MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mr_mitm | 2025-04-17 10:42:57+00:00
I wasn't talking about chemicals.

My computation assumed an antimatter engine. Any drive is bound by conservation of energy and momentum.

I guess you wanted to object to an propulsion drive. Sure, you can do some fly by maneuvers or use earth bound laser propulsion, but I'm not convinced that it will put a dent in it for a regular space ship.

Also, the starshot concept won't help you with slowing down. I was assuming you actually wanted to exit the spaceship upon arrival.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-17 10:44:02+00:00
What do we mean by alone?

Life isn't this "magical" force. Life is just an outcome which is just incredibly rare. Or maybe its not? Maybe we are just too primitive in the sense that we haven't analyzed all planets (like this planet is just 120 light years away, still huge but still, who knows how this search continues, and maybe we can even find more/maybe advanced species as well?

But also, as others have pointed out. I think that getting to civilisation level is pretty rare. Its not like the signs on this life that we have found automatically means that they are one day going to be a civilization level life. They may or may not & so many other comments above this comment have beautifully shown the amount of rarity in that which was the major takeaway from this HN atleast for me.

Its still just so fascinating how human societies exist. Maybe I am pessimistic, but like we believe in gold because everyone else does, but for the first time ever, Imagine the people who started trusting in gold and started trading in gold.

They couldn't eat gold, For all its worth, they might have thought that its just shiny rock and its abundant, we just haven't discovered it yet and its going to be worthless so we might as well use grains.

But such trust in gold,maybe even religion/ general trust on society structure beyond the people you know directly is just so bizarre. People believing and dying for nations made those nations have power. And now we trust those nations and their power because our ancestors said so & taught us so. I have read sapiens book 4-5 years ago and I think I had never wondered about such things until now.

Our ancestors could change things way more radically. They had such freedom.

Voltaire used his reason to pursuade people for a revolution.

I am not sure, but in the vastness of the internet, people have just stopped caring about reason but rather all they care about is authority. Change fears so many people.

People would know that some things are bad yet just because they exist, they think it as something so highly and won't even conceive of the possibility of fixing it. And others would be peer pressured into we can't change it. And the people who want change would be ridiculed and made fun of. So much of the time, reason falls off on dead ears in today's world & emotions are hijacked by echo chambers.

Much of our society(I can't say nobody,because I would do grave injustice to people who reason) wants to reason because we want the comfort of emotion.
by simiones | 2025-04-17 10:44:35+00:00
Or this is merely sci-fi and it's physically impossible to build anything even close to such structures as Dyson spheres. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that just because we can conceive of something like that, it's actually possible to build it using real materials in real quantities with real amounts of available energy in a star system, and even less so to maintain these magical devices even if built.
by conradfr | 2025-04-17 10:44:54+00:00
https://onlineradiobox.com has the data but doesn't search on it it seems.

Disclaimer I make https://www.radio-addict.com but only retrieve the played song data on demand (never tried to probe all 80k+ radio streams at the same time on my small server, could be fun), but searching on it could be a new feature (it's stored in Elixir genservers :D)
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-17 10:45:33+00:00
I never got this. Someone eventually wins the lottery. Someone eventually gets struck by lightning. How lucky a lucky person feels doesn’t influence the cold hard probabilities. So this feeling is mostly a delusion.

And frankly we don’t know how probable or improbable it is for life to form because we aren’t actually clear how it formed in the first place. The fact that the event has not and can’t (so far) be reproduced by us means that it is already highly likely to an extremely low probability event.

The question is how low? Low enough such that there is another planet that has it within 124 light years. I actually don’t think so.

I think the probability of finding a planet that has biosignatures of life but doesn’t have any life at all is a higher probability then actually finding planets that actually have life. No matter what you think the likelihood of finding life is, I think most people agree that the above should be true.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-17 10:45:48+00:00
CAs are a horrendous weakness, but are still a "pillar" weakness and not even a "base" problem. In other words the threat exists not because of a base technological capability or necessity, but because we _choose_ to stick our fingers in a blender and play with the switch. Like the liquidity deadlock persisting the post 1929 depression these things happen because humans, collectively are clinically insane in surrendering before systems (hubris, pride, social control). No one dares to override the system. In reality decisive emergency action can mitigate such sticky situations.

We also worry about existential threats from "class" points of weakness. Like a mathematical breakthrough that makes factoring large primes or mapping elliptic curves trivial. Again here, one can imagine that were it possible to entirely switch-off encryption and return to early 1990s operation, even a catastrophic class failure would not be that bad - we'd just have a massive cybercrime and infosec problem instead of a systemic failure.

Real dangers come from systems where logical regression is strictly not possible. A base weakness like a backdoor or fault in every ARM or Intel processor that could brick half the devices on Earth is a likely cause of widespread civic harm - because it could be unrecoverable, turning devices into e-waste overnight. Crowdstrike had a flavour of this because it reminded us that computers are actually pieces of hardware in data centres that can need manually rebooting or need human physical intervention at scale.
by jlouis | 2025-04-17 10:45:57+00:00
Yes. And immutable data structures.

When data is immutable, it can be freely shared. Changes to the data essentially uses copy-on-write. And it only writes the delta change, since you don't need a deep copy due to immutability. Add that the garbage collectors of Haskell and Erlang are designed to work with a high allocation rate and have 0 cost for dead data, and this is much faster than what people think.

The way you implement a webserver in either Haskell or Erlang is rather trivial. Whenever there's an incoming request, you make a thread to handle it. So you don't have 1 webserver serving 10k requests. You have 10k webservers serving 1 request each. And since they are started from the same core data, they'll share that due to immutability. See also old-style Apache or PHP and fork().
by _jackdk_ | 2025-04-17 10:47:56+00:00
From the footnotes:

> It gets weirder: in Haskell, exceptions can be thrown to other threads!

What's really interesting is that because of purity, you have to have asynchronous exceptions otherwise you give up a lot of modularity. At least that's what Simons Marlow and Peyton Jones argue in Asynchronous Exceptions in Haskell (2006): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

> While the semi-asynchronous approach avoids breaking synchronization abstractions, it is non-modular in that the target code must be written to use the signalling mechanism. Worse still (for us), the semi-asynchronous approach is simply incompatible with a purely-functional language, such as Concurrent Haskell. The problem is that polling a global flag is not a functional operation, yet in a Concurrent Haskell program, most of the time is spent in purely-functional code. On the other hand, since there is absolutely no problem with abandoning a purely-functional computation at any point, asynchronous exceptions are safe in a functional setting. In short, in a functional setting, fully-asynchronous exceptions are both necessary and safe — whereas in an imperative context fully-asynchronous exceptions are not the only solution and are unsafe.

If you can read PLTese, it's really quite a nice paper.
by bostonwalker | 2025-04-17 10:49:01+00:00
> And if we want to apply tariffs, do it slowly. Instead of saying that products will be tariffed at 100% tomorrow, say they’ll be 25% next year, 50% after that, 75% after that, and 100% in year four. And then make it a law instead of a presidential decree

This is the big difference between a tariff regime that is credible in such a way that the business community can plan investment around it, and the current one that has mostly just caused chaos and confusion.
by cedilla | 2025-04-17 10:49:26+00:00
Yes, but the next bush is dozens of light years away. The analogy breaks down because the distances are different in quality.

The only reason why this becomes such a problem in the Three-Body-Problem is the existence of magic in that universe. Thinking protons, instant communication, folded dimensions, easy interstellar travel, it's all interesting speculation inspired by physics, but incompatible with our actual universe.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2025-04-17 10:49:32+00:00
Lists aren’t copied on prepend.

Tries (like scala’s Vector) or trie maps (the core map types of Scala, Clojure and probably Haskell?) aren’t copied on updates.

In fact, whether a data structure is an immutable or persistent data structure or merely an unmodifiable data structure (like Kotlin uses) is based on whether it requires full copies on most updates or not. In FP languages, immutable data structures aren’t “specialized” at all.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-17 10:50:32+00:00
The probability of advanced civilization is given the probability of life is quite low itself.

For the overwhelming majority of time life has existed on earth only a minuscule part of it involved civilization. And an even more minuscule part of it involved technology that has a small chance to send a coherent signal to another star.

Our future is easily estimated by the hardness of traveling through space and the demise of our sun. Probability points to the end humanity by way of the death of our star. We are statistically most likely to end.
by _jackdk_ | 2025-04-17 10:50:46+00:00
The interaction of laziness and purity means that the memory costs are not always what you think. Purity means that it's a lot safer to share structure between old and new versions of a data structure where an imperative language would have to do defensive copying, and laziness means that you can incrementally amortise the cost of expensive rebalancing operations (Okasaki is the standard reference for this).
by baalimago | 2025-04-17 10:51:28+00:00
You can try out the same thing in my homemade tool clai[1]. Just run `clai -cm gpt-4.1 -tools query Analyze this repository`.

Benefit of clai: you can swap out to practically any model, from any vendor. Just change `-cm gpt-4.1` to, for example, `-cm claude-3-7-sonnet-latest`.

Detriments of clai: it's a hobby project, much less flashy, designed after my own usecases with not that much attention put into anyone else

[1]: https://github.com/baalimago/clai
by perihelions | 2025-04-17 10:52:31+00:00
I'm not convinced about the methods. It looks a lot like p-hacking to me: they have a highly specific hypothesis drawn from a large universe—that dozen or so molecules (§3.1) in their infrared spectrum model they're fitting experimental data against. I don't buy the way they created that hypothesis. The put a handful of highly specific biosignature gases into it, things that were proposed by exobiology theory papers. One very specific hypothesis out of many, and a low likelihood one. And that's the hypothesis they get some borderline ~3σ signals for? Really?

edit: Any chance someone might have the charity to explain why my criticism is so far off-base, according to the HN consensus?
by aja12 | 2025-04-17 10:53:15+00:00
As a pentester, who does not love CVSS[0], I found the article explaining how to replace CVSS with CVSS very amusing

[0] CVSS is often poorly understood and used by internal teams so for our internal engagements, we prefer words like "minor", "medium", "major", "critical" to describe criticity and impact and "easy", "medium", "hard" to describe exploitation difficulty (which loosely translates to likelihood), and the reasoning behind all this is very similar to what CVSS does
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-17 10:53:29+00:00
Regarding populating earth and invading space.

I was just watching the original (first) matrix movie yesterday because I was just too bored.

And there was this dialogue by Agent Smith:- ```I’d like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.```

So yea, I totally agree with you because just as how Agent Smith compared Humans to a virus and just like we know that not every living thing is a virus, In a similar fashion, I think not every species have intersection with our sets of interests (populating earth,invading space).

I actually had just watched matrix for agent smith actually. I don't know why but the guy looks really cool to me for some reason.
by nbadg | 2025-04-17 10:53:34+00:00
I often wonder if the answer to the Fermi paradox isn't just as extremely banal as "turns out that interstellar exploration just isn't economically viable". I think it's entirely plausible that advanced economies are circular, and that within a circular economy, it's just extremely difficult to justify the massive expenditure of resources that it would take to become interstellar.

I mean, think about how many stars had to align to catalyze our first steps on the moon. Now, 53 years later, we're just starting to put serious effort into going back -- not because there's any market reason to do so, but because (once again) there's political pressure for it. Which would suggest that the best case scenario for the current exploration efforts are something along the lines of what we already see in Antarctica: a well-staffed scientific presence that does really cool/valuable work, but nothing remotely approaching even a single major city in terms of human presense.

It seems to me that one of the unwritten priors to the Fermi paradox (at least in popular discourse) is that technology is the only prerequisite to expanding a civilization; in other words, if you have the technology, then interstellar expansion is only a matter of time, and that all civilizations will inevitably eventually develop the technology. And that... seems like a pretty big assumption, if human history is any indication.
by macaw5195 | 2025-04-17 10:54:07+00:00
MAZANOKE is a simple image optimizer that runs in your browser, works offline as a web app, and keeps your images private without ever leaving your device.

Created for everyday people and designed to be easily shared with family and friends, it serves as an alternative to questionable "free" online tools.

See how you can easily self-host it here: <https://github.com/civilblur/mazanoke>

Demo: <https://mazanoke.com>
by codingdave | 2025-04-17 10:54:24+00:00
This is for an opinionated definition of "optimal". It might even be correct in specific scenarios, but really looks more like a thinly veiled ad of, "We do software dev, this is the stack we code in, and this is why we like it."

There isn't anything wrong with that take, but it is not a study, and it is not a universal answer.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-04-17 10:54:47+00:00
> In a setting where every operator has exactly one output, when to run an operator to produce some output is obvious: when your consumer needs it. This becomes, at the very least, messier with multiple outputs, since “requests for rows” and “computations to produce rows” are no longer one-to-one.

Don't push-based systems have the same issue for inputs? If you have multiple inputs then you may be handled one of the inputs without the other. The classic example with iterators is a `zip` operator, though maybe this is probably not so common in database queries.
by Galanwe | 2025-04-17 10:55:51+00:00
As someone teaching his kid to read, this font doesn't seem to help.

Most of the arguments seem to be biased by "what an adult think is playful and fun", while my kid has a very different view of things.

Things like lower vs upper case are a struggle for him, it basically forces him to remember twice as many letters. Also the handwriting style just makes letters harder to recognize, especially for n and r, u and v, etc.
by lambdaone | 2025-04-17 10:56:22+00:00
Kaggle certainly seems like a good route for this, making it easy for the many people who merely want Wikipedia data, who will now follow the path of least resistance to get it.

I doubt it will discourage the true large-scale bad actors for whom Wikipedia is only a tiny subset of what they are trying to download, and are sufficiently well-resourced that they can't be bothered to special-case it.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
by dahauns | 2025-04-17 10:56:33+00:00
>Did you know that jet engines were developed thanks to funds from the free market, as the military saw no use for jet engines? The government did not get involved until they saw flying jet aircraft?

sigh At least try to look for examples that aren't so completely, utterly wrong. Which "flying jet aircraft" would that even be? The only one where you could even start to make that argument would be Heinkel's He178 prototype. Apart from the fact that it was explicitly designed to be monetized militarily...where do you think those funds came from in late 30s Germany, at one of the leading military plane manufacturers? (and please don't say Lufthansa...they didn't operate on a "free market" even since their inception in 26, and certainly not after 33).

You can't spell jet aircraft without military-industrial complex. Hell, even the first 707 family variant in service was a military one (KC-135).

Edit - almost overlooked that nugget:

>Externalities, such as pollution, are not free market, and are in the purview of government.

Ah yes, privatize profits, socialize costs. That kind of free market. I shouldn't have bothered.
by probably_wrong | 2025-04-17 10:56:45+00:00
Apologies in advance for the negative tone.

> There are Zen monks who have used absurdity to teach their pupils existential principles.

I get a sense of how those pupils must have felt because I don't feel like I've learned anything about clowning from this post.

One of my pet peeves are tutorials that only make sense after you understood the topic being explained, and I feel that these guidelines fall in that category. "The clown enters the stage to accomplish a task, not to get laughs. If there are laughs it is an interruption" sounds very deep, but I'm not sure how to square that with "The clown offers energy and fun for the audience to enjoy".

All the clowns I remember aimed to get laughs from their audience. Does that make them bad clowns? Or is it a "no true clown comes from Scotland" situation?
by benterix | 2025-04-17 10:57:11+00:00
> This hasn't been my experience at all.

No wonder, I'm pretty sure they're doing A/B testing all the time.

> Not sure why Youtube would suggest big breasted female artists when I never, ever, ever watch the video when I'm playing music.

They don't care. I sometimes open YT on new machines and it's always the same generic junk.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-17 10:57:21+00:00
Greg's BASH Wiki is the best resource that I've found for tips, tricks and discussion of the many, many mistakes that BASH almost encourages people to make.

https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide

Also, ShellCheck is an invaluable resource to use on all your scripts. When it complains about something, read up on why it doesn't like it and then decide to either fix your code or put in an exception to tell ShellCheck to ignore that particular issue for the next line.

https://www.shellcheck.net/
Show HN: Free Tools (No Ads) – What Should I Build Next?
by anticol | 2025-04-17 10:57:24+00:00
Hey HN,

I launched FreeUtilityTools.com, a fast, no-login, ad-free collection of 200+ small tools to solve everyday problems. It's a personal project to make simple utilities more accessible — translated into 10+ languages, fast on mobile, and growing every week.

Some examples:

Text tools: remove duplicate lines, compare text, count characters

Number tools: Roman numeral converter, binary converter, percentage calculator

Time tools: age calculator, timestamp generator

... and a lot of random useful stuff

I'm now trying to figure out what to build next.

I'd love your ideas: What utility tool do you wish existed (or was faster/simpler)?

What problems do you solve repeatedly that a tiny tool could help with?

Any feedback on the site’s UX, performance, or growth approach?

Thanks for checking it out — excited to hear what you think or what tools you’d love to see added.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-04-17 10:57:33+00:00
Earth is on course to become uninhabitable for human civilisation its current form within a century, with an associated mass extinction.

Even if all industrial activity stopped tomorrow there's now enough CO2 in the system to guarantee a succession of uncomfortable and expensive droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires for thousands of years.

If it doesn't they will become more and more extreme very quickly.

If ocean acidification and warming destroy the foodchain in the seas, collapse on land will happen very quickly.
by chromanoid | 2025-04-17 10:57:36+00:00
yeah, I totally agree.

It's like there was a shift in goals after the author made the title. Maybe explaining the basics was so much fun, that the initial idea got lost... I also don't think knowing how a crt monitor works is instrumental for people who want to make software. The domain is cool, but it doesn't match the content. whatissoftware.com might be better.

when it is explained how pixel, gpu or llm work, I would at least expect some intro to Von-Neumann-Architecture.
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-17 10:58:12+00:00
I’m not deep into autodiff (just recall some calculus from university), but the syntax in this post reminds me a lot of ML (the programming language, not machine learning)

I know autodiff isn’t lambda calculus, but the expression-based structure and evaluation rules feel similar. Couldn’t this be implemented in something like ML or Clojure? Just wondering what the custom DSL adds that existing functional languages wouldn’t already support
by lupusreal | 2025-04-17 10:58:43+00:00
Being intelligent doesn't necessarily lead to runaway technological development. Dolphins are smart but they're never going to invent radios to broadcast their existence to other star systems. They're stuck in the water and don't have thumbs. And even orangutans, who have thumbs and live on land, don't seem tracked for technology even if humans weren't around; their ecological niche is small even if we assumed humans weren't wrecking their environment, and they seem comfortable and steady in it.