MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-22 19:26:09+00:00
"I would say Atlantis is like a slightly more falsifiable and slightly more plaudible version of Russell's Teapot."

Falsifying a vague hand-wavy theory of Atlantis, I agree with you. But the specific theory that Richat structure was the home of a large city 13,000 years ago that was destroyed in a flood? I wholeheartedly disagree. It's falsifiable and probably could be done with less than 1/100th the archeological investment that's been made into Egypt.

"Is it possible that there was an advanced civilization that somehow left virtually zero evidence? Yes, but why?"

Several cataclysmic meteorite strikes that ended the ice age, triggered younger dryas, caused biblical flooding, rapid environmental change, etc.

I don't think the geological evidence of this is being refuted, just the consequences of it on our understanding of human civilizational history.
by mrozbarry | 2025-04-22 19:27:01+00:00
I'm going to comment with the preface that I gave up reading the article. It feels like a word-salad, and I'm getting lost trying to find the point a lot of the time.

Christianity is Jesus Christ substitutes the sin of a faithful man or woman with His righteousness.

You cannot buy faithfulness, and you cannot obtain righteousness through good works on your own.

The target has never been against wealth, but the love of money, or trusting in the things of this lifetime. For instance, Proverbs 11:28 says not to trust in wealth. Mark 8:36, Jesus states that if you seek wealth over everything else, what good is it when you die? In 1 Timothy 6:17-19, Paul encourages Timothy in his leadership to instruct wealthy people to not put their hope in their wealthy, but to do good with what God has given them.
by madsohm | 2025-04-22 19:27:18+00:00
Since using `def` to create a method returns a symbol with the method name, you can do something like this too:

memoize def expensive_calculation(arg) @calculation_count += 1 arg * 2 end, ttl: 10, max_size: 2 memoize def nil_returning_method @calculation_count += 1 nil end
by cstrahan | 2025-04-22 19:27:36+00:00
> It’s also open source, did they not accept your pull requests for these “improvements”?

I don’t think you are being fair. This question presupposes that the supposed problems can be solved by iterative changes, rather than being inherent in the chosen design/architecture of the software, which usually requires complete replacement thereof (as well as the leadership thereof, as people who choose poor solutions to problems often can’t appreciate arguments for superior solutions).

(Not that I’m trying to suggest that I agree that homebrew in particular is bad — just speaking generally.)
by exceptione | 2025-04-22 19:27:45+00:00
I would like to ask some questions to the author, at the risk of addressing a robot.

- What kind of value do humans have?

- Do people with slower (cognitive) processing have a right to exist?

- Should we get rid of people with disabilities?

I got chills from reading this letter. It sends the message people are just human resources.

If someone is not performing that well, can you help them? provide training? If someone does not meet the bar of widget per minute, even after lots of trying, but is a fine team mate who finds their happiness doing their best they can, aren't you happy to help someone with a stable income and a meaningful job in society? Wouldn't that be a great company? Wouldn't make that YOU a real human?
by pron | 2025-04-22 19:28:04+00:00
I don't think that's the same thing (rather, it's more like ordinary Zig variables in code that's evaluated at compile-time), as there's no arbitrary mixing of compile-time and runtime computation. Again, compare with https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Case-Study-print-i...

Anyway, I found this article that concludes that D's compile time evaluation is equivalent in power to Zig's, although it also doesn't cover how comptime variables can be used in Zig: https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/comptime-programming

However, as I've said many times, knowing about the theoretical power of partial evaluation, what excites me in Zig isn't what comptime can do (although I am impressed with the syntactic elegance of the mechanism) but how it is used to avoid adding other features.

A phone with a touchscreen is evolutionary; a phone without a keypad is revolutionary. The revolution is in the unique experience of using "just comptime" for many things.

It is, of course, a tradeoff, and whether or not that tradeoff is "good" remains to be seen, but I think this design is one of the most novel designs in programming languages in many, many years.
by jordigh | 2025-04-22 19:28:06+00:00
Well, one catch is that you're doing degree ten thousand. That alone already increases your computational costs and can run afoul of numerical error as your numbers start losing precision. You'll have to start worrying about overflow and underflow. Horner's method or another representation of your polynomial might start to become important. You'll also start to notice your CPU spiking more. In essence, this is kind of fitting more and more points until you get rid of every oscillation you don't want.

The other catch, which the author mentions, is that extrapolation is still essentially impossible with polynomials. This is easy to see. The highest-degree term will dominate all the other terms by an order of magnitude once you step out of the interval of interest. Every non-constant polynomial grows without bound.

Honestly, though, what the author is doing isn't much different than a Taylor approximation. If you're okay fitting any polynomial in a small neighbourhood of the data, then go whole hog and fit the best possible polynomial: a Taylor polynomial. You wouldn't usually need to go to that high degree to get what you want in a neighbourhood either.
by mfkp | 2025-04-22 19:28:20+00:00
I suppose it's just a bit frustrating that HN is one of the few places left on the internet where we can have a mostly civilized discussion about politics. I had missed the discussion from 7 days ago so this was news to me (and I'm sure most of the other commenters). If you miss the one chance to discuss that one topic, it can never be discussed again on HN.

I'm not opposed to this rule for moderation, and I understand the reasoning behind it. But it seems like we're just watching the country burn and when stories like this get suppressed to make room for a new rust package manager, it makes me all nihilistic.

/rant
by woodruffw | 2025-04-22 19:28:23+00:00
Who is "they"? I've never FUDed MacPorts, and in a decade of contributing to and maintaining Homebrew I can say honestly that I've never heard any other maintainer talk much about it beyond user experience.

(Beyond anything else, Homebrew's biggest "win" over MacPorts was and probably is still UX and DX. The core technology of a packaging ecosystem is rarely itself the differentiator.)
by aigen000 | 2025-04-22 19:28:25+00:00
From the original chat that got leaked, Walz had set the group chat up to auto delete messages every week, and 4 weeks in other cases. Official government communication is subject to the federal records act so that chat, which was used to communicate official government actions, was not compliant. If it was just used for lunch dates or something, Hesgeth wouldn't be in this mess.

CISA recommends Signal, but it is not an approved tool to share classified information. That's what SCIFs are for.
by ilrwbwrkhv | 2025-04-22 19:28:27+00:00
What I am saying is that these "incentives" are what books like these do not mention.

Hotmail is also interesting because they had two of these: the free email clickable link and a strategic partnership with Four11.

This book is a class of books I classify as "bullshit books" to my mentees. It is inspired by the bullshit jobs idea.

Makes all the right noises, but tells none of the actual tactics.
by mort96 | 2025-04-22 19:29:17+00:00
This looks like a fun little project, nice work!

I'm not a big fan of keeping the Homebrew terminology though. I never know what a formula, keg, cask, cellar, tap or bottle is. Why not keep to the standard terms of package and repository etc? I don't know beer brewing terminology or how beer brewing is analogous to package management, and I honestly wish that it wasn't something which my tools expect me to learn.
by jmtulloss | 2025-04-22 19:29:32+00:00
Yeah I think it depends on what I’m doing.

For “real work” done by a “real engineer”, I approach it almost exactly as you say.

For side projects/personal software that I most likely would have never started pre-llms? I’ll just go full vibe code and see how far I get. Sometimes I have to just delete it, but sometimes it works. That’s cool.
by FadreWulf | 2025-04-22 19:30:02+00:00
Every particle in existence has a unique vibrational frequency,like a fingerprint or radio signal of sorts. Dimensional resonance refers to the ability to detect and interpret that frequency.

Neural phase feedback is the use of artificial neural systems (AI) to monitor and respond to changes in phase. Information from the system is fed back into itself, allowing it to recognize instability and drift before it becomes destructive.

Entropy modeling is the creation of a simulated environment where the potential disorder of a particle’s state is projected forward in time for prediction modeling.

I understand that these explanations are somewhat vuege, but I can't go around explaining every detail as it will be leaking proprietary methods, but I do hope that explanation helped and thank you for asking the questions. Without someone asking the questions, then I don't know what needs explaining.
by Balgair | 2025-04-22 19:30:10+00:00
Aside:

Hey, a lot of fellow biologists here! A few questions:

Is there a 'hacker news' for biology that I'm missing out on?

Where do you get your biology news from?

Where do you think the field/s are going?

Is bio harder than other STEMs?

I'm a neuroscientist/bioengineer by training and profession. I followed the path that a lot of commenters here did too, in that I came back to bio after a harder STEM career (physics). Glad to know I'm not alone in this!
by Timon3 | 2025-04-22 19:30:16+00:00
It's not like this is the first time APIs have been improved. There are many tools (e.g. deprecation warnings & hints in editors, linter rules) that can help bridge the gap - even if t-strings are only used for new or refactored code, it's still a big improvement!

There's also simply no hard requirement to overload an `execute` function. We have options beyond "no templates at all" and "execute takes templates and strings", for example by introducing a separate function. Why does perfect have to be the enemy of good here?
by motorest | 2025-04-22 19:31:23+00:00
> It’s a real disservice to the project not to give a raison d’etre in the readme, or any kind of technical motivation / differences.

This. There's a wave of projects whose only value proposition is this vacuous "let's reinvent the wheel in Rust" sales pitch, where nothing of value is proposed beyond throwing around the Rust buzzword.
by JamesSwift | 2025-04-22 19:31:53+00:00
I thought ruby would auto-wrap the original exception as long as you are raising from a rescue block (i.e. as long as $! is non-nil). So in that case you can just

raise "Failed to execute memoized method '#{method_name}'"

And ruby will set `cause` for you

https://pablofernandez.tech/2014/02/05/wrapped-exceptions-in...
by foobazgt | 2025-04-22 19:33:19+00:00
You've referenced Lombok a lot here, and some Google searches later, I can see that you're in conversations all over the internet re: Lombok (and similar projects like Manifold). Their purpose is to extend the Java language. The class of code I'm referring to is more like those you already mention in your JEP: logging, tracing, profiling, serialization, authn/authz, mocking, ffi, and so on. I would describe all of those as fitting under the umbrella of "cross-cutting" and needing a "meta-programming" facility.

> However, we think there are much better solutions

I'd like to hear more. Can I discuss this further with you in a more appropriate venue than this forever thread?
by bhouston | 2025-04-22 19:33:47+00:00
I use homebrew constantly but the only part I find slow is the custom installations of the software and the lack of downloading while installing? Neither of these is related to the implementation language.

What part of the home brew experience do you find slow?

eg...

% time brew upgrade

brew upgrade 0.75s user 0.16s system 68% cpu 1.337 total

% time brew list

brew list 0.01s user 0.02s system 57% cpu 0.054 total
by dheera | 2025-04-22 19:33:52+00:00
Not a PI employee, but diffusion policies are like diffusion models for image generation, they generate actions from noise in multiple steps. With current compute you can't run 100+Hz control loops with that kind of architecture.

Some combination of distillation, new architectures, faster compute, can eventually attack these problems. Historically as long as something in tech has been shown to be possible, speed has almost always been a non-issue in the years afterwards.

For now even getting a robot to understand what to do in the physical world is a major leap from before.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-04-22 19:34:00+00:00
If privacy is the ground for creativity and agency, then let it be the soil in which mystery grows, not the airtight vault that suffocates every conversation about you. When you extend that absence to forbid mention or thought, you’ve weaponized oblivion into censorship. The right to be left alone is the creation of thought‑crime by fiat.
by yndoendo | 2025-04-22 19:34:49+00:00
Microsoft has always been bad at folder and path naming.

Visual Studio Project Location -> %USER%\source\repos instead of a short %USER%\Projects My Documents instead of Documents. My Pictures instead of Pictures.

%Windows%\SysWow64 -> storing 32bit DLLs %Windows%\System32 -> storing 64bit DLLs %Windows%\System -> storing 16bit DLLs

"Documents and Settings" instead of Home of Users.

"Program Files" instead of "Applications"

Their registry paths are even worse with setting names using double negatives.
by keithwhor | 2025-04-22 19:36:13+00:00
I've been programming since I was eight, but truly fell in love with biology in 12th grade chemistry: the first introduction to organic chemistry and biochemistry. It was the first time I truly started grokking the application of systems-level thinking to the biological world; how do trees "know" to turn red in the autumn? How do fetuses assemble themselves from two cells?

I decided to purse a double major in biochemistry and evolutionary biology and it was one of the best decisions I've made in my life. The perspective you gain from understanding all life in terms of both networks and population dynamics of atoms, molecules, cells, tissue, organisms and populations -- and how every layer reflects the layer both underneath and above it in a fractal pattern -- is mind-expanding in a way I think you just don't and can't get designing software systems alone.

I work as a software engineer / founder now, but always reflect wistfully on my time as a biologist. I hope to get back to it some day in some way, and think what the Arc Institute team is doing is inspirational [0].

[0] https://arcinstitute.org/
by jMyles | 2025-04-22 19:36:21+00:00
I'm kinda surprised the article doesn't mention (and I have no idea the feasibility of) a system that works in the opposite direction as well: somehow communicating via sound waves the speed, heading, and distance (maybe possible through some kind of doppler effect?) of a boat in such a way that whales will perceive and make themselves safe from collision.

Seems at least worth researching.

> Zitterbart’s aim is for ship captains to receive zero false alerts, so that every ping truly requires their attention. Removing human oversight risks flooding ship captains with false reports

This sounds great, as long as we're still on track for the whole "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."

I don't want to be the one to explain to the whales, "No, look, it's not our fault that we killed your singing partner - the AI told us this was the correct route. See?"
by westurner | 2025-04-22 19:36:24+00:00
AP®/College Biology > Unit 6: Gene Expression and Regulation > Lesson 6: Mutations: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/gene-expressi...

AP®/College Biology > Unit 7: Natural selection: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/natural-selec...

Rosalind.info has free CS algorithms applied bioinformatics exercises in Python; in a tree or a list; including genetic combinatorics. https://rosalind.info/problems/list-view/

FWICS there is not a "GA with code exercise" in the AP Bio or Rosalind curricula.

YouTube has videos of simulated humanoids learning to walk with mujoco and genetic algorithms that demonstrate goal-based genetic programming with Cost / Error / Fitness / Survival functions.

Mutating source code AST is a bit different from mutating to optimize a defined optimization problem with specific parameters; though the task is basically the same: minimize error between input and output, and then XAI.
by 3np | 2025-04-22 19:36:29+00:00
How about encouraging self-harm, even murder and suicide?

https://www.npr.org/2024/12/10/nx-s1-5222574/kids-character-...

https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...

https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/31/man-ends-his-life-a...
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-22 19:36:34+00:00
> this is irrelevant

Plato pretty clearly describes the city as man-made. Perhaps Atlantis was real, but he was mistaken about how it was built, so let's give you that. However, everything else still doesn't match.

>in what way? Be specific

That's a bit bossy. It's funny that you ask me to be specific, given that you're providing no evidence for your claim other than "it's round."

Plato is pretty specific in how he describes Atlantis. He says there's a mountain 9 km away from the city. That does not match the geography of the structure. He says there are three concentric circles of land; it's unclear what would even count as a circle of land in the structure, but it doesn't look like three. Plato claims Atlantis was about 500km in diameter, but the city (i.e., the concentric rings) was only a few km, much smaller than the structure. He said there was a passage for ships into the city, half a km wide, which does not exist in the structure.

He also says Atlantis controlled Libya, Egypt, Asia, and parts of Europe. And yet there are no traces of anything? Nowhere? Nothing at all? But Plato knew about it, and nobody else?

>What about the tens of thousands of axe heads found all concentrated in one spot?

There is nothing there. There are no clay pots, no walls, and no abundance of metals or technological artefacts that should be there if this were Atlantis. There are no walls, and nothing. It's just nothing.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-22 19:36:39+00:00
If you treat the ring of polynomials as a vector space in their coefficients, then the unit monomials 1, x, x^2, etc. form the standard basis of that vector space. Wikipedia has an example of "standard basis" in this sense [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_basis#Generalizations
by zefhous | 2025-04-22 19:36:41+00:00
Part of what I think is rough is the framing of Postgres being "an alternative to Google’s Firebase" in the article. I mean, ok yeah they are both databases in a sense, but they are not the same thing at all. Firebase is a service and Postgres a database technology, and certainly not well-described as an alternative to Firebase by anyone competent in the industry. Lol.

I don't mean to demean "vibe coders" exactly either, but rather jumping on the hype train of using that term for your funding pitch. You're using AI to learn to become a software developer? Great! No problem with that.

But also — if you now have a database involved and you're handling people's data, you better learn what you're doing. A database provider pushing "vibe coding" is not a good look imo.
by listeria | 2025-04-22 19:37:01+00:00
Apparently the static_assert trick doesn't work with GCC, it just compiles it with a warning if it's not a constant expression:

warning: expression in static assertion is not an integer constant expression [-Wpedantic]

Instead you can use the sizeof + compound literal with array type, use the comma operator to preserve the type of the expression and cast the result of sizeof to void to suppress the warning:

#define C(x) ( (void)sizeof( (char [(int)(x) || 1]){0} ), (x) )

The only problem is that it doesn't support floating point expressions
by rafram | 2025-04-22 19:37:10+00:00
Homebrew is 99% IO-bound and this will be too. Installing (prebuilt) packages doesn't require much logic. If this tool supports parallel downloads, it will be 10x faster than Homebrew, but it won't have anything to do with the language. The issue is finding a hosting provider willing to be DDOS'd for the good of the open-source community.
by throitallaway | 2025-04-22 19:37:15+00:00
I don't do much with Windows nowadays, but I do touch it from time to time and I don't think much has changed in this regard. Off the top of my head: driver installers for Intel, Nvidia, and Brother printers all look unique. Same with the installers for Firefox, Chrome, etc. The MSI format has brought some standardization, but it's a fairly rigid framework that leads projects to building their own installers.
by Melatonic | 2025-04-22 19:37:17+00:00
I see your argument here and this could also be solved by some type of somewhat difficult flag that Synology could implement.

Meaning that by default it could require a Synology drive that is at minimum going to work decently.

Want to mess around more and are more technical ? Make it a CLI command or something the average joe is going to be wary about. With a big warning message.

Personally I only like to buy very reliable enterprise class drives (probably much better than whatever Synology will officially sell) and this is my main concern.
by j45 | 2025-04-22 19:37:25+00:00
I over-purchased a NAS and ended up with QNAP, even thought Synology provided more power (lower electricity use) to performance ratio.

In hindsight buying a QNAP that was more than the Synology equivalent felt like a good idea but I didn't really get into it quickly enough.

I also got burned by Western Digital's scandal of selling WD Red drives that really weren't that got them caught in a class action lawsuit. Can't see myself buying them again.