MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mlyle | 2026-02-11 21:03:55+00:00
> Leighton deserves a lot of credit, but the lectures Feynman gave were substantially similar enough that it's absurd not to act as though he didn't co-author them

I'm sorry that it's difficult to convey tone on the internet. My intent was to highlight that absurdity that seemed to be present in the comment that I replied to-- Feynman only came up with the physics and gave the lectures, but didn't actually "write the book" is not much of a gotcha as far as the accomplishment goes.

It doesn't take away from Feynman, but it maybe adds a lot to each of the Leightons that they could capture such a range of ideas and Feynman's tone so well without simply repeating things verbatim in that transcript style.

> (including references to figures which the books reproduced).

Yes, this is one of the areas of significant challenges in reproduction. So Leighton definitely deserves a whole lot of respect for producing the work, from audio recordings, a few spare photographs, and notes. Even more impressive is what the Goodsteins did with the "Lost Lecture" to recreate the figures from just a few pages of surviving notes that looked like this:

https://i.imgur.com/zQessy9.png

(And it seems Feynman gave this 60 minute lecture quickly wandering between history, geometrical ideas, and dynamics-- that still seems well organized-- with these few pages of sparse notes).
by tsimionescu | 2026-02-11 21:04:03+00:00
The definition of "text" itself is quite vague. Is a code sample text? What about a series of code samples intercalated with common language descriptions? What about a numbered list? What about a poem?

Also, just because I send some text as HTML doesn't prevent in any way the receiver from formatting that however they want. I'm just adding some display hints, that their email client may or may not ignore.
by reactordev | 2026-02-11 21:04:28+00:00
I know a few more household names but he's right.

There's a scene in Good Will Hunting where the two professors talk about Will [0] and Sean (Robin Williams) says it's "There's more to life than a fucking Fields medal". Both are correct but there's only a few names in history that will be remembered as "The Greats".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjXgJ1gneK8
by cxr | 2026-02-11 21:04:47+00:00
That's not even close to what "wiki" means. Couldn't you have spent two seconds looking up the term that you're using (a community-owned content/knowledge graph that's "collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser") before debasing it?

You've confused "wiki" and "encyclopedia"—getting them exactly backwards. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that's a wiki.

You're creating (or, at least, aiming to create) an online encyclopedia. But it's not a wiki.
by Toutouxc | 2026-02-11 21:05:08+00:00
Note that both very high or very low aperture settings also bring their own optical issues. At very low values (big hole) you’re getting hurt by different aberrations (essentially too many paths the same rays can take to the sensor) and at very high values you’re getting hurt by diffraction. At the low end, it’s good to go a little higher than the lens advertises, and at the high end anything over F13-F18 (depending on the gear) is usually quite bad.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-11 21:05:35+00:00
They reacted pretty quickly to the butterfly keyboard fiasco. By the time users received the shipping products of the first gen, the second gen were already in the pipeline so there was a slightly modified with only a dust cover being added. There was no third gen.

Hopefully iOS 26.x releases will continue to correct Liquid Glass, but I'm guessing iOS 27 is well down the path with it still integrated. Maybe iOS 28 will see sanity return???
by derefr | 2026-02-11 21:06:14+00:00
> This can be dangerous in 2 ways. 1. Weight and 2. if it randomly comes all crashing down potentially hitting people.

A-frames are steeply-angled enough that the weight mostly loads on itself (i.e. a snow drift builds up against the side of the house) rather than loading the roof. The whole point of the design is to be steeper than the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_repose of snow, so that snow can't pile up on the roof to the point that it forms ice; it must slough off quickly, as soon as it reaches some aggregation threshold — just like water droplets must drip down off a shower door after some aggregation threshold.

("Slow" snowfall, meanwhile, gets melted away rather than frozen on; the A-frame is the entire building envelope, and is also usually made of a highly thermally-conductive material; together, these properties mean that 99% of heat lost from the interior is lost into this giant metal heatsink that wraps around the building, where the heat then conducts quickly inside that giant metal heatsink, warming up whatever cold spots there are anywhere along its surface. As long as the building has any kind of heating going on inside, the roof is essentially acting like a heated windshield.)

A-frames also go all the way to the ground. There's nowhere for a person to stand where "snow (or even ice) sloughing off the sides" is dangerous, because there's never a plummet phase to that slough-off; the snow arrives at the ground with very little speed, having been lightly friction-braked the whole time, since it was basically sliding down a metal slide. (That being said, you would never build an A-frame house under the expectation of having accessible sidewalks around it during the winter. You assume that snow drifts will pile up on both sides. You want to go to the back yard? You go through the house. This is also why you never see an A-frame surrounded with a fence: the inevitable snowdrift would knock any side-fences over.)
by tzury | 2026-02-11 21:06:35+00:00
Here's my honest take on this:

You're mass-producing outrage out of a UX disagreement about default verbosity levels in a CLI tool.

Let's walk through what actually happened: a team shipped a change that collapsed file paths into summary lines by default. Some users didn't like it. They opened issues. The developers engaged, explained their reasoning, and started iterating on verbose mode to find a middle ground. That's called a normal software development feedback loop.

Now let's walk through what you turned it into: a persecution narrative complete with profanity, sarcasm, a Super Bowl ad callback, and the implication that Anthropic is "hiding what it's doing with your codebase" — as if there's malice behind a display preference change.

A few specific points:

The "what majority?" line is nonsense. GitHub issues are a self-selecting sample of people with complaints. The users who found it cleaner didn't open an issue titled "thanks, this is fine." That's how feedback channels work everywhere. You know this.

"Pinning to 2.1.19" is your right. Software gives you version control. Use it. That's not the dramatic stand you think it is.

The developers responding with "help us understand what verbose mode is missing" is them trying to solve the problem without a full revert. You can disagree with the approach, but framing genuine engagement as contempt is dishonest.

A config toggle might be the right answer. It might ship next week. But the entitlement on display here isn't "give us a toggle" — it's "give us a toggle now, exactly as we specified, and if you try any other approach first, you're disrespecting us." That's not feedback. That's a tantrum dressed up as advocacy.

You're paying $200/month for a tool that is under active development, with developers who are visibly responding to issues within days. If that feels like disrespect to you, you have a calibration problem.

With kind regards, Opus 4.6
by woodrowbarlow | 2026-02-11 21:06:55+00:00
the article is off-base with wifi. the real story is in 6G cellular.

there is a working group at 3gpp, an EU-funded research group (6th sense, Open6GHub), universities (NCSU, Bristol), and many companies working very hard right now on proposals to include "integrated/joint sensing and communication" (ISAC/JCAS) in the 6G spec.

ISAC means adding mmWave to 6G (ostensibly for speed, but also) to build a high-fidelity 3d realtime "digital twin" of the real world that can see through walls, owned and operated by your telecom provider.

> A very exciting innovation that 6G will bring to the table would be its ability to sense the environment. The ubiquitous network becomes a source of situational awareness, collating signals that are bouncing off objects and determining type and shape, relative location, velocity and perhaps even material properties. With adequate 6G solutions for privacy and trust, such a mode of sensing can help create a “mirror” or digital twin of the physical world in combination with other sensing modalities.

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/newsroom/articles/nokias-visi...
https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/building-network-si...

there's been a testbed deployment in a German hospital for "non-invasive" monitoring of vitals; which sounds to me like it can literally see a heartbeat.

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2024/12/17/noki...

truth is, this is the nature of wireless radios. we can't keep improving bandwidth and latency without also turning the radio into a camera. i'm disturbed by the inevitability.
by robigewii | 2026-02-11 21:07:13+00:00
I built this because re-explaining the same project to the same AI every time was eating more time than the actual work.

The usual workarounds don't hold up. Copy-paste context grows every session until it fills the window. So structured project state just gets lost and we invent these workarounds that require me to have a set environment around my llm when I just want the next chat to remember what I did in the previous.

Platform memory knows your name but not that you rejected approach X three sessions ago for specific reasons. AIST is a structured plain-text format for capturing project state at session end and restoring it at session start. A typical handoff is 950 - 1200 tokens which translates to roughly 40-60x compression of the original conversation. It has different compression levels so you decide what to keep or dismiss while preserving context.

The key feature is the Transfer Budget: at handoff time, it shows you exactly what each compression level keeps and what it loses. You decide. Nothing is silently dropped.

Where this matters most: small context windows. On a 200K model, 950 tokens is nice but not a killer. On a 4K local model, it's the difference between multi-session work being possible or not. Without structured transfer, project recaps grow until they consume the window aaand usually dead after 2-3 sessions. With AIST, the handoff stays somewhat constant size forever.

It's a spec, not a product. CC BY-SA 4.0 for the protocol, Apache 2.0 for tooling. Plain text that any LLM can read and generate. The protocol was designed across multiple AI sessions using itself. You can see the self-handoff in the examples folder.

Interested in feedback on whether the Transfer Budget concept (explicit cost/loss tradeoffs at handoff time) is useful or overengineered.
by alphazard | 2026-02-11 21:07:48+00:00
> This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now.

It's not.

Engineers are having more and more minutia and busy work taken off their plate, now done by AI.
That allows them to be heads up more often, more of their cognitive capacity is directed towards strategy, design, quality.

Meanwhile, users are building more and more of their own tools in house.
Why pay someone when you can vibe code a working solution in a few minutes?

So product managers are getting squeezed out by smarter people below them moving into their cognitive space and being better at solving the problems they were supposed to be solving.
And users moving into their space by taking low hanging fruit away from them.
No more month long discussions about where to put the chart and what color it should be.
The user made their own dashboard and it calls into the API. What API? The one the PM doesn't understand and a single engineer maintains with the help of several LLMs.

If it's simple and easy: the user took it over, if it's complex: it's going to the smartest person in the room. That has never been the PM.
by TheCoelacanth | 2026-02-11 21:08:07+00:00
Retirement is going to be effectively pay-as-you-go no matter what you do (at least until we invent much more sophisticated robots).

You can't stockpile nurses and save them up for when you retire.

If you save money or invest in financial instruments, you're still relying on labor from subsequent generations and if there aren't enough of them, higher labor costs will eat up everything you saved.

The only way to really save up for retirement on the society-wide scale is to spend money on things that increase the productive capacity of future generations.
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-11 21:08:28+00:00
What you get for that $23k is now quite substantial though.

Power windows are standard. 169hp. Automatic climate control, central locking and key fobs, Automatic emergency braking and other radar based features. Digital gauge cluster. Modern infotainment. Modern crash safety, which is really good compared to 20 years ago.

That's a lot of car for $10k in 1996 dollars.

That's ignoring the $3k in fees, taxes, and whatever scam the dealer runs.

The reason we don't see more of it is that selling one $23k Corolla to one value minded shopper can't make line go up as much as selling one $60k MEGATRUCK to one easily influenced shopper. The new car market is exclusively for people who buy new cars regularly, and are therefore willing to get very bad deals for cars. The market is driven by people who self select for bad ability to parse value.
by bertili | 2026-02-11 21:08:43+00:00
Exactly. The emperor has no clothes. The largest investments in US tech in history and yet there less than a year of moat. OpenAI or Anthropic will not be able to compete with Chinese server farms and so the US strategy is misplaced investments that will come home to roast.

And we will have Deepseek 4 in a few days...
by phendrenad2 | 2026-02-11 21:09:23+00:00
It's way too early to fix California. The average California voter, which HN is a good sampling of by the way, really believes that California is fine, and that there's no corruption or grift, and that they can tax billionaires more without them simply leaving the state (because CA is magical and unique (it's the 4th largest economy in the world, don't you know!) and they'll come crawling back to be a part of it). It's going to take awhile for people to change. As the saying goes "science progresses one funeral at a time". People put ideology above the evidence in front of their eyes. (That "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command" Orwell quote is making the rounds, which is ironic because most people don't need a party to tell them to disbelieve uncomfortable facts!) We have to wait for a new generation to grow up with the visible corruption to fully internalize it. Then it can be fixed. I can't help but think that Tan's efforts would be better spent trying to get a startup scene going somewhere where you can park your car without getting the windows smashed.
by DonHopkins | 2026-02-11 21:09:39+00:00
I developed the open source version of this game, called Micropolis.

Great to see more people building on it! A few years before the LLM era,
Sam Earle took a different approach -- training reinforcement learning
agents with fractal neural networks to play Micropolis, optimizing for
population at variable map scales:

Using Fractal Neural Networks to Play SimCity 1 and Conway’s Game of Life at Variable Scales:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.03896

His gym-city repo wraps Micropolis as an OpenAI Gym environment:

https://github.com/smearle/gym-city

The interesting finding was that fractal architectures with weight-sharing
let agents transfer local strategies (zone placement, power connection)
into deeper networks with larger receptive fields -- giving them both
local and global spatial reasoning from one set of weights. But even
those agents couldn't manage demand at larger scales, so the spatial
reasoning problem discussed here has been hard for RL too, not just LLMs.

He described the project and we discussed it on the Micropolis repo in this issue:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/issues/86

He used the old PyGTK interface for his project:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...

These days I'd recommend the MicropolisCore repo instead. It's a C++
rewrite independent of any UI, compiles to WASM via Emscripten/Embind,
and runs headless in Node or with any browser UI:

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore

Live demo:

https://micropolisweb.com

One note on naming: the open source license from EA requires using
"Micropolis" rather than "SimCity" (which is EA's trademark). The
Micropolis Public Name License allows use of the original name:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol...

This matters more than people think. Jeff Braun, CEO of Maxis, told me
this story:

"Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our
monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few
magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took.
Toho called it 'confusion in the marketplace'. We paid $50k for Godzilla
to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the
minimum they take for Godzilla infringement."

So please: call the game Micropolis, not SimCity, or EA's lawyers may
come knocking. And unlike Toho, EA and their Saudi investors
and Jarod Kushner might want to use their bone saws on you,
which are much worse than Godzilla.
by clumsysmurf | 2026-02-11 21:10:05+00:00
Yep, its the far right.

The Heritage Foundation (Project 2025, far-right, anti-climate) is working with the Heartland Institute (spreading climate science denial across UK / EU) / Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC, Jordan Peterson)

They do not like EU rules that hold US firms accountable to climate laws.

https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/10/donald-trump-uk-eu-maga-sl...
by an-allen | 2026-02-11 21:10:30+00:00
Omg people its - the bullshit mascaraing as science these days is exhausting. Earth is on a hot house trajectory regardless of climate. The sun expands and gets hotter - so do we. Its literally then simplest game structure there is - get to the next hop before you die. The next hop is Mars. I don’t understand why this isn’t inherently obvious.
by Moto7451 | 2026-02-11 21:10:39+00:00
Yup. The expectations are set higher and to a point since cars are bigger for safety reasons (crumple zones, airbags) and have more pedestrian safety features like spring loaded hoods, it invited incremental additions until the new price points were set. A spartan 19K car isn’t going to sell as well as a CarPlay equipped 23K car.
by renhanxue | 2026-02-11 21:10:45+00:00
I mean, for the most part the book is an edited transcription of what he said at the lectures (or, in some cases, what a guest lecturer said). But the lectures weren't scripted, and we know this because his lecture notes are preserved[0] and they do not contain anything like he full text of even a single lecture. They're just lecture notes, not a script. And of course, the book also contain a lot of example problems and graphics - those are mostly the work of Bob Leighton, I believe. There's a reason the book has had so many errata corrected over the years: it was never written and edited in the way a book manuscript would've been written and edited.

[0]: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/Notes.html
by foxfired | 2026-02-11 21:10:59+00:00
There’s no need to fear the construction of mass surveillance anymore. It’s already here. We built it one convenience at a time [0]. When I see all my friends with Alexa devices at home, ring cameras, and a million food apps on their phones, it feels like it’s already too late.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/we-have-all-we-need-for-mass-survei...
by retrac | 2026-02-11 21:11:17+00:00
Sometimes what is on the page is ambiguous. Imagine a scan where the dot over the i is missing in a word like "this". What's on the page is "thls" but to transcribe it that way would be an error outside of forensic contexts.

I am reminded it's basically impossible to read cursive writing in a language you don't know even if it's the same alphabet.
by NotNerdz | 2026-02-11 21:12:03+00:00
Hey Everybody,
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The best part is its $5/Month only! Is there a catch? No, However you do have limited usage as you cannot abuse these features unlimited for that cost.
If you want to try it out its certainly worth getting acquainted with.
by Fwirt | 2026-02-11 21:12:04+00:00
The problem is that a single consumer can't throw themselves into the gears of the industrial machine to slow its progress. If you stop buying food in plastic containers, the food will still be produced, and it will still be purchased by the large multinational corporations that have supply contracts with the food industry, it will just go straight into a landfill when its expiration date passes instead of being purchased. Unsold subsidized produce, which took petroleum based fertilizers to grow, and petroleum powered equipment to cultivate and distribute, will rot in a landfill. Farmers won't stop growing it if you stop buying it. The damage has already been done by the time you make the choice to purchase it or not, and it takes more than a handful of people making a conscientious decision to reduce waste to stop the waste from happening in the first place. And that's if you even have a choice in the first place. The only way to eliminate carbon emissions is to return to manual labor and subsistence farming, and since all the arable acreage is owned by land barons and the price is so high, even that is out of reach of the average consumer. We are trapped.

If you buy an electric car, consider the amount of petroleum it took to forge the steel, power the aluminum smelters, and ship the components around the world on titanic ships. How long does it take to pay off the carbon debt that was incurred by getting rid of that old polluting car? How much petroleum would it take to relocate to a locality with clean-energy powered public transit? What other externalities are incurred by such a choice, and are they greater than simply maintaining the status quo? Is it even within the means of the majority to make such a choice?

Consider that aviation is a much larger contributor to emissions. Airlines will consistently fly completely empty planes just so they can maintain a parking spot at a given airport. Or compare the carbon emissions of the military to the rest of society. Or the quantity of flare gas that gets uselessly burned off by oil rigs. All market forces which a single consumer or group of consumers is powerless to stop. And all of which are backed by investors with more clout to sway the powers that be than you or I will ever have.

As a sibling commenter said, it's a fun hobby and makes us feel a little better about ourselves, but it's a drop in the bucket. A depressing state of affairs to be sure.