MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WASDAai | 2025-08-19 08:12:11+00:00
We formalize three design axioms for sustained adoption of agent-centric AI systems executing multi-step tasks: (A1) Reliability > Novelty; (A2) Embed > Destination; (A3) Agency > Chat. We model adoption as a sum of a decaying novelty term and a growing utility term and derive the phase conditions for troughs/overshoots with full proofs. We introduce: (i) an identifiability/confounding analysis for (α,β,N0,Umax) with delta-method gradients; (ii) a non-monotone comparator (logistic-with-transient-bump) evaluated on the same series to provide additional model comparison; (iii) ablations over hazard families h(⋅) mapping ΔV→β; (iv) a multi-series benchmark (varying trough depth, noise, AR structure) reporting coverage (type-I error, power); (v) calibration of friction proxies against time-motion/survey ground truth with standard errors; (vi) residual analyses (autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity) for each fitted curve; (vii) preregistered windowing choices for pre/post estimation; (viii) Fisher information & CRLB for (α,β) under common error models; (ix) microfoundations linking T to (N0,Umax); (x) explicit comparison to bi-logistic, double-exponential, and mixture models; and (xi) threshold sensitivity to Cf heterogeneity. Figures and tables are reflowed for readability, and the bibliography restores and extends non-logistic/Bass adoption references (Gompertz, Richards, Fisher-Pry, Mansfield, Griliches, Geroski, Peres). All code and logs necessary to reproduce the synthetic analyses are embedded as LaTeX listings.
by internet_points | 2025-08-19 08:13:06+00:00
If there's a book that only has e-book versions on amazon, what is the best way to ensure the author gets money? I'd rather not fill my little apartment with paperbacks, and ordering a paperback and then returning it sounds kind of wasteful. Although I guess I could buy a paperback downtown and drop it off at the used book shop .. What do other people do, when they want to pay authors and read e-books without aiding and abetting Bezos?
by Nevermark | 2025-08-19 08:13:09+00:00
They work fantastically for me. I feel incredibly lucky that they do.

Every morning I put them in, look out my window at the high leaves of a garden tree. Then rotate them until the leaves are sharp,

I am still using my first pair, which are nine years old now. No irritation unless I wear them overnight sleeping.

I highly recommend giving them a try!
by jpdenford | 2025-08-19 08:17:00+00:00
There are plenty of replies raising the issue of empirics vs anecdotal evidence. However to add to the anecdotal, there are many top level vegan athletes out there - Lewis Hamilton, Venus Williams to name a couple of particularly famous ones. It’s worth looking up though as it does show that it’s at least possible to be vegan and much healthier than the average person (depending on your definition of healthy I suppose).
by somenameforme | 2025-08-19 08:17:35+00:00
Yeah, exactly this. No idea exactly what happened but people at some point seem to have stopped accepting other people having different views or perspectives. With basically every community there was invariably some sort of oddballs.

I remember a BBS with this guy called 'Nihilist' who was a total insufferable asshole that'd make glory days Linus look like the world's most gentle man. But as is the nature with community, you learned more about him over time - and he was a guy in his 20s dying of some sort of a muscular deterioration issue, and him acting that way was just how he coped. Everybody loved him, hated him, mourned when he passed, and the community was somehow genuinely a worse place without him.

For another example I'm sure some here are familiar with, Flipcode had this one dude, extremely knowledgeable, who'd basically snipe into conversations, give amazing advice in a rather curt borderline hostile fashion (was it all caps? I think it was, but that was a long time ago), and then disappear. But he was such an important part of that already large community that I'm certain somebody else can fill in the blanks I'm leaving here.

But now when anybody does something as mild as saying the quite part out loud on dumb things, of which there are many in modern times (probably owing to this exact issue), it's like 'zomg burn the witch'! Basically a prerequisite of community requires accepting people for who they are. In modern times today that statement is basically a euphemism for sexual/LGB stuff, but obviously that's a negligibly small part of the diversity and richness of personalities, even if those personalities, or their opinions, may not always be the most pleasant or politically correct.
by tmountain | 2025-08-19 08:17:52+00:00
I live in Portugal, and there is a robust debate around this topic. It's far from ridiculous, and nationality laws are in the process of changing as a component of this discussion.

Also, many countries are "tightening down" their golden visa programs or removing them entirely. I have a friend who works for a golden visa consultancy, and they're already in the process of pivoting because of so many changes.
by globular-toast | 2025-08-19 08:17:54+00:00
I guess your comment is case in point. People still don't understand psychological addiction. Yes, nicotine is addictive, but it's a small component of cigarette addiction. If it was just about that then patches would be 100% effective (in reality their success rate is dismal) and people who never smoked would use patches to get a "hit".

So I guess you could think of it the other way around. If you can believe scrolling is addictive then you should also be able to believe that putting a stick of burning plant matter in your mouth is addictive. Once you open your mind to the reality of psychological addiction you'll see it everywhere.
by ddahlen | 2025-08-19 08:18:37+00:00
It is neat to see some of the old work done in the field, this looks like a pretty classic treatment of the topic. It looks like they were using a fourth-order Runge-Kutta integrator, which would likely limit long term integrations accuracy (though looks sufficient for their use case). Many algorithms I have seen typically use much higher order integration methods to beat down the accumulation of numerical error.

Source: Working on my PhD in orbital mechanics of asteroids/comets, here are my open source (python/rust) orbital integration tools: https://github.com/dahlend/kete
by 9rx | 2025-08-19 08:19:12+00:00
> This was a historical decision because SQL is a declarative language.

What do you mean? Both ALPHA (the godfather declarative database language created by Codd himself) and QUEL, both of which inspired SQL, put "FROM" first. Fun fact: SQL was originally known as SEQUEL, which was intended to be a wordplay on being a followup to QUEL.

Another commenter makes a good case that SQL ended up that way because it was trying to capture relational algebra notation (i.e. π₁(R), where π~select, ₁~column, R~table). Yet relational algebra is procedural, not declarative. Relational calculus is the declarative branch.

Although the most likely explanation remains simply that SEQUEL, in addition to being fun wordplay, also stood for Structured English Query Language. In English, we're more likely to say "select the bottle from the fridge", rather than "from the fridge, select the bottle". Neither form precludes declarative use.
by susam | 2025-08-19 08:19:14+00:00
The reason vertical clusters appear in these examples is that all your chosen numbers are multiples of 6. A prime number greater than 3 leaves a remainder of either 1 or 5 when divided by 6. In other words:

For all primes p greater than 3, p ≡ ±1 (mod 6).

Therefore, when the total number of columns is a multiple of 6, all primes except 2 fall into the same columns, namely 1, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 and so on.
by moomoo11 | 2025-08-19 08:21:14+00:00
The reality is that physics is pretty fucking hard to crack. So that being said, sci fi is easy. It’s made up.

I think SpaceX is cool af but end of the day rocket tech isn’t going to get us off-world unless it becomes our “cathedral” tier project. And we all know that by the time those were completed the world had largely moved on, both spiritually and engineering-wise. We also moved on from the “elites” of that time who are now props (kings and queens) or they invest into some copy paste SaaS that they sell to their friend.

I’d rather the military keep investing into insane special projects that really push the boundaries of what’s possible. Across intelligence, science R&D, and social/behavioral tendencies.

If we are gonna discuss sci fi and dystopias or utopias… My personal utopia would be the USA winning earth first, getting 99% of the world population to relax or FAFO asap so we can get to the off world stage and conquer aliens.

I’d consider myself an America techno militarist optimist.
by internet_points | 2025-08-19 08:21:26+00:00
You can make ricotta in <1h with whole milk, vinegar and a bit of salt. And it's good on pizza!

But most "regular" cheeses like Swiss cheese also need rennet, ie. you need to slaughter a calf and scrape its stomach lining. You may want to make sure your downstairs neighbor is OK with the procedure before you start (offer them a veal dinner to make up for the noise?). Other than that, it's basically (unpasteurized) milk, salt and water. And time.

Yeast: take a sourdough baking class. You just need air, water and (organic) flour.
by windward | 2025-08-19 08:24:05+00:00
Many of the important decisions are made at design and review time. When that team adds PDF support, they should act unlike the Explorer team and avoid unnecessary O(n^2) algorithms.

Part of getting this to happen is setting the right culture and incentives. PM is such a nebulous term that I can't say this definitively, but I don't think the responsibility for this lies with them. Some poor performance is simply tech debt and should be tackled in the same way.

$WORD_PROCESSOR employees should be capable of this: we've all seen how they interview.
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-08-19 08:24:33+00:00
Action Quake had quite different gameplay mechanics that made it difficult to get into. The movements were very fast and similar to Quake. Most of the weapons had very specific ranges (sniper rifles were useless at close range, shotguns were useless at long range). Each shot could cause bleeding, which had to be stopped with a tourniquet. Bleeding reduced your health bar and left a trail of blood behind you. Headshots weren't really emphasised. So as a beginner, you'd arrive on the map, take one or two shots from long range, then bleed to death or get finished off with a shotgun within the first 15 seconds. Counter Strike was much more accessible.
by archerx | 2025-08-19 08:24:44+00:00
I think there is still some use to diction. For me it’s a great way to get screenplays on paper. I can type fast but I can think and speak faster. I just record a stream of thought of the story/video I want, even if I jump all over the place it doesn’t matter, just a nice stream of consciousness. Afterwards I spend time editing and putting things in the right order and clean up. I find this much faster than just writing.

I use whisperfile which is a multiplatform implementation of whisper that works really well.

https://huggingface.co/Mozilla/whisperfile
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-19 08:25:48+00:00
> It wasn't until 2009 with the introduction of Node.js that JavaScript became a viable option for backend development.

JavaScript was used for backend development since the late 1990s via the Rhino engine (the backends wouldn't be pure JS generally but a mix of JS and Java; Rhino was a JS engine for the JVM with Java interop as a key feature.)
by xg15 | 2025-08-19 08:26:28+00:00
I think it doesn't have to follow. You could also generalize the idea and see learning as successfully being able to "use the past to predict the future" for small time increments. Next-word prediction would be one instance of this, but for humans and animals, you could imagine the same process with information from all senses. The "self-supervised" trainset is then just, well, life.
by globular-toast | 2025-08-19 08:26:55+00:00
Not really. It's secured against the house so worst case is the lender repossesses. Either way, unless you have money you will be paying rent to the people who do, either via rent or interest payments. Yeah, I don't like it either, but that's the game.

The OP makes it seem like renting and saving huge piles of cash is the only way. It's not. You can buy and save into your house instead. As long as interest plus maintenance etc is the same as what you would have paid in rent, you'll probably end up better off if house ownership is your goal.
by liamwire | 2025-08-19 08:26:59+00:00
Queensland, Australia introduced state-wide $0.50 public transit fares a year ago, and it’s been a raging success. Conveniently, this also eliminates the entire problem class of needing to calculate fares. Mind you, for those unfamiliar, QLD is a state 2.5x larger than Texas, 5x larger than all of Japan, 7x larger than Great Britain, and is bigger than all but 16 countries.
by yccs27 | 2025-08-19 08:29:27+00:00
You'd never write that ugly one-liner. Just write the recipe imperatively:

dough = mix(flour, water, sugar, butter) dough.knead() dough = dough.add(eggs) cookies = dough.divide(12) cookies = bake(temp=450, minutes=12)

Might be more verbose, but definitely readable.
by charlie-83 | 2025-08-19 08:29:59+00:00
Sometimes you have to choose between not talking to someone and talking to them on such a platform. For friends, sure, just says that you want to switch to something e2e. But for people you don't really know that well it's kind of unreasonable to expect them to switch for you. LinkedIn is a good example, I don't like using the platform but I also have no interest in adding loads of random old colleages I might talk to occasionally to any e2e platform I use.
by mapt | 2025-08-19 08:30:28+00:00
Never done it, never gonna.

Thank _Neoshade_'s legendary story in a Reddit comment for that - https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/dv99nf/til_t...

With a side helping of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and the submarine / treasure hunting arc which describes decompression sickness.
by Grimburger | 2025-08-19 08:30:41+00:00
> I live in Portugal, and there is a robust debate around this topic.

Assumed it was somewhere in that region because my European friends usually talk about it. Personally find it bizarre because the few thousand digital nomads are barely moving the needle compared to tourism or normal migration. It comes across as people getting very upset about a minor issue because they have rigid ideological views that prevent them from touching the main one. A convenient scapegoat but nothing will change in the slightest if the Portugese DN visa is scrapped.

You've created the easiest pathway to a EU passport and then wonder why the planet flocks there.

The simple solution here is to build enough housing to meet demand.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-19 08:31:05+00:00
I would have thought that, but about a year ago I have replaced my old kitchen scale with a 1-gram-resolution with a kitchen scale having 0.1-g resolution.

This kitchen scale was cheap, perhaps $10, and it is made by some no-name Chinese company, but despite that it has proved to be much more accurate than I had expected.

I have checked it with various standard weights between 5 gram and 500 gram, and all of them were displayed correctly, usually with no more than 0.1 g difference. At most there may have been a 0.2 g error once. Most of the standard weights were displayed exactly. I assume that the kitchen scale is calibrated in the factory with a standard weight, and it has good linearity, so it is expected that if one weight is displayed correctly, all the others will also be correct. So what is significant is that it has not drifted since the factory calibration, not even after more than a year later, because I have rechecked it.

The higher resolution has been very helpful with some things that I weigh every day. For instance, when I weigh every day with it 50 grams of something and 125 grams of something else, both being taken for 1-kilogram packages, I can be pretty certain that the first package will suffice for 20 days and the second package will suffice for 8 days, and in the last day for each package I will still use the normal quantity of that product.

With the previous lower resolution kitchen scales, the accumulated 1-gram errors were enough so that in the last day there would remain an abnormal amount of product in the package.

The only disadvantage of the higher-resolution kitchen scale it that it can weigh only up to 3 kg, while the previous kitchen scale could weigh up to 5 kg. However, I normally cook only for myself, therefore I very rarely need to weigh something above 1 kg, so the lower maximum limit did not matter.
by account42 | 2025-08-19 08:31:53+00:00
IA lending books with "weak" DRM also hurts efforts in reducing DRM and reforming copyright though and that is much more important in the long term. It was always a deal with the devil that IA should have never made and them now being at odds with others that preserve those books and actually make them available only makes that more clear.

It's like a food kitchen under a tyrannical regime complaining that people passing their food to rebels might get them shut down.
by mattmanser | 2025-08-19 08:32:58+00:00
I think as they're quite secretive so it seems they're slow followers but they're fairly fast in starting the project, keep it under wraps and take their time to get it right.

Younger readers might not know that before the iPad came out, Michael Arrington tried to make a tablet before tablets were a thing. So the problem back then was that touch screens were expensive and scaling up from a smart phone to a tablet had a lot of engineering problems. It didn't happen overnight. And Arrington started building TechCrunch’s "CrunchPad" in public, and people thought he might steal a march on tablets. It went a bit wrong with a falling out with a manufacturer, and the manufacturer released the JooJoo.

But obviously Apple had been working on the iPad the entire time, kept their mouths shut until they had perfected it and crushed the JooJoo a couple of months after the JooJoo's release date. The JooJoo was more expensive than expected, almost the same price as the iPad, but had performance issues, poor software, no app store and a short battery life.

You might argue that Apple's lost that 'skill' now. For example, the Apple Vision Pro, which didn't nail it.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-19 08:34:27+00:00
As a lifetime experimenter myself, I'm going to play the cards I'm dealt and I sure like slack in the system, but mainly to make up for my other weaknesses :)

One person's idea can be good enough to be the most revolutionary thing in a field, but it still may not be as well thought-out as if more than one worked on it together from the beginning.

One person's physical efforts can almost always be dwarfed by a team of some kind, and that might be the only way for an idea to become reality, but it's not going to help if there's not a proper team to join or resources to build staff from scratch.

Since most teams do not contain an absolute genius, at least they come up with products because they have a team. Excellent products sometimes, but not often genius level.

In some fields they really think brains are the most important thing, but it's too rare and everybody knows it.

So if they want to get to market any time soon they have to settle for what they have to work with until such a rare genius comes along.

Which may be never so no time to wait, but by the time some miracle-working wizard shows up it's too late because the team has no drop-in task for them to perform, and has not naturally been formed with the necessary structure to leverage anybody's wizardry by then. So never mind, they can't recognize it anyway.
by Vektorceraptor | 2025-08-19 08:36:08+00:00
Then show me the easily available "information on the langauge tree" to solve the unsolved problems in science. Btw. books are not mere information, they are also products of effort and sacrifice and intentions. They are also embedded in an economic system of paper, books, ink, transport and what not producers.

So you are either poor or too lazy to buy a book from the store. But this doesn't justify mind theft or it's distribution.
by Blockingto | 2025-08-19 08:37:01+00:00
Blockchain did not give us that.

It only moved the goal post.

As long as you can't guarauntee that the data you put onto a blockchain is trustworth in the first place, whatever you put on a blockchain is not 'tamper-proof'.

Therefore the ONLY thing you can handle on a blockchain 'tamper-proof' is stuff only existing on the blockchain itself. Which means basically nothing.

And there is a second goal post which was moved: the ignorance about a blockchain being 'tamper-proof'. 51% attack are real, you don't know if a country just owns and controls a lot of nodes and the latest rumor: NSA was involved in blockchain creation. You don't know if something is hidden in the system which gives one entity an edge over others.
by Grimburger | 2025-08-19 08:37:25+00:00
> but digital nomads are going to get swept up in the general anti-migration narrative that most populaces are now feeling

Can you name one digital nomad visa that has been scrapped in the last year or two?

I can name a few dozen that have been implemented.

When I started in 2017 there was maybe 3 or 4 places you could move on Earth with a six figure USD salary as a remote worker, it was always a grey zone to go places on tourist visas but that's how people rolled and countries knew how good a deal it was for them compared to raising/educating/supporting locals so let it slide. There's over 70 legal valid options now for remote workers in 2025.

The easily proven evidence doesn't stack up with the narrative people and newspapers likes the Guardian are trying to push for clicks.

I personally couldn't care less if locals don't like me. My own countrymen are jealous about me having a good paying remote job too.