MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nchagnet | 2025-10-27 22:23:49+00:00
"QM works in the Hamiltonian picture and I recall from my undergrad days that you get there from a Legendre transformation on the Lagrangian (or something to that effect) so I'm trying to understand the justification of that approach before moving up the conceptual ladder."

That is only one approach to QM. As you rightly point out, Hamiltonian and Lagrangian approaches are always two sides of the same coin: one is only the Legendre transformation of the other and so they describe the same physics.

So to that end there is a neat QM Lagrangian representation: the path integral formulation. You can apply it to basic QM as well as to QFT or even QFT in curved spacetimes and string theory.

So if your goal is to "trace your way from simple postulates", that is a good way: assume your system can be described by an action, and go from there. It works in pretty much every scenario. In most research I've been involved, you always end up constructing generic actions whose coefficients eventually determine the behaviour of the theory.

And to get back to what I assume is your real conundrum (why do we extremize something to begin with), I just don't think there's any true answer as to why nature behaves this way.

What we can answer is: what is the action, what does it represent, what does it mean to extremize it? The short answer to this (provided by the path integral formulation I mentioned earlier) is that the action is essentially controlling a probability distribution of paths in a given geometry. In quantum mechanics, we interpret this distribution with that of actual particles. When you extremize the distribution, you essentially find the most likely trajectory, and if your distribution is peaked enough around that trajectory, then you can take this path as representative of your system when fluctuations are ignored.

So in the classical limit of QM, that trajectory is all that's left (and that would be the classical mechanics trajectory).

Interestingly a similar interpretation exists in statistical physics. If you "complexify" your time dimension, your action is again on a Euclidean (instead of lorentzian) spacetime and the time direction behaves like a circle whose radius sets a scale akin to a temperature. This might sound a bit complex but where I'm going with this is that once again, you can think of this euclidean path integral as a distribution of paths over fluctuations (this time thermal), and the extremum is this time the system's behaviour when at equilibrium.
by txrx0000 | 2025-10-27 22:24:38+00:00
I think the causal relationship is not quite that way.

better connectivity -> destroyed physical limits on group size -> groups not only get larger but also more ideologically homogenous because they're moderated by a central authority like how physical crowds are moderated -> people make friends more easily in those homogenous groups OR get kicked and start their own group, which also has the potential to get larger and more homogenous without limit -> groups have larger differences and clash harder

More friends is a symptom rather than a cause.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-27 22:24:46+00:00
> usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you

That stirkes me as myopic. My closest friends--the ones I trust with all my secrets, with whom have have practically no secrets, the ones I'd hide if it came to that or risk my life to save--are all over the place values and ideas-wise. It's what makes their company fun. It's also what makes their advice useful, because they'll call me out on my bullshit in a way a mirror image of me could not.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-27 22:24:48+00:00
I have a sinking feeling it's a situation where people who are adept at creating and maintaining relationships are getting more of them, whilst people who struggle socially are being excluded more than ever as a result. The overall count grows, but a substantial slice of the population still has barely any.

I have no data for this, just a gut feeling. I still see so many people on the day-to-day who are completely socially inept. I don't even mean just like, rude or abrasive, I mean people who don't have the emotional intelligence to like, navigate basic conflicts.
by jzelinskie | 2025-10-27 22:24:50+00:00
I'm curious if someone could chime in on the state of adoption of these these Rx libraries in other language's ecosystems.

My poor memory seems to recall them gaining traction ~10 years ago, but they've fallen hard off my radar.

My fear with adopting a library like this for Go is actually that it might end up being very unfriendly to the profiler once bottlenecks start occurring.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-27 22:24:50+00:00
Usually this is very hard because the tasks and the job often subtly shifts in somewhat unpredictable and unforeseen ways and there is no neat clean abstraction that you can just implement as an application. Too hererogeneous, too messy, too many exceptions. If you develop some clean elegant solution, next week there will be something that your shiny app doesn't allow and they'd have to submit a feature request or whatever.

In Excel, it's possible to just ad hoc adjust things and make it up as you go. It's not clean but very adaptable and flexible.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-27 22:24:54+00:00
XHTML in practice was too strict and tended to break a few other things (by design) for better or worse, so nobody used it...

That said, actually writing HTML that can be parsed via an XML parser is generally a good, neighborly thing to do, as it allows for easier scraping and parsing through browsers and non-browser applications alike. For that matter, I will also add additional data-* attributes to elements just to make testing (and scraping) easier.
by _alternator_ | 2025-10-27 22:26:02+00:00
Following up on this, I eyeballed the images in this one: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ae0afe

The brightest stars in all of the images have a clear 4-pointed pattern. The brightest transients _do not_ show this pattern.

This is obviously not definitive, and the fainter stars are harder to eyeball the PSF, but it does provide some evidence to support the hypothesis that the brighter transients could be due to gamma ray exposure of the film rather than flashes in the atmosphere or space.
by aryonoco | 2025-10-27 22:26:27+00:00
Really interesting, and look forward to playing with it

However I find it bizarre that in the comparison table, Qt’s licensing is described as “Commercial”. Yes Qt is available under a commercial license but it’s also available under LGPL 3.

Yes that means you can even build proprietary applications linking against the LGPL license.

That makes that table misleading and borderline FUD.
by bigwheels | 2025-10-27 22:27:12+00:00
Maybe, there are a few different things named "Codex" from OpenAI (yes, needlessly confusing) - "Codex" is a git-centric product, the other is the GPT-5-Codex agentic coder model. I recommend installing the Codex CLI if you're able to and selecting the model via `/model`.

npm install -g @openai/codex

https://github.com/openai/codex
by webdevver | 2025-10-27 22:28:01+00:00
i didnt read the article (save for the tldr at the end), but imo the youth are, by definition, always ok.

nobody is going to become illiterate or such nonsense, the backstop will always be mammals trying to get one-up on each-other, and you don't do that by being dumb and broke.

as for unethicality or exploiting, really the old saying applies: For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law. but its always been that way. those who forgot, were living in fantasy land.
by techblueberry | 2025-10-27 22:28:06+00:00
I think everyone wants pluralism unless they're in charge, in which case they want a world where only the people who agree with them have power.

I also note that - in theory, the purpose of wikipedia is to serve it's users. If I want to know, the example outlined in the blog post, where was George W. Bush born, I can find the answer in Wikipedia. Certainly there are places where it optimizes for it's editors but for the most part, the vastness of a website with 7 million articles implies it is for the consumers.

Uberpedia seems much more intended for the editors. I don't want to consume information, I just want to feel warm and fuzzy knowing that there are people who agree with me.

But Grokipedia doesn't sound like Curtis is describing at all, he explicitly calls out that forks (like conservipedia) don't solve these "issues".
by ckastner | 2025-10-27 22:28:20+00:00
This was worked around ages ago in OpenBSD, and the workaround was already included in Debian (and by extension, Ubuntu) when I started maintaining it in 2010 (I no longer do).

Here's a link to a patch [1] from a version from when the package still kept standalone patches.

It's been a long long time and I honestly don't remember the details, but Debian's cron(8) still says [2]: Special considerations exist when the clock is changed by less than 3 hours, for example at the beginning and end of daylight savings time. If the time has moved forwards, those jobs which would have run in the time that was skipped will be run soon after the change. Conversely, if the time has moved backwards by less than 3 hours, those jobs that fall into the repeated time will not be re-run.

Edit: According to this bug report [3], this workaround first entered Debian in 1999.

[1]: https://sources.debian.org/src/cron/3.0pl1-137/debian/patche...

[2]: https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/cron/cron.8.en.html

[3]: https://bugs.debian.org/8499
by epistasis | 2025-10-27 22:29:14+00:00
I don't recall the government making hugely significant financial decisions about science funding on those grounds, any more than people "falling over themselves" to shave two characters off the default branch name. Nor do I remember DEI being quite as harmful to the humans as master/slave relations in the US. But, it is completely in line with these sorts of politicians and their supporters to criticize people for something, and then act 10x as bad.
by dr-j | 2025-10-27 22:29:48+00:00
Hey kstrauser, thanks for the first comment!

Can you let me know what would reduce the warning bells regarding the itsatrap.gif? Like, what gave you that impression? Really need to get this right.

For general users it's free for 14 days with 10K free tokens; then its 1.99 per month at the moment.

However, if you or HN readers that DM me or email me with the email they register with, I'll give a free perpetual license so there's no monthly fee; and add 1 million tokens.

Thanks again for the feedback, I'm glad you liked the privacy policy! :))
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-27 22:29:54+00:00
The executive order is direction to executive branch officials, including the ones who are responsible for applying the cancellation and clawback terms in the agreement at issue, as to how they are to perform their duties.

It is certainly relevsant to evaluating whether or not it is worthwhile to apply for the grant. That sufficient litigation might reverse an application of the policy in the EO that the agreement text clearly highlights the intent to enforce as inconsistent with the underlying law isn’t worth much unless the cost of expected litigation would be dwarfed by the size of the contract award, and for a $1.5 million grant application, that’s...not very much litigation.
by p1necone | 2025-10-27 22:30:05+00:00
I almost never write single function unit tests. There's usually some subset of the codebase that's self contained that makes sense to be the "unit" you're testing, but it's almost always a handful of functions with a clear entry point.

My general rule is to never mock or remove anything that has no side effects from the execution path of a test, even if it's some utility function that's already tested in isolation in its own test suite - trying to isolate every little bit of behaviour to be tested separately is just a bunch of extra work for questionable benefit.

I still call these tests "unit tests", and I think a lot of people do also. But there are the dogmatic people to whom only a test covering a single function with all dependencies mocked out is a true unit test.
by zuminator | 2025-10-27 22:30:19+00:00
Entirely ignores? There actually are DEI type initiatives specifically designed to benefit Appalachians, such as https://www.arc.gov/grants-and-opportunities/ or more locally, https://www.ovrdc.org/the-appalachian-community-grant-progra.... Of course, Appalachia isn't just poor white people, there are historically black and native populations within its vast expanse.

Also, certainly someone can have principled opposition to DEI without being called a Nazi. But frankly, having a wife or kids "of color" doesn't necessarily prove anything one way or another. Lots of plantation owners in the 19th century also had biracial kids while somehow maintaining their raging bigotry. We humans are quite skilled at compartmentalizing.
by yieldcrv | 2025-10-27 22:30:43+00:00
Oh god flashback, I remember the zoom calls, and people acting like they didn’t know how zoom worked 10 months into it or that the host can mute anyone that doesn’t know how to mute themselves

I opted out of the extended family ones and the social ones

I wonder if they’re still doing that, I’d rather watch paint dry, which I did for a few months in San Francisco
by asacrowflies | 2025-10-27 22:30:50+00:00
You literally used "communist" and other vague "terrorist" language to justify your bullshit as reasonable or sane. And I want that same energy turned back on MAGA . They are literally subverting our nation and more dangerous than any communist . Citizen vs non citizen is irrelevant to the constitution as you have been told repeatedly. If this is how the law is going to play out. Then I want it applied to ALL extremist and terrorists. Period.
by EbEsacAig | 2025-10-27 22:30:55+00:00
> If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.

This is it. The conditions / circumstances of the clawback are irrelevant. If there's any possibility of a clawback, then the grant is a rope to hang your organization with.

I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
by aap_ | 2025-10-27 22:31:13+00:00
Unfortunately I can't help with the classical picture, but in quantum physics it all comes out very nicely: You can interpret the Lagrangian as giving all possibilities to build a trajectory through spacetime. In the path integral formulation we then follow one such trajectory from one configuration to another configuration and find its amplitude. And then we integrate over all possible trajectories that we could have picked. For incoherent trajectories there will always be another one that cancels out the amplitude. Where the amplitudes add up constructively you will find stationary action and the classical behavior in the limit. So this is a depth-first approach: first follow one trajectory completely, then add up all possible trajectories.

The Hamiltonian approach in contrast is breadth-first: you single out a time axis, start with some initial state, and consider all possibilities that a particle (or field in QFT) could evolve forwards in time just a tiny bit (this is what the Hamiltonian operator does). Then you add up all these possibilities to find the next state, and so you move forwards through time by keeping track of all possible evolutions all at once. This massive superposition of everything that is possible (with corresponding amplitudes) is what you call a state (or wavefunction) and the space that it lives in is the Hilbert (or Fock) space.

So Lagrangian/path-integral: follow full trajectories, then add up all possible choices. depth-first

Hamiltonian/time-evolution: add up all choices for a tiny step in time, then simply do more steps: breadth-first

I imagine it a bit like a scanline algorithm calculating an image as it moves down the screen (Hamiltonian) vs something like a stochastic raytracer that can start with an empty image and refine it pixel by pixel by shooting more rays (Lagrangian)

This is my layman explanation anyways...hopefully it helps, even though i can't say much about their relationship in classical physics.
by sally_glance | 2025-10-27 22:31:25+00:00
Having AI create the spreadsheet you want is totally possible, just like generating bash scripts works well. But to get good results, there needs to be some documentation describing all the hidden relationships and nasty workarounds first.

Don't try to make LLMs generate results or numbers, that's bound to fail in any case. But they're okay to generate a starting point for automations (like Excel sheets with lots of formulas and macros), given they get access to the same context we have in our heads.
by sho_hn | 2025-10-27 22:31:51+00:00
Typically in grant work you submit a complete proposal with milestones and roles defined, and receive payout over time to cover the costs in the plan, or some part of them. It's earmarked money.

In more established non-profit areas there's usually also quite some compliance overhead and audits to be passed, so this can be someone's fulltime job on the org side. FOSS backing orgs are typically smaller and less experienced, so donors have so far found ways to make things easier for them and give more leeway.
by wingworks | 2025-10-27 22:31:55+00:00
I took the train from Copenhagen to Stockholm a few years back. I remember getting on the train and then all of a sudden we were boarding a boat, and got kicked out of the train while they transited the across the ocean.

I really liked it, was a cool experience, and an easy way to get on a boat. IDK if it's still like this. I hope it is.

I had checked google maps before the trip and saw a bridge so figured the train would go over that, but looks like it's car only bridge. Was a pleasant surprise.
by foldr | 2025-10-27 22:32:07+00:00
The vast majority of people working very long hours aren't pushing any frontiers. They are just trying to become partners in a law firm or get promoted at McKinsey. (Or, if we look outside our middle class bubble for a moment, they are working in kitchens and cleaning apartments for below minimum wage.)

I'm not convinced that a significant number of people actually do object to other people working long hours. It's only a problem if unreasonable expectations become the norm – in which case you don't have to attribute malicious motives to people ('tall poppy syndrome') to explain their objections. They object simply because they don't want to spend all their time working, which is easy enough to comprehend.
by kulahan | 2025-10-27 22:32:14+00:00
They probably aren't the friends people are thinking of when referring to things like this. The benefit of friends isn't just that you have someone fun to talk to, it's that you're building out a social support circle. Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss, or help you get an interview at a job shortly after you're fired (or at least, not one local to you).

Loneliness is a big topic now, imo, because people are losing helpful human friends and relying on middling digital friends. Just like how looking at pictures of a forest is nowhere near as healthy as actually going to a forest.
by 7373737373 | 2025-10-27 22:33:30+00:00
Even if an event has probability 1 it is not inevitable, conversely probability 0 does not imply its impossibility.

For example, randomly picking the number 0.5 out of the interval of real numbers [0,1] has probability 0, and yet it might happen. The probability of picking an irrational number instead was 1 (because almost all real numbers are irrational), but that didn't happen.

Even if you consider a countably infinite number of events, as with the coinflip example, it might just happen that the coin flips to one side forever.

Since the machines under consideration just represent one specific sequence of events, probabilistic arguments may be misleading.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/221/
by spicyusername | 2025-10-27 22:34:13+00:00
I feel every human just regurgitates words too

I know it FEELS like that's true sometimes, particularly in the corporate world, but it actually just isn't how human beings work at all.

Even when people are borrowing, copying, and stealing, which is the exception, mind you, they are also carefully threading the material they are re-using into whatever it is they are trying to do, say, or make in a way that is extremely non-trivial.
by photochemsyn | 2025-10-27 22:34:19+00:00
Well, 'calculus' is the kind of marketing word that sounds more impressive than 'arithmetic' and I think 'quantum logic' has gone a bit stale, and 'AI-based' might give more hope to the anxious investor class, as 'AI-assisted' is a bit weak as it means the core developer team isn't going to be cut from the labor costs on the balance sheet, they're just going to be 'assisted' (things like AI-written unit tests that still need some checking).

"The Arithmetic of AI-Assisted Coding Looks Marginal" would be the more honest article title.
by eirikbakke | 2025-10-27 22:34:23+00:00
Perhaps a better source (but IANAL):

"Judges frequently invoke anti-redundancy principles in the interpretation of legal language, whether it appears in classic private-law documents such as contracts or classic public law-documents such as constitutions and statutes."

Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, John M. Golden (2016)
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-27 22:34:43+00:00
> Anyone understand how this could work? My mental model for llm is predictive text but here how can it understand cell A1 which has a string is the “header” for all values under it? How does it learn to understand table data like that?

I imagine it uses the new Agent Skills features

https://www.anthropic.com/news/skills
by groby_b | 2025-10-27 22:34:49+00:00
Except here it's made abundantly clear, up front, who has responsibility. There's no pretense that it's fully self driving. And the engineer has the power to modify every bit of that decision.

Part of being a mature engineer is knowing when to use which tools, and accepting responsibility for your decisions.

It's not that different from collaborating with a junior engineer. This one can just churn out a lot more code, and has occasional flashes of brilliance, and occasional flashes of inanity.
by grdomzal | 2025-10-27 22:34:52+00:00
> The sharp rise in both polarization and the number of close friends occurred between 2008 and 2010—precisely when social media platforms and smartphones first achieved widespread adoption. This technological shift may have fundamentally changed how people connect with each other, indirectly promoting polarization.

Indirectly? Seems to me that this is far more likely the "direct" cause, given what we know about the psychology around algorithmic feeds.

Also - I'm not sure if I missed it in the article, but did they define what they mean by "close relationship" means? I'd be very curious to know if a purely online relationship is counted and how this may also contribute to the observations made.