MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by patcon | 2025-06-28 14:14:10+00:00
Good god, the perpetual disdain of default HN for narrative exposition is so deep-rooted.

Y'all know humans are kinda "made of" stories, right? Stories are the unit layer that we add on top of biological structure. It's not "data"

Imho it is essentially self-loathing of the human condition to valorise raw data and detest linear narrative as much as this crowd seems to do

EDIT: Narrative is the wings, without which data cannot travel through enough of the bell curve of minds. Being anti-story is being anti-democratic is toward authoritarianism. </ hot-take>
by sotix | 2025-06-28 14:14:46+00:00
> I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk.

My sister and I have an agreement to trash my mom’s hoard of our school stuff she refuses to get rid of that we don’t want. All it does is bring us stress. If they made physical art like clay pots in a kiln, keep it for yourself if they don’t want it. If it’s something you can scan, I doubt it’s worth keeping and makes it much harder to find signal in the noise when too much is scanned.
by wavemode | 2025-06-28 14:14:51+00:00
My notetaking has devolved in much the same way. Nowadays I pretty much just have one big "Work" note, and then occasional smaller temporary notes for specific things (planning a trip, shopping list, etc).

PKM can often turn into a form of procrastination (it's more fun to make lists and folders and grand archives, than to work on your actual projects). I decided to cut all that off and do the bare minimum instead.
by yoavm | 2025-06-28 14:15:43+00:00
I will stop thinking that this conflict is a war when there will be a side in it that doesn't have the motivation to take over all the land, and acts towards it by attempting to kill the other. As long as there are two parties that are constantly trying to kill each other, I call that a war. As I wrote elsewhere - that doesn't mean I disagree with the idea that genocidal actions are being taken during this war.

Your comment about Jews in Ghetto is wrong at every possible level. Jews were killed in the Holocaust _without_ a conflict, _without_ attempting to kill Germans, _without_ fighting with anyone over the land and _without_ having any aspirations to control the other. That is an example of a situation where there is no war, and no, it has nothing to do with the situation between Israelis and Palestinians.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-28 14:15:51+00:00
This seems like a particular curse of having an indexable, easily searchable journal.

I use a paper notebook, which comes with the built in assumption that most of your notes are going to be permanently put on the shelf and forgotten. A couple pages can be marked somehow or another if anything really useful somehow ends up on them.

Writing things out is an important part of the process… I’d be a bit worried about obtaining a default assumption where those notes become anything other than ephemera.
by IshKebab | 2025-06-28 14:16:16+00:00
> I don't know what else can be done

I don't think there's anything technical you can do. I think it would require:

1. A stable income stream that doesn't depend on something at odds with your goals (i.e. not like Mozilla).

2. Incorporate as a non-profit with rock-solid "we're never going to transition to for-profit" legal terms.

I think Wikipedia is probably the closest thing we have to that, but even they don't have a reliable income source. I mean, they have more money than they know what to do with and waste most of it on outreach nonsense rather than putting it into an endowment... but it's not exactly a reliable source of money.
by sothatsit | 2025-06-28 14:16:52+00:00
I've started seeing a number of people talk about using Claude Code for searching, writing, and organising text documents. It is an interesting trend to me. I tried it out with my non-technical girlfriend and she really liked using it for helping with analysing interview transcripts. It seems like that agentic workflow is really effective outside of coding as well.

I just hope non-technical people that pick this up also pick up version control. Or, is there a better alternative to Claude Code that can accomplish a similar thing while being more friendly to non-technical people?
by Cyph0n | 2025-06-28 14:17:25+00:00
I am completely OK with being conditioned against siding with a 20 month long genocidal onslaught committed by an apartheid ethnostate against a blockaded territory with no sovereignty and no actual defenses of its own.

I completely agree that life isn’t always black and white. But right now it is, just like it was in countless other situations in the past. You can think it’s “complicated” all you like, but the evidence is overwhelmingly against such a framing, which is where the conditioning comes into the picture.

It is great that you volunteered in Gaza, but it’s also tragic that you fail to see what is happening even after directly interacting with Gazans.

Some day in the future, when free Palestinians can build museums and monuments and make movies to mourn those lost in this genocide, everyone will always have been against this.
by wat10000 | 2025-06-28 14:17:48+00:00
I’m becoming very skeptical of the “bad government, good people” idea. Governments need popular support. This goes even for horrible dictatorships. There are degrees, of course. An oppressive state can survive with less popular support than a democracy. But it still needs a decent amount. The machinery of dictatorship is as much about keeping popular support as it is about forcing people to suppress their opposition.
by mgfist | 2025-06-28 14:19:23+00:00
> The point is that all kinds of people have the option to live in the same area

Well not really. Very few people have the option of buying a $2m home. But I get your point.

> Sure, people gravitate to some extent to their own 'class' of people, but making that an actual goal, and exclusive, seems wrong.

It's a big stretch to go from "I want my friends and I to all live close to each other" to "I want to create an exclusive community for my class of people".
by makeitdouble | 2025-06-28 14:19:28+00:00
I read your comment as praise for Stijn for having made a somewhat practical and working prototype for a concept that could only be demoed in the most resource intensive and clunkiest ways 25 years ago.

Steve Mann's demo was I'm sure impressive, still the idea in itself is absolutely trivial (looking for ways to hide ads started the very day ads were born) and it all comes down to the execution.
by rsanek | 2025-06-28 14:19:50+00:00
"wildly popular"? maybe there was alot of interest when it was released, but who even is still using R1 these days? i previously utilized it through perplexity but the o3/Gemini pro models are so much better i rarely bother to read its responses.

it's not even in the top ten based on OpenRouter https://openrouter.ai/rankings?view=month
by scarface_74 | 2025-06-28 14:20:07+00:00
How have you been in the industry for 35 years (myself 30 years in a year) and not had the optionality to say “no” to being overworked? I’ve worked for 29 years across 10 companies from 60 person startups to two F10 companies (including one FAANG) and always knew the worse case for saying “No” is that they could fire me and I just get another job.
by elcritch | 2025-06-28 14:20:23+00:00
I agree, the code output for Nim with Claude and Gemini as well is pretty good. It misses some Nim idioms but generally does really well. Simple syntax with strong types helps both Nim and F#.

I used Claude 4 to generate SIMD versions of signed distance functions for both NEON and SSE2 and it all worked and compiled fine the first time aside from some minor import changes [1]. Gave me an almost 4x increase for many SDFs.

I also use Atlas, an alternative package manager for Nim [2], to clone deps into a local folder which lets Cursor grep and search the dependencies to add it to the context as needed.

1: https://github.com/elcritch/sdfy 2: https://github.com/nim-lang/atlas
by cropcirclbureau | 2025-06-28 14:20:30+00:00
You're not making sense my friend. The recent Muslim immigrants have nothing to do with soft power and I don't see how that's relevant to this context. Are you saying that it counters the influence that Israel has?

And if we're talking about terrorism, IDF and Mossad are very much known to deploy terror tactics across a lot of their historical engagements. The definition of the word doesn't hinge on designation by a Western organization. And the vast majority of "pro-palestine" people in the world are not Iran proxies and secret anti-semites. They're actually, for the most part, young people that are working from a place of empathy and horror. The most blatant and harmful propganda in this whole mess is the attempt to designate pro-palestine protestors anti-semites and secretly in support of Iran and Hamas policies. What a terrible cheapening of the word. Point is, the ones using the most pro-terror rhetoric are those trying to defend the IDF right now.
by gorjusborg | 2025-06-28 14:20:48+00:00
I agree that there needs to be a feedback loop including the system and decision makers (I also have a distrust of non-contributing 'architects').

However, just because you can 'get things done' in the current system doesn't imply you have a good enough theory for maintaining it sustainably. I've often seen self proclaimed 10x coders who trade healthy shared theory for mean time to deployment too aggressively.

They are fast, get praise and pay, then move on before the negative effects of their short term strategy becomes clear.

Another job of 'senior' devs is to point out to the business when this is happening.
by blindriver | 2025-06-28 14:21:53+00:00
I deleted all my gchats over 10 Years ago and it was the most freeing thing I did in my digital life.

I realized they were absolutely useless but carried a weird weight for me.

“What if I need something important from them?” Nope. If there’s something important then I can ask whomever again.

“What if I want to go through them?” Nope. Never even thought about it since I deleted them. Not even the first times I chatted with my now-wife.

Once I realized they were useless it helped me never save my WhatsApp messages and I turned on disappearing messages as soon as the feature appeared. I have another friend I’ve known for 20+ years, we set messages to 8 hours disappearing. If we miss a message or forget what we talked about, so be it.

It’s all so freeing, I never realized what a burden it could be, worrying about what if I lost something. I delete everything now except my photos which have more value.
by ykonstant | 2025-06-28 14:22:26+00:00
The author's defense of C reminds me of this classic youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=443UNeGrFoM&pp=ygUPaG93IGkgc...

I am sure the video above will cause immediate disagreement (I think it goes too far on some topics), but I urge people to consider the ideas contained within.

(I seem to have mis-posted this to another thread?)
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-28 14:22:40+00:00
> Were humans working on health insurance claims previously known for being warm and tend to err on the side of the patient?

I know that in the continuously audited FEP space, human claims processors were at 95%+ accuracy (vs audited correct results).

Often with sub-2 min per claim processing times.

The irony is that GP's system is exactly how you would want this deployed into production. Fail safe, automate happy path, HITL on everything else.

With the net result that those people can spend longer looking at more difficult claims. (For the same cost)
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-06-28 14:24:12+00:00
what about the last two years of video evidence of all the other war crimes?

The bodies of burnt children. The reports of doctors who document multiple sniper rounds found in the bodies of small children and toddlers?

I've been seeing reports about internet connectivity being very touch and go in Gaza the last few weeks.

Is it not unreasonable to think, those who are starving the most might not have internet/electricity to charge a device/care to document when they're starving?
by seadan83 | 2025-06-28 14:24:37+00:00
> "fair and non-tribal" vs "unfair and tribal".

Interesting framing. Tribalism, or 'rule-of-the-strong' is inherently not fair. "Fair" is not the driving consideration. "Rule of law" does have 'just' as a driving consideration.

> For example, in many tribal societies, if a man from tribe A harms a man from tribe B, his own tribe might offer restitution to tribe B (or punishment for the criminal).

I'd suggest the restitution is offered because either tribe A & B are of equal strength, or tribe A is weaker. In both cases, tribe A is "offering tribute" to show subservience, to show they are weaker. If they do not, tribe B is forced to show they are stronger; lest other tribes think that they can take similar advantage of them.

Hence, it is a lot more of a "I'm sorry - please don't hurt me!" rather than a "well, it is only fair that we compensate you". In tribalism, if you are strong, then you don't offer the compensation.

> In fact, disputes would often escalate to tribal leaders, who of course might be biased and only look out for their own, but not always.

Is it not always? The reason to offer restitution to a stronger tribe is so that the stronger tribe does not retaliate.

> Otherwise, anytime someone from a tribe harmed someone from another tribe, there would be war.

I think this is overlooking the case where tribe A is actually stronger. In tribalism, if tribe A is stronger then there would be no recourse for tribe B. By showing dominance over tribe B, tribe A is sending a message to all other tribes that they are not to be messed with.
by msgilligan | 2025-06-28 14:24:50+00:00
The key layout on the calculator (DA or desk accessory) exactly matches the numeric keypad of the Lisa keyboard, but the big '=' key is labelled 'Enter' on the physical keypad. You could use the keypad to use the calculator, which I remember doing on a "Macintosh XL" (a Lisa running Mac OS) Having the big key be '=' was a nice usability feature since 'Enter' didn't make much sense in the calculator DA.

If you search for pictures of "Original Lisa Keyboard" you can see that the layout is the same. However, in the pictures I found the key that corresponds to the small '=' in the screenshot in the article is labelled '-' and there appear to be some other differences. I don't remember these differences or any rationale for them.

Update: They screenshot in the article exactly matches the Macintosh Plus keyboard -- which is a keyboard I actually owned. Although I used Mac XL before getting my Plus, it's probably this keyboard that I'm remembering:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_keyboards#Macintosh_Plus...
by zhyder | 2025-06-28 14:25:10+00:00
All current AR glasses are fundamentally designed to see the real world with existing light, as opposed to XR (mixed reality) glasses that block out all existing light from reaching your eyes and create a real-time "passthrough" video feed. So AR glasses can't really block any real world ads, can only place an annoying overlay on them. It'd work with XR glasses but no one wants to walk around in the real world with those on.

Maybe someone will invent an electrochromic layer on AR glasses that can selectively block light at individual pixels (rather than darken the whole lens, as current electrochromic layers on some AR glasses do)... that's when RealWorldAdBlock would actually be viable.
by kiicia | 2025-06-28 14:25:17+00:00
This reminded me of „Ultrasonic investigations in shopping centers”[1]

> Ultrasonic pilot tones, commonly used in PA systems to monitor speaker connections, are often modulated by background noise or movement. These tones can be used for various purposes, such as speed detection, escalator monitoring, positioning codes, ad delivery, and finding quiet areas in shopping centers.

[1] https://www.windytan.com/2024/06/ultrasonic-investigations-i...
by somewhereoutth | 2025-06-28 14:26:16+00:00
> As we learn to use LLMs in our work, we have to figure out how to live with this non-determinism. This change is dramatic, and rather excites me. I'm sure I'll be sad at some things we'll lose, but there will also things we'll gain that few of us understand yet. This evolution in non-determinism is unprecedented in the history of our profession.

The whole point of computers is that they were deterministic, such that any effective method can be automated - leaving humans to do the non-deterministic (and hopefully more fun) stuff.

Why do we want to break this up-to-now hugely successful symbiosis?
by tim333 | 2025-06-28 14:26:41+00:00
When I said reasonable peacefully I meant not killing each other and quite a lot of people in Gaza were crossing for jobs on the Israeli side of the border. I wasn't say love and social justice reigned.

When westerners and people like Bill Clinton have got involved they have mostly proposed having a Palestinian state with their own land but the Palestinians have mostly objected to Israel existing so we have the current stuff.
by iamsanteri | 2025-06-28 14:26:52+00:00
Very nice article as I’ve felt the same.

Throughout my 20’s I’ve accumulated a huge amount of mental models, diary entries, ambitions, goals, knowledge, thoughts, interests and everything in-between.

It helped me a lot and truly let me excel in some things – surprisingly enough.

Since I turned 30 last year I’ve almost sort of been afraid to look into that repository whatsoever. It’s a mix of amusement and anxiety. What felt like unlimited potential and a nearing of the “apex”, my motivation is still there somewhere in my head, but I’ve suppressed it and opened my eyes to almost half of my life being lived.

Sometimes I’m even afraid to stop and think deeply like I tended to do before. I distract myself.

Was that a some sort of a religion carrying me week by week month to month?

I take it step-by-step, day by day now and try to worry less while bringing back the focus of what I’d want to achieve. I calm myself down and work on things more gradually, cutting myself some slack.

Nonetheless, I wouldn’t just delete it all.

Instead I’m just using it less and less, only adding some truly profound things and thoughts when I come across them. My reading list keeps filling up… I fulfill some of my ambitions, but also leave many of them undone by the time I thought I should’ve been done with them trying not to not feel bad about it.

This techno-masochistic models-oriented mega-productive way of living is already perhaps disillusioning a lot of people out there, and we are entering the next stage.

Feels like end of an era, at least for me personally.
by lapcat | 2025-06-28 14:27:26+00:00
I found the narrative a bit strange, because Doctorow first mentions the famous 2014 polisci paper about US politics but then pivots to antitrust enforcement in the EU and other countries. The US has been a plutocracy from its founding and has remained that way by design and by various demographic factors. Even America's most "progressive" Presidents, the Roosevelts, were themselves plutocrats.

To me, the current situation in the US is reminiscent of 25 years ago, when the Clinton DoJ had won an antitrust case against Microsoft—with the breakup of the company on the table!—but then G.W. Bush was elected, MS was given a slap on the wrist, and 9/11 happened almost immediately afterward, causing US v. MS to disappear from the public consiousness. Similarly, the Biden DoJ won an antitrust case against Google, with the breakup of the company on the table, but then Trump was elected with the backing of the tech billionairies, and it still remains to be seen whether Google will suffer any major consequences or just get a slap on the wrist and continue with business as usual. Remember that billionaires such as Leonard Leo are fully in control of the openly corrupt US Supreme Court, so anything that happens in court at lower levels can be overturned in favor of the billionaires. Apple is still appealing its temporary loss against Epic Games.
by rayiner | 2025-06-28 14:27:31+00:00
> They set records for size and you know it. What do you mean by 'tepid', because they didn't riot?

According to whom? I'm in the D.C. metro area, and the protests are far less noticeable than the 2017 pink hat protests or the 2020 riots. They organized a bunch of small protests all around the country so more people maybe participated, but the intensity is low even in DC.

> Absolute BS. No matter what they do, you'll cook up some reasons to delegitimitze it. But I guess you have to, the moment you cease being useful to the GOP you'll become a target.

I’m just observing. The anti-Trump resistance I know in real life have retreated literally and metaphorically to a bubble in BlueSky. I was at a conference recently, steeling myself to deal with PMCs complaining about Trump, and nobody said anything. People were in a great mood. The vibe shift is real. And your second point is genuinely conspiratorial and fantastical thinking.
by xg15 | 2025-06-28 14:29:06+00:00
They were killing each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settler_violence

Yes, there was an exchange of job seekers, however even that was among a deliberately resource-constrained Gaza, with no hope of the situation improving.

Hamas was definitely not helping in those regards and Oct.7 cannot be excused. But Israel also never did anything to support an alternative to Hamas.
by QuiEgo | 2025-06-28 14:29:21+00:00
I think it's important to acknowledge everyone's mind works differently, and something different works for everyone.

For me, I've found once I start trying to follow a system, like PARA or zettelkästen or whatever else, it just becomes tedious and time consuming and I feel like a slave to the system.

After going through 3-4 cycles of this, I came to feel like the main point of these systems is to sell books to people like me, who's brain craves structure yet struggles to create it :).

I also came to realize most of my notes are write once, read never.

I now just make quick and dirty notes and throw them in an "archive" folder once they are not active (one "inbox" folder for active ones), and rely on search.

No system, no curation.

Same strategy for email.

I do find the notes useful to keep; e.x. "when was the last time I got bloodwork done at the doctor" or "what command did I run to get the debugger to hit the right symbol server for that old old project", but I spend basically 0 thought cycles on them now.

I also find plaintext or markdown to be the ideal format for these notes.

There's a whole other category of notes, where you want to share information with others or teach. This is documentation. It is best suited to a wiki format with rich text.

I think a lot of people end up making wiki-style notes, but really they are never going to look at them again or share them and they could have just hacked up a quick text file and then archived it, instead of making something pretty no one will ever care about afterwords (including themselves). It's really hard to admit this though.
by nobody9999 | 2025-06-28 14:29:27+00:00
>Executive is operating within its legal parameters

Huh? Since when is issuing executive orders that attempt to contravene the plain language of the US Constitution, something that's clearly illegal, "operating within [the executive branch's] legal parameters"?

Whether Congress is doing its job or not (I'd argue they're not representing their constituents in any meaningful way -- hell, I wanted to vote against my congressman since I was moved into his district in the last two elections, but he ran unopposed) is irrelevant to a blatantly illegal assault on US citizens by executive order.

There are plenty of things to take Congress to task for, but executive orders (you know, from the executive branch) aren't one of them.