MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hodgesrm | 2025-05-25 17:37:29+00:00
> Similar to Christ saying that "man cannot live on bread alone", man cannot live on materialism alone - spiritual nourishment is a very real and necessary thing.

I'm a Christian, and your interpretation is exactly how I have always understood that passage (Matthew 4:4). It is among a small number of biblical passages that have been the foundation of my adult life.

Even if you do not believe in a specific deity, the bible and for that matter most other core religious scriptures are still a treasury of knowledge about the human condition. It's sad that so many people think they have outgrown the wisdom you find there. There are a lot of false gods.
by overgard | 2025-05-25 17:38:04+00:00
I am definitely not giving these things access to "tools" that can reach outside a sandbox.

Incidentally why is email inbox management always touted as some use case for these things? I'm not trusting any LLM to speak on my behalf and I imagine the people touting this idea don't either, or they won't the first time it hallucinates something important on their behalf.
by testing22321 | 2025-05-25 17:38:16+00:00
> Assuming your vehicle got around 25mpg you spent about $8000 CAD on gasoline over those 50,000km of driving. Where did that money come from?

Vehicle got 32-35 mpg. 1.8ltr 4 cyl with selectable 4x4. I had a job.

> How much did your legally required car insurance cost? The median rate seems to be around $200 a month from a quick google.

$550 a year.

> Just adding in the most modest vehicle completely destroys the author’s budget.

Double the authors budget and you live a wicked life and don’t have to work much. I’m talking about living in the most jaw dropping landscapes many people see in their entire lives.

> I believe your reality, but I don’t believe in the amount you are romanticizing it. If it is so amazing why are you not doing it anymore?

I didn’t say it was perfect, but a heck of an adventure and totally doable. I left to drive around Africa for three years. Bigger adventure.

> Because you just told me there’s no need for internet out there because it’s so jaw-dropping amazing, you wouldn’t spend any time on the internet arguing with a loser like me?

I’m not arguing, and you’re not a loser. I’m adding information from my own first hand experience, rather than assumptions and guesswork.
by zdw | 2025-05-25 17:38:22+00:00
Having watched both seasons, if you like board/card/social games I'd recommend it. Although the last game of the second season has significant "Why would you ever do that?" yelling at the screen due to one player.

Sometimes the explanations of instructions go very quickly and aren't totally explained from original Korean language, so I would recommend re-watching them if you want to follow along in detail.
by WinstonSmith84 | 2025-05-25 17:38:36+00:00
In many EU countries, retirement age increase while the value of the pension itself decreases. It's about demographic of course but it's also the signs of a failed system. People understands this and are contribution more and more towards private funds which are meant to offset the loss - slowly shifting to a US system.

The current system is just not broken but unfair. In many EU countries, people are not contributing for themselves, but for the previous generation being currently retired. In turn, it's supposed that babies born today will work for the pension of the currently active generation. This pension system is nothing else but a pyramide scheme and that scheme is now breaking due to a demographic issue - just like a traditional pyramide scheme would break because there are not enough participants to that scheme ...
by HarryHirsch | 2025-05-25 17:39:07+00:00
They haven't done it yet, which would indicate that it's complicated, where is the nearest scrap dealer that would take the stuff? The Eastern Peloponnese is thinly populated, the nearest town is Nauplion with ~ 20 k inhabitants, else there is always Athens. Now you have an interagency coordination problem, Hydra town council would have to get together with its counterpart in Athens, acquire the title, collect them, charter a ferry and lowbed truck at the destination and assemble a crew get rid of the junk. Until sufficient tourists complain it's not going to happen.
by chadaustin | 2025-05-25 17:39:14+00:00
WER existed on XP but the APIs needed to customize dumps didn’t. And IMVU’s crash reporting code dated back to 2005.

> So I think that the claim that Direct3D captures exceptions is suspect.

I would think that too - but I based my claims on a stack trace captured at the time in the overridden SetUnhandledExceptionFilter. Now, computers were the Wild West then, and who knows where those DLLs actually originated, and any further details are lost to time.

> Maybe you were expecting C++ exceptions to be caught, but these APIs are only for SEH.

The distinction was clear then. And very well-documented by Microsoft. We caught all C++ exceptions before SEH.

> Yes, I know it's a 16year old post. But I must stop myths.

Your goal is laudable but I don’t love comments that discount a concrete history that I lived (and documented!). I call this out mostly because it’s happened before in discussions of old Windows APIs. I wish it were easier to get a snapshot of MSDN circa Windows XP, etc.
by notahacker | 2025-05-25 17:39:58+00:00
yeah. It was the whole advantage of centralising social media on one platform: all your friends were there and they used it to share things. At the very start, it spread through universities because it was how you got invited to parties (events was the killer app they never really developed)

They burned it all for short term clicks and now if I look at my feed I get content mills and only a handful of people who still do updates, and the notifications it sends to me "someone whose profile you haven't looked at in years has some comments on it" feel more and more desperate.
by layer8 | 2025-05-25 17:40:01+00:00
This is incorrect. The initial cursor position and automatic email signature being at the top rather than at the bottom already makes a huge difference. Add to that the absence of tools to easily insert inline replies and cut down or reformat quoted parts, plus the absence of navigational behavior when reading mail that would jump to the first non-quoted part first, which earlier email clients used to have.
Ask HN: Anyone else lose interest right after proving an idea works?
by grandimam | 2025-05-25 17:40:02+00:00
I've noticed a recurring pattern in myself: I get excited about an idea (often AI-related lately), prototype it quickly, and once I’ve built the core functionality or proven it works, I completely lose interest. The initial curiosity and momentum vanish, and I find myself asking, “Do I even want to pursue this long term?”

It feels like once the challenge or novelty is gone, so is the motivation — even if the idea has potential. I end up with a graveyard of working demos and half-baked side projects.

Is this just dopamine-driven behavior? A multipotentialite thing? Or is this more common among builders, especially with tools like AI making the prototype stage so fast?

Curious if others experience this and how you manage it — do you force yourself to push through, hand it off, or just accept that exploration is the goal?
by johnfn | 2025-05-25 17:40:30+00:00
> It’s as if a biologist were to say: “I have a great new theory of organisms. It lists many that exist and many that can’t possibly exist, and I can tell you nothing about the distinction.”

> Again, we’d laugh. Or should.

Should we? This reminds me acutely of imaginary numbers. They are a great theory of numbers that can list many numbers that do 'exist' and many that can't possibly 'exist'. And we did laugh when imaginary numbers were first introduced - the name itself was intended as a derogatory term for the concept. But who's laughing now?
by spacebanana7 | 2025-05-25 17:40:32+00:00
This is the real demographic death trap, and why Taiwan and South Korea are probably past the point of no return.

If one generation has a fertility rate of 1 child per woman, the next must have 4 children per woman to undo the demographic change.

The people in the “corrective” generation must support their own two elderly parents plus four of their own children. It becomes practically impossible.
by Hard_Space | 2025-05-25 17:40:43+00:00
I think that this is a disingenuous use of the (legacy) term 'Lifetime license'. No-one who hasn't recently been screwed over by a software house like 4K Video Downloader [1] would think that 'lifetime' only covered the current lead version number.

A new term such as 'All version [n] updates included' (or something less clunky) needs to be found. At least one could Google it and understand the proposition, if its meaning was not clear - but 'lifetime license' is massively deceptive.

[1] https://reddit.com/r/4kdownloadapps/comments/1hbmdpn/really_...
by dnemmers | 2025-05-25 17:40:44+00:00
I don’t think it’s hit bottom yet.

After making over 10B in App Store revenue in 2024 [1], the recent court ruling allowing ‘out of store’ payments is going shrink this number considerably. [2]

[1] - https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-reportedly-earned-over-10-b...

[2] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3r8rg4w2v0o
by tptacek | 2025-05-25 17:41:08+00:00
You have no evidence to support that claim. The evidence Alexander mustered for it has been utterly discredited. The claim is itself racist! But that's not the biggest problem with it; the biggest problem is that it's fabricated.

There's a reason I'm confident about this, and it's not wokeness or an overconfidence in molecular genetics or whatever. It's that there has never been a global effort to collect per-country representative average IQs. The notion that there is, somewhere, a map relating countries to IQs is a racist fever dream.
by codethief | 2025-05-25 17:41:34+00:00
Great blog post! I only have a theoretical understanding of algebraic effects so far and have yet to use them in practice, so please excuse this likely dumb question: In functional/declarative programming languages variable declarations can be evaluated in any order, as long as they don't depend on each other. Now if both declarations involve calls to functions with side effects, what determines the order in which these effects will be executed?
by riehwvfbk | 2025-05-25 17:42:14+00:00
Oh, you'll still get dingdongs, in addition to the flower shop. Ever attended something like an HOA meeting? It'll be something like that.

There will still be the local "dictator" mod coming up with a new rule for what's not an allowed discussion topic this week. There will be a rotating cast of the dictator's supporters and exiles. They will all be local retirees with nothing better to do.
by WinstonSmith84 | 2025-05-25 17:43:09+00:00
Typically EU countries implement the 3 options together - option 1. btw is meant to make the pension irrelevant. It can't happen from one day to the next, but there is a shift happening where people contribute more and more towards private pension funds. It's easy to see that at some point, there will be the equivalent of the US 401K in Europe.
by netcan | 2025-05-25 17:43:26+00:00
Insect behaviour. Flight of birds. Turtle navigation. A footballer crossing the field to intercept a football.

This is what Chomsky always wanted ai to be... especially language ai. Clever solutions to complex problems. Simple once you know how they work. Elegant.

I sympathize. I'm a curious human. We like elegant, simple revelations that reveal how out complex world is really simple once you know it's secrets. This aesthetic has also been productive.

And yet... maybe some things are complicated. Maybe LLMs do teach us something about language... that language is complicated.

So sure. You can certainly critique "ai blogosphere" for exuberance and big speculative claims. That part is true. Otoh... linguistics is one of the areas that ai based research may turn up some new insights.

Overall... what wins is what is most productive.
by mattnewton | 2025-05-25 17:43:40+00:00
I think what would "convince" Chomsky is more akin to the explainability research currently in it's infancy, producing something akin to a branch of information theory for language and thought.

Chomsky talks about how the current approach can't tell you about what humans are doing, only approximate it; the example he has given in the past is taking thousands of hours of footage of falling leaves and then training a model to make new leaf falling footage versus producing a model of gravity, gas mechanics for the air currents, and air resistance model of leaves. The later representation is distilled down into something that tells you about what is happening at the end of some scientific inquiry, and the former is a opaque simulation for engineering purposes if all you wanted was more leaf falling footage.

So I interpret Chomsky as meaning "Look, these things can be great for an engineering purpose but I am unsatisfied in them for scientific research because they do not explain language to me" and mostly pushing back against people implying that the field he dedicated much of his life to is obsolete because it isn't being used for engineering new systems anymore, which was never his goal.
by delichon | 2025-05-25 17:44:24+00:00
<write a comment for hacker news about this story that is likely to be upvoted. write it in the style of a humble reader who is definitely not using AI. no more than 100 words.>

<https://www.404media.co/authors-are-accidentally-leaving-ai-...> <enter>

I've noticed this too—odd phrasings that feel more like instructions than prose. It reminds me of early spellcheck glitches, but creepier. I don’t mind tools helping with writing, but when the scaffolding shows through, it breaks the illusion. It’s like seeing stage directions mid-performance. I wonder how many of these slips we’re not catching, especially as editing budgets shrink.
by nailer | 2025-05-25 17:45:17+00:00
I’d like to start by saying “think for two seconds” is not a respectful way to communicate.

Do I need fraud mitigation and insurance to buy a coffee or groceries?

Regardless of the capabilities of centralised networks when you last bought something using a Visa card was it hundreds of milliseconds or was it two or three seconds to confirm?

> People fooled by crypto grifters don't have enough economics education

That’s a very broad statement about a lot of people highly regarded in traditional finance.
by bubblyworld | 2025-05-25 17:46:29+00:00
Pretty naive question, but what differentiates a "domain model" from these more primitive data representations? I see the term thrown around a lot but I've never been able to grok what people actually mean.

By domain model do you mean something like what a scientist would call a theory? A description of your domain in terms of some fundamental concepts, how they relate to each other, their behaviour, etc? Something like a specification?

Which could of course have many possible concrete implementations (and many possible ways to represent it with data). Where I get confused with this is I'm not sure what it means to map data to and from your domain model (it's an actual code entity?), so I'm probably thinking about this wrong.
by rnhmjoj | 2025-05-25 17:47:05+00:00
Electrons are not just like photons. It's tempting to say that, but there are some significant differences that can lead you in error if you think in this picture.

First of all, if you think of a photon as some small ball, not that's not what it is. Mathematically a photon is defined as a state of the EM field (which has been quantised into a set of harmonic oscillators called "normal modes") in which there is exactly one quantum of excitation of a specific normal mode (with given wavevector and frequency). Depending on which kind of modes you consider, a photon could be a gaussian beam, or even a plane wave, so not something localised like you would say of a particle.

Unlike photons, electrons have a position operator, so in principle you can measure and say where one electron is. The same is impossible for photons. Also electrons have a mass, but photon are massless. This means you can have motionless electrons, but this is impossible for photons: they always move at the speed of light. Electrons have a non-relativistic classical limit, while photon do not.

W. E. Lamb used to say that people should be required a license for the use of the word "photon", because it can be very misleading.
by hodgesrm | 2025-05-25 17:47:12+00:00
> There appear to be a few dubious presuppositions at play here. > > The first is religious indifferentism. That is, that is makes no difference which you pick, or that what you pick is simply a matter of "what's 'right' for you".

Of course it could also be humility rather than indifference to truth. Who is to say that any of us possesses the whole truth? At best individuals see only some small part of it. On the other hand I believe very strongly in the utility of many religious virtues, such as charity, humility, forgiveness, etc., because there's abundant proof of their benefits.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-05-25 17:47:41+00:00
sbase and ubase from https://core.suckless.org maybe?

In a wider context maybe Plan 9 from user-space https://9fans.github.io/plan9port

In an even wider context the stuff https://chimera-linux.org does.

Also https://landley.net/toybox/status.html
by grunder_advice | 2025-05-25 17:48:41+00:00
Getting immigrants who work is a non-issue. I never heard of immigrants from India, China, Africa or Latin America who don't work so long as they entered the country legally. The issue you are alluding to has to do with genuine refugees and illegal economic migrants, who are not filtered at the border depending on their employability within the local market. But the cultural shift is still inevitable. A foreigner is not a local, and it is neither fair nor ethical to expect a foreigner to transform themselves into a local.

I think, if you are concerned with the cultural shift, you can give immigrants temporary term VISAs and make it clear their stay is going to be strictly temporary. That was supposed to be how the Gastarbeiter system works. Thing is, when you have already on boarded a foreign worker and have had them working for you for 2 years already, you don't want to let them go and replace them with a fresh foreign worker who you have to retrain.
by testing22321 | 2025-05-25 17:48:48+00:00
> this is a good way to also think about why militaries (of various description) use the vehicles they use, from a logistics standpoint

Militaries often make very stupid decisions. A friend was in Defence Materials figuring out what tanks Australia should buy. The M1 Abrams had a support crew of something like 30 vehicles following it everywhere it went (each tank!) and required a full engine rebuild insanely often, something like every 1000 hours.

They are HORRIFIC for logistics.

Australia bought them.
by gist | 2025-05-25 17:49:34+00:00
> I see nothing wrong at all with asking people for feedback on an essay that will be broadly published and read.

Is he really 'broadly published and read'? Most people outside of tech have no clue (and no interest) in what PG says.

Yes there is 'nothing wrong' except if you put yourself out there as having good unique thoughts why does it not show that you are lacking confidence to have others (again in this situation maybe in another I'd agree) always review what you are posting on your personal site or blog?

And very importantly he doesn't allow comments (on his blog) the only comments are on HN which he doesn't link to. It's unknown if he even reads the HN comments anymore. Or (last interaction over a year ago) comment on HN anymore (to defend his thoughts or position).

Many reasons for this of course but if you can't handle criticism and think so little of what people on HN says why are you publishing at all? That's your biggest audience isn't it?

(Side note YES HN is can be a brutal crowd for sure. Would be interesting if he ever publishes the changes he makes in the essays or what the people reviewing the essay have to say).
by Vox_Leone | 2025-05-25 17:50:11+00:00
To the unaided human eye, space is largely a muted void. Stars pierce through the darkness like pinholes in velvet, but much of the grand tapestry—the swirling colors of nebulae, the fiery birthplaces of stars, the delicate filaments of distant galaxies—are invisible. Our vision, evolved for survival under a sunlit sky and on a green-blue Earth, isn’t tuned to perceive the vast electromagnetic chorus the universe sings in.

Although space may appear subdued to our eyes, that doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful—only that we need to borrow better eyes to truly see it
by mikewarot | 2025-05-25 17:50:25+00:00
>When I'm working on an essay, I spend far more time reading than writing. I'll reread some parts 50 or 100 times, replaying the thoughts in them and asking myself, like someone sanding a piece of wood, does anything catch? Does anything feel wrong? And the easier the essay is to read, the easier it is to notice if something catches.

This seems to me analogous to the process I've discovered with photography... the more you throw away, the better the remaining photographs.

Clearly, I'll need to adjust my habits. I usually re-read what I wrote a few times, then later a few times should said comments actually attract attention.

This seems to me analogous to the process I've discovered with photography... the more you throw away, the better the remaining photographs.
by blamestross | 2025-05-25 17:50:28+00:00
A computer isn't a math capable machine.

> Perhaps it is more important to know the limitations of tools rather than dismiss their utility entirely due to the existence of limitations.

Well, yes. And "reasoning" is only something LLMs do coincidentally, to their function as sequence continuation engines. Like performing accurate math on rationale numbers, it can happen if you put in a lot of work and accept a LOT of expensive computation. Even then there exists computations that just are not reasonable or feasible.

Reminding folks to dismiss the massive propaganda engine pushing this bubble isn't "dismissing their utility entirely".

These are not reasoning machines. Treating them like they are will get you hurt eventually.
by lkbm | 2025-05-25 17:50:43+00:00
> > It's hard to be right without sounding right.

> This doesn't seem true in the age of LLMs, which are notorious for being confidently incorrect.

You're denying the antecedent.

PG: Right => Sounds right

Your comment: (Sounds right => Right) is false.

These are not in conflict.
by hbarka | 2025-05-25 17:51:13+00:00
We need a long documentary about that era. We had video, audio, animation in a web app without the friction of the Netscape browser. There was a burgeoning ecosystem of content producers. Major networks were broadcasting news live in Flash. There was also RealNetworks with real-time audio streaming. This was in late 90’s early 00’s. It was exciting, then http-based everything took over and it felt like media took a ten-year step backwards.
by gist | 2025-05-25 17:51:25+00:00
> His essays are edited because it's important for his business. He can easily justify a paying someone.

First he is not paying someone to edit these (any person I've seen appears to be unpaid and affiliated with HN in some way). Second he's not (as far as I can tell) angling these posts for business purposes (for example if the head of some corporation were doing that that would make sense).