MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-17 10:59:14+00:00
Seriously, most if not all of humanity's issue is our current energy wall. I truly wish we can invest more in energy as compared to AI because I truly believe that most AI agents are roughly the same and now are benchmark maxxing and even google's gemini is really really cool. Maybe now training it even further has less reward for the cost?

I truly wish energy could be a solved issue. I think clean energy can be great of two types, solar and nuclear, though nuclear can require a lot of expertise to build it once and operation costs, (I am not talking about the risk of nuclear reactor exploding since its just a fraction of current risks)

I personally prefer solar as its way more flexible though I am okay with nuclear as well

Mainly the issue in solar is of battery, if I understand it correctly. So We just need to really focus as a civilization to the humble battery.
by Y_Y | 2025-04-17 10:59:34+00:00
I have some sympathy for your position, but I'll add that the prevailing moral opinion seems to be "whoever got there first is the rightful owner". Of course you have to allow for armchair ethnologists not being particularly good at distinguishing between similar groups and later revisionism.

A lot of Pacific islands territories have complicated histories like this (e.g. Hawaii, New Zealand), but the focus usually ends up on whatever bastards most recently took over from the previous bastards (relative levels of bastardy notwithstanding).
by bsenftner | 2025-04-17 11:00:21+00:00
I'm trying to create a recognition of immaturity as an adult problem issue, and if that recognition takes place then society will generally recognize the issue, and that becomes internalized as an issue people understand.

The goal is not to call people out, the goal is recognition as a real, active issue at the root of a lot of public figure behavior. Those behaviors need to be called out, and those public figures shamed for their immature behaviors and immature opinions - which non-public figures then mimic in ordinary life. Which is an immaturity that I do not expect to be called out, which sound like you're focusing.

Beneath the immature world view and attitude is self deception, a far harder issue to call out. That self deception is caused by religious claims of answers to unanswerable questions. To accept an unanswerable question's "answer" from another is a self deception, driven by anxiety and fear. Life has uncomfortable unanswerable questions, and facing those unanswerable questions is a critical part of becoming mature - there are no answers to these questions about what happens or if there is an afterlife. By supplying answers to these critically unanswerable questions, religions create immature individuals that are in fact trapped within the cult of that religion's reasoning, which tends to be terribly immature in far too many logical manners. Then you get morons.
by aeonik | 2025-04-17 11:01:09+00:00
The easiest language I’ve used for async is Clojure—mostly because the language is immutable by default and ~99% of the code is referentially transparent. That doesn’t magically solve async, but it removes an entire class of headaches by nudging you away from shared state and side effects. You don’t need locks if there’s nothing to lock.

Async is hard, no doubt—but some languages are designed to reduce the surface area of what can go wrong. I’ve heard great things about Erlang, Elixir, and BEAM-based languages in general. They treat async not as an add-on, but as a core architectural principle.
by GistNoesis | 2025-04-17 11:02:44+00:00
124 light years seems quite close, it seems to be some sort phytoplankton for now, what can we send there quickly to eradicate them before they become a problem. How much mass of galactic "roundup" should we send ? Do we have the technology yet for planet-scale sanitizing ? Can we pulse some high energy particles at roughly the speed of light and aim it at them ? Do we know if they have some magnetic field protection like earth does ?
by belorn | 2025-04-17 11:03:49+00:00
gTLDs are regulated by ICANN. As much as an organization can achieve to be a global multistakeholder group, at least the intention is to be global.

ICANN have a mostly hand-off approach to ccTDLs. The intention is that each country decide on their own regulations and management when it comes to their country code specific domains.

.nl is a very special case, and it is true that the Dutch government was not involved. .nl was the first country code TLD created outside of the US, when the domain system still was part of ARPANET and operated by the United States Department of Defense. .nl was then transferred to a foundation 10 years later, and that's where ownership now resides.

ccTLDs are somewhat of a mess. Many are created in universities, then transferred to a company or foundation. Others were sold to companies from the start. In some cases, government have sold their ccTLD to other countries.

.se for example was created in a Swedish university, and then later the government took possession of it (or the university gave it to them, can't really say). Now there are laws that explicitly defines how it should be used and governed, which then a non-profit foundation manage the implementation.
by khaledh | 2025-04-17 11:04:03+00:00
Very nice. The design reminds me of a website that I forgot to bookmark a long while ago, it was about explaining network protocols at the wire level, and it had some of the most amazing visuals that I ever saw. It's a shame that I forgot what it was, and googling doesn't help. If anyone knows what I'm talking about please share the link.
by belter | 2025-04-17 11:04:07+00:00
This is a terrible title. The original title was: "Astronomers have found the 'most promising signs yet' of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System"

"Astronomers have found signs of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System" means something completely different. Please @dang update or this looks like the Daily Mail.

It's an example of scientists acting irresponsibly. They might have found dimethyl sulfide but it can be produced abiotically.

Dimethyl sulfide (CH3SCH3, DMS) signatures were found in comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and that is for sure not Times Square on Saturday night...: https://astrobiology.com/2025/02/on-the-abiotic-origin-of-di...

The planet looks more like a Neptune or Uranus than Earth type. They need to find multiple examples of different types of biomarkers, before contacting the press as they obviously did.

"Evidence for Abiotic Dimethyl Sulfide in Cometary Matter" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08724

"On the abiotic origin of dimethyl sulfide: discovery of DMS in the Interstellar Medium" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08892

Edit: I see title is now updated.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-17 11:04:48+00:00
Portugal, 1933 - 1974.

I belong to the first generation growing up as a child after the dictorship ended, thus like many people around the world in similar circustances, I do happen to have a close relation to what it means, and stand by the revolution cries "25 April forever, fascism never again", that unfortunely many in voting age have no clue what it actually means in practice, hence we have our own issues coming to our shores with Chega party.
by cmsj | 2025-04-17 11:05:13+00:00
The thinking generally would be that while it might take political pressure to initially begin leaving the home planet, once politics has unlocked that capability, commerce will take over.

If we were to begin mining the solar system, it unlocks vast pools of resources that would really change things.

That said, interstellar travel is still a pipe dream because of the time involved. Without finding a cheat code for physics, it may well be that intelligent life is always trapped in its home system and has to live and die within the limitations of stellar evolution.
by bux93 | 2025-04-17 11:05:21+00:00
"We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions"

If you read the EU AI act, you'll see it's not really about AI at all, but about quality assurance of business processes that are scaled. (Look at pharma, where GMP rules about QA apply equally to people pipetting and making single-patient doses as it does to mass production of ibuprofen - those rules are eerily similar to the quality system prescribed by the AI act.)

Will a think piece like this be used to argue that regulation is bad, no matter how benificial to the citizenry, because the regulation has 'AI' in the name, because the policy impedes someone who shouts 'AI' as a buzzword, or just because it was introduced in the present in which AI exists? Yes.
by vidarh | 2025-04-17 11:08:40+00:00
Cooperation depends on you and your potential allies surviving long enough to be able to contact each other, and being strong enough to counter the threat. We don't know whether we will develop capabilities fast enough to counter an enemy that e.g. at the first sign of radio started accelerating a bunch of super-dense (hence small, hard to detect and stop) kinetic kill devices our way.

MAD is utter bunk. It depends on rational actors that also believes the other actors are rational. Even Reagan realised the folly of MAD after Able Archer in 1983, and realising the Soviet leadership genuinely seemed to believe the US might be prepared to strike first. If either side thinks the other side is irrational and preparing a first strike, MAD falls apart. If either side is actually irrational, it also falls apart.

But MAD also depends on a sufficient ability for both sides to do serious harm. If one side sees a first strike as an opportunity to prevent the other side from gaining that ability, MAD also falls apart, and the thinking behind it can again then push a rational but callous actor to strike first to prevent being pushed into a MAD scenario.

Cooperation might eventually win out, but that won't help you if your civilization has long since been wiped out.
by belter | 2025-04-17 11:09:10+00:00
Not that exciting until they find other different biomarkers.

Dead Comets have DMS: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08724

And the interstellar medium.... "On the abiotic origin of dimethyl sulfide: discovery of DMS in the Interstellar Medium" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08892

"...Although the chemistry of DMS beyond Earth is yet to be fully disclosed, this discovery provides conclusive observational evidence on its efficient abiotic production in the interstellar medium, casting doubts about using DMS as a reliable biomarker in exoplanet science..."
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-04-17 11:09:12+00:00
Every field of study, subject, or problem, or even business cases, -- all have different ranges.

Why does this one in-particular sound like they don't know what they are talking about? It would be just as accurate for me to say in the range of responses, yours kind of sounds like an anti-science bot. Typical of that type of thinking.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-17 11:09:27+00:00
> While I agree that there is no logical reason that underwater organisms could not become highly intelligent or advance to the level of doing experiments with fire, it is clear that being underwater is an additional barrier.

Meanwhile, a few thousand lightyears away, some sort of talking crab is rubbishing the idea that industrial civilisation could arise on land; after all, they wouldn't even have access to hydrothermal vents! What would they do for energy, burn plants?

(I really think we're inclined to build a _lot_ of unwarranted assumptions into what industrial civilisation has to look like and how you have to get there, because it's what we did.)
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-04-17 11:09:40+00:00
Human civilisation means intelligence and memory are collective, externalised, persistent, communicable. There's also a layer of symbolic abstraction (science and math) which makes it possible to predict useful consequences with some precision.

Individuals die but their inventions and insights remain. Individuals can also specialise, which is a kind of civilisational divide and conquer strategy.

Most animals don't have that. Some do train their young to a limited extent, but without writing the knowledge doesn't persist. And without abstraction it only evolves extremely slowly, if at all.

They have to reinvent the wheel over and over, which means they never invent the wheel at all.

We actually have this problem with politics and relationships. We keep making the same mistakes because the humanities provide some limited memory, but there's no symbolic abstraction and prediction - just story telling, which is far less effective.

Bonus points: I often wonder if there's a level of complexity beyond our kind of intelligence, and what it might look like. Abstraction of abstraction would be meta-learning - symbolic systems that manipulate the creation and distribution of civilisational learning.

AI seems to be heading in that direction.

There may be further levels, but we can't imagine them. We could be embedded in them and we wouldn't see them for what they are.
by mkl | 2025-04-17 11:09:41+00:00
Technically, it is: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sentient (the first two definitions). You mean the science fiction definition though (the third), and it's because it's not self-aware and not very intelligent, because it doesn't need to be to survive and procreate successfully. A slightly smarter crocodile must not have enough of an advantage over its peers to matter for evolutionary purposes.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-17 11:09:48+00:00
I truly agree with this post.

There was this post on HN that life can't be given to mars for 99.99% and even if it could, it would be the most miserable life with only 1-2 decades. It isn't self sustainable as people imagine it to be.

So all we have is, is this Earth & our fellow human beings & instead of treating each other with basic necessities like housing, education , healthcare.

Also these things, in my opinion of researching the space and giving housing, they aren't mutual. They can both be done but even if they are mutual,I would personally pick housing any day, because what point is of space, what point is of going to outer space some day and living shit there if humans are currently living shit here as well.

Regarding Housing, I think it can easily be fixed and so much more like how we say tax the rich, if we could just tax lands.

Because people think of land as some "asset" and that they "own it" ,when in actuality, I might argue that land is the only thing that I personally think the govt. has any right over. So I personally believe that we are better off taxing land so that these pesty landlords who get rich off of the housing crisis can really just suffer so much that the lands would just be productive and not speculative , reducing the price of lands down and even rents down till the point housing is way more favourable.

Its a net win to everybody except those pesty landlords & maybe "investors" or people who bought housing pre-georgism because they might now believe that its unfair to them? Still I think that georgism is pretty flexible and this could be sorted out in such a way that it would have been less controversial and more net positive to the Society than the latest tariffs fiasco, though people didn't vote for housing, they voted for tariffs.
by Borealid | 2025-04-17 11:11:15+00:00
No, a block of text that begins "please improve on the following text:" is likely to continue after the included block with some text that sounds like a correction or refinement.

Nothing is "recognized", nor is anything "an error". Nothing is "thinking" any more than it would be if the LLM just printed whether the next letter were more likely to be a vowel or consonant. Just because it's doing a better job modeling text doesn't magically make it be doing something that's not a text prediction function.
by n4r9 | 2025-04-17 11:11:43+00:00
Well, house prices outside of London have increased roughly in line with inflation over the last couple of decades.

ONS data states that the average house price outside of London and the South East rose from £134k in 2005 to £192k in 2019 [0].

The Bank of England's inflation calculator states that £192k in 2019 costs £139k in 2005 [1].

Looking at London specifically, house prices more than doubled from £303k to £684k over the same period [2]. That's a 63% increase in real terms. Immigration would have some effect on this, but so would UK citizens moving to London or foreign nationals buying up property as an investment.

[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/adho...

[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...

[2] https://www.home.co.uk/guides/house_prices_report.htm?locati...
by whalesalad | 2025-04-17 11:14:54+00:00
Damn. I grew up in Glendale and used to visit this store all the time. I’d take the bus if my parents couldn’t take me. Which was actually 3 buses and probably 4 hours of travel to get there and back. My dad worked at Lockheed Martin and the credit union was right across the street so that was always an excuse to drop-in after a bank visit.

Got my first WRT54G there, my first managed switch, power supplies, misc parts for RC building (heat shrink, soldering accessories). Was always fun to visit “the pit” with all the motherboards and processors unboxed and on full display. Felt like the NYSE with people lined up to look at the board and grab a processor. It was always so active like a bee hive. Visiting more recently it was just a shell of its former self.

It’s still my favorite store with the alien attack vibes and all the army jeeps.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-17 11:15:02+00:00
Time does not matter. Space-faring civilizations can adapt their pace of life to the communication and exploration speeds or even live at multiple speeds. They are likely energy and resource-bound: within the same theory Dyson sphere is a risk, so they can only consume a fraction of locally available energy to remain unnoticed - meaning that it’s not the distance but energy consumption that will limit them.
by dijit | 2025-04-17 11:15:26+00:00
I really like UTM, I especially like UTM remote on the iPad.

The issue is that of course Apple computers that are large enough to run VMs are… expensive.

So I have instead found myself using proxmox on a cheaper (by comparison) threadripper machine.

The added bonus is that xterm.js (the default LXC console viewer) works wonderfully on the iPad- Though of course you can use prompt3 for heavier duty stuff.

The other uses I have for VMs on the mac is Docker and Kubernetes, but those are solved by colima and minikube respectively.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-04-17 11:16:07+00:00
Commendable effort, i would also like to recommend some topics/chapters/lessons whatever you want to call it - How microprocessors and microcontrollers work - Types of storage => RAM / ssd/ hdd / flash drives and storage formats NTFS, FAT32 - OS stuff (theading, multiprocessing, coroutines, scheduling, paging, priority) - Some data structures stuff (trees, stacks, queues, graphs etc)
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-17 11:16:43+00:00
> It costs a lot to buy those music files and that too if they are available (which isn’t always the case)

Virtually all music, particularly modern music, is made available for free on YouTube. You can download it and it's yours.

For example, here's the official release of Taylor Swift's album "Evermore" for YouTube ("Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxrMpCMdYwk&list=OLAK5uy_m-v... . You should be able to pass the playlist to yt-dlp and automatically extract all the audio tracks.

I don't really want wholesale quantities of music, so I do this manually, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's tooling around for it.
by apercu | 2025-04-17 11:17:07+00:00
On a whim in say 2011 I bought 2 bitcoin. 3 weeks later they had tripled in price (not like what happened much later) and I immediately sold them as I was uncomfortable using a USB drive s a wallet for currency. It was dumb to sell at that stage but I have always been somewhat risk averse with my finances. (making money has always felt like _work_ to me ;)
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-04-17 11:17:29+00:00
> But that whole process still took somewhere in the order of millions of years to complete I believe.

The geological evidence is that that oxygen build-up first had to exhaust things that took the reactive oxygen out of the air and water. Iron oxide was laid down as huge deposits of "banded iron ore" The great rust. (1)

This is hard to get an exact number on, but as far as I know, it is estimated to have taken at least 500 million years.

And then oxygen increased again, a billion years later (2)

It was not fast. It was measured in 100 million year ticks.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event#Banded_i...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoproterozoic_oxygenation_eve...
by probably_wrong | 2025-04-17 11:19:29+00:00
I agree that it's not a contradiction for two different people to hold opposing views. My objection is more towards the author of the post who, when bringing clowning to the uneducated masses (aka me), writes "some people say clowns should make you laugh, but others say they shouldn't". That may be technically true, but what am I supposed to learn from that?

I always got the feeling that "high clowning" must be out there and be really interesting to watch. I would have liked the post to shed more light on that.
by wolframhempel | 2025-04-17 11:19:59+00:00
Maybe we need to widen our search for life. Earth is a planet with about 15 degree average temperature and abundant water and oxygen. So that's what live here consumes and where it thrives. But life is all about adaptation. So, father than looking for planets with similar temperatures and resources, shouldn't we be looking for other possible foundations for life? Maybe there's a thriving civilization out there, living happily at 300 degrees, breathing neon and eating sulfur?
by mkl | 2025-04-17 11:20:37+00:00
Faster than light travel isn't needed (and IIRC doesn't occur in the series the dark forest name comes from). Spectacularly devastating weapons are definitely possible - redirect an asteroid into an inhabited planet and you're likely to kill most of its inhabitants; redirect enough and you can kill almost everything. That's not even getting into things like antimatter, gamma rays, etc. The dark forest hypothesis doesn't need destruction of solar systems to be possible, just severe damage to civilisations.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-04-17 11:21:13+00:00
no matter how advanced the civilization is, proxima centauri will always be 42 trillion kms away. Our civilization in current stage is not even close to 0.1% the speed of light but lets say your advanced civilization goes at 99% the speed of light, still doesnt change the fact they need 4.25 years approx to reach earth. Still doesnt change the fact that unless they have a 1 billion km wide telscope, they cannot reliably tell if earth has life or not. So basically you are asking them to take a shot at coming to the solar system on a 5 yr trip when they have no idea what is found here. Now extrapolate the numbers for the average 100 light year trip between 2 points on our galaxy and you ll quickly realize why we dont have aliens
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-04-17 11:21:13+00:00
How so? If great filters exist at all, which is not a given, there could be multiple ones, first of all. They could be somewhere between our level of biological complexity and the kind hypothesised to be responsible for this signal. Endosymbiosis is a very plausible such filter. The evolution of language and the bootstrapping of cultural evolution is another one. Both n=1 on our planet. Probably there are others I can't think of right now.