MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danpalmer | 2025-06-20 03:35:49+00:00
I think it's because in English culture it's only really used now in extremely formal scenarios where you're talking to someone in a position of great power, occasionally in very traditional customer service, or in more formal schools for pupils to refer to male teachers.

When an American says "sir" to me, I know I'm not in any of those positions, so it comes across as parody of those – highlighting the fact that I am not actually in the position of power, or that I am not a highly valued customer. In that way it's sarcastic, and it can imply that I'm actually imposing on the other person and taking that position of power, which as I'm not, therefore comes across as passive aggressive in a way.

If an American asked me to do something and I said "yes Mr President", arguably referring to the highest status in the culture, I expect it would be taken as sarcastic or rude, not polite, because the person is not in fact the president. That's sort of how I see it, but maybe this analogy doesn't work.
by ViscountPenguin | 2025-06-20 03:37:40+00:00
I can't find any benchmarks, but here's an example of the sort of approach I was talking about:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355761412_Path_plan...

GOFAI techniques are: A) Usually unable to incorporate posteri knowledge of the environments they're working on. And B) Often entirely infeasible to adapt to take exploration costs into account.

I've heard of some GOFAI techniques for optimal unbiased pathfinding in unknown environments using optimal transport theory and the like. But unbiased methods are obviously going to lose out in real environments.
by simoncion | 2025-06-20 03:38:17+00:00
It's not true at all. Even Erlang (very much not an OOP language) has public and private methods, with the default being private.

If you don't have a mechanism to indicate which parts of your software's API are internal implementation details and which parts are intended for use by users of that software, then you're going to have to rely on convention. The problem with convention is that no ten people do it the same way... which increases cognitive load... which is to be avoided in a field that has more than enough little things to keep track of already.
by skydhash | 2025-06-20 03:39:08+00:00
> I'm not entirely clear why/how this is an open source issue?

I think it's not even an issue. Most open source projects are implementations (maybe flawed), and few are new propositions. If something was not fully defined in the standard/protocol/interface, the implementation may come up with its own extensions that are incompatible with others. But that's how you choose implementations, you're supposed to commit to one and not use a mismatch.

So if you're using GNOME, try not to depend on something that depends on having the whole KDE installed. If you're using OpenRC, anything systemd is prohibited. All projects are consistent within themselves, the only thing you need to do is to avoid conflicts by having two things doing the same job and to ollow the installed system guidelines.

I don't mind fragmentation. What I mind is dependency due to laziness and not a real need (like using a couple of glibc specific library for no real reason just because you're working on Debian) or taking the time to support windows and macos, but tying yourself to glibc on Linux because reasons.
by throwaway422432 | 2025-06-20 03:39:29+00:00
That can make for a very weird viewing experience.

"Oddball" was filmed in an Australian town I grew up in. There was a chase scene that combined and compressed multiple locations. In one particular scene you are looking at an extra with a backdrop of part of the main street, but the location he is looking at (supposedly directly across the road) is actually about 1/2km away.
by proc0 | 2025-06-20 03:40:15+00:00
Did a first pass on this when it was posted earlier this week (I think). It's great to see an influx of consciousness papers on HN.

This looks interesting. I'm not that familiar with IIT, mostly because I think it is too abstract to really say anything about consciousness. It's like measuring the electrical current of a computer motherboard as a theory for how operating systems work. It seems the wrong level of analysis to me. I'm feeling the same way about this theory which is covering a lot of concepts but they're all very high level and abstract (it's not grounding it in any concrete details of the brain).

Aside from that, I have one comment on the qualia section: > Qualia are a highly condensed, intrinsically valuable, and behaviorally oriented higher-order representation and functional label of the cognitive system’s internal generative model’s assessment of its own stat

i don't think those properties are necessary for qualia. For example you can meditate and have a completely functionless experience of consciousness that serves no purpose by definition (contentless, egoless, etc), yet it would still be qualia because it's still the experience of consciousness. Conversely you can have the functionality of representing internal states without any consciousness. The definition of qualia in the paper would probably apply to current LLMs, since they have some kind of internal assessment of internal states, especially agents.
by tomhow | 2025-06-20 03:40:42+00:00
Please quit this pointless war. Yes, anyone who is banned can create a new account. That's always been the case and we don't even try to prevent it. We just keep upholding the guidelines regardless. Consider that maybe it's not the big win you think it is, to be one of the few people making an effort to use a website in defiant opposition to its intended use, when it's only a place people want to frequent because others put their efforts into making it function well.
by lyu07282 | 2025-06-20 03:40:43+00:00
> I think it's that combined with the EA approach to it which is: let's focus on space flight and shrimp welfare. Not sure which side is more in denial about the impending future?

I think its a result of its complete denial of and ignorance of politics. Because rationalist and effective altruist movements make a whole lot more sense, if you realize they are talking about deeply social and political issues with all politics removed from it. Its technocrat-ism the poster child of the kind of "there is no alternative" neoliberalism that everyone in the western world was indoctrinated into since the 80s.

Its a fundamental contradiction, we don't need to talk about politics because we already know liberal democracies and free-market capitalism is the best we ever going to achieve, faced with the numerous intractable problems we face that can not possibly be related to liberal democracies and free-market capitalism.

The problem is: How do we talk about any issue the world is facing today without ever challenging or even talking about any of the many assumptions the western liberal democracies are based upon? In other words: the problems we face are structural/systemic, but we are not allowed to talk about the structures/systems. That's how you end up with space flight and shrimp welfare and AGI/ASI catastrophizing taking up 99% of everything these people talk about. It's infantile, impotent liberal escapism more than anything else.
by zahlman | 2025-06-20 03:42:02+00:00
> The very introduction of that post has multiple links showing how much the SMTM post was spreading through the rationalist community with little question.

By "multiple links" you're referring to the same "two posts". Again, they weren't as popular, nor were they as uncritical as you describe. From Yudkowsky's post, for example:

> If you know about the actual epidemiology of obesity and how ridiculous it makes the gluttony theory look, you are still probably saying "Wait, lithium?" This is still mostly my own reaction, honestly.... If some weird person wants to go investigate, I think money should be thrown at them, both to check the low-probability massive-high-value gamble

Yudkowsky's argument is emphatically not that the lithium claim is true. He was merely advocating for someone to fund a study. He explicitly describes the claim as "low-probability", and advocates on the basis of a (admittedly clearly subjective) expected-value calculation.

> One of the links is a Eliezer Yudkowsky blog praising the work

That does not constitute "praise" of the work. Yudkowsky only praised the fact that someone was bucking the trend of

> almost nobody is investigating it in a way that takes the epidemiological facts seriously and elevates those above moralistic gluttony theories

.

> Pretending that this theory didn't grip the rationalist community all the way to top bloggers like Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander is revisionist history.

Nobody claimed that Yudkowsky ignored the theory.
by simoncion | 2025-06-20 03:42:36+00:00
> The OP was specifically talking about hue.

I presume this is why you think that?

> ...between cheap LEDs and expensive ones (hue)...

If so, they're referring to the Hue brand of bulbs, rather than the color property. More evidence for the fact that they're talking about flicker is that they quoted this to indicate that they were replying to it:

> > Nah, LED lighting generally uses at least 200 Hz at a minimum. Some up to kHz. You can't perceive that.
by wkat4242 | 2025-06-20 03:43:46+00:00
> I think belonging is one of the most important contributors to mental health, and anecdotally, fewer liberals and leftists "belong" to a group.

> There are progressive churches out there, for example, but they see much smaller membership overall than other denominations.

You don't need a church to have something to belong to. I'm not going to believe in gods just so I can sing kumbaya with others. The whole point of belonging is that you can be yourself and be accepted as you are. That's key. If you're going to pretend you're just fooling yourself.

Also, churches tell you how to feel, what to do, what to think. Another thing that doesn't go down very well with most progressives. I don't think that this causes an extra barrier to belong though. The key part is finding a group that suits you.

Or do you mean these 'churches' are more like enlightenment classes of self discovery? In that case I wouldn't call it a church due to all the negative associations that brings.

> We know that hazing rituals, shared uniforms and appearance, and groupthink create strong bonds, but also lead to little-t and capial-T traumas, especially for queer or neurodivergent folks who may never truly "fit in" without heavy masking or closeting

As a neurodivergent kinda queer leftist, I absolutely hate hazing rituals and uniforms and authority. But it's not like I'm desperately trying to find a group to belong to. A group I belong to has to fit me, not the other way around. They're easier to find than you think. Just chat to someone wearing a rainbow band and they'll tell you what's good in the area. Or someone with blue hair or extravagant clothing. Our communities aren't strictly organised and regulated or formalized but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.

In fact that's something that conservatives tend to project on us. They think there's an LGBT or 'woke' 'agenda'. They project their own need for leadership and organisation on us. In reality this isn't the case at all. Everyone makes up their own goals. And that's great. Progressiveness is all about embracing different.

For me I have found such places such as makerspaces and more spicy places, all of which ended up being full of neurodivergents like me :) And definitely all progressive. But they share no elements of churches other than being a community.

I do think neurodivergents are often less happy because we have more difficulty in life where most others are neurotypical.

> there aren't many organizations to even join, and the ones that do exist are often run poorly.

Most makerspaces are really badly run :) But it doesn't matter. It's not about being successful. It's about making cool stuff with others.
by zahlman | 2025-06-20 03:44:29+00:00
> So I forgot about the slightly condescending, lecturing tone that comes out when you disagree with rationalist figureheads. :)

How was it condescending or lecturing?

> You could simply ask "Can you provide examples" instead of the "If you ____ then I suggest ____" form.

Why is that not equally condescending or lecturing?
by hhhAndrew | 2025-06-20 03:45:38+00:00
This is how Eiffel works. Instead of private, protected, public, you specify the set of classes a method can be seen by: `feature {ANY}` for `public:`, feature {NONE} for private, feature {Self} (IIRC) for protected, feature {Foo, Bar} for descendants of Foo and those of Bar, etc.
by simoncion | 2025-06-20 03:48:08+00:00
My thanks to you for shopping around for non-shit headlights. For a long, long while it seems like every third car had strobing headlights. (Now, the primary problem is INTENSELY bright and poorly-aimed headlights. I'm not sure which is worse, to be honest... but both SHOULD be super illegal.)

> EVERYTHING FLICKERS.

I absolutely could not handle that. My sincerest condolences.
by taeric | 2025-06-20 03:49:57+00:00
My gut is that this is where it should shine, oddly. The appeal of literate programming is that you can reflow the code to how you want to explain it. As such, if you had to add a bit of code in several places for a reason that you can explain in a narrative, then literate programming should help.

I say oddly, as I don't think I've seen it done for common web apps. I suspect that is largely because frameworks have not been a stable foundation to build on in a long time?

I can't help but think the old templates of old were a hint in how it would have worked fine? Have a section of the literate code that outlines the general template of a file, and where the old "your code goes here" comments used to denote where you add your logic, is instead another section that you can discuss on its own. (Anyone else remember those templates? Were common in app builders, if I recall correctly.)
by charcircuit | 2025-06-20 03:50:38+00:00
>so it wasn't good on the desktop, but it ran.

Which is why it would benefit from people who are trying to optimize it, and extend it to offer a good desktop experience.

>It also uses very old kernels.

It's based off the latest LTS release of the kernel.

>Any Gnome or Qt app would have to be completely rewritten to support it

Which is why my comment said that distros would work on backwards compatibility to avoid such expensive work of requiring a complete rewrite amd try to make it as seamless as possible.

>and would probably have to run in the JVM

Android does not use the JVM. It has ART, the Android Runtime, but you can still use native code.

>and their reward would be to live in subservience to the whims of Google in supporting their product which Google themselves never had enough faith in to make it a proper desktop OS

The benefit is being able to reap the fruits of the billions of dollars Google's is investing into the OS. Along with compatibility with a large amount of apps. As a bonus staple Linux applications may be able to installed to some of the billion existing Android devices today. Google may not have seen the benefit of supporting the desktop, but that's where smaller players can come in to play a role in trying to focus on more niche markets where there is less possible return.
by Spivak | 2025-06-20 03:51:03+00:00
This is what you get if you want a declarative syntax. HCL doesn't have any concept of a for loop, and can't have any concept of a for loop— it's a data serialization format. Terraform can be transformed to and from JSON losslessly. The looping feature is implemented in Terraform.

Ansible's with_items: and loop: do the exact same thing with YAML.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-06-20 03:51:24+00:00
> Idk why we need separate media anyways. Just resize the existing partition and create a new Linux recovery partition in place, reboot from that to install m. Or just run the whole installer in a VM on windows and then reboot to a completely working Linux system.

This is far from a simple solution (for the layman end-user) compared to the parent comment.
by pupatlas | 2025-06-20 03:51:57+00:00
A few days ago, I submitted my take on liquid glass using only CSS and SVG filters (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44265285). I decided to throw together an article on how I approached solving that problem, and the implementation details I arrived at. I'm trying to get more in the swing of writing again, so this is my first real post in a couple of years. Let me know what you think!
by skydhash | 2025-06-20 03:52:05+00:00
And the fact is that anyone working professionally was using an IDE, and anyone else was fine with grepping and using ctags.

I think LSP is only truly useful in two contexts, global symbols (even with namespacing) and confusing imports. In language like C, you mostly have a few structs and functions, and for the ones in libraries, you only need to include a single header. With Python, the imports are concise and a good references gives you the symbol identifier. But with languages that needs an IDE or LSP, you find yourself dealing with many imports and many identifiers to write a few lines of code and it becomes quickly unmanageable if you don't have completion or autoimports.
by bilkow | 2025-06-20 03:52:49+00:00
I got curious and found a ton of red flags in about half hour...

Summary of the drama that resulted in Xlibre:

- https://discuss.pixls.us/t/weekly-recap-8-june-2025/50638

From the README at https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver:

> This is an independent project, not at all affiliated with BigTech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activists groups, state actors, etc. It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies. Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed.

This exchange between him and Torvalds in 2021:

- https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/903

- https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/957
by sibeliuss | 2025-06-20 03:53:13+00:00
I feel this, but I try to stick to a personal rule: new work I typically "spike" with claude to get it to draw a map, and then I do the final implementation by hand, exactly as I want it. Some of the sparkle of the craft is certainly gone. BUT... it is also satisfying to get things done that I would never touch otherwise.
by numpad0 | 2025-06-20 03:53:25+00:00
Which one do I want to ride? Soyuz? Or maybe upgraded Starliner?

I don't want to listen to the maddening tic tic tic tic tic sound[1] on Dragon doing best it can to deorbit by mashing H key, or experience human excrement contamination problem[2] caused by toilet system becoming autonomously unassembled. Soyuz with intact main engines don't seem to have those kinds of problems[3], only spinal injury risks in ballistic modes.

Dragon V2 is a Tesla rocket, after all. In hindsight, why would have it not been one, and how could have it ever been a good thing? Sure, Starliner practically died and rebooted during docking with the ISS, which is surely extremely dangerous, but when it comes to Dragon V2, they had proper kaboom during ground testing.

Tell me, which human spacecraft in past 20 years had a full on explosion, and why should I want to be on it?

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADFlgu-3GgU

2: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/01/tech/spacex-crew-dragon-t...

3: https://youtu.be/fr_hXLDLc38?t=298
by zahlman | 2025-06-20 03:53:30+00:00
> it was a general explanation of how the game is played.

You seem to be trying to insinuate that Alexander et. al. are pretending to know how things will turn out and then hiding behind probabilities when they don't turn out that way. This is missing the point completely. The point is that when Alexander assigns an 80% probability to many different outcomes, about 80% of them should occur, and it should not be clear to anyone (including Alexander) ahead of time which 80%.

> He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.

Many sources estimated damages at $2 billion or more (see https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/22/fac... and links from there), so this did in fact come true.

Edit: I see that the prediction relates to 2021 specificially. In the wake of 2020, I think it was perfectly reasonable to make such a prediction at that confidence level, even if it didn't actually turn out that way.

> He predicted Andrew Yang would win the 2021 NYC mayoral race with 80% certainty (he came in 4th place)

> He gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment

If you make many predictions at 70-80% confidence, as he does, you should expect 20-30% of them not to come true. It would in fact be a failure (underconfidence) if they all came true. You are in fact citing a blog post that is exactly about a self-assessment of those confidence levels.

Also, he gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D not being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment.

> These all get mixed in with a small number of geopolitical, economic, and medical predictions with the net result of bringing his overall accuracy up.

The point is not "overall accuracy", but overall calibration - i.e., whether his assigned probabilities end up making sense and being statistically validated.

You have done nothing to establish that any correlation between the category of prediction and his accuracy on them.
by rich_sasha | 2025-06-20 03:54:07+00:00
FT and, as a right-of-centre person, the Guardian (Guardian is "lefty").

It's a trick a friend recommended to me once. Reading a paper that aligns with what you believe anyway doesn't challenge you and merely reinforces your biases. I might roll my eyes on some stuff in the Guardian but that's better than just feeding myself whatever I think already.

Plus, in the UK, the default conservative paper, The Telegraph, seems to be tabloidising and click-bait-ising itself at breakneck pace. Whenever I see a link to it, it's all about how foreign immigrants steal our jobs, overwhelm public services and give us cancer, while Communist Labour is introducing gulags, where salt of the earth Brits are forced to put pronouns in email signatures.

FT has a clear finance/econ bias but is a damn good newspaper apart from that. I find it staying far from directional biases but delivering insightful information.
by hackyhacky | 2025-06-20 03:54:17+00:00
> but at the end we have less choice.

This is exactly my point: you want "diverse choices", which is fundamentally at odds with "cohesive functionality."

The article is about LSP, an imperfect standard, but nevertheless a standard. The prioritization of "choice" above all else is why the OSS world is incapable of creating standards.

> systemd killed many projects

The purpose of software is to fulfill a need. Creation of software projects is simply a side-effect of that process. It's good that systemd killed many projects, because those people who had worked on those projects can now work on a problem that hasn't already been solved.
by simoncion | 2025-06-20 03:54:23+00:00
> You'd expect to be able to have your tooling ignore the annotations and everything should "just work" which eases debugging.

I'd expect any language that uses annotations to have a fairly-complete reflection capability. I'd also expect a good debugger to be able to use that to permit me to read, modify, and call methods and members marked as 'private'.

It has been decades (so perhaps my memory is incorrect), but I remember being able to access private parts in C++ debuggers. If this was true way back when for C++, I expect it to be a common feature now in debuggers for languages that have reflection & etc.