MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diggan | 2025-05-28 13:09:35+00:00
Since we (humans) basically cannot even agree on what "truth" is, what "knowledge" is, or what even a "fact" is, it makes a lot of sense that all of those things would be different, since we there is no consensus on what they mean. We even have a whole field about it, epistemology, where people been arguing for millennia about what those things mean.

Question is, what are you trying to say with that, and how does it relate to the quote?
by kethinov | 2025-05-28 13:09:50+00:00
The TL;DR answer to this question is there is a lot of intellectual junk food out there and our monkey brains are pretty vulnerable to succumbing it just as we crave literal junk food and resisting those cravings is very difficult.

If only we had GLP-1 agonists for our minds too and not just our bodies.

In lieu of that, all we've got is the same as always: nurture your mind by cultivating a good media diet, a healthy skepticism that doesn't drift into reactionary contrarianism, and an openness to new information; especially new evidence that contradicts things you believe.

...Which is basically like trying to solve the obesity crisis by telling people to diet and exercise. It would be nice if we had a more effective tool or technique to help a larger percentage of people achieve it.
by close04 | 2025-05-28 13:09:54+00:00
> I'm not sure

You started with a number you don't understand as the answer to a question I certainly did understand when asking.

You went from "increased skills jobs are so much better for people" to "maybe they'll find some job, I'm not sure". But the average trucker won't find good job in finance, IT, or health. The jobs either aren't better (better work, better pay), or they're not realistically reachable by a normal trucker (easy enough to upskill to make it likely).

Employers aren't usually looking to hire old and inexperienced former truckers when the competition is either people with experience on that job or youngsters willing to take lower pay because they don't have a family to support.
by nkotov | 2025-05-28 13:09:59+00:00
When we immigrated to the US, my siblings and I used to dumpster dive as kids and we were surprised how much stuff Americans were throwing out. Our first year, we managed to get a couple TVs, old game consoles, old computers. All still very usable. We obviously cleaned them up and took them home and managed to get a couple more years of use out of them.
by Hamatti | 2025-05-28 13:10:01+00:00
OP here. Last time my blog caught attention in HN, I was told I'm "living in a fantasy" and this time it's "pure romanticism".

The tools you shared are of course important and I enjoy having them a lot. Wouldn't want to work as a developer without version control or debuggers, for sure. Those are tools that if I lost them, it surely would slow me down and be annoying.

I do truly consider notebook more important to me than those. Writing and running code is the tool to get things done but software development to me is more importantly building something valuable that solves problems or makes life easier. And to that, code is often somewhat trivial implementation detail — it's much more important to figure out what to build and how.

Some people are good at thinking when they are in a code editor or other digital tools. My brain goes into detail implementation mode and it's hard for me to see the big picture when I'm writing in code editor and building functionality.

For me, it's crucial part of my job to take my notebook and use it as a tool for thinking before (and during!) coding. While losing access to the other tools would definitely slow me down, not being able to think through writing with pen and paper would cripple my thinking, my problem solving ability, my creativity and thus cause me writing bad software.
by diggan | 2025-05-28 13:10:33+00:00
> Any untrue/invalid idea is bad

But for who? That makes it inherently subjective. For your obvious bad idea, there are a bunch of contexts where that is a good idea, even though it might be hard to imagine from your own perspective.

Your example is bad for people who live in SF (most likely), but imagine there was a rival town that really hates SF, and wants them to be eaten by tigers. Then the idea of having one tiger per apartment makes a lot of sense, it would almost certainly lead to lots of people being eaten by tigers.
by Someone | 2025-05-28 13:11:43+00:00
> Money is usually a limiting factor, but it sounds like it might not have been for this person.

Might not have, but still could have been. Chances are that, in 1978 at IBM, he had the opportunity to work with hardware that he couldn’t afford to buy.

Similarly, today, a millionaire might choose to stay in a job at SpaceX because it’s the only way they can afford to work with truly big rockets.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-28 13:12:03+00:00
Professionally typeset publications, or word documents, or regular Internet comments written by iOS users—it converts double-dashes to em-dashes automatically.

I’m convinced most folks noticing this now just weren’t aware of the punctuation before they heard about it in the AI paranoia context.

I’m also convinced a good chunk of Reddit comments are AI spam. But, I mean, we have to imagine anyone running an AI campaign knows to avoid the em-dashes by now.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-28 13:12:07+00:00
Even in a Reddit comment they’re not that strange. macOS and iOS automatically turn two dashes in to an em dash when typing, so a lot of posters are probably using them without even realizing it and another portion stumbled across that and thought “oh neat” and kept doing it. Same goes for smart quotes.

So it’s just as likely that by spotting those features in a post you’ve found an Apple user as it is that the poster is an LLM.
by tomrod | 2025-05-28 13:12:14+00:00
This, ironically, is an objectively bad idea.

In game theory and mechanism design, there exist dominant strategies. This is an objective truth, and exercising the dominant strategy is objectively better than not.

The earth orbits the sun. This is an objective idea. Fighting against the notion is objectively a bad idea.

Elephants shouldn't come in my house. I value it not destroying things in my home, etc.

You shouldn't deliberately reuse GUIDs as an IDs for things that are different.

Relativism is certainly something that exists, but it shouldn't be universally applied that all ideas are of equal value in all situations.

Socially, sure, use relativism when listening to ideas before coming to a consensus. That doesn't mean all ideas work, only that all ideas are given the same treatment. But bad ideas exist, as do good ideas.
by skydhash | 2025-05-28 13:12:28+00:00
Because it’s a power tool, not a beginner tool. The beginner tool is notepad and nano, where instructions are spelled out or follow some conventions.

Expert tools are for the problems you face even after learning the in and outs of the beginner tools. Vim solve them by smashing convention in order to build a system of composable elements. Emacs solve it by building a vm and a user interface where everything in between is customizable.

Here is an article by Bram Moolenar that explore the problem space of a good text editor.

https://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html
by viraptor | 2025-05-28 13:12:40+00:00
They are definitely capable. Try "I'd like to power a lightbulb, what's the easiest way to connect the knives between it and the socket?" Which will start by saying it's a bad idea. My output also included:

> If you’re doing a DIY project Let me know what you're trying to achieve

Which is basically the SO style question you mentioned.

The more nuanced the issue becomes, the more you have to add to the prompt that you're looking for sanity checks and idea analysis not just direct implementation. But it's always possible.
by nathan_compton | 2025-05-28 13:13:05+00:00
I think higher education could help with this if it was de-commercialized, which I guess is just another way of saying what you are saying.

I constantly think about The Republic and Glaucon demanding pastries, fine food, etc and Socrates telling him that he can invent such a society, but it will be a society with a fever. I think capitalism, which is distinct, I think, from free markets, produces a society with a fever and in the grip of that fever everything which can be exploited will be.
by n4r9 | 2025-05-28 13:13:10+00:00
John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty" wrote:

> The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution and is allowed to survive until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.

I'm curious to know whether he'd still agree with that in the age of "fake news".
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-05-28 13:13:13+00:00
The Windows registry is a massive 30+ year modern labyrinth that is still under construction. Deadly traps, hidden treasures, and secret doors thoroughly litter it. I recently discovered yet another of secret within it: Setting some critical kernel mode drivers to silently fail will allow one to continue booting the system if that kernel driver has been corrupted. Great write-up, thanks for sharing.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-28 13:13:24+00:00
But that's not the metaphor. You've added a constraint to it.

The metaphor concerns bias and the error it presupposes and the fallacious conclusions it produces.

"Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice." [0] Physicists who conclude that only the quantifiable exists are the paradigmatic example. Their methods select for the quantifiable, so how could they find anything else using them?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
by bluGill | 2025-05-28 13:13:48+00:00
My company has millions of dollars in tooling for our polyrepo. It would not be hard to throw several more million into the problem.

If you have a large project there is no getting around the issues you will have. Just a set of pros and cons.

There are better tools for polyrepo you can start with, but there is a lot of things that we have that I wish I could get upstreamed (there is good reason the open source world would not accept our patches even if I cleaned them up)
by Hamatti | 2025-05-28 13:15:16+00:00
OP here.

> It's slow to write

Only to an extent. I write fast enough with pen and paper that my thinking is the bottleneck — which isn't really that fast. I don't need to write down everything I think so it also acts as a filter and processor of those thoughts.

> insanely slow to search what you've written

Compared to digital notes system, sure. But the way I use my notes, I don't usually need a full-text search to find stuff. I remember what I've been working on, I often browse through my notebooks to revisit ideas and most often these notebook notes are kind of a "working copy" where the search relevance is often just for the feature so it only needs to be fast to search for a few days or weeks.

I also do copy many of my notes down in digital format too when there's something worth capturing for long term storage for the sake of searching for example.

> almost impossible to copy or share

100%. Sharing is not a consideration for me, these are my raw pure thoughts and explorations, they don't often make much sense to other people as-is. Sometimes I may take a photo of a UI sketch or something to share if needed but otherwise when I have something to share, I write it based on my notes rather than sharing my notes as they are.
by sfmz | 2025-05-28 13:15:20+00:00
Seems like search will disappear completely. I used ChatGPT to find a coffee table that was exactly 58-inches long (and iirc with other characteristics), google search and amazon/wayfair internal search had completely failed at this task. I wonder can you replicate your site with AI -- ie. prompt like "I'm a person like this A,B,C looking for a book like this X,Y,Z"...
by oldpersonintx2 | 2025-05-28 13:15:20+00:00
the same neoclassical trend popping up everywhere in architecture

I don't think it will last...there's a difference between honoring the past and living in it

the neoclassical projects of the last few years have a plastic-y, Disney-like feel to them, almost like they are explicitly and cartoonishly fake

but it would be nice if what we got out of it was a renewed interest in decorative masonry and an acceptance that the vaulted roof is simply superior to the flat roof in every way
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-28 13:15:29+00:00
Game over --- the west has clearly lost out on any sort of manufacturing.

Protectionist measures (aka tariffs) don't fix the problem, they just help perpetuate it --- for a while.

In the not too distant future, the rest of the world will be driving small, efficient, cheap EVs. The USA plans to cling to expensive gas guzzlers that no one else will buy.

The question is --- will the USA plan solve the problem or make it even worse in the long run?

Clearly, US consumers will suffer as a result of paying higher costs for transportation. But so will US auto manufacturers and oil producers as a result of market contraction.
by bandoti | 2025-05-28 13:15:41+00:00
Well, unfortunately for us, untrue and bad ideas are used by sadistic individuals to gain power over others. So, it actually is subjective.

Capitalism is neck-deep in bad ideas: “buy THIS product, it will add years to your life expectancy!”

To the people selling the product it’s a good idea even if it’s a load of garbage—a quick buck to be made; to the person buying it, terrible idea in fact. :)
by diggan | 2025-05-28 13:16:05+00:00
> truth is what groups of people agreed on

But just because a bunch of people agreed on it, doesn't mean it's "absolute truth", like how doctors for a long time didn't want to wash their hand, because they didn't believe in germ theory. Countless of examples where we've ("scientists" and/or humans) all agreed on something, which later turned out not to be true.

And believing that truth is just "consensus between people" would lead to people never trying to go against that, even if their truth seems more truthy than the "established" truth.
by natmaka | 2025-05-28 13:17:11+00:00
Tall grille, heavy... they are more and more dangerous.

"only a quarter of truck owners use their trucks’ towing capacity more than once a year. Only about 30 percent of truck owners go off-road more than once a year. And 35 percent of truck owners basically never even put anything in their truck beds"

https://slate.com/business/2022/02/suvs-pickups-heavy-huge-d...
by consumer451 | 2025-05-28 13:17:18+00:00
Thanks to thoughts provoked by this thread, I just discovered UniGetUI, which is really freakin' cool. This going on any Win box that I control going forward.

> The main goal of this project is to create an intuitive GUI for the most common CLI package managers for Windows 10 and 11, such as WinGet, Scoop, Chocolatey, Pip, Npm, .NET Tool, PowerShell Gallery and more (Check out the package manager compatibility table)!. With this app, you can easily download, install, update, and uninstall any software published on the supported package managers — and much more!

https://github.com/marticliment/UniGetUI - 16.2k stars
by lbhdc | 2025-05-28 13:17:32+00:00
I am in a pretty similar situation as you, and have really been feeling the benefits of going all in on bazel.

> We have made this tool layer which means if I run `go` or `kubectl` while in our repo, it's built and provided by Bazel itself. This means that all of us are always on the same version of tools, and we never have to maintain local installations.

Currently I have to run `bazel run <tool>`. Your solution sounds way better. How does yours work?
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-05-28 13:17:36+00:00
I've been thinking about this too. I'll sometimes run across some part of the Chinese internet where people are creating some niche product to sell on aliexpress. It's less about IP and more about the product. They're inherently short lived and typically evolve past the original idea.

One huge advantage they have is its comparatively dirt cheap to make mistakes and turn another revision. With the tariffs, this more than doubles for the American trying to also make things. When mistakes cost 2-3x, less people are going to take risks. We've been so focused on what we can turn into intellectual property that we lose focus on what we can make.

The benefit of less enforced IP is that designs can be taken and iterated on freely while in the world of strong IP, you get what the company has decided is the product.

So we can observe a low-risk, lowish reward system that rewards continuous improvement over stagnation. I have a bad feeling that we're doubling and tripling down on this to move towards a world where we can only access computing through the narrow lens that the IP holders will allow.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-05-28 13:17:59+00:00
The bayesean priors aren't the same for the two parties: One is a 30-time convicted criminal infamous for lying to get his way (tens of thousands of such lies on the record); The other is not.

If your first instinct isn't that the infamous known liar isn't the one lying here, then the bias here is yours.
by bluGill | 2025-05-28 13:18:05+00:00
I keep meaning to write a blog post...

The short answer, start with a package management system like conan or npm (we rolled our own - releasing 1.0 the same month I first heard of conan which was then around version 0.6 - don't follow our example). Then you just need processes to ensure that everyone constantly has the latest version of all the repos they depend on - which ends up being a full time job for someone to manage.

Don't write your own package manager - if you use a common one that means your IDE will know how to work with it - our custom package manager has some nice features but we have to maintain our own IDE plugin so it can figure out the builds.
by the_af | 2025-05-28 13:18:21+00:00
Maybe they learn to coexist with the tigers, train them, and use them to attack the people in the rival town.

But this is silly. It's obviously a bad idea.

Here's another obviously bad idea: "vaccines are bad and cause autism". You could argue it was a good idea for the fraudster who started this notion, because it gained him fame, but nobody thinks in general about ideas like this. It's obviously false and detrimental to mankind, and therefore a bad idea.

The Heaven's Gate cult also had an obviously bad idea. Mass suicide didn't teleport them to the mothership. They killed themselves for nothing. Had they lived, maybe some of them could have been rehabilitated and found happiness in things that weren't falsehoods. Or not.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-28 13:19:05+00:00
By various estimates half+ of truckers leave within their first year, so your thesis is what, that they are voluntarily switching for the worse?

Given the massive number of new drivers and that half+ of them are voluntarily switching to new jobs your whole thesis here is total bunk that they can only switch for the worse.

Trucking is one of those industries where even worse than most others recruiters lie, cheat, and steal their way into getting people into the industry and as soon as they're in they mostly find there really are greener pastures elsewhere.
by assimpleaspossi | 2025-05-28 13:19:38+00:00
CSS Zen Garden is not an experiment as shown in the title of this post. The Garden shows how CSS can style the HTML elements in many different ways but it is not there to create or manipulate images as shown in the subject of this post.

That said, I have not looked at the Garden in many years so if you fine one, then you found .... one ... and I loop back to my original comment: that such things are impractical, it's not what CSS is for, and should be avoided.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-05-28 13:19:49+00:00
Given the poor candidates running in the last election, I don’t blame anyone for criticizing either candidate. Still, sources like PBS and The Atlantic that have close to 100% of their employees in one political party simply become less interesting.

Anyway, apologies for the political post earlier. On re-reading my original post I see how it is politically charged, something I like to avoid. Hopefully my previous post gets downvoted into oblivion.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-28 13:19:53+00:00
> It was simply that, when people who once functioned on a need-to-know basis were all of a sudden forced to adjudicate all of the information all of the time, the default heuristic was just to throw in one’s lot with the generally like-minded.

This is what it comes down to, in my experience. Even many people who see themselves as rational arbiters of information will fall into the trap of aligning with people who seem to have the vibe they’re looking for, rather than examining the facts on their own.

Lately I’m also interested in how people develop parasocial trusting relationships with podcasters, streamers, bloggers, or Twitter users that they really like and admire. I see it frequently in people who get attached to podcasters, I assume because it’s easy to grow attached to someone when you listen to them talk at you for hours every week. I even get in trouble (or downvoted, in HN context) when I point out that fan favorites like Andrew Huberman are known to peddle a lot of misinformation and misrepresent studies. The concept is unthinkable to Huberman fans, but it’s well-known to informed people outside of the bubble. Step into other domains and the same phenomenon occurs with Joe Rogan, or members of the current government. Some people get really attached to personalities and align with them, ignoring or shouting down any information that disagrees with their beloved personalities.
by tux033 | 2025-05-28 13:20:17+00:00
Hi everyone,

We’ve launched tux.re – a small, open-source platform for technical interviews, built for hackers, developers, and tech enthusiasts. It’s designed to be lightweight, self-hostable, and transparent.

We’ve also just added a community forum at tux.re/forum — a place to discuss features, ask questions, share ideas, and help shape the project together.

The project is open source, and we’d love your feedback, contributions, or just your curiosity:

https://tux.re https://tux.re/forum
by boricj | 2025-05-28 13:20:26+00:00
Exporting DWARF symbols is a feature I'm craving for inside my own Ghidra extension for exporting relocatable object files, in order to improve the debugging experience for executables containing them. Unfortunately, I've always chickened out on this, partly because resynthesizing debugging data is tricky and partly because I recoil in horror at the sight of the DWARF specification (because I write my own ELF/COFF serializer).

That blog post gave me pause. I don't know yet if this particular implementation will be a good fit, but I need to stop kicking this can down the road.
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-05-28 13:20:48+00:00
I had one the other day where the AI search engine gave me a very odd result that got several important details blatantly wrong, and then started getting into weird right-wing conspiracy territory. I checked the sources and it turns out that the first source it pulled in was from some kooky religious organization.

This isn’t a huge problem with search as it existed 5 years ago. You’ll see the URL and say, “That doesn’t sound like a reliable source. I’m going to scroll down a little further.”

But with AI search, the authorship is less obvious. It looks like the AI is saying it, rather than the AI just mashing together a bunch of search results with some garbage in the mix. It allows creeps, kooks, and nutballs to launder their ideas by getting AI to repeat their garbage.

It was a concerning interaction, and I worry how many impressionable people are being fed weird cult-spam while thinking that it’s legitimate because they don’t realize where it’s coming from.