MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2025-06-03 20:00:53+00:00
Oh, it's quite easy. If you'll consult this slick marketing diagram I have over here, as you can plainly see, the carbon coming out of our incinerator is brightly colored and can be plainly seen to be smiling broadly. It's very positive carbon.

Whereas this carbon you see coming out of the tailpipe of this car is colored ominously darkly, is clearly wearing an angry expression, and for some reason, is substantially "spikier" carbon than the stuff coming out of our environmentally-responsible incinerator. Much more dangerous stuff. You wouldn't want to meet this carbon in a dark alley at night!

It's all quite simple, really.
Ask HN: Why does time seem to speed up with age?
by syntaxbush | 2025-06-03 20:01:11+00:00
I've been struggling with the observation that as I age it feels like my life is compressed into a few brief moments instead of feeling like some long chronology. I thought doing more unique activities throughout the year would help as it would create "markers" in my memories, but it hasn't.

Have others struggled with similar thoughts - and as a rather odd question - how can one make their life feel...longer?
by xracy | 2025-06-03 20:01:24+00:00
WHy is your initial answer 'no' when the backend of the answer is functionally "But they got away with the recycling scam."

Seems like your initial answer would actually be 'yes?' Specifically because the "non-functional governments were unable to implement this as a cost to the producers."

Plastics producers are absolutely trying to shift the blame of these failed programs onto "personal responsibility."
by MBCook | 2025-06-03 20:01:34+00:00
Apple is known to use Linux on servers, but I could see a case for BSD being in the running.

The macOS userland is based on BSD so you’d get a nice little fit there. And it’s not like some common BSD is bad at doing the job of a server. I know it can do great things.

Who knows if it was ever discussed. They wouldn’t want Windows (licensing, optics, etc) and macOS isn’t tuned to be a high performance server. Linux is incredibly performant and ubiquitous and a very very safe choice.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-06-03 20:01:44+00:00
> I can pretty much verify the answer just by reading it

Only if you have domain knowledge. In both of your examples, you have to 1) know geography to determine whether "Técolum" and "Tolum" are indeed city names or just made up; and 2) know what might be acceptable ("good idea") or not at a birthday party.

Yes, it'll probably save you some time, but it's not orders of magnitude.

> In other cases, clicking through to check that a linked source supports a claim

this supposes that the AI provides a link for every fact. Google search + Gemini does, but most LLM interfaces don't.

secondly, if I have to click through every link and read through the source to determine whether details of a "summary" are correct or not, that really does not save me much time from conducting a search and looking through the linked sources myself

Anecdote from a couple of weeks ago. My wife's professor sent her 5 citations and summaries related to a medical research project. She didn't say they were LLM generated, but it was obvious (to me, not my wife) they were, by the formatting alone. None of the 5 papers existed as cited. My wife was confused, spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was wrong and why she couldn't find any of the papers. A Google Scholar search turned up 2 of the papers which were close enough to the citation to be the ones with some logical thinking, but the other 3 were not even matchable. In the end, the time spent trying to sort out valid vs invalid citations, and find valid replacements, was significantly greater than just doing the search and looking through the abstracts.

PS: LLMs are fine for information that can be "fuzzy": suggest places to go on vacation in September, plan a birthday party, etc. But I wouldn't consider that to be a "revolutionary" advance.
by SunlitCat | 2025-06-03 20:02:00+00:00
I dunno if that's the feedback you wanted but...

Just today i had to write an email about a certain thing, involving multiple people, multiple topics and leading to a conclusion what we could do / offer to do.

I wrote my email in a very very very very informal way (like "...then you and those other people should come together to talk about...) and asked ChatGPT to make it nicer and more formal. Then i reviewed the text ChatGPT did and told ChatGPT more about the topic at hand, so it can refine that EMail with that additional knowledge about said situation.

This approach works (usually) pretty well, because if you ask ChatGPT to write an EMail about some situation in the first place (without giving it an Text to work with), it will create a very boilerplate sounding text.

Hope that helps already!
by superamit | 2025-06-03 20:02:06+00:00
Wow, so many assumptions here that don't make sense to me, but I realize we all have different perspectives on this stuff. Thank you for sharing yours! I really do appreciate it.

I won't go line-by-line here defending the cutesy copy and all that since it's not my job to argue with people on the internet either… but on a few key points that interested me:

- language support: I don't believe we're being disingenuous. Sudowrite works well in many languages. We have authors teaching classes on using Sudowrite in multiple languages. In fact, there's one on German tomorrow and one on French next week: https://lu.ma/sudowrite Our community runs classes nearly every day.

- student usage - We do sometimes offer a student discount when people write in to ask for it, and we've had multiple collage and high school classes use sudowrite in writing classes. We'll often give free accounts to the class when professors reach out. I don't believe AI use in education is unethical. I think AI as copilot is the future of most creative work, and it will seem silly for teachers not to incorporate these tools in the future. Many already are! All that said, we do not market to students as you claim. Not because we think it's immoral -- we do not -- but because we think they have better options. ChatGPT is free, students are cheap. We make a professional tool for professional authors and it is not free nor cheap. It would not make sense for our business to market to students.

- press quotes -- Yes, we quote journalists because they're the ones who've written articles about us. You can google "New Yorker sudowrite" etc and see the articles. Some of those journalists also write fiction -- that one who wrote the New Yorker feature had a book he co-wrote with AI reviewed in The New York Times.

> I then noticed it was last updated in 2020? I highly doubt you guys have been around for that long

So many of these objections feel bizarre to me because they're trivial to fact-check. Here's a New York Times article that mentions us, written in 2020. We were one of the first companies to use LLMs in this wave and sought and gained access to GPT-3 prior to public API availability. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/science/artificial-intell...
by nialv7 | 2025-06-03 20:02:15+00:00
Hear me out. I was thinking jokingly to myself, "for how bad these models are at recognizing five legged dogs, they sure are great at generating them!"

But then it hit me, could this actually be why this is? Diffusion models work by iteratively improving a noisy image. So if it couldn't recognize there is something wrong with the image, it can't fix it.
by Suppafly | 2025-06-03 20:02:27+00:00
>There's no reason to expect it to be cheaper.

Sure there is, the raw materials have to be mined and transported across the country and such, it's ridiculous that it's cheaper to do that than to shred existing material and melt it back down. Even if you're downcycling from something like soda bottles to something like fence posts or plastic bricks or whatever, it should definitely be cheaper to recycle.
by Supermancho | 2025-06-03 20:02:59+00:00
>>> Grifters exist, but not everyone is a grifter.

>> Capitalism rewards dishonesty.

> It's a wonderful thing that no other economic systems reward dishonesty.

This is a whataboutism. To rephrase, "all economic systems reward dishonesty." - That's the point. Saying not every market participant is a grifter is a form of denial.
by dhosek | 2025-06-03 20:03:11+00:00
I don’t know that there’s anything that magical about Swift in particular, but rather the difference of running without the big runtime of the JVM and the advantages of memory management. Go will probably give improvements (and likely be an easier mental adjustment from a JVM language), and Rust, once you mentally adapt to its model will give even bigger improvements. Swift has the advantage of being object-oriented (if that’s an advantage in your mind), but I was thinking 10 years ago that with the move to microservices that Java/Spring apps were going to not work so great with the quick start-up/shut-down that the cloud/microservice model wants.
by jankins | 2025-06-03 20:03:17+00:00
When I broke my collarbone on my dominant arm I learned Dvorak left-handed layout a QMK keyboard. I configured some layers to make all the symbols needed for programming easy to access, and hold-space-for-shift. I learned the layout using Epistory, a typing game. There’s several similar games now that look helpful. It was slower but workable.
by epistasis | 2025-06-03 20:03:44+00:00
This reminds me of the massive risks that Chernobyl presents to this day, as Russia has attempted to destroy the newly installed $2B protective sarcophagus, on Feb 14 with a drone:

https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chernobyl-protective...

The highly engineered protective cover was designed to carefully maintain air pressure to confine the site. The hole caused by Russia threatens all of that, as the Russia's drone lit a fire in the waterproof insulation. The destruction of this basic weatherproofing threatens the entire structure, which was meant to last for 100 years without anybody being required to get close to it. Repairs are, well, difficult. A more detailed examination of the structure and its risks is here in a 12:39 video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW4BEqDS_wM
by philosophty | 2025-06-03 20:03:45+00:00
This is a common theme with criticisms of Go.

Relative amateurs assuming that the people who work on Go know less about programming languages than themselves, when in almost all cases they know infinitely more.

The amateur naively assumes that whichever language packs in the most features is the best, especially if it includes their personal favorites.

The way an amateur getting into knife making might look at a Japanese chef's knife and find it lacking. And think they could make an even better one with a 3D printed handle that includes finger grooves, a hidden compartment, a lighter, and a Bluetooth speaker.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-03 20:03:59+00:00
According to the article:

> Regardless of Amazon's data sovereignty pledge, the parent company remains under American ownership, and may still be subject to the Cloud Act, which requires US companies to turn over data to law enforcement authorities with the proper warrants, no matter where that data is stored.

How does that work with "decisions about how lawful orders are handled are also made by EU people in the EU"? Will the EU cloud division go rogue once the US attempts to use the CLOUD Act or something?
by librasteve | 2025-06-03 20:04:10+00:00
to expand on this (and yes the "claim" is intentionally tongue in cheek)

- HTMX is established as an antidote to React and similar overly complex tools - it has started a renaissance in server side web design options - raku (HARC), Go (GOTHH), Python (FastHTML), Rust (HARM) etc - HARC builds on the declarative/functional approach of ElmLang - Cro (web stack) and Red (Object Relational Mapper) are the raku "goto" modules

HARC is a very serious attempt to refresh the web development experience for hard core coders that embraces LOB and eschews templates with constrained semantics.

raku is well suited for this, but you do need to learn it.

Do we need a better way? Perhaps we should stick with the lovely situation we already have.
by mrinterweb | 2025-06-03 20:04:11+00:00
Anyone who's invested in real estate doesn't want home prices to go down, but it seems a necessity considering how affordability has been decreasing. I would think a buyer market can only sustain so much. If a recession is caused by tariffs, AI taking jobs, war, etc; the real estate market seems to be in a precarious enough position to be affected.
by 9rx | 2025-06-03 20:04:34+00:00
Even the laziest programmer is going to want to wrap the error with another error, and usually you will want to do more than that.

You can put that in-band, with something like:

v := funcWithError()? err := { return fmt.Errorf("lazy programmer wrapping: %w", err) }

But in that case what have you really gained?

Or you can do some kind of magic to allow it to happen out of band:

// found somewhere else in the codebase func wrapErr(err error) error { if err == nil { return nil } return fmt.Errorf("lazy programmer wrapping: %w", err) } v := funcWithError()?(wrapErr)

But that's where you start to see things hidden.
by colmmacc | 2025-06-03 20:04:57+00:00
I'm not an expert on trade and tariffs, but my basic understanding from is that tariffs only apply to goods that cross borders. At the moment, most customers outside of the US have experienced a decrease in price because the dollar has lost strength. Most cloud services are priced in dollars.

At AWS it runs really deep that we don't increase prices. We're like Costco with the hot dog. I've been amazed at the lengths we've gone to over the last few years. As all of our fundamental costs like energy, land, salaries, have experienced inflation globally, we've prioritized cost-savings and efficiency programs that meant we haven't had to pass that on as price increases. We did introduce a new fixed-price for IPv4 addresses, but it's not a significant charge for most customers and is just driven by the finite and now dwindling availability of IPv4 addresses.
by GMoromisato | 2025-06-03 20:05:00+00:00
I think a better analogy is to think of an essay as a set of diffs to be applied to a brain.

For example, if I write an essay about how the world is round, most people would ignore it because they already have that "diff". But the essay (the diffs) presuppose some knowledge: what we mean by "the world" and what "round" means. A 2-year old might not have the base knowledge for the diffs to be effective, and so it wouldn't affect them either.

The more knowledge you assume, the more likely it is for the essay to be novel. Science papers are like this. They are almost all novel because they only include the diffs from the current knowledge in the field. But, of course, only a small set of people are affected by the diffs because only a small set has the baseline knowledge.

Paul Graham's idea is that young people don't have a large knowledge base, so it is easy to create diffs for them that are novel (and therefore impact them). But that assumes that knowledge is a scalar quantity: young people have knowledge level 2 while older people have knowledge level 5.

Instead, I think knowledge is an n-dimensional field. There is knowledge about how to cook, how to dress, how to solve differential equations, etc. There's a vast sea of ideas that I never understood until I had kids. I understand exhaustion now in a way that I never could before. Fear too. And joy. Until I had that baseline, all those diffs failed to merge.

Reading one essay may not change much for you. Sometimes you can't even tell what the diffs were. But each essay you read adds more baseline knowledge that makes the next essay more impactful. Maybe that's why I like reading Paul's essays: now that I've read enough of them I have enough of a common baseline to understand the diffs.

I think it's not the shape of the essay field that matters, but the baseline in your brain.
by rocqua | 2025-06-03 20:05:23+00:00
I love the usage model of Kani. I just dislike the underlying method. Bounded Model Checking cannot take enough advantage of the borrow checker massively curtailing mutable aliasing.

But the idea of incremental annotations that require only a little bit of the program to be annotated is great.

I think there's a niche for a deductive verification approach that allows for incremental verification.
by masklinn | 2025-06-03 20:06:59+00:00
> the basic motivating example for sum types is Option, the whole point of which is to get rid of NULL

I don't think that's the case in Go: whereas I got the impression the C# team started souring on default() after generics landed (possibly because nullable value types landed alongside and they found out that worked just fine and there was no reason nullable reference types wouldn't) I don't really get that impression from the Go team, even less so from them still mostly being Googlers (proto3 removed both required fields and explicit default values).
by MBCook | 2025-06-03 20:07:04+00:00
For TypeScript’s compiler, yes. I can see some real benefits, like Go is already common for some open source software they want to collaborate with non-MS people on. I suspect C# is much less common for that, and when targeting pure performance I suspect a bytecode language like C# wouldn’t have the same large gain.

I’m not in the .NET ecosystem so I don’t know if native AOT compilation to machine code is an option.

But anyway, in this case Apple is making an internal service for themselves. I think a better comparison for MS would be if they chose to rewrite some Windows service’s server back end. Would they choose Go for that?

I don’t know.
by Lalo-ATX | 2025-06-03 20:07:34+00:00
I think Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow can add a useful perspective.

In the Kahneman hypothesis, humans are naturally parsimonious with our mental energy, preferring to use System 1. If we are writing a good essay, we are investing real System 2 effort. When we read someone else's writing, we get a free ride.

Difficulty and (lack of) motivation in your schema drives people towards System 1.

I agree that "obtuseness" is too reductive. There are copious examples of people who have had brilliant insights through the application of their System 2, who go on to embarrass themselves with shoddy System 1 thinking. Anyone can be obtuse - or not - it's just not a clear category.
by StackRiff | 2025-06-03 20:07:54+00:00
I wonder what Apple is using for production monitoring, observability, and performance profiling with swift applications on Linux. In my experience this is one of the key missing pieces in Swift server ecosystem.

You can link against jemalloc, and use google perftools to get heap and CPU profiles, but it's challenging to make good use of them especially with swifts method mangling and aggressive inlining.
by mostlysimilar | 2025-06-03 20:08:16+00:00
Looks miserable. Prompt, tweak, review, test, tweak, prompt, review, test, review, tweak, prompt, etc. Fiddling with settings windows in some black box software that belongs to someone else.

Programming: a powerful skillset, one of the few things that can give you autonomy and agency besides money. Doable on basic computer hardware with no internet connection. Self-reinforcing, investing in yourself.

Prompting: requires expensive subscriptions to someone else's computer, someone else's software. They can turn it off, they control it. Spending your days QAing software and reviewing code and describing in worse language what you want the computer to do, over and over, until you test your way to something approximating what you wanted. Not to mention incinerating the environment.

I know which of the two I prefer.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-06-03 20:08:49+00:00
Because the scam wasn't recycling, it was pretending to recycle and not doing it.

Just as a company promising to use solar energy and not doing so doesn't discredit solar energy.

And as you can see by the reactions around you, no one is angry that the recycling isn't being done. They're angry at the recycling. A process that directly completes with big oil's product. That's the scam.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-06-03 20:09:19+00:00
You misunderstand. I mean the thinking that you say “_is_ the writing”. But the final words aren’t the thoughts that you should be graded on (aka “this is not a pipe”, but your essay is not your thoughts). What a new assessment could look like is an open book debate with a human (or, hell, with a rubber duck LLM). If at the end your thoughts are organized and self consistent you’ve done well.
by nsagent | 2025-06-03 20:09:46+00:00
> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.

I was willing to read until I got to this part. He can shove this drivel up his own ass for all I care if that's how he thinks. What a waste of time.
by dang | 2025-06-03 20:09:50+00:00
Wtf? You can't post like this to Hacker News and we ban accounts that do.

Worse, you've been posting similar things elsewhere too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848538).

I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good things, but if you keep posting ideological and/or political flamebait, and especially religious or nationalistic slurs, we will. Therefore, if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by blibble | 2025-06-03 20:10:24+00:00
under the US Cloud Act: if the company is owned or operated by a US company, or it is majority controlled by US citizens then "sovereign" is simply not true

just like airlines: the licensing regime for very large cloud providers should require majority control by european shareholders

hopefully those writing the "sovereign service audit checklists" are competent enough to see through this subterfuge
by yencabulator | 2025-06-03 20:10:35+00:00
Yeah. I'm more a working programmer than an academic, I fundamentally can't care about the fancy theory if the tool isn't usable in real code (I'm looking at you, `verus! { everything is here and utterly miserable to use }`).

Put differently: If the "academically superior" tooling isn't good enough, I'll be sticking to testing, fuzzers and sans-I/O style architecture with deterministic simulation testing.

The best thing the Rust project could do at this point is to come up with a precondition/postcondition/invariant/etc syntax that a majority of the academics agree with, with the power to express forall and exists and such. Something that is syntactically close to Rust, can be used to annotate normal code, and can be extended tool-by-tool with something that looks like standard attribute macros etc. Then get the academics to focus on the semantics and underlying verification mechanism, while the working programmer gets `debug_assert!` power out of that.
by ofalkaed | 2025-06-03 20:11:21+00:00
Sure, but all you really need is the Forth spec and some basic programming skills in any language, even Bash[0] will work. Get a working Forth up and running with the core words and then start improving it and expanding it, develop that basic core into a higher level interpreted language. You will learn far more than you would following a guide.

[0] One of my odder Forths was fs4th, FileSystemForth. It was implemented with Bash aliases and variables, the stacks were just paths, there was a directory called stack and in it there were numbered directories to represent the stack and what you pushed and popped onto the stack were files. It was a weird way to work with files but I could see it having niche uses. I also made a more normal Forth in Bash as a quick project to refresh my Bash skills.