MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by namaria | 2025-06-10 09:14:10+00:00
You should read the original paper. Turing argued that discussing the abilities of machines to "think" is meaningless and proposes instead to conjecture about whether a digital computer would eventually be able to imitate conversation.

I think time has proved that he was right. It is meaningless to discuss things like "Artificial Intelligence". We can only discuss machines in terms of performance, not in terms of subjectivity. Whenever we try to do the latter, we end up in a semantic quagmire.

This is the main reason I find the current hype irksome. The performance of machines should be evaluated objectively and in terms of the jobs they need to perform. Attributing 'intelligence' or 'thought' to machines is indeed absurd.

The 'imitation game' argument is categorically not that 'if machines appear to be intelligent they in fact are'. What it really is: 'machines cannot think obviously, but what could they do that currently requires a thinking human to be in charge?'.

75 years after Turing published the relevant paper, people are still doing what he called absurd (trying to attribute thought and intelligence to machines), and quoting him to do it. The main insight, that this is a category error and we should look objectively at what jobs need to be performed and how to implement it, is completely lost.
by miramba | 2025-06-10 09:14:36+00:00
I think a competing theory was/is that the mass extinction was caused by volcanism of the Deccan-Traps, briefly mentioned in the abstract “…occurred within the time of Deccan flood basalt volcanism in India”. This article seems to confirm a direct relation between the meteorite impact and the extinction with the deccan traps activity possibly serving as a contributing factor.
by BrenBarn | 2025-06-10 09:14:42+00:00
The point is that what we have now (and what we had before Trump) is not democracy and is not the rule of law, and Trump's actions show that, because those actions are taken within that system. We have been living for a long time under the illusion that our governmental system was democratic when it never was, it was only due to coincidence and luck that it appeared that way. When I say "do the same stuff Trump is doing" I mean use similar methods to create a system that actually supports democracy and the rule of law.
by mg | 2025-06-10 09:14:48+00:00
But does Mistral stand a chance to make a state of the art model?

People will always want to use the best model. Like they use the best search engine.

How would Mistral catch up with US companies, who spend tens of billions of dollars per year on improving their models? As far as I know, Mistral raised something like $1B so far.
by jfernandezr | 2025-06-10 09:14:51+00:00
I would love that Firefox focuses on the browser. I think I wouldn't oppose some monetizing strategy like DDG based on affiliate sales, or even a realistic affordable subscription model (10€/year?). They should put the efforts on privacy and good website usage, maybe include an ad blocker.

But we'll have to wait until Google finally stops paying them for the default search engine. Maybe diverting resources on the Firefox Focus brand will be a transition phase.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-06-10 09:15:06+00:00
> The OIC effectively controls the ICC

That's a pretty crazy claim. 125 countries have joined the ICC. The OIC only has 57 members (not all of them even have a Muslim majority).

Of the three judges who issued the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, two are European (one is French, the other Slovenian).

The US has the same problem with the ICC as it does with the ICJ: the US government does not want to be subject to international law. The US is used to acting as a superpower, in whatever way it wants. It just fundamentally does not accept the premise that its actions should be in any way constrained by international law.

In this particular instance, the problem the US has with the ICC is that the US is Israel's primary backer. The US provides the money, weapons and diplomatic support that Israel needs to continue its war against the Palestinians and occupation of the Palestinian territories. The US itself is heavily implicated in the crimes that the ICC is prosecuting here.
by LightHugger | 2025-06-10 09:15:33+00:00
This isn't popular. People don't want to reward illegal behavior with citizenship, the process should be relaxed for people who want to come in the future but if someone has already broken the law of the land to come here they should already be disqualified. Maintain criminality checks but increase the numbers allowed in each year. This is perfectly viable.

Have you thought about why trump's voterbase includes so many legal immigrants? immigrants who put in the immense effort to come here properly are tired of people sneaking into the country and the democratic party conflating legal and illegal immigrants and acting like the two groups are the same.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-10 09:15:34+00:00
I am not sure what the author meant, but all my smartphones have escaped 'Google-ification' in the sense that I do not have and I never had a Google account.

This has created mostly minor problems. The most serious has been that one of the banks that I am using has discontinued their Web-based online banking services, which I could use with a browser from any desktop, laptop or smartphone, replacing them with inferior Android/iOS apps.

I no longer use Apple devices and for Android the bank has refused to provide their app by any other way except the official Google store, to which I cannot login without a Google account, despite the fact that the app is free.

Fortunately I use several banks, so with that bank I have stopped using most of their services. For their services that I still use, I use their ancient SMS-based interface, which continues to work for now.

I believe that it should be illegal for a bank to condition their services by the customer having to enter a contractual relationship with a third party, which moreover is located in a different jurisdiction, i.e. USA, while both the bank and the customer are in the EU. However, I did not afford to spend time and money to investigate the legality of the bank's actions.
by vbezhenar | 2025-06-10 09:15:44+00:00
I'm not going to jump on you, but for me Linux is much more friendly than Windows or macOS. I tried to use macOS, just because their Apple silicone computers are so powerful, but in the end I abandoned it and switched back to Thinkpad with Linux. Windows is outright unusable and macOS is barely usable for me, while Linux just works.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-10 09:16:04+00:00
Yes, I know those as well, my Asus Netbook (remember those?) came with Linux pre-installed, the wlan and GL ES support was never as good as on the Windows side, and once Flash was gone, never got VAAPI to work in more recent distros, it eventually died, 2009 - 2024.

Notice how quickly this has turned into the usual Linux forums kind of discussion that we have been having for the last 30 years regarding hardware support?
by NalNezumi | 2025-06-10 09:16:19+00:00
I don't know how my comment gave the impression I'm agitated. I'm far from US so it's just an outsider observation.

In either case, thank you for the insight. It didn't give me any additional insight and while you call it one dimensional, I only see an expansion of the same idea I shared: both sides use culture war to smear each other (and as a lazy cop-out to game the media attention for coverage and votes). Most people have heard of AOC, Bernie, and Elizabeth Warren's. Even Ted Cruz & RFK JR (pre election). Surely when congress is 400+ and senate is 100+ people, those names don't represent ALL of the intricate factions of the two parties?

Yet we all act like they somehow are the representative of the opposite. To me you're just saying the same thing, but relieving any responsibility of the parrots, and putting it solely on corporate and self interested politician.

If those culture wars win votes, I think putting the sole responsibility that way is just an convenient excuse for everyone to play along the system and shout at each other.

I guess to the people shouting at each other, my comment might have come off as "touting my horn". I'm from the outside, I don't have any high horse or stakes in this but I understand the confusion
by gf000 | 2025-06-10 09:16:20+00:00
Ah yeah, isn't that the definition of something you don't directly depend on? Of course they "could just replace the OS", I can also just write a new web browser and use it to browse the web as it's supposedly a standard.

Except neither will support even a fraction of the originals' capabilities, at much worse performance and millions of incompatibilities at every corner.
by pmontra | 2025-06-10 09:16:44+00:00
Your example was quite good actually. Even in sw the people that build the system is not necessarily the people that monitor, maintain and use it, even for systems used only inside a company. I used to work in a telco and we had 3 separate departments, plus a 4th one for testing. And yet all of them seem to be subject to section 174, builders, maintainers, testers.

A country wide power grid or telecommunications network are other examples that come to my mind. They are never complete, they get more features every day (new cables?), they are monitored 24/7. The owner companies also use them.
by gambiting | 2025-06-10 09:17:16+00:00
>>That's what Europe will do - stick to letters, faxes and manual methods.

I'm sorry, which parts of Europe have you been to, exactly? Many countries in EU are at the forefront of digitization, years ahead of US in most areas when it comes to banking and civil admin matters.

And not to be rude, but when you go to US it feels like a museum - you see those things called checks that my dad used to tell me about that people pay and are paid with(!!!!), and people still swipe their payment cards like it's 1995. For a country that has the biggest tech companies in the world it's not even in the 21st century on some fronts.

Oh and guess what Apple needed you to do to open a developer account just 10 years ago - that's right, a Fax with your details. I don't think there were any fax machines left in my country by then, I've had to use an online service to send it.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-06-10 09:17:59+00:00
All the footage I've seen and social media I've seen goes the other way: that the people watching and filming the ICE raids were then fired upon by ICE.

I suspect the usual media chicanery - everyone reporting the story that their viewers want to hear.

Anyway. My point was that I could not do this. If I was asked to fire teargas at a crowd who were protesting kidnapping people off the streets and taking them to concentration camps, I could not do that. I would refuse that order.
by Khelo | 2025-06-10 09:18:34+00:00
Join a thriving community of gamers who are already playing smarter. With a seamless interface and endless entertainment, Khelostar is revolutionizing the way you game. Why just play when you can get paid for it? Download the Khelostar app today, discover your next favorite game, and start unlocking exclusive cashback rewards with every victory. Your next adventure awaits
by lores | 2025-06-10 09:19:13+00:00
Then you're double-whamming childless people who did not take any public resources for their children and likely paid more taxes throughout their life, declaring infertile people a disposable class, incentivising child abuse and a glut of poor doctors/engineers/MBAs, and not least incentivising financial benefit and self-interest in one of the last places that's still largely about love, truly a capitalism end goal.
by syllogism | 2025-06-10 09:19:35+00:00
LLM agents are very hard to talk about because they're not any one thing. Your action-space in what you say and what approach you take varies enormously and we have very little body of common knowledge about what other people are doing and how they're doing it. Then the agent changes underneath you or you tweak your prompt and it's different again.

In my last few sessions I saw the efficacy of Claude Code plummet on the problem I was working on. I have no idea whether it was just the particular task, a modelling change, or changes I made to the prompt. But suddenly it was glazing every message ("you're absolutely right"), confidently telling me up is down (saying things like "tests now pass" when they completely didn't), it even cheerfully suggested "rm db.sqlite", which would have set me back a fair bit if I said yes.

The fact that the LLM agent can churn out a lot of stuff quickly greatly increases 'skill expression' though. The sharper your insight about the task, the more you can direct it to do something specific.

For instance, most debugging is basically a binary search across the set of processes being conducted. However, the tricky thing is that the optimal search procedure is going to be weighted by the probability of the problem occurring at the different steps, and the expense of conducting different probes.

A common trap when debugging is to take an overly greedy approach. Due to the availability heuristic, our hypotheses about the problem are often too specific. And the more specific the hypothesis, the easier it is to think of a probe that would eliminate it. If you keep doing this you're basically playing Guess Who by asking "Is it Paul? Is it Anne?" etc, instead of "Is the person a man? Does the person have facial hair? etc"

I find LLM agents extremely helpful at forming efficient probes of parts of the stack I'm less fluent in. If I need to know whether the service is able to contact the database, asking the LLM agent to write out the necessary cloud commands is much faster than getting that from the docs. It's also much faster at writing specific tests than I would be. This means I can much more neutrally think about how to bisect the space, which makes debugging time more uniform, which in itself is a significant net win.

I also find LLM agents to be good at the 'eat your vegetables' stuff -- the things I know I should do but would economise on to save time. Populate the tests with more cases, write more tests in general, write more docs as I go, add more output to the scripts, etc.
by ojame | 2025-06-10 09:19:42+00:00
We host our app on Heroku - the core service and a few microservices. The heroku dashboard is down, and we can't use the cli due to the in-browser auth callback that it needs (which is also down).

The status page itself is either saying nothing is wrong, or points to an error page[0]. The incident itself[1] hasn't been updated, which is pretty frustrating.

We can't submit a support ticket because, well, it requires the authentication procedure as well.

We use worker queues, and the queues are getting blown out because heroku can't action anything. We're having our microservices yo-yo now, which suggests things are getting worse, now better.

I've always been a huge Heroku advocate, but the last 5 years have been death by a thousand cuts.

0: https://status.heroku.com/error 1: https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2822
by rollcat | 2025-06-10 09:20:10+00:00
> I prefer my desktop to be designed around one unifying philosophy instead of a hodgepodge of customizations which don't work well together.

I agree. It's why I prefer Gnome over KDE, and macOS over Windows.

My main point is: Gnome can't tell simple from simplistic. Terminal cursor blinking. Removing every command until everything fits in one menu and/or title bar. It's so crammed with buttons, I can't tell what is what. But ironically, there's no desktop icons, despite "Desktop" folder being pinned in Nautilus. Everything is so spaced out. Top bar has three interactive elements, but it takes four clicks to log out. There's a dock, but you can't move it to the left/right side, so it takes up even more vertical space. You can fix some of that with extensions, but half of them get disabled on every upgrade.

This is in stark contrast with macOS. If you can't find something in the menu bar, there's a search field in the help menu. If you use some menu bar option often, you can bind it to a custom key. Both of these are provided through standard system APIs, so every application uses them by default. Title bars have buttons, but are spacious enough so that there's always an obvious place to click-to-drag. (Gnome had to solve it by making ordinary widgets draggable... How do you know if you're selecting text in a URL bar, or moving the window?) I could keep going, but macOS has always been more intuitive and more friendly to power users.
by gf000 | 2025-06-10 09:20:30+00:00
The thing is.. I am forced to use windows for my current job and it is so much worse than Linux desktop has ever been in the last 10-15 years, I'm honestly buffled.

Like, suspend-wake is honestly 100% reliable compared to whatever my Windows 11 laptop does, random freezes, updates are still a decade behind what something like NixOS has (I can just start an update and since the system is immutable it won't disturb me in any shape or form).
by juliendorra | 2025-06-10 09:20:32+00:00
I have been using CSS since, well, they were invented back in 1995 but not continuously (when I need them). And I can never remember how to properly center things or how to do a lot of supposedly simple things. The specs has a lot of confusing naming (the naming have some logic, but nevertheless a confusing) and of course a lot of interrelated effects.

We used to have css editors that helped.

But I’m glad LLMs can now write CSS for me, and it nearly works perfect every time (I sometimes have to dig and fix things, and to push it to use the latest specs not old obsolete tricks)
by namaria | 2025-06-10 09:20:34+00:00
I disagree with siblings that it's fear or greed.

I think it's way more basic. Much like recruiters calling me up and asking about 'kubernetes' they are just trying to get a handle on something they don't really understand. And right now all stickers point to 'AI' as the handle that people should pull on to get traction in software.

It is incredibly saddening to me that people do pattern matching and memorize vocabulary instead of trying to understand things even at a basic level so they can reason about it. But a big part of growing up was realizing that most people don't really understand or care to understand things.
by raverbashing | 2025-06-10 09:20:53+00:00
Honestly why?

Why does "digital sovereignty" have to rely on stuff like "FOSS email client"

Honestly, as much of FOSS has its importance, focusing exclusively on open source solutions is probably part of why things don't go ahead

Honestly Thunderbird was good 20 years ago. And even then...

Makeshift solutions with pieces duck-taped together and inconsistent UX are not going to win any friends
by nabla9 | 2025-06-10 09:21:00+00:00
It's one of those core innovations like double-entry bookkeeping making things more fair.

VAT provides an incentive for businesses to register and keep invoices, because they automatically pay more for tax they can't show invoice.

I just found out that many people in the US have opinions against it when Trump/Vance did bring out VAT into the discussion, so I felt I had to confirm my assumption that VAT is nearly universal. In some ways the US attitude is like UK was in the 1900s when it comes to infrastructure of governance "old things work just fine."
by hparadiz | 2025-06-10 09:21:49+00:00
They can't detain you forever because they can't ID you. You can't be compelled to own an ID or carry it around with you all the time. Many naturally born americans have no passport, birth certificate, or even state license.

So many homeless here have zero identification.

They are basically just going after people who are too brown and even ending up grabbing people who are just here on vacation, legally.
by neepi | 2025-06-10 09:21:54+00:00
Actually you can use them as external displays but requires some hackery. See https://ohmypizza.com/2023/04/converting-a-5k-imac-into-an-e...

But yeah agree entirely there. When upgrading from my somewhat cranky old 5k iMac a while back, I decided I'd never buy another iMac. The 24" was out. So I bought a Studio Display and a mac mini. At least I can upgrade the computer separately, which has happened already (M2 mini -> M4 mini). I expect the Studio Display to last a long time as you can actually buy parts for it.
by nosianu | 2025-06-10 09:22:47+00:00
It was Russia that stopped delivering gas through the pipeline. It was already non-functioning when it was blown up, the gas inside was static, non-moving, the pressure only kept up to prevent pipe-deterioration. That was unilateral, there were no sanctions, and Russia refused to take delivery of parts they had claimed they needed.

Even before the war, the German subsidiary of Gazprom had already started deliberately lowering the amount of gas stored underground in Germany, at a time when it was usually being filled up for the next winter.

Examples, there are many articles from around that time: https://www.dw.com/en/eu-gas-russia-nord-stream-crisis/a-666... (it shows the timeline, the explosions were inconsequential, gas had already long stopped flowing)

September 2022: "Russia cuts off gas exports to Europe via Nord Stream indefinitely"-- https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/02/energy/nord-stream-1-pipe...

August 2022: "Nord Stream 1: Russia switches off gas pipeline citing maintenance" -- https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/31/nord-stream...
by wtcactus | 2025-06-10 09:23:33+00:00
According to the official Portuguese data, 700000 persons between the age of 25 to 65 are not working. So, more than 11.5% of the population between those ages already - population between 20-65 is 6 millions.

So, get this correctly. More than 11.5% of the population between 25 and 65 are already not working and living off the welfare state.

That's how many. Great, isn't it. May be because all the robots are already doing our work, I guess...
by falcor84 | 2025-06-10 09:24:05+00:00
I've been thinking about this a lot recently - having AI automate product manager user research. My thread of thought goes something like this:

0. AI can scour the web for user comments/complaints about our product and automatically synthesize those into insights.

1. AI research can be integrated directly into our product, allowing the user to complain to it just-in-time, whereby the AI would ask for clarification, analyze the user needs, and autonomously create/update an idea ticket on behalf of the user.

2. An AI integrated into the product could actually change the product UI/UX on its own in some cases, perform ad-hoc user research, asking the user "would it be better if things were like this?" and also measuring objective usability metrics (e.g. task completion time), and then use that validated insight to automatically spawn a PR for an A/B experiment.

3. Wait a minute - if the AI can change the interface on its own - do we even need to have a single interface for everyone? Perhaps future software would only expose an API and a collection of customizable UI widgets (perhaps coupled with official example interfaces), which each user's "user agent AI" would then continuously adapt to that user's needs?
by gexla | 2025-06-10 09:24:32+00:00
Right, I'll have one main chat open for high level planning and guidance. It can knock out big chunks for me. But as soon as I take it on a side quest to fix something that doesn't work, it often starts going off the rails. Better to open a separate context for that fix. And often there's a good reason that it created the issue, like it patterned itself into a wall and a dead-end. At that point you should either start back from where it started drifting or take over (but still starting at the pre-drift point.)