MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bumby | 2025-06-30 20:25:22+00:00
Not my area of expertise, so it should be taken with a boulder of salt, but there are other studies that seem to indicate a much higher correlation. Part of the problem may be that “creative” is a nebulous term. One Swedish study found that people with artistic backgrounds have a 1.9x likelihood of developing schizophrenia and 1.62x odds of developing bipolar disorder.

I suspect (with nothing to support it) that there is a range where people with mental illness are able to interpret the world differently than normies (and thus make connections that normies do not), but also a point where that perception gets so out of joint that they can no longer function in reality. So in the former case, it may help in creative pursuits, but the latter may hamper it.
by danaris | 2025-06-30 20:25:34+00:00
This is hopelessly exaggerated and bad-faith.

First of all, when Apple created iMessage, there was no possible way for them to predict that friend groups would use it as a reason to treat members of their groups poorly due to using Android phones.

Second of all, Apple did not deliberately make interacting with non-iMessage users in group chats "look like trash" in order to exclude them. Apple went out of its way to make it possible for iMessage to interoperate with the ubiquitous (in the US) SMS, with reduced features because SMS did not support the better features. If, instead, Apple had just made iMessage not interoperate with SMS at all, you'd be screaming about that instead.

Third of all, if people are leaving others out of chats, that's not Apple's fault. That's something for those families and friend groups to work out amongst themselves. "Hey, guys, I don't have an iPhone, and don't really have the money to get one, so maybe we could use GroupMe/GChat/WhatsApp/Signal/IRC/email/smoke signals/meeting in person/any of the myriad other ways of communicating instead?" A) "Oh, sure, that shouldn't be a problem!" (everything is solved) B) "What? No, we're not going to change anything just because it makes it impossible to actually include you in stuff. That's a you problem!" (turns out, the problem is your friends are assholes)

Apple cannot by any reasonable standard be held to blame for the way bullying, status-seeking teenagers treat each other.
by slackpad | 2025-06-30 20:25:34+00:00
Haven’t tried it yet (I’d love to find something like this too) but I saw a conference talk on https://docs.voxel51.com/ that looked pretty interesting. It is kind of a data frame for images with a GUI for exploring them. They make it pretty easy to rip various models over your images to add tags, and to evaluate the results.
by ModernMech | 2025-06-30 20:25:47+00:00
I always say this, but my opinion when it comes to bootstrapping a compiler is that it's generally a waste of time unless your language is meant for writing compilers.

While dogfooding your language is a great to stress test it, you want to make sure you're testing the right stresses -- the ones your target users will encounter. A compiler may be that thing, but chances are it is not; most people do not write nor do they aspire to write compilers. So showing off that you've written a compiler in your language doesn't attract users, because they're still left with the question "Okay, well what does it do for me?"

Another reason is that there is an infinite amount of work that goes into writing a compiler. It's really endless, especially for a small team or solo dev. If you try bootstrapping, it means essentially maintaining two compilers until you can fully bootstrap, which may never come. One compiler is really enough work.

The final reason I will say is it takes forever, and puts a total brake on new features, which can really kills project momentum. Writing the first bits of a language can really fly. But when you sit down to bootstrap, it means you're not releasing new features, but redoing everything you've already done. This leads to unfortunate messages like "We’ve now started work on the self-hosted compiler, using the current rudimentary C++-based implementation as a bootstrap.", which followers take to mean "the project is currently in hiatus for the foreseeable future until this background work on the bootstrap compiler is done". This is a critical point in language projects where the bootstrap might never be completed.

When I look at a new language project I always check out the "contributors" section. Whenever I see an initial flurry of activity from one or a few devs, followed by a taper off into nothing, I know the project is in trouble. It seems like maybe this author has hit a wall, and I would be highly suspicious of the bootstrap endeavor causing it.
by SoftTalker | 2025-06-30 20:25:52+00:00
It's really frustrating that bills can include so many unrelated issues. It just makes it impossible for representatives to vote for or against individual provisions. It will never happen but I'd like to see a requirement that bills be limited to one or at least closely related issues. If you want to allocate some wireless spectrum for commercial use, vote on that and that alone. It won't happen because it's too easy for each representative and senator to get their pet causes buried deep in some massive omnibus bill where it won't get much notice.
by pscanf | 2025-06-30 20:25:58+00:00
> if you make the platform that others run on and which creates entirely new economies and allows businesses to thrive, don’t you get to define the constraints that you want since it’s _your_ platform?

Intuitively, this feels right to me, but I think that in this case my intuition fails, because I think of this "right" from the perspective of a person. "They made that thing, it's theirs, they have the right to decide what to do with it."

I don't think the same right applies to a company, though. Especially one so big that it has a significant impact on society, and so big that it's entirely driven by the incentives of capitalism (and not, for example, by a founder's ideals).

In this context I see companies as amoral automata whose only goal is maximizing profits, regardless of the wider consequences of their actions. This seems to produce very good results for the societies in which these companies operate, but it also comes with some side effects. By putting constraints on what companies can do, we can reap most of the benefits and avoid most of the side effects.

</couch-economist>
by atonse | 2025-06-30 20:26:00+00:00
It's not about being fancy. My examples are so utterly dull.

Being able to say "turn on the lights in the living room and turn off the fans in the kids' rooms" – is not a crazy use case.

Instead, I literally have to say:

- Turn on Living Room light

- wait

- turn off <son's name> bedroom fan

- wait

- turn off <daughter's name> bedroom fan

Yes, I could actually say "turn off all the fans" (I believe Siri understands that) but that's usually not what I want.

Another example, you have 3-4 timers going: Let's say I'm cooking and have an oven timer, but also have a timer for my kids to stop their device time. I may have a few going. But being able to say "cancel all the timers except the longest one" is TRIVIAL for a first year programmer to implement. But instead, it's a slog with Siri.
by Swizec | 2025-06-30 20:26:00+00:00
> any evidence that a brain couldn't exist or develop in a jar

The brain could. Of course it could. It's just a signals processing machine.

But would it be missing anything we consider core to the way humans think? Would it struggle with parts of cognition?

For example: experiments were done with cats growing up in environments with vertical lines only. They were then put in a normal room and had a hard time understanding flat surfaces.

https://computervisionblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/cats-and...
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-30 20:26:16+00:00
I mean, does Settings > Apps > Gmail (or whichever other app) > Default Mail App really qualify as “a complex labyrinth”? Sure, it’d be a good thing to add a “Default Apps” section under Settings > General or something, but calling the current route complex almost sounds like an insult to users.

EDIT: Actually, there already is a “Default Apps” section right at the top of the page of Settings > Apps. Yeah, if that’s a “labyrinth” then the assumed level of user intelligence is quite low.
by godelski | 2025-06-30 20:26:46+00:00
> Doesn't seem to be grounded at least with reality and my personal experience with robotics.

It also doesn't match my personal experience with physics nor ML, and I have degrees in both.

You cannot develop accurate world models through observation alone, full stop.

You cannot verify accurate world models through benchmarks alone, full stop.

These have been pain points in physics for centuries and have been the major pain point even before the quantum revolution. I mean if it were possible, we'd have solved physics long ago. You can find plenty of people going back thousands of years boldly claiming "there is nothing new to be learned in physics," yet it was never true and still isn't true even if we exclude quantum and relativity.

Side note: really the paper is "fine" but I wish we didn't put so much hype in academic writing. Papers should be aimed at other academics and not be advertisements (use the paper to write advertisements like IFLS or Quanta Magazine, but don't degrade the already difficult researcher-to-researcher communication). So I'm saying the experiments are fine and the work represents progress but it is over sold and the conclusions do not necessarily follow

Btw, the paper makes these mistakes too. It makes a very bold assumption that counterfactual models (aka a "world model") are learned. This cannot be demonstrated through benchmarking, it must be proven through interpretability.

Unfortunately, the tail is long and heavy... you don't need black swan events to disrupt these models and boy does this annoying fact make it easy to "hack" these types of models. And frankly, I don't think we want robots operating in the wild (public spaces, as opposed to controlled spaces like a manufacturing floor) if I can make it think an iPhone is an Apple with just a stickynote. Sure, you can solve that precise example but it's not hard to come up with others. It's a cat and mouse game, but remember, Jerry always wins.
by grncdr | 2025-06-30 20:27:03+00:00
I believe it’s slightly different in that I can declare a value (or parameter) of type T and know that it can’t be null/invalid.

Consider this Java method:

void frobnicate(bar Bar) { // is bar null? Who knows? }

To get the same behavior in Helix, one would have to declare the parameter type as “Bar?”. If the parameter type is plain “Bar”, callers can still pass you a “Bar?”, but presumably you’d get an NPE at the call site and not somewhere further down the stack.

I’ve never heard of this language before today and don’t have an opinion on it, but I do find the Questionable Types interesting: sort of collapsing Option and Result into one very concise notation.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-30 20:27:25+00:00
I don't think that happened until Apex released sub-$50 DVD players where they were being placed in kid's rooms and people didn't mind if a PB&J was inserted into it. Then it was just another toy the kid broke to go along with the 10 copies of the same DVD that kept getting so scratched up that it couldn't play any more. As long as dad's player/TV were kept clean, the kid's DVD player could be replace at will.

Even VHS tapes were much more expensive than DVDs right up until DVDs.
by gdubs | 2025-06-30 20:27:28+00:00
Been building my YouTube channel where I cover things like Apple Vision Pro development — as well as some new storytelling directions for me, like my newest short on the Voyager mission's camera problems when it was 2 billion miles from earth:

http://youtube.com/@dreamwieber

In parallel I'm working on a bunch of apps for Vision Pro -- my most well-known at the moment being Vibescape which was featured recently by Apple: https://youtu.be/QcTiDBtCafg

To round this out, my wife and I are converting a historic farm in the Pacific Northwest to regenerative agriculture practices. So far we've restored over 20 acres of native ecosystems.

If that's interesting to you there's a channel here:

http://youtube.com/@cleryfarm
by bilsbie | 2025-06-30 20:28:01+00:00
It’s getting kind of silly that we don’t have AI on phones in a usable way.

My wishlist:

Let me talk to AI about anything on my screen. Hey AI why did this guy email me? Hey AI what’s this webpage about? Etc

AI designs the UI on the fly depending on the task I’m doing. No more specific apps? just a fluid interface for whatever I need.

Leave AI in listening or video mode and ask about my environment or have a conversation.
by vkou | 2025-06-30 20:28:12+00:00
Anyone who has ever driven a car will note that they have ~200 degree peripheral vision to observe things moving in front of you, while the limited FOV of your mirrors does not provide that for what's behind you.

Unless you really struggle with object permanence, a child somehow ending up in front of you without you seeing them is not a frequent occurrence, compared to one ending up behind you.

But yes, American cars are stupid big and should be smaller.
by Velorivox | 2025-06-30 20:28:51+00:00
Exactly. Jailbreaking is WAI for the folks who want the “Android experience” on an iPhone. Much of this drama is merely corporations vying to “get theirs” from the ecosystem, without understanding that the extant nature of the ecosystem is why it is the most valuable platform by user spend (that is to say, they care little for the consumer).

Shouting "monopoly" from the rooftops is not enough to affect real change. If I wish not to pay property taxes, my options include moving to another state, but courts do not recognize a general right to challenge tax liability on the grounds of personal preference or disagreement with taxation. Perhaps it's worth sparing a thought as to why, and who ultimately empowered that stance.

Plus, this is often the “if I can’t have it no one can” line of thought, sometimes from companies engaging in anticompetitive practices themselves (like Epic Games).

Edit:

WAI stands for working as intended
by bitpush | 2025-06-30 20:28:58+00:00
> Are you legally prevented from controlling your device

The bar isnt whether it is legal or not. You know that no company can create laws, and either you're saying it out of ignorance, or willful ignorance.

When Walmart drives away mom and pop shops, and dominate a certain town and then hikes the prices for groceries, you cant say "but it isnt illegal to go buy groceries from elsewhere, what did we - Walmart - do wrong?"

Say it with me - monopoly rules are about consumer choice.
by energywut | 2025-06-30 20:29:09+00:00
> Apple walling off iMessage, giving the impression that Apple phones were high technology, and interacting with peasant androids is what made group chats fragment and pictures and videos look like trash.

Which lawsuit PDF related specifically to iMessage interacting with Android was mentioned in this comment? I see a comment about RCS.

Now, maybe you are right, maybe I narrowly interpreted RCS in iMessage to mean chat bubbles, and there's a wider interpretation. Even still, there's no possible way that's the singular most evil thing tech has ever done. The OP is free to be anti-Apple, more power to them, but like, let's be real about levels of evil.

> Also, bringing up IBM, Microsoft or Facebook is "whataboutism".

It's absolutely not whataboutism. The claim the OP made was about Big Tech broadly. Bringing in examples of Big Tech doing evil things is a direct and appropriate rebuttable to the argument that Big Tech doesn't do evil things.
by cush | 2025-06-30 20:29:15+00:00
Just imagine for a moment what this would look like in reality...

"I was going to take your original offer of $220 for this here used HP laptop, but after looking at the high number of writes to the SSD on PCFax, I can't do better than $180."

What a bizarre initiative. CarFax was started in the 80's to combat odometer fraud. Cars need CarFax because they're expensive and have thousands of moving parts
by imglorp | 2025-06-30 20:29:49+00:00
I would. Hands free in the car or when mowing the grass, chatting with the AI would be huge.

"Text my wife and say I'll be late." is still too much to ask: it responds with 20 questions about all the parameters.

"turn up the volume" does actually work for the first time, lately. (Bravo, Android).

"open app antenna pod and begin playing" is way out of the question. Suck.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-06-30 20:29:57+00:00
Agreed and even more heretical from me is that I quite like declared exceptions. It makes the interface of a method clear in all the ways it can fail and you can directly choose what to handle often without having to look at the docs to work out what they mean, because the names tell you what you need to know. You can ignore them and rethrow catch globally but you can also handle them.

Having used Go for years now frankly I prefer exceptions, way too often there is nothing that can be done about an error locally but it produces noise and if branches all over the code base and its even worse to add an error later to a method than in Java because every method has to have code added not just a signature change. I really miss stack traces and the current state of the art in Go has us writing code to produce them in every method.
by lillecarl | 2025-06-30 20:30:00+00:00
I didn't double check this, but according to a quick search 60% of the adult US population owns an iPhone, you're saying that even though you're operating where more than 50% of your target market has your products you should not be held accountable for predatory behavior?

The thing with this 30% tax the private company Apple imposes on a majority of US adults is reasonable?

When you're "competing" with the government (30% tax sounds pretty government like to a Swede, we have 25% VAT) the government will get involved because you're operating a "shadow government" eventually (you set all the rules and set the tax rate, you're now a government).

Supporting Apple here is unreasonable, sure they should be able to take a margin on the app store, but not allowing other stores OR allowing external payment methods to be advertised is definitely predatory behavior and the government already has a monopoly on that.

And the "core fee" response was entirely unreasonable, it is unreasonably expensive. If Apple were operating like Sony on the Playstation where the console is a loss leader for much of it's lifetime then you ofc deserve a cut from developers since you enable them to build profitable games for your platform which markets the game for you and stuff. But Apple makes a profit of iPhones, they make a profit on iCloud, they make profit on App Store... They make a profit everywhere. It's predatory and I don't know how to agree with them here.
by EconoBen | 2025-06-30 20:30:06+00:00
I built a pipeline to automatically convert blog posts into audio using OpenAI's TTS API. The implementation handles chunking long articles (due to the 4096 character limit), generates separate audio files for each chunk, then combines them into a single MP3.

Key features:

- Scrapes and processes blog content for TTS conversion - Handles OpenAI's character limits with intelligent text chunking - Combines multiple audio files into one seamless track - Supports different voice options (alloy, echo, fable, etc.)

Cost is surprisingly reasonable: converted 14 blog posts for $4.20 total ($0.30 per post).

The post includes complete code examples and walks through the entire process from text extraction to final audio output. Great for adding accessibility features or creating audio versions of written content.

Tech stack: Python, OpenAI TTS API, pydub for audio processing.
by mtlynch | 2025-06-30 20:30:19+00:00
I don't have any special domain knowledge in this space, but I know that's an advertised use case for emotional support animals.[0]

I don't know if the client needs the service animal around 24/7, but if you have severe PTSD and could experience severe symptoms unexpectedly while shopping, it seems reasonable to bring along the support animal.

[0] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/service-dogs-m...
by dlgltlzed | 2025-06-30 20:30:27+00:00
Syntax highlighting caught my interest after I created a data format. I stumbled upon TextMate grammar bundles which are supported in some editors and created a bundle that works with three of them. The gnome text editor uses a different language definition format for which I created a grammar file as well. [1]

To highlight the syntax in the browser I checked out the CodeMirror project that uses Lezer grammars. It is very flexible and allowed me to implement additional features like custom folding. [2]

I would also like to create a grammar for tree-sitter, finish the Java implementation and documentation of the ESON parser before I try to implement it in other languages.

[1] https://gitlab.com/marc-bruenisholz/eson-textmate-bundle [2] https://gitlab.com/marc-bruenisholz/eson-lezer-grammar
by msgodel | 2025-06-30 20:31:03+00:00
If you sell me a computer and I don't have a shell on it that's false advertising at best. Doing this en mass with the goal of actually changing people's behavior is even worse IMO. We don't have a word for it because it's not something that could be done before now. Microsoft tried with Windows and IE but the technology at the time meant they couldn't really lock people out of their own devices the way Apple does.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-30 20:31:09+00:00
Big picture—I think it is unreasonable to expect us to solve this problem that has plagued a giant community of pretty smart people, in a couple Hackernews comments. But, in the interest of conversation…

Replication problems—I guess this is sort of a social problem really, it isn’t seen as prestigious to just try and replicate research. Maybe we should start to hand out more grants for that (we get what we pay for, right?). Perhaps this could also help with “publish or perish,” we could stop using paper published as a figure of merit and start using number of papers reproduced. I would put this in the bucket of insufficient diligence applied by the grant issuers.

Overproduction of PhDs, I dunno, if lots of people want to go into research I don’t see that as a huge problem.

Rather than overproduction of PhDs, perhaps we have a problem of seeing grad students as cheap labor. I think it is widely understood that the hours that grad students bill are almost entirely bullshit (you spend way more time doing anything than your contract says), so maybe we need to police that better (it seems like the grad students’ and the NSF could easily have aligned interests here, in terms of making sure grad students get paid more). Pay them more, the university will have to employ fewer. However, we’ll probably need to hire more dedicated instructors at that point.