MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Feedback on my discrete substrate transport preprint?
by FlipSpace | 2025-11-21 02:01:32+00:00
I’ve been working on a long-form open-access manuscript called Flip-Space.

The basic idea is to treat spacetime as a discrete binary flip lattice, then recover continuum physics as a fractional-transport limit. Everything is built from the ground up from two philosophical/structural axioms, instead of starting from phenomenological fits to observations.

If you are interested the work of Wolfram, 't Hooft and Conway, you should see familiar terrain, even if the product is radically different.

Concretely, the framework tries to:

- derive effective transport and hydrodynamics with fractional-order operators from the flip lattice, - reproduce standard cosmological behavior (CMB, Galaxy Rotation, Lensing, etc.) from that substrate, - connect the same substrate structure to some condensed-matter-style transport behavior.

The manuscript is long and calculation-heavy(but not boring, I promise), everything is explicit: local flip rules, coarse-graining, fractional operators, and numerical comparisons against standard ΛCDM fits and condensed-matter benchmarks. ...and if you don't enjoy dense math, I did try to include layman's explanations for just about everything, your mileage may vary, I'm no poet.

At this point I’d really like technical pushback. A detailed critical beatdown is welcome.

Thanks in advance (my email is included in the document if you prefer direct communication).

Zenodo (PDF, open access): https://zenodo.org/records/17663946
by rmunn | 2025-11-21 02:01:47+00:00
Everyone's recommending books; I'm going to do the opposite and recommend a specific dialect.

Install Clojure. Read https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started and choose an editor. If you don't have a favorite editor, I recommend NeoVim with the LazyVim package (clone https://github.com/LazyVim/starter and follow instructions), then run the :LazyExtras command and install the Clojure package. If you haven't used LazyVim before, https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ is a good book; you can read it online for free, then if you find it useful, purchase a copy to reward the author for his hard work.

Once you've installed an editor, you'll want to install https://leiningen.org/ which is the de facto (if not de jure) package manager for Clojure. Makes compiling your Clojure code to an .exe (for distribution to other machines where Clojure isn't installed) about as simple as it can be.

Once you've got an editor and a package manager installed, you're ready to read https://clojure.org/guides/learn/clojure as well as the various books on Lisp others are recommending. Depending on which book it is, the functions may have different names (e.g., some languages use `first` and `rest` while others stick with the historical `car` and `cdr` names, but they're the same functions), but you should find that the concepts translate perfectly well from one dialect of Lisp to another and the only challenge is having to look up what name the function has in the dialect you're using.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-21 02:02:14+00:00
The magic of the system is that we all did it, comrade. There's multiple people, laws define what those people can do, processes, comment periods. It's all spiderman pointing at spiderman. You can't find any one party so clearly culpable that they can in good conscience suffer real consequence.

And it's not just this, every f-ing regulated industry is like this. I work with someone who specs out where the wires and fixtures for the lights are gonna go in commercial buildings. Ceiling lighting is full of crap like this for christ sake. The whole system is rotten.
by Karliss | 2025-11-21 02:03:44+00:00
In many ways it's the opposite, the code counts as writing. At least where I live (should be similar in other EU countries) from the perspective of copyright law code is largely classified as literary work. There are few special rules related to fact that code is typically written by large team employed by company compared to books being written by single author and printed by publisher. Also few special rules that don't make sense for regular literary works related to reverse engineering, interface compatibility with other software and copying as part of installation/execution process.

All the code specific licenses are arbitrary rules decided by right owners under which they license others to use their work. Book authors typically don't have to worry whether when granting permission to read their work they also need to grant rights to relevant patents, or whether dynamic or static linking should be permitted.

Assuming Microsoft owns all the necessary rights for everything I don't see a major reason they couldn't release it as single work under whatever license they want. Considering the way this specific game is written I don't think you can even cleanly separate code from rest of the writing. It's all one big program with bunch of short string literals sprinkled all over the place. You could take all the string literals, but without code defining how those strings are ordered in a non linear and interactive way it would make as much sense as reading a book where all the sentences have been sorted in alphabetical order.

I doubt any of the Zork authors were part of writer union and negotiated separate licensing rules for the text they wrote.

With regards to common case where source is released with open source license separate from art assets there are a couple of reasons. It's much easier to separate pictures and music from code and tell that those are covered by different license. For some of the art assets especially music it's not uncommon that the publisher themselves don't have full rights to them and only have limited license to use in game but not to relicense as separate works. Releasing source code without art assets makes it easier to maintain commercial value and limit ability for others to exploit the work as ready to use product (or sequals) while still allowing programmers to study the code and learn from the technical tricks in code or making new games based on same engine. If I am not mistaken at

From the historical preservation perspective art assets are less likely to bitrot and become unusable. 20 years in future you will likely still be able to rip them out of commercial builds of game with little losses and worst case observable as standalone media. But the code is a lot more likely break and not be runnable on future OS/hardware. Code also has a lot more hidden aspects that you can much more easily observe by reading source code directly instead of reverse engineering the compiled executables. Better release the source code while it hasn't been completely lost.
by pseudalopex | 2025-11-21 02:03:49+00:00
> Banks operate with liability for losses resulting from breaches.

Not enough.

> Unless Flock et al are routinly losing their entire database, this shouldn't be exisential.

The risk of misuse by future governments is too great even if Flock's security was perfect. And allowing anything less than routinely losing the entire database is unreasonably lax even if you don't believe Flock is too risky to exist.
by csense | 2025-11-21 02:04:08+00:00
Anecdotally, two factors at work here:

- Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.

- With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching.

It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it's comparatively much easier to pull your kids out and homeschool them.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-21 02:04:12+00:00
Great comment on HN recently put it this way paraphrasing a comment they liked on Usenet (yes the degree of separation is growing haha):

>of course they shit on the floor, it’s a corporation, it’s what they do, the job of government is to be the rolled up newspaper applied to their nose when they do

Whether you’re a good company or a bad company, a large percentage of companies will always go up right to the limits that are set, and then another significant percentage will go past it until they are caught. That’s just how it works in capitalism. You’re constantly fighting a group of people’s ravenous desire for more money as well as the (often significant) resources they will bring to bear to defend their revenue stream.

You simply can’t expect them to do the right thing without adequate consequences for failing to do the right thing. We have literally centuries of evidence.
by autumnstwilight | 2025-11-21 02:05:41+00:00
I'd like to make the point that even if this does occur, it doesn't mean, "therefore this medication shouldn't be used/is worse than doing nothing," just that awareness and caution is needed.

I went through a frankly terrible few months on my current meds because they removed the emotional numbness before removing the bad feelings. However, once that was over they effectively gave me my life back after 10+ years of continual exhaustion and brain fog.
by toast0 | 2025-11-21 02:05:47+00:00
You don't see me working on this stuff, but people keep complaining about this because instead of one thing that works but is a pain, we have two things that work but are a pain. It's pretty obvious that while Xorg works for a lot of people, it's not the way forward; but I think it's apparent that Wayland might not be either... although I think it's likely some will end up running a wayland server with Xwayland as the single wayland client to get continuing driver support.

This is a lot different than say OSS vs ALSA. OSS really could have worked (and still does on FreeBSD afaik), but ALSA fully replaced OSS. I think pipewire seems likely to replace PulseAudio, even if it may not have PulseAudio's key functionality of ruining audio when things used to work just fine.
by Analemma_ | 2025-11-21 02:06:18+00:00
If it was a few large files as opposed to many small ones, this is totally believable. iPhones have Wi-Fi 6E chips, and an ad hoc network where the devices are right next to each other can actually reach the theoretical max speed of the protocol (as opposed to real-world connections to a base station, which never do). I've never measured it precisely but I've transferred ~1 GB disk images over AirDrop in a couple seconds.
by buu700 | 2025-11-21 02:06:45+00:00
> But why bring in the whole s3 library if you’re going to use one single endpoint?

This is a bit of a reach. There's no reason to assume that the entire project would only be using one endpoint, or that AI would have any trouble coding against the REST API instead if instructed to. Using the official SDK is a safe default in the absence of a specific reason or instruction not to.

Either way, we're already past the point of demonstrating that AI is perfectly capable of writing correct pseudocode based on my description.

> Coding speed is very much not a bottleneck in Emacs.

Of course it is. No editor is going to make your mind and fingers fast enough to emit an arbitrarily large amount of useful code in 0 seconds, and any time you spend writing code is time you're not spending on other things. Working with AI can be a lot harder because the AI is doing the easy parts while you're multitasking on all the things it can't do, but in exchange you can be a lot more productive.

Of course you still need to have enough participation in the process to be able to maintain ownership of the task and be confident in what you're committing. If you don't have a holistic view of the project and just YOLO AI-generated code that you've never looked at into production, you're probably going to have a bad time, but I would say the same thing about intern-generated code.

> I’m more for less feature and better code.

Well that's part of the issue I'm raising. If you're at the point of pushing back on business requirements in the interest of code quality, that's just another way of saying that coding speed is a bottleneck. Using AI doesn't only help with rapidly pumping out more features; it's an extremely useful tool for fixing bugs at a faster pace.
by brain_staple | 2025-11-21 02:07:04+00:00
That was my interpretation of that talk. It seemed like a regurgitation of opinions of an old aerospace engineer. But that's probably unfair to Dustin, I believe that he actually came to that conclusion himself. But it was a really incorrect take that SLS was somehow the "safe bet" in comparison to betting on Starship. The whole talk just seemed insane based on what I knew about both programs.
by drivebyhooting | 2025-11-21 02:07:04+00:00
Meanwhile when seeking treatment for pain with western medicine:

* first see a GP, no real diagnosis.

* get an ultrasound - everyone already knows it won’t show anything of use but insurance companies require this escalation path

* get an xray - same as above

* maybe if you insist get an MRI.

* regardless the treatment is the same: go to a PT’s office.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-11-21 02:07:29+00:00
They have more scope to experiment, in my case it was a way for me to access PRP injections before wider adoption. They are paid rather orthography to treatment, they can treat other things while also giving you regular spinal adjustments - similar to the idea that researchers should be paid to teach as paying them to research will pollute the research. We need a way to continue paying dentists so they can stop finding ‘soft spots’ that don’t exist.

I dislike the quackery but traditional science isn’t free from it either. I wish everyone was rational, evidence based and disinterested (as in not having a particular interest on biasing an outcome). But the world we live in is far from that. Consider the percentage of ‘normal’ medical doctors in Germany who believe in homeopathy. A large part of that is due to the terrain school of thought in medicine which lost out to germ theory. An artifact of history rather than rational people and rational study. I’m still looking for a better way the phrase it; but it seems to me that the belief in the belief of science far exceeds the actual belief in science.

If doctors / medical researchers really were so good at research they wouldn’t have taken so long to rediscover the ancient practice of prolotherapy.
by jallonclone | 2025-11-21 02:08:42+00:00
As I've explained to my NP colleagues (ones that have already completed school), this actually helps them (the impending oversupply threatens NP wages, as some of them are already having trouble finding the job they want since the 45 different APP degree offerings create an unrestricted supply). And while this might discourage some people from entering nursing, that will again only decrease the supply, which will increase the wages since you cannot replace nurses. But that would be a bad thing, as hospitals are already in a crunch trying to find nurses and pay them fairly (a large and different discussion).

On the physician side, there's definitely big changes coming, and I'm banking on a move to up-front APPs and a few remote physicians overseeing things. But I'm actually also seeing a number of entities that hired a bunch of APPs and are now moving back to physicians only and saving money doing do (think urgent care, ED, inpatient), though some specialties work very efficiently with a primary APP or co-management model, particularly the procedural ones.
by karthagokul | 2025-11-21 02:09:07+00:00
I recently published an IETF Internet-Draft proposing "Internet 2.0" — an intent-aware, AI-native extension of the Web. The idea is simple: the current Web is built around documents and hyperlinks, but today most human queries are intent-based, not page-based.

The draft outlines a new protocol layer that allows clients to express intent and systems to respond with structured, multi-source, AI-ready outputs.

This post includes the background story behind the draft, examples, the motivation, and the link to the full IETF document.

Would love feedback from system architects, protocol designers, and anyone thinking about the future of the internet.
by Dusseldorf | 2025-11-21 02:09:19+00:00
This doesn't make much sense to me. As the previous commenter mentioned, this shortage has been ongoing for decades, it's certainly not new in the last two years. Additionally, nursing is one of the jobs least replaceable by AI.

There's a nursing shortage because the work is brutal, under appreciated, and under compensated aside from travel nursing gigs, for those who can maintain that sort of lifestyle. Nurses are a cost center, so management is constantly running floors understaffed. It's to the point that they receive bonuses for running the floor as thin as possible, despite the worsening of patient outcomes and nurses' sanity.

Don't get me wrong, there are some good gigs for sure, but there are lots of terrible ones.
by Nathanba | 2025-11-21 02:09:39+00:00
it's practically always the case that you use a try-catch for more than just one source / line of code. I mean except for database/network calls I don't think I even remember a single case where I ever used a try-catch just for a single line of code. The subtle problems come from errors handling via values. You check but do you check perfectly? What happens when APIs change and the underlying functions add more error cases, then you constantly have more work to do. Nonstop constant error checking that you don't care about. This is exactly where humans are terrible: Really important work that is drudgery and where if you ever mess up once, you fail in very painful ways. Exception handling solves all of this, it fits how humans should be working and it fits the underlying hardware reality as well: We are big picture, we should not be designing languages for describing logic that force us to do drudgery work constantly and care about implementation details of every single thing we call.
by vkou | 2025-11-21 02:10:23+00:00
And you cannot separate the idea of lack of regulation from the harm inherent to the concept.

This kind of lazy ideological posturing is thought-terminating and incredibly tiring.

Your position is simply unable to demonstrate to us how a blanket policy of letting whatever corner-cutting garbage slip into your food, medicine, construction materials, safety systems actually leads to globally better outcomes. It would be truly baffling if of all conceivable points on the axis it was a global optimum.
by danans | 2025-11-21 02:10:29+00:00
> Would the energy be better spent in making Linux more stable or usable for the general public?

Linux is stable and widely used, whether as Android, Ubuntu, WSL on Windows or Crostini on ChromeOS (itself Linux under the hood).

The general public buy products like Macs, Lenovos, Steam Decks, Chromebooks or Frameworks. Nobody buys a "Linux".

Linux and it's ecosystem are features of those products, not products themselves.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-11-21 02:12:26+00:00
At the time, many people. Death stalked the land, children were lucky to reach adulthood, women were lucky to survive childbirth, and almost everyone experienced grief and bereavement.

It's all in his music - the manic passion of trying to master a craft against that background, a burning faith in a better future, against constant reminders of the horrors of the present.

It's not just four part counterpoint. There's a lot more going on.
by linguae | 2025-11-21 02:12:33+00:00
My dream is to work on an operating system that at least gets us to the 1990s and 2000s when it comes to research ideas.

I have a soft spot for the Smalltalk-80 environment and Lisp machines. They had a single address space. In my opinion, the two most interesting things about these environments are (1) their facilitation for component-based software based on live, dynamic objects, and (2) the malleability of the system, where every aspect of the system can be modified by the user in real time.

Of course, a critical downside of Smalltalk-80 and Lisp machine environments is the lack of security; any piece of code can modify the system. There are two solutions to this that I'm thinking about: (1) capability-based security for objects in the system, and (2) work on single-address space operating systems that still have memory protection (Opal was a research system that had this design; see Sharing and Protection in a Single-Address-Space Operating System [Chase et al. 1994]).

One of the nice things about Lisp is its metaprogramming facilities, from macros to the metaobject protocol. Metaprogramming makes it feasible to implement domain-specific languages that make expressing problems more aligned to their domains.

During the late 2000s and early 2010s, Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute had a project named STEPS that investigated the pervasive use of DSLs to implement an entire desktop environment. They did not use Lisp as a substrate, but they did use OMeta (https://tinlizzie.org/ometa/) for handling parsing expression grammars (PEGs), which are used to describe many of the systems in STEPS. Two DSLs that immediately come to mind are one for describing the 2D graphics system and another for describing TCP.

So now I've described my dream substrate: a single-address operating system with capability-based security, where each subsystem is expressed as a live object, ideally coded in a DSL.

Now comes the interface. The programmer's interface would be similar to Smalltalk-80 and Lisp machines, with a live REPL for interactive coding. All objects can be accessed programmatically by sending messages to them. The end-user interface would be heavily based on the classic Mac OS, and applications would conform to human interface guidelines similar to System 7.5, but with some updates to reflect usage patterns and lessons in UI/UX that weren't known at the time. Application software would be similar to the OpenDoc vision, where components can be combined based on the user's wishes.

The end result sounds like a synthesis of various Apple projects from the late 1980s until 1996: component-based applications backed by a live object system with capability-based security.

This is my dream and is a side project I'd love to create.
by maroonblazer | 2025-11-21 02:13:42+00:00
I picked up a collection of several hundred of his 4-part chorales. I like to flip through the pages and pick one seemingly at random and play it. While some hit me harder than others, nearly all of them express this "simplicity to depth" ratio.

My latest favorite: Oh God, Hear My Sighs: https://soundcloud.com/nick66/oh-god-hear-my-sighs-bach
by jefftk | 2025-11-21 02:15:01+00:00
> Though I suppose another possibility is that they all share an identical pylon design or something like that.

They're very closely related planes (MD-11 is an upgraded DC-10; KC-10A is a military version of the DC-10), so that wouldn't be surprising. Likely the KC-10A has the same pylon, and the MD-11 has one that's similar enough that it's worth being cautious.