skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We have tools to dynamically adjust curriculum difficulty for students who value education, whether because they're self-motivated or because their parents make them. The challenge is what to do about the large number of students - at many schools the majority - who don't. When you where dynamically adjust to a student who doesn't particularly care to study, or doesn't have the support to do it properly, you end up with the recurrent scandals where a high school is found to be graduating people who can't read.

Extracurricular studies are always possible for the students who are furthest ahead of the curve, and good schools usually do accommodate that. For the rest, I would argue that a fixed number of tracks that insist on pulling students along is the only practical solution.
Show HN: API monetization with its own billing engine built from scratch
It started as an attempt to replicate some of RapidAPI's functionality in Go around Oct. 2020. Just for fun.

The first public version was released in Dec. 2022 (after I got hit by the job market turbulence) and had no billing capabilities at all, but it allowed API providers to configure "subscriptions plans" more flexibly than with RapidAPI.
Like, you could include several APIs in one plan, exclude certain endpoints from low-cost plans, block some API calls based on request attributes, apply rate limits per group of endpoints from different APIs, etc. And manually create subscriptions, which allowed users to access the API in accordance with the configured rules.

After a month, it became clear that without payments it's not particularly useful.

That's how Billing 1.0 was born, initially integrating only with Stripe.
However, it was already quite versatile, as it could bill for any product-related metrics, not just API calls, combine recurring prices with different billing periods in one subscription, etc. It didn’t use Stripe Billing for subscriptions. It was handling them on its own. True hero.

After a month, it became clear that without self-service onboarding for API users it's not particularly useful.

So we added self-service checkout pages (like Stripe's payment links). And added themes, so that checkout page style could be customized.
API users were happy to self-service onboard themselves.
We didn't ask but pretty sure they were.

Only one part was missing: there was no automatic payment collection. Each time, users had to go to the website, click "Pay" and enter payment details :-/
That was quickly addressed in the summer 2023. Because like...no off-session charges? Really?

Then we integrated the billing engine with Paddle to cover the needs of European providers for Merchant of Record option. That's late fall 2023.

Then we rebranded because the initial name of the product was derived from the name of the folder where the code was stored in 2020, the domain was in *.biz zone and the design was too 2010.
That's spring 2024.

Then, we added analytics that allowed providers to run free-form SQL queries on the data produced by the API gateway.

(I'm turning the commit log into complete sentences here)

Then, we worked to make the API gateway globally distributed. And deployed it in several points of presence. Because why not. And also, our monitoring's latency graph looks more impressive with the drop.

After a month, it became clear that without subscription upgrades/downgrades, one-off prices and a ton of other billing features it's not particularly useful.

So we implemented all of them, released Billing 2.0 (a month ago) and wrote an article on Medium about it (today).

Immediately after the release, it became clear that without a hosted white-label user portal it's already somewhat useful. But it's better with a hosted white-label user portal. So we added that.

After a month, it became clear… :D

Hope you find it useful. Thanks for reading!

The article on Medium, btw: https://nadles.medium.com/billing-2-0-91666da99c74
That doesn't explain why the Cybertruck bothers people more than other expensive things. And the rich have always been ready to express horror at the tastes of the poor (and even more so, the tastes of the slightly less rich). It can't all be about feeling hard done by.

I think people tend to be grumpier about things they consider ugly if those things take up a large amount of public space. People get similarly riled by brutalist architecture.

But really, there's nothing new about people having strong feelings about other people's tastes. Fashion is as much about communication as personal pleasure.
> Objective metrics are very hard.

I agree, but without them we all fall victims to our own blinding bias. Is there much of a point in making predictions or holding opinions when you don't have objective metrics to draw from? Sure, someone has to do it, but not the people in the comment sections of a social media site where we're all trying to learn more.
Can JS/TS based terminal be competitive?
Forbes 30 Under 30 Founder Who Sold A.I. Chatbot to Schools Charged with Fraud
I don't really see a real proposal on this site for something better, besides basically "just let the engineers do it" -- which sort of ignores the fact that lots of software is boring business line software where engineers are not SMEs on the usage, and lots of engineers don't want to spend their time becoming SMEs on the business rules of an ERP or a CRM.
Why is that a problem? It sounds like you successfully had your questions answered.
By the end am not sure, but I think this comment should have been marked /s.
The third prong is a bit badly posed: descriptively, white kids test better than black kids, and each of the three prongs offers an explanation. The third prong points to a discredited belief of genetic inferiority; by positioning the three prongs as exhaustive, the author structures the argument such that if you don't accept either of the first two prongs, then you must be a racist.
Congrats on the launch! Where can I download the desktop app? I tried looking for it on the website and couldn't find it.
In Ideas That Created the Future [1], a curated and edited set of influential computer science papers, the Leibniz contribution is "The True Method" [2], which I read more or less as "if we could formalize everything, we could use mathematical methods to find answers to all questions".

In the collection of papers, it's picked because of its ideas later formalized in Boolean logic, and logic programming in general.

[1]: https://direct.mit.edu/books/edited-volume/5003/Ideas-That-C...

[2]: https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/624726/3/The%20true%20method.pdf
that's a great idea - I put together one example for getting an MFA code for a website, but the captcha thing "pull a human into a web session" is something I've wanted to play with for a while
Given standard home kitchen equipment and techniques, could you prepare this item? Yes -> not UPF; No, requires a factory -> UPF.

This is kind of like the Jeff Foxworthy jokes.

If you remove so many of the nutrients that you have to try to spray vitamins back on... you might make a UPF.

If your product has ingredients where there is no evidence that those ingredients can actually be digested by the human body... you might make a UPF.

If you have to add dyes so your product doesn't look like sawdust or poop, you might make a UPF.

...
I think at some point, the term API should be replaced with another acronym to emphasize humans as the focal point.
The article clearly states the below along with numerous other issues.

"That [airline] employee was being paid by the DEA a percentage of the cash seized, the IG found, and had received tens of thousands of dollars over several years. That arrangement is problematic, investigators concluded."
“We're drowning under the weight of clueless product leads, managers, and owners who've never written a line of code, yet they somehow dictate how software should be built.”

We’ve been through that, you leave coders alone without management and the create a new game engine with custom scripting language and state-of-the-art rendering pipeline and no games to go with it and then they get sad

(I’m only half joking to illustrate the point that extreme points of view are often silly)
Adding realtime voice AI to an app [video]
The single best metric I've found for scaling things like this is the percent of concurrent capacity that's in use. I wrote about this in a previous HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277046

Scaling on things like the length of the queue doesn't work very well at all in practice. A queue length of 100 might be horribly long in some workloads and insignificant in others, so scaling on queue length requires a lot of tuning that must be adjusted over time as the workload changes. Scaling based on percent of concurrent capacity can work for most workloads, and tends to remain stable over time even as workloads change.
Yes, the IG quote in the article acknowledges that. Things like this depend on leadership and evidence. For the next couple of months, there’s a deputy attorney general who’s willing to look at that evidence and extrapolate the larger trend rather than dismissing things as freak one-off occurrences or the proverbial few bad apples. I would bet this has a lot to do with Biden’s political career being over: Democrats tend to run from accusations of being “soft on crime”, which means waiting for evidence to become overwhelming and while the DOJ is somewhat independent its senior leadership is generally going to be careful around sensitive topics.
Sky ECC over TAILS it is!
If you want conventional car utilization where the car sits in a parking spot most of the time then the extra cost from the lidars is much more of an issue than if you're operating a fleet that is acting as taxis most of the day.
Quant Olympics Seeks to Find Next Generation of Finance Stars
https://archive.ph/EK0A6
thanks! What's your favorite potential use case.
Early 30s was around the age I started self-teaching compilers. Great time to learn, and the urge to improve one's lot is one of the best fires in the belly you can have.

> Maybe what I am looking for is purely fantasy and does not exist in a truly feasible manner?

I felt those same things. Places where quality work is respected do exist, but they may not be in FAANG. You may need to choose between interesting work and money eventually.

Happy to chat more over email if it is helpful.
Shikoku Bank Makes Employees Sign Suicide Pledge If They Commit Fraud
Maybe the saddest thing is how much the videos look like the demo on the Caledo website. It's just as weird, with one anchor doing a weird giggle that is abruptly cut short. The lip-syncing is equally iffy.

I have to wonder, "who thought this was a good idea?"

https://www.caledonews.com
> Air travel and road travel isn't. Cargo shipping isn't.

I don't know about cargo shipping, but both air and road travel are subsidized (and I strongly suspect the same is the case for cargo shipping).

> It also just fails a quick reality check: if it were true then passenger railways would be profitable in their own right, as businesses would be happy to buy tickets for employees at their true costs.

What you're effectively arguing is that the only way to measure whether basic infrastructure has positive externalities is to ask whether it turns a profit. By that argument, all government spending on infrastructure is wasteful - a position that I think is obviously wrong.

> HSR is famously mostly empty in China. Go read accounts of anyone who has travelled on the newer lines.

I've traveled on Chinese HSR many times. It is extremely heavily used. Trains are usually packed. I've had to buy first-class tickets before, simply because the regular carriages were completely sold out (luckily, first class is not too expensive on Chinese HSR, and the upgrade is definitely worth it).

What are you basing your impression of HSR being empty on? Are you basing that on newspaper articles in Western press, on first-hand experience, on data, or on something else?

> Nobody stacks shelves with products that will never be sold.

You began by comparing China to the USSR, and talking about Yeltsin was shaken by the abundance of consumer products in the US. This comparison just completely fails when it comes to China. The China of today has a crazy abundance of consumer goods for sale. The malls are full of every type of shop with full shelves. There are packed markets with stalls selling everything. You can buy pretty much any consumer product you can imagine on your smartphone. There are endless numbers of couriers driving on electric scooters throughout every Chinese city, delivering people's online orders. Your image of what China is like is just completely out of date.
Same. I agree with most of what is said, but this is terrible way to deliver it.
Yes, I agree and would add other reasons. It's always seemed obvious to me that YC would invest in multiple startups working on the same problem space for these reasons:

First, compared to a traditional VC, YC is micro-investing in far more startups and doing so faster and more frequently.

Second, YC highly prioritizes founder/team quality over ideas but teams come to YC by pitching an idea. I just read an article yesterday citing evidence that in the last 10-15 years the diversity of startup ideas has declined significantly. This makes sense. Enormous amounts of information about what other very early stage startups are doing as well as which areas are currently being funded is readily available in near real-time. As a serial entrepreneur who did my first startup in the 80s, second in the 90s and third in the early 00s, I can attest we had nothing like this visibility in earlier eras. Ideas which are getting funded and which sound like good ideas in hot areas are obviously going to influence founder idea selection and cause clustering.

Third, YC knows that many startup teams will pivot away from their initial idea once they engage with real customers in real markets. So much so, YC considers it a sign of a smart team working well together. However, like all VCs, at any given time YC has broad sector themes it considers especially ripe for various reasons ranging from new technologies enabling disruption to expected high growth in an emerging sector.

Fourth, is the reason you identified. Having a good enough high-concept idea is necessary but far from sufficient for startup success. In addition to the execution details like go to market that you mentioned there's also timing. Even being 12 months earlier or later can make a difference toward making it. Finally, there's the luck factor. While it's true that quality teams are better able to maximize good luck when it happens and also have a tendency to increase their overall odds too, luck still matters. In my successes we had to get a lot of things right but there were also three or four serendipitous things that made a big difference at important moments. The only way for YC to solve for both the micro-timing and luck factors is betting on multiple similar startups around the same time.
I'm considering this for a workflow agent and would be keen to hear thoughts on this process.

We're a medical device company, so we need to do ISO13485 quality assurance processes on changes to software and hardware.

I had already been thinking of using an LLM to help ensure we are surfacing all potential concerns and ensure they are addressed. Partly relying on the LLM, but really as a method to manage the workflow and confirm that our processes are being followed.

Any thoughts on if this might be a good solution? Or other suggestions by other HN users.
the tool they used is basically a nanoscale version of a 3D printer that uses UV epoxy. Essentially using a laser focused through a high numerical aperture microscope to focus light and cure the epoxy (there's some nonlinear action here but it isn't that important).

The key point here being that it is a serial process where a single spot is rastered over the sample, unlike conventional optical lithography which is an area illuminating parallel process.
Show HN: Superlang – a language-learning e-reader with adjustable difficulty
Hi HN,

I built superlang.com to solve an interesting problem in the language-learning space. One of the leading theories in language acquisition is the "input theory", which suggests that the best way to learn a language is by reading as much as possible. But there's a catch:

1. The material must be at a level where you can understand a reasonable percentage of the text.

2. It has to be engaging enough to keep you reading.

Balancing these two factors is surprisingly hard. Real stories with real plotlines (The Wizard of Oz, Romeo and Juliet, or even War and Peace) are too difficult for most language learners to read. On the other hand, simple short stories purpose built for language learning (think Hans goes to the market, or Amy orders at the restaurant) are typically not very engaging. Superlang aims to solve this dilemma completely. Some notes on the features:

* Choose from a wide range of public domain stories

* Adjust the difficulty level of the text to match your reading ability

* Re-read the same story at increasing difficulty levels as you gain confidence

* Each page has illustrations to aid comprehension

* All the bells and whistles are there: sentence/word translations, grammar insights, audiobook mode

* All content is AI-assisted but human reviewed, ensuring accuracy and avoiding the pitfalls of AI-only language learning tools

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Whether it's about the app, the tech behind it, or what's next, feel free to ask me anything!

Cheers,
Creed
Maybe one page websites are another tool in the market segmentation tool box?

In the end, if a one page website turns away potential customers, you are not solving one of their important problems. And maybe solving one of yours: customers expecting experiences you don't provide tend to be more trouble than they are worth.
It's what I like to call being so smart they're stupid. Everyone strives to be the smartest most pedantic one in the room around here.
Quit the hyperbole. This seems like a basic Civics class topic.
Seems there's a lot of comments in here expressing discontent with the dismantling of GT programs. I won't speak as to where/how GT programs should be implemented, I have no idea.

However, I did attend a GT program during elementary school. This school was a "regular" public elementary school in the sense it had a local geographic boundary, and kids in the area attended this as their default public school. However, then kids who qualified for GT would be bussed in from around the county to go to this school.

Within the school, past the 3rd grade classes were segmented into GT and "base" classes (i.e. non-GT). The "base" classes were local kids who did not qualify for the GT program. GT qualification was based off a single test score, taken in the second grade. Kids in the GT and base classes were often respectively referred to as GT or base kids.

In retrospect, it's always appeared super detrimental to me that those kids were called "base" as if they were a somehow more basic version of the GT kids. The name "base" in itself was probably intended as a kind euphemism, to not otherwise default to calling them non-GT kids, i.e. non Gifted nor Talented.

Anyway, all of this to say GT programs probably have a place, but in my own anecdotal experience they were not always executed flawlessly.
> The "agile" development we're stuck with today is a joke

Are we really? The whole industry has moved on a good 10 years ago.

If you feel stuck with agile, you should probably change job.
I moved to Forsyth County, GA, where my child has access to excellent computer science and musical education (not to mention AP classes and 3 tiers bases on student achievement). In fact, he didn't make it to the top tier in everything because they were just too strong. This is a good thing!

In his supposedly "10" California school, music had been defunded to spread equality to other school systems; also, no career emphasis programs or special tracks were available.

I considered moving to one of the Dallas suburbs, but I like the Southeast weather and setting better.

Note: I'm "Latino", whatever that means, and my son is mixed (my wife is a snow white American) with a "Latino" last name.
> But, composing recursively leads to state being held in multiple layers and computations repeated across layers.

True, which is why re-frame has a dependency graph and subscriptions that avoid re-computation, i.e. the data dependencies are outside any view tree.

If data changes, only active nodes (ones that have been subscribed to) will re-compute. If nothing changed in a node, any dependent nodes will not re-compute.

It's a beauty.
/dev/agents raises $56M for AI agent operating system
> I agree with this, but I also don't think the strategies are mutually exclusive.

Yes I absolutely agree, and I should have said it. Thank you for making this point.

Emotional resiliency is not just about receiving negative stimuli and recovering from that. It's as much about knowing yourself well, knowing what kinds of situations or stimuli you should try to avoid or minimize, and knowing where and when you can best function to your full potential. So I very much agree with what you're saying.
Happened to be experimenting with similar things at day job recently - very keen to see more

Alas (OFF TOPIC) clicking the burger menu on the site (mobile) gives a rather novel fullscreen black error

> "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."
I've now tried Warp twice (once off the back of this post).

Switching back to iTerm2 again because of https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/issues/1811

I like the sound of the other two features (rich text editing and automatic AI commands) but the muscle-memory cost is too high.
Some people do not care about safety so we should change the definition of what a recall is and blame an article for being deceptive?

You gave a bunch of examples of some people not caring about safety then generalized to everyone. You may be in a bubble, or you may not be, but you're presenting zero evidence to call the article deceptive.
Operator precedence is so deeply burned into my brain I would never think of adding parens for it or modify the spacing.

I will use parens, however, for << and a couple other cases. It would be a shame to use lack of spacing to imply precedence, and yet get it wrong. Oops!

I also like to line up things to make vertical formatting of similar expressions, something a formatting program doesn't do. Hence I don't use formatters.
Maybe in the US, Europe has been into manga since the 80's.
My take that seems to never get cold: let kids skip grades. Anything I hear against this runs into the wall of the lived experience of several people I know including mine. It’s fine! And it doesn’t have to be permanent: if a kid doesn’t thrive in the next grade, put them back! Then everyone at grade level gets grade level resources and teachers get students at the right level of knowledge. Having to homeschool or pay for private school to get this simple experience is wild to me.