MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnisgood | 2025-05-26 18:00:32+00:00
What initially drew me to David Hume was a quote from his discussions of miracles in "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" (name of chapter is "Of Miracles").

That said, I began with "A Treatise of Human Nature" around the age of 17, translated to my native language (his works are not an easy read in English, IMO), due to my interest in both philosophy and psychology.

If you haven't read them yet, I would certainly recommend them. I would recommend the latter I mentioned even if you are not interested in psychology (but may be interested in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and/or ethics), as he gets into detail about his "impressions" vs "ideas".

Additionally, he is famously known for his "problem of induction" which you may already know.
by platevoltage | 2025-05-26 18:00:49+00:00
Th best value I get out of AI is just having "someone" to bounce ideas off of, or to get quick answers from. I find that it's a HUGE help if I need to write code/understand code in a language that I don't work with every day. I might get it to write me a function that takes X as input and outputs Y. I might get it to set up boilerplate. I have talked to people that have said "I don't even write code anymore". That's definitely not me. Maybe it's a skill issue, but yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat too.
by unignorant | 2025-05-26 18:00:53+00:00
I do a lot of ML work too and recently gave NixOS a try. It's actually not too hard to just use conda/miniconda/micromamba to manage python environments as you would on any other linux system with just a few lines of configuration. Pretty much just add micromamba to your configuration.nix plus a few lines of config for nix-ld. Many other python/ML projects are setup to use docker, and that's another easy option.

I don't have the time or desire to switch all my python/ML work to more conventional Nix, and haven't really had any issues so far.
by godelski | 2025-05-26 18:00:55+00:00
This is good to see. Often we see the scandal unfold but hear very little about the followups. They're long, drawn out, and incredibly boring. But at the end, there's something very valuable.

Without these followups the public feel like they just get away, and in some cases they do. I'd argue that without seeing the punishment we are encouraging these crimes.

I'd much rather read this kind of news than whatever filler bullshit is on the front page of the news now.
by jw1224 | 2025-05-26 18:00:59+00:00
> If we […] tried to use these systems to solve the kinds of problems we need Einsteins, Hawkings and Taos for, then we would be in for one miserable disappointment after another

We can literally watch Terence Tao himself vibe coding formal proofs using Claude and o4. He doesn’t seem too disappointed.

https://youtu.be/zZr54G7ec7A?si=GpRZK5W1LDvWyBBw
by Ekaros | 2025-05-26 18:01:26+00:00
Problems with pegs are that someone has to take other side. And that side is often losing one. You peg something to current amount of goods, but you have to be able to stand behind that whatever happens to value of those goods... The value drops, you made profit, the value massively increase. Now everyone is wanting to redeem and you need to be good on promise or whole thing collapses...
by Aurornis | 2025-05-26 18:01:59+00:00
> and heavy moderation.

I don’t think there is heavy moderation in the traditional sense. It’s primarily user-driven, aside from obvious abusive behavior. The downvote and flagging mechanisms do the heavy lifting.

The heuristics that detect a high ratio of arguments to upvotes (as far as I can tell) can be frustrating at times, but they also do a good job of driving ragebait off the front page quickly.

The moderators are also very good at rescuing overlooked stories and putting them in the second chance pool for users to consider again, which feels infinitely better than moderators forcing things to the front page.

It also seems that some times moderators will undo some of the actions that push a story off the front page if it’s relevant. I’ve seen flagged stories come back from the dead or flame war comment sections get a section chance at the front page with a moderator note at the top.

Back in the Slashdot days I remember people rotating through multiple accounts for no reason other than to increase their chances of having one of them with randomly granted moderation points so they could use them as weapons in arguments. Felt like a different era.
by kgeist | 2025-05-26 18:02:02+00:00
I agree it doesn't work for all cases. In our case, some services can have complex, service-specific access control logic that's hard to express declaratively in a token, so we also have to make some checks by consulting the DB. I don't think that's usually a problem (performance-wise) because we already need to contact the DB anyway - to retrieve the entity to work with (and that has, say, an OwnerID property). The access token helps reduce DB load by skipping general checks ("can the user access calendars in principle?"), and for users who can, we then consult the DB additionally, if the service requires it ("is the user actually the owner of this calendar?" or any other additional access logic). The general case "can the user access calendars in principle?" also allows to hide menu items / return 403 in the UI immediately with zero DB or cache cost.
by epistasis | 2025-05-26 18:02:10+00:00
I think the history of the 20th century shows that "planned growth" is in many ways far inferior to unplanned growth.

All of our favorite locations were created far before the era of modern planning, when growth was largely uncontrolled.

> in practice the growth leads to government inefficiency and that offsets any costs savings.

Do you have any examples of this? I've never heard of it before and never seen data that could support it. Unless the "government inefficiency" is highly restrictive zoning, which would be an unusual framing but one that I would highly endorse if that's what you mean!
by stackskipton | 2025-05-26 18:02:32+00:00
Even if classical VM deployment, I still see a ton of containers. Like our database servers Ansible playbook which run Ubuntu are "Setup OS, mount disks, install docker apt repos, install stable docker, run container.

So Nix would let us avoid the Ansible playbook by just installing the Nix file but Ansible playbook is extremely rock solid so it feels like a problem we don't have. Also, we do pay for support for Cassandra to someone and while they officially would support us running on Nix, it's clear their support technicians are much more comfortable with RH or Debian based systems.
by csallen | 2025-05-26 18:03:16+00:00
This is the right answer.

Usage of products is determined by what people are driven to do. People are driven by their desires and their problems. And most of these are fairly simple and mundane… eating, paying the bills, feeling healthy, connecting with others socially, etc.

"Expending copious amounts of mental energy on difficult work to create scientific breakthroughs that may-or-may-not allow engineers to build things that contribute to the betterment of the human race" is not how most people want to spend their time, even if there are tools available to help them do that.
by Animats | 2025-05-26 18:04:11+00:00
Stablecoins are money-makers now that interest rates are nonzero. With zero interest rates, there was no place safe to put the money, and many early stablecoins were scams. Now, they're profitable to run honestly.

Trump has his own stablecoin, USD1.[1]

But how much does it cost to get in and out? That's the question. FedNow charges US$0.045 per transaction.

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/usd1/
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-05-26 18:04:12+00:00
> "democracy is bad because it can lead to dictatorship" can't be a serious argument...

It's not and I didn't write, nor intend that.

Educated voters are a pre-condition for democracy and without that, democracy fails. It's similar to how market knowledge is a pre-condition of free markets as otherwise markets favour the biggest trader.
by JadeNB | 2025-05-26 18:04:41+00:00
> > Why introduce two layers of macro indirection

> TeX already has more than enough layers of macro indirection :/

Sure, I should have said "another layer of macro indirection" instead of just two!

> Try debugging an \makeatletter\expandafter and you're going to have a bad day. I think the macro system is even Turing-complete in some sense, certainly the number of times you potentially need to run TeX to guarantee a complete output reduces to the halting problem.

So is the indirect (har!) answer that, for you, which I know isn't the same as the person I was originally responding to, introducing the new macro layer allows you to replace some of the TeX-level indirection by a more concretely understandable macro expander?

(By the way, you are right that TeX's macro system is Turing-complete, not just incidentally but intentionally; Knuth didn't plan to make it so, but did so by request from Steele.)
by ostojan | 2025-05-26 18:05:01+00:00
I work on an iOS habit tracker called Spark: https://letspark.it I’ve been working on it since sometime mid-January and I post daily on Bsky on the process: https://bsky.app/profile/stojanowski.dev The app is kind of simple for now, just basic habit tracking with reminders and streak counter, However, I wait for approval from Apple of a bigger update introducing irregular habits and improving reminders’ reliability. All that with a nice-looking UI. I try to stick to the native Apple UI language, but modify it so it has its own, unique vibe.

I treat the project as a learning opportunity. I’ve always wanted to work on some mobile apps, so Spark is my first step towards that.
by overgard | 2025-05-26 18:05:11+00:00
You might appreciate this article since the email curating zealot and "business idiot" (in Ed's phrasing) are basically the same: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

My suspicion has always been that people that make enough they could hire a personal assistant but talk about how "overwhelmed" they are with email are just socially signalling their sense of importance.
by JW_00000 | 2025-05-26 18:05:12+00:00
Indeed, Dieselgate is 10 years ago. If they would've suffered badly from it, we would've seen that by now. Sure, they've had to pay fines and compensations, but that seems to have been dealt with. In fact, you could argue the opposite: Dieselgate forced VW to drop diesel and switch focus to EVs [1, 2], earlier than they would've done otherwise, giving them an advantage over other European and American competitors (except Tesla). Of course, there are plenty of other issues they've faced since them (inflation, Chinese competition, tariffs, etc).

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgkell/2022/12/05/from-emiss...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/a2c7ca01-461c-4dc2-8006-ec1d6b61a...
by vinceguidry | 2025-05-26 18:05:24+00:00
> Each site should not have to reinvent this feature.

This would send me into peals of laughter if I weren't already crying. The time to make this argument was 30 years ago, when the web wasn't fragmenting into a billion different pieces. The browser can make exactly zero assumptions about any given site, so it could never be a place where user preferences about them could be actionable. Downvoters should get work as web developers sometime. You really want the browser making assumptions about your web design?

All it can do is pass a header and let the website do what it will with it.
by cyberax | 2025-05-26 18:06:13+00:00
I am not going to watch the talk. The slides from it are unavailable either.

And sorry, but the article https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/03/jwt-json-web-tokens-is-ba... is just weak. The only real vulnerability is the key type confusion (HS256 vs. RSA256) enabled by libraries in weakly-typed languages, and easily fixed. Other:

> RSA with PKCS #1v1.5 padding is vulnerable to a type of chosen-ciphertext attack, called a padding oracle.

Not applicable.

> If you attempt to avoid invalid curve attacks by using one of the elliptic curves for security, you're no longer JWT standards-compliant.

This is just nonsense. JWT allows Ed25519: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8037 Moreover, I'm not aware of real attacks against NIST curves.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-26 18:06:31+00:00
> I don’t think there is heavy moderation in the traditional sense.

It seems to be a combination of manual and automated moderation (mostly by dang but he has more help now), using the kind of over/under-engineered custom tools you'd expect from technophiles. I've wondered a lot about the kind of programming logic he and the others coded up that make HN as curious as it is, and I have half a mind to make a little forum (yet another HN clone, but not really) purely for the sake of trying to implement how I think their moderation probably works. If I went through with this, I'd have it solely be for Show HN style project sharing/discussion.
by dTal | 2025-05-26 18:06:32+00:00
A "Chinese Room" absolutely will, because the original thought experiment proposed no performance limits on the setup - the Room is said to pass the Turing Test flawlessly.

People keep using "Chinese Room" to mean something it isn't and it's getting annoying. It is nothing more than a (flawed) intuition pump and should not be used as an analogy for anything, let alone LLMs. "It's a Chinese Room" is nonsensical unless there is literally an ACTUAL HUMAN in the setup somewhere - its argument, invalid as it is, is meaningless in its absence.
by sarchertech | 2025-05-26 18:06:52+00:00
You could AP or CLEP your way out of the majority of your general education classes if you're motivated.

But ignoring that, a huge and often overlooked component of understanding is time. You need the entire 3 or 4 years even if technically you could cram all your CS classes into 2 (well you really couldn't because of dependencies). If you do it right, you'll have CS classes mixed in with your other classes, so that you'll pretty much always be studying CS over the entire 4 years. In a decent CS program, you'll also spend far more time on CS projects out of class than you will on homework in other classes.

The average person will probably spend 75% of their total active time on CS classes.

As far as intro classes go, there was maybe 1 class where I learned almost nothing and I had been programming professionally for a while before I went back. The whole point for me was to fill in the gaps of things I didn't know I didn't know.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-05-26 18:06:52+00:00
You have to prove it is the employees fault by intentionally not completing the task. Incompetence or incapability is not the employees fault, because well, you hired them and judged their ability - probably due to their education (it is a little more complex than that of course). As a concrete example, if you have a CS degree from the 80s and job as a COBOL programer and your employer decides to assign you to a new team doing react+js, the employee is still formally qualified. You couldn't fire him for incompetence, just because a 22 year old bootcamp graduate delivers 10x the results.
by upmostly | 2025-05-26 18:07:10+00:00
Not only do we give you auth out of the box (like Supabase) but we give you app hosting, analytics, event tracking, logs and we have plans to expand our services to cover forms, a help widget, and even Cookie consent!

Also we let you build an app using AI, which is a pretty huge difference between us and Supabase.
by mppm | 2025-05-26 18:07:19+00:00
What you are referring to is called capillary condensation [1]. When you have a hydrophilic surface with thin capillaries or small pores, they can pull water from the air below 100% RH. However, this process requires an enclosed space with a very small radius and the air-water interface is always concave in this case (it's just how capillary forces work).

Forming a convex surface, on the other hand, requires an at least slightly hydrophobic material and produces a positive internal pressure. This is a key difference, because condensation into a hydrophilic pore is favorable in terms of free energy, while condensing onto a hydrophobic surface is unfavorable (unless you have a supersaturated vapor).

> Theoretically speaking, you can have a material that somehow absorbs high moisture from the air but has microscale properties that promote creation of droplets then somehow these droplets are separated from the rest of the air

That "somehow" is what makes the paper's claims impossible. The water condenses spontaneously into the pore because it thereby lowers its free energy. Extruding it onto the surface is then even more unfavorable than direct condensation. Unfortunately, no passive system can achieve this feat, no matter how cleverly nanostructured, as it would go against the arrow of increasing entropy. You need an external energy source to drive that process.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capillary_condensation
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-05-26 18:07:22+00:00
There are multiple potential answers to this basic riddle in various religions. Are you interested in understanding them?

For example, we can say that while God is omnipotent, he has chosen to create a world with humans who have the possibility of choosing to be good -- your word -- or not -- and grow through this choice. A world cannot exist where the "evil" is prevented, unless you also take away the the agency from humans and this potential for growth.

Much of which we think of as "evil" is actually consequence of things we do. One simple example in modern terms is that we tend to repeat the same unconscious patterns over and over again.

We often do it because we have a trauma maybe from childhood -- that we are not conscious of. If I get a physical trauma, muscles around the traums tend to form a tension to protect the site where we get hurt. These often become chronic even after the wound has healed. We have many such chronic tensions in our body.

Similarly, when we get a physical trauma that is too unbearable for us to process, we create tensions around it that protect us from experiencing it.

These patterns we repeat cause much of our suffering. By becoming more aware of our wounds, they can start healing, and we can start becoming free of such suffering.

Our "work" is to learn about ourselves, to overcome these traumas, and heal our wounds. In such a case the "evil" we see is actually a reflection which is necessary for us to become aware of these things in ourselves.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-26 18:07:49+00:00
If a person is earning $15/hour for 20 of their prime years with no upward movement, then they should never have borrowed money to go to school.

They also shouldn’t be in Manhattan or Seattle or any other tier 1 city, there are plenty of cheaper cities with cheaper suburbs that pay $15+ per hour. There is also the military if one wants college without spending the cash.
by HenryBemis | 2025-05-26 18:08:14+00:00
Yes. You either MAKE money or SPEND money (sorry for the caps).

Audit, Security, IT (internal infra people), cleaning personnel, SPEND money.

Sales, Product Development, MAKE money.

Once the "developers" can charge per-hour to the clients, then we love them because they BRING money. But those 'losers' that slow down the 'sales of new features' with their 'stupid' checks and controls and code-security-this and xss-that, are slowing down the sales, so they SPEND money and slow down the MAKING of money.

Now, in our minds, it is clear that those 'losers' who do the code check 'stuff' are making sure that whoever buys today, will come and buy again tomorrow. But as it has been discussed here, the CEOs need to show results THIS quarter, so fire 20% of the security 'losers' to reduce HR costs, hire 5 prompt engineers to pump out new features, and pray to your favourite god that things don't go boom :)

Meanwhile most CEOs have a golder parachute, so it is definitely worth the risk!
by lisper | 2025-05-26 18:08:20+00:00
I think we are more or less in violent agreement here. Our disagreements are on the fringes, and could well just be a result of my ignorance or misunderstanding. That said...

> invoking incompleteness is like invoking Russell’s paradox — important for foundations, but often a distraction in practice

Yes, but the operative word here is "often". "Often a distraction" is logically equivalent to "sometimes relevant". The problem is that whether or not it is relevant to you depends on your goals, and different people have different goals. For example, one of my goals is pedagogy, and so it's really handy for me to be able to fire up a CL REPL and do this:

Clozure Common Lisp Version 1.12.1 (v1.12.1-10-gca107b94) DarwinX8664 ? (expt (sqrt -1) (sqrt -1)) #C(0.20787957 0.0)

so that I can tell a student, "See? i to the i is a real number! Isn't that cool?" But if your goal is to build a social media site that has no value for you. Different strokes.

> The intrinsic (Church) view builds meaning into the syntax itself.

This is what I don't get. I can't even wring any coherent meaning out of the phrase "build meaning into the syntax itself". Programs don't have meaning, they are descriptions of processes. Programs don't mean things, they do things.

Even for natural language sentences, which do mean things, I don't understand what it could possibly mean to build meaning into the syntax. "The dog ate my license plate" has meaning but "The dog ate my car crash" does not despite the fact that those two sentences are syntactically identical.

(BTW, imbuing syntax with meaning sounds more like Chomsky than Church to me. But what do I know?)

> I’m most comfortable rejecting “correct” code.

Again, one of my goals is pedagogy. Towards that goal I once wrote this:

https://flownet.com/ron/lambda-calculus.html

After writing that, I thought this might be a good time to learn Haskell. If CL is good for showing off the lambda calculus surely Haskell will be even better? I'm guessing I don't need to explain to you why that did not go to plan.

And BTW, thanks for the kind words.
by carlosjobim | 2025-05-26 18:08:20+00:00
> The traditional website + DNS model is simply too complex for most people

You assume that business owners should do this themselves, but why? It's very cheap to get a contractor to make you a good website, so that's what business owners should do: contract somebody to do it. That's what business owners also do for signage, print promotion, accounting, machine maintenance, etc.

Most things except for breathing i too complex for most people, including for business owners. That's why there's business-to-business professional services.
by swanYC | 2025-05-26 18:08:25+00:00
Not sure to get it right.

We partner with Recall.ai (YC W20 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/recall-ai) for our meeting infrastructure and we work closely with them to ensure the best possible experience for our users, including alignement with compliance standards.

On the SOC 2 type 2, GDPR, CCPA compliance, we're partenering with Probo (YC X25 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/probo).

Happy to get more insights on the challenges you have in mind !
by JW_00000 | 2025-05-26 18:08:50+00:00
I was going to reply that this is pretty common for web apps, e.g. NodeJS or many Python applications also do not use multi-threading, instead just spawning separate processes that run in parallel. But apparently, HN ran as 1 process on 1 core on 1 machine (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229548) O_O
by _boffin_ | 2025-05-26 18:08:57+00:00
I just had an llm build the my side business’s website and full client portal. About 15k loc.

It’s amazing. Better design in terms of UI / UX than I could have fathomed and so much more.

There’s a lot of duplicated code that I’ll clean up, but the site functions and will be launched for clients to start using soon.

For my day job, it’s also helping me build out the software at a faster pace than before and is an amazing rubber duck.