skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We can think of the goblins as functions that return either the truth, the inverse of the truth, or a random answer.

// Knight, tells the truth
K(a) { return a }
// Knave, lies
k(a) { return !a }
// Joker, flips a coin
J(a) { return random(true, false) }

We can craft a question that will make the Knights and Knaves always return the truth. This could be "What would you answer if you were asked if $goblin is the $role?". This question will be noted Q(recipient,goblin,role), and here's what it returns depending if the recipient is a Knight, Knave or Joker.

$goblin is $role | K | K(K) | k | k(k) | J | J(J) |
T | T | T | F | T |T/F| T/F |
F | F | F | T | F |T/F| T/F |

If we didn't have the Joker and wanted to determine the two goblins roles, it would be as easy as asking this question to one of the two goblins.

Now we add the Joker, but we also can ask two more questions. We need to use those two questions to determine who is the joker, so we can discard him and use our last question to discriminate the two remaining goblins.

The 3 goblins will be noted G1, G2, and G3.

Let's ask Q(G1,G2,J).

Two possibilities:

1. The answer is "Yes" (true), either G1 is the Joker or G2 is the Joker. -> G3 is not the Joker.

2. The answer is "No" (false), either G1 is the Joker or G2 is not the Joker. -> G2 is not the Joker.

Now that we know at least one goblin who is not the Joker (whether they are G2 or G3, I'll call them ¬J), we can ask them the question, this time about the first goblin.
Q(¬J,G1,J)
1. The answer is "Yes", G1 is the Joker, the other two are not.
2. The answer is "No", the remaining goblin is the Joker.

I now know who is the Joker, meaning the other two goblins are either a Knight or a Knave.

Ask Q(¬J1,¬J2,K) and you'll know who is the Knight and who is the Knave.

In summary, the scenarios are as follows:

Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | G1 | G2 | G3 |
Q(G1,G2,J) | Q(G3,G1,J) | Q(G3,G2,K) | J | K | k |
Q(G1,G2,J) | Q(G3,G1,J) | ¬Q(G3,G2,K) | J | k | K |
Q(G1,G2,J) | ¬Q(G3,G1,J) | Q(G3,G1,K) | K | J | k |
Q(G1,G2,J) | ¬Q(G3,G1,J) | ¬Q(G3,G1,K) | k | J | K |
¬Q(G1,G2,J) | Q(G2,G1,J) | Q(G2,G3,K) | J | k | K |
¬Q(G1,G2,J) | Q(G2,G1,J) | ¬Q(G2,G3,K) | J | K | k |
¬Q(G1,G2,J) | ¬Q(G2,G1,J) | Q(G2,G1,K) | K | k | J |
¬Q(G1,G2,J) | ¬Q(G2,G1,J) | ¬Q(G2,G1,K) | k | K | J |

PS: If we assume that "What would you answer if you were asked if $goblin is the $role?" is forbidden because the Joker cannot know in advance what he would answer if they were asked if any goblin is any role, since it depends on their coin-flip, meaning that they wouldn't know what is the truth and what is the lie, and thus they cannot lie or tell the truth reliably, we can switch the question for "If you were asked if you were the truth-teller, or if you were asked if $goblin was the $role, would your answer to both questions be the same and always the same?".
I'd argue that after 5 generations your descendants only have (0.5^5) no more than 3% of your genetic material, and if there's some ambiguity to one of your founders (say who has a 50% similarity to the one stated in the pedigree) then that drops to 1% (rounding down).

1% of the human genome (3billion bp) is still 30M bases, which could easily contain 1 or 2 genes which you may have genotyped, depending on the resolution of your genotyping chip (usually 10M markers spread out over the entire genome, and usually clustered around variants/genes of interest).

So yeah, even 5 generations down these differences could be detected at the variant level. Even at 10, you could still _theoretically_ find differences.

I stress theoretically, because the chance of you having all the individuals from a pedigree genotyped at the same time using the same tech (and thus the same subset of common genotypes to compare) is slim to none.

I'd say 5 generations is a rough rule of thumb where the signal is not that much higher than the noise.
Southern China has no central heating either. Old Chinese farm houses in the north still have coal, I stayed at an urban house in Tianjin in 1999 that still used coal honeycombs for heating. The kotatsu was invented in Japan to provide a space to heat individuals, so it’s kind of like that. You’ll still find it in use today.
You profile is pretty interesting. Lmk if you want to come on the pod!
Europe's Defenses Risk Faltering Within Weeks Without US Support
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4599698/

BTW if you really want a comparison, compare with thousands of unvaccinated with a measels infection.

Vaccination wins that by a landslide.
Show HN: I made an app to find the best time to post on social media
Whoa - I was there! This was at a small elm-lang meetup; Prezi hosted this while Evan was working there.

Thank you for sharing this link!
It only looks for a single leading “e” or “i”, not any number. I’m guessing those tweaks were added to capture specific proper nouns that weren’t captured by simpler “leading capital letter” regexes, like “iPad” or “eBay”.
As long as the the servers they talk to have v6 addresses. Or does Apple implement some DNS64+NAT64 / 464XLAT setup transparently in its OSes too?
Windows beta testing has worked this way for 30 years, if not longer. I was a 'public' Windows 98SE beta tester. I downloaded new 98SE ISOs over 56k once per week and wiped that machine clean once per week.

The only compensation I ever got was from beta testing DirectX 5?, I think, and I received a MS Force Feedback Pro joystick for filing the most bugs.
There's no excuse to be boring anymore
I notice how you reply to this but not to where you stand. I guess we know where you stand.
I had a couple of those boards. The full size slots aren't actually x8, because the CPU those boards support only have 24 PCIe lanes, and over half of them are just running USB, SATA, etc. The full size slots are so you can secure cards to the board, instead of running them zip tied to metal dish racks (like in the video i linked in my reply to your sibling comment: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rTCInAXSzKA)
Vim eliminated mouse usage in my IDE of choice and I was looking for a simple solution for Browser as well, where the results of my work take place. I stumbled upon Vimium, but thought I could improve a few things, specifically action detection, action mnemonics, UX and performance.

For example, I wanted to avoid pressing F each time to highlight actionable elements.

So I ended up building this minimalistic yet technically complex plugin to rapidly navigate websites by typing (BrowseCut). I believe it could be useful for folks here as well.

The plugin enables two things:

If you start typing with keyboard, it will highlight all matching elements and texts on the web page. Pressing Enter will activate the element.

If you hold SHIFT, the plugin plugin will highlight all actionable elements on page and assign short mnemonics, e.g. SHIFT + I for the largest input box.

There is a bunch of stuff under the hood, like improved arrow key scrolling. So I hope you'll find it useful. It is best combined with default browser shortcuts for tab manipulation and search, the plugin comes with a built-in cheatsheet.
This is exactly why hand-to-hand combat instructors will tell you that fighting an obese person will go very differently than you might think it will.
Hey, yeah I know sounds weird. We're experimenting with small custom models <1B params to figure out which part of your code you'd probably not want to instrumentalize the normal way (e.g. logging absolutely everything) and instead in a more tailored way (and what that tailored way is), for instance a python for loop with 10k iterations.
The problem is that fat, sick people lose a lot of weight and muscle mass and then become skinny and frail. It just puts you at risk of other medical issues. In older individuals this can cause decreased mobility and raise the risk of falls. Its well documented in medical literature, that's why people worry about it.
Los Chocoyos eruption dated to 79,500ya show Earth bounced back within decades
Yes, but there'd be less chance of mutation due to the smaller scale. By having a large concentration of animals in a smaller space (relatively), it's like hitting the fast forward button on evolution/natural selection for viruses. To counter the extra risk, large scale farms should be testing for pathogen/viruses to at least get an early warning for when there's a nasty mutation.
https://archive.is/w6gN2

By underspending on defense for decades, Europeans have increased their dependence on a man like Trump.
I left just before the 2016 election, telling my Chinese colleagues that Trump wasn’t going to get elected. Sigh.
> obviously correct

While it is "obvious" that it is correct, it is, in fact, neither obvious nor correct if A. you ever subtract from then len field, and B. you use "len != 0" as a check for "is string non-empty". This program does both things quite a lot and it requires a conscious check to re-assure yourself that no, in this particular program, the patterns of acitons A (subtractions from the len field) never break the property B (non-zero len means that the string is not empty). But any minor modification may accidentally break this harmony if you are not aware that it is required to hold.
Ask HN: Will vibe coding better motivate students to learn to read and write?
Maybe making a video game using English would be more compelling than reading stories and writing book reports?
Amazing paper, I re-read it in more detail today. It feels very rich, like almost a new field of study —- congratulations to the authors.

I’m ninjaing in here to ask a q — you point out in the checkerboard initial discussion that the 5(!) circuit game of life implementation shows bottom left to top right bias — very intriguing.

However, when you show larger versions of the circuit, and in all future demonstrations, the animations are top left to bottom right. Is this because you trained a different circuit, and it had a different bias, or because you forgot and rotated them differently, or some other reason? Either way, I’d recommend you at least mention it in the later sections (or rotate the graphs if that aligns with the science) since you rightly called it out in the first instance.
Instead of looking at it from a price perspective, look it from a value perspective. Most of the potential customers can afford to buy this, if they wanted to. But do they see value in buying it?

People understand that a smartphone is essentially required in modern society. But many people just don’t care about most of the features.

If the 16e is reasonably repairable and the parts/service are reasonably priced, and the phone gets software updates for a long time, I could see people willing to buy it and keep it for a long time; it would provide sufficient value.

But this is a moving target, Android phones are also out there proposing their own value measurements…
Heh. Even more funny than that is that ISIS was the name of a classified intel sharing network around the same time that Osama Bin Laden took out the WTC.
We had a 9/11-type event and many many many smaller scale terrorists events WITH a "non-collapsed" FBI!
It is about the existence or the methodology being obscured, not the contents of an encrypted message. The point of that phrase is to contrast one type of security for another. You and I can know exactly what tool was used to encrypt something, and all the mathematics behind it, but still fail to decrypt it without the requisite private key.
> A study from the University of Exeter, published today (March 6) in Nature Food, warns that by 2080, growing bananas for export may no longer be economically viable in many parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Climate change is driving temperatures higher, making conditions less suitable for banana cultivation.

> The study also highlights major socioeconomic barriers to adaptation, including limited access to infrastructure and labor shortages. Because most banana farms are located near population centers and ports, relocating to cooler areas is not a simple solution.

> The industry is dominated by multinational corporations...

While things may go poorly for the countries currently exporting bananas, I'd bet that those multinational corporations will keep growing bananas, at scale.

(If you're unfamiliar with the industry's "do whatever it takes" reputation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company )
Let's look at a single example of Elon Musk's alleged crimes. He bought Twitter stock in 2022 and did not follow disclosure laws, which led to him getting an extra $150 million. It took the SEC more than two years to investigate him and decide to proceed with charges. That's more due process than most people get.
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...
Love that one, and the closely related hole in a large metal plate. Something about that reframing flips my intuition on it's head.
Good, but how do you reconcile this with a WSJ story from two days ago,

"U.S. Suspends Intelligence Sharing With Ukraine. Pause is expected to cripple Kyiv’s ability to target Russian forces".
That is absurd. Muscle mass is a huge predictor of mortality and anyone who isn't actively strength training and maintaining higher levels of muscle would see a health benefit by doing so. The idea that an overweight person has "too much muscle" is nonsense.

The side affect of muscle loss from these glp-1 agonist drugs is a serious downside that everyone should be aware of and try to mitigate if they choose to take them.
Yes, I'd rather have it cited as an unreliable source than uncited. Every human will happily regurgitate misinformation they've absorbed unknowingly, so it's not that much worse than a confident human comment with no real citation besides themself.

However, I also think it's valid to question what it adds to a conversation if someone is quoting it verbatim. Would we be happier if HN was like Quora and automatically added an AI response to everything?
Not clear to me who this is aimed at?
Ask Deepseek to generate a regex for detecting python import statements.
Yes, they will crack encryption soon.
Yes, they will in a few years. Extrapolating AI accelerating developments that will help them achieve this. Either US or China, but it will happen.
Bitcoin price is based on vibes, not anything in the real world. It only holds value based on how popular it is
Another TechCrunch [dupe]

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43287594
Yeah, 99% sure it's an apartment in this context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_apartment
This is great info! I tried using that approach, but had trouble enabling the `num_traits/libm` dependency on no_std only. Does anyone know if that's possible?
Finder is fast until you need to use a network share. Your choices are NFS (wait on a loading screen for 10-30 seconds every time you change directories) and SMB (changing directories is fast, but Finder does a bunch of blocking calls or something so when you scroll it beachballs every few seconds). I don't have any problems using the same shares on Explorer, Dolphin, or Nautilus, it's Finder specific.
> The idea was that businesses would pay extra for a certificate that guaranteed they were the legitimate brand

I really liked that functionality, it made sense to me
RIP Len.
Connecting AI Agents to Every App
In every way, because context matters, and the original commenter intentionally recontextualized it just to be contrarian.
It's not a 100% solution, and paid (dirt cheap though), closed source, but as I also have my monitor in landscape mode, I use https://startallback.com
Anybody know enough ancient Greek to coin a word for governance by whim or fickleness? Perhaps astathocracy from the Greek word astathes (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B1%CF%83%CF%84%CE%B1%CE%B...)?
The success of Balatro is absolutely incredible, and very well deserved. It's a pity that it seemed to have such a physical toll on the developer.

Balatro's probably the most accessible roguelike deckbuilder I have ever played, and it really is a ton of fun. In a lot of ways it feels like 'outsider art' to the genre - the blog post mentioned that the developer didn't really play any similar games during development and it really shows. Balatro really is a breath of fresh air, and brings a lot of innovation to the table.
Will def. do a technical write up! Wanted to do a more target approach like you around valid mutations only but I think users want to observe variables not only where they are written but also where they are read, so a low hanging fruit was to wrap all the expressions I could (hundreds of lines of AST queries and tricks per language) with functions/lambdas and some sort of "logging". Of course this is only 4 weeks in the making so there is so much more to do. And as you guessed you probably can't do the targeted approach well in Python and others.
Yes that is what the word obscure means.

But the phrase “security through obscurity” is an industry term that refers to keeping things secure purely by not letting people know they exist.

In contrast with encryption, where I can tell you exactly where the encrypted data is, but you can’t access it.

Security through obscurity is hiding a bicycle in a bush and hoping no one notices it, encryption is more like locking it to a bike rack with a very good lock.
Hey dinosaur … the future is the #fediverse.
Wake the fuck up you fascist toady corporate bootlicker.
I tried that with my buddy's shortwave while on guard duty in Iraq and fried the thing due to atmospheric electrostatic energy discharge (or it's actual scientific name), needless to say he was less than happy with me. First clue probably should have been the visible sparks coming off the antenna wire. Second clue should have been I was sitting in a truck insulated from the ground. Yep, he definitely should have known better.
Hi HN!

I regularly share projects and ideas with family, friends, colleagues, and online communities. Many of them live in different time zones, and I want to ensure my posts reach them to get a timely feedback; not hours before/after they’ve already checked their feeds.

Although I like to practice the "just publish it" initiative, without too much second-guessing, I wanted a more reliable data-driven approach.

Now, instead of guessing, I can check the app and know when to post for better visibility, and so can you.
Trump is an erratic man. Canadians have been dealing with Schrödinger's tariffs for months now.
>...could have just bought his own media source, or several smaller ones, and let em rip with yellow attack journalism while promoting his vision.

Maybe he tried?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_South,_Manhattan#Tel...
uBlock Origin Lite – Chrome Web Store
If you wanted Matrix you would use Element or something.

Discord has a totally different feature set than Matrix-based software
Here is my guess. If you twiddle your thumbs in the screw-in direction, the heads move together at twice the rate that a head would move when screwed into a fixed thread. And in the screw-out direction, the heads would move apart at twice the rate of dissassembling a bolt from a fixed threaded hole.
You have to cultivate your inner drone and look at the work from both perspectives. Sometimes you have to make the construction drawing after building the house then pretend you did it the other way round. :)
Europe's defense sector has both "underspend" and "corrupt and incompetent" problems. And without some pretty draconian oversight, firing up their spending will mostly fuel the latter.
Thanks for sharing! I have to admit I do not have the necessary brain cycles to spare today, but OCR processing is indeed of interest to me, and I will take a more in-depth look in the upcoming days.

The idea of an exclusionary approach sounds interesting as well. I'll have to think about that a bit.
I'll bite: after writing and using komorebi[1], it's very painful for me to go back to using software like yabai or aerospace - macOS programmatic UI interactions are just too slow, while on Windows they feel comparatively instant.

All of this is made possible for me as a developer by the excellent work Microsoft has done in providing Win32 bindings for Rust. If only Apple would provide the same.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi
damn - kent state ... not sure how many people on HN were born before kent state... doubt there is a living soul in the USA that has a fear of militant police and state forces and think kent state massacre is just around the corner
it's open sourced and self-hostable
The “boring” one is way better though?
“In nature” means “it would not happen if humans weren’t around”. So no, nature isn’t “everything that happens”. Calcium and californium atoms smashing together to form oganesson would never happen “in nature” without humans using a particle accelerator to drive the process.
This is similar to how I guessed the answer - it's a symmetric system, so there's no reason why it would be one direction over the other and so logically there would be no movement.
Grow, of course. I mean, come on.
I highly doubt that.

LLMs don't need perfect, precise English. So long as you get the gist of what you mean across, they can work with it.

There is also a limited correlation between good prose and good information transfer to an LLM. Something with questionable spelling, typoes, grammatical inconsistencies, and generally irritating prose that is precise and accurate will beat lyrical, poetic prose that skirts around the point.
Nice roundup, and thanks for sharing that proposal!
I played around with a related problem - find the shortest string containing every binary number of length n. There are 2^n substrings, and I seem to recall being able to to do it in 2^n + n - 1 bits. In other words, perfect overlap was possible at least up to n=10.

I was interested in this because it's an optimal way to plot Julia sets by running the iteration backward and choosing one or the other square root. To visit all parts of the outline you'd want to apply every sequence of root selection (positive or negative) up to some length. Doing it at random is cool, but for a fixed number of points you want one of these sequences.
It starts by Microsoft not following the "Developers, Developers, Developers" meme they became famous for.

While, from my point of view, UWP is what .NET 1.0 should have been (see [0]), the way it was introduced, requiring a complete rewrite from Win32/.NET applications, with limited capabilities, already required some adoption love.

Then while trying to achieve feature parity with Win32/.NET, this was done at the expense of breaking compatibilty across WinRT generations (8 => 8.1. => 10 => WinAppSDK), and if that wasn't enough, also breaking the .NET and C++ tooling experience in the process.

I think it was a mix of issues, management naturally, lack of empathy for the Windows developer community, whatever internal KPIs they had/have to meet, and most likely also quite relevant, it appears new employees don't have much experience with Windows development or its culture, were raised in a world without Windows.

People like myself have been PC users since the early days of MS-DOS 3.3, naturally new employees now have other backgrounds.

[0] - https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...
Four book logging apps to keep you reading
erh you can do this somehow,I did it to mine?

now what _I_ want, is to be able to resize the taskbar again.

also, I would prefer win11 didn't disable just about everything I had configured, particularly preview for file types.
and - I dont know how they did it, but basic file explorer view feels much slower than win10,on the same machine.
given that file explorer is basically all windows boils down to, i am not happy that they tske efforts to make it crappier.
and given that win95 was able to show a file grid in 1995, I wonder how they are able to screw that up, 30 years later?
First analysis finds America's butterflies disappearing at "catastrophic" rate