MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-04 15:33:20+00:00
> And yet he is, as the perfect example of changing affiliation for money.

Musk has never changed affiliations.

You can look at his political contributions. Like most of the ultra-wealthy, he does donate to both political parties. But he has never donated more to the Democrats than the Republicans.

In fact, in the average year, for the last 16 years (I went back as far as I have lived in the US) he's donated, eleven times more to the Republican party.

Musk has been libertarian at best, not liberal. And even that is sketchy. It's fine for him as CEO to go on podcasts and smoke weed and have "the highest ability to process ketamine on the planet", but work for Tesla or any of his companies and you'd best piss clean, or you're out.
by theshackleford | 2025-07-04 15:34:25+00:00
> Instead the surgeon had me come in to look at the wound

I'm surprised this is not the standard for any surgery involving a significant incision. In my country it's been the standard for instance for all three of my cervical spine surgeries, including the one I just had.

At the 7-10 day mark I must go to my normal GP who performs wound review and checks for signs of infection or other anomaly.
by rapjr9 | 2025-07-04 15:34:42+00:00
Context is a much bigger problem. For an agent to have appropriate context to offer advice it has to know many things about the specific environment and state of the person querying the agent. For example, to answer the question "what's the weather going to be like later today" the agent has to know where the person is. If they are indoors you may not be able to get that from their cellphone GPS. If they are using a proxy server you may not be able to get location from their IP address. They may have Bluetooth and WiFi turned off. They may not have a default location set or could be somewhere else. The agent also needs to know where the person is going to be "later today". They might be on a plane flying to a new location or driving or on a train. They may have just changed their plans because of a phone call they received and plan to head to a new location. The weather may be complex with a hurricane forming nearby or a storm with tornado potential may be moving through the area.

Context is very difficult for computers to acquire and understand. In some cases it requires knowing what a person is thinking or their entire life history. The sensors currently available are very limited in their ability to gather context; for example sensing mood, human relationships, intentions, tastes, fashion, local air temperature, knowledge about building layout, customs, norms, and a lot more. Context is a huge ontology problem and it's not going to be solved any time soon. So agents are going to be limited in what they can do for a long time. At a minimum an agent probably needs to know your entire life history, and the life history of everyone you know, and the past history of the area you are in. More limited ideas of context may be useful, but context as humans understand it is immensely complex. Even if you define context as just what a person supplies to a chatbot as context, the person may not be able to supply everything relevant to the question at hand because context is difficult for people too. And everything relevant to a question is most certainly not always available on the web or in a database.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-07-04 15:34:43+00:00
A ThinkPad is a different form factor. The MiniBookX is a 10.5inch lightweight (just under 1kg) machine with a 360 degree hinge (not that I ever use it like that). I've got a recent ThinkPad (running Linux) provided by my work, but it's a bit chunkier and not so good for holidaying.
by TeaVMFan | 2025-07-04 15:35:09+00:00
Flavour 0.3.2 is now live on Maven Central. It includes these enhancements:

* Routing enhancements for Dates (contributed by linuxfun) * The archetype has been updated with support for routing and deep linking. (The old archetype is now archetype-minimal, still useful for projects that don't need routing.)

For more information on Flavour:

* Flavour Book: https://frequal.com/Flavour/book.html * Flavour Home Page: https://flavour.sf.net/
by skydhash | 2025-07-04 15:35:41+00:00
> Why not? This is a translation problem so right up its alley.

Translating a sign can be done with a dictionary. Translating a document is often a huge amount of work due to cultural difference, so you can not make a literal translation of sentences. And sometimes terms don't map to each other. That's when you start to use metaphors (and footnotes).

Even in the same organization, the same term can mean different things. As humans we don't mind when terms have several definitions and the correct one is contextual. But software is always context free. Meaning everything is fixed at its inception and the variables govern flow, not the instruction themselves ("eval" instruction (data as code) is dangerous for a reason).

So the whole process is going from something ambiguous and context dependent, to something that isn't. And we do this by eliminating incorrect definitions. Tell me how LLMs is going to help with that when it has no sense of what correct and what it is not (aka judging truthness).
by yieldcrv | 2025-07-04 15:35:48+00:00
yes, blocks are and were periodically empty

if you expected applications to be deployed that would take up block space when used, and were going to build those applications yourself, then it was still rational

in 2012 people were describing smart contracts, joint custody accounts to secure assets better, and many other applications that are commonplace and have their own critique and discussion now

its like seeing an island full of resources and realizing that the bridges and ferry routes haven't been built yet. that

1) you can get to that island yourself before everyone else

2) you can also build the bridge and put up a toll booth

3) other bridges will be built

4) and other people can also come to the island early at great difficulty too

the same play is still true on other blockchains, and sometimes back again on bitcoin

I’ve done the trade many times over the past 15 years
by _V_ | 2025-07-04 15:35:52+00:00
You can be charged, sentenced and then *released* as an illegal without anyone notifying ICE? Wow, that's wild!

So the federal justice system & laws are completely separate from the local law and one does not talk to the other? I always thought that these things are more interconnected.

In my country I know for sure, that these systems are interconnected so if you are for example checked during a traffic stop, the police officer can immediately see whether you have a valid permit to stay. And if you don't they will immediately arrest you & hand over to the immigration enforcement.
by nsingh2 | 2025-07-04 15:36:11+00:00
> As an example, I can think of one politician who is definitely a systems thinker (who is not nice, but is successful and generally outplays his opponents because of it) and ~80% of Hacker News is convinced beyond the shadow of any doubt that he's an evil idiot loser who always makes stupid mistakes.

Not sure whether you’re talking about the Orange Man, but calling him a systems thinker is a hard sell given the damage his tariffs, defunding, and other nonsense are causing.
by AnonymousPlanet | 2025-07-04 15:37:03+00:00
When I say 'place' that includes entire countries. Adapting then depends on the kindness of strangers towards foreign refugees.

I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the near future something like "Adapt. Life is what you make it" could be read in big bold letters above the entrance of a place like Alligator Alcatraz.
by quicktemp42 | 2025-07-04 15:37:31+00:00
Thanks, it's not as bad as for some ppl but made me really rethink what's important in life and I'm 42 lol. Random event you can't control can be life changing. I have 3 more things on the list to try: - diagnostic temp nerve block around implant - bite / occlusion specialist - some blood work for those rare allergies (super unlikely but why not...)
by lossolo | 2025-07-04 15:37:38+00:00
I'm in the process of buying and evaluating mini-PCs to replace my Pi 4. Right now, I'm trying out the Minix Z100-0dB, which is a fanless N100 system. It's great—around 6W idle, with zero coil whine or any other noise.

I also got a Geekom A5 with an AMD Ryzen 7430U, which is a 15W TDP CPU that's about 3x faster than the N100. It's crazy, because even though it has a fan, it idles at just 4W! (That's with an additional 2.5" SSD connected via SATA, plus the standard 2 x 8GB DDR4 and 512GB NVMe that came in the box.) I mean, it scores around 15,000 on CPU Benchmark, compared to the N100's 5,000. And the Pi is way below both of them.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-04 15:37:46+00:00
While brain size is not a certain sign of intelligence, it is correlated with intelligence, especially when the comparison is done between more closely related animals, which have similar brain structures.

The largest brains belong to elephants and cetaceans, and both are among the most intelligent animals. However comparing their brain size to that of primates would not provide useful information, because for both elephants and cetaceans large parts of their brains are dedicated to the control of various functions of their large bodies that we do not consider as relevant for "intelligence", including things like trunk control and echolocation.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-07-04 15:38:02+00:00
Ignoring the possibility of tipping points with self-reinforcing feedbacks is like playing with matches near a gas station.

Of course the doomers have been wrong sometimes, here predicting an ice-free Arctic in September 2015 :

https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/09/is-the-north-pole-n...

But I will still side with their painstaking lists of things that could go wrong, than with the insane mainstream, which mostly acts like they care first and foremost about increasing our supply of matches.

See also : https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/post-index/
by M4v3R | 2025-07-04 15:38:08+00:00
Congratulations, you've managed to spot all the pain/weak points of the whole ~30 hour process without ever noticing all the good points. It takes a special type of skill to do so :).

> About what I expected.

But then again, you opened the video already with an expectation to see failure, so of course you found it.
by justinrubek | 2025-07-04 15:38:35+00:00
Nice try, but the comment you're replying to didn't use the word democracy at all. Maybe it would help to read it again.

Just because a group of people approve of things happening doesn't make it a good year. My estranged family does and they don't have a grasp on the notion of cause and effect nor do they have an acceptable level of reading comprehension- I do not value their opinion in the slightest l.
by palata | 2025-07-04 15:38:54+00:00
I would be curious to know if:

- You have enough experience to agree with the post but feel like writing such a post won't change anything, or

- You are more of a junior and don't understand what the author means because you've grown up with the engineering quality we have today.

Given that you consider this to be "so-so-so many words", I would bet it is the second option. Older people wouldn't consider that this is a huge text.

Am I right? :-)
by theshackleford | 2025-07-04 15:38:58+00:00
> At one point I was convinced it was psychological.

I ended up thinking the same thing after a prolonged period of symptoms that didnt make sense. I 100% began to think I was losing my mind and imaginging it. Turns out I had a spinal cord injury. The problem is, not knowing that for as long as I did ultimately did impact my mental health in other ways.

It was nice to find out ultimately that no, I was not just going insane.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-07-04 15:39:11+00:00
> Software has followed the same trajectory, piling abstraction upon abstraction until we’ve created a tower of dependencies so precarious that updating a single package can break an entire application.

This is like saying old software is so simple that updating a line of code can break an entire application. It's a silly thing to say. No matter how complex or how simple a piece of software is, you can easily break it. If you have a program that prints out "hello world", guess what? Updating a single character can break the entire application!

The world is more complex now. We've stood on the shoulders of giants who stood on the shoulders of giants. A few centuries ago a renaissance man could make advances in multiple fields. Now people are specialized. It's the same thing with software. Of course, people take it to an extreme. However, you go ahead and write your own crypto library, I'll use a vetted one created by experts.
Ask HN: Does it still make sense to learn AI(fundamentals), if so, how?
by shadowjones | 2025-07-04 15:39:26+00:00
I've been a fullstack engineer for a few years, tinkered with AI a bit, but I've never seriously studied the fundamentals/theory of it.

From an outsider's perspective, it seems almost useless and too late to actually study AI now. (unless we're talking about how to use LLMs/agents...)

Is there any point in 2025 to go back to school and get a master/PhD or even join a bootcamp in AI/data science when by the time you'd be graduating we could have already reached the singularity?

If you wanted to work in AI and do more than just calling the latest LLMs, how would you approach it?
by benreesman | 2025-07-04 15:40:37+00:00
It is absolutely going to be a sigmoid, because population in high-literacy areas is crashing generally to name but one antecedent, and so your example is not even a particularly good one.

But really what you're doing is arguing for a nasty status quo with a bunch of deflective name-calling because this is hard to argue against in good faith: calling a potent, contrarian-to-the-gravy-train argument a "cliche", and in so doing implying that it is "asked and answered", that it has been raised, addressed, and disposed of, is the worst kind of argument on 2025 HN. To the extent that it's been raised before and is being raised again, it's precisely because no one has addressed in a satisfying way. And we're going to keep raising it until someone does.

Saying "we're in the the pre-inflection part of a sigmoid" is not the same as manipulating everything from stock markets to wars premised on log-scale-and-ruler math.

"They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way of interrogation." - Erik Naggum
by AvAn12 | 2025-07-04 15:40:52+00:00
Is this an argument to upload more specific, detailed info (“context”) to tech companies? Which have lousy track records for protecting privacy? And an insatiable appetite for proprietary data? Why should any person or company trust OpenAI, Meta, Goo, etc? How does this make any sense? Or am I missing some reason to trust this “context” vision?
by Aurornis | 2025-07-04 15:41:38+00:00
The ancient and mysterious part is the idea that it’s based on wisdom passed down through generations and herbal concoctions, as opposed to synthetic medicines tested in RCTs. This is precisely what draws a lot of people to it, and why it falls in the category of alternative medicine.

It’s actually very interesting that many of the herbal compounds they use do have some quantifiable biological activities. So it’s not all placebo, but you’ll also discover that many of the herbs being sold don’t contain the ingredients they claim, don’t contain enough active ingredients to do anything, or might even be contaminated.

I once asked some doctor friends what things they’ll never do after seeing the consequences in their patients. One of the most surprising answers, to me, was that they avoided TCM and Avurvedic medicines. Apparently they see a lot of people come in with elevated liver enzymes or signs of kidney problems and discover that some TCM or Ayurvedic herbal remedy is causing the damage. Discontinuing the supplement can stop the damage. This happens with megadoses of other supplements too, especially some of the things peddled to gym bros. However, TCM and Ayurvedic supplements seem to catch people by surprise because they assume it’s safer.
by cgriswald | 2025-07-04 15:41:45+00:00
Crazy that you bring up UHF, because it is tradition for us to watch it on the 4th of July.

The idea definitely appeals to me, I just know I wouldn't use it properly. On the other hand, it might be fun to run as a personal service for my own stuff. A Plex plugin maybe.

Have you considered making it a game?
by al_borland | 2025-07-04 15:42:29+00:00
Congrats on the launch. It’s cool you were able to help your friend as well.

I was recently diagnosed with autism + adhd as an adult. When I look at the screenshots, it seems like the reward system is point based. Do task X, earn N point, once you have Y point you get your self-defined reward. Am I understand this correctly?

I’ve always had problems with rewards I make up like this. If they are too small, they don’t seem to matter to me, and I can just go get the reward without doing any work. When the reward is bigger, even if I do the thing, I won’t actually be ready for the reward, I’ll drag my feet (as it requires some effort to make the reward happen), and after some period of time the reward is completely detached from the action. I went nuts paying off my house, and told myself I’d do something one I finally do to celebrate and reward the effort and sacrifice. I didn’t end up doing anything. I told myself certain things were because I achieved the goal, but it wasn’t. I was going to do those things anyway. I didn’t pay off the house to get a different reward, not having the mortgage to deal with was the reward in itself.

When it feels like I must do something, I tend to rebel against it. I think they call this pathological demand avoidance (pda)? This has the side effect of making me less likely to follow through on things I try and commit to, if it’s because I think I should (or someone else thinks I should) vs having a deep internal drive to do it and understanding why I’m doing it. When the latter is true I can’t be stopped, but with the former, I can’t bother to start.

I’m currently using HabitKit to track some things, the UI is similar to the GitHub commit visualization. I’m not necessarily trying to hit things every day, but I want to be able to see if there are trends or patterns, and if things are getting better or worse. Remembering to go in the app can be a problem. I was able to automate a couple with Shortcuts, which is handy. The only real reward is the hope that the data it generates will be useful, or seeing it visually will evoke some kind of mental shift where I start to actually care about the things I “should” care about.
by karaterobot | 2025-07-04 15:43:31+00:00
> one of the reasons I find it hard to leave a high paying job is because "underpaid" has always been the best predictor of job toxicity.

Being 'underpaid' is different than being paid less, though. Describing a job as underpaid is, almost by definition, assuming a company is exploiting its workforce. It's not hard to believe such a company would also be a toxic environment in other ways. But if two companies pay different amounts, but they're both paying a fair salary, it doesn't necessarily imply anything about the company that pays less.
by M4v3R | 2025-07-04 15:44:05+00:00
Browser text entry on mobile phones is notoriously hard to get right and some bugs are literally unfixable [1]. I'm a frontend developer in my day job and I struggled with this even before AI was a thing. I think you just accidentally picked one of the hardest tasks for the AI to do for you.

[1] Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/xaksu6/on_ios_safar...
by atmavatar | 2025-07-04 15:44:48+00:00
If we're being honest, the GOP never had a problem with deficit spending. It was under Republican administrations that the debt and deficits have grown the most, after all.

It just happens to be a useful cudgel to beat the Democrats over the head anytime they want to spend money, both because the debt really is something that will have to be addressed at some point and because most voters are too stupid (or willfully ignorant) to keep track of which party is really doing all the spending and what said spending has been for.
by ipcress_file | 2025-07-04 15:44:50+00:00
I'm conflicted. I remember when I bought my first vehicle with electronic ignition. It wasn't as good as the electronic ignition today and I had to replace a few black box components that I didn't understand (what is a "thick film module" anyways???). So I was irritated and wished that my truck still had points and a regular distributor.

Flash forward to today. I can't remember the last time I replaced an ignition system component. I still don't know how they work. I can guarantee that the techs who do occasionally replace them at the dealer don't know how they work. But the whole system is so much more reliable.

That said, I do wonder how young people are supposed to learn and gain understanding in a world where they cannot possibly understand the components in complex systems. Back in the day (I know, yelling at a cloud), I could actually understand how a set of points and a distributor -- or a even a three-transistor radio -- worked.
by bitwize | 2025-07-04 15:45:57+00:00
I love how he talks about knowing thermal characteristics, etc. and then cites the TI-99/4A as an example of something designed by people who Really Knew What They Were Doing. The TI-99/4A was notorious for being prone to overheat due to its power supply. Munch Man and Parsec were complete non-starters for me when it got hot in July. This was even mentioned, specifically, in Halt and Catch Fire. The early microcomputer engineers were spitballing. You want to talk about the number of bodge wires that were in every TRS-80? Or the Apple III having no thermal vents per order of Steve Jobs, and the "you're holding it wrong" of the 80s being "drop it on your desk to fix it"? We know how to build better, more reliable computers for cheaper today than we ever did in the 80s. Then we fuck them up with things like Windows, but still.
by WalterBright | 2025-07-04 15:46:38+00:00
What the "more features" do is replace the clumsy/inadequate/risky methods used in a less powerful language like C. For example, you don't need to use the C preprocessor to do metaprogramming. D offers a world class metaprogramming capability.

Another example is D enables nested functions. Yes, there are ways in C to do the equivalent, but they are clumsy and indirect.
by doddpronter | 2025-07-04 15:46:48+00:00
It's crazy how much your physical health is tied to mental happiness/lack of stress. I had a friend that during his most stressful period as a 24 year old in Investment Banking had strep throat 4 times in 2 months.

Several doctor visits concluded that it was the long hours and insane amount of stress that was severely crushing his immune system.

Moral of the story is love what you do and take care of yourself: nothing is as important as your own health and happiness
by burnerthrow008 | 2025-07-04 15:47:10+00:00
A large percentage of U.S. software jobs (and probably nearly all YCombinator startups) are in California. Other states might be different, but stuff you do outside of work doesn't automatically become your employer's IP in California.

There are some nuances and I'm not a lawyer, but the gist of it is that three ways to trigger the IP to attach to your employer:

1. You do it on-prem or during work hours (but work hours are flexible for salaried employees)

2. You do it using company equipment (say, company laptop at home)

3. It's reasonably related to what you or other people do at your day job

If none of those apply, then you own it. That's relevant to the discussion at hand because, at least in California, you could work from home for two companies with unrelated businesses and not break any rules.