MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bondarchuk | 2025-09-04 11:13:47+00:00
Interesting point on the translations, but of course we can't really draw any conclusions from it regarding Nagel's intentions when he wrote in English.

Besides, I would not call "there is something it is like to be [...]" a "good and clear" construction. As mentioned on wikipedia, it has 'achieved special status in consciousness studies as "the standard 'what it's like' locution"' - I don't think a specific locution would get special status if it was just any arbitrary way of pointing at what people already understand anyway (i.e. the concept "subjective experience").

>Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.

I agree these would be more or less equivalent, and I think your version is still making the same false distinction as Nagel's by positing a distinct "something". Only it does so (commendably) in a more clear and obvious way, thus it would never become the standard phrasing for people looking to sneak in dualist assumptions :)
by pynappo | 2025-09-04 11:14:04+00:00
>Problem: > >New users must look for a plugin manager and figure out how to install it. > - Nvim documentation should be able to give a one-liner to install (non-builtin) plugin managers and plugins. > > Lack of a declarative way to specify plugins. > - Lets Nvim reason about dependency ordering / transitivity. > - Lets crawlers build a package index. > - [packspec](https://github.com/neovim/packspec) adds potential to leverage NPM tooling (and possibly infrastructure).

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/20893#issuecomment-1...
by bluGill | 2025-09-04 11:14:14+00:00
customers come in groups (lunch hour is when many shop) so the free time is a different part of the day and you send them home. When a clerk is counting cash they could serve the next customer. If there isn't a customer they could stock shelves or clean. stores might have one clerk doing nothing at a till but there are several more scattered around the store doing something else while waiting for a help needed call.

You also completely discounted the managers time counting cash in the backroom. That is more than an hours work in my experience, time that could be used for other things.
by globnomulous | 2025-09-04 11:14:18+00:00
> I've asked Gemini, so it came up with four primary arguments for this claim, commenting on them briefly:

This line means, and literally says, that everything that follows is a summary or direct quotation from an LLM's output.

There's a more charitable but unintuitive interpretation, in which "commenting on them briefly" is intended to mean "I will comment on them briefly:". But this isn't a natural interpretation. It's one I could be expected to reach only after seeing your statement that 'none of the above is AI.' But even this more charitable interpretation actually contradicts your claim that it's not AI.

So now I'm even less sure I know what you meant to communicate. Either I'm missing something really obvious or the writing doesn't communicate what you intended.
by fluidcruft | 2025-09-04 11:14:18+00:00
I'm genuinely curious whether neuroscoence has shown that humans perform backtracking?

I am sure we can be taught to backtrack and many things may seem similar, but I just haven't heard of anything at the neuroscience level that backtracking is a fundamental capacity of biological neural networks. So to the extent that humans perform symbolic computations I'm not sure it's established that backtracking is necessary vs other strategies.
by arghwhat | 2025-09-04 11:15:22+00:00
The problem with these kinds of blur effects is not the cost of a gaussian blur (this isn't gaussian blur anyway as it has a lens effect near the edges). It's damage propagation and pipeline stalls.

When you have a frosted glass overlay, any pixel change anywhere near the overlay (not just directly underneath) requires the whole overlay to be redrawn, and this is stalled waiting for the entire previous render pass to complete first for the pixels to be valid to read.

The GPU isn't busy in any of this. But it has to stay awake notably longer, which is the worst possible sin when it comes to power efficiency and heat management.
by maxvij | 2025-09-04 11:15:45+00:00
Yes, I've been on all the public beta's so far and yes, you can turn it down. You can turn on 'reduce transparency' in the accessibility settings. It breaks most of the effects, but text is definitely more legible. Haven't noticed anything performance wise (when Liquid Glass is turned on), but then again I might not be the best test candidate as I just got a new phone.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-09-04 11:16:21+00:00
People don't have to accept money and do work for terrible people. Google chose to enter this contract. Google could have chosen to not enter the contract. No one forced their hand. $45M is certainly not an existential amount to Google. They could have easily turned down the business. It was completely within their power to say no.

They chose to take the money and do the work.

Calling out businesses for doing business with terrible people is a good thing to do. As to your closing paragraph, that's kind of the point - calling out Google for doing business with a government that is committing genocide. If not for Netanyahu's treatment of Gaza, this contract would not be newsworthy.
by drej | 2025-09-04 11:16:21+00:00
As a user? No, I don't have to choose. What I'm saying is that analysts (who this Polars Cloud targets, just like Coiled or Databricks) shouldn't worry about instance types, shuffling performance, join strategies, JVM versions, cross-AZ pricing etc. In most cases, they should just get a connection string and/or a web UI to run their queries, everything abstracted from them.

Sure, Python code is more testable and composable (and I do love that). Have I seen _any_ analysts write tests or compose their queries? I'm not saying these people don't exist, but I have yet to bump into any.
by Anonyneko | 2025-09-04 11:16:32+00:00
I wish this had been a more common practice back when I was in school ~25 years ago. In my country (and former USSR places in general), it was very common for parents to do much of the homework for the children, as there was a lot of it and sometimes too hard for many of the kids to handle (at other times, parents wanted the kids to have better grades so they could brag about it).

I don't think I've ever seen a school essay back then that wasn't obviously written by a parent, i.e. the ye olde times version of "chatgpt write this for me". I'm of course no exception, even when I wasn't lazy my writers-by-trade folks heavily edited anything I had written as they would have found it shameful for me to present something in school wasn't "well-written".
by RMPR | 2025-09-04 11:16:43+00:00
> It also has a full Android system, which comes with advantages for sure but invites distractions and leads to very disappointing battery life.

While some models have a disappointing battery life, it's most definitely because of BSR[0] not because of them running Android. I had a Note Air 3 and that thing got easily 2 weeks of battery life with heavy use while the BSR version (Note Air 3C) barely survived 2 days.

0: https://shop.boox.com/blogs/news/boox-super-refresh-bsr-tech...
by unwind | 2025-09-04 11:18:12+00:00
Very interesting! Seems like a Bluetooth-connected display is kind of rare.

This part:

The one thing I’m left scratching my head over is the length field. If I have 0x20 bytes of image data to send over, I actually need to put 0x10 into that field.

Made me think the protocol simply assumes at least 2 bytes will always be used, so it transmits the length using the unit of 16-bit "words" instead of bytes. That would not be unheard of, and is kind of smart even.
by lucketone | 2025-09-04 11:18:59+00:00
Not OP, but several examples:

A. instead of building a house on random terrain with random materials, first we prefer to flatten the place, then we use standard materials (e.g. bricks), which were produced from simple source (e.g. large and relatively homogenous deposit of clay).

B. For mental tasks it’s usual to said, that a person can handle only 7 items at a time (if you disagree multiply by 2-3). But when you ride a bike you process more inputs at the same time (you hear a car behind you, you see person on the right, you feel your balance, you anticipate your direction, if you feel strong wind or sun on your face you probably squint your eyes, you take a breath of air. On top of that all the processes of your body adjust and support your riding: heart, liver, stomach…)

C. “Spherical cows” in physics. (Google this if needed)
by throwaway2037 | 2025-09-04 11:19:24+00:00
> Singapore is much less authoritarian than China. The PAP plays dirty in a legal way

I think the easiest way to explain the Singaporean democracy to someone from a North American/European mindset: In Singapore, the opposition in parliament is freely elected, but the ruling party is virtually guaranteed to be PAP ("People's Action Party"... I just love how that rolls off the tongue, and the logo has 1970s Batman vibes).

> having mandatory bomb checks in your metro systems is already on the excessive and comical side of authoritarianism here

Are you speaking about mainland China here? I have experienced it many times in different cities. I wonder if the Chinese Dark Web has memes about the people that they employ. I have hardly seen lower motivation people at their jobs. They move like zombies and are hardly reactive even when you bag causes a "beep" from one of their machines. Do Chinese people think this actually helps? Do they feel safer? I would love to know.
by Telemakhos | 2025-09-04 11:19:34+00:00
Not really: as much as I despise AI slop, LLMs do a much better job than this author of making sure I have the information needed to understand a point. For example:

> I have this little web app I built for my kids to help them manage their day. It has those tiles that animate when you hover on them.

I have absolutely no idea what “those tiles” are. They are familiar to the author, but he has not bothered to explain them well enough to deserve that familiar “those.” AI would have explained them better.

This isn’t AI slop, just sloppy writing.
by mort96 | 2025-09-04 11:20:53+00:00
I'm inclined to believe what I have experienced. I have never before experienced my 2020 iPad Pro to be remotely slow. I use it for some web browsing and YouTube viewing, so I really don't need a lot of computing power.

Now that I'm running the iOS 26 beta, I frequently feel animations going slowly or hitching. It's not terrible, but for the first time, I have the feeling that my experience using my iPad would be noticeably improved if I bought a new and more powerful one.

But I guess this makes me an idiot according to Mitchell?
by maxvij | 2025-09-04 11:22:53+00:00
I wrote about this topic earlier, I believe there is one main reason for Apple to go in this direction: universal design language (spatial computing, Vision Pro). Of course, there can be many side-effects (or reasons) that can be the actual main reason instead, such as 'innovation' or like you mention, guiding people to use the native systems, we'll never know. In my eyes, the universal design language is the main reason. Apple is and always has been design-focused.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-04 11:23:18+00:00
They now actually sell some parts online, and offer official repair manuals and tools.

That only covers a few basic repair types, the tooling is clunky (for a reason - those tools are designed to allow cheap-and-replaceable official employees to perform basic repairs to an Apple-acceptable quality) and the parts are hilariously overpriced. But it's considerably better than nothing. They also enabled a few repairs that were previously hard blocked by software, and required some incredibly complex hardware workarounds because of it - like FaceID replacement.

Make no mistake - I have zero faith in this being Apple actually trying to be better. It's much more likely that this was them walking back their "no third party repairs never ever" stance under pressure from consumer rights activists and regulators in places like EU. But it's a change for the better either way - and it would be good to see more of that in the future.
by api | 2025-09-04 11:23:37+00:00
Embodiment is 1000x harder from a physical perspective.

Look at how hard it is for us to make reliable laptop hinges or the articulated car door handle trend (started by Tesla) where they constantly break.

These are simple mechanisms compared to any animal or human body. Our bodies last up to 80-100 years through not just constant regeneration but organic super-materials that rival anything synthetic in terms of durability within its spec range. Nature is full of this, like spider silk much stronger than steel or joints that can take repeated impacts for decades. This is what hundreds of millions to billions of years of evolution gets you.

We can build robots this good but they are expensive, so expensive that just hiring someone to do it manually is cheaper. So the problem is that good quality robots are still much more expensive than human labor.

The only areas where robots have replaced human labor is where the economics work, like huge volume manufacturing, or where humans can’t easily go or can’t perform. The latter includes tasks like lifting and moving things thousands of times larger than humans can or environments like high temperatures, deep space, the bottom of the ocean, radioactive environments, etc.
by np1810 | 2025-09-04 11:24:13+00:00
> Took me a really long time to realize that I should scroll. Because why would I? There is absolutely no indication that there is anything to scroll to.

> I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.

Thank god, I wasn’t the only one, just posted a similar comment here.
by prime_ursid | 2025-09-04 11:24:22+00:00
One of the rebuttals at the end of the post addresses this.

> That’s only true when you’re in a large corporation. When you’re by yourself, when you’re the stakeholder as well as the developer, you’re not in meetings. You're telling me that people aren’t shipping anything solo anymore? That people aren’t shipping new GitHub projects that scratch a personal itch? How does software creation not involve code?

So if you’re saying “LLMs do speed up coding, but that was never the bottleneck,” then the author is saying, “it’s sometimes the bottleneck. E.g., personal projects”
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-04 11:24:35+00:00
On top of that, hard crashes and partial brownouts due to undervolting can and do lead to data corruption on all sorts of storage, no matter if eMMC, straight NAND or microSD cards.

Most phone PCB designs do not account properly for the scenario "battery gone bad leads to undervolting of components" at all, the best you're gonna get is the BMC cutting off everything when the voltage at the battery drops way too much - but that is a failsafe mechanism, the flash, memory and processor chips will have undergone brownout events before the BMC emergency shutdown hits.
by arghwhat | 2025-09-04 11:25:05+00:00
You misunderstood, this is not about computing individual pixels but only selective rerendering graphical elements which have been changed, and in turn figuring out the total area of change. This propagates through the entire stack to let the GPU scanout hardware know which tiles have changed, and allow partial panel self refresh updates (depending on hardware).

Rendering is still done in bulk for the changed areas, avoiding rendering expensive elements (e.g., transformed video buffers, deeply layered effects, expensive shaders). It's a fundamental part of most UI frameworks.
by TomMasz | 2025-09-04 11:25:51+00:00
I'm old enough to remember a time before blue LEDs. Funny how they're everywhere now.

I make photo prints using the cyanotype process and a UV LED light source. It's a combination of old and new technologies with a very unique look. While the sensitizing solution contains cyanide, it's fine as long as you wear gloves (and don't drink it).
by Anonyneko | 2025-09-04 11:26:00+00:00
Back in the day we were writing code on paper (or on punched cards, using them as a paper substitute, as there were a lot of them left over from the Soviet times and they looked very "computer-y"), so even during computer classes you didn't necessarily need a computer. Not that I really think that it can still work in the year 2025 and beyond...
by squeedles | 2025-09-04 11:26:01+00:00
Multiple nethack ascender here (~50x in 20yrs). I usually play in the traditional November tournament (originally devnull, now tnnt). Never set aside the time to learn any of the other roguelikes mentioned in the article, but wanted to mention that nethack itself is a class of games. Many people have written variants to scratch a particular itch (the article briefly mentions spork, which was one of the very first). Some of those are wildly different from the base game. There is even a separate tournament in June dedicated just to playing as many of the variants as you can (junehack)
by lazide | 2025-09-04 11:26:05+00:00
Water is not readily fungible. No matter what Chicago or any other more-than-enough water location does, it makes zero difference to someone in Phoenix or Las Vegas.

If someone’s in a location with more than enough water, there is really no point in trying to get them to care, because this really really doesn’t matter to them. Typically whatever they don’t use just runs off anyway.
by bopjesvla | 2025-09-04 11:26:27+00:00
The Chinese Room experiment has always been a hack thought experiment that was discussed in other forms before it was posited by Searle, most famously in Turing's "Can machines think?". Searle only superficially engaged with existing literature in the original Chinese Room paper. When he was forced to do so later on, Searle claimed that if you'd precisely simulate a Chinese human brain in a human-like robot, that brain still wouldn't be able to think or understand Chinese. Not a useful definition of thinking if you ask me.

From Wikipedia:

Suppose that the program simulated in fine detail the action of every neuron in the brain of a Chinese speaker.[83][w] This strengthens the intuition that there would be no significant difference between the operation of the program and the operation of a live human brain. Not a useful definition of thinking if you ask me.

Searle replies that such a simulation does not reproduce the important features of the brain—its causal and intentional states. He is adamant that "human mental phenomena [are] dependent on actual physical–chemical properties of actual human brains."[26]
by xenobeb | 2025-09-04 11:26:33+00:00
I do wonder if this is really the same type of alienation that Arendt refers to.

I can understand how if you are afraid the neighbor is going to be an informant, you stop interacting. Public discourse breaks down and ideology takes hold.

This seems quite different to me than the type of alienation we are talking about in 2025 from online interactions. I am not sure alienation is really the right word in terms of isolation from a group. If anything the problems from social media are from too much interaction and too much political discourse.

I would say that is completely opposite to what Arendt was talking about.

I think it is the way "boredom" has quite a different meaning today than in 1990. While you can still be bored in 2025, I don't feel boredom the same way as in 1990 when none of my friends answered the phone and there was nothing on tv. 2025 boredom is more the lack of hyper stimulation and hyper novelty as opposed to the 1990 version of going through your "junk drawer" to find something again novel because you can't think of anything else to do. I can't even remember the last time I had junk drawer to even go through.
by DoctorOW | 2025-09-04 11:26:43+00:00
Yes, the only role of the government was to issue an SSN which has been explicitly said shouldn't be used in such a manner[1].

It is a real pet peeve of mine that people take such hard stands on issues like this when it's so easy to check what's actually happening first. This thread isn't the most egregious example, but it is an example of someone just imagining a system with a big flaw and then suggesting a solution to the problem they made up.

[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/social-security-n...
by rickdeckard | 2025-09-04 11:26:59+00:00
Depends on whether "expensive" refers to

a.) Compute-cycles: Some added passes to apply additional shading on top of the completed render, or

b.) Power-consumption: Some added delay in putting components to sleep (reducing CPU/GPU-clock) on every screen update.

Deferred sleep for a portable, battery-powered device because of a longer UI-rendering pipeline can easily add up over time.

--

I'd be quite interested to see some technical analysis on this (although more out of technical curiosity than the assumption that there is something huge to be uncovered here...).

There's also the aspect of iOS prioritizing GUI-rendering over other processing to maintain touch-responsiveness, fluidity, etc. Spending more xPU-time on the GUI potentially means less/later availability for other processes.

For sure non-native apps trying to emulate this look (i.e. Flutter) will create a significantly higher impact on the power-profile of a device than a native app.
by barrkel | 2025-09-04 11:27:15+00:00
Ads are agents in a zero-sum war for your attention.

If you have focus, if you're not aimlessly wandering around, ads try to distract you. They attack your personal agency and sovereignty, trying to divert you from what you were doing, to pay attention to what they're pushing.

Because they're in a zero sum competition, the dynamics are to escalate. There's only so much inventory, and the winners of the bids for your attention need to have more and more effect on your behavior to justify the escalating costs. Text isn't enough, images are needed. Images aren't enough, videos are needed. Videos aren't enough, interstitials with tiny close buttons are needed, with mandatory pauses. If advertisers could reach out and physically grab you by the head, they would.
by myrmidon | 2025-09-04 11:27:19+00:00
I feel your own examples undermine your positions:

Drinks specifically are one of the most clearcut negative examples to me, where there is zero product discovery/information/customer upside involved; the sole purpose of that CocaCola banner is to marginally shift the ad-targets consumption behavior (fully to his or her detriment, either from overconsuming and/or overpaying).

If I seek product information, ads are the absolute last place to look because they have all the incentive to hide everything negative about the product and to obfuscate any comparison with potentially superior competitors.

I'm not saying that all marketing is a wasteful detriment to humanity as a whole, but a lot of advertising has a zero-sum "benefit" to society, while binding a lot of ressources (but every rational company is somewhat "forced" to play anyway).
by robertkoss | 2025-09-04 11:27:49+00:00
You were talking about data engineering. If you do not write tests as a data engineer what are you doing then? Just hoping that you don't fuck up editing a 1000 > line SQL script?

If you use Athena you still have to worry about shuffling and joining, it is just hidden.. It is Trino / Presto under the hood and if you click explain you can see the execution plan, which is essentially the same as looking into the SparkUI.

Who cares about JVM versions nowadays? No one is hosting Spark themselves.

Literally every tool now supports DataFrame AND SQL APIs and to me there is no reason to pick up SQL if you are familiar with a little bit of Python