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Efficient method to capture CO2 from the atmosphere / Univ of Helsinki

https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/innovations/efficient-method-capture-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-de...
97•lrasinen•1h ago•55 comments

Zero-Code Instrumentation of an Envoy TCP Proxy Using eBPF

https://sergiocipriano.com/beyla-envoy.html
13•sergiocipriano•46m ago•1 comments

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design [pdf]

https://www.ece.uvic.ca/~elec399/201409/Akin%27s%20Laws%20of%20Spacecraft%20Design.pdf
135•tosh•5h ago•22 comments

Fifteen Most Famous Transcendental Numbers

https://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/trans.html
48•vismit2000•2h ago•17 comments

Claude wrote a functional NES emulator using my engine's API

https://carimbo.games/games/nintendo/
35•delduca•2h ago•25 comments

Show HN: Use Claude Code to Query 600 GB Indexes over Hacker News, ArXiv, etc.

https://exopriors.com/scry
161•Xyra•7h ago•45 comments

Winnie-the-Pooh brings 100 years of fame to forest

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9dzj1xj3o
15•1659447091•6d ago•0 comments

Doom in Django: testing the limits of LiveView at 600.000 divs/segundo

https://en.andros.dev/blog/7b1b607b/doom-in-django-testing-the-limits-of-liveview-at-600000-divss...
87•andros•3d ago•31 comments

When square pixels aren't square

https://alexwlchan.net/2025/square-pixels/
13•PaulHoule•1h ago•3 comments

Tell HN: Happy New Year

102•schappim•2h ago•68 comments

Back to the future: the story of Squeak, a practical Smalltalk written in itself [pdf] (1997)

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr1997001_backto.pdf
21•fanf2•6d ago•2 comments

Activeloop (YC S18) Is Hiring MTS – Back End Engineer

https://careers.activeloop.ai/?ashby_jid=d8c54147-5fc8-48ba-a097-a6ae046c42bd
1•davidbuniat•3h ago

Tixl: Open-source realtime motion graphics

https://github.com/tixl3d/tixl
114•nateb2022•4d ago•16 comments

A faster heart for F-Droid

https://f-droid.org/2025/12/30/a-faster-heart-for-f-droid.html
469•kasabali•20h ago•191 comments

Animated AI

https://animatedai.github.io/
252•frozenseven•5d ago•22 comments

OpenAI Is Paying Employees More Than Any Major Tech Startup in History

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-is-paying-employees-more-than-any-major-tech-startup-in-histor...
21•megacorp•56m ago•9 comments

Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite

https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com
619•keepamovin•22h ago•187 comments

FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/02/26/fedimeteo-how-a-tiny-freebsd-vps-became-a-global-weather-s...
347•birdculture•20h ago•84 comments

A super fast website using Cloudflare workers

https://crazyfast.website
53•kilroy123•3d ago•45 comments

'Three norths' alignment about to end

https://www.spatialsource.com.au/three-norths-alignment-about-to-end/
51•altilunium•1w ago•22 comments

The rise of industrial software

https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/12/30/the-rise-of-industrial-software
144•chrisloy•6h ago•118 comments

Readings in Database Systems (5th Edition) (2015)

http://www.redbook.io/
119•teleforce•13h ago•11 comments

Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers

https://vptdigital.com/blog/honey-detecting-testers/
306•AkshatJ27•17h ago•117 comments

A Vulnerability in Libsodium

https://00f.net/2025/12/30/libsodium-vulnerability/
307•raggi•22h ago•42 comments

Odin: Moving Towards a New "core:OS"

https://odin-lang.org/news/moving-towards-a-new-core-os/
103•ksec•5d ago•58 comments

Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

https://loss32.org/
317•akka47•1d ago•408 comments

Drugmakers raise US prices on 350 medicines despite pressure

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/drugmakers-raise-us-prices-350-medici...
10•JumpCrisscross•38m ago•1 comments

Non-Zero-Sum Games

https://nonzerosum.games/
415•8organicbits•1d ago•184 comments

OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/12/30/openais-cash-burn-will-be-one-of-the-big-bubble-ques...
437•1vuio0pswjnm7•17h ago•618 comments

No strcpy either

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/12/29/no-strcpy-either/
240•firesteelrain•1d ago•125 comments
Open in hackernews

Fifteen Most Famous Transcendental Numbers

https://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/trans.html
47•vismit2000•2h ago

Comments

senfiaj•2h ago
> Euler's constant, gamma = 0.577215 ... = lim n -> infinity > (1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + ... + 1/n - ln(n)) (Not proven to be transcendental, but generally believed to be by mathematicians.)

So why bring some numbers here as transcendental if not proven?

auggierose•2h ago
Because it still might be transcendental. Just because you don't know if the list is correct, doesn't mean it isn't.
loloquwowndueo•1h ago
So it’s like “15 oldest actors to win an Oscar” and including someone who’s nominated this year but hasn’t actually won. But he might, right?

No, my dudes. Just no. If it’s not proven transcendental, it’s not to be considered such.

chvid•58m ago
I think the Oscars should go to the algebraic numbers - think about it - they are far less common ...
senfiaj•11m ago
Yes it's "likely" to be transcendental, maybe there are some evidences that support this, but this is not a proof (keep in mind that it isn't even proven to be irrational yet). Similarly, most mathematicians/computer scientist bet that P ≠ NP, but it doesn't make it proven and no one should claim that P ≠ NP in some article just because "it's most likely to be true" (even though some empirical real life evidence supports this hypothesis). In mathematics, some things may turn out to be contrary to our intuition and experience.
barishnamazov•2h ago
Don't want to be "that guy," but Euler's constant and Catalan's constant aren't proven to be transcendental yet.

For context, a number is transcendental if it's not the root of any non-zero polynomial with rational coefficients. Essentially, it means the number cannot be constructed using a finite combination of integers and standard algebraic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and integer roots). sqrt(2) is irrational but algebraic (it solves x^2 - 2 = 0); pi is transcendental.

The reason we haven't been able to prove this for constants like Euler-Mascheroni (gamma) is that we currently lack the tools to even prove they are irrational. With numbers like e or pi, we found infinite series or continued fraction representations that allowed us to prove they cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers.

With gamma, we have no such "hook." It appears in many places (harmonics, gamma function derivatives), but we haven't found a relationship that forces a contradiction if we assume it is algebraic. For all we know right now, gamma could technically be a rational fraction with a denominator larger than the number of atoms in the universe, though most mathematicians would bet the house against it.

zkmon•2h ago
If a number system has a transcendental number as its base, would these numbers still be called transcendental in that number system?
moefh•1h ago
Yes. A number is transcendental if it's not the root of a polynomial with integer coefficients; that's completely independent of how you represent it.
frutiger•1h ago
I think the elements of the base need to be enumerable (proof needed but it feels natural), and transcendental numbers are not enumerable (proof also needed).
tocs3•33m ago
Base pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-integer_base_of_numeration...

Base e: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-integer_base_of_numeration...

JadeNB•31m ago
I think your parent comment was speaking of a "base-$\alpha$ representation", where $\alpha$ is a single transcendental number—no concerns about countability, though one must be quite careful about the "digits" in this base.

(I'm not sure what "the elements of the base need to be enumerable" means—usually, as above, one speaks of a single base; while mixed-radix systems exist, the usual definition still has only one base per position, and only countably many positions. But the proof of countability of transcendental numbers is easy, since each is a root of a polynomial over $\mathbb Q$, there are only countably many such polynomials, and every polynomial has only finitely many roots.)

brianberns•1h ago
I read this with pleasure, right up until the bit about the ants. Then I saw the note from myself at the end, which I had totally forgot writing seven years ago. I probably first encountered the article via HN back then as well. Thanks for publishing my thoughts!
xnorswap•39m ago
The ants argument feels rather like a retelling of Zeno's Paradoxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

nuancebydefault•1h ago
I would have expected more numbers originating from physics, like Reynolds number (bad example since it is not really constant though).

The human-invented ones seem to be just a grasp of dozens man can come up with.

i to the power of i is one I never heard of but is fascinating though!

mg•15m ago
Two surprising facts about transcendental numbers:

1: Almost all numbers are transcendental.

2: If you could pick a real number at random, the probability of it being transcendental is 1.

Most of our lives we deal with non-transcendental numbers, even though those are infinitely rare.

xnorswap•5m ago
Someone is downvoting anyone pointing out that the algebraic numbers are countable and therefore the uncountable set of transcendental numbers vastly outnumber algebraic numbers.

I deleted my earlier comment on that fact, mistaking the downvote for my being incorrectly informed.

adrian_b•9m ago
It should be noted that the number e = 2.71828 ... does not have any importance in practice, its value just satisfies the curiosity to know it, but there is no need to use it in any application.

The transcendental number whose value matters (being the second most important transcendental number after 2*pi) is ln 2 = 0.693 ... (and the value of its inverse log2(e), in order to avoid divisions).