MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Joker_vD | 2025-09-04 04:51:30+00:00
I am; for a more serious take see [0].

Now, there’s something wrong with saying “whales are phylogenetically just as closely related to bass, herring, and salmon as these three are related to each other.” What’s wrong with the statement is that it’s false. But saying “whales are a kind of fish” isn’t.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
by atleastoptimal | 2025-09-04 04:52:21+00:00
If you believe AI is overvalued and is a bubble waiting to burst then you are free to short NVDA.

AI stans don’t become AI stans for no reason. They see the many enormous technological leaps and also see where progress is going. The many PhDs currently making millions at labs also have the right idea.

Just look at ChatGPT’s growth alone. No product in history compares, and it’s not an accident.
by adrian_b | 2025-09-04 04:52:43+00:00
That is known today, but like I have said, the Ancient Greek and Roman authors, like Aristotle or Pliny the Elder, lumped together morrays and lampreys, because for some reason in the ancient world much more attention was paid to skin and limbs when classifying animals, than to the details of their jaws.

Because the Ancient Greeks and Romans used the same word for morrays and lampreys, when translating ancient texts it is difficult to decide which of the two was meant.
by delusional | 2025-09-04 04:54:43+00:00
Talking about "time to evolve something" seems patently absurd and unscientific to me. All of nature evolved simultaneously. Nature didn't first make the human body and then go "that's perfect for filling the dishwasher, now to make it talk amongst itself" and then evolve intelligence. It all evolved at the same time, in conjunction.

You cannot separate the mind and the body. They are the same physiological and material entity. Trying anyway is of course classic western canon.
by intended | 2025-09-04 04:55:41+00:00
Ah you are an old one. I was born later, and missed this phase of our history.

This reminds me of back 11,500 years ago, when people used to worship the sharper or bigger pieces of obsidian. They felt the biggest piece would win them the biggest hunt.

They forgot that the size of the tool mattered less than mastery of the hunt. Why the best hunter could take down a moving mattress with just the right words, string and a cliff.
by Kiro | 2025-09-04 04:55:47+00:00
That's what the author argues, yes. It would work fine as shovelware but I have no interest in shipping that.

In fact, being able to throw it out like this is a big time saver in itself. I've always built a lot of projects but when you've spent weeks or months on something you get invested in it, so you ship it even though you no longer believe in it. Now when it only takes a couple of days to build something you don't have the same emotional attachment to it.
by username332211 | 2025-09-04 04:56:18+00:00
Doesn't this forum periodically discuss an article[*] about profit not really mattering in the grand scheme of things? (As in, profitable and growing companies are capable of showing profit whenever they want, and conversely to show no profit if they so wish.)

[*] This one I believe - https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-04 04:57:04+00:00
Related:

Espargos: ESP32-based WiFi sensing array - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43079023 - February 2025

Passive Channel Charting: Locating Passive Targets using Wi-Fi Channel State Information - https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09924 | https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.09924
by noduerme | 2025-09-04 04:58:24+00:00
I've loved my Boox Nova C color for a few years... but the ability to run Android apps including paint and drawing apps is the real showstopper. I'd love to try this tech for the paper feel but I really like the Boox interface, including their homegrown reader and notes apps. I've been really pleasantly surprised at how their software just keeps getting better and addressing minor UI issues with each (optional) update, without ever getting bloated or annoying. If anything, they've just gotten better at making their own UI more transparent and seamless. Totally apart from the great experience I've had with their hardware, I think their software is just extremely well thought out compared to almost anything else out there.
by linguae | 2025-09-04 04:59:32+00:00
I’ve been periodically keeping up with GNUstep’s progress since 2004, when I first learned about it as a high school student brand new to Linux and Mac OS X (I grew up on Windows at home and on classic Macs in elementary school). I even wrote a report for a community college class on the history of Mac OS X.

I’ve wanted to see GNUstep succeed, but unfortunately it never got as much attention as the KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK ecosystems. I have some theories as to why, but I think the biggest barrier is those who really wanted OpenStep/Cocoa in the 1990s and 2000s could’ve used readily-available NeXT/Apple software instead of waiting for GNUstep. It’s the same issue ReactOS and Haiku have; they’re competing against Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 2003 and BeOS, respectively. Even FreeDOS, which is architecturally much simpler, took quite a while to reach version 1.0; people could just get MS-DOS 6.22.

Of course, the Linux kernel and the GNU ecosystem are counterexamples, though I believe it’s easier to reimplement Unix due to its modular nature than to reimplement entire GUI toolkits, especially if source- and/or binary-level compatibility are required.

A GNUstep that was ready around 1998 or 1999 to capture the attention of former NeXT developers and deliver ports of NeXT software to Linux would’ve been the ideal opportunity, though it still would’ve been quite an effort to bring over other things that made the NeXT special, such as Interface Builder. I’ve noticed that most commercial Mac OS X software in the early days were Carbon applications, not Cocoa applications. Many legendary NeXT software products did not make the transition from NeXTstep/OPENSTEP to Mac OS X. They could’ve had a home on Linux or one of the BSDs via GNUstep had GNUstep been ready.
by chris_armstrong | 2025-09-04 04:59:37+00:00
Damn this is a blast from the past - it was such an ambitious project with so many interesting ideas to explore. CoreObject itself was revolutionary in its thinking about distributed document sharing and versioning, let alone some of desktop environment ideas for managing projects.

I know Quentin Mathé, kept CoreObject going for a decade longer, but I haven't heard from the rest of those involved for a very long time.
by jacobolus | 2025-09-04 05:00:51+00:00
And here you can e.g. find Ficino's correspondence translated into English, with commentary, https://archive.org/details/lettersofmarsili0000fici

If you make a cursory search you can also find other translations of his works, various biographies, and a wide range of commentary and criticism by later authors.

Many of Ficino's originals are also in the corpus of scanned and OCRed or recently republished texts. I'm sure there are archives here or there with additional materials which have not been digitized, but it seems questionable whether those would make any significant difference to a process as indiscriminate and automatic as LLM training.
by rawgabbit | 2025-09-04 05:01:14+00:00
I skimmed the paper and I question the validity of the experiment.

There was a “brain” group who did three sessions of essay writing and on the fourth session, they used ChatGPT. The paper’s authors said during the fourth session, the brain groups EEG was higher than the LLM groups EEG when they also used ChatGPT.

I interpret this as the brain group did things the hard way and when they did things the easy way, their brains were still expecting the same cognitive load.

But isn’t the point of writing an essay is the quality of the essay? The LLM supposedly brain damaged group still produced an essay for session 4 that was graded “high” by both AI and human judges but were faulted for “stood out less” in terms of distance in n-gram usage compared to the other groups? I think this making a mountain out of a very small mole hill.
by giardini | 2025-09-04 05:02:45+00:00
Plato's "Allegory of the cave" was uninteresting and uninformative when I first read it more than 50 years ago. It remains so today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

Also, other than in sculpture/dentistry/medicine I also find "ablation" to not be a particularly insightful metaphor either. Although I see ablation's application to LLMs I simply had to laugh when I first read about it: I envisioned starting with a Greyhound bus and blowing off parts until it was a Lotus 7 sports car!8-). Good luck with that! Kind of like fixing the TV set by kicking it (but it _does_ work sometimes!).

Perhaps we should refrain somewhat from applying metaphors/simile/allegories to describe LLMs relative to human intelligence unless they provide some insight of significant value.
by erikanoriega | 2025-09-04 05:03:40+00:00
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by tooheavy | 2025-09-04 05:03:59+00:00
Materialism (perhaps physicalism as well) appears to be on shaky ground to me - it does not tell me 'why' I have the first person experience that I have, why I experience and embody the matter that is my person or being, a specific entity. Another way to look at it is to say there doesn't appear to be a region in the brain that defines why I experience the brain, that or this specific brain. From this perspective, I find it self-refuting. They appear only to locate or correlate matter and experience - to help explain 'how'. If I could experience other persons or beings in the first person, and the matter in each person explained why it is that I experience that specific person or entity, I might believe otherwise. To me, this simple fact makes it obvious there is something 'more' that must explain how 'being' relates to consciousness, otherwise, we are simply explaining how the brain modulates experience - very valuable, but less interesting and within reach and validated in everyday life (biochemically and physically, degeneration, damage, etc.). So I would say the brain appears to modulate what is responsible for first person experience. This may not be the correct way to look at consciousness, but it's the most intuitively appealing to me. Because we can't separate being from consciousness, I find the idea that we might create it in the near-term unbelievable. We might certainly create something that can operate with the same or similar results, but I'm not currently convinced it would actually have a subjective first person experience equivalent to the reason we experience the matter we experience. There may be a logical or philosophical way around this view, but as I'm not trained, it's not immediately obvious.
by sn0n | 2025-09-04 05:05:15+00:00
I have 2 kiddos, 6&8 who are having some troubles in school. I'm a "remote dad", so I can't do much, but I did create this web app for them (ok, Gemini helped) and wanted feedback.

Trying to keep it simple, no analytics or tracking, no extra features to distract the little minds.

Thoughts?
by AIorNot | 2025-09-04 05:06:59+00:00
I’m an AI engineer but I think schools need a nuclear option

Banish tech in schools (including cell phones) (except during comp classes) but allow it at home

Ie in high school only allow paper and pencil/pen

Go back to written exams (handwriting based)

Be lenient on spelling and grammer

Allow homework, digital tutoring AI assistants and AI only when it not primary- ie for homework not in class work

Bring back oral exams (in a limited way)

Encourage study groups in school but don’t allow digital tech in those groups in class or libraries only outside of campus or in computer labs

Give up iPads and Chromebooks and Pearson etc
by zkmon | 2025-09-04 05:07:40+00:00
There are other factors that drive employment of young workforce, which don't have much to do with knowledge or skills. These are sort of blue-collar jobs within IT.

There is a lot of low-level drudgery work which is currently outsourced or assigned to non-employees (mostly young) in most companies. For example, the IT support and maintenance is mostly done outside of the West. This works requires a lot of back and forth. Don't think AI taking over this area.

Also, some work is assigned to young workers to spread the accountability and risk ownership. Not sure if you can hold AI as accountable as humans.

Also, young workers are generally preferred for their agility, flexibility and ability to work hard. There were easier to exploit and if they were unmarried, they won't mind giving all of their time and attention to work for less pay. I used to work in teams that stayed overnight at office to complete projects. Young people are also very cohesive and they team up well.

So, looking at the situation purely from a knowledge perspective may not give the full picture.
by srkirk | 2025-09-04 05:07:51+00:00
I believe LLMs have the potential to (for good or ill, depending on your view) destroy academic journals.

The scenario I am thinking of is academic A submitting a manuscript to an academic journal, which gets passed on by the journal editor to a number of reviewers, one of whom is academic B. B has a lot on their plate at the moment, but sees a way to quickly dispose of the reviewing task, thus maintaining a possibly illusory 'good standing' in the journal's eyes, by simply throwing the manuscript to an LLM to review. There are (at least) two negative scenarios here: 1. The paper contains embedded (think white text on a white background) instructions left by academic A to any LLM reading the manuscript to view it in a positive light, regardless of how well the described work has been conducted. This has already happened IRL, by the way. 2. Academic A didn't embed LLM instructions, but receives the review report, which show clear signs that the reviewer either didn't understand the paper, gave unspecific comments, highlighted only typos or simply used phrasing that seems artifically-generated. A now feels aggrieved that their paper was not given the attention and consideration it deserved by an academic peer and now has a negative opinion of the journal for (seemingly) allowing the paper to be LLM-reviewed. And just as journals will have great difficulty filtering for LLM-generated manuscripts, it will also find it very difficult to filter for LLM-generated reviewers reports.

Granted, scenario 2 already happens with only humans in the loop (the dreaded 'Reviewer 2' academic meme). But LLMs can only make this much much worse.

Both scenarios destroy trust in the whole idea of peer-reviewed science journals.
by nicklaf | 2025-09-04 05:09:06+00:00
Personally, I don't trust LLMs to write code for me, generally speaking. That said, as of late I've been very pleased with the whole "shoehorn your problem to fit code examples found online" thing these LLMs do, in the very special case of massaging unix scripts, and where the "code examples found online" part seems to mostly amount to making fairly canonical reference to features documented in man pages that are plastered all over the web and haven't changed much in decades.

For questions that I know should have a straightforward answer, I think it beats searching Stackoverflow. Sure, I'll typically end up having to rewrite most of the script from scratch; however, if I give it a crude starting point of a half-functional script I've already got going, pairing that with very clear instructions on how I'd like it extended is usually enough to get it to write a proof of concept demonstration that contains enough insightful suggestions for me to spend some time reading about features in man pages I hadn't yet thought to use.

The biggest problem maybe is a propensity for these models to stick in every last fancy feature under the sun. It's fun to read about a GNU extension to awk that makes my script a couple lines shorter, but at best I'll take this as an educational aside than something I'd accept at the expense of portability.
by username332211 | 2025-09-04 05:09:21+00:00
> But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years.

Just on top of my head, there's the ability to write longer texts, the AI integration (that seems fairly popular in there). There was also some revenue sharing scheme where accounts can get paid for engagement. And from the point of view of management, making it impossible to view threads without login would also be a feature (as in "something we have to deliberately implement").

It's not a lot, but I don't think the pre-Musk Twitter changed even that much in the 3 year period before the acquisition.
by kragen | 2025-09-04 05:09:32+00:00
"Generic functions" is the Common Lisp name for writing a separate method for each class, the same as in Python except that you also have to define the generic function itself before you can define the methods. I'm not sure if that's what you meant; the ML approach is quite different.

This is Common Lisp, which I am not an expert in:

;;; Stupid CLOS example. (defgeneric x (point)) ; make X a method (defgeneric y (point)) ; make Y a method (defclass rect-point () ((x :accessor x :initarg :x) (y :accessor y :initarg :y))) (defclass polar-point () ((radius :accessor radius :initarg :radius) (angle :accessor angle :initarg :angle))) (defmethod x ((p polar-point)) (* (radius p) (cos (angle p)))) (defmethod y ((p polar-point)) (* (radius p) (sin (angle p)))) (defgeneric move-by (point Δx Δy)) (defmethod move-by ((p rect-point) Δx Δy) (incf (x p) Δx) (incf (y p) Δy)) (defmethod move-by ((p polar-point) Δx Δy) (let ((x (+ (x p) Δx)) (y (+ (y p) Δy))) (setf (radius p) (sqrt (+ (* x x) (* y y))) (angle p) (atan y x)))) (defmethod print-object ((p polar-point) stream) ; standard method print-object (format stream "@~a<~a" (radius p) (angle p))) (defvar p1 (make-instance 'rect-point :x 3 :y 4)) (defvar p2 (make-instance 'polar-point :radius 1 :angle 1.047)) ;; prints (3, 4) → (4, 5) (format t "(~a, ~a) → " (x p1) (y p1)) (move-by p1 1 1) (format t "(~a, ~a)~%" (x p1) (y p1)) ;; prints @1<1.047 (0.500171, 0.8659266) → @1.9318848<0.7853087 (1.366171, 1.3659266) (format t "~a (~a, ~a) → " p2 (x p2) (y p2)) (move-by p2 .866 .5) (format t "~a (~a, ~a)~%" p2 (x p2) (y p2))

Here's a similar program in OCaml, which I am also not an expert in, using pattern-matching functions instead of methods, and avoiding mutation:

(* Stupid OCaml example. *) type point = Rect of float * float | Polar of float * float let x = function | Rect(x, y) -> x | Polar(r, theta) -> r *. Float.cos theta let y = function | Rect(x, y) -> y | Polar(r, theta) -> r *. Float.sin theta let moved_by = fun dx dy -> function | Rect(x, y) -> Rect(x +. dx, y +. dy) | p -> let x = dx +. x p and y = dy +. y p in Polar(Float.sqrt(x *. x +. y *. y), Float.atan2 y x) let string_of_point = function | Rect(x, y) -> Printf.sprintf "Rect(%f, %f)" x y | Polar(r, theta) -> Printf.sprintf "Polar(%f, %f)" r theta ;; print_endline(string_of_point(moved_by 1. 2. (Rect(3., 4.)))) ; print_endline(string_of_point(moved_by 0.866 0.5 (Polar(1., 1.047))))
by recursivecaveat | 2025-09-04 05:10:12+00:00
I recently switched to lazy because I wanted to experiment with some more complex plugins, but the answer is just: I didn't keep them up to date. If you're using basic text-oriented stuff like fzf or surround how often is it going to improve in a meaningful way once it has reached its fully-formed state? If it did get a noticeable update its probably more likely to annoy me by breaking my config or muscle memory than anything.
by musbemus | 2025-09-04 05:10:15+00:00
While I agree generally with the premise that the silver bullet that AI coding has been marketed to be has underdelivered (even if it doesn't feel that way), I gotta point out that the experiment and its results don't do a good job of capturing that. One of the biggest parts of using these AI tools is knowing which tasks they're most suitable for (and sometimes it's using them in only certain subtasks of a task). As mentioned, some tasks they absolutely excel at. Flipping a coin and deciding to use it or not is crude and unrealistic. Hard to come up with a reliable method though, I also think METR has it's glaring issues.
by kfreds | 2025-09-04 05:13:21+00:00
Good point. That is indeed a distinct fifth reason.

Here's a sixth one: for some users it can improve latency, bandwidth and/or even cost.

latency/bandwidth: because of weird peering agreements between ISPs / ASes.

cost: there are networks where consumers pay per MB for international traffic, but not local traffic. Consumers can sometimes establish a VPN tunnel to the local data center and get an unmetered international connection, because the data center has a different agreement with the monopolistic consumer ISP.
by belZaah | 2025-09-04 05:13:47+00:00
RM2 was a game changer for me: I could take notes both physically and on a computer and have them seamlessly in one place. Until after a firmware update the device became slow to respond and writing quality declined as the pen did not write continuously or wrote without the tip touching. I’m still, reluctantly, using it, but the thing is only valuable, if it’s as immediate and reliable as paper. Yet another company, that can’t leave their product the hell alone. I did not need that firmware update. My device was perfect, thank you very much
by culopatin | 2025-09-04 05:14:22+00:00
Today a friend of mine connected me with his uncle who wanted to develop an MVP for his company. He claimed he didn’t want to distract his engineers on this project, but that “it shouldn’t take you more than 5hs to do this with vibe coding”. I promptly declined, if it takes 5hs why are you reaching out to me? It would take more than 5hs just to bring me into the loop of what you want vs your own engineers. If vibe coding is that good might as well DIY while you’re showering!
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-04 05:14:33+00:00
You can empathize with your friends’ personal beliefs, but when those beliefs put children at risk, society has to draw a line. Vaccination is basic health hygiene required for large groups of people to live, learn, and function closely together without constant outbreaks. The requirement is minimal: if you want access to public education, you agree to the few safeguards that make it possible for the masses to share space safely (you use the bathroom, you wash your hands, you shower, you get vaccines).

Imagine if I said 'my religion doesn't allow running water, I should be allowed to defecate anywhere, and also science says toilets increase the risk of hemorrhoids, and you can't make me give my kids hemorrhoids'. You can't allow that, not because you don't agree with it, but because the way we live in groups needs artificial sanitation. Just like we need artificial stimulation of immune systems.