MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by macintux | 2025-08-15 17:20:30+00:00
> Wouldn't it be OK if the initial focus was something else and then there was a change of focus?

Retrofitting features into existing languages is rarely satisfying in my experience.

Sure, Python now has functional constructs, but variables are still mutable, so bizarre things can happen inside a map call.

In Erlang, immutability is baked into everything.

Message passing can be added as a library, but you don’t get the same impact as everything being a message. Does your random 3rd party library also use messages? Probably not.

Erlang is a very opinionated language and runtime with a small set of core concepts, and it is very predictable as a consequence.

Java or C++ have just about any feature you can think of, which is beneficial in some ways, but they’re also much more complex.
by ChromaticPanic | 2025-08-15 17:21:05+00:00
It's funny always seeing comments like this. I call them "humans are perfect" comments.

We just assume that all human devs are good. I have met so many that reason like a wet paper bag. Arguably having a smaller context window than current LLM. I have seen and used so many buggy software written by humans, that I find it absurd that we expect LLMs to be perfect. If humans are "the standard" for intelligence, then there is no hope for these automated systems.
by strangattractor | 2025-08-15 17:21:20+00:00
Is anyone here aware of LLMs demonstrating an original thought? Something truly novel.

My own impression is something more akin to a natural language search query system. If I want a snippet of code to do X it does that pretty well and keeps me from having to search through poor documentation of many OSS projects. Certainly doesn't produce anything I could not do myself - so far.

Ask it about something that is currently unknown and it list a bunch of hypotheses that people have already proposed.

Ask it to write a story and you get a story similar to one you already know but with your details inserted.

I can see how this may appear to be intelligent but likely isn't.
by immmmmm | 2025-08-15 17:21:28+00:00
I have a good friend who’s in the “hi end desktop cnc” bizness (with some very cheap models). Asked why he doesn’t do 3D printers (he designed plenty) and he told me the market is SO competitive and products so cheap it’s impossible to compete.

Designing a controller for his machines and as much as I would love to put the thing as OH, I don’t even think of it.

His company:

https://www.badog.ch/
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-08-15 17:21:47+00:00
I'm just saying that OP didn't say that it was the most optimal or efficient solution. They were really only saying that it had the filtering effect. If your point is that we should offer incentives to build two homes and disincentives to build one home then I'm with you; I was just pointing out that you were putting words in their mouth.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-15 17:22:30+00:00
The entire argument is that thinking it's intelligent or a person makes us missuse the tool in dangerous ways. Not to make us feel better; but to not do stupid things with them.

As a tool its useful yes, that is not the issue;

- theyre used as phycologist and life coaches.

- judges of policy and law documents

- writers of life affecting computer systems.

- Judges of job applications.

- Sources of medical advice,

- legal advisors

- And increasingly as a thing to blame when any of above goes awry.

If we think of llms as very good text writing tools, the responsibility to make "intelligent" decisions and more crucially take responsibility for those decisions remains on real people rather than dice.

But if we think of them as intelligent humans, we making a fatal misjudgement.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-08-15 17:22:32+00:00
The idea that we've scraped the "entire internet" is complete nonsense. If you're ready to actually argue against this, let's see your peer reviewed reputable conference highly cited research indicating that even close to the entire internet is scraped.

At best, you've scraped a significant portion of the open internet.

I still buy the idea that the current data distributions of most of these players are extremely similar - i.e. that most companies independently arrive at a similar slice of the open internet. I don't buy that we've hit the data wall yet. Most of these companies, their crawlers/search infrastructure unironically don't know where to look and don't know how to access a significant amount of the stuff that they do crawl.
by mavilia | 2025-08-15 17:22:35+00:00
I agree with your comment as an additional way to look at the problem but want to also mention something I heard on a podcast a few months ago.

Paraphrasing "If you get good at seeing red flags it doesn't make you good at seeing green ones. When you optimize against failure you don't optimize for success. So on and so forth."

A failed founder can tell you what broke but won't know what else could've gone wrong or rather what else they needed to go right.
by squigz | 2025-08-15 17:23:29+00:00
No instead you might sit at a desk writing by lamplight, having your eyes dried out by smoke, assailed by the smell of horse dung (among other things)

I really don't understand this idea that people with ADHD didn't suffer in the past or that the problems we face would magically disappear if society was just organized a bit differently. Would it alleviate a lot of the pressure? Certainly, but it wouldn't do away with the problems. It's the same with autism.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-15 17:24:25+00:00
> So your definition falls apart.

I did not share any definitions, only vague opinions. Not that I'd know what it means for a definition to "fall apart".

And the specific bit you cite is barely even a vague opinion; it is my interpretation of the show "Jeopardy!" based on the Wiki article (I've never seen a single episode, wasn't really a thing where I'm from):

> Specifically because it reads like it's about (...) knowledge: it tests for association and recall (...)

Also:

> By that definition humans doing chess aren't as intelligent as a computer doing chess, since high level chess is heavily reliant on memory and recall of moves and progressions.

Yes, I did find this really quite disappointing and disillusioning when I first learned about it. A colleague of mine even straight up quit competitive chess over it.
by immibis | 2025-08-15 17:25:10+00:00
It's not slightly, it's substantially more complicated to become substantially more convenient. The leap from C to C++ is similar to the leap from assembly code to C. As you add features, the language becomes more complex. That's just how it is.

Most languages deal with this by limiting the features they have - but not C++! (or Scala, which is like Java's C++)
by tracker1 | 2025-08-15 17:25:16+00:00
Went through similar in the eLearning space as well as on some govt adjacent work. A surprising amount is just common sense when using a well flushed out component library.

What's fun is making an app that explicitly requires well sightedness (scanned documents), and meeting accessibility requirements for literally everything in the app beyond that.

Aside: I wouldn't mind seeing a library where you can give a text weight and text color, with the background color you want to use, but it returns the closest background color that will meet accessibility/contrast requirements.
by vile_wretch | 2025-08-15 17:25:38+00:00
I didn't say it was $1/shot yet, though medium format Portra 400 is $16/roll (if buying in a 5-pack) which is at minimum $1/shot. E100G is a bit pricier depending on where you buy it as well. I'm mostly just salty because a decade ago I was paying $6-7 roll for Portra and now (in Canada) it's closer to $35-40.
by tocs3 | 2025-08-15 17:26:05+00:00
A couple observations of the not so distant past (in my lifetime). NBA coaches and players, not playing but sitting on the bench, used to wear suits and ties regularly. Also, Most of the congregation in the church I attended as a child dressed up for church. Now a large part of the congregation are in very casual wear (including shorts and tee shirts).

I think if I were to take notes I would notice that women tend to dress better, both WNBA coaches and at church as well as just general out and about.
by jchw | 2025-08-15 17:26:24+00:00
Well that's the tricky part: what is novel? There are varying answers. I think we're all pretty unoriginal most of the time, but at the very least we're a bit better than LLMs at mashing together and synthesizing things based on previous knowledge.

But seriously, how would you determine if an LLM's output was novel? The training data set is so enormous for any given LLM that it would be hard to know for sure that any given output isn't just a trivial mix of existing data.
by Analemma_ | 2025-08-15 17:26:35+00:00
And making it un-dischargeable in bankruptcy so people are either in perpetual debt bondage or the taxpayer picks up the tab for the inflated costs takes it from gross to downright criminal.

I'd be a lot more OK with student loan jubilees if universities had to pay the remaining principal on any forgiven loans. They'd immediately get their costs under control and be a lot more careful about degree programs which don't have any earning potential.
by infecto | 2025-08-15 17:26:43+00:00
Not sure why you are so angry. I am trying to help you understand at least my perspective but you keep being quite aggressive for no reason.

You are framing this as if the only relevant comparison is “multiple frozen pump events over 25+ years,” but that is narrowing the scope to avoid the larger point. The February 2021 FERC/NERC report clearly documents that frozen instrumentation, valves, and pumps occurred in both regulated and unregulated markets during the same storm. SPP, MISO, and even parts of PJM experienced outages tied to equipment freezing, though the scale and duration differed because of interconnection and resource diversity.

What is different in Texas is not that freezing only happens there, but that ERCOT lost roughly 50 percent of its generation and could not import meaningful power to offset it. SPP lost about 30 percent, had similar natural gas and winterization issues, but managed to rotate outages for shorter periods because it could pull from neighboring grids.

If you want the source, the joint FERC, NERC, and regional entity “February 2021 Cold Weather Grid Operations” report is publicly available and breaks this down by region. It does not fit the claim that regulated markets never see cold-weather-driven pump or plant failures. The record shows they do, but their structure gives them more tools to manage the consequences.

My whole original point was that a more market based generation and consumption model should not be overlook but let’s go through some simple facts because I think your narrative is off track.

1) Both Ercot and SPP had winter weather failures during that storm. Pretty similar on the natural gas side, frozen wells, lack of supply, huge spikes in the spot market.

2) SPP which is federally regulated had very similar winterization voluntary guidelines in place. Post event there are now new rules in place for winter.

3) SPP was able to fair better because they used a rolling blackout to different regions. Using the interconnect they could get energy from outside their grid and create short 60min blackouts. ERCOT had no luxury because of their lack of real interconnects.

https://www.spp.org/documents/65037/comprehensive%20review%2...

You’re more than welcome to read the review of the event from SPP. They call out well-head freeze offs, frozen cooling towers, intakes, fuel lines, etc. 50% of forced generation was a fuel supply issue.

You’re making it sound like Texas was an outlier here. It was not, SPP had the same exact issues of course with a slightly different fuel mix but they got by better with their interconnects. I don’t know why you are struggling to see that this winter event caught other grids by surprise. I am not defending Texas here but simply pointing out facts compared to your modified narrative.
by ryandv | 2025-08-15 17:27:34+00:00
It is sometimes said that Isaac Newton, godfather of modern science, was not the first scientist but rather the last magician. The majority of his scholarly output was in fact focused on alchemy and the occult.

Aleister Crowley somewhat echoes this juxtaposition in the motto of his magickal journal, The Equinox: "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion."
by thrance | 2025-08-15 17:27:40+00:00
> latches onto the real frustrations of the working class

This book clearly is not addressed to the "working class". It's so dry and academic. Very far from the political pamphlet you seem to believe it is.

Das Kapital is pure description, it makes no prescription as to how society should be run. Do you not believe classes exist? Is that the hill you're willing to die on?

I wouldn't recommend reading it because of how dry and boring it is, but maybe try to learn what's in it at least? If anything, so you don't make a complete fool of yourself next time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital
by Refreeze5224 | 2025-08-15 17:28:11+00:00
It's really not an either/or proposition. Humans have used a much larger variety of systems of social and economic organization than capitalists would have you believe. We have innovated as a species in so many ways, like putting a man on the moon, AI, the internet, etc. But for some reason (i.e. capitalists like it that way), we don't seem to think we can innovate in the way that we organize our society and economy. Which is total BS in my book. Of course the people who massively and disproportionately benefit from the current arrangement don't want us image an alternative to it.

Capitalism is designed to maximize profit, which it does well. It has even improved life for many people. Even the most ardent Marxist acknowledges this fact. But what we really care about (unless you're super rich) is maximizing human well-being overall. So why rely on a system that is not actually meant to maximize, prioritize, or focus on what we actually care about, and only does so occasionally or incidentally? It doesn't make sense, and in almost no other arena of human endeavor is this done. Imagine writing software to maximize x, when you really want it to do y, and just hoping that x makes y happen, and saying it's the least worst way of doing it, without trying any other option.

Fundamentally, I think any socioeconomic system should be designed with people in mind as the organizing principle. If we care about human well-being, happiness, flourishing, etc., it makes no sense not to prioritize it from first principles. I imagine some form of economic and political democracy, wherein people have direct control over the things that affect their lives, in the social, political, and economic spheres (the three are inseparable, despite common capitalist dogma to the contrary). And not the usual representative democracy, where you abdicate any real decision-making power to an effectively unaccountable representative every 4 years.

The usual objection to this is that it would be impossible to maintain the status quo with an arrangement like this. But that's just more capitalist self-preservation talking. There are clearly tradeoffs required in a new system oriented towards maximal human well-being. Likely tons of dirt-cheap Chinese-made products are out. But those never made us happy to being with!
by nonethewiser | 2025-08-15 17:28:13+00:00
There is a key difference from "don't do premature optimization." "Premature optimization" suggests the scaled version is optimal. It might not be worth the resource cost to achieve it, but disregarding that, its the best.

Whereas "Do things that Dont Scale" is suggesting the non-scaled process may be the optimal one. For example (and this sort of thing is in the article IIRC), giving direct contact details to the CEO instead of a generic form that get's sent to some shared customer service/sales inbox. Way better process for selling your product. The inquiry form scales but its in no way a premature "optimization."

Another way of putting it is that SCALING IS BAD. Or to be a bit more nuanced, it's a necessary evil. It's complex. It's resource intensive. It creates distance between you and your customer. Of course business goals and environment may dictate it, but that doesn't mean none of the processes are degrading in quality. So its more like dont do "premature process degradation" than "premature optimization" I think.
by sneak | 2025-08-15 17:28:55+00:00
I think you must have misunderstood me. I'm not a copyright maximalist, in fact I am against all copyrights and IP and even the existence of a state to enforce same.

I'm pointing out that under our current system, our society has banned storage of certain digital material. It is not inconsistent with our current system to expect other types of digital material to be banned similarly.

> I own the hard drive. How I choose to arrange the little magnetic islands on the platter is my business.

It's not just sequences of magnetic fields; it's what those magnetic fields represent that cause them to be legislated upon. Thus, your implied argument that you should be free to do whatever you wish simply because it's just magnetic fields on your own device (an argument I agree with 100%, fwiw) is not really a rebuttal in this case because our current system does not recognize or permit that right, and a majority of people in our society agree with that circumstance.

It's nothing whatsoever to do with what types of files you personally do or do not store. The CP example was simply an example of one type of banned magnetic field patterns. Another would be bulk stolen PII.

I actually agree with your viewpoint; but ours is a minority opinion that is not reflected in society or law. Even though there is no victim when a digital file is copied, a majority of people in our world do not want possession and distribution of certain files to be legal.
by oneshtein | 2025-08-15 17:29:22+00:00
/* Produce a quaternion from an axis-angle representation.*/ function quat_from_axis(theta: number, x: number, y: number, z: number) { const halfcos = Math.cos(theta * 0.5); const halfsin = Math.sin(theta * 0.5); return new Quaternion( halfcos, axis[0] * halfsin, axis[1] * halfsin, axis[2] * halfsin, ); }

Function is vibe coded.
by mwrmwr | 2025-08-15 17:29:57+00:00
This discussion would be well served if we separated concerns about the economics of higher education in general (obviously student debt burdens are too high. There has been much written about how this came to be for all major) from the value of humanities program. Where I am coming from (so source of bias) I got a BA and PhD in philosophy, make plenty in software now, and credit to some extent my time in the humanities with the ability of I do that.
by mediaman | 2025-08-15 17:29:58+00:00
Yes, people are going to get squeezed out of the housing market by new arrivals if new housing stock isn't built.

"Squeezing out" is done by a price mechanism: a family that would prefer to stay in Seattle decides to sell, because that new buyer (unable to buy the condo, because it hasn't been built) decides to offer a high enough price to induce the existing family to leave.

That's only done by reducing housing affordability (increasing prices) which is the public policy outcome we're trying to avoid.

It sounds like you agree that new supply is good, I think, because you believe new entrants would otherwise "squeeze out" existing residents and I assume you would agree that this is done by price, and so therefore you would also agree that new housing stock (which decreases the "squeezing") also suppresses price level relative to the alternative fixed stock scenario.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-15 17:30:00+00:00
Larry Niven wrote an essay about different theories of time travel in science fiction

https://www.scribd.com/document/503128860/Larry-Niven-THE-TH...

In some of them (like that Heinlein story) there is just one timeline and you at best get causal knots, in others (like Asimov’s End of Eternity) a time traveller experiences different timelines and whatever other experience is ‘undefined behavior’

I don’t think Nicen wrote stories about traveling into the past but plenty about traveling into the future with cold sleep, stasis boxes, and relativistic travel with Bussard Ramjets, I guess you could have done it even more stylishly if you could afford to buy the secret of the Outsider reactionless drive.
by diob | 2025-08-15 17:30:03+00:00
Yes! I've studied Japanese for years and read numerous novels in it each year, yet I couldn't physically write to save my life.

But there's nothing crazy about that, like you said it's similar to spelling (not entirely, as I can spell things fine if I have a phonetic keyboard that "writes" for me).

Writing vs reading to me, is more about the type of memory.

Recognition vs recall.
by yk | 2025-08-15 17:30:17+00:00
The phrasing the court uses is precisely the one used in the German constitution to allow restricting basic rights for political reasons. Though the court uses "probably against the constitution" in German and Germany's law is not as directly case law as in the US, the court ruling is still saying that being a Marxist "probably" warrants suspension of the constitution and only in the specific instance of a long running reading group who are otherwise harmless basic rights may be granted.
by Insanity | 2025-08-15 17:30:18+00:00
Decided to play around with Grok some weeks ago. To be honest, didn't see any appeal to move away from ChatGPT & Gemini in favour of Grok.

My suspicion is that Grok won't be a long-term player in the AI market.

EDIT: Gut feeling, no strong reasoning behind it, might very well be wrong.
by rayiner | 2025-08-15 17:30:52+00:00
I don’t disagree with your general point, but for clarity, student loans are non-dischargeable because they have been federally guaranteed since 1965. Meaning that if the borrower defaulted, taxpayers would be on the hook. And the reason for the federal guarantees was that students are bad credit risks. So without the guarantees, banks wouldn’t lend to students, especially disadvantaged ones.
by blindriver | 2025-08-15 17:30:59+00:00
I never had this fake sense of shame or embarrassment when it came to contacting people. Some people will keep tabs on when someone last contacted them, and hold it against them. I don't.

Just last month I had lunch with middle school friends I hadn't seen in 40 years. I literally hadn't seen once since Grade 8. I friended them on Facebook years previous but didn't really have anything to chat about, but when I was in the same town as them, I pinged them and said let's go to lunch. It was absolutely amazing, once of those moments that I will remember forever. Not because anything breathtaking happened, but it was just really really nice to connect with people I hadn't seen since the beginning of my life, and meeting them all over again as adults.

I still routinely have lunch with coworkers from 25 years ago. I have friends that I chat with on Whatsapp daily going back almost 50 years. I have no qualms in being the first to reach out, ever.

I have a friend from college that I have been in and out of contact for 30 years, who ghosted me for no reason this past year even after I contacted her a few times. Guess what? I won't hold it against her and I will give her space. I will ping her for her birthday and see if she responds and if not, then I will just leave her alone until she contacts me. But I don't feel shame or anger or embarrassment because I got rejected, that's on her, not me.