MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thomastjeffery | 2025-11-15 20:31:40+00:00
> Human reaction time is around 200ms

Even if you are talking about the entire loop, that sounds pretty high. Maybe if its moving your hands in reaction to an unexpected stimulus in your feet...

We can tell the difference between 60fps (~16ms per frame) and 120fps (~8ms per frame). Any more than that is a noticeable amount of waiting.

It does get complicated, though. What if the information is presented immediately, then animated? Well, that's where a complete measurement of reaction time would be relevant.

Even so, as you pointed out, we often predict what we will be doing in advance, and can perform a sequence of learned actions much more quickly. If there is a delay imposed before you can perform an action, then you must learn the delay, too. That learning process involves making mistakes (attempting the action before the animation is over), which is extra frustrating, considering how unnecessary it is.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-15 20:31:40+00:00
> If I had a penny for everytime a software person / nerd on HN and elsewhere made an argument that shows little understanding of probabilities and statistics, or perhaps only a theoritical understand that's context dependent (meaning they know the math, but magically forget them when discussing some specific topic), I'd be rich.

If 75% of people in some group are above average then 25% of them still aren't.

> They are explaining how little exhaustive their implementation can be, while still being effective for their goals.

But their goals are different than yours. Or if they're not, you're the baddies.
by pvillano | 2025-11-15 20:31:57+00:00
What's the goal of this article?

There exists a problem in real life that you can solve in the simple case, and invoke a theorem in the general case.

Sure, it's unintuitive that I shouldn't go all in on the smallest variance choice. That's a great start. But, learning the formula and a proof doesn't update that bad intuition. How can I get a generalizable feel for these types of problems? Is there a more satisfying "why" than "because the math works out"? Does anyone else find it much easier to criticize others than themselves and wants to proofread my next blog post?
by jtuple | 2025-11-15 20:31:57+00:00
> The US won't allow south korea to enrich uranium on their own. Want to try again?

190 nations have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This includes China, so the very US vs China premise here is misplaced.

[The US, UK, France, Russia, China and 185 other countries] won't allow south korea to enrich uranium on their own
by hearsathought | 2025-11-15 20:32:03+00:00
> America is doing South Korea a favor.

No. America is doing itself a favor. Not south korea.

> It could ratchet sanctions (see: Iran) and ravage SK’s position and economic power on the global stage without its sign-off.

So you are saying that korea is not a sovereign state like iran but a vassal to the US. Maybe the US could protect korea (see: Israel) and send billions of taxpayer dollars to korea.
by hereme888 | 2025-11-15 20:32:43+00:00
Poor title. This is specific to patients who already underwent cardioversion (shocking the heart back into normal rhythm) AND were habitual coffee drinkers, who now have reduced coffee to 1 cup/day rather than sudden complete abstinence. Recurrence at 6 months was 47% instead of 64%. And this only applies to those who don't have clear caffeine-associated episodes.
by sergiopf1 | 2025-11-15 20:34:46+00:00
I have developed a gravitation model based on the nuclear force and have published several low-level papers on the topic. However, when I attempt to submit the work to high level journals, I am informed that it is not an appropriate topic for publication. On some occasions, the editors have stated that the manuscript is out of scope, but the “not an appropriate topic” response has recently occurred in a few journals in theoretical physics. Nonetheless, the manuscript is currently under review in high-energy physics journals, to which some of the journals themselves redirected me.

Do you think is a bad topic? I do not understand how no one has developed a nuclear model, even one based on dimensions, given that it is well established that almost all mass is concentrated in the atomic nucleus.

This is the link to the preprint (and in the url).

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371896737
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-11-15 20:35:19+00:00
Instead of asking, "What is the purpose of OpenAI storing milllions of private conversations" and having HN commenters (mis)interpret this as something other than a rhetorical question, one could ask, "What are the consequences for users of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations that users do not wish to save"

HN replies might try to answer this as well but the answer is already known to the world

The conversations will be made available to the plaintiffs' (including New York Times') attorneys and the plaintiffs' attorneys' experts

If OpenAI did not store such conversations as a matter of practice before being sued, then there would be no private conversations to make available to the plaintiffs' attorneys and their experts

275 upvotes

AFAICT, most HN readers did _not_ misintepret the question

HN replies != HN, it is a small subset of the readership
by tyre | 2025-11-15 20:36:07+00:00
They've gotten much better at streamlining setup and suggesting sane defaults over the years. I hear the GP that there soooo many knobs. I've found that AWS does a pretty good job, like in the postgres compatible RDS case, of suggesting defaults that make sense for most people. And when you run into issues / scaling problems, you can Claude your way to which settings to research.

The only one that still drives me insane is IAM. That product makes me feel dumb every time I use it, even for simple use cases like "I want a managed redis compatible instance that can only be accessed by these resources." The groups and users and roles and VPCs have never felt intuitive to me, despite having a clear idea of what I want the end state to be.
by echelon | 2025-11-15 20:36:18+00:00
Does Boa support `fetch`? And if so, is it built on Reqwest or Wreq [1]?

I immediately have use for this if y'all have async fetch support. I can use JavaScript as an extension language for our app.

I love how supremely easy it looks to embed in normal Rust apps without a complicated build script. That, to me, is a killer feature.

Really awesome work on this!

[1] Wreq is starting to get popular for its ability to bypass Cloudflare and look like a normal browser
by nikisweeting | 2025-11-15 20:37:09+00:00
ArchiveBox open source does not, but I have set it up for paying clients in the past using TLSNotary. This is actually a very hard problem and is not as simple as saving traffic hashes + original SSL certs (because HTTPS connections use a symmetric key after the initial handshake, the archivist can forge server responses and claim the server sent things that it did not).

There is only 1 reasonable approach that I know of as of today: https://tlsnotary.org/docs/intro, and it still involves trusting a third party with reputation (though it cleverly uses a zk algorithm so that the third party doesn't have to see the cleartext). Anyone claiming to provide "verifyable" web archives is likely lying or overstating it unless they are using TLSNotary or a similar approach. I've seen far to many companies make impossible claims about "signed" or "verified" web archives over the last decade, be very critial any time you see someone claiming that unless they talk explicitly about the "TLS Non-Repudiation Problem" and how they solve it: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/103645/does-ssl...
by Aurornis | 2025-11-15 20:37:10+00:00
> What am I missing about how hard it is to enrich uranium?

The challenges are primarily geopolitical. There are uranium enrichment operations in a number of countries around the world. Weapons grade enrichment is a lot harder, but nothing that a sufficiently funded and motivated nation state couldn’t achieve if they wanted to and, most importantly, didn’t have any other countries discover it.

> Processing, 700kg of uranium does not sound insurmountable, even with a terribly slow and inefficient process.

You have to get enough uranium ore, process that down, then enrich it on a large scale. Uranium ore deposits aren’t very uranium dense except for a few known mines, so pulling rocks out of the ground in another country may produce extremely low yields.

Enrichment is a very slow process requiring a lot of stages because U235 and U238 are barely different, so they don’t separate much in each stage. Everything has to work together and work well. Like you said it’s not insurmountable, but by the time a country has spent years mining low-yield ore and building complicated many stage centrifuges they’re likely to make a mistake that leads to an intelligence agency catching on.
by UncleMeat | 2025-11-15 20:38:04+00:00
Car thefts are reported to insurance companies. Murders tend to be reported.

We also have the National Crime Survey, which simply asks people if they have been the victim of various crimes in the last year. No interaction with police whatsoever. This also tracks a huge drop in crime despite people insisting that "crime is up", especially when asked about the country broadly rather than their local region.
by cyberax | 2025-11-15 20:38:04+00:00
Yes.

I've been watching them in Chinese for a while. Their video production evolved through the years by leaps and bounds. Their technical skill also skyrocketed. But it started as a channel with technical reviews and some DIY.

If you want to try to watch their videos with AI translation, you can try this: https://space.bilibili.com/163637592 For example, an artificial flower made of memory metal: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1gN411M7kh/
by txrx0000 | 2025-11-15 20:38:24+00:00
We're not doomed. More people are starting to realize the problem, and it's possible to solve if we put in some effort. A free Internet can be achieved, if we can push back against malicious laws for a little longer to buy a little more time. We need to especially defend the right to use VPNs and the ability to run servers at home.

We can create a decentralized VPN service that can't be blocked or sued by improving on SoftEther VPN, which is open-source software that can make VPN connections camouflaged as HTTPS, so it's invisible to DPI firewalls and can't be filtered.[0] It's already sort of decentralized, as it has a server discovery site called VPNGate that lists many volunteer-hosted instances.[1] But we can make this truly robust by doing a few more things. First, make a user-friendly mobile client. Second, figure out a way to broadcast and discover server lists in a decentralized manner, similar to BitTorrent, and build auto-discovery and broadcasting into the client. Third, make each client automatically host a temporary server and broadcast its IP so others may connect to it whenever it's in use. That should be enough to keep the Internet free in most countries because most forms of censorship would become impossible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftEther_VPN

[1] https://www.vpngate.net/en/

In the long term, we can take things even further and build a decentralized hosting provider, like AWS/Azure but your web services don't run on a physical server that has an IP address and physical location. Instead, the entire network of physical computers around the world together behaves like a single computer: an Internet-sized virtual machine. No node knows what the entire machine is up to, but every node may store things and run programs on it. The amount of compute/storage a node contributes equals the amount of compute/storage it's allowed to use. This would truly make the Internet open and free worldwide and draw out its full potential.

For the short-term goals, there's already concrete progress. The long-term goal needs more theory work but the missing ideas are probably buried in existing literature.
by gorgoiler | 2025-11-15 20:38:27+00:00
For me, Brian Westley is the greatest code poet of all. His poem was a winner in the 1990 round of the International Obfuscated C Code Competition under "Best layout - poetic exchange between lovers":

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ioccc-src/winner/refs/head...

Love is a not a toilet

From: https://www.ioccc.org/1990/westley/index.html
by FrankWilhoit | 2025-11-15 20:38:38+00:00
I, too, have found that in the presence of a-fib, the optimal amount of caffeine is not zero; but I must think that every patient is different. Most people with diagnosed a-fib also take a beta blocker, and I (just only me) found that an excess of the beta blocker had paradoxical effects. So there is another potential interaction. Then, I also voted myself a small dose of OTC lithium, and subjectively derived obvious and substantial benefit from it, but there is (as yet) no science behind that, so I will not assert causation.
by dvntsemicolon | 2025-11-15 20:39:01+00:00
The article mentions masking's psychological effects a lot, and it's spot on. I masked for most of my life before I was diagnosed with autism in my senior year of high school. I was later diagnosed with C-PTSD because having my feelings invalidated on the grounds that I only had ADHD and should've been able to function fine, it was traumatizing.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-15 20:39:20+00:00
Regarding cats on mats ...

If you ask a human to complete the phrase "the cat sat on the", they will probably answer "mat". This is memorization, not understanding. The LLM can do this too.

If you just input "the cat sat on the" to an LLM, it will also likely just answer "mat" since this is what LLMs do - they are next-word input continuers.

If you said "the sat sat on the" to a human, they would probably respond "huh?" or "who the hell knows!", since the human understands that cats are fickle creatures and that partial sentences are not the conversational norm.

If you ask an LLM to explain it's understanding of cats, it will happily reply, but the output will not be it's own understanding of cats - it will be parroting some human opinion(s) it got from the training set. It has no first hand understanding, only 2nd hand heresay.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-15 20:40:10+00:00
Binary explosives aren't fictional. They'll make just as much of a hole in the plane as C4.

The liquids ban is bullshit because you can have arbitrarily many small bottles of liquid and an arbitrarily large empty bucket to mix them in once you're inside. And because blowing up a plane isn't any more of a problem than blowing up a subway car or a highrise hotel lobby but it's ridiculous and infeasible to stripsearch everyone who goes into a high population density area.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-15 20:40:16+00:00
I'm not a native English speaker, but I think "nuclear submarine" implies "submarine powered by nuclear", otherwise they'd use "nuclear-armed" or similar. Of course, the title is probably ambiguous on purpose, so people click on it to try to figure it out.

> Subsequently, the construction of Nuclear submarines marks a departure from past efforts, as previous South Korean submarine construction has focused primarily on conventionally powered submarines
by csb6 | 2025-11-15 20:40:39+00:00
There is no harm in building a compiler and designing a language as a hobby. It is gratifying to build something and see it work, and it is often interesting to hear about other people’s projects.

The problem comes when designers have delusions of grandeur about their language/compiler. There are lots of people like this on programming language forums who drive themselves nuts because they don’t realize that languages become popular due to platform exclusivity/marketing or due to word of mouth around a readily available implementation that offers something unique. Most hobby languages/compilers are not that different from existing ones so this rarely happens. And the people who create languages are rarely good at building communities because they usually lack social skills (and they tend to be a little manic/defensive about their creations).
by 8note | 2025-11-15 20:41:13+00:00
kid koala does jazz solos on a disk of 12 notes, jumping the track back and forth to get different notes.

i think that, along with the sitar player are still interpolating. the notes are all there on the instrument. even without an instrument, its still interpolating. the space that music and aound can be in is all well known wave math. if you draw a fourier transform view, you could see one chart with all 0, and a second with all +infinite, and all music and sound is gonna sit somewhere between the two.

i dont know that "just interpolation" is all that meaningful to whether something is novel or interesting.
by thayne | 2025-11-15 20:41:18+00:00
This wouldn't be an issue if copyright expired after 10 years, which seems like a reasonable length to me.

Or if a work going out of "print" (or equivalent depending on thee medium) some limited number of years forfeits the copyright.

This common situation where a work is still protected by copyright, but isn't available for purchase and it isn't even feasible to determine who currently holds the copyright is just not ok.
by lpcvoid | 2025-11-15 20:41:20+00:00
Lenovo Z13 Gen 2 with 64GB RAM and AMD 7840u is what I daily drive. It's 13.3 Inch, premium build with glas and aluminum. It's my favorite laptop by a wide margin, and runs Linux perfectly. Unfortunately Lenovo stopped producing the Z13/Z16, no idea what I will do afterwards.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-15 20:41:55+00:00
How long can they actually stay below the surface in practice though? I'm guessing water is filtered on the vessel, but food must be re-supplied constantly I'm again guessing? Maybe they do it like airplanes refuel in the air, rendevouz with another submarine and somehow transfer the resources for food making between then? Probably read too much Tom Clancy...
by nekevss | 2025-11-15 20:42:16+00:00
We do have some interop support available in our `boa_runtime` crate (https://docs.rs/boa_runtime/latest/boa_runtime/) and the engine itself.

Just to note, Boa is an JavaScript engine / interpreter. We're not a runtime, but we do already have some runtime features implemented in the `boa_runtime` crate, but I don't believe that includes any sandboxing as of right now. It's not even a full fledged runtime ... yet (there's been some discussion about expanding it to a full fledged runtime if anyone has a general interest to work on it). For now, `boa_runtime` is just a collection of features for users to potentially use and if they'd like to implement more, then they are totally welcome to.
by oezi | 2025-11-15 20:43:11+00:00
I discovered Switcheroo two weeks ago and seeing it abandoned with over 30 forks with relevant commits made me want try to consolidate the forks and add my own flavor to it:

First beta release at

https://github.com/coezbek/switcheroo

Noteable: column design for most frequently used applications and pinned apps shown separately.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-15 20:44:20+00:00
Congrats in general! The Temporal in rust release happening in Chrome & others is so cool! So exiting to see such a core piece of work being done & then shared widely among browsers. Speaks well to Rust, the trust folks have in it, and the ability to use Rust from a variety of projects.

I also really enjoyed your earlier deep dive blog posts on implementation of Temporal, https://boajs.dev/blog/2025/06/15/temporal-impl-1

There's also a very lovely talk Cross-Engine Contributions at Scale: How newcomers accelerated Temporal and Upsert in SpiderMonkey, V8, and Boa that goes deep in depth in how technically Temporal was used across engines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WieD_9BswAE
by jstimpfle | 2025-11-15 20:44:41+00:00
I agree there are many bad timer-waster animations. But animations can be a good thing. Take scrolling as an example. Pressing page-down on a text-page or in a text-editor, without animation, it takes me a lot of time and energy to find the place where I left off reading or editing before scrolling. A good animation can save a lot of time here. It's similar with other operations -- and I agree that those operations that we don't do that often tend to be the ones that profit more from animation, while the ones where we already know in advance what will happen can be made worse by animation. I think an animation should never slow down the user, they should not be blocking. An unfinished animation should not prevent the user from typing the next action.
by hasperdi | 2025-11-15 20:45:12+00:00
If you don't mind closed source paid app, I can recommend MacWhisper. You can select different models of Whisper & Parakeet for dictation and transcription. My favorite feature is that it allows sending the transcription output to an LLM for clean-up, or anything you want basically eg. professional polish, translate, write poems etc.

I have enough RAM on my Mac that I can run smaller LLMs locally. So for me the whole thing stays local
by hearsathought | 2025-11-15 20:47:02+00:00
> 190 nations have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Who cares?

> This includes China, so the very US vs China premise here is misplaced.

Sure. But it wasn't china that stopped korea's and japan's secret nuclear programs. It was the US.

> [The US, UK, France, Russia, China and 185 other countries] won't allow south korea to enrich uranium on their own

Just like they prevented north korea...

Your response debunks your response. It's quite remarkable actually.

The only country that can prevent another country is the one militarily occupying it. China, France, Russia, UK and the other 185 countries don't militarily occupy south korea. The only reason north korea, israel, india, pakistan, etc were able to go nuclear is because they are not vassal states military occupied by a foreign power.
by adi_kurian | 2025-11-15 20:48:30+00:00
Think this is just prompt eng tbh. One shot Haiku 3.5 (https://claude.ai/share/66c17968-485e-4d15-974b-4f6958e1e2fd) decent looking too.

Got it to work on gpt 3.5T w modified prompt (albeit not as good - https://pastebin.com/gjEVSEcJ)

`single html file, working analog clock showing current time, numbers positioned (aligned) correctly via trig calc (dynamic), all three hands, second hand ticks, 400px, clean AF aesthetic R/Greenberg Associates circa 2017. empathy, hci, define > design > implement.`
by carbocation | 2025-11-15 20:48:33+00:00
To add more information, the intervention was guidance about caffeine intake. From the Methods:

> If allocated to caffeinated coffee consumption, patients were encouraged to drink at least 1 cup of caffeinated coffee (or at least 1 espresso shot) and other caffeine-containing products every day as per their usual lifestyle. It was recommended that patients in the coffee consumption group not intentionally increase or decrease consumption of coffee or other caffeine-containing products.

> If allocated to the abstinence group, patients were encouraged to completely abstain from coffee, including decaffeinated coffee, and other caffeine containing products.
by survirtual | 2025-11-15 20:49:40+00:00
Not relevant.

Hallucinations don't matter if the mechanics of the pipeline mitigate them. In other words, at a systems level, you can mitigate hallucinations. The agent level noise is not a concern.

This is no different from CPU design or any other noisy system. Transistors are not perfect and there is always error, so you need error correction. At a transistor level, CPUs are unreliable. At a systems level, they are clean and reliable.

This is no different. The stochastic noisiness of individual agents can be mitigated with redundancy, constraints, and error correction at a systems level.