MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nathan_compton | 2025-07-14 10:32:19+00:00
A flexible spherical shell of charge orbiting an atom necessarily has an axis of rotation and an angular momentum and would thus be oblate. Furthermore, if we neglect quantum effects or prefer to think of them as not real, such a shell would have a continuous set of possible angular momenta, which is not observed. In fact, the ground state, say, of the hydrogen atom, has zero angular momentum and thus, from that point of view, is simply not equivalent to any sort of orbit whatsoever, or perhaps we prefer to think of it as a superposition of orbits which has the property that the angular momentum is zero - but the BLP ontology does not admit superpositions.

Furthermore, the properties of these sheets of electron material seem quite outlandish. Consider the ground state spherical state. If we force it to have zero angular momentum to match observation, then the shell must be rigid, but as you know, a rigid shell does not actually have a stable orbit around a central charge (this is kindergarten physics, feel free to work it out).

Things get worse when we consider high energy states which do have angular momenta. Does the nucleus get stick in one lobe or the other of the charged sheet, which is now infinitely thin (and thus dense) at the center?

This doesn't even begin to get into the myriad other reasons we use quantum mechanics and reluctantly give up our classical ontology besides just the description of atomic orbitals. To meet all these other demands (eg, Bell experiments) with the "sheet of charge" ontology is at least a herculean task which BLP's material does not accomplish (I have read it) and at worst has even greater foundational challenges than quantum mechanics. After all, we know "wave function collapse" (which I use here to refer simply to the totally uncontroversial measured phenomenon without an interpretation given) indeed happens "instantaneously" over spacetime - for a totally classical ontology this phenomenon is beyond peculiar and would indeed involve genuine signals propagating faster than light. At least in quantum mechanics we can understand wave function collapse in alternative ways which do not involve the violation of the laws of special relativity.

And this doesn't even get into how one would formulate QFT in the BLP picture. QFT isn't without its challenges, of course, but its a basic generalization of the structures of quantum mechanics. I don't know of any place where BLP calculates scattering amplitudes correctly, but feel free to show me where he works out ABC scalar field theory or whatever.

In the end the appeal of any theory needs to be evaluated in the full context of human knowledge, not just against a narrow set of objections about some qualities of a given theory. BLP seems motivated by a basic distaste for some of the weirdness of QM but evaluated in total, against the total sum of experiments routinely carried out in the world and against basic physical intuitions from even classical physics, it doesn't hold up.
by mttspss | 2025-07-14 10:33:23+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a solo founder building 12 startups in 12 months.

I had a lot of problems with tracking my finances and store them all in one place. I kept noticing one thing: personal finance tools are either bloated or boring, nothing simple, fast, and actually useful.

So I built Easybudget, a simple budgeting app to actually track where your money goes.

Why I built it:

I wanted a way to manage spending without spreadsheets.

Most apps are overkill for 90% of people — I wanted fast, clean, focused.

I wanted to ship real products fast and learn in public.

Would love your feedback or ideas for what to improve next!

- Matteo (@creatorLLM)
Show HN: HardView – Know Your Hardware Instantly from Python
by gafoo1 | 2025-07-14 10:33:49+00:00
HardView is a native-speed Python module for real-time hardware monitoring and detailed system info — including CPU, RAM, disks, GPU, and full SMART data.

Windows & Linux Real-time CPU/RAM tracking Advanced disk & SMART info Download: pip install HardVew
by RS-232 | 2025-07-14 10:33:50+00:00
Thanks for sharing your story. I too frequently think back on "what could have been." Back in 2013, I bought and sold a bitcoin, and every time I see a crypto headline I remember my mistake of spending it.

Maybe we should not be so hard on ourselves. Afterall, we still have a heartbeat. Did we truly make a mistake, or did we narrowly avoid getting consumed by avarice?
by geocar | 2025-07-14 10:34:44+00:00
> I sold 100 BTC back in 2015, which cleared all my debts and landed my first apartment.

I think you should be less proud of that.

> I can't see the real value ... Sure, there are some very legit usage of crypto, like: Circumventing sanctions, Laundering money, Scams and transactions of illegal goods

Sounds like you understand exactly what the "real value" is:

If you buy and sell bitcoin, you're helping people launder money, protect gains from scamming people, circumvent sanctions, and trade in illegal goods. You are hurting people, possibly a lot of people.

> It is 2025, and I've yet to see shops here in Europe that actively take any crypto, or people that use it in their daily lives

That's because scamming people, selling illegal goods, money laundering, and helping people circumvent sanctions, is well, illegal in Europe.
by rft | 2025-07-14 10:36:12+00:00
There was a talk on the last CCC that covered romance scams from "call centers" in similar conditions in Myanmar. It gives some insights into the daily life from the perspective of someone who managed to flee the compound and take some documents with him. I was very surprised at the level of sophistication and organization that went into this scam. I knew about the tech support scam centers, but I still saw romance scam as something done on the individual level, not fully organized.

Talk is in German, but dubbed into English by the community. https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-erpressung-aus-dem-internet-auf-...
by JimDabell | 2025-07-14 10:36:27+00:00
Why are you avoiding my point?

This is what Mozilla has to say about Web Bluetooth:

> This API provides access to the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) of Bluetooth, which is not the lowest level of access that the specifications allow, but its generic nature makes it impossible to clearly evaluate. Like WebUSB there is significant uncertainty regarding how well prepared devices are to receive requests from arbitrary sites. The generic nature of the API means that this risk is difficult to manage. The Web Bluetooth CG has opted to only rely on user consent, which we believe is not sufficient protection. This proposal also uses a blocklist, which will require constant and active maintenance so that vulnerable devices aren't exploited. This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.

— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth

Again: Generally speaking, when Apple rejects a proposal, Mozilla do too. What’s Mozilla’s motivation for doing this and lying about it?
by kazinator | 2025-07-14 10:36:55+00:00
Tech companies are not like other companies because they can trivially create vendor lock-in without any geographic constraints on where the customers are.

In fact, it's harder to avoid vendor-lock in in tech; it takes extra work to open things up, possibly a lot of extra work.

Even a well-intentioned open-source program can garner a user base which can't easily migrate off it.
by pyman | 2025-07-14 10:37:36+00:00
I'm interested in debating these facts:

- 2.4 million bitcoins are lost forever [0]. Their owners, for one reason or another, can't access their wallets. No insurance, no guarantees, nothing.

- 1.1 million are owned by a mysterious person who sits at the top of the pyramid [0].

- 2.3 million belong to investors and speculators [0] (who, I'm guessing, make money by pumping and dumping).

- 1 million are owned by banks [0], the same institutions that the mysterious man at the top of the pyramid, who created the "system of trust" said couldn't be trusted [2].

- 1.6 million are held by whales [0]: billionaires, money launderers, drug dealers [5], and so on.

- 1.4 million are still left to be mined [0], but only a handful of rich people with servers worth millions can actually mine them [3].

- The rest are owned by individuals who see it as a long term investment [0].

- It's a digital currency most people don't use to buy or sell anything. The only ones making transactions are banks, investors, and the rich [1][3][4].

- Worst of all, banks, investment firms and billionaires with ties to politicians and policymakers are likely to find out first when major regulations or shifts are coming and they'll be able to sell early and minimise losses, while everyone else finds out after the fact. In a system that was meant to be decentralised and fair, the people with the most power and access still end up with the advantage.

– And if you own even a tiny bit of bitcoin and read something like this, you get upset because your investment's at risk and you end up siding with the banks, investors, and the rich to keep the system going.

The way I see it, the banks won.

---

[0] As banks buy up bitcoins, who else are the 'Bitcoin whales'? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-68434579.amp

[1] Research from 2025 has found that the popularity and application of cryptocurrencies have not only promoted financial innovation, but also exacerbated wealth inequality. In other words, blockchain developers have made the gap between rich and poor even worse. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391506544_Cryptocur...

[2] A quote from Satoshi's forum message that he posted on Feb. 11, 2009. It explains the goal of creating Bitcoin and why using banks demands too much trust with no guaranteed positive outcome. https://u.today/did-satoshi-nakamoto-foresee-current-bank-cr...

[3] Prior to May 2021 Bitcoin miners were hugely concentrated, with around 60% to 70% located in China. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/bitcoin-who-ow...

[4] Bitcoin ownership is concentrated among the rich. Research showed that at the end of 2020, there were 1,000 “clusters” controlling 2 million bitcoins. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/bitcoin-who-ow...

[5] Between February 2011 and July 2013, drug dealers operating on Silk Road facilitated sales amounting to 9,519,664 bitcoins. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)
by kkukshtel | 2025-07-14 10:37:38+00:00
To yes, and this —

I've started doing something similar on the command line with Claude Code that works incredibly well:

claude -p "use ffmpeg to convert myvideo.mov into an h264 video suitable for youtube upload" --dangerously-skip-permissions

Highly recommended! I use --dangerously-skip-permissions because I just want to set it and forget it and dont need to babysit the run.
by ivanjermakov | 2025-07-14 10:39:08+00:00
> No, because you would just pass that extra argument around and nothing else would have to change.

> Semantically, passing std.Io to every function is no different from making every Node.js function async and returning a promise. Zig shifts function coloring from blocking/non-blocking choice to io/non-io.

> Complains are about how inconvenient it is to work with [blocking and non-blocking function handling] differences

"Extra argument" in this case is not much different from "extra async keyword", because you can only run I/O functions when having std.Io in scope.
by physicsguy | 2025-07-14 10:39:24+00:00
There's an almost pathological resistance to using anything that might be described as a 'framework' in the Go community in the name of 'simplicity'.

I find such a blanket opinion to be unhelpful, what's fine for writing microservices is less good for bootstrapping a whole SaaS app and I think that people get in a bit too much of an ideological tizz about it all.
by inflationhedge | 2025-07-14 10:39:52+00:00
I have reason to believe my country's fiat will be inflated in the coming 12 months. Not hyper inflation, but a 50% to 100% increase in consumer prices over the next 12 months. My country is small and not connected to anything American related. Still wondering if it is a good idea to buy more crypto now as a further hedge against my fears. The article makes me think it may be unwise to do so given the massive speculation driving the price up led by similar american worries. Still does not change my fear of inflation at home.
by bn-l | 2025-07-14 10:39:53+00:00
" and hating minorities are all “bad” for the same reason, "

What does this have to do with AI?

Also, why hedge everything you're about to say with a big disclaimer?:

> Disclaimer: I believe that what I’m saying in this post is true to a certain degree, but this sort of logic is often a slippery slope and can miss important details. Take it with a grain of salt, more like a thought-provoking read than a universal claim. Also, it’d be cool if I wasn’t harassed for saying this.
by throwaway287391 | 2025-07-14 10:40:19+00:00
> But obviously in hindsight, it was the most expensive mistake I've made in my life.

Maybe a tiresome pedantic response, but this is only a "mistake" to the same extent that it was a mistake for [everyone in the world who had the required funds] not to buy 100 BTC in 2015. If you can overcome the cognitive biases (endowment effect, loss aversion, etc.), the fact that you previously owned the 100 BTC has no real bearing on the situation, beyond transaction fees and a couple hours max saved by holding (doing nothing) vs. buying.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-14 10:40:25+00:00
If by "coherent" you mean the Webster definition then yeah, anyone can.

If by coherent you mean "using only facts and opinions that I accept at face value within my world view" then no.

Personally, I think 5 is way too little. But there are probably some markets for various products and services where 5 is fine. I don't think the number matters so much as that there be potential for a long tail of upstarts who could potentially displace a big player quickly. Whether 95% of the market is captured 2 or 22 players doesn't matter, they gotta know that someone is waiting to take their place if they screw up.
by owebmaster | 2025-07-14 10:41:00+00:00
Quality does not change as fast :)) Actually, most of the times, when things go faster, the quality drops as fast.

> There's no way that creating something like WordPress 20 years ago, before any modern-day web application frameworks, was anywhere near as easy

Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community. This 90% part can't be automated by AI or fast-tracked using RoR, Django or whatever. So much that none of the hundreds of wordpress alternatives created in the past 2 decades got any closer to replace it.
by mistersquid | 2025-07-14 10:41:31+00:00
> Naive or complicit?

FTA:

> Advocacy by Mr. Kassoy and others also led to the creation over the last 15 years of so-called public benefit corporations — required to consider the public good in their business decisions, not just the interests of shareholders as in a standard corporation — through legislation in 42 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Those states include Delaware, where most public companies are incorporated.
by physicsguy | 2025-07-14 10:41:45+00:00
Is this not missing that lots of places still do their deliveries themselves?

For e.g. in my city I can order Pizza from Dominoes or Pizza Hut. Both are located on the same road. Dominoes uses it's own staff, Pizza Hut uses Deliveroo. I've tried both but Dominoes will delivery reliably in 25-35 minutes, and Pizza Hut took over an hour and a half. Guess which one I use still!
by humanrebar | 2025-07-14 10:41:59+00:00
Yeah, story points approximate effort, so it's fairly impossible to be 10x on those.

JIRA has a notion of business value points, and you could make up similar metrics in other project planning tools. The problem would then be how to estimate the value of implementing 0.01% of the technology of a product that doesn't sell as a standalone feature. If you can accurately do that, you might be the 100x employee already.
by IshKebab | 2025-07-14 10:42:06+00:00
Yeah I think the only things that really need assembly these days are vector/SIMD (e.g. writing a video codec), really low level stuff for interacting with hardware (writing an OS) or if you're actually working on CPUs (how I learnt).

It's kind of useful for understanding compiler output on godbolt, and occasionally for debugging code without debug info.

But I successfully wrote a ton of C++ for decades without knowing assembly. It's not really necessary.
by nottorp | 2025-07-14 10:42:33+00:00
I suppose this one is great for someone who has 50000 photos they want to keep!

Can anyone recommend a tool like the old old acdsee? Just browse random folders, display a preview and be able to delete photos?

Because my problem is a photo library where I should probably delete 90% of it. But all those advanced photo managers with functions for pros (or even Apple Photos, which I gave up on) make this particular operation extremely slow.
by vendiddy | 2025-07-14 10:42:47+00:00
I personally find that doing it well in the first pass slows me down and also ends up in worse overall designs.

But I am also pretty disciplined on the 2nd pass in correcting all of the hacks and rewriting everything that should be rewritten.

There are two problems I have with trying to do it right the first time:

- It's hard to know the intricacies of the requirements upfront without actually implementing the thing, which results in designing an architecture with imperfect knowledge

- It's easy to get stuck in analysis paralysis

FWIW I am a huge fan of John Ousterhout. It may be my all time favorite book on software design.
by FabHK | 2025-07-14 10:42:50+00:00
That's what I mean.

Suppose you want to insure your home against fire, which could create damage of say $1m with probability 0.1%.

Without insurance, you'd have to put aside savings of $1m (the maximum loss), that would remain untouched with 99.9% probability, and be used to cover the fire damage otherwise.

With insurance, you'd pay the insurer $1m * 0.1% = $1000, plus a bit on top to cover their cost and profit. In case of fire, they cover your loss. Everyone wins.

So, with insurance you replace provisioning for the maximum loss by provisioning for the expected loss plus a fee.

(That's why one should not get insurance for small items (where one can cover the max), such as baggage or mobile phones or so, but for large items, such as house, life, health).
Ask HN: What's the best way to start with Ruby on rails?
by bn-l | 2025-07-14 10:43:15+00:00
I'm new to ruby and ruby on rails. Are there any devs here experience with both that could recommend a resource? A book, youtube series etc?

It would be really great if someone could recommend an overview of the language so I can get an idea of the syntax, and the syntax of your average rails app.

Finally I want to pair this with inertia.js. Has anyone done this in production? Does the combo work well?
by pjc50 | 2025-07-14 10:43:40+00:00
> What does this have to do with AI?

The author's general concern about externalization of downsides.

> Also, why hedge everything you're about to say with a big disclaimer?

Because people are extremely rude on the internet. It won't make much of a difference to actual nitpicking, as I'm sure we'll see, it's more of a sad recognition of the problem.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-14 10:43:43+00:00
>They brazenly and actively conspired to kill or buy any and all competition, but they've become so large (and so important to the US intelligence agencies) that they'll get nothing more than the most gentle slap on the wrist, relative to their scale. The moral of the story seems to be don't cheat, but if you're going to cheat - cheat relentlessly, ruthlessly, and take it to an extreme - and it might just become worth it.

The moral of the story to me is that the government doesn't give a crap what you do so long as it's good for them. Google only got punished, and even then it was a big "show" with no results not because it did wrong, but because it so flagrantly violated the law the government got pissed that it was being made to look a fool. They didn't really want to "punish" google because it was their buddy and they found it useful, they just wanted the appearance.
by whodidntante | 2025-07-14 10:44:19+00:00
I wanted to give you an example of what I see is not just corruption, but an example of how feedback loops of self interest combine to create systemic issues that threaten our entire society.

It is "known" in the research industry that getting government grants, especially NIH grants, is "gold" in that they provide large sums of money, and, importantly, that a large part of these grants have little accountability and are not used directly for the research. Peoples careers are rewarded for successful at getting these grants, and there are societal mechanisms in place to insure these grants continue to flow. A lot of organizations are so dependent on these type of grants that when an attempt was made to reduce the unaccountable and "incidental" nature part of those grants to what is standard in non-governmental charities, there was fear that entire important research organizations would be brought down.

This is an example:

- My congressman has a public campaign to support the political and legal fight to preserve the ability of research organizations to carve out nearly half, or 42% of government research grants so that they can be used for general organizational needs, and not directly for the research projects they are awarded to. Part of this political and legal fight is about making these carve outs more accountable, as they currently are not. For comparison, non profit grants from non federal sources provide for 0% to 13% carve outs. The new proposal is to reduce the carve outs to 13%, in line with these other organizations, and to have stricter accounting rules. The more common name for this is the 69% indirect costs added to federal grants, as compared to the standard 0% to 15% added by non governmental grants.

- The former CEO of one of these nonprofit research institutes (Dana Farber) was making $3M to $4M per year. This is not unusual for the CEO's of many of these larger non profits.

- This CEO is the mother of this particular congressman.

- This former CEO had 50+ of her research papers called into question due to claims of fraud. These papers were called into question by an outside researcher.

- Six of these papers were retracted due to fraud, several dozen others were "updated". These papers are used directly or indirectly to acquire government grants, and are also used to justify making this person CEO.

- One of this former CEO's co-authors on some of these papers was also the Director of Research Integrity for the institution, who also investigated the allegations (though not the ones he was a co author on).

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/21/dana-farber-pap... https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/top-harvard-cancer-r...
by acdha | 2025-07-14 10:44:24+00:00
That’s why it’s important to remember that not all state-level attacks are created equal. Intelligence agencies can create fake personas at varying levels of cost and realism, but if North Korea is doing that for revenue they’re not going to spend the same kind of resources they would trying to get, say, nuclear weapons data.

The situation here is significantly asymmetric: the attacker has to do a lot of work to build a realistic persona but the defense can make that much harder with a few basic checks. It’s been cost-effective in the past because companies were skimping on their hiring and internal security, similar to how the identity theft crisis was mostly a crisis in companies doing due diligence.
by erremerre | 2025-07-14 10:44:28+00:00
Easier than that, I do not often publish on hacker news, only when I find something that could be interesting to read the comments on. And I though the field there was for a subtitle, rather than that it was published itself as a comment.

If you ask me, I am on the "conspiracy" team. Too much coincidences, to much interests, and very few plausible explanations.