MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Stoic Indifferents vs. Embodied AI
by daly | 2025-04-27 07:19:10+00:00
Stoics concept of Indifferents sees externals as neither good nor bad. The example of a knife, used for meat or murder, has no intrinsic good or bad.

However, the Stoics view might change if embodied AI exists, e.g. in a robot. Now externals have "agency" and possibly have an intrinsic good or bad.

Robots with agency is going to have an interesting impact on philosophy.
by xoa | 2025-04-27 07:19:16+00:00
>This is what I don't get about tipping percentage based. It makes no sense to me.

Of course it makes sense and I think you understand it even if (very reasonably!) you don't like it: it's a rough but effective effort at a progressive taxation/extractive pricing scheme. They're trying to extract the maximum amount of money from each customer for each individual transaction [0], orthogonal to effort or value. They aren't a government of course though and don't have full visibility of anyone's exact income or personal psychology. But as a simple proxy somebody buying a $200 bottle of wine is more likely to either have a lot more money or (just as good here) simply be in a mood/occasion to splash out and due to how humans tend to judge relative expenditures they're a lot easier to convince a $30 tip is acceptable if it's 15% of the price instead of 150% the price. Even if they aren't rich and/or are typically value-oriented, on a "special occasion" it's probably going to be easier to squeeze them harder while not framing it as getting squeezed. Once people commit to paying higher numbers that frames the rest of their economic decision making for the transaction.

And clearly it does work for a lot of places, at least in the short term, same as other exploitive human economic hacks (like the predatory rise of microtransactions in video games). It lets the businesses (including not just owners/managers in this case but many employees as well) make a lot more money.

----

0: Ie, treating it as a non-iterated game theory situation, which probably is rational for a lot of restaurants and particularly tourist ones where odds may be that they will only ever see any given customer once (or perhaps single digits, close enough) in a lifetime. In an iterated game, where a large/critical percentage of business depends on local repeat customers, it can make more sense long term to build loyalty by not feeling exploitive and have lower-per-transaction profits that are steady over years/decades. And I have seen that play out to some extent. Some places may also split the difference, such as by offering special local discount scheme sort of things, or having very different pricing/offerings certain days of the week when statistically very few tourists are there vs locals.
by spiderfarmer | 2025-04-27 07:19:18+00:00
Tailwind makes things like dark mode and group hover/focus states dead simple with modifiers (dark:, group-hover:), keeping all your logic in your HTML. With inline CSS, you’d need messy JS, extra classes, or bloated style tags to handle the same.

It also enforces a design system (spacing, colors, fonts), while inline CSS often leads to small, inconsistent differences everywhere.

It’s a great solution to a problem a lot of people were having. That’s why it’s so popular.
Show HN: WinMon – A Lightweight Process Monitor for Windows in Rust
by Flex247A | 2025-04-27 07:19:34+00:00
Hi guys,

I’ve always liked the Windows Sysinternals tools, so I decided to reimplement pslist as a small learning project. Ended up using the windows-rs crate and I found that very pleasant to use.

While most of the code is inside unsafe blocks, I really liked how the code ended up being!
by throw310822 | 2025-04-27 07:20:54+00:00
> I hate tipping. The last think I want to do after eating is math

The math is not the problem. The problem is that it's a unspecified amount, therefore it's up to you to decide on the spot how much to pay the person in front of you. This creates a social pressure towards paying more, and the results are obvious: the expected tip keeps rising- and in fact it's already reached completely absurd levels.
by rich_sasha | 2025-04-27 07:21:46+00:00
It's a bit like the efficient market hypothesis and the rise of passive funds. The EMH says, if there is any inefficiency in the market, a well-resourced arbitrageur can close it and make a lot of money, so all such inefficiencies are closed before they even arise, so actually there are no inefficiencies. But if there are truly no inefficiencies, then there are no arbitrageurs, as they cannot support themselves! And thus no one to keep the markets efficient.

Passive investment management works really well, but also sort of depends on someone actually reading annual reports and firing incompetent management. Without it, if everyone just invests passively and thinks not one bit what they are doing, management will pay themselves stupid money and run their businesses to the ground.

So... Sure, LLMs learned a lot on from humans, and will eat a lot, maybe 90%+ of programming jobs - which in itself is a little scary. But I'm not sure what a 100% LLM software world looks like. I can imagine, rather, where a lot of mundane stuff that now requires the skills will be shifted to LLMs - like, dunno, a neighbourhood making its own parking app from a prompt. But is the field of software going to stop in its current shape?

TFA makes the point that most SEs these days have no idea how CPUs actually work. There was a time where this was all crucial knowledge, and you could say high level languages like Java make SEs redundant. Well they didn't, and employment in software has only been going up in the long run.
by danans | 2025-04-27 07:21:50+00:00
> Why don't the poor just buy smaller cars?

They do buy smaller cars. But they still spend a much greater percent of their income on gas. Worse, most of the auto industry has upsized their entire vehicle fleet. It's not as easy to find small used cars as it once was. They also are less likely to have jobs they can remote work, and can't afford to live close enough to the workplace to use transit.

Also many poor people need a larger car for their work. I'm not talking about a vanity pickup, but something more like a small pickup or a work van. Others may have many children to drive (maybe their own and others if they live in joint family situations).

Their solution is to buy a 3rd or 4th hand large vehicle.
by redditor98654 | 2025-04-27 07:22:31+00:00
I agree on the head of the line blocking problem and that not everyone needs the per partition ordering. For that I have started to use SQS FIFO with the message grouping key being the logical key for the event/resource. This gives me ordering within the key and not extra ordering across keys. So I don’t have the head of line blocking problem.

If I need multiple independent consumers, I just instead publish to SNS FIFO and let my consumers create their own SQS fifo queues that are subscribed to the topic. The ordering is maintained across SNS and SQS. I also get native DLQ support for poison pills and an SQS consumer is dead simple to operate vs a Kafka consumer.

It does not solve all of the mentioned problems like being able to see what the keys are in the queue or lookup by a given key but as a messaging solution that offers ordering for a key, this is hard to beat.
by jstanley | 2025-04-27 07:23:14+00:00
This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about.

How can you be remotely unsure about whether you are conscious? It is inconceivable to me that you could be conscious and unaware of it. It's an oxymoron.

Of course you can be unsure about whether others are conscious. But if you are conscious then you know that you are.

Do you experience things at all? Or are you a soulless machine that takes inputs and gives outputs and doesn't experience anything on the inside?

If the former, you're conscious and you know it.
by ctenb | 2025-04-27 07:23:52+00:00
For multiline cell contents, there is rule 7, the multi line extension. Newlines are not allowed in cells otherwise, because of rule 2, it's a line based format.

I personally use it to write tabular data manually, used to define our datamodel. Because this format is editor agnostic, colleagues can easily read and edit as well. So in my case it's focus on human read/write and machine read.
by jenadine | 2025-04-27 07:28:29+00:00
An interesting example of bad waste management in the 70's.

But hardly an argument for how safe nuclear energy can be. You wouldn't judge the safety of aviation based on the Wright brothers plane.

Also note that one of the problems on that mine is not only the radioactive waste, but also mercury, lead, arsenic, and other product not coming from nuclear facilities. That kind of waste is dangerous for basically ever compared to the radioactive atoms. Yet nobody talk about it.

Nuclear energy is not the only industry producing nuclear waste. You've got also significant radioactive waste produced by the medical, research, defence, mining, and other industries. And so we need safe waste storage regardless of the existence of nuclear power plants.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-27 07:29:05+00:00
Those who don't learn their history are doomed to find new and innovative ways to repeat history.

If you're older than 40, you remember that there did exist an aeon, long, long ago, when people did not use data object serialization formats as config files. When config files were written not to be easy to parse, but to make it easier for human beings to configure software. When nobody believed there was one single good way to do everything. When software was written not to aid computers, but to aid humans.
by knorker | 2025-04-27 07:30:10+00:00
Binary downloads? Backward compatibility may allow you to run a 5 year old binary on a system from today, but running a new binary on a 5 year old system is not even a goal.

Choke is easy to upgrade on a modern system, maybe. But that defeats the point, you could just be upgraded normally then.

Or maybe, maybe an old Linux x86. But if that's all you were trying to support then what was the point of cmake in the first place.

It was a few years ago now, so I don't remember the scenario, but no it was absolutely not easy to install/upgrade cmake.

You complain about support for 90s compilers, but it's really helpful when you're trying to install on something obscure. Almost always autotools just works. Cmake, if it's not a Linux or Mac, good luck.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-04-27 07:30:15+00:00
> individualism

Yes.

One good counter-force against this wave is dependence. If you depend on someone for something, or you owe them a lot(I don't mean monetarily), you will not cut ties with them even if you have a temporary fallout. You'll push through it. Yes, this has negative effects (abuse) but at the system level you need to optimize for the majority case not the minority case. One of the things an overly financialised society does is to commoditise/securitize every dependency. Homes, food, care, groceries, maintenance, health, everything is attached a value. It is now possible for someone to live entirely on their own, with fully commoditised dependencies. Even when they start a family, the kids go to day care, and eventually the parents go to an old age home - more things commoditised. In fact, the number of old age homes is the best sign of a failing society. Like a nail in the coffin, these commoditized fractures increase the perceived wealth of everyone, rally the stock market and the variety of casinos around us, and people celebrate it.
by throw310822 | 2025-04-27 07:30:21+00:00
> To be fair, tipping on top of sales tax never made sense

That's a bit funny. Why doesn't it make sense? There is no meaningful relationship between the amount you spend, fixed brackets like 15%, 20%, 30% etc, and the job the waiter did bringing you the food. It's all made up and unnecessary. You can be expected to pay it before taxes, after taxes, 0%, 80%, only for desserts, only on your birthday... It's completely arbitrary.
by swores | 2025-04-27 07:33:58+00:00
The difference is: what people generally mean by hallucination is "LLM said something wrong as if it was right". And what you are adding to that in your previous comments is the concept of whether or not the LLM knows the right answer. Which it never does. That's where your interpretation and the general interpretation differ.

I'm afraid I don't personally see how to explain more clearly, so will just say instead that given multiple people are in this thread telling you your understanding of how LLMs work isn't right, please consider that to at least be a possibility and look into it further rather than digging deeper into your current beliefs.
by knorker | 2025-04-27 07:35:28+00:00
It is relevant still, because sometimes you get a vendor system under support contract (can't be upgraded as a whole).

If you only support x64 Linux and at least as new as latest Debian stable, then I don't feel like you should be talking about these things being too complex.

I don't laugh at plumbers for having a van full of obscure tools, when they just needed a wrench to fix my problem.
by yegle | 2025-04-27 07:36:36+00:00
One random idea that I had for a while to replace tips: when I get a bill, that's the total amount I need to pay. There should be a line asking me to fill in a percentage. That percent of my bill goes to the service.

And most importantly, set the percentage limit to 50%, so owner would have to raise menu price by 100% if they want to simply offset it.

This way, customer don't feel like they are paying twice, the service team still get tips to supplement their lower income.

Of course the restaurant owners won't agree to this because now they are the ones subsidizing the waiter's salary instead of the customers. Just like it should have been.
by insin | 2025-04-27 07:36:56+00:00
Did anyone ever do a good post-action write-up of how if you actually use the CSS Zen Garden technique for something which isn't a fixed target for demoing the power of CSS and the creativity of those who wield it, you end up with both HTML and CSS everyone is afraid to touch?

When multiple different CSS layouts depend _deeply_ on the specific structure of the markup and the markup _needs_ to change over time, at the least you're in for pain, and at the most you're hosed/rewriting.
by auxbuss | 2025-04-27 07:37:55+00:00
Robert Saunders, Reader in Modern British History at Queen Mary’s London, wrote an interesting thread about “the economy”.

https://bsky.app/profile/robertsaunders.bsky.social/post/3la...

He starts out by noting that the economy as an idea is very recent invention. And yet it tops the list of voters concerns.

"If you had told Mr Gladstone that "the economy has grown this year", he would not have understood what those words meant."

(William Gladstone was the British Prime Minister, on and off, between 1868 and 1894. He is considered to be one of the great British PMs.)

"Gladstone was the most financially literate statesman of the 19th Century. But the idea of something called "the economy", which could "grow" or "shrink", did not exist."

"It (THE economy) first appeared in a major manifesto in 1950 and didn't get its own section until 1955. That's also when terms like "economic growth" appeared in Parliament."

“What we now call "economics" was usually termed "political economy”. "Economy" was not a technocratic exercise, but a moral and political arena."

"… it subordinated a moral and political judgment (what is "good economy?") to a blunter question: how do we make "the" economy bigger? In reality, economic choices were still moral and political. But they were cast as technocratic questions about "competence" and know-how."

"(and) … it turned "the economy" into a "thing", to be weighed against other, different "things": such as "the environment" or "saving lives". And it encouraged a tendency to make "growth" the goal, without asking what was growing, why and to whose benefit."

I recommend reading the whole thread if you are interested to learn how we got here.

And looking forward?

"Recognising that our concepts are historically specific - that they have been different in the past and might be different in the future - helps us to imagine other ways of talking and thinking in the present. In an age of so many economic challenges, we surely need more of that."
by 27thPW | 2025-04-27 07:39:40+00:00
Sortition as a scheme fails to reckon with the nature of power and how individuals wield it. There is a reason you only ever see these kinds of citizen’s councils created when legislatures don’t want to deal with particular issues, and most of the time their final reports and recommendations are ignored.

For sortition to work the bodies need to be vested with real power. Are we ready to hand over levers of a complex society to a representative sample of our peers? Or to demand that they be handed over?
by Matumio | 2025-04-27 07:39:44+00:00
This kind of thinking, that everything can be broken down into pieces and studied in isolation... it has brought us very far, but it has some hard limitations. Especially in biology, where any leak you find may serve some function.

In medicine, the primary goal is to help, rather than understanding why something works exactly. Sure, understanding is an important goal too, it's just much harder to achieve than being able to help. And less important than knowing that your treatment will work, without any major side-effects, for the kind of patient in front of you.
by the_gipsy | 2025-04-27 07:41:37+00:00
Okay, let's compare it to: Let's not make auto-pilot mandatory in planes, because sometimes a copilot has found that a pilot was drunk when taking off manually.

Even if there was a drunken pilot epidemic that causes 10 plane crashes per year, and autopilot only prevents 1 plane crash per year, it would be ridiculous not to make the autopilot mandatory and rely on its absence to catch some of those drunken pilot crashes.
by milesrout | 2025-04-27 07:43:02+00:00
The structure of the markup is dependent on the semantic structure of the content that is marked up. The CSS is styling that structure.

The markup shouldn't need to change over time in a way that makes the CSS layouts not work because it just reflects the semantic structure of the document, which shouldn't really need to change. If it does you have quite a different document and so of course it will need CSS changes too.

I was always much more afraid of touching ad-hoc CSS that was written alongside HTML, because it ends up having all these classes and elements that have no semantics and it becomes very unclear what anything actually means. The very worst is the "tailwind" styling where classes etc mean nothing, just styling.
by aburdulescu | 2025-04-27 07:43:28+00:00
Shameless plug :)

I've also been playing around with a configuration format, for similar reasons, although my approach is to make it easy(enough) to read/parse for both humans and machines.

HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42516608

Any feedback is welcomed, but keep in mind is just a toy project which has only one user in mind(me), no plans to conquer the world or solve the config format problems for all :)
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-27 07:43:46+00:00
For a long, long time, I ate at whatever restaurant was nearby. And for delivery, I had a huge stack of menus at home, and I'd order whatever tickled my fancy that day.

Since I suffer from PTSD, it has been very difficult for me to discern when I was receiving bad service, disrespect, outright contempt from "the help" because of who I am or what I look like, or what my name/address was. I really just put up with it every day, as an unavoidable fact of life.

And it really came to a head during the pandemic; I was using GrubHub extensively and they were systematically stealing my drinks. I'd order one drink--missing. I'd order two drinks--missing. I was having a meltdown during each reimbursement call, 3 times a day every day!

And my friend counseled me that perhaps I just shouldn't return my business to a place that treats me like that. And I was like, hmm, could it be that easy?

And I began to test it--I switched to DoorDash and they've been fair and honest every day.

I began returning to restaurants where I had noticed they smiled to me and treated me kindly, like a human being. And the difference was amazing.

Of course this worked out to mostly Catholic proprietors around town, whether Italian, Vietnamese, many Latino-run kitchens, whatever.

And yes, "obsequious" sort of describes the experience sometimes. They really do value my business, especially at the struggling Irish Pub downtown, or when I pay cash to the elderly Vietnamese lady on borrowed time in the dilapidated shopping center.

I can still sort of put up with thinly veiled hate when I walk into a really basic fast-food joint. But I've really curtailed my explorations of new restaurants.

And I feel much better tipping the drivers and the waitresses who really do give me good service, and you know, treat me as a human person. I had begun to think it just wasn't possible.
by dguest | 2025-04-27 07:43:48+00:00
Yeah that was my assumption as well.

There's no custom of tipping that much at any of these places, but I feel cheap just clicking the lowest (no tip) of 4 options. Maybe all the time I've lived in the US plays a role here but it seems like it might just be the decoy effect [1] applied to tipping. It will be interesting to see if consumers see this as a dark pattern and push back.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoy_effect
by gf000 | 2025-04-27 07:44:17+00:00
What kind of keywords would you imagine provide an actual, profitable advantage to an ad company? I can't imagine "computer 2", "fridge 3", "egg 4" being all that valuable compared to.. literally my whole browser history and my reaction to other ads/videos (I looked at that short for 10s vs immediately skipping builds a very nice profile). And now add i18n in the picture - even the main AI assistant products suck in anything other than English, so this fancy, advanced technology with low return of value would end up with a low target audience as well.

Also, "Siri" and the like ends up waking the main processor, which is definitely easy to prove/disprove. Just talk to your phone continuously for a long time and see if it wakes.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-27 07:44:45+00:00
Ironic that you've drawn the eye to the thing that needs to be front and center of any C tutorial, and also the thing that makes C so tricky to work with.

When somebody says "This program is written in C", my initial thought is "Which C?". There is no one, single C.

I don't write C daily. Heck, I don't write it monthly any more. And so my grey cells are struggling with which versions introduced what, and you've spotted something I would have missed on a first read.

And this is a problem.

Can you list all the undefined behaviours, and which language features came into which version across ANSI, C99, C11, C17 and C23? The last one feels a little brighter in my mind, but I definitely can't, and if I was writing a C tutorial - like many that have been written - I'd probably be explicit about choosing a version and sticking with it, and good luck and godspeed to everything outside that version.

Of course this is one of the reasons learning C is harder than other languages, and why languages like Zig and Odin have a decent chance: ergonomically simpler than Rust, all the power and flexibility, (much) less of the head scratching.