MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JohnFen | 2025-05-28 14:05:41+00:00
Way back in the '80s, I was commissioned to write a small DOS utility to convert between a couple of audio encodings. It took me about 2 hours and I charged $500 for it.

It was the most significant project of my career because it gave me the clue that there are ways to make a living that don't require me to be an employee.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-28 14:06:06+00:00
That's neat and hilarious to me because I've read a lot about the challenges of working with liquid sodium in the nuclear field [1], that people would use liquid Na as a fuel.

Kinda funny though to think of airplanes dropping sodium hydroxide the same way birds drop uric acid. Probably not a problem if the plane is at 30,000 feet but I can imagine trouble on and around the runway.

As much as sodium fires have been played up as a danger in nuclear work, pool fires of sodium are downright languid and not dangerous for firefighters to get close to, although if sodium forms fine droplets in a spray the results can be devastating.

Aviation has so far shown itself to be entirely uninterested in qualifying new fuels that aren't compatible with old fuels. Thus unleaded avgas stuck around for 50 years longer than it should have and they don't even look at single entity fuels like methane, dimethyl ether, alcohols and other things that could be synthesized at less cost than jet fuel.

[1] burns in freakin' carbon dioxide!
by pjc50 | 2025-05-28 14:06:24+00:00
The first time I encountered something this wonderfully simple was on the Acorn Archimedes (RiscOS): an "application" was a folder whose name started with an exclamation mark. It could customize its icon. If you had the luxury of a hard disk, you could simply drag-and-drop a copy of an application from its floppy disk on which it was distributed.
by bananapub | 2025-05-28 14:06:38+00:00
this is the thing that bothers me most about it all (well, second most after the entire ruling class deciding to replace humans with the Mostly OK Machine without caring about the harm it does to employee and customers and society in the long term) - that people just don't want to take responsibility.

if you want to use an LLM to produce code, OK! have it produce a PR, then review it carefully yourself with your human brain, then send it along. if it fucking sucks, that's on you, and you should feel bad and bear the social consequences of it. if you're not skilled enough to review the PR, then why are you sending it? ditto bug reports. ditto emails.

you, the human, are the one sending it. you, the human, need to take responsibility, instead of pretending it it is someone else's fault, or no one's fault. you, the human, need to use your judgment to decide if sending an LLM-edited or LLM-generated PR or email is a waste of time or not.
by mikhailfranco | 2025-05-28 14:06:59+00:00
This is not surprising at all if you know:

1. Cryptic crosswords (1920s) - the only interesting crosswords.

2. "Metaphors We Live By" Lakoff & Johnson (1980), or perhaps just "Roget's Thesaurus" (1805) long before that (synonyms, antonyms), and obviously homonyms.

3. A little bit of Category Theory, but not too much, just the amount that occurs to you after 1 & 2. An alternative entry point might be knowledge graphs (1990s).
by BartjeD | 2025-05-28 14:07:29+00:00
Christianity is also anti-violence. <insert-any-other-regilion-here> is ...

I'm not sure how you can even qualify an idea or religion as violent or anti-violent, other than by the behavior of it's adherents.

It's clear to me there are violent fanatics in all reglions, I can't believe I have to make THAT argument here.
by ptero | 2025-05-28 14:07:31+00:00
Different people learn and work in different ways. To become comfortable with a new complex topic I personally have to work things out, with a pencil and an eraser, on a piece of paper.

And even writing software I often make toss-away paper sketches; they help me see things in a way that make sense to me. Not replacing a computer, but complementing it. I would not push my method on everyone but it works for me. I also think similar techniques are fairly common. People discuss ideas verbally. They take walks to let brain take a different view, etc. My 2c.
by Survived | 2025-05-28 14:07:36+00:00
I think Bonhoeffer was referring to an acquired or affected stupidity; a position adopted defensively to fit into a social or political situation.

If the truth becomes dangerous or unpopular, a decent defense is adopting stupidity. I think that is subtly different from ignorance, which implies never knowing, as opposed to a rejection of truth.

Like much cognitive dissonance, it can be easiest to live with if you just change your beliefs rather than trying to rail against it.

The danger is, once truth is denied, reality becomes disconnected and atrocity much more abstract.

Maybe there is a better name yet for the phenomenon.
by EvgeniyZh | 2025-05-28 14:08:11+00:00
Theoretical condensed matter here (though not an expert on strange metals specifically). The idea is that in a quantum many-body system, a (low-energy) state can often be represented as a set of independent excitations of the field, which are called quasiparticles. The "particle" picture for the Fermi liquid already operates in a framework of quantum fields. "No quasiparticles" means that there is no such representation, i.e., you can't say something like "these two states differ by an addition of a particle with such-and-such properties."
by throwawayffffas | 2025-05-28 14:08:14+00:00
> It is misguided to say ""if you're not paying for the product, you're the product"", because it makes it seem like we are complicit in sustaining surveillance capitalism—and we are not.

Yes we are. Since you are using google, an iphone or an android. Since you are using uber, you are complicit.

You don't need to live like the Unabomber to avoid being complicit. You can use an adblock use linux and firefox instead of chrome, get a premium search engine like kagi instead of google, get a linux phone, use normal taxis instead of uber and there you go, you are no longer complicit.
by ramesh31 | 2025-05-28 14:08:19+00:00
I've always thought that caring is the most precious resource in software development. You can pay people to show up to an office, you can pay people to write code, but you simply cannot pay people to care. It takes some special confluence of factors that money can't buy. And great software is only made by people that care. This is the real "10x" factor that most people and organizations don't have.
by herf | 2025-05-28 14:08:20+00:00
Windows still has a situation where Chrome's updates use a special service to dodge around escalation issues, and Spotify and many others install in AppData for the same reason, and lots of uninstallers just don't work, leaving files and other things behind. MSI has required "chained signing" using an old key to sign the new one forever, but when you're maintaining updates over a decade that isn't very easy to do. I hope they can clean it all up!
by emptysongglass | 2025-05-28 14:08:38+00:00
Because Buddhism is explicitly anti-violence. It does not emerge from a vacuum. The Buddha himself explicitly, insistently, and repeatedly stressed this. It's in the very scriptures all of Buddhism is built on. Buddhism is not an idea. The existence of violent fanatics across all religions does not, in any way, invalidate this, because they are people acting in the name of a religion that contrary to their actions stresses, ad nauseum, non-violence in its foundational texts.
by seec | 2025-05-28 14:08:42+00:00
If what you say is even remotely true, wealth would have never been passed from generation to generation and people would have never invested in stuff useful for the future.

What you actually mean is that there is a non-negligible portion of the population who act like children and won't ever be able to plan for the future, so we have to force them. But not only them, everyone into the same basket, regardless of their qualities and wants/needs.

Sure, a non-collectivist system would break a few more eggs, but isn't it the point? Rewarding the best/most useful behaviors seems like a fundamental need of a lasting society.

The curent system is problematic because it has pushed the equality ideology at the expense of personal freedom. The irony is that people who could benefit from better environment/luck/opportunities, will still get ahead at the end of the day. You are disproportionately impacting those who could have had better outcomes to "save" the ones who will have bad outcomes regardless.

It's all very cynical, and the peoples in power don't have to care, they are fundamentally not at risk...
by GenZ_RiseUp | 2025-05-28 14:08:44+00:00
I think this is what is meant by 'slop', especially Dan's mention of Hanif Abdurraqib's subject matter on content meant to be consumed while doing something else. Its purpose is consumption for consumption's sake.

That's not necessarily a negative, a lot of entertainment has been predicated on non-thought (Seinfeld was great in part because of no hugs, no learning) consumption. However, when it leaks into how we access and shape the world, there is an increase in 'slop'pily made, low quality structures and products. I feel like its ushering in an era of 'Chabuduo' [1] across the globe that's going to be very difficult to come out of.

[1] https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-minds...
by dematz | 2025-05-28 14:08:59+00:00
Definitely share your feeling that people move the goalposts from "AI can do it" to "well it would have been able to do it if you used model o2.7 in an IDE with RAG and also told it how to do it in the prompt" ...ok, at some point it's less value for the effort than writing the code myself, thanks

That said, AI does make some things easier today, like if you have an example to use for "make me a page like this but with data from x instead of y". Often it's faster than searching documentation, even with the caveat that it might hallucinate. And ofc it will probably improve over time.

The particular improvement I'd like to see is (along with in general doing things right) finding the simplest solution without constantly having to be told to do so. My experience is the biggest drawback to letting chatgpt/claude/etc loose is quickly churning out a bunch of garbage, never stopping to say this will be too complex to do anything with in the future. TFA claims only humans can resist entropy by understanding the overall design; again idk if that will never improve but it feels like the big problem right now.
by bandoti | 2025-05-28 14:09:03+00:00
Honestly, I hate to say it because it’s become an annoying topic—but the problem is social media. Full stop.

People are so distracted, scrolling ad-nauseam, that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.”

They’ll sell a view of their children and family life to the highest bidding sponsor. Then, peddling products to a fresh batch of spectators who think, “Ah! Wouldn’t that be the life? I should do that too—then I will be famous and making a hell-of-a lot more money than I am now!”

I mean the amount of scam ads on YouTube alone selling a lifestyle of abundance and riches—living like a rockstar—only perpetuates the wrong values.

People should be PROUD of hard work. And they will be, when they become less distracted and start to see the joys of value creation again.

Note: I just want to clarify that my intent is not to say that social media is inherently evil—there’s lots of value-creation happening there—just that THIS particular issue is because social media has misdirected people’s ambitions.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/what-is-gen-zs-no...

https://www.sostandard.com/blogs/social-media-is-changing-ge...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/study-young-people-want-to-b...
by EGreg | 2025-05-28 14:09:18+00:00
“ because you can't particularly tell a JavaScript proof of work system from JavaScript that does other things. Letting your scraper run JavaScript means that it can”

LLMs can, LOL

One of the powerful use cases is that they can catch pretty much EVERY attempt at obfuscation now. Building a marketplace and want to let the participants chat but not take the deal off-site? LLM in the loop. Protecting children? LLM in the loop.
by vacuity | 2025-05-28 14:09:30+00:00
On the other hand, though this is n = 1 and from 2000 (and it is classic Linus):

Linus Torvalds:

> I don't like debuggers. Never have, probably never will. I use gdb all the time, but I tend to use it not as a debugger, but as a disassembler on steroids that you can program.

> I don't think kernel development should be "easy". I do not condone single-stepping through code to find the bug. I do not think that extra visibility into the system is necessarily a good thing.

> Oh. And sure, when things crash and you fsck and you didn't even get a clue about what went wrong, you get frustrated. Tough. There are two kinds of reactions to that: you start being careful, or you start whining about a kernel debugger.

> I happen to believe that not having a kernel debugger forces people to think about their problem on a different level than with a debugger. I think that without a debugger, you don't get into that mindset where you know how it behaves, and then you fix it from there. Without a debugger, you tend to think about problems another way. You want to understand things on a different _level_.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/9/6/65

And I agree. At least for me, print debugging goes a long way, and I'm already invested in building mental models about code. I think using a proper debugger has to be the last resort, because nothing else works and it's time to get into the ugly details. Two valuable avenues for producing good code are formal verification (and its ilk, such as specification) and horse sense/common sense, which combine to say that we should have rigorous mental models that impose on our code. That's the primary objective, to me. The use of tools such as debuggers is secondary, and in my experience, largely neutral or harmful. There's the classic caveat of "if your goal is to ship code fast, then this isn't practical", which is fair, but I have some things to say about shucking off that culture.
by biophysboy | 2025-05-28 14:09:40+00:00
I think people right now are way too willing to surrender their own judgment. AI is an example of this, but there are many others: restaurant ratings, movie metascores, political polls, college rankings, engagement metrics, etc. These kinds of data should be a part of decision making, but not all of it. Otherwise, you get this passive, "who cares" mentality that the author describes.
by kiselitza | 2025-05-28 14:09:48+00:00
Hmm, I appreciate this, for real. We'll have some more discussions on how to optimize the landing page.

Curious, how do you feel about the tagline stuff? Happy to learn anything else you'd be willing to add here. We're all for making it crystal clear, no fluff, just making devs lives easier, which also means not wasting their time to understand whether they need it or not.
by sklarsa | 2025-05-28 14:10:06+00:00
> but a single word used in a vague enough way is enough to skew the results in a bad direction

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. It seems like these models latch on to a particular keyword somewhere in my prompt chain and throw traditional logic out the window as they try to push me down more niche paths that don't even really solve the original problem. Which just leads to higher levels of frustration and unhappiness for the human involved.

> Anecdotally, I've felt my skills quickly regressing because of AI tooling

To combat this, I've been trying to use AI to solve problems that I normally would with StackOverflow results: for small, bite-sized and clearly-defined tasks. Instead of searching "how to do X?", I now ask the model the same question and use its answer as a guide to solving the problem instead of a canonical answer.
by elric | 2025-05-28 14:10:19+00:00
When I do things for myself, I cut every corner until everything is spherical. But when I do things for others, I get joy from doing good work. Half-arsing something makes me feel ashamed. Not everything I do is done well, motivation waxes and wanes, sometimes I'm ill or tired or stressed. But then I try to do things as well as possible given the circumstances. I would hope that most people try to do the same.
by acheong08 | 2025-05-28 14:10:27+00:00
> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity.

Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.
Efficient Multi-Vector Retrieval with Muvera [Podcast]
by CShorten | 2025-05-28 14:11:01+00:00
Multi-Vector Retrieval methods, such as ColBERT and ColPali, offer powerful search capabilities by combining the power of cross encoders and learned representations. This is achieved with the late interaction distance function and contextualized token embeddings. However! The associated costs of storing, indexing, and searching these expanded vector representations is a major challenge!

Enter MUVERA! MUVERA introduces a novel compression technique specifically designed to make multi-vector retrieval more efficient and scalable!

This podcast begins with a primer on Multi-Vector Retrieval methods and then dives deep into the inner workings of MUVERA! I hope you find it useful, as always more than happy to discuss these ideas further with you!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSW5g1H4zoU

Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/weaviate/episodes/MUVERA-with-Rajesh-Jayaram-and-Roberto-Esposito---Weaviate-Podcast-123-e33fnpi
by ednite | 2025-05-28 14:11:18+00:00
Great discussion. In my opinion, the real takeaway isn’t about notebooks vs. digital tools, it’s about what shifts your mental gears. Every time we switch modes, it forces our brain to pay attention differently. That fresh context can boost focus, creativity, even recall.

For example, I recently stopped coding all the time and picked up a new hobby at night, writing. That simple change gave my brain a reset and actually improved the performance during the day. Same goes for planning: switching from digital to pen and paper breaks the routine and makes your brain engage differently. It’s less about the tool and more about how the change wakes you up.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-28 14:11:21+00:00
I think there’s something historically unusual going on in the US currently. We got an incredible lead when the rest of the world blew it self up right in the middle of industrialization. Things worked out by default, allowing other parts of the system to half-ass it. Now we have a tradition of half-assing it which seems likely to come back and bite us in the ass as the feedback loop slows down.

Our whole corporate culture is based on the idea that business doesn’t have to plan more than a quarter ahead, because engineering will pull a magic trick instead.
by b112 | 2025-05-28 14:12:10+00:00
Wage stagnation always happens at the start of any economic downturn. However, once over and the economy resumes, typically the stagnation ends, and wages jump.

The massive, huge cynic in me says, people make less because all they do is stare at their phones. Yes, I know, I'm overstating things a bit.

But the other day I noticed the approx 20 year old garbage collector, was staring at his phone the whole time. I am not joking. Truck pulls up, he glances at my garbage bin, back to phone as he snags it. While rolling it to the truck? Staring at phone. While pulling the lever to lift and dump it? Phone. While putting it back in my driveway? Phone.

While hanging off the truck from one arm as it careens up to 100km/hr to the next rural property? Phone.

He's literally not doing his job. He's supposed to be looking for things in the garbage (car batteries, or something else not for normal garbage) during the dump. My bin also fell into the ditch, because he didn't even look at where it was headed.

(And I've had garbage collectors for my entire life, decades of them, and yes it's worse.)

Another example? I had a fridge delivered. One guy was 40. The other 20.

40 year old talks to me, etc as the delivery proceeds. 20 year old? Staring at phone literally every second, monosyllabic answers. Had to be prompted by 40 year old a dozen times to do basic jobs.

I'm not saying it's all phones. But I've heard the cries of horror from people who have been told "if your phone is in your hand at work, you're fired".

I can just imagine, when one is literally that addicted to something, how normal "I don't like work" unpleasantness skyrockets to mega-proportions of inane misery, from the conjoined "ARG, WORK!" and "OMG my fix is missing!"

I envision it as "OK, now I'm working this sucks" mixed with "plus I have shards of glass in my shoes" or some such.
by devmor | 2025-05-28 14:12:28+00:00
No - I am noting that there are several sects of Buddhism with very different practices and cultural norms that even vary by regions claiming to practice the same beliefs.

For example, if you look at Thai Buddhism during the era that produced Pol Pot, you would see that fairly intense violence was a cultural norm as long as it was being used as a tool to teach or discipline rather than in anger.
by fhennig | 2025-05-28 14:12:38+00:00
People do care, about their own self interest and making money. Homo economicus, here we are! A critique of this attitude must look at its origins, and I think the reason we see this so much, is because the narrative of the last 40 years or so has been that: If we all look out for our own self interest, the market will balance everything out, and things will be great! Turns out, doing the bare minimum in an almost maliciously compliant way doesn't yield great results, who could've seen it coming?
by westurner | 2025-05-28 14:13:57+00:00
ScholarlyArticle: "Efficient superconducting diodes and rectifiers for quantum circuitry" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-025-01375-5

NewsArticle: "Superconducting diode bridge efficiently converts AC to DC for quantum circuits" https://phys.org/news/2025-05-superconducting-diode-bridge-e... :

> Their superconducting diode bridge, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was found to perform remarkably well at cryogenic temperatures, achieving rectification efficiencies as high as 42% ± 5%.
by short_sells_poo | 2025-05-28 14:14:00+00:00
There's also no real future to look forward to. Take London. Outside of finance, technology and law, even manager level positions won't earn you enough to ever own the roof over your head. The median salary is just under 50k pounds. Once you pay out of your ass for the myriad of taxes, you are left with say 30k. That's enough to rent yourself a really shitty apartment from an absentee landlord living either abroad or somewhere in a large house in Surrey. Anywhere within commute distance to London, living is so expensive that a large portion (probably the majority) of the population has the beautiful outlook that they'll never own anything and will work until the day they drop dead. Why bother? What is the point of making an effort?

The cost of living a good life has completely run away from the vast majority of the population.
by 0_____0 | 2025-05-28 14:14:02+00:00
I was wondering if maybe this is the result of a tight labor market. A lot lf what I see kind of lines up with what happens if you have to make do with underskilled or otherwise sloppy staff.

The throughline I think is that there's no consequence for being bad at one's job. Not to say I'm perfect - I am pretty sure I've been a mediocre employee before, but I've also never been sacked.