MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tom89999 | 2025-06-14 05:14:23+00:00
I switch of my phone every evening after 20:00 hrs. Nobody has to disturb me except my moms house is on fire. My landline number is known around relatives etc. I never answered or reacted that late on the same day. Its my fucking free time, nothing can be so important i have to give up that personal time. Unluckily i have to use my own personal phone for my job. I receive emails and texts when my teamleader is working late. Thats annoying. A couple of years ago my company handed me a work cell phone, but those days are long gone. When i commute to work, early in the morning, i look outside the window of the tram, look at the sun rising or whats going on on the streets. The entire wagon is just staring on senseless Whatsapps, texts or videos. I dont get why the people dont wanna be bothered that early in the morning and making them ready for work or just enjoy a beautiful sunrise. You cant make friends with them anymore, they dont look around, dont start chatting with the person next to them. Zombies they are. If all those people would hold a bottle of beer and sip on it frequently, we would call them alcoholics and addicts. And those people are addicts, needing treatment. Urgently. But the common reception of phone users is that they are in touch with someone and the social tradegy is hidden behind the manner of use of such devices. One does not see if the user is watching stupid videos or is caught in a bubble. But holding a bottle of beer will bring the people to contempting the blue collar worker after a long working day, talking to real people, earning his wage and returning to his real existing family that evening. What i ask myself the entire time is, how are kids raised by parents working for or owning cellphone providers and manufacturers? What do such people tell their kids how or not to use social media? Do they raise them ascetic when it comes to gadgets? Tell them: Daddy is going to work, selling stuff for stupid people?
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-06-14 05:14:46+00:00
Kagi pulls from Google and Bing and does what neither of them can do (despite their utterly massive budgets) - deliver affiliate free results.

And as a bonus, Kagi only delivers AI results when requested.

Kagi is what Google and Bing could be - if only they weren't controlled by people of questionable skill and low ethics.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-06-14 05:15:15+00:00
Yes, you're starting from zero, so:

- your tax bill will be higher for the next four years, and

- these higher taxes will be totally offset by lower taxes far in the future

How would this affect the optimal hiring/firing decisions of big tech companies? Would they keep fewer engineers to save on current year's taxes, even though they have useful work for them to do?

Also, this penalizes companies for hiring doesn’t it?

How so? Hiring for non-R&D roles is unaffected. If you hire sales and customer service people, you'll still write off their cost right away.

Hiring R&D folks will be treated the same way as other forms of capital investment, so it seems like the playing field will be leveled (between hiring and other forms of capital investment).
by sponnath | 2025-06-14 05:16:09+00:00
I think it's easy to ignore all the times the models get things hilariously wrong when there's a few instances where its output really surprises you.

That said, I don't really agree with the GP comment. Humans are the bottleneck if we knew these models get things right 100% of the time but with a model like o3-pro it's very possible it'll just spend 20 minutes chasing down the wrong rabbit hole. I've often found prompting o4-mini gave me results that were pretty good most of the time while being much faster whereas with base o3 I usually have to wait 2-3 minutes and hope that it got things right and didn't make any incorrect assumptions.
by notjoemama | 2025-06-14 05:17:19+00:00
You didn't happen to try an app called Nothing but Crickets did you? I made a whole $4 from advertising.com from that on WP7. It was a single button and when you clicked on it, the sound of crickets would play. I always hoped someone would use it in a meeting. I didn't care about the money. I just wanted to make people laugh.
by tines | 2025-06-14 05:18:01+00:00
> How so?

The claim was “if your headcount is stable.” If it’s not stable in the upward direction, you’ll get penalized relative to the situation before, because it’ll take five years to ramp up on your tax write offs.

I’m not sure what you mean by saying that hiring r&d will be treated as other forms of capital investment. Isn’t this whole discussion about how r&d is not treated the same as it used to be?

> - these higher taxes will be totally offset by lower taxes far in the future

I think the article addresses this by stating that companies don’t run with five years’ worth of money sitting around ready to be spent on this.
by hackyhacky | 2025-06-14 05:18:21+00:00
> Counterpoint: No it doesn't. I've included about as convincing an argument so hopefully that satisfies you.

I don't seen any evidence. Would you say that government investment in space, the internet, or medicine does not benefit the general public?

> producing food is a benefit to everyone and that isn't funded under the largest possible umbrella. It is funded under a highly decentralised system and works unbelievably efficiently.

Among other mechanisms, the federal government provides extensive financial support and incentives to food growers. Are you saying that federal food subsidies should be eliminated under the same principle as eliminating research?

> have shown to be fund-able by a disparate group of entities (ironically governments).

I feel like you are undermining your own point here.

> Interested parties can just fund science directly.

They can, but historically, profit-motivated non-governmental entities are sufficiently risk-averse that they are unwilling or unable to invest in basic research, i.e. such research that may or may not have a monetizable application. The internet is the classic example of this class of research.
by tom89999 | 2025-06-14 05:18:31+00:00
Then just read a book or magazine. Or just take that boring time, its life that is not always funny, entertaining and colorful. Most people have the problem of being under pressure to spend even their free time productive. But for whom? Boredom is healthy, spinning down your engine from constantly reving up at the street lights in life. When i commute to work, i got an old Walkman, ancient cassette player with me, listening to an entire album of music where i cant hear the phone ringing, no notification popping up and letting me get distracted from listening to people that spent years of work to create an album of fantastic music.
by kazinator | 2025-06-14 05:19:09+00:00
> In one case, a man who initially asked ChatGPT for its thoughts on a Matrix-style "simulation theory" was led down a months-long rabbit hole, during which he was told, among other things, that he was a Neo-like "Chosen One" destined to break the system.

Is there proof that this happened other than that person's claims?
by ijidak | 2025-06-14 05:19:58+00:00
Not true. How the higher level thought is occurring continues to be a mystery.

This is an emergent behavior that wasn’t predicted prior to the first breakthroughs which were intended for translation, not for this type of higher level reasoning.

Put it this way, if we truly understood how LLMs think perfectly we could predict the maximum number of parameters that would achieve peak intelligence and go straight to that number.

Just as we now know exactly the boundaries of mass density that yield a black hole, etc.

The fact that we don’t know when scaling will cease to yield new levels of reasoning means we don’t have a precise understanding of how the parameters are yielding higher levels of intelligence.

We’re just building larger and seeing what happens.
by Beijinger | 2025-06-14 05:20:35+00:00
The whole article feels a bit confusing, and I’m not really sure what they’re talking about. Are they saying the mushroom produces ergot alkaloids—the precursors to LSD? That would be interesting but not groundbreaking. Or are they claiming it actually produces LSD itself?

Fun fact: I once knew someone whose master’s thesis involved a solid-gas fluidized bed reactor—basically wheat kernels suspended in humid air, with ergot fungus growing on them. Ergotamine was then extracted from the air. The reactor was quite complex, spanning several floors, and was a gift from a now-defunct chemical giant.
by jruohonen | 2025-06-14 05:21:28+00:00
"I learned that at least as of this time last year, on questions of literary analysis, ChatGPT will make up quotes that sound like they go with the themes of the books, and it can’t get page numbers correct."

If you assign written homework, requiring proper citations is one way to do it. References with mandatory page numbers would do good also for science.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-06-14 05:21:30+00:00
I once worked on a product that was promising, could have been really big. But the people making it priced it twice as high as all the competitors. There was never a chance of success, even after finding customers, which was hard. The ultimate problem wasn't the product (imperfect as it was). It was the leaders who were cavalier when they should have been biting their nails. Sometimes safety is a curse.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-06-14 05:21:39+00:00
I agree with everything you said here. Most of it transfers to macOS as well. Readability took less of a hit, thankfully.

Some of the work appears so shoddy that I wonder if it was done by code mods or something. The Passwords app on macOS looks bizarrely cluttered and cramped, with all kinds of bad artifacts when you resize the window. I know it's a beta, but it's so bad that I really wonder if a human looked at it for more than a minute before they shipped it out.
by neilv | 2025-06-14 05:22:07+00:00
I remember when my university had a relationship with Sun that let us see Java (Oak) early.

And then -- given that Java was smart, OO, in the Web browser, going big, and free -- built an intro CS curriculum around it. Like many universities.

That history of universities promoting the adoption of Java, and training a generation of Fortune 500 corporate coders in it, has not gone unpunished.
by paulpauper | 2025-06-14 05:22:15+00:00
However, increasing fuel prices have since caused an increase in hourly operating costs for most airplanes, and a Cessna 172 now costs US$95–180[3] per Hobbs hour to rent, including fuel.[4]

I had no idea it is so cheap to rent a Cessna. A private jet is easily 20x that
by grumpy-de-sre | 2025-06-14 05:23:03+00:00
Honestly it's probably just because the condition responds well to hormonal therapy. If you've got a cheap and effective treatment available for a condition it's hard to justify spending research dollars on digging deeper into it (particularly something as strange as Endometriosis, eg. where do you even start looking).

The strong genetic component also makes it somewhat unlikely that it's something we'll be able to ever eliminate completely but perhaps there will one day be targeted drugs that can stop disease progression. It's good to see more research dollars being made available in recent years.

There's a lot of other conditions that receive a similar lack of attention, for a common male analogue "chronic pelvic pain syndrome".
by notjoemama | 2025-06-14 05:23:40+00:00
Sounds like a normal conversational speculation to me. I simply searched for her name + divorce. The Yahoo Finance article I read said there was a prenuptial in place but they settled for an undisclosed amount. At the time he was worth $30B so a $350M buyout for 23andme is probably in a reasonable assumption of what the settlement could have been. Conversationally speaking of course. We don't know either way.
by dkbrk | 2025-06-14 05:23:59+00:00
I actually think that it does a disservice to not go to Nazi allegory, because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there is some critical understanding that I have left on the table; there is an element of the story that you can't possibly understand.

In fact, as I have said before and I emphatically believe, if you had to explain the Nazis to somebody who had never heard of WWII but was an Oracle customer, there's a very good chance that you actually explain the Nazis in Oracle allegory.

So, it's like: "Really, wow, a whole country?"; "Yes, Larry Ellison has an entire country"; "Oh my god, the humanity! The License Audits!"; "Yeah, you should talk to Poland about it, it was bad. Bad, it was a blitzkrieg license audit."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=1459s
by nomel | 2025-06-14 05:24:25+00:00
How is this wrong?

Our visual system is optimized, rather extremely, for understanding 3d scenes under the simple perspective model that our eyes are based on: x' = (x * f) / z

Outside of that 99.999% experience norm, that are brains are so used to, is disconnect and discomfort. If you've ever put on a new pair of glasses, with a different prescription, you'll understand exactly what he's talking about: depth offset and dizziness.

The disconnect is why refraction and lensing is interesting to look at: the model your eyes are used to seeing, for the world behind the thing, is not normal.
by LPisGood | 2025-06-14 05:24:53+00:00
> Existing devs will destroy the new dev with complicated-but-deeply-flawed arguments which management will not fully comprehend. At the end of the day, management will do

I sympathize with this position, but I think it’s worth admitting that it’s also often the case that the complexity increases all made sense at the time of implementation, and the big rewrite in the sky is often more expensive, more risky, and likely to still end up with new complexity than is anticipated at the beginning.
by whycome | 2025-06-14 05:25:10+00:00
His name is Vishwash Kumar Ramesh. But, like an odd game of telephone or something, many news sites are displaying his name as Vishwashkumar Ramesh. And it seems the error is due to the passenger manifest. Airlines often combine first and middle names. It’s odd for news sites to not notice the error. Especially when also naming the brother who has a similarly-constructed name (Nayan Kumar Ramesh and also the deceased brother/passenger Ajay Kumar Ramesh). It’s probably due to western unfamiliarity of the Indian name. (They wouldn’t make the error with a Davidwilliam).
by danhite | 2025-06-14 05:27:30+00:00
> Outside of movies, people do not work out their thoughts on windowpanes or transparent “whiteboards” because of the exact same legibility issues.

I knew a lovely man, a kind hearted engineer, Larry Weiss, for whom this was not true... In the early 1980s I was in his VW van that he used for business roadtrips when he, while still driving, grabbed a felt marker and started drawing on the window in front of him to illustrate a point.

I learned that he kept markers handy and used them to capture his thoughts on long drives (to conferences, customers etc). Rough mechanical sketches mostly.

Back then I did not generally know to describe myself as (modern term) aphantasic as I had yet to realize I was different from most people, but hopefully this context helps you to understand why I then (and now) grokked the value of putting your conceptual thought into your ongoing visual field, non-occlusively aka transparently

Legibility is no more the deciding factor of ~utility here/AR/VR than it is in dreams. Indeed I have been very near sighted for over 50 years and I do not find this ~illegibility to be an issue for clarity of visual~assist to thinking.

The point John Carmack makes may have greater merit for other people or if we were limited to discussing text--but Liquid Glass is not about text per se, is it?

"...there’s way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. I…I don’t even see the code." -- Cypher from The Matrix 1999

P.S. If my story about Larry intrigued you, I am happy to share these two tiny tidbits I found in memoriam ...

https://isaac-online.org/wp-content/uploads/ISAAC-E-News-Oct...

https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Larry_Weiss [re his work and patents at Tektronix in the 1960s]
by andriamanitra | 2025-06-14 05:28:13+00:00
This is a compelling argument but there is an upper limit of how much wealth can be intrinsically tied to a person. When we start talking about 8, 9, 10, 11, even 12 figures it's really hard to argue that the value of the wealth would diminish if it was distributed among more people. If anything I would expect people with more modest amounts of wealth to be more motivated to manage it (rather than hiring someone else to do it, at which point there is no intrinsic personal connection).
by balamatom | 2025-06-14 05:30:43+00:00
>but I assume it's something like giving me enough tunnel vision to forget about background/subconscious anxieties

counterpoint: it might be said that one's "tunnel vision" is made out of anxieties pushed to the background, disrupting the default mode network allows the person to consciously process them. ofc i can't say whether this tracks with your experience
by bubblyworld | 2025-06-14 05:32:03+00:00
Mmm, the problem with computable foundations (in my opinion anyway) is that it takes a lot of stuff that is trivial in standard foundations (equivalence relations, basic operations of arithmetic and their laws, quotients, etc) and fills them with subtle logical footguns.

As you say, some view this as a feature, not a flaw. But to my mind mathematics is a tool for dissecting problems with hard formal properties, and for that I'd like the sharpest scalpel I can find.

For me classical foundations strikes a good balance between ease of use and subtlety of reasoning required to get results. I'm not sure the non-constructive and self-referential bits bother me, they don't really get in the way unless you're studying logic (in which case you're interested in computability and other foundations anyway).
by rahimnathwani | 2025-06-14 05:32:58+00:00
I’m not sure what you mean by saying that hiring r&d will be treated as other forms of capital investment.

I'm countering your point about 'hiring being penalized'. I'm saying, no, it's just being treated consistently (from a cost recognition perspective) as all other types of cost.

I think the article addresses this by stating that companies don’t run with five years’ worth of money sitting around ready to be spent on this.

Google's net cash flow from operating activities is $300bn/year. Its total R&D expenditure is $50bn/year. It has $100bn cash on hand.
by mindslight | 2025-06-14 05:34:02+00:00
The approach that works for me is to get more devices. I'm not really attracted to my phone, because it sucks as a computer. I can tap out maybe 10wpm as opposed to 140 at a desktop. One tiny screen. Swipe pinch zoom blah instead of a mouse. I only use the web browser on that if I'm actually needing to view something while mobile. Most of the apps I have on it are libre communications apps, and a few things like grocery store etc. Nothing I'm ever wanting to poll, and I don't even really pay attention to notifications.

Surveillance industry crapps go on a separate device I just leave at home. I don't disable notifications or even swipe to dismiss them - just ignore. The whole thing is perma-silent and generally forgtten until I want to actually do something that requires a mobile app.

The majority of my usage is on a desktop computer. Surveillance industry websites definitely make themselves harder to use so you waste more time and never quite get your full fix, but you still somewhat do hit a natural satiation limit, much more than you would through a tiny porthole that fits in your pocket.

I haven't done the sit-on-couch-and-watch-TV thing for a year, but obviously I use a real laptop for that rather than falling into the "tablet" (aka big phone) trap.
by JustinCS | 2025-06-14 05:36:27+00:00
I agree, real intelligence may also potentially be explained as all "math and probability", whether it's neurons or atoms. A key difference between our brains and LLMs is that the underlying math behind LLMs is still substantially more comprehensible to us, for now.

It's common to believe that we have a more mystical quality, a consciousness, due to a soul, or just being vastly more complex, but few can draw a line clearly.

That said, this article certainly gives a more accurate understanding of LLMs compared to thinking of them as if they had human-like intelligence, but I think it goes too far in insinuating that they'll always be limited due to being "just math".

On a side note, this article seems pretty obviously the product of AI generation, even if human edited, and I think it has lots of fluff, contrary to the name.
by fcatalan | 2025-06-14 05:36:53+00:00
I concur that SICP 4.4 is very approachable. I once took a class that had a simple Prolog assignment, I recall we were given some building plans and had to program a path solver through the building. I thought it was a bit too easy and I wanted to dig deeper, because just doing the task left you with a taste of "this is magic, just use these spells".

I looked at how to implement Prolog and was stumped until I found that SICP section.

So I ported it to JavaScript and gave it a Prolog-like syntax and made a web page where you could run the assignment but also exposed the inner workings, and it was one of the neatest things I've ever handed in as coursework.
by eklavya | 2025-06-14 05:39:14+00:00
The comments make it sound as if Oracle can just demand money from any Java user. That's not the case, if you were already paying for Oracle Java and support, there seems to have been a change of terms.

If you don't need the support, just use openjdk, what's the problem? What's with the insistence on providing something for free or however much you want to pay for it? Get better terms or switch vendors! Java is an abundant ecosystem with multiple paid support providers.
by adastra22 | 2025-06-14 05:39:35+00:00
Why would you put a square cover on a round hole?

The hole came first. They dig a hole, then they have a need to put a cover on it. Making a circular cover to fit over a circular hole is if anything cheaper and easier than making a square cover over an inscribed circular hole, at least when working with metal.

The hole drove the design of the cover, not the other way around.
by kqr | 2025-06-14 05:40:28+00:00
I also assumed randomness would balance things out, but "balance things out" means maximum entropy distribution.

With 100 people, there are only 100 configurations where one person has all of the money. But there is also only one single configuration where everyone has the same amount of money. There are a small number of configurations where everyone has almost the same amount of money.

The vast majority of the configuration space consists of configurations that on a macro level fall under the umbrella category "unequal". This is not because they are more likely states, but just because there are so many of the states we would label "unequal".
by manquer | 2025-06-14 05:40:39+00:00
That has always been the case, there is loads of empty distance between big population centers even today there are big cities many hours by flight from anywhere else of interest.

In the age of sail, people were perfectly willing to spend months in transit .

Transit times for most objects of commercial interest (i.e. upto moons of Saturns) is only in years if you use a low energy/Delta-v Hohmann transfer orbits and/or gravity assists as is common today for probes.

Direct transfer would be expected for human transits , those can be fairly quick . Transfers to mars within the next 1-2 decades is doable in 6months or less.

There are no fundamental breakthroughs needed to go any orbits we would be interested in 1 year or less by end of this century.

On the other hand I do agree going interstellar is a whole different scale of empty and without near light speed (even with ) is probably out of reach .