MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2025-12-15 18:29:22+00:00
The Universe coalesced into hydrogen and helium from a quark-gluon plasma soon after the Big Bang. It's kind of staggering the sequence of events that occurred afterwards to bring us here.

As many of us know, the fusion in stars produces elements as heavy as iron. It then takes explosions of those stars to scatter those elements into space, ultimately bringing them into the protoplanetary disc of a new star, such that it can form a planet in the right zone. That star then needs to live long enough and the system needs to be stable enough to produce complex life.

But it gets worse because we obviously have elements heavier than iron. So stars of a sufficient size need to form such that when the stars die they do so in an even more violent fashion. The core needs to collapse into neutronium and the resultant supernova can produce heavier elements. They also come from neutron star mergers.

So all the uranium we have on Earth came from such an event. Because of the nuclear decay chain we can estimate when this uranium was made and IIRC that's somewhere between 80 and 200 million years before the Earth formed.

So this all had to happen sufficiently close to the Sun and that material had to be captured in the Sun's protoplanetary disc. We needed the right combination of elements to form a protective magnetic field and produce enough but not too much heat.

We're going to keep discovering mechanisms like this and the importance of particular isotopes, events and things like how amino acids seem to form relatively easily (given the right elements are present), which itself is a consequence of CNO fusion.

But also why did the Sun form at all? It has to be in a nebula of largely hydrogen and helium and something had to trigger that like the shock wave from a nearby supernova or neutron star or black hole merger.

It's kind of why I think sentient life is incredibly rare.
by cakealert | 2025-12-15 18:29:31+00:00
The real question is if AI replaces labor, what will keep democracy in place?

People who advocate for things like UBI don't seem to realize that when voters don't have a share in the productivity of their nation, they become 100% a liability. The reason democracy persists is that the powers that be aren't incentivized to destroy democracy as it would harm them too. In 10 years that will no longer be the case. Arguably, you can already see this today as the future expectations affect the present.
by Paedor | 2025-12-15 18:29:47+00:00
This only really applies in a world of complete information. Pesticide side effects were an enormous externality, which only the company was aware of. And they obviously worked hard to keep that information out of the public consciousness. Perhaps there could be nuance to producing the pesticide, weighing food prices against health impacts, but that’s no justification for lying about what it does.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-12-15 18:30:14+00:00
Completely appalled to learn that docs.rs lets you inject any html/css/js you want into the live site (on pages documenting your crate). I love the flexibility but shudder at the security hole the size of, oh, I don’t know, the Grand Canyon.

It’s not a new discovery, I just didn’t know docs.rs (intentionally) wasn’t blocking this. Cf https://docs.rs/pwnies/0.0.13/pwnies/
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-15 18:30:59+00:00
I’ve been in court multiple times in my life including last month. I assure you there’s nothing free about them.

The US has the largest prison population.

China has plenty of problems but no country matches the depravity of the US “justice” system.

Oh and that’s just the “formal” system, go to the south and you’ll see what it is.
by wtallis | 2025-12-15 18:31:00+00:00
At least the Samsung and SanDisk PCIe AHCI M.2 drives were only for PC OEMs and were not officially sold as retail products. There were gray-market resellers, but overall it was a niche and short-lived format. Especially because any system that shipped with a PCIe M.2 slot could gain NVMe capability if the OEM deigned to release an appropriate UEFI firmware update.
by pdonis | 2025-12-15 18:31:21+00:00
> they are able to represent labor as a single entity

They'd be even more able to do that if they were actual corporations, owned by all the workers, selling organized labor as a service. Then they would only have to negotiate the prices of the services they sold, instead of having to negotiate all kinds of other things. The workers themselves, as owners of the corporation, would be determining things like benefit packages, retirement, how to bring new workers in, etc., etc.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-12-15 18:31:28+00:00
What is the non-insulting alternative? Here's my proposal:

Can we have an honest discussion that uses numbers instead of hyperbole?

Notably, that still seems pretty insulting to me. jimbokun wants to have an honest discussion about the problem, using true data instead of emotional exaggeration. This is a reasonable thing to ask IMO, but of course it seems like an insult towards the person that's making stuff up.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-12-15 18:31:52+00:00
Completely appalled to learn that docs.rs lets you inject any html/css/js you want into the live site (on pages documenting your crate). I love the flexibility but shudder at the security hole the size of, oh, I don’t know, the Grand Canyon.

It’s not a new discovery, I just didn’t know docs.rs (intentionally) wasn’t blocking this. Cf https://docs.rs/pwnies/0.0.13/pwnies/

(This all makes more sense if you read the blog post instead of the direct arborium link: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/my-gift-to-the-rust-docs-te...)
by maxglute | 2025-12-15 18:32:03+00:00
PRC finally enforced it. HK had high degree of autonomy (not full autonomy), and high degreed their way to not implement national security law for 20 years leading to compadrors like Lai to exist (incidentally also the largest CIA base in Asia was in HK). Imagine a region in your country with zero national security ordinance for 20 years during geopolitical competition while nativist/traitors (I'm sorry democracy activists) shake hands with Mike Pompeo lol. TLDR traitors fucked around and found out and now we finally have sustainable 1C2S.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-15 18:32:09+00:00
If the point is to tax AI consumers then AI providers can collect that tax on behalf of the IRS.

Taxing the profit of AI companies is useless since profit is a number that is easily manipulated to 0. Taxing revenue is much more direct. Prices have to go up to cover the tax. Hence the consumer oays "more" and that more is passed onto the tax man.

Taxing profit is exactly why businesses pay so little tax - it's trivial to make "no profit". (For example if the IP is held in another jurisdiction with a lower tax rate, and is "licensed" by the company which wants to make no profit. )
by prepend | 2025-12-15 18:32:25+00:00
I found the info not actionable because it wouldn’t say what actual values were posted.

I have a common name Gmail account. The password is rather complex and I would be surprised if it leaks as only I and Google know it. However, I would get reports that it’s on the dark web with blanked out password values. So I never knew if they actually compromised or just something else.

They would also report when some random site that used my Gmail address as user id was on the darknet that I don’t care about. I don’t care if my fidofido account is leaked. I never use it and if I did, then I would reset.

I think if the data were useful Google would have kept this up.

I bet they keep tracking though, just keep the reports internal.
by wasabi991011 | 2025-12-15 18:32:30+00:00
I'm having a hard time understanding this article.

First of all, a quantum annealer is not a universal quantum computer, just to elucidate the title.

Then, it seems like they are comparing a simulation of p-computers to a physical realization of a quantum annealer (likely D-wave, but not named outright for some reason). If this is true, it doesn't seem like a very relevant comparison, because D-wave systems actually exist, while their p-computer sounds like it is just a design. But I may have misunderstood, because at times they make it sound like the p-computer actually exists.

Also, they talk about how p-computers can be scaled up with TSMC semiconductor technology. From what I know, this is also true for semiconductor-based (universal) quantum computers.
by DrScientist | 2025-12-15 18:33:17+00:00
And I wonder if they will discover that in order to interpret those numbers in a lot of cases they will need to bring in their direct reports to contextualise them.

If corporate decisions could be made purely from the data recorded then you don't need people to make those decisions. The reason you often do is that a lot of the critical information for decision making is brought in to the meeting out-of-band in people's heads.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-15 18:33:48+00:00
Not parent-poster, but I imagine the most difficult cases involve non-public stocks or non-fungible physical assets. Consider the problem of: "Someone purchased an irreplaceable ancient urn for $1m and put their parents ashes in it, what's that in taxable wealth today?"

It's too easy for people to offer hypothetical prices they'll never have to execute on. You could establish a price by forcing people to sell anything to the highest bidder, but that kinda explodes any conventional idea of property, and now the government is spending all its time running a trillion sketchy auctions while no human has time to do productive work anymore because your neighbor is trying to buy your car for $1 and you need to arrange a more-plausible offer before you lose it.
by mzi | 2025-12-15 18:33:52+00:00
> Even if nothing changes, you can run into trouble. Norwegian PNs have your birth date (in DDMMYY format) as the first six digits. Surely that doesn't change, right?

I guess that Norway has solved it in the same or similar way as Sweden? So a person is identified by the PNR and for those systems that need to track a person over several PNR (government agencies) use PRI. And a PRI is just the first PNR assigned to a person with a 1 inserted in the middle. If that PRI is occupied, use a 2,and so on.

PRI could of course have been a UUID instead.
by Marsymars | 2025-12-15 18:34:01+00:00
Are any SATA SSDs actually built to sink heat into the enclosure? e.g. The 860 Pro released in 2018 has a PCB taking up a third of plastic enclosure with no heatsinks to speak of: https://www.myfixguide.com/samsung-860-pro-ssd-teardown/

And even in worst-case hammering of drives, thermally throttled NVMEs can still sustain higher speeds than SATA drives.
by scottlamb | 2025-12-15 18:34:07+00:00
> As I understand most DBMSes synchronously write the log entries for a transaction and asynchronously write the data pages to disk via a separate API or just mark the pages as dirty and let the buffer pool manager flush them to disk at its discretion.

I think they do need to ensure that page doesn't get flushed before the log entry in some manner. This might happen naturally if they're doing something in single-threaded code without io_uring (or any other form of async IO). With io_uring, it could be a matter of waiting for completion entry for the log write before submitting the page write, but it could be the link instead.
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-15 18:34:17+00:00
That's basically the conclusion of the library:

> But my key takeaway would be that if your product is just a SQL wrapper on a billing system, you now have thousands of competitors: engineers at your customers with a spare Friday afternoon with an agent.

I think the issue is that the "two of them explicitly cloned" were trying to clone something that's more than "just a SQL wrapper on a billing system."
by vkou | 2025-12-15 18:34:23+00:00
> They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety.

The legislature can and has ordered them back to work without a contract. Check out how well that went for the railworkers' union. Biden ordered them back to work, and most of them still don't get the sick days they were striking for.

It's interesting that they are so critically important to the nation that they aren't allowed to strike, but not so critically important that they shouldn't be treated like shit.

It's fun to try to square that circle.
by jdross | 2025-12-15 18:34:27+00:00
Specifically in the US context, this is failing. And 70% of our teachers are unionized, with unionized districts seeming to underperform equivalent non-unionized districts (despite researchers repeatedly trying to find the opposite, the stats just are what they are)

You need to be able to explain this better than “look at Austria”. Nearly everything about Austria is different than the US.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-12-15 18:34:29+00:00
He isn't a political opponent, he isn't a politician. He met with high-ranking officials of a foreign nation and lobbied them to take action that he believed would harm China and lead to a change in government.

I also wouldn't call him outspoken critic either. For obvious reasons, the main one being a level of economic development unknown in human history, there isn't very much to criticize outside of politics. His gripe is solely political in that he believes that a different system of government is required (one assumes with more input from people like himself, again though he isn't a politician and, afaik, has no real political positions apart from supporting Trump and NY Post-style sensationalism/xenophobia, iirc they created a meme depicting mainlanders as locusts...it is quite funny to see people who, I can only assume, are not massive fans of Trump cream themselves over the Chinese equivalent).
by 112233 | 2025-12-15 18:34:38+00:00
Looking here:

https://eel.is/c++draft/compliance

One of required headers in freestanding, <cstdlib>, is labelled "C standard library", but it is not <stdlib.h> Something similar with other <csomething> headers.

This kinda implies C library is required, if I read it correctly, but maybe someone else can correct me: https://eel.is/c++draft/library.c
by ectospheno | 2025-12-15 18:34:43+00:00
> It's unfortunate that Apple has taught me (and I assume others as well) over the last 15 years that the best practice is to never install a major OS update.

The sole reason I migrated from Android to Apple was to receive security upgrades for years not months. I am genuinely baffled by the take here on HN. People will (rightly) get up in arms about minor security issues across numerous domains then talk about never updating their phone. That has literally their entire life on it.
by osiris970 | 2025-12-15 18:34:45+00:00
No county matches the depravity of the U.S justice system? Other countries (china for example) have reeducation and labor camps. The us has its problems, and we should make things better! But it's incomparable, china actively imprisons political enemies, puts Muslims in "reeducation" camps, and has an iron fist on free expression.
by semi-extrinsic | 2025-12-15 18:35:10+00:00
The Apple hardware is indeed very nice, but it's not a good environment for gaming. They've traditionally been quite gaming-hostile with refusing to support the later generations on OpenGL. Then there was a wrapper for Windows games called Whisky, but it was finicky and became unmaintained. Apple has their own App store which sells some games, which is in direct competition with Steam and others, so those actors are probably a bit wary of spending too much resources on the platform. Also a lot of gamer culture is related to building your own hardware, which Apple will never support.

Meanwhile gaming on Linux is becoming better than Windows these days, especially with all the trash to be circumvented on Win11, and Steam working hard on SteamOS etc.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-12-15 18:35:22+00:00
>only China, India, Russia aren't US allies

Yes, all the European-aligned states you mention should currently be opposed to USA [or at least the fascist regime ruling it], because of the threats to Denmark/Greenland. UK, Aus should be particularly aligned against USA because of the threats to Canada (as part of the UK royalty's commonwealth).

Trusting the post-democracy, post-constitutional USA we find ourselves with is major folly. We might as well climb in bed with Russia.
by dpark | 2025-12-15 18:35:27+00:00
This came up in the last two threads I read about uuidv7.

This is simply not a meaningful statement. Any ID you expose externally is also an internal ID. Any ID you do not expose is internal-only.

If you expose data in a repeatable way, you still have to choose what IDs to expose, whether that’s the primary key or a secondary key. (In some cases you can avoid exposing keys at all, but those are narrow cases.)
by Aurornis | 2025-12-15 18:35:31+00:00
The first NVMe over PCIe consumer drive was launched a decade ago.

It's hard to even find new PC builds using SATA drives.

SATA was phased out many years ago. The primary market for SATA SSDs is upgrading old systems or maybe the absolute lowest cost system integrators at this point, but it's a dwindling market.
by jamesgill | 2025-12-15 18:35:33+00:00
Last year, I wrote a short ebook to help technical writers--especially those working with software in a 'docs as code' environment--quickly get up to speed with Git. Recently, I turned that book into a small website to make it freely available to a wider audience.

I aimed for an audience of tech writers with absolutely no experience with Git, though it's really for anyone without any experience who just needs to learn enough to start using Git fast. The 'prerequisites' are minimal.
by svara | 2025-12-15 18:35:47+00:00
That can happen, sure, but the cancer's strategy is not a winning one - it dies along with the host.

Again, I'm not arguing for some naive Panglossian view. Things can get pretty bad transiently.

I just take exception at the cynical view that evil is somehow intrinsically more powerful than good.

"Survival of the fittest" is often misunderstood that way too, as survival of the strong and selfish, when, on the contrary, evolution is full of examples of cooperation being stable over long timescales.
by erin_lave | 2025-12-15 18:35:52+00:00
> AI seems to have the potential to cover more territory.

Theoretically, the only two things that any human go to earn money is (a) use muscles or (b) use brains.

I feel like AI plus robots covers all the territory. Maybe not quite yet - maybe we have a few more years, but what job could a human do that couldn't be done by an AI controlling a humanoid robot?
by dabockster | 2025-12-15 18:35:57+00:00
I want viable alternatives too. But Microsoft's stuff accounts for a million+ edge cases that you don't really encounter until you're neck deep into whatever you're working on.

For the sake of conversation, though, there's SoftMaker Office:

https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office

But they're a subscription too. You save only $20 a year for less features than Office 365 as well (especially the lack of an email program). For most people, that savings and "no Microsoft" isn't enough.

> LibreOffice

No.
by bevesce- | 2025-12-15 18:35:58+00:00
I’ve cooked and eaten tofu that was acceptable, and tempeh that was slightly better. I’ve never had tofu that came anywhere close to plain chicken breast—just salted and fried—in terms of taste, let alone something I’d call extremely tasty.

So, I guess, question is, how do you make extremely tasty tofu? Do you have to get some tofu that is not available in Europe?
by apetresc | 2025-12-15 18:36:15+00:00
Bug report: I tried to create a new cafe with a name that contained a space character in it. The form told me the ID was invalid but seems to have created my user account anyway. When I log in now, the CafeID I get is 'undefined'; as in, I am now the proud owner of https://mytinycafe.com/undefined/barista. I'm assuming this is not intended :)
by kiba | 2025-12-15 18:36:28+00:00
Georgists aren't frozen in time, nor had they ever been limited to just taxing "land". We consider any economic "land" fair game. We even discussed network effects that allow companies like instagram retain a monopoly.

In any case, California are where some of the most powerful tech monopoly are located, and not coincidentally it's also where some of the most expensive land there is.
by brettgriffin | 2025-12-15 18:36:31+00:00
> Stripping information from an identifier disconnects a piece of data from the real world which means we no longer can match them. But such connection is the sole purpose of keeping the data in the first place.

The surrogate key's purpose isn't to directly store the natural key's information, rather, it's to provide an index to it.

> The solution is not to come up with yet another artificial identifier but to come up with better means of identification taking into account the fact that things change.

There isn't 'another' - there's just one. The surrogate key. The other pieces of information you're describing are not the means of indexing the data. They are the pieces of data you wish to retrieve.
by hearsathought | 2025-12-15 18:37:12+00:00
"pro-democracy" is code for agent/operative of a colonial power. It's why so many hong kong pro-"democracy" operatives fled to britain, germany, us, etc. And it's also why so may pro-"democracy" operatives end up in countries we have problems with. No pro-"democracy" operatives in allied countries like saudi arabia, qatar, etc. Strange.
by reify | 2025-12-15 18:37:21+00:00
what a bargain

No tax for US companies and shysters in a corrupt country like Ireland.

I live in the UK, a long way away, but I can still smell the shit on the irish governments noses, because they have been up American arses for too long.

A Brown nosed government.

Come on Ireland, tax those rich bastards, stop the surveillance and tax avoidance schemes.
by austin-cheney | 2025-12-15 18:37:32+00:00
After looking at both Texas and California housing markets and their economics there are only two (and a half) things you need to fix the housing crisis in the US.

1. High property taxes. High property taxes have the unintended benefit of depreciating prices. The more in value a property increases the more taxes its owners must pay. Markets with higher property taxes tend to have substantially cheaper housing irrespective of demand.

2. Limit ownership of single family residences to a maximum of 5 properties per owner. When fewer entities own properties the less natural pricing for those properties becomes, for example what people can afford in monthly payments versus what people are willing to negotiate for in transfer of ownership.

2.5. A far lesser concern is quantity of physical housing availability, as in total volume and speed of new construction. Building new properties rapidly does not have significant influence on pricing, but it does influence other factors like growth and desirability.
by vintagedave | 2025-12-15 18:37:46+00:00
> customers aren't able to vote no here. That's fundamentally undemocratic

Union workers _are_ voters and citizens and the disenfranchised. There is almost nothing _more_ democratic than organised action.

If they cause inconvenience through that action, that is intended to be political pressure. If you dislike them because of those effects, that is removing their right to effectively collectively act and bargain.
by hxtk | 2025-12-15 18:37:47+00:00
When I think "premature optimization," I think of things like making a tradeoff in favor of performance without justification. It could be a sacrifice of readability by writing uglier but more optimized code that's difficult to understand, or spending time researching the optimal write pattern for a database that I could spend developing other things.

I don't think I should ignore what I already know and intentionally pessimize the first draft in the name of avoiding premature optimization.