MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-09-18 23:48:16+00:00
Thanks, I haven't been able to give the paper a proper read, but are they're basing claims via results or the ability to recover physics equations?

Because those two things are very different. You can have models that make accurate predictions without having accurate models of "the world" (your environment, not necessarily the actual world)[0]. We can't meaningful call something a physics model (or a world model) without that counterfactual recovery (you don't need the exact laws of physics but you need something reasonable). After all, our physics equations are the most compressed forms or representing the information we're after.

I ask because this is a weird thing that happens in a lot of ML papers when approaching world models. But just looking at results isn't enough to conclude if a world is being modeled. Doesn't even tell you if that's self consistent, let alone counterfactual.

[0] classic example is the geocentric model. They made accurate predictions, which is why it stayed around for so long. It's not like the heliocentric model didn't present new problems. There was reason for legitimate scientific debate at the time but that context is easily lost to history.
by Jedd | 2025-09-18 23:48:23+00:00
> For something low-medium scale.

This isn't a lot to go on.

The important thing is what you're trying to instrument - hosts, applications, network, microservices, all of the above? (And then whether you want a few weeks retention, or keeping years worth.)

Grafana in front of Prometheus with node-exporter or telegraf (it can expose in prometheus mode) on the clients -- will tick a lot of boxes and is fast to get going.

Grafana in front of InfluxDB + telegraf is similar, but personally I find PromQL easier than InfluxQL.

> ... write SQL on telemetry data and plot dashboards / set alerts.

Read up about the design of TSDBs and log / tracing datastores - their design & intent heavily influences their query languages.
by shpx | 2025-09-18 23:49:02+00:00
I don't think "natural" is used metaphorically. If you had an accurate simulation of the human hand you could show that one of the directions minimizes energy usage and damage to your hand, and I think it's the one we use. Starting high means gravity is helping you move down the page, and it's also easier to move your hand towards you than away from you, and the many small movements (rather than the one big one to the top of the next page) are where more energy is spent because of friction.

Writing is done by people and people are almost always subject to gravity. It's one of the 4 fundamental forces. Energy minimization is not an arbitrary selection criteria, it's central to the fitness/design of all living things.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-18 23:50:25+00:00
> surely his private employer have a right to fire him for it?

Short answer: depends on his contract.

Longer answer: if ABC fired him because of illegal threats from Carr, one could construct the argument that ABC and Carr conspired illegally to subvert Kimmel’s First Amendment rights. (Whether this is legal nonsense is beyond me.)
by UtopiaPunk | 2025-09-18 23:50:38+00:00
I'm sympathetic to your take, but I disagree. I personally find a powerful call for non-violence in Christianity, specifically in the Gospels. But there are at least a few other worldviews out there that result in a life dedicated to peace and love.

And I think this is tangential to your point, but it has to be said that there are many different approaches to Christianity, many of which have lead (and are actively leading) to terrible violence.
by Nevermark | 2025-09-18 23:51:54+00:00
> I assumed numerical stability is not that beneficial compared to something precision heavy like physics simulation in HPC.

Yes, exactly.

For physics, there is a correct result. I.e. you want your simulation to reflect reality with high accuracy, over a long chain of calculations. Extremely tight constraint.

For deep learning, you don't have any specific constraints on parameters, except that you want to end up with a combination that fits the data well. There are innumerable combinations of parameter values that will do that, you just need to find one good enough combination.

Wildly different.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-09-18 23:54:33+00:00
Just about everything is a national security issue if you think about it. The military should be forced to buy things from domestic suppliers, at least some percentage of the time, to make sure that there are people and resources available to deal with a war. As a compromise, set a maximum rate of profit allowable to these companies after they recover their investments, to discourage monopolies and price gouging.
by II2II | 2025-09-18 23:54:47+00:00
> All the text books I've ever seen had practical examples in them. Like determining the height of a tree or a house simply based on trigonometry.

The trouble is a lot of those practical examples fall into the, "why would I care category". I had a high school physics teacher who described his university antics, one of which included a funny story of a bunch of his friends climbing on top of each other to measure the height of a flag pole. I guess the profs got tired of dealing with students scaling flag poles because I was measuring the height of mountains on the moon at the same university a couple of years later. The thing is nobody really cares about the height of a flag pole, while only a few would care about the height of the mountains on the moon.

The reality is the interesting applications are much more involved. They either require a depth of thought of process or a depth of knowledge that isn't appropriate for a textbook question. Take that trigonometry in games example. The math to do it was in my middle school curriculum, but it becomes obvious that computer graphics is more than trigonometry the moment you try to frame it as an example. I had linear algebra in high school. That will take you pretty far with the mathematics, but it will also be clear that a knowledge of computer programming is involved. Even knowing how to program isn't going to take you all of the way because few are interested in rendering verticies and edges ...

And that is just the obvious progression of knowledge in a simple application. Physics itself involves buckets full of trigonometry in extremely non-obvious ways, non-geometric ways.
by hirsin | 2025-09-18 23:55:09+00:00
There's at least the appearance of causation here, with the FCC Chairman publicly saying that broadcasters could get their licenses yanked if they didn't drop Kimmel, and later that suddenly occurring.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/18/entertainment/abc-jimmy-kimme...

I imagine a smoking gun will be demanded by this SCOTUS though, and this kind of stochastic "would be nice if someone..." pressure/threat will get a pass.
by PeterWhittaker | 2025-09-18 23:55:11+00:00
Nihilism appeals because the root causes are oligarchy and kleptocracy: when you realize you are powerless in the large, the only real alternatives are disengagement and violence in the small. Why violence? In this context, it is the only thing guaranteed to leave a mark.

The third alternative, the difficult way, is social engagement on a path to social democracy, to limiting the reach of autocrats and robber barons, and to defetishizing the first two amendments.

But that path requires lifting one's eyes, abandoning one's out groups, working with all, and foregoing at least some comfort and self advantage.

It is the only way. I doubt I will see it (entered 7th decade recently, feel pretty confident about that).
by tern | 2025-09-18 23:55:59+00:00
I see arguments like this all the time these days, and it feels important to me to have the story straightened out.

Can anyone recommend a resource that comes to a definitive, non-partisan conclusion (even if the answer is: "it's complicated," or "neither")?

(Separately, it's interesting to ask LLMs questions like this: https://chatgpt.com/share/68cc9e37-8a2c-800e-aeef-dc88977f56...)
by red369 | 2025-09-18 23:56:22+00:00
I can’t stop playing with the low light comparison between the iPhone 17 and the Pixel 10, showing the sandwich shop menu.

Why do the letters in the Sandwiches signage at the top of the image move slightly between the different photos? Is it because of a very slightly different camera angle, or is it because one (or both) of the phones has used OCR and rewritten the word with AI processing of the image when taken? I know iPhones automatically replace slightly blurry text in low light images, sometimes with a faint change in colour of the background - like when using a translate app.
by xnx | 2025-09-18 23:57:57+00:00
> there's not much indication that they were even contacted by the FCC

Brendan Carr: "This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead."

Nice merger you have planned there, sure would be a shame if something were to happen to it.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-18 23:58:20+00:00
I keep trying to explain the difference between a configuration format and a data format. A configuration format is for humans. A data format is for computers. Try to make one format good for both, you end up with one format that sucks at both.

Another fun thing about configuration: it's a great indicator of poor software design. If the configuration can be very complicated, in one single format, in one big file, look at the source code and you'll find a big ball of mud. Or even worse, it's lots of very different software that all shares one big config file. Both are bad for humans and bad for computers.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-09-18 23:58:58+00:00
Is this a serious question? China probably has the full source code of Windows, which has leaked before and could be obtained easily by spies abroad who are employed at Microsoft. They also don't need Windows. They make practically all the computer gear, or enough of it that they can get by in a war. We need to make real essential goods to sustain ourselves, not a bunch of spyware products and "service industry" gigs.
by catlifeonmars | 2025-09-18 23:58:58+00:00
I don’t see how disagreeing with you constitutes “a complete and utter lack of grasp of the subject”. That’s hyperbole.

So your claim is that the state of the art weather models are accurate at somewhere between 24h and 2 weeks (unclear based on the other sub threads) and continually improving. Based on this you extrapolate that given enough compute and sensors it would be possible to predict the weather with the same accuracy a month or more out. I think that’s a reasonable claim assuming that (1) the behavior of the system is deterministic and (2) the system behaves the same at both time scales.

Setting (1) aside, I claim that (2) is a wrong assumption. That weather exhibits chaotic behavior and that this likely puts an upper bound on prediction accuracy and the upper bound is less than 1 month.

The state of the art appears to be GraphCast [1] and FengWu [2]. These show promise out past 2 weeks when run against historical data. However, neither model is making actual weather predictions, and both are still in preprint (e.g. methodology has not been peer reviewed). This is super interesting and it’s possible my claim is incorrect, and that the upper bound is further out than the conventional 2 week limit.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/html/2504.20238 [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02948
by bdamm | 2025-09-19 00:01:11+00:00
I'm not saying people should implicitly trust the government.

I'm saying that lack of trust, and lack of the ability of people and government to meet in a way that develops trust, is the issue that underlies people holding up a "$1280 coffee mug" as an example of government waste.

The ideal is that representatives you do trust would be evaluating the government for you, and so you would be building trust by experiencing trust with one or more of your representatives. But the scale of the federal government has resulted in few people actually trusting their representatives, and the experience of having a trust test with a representative doesn't scale. This is the fundamental issue.

To be totally clear, I am implying that a change to the system needs to proceed towards improvements in accountability and visibility, so that people can experience more legitimate trust in their government.
by brandall10 | 2025-09-19 00:01:55+00:00
To be fair, many cathedrals in the past took well over 100 years to build (ie. Notre Dame @ 182 years), and it wasn't an unusual idea at the time construction started that it could take this long.

Of course one would think modern methods would have sped things up considerably, but it wasn't until the advent of technologies this century that things really progressed.
by clhodapp | 2025-09-19 00:03:03+00:00
I've found the amdgpu Linux driver to be fairly buggy running dual monitors with my Radeon VII, and found things like the fTPM to be highly buggy on Threadripper 2k/x399 to the point that I had to add a dTPM. They never got things truly working properly with those more-niche products before they just.. kind of... stopped working on them. And of course ROCm is widely regarded to be a mess.

On the other hand, my Steam Deck has been exceedingly stable.

So I guess I would say: Buy AMD but understand that they don't have the resources to truly support all of their hardware on any platform, so they have to prioritize.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-09-19 00:03:09+00:00
I have written a Lua type checker in the past and have delved enough into the Lua source code. For that reason I can say that Lua is particularly densely coded; Lua's 14K LoC is something more like 3--40K LoC when coded in the normal, less dense way. Lua is not necessarily small; it's just kinda concise.
by foota | 2025-09-19 00:03:42+00:00
Not sure about everyone, but probably yes. Imo the killer feature is durability and replication. You can use single disks if you don't care about data loss, but once you need to start replicating data you need a distributed filesystem.

Tectonic is Facebooks, Google's is Colossus. I'm not sure about the others.
by roughly | 2025-09-19 00:03:50+00:00
I'd echo everyone else on how awe-inspiring this building is. One thing that's particularly interesting is that, while the outside is extremely cluttered and ornate, the inside is almost spare by comparison, and achieves a level of immersive awe that I've never experienced before.

In that sense, the building is almost too successful - a church is meant to glorify God, but there's no disentangling the Sagrada from Gaudi. You cannot stand in the building and not feel a sense of awe for the mind that created this, and the building is far, far too famous to ever be a servicing church. It was such an interesting contradiction of an achievement - it's such an incredible artistic accomplishment and so successful in its intent to inspire and as an act of devotion that you just cannot look past the finger to see the moon. The artist eclipses the subject.

(As an aside, Orwell makes mention of the Sagrada Familia in Homage to Catalonia, and it's an incredible paragraph: "For the first time since I had been in Barcelona I went to have a look at the cathedral – a modern cathedral, and one of the most hideous buildings in the world... Unlike most of the churches in Barcelona it was not damaged during the revolution – it was spared because of its ‘artistic value’, people said. I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance.")
by n8agrin | 2025-09-19 00:04:47+00:00
I've had similar thoughts. Any interest in sharing notes? Generally I've been thinking there should be a standard declarative format for data vis. This should be inspired by prior art like ggplot, Grammar of Graphics, Vega, VegaLite, etc.

From there it could be compiled to targets declarative or procedural (eg to generate VegaLite specs, echart specs or Observable Plot configs in JS).

How have you been thinking about this problem space?
by throwaway2037 | 2025-09-19 00:04:47+00:00
> Nvidia is fabless and has concentrated supplier and geopolitical risk with TSMC. Intel is one of the only other leading fabs onshor[e]

TSMC is building state of the art fabs in Arizona, USA. Samsung in Texas, USA. I assume these are being done to reduce geopolitical risk on all sides.

Something that I never read about: Why can't NVidia use Samsung fabs? They are very close to TSMC state of the art.
by TrevorFSmith | 2025-09-19 00:05:09+00:00
This reminds me of gas station pumps that play ads on sub-par displays and tiny crackly speakers. I'm already paying for gas and now you think you can force crap ads on me? If an ad starts I immediately stop pumping and go to a different gas station. The fridges in people's homes. Expensive fridges! That's a hard pass.
by firecall | 2025-09-19 00:05:52+00:00
I'm hoping that's the case!

Having to physically login to a remote Mac that has FieVault enabled to get it online after a power outage is not ideal!

So will I be able to actually remote into the GUI now after a reboot?

I've looking at getting a Mac mini for my homelab again, but thinking I'll need one of those remote enable KVM devices!
by cyberax | 2025-09-19 00:07:56+00:00
Just always use a collector. It really simplifies your life. Your app then just always talks with localhost without any authentication. And during the development, you can just set up local Uptrace to help you with debugging with just a different collector config.

And while all the tracing providers speak the OTEL protocol, the way your do auth is not the same. Sometimes you need to specify it in a header, sometimes it's a part of the URL.
by throwaway13337 | 2025-09-19 00:08:56+00:00
I don't think it was rigged.

Having claude run the browser and then take a screenshot to debug gives similar results. It's why doing so is useless even though it would be so very nice if it worked.

Somewhere in the pipeline, they get lazy or ahead of themselves and just interpret what they want to in the picture they see. They want to interpet something working and complete.

I can imagine it's related the same issue with LLMs pretending tests work when they don't. They're RL trained for a goal state and sometimes pretending they reached the goal works.

It wasn't the wifi - just genAI doing what it does.
Show HN: Nallely – A Python signals/MIDI processing system inspired by Smalltalk
by drschlange | 2025-09-19 00:09:27+00:00
Nallely is about experimenting with signals: routing, patching, or writing small neurons that process signals and eventually sink in MIDI devices or any application connected to Nallely.

I try to get inspired by the "Systems as a Living Things" philosophy and aim, step by step, to create an auto-adaptive, resilient, distributed system. Currently, neurons live in their own thread in a session (world), and send signals (messages) to each other through patches (channels). You can also connect to a network-bus neuron to register your own neurons written in any other technology and have them interact with the existing neurons inside the world. Nallely offers an API to easily code your own reactive neurons, and provides a mobile-friendly GUI for patching everything visually.

As anyone posting something based on Python, I can already hear: "no, Python's bad, think about the performances, think about the children".

We all know about Python performances (we've all seen the animation with the moving balls and stuff), but the focus here is on dynamic and emergent behaviors, extensibility, and run time adaptability over extreme performance. Even though Nallely is written in pure Python, it runs on a Raspberry Pi 5 (ok, a powerful one), consuming less than 10% CPU on a normal usage and around 40MB of memory.

And, as someone mentioning Smalltalk, I can already hear: "Why didn't you write it in Smalltalk"? (replace Smalltalk by your prefered dialect)

I like Smalltalk, but I also like Python. Nailed it, perfect justification. Jokes aside, IMO Smalltalk is "Systems as Living Things" pushed at its extreme for designing a language, and I admire that. With Nallely, I want to explore the same philosophy: independent musical/signal-processing neurons, without relying on Smalltalk, while benefiting from Python's deployment and ecosystem advantages (compared to Smalltalk).
by ckemere | 2025-09-19 00:09:34+00:00
Lots of comments below. I think Reagan “Government doesn’t help” campaign + (obviously) big tax cuts were the beginning of the end. Early 1980s was the beginning of deficit spending and tax cuts based on the Laffer Curve big lie. Bush followed suit, and Obama/Biden realized that the American people would gladly elect presidents who spent borrowed money.

Unclear how we recover as a country given the reach of the Fox News propaganda. Maybe a huge recession?
by aacook | 2025-09-19 00:11:00+00:00
I have the first generation of these, and as far as I know there isn't a screen. The sweat issue is sensitivity to the side controls — the glasses think I'm changing the music, volume or whatever and I'm just wearing them and doing nothing. This was an issue early on but recently I went on a ride for 90 minutes and didn't have this issue.
by krapp | 2025-09-19 00:11:18+00:00
But the Church didn't believe in the universality of anything other than their own authority and correctness. Jews, Muslims, and "pagans" (even Protestants and other heretical Christians) were routinely harassed and killed, women were essentially the property of men, slavery was ubiquitous and kings ruled by divine right, all justified by Christian dogma. And they didn't believe in reasoning outside of an explicitly Christian framework or discerning any moral truth not grounded in Biblical doctrine.

Christianity may have inspired the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment succeeded because it was able to separate philosophy, ethics, law and science (such as it was, "natural philosophy") from Biblical dogma and the Church.
by psidium | 2025-09-19 00:11:32+00:00
Can’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World Book by Joseph Henrich.

It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that.

There are so many interest studies mentioned there, one that really stuck with me is how Protestant-raised Americans will work harder for the next day after having (reasearch-led) incestuous thoughts when compared to Catholics and Atheists.

He explains how monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today, and how Mormon towns in Utah were affected by not having monogamy as the basis of society (women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man).

One of the wildest claims in there is the one that the north of Italy is more developed today because it was part of the Holy Roman Empire while the south wasn’t. About a thousand years separate these and he finds effects still. Mostly in connection to the spread of read/write to the public being a core tenant of Protestantism.

Anyway, this is not a summary of the book but instead a few points from it that really stuck with me after reading it. Fascinating stuff