MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WalterBright | 2025-04-20 03:37:28+00:00
A member of our community accidentally discovered that the D compiler could translate C code to D code.

D has a module system, where you import a module and it pulls the global declarations out of it. To speed up this process, there's a compiler switch to output just the global declarations to another file, a .di file, that functions much like a .h file in C.

Then there came along ImportC, where a C lexer/parser was welded onto the D compiler logic.

aaaand it wasn't long before the switch was thrown to generate a .di file, and voila, the C code got translated to D!

This resulted in making it dramatically easier to use existing C headers and source files with D.
by commandersaki | 2025-04-20 03:41:25+00:00
Find math that interests you!

I didn't particularly find (at the time) calculus, multivariable calculus, physics, etc. interesting as I didn't find the applications interesting at the time. I find these subjects representative of what you traditionally learn at school.

When I entered uni I discovered my passion for discrete math, algebra (groups, rings, fields, etc.), number theory, cryptography, theory of computation, etc. as they have a lot of application in CS.

That's really what did it for me - and also I had great uni lecturers. I wish they would have taught the subjects I like in highschool - the difficulty level is about the same.
by slowking2 | 2025-04-20 03:41:31+00:00
I knew some who were bad at math. Asian immigrant test scores on math are ~1/2-1 standard deviation higher than white Americans. That’s noticeable comparing groups of people but still leaves a lot of Asian immigrants who are not good at math.

There is no royal road. If all your kids are biologically yours and you and all your family are good at math and you marry someone from a similar family, you can stack the deck maybe 95/5 in favor or your kid being good at math? But that option is already off the table if you lack that talent. And there are other things you should probably prioritize first!
by teleforce | 2025-04-20 03:42:03+00:00
There's an excellent guide to DMR technology by Andrew Barron (ZL3DW) and brief overview by Motorola Solutions, one of the major suppliers of commercial DMR [1],[2].

[1] Work the world with DMR: Digital Mobile Radio (2022):

https://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-019172

[2] WHAT IS DMR?

https://www.motorolasolutions.com/en_xp/solutions/what-is-dm...
by XorNot | 2025-04-20 03:42:03+00:00
Try actually using a system like this. OpenSnitch and LittleSnitch do it for Linux and MacOS respectively. Fedora has a pretty good interface for SELinux denials.

I've used all of them, and it's a deluge: it is too much information to reasonably react to.

Your broad is either deny or accept but there's no sane way to reliably know what you should do.

This is not and cannot be an individual problem: the easy part is building high fidelity access control, the hard part is making useful policy for it.
by aisenik | 2025-04-20 03:43:02+00:00
I've had my eye on the UTx op for the better part of the decade. It is my understanding that there's no medical reason to expect it would not be successful in a trans woman. I don't have recent numbers but we passed >100 uterine transplants a while back. The most complicated physical requirement is a functional vagina for discharge (which is generally on the roadmap for trans women interested in carrying a child).

I am unaware of trans women having received this operation yet, but Lili Elbe died after the first uterine transplant nearly 100 years ago, before the Nazi regime destroyed trans medicine and eradicated contemporary trans existence. Given the global climate, I don't expect any trans recipients to be eager for publicity. It will happen, and soon.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-20 03:43:34+00:00
> Without realizing it, he was doing algebra.

A friend of mine taught remedial math at UW to incoming freshmen. She would write:

x + 2 = 5

on the blackboard and ask a student "what is the value of x?" The student would see the x, and immediately respond with x means algebra, algebra is hard, I cannot do algebra.

So she started writing:

_ + 2 = 5

and ask the student to fill in the blank. "Oh, it's 3!"
by Avicebron | 2025-04-20 03:44:40+00:00
> It was enshrined as an ideal sociological familial arrangement in the United States because its normalization was conducive for developing larger pools of productive labor.

As opposed to pseudo-Confucius China where larger pools of productive labor naturally formed?

That doesn't take away anything from the fundamental point where it's the smallest self-replicating unit, logic on behalf of the participants has nothing to do with it because it works out the gate. Of course it isn't the best, it was developed during a time of struggle and turmoil a la the industrial revolution (for the rural poor), it won because it was the the most resilient model (small, mobile, reactive, etc) to hard times.

Edit: I said developed, if formed is a word that helps you understand that it's not conscious then here you go
by smeej | 2025-04-20 03:44:57+00:00
> He told the BBC around 10 women have embryos in storage or are undergoing fertility treatment, a requirement for being considered for womb transplantation. Each transplant costs around £30,000, he says, and the charity has sufficient funds to do two more.

Is this because they're not connecting the transplanted uterus to the fallopian tubes or something? Or is there some other reason that it wouldn't be possible to conceive the "old-fashioned way" post-transplant?

Creating and freezing embryos otherwise seems like a very strange thing for a woman to have done who has no uterus, unless she was already considering surrogacy. Where was she expecting them to grow?

Requiring the embryos to be created before knowing whether the womb transplant would be possible or successful seems really odd to me.
by goku12 | 2025-04-20 03:46:50+00:00
It isn't that simple, is it? Even if you place the black surface on a spacer (adding mass, might I add), the black surface itself is going to radiate heat back onto the satellite via blackbody radiation. This is always going to create a worse thermal situation unless you can somehow radiate away as much heat as you could with reflections. To see what I mean, check out JWST's thermal shield.
by dikei | 2025-04-20 03:47:12+00:00
The difference is the quality of the OSS implementation: most OSS ASN.1 tool choke on the enormous 3GPP specs and others used in the telco industry, thus cannot generate 100% valid code.

For some use-cases, you can get by with manually adjust the generated code. That works until the hardware vendors release a new device that use a more modern 3GPP specs and your code start breaking again.

When using a commercial ASN.1 tooling, they often update their compilers to support the latest 3GPP specs even before the hardware vendors, and thus supporting a new device is way simpler.
by danpalmer | 2025-04-20 03:48:27+00:00
I understand the attitude but I think it misses a few aspects.

We have far more isolation between software, we have cryptography that would have been impractical to compute decades ago, and it’s used at rest and on the wire. All that comes at significant cost. It might only be a few percent of performance on modern systems, and therefore easy to justify, but it would have been a higher percentage a few decades ago.

Another thing that’s not considered is the scale of data. Yes software is slower, but it’s processing more data. A video file now might be 4K, where decades ago it may have been 240p. It’s probably also far more compressed today to ensure that the file size growth wasn’t entirely linear. The simple act of replaying a video takes far more processing than it did before.

Lastly, the focus on dynamic languages is often either misinformed or purposefully misleading. LLM training is often done in Python and it’s some of the most performance sensitive work being done at the moment. Of course that’s because the actual training isn’t executing in a Python VM. The same is true for so much of “dynamic languages” though, the heavy lifting is done elsewhere and the actual performance benefits of rewriting the Python bit to C++ or something would often be minimal. This does vary of course, but it’s not something I see acknowledged in these overly simplified arguments.

Requirements have changed, software has to do far more, and we’re kidding ourselves if we think it’s comparable. That’s not to say we shouldn’t reduce wastage, we should! But to dismiss modern software engineering because of dynamic languages etc is naive.
by jodoherty | 2025-04-20 03:50:27+00:00
I think most people don't care about optimizing an extra $10 out of their weekly grocery run.

Probably a better example is figuring out the cost of a loan. Just multiply the amortized monthly payment by the term and compare that to the loan amount. If the difference makes you balk, then go ahead and walk.

How many people even realize that loan interest is a significant cost and would bother to do that? Or know how to do that? Most people just try to minimize monthly payments to something they can bear and sign the paperwork.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-20 03:52:01+00:00
If we're playing the map-projection-advocacy game, I'd say the Mollweide projection is underrated among equal-area maps [0]. (For local maps, use whatever you want, appropriately centered.) Sure, it distorts shapes away from the central meridian, but locally it only adds a simple horizontal skew. I'm not a big fan of how many equal-area 'compromise' projections lie about how long the lines of latitude are.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollweide_projection
by zmgsabst | 2025-04-20 03:52:26+00:00
I’ve always found that an indictment of math education — and spent many, many hours discussing it.

When teaching addition, workbooks commonly use a box, eg, “[ ] + 2 = 5” — and first graders have no conceptual problem with this. Somehow, we lose people by the time we’re trying to formalize the same concept in algebra. There’s been many times I’ve written a box around letters in a problem and asked students “what’s in the box labeled x?”

Pedagogy is hard.
by cortesoft | 2025-04-20 03:53:30+00:00
So CAS records are supposed to keep a CA from issuing a certificate if the CAA record exists and doesn't have that CA.

However, this is relying on the CA to properly check the record. If the CA has a bug where it isn't validating properly, they could also fail to check the CAA properly. Also, this doesn't help against a malicious or compromised CA.
by goku12 | 2025-04-20 03:53:32+00:00
That isn't a big problem due to several factors. To begin with, OFCs on the ocean bed is how route the majority of the internet traffic already. You can easily bury it a few inches under the surface anywhere. Another point is that these are often used only just high capacity backhaul links. You don't need to criss-cross the terrain with it. And even in the case of the worst of terrains, you can switch to high capacity, highly directional RF or Laser data links for short stretches.
by naasking | 2025-04-20 03:53:35+00:00
> If your new hypothesis doesn't even mention the CMB power spectrum

MOND successfully predicted the first peak of the power spectrum. I wonder why everyone focuses so much on LCDM predicting the second peak.

> DM does that, everything else does not.

Whenever someone says DM "does that", it's often after its initial prediction was falsified and the calculation was modified in some way to account for the new observations [1,2]. This has been going on for decades, so that's hardly a ringing endorsement.

I'm not surprised mind you, this is the hallmark of the confirmation bias that's been characteristic of LCDM for decades now.

[1] From Galactic Bars to the Hubble Tension: Weighing Up the Astrophysical Evidence for Milgromian Gravity, https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/14/7/1331

[2] Not that MOND is a suitable replacement because it too has its problems. My only point is that this tendency to sweep these inconveniences under the rug as if DM is a compelling and successful theory and saying "nothing else does the job" is disingenuous at best. What you should say is that "nothing does, period, not even our best DM theory", because that's the truth.
by FabHK | 2025-04-20 03:54:25+00:00
Maybe they called it "face" and not "edge" because an edge is normally understood to be what's between two vertices (of a graph; so an edge has two vertices, beginning and end), while here "face" is what's between two corners of a given triangle (so a face can contain more than two vertices, and so multiple edges).

See the bottom "face" of the top centre triangle in the 4 examples.
by ken47 | 2025-04-20 03:54:34+00:00
The hype levels are so overwhelming that AI coding could never hope to meet them. I've tried having a highly-ranked AI coding app write unit tests for a relatively complex codebase. 80% of the generated test cases failed. But an experienced human such as myself could use those as a starting point since it took care of some of the tedious boilerplate. It genuinely saved me some time and annoyance, but could never hope to replace even the lowliest competent junior dev.

That's what AI is good for right now - boilerplate acceleration. But that's clearly not enough to drive the immense transfers of capital that this high ecosystem demands.
by nsonha | 2025-04-20 03:56:43+00:00
> JavaScript developers would fail to read this

> You need separation between components and data

this is an universal way to do UI, in fact only javascript developers (out of curiosity, are you one?) would even argue against it, because "use the platform", vanila, simple... blabla, or you know, "incapable of programming" and thinking in terms of data flow as opposed to platform intricacies
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-20 03:56:51+00:00
Can you point me at what you mean? I'm not immediately finding something that indicates that it is not fit for this use case. The fact that bad actors use it to resist those who want to shut them down is, if anything, an endorsement of its durability. There's a bit of overlap between resisting the AI scrapers and resisting the FBI. You can either have a single point of control and a single point of failure, or you can have neither. If you're after something that's both reliable and reliably censorable--I don't think that's in the cards.

That's not to say that it is a ready replacement for the web as we know it. If you have hash-linked everything then you wind up with problems trying to link things together, for instance. Once two pages exist, you can't after-the-fact create a link between them because if you update them to contain that link then their hashes change so now you have to propagate the new hash to people. This makes it difficult to do things like have a comments section at the bottom of a blog post. So you've got to handle metadata like that in some kind of extra layer--a layer which isn't hash linked and which might be susceptible to all the same problems that our current web is--and then the browser can build the page from immutable pieces, but the assembly itself ends up being dynamic (and likely sensitive to the users preference, e.g. dark mode as a browser thing not a page thing).

But I still think you could move maybe 95% of the data into an immutable hash-linked world (think of these as nodes in a graph), the remaining 5% just being tuples of hashes and pubic keys indicating which pages are trusted by which users, which ought to be linked to which others, which are known to be the inputs and output of various functions, and you know... structure stuff (these are our graph's edges).

The edges, being smaller, might be subject to different constraints than the web as we know it. I wouldn't propose that we go all the way to a blockchain where every device caches every edge, but it might be feasible for my devices to store all of the edges for the 5% of the web I care about, and your devices to store the edges for the 5% that you care about... the nodes only being summoned when we actually want to view them. The edges can be updated when our devices contact other devices (based on trust, like you know that device's owner personally) and ask "hey, what's new?"

I've sort of been freestyling on this idea in isolation, probably there's already some projects that scratch this itch. A while back I made a note to check out https://ceramic.network/ in this capacity, but I haven't gotten down to trying it out yet.
by kstenerud | 2025-04-20 04:01:38+00:00
> What is so insulting to me about those AI-written messages is that they take less time and consideration to produce than they do to consume. You are, by the nature of sharing these automated words, signaling to me that you care less about my time and attention than you do your own. Of course you’re free to believe that as much as you like—in your own head. Just don’t drop it into my inbox or feed. Because that’s rude.

Oh come off it! You seriously expect me to manually write out some formulaic letter, complete with all the required phatic flourishes, just to respect your time? Use a damn AI to summarize it. I'd you're actually plowing though that slop yourself, you have only yourself to blame.
by goku12 | 2025-04-20 04:01:49+00:00
People have different priorities. Dismissing the needs of the scientific community based on meaningless comparisons for the financial benefit of a few megacorps isn't really a good argument. There are much less disruptive ways to provide good quality internet access for folks even in the most remote places. Considering the US especially, can you honestly say that the telecom companies did everything they could (or even a reasonable bit) to improve the situation, using all the subsidies and grants they took from the government in the name of improving the said connectivity?
by anonymars | 2025-04-20 04:02:03+00:00
Fair point. It's a frustrating pattern that seems to repeat, and I think partially it stems from when other brands are too thick to understand why people are choosing the competitor.

Web browsers are an immediate example that comes to mind. When everyone started switching to Chrome, the other browsers fell all over themselves to strip down into minimalism, as though it was the sparse UI that was capturing users' hearts, as opposed to the rendering speed and compatibility. So then you had all these other fat, slow browsers that took away the only thing that was still distinguishing them from Chrome.

In this case though, I guess it's about money. Why put in an SD card slot when you can instead extort your customers for a cloud storage subscription or a lucrative upsale to the higher model with more storage?

Meanwhile as a customer nothing makes me more irate than "upgrading" to something that's worse because I can't replace the battery and the OS no longer gets updates.
by naasking | 2025-04-20 04:02:05+00:00
> Right now, this is the simplest solution we have that fits all observations well.

It doesn't though. For instance, the latest in a litany of such failures is that rotation curves are flat past a million light years [1]. There is no plausible DM distribution that could reproduce such rotation curves while being consistent with other observations.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09685
by noisy_boy | 2025-04-20 04:06:44+00:00
In my university, I spent more time in the library than anywhere else reading all kinds of books ranging from encyclopedia brittannica to religion to course books to magazines and everything else in between. I do regret not working harder on my course subjects but the decision to spent hours at the library was a life changing one which resulted in me opening my eyes to a world beyond my hometown.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-04-20 04:07:58+00:00
They're annoyed at your "Have you considered that there's a reason?" for strongly implying there's an explanation for the incorrect fact. They dislike that whole type of statement. Their reading comprehension is fine and you're just nitpicking their wording.

Also, saying "Have you considered that there's a reason?" is not at all the same as "asking why it does a thing". It's a strong statement on its own. If your original comment had stopped after the first sentence then you would have gotten a very different response.
by noosphr | 2025-04-20 04:08:47+00:00
The biotech coming down the line will make our current culture wars seem like a disagreement between two best friends.

All of the following are nearly possible today:

+ A man implanted with a womb giving birth.

+ A woman stealing genetic material and creating a baby, the gender of the second parent is irrelevant here.

+ A woman wanting an abortion, instead having the fetus removed and placed in an artificial womb under the care of the father.

And one that I was working on:

+ Farm animals grown with their brains shut off, used as compute substrate for biological neural networks, while their biological functions are controlled remotely.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-20 04:12:25+00:00
You're both beating around the bush that is the core issue, though, and that's a lack of backup media that isn't a HDD for storing large amounts of data indefinitely, nevermind on a medium that doesn't have to be powered on every X interval to ensure it's still functional.

Prosumers/enthusiasts generally have three options for large-scale data backups (18TB+), and none are as remotely affordable as the original storage medium:

* A larger storage array to hold backups and/or versions as needed (~1.25x the $ cost of your primary array to account for versions)

* Cloud-based storage (~$1300/yr from Backblaze B2 for 18TB; AWS Glacier Deep Freeze is far cheaper, but the Egress costs per year for testing are comparable to B2)

* LTO drives ($3300 for an mLogic LTO-8 drive, plus media costs)

Of those, LTO drives are (presently) the only ones capable of having a stable "shelf life" at a relatively affordable rate. Most consumers with datasets that size likely aren't reading that data more than once or twice a year to test the backup itself, and even then maybe restoring one or twice in their lifetime. LTO is perfect for this operating model, letting users create WORM tapes for the finished stuff (e.g., music and video collections), and use a meager rotation of tapes for infrequent backups (since more routinely-accessed data could be backed up to cloud providers for cheaper than the cost of an associated daily LTO backup rotation). LTO is also far more resilient to being shipped than HDDs, making it easier to keep offline copies with family or friends across the country to protect your data from large-scale disasters.

It's the weird issue of making it cheaper than ever for anyone to hoard data, but more expensive than ever to back it up safely. It's a problem that's unlikely to go away anytime soon, given Quantum's monopoly on LTO technology and IBM's monopoly on drive manufacturing, making it a ripe market for a competitor.

I'd still love to see someone take a crack at it though. The LTO Consortium could use a shake-up, and the market for shelf-stable tape backup could do with some competition in general to depress prices a bit.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-20 04:13:09+00:00
AI is to SWEs what self-driving cars (or like features on new cars) are to taxi drivers. A neat thing that may make some basic things a little easier.

But it's the wrong perspective. Think instead what a self driving car is to someone who cannot drive. It doesn't matter if it sometimes disengages to have an operator step in or can only handle basic local trips. It's a total game changer. AI is unlocking computers for people who have never written a line of code in their life.
by erooke | 2025-04-20 04:14:59+00:00
> Also do I understand correctly that "face" means "maximal line segment"?

In the statement of Sperners lemma this seems to be how he means it. You have a triangle who's faces have been subdivided. The face he is referring to is the face before subdivision I think.

This lines up with the usual statement I'm familiar with for Sperners lemma which involves triangulating an n-simplex.