MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bbarn | 2025-05-29 19:55:04+00:00
The thing is, it is replacing _coders_ in a way. There are millions of people who do (or did) the work that LLMs excel at. Coders who are given a ticket that says "Write this API taking this input and giving this output" who are so far down the chain they don't even get involved in things like requirements analysis, or even interact with customers.

Software engineering, is a different thing, and I agree you're right (for now at least) about that, but don't underestimate the sheer amount of brainless coders out there.
by Swizec | 2025-05-29 19:55:34+00:00
> eat what your great grandma did “mostly greens, not too much”

My great grandma is from eastern-ish europe and grew up on a farm. Her diet mainly consisted of potatoes, bread, corn, milk, sausage, lard, butter, fermented cabbage or turnip, various preserved fruits (jams and compotes), and copious amounts of extra salty preserved meats. Fresh food was a luxury reserved for the summer (fruits, veggies) or slaughter weeks (fresh meat). No refrigeration, remember?

If I ate like her I'd die of a heart attack before I turned 40. And I'd be pretty obese, too. Many of those farmers got pretty chunky in their 30's despite working on the farm all day.

Oh and I almost forgot: liters of wine per day per person. Liters!
by hatefulmoron | 2025-05-29 19:55:51+00:00
> When we moved from more physical jobs to desk jobs many of us became sedentary and overweight. Now we are in an "obesity crisis". There's multiple factors to that, it's not just being in desk jobs, but being sedentary is a big factor.

Sure, although I think our lives are generally better than they were a few hundred years ago. Besides, if you care about your health you can always take steps yourself.

> The only one who benefits are the owners

Well yeah, the entity that benefits is the farm, and whoever owns whatever portions of the farm. The point of the farm isn't to give its workers jobs. It's to produce something to sell.

As long as we're in a market where we're selling our labor, we're only given money for being productive. If technology makes us redundant, then we find new jobs. Same as it ever was.

Think about it: why should hundreds of manual farmhands stay employed while they can be replaced by a single machine? That's not an efficient economy or society. Let those people re-skill and be useful in other roles.
by vidarh | 2025-05-29 19:55:52+00:00
It's trivial to demonstrate that it takes only a tiny LLM + a loop to a have a Turing complete system. The extension of that is that it is utterly crazy to think that the fact it is "a model designed to predict sequences of tokens" puts much of a limitation on what an LLM can achieve - any Turing complete system can by definition simulate any other. To the extent LLMs are limited, they are limited by training and compute.

But these endless claims that the fact they're "just" predicting tokens means something about their computational power are based on flawed assumptions.
by notahacker | 2025-05-29 19:55:54+00:00
I'm less familiar with the French Revolution. But the English Civil War might actually be worse: there are two diametrically opposed dumbed down narratives ("Parliament, represented by rugged common folk, fought an arrogant king and nobility for the right to democracy and religious liberty" vs "Puritan extremists fought to overthrow a king, installed a dictator infamous for banning public enjoyment and massacring the Irish, and the whole thing was such a failure that the monarchy was restored with widespread public support.") which are equally [in]accurate and both miss key points like Cromwell not being that important until relatively late on and Parliament really not representing many people and there actually being two English Civil Wars either side of peaceful factional struggles over what the future agreement with the king should look like, plus a prologue involving one side invading Scotland and an epilogue involving the other side invading Scotland

Then you've got questions like "was Cromwell unusually enlightened on issues of religious freedom or a religious extremist with a vicious hatred of anything that vaguely resembled Catholicism?" to which the correct answer is "both actually, and simultaneously". And the likelihood the whole thing could have been avoided if a king who wasn't exactly unusual in his behaviour for contemporary monarchs was actually good at politics or military planning, and that having taking the unprecedented step of executing a monarch for refusing to acknowledge them, Parliament then let a gentleman of modest background and means rule whilst refusing to acknowledge them them because he actually was good at politics and military planning.

Then there was the Glorious Revolution which wasn't actually a revolution a couple of decades and two kings later which was way more influential on democracy and religion in modern Britain and gets studied way less...
by const_cast | 2025-05-29 19:56:07+00:00
The difference between you and those other people is those other people don't care if AI fails. They have the opinion that if you do something illegal or morally wrong, you should fail. That's not a side-effect to them, that's the whole point.

So when you, and other's, stroll up and say "but but if we do this then AI companies won't be able to make money!!1! And also China!" that doesn't mean anything. Because then the response is, "well yeah, illegal actions shouldn't make you money."
by akomtu | 2025-05-29 19:56:36+00:00
The rich is firmly attached to wordly things, they would rather sink with their gold than let it go. The monk that you've described is attached to his self by training it with sophisticated hardships. He hoards inner peace just like the rich hoards gold. Both are practicing the culture of personality. They need to leave that baggage behind, their self-centered life and their polished personas, and reorient their life around helping others. Once they do this, an enormous internal conflict will emerge - the struggle between their selfish and selfless sides, and at the end of this path they'll enter the kingdom of God.

Those who want to climb to the mountain top need to leave everything behind. The higher they climb, the longer will be the fall if they look back for a moment and slip on this narrow path, longing for what they left behind.
by em-bee | 2025-05-29 19:56:39+00:00
i don't know how free will is supposed to affect the laws of physics or chemistry. free will is about the choices we can make. that doesn't imply there are no limits to our capacity. nor does having a choice to believe in god or not imply that humans can't experience god without disbelief. on the contrary. that's the whole point. i can believe that the universe is created by god, and that everything i experience is in some way experiencing god, just as i can believe that god doesn't exist, and then, if god does exist, i would experience god without believing that my experience is caused by god. experiencing something doesn't require that i recognize the cause of the experience.

as for calvinism, how is that relevant? the existence if some faction believing something that contradicts the belief of others has no bearing on that belief other than that it may raise some questions that are worth investigating. my brief look at that leads me to the conclusion that their view of free will makes no sense to me.
by plorg | 2025-05-29 19:58:06+00:00
No? The meme relies on Jesus having lived and spoken in a way that a large group claiming to be his followers today would deride as "Socialism", whether or not it resembles your own, Karl Marx's, or Maduro's "Socialism", and in fact regardless of whether the meme-sayer thinks Socialism by some definition is good. It's a statement about how the loudest followers of Jesus or Christianity preach and act at odds with the meme-er's understanding of the gospel (specifically the 4 books of the Bible that tell the story of Jesus), and for it to work you don't even have to assume that Jesus was good.
by bwb | 2025-05-29 19:58:07+00:00
We don’t focus on newly published books, why did you think that?

We focus on the most loved books published in any year with everything we built. We have filters for the readers who do want to see specific years in some sections, but that is it. Books are fairly timeless.

I think authors really appreciate it when you pay them for said book. The value is immense compared to the small cost, and otherwise there will not be more authors. Libraries are great too! I know if you are outside an English speaking country, books in English can be expensive, especially technical books, so i do understand. But hopefully one day you can pay that back.
by bandoti | 2025-05-29 19:58:07+00:00
Lua is much lighter but the key is that it’s probably one of the easiest things to integrate (just copy the sources/includes and add them to build it’ll work)—like a “header only” kind of vibe.

But, you can strip down a minimal Python build and statically compile it without too much difficulty.

I tend to prefer Tcl because it has what I feel the perfect amount of functionality by default with a relatively small size. Tcl also has the better C APIs of the bunch if you’re working more in C.

Lua is very “pushy” and “poppy” due to its stack-based approach, but that can be fun too if you enjoy programming RPN calculators haha :)
by JSchneider321 | 2025-05-29 19:58:22+00:00
I follow Julian on substack and found out about this discussion from there. I read this post months ago and have been itching to discuss it with people since, so I jumped at this chance. I didn't have an account yet, so I had to make one to comment. I do think it's strange that adamant defense draws suspicion, but adamant criticism does not.

I have no idea if this theory (or fun idea or whatever people want to derisively call it) is correct, but it's wild how unwilling people are to even consider alternative ideas when there are unquestionably issues with the current prevailing theory.

I've read a great deal of Julian's substack, watched a few interviews, and I find him to be deeply thoughtful and quite entertaining, and I'll admit I do find it frustrating to see people dismiss or berate him as just a crazy idea guy without having a good sense of how much has actually gone into this. It's seriously the same thing that happened to Smolin when Susskind brought his weak arguments against CNS and the theory just gathered dust.

Anyway, feel free to write me off as a bot, alt, or some rabid idiot fanboy. As a cosmology enthusiast (but certainly not a scientist by any definition) I was hoping for a discussion of the ideas in the post, but this has been enlightening in other ways, which is not without value.
by javman | 2025-05-29 19:58:43+00:00
I wonder if someone made a mistake with unit conversions... The next paragraph says:

> The results: over half of the eggs broke when dropped vertically from an 8-millimeter (31-inch) height

31 inches is 0.8m, not 8mm. Maybe they meant to say 0.8, 0.9, 1.0 meters? Strange.
by tshaddox | 2025-05-29 19:59:06+00:00
It's probably also worth noting that the majority of these hotels and Airbnbs are also designed to accommodate two or more travelers. Thus the complaint isn't really "single-person rooms are priced that same as two-person rooms," but rather "single-person rooms don't exist, which means I have to pay for more space than I need." In this sense it's not really any different than any other product that you wish was sold in smaller quantities.
by matwood | 2025-05-29 19:59:08+00:00
> I’m not Christian in large part because I did. And it’s almost all batshit.

Haha, same. I was forced to go to church and Sunday school as a kid, which I hated. But since I was there, I read large parts of the bible. This led me to asking a lot of questions, some of which caused me to be remove from Sunday school a few times. Eventually I was old enough to explain why I was an atheist and never went back.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-29 19:59:24+00:00
> I think creating an environment that allows many more medium-sized companies and allowing them to compete heavily will ease away any risk of job loss. Same applies to a bunch of fields other than tech. The US companies are far too consolidated

How do we achieve this environment?

It's not through AI, that is still the same problem. The AI companies will be the 6-10 mega companies and anyone relying on AI will still be small fry

Every time in my lifetime that we have had a huge jump in technological progress, all we've seen is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the gap gets bigger

You even call this out explicitly: "most of the history of the US, maybe not the last 30-40 years"

Do we have any realistic reason to assume the trend of the last 30-40 years will change course at this point?
by tuckerman | 2025-05-29 20:00:05+00:00
Is it possible to distinguish between society penalizing being single and society incentivizing having children? Since society's existence requires that people have children (even in the fairly short term, someone younger has to be around to take care of the older folks) it seems reasonable to incentivize it.

I guess it's all relative, lower taxes for A compared to B looks like higher taxes for B compared to A, but I suspect most of this comes from a) incentivizing people to form as many families w/ children as possible and then b) since there are so many families w/ children, people build businesses that assume most people will be in families.
by KaiserPro | 2025-05-29 20:00:32+00:00
Flash was great, but abused to do bad things (like all good tech)

The killer was the iphone not being powerful enough/having enough ram to run the plugin, and adobe refusing to make concessions.

What it got right:

Design once, looks the same anywhere

reasonably powerful scripting language

Vectors as a first party drawing primitive

abstracted OS hooks

This was it's downfall, because it was for the time heavy to run. Combined with advertisers wanting rich flashy adverts, meant it became the bane of people's life.

There is still no replacement that is easy to author, and works pretty much anywhere. Sure there are loads of JS frameworks that sorta do one part of what flash did, but none of them have the rich editor that allowed you to have such creative freedom.

The closest thing to it now is unity.
by BJones12 | 2025-05-29 20:02:34+00:00
> And its asinine to compare counts of attendees to a church as the number of employees at a company.

You did not comprehend my comments, because I did not.

> And while it might be sound legal advice to shut your mouth, it's not necessarily the moral thing to do.

I hope that you argue that the 5th amendment is immoral when anyone uses it, and not just pastors.

> If the person leading the congregation is making significantly more than the poorest of the congregation there's a real problem.

Ideally a congregation will include all of society, which will include people making zero, so your argument becomes that a pastor making significantly more than zero is immoral.

I would challenge you to find a moral basis for that in the Bible.
by legitster | 2025-05-29 20:02:37+00:00
> In this case, the rationale for charging solo travelers more is fairly clear: It's just another way for airlines to continue “segmenting” their customers, charging business travelers paying with a corporate card more while offering a better deal to families on the exact same flight.

I think the explanation is wrong and the author is jumping to conclusions. Airlines have long offered "bulk" discounts. Their goal is to fill as many seats on a flight as possible. What we are seeing here is their group pricing creep into their direct sales.
by BoorishBears | 2025-05-29 20:02:59+00:00
This makes no sense.

A solo traveler can decide to take a trip because they saw a good fare very trivially: you're not going on a trip with 2 days notice just because a fare "tipped the scale" when you need 10x the planning and logistics, and the airlines know that.

They're not doing it to entice families to travel, they just know solo travel is associated with higher incomes and want to extract more money.
by garciasn | 2025-05-29 20:03:35+00:00
This is the response to most new technologies; folks simply don't want to accept the future before the ramifications truly hit. If technology folk cannot see the INCREDIBLE LEAP FORWARD made by LLMs since ChatGPT came on the market, they're not seeing the forest through the trees because their heads are buried in the sand.

LLMs for coding are not even close to imperfect, yet, but the saturation curves are not flattening out; not by a long shot. We are living in a moment and we need to come to terms with it as the work continues to develop; and, we need to adapt and quickly in order to better understand what our place will become as this nascent tech continues its meteoric trajectory toward an entirely new world.
by Tijdreiziger | 2025-05-29 20:03:43+00:00
Your arguments are a bit unsatisfying to me, though.

> what makes sense for example is the positive impact a religion has on the world. which religion is doing the most good?

I try to have a positive impact on the world by being vegan and donating to (secular) humanitarian organizations. I struggle to see how believing in a religion would improve on this (although I’m open to a good rebuttal!).

> which religion has the better answers to explain the world in which we live in today?

I think that the secular scientific tradition does better here than religion (even if it isn’t perfect, of course).

> take the issues and questions that matter to you, and then look at the answers and see if they are satisfactory. keep searching until you find the answers you seek.

I did that, and it doesn’t look good for religion, as explained above. And yet, here we are with one of the parent commenters telling us that we should believe in the Bible, lest we burn in hell.

Hence my comment above: what evidence shows this, and if there is no evidence, why should I believe it (or any other religious scripture) over my current ideals?
by al_borland | 2025-05-29 20:03:50+00:00
There are already websites, like Going, for getting flight deals. As a solo traveler who doesn’t have to coordinate with anyone and can pack light, I can jump on the deals when they come up and save a lot more than what a regular price group rate probably is. Looking at my upcoming trip, I got it for 50% off the current pricing, for solo or a couple.

Coordination with others also makes booking take longer and tends to fix dates and locations, which makes it hard to grab a deal when they come up.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-05-29 20:04:17+00:00
Aren't chips blown to smithereens and then reconstructed with the help of all those random ingredients? I think this is what "ultra-processed" means and what differentiates these foods from getting your bag of potatoes and frying them at home.

I don't know about Pringles / Lays &c, but I've never seen two potatoes of the same size and shape in a bag, so there must be some way they manage to get all their chips to look the same.
by tengwar2 | 2025-05-29 20:04:18+00:00
Revelations is problematic if you attempt to take it literally rather than understanding that it makes heavy use of symbolism and other literary devices. That literalism is largely specific to American society - and I don't just mean American Christians here. It's not particularly easy to understand the way that ancient literature works, but even if you don't want to put in the time, it's important to understand that the writers were often quite sophisticated, and worked in different ways from what you are used to.
by bakkoting | 2025-05-29 20:04:24+00:00
The service worker jank, while conceptually hacky, is actually remarkably un-janky and not really noticeable to users! It's very much fire-and-forget unless you also wanted to have another service worker (in which case it's time for suffering; service workers aren't even a little bit composable).

For anyone wondering: https://github.com/gzuidhof/coi-serviceworker or https://github.com/WebReflection/mini-coi
by ghaff | 2025-05-29 20:04:54+00:00
Well, they mostly don't. They're often using the same bedding. Most toiletries are squirt containers these days. I don't think toilet paper is that expensive. And another towel or two to wash is probably not a big deal. And to the degree the hotel has a restaurant or bar they probably come out ahead. Your hotel may take a different approach but it's near universal (perhaps outside of resorts) that hotels charge the same for 1 or 2 guests.
by SamBam | 2025-05-29 20:05:20+00:00
Yet the image ("Experimental snapshots for vertical (top) and horizontal (bottom) egg drops.") definitely appears to show something closer to 8mm, assuming the black area is the table.

Edit: Reading the paper [1] it's definitely 8mm. The ArsTechnica writer screwed up the conversion to inches. Should be 0.31".

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-025-02087-0
by uludag | 2025-05-29 20:05:23+00:00
Some ideas that come to mind:

- Concentration of power/attention/market share/etc. can lead to abuse - Competing ecosystems push each to get better - Different tools can be good at solving different problems (e.g. different LLMs may be good as solving different tasks) - Allows people to use tools they're more comfortable with (e.g. worked at one company where everyone was forced to use vim, needless to say I didn't want to stay there long)
by erichdongubler | 2025-05-29 20:05:53+00:00
Member of Firefox's WebGPU team here. I'm curious what extensions you're referring to!

We're hoping to ship on Windows stable in the next couple of Firefox releases. Other platforms should follow in the following year. If you want, I'd encourage you to try out WebGPU on Nightly on Linux and see if you run into any issues!
by crote | 2025-05-29 20:05:57+00:00
Sure, but these days so is Python. And you've got a dozen other languages available after a single command. You wouldn't recommend using a kitchen knife instead of a chainsaw to cut down a tree just because it's already there, would you?

Bash has a huge number of footguns, and a rather unusual syntax. It's not a language where you can safely let a junior developer tweak something in a script and expect it to go well. Using a linter like ShellCheck is essentially a hard requirement.

If you're working in a team where 99.9% of the code you're maintaining is C#, having a handful of load-bearing Bash scripts lying around is probably a Really Bad Idea. Just convert it to C# as well and save everyone a lot of trouble.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-05-29 20:06:01+00:00
> Would you prefer that he graze natural plants 20 hrs/day?

No, it would interfere with his Vibecoding

> Are Dutch people statistically taller than Germans?

Yes. 183 vs 179cm

> Do they eat more junk food?

Arguably. Few would argue that the food quality is better in the Netherlands than Germany.

> Does your milk have more hormones?

Well, there are hormones in milk, and the Dutch drink a lot of it. 25% more than Germans.

> Are Dutch taller today than previous generations?

Yes. But a centimeter shorter than those born in the 1980s, when it was still legal to pump cows up with hormones.

>You can't throw out shit like this and then tack on "ymmv" as a disclaimer.

I can’t exactly advocate for his diet — nor disclaim it. It’s confusing for me!

Govt statistics linked here, O3: https://chatgpt.com/share/6838c51d-c4a4-8007-97e7-431006f495...
by jacobolus | 2025-05-29 20:06:31+00:00
I am only barely familiar with the show, but people online mentioned it several times in connection with the game; apparently they played it as a commonly recurring segment with its own theme song. A web search turns up e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxA2J5W1A7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhdl_iKrVEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clmPQPvPkTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5ciP_ZRMng