MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vanviegen | 2025-07-06 13:18:47+00:00
People in general don't have the time or inclination to properly study the important details of each an every issue, before voting on them.

That's why it makes sense to outsource the decision making to a group of people that are being paid to study these issues full-time.

Given some balanced (yes, there's a problem) expert advice, I think rando's might make better choices than career politicians focussed on extending their power. The rando's would just return to their old careers afterwards.
by o11c | 2025-07-06 13:18:49+00:00
By "unpredictability", we mean that AIs will return completely different results if a single word is changed to a close synonym, or an adverb or prepositional phrase is moved to a semantically identical location, etc. Very often this simple change will move you from "get the correct answer 90% of the time" (about the best that AIs can do) to "get the correct answer <10% of the time".

Whenever people talk about "prompt engineering", they're referring to randomly changing these kinds of things, in hopes of getting a query pattern where you get meaningful results 90% of the time.
Ask HN: How to keep the software field fun?
by Desafinado | 2025-07-06 13:18:53+00:00
Lately I'm starting to get a level of fatigue hearing about augmented coding, and on the reverse, those who write about actually effective methods of writing software. I can't go on Linkedin without being bombarded with a thousand posts about AI and I'm completely bored with it.

Outside of that I feel like I've reached a level of something close to mastery in the field and the process of building software just isn't as fun as it once was.

I still like it, and don't want to leave the field, but I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas on how keep the flame alive. How can I make it fun again?
by NegativeK | 2025-07-06 13:19:37+00:00
I've never seen that perspective.

Work has always been a distraction from my hobbies. _Always_. Sometimes they're related, but often they're not.

Though... Your stance lines up with people who work well into their retirement years while not needing the income? I'd struggle to give two weeks notice if I suddenly had enough money to live on for the rest of my life.
by cluckindan | 2025-07-06 13:19:53+00:00
See the MDN examples:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/if

I for one would much rather use local conditionals than do the logical equivalent through conditionally set CSS variables. It is much more readable and extendable than several layers of abstraction (design token vars -> semantic vars -> theme vars potentially complexed by media/container queries -> element styles).

Of course I wouldn’t replace all of that, but if() would certainly make many things easier to grok for the next guy. Just don’t overuse it.
by afthonos | 2025-07-06 13:21:15+00:00
Greek states were neither particularly stable nor particularly long-lived. Irrespective of its moral merits, the Greek system was outcompeted by monarchies and eventually the Roman Republic. It’s hard to pinpoint the blame, exactly, but I’d be cautious, especially since modern democracies arguably came about due to the pressures of industrialization, and previous models developed in very different environments.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-06 13:22:48+00:00
> The thing is you just don’t seem to be able to convey why it is that it’s such an important issue.

I have conveyed why it's important to me. Whether or not you find my exhortation convincing or not is likely not due to my lack of attempts to convince you why I feel the way I do. Of all the things you could find lacking, I don't think it's unclear. Scripted behavior isn't authentic. Coordinated inauthentic behavior is problematic to me, because I work in security amongst other hats I wear, and I have another name for coordinated inauthentic behavior.

> Nobody else cares about it.

Tomte cares, and posted in this and the other thread? I'm sure other people would care if they saw the thread. Funny how people only care about what they're aware of.

> For what it’s worth we have systems and methods for finding good new articles, like the second chance pool. We wouldn’t ban other people’s scripts for the same reason there’s always room in the marketplace for different variants of a product; someone else’s variant may be better than ours at least in some ways.

> Ultimately there’s just no need for us to spend a whole lot of time thinking about it because it doesn’t cause problems (that we can’t address with routine human oversight).

You don't have to spend any time to ask script users to mention it in their bio! If they don't, they don't. Rule breakers are not an indictment of the concept of making rules, or following ones that already exist, or closing gaps in the rules once identified.

If there was nothing I or anyone else could say to change your mind, perhaps the failure of communication is on your end, and may even be willful. I come to HN to interact with human beings making user-submitted posts and comments. That's what HN is to me, and this announcement is a departure from all prior communications, because you've laid bare what I drew attention to last time this came up, where Tomte also posted. Apparently people are scripting submissions and farming posts on HN. I don't see how that isn't a problem on its face. The fact that you know and do nothing because perfect detection and enforcement is impossible makes me wonder if the reason you allow it is because it is expedient to moderating HN, and not what is necessarily best for HN as determined by HN users.

> But you take us to task about it again and again with these lengthy comments but not a clear statement of what the fundamental problem is.

And yet the problem has been identified, and it remains signposted by me because the problem has been denied to exist in favor of criticisms of the length of my posts. What even is the issue? Should I post fewer, more convincing words? I am honestly at a loss as to how to continue this thread, so I will rest and await any reply from you or anyone else.
by mikeiavelli | 2025-07-06 13:23:27+00:00
I only skimmed it, but I want to point out to the author that in his slope equation, the slope is denoted by m, not x.

But yes, using the Laplacian seems natural as a metric for what he wants to measure. Coming from a physics background though, it felt weird being explained in terms of pixels in a picture what a laplacian is...
by johnisgood | 2025-07-06 13:24:23+00:00
Why would you think that it is insane? It works well, and had no issues for decades. Any personal experiences you have that suggest otherwise? I would love to hear.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not regurgitating what other people have been saying (IMO wrongfully), which is: "Arch Linux for servers? Eww. Bleeding edge. Not suitable for servers.". All that said, please, do share. It will not negate those decades of no issues, however.

As I said, I maintain quite a lot of Arch Linux servers with loads of services without any issues, for decades.
by OjotCewIo | 2025-07-06 13:24:56+00:00
> I want significant change, but not to my income!

That's not it. The issue is (as the GGP mentions) irreversibility (and, I'd add, unpredictability). When you go for a less-paying job, two things are sure: (1) it'll be nearly impossible to return to the previous (better paying) job, if shit hits the fan, (2) the new job will pay a lot less than you are used to (and what your entire current way of living is based upon) from day 1. Whereas, what you desire in return for this, is totally unpredictable: the new job might or might not give you the meaning and inspiration you are seeking; and you'll only learn the outcome months later.

Thus, the negatives are immediate and certain, while the positives are delayed and uncertain. It's a totally irrational and fiscally irresponsible choice.

Of course, sometimes you do have to make that choice; for example when you get psychosomatic symptoms from the stress and the violation of your core identity at work. But then -- let's be clear about it -- the decision does not come from "carefully weighing the pros and cons"; you do it (literally) to survive.

See the author's story <https://write.as/conjure-utopia/the-verbose-story-of-how-i-l...>:

> I almost died [...] to this day I still suffer from chronic issues. This whole experience forced me to slow down, accept my limits, and reframe my plans for the future. It was very liberating: I was forced to quit the rat race [...] I started to appreciate the freedom that comes from restrictions.

You don't implement such life-uprooting changes, you don't take such risks until/unless you have no other way to survive. These changes are inaccessible through reasoning.
by j_w | 2025-07-06 13:25:00+00:00
My takeaway from this is that when you have a system or feature that "can't be tested" that you should try to isolate the "untestable" portions to increase what you can test.

The "untestable" portions of a code base often gobble up perfectly testable functionality, growing the problem. Write interfaces for those portions so you can mock them.
by megaloblasto | 2025-07-06 13:26:24+00:00
Just go to the party and engage with people. Actually be interested in who that person is, what they think, and how they spend their time. People are fascinating, even the grouchy boring ones.

Advice like this article, and the thousands of books before it, are usually totally garbage. I'm very introverted. I've spent weeks by myself in nature, completely alone. I find parties too stimulating. But just do it. It's not like you're getting your arm cut off. You're just talking to people. Don't be mad at yourself for saying some out of pocket stuff. Don't dwell on what you could have done. Just see what's going on in the lives of other people and stop overthinking it.
by supitsj | 2025-07-06 13:26:41+00:00
Yeah but we definitely will get there, this also is not a race per se. Finishing quickly is important but finishing safely for everyone %99.99 of the time is probably the most important thing, next to a flashy UI/UX. We definitely have attention of some fantastic people and of course it will be even better when the bills can be more easily managed or offset costs. I know I immediately stopped paying for all my other cloud services and deposited to float an early bump but also importantly to test the payment systems. Last thing we need is that to fail for a user who has already been sold.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-07-06 13:26:47+00:00
Every few years I put time into learning eshell and it's seriously impressive.

But what I really want is eshell outside of emacs. In fact I want all the bits of emacs outside of emacs.

The problem with eshell is the problem with emacs. It's a monolith. I know I know that's also its strength, but what I really want is for all the bits of emacs to be exploded out into components that make up an overall environment (yes, yes, Genera/Lisp Machines).

Unlike emacs purists, I am too much in and out of that environment to really ever feel fully comfortable adopting all its tools as my mainstay tools.
by CoastalCoder | 2025-07-06 13:26:51+00:00
I've also heard a 3rd-hand claims that not authors of those recipes vett what they've written. E.g., what the true prep / cooking times are.

I still find online recipes convenient, but I don't blindly trust details like cooking time and temperature. (I mean, those things are always subject to variability, but now I don't trust the times to even be in the right ballpark.)

Happily, there are some cooks that I think deserve our trust, e.g. Chef John.
by sfn42 | 2025-07-06 13:27:14+00:00
Isn't that part of the point? If the code runs in the scheduler then its performance is relevant. Same with garbage collection, if the garbage collector slows your algorithm down then you usually want to know, you can try to avoid allocations and such to improve performance, and measure it using your benchmarks.

Maybe you don't always want to include this, I can see how it might be challenging to isolate just the code itself. It might be possible to swap out the scheduler, synchronization context etc for implementations more suited to that kind of benchmarks?
by Y-bar | 2025-07-06 13:27:43+00:00
I remember the time before Uber arrived here, where ”here” obviously is not USA.

I don’t mind the old ways.

Taxis had apps before Uber arrived here, they had geolocation with ETA, contactless payment, up-front pricing, and never refused service (because they were required by law to offer service to anyone anywhere).

The problem probably never was incumbent taxis, it was how they were regulated (or not).
by Hizonner | 2025-07-06 13:28:17+00:00
Not at all. It's not argumentum ad hominem, because it lacks the "argumentum". It doesn't present the person's contemptibility as the refutation of that person's position. Any necessary refutation was done a long time ago.

You're mistaking "Fuck off" for an argument.

The person I was responding to expressed the belief that the law should constrain other people's choices, on threat of punishment, in order to (a) reduce "degeneracy" as that person sees it, and (b) "encourage" the other people to act as breeding stock. In other words, to draft everybody else to implement the world that person wants to see, and to hell with their own preferences.

I don't have to argue against self-evidently Nazish bullshit[^1]. There's no factual question anyway[^2]. Either you're willing to use others that way, or you aren't. And if you are, you don't get my charity.

The whole point is to tell them to go away and stop bothering decent people. They are bad, they should feel bad, and, more importantly, anybody nodding along should be forced to look at the reality of what they're nodding along to.

[^1]: Expressed, I might add, in the very language of Nazism and Moldbuggery.

[^2]: OK, the impact of the "population crisis" is overblown, but that's a very secondary point. It would not justify what that person wants no matter how real or how bad it was.
by samrus | 2025-07-06 13:28:53+00:00
How is your currency real if it has to rely on a centralized currency like USD to be functional? It feels like a failure of decentralized currency if it has to be a parasite on a decentralized currency. Surely the success metric for decentralized currencies has to be that they replace centralized currency right? That was bitcoins purpose, if it doesnt do that, then whats the point?
by nashashmi | 2025-07-06 13:29:07+00:00
I hope you are right. Your discernment is on communal vs independent material-duplicative living. But AGI will also be made hard to reach. And so for communal communities to access it, they would have to part away considerable resources. Well off nations would get first access to AGI. And poorer nations would get last access. By that time, the globalization (neo colonialism) order would have taken possession nearly over everything they own.
by zug_zug | 2025-07-06 13:29:10+00:00
If AGI were invented tomorrow, it'd probably be by open AI. I doubt whoever made it would tell anybody, because the government might step in, they certainly wouldn't make it freely available online.

If it was about as smart as a person, they'd probably roll out a weak "agent" version of for demo sake to get more funding. This would continue until they made one that was significantly more intelligent or cheap.

If they had one that was very cheap, they'd have 10,000 agents of it act together as a group to try to emulate a smart one, by considering every angle of every problem. This would likely mean 10,000 engineers making the AI better/cheaper/faster.

If they had one that was far smarter than a human, they probably have it improve itself, making it far better/cheaper/faster.

Then they'd try to see if they could use it to change the world. They'd have thousands of thinking machines that could be online, place phone-calls, engineer things, create ideas, make political campaigns, dig up dirt on people, or who knows what.

No "country" would "win," because this isn't a team sport and countries are just lines on maps.
by WD-42 | 2025-07-06 13:29:46+00:00
It is fine though. CGI for python is one pip install away, as it is for the other languages you listed.

Most rational people are ok with code being removed that 99.99% of users have absolutely no use for, especially if it is unmaintained, a burden, or potentially contains security issues. If you are serious about cgi you’ll probably be looking at 3rd party modules anyway.
by Fargren | 2025-07-06 13:29:57+00:00
That's a solvable technical problem. If your game needs a online server to work, either patch it to not need it, or distribute the server. IF your licensing prohibits you form doing it... well, don't enter that kind of licensing, negotiate different terms. There might be a small fraction of games that stop being financially viable. That's what we call a tradeoff.
by netsharc | 2025-07-06 13:30:04+00:00
> NASA did test receiving weak GPS signals on the moon with LRO in 2023.

I doubt very much that the position of the ISS in the article is being sent from the ISS at real time. It's more likely calculated using NORAD / Celestrak orbital elements plus orbital calculations.

I remember having a Windows desktop app to show the satellites locations, I'd have to download those text files to keep the information accurate. For the information beyond the snapshot, the app has to calculate distance and trajectory to estimate "If NORAD said it was here at this point in time, and heading that way with that speed, then right now it should be around here.". A bit like "If a train left Chicago 5 hours ago going 60 mph, where is it now?".

Nowadays it's all online of course: https://in-the-sky.org/satmap_worldmap.php .
by roenxi | 2025-07-06 13:30:04+00:00
> I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that some technique can reach AGI but not reach ASI.

Interesting to note that the current techniques are already general, there isn't a topic we can't throw them at and achieve some sort of result. There is already a trend of defining many humans as non-general intelligences so that AIs can be excluded from the category. The current state is, for practical purposes, AGI without ASI. Relatively dumb AGI. Artificial Inferior Intelligence, perhaps.

It is a curious question whether the techniques are fundamentally limited. I'm with you that I think they probably have no particular limit beyond a vague "perfect understanding of the situation".
by VikRubenfeld | 2025-07-06 13:30:27+00:00
>> So then there's no need for AI workers.

> You got this backwards - there won’t be need for humans outside of the elite class. 0.1% or 0.01% of mankind will control all the resources.

Let me rephrase that from 'So then there's no need for AI workers.' to 'So then there's no money to pay for AI workers.'

The UBI approach creates a closed economic loop: Company A pays taxes → Government gives UBI to consumers → Consumers buy from Company A → Company A pays taxes... This is functionally identical to Company A directly paying people to buy Company A's products, which makes no economic sense.

It's like Ford paying his workers $50/day, but the only customers buying Ford cars are Ford workers spending their $50/day wages. Ford would go bankrupt - there's no external value creation, just money circulating in circles.

Where does the actual wealth come from in this system? Who are the net buyers that make the businesses profitable enough to sustain the UBI taxes?

UBI in an AI-dominated economy can't create a functioning economy - it's just an imaginary self-licking ice cream cone.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-06 13:30:30+00:00
Well, he was a field agent. His job was to run assets in-country (Valerie Plame had a similar role).

He worked in West Africa, where Russian proxies were trying to foster communist insurgencies.

He was a very, very decent person; maybe too decent. The straw that broke the camel's back, was the Shah of Iran.
by its-kostya | 2025-07-06 13:30:31+00:00
I had a similar experience that I struggled to understand until now. Thanks to the article, I can approach it from a fresh perspective.

I enjoy cycling, running, swimming, and sports in general. When I bought my first fitness watch and heart rate monitor, I expected to enhance my enjoyment of these activities. However, I found that the focus on achievement diminished my experience. For instance, if I recorded a slightly slower pace than before, it negatively impacted my enjoyment of the workout because I had concrete numbers to compare. Without the tracking, I could simply go for a run and feel good about it, and that was enough for me
Show HN: Chat Capsule – Convert ChatGPT Chats to Markdown (For Notion, etc.)
by bekoeppel | 2025-07-06 13:30:50+00:00
I built Chat Capsule because I wanted to export my ChatGPT conversations in plain-text Markdown, so I can import them to Notion, or take the history over to Claude in the future.

It's as simple as that:

* Get your data export from ChatGPT * Drag-and-drop the ZIP (or just conversations.json) you download from ChatGPT * Parsing happens client-side only, so none of your confidential conversations leave your machine * Download each thread individually, or all of them as a ZIP file

First 100 users get it for free with the code SUMMERDAY100.
by tossandthrow | 2025-07-06 13:31:15+00:00
> In a pre-UBI world, you can at least assume that companies can't completely shaft employees because then no one can buy anything. If the government steps in to make sure people can still buy stuff, that has almost the opposite effect.

In my first comment I referred the Scandinavian countries. Read up on the flexicurity model of Denmark.

> OK, so then how about we do this without the UBI bit and just raise interest rates?

You cannot within the confines of the responsibility of the monetary systems (Eg. The FED). What you are seeing now is that the FED "prints" money that accumulate at the top because the fiscal powers (Eg. the government) are p*sies who do not dare to redistribute - this is called the velocity of money. And there is a higher velocity of money when they are in the hands of the people than in the pockets of the rich.

Regardless, proposing UBI on American forums is generally like setting fire to a wasp nest. Americans have been conditioned to support the oligarchy in quite some decades now.
by bloomingeek | 2025-07-06 13:32:30+00:00
The last century also brought us world wars and racism at all costs. The so called "great generation" (What a joke!), could very well have destroyed all of mankind. Then there's the "boomers". (my godforsaken generation) We have gone out of our way to politically ruin our nation, all for the sake of a lunatic, reality TV star who only cares about power and money. (A convicted felon was elected president?!?) Our vanity knows no bounds!

Now you're praising technologies that won't help the poor or make most people's lives more meaningful because they will be monetized to the point of uselessness. Sheesh!
by michaelcampbell | 2025-07-06 13:32:52+00:00
vterm takes care of at least the vast majority of the display issues that emacsian shells typically suffer from. It's literally a shell as a buffer. htop and other curses based TUI's seem to run fine in it.

I mean do what works for you of course, but I found it a vast improvement over the historical emacs shell things, which I've also used for decades.