Top 28 stories from Hacker News. Top 10 include comment highlights. Compiled at 20:11 UTC.
1512 points by stock_toaster · 842 comments
Apple has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI today, accusing the company of trade secret theft. Specifically, Apple alleges that its...
What HN said:
joshstrange: Some pretty damning stuff: > OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can.
Lio: OpenAI is a company built on copyright violation. That means it’s in the corporate DNA to treat laws as things for little people. Apple have deep enough pockets that they can actually sue OpenAI but I bet OpenAI are surprised they got caught.
jtfrench: Until the industry addresses the Original Sin of Generative AI (and the ascendance of Thievery Corporations), we should expect more and more of this. So far, theft has been rewarded.
impulser_: This is basically the end of OpenAI hardware. This is by far worst than the Waymo vs. Uber lawsuit which killed the Uber self driving project. Also if you are a business using OpenAI models, I would highly suggest you do not because they are most likely looking at your code and I...
364 points by hhs · 163 comments
Researchers have shown the first direct experimental evidence that the textbook triple bond structure breaks down in heavy elements, where relativity makes the rules.
What HN said:
gcanyon: > The increased nuclear mass causes orbiting electrons to speed up to a significant fraction of the speed of light, where the rules of Einstein’s theory of relativity are important. Fun fact: this is why mercury is liquid at room temperature.
kristianp: > The increased nuclear mass causes orbiting electrons to speed up to a significant fraction of the speed of light, where the rules of Einstein’s theory of relativity are important.
nanolith: Wait... wasn't it already understood that relativity influences electron orbits of heavy elements? I clearly remember being taught some of this in physics, in the mid-noughties. For instance, we know that gold gets its color from relativistic effects. https://physics.aps.
seanhunter: My most recent fun fact about chemistry is that the shape of the periodic table is as a result of the symmetry group of a sphere. This was part of this great talk https://www.youtube.com/live/btlQl93qOhc?is=7v7GQ92ozW_kpQtk
283 points by CrankyBear · 1039 comments
It could mean faster internet for rural customers, but not everyone is happy.
What HN said:
tw04: SpaceX needs to claim there’s a need for 100k more satellites to prop up unreasonable valuations. This is no different than Elon claiming Tesla owners would be renting out their cars as FSD taxis while at work (next year, we swear guys!!!) In a functioning economy he’d have faced...
digitaltrees: I have started to see what I think are star link satellites at night on walks with my kids. It actually makes me sad to see that on person owns the night sky and is changing the literal stars my kids will grow up with.
consumer451: When Starlink first became available here in poor-ish Central-EU, I was excited. Then, only months later, but after years of planning: EU funding brought fiber to my farm area, at ~$25/900mbps 10ms.
rayiner: A couple of billion people are doing to join the global middle class over the coming decades. They don’t have pre-existing cable and phone networks that have been in the ground for 50+ years they can incrementally upgrade to broadband.
129 points by downwithdisease · 112 comments
Scientists say modern buildings, LED lighting, and repetitive patterns may overload the brain's visual processing system, causing headaches, nausea, and physical distress for millions.
What HN said:
michaelchisari: If you've ever been in an home owned for generations, filled with books and knickknacks and heirlooms and family photos, despite the clutter it all feels comforting in a way that modern decor doesn't. The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did.
idopmstuff: The Limitations section at the bottom certainly has a lot of limitations: > This paper is a review, meaning it synthesizes and interprets existing research rather than presenting new experimental data.
bob1029: The biggest revelation I've had regarding interior design is to stop using overhead lights. Anyone who has ever worked in the games industry will tell you that lighting is the most important element of what makes a scene look a certain way.
meindnoch: >Eyes and brain alike evolved over millennia to process natural scenes, forests, rivers, coastlines, open skies. These environments share a specific mathematical pattern: their visual complexity decreases predictably as you zoom in on finer and finer details.
128 points by saisrirampur · 15 comments
PgBouncer is single-threaded, so a single process caps out at one CPU core no matter the box size. See how ClickHouse Managed Postgres runs a peered fleet of PgBouncer processes with so_reuseport to scale pooling across every core — with benchmarks showin
What HN said:
x4m: Just use https://github.com/yandex/odyssey :) It's a scalable PgBouncer.
JustSkyfall: I've been using pgdog (https://github.com/pgdogdev/pgdog) and it has worked really well for my needs!
nosefrog: Interesting. We run pgbouncer via kubernetes so it was straightforward to make multiple pgbouncer processes on one machine. Also straightforward to get them running on multiple machines, which helps because we run on Azure and they like to cause rolling outages across our fleet v...
DylanSp: First time I've heard of so_reuseport, which is interesting. The important parts of the setup seem to be that + peering; is peering built-in to PgBouncer and simple to set up?
123 points by speckx · 38 comments
Kelsey Pfendler set out to become first US woman, youngest woman and fastest woman to solo over 2,400-mile journey
What HN said:
CharlesW: It's kind of buried here, but Kelsey is the fastest human to do this. She beat the male record holder's time by 6 days.
SwellJoe: My first thought on hearing about this was, "what's that boat like? I wanna see the boat." Not to take away from Pfendler's incredible achievement. She's amazing. But, I'm the kind of nerd that immediately went to "surely that is a logistical nightmare, how are you going to carry...
vmg12: I used to row and even the tiniest of waves could make it annoying. You'd slide to the front of your seat and try to insert your oar and catch air instead of water. Then if you overcompensated by trying to insert your oar farther in you'd catch a crab (having the oar ripped out o...
koolba: That’s incredible. What does one eat and drink on a trip like this? The article talks about her cooking. With a fire or one of those little butane stoves? Can a small canoe carry enough water for a trip like this or do you rely on rain water too?
114 points by downbad_ · 71 comments
What HN said:
louky: The major proponent was also known as Thomas Midgley Jr.: Accidentally The Most Dangerous Man Who Ever Lived[0] Leaded gas, CFCs, and accidentally created a machine that ended his own existence.[1] [0]https://allthatsinteresting.com/thomas-midgley-jr [1]https://en.wikipedia.
FuckButtons: There are two major sub-fields in materials science. 1: Making materials with interesting new properties. 2: figuring out how to remove the lead from them.
JumpCrisscross: > countries where leaded gasoline was—or still is—used Note: it’s now banned for road vehicles everywhere [1]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/every-country-has-n... Algeria, 2021
hunmernop: Gas itself is poison. Just take a deep huff at the gas station. EVs are the only way to go. At least the pollution is localized, not down every inner city street with exhaust and other vapors.
102 points by ingve · 35 comments
I prefer strict tables in SQLite because they avoid some datatype problems, such as putting text in number columns.
What HN said:
jll29: I'd like to see STRICT as the default. That's pretty much the only disagreement with the SQLite developer, who is an amazing guy that wrote an amazing tool!
Cyberdog: If you're stuck with an older version of SQLite and/or want to enforce order on an existing table without creating a new table with STRICT and then copying all your rows over and/or also want to do things like enforce signedness, int size, or char/varchar length on a field like y...
petilon: The downside of strict tables is that some data types are not available, such as Date. Strict should really be the default. If a database is shared by multiple applications then you should be able to rely on the declared data type.
cdmckay: I would’ve thought this was the default.
83 points by poupeaua · 1 comments
What HN said:
poupeaua: One of the biggest improvements I’ve made to Otary isn’t a new API—it’s a new way to learn it. I’ve just released a brand-new Tutorials section for the library. When discovering a new Python library, I rarely start with the API reference.
83 points by zetalyrae · 40 comments
What HN said:
Lerc: I think it's worth noting the date of this when people claim that AI is being rushed without asking any of the important questions of what it might mean for us. This has been a topic of serious discussion for many many years.
NitpickLawyer: > Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. That's a pretty early definition of what we now call ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence).
dsign: Up to five years ago[^1], we lived an age of pure speculation about intelligence and minds. That age brought about multiple theories of the mind, and to me, their finest legacy are arguments of the form "$X is not $concept because $theory", where any given day $X can be "LLM" or...
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