MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by com2kid | 2025-06-22 17:41:59+00:00
99% of science fiction settings are historical fiction but now In Space(tm).

I'm not saying that is a bad thing, and some fiction explores forms of government that haven't been tried on earth, and also explores systems of government and commerce that may need to happen on a post scarcity society. That is all good, and arguably those explorations need to happen, but still most sci-fi is just some portion of earth society thrown into space. (Banks explores alternatives, but arguably most Gibson doesn't, though I haven't read anything by him in a decade or more so they may have changed).

This is frequently useful as it allows us to examine our existing biased from an outside view. I am definitely less racist/bigoted for having read science fiction.

As a final point, it has been noted that a lot of sci-fi has an undertone of "wow isn't this benevolent monarchy great!" Which is rather disturbing if you think about the implications too much.
by santaboom | 2025-06-22 17:42:02+00:00
Good questions, below I attempt to respond to each point then wrap it up. TLDR: even if TPU is good (and it is good for Google) it wouldn’t be “almost as good a business as every other part of their company” because the value add isn’t FROM Google in the form of a good chip design(TPU). Instead the value add is TO Google in form of specific compute (ergo) that is cheap and fast FROM relatively simple ASICs(TPU chip) stitched together into massively complex systems (TPU super pods).

If interesting in further details:

1) TPUs are a serious competitor to Nvidia chips for Google’s needs, per the article they are not nearly as flexible as a GPU (dependence on precompiled workloads, high usage of PEs in systolic array). Thus for broad ML market usage, they may not be competitive with Nvidia gpu/rack/clusters.

2)chip makers with the best chips are not valued at 1-3.5T, per other comments to OC only Nvidia and Broadcomm are worth this much. These are not just “chip makers”, they are (the best) “system makers” driving designs for chips and interconnect required to go from a diced piece of silicon to a data center consuming MWs. This part is much harder, this is why Google (who design TPU) still has to work with Broadcomm to integrate their solution. Indeed every hyperscalar is designing chips and software for their needs, but every hyperscalar works with companies like Broadcomm or Marvell to actually create a complete competitive system. Side note, Marvell has deals with Amazon, Microsoft and Meta to mostly design these systems they are worth “only” 66B. So, you can’t just design chips to be valuable, you have to design systems. The complete systems have to be the best, wanted by everyone (Nvidia, Broadcomm) in order to be in Ts, otherwise you’re in Bs(Marvell).

4. I see two problems with selling TPU, customers and margins. If you want to sell someone a product, it needs to match their use, currently the use only matches Google’s needs so who are the customers? Maybe you want to capture hyperscalars / big AI labs, their use case is likely similar to google. If so, margins would have to be thin, otherwise they just work directly with Broadcomm/Marvell(and they all do). If Google wants everyone using cuda /Nvidia as a customer then you massively change the purpose of TPU and even Google.

To wrap up, even if TPU is good (and it is good for Google) it wouldn’t be “almost as good a business as every other part of their company” because the value add isn’t FROM Google in the form of a good chip design(TPU). Instead the value add is TO Google in form of specific compute (ergo) that is cheap and fast FROM relatively simple ASICs(TPU chip) stitched together into massively complex systems (TPU super pods).

Sorry that got a bit long winded, hope it’s helpful!
by jjice | 2025-06-22 17:43:36+00:00
Agreed, it blows my mind that more people aren't willing to pay $5-15 ($15 in my case of running Wipr 2 and AdGuard) to clean the web on your phone. The same people in my life who wouldn't think twice about a $15 cocktail.

Nothing wrong with either, but damn the value equation is out of wack to me, it's just so worth it.
by cpgxiii | 2025-06-22 17:44:05+00:00
> True, but FPGAs are suitable only for things that will not be produced in great numbers, because their cost and power consumption are many times higher than those of an ASIC.

While common folk wisdom, this really isn't true. A surprising number of products ship with FPGAs inside, including ones designed to be "cheap". A great example of this is that Blackmagic, a brand known for being a "cheap" option in cinema/video gear, bases everything on Xilinx/AMD FPGAs (for some "software heavy" products they use the Xilinx/AMD Zynq line, which combines hard ARM cores with an FPGA). Pretty much every single machine vision camera on the market uses an FPGA for image processing as well. These aren't "one in every pocket" level products, but they are widely produced.

> Unfortunately, the difference in performance between FPGAs and ASICs has greatly increased in recent years, because the FPGAs have remain stuck on relatively ancient CMOS manufacturing processes

This isn't true either. At the high end, FPGAs are made on whatever the best process available is. Particularly in the top-end models that combine programmable fabric with hard elements, it would be insane not to produce them on the best process available. What is the big hindrance with FPGAs is that almost by definition the cell structures needed to produce programability are inherently more complex and less efficient than the dedicated circuits of an ASIC. That often means a big hit to maximum clock rate, with resulting consequences to any serial computation being performed.
by nivertech | 2025-06-22 17:44:22+00:00
Substance over form

or

De facto vs de jure

Pedantic rule-based systems are easy to circumvent with loopholes and lacunas. That’s why we should look at the substance and not merely a [legal] form

Examples:

- form: a cryptocurrency, but substance: an unregistered security

- “medical alcohol” during dry laws / Prohibition

- “medical marijuana” & patients vs drug users

- etc.

—-

Was Third Reich[1] a “sovereign government” or a front for The National Socialist German Workers' Party?

Was USSR a “sovereign government” or a front for a Communist Party?

Is Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) a “sovereign government” or merely a front for IRGC[2]?

And wasn’t Iran/Persia already a “sovereign government” before IRGC staged a coup d'état (aka “revolution”)?

—-

> "De facto" and "de jure" are Latin terms used to distinguish between what exists in reality and what is legally recognized. "De facto" refers to something that exists in practice or reality, even if not officially established or legally recognized. "De jure" refers to something that is legally recognized or officially established

——

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Germany

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Revolutionary_Guard_...
by breppp | 2025-06-22 17:44:32+00:00
> During the 1980s, when the PLO was the dominant force in Palestine and wanted a two-state solution, Israel supported the much less influential Hamas in order to undermine PLO's position. And I think in 2017, Israel asked Qatar to support Hamas

You have got that the other way around. Hamas was founded in 1987 during the Intifada, before the PLO started supporting a two state solution in 1988. The reason the PLO made that shift was that it was in exile and a new leadership in Palestine was formed (including Hamas), and they were afraid they will lose relevancy.

In 1987 and going forward Hamas fought Israel, so claiming Israel supported it is paradoxical.

Qatari money was transferred to Hamas prior to any Israeli involvement as early as 2007, sometimes in cash through the tunnels.

In 2017 the Palestinian Authority refused to transfer taxes collected to the Hamas Gaza government or pay Israel for Gaza's electricity, leading to an economical downturn in Gaza.

Because of the pending humanitarian crisis that would probably end in starvation due to Gaza less than stellar economy, whose blame would be put on Israel as is accustomed, Qatar was used as a lesser evil solution. It allowed Israel not to directly fund the Hamas government, which except for its military wing, is also its schools, hospitals, municipal and all other civilians functions.

The narrative you are repeating also repeats itself as Israel created Hezbollah or even as far as the US created ISIS, 9/11 was an inside job etc

The source of this narrative in my opinion is the old racist imperialist narrative where the so-called natives are merely children incapable of agency. Here in the post colonialist sense, if there is any evil actor around, its actions or mere existence must quickly be attributed to the West/Israel, or else cognitive dissonance abounds
by voidhorse | 2025-06-22 17:44:40+00:00
I think these are factors to the extent that one sort of needs formal training and schooling in the historical development of the form to appreciate experimental and more contemporary work. The same can generally be said about visual art.

Because of that, yeah, hyper-specialization in schooling and a general movement toward stem means that a lot of people don't actually acquire the requisite background to engage with and appreciate modern work in a sufficient way—just like someone untrained in computing probably would not have an easy time understanding or appreciating significant breakthroughs in computer science.
by pseudocomposer | 2025-06-22 17:45:17+00:00
This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” There are a million metrics by which we might try to measure it, but well… that’s just not how art works. Thinking this way indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of what art is. Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.” And pretty much any arbitrary “1000 best” list is not going to take that into account.

That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing.

(I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)
by GoblinSlayer | 2025-06-22 17:46:02+00:00
>Second, the math doesn't tell you whether or not the discarded parts of the wave function describe something real or not.

The math tells that there are no privileged parts of wave function.

>So anyone who tells you that the MWI is the only possible scientifically tenable interpretation of QM is lying.

Didn't you admit yourself that if MWI works it's a big deal and will kick the chair from under other interpretations?
by margalabargala | 2025-06-22 17:47:01+00:00
> and I can show you why

But you haven't, you've just said "I have decided that proposition X is more likely than proposition Y, and if we accept X as truth then Z is the answer".

You've not shown that X is more likely than Y, and you have certainly not shown that it must be X and not Y.

Your statements don't logically follow. You said:

> it's simply much more plausible that the human feeling of freedom measures something about human cognition rather than reality

You said your opinion about some probabilities, and somehow drew the conclusion that it was "obvious that 40% of a field's practitioners are wrong".

Someone saying "actually, this has an answer, and I can show you why" to a currently fundamentally unanswerable question is simply going off faith and is literally a religion. It's choosing to believe in the downstream implication despite no actual foundation existing.
by tolerance | 2025-06-22 17:47:24+00:00
> What made the fiction literary was it spoke the language of memory, where the reader inhabited the experience of the characters, and this changed how readers experienced the world after. > > — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882341

People don't turn to books for this sort of experience anymore. People are not "literary minded". For the average person, interpolating another person's experience against their own through the written word is counterintuitive if not impossible and detached.

It takes a literary mind to feel through text. Electronic media of all sorts, aside from long form text displayed electronically is just that; electrifying.

I think that the quote I pulled from motohagiography applies to all writing and when we go further:

> Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal, performative, and anti-intimate.

The cultural decline of all writing becomes more obvious.

Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff needs to understand that their brain is rewired but their spirit still craves the same old stuff that it sought out for when the mind could stomach total absorption in a dry block of pulp.
by bentobean | 2025-06-22 17:47:28+00:00
> It is the mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to erase Israel from the map of the region.

> Israel is a hideous entity in the middle east which will undoubtedly be annihilated.

> Iran's stance has always been clear on this ugly phenomenon (Israel). We have repeatedly said that this cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region.

> Western countries allow no freedom of expression, which they claim to advocate, with regard to the myth of the massacre of Jews known as the holocaust, and nobody in the West enjoys the freedom of expression to deny it or raise doubts about it.

- Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran

Those who defend the Iranian regime or suggest that the Israeli government is the greater threat do so to their disgrace. SMH.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-22 17:48:36+00:00
If you want to impress the HN crowd try something other than “implement user authentication” and getting 50 perfect lines.

If you have a framework stacked up to do it and you are just connecting to it maybe, but I’d expect it to take more than 50 lines in most cases, and if somebody tried to vibe code it I’d expect the result to be somewhere between “it just doesn’t work” to “here’s a ticket where you can log in without a username and password”
by invalidname | 2025-06-22 17:48:42+00:00
How many of the 50,000 are indeed Hamas combatants?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/05/far-past-time-to...

Or archived link: https://archive.is/D85m0

Israel didn't start this war. Hamas started it and is keeping it going by refusing to release the 53 civilian hostages it is holding. They are hiding under the cities, under the hospitals and all over the region.

I think the Israeli right-wing took that Hamas bait and used that to commit far more violence than it should have. Hamas is using it to prop western outrage which it believes will bring down Israel. The Israeli right-wing is happy about western outrage because they believe it will force Israel into isolation and let them do whatever they want.
by rafram | 2025-06-22 17:48:54+00:00
It used to be that as long as the vehicle was on the same block as a school or park, you only had to take a one-minute video (versus three-minute). Now there are some annoying documentation requirements if you want to submit a shorter video.

Doesn’t impact the overall usefulness of the program very much IMO — I just didn’t add special handling for school/park reports like I would’ve before they made that change.
by TZubiri | 2025-06-22 17:49:35+00:00
I use python without any dependencies on web servers. Pip is cool, but you don't need to get pulled into the node-like dependecy hell.

For example instead of requests, you can use http.client, instead of flask, http.server, or socket.tcpserver, or just socket. If you want sqlite, don't jump to pip install sqlite or whatever, use sockets to talk to it.
by whstl | 2025-06-22 17:49:54+00:00
True, but I'd say it's worse for books than for music.

For music there's still plenty of network effects in favor of new music... things like live concerts, radio and DJs playing the latest stuff, playlists that make actual money being all about new stuff, younger people wanting to connect to their own generation, pop culture enthusiasts always chasing the "new thing".

Sure there are oldies stations and DJs and listeners rediscovering vintage stuff, but network effects for books are rarer, there's not that many Dan Browns anymore.
by hansmayer | 2025-06-22 17:50:15+00:00
On the one hand you're right. On the other hand, some , let's be honest - moron - bends the ear of some clueless manager with a too-good-to-be-true plan...And suddenly you have to explain it to two clueless people. And I used "junior" in the sense of my own assesment - I've definitely talked to some people who had a "senior" title, but that was perhaps reflective more of their accumulated years of experience, rather than actual knowledge...It's all so easy in their world - for the ChatGPT tells'em so ;)
by voidhorse | 2025-06-22 17:50:52+00:00
This is fundamental misunderstanding of literature.

This is like saying to a musician: I like the melody but you chose all the wrong instruments.

Obviously, the entire character of a song depends not only on the melody (idea) but also on the instruments chosen, the performance, etc. (material).

For literary fiction, the words are the material. What distinguishes literary works is not merely the "ideas" they present but the way in which they are presented. The words are the author's instruments, his paints. This is the difference between writing/reading for information and writing/reading as an aesthetic experience. Literary fiction of course imparts information and ideas, but it is predominantly about the latter experience insofar as the point is the evocative expression of those ideas.

This is why just reading the cliff notes for a literary work is missing the point.
by xeonmc | 2025-06-22 17:51:14+00:00
The transitory enshittified steel subsided once scientific formalization of their requirements emerged. I wonder if the transition period of vibe-coded slop will eventually be supplanted with formal-verification that supersede even the quality of cottage codesmanship, or would it forever remain in snakeoil-ridden limbo due to unspecifiability of software taste unlike that of a material’s mechanical performance?
by ikiris | 2025-06-22 17:51:25+00:00
Startup equity is the equivalent to the old Foxworthy bit

"You can't write me a check?" I said, "No, I -- a check? Hell yeah, I can write you a check! I thought you needed money. Tell you what, I'm just gonna pay the whole thing off right now! I'm gonna be a congressman when I grow up."
by brudgers | 2025-06-22 17:51:31+00:00
[random advice from the internet]

I don't know how old you are, but my experience is of phases when I read less and phases when I read more and all of it depends on my interests.

Deep learning™ changes our interests...but we are culturally conditioned to a positivist (line go up) model of learning. Anyway, the periods where I read less are generally periods where I learning by doing (and the doing-learning is not learning writing).

For me, reading gets supplanted by self-motivated creative work requiring physicality. No matter how many books a person reads about dancing, reading books about dancing is not dancing (even if it is something a dancer might do).

recover from this rot

Nobody cares how many books another person reads unless they are being paid (e.g. teachers) or are the person's parents. Although reading can be imaginative, it is not creative. Nobody cares how many books JS Bach read except grad students desperate for thesis topics -- hopefully their committee will steer them away from that dullness.

Or to put it another way, give yourself permission to grow beyond what you believed growth looked like when you were younger. Good luck.
by breppp | 2025-06-22 17:51:38+00:00
Not sure, how "nothing of what i said is true"

I didn't say there are no supporters, but there is an asymmetry between supporters and protestors. Supporters are being brought by buses, are often members of the Basij or other government functions and generally have incentives to do so. Protestors however risk extremely painful death and torture.

There is support for the regime, usually outside of large cities, but there's a reason there were large protests in almost every single year since 2016

for some reading you can take a look at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/read-online/234eb6fd-85...

There's over 40% of responders that do not claim their religion is Shia, but rather Atheist, Humanist, etc. That's more than the people that define themselves as Shia, in a Shia theocracy. This also correlates with skepticism of government media and rejection of Hijab
by citizenpaul | 2025-06-22 17:51:41+00:00
>bigger social part

Perhaps the "bigger" social part is what is missing. I've found I stop reading books or watching movies now days all the time. It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest.

Its not that the social parts are missing. Its that there are 1,000,000 competing social issues and everyone is trying to make theirs heard.

I'm not sure if its the creator's or the publishing companies watering things down. Either way someone is doing it intentionally. No book where the prominent theme is is a micro politic will ever stand the test of time, or even gain a significant following.
by boston_clone | 2025-06-22 17:51:52+00:00
Gonna need a source for that whole "weapons-grade uranium" claim, otherwise you sound like the New York Times for the last 30 years.

It's also very likely, and so far an exact figure is yet to be reported, that several smart, kind, and non-hostile scientists working towards a clean energy program were killed by this strike.

Celebrating death for the sake of a hypothetical is a very dangerous attitude, and is frankly repugnant to see as a top comment.
by ICBTheory | 2025-06-22 17:51:55+00:00
This paper presents a theoretical proof that AGI systems will structurally collapse under certain semantic conditions — not due to lack of compute, but because of how entropy behaves in heavy-tailed decision spaces.

The idea is called IOpenER: Information Opens, Entropy Rises. It builds on Shannon’s information theory to show that in specific problem classes (those with α ≤ 1), adding information doesn’t reduce uncertainty — it increases it. The system can’t converge, because meaning itself keeps multiplying.

The core concept — entropy divergence in these spaces — was already present in my earlier paper, uploaded to PhilArchive on June 1. This version formalizes it. Apple’s study, The Illusion of Thinking, was published a few days later. It shows that frontier reasoning models like Claude 3.7 and DeepSeek-R1 break down exactly when problem complexity increases — despite adequate inference budget.

I didn’t write this paper in response to Apple’s work. But the alignment is striking. Their empirical findings seem to match what IOpenER predicts.

Curious what this community thinks: is this a meaningful convergence, or just an interesting coincidence?

Links:

This paper (entropy + IOpenER): https://philarchive.org/archive/SCHAIM-14

First paper (ICB + computability): https://philpapers.org/archive/SCHAII-17.pdf

Apple’s study: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think...