MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-09-05 08:10:51+00:00
> The things they thought were important or difficult or impressive are no longer any of those things. Regurgitating information on a test or generating prose from the notes you took in class are tasks which are easy to stereotype, and now readily automated.

Arithmetic is automatic, but you still have to learn how to do it, in an environment without a calculator, first.

Memorization has been solved by computers with infinite memory for at least a decade, but learning how to, building the muscle for, and yes even memorizing things that you can just look up online are still valuable in today's world because they work together with the other parts of your mental muscle and complement them.

Like, a set of wheels and a dolly can replace a lot of heavy lifting, but it's still helpful and healthy to lift weights!
by port11 | 2025-09-05 08:11:00+00:00
This is linked to the superb concept of Senescence [1].

In 'Exercised', the author goes to great lengths to show how, in some societies, people don't turn into 'vegetables' because they're active and engaged. They just… die eventually, without an awful decay into death.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence
by spwa4 | 2025-09-05 08:11:50+00:00
I don't understand why you'd do this. This is THE problem machine learning algorithms are made for. They will be better at this than almost anything else, so why bother with all this theory?

Plus this theory suffers from all sorts of problems like singularities, gimbal lock, self-crossing, ... that machine learning either extremely likely won't have, or definitely won't have.

I mean I get it's how it was done before. But at this point, why?
by dangus | 2025-09-05 08:12:49+00:00
The thing is that you and grandma were only accomplishing static sites back then. You can still do that today with many more options than you had back then and you can even use many of the exact same methods.

But when it comes to actually accomplishing something with application logic on the web, Grandma could ask the AI agent literally all these questions and get solid answers. At any point you get confused you can just ask what to do. You can highlight a line of code and ask “what does this mean?” You can even say “I want this web page to be put online what do I do?”

Beats waiting for a human to answer you.

You’re also taking my example application way too literally. No I don’t know why Grandma needs a signup form, I just couldn’t think of a web app off the top of my head.

MS Access and WSYWIG tools like FrontPage and iWeb were not good. I know because I was there and I used FrontPage at work. A link to your email (get spammed forever) is not a replacement for an application or email form. The whole reason code is preferred over WYSIWYG is because you inevitably have issues with change management even for simple personal projects, which is why static site generators have gained popularity. I’m sure your grandma could have handled markdown + someone else’s Hugo template + Netlify.

Hell, if we want to talk about progress in WYSIWYG editors, Trix greatly improved and modernized the shortfalls of that process and that was launched in 2014, less than 10 years ago. So even in the world of WSYWIG we have better tools now than before.

IIS has not been removed from Windows home edition, by the way.
by edu | 2025-09-05 08:13:05+00:00
I agree that client-side filters would be a great solution, but I see two issues there:

1) Not everybody would know how to do it 2) This creates a weakest link problem, where in a class of say 15 kids, just having one with a non-blocked device would allow for all to see.

I don't know what would be good solution, maybe something intermediate... for example, filtering at the ISP level and making it mandatory for them to inform and request the settings for all their customers? Just a form, so they can block it. But then, maybe I want to block porn for my underage kids but not for me or my partner.
by saberience | 2025-09-05 08:13:06+00:00
Engineers aren't the target audience for Lovable. I see it being used by designers and product managers, and also solopreneur type people, or non-technical folks wanting to build websites or start companies.

One PM I know uses it for designing prototypes then handing them off to the engineering team who then continue them in Claude Code etc.

So it's sorta of competing with Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress, and also prototyping tools like Figma.
by fuzztester | 2025-09-05 08:13:12+00:00
Thanks for the reply.

I had asked because I was thinking of getting some small device like a PDA or programmable calculator, to use to write small programs for fun and possibly actual use, when I'm not with my laptop.

I am not sure if any PDAs or such calculators are still made these days. I have googled some, but so far did not find any, IIRC. So I may have to buy a used calculator or PDA, if I can find a model I like.

I used to have 2 different Palm PDA models earlier, first a V and then a Zire, but I never did any programming with them, although I do remember trying to use Pippy, a Python 2.x version ported to the Palm. But it used to crash all the time, so I could not really do any programming on it, unfortunately.
by yehat | 2025-09-05 08:13:15+00:00
Wikipedia has gone too far from being what it was meant to be. I can agree it is the "last good thing on the internet" with the caveat - "for some people". Is is neither objective, thus not scientific, nor complete in terms of depth of the information. All of this happens because of invading obsession with "modern" ideologies that pollute and distort the pure knowledge gathering, which is a very complex matter itself that becomes a mission impossible in the case of Wikipedia.
by mindbrix | 2025-09-05 08:13:38+00:00
The core problem is path winding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winding_number

Paths can be any size, and the problem is hard to parallelize. GPUs like stuff broken into small regular chunks.

TestFiles/Manchester_Union_Democrat_office_1877.svg is composed of a single huge path, which was a great torture test.
by hkpack | 2025-09-05 08:14:41+00:00
> The nationalists from each country will try to establish their own ethnicity for persons of interest.

Russia is the major player in pushing disinformation in historical articles about eastern europe (and not only). It works on it systematically by using both hired editors and volunteers on scale as well as producing “backing” materials.

Framing editors who are trying to keep up with cleaning all this mess as bad actors is understandable if you support the goal why russia is doing that.
by ruszki | 2025-09-05 08:14:45+00:00
If New York Post just "leans right", then AP should post obvious lies en masse every day for the left with non existing fact checking. If the scale is this, then it is a completely useless metric. It puts using "ostensibly" regarding Trump's random word clouds to the same level as this: https://nypost.com/2022/09/06/teacher-enoch-burke-jailed-ove.... The first paragraph starts with a lie, then the last two paragraphs are worse than anything on AP... but sure, the metric is definitely useful.
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-09-05 08:14:57+00:00
From your link:

In March 2023, the New York Times identified a list of just 34 Bitcoin mining facilities (controlled by 22 different entities) in the United States, which represented about a third of the total worldwide Bitcoin mining network at the time.

If we extrapolate from that, it would be 66 entities that control 100% of Bitcoin mining. Miner revenue is somewhere about $50M per day. So on average one of those miners makes very roughly $1M per day, say $365M per year.

34 such $365M/year entities would have to collude to attack bitcoin. And accept that their business is severely damaged afterwards.

So much for the decentralization and security of Bitcoin.

How does the situation look like in other chains?
by udev4096 | 2025-09-05 08:15:06+00:00
Aren't you the definition of delusion. The past matters for a reason, it's the indication of how they started their fake scam. Sure, hard to touch them now but once a crook always a crook and taking pride in that shows your immoral nature in this late stage capitalistic era where money negates all the bad things you did in the past
by sunshine-o | 2025-09-05 08:15:31+00:00
I am curious about the Lightning Network, 10 years in it is still perceived as a failure.

What is blocking its adoption?

One I can think about is it is hard to accept that if I pay $20 for a pizza today, 6 months later that pizza might have cost me $40. It is a bit irrational but it will prevent most people from using it.

This is where the stablecoin thing is genius, one can decide/optimise when get in and out of crypto.
by hatefulmoron | 2025-09-05 08:15:34+00:00
Your prompting suggestion would certainly make them much better at this task, I would think.

I think it just points to the fact that LLMs have no "sense of self". They have no real knowledge or understanding of what they know or what they don't know. LLMs will not even reliably play the character of a machine assistant: run them long enough and they will play the character of a human being with a physical body[0]. All this points to the fact that "Claude the LLM" is just the mask that it will produce tokens using at first.

The "count the number of 'r's in strawberry" test seems to just be the easiest/fastest way to watch the mask slip. Just like that, they're mindlessly acting like a human.

[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
by jajko | 2025-09-05 08:15:41+00:00
Perfect it ain't, I never even heard anybody actually relevant state that, by the core principle of it it can't be.

But, its by far the best human-averaged source of info on most topics. I'd say even politically charged topics, definitely much better than most news out there who always show some clear bias.

Its not exhaustive (another common complain form folks who seek visibility by complaining and denigrating stuff for the heck of it or some immature popularity), its not meant to be. You also don't do postgrad level physics studies from Encyclopædia Britannica, do you, but it may give you some shallow introduction to orientate in the field a bit.
by bariswheel | 2025-09-05 08:16:29+00:00
Not really though. When people are busy and attempting to go from A to B, they may want to eliminate variables to better focus on their friends or something else in the Waymo. This is similar to the experiment where an incredible musician played violin in the subway terminal and people 'ignored' him. It's all about intention, when people plan to talk to a stranger, they're geared for that, if they are on their way somewhere, it's not the time or place to stop and 'smell the roses' most of the time as they are in a rush, doesn't have much to do with how great the musician is in the subway. When people go to a concert, and if that's same musician in the subway, they'll most definitely enjoy it, because they're planning on enjoying music at that time.
by miki123211 | 2025-09-05 08:17:26+00:00
This is what IBM I[1] (AKA AS400) does I think.

Ibm I applications are compiled to a hardware-independent intermediate representation called TIMI, which the SLIC (kernel) can then compile down to machine code, usually at program installation time. As the SLIC is also responsible for maintaining system security, there's no way for a malicious user to sneak in a noncompliant program.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i
by arcticbull | 2025-09-05 08:17:47+00:00
Even criminals don't want the insane volatility of vanilla crypto, and there's an unfounded sentiment that Tether doesn't freeze value in people's wallets (they actually freeze more than anyone else, and good luck resolving it in Salvadoran court if they even have jurisdiction).

Yes classical finance has had scandals because they're obligated to prevent these things, and in general, they have responded to court judgements by upping their internal controls. Crypto is built specifically not to have either internal controls or the ability to institute them in a meaningful way. It's the fundamental premise. One system is designed to stop this activity but fails sometimes, the other is designed to allow this activity by anarchocapitalist libertarian ethos and offers roughly zero recourse for those caught up incorrectly.

This argument is tantamount to "well, a plane crashed, so obviously the FAA doesn't provide any value, and we should just stop regulating aircraft entirely and yolo it." Same with drugs, well, a side-effect happened, let's just scrap the FDA and legalize the grey market Chinese sackloads of $5 peptides. While we're at it, we should let Walgreens sell em, why not.

If you think what the classical institutions are doing is wrong, you shouldn't say well, just let 'em lol, you should be arguing for stricter penalties and more control. If you think it's right, well, I don't know what to say.

Pepperidge Farm remembers when nobody in their right mind would just give all their money to unregulated offshore banks in the Caribbean. Remind me why that was again?
by mattmanser | 2025-09-05 08:17:56+00:00
That's not a skill test, or you'd point to the "test" instead of telling me to interview for a job role. That's a skilled judgement.

It is a generalization, but it's not unfair. That's the mistake you're making. Is it "unfair" to call the British people Roast Beef, or calling French people Froggies. Those are generalizations but are fair (or were at least). British people genuinely eat a disproportionate amount of Roast Beef and French people genuinely eat Frogs legs.

And there are genuinely more bad PMs than good ones and lots of developers have experience "managing" their PM and trying to ensure they don't do too much harm, like the GP that started this discussion.

Don't worry, most engineers will quickly realize when a PM is good and let them do their job without "managing" them. In fact, it's a delight working with one as they do genuinely make the dev process so much better.
by torginus | 2025-09-05 08:17:56+00:00
How would you go about writing a program/function that runs as close to native speed as possible on Fil-C?

How much more memory do GC programs tend to use?

Curious, how do you deal with interior pointers, and not being able to store type info in object headers, like most GC languages do (considering placement new is a thing, you can't have malloc allocate a header then return the following memory, and pointer types can lie about what they contain)?

You mention 'accurate' by which I assume you use the compiler to keep track of where the pointers are (via types/stackmaps).

How do you deal with pointers that get cast to ints, and then back?
by maxglute | 2025-09-05 08:18:41+00:00
It's western MSM being intransigently retarded/alarmist. PRC RE was 15% of economy. Construction + downstream industries other 15%. The 15%+15% got added together for the 30% at some point for some reporting and became the number that gets regurgitated over time. In reality, RE got slapped by 3 Redlines (i.e. it was deliberate policy choice), it goes from 15%->12%. The other 15% of which a large but still subsect previously captured by RE got redirected elsewhere, i.e. massive renewable rollout. Net effect PRC now growing at 5% instead of 8% with speculative RE. Like 3% ain't nothing, it's "important". But it's "important" same way healthcare+downstream is 20% of US GDP and if a few % got shaved, it would be pretty bad for that sector but it's not end times for everything else, which is how these articles on PRC RE usually comes off.
by sidkshatriya | 2025-09-05 08:18:48+00:00
I think this is the tension in most software. If you want to have excellent and correct software it will take time.

And if you want more features with a "fix as you go approach" you will often have huge technical debt and get saddled with poor interfaces, often forever.

But, I think OCaml errs too much on the side of getting it right the first time. The result is that state of the art keeps moving far ahead. By the time OCaml "catches up" the field of programming languages has moved far ahead. So OCaml always remains the Jack of all trades and the master of none (IMHO).

I like the direction OxCaml is taking. But the problem is that no one has another 10 years to see its learnings get folded back into OCaml. There is a real chance that OxCaml may diverge so much that it becomes impractical to merge it into OCaml. Flambda2 is another great piece of software that may also take a long time to come into OCaml proper.

So I feel that things need to be "speeded up" if OCaml has to become a bigger ecosystem. You can see that some big projects are moving away from OCaml -- facebook for instance used to have their python typechecker in OCaml. Their new one, pyrefly is in Rust. This could be an isolated story, no doubt.
by kubb | 2025-09-05 08:19:03+00:00
For people using OCaml, there’s one thing that kinda discourages me in it, that is exceptions as part of the API in the standard library.

Because exceptions aren’t checked, this effectively means that a language designed for type safety has as much type safety as python, because it’s very easy to forget handling something, and get runtime errors.

How do you deal with this day to day? I assume it’s impossible to just believe that all the code you pull in doesn’t use exceptions?
by arethuza | 2025-09-05 08:19:28+00:00
I learned about it after I graduated with a CS degree - I mean in true university degree fashion we'd been taught about Laplace and Z transforms (and related things) but with no practical applications.

After graduating I joined an academic research team based mainly in a EE department who were mainly Control Engineers - we were mainly doing stuff around qualitative reasoning and using it for fault diagnosis, training etc.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-09-05 08:20:09+00:00
>Why?

Great way to tell the 100x engineer apart from the only 10x (full-vibing) engineer.

Less snarkily, I don't know any stakeholder who doesn't believe there's a theory with far fewer parameters and lower energy/materiel needs--- like the equivalent biological neuro-subsystem

(A mosquito evades all kinds of singularities,delivers the payload, looks for food, friends, makes babies, is a joke, isn't a joke, etc)
by CrossVR | 2025-09-05 08:20:18+00:00
> Since LLM skeptics frequently characterize all LLM vendors as dishonest mustache-twirling cartoon villains there's little point trying to convince them that companies sometimes actually do what they say they are doing.

Even if the large LLM vendors respect it, there's enough venture capital going around that plenty of smaller vendors are attempting to train their own LLMs and they'll take every edge they can get, robots.txt be damned.
by southp | 2025-09-05 08:20:20+00:00
It's fascinating, even though my knowledge to LLM is so limited that I don't really understand what's happening. I'm curious how the examples are plotted and how much resemblance they are to the real models, though. If one day we could reliably plot a LLM into modules like this using an algorithm, does that mean we would be able to turn LLMs into chips, rather than data centers?
by michaelt | 2025-09-05 08:20:58+00:00
> I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.

It's extremely difficult to get solid evidence of this stuff, as it all happens so slowly it's inseparable from many other gradual forces in society.

Are people getting married and having children less, because porn has undermined their ability to form healthy adult relationships?

Or is it because of a successful campaign against teen pregnancy? A rise in women's education levels making them want to wait to start a family? Contraception and pre-marital sex removing a major incentive to settle down? Society's infantilisation of men, who should put away childish things at a much younger age? A housing crisis and hollowing out of the lower middle class meaning people can't hope to afford a family home until middle age? A preference the man out-earns the woman being incompatible with a world where women out-perform men in education? Fears about the future, like the climate crisis? A decline in religion and traditional family values? The rise of online/app-based dating?

Our main tools for disentangling these influences are, as far as I can tell, vibes and anecdotes.
by bigpeopleareold | 2025-09-05 08:21:16+00:00
I started to think that these type of articles posted on Hacker News are a bit excessive. This and the AI stuff. This is one American company (high-profile, for sure) that might or might not be having retention issues. It's up to them to decide that, individual employees of the said company to decide if this arrangement is still right for them and shareholders if this will be a worthy investment in the next years. I think a lot of people are none of these. In the meantime, these "top tech talent" probably make way more than I can ever possibly can, and have the mental acuity to keep up with the demands that their employer requires from them while continuing to have a higher ceiling on the type of employment benefits than I could ever have.

I know I will have an argument over this which I won't both participating in, so please just downvote me.

You want to know about my own employer's policy, and employer you might have never heard of? It's not like Amazon. Amazon is not a bellweather for the wider industry as I see it.
by PxldLtd | 2025-09-05 08:23:00+00:00
Yep, we've got the camera mounted vertically above the screen. We use the dance floors to render an interactive Unity game. The pixel density is pretty good. These panels have an array of IR LEDs embedded in them for detection but the density isn't good enough for small objects we want to track. Great for detecting anything the size of a foot or bigger.
by squigz | 2025-09-05 08:23:36+00:00
Because there's a big difference between having empathy for another's pain and actually understanding what it's like, even to a slight degree. For example, I'm severely visually impaired; I would not expect a deaf person to truly understand what that's like, just as I don't understand what a deaf person's life is like; that doesn't stop either of us from having empathy for the other though.

If this helps people empathize who otherwise wouldn't... isn't that good? Can we just not be glad that people can gain some more understanding of what the elderly go through?
by viking123 | 2025-09-05 08:23:43+00:00
I am around 30 and at least still I feel same as 20. Although I try to walk at least 30 min per day but the city I live in Asia is really shit for walking so it ends up being through shopping malls or some park.

Also I have been taking metformin (daily) and rapamycin (weekly) since like age 24 not sure they have helped but it's easy to buy here so I am giving it a try. I also use sunscreen if I go out during the midday which I rarely do in the tropics..