MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jean-Papoulos | 2025-09-04 07:48:19+00:00
Looking at the "overall" graph they provide, it's clear that jobs as a whole have flatlined since 22, and even non-exposed jobs have had a growth rate hugely reduced. If we disregard the existence of AI, it would be easy to assume this is just the regular economic slowdown impacting younger people more than older ones. I don't see any correlation work done to isolate the source, especially as a lot of the "ai-exposed" work is also very much exposed to how much money is flowing in.
by dns_snek | 2025-09-04 07:48:25+00:00
Your use of LLMs is distinctly different than the use being described here (in a good way).

You might ask "What do I need to pay attention to when designing this type of electronic circuit", the people at risk of cognitive decline instead ask "design this electronic circuit for me".

I firmly believe that the the latter group will suffer observable cognitive decline over the span of a few years unless they continue to exercise their brain in the same ways they used to, and I think the majority won't bother to do that - why spend much effort when little effort do trick?
by pferde | 2025-09-04 07:48:51+00:00
I'm in one of Europe's slightly less developed countries.

And I can only recommend getting into mapping as a hobby. It got me to discover parts of my own city and region I've completely overlooked despite living there for decades, and gave me reasons to get out more.

I just wish it was easier to edit the map on mobile, but alas, nothing beats big desktop screen with a good editor and a precise input method. Mobile screens are small, and my fingers are fat. :)
by mellosouls | 2025-09-04 07:49:30+00:00
Its odd that when places like HN or Reddit ask for favourite podcasts the amazing resources of BBC radio (that precede all modern internet podcasts and the best of which still wipe the floor with most of them) are often forgotten.

In Our Time represents the best of the form, and the BBC, and that's significantly down to the excellence of Bragg.

The archive (you may need a VPN outside the UK):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player

Some curated lists:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2Dw1c7rxs6DmyK0pMR...
by actionfromafar | 2025-09-04 07:51:18+00:00
Amen. And a lot of discoverability comes from long term vision and a reluctance to break things. (Yes, I know, Apple breaks some stuff from time to time.) But in Linux land, you can have major UX things change completely from release to release, so that there is no use learning all the intricacies of a user interface, because the rug pull is probably close.
by lvncelot | 2025-09-04 07:52:35+00:00
I have a Remarkable 2 that I used to use religiously, now use sporadically, but cannot recommend because of the user-hostile changes to the subscription and the very restrictive underlying software.

One of the promises that lead me to buy one was the hackability - "It's Linux!" "You can SSH into it!", which, on paper (heh) is still true, but in practice very much isn't.

I think something like a Boox, which runs Android, might be more open to customization, but for now I am back to pencil and paper. That doesn't run Linux, but it also won't change its terms of service anytime soon.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-04 07:52:46+00:00
> someone working for the local government (Hamas) in 2023 or after, is often treated by the IDF as being a combatant

To be fair, guilty-until-proven-innocent for card-carrying affiliates is deeply precedented during wartime. (Though I'm not sure how we'd classify e.g. a janitor on a military base, casualty-wise.)

Jailing elderly single mothers who haven't been charged with a crime is not. It's important to distinguish between these because while both are horrible, one departs from the way the great powers have fought modern wars.
by coffeebeqn | 2025-09-04 07:52:48+00:00
Same - I use it at work at a big tech company and the real world efficiency gains on net are probably nonexistent. We have multiple large and not so large codebases. In a super trivial script or creating a struct from documentation it does the thing - great. For unit tests it’s about 50-50 if it’s useful or if I waste a few hours and delete the change set. In any moderately complex codebase Claude Sonnet or GPT in agent mode builds unneeded complexity, gets lost in a spiraling amount of nonsense steps, builds things that already exist in the codebase constantly. The best outcome I have to edit and review so heavily it’s like I’m jumping in on someone else’s PR halfway and have to grok what the heck did they misunderstand.

The only actually net positive is the Claude.md that some people maintain - it’s actually a good context dump for new engineers!
by visarga | 2025-09-04 07:53:00+00:00
Interesting topic, but I can only see one chapter. Based on chapter names it seems you lean closer to cybernetics or process philosophy. Is that true? I find ignoring time and process to be the greatest sin in the field of consciousness. The big issue is not that we don't know the quantum trick or property-dualism that explains consciousness, but that we try to remove time and process from it. That is impossible, a static explanation will never capture dynamic execution of a system.

I worked on similar topics, I publish on a "personal" subreddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VisargaPersonal/
A variation of the Secretary Problem to guarantee high reliability
by glathoud | 2025-09-04 07:53:42+00:00
Hello,

In the Secretary Problem, one tries in a single pass to pick the best candidate of an unknown market. Overall, the approach works well, but can lead to a random result in some cases.

Here is an alternative take that proposes to pick a "pretty good" candidate with high reliability (e.g. 99%), also in a single pass:

https://glat.info/sos99/

Feedback welcome. Also, if you think there is a better place to publish this, suggestions are welcome.

Guillaume
by coldtea | 2025-09-04 07:54:17+00:00
>In china, there is a murder wagon with a crematory. Nobody ever finds you..

In China there are portable vans to serve as execution places for executions that are ordered by court - in lieu of having special buildings. No crematory and no 'nobody finds you' nonsense.

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

Still bad, but same for the "land of the free" that still has and carries the death penalty (for comparison, no EU or European country has it).
by versteegen | 2025-09-04 07:54:25+00:00
A Transformer with a length n context window implements an order 2n-1 Markov chain¹. That is correct. That is also irrelevant in the real world, because LLMs aren't run for that many tokens (as results are bad). Before it hits that limit, there is nothing requiring it to have any of the properties of a Markov chain. In fact, because the state space is k^n (alphabet size k), you might not revisit a state until generating k^n tokens.

¹ Depending on context window implementation details, but that is the maximum, because the states n tokens back were computed from the n tokens before that. The minimum of course is an order n-1 Markov chain.
by Certhas | 2025-09-04 07:54:37+00:00
I know that if you go large enough you can do any finite computation using only fixed transition probabilities. This is a trivial observation. To repeat what I posted elsewhere in this thread:

Take a finite tape Turing machine with N states and tape length T and N^T total possible tape states.

Now consider that you have a probability for each state instead of a definite state. The transitions of the Turing machine induce transitions of the probabilities. These transitions define a Markov chain on a N^T dimensional probability space.

Is this useful? Absolutely not. It's just a trivial rewriting. But it shows that high dimensional spaces are extremely powerful. You can trade off sophisticated transition rules for high dimensionality.

You _can_ continue this line of thought though in more productive directions. E.g. what if the input of your machine is genuinely uncertain? What if the transitions are not precise but slightly noisy? You'd expect that the fundamental capabilities of a noisy machine wouldn't be that much worse than those of a noiseless ones (over finite time horizons). What if the machine was built to be noise resistant in some way?

All of this should regularize the Markov chain above. If it's more regular you can start thinking about approximating it using a lower rank transition matrix.

The point of this is not to say that this is really useful. It's to say that there is no reason in my mind to dismiss the purely mathematical rewriting as entirely meaningless in practice.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-09-04 07:55:01+00:00
The EU was sold as a vehicle for common interest of smaller national states. It seems it is just a better vehicle to be targeted by lobbyists.

Constant surveillance ambitions, vast inefficient and unfair subsidies and the boon that is sold to the nasty peasants is that they don't have to show their passport when trying to go on holiday in another European country.

I think the dream of a common Europe or strong EU will be dead if nothing changes.
by watersb | 2025-09-04 07:55:24+00:00
> The US public and government officials had no idea how bad it was in the USSR.

My wife's grandparents had a subscription to "Soviet Life" magazine, beautiful postcard photos and articles about the glowing future of mankind, collective posts capitalist society...

From the 1950s. We've got stacks of them. Wild.

So, yes: many intellectuals in the United States had an "I want to believe" attitude.

> It was a good witch hunt.

There's no such thing as a good witch hunt.

When you are targeting innocent people, destroying lives in the name of freedom, there can be no liberty.

Inciting mob justice is playing with fire. It's a form of insanity. Our judicial system was designed to find fact and render judgment as far from that madness as possible. It's imperfect but can be made to work.

> We very much almost lost the Cold War to the Soviets.

Anyone who spent a weekend in a nuclear bomb shelter in the summer of 1983 knows there was no winning in that Cold War. Everyone was losing.

> What saved us was our economic engine.

The short answer is yes, I agree.

There's a much longer answer. I toured a tiny bit of Estonia and Russia in the summer of 1990. I wish I could tell you in just a few words how I saw a thousand acts of bravery, many acts of brutality, and more than anything a million hungry people who wanted better for their children.

What saved us was our economic engine, our mutual commitment to the welfare and defense of our NATO allies, our intelligence service and our diplomatic corps. Career professionals and rational leadership.

Not witch hunts.
by palmfacehn | 2025-09-04 07:55:29+00:00
>In Ireland, people work to live, but too many Americans live to work. If you ask someone in Ireland to tell you about themselves, you will probably find out what county they are from, what sports they follow, and even their position on Ireland's most closely-fought controversy (Lyons vs Barry’s). Ask an American, and you will immediately find out what they do for a living.

I've always found this to be weird and off-putting. Okay, ask if it is important, but if they don't understand the response, that's on them. I understand that people frame things through their own experiences, but it is strange when wage based employment is assumed to be the only way to earn or live. It is a poor way to start a casual conversation.
by fedeb95 | 2025-09-04 07:55:35+00:00
Copyright restrictions of digital contents is a vestige of the past. Given today technologies, it is rather obsolete.

For those thinking it goes against artists, keep in mind that a lot of art today is simply garbage made only for money. If something is made only for money, it is not art, and indeed I can understand why those making it advocate so strongly for copyright restrictions, money being the only thing attached to their art.

The digital world, making it extremely easy to access and copy human knowledge, is an achievement of the human mind. Patreons, or an art world evolving alongside society and other jobs, may be one of the possible natural adaptations to this human achievement. Otherwise we're making the same arguments as Luddites.

For the unrestricted copyright inclined, there are ways to stay in legality, if such inclinations collide, and they are fruitful. You will find that consuming only public domain content will be a plus, not a privation.
Show HN: Super Web Scraper – The Ultimate Data Extraction Tool
by qwikhost | 2025-09-04 07:55:51+00:00
Super Web Scraper is your all-in-one solution for effortless web scraping, lead generation, and data extraction. With just one click, you can extract emails, phone numbers, addresses, images, links, product details, and more from any website. No coding required. Fast, accurate, and powerful.
by scarecrw | 2025-09-04 07:55:59+00:00
"Dumbing down" is an imprecise and inaccurate description of the most recent changes to the SAT.

The Collegeboard did indeed adjust the test to better appeal to students, but this was primarily done by shortening the length of the exam from ~ 3 hours to ~2 hours. To compensate for this, the test was updated to an adaptive format to present students with more questions of appropriate difficulty levels based on their performance.

The other main change, which the article highlights, was to shorten the reading passages. Yes, there are skills no longer being tested because of this change, but it's also allowed for a broader array of passages to be included. The new version of the test introduced poetry and novel question types involving logical reasoning and use of data. Which of these skills are more important for success in college and future careers is a worthwhile question to ask, but not one with an obvious answer.
by coldtea | 2025-09-04 07:57:07+00:00
>This is the same argument from Mussolini's facists - "at least the trains run on time"

No, it's an added argument that "and everyday life is the same, if not improved".

Many people would prefer living in an orderly state like Singapore, than in a place they fear for their safety, public order is deteriorating, their cities are dying, public works are crap, politics are a circus, and so on, even if they don't get to vote one of two parties that do mostly the same things in favor of billionaires while their life worsens.

That's no 1920s fascist Italy. Nor is China for that matter.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-04 07:57:12+00:00
> Github Copilot themselves say that initially, users only accept 29% of prompted coding suggestions (which itself is a wild claim to inefficiency, why would you publicize that?), but with six months of experience, users naturally get better at prompting and that grows to a whopping 34% acceptance rate. Apparently, 6 months of experience only makes you 5% better at prompting.

Or, alternatively, exposure to our robot overlords makes you less discerning, less concerned with, ah, whether the thing is correct or not.

(This _definitely_ seems to be a thing with LLM text generation, with many people seemingly not even reading the output before they post it, and I assume it's at least somewhat a thing for software as well.)
by sunshine-o | 2025-09-04 07:58:33+00:00
20-25 years ago, one of the problem GNUStep had is it was never packaged in the Linux distros. You had to compile everything.

One of the reason might have been GCC refused to include the Objective C extensions or something like that. I vaguely remember there might have been some legal concerns.

Maybe someone can clarify this.

But damn GNUStep was fast, snappy and a much better platform than let's say Gnome at the time. There was simply no comparison.

You could take a GNUStep app like Mail.app and just compile in Apple IDE and run it on Mac OS X (but the opposite wasn't possible).

It was one of the most impressive Free Software project out there at the time.
by rottc0dd | 2025-09-04 07:59:36+00:00
Another thing that impedes us sunken cost fallacy. Classic "Simple vs easy" change. Even if a design is comparatively simpler, it is harder to make such change for small feature.

We had a project which is supposed to convert live objects back into code with autogenerated methods. The initial design was using a single pass over the object graph and creating abstractions of HDL and combining method blocks in the same pass.

That is a big hairy code with lot of issues. Simpler would be to handle one problem at a time - method generation in one pass and then convert the methods to HDL. But, getting approval for a deployed app is so hard. Particularly when it is a completer rewrite.
by adityaathalye | 2025-09-04 08:01:00+00:00
I believe UUIDv7 does not (cannot) guarantee total order. I am using it as a method to manage multiple timelines---each "fact" lives on its own virtual timeline (identified by a "valid_id", which is a UUIDv7). My DB system does not automatically disambiguate conflicting facts (because it cannot --- it simply does not have the meta-information). The users of the system can manually audit and fix inconsistencies by making correcting (append-only) entries.

For your case, I feel like your best bet would be to create the global order in the first place... i.e. force all writes through a single (and single-threaded) writer process, and fetch reads off one or more independent reader processes (I'm doing this with WAL-mode SQLite).

But I could be totally wrong --- this is my first foray into the freaky world of temporal data systems :D
by geocar | 2025-09-04 08:01:44+00:00
I'm not entirely sure what the valid_range is doing. Besides updating it, do you use this index for anything else? I agree the performance doesn't seem like it would be great.

I do something like 4000 inserts a second, but maybe only a few queries a minute, so I use an "invalidated_by" column which (eventually) points to the newer record, and I update it on query instead of insert (when the multiple nulls are discovered and relevant)
by rsynnott | 2025-09-04 08:01:51+00:00
If (a) companies lay too many people off because the magic robots will make engineers unnecessary and (b) the pipeline collapses, because being a software engineer is an undesirable career because it is being replaced by robots and (c) it emerges that the robots are kinda bullshit, then there's going to be one hell of a shortage.

When I started a CS degree in 2003, we were still kinda in the "dot com crash has happened, no-one will ever hire a programmer again" phase, and there were about 50 people in my starting class. I think in the same course two years ago, there'd been about 200. The 'correct' number, for actual future demand, was certainly closer to 200 than 50, and the industry as a whole had a bit of a labour crunch in the early 10s in particular.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-09-04 08:02:58+00:00
The neovim model of using setup() makes lazy loading a bit trickier than traditional Vim.

Lazy loading is much easier with Vim’s model of configuring by setting variables. You just set variables in init.vim, and the plugin can auto-load when one of its functions is executed.

With lua this requires more orchestration; if many autocmd refer to the same plugin, they all need to explicitly remember to call setup().
by visarga | 2025-09-04 08:03:24+00:00
> I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious

We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious. You can only tell you are conscious yourself, not others. The whole field of consciousness is based on analyzing something for which we have sample size n=1.

They say "because of similar structure and behavior" we infer others are also conscious. But that is a copout, we are supposed to reject behavioral and structural arguments (from 3rd person) in discussion about consciousness.

Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?" - we can't imagine non-experience, or define it without negation. We are supposed to use consciousness to prove consciousness while we can't even imagine non-consciousness except in an abstract, negation-based manner.

Another issue I have with the qualia framing is that nobody talks about costs. It costs oxygen and glucose to run the brain. It costs work, time, energy, materials, opportunity and social debt to run it. It does not sit in a platonic world.
by gwd | 2025-09-04 08:03:50+00:00
One of the problems with their "better / worse" statistics: Bad interactions tend to outweigh good interactions. I think the rule of thumb is that 4:1 good/bad ratio in a relationship is "breakeven" where the relationship will stay neutral; higher than that and things get better, lower than that and things go south.

So if you could talk to a stranger, and there's only a 20% chance you'll feel worse, a lot of people would still not consider it worth the risk.
by card_zero | 2025-09-04 08:04:36+00:00
There's no connection between AI and AGI, apart from hopes. Besides which, if you're talking about AGI, you're talking about artificial people. That means:

• They don't really want to be servants.

• They have biases and preferences.

• Some of them are stupid.

• If you'd like to own an AGI that thinks for you, the AGI would also like one.

• They are people with cognition, even if we stop being.
by GJim | 2025-09-04 08:05:31+00:00
> I know the pigeon story about cosmic microwave background already: please elaborate on the......

We know that story, but many non-scientists don't.

The genius of In Our Time is genuine academic discussions accessible to the lay man. I found the In Our Time discussions on ancient Greece and the arts fascinating, despite these being two subjects I have no background in and know sweet FA about.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-09-04 08:05:36+00:00
You don’t really need a Vim plugin manager, especially if you use git for your dotfiles.

Installing a plugin merely requires placing its files (eg: cloning its repository) into a well-known location. You can just do that.

If you track your config with git, you can track plugins with submodules. This has the added advantage of pinning the exact version (and tracking that version in for).
by splitroute | 2025-09-04 08:05:56+00:00
the initial handshake of the connection in the affected countries is going through all the way obviously so the problem is not google services. the issue is in the interim path

I guess either this is an internet exchange collocation, ISP tier 1 fuckup or some of the non-existent agencies were instructed to sabotage connections. Or they did some interception fuckup.
by newscracker | 2025-09-04 08:06:29+00:00
I feel there’s very little hope for privacy and freedom if people like the author — who claim to be for privacy and understand the implications of digital payments — choose cards all the time “because it’s convenient”. Convenience and coercion (by the businesses not accepting cash or governments forcing more “cashless”) are what the common person succumbs to.

I’m not saying that everyone should switch to cash for everything all the time. But the more that privileged people switch to digital payments and eschew cash, the more difficult it becomes for those who rely on or want to use cash to do so.

Choosing privacy could mean a little more (or a lot more, depending on one’s views) inconvenience. Hopefully there are still enough people who use cash and keep cash payments alive for longer (which helps many other people who may not be as privileged or as educated as a different crowd).
by PokerFacowaty | 2025-09-04 08:06:40+00:00
The idea always has been that it's writing on paper with all the convenience of a tablet like syncing your notes. A notebook will feel like paper, but won't sync, an iPad will not feel even close to paper.

I was considering reMarkable when upgrading my ebook reader with note taking capabilities, but it's mostly a notepad with an option for ebooks (and not the other way around) and the subscription model on top of $500 hardware was ridiculous.