MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjburgess | 2025-07-03 13:11:03+00:00
The question is whether there is a gap between the people who qualify and the people who are perceived to qualify given the language of the law, ie., can we make any sense out of the pension officer who then says, "choosing to present this way doesnt qualify you for a pension under this law"?

You can redefine the terms to eliminate any non-presentational meaning, but it seems quite implausible to say that the people who wrote that law mean to make it a choice as to whether you qualify for a pension.

When they said, "women qualify for a pension at age 66", they were not using the word "woman" which would have any sense of a choice associated with it, right?

Giving the terms "woman", "man" etc. only a presentational meaning renders a vast amount of our discourse using these terms absolute bizarre, at the very least. Law makers of 1940s setting pension ages were not handing the qualification criteria to individuals to decide, right? The law is not encouraging people to present-as-women, it's not saying: if you choose to present as adult females, we'll give you a few more years pension! Indeed, its hard to imagine any law-maker involved ever thought that qualification for a pension could turn on any choice an individual could make.

You can argue that people should not use "woman" to refer to "adult human females" in most contexts, or that it is better to take the rhetorical meaning of "woman" as the primary one (ie., the ones in which one claims to-be-like literal women) ---- but I cannot really see how you could claim the law makers of the 1940s were writing pension grants based on how people happened to present.

Likewise the same goes for medical textbooks, biology textbooks, etc. And a vast amount of social conversation. If bob says "I'm only interested in dating women", and eve replies, "I present in all the ways adult females do!", bob isnt mistaken to say, "no, i'm looking for someone to start a family with".

It's really really strange to say that when bob said, "i'm interested in dating women" he was confused when he thought being pregnant wasn't ordinarily entailed by the term "woman".

Again, you can try to change how these words are used. But the claim that lawmakers, doctors, biologists, ...people going on dates... that everyone is either confused or "always meant" making-choices-over-presentation.. is a very strange view that just seems patently at odds with what people mean.
by francescowork | 2025-07-03 13:11:06+00:00
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by brazzy | 2025-07-03 13:11:08+00:00
Early 2000s PHP was a DSL for very simple web apps. So it's no surprise it excels at that.

People soon found out that it was not very good at complex web apps, though.

These days, there's almost no demand for very simple web apps, partially because common use cases are covered by SaaS providers, and those with a need and the money for custom web apps have seen all the fancy stuff that's possible and want it.

So it's no surprise that today's languages and frameworks are more concerned with making complex web apps manageable, and don't optimize much (or at all) for the "very simple" case.
by nbraga | 2025-07-03 13:11:33+00:00
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by neilv | 2025-07-03 13:12:16+00:00
The worst thing about those "note taker" bots on video and voice calls isn't when your employer uses one internally -- where there might be awareness and at least nominal consent -- but when you get ambushed by one, at the start of a call, outside that company-internal context.

For example, on calls with customers/partners, or with a recruiter, or for a job interview.

Thanks, fellow human. You probably just sold out my voice and likeness -- and, if I don't notice and disconnect immediately, the content of our conversation, and any info I might share -- to some ruthless sociopath techbro startup. Which will use and abuse and leak the data. Even though they don't have rights. And it's actually a felony to be recording calls without consent where I live.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-07-03 13:13:10+00:00
This part really hits home. The first time I got to see a huge enterprise C project, I could not believe how simple the code was. Few to no tricks.

> To be perfectly honest, as a teenager I never thought Max was all that great at programming. I thought his style was overly-simplistic. I thought he just didn't know any better. But 15 years on, I now see that the simplicity that I dismissed as naive was actually what made his code great.
by WASDAai | 2025-07-03 13:13:46+00:00
tl;dr: This article argues that an AI’s identity isn’t something we assign — it’s something that emerges. Specifically, identity is modeled as a fixed point in the AI’s recursive self-transformation process. Instead of labeling the AI from outside, the AI discovers itself by stabilizing its own internal changes. The piece blends mathematical ideas (fixed points, recursion) with philosophical implications about consciousness and autonomy.
by sinisamikulic | 2025-07-03 13:14:47+00:00
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by _verandaguy | 2025-07-03 13:15:18+00:00
I don't have a definitive answer, but there's probably demand for these outside of adventure tourists trying to get to some of the most remote road-connected points in the world.

The James Bay Road exists essentially as a service road for a bunch of hydroelectric infrastructure that's part of Quebec's James Bay Project. I've never gotten past planning a trip up, but I gather much of the traffic on these roads are transport trucks delivering supplies to these remote locations (beyond what can normally be shipped up there by Hydro Quebec's aviation fleet, which as I understand is mostly wet-leased from Air Inuit and can land on many of the unimproved strips near the major project sites).

Anyway, little outposts like these might've been maintained by either Hydro Quebec on an emergency basis for these transports, or by volunteer (sort-of) trail associations, or by the province itself, or a combination of the three.
by aristofun | 2025-07-03 13:15:51+00:00
Witnessing and dealing with some mess among other things helps to understand few unpleasant but important to swallow pills:

1. Code is not an asset, it’s a liability

2. Code is not a piece of art its a plumbing behind the scenes. It doesn’t has to be fancy and elegant. But it must be effective and both easy and cheap to maintain.

3. Most engineers engineer for the sake of it, and this leads to a mess.

4. Most important code quality metrics is a team scalability. Optimizing code for maintainability and simplicity is way more important and profitable than optimizing for anything else.

I think as with any taste it can’t be learned explicitly. It’s an accumulation of many real world examples of good and bad decisions.

But something you can accelerate by jumping on a harder problems and diving into larger projects.
by cyanydeez | 2025-07-03 13:16:02+00:00
it's unlikely the original SS databased had any information about this.

The new one they're building is clearly going to have all this bullshit so they can cherry pick at lightning speed reasons to exile, rendition or punish people.

But just so we're clear, the SS doesn't really care if you're a citizen. All it's tracking is who pays into it and who receives the benefits from the payments.
by latexr | 2025-07-03 13:16:13+00:00
Everyone wants hot coffee. If you hadn’t been getting hot coffee in the past, you’d have asked for it, but if you hadn’t been getting your data mined (or piss in your beer) you might not have noticed but would’ve been better off if it hadn’t happened.

Furthermore, temperature is an essential feature of coffee, so under the GDPR you don’t need to tell or ask users about it. Piss and data mining are not essential features.

So websites are already serving you hot coffee (or cold beer) but then saying “I really really really want to piss in your drink, please allow it”. Previously they just pissed without asking. Which is why the mandatory warning is useful, it immediately signals they are pissers and you should probably go somewhere else. Especially when you click to see their “partners” and it’s a list of literally eight hundred entities wanting to pee in your drink.
by hellojesus | 2025-07-03 13:16:17+00:00
I think my most basic argument is that society is the result of many individuals' participation. It should be viewed as emergemt of individuals working together and not as an organism in-and-of itself.

To that end, I think it is fully appropriate for the society to collapse if individuals within it determine to forgo children. We shouldn't redistribute from some to others purely to ensure society's continuum. Instead, individuals should maximize their utility, and in doing so create society.

These redistributions are not pareto optimal and have major deadweight losses and introduce moral hazard.
by pclowes | 2025-07-03 13:16:34+00:00
Directionally I think this is right. Most LLM usage at scale tends to be filling the gaps between two hardened interfaces. The reliability comes not from the LLM inference and generation but the interfaces themselves only allowing certain configuration to work with them.

LLM output is often coerced back into something more deterministic such as types, or DB primary keys. The value of the LLM is determined by how well your existing code and tools model the data, logic, and actions of your domain.

In some ways I view LLMs today a bit like 3D printers, both in terms of hype and in terms of utility. They excel at quickly connecting parts similar to rapid prototyping with 3d printing parts. For reliability and scale you want either the LLM or an engineer to replace the printed/inferred connector with something durable and deterministic (metal/code) that is cheap and fast to run at scale.

Additionally, there was a minute during the 3D printer Gardner hype cycle where there were notions that we would all just print substantial amounts of consumer goods when the reality is the high utility use case are much more narrow. There is a corollary here to LLM usage. While LLMs are extremely useful we cannot rely on LLMs to generate or infer our entire operational reality or even engage meaningfully with it without some sort of pre-existing digital modeling as an anchor.
by timr | 2025-07-03 13:17:29+00:00
I said a movie was bad because I don’t enjoy being lectured about science by actors, many (if not most) of whom have only the most tenuous grasp of science. I wasn’t being “disingenuous”. I meant every word. It’s fine if you think I’m a snob, but I’m not “lying”.

Y’all seem to have a hard time accepting that some people might not like propaganda, even if it is propaganda for things you support.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-03 13:17:32+00:00
While I'm probably considered high-functioning autistic, I have seen the devastating effects autism can have on people less lucky than me. I don't know if I'd go for an autism cure myself, but if autism can be corrected for in the womb or right after birth, I would definitely be in favour. How necessary such a cure would be, depends on how extreme someone's autism is, and if the cure can be administered before their disability helps form and solidify their personality.

However, I think mental disorders like autism and physical ailments like deafness don't have the same ethical impact. One changes who a person is, the other changes what a person is capable of. It also depends on how bad the disability is; in this case, the kids showing most promise could already hear, though badly, and the treatment let them hear much better. I'm not even deaf but I'd happily take a treatment to fix whatever hearing damage I've collected over the years.

And for what it's worth, eugenics is already with us and that's actually not so evil. People carrying certain genetic diseases choose not to have (biological) kids all the time. Others still choose to risk it. As long as there isn't some large conspiracy about perfecting the human race behind it, eugenics can be helpful.
by thr0w | 2025-07-03 13:18:04+00:00
I think Zoom throws up a consent screen. Obviously if it's some 3rd party thing that joins the call as a recorder, you don't get that.

This is one of those obvious but subtly inappropriate things that just kind of gets foisted on people. Nobody raises an eyebrow, or their voice, and so it's just normalized. Imagine walking into an in-person meeting to find a camcorder set up on a tripod - and if that isn't weird enough, none of your co-workers make a comment on it or acknowledge its presence. It's like pervasive but discreet cameras in public places vs. Surveillance Camera Man making it obvious by sticking a camera in your face.
by cubefox | 2025-07-03 13:18:48+00:00
Pet peeve: It is common to describe XOR as a special logical operator ("either or"), but it is arguably easier to just describe it as ≠ (!=, not equal) for Boolean inputs.

However, then it is clearly still easier to just phrase everything in terms of = (equality) instead!

Equality is for binary inputs is also called XNOR, biconditional, iff, ↔, etc, which is the negation of XOR. But thinking of it immediately as "=" is much more straightforward.

Another advantage of = over ≠/xor is that equality is not just commutative and associative, it's intuitively obvious that it is associative. The associativity of ≠/xor is less obvious. Moreover, equality is also transitive, unlike inequality/xor.

Overall, equality seems a much more natural concept to reason with, yet I don't know of any languages which have a bitwise equality/XNOR/↔ operator, i.e. one that operates on integers rather than Booleans.
by bitwize | 2025-07-03 13:19:13+00:00
I think that's the point. Max did things in the stupidest way that could possibly work, and it did work, and was simpler than the "smart" way, so was he less of a "real" programmer than Mel?

I think for a kid, Max's code was great but ultimately you do need to learn to think about things like error handling, especially if your code is intended to go into "production" (i.e., someone besides yourself will use/host it).
by hellojesus | 2025-07-03 13:19:38+00:00
I don't think it's reasonable to steal from some for the betterment of others. Clearly if those from which money is taken maximized their utility by charitably giving it away to familes with newborns, this policy wouldn't be necessary. To that end, this policy creates deadweight loss for those from whom the redistributive policy takes more than it returns.
by MangoToupe | 2025-07-03 13:19:57+00:00
It was not patents that helped the iphone succeed, it was a massive river of cash and keeping the development mostly secret. All patents ensured was that android operated in a visually slightly different manner.

Anyway, where is all this "innovation" that's supposedly worth caring about? It seems to me that patents stymie innovation by holding competitors hands behind their back (or even in the case of medicine, holding it off the market).

> patents give them some runway to make a profit assuming one can defend those patents.

I'd be shocked if this actually described even 1% of patents issued.

Anyway, yea, fuck all intellectual property except maybe the first ten years of copyright held by actual humans.
by sarchertech | 2025-07-03 13:22:01+00:00
I don’t want to just dismiss the productivity increase. I feel 100% more productive on throw away POCs and maybe 20% more productive on large important code bases.

But when I actually sit down and think it through, I’ve wasted multiple days chasing down subtle bugs that I never would have introduced myself. It could very well be that there’s no productivity gain for me at all. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the numbers showed that was the case.

But let’s say I am actually getting 20%. If this technology dramatically increases the output of juniors and mid level technical tornadoes that’s going to easily erase that 20% gain.

I’ve seen codebases that were dominated my mid level technical tornadoes and juniors, no amount of guardrails could ever fix them.

Until we are at the point where no human has to interact with code (and I’m skeptical we will ever get there short of AGI) we need automated objective guardrails for “this code is readable and maintainable”, and I’m 99.999% certain that is just impossible.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-07-03 13:22:11+00:00
No, it's definitely more efficient:

- Preventative care is far cheaper and more effective than reactive care (e.g. your dentist telling you to floss more in a particular area vs. filling a cavity vs. filling a root canal)

- Insurance is more effective at dispersing costs amongst a larger pool of people

- In a system like the US where insurance companies must negotiate prices with healthcare providers, larger pools have more bargaining power
by timschmidt | 2025-07-03 13:22:40+00:00
I really appreciate his nuanced stance that even cranks and kooks are capable of observation and recording what they see. And his obsession with correlating details through original historical accounts. And the work he's doing mapping the individual blocks of the casings and throughout the passages. It's one of the channels that convinced me that Youtube was a legitimate path for getting your scientific research funded.
by ajd555 | 2025-07-03 13:22:53+00:00
What a great read! And so many good insights! It almost made me want to convert a project to PHP - perhaps I will for a smaller project.

I love the simplicity and some of the great tools that PHP offers out of the box. I do believe that it only works in some cases. I use go because I need the error handling, the goroutines and the continuously running server to listen for kafka events. But I always always try to keep it simple, sometimes preferring a longer function than writing a useless abstraction that will only add more constraints. This is a great reminder to double my efforts when it comes to KISS!
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-07-03 13:22:56+00:00
I think we need a lesson in just funding practices here. Tuition is supposed to cover the costs of educating the person paying tuition. It is absurd that students should be saddled with the burden of paying for someone’s research. By what right? This is financial exploitation.

Using taxes is different, as public money and how it is used is the result of either consensus or some authority’s judgement that some public money should be invested in research for the sake of the common good. Even here, the privatization of profits and socialization of losses is criminal, not to mention the gatekeeping of research results funded by public money.
by HelloMcFly | 2025-07-03 13:24:14+00:00
> Because they know that the vast majority of people advocating for climate change to be a high priority issue is because they want to use that to slow down capitalism

Is this really what you think? That the people concerned about climate change are really just interested in changing economic policy? The real motives of environmentalists is to erode capitalism? Respectfully: that's nuts.

> Let's get rich enough so everyone (even European hotels) can afford AC

This "proposal" does nothing, and in fact makes things worse, if that AC is not clean energy! Your "growth-minded" solution is not only not a solution, it's a problem exacerbator. But yes, many of us do in fact advocate for deregulation of the solar industry (I have canvassed on this very issue), and support fast tracking nuclear power. And is there even a fight against ride-sharing to stop?

I just feel like your comment is coming from a different world than my own.