MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by davedx | 2025-04-17 10:12:20+00:00
Some speculation

On DMS:

- DMS is a very specific configuration that’s rarely the endpoint of non-living chemical cycles.

- The simplicity of DMS doesn’t make it less indicative of life—it actually makes it a very selective molecule, which only shows up in large quantities when life is involved (at least in Earth-like chemistry).

- Until we find a compelling abiotic pathway, high DMS remains a strong biosignature, especially in the context of a planet with a potential ocean and mild temperatures

Possible origins:

We’re looking at some form of life that can:

- Thrive in a hydrogen-rich atmosphere

- Possibly live in or on top of a global ocean

- Generate large amounts of DMS—potentially thousands of times more than Earth

The closest Earth analogy is:

- Marine phytoplankton, particularly species like Emiliania huxleyi, produce DMS as a byproduct of breaking down DMSP, a molecule they use to regulate osmotic pressure and protect against oxidative stress.

- If something similar is happening on K2-18 b, we’d be talking about an ocean teeming with such microbes—perhaps far denser than Earth’s oceans.

Possibly "Giant photosynthetic mats" or sulfuric "algae"

If there’s some landmass or floating structures, maybe the DMS producers are:

- Photosynthetic, sulfur-metabolizing analogues to cyanobacteria

- Living in dense floating colonies or mats like microbial reefs

- Using dimethylated sulfur compounds in their metabolism, and leaking DMS as waste or signaling molecules

===========

Of course there have been lots of ocean planets in sci-fi literature, but I'm most reminded of the "Pattern Juggler" Planet Ararat from Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space" series.

This is incredibly exciting news!
by adrian_b | 2025-04-17 10:13:01+00:00
Most companies that do manufacturing in USA are oriented to making business-to-business products, where high margins can be achieved.

As an European, there have been many decades since the last time when I have seen any competitive "made in USA" product that is intended to be sold to individuals.

There are products that I buy, which have been designed in USA, e.g. computer CPUs, but none of them have also been made in USA.

When I was young, it was very different, there were many "made in USA" products that could compete with those made elsewhere.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-17 10:13:38+00:00
> Germany in this case. The high tax rates at progressive rates mean that salary increases mean that income after taxes is quite flat.

OK, good to know. I definitely haven't experienced flat income after taxes post salary bump, even though I pay 52% marginal on my income (in Ireland).

> Obviously this drastically disincentivizes hoping employers.

I can totally see that. Is it really that common in tech jobs though? I'd have expected this to be much more common in larger, older companies (like the automotive industry).
by rich_sasha | 2025-04-17 10:13:47+00:00
I can see why you say so, and it is a concern, equally if you assume that courts are slow and work eventually, that's what it will look like on the happy trajectory of law being enforced.

If you assume US is now irredeemably fucked forever, you might as well stop venting. But nothing actually is forever. Much, much worse Soviet rule in Europe lasted 45 years. I still hold out that populism in the US will be over much sooner.
by aurareturn | 2025-04-17 10:14:59+00:00
He doesn't have one. It's pure BS.

However, I do think that in-office teams outperform remote teams in general. Not always. But more often than not.

Before covid, only the most capable, senior, proven, specialized people got to work remote full-time. During covid, everyone did. So of course remote work is overall less effective than in-office.
Show HN: Flamabl.com – Real-Time Global Collective Thought Stream
by binaryapparatus | 2025-04-17 10:15:33+00:00
I just launched flamabl.com, a unique experiment in shared online consciousness. It is technically interesting, ready to scale, and something I wanted to make for a while. It could flop or be the next big thing, time will tell. Every 15 seconds, a random message from connected users is displayed globally. Submit your thought, and you might just get your 15 seconds of fame. Vote on what you see. No account needed, just visit and participate. I'd appreciate the HN community's technical and conceptual feedback on this project.
by felipemesquita | 2025-04-17 10:15:50+00:00
The subtitle “A reference manual for people who design and build software” seems at odds with the description:

> This book won’t teach you how to actually make software […] It’s a manual that explains how the things you use everyday actually work. You don’t need to be technical to read this - there are a lot of pictures and diagrams to do the heavy lifting. You just need to be curious.
by hangsi | 2025-04-17 10:16:17+00:00
This is excellent. I wonder how deep the roots of pre-20th century computing systems go. Babbage, Lovelace and the Difference engine are well catalogued, and I have seen a Jaccard loom in a museum with my own eyes.

What comes before this that isn't a history of mathematics, aside from the abacus? If this search is broad enough to include the topic of this article and Luca Pacioli's briefly mentioned double-entry ledgers from Italy, then I can imagine systems from all over the world where commerce flowed or administration ruled: similar systems must have existed in China and India, and I have heard of the Quipu system in the Andes that functioned as a digital storage medium for thousands of years.

How many modern components of information systems are reinventions of past ideas, rather than upgrades?
by binaryapparatus | 2025-04-17 10:16:33+00:00
Author here, just adding a few more details.

What AI told me to tell you:

In today's overwhelming digital landscape, it's easy for individual thoughts and moments to get lost in the noise. I wanted to create a space where everyone has an equal opportunity to have their voice (or at least a short burst of it!) seen by a potentially massive audience, without the need for building a profile or fighting algorithms.

Flamabl.com offers a super simple premise: type in your message, and every 15 seconds, my system randomly selects one message from all currently connected users to display for everyone to see. It's part luck, part shared moment, and a whole lot of "what's next?". When your message "wins," you get a fun burst of fireworks! You can also vote on the messages you see, and each message with votes gets a permanent link with its vote history. The catch? Messages only stay in the pool while you're actively on the site, emphasizing the "now" of the experience.

Who can benefit from it? Anyone who has a fleeting thought they want to share, a quick question for the world, a link they think might be interesting, or even just wants to experience the unpredictable stream of collective consciousness. It's for the curious, the spontaneous, and those who enjoy a little bit of internet randomness. Plus, if you have something you want to promote (a new project, a cause, etc.), it's a free shot at being seen by a potentially huge audience for 15 seconds!

Why it's interesting to me:

It's websockets all the way down, providing the same message on all connected devices every 15 seconds. The server is written in C++, split into several components, so if the number of users starts to grow, I can easily roll out a few more "workernodes" to handle the websocket connections for the end users. Crucially, all the server components also use websockets for internal communication, allowing them to reside on the same server or be distributed across several. The frontend is simple React code. Everything is highly optimized so that potentially millions of users can see the same message simultaneously and vote.
by trhway | 2025-04-17 10:18:46+00:00
>we are only aware of one species that developed civilization building capabilities.

well, the first one just doesn't leave any chance for any other one.

>Life might be very common, but intelligent life still be incrediblY rare.

the time period between big ape and nuclear bomb is extremely short - few millions years. In a hundred or a thousand - doesn't really matter - years we'll be an interstellar species or may be we destroy ourselves by Covid-2319. The point is that complexity develops exponentially and tremendous changes are happening in an extremely a short period of time - i.e. if life has 4B years to develop when it most probably has 4.01B years to develop civilization.
by farzd | 2025-04-17 10:19:41+00:00
Agree with your stance on micro SasS space, I've just built two internal tools for my marketing co-founder, one was a Tiktok dashboard to track impressions for all our accounts. Another was dynamically rendered pages for the Tikok posters, that rendered posting info and schedule from notion. Both took 1 - 2 days each. They are very basic but do the job and i don't have to pay $20 - $50 for another service.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-17 10:19:50+00:00
Deploying decoy target requires more advanced technology (space travel) than hiding the signature (we may be able to do it long before we reach another star). I don’t think this is a good argument. Let’s say, some civilization decides to invest in decoy. It needs to shine brightly, the energy footprint is huge, a lot of work has to be done to transform the entire system. Then what? If there’s a hostile player, capable of destruction, they research and destroy the target, and start surveying the neighborhood. You cannot just build a decoy on another end of the galaxy, right? The further you have it, the more complicated is the task. And then you can only hope that the time left will be enough to collect enough energy (even if you have the tech) for defense.
by b112 | 2025-04-17 10:20:18+00:00
Not how they are grown, but when they were harvested.

Ripe tomatoes are more delicate than underdeveloped, still green tomatoes. So pick them before done developing, ship them, and they'll turn red in the weeks it takes to get to the store.

And if they are picked ripe, they'll also go bad before they even get to shelf via their weeks long boat journey.

That's why local is better, and your own garden better still.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-17 10:21:53+00:00
Let's say you're right and people's immaturity immaturity is the issue.

The problem is, if you try to check people's immaturity and call it out, you get labeled a bigot, a fascist, or a $fobe.

So people's immaturity is a consequence of the modern toxic positivity and cancel culture the west has bred where you aren't allowed to say anything that might hurt someone's feelings, so people grow up in a bubble of fakeness that's detached from real world issues.

You're pointing out the end effect but not the cause that has led to that.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-17 10:22:07+00:00
George Floyd protests happened and they were significant enough to get the second in command of the US military and Americas top military advisor to both say trump is a threat to the constitution as well as achieving the goal of justice in the form of consequences for George Floyd's murder.

It was so traumatic for America's top military advisor that he made a major point to those under him that they swore an oath to the constitution and not a "wannabe dictator."

Many police departments have enacted various reforms, hard to tell if they have been enacted in good faith.

The Vegas shooter is business as usual and generally considered a societal problem. The BLM protests were different and seen as caused/provoked by the administration at the time.

As far as the grim part... Unfortunately that's the way power works. Power will not be challenged without putting up a fight.

If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny. Timothy Snyder - On Tyranny.
by transpute | 2025-04-17 10:23:25+00:00
> it'd sure be nice to have the presentation on video form

March 2025 presentation by the same author, "Seat belts and Airbags for bash"

slides: http://uniforumchicago.org/slides/bash_2025-03-25.pdf

video (87m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvDu8_A2uhs
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-17 10:25:15+00:00
Perhaps the diversity lost is the one caused by seasonality. Fruits and vegetables are highly seasonal, some meat and fish are, too.

From reading various articles, apparently there really was greater diversity in vegetables, too. Nowadays people eat tomatoes, salad, onions, perhaps carots, and that's about it but there are many, many more that can be locally grown and that have almost disappeared from many people's diets. If you mention swedes, turnips, cabbage, beetroots, leeks, rhubarb, types of squash, etc. even cauliflowers to many people they won't be able to tell you when was the last time they ate or touched one. The only time people touch a pumpkin is at Halloween and they don't eat them.

Regarding meat, offal has almost completely disappeared, and I suspect seafood is now mostly processed fish from one or two species only.
by eddie_catflap | 2025-04-17 10:25:20+00:00
I love the C64 but the Atari 8-bit line was fine indeed (one of my first exposures to home computing was Star Raiders at a family friends house - blew me away). Archer Maclean, author of Dropzone (and other titles) famously labelled them the 'Porsche of home computers'.

Where I think the 64 had the edge was in the incredible SID chip and I'd argue the amazing hacks that were found for the system over the years that enhanced what the 64 was capable of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropzone#Development
by chriswarbo | 2025-04-17 10:26:05+00:00
Architectures like x86 can only address a finite amount of RAM, since they have a fixed word size (e.g. 64 bits). However, their memory is still unlimited, since they can read and write to arbitrary IO devices (HDDs, SSDs, S3, etc.); though those operations aren't constant time, they're O(sqrt(n)), since they require more and more layers of indirection (e.g. using an SSD to store the S3 URL of the address of ....)
by wodenokoto | 2025-04-17 10:26:32+00:00
I don't know how async is in other languages but I find Pythons async incredibly difficult to use, and I kinda feel validated about how poor chatGPT is at it as well.

Is it because it is just a very hard thing, or is it because its a synchronous language, with async bolted on? (I'm talking about a purely language point of view, not from a python VM / GIL point of view)
by pjmlp | 2025-04-17 10:27:18+00:00
Yeah, but at the end of the day, what is on paper and the actions one is willing to do aren't really the same.

It took us 48 years to get rid of our dictatorship, and in theory there were multiple occasions where the militar could have joined to take it down, it was only when the colonial wars got bad enough, that there was enough people in the movement to have made it possible.

And to make a point out of it, the laws imposed by the Allied did nothing to prevent what happened in East Germany and Stasi deeds after that law came to be.
by future10se | 2025-04-17 10:31:46+00:00
The on-device models used for Apple Intelligence (writing tools, notification and email/message summaries, etc.) are around ~3B parameters.

I mean, they could be better (to put it nicely), but there is a legitimate use-case for them and I'd love to see more work in this space.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-apple...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.21075
by apercu | 2025-04-17 10:31:48+00:00
I'm semi rural but 4.1-4.3 miles from 3 towns. I have natural gas and cable internet, but a well and septic.

I was very pleased (before making an offer on the house) to find out about the cable internet as I have worked remote for 11 years. But the ISP is Spectrum, which has historically been a very shady business (like most Cable companies, ISP's).

I also run a Mofi router with a SIM card as a back up network.

Year 1: $52/mo Year 2: $74/mo Year 3: $98/mo

I have made no changes to my account.

This is why we need choices for ISP's.
by Intralexical | 2025-04-17 10:32:48+00:00
Maybe they just don't feel the need to blast their emissions all over the sky like some sort of a caveman.

Our own technological signature is coming to form a very thin shell. Once we switch fully to fiber optics, lasers, and beamformers, there won't be any aliens learning English from listening in on our TV transmissions anymore. Radio broadcasting was cool, but also horribly wasteful.

It's probably incorrect to assume that more technologically advanced civilizations would be louder.
by wuming2 | 2025-04-17 10:34:16+00:00
Indeed. Guaranteed capacity for FTTH in the EU is often 0.1% or so of peak. Consistent with your answer.

I am not sure maximizing throughput to gigabit and beyond is materials efficient though. Fig 33 shows energy efficiency is squarely on the FTTH side anyway: https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Prysmian-s...

A software update completing download in an hour instead of one minute often doesn’t lead to any practical difference. The same number of users is being served but the latter requiring gigabit class CPEs.

Alas it does offer some up selling opportunities. As promoting Cat 6 or even 7 cables to home users.
by keheliya | 2025-04-17 10:35:50+00:00
I wish this was supported by default in the Kindle browser. I wonder if there was a way to make it an extension or a wrapper and make it available in eink device browsers. But it seems that even this blog post page is not supported in the Kindle browser. (I don't see the eink mode icon.)

The requirements for me are simple, primarily to make consuming web content on my kindle scribe easier.

* Instead of scrolling by finger gestures (which is a pain to watch on slowly-refreshing eink), have two buttons on the side to do page up and down. * Disable animations * Ability to increase/decrease font size.

I attempted to make this happen for my mastodon feed [here](https://keheliya-slowdon.web.val.run/). source available [here](https://www.val.town/v/keheliya/slowdon). Then there's [Kindly RSS reader](https://github.com/nicoan/kindly-rss-reader)

The goal is to be able to access all the text content that I consume regularly without much pain on a kindle.
by gliptic | 2025-04-17 10:36:20+00:00
I'm not seeing how this is pull in any sense. Calling recv on the channel doesn't cause any result to be computed. The push of the previous operators will cause the compution to continue.

EDIT: Ok, I guess because they are bounded to 1, the spcs will let the pushing computation continue first after the "puller" has read the result, but it's more like pushing with back-pressure.
by XorNot | 2025-04-17 10:37:26+00:00
The lower end estimate depends on the specifics of the increase in brightness accelerating the weathering of silicates, leading to more CO2 absorbed out of the atmosphere until C3 photosynthesis isn't possible. Some plants use a different method which will continue to work (C4), but consequences of plant life as we know it dying off would be catastrophic for life on this planet - barring of course, whatever adaptations are made.

But it's certainly the mark of "the beginning of the end" for life on this planet - it's a major milestone that we (the species) do need to leave eventually if we want to continue.
by dotancohen | 2025-04-17 10:37:51+00:00
> And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived.

Stars are abundant, long-lived, and go through cycles of life and death.

Now look at the night sky. The chance that you eye will detect a star at any given patch of sky that is roughly the size of a star, is nearly nill. That is not bad news for those who wish to see that stars continue to exist - it is a feature of the size, vastness, and expansion of the universe. Same for life, presumably.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-17 10:38:36+00:00
> 48 years to get rid of our dictatorship

Trying to work out which country you're referring to - Spain? Portugal? East Germany?

> laws imposed by the Allied did nothing to prevent what happened in East Germany and Stasi deeds after that law came to be

Well, yes, I should probably have clarified West Germany, a different country from East Germany, due to the Soviet control at the end of WW2. I suppose the point is that no legal order withstands overwhelming force in the end.
by redleader55 | 2025-04-17 10:38:46+00:00
This [1] diagram from Wikipedia represents you are saying in a visual way. NP-hard and NP-complete are defined as basically an equivalence class modulo an algorithm in P which transforms from one problem to the other. In more human terms both NP-hard and NP-complete are reducible with a polynomial algorithm to another problem from their respective class, making them at least as hard.

The difference between the two classes, again in human terms, is that NP-complete problems are decision problems "Does X have property Y?", while NP-hard problems can include more types - search problems, optimization, etc, making the class NP-hard strictly larger than NP-complete in set terms.

The statement in the article means that NP-hard problems require solving a NP-complete problem plus a P problem - hence being at least as hard.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:P_np_np-complete_np-har...
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-17 10:39:02+00:00
It’s game theory, mathematics. Let’s say every player has 3 actions: do nothing, expose yourself and destroy the player you aware about. Your goal is survival. If you expose yourself in this game and there’s at least one player choosing „destroy“ action, you loose.

Now, of course there’s a question of applicability of this model: 1. are there other players? (if the game started, we won’t know until we observe destruction event - but that’s falsifiability) 2. do they have means to destroy you? (we may find out) 3. do they have motivation to destroy you? (we may find out) 4. can you protect yourself against unknown level of technology? (we may find out).

This theory meets scientific criteria, it’s just that those criteria require level of technology that we may not reach in thousands of years.
by autonomousErwin | 2025-04-17 10:39:14+00:00
Isn't that the point of the dark forest theory? It's not the fact that there is a dangerous tribe behind a bush it's more that you don't know if they're dangerous or not so you have to err on the side of caution - because you don't know if they're doing the same.

It's the whole chain of suspicion theory that it's safer to shoot first and then ask questions later because the speed you can communicate is the same speed you can mount an attack.
by apercu | 2025-04-17 10:39:47+00:00
> Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work.

Maybe only tangentially related to your post, but this has been on my mind a lot lately. After many years of doing all kinds of tech and business consulting gigs, I decided to somewhat specialize over the last 3 years and have been spending some time on LinkedIn this year.

What I can't figure out is how (arbitrary percentage) 30% of the people I follow do any work when they are on LinkedIn posting/commenting on posts _all_ day.
by hansmayer | 2025-04-17 10:40:20+00:00
Yes, with a bit of work around prompting and focusing on closed context, or as you put it, interpolating, you can get further. But the problems is that, this is not how the LLMs were sold. If you blame someone for trying to use it by specifying fairly high level prompts - well isn´t that exactly how this technology was being advertised the whole time? The problem is not the bad workman, the problem is that the tool is not doing what it is advertised as doing.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-17 10:40:54+00:00
Thing is, though, it kind of assumes megastructures. AIUI Earth is already getting less radio-noise-y, as fibre-optics take over, and would be difficult for us to detect from the next star (at least to detect the technological civilisation; the biosignatures would be obvious).

Maybe people just don't _actually_ build that many megastructures.