skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Kachika – "Learning Japanese Through Life"
I'm both a Japanese learner and an indie developer. Throughout my journey of learning Japanese (currently living in Japan), I've deeply felt the challenge of memorizing words — learning them only to forget, wanting to speak but finding myself tongue-tied.

Why I Made This
As someone who relies heavily on visual memory, I understand the power of turning abstract concepts into visual forms. You know that feeling when you're walking around and spot something interesting — maybe a beautiful seasonal poster, a curious shop name, or even just a package design that catches your eye? Those little moments of curiosity that make you think "I wish I could remember these words!"... That was exactly my experience

This experience inspired a simple yet powerful idea: "Learn Japanese through life, live with Japanese" — and that became the heart and soul of this app: Kachika (カチカ).

Turn Your Daily Discoveries into Learning Moments
Kachika helps you learn Japanese naturally through your everyday life:

Capture What You See Just snap a photo of anything interesting in your daily life

Instant Learning Words are detected automatically with native pronunciation

Your Personal Collection Build vocabulary that matters to you, all stored privately on device

Fun fact about the name "Kachika" (カチカ):

カチッ (the sound of taking a photo)

勝ち (kachi - victory/success)

か (ka - that soft Japanese particle that makes everything sound nicer!)

I Need Your Help!
I'm looking for fellow Japanese learners who want to make learning more natural and meaningful. What features would help you capture and remember your daily Japanese encounters?

I hope this app can help fellow learners who share the same struggles, making Japanese learning a natural part of our daily lives!

Would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions from:

People studying Japanese at any level

Visual learners who prefer real-world context

Anyone who wants to learn Japanese through their daily experiences

Let's make Japanese learning a natural part of our everyday adventures! ありがとうございます！

App Store：https://apps.apple.com/app/id6739525442

Google Play：https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hugo.photo...
I'd add the caveat that therapy is supposed to be meta (teach you about yourself).

Learning to program isn't therapy. Learning how to learn to program might be.
Gotta pay to play. The rest of the world calls this bribery for a reason.
A monoculture is the least healthy kind of crop. We thrive the most when we incorporate the best ideas from the largest volume of idea space. We pay a price for this, in that we have to undergo the messy process of separating the good ideas from the bad but unless we're dead and stale as a culture we're doing that anyhow.

New is good, anything else is death. Anyone pining for a 'good ol days' culture is chasing a mirage that never existed in the first place and will do damage to themselves and everyone around them by trying.
> I would say that increasingly accurately predicting the next symbols in a massive set of diverse sequences, which explain a huge diversity of real world events described in sequential order, requires increasingly accurate models of the underlying processes of said events.

I disagree. Understanding things is more than just being able to predict their behaviour.

Flat Earthers can still come up with a pretty good idea of where (direction relative to the vantage point) and when the Sun will appear to rise tomorrow.
AWS can make billions from open source. On the other hand, solo developers who try the same path are basically seen as scammers.

Ironic.

And creating a good user interface is very, very hard. Otherwise Gimp wouldn't be the monstrosity it is.
Similar actions can result in different verdicts. For example, an act of firing a gun on one end and having a dead body on the other can result in a whole variety of verdicts, which includes (but not limited to) “terrorism”, “murder”, “killing”, “negligence”, or “self-defense”. You can have several functionally identical cases — e.g. same gun, same ammunition, same wounds, etc. - and still end up with a variety of verdicts, from “not guilty” to “death sentence”.
> If you don’t have a common culture, you need real federalism so people can self-segregate into more homogenous cultural groups and efficiently govern themselves.

This whole thing is disproved by the whole Emo Philips "Die Heretic" joke [0]. If you don't believe pluralism can work, you will divide (usually violently) into smaller and smaller groups of people--smaller even than families--until everyone either dies or lives by themselves. Politics is how groups of 2 or more people make decisions; in order for humanity to advance we have to believe we can work together despite our differences.

> People in both California and Alabama would be a lot happier if they didn’t have to care about what each other were doing except to coordinate national defense and foreign treaties.

Both States would suffer greatly because of lessons we learned while we were governed by the Articles of Confederation.

> Look at the Scandinavian countries. Look how effectively they have been able to implement major policy reforms because their electorates aren’t divided along dozens of cleavage lines.

There really are no homogeneous cultures--for example Sweden has 25 provinces with "their own cultural identities, dialects and folklore" [1].

The reason Congress has ground to a halt is the George W. Bush administration killed the Republican party by invading Iraq and Afghanistan and presiding over the financial collapse of 2008, but rather than adapt it doubled down on its (admittedly successful) politics of demagoguery, using wedge issue after wedge issue to divide the electorate while also pursuing anti-democratic electoral strategies like gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws. This lead to leaders who succeed not by appealing to a majority of all Americans, but by proving their bona-fides to a small subset of increasingly radicalized voters on the right (Republican primary voters), largely by "not compromising their values" to work on legislation with the Democrats and instead obstructing and grandstanding. An unfortunate byproduct of this is there's no longer any governing expertise or even impulse in the party, so even when they're in the majority Republicans have a difficult time providing effective governance.

But that's just Congress, and I wouldn't say we've not implemented major policy reforms--the Supreme Court (an intensely anti-democratic institution dominated by the far right and largely appointed by non-representative Senate cohorts) is working hard to reshape the US.

Anyway, Christians would say we're all God's children. I don't know why people on the right are so taken with this idea of balkanization and segregation (I, of course, have some ideas), but it's not the path forward.

[0]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emo_Philips#Die,_heretic!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Sweden
I’m aware of that, thanks. What I meant is how does the worm change the mantis to have this perception when they previously didn’t.
The paper you linked is about in-context learning, an emergent run-time (aka inference time) capability of LLMs, which has little relationship to what/how they are learning at training time.

At training time the model learns using the gradient descent algorithm to find the parameter values corresponding to the minimum of the error function. At run-time there are no more parameter updates - no learning in that sense.

In-context "learning" is referring to the ability of the trained model to utilize information (e.g. proper names, examples) from the current input, aka context, when generating - an ability that it learnt at training time pursuant to it's error minimization objective.

e.g.

There are going to be many examples in the training set where the subject of a sentence is mentioned more than once, either by name or pronoun, and the model will have had to learn when the best prediction of a name (or gender) later in a sentence is one that was already mentioned earlier - the same person. These names may be unique to an individual training sample, and/or anyways the only predictive signal of who will be mentioned later in the sentence, so at training time the model (to minimize prediction errors) had to learn that sometimes the best word/token to predict is not one stored in it's parameters, but one that it needs to copy from earlier in the context (using a key-based lookup - the attention mechanism).

If the transformer, at run-time, is fed the input "Mr. Smith received a letter addressed to Mr." [...], then the model will hopefully recognize the pattern and realize it needs to do a key-based context lookup of the name associated with "Mr.", then copy that to the output as the predicted next word (resulting in "addressed to Mr. Smith"). This is referred to as "in-context learning", although it has nothing to with the gradient-based learning that takes place at training time. These two types of "learning" are unrelated.

Similar to the above, another example of in-context learning is the learning of simple "functions" (mappings) from examples given in the context. Just as in the name example, the model will have seen many examples in the training of the types of pattern/analogy it needs to learn to minimize prediction errors (e.g. "black is to white as big is to small", or black->white, big->small), and will hopefully recognize the pattern at run-time and again use an induction-head to generate the expected completion.

The opening example in the paper you linked ("maison->house, chat->cat") is another example of this same kind. All that is going on is that the model learnt, at training time, when/how to use data in the context at run-time, again using the induction head mechanism which has general form A':B' -> A:B. You can call this an algorithm if you want to, but it's really just a learnt mapping.
so you pay them to abuse other people's privacy (how else did they train their ai) but don't want them to abuse yours...
I absolutely loved Battlezone when it hit the arcades/chip shops, and probably spent about $500 on it in my youth .. it was one of those games (alongside Defender and Crazy Climber) that I’d spent money on almost robotically, instead of just saving so I could have bought my own computer. I’d probably have gotten one sooner (1980 instead of 1983) if I’d thought about that, grr..

Anyway, the computer I did end up getting (kicking off a career) was the Oric-1, a relatively obscure and underrated machine that is still getting software written for it. In fact, it got a Battlezone port, which is detailed right here:

https://forum.defence-force.com/viewtopic.php?p=30836

The author of that port abandoned the project because of feeling ‘disgusted’ at the design limit they’d imposed, regarding a short distance of objects - I wonder if, in light of the details revealed in this article about how the vector engine renders object at least a half-screen extra on each side of the physical screen, they’d reconsider the flaw, and return to the project… I’ll suggest it to them, anyway, because I love the Oric and I love Battlezone: its just one of those wonderful bits of immersive software that has so much nostalgia wrapped up in it.
How many hours are you looking for QA support each week/month, if it’s part time? I’m interested in extra hours if it works!
When I read the paper I immediately wondered if this would work. Good to see that someone has tried it and indeed it does!
Land of the free, home of the noise pollution
> there is no chance in hell that Ukraine will be admitted to Schengen in less than 10-15 years - if at all.

The main concerns about new states joining Schengen are usually that (a) there may be too many immigrants from the new member to the old members, and (b) that the external Schengen boundaries will be insufficiently protected by the new member state.

Neither problem applies to Ukraine - Ukrainians have had essentially free migration access to the Schengen since 2022, and Ukraine's borders with third-party states would be - by far - the best defended. Ukraine could join Schengen very easily (unlike the EU itself, which may indeed take years). I wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine becomes part of Schengen well before it joins the EU, á la Iceland.
yeah. but remrmber that the BEAM is more than just a message queue, its stuff like monitors and links, which are not part of the actor model and confers benefits like why you dont typically have to manually close a file in the beam, or how you can write to a (non-raw) file over the network transparently
Peter F Hamilton on having his work adapted by Netflix
They say private networks ... they do not say who owns or manages the private networks ... For all private networks could mean is a enterprise grade private network... I would be seriously skeptical about this ... The last part on the link about LWA is pause for thought. This does not look like it is meant for end users.
Good if it works for you, the reasoning doesn’t work for me, as I stated.
Can't wait until people stop using Google products.
> Sea turtle hatchlings have an inborn tendency to move in the brightest direction. On a natural beach, the brightest direction is most often the open view of the night sky over, and reflected by, the ocean. [0]

Man made artificial lighting greatly affect sea turtle hatchlings also. There are several groups of volunteers who watch the eggs for hatching and will help the sea turtles make their way towards the sea.

The volunteers use apps to coordinate watching the eggs and there is tons of data collected. Using AI / ML to help determine when the eggs will hatch or creating autonomous drones to watch the eggs and perhaps assist in corralling the hatchlings to the sea would make great PhD dissertation subjects.

[0] https://myfwc.com/research/wildlife/sea-turtles/threats/arti...
Wait, you mean you can’t just count on making a popular top ten “show HN” post?
lol why fight it? just do the same thing…copy paste the website/company info & ur resume through gpt and make sure to use your new “prompt engineering” skills to run it through a bunch of times with prompts like “make me sound even more certified and a better fit for this company”. u have to be creative with your prompt though
> without a human going through the necessary thought processes and problem solving steps to build the theory of the software as described in this paper

We might not be there yet (well we definitely are not) but it does not seem out of the question that within a generous 10 years we will have systems which can leverage graphs, descriptive language, interpreters, and so on to plan out and document and iterate and refine the structure of a problem and its architectural solution in tandem with developing the solution itself iteratively at a very effective level, given a sufficient explanation of the goals/problem - or more importantly/phrased another way, following the initial theory of a problem formulated by the human; the kind of documentation produced by such systems can also be more easily ingested by other non-human systems, potentially remedying some of the challenges with outlining/documenting/transferring the theory of the problem that humans have.

And what prevents a human from doing code review on such a system’s outputs? Now maybe your point was that the simple expense of a human’s time is the barrier, especially given that you were talking about the context of companies using LLMs to speed up their code production (read: eliminate cost centers), but in that case the errors that may come from poorly designed procedurally generated codebases just reads like bad project management to me for which the chickens will ultimately come home to roost; the companies which can successfully integrate such procedurally codegen engines while still maintaining strong design principles, maintainability, simplicity, etc ought to outcompete their competitors’ slop in the long run, right?

Having said all that, I think the more important loss is that the human fails to build as much intuition for the problem space themself by not being on the ground in the weeds solving the problems with their own solutions, and this will struggle to develop their own effective theories of the problem (as indicated by the title of the article in the first place).
Show HN: HN Wrapped 2024
Happy New Year HN!

The holidays are a perfect time to explore new tech and apply it to a side projects.

Inspired by Twitter Wrapped, I decided to create an "HN Wrapped". Yes, I know it’s a little late, but I still wanted to put it out there.

Give it a try and let me know what you think :)
Rival to SpaceX's Starlink Goes Dark After Failing to Account for Leap Year
better title

Elektročas HH3 – the most accurate atomically assisted pendulum clock on the planet (cern.ch)
Aurora Store downloads apk files directly from gplay servers, why it should be less safe than Play Store?
Pendulum clocks in general need to be periodically rated (length of pendulum adjusted) due to variations in temperature and pressure in order to achieve maximum isochronous movement. All this guy has done is created an automatic rating system. Otherwise, it operates the same way as most any other pendulum clock. So I think the "most accurate pendulum clock" description is fair (assuming it is the most accurate).

I've had ideas for a while for similarly adjusting a pendulum clock from an NTP server, though I was going to add an extra gear to the motion train that would adjust the hands slightly every twelve hours. But that seems more like "cheating" that this rating system.
I knew Key back in the day, and I feel a twinge for him every time kagi comes up on HN.
If iOS has a majority market share in the US, wouldn’t anyone who is not using an iPhone be part of the “cult”?

And I bet if I drop my phone, it would be a lot easier to drive to one of the five Apple Stores in the metro area to get it repaired than it would be for you to get your camera repaired.

That’s not even considering the fact that it could service a drop better than your camera and is water resistant
Bob Dylan has some Dylanesque thoughts on the "sorcery" of technology
No hate to Kagi, but my non-techie friends would laugh at my face if I suggested them to pay for a search engine.

Us, people in engineering and web tech operate in a fairly different mindset. Ads piss us off more than the average people, who have accepted it throughout the years.
Show HN: My open-source project got 50 stars
It is exactly that. I've also been in a pretty intense therapy for 12 months (3 hours a week) and all the takeaways are really obvious. That I had to take responsibility for my life, that I would feel better if I made my life better, to step outside my comfort zone, etc.

Therapy isn't really about the advice but actually transforming it into action, as you say, walking the path instead of just knowing the path.

But for someone who is, let's say, suffering from depression, the aforementioned path sounds like cheesy bullshit and not a source of happiness at all. They don't do those things for many different reasons depending on the person's psychological history, and the advice sounds empty because they don't realise it actually works.

I had been avoiding that advice, pretending outwardly that it was bullshit, for 30 years of my life. Those cliche Instagram slogans actually do mean a lot to me now, it just turns out I literally spent my entire life until now unconsciously, but actively, avoiding them.

The way I learnt to take my first step on that path was to understand the rich psychological tapestry that caused me to avoid the path.
I associate this style with the suckless foundation, even though it is distinct from e.g. the dwm logo. https://dwm.suckless.org/
How can you trust proprietary software, when you cannot inspect code? It's just a blind trust.
This is a further step in the same programme. The programme itself is somewhat agnostic as to the underlying dynamics; the ‘stellar resolution’ mechanism (Eng's terminology, not Girard's, who AFAIR doesn't name the system) is a better-behaved replacement for the ‘designs’ of _Locus Solum_, which IMO remains the best introduction for the bigger ideas of the programme.
> I've been on a quest to find out what went wrong with modernity.

The late bronze age collapse. Humanity fucked up so bad we don't even know what happened. Everything since then has been meh. Future humans might still see us as in some form of iron age.
How would one double blind a traial of one or more therapeutic methods?
It’s odd to call Travelers “indigenous” because they don’t predate the settlement of Ireland by the current majority group. They’re Irish people who culturally diverged around 1600. It’s like calling Appalachian Americans Indigenous.
Pretty incredible how fast those videos are being generated. Excellent work! You can now spam YT shorts all day.
Ask HN: Will cancer treatments likely get better?
Hello HN,

I am an outside observer to the all discussions concerning cancer. I am not a professional in the field, nor am I affected (luckily). But given the relevance of the issue, I am interested in what the future may look like in the field (say, next 20 to 30 years).

In media reporting, there is often a lot of enthusiasm regarding immunotherapy, especially with the mRNA vaccines that gained a lot of relevance during the pandemic. Many outlets were portraying the future of cancer treatments as highly effective, personalized and targeted vaccines. Before that, genetic predispositions seemed to be of huge concern, particularly with breast cancer. From my superficial reading, it also seems like there is a lot of progress in actually understanding were particular types of cancer come from.

I am curious about the opinions of the people in the field. Is there any hope that cancer treatments in the future may be a less gruesome process than todays chemotherapy? Are there any hopes for cancers that are mostly untreatable today (lung cancer, pancreas, mesothelioma)?
Very different experience for me, I’ve tried to switch to DDG many times and always switched back to Google after being disappointed.

Using Kagi for a year now and only a handful of times I’ve checked if Google would give better results.
I wrote down the same concept as a more structured substack.

https://slowtechred.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/154138...
As others have commented, this seems way too hard to achieve. But it warms my heart to see web developers caring about performance.
Easy Way to Achieve a Meterpreter Session by Bypassing Windows Defender
LLMs Are Power Tools for Software Builders
Yes just like instead of Dropbox for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
To the second half: If some other party seeks to hurt you, it is in your best interest to prevent them from doing so. Especially if the cost is less than the harm they would inflict. Presuming peaceful coexistence, then it is not in anyone's interest to limit anything beyond the basic idea of 'my freedom ends where your begins'.
Novalogic used this technique for terrain rendering for quite a while, my favorite is the first episode of Delta Force. It looks like Comanche 4 and the original Black Hawk Down did away with this method and switched to a polygonal engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche_4#Reception
"Of the 4,700 newspapers published in Germany when the Nazis took power in 1933, no more that 1,100 remained. Approximately half were still in the hands of private or institutional owners, but these newspapers operated in strict compliance with government press laws and published material only in accordance with directives issued by the Ministry of Propaganda."

-- https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-press-...