MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freedomben | 2025-05-29 20:54:01+00:00
> If we adjust the question to "why don't we kill all infants after they're baptized if they will just go to heaven", the answer is because it is expressly forbidden by God in his prohibition on murder. On a similar note, suicide is expressly forbidden because it is a rejection of the role on earth you have been called to play, whereas giving up your life for the sake of another, or for the sake of the Gospel, is an ideal because it is in the service of others, which is the fundamental role Christians are ordered to fill.

I have the same question/concern as GP (and have never seen another express that, so that's cool!) and have never gotten a great answer. I (truly) appreciate you engaging on this. It's very difficult because most people get so highly offended at the premise that they aren't able to address it (and I don't blame them as it is quite a horrifying thing to think about, even just as a thought experiment).

Yes I agree that murder is wrong, but wouldn't it be an incredibly selfless act to sacrifice your own salvation so that countless others could be saved? I.e. if I had two kids (or 10 kids, or whatever), I can only go to hell once but I could "guarantee" salvation for all of them if I'm just willing to kill them. Wouldn't the best gift I could give them be eternal life with Christ?

Going even further, Jesus (by most accounts) allowed himself to be killed when he easily had the power to stop it, which seems to me to be only a stone's throw away from suicide. He did it to save all of us from our sins. Isn't that basically the same thing?
by nickjj | 2025-05-29 20:54:39+00:00
> You've never seen a 2+1 free or 3+1 free pricing in stores?

Yes and as a solo person I can choose to buy those and take advantage of it in the same way a family can. Usually it's consumables like a 6 pack of bagels or something that might cost $5 which I'll 100% use.

This airline approach comes off much different, because as a solo traveler there is no benefit or reason why I would ever buy 2 tickets to save $80 per ticket since I wouldn't get any value from it and the cost of 2 tickets even with a discount will be greater than 1 non-discounted ticket.

Most airlines seem to also charge to pick your seats. I wonder if people who travel as a group end up paying that discount back to sit together.
by pkkkzip | 2025-05-29 20:55:26+00:00
Interesting but US isn't the only country that does this. There's an entire religion that was imported out of virtue signaling politics that rose out of the economic comforts afforded by this "protestant theology" that defeated a major superpower.

Fast forward to today, that foreign religion has multiplied (largely due to religious customs) while the local population has dwindled and lost much of its power owing to a political ideology overriding theology.

I see this foreign religion not being compatible with the host country's religion or value system and that many are rallying behind a sort of pan-Western theology to counter the many social issues throughout.
by zahlman | 2025-05-29 20:55:34+00:00
> I didn't say anything else.

You claimed to gain value from discussion that was explicitly against policy, while also claiming to use the site as intended.

> Oh, thanks, I feel much better now.

You were not using the site as intended if you believed that you should be able to get a personalized answer to your question without having to fix it to meet standards first.

> As I said, I left SO behind and am much better off with what I have now

I'm glad you found something that allowed you to have the experience you wanted. This does not in any way change the fact that, based on the available evidence, you did not use Stack Overflow the way it was designed and intended to be used, but rather - like most people - in the way that you supposed it ought to be used.

> Which is what common people call "bad marketing" ;-)

I agree. The company keeps trying to mislead people about how the site is intended to be used, in pursuit of profit.

But Atwood and Spolsky were overall pretty clear about this. They were much more clear about describing the kinds of things they wanted to not be.

And the company staff are, quite simply, not the people who get to decide what that purpose is.

Not now that there are 29M users, with 100k of them eligible for basic curation actions, and a separate meta discussion site with 50k Q&A entries (just for Stack Overflow specifically, and another 100k for the network generally, which includes a ton of old Stack Overflow-specific stuff for historical reasons), and a 16-year-long history of a community figuring these things out among themselves.

> “schön sterben” (to die beautifully)

Oh, the site absolutely will die.

Because because the curators are also leaving, because the company continues to be hostile to them - trying to make the site work like another Quora, repeatedly trying to sneak in random uses for AI; repeatedly claiming to have listened to the community in discussion and then doing yet another thing that demonstrates complete ignorance of the community's most basic positions; repeatedly introducing new channels for user-generated content without even thinking about how spammers will use them; seemingly having no awareness of the work the volunteer community does to fight spam (including large-scale third-party automation) despite being repeatedly told about it; hobbling the mods (the two dozen actual mods) from enforcing the rules....

... And it won't be beautiful.

But maybe some of those curators will come to https://software.codidact.com instead.
by tylershuster | 2025-05-29 20:57:14+00:00
We can experimentally verify spirits by communicating with them. Many such cases.

Now, do you mean measure them using our physical devices that we currently have? No, we can't do that. They are "minds beyond ours" as OP suggests, just not in the way that OP assumes.

Djinn: Demons. Santa Claus: Saint (i.e. soul of a righteous human). Demons: Demons. Fairies (real, not fairy-tale): Demons. Most spirits that you're going to run across as presenting themselves involuntarily to people are demons because demons are the ones who cause mischief. Angels don't draw attention to themselves.
by OskarS | 2025-05-29 20:57:34+00:00
Another thing to mention is that until very recently (Python 3.12, I think?) every interpreter in the address space shared a lot of global state, including most importantly the GIL. For my area (audio plugins) that made Python a non-starter for embedding, while Lua works great.

I agree though: biggest reason is probably the C API. Lua's is so simple to embed and to integrate with your code-base compared to Python. The language is also optimized for "quick compiling", and it's also very lightweight.

These days, however, one might argue that you gain so much from embedding either Python or JavaScript, it might be worth the extra pain on the C/C++ side.
by xandrius | 2025-05-29 20:57:40+00:00
Keep using it and you'll see. Also that depends on the model and prompting.

My approach is to describe the task in great detail, which also helps me completing my own understanding of the problem, in case I hadn't considered an edge case or how to handle something specific. The more you do that the closer the result you get is to your own personal taste, experience and design.

Of course you're trading writing code vs writing a prompt but it's common to make architectural docs before making a sizeable feature, now you can feed that to the LLM instead of just having it be there.
by paxys | 2025-05-29 20:58:42+00:00
Because they may change their plans. They could be a no-show (which will affect your return flight). They could call and change the flight without your knowledge. They could add extras to the trip and charge it to your card.

People are flaky, and being on the same itinerary with the same PNR as someone else means your trip is in their hands.
by freedomben | 2025-05-29 20:59:05+00:00
I've heard it many times, but it also assumes that there aren't other ways to explain similarities, such as cultural cross-exchange of ideas (which happens prolifically even in the Bible, hence why Israel is supposed to avoid inter-marriage and the like), and the fact that most myths begin to explain observed phenomena, which itself tends to be very similar and repetitive. I personally think this is an extremely weak argument that is only compelling if you have already presupposed that God revealed himself and his revelations were bastardized by civilizations around the world. It's classic Confirmation Bias.
by Amezarak | 2025-05-29 20:59:29+00:00
The rich man sorrowfully turning away from Jesus after he tells him that to be perfect, he should give up all his wealth, and then the story of the camel through the eye of the needle immediately following it as a reflection on the man's actions, is repeated almost word-for-word in Luke 18.

Luke and Acts internally claim to be written by the same author, and modern scholarship agrees they were written by the same author.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke%E2%80%93Acts

> The view that they were written by the same person is virtually unanimous among scholars.

So no, "well, it's because the Bible was written by different people" doesn't get you out of this one.
by brailsafe | 2025-05-29 20:59:29+00:00
I've always thought there's a difference between who you book with and who's on your itinerary. Very rarely do I say I'm traveling with anyone unless we're staying in the same room. I guess these fares do specifically state that, but I have a very hard time imagining anyone at the gate would care, they're typically doing the bare minimum as they should.
by chreniuc | 2025-05-29 21:02:01+00:00
Nice, it looks wonderful. I've been using pdf.js and it gave me a lot of headaches.

Another issue with pdfs is generating them, I'm still looking, years later, a library that you can pass a template or something and it generates a pdf. A simple interface to generwting pdfs, I couldn't find any. I was curious if you have plans on also implementing a Pdf generator.
by Marazan | 2025-05-29 21:02:32+00:00
Many airlines operate on the following model. Imagine the plane has a hundred economy seats. The seats will be split into groups of 10, each group has it's own price.

Group 1 seats cost 100 dollars Group 2 seats cost 110 dollars ... Group 10 seats are 350 dollars

Your group order got the last seats in group N and the first seats in group N+1

This is where the myth of "booking late gets you the cheapest seats" comes from. If an early booking passenger cancels their Group 1 seat it becomes available to buy again and it is still a group 1 seat even if every other seat has been sold. So late cancellations can make cheap seats available again.
by xandrius | 2025-05-29 21:02:47+00:00
Nobody is preventing people writing in Assembly, even though we have more advanced language.

You could even go back to punch cards if you want to. Literally nobody forcing you to not use it for your own fun.

But LLMs are a multiplier in many mundane tasks (I'd say about 80+% of software development for businesses), so not using them is like fighting against using a computer because you like writing by hand.
by freedomben | 2025-05-29 21:03:08+00:00
Indeed, this is a variation on the "Watchmaker Analogy." It presupposes that there isn't an alternative explanation to design that can describe how things could be so intricate and complex (Darwinian Evolution provides that alternative explanation). I highly recommend Richard Dawkin's book "The Blind Watchmaker" for anyone wishing to dive deeper on the subject.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-29 21:03:43+00:00
> We would be more than willing to present proof — screenshots, police reports, anything — even though, legally, under the presumption of innocence, we shouldn’t have to prove we’re not criminals.

The legal presumption of innocence does not mean that someone has to be proven guilty before a platform can allow a third party to publish a claim that they have done something wrong, even if the wrong would be criminal.

It means that someone has to be proven guilty to a certain legal standard before the state can apply criminal punishment.
by headcanon | 2025-05-29 21:04:41+00:00
I've been having a lot of success using o3 to run searches. Its really nice to be able to parse through tons of search results and just get the relevant info (probably what the search engine should have been doing in the first place, but I digress).

I really don't want to have to give this up, but I imagine soon enough this too will become enshittified. I mean, its already happening: https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/

Whats the long term solution here? Open Web UI with deepseek + tavily? Would it be profitable long term to have a "neutral" search engine, or will it be cost prohibitive moving forward?
by DSMan195276 | 2025-05-29 21:04:59+00:00
To add on to this, the issue in the article is really more about one-way tickets than single passenger, if you buy a round-trip ticket for that flight the difference in price goes away. In fact, a single passenger round-trip ticket that includes the flight in the article is cheaper than buying the one-way ticket on its own (as in, both tickets _together_ are less than the one-way, it's cheaper to buy the round-trip and skip the return flight). Google suggests that one-way tickets get uniquely screwed because they're often used for business-related travel, but I don't really see anything definitive.

You can also get screwed in the other direction where groups are more expensive - airlines will sometimes bump every ticket in a group to a higher fare level even if they still list one or two tickets at a cheaper price for smaller groups.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-29 21:06:17+00:00
It gets worse. Spend any time reading about psychology and it becomes obvious that the OT god ticks all the boxes for grandiose narcissistic personality disorder.

The OT god is an abuser who demands unconditional and unquestioning love and admiration and threatens disobedience with eternal torture. It's textbook.

The NT is more complex, but huge swathes of Christianity are still hypnotised by the OT. They like the idea of Jesus as an authority, but not so much the reality of the teachings.
by realusername | 2025-05-29 21:06:22+00:00
Personally I used them for a while and then just stopped using them because actually no, unfortunately those assistants don't work. They appear to work at first glance but there's so much babysitting needed that it's just not worth it.

This "vibe coding" seems just another way to say that people spend more time refining the output of these tools over and over again that what they would normally code.
by bumby | 2025-05-29 21:07:16+00:00
There seems to be a false narrative here that increased economic production will always lead to higher quality of life. I would venture to guess you only have to look into your own life to disprove that narrative.

I doubt you work 20+ hours a day. You probably realize there are diminishing or outright negative returns on quality of life for trying to maximize productive output. I would say we should apply the same logic to the economy as a whole; focus production on the things that actually improve society instead of operating on the assumption that “more production is always better.”
by NickC25 | 2025-05-29 21:08:11+00:00
>2) I can grant you he might have just been a harmless mentally ill person.

The same could be said for the "prophets" of any major religion. Muhammadﷻ (SWT) arguably went into a state of psychosis after the premature deaths of both of his sons. Joseph Smith, a local drunk in a small western NY town, said a magical rock in a hat that only he could see told him the garden of Eden was in St. Louis and that the native Americans weren't native Americans, but rather, the real original Israelites.

3) You must now grant me that we crucified someone for that.

Sure.

4) The above is evil. There is your proof. If you need more, you can check out Nazism.

Sure. However, some pretty fucked up stuff has been done in the names of God, Jesus, Allah, Muhammadﷻ (SWT), Israel, Buddha, and so on. Doesn't justify anything.

5) This mentally ill person was pretty adamant about the nature of sin.

So was MLK Jr. He got shot.

6) At the very least , it’s worth considering if he might have been right about a few things.

Sure. Which is why his message is also a cornerstone of Islam.

7) At the very least, one should be slightly freaked out that he actually existed and most likely died due the very reasons he suggested - that something is utterly wrong with humans.

It actually gives me reason to reject religion as a whole. If God made man in his own image, and man treats his fellow man with disdain, hatred, violence, etc, what does that say about God? If God was so perfect, why would he create beings that have free will to destroy the life of another? Paradoxical at best, a fallacy at worst.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-29 21:08:34+00:00
Leaded fuel was worse, and we collectively did nothing about it for about half a century.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the behaviour of demagogues like Putin, Xi, and Trump are at least in part influenced by the damage their brains took from decades of lead exposure.

I noticed than my father has trouble controlling his anger, I do too but I’m far better at this, and my kid is totally chill.

Entire generations had their brains damaged and their personalities changed because industry wanted cheaper fuel.
by Rochus | 2025-05-29 21:09:59+00:00
> You claimed to gain value from discussion that was explicitly against policy, while also claiming to use the site as intended.

I'm sure you can recognize that this does not apply if you read more carefully.

> But maybe some of those curators will come to https://software.codidact.com instead.

You will likely attract original SO "curators" with your statements, but hardly any of the very many customers who fled SO for the same reasons I did.
by bobsingor | 2025-05-29 21:10:19+00:00
Thanks! Yeah, I really get that, pdf.js gave me a ton of headaches too. Honestly, that’s part of why I started building this. I just needed something that didn’t fight me every step of the way.

Not planning to build a PDF generator just yet, but you're not the first to mention it. If more folks are looking for that kind of thing, I’d definitely consider it. Appreciate you bringing it up!
by nfriedly | 2025-05-29 21:11:18+00:00
> You were never getting on the plane in the first place.

I'm not sure that's true. The airlines are gambling that at least one person will miss the flight for whatever reason, and they'll get away with overbooking.

But, of course, when they loose that gamble, it's really a passenger that looses. The house always wins.
by em-bee | 2025-05-29 21:11:39+00:00
I struggle to see how believing in a religion would improve on this

that's not what i am asking. if you believe that religions are "wrong", then it's on you to verify that.

what evidence shows this, and if there is no evidence, why should I believe it

i can't tell you that. you need to look at each religion yourself and decide.

as i asked in another comment, have you looked at all the major religions (as listed on eg wikipedia), and can you say with confidence that none of them do better than secular scientific tradition?
by jghn | 2025-05-29 21:11:55+00:00
To be clear, your claim is that COVID vaccines did not reduce likelihood of infection? It's not clear exactly what point you're trying to make here. Were they completely ineffective? Not effective enough for your tastes? If the latter, what degree of likelihood reduction is your bar?

It's not hard to find literature demonstrating a reduction in infection rate [1]

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
by freedomben | 2025-05-29 21:11:56+00:00
I'm a non-believer, but I do think that is one of the best apologetic books that are out there. It's a bit of a tome and does get a bit slow at points, but I appreciate his attempt at depth and breadth and one can't do that without writing a pretty damn big book. I think everyone should read it (along with books from the other side as well, especially Richard Dawkins (for biology and some philosophy), Bart Ehrman (for Biblical scholarship and some philosophy), Robert Sapolsky (for Neurology/Neuroscience), Lawrence Krauss (Physics), and Robert Wright).

I do wish Craig had reframed from the personal shots he takes at various atheist/agnostic writers (which clearly cross into ad hominem at many points) but he is by far the most interesting defender of faith out there (IMHO). In his defense I think he was playing along with the at times very incendiary approach taken by Dawkin's and many other "new atheists" so it's not like he started the brawl :-). I think he's way too confident in Anselm's Ontological argument, but he has clearly studied it a whole lot more than me so I don't hold a strong conviction there.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-05-29 21:12:21+00:00
Looks like that post author forgot to loop back to the original question once they found a model that fit their own simulations.

Just visually going off the chart, the answer is a "coin" has a 1/3 chance of landing on its edge when its height is 1.7x its radius, or 0.85x its diameter. (the blog author used half-height and the paper he found uses full height)
by kaotown | 2025-05-29 21:14:13+00:00
The constBERT late-interaction model is a step forward in enabling practical implementation of multi-vector scoring in production search applications. Blog post shows how to easily integrate this technique into existing indexes to achieve near-LLM quality search results with negligible latency increase.

What are y'alls thoughts on this approach? I would be curious on people's experience with multi-vector retrieval in production. Are you using multi-stage pipelines for retrieval? How do you currently balance the tradeoffs between speed, accuracy, and cost?
by Animats | 2025-05-29 21:14:20+00:00
Somebody needs to make large lithium-iron phosphate batteries in the US. A123 does, but they are China-owned.

Anyone know if this American Battery Factory company is going to deliver?[1] They have the same street address as Lion Energy, which seems to be an importer of battery packs and inverters. Street View shows a small startup space.

Back in 2022, they announced they would have a new factory on line in two years. Three years later, no factory.

[1] https://americanbatteryfactory.com/

[2] https://www.energy-storage.news/us-gigafactory-startup-abf-c...
by saltcured | 2025-05-29 21:14:35+00:00
I think you're trying to make an argument similar to those arguing against "retina" displays, i.e. there is some minimum perceptual angular resolution for sound, so information finer than that is pointless? I think you're either underestimating the perceptual resolution or assuming a very small screen at a large distance.

I think that kind of resolution is good enough to overlap a lot of task focused screen fields of view. I have experienced a pretty clear "central" sound stage within 30-45 degrees or so with regular stereo speakers. That field can imply a lot of subtle positioning within it, not even considering wild panning mixes. I'm talking about the kind of realistic recording where it feels like a band in front of you with different instruments near each other but not colocated, like an acoustic ensemble. Obviously you cannot shrink this down to a phone at arm's length or a small embedded control screen and still have the same amount of spatial resolution crammed into a very narrow field.

When I sit with a 14" laptop at a normal distance for typing, it is also easy to distinguish tapping sounds along the screen. I just did a blind test by closing my eyes and having my wife tap the screen with a plastic pen. The interesting question to me, though, is whether that is just perception via the binaural sense, or really incorporating some intuition about the screen's structure. It's response to a tap does clearly vary by distance from bezels and hinges...