MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-26 14:26:58+00:00
"Least effort" is the way of life, it is not just how the brain works, it is how the universe works. From the principle of least action that is maybe the most fundamental law of physics, to chemistry, to biology, to human activity. It is all some form of minimization.

Humanity developed agriculture because it requires less effort than hunting and gathering for feeding a given population. We developed machines because it is less effort than doing things by hand, etc... If your dopamine system rewards doing things with less effort, it is working properly.

The caveat is that doing something with less effort does not mean doing less, it can also mean doing more with the same amount of effort, including personal development. It doesn't mean you should AI everything or be sloppy, just not glorify effort as some intrinsic quality, the result is what matters.
by tombh | 2025-07-26 14:27:22+00:00
I think it's worth bearing in mind that all `rust-gpu` does is compile to SPIRV, which is Vulkan's IR. So in a sense layers 2. and 3. are optional, or at least parallel layers rather than accumulative.

And it's also worth remembering that all of Rust's tooling can be used for building its shaders; `cargo`, `cargo test`, `cargo clippy`, `rust-analyzer` (Rust's LSP server).

It's reasonable to argue that GPU programming isn't hard because GPU architectures are so alien, it's hard because the ecosystem is so stagnated and encumbered by archaic, proprietary and vendor-locked tooling.
by cube2222 | 2025-07-26 14:27:27+00:00
Most of my attempts at note taking usually end up devolving to this. Not to say it’s a bad thing, I think it’s effective enough.

I may keep separate append-and-review topics per major area (work, personal, cooking) but that’s about it.

Usually in form of an outline / list, append in the front, and with deeply nested sub-points, as I “discuss with myself in writing”.
by sparkie | 2025-07-26 14:27:58+00:00
An idea I had was to implement a FUSE filesystem for includes, so instead of the separate `#define type_argument` (and `#undef type_argument` that would need to follow the #include), we could stick the type argument in the included filename.

#include <vector.h(int32_t)> #include <vector.h(int64_t)>

The written `vector.h(type_argument)` file could just be a regular C header or an m4 file which has `type_argument` in its template. When requesting `vector.h(int32_t)` the FUSE filesystem would effectively give the output of calling `gcc -E` or `m4` on the template file as the content of the file being requested.

Eg, if `vector.h(type_argument)` was an m4 file containing:

`#ifndef VECTOR_'type_argument`_INCLUDED' `#define VECTOR_'type_argument`_INCLUDED' typedef struct `vector_'type_argument { size_t length; type_argument values[]; } `vector_'type_argument; ... #endif

Then `m4 -D type_argument=int32_t vector.h(type_argument)` gives the output:

#ifndef VECTOR_int32_t_INCLUDED #define VECTOR_int32_t_INCLUDED typedef struct vector_int32_t { size_t length; int32_t values[]; } vector_int32_t; ... #endif

But the idea is to make it transparent so that existing tools just see the pre-processed file and don't need to call `m4` manually. We would need to mount each include directory that uses this approach using said filesystem. This shouldn't require changing a project's structure as we could use the existing `include/` or `src/` directory as input when mounting, and just pick some new directory name such as `cfuse/include` or `cfuse/src`, and mount a new directory `cfuse` in the project's root directory. The change we'd need to make is in any Makefiles or other parts of the build, where instead of `gcc -Iinclude` we'd have `gcc -Icfuse/include`. Any non-templated headers in `include/` would just appear as live copies in cfuse/include/, so in theory this could work without causing anything to break.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-07-26 14:28:31+00:00
I don’t have extensive experience on this yet, but I believe this is also a solved issue (using custom fonts). Serve the font-family from the same source as the website, preload only the primary font-style (say “normal”), and custom-pick the font to just the Latin subset. That should be fast enough that almost none will notice, except for the pedantic developers like us (personally, I can forgive that).

Henceforth, let the others (styles, variable, etc) kick in as needed.
by Sophira | 2025-07-26 14:29:17+00:00
> I thought that the desktop version of a website is the "real website" i.e. that there is only one static original website and that its mobile version was some fake substitute, so I always activated the option "show desktop version".

It wasn't that long ago that when you used the mobile internet, you would be getting a "fake version" of the site that could render speedily, despite the limited speed of 2G networks.

First it was all about WML[0], which would be processed by a proxy that would deliver the file in a binary format that would be smaller.

And even when mobile phones that could access proper HTML content hit the market, it was often still accessed through the use of an accelerator proxy[1] which would optimize the page (stripping unnecessary parts) that you were trying to access so that it could be downloaded faster.

These technologies are still in use in some places, as I understand it. But it's generally not necessary nowadays for locations with access to 3G or better.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accelerator
by Levitz | 2025-07-26 14:29:27+00:00
Your example touches on a very related phenomenon. Videogame design.

Anyone who has activated cheats on videogames enough times can attest to the fact that it takes the enjoyment away. We do have games with superficial, skinner-like rewards, probably the majority, but many still rely on the satisfaction of overcoming real challenges to reward players.

I reckon all puzzle games are like this.
by shvdle | 2025-07-26 14:29:52+00:00
You miss the point. The only reason to buy a diamond is that it is expensive. It doesn’t matter if you could buy the same thing cheaper. It doesn’t matter that there are better gems that are cheaper. You buy the diamond to show that you can afford it. You buy someone a diamond to prove how much they are worth to you.

Yes, you can buy a man-made diamond the same you can buy counterfeit branded clothes. That only shows that you’re tasteless and that you can’t afford the real thing.
by criley2 | 2025-07-26 14:30:41+00:00
China would not engage in nuclear escalation in response to the US striking Taiwan, and China does not otherwise possess the ability to strike the US homeland without incurring a nuclear response, so there is no mutually assured destruction with regards to semiconductor industry. In this hypothetical, the US would succeed in striking Taiwan and China would not escalate into nuclear war. But, the US would not strike Taiwan. Taiwan would destroy their own industry before that happened.
by foundart | 2025-07-26 14:31:41+00:00
> it’s not all that much effort after the first two or three. There’s no reason to think the language you start with should be one that you could get paid to use.

Definitely!

This inspired me to list out languages I've learned to at least some minimal level and written programs in. Here they are, with the contexts in which I used them:

BASIC - middle school ;

Fortran - high school ;

C++ - self-taught & later some work;

Pascal - university;

Motorola 68k assembly - university;

Miranda - university (Programming Languages class only);

Ada - university (Programming Languages class only);

Lisp - university & work (CLOS);

sh - work;

ColdFusion - work;

bash - work and personal;

Java - work;

Atmel microcontroller assembly - hobby;

C - hobby (to replace Atmel assembly);

Ruby - work and hobby;

Scala - work;

Elixir - work;

Solidity - work;

Typescript - work and hobby;

Elm - work;

Clojure - work;

Javascript - work;

Python - hobby (with a tiny smattering of work usage over the years)
by newAccount2025 | 2025-07-26 14:31:48+00:00
> I use AI too but I am very cautious to not let it ”take over”

I think this is the key. Who’s driving?

If you are deliberate about what you want to own, focus on, and create yourself, you can consciously decide how AI help you bootstrap, scaffold, and critique your work to help you go farther.

If you aren’t, and you just tell AI to do it for you, you’re just ordering that Biryani. And heck, maybe that can be OK too. Sometimes you just need a meal you aren’t wanting to work at.
by stavros | 2025-07-26 14:31:48+00:00
You can't get human output back by passing AI output through AI. You'll just get double the AI.

I don't mind AI output, AI is useful for getting you to "mediocre" fast, which is extremely useful for 75% of the population. The rest write well.

I'm very grateful that AI raised the floor to what used to be the 75th percentile.
by nullhole | 2025-07-26 14:32:34+00:00
It's tracked by some national agencies, for example NZ has a deformation model. This link has a summary & links to some lectures about the deformation model: https://www.linz.govt.nz/guidance/geodetic-system/coordinate...

Metres of movement would definitely be significant for a lot of mapping use cases. This is why the time component of any coordinate measurement is important, both due to earthquakes as well as plain old plate motion.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-26 14:33:27+00:00
> The same line of thought can be used for any (new) tool, say a calculator, a computer or the internet.

Yes, the same line of thought can. But we must also take power into account. The severity of the negative effects of a technology is proportional to its power and a calculator is relatively week.

> Shouldn't we try to find responsible ways of adopting LLMs, that empower the majority?

Not if there is no responsible way to adopt them because they are fundamentally against a happy existence by their very nature. Not all technology empowers, even when used completely fairly. Some technology approaches a pure arms race scenario, especially when the proportion of its effect is mainly economic efficiency without true life improvement, at least for the majority.

Of course, one can point to some benefits of LLMs, but my thesis is that the benefit/cost quantity approaches zero and thus crosses the point of diminishing returns to give us only a net negative in all possible worlds where the basic assumptions of human nature hold.
by __mharrison__ | 2025-07-26 14:34:11+00:00
Bad analogy.

I ride about twice as much distance (mountain biking) after I got an ebike (per Strava). It's still a great workout.

Sample size one disclaimer...

A better biking analogy that I've used in the past is that it I wanted to go ride slick rock and have never ridden before, an ebike is not going to prevent me from endoing.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-26 14:35:21+00:00
I won't recommend anything. Every situation is different and you are arbitrarily transposing my argument rudely into another without much real thought, which is a shame. For instance, one thing you are ignoring is that we are evolutionary geared to handle situations of varying beauty.

I could point out many more differences between the two situations but I won't because your lack of any intellectual effort doesn't even deserve a reply.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-26 14:35:33+00:00
True enough, there are no good guys in this story. But I get a chuckle every time some young edgelord blames "capitalism" for everything from the Holocaust to the heartbreak of psoriasis. Don't fall into that trap, there's enough of that feckless goofiness on Reddit.

At the end of the day this is a government-caused problem, in which a lack of meaningful antitrust enforcement is being leveraged by a Republican personality cult. Which makes it a voter-caused problem. We are getting what we deserve, good and hard.
by dahart | 2025-07-26 14:35:44+00:00
Fair point, though layers 4-6 are always there, including for shaders and CUDA code, and layers 1 and 3 are usually replaced with a different layer, especially for anything cross-platform. So this Rust project might be adding a layer of abstraction, but probably only one-ish.

I work on layers 4-6 and I can confirm there’s a lot of hidden complexity in there. I’d say there are more than 3 layers there too. :P
by threecheese | 2025-07-26 14:36:51+00:00
We need to have more conversations about the Nth-order impacts of this new-normal “age of unlimited code”. Which of our patterns do we throw away when “intra-human communication across time” is no longer as important a constraint within our codebases, when developers don’t need to use code to understand how it works?

Where are new module boundaries? Do we even worry about duplication and modularization? Do we ship data models as documentation and test cases, and let codebases implement them however they like, whenever they like? My mind swims.
by pydry | 2025-07-26 14:37:02+00:00
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the capacity for the economy to create "bullshit work" (e.g. work which is engaged in zero sum "wealth defense") is unbounded.

For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even let the bottom 50% retire early, society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital. This would probably only happen with violence.

This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market while the efficiency gains which could be realized at the bottom of the pyramid get "burned off" via inflation targeting of 2%. A quirky side effect of this is that the vast efficiency improvements we have seen have not even been allowed to prevent a pensions crisis.

The Economist, serving in its capacity as a dutiful servant to neoliberal capital, frets equally about AI inevitably causing us to "run out of jobs" as it does a demographic crisis inevitably causing us to "run out of workers" (https://archive.ph/6hgYq).
by ahartmetz | 2025-07-26 14:37:34+00:00
> all mainstream GUI frameworks, including desktop, represent their UIs with a DOM.

If you call every hierarchy of visual items with some kind of layout manager(s) a DOM, then yes. Notably, the D doesn't really apply because GUIs aren't documents, and that's exactly why HTML is kind of awkward for GUI programming: it was initially designed for documents.

Edit: Sibling comment makes the good point that the main difference is that GUIs have mutable state while documents don't. I would add that GUIs also have controls to change that mutable state, which is a more superficial difference, but well, web-based GUIs are still extremely varied in their interaction styles, which not necessarily good.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-07-26 14:38:24+00:00
Upside down and backwards.

The difference is not instantly apparent under UV.

Only about 30% of natural diamonds have fluorescence --- which is *caused* by impurities and imperfections in the material.

Manmade diamonds tend to lack this because they have fewer impurities and imperfections. Equating increased perfection and purity with inferiority is highly debatable and smacks of marketing BS.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-26 14:38:32+00:00
> Why would it be the size of the specific two people in a relationship?

That's the main argument of the grandparent post. If you're missing that then you're not really responding to what they said.

They went into significant detail so I feel like trying to reword it myself would be worse than suggesting you read the post again.

> If it's a question of education, reducing the problem of the size of the people is a terrible terrible idea: the problem will never go away because you don't understand the source and therefore don't act on the source to fix it.

Nah. Root cause analysis is entirely different from risk analysis. This is about risk analysis. If a woman dates a man that's smaller than her, who should be more worried about violence? That's not the time to worry about why and how to fix society.

> maybe men behavior is different from women behavior

Maybe it is! But then you need a really good explanation for the data in the above post. Or you need to say the data is wrong. But you can't just dismiss it as being defensive.
by nfriedly | 2025-07-26 14:38:45+00:00
I have a rate limiting library, and for a long time, some of the most frequent issues related to misconfiguration around X-Forwarded-For headers: either ignoring them when it shouldn't and limiting the load balancer's IP instead of the end user, or blindly trusting any XFF header and allowing limits to be trivially bypassed.

Eventually I added some runtime checks that log a warning and linked to documentation for both of those issues and a few other common ones.

My support burden has decreased dramatically since then.
by sprinkly-dust | 2025-07-26 14:38:46+00:00
My biggest peeve with the forced push towards apps is that you're often forced to fork over permissions to access valuable data that they couldn't otherwise gleam glean from a browser. Chief amongst this is the Contacts permission.

If you are one to carefully curate your contacts book to contain addresses, emails, birthdays for your own convenience and productivity, you have now provided a veritable goldmine of information for these companies to plunder, and betray the confidence of your acquaintances. I really despise this, and I've been looking for a solution but none thus far have seemed satisfactory.

I know of apps (at least on Android) like Bouncer and alternatives from F-Droid that can temporarily grant access to certain permissions like Location for a few minutes at a time, while giving the apps the illusion of full access.

However, save for using a Private Space or different user profile (both similarly require provisioning basically an extra instance of Google Play and everything) I haven't yet found a way to feed some sort of dummy contacts book to these greedy apps. If anyone knows of such a solution that is more convenient than setting up a new profile then please enlighten us.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-07-26 14:39:09+00:00
He is almost right.

We are being given dopamine faster and easier on purpose. The dopamine you get from painting something yourself is no different than the dopamine you get from letting AI do it. The whole point of the modern, technological world is to get us more dopamine and faster. Our dopamine pathway is a profit center.

This is the same story with sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling, social media and...

Stress.

Stress triggers dopamine release via cortisol. In acute stress this is no problem, but with chronic stress the dopamine receptors get down regulated. Yes, you see, you actually can get addicted to stress. Any adrenaline junkies out there? You are actually looking for dopamine.) This is where I feel news addiction can come in for some people. 24x7 stress from anywhere around the globe.

This is how the modern world makes money,

He thinks, and states, "I was born with this dysfunction. You're choosing it." Nah brother, 99% of people are driven by impulses they have no control over, and technology/modern life is just making it worse. Just go to any Starbucks in the morning. You think people are there for the taste of the coffee? Nope, they are there for the drug. Now it is possible his nutrition and genetics make this more of a problem form him, but no one chooses addiction.

He also says in an older article "After a few therapy sessions, doctor appointments, and even a brain scan, I found my answer—dopamine deficiency. There’s no cure, but there’s treatment."

I have been working in nutritional genetics and with my own Asperger's, OCD and Schizoaffcetive Disorder for the last 20 years. I can assure you here is no way to be diagnosed with a dopamine deficiency (and no brain scan for it either). I could see if he had gene testing that found mutations in DDC or somewhere else that inhibited Dopamine production, but he is just a kid, grasping at straws. I know this because I was him at 33. I do not fault him for it, I praise him. Because at least he is thinking about it

It turns out I have a mutation in my CBS gene which limits the rate P5P (B6) binds to the enzyme (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/rs773734233) which. creates a functional B6 deficiency with several down stream effects. I made several assumption that were wrong in the past, but they all led me to my treatment, and saved my mind and also my life.

he is blaming the individuals for their addiction, this is immoral. Blame the dealers of dopamine who know exactly what they are doing and public health for doing nothing about it.
by bediger4000 | 2025-07-26 14:39:19+00:00
I'll believe this when it happens. Members of the US Congress, by and large, seem to be compromised by money, either donors' or large corporations'. Only large corporations will have the resources to use "AI" to do this without making a nonsensical hash of their pricing.

Second, how does whatever regulatory agency know this is taking place? What symptoms would they see that are different than what they see right now?

Third, isn't this interfering in the Free Market? Although I'm skeptical about "AI", and I think that "AI" pricing will completely upset what we all intuitively think about pricing and "the law of supply and demand", this seems like a giant incursion into free markets.
by jakedata | 2025-07-26 14:40:05+00:00
I have a waterproof Garmin Nuvi GPS that will directly accept OpenStreetMap data on micro-SD card. It is in bicycle mode and running on a DC-DC converter from my e-bike pack. I am quite satisfied with it despite being 20 years old. The external storage and well defined format have saved it from becoming e-waste.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-26 14:40:19+00:00
> For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even more wealth (for the bottom 50%), society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital.

And even then, even a small percentage of bad actors who are selfish would likely restructure it back due to technology enabling them to do so! The fact is, the elite at the top is a steady state that is hard to leave if you worship efficiency. Only the Amish and some native tribes have realized that the only way out is not to play.
by kergonath | 2025-07-26 14:41:04+00:00
> But there is something about diamonds that makes them divine: carbon atoms crystallizing and bonding over millions to billions of years to form structures

It does not take millions of years to form a diamond. It takes hours. The million years are atoms sitting around doing nothing before that, and then diamonds sitting around doing nothing while some of them are eventually pushed to the surface.

You can say the same thing about any mineral. There is nothing special about carbon or the diamond structure. If anything, zircons are much more significant, being the oldest minerals we can find.

> rated on a scale of color, clarity, cut, and weight.

This is nothing special. The colour of lab-grown stones can be varied almost at will, and the rest is still an issue with synthetic stones.

> Naaaaah let's just make it in a lab it looks the same.

That’s the thing, though: it does (yes, some synthetic stones have specific defects related to how they were made and they tent to be too perfect if anything, but they still have the exact same property). It’s like complaining that the meat you are eating comes from a farm instead of being hunted.

> People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.

Quite the contrary. Gemstones become more accessible to more people. The diamond industry made its bed, being completely corrupted from extraction to distribution. When stones are cheap we can have discussion about their beauty instead of their prices.