MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jijijijij | 2025-06-19 14:58:42+00:00
Wikipedia says it's both nitrogen and phosphorus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivorous_plant

> It can be fixated only through biological means

I don't think this is very correct, but why do these biological means fail in bogs/swamps? Kinda my point: Other plants and ecosystems figured out the nitrogen problem all over the world. It's more or less the same everywhere, since nitrogen naturally comes from the atmosphere. AFAIK, there are more or less three ways to have nitrogen input into an ecosystem: Lightning, biological fixation in plants/microbes and artificial synthesis/fertilization.

I suspect the swamp ecosystem has something going which makes nitrogen fixation difficult. All other plants in the swamp need nitrogen to grow, too, how are they doing? Maybe it is the (often) low pH, maybe it's a lack of trace metals for certain enzymes. Maybe the anaerobic conditions favor inaccessible conversion of nitrogen in decay.

Nitrogen can't be completely exhausted, because you have (low) constant influx from the atmosphere everywhere on Earth's surface, even without biological fixation. Phosphorus, on the other hand, can be effectively depleted. The "cycling" of phosphorus happens on geological timescales. A low soil pH may leech out the phosphorus from minerals and have it carried away by wind and water.

I still don't think plants would go the carnivorous route just for the nitrogen. If anything, I suspect they recycle the "nitrogen" as amino acids to save on synthesis. Some carnivorous plants apparently secrete phosphatase into their prey. That's a lot of evolutionary effort...
by altairprime | 2025-06-19 14:59:06+00:00
The crowning achievement of FOSS is in convincing maintainers to accept exploitation as beneficial.

The FOSS era can be distinguished from the BSD/MIT era preceding it by its dedicated promotion of libertarianism in all shared source code conversations, which celebrates (quite defensively!) the resulting exploitation and free-riding as beneficial. While this is often presented as a natural outcome of BSD/MIT licensing, that FOSS viewpoint hinges on assumption-by-framing of exploitation without compensation as being morally neutral or positive. That framed assumption is false: the “scientists publish their work to each other” social climate that preceded it was openly hostile to entities who profited from work without ‘uploading’ via publication back to the community in return. Thus, the innovative social bargain of the GPL: you receive legal certainty that improvements to your source code will be shared back to you; then, FOSS advocacy uses adoption of the GPL as proof that exploitation without compensation is beneficial.
by DennisP | 2025-06-19 14:59:06+00:00
Any large fully-reusable rocket basically fits those goals, but methane might not be ideal for the second stage, if you don't intend to refuel on Mars. Hydrogen has better ISP, so your mass budget isn't so tight. It's also six times better as a coolant, so if you want to try SpaceX's original plan of using evaporative cooling in place of heavy tiles, it'll work better. Blue Origin and Stoke Space both use a methane first stage, hydrogen second stage. (Stoke Space has planned evaporative cooling from the start, Blue Origin put in a patent application for their version later.)

Then again, Musk is also big on reusing components as much as possible, so he might have opposed multiple fuels on principle.
by gspencley | 2025-06-19 14:59:08+00:00
> And what about that ally's actions towards Iran?

I'm going to share a personal world view. Some may find this controversial or strongly disagree with this world view and that's fine. This is my opinion, not yours.

What gives a nation-state legitimacy is how well adheres to what is, in my personal opinion, the only moral justification for having a government in the first place: the protection of individual rights.

Human beings have two fundamental ways that we can deal with each other: reason/diplomacy or force.

When reason is chosen, life flourishes. People live together peacefully and we create things, start businesses & families and build communities and thrive.

When force is chosen we get war, destruction, poverty, misery and death. We get gangs, thugs and instability.

The need for a government comes from this dichotomy. Government exists, fundamentally, to remove the element of force from civil existence.

My definition of liberty is "An environment in which all interpersonal relations are consensual."

No country, even the freest in the world today, adheres to this principle perfectly. But we can certainly say that some do it better than others. We can even say that some do it a HELL OF A LOT better than others to the point where there is no rational basis for comparison.

Therefore, the question "And what about that ally's actions towards Iran?" places Israel and Iran on equal moral footing.

I reject that wholeheartedly.

On the one hand you have a nation state that is a liberal democracy. It's not perfect, but people can live and pursue their lives there in relative peace and freedom. You can believe what you want to. Live your life as an LGBT+ individual without interference. Start a business. Own property. Have a family and pretty much do what you want with your one and only shot at this life.

On the other hand you have a religious theocracy that murders women for not covering their hair and throws LGBT+ people off of rooftops and executes people just for criticizing the government.

So, what ABOUT Israel's actions towards Iran, exactly?

To point the finger at a free country taking action against a dictatorship is to suggest that that dictatorship has rights.

It doesn't.

The entire basis for a country's right to exist is the recognition and protection of rights. You can't, on the one hand, say "I have the right to exist and to defend myself" while routinely infringing on the rights of your own citizens. You can't violate peoples' rights and then go and hide behind the concept of rights. That concept is based on the mutual recognition, respect and value for reason and diplomacy over force.
by kragen | 2025-06-19 14:59:54+00:00
Hmm, what epistemological propositions of Popper's do you think they're missing? To the extent that I understand the issues, they're building on Popper's epistemology, but by virtue of having a more rigorous formulation of the issues, they resolve some of the apparent contradictions in his views.

Most of Popper's key points are elaborated on at length in blog posts on LessWrong. Perhaps they got something wrong? Or overlooked something major? If so, what?

(Amusingly, you seem to have avoided making any falsifiable claims in your comment, while implying that you could easily make many of them...)
by mdip | 2025-06-19 14:59:59+00:00
They list the PWM frequency in the bulb specifications? That's news to me.

A few months ago I went through most of the bulbs in my house and replaced nearly all of them with LIFX bulbs. I had spent quite some time trying to figure out which bulbs would have the least flicker and knew from my more DIY setups[0] that PWM frequency is the cause.

I deal with Migraine somewhat regularly and PWM flicker/strobe lights amplify the pain when I'm dealing with one.

Nearly every smart bulb I've grabbed incorporates such a miserably slow PWM setting that dimming the bulb to 1% results in lighting that's reduced by only about 25%. It becomes clear when you set it to 1% that the manufacturer couldn't limit length of the "off" cycle further or the bulb would begin resembling a strobe light.

I haven't tested all of the more expensive variants, but I also had a really hard time finding any "from the manufacturer" information about the PWM frequencies. I've also never encountered an incandescent drop-in that uses anything other than PWM frequency (I wasn't even aware that there are fixtures that do that).

[0] Experiments? Magic-smoke generators? Sometimes-almost-house-fires? I'm no electrical engineer.
by dijit | 2025-06-19 15:00:02+00:00
Honestly; make some blessed standards easier to use and maintain.

Right now running K8S on anything other than cloud providers and toys (k3s/minikube) is disaster waiting to happen unless you're a really seasoned infrastructure engineer.

Storage/state is decidedly not a solved problem, debugging performance issues in your longhorn/ceph deployment is just pain.

Also, I don't think we should be removing YAML, we should instead get better at using it as an ILR (intermediate language representation) and generating the YAML that we want instead of trying to do some weird in-place generation (Argo/Helm templating) - Kubernetes sacrificed a lot of simplicity to be eventually consistent with manifests, and our response was to ensure we use manifests as little as possible, which feels incredibly bizzare.

Also, the design of k8s networking feels like it fits ipv6 really well, but it seems like nobody has noticed somehow.
Show HN: Launching Echovox Studio – ideate → research → generate → edit in mins
by shalaj8august | 2025-06-19 15:00:05+00:00
Hi HN,

We’ve built Echovox Studio—a browser-based, end-to-end audio content workflow that takes you from idea → research → script → voice → edit in a few minutes.

Why we made it While prototyping an audio-streaming product, we talked to creators (founders, educators, bloggers, podcasters). The same pain points kept surfacing:

no time to research or script + trouble finding relevant ideas + a fragmented toolchain (recording, TTS, editing all separate)

What it does (not limited to below):

1) 1-click topic summaries or deep content research and writing (LLM)

2) Voice generation

your cloned voice or 200+ multilingual TTS voices or direct in-app recording

3) Post-processing & easy editing – noise removal, background music, quick trims; more edits coming

Tech stack Next.js UI · FastAPI · Modal · Postgres / Supabase · Azure & Cloudflare

Supported by NVIDIA Inception, Microsoft Founders Hub, DigitalOcean Hatch, and Cloudflare for Startups.

Demo Link: https://studio.echovox.in/echovox-demo Product Link: https://studio.echovox.in/

Love to hear your feedback ! Thanks for taking a look !
by soraminazuki | 2025-06-19 15:00:36+00:00
The only people on character assassination campaigns here are literal Nazi followers rewriting the past trying to depict one of the worst genocide in modern history as an act of "peace." It's legitimate and inevitable that people judge you by your actions, all the more when it comes to what you choose to stand up for. Trying to call that "cancel culture" is just lazy and changes nothing. When someone stands up for Nazis or their defenders and that damages their reputation, that's on them.

Also, trolling LKML doesn't solve racism. Nor does having the Linux project violate sanctions.
by rollcat | 2025-06-19 15:00:43+00:00
Of course there are. Many browser extensions are available for all platforms except Apple's, because you need that $99/y (and a Mac) to wrap (and fix up) a bunch of JS you already wrote and tested everywhere else.

I applaud the authors of the few good extensions who went the extra 20.000 leagues. (But I still reluctantly switched to Ungoogled Chromium.)
by jcastro | 2025-06-19 15:01:04+00:00
For the confusion around verified publishing, this is something the CNCF encourages artifact authors and their projects to set up. Here are the instructions for verifying your artifact:

https://artifacthub.io/docs/topics/repositories/

You can do the same with just about any K8s related artifact. We always encourage projects to go through the process but sometimes they need help understanding that it exists in the first place.

Artifacthub is itself an incubating project in the CNCF, ideas around making this easier for everyone are always welcome, thanks!

(Disclaimer: CNCF Staff)
by uniqueuid | 2025-06-19 15:01:11+00:00
Popper requires you to posit null hypotheses to falsify (although there are different schools of thought on what exactly you need to specify in advance [1]).

Bayesianism requires you to assume / formalize your prior belief about the subject under investigation and updates it given some data, resulting in a posterior belief distribution. It thus does not have the clear distinctions of frequentism, but that can also be considered an advantage.

[1] https://web.mit.edu/hackl/www/lab/turkshop/readings/gigerenz...
by svnt | 2025-06-19 15:01:15+00:00
> My physical reaction to tigers also in no way disproves the simulation hypothesis.

This is a big conclusion to state with no justification and no definitions.

You seem to equate simulation hypothesis with solipsism. Are you actually equating these?

> I perceive thoughts. I don’t perceive my sensory data — but I do perceive my interpretation of my sensory data. (I don’t see pixels or sound samples…

You are missing the fact that in your view all of that sensory information, and all of what you learned about how it works, is simulation. You cannot rely on the fact that pixels are something you have observed to tell you that pixels should be your fundamental light sensory units.

It seems also to be mistaken reasoning that a simulation should emerge from present-era computing and electronic sensing principles.

> And I can think about the number 4. When I do that, something happens in my mind. I don’t think I am perceiving “four” with my sensory system. But the thought has to exist somewhere, right?

Yes, but think about how you got there. You thought about 4. How is that critically experientially different from looking at the door handle. Or listening to the rain.

To answer your question, without having considered the answer much: I think the only things I actually do are perhaps observe, explore and exercise volition.
by wat10000 | 2025-06-19 15:01:40+00:00
What a terrifying statement.

Edit: to be less glib, this is like saying “our shred-o-matic is perfectly safe due to its robust and thoroughly tested off switch.” An off switch is essential but not nearly enough. It only provides acceptable safety if the operator is perfect, and people are not. You need guards and safety interlocks that ensure, for example, that the machine can’t be turned on while Bob is inside lubricating the bearings.

Mutexes and smart pointers are important constructs but they don’t provide safety. Safety isn’t the presence of safe constructs, but the absence of unsafe ones. Smart pointers don’t save you when you manage to escape a reference beyond the lifetime of the object because C++ encourages passing parameters by reference all over the place. Mutexes and semaphores don’t save you from failing to realize that some shared state can be mutated on two threads simultaneously. And none of this saves you from indexing off the end of a vector.

You can probably pick a subset of C++ that lets you write reasonably safe code. But the presence of semaphores, mutexes, and shared pointers isn’t what does it.

Source: also writing C and C++ for 30 years.
by blixt | 2025-06-19 15:02:08+00:00
If we extrapolate these points about building tools for AI and letting the AI turn prompts into code I can’t help but reach the conclusion that future programming languages and their runtimes will be heavily influenced by the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs.

What would the code of an application look like if it was optimized to be efficiently used by LLMs and not humans?

* While LLMs do heavily tend towards expecting the same inputs/outputs as humans because of the training data I don’t think this would inhibit co-evolution of novel representations of software.
by pyman | 2025-06-19 15:02:32+00:00
Same here. I managed to see a video on the App Store. It creates a video with a waveform and the audio you recorded. I like it!

It would be great if I could also add some pictures and have it create transitions while the audio plays. If I only pick one photo, it could just display the image with the waveform on top.

I like sending a picture of myself, or a few of my dogs, cats and gf, because it adds that human touch that IMO is needed when talking to family and friends.

If you could make my mouth move with the audio, I'd definitely be willing to pay more for it.

Great work!
by manishsharan | 2025-06-19 15:02:45+00:00
I decided to build a Agent system from scratch

It is sort of trivial to build it. Its just User + System Prompt + Assistant +Tools in a loop with some memory management.. The loop code can be as complex as I want it to be e.g. I could snapshot the state and restart later.

I used this approach to build a coding system (what else ?) and it works just as well as cursor or Claude Code for me. t=The advantage is I am able to switch between Deepseek or Flash depending on the complexity of the code and its not a black box.

I developed the whole system in Clojure.. and dogfooded it as well.
by solaire_oa | 2025-06-19 15:03:09+00:00
Making 4 PRs for a well-known solution sounds insane, yes, but to be the devil's advocate, you could plausibly be working with an ambiguous task: "Create 4 PRs with 4 different dependency libraries, so that I can compare their implementations." Technically it wouldn't need to pick the best one.

I have apprehension about the future of software engineering, but comparison does technically seem like a valid use case.
by toast0 | 2025-06-19 15:04:32+00:00
> This is dystopia in the making, 1984 coming alive, first of all; why someone's social media activity would be the matter of the government?

I don't know that it's specifically required for a visitor visa, but 'Good Moral Character' is required for naturalization in the US. Activity on social media is probably an indication of moral character, so it's not unreasonable to check social media before issuing visas that have a path towards citizenship. Student visas may technically be visitor visas, but there's a clear path F-1 -> OPT -> H-1B -> EB-2 or EB-3; if you're going to check on moral character at the end of all that, you may as well check at the beginning too.

What constitutes good moral character might not be a great question for a government to decide. There is certainly potential and precident of the government using good moral character as a proxy for discrimination that has nothing to do with morality.
by johngossman | 2025-06-19 15:04:36+00:00
Not a very ambitious wishlist for a 2.0 release. Everyone I talk to complains about the complexity of k8s in production, so I think the big question is could you do a 2.0 with sufficient backward compatibility that it could be adopted incrementally and make it simpler. Back compat almost always mean complexity increases as the new system does its new things and all the old ones.
by WorldMaker | 2025-06-19 15:04:43+00:00
> Or simply use LLMs that struggle at writing good code (GPT

As still the default for GitHub Copilot GPT doesn't seem to "struggle" at all with writing good code. Anecdotally, in comparison with GPT, Claude seems woefully under-trained in areas such as PowerShell and cross-platform solutions compared to GPT. (Which also seems to show directly in Claude Code's awful cross-platform support. If Claude is so good why doesn't it fix Claude Code's Windows support? Add more PowerShell support instead of just bashing out bash-isms?)

A lot of impressions of the LLMs are hugely subjective, and I'm inclined to the above poster's suggestion a lot of of what you get out of an LLM is a reflection of who you are and what you put in to the LLM. (They are massively optimized GIGO machines after all.)
by mdip | 2025-06-19 15:05:12+00:00
Right there with you. I just dropped an amount of money I'm unwilling to admit on replacement bulbs throughout -- only this time I was replacing WiFi RGBW LED bulbs in rooms that had lower-end bulbs (almost everything on the market).

Incidentally, I went with LIFX -- I had purchased their bulbs back when they were the only realistic option besides Philips Hue for smart RGBW bulbs[0]. Still seems those two brands produce the most flicker-free variety.

[0] LIFX was a handful of lumens brighter at the time and didn't have a hub requirement
by simpaticoder | 2025-06-19 15:05:52+00:00
The overall impression I get of such projects is that politicians celebrate the funding victory, and then forget about it. Then the project's funds get eaten up by administrative costs over time. Ezra Klien [1] recently highlighted two such examples: high speed rail in CA, and rural broadband subsidies. Personally, I haven't seen much, if anything, actually spent out of Biden's infrastructure bill. The money from these programs just seems to...vanish. Allowing this to happen undermines the idea that the USG is a trustworthy spender of our money. I would personally prefer it if political success wasn't just grabbing more budget, but actually overseeing successful execution of public projects.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZxaFfxloo
by cogman10 | 2025-06-19 15:06:26+00:00
It's every bit a proto religion. And frankly quite reminiscent of my childhood faith.

It has a priesthood that speaks for god (quantum). It has ideals passed down from on high. It has presuppositions about how the universe functions which must not be questioned. And it's filled with people happy that they are the chosen ones and they feel sorry for everyone that isn't enlightened like they are.

In the OPs article, I had to chuckle a little when they started the whole thing off by mentioning how other Rationalists recognized them as a physicist (they aren't). Then they proceeded to talk about "quantum cloning theory".

Therein is the problem. A bunch of people vociferously speaking outside their expertise confidently and being taken seriously by others.
by resters | 2025-06-19 15:06:30+00:00
Not meaning to be too direct, but you are misinterpreting a lot about rationalists.

In my view, rationalists are often "Bayesian" in that they are constantly looking for updates to their model. Consider that the default approach for most humans is to believe a variety of things and to feel indignant if someone holds differing views (the adage never discuss religion or politics). If one adopts the perspective that their own views might be wrong, one must find a balance between confidently acting on a belief and being open to the belief being overturned or debunked (by experience, by argument, etc.).

Most rationalists I've met enjoy the process of updating or discarding beliefs in favor of ones they consider more correct. But to be fair to one's own prior attempts at rationality, one should try reasonably hard to defend one's current beliefs so that they can be fully and soundly replaced if necessary, without leaving any doubt that they were insufficiently supported, etc.

To many people (the kind of people who never discuss religion or politics) all this is very uncomfortable and reveals that rationalists are egotistical and lacking in humility. Nothing could be further from the truth. It takes tremendous humility to assume that one's own beliefs are quite possibly wrong. The very name of Eliezer's blog "Less Wrong" makes this humility quite clear. Scott Alexander is also very open with his priors and known biases / foci, and I view his writing as primarily focusing on big picture epistemological patterns that most people end up overlooking because most people are busy, etc.

One final note about the AI-dystopianism common among rationalists -- we really don't know yet what the outcome will be. I personally am a big fan of AI, but we as humans do not remotely understand the social/linguistic/memetic environment well enough to know for sure how AI will impact our society and culture. My guess is that it will amplify rather than mitigate differences in innate intelligence in humans, but that's a tangent.

I think to some, the rationalist movement feels like historical "logical positivist" movements that were reductionist and socially darwinian. While it is obvious to me that the rationalist movement is nothing of the sort, some people view the word "rationalist" as itself full of the implication that self-proclaimed rationalists consider themselves superior at reasoning. In fact they simply employ a heuristic for considering their own rationality over time and attempting to maximize it -- this includes listening to "gut feelings" and hunches, etc,. in case you didn't realize.