MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ted_dunning | 2025-08-23 22:53:35+00:00
An easy way to make this more efficient is to proceed as normal, but if the point is outside the sphere, run the algorithm again using cyclic xor's of the coordinates. This gives you a free second try without generating new random deviates.

You can't do the XOR in floating point representation, but you can if you do the entire algorithm in fixed point or if you retain the random bits before converting to a floating point value.

This decreases the number of random numbers that need to be generated from ~5.72 to ~3.88.
by bjourne | 2025-08-23 22:53:39+00:00
Google has exploited network effects and the essentially free labor of millions of content creators to create a video platform no one can compete with. I don't find it the least immoral for me to block ads, while I watch someone play a game I like on a channel with less than 2k views/video.

It's like running a farm at a huge deficit until everyone else goes out of business and then jacking up prices.
by JeremyNT | 2025-08-23 22:54:14+00:00
This is really where the focus needs to be for young people, and I think it's where our education system is really failing.

What exercise is best? Why... the one you enjoy and will continue doing!

Focusing on ROI can be a good way to view it for the right personality type, but I think that mentality can be harmful for the wrong personality type who will just grind out activities they don't really enjoy until they give up in exasperation.

I suspect for most people the trick is just finding something - anything - that is physically demanding that they enjoy, and then sticking to that.
by nostrebored | 2025-08-23 22:54:15+00:00
Your takes are really, really ignorant.

Allowing cyclists to run red lights significantly reduces mortality. Waiting at an intersection is provably one of the most dangerous moments for cyclists.

Your “obvious” example is something that’s unknowable to you as an individual. You have no knowledge of the effective throughput of the road ahead of you.

The disdain you have for cyclists seems bizarre and misplaced. The idea that it’s a double standard is wrong — the standards are set to minimize harm and maximize effective throughput. Having separate rules is entirely consistent here. If we subsidized the lifestyle of cyclists as much as motorists, this would be a non problem.
by atombender | 2025-08-23 22:54:50+00:00
I think part of the problem is that the people working on Postgres for the most part aren't PhDs, and Postgres isn't very state of the art.

Postgres implements the ancient Volcano model from the 1980s, but there's been a ton of query optimization research since then, especially from the database groups at TUM Munich, University of Washington, and Carnegie Mellon. Systems like HyPer and Umbra (both at TUM) are state of the art query planners that would eat Postgres' lunch. Lots of work on making planners smarter about rearranging joins to be more optimal, improving cache locality and buffer management, and so on.

Unfortunately, changing an old Volcano planner and applying newer techniques would probably be a huge endeavor.
by cyberax | 2025-08-23 22:56:56+00:00
The study was from 2005. I can find it, if you want.

> A few years ago ”even an hour” of storage was the impossible marker. Then it quickly became ”a day!!!” and now we are at a month without any solar or wind power.

No. The problem has been known for decades, but governments simply ignored it. That's why there's so much noise about hydrogen in Geramny. It's used to whitewash the natural gas.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-08-23 22:57:28+00:00
The transfer of wealth from tax payers to tech giants has never been better. Enormous state subsidies. For doing something the free market would do if it made economic sense.

How many bailouts is Intel on now?

The idea of forcing a merger between Intel and TMSC at what could be called be barrel of the gun, would at least make it (indirectly) Taiwan that would have to take over paying for Intel.
by daurentius523 | 2025-08-23 22:58:28+00:00
" that a third party removed content B" - which is insane, adblock in some browsers is integral part of the browser. By that definition the browser is third party.

Should we ban links, dillo and lynx for not having a concept like js?

Also EVERY browser is NOT 100% compatible with html/js specifications! Should we ban all browsers? What if browser changes behaviour after creation of website?

Let's not skip legal implications which AGPL or GPL browser (ex GNOME Web) would have on supposed 'program' that results of opening the page? Would user of such browser always commit piracy? After all he was not given right to relicense supposed 'code' of the site, or did he when he informed website that he connects from such web browser which server accepted? Or did site broke the license by using engine to produce a result which cannot be distributed?

> HTML = Hypertext Markup Language

> A markup language is a text-encoding system which specifies the structure and formatting of a document
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-08-23 22:58:40+00:00
Haha. White monsters are pretty popular with gen-z'ers in general. A lot of us don't like coffee but still want a hit of caffeine and it's basically pure caffeine with a very mild taste. Other sugar free energy drinks have a much stronger sourness (red bull) or more distinctive flavours. I do love the tropical and coconut red bulls though.

The green monsters are definitely more male gamer oriented, but the white, green, pink, rose monsters etc seem pretty popular with people in my generation who fall outside that male gamer demographic.

Personally I prefer red bull now but as I get older I mostly drink coffee.
by da_chicken | 2025-08-23 22:58:51+00:00
Yeah, people forget that Windows and Java appear to be less compliant, but the reality is that they moved on i18n before anybody else did so their standard is older.

Linux got to adopt UTF-8 because the just stuck their head in the sand and stayed on ASCII well past the time they needed to change. Even now, a lot of programs only support ASCII character streams.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-23 22:59:07+00:00
Lighter, faster, smaller, more numerous, and more mobile vehicles might make sense because the era of the slow moving castles near the front on land, sea, and air seems about dead.

Drones of all sorts out front with more numerous "ripsaw"-like vehicles with shoot-on-the-move mobile artillery (RCH 155) and air defense (AAA like Skyranger 30 and SAM like M-SHORAD) just behind.
by trogdor | 2025-08-23 22:59:17+00:00
> This is about a government created footage from a surveillance camera. Copyright, or any other notion of imaginary property, most certainly does not apply.

That is incorrect. Copyright generally does not attach to works created by federal government agencies. The same is not true for works created by state and other sub-national government entities.

Harvard has an online resource center where you can learn more about this.

See https://copyright.lib.harvard.edu/states/

I do think it’s true that this particular footage is in the public domain.

>It's essentially a public record, and FOIA likely does apply (as noted by one tiny comment).

FOIA does not apply to MWAA records. MWAA has its own access to public records policy that applies to its records. I have the unfortunate privilege of being a quasi-expert at dealing with MWAA and its records. I am one of three people to have ever appealed a MWAA Freedom of Information Policy all the way to arbitration.

(Bizarrely, binding arbitration is a requester’s final recourse. Unlike every other government entity that I know of, litigation is not an option if you think MWAA has not followed their Freedom of Information Policy.)

See https://www.mwaa.com/sites/mwaa.com/files/legacyfiles/freedo...
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-23 23:00:40+00:00
It is completely disingenuous and unfair to claim that something, especially a small blurb, is written by an LLM. And so what if it actually was written by an LLM. If you want to criticize something, do so on the merits or demerits of the points in it. You don't get a free pass by claiming it's LLM output, irrespective of whether it is or not.
by manquer | 2025-08-23 23:01:39+00:00
It is established economic theory not just some opinion . Constraints in form of regulations, subsidies, tariffs by government intervention will produce inefficiencies.

This is the core economic philosophy behind both the modern centre right[2] i.e. neoliberal democrats (80s-today) and the right wing republican conservatives (pre MAGA -2016).[1]

Even communists would agree this is correct, it is understood in different levels since Adam Smith invisible hand, from far left to centre left just posit that different polices that benefit the people not the economy are worth the cost .

That is actually true for all other groups except anarchists and libertarians all agree government intervention is needed in some form, they just disagree on how .

——-

Postal services anywhere in the world are inefficient by design. They are governed by universal service obligation principles not efficiency same with telecom providers and other utilities.

The question then becomes how much inefficiency is acceptable given the objectives . There are no right answers, you could have competing private couriers who dump unprofitable low density routes to USPS while serving profitable ones themselves (UPS, fedEX, Amazon ) or you could have gigantic postal service which is sole delivery provider socialist style, there are going to be some problems either way.

It is just matter of preference which set of trade offs we are okay with .

—-

[1] Post MAGA it is a populist party economically there is no fixed ideology to be characterized

[2] the centre right label is economic and technical to contrast say the socialist left party of FDR/New Deal 1930-70s, not meant to offend.
by nuwandavek | 2025-08-23 23:01:58+00:00
(blogpost author here) You're right! I did make the distinction in an earlier draft, but decided to use "RAG" interchangeably with vector search, as it is popularly known today in code-gen systems. I'd probably go back to the previous version too.

But I do think there is a qualitative different between getting candidates and adding them to context before generating (retrieval augmented generation) vs the LLM searching for context till it is satisfied.
by cyberax | 2025-08-23 23:02:17+00:00
> Spending 10x as much on nuclear power subsidies and hopefully getting some plants finished in the 2040s?

Here's the thing. If Germany had spent on nuclear the same amount of money it has spent (so far) on renewables, then it could have had 100% carbon-free electricity and heating. With lower energy prices than now.

So yes. Nuclear all the way.

Instead, we now face the reality where Germany will have to rely on imported natural gas as far as the eye can see. And certainly past 2040. While having one of the highest electricity rates in Europe, so high that they're now depressing the industry. And the plan to fix it is to keep repeating the word "hydrogen" until something happens.

Meanwhile:

> The coalition agreement between the CDU/CSU alliance and the SPD mentions the construction of up to 20 GW of gas-fired power plant capacity by 2030. In June, Reiche announced a first step with a tender volume of between five and ten gigawatts.
by pedalpete | 2025-08-23 23:03:04+00:00
I had the same thought about the article. It basically does say "healthy people live longer", even if you try to slice what they are saying differently. The "how do they delay disease" or "why do they get diseases later" still ends up with the "they're healthy longer". Of course, it's important to answer these other questions, but this article only states that these are questions that need to be answered, so not groundbreaking.

On your exercise and diet, yes they are important, but I believe sleep is the primary driver, and that is why I work in neurotech and sleep.

Of course, there is a strong relationship between diet, exercise, and sleep. They are the 3 pillars of health.

However, you can have a poor diet for month, or a lack of exercise for years before you notice the detrimental health benefits. One night of poor sleep, and we all know how bad that feels. It isn't just how you "feel" your bodies vital systems such as insulin and inflammatory responses are impaired immediately.

A person can continue to have a good diet and exercise regularly to maintain (or slow the decline) of fitness. But the restorative function of sleep naturally declines. It isn't sleep time, but the neurological processes such slow-wave activity, directly linked to the flushing of metabolic waste from the brain, hormonal responses, the list goes on and on.

At https://affectablesleep.com we enhance the restorative function of sleep without altering sleep time. We're building on over a decade of research with more than 50 published peer-reviewed papers.

What is yet to be studies, and is one of the things I'm most interested in, is if we can boost restorative function early in life, do we delay or reduce the amount of decline as we age.
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-23 23:03:15+00:00
When all your examples in actual use are bloated…

I’ve never seen another basic tech used to develop other programs that’s so consistently obvious from its high resource use and slowness, aside from the modern web platform (Chrome, as you put it). It was even more obvious back when we had slower machines, of course, but Java still stands out. It may be able to calculate digits of Pi in a tight loop about as fast as C, but real programs are bloated and slow.
by rvz | 2025-08-23 23:05:21+00:00
> ... Because it came from Google?

Nope.

None of what you said are any of the reasons given that it WAS written in Java already [0] but rewrote it all in Go explicitly because of its performance, concurrency and single binary distribution characteristics.

Those were enough technical advantages to abandon any thought of a production-grade version of k8s in Java.

[0] https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/kubernetesclu...
by joshka | 2025-08-23 23:06:15+00:00
You can show the exact opposite of this in a degenerate fixed point situation. Say you have -1, 0, +1 in each dimension. The only valid coordinates are the 6 on each face. (+-1, 0, 0) (0, +-1, 0) (0, 0, +-1). Not sure if this is the only counter example. I'd guess that with floating point math and enough bits the bias would be very small and probably even out.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-23 23:08:07+00:00
The UK isn't a great example, because most MPs - especially in this parliament - are basically filler, with little or no real agency. They were parachuted into constituencies by the Party HQ, with no local connections, often against the wishes of the local members.

It's a nice job, but you have to toe the party line to get it.

There are still exceptions, but the days when the core of the Parliamentary Labour Party was made of people from all backgrounds are long gone.

The UK is actually run by a handful of industries - especially finance, defence, and fossil fuels - and there's much less diversity there, token or otherwise.

School/university diversity only goes so far to solving the problem. Outsiders will still be left out of the existing privilege networks for economic reasons - most people can't afford the annual round of skiing and yachting holidays in prime locations - and for social reasons, which include a lack of confidence, lack of familiarity with expectations and traditions, and outright bullying and abuse.

This isn't an argument against diversity, it's to make the point that breaking down the gatekeeping has to be the start of a broader process. It's not a definitive solution in its own right.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-23 23:09:09+00:00
Drones are fundamentally better than subsonic-Mach 4 missiles because they're 100-1000x cheaper, several times smaller, have a much smaller RCS, and have loiter ability. They're slower and pack tiny warheads relatively, but they're key to taking out mobile forces and other drones.

For fixed targets, that's something artillery and Shahed-like cruise "missiles" can deal with.
by general1726 | 2025-08-23 23:11:41+00:00
> It's also really noticeable how you'll keep seeing the same ads for the same few things, regardless of what your "algorithm" is currently doing. I really have to wonder how much YouTube makes off those cutting board guys.

Oh yes, that's true it has been happening to me as well. Israel/Palestine propaganda fight were biggest offenders. Every 10 minutes one or the other sometimes sprinkled with a scam mobile game ad. And I don't even play mobile games...

Btw cutting on titanium cutting board is the fastest way to have dull knives. So we moved from scam to deception.
by godelski | 2025-08-23 23:12:45+00:00
There's a saying I like. "The harder I work, the luckier I get." I interpret it as working hard allows you to take advantage of more opportunities. The opportunities are luck based, but your ability to capitalize on them are not.

So I'm saying I agree with your point. A lot of networking is opportunities. The elite universities' edge isn't in making people better, it is in presenting more opportunities. They say meritocracy but the service they provide is connecting rich kids with smart kids. If the opportunities are coming through the rich kids then they can't get rid of legacy admissions. At least not as long as we live in a society where you need things like investments to fund ideas or where money is an opportunity vehicle. Personally, I just don't like that we play this game of calling one thing another.
by bdcravens | 2025-08-23 23:13:16+00:00
I have six animals, and Apple Photos does a great job of recognizing them by name after I labeled them the first time (the office dog as well). Two of them however are gray tabbies (brothers) and it can't distinguish them, so I had to name them with an ampersand ("Harley & Ralph Lauren")

Impressed that it can do as well as it does, I just find that amusing.
by bitpush | 2025-08-23 23:14:38+00:00
> Apple doesn’t generate revenue from running ads.

Oh, how mistaken you are. Apple runs a profitable ads business. Not as cute as meta or Google, but still meaningful.

Earn revenue with advertising on Apple News - Apple Support https://support.apple.com/guide/news-publisher/earn-revenue-...

Apple doesn't report Ad business numbers in quarterly earnings report, so we have to rely on third party analyst reports.

> Last year, Apple’s U.S. ad business totaled $6.47 billion, but only accounted for 2.1% of total digital ad spending, according to eMarketer’s March 2025 forecast

https://digiday.com/marketing/when-it-comes-to-ads-apple-isn...
by RustyRussell | 2025-08-23 23:15:03+00:00
Did anyone else find the use if ABNF annoying?

unicode-assignable = %x9 / %xA / %xD / ; useful controls %x20-7E / ; exclude C1 controls and DEL %xA0-D7FF / ; exclude surrogates %xE000-FDCF / ; exclude FDD0 nonchars %xFDF0-FFFD / ; exclude FFFE and FFFF nonchars %x10000-1FFFD / %x20000-2FFFD / ; (repeat per plane) %x30000-3FFFD / %x40000-4FFFD / %x50000-5FFFD / %x60000-6FFFD / %x70000-7FFFD / %x80000-8FFFD / %x90000-9FFFD / %xA0000-AFFFD / %xB0000-BFFFD / %xC0000-CFFFD / %xD0000-DFFFD / %xE0000-EFFFD / %xF0000-FFFFD / %x100000-10FFFD

I mean, just define ranges.

Also, where are the test vectors? Because when I implement this, that's the first thing I have to write, and you could save me a lot of work here. Bonus points if it's in JSON and UTF-8 already, though the invalid UTF-8 in an RFC might really gum things up: hex encode maybe?
by 1oooqooq | 2025-08-23 23:17:01+00:00
"What would you say has been the impact of the National Security Law brought in five years ago?

I think that it restored calm. In 2019, the city was as chaotic [as] I saw during the early days of the Cultural Revolution. There was violence, there was chaos. Traffic was stopped, and my wife and I were somewhat fearful of going out [and] speaking Mandarin, because some Mandarin speakers were beaten up on the streets.

There was a very strong anti-mainland tone among the protestors. We actually considered moving somewhere else, because we didn’t feel that Hong Kong was very safe."

... so the 0.001% didn't feel safe during a revolution against inequality. who would have thought? and it definitely was because they spoke Mandarin and not because they were extremely rich. /s
by kragen | 2025-08-23 23:17:11+00:00
Ferrite is going to be pretty hard on your ball mill, since it's harder than steel, so at best you're going to get a lot of steel contamination in your ferrite. More to the point, though, if you buy 100-micron ferrite flour and you're trying to get a suspension of 1-micron particles, you need to break each of those flour grains into about a million pieces. My intuition is that, while in theory milling will eventually produce the desired result, it will probably take enormously longer than you can afford to wait. So generally the papers I've read about getting submicron particles† of one or another substance do it by synthesizing it in small particles in the first place, not by milling.

______

† "nanoparticles", because calling them that allowed you to scam funds from the National Nanotechnology Initiative even if your research had nothing to do with Drexler's mechanosynthesis objectives!
by GraphGardener | 2025-08-23 23:17:14+00:00
The obsidian‑astro‑submodule gist basically uses git to mirror a folder from your vault into an Astro project's content folder. On Windows 11 with Obsidian 1.5.9 and Node 20 I've had better luck keeping a published folder in my vault, symlinking it into src/content of my Astro site, then running astro dev to preview new posts, so a quick test could be to create a scratch note called TestPost, symlink its folder into your project, run git add && astro build and see whether that gives you a working page; does that fit your tooling or do you need a plugin?
by alecsm | 2025-08-23 23:17:39+00:00
Blue leaning?

I wouldn't mind that. The problem there is that every topic is mixed with politics and it drains me. I'm already bombarded with political stuff from every angle and when I want to talk about tech I don't want more politics into it.

In that regard even X is better. I can keep it pretty clean by following few people and not looking at the For you page.
by johnecheck | 2025-08-23 23:17:48+00:00
A trend indeed. You know what each of those stores charging 30% have in common?

They each come bundled with the OS on your device and have massive advantages over any competing stores (if they even allowed them to exist).

Since devices are so expensive and users tend to be loyal, [company] isn't going to see much increase in sales by lowering their fees. With no competition and no downward pressure on prices, they just pick the 'industry standard', effectively price fixing without true collusion.

I'm pretty sure this isn't ideal but I don't pretend to know the answers. Until then, I'll just be focusing on building my ideas as web apps. (Flutter apps, so I can release elsewhere if the terms are reasonable).