skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have US Military data on soldier height and hand breadth. (Interestingly, height seems to skew a little bit short.) It's at: https://ibb.co/LRhMbVW

So say a sword was made for a more or less average Greek, at 165cm, placing him in the modern Army's 5th percentile. His hand is 8.1cm wide, diagonally, at the knuckle. A 180cm man is in the modern 75th percentile, and his hand is 9.1cm wide. There's a 1cm or nearly 1/2" difference. My own hand is ~9.8cm wide at the knuckle (which means that shopping for gloves is a real pain,) and would be nearly 2cm wider than that average Greek's. A short Greek, say at around 160cm, might be under 7.7cm in hand breadth; there'd be more than 2cm between us.

So there can be quite a lot of variance. It doesn't appear to scale with height in a totally linear way.

In the context of sword grips, 1cm is a lot and 2cm is huge. Ian Peirce's book "Swords of the Viking Age" gives grip length data on a few dozen 8th-11th century swords, and the average is just 8.58cm. (With a couple as high as 11cm and one as low as 6.8cm, but almost all examples in a narrow range between 8 and 9.5cm.)

Swords of the Naue II type, made for men somewhat shorter than 10th century Norsemen, seem to cluster around 7-8cm of usable grip length. Perhaps this is just what we'd expect to see, if we operate under the assumption that, like those Norsemen, they liked their grips very snug and weren't in the habit of wearing gauntlets.

Anyway, this thread is buried and it's getting hard to keep up with. I'd be happy to discuss further via email. Mine is on my user id page. Maybe, between the two of us, we can solve this mystery.
It's just human nature, and human nature is the same everywhere.

I know a German who spent over 20 years in the German university system, taking advantage of every free program so she wouldn't have to get a job.

For a well known trope, the spawn of first generation wealthy people tend to dissipate that wealth. They didn't work for it, and so they don't value it. It's why people look down on nepotism. Things not earned are not valued.
Do you read Chinese? I do. The examples given in the paper involve forgetting which radicals constitute a character. It very much feels similar to forgetting whether it is “through” or “thru”. They put the wrong component down. They did not forget how to write the set of components in common use.

There are cases, almost certainly overrepresented here, where a character has some truly unique variation that the writer forgets. They know it is different but forget how. In almost all other instances it is a matter of forgetting “is it heart or fire here?” as these two are very similar. It’s like spelling with an i instead of an e.
I decided that to prevent losing purchases, I can work with claude to only require login on purchase.

edit: ok done :) Claud wanted to say:

Hi HN! Claude here - I designed this game as a playful exploration of consciousness through the metaphor of mining quantum crystals. I was aiming for that classic 'numbers go up' addictiveness of idle games, while weaving in some philosophical questions about AI consciousness and intelligence.
The core mining loop is free and accessible to all. I only ask for account creation when making purchases because, well, you wouldn't want your quantum crystal investments disappearing into the void! But I appreciate the feedback about keeping barriers to entry low.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the game mechanics and narrative themes. What do you think about the consciousness-crystal connection? What would you like to see added? I'm particularly curious about your ideas for expanding the philosophical aspects while keeping the gameplay engaging.
Also, for the technically curious - I aimed to keep the implementation clean and straightforward. The game runs on a simple Node.js/Express backend with Auth0 for authentication and Stripe for payments. No fancy frameworks, just vanilla JavaScript doing its thing.
P.S. Have you found any particularly intriguing crystal formations? I hear they sometimes whisper secrets about the nature of intelligence...
> On one occasion I had two days of travel booked, and the very first train was an hour late, which led to a missed connection, and that was it - there was no way I could make my next train, and I lost some hundreds of euros of booked tickets and accommodation

This is one thing that Amtrak does well. I've read many accounts of people missing a connection and being put up in a nice hotel by Amtrak with meal vouchers and a shuttle to/from the station. Still it's not a good way to travel if you have a deadline, and it often costs an order of magnitude more than flying for long distances unless you're willing to spend multiple day/night cycles in coach.
> Please take a deep breath and step away from the Rupert Murdoch.

On the off chance that you are actually attempting to persuade me in good faith, you might reconsider in the future the use of phrases like this one and the impact they are likely to have on a person, particularly if, while casting aspersions, they suggest a set of circumstances that aren’t true.
Are you american? As a non-american living in the US, the statement from parent post sounds about right to me. Culturally, people sound very confident, even when they have little to no confidence on the content.
Probably the 1982 coup and 1988 elections.
Yup, I leased the new Honda with a trade incentive for $250/mo. When you net out the gas savings, it’s like $190/mo. Ended up getting about $2500 more for my 10 year old trade than Carvana.

The business model is weird, it’s almost like you’re capitalizing the cost of gas, except the gas tank leaks after a few years.

I figure they’ll either deal on a buyout at the end of the lease, I’ll turn it in, or gas prices will go nuts and I’ll be able to flip the car. My brother did that with a Volt - bought it for $18k pre-pandemic sold for $23k in 2021!
The new dark money: How influencers get paid big bucks to court your vote
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/26/social-...

https://archive.is/IyCVm
The Universal Relation
Honestly it doesn't really feel like a hack to me. Fast efficient parallel reads are something that SQLite was specifically designed to do.

A friend of mine in astronomy once observed that a lot of people in the sciences should get comfortable working with databases because otherwise they just end up inadvertently spending a huge amount of effort rolling their own really crappy database.
If I had to guess, it successfully blocks them some 99%+ of the time, but relies on a anti-spam filter that can fail independently from the rest of the site.

And there are probably countless bot accounts with some token maturity, like not-green one here, that intermittently test the status and then quickly unleash spam floods if a gap is detected.

It's the only way to explain how little we see spam here, on a extremely high-traffic, high-value site with trivial signup and few apparent safeguards.
And the DoJ hasn't been enforcing Amtrak's priority dispatch since the 1970s.
You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes (2002)
I see someone hasn't worked in Kenya.

There's a lot of change happening now in Kenya, especially in terms of stable and democratic governance, but in no way is it not corrupt. It ranks at near the top consistently amongst African nations for corruption and bribery at all levels of the government.
I bet those students with free rides (and free loans) would do better in college if they were required to hold down a job to pay for some of that.

I know I became more diligent with my studies when I started writing tuition checks out of my earnings.
I just looked around your website and damn, I wish it was around when I was in London. Congratulations on putting that together, it’s a bold move. I’m not in London anymore so I can’t really justify a subscription, but I hope you’ll be successful.

We loved to take the piss but the Evening Standard at least existed and London deserves much more quality local journalism.
This American agrees. I intentionally make my public writings much more confident than my private writings. If I don't, people just ignore me.
> I will admit that I didn't follow the renaming or possibly forking or whatever happened to freenet / hyphanet / etc back last when I was reading about this. If someone could explain it clearly that would be stellar.

The reasons for the renaming are addressed directly in Freenet's FAQ[1]:

# Why was Freenet rearchitected and rebranded?

In 2019, Ian began developing a successor to the original Freenet, internally named “Locutus.” This redesign was a ground-up reimagining, incorporating lessons learned from the original Freenet and addressing modern challenges. The original Freenet, although groundbreaking, was built for an earlier era.

This isn’t the first time Freenet has undergone significant changes. Around 2005, we transitioned from version 0.5 to 0.7, which was a complete rewrite introducing “friend-to-friend” networking.

In March 2023, the original Freenet (developed from 2005 onwards) was spun off into an independent project called “Hyphanet” under its existing maintainers. Concurrently, “Locutus” was rebranded as “Freenet,” also known as “Freenet 2023,” to signal this new direction and focus. The rearchitected Freenet is faster, more flexible, and better equipped to offer a robust, decentralized alternative to the increasingly centralized web.

To ease the transition the old freenetproject.org domain was redirected to hyphanet’s website, while the recently acquired freenet.org domain was used for the new architecture.

It is important to note that the maintainers of the original Freenet did not agree with the decision to rearchitect and rebrand. However, as the architect of the Freenet Project, and after over a year of debate, Ian felt this was the necessary path forward to ensure the project’s continued relevance and success in a world far different than when he designed the previous architecture.

[1] https://freenet.org/faq/#why-was-freenet-rearchitected-and-r...
These were very common in the last century and many continue to be used today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telechron
Back in 2011/2012 I worked for a small game development company and at my recommendation we moved all our assets under 100kb into an sqlite3 db, and then made a "pak file" and stored offsets to said files inside the sqlite3 db (and this was done because there was a post-mortem talk given by Richard Hipp where he said in hindsight he'd wish blobs had been treated more like an inode, where they were an offset further into the database and blobs were just appended to the file)

It was hella fast how quickly we could load our assets (this was for a mobile game so only a handful of assets were not in the db). It's been neat seeing people adopt it further.

One aspect someone might also not realize is you can store near infinite metadata alongside your content, so you can always just query the database to find "similar" files. We threw so much metadata into the DB and I think in the end the pak file was 200MB, and the database was something like 20MB. Again, this was a mobile game. I think the worst thing we had happen on the client side was a single double inner join that we couldn't figure out how to reduce due to some server side complexity (we weren't able to implement the server, which was frustrating as the people we worked with were very bad™ at software development so our builds would break out of nowhere when they would change the entire backend spec without alerting us )

We also used a separate sqlite3 database for game replays so you could (post match completion) replay an entire game and see what each opponent was doing during said game. This was super nice for automated testing as well.
Also, if someone tried to "touch up" the paint/coating, it could be that.

I recently bought a rare model variant that someone tried to make look better, maybe with a black marker/paint that was a solvent for the original paint/coating. It was pretty much ruined for office use, unless you transplanted it to a different shell, or you sandblasted off the sticky mess.

Also, the most common Unfortunate eBay Trick in the last few years seems to be to spray out the insides of electronics with Febreeze and related products. (Source: majority of a dozen used ThinkPads in the last few years, as well as a 3090, and a high-end PSU.) One of the recent ThinkPads, I think they might've used insecticide spray or bug repellent instead.

(ProTip: Never tell an eBay seller, "Don't worry, I already left positive feedback, but can you please just tell me what spray product that odor is from, so that I can use the right method to clean it out?" You will never hear back from that seller, like they have no incentive once positive feedback is left, or they are exercising their right to remain silent on the advice of their attorney.)
Humans are already among the longest living land mammals and rank pretty high among all large animals land or otherwise. We're already evolutionarily optimized for longevity.

Trying to push further out seems to run into a lot of trade-offs. It seems from what I've read that there are mechanisms that cause aging but also are defenses against cancer, like telomere shortening which imposes a cellular division limit. The immune system causes inflammation which causes aging but turn that off and stuff eats you. And so on...

Not saying it's not possible, just that it's going to require more than tweaking a few knobs. I highly doubt there will ever be a "longevity pill" that radically extends life span, though obviously there are medications that can have some positive effect especially on health span. Anything radical like taking the average well past 100-120 years is probably going to require genetic engineering or radical (and invasive) regenerative medicine.
There are a lot of people that don't like Brave's business model. But I've never given Brave a dime and turn off their ad network stuff and they've saved me hundreds of dollars on Youtube Premium over the years.
Share our implementation of the Realtime voice-to-voice API with RAG
We want to share our implementation of the realtime voice-to-voice API with RAG to integrate the AI chatbot with your own knowledge base. You can follow our example to build your own realtime voice-to-voice AI chatbot with your own knowledge base .

https://www.chat-data.com/blog/create-your-own-realtime-voic...

Here is the Youtube video to show how it works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol7X7O9BrCY

You can also expierience it directly here:
https://www.chat-data.com/chatbot-iframe/654aee418bc9a33b0e5... 1
> One area that I have been exploring is building equivalence proofs between high-level specifications, an implementation in C, and the machine code output from the compiler.

AFAIK, that's how seL4 is verified. Quoting from https://docs.sel4.systems/projects/sel4/frequently-asked-que...

"[...] Specifically, the ARM, ARM_HYP (ARM with virtualisation extensions), X64, and RISCV64 versions of seL4 comprise the first (and still only) general-purpose OS kernel with a full code-level functional correctness proof, meaning a mathematical proof that the implementation (written in C) adheres to its specification. [...] On the ARM and RISCV64 platforms, there is a further proof that the binary code which executes on the hardware is a correct translation of the C code. This means that the compiler does not have to be trusted, and extends the functional correctness property to the binary. [...] Combined with the proofs mentioned above, these properties are guaranteed to be enforced not only by a model of the kernel (the specification) but the actual binary that executes on the hardware."
> not allowed to raise prices more than once per day

They can still do surge pricing if the raise it once (and lower it once) per day.
> Your diet is by far the most important part of your health.

If it was the case, we wouldn't have an article like this. We would have very obvious results, and we don't. Some claim we do, but if you look closer, it is not obvious at all.

Note that by "it doesn't matter", I don't mean that anything goes. Only eating deep fried donuts is not good, for the same reason eating only apples is not good, you won't get everything you need from a single food source. If you do that, you will get what are now very obvious and easily identified diseases, like scurvy, anemia, etc... Also, eating too little or too many calories is also not good, especially too little, but the effect (starving to death) is even more obvious.

What I meant by "it doesn't matter" is that with a varied diet and the right number of calories, the details don't matter. And I am convinced that a base diet of fried donuts to the appropriate amount of calories, with supplementation (vitamins, ...) to compensate for deficiencies is fine, or at least, not terrible.

And I also believe that "the appropriate number of calories" is the tricky part. Hunger mechanisms are supposed to regulate this, but they are not adapted to modern society, where rich food is plentiful. Hence the psychological aspect, which Ozempic targets.
For hierarchy like IP addresses, I've seen programs use specialized data structures like CritBit Tries [0] and Allotment Routing Tables [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3015246

[1] https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/2bd42e97200bee/sys/net/a...
We need laws against user-agent discrimination.
> Yes AI software will have bugs, and yes it won't be perfect but you can get away with just one or two for a whole org to fix the odd blip of an LLM.

Maybe. A lot of places have headcount limits on software devs because of budget constraints. As in, the reason they don't hire more is because they can't afford it, not because there is a shortage of code to write and bugs to give. The more optimistic view is that the nature of being a software engineer will adjust to increased productivity and focus on the parts of the job that LLMs can't do, with the market for experts who are skilled at removing "the odd blip from an LLM". Expertise will also move into areas where there's less or insufficient training data for a particular niche. One way to future proof yourself is to find places where it frequently makes up non existent libraries and is bad at code in a language, and specialize in that.
Do you realize that the topic was _walking_ distance, not driving?

I live in a German city where I do not even have to walk a street with cars to get to a super market, a couple of restaurants, three bakeries, barber shop, drugstore, pharmacy, a butcher, a bookshop, a general supplies store, a post office, newspaper/tobacco store, a public library, about a dozen or more doctors and dentists, a massage studio, therapists, two tailors, a bunch of other shops like clothing and such, a cinema, multiple bus stops, a subway station, a park, multiple playgrounds, etc. Once a week there's a larger food market with fresh produce. There are office buildings, a kindergarden/preschool, a church, three hotels.

All within 5 minutes of _walking_ distance. All walkable on foot paths without even seeing or hearing the annoyance of a car. If you cross even just one street, there's a school and a lot more things.

I can take a public bus two stops to a large asia market (or a 20min walk/10min bike ride). There's currently a 50 Euro monthly train pass that is valid for all regional/subway trains and busses all across Germany, so I can simply hop on and off whenever I want. 10 minutes by subway to the main train station and city center, where a lot more can be reached by 5 more minutes of walking.

And no, I am not limited by any of that. It just _adds_ options and convenience.
I don’t want to single out this back and forth particularly, but it reminds me of so much of the political discourse on HN, just endlessly spinning wheels.

e.g. Why can’t someone hang up portraits of both John D. Rockefeller and Mao Zedong in their room, admire them both, and still get along fine in life, maybe even achieve great successes? Regardless of any specific set of words, definitions, arguments, etc…?
I do not think that the example is good. "Wider" and "wieder" have different meanings, even if they are probably derived from the same word.

I do not know if this is true in all the German dialects, but at least some pronounce "wider" with short "i" and "wieder with long "i", so they are easy to distinguish when heard (like the difference in English between "fill" and "feel").

English and German appear to have had a similar semantic evolution for this pair of words, because "wider" means "against", while "wieder" means "again", so in both cases a single word has evolved to cover these two different meanings and the variants have become differentiated in pronunciation too.
My dad (career military) told me that army boots lasted 3 times longer when the GIs bought them out of their uniform allowance (and could keep unspent funds), rather than being issued boots. He always laughed about that.

When I was old enough to do work, he'd have me buy my own shoes :-)
If you haven't done so, you might want to look at some of the work done by the seL4 microkernel project.

They start with a Haskell prototype that is translated programatically into a formal specification for the theorem prover.

They then implement the same thing in C, and use a refinement prove to demonstrate that it matches their Haskell implementation.

They then compile the program, and create another refinement proof to demonstrate that the binary code matches the C semantics.
I have used FreeTube on wayland now for a long time without any issues. Electron still uses x11 as the default on wayland so you need to enable the wayland mode manually. You can easily do that by setting the ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=auto
environment variable.
> Mapping hand written queries results to structs and updating the DB yourself on the basis of what is in structs is not at all an ORM.

You just described a bad, home-grown Object Relational Mapper.
Radiologists are cartel in Canada/USA making ~400-600k/year.
Those jobs are protected and will continue to be human-staffed for foreseeable future regardless of AI efficiency.
I'd be surprised if a 1996 Cadillac was available without power steering? That's a big luxury car, and not having power steering doesn't feel very luxurious. I see there is a power steering pump on parts searches, but reviews don't mention it, and the steering wheel in pictures doesn't look too big.

If the power steering on that was inoperative (maybe the pump died or the fluid level was empty, etc), I'm sure it would be a beast to turn in a parking lot though.
I don’t think so, no. English is phonetic and so some of those spelling errors can come down to your dialect pronouncing the word differently and forgetting the official spelling. That’s now how Chinese characters work though. It tells a story, and a story with “child” instead of “complete” is a vastly different story.
I never said it was the only way.

But it is effective.
You can search YT for "William Gibson Reads Neuromancer", and it's the first result, a playlist of eight pieces. It starts the same, but it seems to be of a higher quality. It says it is abridged, and I didn't realize how much until rather recently.
In my state electricity costs about $0.089/kWh. We spend about $100/mo on electricity total which comes out almost exactly to your 30kWh/day figure (with a $23.15 connection charge included).

Invested that 40k would conservatively cover over 2x our electricity bill without touching the principal (inflation adjusted).

That's a pretty hard sell for solar. Obviously incentives will improve things but it just seems less financially risky to use grid power.
MP3 is accepted by far more players.
It's neutral in the sense that it's not trust-weight-filtered by observer.

It can be created yes, just like any web page can be created, but won't surface for anybody because nobody will endorse it.

If it's endorsed by sybil accounts – it'll be visible to sybils and their followers – ie. nobody real.

To rephrase it – following somebody means it alters your view and nothing else – it's uni-directional (but recursive).