MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by techpineapple | 2025-06-27 12:23:24+00:00
“There certainly are diminishing returns to going into science or going into academia generally. Maybe this is why so much of it feels like a sociopathic, Malthusian kind of an institution, because you have to throw more and more and more at something to get the same returns. And at some point, people give up and the thing collapses.”

Isn’t this the nature of any growth curve? The farther you get into it the more you have to spend for a similar gain?

One of the things I don’t like about Thiel, and all the folks in this space, and maybe this is what being a world-changing VC is, is it feels like their all looking for a cheat code instead of addressing the problem head on.

And looking for revolutions and leverage are important, but why not find an alternative “Harvard” that works the way he wants.

In a certain way, it sounds like he’s saying a combination of “the worlds broken and only I can fix it” or “the worlds broken, and it’s everyone else’s fault but mine.

And - I’m all for disruption by being a leader to show people how to do it better, but incremental gains through traditional research are working to solve some kinda of problems, why disrupt that destructively rather than creatively?
by v5v3 | 2025-06-27 12:23:28+00:00
What if the adult creates the account and them gives the switch to a kid? How would Nintendo know who is playing.

Ai answer for definition of 'annual playing users' as per that slide:

Nintendo defines *"Annual Playing Users"* as the number of unique users (based on Nintendo Accounts registered to Switch systems) who played software on the Nintendo Switch during a given 12-month period. This metric includes all active players across age groups and regions, regardless of whether they share a single console or own multiple units.

### Key Details: 1. *Scope*: Counts users who engaged with any Switch software within a year, not tied to hardware sales (e.g., one console can have multiple players) . 2. *Growth Trend*: Nintendo reported *129 million Annual Playing Users in 2024*, up from 127 million in 2023, reflecting sustained engagement despite the Switch’s aging lifecycle . 3. *Demographics*: Includes a broad age range (kids to seniors) and a near-even gender split (50/50 male/female) . 4. *Exclusions*: Does not differentiate between casual or frequent players—only active participation in the year is required .

This metric helps Nintendo gauge platform engagement beyond raw hardware sales, emphasizing its hybrid model’s shared-use potential .
by lazypenguin | 2025-06-27 12:23:32+00:00
There’s a big advantage to having your whole application in one language. I’m not sure the experience of egui on mobile though but egui is great to use as a developer

Pros

- Solid widget set

- Easy to get started

- Less state management

- Easy to make custom widgets

- Active community and crates (e.g docking view, tables, etc.)

- Fast to build new Ui

Cons

- Harder to do layouts (has multipass and some flexbox crates but still hard and compile loop makes it slow to iterate)

- Bring your own architecture (no restrictions on how you build your app so easy to make spaghetti if you’re not careful)

Egui is currently my favorite Rust UI crate although Slint and iced are also interesting.
by the__alchemist | 2025-06-27 12:23:59+00:00
I'm curious too. I currently have both a plasmid editor, and protein/molecule viewer using EGUI. Both have complex UIs, and I haven't hit roadblocks. I think the protein viewer might be more of a canonical immediate-mode case, because most of the window is a 3D render, but it still has a GUI above it.
by dinfinity | 2025-06-27 12:24:49+00:00
You're confusing 'adaptation', 'knowledge', and 'intelligence'. The scientific comparison would be to put the mathematician and (lower IQ for the example) tribesman in the same situation from birth and see which performs better.

Now it's still not a given in that situation that the high IQ individual would be better adapted to the environment as physical traits may matter more, but it is probable that the high IQ individual has a better model of the predators, spiders, snakes and environment in general.

The speed with which an individual develops accuracy in their model of something (ceteris paribus) does seem to be captured by an IQ-like score, according to the research.

The thing people that actually causes problems is that people mentally equate 'higher intelligence' with 'better' or 'more valuable' which goes against our desire for humans to all be equal(ly valuable). That is what generally leads people to come up with other forms of 'intelligence' (emotional intelligence, street smarts, etc.), even though that just redefines intelligence to the point where the original meaning is lost and a new word needs to be introduced. Much better imho is to keep the original word intact and use terms like 'emotional competence', which also capture the experience part rather than just the genetic part.
by bapak | 2025-06-27 12:24:58+00:00
I don’t like React but I disagree with this sentiment. First of all you can already opt out of declarative DOM and knock yourself out with innerHTML and ref.

Second, what can you do with imperative control of the DOM that is less practical with the declarative one? I can only think of certain methods (attachShadow(), showModal()) but even then you're a 10-line component away from making it declarative.
by unwind | 2025-06-27 12:25:31+00:00
Yeah, since the M777 doesn't have a napalm shell [1] that would be totally absurd! :D

In fact, since I got curious, it seems nobody fires napalm out of howitzers, it's non-trivial to combine the thin easy-to-break shell skin needed by napalm with something tough enough to be fired from artillery [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M777_howitzer#Ammunition

[2]: https://www.quora.com/Was-napalm-ever-used-in-artillery-roun...
by the__alchemist | 2025-06-27 12:25:38+00:00
I think the default behavior is to only re-render if the window is active/focused. You can trigger a render at specific points, including in the main loop, which will result in the behavior you mention.

This can be problematic, e.g. some of the sensor interfaces I have, I want to always display correct data, even if not focused. So, I have to decide if I want to have old data shown in the background misleading users, or have a per penalty from constant renders. Or try something else to be clever. (Maybe have it update at a low rate if not focused? I think that's the move...)
by Arnt | 2025-06-27 12:25:40+00:00
There's more. Traffic accidents, Americans have more than twice as many fatal accidents as Europeans and 3-4 times as many as France/Finland/…, and the age of people dying in traffic pulls down the overall average. And of course crime. Americans shoot each other, and that's not just 95-year-olds, so that'll pull down the average as well.
by Kwpolska | 2025-06-27 12:25:43+00:00
Postman is just a terrible GUI for making HTTP requests. Using a REST API can be as simple as `curl https://api.github.com/repos/torvalds/linux`, and you can even open that link in a browser. SOAP requires sending a ton of XML [0] - it is not very usable without a dedicated SOAP-aware tool.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP#Example_message_(encapsul...
by Arathorn | 2025-06-27 12:26:31+00:00
> View from 1000 feet: maybe a way to lock a room's users would be interesting?

That's a really interesting idea - having immutable memberships could be a good band-aid. The problem is that right now the fact that room membership is typically mutable can be valuable: you add assistants into DMs (human or virtual); you can bridge the DM to other platforms; you can add (benign) audit bots for compliance purposes; you can migrate between Matrix IDs by inviting in your new ID and kicking out the old one; etc.

Of course, this same flexibility comes with a risk, and I see the point that it might be better to 'seal' membership if you know this is flexibility you don't want. We'll have a think.

> Or, instead, maybe an option to disable forwarding session keys older than the user's room join event, to keep forward secrecy so that a new user does not get to read old messages (or does this already happen every 100 messages?).

Currently we never forward session keys, so new users don't get to read old messages whatever. This obviously causes its own problems, especially for Slack/Teams style use cases where new joiners expect to be able to read conversation history. Work is ongoing right now to finally fix this (https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/39), but we are very mindful of the risk of not sharing existing history to the wrong users (or devices), which is one of the reasons it's taken so long to land.

The 100-message thing is separate: it's the maximum number of times a session-key ratchet can be advanced before it gets replaced. In other words, if you steal a session key, you can only use it to decrypt a maximum of the 100 subsequent messages sent by that device.
by newswangerd | 2025-06-27 12:26:35+00:00
I've been doing something similar to this, except with go. In my case I have a flutter frontend and a go backend that's built using go mobile. Instead of trying to figure out how to make all of my go functions use data types that are supported by the various native frameworks, I've opted to use protobuf objects for every type that is shared between the frontend and backend. This way I can expose a single go function via the flutter FFI that takes in a binary array and then converts it to a protobuf object. This gives me a nice separation of concerns between my business logic and frontend while also providing easy to use objects for the front and backend.

Not sure that I'd recommend this approach to everyone. Protobuf code generation can be finicky to set up, but I'm doing it so that I can access go's rich array of libraries in my app.
by patwolf | 2025-06-27 12:28:42+00:00
I'm old enough to remember when Google released AJAXSLT in 2005. It was a JS implementation of XSLT so that you could consistently use XSLT in the browser.

The funny thing is that the concept of AJAX was fairly new at the time, and so for them it made sense that the future of "fat" web pages (that's the term they use in their doc) was to use AJAX to download XML and transform it. But then people quickly learned that if you could just use JS to generate content, why bother with XML at all?

Back in 2005 I was evaluating some web framework concepts from R&D at the company I worked, and they were still very much in an XML mindset. I remember they created an HTML table widget that loaded XML documents and used XPATH to select content to render in the cells.
by techpineapple | 2025-06-27 12:29:00+00:00
That’s interesting, so maybe - Stanford enrolls say 50k people and lets the chips fall where they may in terms of majors and doesn’t like prescriptively try and recruit x numbers of comp sci majors. — and the chips are falling away from CS.

Or they are recruiting for growth, but as students progress the natural rate of major change is not as biased towards CS.
by fsloth | 2025-06-27 12:29:59+00:00
The applicable experiment for IQ would be to take two ”equal” populations (say,1000 ppl with middle-class background each), sort by IQ, cut the sample set at the middle to lower than median, and higher than median group.

The statistics so far show that the upper median group will do better on average. One might end up in jungle but it does not really matter for our experiment.

For individuals, IQ is sort of statistical proxy for lots of things if your daily life is lived in a first world country.

But it’s insane to hold it as some sort of key indicator of fundamental human potential.

In population statistical situations, like when hiring, however, imho it does make sense to prefer high iq individuals. Not because of what it tells of a single candidate’s potential, but it acts as a sort of maxwells demon for the workforce as total. So you end up with a employee pool closer to above-median group in our experiment which may or may not provide better business outcomes.
by _flux | 2025-06-27 12:30:04+00:00
I believe these two statements should show the fundamental difference:

- If a safe Rust program exhibits a memory safety problem, it is a bug in the Rust compiler that is to be fixed - If a Zig program exhibits a memory safety problem, it is a bug in the Zig program that needs to be fixed, not in the compiler

Wouldn't you agree?

> Ferrocene is intended to document the behavior of the current version of the rustc compiler, so it's just an effort to formalize "the compiler is the language".

I must admit I haven't read the specification, but I doubt they attempt to be "bug for bug" compatible in the sense that the spec enumerates memory safety bugs present in the Rust compiler. But am I then mistaken?
by nordsieck | 2025-06-27 12:31:28+00:00
> If a actor works for a day on a TV show he may get cheques forever.

Most actors get paid either a fixed fee or hourly. It's only the top talent that can negotiate points. And honestly, that's pretty good for the producers, since that decreases their risk if the TV show or movie doesn't do well.

> If you hire a photographer for a wedding, you will pay him the same rate as a contract developer. But you won't own the rights to the photos and keep having to pay the guy if you want copies.

This part is so weird to me. But I honestly suspect that most photography customers don't care so much about owning the rights to the photograph they pay for, as long as they can use it how they want. And over time, the norm gradually became baked into the industry.
by 7thaccount | 2025-06-27 12:32:17+00:00
In this case you're talking about some information that the professor doesn't know. We don't know if he would or wouldn't have naturally excelled at that if he had been born in that environment.

I think there is learning ability like what kind of CPU your brain gets. Some people get a super computer that seems to break down at times. Some get an i7, some a Pentium III, and even some a TI-89 chip.

Then there is knowledge, which is what you take the time to learn and is kind of like an external storage drive to continue with the computing analogy. Even if you're not able to learn as fast as someone who is equipped with a better chip, you can outperform them at work if you know a lot more about the subject (you studied hard outside of work) and have taken the time to learn new skills like programming (you added new software programs to continue the analogy).

Then there is wisdom. You have a sort of common sense and ability to see the consequences of certain actions in a way that isn't so common.

Overall Intelligence in my eyes is then the sum total of someone's 1.) learning/processing ability, 2.) knowledge across multiple domains, and 3.) wisdom. Someone with a lot of #1 may be considered by many to be unintelligient if they have little of #2 and #3.

This is just my own stupid view on the subject though. I sometimes think we just haven't invented the vocabulary necessary to discuss this - that or I'm just not educated on the subject.
by mtndew4brkfst | 2025-06-27 12:32:39+00:00
Anyone considering it will need to decide for themselves how to feel about it, but I think it's important to prospective users to highlight that the current licensing model for Slint requires either GPL3-compatible licensing of your work, advertising for Slint within your own software, or paying ongoing licensing fees and/or royalties.

https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/blob/master/FAQ.md#licensi...

I only mention this because those constraints are notably more restrictive than the vast majority of the Rust crate ecosystem.

I take no particular stance on whether this is a fair or good practice or about the technical suitability of Slint beyond this concern, I just think it's a hurdle for most people so they should be made aware early and often.
by bell-cot | 2025-06-27 12:33:05+00:00
> With superconductors just in the rotor coils, the motor will achieve efficiencies in the range of 98 to 99.5 percent, which is about four or five percentage points higher than what is realistically possible with a permanent-magnet synchronous motor.

Just between the vacuum chambers and the cryogenics, I'm thinking their new motor would add a whole lot of failure modes for that 4% or 5% gain. Then there's the learning curve - which starts with the engineers trying to design the engine mountings, management & control systems, and cockpit controls.

It'd be interesting to hear what Admiral Cloudberg thinks of this idea.
by switknee | 2025-06-27 12:33:09+00:00
I believe you're confusing knowledge and intelligence. This is effectively like saying intelligence is circumstantial because Mike Tyson could punch through the mathematician's head in the boxing ring. You're comparing an ability (intelligence) to a skill (jungle stuff).

To accurately test the jungle guy's intelligence you'd need to devise a test that doesn't require reading nor writing (skills he hasn't yet developed). The point is to test how well his brain works, not what he's learned. With physical testing there are similar situations, where two people can have the same strength and endurance but one of them can achieve more with it due to certain skills like dance or being Mike Tyson.
by wglb | 2025-06-27 12:33:37+00:00
For whatever reason, my career has been driven by curiosity, first computers and Fortran II, then real-time medical data analysis, then compilers, then collection of batch financial data from dozens of sources, then low-latency financial trading backed by genetic programming, then application security.

I've luckily managed to avoid too many brain-dead execs, but there have been spells that the gig is boring.

Looking back on it, there have been very few spells in which I have not been programming, if not for a gig, but on my own to explore my curiosity.
by basisword | 2025-06-27 12:34:33+00:00
>> 99.9% of people won’t bother at all

I'm not sure about this. Piracy is rampant on Android. "Cracked" versions of Spotify which enable premium for unpaid users are very common. Given developers often prioritise iOS due to the fact users are more willing to pay opening the platform up to piracy could have wide ranging effects on the marketplace as a whole.
by kcplate | 2025-06-27 12:35:09+00:00
> his belief was that radar tracked other (jet) aircraft airspeed by reading the reflections bounced off of the other jets' turning pistons and calculating airspeed by how fast their piston assembly rotated.

TBH this sounds a lot like something I would say just to fuck with a buddy to see a reaction. Oh and I could sell it with a straight face pretty damn good too. Although I wouldn’t let the ruse last long term. Not saying that’s the case here, but that would be my first assumption if I heard something so off the wall that defies belief from someone who should know better.

Of course you have had folks seriously arguing Q Anon, lizard popes, shape shifting Obama family members and all that mess too…so there are definitely those among us that have probably heard “what is you, stupid or something?” more than once in their lives.
by chriswarbo | 2025-06-27 12:36:03+00:00
> part of the problem with the entire "XML as a savior" mindset of that earlier era

I think part of the problem is focusing on the wrong aspect. In the case of XSLT, I'd argue its most important properties are being pure, declarative, and extensible. Those can have knock-on effects, like enabling parallel processing, untrusted input, static analysis, etc. The fact it's written in XML is less important.

Its biggest competitor is JS, which might have nicer syntax but it loses those core features of being pure and declarative (we can implement pure/declarative things inside JS if we like, but requiring a JS interpreter at all is bad news for parallelism, security, static analysis, etc.).

When fashions change (e.g. XML giving way to JS, and JSON), we can end up throwing out good ideas (like a standard way to declare pure data transformations).

(Of course, there's another layer to this, since XML itself was a more fashionable alternative to S-expressions; and XSLT is sort of like Lisp macros. Everything old is new again...)
by Sharlin | 2025-06-27 12:36:14+00:00
Yes, but it just creates a new immutable branch in the commit graph. All the old commits are still there, but if they're not reachable from the root refs, they'll get GC'd eventually. The only mutable parts are HEAD, branch/tag names etc that can be changed to point to whatever. Anything that has a hash is necessarily immutable, because changing it in any way (including changing its parent pointer(s)) changes the hash.
by treetalker | 2025-06-27 12:37:26+00:00
From my reading, even according to Consumer Reports nitrogen can be preferable to air, but Consumer Reports believes the hassle of finding nitrogen, and the added expense, make monthly fill-ups with regular air a better option.

But that doesn't really apply to Costco members: the ready availability of free nitrogen at Costco eliminates any downside.

On that note, a related tip for Costco members (only because I always see people fail to read the instructions): on Costco's tire-inflation pumps, if your tires are hot (meaning you have driven at least 3 miles to arrive at the pump) you're supposed to set the pressure to 4 psi more than the pressure recommended on the label in your vehicle's door jamb.
by OJFord | 2025-06-27 12:37:28+00:00
I mean in the article about the jailbreak, I'm not questioning that the model providers would want to prevent it in the first place, or patch it so the jailbreak doesn't work.

The evidence that it worked is a blurred out screenshot with only the odd word like 'molotov' legible. Just doesn't seem necessary for TFA to hide it to me.
by dgfl | 2025-06-27 12:38:48+00:00
It could also be that their brain is somehow just more optimized. Some extreme outliers (e.g. Von Neumann or Tao) don’t seem to have any significant gaps in their abilities. Although Von Neumann did die of a brain-related issue, so perhaps what was gained in efficiency was lost in reliability. Kind of like tuning an engine.

But this is biology after all. Most likely, plain improvements with zero downsides, very narrow improvements at the expense of something else, and improvements at the expense of life expectancy, are all possible mutations.
by echelon | 2025-06-27 12:38:50+00:00
That's one type of signal and gradient. There are lots of others. One of the best is traction with paying customers. The great thing is that investment capital can try many strategies at once. As can innovation capital and labor.

Collectively we are water, filling all the cracks. Marbles, exploring all the slopes and curves. The fitness gradients of the universe are all in front of us. Follow the ones that make sense and that pull at you. We're all programmed differently enough that the whole space is being sampled, even in the weird places, the well-worn yet unweildy paths, and the completely non obvious domains.

The algorithm focuses energy when certainty crystalizes.
by danaris | 2025-06-27 12:40:49+00:00
It is absolutely not propaganda.

I live in a rural village about 5 hours' drive from NYC. There is no public transport here.

If I drive 45 minutes to the nearest city, I can catch a train—but that train will only take me to a few destinations (primarily Albany, NYC, or Boston one way, or Buffalo, Chicago and points west the other way).

Some cities (outside of major metropolitan areas, which do generally have some kind of rail system) have intracity buses, but they tend to be underfunded and dirty.
by Notatheist | 2025-06-27 12:41:05+00:00
I would have preferred if the author reasoned through why a filmmaker might make these decisions and/or offer feasible solutions. "This is wrong" does not seem helpful to an audience. That proper roman battle looks an order of magnitude more expensive to shoot, Decimus Meridius Maximus doesn't flow off the tongue as well, and there are plenty of composition arguments to be made for why the fortifications and formations look like they do.