MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shoo | 2025-10-21 22:59:45+00:00
The Limits to Growth book is an interesting read. To quote Box, "All models are wrong, but some are useful". I wouldn't take the dates-ranges estimated from the modelling that seriously, but the modelling assumptions are worth reading about and reflecting on. The overall modelling and dynamics seem pretty plausible to me.

From memory, the rough argument was that society depends upon input flows of energy, resources (metals etc) and food. Society needs to allocate resources and energy to extract these inputs. Energy sources such as fossil fuel reserves are finite stocks, some are cheap to extract (high energy return on energy invested). Over time we consume and deplete the high EROEI reserves and have to move on to consuming the lower EROEI reserves. This means that the fraction of energy society needs to allocate for energy extraction increases over time, so there's less energy for other uses. Similarly, we deplete the cheap to extract stocks of metal required to build and maintain industry, leaving stocks that require higher inputs of metal and energy to extract. Similarly for agricultural yields, as we mine and deplete accumulated stocks of nutrients out of the soil.

The business as usual scenario leading to "overshoot and collapse" behaviour is that we have increasing population, increasing industrial capital and increasing demands for energy, food and resource inputs, while the fraction of energy and resources that need to be allocated to energy, resource and food production grows over time. The fraction of remaining surplus energy and resources that can be allocated to things like education, healthcare, research, art decreases over time. At some point the growing fraction of energy and resources that needs to be allocated to energy and resource extraction becomes so large vs the existing population and industrial base that there simply isn't enough surplus to maintain healthcare, education, research, etc at the same level.

The "Overshoot and collapse" dynamic describes stocks of population, industry etc growing to peaks well beyond sustainable levels before the above dynamics catch up and cause them to rapidly decline.

The researchers did a bunch of modelling of alternative scenarios, exploring how to avoid these "Overshoot and collapse" dynamics.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-21 22:59:59+00:00
There's a world of difference between buying produce and buying a more durable good. Produce has a short shelf life, and it is not uniform. When I'm selecting produce, I'm not only looking for it to be fresh (or sometimes even at a very specific ripeness point), but I'm also often looking for a specific size, or more rarely, but sometimes, for some other specific physical characteristic. I wouldn't trust a stranger to be able to tell which piece I want. Obviously, how true this is depends on the specific crop. Lettuce, for instance, is fairly interchangeable, and grains such as wheat are entirely interchangeable.

If I buy something sight unseen from Amazon, I can return it if it wasn't exactly what I wanted. With produce, even if I could actually return it, there's no way it's getting resold, so it's instant food waste. So I feel that it's inherently unreturnable. Also, it would mean that I'd likely have to make an unplanned trip to the store to buy a replacement, or do without, for the meal I was planning to use it in.

It all seems like a bunch of potential inconvenience and bother that can be easily avoided by just going to the market.

I don't want to sound negative about the idea despite all of this -- this is very specific to my own situation and location. Most of the world lives differently than I do (that's true of all of us.) I could see it working, at least in some markets. And there are food deserts that could be excellently served by something like this, especially if there's a delivery component.
by cormacrelf | 2025-10-21 23:00:13+00:00
You can absolutely do that and there is nothing for general linear algebra libraries to do.

The actual paper is very clear about what it's for: https://fiteoweb.unige.ch/~eckmannj/ps_files/ETPRL.pdf

It says:

Consider now a general time-dependent field B(t) of duration T. The pulse B(t) may be extremely convoluted ... Can one make the field B(t) return the system to its original state at the end of the pulse...?

This pulse is modelled as a long sequence of rotations. For maths purposes if you had such a sequence, you can obviously just multiply all the rotations together and find the inverse very easily. For physics purposes, you don't really have access to each individual rotation, all you can do is tune the pulse. Creating an "inverse pulse" is quite unwieldy, you might literally need to create new hardware. The paper asks "what if we just amplified the pulse? Can we change this alone and make it not impart any rotation?"

They are trying to take any pulse B(t) and zero out any rotation it imparts on some particle or whatever by

uniformly tuning the field’s magnitude, B(t) → λB(t) or by uniformly stretching or compressing time, B(t) → B(λt)

And the answer is that you can do that, but you might have to perform the pulse twice.
by cardanome | 2025-10-21 23:00:29+00:00
Oh, first time hearing that term. Thank you, I love it!

Though I don't think this is at play here. Maybe a bit but seeing how my coworkers prompt, there is objective difference. I will spend half an hour on writing a good prompt, revise the implementation plan with the LLM multiple times before I allow it to even start doing anything while my coworkers just write "fix this" and wonder why the stupid AI can't read their minds.

I am producing AI slop as well, just hopefully a bit less. Obviously hand crafted code is still much better but my boss wants me to use "AI" so I do as I am told.
by AfterHIA | 2025-10-21 23:00:52+00:00
I can't edit my previous comment so I'll continue:

This isn't and has never been true in a universal sense. Athens was democratic plutocracy with slaves. The United States didn't have popular democracy until well until the 20th century and it's worth noting that it was the Southern Democrats which wanted to restrict the basic political rights of blacks in the name of, "popular sentiment." The Fukuyamist position which takes a naive view of western democracy as totalizing in a historical sense is being rapidly called into question all over the world. People (almost) universally want the expansion of the their quality of living and political autonomy in a sense which includes but also transcends the ability to cast a paper ballot. We see with Trump that this naive notion has, "serious flaws." In the 1930's the Nazis came to power under a democratically elected conservative government. Democracy means pragmatism. Pragmatism means something about, "having a superior conversation about what we would like to be." The ability to cast a vote is an extension of this sentiment-- it isn't its foundation. We see that in the general experience of the Chinese middle class. They live under a totality but neighborhood associations and not actively being managed by the CCP results in many reporting feeling freer under this system than under ancillaries geopolitically.
by Balgair | 2025-10-21 23:01:04+00:00
I never did buy the dark forest argument. I mean, even in the books, there were smidgeons of humanity left over. And then all the dimension collapsing strangeness. You just can never be sure.

I dunno, it just reeks of the culture of suspicion in communist China. A product of that place and time.

My own idea is the 'used car salesman' idea of the universe. (Reeking of my own mind and place and time). To me, economics will rule in the galactic community. In that water, metals, energy, it's all cheap and everywhere. No need to have any competition over it. No, the only scarce thing is life and then even more it's intelligence. Any other civilization will be desperate to get rights over us and our history.

So, to me, the aliens will come to us loud and proud. Balloons and banners.

And of course, a contract as long as a the rings of Saturn, with print as small as the atoms.

We shouldn't be wary of the weapons, but the lawyers
by Bender | 2025-10-21 23:01:23+00:00
Another option would be to have more memory that required over-engineer and to adjust the oom score per app, adding early kill weight to non critical apps and negative weight to important apps. oom_score_adj is already set to -1000 by OpenSSH for example.

NSDJUST=$(pgrep -x nsd); echo -en '-378' > /proc/"${NSDJUST}"/oom_score_adj

Another useful thing to do is effecively disable over-commit on all staging and production servers (0 ratio instead of 2 memory to fully disable as these do different things, memory 0 still uses formula)

vm.overcommit_memory = 0 vm.overcommit_ratio = 0

Also use a formula to set min_free and reserved memory using a formula from Redhat that I do not have handy based on installed memory. min_free can vary from 512KB to 16GB depending on installed memory.

vm.admin_reserve_kbytes = 262144 vm.user_reserve_kbytes = 262144 vm.min_free_kbytes = 1024000

At least that worked for me in about 50,000 physical servers for over a decade that were not permitted to have swap and installed memory varied from 144GB to 4TB of RAM. OOM would only occur when the people configuring and pushing code would massively over-commit and not account for memory required by the kernel. Not following best practices defined by Java and thats a much longer story.

Another option is to limit memory per application in cgroups but that requires more explaining than I am putting in an HN comment.

Another useful thing is to never OOM kill in the first place on servers that are only doing things in memory and need not commit anything to disk. So don't do this on a disked database. This is for ephemeral nodes that should self heal. Wait 60 seconds so drac/ilo can capture crash message and then earth shattering kaboom...

# cattle vs kittens, mooooo... kernel.panic = 60 vm.panic_on_oom = 2

For a funny side note, those options can also be used as a holy hand grenade to intentionally unsafely reboot NFS diskless farms when failing over to entirely different NFS server clusters. setting panic to 15 mins, triggering OOM panic by setting min_free to 16TB at the command line via Ansible not in sysctl.conf, swapping clusters, arp storm and reconverge.
by al_borland | 2025-10-21 23:01:38+00:00
This has been very frustrating. Another issue I often have is iOS doubling a word when I only typed it once.

Anecdotally, this seemed to start around the time Apple released the auto-complete bar above the keyboard. Normal typing got notable worse with that update and has seemed to get worse over time after that. I found it easier to type on the 1.0 software than I do today.

I find myself using voice to enter text more these days, which is not my preferred method. It’s just what happens when I get so fed up with keyboard issues.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-10-21 23:01:42+00:00
If they wanted to watermark (I always felt it is irresponsible not to, if someone wants to circumvent it that's on them) - they could use strategically placed whitespace characters like zero-width spaces, maybe spelling something out in Morse code the way genius.com did to catch google crawling lyric (I believe in that case it was left and right handed aposterofes)
by jschorr | 2025-10-21 23:01:53+00:00
Reconciling externalized authz with search is actually quite a challenging problem. For standard externalized authz, the recommendation is some form of pre-filtering or post-filtering [1], for which we actually built LookupResources (pre-filtering) and CheckBulkPermission (post-filtering) into SpiceDB.

However, as you mentioned, life is easier when the main database can handle everything, so we actually built a solution in that space called Materialize [2], which heavily denormalizes the authorization data and allows for joining within application databases such as Postgres. My colleague Evan actually put together a really cool video about using it with Gitea [3].

Recognizing that even with Materialize, however, the need to consume events can be a bit annoying, I've been doing some work to allow Postgres itself to do native JOINs against SpiceDB (and other operations). I demo it briefly in our recent announcements video [4] and I think it effectively solves this problem within Postgres, while still allowing for all the benefits (scale, performance, redundancy, distribution) of externalized authz.

[1]: https://authzed.com/docs/spicedb/modeling/protecting-a-list-...

[2]: https://authzed.com/products/authzed-materialize

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/live/u3i1SEd9Ll8?si=mCz5mZterxthoEwj

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/live/uz_gxz3whS0?si=g4NUZAIltYVyFzYj...

Disclaimer: I'm cofounder and CTO at AuthZed and we build SpiceDB and Materialize
by somecontext | 2025-10-21 23:01:57+00:00
I was looking at the submitter's past comments, and the most recent one is interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45092516

> Wow, I was already impressed with the new comment feature on erdosproblems.com and how it's already been used to solve some of the problems. Excited to see if AI can make a meaningful contribution here.

Since then, there has been some discussion of GPTPro finding a bunch of references, thus enabling many of the problem statuses to be changed from "open" to "solved". But it seems that LLMs couldn't find the right reference for this problem.

But there was a different meaningful contribution from AI here instead.
by layoric | 2025-10-21 23:02:19+00:00
Exactly, and the performance of consumer tech is wildly faster. Eg, a Ryzen 5825U mini pc with 16GB memory is ~$250USD with 512GB nvme. That thing will outperform of 14 core Xeon from ~2016 on multicore workloads and absolutely thrash it in single thread. Yes lack of ECC is not good for any serious workload, but great for lower environments/testing/prototyping, and it sips power at ~50W full tilt.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-21 23:02:55+00:00
You thought politicians were bad? We gave TV personalities the nuclear codes! But hey, woke is dead!?

Actual photo of the historic East Wing of the White House today: https://i.redd.it/vchtk38rijwf1.jpeg

___

I once got scammed out of $350 for some speakers sold out of the back of a van, in traffic. I could not admit it for years. I kept pretending they were great, even in front of my audio engineer friends.

How do we bring our friends who got politically scammed, in from the cold? We all get scammed sometimes.
by dmvdoug | 2025-10-21 23:03:19+00:00
> * I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government*

Take away all of SpaceX‘s government contracts. You imagine SpaceX would still be in business?

As you said, every launch provider is basically dependent on government contracts to stay in business because the government is the only entity that has a legitimate need for launch capability such that it’s willing to pay for its development. There are no sufficiently profitable private contracts out there to sustain a launch provider.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-21 23:03:40+00:00
I definitely wouldn't call Slack "awesome". Self-hosted tools like Zulip are doing a better job. Slack is however, the smaller evil amongst MS Teams, Zoom, MS Outlook and similarly bad software. Like, if someone told me all communication, including text chat shall happen via MS Teams, I would seriously consider looking for another job. It is a recipe for absolute disaster and completely broken communication. If the same happened with Slack, I would dislike it, but I guess it is at least usable. Still garbage, but not as much garbage, as MS Teams.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-21 23:04:00+00:00
The command you want to use is "free -m".

This is from another system I have close:

total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 31881 1423 1042 10 29884 30457 Swap: 976 2 974

2MB of SWAP used, 1423 MB RAM used, 29GB cache, 1042 MB Free. Total RAM 32 GB.
by SkyPuncher | 2025-10-21 23:04:31+00:00
You’d be surprised.

I consider myself extremely competent at getting niche results. Couldn’t for the life of me find a certain after market part for a home appliance.

I go ask Claude to find it and it comes back with exactly what I need. One of its queries hit a website with a poorly labeled product that it was able to figure out was exactly what I needed. That product was nested so deeply in results that I would have never found it on my own.
by bahmboo | 2025-10-21 23:04:49+00:00
I see a lot of snark in the comments. Simon is a researcher and I really like seeing his experiments! Sounds like the goal here was to delegate a discrete task to an LLM and have it solve the problem much like one would task a junior dev to do the same.

And like a junior dev it ran into some problems and needed some nudges. Also like a junior dev it consumed energy resources while doing it.

In the end I like that the chunk size of work that we can delegate to LLMs is getting larger.
by afavour | 2025-10-21 23:04:56+00:00
It’s not entirely without reason. Just look at the electoral map proposed in NC: Trump won 51% of the vote, the GOP will be set to control over 80% of the NC House. And the Supreme Court gives permission to do whatever.

You’re right to call out Democrats too. It baffles me. Like Trump destroying the East wing of the White House. Universally not popular (not necessarily unpopular with all but no one is cheering it). Where are the press conferences being held outside to highlight it and show the people how little regard Trump has for the “People’s House”. It’s an easy lay up.
by decimalenough | 2025-10-21 23:05:10+00:00
China's stated goal is to get people on the moon by 2030. This may slip by a year or two, but probably not much more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...

The main hurdle is the CZ-10 rocket, which has not flown yet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_10

But they have plenty of rocketry experience and the YF-100K engine they'll use for CZ-10 has successfully flown on the CZ-12:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YF-100

(Yes, Chinese rocket numbering is weird, and CZ = Changzheng = Long March)
by colechristensen | 2025-10-21 23:05:17+00:00
Maybe not an ass, that's too strong, but it's a common online pattern where someone transforms your point into an entirely different meaning and then disagrees with that transformation. It's annoying.

I'm complaining about thinly veiled ad copy wearing the mask of shared technical notes. This is seen as a bad faith effort by the publisher of such notes and a dirty trick played on the reader. Advertising should announce itself for what it is.

I'm very clearly making a distinction, I like A, I don't like B.

You're taking that, saying I must actually hate both A and B, and by the way C through Z because nobody is 111% pure of heart and everybody must have at least some motivation for doing something and nobody is entirely altruistic.... which is just this crazy extreme that it's clear I don't believe at all.

I like the incentive structure that leads Netflix to produce objectively high quality articles sharing with the community in a way that really seems to be entirely untainted by the motivation.

Ad copy in tech notes does seem to taint the motivation and quality of them, it can be innocent but it doesn't seem like it and is generally irritating to a lot of people.

Dislike of a certain kind of advertising doesn't mean I'm sitting around miserable because nobody is truly altruistic as you suggest, and that the issue. My lines of thinking aren't taken to a silly extreme. A lot of disagreements these days are people reinterpreting their opposition as exclusively extremist and that's a problem.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-10-21 23:05:30+00:00
That's because there are roughly two types of home schoolers, and they're at opposite ends of the achievement spectrum. The high achiever cohort are the ones you see who outperform students in their GPAs, SATs, and get into highly selective colleges. The others don't even finish HS much less apply to college so you don't hear about them.
by throwawayq3423 | 2025-10-21 23:05:42+00:00
> Wrong. Pleading guilty is an admission of guilt. Being convicted is not the same as admitting guilt.

You either pardon a person declared guilty by a judge and jury or a person who pled guilty themselves.

> Pardons can be a tool to overcome miscarriage of justice. And that's exactly what happened there.

I don't like this game and I'm not going to play it. Political violence spirals, and anyone who seeks to excuse it because it's their side, and their side can't be the violent ones, is childish at best and malevolent at worst.

> Nowhere at all am I justifying political violence

no you're just saying there was a bunch of grandmas and they were let in by the police and yes people die but it wasn't their fault and the guy organized the whole thing couldn't have possibly foreseen it becoming violent and then when it did he was in the white house so it's not like he could have pulled out his phone at any time and tweeted for them to go home to stop the whole thing.

I get that you need this to make sense in your head, but just understand not a single person is convinced by your babbling.
by harimau777 | 2025-10-21 23:06:40+00:00
Personally, I think it matters whether its achieved by a private company versus by society. That's especially the case when the private company is so closely tied to someone who hates and alienates so much of society. I don't think that I could view a win for Musk as a win for anything that looks like my chunk of the US.

There's also the fact that part of NASA's mission is to share their knowledge with the public.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-21 23:07:08+00:00
Happy to see a new generation of nerds still blaming themselves for gross architectural failings of platforms they consume. Microsoft's wildly successful ethos of blaming-the-user for the failure of Microsoft's products long ago became industry-wide SOP and one of the industries greatest gifts to itself: push liability for bad design out as far away from yourself as possible. And make your consumer think he's super smart and capable for figuring out a way to overcome your bad design. You're in the sweet spot when your customers blame themselves for not working hard enough to understand and report to you about your products failures. "This product is not warranted as suitable for any particular purpose..."