MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by const_cast | 2025-07-17 20:00:02+00:00
It can be considered a life, maybe in some hypothetical argument, but nobody actually can make that argument.

Because it's hard. There's implications of autonomy here. If an unborn baby is a life and has rights, which rights does it have? Is it an American Citizen? It must, at least, have personhood - what are the guardrails around that? Can I, for example, say that the unborn fetus is a person and is inside me, and is therefore bound by "stand your ground" laws, meaning I am free to kill it for self-defense, much like I would a grown person?

See, the Supreme Court never actually asked that question. As it stands, unborn babies are not people, they are not citizens. We, instead, said "fuck it this is hard to argue" and made exactly 1 exception for unborn fetuses - abortion.

If you want to argue an unborn fetus is alive, there are implications and consequences of that. Evidently, conservatives are too cowardly to address any of them. Ever. So, here we are, with our broken laws that make no sense.
by mandevil | 2025-07-17 20:00:10+00:00
This is actually a lot harder than you think because we still don't understand gene therapy well enough to be able to be sure that any given treatment works without the really expensive part, the Randomized Control Trial. In 2017 a gene therapy was approved in the US for RPE65-associated Retinitis Pigmentosa, Luxterna, the first in-vivo gene therapy approved by the FDA (yay! List price was a mere 425,000/eye). Just a few months ago J&J announced that their gene therapy targeting a different gene, RPGR, missed its primary end-point, only 22 out of 55 treated patients showed improvements on at least two of the measures in the LUMEOS trial and there was no statistically significant improvement on their primary measure. That result happened even though this was mostly just "take the thing that already worked for Luxterna, and do a different gene." The problem is that the human body is far more complicated than computers, and does not scale the same way.

This is why regulators are very wary of "Right to Try" type stuff, they want to be sure that medical treatments are actually effective before they are available to the broad public. These sorts of RCTs are still quite necessary, and they are the really expensive thing in drug discovery. (Well, it's both that they are expensive to run and also they kill all sorts of drugs that don't actually work.)
by kingnothing | 2025-07-17 20:00:20+00:00
> The new Foundation Models framework gives access to developers to start creating their own reliable, production-quality generative AI features with the approximately 3B parameter on-device language model. The ∼3B language foundation model at the core of Apple Intelligence excels at a diverse range of text tasks like summarization, entity extraction, text understanding, refinement, short dialog, generating creative content, and more. While we have specialized our on-device model for these tasks, it is not designed to be a chatbot for general world knowledge. We encourage app developers to use this framework to design helpful features tailored to their apps
by wslh | 2025-07-17 20:00:21+00:00
I previously posted the link to the original research here [1] but copy the link here [2] to not branch the thread.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44593748

[2] "Imidazole propionate is a driver and therapeutic target in atherosclerosis" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09263-w
by gorbypark | 2025-07-17 20:00:39+00:00
I opened up the app bundle of CC on macOS and CC is incredibly simple at its core! There’s about 14 tools (read, write, grep, bash, etc). The power is in the combination of the model, the tools and the system prompt/tool description prompts. It’s kind of mind blowing how well my cobbled together home brew version actually works. It doesn’t have the fancy CLI GUI but it is more or less performant as CC when running it through the Sonnet API.

Works less well on other models. I think Anthropic really nailed the combination of tool calling and general coding ability (or other abilities in your case). I’ve been adding some extra tools to my version for specific use cases and it’s pretty shocking how well it performs!
by ivape | 2025-07-17 20:01:17+00:00
”The people who YOLO it with prompting cycles until the code passes tests and then submit a PR are causing problems almost as fast as they’re developing new features in non-trivial codebases.”

This might as well be the new definition of “script kiddie”, and it’s the kids that are literally going to be the ones birthed into this lifestyle. The “craft” of programming may not be carried by these coming generations and possibly will need to be rediscovered at some point in the future. The Lost Art of Programming is a book that’s going to need to be written soon.
by camilomatajira | 2025-07-17 20:02:12+00:00
<Make is a really powerful tool, with an expressive language that is quite esoteric with a bunch of idiosyncrasies (just like bash). > Agree

<"Well, Make is installed on everyones machine (....)"> It's not everywhere but almost.

<(Yet another idiosyncratic language that we have to deal with)> This is true. However, one has to choose its investments. I believe that Make is a powertool like awk, sed and bash, and despite its ideosyncracies, all of them have a positive ROI.

<Make is not a task runner, it's a build system.> I think a lot of confusion comes from having the wrong perspective on what Make actually is. From the Oreilly book on Make:

"It is important to understand that make is sort of two languages in one. The first language describes dependency graphs consisting of targets and prerequisites. The second language is a macro language for performing textual substitution. "

Make is a 1) language to express dependencies and a 2) language to template and do text substituion at a higher level than scripting languages; it's not a build system, though it's can be used as a tool to help compile C, C++ and possibly others langs. This gives you the ability to resolve simple or complex chains of dependencies by just specifying "target: prerequisities; recipe" and put variables everywhere to keep the code DRY and add conditional logic.

This means that Make shines in whatever follows the pattern "target: prerequisites; recipe" and that is almost all type of scripting! Including 'task runner' kind of jobs.

(In this sense, creating files out of files, and not recreating and existing file, is a "feature" but not the core of Make. )

Hence, when you say that it would be cool to be more bash-compatible I think Make provides a way (see the .ONESHELL target.)

The --list option, could be implemented with a really small awk script, and I also add some ASCII art.

Concerning the discoverability of rules, Make provides bash and zsh completion out of the box.

Parallel execution also works out of the box by adding the -J option.

Conditional logic could be added using "conditional processing directives" and with macro expansions.

Make indeed is really powerful, I would recommend everyone to checkout the Oreilly book on Make.

And again, I'm not trying to bash Just or Task. I'm trying to point out that only because a tool is new does not mean that is better than the old one.
by happytoexplain | 2025-07-17 20:02:30+00:00
Yeah, he's definitely an asshole. But mostly in tone - most of the concrete stuff in this summary section consists of theoretically defensible conservative positions. To be clear: I'm not defending him holistically. I don't know him. I just don't like the idea of anti-immigration opinion as a whole, and the idea that democracy is failing rapidly, being elevated into the echelon of indefensible positions.

Of course "dictatorship", moderate or otherwise, is a scary word to hear from a German/Austrian. But simply the idea that there could be something in-between democracy and dictatorship? That doesn't sound insane. Just daunting. Also, he doesn't even seem married to the idea. The summary mentions his admiration of direct democracy.
by fsckboy | 2025-07-17 20:02:39+00:00
it's not like we didn't know about safety back then, but computers were slow, memory was limited, compilers had to be small, optimization was rare, and C was screamingly fast.

At the same time, when major compiler vendors couldn't even get their Ada compilers out the door in project overruns measured in years, Mitch Kapor's 1-2-3 was written and took over the spreadsheet market (dethroning the incumbent Visicalc) and it was written in assembler, not even C, and barely had memory to spare on user machines (memory? there was barely address space left to spare). The tradeoffs were authentic, and there was zero enthusiasm for Ada among programmers or entrepreneurs looking to get products launched. The mainframe world could have been different but the personal computer software market was exploding in a way larger systems never did.

(oh and let me add, all the undefined behaviors back then were very clearly defined (perhaps over a small field of options) and extremely useful, and should have been left that way; shoot out a compiler warning or error if they get your panties in a bunch)
by 1shooner | 2025-07-17 20:02:53+00:00
>Do you boycott google and amazon

It's odd to put this as some kind of inconceivable checkmate. I have several family members that avoid Amazon, some strictly, some when possible, some when convenient. This thread is about Kagi, of course people boycott Google. 'Degoogling' has been in the zeitgeist for years.
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-17 20:02:54+00:00
SPARK 2012 was what made SPARK viable for a broader audience. Earlier versions of SPARK were not really properly integrated into Ada (SPARK annotations were in comments). SPARK also restricts what is expressible to what is provable within SPARK (which expands over time), this has some important consequences for concurrency and parallelism (using the "concurrency is not parallelism" distinction). So it would have been hard for Graydon Hoare to use SPARK 2012 in 2006 when he started on Rust, and the limitations around concurrency in SPARK 2012 would have been a non-starter for the objectives of Rust as adopted by Mozilla.
by eldaisfish | 2025-07-17 20:03:17+00:00
it is this plus the ability to affect the world.

I have no dog in the US / Russia debate but i recognise that both have tremendous ability to affect the world. Same with China and i avoid chinese products where I can.

That said, i'm much less concerned about North Korea, compared to Russia. The latter has sophisticated weapons and military tactics. North Korea may be an evil state but its small population and economy mean that their ability to sow chaos is limited.

Exact same argument with Sudan, the Houthis, etc. Iran is in the middle of this pack but Russia is far and away the most significant danger.
by EPendragon | 2025-07-17 20:03:39+00:00
You are bringing a great point. In some cases having your data as available as possible is the best thing you can do for your business. Letting them crawl and scrape creates means by which your product is found and advertised.

In other cases, like technical writing, you might want to protect the data. There is a danger that your content will be stolen and nothing will be given in return - traffic, money, references, etc.
by TheSaifurRahman | 2025-07-17 20:03:40+00:00
This only works when different sources share similar feature distributions and semantic relationships.

The M or B game breaks down when you play with someone who knows obscure people you've never heard of. Either you can't recognize their references, or your sense of "semantic distance" differs from theirs. The solution is to match knowledge levels: experts play with experts, generalists with generalists.

The same applies to decoding ancient texts, if ancient civilizations focused on completely different concepts than we do today, our modern semantic models won't help us understand their writing.
by smsm42 | 2025-07-17 20:04:15+00:00
If something goes wrong and you followed the procedure, the chances you're getting fired are very low. If something goes wrong and it is discovered you didn't follow the procedure, the chances of you being assigned the blame and fired are very high. It doesn't matter how stupid the procedure is or what's at stake - 99.999% of people you'd be dealing with do not care if the bank as a whole loses business or money, but care very much whether or not they are getting in trouble. Following the procedure is the easiest way of CYA.
by rickdeckard | 2025-07-17 20:04:21+00:00
> Because it's easy to blame the most standing out feature.

This is an odd conclusion considering that the Droid 4 was already the FOURTH iteration of a QWERTY device from that ONE brand on that ONE carrier, each iteration selling less than the one before as each faced more competition.

If you're interested, the actual reason for the end of the Droid QWERTY series was that the entire "Droid" brand was a Verizon-exclusive product-line with a big focus in sales and big budget in Marketing, just to compete with the iPhone (which was not available on Verizon until 2011).

For a vendor to win a slot in that lineup meant that Verizon Sales and Marketing put all weight behind selling that device, no matter what device it is. This made the Droid 1 and 2 a huge success, not because of the product but because of the sales channel.

But in year 3 (2011), the iPhone launched on Verizon, which put a huge dent in both sales-focus and budget of Verizon's "Droid" product-line.

Later that year, Droid 3 launched but was selling significantly less than its predecessors.

In that year, Verizon instead sold 6.5m iPhones (up from ZERO iPhones the year before).

So Motorola had to cut their losses on the already ongoing development of the Droid 4, the device was redesigned for a much lower total sales-expectation and then launched in 2012.

But the sales turned out even lower than expected: By Q4 2012 Verizon sold 14m Smartphones, with 10m (!) of them being iPhones.

The most successful Motorola device of that year was the Droid RAZR MAXX HD, a non-QWERTY flagship.

It was clear: That QWERTY keyboard didn't drive sales.
by yardie | 2025-07-17 20:04:32+00:00
Just go in with the realization that you're setting your career on fire. I was lucky, I moved to another country and was able to find work in my field after 10-12 month of searching.

> I'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.

If you can always try and save more. Compounding interest means you'll be further ahead later in life. I'm still catching up on my retirement savings, I'm luckier than most healthwise and financially. In hindsight, if I could have stayed around a few more months I probably would have found a job in my expertise and built on it careerwise. But, mentally I was finished. The constant rejections, multiple interview rounds with indeterminate responses, the gaslighting really beat me up inside.
by const_cast | 2025-07-17 20:04:48+00:00
Competing against someone means advocating for yourself instead of them.

Nobody would ever advocate against themselves - that's self-destructive. So, following the golden rule, competition is immoral. You shouldn't advocate against others, because you wouldn't do it to yourself.

More concretely, when you compete you are trying to take money away from other people and give it to yourself. Right? Because a customer could go to them - but you want the customer to go to you. So you get 5 bucks your competitor wouldn't have.

What we're noticing here is one of two things: either the golden rule is not at all a rule, and we have to make exceptions, or capitalism at a conceptual level is immoral.

One of these two has to be true, no way around it. Personally, I suspect Jesus would never allow capitalism. He would say everyone should share, so everyone can be prosperous.

Again... sounds like communism to me.
by thorum | 2025-07-17 20:06:30+00:00
People say this, but in my experience it’s not true.

1) The cognitive burden is much lower when the AI can correctly do 90% of the work. Yes, the remaining 10% still takes effort, but your mind has more space for it.

2) For experts who have a clear mental model of the task requirements, it’s generally less effort to fix an almost-correct solution than to invent the entire thing from scratch. The “starting cost” in mental energy to go from a blank page/empty spreadsheet to something useful is significant. (I limit this to experts because I do think you have to have a strong mental framework you can immediately slot the AI output into, in order to be able to quickly spot errors.)

3) Even when the LLM gets it totally wrong, I’ve actually had experiences where a clearly flawed output was still a useful starting point, especially when I’m tired or busy. It nerd-snipes my brain from “I need another cup of coffee before I can even begin thinking about this” to “no you idiot, that’s not how it should be done at all, do this instead…”
by dawnofdusk | 2025-07-17 20:06:42+00:00
I think the more interesting observation here, although the OP doesn't originally point it out, is that the spread of technology is associated with some sort of utility. Fashion and language seem more subjective: there's not a reason to prefer one over another. But with technology the idea is often that there are better or more productive tools. For example, the steam engine is more productive than the water wheel.

The point of "hype", on the other hand, and the reason to be "hype-optimistic" as the OP is, is that it can result in the spread of technologies that are not necessarily better. In other words, tech hype or marketing will not necessarily spread technologies in a meritocratic way. But actually what many cultural anthropologists know, such as by studying the spread of early human tools, is that there is a wisdom of the crowd effect where large social adoption of suboptimal technology tends to improve that technology unintentionally.

Those who decry "hype" are operating from an engineering background, where good tools are designed from the top down. But "hype" is more like a social force, which can emergently produce better tools from the bottom-up. The latter dynamic is robust yet uncontrollable, but it's definitely a real thing.
by h4ckerle | 2025-07-17 20:06:56+00:00
From what I've seen, Austria also does this pretty well, with everything being on xyz.gov.at. The problem I see for germany is that the principle of subsidiarity is taken very seriously here. Everything is decided at the lowest sensible level of government. Consequently, there are many very tiny local authorities that have to manage things independently and lack IT admins.
by toast0 | 2025-07-17 20:08:00+00:00
> Presumably, curing a genetic disorder for a very small number of people using existing technology is low risk and low reward.

I don't know if that presumption is reasonable. Yes, low reward; but I suspect the risk/cost for a gene therapy is about the same, regardless of the number of people affected. You still need to do all the pre-human trials, which are still expensive; then you've got to do human trials, which are still expensive ... and if there aren't enough potential patients, you might not even be able to run a reasonable trial. (although the article describes a situation of a single patient treatment, you obviously can't run a human trial of that). IMHO, that makes it higher risk than targeting something that affects many more people.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-17 20:08:04+00:00
>But it doesn't change the consumer's spending power. I haven't changed my movie consumption habit just because I watch youtube videos.

I think you're misunderstanding. Consumers don't need to spend money directly, for AI slop farms on Youtube or TikTok to make money, since advertisers pay for the views they get on their videos, not you.

IT's not all about YOU, YOU are probably not the targe audience, but they do make money even if YOU don't watch that stuff.
by mandevil | 2025-07-17 20:08:12+00:00
We are not close to that. Gene therapies are still very much hit or miss in RCT's, if some biohacker offers you something for 5k you are definitely getting scammed.

The first gene therapy approved for in vivo treatment by the FDA, Luxterna, was approved in 2017. It treated RPE65 associated Retinitis Pigmentosa (at an original list price of 425,000/eye). Just a few months ago, J&J's LUMEOS trial revealed that basically the same process but targeting a different gene (RPGR) failed to meet its primary endpoints in the Phase III clinical trial (only 22 of 55 patients treated showed improvement on at least two measures, and there was no statistically significant improvement on the main measure at all). At this point, we can't even reliably take a process that fixed one gene and apply it to another gene to treat the same disease, that's how far away we are from "some dude in a garage." Will we get there? Maybe, but the human body is far more complicated than software, and analogies based on how software work mislead more than they help.
by jjcob | 2025-07-17 20:08:27+00:00
You shape your public image by deciding what you talk about.

Do you want to be known as a legendary skydiver? Then talk about the amazing achievements and plans for the future you made.

Do you want to be known as a former athlete with questionable political views? Then go talk to the media doubling down on stupid memes you posted on facebook.

I have no interest in learning more about the latter. I guess that's why most of us eventually forgot about him until he tragically passed away today.
by arealaccount | 2025-07-17 20:09:15+00:00
Weirdly enough I have the opposite experience where it will take several minutes to do something, then I go in and debug for a while because the app has become fubar, then finally realize it did the whole thing incorrectly and throw it all away.

And I reach for Claude quite a bit because if it worked as well for me like everyone here says, that would be amazing.

But at best it’ll get a bunch of boilerplate done after some manual debugging, at worst I spend an hour and some amount of tokens on a total dead end
by idkwhattocallme | 2025-07-17 20:09:30+00:00
I wonder if the callousness is a consequence of generational experiences. Hundreds of years ago, Europe was once like the US. It had hype manias (tulips). But perhaps they had enough of them where they stopped believing. The US is much younger and we're now in just our 3-4 meta hype cycle. Though in the last 10 years they seemingly have accelerated in tech (SaaS, SoLoMo, Crypto, AI). I wonder if over time that hype will wane. I do agree with DHH here that VC is the gas that keeps the engine going.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-07-17 20:11:01+00:00
Anthropic found the simulated blackmail rate of GPT-4.1 in a test scenario was 0.8

https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

"Agentic misalignment makes it possible for models to act similarly to an insider threat, behaving like a previously-trusted coworker or employee who suddenly begins to operate at odds with a company’s objectives."
by sn9 | 2025-07-17 20:11:19+00:00
Because the numbers are an order of magnitude different? [0]

Water needed to produce 4 oz of soy beans: 64 gallons

Water needed to produce 4 oz of beef: 463 gallons

Your points about the carbon cycle are well-taken but you're ignoring the trophic pyramid for some reason. [1] Or at least I find it hard to believe you could know about one without knowing about the other.

[0] https://watercalculator.org/water-footprint-of-food-guide/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_pyramid
by 12_throw_away | 2025-07-17 20:12:44+00:00
Heh, I've had certain modules where I ended up prefixing the files with `a_initialization.lang` `b_startup.lang` `c_run_the_thing.lang` [...] to make it easier to read for humans. Just like, in, say, a book, where the chapters appear in a specific order, the order of things matters! Probably this is a literate programming sort of thing?