MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-07-16 20:57:19+00:00
> Sounds like China is planning to mine it from the moon.

They won't.

Sometimes you'll hear a quoted figure of "the moon has enough to power the USA for 1000 years". It might. But that's for the entire moon. To quote the linked article:

This is roughly the same ratio of the isotopes as in lunar regolith, which contains 28 ppm helium-4 and 2.8 ppb helium-3 (which is at the lower end of actual sample measurements, which vary from about 1.4 to 15 ppb)

Fusion is about 1e7 times more energy dense than burning stuff, which makes this equivalent (in energy terms) to finding the moon's regolith made of (15*1e-9 * 1e7 = 15*1e-2 = 15%) 1.4-15% gasoline.

Extracting this from the regolith is highly energy intensive. It's so uncommon in the crust, that people seriously suggest using a scaled-up mass spectrometer; a byproduct of extracting it this way is pure oxygen and ridiculously-ultra-pure metal.

The metal produced this way has higher energy density than the helium. And, unlike the helium, we can already turn it into energy on earth by… burning it.

Also, harder than burning it but easier than making a fusion reactor, similar levels of energy by shaping the metal into rods, aiming and firing them at a coil of wire on the earth, and using magnetic induction to extract work from the energy gained by falling through the gravitational potential difference.

But it's worse: We don't (yet, or publicly) have useful fusion reactors of any kind, so we can't use this stuff anyway. Tech demos, sure, but nothing useful.

But it's even worse than that: D+3He is harder than D+T, and while it's easier than D+D, there's no way to make a D+3He reactor that doesn't do at least some D+D fusion, and the D+3He reaction rate is never greater than 3.56 times the D+D reaction rate.

But it's worse than that, the only reason to try to avoid D+D in the first place is that half the output is T+P, the other half is… 3He+N. So you get the 3He anyway as a side-effect of a reaction that doesn't require starting with any 3He.

But it's somehow even more ridiculous, because T decays into… 3He.

And and and… if we did have a reactor that could use this, we wouldn't need the moon anyway, because one thing you can do with a fusion reactor is relatively easily travel to the gas giants and extract the stuff from their atmospheres in much higher densities.

(Wish I could remember the original article that had all this stuff in so I could link to it; saw it years back, never found it again).
by dfxm12 | 2025-07-16 20:57:37+00:00
In this sense, LLMs don’t really change anything. The same person operating the tool will continue to be the same person in either case.

I don't understand why more people don't get this. I've told everyone who will listen in my org that implementing LLM's isn't going to solve the problem of people wasting our time reaching out to us with questions that have already been answered in our KA system. If someone was going to type something into an LLM, they could have typed it into a search bar. People don't skip the documentation because they can't find it; they skip because they don't want to read! They want to bug a live a person (and make it their problem)!

I was correct. Now we have a costly LLM implementation and have our time wasted with questions that are already answered.
by Frotag | 2025-07-16 20:57:58+00:00
> It’s reasonable to argue that some kinds of writing shouldn’t, or perhaps can’t, be summarized. [...] maybe a chatbot could explain them to you more clearly than Hofstadter does—but length and difficulty are part of the point of that book

I get that there's an emotional payoff to things like flowery prose. It helps put you in the mindset of the author / characters, which makes seeing them overcome whatever problems all the more satisfying. That's what I expect if I pick up a book about say, friends-since-birth being torn apart by war, with one entering the military and committing atrocities to reunite them.

On the other hand, if I pick up a book about deciphering alien language found on the moon, I'm not reading for the characters. I'm reading to see how hypothetical aliens would think. Which in practice is often "what would humans be like if we added / removed constraint X" (eg perfect empathy or genetic memory). In this case, lengthy prose and other character development just feel like filler. Like I don't actually care that the character became interested in linguistics after growing up on a farm and watching animal behavior. Just tell me about the aliens!
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-16 20:58:05+00:00
I believe this was always the plan. Pump the TSLA value up with ideas that create the valuation (robotaxi, etc). Get into an index. Investment pours in on autopilot from everyone investing via their contributions while Musk and his accomplices (the board) siphon the value out via liquidating overinflated TSLA shares. Get rich before the rug pull when sentiment turns.

I have been wondering if there is a market for an ETF that gives you S&P exposure without the TSLA exposure.
by chickensong | 2025-07-16 20:58:13+00:00
Amen. Sadly, it seems next to impossible to bring this sort of change and accountability to industry. In the meantime, our only option is pay premiums (both financially and in effort), which the masses are unable or unwilling to do, in order to opt out of the current system (if it's even possible).

At least you're thinking about the issues, and seem to care, so thanks for that.
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-07-16 20:58:34+00:00
There’s the coconut paper by meta, which kind of does a similar thing by reasoning in the latent space instead of doing it in tokens: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06769

Given that anthropic’s interpretability work finds that CoT does not reliably predict the model’s internal reasoning process, I think approaches like the one above are more likely to succeed.
by ModernMech | 2025-07-16 20:58:46+00:00
Speaking as someone who's seen a university budget:

- Undergrad education breaks even

- Research operates at a loss

- Master's and professional programs makes a modest profit because most students pay full tuition.

- Interest income off the endowment barely covers operating expenses

- The remaining balance comes from donations.

YMMV, but at the end of the day, what keeps many universities afloat is providing good experiences to students in their formative years so that when they get older and make money, they just give a portion of it back to their alma mater due to good vibes and nostalgia. That's the business model, not bilking grad students.
by lz400 | 2025-07-16 20:58:50+00:00
Not sure about that one. I do agree with the AI bros that, _if_ we build AGI, ASI looks inevitable shortly after, at least a "soft ASI". Because something with the agency of a human but all the knowledge of the world at its fingertips, the ability to replicate itself, think at order of magnitudes faster and paralelly on many things at the same time and modify itself... really looks like it won't stay comparable to a baseline human for long.
by dndurbah | 2025-07-16 20:58:54+00:00
> Much prefer Perl, I can actually get things done quickly

Python lets you just nest data structures without having to twist your brain. You want a tuple in a list in a dictionary value: you just write it down and can access it with a unified notation. Bam. No reference madness and thinking about contexts. It's a big part of what I typically need to get things done quickly and understand how I did it 5 years later. That has to count for something. Python is boring in that sense, Perl is fun. But that's exactly my problem with it. It's too clever for it's own good and writing it does things to your brain (well at least mine).
by taeric | 2025-07-16 20:59:22+00:00
Thanks! I'm not entirely sure I see a reason to change on there, oddly.

I'm very fortunate that my python projects are all relatively small, so maybe that colors things a bit. Certainly looks like something that would have swayed me to uv at the start, but as things are, I think I mainly just wish there was a more standard/accepted work flow for build and release.
by cardanome | 2025-07-16 20:59:48+00:00
We can do science and extrapolate data:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8870038/

> As of 2018, 2.94% of 10- to 14-year-olds had a diagnosis (1 in 34), vs. 0.02% aged 70+ (1 in 6000).

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8870038/

> The ratio of males to females with ASD is generally quoted as 4:1,[..]The true male-to-female ratio appears to be 3:4. Eighty percent of females remain undiagnosed at age 18, which has serious consequences for the mental health of young women.
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-07-16 20:59:51+00:00
In the SF Bay Area, I pay anywhere from $1-$2 per avocado at most places. I've occasionally gotten them at Farmers markets here too, where they have a nice selection depending on desired ripeness/freshness, but its very seasonal.

I have started growing my own (Wurtz aka "Little Cado", a compact self-fertile variety) - in year 3 I have about a half dozen fruits growing!
by suspended_state | 2025-07-16 20:59:57+00:00
Well, after writing my comment, I realized that a python interpreter could define the variable and set it to None between the guarded block and the except block, and implicitly assign it to the raised exception right before evaluating the except block, when the exception as been raised. So technically, it would be possible to define the variable e in GP example and have it scoped to "whatever is after the guarded block", just like what is done with for blocks.

Is there any chance this would cause trouble though? Furthermore, what would be the need of having this variable accessible after the except block? In the case of a for block, it could be interesting to know at which point the for block was "passed".

So, maybe "None" answers your question?
by notatallshaw | 2025-07-16 21:00:23+00:00
If you want to offer a PyPI competitor where your value is all packages are vetted or reviewed nothing stops you, the API that Python package installer tools to interact with PyPI is specified: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/simple...

There are a handful of commercial competitors in this space, but in my experience this ends up only being valuable for a small % of companies. Either a company is small enough and it wants to be agile and it doesn't have time for a third party to vet or review packages they want to use. Or a company is big enough that it builds it's own internal solution. And single users tend to get annoyed when something doesn't work and stop using it.
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-16 21:01:07+00:00
It's a classic case of revealed vs declared preferences. People overwhelmingly say they want everything ethically sourced, but they reveal that they don't want to pay more for it, which makes ethically sourced anything a luxury good in the cases where it succeeds at all. People want kids out of

At some point IMO people need to grow up and recognize that there's a GULF between the world people say they want, and the one they insist on creating. Assuming that your money follows your stated intentions, you're part of a small minority that truly cares about this to the extent that they're willing to pay for it.
by deathanatos | 2025-07-16 21:01:52+00:00
Lua, too:

__add, __sub, __mul, __div, __mod, __pow, __unm, __idiv __band, __bor, __bxor, __bnot, __shl, __shr __concat, __len __eq, __lt, __le __index, __newindex, __call __gc, __close, __mode, __name
by mihaaly | 2025-07-16 21:02:15+00:00
This reminds me of troubles in a parallel universe.

Construction industry have products with typical lifetime of 50+, in some cases multiple hundreds. Computing and digitalization are hot topic now and for the past several decades with various buzzwords (probably 'digital twins' is the newest one) however when I am unable to open construction design files made in the beginning of my career less than 30 years ago due to obsolescence for various reasons then all those efforts seem for nothing eventually beyond immediate needs. Good old outdated 2D drawings seen as unfeasible practice might save the day in the future (... perhaps, assuming that current pdf files could still be opened some decades down the line, as that is a common 'digital paper' approach nowadays, actual physical world paper are used less and less).
by Dig1t | 2025-07-16 21:02:48+00:00
I am not a bot, you can search the list of cancelled grants on this site: https://grant-watch.us/nsf-data.html

Just take a minute and read some of them, almost every single one is DEI related. It’s pure racism.

The titles I pasted into my post I copied directly from the published list of grants, it’s not like I made up those weirdly specific names. You can search for them yourself.
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-07-16 21:03:45+00:00
I find it incredibly intuitive and useful that it does that. sometimes it drives me nuts that it doesn't do it for comprehensions but I can see why.

But if something fails in a loop running in the repl or jupyter I already have access to the variables.

If I want to do something with a loop of data that is roughly the same shape, I already have access to one of the the items at the end.

Short circuiting/breaking out of a loop early doesn't require an extra assignment.

I really can't see the downside.
by footy | 2025-07-16 21:03:50+00:00
I read like 80 books in a slow year but if someone approached me at the grocery store and asked me to read even a children's book I would refuse. It's not because I can't read, it's because when I'm at the grocery store I am kind of busy getting my groceries and don't want to engage with a stranger who has an odd request.

That stranger might conclude I can't read, when in reality I devour books, am the beta reader for my two published-author friends, and probably edit the "thoughts on books I've read" section of my personal wiki more than any other.
by shakna | 2025-07-16 21:04:12+00:00
Its a protocol. A means of communication. It can't be isolated, by definition. There's plenty of cross-platform things using it.

It is as elitest and isolationist as RSS - another limited system.

The format is limited, to preserve the user agent's ability to act... As a user's agent, rather than the host. That's it.

Your objection seems to be... People walking a path you wouldn't.
by mercutio2 | 2025-07-16 21:04:24+00:00
No. Generally speaking, I want corporations to return capital in excess of operating needs to shareholders unless they have actual high-expected-return, ready-to-be-executed plans for what to do with their money.

When corporations just invest because they have money, there is a gigantic agency problem, and executives have a tendency to burn shareholder value on vanity projects and fancier headquarters.

Stock buybacks are exactly what I want wealthy companies to be doing with money they don't have a high expected ROI for.
by MinimalAction | 2025-07-16 21:05:13+00:00
I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.
by deathanatos | 2025-07-16 21:06:16+00:00
> it's default

This point is true; the ecosystem simply can't change overnight. uv is getting there, I hope.

> it always works the same everywhere

`uv` works the same, everywhere?

> it actually writes down the deps

`uv add` does that, too.

> I don't have to manually switch between them (or set up fancy bashrc triggers) like venvs.

You don't have to do that with `uv`, either?
by FakeFind_ai | 2025-07-16 21:06:20+00:00
That is sick dude. The layout is very nice and getting results doesn't take too long. I also created an AI tool if you'd like to test it out. I made a review checker for Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and many other ecommerce platforms. If your interested: https://fakefind.ai Let me know how it goes.
by ubb_server | 2025-07-16 21:06:23+00:00
I think about this a lot. Friends and colleagues consume their daily media from feeds via instagram, tiktok and youtube nonstop.

I pretentiously/foolishly like to think of myself as a slightly higher class of content consumer, because my media isn't algorithmically sourced; its 'high end', organically and ethically sourced from select artisanal hand-crafted subreddit queries or vote-curated headlines like HN.

Maybe it's not as big of a difference as I'd like to imagine.
by googoloid | 2025-07-16 21:07:22+00:00
I think for me, either would work but in different contexts: - as an npm package for convenience for a node project, so i can just add an npm script to launch it on a local db - for more general personal use, a flatpak-distributed app would be preferred (installing npm packages globally is a hassle)

I would want the source to be open for either case though (like others have mentioned too).
by uecker | 2025-07-16 21:07:26+00:00
This is true to some degree, but not really that much in practice. When refactoring you just add assertions for NULL (and the effect of derefencing a NULL in practice is a trap - that it UB in the spec is completely irrelevant. in fact it helps because it allows compilers to turn it a trap without requiring it on weak platforms). Restrict is certainly dangerous, but also rarely used and a clear warning sign, compare it to "unsafe". The practical issues in C are bounds checking and use-after-free. Bounds checking I usually refactor into safe code quickly. Use-after-free are the one area where Rust has a clear advantage.
by Uehreka | 2025-07-16 21:07:29+00:00
This is why it’s important to follow the studies comparing LLMs’ performance in “needle-in-a-haystack” style tasks. They tend to be pretty good at finding the one thing wrong in a large corpus of text, though it depends on the LLM, the flavor (Sonnet, Opus, 8B, 27B, etc) and the size of the corpus, and there are occasional performance cliffs.
by akho | 2025-07-16 21:08:02+00:00
Mint, afaik, offers a choice between Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. These are all DEs built and maintained to preserve a particular workflow based around hierarchical “start” menus, menu bars in applications, and desktop icons — the Win’95 style. This particular selection is very indicative of a preference for a particular era.

Which is fine if that’s your preference, too. However, you shouldn’t expect your experience to be significantly different from what it was when that desktop experience was fresh when you choose a product made by people with such strong preferences.

Again, Bluefin and the like update (atomically, with a rollback option) when you turn your computer off, with no interruptions or sudoing; app installs are through Gnome Software (for GUI stuff; through brew otherwise), without a need to enter passwords. You pay for that with some customizability, but it’s rock solid if it works on your hardware.
by spauldo | 2025-07-16 21:08:26+00:00
You might consider checking out the Weinersmiths' book "A City on Mars." It goes into great detail of what still needs to be developed before we can seriously consider colonizing another world.

It's one of the reasons I support manned spaceflight - sending robots is easy but limited, sending people allows for way more flexibility but needs a lot more knowledge and engineering. We'll never develop that knowledge and engineering without actually sending people into space.
by nomadygnt | 2025-07-16 21:08:29+00:00
In my mind reading is more similar to thinking than watching. I have no basis for this but it just feels more mentally active. Of course it could just be my biases but I feel it is much easier to passively watch or listen to something rather than to read. But also I would say from my own experience writing and speaking promote “neurological health” even more so maybe the method of consumption is not as important as long as there is sufficient synthesis and thought on the other end.
by pron | 2025-07-16 21:08:39+00:00
> Yeah, and those are also the opposite of "solid" :)

So if that's what the author meant by "solid", i.e. few environmental dependencies, then it's not really about "native" or not, but about how the language/runtime is designed. Languages that started out as "scripting" languages often do rely on the environment a lot, but that's not how, say, Java or .NET work.

> I'm so glad that Go and Rust promote static linking as the default (ignoring glibc).

That doesn't work so well (and so usually not done) once you have a GUI, although I guess you consider the GUI to be part of the kernel.
by daedrdev | 2025-07-16 21:08:40+00:00
It's hard to find recent data, but the trend has been far more books were published in the 2010s than in the decades before, by like 10 or 100x. There is an even more enormous amount of fan works published. However, data since ChatGPT was invented is probably poisoned by people using it to write even if I could find it.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-07-16 21:09:16+00:00
Nope, it's more complicated than that:

e = 'before' try: x = int('cat') except Exception as e: e2 = e print(e) print(e2) # <- This works! print(e) # <- NameError: name 'e' is not defined

It's not a scoping thing, the bound exception variable is actually deleted after the exception block, even if it was already bound before!
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-16 21:09:57+00:00
I would love to see a cross-platform desktop UI toolkit for Swift, preferably one that’s reactive and imperative-dominant with declaritivity sprinkled in where it makes sense (all-in declarative design like SwiftUI hits too many language weak points for the time being). Swift is really quite nice to write once you get a feel for it, and as long as one is judicious about advanced feature use, it looks more familiar and less intimidating than Rust does which is great for newcomers.
by mft_ | 2025-07-16 21:10:04+00:00
There are many 'everyday' activities, foods, and substances that can be shown to be harmful to the individual in the long term, and thus have a negative effect on their close circle, the healthcare system, and potentially society, but which are socially acceptable and so remain.

e.g.

Alcohol is worse than no alcohol, for many reasons.

Smoking cigarettes, obvs.

Eating meat is worse that not eating meat.

Doing woodwork without breathing protection may damage your lungs.

Cleaning with spray cleaning products regularly may damage your lungs.

Sun exposure increases your skin cancer risk.

Running is more likely to cause arthritis than cycling or swimming.

Loud environments may damage your hearing.

Insufficiently frequent ejaculation may increase your risk of prostate cancer.

Yes, I'm being deliberately absurd to make the point, but still: where, and how, to draw the line?
by AUnterrainer | 2025-07-16 21:10:40+00:00
Q is not just a query language or a database. It's an array programming language with database capability. You can build an entire framework with just Q, from real-time streaming, to in memory database to on disk database. You can build all APIs and business logic around it. Because it's vector oriented and in memory it's faster than pretty much everything else, no loops required. I have seen a team of 15 KDB developers build what would require an entire etrading department of 200+ developers