MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-17 13:29:43+00:00
“Almost a decade ago, a Baptist Biblical scholar, a Catholic priest, several rabbis, an Islamic leader, a Zen Buddhist roshi, and more than a dozen other religious leaders walked into a lab—and took high doses of magic mushrooms.”

I seriously wonder what this Catholic priest was thinking.

According to a natural law view, the reason for taking a psychoactive substance is a major component in determining whether taking it is licit. A bad intent corrupts the act. So, if I have a martini in order to calm my nerves, or choose to savor the goodness of a glass of beer, then knowing what we know about the effect of alcohol in moderation and our own personal response to the quantify in question, there is nothing wrong happening. (Catholics are not teetotalers. We like our wine.) Indeed, if you are in a state of high anxiety that impedes the use of reason, taking something to calm your nerves would be therapeutic and restorative. But if we consume alcohol in order to get drunk or buzzed, then this is morally illicit, as the intended effect — the distortion of perception and the impeding of the operation of our rational faculties — is immoral. This is because, on a natural law view, our nature is to be rational animals — to know reality as it is, which is what the senses and reason are for — and to intentionally thwart our nature, and especially that which is most essential to our humanity, our rationality, is bad for us as human beings. (It also produces emotional distortions, which are, again, something bad for us.) That is why it is an affront to human dignity to trip, and we intuitively perceive this when we see a drunk or someone who is high. They disgust us, they arouse pity in us, or, in less serious cases, we laugh at them, because the comedy is the result of them failing to be rational and thus human.

The principle of double effect also tells us how and when taking a substance with harmful side effects is licit. The intent is, again, an essential component, and recreational drug use is simply never licit for that reason as explained above.

The idea of using drugs to produce a “spiritual experience” is also nonsensical. That is because it isn’t a bona fide spiritual experience. It is a hallucination, a corruption and suppression of the perceptive and rational faculties which is how we come to know reality. It does not clarify our perception of reality per se, but darkens it by producing mental and emotional distortions. A true spiritual “experience”, if you want to call it that, would involved the heightened or elevated operation of perception and rationality, not their diminution. So the real McCoy is exactly opposite. That people subjectively report having gained insight is either a side effect of the hallucinogen disrupting some pattern of denial or whatever, or merely an error of perception (which is expected, as people high on drugs aren’t thinking clearly and have a poor ability to appraise the validity and value of their thoughts).

True spiritual maturity is sober. Hallucination is the exact opposite of sober. It is a fraudulent ersatz, not some royal road to the divine or whatever.
by nyrikki | 2025-06-17 13:29:45+00:00
As other have stated, evaporative cooling is most of the usage, AC dries the air and requires adding moisture to the air to prevent problems with static electricity, this drives a much smaller portion of the usage.

Note that evaporative cooling also produces significant amounts of brine, as it is similar to distillation, producing a brine that is difficult to treat and often not useful for other purposes.
by bayindirh | 2025-06-17 13:29:46+00:00
I once read an anecdote:

In an airport, people complained that luggage delivery was so slow after landings. Airport measured the time, agreed with passengers and increased workforce to reduce waiting times substantially, but the complaints didn't reduce.

Instead, they routed passengers through a longer path, so their luggage was waiting for them when they arrived, and nobody complained about the longer walk.

We, the humans, are interesting.
by bluGill | 2025-06-17 13:30:38+00:00
30 years ago we had a good idea. Anything considered good 30 years ago - 3DES- still is. Anything not considered good has turned out not to be. We don't know what the future will hold so it is always possible someone will find a major flaw in AES, but as I write this nobody has indicated they are even close.
by mvieira38 | 2025-06-17 13:30:39+00:00
Last night I just removed myself from every friend groupchat and blocked everyone there, while leaving a status message about how they can reach me on Signal or call me. If they are actually your friends they'll come around, and families survived before Whatsapp existed. I'm also brazilian, I just won't stand with people dismissing what matters to me as if I'm a nutjob for not using their fascist app
by diggan | 2025-06-17 13:30:54+00:00
> The water presumably isn't destroyed it's just put back hotter than before right?

I'd assume the water isn't put back into circulation after passing through a data center, so if anything it might be cooled and then reused in the same data center, best case scenario.

The results is the same, farmers who already have to fight to get enough water in Aragon now have to fight more and compete against companies like Amazon and other foreign investors for the water. Aragon isn't exactly wetlands, so hard to not feel the local government is making the wrong choice here.
by e_i_pi_2 | 2025-06-17 13:31:21+00:00
> being hard with people that just say hello just doesn't make much sense to me anymore

This is the problem I run into, I want to just reply to any "Hey" message with a link to this page, but then I'm the one being rude. We just need a better way to let other people know that this isn't a good way to do async chat. I've heard of other people making their status message this site, so then people see it when they go to message you and it doesn't have to be explicitly brought up

> If the worst they do to me is to say hello and never talk to me again, I'm ok with accommodating this in my daily workflow

This I can't really get behind, because if they just send a hello it's implied that I then need to follow-up and find out what they were asking about
by abalashov | 2025-06-17 13:31:23+00:00
I think the point about owning the code is the significant one. If you’re just doing some throwaway prototyping or trying stuff, fine. But if you really need to commit to ownership and maintenance and care and feeding of this code, best just write it yourself, if only for the reason that writing it engenders the appropriate level of understanding while removing the distraction of AI slop code review.

Where I find it genuinely useful is in extremely low-value tasks, like localisation constants for the same thing in other languages, without having to tediously run that through an outside translator. I think that mostly goes in the "fancy inline search" category.

Otherwise, I went back from Cursor to normal VS Code, and mostly have Copilot autocompletions off these days because they're such a noisy distraction and break my thought process. Sometimes they add something of value, sometimes not, but I'd rather not have to confront that question with every keystroke. That's not "10x" at all.

Yes, I've tried the more "agentic" workflow and got down with Claude Code for a while. What I found is that its changes are so invasive and chaotic--and better prompts don't really prevent this--that it has the same implications for maintainability and ownership referred to above. For instance, I have a UIKit-based web application to which I recently asked Claude Code to add dark theme options, and it rather brainlessly injected custom styles into dozens of components and otherwise went to town, in a classic "optimise for maximum paperclip production" kind of way. I spent a lot more time un-F'ing what it did throughout the code base than I would have spent adding the functionality myself in an appropriately conservative fashion. Sure, a better prompt would probably have helped, but that would have required knowing what chaos it was going to wreak in advance, as to ask it to refrain from that as part of the prompt. The possibility of this happening with every prompt is not only daunting, but a rabbit hole of cognitive load that distracts from real work.

I will concede it does a lot better--occasionally, very impressively--with small and narrow tasks, but those tasks at which it most excels are so small that the efficiency benefit of formulating the prompt and reviewing the output is generally doubtful.

There are those who say these tools are just in their infancy, AGI is just around the corner, etc. As far as I can tell from observing the pace of progress in this area (which is undeniably impressive in strictly relative terms), this is hype and overextrapolation. There are some fairly obvious limits to their training and inference, and any programmer would be wise to keep their head down, ignore the hype, use these tools for what they're good at and studiously avoid venturing into "fundamentally new ways of working".
by echelon | 2025-06-17 13:32:07+00:00
> other people pretend to be doing

Not everyone works or thinks the same. Some goals and passions come from within, and for some people these can be the very reason for living.

One infinitesimal, geologically small moment where the universe is awake and alive and available for you. The world is an infinite blank canvas, and it's full of adventure.

Some people exist to do, build, or explore with their short time. Life is full of energy and opportunity to do so.

Some of these people would find the "traditional life" inescapably boring.
by diggan | 2025-06-17 13:32:08+00:00
> Without tech companies and data centres we will just be a theme park for tourists with the poorly paid

Since when was Aragon ever a tourist hotspot? As far as I know (as another "actual" Spain resident), tourists flock to the coastal areas and the islands (and for some reason, Madrid), not to the inner-mainland like Teruel and Zaragoza.
by meonkeys | 2025-06-17 13:32:12+00:00
/e/ OS installed DIY or pre-installed by Murena (especially on a Fairphone) solves many of the issues mentioned in other threads. It's an AOSP fork with a simple decent launcher and near-zero bloatware (I only chose to disable weather and magic earth maps). Built-in access to many simpler and more user-respecting apps in F-Droid. Tracker protection and other privacy features. Works well with Nextcloud if you use that.

Doesn't fit everyone's use case. No iMessage, no RCS, no visual voicemail, no spatial audio. Personally I don't need or want any of that, I just want a smartphone I can mostly control.
by jmyeet | 2025-06-17 13:33:02+00:00
There are lots of lessons to learn from Google Wave.

The first is: what problem does this solve (for users)? That was never clear. It always seemed like a solution in search of a problem. Any communication platform needs to ask "how does this compete with text messaging, group chats and email?"

The second is: this was peak "startup within Google" experimentation. And it cannot work. No new product will be able to compete with existing billion+ dollar businesses. There's no incentive to succeed and political inertia preventing you doing anything. A whole bunch of people got a ton of equity thrown at them for mediocrity.

Third, Wave was still in the era when Google was pushing Google Web Toolkit ("GWT") as a solution to UI engineering. This didn't really solve any problems and created a bunch of new ones. For example, for the longest time (this was eventually fixed many years later) you had to use special versions of protobuf Java classes.

Lastly, i believe I heard that the internal implementation was incredibly complicated such that people managed to produce the same functionality with a fraction of the source code in Python/JS.
by haswell | 2025-06-17 13:33:11+00:00
The goal is not death. The comment mentioned ego death which is something else entirely.

At the risk of trivializing something that must be experienced not explained, the realization of no-self (ego death) is one of the most liberating things one can experience.

It’s the realization that the feeling of “I” is just another feeling that arises in the same space as all other feelings, and that this feeling is ultimately greatly constraining/limiting. It’s the realization that what we are is far more expansive than most people realize without such exploration of self and no-self. It’s liberation from the illusion that is our default state.

> what's the point of living?

For me, experiencing it is what makes life worth living.

The best way I can describe this is that it was the gradual dissolution of certain ideas I had about what it means to be me. This dissolution wasn’t just experiential - it was also the result of rational interrogation of various beliefs I had about myself.

To put this another way, it was the sum total of a series of realizations about what it can’t mean to be me.

- It feels like “I” is at the “center” of me, but biologically and neurologically, there is no discernible center

- It feels like “I” am my thoughts and feelings, but who then is aware of these thoughts and feelings?

- It feels like “I” am looking out at the world through the windows of my eyes, “I” am in the inside, and the world is on the outside. Except this relies on the unexamined belief that there’s some kind of homunculus inside my head doing the seeing. Instead, there’s just seeing.

And a list of related realizations too long to enumerate without making this comment longer than it already is.

The end result that people often refer to as ego death is the opposite of a waste in my experience. A life without breaking down these illusions is a life of servitude to our evolutionary defaults. A life lost in thought is a life that hasn’t experienced some of the most awe inspiring states of consciousness on offer.

As a skeptic, I spent the first 35 years of my life lost in my thoughts and feelings, and unaware that I could experience life any other way, and frankly uninterested in such ideas.

Life circumstances gave me a taste of what ego death entails, at which point I realized how completely oblivious I’d been and how deep my misconceptions about people who talked about such things were.

This comment is a stream of thought and not sufficient to communicate what ego death entails, but it is certainly not the scary/bad thing I had once believed, and is one of the most meaningful/helpful experiences of my life and has made life much richer.

Anything but a waste.
by hedora | 2025-06-17 13:33:29+00:00
The main effect of UBI getting people to not work is that it raises the bar for working from “I don’t want to live outdoors and starve” to “you are paying me more than my time is worth”.

People that use ubi to quit their jobs mostly end up investing their time in things like additional education, higher paying (per hour) part time positions or entrepreneurship.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-17 13:33:41+00:00
I wasn’t saying that all bad things were attributable to the colonial powers, but those powers orchestrated the spread of propaganda that led to the “mob rule” as a backlash against colonial meddling and empire. I agree it was a sweeping statement, and glosses over a lot of nuance. I don’t mean to minimize man’s inhumanity to man due to local innovations.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-17 13:33:52+00:00
As applies to other major data services providers with shit-useless customer support and arbitrary algorithmic "service" decision-making, DO NOT FUCKING TRUST your data to rest exclusively within anything that they own and control.

Export your email archives, spread your personal files across multiple devices and services, and ideally, keep copies of your files on your own backup HDs or at the very least with one other cloud provider, that also happens to be small enough for you to reach a human if something goes wrong.

At least Microscum can't yet lock one out of their own PC or laptop at this stage. This person trusted too much in their OneDrive service.

To note: looking particularly at people who've let themselves become Google-dependent here, just as much as anyone silly enough to trust 30 years of their work exclusively to fucking Microsoft of all things.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-17 13:34:03+00:00
Supply-side UBI (UBE?) is equally curious.

I.e. if we took the money (or a portion of it) that would be going to UBI and instead used it to directly buy the goods, for distribution, at scale.

Universal tertiary education (for the countries that don't have it), universal healthcare (for the US), universal food and shelter entitlements, etc.

I'll grant that some amount of direct income would be best, because of the flexibility it affords, but UBI in capitalist societies is a slippery slope for the reasons you mentioned (especially market price changes).

Why not instead focus on directly driving costs for basic goods so low (via volume) that we can make them effectively free?
by Lerc | 2025-06-17 13:34:53+00:00
I was working on something using AVR assembly as a fantasy console.

I never quite completed it, but I managed a emulator/assembler IDE in the browser. Making my own assembler let me play around with some ideas for macros.

It could even load programs from gists.

https://k8.fingswotidun.com/static/ide/?gist=ad96329670965dc...

Reflecting on it now, I think one feature that could help a assembler on devices like this is the ability to inline compile assignment expressions that use values of only one type. It would be easy enough to emit a stream of instructions for

x=32+(x*(y+2))

or even

r15=32+(r15*(y+2))

using registers as expression values.

The result would usually be what an assembler writer would write themselves.

I think a macro assembler that did that would ease a lot of the tedium of assembly while maintaining the near absolute control over memory use and IO that you need for low level coding.
by ChrisGermano | 2025-06-17 13:35:27+00:00
My team has faced issues like this and other than ensuring any secrets are removed from your code and stored in a .gitignore'd config file (if you really need them to live so close to the codebase in the first place), you need to prioritize that everything goes through proper PRs, privacy/access is properly configured, and any compromised secrets are rotated immediately. We have some tools like Snyk and Trufflehog but even those don't catch a lot of things - human review is best.
by hbn | 2025-06-17 13:35:35+00:00
I never used Wave personally and I think it had a lot of cool innovations for the web at the time, but I also would disagree with a lot of the premises it was designed around. It seemed too overcomplicated to ever really latch on in the mainstream, and honestly I hate the idea of instant messaging in a Google Docs style where people can see my unedited drafts of messages where I likely said something stupid, just for the luxury of "not having to hit enter". Being able to edit my message before I send it off to the other person is a feature!
by twodave | 2025-06-17 13:35:56+00:00
These are ok points. Though I don't think it's necessary to use tables to be accessible, for example. It's perfectly fine to use whatever you want, so long as you include the proper semantics/ARIA tags to help the screen reader know what's going on.

I think understated by the author is how many a11y considerations are visual, real-time and/or physical in nature. Accessible UIs aren't just for communicating the structure of a page to a screen reader. Sometimes your user is deaf, or just colorblind, or lacks fine motor control/experiences physical fatigue using computers. Sometimes they're not blind, but they need larger letters and contrasting colors to quickly and accurately use your application. Sometimes you're displaying something new, and you need to let all of these users know about it clearly.

Also probably understated is that many component libraries (Prime, Material... all of them) have a11y bugs that nobody finds because most don't care. If you want your name on some open-source commits [0], this is a really easy way to get your feet wet.

Source: have done multiple WCAG audits

[0] seriously: https://github.com/primefaces/primeng/pull/15161/commits/ea4...
by dagw | 2025-06-17 13:36:51+00:00
Housing supply and demand isn't static. With UBI the need to live close to employment opportunities decreases, opening up more supply in areas that are currently less attractive and decreasing demand in other areas.

Furthermore we still don't know how people will react to UBI once they feel it is universal and permanent. If you're busting your ass to take home $1500 a month today, and then you get $1500 a month UBI, will you keep working just as much and take home $3000 a month, will you cut down on work and aim for $2200 a month, or will you keep living on $1500 a month and just chill all day. Depending on what choices people make, most people might not end up with that much more money.
by Permit | 2025-06-17 13:38:04+00:00
> Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users (they’ve since cut off all 3rd party clients).

One thing I haven't seen written about much is how these APIs turned into massive liabilities for privacy. If a Twitter API allows me to siphon tweets off of Twitter, you can never delete them. If a Facebook API allows (user-approved apps) to view the names of my friends and the pages they like, this data can be used to create targeted political ads for those users[1].

So a company considering creating a public-facing API must deal with the fact that:

1. This API could be helping my competitor

2. This API makes internal changes more difficult (typically there is a strong effort to maintain backwards compatibility).

3. If company XXX uses the API to extract data (that users have given them explicit access to), the ensuring scandal will not be called the "XXXX Data Scandal", but rather the "MYCOMPANY-XXX Data Scandal"[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
by xpe | 2025-06-17 13:38:45+00:00
Ok, but you are moving the goalposts relative to my original quote: “Their daily practice leaves little time or incentive for keeping up with studies.” My first point is that software developers (generally, more often than not) have the time and incentive to learn on an ongoing basis.

Second point: if continuing education has to be mandated, it is likely a symptom of a system that lacks proper incentives.

On the positive side, as more patients educate themselves and press doctors for statistical understanding and synthesis across studies, “Dr. Expert’s” stale knowledge will no longer fly.
by elric | 2025-06-17 13:38:47+00:00
> Without tech companies [...]

Maybe. Tech companies might have some good jobs for a while. But they will continue to transfer their profits to their parent companies in the US (and/or some tax shelter somewhere).

> and data centres

Data centres employ very few people. Pretty much exclusively during construction. Once operational, very little actual labour is required. Mostly maintenance.

> we will just be a theme park for tourists with the poorly paid, precarious hospitality jobs that go along with that.

No more poorly paid or precarious than a data centre job for Big Tech, I would imagine.

I agree with the sentiment that Spain (and much of Europe, really) needs a big economic boost beyond tourism. But AI fueled data centres ain't it.