MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iamthemonster | 2025-05-05 02:42:31+00:00
Check out Tod's Workshop youtube channel. It's only entertainment, but he has a far more realistic overall testing of arrows' armour-piercing capability.

A lot of the tests are firing perpendicularly at plate armour that's held in front of a hard surface with no gambeson underneath. When you take account of arrows often arriving at a slight angle, and humans are a movable pile of meat covered in thick cloth with plate on top, then the ability to penetrate deep enough to cause a significant wound is reduced.

Never eliminated though!

But if arrows really did pierce plate armour, and I was a knight in a battle then I'd just get myself a 6 foot tall 3 foot wide, heavy wooden shield and hide behind it until I got to close quarters. But the fact is people didn't bother doing this because they found a less cumbersome shield more effective, and that suggests that rich plate-armour-clad knights weren't dying left right and centre from arrow fire.
by emmelaich | 2025-05-05 02:43:51+00:00
A UNSW press release: https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/05/mathematician-...

> A UNSW mathematician has discovered a new method to tackle algebra’s oldest challenge – solving higher polynomial equations.

See also author's blog https://njwildberger.com/ and youtube channel Insights into Mathematics https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXl0Zbk8_rvjyLwAR-Xh9pQ
by planck_tonne | 2025-05-05 02:44:01+00:00
Another funny story is Nokia. They started as a paper company or something like that. Wikipedia page has a photo of Nokia-brand toilet paper rolls.

Overall, this kind of business shift is not rare. It's good to be reminded from time to time though, that businesses change over time. Same goes for other institutions (say, universities, countries...). Puts things in perspective.

I am honestly shocked about the gaming industry size thing though. No joke, are videogames more influential in pop culture than film and music now? I really have a hard time picturing that. But when I was growing up, being a nerd would get you bullied. How does it work now?

Finally, regarding the downfall of legacy media: it's very simple, the way I see it. Back then, you only had two sets of conversations: (1) the people you personally knew, and (2) the one in the legacy media. So the legacy media had a huge power over the official narrative. People always trusted (1) more, but it was very limited in scope. With the rise of the Internet, discussion forums such as this one, (1) started to include conversations with people all over the world, so people ditched (2) in favor of that. As that got to big, we started to get astroturfing etc... that's where we are now.

Cool article.
by AIPedant | 2025-05-05 02:44:46+00:00
Dogs can pass a dog-appropriate variant of this test: https://xcancel.com/SpencerKSchiff/status/191010636820533676... (the dog test uses a treat on one string and junk on the other, they have to pull the correct string to get the treat)

This was before o3, but another tweet I saw (don't have the link) suggests it's also completely incapable of getting it.
by esafak | 2025-05-05 02:46:26+00:00
I agree, and I would add that experience helps with not having to spend all your energy on taking the picture. I know intuitively now where to stand, when to take the picture, how to frame it.

I did lug my DSLR into the delivery room, I got decent pictures without asking the medics to move, and I was present in the moment too. If anything, I wish someone took pictures of me that fine day.

My biggest challenge is making sure I don't lose it all due to corruption (local) or a shuttered service (cloud).
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-05 02:48:48+00:00
My son and I went to Rome, and the ridiculous behaviors from people getting their must have shots is ridiculous.

My favorite shots are selfies… one with the two of us on the tarmac in front of the plane on arrival, the other on a random street.

I lost my wife to cancer, and regret that pre-kid, we took very few pictures relatively speaking, and I cherish the ones I have.
by Jensson | 2025-05-05 02:48:48+00:00
> I think there is a suggestion of a historical transmission from the late Classic era to the early modern era and it was possibly archery. Not to mention crossbows.

The most obvious reason they practiced volley firing for muskets is the large amount of smoke they produce, once one person shoots the rest can't see where they would fire so you want everyone firing at once so they don't block each other.

So there is no reason to believe the practice evolved from anywhere, they is no world where they didn't volley fire with muskets that produce a lot of smoke since its the obvious thing to do.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-05 02:49:28+00:00
You should be able to vouch that comment (click on it to do so, it'll be in the post-action links at top of comment).

You can also email a vouch to HN's mods at hn@ycombinator.com. They can remove flags directly, though the email lag response seems to be increasing (give it 24--48 hours), which makes direct vouches all the more valuable.
by tcmart14 | 2025-05-05 02:49:41+00:00
I used to work for a guy who had his engineering degree from Harvard. I was out of the Navy, got a job but also had a GI bill and was looking to go to school for engineering while working full time. I asked him his advise. Pretty much he said is to go to a state school. The only real benefit, at least for engineering from Ivy League, is the network, which can make getting the first job easier. Otherwise the course work is the pretty much the same.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-05 02:50:09+00:00
Part of the problem with chatbots (similarly with social media and mobile phone gambling) is that dosage is pretty much uncontrolled. There is a truly endless stream of chatbot "conversation," social media ragebait, or thing to bet on, 24/7.

Then add that you can hide this stuff even from people you live with (your parents or spouse) for plenty long for it to become a very severe problem.

"The dosage makes the poison" does not imply all substances are equally poisonous.
by wenc | 2025-05-05 02:50:28+00:00
Typically small data is batched. While theoretically you could, I wouldn't create 1 file per row (there would be too many files and your filesystem would struggle). But maybe you can batch 1 day's worth of data (or whatever partitioning works for your data) and write to 1 parquet file?

For example, my data is usually batched by yearwk (year + week no), so my directory structure looks like this:

/data/yearwk=202501/000.parquet /data/yearwk=202502/000.parquet

This is also called the Hive directory structure. When I query, I just do:

select * from '/data/**/*.parquet';

This is a paradigm shift from standard database thinking for handling truly big data. It's append-only by file.

500GB in CSVs doesn't sound that big though. I'm guessing when you convert to Parquet (a 1-liner in DuckDB, below) it might end up being 50GBs or so.

COPY (FROM '/data/*.csv') TO 'my.parquet' (FORMAT PARQUET);
by godelski | 2025-05-05 02:50:29+00:00
I think you missed the parent's point. Maybe consider this:

Why don't employers recognize the credentials of a MOOC to the same degree that they would a university degree?

We could similarly ask why employers value the degrees of some universities more than others.

I think it's important to realize that ultimately the decisions come from the employers, not the universities. No one is making the employers do anything. But at least the second question might have a clearer partial answer. In part, there is a selection of a tribe, an implicit "culture fit" that's happening. It isn't uncommon to see employer bias towards specific universities. This is especially true with prestigious universities.

But it's not the universities that are making anyone do anything and that's an important distinction.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-05 02:51:41+00:00
> I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection.

It very much depends on the historical context. Your average conscripted peasant during the middle ages would be arriving as part of their lord’s retinue. If they broke rank or ran away from battle, everyone including their parents, siblings, neighbors, and potential lovers would hear about it back home (and never let them live it down). Most conscripts at that time fought alongside their fellow villagers and farmers, not random professional soldiers. They maintained unit cohesion through social pressure rather than training and drills.
by colechristensen | 2025-05-05 02:54:59+00:00
The hawking radiation of a 9x earth mass is somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.01 K where the cosmic background is 2.7 K. It would appear to be a very tiny very cold ball.

The break even point for hawking radiation vs the cosmic background is about the mass of the moon.

I'm not going to do much more searching or calculation but I would be willing to bet a black hole small enough to emit xrays would have a remaining lifespan measured in nanoseconds at most.

A black hole bright enough to see its hawking radiation has to be tiny and would be quite short lived with an origin of unknown mechanism.
by haarolean | 2025-05-05 02:55:58+00:00
> you might get dangerous X-ray and gamma ray emissions from its accretion disc

There’s not enough matter nearby to feed it enough to form an accretion disc

> we could send probes to orbit it

Hitting a cm-sized black hole orbit at a lunar distance sounds insanely hard, given it’s invisible (even with occasional lensing).
by nikisweeting | 2025-05-05 02:58:23+00:00
You're not going to hit your bump stops until you max out the travel, which a 4in speed bump is likely not doing unless you're in a fairly low car.

> The faster you go, the higher the forces.

The higher the forces into the dampers, yes, but the whole point is that if you're in the right section of the damping curve they spread it out and turn most of it into heat. With well tuned suspension that means lower peak force on the rest of the car, which means less rattling of every single part other than the unsprung bits.

> If the speed bump is tall enough

Those are a rare exception on pubic roads. All the points you make are about pushing your car beyond max travel, which obviously will start to break things. I'm talking only about bumps below your max travel, which I argue you can hit at significant speed with minimal wear to anything sprung.

> This is a case of knowing just enough about a topic to be dangerous.

I mean I do race off road competitively so I've had plenty of experience testing these assumptions and witnessing real-world wear on my components as a result. If you ride washerboards all day in high heat you'll see plenty of blown shock seals, but with well tuned suspension a single speed bump at 30mph wont harm a thing on the average car. It just makes a "thud" that sounds like damage to people, and I guess that's a good deterrent.
by coreyp_1 | 2025-05-05 02:58:30+00:00
Wow. This sounds to me like someone saying,"Don't make flashcards to learn a language, just remember the words!"

Flashcards help. They aren't a substitute for learning the language, but flashcards definitely help.

Pictures help me remember many, many things!

There were quite a few odd things said in this article, and they all seem, for the most part, like a Ted talk: a lot of flash, but very little substance, especially when reality has to be taken into account.
by EdwinFeinberg | 2025-05-05 02:59:24+00:00
Hey guys i’ve been building a spiritual AI that lets you talk to a Rabbi, Pastor, Imam, or Monk (more to come). Not to debate religion, but to offer calm, wise, and nonjudgmental perspectives when you're searching for meaning, struggling, or just curious. Like many people in our generation, I’ve felt both drawn to and disconnected from religion. I built this because I wanted a way to reconnect with the wisdom religion offers without the dogma. I wanted to be able to ask deep, hard questions and get responses that feel thoughtful, grounded, and diverse. There is no account needed, no preaching; just a way to have a conversation with the best of what these traditions offer. Looking forward to your thoughts and critiques!
by kjellsbells | 2025-05-05 03:00:44+00:00
If I look at this painting on my phone, what I'm experiencing is radically different to the patron of 1500-whatever looking at the altarpiece. My experience is physically different, for a start, and perhaps more insidiously, other people, in control of my experience, can change my emotional response to it (see "Kuleshov effect"). Imagine seeing the image preceded by some doom scrolling on your phone concerning religious sectarian atrocities, say, vs it being preceded by a story about nuns helping children. You are not engaging with the work, you are engaging with an image of the work. And that image has been edited, curated, and positioned by someone for you.

One might also note that even seeing an artwork like this in the modern public galleries that we have is quite odd. Altarpieces invite repeated contemplation by the worshippers in a church, over a long time. Maybe you grow up liking the look of baby jesus but as an adult start to notice and think that Mary is smiling down on you in your troubles. In a gallery, you shuffle along in a sea of people, and get a few seconds to look at the piece before your attention is captured by another piece in the same room.
by nkurz | 2025-05-05 03:02:21+00:00
Yup, and incredibly they are able to do this on standard RAM by "intentionally violating the timing parameters":

Processing-Using-DRAM (PUD) leverages the inherent analog operational characteristics of DRAM to enable highly parallel bit-serial computations directly within memory arrays. Prior research has demonstrated that commercial off-the-shelf DRAM can achieve PUD functionality without hardware modifications by intentionally violating the timing parameters.

These studies have established two fundamental PUD operations: RowCopy and majority-of-X (MAJX) (Fig. 1). The RowCopy operation facilitates data movement between different rows within a subarray by issuing a PRE command followed immediately by an ACT command before bitline precharging completes, enabling data transfer through the bitlines. This operation affects all cells along a row simultaneously, making it approximately 100 times faster than processor-mediated data movement. The MAJX operation performs a majority vote among X cells sharing the same bitline that are activated simultaneously, implemented in commercial DRAM by issuing ACT, PRE, and ACT commands in rapid succession without delays. This allows concurrent activation of 2∼32 rows. MAJX enables bit-serial computations that leverage the parallelism of subarrays with 65,536 columns, serving as the fundamental computational unit for PUD.
by drpixie | 2025-05-05 03:04:20+00:00
I'd rather travel with you, than those who insist on always carrying a camera.

Everyone sees and feels the world quite differently without a camera. With one, part of you is preoccupied and looking for images, not with being in the place and feeling the experience.

I might loose out in the pictures-of-my-trip competition, and in the I've-"done"-that-place conversation. But I don't want to be the person who "did" somewhere. I want to be the person who got to know it a bit, who lived it, who met the locals, and who remembers the place and the feelings.
by hinkley | 2025-05-05 03:04:34+00:00
YouTube suggested an old NileRed video to me today. He bought 100 lbs of titanium shot for a project. It came in a bag in a metal can.

The first two times he lifted the bag he said this isn’t that heavy, maybe he got defrauded, so he got a scale and checked. But by the time he tried to lift it off the scale he was struggling, and getting it back into the metal can was serious work.

Stamina separates the pro from the amateur, but fatigue comes for all of us.
by Jach | 2025-05-05 03:04:49+00:00
Lisp applications still are used behind the scenes for a lot of interesting stuff. In 1987, "An advanced VSLI design and simulation suite, with programmability and a GUI, used to design actual taped out processors."[0] Screenshots in "The Symbolics Ivory Design and Verification Strategy": https://archive.org/details/ivory-design-verification/mode/1...

[0] Thanks to stylewarning for the link last year: https://x.com/stylewarning/status/1834996048307388889
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-05-05 03:05:10+00:00
Soon?

I hire people now and where they went to school means little to me. The first priority is “can they do the work?” which is a niche programming. After that is established, I barely take note of school.

I don’t personally count a CS degree as an indication the person is a good programmer, or thinks logically, or has good work ethic.
by epgui | 2025-05-05 03:05:59+00:00
The nesting level doesn’t necessarily impair legibility, it depends how it’s done. Nesting levels in homoiconic & referentially transparent languages have an impact more comparable to nesting levels in yaml or json than nesting levels in a language like python or javascript. The tradeoff weighs in a completely different way.

First you will usually want to write small chunks of code, instead of a large soup.

Second, you can make intentional decisions with your use of newlines in order to highlight specific aspects of the code.

I find clojure more readable than most other languages… However, bad code stands out horribly (which is actually great if you have at least one experienced engineer in the team- I’d argue there’s nothing worse than bad code that looks normal). Just like anything else, writing good lisp takes some skill.

Your specific editor and its configuration will also have a big impact on your experience.
by j_bum | 2025-05-05 03:06:11+00:00
Awesome!

When I explain it to people, I always ask them to close their eyes and picture an apple on a table. I then ask them what color the apple is. Everyone I’ve ever done this with (except a sibling) answers a color.

I then say, “to me, there is no color, no apple, no table, no outline; nothing.” Always a leads to fun discussion :)
by philwelch | 2025-05-05 03:07:09+00:00
This isn’t entirely down to arbitrary cultural preference. Terrain and enemy composition are relevant. All of the cultures that used war elephants successfully lived and mostly fought in elephant habitats. Likewise, cultures on or close to the steppe had much more of a cavalry focus because cavalry was so much more effective there. When the Romans went east, they didn’t stick to their heavy infantry, they developed cataphracts. And their eventual conquerors, the Turks, replaced most of their traditional cavalry with infantry as they expanded westward into Europe.
by AnIrishDuck | 2025-05-05 03:08:20+00:00
Blender is serviceable for simple stuff, but you really want CAD for mechanical parts.

Think figurines (Blender) vs gears (CAD).

Constraints, among many other important features, just aren't as well represented in Blender.

An analogy is C vs JavaScript. Can you do "memory management" in JavaScript? Sure, but you're fighting the tool. Ditto for building a complex frontend in C.

The desire to "just learn one thing" is naturally strong. But the "design 3d things" problem space is as large (if not larger) than "programming computers". Hence the proliferation of tools with very different approaches (the underlying representation in CAD is generally brep [1], which is much different than vertices / edges / faces at the core of Blender)

The good news is the underlying thinking is somewhat transferrable, especially for core concepts.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation
by codr7 | 2025-05-05 03:08:21+00:00
And how exactly is that going to help improve the hiring situation? It's already very inhumane and getting worse.

Are applicants just supposed to sit and roll their thumbs waiting for the right AI to have the right hallucinations?

I don't get the excitement for applying this crap to each and every aspect of our lives. What about the human experience?
by sargstuff | 2025-05-05 03:08:57+00:00
Most of theses have free online versions available:

The New Turing Omnibus, 66 Excursions in Computer Science[1]

Code Complete [2]

Debugging The 9 Indispensable Rules of Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems [3]

The Pattern on the Stone [4]

The Tinkertoy Computer and Other Machinations ... [8]

-----

#5, #6 & #7 approach from different directions and "meet in middle":

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software [5] Nand2Tetris[6] The Little Schemer and Understanding Computation [7]

--------

?? Links to 'editor'/ide cheetsheets ??

--------

[1] : https://www.amazon.com/New-Turing-Omnibus-Sixty-Six-Excursio...

[2] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Complete

[3] : https://www.amazon.com/Debugging-Indispensable-Software-Hard...

[4] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pattern_on_the_Stone

[5] : https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...

[6] : https://www.nand2tetris.org/

[7] : https://vpb.smallyu.net/%5BType%5D%20books/The%20Little%20Sc...

[8] : https://www.amazon.com/Tinkertoy-Computer-Other-Machinations...

----

When semester of programming projects isn't enough / couldn't wait for the programming langauge of choice : https://exercism.org/
by echelon | 2025-05-05 03:10:38+00:00
> Are applicants just supposed to sit and roll their thumbs waiting for the right AI to have the right hallucinations?

The really bright people are doing hype and bleeding edge things like this. Getting lots of notice, trending on HN (and probably LinkedIn), etc.

Everyone else? Yeah.

I don't mean this as a diss. This is just the meta. I got a really good job doing exactly this sort of thing. And it worked marvels for fundraising too.

I absolutely know not everyone has time or patience for this bullshit meta game. But networking and distribution are kind of like that.

tl;dr - If you trend on HN, LinkedIn, etc., you're already winning the hiring game.
by animal_spirits | 2025-05-05 03:11:17+00:00
Further, if a student can get a diploma without work, then the diploma does not have value anymore. If diplomas are no longer valuable, the signal they provide in the labor market will turn into noise.

If employers no longer look for the diploma-signal in an employee, what will be the reason an employer will hire an employee?

I think this story will become true, and society will radically shift into one where critical thinking skills will actually be the only skills employers look for in employees, since the grunt work can be automated.

What becomes the signal then? Will we shift back into apprenticeship based employment? How do potential laborers display their critical thinking skills apart from displaying them in person?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-05-05 03:11:30+00:00
Why do you think those stories weren't true? The median teenager in 2023 spent four hours per day on social media (https://news.gallup.com/poll/512576/teens-spend-average-hour...). It seems clear that internet addiction was real, and it just won so decisively that we accept it as a fact of life.
by 7bit | 2025-05-05 03:11:55+00:00
> It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving.

No. It has value, because companies value it. It sets the starting point for your first salary and then for every salary negotiation moving forward.

As someone who did not go to university, but has the same knowledge self-taught I can tell you that this piece of paper would have opened so many doors and made life so much easier. It took me 15 years to get a salary, that people get with the piece of paper after graduating. And not because it took me 15 years to reach that level of knowledge. I had that by the time the other graduated.

I had a friend who always cheated in school, and now he works for a big car company and earned a fuck ton of money.

Life is unfair and companies only care about the paper your diploma is printed on. If students would ask me for advice, I would tell them to cheat whenever possible.