MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jiggawatts | 2025-12-20 23:12:13+00:00
You're being somewhat unfairly voted down, it's a legitimate questions because the popular media so grossly misrepresents what string theory is, especially in their visuals.

It's hard to visualise in 3D, but if you cut down the spatial dimensions to just 1D (a line), then theories like string theory just turn the infinitely thin mathematical line into a tube. You can picture a tube that vibrates, or has waves in its cross-section. Don't think of the the "strings" as actual little loops moving around in space, they're a modification of what space is.

You can even do the same kind of line->tube extension of a space with even more extra "loop" dimensions than the number of base dimensions. AFAIK the current theories have 10 total, of which 3 are the usual "large" dimensions of space, the rest are "small" and rolled up like the tube example.
by tmnvix | 2025-12-20 23:13:29+00:00
One definition of authoritarian is "enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom".

It would seem to me that the recent spate of sanctioning individuals - e.g. for 'disseminating misinformation' without a legal definition of what that actually is would be an example of authoritarianism. A direct attack on freedom of speech and thought.
by pretzellogician | 2025-12-20 23:13:35+00:00
Yes, very rough. Marijuana still being illegal at the federal level, and often illegal at the state level, means it's not always in your best interest to self-report.

For example, in my doctor's questionnaires. "Have you used illegal drugs in the last year?" I'm always going to say no. I don't trust security and privacy enough to say otherwise.

And yes, for HN scrapers, I'll mention this is all hypothetical.
by pellepelster | 2025-12-20 23:13:40+00:00
I have spent quite some time the past months and years to deploy Postgres databases to non-hyperscaler environments.

A popular choice for smaller workloads has always been the Hetzner cloud which I finally poured into a ready-to-use Terraform module https://pellepelster.github.io/solidblocks/hetzner/rds/index....

Main focus here is a tested solution with automated backup and recovery, leaving out the complicated parts like clustering, prioritizing MTTR over MTBF.

The naming of RDS is a little bit presumptuous I know, but it works quite well :-)
by ch4s3 | 2025-12-20 23:15:50+00:00
I don’t have the book I’m looking for handy but the consensus opinion of historians of Iran is that it was an illegitimate move, as explained by Ervand Abrahamian in “ Evolving Iran: An Introduction to Politics and Problems in the Islamic Republic”.

Tellingly his first act after seating a half empty Majlis was to have them grant him emergency powers that allowed him to dictate laws. This is not a democratic system.
by gopher_space | 2025-12-20 23:16:00+00:00
> The Geek Code, developed in 1993, is a series of letters and symbols used by self-described "geeks" to inform fellow geeks about their personality, appearance, interests, skills, and opinions. The idea is that everything that makes a geek individual can be encoded in a compact format which only other geeks can read. This is deemed to be efficient in some sufficiently geeky manner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code
by tim333 | 2025-12-20 23:16:22+00:00
Even so I don't get how electrons a meter apart interact through that stuff, as opposed to the electrical fields which spread out through space and so interact with other electrons as featured in quantum field theory which is what physicists use to actually calculate physical results, as opposed to string theory which fails to calculate actual physical results.

"if you cut down the spatial dimensions to just 1D" doesn't sound very physical to me.

I'm maybe being downvoted fairly. I studied physics and it don't think it's a misunderstanding of popularisation or that string theory is untestable, I just think it's straight wrong and not how the physical universe works.
by bikenaga | 2025-12-20 23:16:27+00:00
Research mentioned in the article: "Inflammation, Cholesterol, Lipoprotein(a), and 30-Year Cardiovascular Outcomes in Women" - https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2405182

"Results. The mean age of the participants at baseline was 54.7 years. During the 30-year follow-up, 3662 first major cardiovascular events occurred. Quintiles of increasing baseline levels of high-sensitivity CRP, LDL cholesterol, and lipoprotein(a) all predicted 30-year risks. Covariable-adjusted hazard ratios for the primary end point in a comparison of the top with the bottom quintile were 1.70 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.52 to 1.90) for high-sensitivity CRP, 1.36 (95% CI, 1.23 to 1.52) for LDL cholesterol, and 1.33 (95% CI, 1.21 to 1.47) for lipoprotein(a). Findings for coronary heart disease and stroke appeared to be consistent with those for the primary end point. Each biomarker showed independent contributions to overall risk. The greatest spread for risk was obtained in models that incorporated all three biomarkers."
by grogers | 2025-12-20 23:16:47+00:00
An often underlooked aspect of SSDs for databases is write endurance. With the wrong workload random writes can burn through your drive in months instead of years. This is the hidden gem of LSM over b-tree - low write amplification, not just better write performance. Maybe doesn't really matter on AWS since you can just pitch your instance once you've trashed the SSDs
by strken | 2025-12-20 23:18:08+00:00
You're only expected to crash 500 or so times per 100 million miles as the base rate[0]. If you were impaired enough to have 2x or 3x the risk of crashing then it's entirely possible that you wouldn't crash, or that other factors would play a larger role.

[0] https://www.friedmansimon.com/faqs/how-common-are-car-accide...
by palata | 2025-12-20 23:20:05+00:00
> They are too big to fail but they aren’t too big to have to pay out a huge settlement. Facebook [...]

I think it's pretty clear from history that they are too big to have to pay out a huge settlement.

First, they never had to. There was never a "huge" settlement, nothing that actually did hurt.

Second, the US don't do any kind of antitrust, and if a government outside the US tries to fine a US TooBigTech, the US will bully that government (or group of governments) until they give up.
by mndgs | 2025-12-20 23:20:21+00:00
Watch this, where he goes through the questions and explains how he did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mx_xhiIRpw

I'm pretty good with Excel, my main tool at the job for over 20 years. I understand how he did it, but it's just really humbling...

I still think quality of what you do with Excel (idea) is more important than how you do it (skill).
by hn_user82179 | 2025-12-20 23:20:22+00:00
I would suggest editing the title to include “without a valid H-1B visa stamp”

> we strongly recommend that employees without a valid H-1B visa stamp avoid international travel for now,” the Fragomen memo reportedly said.

This isn’t really a change from previous years (this is different from September when companies were having their employees emergency-fly back to the US as they didn’t know if even valid H-1B visa holders would be let back in).
by betaby | 2025-12-20 23:20:37+00:00
> cloud computing

Nope. Large scale DCs are IPv6 only underneath, exascalers like Google and Meta have stated that multiple times. I.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3ird3UDnOA also see various NANOG talks https://www.youtube.com/@TeamNANOG/videos
by FeepingCreature | 2025-12-20 23:23:03+00:00
See also my site fncad https://fncad.github.io ! It's basically intended as "SDFs in your browser with realtime preview with openscad-like syntax". I mostly use it for 3d models for printing.

What do you use for sdf meshing? I never really got the perf where I wanted it.
by charlie-83 | 2025-12-20 23:23:28+00:00
None of the models currently are able to make competent changes to the codebases I work on. This isn't about them "making mistakes" which I have to fix. They completely fail to the point where I cannot use any of their output except in the simplest of cases (even then it's faster to code it myself).

So no, I'm not worried.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-20 23:23:35+00:00
> nobody in their right mind can intuitively understand IPV6 addresses

If someone can't understand "it's longer" then what is wrong with them?

And using hex instead of decimal for magic computer numbers should be more intuitive, not less.

Also structure-wise the first half is the subnet and the second half is the host. That's much more intuitive than IPv4.

> absolutely no benefit to the non-network engineer

If you do anything peer to peer at all, calls or file transfers or games, there's a benefit. And the typical benefit grows over time as more and more ISPs install CGNAT.
by chrneu | 2025-12-20 23:24:10+00:00
Not true at all. I support small artists and it's the only way they make money. Ticket sales and merch make up the vast majority of artist revenue for artists who arent in the top 1%. Most musicians don't make money if they aren't touring or selling merch somehow.

there's also the invaluable aspect of networking that touring allows. bit of a tangent, but it's very important for musicians to network.

The exception are musicians who do production stuff. Think movie/tv scores, commercials, etc. I actually know a handful of artists who used to tour quite a lot but eventually settled down to do production stuff. So they transitioned from touring to make money to production. Touring all year with no healthcare catches up to people.
by taylorsatula | 2025-12-20 23:24:11+00:00
Fixed! BSL (to my understanding) is a copy of the license and its a 'hashicorp document' so it had their title on it.

However, someone earlier today put me onto the concept of AGPL licenses so I changed MIRA over to AGPL because it still aligns with my overall intent of protecting my significant effort from someone coming in and Flappy Bird-ing it while still making it freely available to anyone who wants to access, modify, anything it.
by toast0 | 2025-12-20 23:24:19+00:00
> There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown.

Music licensing (in the US at least) is actually pretty nice for this (from the licensee perspective anyway). There are mechanical licenses which allow you to use music for many uses without contracting with the rightsholders and clearinghouses whose job is to determine where to send royalties. So you can use the music and send reporting and royalties to the clearing houses and you're done.

Of course, you may want to contract with the rightsholders if you don't like the terms of the mechanical license; maybe it costs too much, etc. If you're Spotify or similar and you have specific contracts for most of the music, and have to pay mechanical license rates for the tail, it might make sense to do so in order to boast of a larger catalog.
by chrneu | 2025-12-20 23:24:43+00:00
99% of that 10 billion went to a handful of artists. Actually, I'd wager nearly half of it went to labels and other middlemen, but that's beside the point. The vast majority of money in the music industry never trickles down, ever.

edit: I looked it up, 70% of spotify's payouts go directly to labels, not artists. So...that $10 bil is nothing.

This is by design and it's the same broken system that metallica defended in the 90s/00s because it benefits large artists while fucking over the other 99%.

We keep repeating the same script using the same busted short term logic.
by black_knight | 2025-12-20 23:25:02+00:00
Having a PhD in mathematics myself, I have been surrounded by such and had this discussion a few times. Some even like the ideas suggested!

I would say the most common counter argument is cultural: Classical mathematics is the norm in the field, hence one must use it to participate in research in this field.

But that seems to me a rather intellectually unsatisfying argument, if one cares about the meaning of the work.
by fra07 | 2025-12-20 23:25:25+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this free macOS app because I was tired of manually opening the same sets of terminals, folders, and websites every time I switched context (e.g., from "Freelance Work" to "Side Project").

There are other tools out there, but many are Electron-based, paid subscriptions, or too complex. I wanted something native, lightweight, and fast.

WorkSpace Manager is: - 100% Native SwiftUI (~15MB) - Menu bar resident (stealth mode) - Supports launching Terminals (with venv/scripts), Apps, URLs, and Finder windows - Privacy-first (no data collection, local storage only)

v1.1 just released with Multilanguage (IT/EN), Dark Mode, and Backup/Restore.

It's a free indie project. Feedback is super welcome!

Web/Download: https://frafra077.github.io/workspace-manager/ Repo (Issues): https://github.com/frafra077/workspace-manager
by virtualritz | 2025-12-20 23:25:49+00:00
I just found out that https://annas-archive.li/ is masked by my German internet provider (SIM.de/Drillisch). I usually use a VPN but I had it switched off temp. to watch Fallout (Prime Video won't let you watch through a VPN). Only when I switched Mullvad back on could I open the site.

I didn't know German providers do this.
by taylorsatula | 2025-12-20 23:25:49+00:00
If it throws an actual error please let me know by lodging it as an issue in the GitHub repo and I'll modify the code. I'm hanging around the house tonight to fix bugs people uncover.

EDIT: Thanks for the feedback! I was able to pinpoint it to a change I made earlier today to allow simultanious OAI endpoints and the native Claude support. When on a model via a 3rd party provider certain parts of a toolcall were being stripped. Not any more! Pushed an update.
by joshka | 2025-12-20 23:25:57+00:00
The DSPy + GEPA idea for this mentioned above[1] seems like it could be a reasonable approach for systematic evaluation of skills (not agents as a whole though). I'm going to give this a bit of a play over the holiday break to sort out a really good jj-vcs skill.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338371
Show HN: Discord bot that reminds you to commit daily
by nkmak | 2025-12-20 23:26:05+00:00
I built a simple Discord bot that checks your GitHub contributions and sends a reminder if you haven't committed today.

Stack: Hono + Cloudflare Workers + Cron Triggers

It's lightweight, runs on the free tier, and takes about 5 minutes to set up. Made it to keep myself accountable for daily coding habits.

GitHub: https://github.com/NKMAK/commit-reminder-discord-bot
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-20 23:27:29+00:00
Haha yes I remembered it but mixed up the titles. (-10 for care, conscientiousness) Preceding sentence though

But at the core of this great heterogeneous body of public opinion is a tenacious will to live, to progress, to move in the direction of ultimate social and individual benefit.

Hints at something more than token respect (of a wild beast to be tamed).

Gemini concurs though that overall Bernays didn't think elites should have anything to gain from heeding public opinion beyond sharpening their technique. (The public as an object, and not a peer)
Show HN: Research repo for a time-based macroeconomic valuation model
by AGsist | 2025-12-20 23:27:33+00:00
This repository documents a conceptual macroeconomic model that explores time as a primary unit of value measurement.

It includes formal assumptions, core formulas, and architectural constraints, with the goal of establishing authorship and prior art rather than proposing an immediate implementation.

There is no tokenomics, no protocol, and no fundraising involved at this stage.

I’m sharing this to get technical feedback on the assumptions and structure, and to learn how others would stress-test or formalize such a model.
by hattmall | 2025-12-20 23:28:11+00:00
It's seat belts. People who die in wrecks are overwhelmingly not wearing seat belts. I would think marijuana users as a group probably have average seat belt usage, but people who don't wear seat belts probably have much higher than average marijuanna usage. Roughy 92% of people wear seat belts. But that 8% of people that don't wear setbelts makes up 50% or more of all fatalities. From my personal experience it seems easy to me to assume that 90% of the people that don't wear seat belts also use marijuanna.
Ask HN: Why do QR codes need so much visual real estate?
by rishikeshs | 2025-12-20 23:28:20+00:00
I am working on a small read-only display and I want users to open a link on their phone to read more.

QR codes work, but even small ones end up taking a lot of space and feel visually heavy, especially when the link itself is very short. Why is that? Is it because of how cameras detect QR codes, error correction, or the way the standard is designed?

Have people tried more minimal scannable alternatives, or is QR already close to the practical limit?
by 000ooo000 | 2025-12-20 23:28:44+00:00
There's value in the struggle, learning what questions to ask, handling the questions following a question, articulating what it is that you want to know, learning how to have an exchange of information with another human being, and being civil about it. If you honestly think that replacing this growth with a paywalled, corporate chatbot that has been known to convince people to kill themselves will be a boon for society, I'm not sure what to tell you.
by VanTheBrand | 2025-12-20 23:29:15+00:00
I think there is definable a connection between cannabis use and auto accidents. It slows your reaction time and that’s a known factor with accidents. That said, substance use data is notoriously underreported[1] in surveys. So that 20% data point is not very helpful. Also 12-15 year olds are bringing that number down in your data and also can’t drive making it even less useful for comparison.

[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089085672...
by tclancy | 2025-12-20 23:29:54+00:00
I love that SoulSeek still exists in some format. My path was Napster (made me get cable Internet and a cd burner) > AudioGalaxy (learned how to path things on routers so I could download music to home from work) > SoulSeek. Plus it had some useful chat and people who cared about sound quality and metadata.
by goldsteinq | 2025-12-20 23:30:55+00:00
> Also, for OP: Do you mean "access to the system it runs on"? Because I'm pretty sure it doesn't run with "SYSTEM" access (as in privileged user).

Yeah, I mean “access to the system”. It’s not the same as using headless chrome, because it gives you ActiveX and you can shell out to an arbitrary command.
by miiiiiike | 2025-12-20 23:31:04+00:00
Eh, you’re trying to put words in my mouth.

I didn’t ascribe a motive to anyone. Their reasons are their own and it only makes sense that the people who stay in these fights do it because it’s part of their jobs.

There are people who, for whatever reason, keep debates going over small points of disagreement and prevent issues from being settled. Sometimes for years. Right?

The older I get, the more likely I am to recognize and route around or ignore interminable debates. Especially if it’s not for a company, project, or initiative under my direct control.

Remember, the question at the top of this thread was essentially “What happened to ‘masonry’?” Well, there were quibbles over the descriptors.

I don’t care about quibbles. “masonry”, “grid-lanes”, “grid-masonry”, pick one, they’re equivalent. I don’t like it when quibbles block progress.

Sometimes people and companies do want to block things. You’d have to ask them why. Like I said earlier:

> I don't have an incentive to build consensus within a group of people who fundamentally disagree that the thing I need should exist.

Pick your battles… Actually, no, it’s usually better to ignore the fights and just get what you need to get done so you can move on.
by austin-cheney | 2025-12-20 23:31:15+00:00
I am in management of enterprise API development. AI might replace coders but it won’t eliminate people who can work between teams and make firm decisions that drive complex projects forward. Many developers appear to struggle with this and when completely lost they look to waste effort on building SOPs instead of just formulating an original product.

Before this I was a JavaScript developer. I can absolutely see AI replacing most JavaScript developers. It felt really autistic with most people completely terrified to write original code. Everything had to be a React template with a ton of copy/paste. Watch the emotional apocalypse when you take React away.
by sergiotapia | 2025-12-20 23:31:33+00:00
Some fun math for you guys.

I had a single API endpoint performing ~178 Postgres SQL queries.

Setup Latency/query Total time ------------------------------------------------- Same geo area 35ms 6.2s Same local network 4ms 712ms Same server ~0ms 170ms

This is with zero code changes, these time shavings are coming purely from network latency. A lot of devs lately are not even aware of latency costs coming from their service locations. It's crazy!
by charlie-83 | 2025-12-20 23:31:39+00:00
Anyone else cringe at this kind of swearing-filled stuff. I'm all for people expressing themselves however they like but I just personally cringe at it for some reason. I have no problem with swearing but I think it reminds me of when I was 8 and everyone at school used as many swear words as possible because they thought it made them sound cool. I really mean no insult to the people writing this stuff though
by jiggawatts | 2025-12-20 23:31:56+00:00
> Even so I don't get how electrons a meter apart interact through that stuff

Very roughly: It's possible for point-like (or tiny looped) particles to interact as long as they take every possible path instead of just the one path that would cause a collision. How you interpret this is... up for debate. I prefer the many-world interpretation (MWI), but not everyone agrees.

> "if you cut down the spatial dimensions to just 1D" doesn't sound very physical to me

That's just a simplification to aid understanding, it's now how the theory actually works.
by chrneu | 2025-12-20 23:32:29+00:00
> I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales.

i think we're actually in agreement. I just don't see streaming as a "must". A lot of musicians I work with and follow also don't see streaming as a must. It's a necessary evil in today's convenience fixated life/culture.

Most musicians I ask about this absolutely fucking hate streaming and don't view it as a real revenue stream.

That's why nearly all merch tables still have CDs, bandcamp links or records for purchase. Artists make more money off a t-shirt sale than they do from 50,000 streams.

I think you slightly misinterpreted what I meant by "selling their music". Or I might have said it poorly.

also, piracy does not mean less money for small artists. evidence suggests the opposite, i think. I think piracy marginally harms record sales for the top 1% of artists while benefiting basically all other artists.

piracy = free exposure. more exposure means more ticket sales, more merch sales, etc. most musicians i know just want people to hear their stuff. piracy enables that for the majority of folks who can't afford to buy every album. i think artists care more about their art being used in commercial stuff without permission/payment, not everyday people checking their shit out.