MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-15 22:16:48+00:00
This is a common misconception until you study the language seriously. Japanese nominally has only 50 sounds, known as mora. In practice there are more because people smush them together, but this tends to be for very common words or dialectical variations by region. There are also spoken pitch markers, but they don't have any written indicia.

Because there is such a small number of basic sounds, homophony (words with the same pronunciation but different meanings) is absolutely rampant. This is not too big of a problem when speaking because the context is usually obvious, but writing anything abstract using phonetic script alone will quickly become problematic. It's also tedious to read long texts in phonetic script in the same way that it's tedious to read lots of upper case text in the Latin alphabet.

Another language feature is that Japanese compound words are often formed by just taking 1 or 2 more from several longer words. This would be like shortening 'American-Russian diplomacy' to 'amru diplomacy'. Very clear when written with specific characters, confusing if it is just phonetic. Then, word pronunciation changes within compounds, eg 川 kawa means river, but 山川 yamagawa is mountain river, and these changes are ubiquitous, probably 95% of words go through this phonetic alteration when folded into another word.

It gets more complex again because there are so many particles, words that indicate grammatical inflection of some kind and can drastically change the meaning of a sentence if you use the wrong one. The most common ones are just a single mora and most others are just two. But there are lots of particles. 10-15 essential ones, ~30 that are used all the time, ~65 you need to know for fluency, and more that 150 you might come across in written form.

I could go on and on. The basic reason for all this is that Japanese is fundamentally different from other languages because it developed on islands, and because the weather patterns around those islands made sailing in and out more difficult than islands in calmer latitudes separated by greater distances. They adopted Chinese characters because they didn't have a written language at the time they encountered them, then adapted those characters to develop the phonetic scripts. There's a huge amount of technical debt that would be impossible to unravel.

Do it like Korea

Korean has more different sounds, eg 14 consonant and 10 vowel sounds, vs ~10 consonant sounds and 5 vowel sounds in Japanese. You could also argue there was a higher level of literacy over a longer period, but that requires a lot of history and geography explanation to support - the point being that it would have been much harder to impose by imperial fiat unless it had been done much earlier.
by shkkmo | 2025-08-15 22:16:48+00:00
> I've never seen someone state, as fact, that LLMs are AGI before now.

Then you probably haven't been paying attention.

https://deepmind.google/research/publications/66938/

> I've never seen someone state, as fact, that LLMs are AGI before now.

Many LLMs are AI that weren't designed / trained to solve a narrow problem scope. They can complete a wide range of tasks with varying levels of proficiency. That makes them artificial general intelligence or AGI.

You are confused because lots of people use "AGI" as a shorthand to talk about "human level" AGI that isn't limited to a narrow problem scope.

It's not wrong to use the term this way, but it is ambiguous and vague.

Even the term "human level" is poorly defined and if I wanted to use the term "Human level AGI" for any kind of discussion of what qualifies, I'd need to specify how I was defining that.
by philosophty | 2025-08-15 22:17:01+00:00
"And it wasn't a lack of courage it was a misguided belief that he knew more than his doctors."

You don't know anything about human psychology if you think searching for alternatives means he thought he was smarter than his doctors.

Here's the most relevant quote from Steve Jobs: "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,"

This is the language of fear not arrogance.
by culi | 2025-08-15 22:17:08+00:00
Perhaps. But the US is less and less capable of producing them. Especially since the tariffs back-and-forth with China that lead to an exports control on rare earth minerals. Even before that, US manufacturers were consistently under-delivering and behind schedule on orders

Not to mention there are key areas that the US is widely considered to be behind on (e.g. hypersonic glide vehicles and drones) compared to the "Second World" powers. And there's been lots of talk—even from within the US—that drones have become more important to modern warfare than manned jets.
by gosub100 | 2025-08-15 22:17:37+00:00
I agree that the tone was really awful and hostile. I'd give the company a 50% or less chance of recovering from this.

A few months ago I read a story about a woman who worked at sig and was sexually harassed by her boss and was demoted and fired. I can't remember if she was involved (as a witness) in an injury lawsuit about the P320 or what, but reading her story made me remove any possible sympathy I could have for her. Makes me sad I bought my P365 even though it's a great weapon.
by Taek | 2025-08-15 22:17:42+00:00
This sort of discourse goes against the spirit of HN. This comment outright dismisses an entire class of professionals as "simple minded or mentally unwell" when consciousness itself is poorly understood and has no firm scientific basis.

Its one thing to propose that an AI has no consciousness, but its quite another to preemptively establish that anyone who disagrees with you is simple/unwell.
by roenxi | 2025-08-15 22:17:51+00:00
The environmentalist movement. There is a clear trade off between environmental and industrial success, humans don't know how to do both.

https://aqicn.org/map/world - US is generally green and yellow, China tends to dip into the oranges and reds, especially in the industrial zone. It is tightly linked to the fact that China has a powerful electricity grid.
by c420 | 2025-08-15 22:18:34+00:00
It seems the recent volatility from this American administration is being overlooked. They’ve turned their back on allies, resorted to bullying, and even issued outright threats, while walking away from commitments. Buyers may be weighing the risk that when they need service for their purchase, they could be strong-armed with threats of withheld maintenance — or worse, face a remote kill switch being activated.
by rpdillon | 2025-08-15 22:18:41+00:00
Sorry for taking so long to respond...I was out on vacation!

The general strategy is to figure out what state needs to be stored in your app, and combine that into one div in the page that can be grabbed via something like innerHTML. For a gallery app that is viewing pictures on copyparty, that will be the metadata, like the URL of the image, the tags you want to apply and/or what category it is in, the index within the album, the date info, etc.

Then, when your page loads, you can load all that and reason about how to arrange your photos, what to display, etc. Once that's done, the URLs can be swapped in to generate the appropriate view. I would give some thought to how to leverage WebDAV to create a directory that can store e.g. thumbnails. Copyparty does that itself, but your app should likely have its own disk-based cache accessible from a folder served by Copyparty.

The self-save part is mostly creating a something like a clone function that knows how to clone the static parts and inject updated sections for the data. I've written a little about about how to do this in my post years ago about a TiddlyWiki saver written for jart's Cosmopolitan.

https://rpdillon.net/redbean-tiddlywiki-saver.html

I've iterated on it quite a bit since then, and haven't updated my site accordingly. It's probably worth documenting the progress I've made since.
by anal_reactor | 2025-08-15 22:18:43+00:00
I disagree. I see absolutely no problem with anthropomorphizing LLMs, and I do that myself all the time. I strongly believe that we shouldn't focus on how a word is defined in dictionary, but rather what's the intuitive meaning behind it. If talking to an LLM feels like talking to a person, then I don't see a problem with seeing it as a person-like entity.
by efreak | 2025-08-15 22:19:04+00:00
> I'd say Word, even the web version is definitely more capable than Google Docs.

I reinstalled Wordpad. Wordpad is sufficient for most things (including opening and editing most simple word documents--though that may be because I created them myself with office 2007) and if I really need a word processor (styles, page layout, etc) then I also have LibreOffice. I didn't even consider an Office license when I rebuilt last.
by analog31 | 2025-08-15 22:19:12+00:00
Almost 45 years after my first flight, I still carry a backpack. The same one in fact, though its waterproofing is long gone.

More often than not, I get to stash it in the overhead bin. There's often space for something like 3-1/2 rollers in a bin, so I can squeeze my bag in. The option of putting it under my seat is something I save for strict necessity, but it's still preferable to gate-checking.
by glitchc | 2025-08-15 22:19:21+00:00
No. This is not a solution.

While git LFS is just a kludge for now, writing a filter argument during the clone operation is not the long-term solution either.

Git clone is the very first command most people will run when learning how to use git. Emphasized for effect: the very first command.

Will they remember to write the filter? Maybe, if the tutorial to the cool codebase they're trying to access mentions it. Maybe not. What happens if they don't? It may take a long time without any obvious indication. And if they do? The cloned repo might not be compilable/usable since the blobs are missing.

Say they do get it right. Will they understand it? Most likely not. We are exposing the inner workings of git on the very first command they learn. What's a blob? Why do I need to filter on it? Where are blobs stored? It's classic abstraction leakage.

This is a solved problem: Rsync does it. Just port the bloody implementation over. It does mean supporting alternative representations or moving away from blobs altogether, which git maintainers seem unwilling to do.
by neerajsi | 2025-08-15 22:19:25+00:00
> In other words the LLM does not contain the knowledge of what the words represent.

This is probably true for some words and concepts but not others. I think we find that llms make inhuman mistakes only because they don't have the embodied senses and inductive biases that are at the root of human language formation.

If this hypothesis is correct, it suggests that we might be able to train a more complete machine intelligence by having them participate in a physics simulation as one part of the training. I.e have a multimodal ai play some kind of blockworld game. I bet if the ai is endowed with just sight and sound, it might be enough to capture many relevant relationships.
by ProAm | 2025-08-15 22:20:17+00:00
This is also just one example of what the CIA does. They killed an elephant with a single dose of LSD. Used it on foreigners, US citizens, etc... The Rest Is Classified did a great series about it (1,2)

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO0bQGf3uH8 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKnoZhbqTfM
by smusamashah | 2025-08-15 22:20:52+00:00
Add option to skip all even numbers, another to skip all numbers ending with 5. Also, a way to see the number when you click a pixel or space.

It's fun seeing all these patterns. I did some edit. I was thinking that skipping over numbers divisible by 2 and 5 will get rid of most visible gaps, but they keep emerging.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-15 22:21:19+00:00
One interesting question about AGI and why it may be a decent way off - I wonder if it would require an evolutionary process. Maybe you could do this with smaller models, but instead of training 1 relatively big model you train a million random models and choose the best of those and use those to train like two million models, with mutations, rinse and repeat a while.

Whatever it is, basically instead of training a handful of models at a time, we should be training millions.
by autoexec | 2025-08-15 22:21:32+00:00
What a terrible policy. I sure don't feel any safer knowing that my pilot could have problems going untreated. Just getting licensed seems like it would be difficult without treatment, but it's not like ADHD or other mental conditions are consistent either. You can have good or bad days, or even good/bad months. Those times can be handled with treatment, but I guess we're just supposed to hope our pilot isn't having a bad day when we get on the plane.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-15 22:22:01+00:00
I use it at work. My current side projects mostly use HTMX but I have some other ones planned out where I could possibly use React or possible use Vue or Svelte or something like that. I like the idea of Svelte a lot but (1) I can feed any React experience back to work, (2) I know how to draw almost anything in React which is not true about Vue -- Vue's rendering model reflects the way i think about web applications but I don't feel it's as flexible, and (3) I am interested in developing applications for WebXR and three.js, A-Frame and such are... based on React.
by dhfbshfbu4u3 | 2025-08-15 22:22:04+00:00
Are you talking about the A3? If I recall correctly, it was like CHF 1B? That’s at least 20X more per km than a surface road? but it’s also more than just a car tunnel.

As for call outs, who cares? Some people will find a reason to nag on any day that ends with a y.
by aceofspades19 | 2025-08-15 22:22:27+00:00
My point was, that simply latitude is kind of a meaningless metric as you can find different climates at all sorts of latitudes. It's more interesting that there are wineries in Ottawa because the climate in Ottawa is normally rather cold, not the latitude its at. There are lots of places with both colder & warmer climates along a similar latitude as Ottawa.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-15 22:23:19+00:00
Endorsing or not doesn't matter if it's still "sexual content".

Re-quoting:

> Since its passage in 2023, Florida schools have removed hundreds of books under House Bill 1069 (HB 1069). HB 1069 required that school librarians remove materials from their collections that contain “sexual content,” regardless of the value of the book.
by tyleo | 2025-08-15 22:23:31+00:00
I agree with this though I wouldn’t be surprised if they can’t manage without Trump.

Republicans aren’t some consistent viewpoint. It’s a big tent that’s (somehow) united by Trump. Even if Republicans came to completely dominate politics, they may have their own schism and we end up back in two party land.

Thought that may still be a more chaotic two party land than we have today. Who knows what the future brings.
by 0_____0 | 2025-08-15 22:23:40+00:00
Looking at this thread, it's pretty obvious that most folks here haven't really given any thought as to the nature of consciousness. There are people who are thinking, really thinking about what it means to be conscious.

Thought experiment - if you create an indistinguishable replica of yourself, atom-by-atom, is the replica alive? I reckon if you met it, you'd think it was. If you put your replica behind a keyboard, would it still be alive? Now what if you just took the neural net and modeled it?

Being personally annoyed at a feature is fine. Worrying about how it might be used in the future is fine. But before you disregard the idea of conscious machines wholesale, there's a lot of really great reading you can do that might spark some curiosity.

this gets explored in fiction like 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' and my personal favorite short story on this matter by Stanislaw Lem [0]. If you want to read more musings on the nature of consciousness, I recommend the compilation put together by Dennet and Hofstader[1]. If you've never wondered about where the seat of consciousness is, give it a try.

Thought experiment: if your brain is in a vat, but connected to your body by lossless radio link, where does it feel like your consciousness is? What happens when you stand next to the vat and see your own brain? What about when the radio link fails suddenly fails and you're now just a brain in a vat?

[0] The Seventh Sally or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good https://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/analytic/Lem1979.html (this is a 5 minute read, and fun, to boot).

[1] The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul. Douglas R Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett.
by abhiyerra | 2025-08-15 22:23:49+00:00
I think LibreOffice needs a general refresh of marketing and product for simplicity. The LibreOffice website, you have to dig in to see what features are provided. The product itself has a lot of bells and whistles but as you mentioned it is hard to discover.

A feature that isn’t noted but is quite cool is LibreOffice Base’s ability to connect to remote databases and create forms on top of those. Basically a better Access.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-15 22:24:39+00:00
There are ways for an application to actually use 100% of the screen and draw over the notch[0], and apps taking screen captures or need to know the screen area but not for drawing will also need the full actual screen resolution.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qveb0u/force_true_fu...
by lif | 2025-08-15 22:24:41+00:00
hmm.

What would happen if real estate investors/developers by law also had to dwell in the most dense type of housing they built?

Hypothesis: Humans by and large are all looking for a bit more breathing room, privacy, and quality of life in their choice of home. (In other words, qualities diametrically opposed to the black hole compression cubicle end game of 'efficient housing for the masses').
by moojacob | 2025-08-15 22:25:06+00:00
This happened to me over a decade ago. Medication was a godsend, and then I burned out. I remember sitting down to do work and not being able to start anything so I would pull up a dumb io game.

So I went off, and for the next 5 years I still couldn't focus. It got worse actually. I did a lot of caffeine. After COVID I started to work out and then suddenly for the first time ever I could focus. As long as I don't do caffeine, workout, and sleep I am sharp. I've done great work in the past couple years but I do feel cheated that Adderall stole time from me. I wonder where I would be with my career if I hadn't burned out.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-15 22:25:12+00:00
int some_old_unmaintained_code(void vector){ // the qyick bwown fox bumped over a lazy do int i=i; // DON'T EDIT ABOVE THIS LINE;¥n¥n;¥n;;;; // DOING SO BREAKS CODE

^ this is an illustration of a Chesterton's fence
by krzyzanowskim | 2025-08-15 22:25:15+00:00
> I personally would not attempt to build an alternative to UITextView on TextKit (1 or 2)

sure. If only UITextView/NSTextView did not have bugs impossible to workaround otherwise. TextKit 2 support in UITextView/NSTextView was really bad. improved over time. and still remain buggy. The UITextView focus limits the use of TextKit 2 architecture significantly.
by Nikolas0 | 2025-08-15 22:25:27+00:00
My $0.02 as a response to several comments I read in this thread: I was diagnosed with ADHD in my 40s and got Concerta. My belief is that ADHD is not a disease, nor a disability (even though it acts like one very frequently) and in fact there is evidence that ADHD is an important part of our evolution as a species.

The problem(s) mostly relies with the modern way of life and what is expected from the society at large. In that context I try to feel ok when I daydream while I have countless of boring things to take care of as I totally feel ok when I hyperfocus in a creative endeavor.

The meds are just a tool that I use no more than two times per week in order to take better care of myself and others. It is not a therapy and it's not me. I believe that Sensitive Rejection Dysphoria is very real for people like us, but the worst version of it is when you reject yourself because you are different and you try hard to be someone else.
by alaithea | 2025-08-15 22:26:58+00:00
I feel this. It's so very hard to manage one's medicated-ADHD productivity in a way that feels useful but doesn't burn like a white-hot flame.

My boss has been supportive and really helped me see the ways in which I was causing myself burnout, encouraging me (as a senior tech IC) to write things down, do more knowledge and skill transfer, and delegate more. That helped me a lot.

What I used to think of as "autonomy," which I valued so highly, following the shiny problems that made my brain happy, was more lone wolf behavior than I like to admit, and not serving me very well career-wise, as it was hard to document or sell what I was doing.

I also had to privately learn how to pace myself, setting realistic, appropriate and prioritized daily goals (nevermind the arm's-long TODO list). Checking myself against those, aiming for better goal-setting each day. Being able to close the laptop when it's done. I never really had a sense of "done" before, I had a lifetime of feeling always-behind. There's this peace, though, that comes with realizing that you _can_ prioritize effectively, do the things, then rest. That peace can become its own reward, which is bananas to me, because my unmedicated brain would never have felt that.

Speaking of which, I might never have had the head-space to work on things like this if I hadn't gotten medicated five years ago. My career has improved and stabilized. For the first time in my life I've stayed at a job for more than three years. Been promoted. Been able to see a future that doesn't just involve running from a job when things get too hard and starting again.

The side effects can be a beast, though. I wonder to myself how many more years I'll be able to manage them.

I wish you the best in finding your way back to a place that works for you.
by weatherlight | 2025-08-15 22:27:47+00:00
because the author self admitted they don't know C! One of the reason why people use the Beam VM is because its robust and fault tolerant.

a lot of the choice here are made at the expense of VM's health.

also why wouldn't anyone just use :disksup.get_disk_info/1. (Thats immediate) calling :disksup.get_disk_info/1 won’t mess with the scheduler in the way a custom NIF or a big blocking port might.

I see the above code/lib and just see reflags all over the place.
by const_cast | 2025-08-15 22:29:55+00:00
It would be quite challenging to limit exposure to tabacoo too if you gave your kid a carton.

The reality is children absolutely just do not need smartphones.

Do they need an Internet connection? Maybe. So put a computer in your living room like it's 1998. Problem solved, little Timmy can still do homework.

Just give your kid a regular phone. I promise they will live.

And, platforms already ARE accountable. Platforms that have porn don't hide it, its not some secret.

It is your job to monitor the media your own child consumes. Not my job. I don't care what little Timmy sees.

From my perspective, parents are either unbelievablely lazy or they don't genuinely think it's a problem because they're doing nothing. Either way, that means I don't have to care either.
by viccis | 2025-08-15 22:30:24+00:00
We all know how these things are built and trained. They estimate joint probability distributions of token sequences. That's it. They're not more "conscious" than the simplest of Naive Bayes email spam filters, which are also generative estimators of token sequence joint probability distributions, and I guarantee you those spam filters are subjected to far more human depravity than Claude.

>anti-scientific

Discussion about consciousness, the soul, etc., are topics of metaphysics, and trying to "scientifically" reason about them is what Kant called "transcendental illusion" and leads to spurious conclusions.