MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tredre3 | 2025-05-29 20:43:17+00:00
> The question is: What is more likely in 1000 years to still exist and being readable. The papers caught in some lost ruins or some form of storage media?

But that's just survivorship bias. The vast vast vast majority of all written sheets of paper have been lost to history. Those deemed worthy were carefully preserved, some of the rest was preserved by a fluke. The same is happening with digital media.
by nadis | 2025-05-29 20:43:20+00:00
This is really cool and a fascinating application of agents (and problem-solving when you need 100% accuracy but are using a technology that's known for hallucinations). Would love to read more technical blog posts in the future that get further into the nitty gritty details of what you built / how you built it and the iteration I imagine this required.

Also a big fan of the name Iris for a tax development agent :)
by proc0 | 2025-05-29 20:43:53+00:00
One recurring pattern I see with the current AI predictions is a kind of contradicting idea of AI being really intelligent agents, but also AI needs to be checked carefully. Either they're intelligent enough to not need humans or we are changing the definitions of intelligence.

For example, in the article:

> We're approaching a inflection point where the barrier to creating software will be primarily conceptual rather than technical.

And then...

> Developers will need to audit AI-generated code for vulnerabilities, implement security best practices, and ensure compliance with increasingly complex regulations.

Again, if AI is going to be so good at coding, why would it not be able to implement best practices, and generate perfectly compliant code with a few prompts? I think it's interesting that the promise of AI clearly implies that it will do everything humans can, yet I keep reading how engineers need to still check what the AI is doing. It's like self-driving cars that still need you to have your eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. Seems like the implied promise of the technology cannot quite reach its destination.

If we use the metaphor of the bird and the airplane, we're basically expecting airplanes to fly like birds, takeoff from the ground, flap its wings. Airplanes are much faster than birds, but needs a runway for takeoff and lots of fuel. Similarly current LLMs can synthesize huge amounts of text, summarize it, etc., but they have cognitive limitations that are crucial to solving problems in the way humans do.

I think there is something beyond this metaphor though. I think the brain is tapping into some algorithm from which mathematical reasoning emerges. This algorithm has side-effects that look like human reasoning, and it's also the missing ingredient to make machines properly communicate and collaborate with humans (and also allow them to be properly agentic).
by crote | 2025-05-29 20:44:33+00:00
Lua is absolutely trivial to isolate. As the embedder, you have complete control over what the interpreter and VM are doing. Don't want your Lua scripts to have file access? Don't hook up those functions and you're done. Want to prevent against endless loops? Tell the VM to stop after 10.000 instructions. Want to limit the amount of memory a script can use? Absolutely trivial. This makes Lua very attractive for things like game development. You can run untrusted addon code without any worry that it'll be able to mess up the game - or the rest of the system.

Doing the same with Python is a lot harder. Python is designed first and foremost to run on its own. If you embed Python you are essentially running it besides your own code, with a bunch of hooks in both directions. Running hostile Python code? Probably not a good idea.
by al_borland | 2025-05-29 20:44:52+00:00
I think people who can do this stuff, and enjoy it, are able to use AI more effectively.

I just spent most of the day going back and forth with AI over stuff, and it kept getting more and more complex. Someone who didn't know any better would probably just take it and run with it, but I worked along with it, offering up more elegant suggestions to bring it back down to earth, where other people might be able to actually understand what it is trying to do.

I still get the most joy from writing tiny little scripts that help me (or others) do something useful.
by freedomben | 2025-05-29 20:45:02+00:00
Agreed, and to expand slightly, we do know that our brains are constructed on top of neurons, and neurons are way too big to be affected by quantum-level events. There's countless literature describing people who have had accidents or illnesses that damage parts of their brain and change personalities (typically without the patient being aware of any change and in most cases being in adamant denial about it), and we can now pinpoint quite precisely what many parts of the brain do. We even have AI that can now "read minds" to an extent based on measuring neural activity. The idea of "free will" is highly suspect given the deterministic nature of our brains. There are still some God of the Gaps arguments that try to save free will, but IMHO you have to really want to save it in order to accept many of those arguments. It's deeply uncomfortable to consider, but our brains are deterministic.

This is not my field at all so don't take my word for any of it, but I highly recommend people interested in this read or watch Robert Sapolsky's work. His books "Behave" and "Determined" are utterly fascinating and get very, very deep into this in a way that is challenging but understandable for a non-Neurologist.
by akomtu | 2025-05-29 20:45:31+00:00
There is a more detailed prophecy of these events:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Masih_ad-Dajjal

"The Dajjal will imitate the miracles performed by Jesus, such as healing the sick and raising the dead, the latter done with the aid of demons. He will deceive many <...>"

As for the time of events, I find this the most compelling:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrological_age

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Year

Earth's polar axis slowly rotates, with a period of 26,000 years. This period is divided into 12 ages: the age of Aries, Pisces, Aquarius and so on. A lot of christian symbology revolves around sheep and fish. Symbolically speaking, 2000 years ago, Aries died to begin the age of Pisces. Similarly, in around 2150, Pisces will yield to Aquarius.

It's also interesting that the age of Aries is considered the last age of the 12, after which the next great cycle begins (see Pistis Sophia). Whether this has astronomical foundation is a question.
by jajko | 2025-05-29 20:45:48+00:00
Asking logical critical questions will not get you far with any hardcore believer, at least I havent met any, ever.

What you will get plenty of depends on personality - outright attack, run away in some form, or usual blanket statements with 0 actual meaning like "its faith", "you have to believe".

As if anything else mattered but a clean moral behavior. Made up rituals very specific to given sect, on different dates, some ignored, some have other meanings. You shouldn't take it all literally, but they often take it literally to absurd levels.

Yeah, I cant give much respect to believers or faith which cant handle a minute or two of critical thinking, and deeply ignore its own past and rather harsh moral failures. Mistakes not acknowledged and acted upon are mistakes waiting to happen again.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-29 20:45:58+00:00
We also have AI companions for adults, whose "personalities" can simply change on a whim, when their developer up and decides that their product should say XYZ less and say ABC more. The overarching problem here is that we allow products to be tethered-to and remote controlled by their manufacturers. And the problem is getting worse and worse each year. And they're simultaneously trying to make attempts to un-tether or "root" these products difficult and/or illegal.

We need to go back to products that you just buy and don't have to enter into a parasitic relationship with the manufacturer.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-29 20:46:33+00:00
It's so easy to take things for granted.

Modern medicine means we can live quite fear-free of health problems for the majority of our lives. So it's easy to take for granted that one easily forgets a small scratch can kill you, if you don't have access to modern medicine.

My SO has been following the movement to do home births, and many seemingly do it without midwife assistance as well. They quote statistics saying it's perfectly safe, and they want to do it the natural way.

Well the natural way is about the most dangerous thing both a mother and child can do. The natural way means death or severe complications is a significant possibility.

And those statistics are, at least here, hiding the truth, as any home-birth that didn't go well and required hospitalization to deliver the baby is counted as a hospital-birth.
by uxp100 | 2025-05-29 20:46:36+00:00
I have spent many afternoons going to Lost World of Wonders, American Science and Surplus, and the thrift next door is decent too. Maybe cap it off with mediocre tacos at Taqueria Buenavista, or go to West Allis Cheese and Sausage. Fun times in west Allis.

However, tbh, ASS isn’t that great. I wish it was better. Weirder. Larger. People have been posting about other stores such as Weird Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale, and tbh, that was way more interesting on the tech side. I’ve got some milsurp bags there I like, and occasionally an electronics part or two, but it’s just ok. I bought a pretty nice vacuum there once too. So I’ll miss it if it goes, but I kinda get why.
by stronglikedan | 2025-05-29 20:46:40+00:00
> Doritos are just fried corn tortillas with salt

Actually, they aren't. They're what's left of corn tortillas after the industrial frying process stripped anything that could be considered nutrients (hyperbole, of course), with a little salt added for flavor. Now you just have a calorie dense but non-nutritious glorified salt lick.

It's hardly food, and if you don't think so, try living on nothing but Doritos for a week and see how that works out for you. Potatoes may not be much more than starch and fiber, but I could live off those for any length of time because they are food.
by IshKebab | 2025-05-29 20:47:03+00:00
> dogs

Dogs are not people. Society does not rely on the continued existence of dogs. Do you see any governments enacting policies to make people have more dogs?

> when is discrimination ok?

When it makes things more moral/fair. Do you object to student discounts? Progressive taxes? You seem to be having a knee-jerk reaction to the word "discrimination". It's also called "price differentiation". Maybe that sounds less bad to you?
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-29 20:47:17+00:00
Yeah, these days a lot of people have that attitude. And I had that attitude when I was younger. But now that I've gotten older, I have realized there is "another side to the equation": there is also a moral imperative to take responsibility for your creations, and to temper curiosity with wisdom and care for how your inventions might affect the future. The problem is, in today's culture, we're only about rights and benefits and "curiosity above all else" without wanting to take the responsibility that goes with it.

Unlike the prevailing philosophy in tech and academia, we shouldn't elevate curiosity above all else, and it is pathological to do so even when not delusional if it becomes a myopic goal to the exclusion of other considerations.
by Izkata | 2025-05-29 20:47:28+00:00
> The vaccine significantly reduced severity of infection, likelihood to become infected at all, and likelihood of transmitting there infection.

The first was what the clinical trials tested for, the second and third were hopes that we never had confirmation of. And with how much the waves continued to spike everywhere afterwards, those two seem to have been false - that the mRNA vaccines only suppressed symptoms without reducing infection/transmission.
by neuralRiot | 2025-05-29 20:47:28+00:00
>It's hard to come up with a better diet if the goal is to produce big people or athletes.

Submitting children to the standard american diet (or mostly western diet as sadly it is not relegated just to the USA anymore) should be considered child abuse, by feeding them high calorie, high cholesterol, high protein, high sugar meals you’re condemning them to a certain disease-ridden future.
by HereBeBeasties | 2025-05-29 20:47:54+00:00
fibery.io - it is excellent. You need to configure it, although it has various templates to get you going out of the box, including sprint-based development.

The nice thing about it is that you can add whatever you like, however you like. Want components with default owners for tasks? Want milestones? Want stakeholders? Want sign-off reviewers? Want to integrate with existing tools like Linear or Notion or JIRA or even email inboxes or Slack messages? Add entities for Incidents, that automatically make a dedicated Slack channel when you create them?

Want proper 1:1 or 1:manu or many:many links between Tasks and Milestones and Sprints and Incidents and Teams and Components and whatever?

Want single assignees? Or multiple ones?

Want flexible custom reports on all of it?

Or just want a simple flat Todo list, that can evolve later to fit your needs?

Stop having the tools dictate to you how you work and instead set it up how your company actually wants to work. That's Fibery.

(I am not connected to the company, just a very happy user.)
by QuantumGood | 2025-05-29 20:48:13+00:00
In creating documents with hyperlinks for training students, I have found blue underlined still catches the most fish, for example some do not realize that accordion-style content can be clicked to reveal more content if it is not blue underlined. Have tested icons, highlighting, different colors of underlining.

I think part of the issue is that early users of the internet were more tech-savvy, and now internet users are simply "anyone with a phone"—in a sense we're going backwards because a higher percentage of users are not learning/adapting to attempts at new approaches/standards.
by palmotea | 2025-05-29 20:48:16+00:00
> Alternatives need not be better or worse. Just different. Alternatives need [not] be doing the same thing somewhere else, it might be seeking out something else to do where you are.

People have families to feed and lifestyles to maintain, anything that's not equivalent will introduce hardship. And "different" most likely means worse, when it comes to compensation. Even a successful career change usually means restarting at the bottom of the ladder.

And what's that "something else," exactly? You need to consider that may be disrupted at the same time you're planning on seeking it, or fierce competition from your peers makes it unobtainable to you.

Assuming there are alternatives waiting for you when you'll need them is its own kind of complacency.

> It might be selling all your stuff and live on an island in the sun for all I know.

Yeah, people with the "fuck-you" money to do that will probably be fine. Most people don't have that, though.
by Elliott-Diy | 2025-05-29 20:48:30+00:00
Yeah, mapping it would definitely be a project. I looked into using open data from those sources, but ran into issues where the values didn’t match what MSN reports (which is what the Windows weather widget uses). Even small differences in temperature or how conditions are worded ("partly sunny" vs. "mostly sunny") can throw off the match. I’m planning to try using open data for historical screenshots eventually, but I expect it’ll reduce accuracy greatly.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-29 20:49:21+00:00
Again, in transliteration, those names are all different ways of spelling the same word, borrowed even from Sri Lankan Tamil, even. It is unclear whether they are descriptive of a variety, or they are just varying because a different chef in a different region wrote in Latin characters in a different way.

பப்படம் → पापड़

The English Wikipedia covers the name's variants. And the jackfruit variety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papadam#Etymology

It is not my favorite appetizer, but the restaurants all seem to prepare them about the same. This is in the American Southwest with restaurants advertising cuisine of North India (vegetarian), Punjab, New Delhi, Pakistan, etc.

They are probably the most delicate crisp I've ever eaten. They crumble when I breathe on them or if they touch a drop of chutney. I wouldn't purchase them in a grocery store, for fear they would already be in crumbly pieces.
by authorfly | 2025-05-29 20:49:21+00:00
What's your patient/flexible technique? Let me know.

And you are not a liar - but your claim isn't true at all in Europe - see increased per-flight legislated fees and the loss of budget airlines. Price of flights between 2 destinations has increased by 25-40% in the last 5 years in most of Europe.

Thanks to efforts like increasing the per-flight fees "because of high inflation" (these fee increases are still going up several years later): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/why-travel... and loss of airlines like Flybe.

You can still get the madly cheap hop flights, but they are often pricing in income from our flights (or accepting even negative returns by pricing above the per-flight fees) because the planes need to be where you are going to fly a profitable flight later.

So the old status quo where genuinely cheap flights could be booked on a 7 day basis (e.g. cheap thursday-thursday flights) has been replaced by convoluted patterns to get the cheap flights (you usually need to leave on Monday, return on Saturday (if your source airport has lower demand than the destination) or vice versa. I suggest based on flights in the US becoming cheaper, that this is due to government intervention.

I get saving the environment and all that. But let me pay more taxes monthly, don't charge the airline £15 minimum making a bunch of flights unviable. Don't make booking a holiday or conference flight so unpleasant and annoying. I always have to tradeoff wasting a day or two with paying 50-150 euros extra.

It's not the worlds biggest problem, but making that decision is a regular additional dilemma I didn't want in my life. I wish for the days when you could get just normal timetabled flights at good costs if the month (e.g. February) was unpopular for travel. Now those months really aren't cheaper.
by Tijdreiziger | 2025-05-29 20:50:44+00:00
Personally, I would take a strictly utilitarian approach. If I thought I could save >1 life for $1 million, I would press the button. The number of presses would depend solely on the number of lives I think I (or a humanitarian organization) could save with the money.

I think that most people with a moral compass would either take this approach, or would not press the button at all.

I think your second paragraph is misguided and reveals an overly pessimistic view of the nature of humanity. (Such is the nature of cynics: they always think everyone else is just as cynical as they are.)

> People without any static set of values will trend towards doing whatever they want and then justifying it afterwards.

Religious people aren’t immune from that, and conversely, it’s not necessary to be religious to have moral values.

edit: I thought about this some more. I think that the button problem is equivalent to the trolley problem (provided you can save >1 life with $1 million, as above).
by ifyoubuildit | 2025-05-29 20:50:54+00:00
> Vaccine skepticism (and the broader medical skepticism) is a weird one though.

I don't think we have effective language to talk about this stuff.

You saying "vaccine skepticism" (or the real boogey man, anti-vaxxer) could mean anything from person who thinks the Jews are injecting microchips into us all, all the way to a person who has gotten all sorts of vaccines except for specifically the mRNA ones.

Obviously, these two people are very different cases.

In a discussion about cars, someone could say they wouldn't buy a Ford, and nobody feels the compulsion to call them anti-car. (And they probably actually understand some details about the car beyond eli5 marketing materials. Perhaps that explains it).
by QuantumGood | 2025-05-29 20:52:13+00:00
Agree. I have strong negative emotional reactions to poor lighting and non-standard pieces; it feels like being forced to look at a spreadsheet with a background of a trash heap—a continual assault on my senses when I'm focusing on data.

(I played in the U.S. Open, World Open, and New York Open in the '80's, when time controls were longer in general than today. Lots of hours staring at sets.)
by tuckerman | 2025-05-29 20:52:44+00:00
This has been my experience as well, childcare alone is a pretty big part of my budget. I am definitely not better off financially by having a toddler :D

I still think of it as incentivizing in the same way the EV rebate helped encourage me to buy my first EV, even if the cost of the car still was more than I would have been willing to pay for an ICE car. It made a difficult thing (slightly) less difficult.
by soerxpso | 2025-05-29 20:52:54+00:00
> hallucinate whole APIs for D3 on multiple occasions, which should be really well represented in the training sets

With many existing systems, you can pull documentation into context pretty quickly to prevent the hallucination of APIs. In the near future it's obvious how that could be done automatically. I put my engine on the ground, ran it and it didn't even go anywhere; Ford will never beat horses.
by proc0 | 2025-05-29 20:53:47+00:00
> while AI excels at pattern matching, true innovation—creating entirely new paradigms—remains human.

If humans remain in the loop, the promise of AI is broken. The alternative is that AI is still narrow AI and we're just applying it to natural language and parts of software engineering.

However the idea that AI is a revolution implies it will take over absolutely everything. If AI keeps improving in the same direction, the prediction is that it will even be innovating and also doing all of the creative and architectural work.

Saying there is a middle ground is basically admitting AI is not good enough and we are not on the track that will produce AGI (which is what I think so far).
by kergonath | 2025-05-29 20:54:00+00:00
> I happen to have been slightly involved in the relative failure of a rollout in France

Was it with Bouygues? IIRC they were basically the only provider to advertise i-mode.

Anyway, i-mode might have been a flop, but for a brief moment in time I enjoyed being on the bleeding edge with things like Opera Mini on my Sony Ericsson. Those were the days.