skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Typical galaxies the size of the Milky Way have 100 to 2,000 billion stars and could have as many as ten trillion planets.

That’s about 100^5, so one way to think of this is that if you categories these by any four properties (temperature, stability, hydration, day length) then you’d expect about 100 samples for any point in that 4D space.

So even if you believe Earth is unique along four critical metrics, there are about a hundred planets per galaxy that also have those attributes within a percentage point. If you allow some wiggle room then you have tens of thousands or even millions.

We know conditions here on Earth varied significantly more than 1% over billions of years and life survived and even thrived.
But what about chess boxing? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing
You know string theory is now generally considered a large scale fraud perpetrated by cox to maintain funding right?
As a mid-50 year old who discovered two years ago that he has moderate hearing loss (50-55 dB HL), I will be forever grateful to Apple for doing this.

If anybody from the accessibility teams is reading this, please know that it is difficult for me to overstate my gratitude and my appreciation for the amount of work this must've taken.

Music sounds unbelievably better through my AirPod pros, and I didn't even know what I had lost until I heard it again.

I'm willing to bet that a lot of my middle aged compatriots don't even know how much their hearing has degraded… Get your hearing test tested, folks, while you still have it!
Mosquitoes always seem to come exclusively to me instead of my wife. I would love to understand this "preference" but unfortunately the article doesn’t really explain it.
Or their daughter. Or when it's them.

There's a reason this twenty-four-year-old article is a classic:
https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-...
As the article mentions ,we was familiar with the literature. He communicated with other mathematicians, read papers, and submitted in journals while in India. he was not some hermit in a cave or something. I think this claim that he just dreamed the results part of mythology that has been built around him. From what I read, he he did a lot of the grunt work deriving these formulas but only published the final results, so it only appears that he conjured them out of nothing. It's not like he could have sent Hardy a book-sized letter of all the steps to derive those results.
fdisk or mount?
I've done that. At some point I felt like they weren't doing anything and pulled them out only to discover what a good job they had been doing. They lower the volume while keeping the sound pretty much the same. It's incredible.
Agreed.

It's the crazy ones that push humanity forward. We lose far more than we can imagine by not enabling even just one of them. This is one of the most important problems for us to fix.
Because everything I've ever heard about acquiring dedicated hearing aids has been about what a joy they are to purchase, maintain, and operate.
Yeah and my comment is addressing some of the broader motif of the thread and article since I didn't want to leave multiple. Addressing your hypothetical thought quotation the "we should hire people..." I agree that it would rarely to never go down like that. Instead, the impact on people's lives and livelihoods is collateral damage to the need to be perceived as a change maker or in charge or whatever. The fact that it is repeating is just an artifact of people being rewarded to retread the same ground because institutional memory is for whatever reason not in the control system's feedback design.
To my limited knowledge it's not even clear what the edges are but I think it's probably safe to say that the bigger it is, the more complexity you can cram in there.
My money is on it just being a playing field for the game of life. A damn good one at that.
I believe the opposite. The issue is that destroying requires much less effort than creating.
So it only gives Elon to these power but not to any other for past decades or longer :) Interesting media propaganda.
> For example, Python can import an entire package hierarchy from a zip file.

As could Python's contemporaries back in the day, JAR extensions notwithstanding. That fact does not justify bad design.
The summation of almost every tech company integrating AI features to boost engagement and sales, not to mention the AI girlfriends business alone. There are More lonely people out there than you might realize.
Well also now entire companies fail quicker instead.

It is useless because no one will read it or use it as any type of benchmark, probably rightly so here. There is a version of this at every company, just more relevant, also already not being read of course.
This is something I have personally struggled with, so I wish the author elaborated more. If you are a novice, how do you quickly identify what the foundational knowledge is? How do you know what makes you an expert and not an "expert beginner" as the author says to the extent that you can build a personal curriculum about it?
Starting from the basics, Ramanujan was known to spend huge amounts of time in the library pouring over mathematical texts. He was also personally and spiritually obsessed with mathematics, thinking it was an expression of divinity. So its quite probable a significant chunk of his memories were already mathematical and random accesses to it were the same.
The SEC'smarket monitoring system is fully operational after 14 years
My experience is that they serve different purposes.

I have a very nice and expensive set of ReSound hearing aids and they're fabulous at what they do, which is focus on speech and kind of on music if I set them for that.

They're also unobtrusive and easily last 18-20 hours on a charge. I forget I'm wearing them, and nobody notices that I have them.

My AirPods I use primarily for running and listening to music because they just sound unbelievably better, and they're probably fine for a concert although I haven't done that with them. But I think for long-term use every day all day it wouldn't be that comfortable or unobtrusive.

Would love to hear the experience of somebody who's trying it, though!
We shouldn't need crazy people to push the boundary. Rather, the crazier you are, the more likely you will flame out.

People who are "weird" and yet are entirely functional are the best of both world and a much rarer combination.
One such school:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School

The kids that went there … some succeeded, some really struggled to adjust to other schools and environments.
Like everyone working for Wired is an undercover Fed?
Show HN: I made an extension that uses AI to help avoid BS brands on Amazon
That’s hardly proof considering these examples all share a common ancestor. I ask you, can you communicate with a slime mold? Even the slime mold is more similar to ourselves than any potential life we’d find elsewhere, as we share a common ancestor.
I’m ready for the new internet. Are there any candidates out there?
I suspect the actual dollar value of AI from "companionship" far outstrips the value created from the endless junk like Gemini summaries.
no, you mean Ritalin. caffeine is a joke compared to actual stimulants.
You are under this illusion about other fields like architects because you don't work there and you can't tell. You don't know how the sausage is made.

Historically I have tended to learn about a new field WAY too much before I tried to hire people in these fields. The truth is, that makes it hard to hire people (but for good reason - depending on your needs, you need to pass on a lot of people). More recently I have tried to pay very close attention to how people do their work (about whose field I am building an interest). The sad reality of the world is that most people and businesses stay in business entirely through dumb luck and because the world is not usually THAT demanding. And if you have a specific requirement, they won't be able to help "out of the box".

You are imagining this competence. It doesn't exist in most people.

And to compound this, to me, the characteristic of an engineer is that they are capable of learning about a specialty discipline. If you hire an engineer and they are incapable of learning something that's needed in your project, THAT is where their problem is (and yours for not hiring to that.) Engineering is not a trade. Certifications are usually about selling them or gatekeeping. I wish it were possible to certify "engineering progress mindset" - no, it doesn't have an ISO number.
Powers of darkness trying to plunge us into a world with no accountability, where anything goes.

The courts seem to be super happy to let in bedlam & havoc.
That's not because you're doing it through Apple. You still get the remainder of your 30 days if you sign up and cancel via Spotify's website. The reason they're eliminating in-app purchases is they lose 30% to Apples in-app purchase commission. Other companies handle the situation by charging a different price to Apple app store people (something like +30%).
> Dozens of neo-Nazis are fleeing Telegram and moving to a relatively unknown secret chat app that has received funding from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

Isn't Telegram notorious at this point for being the go-to app for people distributing CSAM? Not trying to tar Telegram, and obviously, most people are using it legitimately. But it's crazy that Wired seems more concerned about what messaging service "dozens" of "neo-Nazis" (no doubt generously defined) are using rather than child exploitation. In fact, the article only mentions child exploitation in two paragraphs. It would be like an article about "Roblox Racists" that ignores its much more serious predator problem.
If light is hitting it, can you explain why not?
Thanks! Don't have much out there but here is the handle! https://github.com/Vibinghq
Here is some of more pre-existing research about this topic:

https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/why_are_some_people_tas...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8906108/
And thats just how life on earth happened to iterate in recent terms. For most of the history of life on earth, it was unicellular. It could have just as easily remained a planet of unicellular life for another few billion years if it weren’t for a few chance mutations that happened to be slightly more competitive over the background.
To play devil's advocate: private face-to-face conversations do not allow for effective coordination of actions across large distances. There are plenty of good arguments for keeping the government out of everyone's private messages, but this kind of messaging and a conversation are not the same thing.
The shelving down there is frictionless, so they're often not so nearby.
> I've worked for those ad companies

Well, then I definitely don't trust your moral compass and this whole discussion is pointless.
I'm trying influencers and reddit and other channels rn.
Ask HN: How to "Relearn" Motivation?
After a few years of sleep deprivation, mix of burn out and stimulants I want to approach this industry (big tech) with some normalcy.

I’m realizing I’m wholly unmotivated and easily distracted. How can I improve this long term? I still love tech and development, but having trouble right now focusing and being productive.

Without describing my lifestyle, habits and schedule, I’m curious what has worked for you from personal experience.
I'm dubious of its scale and effects. Tech creates exponential value because of aggressive focus, iteration and critical mass of talent. The reserves seems very far from this.
Got a source for either part of that?

* generally considered a large scale fraud,

* perpetrated by (UK's Professor Brian) cox

Most that I know would say that it was disapointingly too big and too general to make specific predictions tied to this specific universe we occupy, although it had early promise.

Brian Cox didn't even make the wikipedia page so its difficult to claim he had any major role in perpertaring it as a large scale fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory
I built a browser extension to solve a common frustration I have when shopping on Amazon. It's tough to distinguish reputable brands from the countless "alphabet soup" names that flood the search results. While there’s definitely a place for those lesser-known brands (I’ve bought plenty myself), sometimes I just want to find a brand recognized for quality.

While the extension delivers on its core purpose, what has been most surprising to me has been the fact that I've discovered dozens of new (lesser known) brands which make high quality products. Welcome any feedback!
>If you have enough funding, Malaria is preventable.

It requires more than funding to solve the problem. Sorry that my source is a YouTube video, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGRtyxEpoGg explains a general problem (that of trying to solve problems that are more prevalent elsewhere in the world, from within your own cultural context) and gives malaria as an example. People in malaria-afflicted countries, given free insecticide-treated nets, will often try to use them for fishing - not caring about the effect the insecticide will have on the haul. It's not due to ignorance or a lack of understanding, but due to a value judgment: people who have lived with malaria for generations don't see it as being as big of a problem, while poor people (on a global scale - not like in the US where "the poor" can afford some really impressive things) are always concerned with food supply.
You would need to use serializable isolation for this to hold true. Any isolation level less than serializable will use the snapshot that was active at the time of the select.

In Postgres, even with the serializable isolation level, all transactions that touch the same rows must also be using the serializable isolation level or it's not really enforced. This is one aspect of serializable isolation in Postgres that seemed like a major gotcha for real world application development. There's no future proof solution: new code can be added that doesn't use the serializable isolation, and then the assumptions of isolation from the earlier code are no longer valid.

FOR UPDATE is the only real solution in my eyes
It doesn't seem like this is a problem solved by trying to put up walls and pay for more law enforcement officers and military equipment.
The universe runs on IEEE floats. The missing matter and energy are due to roundoff error. We pray to the great NaN in the sky.
FDA approval means you can call them hearing aids, not just some marketing term.
Audiologists don't seem to care about your high-frequency hearing.
I have a master sqlite file with an arbitrary schema that is constantly evolving. I go hard with the constraints and primary keys - so hard, in fact, it's nigh-impossible to add a new contact without cascading changes. I'm always eager to keep my contacts, so this has kept my pretty sharp with sqlite.
One of the Civet devs here. To me, the main benefit of Civet is the ability to rapidly add useful features to the language, while preserving all the benefits of TS (tooling, etc.). We're constantly coming up with ideas — from TC39 proposals, other languages, or general brainstorming — and implementing them quickly. For example, we recently added pattern matching when catching exceptions, which took just a couple of hours of development; or Python-style from ... import ... for better autocompletion of imports. All of these features are optional; you can write well-formed TypeScript as usual, and just choose to use the features you think are worth the learning curve for readers. The plugins for VSCode, Vite, esbuild, Webpack, eslint, etc. aren't perfect, but they let Civet code enjoy most of the tooling out there.

I personally use Civet for all my coding projects, as I'm devoted to it continuing to flourish. But if you ever don't like what Civet is offering you, you can eject at any time by replacing your code with the TypeScript compilation, which we make as close as we can to your input.

What happens if a TC39 proposal is rejected? That's actually the good case for us, because it means we can keep the feature as is. Civet already transpiles all features to TypeScript, so they can live here forever if we think they're good. The trickier part is when Java/TypeScript changes in a way that's incompatible with Civet. Then we plan to change Civet to match Java/TypeScript, so that we don't diverge (though compiler flags allow us to also support the older form with explicit opt-in if we think it's worth doing so).

JavaScript and TypeScript move slow. Largely that's a good thing; they're a stable foundation, and we don't want to mess them up. But it's also exciting to be on the bleeding edge, explore new ideas, and obtain new features as quickly as we can design them, instead of waiting a decade. Many features are also too niche / add to much complexity for the general JavaScript language, but they're still fair game for languages that transpile to JavaScript. See also the recent JS0 vs. JSSugar discussion.
Can somebody share the pdf? Link is paywalled for me.
Do you have o blood type?
A bit too late if you are comparing to football level of specialization to produce people like messi
'Blade Runner 2049' producer sues Elon Musk over Tesla Cybercab launch
Furiphone FLX1 Update 13.0.4 – Support for US Bands
There's a formalism in math/information theory describing this idea called the Kelly criterion. Not a common/colloquial phrase, but it describes a similar idea of portioning bet size according to percentage of available cash based on the risk of the bet.
>Saying this as someone who's read Kant twice

I assume you mean the Critique of Pure Reason? Kant's Oeuvre is quite vast, though it wouldn't be unreasonable to have read the 3 critiques twice.

>What would Kant add to this discussion that the physicists in the article haven't considered?

Kant himself, I'm not sure, but its his model of the cosmos that we employ today, and spatio-temporality is a development out of his critical philosophy, especially his aesthetics. If you want to break space and time out of spatiotemporality it helps if you are familiar with the metaphysical undergirding of contemporary physics, since we have not treated them as separate since Einstein, even though Kant originally kept them as completely separate intuitions and did not seek to unify them but only to try and see what happens when they are set in relation. That is to say that spatiotemporality is, if we are being good Kantians, an entirely negative, transcendental view of space and time since it does not appear at the level of the senses but rather as an abstraction from them. But if we treat the second-level abstraction as real then we are bound to make errors about the empirical world, as returning to the critical project would, I believe, greatly help in re-evaluating our empirical methods.
That’s why it’s called software engineering.

We build the best Rube Goldberg machines - they take out payroll when the mouse trap falls.
Maybe we would .. but Musk has to turn off his leaky Starlink over the Murchison (not so) Quiet (anymore) Zone first.
Vinton Cerf (TCP/IP) & Whitfield Diffie (DH) on AI (2024) [video]
Isn't the reality of things that credentials are a low bar. Yes, even with the legal bar exam, or the PE engineer, etc? When you are hiring, are you really hiring JUST based on that low bar? No! That wouldn't make sense! For example if you have a specific problem, most of the time you are looking for a lawyer who has already worked for a while in THAT specific field. The bar exame is not enough! I feel that's usually the case. And that makes sense. Why just specify "PE engineer"? When there are lots of them who have at least some specialization in the direction you want?
> Randomness should have error correction, as it's random.

Randomness itself doesn't have error correction, but systems that generate or use randomness may have checks to ensure they function correctly. Error correction applies to data or signal integrity, which is a separate concept from pure randomness.
> I think over the past 18 months, that problem has pretty much been solved – meaning when you talk to a chatbot, a frontier model-based chatbot, you can basically trust the answer

Yes, I'm sure if we ask a question about The Party to your (Baidu) model, we can trust the answer.
Yes, and protect your hearing while you can. Turn down your tunes.

Disclosure: Working musician. I wear musician's earplugs when playing in bands.
I'd subscribe to your religion but for the division.
It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.

then why does this 'discovery process' have to continue into college? That was the OP's point. When money and time is on the line, let adults decide what they want to study. An 18-year-old is no longer a child.
92% of adults know how to read to varying level.[1]

The number, while high, is not satisfactory. Clearly, we also want adults to be functionally and not pass a super low bar of being able to read a sentence which 92% does not care to distinguish, but it is not fact true that "many of them don't even know how to read".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
Launching Passwordless Authentication for Android Apps
Hi Community,
We are Hawcx, a passwordless authentication company. We recently launched Passwordless Auth for Android Apps with support for Java, React-Native and Flutter. We are gearing up to launch iOS next.Please give it a try and give us your feedback. Exicted for this community to try Hawcx.

More info at docs.hawcx.com
> The point is that "amateur" means literally "lover" in latin.

It doesn't mean anything in Latin. It means "lover" in French. Possibly a version of French from before "love" changed to "aimer".
Ask HN: What do you think about developing a web front with Vanilla JavaScript?
What do you think about developing a web front-end with Vanilla JavaScript to minimize performance issues?

I believe I have reached a certain level of success. The canvas seems to have excellent performance. Could you take a look at the ongoing test and provide feedback?

https://alpha.breathingworld.com/
I'm not very tasty to mosquitos to begin with. I used to have the usual reaction to mosquito bites (slight bump, itching). I grew up near a wetland in Minnesota, so I was no stranger to mosquitos, but after getting absolutely mobbed by mosquitos when I took my wilderness survival merit badge course at scout camp, I stopped reacting to mosquito bites.

Though, the downside is that I do have less incentive to protect myself if I'm in malaria/dengue/etc. areas.
Is there any reason to suppose that blood type plays a role?

It's a big deal for blood transfusion but that doesn't automatically make it relevant to mosquito preferences, and TFA doesn't mention blood type.
I can’t make heads or tails out of this logic so I’ll just say it frankly:

I didn’t choose to reach out and engage with you, ‘Tostino’, or ‘thfuran’, nor do I care about who ‘Tostino’ wants to interact with, relative ‘arguments’, etc…, because this user didn’t exist for me until 3 comments ago!

There literally wasn’t enough time to care about this nonsense. So take it and leave already instead of doubling down.
If you have severe and above hearing loss, these won’t help much. This is what I have gotten to know from lot of forums. They do work well for my moderate-to-severe hearing loss. Been using for around 7 months now.