MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vidarh | 2025-06-17 09:47:24+00:00
> If you write a program to add a couple of numbers, it seems absurd to imagine some entity magically poofs into existence, imagines itself carrying out such, and then poofs back out of existence.

It may be absurd, but we nevertheless can not rule it out, and so it means that our ability to know anything about existence for certain is limited to almost nothing.

Note that I'm not saying I believe this to be the case. What I'm saying is that I see looking for "universal truths" to be entirely futile, because we can't possibly know much of substance with certainty.

Instead we have to accept that unless someone "pierces a veil" and shows us that there's a reality past the one we observe, we are limited to talking about what is observable and measurable within our observable reality, knowing that we are dealing with assumptions and probabilities, not universal truths.

> I find it no less absurd to imagine the same even if it happens to be 10^100 instructions.

This seems fundamentally at odds with saying you were gradually pushed towards a simulation hypothesis...

> if you die only to 'wake up' and discover it was all just a simulation, you're still back right where you started.

A simulation hypothesis does not need to imply that there's anything to wake up from for anyone. Indeed, even if you were to wake up, by confirming that simulation is possible, this would seem to strongly suggest that you should consider the probability that the world you wake up in is simulated to be extremely high.

> The search for natural explanations feels unsatisfactory because it will always come back to a question of what created that.

It may feel unsatisfactory to you. It doesn't to me. I accept that whenever we push the horizon of knowledge, we're likely to discover more things that we don't know, and for the set of things we know we can't know to expand as well.

> You basically have to do a whole bunch of hand waving and assumptions to the point that it starts to rapidly feel like religion for an atheist.

You don't have to do anything. You can accept that we don't know.
by sharpshadow | 2025-06-17 09:48:04+00:00
I think it’s not occupied land as in occupied by force against the will of the inhabitants. The majority of people of Crimea participated in the referendum of which one option was to join the Russian Federation and this choice got the most votes. There are conflicts in international law about “Self-determination versus territorial integrity”[0] which contradict each other like the people of a region want self-determination while the state says it’s illegal. Sometimes it doesn’t work like in Catalonia, sometimes it works like in Kosovo or in a little bit more distant time when a referendum was held to make Hawaii the 50th state after the US annexed it.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination
by ben_w | 2025-06-17 09:48:33+00:00
I don't know where you get these ideas from, but they're very very wrong.

You can already buy PV for sunlight with higher efficiency than 27%. Heck, even with a single band gap the limit for *sunlight* with all the problems I've just stated (because a broad spectrum will waste energy and the sun's spectrum is very broad) still gets you to the 33% Shockley–Queisser limit for one junction on the solar spectrum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley–Queisser_limit

But for monochromatic light, tuned to the band gap, stuff people have already built is several times better than that, and the theoretical limit is basically how finely you can tune the laser bandwidth and how precisely you can control impurities that broaden the band gap.

Here's one designed for monochromatic laser use, that was actually built, with results published in early 2019, with 70% where they recon doing it better would get to 80%: https://krichlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Xia18-PVSC.pd...

As with all quantum systems, which is what both PV and lasers are, the ultimate efficiency of a tuned laser-and-band-gap pair is as good as your engineering, hence ~99.9% (on the cell side) if you control absolutely all parts of it properly.
by askew | 2025-06-17 09:48:35+00:00
Is that extra development cheaper than the risk of a lawsuit or loss of reputation? Not forgetting the ~20% of potential customers you might be missing out on…

> not least that you aren't imposing a heavy tax on everyone else for a really small customer base.

Ah. Seeing your disabled customers as a burden. One day you might encounter barriers when it comes to computing.
by danielbln | 2025-06-17 09:49:41+00:00
I put the examples he gave into Claude 4(Sonnet) purely asking to eval the code, it pointed out every single issue about the code snippets (N+1 Query, race condition, memory leak). The article doesn;t mention which model was used, or how exactly it was used, or in which environment/IDE it was used.

The rest of the advice in there is sound, but without more specifics I don't know how actionable the section "The spectrum of AI-appropriate tasks" really is.
by Jach | 2025-06-17 09:50:03+00:00
You also have the ability to easily setup a "Work profile" that's functionally like a second user with its own apps that don't talk to your normal profile apps, and you can shut the whole work profile off when you don't need it so the apps can't even run until you turn it back on. My preferred way of setting it up is with Shelter installed via FDroid.
by stared | 2025-06-17 09:50:44+00:00
I highly recommend the whole book "Sacred Knowledge" by William Richards (one of the author of the studies).

“To most people who are even moderately experienced with entheogens, concepts such as awe, sacredness, eternity, grace, agape, transcendence, transfiguration, dark night of the soul, born-again, heaven and hell are more than theological ideas; they are experiences.” - Thomas Roberts

This phrase is quoted in "Sacred Knowledge" by Richards, yet I find it the most suitable summary of this overview of scientific research on psychedelics and religion.

We hear about mystical visions from LSD ("acid"), psilocybin ("shrooms"), and DMT from many "spiritual but not religious" people and self-proclaimed shamans. But how does it relate to vision by ordinary people (ones who never tired, and wouldn't try if it weren't for legal, scientific research)?

And how does it relate to prayer, mediation, and mystical visions by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus? How do monks and priests compare their psychedelic experience with their regular practice? Do they all turn to Zen Buddhism, or entrench in their religious background?

Regardless if you are deeply religious, or a non-spiritual atheist, I believe you will reconsider a few things after reading this book.
by bubblyworld | 2025-06-17 09:54:06+00:00
Right, this is a claim I agree with, of course. I interpreted your earlier comments as the former, which I'm sure you agree is not provable in PA. There's a certain unavoidable ambiguity when talking about these things informally!

The truth predicate for PA is undefinable in PA, I agree, but you can represent the reflection principle as an axiom schema: for each formula A(x) the axiom "forall x. Provable([A(x)]) -> A(x)".

(which has the intended meaning at the meta-level, "if A(x) is provable in PA then it is true")

This is consistent with PA but much stronger. In particular it proves Goodstein's theorem, and hence consistency of PA too via cut elimination.

(or flavours of that, there are many reflection principles, but the basic idea is not to represent it as a single formula - quantify at the meta level, if you will)
by arielzj | 2025-06-17 09:55:41+00:00
The idea of cryopreservation is simple and beautiful: When a person is beyond saving by modern methods, we can give them another lifeline. First, perfuse their bloodstream with antifreeze. Once administered, it’s possible to safely cool the body to incredibly low temperatures without ice forming inside organs and crushing delicate cells. Cold slows chemical reactions, all of them: According to the Arrhenius equation, every 10 °C decrease in temperature halves chemical reaction rates. A coolant like liquid nitrogen halves the ordinary rate of chemical reactions 22 times over. That stretches a single second of life into 48 days.

...

As you might expect, this simple idea turns out to be monstrously complicated and exacting in practice. The human body is much more finicky than the field’s founders in the 1960s had hoped. But the techniques exist. I’ve spent my life helping to develop them. The cryopreservation available today is far removed from the ideal — fussier, less elegant, and limited in what it can offer. There is much room for improvement and much work to be done. Still, it works, at least for a particular definition of working. We can’t yet warm up a frozen person and revive them, and it’s not certain we ever will. What we can do is reliably preserve memory in an information-theoretic sense. If our current understanding of neuroscience is correct, then we have the techniques to preserve all the information that makes a person who they are — albeit in a form that's impossible to extract with today's technology...
by barrell | 2025-06-17 09:56:25+00:00
It’s been my experience that most people opinions on AI is inversely proportional to the timescale they have been using it.

Using AI is kind of like having a Monika Closet. You just push all the stuff you don’t know to the side until it’s out of view. You then think everything is clean, and can fool yourself into thinking so for a while.

But then you need to find something in that closet and just weep for days.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-06-17 09:56:28+00:00
This doesn't seem like a useful nor accurate way of describing LLMs.

When I built my own programming language and used it to build a unique toy reactivity system and then asked the LLM "what can I improve in this file", you're essentially saying it "only" could help me because it learned how it could improve arbitrary code before in other languages and then it generalized those patterns to help me with novel code and my novel reactivity system.

"It just saw that before on Stack Overflow" is a bad trivialization of that.

It saw what on Stack Overflow? Concrete code examples that it generalized into abstract concepts it could apply to novel applications? Because that's the whole damn point.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-17 09:57:29+00:00
My hypothetical assumes that the team was writing 95% accessible software already. The last 2 weeks are for the final push.

Of course, if this is a truly all-or-nothing thing where you need to do it 100% perfectly to incur no extra cost, then that strengthens my argument for the compatibility layer, it doesn't diminish it. Very few non-specialists can get something 100% right on the first shot.
Show HN: Alquilame.io – Mobile-first rental management tool for small businesses
by oscarolbe | 2025-06-17 09:58:04+00:00
Hi HN!

I built https://alquilame.io, a mobile-first rental management tool for small businesses and independent owners who rent out physical products (party supplies, tools, event gear, or experiences).

Most of them run everything through WhatsApp. No complex platforms, no accounts, just conversations. I wanted to give them a way to:

List their products with a public link (or embed it)

Receive rental requests and move the conversation to WhatsApp

Track reservations and availability with a simple internal calendar

It doesn’t handle payments — those are agreed between business and customer, just like they’re used to.

The core idea is: stay lightweight, mobile-first, and build around existing workflows.

I’d love your thoughts, feedback, and ideas for improvement. Thanks!
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 09:58:34+00:00
Nah, it's even simpler than that: after shoving enough surveys in users' faces (as they seem to semi-regularly do across all Meta products; I've had at least 2 in WhatsApp alone over the past few months), they've collected enough misclicks and drunk responses to be able to interpret them as lots of people wanting ads.
by ukprogrammer | 2025-06-17 09:59:03+00:00
> “It takes me at least the same amount of time to review code not written by me than it would take me to write the code myself, if not more.”

There’s your issue, the skill of programming has changed.

Typing gets fast; so does review once robust tests already prove X, Y, Z correctness properties.

With the invariants green, you get faster at grokking the diff, feed style nits back into the system prompt, and keep tuning the infinite tap to your taste.
by nottorp | 2025-06-17 09:59:05+00:00
> Which is never?

In my experience it was "a lot". Because my stack traces were mostly hardware related problems on arm linux in that period.

But I suppose your stack traces were much different and superior and no one can have stack traces that are different from yours. The world is composed of just you and your project.

> Do you often just lie to win arguments?

I do not enjoy being accused of lying by someone stuck in their own bubble.

When you said "Which is never" did you lie consciously or subconsciously btw?
by bob1029 | 2025-06-17 09:59:07+00:00
> Secondly, we have got machines equipped with multi-level stores, presenting us problems of management strategy that, in spite of the extensive literature on the subject, still remain rather elusive.

NUMA only got more complicated over time. The range of latency differences is more extreme than ever. We've got L1 running at nanosecond delay, and on the other end we've got cold tapes that can take a whole day to load. Which kind of memory/compute to use in a heterogeneous system (cpu/gpu) is also something that can be difficult to figure out. Multi core is likely the most devastating dragon to arrive since this article was written.

Premature optimization might be evil, but it's the only way to efficiently align the software with the memory architecture. E.g., in a Unity application, rewriting from game objects to ECS is basically like starting over.

If you could only focus on one aspect, I would keep the average temperature of L1 in mind constantly. If you can keep it semi-warm, nothing else really matters. There are very few problems that a modern CPU can't chew through ~instantly assuming the working set is in L1 and there is no contention with other threads.

This is the same thinking that drives some of us to use SQLite over hosted SQL providers. Thinking in terms of not just information, but the latency domain of the information, is what can unlock those bananas 1000x+ speed ups.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-17 10:00:07+00:00
Depends! If you only have a classic Girocard in Germany, iDEAL in Netherlands, Przelewy24/BLIK in Poland, Bancontact in Belgium for example, you will only be able to use it on services that support them. Amazon and PayPal support these schemes (as well as SEPA Direct Debit), but other than these, it's rare for non-domestic services to be accepted.

International payments are a huge huge goddamn mess and I do not envy anyone who has to deal with their peculiarities.
by closewith | 2025-06-17 10:00:14+00:00
The diesel supply in all countries is dependent on the grid, so days is the absolute maximum. The reality is often much less. During the recent power outage in Portugal, the Alfredo da Costa maternity hospital had only one hour's diesel and had to be resupplied by ministerial chauffeurs delivering Jerry cans of fuel.

Still, all the ancillary services that go into a hospital like water, sewage, medical gasses, cold chains, etc are all dependent on the grid, as are the people who make them work. If a large-scale outage happens, most hospitals will start losing patients within 24-48 hours and will close as functioning hospitals well within a week.
by rglullis | 2025-06-17 10:00:42+00:00
We should be able to do a lot more than that. I for one would love to have UML as the basis of for system design and architecture, have "pseudo-code repositories" that can be used as a "pattern book" and leave that as the context for LLM-based code generation tools. We could then define a bunch of constraints (maximum cyclomatic complexity, strict type checking, acceptance tests that must pass, removal of dead code) to reduce the chances of the LLM going rampant and hallucinating.

This way I'd still be forced to think about the system, without having to waste time with the tedious part of writing code, fixing typos, etc.

Bonus point: this could become a two-way system between different programming languages and UML as the intermediate representation, which would make a lot easier to port applications to different languages, and would eliminate concerns about premature optimizations. People could still experiment with new ideas in languages that are more accessible (Python/Javascript) and later on port them to more performant systems (Rust/D/C/C++).
by billynomates | 2025-06-17 10:01:01+00:00
They did, if you read the study linked in the article. The individuals who took psilocybin mostly became more open, compassionate, and grounded in their spiritual roles. They reported feeling more deeply connected to their faith communities, more empathetic in their pastoral care, and more authentic in how they engaged with others. And the changes were still evident over a year later, long after the acute effects of the substance had passed. What shifted wasn’t just mood or perspective but the felt sense of purpose and interconnection. Many described themselves as more present, more patient, and more attuned to the emotional and spiritual needs of those they served. Their beliefs became less rigid, their egos softened, and their sense of service deepened. For the people around them the net result was almost universally positive. Not in a grandiose or abstract way, but in the quiet, daily patterns of being more available, less judgmental, and more aligned with what they had always claimed to teach.

“Participants often described becoming more open and understanding toward others’ beliefs, feeling greater love for those they serve, and experiencing renewed clarity in their spiritual leadership.”
by amunozo | 2025-06-17 10:01:27+00:00
What I still wonder is whether using LLMs is helpful in some ways, or it is, as other users say, just useful for man-made problems such as corporate communication or bureaucracy. I use it for coding and it makes me confident to tackle new things.

I try to use it to understand the code or to implement changes I am not familiar with, but I tend to overuse them a lot. Would it be better, if used ideally (i.e. only to help learning and guiding), to just try it harder before using this or using a search engine? I wonder what's the most optimal use of LLMs in the long run.
by SunlitCat | 2025-06-17 10:01:43+00:00
Ideally, the entire path from source to display is secure and inaccessible (even for the operating system), that is the core promise of DRM. Of course the device must render the content somehow, but DRM is specifically designed to ensure that this path can't be intercepted or exploited.

What happens outside of that path, before it's decrypted or after it's displayed, is beyond what DRM is meant to control.
by sebastiennight | 2025-06-17 10:02:35+00:00
I think your chronology is wrong.

It is extremely unlikely that you used WhatsApp "before they started threatening with charging money" but would have preferred Telegram at the time.

Why?

1. Because WhatsApp was a paid app from the beginning ($0.99 after the first year of using it)

2. Because WhatsApp was bought by FB in early 2014, who made it free.

3. Because Telegram was founded in late 2013
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-17 10:03:35+00:00
> "Bank specific cards" are actually debit cards.

Yes, but not necessarily MasterCard/Visa debit cards. Germany's Girocard for example is a national debit card scheme that does not use any of the American grifters. Unfortunately, it's being phased out in favor of MC/Visa because the EU fee cap on national schemes is much lower than for MC/Visa and so banks can make more money off of you.

We're just standing by and watch our dependence on American grifter megacompanies larger every day.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-17 10:04:17+00:00
To give a brief example of this -- a college asked why an exec had listened to my argument but not theirs recently, despite "saying the same thing". I explained that my argument contained actual impacts: actual delays, actual costs, an actual timeline when the impact would occur -- rather than nebulous "there will be problems".

Everyone comes to execs with hypothetical problems that all sound like people dressing up minor issues -- unless you can give specific details, justifications, etc. they're not going to parse properly.

This would be one case where a person asking an LLM for help is not even aware of the information they lack about the person they're trying to talk to.

We could define expertise this way: that knowledge/skill you need to have to formulate problems (, questions) from a vague or unknown starting point.

Under that definition, it becomes clear why LLMs "in the large" pose problems.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-17 10:04:48+00:00
Fair enough.

> Very few non-specialists can get something 100% right on the first shot.

But that certainly doesn’t stop managers from assuming 100%, first shot.

In my experience, a realistic plan can save huge amounts of cost; in far more areas than just accessibility.

Also in my experience: realistic plans are unicorns.
by ukprogrammer | 2025-06-17 10:06:45+00:00
> If the AI actually outperforms humans in the full context of the work, then no, we won't. It will be so much cheaper and faster that businesses won't have to argue at all. Those that adopt them will massively outcompetes those that don't.

This. The dev's outcompeting by using AI today are too busy shipping, rather than wasting time writing blog posts about what ultimately, is a skill-issue.
Ask HN: Tech people who are self employed. How do you do it?
by throwaway_owe98 | 2025-06-17 10:07:45+00:00
I have realized that I love building software, and I suck at marketing. I'm trying to escape waged job, and switch to being self employed with more flexible times. I don't mind working long hours, but I have problem with 9-5, and being a wage worker.

However, as a techy, I can't seem to build useful things, or things that generate money.

Are there any tech oriented people who were able to quit wage work and turn into self employed? What did you do to achieve this?
by je42 | 2025-06-17 10:09:31+00:00
I find that LLM extremely good in training such language skills by using following process:

a) write a draft yourself.

b) ask the LLM to correct your draft and make it better.

c) newer LLMs will explicitly mention the things they corrected (otherwise ask for being explict about the changes)

d) walk through each of the changes and apply the ones you feel that make the text better

This helped me improving my writing skills drastically (in multiple languages) compared to the times where I didn't have access to LLMs.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-17 10:09:42+00:00
>Is that extra development cheaper than the risk of a lawsuit

It probably isn't cheaper, no. The base risk of a lawsuit in this domain seems very low for all but the largest of websites; the largest of websites generally have large enough user pools that investing in out of the box accessibility makes sense anyway. In fact I would wager Facebook makes more advertising money off of its median blind user than its median fully-sighted user, simply because that's a very easy demographic to target ads to.

I'm willing to change my mind on this if you can provide evidence if even, say, 1% of all inaccessible websites on the Internet have been sued on these grounds.

>Seeing your disabled customers as a burden

Disabled potential customers, for one. Disabled people aren't dumb, and they don't pay for things they can't actually use. I'm surprised you assume they would.

But, and and this may come as a surprise, I genuinely think the compatibility layer approach is the much better option here. There are plenty of reasons to think so, which I outlined in the original post. Your slander is not welcome or acceptable just because you disagree with me.