MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2025-10-17 19:29:34+00:00
ScholarlyArticle: "Selective excitation of a single rare-earth ion in an optical fiber" (2025) https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-33-19-41011

NewsArticle: "Streamlined method to directly generate photons in optical fiber could secure future quantum internet" (2025) https://phys.org/news/2025-10-method-generate-photons-optica...
by branon | 2025-10-17 19:30:07+00:00
I like GOG a lot but it's wild to me that their GOG Galaxy client doesn't work on Linux! A lot of gamers who care about preservation and availability are spending money with Valve because Steam's DRM is mostly inoffensive and the Linux support is so good.

The addressable market segment of people who play PC games and also care about DRM-free accessibility would be larger if GOG's launcher ran on Linux and targeted Linux users. It seems like a logical overlap to me.

Valve is eating GOG's lunch in this segment but it could easily change. Sure it might be small but it's bigger than ever, still growing, and seems to fit GOG's mission.

I would definitely start repurchasing my Steam games DRM-free on GOG if only they provided a launcher with the tooling necessary to download & run them on my system.

As things stand now, and for all the good GOG does... it's not enough to be DRM-free but only distribute Windows installers. You've just outsourced the DRM scheme to Microsoft. If the software doesn't run on a DRM-free OS, the job is only halfway done.

And in the meantime, GOG's product is tragically subject to piracy, (I believe) partially enabled by their decision to _only_ package games for the OS upon which most piracy traditionally takes place! :( I hope this could be offset by packaging for a crowd with more ideological overlap.
by ang_cire | 2025-10-17 19:30:08+00:00
No, the ISPs who operate the ASes and routers that make up "the internet" are the ones who bring the service to the UK.

4chan does not reach out to UK users in any way, only responds to their incoming requests.

It really is analogous to UK users going to a foreign country, buying something that their home country has an issue with, having a third party ship it to their home country, and then their home country getting mad at the store.
by comprev | 2025-10-17 19:30:12+00:00
I'm a firm believer in having a single source of truth and that's often a Jira ticket ID in the corporate world. On Jira you can either directly link to another item, link to a Confluence page or leave a comment with the unique string (if the boards are not connected).

Every git branch and commit contains a Jira ID string, even down to "description" fields in resource properties or meta tags.

The idea is a future engineer who I will never meet has a starting point to understand the context of the change.

Projects on GitLab get a "release" too which contains the Jira ID, or possibly multiple in the auto-generated CHANGELOG.

It's not perfect and does require good discipline however I feel a professional responsibility to make the extra effort.
by SR2Z | 2025-10-17 19:30:27+00:00
Right, but modeling the structure of language is a question of modeling word order and binding affinities. It's the Chinese Room thought experiment - can you get away with a form of "understanding" which is fundamentally incomplete but still produces reasonable outputs?

Language in itself attempts to model the world and the processes by which it changes. Knowing which parts-of-speech about sunrises appear together and where is not the same as understanding a sunrise - but you could make a very good case, for example, that understanding the same thing in poetry gets an LLM much closer.
by TZubiri | 2025-10-17 19:30:49+00:00
Not only is this the case for solo devs, tech partnerships, and spend-averse people who don't do money to time conversions.

But if you have low cash on a company and have excess workforce, you might not necessarily get to a point where you have to fire, but you can spend those, already paid for, man-hours, in migrations and infrastructure to save some cash.

As an added bonus you have tasks to give your otherwise idle workforce to keep them warmed up
by OutOfHere | 2025-10-17 19:31:17+00:00
There was no crypto mining involved whatsoever. There was some crypto analysis involved, among unrelated other analyses, but no mining.

If you think about it, Hetzner had to be spying on my activities in very close detail to see what I am doing. Such unnecessary spying (without a court order) alone should detract anyone from using them. Assuming they copied my disk image and subjected it to a scan, it's very possible that they retained my confidential data without my permission. Is this the kind of cloud provider that anyone should use?

As for the type of server, it really shouldn't matter. The service exists to be used. People don't rent say 24 core or 48 core servers just to pass the time and pay money for nothing.
by GenerWork | 2025-10-17 19:31:23+00:00
Triz is a double agonist while Sema is a single agonist. Generally, more agonists = better, although some people will prefer one to another due to the side effects.

Reta is a triple agonist that is basically Triz + glucagon. Bodybuilders love it because it'll repress appetite but also burn fat. As for why they're cheaper, it's because the Chinese will manufacture them for cheaper than the pharma companies, not slap a tremendous markup on them, and then sell the raw powder to the steroid sites.
by hinkley | 2025-10-17 19:31:50+00:00
I was thinking the same but couldn’t organize my thoughts to match up with the linked articles. The quantum computer can deliver new entanglements at whatever rate it wishes as long as they are below the speed of light. I don’t believe we know how to entangle particles at a distance. If you can keep particles

Le Guin’s ansibles were used for low bandwidth communication. Card expanded them to realtime immersive 3D surround. But I think that’s more fantasy than science fiction. But I believe in the later books we find out there’s some other dimension of space where things or people are wired together and that’s how his ansibles function.
by jwr | 2025-10-17 19:32:00+00:00
I am impressed by the efforts of the fossil fuel industry (and I think many car manufacturers) to discredit EVs. Their campaign has been sneaky and devious and very, very effective.

To spread good FUD, there has to be truth in it, so that debunking it gets very difficult. Over the years I've seen so much FUD it's not even funny (see for example https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/factcheck/electric-vehic...).

This news story shows that the FUD has worked well (especially in the US), hats off to the fossil fuel industry. It's also a double-whammy: this story will spread, so people will be even more suspicious of EVs, which will cause their popularity to fall, which will cause their resale prices to fall…

It's quite sad, but also impressive.
by volkl48 | 2025-10-17 19:32:31+00:00
That's basically getting into having radically different lifestyles and development patterns and you not liking a car-oriented one. (And hey, I agree with you and live somewhere I can walk to most things, including groceries. But that's not the average American lifestyle).

Approximately 92% of US households have at least one car, 59% of US households have more than one car.

The fundamental point that I am making is: Americans do not typically go to convenience stores to buy groceries, it's not even a consideration. The places most do go to buy their groceries do have fresh produce + meat and so on. They tend to just make less frequent trips and buy more at once.

Since they are getting there by car, it's also easier to buy a lot more at once.

When they get home - they also have a much larger refrigerator + freezer (possibly more than one) than is typically seen in Europe to store it in.
by godelski | 2025-10-17 19:33:09+00:00
It's a lot more complicated than that.

You have instincts, right? Innate fears? This is definitely something passed down through genetics. The Hawk/Goose Effect isn't just limited to baby chickens. Certainly some mental encoding passes down through genetics as how much the brain controls, down to your breathing and heartbeat.

But instinct is basic. It's something humans are even able to override. It's a first order approximation. Inaccurate to do meaningfully complex things, but sufficient to keep you alive. Maybe we don't want to call the instinct a world model (it certainly is naïve) but can't be discounted either.

In human development, yeah, the lion's share of it happens post birth. Human babies don't even show typical signs of consciousness, even really till the age of 2. There's many different categories of "awareness" and these certainly grow over time. But the big thing that makes humans so intelligent is that we continue to grow and learn through our whole lifetimes. And we can pass that information along without genetics and have very advanced tools to do this.

It is a combination of nature and nurture. But do note that this happens differently in different animals. It's wonderfully complex. LLMs are quite incredible but so too are many other non-thinking machines. I don't think we should throw them out, but we never needed to make the jump to intelligence. Certainly not so quickly. I mean what did Carl Sagan say?
by tialaramex | 2025-10-17 19:34:06+00:00
Those "things that look at a lot like strings already" are literals and thus constants, with the type `&'static str` which is how Rust spells an immutable reference to a string slice which lives forever. So, Rust is promising that the string slices "Hate Me" and "Blue October" exist, and in practice probably if you look inside the resulting executable it says "Hate MeBlue October" or similar.

On the other hand the String type is a growable array of bytes used to assemble strings, it's an owning type, so Song will own those two Strings, they can't go away or be altered via some other force. Owning a string would allow you to add to it, change it, or discard it entirely, you obviously can't do that to the text baked into the executable, so if you want to own a String it will have to be allocated at runtime.

You can also write "Some Words".to_owned() for example to the same effect.
by nawgz | 2025-10-17 19:34:07+00:00
This type of dismissive attitude is so strange to me. The only reason "lifecycles magic + probably global_state" would be causing your app to behave unpredictably is - this is going to shock you - because you closed your mind to a tool by dismissing it as garbage before you used it, and then failed to use it properly because you think its popularity boils down to PR.

For instance, you could entirely forgo the influence of lifecycles and global state by putting everything in a top-level Context with 1 state object that you only ever update by calling `setState`.

After that, you might find reasons to optimize your app, which could lead you to more interesting approaches like reducers or state management libraries or memoization, but I'm guessing you would never get that far and just go back to what you were doing before, since YOUR preferences are battle hardened and reliable software, while things you don't know about are only popular because of Facebook. Obviously.
by AIxHunter | 2025-10-17 19:34:23+00:00
I was preparing for an Azure Certification lately, but when I tried to test my knowledge I found out that most of the Quiz apps are paid or have limited access, so I created this free interactive app that uses AI to generate quizzes and let you focus on specific topics by just prompting

Check the below video for a full tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWl2JKMsX7c

Try it now: https://quiz.aixhunter.com/

I’d love to hear your feedback and topic requests, thanks.
by westurner | 2025-10-17 19:34:28+00:00
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44054783 :

> "Re: ntpd-rs and higher-resolution network time protocols {WhiteRabbit (CERN), SPTP (Meta)} and NTP NTS : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40785484 :

>> "RFC 8915: Network Time Security for the Network Time Protocol" (2020)
by thomasikzelf | 2025-10-17 19:34:38+00:00
<select id=dropdown> <option value=a>a</option> <option value=b>b</option> </select> <select id=a style="display: none">...</select> <select id=b style="display: none">...</select> <script> const $ = name => document.querySelector(name) $('#dropdown').addEventListener('change', ev => { $('#a').style.display = ev.target.value == "a"? "block" : "none" $('#b').style.display = ev.target.value == "b"? "block" : "none" } </script>

vs

const [showing, setShowing] = useState(null) const handleChange = ev => setShowing(ev.target.value) let other if(showing == "a") other = <select>...</select> if(showing == "b") other = <select>...</select> return <> <select onChange={handleChange}> <option value=a>a</option> <option value=b>b</option> </select> {other} </>

some notes:

- The complexities of both of these tiny pieces of code is similiar (I would say)

- React needs to load a big bundle

- React spits out a large stacktrace with react internals if something goes wrong

- React is slower

- React code cannot be easily stepped through with the debugger

- React needs a build step

- React performance is very unpredictable (this is more of a problem with many elements and dynamic code)

Your next question might be what you do once your form grows huge. See my other answer to @iliaznk how I handle that.
Ask HN: Would you use an auto-migration ORM for Android apps?
by hedzzhu | 2025-10-17 19:35:07+00:00
Hey everyone — I’m exploring an idea and want honest feedback from Android devs.

I’ve been working on Android apps where handling Room/SQLite migrations is painful:

- Writing and maintaining Migration(x, y) classes every release

- Debugging weird “missing column” crashes on old users

- Keeping schema history consistent across multiple devs or release tracks

- Testing N→latest migrations in CI

In backend systems (Go + Ent, Prisma, Flyway, etc.), this is solved by automated, versioned migrations with deterministic checks.

But on Android, everything happens locally on each device — so the tooling is messy.

I’m considering building a tool / Gradle plugin that would:

- Auto-detect schema changes from your models

- Generate safe migration SQL (with rollback + dry-run simulation)

- Validate migrations in CI/CD

- Optionally visualize schema evolution over time

- Integrate directly with Room or SQLDelight

Basically: “Prisma-style migrations for Android.”

I’d love your thoughts:

- Does your team still hand-write migrations?

- Would this actually save you time or is Room good enough now?

- Would you pay (or convince your manager to pay) for a Pro version that integrates with CI and shows visual diffs?

- What’s your biggest migration headache?

I’m just validating the pain before building an MVP — any feedback, criticism, or examples from your workflow would really help. Thanks
by auraham | 2025-10-17 19:35:09+00:00
Can you elaborate on how React was a better fit than LiveView for your use case?

In my opinion, the main drawback of LiveView is that we assume that the user do no click on the Back button of the browser. In other words, if the user changes the page by pressing the Back button, then Phoenix closes the socket, creates a new one, and the state is lost. I really like LiveView but not sure how to persist the state between page reloads without using Ecto (also, not sure if that is idiomatic).
by thatfrenchguy | 2025-10-17 19:35:18+00:00
> charging infrastructure is still quite poor

Now that basically every car can access Tesla Superchargers and vice versa for Teslas, this is really not a problem anymore. We’re at the « sometimes I’m grumpy the best stop for my car does not have the exact amenities I want » stage now.

I guess is worse than the « the stop with the exact amnenities I want is not the provider with the cheapest electricity that I wanted » stage that we are in say, France.
by famouswaffles | 2025-10-17 19:35:42+00:00
>This doesn’t make any sense. Popular is not the same as useful.

If you are using a service weekly for a long period, you find it useful.

>You’d have a more compelling argument if you included data showing that all this increased LLM usage has had some kind of impact on productivity metrics.

Why would you need to do that? Why is a vague (in this instance) notion of 'productivity' the only measure of usefulness? ChatGPT (not the API, just the app) processes over 2.6 B messages every single day. Most of these (1.9B) are for Non work purposes. So what 'productivity' would you even be measuring here ? Do you think everything that doesn't have to do with work is useless ? I hope not, because you'd be wrong.

If something makes you laugh consistently, it's useful. If it makes you happy, it's useful. 'Productivity' is not even close to being the be-all and end-all of usefulness.

[0] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f1...
by o11c | 2025-10-17 19:36:15+00:00
I mean, there's nothing wrong with all 3 potentially applying.

It can be a Ponzi scheme for specific investors, a bubble in the stock market in general, and a cargo cult for the companies using it.

One of the comments downthread did give an argument against "cargo cult" applying though - you need actual past successes (of the particular degree, not extrapolated) to assume that your actions will repeat them.
by westurner | 2025-10-17 19:36:22+00:00
Is this (the OT [1]) with ytterbium a more or less efficient way to count clock ticks with high precision than is described in [2]?

[1] "Quantum-amplified global-phase spectroscopy on an optical clock transition" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09578-8

[2] "Quantum watch and its intrinsic proof of accuracy" (2022) https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev...
by deaux | 2025-10-17 19:36:49+00:00
Long thinking seems to be a marketing term without clear definition, only applicable to the opaque chat frontends. If you give Anthropic models a hard problem and set the thinking budget high (API), it does plenty of reasoning and the CoT helps a lot with debugging. With Gemini and OpenAI you can't debug as the summaries tell you effectively nothing about why it's giving a wrong answer or going off the rails when it does som
by thatjoeoverthr | 2025-10-17 19:37:02+00:00
The thing with the hype is it's always the same hype. "If you can just 3D print another 3D printer ..." "Apps are dead, everything will be AJAX" etc. I no longer believe the hype itself warrants attention or pushback. Let the hype boys raise money. No need to protect naive VCs.
by cwillu | 2025-10-17 19:37:02+00:00
A changing magnetic field induces an electric field; this is how asynchronous motors work.

Having been in the room with a patient undergoing TMS a couple dozen times, I can assure you that the electromagnet will induce a muscle twitch from the electric field it creates. What it doesn't do is cause a seizure, which is the typical desired result of ECT.
by somat | 2025-10-17 19:37:02+00:00
As far as legal hacks go I always liked xkcd joke on the matter.

https://xkcd.com/504/

If it is a munition the US government has limitations on it's actions controlling it covered under the 2nd amendment to the constitution.

In reality it nor the first amendment(freedom of speech) hack probably would not work. The limitation was on exporting strong crypto, not using or importing it. It was stupid and impossible to control. But I would guess any charges would be espionage(illegal speech) and smuggling(illegal goods). regardless of how you packaged it.
by Sniffnoy | 2025-10-17 19:37:05+00:00
An interesting post I read recently about why we haven't: https://svpow.com/2024/09/07/were-not-going-to-run-out-of-ne...

Of course, that's specifically about human anatomy. In this case we're talking about a feature that I'd bet is present in other animals too, so the factors discussed here don't all apply. In this case though there seems to be a straightforward answer -- the structures involved are very small! The post I linked is largely talking about larger structures we failed to find...
by saghm | 2025-10-17 19:37:55+00:00
The latter two of these points seem pretty subjective. I feel like they're written in a way that anyone could easily make an argument for or against Rust having fulfilled them today or literally at any point in the future. There's not really any way to refute an argument that something is "changing too fast", "not boring enough", or "hasn't demonstrated it can do the kind of work C does". I'd find them more compelling if they were expressed in a way it was actually possible to verify whether Rust reaches them or not at some arbitrary point in the future. Otherwise, people will inevitably just see them as a reflection of their existing opinion on whether it's wise or foolish for SQLite to use C rather than Rust.
by Seattle3503 | 2025-10-17 19:38:01+00:00
If you pirate then re-sell the book to a friend and they do the same, only one copy ever gets bought but everyone gets access forever.

Whereas of everyone buys new, keeps the book, and pirates, the author isn't going to see much negative impact.

Hanging on to the "proof" is important. Otherwise all you really prove is that you paid money to touch a physical copy.
by iamnothere | 2025-10-17 19:38:03+00:00
Then the UK should just step up and pass a censorship law, not do this song-and-dance about fining businesses outside their control.

If this kind of BS becomes too common then running a small internet business will become impossible. Even if you don’t do business in a country, you will have to consider whether or not they might consider you in violation of some obscure law and then consider whether or not that country has the leverage to impact your business or even your own personal safety. It’s utterly ridiculous. This would spell the end of the global internet, except for megacorps. It’s already a tough business environment as it is.

The status quo is that some countries have these laws, but they are generally ignored unless you’re a citizen, you manage to do something geopolitically significant, or you get involved in transnational crime rings. This seems acceptable to me. If countries don’t like the free internet, then ban it so we can all see what you’re really up to.
by dangus | 2025-10-17 19:38:25+00:00
This seems hyperbolic to me. Sometimes companies just want to make money.

Similarly, a SaaS company that would very much prefer you renew your subscription isn’t trying to make you into an Orwellian slave. They’re trying to make a product that makes me want to pay for it.

100% of paid AI tools include the option to not train on your data, and most free ones do as well. Also, AI doesn’t magically invalidate GDPR.
by Noaidi | 2025-10-17 19:38:27+00:00
I believe you’re being disingenuous and hopes that no one reads the full article. Because what he said is more nuance than what you’re proposing that we should not appeal to authority. I’ll post what he said here just to be clear.

“ I fully admit that this is an appeal to authority! But saying you should rely on the framings of a scientific field, like literally just respecting how it defines terms, is extremely reasonable as an appeal. It’s also very different than saying you should blindly believe the conclusions of that field. While “trust the experts” is often too strong a claim, the much weaker ask of “use the agreed-upon vocabulary the experts use when discussing the field” is actually quite reasonable, and most people who want to have an opinion about a scientific (or philosophical) subject should respect the used terms. The same goes for consciousness.”
by ramesh31 | 2025-10-17 19:38:50+00:00
> Try creating a GUI in C++ without using any libraries.

This is more or less my response to anyone who complains about CSS; just consider the alternatves. CSS is, by an order of magnitude, the most powerful, flexible, accessible, and maintainable paradigm for UI development in existence. In some cases you're talking hundreds of native LOC to implement what a single CSS rule in a class can do.