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Should I Block ICMP?

http://shouldiblockicmp.com/
65•rascul•2h ago•38 comments

For algorithms, a little memory outweighs a lot of time

https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-algorithms-a-little-memory-outweighs-a-lot-of-time-20250521/
179•makira•5h ago•35 comments

Display any CSV file as a searchable, filterable, pretty HTML table

https://github.com/derekeder/csv-to-html-table
12•indigodaddy•49m ago•0 comments

ITXPlus: A ITX Sized Macintosh Plus Logicboard Reproduction

https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/itxplus-a-itx-sized-macintosh-plus-logicboard-reproduction.49715/
40•zdw•3h ago•9 comments

Show HN: Confidential computing for high-assurance RISC-V embedded systems

https://github.com/IBM/ACE-RISCV
70•mrnoone•4h ago•5 comments

Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

https://rockylinux.org/news/rockylinux-support-for-riscv
72•fork-bomber•4h ago•15 comments

Tales from Mainframe Modernization

https://oppi.li/posts/tales_from_mainframe_modernization/
13•todsacerdoti•1h ago•1 comments

Devstral

https://mistral.ai/news/devstral
365•mfiguiere•10h ago•74 comments

OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-21/openai-to-buy-apple-veteran-jony-ive-s-ai-device-startup-in-6-5-billion-deal
623•minimaxir•8h ago•849 comments

Collaborative Text Editing Without CRDTs or OT

https://mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html
179•samwillis•8h ago•49 comments

The curious tale of Bhutan's playable record postage stamps (2015)

https://thevinylfactory.com/features/the-curious-tale-of-bhutans-playable-record-postage-stamps/
80•ohjeez•6h ago•5 comments

The Machine Stops (1909)

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster/short-fiction/text/the-machine-stops
41•xeonmc•4h ago•9 comments

Animated Factorization (2012)

http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/math/factorization/animated-diagrams/
223•miniBill•10h ago•53 comments

Show HN: I've built online video editor

https://clipjs.vercel.app/
85•mohyware•5h ago•38 comments

Sorcerer (YC S24) Is Hiring a Lead Hardware Design Engineer

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sorcerer/6beb70de-9956-49b7-8e28-f48ea39efac6
1•maxmclau•4h ago

CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/cern-gears-up-to-ship-antimatter-across-europe/
48•ben_w•2d ago•11 comments

An upgraded dev experience in Google AI Studio

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-ai-studio-native-code-generation-agentic-tools-upgrade/
97•meetpateltech•7h ago•53 comments

LLM function calls don't scale; code orchestration is simpler, more effective

https://jngiam.bearblog.dev/mcp-large-data/
152•jngiam1•8h ago•65 comments

I have tinnitus. I don't recommend it

https://blog.greg.technology/2025/05/20/tinnitus.html
19•gregsadetsky•2h ago•11 comments

How we made iText's table rendering faster

https://kb.itextpdf.com/itext/how-i-made-pdf-table-rendering-faster
20•whizzx•2d ago•1 comments

London's Water Pumps: Where History Flows Freely

https://londonist.com/london/features/london-s-water-pump
13•joebig•3d ago•0 comments

How Gemini Figured Out My Nephew's Name

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/May/gemini-figured-out-my-nephews-name/
5•BeetleB•3d ago•1 comments

Storefront Web Components

https://shopify.dev/docs/api/storefront-web-components
116•maltenuhn•8h ago•34 comments

Introducing the Llama Startup Program

https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-startup-program/?_fb_noscript=1
149•mayalilpony10•9h ago•48 comments

Understanding the Go Scheduler

https://nghiant3223.github.io/2025/04/15/go-scheduler.html
101•gnabgib•3d ago•15 comments

Launch HN: SIM Studio (YC X25) – Figma-Like Canvas for Agent Workflows

46•waleedlatif1•9h ago•30 comments

The US has a new most powerful laser hitting 2 petawatts

https://news.engin.umich.edu/2025/05/the-us-has-a-new-most-powerful-laser/
89•voxadam•10h ago•94 comments

µPC: Scaling Predictive Coding to 100 Layer Networks

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13124
16•frozenseven•5h ago•0 comments

By default, Signal doesn't recall

https://signal.org/blog/signal-doesnt-recall/
420•feross•8h ago•322 comments

'Turbocharged' Mitochondria Power Birds' Epic Migratory Journeys

https://www.quantamagazine.org/turbocharged-mitochondria-power-birds-epic-migratory-journeys-20250519/
89•rbanffy•11h ago•69 comments
Open in hackernews

Goethe's Faustian Life

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/goethe-mitchell-wilson-faust-johann-biography
35•lermontov•20h ago

Comments

SSJPython•9h ago
> As Wilson writes in his expansive and somewhat baggily written introduction, now—amid increasingly dire ecological and political conditions—we can see our own world in Faust more clearly than ever before. For Faust, he writes, is “about a world which had taken leave of God but did not know how to live.”

Man has a natural inclination to worship something. For most of human history, that has been the divine/supernatural/metaphysical. Nowadays, rationalism and materialism have become the main objects of worship. But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.

Similar to Christ saying that "man cannot live on bread alone", man cannot live on materialism alone - spiritual nourishment is a very real and necessary thing.

croes•9h ago
Metaphysics and religions don’t have answer either.

They just stop asking questions at a certain point.

geodel•8h ago
But that is sufficient for people with limited time and resources which is most people.
IAmBroom•5h ago
You forgot: " and curiosity ".

The sentence is otherwise correct.

williamdclt•8h ago
That's very handwavy and unconvincing TBH. I can't imagine who'd argue that humans "worship" rationalism and materialism, that's a pretty big stretch of the word.

What definition of the word do you use?

That man has a natural inclination to it is another pretty big assumption, whether "natural inclinations" are even a thing at all has been debated for centuries

SSJPython•8h ago
I should've said the worship of the temporal (material reality, etc.) rather than the spiritual.
CamperBob2•8h ago
What has the spiritual ever done for us? We know nothing of gods that we didn't learn from other men.
quotz•7h ago
But men do not respect other men nearly as much as they respect the gods and the supernatural
CamperBob2•7h ago
Exactly, so what you're saying is that extolling spirituality is just a way to garner unearned respect.
lo_zamoyski•7h ago
You're committing the same fallacy that many do which is to lump them all under "gods" and then make it a problem of distinguishing which of these possible beings exists.

But this fails to distinguish between a being and Being. You and I are beings, beings among many. The pagan gods, personifications of various natural phenomena, were like us, in this sense: they were beings among, only more powerful. Being, on the other hand, is the verb to be. You exist, I exist, all the beings of the world exist. The pagan gods, I submit, do not exist, save as fictions.

So how do you relate to your existence? We all exist, so it isn't particular to you. And you are not the cause of your own existence, here and now. Rather existence is something prior to any particular existing things in the order of causes. This cause, this existence, this Being itself, is God, and you can know quite a bit about it, analogously, through unaided reason and without appealing to authority.

> What has the spiritual ever done for us?

That question is premature for you.

williamdclt•2h ago
It’s not any less vague. Again, what definition of “worship” do you use? It’s certainly not any of the dictionaries
libraryofbabel•8h ago
Well, yeah. That’s just the central problem of modernity and it’s been the preoccupation of the last two hundred years of philosophy and literature: c.f. existentialism and many other isms. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and a legion of other philosophers and novelists address this exact question. There’s a lot of answers out there that don’t require signing up to an old religion, you can go and take your pick!
lo_zamoyski•8h ago
> There’s a lot of answers out there that don’t require signing up to an old religion, you can go and take your pick!

There appear to be a few dubious presuppositions at play here.

The first is religious indifferentism. That is, that is makes no difference which you pick, or that what you pick is simply a matter of "what's 'right' for you". The question of truth never enters the picture. This makes religious belief a matter of utility: I believe X because I derive some kind of perceived or real benefit from believing X.

The first problem with religious indifferentism is exactly that it is indifferent to the truth. If you believe something because of the utility it provides, it means you don't really believe in that thing. You believe in the utility of the thing. So while a Christian will believe that Christ is God Incarnate because he believes this to be true, an indifferentist wouldn't really believe Christ in God, but he might "use" that belief. There is a lack of integrity, a kind of bad faith, at work here. The pretense of this lack of integrity never produces any peace or alleviates the misery of nihilism plaguing the indifferentist. He's still where he started.

While Nietzsche and others had valuable insights (and misconceptions), he and most others did not themselves find a solution to the basic problem of nihilism.

barbazoo•8h ago
> But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.

That's the crux of it. Nothing and no one has those answers. Some isms acknowledge that, most don't.

superb-owl•8h ago
There's a middle ground between claiming you have a final answer, and ignoring the question entirely.

The best spiritual disciplines provide a _framework_ for exploring existential questions.

lo_zamoyski•7h ago
How have you come to this conclusion?
mistrial9•4h ago
> a natural inclination to worship something.

uh really? Barbarism and brute force have succeeded many times.

fallinditch•7h ago
It seems to me that Mephistopheles' offer was a no brainer for Faust.

Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?

Presumably if Faust refuses Mephistopheles’ bargain, he must resign himself to a life haunted by unfulfilled longing, existential frustration, and the bitter realization that some mysteries will forever remain beyond his grasp. Or worse, his life could descend into base forms of evil and criminality, which seems likely given what he did to Gretchen.

SSJPython•6h ago
> Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?

Christ Himself rejected various temptations by Satan when he was in the wilderness.

fallinditch•5h ago
An interesting point, but it's not really a fair comparison: Jesus was the son of God and able to perform miracles, so maybe he felt he could afford to reject an offer of all the riches in all the kingdoms of the world (which tbh Jesus must have known that Satan was lying about anyway). Whereas Faust was just a man.
tickerticker•6h ago
^Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?

The bargain had a quid pro quo...you get knowledge and pleasure in exchange for perpetual servitude to a bad guy. I wouldn't make that trade

fallinditch•5h ago
No me neither, but that's not the story. The deal was that Mephistopheles would come back at the end of Faust's life to claim his soul. As Faust dies, Mephistopheles tries to claim his soul, but angels intervene. Because of Faust's relentless striving and Gretchen's intercession, he is redeemed and ascends to Heaven.

So Faust enjoyed his life of pleasure and knowledge and got away with making his Mephistophelean deal.

IAmBroom•5h ago
If you believe saintlike people are in their right minds - many. I use "saintlike" in a secular sense; I myself am an atheist.
timoth3y•2h ago
Marlowe's "The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus" was written 300 years before Goethe's version.

In Marlowe's version Faust goes to hell.

I always found Goethe's ending to be unsatisfying, and prefer Marlowe's where Faust not only accepts, but embraces his fate to be a far better resolution.

ginko•7h ago
>The Victorians––Hapsburg-descended Queen Victoria and Saxon Prince Albert among them––were steeped in Goethe.

I've never heard of queen Victoria having Habsburg ancestry and I can't find any details on this other than AI hallucinations.

cafard•6h ago
That is odd.
fidrelity•6h ago
Reading Faust in school left a lasting impact on me and an appreciation for the language as a tool of art.

I believe many are not even aware of the amount of proverbs coming from that classic:

Des Pudels Kern - the poodles core/crux of the matter

Gretchenfrage - the essential question

... And many more that I won't bother trying to translate.