MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by davorak | 2025-08-13 17:14:37+00:00
> He's very explicit that he's not trying to map to the colloquial definition of empathy. Which is the correct approach, because people's definitions vary wildly and it's important to separate from the value-loaded components to come to a fresh perspective.

I read the prologue/introduction and Bloom says the inflammatory/proactive claims first then clarifies with his modified definition. That is going to hooks some people and throw some people off. So not above saying something misleading to hook some people more strongly, not an uncommon writing tactic but so often used and misused that it is off-putting to me.

> With that caveat, I do recommend it. In particular your comment indicates you would like it, if you're willing to accept the terminologies the author spends right away defining.

The wikipedia article seems to well match the intro of the book. Bloom in the intro does the same artificial separation I talked about above at least in implication.

> The notion of empathy that I’m most interested in is the act of feeling what you believe other people feel—experiencing what they experience. This is how most psychologists and philosophers use the term. But I should stress that nothing rests on the word itself. If you’d like to use it in a broader way, to refer to our capacity for caring and love and goodness, or in a narrower way, to refer to the capacity to understand others, well, that’s fine. For you, I’m not against empathy.

This statement only makes sense when "the act of feeling what you believe other people feel..." is separate/independent from "the capacity to understand others". There is no explicit claim that "the act of feeling what you believe other people feel..." does not enable or a part of "the capacity to understand others" only implicit.

That claim is a large one though and without evidence. I would not except these are independent cognitive functions and Blooms arguments seem to depend on them being mostly independent.

If we assume they are not mostly independent cognitive functions, against Bloom's implicit claim, then discouraging "the act of feeling what you believe other people feel..." will also discourage "the capacity to understand others". It is easy to come up with arm chair reasons for why these would be linked and enhancing each other to some reasonable extent.

From the writing in the intro I would assume Bloom does not dig on this issue to his premise and worry I would mostly collect more premises with unaddressed flaws if I continued to read the book. If you think there something in particular that is interesting to dig down on let me know.

After the intro, and skimming chapter 1, I have the same impression that I have to similar speculative works, that getting to the bottom of questions like these likely requires original and rigorous neurological or physiological research.
by snickerbockers | 2025-08-13 17:14:40+00:00
Well if all that counts is who's fighting >= 51% of the Axis, then you have to take into consideration that the USSR didn't even join the Asian theater until the day after Hiroshima happened despite sharing a border with Imperial Japan and having struggled through a brutal war of attrition with the Japanese just a couple decades earlier.

This idea you and many other armchair historians have that the USSR can solo 1v1 the axis powers and win isn't any less naive than saying America saved Europe, because it ignores the significant amounts of foreign aid that the US donated to other allied nations. This includes the USSR, who would not have been able to carry out a successful war of attrition against the Germans without a consistent pipeline of supplies and weapons. It certainly would not have been able to win a war on two fronts if the Japanese felt free to invade the soviet far east. I will concede that the Chinese deserve way more credit than they generally get for waging their own war of attrition against the Japanese which prevented them from going to war in the soviet far east, but that was also made possible with significant American logistical support.

But more importantly, you seem to have an oddly eurocentric view of history in which the european theater is the only one of any import. Japan's eventual defeat was never a foregone conclusion, and they were just as cruel to their conquered foes as the Germans were. They were also the only Axis that posed a credible threat to the United States, having successfully established a foothold in the Aleutian Islands with an aim towards invading Canada and the United States. Realistically I don't think it ever would have worked (again, they were pre-occupied with China) but they certainly have a better track record of attacking the North American continent than the krauts ever did.
by starchild3001 | 2025-08-13 17:15:00+00:00
It reminds me of the early-2010s SaaS wave. Back then, you could argue Salesforce or ServiceNow had huge TAMs and defensible positions, but the best entry points were when their multiples compressed and execution caught up to expectations, not when valuation implied flawless performance. At those heights, any hiccup, a missed quarter, a competitor with a better AI story, or a shift in procurement priorities, can rerate the stock brutally.

From the tech side, I’d be curious how much of Palantir’s AI-driven growth is tied to custom, high-touch deployments vs. something that scales like a true product. If a lot of revenue still depends on specialized integration work, sustaining that 40%+ clip at their current size gets trickier.

I invested in Lockeed Martin a few years back thinking that defense will be a bigger deal going forward in the current uncertain geopolitical situation. Looks like I should've picked Palantir instead, which is not only defense but also AI.
by latexr | 2025-08-13 17:15:12+00:00
> Elon understands this deeply in my opinion (…) you would think elon has a phd in the subject.

Do you have a PhD on the subject? And if not, what’s your opinion based on? It’s well-known that Musk consistently and confidently spews bullshit on subjects he doesn’t understand. It really became obvious to a lot of people when he took over Twitter and talked nonsense about its architecture and the reasons for the failures. Oh, and let’s not forget the genius idea of asking coders to print their code, and then telling them to shred what they had printed.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-fires-twitt...

https://xcancel.com/caseynewton/status/1586127052767318016
by rollcat | 2025-08-13 17:16:24+00:00
Gold coins were replaced by paper money. Paper money was replaced by credit cards. Now credit cards are being replaced by smartphone wallets. My phone or watch can still pay for stuff while they're offline. For the past 5 years, I didn't carry a physical wallet. I'm doing more with less, and failing safe.

If the lock freaks out - and yeah, I'm having problems with my HomeKit stuff every now and then - I need the physical key on me. That already defeats the purpose. Otherwise I need to grab the spare key from wherever I keep it. This is not a mere inconvenience, this is an emergency procedure.
by lesuorac | 2025-08-13 17:16:32+00:00
Where's interest payments?

Based on their omission I assume you're computing these numbers with them split out but it hardly seems fair to say you're spending "900" on defense when the total cost of paying that "900" is going to be much more since you had to borrow.

It's like saying a house only costs 1M when you end up paying over 1M in interest as well as the principal for 2M.
by crinkly | 2025-08-13 17:17:29+00:00
Yeah that. The company I work for has an annual revenue of about 6x the valuation of Netlify. We're busy sucking Gartner off at every possible corner and learning it's a mistake over and over again. Everyone we know is as well.

Some of the startup industry has no idea how enterprise is at all. There aren't even any trendy CEO/CTO here. It's all suits.

Not all things are sexy.
by aatd86 | 2025-08-13 17:18:06+00:00
LLMs definitely have personalities. And changing ones at that. gemini free tier was great for a few days but lately it keeps gaslighting me even when it is wrong (which has become quite often on the more complex tasks). To the point I am considering going back to claude. I am cheating on my llms. :D

edit: I realize now and find important to note that I haven't even considered upping the gemini tier. I probably should/could try. LLM hopping.
by rprend | 2025-08-13 17:18:14+00:00
Since February, Teddy and I have worked tirelessly to build a Visa+Mastercard competitor. We quit our jobs and built an instant clearing, mobile first, pay-by-bank network. However, we failed to get any adoption besides thieves and mobsters.

A couple weeks ago, we decided to pivot away from Zenobia Pay. Today, we are open sourcing all the code we wrote: the core payments service, the merchant dashboard, the ecommerce integrations, the transfer status websocket service, and the iOS app. It is all free and MIT licensed.

To go live, you will need a fintech banking partner, so this isn't a one-click-deploy. That said, I hope it will save a lot of time for somebody who wants to try where we failed. I've seen a few HackerNews commenters talk about this recently, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676559.

In the blog post, I go through the different customer iterations we tried and the problems we faced with each. If you just want to see the code, here are the links: - https://github.com/zenobia-pay/ios - https://github.com/zenobia-pay/zenobia-pay - https://github.com/zenobia-pay/core
by superkuh | 2025-08-13 17:18:25+00:00
Nah, LE and ACME only hides the enormous complexity of CA TLS certs. And if they'd set it up when LE came out then it'd have stopped working by now because acme protocol doesn't work with LE anymore. Only acme2 protocol works. This is just one example. There's also the 4 times the LE root certs have expired in the last ~7 years. Not even thinking about all the certbot or acme client issues that can happen.

Unmantained HTTPS with CA TLS only has a lifetime of a couple years at best. Sometimes just a few months. Not that it'd be bad to have, but for a long living website you have to do HTTP+HTTPS. Not just fragile CA TLS HTTPS only.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-13 17:18:29+00:00
A literal, plain-language reading of the Constitution is sufficient. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: [The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Copyright doesn't promote the progress of science. Rather the opposite, as it allows journals that contribute nothing to progress to charge the rest of us to access research our taxes paid for.

As for "arts," useful and otherwise, those are secured these days via unbreakable permanent DRM, which overtly violates the constitutional basis of copyright law as a time-limited bargain with the public domain. You should be at least as outraged about that as you are about AI, but evidently you're not.

Meanwhile, you'd have to have rocks in your head to argue that AI doesn't constitute scientific progress at a bare minimum.
by andy99 | 2025-08-13 17:18:30+00:00
See also "Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059857

FWIW, I disagree with this logic

It has nothing to do with the CoL where you live, and everything to do with how much the company values you in that role.

It's not about cost of living, it's about supply and demand. If you want people in e.g Bay Area to consider you at all, you'll have to offer them more than you'd need to get the attention of people in Warsaw. That's why remote salaries can still vary by location.
by ttd | 2025-08-13 17:18:42+00:00
Yes - but there are other curve classes (like P-H) that have an exact solution and don't need approximation. Bezier curves have tons of nice properties but also a lot of shortcomings, for example not being able represent conic sections like circles and ellipses without introducing weighting (rationals), which complicate computations even further. So, depending on what you're doing with them, it's worth exploring other curve types IMO.
by chiph | 2025-08-13 17:19:26+00:00
One of the things I learned going through my own treatment (prostate) was that everyone's cancer is different. Which makes sense if you think about the variability in malignant cell growth.

So something that cures half the patients and only requires an office or outpatient visit every few weeks (no surgery, no radiation) is astounding. This result will likely lead to further research using this approach.
by kccqzy | 2025-08-13 17:19:27+00:00
This is also my favorite thing about floating point numbers. Unfortunately languages like Python try to be smart and prevent me from doing it. Compare:

>>> 1.0/0.0 ZeroDivisionError >>> np.float64(1)/np.float64(0) inf

I'm so used to writing such zero division in other languages like C/C++ that this Python quirk still trips me up.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-08-13 17:19:55+00:00
This is really cool, but I find projects that have thousands of people depending on it not cutting a stable release really distasteful.

Edit: Downvote me all you want, that's reality folks, if you don't release v1.0.0, the interface you consume can change without you realizing it.

Don't consume major version 0 software, it'll bite you one day. Convince your maintainers to release stable cuts if they've been sitting on major version 0 for years. It's just lazy and immature practice abusing semantic versioning. Maintainers can learn and grow. It's normal.

Dehydrated has been major version 0 for 7 years, it's probably past due.

See also React, LÖVE, and others that made 0.n.x jumps to n.x.x. (https://0ver.org)

CalVer: "If both you and someone you don't know use your project seriously, then use a serious version."

SemVer: "If your software is being used in production, it should probably already be 1.0.0."

https://0ver.org/about.html
by varispeed | 2025-08-13 17:20:10+00:00
That “hierarchy” only works if the foundations stay intact. A service/finance economy without domestic manufacturing is like a skyscraper with no lower floors - great view until the support gives way. Manufacturing isn’t just a rung you discard, it’s strategic infrastructure. Lose it and you become dependent on those “lower tier” nations for essentials - and your position in the hierarchy is theirs to decide.

And participation in the service economy isn’t even open to everyone. In the UK, a working-class person can’t just start a small service business - IR35 and similar rules ensure they can’t make a profit. The rich have captured both the economy and policymaking, shifting into pure wealth extraction mode. Everything gets more expensive, ordinary people get poorer, and with no stake in production or ownership, there’s no one left to buy the services the “upper tier” depends on. Western capitalism is eating itself.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-08-13 17:20:12+00:00
My tech (I was founding engineer and CTO) company took over a co-working space and expanded it, we ran that portion of it at break even.

We intentionally set out to create a social club/co-working space. A lot goes into it. I'm a non-theist who comes from a multi generational group of theist church planters (like 100s of churches, just over and over), it's a multi factorial process with distinct transitions in space-time and community size, where each transition has to be handled so you don't alienate your communities founding members (who will be very different from later members) and still are able to grow.

People don't do it because they can't see the value while they are in the early mess of it. You have to like people to pull it off, you have to NOT be a high control person who can operate at high control at certain developmental stages. You have to have a moral compass everyone understands and you are consistent with, tech people like 0 trust. You have to create a maximum trust environment which means NOT extracting value from the community but understanding that the value is intrinsic in the community.

You have to design a space to facilitate work and play. It's not hard but you have to get everything right, community can't have mono culture and it must be enjoyable/uncomfortable, and you must design things so people can choose their level of engagement and grow into the community. It's easier once it has enough intertia that they understand they are building a thing with real benefits.

Even things like the flow of foot traffic within the space, chokepoints narrowing, these kinds of thing all effect how people interact.
by nlawalker | 2025-08-13 17:20:47+00:00
I think the main problem is that the source GP is using, https://github.com/firebase/firebase-admin-java, contained almost nothing that context7 extracted as "docs".

It looks like https://firebase.google.com/docs/ is being refreshed as I type this, I imagine that using that as a source and including "Java" in the topic filter might give more results (or maybe the https://github.com/firebase/firebase-docs has the same content).
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 17:21:15+00:00
People want the feelings associated with love. They don't care how they get it.

The advantage of "real" love, health wise, is that the other person acts as a moderator. When things start to get out of hand they will back away. Alternatives, like drugs, tend to spiral of out of control when an individual's self-control is the only limiting factor. GPT on the surface seems more like being on the drug end of the spectrum, ready to love bomb you until you can't take it anymore, but the above suggests that it will also back away, so perhaps its love is actually more like another person than it may originally seem.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-13 17:21:23+00:00
> if you truly did think in the language you speak, how could this situation happen?

As far as how it happens to me is concerned, either something closer to speech than raw thoughts reports back the data in shared memory is invalid for selected language, or I find there's no text representation exist for what I am trying to say.

The "raw" thoughts work with the currently active language, for me, so at least for me, I just know strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not even a hypothesis, but just a reasonable verbalization closely matching my own observations.

I don't get why people can't take it, even in the age of LLMs. It is what it is and that old guy is just never correct even for once.
by reactordev | 2025-08-13 17:22:03+00:00
More like when the project kids show up in the millionaire neighborhood because they know they’ll get full size candy bars.

It’s not that there’s none for the others. It’s that there was this unspoken agreement, reinforced by the last 20 years, that website content is protected speech, protected intellectual property, and is copyrightable to its owner/author. Now, that trust and good faith is broken.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-08-13 17:22:04+00:00
What if we had some sort of voting system that allowed people to have some say into what they value? You wouldn't give everyone the same amount of voting credit, we'd allocate these voting credits to people depending on how much value we think they provide society.

Some might value having a nicer car and smaller house, others might want more land, and then depending on how people 'vote' with those credits.
by lupusreal | 2025-08-13 17:22:33+00:00
Most ghettos aren't built to be ghettos. They were built as nice neighborhoods and have nothing structurally wrong with them, but then had criminals and shitbags wreck the place. Ghettoification can in fact be reversed without any changes to infrastructure by simply having nice people move in who give a shit and make an effort to clean up and maintain their properties. This is derogatorily called "gentrification".

Also, your ratios are absurdly out of wack. 79% of the country doesn't live in a ghetto and you don't need to be economically or socially privileged to maintain a nice neighborhood. Most working class neighborhoods are not ghettos, nor even resemble one in the slightest.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-13 17:22:42+00:00
1) because they're the ones who most benefit from it. Because they still need the research itself, even if someone else isn't paying for it.

2) Harvard has a $54 billion endowment and spends $6.4 billion a year, that doesn't include tuition and fees, that's just what they have in the bank.

3) Actually spending the money is tax deductible and better for the economy.
by josegonzalez | 2025-08-13 17:22:48+00:00
This is great. Dokku (of which I am the maintainer) has a hokey solution for this with our letsencrypt plugin, but thats caused a slew of random issues for users. Nginx sometimes gets "stuck" reloading and then can't find the endpoint for some reason. The fewer moving knobs, the better.

That said, its going to take quite some time for this to land in stable repositories for Ubuntu and Debian, and it doesn't (yet?) have DNS challenge support - meaning no wildcards - so I don't think it'll be useful for Dokku in the short-term at least.
by anonym29 | 2025-08-13 17:23:00+00:00
There is another framing/view that the authoritarianism-anarchism axis is perpendicular to the left-right axis. Nobody's suggesting that fascism isn't fundamentally authoritarian, but "left leaning" is not mutually exclusive with "authoritarian", nor is it a synonym for "anarchist". See: East Germany, Soviet Union, China, North Korea.

Also, it's not kind to call someone 'daft' for expressing a political view you disagree with. Nobody's saying you should accept their perspective uncritically, but you don't need to be mean-spirited or engage in name-calling to critique their perspective. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by paddy_m | 2025-08-13 17:23:05+00:00
I have heard multiple people claim that macros are incompatible with strong or static typing and I don't see why.

If there were a lisp with optional static typing like typescript, it would seem to me to be completely possible to write macros that write types. In many cases it woudl do away with the need for generic types (and allow multiple competing syntaxes for dynamic types). Most interestingly it would allow you to write new generic forms instead of waiting for whatever the language designer gives you. It would also allow you access to types at runtime (which the typescript language designers took away).

Maybe people were telling me that lisp style macros were incompatible with hindley millner typing, but I still don't see how. The macros would just emit a hindley milmner subset.

What am I missing?
by soulofmischief | 2025-08-13 17:23:17+00:00
Yes, I am aware of bookmarks, and as someone who used to use them quite a lot, I'm aware of their limitations. Some things are just ephemeral and should remain so. Browser search is great. As you mentioned, tabs lazy load so the main functionality is the same, so it's presumptuous to assume I get no value out of my organizational strategy.
by zamalek | 2025-08-13 17:23:19+00:00
I'm of two minds about it (assuming there isn't any ago stroking): on one hand interacting with a human is probably a major part of the healing process, on the other it might be easier to be honest with a machine.

Also, have you seen the prices of therapy these days? $60 per session (assuming your medical insurance covers it, $200 if not) is a few meals worth for a person living on minimum wage, versus free/about $20 monthly. Dr. GPT drives a hard bargain.