MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derbOac | 2025-06-11 20:37:47+00:00
I have family in the area and my impression from archeological and historical news, articles and books from there is there isn't really one definitive moment where everyone in the colony just kind of up and left to the same place at the same time. If I had to bet, there was a kind of gradual process of degradation of the colony and some went one way and others went another.

This was interesting to read and it seems kind of definitive, and my impression is it's consistent with other things I've read. But if I recall correctly, there's also evidence from other sites that some from the colony also went elsewhere.

It seems reasonable to me to think that if things were breaking down, there might be differences of thought or preference about where to go, and that they might have also assumed they weren't totally cutting off contact from one another, being in the same area.
by jl6 | 2025-06-11 20:37:53+00:00
I didn’t understand whether the author is implying that this happens to all black holes or whether the model only applies in some circumstances.

I definitely didn’t understand whether this is suggesting that expanding universes can be contained within black holes that look like fixed-size finite objects from the outside.

And what happens to the inner universe when the parent black hole evaporates through Hawking radiation?
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-06-11 20:37:53+00:00
> If you start the stopwatch and leave the app, the stopwatch stops.

...there wasn't enough free memory to store a 64 bit timestamp of when the stopwatch was started?

> You can set the e-mail app to check for mail every five minutes, but there is never any free memory, so the mail check never runs. There isn't even anything to keep the crucial alarm process alive. If the phone is busy when an alarm is supposed to go off, it just doesn't go off. An alarm you can't trust to work 100 percent of the time is useless.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all of this stuff worked on iOS 1 in the original iPhone. It didn't have multi-tasking for most things, but preinstalled apps like the Clock and Mail were special.

This sounds to me more like unfinished software than hardware limitations. Of course, I can imagine that hardware limitations would make finishing software harder—but Apple clearly did it.
by exe34 | 2025-06-11 20:38:38+00:00
An interesting corner of philosophy for me is when people worry about perfect clones with all your memories. The only reason it bothers us is because we're not used to our doppelgangers turning up and claiming our sofas and relationships. In a polity where clones are commonplace and provision is made to inform the source and the perfect copy that their material possess will be divided or some stuff will be provided, the shock value would fade away.
by bluGill | 2025-06-11 20:39:00+00:00
I'm not convinced. The reason the natives didn't have the ability to forge iron was more related to there were no good ore deposits to work with. If you are intelligent and see a blacksmith work a few times you can figure out how to forge iron if given some - it is a lot of effort and your first attempts will not be good, but if something is broken you don't lose anything by putting it in a fire and attempting to fix it. (a camp fire gets plenty hot for blacksmithing - just wait for the coals and then blow on them) However the lack of quality ores that were easy to get at meant that they didn't have any metal working in that part of the world and so of course they wouldn't know how to do it. Iron would have made the natives life much better if they had it, and they were smart enough to figure out how to work it from scratch if they had it (they have centuries to learn just like the rest of us)

Which is to say the facts are fit equally well by saying "The natives saw blacksmiths work in the colonists. So when aliens took the colonists way in a spaceship after they collected the iron which remained and learned to forge them into useful tools for themselves". Ridiculous of course, but it fits the facts just as well.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-11 20:39:44+00:00
> They are heading in a good direction

Why do you think they are headed in a good direction? There is literally nothing I like about the liquid glass effect from a usability perspective. The transparency/translucency is wholly negative in my opinion.

The best analogy to me is physical buttons in cars vs. touch screens. The "headed in a good direction" there is to actually stop putting more shit into the touchscreen and have physical buttons for anything you'd touch while the car is in motion.
by jerf | 2025-06-11 20:39:47+00:00
A more accurate summation would be that our theories do not permit us to go back beyond what appears to be the "Big Bang", and indeed, we can't quite get to it either, since the need for Quantum Gravity becomes too great as we get to what seems to be the "zero time". We have no principled, reasonable way to make any claims about what came before the point where our theories break down, and that includes the claim that there was no space or time at all before then.

Thus, anything and everything you've heard about what is there "before the big bang" has always been speculation. I mention this because sometimes people read the science media, which is always reporting on this speculation, and think that the reporting on the speculation constitutes "science" constantly changing its mind, but that's not the case here. Science has consistently not had a justifiable position on this topic, ever. It has always been speculation. It is the press that often fails to make this clear and writes stories in terms of what "science" has "discovered", but any claims of certainty in this area are not the claims of "science".
by Kirby64 | 2025-06-11 20:40:29+00:00
Ah, right. We're both getting it a bit wrong. A 'unit' (10 ml of pure ethanol) isn't actually equivalent to a 'drink'. One 'drink' is considered to be 12 oz of 5% beer, 5 oz of 12% wine, or one 1.5 oz 40% shot. None of those are actually '1 unit', they're all ~1.7 units (~17 ml of ethanol).

I think most folks think in 'drinks' and not 'units'.

So, back to the original comment: 6 shots at most establishments would be ~10 'units' of alcohol. Or, closer to 3.3 20oz pints of beer. 3.3 20oz beers would be enough to get most folks pretty intoxicated if drank quickly; the difference being that 3.3 20oz beers (66oz total!) is a lot harder to drink very quickly than 6 shots, purely by volume of liquid.
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-11 20:40:59+00:00
You don't even need to involve the feds or the balance of fed-state power. Just slice up the damn state. There's just no avoiding dysfunction at its current scale. No one state government can serve so many diverse interests.

On the east coast they solve this problem by having smaller states. Wouldn't want those Massachusetts doctors or NYC financiers sticking their dick in Pennsylvania's farming economy or Maine's lumber and tourism economy and screwing it all up. Or vise versa. And those are the problems that CA suffers from.

If the argument not to is federal party politics there are plenty of solutions to slice and dice in a net-neutral manner.
by Kranar | 2025-06-11 20:41:05+00:00
There's a perfectly good explanation for why though, in fact the explanation is what motivated the formalism of entropy to begin with. There are significantly more ways that the energy contained within a closed system can spread throughout that system than there are ways for energy contained within a closed system to condense, so that if you observe the state of a system at two different moments in time, you will expect to see it evolve towards the statistically more likely outcome than the statistically less likely outcome.

And from first principles, that's what entropy is, a measure of how energy is dispersed throughout a system. Of course once you have that first principle understanding of entropy then you can come up with more rigorous formalisms to properly quantify what it means for energy to be distributed throughout a system, such as measuring the number of microstates that correspond to a macrostate, and other various formalisms that are more or less equal to each other... but fundamentally they all start from this basic principle.
by kennywinker | 2025-06-11 20:41:24+00:00
Apple patches anything with a proven exploit as long as it’s in a supported version of the OS. E.g. They will not patch versions beyond macos 10.14 i believe, not sure what the cutoff for iOS is but it’s usually about 6 years of security updates. Which means that iOS 9.3.5 is well outside of that and so a bug that impacts that os will not be patched. Which means using an old device like that on the open internet is deeply foolish
by unwind | 2025-06-11 20:41:41+00:00
Also in New York's Roosevelt Island [1], pretty sure I've read about it here in the past.

Edit: yeah, [2] for instance, from 2017 or something.

[1]: https://www.untappedcities.com/inside-roosevelt-islands-futu...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14939745
by mattgodbolt | 2025-06-11 20:41:46+00:00
Thanks so much! I've not had too much success chasing down no-strings-attached stuff. Grafana and Sentry are pretty cheap compared to the AWS, so I didn't spend too much time...

Twice I've had folks from AWS approach me about helping, but it fizzled out. The best I've had is a pal who was a salesperson used to slip me a few "$100 new customer vouchers" every now and then I could redeem.

The pre-allocation means some kind of commitment: every time I've looked I've baulked at dropping many thousands of dollars in one go (and it screws up my terrible book-keeping :D ). I should probably revisit it. It's really nice to know I'm not paying for things I don't "need", but it's unlikely CE usage will drop _that much_ in the next year or two (say).

I'll take a look at the OSS stuff you linked: thank you!
by Junk_Collector | 2025-06-11 20:41:59+00:00
It's technically not a signal generator but an Arbitrary Waveform Generator. It provides a base-band modulated signal to the signal generator which the sig gen upconverts to the RF carrier. If you purchased a Vector Signal Generator this would be built in but you can still buy them stand alone and they are pretty common. NI, R&S, Tek, and Keysight all have product lines of them.

Another way to think about it, this would be comparable to a signal generator in the same way that an oscilloscope is comparable to a spectrum analyzer.
by darepublic | 2025-06-11 20:42:21+00:00
In the abstract the reference to 'safety' gave me pause. For one it seems doubtful that the AI could ever improve enough to cause serious trouble, unless of course you equipped it with things that just about any piece of software could create trouble with --elevated permissions, internet access, network endpoints etc.

They mention putting it in a sandbox which I assume to just mean something like a VM or docker container. I wonder if that would be sufficient if the AI truly reached singularity level intelligence. Could it figure out some kind of exploit to break free of its sandbox, and transmit its code over the internet for further replication?
by threemux | 2025-06-11 20:42:37+00:00
This is an age-old question. All I can do is share the Catholic perspective on this which you may or may not like or agree with.

God allows suffering to bring about a greater good, His plan. He endows us also with free will, which sometimes means we make choices that cause suffering for ourselves or others. Free will doesn't mean all or even most suffering in a given life is because of our choices. Sometimes it is though.

Satan's playbook is all about denying these things, denying the cross, denying redemption. Satan is the one whispering that life isn't worth it, that it would be easier to end it, come down from the cross.

For a even better discussion of these things, I always recommend Life is Worth Living which is an old program hosted by Bishop Fulton Sheen. It is as relevant today as it was when he recorded it. Many of the episodes are on YouTube.

EDIT: many seem to be taking this as an anti-painkiller stance which it is not. Reducing pain until natural death is a great kindness.
by nextn | 2025-06-11 20:42:44+00:00
off-topic: hi dang. Can you help me understand why this got flagged?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44246859

FWIW, when potentially live saving content gets flagged on HN, effectively censoring it, I can't help but think there's a concerted effort by some actors (terrorist organizations, 3-letter agencies, foreign countries) to suppress information.

It's a big reason I avoid HN. I can imagine censoring free-speech being HN's downfall.
by dml2135 | 2025-06-11 20:43:01+00:00
> This is no different than, say, the typical anecdote of a junior engineer dropping the database. Should the junior be held accountable? Of course not - it's the senior's fault for allowing that to happen at the first place. If the junior is held accountable, that would more be an indication of poor software engineering practices.

Of course the junior should be held accountable, along with the senior. Without accountability, what incentive do they have to not continue to fuck up?

Dropping the database is an extreme example because it's pretty easy to put in checks that should make that impossible. But plenty of times I've seen juniors introduce avoidable bugs simply because they did not bother to test their code -- that is where teaching accountability is a vital part of growth as an engineer.
by alexpotato | 2025-06-11 20:43:15+00:00
> Wonnacott had met Paula once before, and he found her to be a fairly accurate narrator of her own medical history.

This line reminded me of a lecture from my Psych 101 class back in college:

There are three "views" of ourselves

1. Reality

2. What we wish we were

3. Where we think we are

If 2 and 3 match but are far from 1: we are happy but "delusional"

If 1 and 3 match but we are far from 2: this is VERY often found in people who have depression.

And, ideally for long term happiness, 1 and 3 are close together and 2 is a "reasonable" distance away or close to 1 and 3.
by SigmundA | 2025-06-11 20:43:31+00:00
This is not an answer that satisfies just begs more questions.

Who Created God? No one? Why does the universe need a creator if God does not?

Where does free will and evil come from if God is "originator of all things that were, are, and will be". For true free will to exist it must have a source of entropy which denotes something outside of Gods control and design otherwise everything is deterministic as set forth by God.
by moontear | 2025-06-11 20:44:06+00:00
O365 defaults there now? I‘m not sure I understand.

The Copilot we are talking about here is M365 Copilot which is around 30$/user/month. If you pay for the license you wouldn’t want to turn it off would you? Besides that the remediation steps are described in the article and MS also did some things in the backend.
by tverbeure | 2025-06-11 20:45:05+00:00
It’s used to create communication test signals.

Say you designed a Bluetooth transceiver chip and need to test the performance under stress conditions: noise, sample clock instability etc.

The WinIQSim software simulates such a signal and uploads it to the AMIQ, which is essentially a high quality digital analog converter.

The analog output will go to an RF signal generator and then to your chip under test.
by tverbeure | 2025-06-11 20:45:34+00:00
I bought it through edispositions.com.

Extremely good deals are rare and the chance that there’s something broken is very real. I often consider that a feature: fixing test equipment is a bit of a hobby, but be prepared to end up with a doorstop that cost a few hundred dollars.

Here are some examples that I bought though them:

- HP 8650E spectrum analyzer: works but intermittent shutdowns

- TDS 794D: works, but CRT is broken. A well know failure mode. Need to install a $75 LCD replacement.

- this R&S AMIQ: totally broken. Needed many days of work to revive.

It’s high risk buying these things.
by kannanvijayan | 2025-06-11 20:45:36+00:00
Oh I have so many questions on this topic.

I've often wondered about this. I don't have any direct physics training, but it's something that felt really plausible after I learned that the mass of a black hole is linearly proportional to its swarzschild radius.

As the size of the black hole goes up, its overall density must decrease. Combined with the other observation that our universe has uniform density at large scales, it seemed really obvious to me that there existed some threshold at which the decreasing density of a very large black hole, and the fixed density of our observed universe.. would cross.

I used to muse about this question with some other tech colleagues that liked talking about physics stuff but never really got a clear answer to this.

On a side note - I'm absolutely fascinated by the implications relating to this. I'll post a follow-up thought I'm hoping somebody else has also thought about:

I've seen discussion of dark energy mostly presented as a surrogate for real energy. That there is some underlying energy "accelerating things away from each other".

I always felt uncomfortable with that characterization. It seems more reasonable to me to think of dark energy as _negative energy_ - i.e. a loss of overall energy.

In a classical system, two things moving away from each other stores potential energy that can be recouped at some later time. Dark energy doesn't work this way - things accelerate away from each other the further apart they are. From a global perspective, it's an energy loss.

The energy loss pervades to the quantum world as well - photons that start off high frequency arrive low-frequency.

It somehow feels more appropriate to me to think of dark energy as energy being extracted out of the universe, in some form never to return. Maybe like a black hole evaporating as observed from the inside?

When I asked this of some people in real life, I was pointed to answers that indicated that the "energy" component in dark energy is normalized into the "tension" of space somehow. As I mentioned before I'm not really studied in physics, but that explanation felt unsatisfactory to me.
by hamburglar | 2025-06-11 20:45:42+00:00
A lot of things I clicked on just led to an upsell page that wanted me to do a week trial that led to a $49 monthly, which surprised me since I hadn’t even begun to explore and only had a single metric which I’d never even recorded a datapoint for. And it seemed like I only was allowed to define a single metric, so I tried to delete it in order to create a new one, but clicking “delete” on it was apparently a premium feature as well. I gave up.

You really need to let people actually use the product with no commitment, see how it’s useful, and then bug them a month later.

Btw, I found a bug: on the page where there are three big buttons and the third is “load a csv”, the csv button isn’t clickable. Only the icon on it is.
by pipes | 2025-06-11 20:47:11+00:00
Looks lovely. Thanks for creating this.

If you have time:

Does it (or can it) run emulators natively? I'm trying to get my head around js emulator, how is that libretro? Is libretro compiled to wasm?

Is it running retro arch underneath or have you managed to implement the libretro API?

I love and hate retroarch. Its menus are ridiculous but it's still easier than managing multiple emulators.
by fidotron | 2025-06-11 20:47:30+00:00
It's not my place to go into details as to what it is at this time, and there are other people involved on here!

The build is neither cheap nor fast, though the proof of concept was. If you are aiming at a dev/maker audience telling them to configure things with ESP Flasher will work. If it's for some random person then it won't, and the complexity explodes.

I would caution anyone going into this because almost everyone you speak to will radically underestimate the difference between the proof of concept and a shippable product, even a giveaway one, with the consequence that most people respond as if it's a high school science project and not real work.
by wand3r | 2025-06-11 20:48:22+00:00
I understand that, and I kind if alluded to this being a concept less than a well thought out policy. If it was strictly profit, then all expenses of the business would be written against advertising and miraculously there would be 0 profit. My general point is that advertising revenue is insanely easy to get, especially with auctions and technology from google. Some of the problems and perverse incentives: - negative engagement in media - advertising screens at gas stations - popups everywhere - hardware devices you own display ads - software you purchase has ads - streaming services you bought without ads have ads added later

You all participate in society, so you get it. Advertising has become a tragedy of the commons and 2nd order effects are things like negative engagement and body dysmorphia. There needs to be a vice tax for advertisements to stop them from being bolted on everywhere. Lobbyists, smart policy makers, economists and lawmakers can come together to find the right mix. However, we should disincentivize it AND use it to make up for budget shortfalls.
by joshvm | 2025-06-11 20:48:24+00:00
That's a fun idea, just have it ask questions like the little IQ toys and have a yes/no button. Turns out this works reasonably well if you only allow binary responses. If you also had an "I'm not sure" or "I don't know how" button it might work even better.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6849eb45-6700-800d-ad3b-57458eb5c7...

(Asking chatgpt how to put up shelves without it knowing what the task is and only allowing yes/no responses)
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-11 20:48:45+00:00
You're incentivized not to sell targeting data, but you're very incentivized to collect and maintain as much of it as you can, and then offer access using it as a service.

So, at the end of your day, company X has an overdetailed profile of you, rather than each advertiser. (And also, at least in the US, can repackage and sell that data into various products if it chooses)
by normalaccess | 2025-06-11 20:48:57+00:00
LLMs suffer the same problems as any Von Neumann architecture machine, It's called "key vulnerability". None of our normal control tools work on LLMs like ASLR, NX-Bits/DEP, CFI, ect.. It's like working on a foreign CPU with a completely unknown architecture and undocumented instructions. All of our current controls for LLMs are probabilistic and can't fundamentally solve the problem.

What we really need is a completely separate "control language" (Harvard Architecture) to query the latent space but how to do that is beyond me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architecture

AI SLOP TLDR: LLMs are “Turing-complete” interpreters of language, and when language is both the program and the data, any input has the potential to reprogram the system—just like how data in a Von Neumann system can mutate into executable code.
by BitwiseFool | 2025-06-11 20:49:05+00:00
I understand that many people yearn for a religious explanation to answer the question of what caused the universe to exist. I myself am content with the "it just happened" explanation, as any information prior to the big bang, if it even exists, is unknowable.

There are countless other religions that believe in a deity who created the universe. These deities either created themselves, or had always existed outside of space and time. To that end, any one of those deities would be on equal footing with YHWH. I don't think that it is appropriate to axiomatically claim that a certain deity exists because only that deity could have caused the universe to exist.