MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nephihaha | 2025-12-20 13:56:27+00:00
Two links about "stratospheric aerosol injection" from mainstream sources.

"The Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) - a government backed body - is funding nearly £60m that could allow real-world experiments, including in the UK.

"As part of the Exploring Climate Cooling programme, projects in Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) will involve trying to thicken Arctic sea ice and make clouds more reflective." https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/c5ygydeqq08o

Paper on how "Low-Altitude High-Latitude Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Is Feasible With Existing Aircraft" https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024EF00...
by Lapel2742 | 2025-12-20 13:56:31+00:00
> Talk to Europeans and they hate the EU and see it as an oppressive foreign power.

Maybe you should get out of your right-wing bubble.

- EU approval among its citizens hits record high as security fears grow, poll shows (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-approval-among-its-c...)

- Nearly three quarters of EU citizens (74%) say that, taking everything into account, their country has benefited from being a member of the EU. (https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3378)
by wpietri | 2025-12-20 13:56:31+00:00
I should add that the bond between relational databases and spinning rust goes back further. My dad, who started working as a programmer in the 60s with just magtape as storage, talked about the early era of disks as a big step forward but requiring a lot of detailed work to decide where to put the data and how to find it again. For him, databases were a solution to the problems that that disks created for programmers. And I can certainly imagine that. Suddenly you have to deal with way more data stored in multiple dimensions (platter, cylinder, sector) with wildly nonlinear access times (platter rotation, head movement). I can see how commercial solutions to that problem would have been wildly popular, but also build around solving a number of problems that don't matter.
by sgnelson | 2025-12-20 13:57:36+00:00
FYI, this was posted a month ago when discussing thermal effects of clock drift. I thought it was quite interesting view of what the WWVB location looks like:

https://jila.colorado.edu/news-events/articles/spare-time

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46042946
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-20 13:57:58+00:00
I wonder how model competence and/or user preference on web development (that leaderboard) carries over to more complex and larger projects, or more generally anything other than web development ?

In addition to whatever they are exposed to as part of pre-training, it'd be interesting to know what kind of coding tasks these models are being RL-trained for? Are things like web development and maybe Python/ML coding overemphasized, or are they also being trained on things like Linux/Windows/embedded development etc in different languages?
by dist1ll | 2025-12-20 13:58:11+00:00
The Aurora paper [0] goes into detail of correlated failures.

> In Aurora, we have chosen a design point of tolerating (a) losing an entire AZ and one additional node (AZ+1) without losing data, and (b) losing an entire AZ without impacting the ability to write data. [..] With such a model, we can (a) lose a single AZ and one additional node (a failure of 3 nodes) without losing read availability, and (b) lose any two nodes, including a single AZ failure and maintain write availability.

As for why this can be considered durable enough, section 2.2 gives an argument based on their MTTR (mean time to repair) of storage segments

> We would need to see two such failures in the same 10 second window plus a failure of an AZ not containing either of these two independent failures to lose quorum. At our observed failure rates, that’s sufficiently unlikely, even for the number of databases we manage for our customers.

[0] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~yxy/cs764-f20/papers/aurora-sigmo...
by sylware | 2025-12-20 14:00:06+00:00
Doing such "customizations" (which are actually crypto 101) will break all attacks designed specifically for a crypto algo in mind. Even better if you lie on the crypto algorithm.

Ofc, that must be encrypted on systems which "cannot connect" (and you can go overkill with EM protection with a very good faraday cage).

If you are making such a technical pain for attackers, they will switch to social engineering anyway.
The hierarchy problem is strictly a geometric scaling identity
by albert_roca | 2025-12-20 14:00:10+00:00
Particles are treated as points, but reality is 3D.

Electrostatics and gravity have historically been considered separate interactions with an apparently inexplicable gap. I propose this is entirely explained by the ratio between mass and volume and the ratio between mass and surface.

If we define m_z = √α ⋅ m_P ≈ 1.859 × 10^–9 kg, the ratio of forces becomes identical to the geometric scaling ratio:

F_e / F_g = (m_z / m)^2

This is not an approximation. It is an exact geometric identity derived from the scaling of acceleration:

a_e ∼ m^−5/3 a_g ∼ m^1/3

Below m_z, surface scaling dominates. This is the electrostatic regime. Above m_z, volume scaling dominates. This is the gravitational regime.

There is no hierarchy problem, only a transition between different geometric ratios.

This same geometric model consistently resolves major tensions across all scales with zero free parameters:

A. Proton radius (r_p):

Theory: r_p = 4 · ƛ_p Calc.: 0.84123 × 10^–15 m Exp.: 0.84075 × 10^–15 m ∆: 577 ppm

B. Muon anomaly (g – 2):

Theory: Lepton as an icosahedron (12 vertices). Formula: a_μ = (α / (2 · π)) + (α^2 / 12) Calc.: 0.001165847 Exp.: 0.001165920 ∆: 63 ppm

C. Hubble tension (H_0):

Theory: Local parallax due to electron topology (1 / 12). Formula: H_0_local = H_0_CMB · (1 + 1 / 12) Calc.: 73.01 km/s/Mpc Exp.: 73.04 km/s/Mpc ∆: 328 ppm

D. Fine-structure constant (α):

Theory: α^–1 = (4 · π^3 + π^2 + π) – (α / 24) Calc.: 137.0359996 Exp.: 137.0359991 ∆: 0.005 ppm

E. Cosmic ratio:

Theory: Ω_Λ / Ω_m = √5 Calc.: 2.2360 Exp.: 2.2144 ∆: < 1%

Preprint: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17847770
Show HN: Flock – Social todo app for accountability
by henryaj | 2025-12-20 14:02:54+00:00
Flock is a social productivity app where you share your daily todos with friends for accountability.

Features include real-time visibility of friends' tasks, Pomodoro timer, vim-style keyboard shortcuts (j/k to navigate, space to complete), color-coded goals, and an inbox for quick capture. Built for people who want social motivation to get things done.
by eszed | 2025-12-20 14:03:17+00:00
> The livestream sharing commentary on investing appeared for at least eight minutes late Thursday on whitehouse.gov/live, where the White House usually streams live video of the president speaking.

So /live is some kind of a redirect to whatever other stream source. My guess is that whoever was meant to post the latest stream had this guy's URL in his clipboard history. Oops! Hard to see it being hacking - there are way more "interesting" things to do if you have the keys to whitehouse.gov - and it's not really a big deal, except for the poor schmuck who was watching personal finance videos at work, and maybe to the guy who just found out he has a fan in the Whitehouse. Hope neither of them gets too much federal law enforcement attention.
by Daniel_sk | 2025-12-20 14:03:27+00:00
I don't even see much reason to use Cursor. I am used to IntelliJ IDEA, so I just downloaded the Claude Code plugin and basically now I use the IDE only for navigating in the code, finding references and reviewing the code. I can't even remember the last time I wrote more than 2 lines of code. Claude Code has catapulted my performance at least 5x if not more. And now that the cost of writing test is so minimal I am also able to achieve much better (and meaningful!) test coverage too. The AI agents is where the most productivity is. I just create a plan with Claude, iterate over, ask questions, then let it implement the plan, review, ask to do some adjustments. No manual writing of code at all. Zero.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-20 14:03:28+00:00
Your first sentence: That could happen, but they'd have to send someone, which is an expensive process. It would also cross the into deliberate fraud. In the larger picture, privacy protections are not bulletproof. They don't have to be. They just have to be good enough that they (plus laws against violation) restrain most people from violating them.

Your second sentence is incomprehensible. What are you trying to say?
by nalaginrut | 2025-12-20 14:03:45+00:00
I never met TTN physically, but I'm familiar with him in cyberspace from his code. I didn’t realize he was a private person in real life. From his work, I always felt he was someone deeply passionate, someone who expressed his creativity wholeheartedly through code.

He was one of the pioneers of GNU Guile. It was a lonely and thorny road. Guile was an underappreciated project with a small community, limited tooling for exploration, and very few reference projects to learn from. Only true lovers of the craft were willing to contribute under such conditions.

TTN had spent his precious life time to help to make the foundation of GNU Guile community. His works and skills in the code inspired me a lot in the early time.

I’ve heard that he also contributed to other free software projects, though what I’ve written here is what I know firsthand.

It says, the internet has its own memory. I hope that by writing this to remember what he did and the quiet impact he had.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-12-20 14:03:47+00:00
Could you define an absolute source of truth based on extrinsic features. Something like taking an intrinsic time from atomic sources, pegged to an astronomic or celestial event; then a predicted astronomic event that would allow us to reconcile time in the future.

It might be difficult to generate enough resolution in measurable events that we can predict accurately enough? Like, I'm guessing the start of a transit or alignment event? Maybe something like predicting the time at which a laser pulse will be returnable from a lunar reflector -- if we can do the prediction accurately enough then we can re-establish time back to the current fixed scale.

I think I'm addressing an event that won't ever happen (all precise and accurate time sources are lost/perturbed), and if it does it won't be important to re-sync in this way. But you know...
by xtiansimon | 2025-12-20 14:03:49+00:00
Reminds me of this lecture: “Don’t talk to Police”, Law Professor James Duane.

The argument goes, there are a lot of laws and there are virtually an infinite variety of possible circumstances which could trigger a possible violation making it impossible for anyone to know if their statements might appear relevant to a prosecutor.

https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?si=9ZYuVSlPsfEgQyc9

Of course, if you don’t have time to watch that excellent presentation, just crib this one: National Lawyer’s Guild of Detroit, MI: “When the cops come calling, what do you do? SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

https://youtu.be/nWEpW6KOZDs?si=eobu1fTfSMTwbXME
by andai | 2025-12-20 14:05:42+00:00
I found this extremely interesting and enjoyable.

I would however recommend testing it on a slower internet connection and a lower end device. Because I was spending 90% of my time in the "loading data" phases, and once the intro was done, the thing ran at one frame per second and I was not able to use it. (I have 5G and I bought my phone last year.)
by nephihaha | 2025-12-20 14:06:13+00:00
Voter turn out is extremely low in certain central and eastern Europe for EU elections. I think it was down to under 20% in some places a few years ago.

I had hoped that the UK would vote to remain and Europe would move away from a centralist, authoritarian model, but it's got worse especially since 2020. The EU is its own worst enemy.
by ramoz | 2025-12-20 14:06:28+00:00
https://x.com/giansegato/status/2002203155262812529/photo/1

https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/2002203627377574113

> Even Google's cheaper Gemini 3 Flash model seems to be slightly ahead of Opus 4.5.

What an insane take for anybody uses these models daily.
by taffer | 2025-12-20 14:06:47+00:00
On the other hand, smaller pages mean that more pages can fit in your CPU cache. Since CPU speed has improved much more than memory bus speed, and since cache is a scarce resource, it is important to use your cache lines as efficiently as possible.

Ultimately, it's a trade-off: larger pages mean faster I/O, while smaller pages mean better CPU utilisation.
by seec | 2025-12-20 14:06:49+00:00
My life experience and resulting sentiment is extremely similar to yours.

I feel that the education system is deeply flawed and rewards all the wrong things because we refuse to select based on real factors because of political ideology. I think those that are successful become so despite of it, instead of because of it. When you looks at the biographies or people who truly pushed the enveloppe and changed the world, it becomes evident.

We need to ask if the cost of the education system are really worth the rewards. Considering how large that cost has become nowadays, my premilinary anwser would be no. And I feel that the shift to rent seeking economy as well as reduced innovation and iteration speed is deeply linked to that. Most of the recent growth came from IT, a field that was notorious for be full of dropouts. That should tell you something. Now that the field has been innunduated by college graduate, it has shifted to fully extractive behavior.

Any push back against the system is met with suspition because most people feel they should have a shot at making it big, because they are worth it. In practice, it seems that the inequalities never disappear anyway, and people just have to pay more upfront in order to try to prove themselves. In the long run, it mostly end up exactly as it started and society just pay a dear cost for what is basically unproductive behavior.

You behavior remark is quite on the nose, because from my point of view this is exactly how tyrannies are created. If you get rewarded too much for simply being obedient to the autority in place, overtime any other strategy gets pennalised dispropotionally and you end up with a bunch of sycophant you will never push back against the order, no matter how bad the decisions/rules get.
by aeonik | 2025-12-20 14:06:57+00:00
I do a lot of work in similar areas here.

While vibe coding will get you something that potentially works, I've noticed LLMs are really bad at cleanly abstracting across multiple layers in this area. They usually will insist on parsing and serializing every field at every layer.

If you have the protocols/interfaces well defined up front it is very fast at building extensions, analytics or visualizations though.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-20 14:07:00+00:00
We agree.

What's interesting is JFK Jr. (our Secratary of Health and Human Services) has a stance that Americans eat too many ultra-processed foods. He wants people to eat more whole foods and fewer additives. He questions conventional warnings about saturated fat and supports dietary changes than include more full-fat dairy and meats. He prefers education over bans or mandates.
by mkw5053 | 2025-12-20 14:07:07+00:00
Interesting, thanks for sharing!

I definitely don't walk away from any of Brian Greene's content thinking that String Theory is anything close to a confirmed fact at all.

It's been some times since I read his earlier books, possibly his tone has changed?

I'll also say, I'm far from a professional physicist. I'm reading and watching for fun and intellectual curiosity, not to learn physics with the goal of doing my own research. I always thought of String Theory as being more of a study of math where many people have unsuccessfully tried to apply it to physics. And, that it's lead to some really interesting ideas. I just find him and his work really enjoyable.
by charlescearl | 2025-12-20 14:07:27+00:00
If you attend any “public” meeting of a government or quasi-state entity in the US (library board, energy regulation board, county board,…) it becomes clear that the state seeks to hide and shift accountability at every turn and is willing to bring in armed force to squash even the slightest demand for transparency.

Living in actually existing fascism requires adoption of anonymity & privacy preservation processes. You have so much worth protecting because you have everything to lose.
by simondotau | 2025-12-20 14:07:55+00:00
Because such bugs were predominantly associated with then-new platform features.

As a web developer myself, I appreciate the frustration with Safari's flexbox bugs of a decade ago and viewport bugs more recently. I also remember being endlessly frustrated by Chrome bugs too, like maddening scroll anchoring behaviours, subpixel rounding inconsistencies, and position:fixed bugs which were broken for so long than the bugs became the de-facto standard which other browsers had to implement. All browsers have bugs. To suggest that Safari was uniquely bad is to view history with Chrome-tinted glasses.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-20 14:08:36+00:00
Well, it's a judgment call. Is this critic operating in good faith, or not? The reporter is not necessarily in the best position to judge. On the other hand, they have the best grasp of all the details of the interaction with this (alleged) bully.

"You don't want continuing abuse" is quite different from "you don't want feedback".
by dejv | 2025-12-20 14:09:58+00:00
"Do LLMs make bad code: yes all the time (at the moment zero clue about good architecture). Are they still useful: yes, extremely so."

Well, lets see how all the economics will play out. LLMs might be really useful, but as far as I can see all the AI companies are not making money on inference alone. We might be hitting plateau in capabilities with money being raised on vision of being this godlike tech that will change the world completely. Sooner or later the costs will have to meet the reality.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-20 14:10:32+00:00
> Columnar layout is FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN on media that doesn't have two fixed-size axes.

You can use plain old CSS columns (which don't have the automated "masonry" packing behavior of this new Grid layout, they just display content sequentially) and scroll them horizontally. But horizontal scrolling is cumbersome with most input devices, so this new "packed" columnar layout is a good way of coping with the awkwardness of vertical scrolled fixed-width lanes.
by 9rx | 2025-12-20 14:11:08+00:00
Each of the last productivity multipliers coincided with greatly expanded markets (e.g. PC revolution, internet, mobile). Those are at the saturation point. And we've effectively built all the software those things need now. Of course there is still room for innovation in software, but it is not like in the past where we also had to build all the low-hanging fruit at the same time. That doesn't require nearly as many people — and that was already starting to become apparent before anyone knew what an LLM is.

This AI craze swooped in at the right time to help hold up the industry and is the only thing keeping it together right now. We're quickly trying to build all the low-hanging fruit for it, keeping many developers busy (although not like it used to be), but there isn't much low-hanging fruit to build. LLMs don't have the breadth of need like previous computing revolutions had. Once we've added chat interfaces to everything, which is far from being a Herculean task, all the low-hanging fruit will be gone. That's quite unlike previous revolutions where we had to build all the software from scratch, effectively, not just slap some lipstick on existing software.

If we want to begin to relive the past, we need a new hardware paradigm that needs all the software rewritten for it again. Not an impossible thought, but all the low-hanging hardware directions have also been picked at this point so the likelihood of that isn’t what it used to be either.
by darepublic | 2025-12-20 14:11:33+00:00
On Firefox mobile if I pick the last item then scroll up past the top of the first item and place it often doesn't reflect. There are probably other little bugs like this. Also if you pick and scroll past the area there was some jitter with the cancel and place options. Maybe need to deal with those edge cases. When it works well it is nice but I would be afraid to use something like this
by ajb | 2025-12-20 14:12:12+00:00
It's older than 1832; for example: "He who trembles at this moment is guilty. For innocence never trembles before public vigilance." Maximilien Robespierre, July 26 (8 Thermidor), 1794 (translated - the original would be in French). When it is used by surveillance advocates, they don't use the exact words.

Incidentally here is that quote, with Ian Richardson as Robespierre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOW6OfeOW10
by toolslive | 2025-12-20 14:13:01+00:00
but... but... SSD/MVMes are not really block devices. Not wrangling them into a block device interface but using the full set of features can already yield major improvements. Two examples: metadata and indexes need smaller granularities compared to data and an NVMe can do this quite naturally. Another example is that the data can be sent directly from the device to the network, without the CPU being involved.
by stared | 2025-12-20 14:13:45+00:00
My motivation was to use the smartest model available (overall, not only from Google) - I wanted to squeeze more out of Gemini 3 Pro that in Cursor. With new model releases usually there are things with outages. This are ever changing.

That said, for many tasks (summaries and data extraction) I do use Gemini 2.5 Flash, as it cheap and fast. So excited to try Gemini 3 Flash as well.
by cornholio | 2025-12-20 14:14:19+00:00
You know you need to be careful when an Amazon engineer will argue for a database architecture that fully leverages (and makes you dependent of) the strengths of their employer's product. In particular:

> Commit-to-disk on a single system is both unnecessary (because we can replicate across storage on multiple systems) and inadequate (because we don’t want to lose writes even if a single system fails).

This is surely true for certain use cases, say financial applications which must guarantee 100% uptime, but I'd argue the vast, vast majority of applications are perfectly ok with local commit and rapid recovery from remote logs and replicas. The point is, the cloud won't give you that distributed consistency for free, you will pay for it both in money and complexity that in practice will lock you in to a specific cloud vendor.

I.e, make cloud and hosting services impossible to commoditize by the database vendors, which is exactly the point.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-20 14:16:22+00:00
It is not a question of want. Gaming will exist in some form so I am simply uncertain what you are concerned about.

Can you elaborate a little? What, exactly, is your concern here? That you won't have nvidia as a choice? That AMD will be the only game in town? That gpu market will move from duopoly ( for gaming specifically ) to monopoly? I have little to go on, but I don't really want to put words in your mouth based on minimal post.
by albert_e | 2025-12-20 14:16:29+00:00
interesting -- but i am not sure one would want to build an entire presentation with a lot of 3D effects and animations

IMO this would be a good tool to have among many -- to use judiciously only when needed. -- Maybe if we could somehow integrate this capability into existing tools (not sure how).

(I think MS Powerpoint has some 3D objects and animations -- but I dont see it used much in business. I used it once for a fancy presentation and it worked fine. It does support "Morph" transition so you can copy a slide 1it ha 3D object and move / scale / rotate it in 3D ... and powerpoint will interpolate it for you. you can also animate the objects - like apply a 3D rotation.)