MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-05-25 17:27:37+00:00
> people still find value in that even if it’s destructive

I am probably in the 98th percentile of time playing video games, and have a lot of friends that play. I really don't disagree with most of your post, but this sentence grabbed me. A person "finding value" in something destructive is not a "different strokes for different folks" situation.

It's more likely they are caught in a desperate situation, either from chasing money that will never materialize or some other kind of high. The cycle of gambling long term is horrible. It's an addictive and destructive pattern with no end in sight, and it ruins lives, and not just the life of the gambler.

While it's rare for a similarly extreme situation to happen with online games, it's less about losing all of your money and more about losing all of your time. It's not uncommon for people to play these games more compulsively than anything, while having 0 fun. Some are self-aware enough to wish they weren't playing it altogether, while being unable to stop. And I realize this can come off condescending, but some people are unaware that they aren't having fun and are sad at the end of the day, unable to confront why. It would not be wise to fault the people themselves with this behavior. There are games designed to foster this compulsion.

I don't think this is unique to online games. There are certainly single-player games that can impart the same feelings. But there are bad design decisions that are more common to online games that are meant to create addiction. Take daily quests: Where they are present, they are the only decent way to progress in a game. They fucking suck, are universally hated, but people still play everyday, even if they don't feel like it. The game can obviously be balanced to provide better general progression and omit daily quests, which would let people play when they feel like it. But designers choose not to do this, because research shows people play more when they login every day. And the longer people are playing, the more likely they can be monetized.

And that's an inherent issue with recent online games that build a revenue model on micro transactions: They are trying to make you play as long as possible to maximize conversion. That's not a healthy relationship with a customer. These games are distinct from Chess, not because they lack depth or mechanics, but because they are fine-tuned to make you chase the next thing, forever. Many people recognize this, don't enjoy it, and can't stop. The same way many kids are hyper aware of their addiction to scrolling, but continue to scroll.

So yes, people play these games, but that doesn't mean they have value even to the player. They just have the bells and whistles to keep people hooked. For my own part, it's a constant battle to be aware of when I'm having fun and when I'm getting sucked into something unhealthy.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-25 17:28:24+00:00
You have to grow your economy at a rate that allows you to pay for the additional pensioners.

Birthrates seem very hard to change and even if change would happen it is much too slow.

Germany did the experiment on immigration and has not seen GDP growth for half a decade. There the system is failing far worse in some ways, but in Germany employees are paying directly for the pension plans, so the state just raises the employee contributions.
by mattlondon | 2025-05-25 17:29:11+00:00
I frequently use it to assemble the boiler plate tedious stuff. E.g. add a new test file and wire up all the build rules etc, then implement tests x y z. Or the other day I had to create an input form in an Angular app and I just asked for the 7 or 8 fields I wanted and it did it and wired it all up for me (both template and Typescript). It can do those sorts of things in a few seconds and saves me maybe only 15-20 minutes but the mental relief of me not having to do it is great, even if the time saving is relatively low.

The other thing is sometimes just writing out method signatures with all the right types and conversions/casts etc between types/interfaces/classes etc when I can't be bothered to do all the look ups myself ("Create a method here called foo that accepts a Bar instance and converts it to Baz. Return type should be Quux - add a conversion from Baz to a new Quux instance before the final return - use the builder pattern and map the constant magic-strings in blah.ts to appropriate enum values in Quux." Etc etc and then I write the logic in the middle) Again not a huge time saving but it mentally lightens the load and keeps you concentrating on the problem rather than the minutia
by hyperman1 | 2025-05-25 17:30:24+00:00
One part of the answer is rust's borrowing provided assurances that make it possible to clone less. The type system guarantees immutability in a lot of cases.

For small scale examples this doesn't mean much, but larger software gains a few percents for free.

This argument is cultural, not technical. I presume it is possible to write e.g. C++ classes with similar guarantees. But it is work you get for free in rust, so in practice it almost only happens there at scale.
by holsta | 2025-05-25 17:30:30+00:00
> you can get houses near major cities for usd 80k.

There are 53706 homes for sale today. 2784 of those are actual homes, not empty lots, costing less than 600K DKK.

I would not expect to live a healthy, comfortable life in most homes at that price range. Draft, mold, poor insulation and high energy bills.
by Buttons840 | 2025-05-25 17:30:37+00:00
> why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time?

This will never be required. An artist is free to keep their art for themselves and never make a copy.

Once an artist has distributed a copy however, the question becomes, why aren't other people free to do things they are capable of doing, like making additional copies?
by loevborg | 2025-05-25 17:31:03+00:00
Great talk, there's a lot I can relate to in here.

I find this topic difficult to navigate because of the many trade-offs. One aspect that wasn't mentioned is temporal. A lot of the time, it makes sense to start with a "database-oriented design" (in the pejorative sense), where your types are just whatever shape your data has in Postgres.

However, as time goes on and your understanding of the domain grows, you start to realize the limitations of that approach. At that point, it probably makes sense to introduce a separate domain model and use explicit mapping. But finding that point in time where you want to switch is not trivial.

Should you start with a domain model from the get-go? Maybe, but it's risky because you may end up with domain objects that don't actually do a better job of representing the domain than whatever you have in your SQL tables. It also feels awkward (and is hard to justify in a team) to map back and forth between domain model, sql SELECT row and JSON response body if they're pretty much the same, at least initially.

So it might very well be that, rather than starting with a domain model, the best approach is to refactor your way into it once you have a better feel for the domain. Err on the side of little or no abstraction, but don't hesitate to introduce abstraction when you feel the pain from too much "concretion". Again, it takes judgment so it's hard to teach (which the talk does an admirable job in pointing out).
by bradknowles | 2025-05-25 17:31:27+00:00
With regards to cerebral palsy, my mind always goes back to Chuck, a guy I knew in high school in 1983-1984. His case was pretty severe, most people couldn’t understand him when he talked. He was able to drive his motorized wheelchair pretty well, but unless you looked closely, it wasn’t obvious how he did it.

Chuck was a bit older than most of the high school kids, due to his challenges. I think he was something like 27 at the time. But he was also the best programmer I have ever known.

We had Apple ][+ and Apple //e hardware in our computer lab, and one was set aside for his personal use. It had a special hardware adapter over the keyboard so that you couldn’t accidentally press two keys at once.

Watching Chuck write a program was wild. His hands would wave around in the air for a minute or so, and then somewhere in there you would hear a “chunk” sound. That sound was him hitting a key on the keyboard. He had a 100% success rate of hitting the key he wanted, every time. Because editing a file would have been too painful for him.

Chuck’s programs were also perfect. They did exactly what needed to be done, no more and no less. And you couldn’t shorten them by a single character, because otherwise the functionality would have been lost.

Chuck spent a hell of a lot of time thinking about his programs before he ever sat down in front of the keyboard. By the time he got there, the program was already completely written in his mind. And it was completely debugged. I think he was the only person to get a perfect score on every test and every program in the computer science class that year.

Over the time I knew him, it became easier for me to understand what he was saying. Towards the end of that time, if Chuck and I were in the room at the same time, his assistant was able to even take breaks to go to the bathroom. Otherwise, she had to be with him 24x7. That wasn’t something that I intentionally enabled, it just kind of developed that way, but I did find out later that she appreciated the time that we were together.

I think a lot of people looked down on Chuck due to his difficulties, but I thought he was amazing. And over forty years later, I still think that he is the best programmer I have ever known.
by veidr | 2025-05-25 17:31:49+00:00
Yeah, Iran was a more proimising country before cultists took over... and, um, so was the US.

OK, you may have found a point of commonality in our opinions. The US isn't yet as far down that road, but... yeah. It's catching up quickly.

But the present debate started with the false equivalence between science in "free countries" being influenced by various corporate and political interests, vs being influenced by theocratic dictatorship inclided towards torture and murder.

That the US is becoming increasingly more like Iran doesn't negate that, it just makes the US not the right example to demonstrate the point.
by akkartik | 2025-05-25 17:32:01+00:00
I don't care about dates on titles in HN, but strongly care about dates _somewhere_ on any post online. Some indication of the time (range) when it was published. Even if the author doesn't consider it important it helps future readers (including the author! kinda like code comments!) answer all sorts of unanticipated questions about the post down the road. And it's easy to do. I do it all the time by reflex in my private longhand notebooks. So if you also consider this precious, I don't understand what you mean by "precious" and I have trouble translating it to some concrete ill-consequence that would preclude doing this very easy thing that might help one's readers.
by next_xibalba | 2025-05-25 17:32:06+00:00
Chomsky is always saying that LLMs and such can only imitate, not understand language. But I wonder if there is a degree of sophistication at which he would concede these machines exceed "imitation". If his point is that LLMs arrive at language in a way different than humans... great. But I'm not sure how he can argue that some kind of extremely sophisticated understanding of natural language is not embedded in these models in a way that, at this point, exceeds the average human. In all fairness, this was written in 2023, but given his longstanding stubbornness on this topic, I doubt it would make a difference.
by tossandthrow | 2025-05-25 17:32:10+00:00
This is about public pensions.

Denmark has private pensions like the 401k system in the US.

People can start tapping into these up to 5 years before they are 70.

In reality most people will go down in time and partially tap into private pensions and saving long before they turn 70.

This is opposed to other European countries, like Germany, that does not have these private pensions, but only retirement insurance.
by Bender | 2025-05-25 17:32:19+00:00
There is no unbiased platform for all people to discuss ideas in nature. I don't know why anyone thinks they can create one. You can't increase communication by raising the noise floor.

Absolutely agree. I create tiny communities that are locked down. Any sign of invasion is responded to with Mjölnir. All the big platforms will ultimately become places for the masses to be manipulated and bad actors to hide behind keyboards or bots with little or no consequences.
by skrebbel | 2025-05-25 17:32:45+00:00
I'm irked how "Firebase alternative" has come to mean "hosted database with an API layer". I mean, the key pitch of Firebase has always been that it's a realtime database. With both Supabase and Trailbase this seems a bit of a bonus aspect, kinda sorta half supported for a few things here and there. In Firebase meanwhile, as well as its successor Firestore, everything can be monitored in realtime. This is its key feature and all design choices derive from that. Notably all its weird limitations of the schema possibilities and query options derive from the goal to make a simple database that's 100% realtime-observable.

It's just super weird to me to see something presented as a "Firebase alternative" without a single realtime data sync example on the homepage. Trailbase has one deep, deep down the docs and nothing is explained about the "subscribe" limitations. That's not a Firebase alternative, it's just a hosted database. That's like calling a Chromebook an "iPhone alternative" because it lets you access WhatsApp and Twitter just like an iPhone would.

ps. I haven't followed Supabase a lot so maybe they got on top of this since, but it was pretty disappointing to me back when they launched to much fanfare. Like the only realtime thing they had was a counter or something like that.
by ColinWright | 2025-05-25 17:33:29+00:00
I've written one, and people who use it, love it. People who look at it from the outside, hate it, hate on it, say hateful things about it, and generally make it clear that it should be set fire to, then buried.

But I and colleagues use it regularly, and it absolutely hits the spot for non-linear discussions that are intended to find conclusions.
by throw4847285 | 2025-05-25 17:34:16+00:00
I took Intro to Modern Philosophy with one of the top Kant scholars in the world, and when we got to Kant the professor warned us that he was a brilliant thinker but a terrible writer. He shared the old philosophical cliche, "Hume wrote about complex ideas simply, Kant wrote about simple ideas complexly."

And yet to this day I suspect that Kant got a lot right, or at least set the terms of debate for hundreds of years. The reason why his writing is so obtuse is because he is grappling with a rigorous approach to concepts that are intuitively simple but entirely unexamined by most people.

For example, I was trying to make my way through just the intro of a Critique of Judgment and I already encountered an idea so blindingly obvious and yet never really examined. Kant set up a dialectic between two ideas that people all believe but never really examine together:

1) Matters of taste are subjective and there is no reason to argue about them. People like what they like and you can't question that.

2) People argue about matters of taste as if their lives depended on.

I wish I had the time and focus to really try to read through this book, but I know I don't. Still, even getting a glimpse at what was going on in that guy's mind is gratifying.
by horhay | 2025-05-25 17:34:29+00:00
Dude. Have you been paying attention to even the first Veo or even the first few iterations of Kling? They've HAD facial expressions that follow the prompt pretty well. You're being fooled by your own senses now because now you can't think they've existed before speech and sound effects have been integrated into the output. They've been there. You just couldn't hear what they were saying. You're paying attention now to how the words they are speaking make sense because lipsync actually adds relevant context to the output. But people have been making similar outputs just with a different workflow prior to this.

I don't need to create anything for you. Go visit r/aivideo and go look at the Kling or even the Hailuo Minimax (admittedly worse in fidelity) attempts. Some of them have been made to even sing or do podcasts. Again. They've been there for at least 6-10 months ago, this happens to generate it as one output. It's not nothing, but this really exposes a lot of the people who aren't familiar with this space when they keep overestimating things they've probably seen a months ago. Somewhat accurate expressions? Passable lipsyncing? All there. Even with the weaker models like Runway and Hailuo.

Again. Use the products. You'll know. Hobbyists have been on it for quite sometime already. Also. I didn't say they were just adding foley, though I can argue the quality of the sound they're adding, that's not my point. My point is, is that everytime something like this comes out there's always people ready to speak on "what industries such thing can destroy right now" before using the thing. It's borderline deranged.
by sidibe | 2025-05-25 17:34:39+00:00
> won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?

No why would there be? Unless you are spiritual, there isn't any reason any of the physical processes that make up human thought can't be done artificially, probably much more efficiently. Society needs to confront the myth that automation is going to always open up more jobs that need human labor. It's comforting for people who hate the idea of UBI or other safety nets that people can keep "retraining". Eventually there's going to be nothing to retrain to (at least of nothing of economic value)
by tossandthrow | 2025-05-25 17:34:48+00:00
That is why I explicitly said major cities and not Copenhagen.

Look 20 minutes out of Odense, Aalborg, Randers, etc.

Don't let yourself believe that a country is nothing but its capital - it is correct, that if you decide to live in a 4mil DKK apartment in the Copenhagen area, then you have also opted out of public help, and you are on your own.
by kiitos | 2025-05-25 17:34:50+00:00
In short, that's the job of the software/tooling/LLM to figure out, not the job of the user to specify. The user doesn't know what the context needs to be, if they did and could specify it then they probably don't need an LLM in the first place.

MCP servers are a step in the direction of allowing the LLM to essentially build up its own context, based on the user prompt, by querying third-party services/APIs/etc. for information that's not part of their e.g. training data.
by Flemlo | 2025-05-25 17:34:55+00:00
I'm not allowed to do that at all.

I'm also lost on why you think this will make bank.

If it's a basic frontend and no one in your company cares, no one else will.

And you will run into 'conflict of interest ' very fast.

An 'idea' is not worth anything.

If it affects your daily work I would expect you to just do your job which might include making a frontend to make your job easier in company time. After all the company pays you for your expertise. If I would be your boss, I might even be offended by this way of thinking tbh
by jordanb | 2025-05-25 17:36:17+00:00
Fundamentally any retirement plan that doesn't involve canned food in a celler is pay-go because the retirees will be consuming resources from the economy they retired into rather than the one they were workers in.

Their retirement savings can be in public company stocks instead of government guarantees but that only works if there are people willing to buy those stocks (ex: younger people saving for retirement).
by spankibalt | 2025-05-25 17:36:37+00:00
"PC-98" is both a branding and a standard; it's capabilities run from eight-color reproduction to standard SVGA+ capabilities. Many Western ports made it to 9801 and especially 9821 machines. And that's before we factor in graphics workstations.

Practically reducing the uniqueness to graphics adapter capabilities is bizarre; a variety of reasons are responsible:

- long-honed, specific (indigenous) art styles (often with higher levels of detail, e. g. in background art)

- distinct tools (see msephton's list in the comments)

- distinct design languages and typography (UI/UX)

- higher res and sharpness (no need to use "fuzziness"-exploitation techniques of other platforms, e. g. Amiga)

- homogenous (PC-98) vs. heterogenous setups (e. g. Amiga)*

- color palette limitations (Also: Many a PC-98 artist chose lower fidelity for compatibility reasons)

* Production machine vs. consumer machine (PC-98: monitor; Amiga: TV OR monitor!)
by dylan604 | 2025-05-25 17:37:16+00:00
How is the modern JS control of DOM elements styled with CSS not the same as ActionScript and Flash sprites. I'd argue that Flash was not a video format. It could play videos encoded in specific codecs, but that's not the same as being a video format. At the end you could wrap MP4 encoded video as an FLV, but that was just a wrapper not a format.

At this point, the only think I see being Flash was the app with its timeline to make the animations visually instead of just with code. I've seen plenty of Show HNs of various apps attempting he animation UI similar to Flash, so I know they are out there. I just have no need for that type of work, so I don't spend too much time with them.
by throwanem | 2025-05-25 17:37:16+00:00
Oh, I think I see your meaning. Sure, for trivial translation and rotation, even scaling, I wouldn't expect or want to take a new dependency on the library. But if I already have Lottie in the bundle and a completed example of the animation in Lottie format, how much sense in the general case does it make to reimplement instead of using what I have? It will take pixel peeping and I would most likely do better to spend the same time on something a designer can't also do.
by skydhash | 2025-05-25 17:37:21+00:00
Quite a nice overview. For almost any specific measure, you can find something that is better than human at that point. And now LLMs architecture have made possible for computers to produce complete and internally consistent paragraphs of text, by rehashing all the digital data that can be found on the internet.

But what we're good as using all of our capabilities to transform the world around us according to an internal model that is partially shared between individuals. And we have complete control over that internal model, diverging from reality and converging towards it on whims.

So we can't produce and manipulate text faster, but rarely the end game is to produce and manipulate text. Mostly it's about sharing ideas and facts (aka internal models) and the control is ultimately what matters. It can help us, just like a calculator can help us solve an equation.

EDIT

After learning to draw, I have that internal model that I switch to whenever I want to sketch something. It's like a special mode of observation, where you no longer simply see, but pickup a lot of extra details according to all the drawing rules you internalized. There's not a lot, they're just intrinsically connected with each other. The difficult part is hand-eye coordination and analyzing the divergences between what you see and the internal model.

I think that's why a lot of artists are disgusted with AI generators. There's no internal models. Trying to extract one from a generated picture is a futile exercice. Same with generated texts. Alterations from the common understanding follows no patterns.