MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasperry | 2025-06-16 18:48:01+00:00
How is random.org publicly verifiable? As far as I know, there's no way to prove that a certain set of numbers was produced by random.org at a certain time.

The public verifiability is the real "quantum" advance of this research; probably the title should say that. Of course, it's true that when you don't need public verifiability, your OS's entropy pool + PRNG is good enough for any currently known scenario.
by wkat4242 | 2025-06-16 18:49:00+00:00
One of the drawbacks of SF6 is said to be the protective clothing. But it sounds like CO2 at almost-liquid pressures will be even more dangerous to an unprotected human.

Though I looked it up and the pressure isn't as high as I thought at around 72 bar. Still enough to make weak parts explode though.

In other words, I don't think this will be the end of protective gear.
by wildzzz | 2025-06-16 18:49:49+00:00
It could just be that using Ethernet allows for more flexibility in what is connected to that board-to-board connector. In this instance, it's a wifi router but a customer may instead want a bare port to connect to their existing infrastructure (just the modem). It also means you don't have to worry about which MII standard both boards use, they can be upgraded independent of each other. The physical interface for Ethernet remains the same whereas MII has different pin counts.
by techpineapple | 2025-06-16 18:49:58+00:00
I’m curious what’s going to come of this government tech overhaul, on the one hand, I think there are a decent number of the people getting involved with good intentions, and I do think there are probably plenty of opportunities to tech overhaul some areas of the government and tech execs are good ones to lead that( as Obama found out when he hired a bunch to fix Healthcare.gov)

On the other hand if it’s to factional, it will probably be a mess. Sahil seemed to really hope there were some good opportunities for traditional process improvements:

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/02/nx-s1-5417994/former-doge-eng...

But there seems to be a “AI all the things” contingent that I’m less optimistic about.
by sandworm101 | 2025-06-16 18:50:10+00:00
Most any sensor attached to a realworld physical system can produce sufficient randomness. Put a vibration sensor on my clothes dryer, plug the output into an md5 hash, and voila. Or setup a webcam aimed at a tree blowing in a breeze. Or pour out some m&ms onto a table and photograph that. We dont need to go quantum when sufficiently random systems like turbulance exist in the macro world.
by not_your_vase | 2025-06-16 18:50:14+00:00
The animation looks nice. I was curious how it uses Google translate, without any api keys and stuff, it's not unheard that google blocks unauthorized users... The title claims Google translate, but the code seems to call

https://api.jigsawstack.com/v1/ai/translate

and it also seems to require a separate API key. Which is fine, but it's not google translate (though not saying that this is a bad thing... just a statement of fact)
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-16 18:50:19+00:00
Basically they get to measure a super position particle twice, by using an entangled pair of it. So two detectors that each measure one of the particle's 3 possible spin directions, which are known to be identical (but usually you only get to make 1 measurement, so now we can essentially measure 2 directions). We then compare how the different spin directions agree or disagree with each other in a chart.

15% of the time they get combination result A, 15% of the time they get combination result B. Logically we would expect a result of A or B 30% of the time, and combination result C 70% of the time (There are only 3 combinatorial output possibilities - A,B,C)

But when we set the detectors to rule out result C (so they must be either A or B), we get a result of 50%.

So it seems like the particle is able to change it's result based on how you deduce it. A local hidden variable almost certainly would be static regardless of how you determine it.

This is simplified and dumbified because I am no expert, but that is the gist of it.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-16 18:51:30+00:00
I don't see it as a binary option. Why can't we learn from one another? I'm more interested in some of the elements found in for instance that system, where the victim can elect to prioritize restitution over retribution when it leads to a higher likelihood they will be made whole. I don't see any requirement that one has to embrace everything about a societies' system to find advantages in elements of it.
by EastLondonCoder | 2025-06-16 18:51:42+00:00
Many years ago I used to work for a company in the gambling domain. There was a story going around from years before I joined that hardware TNRGs where used. And one day they failed. I can't remember precisely but heat was involved in one way or another and the failure mode they encountered was caused by overheating and repeatedly giving an endless series ones. A switch to PNRGs was promptly introduced.
by silisili | 2025-06-16 18:51:52+00:00
Aw man, this sounded like just my kind of place. But...

> It’s a sentiment eagerly embraced by The Dull Men’s Club. Several million members in a number of connected Facebook groups strive to cause dullness in others on a daily basis.

Apparently I'm too dull to even have a FB account. I know it's a bit tongue in cheek, but in the name of maximum dullness, something with UX closer to this site seems much more appropriate than a Facebook group.
by owenversteeg | 2025-06-16 18:52:26+00:00
For those that aren't familiar with Richard Foreman, he was an experimental playwright who died earlier this year. I think a few quotes from the article do a good job at summarizing who he was:

>These were not plays in any traditional sense. Instead, Foreman created living works of art by “using everything” that a given moment in time brought to bear on his process. He began not with a completed script but with a raw running text, the lines of which he would assign during his monthslong rehearsals, arranging and rearranging his words, giving them to one actor then trying them out on another.

>The visual style of his earliest works resembled that of the surrealists: he composed tidy, witty tableaux of odd objects and strange people speaking what often seemed like stray thoughts, all of which briefly shared the air before careening into their next encounter. Later, the look of his productions became more macabre, almost menacing: he would litter the stage with stuff, visual interferences that prompted the audience to lean closer and look harder. Throughout, his plays remained fairly consistent, all running about seventy minutes and keeping his performers in a near-constant state of movement as they spouted lines that sounded as though a mystic had fallen through the looking glass or a philosopher had become stuck in a screwball comedy. These mind-melting, incandescent productions were equal parts theater, philosophy, literature, and visual art.

>He wrote and directed at least one new play a year, designing the sets as well as the sound, which comprised densely layered loops and samples that he himself played live at every performance.

>Foreman was a MacArthur Fellow whose genius status did not prevent handfuls of people from leaving the theater at nearly every single one of his shows.

Something the HN crowd can appreciate: he offered up his plays to the public, on his website ontological.com, free to stage or create new works or do what you wished.

If you have a spare sixty seven minutes, you could watch his play Lava: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE
by abetusk | 2025-06-16 18:52:30+00:00
Thanks for the link, very interesting. I'll have to check out the paper but just watching the video it seems all these counter intuitive effects can be described from the oscillations being related to the size of the chamber.

For example if I were to roll the chamber at a very low frequency, I would expect the particles to clump on one side, then the other and so on. This is not really so surprising and the frequency will depend on the chamber dimensions.
by footy | 2025-06-16 18:53:09+00:00
> it's apparently not at all uncommon for autistic folks to have this sort of extremely strong empathy response in some cases, while a totally flat empathy response in others

to add another datapoint to this, the only movie that's ever made me cry is Wall-E. I felt so sad for him at the beginning of it, all alone and trying to complete an impossible, unappreciated task.

I'm sure there are objectively sadder movies out there, but not for me.
by arrowsmith | 2025-06-16 18:53:24+00:00
Elixir really needs to lose the perception, if there is one, of it being a subset of the Ruby/Rails community. It's true that the initial influx of Elixir developers came from the Ruby world back when Elixir was new, but that was a long time ago. Tons of Elixir folk come into it nowadays without a Ruby background.

Elixir and Ruby really aren't that similar anyway. The syntax differences are very superficial - Elixir's a functional language with very style and semantics to Ruby, and that's even before you get into the magic of OTP and the BEAM, for which Ruby has nothing comparable.
by Denvercoder9 | 2025-06-16 18:54:23+00:00
It's actually because someone with "crap" as a substring of their e-mail address made a bunch of contributions with their e-mail address in it (e.g. in maintainer records and copyright notices) around that time. Nothing to do with COVID-19.

See the graph with the entire domain for comparison: https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#crapouillou
by pcthrowaway | 2025-06-16 18:54:51+00:00
I'd be interested in a hacker cruise.

A boat with 100 hackers on board is in the middle of the ocean when the nav system gains self-awareness and decides not to return to land.

The boat is equipped with satellite communication devices, but passenger internet access is off.

Only 40 days of rations.

Will they be able to hack their way back to shore before they run out of red bull? Or will they turn to a life of piracy instead?
Show HN: Drop – Svelte like compiler for Web components
by GuillaumeDucret | 2025-06-16 18:55:55+00:00
I've built a small compiler, heavily inspired by Svelte, that leans on modern web standards and proposals, namely Web Components, HTML Modules, and Signals.

Although web components never really took off, I still believe they have strong potential as a foundation for building web applications without relying on a framework.

GitHub: https://github.com/GuillaumeDucret/drop

Blog post: https://guillaumeducret.medium.com/web-components-and-my-que...

I’d appreciate some feedback before committing more time to this project !
by Ray20 | 2025-06-16 18:56:21+00:00
>Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.

What a complete bs. If anything, in India it costs MORE to achieve a similar standard of living than in the USA. In India you can spend 3 times what a US worker gets paid - and you'll barely have enough money to get the same level of security that that worker gets.

Companies don't care, they pay the minimum amount that they think will interest the worker for long-term employment. And since in India or Thailand the workers don't have such a wide choice in work - they will be paid less, just enough to get them. And they pay the Americans just enough to get them, it is just happening that for Americans this amount are several times bigger. That's all here is.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-06-16 18:56:49+00:00
Yeah it's not ideal for sparse populations but I think you could get a lot of coverage by just running a node with a solar panel wherever your mailbox is and also having your mail driver put a node in their vehicle.

Really the thing I'm trying to push back against is the idea that the entire path between them must be connected all at once in order for two parties to communicate. If we design for short range, partition-tolerant, pocket-to-pocket background gossip, then that same protocol will work just fine if you attach specialty radio hardware and give it miles worth of range, and you've still got the fallback ready for cases where all you have is consumer grade hardware.

On the other hand, if you design for persistent connectivity and then try to use it in an intermittently-connected context, you're going to have a much worse time.
by tptacek | 2025-06-16 18:57:02+00:00
Well, I'll just say, when I referred earlier to institutionalized systems wherein victims are given principal roles in meting out justice, I was specifically using that word to contrast with things like xeer clan law --- a system you just implied might be superior to our common law system (it is not). There are "modern" legal systems descended from that kind of oral tradition honor law. You would not want to live under them.

Happy to keep nerding out on comparative legal stuff from around the world! Just keeping this grounded in "you probably wouldn't enjoy living somewhere where your landlord can have you imprisoned for unpaid rent".
by BizarroLand | 2025-06-16 18:57:16+00:00
Counter Argument:

Talking to therapists is difficult, time-consuming, painful, annoying, and expensive. The number of hoops you have to jump through just to get to the starting line is crazy, even if you are willing and able to pay the few hundred dollars an hour out of pocket yourself.

Therapy isn't like confession or church or a religious experience. Its proposed benefits will never be life changing, it will not build you up, it will not give you anything you didn't already have, and you have to pay for it.

If I can work out a few kinks in my psyche on my own I'll do that. If I bounce some words off of a convenient lie bot, then fine.

The only way I can get more f'd in the head would be to start killing, and at this point I just don't have the drive to take on murder as a new hobby.
by benreesman | 2025-06-16 18:57:46+00:00
It's a daily thing we all do: decide if this problem is better solved by a big chunk of code that is probably well tested but probably satisfies a bunch of requirements and other constraints or a smaller chunk of code that I can write or vendor in and has other advantages or maybe I just prefer how its spelled. Sometimes there's a "right" answer, e.g. you should generally link in your TLS implantation unless you're a professional TLS pereon, but usually its a judgement call, and the aggregate of all those micro-decisions are a component of the intangible ideal of "good taste" (also somewhat subjective but most agree on the concept of an ideal).

In this instance the maintainer of a useful piece of software has made a choice that's a little less common in C++ (totally standard practice in C) and it seems fine, its on the bubble, I probably default the other way, but std::function is complex and there are platforms where that kind of machine economy is a real consideration, so why not?

In a zillion contributor project I'd be a little more skeptical of the call, but even on massive projects like the Linux kernel they make decisions about the house style that seem unorthodox to outsiders and they have their reasons for doing so. I misplaced the link but a kernel maintainer raised grep-friendliness as a reason he didn't want a patch. At first I was like, nah you're not saying the real reason, but I looked a little and indeed, the new stuff would be harder to navigate without a super well-configured LSP.

Longtime maintainers have reasons they do things a certain way, and the real test is the result. In this instance (and in most) I think the maintainer seems to know what's best for their project.
by derbOac | 2025-06-16 18:57:54+00:00
But why political content in particular?

If there is any kind of concern about content monopoly, they shouldn't grant the merger, period, it seems to me. Singling out political content is where their discussions seem questionable from my perspective. Otherwise the tacit argument is "content monopoly is ok unless it is political in nature" which seems somewhat arbitrary and very much about the government restricting speech, as it is of a specific nature being targeted.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-06-16 18:59:21+00:00
They're thinking that they want their own currency that won't run a foul of the laws that prohibit that and company scrip.

> Oh, our employees may make minimum wage, but they get (the speculative asset) Walmart Coin as a benefit that can be redeemed at any Walmart, equivalent to an extra 50% income! It's like stock options, but useful!!! Why, yes, we do still teach them how to apply for welfare programs!

Since, of course, cryptocurrency is not a currency somehow.
by thinkingemote | 2025-06-16 18:59:24+00:00
For me, even software running on devices can make the device "content" or "unhappy". It's like the software is in line with how the silicon wants to be. Its not design, it's something deeper. Like a kind of flow state for bits.

One large scale example could be linux vs windows on a server. Linux seems to be more attuned to how the system wants to run. With reflection this might be me combining anthropomorphising and my own prejudices and likes and biases with a projection of my personality onto the software.

But I remember certain Windows applications felt they run better than others - even ones with worse design or that were proprietary. With more consideration this might be when computers had visual blinking LEDs and audible HD clicks and subliminal capacitor whine. If that's the case then in my feeling, software that made conservative use of CPU and HD beyond looking nice might be "happier" than more popular applications.

Writing the above I'm reminded of Terry Davis's TempleOS but I'm not sure what to make of that feeling!
by ornel | 2025-06-16 18:59:46+00:00
Regular internet on ships is a flat rate for the ship owner (except for Inmarsat, which is hugely expensive and only used if nothing else works) and the big issue is sharing limited bandwidth with all users. Before Starlink this meant blocking all streaming for our ≈35 people crew, unless you used a VPN, which allowed you to bypass blockage and would get you banned if caught. It's a huge cat and mouse game that burned too much of my time. But then, cruise companies are sleazy as fuck and totally deserve this.

Source: I was a radio operator on Greenpeace ships for nearly 20 years
by squigz | 2025-06-16 18:59:56+00:00
Yeah, I'm a bit confused if GP is saying their lighters are bad. Every single person I know who uses a lighter many times a day generally uses a Bic[0] - if they're not, it's one of these cheap plastic ones[1], very similar to the pens GP is referring to. A few of them have Zippos, but those are relatively rare among people I know, at least for everyday use.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ae/BI...

[1] https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61TNMUaoFrL.jpg
by ben_w | 2025-06-16 18:59:57+00:00
> But modern Star Trek is by and large nothing like that. The Abrams movies I'm ok with, because to be honest the old Trek movies had plenty of "it's just a fun action movie" too. But DIS and PIC both seem to positively revel in a pessimistic vision of the future where everyone sucks. Where we once got stories where the writers were smart enough to let viewers draw their own conclusions and apply them to real life (mostly, there were preachy episodes too), the modern shows are a blatant soapbox for the writers to preach to us about their views on the world. Where we once had teams of competent professionals using their skills to solve problems, now we have characters who act like children and only know how to apply "hit it real hard" as a solution.

I've not noticed a difference in the preaching, TBH, but otherwise yes.

And also that PIC took many interesting side characters from TNG, and used them as redshirts. Maddox, Hugh, Icheb, Shelby… and both Picard and Data in season 1 — and worse for both. Data because Data was (a) brought back the wrong way (should've been him in B4's body properly and not the simulation), and (b) that version of him wasn't given an appropriate reason for seeking his own death, and they really could've done it quite easily by writing that Data to have a plot point of ~ "I don't want my friends to die, I will choose death again to save them". Picard because it was such a missed opportunity, not only to give Patrick Stewart the same makeup that Brent Spiner had had for all those years, but also because Q said he still had a synthetic body in season 2 and yet they had him getting a "neural stabiliser" for "his brain".
by jszymborski | 2025-06-16 19:00:53+00:00
> comes off as injecting (his) biased views into reporting

The trouble is that not adding context is also a choice, which also reveals an authors belief on the topic, except with sufficient plausible deniability. This is why the article describes it as cowardly. It isn't sufficient to defer to people in positions in power. You may appear to be neutral to those who don't bother to think about it, but in truth you're just adopting the position of the person whose anecdata you've unthinkingly regurgitated. The job of a journalist is to think, apply rigorous thought, do research, challenge the status quo.

There is no "unbiased" media, just sincere and insincere. Good will arguments and bad will arguments.

We all perceive the world some way, and it isn't always how other people perceive it. What one calls boss-coddling, another might call common sense business. As long as you do your homework, "stand on your shit", and don't just remasticate the pablum handed to you from on high, we'll be fine. Sadly, as pointed out in the article, we're sorta drowning in soggy pablum these days.
by alistairSH | 2025-06-16 19:02:42+00:00
I'm going to write "This is fucking magic" in the code, and my coworkers will know to give that code the respect it deserves.

This is so weird to me. You won't find blueprints (at least not the copies that will be handed around across teams and companies) marked up with "this is fucking magic" when an architect or structural engineer design something amazing. In a DM/email/SMS? Sure, that's the correct place to put that message.
by jasperry | 2025-06-16 19:03:13+00:00
Thanks, this is a great story to illustrate why there's almost never any advantage to using a TRNG over a cryptographic-strength PRNG. That's also why Linux removed the blocking RNG from the kernel; there was no attack model where it gave more security.

Of course, PRNGs should still be seeded with real entropy from the outside world, but even if that fails at some point, your PRNG will still be producing effectively unpredictable numbers for a long time.
by garfieldnate | 2025-06-16 19:04:17+00:00
Having a to-do app that really pushes you to break down tasks into tiny pieces actually sounds really nice. I think that's the biggest takeaway for me here. The receipt print might seem a bit extra, but there's also something nice about having a physical motion to finish tasks while also not having to write everything out by hand. I dunno, writing doesn't actually take a long time. The post-its do feel a bit wasteful though, because they're so expensive.