MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antonvs | 2025-09-04 00:02:19+00:00
I agree with the other reply that you're overthinking this.

If you claim there's no distinction, then in terms of the meaning Nagel is trying to convey, you're claiming there's no distinction that sets you apart from a game of Tetris in terms of consciousness.

That's where my first reply to you was coming from: if you believe the distinction Nagel is trying to convey doesn't exist, that's tantamount to saying that consciousness as a real phenomenon doesn't exist - the eliminativist position - or something along those lines.

If you do believe consciousness exists, then you're simply arguing with the way Nagel is choosing to characterize it. I asked how you would describe it, but you haven't tried to address that.
by philsnow | 2025-09-04 00:02:39+00:00
I'm reminded of Nethack, which keeps track of your score as a 32-bit* signed int, and so some people have perfected making sure that they have MAX_INT when they win.. and then it becomes a game of trying to do as much as you can in the game without going over MAX_INT.

* though I guess newer builds are defaulting to 64-bit signed ints?
by bdhe | 2025-09-04 00:02:55+00:00
> One example: many skeptics ask the question “if vaccines are so safe then why are they immune to lawsuits?”. This is a very reasonable question for people to ask!

I hear this point cited and I googled it and it took me like 3 seconds to get this answer: https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/science-histor...

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...

Seems like a reasonable answer to me! The question is, why don't vaccine skeptics just look things up and try to educate themselves?

===

Why are vaccine manufacturers shielded from liability? A 1982 TV news report entitled Vaccine Roulette suggested that the whole-cell pertussis vaccine was the cause of permanent brain injury. Subsequent studies indicated that while the whole-cell vaccine was associated with febrile seizures, it was not associated with long-term brain damage. However, those studies took at least 10 years to exonerate the vaccine.

In the meantime, as vaccine manufacturers were flooded with lawsuits, some decided to stop making vaccines rather than face continued legal pressures. Consequently, production dropped, leading to concerns about vaccine supply and subsequent vaccination rates.

By shielding vaccine manufacturers from liability, Congress assured that future generations would be protected from devastating diseases. A common misconception is that this process completely shields vaccine makers. However, a plaintiff may file a civil court claim against vaccine companies after filing a claim in the VICP if they reject the vaccine court's decision.
by ge96 | 2025-09-04 00:03:31+00:00
Funny I almost wish I bought an RM2 (again)

I got a PineNote and it had a $100 import duty

This device for me is odd/too small it's like you'd have 2 phones. Though I've seen those e-ink phones.

The writing feel is great on the RM2 and the battery life wow. Charge it once a month deal.
by davmre | 2025-09-04 00:04:08+00:00
Regardless of the effects, I don't think the case against MS was brought with the intent to "punish" MS through the trial process. The government brought the case because it thought it could win, it did win, and a judicial remedy was imposed. Trials are inherently unpleasant, but a just system tries to minimize this, not exploit it.

Any unjust policy (including just dispensing with trials altogether and allowing the executive to arbitrarily break up companies) will get to the 'desirable' outcome in some cases. That doesn't make it a just policy.

The specific allegation in the post is that the Trump administration will not appeal the verdict because Sundar gave $1M to Trump's inauguration. As far as I know, the government has not yet indicated whether it will appeal, so the claim that "Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over" is in fact not true. (whether it becomes true at some point in the future, it was a falsehood at the time the author wrote it). It's also quite plausible that a Republican administration wouldn't appeal the verdict just due to being more pro-business in general, even without explicit corruption. But it's precisely because we have such a corrupt executive that it becomes all the more important to stick up for the rule of law. The correct response to authoritarianism is not to advocate for more authoritarianism!
by FloorEgg | 2025-09-04 00:04:12+00:00
Yes, essentially.

There are multiple long-form text inputs, one set is provided by User A, and another set by User B. User A inputs act as a prompt for User B, and then User A analyzes User B's input according to the original User A inputs, producing an output.

My system takes User A and B inputs and produces the output with more accuracy and precision than User As do, but a wide margin.

Instead of trying to train a model on all the history of these inputs and outputs, the solution was a combination of goal->job->task breakdown (like a fixed agentic process), and lots of context and prompt engineering. I then test against customer legacy samples, and inspect any variances by hand. At first the variances were usually system errors, which informed improvements to context and prompt engineering, and after working through about a thousand of these (test -> inspect variance -> if system mistake improve system -> repeat) iterations, and benefiting from a couple base-model upgrades, the variances are now about 99.9% user error (bad historical data or user inputs) and 0.1% system error. Overall it took about 9 months to build, and this one niche is worth ~$30m a year revenue easy, and everywhere I look there are market niches like this... it's ridiculous. (and a basic chat interface like ChatGPT doesn't work for these types of problems, no matter how smart it gets, for a variety of reasons)

So to summarize:

Instead of training a model on the historical inputs and outputs, the solution was to use the best base model LLMs, a pre-determined agentic flow, thoughtful system prompt and context engineering, and an iterative testing process with a human in the loop (me) to refine the overall system by carefully comparing the variances between system outputs and historical customer input/output samples.
by tom_ | 2025-09-04 00:04:22+00:00
Add me to the VB for DOS fan club! I was a user in the mid to late 90s. TurboVision was beyond me at the time (I didn't really know Pascal well at all, and I wasn't good enough at C++), but VB for DOS was just the ticket (mostly) - the language was not terrible, and the form designer was super easy to use. Much easier than me attempting to recreate a nice text UI in C. I wrote a few programs in it.

I do recall the 640 KB barrier being a limitation. I've forgotten the exact details, but, as I recall, the docs implied it shouldn't generally be an issue - but in practice it was. And it'd always be a problem at the most annoying time.

(But it could just have been some large model thing that experienced real mode fiends would instinctively know to avoid? Coming from a 68000 background, for DOS stuff I'd used Borland's huge model or a DOS extender of some kind, to avoid the segmentation one way or another. Maybe that was the problem.)

Despite the occasional problems I had, I always generally liked it, and felt the UIs I created with it looked really rather nice.
by dmitrygr | 2025-09-04 00:05:28+00:00
I used to be a huge fan of these guys, going as far as buying their extremely expensive $800 device as gifts for a few friends, but now I advise anybody and everybody against ever giving them money

Two separate reasons.

One: they design hardware very poorly, and when advised and shown, do not fix it. I am convinced this is on purpose, and this saddens me. I can share my email exchange where i advised them on this. Did not go anywhere. This has been the cause of a lot of broken USB C ports on remarkable2. I have documented this extensively with photos on multiple devices. No sane person places a USB-C port that will interact with the a real user in the real world, handling insertion/removal forces on the very very edge (less than 1mm from edge) of a very very thin (0.4m thick IIRC) PCB, without affixing it to something else as well -- to take the load. They did. Predictably, it breaks.

Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/eu4P8fnaNtV9vhMo7 . The video in there, via microscope, you can see how the contacts peeled off. Larger photos show the PCB and how the connector is "affixed". Final photo is after it was fixed, but before the epoxy was added by me

Two: they took features that were part of the original very expensive product, bought under the understanding that "I pay you much $$, you do not nickel and dime me ever again", and locked them behind paywalls of monthly service years after original purchase. They did sort-of grandfather-in all existing users, but not if you reset the device or gift/transfer it. Devaluing/crippling products post facto is something that should never be rewarded. Companies that do that should fail.

Please help reMerkable fail for the above anti-user behaviour. They deserve it.
by bcrosby95 | 2025-09-04 00:06:13+00:00
I think it depends.

There are very simple apps I try to vibe code that AI cannot handle. It seems very good at certain domains, and others it seems complete shit at.

For example, I hand wrote a simulation in C in just 900 LOC. I wrote a spec for it and tried to vibe code it in other languages because I wanted to compare different languages/concurrency strategies. Every LLM I've tried fails, and manages to write 2x+ more code in comparatively succinct languages such as Clojure.

I can totally see why people writing small utilities or simple apps in certain domains think its a miracle. But when it comes to things like e.g. games it seems like a complete flop.
by causal | 2025-09-04 00:06:21+00:00
Then in a subscription economy- where having a poor credit score can result in loss of housing, insurance, and more- opaque unelected beureaus are wielding tremendous power. Perhaps they are not evil or even unfair, but if you'll recall the context of TFA, it bears many of the same failure modes of a social credit system, and will only be as good as the people regulating it.
by imadEngineering | 2025-09-04 00:06:23+00:00
>So what gets you out of bed each morning?

Fajr (morning) prayer

To answer the title question we need to first agree that, it must be objective, and to be objective you need to define the terms used here, as the question will first be: What is happiness?

A Materialstic view may go "its chimical signals in our brain"

Then a neurologist refute that by saying "It is not yet confirmed to be the case"

A random humanitarian may go "Its when you sit in the worms of your family"

In which a guy with ABC in philosophy mentions a single instence where its not the case and say: "Your universal is broken"

A Nihilist may go: "There is no such thing as happiness or happy life."

Then a religious person (like me) respond saying: "Worshiping and obeying God is the only happiness path in this world"

And so on, each with his views, with definition in mind you could seek to validate the objectiveness of them.

Picking the wrong "happiness model" will have effects on your journey seeking happiness, so pick wisely.

Good luck.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-09-04 00:06:37+00:00
> if you can find a way to produce verifiable rewards about a target world

I feel like there's an interesting symmetry here between the pre and post LLM world, where I've always found that organisations over-optimise for things they can measure (e.g. balance sheets) and under-optimise for things they can't (e.g. developer productivity), which explains why its so hard to keep a software product up to date in an average org, as the natural pressure is to run it into the ground until a competitor suddenly displaces it.

So in a post LLM world, we have this gaping hole around things we either lack the data for, or as you say: lack the ability to produce verifiable rewards for. I wonder if similar patterns might play out as a consequence and what unmodelled, unrecorded, real-world things will be entirely ignored (perhaps to great detriment) because we simply lack a decent measure/verifiable-reward for it.
by TuringNYC | 2025-09-04 00:06:58+00:00
Love this note. For those interested, this is the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 Section 179.

For a software engineering business, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 significantly impacted how software costs can be expensed under Section 179. While Section 179 previously allowed for the immediate expensing of many software purchases, TCJA reforms restricted this deduction primarily to "off-the-shelf" software. Custom-developed software and internal development costs are no longer eligible for Section 179 expensing and must now be capitalized and amortized.

Under the TCJA, Section 179 cannot be used for software that a company develops for itself. This includes the direct costs for the engineers, programmers, and other personnel involved in the development process.

The report not addressing this elephant in the room is a disappointing.
by Ljubo-Kovac | 2025-09-04 00:07:29+00:00
Hi. Needed a "tool" to help me build other much bigger project. Wanted to see,manage, and edit all my files in one place (window/tab). So I built one. After a few weeks of using it , I decided to create a website out of it and, in essence, a standalone webapp for other people to use it. So... here I am looking for feedback, opinions... basically, are there other people who find this useful? I jumped into the future with my roadmap , because thats what I see.. Thank You All.

Looking forward to your reaction, good or bad(preferred). - regards, L J K.
by foxylad | 2025-09-04 00:07:51+00:00
I own my company so have no fear of losing my job - indeed I'd love to offload all the development I do, so I have no resentment against AI.

But I also really care about the quality of our code, and so far my experiments with AI have been disappointing. The empirical results described in this article ring true to me.

AI definitely has some utility, just as the last "game changer" - blockchain - does. But both technologies have been massively oversold, and there will be many, many tears before bedtime.
by carabiner | 2025-09-04 00:08:13+00:00
What do you use Organic Maps for? Driving directions, walking, hiking, cycling? All of those or something else? It doesn't seem good for hiking because it's missing so many basic metrics that Gaia has (elevation data, different speeds like rate of ascent). I've got a rough impression that it's mostly suited for urban European locales for walking directions, but in the US I only use mapping apps for driving (turn by turn directions) and hiking in mountainous wilderness (as opposed to some places in Europe that had nearly urban "hiking").
by drum55 | 2025-09-04 00:08:20+00:00
I have a RPP and it’s an almost device, it’s so close to good in many ways and falls flat in others.

My biggest gripe with it originally was that the next and previous page gestures worked perhaps one in three attempts, which has been fixed in the most recent software that reduced the perceived latency of everything dramatically. Beyond that it’s a weird experience, it’s sort of usable with open source tools but requires a lot of hacks to not have it sync with their cloud offering if you want privacy. Even if you use their cloud services it often feels a bit clunky and half considered where buttons and controls end up being.

I love the hardware, it’s an amazing looking screen, it feels ultra premium, the folio cases people have made for it fit perfectly in my bag.
by m-hodges | 2025-09-04 00:08:38+00:00
This article reminds me of two recent observations by Paul Krugman about the internet:

"So, here’s labor productivity growth over the 25 years following each date on the horizontal axis [...] See the great productivity boom that followed the rise of the internet? Neither do I. [...] Maybe the key point is that nobody is arguing that the internet has been useless; surely, it has contributed to economic growth. The argument instead is that its benefits weren’t exceptionally large compared with those of earlier, less glamorous technologies."¹

"On the second, history suggests that large economic effects from A.I. will take longer to materialize than many people currently seem to expect [...] And even while it lasted, productivity growth during the I.T. boom was no higher than it was during the generation-long boom after World War II, which was notable in the fact that it didn’t seem to be driven by any radically new technology [...] That’s not to say that artificial intelligence won’t have huge economic impacts. But history suggests that they won’t come quickly. ChatGPT and whatever follows are probably an economic story for the 2030s, not for the next few years."²

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy....

² https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/opinion/ai-chatgpt-jobs-e...
by alsetmusic | 2025-09-04 00:08:39+00:00
> Plans are time-bound

This is exactly what I don't want. I mean, I'm no longer in the market for meeting new people (read: dating), but I can't imagine anything worse than not having a good way to politely exit an awkward encounter.

My experience with dating apps (good and bad) tells me that I don't want to get locked in with a stranger without an out, whether for dating purposes or otherwise.

Edit: I commend the originality of the idea, however.
by baby_souffle | 2025-09-04 00:09:19+00:00
Kindle scribe has been a disappointment. Unless you're going to go through all the work needed to jailbreak, your subject to whatever software changes Amazon wants to push on you with next to no notice.

I haven't looked much since shortly after a launch of the original scribe but I was infuriated to find out that they didn't have a straightforward or simple API for extracting notes and that wasn't something they had on the road map for immediately after release either.

To the best of my knowledge, there is still no convenient way to extract handwritten scribbles and store them as an SVG alongside OCR inside of an obsidian vault. I would love to be proven wrong on this though.

If you don't plan to do a ton of handwriting, the scribe is a gorgeous and large screen. Reading long form documents on it would be a treat if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to side load and synchronize PDFs.

Now I just do everything through my iPad with a pencil and it's almost as good...
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-09-04 00:09:39+00:00
It absolutely was considered a toy by most people when it debuted in late 2022. This was the era when memes abounded about how ChatGPT would dutifully answer the query "what's the world record for crossing the English Channel on foot?" [0] or "what weighs more, a pound of feathers or a kilogram of bricks?" [1]

Most people didn't start taking ChatGPT/gen-AI seriously until mid-2023, when GPT-4 became widely used.

[0] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*yJs...

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fpl09fAakAE1cFW?format=jpg&name=...
by The_Fox | 2025-09-04 00:09:39+00:00
> The rapid growth of revenue of AI model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.

You can't use growth of AI companies as evidence to refute the article. The premise is that it's a bubble. The growth IS the bubble, according to the claim.

> I don't know why the author of TFA claims that he can't make a bunch of one-off apps

I agree... One-off apps seem like a place where AI can do OK. Not that I care about it. I want AI that can build and maintain my enterprise B2B app just as well as I can in a fraction of the time, and that's not what has been delivered.
by Shank | 2025-09-04 00:09:51+00:00
> I don't see why most editors should behave like hand crafted musical instruments when in reality they are much more akin to high quality knives in a kitchen (sure you have your favorite knife set and bring it from job to job, but at the end of the day you can be just as productive with a different knife when necessary).

This is such a poor analogy. Yes, a good chef can make do with a different knife, but there is a reason why chefs pay for significantly higher quality knives, keep them sharpened, and treat them with diligence and care, than other kitchen tools. A blunt knife can actually be dangerous. Consequently, a lot of chefs buy knives that are effectively hand crafted / forged knives out of this relentless pursuit of quality.

> What most of these comments are missing is the attempt at standardization and unification.

> While that may be true and your particular workflow requires certain features, what is overlooked is the survival pressure for editors.

I think your general perception is not something I agree with. I want to use software I enjoy using. Programming is a creative exercise for me, and I want to use the tools I enjoy. If a tool is not enjoyable to use, I do not want to use it. Sometimes, productivity does increase enjoyment, but sometimes it doesn't. For example, arguably I would have been more productive in my Java days if I used Eclipse, but because the editor was so bad, I preferred to learn the APIs myself and use Sublime Text instead.

I also don't think I'm sympathetic to the survival of any particular editor. Software comes and goes, and sustainably built business models will prevail. All of the AI-first editors hinge on this being the right iteration of this technology, and we simply do not have a long enough timeframe or context to know if this is truly the best way to write code using AI. MCP/ACP, whatever else might be the best strategy for now, but I think it's too early for anyone to suggest that we've come to the right conclusion forever.
by captainkrtek | 2025-09-04 00:10:09+00:00
To add to this:

If I as a reviewer don’t know if the author used AI, I can’t even assume a single human (typically the author) has even read any or major parts of the code. I could be the first person reviewing it.

Not that it’s a great assumption to make, but it’s also fair to take a PR and register that the author wrote it, understands it, and considers it ready for production. So much work, outside of tech as well, is built on trust at least in part.
by wenc | 2025-09-04 00:11:12+00:00
I’m not sold on e-ink devices being a creation device. The refresh rate is too slow and the resolution is too low.

I realized there was already a device that was perfect for note taking on an infinite canvas.

I use an iPad and Apple Pencil (bought refurb on backmarket.com) with paper like surface [1] I install nothing in it except Apple Freeform. (No distractions)

High refresh rate, Retina display, excellent pen pressure, and fast chip. Cheaper than RM2 if bought refurb.

[1] https://a.co/d/dHLwPp1
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-04 00:11:13+00:00
The worst thing about Google is that they discovered the ad-model and created an entire generation that is entitled to free tools and services on the internet. People who think Gmail, drive, sheets, translate, Gemini, YouTube, search, android, etc., etc. are all inherently free services that Google is greedily slapping ads on.

Google is a monster because people so heavily favor the ad-model over paying for things.

Kagi wonderful, but paying for search? Lol that shit is free!
by danans | 2025-09-04 00:11:20+00:00
> SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year

It was pretty clear by late 2022 that AI assisted coding was going to transform how software development was done. I remember having conversations with colleagues at that time about how SWE might transform into an architecture and systems design role, with transformer models filling in implementations.

If it was clear to workers like us, it was pretty clear to the c-suite. Not that it was the only reason for mass layoffs, but it was a strong contributor to the rationale.

Many large companies were placing a bet that there were turbulent times ahead, and were lightening their load preemptively.