MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crazygringo | 2025-09-03 23:04:20+00:00
I'm not defending it, just explaining it. Different dealerships will have different tolerances for risk, including allowing employees to bypass standardized requirements. I'm not making anything up, just explaining what's most likely going on with this particular dealership, and how it's not unusual.

If your dealership is letting you drive off with a vehicle with a personal check (not even a cashier's) and without any kind of credit check or database identity verification, that's actually pretty wild. I assume you know the owner or salesperson personally. Otherwise, you could be a rando passing them a forged check, and then they'll be out both cash and car. I don't know many businesses willing to take that $10K+ risk.
by muzani | 2025-09-03 23:04:25+00:00
Part of the test is whether you try to know the rules. People are going to be dropped into a complex codebase with outdated documentation. For more senior roles, you want people who bring in expertise instead of just doing what they're told.

There's a certain kind of personality that will grind Leetcode for months but never develop a skill for questioning the question.

What kind of file am I transferring? How many machines and how frequently? Does it need to be encrypted? Who needs access? In a video game, you move the mouse around and mash buttons.
by luqtas | 2025-09-03 23:04:29+00:00
so show me any meta-analysis pointing less poison usage on organic crops vs. GMO. i also challenge you to show me any paper pointing organic uses less land than GMO... organic pesticides have different toxicity profiles for sure, some have even greater impact than synthetics [0], most of the times applied without the safety of a high-tech cabin [1]. the very few independent meta-analysis studies done on health, points no health impact on eating GMO too

organics literally don't even compose 3% of the whole world food production. if we have a sane society that doesn't think only about meat and money, GMO research on various other crops would be pretty beautiful by now

again, i don't like proprietary science nor greed billionaire companies with no pro-social intention but they are screwing the planet much less than farmers going organic because "sustainability". rural flight is a solid phenomena, which by the way, still happens. high-tech farms allows machines do the work everyone doesn't want to and don't cite me some few people that would stay there if wasn't for the "aggressive competition of GMO [3]"(which goes from resources efficiency, investment and financial returns), because farming scores uber high on modern slavery. being a field worker applying a substance that can kill you in a minute if you swallow a swig and the hard endurance work of farming stuff has no comparison against city jobs... i worked for a year volunteering on WWOOF and the situation of some workers is miserable. most of the times organic is about the tech enthusiast or medium/upper class retiring into the country while running their production out of cheap labor that even if it was well paid, you probably don't want to retire as a working class farm field worker

[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402... [3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4218791/
by vkou | 2025-09-03 23:04:50+00:00
I'd like to see those SVPs and PMs, or shit, even a line manager use AI to implement something as simple as a 2-month intern project[1] in a week.

---

[1] We generally budget about half an intern's time for finding the coffee machine, learning how to show up to work on time, going on a fun event with the other interns to play minigolf, discovering that unit tests exist, etc, etc.
by searls | 2025-09-03 23:05:11+00:00
The answer is that we're making it right now. AI didn't speed me up at all until agents got good enough, which was April/May of this year.

Just today I built a shovelware CLI that exports iMessage archives into a standalone website export. Would have taken me weeks. I'll probably have it out as a homebrew formula in a day or two.

I'm working on an iOS app as well that's MUCH further along than it would be if I hand-rolled it, but I'm intentionally taking my time with it.

Anyway, the post's data mostly ends in March/April which is when generative AI started being useful for coding at all (and I've had Copilot enabled since Nov 2022)
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-03 23:05:13+00:00
It certainly is. I’m not pretending that liberal democracies are perfect. Ensuring that the one with the least power or at the margin don’t become victims and remain free is a constant struggle but people are fighting it. It can be a dispiriting one when you go through times like the one of the USA are currently traversing

It would be a deep mistake however to fall from the traditional defence of illiberal countries and think that the imperfection of liberal democracies somehow make authoritarian countries as legitimate and acceptable. Oppression there is not an imperfection. It is the system working as designed.
by brudgers | 2025-09-03 23:05:30+00:00
"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states

How do you know that?

Philosophically, of course.

I mean sure you can’t cut a rock open and see any mental states. But you can no more cut a human open and see mental states either.

Now I am no way suggesting that you don’t have a model for ascribing mental states to humans. Or dogs. Or LLM’s. Just that all models, however useful are still models. Not having a model capable of ascribing mental states to rocks does not preclude rocks having mental states.
by dabockster | 2025-09-03 23:05:47+00:00
> Mozilla said they wont survive

Entirely their fault, tbh. Mozilla's C suite has knowingly enriched themselves off this money for over 15 years now. If they were serious about surviving, they would have found alternative funding sources a long time ago.

Firefox isn't a true project. It's Google paying off someone to make Chrome appear not to be a monopoly at first glance.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-09-03 23:06:22+00:00
> Is there actually any evidence that caffeine is bad for kids

It's complicated as there can be beneficial effects as well. The issue is likely with the dosage as typical tea drinking hasn't seemed to cause any issues and us brits have been drinking tea for a long time. I've heard anecdotes of extreme coffee drinking (multiple espressos over a short time) causing heart palpitations, but that's not common as excessive coffee tends to make people jittery (c.f. Futurama episode where Fry drinks 100 coffees).

Energy drinks have high levels of caffeine and high levels of sugar and tend to be chugged, so they're likely to excessive doses.

Found this review is likely relevant and in my view, the sleep disruption is a red flag for a healthy lifestyle: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7177467/
by kragen | 2025-09-03 23:06:27+00:00
That's because concept cars aren't investments. This project is an investment. Investors invest in investments to get a return on their investment (ROI). Car buyers, other than car dealers and outfits like Budget Rent-A-Car, do not buy cars to get ROI. Advertising an investment without publishing any projected ROI figures (the business plan you mention) is like advertising a concept car without publishing any photos, video, or drawings.

And I don't think it's accurate to say, "this is a first-time installation of a new technology that hasn’t scaled". People have been using thermal energy storage for household heating for literally millions of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_mass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ondol#Advantages_and_disadvant... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry_heater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trombe_wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feolite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_bed-stove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship#Thermal_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mass_heater https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2018/Gigantic-cavern-heat-stora... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barra_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_shelter#Active_and_passi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokpoort_CSP#Energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_stove#Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifer_thermal_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_energy_storage#Thermal_en... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#Cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_heat_exchanger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rammed_earth#History https://www.mha-net.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_Generating_Station#Ener... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_water_storage_tank
by quickthrowman | 2025-09-03 23:06:32+00:00
It’s probably ~15 or so years old, it mentions Brogue as a recent release and that came out in 2009.

Nice to see a mention of the ##crawl channel on freenode, I spent a lot of time there during DCSS 0.9 to 0.12 or so, I even took 3rd in one of the online tournaments! [0] The guy that won that year was a child chess prodigy who then became a mathematics professor who has worked at Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. There was another top level player who was also a mathematician, and both of these guys won a Morgan Prize (and also have Wikipedia articles). I got a GED in my early 30s, somehow I was able to keep up ;)

Another regular from ##crawl posts on HN from time to time as well.

[0] https://crawl.akrasiac.org/tourney12a/all-players.html
by NathanKP | 2025-09-03 23:07:05+00:00
I think the explanation is simple: there is a direct correlation between being too lazy and demotivated to write your own code, and being too lazy and demotivated to actually finish a project and publish your work online.

The same people who are willing to go through all the steps to release an application online are also willing to go through the extra effort of writing their own code. The code is actually the easy part compared to the rest of it... always has been.
by glenstein | 2025-09-03 23:07:14+00:00
>Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience.

I was quite liking this explanation but you lost me here. I very strongly agree with your opening, and I think it's the key to everything. I think everyone insisting on a categorical divide runs into impossible problems.

And a good explanation of consciousness has to take the hard problem seriously, but doesn't have to agree that subjective and objective, or first person in third person or whatever you want to call them, are irreducibly distinct categories. But I think it makes more sense to say that some subset of all of the objective stuff out there is simultaneously subjective, rather than saying that all stuff at all times is both objective and subjective. I don't think an apple experiences gravity the way a mind experiences a conscious state, but I do think the through line of understanding them both as importantly physical in the same sense is key to tying physical reality to explanation of conscious states.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-09-03 23:07:30+00:00
I love seeing your perspective here among all the hand wringing, thanks for not letting downvotes scare you off. IMO it’s regressive to think just because someone has no money they should have no music, and it’s rich seeing calls for free information get downvoted on the same site singing praises of LLMs, as tho those companies paid a dime for their source material
by biggusdickus69 | 2025-09-03 23:07:57+00:00
The memory usage is interesting, where different kind of shared memory is obvious hard to visualize, just two values per process doesn’t say enough.

Most users actually wants a list of ”what can I kill to make the computer faster”, I.e. they want an oracle (no pun) that knows how fast the computer will be if different processes are killed.
by metalman | 2025-09-03 23:08:15+00:00
the tricky part is that the underlying problem is the drastic decrease in keystone species that are responsible for habitat maintinence/engineering, famously beavers and bison in certain areas, but they are only part of the equation. In other areas horses are responsible for primary environmental maintanence, where in the north, there incesant hunting for food tramples the ground ,compacts the snow, and actualy creates permafrost as a result, and in deserts horses are prodigious well diggers, and will dig down into dry river beds till they hit sub surface flow more than 10 ' down, which then all the other critters will use. As to seed dispersal, there are so many relationships between plants and animals that it's never endingly facinating to marvel at just how long and strange the processes must be to achive such specialised forms and methods. All in all humanity is playing a very dangerous game by treating everything in nature as worthless and expendable, or cute, and great for backgrounding a selfie and therefor about them.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-09-03 23:08:30+00:00
At least in my experience, it excels in blank canvas projects. Where you've got nothing and want something pretty basic. The tools can probably set up a fresh React project faster than me. But at least every time I've tried them on an actual work repo they get reduced to almost useless.

Which is why they generate so much hype. They are perfect for tech demos, then management wonders why they aren't seeing results in the real world.
by teachrdan | 2025-09-03 23:09:17+00:00
> people have the option to refuse to accept your money...

This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.

But then the owning class has every incentive to reduce or remove the safety net. Not least because they will be paying a lot for it! But even more so because that safety net is what gives people some small amount of power to say no to them.
by mfsch | 2025-09-03 23:09:17+00:00
From what I can gather, they are not yet incorporated and they are working through organizational questions in [1] and the issues thereof. The `ACCOUNTS.md` file there gives an idea about the main people behind the project and the donation page on Open Collective [2] also documents team members and how they spend those donations.

[1]: https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance [2]: https://opencollective.com/comaps
by tern | 2025-09-03 23:09:34+00:00
This seems correct to me. I'm unusually appreciative of vertical integration (life-long Apple user, etc.), and I can already feel the vendor lock-in tightening. I have no need for anything other than my ChatGPT subscription, and adding other tools appears to offer marginal gain at double the cost.

This type of bundling appears to be one of the strongest forces in the economy today, and I think comes about consistently due to a confluence of efficiencies of scale, coordination, and second-order effects of prestige (being able to hire and pay large numbers of outlier high performing employees, etc.)

I've learned not to bet against it, except in niche areas.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-03 23:10:29+00:00
> Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision

Sure - although depending on how quickly one was scanning the environment with echolocation it might also feel a bit like looking around a pitch black room with a flashlight.

In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one, so is bound to feel more like (have a similar quale to) vision than hearing.
by like_any_other | 2025-09-03 23:11:43+00:00
> In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing?

A world with laws against monopolies, anti-competitive practices, and media ownership concentration. Not all uses of power are equivalent.

Standard Oil wasn't tamed by taking money from its owner. In fact, even if ownership over the company was dispersed among 10x as many shareholders as before, so long as the company can continue to act as a single entity, the abuse of its monopoly would continue.
by eldaisfish | 2025-09-03 23:12:13+00:00
I am an electrical engineer based in Ontario, Canada. I'm very interested in the energy transition, especially the shift to electric vehicles, electric heat and the opportunities this creates in the electricity sector.

Looking for contract, part-time or volunteer work, specifically in renewable energy or smart grid consulting. I can also help write/review grant applications for Canadian federal/provincial support, but outside my areas of direct work.

Preferably smart grid technology, wind energy, solar PV, energy policy. Happy to chat about the long term revenue streams on the electricity grid, especially opportunities on the distribution system.

Location: Remote, prefer opportunities in US/Canada

Experience - Fifteen years total. Wind energy design background (Netherlands), Power systems degrees, experience working with the Canadian Federal government.

Remote: Yes, please. Willing to relocate: No.

Résumé/CV: On request. See linkedin: https://www.linkedin.co/in/eldrichrebello Email: eldrich [at] eldrichrebello.ca Scientific publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=a0oog-YAAAAJ
by stirfish | 2025-09-03 23:12:25+00:00
There's

Interior ballistics: what happens inside the gun

Exterior ballistics: what happens when the projectile is in the air

Terminal ballistics: what happens when the projectile pokes a hole in the paper.

We use jacketed ammo (lead bullet coated in copper) because, with gas-operated guns, that lead dust that gets ground off of the bullet can foul up the mechanisms. Some ranges only let you use jacketed ammo because of the lead dust.

I've had copper pellets get stuck in airguns because they didn't swage to the barrel properly.

Edit: and suppressors for air guns are often called "lead dust collectors" because the drag-stabilizing skirt on a pellet is definitely going to leave some of itself behind. A bullet in a firearm makes a lot more contact with the barrel, so there's a lot more lead to lose.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-09-03 23:12:39+00:00
The trick is that no one is actually carefully reviewing this stuff. Reviewing code is properly extremely hard. I'd say even harder than writing it from scratch. But there's no minimum amount of work you have to do. If you just do a quick skim over the result, no one will know you didn't carefully review every single detail. Then it gets merged to production full of mistakes.
by ratherbefuddled | 2025-09-03 23:13:05+00:00
There's very little reason that Google should have been protected from the evidence of its wrongdoing being made public. That's not extrajudicial punishment, that is public record. Justice should be seen to be done as well as done.

Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden?

For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-03 23:13:16+00:00
I don't know what your point is.

Maybe it's not enough data to make search results 100% as good as Google's, but enough to make them 95% as good? And everyone on HN complains about the quality of Google results, so surely there are algorithmic opportunities for MS to do better, right?

All we know is that Microsoft has decided not to compete seriously in search, but compete at a minimal level. There are a hundred different strategic reasons why they might have chosen this. But this in no way indicates it would be somehow impossible for Microsoft to compete there if they wanted. They could spend the tens of billions in traffic acquisition just like Google does. The fact that they aren't doesn't mean they couldn't.

There are no "realities about the search market" that mean Microsoft could never become a serious competitor. Your unfunded startup can't, but Microsoft could. Microsoft has all the data and money required.

They've just chosen not to, the same way Apple has chosen not to enter AAA gaming, Google hasn't entered general-purpose desktop operating systems, and Amazon hasn't entered VR headsets.
by heavyset_go | 2025-09-03 23:13:18+00:00
> I think that there will be neurological fatigue occurring whereby if software engineers are not actively practicing problem-solving, discernment, and translation into computer code - those skills will atrophy...

I've found this to be the case with most (if not all) skills, even riding a bike. Sure, you don't forget how to ride it, but your ability to expertly articulate with the bike in a synergistic and tool-like way atrophies.

If that's the case with engineering, and I believe it to be, it should serve as a real warning.
by glenstein | 2025-09-03 23:13:27+00:00
It's a great pull, because it has an important implication that I think ties in directly to Nagels point. Another fascinating variation of the same idea is "beetle in the box", another great one from Wittgenstein. I don't think I agree with him, because I think it hinges on assuming lions have fundamental and irreducibly different experiences. But I think we have important similarities due to our shared evolutionary heritage, and even from the outside I'm willing to die on the hill of insisting that Lions certainly do have experiences familiar to us, like hunger, pain, the satisfaction of having an itch scratched, having a visual field, and having the ability to distinguish shades and color (though their experience of color is likely importantly different from ours, but overlaps enough for there to be such a thing as shared meaning).

I don't understand why Wittgenstein wasn't more forcefully challenged on this. There's something to the principle as a linguistic principle, but it just feels overextended into a foundational assumption that their experiences are fundamentally unlike ours.
by soraminazuki | 2025-09-03 23:14:13+00:00
Become smarter at what exactly? People reliant on AI aren't going to use AI on just one thing, they're going to use it for everything. Besides, as others have pointed out to you, the study shows evidence that AI reliance causes cognitive decline. It affects your general intelligence, not limited to a single area of expertise.

> Students who repeatedly relied on ChatGPT showed weakened neural connectivity, impaired memory recall, and diminished sense of ownership over their own writing

So we're going to have more bosses, perhaps not in title, who think they're becoming more knowledgeable about a broad range of topics, but are actually in cognitive decline and out of touch with reality on the ground. Great.