MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aosaigh | 2025-06-19 14:31:08+00:00
> “You’re Scott Aaronson?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?”

Give me strength. So much hubris with these guys (and they’re almost always guys).

I would have assumed that a rationalist would look for truth and not correctness.

Oh wait, it’s all just a smokescreen for know-it-alls to show you how smart they are.
by diggan | 2025-06-19 14:31:49+00:00
> If "AI" worked (which fortunately isn't the case), humans would be degraded to passive consumers in the last domain in which they were active creators: thinking.

"AI" (depending on what you understand that to be) is already "working" for many, including myself. I've basically stopped using Google because of it.

> humans would be degraded to passive consumers in the last domain in which they were active creators: thinking

Why? I still think (I think at least), why would I stop thinking just because I have yet another tool in my toolbox?

> you would have to pay centralized corporations that stole all of humanity's intellectual output for engaging in your profession

Assuming we'll forever be stuck in the "mainframe" phase, then yeah. I agree that local models aren't really close to SOTA yet, but the ones you can run locally can already be useful in a couple of focused use cases, and judging by the speed of improvements, we won't always be stuck in this mainframe-phase.

> Mediocre developers are enabled to have a 10x volume (not quality).

In my experience, which admittedly been mostly in startups and smaller companies, this has always been the case. Most developers seem to like to produce MORE code over BETTER code, I'm not sure why that is, but I don't think LLMs will change people's mind about this, in either direction. Shitty developers will be shit, with or without LLMs.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-19 14:31:57+00:00
Neither India nor China allow dual citizenship, so a US citizen of Indian or Chinese origin who argues in favor of one or the other at the expense of the US's strategic goals is absolutely suspect.

> Look at the outrage about the "invasion" because some protestors hoisted Mexican flags

Because LA Chicanos did not realize how inflammatory using the Mexican flag is in anti-government protests outside the California.

In CA, it's well understood it's used as an identity marker (though still exclusionary, as a growing portion of the Hispanic community in CA isn't Mexican anymore), but outside CA using another country's flag at the expense of the US absolutely is viewed as a severe faux pas.
by bell-cot | 2025-06-19 14:31:58+00:00
If you have a good specific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse , and you can get decent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_ratio s in your lower stages, then 2 stages are definitely the way to go to LEO. Every stage over 2 adds a load of weight (more engines, structure, etc.), lots of ground system/support complexity, and a whole 'nother stage separation worth of failure modes.
by qualeed | 2025-06-19 14:32:49+00:00
>"hardware interrupts" (whatever that means)

Hardware interrupts are a standard part of computing. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrupt#Hardware_interrupts)

"Android also inherits the interrupt mechanism from Linux, which is designed for the efficient communication between the CPU and external devices. When new hardware events (e.g., user touching the screen) come, the corresponding hardware device (e.g., touchscreen controller) sends a signal to ask OS for immediate processing"

And, at least previously, the timing of interrupts have been used to facilitate information leakage. For example:

"Through analyzing the interrupt time series produced from touchscreen controller, attacker’s chance of cracking user’s unlock pattern is increased substantially. The interrupt time series produced from Display Sub-System reveals unique UI refreshing patterns and could be leveraged as fingerprints to identify the app running in the foreground"

https://staff.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/~khzhang/my-papers/2016-oakland...

It's been awhile since I've looked closely at anything related to phones, but for decades /proc/interrupts was globally readable. It may still be.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-06-19 14:33:00+00:00
And that every extra gets their own story; the random slave that Jabba kills is mostly forgettable but apparently in the extended universe, she survives, is or becomes a jedi and becomes Luke Skywalker's wife ???

It really feels like they have absorbed fanfiction into the mainline series. The Star Wars sequels had potential after the first film, but since it seems they had no idea what they were doing the second and third were a waste. The very intentionally placed marketable plushies did not help.

The Hobbit could have been fine, but they botched the production, had to pull in Peter Jackson to try and save it, they made it a cynical cash grab with forcing it to become a trilogy with unrelated story and made-up plotlines put in. Rings of Power was completely unnecessary and I have zero intention to watch it.

In hindsight, the Matrix sequels were actually alright. For one thing they pushed the technology (and budgets) of filmmaking forwards, with the big gun suits vs the tentacle robots segment costing more than most films that had been made up until then.
by noworriesnate | 2025-06-19 14:33:06+00:00
Wouldn’t it be better to spend the time understanding the reality of the situation in Gaza from multiple angles rather than philosophizing on abstract concepts? I.e. there are different degrees of genocide, but that doesn’t matter in this context because what’s happening in Gaza is not abstract or theoretical.

In other words, your question ignores so much nuance that it’s a red herring IMO.
by everdrive | 2025-06-19 14:33:16+00:00
And when I block js, most websites are still readable. (some even look better!) The fact that some sites work just fine without js mean that most could. Certainly the sites load much, much quickly without the js. 90% of the time all I want is the text, which loads perfectly without it. JS is a huge waste of resources with no real benefit to consumers. Some web apps need it, yes, but even those could still do fine without it. (until recently there was still an HTML gmail app which worked just fine.)
by diggan | 2025-06-19 14:34:09+00:00
> LLMs don’t know what it is

Of course they don't, they're probability/prediction machines, they don't "know" anything, not even that Paris is the capital of France. What they do "know" is that once someone writes "The capital of France is", the most likely tokens to come after that, is "Paris". But they don't understand the concept, nor anything else, just that probably 54123 comes after 6723 (or whatever the tokens are).

Once you understand this, I think it's easy to reason about why they don't understand code quality, why they couldn't ever understand it, and how you can make them output quality code regardless.
by dagw | 2025-06-19 14:34:12+00:00
The big question you need to get the answer for is will you be writing 'modern' PHP or maintaining 'legacy' PHP.

Modern PHP using the latest tools and frameworks and modern PHP best practices isn't too bad a language. Far from my favourite, but quite decent.

'Legacy' PHP on the other hand can be a nightmare, especially if it's a system that has been around since the PHP4/5 days and still written in style of the time. I would definitely stay away from that.

As to resume impact, I wouldn't overthink the language. Most decent companies care much more about what you where doing, than what language you where doing it in. Building a cutting edge micro service setup that scaled and performed really well (in PHP) should easily count in your favour.
by technofiend | 2025-06-19 14:34:17+00:00
A childhood favorite and warm, nostalgic memory as an adult. A good friend of mine and I taped a spoof of Copacabana by Barry Manilow and got a really lovely letter back from the good doctor saying he'd done his best but couldn't play our tape. My friend had gotten a tape splicing kit from Radio Shack and insisted we cut the tape down to just our demo. Somehow we botched it and sent Dr. Demento a blank tape. He said he repaired our splice job and even tried flipping the tape in case we'd done the same by accident. Which was a really kind and probably time consuming gesture for a random tape sent in by two fifth graders. The man is a gem.

The only lyrics I remember from our spoof are how it starts: Her name was Lola, she was a show bot, but that was many years ago, when her neon used to glow. Oh well. Time to download an MP3 or two and subject my wife to Fish heads and I'm looking over my dead dog Rover.
by midenginedcoupe | 2025-06-19 14:34:32+00:00
But I think that's my major issue with the app as I understand it.

Starting by choosing which muscle to work is a really odd choice. If you're novice enough that you don't know which movements to choose then you're also likely to not know which are the most effective muscles to target for your goals.

Then the app gives you a bunch of exercises to target that one muscle, but doesn't tell you which other muscles the exercise also targets. Or any clues on suitable weights or rep ranges, never mind progression. It also seems it's suggesting doing all the suggested movements. I picked barbell and pecs and it gave me three exercises. Then, even more weirdly, I came in again to write this comment and selecting the same options it gave me a different set of three exercises. First time around it didn't even suggest barbell bench press - the most obvious and common exercises for that muscle and equipment. That's all really confusing and un-obvious.

Being able to pick a template programme and tweak from there seems a much friendlier way of getting started.
by vidarh | 2025-06-19 14:35:34+00:00
You'd run it on any architecture that can spawn a process and attach to stdin/stdout.

The overhead of spawning a process is not the problem. The overhead if your runtime is huge and/or slow to start could be, in which case you simply wouldn't run it on a serverless system - which is ludicrously expensive at scale anyway (my dayjob is running a consultancy where the big money-earner is helping people cut their cloud costs, and moving them off serverless systems that are entirely wrong for them is often one of the big savings; it's cheap for tiny systems, but even then often the hassle isn't worth it)
by mananaysiempre | 2025-06-19 14:35:40+00:00
The umlaut comes from an e written above the letter, and is thus historically distinct from the diaeresis aka tréma (as in Noël, naïve). I first realized after that looking at Fraktur street signs in Vienna, where it is more like two vertical lines, but the most immediate understanding will probably come after looking at the lowercase e in a table of Kurrentschrift[1].

Which, incidentally, is missing in TFA. Funny how thoroughly the Nazis managed to erase that piece of German legacy (and the only modern Latin-script cursive distinct not coming from the familliar Irish>Italian lineage).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent
by api | 2025-06-19 14:35:58+00:00
That's exactly what Rationalism(tm) is.

The basic trope is showing off how smart you are and what I like to call "intellectual edgelording." The latter is basically a fetish for contrarianism. The big flex is to take a very contrarian position -- according to what one imagines is the prevailing view -- and then defend it in the most creative way possible.

Intellectual edgelording gives us shit like neoreaction ("monarchy is good actually" -- what a contrarian flex!), timeless decision theory, and wild-ass shit like the Zizians, effective altruists thinking running a crypto scam is the best path to maximizing their utility, etc.

Whether an idea is contrarian or not is unrelated to whether it's a good idea or not. I think the fetish for contrarianism might have started with VCs playing public intellectual, since as a VC you make the big bucks when you make a contrarian bet that pays off. But I think this is an out-of-context misapplication of a lesson from investing to the sphere of scientific and philosophical truth. Believing a lot of shitty ideas in the hopes of finding gems is a good way to drive yourself bonkers. "So I believe in the flat Earth, vaccines cause autism, and loop quantum gravity, so I figure one big win this portfolio makes me a genius!"

Then there's the cults. I think this stuff is to Silicon Valley and tech what Scientology is to Hollywood and the film and music industries.
by pja | 2025-06-19 14:36:07+00:00
> You have to be extremely verbose in describing all of your requirements. There is seemingly no such thing as too much detail.

Sounds like ... programming.

Program specification is programming, ultimately. For any given problem if you’re lucky the specification is concise & uniquely defines the required program. If you’re unlucky the spec ends up longer than the code you’d write to implement it, because the language you’re writing it in is less suited to the problem domain than the actual code.
by drhagen | 2025-06-19 14:36:23+00:00
1s in other ordinals were misread, but two 1s next to each other were misread wildly more often than anything else. My current theory, which I only hint at in the last paragraph, was that "nth" was in the OCR dictionary, "nth" is close to "11th" in pixel space, and no other ordinal is that similar to a dictionary word. Therefore, "11th" gets misread most often.
by toyg | 2025-06-19 14:36:44+00:00
The coming of AR glasses has finally opened the market for "cyberdecks". I don't think they will be massively popular, but there is definitely an audience among geeks who travel a lot. I would totally buy one to pair with my XREAL One glasses.

The problem will be finding the right scale. LingLong had a crack with a limited kickstarter run, but they don't seem interested in following up with sustained mass-production.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-06-19 14:36:47+00:00
I think that chemistry, physics, and mathematics, are engaged in a program of understanding their subject in terms of the sort of first principles that Descartes was after. Reduction of the subject to a set of simpler thoughts that are outside of it.

Biologists stand out because they have already given up on that idea. They may still seek to simplify complex things by refining principles of some kind, but it's a "whatever stories work best" approach. More Feyerabend, less Popper. Instead of axioms they have these patterns that one notices after failing to find axioms for a while.
by elt895 | 2025-06-19 14:36:50+00:00
Are there other philosophy- or history-grounded sources that are comparable? If so, I’d love some recommendations. Yudkowsky and others have their problems, but their texts have an interesting points, are relatively easy to read and understand, and you can clearly see which real issues they’re addressing. From my experience, alternatives tend to fall into two categories: 1. Genuine classical philosophy, which is usually incredibly hard to read and after 50 pages I have no idea what the author is even talking about anymore. 2. Basically self help books that take one or very few idea and repeat them ad nouseam for 200 pages.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-06-19 14:37:04+00:00
I most certainly would like to see tax havens abolished worldwide. And I would most certainly like to see these corporations and their executive pay the taxes that they should be paying.

But I've come to realise that the apathetic general public only care about being racist, sexist and homophobic to each other whilst the ruling class laugh all the way to the bank. And the few intelligent people who understand what's going on don't raise their voices so long as their high tech salary is protected, so long as their taxes aren't raised, so long as they can own a holiday home or two when others struggle for their first home.

If you actually look into the numbers, what tax companies like Apple, Google, Amazon etc actually pay it's just...yeah.
by diggan | 2025-06-19 14:37:12+00:00
> Does anybody really want to be an assembly line QA reviewer for an automated code factory? Sounds like shit.

On the other hand, does anyone really wanna be a code-monkey implementing CRUD applications over and over by following product specifications by "product managers" that barely seem to understand the product they're "managing"?

See, we can make bad faith arguments both ways, but what's the point?
by bandoti | 2025-06-19 14:37:17+00:00
Seurat created beautiful works of art composed of thousands of tiny dots, painted by hand; one might find it meditational with the right mindset.

Some might also find laziness itself dreadfully boring—like all the Microsoft employees code-reviewing AI-Generated pull requests!

https://blog.stackademic.com/my-new-hobby-watching-copilot-s...
by gilleain | 2025-06-19 14:37:51+00:00
> protein folding (reduction to quantum chemistry),

I am not sure in what sense folding simulations are reducable to quantum chemistry. There are interesting 'hybrid' approaches where some (limited) quantum calculations are done for a small part of the structure - usually the active site I suppose - and the rest is done using more standard molecular mechanics/molecular dynamics approaches.

Perhaps things have progressed a lot since I worked in protein bioinformatics. As far as I know, even extremely short simulations at the quantum level were not possible for systems with more than a few atoms.
by dboreham | 2025-06-19 14:37:59+00:00
I like the idea, but I'd want this functionality "unbundled".

Being able to run a registry server over the local containerd image store is great.

The details of how some other machine's containerd gets images from that registry to me is a separate concern. docker pull will work just fine provided it is given a suitable registry url and credentials. There are many ways to provide the necessary network connectivity and credentials sharing and so I don't want that aspect to be baked in.

Very slick though.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-19 14:39:13+00:00
If something were to happen to Apollo, the blast radius would be limited to those 3 people. If something happens to your car with 3 people onboard while travelling down the motorway, the blast radius could affect other cars with their people onboard. This would make the failure even more spectacular having unsuspecting civilians affected vs 3 highly trained volunteers for mission. All this to say that I think we are way underplaying "it's just a car" type of thoughts here
by sillystuff | 2025-06-19 14:39:50+00:00
I really liked the idea of Framework making inter-changeable parts available for their laptops-- allowing the purchaser to keep the laptop running / upgrading as long as they wish. I also liked not having to buy parts with the laptop that I will be replacing anyway (SSD, RAM). Unfortunately, Framework now includes wifi even with the bare bones laptops, so some e-waste from replacing that.

But, the premium paid is high. And, their warranty support was, in my opinion, not a good experience. The expansion cards, which are just USB dongles internal to the computer, are gimmicky and waste space that could be used for something useful, like a slot for a second SSD, or larger battery.

I ended up sending back the Framework 13, I recently purchased, because of the warranty support experience for a mechanical issue with a single expansion card (usb dongle). Framework support had me jump through hoops for a week, repeating tests, asking me to answer the same questions again and again, and finally, "now do everything again and make a video and upload it to youtube" [actual request from Framework]. All for a part that retails for $9. The experience spooked me, and I sent back the laptop for a refund during the 30 day return window.

The Dell I replaced it with has an inferior screen*, a slightly inferior keyboard, vastly inferior CPU cooling (the Dell thermal throttles under heavy load), but Dell was half the price, and it arrived at my door 8 hours after I ordered it. And, unless things have changed, Dell warranty support was always excellent.

Hopefully Framework fixes the issues with their warranty support process. I hope they succeed.

* Dim screen on Dell mitigated by using the money I saved on the laptop price, to buy a portable 13" e-ink monitor which is vastly superior to the Framework display when working outdoors.
by DanHulton | 2025-06-19 14:39:52+00:00
I'm curious where that expectation of the flip comes from? Your experience (and mine, frankly) would seem to indicate the opposite, so from whence comes this certainty that one day it'll change entirely and become reliable instead?

I ask (and I'll keep asking) because it really seems like the prevailing narrative is that these tools have improved substantially in a short period of time, and that is seemingly enough justification to claim that they will continue to improve until perfection because...? waves hands vaguely

Nobody ever seems to have any good justification for how we're going to overcome the fundamental issues with this tech, just a belief that comes from SOMEWHERE that it'll happen anyway, and I'm very curious to drill down into that belief and see if it comes from somewhere concrete or it's just something that gets said enough that it "becomes true", regardless of reality.
by zug_zug | 2025-06-19 14:40:01+00:00
Meh, imo this is wrong.

What Kubernetes is missing most is a 10 year track record of simplicity/stability. What it needs most to thrive is a better reputation of being hard to foot-gun yourself with.

It's just not a compelling business case to say "Look at what you can do with kubernetes, and you only need a full-time team of 3 engineers dedicated to this technology at tho cost of a million a year to get bin-packing to the tune of $40k."

For the most part Kubernetes is becoming the common-tongue, despite all the chaotic plugins and customizations that interact with each other in a combinatoric explosion of complexity/risk/overhead. A 2.0 would be what I'd propose if I was trying to kill kuberenetes.
by thegeomaster | 2025-06-19 14:40:11+00:00
I have been using LLMs for coding a lot during the past year, and I've been writing down my observations by task. I have a lot of tasks where my first entry is thoroughly impressed by how e.g. Claude helped me with a task, and then the second entry is a few days after when I'm thoroughly irritated by chasing down subtle and just _strange_ bugs it introduced along the way. As a rule, these are incredibly hard to find and tedious to debug, because they lurk in the weirdest places, and the root cause is usually some weird confabulation that a human brain would never concoct.
by cyberax | 2025-06-19 14:40:33+00:00
Hm. That actually sounds doable (we do have hashes for integrity). I'll try that and see how it goes.

> Instantly sounds like a whole reason to use nix and capture those tools as part of the dependency set.

It's tempting, and I tried that, but ran away crying. We're using Docker images instead for now.

We are also using direnv that transparently execs commands inside Docker containers, this works surprisingly well.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-19 14:40:40+00:00
The Chicano movement made their own flag back in the Cesar Chavez era. 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Gen Los Angeleños of Mexican origin could have used (and plenty did) and a sign finger portion of protestors made sure to incorporate the US flag as well, but a significant portion simply did not realize that the Mexican flag is not viewed as an ethnic marker outside of CA.