MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ggreer | 2025-08-12 19:06:13+00:00
Similar policies and pricing? You can get Android phones for much cheaper than iPhones. And many smartphone manufacturers let you run whatever you want on their devices. The largest smartphone manufacturer in the world (Samsung) ships most of their phones with two app stores, and lets customers enable side loading with a few taps.

If you're talking about policies and pricing for developers, then why not apply that argument to app stores owned by Sony, Microsoft, & Nintendo? Those are much more restrictive than anything in the smartphone world. Heck, even Steam takes a 30% cut.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-08-12 19:06:25+00:00
Is "impossible to say" needed for any disclaimer about trying to control for confounding factors in retrospective and observational studies?

Regarding the subject of whether vegan and vegetarian diets reduce cancer risks, I don't want to dive too deep.

But this issue seems to plague all studies of this kind, bo matter in which direction, right?

E.g. here it is an argument for doubting a positive outcome correlation (higher status, money, exercise, health attention vs diet), but it goes the other way around and is just as flawed.

E.g. stroke risk and pollution, air quality, noise, size of accomodation etc. vs income, social status and resilience.

"Impossible" to me sounds almost like a capitulation?

As if someone would say "It is impossible to say whether pollution, noise, income, diet or exercise effect stroke risk in addition to diet".

Isn't the purpose of statistics to untangle these webs of correlations.

I've found this dubious all my life, but again: in either direction, be it affirming or denying an assumed causation.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-12 19:06:43+00:00
Judges don't get elected in the US (except for some state and local judges) and yet the US is a superpower. I don't think judicial selection plays a major factor in determining superpower status.

Can you name any country that has ever been a superpower where judges (of the national judiciary if it has separate judiciaries for constituent parts from the national one) were predominantly democratically elected?
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-12 19:06:59+00:00
I really want to believe this, but I have a hard time seeing this applying to the ultra-wealthy nowadays. There are far too many strategies to hold on to your wealth or to get it back.

Aside from lottery winners whose assets start liquid, are there examples of people in the last 5 years with over $100 million in assets that permanently lost most of their wealth without doing something really stupid?
by gethly | 2025-08-12 19:07:04+00:00
I have been using bitbucket before it got acquired by atlassian, which was in 2010, so i am sure github changed quite a bit since then. Even though i do have a github account, i don't use it for anything else other than creating or commenting on issues for other repos. So i have no clue about present day github capabilities as i am satisfied with bitbucket and had no need to explore github in depth.
by godelski | 2025-08-12 19:07:44+00:00
> real intelligence isn't just about having seen the answers before, it's about being good at games and specifically new situations where you can't just pattern match your way out

It is insane to me that so many people believe intelligence is measurable by pure question answer testing. There's hundreds of years of discussion about how this is limited in measuring human intelligence. I'm sure we all even know someone who's a really good test take but you also wouldn't consider to be really bright. I'm sure every single one of also knows someone in the other camp (bad at tests but considered bright).

The definition you put down is much more agreed upon in the scientific literature. While we don't have a good formal definition of intelligence there is a difference between no definition. I really do hope people read more about intelligence and how we measure it in humans and animals. It is very messy and there's a lot of noise, but at least we have a good idea of the directions to move in. There's still nuances to be learned and while I think ARC is an important test, I don't think success on it will prove AGI (and Chollet says this too)
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-12 19:07:50+00:00
Incumbents in a bad system always argue that it's better than their worst characterization of the alternative. The reality is that elected officials still have very little accountability. They're only subject to re-election once every few years and it's virtually impossible to get rid of one mid-term unless they get themselves arrested.

I get your point about petitions and direct democracy being a form of who shouts louder (in the media, advertising, # of campaign events etc), but this is equally true of regular elections. It's even more so in a first-past-the-post system like the UK, whose two major parties have no interest in shifting to a proportional representation system because it would advantage smaller parties at their expense, even though the result would more closely reflect public preference.

In my view, parliamentary systems developed a few centuries ago have their advantages but also come with a great deal of historical baggage (systems that benefit a particular class of candidate and so forth), and they're buckling under the pressures of a real-time information society where people know transparency and timely publication of information are technically possible but such goods are systematically withheld from the public.
by rootusrootus | 2025-08-12 19:07:55+00:00
If you are suggesting that LLMs are proving quite good at taking over the low skilled work that probably 90% of devs spend the majority of their time doing, I totally agree. It is the simplest explanation for why many people think they are magic, while some people find very little value.

On the occasion that I find myself having to write web code for whatever reason, I'm very happy to have Claude. I don't enjoy coding for the web, like at all.
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-12 19:08:12+00:00
The best position in the middle is the combination of Python and C. I don't know why people are so aghast about writing small C programs, compiling them, and launching them with Python through an os call.

>I prefer a language where I don't have to constantly worry if the type system is defeated at runtime.

If you are doing this with Python, you are doing something very wrong, even without mypy. As for NodeJS, just use Typescript.
by morleytj | 2025-08-12 19:08:12+00:00
I now feel the need to comment that this thread does illustrate an issue I have with the naming of the philosophical/internet community of rationalism.

One can very clearly be a rational individual or an individual who practices reason and not associate with the internet community of rationalism. The median member of the group defined as "not being part of the internet-organized movement of rationalism and not reading lesswrong posts" is not "religious extremist striking the world trade center and committing an atrocious act of terrorism", it's "random person on the street."

And to preempt a specific response some may make to this, yes, the thread here is talking about rationalism as discussed in the blog post above as organized around Yudowsky or slate star codex, and not the rationalist movement of like, Spinoza and company. Very different things philosophically.
by Alex3917 | 2025-08-12 19:08:23+00:00
> From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.

To build a one person unicorn, the main thing you need is an arbitrage opportunity for getting users that is unattractive to multi-person companies. Once established, this business may well turn into a network effect monopoly, but I don't think that is the crux of what is needed to get going.
by GodelNumbering | 2025-08-12 19:08:26+00:00
Claude in particular abuses the word 'Comprehensive' a lot. You express that you're unhappy with its approach, it will likely comeback with "Comprehensive plan to ..." and then write like 3 bullet points under it, that is of course after profusely apologizing. On a sidenote, I wish LLMs never apologized and instead just said I don't know how to do this.
by reactordev | 2025-08-12 19:08:30+00:00
I believe their plan is to offload the risk to the chains. I've been asked by several firms if I would be interested in joining them - so I assume that want to lock up their assets on the chain or want to offload risk to it. I'm more keen on the latter.

Still - nobody make any sudden moves and we'll ride out what remaining value we can squeeze.
by koolba | 2025-08-12 19:08:34+00:00
> Diversify, be reasonable and be prepared for it to happen someday.

Indeed, but even with something like SPY, there’s quite the concentration in tech:

Top 10 Holdings (37.99% of Total Assets) NVDA 8.07% MSFT 7.37% AAPL 5.77% AMZN 4.11% META 3.12% AVGO 2.57% GOOGL 2.08% GOOG 1.68% BRK-B 1.61% TSLA 1.61%

Now that’s intentional as it’s market cap weighted. But the investing world is in for a rude awakening if things start to pop.
by xp84 | 2025-08-12 19:08:37+00:00
> most prefer to experience 2 childbirths. A few will go for 3, in case they didn’t get a boy or girl, but the amount that want more than 3 is basically negligible.

I guess in societies that hadn't succumbed to nihilism, what people "prefer" was less of a direct line to what people would do.

> health or physical risks women face in partnering up with a man, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, infant rearing (lack of sleep),

> harassment and violence against women

> doesn’t make sense for women to partner up with the bottom 10% of men? Or even 20% of men?

It seems clear where you are coming from is about female victimhood, and yes, I agree that biologically there are inherently risks. I'd argue that Western society mitigates those with orders of magnitude less maternal childbirth mortality, and balances them with legally enforced child support and alimony. The risk to the father is that he has children with someone who will change and treat him like dirt, leaving him to choose between staying there for his child and being miserable, vs leaving and being financially ruined and potentially unable to move on.

But it's wild to me to suggest that one in five humans who are male deserve to be Forever Alone. Obviously the "bottom 20%" of women by whatever measure you think determines "worth" should be with their "bottom 20%" male counterparts.

I agree though that what you describe is what's being practiced. Studies have shown very clearly that if you get everyone rated by attractiveness (such as by polling a large group to rate each person) and ask each woman which man she would accept, even the 1s and 2s will not consider the male 1s and 2s, and in fact most will not even consider the 4s and 5s. The male 10s and 9s are all drowning in options, the 6-8s are eventually finding someone, and the 1-5s of both sexes are having a hard time forming relationships. The women are alone because they think they deserve 9s and 10s, who have "better" options and thus will only temporarily use them; and the men are alone because essentially zero women want their attention.

The outcome of the above mismatch does seem to totally make sense with collapsing fertility.
by abc_lisper | 2025-08-12 19:08:43+00:00
I doubt there is much art to getting LLM work for you, despite all the hoopla. Any competent engineer can figure that much out.

The real dichotomy is this. If you are aware of the tools/APIs and the Domain, you are better off writing the code on your own, except may be shallow changes like refactorings. OTOH, if you are not familiar with the domain/tools, using a LLM gives you a huge legup by preventing you from getting stuck and providing intial momentum.
by derefr | 2025-08-12 19:09:37+00:00
> Well, arguably that's exactly where we are

Yep; from the perspective of evolution (and more specifically, those animal species that only gain capability generationally by evolutionary adaptation of instinct), humans are the recursively self-(fitness-)improving accident.

Our species-aggregate capacity to compete for resources within the biosphere went superlinear in the middle of the previous century; and we've had to actively hit the brakes on how much of everything we take since then, handicapping . (With things like epidemic obesity and global climate change being the result of us not hitting those brakes quite hard enough.)

Insofar as a "singularity" can be defined on a per-agent basis, as the moment when something begins to change too rapidly for the given agent to ever hope to catch up with / react to new conditions — and so the agent goes from being a "player at the table" to a passive observer of what's now unfolding around them... then, from the rest of our biosphere's perspective, they've 100% already witnessed the "human singularity."

No living thing on Earth besides humans now has any comprehension of how the world has been or will be reshaped by human activity; nor can ever hope to do anything to push back against such reshaping. Every living thing on Earth other than humans, will only survive into the human future, if we humans either decide that it should survive, and act to preserve it; or if we humans just ignore the thing, and then just-so-happen to never accidentally do anything to wipe it from existence without even noticing.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-12 19:09:40+00:00
No, Notch wasn't alone, even at the very beginning of Mojang: he founded the studio with Jakob Porsér and soon after Carl Manneh. It had 25 employees in 2012, and close to a hundred in 2014 by the time it got acquired.

No venture is ever done alone. Not just because founders are, as the article say, unable to even handle their own emails, but because every single founder in the world lacks talent. We all do. You're not good enough, and you never will be, especially not to hit a billion. That's a fact. Every single human creating has been a collaborative one, and Sam Altman's delusions don't change that.
by Analemma_ | 2025-08-12 19:09:46+00:00
I wish the world worked this way, but I don't think it does, especially in tech. If you "do one thing well", the cloud hyperscalers will use their billions to copy whatever that is, and add your "one good thing" into their bundled subscriptions or cloud plans. At which point, any rational CTO will go "why should we pay for this, when we're already getting it via AWS/O365/whatever, and with better integration with our existing tooling to boot?"

I don't think "do one thing well" can succeed in this world, which is why Atlassian, Dropbox, etc. keep on launching things like office suites even though that makes no sense considering their core competencies. It's the only way not be streamrolled by FAANG.
by do_not_redeem | 2025-08-12 19:10:08+00:00
Those specialized network cards have ASICs that parse network packets and don't need additional memory to do their job. You can easily build a fixed-size hardware register to hold an IPv4 packet header, for example.

But a "high level CPU" is all about operating on high-level objects in memory, so your question becomes, how do you store a linked list in memory more efficiently than a RISC CPU? How do you pointer chase to the next node faster than a RISC CPU? Nobody has figured it out yet, and I agree with the article, I don't see how it's possible. CPUs are already general-purpose and very efficient.
by ofalkaed | 2025-08-12 19:10:43+00:00
This summary for XY 1.7 [1] seems a better writeup of what XY actually is and the 1.7 links at the bottom of OP also provide terse documentation.

>XY is a direct descendant of the vector language K and the concatenative language Joy.

[1] http://www.nsl.com/k/xy/xy.txt
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-12 19:10:48+00:00
Many years ago I met Eliezer Yudkowsky. He handed me a pamphlet extolling the virtues of rationality. The whole thing came across as a joke, as a parody of evangelizing. We both laughed.

I glanced at it once or twice and shoved it into a bookshelf. I wish I kept it, because I never thought so much would happen around him.
by justcallmejm | 2025-08-12 19:10:59+00:00
"In the A.I. economy, it seems possible that many of the rewards will go to top firms that can afford to build and maintain large A.I. models..."

This is a flawed (and common, still, somehow!) idea of where value is within AI. The gigantic models are commoditizing rapidly. They practically incinerate cash.

There is real value being created at the layer where users can use a product they can actually trust. LLMs are certainly not that.

Our system, Aloe, is model agnostic - so when next month's model comes out we just get better. And we already beat the pants off the frontier models in capability, spending a tiny fraction of a percent of the capital to build the system.

The existing concentration of capital into big LLM companies is indeed a bubble. Eventually some of those VCs will wake up and invest where the value is being created, I presume.
by lesuorac | 2025-08-12 19:12:05+00:00
Do keep in mind.

H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role so somebody comes into the US on a visa to fill that slot.

O-1 [1] is a for when somebody non-American has a lot of skill and is allowed to immigrate into the US to perform it.

I still think H-1B visas should require some kind of additional fee proportional to training an American to fill that role. Afaik, most of the H-1B visas are just abuse where you hire somebody at a low wage than you'd need to for an otherwise legal resident so there needs to be some kind of higher opportunity cost to the company.

[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-12 19:12:13+00:00
No. Jeb was the main developer from 2011 onwards, the moment Minecraft left alpha. Unless there's a time hole I'm not aware of that swallowed 2011, 2012, 2013 and most of 2014, Notch is pretty much only responsible for the very base of the game.

In addition, code is not the only thing that makes a game. Artists, music, management, and many more.
by trod1234 | 2025-08-12 19:12:15+00:00
> but it needs an edit pass - for politeness/assumption of positive regard.

We will have to disagree.

I have appreciated that, though the post isn't repetitive, each point has a fine and different nuance its meant to convey, and a single tie-in back to the overarching point/theme at the end signaling the completion of the idea; this is a very common writing style/structure when conveying information.

The problem with doing as you mention is that any further reduction would introduce ambiguity, and fragmentary thought, through improper generalization/isolation. These would then be latched upon towards subtle harassment attacks, like nullification, which have become all too popular on all platforms today.

You'll notice the people I responded to don't provide reflected appraisal, as someone earnest would, and that is needed to write or tailor responses towards a common audience level, or bridge the comprehensive gap. This is a failing on their part, not mine.

They are in all likelihood either bots seeking to remove useful information, or are doing so purposefully following a critical theory mindset which are a particularly destructive engrammed set of trauma loops, though a rare few manage to crawl and pull themselves out of it towards actual reasoning when the mistakes in reasoning are brought to light.

Politeness and positive regard aren't what you seem to think. Washington wrote about politeness, and aside from the dated material, it still holds up today.

You will find much in his 110 Rules of Civility which constitute politeness which are present in my writings.

The 'disarmed politeness' you seem to want is based in an impossibility when you strip all the indirection and contradiction away. The brevity you seem to want ignores the fine nuance/comprehensiveness needed to be polite, and the resulting outcome of doing either naturally leads to "lies to children", and the imposition of harassment for volunteering useful information, something I won't do disarmed. An impasse.

Charity is provided and given solely on the terms of the giver, and not at the barrel of a gun, blackmail, or inherent threat thereof and volunteers stop giving when it costs them more than they were willing to give, and its an individual decision.

I'll have to remember Mathew 7:6 when next I consider providing such charity, though I'm glad and appreciate you letting me know you found the substance useful. So few people do this and it is appreciated.
by worldsayshi | 2025-08-12 19:12:20+00:00
I think it's very much down to which kind of problem you're trying to solve.

If a solution can subtly fail and it is critical that it doesn't, LLM is net negative.

If a solution is easy to verify or if it is enough that it walks like a duck and quacks like one, LLM can be very useful.

I've had examples of both lately. I'm very much both bullish and bearish atm.
by jacobr1 | 2025-08-12 19:13:00+00:00
That provides a good case study. A single person can bootstrap a company, along with outsourcing and a ton of grit. Moving the boundaries on what tasks are automatable, at difference cost points, and different levels of experience required to figure it out probably have all shifted in favor of individuals or small founder groups in recent years.

Maybe you can stay bootstrapped longer with less capital. That seems true.
by cmdli | 2025-08-12 19:13:16+00:00
My experience has been entirely the opposite as an IC. If I spend the time to delve into the code base to the point that I understand how it works, AI just serves as a mild improvement in writing code as opposed to implementing it normally, saving me maybe 5 minutes on a 2 hour task.

On the other hand, I’ve found success when I have no idea how to do something and tell the AI to do it. In that case, the AI usually does the wrong thing but it can oftentimes reveal to me the methods used in the rest of the codebase.
by Apes | 2025-08-12 19:13:27+00:00
It’s not even clear that an auction would be the most efficient way to allocate H-1Bs if we define efficiency as maximizing long-term economic and societal value, not just short-term revenue. An auction favors companies with deep pockets right now — meaning a startup looking to bring in a world-leading PhD in a critical field could lose out to a much larger firm simply filling headcount. That’s hardly an optimal outcome for innovation or competitiveness.
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-12 19:13:28+00:00
I don't think this works right now tbh.

It has the same problem as LMArena (which already had webarena): better aesthetics are so far out of distribution you can't even train on the feedback you get here.

You just get a new form of turbo-slop as some hidden preference takes over. With text output that ended up being extensive markdown and emojis. Here that might be people accidentally associating frosted surfaces with relatively better aesthetics, for example.

The problem is so bad LMArena maintains a seperate ranking where they strip away styling entirely
by realusername | 2025-08-12 19:13:33+00:00
I'm talking from the point of view of app developers.

Sure I'm open to the idea that there's fierce competition on the hardware, on the software though, there's absolutely zero signs of it.

> then why not apply that argument to app stores owned by Sony, Microsoft, & Nintendo?

We do have signs that there's competition in the console world, if you want to make that parallel, when was the last time Google or Apple paid for an app exclusive similarly to game exclusives?
by eaglelamp | 2025-08-12 19:13:48+00:00
The primary harm of a bubble is *not* a crash in equity values, it is the misallocation of capital. The worst outcome would be for the misallocation to continue due to the intervention of asset owners with the most to lose who are also in control of the state.

All of the events you listed have had significant economic effects and required massive intervention from the state to buoy asset prices. The longer this continues the more our economy becomes geared to producing "value" for this small, and shrinking, group of owners at the expense of everyone else.