MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quietbritishjim | 2025-08-12 21:14:18+00:00
It still seems like you have invented some notion of "program" that doesn't really exist. Most suspicious is when you say this:

> So what I mean is that no file matching <winkle.h> has been presented as part of the external file set given to the implementation for processsing.

The thing is, there is no "external file set" that includes header files, so this sentence makes no sense.

Note that when the preprocessor is run, the only inputs are the file being preprocessed (i.e., the .c file) and the list of directories to find include files (called the include path). That's not really part of the ISO standard, but it's almost universal in practice. Then the output of the preprocessor is passed to the compiler, and now it's all one flat file so there isn't even a concept of included files at this point. The object files from compilation are then passed to the linker, which again doesn't care about headers (or indeed the top-level source files). There are more details in practice (especially with libraries) but that's the essence.

I wonder if your confusion is based on seeing header files in some sort of project-like structure in an IDE (like Visual Studio). But those are just there for ease of editing - the compiler (/preprocessor) doesn't know or care which header files are in your IDE's project, it only cares about the directories in the include path. The same applies to CMake targets: you can add include files with target_sources(), but that's just to make them show up in any generated IDE projects; it has no effect on compilation.

Or are you just maybe saying that the developer's file system isn't part of the ISO C standard, so this whole textual inclusion process is by some meaning not defined by the standard? If so, I don't think that matches the conventional meaning of undefined behaviour.

If it's neither of those, could you clarify what exactly you mean by "the external file set given to the implementation for processing"?
by _QrE | 2025-08-12 21:14:37+00:00
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but you can add filters to RSS feeds. What is proposed is pretty much just RSS, except for one specific item. Yes, it's more work on your side, but asking the creator to manage updates for whatever one thing any/every random person is interested in is pretty unrealistic, especially since the people asking for this are going to be explicitly not interested in everything else about the creator.

> There’s no AI to this. No magic. No problems to be solved.

Why would you not involve yourself in the new hotness? You _can_ put AI into this. Instead of using some expression to figure out whether a new article has links to the previous ones in the series / a matching title, you can have a local agent check your RSS feed and tell you if it's what you're looking for, or else delete the article. For certain creators this might even be a sensible choice, depending on how purple their prose is and their preferred website setup.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-08-12 21:15:02+00:00
The bigger problem I'm seeing is engineers that become over reliant on vibe coding tools are starting to lose context on how systems are designed and work.

As a result, their productivity might go up on simple "ticket like tasks" where it's basically just simple implementation (find the file(s) to edit, modify it, test it) but when they start using it for all their tasks suddenly they don't know how anything works. Or worse, they let the LLM dictate and bad decisions are made.

These same people are also very dogmatic on the use of these tools. They refuse to just code when needed.

Don't get me wrong, this stuff has value. But I just hate seeing how it's made many engineers complacent and accelerated their ability to add to tech debt like never before.
by guerrilla | 2025-08-12 21:15:20+00:00
> I don’t think it’s just (or even particularly) bad axioms, I think it’s that people tend to build up “logical” conclusions where they think each step is a watertight necessity that follows inevitably from its antecedents, but actually each step is a little bit leaky, leading to runaway growth in false confidence.

This is what you get when you naively re-invent philosophy from the ground up while ignoring literally 2500 years of actual debugging of such arguments by the smartest people who ever lived.

You can't diverge from and improve on what everyone else did AND be almost entirely ignorant of it, let alone have no training whatsoever in it. This extreme arrogance I would say is the root of the problem.
by IX-103 | 2025-08-12 21:15:58+00:00
That's an unnecessary charicaterature. I have met many rationalists of both genders and found most of them quite pleasant. But it seems that the proportion of "arrogant dickheads" unfortunately matches that of the general population. Whether it's "irrational people" or "liberal elites" these assholes always seem to find someone to look down on.
by churchill | 2025-08-12 21:16:02+00:00
The US unemployment rate currently stands at 4.2% - despite all the hundreds of millions of jobs that have been outsourced to Chinese workers. Why isn't this gap larger? The reason is simple: as jobs move to places where they can be done cheaper, the market reorganizes itself! That's why horses, telegrams, and zeppelins are not missed. Better tech. has replaced them; these Americans got better jobs, mostly by moving out to other parts of the country.

That's why unemployment is so low.

>The QE point you're making is interesting. In addition to that I think it should be noted that the money that was "printed" disproportionately went to the richest, just as the benefits of globalization did.

It's not anyone's fault that Western governments decided to dilute their people's purchasing power and transfer it to the wealthiest. China (and Vietnam, Ethiopia, etc.) is actively helping those who have been so robbed by producing low-cost goods they can buy and enjoy in abundance, despite the constant erosion of their wealth.
by antisthenes | 2025-08-12 21:16:16+00:00
It's crazy to read this, because by writing what you wrote you basically show that you don't understand what an axiom is.

You need to review the definition of the word.

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

The smartest people are unsure about their higher level beliefs, but I can assure you that they almost certainly don't re-evaluate "axioms" as you put it on a daily or weekly basis. Not that it matters, as we almost certainly can't verify who these people are based on an internet comment.

> I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something, especially if they derived it on their own.

That's only your problem, not anyone else's. If you think people can't arrive to a tangible and useful approximation of truth, then you are simply delusional.
by gambiting | 2025-08-12 21:16:20+00:00
>>You can interview people and ask, do you have funds? Do you have a job? They say yes and go in, that's the end of it.

How do you think this works now then? Or how it worked with non-EU people before Brexit? You asked them and they had to provide proof. If they couldn't they were turned around. It's not rocket science.

>>There isn't a way under EU law to just say no there are too many people already, you can't come.

And again, the existing legal ways of removing EU immigrants would have helped with that, but it was easier to take the entire country of the EU than just use them.

>>The political class is completely bought into mass migration being a moral good

Which political class? Tories which have been in power for forever? the same Tories who ran the "hostile environment" company against immigrants? Or Labour, which is now making it much harder and more expensive to both get in and stay in this country legally?
by Miraste | 2025-08-12 21:16:31+00:00
Yes, you can't use any of the heuristics you develop for human writing to decide if the LLM is saying something stupid, because its best insights and its worst hallucinations all have the same formatting, diction, and style. Instead, you need to engage your frontal cortex and rationally evaluate every single piece of information it presents, and that's tiring.
by keeda | 2025-08-12 21:16:33+00:00
People themselves don't know when they are wrong, and that is why high-functioning organizations have all sorts of guardrails in place. Trivial example, code reviews. Now, code reviews are multi-purpose, and their primary benefit is not just catching bugs, but they do catch bugs pretty often (there are actual studies about this.)

So my experience in working with AI is actually much more similar to working with people, except I have to correct the AI much less frequently.

I always say, AI is technology that behaves like people, and so the trick to working with it effectively is to approach it like working with a colleague, with all their specific quirks and skillsets, rather than a tool.
by nailer | 2025-08-12 21:17:37+00:00
Ramzan Kadyrov got his hands on a Cybertruck, and it was disabled remotely. Asides from the trade embargo with Russia, Kadyrov also trolled Elon by thanking him personally, Telsa found it and turned it off: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/20/business/chechnya-kadyrov-mus...
by techpineapple | 2025-08-12 21:17:52+00:00
I really find tech "optimism" distasteful. It's become this weird battle ground where I dunno, if you're reasonably optimistic but think AI isn't set to become a god you're called a doomer, at the same time that Tech optimists are basically giving up on humanity.

I guess on a more interesting side - it feels interesting more and more how our polarization leads us to see our side as inevitable. It seems inevitable to me that there will not be a fast takeoff, that's just the way that the universe works, that things are incremental, that things grow fast for a while and then taper off. And as someone who believed this, it still is super _weird_ seeing all the people say no, AI is different, it's going to lead to Utopia.

As weird as it is for people who read this and believe the opposite think I am. But I think this is also a reaction to where we are as a species. Everyone wants the easy answer.

On some weird level, it's weird to me that the same psychological quirks that inhabit folks and make them believe in sort of cults or spiritual beliefs also inhabit billionaires, and make markets spend billions of dollars.

But yeah. This article is... Real is beautiful! The possible is beautiful! AI is cool, let's enjoy it and all the other cool things in life.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-12 21:17:57+00:00
I don't see what nix is doing for you? There's vim, absolutely, coreutils (though I don't immediately see anything GNU-specific), and a tiny wrapper script that happens to be written in flake.nix but could trivially be factored out. I don't see anything that I wouldn't expect to run on, say, OpenBSD if you installed vim.

(That said, yes, it's a nice journaling system)
by intrasight | 2025-08-12 21:18:01+00:00
Kodak could rightfully lay claim to having been the first tech platform company. With the Brownie camera - released in 1900.

My father worked there for 33 years. I did an internship in 1984. My boss took me on a tour of one of the buildings at our site - where all disc cameras were manufactured. When I did my internship, the single site where I worked employed 14,000 people. Our start and end times were staggered in five minute increments to manage traffic.
by o11c | 2025-08-12 21:18:22+00:00
It's called context. The beginning of the chapter is Elijah (Elisha's master) being removed from Earth and going up (using the exact same Hebrew word) to Heaven. Considering that the thugs are clearly not pious people, "remove yourself from the world, like your master did" has only one viable interpretation.

As for my choice of the word "thugs" ("mob" would be another good word), that is necessary to preserve the connotation. Remember, there were 42 of them punished, possibly more escaped - this is a threatening crowd size (remember the duck/horse meme?). Their claimed youth does imply "not an established veteran of the major annual wars", but that's not the same as "not acquainted with violence".
by churchill | 2025-08-12 21:18:41+00:00
Taken to its natural conclusion, your idea is that we should farm our own wheat, thresh it, grind it into flour, make our own bread, and build our own homes. Should we do that?

If jobs can't be exported to specialists who can do it at scale in Asia, Europe, etc. then there should be no specialization at all! Your logic demands that everyone fend for themselves primitively, which will lead to a collapse of the abundance mass production/specialization has created for humanity.
by mmarian | 2025-08-12 21:18:46+00:00
In an ideal world, absolutely! But it's impossible to tell unless you personally know someone who can provide evidence. A couple of examples...

PostScan Mail - claims it started in 2012: https://www.postscanmail.com/about.html , which corroborates with their Android app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.postscanma... and Internet Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.post...

Escapees - claim to be the oldest, having started in '85. But their Android app was released in 2018: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.companynam..., the iOS app owner is different brand and the copyright on that listing says the company started in '95: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/escapees-mail-service/id161252.... Domain was only bought less than 2 years ago: https://whois.domaintools.com/escapeesmailservice.com

So, should you choose Escapees based on what they claim on their site?

As an aside, I used to analyze insurance companies' creditworthiness, and saw how they played the branding game because people cared about longevity.
by dijit | 2025-08-12 21:19:44+00:00
I’m don’t seem to be getting anything wrong as you haven’t disproved anything I said; in fact it reinforces it.

you don’t mention what a third type of person would look like, i only can see that you’re the first type from your comments. They’re fundamentally incompatible with each other (or, will cause major issues for each other) so being a blend of both is to be a walking contradiction.

What else are you wrong about!?
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-08-12 21:19:44+00:00
It's not about players not wanting to win, it's about wildly heterogeneous perspectives of winning. If we're not playing for cash, walking away in first place with $30 of the $100 bucks on the table isn't much different than walking away in first place with $80 of the $100 bucks. On the other hand, a second place win with $40 might be considered worse than a first place win with $30 dollars. With cash, those dollar amounts mean something intrinsically.

It leads to overly aggressive, low-information gameplay, because players will opt to "either win or lose by a lot" over "lose by a little".
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-08-12 21:21:11+00:00
The problem with China is that it is not a level playing field. Not even close. If they were an open market, then you would not see as big of a trade imbalance. They are predatory, manipulative and duplicitous.

The ideas behind globalism was to promote peace through trade and it worked for a while until China used it to try to become an empire.
by EGreg | 2025-08-12 21:21:12+00:00
Agreed, that was phrased wrong. The fruits across the board have been genetically engineered to be extremely sweet (fructose, not the syrup): https://weather.com/news/news/2018-10-03-fruit-so-sweet-zoo-...

While their nutritional quality has gone down tremendously, for vegetables too: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10969708/
by jacquesm | 2025-08-12 21:21:15+00:00
There are a lot of weapons from the former Yugoslavian war still floating around in Europe, both single pieces an much larger caches. These pop up with some regularity in crime busts and given the number of weapons that went missing (> 1 million weapons remain unaccounted for) this will likely remain a problem for a long time to come.

At least the Ukraine/Poland border now scans the bulk of the vehicles to prevent the next issue like that. But the ones that are already in the EU are going to surface only bit-by-bit as they get used or uncovered. Given how hard it is to obtain weapons here they are very valuable.

https://thedefensepost.com/2020/07/30/weapons-yugoslavia-eur...
by guerrilla | 2025-08-12 21:21:20+00:00
In traditional philosophy, rationalism and empiricism are at odds; they are essentially diametrically opposed. Rationalism prioritizes a priori reasoning while empiricism prioritizes a posteriori reasoning. You can prioritize both equally but that is neither rationalism nor empiricism in the traditional terminology. The current rationalist movement has no relation to that original rationalist movement, so the words don't actually mean the same thing. In fact, the majority of participants in the current movement seem ignorant of the historical dispute and its implications, hence the misuse of the word.
by bithive123 | 2025-08-12 21:21:36+00:00
Language models aren't world models for the same reason languages aren't world models.

Symbols, by definition, only represent a thing. They are not the same as the thing. The map is not the territory, the description is not the described, you can't get wet in the word "water".

They only have meaning to sentient beings, and that meaning is heavily subjective and contextual.

But there appear to be some who think that we can grasp truth through mechanical symbol manipulation. Perhaps we just need to add a few million more symbols, they think.

If we accept the incompleteness theorem, then there are true propositions that even a super-intelligent AGI would not be able to express, because all it can do is output a series of placeholders. Not to mention the obvious fallacy of knowing super-intelligence when we see it. Can you write a test suite for it?
by gooodvibes | 2025-08-12 21:21:49+00:00
Leetcode was never about being similar to real work. Companies aren't stupid - they know it's different and still think that they get useful signal from testing skills that don't match the day-to-day of the job. Whether that's appropriate or not is where the actual debate around the value of Leetcode is; the debate isn't whether leetcode is like day-to-day work, nobody is claiming that it is.

And LLMs don't make the difference you think they make to the viability of LC interviews. Before LLMs, you could solve an interview problem by looking it up in a database with solutions. Or (in real work) you solve these algorithmic problems by importing a library. LLMs are just the (n+1)th way to do the same thing.

Where LLMs play some role is that they make cheating in remote leetcode interviews easier.
by frankfrank13 | 2025-08-12 21:22:33+00:00
Great quote at the end that I think I resonate a lot with:

> Feeding these algorithms gobs of data is another example of how an approach that must be fundamentally incorrect at least in some sense, as evidenced by how data-hungry it is, can be taken very far by engineering efforts — as long as something is useful enough to fund such efforts and isn’t outcompeted by a new idea, it can persist.
by allan_s | 2025-08-12 21:23:21+00:00
I'm very honestly wondering if they become violent, because using socratic method has closed the other road.

I mean if you've just proven that my words and logic are actually unsound and incoherent how can I use that very logic with you? If you add to this that most people want to win an argument (when facing opposite point of view) then what's left to win but violence ?
by aaronbaugher | 2025-08-12 21:23:45+00:00
How many minutes do you think it takes to pick an apple?

The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true. Labor is a portion of the wholescale cost of food, which is a portion of the retail cost. A lot goes to shipping, packaging, processing, marketing, etc. If all migrant workers were replaced by Americans being paid a competitive wage, food prices would go up a little, but you wouldn't pay double for apples, let alone several times more. Highly-processed foods like cereal and pasta wouldn't change noticeably.
by b112 | 2025-08-12 21:23:56+00:00
I think, if you look at Boox and how they have display options and config for each app, you could do this for X11 quite easily. Especially a custom backend video driver which flattens to greyscale, and distinguishes change on a per app basis.

An incredibly hacky thing, is that (as an example) Sawfish is an immensely extensible window manager. You can literally drop in lisp code linking actions by tagging on window names, application names, and so on.

So you could actually extend sawfish quite easily, and then do what Boox is doing. Change per-window methods of refresh, by interfacing with the backend video driver in X11, and so on.

I think a lot of people who don't use Linux, would "put up" with Linux if there was a way to use a framework with a display. So I think, strongly think, that the display of course and your work of course must be done, but that it relies very strongly on slapping together a more holistic environment.

Just thoughts. And good luck with this.
by windowshopping | 2025-08-12 21:24:23+00:00
> Consider the pre-tipped scale. You suspect the scale reads a little low, so before weighing you tilt it slightly to "correct" for that bias. Then you pour in flour until the dial says you've hit the target weight. You’ve followed the numbers exactly, but because you started from a tipped scale, you've ended up with twice the flour the recipe called for.

I'm not following this example at all. If you've zero'd out the scale by tilting, why would adding flour until it reads 1g lead to 2g of flour?
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-12 21:25:09+00:00
> this is an unfortunately common viewpoint

Not everyone believes that the purpose of life is to make more life, or that having been born onto team human automatically qualifies team human as the best team. It's not necessarily unfortunate.

I am not a rationalist, but rationally that whole "the meaning of life is human fecundity" shtick is after school special tautological nonsense, and that seems to be the assumption buried in your statement. Try defining what you mean without causing yourself some sort of recursion headache.

> their child might wind up..

They might also grow up to be a normal human being, which is far more likely.

> if Norman Borlaug's parents had decided to never have kids

Again, this would only have mattered if you consider the well being of human beings to be the greatest possible good. Some people have other definitions, or are operating on much longer timescales.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-12 21:25:09+00:00
I've spent close to 45 years out of 60 in NL, and I've interacted with the police a handful in that time, and usually I initiated the interaction (other than random alcohol checks). I've spent less than a year contiguously in the United States and have interacted with the police there on every visit, sometimes multiple times per visit. And I never initiated the contact.
by wk_end | 2025-08-12 21:25:44+00:00
Well, the article says:

Trade history is too often a sideline reserved for economic historians, yet any effective study of the past four hundred years ought to move it to centre stage, as a prime generator of war and peace, stability and chaos, prosperity and dearth. As Clausewitz might have said, shooting wars are trade wars carried on by other means. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, for instance, came after the tsar quit the Continental Blockade.
by arwhatever | 2025-08-12 21:25:48+00:00
Won’t this cause [insert LLM] to lose context around the semantics of messages passed between microservices?

You could then put all services in 1 repo, or point LLM at X number of folders containing source for all X services, but then it doesn’t seem like you’ll have gained anything, and at the cost of added network calls and more infra management.