MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GolfPopper | 2025-06-28 00:05:55+00:00
We can do better than that! Using the Sun as a gravitation lens[1], and a probe at a focal point of 542 AU, we could get 25km scale surface resolution on a planet 98 ly away. [2] This would be an immense and time-consuming endeavor, but does seem to be within humanity's current technological capabilities.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens

2. https://www.nasa.gov/general/direct-multipixel-imaging-and-s...
by pedalpete | 2025-06-28 00:07:34+00:00
I am looking for feedback, but I don't think that is a valid argument.

A single person absolutely can and should pull the fire alarm!

Are you suggesting that an entire country should operate as a single building?

Different districts have different laws and by-laws, and a district judge SHOULD be able to take issue with any law being passed down from on high. But should one person be able to challenge and essentially negate the power of the President.

Remember, I'm trying to take how this would be viewed if it were not a Trump issue. It's really easy to say "oh it's Trump, so screw him!"

I'm just surprised that this is how the system works. A single judge can bring the entire system to a stand-still? Is that really how this works?

This isn't a single person pulling a fire alarm. The alarm has been pulled, it's a single person saying "turn that damn thing off, I don't agree with your fire".

Under normal circumstances, the president wouldn't be shooting the country in the foot, so I completely agree that in this instance, perhaps it is good that a district judge can do this. But if American politics starts getting played this way, I think you may see significantly more challenges in getting good laws passed. I am not saying this is a good law.
by dh2022 | 2025-06-28 00:07:56+00:00
Huh? Kamala lost because Trump made in-roads in Latino and Arab voting population in Michigan and Wisconsin. Almost half of Latinos voted for Trump [0] and more Arabs voted for Trump than Kamala [1] and [2] and [3]. Quite the opposite of minority voters were disenfranchised - minorities exercised their right to vote the way they wanted.

[0] https://www.as-coa.org/articles/how-latinos-voted-2024-us-pr... [1] https://www.voanews.com/a/in-historic-shift-american-muslim-... [2] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/03/nx-s1-5249686/arab-muslim-vot... [3] https://thewash.org/2024/11/07/arab-american-voters-shift-to...
by kelseyfrog | 2025-06-28 00:09:05+00:00
Epistemic collapse is a terrifying phrase. It expresses a fear in of loss of an epistemic world that certainly never existed. Sure, if you've lived your entire life inside an epistemic hegemony, then epistemic pluralism feels like anarchy, but that says more about one's personal comfort applying epistemic rigor than it says about the downfall of the hegemony. Pining for the restoration of the hegemony is expressing a nostalgia for a world that never really existed.

The history of "consensus reality" is mostly the history of who got to enforce the consensus, and who didn't. If you grew up listening to Cronkite what you got was a sense that you knew what was going on - that's how it feels when you're in the hegemonic bubble. But if you've been outside it, you know how the illusion of a Potemkin village breaks down the moment you step off main street.

What's changing is that the mainstream view of what truth is was only made possible by the concentrated power afforded to television broadcasters during the middle to late 20th century. It was a product of a system few had choice in.

The internet didn’t create plural epistemologies, it simply showed you that they existed and always have, even at the heyday of broadcast tv. Of course, there are dangers, but let's not confuse danger for decline or loss.

"Who gets to decide what’s true?" was never a solved problem; we just couldn't hear other voices over the sound of The News.

The call to action isn't to revert to the golden age of epistemic monoculture. Are we truly aware we're asking for manufactured consent? Of course not. The call to action is to build skills and habits for reasoning when we're bombarded by noise and irreducible disagreement.

That's not collapse. That's what growing up looks like, for a civilization. We stop waiting for another Daddy Cronkite to come home and do the job for ourselves. The cure to epistemic anxiety is not the restoration of the hegemony. If he taught us well, we should be able to do it for ourselves.
by helij | 2025-06-28 00:10:17+00:00
This is simply not true. Did you walk any US, UK and other first-world countries factories? A lot of them have separate machinist shops with tens or hundreds of machinists who can make pretty much anything given materials and time. Even every other small factory has a machinist shop where all kinds of things are made including whole machines, parts, improvements for existing machines, etc. In my small town there are two small modern machinist shops that can make anything you want. Look around and see if there are any factories or small shops and ask if you can take a look. You would be amazed by locally made high tech you see and what can be done.

I'm not really sure when and where the "we've lost the ability to make things" came from?

I agree that other countries caught up though.
Ask HN: What's the hardest/most interesting thing you've used AI to code?
by ozb | 2025-06-28 00:10:58+00:00
Personally I'm more interested in technically complex projects, and systems programming more than web apps, vibe coding tools, or MCPs.

What tools have you used? What tips do you have?

For me this would include a couple of fuse filesystems, inter-language bridges, ORM adapter, a good chunk of app/framework code, and a lot of small platforms scripts that I probably wouldn't have bothered with if I had to look up everything instead of using AI. One notable aspect is that I've used a lot of Rust, even though I don't actually know Rust.

I do make sure to understand each block of code if not every line, and more carefully review the tests, which I generally do in a language that I do know. I use primarily aider-chat. Tips would be TDD, systematic design-architect-implement-troubleshoot and propose-criticize-refine loops, and multitasking (tmux) to avoid always waiting on an LLM response.
by dminik | 2025-06-28 00:11:44+00:00
Well, unfortunately I don't have an exact answer for you, but I do have the next best thing: speculation.

I had a quick look and found this article that compares a partial port of a C++ codebase (at around 17kloc). https://quick-lint-js.com/blog/cpp-vs-rust-build-times/

The resulting rust code apparently ended up slightly larger. This isn't entirely unsurprising to me despite the 25:1 figure from above. Certain things are much more macro-able than others (like de/serialization). Note that C++ is actually well positioned to level the field here with C++26 reflection.

Despite the slightly larger size, the compile times seem roughly equal. With rust scaling worse as the size increases. As a side-note, I did find this part relevant to some of my thoughts from above:

> For example, proc macros would let me replace three different code generators

Now, I know that C isn't C++. But, I think that when restricting yourself to a mostly C-like subset (no proc-macros, mostly no generics outside Option/Result) the result would likely mirror the one above. Depending on the domain and work needed, either language could be much shorter or longer. For example, anything involving text would likely be much shorter in rust as the stdlib has UTF-8 handling built-in. On the other hand, writing custom data structures would likely favor C.

I am interested to see if TRACTOR could help here. Being able to port C code to Rust and then observe the compile times would be pretty interesting. https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/translating-all-c-to...
by owlstuffing | 2025-06-28 00:12:01+00:00
Societal trust levels tend to correlate with cultural and racial homogeneity. The erosion of trust within Western civilization reflects this trend, particularly in the United States following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act).

But this is hardly unique to the modern era. Consider ancient Rome: as the Empire expanded, it absorbed vast, culturally diverse populations. Over time, this growing diversity--combined with weak integration mechanisms--gradually strained social cohesion and undermined trust in institutions.

It’s a recurring pattern throughout human history.
by nwallin | 2025-06-28 00:14:09+00:00
It's only binding in that district.

So here's how the loophole works. There are 12 courts of appeals. You (ICE) does a bad thing. (renditions a US citizen to an El Salvador concentration camp without due process) You get sued, appeal it to that court of appeals. Let's say it's the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, let's say you lose. You take the L and move on. You never do the bad thing in the 9th circuit again: that decision is binding. Then you do it again in a different circuit. Let's say you do the bad thing in Texas, where the 9th circuit decision was not binding. Let's say you win this time. Now the 5th circuit is your playground.

From now on, every time you arrest someone in the 9th circuit, you put them on an express flight to anywhere in the 5th district within an hour or so of arresting them, before they can get a lawyer to talk to a judge. The precedent that matters is the 5th circuit precedent, where the detainee is right now, not the 9th district (or anywhere else) where they were detained.

Because the Supreme Court has now ruled that this is a lower court problem, they've effectively blocked anyone from ever getting justice ever again.
by ggm | 2025-06-28 00:15:05+00:00
Oftentimes hard to model this from other nations. Here in Australia we have pretty well understood applicability of federal law everywhere, but when the states started enacting changes in abortion law, voluntary assisted dying, decriminalisation of recreational drugs, it all got a bit messy. Especially since we have non-state territories where enacting laws means .. conditional to the federal government with lower barriers than with the states.

Britain its mostly UK Law, with bits of "no, thats English law, this is Scotland" on top. I emigrated so long ago the national appeals structure has changed and I don't entirely understand when it applies and overrides. But immigration is clearly nation-wide.

I think "birthright" citizenship is pretty alien to most legal regimes. Ireland might be the one people think about in the Europe/Britain context. Used to be a lot of pregnant women flying in late stage. But, thats not to call it wrong or decry what the appeals in the US were trying to do. It was amended into the constitution a very long time ago, and until recently what the current WH is trying to do was seen as "fringe law" but now seems core.
by throwanem | 2025-06-28 00:15:35+00:00
It's a recurring bullshit just-so story peddled by people who reject the complexity of actual history, which is why you provide no sources: you have learned Spengler and Hanania are unwelcome in polite society but not why, and there is no one else to whom you could turn. - well, Steve Sailer, I suppose.
by GuB-42 | 2025-06-28 00:16:13+00:00
If programmers don't use a debugger, that's because the debugger is bad.

For me, the ideal debugger is one you never leave. That is you are in a debugging session, maybe with your code running, or stopped on a breakpoint, and you write your code without leaving the session. You can see the values of your variables as you type them, the branches that will be taken, etc... When an error condition happen, you break on it, and still without leaving the session, you can fix the code, roll back before the error happened and see if it passes. IntelliJ is close to that, and it seems like some tools from the video game industry are even better.

Debugging should be natural, it shouldn't be something you pull out as a last resort. If it is not natural, it is a bad debugger, or a bad development environment, period. Maybe there are reasons for why it is bad, maybe the language designers have other priorities, which is acceptable, but it doesn't change the fact that it is bad. Same goes for slow compile times by the way.
by mtlynch | 2025-06-28 00:16:53+00:00
As someone interested in learning OCaml, this felt like a pretty inaccessible introduction.

Having seen "A tour of Elm,"[0] I really prefer that style. The left-hand side (what English readers read first) is an explanation of the concept, then the right side is the code, and the explanation gives you enough details to complete the code.

This introduction doesn't really explain anything, as I guess it assumes you've learned OCaml elsewhere and are just here to practice.

I tried the first exercise, and it felt more like a math problem than an exercise to teach a programming concept:

>Suppose that a variable x exists and is an integer.

>Define a variable x_power_8 that uses three multiplications to calculate x to the power of 8. The only function you are allowed to call is the (*) operator.

>Hint: use auxiliary variables.

So, at first I thought I was supposed to just call multiply eight times, and then I realized that they said you can only call multiply three times. So, you're supposed to do let a = x * x; let b = a * a; let x_power_8 = b * b. But that feels really contrived to me and not like anything I'd write in a real application, even a toy one. If the idea is teaching variables, why not just ask me to declare a variable that represents x plus 1?

[0] https://a-tour-of-elm.axelerator.de/#JSFunctions
by rickydroll | 2025-06-28 00:17:19+00:00
Define small government.

My list starts with:

-fund basic research in science and engineering -fund nascent beneficial commercial efforts where private interests fear to tread - supply infrastructure and services that are useful to most but are natural monopolies are network effects monopolies. (i.e. roads, rail,air, healthcare, research labs, weather services to name a few) - punishing cheating. i.e. fraud, externalities such as pollution, shifting costs onto the public to enhance profitability, and all forms of financial engineering. - protection against catastrophic loss - protection of vulnerable people - limiting corporations and individuals from gaining society distorting power.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-28 00:18:20+00:00
I arrived to a thread in chaos. I don't take it to have been my foot forward.

Perhaps I could've better phrased it, "Given the emotional disregulation caused by the dissents, go read K's concurrence" -- however this is what I meant to say, still mean to say, and said.

I don't take the only legitimate aim of a comment to be "arguments" in this sense. One can comment on the psychology of the environment one finds oneself in without this being ad hom.
by hayst4ck | 2025-06-28 00:20:42+00:00
If the law is universal then it makes sense that courts can rule universally. If the law is arbitrary and every judge is basically a ruler of their own domain, which directly conflicts with the idea of Rule of Law, then it would be invalid for a lower court to make universal rulings.

It is precisely the universality and supremacy of the law which gives the lower courts the authority to make universal rulings. Just because something is federally illegal in one federal district doesn't mean it is legal in another.

The lower court doesn't have more authority than the appellate court if the appellate court can overturn the lower court.

No court has the "authority" to make arbitrary unlawful rulings.
by meatmanek | 2025-06-28 00:21:03+00:00
Because exoplanets by definition are going to be found adjacent to stars, which limits the area you need to search. Planets are fairly common, so you don't need to look at that many stars before you find evidence of an exoplanet, provided you have a good-enough telescope.

A hypothetical planet beyond Pluto be in a huge part of the sky: Presumably the orbit of such a planet could be inclined about as much as Pluto's. The 17-degree inclination of Pluto's orbit means it could be in a 34-degree wide strip of the sky, which, if I'm doing my math right, is about 29% of the full sky. If we allow for up to a 30 degree inclination, then that's half the sky.

There's also the matter of object size and brightness. The proposed Planet Nine[1] was supposed to be a few hundred AU away, and around the mass of 4 or 5 Earths. The object discovered in this paper is around 100 M🜨, at around 52 AU from its star. Closer and larger. (Of course, there's a sweet spot for exoplanet discovery, where you want the planet to be close enough to be bright, but far enough away to be outside the glare of the star.)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine
by charcircuit | 2025-06-28 00:21:04+00:00
>The next article in this series will look at the design of the interface between the C and Rust code in the kernel, as well as the process of adding new bindings when necessary.

This is the actual useful one since so little of the kernel has Rust bindings. When I tried to implement a filesystem driver in rust I spent most of my time trying to write bindings instead of trying to write a filesystem.
by odux | 2025-06-28 00:22:24+00:00
I think there is something more than that. India is fairly homogeneous. Was high trust decades (5+) ago. Trust getting lower today. Similar practices (trusting a stranger with your child) would have been conceivable in the same timeframe as mailing kids but not today. I think the other sister comment makes sense: protecting children had a very different definition back then than it is today.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-28 00:22:40+00:00
Discussion (388 points, 3 days ago, 115 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44365806

"Original source" (of this dupe): https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/after-27-years-engin... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44400825)
by normadia | 2025-06-28 00:23:45+00:00
I’m building a website designed to help small and medium-sized businesses formalize their requirements for IT projects by AI generating a Functional Specification (aka a business requirements document).

In my experience, many IT projects fail or face serious delays simply because this essential alignment phase is poorly managed and overlooked as this task is usually very time consuming. This website aims to save business departments’ valuable time allowing them to focus on building their value proposition.

I want to speed up and simplify this painful process. Another lead I might want to develop soon: The algorithm would gather inputs from different stakeholders asynchronously, it would detect contradictions or conflicts between expectations, and suggests corrections to create a consistent and clear business requirements document.

Normadia https://normadia.vercel.app/
by mindslight | 2025-06-28 00:25:19+00:00
> They will die on their sword for 2A

No, they will not. Remember when Breonna Taylor was summarily executed for Kenneth Walker exercising his second amendment right to night time home defense - one of the exact scenarios the gun-fundamentalists are always fantasizing about - but then the Trumpists came out on the side of licking the jackboots?

Personally, I think it is likely that sometime during this Trump "presidency" we will see him call for more national gun control (obviously framed in terms of hurting some vulnerable group). We will see most of his supporters fall right in line, just as they have been doing on everything else. There will be heaps of rationalization about how it won't affect them of course, and they might even be right.

Morals, values, and other lofty ideals mean nothing to these people, beyond being trotted out as dishonest justifications to try and trick reasonable people into supporting their movement. I'm sure they meant something at some point, but that has been long forgotten. Their only real desire appears to be unrestrained power for their team, demonstrating it by hurting people who aren't on their team. This is why it has been impossible to have an actual discussion about what they actually want, or how Dear Leader and his policies fail at everything they claim to want - there is literally nothing of substance there.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-28 00:26:14+00:00
> This interpretation is not to be found in the ruling.

Then you haven't read it. It's explicit.

> they opened the door to official corruption,

Their job is not to make America moral, that's the job of the congress and the democractic process of government. If they say a statue means A rather than B, it is then the job of elected representatives to clarify they mean B. Or else you believe 9 unelected people should govern the country. Congress often modifies law in light of SC rulings to make these clarifications.

> Your position makes it impossible to ever find that SCOTUS...

I don't think you've understood my point. My point was only that today's ruling asserts what you are asserting. The SC has explicitly said that they will still impose universal injunctions, still invalidate executive orders, etc. Only that district courts cannot.

There is nothing in this principle which means that the courts can no longer constrain the executive. The constitution only prescribes one court, the supreme court -- all others are created by congress and must therefore be granted these powers by congress.

What the SC has said is that these powers were not given to district courts by congress. They still can be if congress wishes. So congress can grant these powers.

All of this is irrelevant anyway, as K explains in his concurrence, that there are many ways to universally challege this order that do not require extraordinary powers to be given to district court judges, powers never given to them by congress.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-06-28 00:26:44+00:00
Yeah sure, just like in 2016 in the Paint in Black video ?

I have no doubts that the car drove itself to the customer. We are in 2025 - there are several autonomous vehicle operators, that logged millions of autonomous miles. There is nothing difficult to fake a 'self delivered car'.

By faked I mean - a pre-mapped, potentially driven 100 times route before the real 'delivery' took place. If they start delivering autonomously to all the clients, then I'm completely wrong and it would absolutely be very impressive. But we both now that it will not happen (or as Tesla like to say in 'two weeks maybe').
by 8note | 2025-06-28 00:26:59+00:00
thats not very convincing. you should also show that it wasnt say, inequality that killed the trust

canada is a high trust society because of its ethnic diversity, and the competition between french and englisg culture. europe is in a much higher trust state as the EU than it ever was as a set of competing great powers.

greece has plenty of homogeny, but is very low trust.

keeping racists happy is probably pretty uncorrelated to trust, compared to say, government services rendered, and democratic participation.
by golly_ned | 2025-06-28 00:27:51+00:00
"Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don't have jobs"

That's a "prediction" by Amodei.

It's just words. Pure bullshit. Diminishing my otherwise high opinion of Anthropic.

Easily the biggest reason I left anthropic recruiter on read.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-06-28 00:28:53+00:00
> Agreed that the odd spikes don't matter, that's why I didn't bother discussing them

That was sarcasm =P Those spikes are very curious and the choice of presentation makes them seem like noise but there is something there that should be investigated further imho. In the graph it looks like noise. I mean it’s just 1ns. But a 2x throughput difference isn’t noise! Thats huge! Very curious.

> Not sure I quite follow what you're saying about mmap on Linux vs Mac

Your 4th conclusion is “On Linux, random order starts getting even slower for arrays over a gigabyte, becoming more than 50x slower than first-to-last order; in contrast, random order on the MacBook seems to just level out as long as everything fits in RAM.”. That doesn’t make sense. There shouldn’t be any OS difference here.