MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xoa | 2025-08-21 19:23:58+00:00
>Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it.

I'm afraid I think your hypothesis is entirely off base. Physicists do not need an ounce more or less "foundation in logic" than chemists or biologists, they all need the exact same thing: hard experiments testing existing hypothesis and theories and provide fresh data for new ones. The problem vs biology or chemistry is simply that we've picked all the low hanging (=low energy) experimental fruit. To probe deeper simply requires access to energies that are far from readily available and thus extremely expensive and complex. This is true for both the fully artificial and natural+instrument potential approaches. The former is clear enough, the US killed the super collider and has had nothing similar even on the drawing board since, and the LHC was already a big challenge to get done and seems further than ever from being replaced with something another order of magnitude or more up. One workaround is the second approach via astronomy, trying to get more info from natural ultra high energy events. But as well as being hard to do certain careful precise experiments with, even there to get more data requires bigger instruments. The JWST for example, but that itself was an enormously expensive and time consuming project, like the LHC there is just one that has to time share for everyone, and there is no prospect for what's next. There at least more cause for optimism exists because of plummeting launch costs with the real prospect for more. Starship and similar efforts should ultimately open up a lot of new potential. But it's still going to be a haul. One can envision advancements in automated construction someday resulting in major cost decreases for new accelerators, or a further future space economy also making it possible to do cheaper big ones constructed completely in space (or on the moon or something). But that could be many decades, if it happens.

I think that's the real root, all science needs the constant iteration against the actual real universe to make forward progress and avoid going insular. Hard results ultimately trump all, even if it takes many years. But for physics the cost increases have been non-linear, and could costs tens of billions a pop going forward. So a whole field is being left for the first time really grinding away over comparative scraps. During the Cold War there was a period of time where by happy coincidence physics aligned with hard results, geopolitical struggles and a lot of low/med hanging fruit and a bunch of other spheres such that it got big budgets while delivering rapid leaps forward, many of which directly fed back into valuable tech too. That has long since broken down.
by xpe | 2025-08-21 19:24:00+00:00
> A. Businesses will boom and bust. Hype will come and go. Humanity has an intrinsic drive to advance thinking tools. So AI is backed by huge incentives to continue to grow, no matter how many missteps economic or otherwise.

Corrected to:

A. Businesses will boom and bust. Hype will come and go. Nevertheless, humanity seems to have an intrinsic drive to innovate, which means pushing the limits of technology. People will seek more intelligent machines, because we perceive them as useful tools. So AI is pressurized by long-running, powerful incentives, no matter how many missteps economic or otherwise. It would take a massive and sustained counter-force to prevent a generally upwards AI progression.
by lostlogin | 2025-08-21 19:24:09+00:00
> My dad broke a Craftsman shovel once that he had owned for four years, took it to Sears, and it was replaced immediately, no questions asked. I broke a socket wrench that I had owned for a year and had the same story.

This is covered by consumer protection laws in some places. 4 years on a spade would be pushing it, but I’d try with a good one. Here in New Zealand it’s called ‘The Consumer Guarantees Act’. We pay more at purchase time, but we do get something for it.
by jama211 | 2025-08-21 19:24:44+00:00
Fair enough. I will say the point of the Ferrari analogy wasn’t to demonstrate that the features would have a similarly astronomical gulf in price between one model and another, it was merely to demonstrate the issue with cherry picking features when talking about price differences. So, none of my examples had to meet a “Ferrari expense” as that wasn’t the purpose of the analogy.

But yeah, I think we understand each other.
by cvoss | 2025-08-21 19:24:50+00:00
It does matter how and where a PR comes from, because reviewers are fallible and finite, so trust enters the equation inevitably. You must ask "Do I trust where this came from?" And to answer that, you need to know where it come from.

If trust didn't matter, there wouldn't have been a need for the Linux Kernel team to ban the University of Minnesota for attempting to intentionally smuggle bugs through the PR process as part of an unauthorized social experiment. As it stands, if you / your PRs can't be trusted, they should not even be admitted to the review process.
by zg94 | 2025-08-21 19:25:22+00:00
There's no mention of a fee similar to the infamous Runtime fee (which charged per install) here; instead, the closest thing on this page is a mention in the FAQs about how if the Unity runtime is included in a commercial product, then not only do you need permission from Unity to do so but you also will give Unity a fee that is roughly equivalent to 4% of the software's revenue.

This license appears to be intended for users using Unity to augment their business' operations; creating a commercial product with the runtime is treated as an edge case under this license.
by Nextgrid | 2025-08-21 19:25:35+00:00
This is downvoted for some reason and yet it’s absolutely correct. There’s a reason telcos specifically are notorious for the shittiest customer service ever - because major telcos typically have a monopoly and/or long-term contracts the customer can’t easily leave. They could literally bill you and not provide any service, and most people would still pay at least a couple months while fighting to cancel or get it resolved to avoid getting their credit report dinged.
by penteract | 2025-08-21 19:25:35+00:00
If you account for the fact that biological neurons operate at a much lower frequency than silicon processors, then the raw performance gets much closer. From what I can find, neuron membrane time constant is around 10ms [1], meaning 10 billion neurons could have 1 trillion activations per second, which is in the realm of modern hardware.

People mentioned in [2] have done the calculations from a more informed position than I have, and reach numbers like 10^17 FLOPS when doing a calculation that resembles this one.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/fast-efficient-neural-networks-cop...

[2] https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/
by neilv | 2025-08-21 19:26:17+00:00
There is also IP taint when using "AI". We're just pretending that there's not.

If someone came to you and said "good news: I memorized the code of all the open source projects in this space, and can regurgitate it on command", you would be smart to ban them from working on code at your company.

But with "AI", we make up a bunch of rationalizations. ("I'm doing AI agentic generative AI workflow boilerplate 10x gettin it done AI did I say AI yet!")

And we pretend the person never said that they're just loosely laundering GPL and other code in a way that rightly would be existentially toxic to an IP-based company.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-21 19:26:23+00:00
> But that's the thing, she is essentially equating Weinstein's theory to all other theoretical physics.

That's the thing that the blog argues, but not the thing I (a complete outsider in this whole thing) got from her video. Her argument was more about how "the establishment" treats this paper vs their own bullshit papers. The way I saw the video it was more of a comment on academia's own problems than weinstein's "theory" (which, earlier she said it's likely bullshit). She's calling out the double standard. I think.

> Now, as to the statement that all theoretical physics papers are bullshit, that's frankly bullshit.

I don't think that's correct. She never said (or I never saw the videos where she did) that all new theoretical physics is bullshit. She has some valid (again, from an outsider perspective) points tho:

- just because you invent some fancy math doesn't mean it works in the physical world

- just because it's complicated doesn't mean it's novel

- not falsifiable is bad science

- not making predictions is bad science

- hiding predictions behind "the next big detector" is lazy

(that's basically what here points are, from the videos I've seen).
by fph | 2025-08-21 19:26:24+00:00
Nethack is one of the wildest. So many hardcoded edge cases and wild interactions.

From the wiki: "Food rations have a 1/7 chance of being rotten when eaten if they are uncursed and older than 30 turns, or else are blessed and older than 50 turns, while cursed food rations are always rotten. Food rations can be thrown to tame domestic canines and felines and pacify domestic equines. "
by sarmadgulzar | 2025-08-21 19:26:57+00:00
I know I'm biased, but Rust is the closest thing we have to a perfect programming language. Is the borrow checker a pain in the ass? Yeah. But is it necessary? Absolutely. Imagine writing the same buggy program in C, deploying it, and then it blows up at runtime—you still have to fix it, right? A bug is a bug, and it needs fixing. The difference is Rust forces you to deal with it before you even get a binary, while with C you might get a 3 a.m. wake-up call trying to figure out what went wrong. So it’s not that Rust is harder, it’s just different. It takes a paradigm shift in how we think about writing safe and secure code. Change is uncomfortable in general for humans and that paradigm shift is precisely why most (I hope not) people feel this way about Rust.
by hedgehog | 2025-08-21 19:26:59+00:00
Having written a moderate amount of both Rust and TypeScript they seem different but I wouldn't say projects in one are significantly simpler than projects in the other. Rust itself feels a little more complicated than TypeScript, but more carefully thought out. TypeScript has more cruft and legacy footguns. Rust tooling is much better (and faster). For cranking out web front end code TypeScript will get the job done faster, most other needs I run into are easier solved using either Rust or Python when starting fresh is an option.
by more_corn | 2025-08-21 19:27:06+00:00
Heroku Vercel AWS ECS

What’s your business? Do you have product market fit? Do you benefit enough from the three things K8S does well to pay the cost in increased complexity, reduced visibility, and increased toil? If you can’t immediately rattle off those three things, you don’t need it.

Don’t you want to just focus on the problem you’re solving for your customers and not the infrastructure that makes your app go? Every startup I’ve seen doing k8s should not have been. Every startup I’ve seen not using k8s didn’t need it. (Except a startup who moved from beanstalk which nobody should ever use, and they could have done better by moving to something like ecs)

I’ve seen a startup lose their entire DevOps team and successfully go a year without it because their core app was on heroku. What’s that worth in dollars? What are those dollars worth in opportunity cost?
by thallavajhula | 2025-08-21 19:27:26+00:00
I’m loving today. HN’s front page is filled with some good sources today. No nonsense sensationalism or preaching AI doom, but more realistic experiences.

I’ve completely turned off AI assist on my personal computer and only use AI assist sparingly on my work computer. It is so bad at compound work. AI assist is great at atomic work. The rest should be handled by humans and use AI wisely. It all boils down back to human intelligence. AI is only as smart as the human handling it. That’s the bottom line.
by sfblah | 2025-08-21 19:27:35+00:00
I agree with this to some extent, but I honestly believe the capital markets would look VASTLY different had the Fed not rescued them with unprecedented money printing in 2002-3, 2008-15 and 2020-1. Yes, software is important and changing the economy, but it doesn't rewrite the basic rules of finance and valuation. The Fed did that.
by nytesky | 2025-08-21 19:27:46+00:00
I only use my Google voice number for basically non-personal contacts, like my bank or shopping, etc. That way when you get an unknown call from a business, it will usually be coming from an unknown number and thus the screening will be in place.

The screening on my personal phone is such that I will have any person that I expect to be calling already in my directory so that will be identifiable immediately
by AlexandrB | 2025-08-21 19:27:46+00:00
It's a spectrum, isn't it? I wouldn't want to waste my time reviewing a bunch of repetitive code generated from some script or do something like review every generated template instantiation in a C++ code base. I would want to review the script/template definition/etc., but what's the equivalent for AI? Should the review just be the prompt(s)?

Edit: Also, it's always good to provide maximal context to reviewers. For example, when I use code from StackOverflow I link the relevant answer in a comment so the reviewer doesn't have to re-tread the same ground I covered looking for that solution. It also gives reviewers some clues about my understanding of the problem. How is AI different in this regard?
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-21 19:27:53+00:00
Every engineer I've met who isn't a total dick will watch a user handle their product, cringe a lot and then go find ways to change the design to be more layperson-compatible.

When I design a UI, it's clearly a programmer's UI. But I try very hard to make things as clear as possible and I'm usually wrong. When I see people struggling to use a tool I made, it means I have failed at design and need to fix it.

It's my belief that if you grab a random person off the street and they can't figure out what your product is or how to do even the basics, you have failed to design your product. In 100% of cases, a user should be able to walk up and figure out the basics after a few minutes of poking.

If a user needs to check documentation before they can accomplish any task, your design is bad and you should feel bad. If a user needs to inspect every tooltip every time, ten million years dungeon.
by gwd | 2025-08-21 19:28:38+00:00
There's something strange about this whole narrative. I don't know anything about the science or personalities at all (except for having seen a number of Hosselfelder's videos, and what she said in her recent video about Weinstein). But here in this blog post we have story after story of people who seemed really enthusiastic about talking to Nguyen, and then later ghosted him or changed the topic of conversation or seemed to express a different opinion than the one he thought they'd had. Lots of different people -- podcasters in different domains, academics, etc.

One common denominator across all of these is of course Weinstein (since the conversations are about his work); and so one theory is that somehow he's using his influence with all these people to make them drop an interesting alternate.

But the other common denominator is Nguyen. Knowing absolutely nothing about either the content of these papers or the people involved, a priori, which is more probable: That Weinstein, who has been unable (by his own account) to be taken seriously by academia, has this massive influence across this diverse set of influencers? Or that the results of these interactions actually have something more to do with Nguyen -- either a weakness in his paper, or a quirk of communication, or a vein of unreasonableness in his character, that each person eventually runs across?

If anyone has actual knowledge of Nguyen's character or the topic at hand, I'd appreciate hearing from them.
by quotemstr | 2025-08-21 19:28:50+00:00
It. doesn't. matter.

The only legitimate reason to make a rule is to produce some outcome. If your rule does not result in that outcome, of what use is the rule?

Will this rule result in people disclosing "AI" (whatever that means) contributions? Will it mitigate some kind of risk to the project? Will it lighten maintainer load?

No. It can't. People are going to use the tools anyway. You can't tell. You can't stop them. The only outcome you'll get out of a rule like this is making people incrementally less honest.
by selimthegrim | 2025-08-21 19:30:05+00:00
That is manifestly not the same thing as overstaying a visa. Moreover, not only does it not apply if you’re already found to be in the country illegally you have to be caught in the act of entering - it was amended in 1996 to apply a civil penalty by the same act that created expedited removal (yes, it is not supposed to be in lieu of any statutory criminal penalty that _may_ be applied) and lower court judges have found against the re-entry provisions in 1326 [1]

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/163419/miranda-du-unconstitu...
by margalabargala | 2025-08-21 19:30:14+00:00
> Sure it does. I can use words any way I want.

You can do that, but I hedged my statement with:

> and expect anyone else to understand you

under which constraint, you're incorrect.

There's a relevant quote from Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass:

> "When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
Show HN: Tap – Interactive CLI Prompts for Go (Clack Port)
by yar-kravtsov | 2025-08-21 19:30:25+00:00
I’ve been working on a new Go library called Tap: https://github.com/yarlson/tap. It’s a Go port of the TypeScript library Clack https://clack.cc/, bringing its simple, interactive command-line prompts to Go.

Why: I often found myself rewriting input handling, spinners, and progress bars when building CLI tools. Existing options in Go felt either too barebones or too heavyweight. Tap aims to provide a middle ground: ergonomic, event-driven prompts with minimal dependencies.

What works today:

- Text and password input

- Confirm and single-select menus (generic, type-safe)

- Spinners and progress bars

- Styled intro/outro/cancel messages

- Built-in testing utilities

What’s coming next:

- Multi-select

- Autocomplete

- Grouped prompts and themes

Status: Early stage. APIs may change. Core features are tested but it’s not production-ready yet.

Repo: https://github.com/yarlson/tap

I’d love feedback on API design, missing features, and cross-platform quirks.
by pixl97 | 2025-08-21 19:30:55+00:00
The problem is 'actual' reality is much more complicated than this.

50 years ago husbands beat the living shit out of their wives without recourse of the law. 50 years ago drunk driving was a socially acceptable past time. I knew people with dozens of DWIs and other that had killed people in alcohol related accidents that didn't get any prison time. What we call hate crimes now were just crimes that weren't investigated by the police.

This said, there is something that has change.

24/7 news and always on news with the internet. The fears we had of bad things happening to us were things we may have watched once a day, not every 15 minutes on the hour. That seemingly had a pretty large effect on how people viewed their safety in this world.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-21 19:31:04+00:00
>Entering the United States without proper documentation, such as a passport or visa, is considered a federal crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.

Yes. The link[0] I posted with my comment cites that specific law:

To be clear, the most common crime associated with illegal immigration is likely improper entry. Under federal criminal law, it is misdemeanor for an alien (i.e., a non-citizen) to: Enter or attempt to enter the United States at any time or place other than designated by immigration officers; Elude examination or inspection by immigration officers; or Attempt to enter or obtain entry to the United States by willfully concealing, falsifying, or misrepresenting material facts. The punishment under this federal law is no more than six months of incarceration and up to $250 in civil penalties for each illegal entry. These acts of improper entry -- including the mythic "border jumping" -- are criminal acts associated with illegally immigrating to the United States. Like all other criminal charges in the United States, improper entry must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in order to convict.

And in fact, I said:

Being present in the US without legal status is a civil infraction and not a crime. Unlawful entry is a criminal act however. That said, the vast majority of undocumented folks entered the US Legally and overstayed their visas. Which is a civil issue, not a criminal one.

Where did I claim otherwise? Seriously. That's not a rhetorical question.

[0] https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/is-illeg...
by renrutal | 2025-08-21 19:31:16+00:00
I won't put it as "just another tool". AI introduces a new kind of tool where the ownership of the resulting code is not straightforward.

If, in the dystopian future, a justice court you're subjected to decides that Claude was trained on Oracle's code, and all Claude users are possibly in breach of copyright, it's easier to nuke from orbit all disclosed AI contributions.
by 13324 | 2025-08-21 19:31:24+00:00
I used Anki pretty heavily during ~8 years of law school and it was a game-changer. Two things that helped me the most (and that I think apply to any kind of flashcards, digital or paper):

- The twenty rules of formulating knowledge (https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin...) ; old but really solid advice on how to actually write cards that stick.

- The book Fluent Forever; it’s meant for languages, but the general principles carry over to learning basically anything.
by iLemming | 2025-08-21 19:31:33+00:00
Fair point! Programming paradigms aren't objectively superior - they're tools, and different people's brains work differently. Many problems are naturally iterative, and forcing them into recursive patterns can feel awkward. That said, some problems become much cleaner with FP approaches - data transformations, avoiding shared state bugs, or mathematical computations. It's worth having both tools available. use imperative when you think in steps, use functional when you think in transformations. Don't force one paradigm everywhere just because it's trendy or "pure."

But do give yourself this gift - even if you end up preferring imperative style for day-to-day work, learning Haskell or Clojure can be genuinely eye-opening.

It's like learning a foreign language - even if you never become fluent, it changes how you think about your native language. You'll start seeing patterns and abstractions you missed before, even in imperative code.

upd: sorry, only after posting it I noticed your "as someone who's done both". Just wanted to point out that here my suggestion is aimed not to you directly, but to a "proverbial" programmer, I used "you" in more general sense.