MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spicy69 | 2025-06-05 06:58:47+00:00
I use orgmode's ~tilde = "for code"~ and =equals_for_filenames.txt=, but what do I know.

I also like [Markdown's text first](https://hyperlink.com) then link format much more than [[https://hyperlink.com][Orgmode's link first then text]].

But for the life of me, there are so many things I hate about Markdown:

- Alternative syntax for _italic_ *italic* and __bold__ **bold** (why?) - versus using /italic/ and *bold*. It just feels so right - You need to use HTML tags <u>to underline</u>, or 
strikethrough
, or just about anything in Markdown (including line breaks! You need to use the <br> tag) - +strikethrough+ is alright, but _underline_ just makes sense - Lack of a unified Markdown standard: - Diminishes portability (e.g. varying approaches for file meta tags like in Obsidian) - Causes different renderings of the same document (e.g. Obsidian vs GitHub) - There was a serious standardization effort in 'Standard Markdown', only for the original creator to be a knob about it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/

It's a shame too because despite Orgmode being superior to Markdown in just about every way, its adoption is nowhere near as close (editing is hard on iOS, and needing Emacs is a barrier for the general public).

Markdown isn't going away anytime soon.
by speed_spread | 2025-06-05 06:58:52+00:00
Fuck no, it's not. But I've seen it because it gets promoted by some smartass tech lead chasing so called webscale performance. But they never do comparative benchmarks against regular blocking code for fear that it would demonstrate the true nature of their head trip. Then they leave to go shit elsewhere and leave other people to deal with the consequences of their hubris.
by StanislavPetrov | 2025-06-05 06:59:49+00:00
>Re reading your comment, the straw man about "democracy is actually the institutions" makes me think I may have fallen for a troll so I'm just going to stop here.

You haven't, so be assured.

>I think it's a misreading to say the government should do whatever the whim of the most vocal, gerrymandered jurisdictions are.

It shouldn't, and I didn't argue that. My argument is that the people in charge have completely disregarded the will of the people en mass for a long time, and that the people are so outraged and desperate that at this point they are willing to vote for anyone who will upend the elite consensus that refuses to change.

>Instead, it is a supposed to be a republic with educated, ethical professionals doing the lawmaking within a very rigid structure designed to limit power severely in order to protect individual liberty.

How is that working out for us? Snowden's revelations were in 2013. An infinite number of blatantly illegal and unconstitutional programs actively being carried out by various government agencies. Who was held to account? Nobody. What was changed? Nothing. Who was in power? The supposedly "good" team that respects democracy. Go watch the conformation hearing of Tulsi Gabbard from this year. Watch Democratic Senator after Democratic Senator denounce Snowden as a traitor and repeatedly demand that she denounce him as well, as a litmus test for whether or not she could be confirmed as DNI (this is not a comment on Gabbard one way or another). My original comment disputed the contention that one party was for democracy and the other party was against it. Go watch that video and tell me that the Democrats support liberty, freedom, democracy and a transparent government. I don't support either of the parties, and this is one of the many reasons why.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-05 07:00:53+00:00
>Agnostic, at least as I was using it, was intending to mean 'who knows'. That's very different from a 50% possibility

I take "don't know" to mean the outcome is 50/50 either way because that's the default probability of "don't know"

> not evidence LLMs will continue to AGI, even more so now given we're running into the limits of scaling it

Never said it was. The human brain is evidence of what can be physically realized and that is compelling evidence that it can be built by us. It's not definitive evidence but it's compelling evidence. Fusion is less compelling because we don't have any evidence of it existing on earth.

>AI winter is a common term for a reason. We make huge progress in a short amount of time, everyone goes crazy with hype, then it dies down for years or decades

>AI winter is a common term for a reason. We make huge progress in a short amount of time, everyone goes crazy with hype, then it dies down for years or decades

AI winter refers to a singular event that happened through the entire history of AI. It is not a term applicable to a common occurrence as you seem to imply. We had one winter, and that is not enough to establish a pattern that it is going to repeat.

>1. LLMs are good at specific, well defined tasks with clear outcomes. The thing that got them there is hitting its limit

What's the thing that got them there? Training data?

>It matters.. because everyone's hyped up and saying we're all going to be replaced but they can't fill in the 2. It's a religious debate because it's blind faith without evidence

The hype is in the other direction. On HN everyone is overwhelmingly against AI and making claims that it will never happen. Also artists are already replaced. I worked at a company where artists did in fact get replaced by AI.
by sokoloff | 2025-06-05 07:01:41+00:00
Because their tenant can just go down the street and rent from another landlord whose costs did not increase by $10-20K/yr.

In a world where LVTs increased taxes on all nearby landlords, that threat is an empty one. Sure, they can threaten to go move 10 miles away or eventually to go move into a beehive apartment that will be built 3 years from now to optimally house humans while not leaving a shred of land under-used.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-05 07:06:01+00:00
> One analysis I’d like to see is how a pure LVT tax shifts the tax burden toward people with less valuable homes while giving a break to people with nicer homes.

In practice this would end up being the opposite. Right now if you have two plots of land of the same size and one of them has a single big mansion while the other has a condo tower with 50 units, the mansion is valued at a million dollars and the condo tower is valued at 25 million dollars, implying that each of the condo units is $500k. So each of the condo units is being taxed half as much as the mansion, but the total for that plot of land is really 25 times as much.

Under LVT they both pay the same for the land, but then the owner of the mansion is paying 100% of the tax on the land and each of the condo owners is paying 2% as much instead of 50% as much.

You only get the result you're referring to if you have people building a single small house on a plot of land big enough for a mansion or large multi-unit building. But in that case why are they consuming so much land for such a small structure? Making inefficient use of high-value land is a luxury.
by globular-toast | 2025-06-05 07:07:12+00:00
It's not that they can't, it's just pointless to offer a licence for something that's in the public domain.

Also it's important to remember these works are not in the public domain because someone declared them to be, they are simply because they are works carried out by the US government. Similar to how copyright is automatic, it's not applied only when you put the copyright symbol, that's just informational.
by tomhow | 2025-06-05 07:07:51+00:00
Please don't comment like this on Hacker News, it's against the guidelines, especially these ones:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id= 44186635 and marked it off topic.
by hollowturtle | 2025-06-05 07:08:52+00:00
Missing forest by chatting about a problem? I keep going back to agents from time to time, never worked for me, and I already spend a lot of time understanding boss tickets(via extra meetings and feedback loops) I don't want explain again down the line, my strong opinion is that I'm paid for doing real work augmented by AI, not assigning "tickets" to the AI
by 1_08iu | 2025-06-05 07:09:16+00:00
If people feel that they need to learn different language patterns in order to communicate effectively in their native language with an LLM then I'm not sure if I agree. I think that if your native language truly was a programming language then there wouldn't be any need for prompt engineering.

Regardless, I think that programmers are quite well-suited to the methods described in the article, but only in the same way that programmers are generally better at Googling things than the average person; they can imagine what the system needs to see in order to produce the result they want even if that isn't necessarily a natural description of their problem.
by preisschild | 2025-06-05 07:09:22+00:00
> The science service of the German Bundestag seems to disagree [4]. A more comprehensive study is here [5].

You are wrong. It's not the science service of the Bundestag quoted in your link, but the exact same junk-science study by the anti-nuclear "Forum Ökologisch-Soziale Marktwirtschaft" that you quote below

See here: https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/14/080/1408084.pdf

Antwort des Parlamentarischen Staatssekretärs Siegmar Mosdorf vom 15. Januar 2002 > In Deutschland sind bisher in Leichtwasserreaktoren ca. 3 225 Mrd. kWh erzeugt und in öffentliche Netze eingespeist worden. Subventio- nen für die kommerzielle Stromerzeugung aus Kernenergie gab es nicht. Allerdings wurde die Forschung auf dem Gebiet der Kern- energie durch öffentliche Mittel unterstützt.

Translated:

Answer from Parliamentary State Secretary Siegmar Mosdorf dated January 15, 2002 In Germany, around 3,225 billion kWh have been generated in light water reactors and fed into the public grid. There are no subsidies for commercial electricity generation from nuclear energy . However, research in the field of nuclear energy has been supported by public funds.
by disambiguation | 2025-06-05 07:09:30+00:00
I've never read moldbug but I know people who know people in certain circles - and I can't tell if his ideas genuinely captivate the imagination of the elite, or if he's a kind of Judas goat, because the non-elite are definitely captivated by his ideas. I feel like his work came at a time when the Right lost its core conservative values. Libertarianism was poised as the successor but was defeated, leaving a vacuum for something new. I think yarvin's ideas also satisfies the right's need for something intellectual to stand up to left wing ideology, but there's the possibility that its simply an intellectual trap - consistent and elaborate, but untrue due to false assumptions. Strange times.
by elgenie | 2025-06-05 07:10:30+00:00
When the words are actually spelled out the sheer ridiculousness of "Full Self Driving" having a "(Supervised)" postscript becomes rather readily apparent.

Tesla can't help but know that the supposed non-driver getting constantly nagged to be vigilant as if actively driving destroys most of the value proposition of FSD. Vision Attention Monitoring has quite a bit of potential to be very useful … precisely in situations in which vehicles are not driving themselves.
by irjustin | 2025-06-05 07:10:37+00:00
> levels 3 and 4 are supposed to have the same behavior.

This isn't correct. Level 4 doesn't require driver intervention[0]. Hence, why I'm arguing "Full Self Driving" starts here, level 4.

So now if you're explicitly not required to "be present" then the system should be liable or at least the "driver" isn't to blame directly.

It's actually level 5 is the same as level 4 but add heavy rain, snow, ice, name-your-adverse-condition.

[0] https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-05 07:10:44+00:00
When they're making billions from their cut on app store sales and receiving billions from Google to do nothing, and people buy their devices anyway, why would Apple care?

If people keep buying your devices anyway it's feedback to the company management that the customers aren't bothered and you can keep doing what you're doing, so there's no reason to change anything. It's the PRO of being a monopoly and a money printer.
by octo888 | 2025-06-05 07:11:30+00:00
Exactly. The ECJ flapped a bit in 2019 about this but then last year opined that the current interpretation "legitimate interest" by the Dutch DPA is too strict (on the topic of whether purely commercial interests counts)

It's a farce and just like the US constitution they'll just continuously argue about the meanings of words and erode then over time
by AStonesThrow | 2025-06-05 07:11:45+00:00
One night I was fresh off the plane in Barcelona and my friend had taken me to a restaurant for supper. Knowing plenty of Spanish and Romance languages, I could mostly figure out how to read menus and signs. I went to find the Men's Room which was downstairs.

I must've pushed the door instead of pulling it, then I decided it was locked, and so I loitered there waiting for the other guy to exit the bathroom, and I waited a long time, being still rather disoriented in a foreign country for the first time.

And one guy emerged, and I tested the door again, but decided it had locked behind him. A second guy came out and I was like "hey wait, this is not a one-man room!" And that is when I rediscovered how bathroom doors work.

Nothing in this scenario was actually unfamiliar or unusual, but I suppose being in Catalonia instead of the U.S., I expected it to be so!
by unwind | 2025-06-05 07:12:52+00:00
Very nice-looking for being SVG!

One possibly uncalled-for piece of feedback: is that USB-C connection finished, and is it complying with the various detection resistor requirements for the CCx pins? It seemed very bare and empty, I was expecting some Rd network to make the upstream host able to identify the device. Sorry if I'm missing the obvious, I'm not an electronics engineer.

See [1] for instance.

[1]: https://medium.com/@leung.benson/how-to-design-a-proper-usb-...
by thephyber | 2025-06-05 07:13:18+00:00
It’s WAY more complicated than that.

Where is the HQ of the company?

Where does the company operate?

What country is the individual user in?

What country do the servers and data reside in?

Ditto for service vendors who also deal with user data.

Even within the EU, this is a mess and companies would rather use a simple heuristic like put all servers and store all data for EU users in the most restrictive country (I’ve heard Germany).
by mattlondon | 2025-06-05 07:13:45+00:00
Likewise, why should America be able to override European laws regarding European users in Europe?

It's all about jurisdiction. Do business in Country X? Then you need to follow Country X's laws.

Same as if you go on vacation to County Y. If you do something that is illegal in Country Y while you are there, even if it's legal in your home country, you still broke the law in Country Y and will have to face the consequences.
by jjk166 | 2025-06-05 07:13:47+00:00
Again, that's not a win for anybody. No one winds up in a better position than where they started, there is no payback in exchange for the temporary drawback, which also isn't temporary if the final standard is inferior.

If some people like hip hop but more people like country, it's not a win for everybody to eliminate the hip hop radio stations so we can all listen to a single country station.
by photonthug | 2025-06-05 07:15:35+00:00
Yep. Tfa mentions elixir being below the suggestions to rewrite a web app in rust and golang (??). The conclusion here should be that the LLM cannot be trusted that much, but we know that’s not going to happen, so anyone who wants to remain relevant must start playing games and damn the consequences.

Now instead of improving the language in other ways there will be distracting constant pressure to appease the machine. Now call this added “efficiency” with AI, similar to how adtech calls hiring your own director of marketing and paying tons of people who actually work for google with money from your own company coffers “5:1 ROI on advertising investment“.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-06-05 07:17:49+00:00
Depends what you consider better motor skills, but I couldn't fall head first from a two story building, land on my feet and shrug it off. My cat likely could. I'd also struggle to hunt a healthy bird without tools to assist me.

Then again, my cat lacks opposable thumbs and would struggle to draw a line on a piece of paper with a pen.
by thom | 2025-06-05 07:18:00+00:00
I have search enabled 100% of the time with ChatGPT and would never go back to raw-dogging LLM citations. O3 especially has passed the threshold of “not always annoying”. Had an argument with Gemini yesterday where it was insisting on some hallucinated implementation of a function even while giving me a GitHub link to the correct source.
by epistasis | 2025-06-05 07:19:06+00:00
I'm not "playing dumb" it's basically exactly the type of text I would type in my notes before it was codified. Headers, bullets, bold, italic, all would have fit in perfectly in text-based Usenet groups of the 90s.

It's not "clutter" it's meaningful information for the human eye in plain text.

Which is why I'm asking: what's your alternative? Is it no headers, no lists, no standard * or \_ for emphasis, as it has been done long before Markdown existed?
by DidYaWipe | 2025-06-05 07:19:12+00:00
And read-me files are for, <gasp>, READING. Not writing. I have no need to EDIT any Markdown files... pretty much ever. Nor do I need to clutter my IDE with tabs devoted to reference material, much less an extra pane to "preview" it in its intended rendering.

Your pretension that most programming involves writing Markdown "source code" is absurd. I neither want nor need Markdown in any of my source-code editors, ever. Not once in decades of professional programming have I missed it.

And if I do need to create Markdown, I will want to do so in a simple WYSIWIG editor and save it as MD. Again... not in my IDE.
by a_tartaruga | 2025-06-05 07:19:18+00:00
I have to disagree with this strongly. Git is probably the perfect software. It is designed around a mental model that is exactly matched to its use case. Far from copy pasting experienced developers are often fluent in the git model and use it intentionally. I took a look at the man page out of curiosity given your 95 percent comment and I would agree that the majority of ancillary and log level commands are unused. But looking only at the main porcelain commands I would say I regularly use 80 percent of them.
by StanislavPetrov | 2025-06-05 07:21:27+00:00
Germany, where they lock you up for criticizing politicians[1] or where they have a ban against protesting for Palestine because it's "antisemitic"?[2]

Or UK where you can get locked up for blasphemy[3] or where they lock up ~30 people a day for saying offensive things online because of their Online Safety Act?[4]

Or perhaps Romania where an election that didn't turn out the way the EU elites wanted is overturned based on nebulous (and later proven false) accusation that the election was somehow influenced by a TikTok campaign by the Russians that later turned out to have been funded by a Romanian opposition party.[5]

I could go on and on, but unfortunately most other western democracies are just as flawed, if not worse. Hopefully we can all strive for a better future and flush the authoritarians, from all the parties.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc

[2] https://www.euronews.com/2023/10/19/mass-arrests-following-p...

[3] https://news.sky.com/story/man-convicted-after-burning-koran...

[4] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...

[5] https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
by jillesvangurp | 2025-06-05 07:21:46+00:00
This is why American cloud providers have legal entities outside of the US. Those have to comply with the law in the countries where they are based if they want to do business there. That's how AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. can do business in the EU. Most of that business is neatly partitioned from any exposure to US courts. There are some treaties that govern what these companies can and cannot send back to the US that some might take issue with and that are policed and scrutinized quite a bit on the EU side.

OpenAI does this as well of course. Any EU customers are going to insist on paying via an EU based entity in euros and will be talking to EU hosted LLMs with all data and logs being treated under EU law, not US law. This is not really optional for commercial use of SAAS services in the EU. To get lucrative enterprise contracts outside the US, OpenAI has no other choice but to adapt to this. If they don't, somebody else will and win those contracts.

I actually was at a defense conference in Bonn last week talking to a representative of Google Cloud. I was surprised that they were there at all because the Germans are understandably a bit paranoid about trusting US companies with hosting confidential stuff (considering some scandals a few years ago about the CIA spying on the German government a few years ago). But they actually do offer some services to the BWI, which is the part of the German army that takes care of their IT needs. And German spending on defense is of course very high right now so there are a lot of companies trying to sell in Germany, on Germany's terms. Including Google.
by xlii | 2025-06-05 07:21:48+00:00
I have multiple ones. They accumulate dust easily and get damaged much more often. You won’t see that if 99% of the time is in clean environment. As of today I have 3 iPhones that won’t charge on the wire. Those are physical damages so it’s not like anything covers it (and Apple Care is not available in Poland). Same happens with the cables. I’m replacing USB-C display cable (that’s lightning I suppose) every year now because they get loose and start to disconnect if you sneeze in the vicinity.

I despise USB-C with all my heart. Amount of cable trash has tripled over the years.
by raducu | 2025-06-05 07:22:03+00:00
> you can't tell it to remind you of something in 5 minutes without an external agentic architecture.

The problem is not the agentic architecture, the problem is the LLM cannot really add knowledge to itself after the training from its daily usage.

Sure, you can extend the context to milions of tokens, put RAGs on top of it, but LLMs cannot gain an identity of their own and add specialized experience as humans get on the job.

Until that can happen, AI can exceed algorithms olympiad levels, and still not be as useful on the daily job as the mediocre guy who's been at it for 10 yers.