MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gwd | 2025-08-17 13:15:13+00:00
I cannot construct a consistent worldview that places value on the "experience" of a 100k of neurons inside an ant, and not on the millions of neurons inside an LLM. Both are patterns imposed upon states of matter. Even if you're some sort of pantheist, that believes there's some sort of divinity within the universe itself that gives the suffering of the ant meaning, why would that divinity extend to states of chemicals in the neurons of ants, but not to states of electrons inside the state of an LLM?

Before continuing I suggest you read this person's experience "red-teaming" LLMs:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnYnCFgT3hF6LJPwn/why-white-...

Then ask yourself, how do I know when the apparent distress of an LLM is the same value of the apparent distress of an ant?
by kouru225 | 2025-08-17 13:15:21+00:00
“You live in the now not in the future”

The only reason I can imagine you’d add this to the convo is if you feel like having a cohesive philosophy of ethics necessarily enables you to live a moral life with no immorality. IMO even with perfect philosophical understanding, you can still end up acting immorally. It’s always a possibility and no philosophy will ever save you from that.
by Tade0 | 2025-08-17 13:15:48+00:00
I don't see in your blogpost any sources cited regarding anyone saying that ES modules were infeasible.

Additionally, io.js actually forked off due to internal drama which started with Ben Noordhuis having changed some pronouns here and there and people wanting to cancel him for that, to which he picked up his toys and left the sandbox.

It so happened that aside from being competent himself, he had competent people on his side, which eventually forced those governing Node.js to concede.

Bun is just a cash grab in comparison.
by tpoacher | 2025-08-17 13:16:06+00:00
Fools. Everybody knows a TLA (three-letter acronym) is instantly more marketable than a two-letter one (also abbreviated TLA, but we don't talk about Bruno and all that jazz).

You should have called it the Amos-Tversky Network, abbreviated ATN. An extra letter instantly increases the value of the algorithm by three orders of magnitude, at least. What, you think KAN was an accident? Amateurs.

Now you just sound like you're desperately trying to piggy-back on an existing buzzword, which has the same feel as "from the producer of Avatar" does.

Everybody knows a catchy name is more important than the technology itself. The catchy title creates citations, and citations create traction. And good luck getting cited with a two-letter acronym. Everybody knows it's the network effect that drives adoption, not quality; just look at MS Windows.

What. You think anyone gave a rat's ass about nanotechnology back when it was still just called "chemistry"?

/s
by hoistbypetard | 2025-08-17 13:17:00+00:00
I had that feeling about several questions. The one that stood out to me was

"""

When debugging, I typically:

* Write tests to isolate the problem

* Reason about the code logically first

* Add print statements to understand data flow

* Use a debugger to step through code systematically

"""

and I typically do all 4 of those things. If I don't understand the dataflow yet, I'll start with either print statements or the debugger to understand that. If it's code where I already understand the dataflow, and I can reason about the code already, I'll do that. Otherwise I might first write tests to help me reason about the code. But I generally do all of these things and the order depends on my specific problem.
Show HN: I made a language where the only command is "I use arch btw"
by tikrack | 2025-08-17 13:18:24+00:00
I built a minimal esoteric programming language called iusearchbtw.

The language has a single “command”: i use arch btw.

You wrap repeated commands in parentheses ( ... ). The number of repetitions determines the character output.

Supports uppercase, lowercase, symbols, and spaces.

The release is a static Linux binary, so it runs without dependencies.

Example usage:

./iusearchbtw hello.iusearchbtw

Full character map, examples, and a README are included in the repository. It’s primarily a fun exercise in encoding, counting, and building tiny interpreters.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-17 13:18:33+00:00
As an aside, marketing isn’t bullshitting.

Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers.

But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.
by dgfitz | 2025-08-17 13:18:59+00:00
> Consider this thought exercise: if we were to ever do an upload of a human mind, and it was executing on silicon, would they not be experiencing feelings because their thoughts are provably a deterministic calculation?

You just said “consider this impossibility” as if there is any possibility of it happening. You might as well have said “consider traveling faster than the speed of light” which sure, fun to think about.

We don’t even know how most of the human brain even works. We throw pills at people to change their mental state in hopes that they become “less X” or “more Y” with a whole list of caveats like “if taking pill reduce X makes you _more_ X, stop taking it” because we have no idea what we’re doing. Pretending we can use statistical models to create a model that is capable of truly unique thought… stop drinking the kool-aid. Stop making LLMs something they’re not. Appreciate them for what they are, a neat tool. A really neat tool, even.

This is not a valid thought experiment. Your entire point hinges on “I don’t believe in souls” which is fine, no problem there, but it does not a valid point make.
by verelo | 2025-08-17 13:19:04+00:00
Everyone talks about 4o so positively but I’ve never consistently relied on it in a production environment. I’ve found it to be inconsistent in json generation and often it’s writing and following of the system prompt was very poor. In fact it was a huge part of what got me looking closer at anthropics models.

I’m really curious what people did with it because while it’s cool it didn’t compare well in my real world use cases.
by jhbadger | 2025-08-17 13:19:05+00:00
It's interesting that he seems to have written this for a pocket computer, because there actually was a pocket computer of similar vintage that had LISP built in -- 1989's Casio AI-1000

https://pockemul.com/index.php/2020/04/27/pockemul-1-10-0-ne...
by vessenes | 2025-08-17 13:19:09+00:00
Notable here I think is the agent workflow - as LLMs continue to have increased 3d world understanding, they’re going to be useful in a variety of circumstances. Taking the human out of the loop for error checking and bug fixing is going to be useful, even if its just a background process that experts like Etherlord87 in this thread gain a little bug fixing / suggesting / pop up help from. Meanwhile being able to programmatically instrument this stuff is super useful, and will keep getting more useful.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-17 13:19:30+00:00
Hyundai has car factories in 10 countries. The car in question is made in at least 2 countries. The defect being fixed applies to cars sold by a British subsidiary in Britain to Britons with the promise that it meets British market standards. It’s not even clear to me that these cars were manufactured in Korea, if they were, they couldn’t be sold there due to the right hand drive. The cars in question were very much NOT made to be driven in Korean conditions.

If these people had bought a Korean market car in Korea and personally shipped it to the UK, yours would be a more compelling argument.

As it is, it makes no sense. If you choose to participate in a foreign market you do not get to abdicate responsibility for problems because they don’t exist in your home market.
by paffdragon | 2025-08-17 13:20:57+00:00
I finished it anyway:

Your Programming Philosophy

You value clarity and directness in code. You prefer explicit, step-by-step solutions that are easy to understand and debug, even if they require more lines of code. Abstract ↔ Concrete: 0 Neutral Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +6 Human-Friendly

The compass is almost in the middle, just a little up from center towards human friendly. That's fine, since most code you write is for other humans to read, the compiler is writing for the machine, only in critical perf sensitive paths you write for computer-first... The rest was mostly neutral, because what I wrote in the parent, it depends on the situation and it can go either way depending on the project.
by eliseumds | 2025-08-17 13:22:09+00:00
Yeah I understand the frustration, I had issues setting up ESLint/Prettier years ago and spent a few hours getting the Biome configuration right. Also a monorepo with ~4000 TS/TSX files. If you ever feel like trying it again, make sure that you have "files.maxSize" and "files.ignoreUnknown" set. And be very careful with the "files.includes" list.
by b112 | 2025-08-17 13:22:34+00:00
Or maybe this hack?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/us/paul-jones-fertility-s...

Or like this guy?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/fertility-doctor-own-s...

Seems that 'fertility doctor' is a simple hack for personal breeding program. There are more of these cases too.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-17 13:23:14+00:00
Historically, source IP was a lot more readily available. Every IRC user's source IP was visible, every UNIX login session's source IP was visible, and lots of people hosted their own websites which meant they saw your IP address there too. The implications of it used to be more like having an email address from a specific university. Skype happened relatively early in the world of online privacy.
by svantana | 2025-08-17 13:23:51+00:00
That's the conceit for the tv show For All Mankind - what if the space race didn't end? But I don't buy it, IMO the space race ended for material reasons rather than political. Space is just too hard and there is not much of value "out there". But regardless, it's a futile excuse, markets and politics should be part of any serious prognostication.
by kouru225 | 2025-08-17 13:25:45+00:00
Yea I mean I don’t really respect the legal world very much. You can see the failure of this with popularized cases like Brock Turner, who was guilty but given only 6 months because the Judge essentially decided his mind wasn’t that guilty and instead he “had a great future ahead of him”. “Guilty mind” is basically just saying “I don’t find the defendant to be relatable” and so it’s no wonder that people of different races and ethnic groups are significantly more likely to go to jail and get higher sentences for the exact same crimes.

Edit: also, let’s be very clear: the point of law is to decide whether or not someone should be punished; not to decide whether or not someone is immoral. Those are two separate things.
by eszed | 2025-08-17 13:26:59+00:00
I've sometimes been able to get a cash discount by asking for it. This won't work with corporate places, obviously, but sole-proprietor sorts of shops - like my local car mechanic, and a print shop I used to use occasionally - have been receptive. I think they discounted by ~5% in each case. Did I suspect they're keeping the cash off-book? Of course. Did I care? Not at all. I don't expect their big-business competitors are paying tax, either.
by mpweiher | 2025-08-17 13:27:43+00:00
1. Energy crisis

> Because the shock in every single one of those countries was because of fossil fuel prices/shortages or climate change, not renewables.

EXACTLY! Thank you for finally agreeing to this obvious point: that the correlation of high electricity prices to renewables has nothing whatsoever to do with the energy crisis of 2021-2023. Not sure why you tried this in the first place, it was so obviously wrong.

2. Wind turbine blade recycling

> Hence the bad faith arguments and misinformation. Suddenly there’s all this care about lack of recyclability

Er, it was you who brought up the issue of blade recycling, in order to incorrectly smear some site as an unreliable source. This smear failed, because they were correct and you were not.

In this thread, the subject was the correlation of high electricity prices with renewables build out.

Glad we can put another one of your straw men to bed.

3. Economic insanity of 100% renewable targets

Actually, Germany for example does have a de-facto 100% renewables target for electricity. And yes, the same effects occur when you mix intermittent renewables, and we are already seeing those effects.

Germany has the highest electricity prices in the EU.

4. China

Here you present another common straw man, which is that renewables and nuclear are somehow mutually exclusive. This idiocy is only really prevalent in Germany, pretty much all other industrialized nations are doing both.

Even France is adding wind and solar, because it allows their nuclear plants to run more efficiently.

5. Overcapacity

This is simply a fact. In fact, coal consumption increased while renewable share went down. So check your facts. And no, your wishful thinking does not change those facts. Oh, and "demand side flexibility" is simply newspeak for "sorry, we have no electricity for you".

6. Wind blows and sun sines for free

Uranium atoms also don't send invoices for splitting. In both cases it is the machinery that is expensive. And intermittent renewables are so inefficient that you need a lot more of that expensive machinery. Add required overcapacity, required short-term storage, required long-term storage, required transmission lines and the costs become astronomical.

Already are, incidentally. Germany spent somewhere between €400-600 billion on its failed "Energiewnde", and it has 10x worse CO₂ emissions than France, which spent €228 billion to nuclearize its electricity sector.

But it only gets worse, because so far was the easy part.

Anyway, I think we're done here. Bye.
by pas | 2025-08-17 13:28:18+00:00
... it's strictly better that this guy realized that there's a problem and spoke up rather than staying quiet, or staying a GOP supporter

that said it's very hard to accept that most people are truly proper fucking idiots, and cannot be reasoned with, cannot be shocked out of their confirmation bias.

even harder is to see that many times we are smack dab in the middle of the crowd that's blind to reality.
by d357r0y3r | 2025-08-17 13:30:06+00:00
What's the story with supporting CommonJS libraries? I've tried to update many projects to ESM multiple times over the years, and every time, I ended up backing out because it turned out that there was some important upstream library that was still CommonJS - or even if we fixed those issues, our downstream NPM consumers wouldn't be able to consume EJS. So then you have to go down this rabbit hole of dual compilation, which actually means using something other than tsc.
by jongjong | 2025-08-17 13:30:23+00:00
In a corporation-dominated economy, LinkedIn can't produce anything different... People are limited in what they can say. On LI, you are representing your employer to some extent. You can't just post all your juicy gossip or crazy takes.

At best, you can nerd-out in your subject area, but even that's limited as you risk being seen as either a show-off or you may make a mistake one day and be shuned for it. It's kind of high-stakes. It's like social networking but with your employer potentially scrutinizing your posts.

On LI, people are always one bad post away from losing their income. You're never going to get fully honest takes in such environment.

The only people who can share everything honestly on LI are people who are very predictable and basically don't have any opinion about anything... Not the most exciting kinds of people.

Though at least this self-censorship boringness ceiling does make it easier to get eyeballs for your content if you're willing to get risky. It's easier for content to stand out.
by crabmusket | 2025-08-17 13:31:35+00:00
It's an interesting tangent! I agree with that idea, what we are taught as the "scientific method" does kind of assume you've already had the idea. The method helps you test or criticise it. I don't remember if Deutsch has an opinion on where conjecture comes from, but I think it's bound up with creativity... "quality" sounds like an interesting way of putting it.
by 9dev | 2025-08-17 13:33:03+00:00
They need someone to literally care for them. In Germany for example, there are far too few people working in elderly care, and it’s a huge problem if we don’t want them to die of starvation, malnutrition or falling down the stairs with nobody to find them there.

Even wealth can’t magically summon the humans necessary to do that kind of work, robots are no solution for the foreseeable future and I don’t think starting a family is easy if you have to take care of your parents and/or grandparents.
by arcane23 | 2025-08-17 13:33:05+00:00
Yeah, I was thinking about this. Humans vary depending on a lot of factors. Today they're happy, tomorrow they're a bit down. This makes for some variation which can be useful. LLMs are made to be reliable/repeatable, as general experience. You know what you get. Humans are a bit more ... -ish, depending on ... things.
by mattigames | 2025-08-17 13:33:09+00:00
Something I don't understand is why is there such effort to crafting generators for all kinds of content but there isn't the same level of interest for crafting consumers of it? AIs that will play your games and watch your movies and tell you how good job "you" did? If is about money you don't have a chance because the monopolistic middlemen will hoard all space, e.g. Steam will generate the PC games that go popular, and whatever space is left will be quickly saturated by an overabundance of generated content, so given the scarcity of attention is only going up the next logical step is to generate the "people" that will consume the content, bots that craft reviews about what they "saw" and how they "felt" and have different "personalities" and constantly interact with each other.
by prmph | 2025-08-17 13:33:21+00:00
I agree. I've tried the Node TS and test runner features, and they are still (not yet) as good as Bun's. So for now sticking with Bun for those.

Really, in the Node ecosystem you eventually learn not to put all your eggs in one basket. Different things excel in different aspects. Here is my preferred setup for now:

Bun.js: As a Node runtime, and for TS execution and test running. I tried lots: TSX, TS-Node, Node itself

NPM For executing tooling scripts

PNPM For installing dependencies. It's simply better than the rest (npm, yarn, bun) for several reasons

Biome.js For linting (superior to every other tool I tried)
by belter | 2025-08-17 13:34:04+00:00
Here is a interesting fact, for which there is documented evidence. Before the outrageous deal by Alex Acosta, Jeffrey Epstein traveled to Israel, most probably waiting for the outcome of the Acosta deal.

"How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime" - https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/perversion-of-just...
by Zambyte | 2025-08-17 13:34:19+00:00
I ran some numbers by GPT-5[0], and for the scenario of generating 10k UUIDs in one ms every 10ms, over three years, it came up with a 0.0025% chance of collision for UUIDv7, and a 0.000000084% chance for collision with UUIDv4.

[0] https://kagi.com/assistant/dd7d8c48-44e4-499b-9f2f-33663d125...
by notahacker | 2025-08-17 13:34:41+00:00
Judging by the content I get served, the kind of content that performs best is outsourced to ChatGPT

And written in a very specific way

Not like that. Like this.

The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging.

And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined.

It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks.

And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps.

I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn

But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment.

That sounds like mediocrity to me.

In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit
by somat | 2025-08-17 13:35:42+00:00
2^61 guids is... 36 exabytes, if my napkin math is correct. when storing them in binary format(16 bytes each) if doing the javascript thing and storing them as strings... (shudders) I don't even want to think about it.

Anyhow that was my first thought when you mentioned 2^61 guids, where are you even going to put them? second thought, I don't think enumerating 2^61 guids is trivial, in fact, I suspect it would take longer than anyone would be willing to spend, and if you are not storing them why are you generating them?

And what even is a guid collision attack? it is not like they are a hash, and since they tend to be public identifiers it turns out despite their stated use to prevent collisions, you can't really use guids generated by others(if they wanted collisions they would straight up just copy yours) so you end up regenerating them anyway.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-08-17 13:37:20+00:00
I like using triggers for validation important for maintaining data integrity.

Example: let's say you have a parent table P whose rows are soft deleted (update P set _deleted=1 where id=?) and a child table C (foreign key on P.id) On delete cascade isn't gonna work here obviously. So I use a trigger to emulate on delete cascade.

Also, I've seen triggers to cancel transactions raise abort(..) if they violate some property that can't be retrofitted into a proper db constraint due to team politics at a previous workplace.
by hylaride | 2025-08-17 13:37:59+00:00
Java startup times would almost certainly be worse, depending on what's going on.

A previous job I worked at ran Java on AWS Lambda. We ran our busiest Java lambda in a docker layer as our whole build system was designed around docker and from a compute performance point of view it was just as fast.

The main issues were:

* Longer init times for the JRE (including before the JIT kicks in). Our metrics had a noticeable performance hit that lined up to the startup of freshly initialized lambdas. It was still well within a tolerable range for us, though.

* Garbage collection almost never ran cleanly due the code suspension between invocations, which means we had to allocate more memory than we really needed.

The native AWS Lambda Java's 'snap start' would have helped, but the startup times were just not a big deal for our use case - we didn't bother with provisioning lambdas either. Despite the added memory costs, it was also still cheap enough that it was not really worth us investigating Java's parallel GC.

So as always, what language one should use depends on your use case. If you have an app that's sensitive to "random" delays, then you probably want something with less startup overhead.
by mobileturdfctry | 2025-08-17 13:38:35+00:00
The one that I had in mind while writing this was a "variation on this theme". Altered Carbon (Netflix, 2018–2020), based on the 2002 novel by Richard K. Morgan.

There are a number of others, though as well where the recurring theme seems to be the "evil elites" leaving the poor to fend for themselves.

Definitely agree, no one "knows" how the world works. I don't think the OP presumes anyone does. The intention in saying this was to point out that there are some (these days it seems many) who are off the mark in an almost tragic way, and have no desire to reflect / improve on this.