MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by computably | 2025-07-08 00:04:58+00:00
> Language can exist entirely independently from senses and cognition.

Maybe? Are you just outlining the thesis, or saying this should be self-evident?

> It is an encoding of patterns in the world where the only thing that matters is if anybody or anything wielding it can map the encodings to and from the patterns they encode for (which is more of a sociological/synchronisation challenge).

Yes, and my point is, current genAI utterly fails in unpredictable / bizarre ways because it only mimics the abstract encodings, ignorant of patterns in the world. Obviously some people argue "next token prediction is all you need," but that's a claim that is far from self-evident.

> There are many parts of non-programming languages that similarly have nothing to do with embodiment. Some of them are even about incredibly abstract things impossible in our universe. One could argue that for many fields genius lies in being able to mentally model what is so foreign to the intuition our embodiment has imbued us with or to be able to find a mapping to facilitate that intuition.

I would say this misses the point. The meaningfulness of abstractions, even ones that are unintuitive or unphysical or illogical, come from our embodied experience. Our enjoyment of even the most absurd fiction comes from our ability to simultaneously comprehend what it is "about" and what is "possible." Both relate to experience-of-reality and mean nothing in a vacuum.

> Said otherwise: the experience our embodiment has given us might limit how well we can understand the world (Quantum Mechanics anyone?).

I agree that we are limited in some ways by our particular embodiment. e.g. There's a huge spectrum of sensory experiences - colors, sounds, smells ... - which we know other animals have that we do not.

As I understand, where we disagree is on the why. I would say our capacity for understanding comes from our embodiment, therefore it's only natural that the limits of our embodiment also limit our understanding. After all we could imagine that if we had direct sensory experience of quantum effects, we would understand QM better or at least easier. In some fuzzy way, (no embodiment => poor understanding) and (embodiment => better understanding) is evidence for (embodiment <=> understanding). I suppose your argument is a counterfactual that we might be able to imagine a (no embodiment & some understanding) so (no embodiment =/> poor understanding), but I don't see the evidence that this is not just imaginable but actually possible in reality.
by RandomBacon | 2025-07-08 00:05:08+00:00
> try finding a new car of any kind in the United States for $15,000.)

> This is because nobody would buy it. People signal wealth, status, and even personal values by way of their vehicle in the US.

Speak for yourself. There are a ton of people who probably make a lot less money than you or I, who would purchase it, where transportation is more important than status.

"It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?"
by alterom | 2025-07-08 00:06:45+00:00
Have you considered that you can help the artists reach their dreams better if you make sure they check in with you about their gear before they haul it in out of the blue?

In no way does doing that inhibit their art making.

All it does is helps you help them.

To put it another way: any reason they're not doing that?

Other than "nobody bothered to think about it, and the tech guy will make it work anyway".
by antonvs | 2025-07-08 00:07:37+00:00
> What made ChatGPT think that this feature is supported?

It was a plausible answer, and the core of what these models do is generate plausible responses to (or continuations of) the prompt they’re given. They’re not databases or oracles.

With errors like this, if you ask a followup question it’ll typically agree that the feature isn’t supported, because the text of that question combined with its training essentially prompts it to reach that conclusion.

Re the follow-up question, it’s almost certainly the direction that advertising in general is going to take.
by DeonRob | 2025-07-08 00:08:46+00:00
Yeah, but you don’t actually want intelligence — you want consistency. And LLMs are great at giving you the next word or phrase based on the probability that you truly believe a prompt and its context.

Which is exactly what you want. It’s like if you ask a group of five people what they want to eat, knowing they’re all vegans. If you wanted a fair decision-maker, you’d hope they pick something close — vegan and good. An AI will always give that answer in a boring and predictable way. But a human might take outside context into account or selfishly pick a non-vegan restaurant — not because it’s consistent, but due to any number of random outside factors.
by danpalmer | 2025-07-08 00:11:54+00:00
This just doesn't match my experience.

People love to say it, but when we had GSuite issues at my previous workplace we spoke to GSuite support and had a resolution quickly. When we had GCP queries we spoke to our account manager who gave us a technical contact who escalated internally and got us the advice we needed. When we asked about a particular feature we were added to the alpha stage of an in-development product and spoke with the team directly about that. I've got friends who have had various issues with Pixel phones over the years and they just contact support and get a replacement or fix or whatever.

Meanwhile I've seen colleagues go down the rabbit hole of AWS support and have a terrible time. For us it was fine but nothing special, I've never experienced the amazing support that I've heard some people talk about.

We were a <100 person company with a spend quite a bit less than many companies of our size. From what I've heard from YouTubers with a million followers, they have account managers and they always seem to encourage talking to account managers.
by HaZeust | 2025-07-08 00:14:08+00:00
Sort of. I've addressed this with another commenter already [1]

>"What? THAT CASH comes from owning the inside spread on roughly half of every US equity share that trades. They quote a micro-price adjustment, and it pushes out anyone slower - which exactly the “service” that lets retail investors, like us, hit a bid or ask.

>

>Honestly, whether YOU want to call that trend-following or market-making - I can't be arsed, but it’s still data-retrieval that runs THE institutional scale"

I find this comment chain becoming cyclical, so I'll likely end it here.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495361
by b112 | 2025-07-08 00:14:10+00:00
Let's solve that productivity issue!

The classic view of one reclining on a couch, and the professional listening, seems to have a lot of downtime for the professional. The occasional sound of affirmation, 'go on', 'yes, yes' may be heard, but often a lot is the patient talking.

We could easily move this to text or video, but let's choose text. Best would be some form of speech to text, but AI driven and with a shorthand for emoted quality.

I suggest we assign primary emotions to primary colours, using three base emotions as primaries, and the professional would be able to read the emotions at play, and quantity, merely by the resulting colour of text. Larger print or bold or what not, could be used for more intense speech, eg yelling.

This would allow one professional to allow multiples to speak, yet they could simply wait for the text to appear, consider it, and respond vocally. Any perceived delay in response, could be derided by the concept of "I needed time to think on your words".

Thus the patient speaks, the professional's voice responds, the illusion of complete dedication to one patient is whole. Yet anywhere from 4 to 10 patients could be served in parallel with such a system, and remotely too!

I'm fairly sure I could whip this entire platform up over a weekend.

This solves the surmised shortages, for one could do the work of 10. It also helps the environment, with people not traveling to an office for their appointment.

Hmm. Maybe I should pursue this, and be bought out by Amazon so it can be included in Prime Plus or whatever.
by amy214 | 2025-07-08 00:14:27+00:00
>desktops are actually laptops nowadays.

With concepts such as "chromebook" (semi-merging with android phones), apple convergence between iPhone and iComputer chipset and code, Samsung DeX (run samsung phone as a desktop), in my opinion the endpoint is:

- Your phone is your desktop is your laptop. It may dock with a keyboard/monitor. This will happen when software kit is integrated between phone and computer (Microsoft has tried this in the past - too early), and the formfactor is sorted. Also a key gating item is phone CPUS matching laptop performance - Also some form of local AI will be present everywhere - Also, sadly, the way things our headed, such a system will be hardcore locked down if it inherits more from the phone ecosystem than the OS ecosystem
by lukeschlather | 2025-07-08 00:16:40+00:00
Meteorological simulations don't contain detailed state machines that are intended to encode how a human would behave in a specific situation.

And if it were just language, I would say, sure maybe this is more limited. But it seems like tensors can do a lot more than that. Poorly, but that may primarily be a hardware limitation. It also might be something about the way they work, but not something terribly different from what they are doing.

Also, I might talk about a meteorological simulation in terms of whatever it was intended to simulate.
by janalsncm | 2025-07-08 00:17:24+00:00
> Are they, or instead they will help keeping you in your comfort cage?

I’ve been paying close attention to what YouTube shorts/tiktok do. They don’t just show you the same genre or topic or even set of topics. They are constantly in an explore-exploit pattern. Constantly trying to figure out the next thing that’ll keep your attention, show you a bunch of that content, then on to the next thing. Each interest cluster builds towards a peak then tapers off.

So it’s not like if you see baking videos it’ll keep you in that comfort zone forever.
by homebrewer | 2025-07-08 00:17:37+00:00
I used to order books in English from the US before shipping costs became prohibitive and the cost of shipping the book went to about twice to thrice the cost of the book itself. Is it fair use for me to download books from Anna's Archive now considering that books in English are not available in my region through other means (including the vast majority of ebooks)?

Rhetorical question, we all know that me reading books is not "transformative" so it won't be considered fair use for me to yoink them (transformative as in transforming more damage to the society at large into more money for the already rich).
by WantonQuantum | 2025-07-08 00:17:41+00:00
I'd like to better understand steps 3 and 4.

The sender deposits a fee into a smart contract.

The message is encrypted in layers, with each forwarder only able to decrypt their part (like an onion).

As the message is forwarded peer-to-peer, each forwarder appends some kind of proof-of-forwarding.

When the recipient finally receives and decrypts the message, they unlock the contract using a code embedded in the message. This triggers micropayments to all the forwarders.

Do forwarders need to interact with the blockchain (i.e., create/update a smart contract) when forwarding?

If so, wouldn’t that require each forwarder to have internet access at the time of forwarding—which breaks the idea of fully offline Bluetooth relaying?

Or is all the blockchain interaction deferred to the recipient, who proves the path the message took and triggers all payments at once?
by slowmovintarget | 2025-07-08 00:17:47+00:00
That's not creativity.

That's closer to simply observing the mean. For an analogy, it's like waiting to pave a path until people tread the grass in a specific pattern. (Some courtyard designers used to do just that. Wait to see where people were walking first.)

Making things easy for Chat GPT means making things close to ordinary, average, or mainstream. Not creative, but can still be valuable.
by btown | 2025-07-08 00:19:11+00:00
Change management, designing schemas for being amenable to change management, having systems that can migrate data with an understanding of what historical context in which that data got into the system (was it imported from a source with a nuance that was fine before you changed the form, but now makes less sense with the updated meaning and positioning of the field?)... all of this is what makes software hard, whether low-code or high-code!

One of the ironic things, to bring it back to Figma, is that giving designers and stakeholders Figma in all its glory becomes a justification for having engineers on the project, because you can't realize those exciting design visions with just Airtable and the like. Those engineers aren't useful because they can write code; they're useful because they'll (hopefully!) think through those change management and schema design considerations, building something that will be maintainable in the future. It's a good thing to have a design tool that incentivizes a level of foresight before launching a product that's meant to be best-in-class.
by codingdave | 2025-07-08 00:19:40+00:00
Having been doing photos as a hobby and professionally for almost 50 years, before and after social media, including a degree in fine arts along the way, I can assure everyone that the idea that these ideas were formalized rules is absurd. They were design principles, yes. But they were also cliches. They were basic ideas taught in photo 101 classes, used by students until they learned enough to know when to use them and when to break them in order to be more creative and fulfill their own visions.
by gerdesj | 2025-07-08 00:20:17+00:00
I'm so sorry but I can't help myself: 01975 is the dialling code for somewhere in Aberdeenshire!

WP: "(However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])"

[29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf - this does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do look to be reputable and they refute some rubbish documented cases of ancient honey but not all of them.

I'm going to call out the WP article as being factually wanting on that point.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-08 00:20:59+00:00
> "Were you there?"

Was he there when the Red Sea parted, or is he only using one source for evidence? Noah's Ark? Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot's salt pillar wife? No, then it's not proven. Even back then, that was my equally lame retort, but it tended to make someone take a pause when they (if) they realized the limb they were standing one wasn't very strong
by alexjplant | 2025-07-08 00:23:33+00:00
I don't even own a car but probably would buy one that cheap. The problem is that we're on Hacker News and aren't representative of the general car buying populace. Many people spend more than 50% of their gross salary on cars because it makes them happy. Manufacturers are giving the public what they want and what people want is bigger cars with more amenities, hence the change in price [1].

Also, as somebody else pointed out, if you value transportation more than signaling then you buy used.

> "It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?"

I didn't buy a new car until I was well into my 20s and have driven multiple vehicles that were worth no more than their scrap value. That line would probably work better on somebody else, that is, somebody that hasn't apprehensively poured K-Seal into their leaking radiator when they had $600 in their checking account.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/americans-can-no-longer-afford-thei...
by blehn | 2025-07-08 00:23:49+00:00
I want to love this but the visual language makes it kind of unusable for me. Why not match the track and train colors to their line color (red for the 123) and then use different visual indicators for train state (stopped, at station, etc)?

For example: Selected: Black fill Normal operation: Color fill with 100% opacity Slowing down: 70% opacity Stopped: striped fill, 50% opacity At station: pulsing opacity
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-08 00:24:07+00:00
I'm a mind-body dualist and just happened to come across this list, and I think it's an interesting one. #1 we can answer Yes to, #2 through #6 are all strictly unknowable. The best we might be able to claim is some probability distribution that these things may or may not be conscious.

The intuitive one looks like 100% chance > P(#2 is conscious) > P(#6) > P(#3) > P(#4) > P(#5) > 0% chance, but the problem is solipsism is a real motherfucker and it's entirely possible qualia is meted out based on some wacko distance metric that couldn't possibly feel intuitive. There are many more such metrics out there than there are intuitive ones, so a prior of indifference doesn't help us much. Any ordering is theoretically possible to be ontologically privileged, we simply have no way of knowing.
by lordfrito | 2025-07-08 00:24:11+00:00
I'd definitely buy one! Back in around 2007 I went to the Chevy dealer and said "What's the cheapest car you got" and he said you want a Cavalier... I got it with air conditioning and an automatic for around $12k.

It was a great car at a great price, zero problems.

I don't understand why cars have gotten so much more expensive in the last 20 years. There is definitely room at the bottom for entry level vehicles.

I suspect the problem may be the increasingly strict emissions laws that push the OEMs into preferring certain segments at the expense of others. It might be that it doesn't make sense for the OEMs to pursue the low end market, it's not worth the trouble.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-08 00:24:32+00:00
My objection to raising minimum wage too high is that it makes it illegal for people with modest skills and abilities to earn a living unless they can find an employer to dress up charity as a job.

I know people who would struggle to create $100 of value for an employer per day. I would rather they be allowed to hold a job at $80/day than to have minimum wage set above the value they are able to create.
by johnklos | 2025-07-08 00:24:36+00:00
But you're giving Google money.

I should've qualified what I wrote, but what I mean is that no matter who you are, if you don't know someone there and aren't paying them money, there's no way to communicate with humans there.

It's like companies that won't let you sign up unless you give them a cell phone number, but not only do they not have a number themselves, they don't even have email. Or, for companies like Verizon, they don't have email, but they have phone numbers with countless layers of "voice assistants" you can't skip. It's a new way of "communicating" that's just crazymaking.
by chris_st | 2025-07-08 00:24:47+00:00
There's a book where the author tested watercolors which my watercolor teacher said was extremely controversial when it came out, but she was able to replicate some of his results, and so changed which colors she bought.

I tried the colors she recommended, and got good results. I also tested various black pens, and found (25 years ago!) that Micron pens were colorfast. Some black (gel, IIRC) pens faded to a nice sepia.
by llsf | 2025-07-08 00:26:22+00:00
I have a Dyson DC15 (https://www.dyson.com/support/vacuum-cleaners/uprights/dc15) purchased in 2006. Using it once a week (with few exceptions here and there) for nearly 20 years now, and working perfectly fine.

Yes, it is heavy, and corded, but it is a beast, and still amazed at how much dust it gets every week.

I have to admit that I am not impressed at all by the latest Dyson cordless versions, including the new Dyson PencilVac (https://www.dyson.com/discover/innovation/new-machines/penci...).
by martin-t | 2025-07-08 00:27:14+00:00
Do you mean that HN censors topics/comments which it detects based on advanced filters which search for meaning even when people self-censor and use language to avoid simplistic filters like regex?

HN also has a flagging system and some people really, really hate some kind of speech. Usually they get more offended the more visible it is. A single "bad" word - very offensive to them. A phrase which implies someone is of lesser intelligence or acting in bad faith - sometimes gets a pass, sometimes gets reported. But covert actions like lying, using fallacies to argue or systematic downvoting seem to almost never get punished.
by mystified5016 | 2025-07-08 00:27:40+00:00
You are exactly the kind of annoyance I'm trying to avoid. I don't care at all what you have to say. I have my own problems and I'm trying to mind my own damn business.

You don't have some God-given right to demand the undivided attention of a stranger. That is literally the behavior of a 5-year old. Grow up.
by theturtle | 2025-07-08 00:28:06+00:00
All I see with Dyson is shitloads of overpriced plastic. I refuse to use any of the various expensive always-break plastic Dysons and prefer my heavy fifty-year-old Kirby Omega. Actual metal. You can still get almost all parts for it, they'll rebuild it, and it is incomparable at sucking up and mulching spilled hay and wabbit poop. I could probably vacuum my driveway with it. $35 used on eBay years ago.

It has a headlight.
by kragen | 2025-07-08 00:29:39+00:00
If you can get an aqueous solution of solids to completely crystallize (and sucrose does like to crystallize), it won't support microorganisms, but if it doesn't crystallize, it will have a critical "deliquescence relative humidity". When the relative humidity of the air is above the DRH†, the solution absorbs water from the air rather than giving up water to the air, and if there are crystals in it, they tend to shrink instead of growing.

Different solutes have different DRHs, but there are many of them whose affinity for water is so strong that their DRH is so low that under normal circumstances they never completely dry out. Some of them are commonly used as desiccants, such as lye, calcium chloride, and magnesium chloride. In general, mixing solutes tends to impede crystallization, so more heterogeneous mixtures like honey tend to have lower DRH than more homogeneous mixtures like pure sucrose.

(This is an engineering reason to add something like lemon juice when you make simple syrup: the citrate hydrolyzes some of the sucrose into glucose and fructose, greatly impeding crystallization and greatly improving your chances of having a pourable syrup when you want to use it next month.)

Under many circumstances, honey will eventually absorb enough water from the air by this mechanism to permit the growth of yeasts and bacteria. But it takes a remarkably long time.

______

† The DRH does vary with temperature, but in most cases only slightly over the human-survivable range, so you can say "CaCl₂ has a DRH of about 40%" and be correct enough for many purposes.
by lordfrito | 2025-07-08 00:30:19+00:00
From a product standpoint, we're beginning to look at lot more like Europe did to us in the last few decades. The EU couldn't manufacture a cheap consumer item no matter how hard it tried and no matter how much the EU subsidized things. Just too much government/societal bloat. Seems to be the direction we're heading unless we can recapture the "get it done" spirit of old. I don't think we can do that while we're continually focusing on making sure everything is always fair to everyone all the time.
by smallerize | 2025-07-08 00:30:43+00:00
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257 "Underlining earlier work by Speth (61), experiments recently demonstrated that organic perishable containers, e.g., made out of deer skin or birch bark, placed directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently to process food, with the advantages of wet-cooking beginning at lower, sub-boiling temperatures than thus far acknowledged (62)." Reference 61 goes to this 2015 paper: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=When+did+hum... "to alert archaeologists and others to the fact that one can easily and effectively boil in perishable containers made of bark, hide, leaves, even paper and plastic, placed directly on the fire and without using heated stones."