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Zerosearch: RL search training without Google

https://alibaba-nlp.github.io/ZeroSearch/
1•vessenes•1m ago•1 comments

Show HN: I built a visual AI chat with branching and rich content

https://why.new
1•rogutkuba•2m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How to get good at marketing your product and SEO?

1•flashblaze•4m ago•0 comments

Syntactic Musings on Match Expressions

https://blog.yoshuawuyts.com/syntactic-musings-on-match-expressions/
1•PaulHoule•5m ago•0 comments

Wikipedia legally challenges 'flawed' online safety rules

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62j2gr8866o
2•hmac1282•7m ago•0 comments

Ztalk – Real-time voice-to-voice translation for Zoom, Gmeet, Teams

https://ztalk.ai/
1•kshitijzeoauto•8m ago•2 comments

Sub 15ms NetBSD MICROVM boot is now maintream

https://old.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/1khyjq9/sub_15ms_netbsd_microvm_boot_is_now_maintream/
3•iMil•8m ago•0 comments

Lessons from World War II to Avoid World War III

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/opinion/world-war-2-europe-peace.html
4•whack•8m ago•0 comments

Just When You Thought It Was OK to Skip Breakfast

https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/breakfast-health-weight-loss-study-6704788b
1•karulont•8m ago•0 comments

Rust Dependencies Scare Me

https://vincents.dev/blog/rust-dependencies-scare-me/
2•hmac1282•9m ago•1 comments

'Inheritance is an injustice': Why a 33-year-old redistributed €27M

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/05/08/inheritance-is-an-injustice-why-a-33-year-old-redistributed-27-million_6741060_19.html
8•stuaxo•10m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Offer Fast and Efficient AI Image and Video Generation for the World

https://wavespeed.ai/
1•sylm•12m ago•0 comments

What is the Transformers' Context Window? (and how to make it LONG)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqTYjSbnP9o
2•research_pie•13m ago•0 comments

PostgreSQL Event Triggers without superuser access

https://supabase.com/blog/event-triggers-wo-superuser
1•steve-chavez•13m ago•0 comments

Can It Run Doom? An Archive of All Known Ports

https://canitrundoom.org/
1•tanelpoder•14m ago•0 comments

Giles Martin on AI Plans

https://news.sky.com/story/giles-martin-on-ai-plans-its-like-saying-you-can-burgle-my-house-unless-i-ask-you-not-to-13363357
1•belter•16m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Azure Open AI Issues?

2•scottndecker•16m ago•0 comments

VIK: An FPC interface for connecting keyboard modules

https://github.com/sadekbaroudi/vik
2•fanf2•16m ago•1 comments

Professors say UAB is 'altering' research proposals, pressuring faculty: Letter

https://www.al.com/news/2025/05/professors-say-uab-is-altering-research-proposals-pressuring-faculty-letter.html
1•Jimmc414•18m ago•0 comments

Workday handed no-bid deal to fix staffing meltdown at US Uber-HR agency

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/08/opm_chooses_workday_no_bid/
1•rntn•18m ago•0 comments

If Google is forced to give up Chrome, what happens next?

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/09/opinion_column_google_chrome_potential_divestiture/
2•CrankyBear•20m ago•0 comments

Europe launches program to lure scientists away from the US

https://es.wired.com/articulos/europa-lanza-iniciativa-para-atraer-talento-cientifico-tras-recortes-en-ee-uu
3•voxadam•21m ago•1 comments

Replicating Postgres Production Traffic

https://pgdog.dev/blog/replicating-postgres-production-traffic
3•levkk•24m ago•1 comments

Monkey Patching Otel and Prometheus Support into MCP

https://www.mcpevals.io/blog/adding-otel-and-prometheus-to-mcp
1•mlenhard•24m ago•0 comments

Entire BART system is down due to computer systems failure

https://www.bart.gov/
35•ksajadi•24m ago•4 comments

Show HN: Can you meld minds with AI and guess the same word?

https://www.convergegame.com/
6•cwackerfuss•26m ago•3 comments

Sam Altman: 'This is genius-level intelligence'

https://subs.ft.com/products
2•merksittich•26m ago•0 comments

Photographs of 19th Century Persia

https://cosmographia.substack.com/p/photographs-of-old-persia
1•merothwell•26m ago•0 comments

Write the most clever code you possibly can

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/write-the-most-clever-code-you-possibly-can/
2•todsacerdoti•27m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: HN Problems?

2•fbn79•27m ago•5 comments
Open in hackernews

Dead Reckoning

https://www.damninteresting.com/dead-reckoning/
129•repost_bot•11h ago

Comments

defrost•10h ago
Notable for deadpan correct use of Ear regardless . . .

Worth the read.

card_zero•6h ago
Oh irregardless. Clever. I admire how Alan spins these puns up with such casual breeziness, but of course I would say that because I'm a big fan.
foobahhhhh•4h ago
Spoiler alert! That was brilliant. I read it then went back and like "hold on...."
heresie-dabord•4h ago
Agreed, this article is well-written and rewarding to anyone capable of enjoying prose. Take the time to enjoy the article.

And for HN in particular, there is an ancestral link from the suffering crew of the ill-fated ship to the category of jobs that we have today.

I won't spoil it. But here is a clue: A.L.

someone7x•1h ago
Thanks for the nudge, a well told story well worth the read.
DavidPeiffer•9h ago
My favorite application of dead reckoning is the early 80's Honda system to display the car location on a map. While testing the system, there were times where the car showed itself off of the road. After looking into it further, they learned the map maker had taken some liberties with the exact position of the road, and the vehicle was correct.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38135979

chneu•5h ago
Not dead reckoning related but for some reason your comment made me think of this.

Map makers make mistakes on purpose. This way they know when someone copies their maps. They look for these little tiny "mistakes".

Ecgberht•3h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
reginald78•2h ago
My favorite are the trap towns that didn't exist, but because of the maps with the trap towns on them a form of citogensis occurs and the town is bootstrapped into existence in the real world.
calvinmorrison•1h ago
This seems like it's happening more and more with google maps. I see tons of "Trap Towns" and can't figure out of its realtors making up new neighborhood s to sell houses or them going on google maps, and putting google maps into reality.
ir77•1h ago
that's literally no different than what Google Maps does in my car while in CarPlay mode. It's like Apple neuters it and don't give it full gyro/compass data, because when driving it constantly moves the "car" anywhere from 90 to 270 degress and keeps it there for a few seconds until it figures this out again. I checked all possible permissions and still can't figure it out.

Never happens on the Apple Maps, although I have 0 trust in siri and apple maps, especially when we travel to europe, i feel like i'm an experiment for apple to see how much off straight forward route it can make me take.

lqet•1h ago
Interestingly, if you have good map data, the relative "shape" of you previous trajectory is enough to locate your position globally, without GPS, even without knowing where north is.

https://ad-publications.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/GIS_paths...

trhway•7h ago
The extremely hard travel around Cape Horn highlights the importance of the Panama and Suez channels, and i'm wondering whether Trump will surprisingly be vindicated by history for his steps toward getting the Northern Passage, ie. for the friendship with Russia and for the attempt to grab Greenland (or whether it will go down just the way it looks now :)
louthy•7h ago
> i'm wondering whether Trump will surprisingly be vindicated by history

He won’t. And those that went along with him will be judged poorly by it.

rokkamokka•6h ago
Vindicated? God, no
albert_e•7h ago
> the Drake Passage was the least impractical route for large European ships to travel around South America to access its west coast.

"least impractical"?

Unintentional double negative, I think?

Currently it conveys the meaning of being "most practical" whereas it was the opposite.

mattclarkdotnet•6h ago
Yeah, the thrust of the story is that it was the worst of all options
eru•3h ago
No. It was a best out of a bunch of bad options.
louthy•6h ago
I had to read that twice, but it’s correct I think. It’s an impractical route, but all the routes are… the Drake Passage was the least impractical of all of the routes.
andyjohnson0•5h ago
I read "least impractical" as meaning "least worst" -- the best bad option.
throwanem•3h ago
It's correct and as intended. "Least impractical" denotes "most practical" but the double negative, which you accurately note is unusual but which is grammatical in this usage, calls attention to the specific connotation that all options are bad and this, though also bad, is nonetheless the most potentially serviceable of the lot.
542354234235•3h ago
We all know that language contains a lot of subtleties, but it is always interesting when someone breaks down exactly how those are used in some interesting prose.

And the prose itself is good too.

throwanem•3h ago
I've been an eager student of grammatical nuance in English since my introduction to the written language at age two. I'm always happy to take apart an example of same and show its workings!
louwrentius•6h ago
Damn interesting has an amazing collection of high-quality podcast episodes with amazing story telling. They haven’t released new episodes in a while, but their back catalogue is worth investigating.
card_zero•6h ago
It bugs me that the last episode is ominously called "A trail gone cold", and I wonder what went wrong.
DamnInteresting•10m ago
Alan Bellows here, author of this article, and founder of Damn Interesting. For years I kept the site going by working a part-time coding job, along with occasional contract work. Combined with donations to the site, this brought in enough income to survive, while allowing me to dedicate 5-6 hours per weekday to writing/editing/etc.

Early in the pandemic my job wrapped up, and when I went looking for a new part-time or contract gig, there was absolutely nothing. I networked and searched for a year and a half, and never found a single part-time opening. In the meantime, donations to the site were on a steady downward trajectory. I was burning through my savings at an alarming rate.

Eventually I had to take a regular full-time job just to have income again. I hoped I could find some plausible approach, but so far it's been unworkable. I also have a six year old, so evenings and weekends tend to be spoken for. And after the little one's bedtime, there's not much left in the fuel tanks. I'm approaching 50 now.

Maybe I'll find a part-time gig, or perhaps some anonymous wealthy benefactor will fund the site for a while. Both have happened before. If not, we may need to pack it up soon. 20 years is a pretty good run.

beAbU•5h ago
My favourite example of some humorous dead reckoning, from this old copypasta:

-----------

The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.

In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was. The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows. Because a variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not sure just where it is. However, it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice-versa, and by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be, and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.

-----------

eloisius•4h ago
This is like James Joyce describing a Kalman filter.
cjs_ac•2h ago
I think the delivery in this video is an important part of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZe5J8SVCYQ
bombcar•2h ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1sSy39CuU Goodbye, my friend.
mistersquid•50m ago
Made me think of Doolittle philosophically provoking Bomb 20 in John Carpenter’s _Dark Star_. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LXen-07Qds

danw1979•3h ago
> the castaways had not seen any women in months, and based on the resulting unwanted attention, the indigenous people opted to evacuate before the English seamen became a problem.

chef kiss

thoroughburro•3h ago
The western barbarians seem to have been quite an uncivilised menace.
seanhunter•2h ago
My favourite dead reckoning anecdote[1] was there was this British naval captain who found himself in the Atlantic just a bit south-west of the Canary Islands in a lifeboat. He knew that the ocean currents would be against him and too strong to row against, so he set off for South America and made it there by rowing with the current and using dead reckoning to course correct.

[1] And this is from memory and a bunch of googling around hasn’t turned it up so pardon me if I get some details wrong.

cgriswald•1h ago
William McVicar

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-capt-will...

lmm•1h ago
Transatlantic by dead reckoning alone sounds impossibly difficult. Captain Bligh navigating 3500 nautical miles from Tahiti to Kupang in an open boat after being mutinied against was a celebrated feat of navigation, and he had the aid of a compass and a pocket watch.
seandoe•1h ago
Amazing story. I read the book and couldn't put it down. Highly recommended.
DamnInteresting•6m ago
If by 'the book' you are referring to David Gran's The Wager, it's worth noting that the article linked here (which I wrote) was published about 3 years before that book was published. I mention this only to dispel any impression that the article is derived from Gran's book.
eirikbakke•1h ago
Reminds me of "In The Heart of the Sea: The Comedy of the Whaleship Essex" (a musical book report)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEDU2I9fp_8

mitsu_at•32m ago
The part about scurvy reminded me about the role scurvy played in Robert Falcon Scott's 1911 Antarctic expedition: https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm