MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perihelions | 2025-05-14 17:06:34+00:00
It's the wrong question though! The US is sitting on piles of rare earth deposits—it still doesn't mine them. It can't compete on pure cost with the mining industry in China. It's discussed extensively (e.g. here[0]) that the mining, and particularly chemical processing of ores, is labor/resource-intensive, expensive, and hazardous to ecology and to humans. It has nothing to do with the raw availability—these are super abundant ores, not rare at all, despite the name.

Jack Lifton in [0] adds the perspective that rare earth processing involves a large amount of institutional knowledge, that would take time for the US to reacquire, since we forget everything when we stopped mining many decades ago. While in the interim, China has spent its time as the world's rare earth monopoly optimizing the chemical processes, widening their moat. It's like the manufacturing question, where's it about institutional knowledge and industrial ecosystems—nothing at all like oil/gas where it's solely about where the minerals are.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43953272
by robertlagrant | 2025-05-14 17:07:19+00:00
I can imagine it would cost a bit more, because corporation tax, and you probably can't afford to run a year where you lose $8.8bn[0].

Although I thought USPS had an enforced monopoly on US mail, so how did you do the comparison with private sector mail?

[0] https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2019/1114-...
by jsheard | 2025-05-14 17:08:00+00:00
I linked via xcancel to get around the login wall, and it seems clear enough to me? The OP posted a photo, someone else pinged Grok to ask where it is, and Grok went off on a tangent about SA farm attacks apropos of absolutely nothing.

IMO it's notable because it looks an awful lot like Elon Musk rigging xAI to aggressively push his own talking points, ineptly for now, but it'll only get harder to spot.
by solarkraft | 2025-05-14 17:08:12+00:00
Challenge-response with asymmetric encryption is pretty much perfect. I wish all auth worked like SSH.

Passkeys kind of take that concept, but make it suck. No backups. Terrible interoperability.

The other day I attempted to create one on my Mac with Firefox. The system passkey popup came up and made me scan a QR code with my iPhone that had to be connected to the internet. Bitwarden (my iOS passkey manager, that part works well) did open, but after selecting the profile to create the passkey in, it errored out. No passkey for me.
by quantumHazer | 2025-05-14 17:08:17+00:00
Cool, but don't get me wrong, isn't this essentially similar to Google's Co-Scientist, where multiple models are in a loop, passing context back and forth validating things? At its core, it's still a system of LLMs, which is impressive in execution but not fundamentally new.

LLMs are undoubtedly useful at tasks like code "optimisation" and detecting patterns or redundancies that humans might overlook, but this announcement feels like another polished, hypey blog post from Google.

What's also becoming increasingly confusing is their use of the "Alpha" branding. Originally, it was for breakthroughs like AlphaGo or AlphaFold, where there was a clear leap in performance and methodology. Now it's being applied to systems that, while sophisticated, don't really rise to the same level of impact.

edit: I missed the evaluator in my description, but an evaluation method is applied also in Co-Scientist:

"The AI co-scientist leverages test-time compute scaling to iteratively reason, evolve, and improve outputs. Key reasoning steps include self-play–based scientific debate for novel hypothesis generation, ranking tournaments for hypothesis comparison, and an "evolution" process for quality improvement."[0]

[0]: https://research.google/blog/accelerating-scientific-breakth...
by miladyincontrol | 2025-05-14 17:08:53+00:00
Few things are in absolutes. Yes most consumers wont have every screen hdr nor 4k, but most consumers use a modern smartphone and just about every modern smartphone from the past half decade or more has hdr of some level.

I absolutely loathe consuming content on a mobile screen, but its the reality is the vast majority are using phone and tablets most the time.
by Suppafly | 2025-05-14 17:08:58+00:00
>My opinion is that reading hard books at school simply turns people off reading completely.

The thing is, most of these books people are complaining about aren't actually 'hard books', especially when read at a chapter or two per week with a teacher guiding you through all the major themes. The goal isn't to teach kids that reading is fun, it's to teach them critical reading skills.

There is something to be said about reaching the students where they are, but we already dumb down things too much to allow the slower students to keep pace. They can learn about reading for fun in remedial reading classes.
by chneu | 2025-05-14 17:09:23+00:00
you p much repeated what i said. you want to be told how to use your phone. you'll use the apps that you're given to do the tasks they decide you can do on your phone. that's fine. that's why stock ios exists.

but the person i was replying to was acting like android doesn't work. They were trying to do things that their chosen walled-garden(apple/ios) prevents them from doing, then blaming anything but their walled-garden. they were showing clear bias.
by _verandaguy | 2025-05-14 17:09:55+00:00
> So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places? The technology has been available for a long time

This is ubiquitous in even small Canadian cities, like Thunder Bay and Sault, though it often comes through a partnership with the Transit app (which I have complex feelings about -- the ubiquity is nice, but having a publicly-funded option would be better, and I question whether Transit is doing anything underhanded with usage data; the app has a paid plan, but it's plenty usable without it).

I live in a bigger city (Toronto), and speaking from experience, locations tend to be accurate to within a minute or so on most routes, and the app does a good job of telling you about route changes due to maintenance or detours due to construction.

Pre-Transit, Ottawa -- a medium-sized city in its own right -- had a system where you'd text a service your bus stop number and it'd give you the next bus's estimated next pass at that stop; I know that early on, that just did a lookup of the static bus schedule, but I believe it eventually started using live location data (though by that time I was using early versions of Transit anyway).

The US has this problem where transit gets continuously underfunded and people then act surprised when it's sub par. Canadian transit needs a lot of love, but US transit's consistently been some of the worst I've ever had to use.
by the_gipsy | 2025-05-14 17:10:21+00:00
You can deconstruct those supposedly complete sets of plot types further, into just two atoms: rise and fall. The protagonist rises, then falls, but rises again (not necessarily to the same levels, but you get the idea). Or just falls and falls, but ultimately rises.

Meaningless, but so are those "7 types of story archs" taxonomies.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-05-14 17:10:25+00:00
It still looks like how they say where its way too bright and makes formerly “bright” whites appear even neutral grey surrounding the hdr content. Personally I find it extremely jarring when it is just a frame that is hdr within the overall screen. It is much nicer when the hdr content is full screen. Imo I wish I could just disable partial screen hdr and keep the full screen implementation because it is that distracting.
by mg | 2025-05-14 17:10:27+00:00
The article complains that most movies follow the same plot:

We meet the protagonist in their ordinary world, then an inciting incident changes everything, they are pulled into a new quest, meet someone who shows them a different way of being, they struggle with a powerful antagonist, and in the end the protagonist either triumphs or fails tragically.

HN to the rescue! What are some movies that do NOT follow this plot?
by have_orange | 2025-05-14 17:10:43+00:00
I'm working on releasing a product and I am trying to figure out between: self-hosted and SAAS model. My question is: I want to release it as self-hosted, but I think the risk of giving the customer the source code is too high... they can just release it as open-source or sell it at a lower price, so my business is dead? how do you do it? Is it worth trying to obfuscate code or compile it as a binary so they cannot access the code?

Also, with it being self-hosted, how are you chargin a monthly fee? If you are chargin for a monthly fee, can't the customer just remove the product licence validity check? e.g. they remove verification that they have purchased a licence?

Any insight highly appreciated.
by flobosg | 2025-05-14 17:11:08+00:00
> I honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process.

I can't recall if Bök gave details about his methodology, but my guess is that he brute-forced ciphers until he found a suitable one. And he’s quite good at constraint-based (Oulipo) poetry.

> I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?).

The designed protein (Protein 13) is not fluorescent. He’s expressing it as a Protein 13-mCherry[1] fusion construct.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCherry
by zamadatix | 2025-05-14 17:11:13+00:00
For TVs under ~80" I feel like you'd have to be sitting abnormally close to your TV for it to matter much. At the same time I think the cost difference between producing 1080p and 4k panels is so low it probably doesn't matter. Like you say, things like the backlight technology (or lack thereof) make a much bigger difference in perceived quality but that's also where the actual cost comes in.
by aabajian | 2025-05-14 17:11:14+00:00
From the paper, "Notably, for multiplying two 4 × 4 matrices, applying the algorithm of Strassen recursively results in an algorithm with 49 multiplications, which works over any field...AlphaEvolve is the first method to find an algorithm to multiply two 4 × 4 complex-valued matrices using 48 multiplications."

If you do naive matrix multiplication, you get a sense that you're doing similar work multiple times, but it's hard to quantify just what that duplicated work entails. Compare it to, for example, calculating the size of the union of two sets:

Total size = size(A) + size(B) - size(intersection(A, B))

You have to take out that extra intersection amount because you've counted it twice. What if you could avoid counting it twice in the first place? That's easy, you just iterate over each set once, keeping track of the elements you've already seen.

Strassen's algorithm keeps track of calculations that are needed later on. It's all reminiscent of dynamic programming.

What I find interesting is that it seems the extra savings requires complex values. There must be something going on in the complex plane that is again over-counting with the naive approach.
by Windchaser | 2025-05-14 17:12:03+00:00
Hey, sometimes people don't want advice. Sometimes they just want to kvetch.

Secondary: sometimes they've already been offered this advice.

I'm with you that there's a "rubber meets the road" place where you have to put in the work. But there should also be a place where we can offer sympathy and solutions, instead of only focusing on solutions.
by duxup | 2025-05-14 17:12:16+00:00
It's always interesting to me how easily corruption occurs. I always assume that accounting double checks things and so on, but I've seen so many business where someone just creates an account and money goes out and ... nobody notices for years.

I've even created automated invoices for some companies and realized that some data was missing for months. And yet they got paid significant amounts. I realized that the invoices could have been for just about anything and they would have gotten paid ...
by trealira | 2025-05-14 17:13:00+00:00
> I'm not saying zero, I'm just saying null.

What would happent to the primitive types of that language, then? When I said that, I was thinking of languages like Go and Java, both of which implicitly initialize integers to 0, booleans to false, floats to 0.0, and references to nil or null. That's what I'm calling less user-friendly than disallowing variables that aren't explicitly initialized before being used in all branches.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-14 17:13:31+00:00
Alternatively, they view government services as a bad thing when they are terrible, which they very often are because of the retreat from public investment that's been going on since the 80s; and when they view them as good, they also view them as temporary. Because they will be.

No efficient service will be allowed to survive long in the US, if anyone has any power to cut it. An efficient service is just one that temporarily lacks enough middlemen to increase costs, or enough red tape to reduce enrollment. If neither of these things happen, that means no one with any power has any personal interest in it, so it will be cut arbitrarily at some point in order to make a budget target.

The reason USPS has lasted so long (even in its degraded state) is just because it has lasted so long previously, and is deeply integrated into society. But there's been a bipartisan effort to privatize it and sell it off (to each other) for nearly a generation now. They've taken the steps of lowering its quality and level of service, barred it from entering lines of business that private companies have taken over, and played accounting games with it in order that people will depend on it less. This is not something "conservatives" did, but both Democratic and Republican Congresspeople have even dropped into deceit to try to make happen, and they publicly blame each other for the inexorable progress of dismantling USPS during each administration to distract extreme partisans.

Democrats talked a lot of trash about DeJoy before not firing him when they had the opportunity. It's like how they screamed about DeVos being horrible and out of touch, but Arne Duncan, the school privatizer-in-chief, got to play the "cool" white guy who plays basketball with the "cool" president with virtually identical policy positions.

Once people have stopped depending on the USPS because it is bad, they can give it the Royal Mail treatment that they've always wanted. Mail privatization in the UK was a massive success if you don't care about the mail. The people who got it made a lot of money. The mails there became so brutally expensive and unreliable that it probably affects exports and it still doesn't matter.

edit: sometimes I feel optimistic, though. There was a recent announcement that while hiring for a new person to run public transportation in Chicago, the city has decided that, this time, they will look for somebody with experience in transportation. This is unusual because the job is usually filled by political patronage, by someone with no experience.
by jFriedensreich | 2025-05-14 17:13:44+00:00
I think this is made for an audience who find it obvious. "Why would you do it any other way" would be more interesting: There is a weird divide between git supported features on one hand and pull requests/ merge requests/ patch lists/ issues/ bug trackers etc. If everything was supported in git all these features would be interoperable between forges like github, bitbucket and gitea, forgejo.

Not only interoperability but backups, tooling, distributed workflows and everything in between would work consistently and the same way.

That said, I cannot count the times this concept was brought up and tried to make work but despite how much i love the idea in theory, i have yet to see a way it could work in practice.

Some of the issues: - no universal agreement on exact schema, feature set and workflows, do the competing implementations break each other? if its not interoperable why even bother vs just using an external solution

- how to handle issues not associated to one specific repo or to multiple repos, splitting repos etc.

- how to not confuse devs seeing issue branches or wherever the actual data is stored in the repo

- how to best make this usable to non devs

The list goes on
by klik99 | 2025-05-14 17:13:54+00:00
I just learned about kishōtenketsu thanks to this great video on How To with John Wilson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-SwyF-Vvbs). I'm surprised that it's not as well known in the west, considering how many great directors use it.

Ozu is my favorite director, and learning about the 4-act structure helped me understand why - I always hated the third act of most movies, when character motivations go out the window in the interest of a big explosive ending. There is a lot of potential in kishōtenketsu structure to tell stories that are more realistic and introspective and don't require the kind of antagonistic conflict of 3-act structure.
by legitster | 2025-05-14 17:14:00+00:00
I don't think the real primary concern was prices - no one was actually going to buy the $3000 iPhone. The primary concern was ultimately "decontenting" America - fewer products on shelves. As if it would matter at this point, actual tariffed inventory was just about to start hitting shelves when the tariffs were paused.

The real metric to watch would be consumer spending and purchasing power. Heck, there's a risk of deflation as the economy scales back and consumers hold onto money waiting out the tariffs.
by gamblor956 | 2025-05-14 17:14:03+00:00
Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).

This is all wrong. At any given moment, the average bus will replace at least a dozen cars, so a bus "blocking a right turn" for a few seconds is significantly less of an obstacle than a dozen or more cars in that lane.

Buses make slow left turns, yes. But not much slower than normal cars, and it's far more likely that you'll miss a left turn due to a normal driver staring at Instagram on their phone instead of watching for the green turn signal.

Buses do not take up more than their lane in the U.S. Also, buses and bus stops were around before bike lanes, which (being generous) serve 1/100,000th as many people.

One diesel-powered bus still pollutes less than the vehicles it replaces.

And finally, Chariot wasn't outlawed. It just couldn't compete on the basis of real-world economics even though it was charging a multiple of what Muni charged for the same routes. To put it bluntly: the private company so inefficient that it couldn't make the numbers work even charging 5x what the public agency was charging. (SF did suspend Chariot for a weekin 2017 because Chariot was found to have been employing drivers without licenses.)
by incomingpain | 2025-05-14 17:14:11+00:00
Humans dont like change.

https://www.jalopnik.com/every-car-looks-like-this-thanks-to...

Everyone hates the cybertruck because its different than the generic white ecobox.

https://www.phonearena.com/news/Why-do-all-smartphones-look-...

What happened to flip phones and physical keyboards?

Can you go into a mall anywhere in the world and go buy a starbucks before you go to H&M? Doesnt even matter if you go to H&M or zara because its all the same clothing.

Getting back to film and tv context. The skill of the author is what lets the change or difference come through. Goerge RR Martin had a different take and did well. How did he do it? Game of thrones is empathy. Empathy lets you escape the narrative prison. Show the trauma of the villian to make them a victim.

The Fairphone still looks like a generic smartphone but they sell it via empathy of ethical, sustainable, and repairable parts.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-05-14 17:14:26+00:00
Not a movie but most motorsports do not follow the monomyth. The cars or trucks or tractors compete, but none of them are designated protagonist. The progression is usually from slower and cheaper vehicles to more expensive and faster ones, to build excitement for the audience.

The adventure of the individual vehicle is that it prepares for the races, it practices, it tunes, then it competes, and then it either wins or loses. And then, budget permitting, it prepares for the next race.
by brendoncarroll | 2025-05-14 17:14:39+00:00
The serialization format solves a similar problem to Protocol Buffers or JSON. If you haven't heard of either of those, then Mycelium might not solve a problem that you care about. Just after your quote the README mentions things like Products and Lists which both Protocol Buffers and JSON have support for in the form of Messages/Repeated and Objects/Lists respectively.

Mycelium has some interesting design choices compared to JSON and Protocol Buffers. Everything is built up from Bits, there is a Bit type which contains the values 0 and 1. Bytes are `Array[Bit, 8]` and Strings are `List[Byte]`. A 32 bit integer would be `Array[Bit, 32]`. There are also Sum (Coproduct) types, and cryptographic pointer types (called Refs in Mycelium).

Mycelium can be used to solve the same problems as those technologies. That's sort of table stakes for a serialization format. Mycelium additionally tackles the problem of sending procedures (called Lambdas in Mycelium) over the wire as well. That is a fairly simple feature to explain (get my procedure from here to there, it works with strings why not functions?), but it implies a significant amount of technology including a machine code specification and abstract machine model to execute it.

As for practical applications. Mycelium is suitable to be used as:

- A serialization format for storage and transfer.

- A VM with well controlled access to external resources for applications to run untrusted code.

- The VM can be a compiler target for programming languages. (Spore https://github.com/mycweb/mycelium/tree/master/spore is one such language)

- A format for data structures which need to be cryptographically signed. All Mycelium data structures are Merkle Trees.

- Large data structures which need to be efficiently synced. All Mycelium Values can be synced efficiently by traversing the cryptographic pointers and skipping values which are already available locally.
by ummonk | 2025-05-14 17:14:41+00:00
There were two more revisions (Ada 2005 and Ada 2012) with substantial additions, but I'd say the biggest jump was from Ada83 to Ada95.

Tucker Taft has been the lead architect for all post-83 versions of Ada, so there's some consistency in the direction of additions.

If Ada83 is analogous to C, Ada95 would be analogous to C++, with subsequent versions of Ada being analogous to subsequent versions of C++.

I'd personally argue that the situation we're in today, with one company (AdaCore) being responsible for the only open source Ada compiler out there, is due in large part to the large increase in complexity of the Ada language (the Ada83 reference manual was 348 pages while the Ada 2012 reference manual is 951 pages).