MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pavlov | 2025-07-18 22:58:35+00:00
Ultima IX was so bad that I stopped playing computer games entirely. 3D worlds just never worked for me. All the story immersion and imagination that I’d loved in the games of my childhood seemed to be gone. (I never cared for Doom either, and then all games somehow became Doom.)

The next time I bought a high-end 3D game was over 15 years later. That was Fallout 4. I played 30 minutes and then never returned to it. Uncanny valley graphics and boring first person action — nothing like the original Fallouts 1 and 2 of my memories.

I guess I’ll have to try another AAA PC game in 2030 just to stick to the schedule.
by garciasn | 2025-07-18 23:00:08+00:00
That has absolutely nothing to do w/a surveillance state. Let's pretend it was the 1880s and these two were executives at Standard Oil. They were seen cavorting at the opera together by someone who then tipped off the press and/or their company who then tipped off the press. It might have been big news the next day or the day after that.

Frankly; this is exactly what happened here. Do you feel there was a 'surveillance state' in the 1880s? I don't.
by jayd16 | 2025-07-18 23:00:39+00:00
Well I'm having a hell of a time understanding what this article is trying to say. On a 3rd and 4th pass I think perhaps they mean task (in)dependency tracking is a fundamental concept. Independent tasks have "asynchrony." (Can we just say dependency and independency?)

But even with that definition, it seems like the idea of promises, task tracking, etc is well tread territory.

Then they conclude with how fire and forget tasks solve coloring but isn't that just the sync-over-async anti-pattern? I wouldn't be excited that my UI work stops to run something when there are no more green threads but they seem excited by it.

Anyway, I guess I got too distracted by the high concept "this is a fundamental change in thinking" fluff of the article.
by mvieira38 | 2025-07-18 23:00:46+00:00
Another perspective for the kaboom is search and programming tasks for the average person.

For the average consumer, LLM chatbots are infinitely better than Google at search-like tasks, and in effect solve that problem. Remember when we had to roll our eyes at dad because he asked Google "what are some cool restaurants?" instead of "nice restaurants SF 2018 reddit"? Well, that is over, he can ask that to ChatGPT and it will make the most effective searches for him, aggregate and answer. Remember when a total noob had to familiarize himself with a language by figuring out hello world, then functions, etc? Now it's over, these people can just draft a toy example of what they want to build with Cursor instantly, tell it to make everything nice and simple, and then have ChatGPT guide them through what is happening.

In some industries you just don't need that much more code quality than what LLMs give you. A quick .bat script doesn't need you to know the best implementation of anything, neither does a Python scraper using only the stdlib, but these were locked behind programming knowledge before LLMs
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-07-18 23:01:00+00:00
The first link on their site is alchemy.pdf behind announced a solution. Maybe read that? (40 pages) Or not, because here is the abstract ;)

Abstract A scalable approach for chrysopoeia—the transmutation of base metals into gold—has been pursued for millennia. While there have been small-scale demon- strations in particle accelerators and proposals involving thermal neutron capture, no economically attractive approach has yet been identified. We show a new scalable method to synthesize stable gold (197Au) from the abundant mer- cury isotope 198Hg using (n, 2n) reactions in a specialized neutron multiplier layer of a fusion blanket. Reactions are driven by fast 14 MeV neutrons provided by a deuterium-tritium fusion plasma, which are uniquely capable of enabling the desired reaction pathway at scale. Crucially, the scheme identified here does not negatively impact electricity production, and is also compatible with the challenging tritium breeding requirements of fusion power plant design because (n, 2n) reactions of 198Hg drive both transmutation and neutron multiplication. Using neutronics simulations, we demonstrate a tokamak with a blanket configu- ration that can produce 197Au at a rate of about 2 t/GWth/yr. Implementation of this concept allows fusion power plants to double the revenue generated by the system, dramatically enhancing the economic viability of fusion energy.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-07-18 23:01:11+00:00
> Is there a non-religious reason to be against the right to choose abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy?

Of course there is. It's not hard to construct an argument to that effect either. For example: let's agree for the sake of argument that a newborn has moral rights, and that gametes do not. It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point between conception and birth the fetus gains moral rights. No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction, the only point for assigning rights which can't be argued against in that way is at conception. Thus, we should disallow abortion so we aren't depriving the fetus of its rights.

I'm not saying that's a bulletproof argument. Indeed the argument doesn't even need to be correct for my point. My point is that nothing about that argument requires any religious belief whatsoever. So it is possible. I'm also quite certain that a cleverer person than I could construct a better argument which still doesn't require any religious dogma. This is an ethical topic, not a religious one. Obviously religion has a lot to say on ethics, but that's no reason to believe that secular arguments against abortion can't exist.
by modeless | 2025-07-18 23:01:16+00:00
Unfortunately gold generated in this way would be radioactive. They calculate they would have to store the gold for over 13 years to not require labeling as radioactive waste, or over 17 years to reach the level of radioactivity of a banana.

I bet it would still be less valuable than regular gold even after that. It could still be identified, and people would discriminate against it. People are funny about nuclear waste, and likely wouldn't accept arguments like "it's perfectly safe" and "it's less radioactive than a banana".
by brudgers | 2025-07-18 23:01:22+00:00
A PSA of 12 is pretty far past the threshold for an MRI (don’t know about a PET scan) and an MRI would be pretty determinative about whether or not a biopsy is warranted. A biopsy would be pretty good at identifying cancer.

Sounds like either there are complicating factors or an absence of standard protocol adherence.

US health insurance is a mess, but that doesn’t sound like the entire story. I suspect urologists see a fair amount of friction for routine procedures related to prostrate health.
by throw310822 | 2025-07-18 23:01:25+00:00
Maybe you didn't realise that LLMs have just wiped out entire class of problems, maybe entire disciplines- do you remember "natural language processing"? What, ehm, happened to it?

Sometimes I have the feeling that what happened with LLMs is so enormous that many researches and philosophers still haven't had time to gather their thoughts and process it.

I mean, shall we have a nice discussion about the possibility of "philosophical zombies"? On whether the Chinese room understands or not? Or maybe on the feasibility of the mythical Turing test? There's half a century or more of philosophical questions and scenarios that are not theory anymore, maybe they're not even questions anymore- and almost from one day to the other.
by alerighi | 2025-07-18 23:03:26+00:00
You don't need mutex in async code, since there is no parallel execution whatsoever. In fact languages that use async programming as a first class citizen (JavaScript) don't even have a construct to do them.

If you need to synchronize stuff in the program you can use normal plain variables, since it's guaranteed that your task will be never interrupted till you give control back to the scheduler by performing an await operation.

In a way, async code can be used to implement mutex (or something similar) themself: it's a technique that I use often in JavaScript, to implement stuff that works like a mutex or a semaphores with just promises to syncronize stuff (e.g. you want to be sure that a function that itself does async operations inside is not interrupted, it's possible to do so with promises and normal JS variables).
by dv35z | 2025-07-18 23:03:42+00:00
(1) These look great - I saved the Impacts so I can keep reading it later. Can you share what the background/reason is for this document?

(2) Hoping you might be able to point me in the right direction. I often take notes with clients in Markdown, and then after the call, do some cleanup. At that point, I would love to export it as a slick-looking PDF, and also HTML which I could paste into Apple Mail. I've done a few experiments with Markdown --> Pandoc --> HTML, but I started to realize I would need to dig deeper into Pandoc, figure out its HTML templates, create CSS. And wasn't sure if I ought to be doing Markdown-->HTML-->PDF. My ideal "flow" would be something like...

pandoc 2025-07-18_Client1_Topic.md --style "Client1.css" ---output 2025-07-18_Client1_topic.pdf --output 2025-08.18_Client1_Topic.html

When digging around in Pandoc, I also got the impression I would need to learn Tex formatting. I haven't figured out a "stack" on this topic, so thought you might have ideas.

Currently, I am using Obsidian for taking notes. Then I use the "Copy as HTML" 3rd party plugin to copy my Markdown notes as basically themed HTML. I then open up MacOS TextEdit, on Rich Text mode, and paste that in. I might do a bit of text formatting here, clean out [ ] markdown links, etc. Next, I copy & paste from TextEdit to Apple Mail. I sometimes color the headings manually, and other basic formatting. Here I'll add the "Hello, " and "Sincerely" wrap around the notes, and send. I'll then check my iPhone Mail to make sure the mail looks OK on Dark Mode.

Seems like a huge gap in the "note taking" tooling, but I'm hoping that I'm just ignorant of a few solid tools that can handle this workflow: "Take notes on a call, send them nicely formatted to client in email / PDF"

Thanks for any ideas / suggestions you can share!

// JRO
by ajb | 2025-07-18 23:04:03+00:00
Here's what may seem like an unrelated question in response: how can we get 10^7+ bits of information out of the human body every day?

There are a lot of companies right now trying to apply AI to health, but what they are ignoring is that there are orders of magnitude less health data per person than there are cat pictures. (My phone probably contains 10^10 bits of cat pictures and my health record probably 10^3 bits, if that). But it's not wrong to try to apply AI, because we know that all processes leak information, including biological ones; and ML is a generic tool for extracting signal from noise, given sufficient data.

But our health information gathering systems are engineered to deal with individual very specific hypotheses generated by experts, which require high quality measurements of specific individual metrics that some expert, such as yourself, have figured may be relevant. So we get high quality data, in very small quantities -a few bits per measurement.

Suppose you invent a new cheap sensor for extracting large (10^7+ bits/day) quantities of information about human biochemistry, perhaps from excretions, or blood. You run a longitudinal study collecting this information from a cohort and start training a model to predict every health outcome.

What are the properties of the bits collected by such a sensor, that would make such a process likely to work out? The bits need to be "sufficiently heterogeneous" (but not necessarily independent) and their indexes need to be sufficiently stable (in some sense). What is not required if for specific individual data items to be measured with high quality. Because some information about the original that we're interested in (even though we don't know exactly what it is) will leak into the other measurements.

I predict that designs for such sensors, which cheaply perform large numbers of low quality measurements are would result in breakthroughs what in detection and treatment, by allowing ML to be applied to the problem effectively.
by cyw | 2025-07-18 23:04:23+00:00
I apologize for misunderstood, English isn't my first language but I totally get what you mean now. We have updated our web page with Github repo to a demo version and documentation page is available now as well. Although we don't know what would be valuable to put in documentation page but if there is something you are interesting to learn, please let me know! Thanks again for your time
by oh_my_goodness | 2025-07-18 23:04:34+00:00
Even if this were true, at 0.15 USD/kWh it would cost more than just buying the gold. Even excluding cost of cleaning up the radioactivity, the equipment, labor, everything except the power.

A GW-year is 8760 GWh. That's 8760/5000 = 1.75 GWh per kg of gold. At 0.15 USD/kWh, a GWh costs $150k US. So 1.75GWh costs about $263k. A kg of gold costs about 100k US.
by dmix | 2025-07-18 23:04:50+00:00
Regulators often barely grasp how current markets function and they are supposed to be futurists now too? Government regulatory interests almost always end up lining up with protecting entrenched interests, so it's essentially asking for a slow moving group of the same mega companies. Which is very much what Europes market looks like today. Stasis and shifting to a stagnating middle.
by jpc0 | 2025-07-18 23:05:16+00:00
You only know about it because it made news, for a high profile person like this a good reporter would likely have picked up the story locally regardless.

For you neighbour sleeping with a coworker you likely have no idea unless you know who he/she is (good on you if you do, you are a dying breed) and the news would not give a damn.

Your anonymity isn’t in question here, as the CEO of a company you gave up any right to anonymity and getting caught in public with your mistress was a failure in exposure not a failure of the state to protect your privacy.

If this was footage from a concert that happen to catch something happening in the CEOs back yard or living room 100% there would be a lawsuit because that would be the invasion of privacy you think it is, the news would likely still run with the story.
by suddengunter | 2025-07-18 23:06:01+00:00
wow

When a few years ago I moved from Eastern Europe (where I had 1GB/s to my apartment for years) to the UK I was surprised that "the best" internet connection I was able to get was about 40MBit/s phone line. But it's a small town, and during past years even we have fiber up to 2GB/s now.

I'm surprised US still has issues that you mentioned. Have you considered Starlink(fuck Musk, but the product is decent)/alternatives?
by ryandv | 2025-07-18 23:06:11+00:00
Strictly speaking commutativity is defined over (binary) operations - so if one were to say that two async statements (e.g. connect/accept) are commutative, I would have to ask, "under what operation?"

Currently my best answer for this is the bind (>>=) operator (including, incidentally, one of its instances, `.then(...)`), but this is just fuzzy intuition if anything at all.
by floxy | 2025-07-18 23:06:55+00:00
>In practice, given that much of all gold is used to store value and is not actively in use, we do not expect the need to store it for 7–17 years to be a major impediment; at worst, it means that the product will initially have somewhat less value than pure 197Au, and so some discount should be applied to the value of freshly produced gold.
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-18 23:07:28+00:00
>And it has absolutely fucking nothing to do w/surveillance; this could have happened anywhere, at any time in history, with or without technology.

It absolutely has. This is what real everyday surveillance is that shapes people's behavior. When you cannot go anywhere without in your head thinking "am I on a camera or a microphone?" you're in a surveillance society. It's significantly more insidious and pervasive than any public camera is.

I recently talked with a friend about the fact that you don't see people going skinny dipping any more as we did when we were teenagers spending a day at a lake, and it's pretty obvious why. Smartphone cameras, everyone says they're afraid that someone takes an unflattering picture and shares it with the entire internet. That's how you breed a nation of neurotic people. This wasn't possible a few decades ago or at least not practical.

Every single spot with an internet connection has effectively become a stage where the slightest mishap can turn you into a joke in front of an infinitely large audience. It is no surprise that the mental state of young people is what it is and why they're anxious about the most everyday things. It's literally the logic of the Panopticon, you're going to police yourself harder than anyone externally ever could.
by puzzlingcaptcha | 2025-07-18 23:07:53+00:00
AAV-based vectors are specifically non-integrating. Wild-type AAVs can integrate, but in the absence of rep protein they will instead persist in the cell nucleus in the form of episomal concatemers - long, circular DNA structures containing multiple copies of the virus DNA. These will not replicate when a cell proliferates - they will instead dilute with each division. This makes them desirable for treating diseases affecting post-mitotic tissue like muscle, less so for, say, bone marrow. Unless transient expression (but not as transient as with NLPs) is what you want.
by thelastgallon | 2025-07-18 23:07:55+00:00
Couldn't come soon enough! The Govt needs money for other things!

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_687ad3aa8f488191b68b4e01cddb57cd

What's Happening with ICE Hiring?

Major Expansion Plans Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed on July 4, 2025, ICE is set to add about 10,000 new employees over the next five years. That would grow the workforce from roughly 20,000 to about 30,000 officers and support staff

This anticipated increase represents a 50% staffing boost, making it one of the largest expansions in the agency's history

Massive Budget Bump ICE is receiving unprecedented funding—including nearly $76.5 billion in overall agency spending and $29.9 billion earmarked specifically for hiring and deportations

In total, DHS immigration enforcement funding reaches upwards of $170 billion, making ICE the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the U.S
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-18 23:07:57+00:00
This was a whole cottage industry during the cold war, kind of like it is now that we're in another sort of cold war.

The Soviets would fund anyone applying Marxist thought to this or that. There may be some interesting ideas for those willing to sort out the chaff, but for the most part you know exactly what they're going to say if you're already familiar with the propaganda that came before.
by Duanemclemore | 2025-07-18 23:09:08+00:00
I've always meant to read more SCP [0], and specifically of qntm's anti-mimetics. (fnord)

This seems like a complete re-work of the original [1]. So I may have to start here. It's exciting to see this come out from a major publisher!

[0] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/

[1] as stated in the discussion here: https://qntm.org/antimemetics
by derefr | 2025-07-18 23:09:10+00:00
I don't see anything that appeals to me or anyone I know (and I know some very geeky people!) in the concept.

You can certainly add the CPU/GPU module — it's just a NUC with a battery strapped to it, essentially — but if doing so doesn't make the display module lighter-weight and longer-lasting than a smartphone for what people tend to use a smartphone for, then I don't see what I gain by carrying it.

Remember that the conversation here is in the context of an OP about mini-sized phones; everyone in the thread is presuming your point had something to do with the separating-out of compute from other tasks resulting in the "terminals" you mentioned, becoming more like the "iPhone Mini-sized Android Phone" referenced in the OP. You did seem to imply this rhetorically, phrasing your desire as those terminals being "nothing more than" components X/Y/Z — as if this would imply they could be lighter-weight, etc.

But if you concede that even with your Personal-Area-Network (PAN) compute-offload module, the smartphone-sized display module effectively still needs to be a smartphone in order to be a "fat client when that is advantageous", with all that that implies... then you've lost the interest of everyone here, who were all hoping you were proposing some sort of key perspective shift that would allow for smaller, thinner, lighter, longer-lasting smartphones.

---

And to be clear, I do understand why you would want a PAN compute-offload module; that was a concept tossed around quite a bit in futurology circles ~10 years ago. But the zeitgeist has moved on — 5G came along, designed specifically to address the need to carry around such a brick.

In the modern version of this architecture, your PAN's compute-offload either lives in your house/car/etc., or is just some cloud VPS you're renting — either explicitly, or implicitly through amortization of big hardware payments into an implicit subscription (as with e.g. the Apple Intelligence compute cluster.) The rest of your PAN then uses offloads compute by pushing workloads to it through cellular radio; this is practical because the cells for the cellular radio in question are omnipresent enough [and thereby, the handset side of the connection low-wattage enough], and the protocol non-chatty enough, that having such a radio "up" but idle doesn't burn much battery — so every PAN device can afford to do it.
by singleshot_ | 2025-07-18 23:09:20+00:00
In the 1880s they were missing: the long distance video camera; the real-time display on the Jumbotron; the ability of any concertgoer to snap a quick series of hires photos; the capability to select and edit the best photo; a globally interconnected system of social media platforms to which to post the resulting photos; and a 24 hour doomscrolling apparatus to put the photos in front of of every person in America six times a day for half a week.

So no, I don’t feel like there was a surveillance state in the nineteenth century for what must now must feel like a collection of the most obvious reasons ever collected in one post.
by firefax | 2025-07-18 23:10:17+00:00
I also had my backup codes fail, which caused me to lose access to the email account I had had since I was a teenage hacker. In the Google Voice was the cell number I'd had all my life. Two decades of emails, documents, conversations, and contacts lost forever through no fault of my own.

>If there are some people from Google reading this, please, don't reach out to me offering to help.

I wouldn't worry yourself on that front, unless you are some kind of celebrity, they don't seem to care that a basic, core function of one of their most popular products can fail in a manner that totally locks people out.

The whole point of the backup codes is to facilitate account recovery, and it's really hilarious to me that a company full of allegedly elite engineers can't do one simple thing.

I point folks to 0365 for the their cloud needs nowadays -- Microsoft does this strange thing where you pay them money for services that works rather well, and office itself is streets ahead of docs. (And if you enter a code... it WORKS.)
by kingo55 | 2025-07-18 23:10:27+00:00
There's now Ethereum, Base and Solana featuring US dollar stablecoins and significantly cheaper fees. If you want to go a step further and eliminate the stablecoin issuer's counterparty risk you could even pay in the base asset of ETH. Shopify allows payments from crypto now, so Steam should try it again.

Good luck censoring purchases on ETH.