What are the most upvoted users of Hacker News commenting on? Powered by the /leaders top 50 and updated every thirty minutes. Made by @jamespotterdev.
The best way to have successful results showing work on HN is to build something that is interesting (does something neat, is immediately useful, solves important problems, &c) that HN readers can immediately interact with. Availability of source code usually doesn't have much of anything to do with it. You are better off posting a strong interactive experience and a good writeup than you are posting the source code.
If you post something that isn't "FLOSS", 2 or 3 people will complain about that in the comment threads, before they're (usually) flagged off the thread.
Open source is great, but promoting open source is not in fact a goal of HN.
He is unapologetically antitrust. The piece touches on all of the points you mention.
> What ensued was a bidding war between Frontier and JetBlue over Spirit Airlines. JetBlue raised their bid, and ultimately, shareholders and executives accepted the higher JetBlue offer. The result was exactly what the Spirit Board had predicted; the Antitrust Division sued in 2023 to block the JetBlue-Spirit deal. The law is the law.
> That’s not all. In 2024, during the trial over JetBlue’s proposed acquisition of Spirit, the judge directly asked Spirit executives if they would go bankrupt should the merger fail. The reason is that there’s a special loophole in merger law, such that if your firm would otherwise fail absent a merger, you can get special dispensation to sell your company even if such a sale would erode competition. And that makes sense, if the company goes out of business then there wouldn’t be competition anyway. So what did Spirit executives tell the judge? They said, no, we’re not a failing firm, we’ll be fine if the merger doesn’t happen.
> In other words, they turned down the Frontier merger and accepted JetBlue’s proposed illegal one to get more money. Then the executives misled the court or themselves on the firm's financial condition so they wouldn’t have to admit they had run the airline into the ground.
> So that’s the situation. But an additional question is as follows. Is the bankruptcy actually bad? Sure shareholders will get wiped out. Guess what? GOOD. They deserve it. They opted for an illegal deal instead of a legal one. Plus Spirit will keep flying as a competitive airline, at least for now. This particular kind of bankruptcy isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just means you reorganize the creditor relationships but keep the entity as a going concern.
https://www.economicliberties.us/matt-stoller/
> Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project. He is the author of the Simon and Schuster book Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, which Business Insider called “one of the year’s best books on how to rethink capitalism and improve the economy.” David Cicilline, Chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, has called Stoller’s work “an inspiration.” Stoller is a former policy advisor to the Senate Budget Committee.
2019-2020 was also a big H1N1 (Spanish/Swine Flu) year, as were 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. Entirely possible that's what you remember reading about or getting. If COVID hadn't happened Spanish Flu would've been a big headline anyways; as it is, a lot of the people who think they got COVID before March 2020 probably actually had H1N1. Before then the case numbers are orders of magnitude higher for flu, but COVID was more transmissible and almost 10x more lethal, and so post-lockdown it dominated.
It is my own perception that HN has gotten worse in the six months but these sort of "meta" discussions can be as much part of the problem as part of the solution or possibly a bad smell.
My take it this.
The median scientific paper is wrong. I wrote a wrong paper. The average biomedical paper doesn't fit the standards of the Cochrane Library mostly because N=5 when you need more like N=500 to have a significant result. Since inflationary cosmology fundamental physics has been obsessed with ideas that might not even be wrong.
It's well known that if you lose a lot of weight through diet (and even exercise) you are likely to lose muscle mass. With heavy resistance exercise you might at best reduce your muscle loss if you don't use anabolic steroids and similar drugs. That you could have changes in heart muscle with using these weight loss drugs isn't surprising for me at all and it's the sort of thing that people should be doing research both in the lab and based on the patient experience.
(Funny you can get in trouble if you do too much exercise, spend 20 years training for Marathons and you might get A-Fib because you grew too much heart muscle instead of too little.)
A lot of the cultural problem now is that people are expecting science to play a role similar to religion. When it came to the pandemic I'd say scientists were doing they best they could to understand the situation but they frequently came to conclusions that later got revised because... That's how science works. People would like some emotionally satisfying answer (to them) that makes their enemies shut up. But science doesn't work that way.
The one thing I am sure of is that you'll read something else in 10 years. That is how science works.
A recent thread going into details of why (only a tiny fraction of zones are signed, in North America that count has gone sharply down over recent intervals, and browsers don't support it):
> Most companies don’t have an issue with clear communication because they’re not worried about what’s being said will end up part of a criminal investigation.
Only if you count "most companies" by company, i.e. most companies are therefore small businesses. And of course they're not worried because they're small and not subject to these kinds of investigations. They're not profitable enough to be targets.
But if you count "most companies" by where most people work, you're talking about medium-to-large corporations. And it's standard these days to have policies exactly like Google's, to not retain instant messages for example, and delete e-mails after a short number of years. Because they're big juicy targets for frivolous lawsuits.
So no, this isn't a win-win. People say dumb stuff all the time that a lawyer can take out of context. That doesn't mean a corporation is a criminal organization, as you suggest.
Corporations sue each other all the time, not because the corporation being sued is criminal, but because the corporation suing thinks it'll be able to get away with it. But you seem to be ignoring that.
I don't know why people keep saying this. There are some features of Next.js that are better supported on Vercel. That doesn't mean that you have to use Vercel. In fact if you are just building a static React site without any server components (so, 99% of sites created with Next.js) then it makes literally no difference where you deploy it.
I would assume that a good chunk of students in poverty simply don't have a device that works well for consuming books on.
If you don't have a tablet or laptop, just a phone with a small screen, I can see people saying z-lib isn't helpful for them. That they'll just use physical books at their library. (And students without computers is definitely still a thing, that's why computer labs still exist.)
I can definitely imagine a lot of undergrads who would assume that if a book isn't available in their college library then they'd never need it anyways. (Rightly or wrongly.)
And remember that so many textbooks now contain a mandatory online component where assignments get submitted and tests are taken, so you're forced to buy it even if z-lib has it. (I'm not defending that... just explaining it.)
Huge if this can be commercialized in water purification units similar to UV.
Paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40295-024-00458-3
Anyone have an open link?
Lately I have been working with IDE-integrated assistants like Jetbrains and Windsurf whose claim to fame is that they can make little changes to existing code bases.
I've been impressed with the ability of these systems to, say, look at liquibase migrations and JooQ stubs and figure out what the CREATE TABLE must have been, or help me use a feature in Postgres I'd never used before and then use it in JooQ.
On the other hand, AI-assisted programming is a lot like working with a junior, there is a lot of "Dude, there's a red squiggle on line 92!"
A basic mental model for a complex task is that it is comprised of N subtasks which each have a probability p of success. In that can the probability of success is
pᴺ
This essay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
talks about the reason why so many attempts to revolutionize programming failed which comes down to: there are five things that burn up time in projects, some startup thinks only three of them matter, they make some improvement in the areas they want to improve, but they didn't remove all of the roadblocks so no revolution! It can be really exhausting to talk with people about these kind of projects because they insist that they want to limit the scope to make a product they can really make, but in so limiting the scope they produce a product that's doomed to fail.
The missing link for AI in the database I think is in testing, recovery, etc. It's already a terrible problem that conventional answers for testing SQL are often bad. Because it might take several minutes to create a realistic database for testing and how you just couldn't always get a database instance when you need it for the cloud people have avoided real integration testing for databases in many projects. So then we wind up writing awful tests using mocks and such instead.
You are not going to get superhuman accuracy out of a SQL agent unless it has a set of test cases to work with. You just aren't. Testing is how we get superhuman performance out of humans.
There is also this issue of recovery and infrastructure protection. If that bot writes a bad UPDATE against your test database that might be 20 minutes to restore from backup (if you've got a big test database) Write it against the production database and it is like a game of snakes and ladders, anything you gained from AI is lost.
Anyhow I have talked to (even worked for) a lot of people who think they can revolutionize programming by choosing a few problems to solve and ignoring the others and people like that are quick to say "you don't really need that..." and maybe sometimes they are right but so far the Ancien Regime still holds.
You usually can't sell off 5% of a small business. A sole proprietor is not going to issue stock for 5% and get any buyers.
> once they are fixed take them out again
In an actual war, you hit the repair equipment and personnel [1].
(As to the Geneva Conventions note, we're discussing a hypothetical war with Russia. The status quo, including rules of war, are going to be rewritten by the victors.)
> bring back the google from 5-10 years ago
Given Kagi's abysmal adoption rates, it's clear that good search isn't worth it for most people.
It's OK to adjust the title to have more relevant facts or to fix a poorly worded one. Editorializing is more like 'Amazing: Niantic makes world-changing AI breakthrough'.
> Just bring back the google from 5-10 years ago please
What you really want is the internet from 5-10 years ago (really even longer than that), and that's not coming back.
September thread on Forbes Marketplace and "parasite SEO" (300 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590466
AMEN!
I remember this guy
pointing out the line between what you can get away with with SEO and what you can't get away with and what you can't get away with is making Google look stupid.
Why do folks like your self make such foolish analogies? If the US had invaded Mexico like Russia invaded Ukraine then yes, it would be completely fine for Mexico to fire missiles into the US.
> Russia is responsible but not alone. This war could have been prevented by not pushing Ukraine into NATO
The war is what caused Ukraine to restart its previously-repudiated attempts to join NATO, so this isn’t just wrong but entirely backwards.
Going up is what an endowment is supposed to do; you spend some part of the return on operational needs, while also growing the base so you have greater (nominal, and hopefully also real) capacity for that downstream.
If, over the long term, an endowment isn’t growing, it’s being mismanaged.
> The only time exponential backoff is useful is if the failure is due to a rate limit and you specifically need a mechanism to reduce the rate at which you are attempting to use it.
Exponential backoff is applicable to any failure where the time it has so far gone unresolved is the primary piece of available data on how lilong it is likely to take before being resolved, which is a very common situation, which is why it is a good default for most situations where you don’t have a better knowable-in-advance information at hand and the probability distribution ofn time to resolve, and where delays aren't super costly (though knowledge of when delays become costly can be used to set a cap on exponential backoff, too.)
My favorite ex-library book was "Engineering with Nuclear Explosives", discarded from the Stanford engineering library.[1]
[1] https://archive.org/details/engineeringwithn00plowrich/mode/...
~40% of cargo tonnage is moving fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) around [1] [2]. I would expect this volume to decline as the global energy transition continues to ramp. China's economy and EVs are already depressing global oil prices [3] [4] [5], for example. Also consider global decoupling and repatriating of supply chains [6] [7].
My analysis: We're potentially going to require much less marine transport capacity in the future. How much of that can be electrified is the question, imho (versus "green ammonia" produced from low carbon energy [8]).
[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/01/12/almost-40-...
[2] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2019_en...
[3] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/china-s-slowdown-is-weighin...
[4] https://theprogressplaybook.com/2024/09/18/chinas-ev-and-hig...
[5] https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/chinas-slowing-oil-dem...
[6] https://www.axios.com/2024/11/14/companies-global-trade-chin...
[7] https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2024/...
[8] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Quite a few sites are slow for me right now, including Amazon.com and Bluesky (hosted on AWS). Feels like an outage brewing.
I always felt public APIs were as much about limiting access as it was granting it. So often I see an API which is designed to preclude doing anything interesting, like coaching in the case of Strava.
It's why my first step to an integration is often an "IPA" that works on a web interface; it's really amazing how you can often reuse an old selector-based HTML scraper and have the integration done before the people who went the API route were able to log in. When I hear "API" I think about what they took out before I think what they put in.
Bluesky's search is down, and Amazon.com is super slow for me. Feels like an AWS outage brewing.
Making a metric an objective is an effective if often very costly way of testing the hypothesis that it is coincident rather than a proxy (which in cases more complex than racing is frequently a matter of dispute.)
How much of this is what Google is doing, and how much is what this guy wants Google to do?
The 1980s AI "boom" was tiny.
In the 1980s, AI was a few people at Stanford, a few people at CMU, a few people at MIT, and a scattering of people elsewhere. There were maybe a half dozen startups and none of them got very big.
Zotero [1] like GUI Internet Archive client.
It is growing like crazy right now, so there's a burst of activity. Like anything that gets suddenly popular, that will end, and it'll subside.
It’s incredibly difficult to structure these rules in a way that doesn’t discriminate against small businesses while not opening a giant loophole for the rich.
It is a powerful capability for executing arbitrary user provided code in a secure manner. You can then repatriate to OpenFaaS on Kubernetes if an exit strategy is required.
When I toured Jacques Littlefield's Tank Ranch they had, what I believe to be, this exact tank. They told the story of how it had been lost in the river and sat there and they went to see if it was still there and arranged to get it removed and returned to California where they restored it.
If someone was so motivated, they could probably go back to the internet archives of the auction that happened after Jacques died to find a picture of both the restored tank and its providence.
There is more than one kind of quality.
When I drove from New Mexico from New Hampshire I thought roads in the US South were remarkably good. I settled in New York where major roads seemed pretty good but go to Pennsylvania and it seems there are two kinds of roads: bad roads and roads under construction, you never seem to find a good road that was just constructed. A lot of people thought it was frost heaves but this article say it isn’t.
My quality problem in NY is that atlas maps and GPS maps show numerous roads that aren’t really passable or if they are passable are too risky. I never saw ‘minimum maintenance’ or ‘abandoned’ roads before I came to NY and I wish they were so marked in GPS maps. There is a road near me which is sometimes passable in the winter if you have the right kind of vehicle and if you know the road goes downhill and won’t require that much traction… People who don’t have the right kind of vehicle will get led by GPS down this road and think it is OK because there are tracks but halfway through they panic and try to turn around now they are in trouble. That road is passable in the summer except for when it gets washed out.
Also NH is in a class by itself with its motor-oriented infrastructure (in 1980 they rerouted route 93 to go around Manchester and nobody goes there anymore) which is tree-structured as much as possible so you have many levels of hierarchy which can and will jam up. Want to walk? You can’t get there from here. I can go for years in NY without updating my GPS maps but if I drive to NH I will see the road I am got rerouted and there is a shopping center where there used to be a road. And this is in a state that doesn’t have income taxes so I don’t know how they pay for it.
As the article points out, it looks like the fabled MI300C.
Impractical as it'd be, I'd love to see a workstation based on one of these. It's more or less a computer on a single chip.
Lenin talked about rural stupidity but I sometimes see urban stupidity. If you grow up underclass in New York City the skyscrapers seem to hang in he air without physical support —- or financial support. Without visibility of the invisible economic pyramid underneath them the whole economy looks like a scam or a power trip right out of Foucault. So no wonder a state rep from the Bronx will insist that we subsidize off-track betting to save jobs.
In this classic book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Thermonuclear_War
Kahn points out that if the cities of the US were destroyed we could reconstruct them in 40 or so years based on resources from the countryside. If it was turned around the city people just die.
We’ll build it back up. This too shall pass.
This is one of those ideas that I've seen kicking around for at least a decade now, but manifesting it in real code is easier said than done. And that isn't even the real challenge, the real challeng is keeping it working over time.
I've seen some stuff based on treesitter that seems to be prompting a revival of the idea, but it still has fundamental issues, e.g., if I'm embedding in python:
sql = "SELECT * FROM table "
if arbitrarilyComplicatedCondition:
sql += "INNER JOIN a AS joined ON table.thing = a.id "
else:
sql += "INNER JOIN b AS joined ON table.thing = b.id "
sql += "WHERE joined.
This is just a simple example; they get arbitrarily complicated, quickly. This is one of those things that when you think of the simple case it seems so easy but when you try to bring it into the real world it immediately explodes with all the complexity your mind's eye was ignoring.
We are kind of getting back there - a modern server (and mainframes before them) has a bunch of slave processors for all kinds of specialized work, not only GPUs, but DPUs, crypto acceleration, and so on.
The C64 went a bit further than that, in something that reminisces of a Plan 9 network of a workstation and one or more storage servers (the drives).
If I like Amaro, but haven't been a fan of Fernet, is Malort worth a shot?
Related:
Russia bans crypto mining in several regions to address electricity shortages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42185827 - Nov 2024
Russia's War Economy Is Hitting Its Limits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42152373 - Nov 2024
Russian Food Prices Skyrocket in Growing Concern for Kremlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42139964 - Nov 2024
> Using a full-featured RPC framework for IPC seems like overkill when the processes run on the same machine.
That is exactly what COM/WinRT, XPC, Android Binder, D-BUS are.
Naturally they have several optimisations for local execution.
> In any case, surely the 'punishment' should be directed at North Korea?
The problem is at least as much Russia inviting NK as North Korea positively responding, aiding Ukraine works against all the belligerents aligned against it, NK as well as Russia, and the North Koreans in Russia are not protected by the Armistice the way North Koreans on the Korean peninsula are.
The difference is that it's impossible to wind API features back: as an open protocol, they literally cannot do that. "The future company is an adversary" is a slogan the team uses to help guide decisions.
Most of them aren't named like government entities, given a verified-government-entity greycheck on Twitter, have their leadership announced by the incoming President elect, recruit on the explicit premise of being part of Administration policy, and have public confusion as to whether they are a government department or something else.
But “chronological” feeds are typically newest-first, so “people don't want to go back to what happened a while ago” isn’t really an argument against them.
While your parent is not, that Graydon is here: https://bsky.app/profile/graydon-pub.bsky.social
> This just proves how entrenched this country is in car centric transportation
How? We’re big, rich and sparsely populated. I’m not saying that means we must have this system. But the longest road network doesn’t prove that’s wrong.
>He was paid a one-off fee of £6.
Suboptimal asset class having existential crisis.
It's not just that it tastes bad. Elisir Novasalus tastes bad. Lots of things taste bad. Malort tastes like something you are not supposed to be drinking; like solvents, like something leaking out of the engine of a car. Not in a good way. It tastes like a bad product.
> reason algorithmic ordering is so common is because that's what gives the most runway for advertising
You’re both right. Algorithmic feeds boost engagement, both by surfacing the most-engaging content and removing the burden of trimming one’s follow list, and also aids in serving ads. (Both by making them easier to sneak in and in the same engine that surfaces engaging organic content being useful for serving engaging ads.)
This is basically a form of the "Sufficiently Smart Compiler" claim. It is generally false, barring a definition of "semantics right" that simply includes a presumption that the "semantics" will be chosen for performance in which case the claim becomes circular.
At this point in the collective journey we are all on understanding programming languages and what they can do, the evidence is overwhelming that there are in fact plenty of useful semantics that are intrinsically slower than other useful semantics, relative to any particular chunk of hardware executing them. That is, what is slow on CPU or GPU may differ, but there is certainly some sort of difference that will exist, and there is no amount of (feasible) compiling around that problem.
Indeed, that's why we have CPUs and GPUs and soon NPUs and in the future perhaps other types of dedicated processors... precisely because not all semantics can be implemented equally no matter how smart you are.
The author appears to be defining it in terms of the effort put in to the language, basically, person-hours.
Go may be a small language by some definitions (and as my phrasing implies, perhaps not by others), but it is certainly one that has had a lot of person-hours put into it.
Seeing a Ruby Sinatra project after a long time.
> Do you expect sites you do visit, like "google.com" or such, are going to serve up malware?
Absolutely. One of the main reasons to run an adblocker. Malicious ads slip through regularly onto entirely reputable sites.
> Russia have for a long time been saying that such action would be tantamount to a NATO attack
They say this every time. When Obama sent non-lethal aid, they used the same line.
Why do they object? What's objectionable about Mozilla knowing what features someone anonymous uses?
If you can "spark outrage" with such a post, then no statement is safe.
Such a post is a canary in the goldmine for censorship.
> sound like IIT has dealt with the very large number of students who want to study CS by trying to limit it to the overall academically strongest students?
It might also be a check against rote learning.
> Achieving that level of technical and artistic refinement is such a huge factor in its success.
Yep, the article talks about how they built their way to success, but the actual method they used is "have a team of two superheroes make the game".
If it's copying anything it's the United Colours Of Benneton series of ads from the nineties.
Shitting on people when they do something good for not going further is a surefire way of stopping them from doing anything else.
I guess on the flip side, how many of those comments are from anyone in Jaguar’s market? Jaguar is a luxury brand. It doesn’t seem dismissibly stupid for it to act like other luxury brands as opposed to Toyota.
CG Boost‘s apple basket course (free) or their Blender Launchpad course (cheap).
Which is why having cybersecurity laws and liability in computing is so relevant.
This is PR to remain relevant while engagement grows elsewhere.
Further in the newsletter.
Apple is focused on licensing its movies to other companies, such as foreign TV networks and stores, where viewers can rent or buy them, according to a person familiar with the plans. The company isn’t [yet] planning to license its original TV shows to third parties.. Apple has already started selling TV+ via Amazon in a bid to increase the audience for the service. Licensing to third parties will generate additional revenue and introduce Apple movies to people who don’t yet pay for TV+.Wild Moose (W23) does this for everyone.
Edit: Lol at myself, I thought this was a blog post from Meta and I was pointing out that there is a YC company that does this for everyone.
Now I realize that this was an ad for a different YC company that also does (although WM is a year older).
I think is forgotten here that one of the benefits of nominal typing is that the compiler can know that data layout at run time so performance benefits.
There has been so much ink spilled on the question of what kind of type systems help programmers be productive but there is not such controversy on the performance side.
Yes. It's a good success story. And a cute little game.
Title on article
Using Lua for Embedded Development vs. Traditional C Code
No it's not, it's perfect.
You want to be able to do side-by-side diffs on your laptop using a normal sized (not tiny) font.
You want to be able to paste snippets into design documents and emails and blogs without accidental wrapping or truncating or scrolling.
80 is nicely legible. It works really well.
They’re much smaller and don’t have to move/deploy.
As someone who has used Riak in anger once in his career and who has a blossoming interest in FoundationDB I'd love someone to contrast the two systems. My knee-jerk reaction --- which I'm calling out as such! --- is that FDB has decreased the relevance of systems like Riak.
It’s wild how different experiences can be. I’ve had five vaccinations for Covid (two initial, three boosters) and my antibody tests at every annual physical show I’ve never gotten it.
In my direct personal experience, for me it was 1969 during my first major gig. I remember one project, called the March 1 system, that slowly came into being sometime that October, if my memory serves me correctly. There was tension, of course. This was exacerbated by having to work nights to get access to the system to continue development.
I eventually learned, when asked for a "quick" estimate, I would give something drastically longer than I knew would be accepted. I said "But I can give you a better estimate if you give me a few days to do a better plan." This always got me the extra time to provide an estimate.
For what it's worth: I'm not saying Singal is exaggerating how bad SciAm is. I think I agree with him, and have complained about it elsewhere.
I do have a problem with him dipping his toes into defenses of scientific racism (which is what he's doing when he implicitly imputes wokeism to an editorial calling E.O. Wilson out for dabbling in scientific racism). This is a problem with the reflexive contrarian rationalist sphere Singal has allowed himself to be relegated to (listen to his podcast, it's even more obvious there).
A lot of stuff SciAm has written is real dumb and even destructive. But not everything that anti-woke people object to in SciAm is wrong; if you adopt that stance, you can launder all sorts of crazy things into the discourse. He did that here.
Seconded, Zulip's model is fantastic. It makes it a breeze to catch up or coordinate.
So uv caused a bit of an issue with me installing PyTorch over the weekend.
When installed with brew on my MacBook, uv currently has PyTorch 3.13 as a dependency, which is fine. But PyTorch does not currently have a stable wheel that's compatable with Python 3.13! This resulted in very confusing errors. (Solution was to point to the Nightly index)
That's technically PyTorch's fault, but it's indicitave why a specific page on installing PyTorch is necessary, and it's good to know the documentation specifically calls it out.
They contacted me. My take was it fit the criteria for
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam
BTW, this is a "author didn't take his writing seriously so he posted to medium so I just read the first paragraph" case. If you want people to read what you write, try a different platform.
They announced a no-go while it was still boosting towards space, so it won’t be a relight issue.
No. Not in the context Rayiner meant it, where there's policy discretion about who gets it, the way you might apply work requirements to SNAP.
Useful. This demonstrates that coin flipping merely amplifies noise in human manipulation.
A classic example in the old PSSC high school physics curriculum was a little catapult-like device which tossed a coin, spinning it a few times in mid-air, and repeatably landing it on the same side. It's a demonstration that Newtonian physics is repeatable.
Something like that is inside some automatic transmissions.
Sperry UNIVAC once built a 4-bit fluidic ALU as a demo, but it was useless.
Pot, meet kettle? It's usually the industry that's leading with "write inefficient code, hardware is cheaper than dev time" approach. If anything, I'd expect a long-running physics research project to have well-optimized code. After all, that's where all the optimized math routines come from.
The whole point of testing (and making) deadly nuclear weapons is to ensure they are never used again. The Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine has kept us alive through the darkest pf the Cold War (also keeping the Cold War cold). In order to credibly threaten anyone who tries to annihilate you with certain annihilation is with lots of such doomsday weapons. We have lived in this Mexican standoff for longer than we remember.
>Listening to people who probably proclaim themselves "anti-imperialists" give full-throated defenses of imperialism never gets old.
Yeah, nothing like nato when it comes to anti-imperialism...
Has there ever been a serious effort to play chess by "rule-based" methods as opposed to search?
(... other than the evaluation function being based on handwritten or learned rules)
Hmmm. It might be fun to create a HN leaders starter pack.