MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lisper | 2025-06-13 23:06:58+00:00
The Lorentz factor at 0.5 c is 0.86 so this only reduces your proper travel time by about 15%. Even at 0.9c the LF is only 0.43, so it would still take you 2 years just to get to Proxima Centauri. And as you approach c, 1G acceleration speeds you less and less. And you also have to slow down at your destination.
by danbolt | 2025-06-13 23:07:18+00:00
> It has a terrible scripting language

Curious, could you elaborate on what you find terrible about it? I’ve been toying around with GDScript for a little while, and I think it’s actually quite well-suited for developing 3D games.

Or, they get a lot right with gradual typing, reference counting, and low-cost marshalling between native code and the script VM. The language authors know it’s a DSL, so they add specific features such as `$` and `@export` that are idiomatic to the engine’s architecture.
by woopsn | 2025-06-13 23:08:24+00:00
If I had to write again I might say "same theorems about natural numbers" and capitalize ROUGHLY. It is a conversation, what exactly I am weaseling around (not just nonstandard model theoretic issues), and I take your caveat about consistency strength - with that said would you still call it misleading? Why is it that eg x+y=y+x for x y given takes exponential length proof in Robinson compared to PA? For the reason stated, which is true in a very broad sense.
by ilc | 2025-06-13 23:08:58+00:00
Ironically it DOES. Because part of your ability is your ability to convince others etc.

People think of ability as just technical, or just soft. It is mixing it all together that produces true strength.

If I wear a suit at the wrong time, it shows an inability to read the room, and in some firms may even have gotten my manager to ask if I was looking for a job!

So, understanding how to dress how you want to be seen is critical. I'm not saying it's high fashion time, but at least understand the audience, and the aura you want to put out.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-06-13 23:11:36+00:00
Ultimately if you're working on weapons tech you don't get any say in how the technology will be used, there are very very few things that can only be deployed defensively. Because defending an open line in a war theatre can totally be an offensive action. On the flip side plenty of military offensives have been justified as preemptive defense. Not only the lines are blurry, they're not under your control unless you're actually in the chain of command.
by roywiggins | 2025-06-13 23:11:56+00:00
One fun thing about MUMPS is that if you don't use the newfangled "new" keyword when declaring them, variables iirc are all global to the file. Or record, or whatever not-quite-a-file entity contains source code in MUMPS systems (8 character hard limit on filenames)

And of course some code ends up relying on ambient global state to function properly, so the codebase is strewn with "environment setting" methods that set up the required globals before you call the functions that rely on them.

The other fun one iirc is that calling a function inside the "true" branch of an IF can clobber the global TEST flag and cause the "false" branch to execute as well, since the "else" keyword relies on $TEST to decide what to do. The fix is to end it with a noop "if true" to unclobber $TEST.

The other worst MUMPS code was MUMPS code that used string concatenation to generate more MUMPS code from the worst DSL you've ever seen, MUMPS code that seemed to partially implement a MUMPS interpreter...
by gleenn | 2025-06-13 23:14:15+00:00
I agree, but will the money be made by the same people? Like, if a psychologists group stands to benefit from treating it they wouldn't reap the benefit of the pharma research. Kind of like how the alcohol industry lobbies against weed or other possible substitutes. Or the car companies buying out the rail roads and then shutting them down to prevent competition. There is just so much inefficiency from competing industries sabotaging each other. You are also making a leap that understanding the cause is physiological means that there is a drug you could sell and not cost billions of dollars to get to market without risk. I always wonder about the PReP drugs for treating AIDS was really the best outcome instead of aiming for the cure. Definitely tradeoffs with a lot of money one way or another.
by Centigonal | 2025-06-13 23:14:23+00:00
It seems to me that "forgetting correctly" is rapidly becoming a more pertinent problem in this field than "learning correctly." We're making great strides in getting models to teach themselves new facts, but the state of the art in jettisoning the least relevant information given new knowledge and finite capacity is lagging far behind.

"Forgetting correctly" is something most human brains are exceptionally good at, too. I wonder how that works...
by pedalpete | 2025-06-13 23:16:02+00:00
Neurons definitely re-wire, or just wire/connect. Meditation, creates an understanding of how we can "control" or monitor our thoughts. Reading creates understanding.

Yes, if you lift the weight, muscle will grow. If you look at or think about the weight, studies suggest, muscles will also grow.

But I'm cautious to not conflate "we see electrical activity" to "we have re-wired the brain".

Meditation changes the electrical activity, but we don't put an electrical signal into the brain and end up with meditation. We can kinda force the brain into a meditative state with magnetic stimulation, but we're talking about some really powerful stuff, and I think some would argue that we aren't actually creating a meditative state if we were to do this. Note: I haven't looked into this too deeply.

The way I look at it, we are just really clever apes. We keep thinking we understand how the brain/body/consciousness works, but every time we discover another layer of science and understanding, we look back at our previous understanding and think how naive we were. I think this is the same.

We used to literally think we understood how the body worked by "balancing the 4 humours". We understood how blood delivered oxygen to muscles and nutrients and we thought "oh, I get it, it's a big pump, and we pump this blood stuff around and that's how it works". Then we discovered electricty, slapped our collective foreheads and went "OH!! Of course, it's electric! electricity contracts the pump, oh, and look at these thing in the brain! They're electric too!! I get it".

Soon, we'll go through this whole process again and realize that the electrical activity wasn't wrong, but was naive, and I suspect the process will repeat again, and again.
by segmondy | 2025-06-13 23:16:14+00:00
Yup, and it's rooted in reality too. Older folks might have more wisdom, but MOST, not all of them are slower, it takes them longer to figure out things, learn new things, they are more closed minded. I say this as an older folk clocking 50, I was very open minded to hiring older folks as a younger person and have done many, and I have been burned the most by older folks that interview great, can talk the talk but can't back it up with walk. Now, I'm not saying ALL, just MOST. ... this unfortunately will always be a problem, I'm seeing it now with LLMs, most older folks are very closed minded about it, and younger folks are embracing it. Tomorrow they will be shocked when no one wants to hire them. Such is life.

If you're older, keep your skills up to date, be chill, be open minded, and keep hope alive.
by XorNot | 2025-06-13 23:20:42+00:00
Which they use all the time. If you did this at a district heating level, you'd just be running an electric district heating system, resistively, which you run all the time - it wouldn't be a dump load, it would just be the load and a very inefficient one at that (compared to a heat pump).

The point is all this stuff costs money to build, money to maintain, so if you don't use it most of the time the time you do needs to be incredibly valuable.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-13 23:21:14+00:00
> Even if you agree with not watching porn at work on principle, it's weird to have it as an explicit policy. It's like if the employee manual has a "No stealing the office supplies" or a "No office fight-clubs" policy.

No personal use (with incidental use exceptions for some items, and often exhaustive examples of what is and isn't incidental) of company property and zero tolerance for workplace violence of any kind policies are pretty common, IME.
by ghaff | 2025-06-13 23:22:14+00:00
It wasn't the Itanium people so much as the industry analysts who follow such things. And, yes, they (including myself) were spectacularly wrong early on but, hey, it was Intel after all and an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar and 64-bit chips were clearly needed. I'm not sure there was any industry analyst--and I probably bailed earlier than most--who was going this is going to be a flop from the earliest days.
by pfisherman | 2025-06-13 23:22:24+00:00
They decided to try to be a pharma company instead of a diagnostics company. The microarray tech was obsolete, but they did have a lot of data. The problem is that being a pharmaceutical company is very difficult. I always question why they wanted to play in early pipeline rather than using their data to have an edge in later stage acquisitions. Perhaps they felt that running later stages of development and commercialization was too difficult, risky, and capital intensive; but if so then they probably had no business trying to sell drugs in the first place.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-06-13 23:23:09+00:00
This is really cool, thanks for the info. I've always wondered about how this was done, especially for games.

> so the executable statically links with pretty much everything, including stuff that would count as part of the OS on a PC.

So this is something like whatever libc implementation was used? What era was this? "modern" ish consoles (ps4/XBox-whatever-from-the-last-decade)?
by muzani | 2025-06-13 23:23:27+00:00
I'm always surprised how nobody in these threads try to be the one who gives AI the job.

A few years ago, everyone kept talking about how they were inspired by tim ferriss and rich dad poor dad to quit their jobs and become entrepreneurs. Now people are talking about how they miss having jobs.

People were automating businesses on less then. If you have something with the capabilities of putting someone out of a job, then what about being a solopreneur? Without a large team to feed, you don't need the big markets; you can do niches like say, fitness for diabetics, and all kinds of crazy features you couldn't do 5 years ago like calculate glycemic load from a photo of a hot dog.
by Kon-Peki | 2025-06-13 23:23:31+00:00
The Caterpillar Museum [1] in Peoria, IL has a few VR-ish cockpit mockups that you can try out. I’m fairly certain at least one of them is an excavator.

PS, it shares a parking garage with an art/science museum [2] that is pretty nice.

[1] https://www.caterpillar.com/en/company/visitors-center.html

[2] https://www.peoriariverfrontmuseum.org/
by pedalpete | 2025-06-13 23:24:22+00:00
We work in neurostimulation and sleep, and collaborate with Alzheimer's researchers.

The Amyloid hypothesis is not disproven, it is still ONE of the primary candidates for AD.

The problem with any Alzheimer's research is that the disease is still not well understood. It is likely that multiple diseases are being bundled in as a single disease. The tests for AD, are somewhat rudimentary. Beginning with psychological and neurological tests, the blood work to rule out other conditions, followed by a PET scan to look for brain atrophy, and CSF measures for amyloid and tau levels.

It seems almost like they're basically ruling out any disease we can actually measure for and then if it isn't one of those, it's AD.

Does this mean the Amyloid hypothesis is wrong? Unlikely. Is it incomplete? Absolutely!

But articles shouting that all the research should be thrown out are not helpful .

The AD community know that they don't understand the disease, and though therapeutics have been mostly focused on amyloid and tau, research into how the disease works continues.
by landl0rd | 2025-06-13 23:24:54+00:00
I think the "escape the box" explanation misses the point, if anything. The same problem has been super visible in RL for a long time, and it's basically like complaining that water tries to "escape a box" (seek a lowest point). Give it rules and it will often violate their spirit ("cheat"). This doesn't imply malice or sentience.
by gexla | 2025-06-13 23:25:39+00:00
I have found it's the most brutal of all of them if you simply tell it to be "hard-nosed" or play "Devil's Advocate." Brutal partially because it will destroy an argument formulated in Gemini or ChatGPT. Using whatever I can get without subs across the board. Debating seems to be one of Claude's strong points.
by raisedbyninjas | 2025-06-13 23:26:40+00:00
Apples app store was 3 years old at that point and white hot. The Samsung Galaxy was 2 years old then. If they wanted to go to market with an unpolished product differentiated with a few nifty features, they'd need to spend months paying loads of money to devs to fill out their app store to have a chance.
by nwallin | 2025-06-13 23:27:51+00:00
> Disassemble a pea into a finite number of pieces. Then reassemble those pieces to create the sun.

"Finite number of pieces" is a tricky thing. It's a finite number of pieces, sure, but each of those pieces is made of an uncountably infinite number of pieces. Banach-Tarski is a clever way of sweeping an infinite number of dust bunnies under the rug until just the right moment, when it reveals all infinitely many of them in the shape of a pea and claims to have just created them, when in reality, they were actually there all along, hiding under the rug.

For me, Banach-Tarski is just an another version of Hilbert's Hotel, but with uncountable infinities instead of countable ones. Once you accept, in your heart, that infinity is real and is equally deserving of your love and respect as finite natural numbers, then the paradoxicalness of Banach-Tarski melts away.
by taeric | 2025-06-13 23:29:14+00:00
Ish? Is only really true if what you are programming can be seen as a search for the completion of a statement?

For an easy example to consider, what would the logical program look like that described any common fractal? https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Koch_curve#Prolog shows that... it is not necessarily a win for this idea.

For the general task asked in the OP here, I would hope you could find an example in rosettacode that shows prolog gets a good implementation. Unfortunately, I get the impression some folks prefer code golf for these more so than they do "makes the problem obvious."
by slg | 2025-06-13 23:29:58+00:00
Since fascism is more a political philosophy than an economic one, it is hard to define an "objective measure" for this type of thing, but the formal merging of corporate interests with military interests by commissioning C-suite officials is probably as close as we could get.

It might help to contrast it with an authoritarian left-wing approach to this same problem of private and state collaboration. In a system like that, we might expect these companies to be nationalized. But a right-wing system would generally be against that. They would instead keep those companies private, but the company could effectively still become state controlled by intertwining leadership such as we see here.

A free and open society should generally be against the merging of corporations and the state as it allows for too much concentrated power which can lead to both corruption and tyranny. These two sides will of course be aligned generally on the well-being of the nation, but having leadership literally splitting time between the two functions goes way beyond that as it creates problems like inherent conflicts of interest and allows for the circumvention of laws and regulations around how both the government and corporations should work. For example, the government might be prevented from spying on its people such as collecting internet histories and corporations might be prevented from exerting physical power over people like imprisoning them. But if the two groups are acting as one, this distinction doesn't matter. The corporate side can do the data collection to find who needs to be imprisoned and then the state does the dirty work of rounding people up. This would be much easier to implement and hide when it can all be orchestrated by a single person delegating their desires down whatever chain of command can legally accomplish the specific subtask at hand.

And wrapping this all up under the general banner of patriotism is doing them no favors here either as it comes off like the nationalistic propaganda that often accompanies fascism.
by ssl-3 | 2025-06-13 23:30:11+00:00
Indeed.

As part of a carrier buyout a ~decade ago, my then-partner was given a "free" phone. IIRC, it was a Nokia something-or-other that ran Window 8 Mobile.

The specs were very low-end compared to the flagship Samsung I was using. And as a long-time Linux user (after being a long-time OS/2 user), I had deep reservations about everything from Microsoft and I frankly expected them to be very disappointed with the device.

But it was their first smartphone, and the risk was zero, so I didn't try to talk them out of it.

It was a great phone. It was very snappy, like early PalmOS devices (where everything was either in write-once ROM or in RAM -- no permanent writable storage) were also very snappy. The text rendering was great. It took fine pictures. IIRC, even the battery life was quite lovely for smartphones of the time.

Despite being averse to technology, it was easy enough for them to operate that they never asked for me help. And since they'd never spent any time with the Android or Apple ecosystems, they never even noticed that there were fewer apps available.

Their experience was the polar opposite of what I envisioned it would be.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-13 23:32:20+00:00
> The Army calls the program to recruit Silicon Valley executives Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. One of the executives, Andrew Bosworth of Meta (formerly Facebook) posted on X that the “201” monicker was a nod to an HTML coding command, in which a “201” response indicates the creation of a new programming resource.

Somehow I imagine that Andrew Bosworth didn't phrase things quite that way.
by ghaff | 2025-06-13 23:32:30+00:00
To this day, I don't know if Intel thought Itanium was the legitimately better approach. There were certainly theoretical arguments for VLIW over carrying CISC forward--even if it had never been commercially successful in the past. But I at least suspect that getting away from x86 licensing entanglements was also a factor. I suspect it was a bit of both and different people at the company probably had different perspectives.
by simoncion | 2025-06-13 23:33:09+00:00
> The main problem is they use up an increasingly scarce USB port.

This logic I do not understand. USB hubs exist and are more-or-less commodity parts these days. [0]

I'd be surprised if the fingerprint reader was anything faster than USB 2.0, and deeply offended if the reader did anything other than idle on the bus when it's not being used... so you're not going to be suffering any real bandwidth contention by putting that guy and a USB 3.x device on the same hub.

[0] They're also usually how motherboards that have a whole bunch of USB ports hook those ports into the onboard USB controller(s). (Do folks usually think that every one of the 10gbit/s ports on one's desktop machine could be simultaneously run at 10gbit/s?)
by lxgr | 2025-06-13 23:34:16+00:00
I don't think I've ever had a CD and a player that supported it, unfortunately. A real shame, especially on car radios with 10 disk magazines in the trunk, where the CD case was unlikely to be around.

CDDA barely feels like a digital format: Sure, there's PCM audio on them, but error detection is dubious at best – it doesn't cover any sub-channels to my knowledge, and it's done by the same low-level layers as error correction, so I believe there's a chance for mistaking a garbled-but recoverable frame for a broke one.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-06-13 23:34:34+00:00
It's not just that. When Apple adopts a trend or implement a modern feature/flow that they are not the first to, like flat UIs, wearables, VR, etc they do put in earnest effort to polish and distinguish their experience compared to others. Something their competitors don't put a ton of weight in. This pushes people in general to believe that the "Apple way" is somewhat better just because it's different or at least has some mysterious merit. iPeople even more so tan the general public.
by danielodievich | 2025-06-13 23:35:30+00:00
Dropping someone who did a lot for you - and you may not have realized it at the time but now you do - a note out of the blue is a wonderful thing to do. Especially if it is carefully written. Megabonus for paper note although in the career field you may not know where they are at, so email is best.

I've done it throughout my career for one manager, and few peers. It was wonderfully fun and much appreciated.

Great Ask HN question
by armchairhacker | 2025-06-13 23:36:56+00:00
> Speaking to reporters after he was released, the civilian identified himself as Marcos Leao, 27. Leao said he was an Army veteran on his way to an office of the Department of Veterans Affairs when he crossed a yellow tape boundary and was asked to stop.

> Leao, who gained his U.S. citizenship through military service, said he was treated "very fairly."

> "They're just doing their job," said Leao, who is of Angolan and Portuguese descent.

Interesting. This is much more nuanced than the headline may seem. I hope things stay nuanced.
by bitpush | 2025-06-13 23:37:23+00:00
You can only get a frosted glass effect with that.

Imagine an overlay in front of a red circle. If you want the red circle blurred in the overlay, you need to know about red circle, and sample from it for each pixel. Vision Pro cant sample the entire viewport 120fps (or whatever fps they are running at). It would be a janky mess.

Vision Pro UI is not transparent / translucent but frosted.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2024/02/apple-announce...
by nntwozz | 2025-06-13 23:37:31+00:00
Cheers.

Gruber does mention Metro:

The lack of skeuomorphic effects and almost extreme flatness of the “modern” (née Metro) Windows 8 interface is remarkably forward-thinking. It’s meant to look best on retina-caliber displays, not the sub-retina displays it debuted on (with Windows Phone 7.x) or the typical PC displays of today. That said, I think there’s a sterility to Metro that prevents it from being endearing. It epitomizes “flat” design, but I don’t think it’s great design.
by sheepscreek | 2025-06-13 23:37:53+00:00
When discussing disasters, it’s impossible to ignore BlackBerry. They crafted solid devices, and their downfall from a hardware company is a tragic one. They grew too big and failed to adapt in times of “war” with a diminishing market share. However, I firmly believe they could have maintained a loyal user base over the years, at least large enough to allow them to fight another day.

Their user interface was a true gem - beautiful yet functional. The devices were incredibly fast, and the optical cursor was a revelation. I genuinely believe the way the trackpad cursor functions on the iPad is inspired by BlackBerry’s design.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-06-13 23:39:39+00:00
I can't be the only person who thinks this whole "liquid glass" thing is a nothing-burger. Just a WWDC25 misdirection by Apple because they got nothing of "major" excitement to the general market this year.

I feel Apple throws a "UI overhaul" WWDC when they want to occupy all the discussion about them with "UI discussion" while why buy themselves more time to work on things. People will spend all their time and effort arguing merits of UI that Apple fully intend to again as soon as they release it.