MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-06-09 19:40:15+00:00
Fungi and animals have a common ancestor, but that ancestor was an unicellular protozoan, without any resemblance to a fungus, but which resembled somewhat a human sperm cell, by having a single posterior flagellum used for swimming. Fungi and animals and their close unicellular relatives are called opisthokonts (Opisthokonta), which is a name describing their posterior flagellum (opistho- means back, while konta was the name for the rods that were used for pushing boats in areas with shallow water).

The branch that has evolved towards animals has developed multi-cellularity while retaining their ancestral lifestyle of eating other living beings, which is a lifestyle that requires mobility.

The branch that has evolved towards fungi has adapted to a terrestrial life, unlike the branch that has evolved towards animals in the oceans.

To avoid desiccation on land, the fungi have developed a chitinous cell wall. This has solved the desiccation problem, but this wall has made the fungal cells immobile. So they had to change their lifestyle from the ancestral lifestyle of the eukaryotes to a lifestyle similar to that of the heterotrophic bacteria, i.e. fungi do not eat food by engulfing it, like animals, but they grow into food, by secreting enzymes that break the food into small molecules, which can be then absorbed by the fungal cells.

While there exists only a single group of living beings like the animals, which are both multicellular and mobile, there are several groups like the fungi, besides the true fungi. All such fungous organisms have immobile cells with cell walls, so if they are multicellular they must grow into food in the form of a branched network, in order to maximize the surface of contact between them and food.

The other groups of living beings that look like fungi, but which are not true fungi, are not closely related to animals. The most important of those groups is related to the brown algae, but there is even a group of bacteria that look like fungi, the actinomycetes. Besides the other living beings that feed like fungi, so they look like mycelia (branched networks), there are even more groups of living beings that do not feed like fungi, so most of the time they do not look like fungi, but which are terrestrial like fungi, so they must use the same method of spore dispersion by wind, so they grow mushroom-like bodies for the launch of spores, e.g. the slime molds.
by handfuloflight | 2025-06-09 19:40:41+00:00
Are you assuming all commercial relationships are adversarial? Why can't advertisers and those advertised to have aligned interests? What transparent levers do non-advertised results have, how do you know search rankings don't have hidden commercial incentives? Why trust undisclosed bias over disclosed relationships? Isn't transparency about incentives better than pretending they don't exist?
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-09 19:40:49+00:00
The style here suggests a split between tools and content, which is something I'd love love love to see emerge. Having one and only one app be both viewer and toolkit feels like a convenience trap, one that NeXT tried to fight (as did OLE) and that feels unlikely to ever be turned back from, but I want to dream. This UI doesn't materially move us towards a more aggregative/accreted system of systems model, but it visually suggests some of the absurdity of there being such heavily coupling, if the UI is really incidental that floats atop. I'd love to see this pushed further, to emerge into a multilayered information world, where Rainbow's End discourse piles up and forms trees out and up.

I hear folks on contrast concerns. I have hope though. I really like the de-emphasis on compute. On tools being less the thing, on the content first, on getting computing out of the way, making it ambient. Unboxing the content, unframing it.

The glass refraction seems like a an amazing leap forward. Material has been around forever and there's all these developer docs showing the stack up of layers, implying the depth of the system, but in the 2d user world everything is flat, composited into indistinction. The visual sepration, allowing semi transparent motion, but using refractive style to clearly separate the layers, adds such clarity that it feels obvious in retrospect immediately to me.

I still lack hope that XR is going to be a huge huge thing, that it will be comfortable over time, but it makes such sense to me that XR would inspire & lead this shift, to depriotizing the UI & emphasizing the content.

I'm stressed a bit trying to imagine the transforms required to make this refraction happen. I don't think CSS is going to be enough. The new CSS Painting API ("Houdini") also seems more generative than able to modify & script what is?
by tacocataco | 2025-06-09 19:40:53+00:00
A Dog's heightened senses are an asset when detecting intruders. I'm sure thats probably the biggest reason humanity domesticated them in the first place.

If a dog keeps depression at bay, someone could possibly avoid having their brain chemistry permanently altered by owning a dog.

There are even working breeds with many different purposes. It's not all black lab and American Eskimo.
by ManBeardPc | 2025-06-09 19:40:54+00:00
> For purposes of this section, any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software shall be treated as a research or experimental expenditure.

For me that sounds like everyone and everything in a company that develops software of any kind, including low-/no-code stuff, accounting, HR, travel costs, massages. Like who is not "in connection with the development of any software" in a company that develops software? Without further definitions this is even worse then just software engineering costs.
by koolba | 2025-06-09 19:40:56+00:00
> if I earn $100/year, and I can deduct $50 of that, my tax bill is not $50. It is some percentage of $50, usually a low number for businesses. (Amazon regularly pays $0/year in taxes.)

It’s not that low. Federal corporate tax rate is 21%. So you would be on the hook for $10 in taxes.
by dcchambers | 2025-06-09 19:40:59+00:00
> The iPad has become practically a MacBook Air with a touch screen. Unless you were a video editor, programmer who needs resources to compile or a 3D artist, I don't see how you'd need anything other than an iPad.

No! It's not - and it's dangerous to propagate this myth. There are so many arbitrary restrictions on iPad OS that don't exist on MacOS. Massive restrictions on background apps - things like raycast (MacOS version), Text Expander, cleanshot, popclip, etc just aren't possible in iPad OS. These are tools that anyone would find useful. No root/superuser access. I still can't install whatever apps I want from whatever sources I want. Hell, you can't even write and run iPadOS apps in a code editor on the iPad itself. Apple's own editor/development tool - Xcode - only runs on MacOS.

The changes to window management are great - but iPad and iPadOS are still extremely locked down.
by antics | 2025-06-09 19:42:13+00:00
I'm not sure we're on the same page about what this result practically means, so let me re-state it a few different ways, so that people can draw their own conclusions:

* The von Neumann approach will "appear to be O(1) (constant-time)" for any particular biased coin, but that constant might be big if the coin is very, VERY biased in one direction.

* How can this be true? Every flip reduces the probability you do not have an answer exponentially. The "concentration" around the mean is very sharp—e.g., at 275 coin tosses for P(H)=0.5 (the fair case), the probability of not having an answer is smaller than 1 divided by the number of atoms in the known universe. It is technically possible, but I think most people would say that it's "effectively constant time" in the sense that we'd expect the coin to phase-shift through the desk before flipping it 275 times in a row and not getting answer. So it takes 275 flips, it's "constant" time! Interpret it how you like though.

* As you make the coin more and more biased, that "horizon" increases linearly, in that 0.99^1,000 is approximately the same thing as 0.999^10,000. So, an order of magnitude increase in probability requires roughly an order of magnitude increase in the number of flips. This is why it's not useful for the adversarial case, and why adversarial extractors are held apart from normal extractors.

Whether this is a "give me my money back" type thing is for you to decide. I think for most people the claim that you can simulate a fair coin from a biased coin in, effectively, O(1), and that the constant increases in O(n) in the bias, is plainly incredible. :)
by mrweasel | 2025-06-09 19:42:13+00:00
> Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?

We have volume sliders rather than knobs, because that's easier on a touch interface. I get your point, but does the button need to look like the button on the radio in our grandfathers car from 1960? Probably not. I was thinking more in terms of filling cabinets, floppies as save icons or even the phone as the receiver on a rotary phone. Would it be easier to set a timer on your phone if the UI looked like a kitchen egg timer? Having the email icon be a letter doesn't even make sense anymore. My kid has sent one letter ever and all the mailboxes will be removed next year. How does having a letter as an icon going to provide any meaningful frame of reference when we daily receive more email than we do actual letters in a year, or two, or three?
by spencerflem | 2025-06-09 19:42:34+00:00
Fair enoubh,I'll concede "Expanded" instead of "Maintained" for the NSA.

Re: SVB, I still think its important that the main customers for the bank were companies and not individuals. Particularly that they were evil silicon valley companies. I was rooting for them to go bust for their arrogance and they got bailed out regardless. Better than also bailing out the bank's investors too so it could have been worse.

Re: TPP, I believe you that there's more to it. The hubub I heard about it at the time was mostly on the IP stuff and the power it gave to companies over countries.

I guess the point I stand behind is that he had eight years and accomplished one very compromised insurance bill and not a ton else.

Yes, Obama could have done more with a better congress, and maybe Biden could have passed BBB with one too.

But in general the goal of the Democratic Party seems to be either ignoring or working directly against most agendas I have: - Ending the police state - Stopping the genocide in Gaza - Getting money out of politics - Reigning in corporations dramatically - An end to oil - Equal rights for all - An end to billionaires

And imo. Obama accomplished very little of that, and didn't even call for half of it.

Neither did Biden.

And while both of them seem to have most of the same agenda as Reagan (free trade, low corporate taxes, no worker protection, trickle down economics, messing with other countries via monetary theory) they're at least a step above the rest of Dem leadership which I consider entirety hostile.

I don't believe Obama would have ended the filibuster or stacked the courts even if given the chance. He never called for it.
by vFunct | 2025-06-09 19:42:54+00:00
I like it a lot. Reminds me of the OG Mac OS X Aqua theme, except a more reactive/dynamic version of it to account for accessibility.

Refreshing counter to the brutalist styles that were trending. The problem with brutalist styles is that they tend to be busy, which becomes confusing and unintuitive to new users.

This seems like it would help separate elements for easier focus, to make things more obvious.
by cush | 2025-06-09 19:43:05+00:00
> You can't compare an API that is profitable (search) to an API that is likely a loss-leader to grab market share (hosted LLM cloud models).

Regardless of maturity lifecycle, by definition loss-leaders are cheap. If I go to the grocery store and milk is $1, I don't think I'm being swindled. I know it's a loss-leader and I buy it because it's cheap.

We are currently in the early-Netflix-massive-library-for-five-dollars-a-month era of LLMs and I'm here for it. Take all you can grab right now because prices will 100x over the next two years.
by poulsbohemian | 2025-06-09 19:43:17+00:00
Do you live somewhere in the east where states are close together? If I want to travel across my state, I'd have to plan a recharge somewhere along the way for nearly any electric vehicle. To fill up with gas would take ten minutes; as far as I can tell, any EV is going to take >30 minutes. Not saying that's a gating factor, but it's certainly something to consider. Likewise in states with more continental weather, there also appears to be some concern about extreme cold causing issues with charging and/or battery service life.
by paxys | 2025-06-09 19:43:22+00:00
While I agree with UBI at a philosophical level, attempting to study it scientifically with a sample size of N people in an existing functioning economy is pointless. If 10 people have UBI and 1000 others are doing regular work, you can't turn around and say "see how much happier the 10 people are!" Of course they are happy. They earn more money than their neighbors for doing less work. Now give everyone else the same amount of money and see how things play out. Is rent going to be the same? Is anyone going to be working menial jobs? Is UBI going to increase income inequality by sending more money to the capital class (like say COVID relief checks did)? We won't know all this until such an experiment is done at an economy-wide level.
by os2warpman | 2025-06-09 19:43:32+00:00
The reporting on this has been an atrocious, lazy, embarrassment to journalism (aka: a normal day) so I tried my best to look into it.

As far as I can tell the only systems that use floppy disks are IDS-4 terminals, of which there are a couple hundred left in the US, the rest having been upgraded (to IDS-5 or similar systems) over the last 30 years.

I don't know if it is small regional airports with no money, large international airports with few moments of downtime time needed for the upgrade, a mix those two, bad luck with the bureaucratic wheel-of-priorities spin, or what.

But there's no context to any of these articles, only "FLOPPY DRIVES LOL" so I had to take the time to find out what systems were actually impacted.

I mean, it could have been an old HP Oscilloscope in a RF rack that used floppy drives to store images and log data, or it could have been the Master Control Program of the entire air traffic control network.

There's a slight difference in impact between those two.

It appears as though there are multiple competitors/replacements to IDS-4 so the solution is to cut a check and block off some time on the calendar.

edit: every single journalist who just grabs a couple of tweets, adds some commentary, and dusts off their hands muttering "job well done" should encased in a Lucite cube and displayed in the town square as an object of ridicule.
by epistasis | 2025-06-09 19:43:40+00:00
> software that is built, not bought, the company building it clearly values it exactly enough to pay the salaries of the software developers building it

Even in the absence of the Trump tax rule, a software company values the software they are building a lot more in financial terms than the cost of building it. Any project where value=cost should be cut, when the value is taking into account the value it brings to the rest of the company.

This is the entire point of the business, after all: take labor, land, and capital and make something that's worth a lot more to the world than the sum of the components.
by benjismith | 2025-06-09 19:43:40+00:00
A similar kind of question about "understanding" is asking whether a house cat understands the physics of leaping up onto a countertop. When you see the cat preparing to jump, it take a moment and gazes upward to its target. Then it wiggles its rump, shifts its tail, and springs up into the air.

Do you think there are components of the cat's brain that calculate forces and trajectories, incorporating the gravitational constant and the cat's static mass?

Probably not.

So, does a cat "understand" the physics of jumping?

The cat's knowledge about jumping comes from trial and error, and their brain builds a neural network that encodes the important details about successful and unsuccessful jumping parameters. Even if the cat has no direct cognitive access to those parameters.

So the cat can "understand" jumping without having a "meta-understanding" about their understanding. When a cat "thinks" about jumping, and prepares to leap, they aren't rehearsing their understanding of the physics, but repeating the ritual that has historically lead them to perform successful jumps in the past.

I think the theory of mind of an LLM is like that. In my interactions with LLMs, I think "thinking" is a reasonable word to describe what they're doing. And I don't think it will be very long before I'd also use the word "consciousness" to describe the architecture of their thought processes.
by leakycap | 2025-06-09 19:43:46+00:00
I've seen what overuse of screens has done to adults, including myself at times. I can't imagine what it would have done to me during my development years.

This is a dense read, but I'm already surprised how much they're focusing on video games vs. just using a screen for any purpose.

I would assume there to be no difference whether a game or a video or typing a file, but I'll be trying to understand more now that I see the APA focusing in like this. Thanks for the share.
by Negitivefrags | 2025-06-09 19:43:56+00:00
Theoretically it’s the same with any asset you pay someone to make.

If you pay someone to make a chair, you don’t deduct the salary. Instead you create an asset valued at what you paid to build it, then depreciate it over time.

The arguement for this is that it would be inconsistent to do otherwise. After all, why should buying a chair from someone else be different than paying an employee to do it?

It’s worth noting that this change brings the USA in line with international financial reporting standards, so it’s not like it’s some crazy unique idea or anything.
by srean | 2025-06-09 19:44:17+00:00
Could you take a look at Barry Jay's shape theory.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111015133833/http://www-staff....

This was used in his shape aware language FiSh, for dealing with multidimensional arrays. Shape compatibilities were statically type checked, if I recall correctly. Shapes were also used to optimize the loops.

[Programming in FISh] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s100090050037

[Towards Dynamic Shaping] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265975794_Towards_D...
by coastalpuma | 2025-06-09 19:44:29+00:00
This is an existing and somewhat nitpicky issue, but it's also annoying how they specifically insist on rounded corners "because that matches all modern devices" in the announcement. Pretty much all third party external monitors don't, and even their latest top line laptops only have them at the top of the screen. So we're stuck with these dumb little triangles of background peeking out. It's kind of the "charging port on the bottom of the magic mouse" of MacOS.
by pxc | 2025-06-09 19:45:00+00:00
I hoped for a moment that "Containerization Framework" meant that macOS itself would be getting containers. Running Linux containers and VMs on macOS via virtualization is already pretty easy and has many good options. If you're willing to use proprietary applications to do this, OrbStack is the slickest, but Lima/Colima is fine, and Podman Desktop and Rancher Desktop work well, too.

The thing macOS really painfully lacks is not ergonomic ways to run Linux VMs, but actual, native containers-- macOS containers. And third parties can't really implement this well without Apple's cooperation. There have been some efforts to do this, but the most notable one is now defunct, judging by its busted/empty website[1] and deleted GitHub organization[2]. It required disabling SIP to work, back when it at least sort-of worked. There's one newer effort that seems to be alive, but it's also afflicted with significant limitations for want of macOS features[3].

That would be super useful and fill a real gap, meeting needs that third-party software can't. Instead, as wmf has noted elsewhere in these comments, it seems they've simply "Sherlock'd" OrbStack.

--

1: https://macoscontainers.org/

2: https://github.com/macOScontainers

3: https://github.com/Okerew/osxiec
by 9d | 2025-06-09 19:45:07+00:00
Not sure why you were downvoted. I think you're probably right about a lot of that. I do know that it's certainly the case for me. I have a lot of talent, but I can't harness it unless I find a project I truly believe in. But who's to say which projects are worthwhile, which projects genuinely help humanity? Not everything we do and breathe needs to be activism against injustice all the time. Take pico8 as an example. That has rejuvenated the joy and wonder of countless aging programmers, and probably taught many young people how to make games. Is that not inherently a good thing? And it made money doing it, should it not?
by p0w3n3d | 2025-06-09 19:45:50+00:00
Government has no money. They do not produce anything. There is printing. Govt can print money and give it to people, which causes inflation.

I live in Poland. When I as 4 people were losing every money they had at their own because of hiperinflation because govt was spending too much money. They just printed it.

When it started my parents were earning 1000zl monthly, a few years later I could buy one ice cream ball for 2500zl.
by hintymad | 2025-06-09 19:46:24+00:00
Does Section 175 apply to other professions? For example, if I hire a full-time handyman for my office, does their salary count as a deductible cost?

Sorry if this sounds naive—I'm genuinely struggling to understand why the labor of software engineers would be treated differently from other kinds of work. It seems logical that either all labor costs should count as costs, or none should. If different types of jobs are treated differently, what's the reasoning behind that?
by andrepd | 2025-06-09 19:47:34+00:00
It is, once again, designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback, optimising for looking good on screenshots and marketing materials and not for actual usability or user friendly was. With "vibes" here standing for whatever some SV asshole thinks it's cool and modern.

Alegria, flat design, pastel colors, or unholy amounts of whitespace. It's been the story of the last 15 years of UI design at least.
by zargon | 2025-06-09 19:47:38+00:00
I don't have bed adhesion issues. The prints are just extremely fragile, features peeling off at the slightest provocation. The filament binds to itself a little bit better (but still not great) if I print at 230° with a cooling profile that tops out at a max 20% fan speed, but one can't print details or overhangs in those conditions.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-09 19:47:52+00:00
> conflict provoking comment

> irrelevant time-wasting demand

It simply doesn't feel like an HN thread until someone gets insecure enough to berate non-sequitur Open Source projects, does it? When I browse the rest of the web, I always end up missing HN's iconic Jungian groupthink. You lot tend to shoot yourself in the foot before anyone even notices you're drawing a gun.