MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dataviz1000 | 2025-06-23 16:42:14+00:00
I entered a jazz izakaya in Kanazawa with only two stools and no room for anyone else. There was an old man on one stool and a bartender in his 70s or 80s. It is rude to tip and they will not except it but offering to buy a drink for the bartender is encouraged. I ordered a Japanese whiskey and offered the old man and bartender one. There were piles of knickknacks and maybe $15,000 worth of stereo equipment including a record player, planar magnetic speakers and a vacuum tube amplifier in this little room. I heard the distinctive sound of Sonny Rollins saxophone and used the translation app to say I saw Sonny Rollins play live at the Monterey Jazz Festival and he played an encore of La Cucaracha for close to two hours where his band eventually left the stage and he kept playing and playing. The bartender pulled out a Sonny Rollins record from his stack of vinyl and put it on the record player. The three of us sat there for 40 minutes not saying a word listening.

If you are in Kyoto, I recommend a similar style bar called Brown Sugar. They tend to have these types of names, for example, in Sapporo there is one called Jim Crow. [0] However, if in Sapporo, I recommend the half note. [1] Most bars and restaurants for that matter will not serve me because I do not speak Japanese, so they say. If I wanted a drink I would stick to Karaoke and jazz bars. I made some friends in Kyoto who were finishing their 4th year studying engineering at University of Kyoto who were from Africa -- these kids are African royalty. They spoke perfect fluent Japanese and they couldn't get access into bars that would let me in. So the names are fitting and likely they know exactly what they mean.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=sapporo+japan+bar+jim+crow

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=sapporo+japan+piano+ba+half+...
by jbeninger | 2025-06-23 16:42:15+00:00
I've often thought that what we need is a social network. You only see your friends, and your friends' friends, and so on. With tools for blocking branches of the graph and restricting views to those friends. All controlled by signed content. A blockchain without the "chain" bit, I guess.

The devil is in the details, of course. Is it even possible to thread the needle of usability and controlling your own data/algorithm? Maybe! But if there's going to be a human island, I think this is the way. Individual trusted connections branching out from you.
by carbonwithasoul | 2025-06-23 16:42:29+00:00
A few things may help:

1. Learn something you like with Anki, every day (spaced repetition does wonders)

2. Read a book that captivates your attention

3. Meditate on your breath for 20-30 minutes, when your attention moves to something else, go back to the breath. Just keep to it, every day.

4. Write something or journal every day

5. Deconnect from social media. It conditions our minds for short attention spans.

6. Rest and sleep, a lot

7. Set a short todo list every day of what you want to do that day, and keep to it
by rsingel | 2025-06-23 16:42:58+00:00
Dude, I don't lose any credibility by stating the truth. The contention was there were active programs to make chemical and nuclear weapons and depots ready to use or be handed over to Al Qaeda. None of that was found. It was all fake. I don't lose any credibility by stating the obvious and using shorthand.

It would be like the FBI saying they raided the world's biggest drug lord, and the only thing they found was a little bit of shake in a backpack in his garage.

You pedantically "but they did find drugs!"
by Barrin92 | 2025-06-23 16:43:03+00:00
>That it's considered an investment vehicle is downstream from the rising markets

That's not what its downstream from, that's restating the same thing in financial terms. What it's actually downstream from is that Japan is a fully urbanized society. The reason why Americans cannot implement this is because houses are their little homesteads and castles, Fukuyama used the term "suburban villager" for this attitude (also prevalent in Greece and Eastern Europe etc.)
by waffletower | 2025-06-23 16:43:52+00:00
While a deeply problematic solution which pits citizens against each other, idling is also deeply problematic and awareness of the toxicity of internal combustion engines (ICE) needs to grow. While hardly a massive feedback loop, it is at least a bit tragic to see the growth of ICE idling during heatwaves encouraged in part by global warming and also the growth of smart phone usage in cars.
Show HN: Enigma Machine and Bombe Implemented in eBPF – Turing's 113th Birthday
by aanm__ | 2025-06-23 16:44:09+00:00
I implemented the Enigma encryption machine and Bombe decryption device in eBPF to honor Alan Turing's legacy. This project uses eBPF to process network packets through virtual Enigma rotors and reflectors, just like the original WWII-era machines. Messages sent through virtual interfaces are not only encrypted but also decrypted in real-time, demonstrating how Turing's pioneering work can be reimagined with modern systems programming. The implementation includes configurable rotors, reflectors, and position settings.
by londons_explore | 2025-06-23 16:44:42+00:00
A quick test shows that chromium at least cannot use the GPU with a remote X connection. Loading the google homepage is ~100 megabytes of data across the X connection, and scrolling up and down for a few seconds sends a further 1 gigabyte.

My guess is the lack of shared memory buffers stops the use of opengl, and whilst it's theoretically possible, it is probably unimplemented because nobody does that in 2025.
Show HN: QryPad – A simple terminal UI for quick, ad-hoc database exploration
by wheelibin | 2025-06-23 16:45:01+00:00
I spend most of my day in the terminal but I couldn't find a simple terminal-based database client that did what I wanted, so I built one.

It's written in Go using Bubble Tea (https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea) and supports Postgres and MySQL.

It's minimal and designed for simple querying but I've been enjoying using it over pgAdmin, which I find to be very slow and a bit painful to use!
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-23 16:45:11+00:00
I have three ideas here. (I present these as "one or the other or both", not as any kind of a cohesive package.)

1. Many people find the default accepted worldview to be empty or unsatisfying. Aliens or bigfoot give them something else, something "out there" to believe in.

2. Aliens or bigfoot give them the sense of being "in the know", one of the few who "accept the truth". It lets them feel good about themselves, that they are special.

3. Aliens and bigfoot don't ask them to change their life in any way. University scientists and government experts say some uncomfortable things sometimes.
by throw0101c | 2025-06-23 16:45:24+00:00
> Let's hope the plan incorporates cutting-edge advancements, like molten salt and liquid thorium designs..

Let's hope not. At least not for the first few new nuclear plants.

There is a lot of operating experience with 'traditional' designs and lessons learned over the decade. There are also new lessons learned with the Vogtle AP1000s. Any new construction (in the US) should be AP1000s to take advantage of those lessons.

Once people are familiar nuclear again then perhaps look at different designs. But you should learn to crawl and walk before trying to run.

(A lot of nuclear construction is the civil works, and is the same for any type of design, and getting that down to cookie cutter output would help any different designs as well.)
by munificent | 2025-06-23 16:45:26+00:00
I think we all know that we should avoid junk food snacks and instead eat a few healthy meals that leave us feeling fully nourished and sated. The kind of meal where afterwards you feel done but not gross or weighed down.

When I'm disciplined about not buying junk at the store and my kitchen only has relatively unprocessed ingredients, I find myself obligated to make that kind of food.

But if the chips are there, it's really hard to not wander into the kitchen and snack on them. I only have finite willpower after all.

The modern world is like being completely surrounded by junk food for our attention, 24/7. It's no wonder ADHD diagnoses are spiking, people are anxious, no one seems to have enough willpower anymore, and we're all struggling to do what we know is best for ourselves.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-23 16:45:46+00:00
Carmine is better known as Red 4 these days. Doesn't have much taste. Saffron adds basically no taste in the amounts typically used for something like Saffron rice. Squid ink again, mostly for the striking color. The taste isn't particularly great.

Turmeric can go both ways, but the ground turmeric that's historically common for preservation reasons is much less flavorful than the fresh root. It's mostly a color thing.

Of course, we can also just open up a medieval cookbook to see what they say. The Forme of Cury is a nice 14th century example that's available from Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8102

As to colours, which perhaps would chiefly take place in suttleties, blood boiled and fried was used for dying black. saffron for yellow, and sanders for red. Alkenet is also used for colouring, and mulberries; amydon makes white; and turnesole [for yellow]

Alkanet is commonly used today for Rogan josh, but historically would have been more known for rouge and dying wine. A Mediterranean cookbook might have instead chosen amaranth for the same purpose
by latexr | 2025-06-23 16:46:00+00:00
> There’s a ridiculous number of Japan-centric things that make it to the front page compared to any other culture.

But is there a ridiculous number of Japan-centric things that make it to the front page compared to any other community? Are Japan-centric things discussed on HN more than Reddit, Tumblr, Imgur? Because that was my point; Japan is popular in general, not just popular on HN to the point it’s even worth singling out.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-23 16:46:15+00:00
I agree with you, and this backwards mentality is handing even more business over from smaller local shops to the big online stores!

People are going to discover your prices anyway. Hiding them just means it will take longer. I remember my grandpa used to go to five different grocery stores weekly, just to do grocery shopping, because he knew store A had the cheapest eggs, store B had the cheapest vegetables, store C had the cheapest milk, and so on.
by ecshafer | 2025-06-23 16:46:24+00:00
Japan has zoning but its done very sensibly.

In the US our zoning is done very restrictively: in this place you can build a detached single family home with this kind of set back and up to this height. In this spot you can build low density commercial. Etc you can ONLY build what the zoning board says. Then there are also complications from HUD, like they dont give FHA loans for condos or if developments have straight roads.

In japan the national government has a zoning policy. The most common zoning is “light industrial”. But if you have a zoning policy, you can build anything at that level or below. So in light industrial you can build a coffee shop, or a house or an apartment or a machine shop.
by pedrocr | 2025-06-23 16:46:54+00:00
> No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.

If that's your assumption then this is a non issue. Minnesota is currently less than 2% of total winter electricity demand in the US. Lets be pessimistic and assume that because it needs more heating in winter than average those 2% become 5% with electrification of heating nationwide. Even if 100% of that electricity needed to be imported from other states that's still a very small amount of the total. You could import all that solar and wind energy from other states if you can't produce any at all locally. The scenario is obviously much better than that, you'd only need to cover the shortfall which is what already naturally happens in joint grids all over the world.

> Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.

I'm still waiting for a link that shows that nuclear can be built at anything approaching reasonable cost. In all these discussions that's always presented as a given and then all the discussion is on the shortfalls of renewables. Meanwhile the actual reality on the ground is that the renewable roll-out is rising exponentially and nuclear projects are practically non existant.
by pmontra | 2025-06-23 16:47:01+00:00
Counter example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empire

What's important is the life expectancy at a given age. There used to be a huge infant mortality but the half of newborn that made it to 10 would live on average 50 years. That means that some of them would live 70 or more.

There is a table with life expectancy given the age. At 70 was 6.5 more years.

That is from a mix of the sparse available data and models.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-06-23 16:47:22+00:00
1995, I work 3 days a week for Amazon but need some sort of computing device at home when I'm parenting my kid. I have a nice SPARCstation in the office, and money is actually a little tight, so I'm not getting one of those for home use. I'd already used NCD X Terminals in my previous job at UWashington CS&E, so we got one of them, connected it via a 96k modem (the NCD's could do this, using SLIP), and I was able to dial into "the office" and have a relatively normal X session in my home.

OTOH ... we had already started using the first Linux system at amazon by that time, and a few years later, when a 25MHz 486 running Redhat became the first computer I actually owned (I resisted for that long!), the idea of an X Terminal seemed a bit quaint and limited.
by squigz | 2025-06-23 16:48:27+00:00
> School as we know it is a dead institution walking, and good riddance, and I very much hope the universities as we know them will cease to exists right along with it.

Also, when can we expect this to happen? I mean, I've been waiting for this since computers, then the Internet, and now LLMs have been around for several years, so just curious.
by Joeri | 2025-06-23 16:48:55+00:00
It can be true that what people miss most of all is the freedom of childhood and that the internet is on a decades long decline.

The commercialized centralized appified algorithm-fed web is inferior when it comes to community-forming. It creates the illusion of social cohesion but in reality interactions are too superficial for real communities (and friendships) to form.
by mlhpdx | 2025-06-23 16:48:55+00:00
> I’m not talking about the building in the article, or even Japan specifically, but addressing the general point of trees and other growths which cause literal cracks and compromise structural integrity.

Structural integrity or uniformity (or some other qualitative)? Yes, occasionally there is an actual structural problem (MSME here) but far, far more often things are torn down or discarded when a slight repair would suffice (other than the preference).
by kristoff200512 | 2025-06-23 16:48:59+00:00
For a solo indie developer or a small team, the journey from a brilliant game idea to a playable reality is filled with challenges. One of the biggest hurdles? Finding high-quality, affordable, and properly licensed 2D art. A great art style can make your game stand out, while placeholder graphics can stall a project indefinitely.

Fortunately, the internet is brimming with incredible resources. But sifting through them can be a full-time job. That's why we've curated this list of the top 5 best sites for 2D game assets. Whether you need assets for prototyping, a game jam, or your commercial release, your search ends here.
by cs02rm0 | 2025-06-23 16:50:11+00:00
Lies, damned lies and statistics, but I'm not sure any of that contradicts my view. Print sales are down since the pandemic bump, they're back at ~2008 levels when the US population was >40m fewer.

That the percentage of people who can read (and do read one book per year) is higher, clearly isn't translating to more book sales, so people are reading, or at least buying, fewer print books.
by tomp | 2025-06-23 16:50:54+00:00
You're a bit wrong here, aren't you?

- US is special because it is by far the richest and most entrepreneurial (big) country in the world; it gets the creme of the crop of the world, and corresponding economic growth, which no other Western country can replicate; many people want to move to all Western countries (e.g. Europe is experiencing an immigration crisis) but unfiltered (low-skill) immigration doesn't result in economic growth

- illegal (slave?) labour on farms is simply delaying automation, which is ultimately detrimental to economic growth [1]

- in fact, recent studies (and public data) show that non-Western immigrants are not net taxpayers, therefore they result in the opposite of economic prosperity (see graph in [2])

[1] https://x.com/Indian_Bronson/status/1933725059837014066

[2] https://archive.is/Kaqrp
by hogepodge | 2025-06-23 16:51:12+00:00
One of the big differences here is that the Mojo/Python interop package is doing a lot of the heavy lifting of compiling and loading the code. The goal here is to have a language that's close to Python that gives you hardware acceleration as you need it, without having to configure and build C++ code for every platform.

We've run a few events this year (disclosing again that I work for Modular, to put my comments into context), and we've had some great feedback from people who have never done GPU programming about how easy it was to get started using Mojo.

C++ is a powerful and mature language, but it also has a steep learning curve. There's a lot of space for making GPU (and other high performance computing) easier, and platforms/languages like Triton and Julia are also exploring the space alongside Mojo. There's a huge opportunity to make GPU programming easier, and a bit part of that opportunity is in abstracting away as much of the device-specific coding as you can.

I was a HPC C++ programmer for a long time, and I always found recompiling for new devices to be one of the most painful things about working in C++ (for example, the often necessary nightmare of cmake). Mojo offers a lot of affordances that improve on the programming experience at the language, compiler, and runtime levels.
by codelieb | 2025-06-23 16:51:19+00:00
Hello _wire_. I tried to find the "quotations" you have attributed to The Feynman Lectures on Physics. I looked in Volume I chapters 37 and 38 (which are the same as Volume III chapters 1 and 2) and I could not find them, neither in those chapters nor in the recordings of the original lectures they are based on (for which I made transcripts using the Parakeet STT), so I am wondering where you got these quotations. Could you enlighten us in that regard?
by wagwang | 2025-06-23 16:51:31+00:00
Re;

Section 3.1

This is a question on how human do we want AI's to act, which I think could just be set thru system prompts.

Section 3.2

I think this is an argument saying that AI's are fundamentally missing certain sensory inputs so its information space is limited? Bad argument cuz you can always amend sensory information. The question could also be reframed as an experiment design problem instead of treating AI as an oracle. There's no reason an autonomous reasoning system can't do this.

Section 3.3

This is probably the worst argument yet. It's basically claiming that AI can't synthesize information?! Idk why the author keeps trying to simulate AI with his own words instead of just running the systems outright.
by sophacles | 2025-06-23 16:51:39+00:00
Governments go to bat for their companies all the time. Via diplomacy, war, etc. Have you ever heard the justification for US bombs being dropped... 90% of the time its "to protect US interests", aka the US companies' ability to do business there. Trade deals exist to make it easier for one nation's businesses to profit in another nation. Foreign aid is similar - it's a nation paying it's own businesses for stuff to be delivered to another country... a nice combination of marketing, subsidy and to some extent "the first one's free kid".

Trying to separate the government of a nation and it's businesses is not so simple as "a government did it" or "a company did it".
by godelski | 2025-06-23 16:51:51+00:00
They mention the Pixel and I just got to say, I wish someone would bring back the fingerprint reader on the back of the phone. That was seriously the best solution. Fastest way to unlock your phone, because no matter how slow the fingerprint reader is you activate it while pulling it out of your pocket. I honestly don't get why people like Face ID more (what I currently use). Someone, please bring this back
by jgon | 2025-06-23 16:52:09+00:00
I generally agree with the sentiment behind this, but like many other things, underneath the zoning issues what it actually actually goes back to is cultural issues. For a large number of other countries you could loosen zoning up and ultimately someone would start operating an abattoir next to an elementary school and it would make the 5 o'clock news and then the city council would throw a bunch of new regulations in and the whole thing would be over.

I hate to even sound like this, I hate the cynicism in my comment, and maybe the answer is to actually just do it and not declare premature defeat, but having watched how other initiatives in my own local area have gone I can't help but feel that we don't have the real secret weapon that works for places like Japan, and makes stuff like Star Trek work outside of all the fancy tech, and that's sufficiently advanced culture to not immediately race this all to the bottom.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-23 16:52:23+00:00
> "Messages on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted by default, meaning only the recipients and not even WhatsApp can see them."

The handling and metadata around encrypted messages is nearly as exploitable as the actual message contents. End-to-end encryption is necessary but not sufficient. The infrastructure has to be designed to minimize risk of other forms of exploitive analysis as well but in the case of WhatsApp that is essentially their business model.
by perihelions | 2025-06-23 16:52:26+00:00
> "Each telescope has different patterns"

This one's extra-special! The pattern is multiple + shapes, rotated and superimposed on top of each other. And they're different colors! That's this telescope's signature scanning algorithm—I don't know what that is, but, it's evident it takes multiple exposures, in different color filters, with the image plane rotated differently relative to the CCD plane in each exposure. I assume there's some kind of signal processing rationale behind that choice.

edit: Here's one of the bright stars, I think it's HD 107428:

https://i.ibb.co/HTmP0rqn/diffraction.webp

This one has asteroid streaks surrounding it (it's a toggle in one of the hidden menus), which gives a strong clue about the timing of the multiple exposures. The asteroids are going in a straight line at a constant speed—the spacing and colors of the dots shows what the exposure sequence was.

I think this quote explains the reason they want to rotate the camera:

> "The ranking criteria also ensure that the visits to each field are widely distributed in position angle on the sky and rotation angle of the camera in order to minimize systematic effects in galaxy shape determination."

https://arxiv.org/abs/0805.2366 ("LSST [Vera Rubin]: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products")