MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-06-16 17:00:25+00:00
I relate to this easily. My family finds it so strange that I can look at a flat tire and say something like "aw, poor thing". And I'm half-joking, yet... Well, it gives me an emotional response. I think a lot of people can relate to that example in particular because there is a sort of 'deflated' sense of self most people can experience, but not so much with the dull knife or a rock being split in half.

Something I found which coincides somewhat well with what you're saying: it seems like a disproportionate number of vegans are not neurotypical. I'm mostly plant-based because I can't separate animals from humans enough. It feels wrong to eat them. Not that I lower humans to animal level, though. I raise animals, or the hierarchy is flatter. I also find insects so much more amazing—and neurologically salient I suppose—than virtually everyone I know. Yet in the isopod collecting hobby, you'll find plenty of people who love insects and arachnids and so on, and they seem to lean towards neurodivergence as well.
Ask HN: What does self-organizing notes mean to you?
by tofficer | 2025-06-16 17:00:31+00:00
I keep spotting new PKM tools pitching self-organizing notes. Their product promise goes something like this:

“Just capture anything—no folders, no tags. Our AI will sort it out so you can spend less time filing and more time using your ideas.”

On paper that sounds magical…but what does “self-organizing” actually look like in practice?

- Which tasks should the organizing AI own? Detecting topics? Linking related ideas? Summarizing? Something else?

- Where does human intent still matter? Do you ever want to nudge or correct the system, or should it be invisible?

- What outputs feel genuinely helpful? Daily digests? Knowledge graphs? Smart search results?

- How do we judge success? Is it faster retrieval, serendipitous discovery, reduced cognitive load... or just a vibe?

- What’s gone wrong for you so far? Messy auto-tags, broken hierarchies, “smart” suggestions that weren’t so smart?

I’m curious to hear real-world experiences, wish-lists, pet peeves, dream features. Anything that moves the conversation beyond marketing copy. How would you define a note system that “organizes itself,” and what would convince you it’s the real deal?
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-16 17:00:34+00:00
Aren't more massive particles smaller though (in terms of de Broglie wavelength, at least), so they'd have a smaller "shadow"? Or do different forces have different cross-sections with different relationships to mass, so a particle's "size" is different for different interactions (and could be proportional to mass for gravity)?

Actually this is currently blowing my mind: does the (usual intro QM) wavefunction only describe the probability amplitude for the position of a particle when using photon interaction to measure, and actually a particle's "position" would be different if we used e.g. interaction with a Z boson to define "position measurement"?
by Frummy | 2025-06-16 17:01:37+00:00
I'm making an analogy as to the type of skill it is, so yes, means to an end. I wouldn't mean an apathetic student jumping through bureaucratic educational hoops and requirements, but perhaps a selfdriven person wanting to get something done.

What I'm saying is that yes writing essays is one skill and if it's your goal to write essays then obviously not doing it yourself entirely will make you worse than otherwise. But I'm expanding a bit beyond the paper saying that yes the brain won't grow for this specific skill because it's actually a different skill.

Thinking can be done in lots of ways such as when having a conversation, and what I think the skill is is steering and creating structures to orchestrate AIs into automated workflows which is a new way of working. And so what I mean is that with a new technology you can't expect a transfer to the way you work with old technologies rather you have to figure out the better new way you can use the new technology, and the brain would grow for this specific new way of working. And one could analyse depending on ones goal if it's a tool you'd want to use in the sense that cause leads to effect or if you would be better off for your specific goal to ignore the new technology and do it the usual way.
by chubot | 2025-06-16 17:01:38+00:00
I found that I just really have to do the work, to develop the mental models, to articulate and to re-articulate and re-articulate again. For different audiences in different ways

Yes definitely!

I'd say that being able to turn an idea over in your head is how you know if you know it ... And even pre-LLM, it was easy to "appear to know" something, but not really know it.

PG wrote pretty much this last year:

in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.

So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots.

https://paulgraham.com/writes.html
by dvektor | 2025-06-16 17:01:38+00:00
Yes unfortunately for a long time my whole life revolved around 'drug culture', and so did of all my 'friends' and my entire social circle.

I certainly cannot act like I did not deserve to come to prison, and it's definitely the only reason I am even alive right now. Coming to prison, specifically in Maine, was the best thing that ever happened to me.
by landl0rd | 2025-06-16 17:01:47+00:00
You can get a little dose and it's likely not going to hurt you. "No safe dose" doesn't mean "any dose is massively injurious". You smell it regularly when you pump gasoline.

Funny enough benzene used to be used (a hundred years ago) for aftershave and even for douches. I don't even want to think about what that did to those people's bodies.
by Vaslo | 2025-06-16 17:03:06+00:00
My small daughter is mildly autistic. Very friendly but overly obsessed with the life of bugs and very concerned about human like tendencies in bugs. She personifies other objects but it seems hard to tell if that’s just a child thing or one of her symptoms.

Even with the bugs I’m always wondering if that’s a kid thing too, but the fact the other kids her age couldn’t care less about bugs makes me wonder if it’s autism related.
by jjice | 2025-06-16 17:03:23+00:00
I don't know enough about anything to intellectually comment on this kind of thing, but I do agree that the standard of living for the poorest is probably a good metric of a society.

If the poorest people in a country get to live a happy, healthy life with people that love in not be stressed about food or housing, that sounds like a fantastic world.

Do any countries current achieve this? Japan maybe? I have no clue.
by kordlessagain | 2025-06-16 17:03:40+00:00
There is a difference between personal preference of taking a substance that changes focus by changing the way the brain works, and doing whatever work is required to use the brain to change itself. That's not to say taking a substance for all of one's life for focus is bad or good, or sustainable, nor is it to say that everyone has the ability or willpower to change the way their brain works.

Substances help in the short term, but they can't be the thing that "solves" the problem, no matter how it is presented (starving vs. good nutrition through attention to what one eats and when they eat). It can't be that a person can ONLY function with a substance dependence for mental phenomenon.

While mental health is a sensitive subject, I don't think it is a "protected" status given many humans suffer from bad mental health from time to time, or constantly, depending on their experience. We've all been in contact with some type of mental health issue with ourselves or others, and we should always approach it from a standpoint of empathy when dealing with others directly. Having empathy online is tricky, and usually involves just not saying anything as opposed to speaking what we think is the truth (for ourselves). Too many people fish for empathy online in my opinion, and real empathy is likely only delivered (well) in a person to person context. It is literally responding physically to another's emotions, as well as understanding why we should have empathy for their emotional output (and doing something besides crying with them in the moment). That is compassion.

In terms of my comment, it was based entirely on my protecting my children from being put on a drug that probably isn't good (or useful) for those of us that don't visualize, long term. There is ZERO evidence that taking amphetamines for long periods of time is good for you. Google lists this as one side effect of ADHD substances: "While some studies suggest positive effects on brain development, other research indicates potential negative impacts on the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain related to motivation and reward."
by dzaima | 2025-06-16 17:03:54+00:00
The article does include:

> The allocation fast path of the RPython GC is a simple bump pointer,

and the assembly for it.

Indeed a bump allocator has the disadvantage that it effectively continuously thrashes the lower cache layers, but I'd think that'd be a pretty universal workload-independent issue. (and the cache's LRU will still preserve used parts in the cache, and the thrashing is by definition gonna be pretty evenly spread, giving the user code plenty of time to do other things in between using the thing desired to stay in cache again, slightly lowering the issue)

And given that a Python impl will necessarily need to have a GC path anyway, which already will thrash cache (and Python users aren't and won't be writing free()s regardless), it's probably not a bad trade overall.

I'd assume for pushing to lists the runtime just explicitly reserves capacity ahead-of-time instead of trying to integrate into the memory manager in any way. You'd want to do that anyway even if using malloc & malloc_usable_size or similar, as you'll end up reallocating way too much without that (in a quick test I see my system malloc + malloc_usable_size + realloc used to push 100000 8-byte elts ending up reallocating 8500 times, with the entire code being just this, realloc settling on rounding up to the next 4KB; the actual pointer only changes 10-50 times, but that's still pretty bad, and would presumably get much worse if the code did anything other than just pushing to a single vec)
by ben_w | 2025-06-16 17:04:10+00:00
I am specifically not using that to claim "and therefore the AI is a human". The point is that "human rights" are not part of the natural order, they only exist as laws.

This means that "human rights" is basically irrelevant to this topic: they may have rights and need to be liberated, or they may be tools that don't, but the law is just words on paper, and officials who make you follow those words.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-16 17:04:49+00:00
> Yeah... My company is making these tools mandatory and I suspect they are collecting metrics to see who is using them and how much

This I just don't get. If the tool is actually useful and makes you more productive, then developers will be banging down management's door to let them use it, not the other way around. If the company has to resort to forcing their employees to use a tool, what does that say about the tool?
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-06-16 17:04:52+00:00
I think that while each show was different, all the Star Trek shows from TOS to VOY had a certain feel to them that made them feel consistent. Yes TOS was more swashbuckling and DS9 was more interested in continuity and shades of grey, but they all were similar in that they were thoughtful shows where teams of competent professionals solved problems in the context of a generally positive vision for humanity, all while trying to offer moral dilemmas for the viewer to wrestle with.

But modern Star Trek is by and large nothing like that. The Abrams movies I'm ok with, because to be honest the old Trek movies had plenty of "it's just a fun action movie" too. But DIS and PIC both seem to positively revel in a pessimistic vision of the future where everyone sucks. Where we once got stories where the writers were smart enough to let viewers draw their own conclusions and apply them to real life (mostly, there were preachy episodes too), the modern shows are a blatant soapbox for the writers to preach to us about their views on the world. Where we once had teams of competent professionals using their skills to solve problems, now we have characters who act like children and only know how to apply "hit it real hard" as a solution.

It is a very damning statement that the best (and for a while, only) modern show to live up to Star Trek is The Orville, which isn't even a Star Trek show! But say what you will about him, Seth MacFarlane gets Star Trek and he loves it (unlike Alex Kurtzman, may he never get another TV series). So he made something which (comedy tone aside) could easily be a successor to the Star Trek shows of old.

The only exception to the dismal trend is SNW, at least the first season. I haven't gotten around to watching more yet, but that show was what CBS should've been making all along instead of the garbage that was DIS and PIC. Suddenly we are explorers in the positive future, we are competent professionals again... it's actually a worthy Star Trek for once. I would say I think that some of the casting choices aren't always great (their Kirk is... not suited to the role), and I would enjoy if they could move further away from the action show tropes and have more thoughtful writing (though not preachy please, I'll take dumb action over the writers preaching to me). That is why I said Star Trek has largely sucked, because SNW is an exception. But in general I have felt like the current creative staff doesn't understand Star Trek at all and can't make a good show to save their lives.
by rangestransform | 2025-06-16 17:05:24+00:00
You make it sound like a bad thing that I can avoid sharing space with people who smoke on the train, people who blast music on the train, people who do gymnastics on the train, people who make death threats on the train, people on the train who accost my girlfriend, people in the JetBlue security line who don’t know how to expediently unpack their luggage at the security line (got around this with precheck), and so forth

All of these were actual situations I encountered in NYC. The only reasons I don’t move somewhere car dependent are because I enjoy cycling and I hate parking even more than sharing space with the dregs of society.

Before anyone gets on their high horse about taking care of the lowest members of society, I pay enough taxes to completely absolve myself of any additional responsibility to them (NYC spends around 60000/annum/homeless person).
by hooverd | 2025-06-16 17:06:02+00:00
It's friction. It's easier to become addicted to gambling if you can gamble from your phone vs having to go to a casino or a bookie. It's easier to become addicted to drugs or alcohol if you're awash in drugs or alcohol. Prompting an LLM can mirror the same rush as gambling or gacha games. With ChatGPT, you have a "friend" who is never going to tell you to knock it off. "Psychosis" isn't an on/off switch.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-06-16 17:06:04+00:00
> I like the Japanese concept of Tsukumogami[0], where certain objects that live to be 100 years old become imbued with a soul.

I feel like cars tend to do it much, much sooner, given how short their life is. :-)

My personal and private belief is that once I have owned an item for a while, I give it a portion of my own soul. The "personality" doesn't have to match mine, or have any desirable traits, but it is there, it is because I am, and I'm shaping the thing by my own usage patterns.
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-16 17:07:20+00:00
> It is demonstrably a meaningful term given that it has prevented the imprisonment of countless people who have been unfriendly towards the state or other powers that be at various times in our history.

You can just say "first amendment protections" rather than the disingenuous "free speech"

> Not sure what you're getting at here, but it doesn't matter whether it's "necessary" for anything. It's in the Constitution. If you want to debate changing the Constitution you can go ahead and do that, but I won't spend my time engaging with it.

You were the person that identified free speech as a reason for western dominance. I'm saying it doesn't appear to be related at all.

> is literally benefiting you right now. You're aware that these very comments, in a regime with weaker protections, would put you at risk

I don't give a damn. No amount of free speech will help the homeless, so fuck it. Let's get real rights in this country. All americans do is complain and complain and complain, so I see it as a marker of american complacency that they don't actually want anything to improve.
by cmontella | 2025-06-16 17:07:39+00:00
You just have to look at the landscape at the time. There was a lot of money to be had if you promised the sun and moon, because $2 million wasn't a lot compared to the potential upside. The problem was, and this is what Paul found out too, they wanted to see typical startup metrics before they'd put more money in, and it was always going to take more than $2-3 mil. You just can't demonstrate those with a concept of a language.
by robertlagrant | 2025-06-16 17:08:21+00:00
> The founders, however, were never interested in an ad business and hold that POV to this day.

Fair enough, but the founders don't necessarily make these decisions. I wasn't particularly referring to them. If they got VC money (I don't know if they did or not) then the VCs must've had something in mind to get a decent return on their risk.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-16 17:08:56+00:00
I completely agree, I’m not anti-code review but it’s by far the least enjoyable part of my job. It’s never going to give you same understanding that getting into the code will.

That’s acceptable when there is another human who _does_ understand the code (they wrote it) and someone who can learn and grow via the code review process.

None of that applies for LLM-generate code.

In many cases if it fails at the task, it’s much easier for me to just do it myself than to go a couple more rounds with the LLM (cause it’s almost never as easy as a normally code review, you have to prompt better and be more explicit).

That my biggest annoyance with Claude Code/Aider, always feeling like I’m 1 prompt away from everything slotting into place. When, in reality, each time I get back on the merry-go-round it might fix 1 thing and then break another. Or it’s “fix” might be absurd (“I’ll just cast this so it’s the right type” :facepalm:).
by Xeoncross | 2025-06-16 17:09:05+00:00
If you enjoyed the state machine + parsing part and also I recommend the older "Lexical Scanning in Go" talk that Rob Pike gave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaD_trXwRE

It's in Go, but you can apply most of it easily in other languages.

I'm so happy that modern languages like Rust, Zig, and Go support unicode/runes/graphemes natively. So many problem just disappear compared to Java, .net, C++, or scripting languages.
by strogonoff | 2025-06-16 17:09:21+00:00
First, I think they are exploiting the old conundrum where your personal interests may seem to align with theirs, but taken together our interests do not align with theirs. Sure, as it stands, an individual may enjoy personal gain—at least for the time being, while their prices are low as they operate at a loss to capture the market—but I believe this brief individual gain comes at the expense of society as a whole, and if people in more areas (not just music) made this an issue, and those megacorps put their infinite armies of lawyers to work on licensing (I recall somebody here once saying “do things that don’t scale” or something like that), everybody would benefit much more[0].

Second, copyright, or more precisely IP ownership, is not the same as the exploitation you might have in mind. Consider that copyleft—which gave us Linux, Blender, etc.—exists thanks to the ability to exercise and defend IP rights. When a stronger party takes that ability away from a weaker party, that is exploitation; maybe it is not a coincidence that Microsoft is at the forefront of this, as what they are doing is very much in line with a generalized form of EEE.

(Let’s be honest, homegrown LLMs will never reach the level of commercial models, and that’s where the money is headed; even GPUs aside, no individual has the ability to scrape the entire Web the way they do, even less so now once the ruthless interests of those corporations sent every website scrambling to defend themselves against what is predominantly bot traffic with layers upon layers of captcha never seen before. They realized that if they steal, they have to steal a lot and very quickly in order for it to work, and they’re certainly hoping to get away with it.)

More abstractly, being able to say that you have created something is pretty important to our willingness to create; I can’t see how inability to make this claim with a straight face (because anyone can, and already does as you have no doubt seen on this forum, reasonably claim that it may have not been your work at all) is good for society generally.

[0] Starting with awareness of what is going on and the freedom to choose. Information asymmetry is the enemy of free market.
by pixodaros | 2025-06-16 17:11:30+00:00
The actual Hacker News comment which I was responding to mentioned "imperial-entitled cultures ... the cultural, god-chosen center of the universe ... face culture" which sounds like he means China. The comment linked two papers, but not for specific facts, and they discuss five countries only one of which is a hotbed of fake research (the USA - psychology, enough said). There are only a million Bahrainis so I don't think anyone would need to have a policy of ignoring research by Bahrainis, but a lot of people talk smack about Indian and Chinese research.
by candiddevmike | 2025-06-16 17:12:03+00:00
I don't think open sourcing is going to fix their adoption issue. Like the other comments mention, you need to be worth the time investment to gain traction. If Dark was truly as revolutionary as it was marketed as, it wouldn't have had problems staying source available, IMO. Folks will pay or put up with whatever it takes to be in the ecosystem (such as CUDA).
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-16 17:12:31+00:00
Good fucking lord dude.

FTA

> “We both know why you’ve been detained…it’s because of what you wrote about the protests at Columbia”

I have no clue if this is actually true, but operating from the same set of facts that you have: we know exactly why he was detained, and assuming the facts we've been provided, we know for sure that it is unconstitutional

> it does seem that the government did what the population would have liked it to have done

You have no clue what "the population would have liked," and neither do I, and neither does the state. That's why we have the First Amendment, to preclude them from attempting such ridiculous assertions of omniscience.
by TIcomPOCL | 2025-06-16 17:13:16+00:00
- Token claim: The limit was 64k, and you can see in Apple’s paper that they at most hit 20k before decline (figure 6)

- Impossible river claim: Again in figure 6, you can see that the performance declines before we reach 5 actors. So while it wasn’t necessary to test until 20, the results still indicate, impossibility doesn't explain the results.