MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by short_sells_poo | 2025-04-01 17:02:59+00:00
Yes, and CFD simulations notoriously break down the moment you scale them up. Look at weather forecasting! Extremely complex models that push the boundaries of modern computational capabilities, and yet we are barely able to forecast weather a day or two out. Sure, we can make vague forecasts over large areas, but errors compound and we lose both granularity and accuracy.

And that's with us having a pretty solid understanding of how fluid dynamics works. We have an extremely poor understanding of how a brain works, doubly something of the complexity of the human brain. We are fundamentally unable to study it during operation, because we don't have a non-invasive high resolution access to it's internals. We are basically butchers sticking electrodes into living tissue.

The article itself proposes that we may - barely - be able to study the workings of the brain of an extremely simple organism.

A rocketry analogy would be Archimedes dreaming about people traveling to the stars.
by pqtyw | 2025-04-01 17:03:06+00:00
The potentially perverse incentive to spend every single $ you have before you die? If everything you have goes to the government after you're dead and you have more money than you personally need you can still spend it all on your children before you die.

Presumably this 100% tax would also apply to gifts cause otherwise it wouldn't really work but where does it stop? Parents can't pay for college? Buy their children a car? Go on vacation with them? Spend any money on them at all so that they would "stand on their own two feet"? Be banned from giving any financial support to their children when they reach 18?

I mean... it's an obviously not a good idea.

Also the most optimal strategy would be to spend all the money you have in addition to getting a reverse mortgages on any property so that by the time you die your net worth would be as close to 0 as possible. Or just selling everything and buying an annuity.
Show HN: We're building a space elevator with carbon nanotubes (first ride 2041)
by shreshthmohan | 2025-04-01 17:03:17+00:00
After 3 years of quantum-guided molecular assembly research, we're unveiling plans for ASCENSUS-1, the world's first commercially viable space elevator. Our nanotube ribbon (73.5 GPa tensile strength) will eliminate the need for rocket fuel while providing 5-day ascents to geosynchronous orbit.
by 082349872349872 | 2025-04-01 17:03:25+00:00
TIL; it seems like a common protocol:

> MtBSTFA derivatives are 104 times more stable to hydrolysis than their corresponding TMS derivatives and produce easily interpreted mass spectra for GC/MS.

https://www.registech.com/derivatizing-reagents/silylation-r...

EDIT: Derek Lowe: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alkanes-mars

(thx to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43548673 )
by skydhash | 2025-04-01 17:04:06+00:00
Several level of reading and bookmarking. I don't need to consume everything. Sometimes I just store a reference to the content in case I need it. Sometimes, I do a quick overview. I only give my full attention to a few thing.

Another practical tip is strengthening up you foundations. If you're interested in programming languages, once you learned the theory behind them, you'll find it's faster to learn new ones. Textbooks are great for this. This day, I don't care about most content, as there are few that are more than a sliver of insight.
by huem0n | 2025-04-01 17:04:11+00:00
Sorry, but I think this guy (The Quantified Scientist) has the article beat in terms of rigor and analysis (As some other peoole mention) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCVf3QPm-8w

- Similar graphs

- Medical grade baselines

- His whole channel is dedicated to this kind of stuff

- The original post is good, its just this channel is insanely good
by torsi0n | 2025-04-01 17:04:55+00:00
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by khedoros1 | 2025-04-01 17:05:01+00:00
My only experience with it was in 1999, I took a distance-learning class to learn C++. The teacher would send us mail about assignments, reading that we needed to do, quizzes at the end of a unit, etc. We submitted our projects through that system too.

Maybe I'd have a different opinion now, but I remember it working pretty well for that purpose back then.
by altairprime | 2025-04-01 17:05:11+00:00
Book author, in reply to your post’s discussion about the effectiveness of submitting posts to Hacker News:

Your final post title to HN was clear, direct, and talked about your book. The prior titles were not necessarily that - and used the Foo Bar Title Caps formatting in their submissions which is a mark against you before I’ve read past word two.

> My Seventh Year as a Bootstrapped Founder

Biographies are interesting to some people but not me, and this offers very little insight into what’s unique about you that’s worth reading. (There is, presumably, something unique to you that’s interesting!)

> No Longer My Favorite Git Commit

This feels like an in-joke that I didn’t get because I’m not a regular reader of your site, and probably overlooked the prior HN post. It also isn’t particularly distinctive: why not? what commit?

> Show HN: …

This title was excellent. I remember the post and I remember having all the information I needed in the title to decide how to respond to it. Lots of people run statistical analyses on HN, so it’s a common enough Show topic.

> How to write blog posts that developers read

This title is also excellent. It’s to the point, helps me understand what the focus is going to be, and either is a topic I care about or not. More like this, please!

As a concluding note, when I see people self-linking, I take a glance through their post and comment tendencies; >90% of your last 20 posts and of your last 90 days of comments are about your own work, rather than those of others. It typically takes me about ten seconds to check someone’s recent posts and make a snap judgment if I see a page full of self-links, no matter if it’s over ten days or ten months, because that’s a very reliable indicator of “promoting” rather than “participating”. I’m perfectly fine with promotion, but only in balance with participation. So, that’s a key factor in why I haven’t engaged with your posts this year to date. I’m glad your book funding went well, but I’ll continue glossing over your submissions as long as that participation ratio remains 9:1 self/other rather than 1:9 self/other.
by wg0 | 2025-04-01 17:05:11+00:00
Trust me, the function based components are way too simpler. Just a function that returns HTML. That's it. compose your UI as those functions. These functions can take arguments to customise their output (rendered HTML) as arguments (called props) or can call special functions from React (called hooks) such as asking the React to "remember" a value for you (state) or cache something for you (useMemo) so as to not compute it every time or trigger rendering if value of certain variables change (useEffect) or at the component start (useEffect with no dependencies mentioned) and that's all the React that you need to know for I would say your 95% of the needs.

React compiler (already used for Facebook and Instragram code base) further renders the use of certain hooks unncessary thus making React a lot more simpler.
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-01 17:05:48+00:00
I really like the four-part documentary series called "Staion X" which was all about Bletchly Park. It has numerous interviews with the folks that worked there -- they were a bunch of excellent oddballs, for sure.

It's a really fascinating perspective on WWII and how crap Monty was at being a general; he was reading the Germans' messages and still couldn't defeat Rommel. Only when the Med fleet intercepted and sank all his resupply ships did Rommel's crew finally lose.

The Germans' overconfidence in the Enigma machine was a big part of their downfall, especially once America's resources came to bear. Of course, that's what they deserved for having a leader speedballing meth and morphine.

All that said, the interesting historical twist is that no WWII history before the 1970s is accurate because all the Bletchly work was completely classified until one of their officers wrote a book about it. They cover that in the documentaries, too. There were men and women who had never told their families about what they did during the war, until the news finally broke. One mentioned how her daughter wondered why her mom knew that 'M' was the 13th letter.
by bArray | 2025-04-01 17:06:06+00:00
Unfortunately it is not an April Fool's joke, but it should be.

> Donkey Kong champion wins defamation case against Australian YouTuber Karl Jobst

The title sounds as if he is still recognised as a Donkey Kong Champion, where clearly in the first sentence:

> A professional YouTuber in Queensland has been ordered to pay $350,000 plus interest and costs to the former world record score holder for Donkey Kong, after the Brisbane district court found the YouTuber had defamed him “recklessly” with false claims of a link between a lawsuit and another YouTuber’s suicide.

They describe him as a former world record score holder, but don't go as far as to state that it was revoked based on allegations of him cheating.

I don't think that Karl did $350k+ worth of damages to Billy, to be honest I wasn't really aware of the suicide allegation anyway.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-01 17:06:18+00:00
As the author puts it [0], the issue is that if you expand or contract an ellipse by a fixed radius in every direction (e.g., if you create inner and outer walls for an elliptical corridor of constant width), then the resulting curve is no longer an ellipse. In contrast, piecewise-circular arcs can be expanded or contracted and remain piecewise-circular, though the control points will shift around as you transform it.

[0] https://medium.com/@brunopostle/hey-ovals-are-better-than-el...
by fuzzfactor | 2025-04-01 17:06:19+00:00
It's the internet.

The default has always been no friction, especially no paywall.

Anything less is supposed to raise an eyebrow.

If you've got significant visitors to your website, the default is flourishing also.

Paywalls or other obstacles are just a sign that you're not flourishing as well as others in the same environment.
by christinaconant | 2025-04-01 17:06:20+00:00
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by fancyfredbot | 2025-04-01 17:06:24+00:00
I feel like this issue is to at least some extent a red herring. Even accepting that ROCm doesn't work on some motherboards, this can't explain why so few of AMD's GPUs have official ROCm support.

I notice that at one point there was a ROCm release which said it didn't require atomics for gfx9 GPUs, but the requirement was reintroduced in a later version of ROCm. Not sure what happened there but this seems to suggest AMD might have had a workaround at some point (though possibly it didn't work).

If this really is due to patent issues AMD can likely afford to licence or cross-license the patent given potential upside.

It would be in line with other decisions taken by AMD if they took this decision because it works well with their datacentre/high-end GPUs, and they don't (or didn't) really care about offering GPGPU to the mass/consumer GPU market.
by weare138 | 2025-04-01 17:06:26+00:00
Ok this site lost me at Tor Browser. Why is Tor Browser listed on there as if it's a commercial product/service and rated as 'Grade C' without any supporting evidence? If they don't even know what Tor is then I don't know how qualified they are to weigh in on privacy issues.

I'll save everyone some time. In the year 2025, just assume any for profit corporation is stealing your data and you've waived all your rights as a consumer when you agreed to that ToS unless presented with compelling evidence to the contrary.
by caspper69 | 2025-04-01 17:06:45+00:00
It has been in discussion for quite some time. I believe they'll get there soon: (example) https://dev.to/canro91/it-seems-the-c-team-is-finally-consid...

In the interim, MS demonstrates how C# 8.0+ can fake it pretty well with recursive pattern matching: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...

Not the same I know, and I would love me a true ADT in C#.

Edit (a formal proposal): https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/18a527bcc1f0bdaf54...
by acomjean | 2025-04-01 17:06:50+00:00
They did show Mitchell delivering a frogger(?) arcade machine so a senior could practice for a tournament, which was nice. I think it was an extra in the dvd.

Billy to my mind is a bit annoying but he’s a mild “villain” in the documentary. I mean it’s video game high scores and very compulsive people..

I should watch it again.
by jerf | 2025-04-01 17:07:02+00:00
Truly random shuffling is not very good in practice, really.

Way back in the day, before the current trend towards throwing all your MP3s in a pile and using id3 tags to hopefully sort it out, I had my MP3s in a directory structure by rough genre and album. I wrote myself a shuffler that would honor the directory structure; it would tend to stay in the same directory and use a record of the most recently played songs to avoid repeats, and only jump out if it needed to, or with some relatively smaller probability. Then there was a relatively smaller probability it would continue jumping up through the directories.

The idea is, if you have a multi-genre collection, you may want a "shuffle" but it can be jarring to whiplash between the various genres on every single song as a fully random shuffle would do. So shuffles would tend to honor albums, then honor genre, so that there was a small chance you might flip from techno to classical, and if you did, it would tend to stay in classical for a while, before flipping to pop music or whatever.

I do sort of miss it and sort of simulate it nowadays by just being a bit heavyhandedly intentional about the playlists I make for the day.
by efirman | 2025-04-01 17:07:05+00:00
Your indifference is based on some core assumptions that are false. In reality, 1) Fluoride in water works in addition to fluoride in toothpaste to protect our teeth - rather than two highly concentrated events of reminieralization, fluoriated water reminieralizes the teeth throughout the day. 2) There is a strong economic downside to ceasing fluoridation: Fluoridation saves millions of dollars that otherwise would be spent on dental bills by the public - https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2016.0... - shows cost savings ratio of twenty dollars for every. dollar invested in reduced treament costs. This remains apt: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7164347/ 3) The best way to preserve choice is to maintain fluoridation. People cannot choose to fluoridated their own water system - they can choose to live in unfluoridated areas, use filters that remove fluoride, or otherwise avoid the tap water. 4) Removing fluoridation means acces to fluoride becomes much more difficult and expensive. The reason fluoridation is so cost effective is that it is delivered through the public water system - a community resource. Bottled fluoridated water is more expensive than gasoline. It is also less regulated and less available in the U.S.A.
by pqtyw | 2025-04-01 17:07:28+00:00
> Tax wealth,

Perhaps. However an extremely high inheritance tax is an irrational way to do that. It would incentivize everyone to spend all their money/wealth before they die e.g. directly or just by selling all their property and buying an annuity.

A massive increase in consumption wouldn't necessarily be the best outcome. Though I do see some benefits.

> we have to stop all this inheritance bullshit.

That would only work if you ban parents from giving any gifts or financial support to their children. Which is a very slippery slope...
by int_19h | 2025-04-01 17:07:37+00:00
> Like, in Ruby, where everything truly is an expression, importing a file and then evaluating it has side effects.

In the context of ML, I think it's a more useful baseline. So declarations are still declarations, but e.g. ; is just a sequential evaluation operator.

> let being a statement is nice because it means it can only happen at the "top level" of a block, and not say, inside a loop condition.

I would argue that it's actually a downside - it means that a loop condition cannot have common subexpressions (that nevertheless need to be evaluated on every iteration) factored out.
by short_sells_poo | 2025-04-01 17:07:42+00:00
I sympathise with you, but I'd take a much more optimistic view on this. If death is oblivion, then you won't be able to feel sad that you don't exist since there won't be a consciousness to interpret these feelings.

If there's consciousness after death (in whatever form), then it is clearly not the end, just a part of a much longer - possibly infinite - journey. Even better!

In either case: it's better to stop worrying about what may come after and enjoy the journey to the fullest!
by AlecSchueler | 2025-04-01 17:07:52+00:00
> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

Like the death of American democracy, the death throes of the global status quo? The normalisation of facism?

I've been here for a decade and a half and I've never once felt the need to discuss politics here before. This situation is very different and is sure to have a direct effect on anything else we may want to discuss in the future. There's also often a technological aspect where I am dying to hear expert opinion and this is where the experts are.

Again, this situation is very new and it requires a response. Hundreds of people are upvoting these articles every day and every day they're being told to go elsewhere. It's a very disconcerting feeling and I don't understand why "hide" isn't enough.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-04-01 17:08:04+00:00
I don’t normally respond to shallow dismissals, but in this case my TL;DR is indeed a fair rephrasing of his conclusion. Emphasis added:

> *Chesterton’s answer to the semantic apocalypse is to will yourself out of it.* If you can’t enjoy My Neighbor Totoro after seeing too many Ghiblified photos, *that’s a skill issue.* Keep watching sunsets until each one becomes as beautiful as the first (the secret is that the innumerable company of the heavenly host sings in a slightly different key each time).

> I support Erik Hoel’s crusade to chart some society-level solution to the semantic apocalypse problem. You’re not allowed to say “skill issue” to society-level problems, because some people won’t have the skill; that’s why they invented the word “systemic”. *But your personal relationship to the meaning in your life is not a society-level problem.* While Erik Hoel works on the systemic issue, you should be thinking of your own individual soul.

> *If you insist that anything too common, anything come by too cheaply, must be boring, then all the wonders of the Singularity cannot save you.* You will grow weary of green wine and sick of crimson seas. But if you can bring yourself to really pay attention, to see old things for the first time, then you can combine the limitless variety of modernity with the awe of a peasant seeing an ultramarine mural - or the delight of a 2025er Ghiblifying photos for the first time.
by zie | 2025-04-01 17:08:06+00:00
Agreed on the larger picture. Oracle ZFS is calcified ZFS. Their last stable release it looks like was in January of 2023.

OpenZFS released 2.3.1 a few weeks ago: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases It has direct support for FreeBSD and Linux.

macOS, Windows and other ports work great, but are not (yet) upstream: https://openzfs.org/wiki/Distributions
by morgoths_bane | 2025-04-01 17:08:48+00:00
Bill Gates and Oprah are both billionaires. Billionaires in general want solutions that defend capital. Privately run schools that receive government funding, in addition to tuition, while also being able to set their own curriculum free from the state is certainly within their collective class interest.

Many seem to make the mistake of assuming that one’s allegiance to the US Democratic Party means that the individual is a leftist, that cannot be further from the truth. The most recent presidential election I hope would have dispelled such myths however I am not certain if that is the case. That said, the US Democratic Party is a right centrist party. I fail to see how a film with endorsements from Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey is convincing evidence to show that this film is not rightwing propaganda. All conversations within the Overton Window of acceptability within the US are going to be right of center inherently, including films like this one.
by neonsunset | 2025-04-01 17:08:56+00:00
This is perfectly fine, but I think it's better to be unsure about specific language feature than confidently state something that is not correct (anymore).

Personally, I'm just annoyed by never-ending cycle of ".NET is bad because {reason x}", "When was this the case?", "10 years ago", "So?".

Like in the example above, chances are you just won't see new F# code do this.

It will just use task { ... } normally.
by vlovich123 | 2025-04-01 17:09:00+00:00
That's my point though. You either have graph structures with loops where the "performance" of the tracing GC is probably irrelevant to the work you're doing OR you have graph ownership without loops. The "without loops" is actually significantly more common and the "loops" case actually has solutions even without going all the way to tracing GC. Also, "performance" has many nuances here. When you say "bolt on GC significantly hinders performance", are you talking about how precisely they can reclaim memory / how quickly after being freed? Or are you talking about the pauses the collector has to make or the atomics it injects throughout to do so in a thread-safe manner?

I suspect the benefits of compaction are wildly overstated because AFAIK compaction isn't cache aware and thus the CPU cache thrashes. By comparison, a language like Rust lets you naturally lay things out in a way that the CPU likes.

> if you have a tracing GC, the simplest way to handle strings is as a heap-allocated immutable array of bytes

But what if I want to mutate the string? Now I have to do a heap allocation and can't do things in-place. Memory can be cheap to move but it can also add up substantially vs an in-place solution.