volunteer thing; they did not conscript for the SS proper. The Wehrmacht was, at least by the period we're concerned with here, a conscript army, but the SS wasn't.
>However, no mainstream language has a first-class data type for representing money

Parcal has a Currency type. Though, I can understand not calling it mainstream... Fun fact it's a fixed point type which is just a Int64 behind the scenes, at least in Delphi.
Can't forget having to signal away from military. Accessible drone AI can be used to stop petty crime, man the borders, catch drug smuggling boats & ofc, kill people effectively. These uses are drenched in politics, so have to signal something more palatable.

Truly accessible drone automation software is instant unicorn status. It would've been acquired by Anduril or Dji before it saw the light of day.

We live in an interesting time where the 1st world's biggest problems (illegal immigration, drug smuggling, obesity, effective transportation, solving crimes, infinite energy) are already solved from a technical standpoint. But we artificially limit their use due to dystopian vibes.
Second the Asianometry shout-out: Jon makes deep-dive video essays around the semiconductor ecosystem. Recommended.
If you used iMessage, Apple phones remember this and will continue sending you iMessages which you won't receive on your non-Apple phone.
Coming in with a very late response - after going back to the manual as I should have, I realized Continue.dev has other options for using locally hosted models (e.g. LM Studio) so I'm going to try those
You could also extrapolate this into more than two terms by squinting your eyes and saying that λ ∈ {1, -1} is close enough to λi ∈R^d ∣ ∥λi ∥=1. No idea if it would result in better performance, but that's research babyyyy!
I think what comes next is interest-based, influencer-moderated, semi-private chat rooms. For example a lot of hobby youtuber have moderated discord servers. My diy 3d printing communities have discord servers. I have a few invite-only discord servers for various circles of friends and family.
Samsung Apologizes for Falling Behind in AI Chips Race
This is funny to me because I recently re-read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and I found the general vibe very appealing. I'm not currently immersed in a world of well-spoken high-status gentlemen-scientists who carry out their own experiments and enforce the law themselves without any bureaucracy -- but it sure does seem appealing to me!
Elon Musk’s 2.4 mile subterranean road network
You can find jailbreaks for that generation of iPhone that are fairly reliable.

The problem with jailbreaks is that you’re in untrusted code territory. Treat them accordingly.

Project Sandcastle may have better support for 6 these days but you’d have to check. Last I checked the 7’s had the best support.

Good luck and have fun!
Sure, "we broke it so we should try to help maintain it" is entirely an ethical question and not a scientific one.

Are you satisfied now? Can we go back to talking about the problem instead of arguing about the definition of "natural"?

...but wait, you're the one that introduced the word "natural" to this conversation, using it as a reason to do nothing. That's ridiculous. If everything is natural, then your argument would say we should never do anything ever.

You can't have it both ways. If you want to use such a wide-reaching definition of natural, then you can't also use "natural" as a motivation to not intervene.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/samsungs-chip-technologies-fall-beh...
In case it needs to be spelled out, the problem is Europe has a maritime duty to rescue [1]. Once rescued, it has a duty to consider asylum and take care of the migrants/refugees [2]. Essentially, once SAR identifies a migrant vessel in distress, the closest country is forced to admit them.

The duty to rescue means "a state cannot legally prohibit its vessels from rescuing persons at sea." This technically covers search. But some Mediterranean governments have taken the view that if they don't see the migrant vessel sink they don't have a duty to rescue.

[1] https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-cr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_Relating_to_the_Sta...
Actually that is quite common in Germany, just for the completely opposite purpose - farmers use Mavic 2/3 Thermal drones to scout out for baby deer prior to letting a corn or grain harvester raze a field... because turns out, baby deer just freeze up when they are afraid of the machines and end up getting chopped up by the blades.
> Back in the 32 bits days there was a ~700 MB limit due to the address space, but there aren't anymore nowadays with 64 bits.

Not true, unless something changed recently (definitely more recently than the 32->64 transition). All iPhones have a virtual memory limit (although the limit is higher on phones with more physical RAM).

I know this for sure because several years ago I was the main person in charge of reducing OOM kills on the Facebook iPhone app and virtual memory exhaustion on 64-bit phones was definitely an issue.

See here for where this is enforced in XNU: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/xnu-1121...

I assume Apple does this specifically because they want to prevent apps from simulating swap space by mapping a big file and allocating from it.
Improving Parquet Dedupe on Hugging Face Hub
Was tremendously intrigued to see Marcou's name and position on the topic that came up in this discussion. He's a titan in historical geology.
But I can't think of any early maps that identify this people group or mountain range. Especially early on (16th -17th century). Solid, reliable depictions of the Central American interior come late, many in the late 18th and early 19th century.
Identifying people groups was pretty darned important. Think to those early maps for New England, identifying people groups were as abundant as placenames and detailed landform. Take the Blaeu for New England, abundant in native peoples...
https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~3...

I appreciate Marcou's map (1890) being a historical recreation of that region of Nicaragua, but I would have expected this tribal name to be an anchoring notation throughout early maps of the region from the beginning. But maybe I'm missing something.
And then it transformed into "move things and break fast".
I completely agree that in a free market, the longshoremen are entitled to throwing whatever tantrum they like.

Is that actually in their best interest? Opinions differ.

By the way, here are some examples of what I mean:

Real disposable income is up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0

Real median personal income is up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
Every company I've worked for in the last 20 years or so have combined sick time and vacation time into a single "paid time off" bucket.

I strongly prefer that, honestly. It means that I don't have to categorize the reasons why I'm taking the time off because it doesn't matter. It's all just time off.

The key to remember is that it means that PTO is not "vacation time". It's a paid time off allowance that can certainly be used for vacation, but can also be used for other things.
> "Latinos" are what Spanish and (to a much lesser extent) Portuguese-speaking people living in the USA call themselves (and their relatives still living in other Latin-American countries). They seem to prefer it to "Hispanics".

In my part of the world (Santa Fe, New Mexico), people of "direct" Spanish descent prefer the term "Hispano" to differentiate themselves from both Hispanics (n-th cousins who might still arrive here, but did so after several generations south of Mexico City), and Latinos which is broadly equivalent to Hispanic.
You can see here:

res = rest(ollama, {

"model": "llava",

"prompt": genprompt(box.name),

"images": [box.export()],

"stream": False

})

They are calling the ollama API to run Llava. Llava is a combo of an LLM base model and + vision projector (clip or ViT), and is usually around 4 - 8GB. Since every token generated needs access to all of the model weights, you would have to send 4 - 8 GB through USB with the Coral. Even at a generous 10gbit/s that is 8GB / 1.25GB = 6.4seconds per token. A 150 (short paragraph) generation would be 16minutes.
How do you remember what you have read in a book

Daydream about the narrative.
If there is no cohesive narrative, create one in your daydreams.

and how do you act on that?

Play "pretend" about it, invite friend(s) - dress up, house, larp - immersion - have fun with it!
Isn't there an etching step somewhere so that the stamp doesn't need to physically deform the workpiece? Like stamp a soft "mechanoresist" layer, then cure the resist, then etch?

The same technique could be used to create copies of a master stamp without much wear on the master.
Nice! Reminds me of the ergonomics of Rebol's money type:

https://www.rebol.com/docs/core23/rebolcore-16.html#section-...

> $100 + 11
$111.00

> $10 / .50
$20.00

In general, Rebol's type system was very expressive. Would love to see more libraries like this provide that type of experience.
Not forcing kids to struggle through books they don’t care for creates generations of adults who think they can’t or simply won’t do anything that is hard or that they don’t want to do.

They shouldn’t only be reading these challenging works, but they should be reading some of them.
Show HN: Google-Like Avatar Stylization for Today's Holiday
I get the hoopla about why this shouldn't be in physics, but to answer your question: everything.

We like to act like it's a new abstraction entirely, but everything about code is predicated on physics and earlier associated works.
That's my favorite book as well. I came to it much later than college, and still found so much wisdom in it.
In such a state, it's hard to be "respected in your field" unless you publicly pledge loyalty to the ruling party. This does not mean that all such people were all apolitical, just that their motives and outlook will vary. And that for people who were prominent when the Nazis came to power, there likely wasn't much middle ground between "leave the country, go far away" and "join the party".
Home Depot software devs to spend 1 day per quarter working in a retail store
It's more the fact that you're willfully ignorant which makes you annoying. Numerous people have already explained to you why you're wrong and you just keep repeating yourself. You're a hypocrite and you don't even realize it. I'm not going to waste my time trying to reason with an unreasonable person.
While I personally am not a harbinger of failure, here with my Macbook and my boring Toyota and various LG appliances, I always have enjoyed going to Grocery Outlet to sample various after-the-fact product failures available at low, low prices. It's fun to spend a dollar or two on "what were they thinking?" foodstuffs. My personal favorite has always been the Lance Armstrong performance-enhanced Stroopwafel, always befuddling. Breakfast cereals with excessive chocolate. Stale candies. Wines with weird labels. Just magic.
The notion that generating something "in the style of" a human creator is a violation of copyright is categorically false. Copyright is only infringed when a work is substantially copied. Generating something new but with a similar feel is fair game. That OUGHT to be (but, obnoxiously, seems not to be) universally uncontroversial.

Human creators might bristle and find it distasteful to have works automatically generated in a style they spent a long time honing, but it is most certainly not a violation of copyright.
You'll need a travelling eSIM for that as plans from regular providers usually have restrictions on how long you can use them in roaming. The downside to this is that travelling eSIMs usually don't give you as much data as some local plans - at least in some markets.
> Do stats often deal with distict probabilities below 10^-300?

Yes and with very wide dynamic range, though you really try to avoid it using other tricks. A lot of methods involve something resembling optimization of a likelihood function, which is often [naively] in the form of a product of a lot of probabilities (potentially hundreds or more) or might also involve the ratio of two very small numbers. Starting out far away from the optimum those probabilities are often very small, and even close to the optimum they can still be unreasonably small while still having extremely wide dynamic range. Usually when you really can't avoid it there's only a few operations where increased precision helps, but again even then it's usually a bandaid in lieu of a better algorithm or trick to avoid explicitly computing such small values. Still, I've had a few cases where it helped a bit.
Yeah, at the peak of Vietnam we had more troops on the ground than the Army has on active duty today (about 450k). The Army's size declined by half after Vietnam, and then declined by half again in the 1990s. This is a nice figure illustrating active duty end-strength for all services since 1950: https://www.laits.utexas.edu/gov310/media/fad_milper_400.gif

That figure doesn't go back as far as WWII, of course. Even the Korea and Vietnam-era Army would be dwarfed by the WWII Army: 8 million troops in 1945.

Note that we do also have the Army Reserve and Army National Guard, which effectively doubles the total Army end-strength to about 1 million today.

As a career Army officer, I could go on about this, and what it means, and what worries me, all day.
I think what people find "wild" is likely the blatant contradictions in rhetoric between valuing humans and valuing "impressive achievements". The US and the NAZIs are merely the best examples of valuing the latter over the former. At least, for now.

Notably, nobody in this entire comment section has been able to articulate how the space race has improved humanity more than equivalent efforts that focus on human quality of life, like implementing a public healthcare system. Whitey On The Moon rings just as true now as it did 60 years ago. Political posturing that happened to spawn technological development is a poor excuse for lack of coherent values. The fact that we achieved something that is truly admirable does not excuse for the general lack of giving-a-shit-about-humans that surrounds national politics. You know what else would be admirable? Taking care of our neighbors even if they don't contribute to the GDP.
There's another pretty common case: children who get lost somehow or decide to go on walks by their own and don't find their way back home but seek shelter wherever they can.

I'm training for drone-based SAR at the German THW (Technical Relief Agency) at the moment, and that's probably going to be the majority of usecases.
Incorrect. ẞ is still a thing.
Counterpoint: Nazis aren't here to engage you in good faith debates, so it would be a mistake to attempt to defeat them by doing that.
You Shouldn't Forget to Optimize the Data Layout
Better obesity drugs are coming soon
I guess the question I’ve always had with the “sell by” label is, how much longer is the food good for after that date?
A “best before” date would at least give me a chance at not messing that up.

However it’s all just a shot in the dark anyway isn’t it ?
How do QR codes work? (Veritasium) [video]
My understanding is that the American soldiers who violated the rules of engagement or other rules of war have been rounded up and prosecuted. Can you provide any evidence to the contrary? Anyone who slipped through the cracks? Honestly asking, I haven't looked too closely.