MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-03 13:24:35+00:00
There are good analogies to be had in mythologies and folklore, too! Before there was science fiction - hell, even before there was science - people still occasionally thought of these things[0]. There are stories of deities and demons and fantastical creatures that explore the same problems AI presents - entities with minds and drives different to ours, and often possessing some power over us.

The arguably most basic and well-known example are entities granting wishes. The genie in Alladin's lamp, or the Goldfish[1]; the Devil in Faust, or in Pan Twardowski[2]. Variants of those stories go in detail over things we now call "alignment problem", "mind projection fallacy", "orthogonality thesis", "principal-agent problems", "DWIM", and others. And that's just scratching the surface; there's tons more in all folklore.

Point being - there's actually decent amount of thought people put into these topics over the past couple millennia - it's just all labeled religion, or folklore, or fairytale. Eventually though, I think more people will make a connection. And then the AI will too.

--

As for current generative models getting spooky, there's something else going on as well; https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor has a hypothesis I agree with.

--

[0] - For what reason? I don't know. Maybe it was partially to operationalize their religious or spiritual beliefs? Or maybe the storytellers just got there by extrapolating an idea in a logical fashion, following it to its conclusion. (which is also what good sci-fi authors do).

I also think the moment people started inventing spirits or demons that are more powerful than humans in some, but not all ways, some people started figuring out how use those creatures for their own advantage - whether by taming or tricking them. I guess it's human nature - when we stop fearing something, we think of how to exploit it.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Fisherman_and_... - this is more of a central/eastern Europe thing.

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski - AKA the "Polish Faust".
by 28304283409234 | 2025-07-03 13:24:59+00:00
That is the Wizard's First Rule for a reason.

"Wizard's First Rule: people are stupid." Richard and Kahlan frowned even more. "People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."
by josephg | 2025-07-03 13:25:00+00:00
Yeah I think of Zig as a modern version of C. And Rust and (I think) D like modern versions of C++. Well. Given D's marriage to the GC, maybe its more like Go or C#.

I know its petty - I still can't get past how idiotic and frustrating it is that Zig treats unused variables as a compiler error. Its the worst of all worlds:

- Its inconvenient (I have to explicitly suppress them in my code with _ = foo)

- Once I've suppressed them, I don't get any compiler warnings any more - so ironically, it takes more effort to find and fix them before committing. I end up accidentally committing code with unused variables more than in Rust or C.

- And it totally breaks my flow. I like to explore with my hands and run my code as I go. I clean up my code after my tests pass so I can be sure I don't introduce new bugs while refactoring.

Zig's handling of unused variables seems like an unforgivably bad design choice to me. Its been raised by the community plenty of times. Why hasn't it been fixed? I can understand if Andrew Kelly doesn't program the same way I do. We all have our idiosyncrasies. But does he seriously not have any smart people around him who he trusts who can talk him out of this design?

It seems like a huge pity to me. It otherwise seems like a lovely language.
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2025-07-03 13:25:00+00:00
Paywall, so I don't know if they mention Loma Linda CA (which doesn't have the pension fraud/reporting problems of some of the other areas)

https://www.bluezones.com/explorations/loma-linda-california...

Diet, exercise, and healthy social life are the keys. Simple, but hard.
by jijijijij | 2025-07-03 13:25:19+00:00
AFAIK, the derivatives are less researched, so hard to argue about. Often, the concentration isn’t disclosed, too.

I would just go DIY, since commercial products are either very, very expensive, or ineffective. Once you got your measurements down, mixing it freshly takes no time. And you can afford to use it all over the body, not just the face. This way you know, it’s not oxidized, it’s exactly what’s used in some better studies, it is effective. Even DIYing a stabilized formulation with ferulic acid is possible and still much cheaper.

Personally, I have trust issues with vitamin C chemistry tho :D
by dangus | 2025-07-03 13:25:22+00:00
I understand that there is non-academic infrastructure and amenities, but I’m not sure the cost gap is very well explained. I’m paying a multiple orders of magnitude cost premium on my professor’s wage depending on the size of my class and somehow I’m supposed to believe that it isn’t sufficient to pay for some amenities, building maintenance, and other reasonable overhead?

Planet fitness can make a killing on $20/month gym memberships but supposedly the campus recreation center is the bleeding me dry?

This also doesn’t explain how my online state school only had a slight discount over in-person instruction to take classes online. Like I said in my first comment, my professors only performed live instruction for an hour a week and taught with recycled and off-the-shelf materials.

Unsubsidized tuition room and board is higher than the median individual salary.

I think that if there was some kind of mandate or incentive to reduce costs that we would suddenly see cost reduction with very little compromise. But as it stands, everyone involved is incentivized to keep prices as high as possible.
by cmiles74 | 2025-07-03 13:25:32+00:00
We’re saying that “intent very much matters here” but when we are talking about people flashing headlights to warn others of a police-manned speed trap, we focus on the effects of the action. Isn’t the intention of the person flashing their headlights (in many cases) to help people break the law? That is, people see the signal and slow down while passing the speed trap only to increase speed once past, evading detection.

This looks much the same to me as people warning those around them of ICE activity.
by jerf | 2025-07-03 13:25:39+00:00
A few perhaps less obvious lessons:

I think of "straight-line code" as a distinct sort of code. It's the sort of code that does a thing, then does the next thing, then does the next thing, and if anything fails it basically just stops and yields some kind of error because there's nothing else to do. Programmers feel like they ought to do something about it, like this is bad, but I think there's actually great value in matching the code to the task. Straight-line code is not necessarily improved by some sort of heavyweight "command" pattern implementation that abstracts it into steps, or bouncing around a dozen functions, or through many objects in some other pattern. There's a time and a place for that too; for instance, if these must be configured that may be superior. But a lot of times, if you have a straight-line task, straight-line code is truly the best solution. You have to make sure it doesn't become hairy, there are some traps, but there's also a lot of traps in a lot of the supposed "fixes", many of them that will actually bite you worse.

For many years now I've been banging on the drum that if you've been living solely in the dynamic scripting language world for over a decade, you might want to look back at static languages to put one in your tool belt. When the dynamic scripting languages first came out, they would routinely be estimated at using 1/10th the lines of static languages, and at the time I would have called that a pretty good estimate. However, since then, the gap has closed. In 1998, replacing a 233-line PHP script with a merely 305-line static-code replacement would have been unthinkable. And that's Go, with all its inline error-handling; an exception-based, modern static language might have been able to effectively match the PHP! Post this in the late 90s and people are going to be telling you how amazing it was the static code didn't take over 2000 lines. This doesn't represent our tools falling behind... this represents a staggering advance! And also the Go code is going to likely be faster. Probably not in a relevant way to this user, but at scale it would be highly relevant.

A final observation is that in the early PHP era, everything worked that way. Everything functioned by being a file that represented a program on the disk corresponding to that specific path. If you want to get fancy you had a path like "/cgi-bin/my.cgi/fake/path/here" and had your "my.cgi" receive the remainder of the path as a parameter, and that was a big deal. It took the web world more-or-less a decade to get over the idea that a URL ought to literally and physically correspond to something on the disk. We didn't get rid of that because we all hate fun and convenience. We got rid of that because it produces a lot of big problems at even a medium scale and it's not a good way to structure things in general. It's not something to mourn for, it's something we've had better ways of doing now for so long that people can forget why they're the better way.
by dotnet00 | 2025-07-03 13:25:45+00:00
I think this may be too much of a "literal" interpretation of OSS without really considering the social contract many OSS supporters believe in, wherein users of OSS will act in good faith and might eventually reciprocate for the benefits they're getting, e.g. the way companies have slowly accepted paying their own employees to contribute to projects openly, releasing their own open source code, respecting the spirit of OSS licenses, sponsoring the developers of the thing they use, etc.

I think it's entirely fair that even staunch supporters of OSS get turned off when AI companies scrape their work to ingest into a black box regurgitator and then turn around and tell the world how their AI will make trillions of dollars by taking away the jobs of those obsolete OSS developers, showing no intention of ever giving back to the community.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-03 13:26:15+00:00
An insistence - in spite of the reality - that you're a democracy seems likely prophetic.

Right now though I think you can say the US is just back-sliding. Trump threatened to arrest Mamdani for I guess being very popular or something but he doesn't seem to have even attempted to actually do that. Once it's actually gone, Mamdani just gets imprisoned or executed so that Trump's preferred candidate "wins" regardless. The technology of democracy is still there, but the actual principles it supports are gone.
Show HN: An interactive kids' book written in Emacs Org Mode
by dskhatri | 2025-07-03 13:27:16+00:00
I authored and developed an interactive fiction book in Emacs using Org mode and Twinery. Read an entire storyline/adventure of the Web Book, no login required here: https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/

---

I authored and developed an interactive children's book about entrepreneurship and money management. The journey started with Twinery, the open-source tool for making interactive fiction, discovered right here on HN. The tool kindled memories of reading CYOA style books when I was a kid, and I thought the format would be awesome for writing a story my kids could follow along, incorporating play money to learn about transactions as they occurred in the story.

Twinery is a fantastic tool, and I used it to layout the story map. I really wanted to write the content of the story in Emacs and Org Mode however. Thankfully, Twinery provided the ability to write custom Story Formats that defined how a story was exported. I wrote a Story Format called Twiorg that would export the Twinery file to an Org file and then a Org export backend (ox-twee) to do the reverse. With these tools, I could go back and forth between Emacs and Twinery for authoring the story.

The project snowballed and I ended up with the book in digital and physical book formats. The Web Book is created using another Org export backend.

Ten Dollar Adventure: https://tendollaradventure.com

Sample the Web Book (one complete storyline/adventure): https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/

I developed another nifty feature that lets readers of the physical book access an online dashboard of achievements anonymously using secret "magic words" in lieu of requiring personal information. I couldn't muster the effort to write a special org export backend for the physical books unfortunately and used a commercial editor to format these.

Twiorg: https://github.com/danishec/twiorg

ox-twee: https://github.com/danishec/ox-twee

Previous HN post on writing the transaction logic using an LLM in Emacs: https://blog.tendollaradventure.com/automating-story-logic-w...

Twinery 2: https://twinery.org/ and discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32788965
by micromacrofoot | 2025-07-03 13:27:27+00:00
> Many of these institutions went on a massive PR campaign demonizing the majority demographic

I'm sorry what? where's the evidence?

the current administration has been saying (in their words) that they're pulling funding from Harvard because they aren't doing enough to stop antisemitism and are pushing for a direct role in governance — they've attempted to freeze billions of dollars in grants for a number of things including medical research

Historically this research has shown massive measurable return on investment, which is why it's funded so well.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-03 13:27:51+00:00
Man people who talk like you must work in absolutely miserable companies.

Meetings at my workplace are to the point, never longer than they need to be, and while yeah I weasel out of as many as I feel I can, I don't send an AI notetaker nor do I need it summarized. We meet for a topic, we discuss that topic, usually bullshit for a little in and around the topic, and then we get back to work. I would say most of our half-hour scheduled meetings are 10 minutes, and most of our hour scheduled ones are about 30-40 depending what it is. If we have a LOT to do, VERY occasionally, we actually use up the full time and then end things promptly because we all have more to do.

We don't backstab or plot on one another, our work relationships are built on mutual respect for one another's contribution to our goals. Meetings (nor even being in leadership) are not about jockeying for power, they're about enabling the best of us to help push our goals forward.

I'm getting whole new kinds of appreciation for my job and it's deliberately small, flattened structure because apparently the default state of business is to turn into high school with higher stakes, and I would genuinely rather run into traffic than work at some of these places.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-07-03 13:28:10+00:00
ICEBlock is actively lying, is not open source and is confidently misleading many.

While I don't want to assume regular fed honeypot, we can at the very least be certain that it's an app made by an Apple Kool-Aid drinking person. iOS is, in many ways, more susceptible to governement subpoenas than an Android app would ever be. Sideloading, UnifiedPush, maintaining a connection to a server to handle notifications yourself are all more secure than just trusting that Apple will not just hand you over to the cops.

In addition, if the author is worried about a subpoena, it means that they're US based. Which is an absurdly stupid thing to do if you're going to make a fascist-reporting app while living in a fascist country.
by octember | 2025-07-03 13:29:25+00:00
Let's say you've built the perfect SaaS: you've built the perfect tool for a customer and put it in front of them, excited to save them time/money/energy. And?

They don't want it! They don't want to learn your new fancy software.

But what do they want? Solutions: someone to do the job for them. That person doing the job could be leveraging SaaS on the backend, but these businesses have 0 appetite for doing the new work themselves.

AI enables solutions to scale. Operations, communication overhead, manual sales processes: this is all ripe for automation + AI. What was once a fixed linear cost scaling has become a more attractive curve.
by perlgeek | 2025-07-03 13:29:42+00:00
This is some very black-and-white thinking.

If you haven't grown up with every semi-publicly spoken word recorded and made searchable, you aren't used to restrict what you say to those that you are OK with being recorded.

But, even more importantly, even if you do, you might later change your mind about things.

Part as a problem is that we, as a society, don't really deal appropriately (at least in my opinion) to old recordings. If somebody said something slightly offensive 10 years ago, and it wasn't recorded, basically nobody cares. If it was recorded, there's too much outrage, considering that this was one thing of literally 100k things they said that year.
by trealira | 2025-07-03 13:29:47+00:00
> 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.

First, clearly such people don't donate to families, making that a pointless argument, and second, even if they gave new parents money directly, they might still not have a baby if they don't have time to take care of the baby without parental leave. Long work hours for couples decreasing the national birth rate is a negative externality. If all companies acted hostile to parents and no one became a parent, that might boost each individual company's productivity levels, but they would be killing off the workforce in the long term. That, like overfishing, would be an example of the tragedy of the commons.
by pclowes | 2025-07-03 13:29:55+00:00
I have not found LLMs to be most beneficial in straight writing code especially in complex large scale systems. However, I have found them extremely useful at the aspects the author claims they make more difficult: understanding, testing, and trusting that code.

An LLM is an extremely useful search engine. Given access to plenty of CLI tools asking it questions about an unfamiliar code base is extremely helpful. It can read and summarize much faster than I can. I don't trust its exact understanding but I do trust it to give me a high level understanding of an architecture, call out dependencies, summarize APIs, and give me an idea of what parts of the code base are new/old etc.

Additionally, having LLMs write tests after setting up the rough testing structure and giving it a few examples massively decreases the amount of time it takes to prove my understanding of the code through the tests thereby increasing my confidence/trust in it.
by dcow | 2025-07-03 13:29:56+00:00
Unless people use weak passwords today, all their passwords are scattered across various browsers and system autofill, unless they use a PW manager deliberately, in which case they’re “locked in”.

One of the couterpoints here is that while good security might have you adopt one password manager vendor, that vendor is not necessarily the same as your platform vendor. Traditionally this is a way to fight vendor lock in.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-03 13:30:02+00:00
> if everything comes from a single AI mind, it all fails in the same general kind of way

I'm reminded of https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ; even if we don't get brain uploading, we have a similar sort of thing going on with synthetic "personalities" of LLMs.

> diversity beats even very smart geniuses.

Some of HN will get very mad about that statement but it is often true. Of course, the best combination is a diverse collection of geniuses, which is why midcentury openish borders US did so well.

> The image generators do seem to be able to get meaningfully distinct output styles

Generally they can plagiarize in the style of any human artist you can name whose work is on the internet. Artists are, not unreasonably, upset about this.
by 9x39 | 2025-07-03 13:31:17+00:00
> my core point is that one cannot construct morality from extreme hypotheticals.

Isn’t that what happens when we codify limits of behavior, which are often extreme, into laws or religious texts which then govern a population?

Even if you don’t consider law as de facto defining morality, moral lessons from literature to oral tradition are often handed down as metaphor through stories of finding balance between extreme outcomes.
by Joker_vD | 2025-07-03 13:31:46+00:00
> Invariants are functions that run at the start and end of every public member function, and can be used to ensure that the type is always in a valid state.

The ironic thing about this is that it means that the public functions of an object can't, generally, call each other willy-nilly unless they take special precautions: very often, the object's invariants are broken when the execution is in a middle of the object's method. This is not a problem with D, the language merely helps you to uncover this lurking problem which usually simply goes unnoticed until something breaks and someone notices it.
by cloverich | 2025-07-03 13:31:46+00:00
It's interesting to think about, but LLMs are perhaps not impacting everyone, even at the same level, the same ways. I'm similarly more productive, and for a different reason. I've always struggled with task persistence when the task is easy and monotonous.... or something. Easy jobs, books, code, that still took a while to do, always took the longest, focus was impossible. Hard tasks, books, classes, etc, i always did the best at. nearly failed school from the easiest course; highest marks in the hardest ones. I've never gotten over this.

That's now melted away. For the first time my mind feels free to think. Everything is moving almost as fast as i am thinking, Im far less bogged down in the slow parts, which the llm can do. I spend so much more time thinking, designing, architecting, etc. Distracting thoughts now turn into completed quality of life features, done on the side. I guess it rewards add, the real kind, in a way that the regular world understandably punishes.

And it must free up mental space for me because i find i can now review others prs more quickly as well. I don't use llm for this, and don't have a great explanation for what is happening here.

Anyways im not sure this is the same issue as yours, and so its interesting to think about what kinds of minds it's freeing, and what kinds its of less use to.
by leeoniya | 2025-07-03 13:31:46+00:00
> You might think that Max's practices make for a maintenance nightmare. But I've been "maintaining" it for the last 15 years and I haven't found it to be a nightmare.

c'mon, you're talking about 200 LoC here. anything except BrainFuck would be maintainable at this scale.

have you ever had to fix a non-trivial third party WordPress plugin? the whole API used to be a dumpster fire of global state and magic functions. i dont know what it is now, but 15 years ago it was a total nightmare.
by dirkc | 2025-07-03 13:32:24+00:00
Each time I'm in a meeting with an AI note taker I am very tempted to prank the AI / person sending the AI. Maybe I should create a AI meeting mayhem bot that plays out some ridiculous scenario for the note taking AI to transcribe.

I can already hear the panicked phone call asking if Alice okay and how on earth could her whole house get swallowed by a sink hole without the wifi cutting out :P