MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Epistemological Primes
by _g0wg | 2025-07-10 14:00:51+00:00
I am on a quest for the epistemological primes. These are the deep foundational knowledges which underpin everything. Somehow relates to that "high-leverage generalist" concept, but it's like the next level above that. We're talking level 3 jack of all trades here.

The epistemological primes of mathematics might be logic, set theory, category theory, model theory, graph theory, and a few others. Things that can't be reduced any further; their own whole ways of thinking.

These primes exist in everything. Doing drugs (the way I do them) involves knowledge of chemistry, thermodynamics, and cognitive psychology. Cooking also involves chemistry and thermodynamics, and the knowledge of "flavor profiles" (which cores does that come from?). Doing projects involves some kind of "how to work" prime.

"Physics" is not a prime, but kinematics probably is a prime.

It's hard to figure some of them out. Demographics feels prime, but is probably actually a few things mashed together. Same for metrology, photography, color theory, emergency rescue, asset management, rhetoric, etc.

Any thoughts?
by alephnerd | 2025-07-10 14:00:59+00:00
> They'll let someone else figure out if there is a market for it and then they'll refine it.

The same was said about Nokia, RIM, Sony, and Microsoft, yet they failed. The current iteration of leadership at Apple doesn't have a strong history of successfully launching monetizable software plays other than the App Store, and that is a fairly distinct muscle.

More critically for Apple and the target personas who read Axios, Apple will not be able to justify it's current P/E ratio, because it's growth story has become difficult and it's margins are weaker now. That is why Apple is "turning" into a loser.

> Apple didn't invent the mobile phone, or the laptop, or the mp3 player, etc

Apple in the 2000s also didn't have a PE ratio in the 30s, which gave it more breathing room as it's product was it's products, not it's stock. Apple became a victim of it's success, as it is now treated as a blue chip - and by blue chip standards it is one of the less diversified ones (similar to Tesla imo)
by ricardobeat | 2025-07-10 14:01:18+00:00
As far as I've seen, a heap implementation using generics is not any shorter or simpler than the old `heap.Interface` - what it gained is reusability.

> Code is read more often than written, and still needs to be reviewed, understood and maintained.

Which takes us back to the points above. AI is really good at generating repetitive patterns, like plain types, or code that implements a certain interface. If you reduce the cost of creating the verbose code [at write time] we can all enjoy the benefit of reduced complexity [at read time] without resorting to generics.

Also not saying this as an absolute truth, it is more nuanced than that for sure. But in the big picture, generics reduces the amount of code you have to write, at the cost of increased layers of abstraction, and steering away from the simplicity that make Go popular in the first place. Overall I'm not convinced it was a net positive, yet.
by throwaway7402 | 2025-07-10 14:02:33+00:00
No thanks. We're still sticking with version 102, the last release before the ruinous "Supernova" redesign which nobody asked for, when it became apparent the project was being abused by "UX" kiddies looking to bloat their Github resumes. We're just thankful that some wiser developer had previously added the "allow-downgrade" option.
by preetsuthar17 | 2025-07-10 14:02:46+00:00
Today, I’m going to share the story of my freelancing journey—how I earned my first dollar online and eventually built my own web development and design agency.

It all started four years ago. Back then, I was just playing around with HTML and CSS, creating simple websites and showing them off to my friends. I had no clue about freelancing. One day, while scrolling through YouTube, I came across a video explaining freelancing—how you could get paid for building websites for others.

That video was a game-changer. I realized there was a world where my skills could actually be valuable. I felt excited and ready to dive in. I started on platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, spending an entire year messaging potential clients, sending emails, and pitching my services.

But after a year, the results were... zero. Zero clients. Zero money. I was frustrated and burned out. So I gave up.

After giving up on freelancing, I spent the next six to seven months playing video games and doing nothing productive. I was stuck, convinced I was done for.

Then one evening, while sitting on my balcony watching the sunset, something clicked. It felt like one of those moments from a movie. I realized I couldn’t just stop here. Giving up wasn’t the answer. I had wasted time feeling sorry for myself instead of working on my skills and doing what mattered.

That day, I made a decision—I was going to turn my freelancing journey around. I went back to learning, but this time I focused on modern frameworks like React.js and Next.js instead of just HTML and CSS.

I joined freelancing communities and Discord servers, shared my work, talked to people, and networked as much as possible. For almost a year, I hustled nonstop, doing everything I could to get noticed.

One day, I received a message on Discord: "Hey, I like your designs and your work. Can we talk?"

That message changed everything. After nearly three years of struggle and self-doubt, I finally landed my first client. I gave the project my all. The deal closed for \$70—not a big amount, but it meant the world to me.

A few days later, the same client came back with another project. This time, I charged \$100. Slowly, through word of mouth, more clients started coming in. I started earning \$150 per project, then \$1,200 over the course of a year.

Fast forward to today—I'm now running my own web development agency called HextaStudio. I’ve also created over 10 startup and SaaS projects. None of them have gone viral or made money yet, but I’m not giving up.

I’m constantly learning, building, and moving forward because I believe hard work never goes to waste.

If there’s one thing my journey has taught me, it’s this—success doesn’t come easy. It takes time, effort, and a lot of resilience. I’ve faced rejection, burnout, and self-doubt. But every setback made me stronger.

To anyone struggling with freelancing or feeling stuck, remember: it’s not about how many times you fall. It’s about getting back up every time. Your hard work will pay off. Just keep going.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-10 14:02:51+00:00
People have this misguided belief that LLMs just do look-ups of data present in their "model corpus", fed in during "training". Which isn't even training at that point its just copying + compressing. Like putting books into a .zip file.

This belief leads to the thinking that LLMs can only give correct output if they can match it to data in their "model corpus".
by pydry | 2025-07-10 14:03:04+00:00
We can either pray and wait for a technological breakthrough that makes storage tech way cheaper than gas or we can just use taxes and subsidies to make it happen now.

It's not so hard. Lavish subsidies were used to make nuclear power semi-sort-of-competitive even though it's way more expensive.

The same thing could have been done with solar and wind but apparently we thought the best course of action was just to wait until they became cheaper than coal without subsidies (& then Obama and Trump slammed solar with tariffs).
by dinfinity | 2025-07-10 14:03:25+00:00
I'm sorry, but you are being melodramatic. The pricing is in no way a guarantee for LLM accuracy, especially for somebody even remotely technical (you're on Github and HackerNews).

If my grandmother had this experience, I would not blame her for being ignorant of LLM hallucination and demanding better service, but for somebody technical to go to such lengths to complain after they got burnt makes me think that the 'insult' was actually pretty accurate.
by thijson | 2025-07-10 14:03:31+00:00
I just bought an ecoflow for around $350 for 1 kWh. It uses LFP, I guess there's a lot of room for it to fall in price.

I wonder if there will be a tipping point where people start defecting from the grid, making it more expensive for people still on the grid, giving them a bigger incentive to defect.
by tapirl | 2025-07-10 14:03:51+00:00
It was also promoted as a language that prioritizes explicitness. But just look at the changes made in Go 1.22 (3-clause for-loop semantic change, [1]) and 1.23 (iterators, [2]). Magic implicitness was introduced in the two versions.

Even worse, it was also promoted to keep backboard-compatibility seriously. But Go 1.22 broke the backward-compatibility so badly ([3] [1]). Despite this, the Go 1.22 release notes still claims "As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility".

[1]: https://go101.org/blog/2024-03-01-for-loop-semantic-changes-...

[2]: https://go101.org/blog/2025-03-15-some-facts-about-iterators...

[3]: https://go101.org/bugs/go-build-directive-not-work.html

And the change makers even have no interests to fix the problems caused by the changes:

* https://github.com/golang/go/issues/66070#issuecomment-19816...

* https://github.com/golang/go/issues/71830

* https://github.com/spq/pkappa2/issues/238

* https://github.com/golang/go/issues/66388

* https://github.com/golang/go/issues/71685
by jgys | 2025-07-10 14:05:30+00:00
I read this twice and don’t think I misread it:

> The tiniest of pieces of plastic, nanoplastics are defined by the researchers as having a diameter of less than one micrometre (one one-thousandth of a metre). Microplastics are between one micrometre and 5 millimetres across.

Isn’t a millimeter one one-thousandth of a meter and a micrometer one one-thousandth of that (or one-millionth of a meter)? I don’t have to reason about objects this small very often so I was trying to make sense of the relative sizes and this threw me off.

Of course mistakes happen, so whatever, hopefully it’s corrected shortly; I’m just surprised to see something so easily check-able as a unit definition get missed in a publication like Nature.
by bena | 2025-07-10 14:05:36+00:00
I think the overall point is that we will never get there.

Renewables will never be cheap enough to fully replace fossil fuels, batteries will never be good enough.

No matter what, as long as the cost of extracting and burning fossil fuels is less than the result of what gets produced by the consumption, someone will be doing it.

It’s why crypto will never solve the energy issue. Why AI/GPT/LLM won’t either. Especially when the cost of that output is pegged to the cost of generating the above.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-10 14:05:41+00:00
Toyota at least invested in building a battery supply chain with Idmetsu Kosan years ago, and is working on battery tech national projects within Japan.

Apple hasn't done the same kind of homework yet, as Siri has largely been moribund nor will Apple be the reciever of significant state funding and subsidizes for R&D the same way Toyota is.
by jraph | 2025-07-10 14:06:18+00:00
Not sure what's your point, netbooks like the eee PC are starting to become ancient history anyway.

When it comes to our current era, Dell, Lenovo and HP computers sold with Linux are fine, and there's KDE-related hardware that seem nice too [1] (at KDE they understood that it's important to be the default OS, so they are pushing towards this). system76 too I've heard. Obviously choice is more limited than for Windows (although macOS is doing well with limited choice too), more biased towards pro, but there are decent options. The installed distros are quite standard too, there's some customization but not more than what we see on Windows computers.

[1] https://kde.org/fr/hardware/
by codetiger | 2025-07-10 14:06:19+00:00
Hi HN — I’m excited to share Reframe, an open‑source engine written in Rust for transforming ISO 20022 financial messages. It provides: • Zero‑copy, high‑performance parsing & serialization—ideal for latency‑sensitive payment systems • Modular support for both message sets (e.g., pain, pacs, camt) and business domains • Pluggable validation/transform rules for data normalization, enrichment, or migration flows • A clean Rust API + CLI tool for easy integration and automation

Reframe is geared toward banks, fintechs, and open‑source adopters preparing for ISO20022 migrations.

Would love your feedback, use‑cases, or contributions!

https://github.com/GoPlasmatic/Reframe
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-10 14:06:44+00:00
Indeed. Bur ironically, this is exactly the position most people propose to take with MCPs.

From the POV of the service, prompt injections are immaterial - the LLM is acting on behalf of the user, so as long as it's limited to the same actions/privileges the actual user has, it's really not the job of the service to police what the LLM does. It's the user's choice to delegate to an LLM instead of doing something themselves.
by bluGill | 2025-07-10 14:07:04+00:00
That depends on the hack. If the hack is something that is traceable to you then the hack becomes fraud and the police will be at your door. This assumes that the likes of Russia and North Korea have decided that there is more value in bitcoin remaining operational than the one time haul of money they can get from the fraud (which to be fair seems unlikely since it is prisoners dilemma where the defector chooses the final round)
by throw0101d | 2025-07-10 14:07:07+00:00
>> Getting smacked with an asteroid

> There is nothing we can do about it, therefore comparing this risk the the risk induced by nuclear reactors seems moot to me as we can decide to prefer renewables upon nuclear.

Sure there is (with enough warning); it's just physics:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Te...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_Redirect_Mission

> Nuclear-generated electricity is way more expensive than renewables', and the gap is widening. Source: LCOE (the gold standard)

I live in Ontario, Canada, and renewables are much more expensive than nuclear (Table 2):

* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2024...

In previous years nuclear was cheaper than (natural/methane) gas:

* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...

* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2022...

* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2021...

* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2020...

* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2019...

To date, nuclear energy has cost the province $58B and has generated 3300 TWh, while our renewable experiment with the Green Energy Act will cost several billion per year over the life of the twenty year contacts and generate 200 TWh.

> In order to generate electricity even France burns non-negligible amounts of fossil fuel since the inception of its nuclear fleet:

Perhaps they should get more nuclear so they burn less fossil fuels. Ontario's mix:

* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply

There are currently plans to expand the nuclear fleet.

> One can decide whether he will (or not) hop on a plane. A nuclear reactor and its waste threatens everyone, even very remotely and in a distant future.

It threatens the people who live >500m underneath the ground once it is buried.
by mvieira38 | 2025-07-10 14:07:22+00:00
Remember when we paid for Kagi because it was "search"? I was basically an unpaid sponsor of them for the last year or so, but damn this constant pipeline of new shiny stuff is getting on my nerves. How can a company focus on building a good search engine with a good index and algo if they are also developing a translator, an LLM assistant and now a damn news app? Please, Vlad, just build different companies and stop piping my money to these other offerings I didn't ask for
by 123yawaworht456 | 2025-07-10 14:07:22+00:00
>Just not the kind of people that those in power want.

farm owners don't give a fuck what color the cattle is.

>You bring in families from around the world

and if/when they integrate into the host society, their children will have as few children as the natives

>give them amazing opportunities, then hire them to take care of the elderly

yeah, sure. changing adult diapers. such an amazing opportunity

>This is why immigration is so important to the economy of a developed nation.

exploiting the resources of the undeveloped nations is bread and butter of the developed nations, yeah.

cui bono? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh2Vh-G3vEk
by empath75 | 2025-07-10 14:07:41+00:00
There is a coordinated action problem here, I think. (I have three young kids).

When I was a kid, I could be relatively sure that if I went outside on a random day, there would be other kids playing outside. So, all the kids went outside most days to play.

I _could_ send my kid out to play and there _are_ other kids in the neighborhood, but almost all of them are inside playing video games. At best there might be some kids going on a walk with their parents.

If my oldest kid wants to interact with with his friends, his best bet is to get on fortnite, which he does most days _and he doesn't even like fortnite_.
by Svoka | 2025-07-10 14:07:53+00:00
I find it absolutely bizarre that people post about stuff they are seemingly have no idea about. Like, code signing & notarization provides clear quality of life improvement for many users. And your reasons are just plain wrong.

1. 100$ is a pocket change for many people. Depending where you live. I think it is enough of a barrier to force a thoughtful action. Also, to compare, cheapest certificates for signing windows software are like 450$/year. Microsoft has a hosted service now for $15/year, but that is still in beta. Both of those options are significantly more expensive than 99$/year Apple charges.

2. No, Apple does not deny randomly access to developer accounts. Also, this is quite besides the poin.

3. Code Signing has absolutely nothing to do with submitting your app to app store, or anything Apple has to approve of. Like, why even write about something you have no idea about?

4. True. Not sure how it is relevant.
by erk__ | 2025-07-10 14:07:53+00:00
It should be noted that even though the post links to the perl version for some reason, it is actually not what cargo flamegraph [0] uses, it uses a reimplementation of it in Rust called inferno [1].

[0]: https://github.com/flamegraph-rs/flamegraph

[1]: https://github.com/jonhoo/inferno
by kurikuri | 2025-07-10 14:08:43+00:00
What? You’ve managed to mangle so many terms in so few words… Signatures can refer to two things: integrity checks on a file or authentication checks for a recieved file. In the integrity check situation a hash function (e.g., SHA) is often used. In the authentication check situation, we usually use a public/private keypair for asymmetric encryption; the hash function is only part of the process. The key material used to make this keypair (should) comes from some random number generator…

The ‘hash’ function is a deterministic transform, not a source of randomness.
by diputsmonro | 2025-07-10 14:09:07+00:00
>> And if you found out accidentally that you find their beliefs unsavoury (say, they like abortion whilst you don’t, whatever) would you not sit with them?

Yes; if I find out that someone has the firmly held belief that me or my friends should be dead (I have several trans friends for example), then I would absolutely not sit with them. And if I found out that a friend of mine sat with people who had the "political opinion" that I should be "dealt with decisively", then I would be pretty upset with them and wonder if they feel the same way about me.

You cannot just treat "being a Nazi" as some normal difference of political opinion. There is a reason that being a Nazi is verboten. Their political ideology is that some people should be removed from society, by violence if necessary. I shouldn't have to say this, but murdering people you don't like should be off the table in civilized political discourse. And if you break bread with such people, then I believe you have something to answer for. What is so valuable about their friendship that you're willing to break bread with people who want to use the power of the state to murder people?

This is all happening in the context of, just yesterday, Grok literally praising Hitler, by name, for dealing with jews decisively - which it claims strong leaders need to do "every damn time"

(https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...)

One needs to ask why Grok continues to have these nazi outbursts while other modern chatbots don't.
by ttttransformer | 2025-07-10 14:09:20+00:00
Festro, this is fantastic feedback, thank you.

You're right on a lot of things. The actual demo video will be up on our Youtube and Socials in the next couple days, we're pushing a few new things that I'm going to want to include in it so just waiting till the end of today to get recording. I'm also probably going to stick it on our website too.

Spot on about the Twitter profile being an old personal profile, I'm running a script now to delete all my previous posts lol - not very on brand.

We're also for sure going to be adding more social proof to the site over time. Feels to me like you're quite familiar with the space, be great to chat some time - dp@groas.ai if you ever wanna connect.

Thanks

DP
by flerchin | 2025-07-10 14:09:23+00:00
Grouping up with the guys to play an online game wouldn't count here. Nor various other online activities that I would consider social. The drop-off in alcohol is stark, but probably good? I suppose we would see an uptick in weed in legal and probably also illegal states.

The article focuses on US because that's the data they have, but I wonder if it's a similar trend for other developed countries. Anyone sharing a personal anecdote is probably not meaningful. These are broad trends and really hard to intuit by lived experience.
by jaza | 2025-07-10 14:09:48+00:00
Because now it has been "unveiled"! I guess it was wrapped in cellophane before...

Probably timed to coincide with the peak of the tourist season in Peru. Dry season is May-Oct (not at all advisable to visit Machu Picchu in the wet season). Jul-Aug is summer holidays for Europeans, who are the biggest cohort of international tourists in Peru (and summer holidays for North Americans). And Peru's independence day is 28 Jul, so locals take an (often extended) long weekend, so a bit of a spike in domestic tourism coming up too.
by _g0wg | 2025-07-10 14:09:59+00:00
My current document for this project includes the following, though many of them are decidedly NOT prime and must be extrapolated further:

- metacognition, epistemology, metaphysics, ontology, pedagogy, ethics

- formal logic, set theory, category theory, number theory, type theory, model theory, graph theory, complexity theory, information theory, combinatorics, universal algebra

- systems theory, algorithms, data structures, cryptography

- kinematics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, fluids, quantum, chemistry

- geology, meteorology, astronomy, ecology, bio-something

- history (very not prime), demographics, law

- linguistics, public speaking, rhetoric, debate, oration

- psychology: cognitive, behavioral, developmental, social, cultural, educational

- microeconomics, macroeconomics, finance, asset management

- how to work, craftsmanship, project/task/time/revision/supply-chain management, logistics, metrology, drafting, interface design

- engineering: process, architecture, hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical, electronics, cybernetics

- scientific method, design of experiments, prototyping, data collection, documentation writing

- anatomy, medicine, drugs, nutrition, cooking

- safety, rescue, emergency survival, navigation/cartography, comms/signals

- photography, videography, audiography, aesthetics, color theory