MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CRConrad | 2025-04-17 09:53:17+00:00
> it is a couple of pages and then goes "The rest of this article is exclusive!"

But after that it says, "This article will unlock in 6 months". And hovering over the "6 months" bit displays a hint, "Monday, 13 October 2025 at 23:30:00". -- though it doesn't specify, "23:30" in which timezone.

.

As for the bit of content we are allowed to see, it certainly didn't sell me on Rust... but sure confirmed my resolution to avoid JavaScript at all cost.

Oh well, maybe I'll have to ingest the rest the slow way, by the video.
by meindnoch | 2025-04-17 09:54:02+00:00
>It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now.

Or they've reached their technological plateau millions of years ago. Like we did 50 years ago.

>And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived.

We know for a fact that life have existed on Earth for >2 billion years.
by turtleyacht | 2025-04-17 09:55:58+00:00
ed(1) scripts can be used to transform text. Starting with a default Vagrantfile and "playing" each transform 001.ed, 002.ed, etc on it.

What I haven't seen yet are (1) state-modifying workflows and (2) domain-specific macro "loadouts."

For example, editing something and re-opening the same file after incrementing a variable.

And for the second, sourcing a "writing a novel" .ed script so that certain keymaps help with that, versus a coding loadout where keymaps help with refactoring.

Maybe it gets too confusing or complex, maintaining the tooling instead of getting to the actual work. But it aligns with the desire to customize one's computing environment.
by greatgib | 2025-04-17 09:56:31+00:00
I don't know who is this people that you are talking about, but if it was the case, everyone would only use taxis already. Even if robotaxis would make the ride "half price", that would still be costly for a lot of persons, especially the one using their cars a lot.

Also you might like to own your car, to fit it to your need and style, you might need to use it to store items for period of times, you might want to be able to take your time, load and unload in private spaces, you might want to be 100% sure to have your car ready at the place that you want at the exact time and schedule that you need it, you might need your car for lot of small trips in a row without a clearly defined schedule, ...
by bob1029 | 2025-04-17 09:56:58+00:00
> Most "definitely harder than NP" problems require a nontrivial background in theoretical computer science or mathematics to understand.

One of the simplest examples of this is automatic program synthesis.

Searching for the optimal (e.g., shortest) program that satisfies a given set of inputs/outputs (function) is an undecidable (worse than exponential time) problem similar to the halting problem. The exponent in this case would have been the size of the instruction set, but we still don't know how many cycles we need (i.e., is it even practical to run?).

In applications like genetic programming, we deal with the halting problem by specifying a maximum # of cycles that the program interpreter will run for each time. The ability of the synthesized programs to halt in a bounded time becomes part of selection pressure. Candidates that return poor or no results within the constraints are quickly eliminated. This can be further compounded by making the candidates evolve their own resource limits as part of their genome.

Put differently, we can approximately solve the halting problem for some smaller problems with clever search techniques. I don't think talking about these things in absolute terms is very useful. Everything depends on the problem and the customer's expectations.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-17 09:57:02+00:00
> As I said in another thread, basically that will kill any possibility to do your own CA for your own subdomain

Only if browsers enforce the TLS requirements for private CAs. Usually, browsers exempt user or domain controlled CAs from all kinds of requirements, like certificate transparancy log requirements. I doubt things will be different this time.

If they do decide to apply those limits, you can run an ACME server for your private CA and point certbot or whatever ACME client you prefer at it to renew your internal certificates. Caddy can do this for you with a couple of lines of config: https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/acme_serve...

Funnily enough, Caddy defaults to issueing 12 hour certificates for its local CA deployment.

> no certificate pinning anymore

Why bother with public certificate authorities if you're hardcoding the certificate data in the client?

> Instead of having closed systems, readonly, having to connect outside and update only once per year or more to update the certificates, you will have now all machines around the world that will have to allow quasi permanent connections to random certificate servers for the updating the system all the time.

Those hosts needed a bastion host or proxy of sorts to connect to the outside yearly, so they can still do that today. But I don't see the advantage of using the public CA infrastructure in a closed system, might as well use the Microsoft domain controller settings you probably already use in your network to generate a corporate CA and issue your 10 year certificates if you're in control of the network.
by ta20240528 | 2025-04-17 09:57:17+00:00
Have you asked any of the inmates at the Angola "working farm" in Louisiana?

Apparently 63% are serving life terms, 27% more than 20 years.

Doesn't seem worse than China's attempt to iron out a seditious, violent sub-culture that was actually detonating bombs amongst civilians? Most seem to have closed, so the maximum term < 10 years.

Neither are good ideas IMHO - but one way worse than the other? Come now.
by milesrout | 2025-04-17 09:57:29+00:00
And the evidence of that is what? What is the mechanism behind that? How is it testable?

This is what annoys me about this field. It is just magical thinking and baseless speculation. Random ideas get given names like "dark forest theory" like they are deep and consequential.

What you said is the only consequence of that "theory", because that "theory" is literally just the idle speculation that "alien civilizations may stay undetectable by hiding biological signatures of their worlds."
by modo_mario | 2025-04-17 09:57:31+00:00
Oh for sure. But it helps to spread the effort and to have to fight hunger and cravings less. If one fails there it makes sense to put at least minimum effort to alleviate that strain.

Also i mentioned strength training specifically since other than what you burn at a workout resting metabolic rate also increases and helps. I assume the average person on this website is notably rather sedentary and would see above average results depending on age and such.[1] (Even more so if he's a guy which I believed he was based on his name.) You'll always need a base and you're reducing your intake anything so something like a 15% difference is gigantic when you're struggling and super helpfull (even just 5% is worthwile).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8030593/

edit: and I'll acknowledge it would take a while before that increased resting metabolic rate starts to play more but again....it needs to be sustainable so whatever you're doing you need to be able to keep up anyway.
by Doxin | 2025-04-17 09:57:38+00:00
> and totally didn't get in the way.

Are you sure about that? My recollection is mostly clippy doing inane animations in the bottom right, with no real good way to turn him off. You could tell him to go away but by default he'd pop back in real quick as soon as he thought you were doing something he could help with. Even the more permanent setting to turn him off would periodically revert.

By modern standards that's maybe not intrusive.
by lucb1e | 2025-04-17 09:58:11+00:00
If you find that sort of thing interesting... I don't always know how seriously to take the things on this channel, but I discovered Fraser Cain not so long ago and find the ideas mentioned in the interviews to be fascinating, for example "Interstellar Travel Without Breaking Physics with Andrew Higgins" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkGRVvA23qI (warning: it's over an hour)
by ta8645 | 2025-04-17 09:58:42+00:00
But if there was a Kardashev type III civilization in the Milky Way, they would have had full control of our entire galaxy in a mere 200 million years or so. And we can be pretty sure that such a civilization doesn't actually exist. Which suggests that either advanced life is rare, or dies off long before it ever reaches such technological breadth.
by cedilla | 2025-04-17 09:59:01+00:00
The dark forest theory makes for a great book premise, but it probably doesn't apply in real life simply because the distances are so far.

The universe is not a forest. It's a gigantic, empty ocean. The next, dangerous tribe is not lurking behind a bush 2 meters away, but is sitting on an island that's so far away it will take centuries to go there, if it is possible at all
by kedislav | 2025-04-17 09:59:01+00:00
Website seems to be down or dead, consider using the archived link [1]. Also, since these are slides, it'd sure be nice to have the presentation on video form since a lot of context is missing from the slides. It does not seem to be available (well, it is from October 2006).

From the archived site's abstract [2]:

>"bash (and scripting languages in general) act as the glue that hold other system components together. This presentation will focus on the under utilized features of bash that are critical to building production quality scripts. Demos will show you how and why to turn these features on."

EDIT: seems the website being down is a me issue (?), but still, having the archives doesn't hurt. ---

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241212102046/https://uniforumc...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240719092417/http://uniforumch...
by zaphodias | 2025-04-17 10:00:02+00:00
I'm doing the same, I have family plans with my friends for pretty much anything so I don't think I ever reached such high monthly costs though.

I started my home server for self hosting Immich, not only for the cost but because I like to have my images close to me.

I also recently replaced Lightroom with ON1, it's definitely not the same quality but, as hobbyist, it didn't make much sense to pay that much for me anymore. It was by far the most expensive subscription I had.
by 10729287 | 2025-04-17 10:00:44+00:00
It's also great sometimes to discover great music from genre you usually don't like, or... just be exposed to songs you don't like. This is what helps building a musical culture.

Please allow me to recommend FIP, as a human (it's a classic here but there's no such thing as recommending too much FIP) : https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip
by lucb1e | 2025-04-17 10:00:50+00:00
Wait, we're talking about buying domain names right? Not about buying countries in order to own a ccTLD rather than a 'regular' TLD

So then you don't have to produce an offence that takes the TLD down (whichever kind) but one that makes a judge within the country that the TLD operator operates in approve a takedown notice for your domain name or even get the TLD operator to cooperate voluntarily
by sjducb | 2025-04-17 10:01:16+00:00
If you include our crops and livestock then our civilisation has about half the land biomass. 38% of the earths land is farmland. (We use the richest parts as farmland) https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-faq/what-percentage-of-land...

Another 34% is Forrest, much of which is managed for logging.
by adrian_b | 2025-04-17 10:01:23+00:00
The 90 nm Prescott Pentium 4 was much more power hungry than the previous 130 nm Northwood Pentium 4.

Even worse than the TDP was the fact that the 90 nm Pentium 4 had huge leakage current, so its idle power consumption was about half of the maximum power consumption, e.g. in the range 50 to 60 W for the CPU alone.

Moreover, at that time (2004) the cooler makers were not prepared for such a jump in the idle power consumption and maximum power consumption, so the only coolers available for Pentium 4 were extremely noisy when used with 90 nm Pentium 4 CPUs.

I remember when at the company where I worked, where we had a great number of older Pentium 4 CPUs, which were acceptable, we got a few upgrades with new Prescott Pentium 4. The noise, even when the computers were completely idle, was tremendous. We could not stand it, so we have returned the computers to the vendor.
by arkey | 2025-04-17 10:01:51+00:00
> ...yes, I know I look like a shill/bot. I don't care. They're genuinely just that good, and I will happily advocate for them until that ever changes.

Properly good, human and effective customer service is so rare these days that I tend to trust hyperbolic reviews like these more than others, believing that the person honestly feels that way, having been there myself.
by mr_mitm | 2025-04-17 10:01:51+00:00
Calling it simply an engineering issue is not properly conveying the ridiculousness of such a journey. For a small space ship of 1000 tons, this would take ten thousand times the current yearly energy consumption of mankind. So we'd need to figure out how to generate the energy and then store it on a space ship before even thinking about the engineering.

And that's ignoring the mass of the fuel. The classical rocket equation has the mass going exponentially with the velocity, which makes this endeavor even more mind bogglingly ridiculous. We'd actually need 2 million years worth of our current yearly energy consumption.

It's fun to think about, but being clear about the challenges puts quite the damper on it.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-17 10:02:05+00:00
Yep. Social programs and taxes were reduced under Reagan to prevent "welfare queens" from abusing the system. Many of the "poor whites" would have also benefited from those very same social programs. Rich people who were taxed less were able to spend that money consolidating power and weakening the government making the government less capable of regulating that very power consolidation. Power compounded and now we have oligarchs. Eventually they purchased citizens united from the supreme court "legitimating" their money as valid political power in a democracy.
by mattgi | 2025-04-17 10:02:52+00:00
I think it won’t replace people for quite some time.

But it will replace people that don’t want to use AI! It still requires someone to closely monitor, tweak a prompt, change direction, or manually fix some code.

That said, a product manager or QA specialist who is motivated to learn how to prompt, “vibe code”, and interact with an LLM is going to be much better off than a software engineer that just wants to hand write code.

Where things also really get interesting is in the micro SaaS space. I reflected on this recently at https://weaver.so/articles/vibe-coding-and-saas.

I think anyone working on small tools that improve a specific process (but doesn’t fit a business need precisely) will find themselves losing customers. Motivated folks will just start building their own tools to meet their needs instead.
Show HN: Lit.money – Ethically designed to be a private, simple way to see money
by mhrnik | 2025-04-17 10:05:27+00:00
Hey HN People,

I know it's 2025, and you might be wondering why there's a need for a personal finance web app. I'd like to share my story and why I created lit.Money.

During COVID, I started actively managing my finances, primarily optimizing for FIRE and monitoring my progress. There are apps in India, but I didn't like their UI. I don't like to exchange messages or call with accountant for bank details or transaction queries. I also wanted a simple way to view my partner's and family's finances in one place. I considered Copilot, but it wasn't available in India. While there are 1 or 2 good apps available, none offer financial view sharing with partners, family, or accountants.

I wanted a simple, user-friendly web app, so I built lit.money (currently available as a web app).

Some key features: - View all your data on a single screen, including the number of transactions and accounts - Delete all your data with a single click (no need to contact support or wait) - "Finspace" -> a financial space where you can share your finances with partners, family, or accountants with customizable permissions (read/write) and account visibility - Easily bulk edit transactions and export data

I'm not trying to create the next big thing, just a simple project that provides real value. I would greatly appreciate your feedback! There's a DEMO MODE available to try it easily, or if you're busy, you can check out some videos (thanks to my wife, she made them): https://www.youtube.com/@litmoneyapp
by yorwba | 2025-04-17 10:05:58+00:00
It's not about a single point of failure. It's about lots of different systems, each with their own unique set of vulnerabilities, and a well-resourced adversary picking them off one-by-one, escalating privilege, gaining persistence and then... doing nothing, because they're not at war... yet.

It's like building up an arsenal of ICBMs without ever using them, but when they do get used, they're launched all at once.
by saberience | 2025-04-17 10:06:02+00:00
People were making a front and backend web app in half a day using Ruby on Rails way before LLMs were ever a thing, and their code quality was still much better than yours!

So vibe coding, sure you can create some shitty thing which WORKS, but once it becomes bigger than a small shitty thing, it becomes harder and harder to work with because the code is so terrible when you're pure vibe coding.
by goognighz | 2025-04-17 10:06:27+00:00
Interestingly we can’t actually know that we are correct in our calculations of what a planet lightyears away has as its atmosphere because we will never be able to go there and make sure we are correct. It’s a calculation and nothing more. For all we know that planet may not even exist. That’s what’s mind blowing about astronomy. We really don’t have any way of proving anything about what we are observing. All we can say is we are observing. That’s the only thing science can offer us.
by amelius | 2025-04-17 10:06:54+00:00
Not available for everybody.

> As of today, daylist is available to both Free and Premium users across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland at spotify.com/daylist.

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-12/ever-changing-playli...

(note: old post, but still accurate?)
by glimshe | 2025-04-17 10:07:06+00:00
Microsoft was one of the first companies who fully internalized the importance of seamless backwards compatibility. The lessons had been around for a while, such as the fate of the 1200XL.

They would have done a lot better, even at a higher price, if they had focused on it. The Atari 8-bit line had a lot going for it and was arguably superior (flame wars incoming, Atari army please help me) in many ways than the C64.
by anon373839 | 2025-04-17 10:07:35+00:00
That’s pretty useful info! If you were feeling uncomfortably hungry beyond a short adjustment period, that makes me question if your caloric deficit was too aggressive. And/or if your diet didn’t include enough fiber and protein for satiety. (It’s also possible to be confusing other signals for hunger, like thirst, boredom, or anxiety.)

Losing weight does not have to be so hard. You can lose a lot of weight gradually over time with a small, consistent deficit. Measurement accuracy is critical, though - you will absolutely fail if you aren’t logging your food like a lab scientist.

But it is definitely possible to succeed without that constant sense of privation. In fact, if you want to succeed long-term, you HAVE to find that balance because nobody can force themselves to feel deprived indefinitely.
by frontfor | 2025-04-17 10:09:06+00:00
> I don't think talking about these things in absolute terms is very useful. Everything depends on the problem and the customer's expectations.

Agreed. In the real world, approximate solutions to hard problems are often good enough.

For instance, the TSP might be a hard problem, but solving it exactly is pointless since the distances between nodes might be subject to measurement uncertainty anyway, and actual travel times might not be fixed as they might fall under a distribution.

Having said that, it’s still worth studying the theoretical aspects of these problems.
by poulpy123 | 2025-04-17 10:10:34+00:00
Yeah sorry but the Apple math is so weird that it cmake me doubt the rest of the article. An increase of 54$ in taxes doesn't explain the 216$ increase in price. Of course to keep the same profit, the price would increase more than 54$ to handle some externalities and the decrease of sales, but it would be paid only once and do not need to increase at each step
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-17 10:12:13+00:00
I agree with the issue ("What's bigger than a dog? THE MOON"), but I don't agree with the need to provide an example that is provably distinct from NP. We're fine providing NP-complete problems without proving that they're distinct from P.

There are lots of accessible problems that belong to spaces that probably aren't NP. One that should be familiar to most people studying CS theory is "do these two regular expressions match the same set of strings?".

---

For the Diophantine vector reachability problem... I don't really like the Quanta presentation. ("An easy-sounding problem yields numbers too big for our universe.")

First, the problem, if you describe it accurately, doesn't sound easy at all. Diophantine problems are never easy. That's why we have real numbers.

Second, the article suggests that the problem should be introduced to children by casting in in terms of several rules of exchange ("For Alice, the transition vector (−1, −1, 1, 0) would represent the exchange of an apple and a banana for a cantaloupe."). But that would make the problem trivial: you start at the origin; without a rule of "exchange" in which the other party gives you as much as you want of something for free, you're never going to leave it.

And third, many easy problems generate numbers too big for our universe. That's not unusual at all. Compare the question "how many digits of pi do you need before the potential error in calculating the volume of a sphere the size of the visible universe is less than the volume of one hydrogen atom?". Can you imagine using more digits than that? You just involved a number too big for the universe.

The article passes over this point itself:

> It’s physically impossible to write down all the digits of 2↑↑­­6 — a liability of living in such a small universe.