MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tombert | 2025-08-12 19:32:35+00:00
I still haven't used Hurd, and at this point with the ridiculous diversity in hardware for desktop and laptops I don't think I could realistically use it for anything outside of playing with it in a virtual machine or something.

Still, a part of me wishes we lived in the alternative universe where Hurd had taken over the world instead of Linux. I don't know much about kernel design so I'm speaking out of my ass here, but I've always thought that the microkernel design was more elegant than the monolithic thing we ended up with. I don't know that the alternate universe would be "better", and maybe realistically a design like Hurd would never be able to take over the world like Linux, but it always seemed cooler to me.

I honestly didn't really realize that they were still working on Hurd. Does anyone here use it for anything?
by godelski | 2025-08-12 19:32:38+00:00
> I don’t think it’s just (or even particularly) bad axioms

IME most people aren't very good at building axioms. I hear a lot of people say "from first principles" and it is a pretty good indication that they will not be. First principles require a lot of effort to create. They require iteration. They require a lot of nuance, care, and precision. And of course they do! They are the foundation of everything else that is about to come. This is why I find it so odd when people say "let's work from first principles" and then just state something matter of factly and follow from there. If you want to really do this you start simple, attack your own assumptions, reform, build, attack, and repeat.

This is how you reduce the leakiness, but I think it is categorically the same problem as the bad axioms. It is hard to challenge yourself and we often don't like being wrong. It is also really unfortunate that small mistakes can be a critical flaw. There's definitely an imbalance.

>> The smartest people I have ever known have been profoundly unsure of their beliefs and what they know.

This is why the OP is seeing this behavior. Because the smartest people you'll meet are constantly challenging their own ideas. They know they are wrong to at least some degree. You'll sometimes find them talking with a bit of authority at first but a key part is watching how they deal with challenging of assumptions. Ask them what would cause them to change their minds. Ask them about nuances and details. They won't always dig into those can of worms but they will be aware of it and maybe nervousness or excited about going down that road (or do they just outright dismiss it?). They understand that accuracy is proportional to computation, and you have exponentially increasing computation as you converge on accuracy. These are strong indications since it'll suggest if they care more about the right answer or being right. You also don't have to be very smart to detect this.
by danaris | 2025-08-12 19:32:57+00:00
While I'm deeply and fundamentally skeptical of the recursive self-improvement/singularity hypothesis, I also don't really buy this.

There are some pretty obvious ways we could improve human cognition if we had the ability to reliably edit or augment it. Better storage & recall. Lower distractibility. More working memory capacity. Hell, even extra hands for writing on more blackboards or putting up more conspiracy theory strings at a time!

I suppose it might be possible that, given the fundamental design and structure of the human brain, none of these things can be improved any further without catastrophic side effects—but since the only "designer" of its structure is evolution, I think that's extremely unlikely.
by Findecanor | 2025-08-12 19:33:07+00:00
For release 26.04 next year, it makes more sense because that is a Long Term Support release and a lot of new hardware from then on will be RVA23-compliant.

They recommend 24.04.3 LTS for current hardware. Maybe they just don't want (then) old hardware to be stuck on a non-LTS release.
by psunavy03 | 2025-08-12 19:33:08+00:00
A problem with this whole mindset is that humans, all of us, are only quasi-rational beings. We all use System 1 ("The Elephant") and System 2 ("The Rider") thinking instinctively. So if you end up in deep denial about your own capacity for irrationality, I guess it stands to reason you could end up getting led down some deep dark rabbit holes.
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by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-12 19:33:29+00:00
Creating an artificial market around an artificial limitation that dumps cash into the government general fund is not what most economists would describe as "efficient allocation of resources".

It might create a local maxima around revenue per visa, but "google bought all of the H1-Bs to make life harder for Apple" is both an entirely foreseeable outcome, and one that has such a wide range of negative externalities that even in the context of the local maxima, it would be a challenge to argue of efficient allocation of resources with a straight face (if that argument is, in fact, the goal).
by SilasX | 2025-08-12 19:33:51+00:00
Reminder: if you want to bet on an asset's demise (i.e. short it), you don't need a derivatives market, you just need to be able to borrow the asset and sell it. So you could accomplish the goal there by borrowing Monero and converting it to USD. A lot of smartcontract platforms let you do this -- including on other chains, where they hold a token convertible into the original chain's native unit.

I bring this up because people are always asking what platforms are allowing me to short cryptocurrencies, which seems to miss that it's enough to just have a debt denominated in what you want to bet against.
by eschaton | 2025-08-12 19:34:20+00:00
It makes a lot of sense when you realize that for many of the “leaders” in this community like Yudkowsky, their understanding of science (what it is, how it works, and its potential) comes entirely from reading science fiction and playing video games.

Sad because Eli’s dad was actually a real and well-credentialed researcher at Bell Labs. Too bad he let his son quit school at an early age to be an autodidact.
by tbrake | 2025-08-12 19:34:33+00:00
having known dozens of friends, family, roommates, coworkers etc both before and after they started them. The two biggest telltale signs -

1. tendency to produce - out of no necessity whatsoever, mind - walls of text. walls of speech will happen too but not everyone rambles.

2. Obnoxiously confident that they're fundamentally correct about whatever position they happen to be holding during a conversation with you. No matter how subjective or inconsequential. Even if they end up changing it an hour later. Challenging them on it gets you more of #1.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-12 19:34:41+00:00
I use Gemini-cli (free 2.5 pro for an undetermined time before it self-lobotomises and switches to lite) to keep the specs up to date.

The actual tasks are stored in Github issues, which Claude (and sometimes Gemini when it feels like it) can access using the `gh` CLI tool.

But it's all just project management, if what the code says drifts from what's in the specs (for any reason), one of them has to change.

Claude does exactly what the documentation says, it doesn't evaluate the fact that the code is completely different and adapt - like a human would.
by lenkite | 2025-08-12 19:35:18+00:00
Regarding 2) it is well known that Hochul herself is a strong Israel supporter who has opposed Palestinian protests. She ordered CUNY school Hunter College to remove the Palestinian Studies professor position. Pro-Palestinian protestors have been arrested several times at her events.

(Incidentally, I personally support the UN Resolution 181 for a 2-state solution, so I am against the position of the US government - whether Republicans or Democrats)
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-12 19:35:18+00:00
> It’s funny how the HN hive mind is against H1-B visas and AI because they suppress their wages and take their jobs. However, the millions of unskilled illegal immigrants are a good thing, because they have that effect on the working class instead.

The hive mind is greatly exaggerated. The existence of cognitively dissonant opinions on a website is more likely evidence that the site has posters that have differing viewpoints, rather than evidence of a group thought process that is illogical.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-12 19:35:20+00:00
I mean both bluesky and fediverse are just decentralized technologies, so lets say that you are worried about bluesky "enshittening"

I doubt it to happen because of its decentralized-enough nature.

I also agree with the subscriptions curation part the last time I checked, but I didn't use mastodon as often as I used lemmy and it was a less of an issue on lemmy.

Still, I feel like bluesky as an technology is goated and doesn't feel like it can be enshittened.

Nostr on the other hand does seem to me as an echo chamber of crypto bros but honestly, that's the most decentralization as you can ever get. Shame that we are going to get mostly nothing meaningful out of it imo. Which in that case bluesky seems to me as good enough but things like search etc. / the current bluesky is definitely centralized but honestly the same problems kept coming up on fediverse too, lemmy.world was getting too bloated with too many members and even mastodon had only one really famous home server afaik iirc mastodon.social right?

Also I may be wrong, I usually am but iirc mastodon only allows you to comment/ interact with posts on your own server like, I wanted to comment on mastodon.social from some other server but I don't remember being able to do so, maybe skill issue from my side.
by zarzavat | 2025-08-12 19:35:27+00:00
Both modes of operation are useful.

If you know how to do something, then you can give Claude the broad strokes of how you want it done and -- if you give enough detail -- hopefully it will come back with work similar to what you would have written. In this case it's saving you on the order of minutes, but those minutes add up. There is a possibility for negative time saving if it returns garbage.

If you don't know how to do something then you can see if an AI has any ideas. This is where the big productivity gains are, hours or even days can become minutes if you are sufficiently clueless about something.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-12 19:35:32+00:00
Yeah, to compare Yudkowsky to Hubbard I've read accounts of people who read Dianetics or Science of Survival and thought "this is genius!" and I'm scratching my head and it's like they never read Freud or Horney or Beck or Berne or Burns or Rogers or Kohut, really any clinical psychology at all, even anything in the better 70% of pop psychology. Like Hubbard, Yudkowsky is unreadable, rambling [1] and inarticulate -- how anybody falls for it boggles my mind [2], but hey, people fell for Carlos Castenada who never used a word of the Yaqui language or mentioned any plant that grows in the desert in Mexico but has Don Juan give lectures about Kant's Critique of Pure Reason [3] that Castenada would have heard in school and you would have heard in school too if you went to school or would have read if you read a lot.

I can see how it appeals to people like Aella who wash into San Francisco without exposure to education [4] or philosophy or computer science or any topics germane to the content of Sequences -- not like it means you are stupid but, like Dianetics, Sequences wouldn't be appealing if you were at all well read. How is people at frickin' Oxford or Stanford fall for it is beyond me, however.

[1] some might even say a hypnotic communication pattern inspired by Milton Erickson

[2] you think people would dismiss Sequences because it's a frickin' Harry Potter fanfic, but I think it's like the 419 scam email which is riddled by typos which is meant to drive the critical thinker away and, ironically in the case of Sequences, keep the person who wants to cosplay as a critical thinker.

[3] minus any direct mention of Kant

[4] thus many of the marginalized, neurodivergent, transgender who left Bumfuck, AK because they couldn't live at home and went to San Francisco to escape persecution as opposed to seek opportunity
by daymanstep | 2025-08-12 19:35:37+00:00
> I have been able to swap to languages I have almost no experience in and work fairly well because memorizing syntax is irrelevant.

I do wonder whether your code does what you think it does. Similar-sounding keywords in different languages can have completely different meanings. E.g. the volatile keyword in Java vs C++. You don't know what you don't know, right? How do you know that the AI generated code does what you think it does?
by dmoy | 2025-08-12 19:35:49+00:00
I just read the prospectus investment strategy, and it looks like it trails the trades by up to 30-45 days? Seems like the majority of that upside might be gone by then, no? They explicitly list that in Reporting Delay Risk.

Also I didn't see any info on whether the fund manager can beat hft et al to the punch once disclosure happens.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-12 19:36:01+00:00
If you do this, you'll have unintended consequences:

- You don't allow the US to import skilled workers anymore, and rather than hire locally from a non-existent labor pool they simply move the jobs abroad. What's worse, hiring someone from India on an H1B to work in your AI lab, or moving your AI lab to India?

- You don't allow importing unskilled workers and expect farmers to pay $30/hour to have Americans pick apples. Or maybe...they'll just figure out how to automate those jobs or go out of business since no one wants to pay $5 for an apple.
by senko | 2025-08-12 19:36:06+00:00
> Just got out of a 15m huddle with someone trying to understand what they were doing in a PR before they admitted Claude generated everything and it worked but they weren't sure why...

But .. that's not the AI's fault. If people submit any PRs (including AI-generated or AI-assisted) without completely understanding them, I'd treat is as serious breach of professional conduct and (gently, for first-timers) stress that this is not acceptable.

As someone hitting the "Create PR" (or equivalent) button, you accept responsibility for the code in question. If you submit slop, it's 100% on you, not on any tool used.
by paradox460 | 2025-08-12 19:36:18+00:00
Romanization systems for Chinese vary, but all have the issue that a single "word" in the romanized system can map to dozens, if not hundreds, of actual "words" in the target language.

Pinyin is sort of the standard for romanization, although other systems exist, as well as inputs that aren't based on romanization (bopomofo).

Take the pinyin `fei`. Just looking at the tones that can be on this word, it can mean at least 4 words (my dictionary app couldn't find any neutral tone words). In reality, its at least dozens, each with different contextual meanings.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-12 19:36:19+00:00
> Purity Spirals

This is an interesting idea (phenomenon?):

> A purity spiral is a theory which argues for the existence of a form of groupthink in which it becomes more beneficial to hold certain views than to not hold them, and more extreme views are rewarded while expressing doubt, nuance, or moderation is punished (a process sometimes called "moral outbidding").[1] It is argued that this feedback loop leads to members competing to demonstrate the zealotry or purity of their views.[2][3]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_spiral
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-08-12 19:36:29+00:00
I deal with GitLab a lot. Both the official instance and third party instances.

It drives me crazy how slow it is. A lot of operations take minutes. Eg: I push commits to a branch and open an MR. During 2-3 minutes, the MR will indicate that no changes were found. When I push new changes, it can also take minutes or update, so I can’t quickly check that it all looks correct.

The latest release changed their issues UI, so when you try to open an issue, it’s opened on a floating panel on the right 30% of the screen. I’ve no idea what exotic use case this addresses, but when I click a link, just open it. The browser does it find. No need to reinvent navigation like this. Now to open an issue, I need to wait for this slow floating UI to load before I can _actually_ navigate to the page. Which will also be extremely slow.

Don’t even get me started on the UI. Buttons are hidden all over the place. Obvious links are behind obscure abstract menus. At this point, I remember where all the basic stuff is, but I can understand why newcomers struggle so much.

Hosting GitLab is also really resource intensive. For a small team of 2-3 people, I don’t think you can get away with “just” 8GB of ram.

—-

I do have to admit, GitLab CI is pretty good, assuming that you’re fine with just Docker support and don’t need to support BSD or some exotic platforms.
by bevr1337 | 2025-08-12 19:37:26+00:00
> Preference disagreement: I absolutely need my workspace to be different from my gaming space, or I’d go totally nuts

Preach. I made this wonderful office for myself. It's got name brand monitor stands, I only need one cable, the desk mat is cute, and there's a huge pegboard for all my work hardware.

After a month or so, I preferred working on the kitchen table with a laptop. Brains are funny things.
by mtrovo | 2025-08-12 19:37:33+00:00
Is that really true? My impression is that companies tries as much as possible to not use the O-1 route, not sure because the requirements are by design too high or process and cost are not worth it compared to other routes.

O(1) data point: got offer from FAANG to join on the H-1B lottery, later moved to L-1 because the timing was not going to work well for the H-1B process and L-1 at least would give my partner the chance to also work, I later decided to not migrate and keep working from a different country.
by tombert | 2025-08-12 19:37:54+00:00
I guess it sort of depends on how you define "success"; there's plenty of projects that still have some development and active users.

TeXMacs was release in the late 90's (I think) and it's pretty neat and I think has at least some user base, and I think GNU Parallel was released in the mid 2000s and I know a number of people who use that (including myself).
by toss1 | 2025-08-12 19:38:35+00:00
Call a plea bargain a distortion or corruption of due process, but even with plea bargains, due process is far less bad than extortion.

Plea bargains, within limits and when not abused are also sensible for both sides. An accused who is guilty can benefit from a years-lighter sentence by saving the prosecutor's office thousands of hours of work by taking a bargain. Or, they can always decline the bargain, go to trial, and potentially walk away acquitted, or be subject to the full legal penalty if convicted.

Where plea bargains go horribly wrong is when used against the innocent as a means of coercion to extract a conviction, and yes, that is extortion-like and a corruption of due process.
by guywithahat | 2025-08-12 19:38:42+00:00
I mean if Anthropic is really stealing market share from OpenAI in the enterprise space, as this article suggests they are, then what OpenAI is doing makes total sense. They should price competitively to get companies hooked on OpenAI early to build market share. I don't think OpenAI is burning boats because I don't think their position is dire
by g42gregory | 2025-08-12 19:38:43+00:00
I don't know where the author gets his information. The GPT-5 is not on par with Claude Opus.

It's still cheaper than Sonnet, but certainly not by 10x. Sonnet, arguably, is still better than GPT-5, although not by much and not in all circumstances.

I read analysis that GPT-5 is better at debugging (super important) and following exact instructions (many people don't quite know what they are asking for anyway, so this could be counter-productive in many cases).

So no, OpenAI did not burn the boats...

(Ok, this is for coding only. I have no information on other uses.)
by alloutofnickels | 2025-08-12 19:38:53+00:00
I don't use emacs but vi on all of my devices. This should probably work with emacs stuff if they save it in regular files/directories. I put everything in ~/notes. Quick sync before leaving the house, sync when I return. Can use your desktop as the central location if you don't have a home server. Works with termux on android. I think iphone has iSh or something for alpine.

Swap src and dest as necessary (could use other options but this is compatible with OpenBSD openrsync): rysnc -rlpt --delete notes/ user@lanip:notes
by symbolicAGI | 2025-08-12 19:38:56+00:00
I first generate a specification JSON object from a text design narrative that lists fine-grained steps for each Java class that are constrained to be decomposed such that each fine grained step can be implemented as a static method in 20 lines of Java code or less. Likewise helper methods are similarly scoped to 20 LOC or less.

I also have a markdown-formatted document `core-programming-guidelines.md` that I include in the Claude Code code-generation prompt.

For example:

## Core Programming Principles

### Defensive Programming & Safety 1. *Use 'final' keyword aggressively* for method parameters, local variables, and class fields 2. *Null Safety*: Include null checks with Validate.notNull() and assertions for external calls 3. *Input Validation*: Validate all method parameters with clear preconditions using org.apache.commons.lang3.Validate

### Performance Optimization 1. *Collection Sizing*: Always provide calculated initial capacity for collections 2. *String Processing*: Use StringBuilder with pre-calculated capacity, avoid regex where possible and avoid `java.util.Scanner` where possible. 3. *Memory Management*: Clear large collections when done, reuse objects where appropriate

### Code Clarity & Documentation 1. *Naming Conventions*: Use descriptive names for variables, methods, and constants - All StringBuilder variables should be suffixed `Builder`. 2. *Documentation*: Comprehensive JavaDoc for all public, protected, and private methods 3. *Inline Comments*: Explain complex logic, algorithms, and business rules

### Modern Java 23 Features 1. *Text Blocks*: Use for multi-line string literals 2. *Pattern Matching*: Use where appropriate for cleaner code 3. *Records*: Use for immutable data carriers 4. *Enhanced Switch*: Use new switch expressions
by vintermann | 2025-08-12 19:39:22+00:00
I think speech is not the same money, and that any kind of property you expect others to respect comes with obligations. Why should I respect your property claims if you can't show me you didn't steal your property?

But that's really beside the point, because it isn't me who will come after you, it's the IRS (or equivalent). If you spend a lot of money, you're in trouble if you can't explain how you got it. And if you explain that you participated in a network which has as its only purpose to destroy evidence of how you got it, you're usually in extra big trouble.