MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gavinray | 2025-06-20 12:55:07+00:00
> *‘Instead, customers just point and say: “OK, yeah, just put it over there,” and then I drop off the stuff, and they just tap it. I think they see it as more of an – I think they see it as automation. They see you as just a system.’*

If I pay someone to perform a task for me, that's all I desire out of them. Do the job, do it right, collect your payment, and leave.

A transactional exchange is not the right place to look for meaningful human connection.

In fact, if I COULD hire robots instead of humans to do things like drive me places or deliver my groceries, I WOULD. Robots are predictable and reliable, a random human may or may not be.
by thinkingemote | 2025-06-20 12:55:34+00:00
When reading this interesting article I found my brain ringing "alienation!" so thought I'd comment.

Marxists have the theory of "alienation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation

They posit that people are alienated, estranged and invisible. "Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society" It's alienation that is the driving emotion behind people coming together (leading to things like socialism / communism).

Given that it's a core left wing idea, it's a bit strange to see only this applied to right wing populism. Possibly it's a signal of the authors own politics. Maybe the recent adoption of identity and group politics tends to keep people separated and increase alienation than towards a togetherness in a common shared struggle. Reducing alienation could lead to a weakening of certain political stances. Today's technology appears (falsely) to be apolitical, amoral and independent of the traditional things politics are about.

But its important to be fair, that was a tiny bit of the article and there's not much politics in this interesting piece which is really about technology and neither "Marx" nor "alienation" nor any old school theoretical background on the phenomena being observed is talked about.
by jonoalderson | 2025-06-20 12:56:15+00:00
Thanks for all the delightful feedback, folks!

Some people rightly pointed out that it was a bit hypocritical of my site to be loading a bunch of third-party JS and resources(!), which I've now addressed.

In my defence, this was only due to loading ReCAPTCHA on blog posts as a quick protection mechanism from an influx of spam - which I've now replaced with Turnstile (and only lazily trigger the JS+resources for that when the comment form enters the viewport).

Also, no, the post wasn't written by AI / ChatGPT / etc. :)
by IAmBroom | 2025-06-20 12:56:48+00:00
That's exactly it.

There exists two genes that code for the red-cone-detector. They sense /slightly/ different shades of red (more precisely, their gaussian-like filters are centered differently).

And these are carried on the X chromosome. Either one or the other is in a male fertilized cell, but both are possible in a female fertilized cell.

The measurable end result is that some few women have both kinds of cones (therefore four color detectors, where two majorly overlap in the red region). These tetrachromats can detect finer distinctions between colors on the red end of the spectrum; their color detection in green/blue is identical to ordinary color vision.
by tom_ | 2025-06-20 12:56:55+00:00
I figured enough people just flag the submission, because they don't want to put up with the Xlibre guy's specific category of shit, or that of his inevitable hangers-on. Are they right? Are they wrong? Well, it's their decision. I've seen enough stuff I've flagged myself disappear quickly, and then reappear later (with more surprisingly reasonable discussion than I at least had predicted), to suggest that the admins will retrieve any popular discussion that was unreasonably assigned to the naughty step.

(Of course, admin intervention in the other direction is always a possibility, and that's fair enough too. If you want unmoderated discussion, you'll need to go somewhere else.)
by pjc50 | 2025-06-20 12:57:50+00:00
Someone making trades from time to time doesn't take over their life in quite the same way. Ultimately it's a question of richness, like having a variety of diet.

Pre-20th century people would have much stronger family ties, religious ties, and in many places some sort of feudal ties of varying levels of onerousness. But you can also find examples of people being extremely lonely, such as press ganged sailors separated from their families.
by probably_wrong | 2025-06-20 12:58:47+00:00
I would argue that only the phoenix is guaranteed to raise from the ashes. Everything else may come out worse or not at all. Sometimes when you burn something to the ground it just remains burnt.

Stretching your analogy (perhaps too much): when you're in isolated confinement there is at least someone ensuring you get fed, clothed, receive at least some basic care and are kept somehow safe. When you're in the ruins of a city you may starve, get beaten to death, die from a preventable disease, etc. And nothing ensures that the labor will be any lighter.

For a more software-related argument, here's an essay on why rewriting Netscape from scratch was a mistake: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
by Retric | 2025-06-20 12:59:59+00:00
That’s more effective as an argument to get rid of the most extreme forms of punishment (eg drawn and quartered) not all forms of retribution.

In a world without free will crimes of passion are simply the result of the situation which means that person would always chose murder in that situation. People who would respond with murder in an unacceptably wide range of situations is an edge case worth consideration without free will. Alternatively if we want nobody to respond with murder in a crime of passion situation evolutionary pressure could eventually work even without free will.

> E.g. punishment might still be justified from the point of view of reducing offending and reoffending rates, but if that is the goal then it is only justified to the extent that it actually achieves those goals, and that has emotionally difficult consequences. For example, for non-premeditated murders carried out out of passion rather than e.g. gang crimes, the odds of someone carrying out another is extremely low and the odds that the fear of a long prison sentence is an actual deterrence is generally low, and and so long prison terms are hard to justify once vengeance is off the table.

That’s assuming absolute certainty about what happened. Punishments may make sense as a logical argument even if it’s only useful in a subset of cases if you can’t be absolutely sure which case something happened to be.

Uncertainty does a lot to align emotional heuristics and logical actions.
by techpineapple | 2025-06-20 13:00:46+00:00
We should really apply this to everyone, have AI read all your public info, and you get a score like debt. If your score is too low or nonexistent, we exclude you from society, or maybe even arrest you. Our criminal justice system is too biased toward action, and not enough towards potential action. It’s like. We spend 90% of our time on violent crime, 9% on white collar crime, and the amount of time we spend on thought crimes basically rounds to zero. WTF?
by maaaaattttt | 2025-06-20 13:00:47+00:00
That's what I understood from the explanation on stackexchange. But given what you said, if we take the plank length as the shortest length unit, and we consider two theoretical "objects" placed at one plank length away from each other. Does the universe expanding for these two objects mean: 1. the plank length is becomming bigger, 2. more plank lengths are added in between the two objects, 3. Something else and I'm completely off
by Hilift | 2025-06-20 13:00:57+00:00
> rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem.

It used to be rare. But LA managed to make $700,000 the minimum cost for housing someone. That is a studio or one bedroom, without laundry. That is why LA City and LA County terminated the current housing organization (LAHSA). LA and San Francisco spent billions and accomplished very little. They probably housed two or three people/households per day. Now they get to stop the easy way, due to they are out of money. LA has a $1 billion budget deficit.

Two years ago, a small part of San Francisco with camps was so bad, two people were dying per day from overdose, and that was with handing out hundreds of doses of free narcan daily.

https://southpasadenan.com/l-a-county-moves-to-strip-funding...

As an added bonus, 33% of fires in LA were started by homeless. When asked about this, the fire chief pointed out that the city budgeted more funds for the homeless ($961 million) than the fire department ($837 million).

https://abc7.com/post/third-las-fires-last-years-involved-ho...
by bko | 2025-06-20 13:01:03+00:00
Maybe for some, but how do you see it playing out?

Suppose you're living in LA or NYC, and you lose your job, get evicted (takes a few months and you can't land on your feet by then) and then move all your stuff to a shopping cart and start sleeping under a bridge?

I'm sure this has happened, but if I were in that situation I would begin by moving out of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. Go to the library, find cheap cost of living and high job availability place, and get a one way bus ticket there. Literally anything is better than living on the street.

This is all to say I'm skeptical of the explanation that people living on the street are just like me except with bad luck. Temporarily, sure. A few nights crashing on someones couch or sleeping in a park or bus station. But chronically homeless people.

I think the overwhelming majority of them are not rational actors (could be induced by drug abuse, mental illness, some combination of the two). So giving them keys to a home won't really solve their problems.
by anonym29 | 2025-06-20 13:01:09+00:00
Can you elaborate more on discussions about XLibre being banned on here? Are accounts that mention it getting banned? Is there just mass downvoting by partisans with some kind of agenda?

I get that X11 has security issues, but NVIDIA drivers and Wayland still seem to have no support now and no support planned for the future, so Wayland is a non-negotiable non-option for many (most?) Linux desktop users, including myself.

That said, with the custodian of X11 refusing to merge 1000+ patches including various bug fixes and security fixes, I'm excited for the prospect of XLibre - this is exactly what Open Source, as an idea, was invented to facilitate - user choice.
by IAmBroom | 2025-06-20 13:01:36+00:00
A lot of false assumptions are going on.

Tetrachromats are not seeing four well-separated colors. They are seeing the exact same blue-area and green-area colorrs, with two different cones responding slightly differently to red-area light.

So, instead of a color looking RGB(200,100,100) to them, it might look (200.26,100,100).

The very slight difference is why it's so hard to detect in people, and frankly, doesn't affect much (which is why there's apparently very little evolutionary "pressure" on the color genes).
by mkesper | 2025-06-20 13:01:51+00:00
TLDR (non-AI): The author raises very valid points about accessibility under Wayland. The "And Now We Don’t Have a Choice" subtitle seems to address that only Gnome seems to have usable accessibility under Wayland right now but can easily be misunderstood as "we have no alternative to Wayland". The author also mentions X11 sucked in many ways and that this transition also is a moment to rethink what proper accessibility should fulfill.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-06-20 13:01:59+00:00
I don't think that is correct.

One of the biggest problems with the European business environment is that it's primarily set up to cater to big European tech companies, largely at the cost of smothering smaller companies.

Problem is most of these companies are so old they date back to the industrial revolution, making a company like IBM look like a spry startup by comparison. This includes old dragons like Siemens, Ericsson, ABB, Bosch. SAP is perhaps the odd one out, being only 53 years old.
by tbrownaw | 2025-06-20 13:02:04+00:00
> And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.

I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.

Turns out that making it too easy to avoid the hell that is other people has some less than great side effects.
by JoshuaDavid | 2025-06-20 13:02:06+00:00
Yeah, the logic is basically "sure there are lots of structural or root issues, but I'm not confident I can make a substantial positive impact on those with the resources I have whereas I am confident that spending money to prevent people (mostly kids who would otherwise have survived to adulthood) from dying of malaria is a substantial positive impact at ~$5000 / life saved". I find that argument compelling, though I know many don't. Those many are free to focus on structural or root issues, or to try to make the case that addressing those issues is not just good, but better than reducing the impact of malaria.
by 90s_dev | 2025-06-20 13:02:26+00:00
I remember learning how simple and pure Makefiles were back in about 2010, and then running into so many bumps that a friend recommended CMake. But usually CMake just uses Make under the hood anyway. I really do like this idea of "build a small, simple, and robust layer, and if it's not good enough, build another layer on top of it." But I do wonder what life would be like if we started from scratch by merging all these layers. Would it be Cargo? Probably not, I doubt it's as flexible as all these layers combined.
by bluGill | 2025-06-20 13:02:37+00:00
My problem with literate programming is it too often describes things that are obvious to someone who understands the code, while not describing the important things that are not obvious in the code. It is easy to write "++i; // increment i" which gives me no clue as to why i is incremented - if instead you just name the algorithm you are implementing I would understand. Document things that are not obvious "++i; // must be incremented in the middle here because some weird interaction where...". Document what the interface is. There are other good things to document, but literate programming is telling me what I already know - beginners have no business looking at real world code until they are not beginners (which can be as little as a few days if you are otherwise experienced, or a few years if just starting programming school).

That comment about beginners is a nod to the sibling comment explaining how it is useful for a beginner. I've never found it useful myself, but I can see the value.
by h2zizzle | 2025-06-20 13:02:39+00:00
Nope. The flip side of commoditization is relationships. Racism, xenophobia, nepotism, etc. are all products of a paradigm where, "What can you do for me? I don't care who does it," is less important than, "Who you are is most important, we can figure out what you can do for me later." And obviously ranking human worth along those lines isn't alien to this era or the preceding ones.

Depersonalization is a double-edged sword. You're no longer persecuted as an individual with a particular identity, but you're no longer valued as one, either. Though obviously it's not so much a binary as a field that can be collapsed to a point on a sliding scale.
by b112 | 2025-06-20 13:02:41+00:00
I never even hinted that prior knowledge has no value. Not once.

Instead, I said it is an impossible thing to compare, for everything is built upon another. In fact, everything is built upon a myriad of other things.

Really, both the Heavy and the Saturn cost about the same. That's because they both depend upon the entire sum of human knowledge and research, to be built.

A billion trillion trillion trillion in today's dollars of knowledge gained and experience honed, over millions of years. So what if one cost a billion trillion trillion trillion, and another cost a billion trillion trillion trillion + a few billion more. The difference is meaningless, and not even worth considering.

And then there's the whole "how much is new" argument, and there's new knowledge aplenty thanks to SpaceX.

I really don't get these arguments. People seem to really love to denigrate the effort, the excellent results. It's beyond bizarre. And worse, mock because test flights, expected to possibly go sideways, do?

So weird.

"Hi, I'm going to see if this will work. It'll probably explode. But if it does, I'll learn something"

<boom>

hahaha it exploded you suck

I don't get it.
by jagger27 | 2025-06-20 13:02:43+00:00
I feel such vindication in my disdain for this work, and the people who continue to automate human experience away.

You are monsters who mistake luxury for bliss, money for agency, and power for love.

I speak directly to the likes of Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, and all those who follow them. They are false prophets who deny us all our humanity. Monster is the perfect word for them.
by bmacho | 2025-06-20 13:03:01+00:00
> I've seen enough stuff I've flagged disappear quickly, and then reappear later (with surprisingly reasonable discussion), to suggest that the admins will retrieve any popular discussion that was unreasonably assigned to the naughty step.

That's the whole point.

The default for everything that has at least a small hater base is to disappear, until for manual reenabling by moderators. This is not community moderation, it is de-facto pre-moderation. Which, in this case has a strong bias against xlibre despite it having literally nothing wrong with it (like the other stuff reappearing). It's gross censure (for the sake of a gross, user hostile corporate), and the moderators should be called out for it.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-20 13:03:13+00:00
If you're going to answer their question then why not suggest a solution that results in a website one controls, instead of some very basic "use facebook" suggestion. Facebook and other social media for a business are all good ideas, because as a business, eyeballs is what you want and that means putting up your presence wherever they're found in a way that's relevant to you.

However, any self respecting business owner planning for a stable long-term presence should absolutely also have their own website, and have it made to be as independent, simple and easy to maintain as possible in the context of its technical needs.
by jclem | 2025-06-20 13:04:47+00:00
For years, a friend of mine (in San Francisco) and I (in New York City) have sent one another an image [1] of one of these being tuned any time we’re doing coast-to-coast software debugging (especially relevant when we were working on a realtime collaborative text editor).

[1] https://www.loc.gov/item/2014714519/
by hashemian | 2025-06-20 13:05:29+00:00
There is no way to access the Internet from inside Iran, not for private citizens, nor for companies, or even many server hosts. Just very very few places, directly linked and controlled by the government, have limited Internet access.

There is not even the option to call phone lines inside Iran, or call abroad from Iran (not tried direct call, but no VoIP works).

You still can access any server inside Iran ("Internet-e-Melli" or National Internet, they call it), but none of these servers in turn have access to free Internet.

Would love to hear your thoughts if there is a technical way to bypass such restriction (me and my friends, fairly tech savvy, could not find a way).
by KaiserPro | 2025-06-20 13:06:01+00:00
Tech has played a big part in the shift that has caused lonleyness, but its at best a sideffect.

there are four key things that "obliged" people to meet in the local area:

1) organised religion

2) organised fun, ie drinking, sports, location based hobbies

3) organised politics (social clubs dressed up as poltical movements, or vicaversa but crucially meeting regularly to do activities together)

4) work

In the UK at least there has been a strong but steady shift away from 1 & 3, to the point where they just don't really exist at any critical mass for people under 60. work is now more remote, which mean less concentration of people

Combine that with digital means to form your own virtual groups, You have less and less ties to your local area.

sprinkle on top that parents are utterly horrified by the idea that children might be left to wander, means that meeting your best mate (because there they are on the same street and the same age) becomes digital only.

In the UK is has (almost) never been safer to walk about in public https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand... yet we are paralysed by fear that young people are going to be mugged, drunk, mixed up in drugs.

There is also a massive decline in funded social venues, as council budgets have been slashed.

So whilst tech could be blamed for this, I strongly suspect that its only making it more bearable. The UK at least needs systematic cultural change.
by edude03 | 2025-06-20 13:06:04+00:00
Now, this is a whole other philosophical debate - but why does anyone need to live in LA? I really doubt that people of sound mind are living their homes willingly to be homeless in LA. Sure - there is the crowd that think LA is where they need to be to make it - and I'm sure more than 0 of them believe in the grind so much that they do decide to be homeless on purpose HOWEVER (with no data to back it up) I'm confident that's not the majority of homeless people in LA.

I'm saying of sound mind not as pejorative to be clear but I think for most people of "sound mind" they could figure something out that's not living on the streets (getting roommates, moving somewhere cheaper etc)
by cbondurant | 2025-06-20 13:06:31+00:00
The mention of syn/serde being a compile time trap strengthens my feeling that having some better tools in the rust standard that make the job of syn/serde easier (compile time reflection being one of them) is probably the single most important improvement that could be made for the health of the rust ecosystem as a whole.

Anything that makes syn and serde run or compile faster will help a large swath of the ecosystem by extension.
by SecretDreams | 2025-06-20 13:06:34+00:00
> "Linus Torvalds is an antisocial jerk, and he's a genius, therefore if I am an antisocial jerk I must be doing genius-level work."

There's way too much of this in general. People use a talented individual with problematic behaviors to justify their own problematic behaviors. So many talented ICs that are absolute dickheads to work with.
by bamboozled | 2025-06-20 13:06:47+00:00
Sounds like a myth to me, I remember life before "devices" and laptops, I had newspapers, books, magazines, board games and card games, walkmans, audiobooks, idk...maybe you're talking like a thousand years ago?

Not to say the phones aren't having an impact of some sort, but yeah, I always knew how to distract myself.
by mtalantikite | 2025-06-20 13:06:53+00:00
I think the environmental impact arguments are valid, but also it seems silly that they have us arguing about light bulbs when every single car on the road in the US is now some giant SUV and our built environment is actively hostile toward humans walking to go about their daily lives. Like, are the two incandescent bulbs in my Brooklyn living room the problem, or the giant suburban home eating meat 3x per day driving to Dollar Tree to buy junk?

As someone that has never owned a car, is vegetarian, and walks/subways everywhere, I kinda feel like what's the big deal if I use a few incandescent bulbs every year in my small NYC apartment?