MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kgwgk | 2025-10-30 22:53:46+00:00
The thermodynamic arrow appears also because we have memory and prediction abilities.

Concepts in statistical mechanics by Arthur Hobson

Publication date 1971

https://archive.org/details/conceptsinstatis0000arth/page/15...

Concerning the concept of time, it is clear that the generalized second law is related in some manner to the question of the "direction" of time. It is sometimes asserted that the second law explains the distinction between past and future, or that the future may be defined as the direction of increasing entropy. This assertion says that the second law is more fundamental than the distinction between past and future.

It seems to the author that the above assertion is wrong. It was seen in Section 5.2 that the generalized second law is derived from the distinction between past and future; hence the distinction between past and future is more fundamental than the second law.

The following statement seems to be the most fundamental physical assertion which can be made regarding past and future: we can classify all instants t into two categories; the first category contains those instants about which experimental data is (or could be) known, and the second category contains those instants about which no experimental data is known. The first category is conventionally called the "past" and the second is called the "future". The instants may be labeled with real numbers running from -∞ to +∞, in such a way that the "past" instants constitute a set of the form (-∞ < t < t0), and the "future" instants constitute the set (t0 < t < +∞). The choice of the positive direction as the future is purely a convention.

According to Sections 5.2 and 5.4, irreversibility and the generalized second law are derivable from the existence of the above two categories of in-stants: an "information-gathering category" (the past), and a "predictive category" (the future). The existence of these two categories seems to be a fundamental feature of nature, not explainable in terms of the second law or in terms of any other physical law.
by ch_fr | 2025-10-30 22:54:01+00:00
I was very surprised by this move, because the whole lingo while they were teasing it was giving me much worse vibes than what this ended up being about.

I paid for V1, paid again after they released V2 even though I was on Linux which they didn't support. I did it mostly out of support, and also because the community was making strides to get a decent wine setup working, so I would eventually get back to using it if I ever felt like it.

More diversity in creative software is always nice to have, and it's good to keep challenging the idea that "Adobe is dominant because it's the best solution". Tho I don't feel like Canva is quite the player I'd be rooting for either.

Fortunately, they seem to be handling the existing lifetime licenses a lot better than Autograph did when it got acquired by Maxon.

Overall I think I'm rooting for them. Good luck Affinity!
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-30 22:54:14+00:00
This is a cool tool but compared to modern redstone contraptions this is a sidegrade, not an upgrade. It's straightforward torch and dust logic, with each torch being a nor gate and dust being wires. And it doesn't consider timing at all. This could have been made the week redstone was added (with minor adjustments to not have repeaters), and it wouldn't have taken any newer insights.
by saltcured | 2025-10-30 22:54:44+00:00
I am also aphantasic and have no internal monologue. I never had them as far as I know. When I heard that kids could have "imaginary friends" I thought it sounded totally absurd. I equated it with my schizophrenic relative who hallucinates and suffers delusions.

Unlike you, I have a little bit of aural memory and recall. It is faint and abstract compared to real hearing, but not nearly as abstract as for imagery, which is basically not there except for some spatial or topological feeling.

I'm also pretty good at recognizing voices, faces, gaits, and such. I also often have a feeling best expressed as, "doesn't this person resemble that person except for X", like I can feel a subset of recognition features are present or there is something contradictory about it. I don't think recognition entails "envisioning and comparing". It is a much more direct triggering on the recognizable features.

I remember the horror I experienced as a little kid, when I mis-recognized my mom in a store. I was so small I was looking at legs and hands and the torso disappears up into perspective. I went right up to her and grabbed her and then looked up. The feeling of "knowing" my mom was there evaporating and being replaced with the understanding that I just grabbed a stranger was a very disturbing perspective shift.
by zahlman | 2025-10-30 22:55:03+00:00
> PyPI has its oopses too, Cargo is theoretically just as bad but in practice has been safe.

One obvious further mitigation for Python is to configure your package installer to require pre-built wheels, and inspect the resulting environment prior to use. Of course, wheels can contain all sorts of compiled binary blobs and even the Python code can be obfuscated (or even missing, with just a compiled .pyc file in its place); but at least this way you are protected from arbitrary code running at install time.
by lordnacho | 2025-10-30 22:55:55+00:00
Can I ask you a personal question? How do you imagine sex? I thought that everyone kinda thought about themselves doing it with someone else, a bit like a porn movie that you make in your own mind.

I can't imagine it being at all interesting to just think about it the way you are talking about it, like it would just be a sort of description of what the other person looks like, without the multifaceted sensations. Touch, smell, visuals.

And if you can't imagine it, how do you go about ever doing anything about getting it? It's like saying you want a juicy burger without imagining yourself eating it. Like a paper description of an experience, rather than a simulation of it. It doesn't seem motivating enough that you'd bother washing yourself, getting nice clothes, and going to chat with women.
by analog31 | 2025-10-30 22:56:29+00:00
There are many more than three "dimensions" if I may use the term loosely, in software or hardware engineering.

Cost, safety, interaction between subsystems (developed by different engineering disciplines), tolerances, supply chain, manufacturing, reliability, the laws of physics, possibly chemistry and environmental interactions, regulatory, investor forgiveness, etc.

Traditional engineering also doesn't have the option of throwing arbitrary levels of complexity at a problem, which means working within tight constraints.

I'm not an engineer myself, but a scientist working for a company that makes measurement equipment. It wouldn't be fair for me to say that any engineering discipline is more challenging, since I'm in none of them. I've observed engineering projects for roughly 3 decades.
by roywiggins | 2025-10-30 22:56:59+00:00
All of my photos are stored in a big Lightroom database. If I wasn't using an old camera supported by Lightroom 5 (that I bought outright in 2011), and was using modern Lightroom instead, I would have to pay an ongoing cost just to maintain access to my photo database, in perpetuity.

This sucks no matter how much the subscription actually is right now. Losing access to all your old work in its original format if you don't pay a subscription to a company that might decide to do anything, up to and including shutting down the servers and killing the app? No thank you.

Yeah, Lightroom 5 hasn't had any updates, doesn't support any new cameras, etc. But it still works, I can still look at all the photos I took with my old camera, and all my edits, and this will work, for free, until Lightroom 5 bitrots away into not working on Windows 14 or whatever.

It sucks that I can't just buy a new version of Lightroom when I get a new camera, instead I'd have to jump ship or sell my soul to Adobe.
by sascha_heyer | 2025-10-30 22:57:30+00:00
I've been following the OpenAI Agents repo and came across this pull request.

A contributor submitted a massive, 1,200+ line PR to add support for the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol. This wasn't a lazy contribution.

It included 30 tests, full documentation, and core infrastructure for agent interoperability.

What's notable is that the A2A protocol was initiated and specified by Google.

The response from the OpenAI maintainer showed zero appreciation for the significant effort. It was a cold, procedural shutdown:

"Hi @Kunmeer-SyedMohamedHyder, thanks for sending this pull request. However, we don't have immediate plans to add A2A support to this SDK. We can't say if or when we'll review it. For future major contributions, it would be appreciated if you could start with an issue for discussion first."

The PR was then marked as draft and auto-closed by a bot for inactivity.

This is a perfect example of the "open source" facade from large AI labs. An engineer does a huge amount of high-quality, free work to add a valuable, open interoperability standard. Instead of appreciation or discussion, they're met with a "we don't have plans" and a passive-aggressive "ask first next time."

It's hard not to see this as a "Not Invented By A Competitor" rejection. Why else would you show zero interest in a feature that so clearly benefits the entire agent ecosystem? It sends a strong message to any potential contributor: don't bother building anything that doesn't align with OpenAI's closed roadmap, especially if it has Google's name on it.

What's the point of hosting on GitHub if you treat high-effort community contributions like this?
by reducesuffering | 2025-10-30 22:57:42+00:00
That’s interesting because I’m in the East Bay Area too and have the opposite experience. Chipotle burrito is $10.50, 80% of taquerias are $15 burritos.

In N out double double meal is $11, but McDonalds app has free fries so a Double Quarter (with 2x meat), fries, and drink is $9…
by h2zizzle | 2025-10-30 22:58:03+00:00
I see the logic here, but I have reservations. My perspective: today, maybe, with so many consumers already angry at or distrustful of Google. In the early 2010s, when "Google" was a verb and "Don't be evil" was still part of the mission? That would be like DirecTV trying to placate Disney Channel lovers by pushing them towards Fox Family.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-30 22:58:06+00:00
> It is that the US has the death penalty for this, and they want to kill people who commit war crimes.

> At least that was the reason I was given in the US military.

That's obviously nonsense. For many reasons:

(1) ICC jursidiction does not supercede national jurisdiction that is actually exercised—that's explicitly a basis for ICC jurisdiction not to be applied (it can be applied in the case of sham proceedings designed to provide cover). So it wouldn't stop the US from trying, and applying the death penalty to, any war criminals.

(2) The actual reasons for the the US opposition, including Congress passing a law threatening the ICC, are matters of public record, and are much more about the US wanting impunity for accused (American) war criminals than any fear of inadequate punishment.

(3) The US response to its own war criminals that it has had the opportunity to punish since the establishment of, and its refusal to join, the ICC has shown a singular lack of capital punishment. And even the occasional Presidential pardon after conviction.

Even for US military propaganda directed at is own personnel, that's pretty lazy, low-effort stuff.
by virgil_disgr4ce | 2025-10-30 22:58:43+00:00
This is an interesting position because that's only simple if you already know it. From the perspective of discoverability, it's literally the worst possible UI, because a string of that length has, say, 30^30 possible combinations, among which only one will produce the desired effect, and a bash prompt gives you no indication of how to arrive at that string.
by markhahn | 2025-10-30 22:58:51+00:00
I find it implausible that people really have extreme, detailed imagery. Not that they can't do it on demand, if desired. But if every time they imagined something, it instantly appeared with all possible detail - that's just tremendously inefficient.

I think of it as more like Level of Detail in a 3d visualization. So when you ask people how much detail they imagine, their response strategy might determine most of the variance. (Some think you mean "what is the ultimate limit of your viz", and others think you mean "what detail is in a no-purpose-given, speeded-response viz".
by uberdru | 2025-10-30 22:58:55+00:00
I just switched to Codex after using Claude Code (heavily). The main advantage is that usage/pricing is MUCH more transparent. It's slower but generally more thoughtful. Claude Code has that bad habit of slapping together duplicates, fallbacks, mock data. Thus far, Codex is doing a bit better, but I still use (and pay for) both.
by freehorse | 2025-10-30 22:59:47+00:00
> NaN === NaN and some NaN !== NaN

In julia NaN === NaN evaluates to true but NaN === -NaN evaluates to false. Of course, NaN == NaN evaluates to false. I think it makes sense that in principle === looks at bit representations, but cannot think of any reason === is useful here, unless you want to encode meaningful stuff inside your NaNs for some reason. It reminded me of this satirical repo [0] discussed also here [1].

[0] https://github.com/si14/stuffed-naan-js [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43803724
by _greim_ | 2025-10-30 23:00:11+00:00
Since the goal is to create an illusion of real physics, I wonder when they'll just cut to the chase and start using actual physics engines.

Reason I mention it is neither this nor bezier curves deal with the target changing mid-animation very well. CSS just starts over from the current position, which breaks the illusion. A physics engine would maintain the illusion, and could be simpler to specify:

transition: physics(system=gravity, force=10, bounce=on, dampening=3) transition: physics(system=spring, force=5, bounce=off, dampening=5)
by Agingcoder | 2025-10-30 23:00:19+00:00
I disagree, but it doesn’t mean you’re wrong - we might just be looking for different things.

My view is that if you’re going to talk like a bored robot, then I need a transcript or a paper which is much shorter than a talk. I distinctly remember not going to classes at university because the teachers wouldn’t give me anything beyond reading a book aloud. I just read the book at home.

Now, if you’re able to indicate what’s important and not important, what’s interesting and what isn’t , and why you like it , I’ll be delighted to watch your talk.

I think it’s very difficult to be interested in something new if the presenter doesn’t seem to care about it. This is different from something written , where I expect something dry anyway.
by shoo | 2025-10-30 23:00:39+00:00
From Jennifer Senior's excellent 2006 article about burnout titled "Can’t Get No Satisfaction" [1]:

Farber had burned out once before. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, he taught public school in East Harlem. He’d wanted to help people, do the world some good. Yet for four years he’d struggled to stop his students from fighting with one another, and in spite of his best efforts he couldn’t even teach all of them to read. His classroom became a perverse experiment in physics, with energy never conserved (input always exceeded output), and he, a teacher in perpetual motion, always craving rest. Eventually, he began to pull away from his students—depersonalization, as the literature now calls it—justifying his seeming insensitivity by telling himself he wasn’t making a difference anyway. It was only when Farber went to graduate school at Yale that he learned that this syndrome had a name: Burnout. “The concept offered a perfect understanding of what teachers were feeling,” he recalls. “It wasn’t in fact that they were racist and mercenary and noncaring but that their level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results.”

[...]

To me, the most beguiling data to emerge from burnout research are the profiles of the people who experience it most acutely. In her early work, for instance, Maslach found that younger people burn out more often than older people, a finding that turns up again and again both here and abroad. (In fact, that study from the University of Michigan explicitly said that younger surgeons burn out more quickly than older ones.) This conclusion may seem counterintuitive, because we associate burning out somehow with midlife disillusionment. But not if we think of burnout as the gap between expectations and rewards. Older workers, as it turns out, have more perspective and more experience; it’s the young idealists who go flying into a profession, plumped full of high hopes, and run full-speed into a wall. Maslach also found that married people burn out less often than single people, as long as their marriages are good, because they don’t depend as much on their jobs for fulfillment. And childless people, though unburdened by the daily strains of parenting, tend to burn out far more than people with kids. (This, too, has been found across cultures; in the Netherlands, a recent survey by the Bureau of Statistics showed that twice as many working women without children showed symptoms of burnout as did working women with underage children.) It’s much easier to disproportionately invest emotional and physical capital in the office if you have nowhere else to put it. And the office seldom loves you back.

[1] https://nymag.com/news/features/24757/
by Mogzol | 2025-10-30 23:02:09+00:00
A package, especially a javascript package, is not necessarily installed to run code, at least not on the machine installing the package. Many packages will only be run in the browser, which is already a fairly safe environment compared to running directly on the machine like lifecycle scripts would.

So preventing lifecycle scripts certainly limits the number of packages that could be exploited to get access to the installing machine. It's common for javascript apps to have hundreds of dependencies, but only a handful of them will ever actually run as code on the machine that installed them.
by cyberneticc | 2025-10-30 23:02:33+00:00
Thanks a lot for your comment, these are indeed very strong counterarguments.

My strongest hope is that the human brain and mind are such powerful computing and reasoning substrates that a tight coupling of biological and synthetic "minds" will outcompete pure synthetic minds for quite a while. Giving us time to build a form of mutual dependency in which humans can keep offering a benefit in the long run. Be it just aesthetics and novelty after a while, like the human crews on the Culture spaceships in Ian M. Banks' novels.
by smcin | 2025-10-30 23:02:43+00:00
Intentionally opting into an AI platform where we would already foresee a subset of users would start generating sexual content of other users without their knowledge, then professing to be surprised about it, seems contrived. OpenAI had just allowed porn and violence, and we already know a subset of their users will obsessively push the guardrails (plus there's a financial incentive to).

The only parts of the article that seem to be news are a) OpenAI's blanket consent is very broad and doesn't warn users what might be done with cameos, or segment consent into various different types of content use (as even 25yo modeling sites do) b) that subset of users will bypass the guardrails and c) OpenAI doesn't close the feedback loop by notifying the users in a) what the users in set b) are doing, let alone allow revising or revoking consent.

But why is the conversation only about b) (the predictable bad behavior by users) rather than a) and c) (feasible solutions)?

Notopoulos correctly remarks: "part of an overall pattern of how OpenAI has approached the concept of copyright and intellectual property: asking forgiveness, not permission."

By the way previous (non-sexual-content) incarnations of this sort of issue are 2019 when Clearview scraped 3 billion images non-consensually from people's social-media and state DMVs [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35421117].

Or the previous 2024 OpenAI/Scarlett Johansson-sounding voice shenanigans. Or the existing proliferation of AI porn elsewhere.
by lordnacho | 2025-10-30 23:03:05+00:00
Well, I have another question further down to another guy about how he imagines sex, I guess you can answer that as well.

But also, how do you solve math problems? Often the you need to draw a graph and look at some crossing points. For me, I can conjure up a video in my mind similar to 3B1B, and I use that to think about the problem. It can even get complicated enough that it would take me a while to draw on paper. How do you solve such problems?
by jcul | 2025-10-30 23:03:30+00:00
> The only victim of the accident was Wim Delaere, a computer science student reported to have been either 18 or 19 years old.[4][5][1] He was sleeping alone after celebrating the end of his university exams the previous day when the MiG crashed and killed him at 10:30 am. His mother and brother were shopping for groceries in Kortrijk, and his father was working in Ypres.[4]

From the linked Wikipedia article on one of the answers.

What an unlucky kid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Belgium_MiG-23_crash
by megous | 2025-10-30 23:04:12+00:00
My Pinebook Pro with i3wm is really simple to use. You power it on, all it does is it asks for one of the LUKS passwords. If you miss, it will ask again. Then it's on.

You can't do anything wrong with it. There's no UI to fiddle with WiFi. It's all pre-configured to work automatically in the local WLAN (only; outside, all that's needed is to borrow someone's phone to look for the list of wifi nets in the area and type the name of selected network to /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf). But there's rarely any need to go out anyway, so this is almost never an issue.

There are no buttons to click, ANYWHERE. Windows don't have confusing colorful buttons in the header. You open the web browser by pressing Alt + [. It shows up immediately after about 5 seconds of loading time. So the user action <-> feedback loop is rather quick. You close it with Alt + Backspace (like deleting the last character when writing text, simple, everyone's first instinct when you want to revert last action)

The other shortcut that closes the UI picture is Alt + ]. That one opens the terminal window. You can type to the computer there, to tell it what you want. Which is usually poweroff, reboot, reboot -f (as in reboot faster). It's very simple and relatable. You don't click on your grandma to turn it off, after all. You tell it to turn off. Same here.

All in all, Alt + [ opens your day. Alt + ] gives you a way to end it. Closing the lid sometimes even suspends the notebook, so it discharges slightly slowerly in between.

It's glorious. My gf uses it this way and has no issues with it (anymore). I just don't understand why she doesn't want to migrate to Linux on her own notebook. Sad.