MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-06-16 17:14:03+00:00
My opinion is that the so called "AI", when applied to programming, is just a clever trick for avoiding the copyright laws.

Despite the fact that a half of century ago there was a lot of talk about "software reuse", that has never happened at the expected scale, but not for technical reasons. It has never happened because the copyright laws have prevented it.

During the early years of electronic computers, there were computer user groups where the programs of general interest were shared rather freely between different companies, in order to avoid the duplication of programming work. This has changed sharply after the appearance of software as a product that can be sold and bought, separately from computer hardware.

Even when there exists an open-source solution it frequently cannot be incorporated in the program you are writing for a company, due to incompatible copyrights. Therefore much of the programming work consists in rewriting with minor variations programs that have been already written countless times before, but at another company or by some individual.

The "AI" that "writes" a program for you just makes a search instead of you for one of the existing solutions, with the additional advantage that it has searched code bases that you would have been forbidden to search, and it produces a program source that has been detached from its original copyright, allowing it to be inserted in a proprietary program of your company.

A program "written" by an AI will have the highest quality when it almost matches some program that has been present in the training set. Whenever the generated program is more distant from a verbatim reproduction, being a combination of several programs or having some random changes, there is a high probability that the AI has introduced some errors, which must be corrected by a competent programmer in order to get a valid programming solution.

A human could have done exactly the same thing as the "AI", replacing most of the programming with searching then doing copy and paste, with a similar increase in productivity, but this would have been punishable by the existing laws, while when the AI does it, this is legal.

If software reuse would have been possible without copyright restrictions, then indeed less programming jobs would have been needed. So with the "AI" workaround against the laws, it is really expected to see a job number reduction in this domain.
by Frummy | 2025-06-16 17:14:52+00:00
From the thread: yes, it's sarcasm. Here's some clarification as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44291314

Yes, I'm acknowledging a lack of skill transfer, but that there are new ways of working and so I sarcastically imply the article can't see the forest for the trees, missing the big picture. A horse and carriage is very useful for lots of things. A horse is more specialised. I'm getting at the analogy of a technological generalisation and expansion, while logistics is not part of my argument. If you want to write a very good essay and if you're good at that then do it manually. If you want to create scalable workflows and have 5 layers of agents interacting with each other collaboratively and adversarially scouring the internet and newssites and forums to then send investment suggestions to your mail every lunch then that's a scale that's not possible with a pen and paper and so prompting has an expanded cause and effect cone
by VBprogrammer | 2025-06-16 17:15:45+00:00
Yeah, I initially wondered about a botched single engine failure. It's not uncommon in twin piston and turboprop aircraft for someone to shutdown the good engine. It is less common in turbofan aircraft because their performance is typically pretty good, even one engine out, and there is no immediate need to manage the dead engine.

As you say, the complete lack of any unintended yaw motion and lack of any evidence of failure of either engine in the videos make it seem less likely.

An auto-thottle cock up does seem like a likely, if scary, scenario. Two competent pilots on a CAVOK day losing a plane under complete control just by failing to advance the throttles manually. I'd prefer a mechanical fault.
by comrade1234 | 2025-06-16 17:16:17+00:00
It feels like the USA is becoming like India (and others) where a middle class lifestyle depends more and more on the work of the extreme poor. I have friends in India with live-in Nannie's, live-in chef and a driver and they aren't extremely rich - they can get by paying these people a pittance.

The USA similarly relies on low-paid, often illegal, workers being paid less than minimum wage to harvest their food, wash their cars, do their gardening, etc...
by simianwords | 2025-06-16 17:16:25+00:00
> "emergence" as inherently good

I did not claim it as inherently good, only that it is preferable.

> capitalism systematically collapses higher-order questions about what kind of world were building into first-order value propositions like "growth," "utility," and "innovation."

There is nothing about capitalism that ignores second or third order effects of its policies. Let me make it clear what kind of capitalist system we have in place - private ownership and free market regulated by a government that works for and is elected by the people. In this system the free market works but only till it progresses certain things the people voted for like standard of living, freedom etc. If free market does instead has unintended consequences we have levers to guide it where we want like taxes and subsidies.

> Capitalism resists second-order critique from within because it translates every possible value: justice, meaning, even critique itself, into terms it can price or optimize

I think I see were you are getting at but I have to be honest - I think it is coming from a naive place (I'm open to be proven incorrect).

Imagine you had the power and the responsibility to shape lives by enacting policy decisions. You are presented with a fairly complex problem where you have a large number of people, each one with their own lives and interests and you have to guide them into doing something preferable. No matter where you come from, left or right in the political axis, you will end up using quantitative methods. I imagine your problem is with such optimisation. If so, what is your exact critique here? How would you rather handle such a situation? How would you manage a system of so many people and without quantitative method? Religion?

> If you were engaging at the second-order level, you'd interrogate not what the system produces, but what it refuses to ask, and who gets to decide. That silence is precisely my point.

Ok please elaborate (only if you have engaged with my question above).
by workworkwork71 | 2025-06-16 17:16:38+00:00
The product is in early days and in a closed alpha right now. We're looking for test users that are willing to work with us and provide feedback as we squash bugs and build out the platform out of it's infancy.

What you just described is the whole point. If you just responded to that email, one of the co-founders would reach out directly with a question or two and next steps.

We know we are dealing with a touchy but all important subject of managing people's wealth/investments, so it would be irresponsible to allow open account creation and access to investment recommendations without doing our due diligence as founders at this stage.

You might not like the approach (totally fair), but it's brought us incredibly engaged and enthusiastic initial users who's feedback is directly going back into the app in a quick iterative loop.
by IncandescentGas | 2025-06-16 17:17:18+00:00
Since the top comment seems to be judging the worthiness of this individual to work with databases after prison, for those considering working with or hiring someone with a criminal record, I'd beg you to consider:

You're hiring the person as they are today, long after any punishment, rehabilitation, parold, probation, and personal growth. Not who they were at the time of past actions.

Having your own mini trial, where you sit in judgement over the candidate, from your ignorant position of privilege, using whatever details you can dig up with google may be entertaining for you, but is tells you nothing of what kind of employee they might be. Your mock trial may be especially traumatic to endure for the candidate, because their side of the story is rarely included in any reporting you can dig up. Especially for those unfairly convicted.

With everything going on today, do you really trust our justice system to be fair, especially to someone who is not a wealthy and connected straight white male?

If you're only willing to give people a chance when you judge their offence to be trivial by your own ethics, you're not actually providing second chances for those that need it.
by astrobe_ | 2025-06-16 17:17:19+00:00
Yes, Tsukumogami is I believe an instance of animism [1].

AFAIK I am not affected by autism, but I distinctly remember when as a child I refused to eat something because that thing didn't "want" to be eaten. I guess that from my parent's perspective, it was just their child's whim-of-the-day.

But that memory makes me think that animism is something natural - perhaps some sort "bug" in the system that make us attribute intentions [2] to others.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals#Attr...
by ben_w | 2025-06-16 17:17:30+00:00
Nope.

Betavolatics can be just about anything that emits an electron. Could be tritium. Low power due to long half life and low decay energy, but not because it is low-Z.

RTGs can be anything that gets hot from its own radiation. Loads of things with a short half-life and high decay energy, so phosphorus-32 would be a low-Z option, and polonium-210 (which still isn't transuranic) if you're completely disregarding safety.

Big part of the mass budget is shielding, not source. This gets proportionally worse for small sources, as you need a certain thickness (proportional to r^2), while the emitter power is proportional to volume (r^3).
by MarkusQ | 2025-06-16 17:17:33+00:00
To be clear, I was role playing an efficient market fundamentalist. Or trying to.

And (trying to steelman the argument) was careful to not specify which group of people were making the bad decisions. It is obvious that at least one side of any pure monetization trade like this are making a bad decision (and it could be both; for some such games the only winning move is to refuse to play). So I certainly wasn't claiming that people couldn't make decisions this bad since (as you note) this is clearly counterfactual.

My point is that we're seeing an intersection of "you can't cheat an honest man" and "there's a sucker born every minute," with a touch of "we cheart the other guy and pass the savings on to you"; _everyone_ involves thinks they are making a smart move, and in a case like this at least half of them must be wrong.
by cogman10 | 2025-06-16 17:17:38+00:00
A big thing that enabled that was having a community.

It's really hard to make a pot if you are trading making that pot with finding food for the day.

That's why when they did the season with couples, they were able to get a lot more done simply because 1 person could spend the day building a shelter while the other person foraged.

The moose guy that won did so because he had a huge calorie surplus from killing the moose. That freed him up to spend pretty much all his time foraging for plants or building shelter.

> Making lots of tea and thin soups in the winter should have been a target for many of them.

Most plants have almost no calories. Soups are useful as a preservation technique but only work if you are constantly adding fairly calorie dense items (like meat) into the mix. If you haven't sourced beans, potatoes, or rice plants then a soup won't really do much to improve your survival.

The benefit of tea or soup is you are boiling the water which prevents a good number of diseases.
by danans | 2025-06-16 17:17:51+00:00
> If everyone has access to medical care, housing, and education, does it really matter if some people have more on their bank account?

It still matters when some people have 6+ orders of magnitude more wealth than the median person.

Because of this wealth disparity, through the legal channels of campaign contributions, they are able to have a disproportionate and therefore antidemocratic effect on government policy.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-16 17:18:04+00:00
I've responded now to several of your comments, but this is a common enough sign of miseducation among the terminally online that I'll respond again here:

The far left is within their First Amendment rights to create "all the 'end ___ hate' campaigns" they want. The far right is within their First Amendment rights to create all the "hate _____" campaigns they want.

Bystanders, commercial entities, private schools, your friends and family are allowed to be friendly with you or disown you per their own preference for which side you take. They're even allowed to call you mean names like "ignorant fascist incel" if they want. And you're allowed to call them mean names too!

The government is not allowed to utilize state power to suppress either side of the hate or not-hate debate. It is not allowed to utilize state power to compel the "end hate" crowd to be nice to, give jobs to, maintain platforms for, or educate the "hate" crowd, nor vice versa.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-06-16 17:18:09+00:00
Why are Tesla related posts still being flagged? Mr Musk stepped out of his governmental role so criticism of his assets is no longer unavoidably political. My understanding was that criticism of Tesla was for the past few months seen as a political action and that many here don't want any inflammatory political discussions about the current US administration, but what's the current reason for flagging? This is surely tech/business news through and through.
by energywut | 2025-06-16 17:18:11+00:00
Some scientists believe that autistic people have different levels of empathy than allistic people. Sometimes this manifests as higher levels of empathy for objects and animals, or higher emotional empathy.

I'm dx'd autistic, and I am someone who will weep openly or experience unbridled joy alongside, say, a movie about a bunch of animals surviving tough times. But if I see an adult human make a poor choice and suffer consequences I feel nothing. I have to teach myself that my values are that we should care for everyone -- even the people I feel no intrinsic empathy towards.

In speaking with my doc about it, it's apparently not at all uncommon for autistic folks to have this sort of extremely strong empathy response in some cases, while a totally flat empathy response in others.
by strogonoff | 2025-06-16 17:19:32+00:00
> The point is that "human rights" are not part of the natural order, they only exist as laws.

I have seen this argument used before; when something suits an argument, it’s “nature”, when something doesn’t then it isn’t. I think it’s a fallacy.

Humans are part of natural order. Our laws and how they evolve are part of our nature, and by extension part of nature. I don’t believe in silencing such discussions as irrelevant because of an imaginary cutoff point where it stops being part of nature and suddenly becomes “artificial”.

> This means that "human rights" is basically irrelevant to this topic: they may have rights and need to be liberated, or they may be tools that don't, but the law is just words on paper, and officials who make you follow those words.

I’m not sure how it is irrelevant. If we can claim “LLMs are like human, and so their creators and commercial operators are not guilty of IP laundering that LLMs do”, then we have a moral imperative to stop using them because, well, they are like human, and no human should be put through what would be, to any human mind, abuse. If we do not believe they are human and free in this sense, then the excuse quoted above in this paragraph also stops applying.
by temp0826 | 2025-06-16 17:19:42+00:00
I have a Shipibo (indigenous Peruvian language) to Spanish dictionary that I've been trying to translate into a Shipibo to English dictionary using a couple different llms but keep struggling with formatting (two columns, strange line breaks, but also both Shipibo and Spanish in the definitions make it difficult to grok). That all plus being pretty poorly scanned. May need to give this a try.
by korkybuchek | 2025-06-16 17:20:53+00:00
> socket.io is probably one of the most unnecessary libraries on this planet. Websockets are already as simple as possible.

Eh... While I agree that socket.io is one of those libraries you could probably "write" in an afternoon, and Websockets are simple, there are a couple of things that are kinda painful to rewrite time after time:

- keepalives to detect dead sockets - reconnection logic with backoff - ability to switch to long-polling for weird environments - basic multiplexing/namespacing
by pookha | 2025-06-16 17:21:29+00:00
Unlikely...He's an incredibly callous individual that was cutting drugs with a substance orders of magnitude more dangerous than fentanyl so he could drive an Audi and live the high life. Given that they tied several deaths back to his operation, and that it was a multi-state joint effort, I doubt he'd get a slap on the wrist by a European judges.
by kgwgk | 2025-06-16 17:21:36+00:00
> You can measure the changes in entropy from a minimal state and integrate - and you'll get the "total" entropy

That doesn’t help with the following (at least if you keep those kinds of gas in gas state):

> if I give you three containers […] you can measure their entropy using thermodynamic experiments and tell which of the three is a mix of the other two because it will have a higher entropy

But you can weight them, it’s much easier.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-16 17:21:49+00:00
> Initially I looked into ham radio, but it is just too expensive, difficult, and power-hungry to be practical.

Beg to disagree here. 30 dollars for a cheap-ass Quansheng will get you pretty far as long as a repeater is in reach (if it's Echolink capable, worldwide), and a bunch of repeaters for all kinds of modes are tied together not only via the Internet but also via AMPR / HamNet [1]. APRS and DMR capable devices are in the 200 dollar range.

For high bandwidth data communication it becomes a bit more involved - Ubiquiti hardware for example can be trivially software-modified to transmit on the amateur radio ranges, which is how that gear ends up powering a lot of HamNet stations. Sadly, unless there's a HamNet node on a nearby large structure you'll probably need to raise a tower large enough to achieve line-of-sight to the nearest HamNet node.

For people in reach of the QO-100 satellite (i.e. Europe, Africa, about half of Asia), there have been experiments to use that satellite not just as a repeater for voice and video, but also data [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet

[2] https://forum.amsat-dl.org/index.php?thread/4306-npr-vsat-ip...
by ang_cire | 2025-06-16 17:22:16+00:00
> When researchers measure an individual particle, the outcome is random, but the properties of the pair are more correlated than classical physics allows, enabling researchers to verify the randomness.

Is this not possibly just random-seeming to us, because we do not know or cannot measure all the variables?

> The process starts by generating a pair of entangled photons inside a special nonlinear crystal. The photons travel via optical fiber to separate labs at opposite ends of the hall.

> Once the photons reach the labs, their polarizations are measured. The outcomes of these measurements are truly random.

I understand that obviously for our purposes (e.g. for encryption), this is safely random, but from a pure science perspective, have we actually proven that the waveform collapsing during measurement is "truly random"?

How could we possibly assert that we've accounted for all variables that could be affecting this? There could be variables at play that we don't even know exist, when it comes to quantum mechanics, no?

A coin toss is completely deterministic if you can account for wind, air resistance, momentum, starting state, mass, etc. But if you don't know that air resistance or wind exists, you could easily conclude it's random.

I ask this as a layman, and I'm really interested if anyone has insight into this.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-06-16 17:22:28+00:00
But that unfairness is itself based on forces of the universe, in this case: a seed can grow in shit, a seed cannot grow in asphalt.

To extend your metaphor, we have tons of the available "surface area" for people to fall on paved with asphalt, to suit the preferences of those sitting in shit. These are not fixed things. We placed the asphalt. We can tear it up, if we so choose to.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-06-16 17:22:30+00:00
Given some of the takes in this comment section so far, this community seems to be proving its point. I imagine almost no one in tech is making minimum wage, so I'm a bit perplexed why we seem to be so split on raising it. Some seem to have fallen for the "prices raise" narrative, as if they didn't raise regardless for the last 1t years.
by kordlessagain | 2025-06-16 17:22:52+00:00
Reporting back on this, here's some sample output from https://www.sidis.net/animate.pdf:

THE ANIMATE AND THE INANIMATE WILLIAM JAMES SIDIS <img>A black-and-white illustration of a figure holding a book with the Latin phrase "ARTI et VERITATI" below it.</img> BOSTON RICHARD G. BADGER, PUBLISHER THE GORHAM PRESS Digitized by Google

I haven't see ANY errors in what it has done, which is quite impressive.

Here, it's doing tables of contents (I used a slightly different copy of the PDF than I linked to):

<table> <tr> <td>Chapter</td> <td>Page</td> </tr> <tr> <td>PREFACE</td> <td>3</td> </tr> <tr> <td>I. THE REVERSE UNIVERSE</td> <td>9</td> </tr> <tr> <td>II. REVERSIBLE LAWS</td> <td>14</td> </tr>

Other than the fact it is ridiculously slow, this seems to be quite good at doing what it says it does.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-16 17:22:53+00:00
Yikes, as an employee, "not much room for progression" and "maxed out promotions" aren't really phrases that I'd want to hear spoken aloud. I was going to comment that the behavior described sounds like someone who doesn't see any future growth potential in the company, but here it is, spelled out!

Every job I've quit, I decided to do so when I realized that I had hit a (visible or invisible) ceiling that the company was preventing me from breaking through.
by energywut | 2025-06-16 17:23:01+00:00
It's not the worst name for the concept when you include "a male" and "a female" as prominent nouns in that noun class. If you adjust your language depending on whether you are addressing a man or a woman (or speaking about a man or woman), then it's definitely also social gender (as well as grammatical gender), even if those two concepts are separate.
by codingdave | 2025-06-16 17:23:57+00:00
Sounds quite similar to how running an internal dev shop in an enterprise environment used to be, before SaaS apps took over. "Power users" would write basic apps in SharePoint, Domino, Business Objects, or other such "low-code" platforms... even Salesforce in its early days. It worked fine for department-level CRUD/LOB apps. If anything they were doing grew and became important enough that their lack of engineering skills became a problem, us IT folks would come in, take over the app, refactor it, and make in an officially supported app. But we would have hundreds of half-baked apps out there that were good enough to handle the small stuff that small business groups needed. We focused on keeping the platforms up to date, running well, setting up various data they could query, etc.