MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jact | 2025-07-20 12:59:43+00:00
Nothing I said was nonsense or a non-sequitor. You’re citing a bunch of historical myths to support your point, so I am pointing those out.

As for your point itself, I don’t think “religion” is a meaningful category. It’s unclear to me Christianity and say — Shinto have some common trait that holds them together. Even Christianity and Islam have vastly different goals and ideas about what the purpose of “religion” is. So I don’t think it’s meaningful to say “religious people tend to care about intellectualism.”

Communist Russia cared a lot about intellectualism — they promoted and persecuted many intellectuals and academics, just like the Catholic Church. The common denominator between the Soviet Union and the Catholic Church is surely not that they were both religious. To assert that communism is a religion would only further prove my point above.

The Catholic Church during the counter-reformation, its most highly censorious and intolerant period, was, like the Soviet Union, a society experiencing intense paranoia and saw itself under siege by foreign and internal enemies and needing to protect itself. This was an attitude that lead to atrocities, but it’s difficult for me to see how this has anything to do with religion as such given that the same pattern happens in secular culture all the time. Politically powerful people (or those with political ambition) tend to care about these things is the real thing going on here, especially if they perceive potential threats from the intellectuals. Intellectuals are not unique targets in this respect.

Many “religions” promote having a literate class to be educated in both their scriptures and in wider philosophy because it’s necessary to socially reproduce their own teachings. In that sense they care about intellectualism but we do the same thing to reproduce American, French, British, etc. secular culture, and good luck to public school teachers who want to buck the curriculum (I don’t particularly think they should, but they’ll have issues).
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-20 12:59:49+00:00
Your comment is just nit picking. Point was there's a lot of situations where the math hugely favors the cheap tool.

Used tools of the brands that anyone screeching about nice tools would consider to be of repute are going to generally be priced at equivalent to new tools of unknown brand. Specialty tools frequently aren't available on the used market.

Anything that spins or plugs into the wall tends to be finicky after decades of prior owner abuse and if you're not in a commercial setting (and even a lot of times if you are) it makes more sense to just buy new cheap stuff because then using your tools won't be a project by itself.

I've got like three people's worth of used tools from various sources because you can never have too many and I never throw stuff out but they are not the outstanding value the Garage Journal forum or Reddit type "polish my wrenches more than I use them" crowd makes them out to be.
by MarkPNeyer | 2025-07-20 13:00:00+00:00
You are pointing directly at the philosophical bedrock of western civilization, something which most white collar elites implicitly believe but don't state outright. It shows up right away in the article:

> ... quality is an inherently subjective concept, as it depends on the preferences of each consumer.

For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization believed that there WAS an objective notion of quality (i.e. value). The idea that these things are purely subjective is a very recent concept in human history.

In the west, and places influenced by it - most elites come to believe that value is purely subjective. We talk, instead, about people's _preferences_ - but we can't measure feelings, just actions. "Some things are more valuable than others" is a very different belief from "people prefer some things over others". In a world that only recognizes what it can measure, the idea that value is subjective reduces to "people do some things and not other things", and _any_ action which can reliably be motivated - whether that's having babies or getting divorced, losing weight or watching porn, eating healthy or eating junk food - _all_ that our economy cares about is, "can you reliably produce that outcome at scale." This is all a natural consequence of the idea that value isn't real. People can't be wrong in what they want, and what they want is revealed in what they do. Therefore, literally all that matters is, can you motivate some kind of action - whatever that action is? If you can, you're 'adding value.' Motivating people to go out and commit crimes could itself, be valuable - if you were, say, the operator of a private prison. As long as your motivational technique isn't too direct and obvious, it's profitable for you. You're creating demand for business!

What would the world look like if value were _real_, we could sense it intuitively, but we could not measure it, and had persuaded ourselves it were entirely subjective? I think it would look exactly as it does now: a prevailing sense that quality is declining. We would observe drops in numerous large-scale metrics like "does humanity value life enough to create more humanity", while metrics like "time people spend doing measurable things" would go way up, along with a creeping sense that something was deeply wrong.

If value _were_ purely subjective, I would have expected that we'd have locked into some functioning propaganda loop by now. If value is purely subject, and there's no hardwired human nature to value some outcomes over others, What would be better for the economy than convincing everyone that EVERYTHING IS AWESOME all the time?
by yesbut | 2025-07-20 13:00:09+00:00
This is another argument for need more democratically controlled, worker-owned enterprises. There shouldn't be a situation where this is possible [As VPs/Directors have told me on multiple occasions "we sell to the decision makers." And with how short-term decision making is for most companies, ESPECIALLY large/public ones, it's very easy to make that sale via "no one ever got fired for..."/bundle deals/incentives/etc.] The devs doing the work should be the ones making these decisions collectively, not ignorant, short-term thinking execs.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-07-20 13:00:52+00:00
> People fall largely in two categories: Those who condemn the past and those who glorify it. Of course the reality is between.

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/550

Panel 1 is a depiction of Neanderthals in the Shanidar Cave, in particular the "Shanidar 1" specimen, which showed a large number of old injuries and disabilities in the individual. The fact that they had lived for so long showed that the Neanderthal community cared for their members even when they were no longer "useful" physically to society.

It's kind of hard to imagine going back and showing the Shanidar Neanderthals all the gains we've made as a society to produce enough food for everyone, and yet people still go hungry. Then again, imagine showing him Nintendo Switch. I bet he'd love Nintendo Switch, so it's really a wash.
by jfengel | 2025-07-20 13:01:00+00:00
There really isn't anybody with state ownership of the means of production. It's hard to find anything to make a comparison to.

Communism would have its own reasons for declining quality: the lack of an individual profit motive. The hope would be that you would no longer be alienated from the products of your work, but that never came close to happening.

So if you were referring to China... they are the world's foremost capitalists right now. Their products get worse because that's what the market tells them.
by jorams | 2025-07-20 13:02:45+00:00
> I’m not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality

I think that hints at part of the real problem: humans have very little ability to judge the quality of products. Marketing departments are very good at cosplaying quality. "Awards" on things like wine only tell you the manufacturer paid the owner of the trademark some money. Reviews are often fake or at least paid for by the manufacturer.

With price also not being a meaningful quality signal you're left with a choice: Buy the expensive product hoping the quality reflects the price, or buy the cheap product knowing the quality is probably not great, but at least you didn't spend a lot of money on something that isn't worth it.
by westurner | 2025-07-20 13:02:59+00:00
> erythritol is a sugar alcohol

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299867 :

>> "Cyclodextrin promotes atherosclerosis regression via macrophage reprogramming" (2016) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aad6100

>> "Powdered Booze Could Fix Your Clogged Arteries" (2016) https://www.popsci.com/compound-in-powdered-alcohol-can-also...

> FWIU, beta-cyclodextrin is already FDA approved, and injection of betacyclodextrin reversed arterio/atherosclerosis; possibly because our arteries are caked with sugar alcohol and beta-cyclodextrin absorbs alcohol
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-20 13:03:12+00:00
You're getting downvoted because a huge chunk of HN spends their 9-5 making things worse with a fuggit attitude because that's what their KPIs incentivize.

Those MBAs didn't come out of nowhere. They answer to C suites who answer to boards. They have to weigh their decisions against the cost of customer attitudes and employee morale. The fact that we get the outcomes we do indicate this is a top to bottom societal problem.
by kevincox | 2025-07-20 13:03:46+00:00
Make-work is the stupidest idea. If we want people to have an income why don't we just give it to them rather than making them do work that is useless (or sometimes harmful, see coal) to the public?

> There is no free money.

When you are talking about the MTA budget no. But at the higher government levels there often is. Lots of lower-income people's income ends up right back in the economy or reduces other costs (like healthcare of people on government health plans). Plus it oven gives people the resources (time and money) to get a job that is valuable to society. (From things like going to a education course to something like being able to have a shower before your interview and a phone to receive job offers on.) There are of course "losses" like money exiting the country or consumption of raw resources (which is likely going to happen whether they have a useless job or are just given some form of welfare) but it isn't nearly as expensive as the critics like to pretend it is.
by grimblee | 2025-07-20 13:04:07+00:00
Privatisation and attacking social security does not work, it just makes the wealthy even wealthier.

Not the solution is fair taxation every trade made in the country, if you make business in a country you need pay taxes there for the transactiona made there.

Otherwise you just extract value out of the country, without giving back.

To me there is no worse thievery than tax evasion, it's literally robing a nation.
by anal_reactor | 2025-07-20 13:05:10+00:00
I think the problem is the detachment of a developer from what is being done. Many developers want to treat coding like a crative work, while corporations try to make it an automatic job that turns tickets into code. The fact that the person working on a dialog isn't aware that there are translations where things might force a different layout is a proof of a broken system.

I'm not saying that developer should also be UI specialist, that's nonsense. But a developer should know who to talk to regarding advice, and the contact should be easy. The model where a dev doesn't even know that French translation exists is wrong. The correct model is having a dev think "wait, this might affect translation, better send a Slack message to some UI guy and let him know".

Actually, what I said is a pipe dream. The reality is, most devs are average devs, and companies need to optimize processes for that. This results in very official communication that takes years to get anything done, because you can't trust average developer that they'll contact the UI guy. This leads to a lot of frustration from above-average developers, who simply need a different environment to shine (more freedom but also more responsibility)
by 7bit | 2025-07-20 13:05:22+00:00
What an interesting phenomenon.

I recently walked through the city to visit some shop, of which there are two in the city. While walking, I noticed that the one I was walking to is actually farther than the other one. The shorter one actually needed me to backtrack like 500m. I decided to keep walking to the farther one, simply because taking the new route would at least give me new impressions, instead of seeing the same building left and right when backtracking. While walking the farther way, I believe it felt shorter, because time passes slower when backtracking.

Not disputing the results, it's just how I experience the world personally, and that only touches the backtracking.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-07-20 13:05:29+00:00
Well, there already is slightly more fine gained control: in the sync version, you can perhaps call sync write() a few times before calling fsync() once i.e. basically batch up a few writes. That does have the disadvantage that you can't easily queue new writes while waiting for the previous ones. Perhaps you could use calls to write() in another thread while the first one is waiting for fsync() for the previous batch? You could even have lots of threads doing that in parallel, but probably not the thousands that you mentioned. I don't know the nitty gritty of Linux file IO well enough to know how well that would work.

As I said, I don't know anything about fsync in io_uring. Maybe that has more control?

An article that did a fair comparison, by someone who actually knows what they're talking about, would be pretty interesting.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-07-20 13:06:06+00:00
Yes. To be more specific, look for the point where a Private Equity firm gets involved. Whose aim is extractive and often bankrupts the host company - to cut costs, send production somewhere cheaper, and in general use up the value in the good name that the product has.

This is what happened to Dr. Martens (footwear)

to Instant pot (cookware)

to Red Lobster (restaurants)
by lapcat | 2025-07-20 13:06:35+00:00
> Billionaire wealth grew an average of 57.1% under Democratic administrations compared to 16.5% under Republican administrations over the past 40 years. This counterintuitive pattern suggests many billionaire political donors prioritize immediate tax cuts over the stronger economic growth that historically occurs under Democratic policies.

I don't think we can assume that billionaire wealth would have grown even more with uninterrupted Democratic administrations. I suspect that tax cuts and deregulation during Republican administrations were essential for future growth of their wealth, with effects lasting many years afterward. (The Democratic administrations never fully undid, if they undid at all, the tax cuts and deregulation that occurred in previous Republican administrations.) Also, I think if Democrats were holding onto power comfortably, there would be more calls for and less resistance to anti-billionaire economic policies coming from the left wing.

I'd be interested to see the chart of billionaire wealth growth compared to median income growth. Billionaires claim that it's not a zero-sum game, but if you look at the % of campaign contributions by the most wealthy, that's hard to believe. Relative wealth matters a lot. If the overall economy is growing, that ultimately gives more power to labor, who can more easily change jobs and demand higher wages, so there may be an occasional, intentional reset—an economic downturn, layoffs, etc.—just to put labor in its place and ensure continued billionaire dominance over the masses.
by fidotron | 2025-07-20 13:06:54+00:00
> Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades.

Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality improvements. Technology can improve quality, but it can also be used in other ways.

My personal view is the west, especially North America, never recovered from the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable, at least compared with today, with the result that all sorts of objects were radically heavier than their newer equivalents. You take away the need for handling such enormous weights for everything everywhere and it becomes possible to replace almost our entire infrastructure with things that are simply much flimsier.

It is that combined with the culture of low expectations that puts up with the results.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-20 13:07:00+00:00
>Expensive does mean higher quality if you know the right brands to pick

<laughs in Toyota turbo-4cyl that can't stay together for a laundry list of reasons>

You can't base decision on brand, no matter ho much a bunch of screeching morons on the internet tell you you can. You have to also consider how much the company cares about the product line, how core the product line is to the company, where in the lifecycle it is, etc, etc. The brands that people herald as good are very capable of phoning it in or whoring themselves around. Kitchen-aid slaps their name on all sorts of garbage outside the core products they built their name on, to pick one example of the latter. And the brands that people herald as bad are very capable of producing very good stuff when the incentives align.
by KineticLensman | 2025-07-20 13:07:50+00:00
And if you live on a UK housing estate or business park whose road names include 'Comet', 'Lysander', 'Mosquito', etc, etc, it was probably a WW2 airfield that was re-developed. E.g. Where I had my first job

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.7388646,-1.7350651,17.88z

and where my in-laws lived

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Comet+Way,+St.+Ives/@52....
by jraedisch | 2025-07-20 13:08:19+00:00
Stefan Munz called this “YOLO vs tight-leash” at a very entertaining agentic coding meetup in Hamburg recently.

https://bsky.app/profile/stefanmunz.bsky.social

https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/de-DE/agentic-coding-meetup-ham...
by psychoslave | 2025-07-20 13:09:26+00:00
Regularity, as the number of rules a system rely on, is not the only variable, and not even the effectively most significant one, when it comes to language ergonomic. Just like terseness, it's an easy to measure and easy to make low in ways that are actually working against ergonomy.

If you look at Justine post, Ruby is given as the hardest to make highlighted correctly. Much of it I guess however pertains to the many ways it's possible to switch to in place string feeding. It's harder to deal with for automated parsers, but it's generally not pushing human writers to encode in a way that is later harder to interpret by fellow humans with many surprising pitfalls to keep in mind. It doesn't mean that Ruby doesn't have any pitfall, but at least its community is using this low level of suprise as a guiding principle.

Optimizing for the shortest encoding string is missing the point that the biggest cost will be how much time some human being will need to understand correctly what was the intended result. Python used to emphase easy to read over syntax tersrness golf. Looks like it changed.

Now, they are people who love that kind of golf, I'm sure. So for them, that's certainly good that Python is digging that rabbit hole.

It's ok not everyone share the same taste, isn't it?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-20 13:09:47+00:00
As long as there are customers who will pay for low quality, and there is no external [read: "regulatory"] goad, there will be vendors that will sell it.

Basic human (and capitalist) nature. Not good, but not evil, either. It's just the scorpion and the frog story.

It sucks, trying to actually create things with higher levels of Quality. It's a lot more expensive to add even rather incremental levels of Quality, and companies that try, usually (but not always) get ground into the dirt.

If we deliberately create substandard quality, it can really eat at our souls. I think many folks are able to work out a deal with their conscience, but I was never able to do that, so I worked for most of my career at a company that was all about Quality.

This whole thing brings to mind the Vimes Boots Theory: https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...
by ianberdin | 2025-07-20 13:10:15+00:00
Yes, formatting is a pain. I’m too lazy to type it myself. It turned out to be so inefficient compared to what I can dictate into my own tool: OpenAI transcribes everything, then applies the formatting, and I just paste the text. Beautiful!

Now I love dictating by voice instead of typing. It used to seem that typing was so easy—so “easy”—and thanks to ten-finger typing everything happened very quickly. But compared to what you can rattle off by voice, it’s like night and day.

And those dashes the transcription adds, of course—they look completely out of place.
by boomlinde | 2025-07-20 13:10:27+00:00
I'd argue that they both represent a kind of efficiency. If your product or service has an unacceptable quality, demand will decrease and you will lose money that way. On the other hand, if in the pursuit of higher quality your production costs become too high, profit will decrease and you will lose money that way. Somewhere between these is a sweet spot where the level of quality and demand are in balance so as to maximize profit.

The difference between cheap rocket launches and cheap clothes in those terms is just where this sweet spot is: there may not be a high demand at all for more failure prone rocket launches, while poorly constructed clothes and appliances have evidently come to seem perfectly acceptable to a lot of consumers.
by nfriedly | 2025-07-20 13:10:31+00:00
Yeah, probably. At least until the Sony's break down and start sounding like trash.

But, to be honest, I do more audiobooks and podcasts than I do music, so the audio quality was not the top reason I picked them. The link buds have a fairly unique design with a 2~3 mm hole in the middle of the earbuds that lets outside sound in. I like it a lot better than any active transparency mode I've ever tried. They also have much better controls than any other earbuds I've tried.

The problem with the Sony's is that they either get something messed up inside the speaker and start sounding like crap at medium to high volume, or the case's open/closed sensor breaks and they wake up and start discharging in the case, and then they're dead by the time I try to use them.

I occasionally try watching videos on my phone, but the latency that Bluetooth adds throws me off, so I don't really enjoy anything with dialogue because the lips are moving out of sync with the words. I've tried lots of different Bluetooth earbuds - from Sony, Aukey, Jlab, even the "gamer" ones from razr - and all of them seem to have noticeable amounts of latency.

I'm not sure if I'm more sensitive to it than most people or they're just all shit, but the latency is the big reason that I'm annoyed that nearly all the manufacturers removed headphones jacks from flagship phones. (Sony actually deserves some credit here, I think their flagship Xperia phone still include a headphone jack and a MicroSD slot!)
by swat535 | 2025-07-20 13:10:33+00:00
My biggest problem with working LLMs is that they don't understand negatives and they also fail to remember their previous instructions somehow.

For example:

If I tell it to not use X, it will do X.

When I point it out, it fixes it.

Then a few prompts later, it will use X again.

Another issue is the hallucinations. Even if you provide it the entire schema (I did this for a toy app I was working with), it kept on making up "columns" that don't exist. My Invoice model has no STATUS column, why do you keep assuming it's there in the code?

I found them useful for generating the initial version of a new simple feature, but they are not very good for making changes to an existing ones.

I've tried many models, Sonnet is the better one at coding, 3.7 at least, I am not impressed with 4.