MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dguest | 2025-04-18 07:57:59+00:00
Depends on what you mean by "image". We might be able to capture blurry blobs with our current telescopes. Let's say you want to take a picture of Alien Manhattan 100 light years away, where you can see e.g. bridges and buildings, stuff about 10m across. I think we could do it pretty well if we could launch around 50,000 space telescopes, each 30 km across.

My math is below.

Note: I'm not an astronomer.

----

The angular resolution limit for a telescope is roughly the wavelength of the light it's sensitive to over the diameter.

If we want to sense things 10m across, with light at the shorter end of the visible spectrum (400 nm), we'd need a telescope with a diameter of about 1/4th of an AU (i.e. the distance from the earth to the sun), around 40 million kilometers.

More practically we could use a telescope array with this diameter, which could conveniently be in lot of orbits about 1 AU out. But the area is still a problem: assuming this 100m^2 object is as bright as it would be on earth under midday sun, it's going to be reflecting around 100 kw of energy. One of these photons has an energy of around 3 eV, so we're getting 2e23 of them a second. Unfortunately these spread out over a sphere with a surface area of 1e31 km^2 by the time they reach earth, meaning we see one every second if we have a telescope array with an area of 50 million square km.

Ok, so let's go kind of sci-fi and say we can build a 30 km diameter space telescope. It would be impressive (and unprecedented) but since it's floating in space and could be made of thin material you might be able to imagine it with today's technology and a lot of coordination. That gets us around 1000 square km! Now we just do it 50,000 more times.

Great, now we have 1 Hz of photons coming from each 100 m^2 patch of Alien Manhattan! I'm sure in the process of building 50k mega-projects we'll figure out a way to filter out the noise, and with a few years of integration we'll have a nice snapshot!
by rstuart4133 | 2025-04-18 07:58:09+00:00
Trump is evidently vaguely aware China has him over the rare earth barrel https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1drqeev36qo Quoting:

"Everything you can switch on or off likely runs on rare earths," explains Thomas Kruemmer, Director of Ginger International Trade and Investment. Rare earths are also critical to the production of medical technology like laser surgery and MRI scans, as well as key defence technologies. China has a near monopoly on extracting rare earths as well as on refining them - which is the process of separating them from other minerals.

Ergo, it's interesting that Trump was demanding Ukraine hand over control of their rare earths to the USA many weeks before his little trade war lead to China's export ban. It's almost as if he expected that to happen, which means all of the chaos you see now was planned out well in advance. That should give pause to the many here claiming the actions of the current explanation are all explained by having a 79 president suffering from dementia. Then again, quoting from https://spectrum.ieee.org/ukraine-rare-earth-minerals on getting rare earths from Ukraine:

Even without a war to contend with, it would take at least 15 years to build a mine to begin extracting rare-earth ore on a large scale, Lifton notes. And according to the terms of the draft critical materials deal, private companies would have to invest huge sums, likely a billion dollars or more, to develop rare-earths mines in Ukraine. It’s a possibility that Lifton, an IEEE member and former metals trader, dismisses as absurd. He notes that a multinational mining company, Rio Tinto Group, has spent close to US $3 billion on potential mine sites in Arizona and Alaska and still does not have the necessary licenses and permits from the U.S. Government to begin building a mine in either place."
by KaiserPro | 2025-04-18 07:58:20+00:00
Its a different risk.

The cornershop does not have access to your friend graph. Also, if you pay by card, digital ID only provides corroboration, your payment acts as a much more traceable indicator.

The risk of "digital ID" is that it'll leak grosly disprocotionate amounts of data on the holder.

For Age verification, you only need a binary old enough flag, from a system that verifies the holder's ID.

The problem is, people like google and other adtech want to be the people that provide those checks, so they can tie your every action to a profile with a 1:1 link. Then combine it to card transactions to get an ad impression to purchase signal much clearer.

The risk here is much less from government but private companies.
by KingMob | 2025-04-18 07:59:16+00:00
Don't misunderstand. My views are not driven by random Tiktok videos. I mentioned them to point out that bias questions cannot be relevant in their case.

You might think those videos are aberrant, but I see it as just part of the overall pattern.

"War" is a misnomer when Israel has 10x the money, the resources, the military, controls Palestinian movement/water/food, erects walls completely surrounding Gaza, and bombed 100% of the hospitals and universities in Gaza.

"War" creates the illusion of roughly-equal enemy forces.

You don't have "war". You have a displaced, dehumanized people living in modern apartheid conditions, who periodically strike out against their conditions and history, and then get vengeance visited upon them 100-fold.

----

"You can't get a picture of reality through anecdotes ... I've spoken to soldiers who fought in Gaza"

So... you heard some anecdotes.
by flohofwoe | 2025-04-18 08:00:36+00:00
It's the better 'OOP extension' to C than C++ though ;)

Apart from the unfamiliar method call syntax it's actually a decent language extension once you understand what problems it wants to solve, and the killer feature of ObjC is that it doesn't mess with C semantics (which means ObjC part of the language is always automatically compatible with the latest C standard, while the 'C subset' of C++ is forever stuck in the mid-90s).
by intended | 2025-04-18 08:01:11+00:00
Being able to file taxes is ideally a public good.

For private enterprise, the benefits are to encourage more complex tax laws, and to add MORE challenges that they can intermediate.

The incentives for governments are to get it done easily, cheaply and at scale, without differentiation between users.

Plus we know how this is done globally. We even know that tax filing is intentionally made as painful as possible to ensure American voters hate filing taxes even more.
by Pikamander2 | 2025-04-18 08:03:27+00:00
Relevant news article from yesterday:

https://www.wired.com/story/new-jersey-sues-discord/

> Platkin says there were two catalysts for the investigation. One is personal: A few years ago, a family friend came to Platkin, astonished that his 10-year-old son was able to sign up for Discord, despite the platform forbidding children under 13 from registering.

> The second was the mass-shooting in Buffalo, in neighboring New York. The perpetrator used Discord as his personal diary in the lead-up to the attack.

In other words, this is yet another attack on privacy in the name of "protecting the children".
by suddenlybananas | 2025-04-18 08:03:33+00:00
Of course it is possible that the tradition goes back more than a thousand years from when it was first attested, but we have no material evidence of that whatsoever. No statues of a goddess surrounded by eggs and rabbits, no amulets of protection, no recorded myths, no references to something similar from Greek or Roman sources, nothing. This is in contrast to beer where we have actually found remains of beer from long, long ago.
by comrade1234 | 2025-04-18 08:05:36+00:00
I was actually surprised at how boring and mundane their lives were and how ineffectual the program sounded. The only slightly interesting part was the possible spy at the nuke lab, but of course these agents’ part was to only drop something off at a dead drop, if even that (they may have only scouted a spot).

The Americans tv show was much more exciting and even that got a bit boring.
by yorwba | 2025-04-18 08:05:49+00:00
It is a natural mistake to make, so spending some time showing that it gives the wrong result is probably appropriate. Of course giving that wrong result a special name (especially something short like "e") or even calculating its value to a high degree of precision are pointless at this stage.

Then later when you have formally introduced sequences and how to prove convergence, you can show that (1+1/n)^n is monotonically increasing and bounded above, hence convergent. This is no longer a mistake, but closer to a fun (and quite difficult) mathematical puzzle than anything practical. Naming it "e" is still premature at this point.

Then even later when you've introduced differentiation, it's time to talk about the derivative of arbitrary exponential functions, which is where that sequence reappears, and giving e a special name finally becomes appropriate.

It seems like American math curricula are typically so excited to talk about e that they try to skip over all the intermediate steps?
by 6P58r3MXJSLi | 2025-04-18 08:07:16+00:00
See the problem?

You assume, "it's China, they must be bad, no?"

No

TikTok in China is mostly the same app, under a different name of course.

What is different?

The Chinese society, which does not exists in a vacuum and is not directed by evil entities coming from another planet to rule the Chinese people under their thumb, they are Chinese people too.

In China kids are only allowed a limited screen time per day, because that's what parents want, that's what studies showed them, that it's not safe for children, and that's their beacon: for parents, the ruling class and the society at large. They chose safety over instant gratification.

OTOH when US government tried to ban TikTok people protested vehemently. It was mostly so called "influencers" who turbo charged their armies of minions against a decision that could harm them, but was good for everybody else.

So Americans should ask themselves why they prefer TikTok over the safety of their children, Chinese people don't, because they don't do it.

edit: grammar
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-18 08:07:47+00:00
If the post office mandate was only to be profitable, it would have been disbanded decades ago. It is a communication organization mandated by the constitution, by the founding fathers. Profit was never ever part of rurual postage service, neither was rural electrification, not rural phone service, and rural internet. The service that shows the most profit is the war machine.

How many people does the post office unalive?

The post office is loved by children, young adults, and senior citizens. Is the profitable military as popular amoung the people who call our veterans loosers? This comes from a propoganda machine of the oligarks who want, instead of government service, want only their own selfish profits.

War is a waste of money, and arguing about it is a waste of time.

To the many who think mail to rural people is a waste of money? I would rather recieve a letter from someone than a list of war dead.

Thr many who think that profit is the reason for the existence of the post office, left a Marine for dead in Africa, lied about it, and never learned to pronounce his name to his mother.

At least a coconut in the mail is not as empty headed as most of the political party that wants to run the entire government as a profitable business only to bankrupt it like a casino.

How do they bankrupt a casino?

Show me the first politician who ran on a platform of a profitable war machine? Pretty sure it was the German socialist Democratic party, who were never thet socialist not democratic.
by bell-cot | 2025-04-18 08:08:17+00:00
As the title implies, the article is 100% devoted to dishing dirt on Mr. T. & Co.

It'd have been nice if the article noted how many big (bad) changes has been announced by the White House...then reversed course on. Generally after serious pushback, or (presumed) grown-ups pointing out the major downsides of the change.

The article might even have suggested things which readers could physically do, if they cared to add to the pushback.

Trump or no Trump - if both the citizens' and journalists' ideal for "citizen participation", when things are going badly wrong, amounts to "keep clicking on articles and quietly emoting over those" ... well, then you don't have much of a democracy.
by tempthrow | 2025-04-18 08:08:46+00:00
I think it's the small TPM limits. I'll be way under the 10-30 requests per minute while using Cline, but it appears that the input tokens count towards the rate limit so I'll find myself limited to one message a minute if I let the conversation go on for too long, ironically due to Gemini's long context window. AFAIK Cline doesn't currently offer an option to limit the context explosion to lower than model capacity.
by photios | 2025-04-18 08:09:06+00:00
> I find it odd how Easter, a pre-Christian Pagan festival (worshipping goddess of fertility: Eostre) has become seemingly-arbitrarily connected to the purported events at the end of Jesus' life..

The Eostre connection is unconvincing. Eostre is a Saxon goddess with earliest sources about her cult from 8th century and:

- Easter has been celebrated before 8th century.

- And it has been celebrated by people that have never heard of Saxons or their gods.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-04-18 08:09:18+00:00
"As an existing happy subscriber" -- goodness! Even after years of seeing what happens after such illogical evangelism, hn never ceases to surprise you and brings the fandom out in full force. It's like with Apple. You say once "your phone switches on and off on its own - maybe something is amiss with the hw/sw" and there are dozens of replies already blaming you "you must be holding it wrong!". It's a whole new level of apologism.
by sergioisidoro | 2025-04-18 08:09:56+00:00
Personal anecdote: I do freediving, so CO2 tolerance training is common, and I've done it on and off. Basically you do breath holds to train your body to get used to high leves of CO2.

I've found that brief high C02 levels are very good for activation, and to get out of a lethargic state. I don't know if a mix of cortisol and vasoconstriction and dive reflex triggered by the CO2, but I feel like it's a tool I have on my toolbox whenever I need to so something difficult or that requires a lot of will power.

It's not for everyone tho, because many people can't get past the initial urge to breathe, and would probably freak out with the first involuntary contraction.
by Asraelite | 2025-04-18 08:10:00+00:00
I use it for basically everything I can, not just code completion, including end-to-end bug fixes when it makes sense. But most of the time even the current Gemini and Claude models fail with the hard things.

It might be because most bugs that you would encounter in other languages don't occur in the first place in Rust because of the stronger type system. The race condition one you mentioned wouldn't be possible for example. If something like that would occur, it's a compiler error and the AI fixes it while still in the initial implementation stage by looking at the linter errors. I also put a lot of effort into trying to use coding patterns that do as much validation as possible within the type system. So in the end all that's left are the more difficult bugs where a human is needed to assist (for now at least, I'm confident that the models are only going to get better).
by tkgally | 2025-04-18 08:10:01+00:00
Still later: I later read that o3 is supposedly particularly good with this geoguessing, so I tried the same prompt and photos with o3. This time it got one out of four correct: “The view of the canal with cherry blossoms and the green railway viaduct is the Ōoka River in Yokohama, looking north from the little road bridge between Hinodechō and Koganechō stations. The tracks on the left belong to the Keikyū Main Line, and the high‑rises in the distance are the Minato‑Mirai and Kita‑Naka district towers.” Its other three answers were still wrong.
by chmod775 | 2025-04-18 08:10:08+00:00
From my personal testing it's more like "hardly any" photo.

It can't find a church in Germany nor can it find a rather distinct mall in China.

Unless I feed it a photo from a tourist-y location, it doesn't do very well.

The church was particularly embarrassing. It got the correct general vicinity from a number plate, then picked the wrong church out of two options, because it fixated on the number plate, which was from the neighboring city. You just had to compare the picture to each church at this point...
by geysersam | 2025-04-18 08:11:03+00:00
If it's trained on street view data it's not unlikely that the model can associate a particular piece of context to street view. For example, a picture can have telltale signs that street view content has, such as blurred faces and street signs, watermarks, etc.

Even if it's not directly trained on street view data it has probably encountered street view content in it's training dataset.
by eigenschwarz | 2025-04-18 08:11:04+00:00
Does this help? I am a physicist with interest in these subjects and have always been wary of breathwork because of tetany and the following studies. What do experts closer to this field make of these?

[1] "Brain Damage in Commercial Breath-Hold Divers" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[2] "Do elite breath-hold divers suffer from mild short-term memory impairments?" https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/apnm-2017-0245

Ref. [2] is especially concerning to me in pushing in any sort of static apnea training or breathwork: "The time to complete the interference card test was positively correlated with maximal static apnea duration (r = 0.73, p < 0.05) and the number of years of breath-hold diving training (r = 0.79, p < 0.001)."
by fguerraz | 2025-04-18 08:11:11+00:00
I don't have access to the paper, but it seems to make zero testable predictions and is therefore just mathematical fiction. If it's not falsifiable, it's not science.

EDIT: the last sentence is "Given sufficient redshift (or, equivalently, time) resolution effected by the redshift slicing, one might just find that the Hubble diagram exhibits jumps in the redshift distance relation, which would be very revealing." So they say it's testable. However, we see the effects of "dark matter" (or whatever it really is) today affecting the spin of galaxies, so I don't see how that's compatible with the explanation of these events being "rare".
by tonywestonuk | 2025-04-18 08:11:44+00:00
Spring is the big reason that Java has such a bad rap.

90% of all Java codebases are Spring Spring is a hornets nest of overcomplexity.

But, if you write Java, in the style of 'Pythonic' python, you end up with some really nice, compact, easy to maintain code that goes against practically every Java departments coding standard. And, that what the influence of Spring has done.

You don't have to use private variables. you dont have to use getters and setters. You don't have to use proxyFactoryBean.

He can totter off to Kotlin, and make that the hell hole that Java became.
Show HN: Prompt Compression for LLMs App
by xgzlucario | 2025-04-18 08:12:12+00:00
Hi HN!

I've noticed that as the applications of LLMs continue to expand, the demand for tokens is increasing, which also brings significant cost burdens to users. Currently, there aren't many effective prompt compression products on the market, so I've created a simple demo site: https://hello-llm.com.

This application includes two features: lossy compression and lossless compression.

1. Lossy compression allows users to specify the compression ratio and is faster; 2. Lossless compression lets the model determine the compression ratio, aiming to retain as much useful information as possible, albeit slower.

This is just a demo, and I plan to assess its feasibility and gather enough feedback before deciding whether to launch a formal product. Everyone is welcome to try it out!
by IndrekR | 2025-04-18 08:13:13+00:00
Have mailed live queen bees in Europe as well. Funniest was when receiving some (I think it was from Denmark to Estonia before we joined the EU) and one delivery got stuck in customs due to unpaid alcohol tax — someone had misread “Live Bees” as “Live Beer”. Fortunately this was cleared out within two days and bees were still alive (but a little short on food).
by vanschelven | 2025-04-18 08:14:45+00:00
Hey, that's me!

When I posted this myself on Reddit, I said the following:

I've long held off on actually posting this article to a platform like this one (don't bash your competition and all that), but "isn't Sentry self-hosted?" _is_ one of the most asked questions I get, and multiple people have told me this blog-post actually explains the rationale for Bugsink better than the rest of the site, so there you have it.
by flohofwoe | 2025-04-18 08:15:13+00:00
It really depends on how much ObjC features you use in the performance-sensitive parts of your code base.

If you build your entire code around the ObjC object model and not just the parts that talk to operating system APIs you might see a performance hit since ObjC method calls are simply more expensive than a direct C function call (especially since C function calls can often be inlined)., and even setting or getting an ObjC object property involves a method call.

But since ObjC is also a complete C there's really no point in using more ObjC OOP features than really needed (e.g. just for talking to iOS/macOS framework APIs).
by nirvdrum | 2025-04-18 08:15:13+00:00
Huh? The title of the blog post is "Kagi Assistant is now available to all users!". Their users are people paying for what up until now was just their search service. They're now rolling in Assistant as a value-add. Your subscription price didn't increase. You're strictly getting more for what you were already paying. If you don't use it all, you're no worse off than you were yesterday.

If you want metered billing, there's no shortage of AI services that offer that option. Kagi even offers one by way of the FastGPT. You can also pay to use their search API if you don't think the subscription is worthwhile. You can cobble something together with Open WebUI pretty easily.

I have Kagi Family plan for my household. I've been paying for the Ultimate upgrade for my account in order to access Assistant, but given how infrequently others in my family would use it, it never made sense to upgrade them. Still, it would have been convenient if they could occasionally access Assistant. And now they can. And my bill didn't increase. And they're being incredibly transparent about what the limits are and why they're there. I'm a really happy customer today.
by FrojoS | 2025-04-18 08:15:44+00:00
You can somewhat simulate it yourself.

Lie down, do a push up, then jump up to your feet, upright, arms raised (Burpee). Repeat in rapid succession twelve times, then immediately shut your mouth and close your nose with your hand. Hold it. Close your eyes and imagine you are under water and don‘t know how long it will take till you can resurface.

You will feel an immediate urge to breath, a very unpleasant feeling in your throat, nose, ears, etc, and an immediate feeling of panic. That feeling is AFAIK caused by heightened CO2 levels [1].

Imagine trying to fight your way to the surface, in a panic, but the turbulence of the wave is too strong and keeps you down. Instead you have to accept the feeling of panic without acting on it, converse your energy while being rag dolled and pounded, trying not to dislocate your joints, keep or regain your sense of orientation, and wait for the moment that the turbulence subsides to the point it is possible to surface again.

You have little control over when that moment finally comes. And while seconds start to feel like eternities you might start telling yourself to never go surfing again. As time drags on, your resolve increases, to the point you might act on it once, and if, you finally resurface.

[1] I have no expertise but this is what I was told and this source seems to somewhat confirm https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3138667/#:~:text=In...