MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by john-tells-all | 2025-09-28 14:51:26+00:00
I read this book many years ago and it made a big impression on me.

His view is that normal, rational, intelligent people... can have fictional stories in their heads about how things work. It takes energy and focus and research to fix these wrong stories, so often we live with them or don't recognize them.

Many times I've been casually talking with someone, say something, then realize that doesn't make any sense. My wrong story made sense in my head, but not when I speak it out loud.

By practicing the scientific method, we can gradually weed out the wrong stories in our heads.

Now I'm going to re-read `The Demon-Haunted World`
by Aurornis | 2025-09-28 14:51:29+00:00
> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs?

A lot is driven by contrarianism. They see what the other side wants and automatically fight for the opposite.

Among those who actually think deeper, they hold beliefs that putting restrictions on coal will make their energy bills explode or make industries in their town go out of business.

Some come from states with coal mining operations. They see the initiatives as an attack on their state.

There is also a lot of misinformation about clean energy. You can still find people who believe that it’s impossible to build enough solar or wind energy to make a difference so they believe it’s all just a scam to spend their tax dollars on useless ventures.

> I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD. Where does this 'clean coal' concept come from?

Modern mines are still somewhat dangerous but they’re not like the Zoolander style pickaxe and black lung operations you might have seen in history books. Modern mining relies heavily on machinery and many coal mines are surface operations. The number of humans involved has decreased every year for a long time while safety improves, much like how farming today doesn’t resemble farming of 100 years ago.

It’s not the safest industry, but arguing that we need to eliminate it to avoid black lung is going to be very unpersuasive to anyone in an area with mining operations.
by throwaway106382 | 2025-09-28 14:51:59+00:00
Ruby has had static typing via RBS for a while now, and I don't know if it's because I'm primarily a Rails developer and DHH doesn't like static typing so using these with Rails feels third-class or maybe just that I'm really just all the way in "the ruby way" but it feels antithetical to a dynamically typed language to start shoehorning in static types. Even as a type definition in a separate file it just feels wrong.

Ruby particularly is already strongly typed so there isn't too many suprises with automatic conversions or anything like that. RBS also just makes metaprogramming more annoying - and Ruby's ability to do metaprogramming easily is one of its biggest strengths in my opinion.

If I wanted a statically typed language I would just use a statically typed language.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-28 14:52:39+00:00
And this is why this is so exciting. The rules are so strict because kidney supply is extremely limited and they want to maximize the life of the kidney as much as possible.

Having a ready supply of pig kidneys would be fantastic. All the sudden it wouldn't matter as much that you are a bad candidate, you might end up simply cycling through pig kidneys more frequently.
by andy99 | 2025-09-28 14:53:17+00:00
This doesn't feel at all credible because we're already well into the sigmoid part of the curve. I thought the gpt5 thing made it pretty obvious to everyone.

I'm bullish on AI, I don't think we've even begun to understand the product implications, but the "large language models are in context learners" phase has for now basically played out.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-09-28 14:53:18+00:00
Watching the human programmers become dumbfounded as AlphaGo invented novel Go-playing strategies... is what I remember most from having watched this a few years ago (right before GPT3.5/ChatGPT debuted). The algorithm makes [victorious] wildcard moves which no human player would even contemplate [stupid moves become masterplays].

When 9D-master Sudol attributes human qualities to the beauty of his AI opponent's creativity upon formulating certain moves... is definitely eye-opening. Hubris replaced.
by mothballed | 2025-09-28 14:53:22+00:00
It never ceases to baffle my why Californians tend to opine towards a strong federal government when the documents authorizing it are structured such that California is virtually guaranteed to get the worst end of the deal. California has 12% of the population and 2% of the senators.

Every time Californians urge to give the federal government more power, even for "good" things, the rules of the game virtually demand it will be used against them. This might be a necessary evil for the bare minimums (military protection, federal court to settle contracts, enforcement of some federal laws), but I don't understand how Californians justify that every positive intention will be turned against them and carry on anyway.
by credit_guy | 2025-09-28 14:53:23+00:00
I think the author of this blog is not a heavy user of AI in real life. If you are, you know there things AI is very good at, and thing AI is bad at. AI may see exponential improvements in some aspects, but not in other aspects. In the end, those "laggard" aspects of AI will put a ceiling on its real-world performance.

I use AI in my coding for many hours each day. AI is great. But AI will not replace me in 2026 or in 2027. I have to admit I can't make projections many years in the future, because the pace of progress in AI is indeed breathtaking. But, while I am really bullish on AI, I am skeptical of claims that AI will be able to fully replace a human any time soon.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-09-28 14:53:24+00:00
Exponentials exist in their environment. Didn't Covid stop because we ran out of people to infect. Of course it can't keep going exponential, because there aren't exponential people to infect.

What is this limit on AI? It is technology, energy, something. All these things can be over-come, to keep the exponential going.

And of course, systems also break at the exponential. Maybe AI is stopped by the world economy collapsing. AI advancement would be stopped, but that is cold comfort to the humans.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-28 14:53:39+00:00
The narrative quietly assumes that this exponential curve can in fact continue since it will be the harbinger of the technological singularity. Seems more than a bit eschatological, but who knows.

If we suppose this tech rapture does happen, all bets are off; in that sense it's probably better to assume the curve is sigmoidal, since the alternative is literally beyond human comprehension.
by naasking | 2025-09-28 14:53:47+00:00
> But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors.

S curves are exponential before they start tapering off though. It's hard to predict how long that could continue, so there's an argument to be made that we should remain optimistic and milk that while we can lest pessimism cut off investment top early.
by naasking | 2025-09-28 14:53:52+00:00
> But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors.

S curves are exponential before they start tapering off though. It's hard to predict how long that could continue, so there's an argument to be made that we should remain optimistic and milk that while we can lest pessimism cut off investment too early.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-28 14:55:25+00:00
Anyone with a couple of marbles in their noggin can see that depending on a finite resource dug out of the ground for everything is not a good long term plan. Offsetting that dependence with infinitely renewable sources just makes sense. You mention China cares less, yet you fail to acknowledge China by far outpaces the US in its pursuit of renewables. Yes they still use a lot of coal, but they are actively adding more renewables. It’ll just take time. At least they are trying. Also look at their adoption of EVs compared to US.
by tedivm | 2025-09-28 14:55:28+00:00
I've been working with Python for years (since 2014) and typing makes the code less buggy and easier to maintain. I also would hardly call it "shoehorning", as years of design went into it.

Honestly the only people I see who really push back against it are the people who haven't bothered learning it. Once people use it for a bit, in my experience at least, they don't want to go back.
by olokobayusuf | 2025-09-28 14:56:12+00:00
Our primary use case is cross-platform AI inference (unsurprising), and for that use case we're already in production by startups to larger co's.

It's kind of funny: our compiler currently doesn't support classes, but we support many kinds of AI models (vision, text generation, TTS). This is mainly because math, tensor, and AI libraries are almost always written with a functional paradigm.

Business plan is simple: we charge per endpoint that downloads and executes the compiled binary. In the AI world, this removes a large multiplier in cost structure (paying per token). Beyond that, we help co's find, eval, deploy, and optimize models (more enterprise-y).
by esperent | 2025-09-28 14:56:43+00:00
I prefer Google Lens because the voodoo it does is far more than just image search, and is genuinely useful to me. I use it to translate text in images multiple times a day (I live in a country where I'm not a native speaker). I've used it to identify birds, plants, and even furniture - it found me the local shop for a table in a cafe that I liked, which was pretty amazing.

I'm not a Google fan, in fact I actively try to choose alternatives where possible, but they do make some good products not matched by anyone else, and it's not useful to pretend that isn't the case. Lens is one such product, Maps is another... Ok maybe that's it, since I use LLMs for most translation tasks these days.
by dragontamer | 2025-09-28 14:56:58+00:00
Nah.

I think with the rise of KataGo, its becoming clear that AlphaGo's "dumbfounded" strategies were instead incredibly strong tactical play with hilarious levels of blindness with regards to ladders.

It feels like modern AIs (like KataGo, which are hundreds of times better than AlphaGo) are getting closer to what humans consider appropriate strategic play.

Go players must be humble because if the opponent is stronger then the opponent wins. But Go AI Programmers don't necessarily have to be. Go AI programmers look for the weaknesses, lean upon them and yes, prove that AlphaGo/AlphaZero never learned ladders. Ever. Or other such concepts of strongly forcing moves (ex: loose ladders).

That's one of KataGo's biggest innovations. Explicitly programming a ladder solver so that simple ladders can indeed be factored in by the neural net.

----------

I do wonder how Lee Sodul will react if we told him that the superhuman AI he played could not see ladders... and had other such key weaknesses.
by sipjca | 2025-09-28 14:57:07+00:00
It's primarily this. I'm a novice Rust developer and really would like to improve the code quality across the board, and some of this comes to attracting the right kind of developers to help. Maybe "Rust" in the title helps, maybe it doesn't. Clearly HN doesn't like it and that's okay.

I stated my need for help on the about page as well

> This is my first Rust project, and it shows. There are bugs, rough edges, and architectural decisions that could be better. I’m documenting the known issues openly because I want everyone to understand what they are getting into, and encourage improvement in the project.
by tehjoker | 2025-09-28 14:57:12+00:00
Long COVID is still a thing, the nAbs immunity is pretty paltry because the virus keeps changing its immunity profile so much. T-cells help but also damage the host because of how COVID overstimulates them. A big reason people aren't dying like they used to is because of the government's strategy of constant infection which boosts immunity regularly* while damaging people each time, that plus how Omicron changed SARS-CoV-2's cell entry mechanism to avoid cell-cell fusion (syncytia) that caused huge over-reaction in lung tissue.

If you think COVID isn't still around: https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/COVID19-national-data.html

* one might call this strategy forced vaccination with a known dangerous live vaccine strain lol
by bwfan123 | 2025-09-28 14:57:43+00:00
> Instead, even a relatively conservative extrapolation of these trends suggests that 2026 will be a pivotal year for the widespread integration of AI into the economy

Integration into the economy takes time and investment. Unfortunately, ai applications dont have an easy adoption curve - except for the chatbot. Every other use case requires an expensive and risky integration into an existing workflow.

> By the end of 2027, models will frequently outperform experts on many tasks

fixed tasks like tests - maybe. But, the real world is not a fixed model. It requires constant learning through feedback.
by nokya | 2025-09-28 14:57:53+00:00
Okay. Let's assume your top priority is to test for genetic health issues, I will also assume that you either plan on reducing the risk of future complications or you are factoring this information into account when deciding to get children (otherwise, why would you want this information?).

In the first case (reducing risk factors), chances that you will at least check positive for one thing are almost 1 (certain) and you don't need a test to know that. In almost all cases, limiting the risk will involve a) eating well b) stopping alcohol / smoking c) regular physical activity d) taking some Aspirin for the remainder of your life. You don't need the test results to start doing this. Either you sincerely want to live longer and shouldn't wait for genetic screening to take your matters into your own hands, or you think that test results will suddenly turn you into a monk. News flash: won't happen.

In the second case (whether or not to procreate): any decision you make on the hypothesis that your children will inherit it and that science will not have solved it in the next 50 years will very likely be a bad reason to not have children (there are many good reasons to not have children, though, but having a rare genetic conditions is not a good reason).

The only people who should not have kids are bad parents and people who don't want kids. Guess what? These two groups that probably have the highest amount of kids on Earth.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-28 14:58:31+00:00
I'll refer back to:

> Hell, there's one app I have to use daily which is still officially only 32 bit Windows (it, thankfully, works in Crossover).

As an example. This one is Intangi IRIS, a BOM and quoting tool for network products, and they officially support Crossover. They've been talking about native macOS support since before I started using it in 2019... but that's the speed of business for you :).

It's the long tail of apps like these that can make it painful - not the bulk of the day (email, conference calls, and web ticketing systems) itself.
by hylaride | 2025-09-28 14:58:59+00:00
The big difference is that there's now alternative peers to the US (economically and militarily) that didn't exist before. The Soviet Union was economically stagnant by the late 1960s and China and India were in self-imposed isolation to varying degrees. There was no other unified entity anywhere near as big and powerful.

While Russia is a paper tiger and it's military kit (mostly) second rate, China and India both now have a very large market for energy as well as a developing defence sector making modern kit (especially China).

Now we have the United States essentially throwing a hissy fit against everybody for every (perceived or real) "unfair" trade relationship now that they may actually need to compete again (while turning its back on it's one major superpower, the fact that it is/was a magnet for immigrants).

I do agree that the west, and especially America, can suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of other country's origins, culture, and governments. This is especially true of right-leaning political leaders who think everybody wants to be like the United States (which made those in the Bush Administration think Iraq would welcome them and misreading Saddam's vague statements about WMDs being more about derring Iran). "The west" has had a 2-300 year run at the top and that's made us complacent, I think.

(On a side note, it still remains to be seen how well China will fare in the medium to long term - centralization of power usually ends up meaning little problems fester into larger ones far more than more open societies where criticism can mean earlier awareness to deal with them...)
by lazide | 2025-09-28 15:00:27+00:00
Interestingly, the peak voltage of 240V AC (typical) is 330ish+ volts.

Typical house wiring is required to handle 600v due to voltage transients and wear and tear.

So any component rated to 240V dc will fail immediately on AC, and even 400-500V DC is not a good idea.

I guess there is a reason there is a whole category of engineers for this kind of thing.
by mikeyouse | 2025-09-28 15:00:33+00:00
The Federal courts have reached this point too. There’s a “presumption of regularity” where the government has historically been seen as a mostly truthful arbiter that would make good faith efforts to follow court orders.

So when a judge would ask, “Do you plan to deport these people tonight?” to a government lawyer, if the lawyer replied, “No”, the court wouldn’t intervene because government lawyers obviously wouldn’t just lie to a judge presiding over a lawsuit. Well it turns out that they’re continually lying and being rewarded for it (Emil Bove for one). So courts are now suspending that presumption and ordering explicit actions with strict timelines for updates for basically the first time in modern history.

It’s astonishing at how little regard this administration has for the norms and structures that make up our government and how much damage they’re doing to the rule of law.

https://www.justsecurity.org/120547/presumption-regularity-t...
by throwaway106382 | 2025-09-28 15:00:35+00:00
Maybe it's just because Python is just kindof a lousy language to use in the first place. I started with Java and C++, did Python for a bit and switched to Ruby and never looked back. Being forced to use Python for anything feels like a punishment.

Years of design also went into Ruby's type system, and for the people that enjoy it - be my guest - but I would never use it for my own code.
by dartharva | 2025-09-28 15:00:47+00:00
All advertisers wouldn't be together converging on the tracking-based ad model if that were the case. It's being used because it's driving more CTR than the traditional way.

Your browsing history gives a more reliable base to segment you based on buyer profiles (incl age groups, location, interests), figure out your "intent" and target ads based on it. If you were to, say, read a random "Top 10 cars with highest resale value" article, on its own without historical data it won't be of any use for targeting because they don't know if you're actually a potential buyer in the market or just some teenager passing their time. Showing you those ads will waste their $$ if it were the latter.

This isn't in any way an endorsement of their intrusive advertising practices, by the way - I personally have been using ad blockers and aggressively taking every step possible to avoid all online advertisements for more than a decade. It's just to provide a perspective on why it's not so simple.
by ninalanyon | 2025-09-28 15:01:23+00:00
Surely hypertext and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu were well known to most people in the field by the time Berners-Lee did his work?

If Ted Nelson hadn't been so obsessed with making it pay we might have had the web sooner. Whether that would be a good thing or not is debatable though as the Internet was not available when he started.
by atoav | 2025-09-28 15:01:55+00:00
Many of the "people don't understand Exponential functions" posts are ultimately about people not understanding logistic functions. Because most things in reality that seemingly grow exponentially will eventually, unevitably taper off at some point when the cost for continued growth gets so high, accelerated growth can't be supported anymore.

Viruses can only infect so many people for example. If the growth was truly exponential you would need infinite people for it to be truly exponential.
by kartoffelsaft | 2025-09-28 15:02:31+00:00
Seeing as the subject of the sentence is the pig organ, it's saying the organ is the one doing the surviving and only tangentionally mentions the person surviving by calling then living. I (and presumably we) only come to a different interperetation because I have the context that the latter is the important bit. If I give some other similarly structured sentences but without context, how would you interperet these?

- This is the fastest Alice had driven since Bob broke the speed limit.

- This is the oldest tree still standing in the burnt forest.

- This is the most stable chemical additive to our long-lasting concrete.

Without context, to me these examples sound primarily about Alice going fast, the tree being old, and the chemical being stable. But if those appeared in articles about traffic law, natural disasters, and sidewalk design, then these phrasings might be less ambiguous if flipped (as another commentor pointed out).
by lukeschlather | 2025-09-28 15:03:24+00:00
This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives. On average individual Americans contribute more to the problem than individual Chinese people.

One example is airline miles. Americans travel 2000 miles by plane every year. In China the figure is 1000 miles. So your argument is basically "sure, we could stop traveling by plane, but if Chinese people travel an extra 50 miles a year that wipes out our progress." But that's a pretty poor argument to justify continuing to do 2000 miles/year, if you genuinely think the problem should be addressed.

If both countries reduced to 100 miles/year, it probably wouldn't be enough. But this is an ongoing choice all around. It's not reasonable to suggest that Chinese people have less individual need for air travel. Looking at contribution per country and not per person is not reasonable.
by oivey | 2025-09-28 15:04:11+00:00
I feel pretty similarly on this. Python’s bolted on type system is very poor at encoding safe invariants common in the language. It’s a straight jacketed, Java-style OOP type system that’s a poor fit for many common Python patterns.

I would love it if it were better designed. It’s a real downer that you can’t check lots of Pythonic, concise code using it.
by hermannj314 | 2025-09-28 15:04:52+00:00
Do you have data to back up this claim?

The marketing side of the business is very data driven with lots of very intelligent statisticians and scientific testing for ad placement and ad content, etc. I cant accept that the same people that are manipulating my thoughts and desires with algorithmically optimized content never once thought to run hypothesis test on performance of targeted ads based on browsing history.

I feel like you are making a bold claim, am I misunderstanding?
by humdaanm | 2025-09-28 15:04:56+00:00
the issue of having multiple inputs able to be indexable by ints, is exactly why i prefer that type hints remain exactly as "hints" and not as mandated checks. my philosophy for type hints is that they are meant to make codebases easier to understand without getting into a debugger. their functional equivalence should be that of comments. it's a cleaner more concise way of describing a variable instead of using a full on docstring.

though maybe there's a path forward to give a variable a sort of "de-hint" in that in can be everything BUT this type(i.e. an argument can be any indexable type, except a string)