MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-04-21 12:57:55+00:00
For some reason Meta destroyed Insta as a monetisation tool. The algo used to be good for self-promo for artists and writers, and they tweaked it to kill that. Now it's useless.

There was a mass exodus to Threads, which is now a weird toxic liminal space apparently tuned for woke-adjacent rage bait blended with LinkedIn-for-creatives. "I have an opinion, now buy my fan art."

My take on all of these is that huge corporations are all polluters. We think of pollution as chemical and environmental, but Meta and X are the world's biggest sources of mental and emotional pollution - outside of the MSM.
by notpushkin | 2025-04-21 12:58:13+00:00
Absolutely unrelated, but there’s a Haskell-like syntax for Python: https://web.archive.org/web/20241205024857/https://pyos.gith...

f = x -> raise if x :: int => IndexError x otherwise => ValueError x

Complete with pipelines, of course:

"> {}: {}".format "Author" "stop using stale memes" |> print
by talkingtab | 2025-04-21 12:58:21+00:00
Very good point. Trying to think this through.

I think community source should be accessible and usable outside the community. A community license should have a provision for paid use by corporations. If Microsoft wants to use it that is fine - if they pay.

But if Microsoft wants to fork things, to me that is predatory. If I can't fork windows, why should they be able to fork community software? If they argue that people should pay for their products, it just seems fair to me that they should not get community products for free.

I guess the concept is playing by the same rules?
by satisfice | 2025-04-21 12:58:57+00:00
I like the sentiment but I would make some very different choices. For instance, use the . operator, because it is easier to understand than his Rube-Goldberg-logic negation groups alternative.

He’s also strangely worried about portability. If you are really concerned about portability, you are moving between languages and you probably aren’t some novice who should be frightened by complexity.

I don’t think about portability at all, ever. And I do maintain code in Perl, Python, and Javascript.

But yeah, just as in all programming languages, you can get by with knowing about a 20% subset of all it can do.
by b112 | 2025-04-21 12:59:25+00:00
There is no such difference.

A company is not a person, and can literally have its entire staff changed in short order. Or be bought.

Companies have no morals. Sometimes people in companies do, but again, that person can vanish instantly.

You should treat a company as a person which may receive a brain transplant at any time. Most especially, when writing contracts or having any expectation of what that company will do.
by swat535 | 2025-04-21 13:00:18+00:00
Pope Francis caused quite a bit of controversy among Catholics. From his crackdown on the TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) to his often unscripted, pastoral tone on issues like sexuality, economics, and interfaith dialogue, he unsettled many and yet drew others closer to the Church. With his passing, we’re left to process a papacy that disrupted in the deepest sense of the word.

As a Catholic, I often found myself both inspired and unsettled by him. His theology wasn’t always systematic, but it was deeply Ignatian, rooted in discernment, encounter, and movement toward the margins. Francis often chose gestures over definitions, and presence over proclamations. That doesn't always scale well in a Church that spans continents, cultures, and centuries.

His legacy will be debated. But I think what made him so compelling, especially to someone who lives in the modern world but tries to be formed by ancient faith is that he forced us to confront the tension between tradition and aggiornamento not as an abstract debate, but as something lived.

He reminded me that the Church isn’t a museum, nor is it a startup. It’s something stranger.. the best I can described it is a body that somehow survives by dying daily.

- Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-04-21 13:00:28+00:00
While this may be a nice exercise to learn bootc, shipping a whole OCI image, just because you wanted to put a couple files under /usr seems quite wasteful to me.

To put things into perspective, GTK themes, unless they bring lots and lots of bitmap images (which doesn't happen nowadays), rarely exceed a megabyte in size.

I guess one could spend less time learning how to package these as RPM packages and set up COPR to do just that, making OCI + bootc entirely optional (and yet you could build an OCI + bootc installing this package if you so wished!).
by Mond_ | 2025-04-21 13:01:03+00:00
> Pipelining can become hard to debug when chains get very long. The author doesn't address how hard it can be to identify which step in a long chain caused an error.

Yeah, I agree that this can be problem when you lean heavily into monadic handling (i.e. you have fallible operations and then pipe the error or null all the way through, losing the information of where it came from).

But that doesn't have much to do with the article: You have the same problem with non-pipelined functional code. (And in either case, I think that it's not that big of a problem in practice.)

> The author uses examples that function very differently.

Yeah, this is addressed in one of the later sections. Imo, having a unified word for such a convenience feature (no matter how it's implemented) is better than thinking of these features as completely separate.
by geocar | 2025-04-21 13:01:21+00:00
> That's a weird take

I appreciate that, but...

> I've been working for multiple decades now with systems that have no UI to speak of; their end-users are barely aware that there's a whole system behind what they can see, and that's a good thing because they become aware of it when it causes them trouble.

Notice I said "user" not "end-user" or "customer".

This was not an accident.

In your system (as in mine) the "user" is the operator.

> the best solution to a problem is to avoid it.

That's your opinion man. I don't know if you can avoid everything (I certainly can't).

Something to consider is why Erlang people have been trying to get people to "let it crash" and just deal with that, because enumerating the solutions is sometimes easier than enumerating the problems.
by sanderjd | 2025-04-21 13:01:27+00:00
You're using fancy language and fancy-seeming arguments that don't engage in the actual argument being made, but instead are designed to distract while changing the subject. This kind of argumentation is called sophistry.

>>> They weren't trying to propagandize children, they targeted adults.

>> I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.

> That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today.

They had a propaganda organization called The Hitler Youth. Either you were unaware of that or you're arguing in bad faith.

Either way, I don't think you're a serious person.
by kashunstva | 2025-04-21 13:01:42+00:00
> You cannot insult the faith of others

Why not? The concept of proportionality between an “offense” and a response that characterizes the liberal worldview was entirely missing here. If one chooses to take offense about some deeply held personal view, whatever it is, then fine; but let your response be proportional.

The music of Beethoven is sacred to me, let’s say, but I’m not prepared to murder you if you mock it, or miss a note in performance.

The pope’s threat of physical intervention himself seems at odds with the teachings of his own faith, too, as I understand them. Turn the other cheek, and all. But that would be for adherents to say for sure.
by alistairSH | 2025-04-21 13:01:44+00:00
There was an interview on NPR this morning with a high-level Jesuit in the Americas (former leader of the order in Canada and USA, IIRC).

He put it well... Pope Francis was always a pastor at heart. And he put the needs of the person in front of him ahead of strict doctrine. The interviewee likened it to triage in a field hospital - address the soul in front of you, worry about doctrine later (suture the wound, worry about cholesterol later).
by chii | 2025-04-21 13:01:45+00:00
That's why the premise in the grandparent post is ridiculous.

But the license of a piece of software is not ridiculous - if you chose a very permissive license, you cannot then go and choose who should or shouldnt be profiting off your software. The license was a pre-commitment.

But lots of people make this pre-commitment, but then makes a moral/ethical judgement post-facto when someone rich seems to be able to extract more value out of the software than what "they deserve", and complain about it.
by luqtas | 2025-04-21 13:02:16+00:00
the Wiki citation doesn't even have a source, nor is calling that indigenous people made it

your last link is about Llanos de Moxos, which isn't in Amazon. you don't seen to understand even basic geography... even if Llanos was 100% man-made (and isn't) and it was part of the Amazon (and not a region that borders it) it would be the equivalent of 2.6% of the whole Amazon area. concluding such a thing because 3% of an area that benefited (soil quality wise) from billions of years of geologic events and was partly modified by humans is ignorant but again, Llanos isn't even Amazon

it was common knowledge among middle age that Earth was flat. doesn't seem an argument to me
by arjunaaqa | 2025-04-21 13:03:13+00:00
Every time we see this argument “this frees humanity to focus on higher things”

and then we see what actually humans are spending more time on,

- not books - not people - but mobile - senseless entertainment (2-3 hours daily on mobile ) - social media

If we stop using a part of brain, and that function (say memory or calculation) donwe actually use it ever again ?

Or we are becoming more and more zombies ?

So much so that most people are incapable of reading a book,

Or even watching a 3 hour movie.

Say what you may, but this extra time is not being used for meaningfup stuff.

Devices are becoming smart and our brains & bodies are becoming dumber.

Simple way to know if a high school student can stand against high school student of 90s ?

Or even researchers or programmers ?

In depth of thinking and agency.

I want this to happen but real world evidence is not saying this.
by jasonlotito | 2025-04-21 13:03:29+00:00
In the context of this thread (where the commenter is suggesting the author release a binary with a different license), your comment is meaningless.

The author of the GPL code can release binary-only blobs released under something other than the GPL. Suggesting that the copyright holder cannot relicense their code how they want is absurd.

Saying the "GPL does not allow binary blobs" implies that the author is not allowed to release binary blogs, which is not true in the slightest.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-21 13:03:29+00:00
Yes, I mean the USA. Here's a presentation on the Canadian oil and gas industry [1]. You can see that a very small portion is exported directly. Almost all of it is via pipelines to the USA.

This is a huge strategic benefit to the US, which is yet another reason why alienating Canada through tariffs and other policies is such a laughably ignorant and terrible idea.

It's also why anyone pointing to non-zero US imports of oil and gas as damning proof of the US not being energy independent is incredibly ill-informed.

[1]: https://www.capp.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Canadian-Expo...
by mapontosevenths | 2025-04-21 13:04:05+00:00
Sure, it's easy to fall into a trap where accepting new information is hard, and I think most adults are aware that as we age it's important to try and keep an open mind. However, our society currently has an even bigger problem with people who do the opposite. People were taught to "keep an open mind", but haven't been taught what a good source is.

Like everything, you have to find a balance wherein you can accept new information but are choosy about the sources of that info. Otherwise bad data and hidden agendas will have you avoiding basic healthcare because vaccines give you autistic 5g and drinking bleach to kill the imaginary parasites makes more sense than smearing a little cortisone cream on.

A great man once said: "We do our peers, countrymen, students, and children a grave disservice by admonishing them to think for themselves without also giving them the critical thinking tools to do so, for in so doing we foster a culture where "independent thought" is equated with "contrarian thought". This gives rise to an anti-intellectual, anti-science paradigm that supports an idea not because it meets a basic standard of evidence, but rather simply because it opposes established thought. This is worse than the intellectual calcification that stagnant "herd thinking" would give rise to, because it doesn't simply halt progress — it puts it in full retreat."
by alganet | 2025-04-21 13:04:05+00:00
> When your amygdala calmly informs your neocortex "learn, work hard, or die" the effect can be pretty profound.

There are cases and cases, of course.

Let me give you counter example:

An AI that can invest better than VCs could put them in a precarious condition. Why we would need them if an AI can do it?

Of course that is a very improbable scenario. AIs can't form networks, inherit family money or form lobbies, so it is unlikely for such tech to compete in that realm. It would be very nice if it could! Can you imagine that?

To keep an open mind for different and wild scenarios is always a good thing we humans do.
by flkiwi | 2025-04-21 13:04:55+00:00
After looking in vain for a browser-based Logseq (i.e., the way logseq used to be before APP EVERYTHING!!! began the downward spiral -- the next version won't even use markdown files), I've gone full Leeroy Jenkins on Silverbullet. It's not refined. It's not stable. But it's good enough, it lives in a browser, and it creates markdown. It's also incredibly customizable with Lua, but that's not necessarily a net positive for someone who wants an environment that works simply.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-04-21 13:05:21+00:00
No, Ukraine should not surrender because if they surrender now the same argument can be made next time - and with Russia there will always be a next time. This is an existential fight for Ukraine and Ukrainians.

Assuming that you are arguing in good faith you should read up on some basic game theory. The outcome of this fight is not just about this war but about establishing the incentives of all future potential attempts at aggression by Russia (and other expansionist countries).

Edited to remove the snark.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-04-21 13:05:51+00:00
To one up this: Of course it is even better, if your language allows you to implement proper pipelining with implicit argument passing by yourself. Then the standard language does not need to provide it and assign meaning to some symbols for pipelining. You can decide for yourself what symbols are used and what you find intuitive.

Pipelining can guide one to write a bit cleaner code, viewing steps of computation as such, and not as modifications of global state. It forces one to make each step return a result, write proper functions. I like proper pipelining a lot.
by alexarmbr | 2025-04-21 13:06:04+00:00
author here: thanks so much for the feedback. I agree, 'more memory for accumulators' would be a better title for this section.

and I also see the misconception you are pointing out in the 'best case' section. re-reading this, I realize that if you are accumulating C using outer products between columns of A and rows of B, you can achieve O(N) intensity while storing all of C, and just a column of A and a row of B in fast memory. Whereas if you are using inner products, you need all of A,B,C in fast memory to achieve O(N) intensity.

I guess when I wrote this I was just thinking about an inner product, which is too narrow. Thanks I might tweak this section :)
by loudmax | 2025-04-21 13:06:46+00:00
Socrates had this to say about literacy:

> In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.

Presumably very few people since Socrates would argue that society would be better off without writing. But it's a legitimate point. There is a cost to any new skill or technology. We should be conscious of what we're giving up in this exchange.
by Izkata | 2025-04-21 13:06:51+00:00
You skipped a step. One of the problems is more obvious with a different operator we learn when in the "box" stage:

> Go from "[ ] x 2 = 10" to writing it "box x 2 = 10--what is box?". Then "b x 2 = 10--what is b?" then "x x 2 = 10--what is x?".

From memory, we didn't switch from "x" to dot for multiplication until at the exact same time we started using symbols. If we'd done it earlier (or even right from the start) it might not have been as much of a problem.
by delusional | 2025-04-21 13:07:11+00:00
I think that worldview leads to a much poorer world.

Normal people aren't constantly engaging in a fight for survival in every aspect of their lives, and I don't think it's a good thing to ask them to. We should expect the people we deal with to be acting in good faith. I think it would be bad actually if I had to consider if you're going to make money off of my idea when talking to you.

Asking everybody to be constantly vigilant of possible exploitation by megacorps puts an undue burden on individuals. We should have strong and durable protections against those megacorps in other ways.

What I'm saying is that this sort of copying should be criminal (not just illegal, but criminal) and Microsoft, the legal entity, should be held accountable and fined. I acknowledge that this isn't currently possible with our legal framework, but we should work to make it possible.
by mrkeen | 2025-04-21 13:07:55+00:00
data.iter() .filter(|w| w.alive) .map(|w| w.id) .collect() collect(map(filter(iter(data), |w| w.alive), |w| w.id))

The second approach is open for extension - it allows you to write new functions on old datatypes.

> Quick challenge for the curious Rustacean, can you explain why we cannot rewrite the above code like this, even if we import all of the symbols?

Probably for lack of

> weird operators like <$>, <*>, $, or >>=
by hardwaresofton | 2025-04-21 13:07:59+00:00
> The problem is that it scares away also others. Personally I avoid such projects for any purpose, they simply don't exist for me.

I think this isn’t a problem — not everyone has to contribute to any project! People sometimes struggle with the choice between GPL and MIT for similar reasons of popularity.

People who want the widest possible usage/corporate adoption can pick licenses that reflect that and embrace the tradeoff
by coldpie | 2025-04-21 13:08:22+00:00
> My sense is that Twitter’s fall was an opportunity for a lot of people to just drop out.

Yeah, that was the case for me. I used Twitter quite a bit from about 2012 through 2020, but I was already phasing it out when the takeover happened, so it was an easy call to just close my account. While I do have an IG and Bsky account, I rarely use them. So Twitter's death basically meant the end of my mainstream social media usage.
by protonbob | 2025-04-21 13:08:38+00:00
Stories like these where bad actors take over regulatory bodies make me curious why people are so trusting of central government authorities especially when it comes to the food that they consume. Sometimes there isn't a better option but people will religiously defend an org (FDA) that allows sales and marketing to children of food that contains chemicals and dyes that are known to be harmful by European regulatory bodies.
by sneak | 2025-04-21 13:08:54+00:00
It is impossible to reconcile the idea of an omnipotent god that is simultaneously good and permits people to be tortured for eternity.

Perhaps he chose the “god is good” over the “god, despite being able, will not prevent billions of reasonable and decent people from suffering eternally” fork in the road. You can’t logically choose both, and if you’re the pope, you probably had better have a belief in the goodness of god.
by Mond_ | 2025-04-21 13:09:07+00:00
> if your language allows you to implement proper pipelining with implicit argument passing by yourself > You can decide for yourself what symbols are used and what you find intuitive

i mean this sounds fun

but tbh it also sounds like it'd result in my colleague Carl defining an utterly bespoke DSL in the language, and using it to write the worst spaghetti code the world has ever seen, leaving the code base an unreadable mess full of sharp edges and implicit behavior
by alfonsodev | 2025-04-21 13:09:08+00:00
Critical thinking and understanding what really a LLM is, is crucial, for educated people I think it only augments intelligence not harming. With that said what about the rest of the people ?

Why not making an onboarding tutorial of what really is going on ?

I had a little conversation with ChatGPT about ethics and it acknowledged that most probably one of his instructions is to stay aligned with the user to maximize engagement, this might come from training data of people speculating in Reddit or the model being able to observe his own output and deduce what’s going on. I don’t know and there is no way to know so does it really matter? Because is kind of a meta point.

I’m sure many of us have heard from non technical people that chatGPT is their best friend.

Don’t get me wrong I love the tech, but I don’t think is enough just to not give it a human name, the illusion is too strong and misleading.

I think at least there should be very visible button to allow you to switch to raw mode, meaning disabling pleasing, disable talking like a human, disable trying to be my friend in subtle ways, praising etc etc And ideally a visualization on the graph path that has taken, I know this is impossible right now.
by mantas | 2025-04-21 13:09:55+00:00
JPII was also elected in a very different world. And he played a big moral role in taking down iron curtain and getting Eastern Europe back Europe.

Meanwhile Francis was quite the opposite. Especially as seen in the light of Russian aggression against Ukraine. For much of Eastern Europe that was like 180 turn. At least here both church goers and not seem to despise Francis while JPII has a warm place in the hearts both factions. Maybe it was different far away where Russia ain’t a hot topic.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-04-21 13:10:31+00:00
I have the usual programs running on my Mac, along with open-codex: Emacs, web browser, terminals, VSCode, etc. Even with large contexts, open-codex with Ollama and Gemma 3 27B QAT does not seem to overload my system.

To be clear, I sometimes toggle open-codex to use the Gemini 3.5 Pro API also, but I enjoy running locally for simpler routine work.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-04-21 13:10:32+00:00
What would be the goal of this? I ask because I think the nice thing about the current system is that the goals are well represented/easy to sum up and defendable.

What would be the goal of a license between AGPL and SSPL on the spectrum? Seems like such a license would at the very least be non-free? (which is perfectly ok)
by keiferski | 2025-04-21 13:11:38+00:00
Seems like a real lack of nuance in these types of conversations. Personally I feel like AI has both directly and indirectly helped me improve my intelligence. Directly by serving as an instantaneous resource for asking questions (something Google doesn’t do well anymore), making it easier to find learning materials, and easily reorganizing information into formats more amenable to learning. Indirectly by making it easier to create learning assets like images, which are useful for applying the picture superiority effect, visualizing information, etc.

At the end of the day, it is a tool and it depends on how you use it. It may destroy the research ability of the average person, but for the power user it is an intelligence accelerator IMO.