MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2025-06-10 14:43:32+00:00
"He kept Mechanics for 2000 in the dark ages,"

You can blame him for being wrong at first, but somewhere around, oh, 200 years later (very, very conservatively), the people who treated him as an unimpeachable source really ought to be assigned about 100% of the responsibility.

"A bit of mathematics would have helped."

Your use of modern terminology in the previous sentence leads me to think you're not clear on how primitive mathematics is for Aristotle. The calculus you are referencing comes from give-or-take two thousand years in the future, and while you can make a case that physics was "held back" by some very bad understandings, I think if you survey the history of mathematical development that you can't really make that argument for math [1]. Are you personally ready to stand and give an account to the future for failing to understand concepts that will be considered obvious and taught to whatever the equivalent of schoolchildren is in the year 4025 AD? 'Cause I wouldn't take that responsibility on.

[1]: What I mean here is that while mathematicians also had some errors, that just by the nature of math being built up from the ground those errors were never as fundamental as the physics errors because there was always a clear sense of what was well-grounded versus speculation. You have things like the casual assumption of Euclid's parallel postulate being true, but that didn't really "hold back" mathematics in the same way; it prevented the investigation of hyperbolic and spherical geometry but not discovering and/or investigating a new field is radically different than being persistently wrong about an existing one for centuries at a time.
by freehorse | 2025-06-10 14:43:40+00:00
> I'm quite sure you're going to get a pretty uniform response from non-native speakers across the globe if you are saying that we are poor little creatures and the world should lower this bar

I am non-native speaker, so n=1 here. Moreover, I said that I do not consider OP to be such a low bar. It may be informally written, but it did not cross my mind it would have been not understandable to some. I guess opinions may vary on this. Going back reading it I see quite a few obvious grammatical errors, surely they should have spent some effort fixing them before posting it here (nowadays it should be trivially easy to do) but again it is not to the point of not being understandable or hard to read, imo.
by dataflow | 2025-06-10 14:43:42+00:00
> If you have infinite time, then you can wait for it to take more than a few hundred iterations.

To be clear, you're making this argument while also arguing "this wouldn't happen in the real world". [1] You can't have it both ways.

> Also "constant time" wasn't even part of the original promise!

We're not even asking for "constant time". We're literally only asking for "will finish in any bounded amount of time". Even an exponential time bound would've been better than unbounded!

A simulator that can't even promise to get to step #2 of the simulation in any bounded amount of time very much needs a giant proactive asterisk on its labeling, because that's not what people understand to be a simulator. Again, if you sold someone that in such a manner that obscured this fact, they would absolutely be justified in wanting their money back.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44228568
by noitpmeder | 2025-06-10 14:43:46+00:00
You'd find many people (even here on HN) that would argue your time spent among "nature, good food, an endless supply of places to go and interesting things to see" is well worth the lack of focus on your career. Hell, many people hyper focus too much on the latter until they wake up one day wishing they spent more time appreciating the former.

And, it's hard to imagine anyone arguing in good faith that you should give those amenities up and move somewhere boring in order to "spend most of my free time learning about new areas of mathematics and computer science" (not that that's not a noble pursuit in itself).

Harking back to the article, it's more about how you want to see yourself in the future. Do you want to be someone who has an appreciation (and has appreciated) life outside a career, at expense of some potential of said career?
by MarkusQ | 2025-06-10 14:43:55+00:00
> Should we suggest that everyone learn how to money launder to even the playing field against criminals?

Certainly. We should also teach them how phishing scams work, and about confirmation bias, high pressure sales tactics, phantom limbs, vote splitting, inflation, optical illusions, demagoguery, peer pressure, lotteries, both insurance and insurance fraud, and lots of other things work.
by HAL9OOO | 2025-06-10 14:44:22+00:00
To add on, there's tons of reports of people being wrongly flagged online, and I've done the 'request review' button already. I even get database dumps from Facebook on my console.log sometimes, the whole site is a technical mess. I even get 'DB update errors'/graphql errors popping up when I scroll around the page.
by keiferski | 2025-06-10 14:44:23+00:00
This is a really weak article that doesn’t seem to have many arguments, just opinions.

Plato’s argument that the soul could survive the death of the body established a dualistic model of mind and matter that still hampers our thinking today.

The Greeks had a concept of an afterlife prior to Plato. Dualism seems more to me that it originated in one of the following: the fear of death and the hope for an afterlife; the fact that things seem to continue existing even when you aren’t observing them; or just because the mind seems (in a common sense way) to exist in a separate place from the body, in the sense that I can sit in a crowd and have thoughts that are not accessible to others.

Anyway, I think critiquing Plato on scientific correctness is sort of anachronistic, because you could argue that the scientific culture of the Renaissance needed a couple millennia of “seeking the truth” to develop in the first place – which is ultimately a core idea of Plato, even if he got the specifics wrong.

A stronger critique comes from Nietzsche IMO, but it’s a cultural and value critique, not a scientific one. Too long to put here, but essentially he says Plato established a philosophy that debased reality in favor of abstractions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/9i9puk/what_...
by o11c | 2025-06-10 14:44:24+00:00
This is woefully misguided. Half the time passing it to the shell is explicitly a feature, e.g. `popen("gzip > foo.gz")`. If you have user input you should always sanitize it regardless of API.

But `ssh` does deserve all the shame. It's a pity the real problems are hard to find in an article full of nonsense.

Note also that if you're using a deficient shell that supports neither `printf %q` nor `${var@Q}` it's still easy to do quoting in `sed`. GNU `./configure` scripts do this internally, including special-casing to only quote the right side of `--arg=value`.
by Nevermark | 2025-06-10 14:44:30+00:00
Given the edges are represented by lines, line representation needs to be robust to any angle, including very vertical or very horizontal, and they are segments:

I expect the line segments are represented by their two end points.

This makes it easy to encode which side is fill vs. alpha, by ordering the two points. So that as you move from the first point to the second, fill is always on the right. (Or vice versa.)

Another benefit of ordering at both point and segment levels, is from one segment to the next, a turn to the fill side vs. the alpha side, can be used to inform clipping, either convex or concave, reflecting both segments.

No idea if any of this what is actually happening here, but this is one way to do it. The animation of segmentation did reflect ordered segments, and clockwise for the outside border, and counterclockwise for the cavity in R. Fill to the right.
by 9rx | 2025-06-10 14:44:42+00:00
> this is a rough equivalent of the enum I gave

Yes, this echos what I stated earlier: "An enum is conceptually the same as you manually typing 1, 2, 3, ... as constants, except the compiler generates the numbers for you automatically" Nice to see that your understanding is growing.

> Taking from your examples, the key point is that a Foo is not a Bar.

I'm not sure that's a useful point. Nobody thinks

class Foo {} class Bar {}

...are treated as being the same in Java, or, well any language that allows defining types of that nature. That is even the case in Go!

type Foo int type Bar int const f Foo = iota const b Bar = f // compiler error on mismatched types

But what is significant to the discussion about enums is the value that drives the inner union of the class. As in, the numbers that rest beneath SUNDAY, MONDAY, TUESDAY, etc. That's the enum portion.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-10 14:44:43+00:00
Deflecting the conversation from me pointing out your misinformation based on assumptions, to my tone, is exactly what I expected from someone unwilling to admit he is wrong.

It's not polite to abuse some's time and labor and have them google things for you, you can do that yourself if you want to check if what they said is correct before attacking them.

The least you can do is abstain from making confidently incorrect assumptions and admit when you're wrong.
by JadeNB | 2025-06-10 14:45:20+00:00
> I don't like how they give and example of a geometric axiom and then give a number theory result. This makes it seem that the number theory result follows from the geometric axions.

This isn't some weird gloss on their part; there are number-theory results in Euclid's Elements, even if you and I would nowadays think of them as belonging to a different discipline.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-10 14:45:29+00:00
Its not LIKE that, and you can tell because in that situation, the Guard was called up by thr governor to directly prevent implementation of a federal court order, and it was only federalized to order it to return to its barracks (and the 101st deployed to assure that order was followed.)

The fact that the Guard can be actively federalized, rather than sent home to prevent jt from being used against the Federal government, demonstrates that the situations are wildly dissimilar.

(It is also not legally similar as Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act, which is the only thing that allows using the US military use to enforce the law, whether restricted to doing so in the neighborhood of civilian federal infrastructure and personnel or not.)
by some_random | 2025-06-10 14:45:34+00:00
I would argue that it has already started to some degree, you can't buy really any fireworks in non-specialty stores anymore, many jurisdictions ban all sales, and every 4th there are cops chasing down people illegally launching fireworks in cities. As you said, it hasn't been connected to the greater culture war zeitgeist but I agree it's only a matter of time.
by anthony_s_khim | 2025-06-10 14:45:49+00:00
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by jordanb | 2025-06-10 14:45:49+00:00
Except fireworks "code Chinese"

I kinda forsee drone shows getting so extravagant that they make fireworks shows seem quaint: "why don't the fireworks make any pictures?"

Then the drone shows get oversaturated because they can easily be put on day after day without expending any munitions. Then they start to be seen as a nuisance and get regulated.
by laborcontract | 2025-06-10 14:46:08+00:00
I totally understand the desire to hate the liquid glass aesthetic but at least the downsides are mitigable by disabling transparency.

On the flip side, having used the beta for a while, I think I’ve fallen in love with it. The UI is absolutely gorgeous and such a delight to use. It’s the closest thing we’ve come to Aqua’s “lickability”. It’s not something that can be judged by product videos and screenshots.

From a purely utilitarian perspective, there are some regressions. The most egregious one being the lack of a properly sized url bar in Safari.. but on the other side of that, content and websites are so much more immersive with this design.

We’re definitely going to see improvements made over the beta period. Notifications are a swing and a miss and impossible to read.

I really thought I’d hate this new design language but I think Apple’s on to something here. I remember the good old days of the first iphone, and how it engaged you in a way that made you want to do stuff with the UI like flick through cover art, scroll up and down my music library just for fun, and pinch to zoom in on random things.

The liquid glass redesign is recapturing my imagination in the same way. I’m fiddling just to fiddle. This is not vista.
by anonfordays | 2025-06-10 14:46:26+00:00
This is a bad faith argument. ICE is not "throwing tear gas canisters into busy restaurants and locking people in without cause while they check their papers," they're deporting illegal aliens.

>The America I grew up in would call that "commie shit,"

No they wouldn't have. The America I grew up in didn't have a political party that fetishized trafficking in the third-world into the US. That is "commie shit."

>I'm pretty sure that I have a better representative understanding of American values to know that officers throwing a tear gas canister into the restaurant I'm eating at and then asking me to "show my papers" is exactly the kind of Soviet-ass behavior that it's my American duty to protest.

Repeating false propaganda likely from Russian assets posting on reddit is Soviet-ass "commie shit."

>I don't care about any justification, if what it requires to keep undocumented migrants out of restaurant kitchens is that cops get to kick down doors and ask people randomly for papers, I'll take the America with the 4th and 5th amendments and the undocumented migrants in the kitchen before I take the communist alternative you're offering.

I don't care about any justification, if what it requires to keep illegal immigrant slaves out of restaurant kitchens is that cops get to kick down doors and ask people randomly for papers, I'll take the America with the 4th and 5th amendments and tear gassing rioters in before I take the communist alternative of importing slave labor you're offering.

Both of us can play this game. Flooding the West with illegal aliens is literal Soviet-era propaganda. Deporting them is democracy, as this is a country for the of the people, by the people, for the people
by thunspa | 2025-06-10 14:46:34+00:00
I never used Telegram, but was under the impression that it's similar to Signal. However, Pavel Durov recently tried to meddle in the Romanian elections process[0] in a very bizarre, almost desperate attempt to misinform the electorate.

[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/05/23/why-is-t...
by cogman10 | 2025-06-10 14:46:47+00:00
> could be wildly reckless

Could be, which is why you have a lawyer to put guiderails on and give a "are you sure you want to go down this path?".

> Telling an attorney what should literally be in his response to a motion, ignores all his/her knowledge about motion practice, the law, and evidence which will be relevant to the question.

No, because before a lawyer files the response they have to (well, they should) both read, understand, and verify that it is in fact a valid response to file. Not doing so can get them sanctioned.

It's also their job to bring up to the client "Look, I know you want to file this but in my experience you'd really be better served if you did this instead".
by JadeNB | 2025-06-10 14:47:05+00:00
> I am not sure this is true for "all" mathematics. You're still using some metalogical axioms that are always true. In particular, laws of untyped lambda calculus (or any other model of universal computation) are "axioms" that you consider unquestionably true (just like you can consider unquestionable that objective shared mathematical reality exists).

Although, if you informally asked me if the rules of logic were true, then I would say that of course they are, if you asked me formally I think I would say that they are not unquestionably true, only unquestionable if you want to do classical mathematics. If you're willing to grant basic rules of logic, then certain consequences follow. If you're not, then you're not doing classical mathematics, although you might still be doing interesting mathematics—for example, if you decide not to accept the law of the excluded middle.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-06-10 14:48:00+00:00
Europe needs a whole new engineering culture if it wants to stay relevant in this field. It still is focused on outsourcing problems, people are too lazy for details and demand ready to use products.

I believe engineering in growing countries have completely different mindsets. They put the enterprise in enterprise and the results speak for themselves.

Of course you have to stay pragmatic here and not every battle is in the interest of a company. But engineers with the ability to pursue their craft, sensible knowledge management and training have become a rare sight. So R&D is just plainly better in other countries.

Problem is that this laziness of course empowers other players to grow to insane dimensions, like Microsoft did. Microsoft has many competent developers, but their success isn't due to software quality. Especially if you look at the latest cloud offerings. They are so large that they don't have to be good anymore.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-10 14:48:22+00:00
obviously by population problem I mean declining population. This is just pedantism.

That being said every expert who talks about this or studies it refers to this as a problem. Everyone. You’re on a sinking ship trying to not look like an idiot and you’re failing. It’s more than just a demographic problem. It’s a major economic problem even when looked at independent from the demographic issue.

When did I extrapolate extinction or zero birth rate? Don’t be an idiot. zero birth rate means nobody is having kids. If one person out of 10 billion people has a kid then the birth rate is positive. Only a genius can come up with a statement like zero birth rate.

What the hell is up with your underscores? “_that_” as if you know what you are talking about. You said this isn’t “_that_ novel”? Are you kidding? Every major expert or study classifies our declining birth rate as completely novel. Unprecedented in the history of mankind. Nobody knows the exact cause and nobody knows where it will lead.

In general it is associated with the cultural and technological shift in human civilization that has never happened before throughout human history. Modern technology, women’s rights, birth control, the way we live. The current way we live represents about 1 percent of our collective history and we’ve never lived this way for 99 percent of our history. For most of human civilization we couldn’t afford to raise a freaking dog because doing so would compromise our survival. Things have changed and we are very sure that the changes are related to declining population but we cannot point to an exact causal source.

Wake up. Go educate yourself about the issue extensively and learn about anthropology and the economy before pretending you know what you’re talking about.

Science will also always intersect with your love of dogs, liberal beliefs or conservative values. Ignore the morals when judging truth as truth is independent of right and wrong. Then when you have clarity about what’s going on you’ll gain the ability to interpret reality for what it is rather then blindly fighting for some ideology.

For example, I love dogs. But that doesn’t change the fact that dogs offer virtually no evolutionary benefit to humans. If you want to solve the population issue without harming your dogs then address the issue truthfully rather through some misguided attempt to protect man’s best friend by making up bs.
by rich_sasha | 2025-06-10 14:48:26+00:00
I used to code C++ in early 00s and used to think I know the language OK. Then I stopped using it, meanwhile C++11 and friends came, along with lambda syntax, move semantics etc. - that was a jump but I could still just about follow.

Now I don't follow anymore. It's a new language on top of new language on top of new language. On top of C++. On top of C.
by holsta | 2025-06-10 14:48:56+00:00
> Who do you think built and maintained the socioeconomic systems that allowed women to focus on creating and raising children?

This statement completely ignores how our current world is shaped by white supremacy and the patriarchy. Women were prohibited from taking part in anything expect raising children (which even today is seen as contributing nothing).

Women who dared venture outside the home had their work ignored or credit stolen. Eunice Foote and Rosalind Franklin are two obvious examples.

Later, textiles, telecoms and computing were powered by women labour and they were expected to stay in their lane so the men could take credit and the money.

> Women have stopped making babies.

Couples have stopped making babies.
by absurdo | 2025-06-10 14:49:23+00:00
A few things that jump out:

1) This over all seems like an advertisement piece wrapped up as an FAQ.

2) The definition of narcissism here is so loose and encompassing so many things it makes me wonder if these people can actually distinguish various pathologies. I’d opt to re-categorize especially because terms like narcissism, empathy, psychopath etc are in vogue but given their definitions it’s a day that ends with ‘y’.

3) I’d like to sincerely know the scientific backing of the education that these positions hold, in particular because while I’m okay with a certain level of hypothesizing, getting people hooked on drugs because it can cure anything from grandiosity to childhood neglect is not something I’m ready to accept at face value. I want to see how do they determine conditions, origins, and treatments.
by daseiner1 | 2025-06-10 14:49:27+00:00
You're essentially describing Idealism vs Materialism.

Related is Nietzsche thinking he was the one to overturn Plato. Heidegger thought that Nietzsche was instead the logical conclusion of metaphysics. Heidegger's project was about "returning to the Question of Being" which he thought was first occluded by Plato, so he is in strong conversation with the Pre-Socratics. Deleuze has an interesting critique of Plato built on flipping the latter's hierarchy of model and copy.

> insane forms of magical thinking like [...] where people believe that our thoughts determine reality.

This can't be hand-waved away as easily as you might think.
by sougou | 2025-06-10 14:49:37+00:00
Hello HN, co-creator of Vitess here. The goal of Multigres is to build an open source adaptation of Vitess for Postgres.

In terms of project plan, we're still deciding. One option is to fork and retrofit. This will give us immedate results, but we'll be inherting quite a bit of legacy that we'll have to overcome later. The other option is to start with a clean slate and move pieces from the original Vitess code. This will ensure that Multigres has the Postgres DNA. We'll also avoid inheriting legacy features. Let us know your thoughts on this.

I'll try my best to answer any other questions you may have.