MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-04-02 07:21:23+00:00
I don't have anything more than Newton's third law for you and that its effects also hold in general relativity. The "far away parts of the universe are disconnected" is from my astrophysics courses back in university and the number of lectures to the cosmic microwave background, mostly coming from people discussing the Planck mission.

But.. no, I don't have a convenient citation for you. And at least for the "angular momentum is conserved thing", I'd be surprised if you'd find a google scholar paper, this is early GR
by vladvasiliu | 2025-04-02 07:21:29+00:00
There's something to be said about quality of life, too. Just because something doesn't outright kill you (sooner) doesn't mean it's fine to live with it.

I'm not asthmatic, but last summer I had an eye-opening moment about pollution. I live in a very dense city, and I regularly go for short runs in a local park. Last summer I spent a few weeks at my parents' house, who live in the suburbs of the same city, only farther away, in a small town surrounded by fields and forests.

When I went running in the forest, I couldn't believe how easier it felt to breathe and how all-round easier my session felt, event though I ran faster and longer. I don't usually run so fast that I'm out of breath, but that particular time I felt a marked difference in how easy breathing felt. It was as if I needed to breathe in "less air" to get the oxygen I needed.

I had already felt a similar thing after the first covid lockdowns coming back to the city. I had sensation of something "rough" in my throat and had short bouts of coughing. This was a few days after the lockdowns lifted, and people were still weary of public transit so everyone on their dog were sitting in gridlocked cars on the roads.

I think it's the same thing with ambient noise. After some point, we just don't notice it any longer, but it does take its toll in stress and all-round irritability.
by jruohonen | 2025-04-02 07:23:52+00:00
So I posted this not because of science per se but because scientific literature (alongside Wikipedia, high-quality mainstream media, and perhaps some others) is among the few places left to get decent new training material.

And the case is also quite revealing because I didn't think that the LLM contamination would happen so fast. In other words, even the LLMs or AI agents, or whatever they are today called, of some big companies have already eaten these tortured phrases.
by AnthonBerg | 2025-04-02 07:23:59+00:00
Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System – Takahashi, Flanigan, McEwen & Russo, 2018

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience...

“Aggression has an adaptive significance for most animal species and is critical for acquiring and protecting territory, food, reproductive mates, and offspring. In animals with hierarchical societies, aggressive behavior is thought to help individuals gain and maintain higher social status (Box 2). It has been shown that aggressive behavior, especially the experience of winning, has rewarding properties in animals and repeated aggressive experience may lead to compulsive, pathological aggression that is highly reinforcing (Fish et al., 2002; Falkner et al., 2016; Golden et al., 2016, 2017).”
by okeuro49 | 2025-04-02 07:25:22+00:00
"Sitting among the gleaming steel fixtures and softly glowing concrete lines of the modernist Cologne Bonn Airport on a sunny Sunday morning in late 1977, en route to his homebase, the perennially nervous flier recoiled once again at the canned pop pleasantries mindlessly piped into such an inspired space. The music was not only an afterthought but also insulting to the idea that you would soon climb into a sleek metal tube and be propelled by engines through the sky at 40,000 feet. “I started thinking, ‘What should we be hearing here?’ I thought most of all you wanted music that didn’t try to pretend you weren’t going to die on the plane, ” Eno, laughing but serious."

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brian-eno-ambient-1-mus...
by sparkie | 2025-04-02 07:26:07+00:00
They're not so different in that regard. C# `await` can be adapted by making an awaitable and awaiter type[1], which isn't to dissimilar to how a computation expression in F# needs to implement methods `Bind`, `Return`, `Yield`, etc.

In both languages these patterns make up for the absence of typeclasses to express things like a functor, applicative, monad, comonad, etc.

[1]https://ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-334_7...
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-04-02 07:27:24+00:00
I would bet the main forcing being insurance companies. There are only a handful of those and while they are powerful, they are also subject to (western) courts. And if (essentially) the US says: If you insure a ship using the wrong fuel you will cease existing, those ships won't be insured. And ships are too expensive to run without insurance (at least most of them). But.. pure speculation

Ports could be the other player, but how would you coordinate the ~all ports?
by noneeeed | 2025-04-02 07:27:56+00:00
The other striking aspect for me is how, as has often been the case, those most affected are the poorest.

Levels of asthma in London are highest among kids in the vacinity of the docks where cruise and container ships and moor. They sit there running their engines for power, churning out SO2 and other pollutants. These areas are some of the poorest in London.

The same was the case in industrial cities during the industrial revolution. The poor factory workers lived close to the factories, and their kids grew up breathing the smoke. The wealthy owners moved to the outer suburbs (often upwind) where the air was clear.

There was a bit of an uproar a few years back about how many premiership football players were using asthma medication, a higher rate than the general population. The implication being that they were using them as performance enhacning drugs. But if you take into account that they disproportionately come from poor inner-city areas (not all, but many more), the proportion with asthma looks much more in line with the background rate.

Urban air pollution is insidious. Unlike the dreadful smogs of previous generations that lead to things like the Clean Air Act and the banning of open fires in urban areas, today's is invisible, and so doesn't create the same political problems. In fact if you try to do anything about inner city pollution you can pretty much guarentee an angry pushback.
by nomilk | 2025-04-02 07:29:18+00:00
Something I haven't quite figured out is why my perceptions of cities' air pollution differ dramatically from their readings as reported by air quality sites.

I suspect readings are quite dependent on the specific location of the reading device. E.g. if the air quality monitor is located in a claustrophobic city street with lots of motorcycle traffic (e.g. Nha Trang), air pollution might be through the roof, but 100m away on the beach it might be clean(ish) air. Similar for 'leafy' cities (e.g. Singapore), where 100m can make a huge difference in air quality e.g. near a park vs beside a busy road.

Curious to know if the science backs up my suspicion that ostensibly 'polluted' cities sometimes have unpolluted alcoves (and 'clean' cities have spaces with bad air), so your micro environment really matters (more than the 'average' reading for that city, anyway).
by throwaway2037 | 2025-04-02 07:29:26+00:00
I am such a luddite -- I hardly stream (a couple of things per year from Google Play). I know about the book "The Electric State", but I never knew it was made into a film by Netflix. If you Google search for reviews, they are absolutely savage. Just the headlines are enough:

Vulture: Netflix's The Electric State Is a $320 Million Piece of Junk

The Atlantic: How to Make an Instantly Forgettable, Very Expensive Movie

The Guardian: Why are the most expensive Netflix movies also the worst?

EDIT:

Regarding this:

> Netflix can get away with inefficient business processes because it's making enough money right now to paper over those costs, but eventually they'll have to streamline their processes.

If this were really true, why are the professional stock analyst ratings overwhelming "buy" (instead of "hold" or "sell")? The stock is up 50+% in last 1 year, and 150+% in last 5 years. That is outstanding performance.
by littlestymaar | 2025-04-02 07:30:23+00:00
In fairness we don't really have such models, at least not anymore.

We used to, that's what “macro” economics was about. The models where crude but they did the job for a while, we used them for more than 30 years between the 40s and the late 70s, with great success (no economic crisis for the longest time since the industrial revolution).

But they conflicted with the idea that economist made of their job, as these models didn't include any if the classical economics credo that economists had been worshipping for almost two centuries (markets, competition, scarcity, supply and demand, etc.). So people started building “micro-founded” macro models, that tried to reconcile the empirical models that worked with the ideological principles of classical economics. But you can't have good models if you design them to match an ideological paradigm.

And then as you said, it failed catastrophically: the oil shock came, and suddenly the forecasts of the models became useless for a while. At that very moment, everyone who opposed to using models to justify state intervention where thrilled, and the era of short-terms economic engineering based on models was dead.
by londons_explore | 2025-04-02 07:32:10+00:00
This approach has a problem when the mobile client is on the end of a very slow connection, yet the diff that needs to be synced is gigabytes, perhaps because it's an initial sync or the database got bloated for whatever reason.

A hybrid approach is to detect slow syncing (for example when sync hasn't completed after 5 seconds), and instead send queries directly to the server because there is a good chance the task the user wants to complete doesn't depend on the bloated records.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-02 07:32:26+00:00
> Deep learning models produce their outputs using a series of transformations distributed across many computational units (artificial “neurons”). The field of mechanistic interpretability seeks to describe these transformations in human-understandable language.

This is the central theme behind why I find techniques like genetic programming to be so compelling. You get interpretability by default. The second order effect of this seems to be that you can generalize using substantially less training data. The humans developing the model can look inside the box and set breakpoints, inspect memory, snapshot/restore state, follow the rabbit, etc.

The biggest tradeoff here being that the search space over computer programs tends to be substantially more rugged. You can't use math tricks to cheat the computation. You have to run every damn program end-to-end and measure the performance of each directly. However, you can execute linear program tapes very, very quickly on modern x86 CPUs. You can search through a billion programs with a high degree of statistical certainty in a few minutes. I believe we are at a point where some of the ideas from the 20th century are viable again.
by originalvichy | 2025-04-02 07:33:12+00:00
Cars become worse the more you approach colder climates. Every fall and spring there are multiple weeks during which asphalt roads are dry from sunlight and warmth, which leads to studded tyres chewing through asphalt. Not only that, the sand we spread on roads to help people stay on their feet also helps in creating massive amounts of dust. It's so difficult to time the change from summer tyres to winter tyres.

It's quite possible to survive with friction tyres with the help of good traction control (especially from an EV) but there are vast areas of the country that do not get roads plowed in a timely manner, so it's "safer" to go with studs.
by animuchan | 2025-04-02 07:33:48+00:00
> Russia is not a democracy

How do you determine this though? There are candidates. Majority of the people vote. The one voted for the most wins.

Sure, _some_ candidates are in jail (or dead) — but that's strictly because they were convicted in a fair trial, they're criminals, you see.

I argue that there are similarities between two regimes blacklisting political candidates from the democratic process.

> When in a real democracy

If we cherry-pick the ones we like to be "real", and the ones we dislike to be "fake", then by definition the "real" ones are the good ones.

> Not in Ukraine either

E.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/20/ukraine-suspen...

Sure, not a court per se — it was apparently the country's national security and defense council that took the decision to ban the parties from any political activity.

But I agree, it's whatever.

> Trump was elected after that!

Yep, despite well-documented efforts to block him from running. The outcome is I think a win for democracy. That democrats think of this as a defeat is amusing to me. (I'm an foreigner and don't live or vote in the US, so no horse in the race either way.)
by seektable | 2025-04-02 07:35:03+00:00
Common approach is to use a data warehouse that is suitable for executing OLAP queries (to load/calculate data for your dashboards) in seconds. In simplest cases ('small data') this can be simply app's database replica - a separate (read-only) DB server that is used for reporting/analytics purposes. It is easy to configure master-slave replication with built-in SQL Server/PostgreSql/Mysql capabilities.

If replica server cannot execute queries fast enough, a specialized (optimized for OLAP-workload) database should be used instead. This can be a cloud service (like BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Motherduck) or self-hosted solutions (ClickHouse, PostgreSql with pg_analytics extension, or even in-process DuckDB). Data sync is performed either with scheduled full-copy (simple, but not suitable for near real-time analytics) or via CDC (see Airbyte).
by a_c | 2025-04-02 07:35:13+00:00
While I'm not going to make any food according to the recipes yet, the recipes gave me good chuckle. I'm always amazed by the creativity people have, a feeling that dissipates the moment I know something is AI generated. Comprehensive JavaScript Tutorial https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_VDcP5QiJjAPVhV/comprehen... is my favourite so far.
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-04-02 07:36:47+00:00
Isn't the compatibility promise what syscalls essentially are?

Historically, they (almost) never break and they are steadily incremented to prevent overlaps in differences of parameters.

As WASI is also implementing syscalls for WASM, I'd argue that the binary format doesn't really matter as long as it's using the same syscalls in the end.

I understand this topic is mostly focussing on glibc/muslc problems, but if you want to develop stable software, use CGo free Go binaries. They likely will run in 10 years the same way they do today.

C ABI compatibility is a mess on linux mostly because upstream maintainers don't give a damn about semantic versioning. Just take a look at the SO file headers, and how they differ from upstream "semantic" versions of the library. As long as shared objects differ in versions due to breaking changes, and as long as the C ecosystem doesn't enforce correct versioning, this won't change.
by Kreoss | 2025-04-02 07:38:22+00:00
Highlights from the article:

• The first release candidate of Phoenix 1.8 is out with some big quality-of-life improvements! We’ve focused on making the getting started experience smoother, tightened up our code generators, and introduced scopes for secure data access that scales with your codebase. On the UX side, we added long-requested dark mode support — plus a few extra perks along the way. And phx.gen.auth now ships with magic link support out of the box for a better login and registration experience. • Phoenix 1.8 extends our built-in tailwindcss support with daisyUI, adding a flexible component and theming system. • The phx.gen.auth generator now uses magic links by default for login and registration. • Scopes are a new first-class pattern in Phoenix, designed to make secure data access the default, not something you remember (or forget) to do later. Reminder that broken access control is the most common OWASP vulnerability. • Streamlined onboarding: we chose to simplify several of our code generators. Our goal is to give seasoned folks a better foundation to build the real features they want to ship, while giving newcomers simplified code which will help them get up to speed on the basics more quickly. • We have also revised Phoenix nested layouts, root.html.heex and app.html.heex, in favor of a single layout that is then augmented with function components. • You can update existing phx.new installations with: mix archive.install hex phx_new 1.8.0-rc.0 --force
by ajw287 | 2025-04-02 07:38:24+00:00
Really?! Making this project must have taken tens or hundreds of hours - if they are proud of the work, why not show it off? The video looks like it wasn't faked.

Did nobody look at the image after they generated it? If they live in a bedsit and don't have a nice windowsill, they could easily generate the background and if the product is vaporware they could drop a rendering over the top - I think that might actually be easier than training an AI on your product... I'll be grumpy at clouds next!
by rossant | 2025-04-02 07:38:30+00:00
> I actually tried contacting some researchers locally, because I live near a university hospital that does a lot of research into testing for cancer. They basically said it was impossible and to stop wasting their time… like damn okay sorry

Too bad. I guess a blind study with a control group wouldn't be too hard to conduct. Worst case, it was a waste of time. Otherwise, might lead to interesting discoveries.
by genewitch | 2025-04-02 07:38:55+00:00
Your comment reminds me of a picture I saw a few days ago of a telescope shot, caption "there are no stars in this picture, only galaxies" and there were so. Many. Bright spots.

I don't know where or when it was taken, or what part of the sky that happens in. Maybe it's just a really long lens, so it's seeing "through" the galaxy we normally see "stars" from?

Anyhow, how do you think you could prove this or how someone could prove it? Is it like, two observers on opposite sides of the planet observing the same thing, say during an eclipse or something? Maybe radioastronomy?
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-04-02 07:38:58+00:00
I think the other commenter is correct, that it's one company (Regent) trying to make "Seaglider" a thing.

For obvious reasons - which word would you rather introduce to the public: "Ekranoplan", or "Seaglider".

If anyone else is working on modern Ekranoplans, I'd like to know. But AFAIK, it's just one company working on it, and promoting it.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-04-02 07:40:33+00:00
Yes, it is and this is projection again. We had years with arguments "they are a private company", "free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", etc. pp.

Perhaps integrity would demand that people speak up and in my experience they indeed still do. But you shouldn't be surprised if the criticism is quite a bit less loud if it concerns speech from a politicized crowd that demanded more content control and censorship just a few weeks before. Petty? Maybe. Wrong? Maybe. But certainly not surprising that bad life decisions in the past do have an effect.
by dmbche | 2025-04-02 07:40:43+00:00
You've stumbled upon Chaos Theory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory), which aims to study chaotic systems (charactesised by very high relation to initial variables - see weather prediction, double pendulum, etc).

Some problems are too sensible to initial variables and solutions are not prescriptive like regular physics - meaning that variability at the 20th decimal in your initial variables will induce massive output differences. Lorentz discovery of this is interesting as he was working on weather modelling, it's a clear example of the issues with chaotic systems. He was running simulations of weather systems with multiple fixed initial variables (temperature, wind speed, etc) and seeing how the system progressed over a few hours. He realised that after a typo on a very far away decimal on a single parameter, the system was modelling the complete opposite of what we had seen in the previous test (think it was forecasting a typhoon when it used to say sunny day), even while using values that would be "equal" with relation to the precision of the measuring equipement. And that's nothing to talk about getting clean, precise enough data for such models, which is practically impossible (see the observer effect, between other causes). Garbage in, garbage out.

All this to say that problems in this sphere are characterized by quickly becoming untractable and impossible to model precisely how they evolve over time.

I can recommend James Gleick's Chaos: Making a new science for a overview for the layperson.
by littlestymaar | 2025-04-02 07:41:00+00:00
> and an equilibrium assumption to recover the parameters

That parts makes no sense though, there isn't an equilibrium and can never be, economies are a chaotic system. One of the key problems of economic modeling is that they used mathematical tool that aren't suited for that.

You can't consider an economy as a steam engine. Walras was a trained engineer in the 19th century so I can excuse him for making this approximation, but I can't excuse anyone still following his course more than a century later.
by unwind | 2025-04-02 07:43:32+00:00
PCBs get more expensive with larger area, but it should probably be ok.

I hunted down the Gerbers and uploaded to JLCPCB real quick, the cost for the bare PCB at the current size (218x218 mm) is $22 for 5 pieces, excluding shipping. I thought it was interesting to have as a reference.

Scaling up the PCB is not possible in their web UI since the Gerbers "lock in" the size, of course.
by Tainnor | 2025-04-02 07:43:54+00:00
> there is an underserved audience that wants an engaging way to learn a language and are disillusioned with Duolingo already

I'm just very unsure whether it's possible to design an effective language learning program that is "engaging" in the way that Duolingo users want it. At the end of the day, you should feel engagement from using the language (and seeing yourself improve) and not from external gimmicks.
by xlii | 2025-04-02 07:44:26+00:00
I thought that this article will address an elephant in the room but either it missed it or I missed it.

My problem with pollution is that… you need to measure it, and those who pollute don’t do it consciously. Anecdotally I often drive through a small town. You can smell pollution, a plastic smell. In winter you can see column of smoke coming out of chimney. Sometimes it’s milky white, sometimes it thick black. There are many like that. I asked shop keeper is it happening often, she confirmed and said that no one is interested in doing otherwise, installing sensors was directly opposed by town council.

The town is not on a pollution map. Nearby cities are with medium-high pollution but that particular region is supposedly clean as reported by a single sensor positioned somewhere on a hill.

It’s not like there is one town like that in the world. There are nations that pollute heavily and don’t care and don’t meter the impact. I would be curious if all the effort, regulations etc. are worth it when applied to average Joe versus huge polluters.
by jl6 | 2025-04-02 07:45:10+00:00
What this mostly seems to demonstrate is that hip-pop is endlessly derivative. That might be a consequence of their data source:

> To build this project, we used the dataset of hundreds of thousands of songs on Genius.com accessible through their API, over 200,000 of which were “connected” in some way by sample, interpolation, cover, or remix.

Genres where sampling is openly and explicitly acknowledged are going to be massively over-represented. It would be cool build a relationship network using feature extraction on the actual audio.