MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by uplifter | 2025-12-27 19:20:23+00:00
> What is the algorithm implementation when it comes to the physical world?

It is the physical world, nature is the implementation of the natural selection algorithm. Yes, the strong force is part of the implementation, because the strong force can play a role in selection events, cf nuclear bombs and radiation. The gravitational pull of remote galaxies can also influence selection events by changing planetary orbits minutely.

I don’t see these as problems for my argument because I am not the one claiming they encode an objective, I just see them as natural forces which can influence selection without any overarching purpose or goal. It is those claiming natural selection is an optimization process who must show how it could work. The onus is on them to show where their supposed objective of natural selection is encoded in its implementation.

> If you create selection pressure, and have a reproductive system that allows for mutations, then you may end up an "implementation" that encodes the goal implicit in the selection pressure.

What goal are you referring to?

> But anyone who messed around with genetic algorithms or artificial life in the 90s knows that you can trivially start out with no resemblance to "the goal" at all. Where life on earth in aggregate or any specific example of it in particular might be along that pathway is similarly impossible to say.

I am one of these people, but I don’t know what goal you are saying these systems came to demonstrate. Are you saying these artificial evolution systems had objectives they pursued? What caused them to follow these objectives? What is this “pathway”?

>Consider the well-documented case of moth evolution in industrial (and later, post-industrial) northern England. Their camouflaging wing tones changed to respond to the typical color on vertical surfaces, twice within a human generation or three. Was "the goal" flexible coloration across generations, or was it "light, then "dark" and then "light" again?

There was no goal at any point in the process. Moths with colors that matched their contemporaneous environment were less likely to be eaten by predators than those which stood out. Calling it a goal is a confusion, its trying to add a conceptual framing that isn’t necessary and adds nothing to the understanding of the system. Neither the soot levels in the air nor the birds hunting for moths have a goal of adjusting the balance of moth coloration phenotypes. They are just the context, along with everything else in their environment, in which evolution of moth coloration may occur.

In what sense is there any goal in the example? And if it is a goal, why is it not optimization? I claim there is no goal, no optimization objective to natural selection. Its not just a philosophical side question, it is the question.

edit: typo
by maxglute | 2025-12-27 19:21:18+00:00
Dollar dominance erosion shifting towards dollar inertia. Post RU sanctions dollar lost much of it's leverage (as geopolitical weapon), i.e. actual useful dominance function (transaction panopticon, sanctions)while still retaining most of the liability (Triffin etc). Dollar going to remain popular by volume because plumbing in place, but parallel payment systems last few years = systematic blindspots where US treasury can't monitor what others buy outside of dollar system, and generally weaker ability coerce countries. What's left of dollar system is US enjoying exorbitant privilege of going into ~35T and rapidly increasing debt to serve as asset for everyone else, while dragging down export via uncompetitive FX.

One interesting attack vector vs USD is PRC recycling it's dollar surplus / shadow lending it's USD reserves at more favorable rates than US gov can, i.e. countries (emerging markets / BRI recipients) who would have borrowed USD from FED (or US influenced IMF/WB) now borrow from USD from PRC -> reduce US treasuries demand and drive up US interest -> further increase US debt. PRC basically hijacked and weaponize USD liquidity to make increasingly ineffective dollar system (as geopolitical tool) even more expensive to maintain while PRC can enjoy dollar liquidity without the maintenance costs. And that's probably the ultimately the goal, smart play is not to inherit reserve obligations, but to turn reserve holder's exorbitant privilege to exorbitant curse.
by tonymet | 2025-12-27 19:21:22+00:00
Traditional taxes are democratic -- if the legislature raises a tax, they can be voted out.

Creative revenue approaches sound efficient, but you don't want efficiency with spending. Efficiency means that spending will grow unabated.

In my state they've had record revenue for 12 years (until just lately). Regardless of each record, they continued to outspend revenue into a deficit.

Commercial enterprises are bounded by revenue (and debt). Public agencies used to have a feedback loop (losing the next election), but in many states there is little consequence for deficit spending.

Don't give spendthrifts more ways to spend money. They will always exceed the revenue they generate.
Is the windows11 mandate to upgrade hardware akin to older corp's toxic messes?
by srevenant | 2025-12-27 19:21:29+00:00
Just a thought. So as I understand it, largely the only reason for the "your computer can't run windows 11" thing is because of TPM 2.0 as a minimum. This creates a vast array of unusable computers that are stuck on TPM 1.x, even fully functional.

In the end it feels like an artificial requirement. Sure it's packaged in the trappings of fear and uncertainty (stronger crypto is good right?) But the crypto there is /good enough/ for most CONSUMER use cases. /FORCING/ them to throw away perfectly good computers feels... wrong.

On the level of "love canal" wrong, for the amount of e-waste it is effectively driving.

Sure the hardware vendors love it. And it's all spun up as "we're keeping you secure and better."

But let's be honest. I feel like the real reason for the push is better DRM, in the end. They keep the IP holders happy by making it harder for consumers to rip video.

I might be completely wrong, dunno :) It just seems very suspect.

I wouldn't know where to even begin, but has anybody calculated the environmental impact (if any?) of forcing obsolescence on computers largely to the benefit of the IP holders?

There's going to be a constant rate of ewaste as it is. Has that gone up thanks to windows 11 and the various pushes to retire "old" hardware that is still just fine?

I know Linux has seen a big bump of desktop users (relatively speaking) thanks to this.

Just makes me wonder, but I'm not in the know to calculate and figure this stuff out.
StreamKernel a Kafka-native, high-performance Java 21 event orchestration kernel
by lopez_steven | 2025-12-27 19:21:50+00:00
StreamKernel is a Kafka-native, high-performance event orchestration engine designed to decouple pipeline orchestration from payload semantics—enabling low-latency data movement while supporting real-world enrichment, durability, and observability requirements.

At its core, StreamKernel provides a thin, pluggable execution kernel that manages concurrency, backpressure, and lifecycle orchestration, while delegating schema, serialization, and business logic to interchangeable components. This architectural separation allows the same kernel to drive synthetic benchmarks, production-like enrichment pipelines, and downstream systems without rewriting core flow control.

https://github.com/IntuitiveDesigns/StreamKernel
by xorcist | 2025-12-27 19:23:18+00:00
These are not vulnerabilities in the "remote exploit" sense. They should be taken seriously, you should be careful not to run local software on untrusted data, and GPG should probably do more to protect users from shooting themselves in the foot, but the worst thing you could do is panic and throw out a process your partners and colleagues trust. There is nothing here that will disturb your workflow signing commits or apt-get install-ing from your distribution.

If you use crypographic command line tools to verify data sent to you, be mindful on what you are doing and make sure to understand the attacks presented here. One of the slides is titled "should we even use command line tools" and yes, we should because the alternative is worse, but we must be diligent in treating all untrusted data as adversarial.
by sethhochberg | 2025-12-27 19:24:39+00:00
I think there's some real sample bias in that definition of "the community" though, because people who are passionate Ruby programmers giving conference talks, running meetups, etc are often a distinctly different group than the regular-old programmers making business software go 'round every day. The big players writing tools for bringing various flavors of type safety into Ruby are doing it because they're experiencing the pain of having lots of programmers working on large, complex software over years-long periods with the tools that Ruby gives you out of the box. They often employ some of those community fixtures, but thats not the majority of an engineering organization.

The reality is that there certainly are enthusiast programmers who can thrive with the lightweight elegance of stock Ruby, but most people writing code professionally aren't enthusiast programmers under ideal conditions. Everything is always a little more distracted, a little less well-defined, and a little more coupled to legacy than anyone would want. And those are the conditions where I want my tools working as hard as possible, automatically, for me / my teams.
by wtallis | 2025-12-27 19:25:01+00:00
I feel like maybe you didn't understand the meaning of that last bit you quoted from Tom's Hardware. To be clear: the standard for consumer SSDs is 1 year of unpowered data retention after the drive's full write endurance rating has been exhausted.

The experiment Tom's is reporting on found twelve instances of data corruption on a low-end drive that had been subjected to over two thousand full drive writes, four times its rated write endurance, then left on a shelf for two years. This is a demonstration of a bottom of the barrel SSD wildly exceeding expectations.

It's really important in conversations like this to accurately convey not just the existence of the failure mode, but also the realistic chances of running into this problem, and the extent of the problem when it does manifest. If a deliberate torture test can only produce a few kilobytes of data corruption after twice the duration and four times the abuse the drive is supposed to be able to handle, this problem should be described as extremely minor.
by dawnerd | 2025-12-27 19:25:05+00:00
Problem is, it’s not a tax. It’s a handout to private companies that take advantage of taxpayers fronting the construction cost in a lot of cases. We had one here paid for by tax payers but then leased to a company for some low dollar amount and they keep most of the money.

It’s just another form of rent seeking.

Now, gov run tolls seem like a good idea in areas where congestion needs to be managed. But also needs to be careful not to be a secret tax on the poor.
by sireat | 2025-12-27 19:25:22+00:00
Very simple - look for who has a stake in Groq currently:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startu...

"Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came together quickly. Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco
, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner."

POP QUIZ - Which minority partner is the key here?
by alwa | 2025-12-27 19:25:37+00:00
That guy was denigrating somebody who did nothing more than share a list of stuff they thought was cool this year. He came at @fogus (the author) with, essentially, “I’d come across all that cool stuff too if I didn’t have my much better life of wife and kids, I bet he’s existentially unfulfilled.”

Reflective or not, it seems really personal and unfair to swing at a stranger like that. For all he knows, @fogus has the same number of partners and kids as he does, or is just as happy with whatever way their life is organized. I don’t think it’s fair to come at @fogus as “insecure” for reacting to derogatory assumptions.

Maybe everyone else here knows stuff I don’t about @fogus’ life, but I just read somebody being generous enough to share their internal thinking in public and, in exchange, getting shit on for no reason.

And as to gp—I agree the intention seems thoughtful and self-reflective; thank you for sharing those sentiments. I’m glad you’ve found happiness and fulfillment, and I think your point would stand just as strong without swinging at a stranger.
by 827a | 2025-12-27 19:26:56+00:00
Gold-backed currencies, and even Bitcoin, are really good if you want your economy to be only this big, and never grow bigger. Eventually, a crisis will happen, and you'll say "actually, its now 1.3 yuan to the gram, because we need to build tanks", or "actually, did we say we had 8,000 tons of gold in reserve? we meant 9,000. Yeah we just counted, no you can't look at it, we have 9,000, here take the yuan and go build vaccines", or "its now illegal for citizens to own gold, turn it in at your nearest party headquarters" (even the US participated in that one!)
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-27 19:27:33+00:00
It's like Mark Twain and the rules for reselling a slave in Missouri https://medium.com/p/fe48ea07ad20
"the free black man in Missouri could only remain in the state for 6 months before being taken and put on auction as a slave." only it turned out to be false, and evidently made up by Twain for reasons of fiction.
by Maxatar | 2025-12-27 19:28:07+00:00
By itself it's not a problem, but it's certainly useless. Perhaps you can tell me what use "3 ∩ 4 = 3" has.

The problem is that these properties get in the way of proving arithmetic theorems because if you are being absolutely strict, you have to distinguish things that are true of natural numbers as an algebraic structure, from things that just happen to be the case because you picked some specific representation to use for natural numbers. This introduces a lot of noise and makes formal proofs very frustrating, somewhat like when you're programming and you have to bend the type system of your compiler to accept your code even though the program is conceptually correct and you end up spending effort on type coercions, casts, "unsafe" blocks etc... mathematically this makes your proof significantly longer, more brittle, and harder to reuse because it accidentally depends on details of the chosen encoding rather than on the intrinsic properties of arithmetic.
by ZuzuDuck | 2025-12-27 19:28:09+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm Mateusz, full-stack dev from Poland. For the past 4 years I've been running planning poker sessions in software houses and corps. Every tool I tried had the same problems:

- Onboarding takes half the sprint planning ("wait, let me show you how this works...")
- Free tiers showing job ads from competitors during estimation
- Per-seat pricing that punishes you for growing (5 people → 20 people = 4x the cost)
- Everyone needs an account just to vote

So I built VoteSprint. The idea is dead simple: click to create a room, share a link, people vote. That's it. No accounts for participants, no ads ever, flat pricing regardless of team size.

*What's different:*
- Zero registration for voters (facilitator-only account)
- Async mode for distributed teams across timezones
- One price up to 20 people (not per-seat)
- Lifetime deal option – pay once, use forever

Currently collecting signups for closed beta (Q1 2026 launch). First 50 teams get free beta access.

Tech stack: Django + React + PostgreSQL, hosted in EU (GDPR compliant).

I'd love feedback on:
- Does the value prop resonate with your team's pain points?
- Pricing model – does flat fee make sense vs. per-seat?
- Any must-have features I'm missing?

Happy to answer any questions about the product or the build.
by websiteapi | 2025-12-27 19:28:36+00:00
it would never happen, but ideally toll roads would be dynamically priced such that the average speed is always within 10% of the speed limit. congestion fixed.

earmark this money in a way that can't be siphoned and build public transportation with it. in addition buy fleets of buses with the cash that are exempt and analyze the destinations and origins of the traffic and put them there.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-12-27 19:28:58+00:00
A highway is not a public good. It is a publicly subsidized good for private consumption.

Can I use the highway if I don’t have a car? (Barely)

Can I use it for anything non driving related (like a downtown street where lanes can be repurposed for outdoor seating)? No

I agree with you on what does the majority of the damage.
by sixo | 2025-12-27 19:29:04+00:00
It's a leaky abstraction, in software terms. Ideally, an abstraction models the semantics of the problem domain "opaquely"; ideally our natural numbers have only the properties of the natural numbers and no others. An additional property leaking through is not like handy "bonus", but a point of confusion. You can't rely on it in proofs involving natural numbers without being careful to delineate which conclusions follow from the construction vs. which are inherent.
Why blog, when you can write in notepad?
by onesandofgrain | 2025-12-27 19:29:12+00:00
If the whole purpose of blogging is to reflect and write down thoughts and learn/(have personal discussions), why not just use notepad?

If you want your content to be read, that's obviously a different matter, but blogging framed as "notepadding" seems somewhat disingenious?

I dunno, but my impression is that blogging is done with some degree of underlying desire to reach out to people and have your writings read (which is fine).

Blogging (with a domain) is more expensive, more cumbersome, less write-friendly due to HTML and .md syntaxing and formatting and it's also laced with the entertainment-complex (it might be read by someone so it should be good writing). But in my opinion this entertainer-complex makes your writing more edgy and attention-seeking (which again is fine).

That's my ramblings :)
-... -.-- .
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-27 19:29:17+00:00
The Fed most commonly uses Open Market Operations to modify the money supply, with "money printing" or Quantitative Easing used in more emergency situations.

But more broadly your comment doesn't really represent reality, whatever happens in the markets and economy the Fed manages inflation (or deflation) and it's much more complicated than a single relationship like you describe.

More interesting is trade, where the US consumes so much and pays out so many dollars for goods that places like China which run huge surpluses have few choices other than lend it back to the US.
by dboon | 2025-12-27 19:29:39+00:00
Sure! It's very raw, though. There's a lot of functionality, and I use it to build all sorts of projects already. But a common thing I do is to write the stupidest possible version of a thing and only do the hard engineering when it becomes untenable. Hence it's not raw as in being new or bare, but it's very raw in that you'll see some really rough stuff in the code.

But, that being said, here's the repo! I added a very basic README for you. It's one command to bootstrap to a self hosting build, so give it a shot if you're interested. My contact is in my profile.

https://github.com/tspader/spn
by kibwen | 2025-12-27 19:29:48+00:00
Cargo is fantastic... for building Rust code. Once you start trying to also use it to build C code, you're moving outside of Cargo's wheelhouse, using features that Cargo only supports begrudgingly (like build scripts). Cargo is definitely not intended to be an end-all be-all build system for all languages; it's specialized for Rust, and that's what it's great at. For multi-language projects, you want some sort of simple tool to orchestrate the builds (e.g. `just` https://just.systems/man/en/ ) that internally calls out to Cargo (and whatever other build systems you have for whatever other languages you're using). The overall mistake is thinking that Cargo is a replacement for `make`, when it isn't nearly so general.
by survirtual | 2025-12-27 19:30:12+00:00
Every single lifestyle item of a modern life, whether you have a car or not, depends on the road system.

If you want food, products, or services, you depend on the roads. This means it should be taxed universally and equitably. We should all contribute our fair share to maintain the roads.

Tolls are a regressive tax on low-income people who do the most to make society work, and it is unfortunate that more people do not see this. What's more, they are generally administered by corrupt and inefficient private for-profit orgs. This creates even more overhead which then costs more money.

These orgs generally have slimy deals with city and state governments, while directly profiting from public works that built the road system to begin with.

There are much better ways to fund the road system. Tolls are among the worst.
by abigail95 | 2025-12-27 19:30:13+00:00
And now we get to my question of why. They want the Linux source code, the company is not giving it to them, why is the next step a blog post instead of a lawsuit? Again this is a medical device - it's important enough to spend the money on.

They make a blog post about GPL violations which allege the company is violating the law.

I'm absolutely begging for anyone in a similar situation to prove it. The reasons those emails were sent is because they think they have a legal entitlement to be sent the source code. *PROVE IT*. It's cheap!
by phil21 | 2025-12-27 19:30:32+00:00
> My bet is that it will end up being a very good thing for the world at large.

I generally agree with pretty much all your points other than this one.

While it will be good for other countries to regain sovereignty - and the weaponization of the US dollar for trivial reasons will be the biggest self-own perhaps in history - I do not think the world is going to be a better more peaceful place in 50 years.

It might be more free in a certain sense though, which may or may not end up long-term (over multiple generations) being better overall for humanity. Time will tell.

Certainly though, the average quality of life in the US is about to plummet.
by vogtb | 2025-12-27 19:30:41+00:00
Oh, we're doing Fly again? Cool! I don't mean that sarcastically -- making it dead simple to get a VM at a domain or IP in a few seconds is good and useful. We should keep trying this idea, because every time it gets easier.

On a side note, a lot of people in this thread are doing a sort of "I don't get it, your website sucks" but it's like, come on dude! Just read the site! It takes less time to read the pricing, docs, and FAQ than it does to post about how you don't get it.
by nirvdrum | 2025-12-27 19:30:47+00:00
If you’re just committing for your own sake, that workflow sounds productive. I’ve been asked to review PRs with 20+ commits with a “wip” or “.” commit message with the argument: “it’ll be squash merged, so who cares!”. I’m sure that works well for the author, but it’s not great for the reviewer. Breaking change sets up into smaller logical chunks really helps with comprehension. I’m not generally a fan of people being cavalier with my time so they can save their own.

For my part, I find the “local history” feature of the JetBrains IDEs gives me automatic checkpoints I can roll back to without needing to involve git. On my Linux machines I layer in ZFS snapshots (Time Machine probably works just as well for Macs). This gives me the confidence to work throughout the day without needing to compulsively commit. These have the added advantage of tracking files I haven’t yet added to the git repo.