MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anon721656321 | 2025-10-30 10:47:02+00:00
So much for nuclear non-proliferation...

One of the best benefits of the current no live nuclear testing treaties / environment, was that the United States was one of a few countries that had done extensive live tests early on.

The United States is able to sit on its arsenal and data, and with extensive research and simulation validate to a high degree of accuracy that "hey our bombs still work".

Most countries do not have the data/technical expertise/resources to be able to validate with just simulation. But since no-one else is doing live tests, they do not do live tests either.

How much do you want to bet that a subset of the Russian nuclear weapons simply do not work, and that they will only figure this out when they need to 'test' in response to American tests.

My bet is that it is non-0.
by ControlStack | 2025-10-30 10:48:04+00:00
Astronomers studying the interstellar visitor *3I/ATLAS* have confirmed *seven extraordinary anomalies*—each challenging our understanding of cometary physics and raising profound questions about its true nature:

1. *Trajectory* Its path aligns almost perfectly with the plane of our Solar System—a precision seen in only *0.2%* of simulated interstellar object trajectories.

2. *Timing* Its closest approach to the Sun occurred *exactly when the Sun blocked Earth’s line of sight*, delaying its discovery and raising eyebrows about observational coincidence.

3. *Mass & Velocity* Roughly *one million times more massive than ‘Oumuamua* and traveling *twice as fast*—defying typical expectations for interstellar debris.

4. *Composition* Only *4% water vapor*, but an *unusually high concentration of CO₂*—a chemical ratio *never before observed* in comets.

5. *Metal Signature* The outgassing is *rich in nickel, not iron*—a rare and puzzling isotopic fingerprint that doesn’t match known Solar System or interstellar chemistry.

6. *Light Polarization* Exhibits a *negative polarization curve*, a phenomenon *unseen in any known comet* to date—suggesting exotic surface or dust properties.

7. *Anomalous Tail* For several weeks, its tail *pointed toward the Sun*—the *opposite* of normal cometary behavior—before abruptly reversing direction.

---

Is 3I/ATLAS a natural object pushed to the limits of known astrophysics… or something else entirely?
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2025-10-30 10:49:05+00:00
You’re right. But it’s only a problem if you can play in the first place. Of course solving book keeping effectively can lead to more possible times to play since you don’t need as long.

Online platforms like BGA solve both problems and are pretty cheap and constantly implement new games. And I can play with friends that have moved overseas! And if you have a regular group, you only need to pay one subscription. Could have an old fashioned LAN party for online boardgames for an order of magnitude less money.
by close04 | 2025-10-30 10:49:05+00:00
> I think you’re wrong. But that’s irrelevant. The fact that it exists now is what gives it staying power.

You said OP was wrong to say "that has nothing to do with the Bay Area and everything to do with accidents of history" but that it's irrelevant anyway because the area has incumbency effects. Those are 2 separate things, something that you claim to be wrong but irrelevant, and something you say is true.

I agree with the second point, incumbency is a heavy weight to dislodge. But why would OP be wrong to say there's nothing intrinsic to the place that give it power?

I think OP is completely correct, the Bay Area as a place itself isn't special, it's those historical accidental decisions that now make it a hard to dislodge incumbent. But this detail is very important because if "the place" doesn't have some intrinsic power, like some unique natural resource, geography, climate, etc. that just can't be replicated elsewhere, then it can be replicated elsewhere.

In fewer words, "the place" having something unique means immovability. Incumbency just means inertia. Inertia isn't what it use to be. Detroit was the place for building cars just a few decades ago. One accidental decision, one bad policy can send an incumbent on a slow roll down. The Bay Area itself has nothing that reasonably can't be replicated elsewhere, unlike for example an oil field which you have or you don't.
by poszlem | 2025-10-30 10:49:32+00:00
Nuclear non-proliferation only really works when no one feels the need for nuclear weapons in the first place. As soon as countries start feeling threatened or distrust each other, the whole idea falls apart. It’s easy to agree on disarmament when everyone feels safe, but when fear enters the picture, every nation starts looking for its own button to press.

Sadly, the world learned this lesson the hard way from Ukraine’s example: a country that gave up its nuclear arsenal for security guarantees, only to be invaded by the very power that signed them.
by fragmede | 2025-10-30 10:49:45+00:00
A side effect of healthcare being a for-profit system in the US means it runs the gamut, from a doctor you meet with in a clinic irl, to a doctor you never actually meet online, you just fill out some digital paperwork for, to the exteme where users get chemicals from sketchy websites and do chemical prep at home. The middle ground is to use an online "pill mill" that ships out from a compounding pharmacy, often not covered by insurance so paid out of pocket. Maybe $300/month? According to online sources aka reddit it's fairly accessible, just fill out an online questionaire and get a prescription from a doctor, followed by getting the medication shipped to you. It was a bit more open during Covid, but it's still relatively accessible. If you do have a high BMI then more mainstream sources are available to you though.
by bashkiddie | 2025-10-30 10:50:10+00:00
raises hand I hate python.

I am a user of pip binaries. Every few years one of them breaks.

As far as I understand, developers never cared about pinning their dependencies and python is fast to deprecate stuff.

$ uvx remt Built pygobject==3.54.5 Built remt==0.11.0 Built pycairo==1.28.0 Installed 12 packages in 9ms Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/user/.cache/uv/archive-v0/BLXjdwASU_oMB-R4bIMnQ/bin/remt", line 27, in <module> import remt File "/home/user/.cache/uv/archive-v0/BLXjdwASU_oMB-R4bIMnQ/lib/python3.13/site-packages/remt/__init__.py", line 20, in <module> import pkg_resources ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pkg_resources' $ uvx maybe × Failed to build `blessings==1.6` ├─▶ The build backend returned an error ╰─▶ Call to `setuptools.build_meta:__legacy__.build_wheel` failed (exit status: 1) [stderr] /home/user/.cache/uv/builds-v0/.tmpsdhgNf/lib/python3.13/site-packages/setuptools/_distutils/dist.py:289: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'tests_require' warnings.warn(msg) /home/user/.cache/uv/builds-v0/.tmpsdhgNf/lib/python3.13/site-packages/setuptools/_distutils/dist.py:289: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'test_suite' warnings.warn(msg) error in blessings setup command: use_2to3 is invalid. hint: This usually indicates a problem with the package or the build environment. help: `blessings` (v1.6) was included because `maybe` (v0.4.0) depends on `blessings==1.6`

I heard rumors from computer vision developers that even libraries deprecate that fast.
by M95D | 2025-10-30 10:50:13+00:00
I work in a lab. Let me give you some ideea of what's happening:

- Some machines use embedded MCUs with no operating systems. I haven't seen one of these in the last 15 years. The last DNA extraction machine we got (a glorified sample shaker with 2 stepper motors) runs Win10! It has no keyboard, no network, and absolutely no ports of any kind (or at least not accessible without dissasembling the machine). A 8051 could do the job and still have memory left for Pong. [1]

- Very old machines run MSDOS and a proprietary software that directly talks to hardware ISA boards via I/O ports - no drivers. That software can't be ported to Windows2000+ because of the same reasons DOS games can't run in Win2000 - the kernel won't allow direct hardware access. Linux doens't allow it either.

- Newer machines run Windows 2000/XP/7/10, many of them offline. Some of them were updated to run Win10 from older versions, with the same app version (just Windows updated).

- Since Win10 can no longer be bought, newer machines run Win11 with permanent internet connection and they are minimally customized - the vendors left all ads, Copilot, Store and the kitchen sink installed. It's atrocious to work with those, but nobody cares. The management that make the decisions to buy the machines never ever touch them or even see them, and they don't take advice or feedback from us (or anyone else but accounting).

[1] https://gentechbio.com/en/producto/panamax-48/
by dtagames | 2025-10-30 10:50:14+00:00
There is already legal precedent in the US that LLM training is a version of reading/studying akin to what people do, is not a form of wholesale duplication, and involves a great deal of transformation at significant effort and expense.

So the copyright ship has sailed. Current lawsuits are about how copies were obtained or how materials produced by an LLM are themselves infringing. But training? That's all open and legal already.
by cb321 | 2025-10-30 10:50:18+00:00
Nim compile+link times can be sub-100 milliseconds with tcc [1] (just saw 93 ms on my laptop) which can yield pretty reasonable edit-compile-test cycles.

The grandparent's scientific/Go interests suggests a need for a large, working ecosystem and there are probably several places in ArrayMancer which need some love for "fallback cases" to work with tcc (or elsewhere in the as you note much smaller Nim eco-system).

EDIT: E.g., for ArrayMancer you need to make stb_image.h work with tcc by adding a nim.cfg/config.nims `passC="-DSTBIW_NO_SIMD -DSTBI_NO_SIMD"` directive, though. And, of course, to optimize compile times, just generally speaking, you always want to import only exactly what you really need which absolutely takes more time/thought.

[1] https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-30 10:50:22+00:00
We're not yet suffering from famine, because new technologies allowed us to extract way more food than anticipated from the same surface area. However, these practices are not workable long term. You can't actually extract the amount of food we are currently extracting from our agricultural land for another 100-200 years. If we try, we'll ultimately leave the soil in such a bad state that will not grow much of anything - and mass starvation will happen long before then.
by metalman | 2025-10-30 10:50:25+00:00
rural Candian, who has traveled the world here: and you clearly are not talking to the vast majority of Can/US/Mex ,working class people who are stuck in technologicaly enabled doom loops of exploitive financial circumstance that limits there ability to finance basic self care, let alone anything exceptional like a house and kids, which they want, but are fed naratives designed to increase self doubt, and compensate with unessesary pointless expensive consumption
by dekken_ | 2025-10-30 10:50:29+00:00
> is just too low of a fidelity for such a complicated system?

I think you're asking questions that some are afraid to ask.

It appears to me that some people have become accustomed to working with approximations, and have accepted the map for the terrain.

Fundamentally, I don't see how you can use continuous math to explain a discrete system.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-30 10:50:47+00:00
You can achieve a lot of bad things that way too, with nobody to stop you. It's the promise of every totalitarian: free you from all the messiness of having to deal with conflicting opinions.

It is remarkable how well the tradeoff of "you don't need political freedom if the economic growth rate is high enough" works for China, and also previously Korea and Singapore. Even, to a certain extent, Japan - fairly high levels of political freedom, but somehow it's still a one-and-a-half-party state.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-10-30 10:51:27+00:00
I have always thought it would eventually be owned my Microsoft. The only uncertainty is the path it takes to get there.

Given the froth in the market right now, I think there is a good chance the IPO gets scrapped if we are talking mid 2026. An IPO at a trillion would work right now but mid 2026 is a long ways away.

Like how the Deepseek moment feels like ancient history but it wasn't even a year ago.
by saispas | 2025-10-30 10:51:42+00:00
I think that's true (particularly about the Dark ages not being uncultured), but in some places, the signs that what came before was vastly superior technologically (and culturally) would have been all around them.

E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology.

And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period – in the service of religion in the monasteries, of course, but also in what we'd know call 'science'. E.g. wasn't Aristotle taken as the go to authority in scientific matters for the scholastics?
by wosined | 2025-10-30 10:51:47+00:00
Another piece of high quality urinalism. It is simply not true that walking above 6km/h will get you a fine. What actually happened in reality, not in the fantasy land where these journalists live, is that walking speed was defined to be 6km/h, so that other laws that refer to walking speed have a quantifiable basis. This does not mean that you cannot walk faster, it only means that when a law refers to walking speed, it means 6km/h. So it is a definition for other laws that says what the term "walking speed" represents, not a new law that dictates walking speed.
by Synaesthesia | 2025-10-30 10:52:02+00:00
So let's see we've allowed all the arms control treaties to lapse, every single major power is investing more in armaments including nuclear delivery systems.

There is a huge active conflict in Ukraine, right in Europe, the Middle East and many other places like Africa. Many more conflicts are brewing like in Latin America, China, India/Pakistan etc.

There should be alarm bells going off. People aren't aware of just how massive and devastating this threat is.

In the 1980s there were huge protests about jucelar weapons that actually resulted in detente and a relaxation of tensions.

Right now tensions and conflicts are rising. Many people think the threat of nuclear weapons went away after the cold war. They never did.

Where are the peace movements? There has to be popular pressure to institute arms control, make peace and ultimately dismantle these nuclear weapons.
by exasperaited | 2025-10-30 10:52:29+00:00
Don't try to find the magic truth in Trump's rants: he is an ignorant, dementia-addled old man whose self-perception as a leader is as a strongman in an imagined late 1970s/1980s era because he's always been stuck in that era.

Pretending it's all a crazy-man act with hidden strategy a) requires that he isn't mentally declining (when he obviously is and his doctors think so and are trying to tell us) and b) would require that this ignorant man has good advisors where he very clearly does not.
by consp | 2025-10-30 10:53:11+00:00
The problem with most current pension systems is the inability of the last boom to plan for that boom to become part of it. And people hating on immigration, not realising it is massively needed to offset the negative replenishment rate. We might also have a negative growth rate when the boom generation starts dying but that might not actually be a bad thing. Note: the boom lasted from about 1948 to 1974 so it will take a while.
by dvhh | 2025-10-30 10:53:59+00:00
Once used object storage as queue, you can implement queue semantic at the application level, with one object per entry.

But the application was fairly low volume in Data and usage, So eventual consistency and capacity was not an issue. And yes timestamp monotonicity is not guaranteed when multiple client upload at the same time so unique id was given to each client at startup and used for to add guarantee of entries name. Metadata and prefix were used to indicate state of object during processing.

Not ideal, but it was cheaper that a DB or a dedicated MQ. The application did not last, but would try again the approach if adapted to stuation.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-30 10:54:09+00:00
A lot of the retirees vs young discourse (and, tbh, wider politics) is just mirroring the conflict people have with their own parents or children. Especially the "why don't you just" for getting a job/a house/a partner, without acknowledging the very different conditions prevailing.

(sometimes it materializes more directly, in things like NIMBY planning conflicts or homophobia)
by bostik | 2025-10-30 10:54:14+00:00
Plus of course you can take out the primary even with a read from a replica. It's not a trivial feat, but you can achieve it with the combination of streaming replication and an hours-long read from the replica for massive analytical workloads. For large reads Postgres will create temporary tables as needed, and when those in the replica end up far enough, the cascading effect through replication backpressure will cause primary to block further writes from getting through...

The scars from that kind of outage will never truly heal.
by hliyan | 2025-10-30 10:54:44+00:00
It's interesting that there is a generation of developers now who seem to believe that the Internet is an achievement of pure commercial, market dynamics and are surprised to learn about ARPANET and its early development within academia (we were taught this history in the first year of university). If the foundations of the Internet (particularly the protocol suites) had not been open, government-funded and not-for-profit, we would probably have a number of competing closed platforms instead of a single Internet, with paid services to perform protocol translations between them.
by adriand | 2025-10-30 10:55:18+00:00
I really recommend watching A House Of Dynamite, the new movie by Kathryn Bigelow, which provides a highly realistic view of just how insane the entire nuclear system is. All of us live in a constant state of enormous danger: we are just 20 minutes away from apocalypse at all times. Even if you believe that nuclear deterrence is what prevents great power conflict, there is no avoiding the fact that it would take just one mistake or one technical failure or one mentally ill submarine commander to end civilization. We have to fix this, not make it worse!
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-30 10:55:44+00:00
> Where are the peace movements?

A lot of the "peace movements" of the past were financially and ideologically supported by the USSR and Russia [1].

There's nothing bad per se to say against pacifism, to the contrary - but the public image of pacifist movements these days has been heavily tarnished by both the obvious Russia-apologetism regarding the Ukraine war [2] and outright glorification of the horrors done by Hamas on Oct 7th.

[1] https://www.swr.de/swrkultur/wissen/wie-russische-einflussne...

[2] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/zuviel-verstaendnis-fue...
by yanhangyhy | 2025-10-30 10:55:46+00:00
In China, the process requires passing a strict psychological evaluation and surgery before one can change their legal identity and be recognized by the state. Since I used to be know some people from the community, so I have some understanding. I don’t know the policies of other countries, but for those who truly want to transition, I think this is necessary. The requirement to be unmarried is reasonable, since China does not recognize same-sex marriage. I’m not entirely sure about the family consent requirement, but China has the household registration system (hukou), which records family members, so it seems somewhat reasonable. As for being heterosexual, I don’t think that should be a standard requirement, since the main requirements are the hospital’s psychological evaluation and surgery. At least I know of many cases where people successfully changed their legal identity. Of course, these requirements might seem a bit strict in other countries.
by AyanamiKaine | 2025-10-30 10:56:10+00:00
There is always one thing that I found so facintating with the modding scene in Minecraft. Because Minecraft does not have a modding api but the java byte code can be changed. People simply developed their own way of creating an API. There are 2 main modding APIs. Forge/Neo-Forge and Fabric.

[1]Fabric uses Mix-ins while [2]Forge uses a more event based system that is added to the source code of minecraft where they add hooks into events that users can use.

To me its just incredible. Its not often that I see that users own an abstraction instead of the developers.

I wonder from a modding perspective would it be better if all public methods are just the API users can call and they themselves create a way for mods to exist?

[1] https://wiki.fabricmc.net/tutorial:mixin_introduction [2] https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/latest/concepts/lifecycle...
by patrick0d | 2025-10-30 10:56:14+00:00
paper looks nice! i think what they found was that they can recover the input sequence by trying all tokens from the vocab and finding a unique state. they do a forward pass to check each possible token at a given depth. i think this is since the model will encode the sequence in the mid flight token so this encoding is revealed to be unique by their paper. so one prompt of 'the cat sat on the mat' and 'the dog sat on the mat' can be recovered as distinct states via each token being encoded (unclear mechanism but it would be shocking if this wasn't the case) in the token (mid flight residual).
by coldtea | 2025-10-30 10:58:01+00:00
>The "the young people have to work more" argument is only valid as they are working for the older generation.

Nope, that's just a tiny part of the problem.

An economy has a certain size, which depends on how many people support it (work) and how many people buy stuff (consume).

Fewer young people means (everything else being equal) less productivity. That's regardless if the old people are kept around or euthanized (!) or whatever.

Seems you forgot that declining fertility also means less young people each year, not just a larger percentage of older people. Even if you ...kill anybody above 40 years old, the number of 20 and 30 year olds will still drop because of the declining fertility.

Smaller worker and consumer base then means contracting economy.
by andblac | 2025-10-30 10:58:22+00:00
And now we’ve built LLMs - the biggest mirror of them all. The Internet and smartphones gave us countless ways to look at ourselves and see how others see us. And then LLMs helped us gaze at the sum of all that and even confront reflections of our own thoughts.

Yeah, TFA ended just before it got to the really interesting part of how self-reflection itself is fundamental to the development of concisousness. Mirror-like technologies don't just show us our own appearance. They help us understand how we relate to the world around us.

It reminds me of Kieślowski's movie Camera Buff (1979), where the main character in iconic scene points the camera at himself and realizes that the act of making movies reflects not only his subjects, but also on who he is in relation them.

Yeah, I'd would love to read article on all that.