MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by djaychela | 2025-05-10 16:03:01+00:00
As someone who has a terminal cancer diagnosis (and I'm mid-way through the range of time I was told I had left, months, FTR), I don't agree with a lot of this. And I'm essentially on my deathbed (mentally), even though I'm currently not bed-bound.

Yes, my state now is not a representative state of the one I was in a year ago before my health started failing. But I'm still the same person. I forgot that briefly after my terminal diagnosis, and starting doing things I thought were the right things (making sure things would be OK for my wife, tidying up a litany of messes that would be hard for her to deal with without just giving up and selling things for pennies or giving them away), but after a few weeks and speaking to the right people, I started living more normally again.

Yes, my priorities have changed massively - things that I thought were important 4 months ago are truly meaningless to me now - but many things that are important to me now were so before. And they will be until I cease to exist. I'm making the most of the time I have left because it's important that my experience at this point is as good as it can be, and because I want my wife to have good memories of our last months together.

I've never suffered from 'reason 2'. I've always felt I made the right decision at the time with the information I had and the person that I was at the time. So I don't have many regrets - none of significance to speak of, certainly. I know I am lucky in this respect.

Reason 3 is meaningless, IMO - both generally and certainly to me. I'm 53.

And I don't think many people really do think about this seriously until it's actually on the table for them. I certiainly know I didn't - even last year when I had an operation which hopefully would have removed the cancer and given me years of life, I hadn't really thought about the finality of death and what it means (or doesn't) to me. FTR I'm an Atheist, and I think that 2026 will have as much meaning/experience for me as 1969 (i.e. before I was born).
by Steuard | 2025-05-10 16:03:28+00:00
I don't pretend to know what this simulation is doing, but for the record, electromagnetism works just fine in 2D. You might be thinking "but magnetic fields are intimately tied to cross products, which only work in three dimensions." But you can set up the equations of electromagnetism just fine either using differential forms or bivector magnetism (https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02548), and it works in any dimension you'd like. (The cross product version is really a narrow and sometimes misleading special case.)

Possibly related: there are options to "View B" and "View H" in the scalar dropdown, not in the vector one. That may be closely related to the fact that in two dimensions, the magnetic field has just a single component. Whether you describe is as a 2-form or a bivector, the magnetic field is an antisymmetric rank-2 tensor: an antisymmetric matrix. In 3D, that means 3 independent components, and there's a one-to-one mapping to vectors (more or less). But in 2D, an antisymmetric matrix has just one independent component. (And in 4D, it's got six: this is precisely the relativistic electromagnetic field tensor, that in 3D splits into an electric part and a magnetic part. My paper has more details.)
by samtheDamned | 2025-05-10 16:04:05+00:00
It wouldn't change the fact that I don't use it (I almost never work with images) but it would definitely change the fact that I don't recommend it to anyone outside of the FOSS community.

I am not from a region that uses the name as a slur, but even the reference to an unsavory scene in Pulp Fiction and the overall negative connotation make it awkward at best and with the fact that it is a slur I run the risk of being downright offensive for no good reason. I just recommend Krita and explain that it's not an exact photoshop place in and that there are other options out there as well.
by wslh | 2025-05-10 16:04:10+00:00
Right, if you look back through the history of ideas, every breakthrough builds on prior research and inventions. In the realm of patents and copyrights, this is acknowledged formally: they expire after a certain time and enter the public domain. This also supports the view that the current state of the world, for better or worse, owes much to the past and those who came before (living or not living elements).
by jeffbee | 2025-05-10 16:04:26+00:00
Yes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and it underinvests in research and development, preferring to hoard cash. OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and force them to enter the chatbot market. Nothing that transpires between Microsoft and OpenAI is really at arms' length. Personally, I don't think this is a positive development for the industry or for humanity in generally. We were doing better before we had sycophantic robots confidently misleading us.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-10 16:04:55+00:00
Yes, large monopolistic corporations can spend large amounts of money on, presumably, completely unmonetizable research.

Nevertheless anti-Trust law exists because of the belief that monopolies should not exist and that it is the governments function to dismantle monopolies. The consequence of that is that corporations who can freely spend hundreds of millions on basic research will be dismantled as well, as happened with AT&T, and the funding for the basic research will cease.

>YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?

No. That is the stance of the government. YC is arguing that the remedies the government is seeking are appropriate.
by absolutelastone | 2025-05-10 16:05:40+00:00
Well the obvious answer is training. Medicine requires 4 years undergrad plus 4 years grad plus 3+ years residency. You might argue medicine can be replaced by AI similarly, but the issue is risk. That 11 years is to reach the point you can be trusted to make the really high-risk and high-value decisions, not to do the easy stuff analogous to entry-level software.

Software has been an outlier in terms of its high salaries requiring only minimal training. That implies automating it will disproportionately be both easier and more valuable than many other skilled tasks.
by justin_oaks | 2025-05-10 16:06:02+00:00
You may have to temper your expectations. Free usually means "sells/uses your data to offset costs". If you're OK with that, there's no need to switch off of GMail. If you're not OK with that, you'll have to pay.

Also, hosting email under your own domain gives you the freedom to move from one email provider to another even if they do shut down.

I put my money where my mouth is. I wanted to degoogle and so pay $50/year for Fastmail. One feature I like is automatically snoozing certain emails. Most of my non-personal email is automatically snoozed until 6pm every day. This way I don't get multiple notifications throughout the day for emails that aren't time sensitive.
by didgeoridoo | 2025-05-10 16:07:07+00:00
This imperative/declarative shift happened as part of UIKit -> SwiftUI too. However, it’s still pretty well accepted that if you’re doing anything “complicated” you’re going to end up writing UIKit imperative code.

I wonder if there’s any research (PL or maybe even more philosophical) on whether declarative approaches can logically cover all imperative use cases.

Basically: is there something special about “verbs” (imperative) that let you do things that “nouns” (declarative) cannot, at least within reasonable verbosity constraints?
by keybored | 2025-05-10 16:07:27+00:00
The opposite of nitpickingly missing the point is making grand generalizations and extrapolations.

No the What About Your Deathbed is annoying and has holes in it. You shouldn’t necessarily plan according to what your deathbed-self thinks.

Then you say no, you’re missing the point. It’s about having a finite life. For some reason I am perfectly capable of appreciating wisdom about life being finite when it is delivered in better ways. That is: the ways that I have the capacity to recognize as such.

If this Deathbed narrative is really about having a finite life then it should perhaps be better formulated. Wisdom is also about communication.

(Someone else has already mentioned memento mori... can it get more evocative than an emperor in a parade being reminded by a slave repeatedly that he is mortal like everyone else? The Deathbed formulation is far worse.)

I appreciate wisdom. At worst I can be accused of missing the forest for the trees sometime.
by mjcl | 2025-05-10 16:09:51+00:00
And it was an antitrust action that unlocked a lot of that value. The consent decree required Bell Labs to license its patents (e.g. transistors) for reasonable royalties. The same consent decree also forbid AT&T from entering new industries like computing. So after they built UNIX, they sold the source code 'as-is' to universities for $200 ($20k for businesses).
by hedora | 2025-05-10 16:10:36+00:00
Ignoring the comment you replied to, I am curious about the claim that pipewire is incompatible with the audio card.

I get that pulseaudio cannot default to using an output with speakers. This happened to me too on every single login, so I switched to pipewire, which is capable of saving settings between seessions (pulseaudio claims to support this, but it's been broken for over 10 years based on my internet searches).

I guess I got lucky that pipewire can talk to my card?

I'd expect it to be far enough up the stack where hardware compatibility wouldn't matter.
by kbolino | 2025-05-10 16:11:47+00:00
Indeed, it has no bearing on binary size at all, because none of it will be included. If you are coming from the perspective where the standard library is entirely unusable to begin with, then improving the standard library is irrelevant at best. It also likely means that at least some time and effort will be taken away from improving the things that you can use to be spent on improving a bunch of things that you can't use.

I feel like this is an organizational problem much more than a technical one, though. Rust can be different things to different people, without necessarily forcing one group to compromise overmuch. But some tension is probably inevitable.
by eulgro | 2025-05-10 16:12:52+00:00
For me I think it all revolves around the value we attribute to the past. To me, the past has little to no value. Since I can't change the past, the only thing I can do is learn from it what I haven't already learned, which is usually little. Dwelling on the past is useful as far as it provides me actionable advice for the present and the future. In reality, I often find myself thinking so little about the past that I have essentially forgotten large portions of my life.

Since I don't believe there is anything after death, this makes thinking about the life I lived useless, because in a short time, I will be dead. There's is no actions I can do anymore, so there's no point in trying learning from the past at that point. Perhaps thinking about the good things I have done will be worthwhile and ease my death. But I see no point in seeking regrets.

Of course I could also give advice to others on my deathbed. But it's something I try to avoid doing. On one hand, because I mostly reject the advice others give me, and thus I expect others to do the same, so I won't waste my time trying to give them advice. On the other hand, I generally find this advice either doesn't match my experience and world view, or it tends to be absolutist about the "one good way of living life", which I don't believe in. People all have different aims in life, and who I am to say which one is correct. Live your life as you see fit, I'm not advising you about what to do and what not to do, because I don't know you better than you do.

Something that annoys me a lot is when people say things like "do it now, or you'll regret it later". Even worse: "do it now, anything could happen in the future, you could get sick or even die". So what if that happens? If I die, there's absolutely no judgement I will be able to make of it, since I will be dead. If I get sick and become unable to do it... so what? I will be unable to do it, but since the past has no value to me, it doesn't make it different from anything else I was already unable to do.
by luckydata | 2025-05-10 16:14:32+00:00
Do you not understand that a search engine is not a business by itself? I'm struggling to understand why so many supposedly smart people don't seem to grasp the obvious fact that Google can only exist in the current form or not at all and that any viable business of the same form has to look the same. Chrome is not a self standing viable business. YouTube is definitely not one either. Ads only works because the search engine exists. The search engine without ads would be a money pit. It's a synergistic business.
by anonymars | 2025-05-10 16:15:43+00:00
I'm free to not fend for myself with everything in life. Healthcare (ex US), defense, food safety, inaccurate gas pumps/food scales, etc.

It only works if everyone pays into the system. Something something tragedy of the commons/social contract. The needle of what should/shouldn't be covered moves around.

Related thought experiment, how much would you bid (as in an auction) before birth, if you had a choice of which country you'd be born into, and which countries would be at the top of your list? What do they look like politically?
by etaioinshrdlu | 2025-05-10 16:16:21+00:00
The creators are definitely trying to make them tell the truth. They optimize for benchmarks where truthful answering gets a higher score. All the big LLM vendors now have APIs that can ground their answers in search results.

Just because it's a hard unsolved problem, I don't understand the impulse to assert the AI industry is on a war with truth!
by beagle3 | 2025-05-10 16:16:30+00:00
Nim has solved this in a very practical way, which works great - case insensitive except 1st letter, and underscore insensitive. So hello_world and helloWorld and hello___wOrlD are the same identifier, though HelloWorld and hello_world are not.

Many people complain that this is horrible, but not people who have actually tried it. It works very well, lets you bridge over differences in C++ library conventions, Unix C conventions and Microsoft conventions in a project that interfaces all of them, without getting users upset. (There’s more to it - consistency for some identifier can be enforced, there’s a smart source reformatted, and more)
by hedora | 2025-05-10 16:16:55+00:00
I noticed the one bright spot in the article is debian, though even that's broken for me thanks to systemd.

I switched to devaun, and things are much better, for now. It's unclear how long new software will keep reliably working under X11 without systemd.

Anyway, as a sighted user, my experience almost exactly matches the article, toned down about 10x.

(Concretely, on the systemd side: I hit the same issues with pulseaudio, and the new session stack regularly perma-blanked by screen until I rebooted. I can't reliably share machines with family members because elogin is so bad.)
by jmogly | 2025-05-10 16:17:04+00:00
Religion is not my strong suit, but I don’t think religion as we think of it today was really around like that, it might have been but that is not my current understanding. IE There probably weren’t prehistoric monks and rabbis having epistemological debates about the meaning of life or what a good life is. Religion was more likely a way of understanding the natural world, like death, floods, luck, etc. Not an expert again.

On your second point, “there is no meaning”, I’m not sure I exactly prescribe that. I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met. And when I say that “there isn’t actually anything that actually needs to be done”, I mean that if you have a surplus of all your needs, say just after harvest, you don’t actually need to do anything. All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day. Prior to agriculture, surpluses were not regular.

Addressing the spirit of your second point though, even today there is much to be done. As a group we have and produce more surplus than we could ever use, but the distribution is such that many people live in abject poverty, or precariously close to it.
by clickety_clack | 2025-05-10 16:17:40+00:00
You put my reaction to this in much more educated terms. I’ve always felt that thinking of DNA as bits was a bit simplistic. Just because we store information as bits it doesn’t mean that nature does.

Not that it means they can’t be right, but the author also doesn’t seem to have any particular expertise in genetics. Their ideas need to survive a lot more criticism by people who know what they’re talking about before you could start to see them as convincing.
by hliyan | 2025-05-10 16:18:11+00:00
There's another, similar genre of non-fiction books: Sapiens, Outliers etc. I notice these tend to be unusually popular with people who have too short an attention span to absorb knowledge rigorously (e.g. high net-worth individuals), and would rather prefer it be weaved into a narrative, even at the cost of some accuracy. Bonus if the narrative confirms their preconceived notions. For a while, I myself was guilty of consuming both these and business books. I still occasionally read them, but now I recognise them as entertainment and am under no illusion about rigour or practical application.
by ciprian_craciun | 2025-05-10 16:18:26+00:00
I don't see how respecting one's rights (in this case one's copyright over his own works) leads to having revoked the right to buy books.

I agree that it is sad to see many online book stores moving from "selling" to "renting". But that is a completely different problem.

As a personal note, I know the pain of not being able to access scientific papers because they were behind paywalls, and I had to search for drafts to be able to read them. But that model was well in place circa 2010, thus it's and old tactic applied to a new field: books (and others).
by qwertox | 2025-05-10 16:18:37+00:00
Radxa has been notoriously bad at supporting their hardware from the software side.

Their hardware is great, but they launch a product and then won't offer a proper distribution for it, hoping that some developers will take care of this for them, for free.

This is why I love Raspberry Pi so much: they care about the software just as much as about the hardware, if not even more. And that is great. Because the hardware, once you have it, that's it, it won't change.

I don't know about Raspberry OS, but when I installed Raspbian 12 Bookworm on my first-gen Raspi with 500MB RAM, it worked. It's now working as a VPN server.

See this, for example: The Zero 3e is a really great board, but this is the software they offer for it https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-zero3/releases

3 weeks ago: internal test build

Apr 8: internal test build

Jan 10, 2024: beta 6: Currently there is an issue preventing the Debian CLI image from booting, and we suggest users to use the Desktop variant instead for now. Ubuntu CLI: This flavor is provided as-is except for critical issues. Users should look at Debian CLI as an alternative.

There are now community maintained Armbian variants, but it took a long time for them to appear. There was also a distibution by some other volunteer, but Radxa did nothing.
by nine_k | 2025-05-10 16:18:58+00:00
I think it's deeper. The mind is an optimization tool. It always keeps looking for something better, hence it is always not completely happy with the current state of things. The first noble truth (aka the principle of dukkha) is at least 25 centuries old; it says that sentient existence is inseparable from discontent, and thus from suffering.

This whole search for a better optimum, like other evolutionary mechanisms, results in survival and proliferation, but not necessarily in happiness. Proliferation seems to correlate positively with happiness, but up to a limit, and the limit is all too visible.

On the other hand, reaching the true global optimum does not seem too blissful either: any change would be a change to the worse, so all development, all motion except basically spinning at place would need to stop. This is not very different from death. OTOH the human mind, as it is, would still try to keep on searching, still feel somehow discontent.

(I agree that the reasonable path is to try to limit the suffering of living beings, including but not limited to ourselves. It's the least bad option.)
by drob518 | 2025-05-10 16:19:27+00:00
IMO, it’s company culture and focus. At Apple, they are focused foremost on designing the customer experience. If you’ve ever unboxed one of their products, you can tell from the first moment that they care about even this part of the product life. It’s only 5 minutes and yet someone has clearly spent time on it. That carries through to the integration of hardware and software in the products. That doesn’t mean Apple is the best at either hardware or software. IMO, there are companies that do just as well or better at either of those things. But Apple does whole product design better than anyone. That is something that is very difficult to add to an organization that doesn’t understand it. IMO, it really started for Apple with Steve Jobs and being the founder, he was able to drive that into the culture. But it wasn’t there even for them at the start. IMO, it really got going when Steve returned the second time and drove products like iMac and iPod.
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by rendall | 2025-05-10 16:20:41+00:00
> If every aspect of human planning, skill, and knowledge are reproducable...

Neither the article nor the paper discuss consciousness, only biological computing capacity considering quantum states.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt4623

Today's classical computing accomplishments are impressive, but nowhere near what a human can do. Perhaps someday soon a single AI could (in the words of Heinlein) "change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly" but that day is not yet here. If we struggle to build such a device, we might consider that our computers are too limited.
by cbarrick | 2025-05-10 16:20:49+00:00
MKL is usually what you want if you are doing matrix math on an Intel CPU.

A better design is to make it easy you to choose or hotswap your BLAS/LAPACK implementation. E.g. OpenBLAS for AMD.

Edit: To be clear, Netlib (the reference implementation) is almost always NOT what you want. It's designed to be readable, not optimized for modern CPUs.
by secure | 2025-05-10 16:21:12+00:00
Yes, I didn’t want to analyze and compare different solutions, I just wanted to share the joy of finding a solution that works well for me.

Using hot keys is nice, but hot keys (intentionally) don’t work while my screen is locked. I contemplated mapping an xrandr call onto a smart button (Shelly Button 1, essentially triggering an HTTP request), but in the end grobi has the same effect and is even more convenient than having to press buttons.