MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-17 19:01:17+00:00
> The conservation of baryon number is not consistent with the physics of black hole evaporation via Hawking radiation.

There are other black hole models that can conserve these quantum numbers!

Speaking of things that are so obviously true that you must be an idiot not to agree, there are statements so obviously false that you have to be an idiot to agree: People keep repeating the nonsense put out by Penrose, which require non-physical timelike infinities to work.

The current "pop science" (nearly science fiction) statement is that it is possible to fall into a black hole and there is "nothing special" about the event horizon.

Quite often, just one paragraph over, the statement is then made that an external observer will never observe the victim falling in.

The two observers can't disagree on such matters!

To say otherwise means that you'd have to believe that the Universe splits (when!?) such that there are two observers so that they can disagree. Or stop believing in logic, consistency, observers, and everything we hold dear as physicists.

This is all patent nonsense by the same person that keeps insisting that brains are "quantum" despite being 309K and organic.

If the external observer doesn't observe the victim falling in, then the victim never falls in, full stop. That's the objective reality.

Penrose diagrams say otherwise because they include the time at infinity, which is non-physical.

Even if the time at infinity was "reachable", which isn't even mathematically sound, let alone physically, Hawking radiation is a thing, so it doesn't matter anyway: Black holes have finite lifetimes!

There is only one logically consistent and physically sound interpretation of black holes: nothing can ever fall in. Inbound victims slow down relative to the outside, which means that from their perspective as they approach the black hole they see its flow of time "speed up". Hence, they also see its Hawking evaporation speed up. To maintain consistency with outside observers, this evaporation must occur fast enough that the victim can never reach any surface. Instead, the black hole recedes from them, evaporating faster and faster.

This model (and similar ones), can preserve all quantum numbers, because there is no firewall, no boundary, nothing to "reset" quantum fields. Everything is continuous, consistent, and quantum numbers are preserved. Outside observers see exactly what we currently expect, black holes look and work the same, they evaporate, etc...
by oellegaard | 2025-05-17 19:01:28+00:00
I’m not saying VS Code is trash but I think it’s closer to a text editor than an IDE. I even use it for some things non python but I remain curious to the fact why people use it for python.

It might not be tied to VS Code but the title clearly says “New […] IDE experience for…” which is why I commented. I had hoped to see something for PyCharm or even a new IDE.
by kabiroberai | 2025-05-17 19:04:07+00:00
I looked into streaming but afaict the XIP format doesn’t support random access the same way that ZIP does. specifically because 1) it doesn’t seem to have a Central Directory like ZIP and 2) it has an optimization where files can be hardlinks to other files (by ID) in the XIP, so if you want to extract a file but all you get is a hardlink ID, you can’t expand the contents until you encounter and expand the hardlink pointee. it’s possible I’ve missed something, open to ideas for sure.
by permo-w | 2025-05-17 19:05:29+00:00
I think if you knew me you would know that I am the absolute last person who wants to privatise the BBC. the privatisation of the BBC would be the end of my world. I think the public ownership of the BBC, and the BBC in general is the greatest cultural achievement of modern Britain.

I just think that instead of making it so that people can fuck up and not pay by accident or by laziness, it would be better if there was no way for that to happen. it has nothing to do with public vs private ownership
by gnramires | 2025-05-17 19:05:41+00:00
It's an interesting idea, I've never tried it. It could also be a simple VM running a given OS (with reduced need for hardware support), or an application running interpreted code with the environment UI.

Generally the idea is to expand UX in more interesting/fun directions without incurring significant hurdles associated with an OS (where everything needs to run reliably and be secure).

I've found this quite interesting related discussion: "Classical "Single user computers" were a flawed or at least limited idea" https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/SingleUserComp... (discussion on lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/s/plkdy5/classical_single_user_computers_w...)
by LooseMarmoset | 2025-05-17 19:06:49+00:00
As a knife-maker, may I request 80CRV, 1084, and 1075? They're very commonly-used steel grades in knives.

Also, 440 has a number of grades.

Cool tool!

EDIT: It might also be interesting to point out the manganese levels, and whether the steel is a deep- or shallow-hardening steel. Those factors help indicate whether the steel will form a hamon or not.
by anthk | 2025-05-17 19:07:06+00:00
With the PS2 you are right. With the PSX... so-so. Yes, it could match maybe a Pentium 90 almost 100, but a MMX pentium with 3DFX would stomp it and be on par of the N64 if not better.

MIPS CPU's are amazing, they can do wonders at low cicles. Just look at the PSP, or the SGI Irix.

Also, the PS2 "GPU" is not the same as the R4k CPU. BTW, on the PS2... the Deus Ex port sucked balls against the PC port, it couldn't fully handle the Unreal engine.

Yes, the PS2 did crazy FX, but with really small levels for the mentioned port; bear in mind DX was almost 'open word' for a huge chunk of the game.
by Balgair | 2025-05-17 19:08:20+00:00
Yeah, I mention this in some other comments that got greyed out.

Basically, the real deal technology here is the lipid bubbles that deliver the payloads to the right cells, not the base modification. You can go look at them, and a lot of other comments in this thread for more info on that tech.

TLDR: No way that anyone can bypass anything. These lipid bubbles are a miracle that they work at all; they're so unstable, it boggles the mind we can even use them to begin with. Doing any large scale DNA editing on an unsuspecting population would be so insanely expensive and difficult, I certain moving to the Moon would be cheaper.
by mullingitover | 2025-05-17 19:10:56+00:00
(Nitpick: Bond revenues don't pay Social Security, Social Security pays Social Security. Bonds are actually bought with Social Security revenues.)

The rest of these investments in the citizenry do pay dividends. Not every investment is a simple matter of buying something which spits out money immediately. Spending on health and education is a long-term investment which returns higher tax revenues. Paying for national defense and caring for veterans is simply paying ourselves, that money continues circulating and yielding tax revenues. Even debt interest is paying ourselves! Most of the debt is internal, which just circulates the money around in the economy. Only something like 20% of debt is foreign owned, and that revenue still often comes back to us in to form of rolled-over bond purchases and trade.

In closing, the national debt is only a problem when we stop circulating currency. We can make the debt a huge problem by suddenly slashing productive investments in the deluded belief that we're a poor family which has racked up a big credit card bill.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-05-17 19:11:33+00:00
>> brew, distrobox, flatpak

> You can have that stuff on Nix if you need it.

In fact, I'd openly recommend such a solution: NixOS base, most applications via flatpak, and dev work in distrobox. Gives you 80% of the benefits for 20% of the work.

(Although I will also happily agree that Fedora's Silverblue or OpenSUSE MicroOS as the base is also pretty good; I think that's just a trade if you need to actually tweak the base layer)
by refulgentis | 2025-05-17 19:12:41+00:00
The WCAG luminance formula (relative luminance in color science terms) has perceptual mid gray at 0.18, not 0.5.

re: just change APCA contrast target, that's separate from the Not Even Wrong stuff in the article. I didn't mean to imply APCA is wrong to say you need less contrast, but rather, that the article is wrong to conclude white has more contrast.
by deontology | 2025-05-17 19:13:13+00:00
Added a bit more:

"The research demonstrates something interesting about language models' ability to simulate search behavior in controlled conditions. But claiming equivalence to a "real search engine" is like saying you've built a military defense system because your soldiers performed well in peacetime maneuvers. The real test isn't whether it works when nobody's trying to break it—it's whether it works when half the internet is trying to game it for profit. To illustrate, imagine a small corpus with two documents: Mr. Fox is great. Mr. Fox is not great. If the search term is "Mr. Fox," then, from the perspective of semantic relevance, the two documents are equal. Instead, to build a more useful ranking, you need some signal of consumer demand, which would include biases toward Mr. Fox (and perceptions of trustworthiness) that presumably affect consumer utility. Now, imagine I use GenAI to flood the Internet with 100,000 pages praising Mr. Fox. These aren't crude spam pages—they're well-written articles with proper grammar, coherent arguments, and seemingly legitimate citations. Each page offers minor variations on the same theme: "Mr. Fox is innovative," "Mr. Fox shows exceptional leadership," "Studies confirm Mr. Fox's approach is effective." From a pure information retrieval perspective, a language model examining this corpus would find overwhelming "evidence" that Mr. Fox is great. LLMs have no built-in mechanism to recognize that these pages are 'artificial' unless we model signals like "All 100,000 pages appeared within the same week", "None have meaningful engagement from real users", etc."

And now, we can give context w/ 'solve for the equilibrium'
by refulgentis | 2025-05-17 19:14:07+00:00
Voters, I'd be very happy for feedback, I'm quite surprised it is -3.

EDIT:

I get it, it is easily read as "the entire article is wrong" instead of "the article is wrong on these points"

You're free to elaborate on your concerns. We could raise this to a conversation, I think that'll feel better for both of us than me taking that remark about me personally.

For example, I agree that the primary container color shouldn't have been L* 90 and used for buttons, and they shouldnt have severely limited chroma. In fact, I left over it and the dysfunction between VPs wondering why we didn't have it day 1, approving fixes repeatedly, and Android dysfunction that kept the conversation at "What? Didn't hear nothing from nobody in engineering! Anyways, lock screen clocks!"
by anywhichway | 2025-05-17 19:14:45+00:00
> You then have to hunt around for the info

Have you considered that that might be the goal of releasing trickles of information about the film prior to its official release? It makes collected information feel more exclusive to super fans and encourages fans to interact with each other on social media providing fuel for Bjork focused communities. If collecting this information feels exhausting instead of exciting to you... why are you trying so hard to collect it? Just wait for the actual release.

> We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.

I don't understand how you expect a critic to tell you whether its worth your time based on a collection of pre-release rumors and interviews. For deciding if its worth my time, I mainly want to hear from critics who have seen the upcoming media and I want to hear their opinion on what they saw. Why would I care to hear Ebert and Roeper's opinion on what the actors said in their press release tour? Unless it was something especially newsworthy and they wouldn't need to go digging for that. I just don't see how a critic's review would be enhanced by "devoting their lives to browsing through the piles".
by kazinator | 2025-05-17 19:15:17+00:00
> If there’s an if condition inside a function, consider if it could be moved to the caller instead

This idle conjecture is too rife with counterexamples.

- If the function is called from 37 places, should they all repeat the if statement?

- What if the function is getaddrinfo, or EnterCriticalSection; do we push an if out to the users of the API?

I think that we can only think about this transformation for internal functions which are called from at most two places, and only if the decision is out of their scope of concern.

Another idea is to make the function perform only the if statement, which calls two other helper functions.

If the caller needs to write a loop where the decision is to be hoisted out of the loop, the caller can use the lower-level "decoded-condition helpers". Callers which would only have a single if, not in or around a loop, can use the convenience function which hides the if. But we have to keep in mind that we are doing this for optimization. Optimization often conflicts with good program organization! Maybe it is not good design for the caller to know about the condition; we only opened it up so that we could hoist the condition outside of the caller's loop.

These dilemmas show up in OOP, where the "if" decision that is in the callee is the method dispatch: selecting which method is called.

Techniques to get method dispatch out of loops can also go against the grain of the design. There are some patterns for it.

E.g. wouldn't want to fill a canvas object with a raster image by looping over the image and calling canvas.putpixel(x, y, color). We'd have some method for blitting an image into a canvas (or a rectangular region thereof).
by ryandrake | 2025-05-17 19:16:27+00:00
I don't think there's a lack of skepticism on HN of all places. Every article that gets posted that discusses even a mild scientific result brings at least one HN commenter out of the woodwork to dunk on it. You can bank on it--there is always That Guy who has to argue against it, whether he's right or not.

Also, the comment you reference was probably downvoted because of the tone, not because of some HN bias against naysayers. Starting out your comment with "It's nonsense." is about as conducive to a productive conversation as starting it out with "You're wrong."
by multjoy | 2025-05-17 19:18:05+00:00
No it doesn't. It makes them average. It regresses as far as it can to the mean because that's what it does.

It has no creativity, it cannot think. It has no idea what is right, only that it can make your input look like the corpus of data that it has been trained on.

If you think that's better, then that's your look out.
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-17 19:18:21+00:00
> "To maintain consistency with outside observers, this evaporation must occur fast enough that the victim can never reach any surface. Instead, the black hole recedes from them, evaporating faster and faster."

If this is radiating a star's mass worth Hawking radiation particles, is it like the Solar Wind, and if it's happening ever faster is there a point where it would start pushing the victim away from the black hole again? (the 'victim' can be a solar sail if that helps)
by zyntraxis | 2025-05-17 19:18:24+00:00
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by jofer | 2025-05-17 19:18:43+00:00
We received a two knife set as a wedding gift many years ago. This was well before they were common, and it was quite a nice gift. I strongly agree with the "don't buy a knife you can't sharpen" point that folks often make, but ceramic knives do have their niche.

They're great for minimizing oxidation along cuts. E.g. cutting iceberg lettuce and avoiding having the edges turn brown. They're also very lightweight, which is nice for some things, while being bad for others. I'd never use them the way I do my workhorse chef's knife, but there are certainly tasks I prefer them for. Dicing lots of hot peppers comes to mind, oddly enough, as does some very precise and relatively tedious knifework like making very even matchstick cuts for carrots/radishes/etc (the large one has a very wide blade, which is great for this, and is lightweight enough to reduce fatigue).

Overall, I can see why folks like them. It's not really the "no need to sharpen" point. It's more the "lightweight and very thin" part, along with a non-oxidizing edge.

I'm still kind of opposed on principle, I suppose, but I do use the set we were gifted fairly often, despite having some very nice steel cutlery that I'm very fond of. I can't blame anyone for buying them now that they're priced more reasonably than they used to be.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-17 19:19:02+00:00
Using percentages is illegitimate. It's frog boiling.

Governments lean on large providers like Microsoft to not implement strong technological privacy protections because they want to invade everyone's privacy, and those companies go along because they want to get government contracts or curry favor with government regulators, or because they want to invade your privacy themselves.

Then anyone privacy-conscious abandons them before any abuses are revealed because they've seen this movie before and know what's coming next. But that includes criminal organizations, so now for a transient period of time the competing services that still protect privacy have a disproportionate number of criminals. This is then used as an excuse to shut them down or force them to stop protecting anyone's privacy.

That's when the real abuses start, because the privacy-protecting services have been suppressed as "only used by criminals" and once the general public has lost the ability to switch, there is no longer competitive pressure on the incumbents to not betray their now-captive user base.

You can try to prevent this by getting people to switch to the privacy-protecting services ahead of time, but that doesn't mean it's reasonable to accept the consent-manufacturing tactic as legitimate either.
by montebicyclelo | 2025-05-17 19:19:58+00:00
Hmm, just my intuition: training this model was very sensitive to the initial seed and training hyperparameters. It struggles to actually get to the 3x3 conv solution; but once it gets close to that things move much more quickly. This can kind of be seen in the animation of the attention matrix over time, which starts off random / spread out, but then once it starts to get more parts of the attention matrix in place it moves quicker. (Assuming all the experimentation wasn't in some bad part of the hyperparameter space.)

Also, it may just be the nature of the task. Some tasks you might have more to learn, all the time, with each training sample potentially giving information that's different from all the others. But with this, once it gets close to the solution of Life, it's quick.
by RHSeeger | 2025-05-17 19:20:29+00:00
It's not necessarily discriminatory just because it winds up impacting one group more than another.

For example, if you have 2 groups of people and one of the groups is doing something wrong twice as much, and you enforce the law on everyone... it's fair, not discriminatory. (Ignoring the fact that what is labelled "wrong" can be done in such a way as to be discriminatory. I'm assuming a neutral view of what is wrong )
by amluto | 2025-05-17 19:20:50+00:00
> The two observers can't disagree on such matters!

Why not?

If a spaceship fell toward a black hole and, as it approached the event horizon, one observer saw it turn into a horse and the other saw it turn into a cat, that would be very strange indeed, and one would suspect at least one of the observers of being wrong.

But if one observer sees it fall through the event horizon and the other observer waits… and waits… and gets bored and starts doing some math and determines that they could spend literally forever and never actually observe the spacecraft falling through the event horizon, then what’s the inconsistency? You might say “well, the first observer could fire up their communication laser and tell the second observer that ‘yes, the spaceship fell in at such-and-such time’, and the second observer would now have an inconsistent view of the state of the universe”, but this isn’t actually correct: the first observer’s message will never reach the second observer!
by westurner | 2025-05-17 19:22:16+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43067347 :

> Still hoping for SR-IOV in retail GPUs.

> Not sure about vCPU functionality in GPUs

> Process isolation on vCPUs with or without SR-IOV is probably not as advanced as secure enclave approaches

[Which just fell to post-spectre side channels]

>> Is there sufficient process isolation in GPUs?

/? Sr-iov iommu: https://www.google.com/search?q=sr-iov+iommu

Is there branch prediction in GPUs? What about other side channels between insufficiently-isolated GPU processes?

I see that vgpu_unlock no longer works for technical reasons.
by RHSeeger | 2025-05-17 19:22:51+00:00
I love meetings that are get togethers to share ideas. Certainly not enough to impact other timelines; but getting together with a broader team of people to discuss what everyone has been dealing with is very valuable. Sometimes you wind up with an action task (like to create documentation on something that multiple people have had issues with), but oftentimes you don't.

I like to say that part of becoming a good software developer is experience. And hearing about other people's experiences helps with that; experience by proxy. It's also why I read (and write) blog posts where people working through issues. Because seeing how the person found, analyzed, and solved the issue can make _me_ a better developer.