MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daxfohl | 2025-04-21 21:35:50+00:00
I see intermixing of the terms quantum computer and quantum system. These are different concepts, and I think that's the source of the confusion. A quantum computer is a well defined thing. It's just like a classical computer but instead of just binary bits, it can work with qubits that support superposition. But it still needs programs just like a classical computer, and the results that we can actually read are binary in both cases.

Both of them are quantum "systems", in that both require quantum physics to work, if we're considering modern CPU gate sizes. Just, classical computers expose binary bits, and quantum computers expose qubits.

What I think you're picturing is a quantum "system", like a blob of quantum goo, that you can toss some "state" into and...something. But, that's not what a quantum computer is, any more than a classical computer is something you could throw into a blob of electrical goop and expect it to do anything.
by DrSiemer | 2025-04-21 21:36:00+00:00
As somebody who has listened to hundreds of audiobooks, I can tell you authors are generally not the best choice to voice their own work. They may know every intent, but they are writers, not actors.

The most skilled readers will make you want to read books _just because they narrated them_. They add a unique quality to the story, that you do not get from reading yourself or from watching a video adaptation.

Currently I'm in The Age of Madness, read by Steven Pacey. He's fantastic. The late Roy Dotrice is worth a mention as well, for voicing Game of Thrones and claiming the Guinness world record for most distinct voices (224) in one series.

It will be awesome if we can create readings automatically, but it will be a while before TTS can compete with the best readers out there.
by vitus | 2025-04-21 21:36:14+00:00
I think the biggest win for pipelining in SQL is the fact that we no longer have to explain that SQL execution order has nothing to do with query order, and we no longer have to pretend that we're mimicking natural language. (That last point stops being the case when you go beyond "SELECT foo FROM table WHERE bar LIMIT 10".)

No longer do we have to explain that expressions are evaluated in the order of FROM -> JOIN -> ON -> SELECT -> WHERE -> GROUP BY -> HAVING -> ORDER BY -> LIMIT (and yes, I know I'm missing several other steps). We can simply just express how our data flows from one statement to the next.

(I'm also stating this as someone who has yet to play around with the pipelining syntax, but honestly anything is better than the status quo.)
by zak-mandhro | 2025-04-21 21:36:32+00:00
100% agreed on the core principle — "only collect what you actually need for the feature the user is engaging with."

The frustrating part is that so much of modern web infrastructure (ad networks, analytics, personalization layers) depends on quietly hoovering up far more than the feature strictly requires.

I sometimes wonder: if browsers enforced "functional data collection only" as a technical baseline — like enforcing CORS or CSP today — how much of the tracking economy would collapse overnight?

Curious if you think real technical enforcement (browser-level) is the way forward, or if we’re stuck waiting for another round of slow, partial regulation.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-21 21:36:41+00:00
At the very grave risk of scope creep, I'll point out that the GP's yaml is very close to an Ansible inventory file so rather than just making up a new structure one could leverage any existing muscle memory (and create helpful defaults for folks who have not yet seen Ansible but have seen your tool)

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/11/collections/ansible/buil...

e.g.

all: children: mygroup: hosts: myhost-01: hostname: actualhost1.com port: 1234 user: myuser myhost-02: hostname: actualhost2.com port: 7890 user: myuser myhost-03: hostname: actualhost3.com port: 8888 user: myuser vars: files: - /var/log/syslog - /var/log/foo - /var/log/bar

That first "children" key is because in ansible's world one can have "vars" and "hosts" that exist at the very top, too; the top-level "vars" would propagate down to all hosts which one can view as "not necessary" in the GP's example, or "useful" if those files are always the same for every single host in the whole collection. Same-same for the "user:" but I wasn't trying to get bogged down in the DRY for this exercise
by zahlman | 2025-04-21 21:36:56+00:00
Yes, and the parent is misguided. As was pointed out in multiple replies, the library can distinguish whether an ordinary string or a t-string is passed because the t-string is not a string instance, but instead creates a separate library type. A user who mistakenly uses an f prefix instead of a t prefix will, with a properly designed library, encounter a `TypeError` at runtime (or a warning earlier, given type annotations and a checker), not SQL injection.
by dkarl | 2025-04-21 21:37:28+00:00
> while never quite explicitly straying outside the bounds of faith and morals defined by the Magisterium, often seemed to strongly imply the opposite. This was especially true for audiences that did not already know the Catechism through and through, which even most Catholics do not. In that sense, Pope Francis's remarks sometimes seemed to possess a kind of not-committing-heresy-can't-get-mad character

He sounds like a good teacher, reminding people how much the faith encompasses outside of what they feel that it encompasses. People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions. If their reaction to his teaching is to trust their knee-jerk discomfort over the pope, despite not being able to formulate any concrete objections, just the feeling that it must be wrong in a sneaky way they can't put their finger on, then it seems like they have decided to let their own feelings be the highest authority.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-21 21:37:54+00:00
I'm not mistaking it at all. Yes, duck typing is very much liberal acceptance, but Python code tends to go much farther. I could give a million examples -- like how in Python's isinstance() the second argument can be a type or a tuple of types, or in sqlite3 that you can run queries on a connection or on a cursor, and don't even get me started on Matplotlib or Numpy. It's just idiomatic in Python to make things easy for the programmer by accepting multiple types when possible. If you don't recognize this as the common Python pattern, I literally don't know what else to tell you.
by SllX | 2025-04-21 21:38:07+00:00
Probably, but if a Venus-sized mass showed up in the inner solar system because the Sun just picked it up along the way, it might not be instant death but we’re probably in for a rough time. It doesn’t have to be a black hole that does us in, it could be something much smaller that still strips the Moon away or causes Earth to readjust its own position in a way we, as in life, but also maybe we as in humans or we as in mammals just don’t like very much in a very short amount of time temporally speaking, and we couldn’t do anything about it anymore than we could do anything about a black hole because we’re just not the captains of this ship. We’re just some homegrown stowaways.

But for what it’s worth, it’s also just so incredibly unlikely it’s not a scenario worth thinking about either, and thinking about it too much just invites existential dread.
by viccis | 2025-04-21 21:38:12+00:00
>I think you have a blind spot to the fact that the war has been an excuse for people to go after Jews

I don't think antisemites have ever needed excuses to justify their conduct to themselves or others. And I have yet to see any outcomes for Jews in the US or UK that even approach the consequences that Arabs and those who have vocally opposed Israel's actions have faced.

>The very first thing I heard from most of the antifa people was some variation of "They had it coming."

Imagine asking some Jewish friends in 1944 in Poland what they thought about the victims of the Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising. You have to put yourself in other peoples' shoes if you want to understand their perspective.

>And with them, I can have a real conversation about the facts without any hatred or heated tempers.

You actually can't. Arabs know very well that they are being racially scrutinized when it comes to their views about this conflict, and they all know that the best course of action is to be as loudly and visibly Not Mean To Jewish Or Israeli People. It's not a real conversation because the power balance is way off; you have the state apparatus behind you (assuming US or UK) as well as a wide range of doxxing and terrorizing organizations like Betar. There is no free speech when it comes to opinions on Israel in either country I mentioned.

>It's indigenous homeland of the Jewish people.

I'm well aware of the Blut und Boden narrative about it, and settler colonialism has made fantastic use of it many times in the past (Liberia for example). It is absolutely an ethnostate however, per its own government's legislation (the 2018 Nation-State Bill). An ethnostate can include preferential treatment to a variety of types of Jews (though not all, as many African ones are excluded or subjected to scrutiny not faced by European ones).

>The fact that you have a problem with one particular ethno/religious state out of all the states in the Middle East and the world says plenty about your personal biases.

I don't, and hell it ain't even just the Middle East. Ask me what I think about the Azeris...
by tptacek | 2025-04-21 21:38:25+00:00
Regarding obscurantism, I don't know how one gets around that observation. It's striking to me that even many TLM celebrants aren't fluent in the language. You know why you're going and you seem to have a good reason for it, and I respect that. I think the rap on the TLM is that, in addition to reasonable people like yourself, it also attracts a lot of whackjobs, some of whom have unfortunately included priests.

I'd actually love to attend a TLM! But I'm not setting foot into a chapel run by an order whose officiants accused the Jews of orchestrating 9/11. (That's SSPX, of course, not FSSP.)

I hope my "it's complicated" gives me some cover from the idea that I'm a folk-group C&E Catholic just looking to dunk on some tradcaths. I mean, I may be that too; it's complicated.
by Maxatar | 2025-04-21 21:38:25+00:00
I mean it's logically impossible to formally and specifically define the natural numbers without introducing a logical inconsistency. The best you can do is define a set that has all the properties of natural numbers but will also define things that aren't natural numbers as well.

As an analogy you could imagine trying to define the set of all animals with a bunch of rules... "1. Animals have DNA, 2. Animals ingest organic matter. 3. Animals have a nervous system. 4. ... etc..."

And this is true of all animals, but it will also be true of things that aren't animals as well, like slime molds which are not quite animals but very similar to them.

Okay so you keep adding more rules to narrow down your definition and stamp out slime molds, but you find some other thing satisfy that definition...

Now for animals maybe you can eventually have some very complex rule set that defines animals exactly and rules out all non-animals, but the principle is that this is not possible for natural numbers.

We can have rules like "0" is a natural number. For every natural number N there is a successor to it N + 1. If N + 1 = M + 1 then N = M. There is no natural number Q such that Q + 1 = 0.

Okay this is a good starting point... but just like with animals there are numbers that satisfy all of these rules but aren't natural numbers. You can keep adding more and more rules to try to stamp these numbers out, but no matter how hard, even if you add infinitely many rules, there will always be infinitely many numbers that satisfy your rules but aren't natural numbers.

In particular what you really want to say is that a natural number is finite, but no matter how hard you try there is no formal way to actually capture the concept of what it means to be finite in general so you end up with these mutant numbers that satisfy all of your rules but have infinitely many digits, and these are called non-standard natural numbers.

The reason non-standard natural numbers are a problem is because you might have a statement like "Every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes." and this statement might be true of the actual natural numbers but there might exist some freak mutant non-standard natural number for which it's not true. Unless your rules are able to stamp out these mutant non-standard natural numbers, then it is not possible to prove this statement, the statement becomes undecidable with respect to your rules. The only statements you can prove with respect to your rules are statements that are true of the real natural numbers as well as true of all the mutant natural numbers that your rules have not been able to stamp out.

So it's in this sense that I mean that it's not possible to specifically define the natural numbers. Any definition you come up with will also apply to mutant numbers, and these mutant numbers can get in the way of you proving things that are in principle true about the actual natural numbers.
by hinkley | 2025-04-21 21:38:44+00:00
This would certainly be some of it but the awkward fact is that we've positively identified so very little of the matter that makes the universe the shape that it appears to us to be that we could double the known matter in the universe with black holes and we'd still only be a 10th of the way there.

However if we could eliminate the false signals from invisible (singularity) matter I am hopeful that will give us a clearer idea of whatever the rest is.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-21 21:39:07+00:00
I'd agree that would be nice, but at least they can change into that in the future if they want.

Hilariously, it's kind of less centralized than I expected: there's no "Bluesky is the web of the root of trust" here, only "Bluesky chooses which records convert to UI" which leaves the whole system open for others.
by Versipelle | 2025-04-21 21:39:26+00:00
> Wouldn’t it be more desirable to hear an actual human on an audiobook? Ideally the author?

Of course, but it's not always available.

For example, I would love an audiobook for Stanisław Lem's "The Invincible," as I just finished its video game adaptation, yet it simply doesn't exist in my native language.

It's quite seldom that the author narrates the audiobooks I listen to, and sometimes the narrator does a horrible job, butchering the characters with exaggerated tones.
Ask HN: Were early stage products always so buggy?
by AbstractH24 | 2025-04-21 21:39:52+00:00
I help startups roll out tools for their go-to-market teams. These days, I keep coming across different products with small teams, the backing of notable VCs, and lots of potential, but then when I go to use them the UIs are just littered with bugs which prevent them from functioning. And often it has nothing to do with prompting, hallucination, or anything like that. It's simple things like "when I hit save, my data disappears."

I'm accustomed to working with buggy tools, nothing I do is mission-critical, so things aren't as thoroughly tested as a car might be before hitting the road. But it seems things are getting released with more and more bugs. Am I nuts?

Seems like there are three possibilities to me:

1. This is just what happens with products that are new to market. 2. People creating these products are relying too much on tools like Cursor that don't work right. 3. The pressure to keep up is getting faster and faster, so companies are releasing products that are less and less thoroughly tested.

My gut tells me it's a combination of 2 and 3, and this is a sign we're reaching a new stage in the AI bubble. But maybe I'm wrong and being overly cynical.
by skissane | 2025-04-21 21:39:53+00:00
Which is a problem for some Protestants who insist that only Christians can be saved... but not necessarily for Catholics. The belief that only Christians can be saved has actually been condemned by the Catholic Church as a heresy (Feeneyism, after the 20th century American priest, Leonard Feeney, who most famously espoused it)

According to Catholic teaching, non-Christians can be saved if (1) they are "invincibly ignorant" (i.e. their ignorance of the truth of Christianity is not their own fault), and (2) they have an "implicit desire" for the Christian God
by rda2 | 2025-04-21 21:40:02+00:00
Those rates and risks are meaningless without a baseline, as Einstein and 28 other Nobel Prize Winners may agree.

If you're familiar with the early retirement community, the simplest strategy is withdrawing a fixed percentage of your initial retirement portfolio, adjusting for inflation every year. For an 100% equities portfolio, these are the odds of success over a 30 or 60 year horizon[0] when backtested against Shiller's total real return data from 1871-2018

4%/30 year: 97%

4%/60 year: 89%

3%/30 year: 100%

3%/60 year: 100%

Hence my comment about spending a little less or saving more - 4% to 3% makes a massive difference in success rates. I'm sure you've done some backtesting of your offerings, and hopefully would be able to share some withdrawal amount vs success rate comparison, even if it's not an identical time period/comparison.

[0]https://earlyretirementnow.com/2016/12/14/the-ultimate-guide...
by cyral | 2025-04-21 21:40:54+00:00
> Is there some kind of huge liability question if they ever facilitate giving access to the wrong person?

This is what I was thinking as I read the article. Imagine what will be written about them when they do give iCloud access to an impostor. Depending on what's on their account thieves could dedicate a ton of time to social engineering Apple into recovering the account. The article mentions police reports being "proof", but that doesn't seem like solid evidence considering how easy it could be to fake a police report from one of the tens of thousands of jurisdictions in the US. This is a problem for a lot of industries actually, i.e. banks and death certificates.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-21 21:41:37+00:00
I have no real insight. I do know that I am a big fan of Bluesky/atproto and post about it fairly regularly, and enjoy being friendly with the devs. They verified just over 200 accounts, and most of them are news organizations and their employees, and the rest are programmers who regularly use the site and/or engage with the protocol.

I think this makes sense, because 1. most people want this sort of feature for news and 2. the kinds of people they verified technically are likely to play around with it and see how sound it is, which is who I'd want to be kicking the tires.

I'm not sure when they'll verify more people, but this is only the beginning, for sure.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-04-21 21:41:39+00:00
An accurate estimate isn't really possible with the food delivery business model. Couriers will have 2-3 orders, so if you are order 1 or two, there is a new variable that enters the equation after you purchase the food. They obviously add other items on a similar route, but wait times and such are fairly random). Of course they could do 1 order to 1 driver but that would double the labor costs (sequential orders would be 2-3 deliveries per hour max per courier, vs 4ish when optimized).
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-04-21 21:41:46+00:00
One thing that I hate about these rules is the fine. The fines over time had been massive over weird and tame cases like promoting their store in Google search, but for the more obvious cases like misleading consent banner, they have been few and far in between. Also the rules are vague and there is no warning.

Not to mention fines create bad incentive for the government. Specially if control of fine money is given to the same people who are fining the companies.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-04-21 21:42:00+00:00
Two points. The first is that harm reduction is what I want, but not necessarily what the state wants or what others want. Many want the state to promote stability, even if the world made stable involves a lot of harm. Objectively, a primary motive of the state is to maintain itself, since if it didn’t maintain itself it wouldn’t exist. Harm reduction is something the state has to be pushed and dragged into doing and there isn’t enough will to do so imo.

The second point is that what you’re asking for may cause more harm than it prevents by putting us one step away from a eugenics policy. Deliberate suppression of minority populations could (and would) be done by subtly adjusting the criteria people would need to meet to be approved for having children without the majority of the population taking notice. I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea if it had no misuse, but I’m certain it would be misused.

Just give parents money.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-21 21:42:06+00:00
> AI Week at Visual Capitalist is a first-of-its-kind editorial event, launching in lockstep with the release of Stanford’s AI Index - one of the most influential AI reports of the year. // On our AI content hub, we delve into the numbers behind the AI boom, from global investments to cutting-edge capabilities and the cost of staying ahead

From https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visual-capitalist-ai-week/

First page of the event:

# Visualizing Global AI Investment by Country

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-global-ai-inves...
by gessha | 2025-04-21 21:42:11+00:00
> Something needs to be done about these countries and their resources - they deserve to be utilized in a way benefitting all citizens, not just the junta in power.

This utilitarian way of thinking mixed with a lot of racism is what led to colonists performing asinine acts of barbaric cruelty like slavery, massacres, etc. If I were to look up terms related to this type of thinking I would look up: Neo-colonialism, savior complex, and paternalism.

> Unfortunately, democracy doesn't come on its own

Who started the first democracies on Earth, aliens?
by zahlman | 2025-04-21 21:42:28+00:00
Oh! I missed this one because I've been looking specifically at the Packaging forum rather than the PEPs forum. This looks like a brilliant use case. (I'm aiming for wide compatibility - back to 3.6 - with my current projects, but I look forward to trying this out if and when it's accepted and implemented.)

Now if only the overall `subprocess` interface weren't so complex....
by toast0 | 2025-04-21 21:43:01+00:00
All the mainstream 6th gen consoles had first party support for wired ethernet; although only the Xbox had it built in (well, the slim ps2 had it built in too). I'd expect they've all served web pages at one time or another.

5th generation could probably make it happen, but without ethernet, you're looking at a modem or serial interface, and in today's world that's almost certainly talking to something else in your house that's a better host. :P Wikipedia categorizes the Apple Pippin as 5th gen, and it's more or less a Mac with a weird pinout for the PCI slot, so I'd guess it's the easiest to get ethernet with; without resorting to something that has more smarts than the 'host'
by skissane | 2025-04-21 21:43:07+00:00
> Francis spent the last couple of years creating new cardinals to stack the College in what - he hoped - was a more progressive direction.

I don't think that was necessarily what he was doing.

He tried to rebalance it to include a lot more cardinals from the developing world–who on average tend to be more conservative, at least on some issues. He arguably avoided the more outspoken conservatives, but he would have caught up a lot of quieter conservatives in the process.

Whereas, if he just wanted to stack it with progressives, he would have focused on adding cardinals from the developed world, where Catholic progressivism is arguably the strongest.