MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maxbond | 2025-09-20 18:01:37+00:00
Triboluminescence in wintergreen mints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BckJfovkxOc

Quartz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tribo.ogv

I've been able to see this by going into my driveway at night, by picking up some quartz gravel, jumping up and throwing the gravel down as hard as I can directly towards the ground (where it impacts other gravel).
by gcanyon | 2025-09-20 18:01:41+00:00
I think Emma qualifies as literature. This is much clearer than Bleak House:

> Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

Moby Dick -- of course the first sentence is about as simple as possible. But extending to the second:

> Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

Again, that is much clearer. N=3 and selection bias and all, but Bleak House appears to be the outlier here.
by sarchertech | 2025-09-20 18:02:13+00:00
Sure that's a thing he might do. I think the most likely outcome is that big tech ends up scooping up all the H-1B slots.

But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not saying people were anti H-1B visa and now they still are, but disagree with Trump's "solution" I'm seeing comments full of "H-1Bs are good actually".
by DonHopkins | 2025-09-20 18:02:39+00:00
SelfishScript. JavaScript credits Self as inspiration, but misses all the important things about Self.

JavaScript copied:

The name "Java", cynically chosen for marketing misdirection, not technical truth.

The word "prototype" from Self, but turned it into a quirky pseudo-class system. Instead of living objects delegating naturally, with multiple inheritance dynamically changeable at runtime, JavaScript glued on a weird constructor-function pattern that always confuses people, with constructors you have to call with new but can also uselessly call as normal functional foot-guns.

JavaScript missed:

The fluid, live object experience (JavaScript dev environments were never designed around exploration like Self’s Morphic).

The elegance of uniformity (JavaScript bolted on primitives, type coercions, and special cases everywhere).

The idea that the environment mattered as much as the language. Netscape didn’t ship with the kind of rich, reflective tools that made Self shine.

And most important of all: Self's simplicity! The original Self paper (Ungar & Smith, 1987, “Self: The Power of Simplicity”) was all about stripping away everything unnecessary until only a uniform, minimal object model remained. The title wasn’t ornamental, it was the thesis.

Simplicity. Uniformity. Minimal semantics. A clean consistent model you can hold in your head. Less semantic baggage frustrating JIT compiler optimization. Dynamic de-optimization (or pessimization as I like to call it).

Self proved that expressive power comes from radical simplicity.

JavaScript showed that market dominance comes from compromise (worse is better, the selfish gene).

JavaScript should be called SelfishScript because it claimed Self’s legacy but betrayed its central insight: that simplicity is not just aesthetic, it’s the whole design philosophy.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-09-20 18:02:48+00:00
People buy a new car generally every 5-7 years.

furthermore there does not seem to be any great brand loyalty in the market

https://cardealermagazine.co.uk/automotive-consumers-more-di...

maybe because of being afraid of dying but probably not, but given how often people buy new cars (not that often) and the lack of loyalty, I think it would not make any sense from a business perspective to give a damn if the customers die (disregarding moral perspective which I'm sure is a primary concern for automotive manufacturers)
by lr0 | 2025-09-20 18:03:35+00:00
See also:

- Important open source projects should not use GitHub (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43688417 - 73 comments

- Ditching GitHub (2024) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826484 - 65 comments

- Why Microsoft is Evil https://programmerbear.com/why-microsoft-is-evil/
by vid | 2025-09-20 18:03:53+00:00
The way I see it is the web was supposed to transform into the Semantic Web in 2000. What that means is you can give everything an identifier and create any type of relationship, turning the entire web into a database designed for a type of reasoning. On its own this is pretty benign, and I thought it would be a Good Thing because it would engage people past pages, links, and predetermined content. I imagined it becoming interesting for most people to craft meaningful connections. I also thought it would enable people to be more usefully and grounded-ly critical of big orgs, through projects like Sunlight Foundation and eventually Wikipedia (and now Wikidata, which uses the formal Semantic Web).

But the basic idea of "things" and relationships is easy to conceptualize, in fact those physical evidence boards with people and things connected by association have been around for a long time.

But the formal Semantic Web tech proved too complicated, so it's only really used in areas like science and to a limited degree for SEO. However, companies like Google and Facebook saw the value and built their own "knowledge graphs," and eventually companies like Palintir started selling services built on the ability to create knowledge graphs about anything. There are a few companies that do this on a smaller scale, but Palintir has really taken off, and given (and perhaps because of) the personality of the founders and its policing/military focus, and the fact that everyone is incidentally connected one way or another, it has become a very dangerous tool because it ironically does the opposite of what these tools should do on a large scale, enables big orgs to track individuals, starting perhaps legitimately with crooks and terrorists but now expanding into every field and citizen, meaning everyone can be tracked, predicted, and managed (barring good societal rules). If it isn't stopped, it gives absolute control to whoever is on top.
by askonomm | 2025-09-20 18:03:53+00:00
But how would that work?

Say I have software written that runs just fine, but has not been updated to the latest runtime of Python or Node (as per your example). Perhaps a dependency I use has a broken recent version, but the old version I use works fine. You remove the package, now it breaks my software. This would effectively make it so that all libraries / dependencies that are "abandoned" by the author or inactive, would be deleted, which then results in all the software that used them to also break.

Unless I misunderstood something?
by upheaval7276 | 2025-09-20 18:04:04+00:00
I agree with you, and especially identify with the last sentence. However, I’m fed up with Apple and Google, and any alternative that doesn’t tie me to Google and has all functioning hardware and usable 5G or at least LTE with reasonable specs is a major win in my book. I’ve preordered the FLX1s. The FLX1, which is no longer in production, had a replaceable battery, but lack of a replaceable battery or non-pure Linux in an alternative phone certainly isn’t going to keep me chained to Apple or Google.
by mmphosis | 2025-09-20 18:04:10+00:00
Make two lists: the first list is the "dream" machine -- what I want if money were not an issue, and the second list is the features that I need. Match those two lists of specifications to available machines. Maybe compare the lists with machines that I already have. If money is an issue, throw out the "dream" machine list and go with the only what is needed list.

Much of this is a matter of preference. https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air/13-inch-sk...

13-inch -- this is slightly large for me. (Maximum) 32GB RAM -- this is not enough for me.

https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch-sp...

16-inch -- this is a behemoth but the only laptops capable of having more than 32GB RAM!?! 128GB RAM -- now we're getting somewhere $10,549.00 -- this is in the "dream" machine list
by walleeee | 2025-09-20 18:04:32+00:00
I'm not sure what to make of the point about 1 or 10,000 people. 1 person can definitely build a primitive aircraft with time, money and perseverance. No 10,000 random people, whether IQ 100 or 1000, will build an airliner, but Airbus will, more or less reliably regardless of the exact IQ of any particular employee. The ability to build one is distributed over hundreds of thousands of people and millions of machines at Airbus, and millions of people and billions of machines in the industrial civilization behind the whole endeavor.

If your point is just that different people have different capacities, then sure, that's true enough. But even so, it's an extremely coarse summary of an enormously complex and detailed landscape.
by dbsimmons64 | 2025-09-20 18:05:07+00:00
Small nitpick - I'd say the main Gleam web framework, Lustre, takes inspiration from Elm. Gleam itself takes inspiration from a number of sources, Rust, Erlang, the ML family of languages. I think Gleam is a lovely little language (though I'm also a huge fan of Elixir).
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-20 18:05:45+00:00
> Please parse that sentence more carefully. I said "labor productivity"

Yes. Unless we’re redefining labour to fit a square peg into a round hole, this remains true.

Access to the latest technology is never a sole determinant of productivity in any technological revolution. If anything, it having any relation to productivity is a modern phenomenon.

(Most kids who had a computer in the 80s or internet in the 90s didn’t become wildly more productive for it. They just found new ways to entertain themselves.)
by djha-skin | 2025-09-20 18:05:53+00:00
Rust suffers from the same problems that functional programming languages suffer from: deep learning curve and high complexity. The high complexity is intended to push more runtime errors back to compile time, but boy does that mean the language pays for it. Rust is a tire fire of complexity.

For these reasons I believe it is not a good idea. The kernel also sort of rejected Rust. The kernel is complex enough without adding a Haskell type system and a lisp-level macro system capable of obfuscating what code calls what code. serde code is so hard to spelunk for this reason. Contrast this with Go's Unmarshall, much easier to follow.
by 0x1ceb00da | 2025-09-20 18:06:10+00:00
It's exactly like the tariff war with china. India refused to put sanctions on russia (who helped india in its wars with pakistan, who received help from USA), so now trump is saying we don't want your people in here. The outcome is probably going to be similar to the tariff war as well. They'll start out with totally absurd bullshit and then come down to something more reasonable. Maybe $10-20k per worker per year. From the point of view of the state, humans are just another resource, like crude oil. If you don't have something, you import it. And what's happening right now is haggling at the global scale. It's just a bunch of gorillas thumping their chests. Nobody cares about the citizens.
by some_furry | 2025-09-20 18:06:33+00:00
> It's also worth noting, the user _must_ be made aware of the encryption method that was used, their "signer" application, which is also responsible for encryption and decryption, would require their permission to do an operation in either direction.

Let me ask a more pointed question about downgrade attack resistance then:

Is the algorithm being used determined by the encrypted message contents? Or is it determined by the key controlled by the signer app?
by pazimzadeh | 2025-09-20 18:06:43+00:00
That’s interesting, thanks for the link.

Nevertheless, exercise turns on repair pathways in multiple tissue types.

Molecular mechanisms of exercise contributing to tissue regeneration (2022) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-022-01233-2

Exercise Promotes Tissue Regeneration: Mechanisms Involved and Therapeutic Scope (2023) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10164224/
by tmoertel | 2025-09-20 18:06:43+00:00
Woz is rightly celbrated for his hardware designs, but, as this article shows, his software designs were also impressive. This article gives a clear derivation of some clever math and implementation techniques to compute e to over 100,000 places on a very limited 8-bit Apple 2 computer in the late 1970s.

Interesting quotes:

> I first calculated e to 47 K bytes of precision in January 1978. The program ran for 4.5 days, and the binary result was saved on cassette tape. Because I had no way of detecting lost-bit errors on the Apple (16 K-byte dynamic memory circuits were new items back then), a second result, matching the first, was required. Only then would I have enough confidence in the binary result to print it in decimal. Before I could rerun the 4.5 day program successfully, other projects at Apple, principally the floppy-disk controller, forced me to deposit the project in the bottom drawer. This article, already begun, was postponed along with it. Two years later, in March 1980, I pulled the e project out of the drawer and reran it, obtaining the same results. As usual (for some of us), writing the magazine article consumed more time than that spent meeting the technical challenges.
by ben_w | 2025-09-20 18:06:52+00:00
Turned out that for a lot of things (not all things, Transformers have a lot of weaknesses), using a neural network to score an output is, if not "fine", then at least "ok".

Generating 10 options with mediocre mean and some standard deviation, and then evaluating which is best, is much easier than deliberative reasoning to just get one thing right in the first place more often.
by maxbond | 2025-09-20 18:07:01+00:00
Very cool! From cursory research it seems like many salicylates produce triboluminescence (I don't know why), and some people online with special dietary needs say that bananas are high in salicylates (though it seems controversial). So that would be my hypothesis.

I'm gunnuh try crushing an aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) and see what happens. (ETA: My headache pills that have aspirin, acetaminophen, and caffeine, along with whatever binders, did not produce any light that my camera detected. That's the only aspirin I have and I'm only willing to sacrifice one of them. Oh well!)

ETA2: Wasn't able to get it to work by peeling a banana, crushing the inside, or crushing the peel, but I don't doubt it happened. Bananas probably vary a great deal. Thanks for the fun diversion, I haven't done an experiment like this in years.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-09-20 18:07:04+00:00
You're really splitting some very thin pedantic hairs.

You're problem isn't with me, you are quibbling with there own marketing materials. Go complain to marketing if they are using the words that you disagree with. Everything I've posted is directly from Mojo's website.

You: "Well, technically they are embedding the interpreter, so all the surrounding code that looks exactly like python, and we promote as being compatible with python, and promote as extending python. My good sir, it is not really python. That is just a misunderstanding with marketing. Please ignore everything we are clearly making out as an important feature, totally wrong".

They clearly promote that they are extending python. What is your problem with that? How is that wording causing you to seize up?

I'm aware of what is technically happening. Where did I ever say anything that was not directly from them? Do I really need to write a thesis to satisfy every ocd programmer that wants to argue every definition.

Were you let go because of an inability to think flexibly? Maybe too many arguments with co-workers over their word choice? Does you're brain tend to get single tracked on a subject, kind of blank out in a white flash when you disagree with someone?

Actually, I'm kind of convinced you're just arguing to argue. This isn't about anything.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-09-20 18:07:07+00:00
Newton's method isn't really so useful for cubics (outside of lucky initial guesses), given how simple the algebraic expressions are.

Meanwhile, I wonder to what extent the reported improvement over Blender's cubic solver has to do with the approximations this library makes [0]. Algebraic cubic-solving seems to be well-trodden ground (this library's formulas look similar to those in a paper by Holmes [1]), so faster approximations in a limited range can definitely be appropriate to obtain a further speedup, but I would've liked to see a more thorough accuracy analysis.

[0] https://github.com/jurgus/EasingCubicBezier/blob/5b07bd9d316...

[1] https://users.math.msu.edu/users/newhous7/math_235/lectures/...
by y-c-o-m-b | 2025-09-20 18:07:10+00:00
I don't think they care about the citizens either. That's not the point. I'm sure others have their own interpretations, but everything I gather from Thiel's books, podcasts, interviews, etc suggests that he believes he's part of a group of intellectuals that are actively working towards technological advancement for the benefit of himself and others like him. We - as ordinary citizens - are in his way. He's totally fine with "leaving us behind" so to say and that's his sell to other powerful elites: they can usher in his grand vision or rot with the rest of us.
by furyofantares | 2025-09-20 18:07:34+00:00
I've seen public schools and public courts use YouTube to host their videos. I don't quite follow why they would care so much about either using downloaders themselves or their users having access to downloaders that they'd switch providers. To me it is unlikely but plausible.

But even if they did - I don't see why Google would care about these organizations. I expect anyone doing this is not expecting to get any views from the algorithm, is not bringing in many views or monetizing their videos.

To steelman it though, maybe Google cares if their monopoly benefits from nobody even knowing other video sites exist.
by foldr | 2025-09-20 18:07:52+00:00
Jeremy Corbyn isn't Jewish in any straightforward sense. He's said that he has some distant Jewish ancestry:

https://www.thejc.com/news/jeremy-corbyn-my-jewish-ancestry-...

It's not my job to decide who's Jewish or not, but I think it's inaccurate to just describe him as 'Jewish' without qualification.
by wenc | 2025-09-20 18:08:21+00:00
> “if it typechecks, you’re done” nature of proofs.

This resonates with me.

Software engineering is more art than math -- you have to deal with corner cases, exceptions, human interactions. So much of code encodes culture, preferences, storytelling, etc. It's kind of a "procedural epistemology". You are codifying -- without correctness -- the behaviors that you know.

Pure Math doesn't work like that -- it is more declarative and is built on a structure of correct statements. (numerical math is a different animal -- it's closer to engineering -- but proofs are pure math). It's way more limited and restrictive and rigorous than imperative code.

It's like writing in Haskell. If it compiles in Haskell, the result might not be useful in real life, but there's a degree of consistency that languages like Python cannot enforce.

But even Haskell for practical reasons only aims at consistency rather than correctness. Proof assistants like Lean and Coq go all the way in Curry-Howard correspondence.
by slg | 2025-09-20 18:08:48+00:00
The rate the Trump administration is losing plausible deniability has been accelerating over recent months/weeks/days. The MAGA diehards flying Trump flags aren't going to change their ways because they are true believers in "putting the corrupt radical left | greedy corporations | immigrants in their place". But what about all the techno-libertarians that populate HN? Can you genuinely say this type of loophole that allows naked corruption is good? Do you agree with the FCC threatening to take away broadcast licenses for jokes? When does the water get too hot for all us frogs?
by SoftTalker | 2025-09-20 18:08:59+00:00
A big change from then to now for remote collaboration is better connectivity in general, and technology such as Zoom and Teams. But how do you handle the time zone difference? That has always been the issue I've seen with any kind of real-time collaboration with contracrors or employees in India. If it's work that doesn't involve that, then what is the big difference now? Github? Slack?
by brap | 2025-09-20 18:09:00+00:00
I don’t know why Palantir is always singled out as some sort of EvilCorp.

There are plenty of companies in the defense sector but those aren’t usually considered “tech” so for some reason they’re out of the discussion.

And besides, these US companies build things that the US and US-approved governments buy, so any criticism should be pointed at the governments.

Personally I don’t even think that criticism is deserved. What do you expect UK to do for example, not sign any defense contracts?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-20 18:09:08+00:00
> that only happens after tens of millions have died and entire countries are leveled

That levelling, darkly, does solve the problem. Nazism ultimately turned Western Europe into an American protectorate. And under Pax Americana, it thrived. One can similarly point to Imperial Japan having laid the groundwork for the Asian miracle, at the cost of millions of lives.

Maybe fascism has a purpose: it lumps together a generation’s horrific and emotionally stunted and combusts them against an innocent population. That’s horrible. But it leaves better cinders than it came to.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I neither think fascism is good nor inevitable.)
by John23832 | 2025-09-20 18:09:29+00:00
The gotcha's don't work on me, sorry.

They've steered a massive ship (and its crew) well enough to corner the manufacturing market for everything, globally, in less than 30 years. They've steered that same ship well enough to create mirror (and sometimes superior) industries in pretty much everything else. They also created global soft power in the process.

If they need to retool/manage gig work, the command and control economy in China has a much better chance at figuring it out than waiting for the "hand of the market" in US.
by username332211 | 2025-09-20 18:09:40+00:00
And yet, the culture of the realm is probably innocent even there. There are very sound financial reasons why nobody in that island aspires to work in any sort of science and engineering.

Similarly, if you are the sort of person interested in putting their capitals to productive use (as opposed to a downright parasic extraction of rents) , the best decision you could make is to place them across the sea. Or the ocean.
by sarchertech | 2025-09-20 18:09:45+00:00
>Amazon has over 10k H1B workers. Think about how much money it means.

Something like 0.3% of their yearly profit.

They're already paying probably somewhere near $200k a year more. Clearly it's not for no good reason. Clearly there is some advantage to employing them here if they are already willing to pay $200k more than they have to.

An extra $100k doesn't erase whatever that value is. The question is, is employing them here worth $200k to Amazon, but not $300k? Likely the case for some employees, but almost certainly not all.