MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stared | 2025-06-17 20:53:22+00:00
I recommend reading "Sacred knowledge" even more (the author is Christian, if it makes a difference). When it comes to mystic experiences, while technically it can me "less than 50%", it is still a lot (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/12/07/spiritual-ex...). Not everyone is happy to talk about it, both is it might be very personal and as many are afraid to be considered crazy.

I cannot say much about relative Bayesian probability of getting a vision from God or Satan, though.
by eightys3v3n | 2025-06-17 20:54:26+00:00
Yes, that could be true, it even likely is. The point I was making is that if I can take apart the capsule and drink the contents mixed with water without noticing a smell or taste, there is a significant difference between brand name Vyvance I aquired during that time and what the other commenter acquired. Given the odor is undesirable, I would say the meds they acquired were much lower quality than the brand name ones I had (which of course I am just assuming are reletively representative).
by jp57 | 2025-06-17 20:54:26+00:00
Programming languages researchers and designers labor under the mistaken assumption that programming practitioners--people who are writing programs to solve problems--actually want "a language with a syntax and semantics tailored for a specific domain", or any really fancy language features at all.

I say this from the perspective of someone who nearly became a PL researcher myself. I could easily have decided to study programming languages for my PhD. Back then I was delighted by learning about cool new languages and language features.

But I did didn't study PL but rather ML, and then I went into industry and became a programming practitioner, rather than a PL researcher. I don't want a custom-designed ML programming language. I want a simple general-purpose language with good libraries that lets me quickly build the things I need to build. (coughPythoncoughcough)

Now that I have reached an age where I am aware of the finiteness of my time left in this universe, my reaction when I encounter cool new languages and language features now my is to wonder if they will be worth learning. Will the promised productivity gains allow me to recoup the cost of the time spent learning. My usual assessment is "probably not" (although now and then something worthwhile does come along).

I think that there is a very real chance that the idea of specialized programming languages will indeed disappear in the LLM era, as well as the need for various "ergonomic" features of general purpose languages that exist only to make it possible to express complex things in fewer lines of code. Will any of that be needed if the LLM can just write the code with what it has?
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 20:55:00+00:00
On the one hand, this sucks. On the other hand, we're already vacillating along the Pareto frontier of how much we can stuff into code; in fact, most of the criticisms of DSLs are indirectly stating just that.

So with LLMs making it easier to project back and forth between how programmer sees the task at hand, and the underlying dumb/straightforward code they ain't gonna read anyway, maybe we'll finally get to the point of addressing the actual problem of programming language design, which is that you cannot optimize for every task and cross-cutting concern at the same time and expect improvement across the board - we're already at the limit, we're just changing which time of day/part of the project will be more frustrating.
by thayne | 2025-06-17 20:55:08+00:00
So, temperature is basically a measure of the average kinetic energy of particles in a substance. When you have an extremely diffuse gas, as is the case between galaxies, the particles can be moving very fast, but energy density is still low, because there are so few particles. According to the abstract of the paper, this gas is just 10^-3 particles/cm^3 or 1000 particles per cubic meter. That is 5 orders of magnitude less than the space between planets in our solar system.

So, yes, it is hot. But it also very, very sparse. According to Wikipidia 10^5 to 10^7 K[1]. But there isn't very much of it.

As to why they are hot, from what I've been able to find, it is at least partly due to gravitational potential energy being converted to thermal energy, as it falls into filaments.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm%E2%80%93hot_intergalactic...
by gopiandcode | 2025-06-17 20:55:18+00:00
Oh that's a great blog post and a very interesting point. Yep, I hadn't considered how LLMs would affect frameworks in existing languages, but it makes sense that there's a very similar effect of reinforcing the incumbents and stifling innovation.

I'd argue that the problem of solving this effect in DSLs might be a bit harder than for frameworks, because DSLs can have wildly different semantics (imagine for example a logic programming DSL a la prolog, vs a functional DSL a la haskell), so these don't fit as nicely into the framework of MCPs maybe. I agree that it's not unsolvable though, but it definitely needs more research into.
by martinpw | 2025-06-17 20:55:40+00:00
> we need a lot more nuclear that can be dialed up to compensate for renewables going offline during certain weather conditions

If you want something to compensate for intermittency, nuclear seems like the worst option. It implies you have nuclear plants sitting offline until needed, or being ramped up and down. My understanding is that you really want to run nuclear plants 24/7 at full output.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-06-17 20:55:50+00:00
> JPEG-XL seemed like the next logical step until Google took their toys and killed it despite already having the support in Chrome, which pretty much makes it dead in the water (don't you just love monopolies making decisions for you?)

It's worth noting that Firefox is willing to adopt JPEG-XL[1] as soon as the rust implementation[2] is mature And that rust impl is a direct port from the reference C++ implementation[3]. Mac OS and Safari already support JPEG-XL [4]. And recently Windows picked up JPEG-XL support. The only blockers at this point are Firefox, Chromium, and Android. If/when Firefox adopts JPEG-XL, we'll probably see google follow suit if only out of pressure from downstream Chromium platforms wanting to adopt it to maintain parity.

So really if you want to see JPEG-XL get adopted, go throw some engineering hours at the rust implementation [2] to help get it up to feature parity with the reference impl.

-----

1. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064

2. https://github.com/libjxl/jxl-rs

3. https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl

4. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/07/apple_safari_jpeg_xl/

5. https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/03/05/turn-on-jpeg-xl-jxl...
by drob518 | 2025-06-17 20:56:28+00:00
I’m not sure why discussing the very real issues with renewable power is a “conservative talking point.” Why is everything assumed to be politically motivated. Everyone assume I’m throwing renewables under the bus for the 2021 grid failure. I’m not. Everything failed in 2021. Gas failed. And renewables couldn’t pick up the slack because renewable generation always slumps in the winter.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-06-17 20:56:50+00:00
> These frameworks make it easy to get started by simplifying standard low-level tasks like calling LLMs, defining and parsing tools, and chaining calls together. However, they often create extra layers of abstraction that can obscure the underlying prompts and responses, making them harder to debug. They can also make it tempting to add complexity when a simpler setup would suffice.

> We suggest that developers start by using LLM APIs directly

Best advice of the whole article by far.

It's insane that people use whole frameworks to send what is essentially an array of strings to a webservice.

We've removed LangChain and LangGraph from our project at work because they are literally worthless, just adding complexity and making you write MORE code than if you didn't use them because you have to deal with their whole boilerplate.
Founders: Do you check WorkAtAStartup applications?
by PermutationCity | 2025-06-17 20:56:58+00:00
I've had a career so far at larger tech companies with huge recruitment operations, so for the most part I've had the luck to have not directly applied for many jobs, instead getting referred from connections or recruited.

At this point in my life, I'm looking to try working at startups and some domains different from what I'm normally recruited to. For founders and people hiring at startups and smaller companies, how do you generally prefer candidates to apply? YC's WorkAtAStartup database seems to have a great overview of companies, but the application just being essentially an email makes me wonder if that feature is silently ignored - perhaps this is common knowledge. Do you tend to go through your applications on Linkedin or your company site before looking through WorkAtAStartup?
by hocuspocus | 2025-06-17 20:57:59+00:00
The issue with SMS even if unlimited, in Europe a lot of people need to send text messages across borders. EU mandated free roaming, which makes SMS billing under the same pricing conditions when you're roaming but doesn't say anything about sending SMS abroad when you're in your home country. Also what happens if you need to send an SMS to a Swiss or UK number?

While effectively unlimited plans do exist as carriers have stopped caring in multiple countries, this kind of friction pushed everyone to WhatsApp 15 years ago and most people won't bother checking what's included in their plan. Remember they're very cheap compared to the US, I know people paying 5€/month.

Additionally there's also the immigrant population that need to communicate with their relatives back home on other continents.
by Lammy | 2025-06-17 20:58:01+00:00
Being a much more complicated format than JPEG (WebP is based on the VP8 video codec) invites a huge attack surface because it requires so much more code to support. On top of that, the fact that 99% of people (even Apple's ImageIO!) use Google's libwebp means any exploit can hit almost everyone all at once. This has actually happened:

- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-41064

- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-41061

- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-4863

- https://citizenlab.ca/2023/09/blastpass-nso-group-iphone-zer...
by dvt | 2025-06-17 20:58:05+00:00
> For this case, i will probably lift off the example from the library docs. Or spend 5 minutes writing a bare implementation as it would be all I need at the time.

Both of these would take longer than 5 minutes. There's also no "lifting" as this case involves both Provider and Context, so you'd have to combine React doc examples.

The only alternative would be knowing it by heart, which you might, but I don't (nor do I particularly care to). There's definitely a force multiplier here, even if just in the boring boilerplate cases.
by SimianSci | 2025-06-17 20:58:42+00:00
More OpenAI news and yet more reason to think the executive team is desperate to cash out before their chickens come home to roost.

No matter what you might think of OpenAI's contributions to the AI industry, the investment dollars have clearly out-paced the tangible value and with no path to profitability available to them, I cant help but think that the executive team is looking to secure their share of investor dollars before the investors start to lose their money.
by gus_massa | 2025-06-17 20:59:37+00:00
Assuming it's not a fabrication of the press release, it may be jargon. Astrophysicists call "metal" everything that is not Hydrogen or Helium, but Chemist disagree heavily.

In this case, the paper don't call it "hot" but it says that 99.99% of the Hydrogen is ionized.

To ionize one Hydrogen you need 13.6eV. The average energy is temperature*k_Boltzmann. So if the temperature is 13.6eV/k_Boltzmann ~= 160000K then the 50% of the Hydrogen is ionized and 50% not ionized.

To get only 0.01% not ionized you need to increase the temperature, IIRC -log(0.01%)~=9 times.

So the temperature is ~1400000K. Unless I'm making an horrible stupid mistake, I agree it's hot.

(I may be missing the 4.7eV of the dissociation of H2 molecules into two H atoms, that would increase the temperature like a 40%.)
by grishka | 2025-06-17 21:00:01+00:00
What really grinds my gears is websites with news/articles that assume that you have a stable fast internet connection for the whole duration of you reading the article, and so load images lazily to "save data".

Except I sometimes read articles on the subway and not all subway tunnels in my city have cell service. Or sometimes I read articles when I eat in some place that's located deep inside an old building with thick brick walls. Public wifi is also not guaranteed to be stable — I stayed in hotels where my room was too far from the AP so the speed was utter shit. Once, I loaded some Medium articles on my phone before boarding a plane, only to discover, after takeoff, that these articles don't make sense without images that didn't load.

Anyway. As a user, for these kinds of static pages, I expect the page to be fully loaded as soon as my browser hides the progress bar. Dear web developers, please do your best to meet this expectation.
by mandevil | 2025-06-17 21:00:18+00:00
Afghanistan was in the middle of a semi-active civil war when the US joined the fray, and by providing large scale air support to Northern Alliance troops on the ground, the situation changed abruptly. Iraq involved multiple US divisions of troops, which took months to get into position to launch a large scale ground invasion. Libya was in the middle of a very active civil war when the US started Operation Odyssey Dawn(1).

All of those cases involved a whole lot of troops on the ground, which is something that I see as notably missing from any plans discussed so far. Outside troops invading seems like a very bad idea, because Iran's population is about that of those other three combined. Operating sufficient outside country ground troops to topple the existing government would quickly lead to friction between civilians and the outside troops, which would almost certainly quickly turn into a revolt of some kind, and fatally undermine any government they attempted to put in place. Also, it would take a very long time for sufficient US force to topple the Iranian government to arrive in the area, and then either launch a D-Day style opposed amphibious assault or operate from one of Iran's neighbors with sea access (2). But because there is no preexisting Iranian civil war, there is no local source of ground troops either.

I don't think we've ever seen a government toppled by external air-strikes alone. The general consensus from research is that being bombed makes citizens support the government more, not weaken their resolve.

1: It didn't lead to change of government, but Operation Allied Force- the NATO bombing of Serbia helped the Kosovo Liberation Army achieve their independence- again air-power supporting troops on the ground to achieve an aim, not air-power alone. What eventually toppled the government of Serbia was the Bulldozer Revolution a year later, with no outside military force involved.

2: Your choices are not going to be good ones. Iraq? Turkey through Kurdistan? Pakistan?
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-06-17 21:00:23+00:00
default jpeg-xl uses a different color space (XYZ), bigger transform (up to 256x256), rectangular transforms, etc. if you go from jpg to jxl, you can go back (but your jxl file will be less efficient), but if you compress directly to jxl, you can't losslessly go to jpg
by xenadu02 | 2025-06-17 21:01:10+00:00
This seemed to be a point of confusion in the original story and the video wasn't super clear but:

Pretty much all tape backup software writes headers as it is streaming the file to tape. Just more bytes in the buffer.

For normal restores it consults its local database because that is way faster. If you don't have the local database you do a "Catalog Tape" operation that scans the file headers on the tape to reconstruct the database. For whatever reason ARCServe couldn't complete the catalog with that specific kind of tape. Whether that was the specific version he found or was a general problem with support for those tape drives I don't know.
by msgodel | 2025-06-17 21:01:24+00:00
I love the idea of coming up with something simpler than Xorg or even X11.

Unfortunately Wayland devs seem to have become user hostile in a way similar to the systemd devs (your use case being incompatible or unsuported is your problem, shut up and let us rearrange the OS etc) on top of the software just not being very good. Basic things like running video terminal emulators just doesn't work as well as it does on X (comparing Xterm on X to whatever on Sway always seemed to have much higher latency on my hardware, even moving the window around seems to lag a frame or two behind where it should be.)

At this point wayland itself has gotten pretty old, doesn't support what most desktop Linux users need day to day (at least enough to replace X) and is so unpleasant to deal with I don't think I'll be trying it again. It's a shame, the bar isn't that high. Then again maybe X11 is the oldest still in use graphics API for a reason.
by SunlitCat | 2025-06-17 21:01:58+00:00
To really delve into the technical side of things: I’m fairly certain that large parts of Windows, especially when it comes to DRM, rely on third-party technologies, components that Microsoft licenses and integrates but doesn't necessarily have full visibility into or control over. That could very well include parts of the DRM stack itself.

So while Microsoft controls the platform, that doesn’t automatically mean they can trivially extract plaintext content from DRMed streams, especially not without compromising the integrity of systems they themselves may not fully own.
by interestica | 2025-06-17 21:02:15+00:00
Media coverage, and thus wikipedia info, on this incident is a bit misleading. A lot of reporting assumes a separate CVR and FDR, but that doesn’t apply here. This is one of the first major incidents involving the 787 where that distinction matters. For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwqjv09q7xo

But, the 787 uses Enhanced Airborne Flight Recorders (EAFRs), which combine both cockpit voice and flight data functions. The functions are combined into a single unit. There are two units per aircraft: one located forward, one aft, providing redundancy. Each unit includes a Recorder Independent Power Supply (RIPS), which is relevant given early speculation about a possible electrical fault.

https://www.militaryaerospace.com/power/article/16718134/ge-...

From a 2012 incident, you can check out what kind of data the EAFRs pull in:

https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=40431665&Fi...

For more on the data storage within the EAFR: https://skybrary.aero/sites/default/files/bookshelf/2955.pdf
by price | 2025-06-17 21:02:33+00:00
They're reverting this developer's previous changes, because those changes were bad.

More on those previous changes here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797#no...

Definitely some blame also belongs to the Xorg committer who reviewed and merged those changes (and it looks like that person understands that in retrospect). But the primary responsibility for getting a change right is the author's.
by miloignis | 2025-06-17 21:02:39+00:00
The article mentions the ban was lifted late last year:

"It banned WhatsApp and Google Play in 2022 during mass protests against the government over the death of a woman held by the country’s morality police. That ban was lifted late last year. ( https://apnews.com/article/iran-social-media-whatsapp-google... ) "
by keybored | 2025-06-17 21:03:09+00:00
On the one hand you have a country which has nuclear weapons with a regional ally that doesn’t want to say whether it has nuclear weapons or not that has in real life couped the other country’s government. On the other hand you have the country which Israel lies about getting nuclear weapons (et tu?) very soon and that says mean things about Israel and the West. Conclusion: there is “certainly” no blame for responding (invading) that other country.

Thank you for the opportunity to engage in healthy criticism of rogue states.
by munificent | 2025-06-17 21:03:13+00:00
Since I work on a language professionally, I think about this all the time.

As someone who loves a wide diversity of actively evolving programming languages, it makes me sad to think those days of innovation may be ending. But I hope that's not going to happen.

It has always been the case that anyone designing a new language or adding features to an existing one is acutely mindful of what programming language knowledge is already in the heads of their users. The reason so many languages, say, use `;` for statement terminators is not because that syntax is particularly beautiful. It's just familiar.

At the same time, designers assume that giving users a better way to express something may be worth the cost of asking them to learn and adapt to the new way.

In theory, that should be true of LLMs as well. Yes, a new language feature may be hard to get the LLM to auto-complete. But if human users find that feature makes their code easier to read and maintain, they still want to use it. They will, and eventually it will percolate out into the ecosystem to get picked up the next time the LLMs are trained, in the same way that human users learn new language features by stumbling onto it in code in the wild.

So I'd like to believe that we'll continue to be able to push languages forward even in a world where a large fraction of code is written by machines. I also hope that LLM training cost goes down and frequency goes up, so that the lag behind what's out there in the world and what the LLMs know gets smaller over time.

But it's definitely possible that instead of that, we'll get a feedback loop where human users don't know a language feature even exists because the LLMs never generate code using it, and the LLMs never learn the feature exists because humans aren't writing it.

I have this same fear about, well, basically everything with LLMs: an endless feedback loop where humans get their "information" from LLMs and churn out content which the LLMs train on and the whole world wanders off into a hallucinatory bubble no longer grounded in reality. I don't know how to get people and/or the LLMs to touch grass to avoid that.

I do hope I get to work on making languages great for humans first, and for LLMs second. I'm way more excited to go to work making something that actual living breathing people use than as input data for a giant soulless matrix of floats.
by D13Fd | 2025-06-17 21:03:40+00:00
Yeah. I paid for the lifetime plan a long time ago. It’s fast and easy to use. Generally I would categorize it as inoffensive.

I loved the change a few years ago that prevented mod authors from removing mods. I use Wabbajack, an amazing program where modders compile lists of mods and bundle them with compatibility patches to make everything work nicely. The Wabbajack program automatically downloads and sets up everything.

But random disappearing mods created endless work for the Wabbajack modders, because they would have to adjust lists and compatibility patches every time someone removed an old version. Mod lists would go away for days, weeks, or forever because someone removed some tiny mod from Nexus for no good reason. It’s so much better now.
by const_cast | 2025-06-17 21:03:51+00:00
Cheap labor is still valuable, I don't know what to tell you. 20k salary net is very cheap. I don't know why you think it's expensive, because it's not. What you're maybe missing is the job needs to be done regardless - it's not like if we stop using prisoners for labor that need for labor just - poof - disappears.