MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pabs3 | 2025-05-11 02:07:26+00:00
> distinguish free software and open source software

The movements are different sure, but when it comes to acceptable licenses, they are pretty much equivalent. Sounds like you are talking about licenses people common associate with each movement though. I agree there is somewhat of a dichotomy, although I feel like at the beginning open source was a bit more of a copyleft thing, and became more associated with permissive/pushover licenses later when GitHub became popular and Big Tech steered folks towards those licenses.

> Competitors launching a service based on free software isn't the real issue.

It is for the companies who are adopting the AGPLv3 in an attempt to be seen as "real open source" again. They don't actually care about users, except to the extent they can get cash from them, to pay back their vulture capitalist funders.

> It's all about us, the users of the software. Developers don't really matter.

Sure, as far as licenses etc go, but developers have to matter to some extent, otherwise you get unmaintained/buggy/nonexistent software.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

> Copyright is a lost cause.

In a world without copyright law, there would still be proprietary trade secret software, and Free Software. I see the Free Software movement as aspiring to providing a high level of equality of access to a work between both the original author and far downstream recipients. The license is only one aspect of that, the other is the source code, without which you can't have equivalent access to the author. The form that source comes in also matters, since there are forms that can only be modified with proprietary software, and forms that discard information (like machine code exectuables, or lossy video encoding).

https://wiki.debian.org/AutoGeneratedFiles

> I advocate for its abolition.

That would remove the one possibility of GPL enforcement that we have, since I assume we aren't going to resort to kneecapping violators when copyright goes away :)

Perhaps there would be other non-violent tactics like boycott campaigns or trademarks to mark ethical software that could be effective. We should be doing those now too though, and are to some extent.
by cuttothechase | 2025-05-11 02:08:00+00:00
This feels like "Linda Goodman of Sun Signs" style of storytelling. Arguments like what the author makes can never be confirmed or proven wrong. I feel like this is important work because it has a bit of mass delusional element to it (see the number of likes), very similar to Linda Goodman works, and we can see from the outside what makes these kind of arguments appeal to so many people!?
by sheepscreek | 2025-05-11 02:10:04+00:00
This is very cool. Reading through the list, I discovered:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person-centered_therapy

That sounds an awful lot like what current gen AIs are capable of.

I believe we are in the very early stages of AI-assisted therapy, much like the early days of psychology itself. Before we understood what was generally acceptable and what was not, it was a Wild West with medical practitioners employing harmful techniques such as lobotomy.

Because there are no standards on what constitutes an emotional support AI, or any agreed upon expectations from them, we can only go by what it seems to be capable of. And it seems to be capable of talking intelligently and logically with deep empathy. A rubber ducky 2.0 that can organize your thoughts and even infer meaning from them on demand.
by chrismeller | 2025-05-11 02:10:20+00:00
The UI is also just… awful. It gets so confused about what is read and what isn’t. Muting a channel doesn’t really work the way you would expect. Scrolling through messages suddenly just stops and waits 30 seconds to load the next “page”. Even reading through JIRA updates in Teams is hard because the UI is so bland and blank it’s tough to distinguish between the individual updates, but in Slack I have no problem.

Oh, and of course there are three different ways to add a code snippet now, and all three absolutely suck. In Slack there is one, and it just f’ing works.

Teams is free because no one would ever pay for it.
by like_any_other | 2025-05-11 02:10:47+00:00
> That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point

They still can be broken up. As for not being competitive on the global market - neither is regular labor compared to slave labor. And just like companies employing slave labor are (or should be) barred from the US market, so can companies that are too large. Solving such prisoner dilemmas is exactly what government is for.
by cxr | 2025-05-11 02:11:15+00:00
It's interesting that Wikipedia lists studies and a degree in molecular biology, started first at Bethany College prior to his draft in the Air Force and finished in Boulder from University of Colorado, whereas the Vita section of his HTML-ified thesis lists simply "biology" at Bethany College and lists anthropology when he returned to school in Boulder. It shows a BS in only math.

<https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/pdfs/kay.htm>
by bloaf | 2025-05-11 02:11:45+00:00
I am quite familiar with Ed Feser, I refer to his writings often.

Indeed, Aquinas is using the soul the way that modern scientists use "dark matter". Except where the modern problem is unexpected rates of universal expansion, Aquinas' problem is vitalism-qua-"why are living things different than non-living things."

Once we abandoned vitalism, the conception of the soul must therefore also change. But in my reading of history, there is no clear break; no "before" and "after". Aquinas' definitions and concepts were never really abandoned, the church just retreated from the bailey of "the soul explains all the features of living matter including how it moves around" to the motte of "the soul explains intellect/reason/will since thats the only thing left thats not obviously physical."

Indeed, you will see that Aquinas' language suffuses most official Catholic teaching on the soul, even though the official teachings are usually a slightly generalized version of Aquinas's concrete assertions.
by 9o1d | 2025-05-11 02:11:49+00:00
A financial chat for personal expenses. The user enters one number, how much money he has spent so far. The chat responds with a message:

1. List of expenses for today

2. Total expenses for today

3. Total expenses since the beginning of the month

4. Average expenses per day, calculated as total_since_the_beginning_of_the_month / current_date_of_the_month

5. Forecast of expenses for the month, calculated as average_expense_per_day * number_of_days_in_the_month

It is useful to add in advance on certain dates, scheduled loan payments and rent payments, which can be ignored in the average daily expense, so that it reflects only current expenses that can be reduced. It would be convenient to scan the QR code on receipts so as not to enter them manually.

This app will help people save money.
by int_19h | 2025-05-11 02:13:04+00:00
This argument is very similar to that for "enlightened monarch" kind of despotism.

The fundamental problem is that, even if you buy the notion that this particular ruler is really so enlightened that they are a net benefit, there's no guarantee that this will still be the case in the future.

So, even if you believe that Google provides net benefit today, letting them acquire more and more power is a bad idea because they aren't necessarily going to give you free things tomorrow. Indeed, the logic of capitalism dictates that they stop doing so as soon as there's no more competition, however small, that continues to contest that particular niche.
by sheepscreek | 2025-05-11 02:13:07+00:00
You can create an LLM to keep a check on the LLM interacting with people. This is basically what all “safety” etc models do - they work as gatekeepers for the more powerful model.

This is an implementation problem and not really a technical limitation. If anything, by focusing on a particular domain (like therapy), the do’s and don’ts become more clear.
by _bent | 2025-05-11 02:13:23+00:00
> a) Ginger Bill (the Odin language creator, no affiliation) stated on a podcast that Odin will never have an official pkg manager

The cognitive dissonance for how one can believe that Rust preventing you from derefercing freed memory at compile time is overzealous nannying by the language authors -- while at the same time deliberately making code reuse harder for users because they could make engineering decisions he doesn't like is staggering.
by cocoafleck | 2025-05-11 02:14:09+00:00
I think a click stream isn't necessary, but Kagi is not a good basis for the argument in my opinion.

Kagi is a primarily meta search engine. The click stream exists on their sources (Bing, Google, Yandex, Marginalia, not sure if they use Brave). They do have Teclis which is their own index that they use, and their systems for reordering the page of results such as downranking heavy ad pages, and based upon user preferences (which I love).

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-... is a source I would recommend checking out if you are curious.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-11 02:14:23+00:00
Well, Rust's standard library has three components, named core, alloc and std

The no_std Rust only has core but this is indeed a library of code, and freestanding C does not provide such a thing = freestanding C stdlib provides no functions, just type definitions and other stuff which evaporates when compiled.

Two concrete examples to be going along with: Suppose we have a mutable foo, it's maybe foo: [i32; 40]; (forty 32-bit signed integers) or in C maybe they're int foo[40];.

In freestanding C that's fine, but we're not provided with any library code to do anything with foo, we can use the core language features to write it outselves, but nothing is provided.

Rust will happily foo.sort_unstable(); this is a fast custom in-place sort, roughly a modern form of introspective sort written for Rust by its creators and because it's in core, that code just goes into your resulting embedded firmware or whatever.

Now, suppose we want to perform a filter-map operation over that array. In C once again you're left to figure out how to write that in C, in Rust foo impl IntoIterator so you can use all the nice iterator features, the algorithms just get baked into your firmware during compilation.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-11 02:14:41+00:00
> I think it was in the early 1900s that the church Magisterium finally said that human souls belonged to different "orders" than plant and animal souls

Or you could go back to Genesis 2:7 and countless other Biblical passages. This isn't about the Church, it's just a core tenet of Christianity.

> The church excommunicated at least one scientist for early work on evolution

Because he followed Lamarck and Darwin, a vague deist and an agnostic. For a prominent scholar who claimed to be Catholic, excommunication was probably the correct course of action to avoid the scandal of confusing Catholics. This had nothing to do with theistic evolution, which neither of them believed in

But theistic evolution just says that maybe God used natural processes to create the physical bodies of the original humans, apart from their souls which are created individually and instantly for each person.

This was conceded even by St. Augustine as a possibility.
by ENadyr | 2025-05-11 02:14:55+00:00
I happen to be from Kyrgyzstan (but now live in the SF Bay Area). While eagle hunting is fascinating, it's not unique to Kyrgyzstan and is often practiced in Kazakhstan and Mongolia (possibly Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). There was a fascinating documentary about a Mongol girl who went into this sport that is traditionally considered a man's sport (The Eagle Huntress, 2016)
by achierius | 2025-05-11 02:14:56+00:00
They were not. In brief, we know this because of both individual accounts -- people were quite verbal about preferring the life of an independent peasant to that of the 'servant-like' factory worker -- and aggregate demographic trends, which show that peasants primarily moved into the cities during hard times, when famine and economic woes made their previous lifestyle impossible.

Cities at the time were charnel houses -- even worse, I think, than the popular imagining of them today. The rate of death in London, as well as in other cities during the revolution, was so high that it needed a constant inward flow of immigrants to even maintain its population. Without the safer, more livable countryside to provide a continuous supply of fresh meat for the mills, those cities would have depopulated through a combination of plague, malnutrition, violence, and workplace injury.
by spiderfarmer | 2025-05-11 02:15:18+00:00
It’s actually not that surprising that some people are incredibly good at reading others. Your body is constantly broadcasting information through tiny facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, and even micro-movements. Every second, you’re sending out lots of signals, and some people are just especially tuned in to pick them up.

The interpretation isn’t always right, but if you’re good at engaging with people (mostly by listening) you’ll improve that skill pretty quickly.
by mrcsharp | 2025-05-11 02:15:35+00:00
> "I personally have the belief that everyone should probably have a therapist,” he said last week. “It’s like someone they can just talk to throughout the day, or not necessarily throughout the day, but about whatever issues they’re worried about and for people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI.”

He seems so desperate to sell AI that he forgot such thing already exists. It's called family or a close friend.

I know there are people who truly have no one and they could benefit from a therapist. Having them rely on AI could prove risky specially if the person is suffering from depression. What if AI pushes them towards committing suicide? And I'll probably be told that OpenAI or Meta or MS can put guardrails against this. What happens when that fails (and we've seen it fail)? Who'll be held accountable? Does an LLM take the hippocratic oath? Are we actually abandoning all standards in favour of Mark Zuckerberg making more billions of dollars?
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-11 02:16:33+00:00
Click stream is useful, without a doubt. It isn't essential. We had already started the process at Blekko of moving to alternate ways for ranking the index.

That said, if you run the frontend as proposed, you get to collect the clicks. That gives you the click stream you want. If the index returns you a serp with unwrapped links (which it should if it was unbundled from a given search front end) then you could develop analytics around what your particular customers "like" in their links and have a different ranking than perhaps some other front end. One thing that Blekko made really clear for me that the Google idea that there was always the "best" result for that query (aka the I'm Feeling Lucky link) there was often different shades of intent behind the query that aren't part of the query itself. Google felt they could get it in the first 10 links (back before the first 10 links were sponsored content :-)) and often on the page you could see the two or three inferred "intents" (shopping, information, entertainment were common).
by yawaramin | 2025-05-11 02:18:54+00:00
> And a change to something like an Arena like memory allocation strategy or something else reduces issues like that by a hell of a lot

So for example if I have a server, instead of allocating a Request object for each incoming request I should pre-allocate an arena of N request objects and just keep reusing them? Doesn't this blow up memory usage if I have a static pool of objects that may not be actually needed depending on traffic?
by sheepscreek | 2025-05-11 02:19:00+00:00
> If I don't take this job with Trump, he'll give it to a corrupt crony or some random nutcase. But if I do take it, I can work for positive change from the inside. Hmm. I really don't have a choice, do I?

True though, isn’t it? Election has already been won. If you get ostracized from the party, won’t do any good to anyone.

Hmm. Extending that logic, maybe there isn’t a clear right or wrong. Just decisions and consequences. Do what you can and hope for the best. Not a fun way to work (or live).
by Trasmatta | 2025-05-11 02:19:51+00:00
The history of the site is wild, too. From the origin in the wake of Jeff Gerstmann being fired from GameSpot, the subsequent exodus from that site, to the death of Ryan Davis, to being bought by CBS Interactive and brought right back under the fold next to GameSpot, to being acquired by multiple other companies, to Jeff Gerstmann getting fired AGAIN, and now this. And all the fun times and weirdness and insanity along the way.

And a funny bit of trivia: likely the most widespread impact the site has had outside of gaming is that it was the origin of the "blinking white guy" meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb6BsegPewk
by anon84873628 | 2025-05-11 02:20:00+00:00
The author uses several metaphorical dichotomies, and I think this one is the most tenuous and unintuitive. I understand the two groups of people, but tying it to where they "generally exist" doesn't make sense to me. The mind/body dichotomy can imply so many different things that this would need a lot more elaboration to clarify. Or maybe I'm not enough of a natural people watcher.
by pabs3 | 2025-05-11 02:21:13+00:00
GTK were talking about dropping X11 support at some point, so X11 folks using GTK apps would probably need to some sort of Wayland to X11 proxy, or to migrate from Xorg to some sort of multi-protocol display server that supports both X11 and Wayland, like Mir from Canonical/Ubuntu, or Arcan.

https://news.itsfoss.com/gtk-drops-x11/ https://arcan-fe.com/
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-11 02:21:39+00:00
There's a papal document from about 2 years ago saying exactly the opposite, effectively that Thomism has been useful within Christendom to explain Catholic doctrines for hundreds of years, but now that Christendom is dead, new ways of explaining the same timeless, aphilosophical theologies must be invented, and Thomism essentially left in the past. I was particularly happy when it came out, especially with how it came from Rome, because I came to the same conclusion about 6 months prior.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-05-11 02:21:47+00:00
But the pumps and turbines are based on how much power it can process, not how much it can store. Most storage systems have a big downside in that the J that you use once a year costs just as much to store as the one you use every day. This perhaps permits putting a lot of air down there as reserve for when the sun doesn't shine for days on end. Lithium is non-viable for dealing with long periods of darkness (big storm on top of your collectors.) To ensure the lights stay on in the worst case you need weeks worth of storage.
by kyriakos | 2025-05-11 02:22:08+00:00
This kills teams for Linux users since there is no desktop client so capturing can't be prevented. Linux users will be audio only in those calls.

The worst thing about this feature is that if someone takes a screenshot it will be saved on an IT controlled computer but if users are forced to snap screen caps with their phones the sensitive information ends up on personal devices and probably cloud synced to Google drive etc
by crote | 2025-05-11 02:23:26+00:00
I just tend to completely forget the select-clipboard even exists - right until a HN submission reminds me, or I drop some garbage in the middle of the text I'm writing.

Text-wise the only thing I can think of where clipboards don't Just Work is indeed terminals, but I hardly consider that an issue in practice. Either it's a trivial session and I'll happily right-click to paste, or I'm in tmux and using lead key prefixes for shortcuts already.

Cross-app rich media copy/paste does have a habit of being a bit buggy from time to time, though...
by johnnyjeans | 2025-05-11 02:24:22+00:00
A picture of every page of a book combined in a collection is a copy of that book, and for all intents and purposes is the same book. This is because the overwhelming majority of books, the text is what matters. Gravity's Rainbow is still Gravity's Rainbow whether it's in a PDF or the very first printed copy. To extend that to games, it doesn't matter if you're playing the MS-DOS version of X-COM or OpenXcom.

And for that matter, if you're concerned about minute granular details of visual media being an integral component of the meaning and essence of that media, you should be far more concerned with whether or not the cultural context is one that's even accessible to you in a meaningful capacity, because most are not. The whimsy of the Mona Lisa in person isn't actually all that deep.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-11 02:25:33+00:00
Extremely rarely IMHO.

A nice example of this is Masamune Shirow, of Ghost in the Shell fame. If you go through the interviews, most of his inspiration comes from early scientific research and engineering debates that he internalized and integrated into a coherent and compelling vision of the future.

This is no small feat, he is extremely influential in that he exposed whole generations of people to these ideas and cutting edge research fields, and many researchers today probably chose their fields based on the ideas exposed in his art.

But did he get there before the researchers ? I'd say no. And he doesn't need to, what he did is incredible in other ways already.

PS: too many people assume that scientists or engineers don't have imagination nor project their ideas into the future. That would be misguided.
by tdpvb | 2025-05-11 02:27:01+00:00
There's definitely a moral aspect / undertone here (similar to many other topics).

I think also, disputes like this suffer from a double red herring of sorts, where folks argue past each other and confuse "whether a solution has efficacy" vs. "is there an alternate solution closer to the root cause that renders the initial problem moot".

In this case, "whether ADHD meds work" is a separate topic vs. "could most ADHD cases just be childhood anxiety, or mitigated with therapy, etc". Or diabetes: "$20B+ industry for insulin to lower blood sugar," vs. "why not just consume less sugar in the first place". Could it be that we're all be so busy trying to find solutions to a problem that itself is optional?
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-11 02:27:09+00:00
> Cooper decided to promptly throw away the 25,000 lines of messy prototype C code that comprised Tripod and start over from scratch, feeling like it was so irredeemably full of time-pressured hacks, it'd simply be easier to rewrite it with a cleaner design.

Usually this is either a sign of a terrible programmer or a very competent and experienced one, and it's hard to know which without seeing their other work. But I've done this before, and to good effect. Writing code is not hard. Figuring things out is hard. But once the things are figured out and well understood, rewriting them in a cleaner design is especially easy. Granted, it still takes time, that sometimes that time can be on a scale of months. But the more experienced you are, the more you can estimate that time more accurately.
by jdietrich | 2025-05-11 02:28:44+00:00
Poorly. PLA has a notoriously low heat deflection temperature, losing nearly all yield strength above about 60ºC. Any 3D printing enthusiast will know that PLA turns into a wet noodle in a hot car. Unless they've made a significant breakthrough in polymer chemistry, this substrate just won't work for the vast majority of applications.