MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teleforce | 2025-12-07 11:57:26+00:00
Thanks for pointing that out but there's must some mistakes on the website. Al-Kindi contribution is on the experiment in showing that tides are caused by the expansion of water due to heat but of course later people know that it mainly due to gravity.

Other well known Arabic and muslim reseachers in the middle ages working on ocean tides are Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi (Albumasar), Al-Biruni and Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji (Alpetragius).

Albumasar in his seminal book on tides was the first hypothesized the lunar correlation [1]. He's arguably the most important figure in the history of tidal theory between the ancient Greeks and Renaissance. His famous work namely The Great Introduction to Astrology (Kitab al-Madkhal al-Kabir) was translated into Latin in the 12th century and became the standard reference for European scholars (like Roger Bacon and Albert the Great) when they tried to understand tidal physics.

Al-Biruni was a polymath who had direct experience with the strong tides of the Indian Ocean specifically at the port of Somnath in Gujarat, India. Of the 146 books written by him, 95 are devoted to astronomy, mathematics, and related subjects like mathematical geography [2]. In his encyclopedic work Indica (Kitab al-Hind), he discussed how the moon influences "moist substances". He dismissed the common myth in the region that viewed tides as the breathing of the earth or sea monsters. He firmly established the moon as the physical cause of the tidal cycle. This observation was using data gathered from sailors and his own measurements of the shoreline.

Al-Bitruji was the very first astronomer who proposed an alternative to Ptolemy's model of the universe long before (more than 300 years) Galileo, by avoiding both epicycles and eccentrics mechanism [3]. According to him, the movement of the celestial spheres created a physical dragging force that stirred the waters of the earth, but his theory is less accurate than Albumasar's.

Ocean tides was a significant area of study for Arab and Muslim reseachers during the middle ages (Islamic Golden Age), had extensive access to the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, where tides are far more dramatic. The Greeks and Romans however, had a very limited exposure to ocean tides since they mostly observing the tide-less Mediterranean sea.

[1] Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ma%27shar_al-Balkhi

[2] Al-Biruni:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Biruni

[3] Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur_ad-Din_al-Bitruji
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-12-07 11:57:59+00:00
Pure perl modules are not, unless they use syntactic features that first appear in the newer versions.

Modules with C extensions have to be recompiled with libperl they run against, as much as CPython extensions link to a particular libpython, and guess Ruby is the same. But they, with very few exceptions, will recompile and run fine. XS is cryptic but its backwards compatibility story is good.
by spankibalt | 2025-12-07 11:58:22+00:00
> "I don’t know what you mean by 'market realities'."

The reality that a certain crowd, I count myself among them, has to/or might have to choose laptops because machines in their preferred form factor either a) implement too many inacceptable but technically entirely avoidable compromises, or b) don't exist at all. That market reality. Like, when you have to settle for a laptop.
by EGreg | 2025-12-07 11:59:44+00:00
This. I remember in 2012 TechCrunch disrupt hackathon overnight making “Birthdays” to satirize how Facebook systematically helped society cheapen the word “friend” and “like”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om4_F0VFIdI

It has only been downhill from here. Now my AI wishes happy birthday to your AI which thanks it. Thoughtfulness at scale!
by onestepahead | 2025-12-07 11:59:48+00:00
One Step Ahead is an offline security app for iOS/macOS that uses Smart Split (3-by-2) technique to protect sensitive data like crypto seed phrases, logins, text, images, and PDFs. Instead of encrypting everything into a single vault, it splits your data into 3 parts, and any two parts can reconstruct the original. This removes the single point of failure problem (lost password, corrupted vault, compromised device, etc). The app generates QR/text files or pages you can distribute across different devices or locations. It also supports image/Binary splitting for images and PDFs. Would love feedback on the concept, especially around security assumptions and offline UX.
by soerxpso | 2025-12-07 11:59:51+00:00
Would calling and saying, "Hey, the bridge is destroyed!" without an image not have also triggered a delay? I question the safety standards of the railway if they would just ignore such a call after an earthquake. Generative AI doesn't change the situation at all. An image shouldn't be treated as carrying more weight than a statement, but the statement without the image would be the same in this situation. This has really been an issue since the popularization of the telephone, which made it sufficiently easy to communicate a lie from far away that someone might choose to do so for fun.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-07 11:59:56+00:00
Once you see a multi-party parliamentary system up close, the US presidential system (and other presidential systems) look far inferior. They are frequently two parties only, and the executive branch is too strong. It is like electing a king/queen for 4 to 5 years. Plus the US system is setup to make it almost impossible to change the constitution. If you look at other highly developed democracies, they make small regular changes to their constitution -- that is impossible in the US.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-07 12:00:53+00:00
Matlab is fundamentally not a great language. It's not great at interacting with data that isn't already blocks of numbers, it's terrible for UI design, and even for matrix manipulation numpy is beating it nowadays. The main reason to use it is if you really need something in one of the toolboxes that doesn't have an open-source equivalent, or for Simulink. As a general data processing language it's far from the best default.
by riedel | 2025-12-07 12:01:29+00:00
I tried to use task warrior, however, a) I need a way to creat task quickly when I think about them (I guess I am being a bit on the attention deficit spectrum) b) I need a way to integrate a bit with time boxing on my work calendar . The problem is that the task warrior android or mobile eb apps app on mobile are really a bit of a UX nightmare compared to the cli interface. And while the plugin landscape of task warrior is broad, support for typical work settings is not really great out of the box. In the end all 'solutions' only seem to be a road towards meta-procrastination, instead of getting things done...
by mistersquid | 2025-12-07 12:03:47+00:00
> If you're interested in things like this you might wanna checkout CGP Grey's videos on tracking down various stories from books through archives. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ

The video is sort of funny and reminds me of the paranoiac absurd archival research of the Trystero in Thomas Pynchon's _The Crying of Lot 49_.
by leobg | 2025-12-07 12:04:24+00:00
Chapter 4 - The Father and Mother

> Transplanted, moreover, to a world in which women had to work, and work hard. On washdays, clothes had to be lifted out of the big soaking vats of boiling water on the ends of long poles, the clothes dripping and heavy; the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands; the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
by finaard | 2025-12-07 12:04:29+00:00
> Python was so much easier as it was simple define the regex and then use a function on it. I suppose I should hjave spent a few days to write some wrapper in perl - doing those few days would have saved me time overall.

That's funny. I avoid python whenever possible, but one of the things I hate the most is how it is doing regex. I find the way it works in perl (both for search/replace and in conditionals) just intuitive.
by jchw | 2025-12-07 12:06:19+00:00
This begs the question, and I've genuinely thought this before, of why we don't just strap a battery to a kettle and end this silly debate. If it takes 5 minutes to boil a cup of water in a 1000 watt kettle, that's somewhere around 80Wh... I guess it would be kind of expensive, but couldn't you make a pretty fast kettle with some number of high discharge battery cells?

(Well honestly, I guess the real answer is outside of Internet debates most people probably just don't consider 5 minutes to boil a cup of water to be a problem.)
by jalapenos | 2025-12-07 12:06:43+00:00
The weapon theory strikes me as silly.

But it's still amazing that we haven't settled where it came from, and instead everyone decided to approach this factual matter as a political one, stupidmaxxing.

Not only that, we all just moved on as if nothing happened, despite this event having killed so many people, and destroying countless other people's lives. Not by natural event, but (under either theory, since it really wasn't that deadly) due to the actions or reactions of people.

Kind of makes one understand where the emotional urge for "judgment" stories like the Egypt locusts in bible etc, where whole societies just get wrecked, motivated by various forms of wanting righteous retribution against society at large come from. The average person's attitude and behavior is just so profoundly contemptible.
by a5c11 | 2025-12-07 12:06:46+00:00
> whatever ultimately gets you to where you want to be

Money.

> classifying people is utter BS, and assigning labels is very hurtful

Is saying "you have cardiovascular issues" labeling or diagnosis? Where would you draw the line? We have a definition of a healthy heart, likewise we have a definition of a healthy brain. If I suffered a stroke, it's not because my body is unique, it's because of a disease.
by soerxpso | 2025-12-07 12:07:57+00:00
Suppose that I care about trustworthy and reliably accurate news sources and am willing to pay. How can I distinguish which ones are trustworthy and reliable? No offense to the folks at 404 Media, but I've never met a single one of them, and I have no reason to believe that they wouldn't lie to me for money. You clearly have your own prejudices and biases about which media organizations are honorable and which are not, which you're wrapping up as if it's about a "truthfulness" that you couldn't possibly actually verify.
by bsenftner | 2025-12-07 12:08:12+00:00
20% to 25% of the cowboys were Black, and that aspect of history has been erased. Hollywood, propagandists and media's efforts to glorify, White wash, and profit off the American West Frontier has 100% distorted our history. It was much closer to this "the past was not cute", and then add in rampant corruption, criminal and religious criminal activity and you art starting to get there.

We are a propaganda nation, far better at it than any other on Earth.
by opan | 2025-12-07 12:08:20+00:00
Due to these sorts of quotes from them, I often say semi-seriously that programmers don't know how to use computers. Another thing in this vein I often recall is Notch saying he finds both vim and emacs too confusing/difficult (while many non-programmers can use them both without issue). It may be an over-specialization. With modern labels you could say they put everything into "Dev" and only the bare minimum into "Ops".
by svilen_dobrev | 2025-12-07 12:09:52+00:00
well, maybe it is everything that is not "illiterate programming", i.e. "programming-without-understanding".. which decade by decade gets more and more abundant/dominating.

i do similar thing which i call live-sketching.. a mostly-no-content python namespace-hierarchy of module(s) and classes (used as just namespace holders), and then add (would-do-somehing) "terminal" methods, and combine-those-into-flows actual "procedures" methods , here and there .. until the "communication" diagram starts appear out of it, and week after week, fill the missing parts. It feels like some way of writing executable spec over imagined/fake stuff, and slowly replacing the fakes with reals. Some parts never get filled. Others are replaced with big-external-pieces - as-long-as matching the spec needed. What's left is written by hand.. and all this maybe multiple cycles.

This approach allows for both keeping the knowledge of what the system should do - on the spec / hierarchical level - and freedom to leave things undone, plug some external monster, or do-it-yourself as one sees fit. The downside is that the plumbing between pieces might be bigger/messier than the pieces - if you have ever seen the spiderweb of wires above a breadboard with TTL ICs..

e.g. for my Last project - re-engineering a multiple-aging-variants of kiosk-system into coherent single codebase that can spawn each/most of the previous - took me 6 months to turn a zoo of 20x 25KLoc into single 20Kloc +- 5 for the specializations - and the code-structure still preserves the initial split-of-concerns (some call it architecture), and comms "diagram", who talks to who when/why.

But yeah, it's not for faint-hearted, and there little visibility of the amount of work going/done, as the structure at day 1 is more or less the structure at day 181, and management may decide to see only that..
by vladvasiliu | 2025-12-07 12:10:58+00:00
> Input lag is the topmost issue

What do you mean? I haven't daily driven a Mac in almost five years now. I mainly run Linux and occasionally Windows on regular PCs. Whenever I open a MacBook, the first thing I notice is how reactive it feels. Sure, I could do without the animations, but I think that's a different issue. This impression is all the more pronounced if I'd been using Windows just before, but that's probably because Linux is a pretty bare i3 setup.
by rimbo789 | 2025-12-07 12:12:19+00:00
I had never worked on slack until this spring when I joined a company that used it. I don’t get what all the fuss is about. It is just an IM client?

Honestly I preferred Google hangouts because they were better integrated with my email.

Channels as far as I can tell are a mix of group chats or replacements for mass email distribution lists. Nothing special.

Also point 7in this blog is truly insane. The whole point of a dm is I don’t want others to see it.
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-07 12:14:03+00:00
The error wasn't ignored, it was logged (and it's an example on a web forum, in reality you'd at least increment a metric too and do other things).

> General top level exceptions handlers are a huge code smell

And yet millions of programs have such things and they work fine. My experience has been that they tend to be more reliable than other programs. E.g. IntelliJ hardly ever tears down the entire process when something goes wrong, it fails gracefully and reports back to HQ whereas other IDEs I've used hard crash quite regularly. Much more disruptive.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-07 12:14:19+00:00
> $200k a year doesn't even get you a nice 1 bedroom apartment in many of the cities these representatives represent.

This is getting a little bit ridiculous. Manhattan is surely the most expensive housing market per square meter in the United States. You can get a nice 1 bedroom for about 5,000 USD per month. That is 60K USD per year. That is only 30% of their salary.

> Let alone pay for the 2 separate residences that they effectively need to maintain.

Their second place of residence while in Washington D.C.: That is paid for by the US gov't.
by rpastuszak | 2025-12-07 12:14:35+00:00
I've been messing with and collecting stuff like this for many years. Some links:

- On building kind, sustainable software: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/kind-software/

- Example projects (toys instead of blogs): https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/projects-and-apps-i-built-f...

- Wishlist: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/things-to-support-my-own-we...

- List of places to find indie content (something I used for my weekly newsletter): https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/places-to-find-indie-web-co...

Nowadays my current approach is:

1) meeting folks via Say Hi (unoffice hours)

2) keeping a separate RSS feed in NetNewsWire called People - this feed contains only the people I've met online or in person

EDIT: I almost forgot, but my partner wrote a cool intro to Indieweb for less techie folks: https://newpublic.substack.com/p/the-handmade-internet-is-ma...

It includes interviews with some of the people you might know from here :)
by barrister | 2025-12-07 12:14:51+00:00
Have you tried vscode-neovim?

"This extension uses a fully embedded Neovim instance, no more half-complete Vim emulation!"

This article seems to compare an out-of-the-box vscode with a tailor made vim.config. I guarantee if he spent as much time configuring vscode as he did configuring vim he could establish equivalent environments. That vscode-neovim plugin alone (not vscode-vim) is likely sufficient.
by adangert | 2025-12-07 12:15:58+00:00
Not everything has to be black and white, there is middle ground for improvement. I'm not sure anyone loves the same MegaCorp™ ad plastered all over buildings, highways and stoplights.

The size, depth, and reach of the advertising industry is a direct result of the amount of money injected into it. The current ad industry is effective, awful, anti-competitive and resembles more of a cancer at this point than it's intended purpose to provide useful information.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-07 12:16:08+00:00
> since LLM generated content is not copyrightable

That's not how it works. If you ask an LLM to write Harry Potter and it writes something that is 99% the same as Harry Potter, it isn't magically free of copyright. That would obviously be insane.

The legal system is still figuring out exactly what the rules are here but it seems likely that it's going to be on the LLM user to know if the output is protected by copyright. I imagine AI vendors will develop secondary search thingies to warn you (if they haven't already), and there will probably be some "reasonable belief" defence in the eventual laws.

Either way it definitely isn't as simple as "LLM wrote it so we can ignore copyright".
by dash2 | 2025-12-07 12:16:26+00:00
This is true and fair, yet there is another mistake which I see a lot of: thinking that because people didn't live lives as comfortable as we do, their lot was unremitting misery. Kind of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail view of pre-industrial life.

It's important to have some nuance. Different places had different living standards. The French village life depicted in Peasants into Frenchmen sounds grim; English village life around 1900 was nice enough to generate nostalgic books like Lark Rise to Candleford after the rise of the motor car. The peasants in Brueghel paintings are having a lot of rough, unsophisticated fun.

That doesn't mean we should not be grateful for (say) modern dentistry! Of course we should. But if you paint an entirely black picture of premodern life, you may subtly dehumanize the people who lived it.
by Mtinie | 2025-12-07 12:17:09+00:00
Both camps, for different reasons.

For novices, LLMs are infinitely patient rubber ducks. They unstick the stuck; helping people past the coding and system management hurdles that once required deep dives through Stack Overflow and esoteric blog posts. When an explanation doesn’t land, they’ll reframe until one does. And because they’re confidently wrong often enough, learning to spot their errors becomes part of the curriculum.

For experienced engineers, they’re tireless boilerplate generators, dynamic linters, and a fresh set of eyes at 2am when no one else is around to ask. They handle the mechanical work so you can focus on the interesting problems.

The caveat for both: intentionality matters. They reward users who know what they’re looking for and punish those who outsource judgment entirely.
by bsenftner | 2025-12-07 12:17:43+00:00
It is really too bad that "Slack" (the application) is the antithesis of "Slack" (the SubGenius philosophy):

In the satirical Church of the SubGenius, Slack is the ultimate goal: a state of blissful, lazy freedom from work, responsibility, and societal pressure, achieved by rejecting "Normal" conformity and embracing conspiracy, self-delusion, and "Bulldada" (bullshit) to attain personal liberation, money, and effortless success, with the mustachioed avatar J.R. "Bob" Dobbs as the ultimate guide to this spiritual laziness. Key Aspects of Slack:

Anti-Work/Anti-Conformity: Slack means escaping the "compulsive urges" of modern life, like working, saving money, and trying to be "normal".

Effortless Achievement: It's the ability to get what you want (wealth, status, love) without effort, often through bizarre, pseudo-occult means or by exploiting the system.

Conspiracy & Weirdness: Slack is tied to uncovering hidden truths (aliens, conspiracies) and embracing abnormality, separating believers from the "Normals".

J.R. "Bob" Dobbs: The iconic, pipe-smoking, suited figure is the living embodiment of Slack, a shortcut to financial heaven and a life of ease.

"Hour of Slack": This is the name of the SubGenius radio show, broadcasting their anti-establishment message and teachings on achieving Slack.

How to Get Slack (According to the Church): * Join the Church of the SubGenius and pledge allegiance to Bob. * Use "Bulldada" (bullshit) and "Morealism" (more bullshit) to overcome problems. * Learn "occult technology" and incantations for financial power. * Reject mainstream pressures and embrace your inner weirdness.

Essentially, Slack is a satirical take on the American dream, promising ultimate success and happiness through utter laziness and rebellion against the very systems that create the need for such a shortcut.

...and it being "the season" - if you live in any city larger than 30K, look for an announcement of the "drunken Santa pub crawl". That is a global annual event the SubGenius put on every year, where mobs people in Santa outfits swarm bars for a 24 hour period, often over a hundred Santas.
by mopsi | 2025-12-07 12:18:43+00:00
Speaking of things people pretend not to exist, Russian historiography frames WWII as lasting from 1941 to 1945. The USSR conspired with the Nazis to divide Europe[1], invaded Poland from the east in cooperation with Germany[2], held a joint victory parade when Soviet and German forces met[3], murdered the Polish people in an industrial manner[4], and so forth. Later, it pretended that the war began only in 1941 and that none of this had happened. These events were officially acknowledged only in the early 1990s, in the final days of the USSR.

And these were only the opening months of the war. Here is Soviet officer Leonid Rabichev giving a chilling description of the final months of the war in Prussia and the extent of Soviet atrocities against civilians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ywe5pFT928

Stories like these are why the phrase "Soviet liberators" is used only sarcastically in Eastern Europe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_military...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
by ffsm8 | 2025-12-07 12:18:52+00:00
Apple Silicon is a slightly customized ARM processor soldered onto a main board. That's not the reason for it's better performance.

Microsofts support for these is still kinda bad ime, which is easily the biggest impact on their battery longevity.

Furthermore, Most super intrusive and performance hindering spyware aka antivirus is only deployed on windows, hence it gets double-punched by having subpar processor support and wastage in the processes running in corporate environments. The latter being the biggest performance impact.

These are however all software, not hardware bound issues