MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ngruhn | 2025-09-24 22:00:13+00:00
With "application" they mean "function application" (aka. calling a function).

But I feel you. I'm sure there is a less academic way to explain this stuff.

Do you know Lisp or Clojure? Then you already understand lambda calculus.

Do you know JavaScript? Then replace all those lambdas with arrow functions:

(λ x . x + 2) 1

becomes:

(x => x + 2)(1)

So lambda calculus "programs" are just a bunch of these nested immediately invoked anonymous functions. You could run that by just pasting it into the web console / NodeJS REPL.

Like Turing machines, this is a general model for computation. But it's conceptually much simpler and easier to reason about mathematically.

Each computation step comes down to rewriting the program. That's just like computing algebraic expressions on paper:

(1 + 2)x - 2x = 3x - 2x = x

sum up something there, multiply out here, ...

In the lambda calculus you can do the same but you have "applying a function" as a step that you can do:

(λ x . x + 2) 1 = 1 + 2 = 3
by Ambroos | 2025-09-24 22:00:28+00:00
This might be a good time to remind you that her Vulnicura VR album (that the video you linked to is from) has just been remastered and rereleased. Available on Quest 3 (https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/9760145800676411/) and Vision Pro (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bj%C3%B6rk-vulnicura-vr-remast...). It's one of my favourite ever albums and I really need to find a friend with a Quest 3/Vision Pro, I have never gotten to experience the VR videos.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-09-24 22:00:34+00:00
> In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations?

I genuinely struggle to think of a social ill we're currently facing that isn't down in one way or another to some mega-entity acting against the public interest with no fears of reprisal because it is "too big to fail."

> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US

The US has demonstrated thoroughly it cannot and is not interested in preventing the ascent of a Chinese superpower, simply from the fact that, if you believe them at face value, the current ruling party and administration are absolutely ripping the walls out from the U.S. Government largely to prevent that exact phenomenon, and have utterly failed to do so. And, in their ineptitude, have in fact both made the United States a global embarrassment and left tons of soft power just sitting on the damn table for China to pick up.

> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US

... but we have a lot of these supposed super-corporations. The problem is the United States, contrary to the ramblings of numerous chronically online people, does not actually use it's authority. Those corporations are in fact far more worried about accessing China's market than ours, because we don't regulate and they do, and there's far more Chinese consumers than American ones.

Add to it America's consumers are already strip-mined to the studs and China's middle class is growing... I mean. It's just full steam ahead on American irrelevance.

I think the real lesson is that when you're the big player already benefiting from global free trade in virtually every single way, laying tariffs on everything and sabotaging foreign investment in your own country is... well. Fucking stupid?
by ngriffiths | 2025-09-24 22:00:55+00:00
I wouldn't be surprised if there were a much more clear and concise way to introduce it, but on the other hand, the topic doesn't seem all that useful to someone without exposure to some fundamentals, so it seems fine to me if it has a bunch of jargon. Lambda calculus programs that actually do something useful are extremely weird and hard to read and write, even very simple ones, so that's not where its value comes from. Probably a better thing to learn in connection with stuff like interpreter and compiler design when it isn't weird to say "function application" and expect you to know what that is.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-09-24 22:02:02+00:00
Philosophy doesn't have any ROI. It lives off critical examination of ideas, which is why research on it has to be done in a vibrant community. In a nutshell, it needs a research topic to be popular enough to stir up some criticisms of it and have enough experts who can evaluate it. Otherwise, that research program is doomed. Without critical evaluation you cannot have research. That requires enough of a critical threshold of people working on the topic and a community.

Generally, science lives off skepticism. Skepticism requires a decent number of skeptics who try to show that you're wrong. That requires your research to be sufficiently popular for others. Without that control, it becomes crackpotery very fast. You've got it the wrong way 'round.
by tanjtanjtanj | 2025-09-24 22:02:10+00:00
I stand by what I said and I think you are interpreting my words uncharitably in order to “win” some argument I’m not a part of.

I am not going into a semantic argument with you over whether my exact wordings match whatever you think I said.

I will however say that both theses put forth by the comment I replied to are false. If you read either article you linked they actually support my point, the Hunter Biden news was extremely widely shared on Facebook and only throttled due to suspicions on Facebook’s part that it may have been inorganic. A particular article (but not the news) was blocked on Twitter based on an existing policy, discussion was still allowed and it was definitely widely discussed and shared.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-09-24 22:02:17+00:00
Presumably that part of the drive would happen before rush hour, so it would be faster.

And yes, for certain cases it will be - employees who start their day less stressed produce more value. For people with paid mid-six-figures, this potentially lets the company wring more cognitive labor out of their them instead of them wasting it on driving (and maybe they'll even work from the car).
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-24 22:02:48+00:00
> Just do whatever you want and then listen to your actual users' feedback.

That's good advice. But there's an important caveat: telemetry is not user feedback.

This is where "data driven" approach often fails in practice: telemetry isn't feedback, it's evidence you gather to help you guess the user feedback in lieu of actually getting it. When that's not understood and given proper care (which is approximately always, because everyone has too little time and too many stakeholders breathing down their necks), it's very easy to just find proof for your own preconceptions in the data stream.
by kej | 2025-09-24 22:02:48+00:00
There are a handful of projects for making vim available in any textbox. They work by having some kind of hotkey that opens a temporary file in vim and then pasting the contents of that file into the original program when vim is closed. Examples are vim-anywhere, nvim-anywhere, vimlauncher-kde, probably others.

If you like vim, you could just use one of those methods to do everything you described. If not, you could probably use one of those as a starting point and just change the part that calls vim to call some other text-generating program or custom repl instead.
by philwelch | 2025-09-24 22:02:59+00:00
That's the same tradeoff we make with all civil rights.

Lots of people criticized Donald Trump's proposal of a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on", and rightfully so in my opinion. Do you think the irony would be thick if some of those people were murdered by Muslim terrorists?
by tempestn | 2025-09-24 22:03:36+00:00
One other one that just came to mind is the Chernobyl disaster. Obviously it was still a disaster (it's in the name!), but if I recall correctly, there was a water reservoir below the meltdown, which if reached (and I think it came close?) would likely have caused an explosion that would have spread enough radiation to make much of eastern Europe uninhabitable, among other disastrous effects. That's quite a dodged bullet.
by jmull | 2025-09-24 22:03:44+00:00
> no?

No. Because people don't know how crappy it will be when they book.

They're just juggling prices and scheduled times.

People who aren't flying very frequently and don't have a trustworthy source of knowledgeable recommendations -- that is, a substantial majority of people -- will never take enough flights to know which airlines are worth $X more. If they even have many options for their route and time.
by danlitt | 2025-09-24 22:04:37+00:00
If you hear about someone getting actually punished for this then I would probably agree with you. But I (and I think everyone else in the thread) was talking about whether people in the US should risk that punishment in order to support our Iranian friends. OP would not do so and neither would I, because the risk is too great. But I've said repeatedly, I oppose the law, you can't then spin around and act like I'm advocating for rounding people up just because I don't think it's worth my while to break it.

If you want to break that law, go ahead, I will support you all the way, and you will end up in jail anyway.
by asdff | 2025-09-24 22:04:40+00:00
As annoying as it is to be nickel and dimed I really can't complain when thinking about what is actually on offer. If I told my ancestors I was unhappy about traveling 2000 miles in 5 hours for $250 they'd rightfully slap me over the head. What a historically unprecedented capability for our species to end up on the opposite side of the planet in about a half a day.
by jongjong | 2025-09-24 22:06:06+00:00
I really appreciate this kind of simple out-of-the-box thinking, leveraging innovation to reinvent basic primitives. This feels significant. I can already see some dystopian 'Dead Internet Theory' use cases for this but also could help to further decentralize the web in a positive way. This could be a game-changer for personalization. My gut is telling me this idea is more important than it seems.

I think combining this tech with vector embeddings with similarity matching for personalization could be a real game-changer and can be done cheaply.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-24 22:06:40+00:00
I don't know what you're talking about.

You can be just as intentional about your streaming services as you were about Netflix DVD's. You can prioritize your queue of upcoming shows, since there are significant costs in paying for a month of streaming you don't use. There's real anticipation in switching from Apple TV+ back to HBO, both of which generally release shows weekly, not at once. And then you can keep your list of movies you want to watch, and look forward to which ones will become available when you do switch streamers.

I mean, if you want to waste all your money subscribing to everything at once, then sure maybe everything is readily available. But most people I know, the thing they suddenly want to watch the most often isn't on a service they're currently subscribed to. So the anticipation you talk about continues to be a very real thing. Everything isn't readily available unless you've got lots of cash to burn.

And back in the day of Netflix DVD's, plenty of people watched network and cable TV just as mindlessly as you seem to think they do with streaming today... renting DVD's was an active intentional choice.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-09-24 22:06:49+00:00
But it does matter. I’m not sure if you are already aware and did it intentionally or if it was a happy accident, but FEJKA really is named that because it’s a real word in Swedish that comes from English with meaning very near to how you used it there.

Swedish adjective “fejk” comes from English adjective “fake”.

Swedish “fejka” is the verb form of the same, with the meaning similar to one of the English meanings of the verb form: To give the impression that something is a certain way when it is not.

And that’s what the FEJKA series of products happen to be. Artificial plants that look like they are real, even though they are not :)

And so back to the point of naming these pretend IKEA manuals. If they are to really look real without being real, they should be named in a way that would make even swedes second guess whether they might be real manuals. (When seen in a context where it was not immediately stated that they are imitations.)
by thfuran | 2025-09-24 22:06:50+00:00
But if you are iterating on code and using an LLM without even looking at the code, there's a reasonable chance that when you prompt "okay, now handle factor y also", you end up with code that handles factor y but also handles pre-existing factor x differently for no good reason. And scientific work is probably more likely than average programming to be numerics stuff where seemingly innocuous changes to how things are computed can have significant impacts due to floats being generally unfriendly.
by griffzhowl | 2025-09-24 22:06:53+00:00
If you're confused by a mathematical or technical text, it can help to simply accept that, and read on for a bit (I've heard from professional mathematicians that this is commonplace in their readings)

In this case, we find after the abstract and the contents list that the idea is that a function is a general expression like x^2+1, with a variable x. Applying this function to an argument, e.g. 2, results in the value 5.

Edit: So that should make sense of the idea of a function, on one hand, and the application of the function, on the other.

The idea behind lambda calculus was to come up with a certain primitive set of operations that were precise enough that they could be defined mechanistically (and this was before the days when computers existed that could carry these out mechanistically), but also were rich enough that they could be used in combination to compute any function hitherto devised
by ckemere | 2025-09-24 22:07:05+00:00
I think the key problem with this idea is taught in basic Microeconomics. A competitive market should have zero profit.

The choice of the government to allow a non competitive market is a choice to transfer consumer surplus to producers, which is effectively a tax-by-regulatory choice. So the counter argument to “what about Bell Labs” would be that the democratically elected government (in theory) can more efficiently gather that tax and pay for research.

Recognizing counter arguments about effective allocation of resources to useful research. But also recognizing that much R&D goes to future profits for the company rather than just societal benefit.
by jerryliu12 | 2025-09-24 22:07:09+00:00
Yep! Have tested it out on Qwen 2.5VL 3B and it works reasonably well on my 16GB Macbook Air. The only thing I will say is that I don't think it's a great idea to run local models on laptop battery, since it's quite compute intensive and drains kinda quickly. Have tested with Ollama and LMStudio, but you should be able to use any OpenAI compatible local server.
by techblueberry | 2025-09-24 22:07:13+00:00
Yeah, I do think there are some interesting questions in this area, but the idea that a country is primarily a country for X is hugely problematic and racist in many parts of the world, and has led to countless civil wars. The most obvious one being “Israel is primarily a country for Israelis.”

But one of the legacies of colonialism is the Middle East and Africa being carved up in lines that didn’t match the underlying cultural groups.
by joz1-k | 2025-09-24 22:07:39+00:00
The reason governments no longer fight huge corporations or even clear monopolies is also due to heavy globalization. If one government destroys a monopoly (a global mega-corporation) in its country, it may strengthen the monopoly (and the global mega-corporation) in another country. So the line of thinking is, "We don't like this nasty monopoly, but at least it's our monopoly."
by grogers | 2025-09-24 22:07:43+00:00
Several years ago I was crazy frustrated with how slow 'less' is for some things (regex search and handling long lines) and was slowing down my day to day operations work. I very briefly entertained an idea to write my own pager to fix those problems but it would have been way too complex to do in my spare time. If libghostty existed then it might have been a different story. If libghostty is done well I think it could be an enabler for many types of terminal applications. I'm excited to see where it goes.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-24 22:07:53+00:00
Me three, there are many dozens of us!

Compulsive selecting while reading, and hitting CTRL+S every couple seconds while editing documents, are the two "weird" habits I couldn't kick for decades now. Most of the time, I'm not even conscious I'm doing those things; I only notice when the text isn't selectable or the program pops up a modal in response to CTRL+S.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-09-24 22:07:55+00:00
Real-life anarchists aren't proposing the naïve "burn it all down" anarchy. Apparently that's just a media thing. (Some claim it's authoritarian propaganda, but I suspect it's just writers going: "we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society, but they need a reason, and we've had too many religious extremists: let's make this one an anarchist!"… though maybe this is a false dichotomy? Someone's probably written a book about it.)

Oh, hey, the first text I picked from the Anarchist Library answers the question in my previous comment! https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alex-stefanescu-rela...

> A revolution would be necessary to topple a political regime. But, if your starting point is the rejection of authority, if you don’t need “permission”, you don’t need the revolution either. Anarchy starts not with a bang, but with a whimper — not with an announcement on public television that it is the time to dismantle hierarchies, but with our collective work to slowly build something on the lack of the hierarchies themselves.

I'm not sure I understand the rest of this document, but this bit seems straightforward.
by kenhwang | 2025-09-24 22:08:10+00:00
The lead developer is the person assigned to the lead developer role. I know it's cheeky but it really could be anyone. It's usually at least a senior-level individual contributor (IC). It's not uncommon for it to be a manager (that hopefully used to be an IC).

The lead's authority also tends to be varied in scope. They could be the lead of the feature, project, repo, team, initiative, or org. Depending on the context, their hierarchy might not always be the same.

So really, a lead is someone that is in or uses leadership within their scope and with others in the same position. Alternatively referred to as "politics".

In this context, they're handing the politics of development issues with the goal of getting features done.
by timschmidt | 2025-09-24 22:08:44+00:00
> User lordnacho clearly expressed he thinks Chat Control will be ineffective

Feel free to respond to lordnacho directly. I don't accept communication for them. Nor can I speak for them. The only way to address the issue you have with what you feel they've implied is to talk to them about it.

> and from that one can easily take that ineffective initiatives should not be supported except in cases of wanting to abuse the infrastructure.

Your assumption.

I find the fact that mass surveillance is largely ineffective at improving safety to be incidental and ironic. It is highly effective at removing safety and liberty. That's the salient point.

Much like torture, mass surveillance corrupts those who practice it, which has led principled people to oppose it on grounds including human rights and an awareness of atrocities committed with the aid of surveillance in the past. As Benjamin Franklin said: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Do you deserve liberty and safety?

> It's a trope common enough that it comes implied and does not have to be spelled out.

You'd do well to respond to what's been said, and not to what you think has been implied. Responding to perceived implication didn't serve you here.

https://www.etsy.com/market/don%27t_hear_what_i_didn%27t_say...
by asdff | 2025-09-24 22:08:59+00:00
What I do is bike to and from the train station on the way in, saves me a 15 min walk on either end and no sweat at all biking at easy pace for a few mins especially when its so cool in the morning. On the way back I will bike the whole way for the fitness benefit and shower when I get home as usual after work. Once you are in shape though, which happens surprisingly quickly with regular riding, you won't really sweat from ~30 mins easy pace rides.

If you don't have a train or bus along the way, ebikes can also save you sweat. You don't even need to pedal at all.
by lucb1e | 2025-09-24 22:09:10+00:00
Thanks for the elaborate and thoughtful reply! I have little to add to the bigger paragraphs, but about the question at the end: I've been wondering the same and think it must be an information age thing. Not in the abstract or the "kids these days" sense, but in that everything is stored somewhere and processed in invisible ways

I don't remember caring that someone took a picture of me with their Nokia when I know that they'll at worst share it to a handful of people via Bluetooth or try to upload it to a friend's MSN channel via GPRS. It won't be uploaded to Facebook, facial-recognized, and stuffed into a global database. Or visiting websites: I operate a website and I know you can parse which pages I viewed straight from the access logs. I don't mind, you can see what paths I took through the website and you might learn how to make a better flow. But technically, drilling down to such an individual user level is tracking based on personal identifiers and so would require consent under 2018's GDPR. I'm happy that it now does because I don't want Google to track every page I visit, and ~everyone uses Google Analytics because then you get perks like knowing what search queries you are doing well on (how convenient that google removed referrers for privacy)

I don't really have a solid answer -- why do I care about Facebook and Google but not about John "Malicious Sysadmin" Doe? -- but maybe it makes sense on some level. I need to think about it more still
by jsheard | 2025-09-24 22:09:24+00:00
They gave up on permanent exclusivity a while ago, this isn't the first game they've let slip to Playstation. The rule of thumb is now that MS games launch on both Xbox and PC then go to Playstation after a year or so, Sony games only launch on Playstation then go to PC after a year or so, but never Xbox, and Nintendo exclusives are still forever aside from some weird China-only deals.
by shawneechase | 2025-09-24 22:09:48+00:00
Remember when “agentic commerce” demos always stopped at checkout? That wasn’t a product decision — it was an auth problem. Nobody wanted to let an AI agent loose with a credit card.

The breakthrough: just-in-time auth. Think disposable payment credentials that only work for one store, one exact amount, then vanish. Combine that with payment guardrails — weekly spend caps, whitelisted vendors — and suddenly AI agents can safely handle real purchases.

This isn’t just a demo. Early adopters are already running it in production:

- Logistics companies auto-purchasing shipping supplies when inventory runs low

- Marketing teams topping up ad credits based on performance triggers

- Facilities managers automating recurring orders under $500

Why it matters:

- Traditional e-commerce → human finds, human buys

- AI-assisted commerce → AI suggests, human buys

- Agentic commerce → AI finds, evaluates, and buys

That last step is the leap: from AI as advisor to AI as autonomous economic actor. It turns agents into participants in the economy, not just fancy search engines.

Curious to hear thoughts: what are the security, economic, or UX implications once AI agents can actually spend money?