MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bglusman | 2025-06-11 20:26:26+00:00
Wow, wild this is being taken seriously now perhaps, I first encountered the idea in The Life of The Cosmos ~26 years ago[0] and my impression was the author, Lee Smolin, didn't REALLY beleive it, but he came up with it mostly to have some kind of preferable, falsifiable(er?) alternative to string theory, which he disliked even more, and perhaps more as an idea of the kind of theory we need to explore to start making progress... or that's my memory/impression form 26 years ago, I've been meaning to re-read it for a while since. Anyone read more recently/have other impressions?

(the basic idea was fecund universes/cosmological natural selection[1], such that we should expect to find ourselves, if the theory were true, very near to a local maxima of values such that they approximately maximize the number of black holes produced... but most of the book is really taken up with a fascinating look at the history of physics and ideas...)

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_the_Cosmos [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection
by nobody9999 | 2025-06-11 20:26:51+00:00
>Sometimes I wish English had an easy way for me to convey "I respect you" as subtext.

I find that sir/ma'am plus politeness (please, thank you, etc.) works nicely.

While there is the chance that you might misgender someone with that, that's not very common (at least for me) as long as you, you know, pay attention.

That said unless they have a note tattooed on their forehead with their preferred term of address, I can only use non-language cues to determine the appropriate term.

On the rare occasions where I use the wrong term and am corrected, I am fastidious in adhering to the requested term(s).

None of that's is rocket surgery, just simple respect for other humans IMHO.
by johnea | 2025-06-11 20:26:53+00:00
My lay interpretation of this theory is that it says there was no beginning.

But a cycling of a previous universe.

I was a little unclear on the ending, where he says this theory would place our entire universe "inside" a black hole of a parent universe.

All in all, it does seem to tie up some loose ends, and suggest some order to what previously required speculation.
by derefr | 2025-06-11 20:26:59+00:00
I presume that "outdated upon release" benchmarks like these happen because the benchmark and the models in it were chosen first, before the model was created; and the model's development progress was measured using the benchmark. It then doesn't occur to anyone that the benchmark the engineers had been relying upon isn't also a good/useful benchmark for marketing upon release. From the inside view, it's just a benchmark, already there, already achieving impressive results, a whole-company internal target to hit for months — so why not publish it?
by const_cast | 2025-06-11 20:26:59+00:00
IMO it is an investment and it will bring future revenue to the US. Because this fosters working relationship with other countries, countries that we ultimately rely on for their resources. Because they have a working relationship with the US, they're willing to give us some pretty sweet deals.

If you look at Africa, it has the most wealth by resources out of any continent. It's also the poorest continent nominally. We're getting a lot of good stuff at INSANE discounts.

What I'm describing is, of course, colonialist in nature. The US is an empire, not a nation. But, the hope is that as we help those countries develop they can help us stay developed, and we can eventually reach some mutually beneficial equilibrium. Instead of exploitation.

But, currently, the relationship is exploitative. It's a bit wild to me that you legitimately think the US, of all countries, is being exploited. No bubba... no. We do the exploiting. Everything you own is build with layers and layers of global exploitation built into it. You have a few hundred slaves working for you as we speak.
by teraflop | 2025-06-11 20:27:00+00:00
Don't get me wrong, this seems like a fun thing to play with. But it feels very weird to see so much marketing and branding poured into something that's literally just a plastic enclosure and software for an off-the-shelf dev board made by somebody else.

Like, the page says:

> Want more hardware? We included an I²C expansion port, just for people like you.

No you didn't! Adafruit did! You didn't even add a connector.
by n4r9 | 2025-06-11 20:27:19+00:00
Maybe I'm misreading it (or it's just wrong) but this NHS webpage very clearly states that a "Pint of higher-strength lager/beer/cider (ABV 5.2%)" has 3 units:

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-advice/calculating-alco...
by wahern | 2025-06-11 20:27:21+00:00
In rural Georgia my father's wife, still 15+ years my senior, would always "yessir" and "no sir" me, just as she did with everyone else (ma'am for women, of course). And this was in the past 10 years. Even my half-siblings from rural Alabama do that generally, but not nearly so strictly with family like myself. Use of last names, though, is still reserved for non-family elders.

Conversely, in coastal California that kind of speech is actively (even aggressively) discouraged, such as in public schools, higher grades, especially. It's still appreciated in more traditional communities, though, such as black or immigrant Asian communities. Code switching isn't limited to certain minority groups; even affluent coastal white folks often end of code switching.
by lostmsu | 2025-06-11 20:27:34+00:00
How do you talk to Claude? Maybe you meant Gemini?

P.S. I'm working on Android app to talk to any LLM ( iOS one is already out: Roxy Voice: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6737482921?pt=12710... ) using an OpenAI-compatible completions endpoint.
by asveikau | 2025-06-11 20:29:30+00:00
I think it's unclear what kind of determinism you are presuming. Determinism in the universe? Determinism in consciousness? Certainly a deterministic machine can exist in a non-deterministic universe.

However I didn't just assume a lack of free will. I also assumed a lack of identity. Do you realize that who you are is socially defined? When you breathe in, the air in the room around you becomes part of you. When you breathe out, you lose certain gases. When you eat your food, similar story. There's a good case to be made that "you" are in the entire room or the entire food chain. That does make causality and culpability hard to assess objectively. When we do so, we do so subjectively.
by qualeed | 2025-06-11 20:30:08+00:00
I had a lot to say to this comment. I think your comment is gross. But it will just end up in a debate about god, so I'm editing it out.

However:

>How many people will we lose to despair that could have been helped?

Assisted death is not something reserved for mental illness, and it's dishonest to frame your comment like it is. Terminal, painful diseases are the leading reason for assisted death. In fact, many assisted death programs do not consider mental illness alone to meet the criteria of acceptance.

The whole point of these programs is that there is no other help possible. Except, maybe, enough drugs to make the person basically dead anyways. Which, in my opinion, is not "help".
by kibwen | 2025-06-11 20:30:27+00:00
Why not? If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside the realm of science and in the realm of belief. Until someone figures out a way to experimentally verify the big bang hypothesis (or any other explanation for the origin of the universe or what came "before"), it's entirely fair to attribute it to whatever you feel like, be it a god or anything else. There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-06-11 20:31:09+00:00
Some anecdotical evidence of mine. I tend to kill -9 Firefox or derivatives before system, or browser updates, to reliably get my tabs and cookies (for selected sites) back, without the need for any extensions.

Usually I'm doing that from within htop, or btop++. Under systemd that is slow, the process-tree of FF takes several seconds to vanish.

That felt very wrong. I increased the update frequency of htop and btop++ to 200ms (usually they poll/actualize/redraw at 2 seconds only) to investigate.

Then I retested that with Runit/S6(6) on the same systems.

Magic! The process-tree is instantly gone! And if you only SigHup it, it instantly reappears. BAM! BAM! BAM!

This applies to all sorts of process-trees also, not only FF.

Compared to that systemd feels like a sloth.

Yes, Yes, I did that under several different distros, initially AntiX, recently "init diversity edition"(Debian derivative optimized for 'live-booting', running from RAM, in all sorts of 'Frugal' installs), some Arch-derivatives, sometimes 'riced' to the max, and default Debian, just to be sure.

Over several years. Initially on a Core-i7 640LM with only 8GB RAM, more recently on Core-i5 7500t, and Core-i7 7700t with 32GB RAM.

Verdict: systematically slo(w)thified.
by Kranar | 2025-06-11 20:31:38+00:00
Strictly speaking, modern cosmology does not treat the Big Bang as the beginning of all of existence, it's what happens when you take observations about large scale cosmology and run them backwards in time.

Based on the information we have available about our universe, we can't make predictions or formally model anything prior to a certain point in time, consequently it's convenient to treat this moment as the earliest point in time in which physics as we know it makes any sense. So while there may have been some kind of existence prior to the Big Bang, we have no way to make sense of it even at a conceptual level. Given that, we may as well treat this special point in time as the beginning of the universe as we understand it and can explain it using physics, as opposed to some absolute beginning of all of existence.
by rickydroll | 2025-06-11 20:32:16+00:00
Potentially, yes. However, the same problem I have with current subscription models also exists with Substack. I added up all the subscriptions necessary to bypass paywalls I encountered every month, and it came to roughly $3,000 a year. I'll have to do the same thing with Substack subscriptions. I expect they'll be like $50 a year for the basic subscription, so it would probably only be a few hundred to a thousand per year.
by davidw | 2025-06-11 20:32:25+00:00
As a born and raised English speaker and fluent Italian speaker, I still don't love the "tu / lei". It's very... binary as to what gets used. Sometimes that's easy, but the marginal cases can be difficult to figure out.

I think the tone and posture when addressing someone convey enough formality. Like if I met Barack Obama, I would be very formal and respectful in my bearing and language, but of course still use 'you'.
by ASalazarMX | 2025-06-11 20:32:42+00:00
And this is already happening. I have a few acquaintances that will ask ChatGPT thinks they could readily find on Wikipedia, or use it as a shortcut for mental effort. They've become dependent, even addicted, to this patient butler that can work and think for them; who cares if it makes some mistakes? They'll just ask it more.

Once enough people become like this, they will gladly pay to keep it, they'll consider it a basic necessity.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-06-11 20:32:51+00:00
You're being downvoted for a bad read of the material. Any comparisons to God are intentional and deliberate - but mostly serve to knock God down a peg or two by grounding it in something plausible instead of the faith based miracles and straight up fantasy style magic from the Bible.

Futurama has a great episode where Bender meets God (who has merged with a computer) that tackles similar themes.

If you find this to be a harsh reaction, maybe consider how the wording of your initial comment is an effective provocation to anyone who doesn't share your belief system.
by yongjik | 2025-06-11 20:33:03+00:00
Umm... I'm not sure I follow. You were casually asking prices in English and the shopowner jumped to the conclusion that you were trolling him by using English when you were fluent in Korean?

If it was around that time, most Koreans were not good at English, and it's not exactly hard to tell a native English speaker from a Korean who learned "I'm a boy, you are a girl" in middle school.

Sounds like the shopowner was just a jerk and was mad for some random reason.
by const_cast | 2025-06-11 20:33:48+00:00
Yes, it's the same thing I see with logins. How many more sales could we be making if we didn't require a user account? A lot, I would imagine. Most people are going to be seeing your site for 5 minutes, buy what they need, and then get a confirmation email. That process should be something you're optimizing for - but evidently, the promise of juicy data is more important than actual sales. Hopefully that user account is worth more than a few cents!

Exhibit A: parking apps. Why do I need an app? And why do I need an account? What if I just... don't pay? How many people are doing that? Probably a lot.

So let's spin up a contract with a local towing company and burn all this money for non-compliant customers instead of just getting our heads out of our asses and streamlining the process. I bet you if you just put a tap-to-pay meter then 99% of the non-compliance will just - poof - disappear.
by numpad0 | 2025-06-11 20:34:05+00:00
I think it's more about when to push than about what to push. Maybe there are specific types of products aside from what's obvious, or actions to take or not to take. Like avoiding discounts when customers are least likely to develop loyalty, maybe even how to rotate through choices of products like meats to vegs to dish soaps.

By the way, I've seen self proclaimed male on social media posting how they use these trackers to predict their irresistible sushi cravings. Apparently, and contrary to intuition, men also have the cycle, just less obvious. Pelvis opening up and such.
by nextn | 2025-06-11 20:34:07+00:00
You're being a bit gratuitously negative, which is against HN rules, considering the magnitude of the potential impact of this work. Ivermectin won the Nobel Prize.

"First-in-the-World Ivermectin, Mebendazole and Fenbendazole Protocol in Cancer has been peer-reviewed and published on Sep.19, 2024!"
by bell-cot | 2025-06-11 20:34:26+00:00
I kinda doubt that the RR's - especially the long-established ones of the north-east - would have spent the vast sums on opulent passenger terminals, fast luxury trains, and high-density passenger service if passenger service was merely a legal necessity for their freight businesses.

Flip-side, I have heard that the phase-out RMS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mail_Service ) cut the RR's passenger train revenue by about 1/3. Few business models can survive a 1/3 revenue cut.

BTW - at the high end, airplanes were at least as damaging (to passenger rail) as cars.
by INTPenis | 2025-06-11 20:34:26+00:00
I instantly pictured this being a rubber duck. And then I started thinking, how could a virtual rubber duck help you deduce things?

Mostly you'd want it to listen and be supportive I guess.

But maybe, just maybe, could AI somehow summarize a very short suggestion or response based on what you say.

That is something I'd buy. Tactile, can be thrown around a bit, listens at the press of a button, responds with a random short suggestion or idea.
by edfletcher_t137 | 2025-06-11 20:34:27+00:00
> The black hole universe also offers a new perspective on our place in the cosmos. In this framework, our entire observable universe lies inside the interior of a black hole formed in some larger “parent” universe.

Does it also follow that black holes in our universe contain universes internally, beyond their event horizons?! Seems like it should. Mind-blowing.
by CMay | 2025-06-11 20:34:27+00:00
What you're talking about is the rhetoric and politics surrounding the current times as opposed to the reality. Trump says a lot of things and he is a man of action, so that makes him a credible threat whenever he says he's going to do something. At the same time, it's pretty normal that whatever he does goes through a team of lawyers first.

This is convenient for Trump, because anything he says that people get riled up about ends up discrediting them as ridiculous, because the reality ends up being less surprising. In the US you can only be president so long as you remain within an operable window of reasonability, which Trump remains within despite his character.

Now, does that mean you just ignore the rhetoric and stop paying attention to let it normalize in your mind so that when something actually bad happens it can just feel like a minor iteration rather than a shocking leap? No. That said, the rhetoric is the rhetoric and the reality is the reality.

Trump also said to lock Hillary up, yet that never happened. Sure, you shouldn't have to be a constitutional lawyer or understand entirely how the country works to get a decent sense for what's really happening, but ideally high quality journalists help fill that role to contextualize important events, grounding viewers in reality. The problem is that people get so much of their news from entertainment comedy shows and emotional opinion shows now rather than actual boring (good boring) journalistic media. It becomes celebrity clickbait.
by n2d4 | 2025-06-11 20:34:28+00:00
Yea, and it was a great read too. I wish more researchers would publish blog posts alongside their technical whitepapers, although I acknowledge that not everyone involved in science has or wishes to acquire the skills needed to write blog-form content.

(I'd also be worried about a world where researchers are evaluated based on the virality of their blog posts, vs. how impactful their work was.)
by davidweatherall | 2025-06-11 20:34:52+00:00
Hey Charles, annoyed I missed out on the first batch, signed up to the newsletter looking forward to the next one!

I thought your product page could use a slightly nicer UI. - I'm building an app that let's people spin up multiple variations of their pages and easily implement new UIs. - I like to put HN websites through it whilst I'm training it up to see if I can improve them.

here's what my app came up with for your site: https://streamable.com/vbby9q

If you want the html + css, it's here free of charge, I've split each one up with a ## Variation 1/2.. etc.. just let me know what you think - https://pastebin.com/WGNieVmq
by gabriel666smith | 2025-06-11 20:35:38+00:00
> "but I just have a feeling AI is going to be more widely adopted to pump out passable (or even arguably "good") content"

Absolutely! And, as you say - the vast majority of books are already written to be passable-enough for publication. I guess it'll be slightly less charming when it's unclear whether a book you're buying has had at least one human believe it is good. Maybe this is already the case on Amazon!

> "that people will pay money for."

Haha - authors aren't making much money as it stands. I do really hope that a (much) higher volume of 'slop-work' means audiences value 'good-work' more, as 'good-work' will be harder to seek out, and that as a result of this better revenue models for creators of freely-duplicatable work (like books and music) are forced into creation. That's the best possible outcome. But - I think we agree that material reward isn't a good incentive for the creation of art.

I'm not wildly concerned about the arts, in this sense - I think it's (over a long enough timespan) a highly meritocratic world. I trust readers / audiences / users. Good work finds its audience and time and floats eventually. And DRM-locked, Kindle-Unlimited-type work will, by design, not be on anybody's shelves in fifty or a hundred years.

The alternative, I think, is that LLMs start making beautiful art completely unprompted (something I've seen zero evidence of being possible thus far). That's a universe I would be fascinated to exist in. A shame its probably paradoxical - I can imagine it being like whalesong :-)

Software is very different, as you say, not least because of its contingency on utility and temporality. Another thing that I find nice to imagine is a future canon of 'classical' software. I'm sure that this will exist at some point, given how young a form it is, relatively speaking. That too, I hope, will be predicated on beauty of design, as we've done with all our other canons.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-06-11 20:35:52+00:00
The universe casually didn't follow the laws of physics immediately after the Big Bang, an improbable event directly after an improbable event. No explanation has been found, even according to CERN, why everything that was created was not spontaneously annihilated. Attributing that to a divine intervention is the most probable explanation. CERN attributing this to "Some unknown entity" is humorous.

One theory (which CERN is using) is to argue that almost all matter was destroyed, and that the current observable universe is merely the tiny leftover due to slight differences in behavior, making the Big Bang look more like the Ludicrous Bang. This, of course, just contributes to religious snickering at how all problems are solved by adding another billion years to the timeline, over and over.

https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetr...

Edit to reply: They behave differently; but why there is more of one than the other, remains unexplained; as regardless of how they behave, both should have been initially created in equal numbers. As for Sabine Hossenfelder's quote, that's a religious-faith level cop-out. When science requires faith, should it not be treated as a religion?
by anonymars | 2025-06-11 20:36:25+00:00
I love steam trains in the abstract, but was appalled at how filthy it was. My skin and clothes were covered in soot and I pulled my shirt up to my mouth to try and avoid breathing it in and coughing.

That said, Big Boy 4014 is traveling between Cheyenne and Denver next month (https://www.up.com/heritage/steam/schedule/index.htm)
by emigre | 2025-06-11 20:36:40+00:00
Well, it's just a joke. :) It doesn't necessarily have to make a lot of sense.

In any case, I find your comment very interesting. I'm studying quantum computing at the moment, and I've had to read the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, including Everett's many-worlds interpretation. As a non-physicist, I've found the different interpretations fascinating.

The many-worlds one, as far as I understood it, says that all the possible outcomes of a quantum measurement actually "happen" in different worlds. I have the impression that you would be able to give a much better explanation.

In any case, in the joke the gun is shot in the macro world, not in a quantum state. It's possible that it is a quantum gun, but probably not.

Let's say "overruled" then.
by footy | 2025-06-11 20:36:51+00:00
MAiD is not available for people whose only condition is a mental illness [1]. I'm saying this not for you but for anyone who may read this, particularly non-Canadians. It's not about "despair".

[1] https://www.camh.ca/en/camh-news-and-stories/maid-and-mental...
by flyingbuilding | 2025-06-11 20:37:20+00:00
Everyone on the panel thought they bombed the algorithm question.

But then we heard them speak: they’d onboarded two interns, led a recovery after a production outage, and wrote internal docs so good the team printed them out.

We hired them.

Sometimes, it's not about solving puzzles. It's about showing impact.

(Ask HN: How do you balance storytelling vs coding performance in your interviews?)
by RS-232 | 2025-06-11 20:37:44+00:00
Not many people these days like to hear this (I myself was one of them), but the answer to this is in Genesis.

There's a reason some of the most famous mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and philosophers of all time believe(d) in God.

The Hebrew name of God, YHWH, literally means "He Who Is." In other words, the Self-Existent One. The father and originator of all things that were, are, and will be, who exists outside of spacetime.