MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danaris | 2025-06-28 17:08:07+00:00
..."a few hundred years ago"?

It was covered in ice a few tens of thousands of years ago. As far as I'm aware, the last time it was the bottom of the sea was some significant number of millions of years ago.

Scandinavia has been free of ice for roughly as long as, say, Canada and the northern US.

I don't know much about its soil quality, but if your claim is that it's got only a couple of inches of good soil because it "recently emerged", I'm going to be very skeptical of your other claims.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-28 17:08:13+00:00
The greatest chance for this was probably the US-Arab world, but the Shia/Sunni sectarian-political feudalism made that a non-starter, especially in the context of the Cold War.

As a colleague from Bahrain once quipped, 'the countries of the Arab world love to use Palestinians as propaganda for domestic purposes, but none of them actually give enough of a shit to make hard choices to solve the problem.'
by coderjames | 2025-06-28 17:08:20+00:00
> I'm still a bit upset that they took away vertical taskbars from us

After getting a new W11 laptop at work and discovering the removal of vertical taskbars (ridiculous on 16:9 monitors), that particular loss is specifically what keeps me from "upgrading" from W10. Windows Updates warns me that "certain features aren't available on Windows 11" without specifying which ones; finding that sane placement of my taskbar is one of them means I'm plenty willing to pay $30 for another year of security updates to get to keep W10.
by bird0861 | 2025-06-28 17:08:28+00:00
You're really shrugging off an interactive device engineered by at least one (likely a ~dozen) person to be X percent more sycophantic and agreeable? Do you think the user experience is really so inscrutable? Guardrail models are a common safety measure in use by everyone else (INCLUDING CHATGPT!) -- why is it you can talk endlessly with ChatGPT models (specifically I'm referring to the configuration of the models and the application) about a dangerous delusion but not chemical weapons??

Of course there are people prone to psychotic delusions and there may always be but to just hand wave away any responsibility by OpenAI to act responsibly in the face of this is absolutely ludicrous.
by bgwalter | 2025-06-28 17:09:36+00:00
You are a good employee!

> To use a metaphor employers don't want weavers who refuse to make use of the loom.

The loom actually produced something, as opposed to mediocre coders who ingratiate themselves with management by pushing "AI" because they hate all productive people.

The loom also did not steal other people's IP.
by jakub_g | 2025-06-28 17:10:51+00:00
I bought my parents a Dell laptop in 2019/2020. It has 7th gen i3 so just below the Windows 11 threshold. The machine is in perfect shape as it's used a few times per month max for watching YouTube or some online banking, or occasional LibreOffice usage.

I don't want to generate electronic waste, what would you recommend? Installing Linux Mint?

Note: I'm far from my parents so can't do IT support.

Edit: also occasional HP scanner/printer usage.
by BoorishBears | 2025-06-28 17:11:17+00:00
Past a certain level of seniority, your job increasingly becomes translating imprecise mandates from on high into practical outcomes.

If I heard someone making a blanket mandate for using AI, I'd translate that to them hearing this "new AI thing" allows people to do more work more efficently, and they to see that increase in their org.

I'd take that mandate as a chance to explore AI on someone else's dime, but continue doing my work otherwise, only using AI as it benefits me.

If expectations rise to un-reasonable level because of unrealistic expectations around AI, that's a seperate problem you'll have to deal with.

(It's also not a great look that your leadership wouldn't dig in to realize how silly forced AI is, but a charitable reading is that they're trying to force interactions with AI so employees can discover where it works and where it doesn't)
by edanm | 2025-06-28 17:11:27+00:00
> But yeah, in practice, we seem to want it to end with full Israeli dominance, and the Palestinians either emigrating to Egypt and Jordan or vanishing into thin air, I suppose.

No, the majority of the West strongly wants a two-state solution (on the 1967 border, roughly). So did many Israelis, who voted people into office intent on achieving that goal many times.

The problem is, Israel and Palestine never managed to sign an agreement leading to a two-state solution. And in parallel to the peace process, some Palestinians launched the second intifada, a terror campaign which killed many hundreds of Israelis. This eventually lead most Israelis to think that a two-state solution is impossible.
by vinceguidry | 2025-06-28 17:11:57+00:00
> Please keep in mind that the people who are anti-story are the same folks who view human interaction as a “problem to be solved”.

Yes. But your next statement is nonsense.

> They’re the outliers in society who make the rest of our lives easier.

Nothing about Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg made our lives easier. All they've done is made the social contract worse, making our lives harder, not easier. They've given lucrative jobs to a few, but all their market offerings gave the world is distraction and misery, in the case of Facebook, and flashy status symbols to chase, in the case of Tesla. They crowded out the market for competitors, so people can't have truly useful solutions to the problems Zuck and Musk claimed to solve.

Ask yourself why Chinese electric cars would be banned from the US market and you're getting there. Musk bought a social network with the explicit aim of making it worse, and more than succeeded.
by mpalmer | 2025-06-28 17:13:53+00:00
"Hedge funds will go to great lengths in pursuit of profits, whether it is by counting cars in satellite photos of parking lots or shipping gold across the Atlantic. Building a compiler—a piece of software that turns human-written code into programs a computer can execute—for your homegrown language? That still raises eyebrows."

Cringeworthy. Quant funds do in fact work on things like this. It's not that crazy.
by blablabla123 | 2025-06-28 17:14:39+00:00
I don't think it's possible to understand the whole issue without taking into account how people fled into Israel, both because of genocide in Europe as well as prosecution in multi-ethnic yet predominantly Arab states. Germany being in an awkward position of being an economically dominant state but also having contributed to the whole misery. Also the US is far from neutral probably due to deeper ties that are just part of reality. You cannot undo the past but I don't think it's possible to unroll the whole problem without properly confronting it. The increasingly horrific escalations have obviously completely detached from any reason
by spauldo | 2025-06-28 17:14:54+00:00
A light oil has a density of 700kg per cubic meter. Most common oils are denser.

Then you'd need vanes, agitators, and pumps to keep the oil moving around without forming eddies. These would need to be fairly bulky compared to fans and fan motors.

I'd have to see what an engineering team came up with, but at first glance the liquid solution would be much heavier and likely more maintenance intensive.
by nine_k | 2025-06-28 17:15:03+00:00
This is logically sound, but pragmatically not so. I wish the compiler could issue a warning or even an error if an expression of type `never` is used in a logical condition, like that of an `if`. While such cases might have rare legitimate uses (e.g. some edge cases of macro expansion, etc), I'd like it to be marked explicitly, similar to `unsafe`, e.g. with some `allow_never_as_condition` marker.

Likely the same should apply to expressions of type `()`.
by alganet | 2025-06-28 17:15:03+00:00
You need to understand that Mr. Fowler works for a consultancy.

LLMs sound great for consultants. A messy hyped technology that you can charge to pretend to fix? Jackpot.

All things these consultancies eventually promote are learnings they had with their own clients.

The OOP patterns he described in the past likely came from observing real developers while being in this consultant role, and _trying_ to document how they overcame typical problems of the time.

I have a feeling that the real people with skin on the game (not consultants) that came up with that stuff would describe it in much simpler terms.

Similarly, it is likely that some of these posts are based on real experience but "consultancified" (made vague and more complex than it needs to be).
by nathanlied | 2025-06-28 17:15:51+00:00
There are Jewish communities within Iran, yes. But peacefully?

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/iran/2025-06-27/ty-... (archive: https://archive.is/0qEg9)

One could blame this crackdown on Israel, sure. But that absolves the countries perpetuating persecution of Jews from their own share of responsibility in it. After all, when the American Government interned all those Japanese-Americans - did we blame Japan for it, or did we rightfully blame the American government?

I do not seek to defend Israel's actions against the Palestinian people, but to say that the Jews live "peacefully and with dignity" in places where they often are scapegoated, persecuted, and killed out of hand is not the way. Look at what happened to the Jewish populations of the region between the 40s and now, and you will see a grim picture of persecution, killings, and exodus.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-28 17:16:08+00:00
Can it really be good writing if the central premise that we followed a tribal "law of the jungle" for all of human history, is fundamentally flawed? I'd like to see literally any anthropology work from this century advocating it.

For what it's worth, modern foragers that we can study are almost to a group stiflingly egalitarian. Being powerful and egoistic gets you quickly cut down to size in the social order. A few people (myself included, but more notably graeber) argue that other social structures were historically common and didn't survive to be recorded ethnographically. Neither of these suggest what the post is talking about.

What they're calling tribalism is actually a characteristic of warfare, usually modern. That's not a normal social environment by any means and there's probably an interesting discussion to be had on it, but the author seemingly isn't even aware.
by cassepipe | 2025-06-28 17:16:10+00:00
Even assimilation seems hard at this point. If I were a gazan I'd ask the international community to have Israel buy me decent housing somewhere safe in an arab speaking country. Like, I get it you are stronger and don't want me here but give me.somewhere decent to go. I often wonder what are the options for Palestinians and especially gazans who do want to get out of there.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-28 17:16:25+00:00
> Ask yourself why society at large has stopped trusting mainstream media

Because certain political interests take the existence of a fact-based, independent power center as a threat to their own power?

And so engineered a multi-decade campaign to indoctrinate people against the news/media, thus removing a roadblock to imposing their own often contrary-to-fact narratives?

Pretending this happened in a vacuum or was grassroots ignores mountains of money deployed with specific intent over spans of time.

> It can also mean that society as a whole needs to hold journalism accountable, and demand that they return to the role of the Fourth Column.

I absolutely agree with this.

If I had my druthers, the US would reinstate the fairness doctrine (abolished in 1987) and specifically the components requiring large media corporations to subsidize non-profit newsrooms as a public good.

The US would be a better place if we banned 24/7 for-profit news.
by gametorch | 2025-06-28 17:16:31+00:00
1. Pre-prompting for image and video generation. Gives you way better results for less than a cent of added cost. Although many image models do this thing for you; you have to understand each individual model and apply this judiciously.

2. I build REPLs into any manual workflow that makes use of LLMs. Instead of just being like "F@ck, it didn't work!" you can instead tell the LLM why it didn't work and help it get the right answer. Saves a ton of time.

3. Coming up with color palettes, themes, and ideas for "content". LLMs are really good at pumping out good looking input for whatever factory you have built.
by fmajid | 2025-06-28 17:17:44+00:00
The UK is busy destroying the little agriculture it has with free-trade agreements like the one with Australia that has far fewer animal-welfare safeguards, thus tying British cattle growers' hands behind their backs, when Australia already has significant comparative advantages. You can imagine what will happen to those supplies if there is any major disruption.

The thing is, global warming is making UK agriculture more productive, but government policies are hostile to agriculture, obsessed as they are with finance and what Dan Wang dismissively calls the "sounding smart industries" like media, which are going to be hit by GenAI like a freight train. The country also needs to get a grip on its water supplies, something that takes long-term investment over decades. The current government is loth to take action against water utilities that were privatized by Thatcher and continuing to be looted by their hedge-fund investors.

Similarly the EU's Common Agricultural Policy was originally a subsidies program for French and Italian farmers. It is long past time for it to be reoriented towards food security. The massive food surpluses like the mountains of EEC butter of my childhood are a distant memory now.
by TZubiri | 2025-06-28 17:18:37+00:00
>What if it's just "a standardized way to connect AI models literally anything to different data sources and tools"?

Then you aren't exploring a novel concept, and you are better served learning about historical ways this challenge has been attempted rather than thinking it's the first time.

Unix pipes? APIs? POSIX? Json? The list is endless, this is one of the requirements that you can identify as just being a basic one of computers. Another example is anything that is about storing and remembering information. If it's so foundational, there will be tools and protocols to deal with this since the 70s.

For the love of god, before diving into the trendy new thing, learn about he boring old things.
by bwfan123 | 2025-06-28 17:18:50+00:00
There are 2 kinds of usecases that software automates. 1) those that require accuracy and 2) those that dont (social media, ads, recommendations).

Further, there are 2 kinds of users that consume the output of software. a) humans, and b) machines.

Where LLMs shine are in the 2a usecases, ie, usecases where accuracy does not matter and humans are end-users. there are plenty of these usecases.

The problem is that LLMs are being applied to 1a, 1b usecases where there is going to be a lot of frustration.
by eastbound | 2025-06-28 17:19:33+00:00
> UN (…) Israel does not recognize

An UN agreement is still the highest rank of agreements for whether a state exists.

UN is shock-full of anti-Israeli militants, so it is also unsurprising that Israel doesn’t respect all of it.

> Let that sink in: if you're a Palestianian you can't go to the bank and take out your own money without permission of the Israeli military.

Is this money used for the war against Israel? If yes, it can be legitimately seized. If Palestinians didn’t swear the death of Israel, that would be another story.

Both parties wage a war to death. If Israel gets feable, it gets genocide.

The only way out is peace, but you are actively arguing for the entire eradication of Israel, with the entire weight of the Western Civilization behind you, so… oh man that doesn’t help at all.

> Not having snipers executing children

Depends what the children are doing. Without context, it seems horrible, and yet every time we’re filled in on the context that was conveniently forgotten by “journalists” (who are a certain socio demographic of Western youths, surprisingly), then we notice there’s more to it than “Israel kills blindly”.

If Israel killed blindly, they wouldn’t take so many precautions.

And the funny thing is, I’m not even pro-Israel. I’m just here to show the balance that you have forgotten.
by scarface_74 | 2025-06-28 17:20:07+00:00
If you have those things, you are empowered to say “no”.

I just came away from a 3.5 year stint at AWS - the most toxic of the big tech companies - the year before last. While many were losing sleep, overworking during their “focus”, I didn’t cancel a single vacation, refused to be overworked, and when they gave me the choice of accepting the severance and “leave immediately”, I accepted the severance without even listening to what I could do to possibly stay, reached out to my network, started interviewing and went to NYC for a week two weeks later to go to the US Tennis Open.

I had an offer ten days after my last day.

The next year in 2024, I got an invite at 7 PM for a “1-1” with my manager the next morning at 9 AM. I told my wife I’m about to be let go probably. She asked me was I okay. I said yes, set my alarm and rolled over and went to sleep.

I said thank you to my manager, asked them about the process to turn in my laptop (worked remotely) and asked about my severance and started interviewing that day - I had an offer within two weeks - staff architect working full time at a cloud consulting company.

I’ve been working since 1996 and I’m in my tenth job. I don’t panic, I don’t work over 40 hours a week unless I’m spending time learning something new to me, I don’t sacrifice my health or well being. I’ve been through the dot com bust, the 2008 recession and the shit show of the last three years.

It’s not “doing damage” to people who stay prepared. I don’t do the leet code grind. I don’t do take home test. I’ve never struck it rich in either BigTech or startups and I was a mostly your standard enterprise dev until 2020.

I mentioned my background here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44377380
by tiagod | 2025-06-28 17:20:08+00:00
> It’s easy to say why someone is wrong, Putnam said. The hard part is figuring out why they’re right. And everyone is right. Everyone has some central insight, hard won by the consistency-making mechanism of the brain, built of past experiences, cast as motor predictions, a pattern that repeats, sustains itself in the chaos. Our job is to pan for it like gold, sift it into our own nervous systems, reconcile the resulting contradiction, become something new.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-06-28 17:21:29+00:00
Panic-journalism is out of control. Same as it's ever been.

This is one more instance in a long history of moral panics, economic panics, public health panics, media panics, terror panics, crime-wave panics - the list goes on.

Panics always follow the same cycle; trigger, attention escalation, peak alarm, trough of doubt, contextualization, and integration.

We're at the attention escalation phase of the panic cycle so what we're going to see is a increase of publications that feature personal accounts of ChatGPT Psychosis. As we edge toward peak alarm expect to see mainstream journalists write over-penned essays asking "Why Haven’t Regulators Asked How Many Psychiatric Holds Involve AI?" "Are Families Prepared for Loved Ones Who Trust a Bot More Than Them?" or "Is Democracy Safe When Anyone Can Commune With a Bot That Lacks an Anti-Oppression Framework?"

What's the real way to address this? Wait until we have actual statistical evidence. Become comfortable with mild amounts of uncertainty. And look for opportunities to contextualize the phenomenon such that it can ultimately be integrated appropriately into our understanding of the world.

Until then, recognize these pieces for what they are and understand how these fit into the upward slope of the panic cycle that unfortunately we have to ride out until cooler minds prevail.
by gebdev | 2025-06-28 17:21:41+00:00
This is an interesting study. I wonder how the LLM option might compare to human written responses in the same format (but with higher latency), or even to having a physical human in the room. Given some of the points from the conclusion about teachers being able to detect LLM inspired work, I wonder if either of these options may, at times, be better forms of learning due to improved quality.
by mrbombastic | 2025-06-28 17:22:08+00:00
While I am surprised by the extent of these breakdowns, I do think having a sycophantic mirror constantly praising all your stupid ideas does likely have profound impacts. I think I am probably prone to a bit of delusions of grandeur and I can feel the pull whenever ChatGPT decides some of my input is the greatest thing mankind has considered, “maybe this is a billion dollar idea!”. I imagine a less skeptical, more vulnerable person could fall into an ugly spiral of aggrandizement. And it still seems to sycophantic despite openai saying they tuned it down even custom system prompts don’t seem to help beyond surface level, the general tone is still too much.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-28 17:22:34+00:00
We are not: it depends on the conflict.

When one military force blends in with the civilian populace, actual civilian casualties will fall somewhere inbetween extremes (100% of those killed and 0%).

Ergo, excessive casualty ratios indicate that either (a) the enemy military force is larger, (b) the IDF is exceedingly good at killing only enemy combatants without taking casualties, or (c) a large number of civilians are being killed.

I don't think anyone would argue that Hamas has as many fighters as the IDF?
by turnsout | 2025-06-28 17:22:41+00:00
I’m no Peter Thiel fan, but I love his critique of DOGE:

> I had a conversation with Elon a few weeks ago about this. He said we’re going to have a billion humanoid robots in the U.S. in 10 years. And I said: Well, if that’s true, you don’t need to worry about the budget deficits because we’re going to have so much growth, the growth will take care of this.
by indianmouse | 2025-06-28 17:22:54+00:00
Well said. I agree to your view points of continuing to write and publish opensource.

It is not going to change anything and heck yeah, if it is going to help people and save sometime to re-use or use whatever that is published, continue.

While not having to worry about the consequences, is a good thing because sometimes, all the scientific research is in the same boat until it is misused...

Nothing in the world is going to change by a few developers stopping to publish their work as the damage is already done and beyond containment.