MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Balgair | 2025-06-15 20:07:04+00:00
I'm sorry what?

What do you mean by diffraction here? Are you talking about the bokeh?

The laser isn't interacting with any other elements than the air before it makes the gradient sheet light up. And the permisivity of the air is about the same as vacuum here.

Like, the grating is going to show a diffraction pattern similar to any pinhole aperture source [0] because of the 'half cancellations' they kinda explain, but not all that in depth.

But since there are no elements in the path yet, the only conclusion we can make is that of Feynman's - that the light is in fact taking all possible paths and then cancelling out to make the laser light we normally experience.

What am I missing? To me this demo is like mind boggling as it shows that the wave model is the correct one even with a laser.

[0] https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

Something like (a) above, though I'm not confident that this is really showing that exactly.
by em500 | 2025-06-15 20:08:31+00:00
You don't actually know how they're stored. SQLite has a rather idiosyncratic approach to datetimes: it does not provide any datetime data types (the only SQLite data types are NULL, INTEGER, REAL, TEXT and BLOB). It's left entirely to the user how to store datetimes using these types. What SQLite does provide are functions (documented on the submitted page) that translate some datetime representations (stored using the one of the mentioned basic datatypes) to other formats. So you can choose to store your datetimes in unix-epoch INTEGER and use the translation functions to output ISO8601 TEXT when needed, or the other way around: there is no correct or even preferred way in SQLite.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-15 20:08:47+00:00
I think SSL is a better fit, actually. In theory TLS could be a transport-layer security mechanism that would let arbitrary protocols run on top of it (like IPSec does), but in practice it's pretty much tied up to TCP sockets. The UDP variant (DTLS, and I suppose QUIC) isn't part of the TLS spec for instance. Of course we have kernel TLS on Linux now, and Windows also has infrastructure like that, but it isn't as easy as setting a flag on a socket to turn TLS on.

Plus, who doesn't like to sound like a snake sometimes? Snakes are badass.
by eesmith | 2025-06-15 20:08:47+00:00
One place to start - we must all have the right to live off-line.

This must apply broadly. There must be no need for an app for health care, parking, schools, transit, tolls, package delivery, hotels, restaurants, retirement, banking, and other things which 10 years ago had perfectly reasonable and affordable non-app access.

This analog alternative must be reasonable. It can't be that non-app access is only available, for example, every fifth Monday of the month.

If you think the unelected people who control your phone are doing the wrong thing, then you must be able to boycott them and still live a regular life, perhaps with a few more in-person visits than you expected.

This right applies more broadly.

I read about a blind man in France who wanted to take the train. The local station no longer had ticket service, not even a machine. The app didn't support blind people. He got on the train and ended up having to pay a fee as he had no valid ticket.

A ticket machine, or the ability to pay onboard from staff when coming in from a station without a ticket machine, is a perfectly reasonable analog alternative.
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-15 20:08:50+00:00
> All I want is an easy, documented, supported way to run a binary on my computer and say "it can only access these files, use this much RAM and it's not allowed to make any outbound network requests". It always surprises me how hard this is!

I think that if the operating system (and the computer design too) were designed better, then I think that it might be possible to do that, and other things (e.g. all outbound network requests must go through a specified proxy without the program knowing of the proxy, or must use a specific network interface, etc).
by IshKebab | 2025-06-15 20:09:15+00:00
I mean... that sounds like a pretty horrible dev experience. Every time I want to understand a piece of code I have to actually run it? Insane.

For example I'm trying to understand Gitlab's merge train behaviour. Do I have to set up an entire Gitlab instance from source, then create a project, set up CI, run a merge train, all while running Gitlab in a debugger and then set a breakpoint and then finally I can see where the code is called from?

I've also done a lot of work on VSCode which is similarly large but mercifully written in Typescript. For that I just right-click->find all references. It takes 3 seconds.
by userbinator | 2025-06-15 20:09:18+00:00
If you're not familiar with it, steel is actually surprisingly strong for its size. Look up "ultimate tensile strength" and "compressive yield strength". They are many tens of thousands of pounds per square inch for structural steel. Even the tensile strength of small fasteners like bolts is very high in "human" terms:

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/us-bolts-tensile-proof-lo...

The bottom floor of a 100 story building is holding up 99 floors of weight.

That's not how it works. All the load of the floors above is held by the columns, which go into the foundation.
by chollida1 | 2025-06-15 20:09:43+00:00
> As a part of the cutthroat competition, Microsoft decided to revise the SSL 2 protocol with some additions of their own, and specified a protocol called "PCT" that was derived from SSL 2. It was only supported in IE and IIS.

> Netscape also wanted to address SSL 2 issues, but wasn't going to let Microsoft take leadership/ownership in the standard, so they developed SSL 3.0, which was a more significant departure.

I remember this moment and this is where I realized that Microsoft wasn't always the bad guy here. They had the better implementation and were willing to share it. But Netscape in this instance acted like kids and wouldn't cooperate at all. Which is why this meeting had to occur and by that point it was clear Netscape had lost the browser and it wasn't going to be close.

Hence the quick about face by Netscape to accept what was pretty much Microsoft's proposed solution.

I can't speak to the rest of Microsoft's browser decisions and given the court ruling it's clear they weren't the good guys either but this opened my eyes to the fact that all companies are the bad guys some time:)
by ThinkBeat | 2025-06-15 20:10:18+00:00
I feel all such studies should be headlined with: In mice: blah blah blah.

and then if the research is farther along:

In <other animal>: blah blah

and finally if ever

In humans: blah blah blah.

I keep reading storie about what happens to mice in studies but I am far more interested when the research has been able to get to human trials and results are coming in.
by zh3 | 2025-06-15 20:10:18+00:00
TLDR: Native language wins over JVM optimisations.

In my recent but limited experience of working on iOS apps, they do need any performance boost they can get anywhere. Coming to the Apple ecosystem (appstore connect, testflight, xcode etc) it's quite a shock on how slow it all is (using xcode on a Mac Mini M4 for development, and as for web updates/approvals etc I now understand the pain others have mentioned here).
by decimalenough | 2025-06-15 20:12:19+00:00
They're not a panacea, but they're better than gas/petrol/diesel (or biofuel) cars across the board. Emissions have dropped and air quality has measurably improved in places with high BEV adoption, like Norway and China.

Even the weight thing is a bit of a red herring: if we really cared about that, we should restrict car weights across the board. (Few BEVs clock in at over 2T, while virtually every F-150 style truck does.)
by jpm_sd | 2025-06-15 20:12:30+00:00
RGMII isn't really designed to go board-to-board, fairly high data rates, and ideally all of the signals should be delay matched. That gets a bit trickier when there are two boards involved. Also I would expect EMI/EMC issues.

I know people do that sort of thing for evaluation kits, but it doesn't seem like a good idea for production.
by codingdave | 2025-06-15 20:14:31+00:00
> Startup founders are the happiest people in tech: They’re the only group growing more optimistic while consistently outranking everyone else in workplace well-being.

In other words, the happiest people are the ones with the most autonomy, building their own vision, with the most potential upside. This is not news to anyone.

Now if you took a survey of failed founders (which is most of them) and ask if they'd do it again and contrasted that demographic vs. 1st time founders vs. the masses of everyone else just doing their work for a corporation... I suspect you get some interesting/surprising results.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-15 20:14:39+00:00
This cannot be a serious comment, can it?

"Does it make sense for a place with a completely different governance structure, completely different laws, and completely different norms (notably lacking the US Constitution and its unique 1st Amendment protections) to behave differently?"

Uhhh yes. You would expect a different result in a different place. Here in America we have the laws that exist in America. In Thailand they have the laws that exist in Thailand.
by strongpigeon | 2025-06-15 20:14:56+00:00
I wonder how long their build time is. The article from the “Things” folks said their system took 10 minutes to build despite being only 30k LoC, which seems really bad. I can’t help but think they must have done something off for it to take that long.

Hence, I wonder how long it take a to build what is probably a medium size system when done by a team at Apple.
by gruez | 2025-06-15 20:21:13+00:00
>Which part of journalism doesn't involve "political engagement"? Selecting which stories are covered, and how prominently? Choosing whom to interview and deciding what questions to ask? Which details are important enough to include, and which to omit? There is no cogent definition of "journalism" by which it is not an intrinsically political activity.

"politically engaged" in this case refers to participating in the protests itself, or even taking a particular side. It's the opposite of being "objective", back when that was an ideal to strive for. Nowadays "objectivity" is being dropped in favor of "moral clarity".

>That is common among journalists; it is called a "beat".

No. Writing about resturants in New York is a "beat". Writing pieces consistently favoring one side is being an activist.

>Hundreds of millions of people all over the world protest. 2–4 million did so in the U.S. alone yesterday. Are they all "activists"?

Yes? Are you going to gatekeep "actvist" to people who are card carrying DSA members or something?
by fakedang | 2025-06-15 20:21:59+00:00
What the article does not mention is that one of the more recent key biological therapies that is used is asparaginase, which has proven to be extremely effective for ALL.

Also surprisingly, the article did not mention that there's a severe shortage of this therapy currently in the world, which has recently affected treatment progress worldwide, especially in the developing world.

Asparaginase can be made dirt cheaply (it's used in food processing for breadmaking, frying, etc, to destroy certain carcinogens), but the product is extremely unstable for the kind of purity that is required for ALL treatments. The shortage is because there's only one manufacturer now.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-15 20:22:01+00:00
> Take a multivariate regression model that predicts blood pressure from demographic data (age, sex, weight, etc). You can train a pretty accurate model for that kind of task if you have enough data (a few thousand data points). Does that model need to "reason" about human behaviour in order to be good at predicting BP? Nope. All it needs is a lot of data. That's how statistics works. So why is it different for a predictive model of BP and different for a next-token prediction model?

For one, because the goal function for the latter is "predict output that makes sense to humans", in the fully broad, fully general sense of that statement.

It's not just one thing, like parse grocery lists, XOR write simple code, XOR write a story, XOR infer sentiment. XOR be a lossy cache for Wikipedia. It's all of them, separate or together, plus much more, plus correctly handling humor, sarcasm, surface-level errors (e.g. typos, naming), implied rules, shorthands, deep errors (think user being confused and using terminology wrong; LLMs can handle that fine), and an uncountable number of other things (because language is special, see below). It's quite obvious this is a different class of things than a narrowly specialized model like BP predictor.

And yes, language is special. Despite Chomsky's protestations to the contrary, it's not really formally structured; all the grammar and syntax and vocabulary is merely classification of high-level patterns that tend to occur (though invention of print and public education definitely strengthened them). Any experience with learning a language, or actual talking to other people, makes it obvious that grammar or vocabulary are neither necessary nor sufficient to communication. At the same time, though, once established, the particular choices become another dimension that packs meaning (as it becomes apparent when e.g. pondering why some books or articles seem better than other).

Ultimately, language not a set of easy patterns you can learn (or code symbolically!) - it's a dance people do when communicating, whose structure is fluid and bound by reasoning capabilities of humans. Being able to reason this way is required to communicate with real humans in real, generic scenarios. Now, this isn't a proof LLMs can do it, but the degree to which they excel at this is at least a strong suggestion they qualitatively could be.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-06-15 20:22:09+00:00
It is important to note that extended water fasting will have adverse effects for some people. It is not recommended to do it for that long.

"" The water fast lasts for 24–72 hours. You should not water fast for longer than this without medical supervision because of health risks. "" https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/water-fasting
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-15 20:22:29+00:00
That's definitely insightful. Everyone reaches a level where coasting on smarts is no longer sufficient.

Many reach this realization when starting university, but some can still coast okay in college since the material to learn is well defined and upper bounded. A PhD is not really upper bounded. There's no set out amount of papers to read per week like in a college course. There's no "this won't be part of the exam". Anything is fair game. The returns on being smarter never flatten out, but simply there's no ceiling. You can always do more, read more to keep up with the literature firehose, improve your experiments, your method, etc.

You also need soft skills and a network. You need to keep your finger on the pulse of the community by going to conferences and getting to know people, grabbing coffee or going out to dinner with them. You also need to be slef driven instead of waiting for instructions like it was in college. You need to be just the right amount of skeptical and critical regarding existing methods to be able to come up with new things while being also understood and accepted and seen relevant and exciting by the community.

You also need to manage your time and set your own deadlines and maintain a routine without the external sync given by university lectures and exams. All this basically has no upper limit and even the expectations are vaguely defined. You face rejections maybe for the first time despite having done a thorough work because the reviewers don't see enough novelty or it doesn't slot neatly into what is in fashion at the moment.

My point is that a PhD can push everyone to meet their mental limits. It can be frustrating and it's a notoriously hard period of time for many PhD students. Of course if your only goal is to graduate to get the doctorate, there are possible strategies to "coast", but those who go for the academic path often expect to achieve more than the bare minimum, especially if they managed to coast with good results in college.
by deepfriedchokes | 2025-06-15 20:22:45+00:00
There’s been a lot of psychedelics in Silicon Valley for decades now. Back in the day I bet it had a pretty significant positive impact on the grey beards who built the place, but now that it’s being used by the money guys with big egos who came to exploit the place, it’s probably pretty detrimental. Ram Dass warned everyone about this. If you go through the doors of perception with your ego you lose your damn mind. I think a lot of the anti-democratic tech bro behavior we’re seeing is a result of this.
by worik | 2025-06-15 20:23:44+00:00
The perfidious outcomes of viewing climate change as a "business opportunity" rather than an urgent crises is making things worse

There are the obvious effects outlined here

There is also an opportunity cost. Bad policy displaced good policy

We see something similar with planting trees in New Zealand. Huge land area planted out with pine trees, allowing polluters to tick a box, take good productive land out of use, impoverish the people living around it, and in the end they burn

What a waste
by spacechild1 | 2025-06-15 20:23:45+00:00
> I’ve used std::function<> and I’ve used lambdas and what pushed me away from them were crash reports.

In danger of pointing out the obvious: std::function does note require lambdas. In fact, it has existed long before lambdas where introduced. If you want to avoid lambdas, just use std::bind to bind arguments to regular member functions or free functions. Or pass a lambda that just forwards the captures and arguments to the actual (member) function. There is no reason for regressing to C-style callback functions with user data.
by mobileturdfctry | 2025-06-15 20:24:39+00:00
Agree with the sentiment that we need to have compassion and be willing to compromise, but I also think that given this President's track record he needs to be on a short leash. I personally found it stunning that people at high levels in government positions are worried about this. They are obviously seeing things we're not seeing that give them the indication that Trump is obviously not making decisions based on whether he thinks what he's doing will incite riots or not.
by EGreg | 2025-06-15 20:24:56+00:00
This. It is like roots of a tree for instance. The trunk by itself is actually much smaller than the branches — like the opposite of a pyramid.

I guess most of the stress is distributed throughout the building frame going into the foundation - like they drive those pylons into the ground before building a large building.

But still, it could snap from all that stress, like a tree that’s been felled by the wind…

That is why the other part is that skyscrapers are designed to sway in the wind and have the entire structure above the ground absorb the kinetic energy and sorta cancel it out before it reaches the base.

Some buildings use tuned mass dampers (like the giant pendulum in Taipei 101) to counteract swaying by moving in opposition to the wind-induced motion.

In fact, a lot of the time the majority of the building’s outer shell (glass etc) can be blown out by the wind, if it is too strong, and the steel structure will then have a lot of holes in it for the wind to pass through.

They test these structures for how the wind and water will flow around them. Look at the base of the Burj Al Arab, and how they built it to withstand the 100-year storm.

https://theskydeck.com/do-skyscrapers-sway/
by bubblyworld | 2025-06-15 20:25:07+00:00
Hmm, earlier you wrote:

> This is because the key observation is not that there are nonstandard models, but rather that the standard natural numbers model PA.

This fact (that the standard natural numbers model PA) implies that PA is consistent, so your argument is implicitly assuming that from the outset, right? If PA is consistent then this is not something that PA can prove, so I don't see how you could run your proof in PA itself. And certainly not how you could do it in a weaker theory. Logic is subtle though... so what am I missing?

As far as I know what you're describing (namely that "Provable(X)" implies "X") is called the uniform reflection principle and added to PA is much stronger than PA alone.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-15 20:25:22+00:00
> Two seconds of thought suffice to show how that doesn't work: if a digital computer can do everything the brain can do, because the brain is a biological computer, then how come the brain can't do everything a digital computer can do? Is it possible that two machines can be both computers, and still not equivalent in every sense of the term? Nooooo!!! Biological computers!! AGI!!

Another two seconds of thought would suffice to answer that: because you can freely change neither hardware or software of the brain, like you can with computers.

Obviously, Angry Birds on the phone can't do everything digital computers can do, but that doesn't mean a smartphone isn't a digital computer.
by OskarS | 2025-06-15 20:26:00+00:00
> But I do know the code I write and you're wrong about performance of Func0 and Func1. Those are 2 machine words and all it takes to construct them or copy them is to set those 2 fields.

You also have to heap allocate your userData, which is something std::function<> avoids (in all standard implementations) if it’s small enough (this is why the sizeof() of std::function is larger than 16 bytes, so that it can optionally store the data inline, similar to the small string optimization). The cost of that heap allocation is not insignificant.

If I were doing this, I might just go the full C route and just use function pointers and an extra ”userData” argument. This seems like an awkward ”middle ground” between C and C++.
by andy99 | 2025-06-15 20:26:59+00:00
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North...

Also learning about this today. Apparently they're bad for ecosystems that had evolved with slowly decaying organic matter (because they eat it all quickly). In particular forests.

At least in my education they have always been framed as a vital component of the ecosystem and a sign of healthy soil. It's interesting to learn that's not true.
by fuzztester | 2025-06-15 20:27:52+00:00
After reading your comment, I realize now that there is no one correct way. Thanks.

I have not read the GNU docs much, only as needed, now and then, because, as I said, my usage of Unix predates the creation of GNU / Linux by some years, and I had spent tons of time reading Unix man pages and other docs earlier, and tons of time actually using various Unix versions too, in production, over multiple years, including the shell (sh before bash, even, and awk, sed, (e)grep, and friends, aka lots of Unix filters, including custom hand-written ones in C, and combinations of all of the above, as all red-blooded Unix folks did for years, and still do :)

See "The Unix Programming Environment" book by Kernighan and Pike for the best experience of the gestalt of Unix, other than real life usage with the guidance of a friendly expert.

Nothing against GNU, they have done tons of really good work.

And, for example, there is a lot of appreciation and regard for GNU, Linux and other free software and open source stuff in India, and interestingly, somewhat more so in Kerala, an Indian state with a more communist (politically) and hence somewhat / sometimes more egalitarian approach than other states. And they don't just appreciate, many of them also contribute to such efforts. People in other parts of India also do, some, of course.

I'm not from there, but I have family and friends from there, which is one reason I know about this.

Cheers.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-06-15 20:28:04+00:00
We aren't getting results thanks of times better. we're getting results 10s of times better on problems with cubic (or worse) scaling. e.g. 3 day forecasts as of 2017 are more reliable than 1 day forecasts in 1990 https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...