MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benjaminclauss | 2025-07-22 16:35:17+00:00
some things that have helped me with this

1. introduction to epistemic humility

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_humility

Your knowledge is limited and fallible. Other people may know things you don’t. Reality is complex.

Though, it makes any political discussions difficult.

2. first principles thinking

3. Zettelkasten note-taking

What is a web browser? What is HTTP? What is an IP address? Link on and on IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
by throwanem | 2025-07-22 16:35:20+00:00
Oh, I see. That's too broad a claim in my view, but I would agree we can't be certain without a general solution of the 'hard problem' - no more about LLMs than about humans; in the general case, we can't prove ourselves conscious either, which is the sort of thing that tends to drive consciousness researchers gradually but definitely up a wall over time. (But we've discussed Hoel already. To his credit, he's always been very open about his reasons for having departed academia.)

It sounds to me as though you might seek to get at a concern less mechanistic than moral or ethical, and my advice in such case would be to address that concern directly. If you try to tell me that because LLMs produce speech they must be presumptively treated as if able to suffer, I'm going to tell you that's nonsense, as indeed I have just finished doing. If you tell me instead that they must be so treated because we have no way to be sure they don't suffer, I'll see no cause to argue. But I appreciate that making a compassionate argument for its own sake isn't a very good way to convince anyone around here.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-07-22 16:35:24+00:00
I moved to "Atkinson Hyperlegible" for all of my Note-taking/Reading, Markdown Editing, etc. And recently upgraded to "Atkinson Hyperlegible Next" beating my choices of iA Writer’s Fonts. We are spoiled for choice and they are all beautiful and super readable and comfortable.

Unfortunately, I found "Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono" (IDE/Terminal) to be a tad stunted for my liking. I wear glasses but not that bad and I like to use my computer without glasses. I personally like "Monaco" with a tad larger font-size. The other reason I try to stick to more common fonts and pick one of the better of them is to be able to use any IDE (helping/discussing with team members) and not feeling uncomfortable without "my favorite font."

Again, very personal, but I tried "Atkinson Hyperlegible" for the website for about a month or so and I found it to be neither modern, nor professional nor vintage/classic but more like the website warming up to the reader/visiter, “Hey, are you OK? Finding it hard to read, I'm going to make some scientific fixes to help you read!”
by wredcoll | 2025-07-22 16:35:34+00:00
> If there's one guy who says he's gonna try to slash it, I'll take that guy and hope for the best.

Ok, and then what we actually got was elon musk's incompetent "doge" organization.

This is literally my point, you have faith that there is this "bad cruft" and so you're willing to believe in, and give power to, incompetent idiots merely because they sound like they agree with your predetermined faith.

It's frustrating to watch this sort of thing happen. Regardless of the actual status of "cruft", musk and trump are famously incompetent, the odds of them suddenly developing the skills necessary to combat "cruft" are highly unlikely.
by mootothemax | 2025-07-22 16:35:44+00:00
Tailwind is magical to me for one reason alone:

I can now design.

As someone who spent 20+ years as a jack-of-all-trades / full-stack developer, specialising in back-end and database skills, this has largely been... confusing.

Before, I couldn't even make plain text work. Totally hopeless, I didn't have the eye for things.

Now though, now I help my kids lay out their homework to be more visually pleasing. It's bizarre.

(caveats: while I can put together a visually pleasing and consistent websites, I'm not saying that design is easy, nor that designers don't have talents way above my own. I view this more like an enthusiastic amateur at the piano rather than having become a concert pianist.)

I know of one other dev who's experienced the same. I'm keen to learn if there are more of us out there.
by Intrinisical-AI | 2025-07-22 16:35:48+00:00
Absolutely — you’re on the right track! The intuition of the "mound" is actually quite powerful.

Let’s imagine the embedding space as a 2D surface with a third hidden dimension — say, curvature pointing ‘up’ toward a peak (like a saddle or a bump).

Then:

Two vectors pointing in the same compass direction (e.g., “north”) might diverge or converge depending on their local curvature.

If you try to compare them using Euclidean cosine similarity, you’d be blind to the underlying geometry.

What you'd want is to "parallel transport" one vector along the surface toward the other — adjusting its direction to the curvature — and then compare them.

In high-curvature regions, even small angular differences can grow rapidly. In flatter regions, directionality might dominate. So yes, context (i.e., local geometry and density) changes everything.

Right now I'm testing some of this with reranking signals based on Ricci curvature + soft k-NN graphs (preserving density), and trying out simple geodesic-aware losses. But it’s still early days.

Your comment actually gave me a better mental image of what happens when you’re “far from the mound” — maybe curvature becomes negligible, and naive methods recover. Thanks for that.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-22 16:35:53+00:00
I think that's a case for "NOTE", which has the semantics of "this is something unusual and significant to pay attention to".

Edit: BTW, my specific disagreement is with using "TODO" to mean different things. I'm otherwise completely on board with the kinds of comments you're asking people to write, even if I'd label them differently. When I'm trying to understand new code, much of the effort is in trying to figure out why the author chose the approach they did. Why'd they do this instead of the more usual approach? Did they understand the tradeoffs, or just find things on Stack Overflow or ChatGPT? Did they take this edge case into consideration? Seeing their thinking is vastly more useful than

// Add two numbers three = one + two
by ngruhn | 2025-07-22 16:36:04+00:00
> what Israel’s strategic goal is

I agree. It's painfully obvious that nobody has a plan or even an idea what could be done. But that's because all options are garbage. Stay in Gaza? Guerilla warfare forever and more civilian deaths. Pull out of Gaza? Hamas rearms in a few years, starts shooting rockets again, Israel retaliates and more civilians casualties. Regime change? Good luck, all moderate voices are toothless against the Jihadists.

The fundamental problem here is Hamas. There is just nothing in this world you can offer them to stop this suicide mission. All they care about is destroying Israel. No matter the cost. And that has nothing to do with Israels conduct. I'm sure it's compounding after decades of bloodshed but deep down they just hate Jews.
by RobGR | 2025-07-22 16:36:12+00:00
My gut feeling is that is what is going on. But, the creation of new plasma donation centers is not a random process, so we've identified a correlation, not a definitive cause and effect. What if areas that are on an upward economic trajectory are more likely to have new businesses open ? Maybe those are the areas where it is easier to get the necessary zoning or building permits.
by daemonk | 2025-07-22 16:36:22+00:00
I think this sentiment has probably been echoed through the ages.

It feels like there's an assumption that we've reached some kind of a complexity ceiling and compressing complexity below us will just make us dumb? What if we've black-boxed complexity below us so we can explore more complexity above us?

Maybe the argument is that the rate of compressing complexity below us is faster than expanding the complexity space above us? And the result is that it makes us run out of knowledge of digest and explore? Perhaps the answer to that is to make people more curious to go out and explore the complexity above us so we can generate that knowledge.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-22 16:36:27+00:00
There's no reason to think those cases will go any differently. As far as I know, the ruling would have to be appealed at this point. I am only commenting to say that there is reason to think this is true:

> But isn't it already known and admitted (and allowed?)

You seemed to be confused about why this person believed that:

> No, and I don't see where you got that from.

And I wrote a comment intended to dispel your confusion. The above commenter thought that it was allowed because a judge said it was allowed; that can be appealed but that's the reason someone thinks it's allowed.
by kennywinker | 2025-07-22 16:36:28+00:00
> This is basically just criticizing Israel for having the means.

No, it’s criticizing israel for the will, the means, and the action of murdering tens of thousands and starving millions.

> Hamas, who run Gaza, want to "Globalize the Intifada" and bring violence to Jews worldwide

This is one interpretation of that phrase. Intifada means roughly “shaking off”. A call for international support for shaking off the oppression of Palestinians is how it’s usually understood. I’m not here to defend hamas, but using the words of hamas to excuse the genocide of all palestinians (including in the west bank where hamas does not exist) is disgusting. Like using the words of trump to justify shooting up a walmart.

But you are right in that if hamas was doing the same thing that israel is doing UNESCO and UNICEF would be “getting political” about that too.
by tracker1 | 2025-07-22 16:36:39+00:00
This is why you need knowledgeable professionals to setup a project. I'm a massive proponent on CI/CD processes in place as early as possible and guardrails on access and deployments.

I mean, sure you could possibly get a schema change script through two approvers and deployed all the way to production that truncates a bunch of tables or drops a database, but it's at least far less likely.
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by fragmede | 2025-07-22 16:36:59+00:00
> People make music because they want to.

Unfortunately, "want to" doesn't pay the bills. Before recorded music, there was a lot more demand for a jazz saxophone player, and that musician made a decent middle class living off of that skill. Now we have Spotify and don't need to pay that musician. Suno.ai makes very passible music. Midjourney makes passible art. The microwave makes passible food. LLMs write passible books.

Programming as a job will go the way of the saxophone player as a job, but then what's left? Are we a jester economy? One where everyone competes to perform tricks for wealthy billionaires in order to get some money to eat?
by steveklabnik | 2025-07-22 16:37:05+00:00
> Does JJ play well with Gerrit?

There was a PR for a `jj gerrit` command, but at this point, it's not super needed. Here's the main bug tracking this https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/issues/4387

Beyond that, the jj, gerrit, and git butler folks are working together on standardizing the change ID concept so they all work well together without extra tooling. That's going to take a long time though. Think "store the change ID in the commit rather than as a trailer", that kind of thing.
by Alupis | 2025-07-22 16:37:50+00:00
If you write enough CSS for a site... eventually you end up building utility classes anyway.

Now, you re-invented Tailwind... but in your own proprietary way that nobody else understands.

Tailwind takes the inverse approach. The example posted by the parent above is completely unambiguous - what you see is what you get, and it's done the same way everywhere Tailwind is used. You can read the component's styles and understand what it should look like without having to do a bunch of look-ups, or alter classes which might impact other areas.

So now instead of memorizing a bunch of custom classes like `pad-left-20` (because you didn't discover the `leftp-20` your colleague added 8 months ago)... you now have a standard way.
by stouset | 2025-07-22 16:37:55+00:00
> When doing a rebase, there’s no way I want to do something else in the middle of it, and having a modal state feels totally natural to me.

This is a consequence of rebases being a special, modal state that requires dedicated focus to work through to resolution.

Rebase conflicts are (to a jj user) just another fix you might want to make to a revision. Or it might be better done by making a tweak to an earlier revision, instead of the revision where the conflict first occurred. There’s no pressure to fix it right this second, you can always come back where you left off. And you can make your fixed in a separate commit that you squash into the conflicted commit if it’s particularly hairy.

> It feels like jj is solving a lot of problems that do not exist, or are mostly solved with worktrees.

Git has grown a lot of features over the years and countless flags to make some things feasible.

jj rethinks the core interaction model in a way that gets rid of all the band-aids.

There are people who still live and die by C and swear that anyone running into issues is holding it wrong or just needs to be more principled about how they handle memory. But most people have moved on to higher-level languages. It doesn’t mean C was a bad language, it doesn’t mean those programmers weren’t familiar with C, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t still some cases where C is the right answer. But most people nowadays find other languages more productive with less friction.
by thenthenthen | 2025-07-22 16:37:58+00:00
I am qualified and this purely a speculative ‘mapping’ in broadest sense. Visually rich, useful in a sense that it is useless (maps are objects of power, they want to show theyre aware of this and maybe even critique this by producing a useless map?). Anyway, I do not see this anymore than an exercise in aesthetics (in a wannabe Simon Denny-ish way) and not much more sadly.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-22 16:38:03+00:00
Honda sells a lot of Prologue EV's, and Toyota sells a lot of bZ EV's. The two companies seem to have split brain about EV's. The exec's bash them, but then they add incentives to their EV's to ensure they sell well. If they don't like EV's, why do they add so many incentives to make them move well?
by nucleardog | 2025-07-22 16:38:26+00:00
Hard agree. If you lean into it, it's a much more pleasant way to travel in many cases.

Everything about air travel is rushed, stressful, and unpleasant. Yeah, I can get there in 3 hours (if you account for the "show up two hours early in case we understaffed the check-in desk" thing), but by the time I get there I'm _wiped_. Plus I'm probably going to end up either leaving or arriving at some ungodly hour that means my sleep schedule's screwed and that's basically all I'm getting done that day anyway.

The train I take instead runs every 30 minutes. You can rock up 6 minutes before the train leaves and walk right on after someone scans a QR code. You can bring a drink! There's tons of space for people and luggage. The seats are huge. Your legs fit. The tray is big enough to actually work on. You can get up and go for a walk. There's a water fountain and water bottle filler. The washroom is bigger than some bedrooms I've had.

If you're traveling with kids you can actually book seats at a full-fledged table and have lots of room for activities and colouring and such.

And it takes 5 hours. So sure, in theory it's two hours longer. In reality, I've got back almost 5 hours of my day. And I can arrive at a reasonable hour and not tired and stressed to shit and actually do things with the rest of my time.

Last trip I used the way there for some relaxing. Did some reading, played some games, generally just wound down. On the way back I was able to get some work done effectively so actually got paid for my travel day. Either way, it was a much better experience.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-07-22 16:38:31+00:00
There's a few pain points with containers; whenever I'm browsing in a container tab, I wish CMD-T opened a new container tab, not my default tab. I haven't been able to find a setting for this :/

I also wish there were more keyboard shortcuts for opening links in specific containers, or re-opening a current tab in a different one.

I know you can set certain domains to always open in certain containers - fine for Facebook, when I occasionally have to use it - but annoying when I'm trying to do things in different (e.g.) Bluesky accounts.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-22 16:38:39+00:00
>Have to disagree. If someone says their dog "awakened" with superhuman math skills,

The problem here is that this analogy doesn't work. The equivalent analogy is the dog is actually passing math tests and doing math AND THEN someone says it's awakened.

>or that my local LLM felt hours of loneliness while I'm sleeping and not talking to it

No this doesn't apply. Because it's a ground truth fact that the LLM is not doing anything when not analyzing a prompt.

> I agree it is difficult to say what an LLM is doing, but most of these stories jump to saying it has humanlike experiences, or acting like it has an always-on consciousness.

Nah most people aren't doing this. It's a small minority that falls for this. But to your other point that it is <NOT> naive to say it is not "awakened"... when all observable evidence points to responses that signify understanding that is extremely identical to human output... then from an observational standpoint saying it is conciouse is a reasonable possibility because it's all we can ascertain from available information.

You can't say absolutely it is conciouse because there's not enough evidence. But this goes both ways. You can't say it isn't either.

What people don't realize is that given observable evidence to say absolutely that the LLM is just a stochastic parrot and is not conciouse is just as stupid and niave to say absolutely an LLM is "alive." Same type of stupidity.
by CWuestefeld | 2025-07-22 16:38:42+00:00
I think it's a little more subtle. It's not that they want to do nothing. It's that they're terrified of being seen to have done something, if for some reason that thing turns out to be a mistake.

For all the talk about wanting to do things scientifically, there's a remarkable lack of willingness to actually experiment. If a failed experiment is fatal, then we'll never do anything, bad or good.
by andrewmutz | 2025-07-22 16:38:43+00:00
This is a good blog post. Two thoughts about it:

- Contradictory facts often shouldn't change beliefs because it is extremely rare for a single fact in isolation to undermine a belief. If you believe in climate change and encounter a situation where a group of scientists were proven to have falsified data in a paper on climate change, it really isn't enough information to change your belief in climate change, because the evidence of climate change is much larger than any single paper. It's only really after reviewing a lot of facts on both sides of an issue that you can really know enough to change your belief about something.

- The facts we're exposed to today are often extremely unrepresentative of the larger body of relevant facts. Say what you want about the previous era of corporate controlled news media, at least the journalists in that era tried to present the relevant facts to the viewer. The facts you are exposed to today are usually decided by an algorithm that is trying to optimize for engagement. And the people creating the content ("facts") that you see are usually extremely motivated/biased participants. There is zero effort by the algorithms or the content creators to present a reasonably representative set of facts on both sides of an issue
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-07-22 16:39:01+00:00
> 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind.

There's a bug on Linux where background windows continue rendering, even if they're in an inactive workspace or not visible in any other way. This really hits performance, but it doesn't seem to be fixable due to some limitation on GTK3.

If I hide/resize my system status-bar, every single window gets resized to match the new available screen space. Firefox re-renders all content in all windows, causing multiple CPUs to spike to 100%.

See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1880467

In fact, there are a lot of bugs which are basically "unfixable due to limitations in GTK3". So the experience is likely quite different that on other platforms.

Regrettably, there don't seem to by any plans to move away from GTK in future.
by _the_inflator | 2025-07-22 16:39:57+00:00
I am very thankful for these insights.

Is there any project using React that uses something other than Tailwind? It is the default for many projects, especially those that are new.

Aesthetically, it was well deserved. There is a reason why component libraries build on top of Tailwind.

But every time I touch the framework, I miss Bootstrap. Tailwind is an aesthetic masterpiece, but the code quality feels like a regression. BEM, Bootstrap, Material. Different beasts, even jQuery UI, but Tailwind would be something I might consider, not a masterpiece, judging by the code.
by 1718627440 | 2025-07-22 16:40:10+00:00
> no need to be an ass about it

That wasn't what I meant, git --fixup is for changing earlier commits, you answered as if it didn't that's what I wanted to point out. (I tried to be sarcastic, because it was obvious that you didn't mean that.)

>> Maybe sensible, don't need it most of the time.

As in I want the opposite behaviour most of the time. That's why that is the default.
by dkural | 2025-07-22 16:40:23+00:00
I think there is a spectrum of compression here, so I find myself agreeing with your overall point but with a caveat. Putting aside "experiences" - travel or emotion - for transmitting information, the level of "desired compression" is based on the background knowledge the receiver brings, and what they consider to be the irrelevant bits.

I will say on historical mathematics - reading the greats shows you the road traveled, and often one realizes the unexplored paths along the way, that lead to brand new continents. This may not be as relevant if one is not trying to innovate.

I would also say reading Newton as a "first book" is positively counter-productive to learning Calculus in high school.
by muzani | 2025-07-22 16:40:52+00:00
Download claude code. Use it. Try to build that thing that would take 5 people six months to do. You'll find very quickly that programmers are needed, and more skilled ones too.

For a long time, we've been coders, developers. Mentally in the code. But now we work on the code. We're now engineers. We coordinate how the parts work together. I like this definition of engine: "any of various mechanical appliances, often used in combination"

The most expensive model today is Claude Opus 4. It can draft plans. It can engage this plan. It can write tests, run tests, fix tests. All by itself. But if you don't keep an eye on it, it will run off and do something you didn't intend it to do for 20 minutes.