MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by balamatom | 2025-09-23 22:05:47+00:00
Evidently that's known to psychoanalysis as the "idealized image". That's another way to refer to what I'd call "the sum of one's conditioning", i.e. the interplay of automatic reactions to outside stimuli that usually takes up so much of your waking hours, that begin to habitually mistake it for yourself. Moreover that's how everyone else does it, innit?

Calling it "idealized image" downplays the mechanistic and implies the inauthentic - these judgments differ, see below. Nonetheless the resulting state of mind is the same: you're stuck somewhere being someone you don't truly know how to be - and it's been so taxing for so long that you've started to forget why exactly you're there in the first place.

It's a relatable sentiment. Funny how this surfaced today, after a few other materials inducing delusion of reference on HN frontpage. (I don't remember anyone ever saying how personalized HN's recommender is, but if there's places on the Net where it pays for the recommender to be subtle, here's one.)

As this sort of habituation is commonplace, it seems like not long after the stage where different authors introduced varying ontologies of the same alienatory phenomenon, the 20th century psychology community might've suffered something of a schism on the matter of whether it's right for the state of dedicating 100%+ of one's life energies to the "idealized image" to be considered "normal".

As a result, the currents in psychological/philosophical/humanistic inquiry most able to produce "technical" insights, i.e. ones which can be genuinely and reliably useful to an introspective person without necessitating the services of a care facilitator, remain underdeveloped and walled off. (You're in for a ride if you look into those, it's no coincidence you find em piecemeal in the oeuvre of a certain sort of literary carny barker.)

Anyway, some of them say that as you find ways to let go of conditioned reactive patterns, that results in something like more headspace freed up for your actual volition. Let's see how that one goes then. What I can add is that unconditioning oneself is done by experiencing unhabitual stimuli. If you're even a moderately routine-based sort of person you can drill yourself into a sort of "RNG watchdog" habit. At a random minute of every hour begin to breate manually, and proceed from there.
by zer00eyz | 2025-09-23 22:05:59+00:00
> Can somebody explain to me how backdooring every app does not lead to the real risk of an entire population's bank accounts being emptied, or similar more hidden but widespread attacks that absolutely cripple any country doing this?

We already had this debate once before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

The answer is that it is a bad idea.

This also recently came up when huntress exposed what it could do with its tool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45183589 and then failed to understand why this might be a bad thing.

Or you know crowdstrike getting rolled in a supply chain attack: https://www.ox.security/blog/npm-2-0-hack-40-npm-packages-hi...

The government wants a back door to spy on its citizens, not realizing that any back door you build is rife to be exploited by anyone.
by nis0s | 2025-09-23 22:06:00+00:00
I like the idea instead that some biological components have deterministic optimizations because they’re closer to a molecular form, like DNA, RNA, some protein machinery, etc. because essentially these are driven by some kind of chemistry and physics. Whereas higher level, emergent biological forms are more stochastic in their function, like organelles, an organism, or populations, etc. In that sense, there’s no computation to life, more that life is constrained by the physics of the world in which it develops.

It’s likely if different life forms on another planet, it will have a different “computation” model because its defined by different physics that it experiences during evolution. Though I suppose there will some similarities depending on some fundamental rules of the universe. Will propagation molecules like RNA or DNA always look like helixes, or will the radiation or physics of another planet create another form of propagation molecule we haven’t yet observed. Might make for an interesting experiment to simulate.
by K0nserv | 2025-09-23 22:06:10+00:00
The problems Rust are trying to solve are both novel and difficult so it isn't particularly surprising that it's taking time. The team has also landed great improvements, like NLL. I'm optimistic about the direction of this, even if it takes time.

Zig feels much younger than Rust so we'll see how it develops, but it's certainly interesting. In particular, comptime and explicit allocators are two ideas I hope Rust borrow more from Zig.

> And Rust will be the low level language for any large project where safety is amongst the top 3 priorities.

Personally I don't really see what'd be left for Zig, because in most software of consequence safety is already a top 3 priority.
by tgma | 2025-09-23 22:07:19+00:00
> Proroguing in parliaments is nothing new or anti-democratic.

He prorogued the parliament and was calling for a referendum to overthrow the monarchy against the Constitution. He was terminated by the monarch per Constitution, but he would not leave the post which resulted in uprising from both sides.

> During that time two monarchs — Reza Shah Pahlavi and his son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi — employed secret police, torture, and executions to stifle political dissent. The Pahlavi dynasty has sometimes been described as a "royal dictatorship",[1] or "one-man rule".

Yeah if you read biased and debunked media and the Mullah supporters and comrades[1] (which is the source of Wokipedia) during the Cold War era, and by the way both sides conspired to get rid of the monarch for different reasons, you might believe such propaganda. If you'd talk to the actual industrious people who experienced it, you might get a very different perspective. Double digit annual GDP growth, #1 is number of international students in the US (not per capita, absolute.) So yes, golden era, indisputably.

[1] Interestingly, we see the same Marxist-Islamist alliance has now hit the West.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-23 22:07:25+00:00
>So any pure function is Markovian then?

I guess it would be more accurate to say that at its core a Markovian process is based around a pure function. Usually there's some kind of feedback loop around the function that allows the process to evolve in some way and continue producing output.

>I’m pretty sure anything can be modeled using pure functions.

We're not talking about theoretical models of black boxes, though, we're talking about known mechanisms. A recursive function doesn't become iterative just because it could be thought of as iterative (because eventually the CPU does loop over some sequence of instructions). We still say it's recursive.

>I’m not sure what the usefulness is

I suppose part of the usefulness is to de-mystify LLMs. If you can understand what Markov chains do, the thought "oh. An LLMs is just a much more complex Markov chain" can help reasoning about them.
by iagooar | 2025-09-23 22:08:57+00:00
I added that line, because otherwise the LLM would generate goals that are not verifiable in development (e.g. certain pages to render <300ms - this is not something you can test on your local machine).

Documentation is a different topic - I have not yet found how to do it correctly. But I am reading about it and might soon test some ideas to co-generate documentation based on the PRD and the actual code. The challenge being, the code normally evolves and drifts away from the original PRD.
by woeirua | 2025-09-23 22:09:10+00:00
It seems to me that a lot of people are missing the forest for the trees on misinformation and censorship. IMO, a single YouTube channel promoting misinformation, about Covid or anything else, is not a huge problem, even if it has millions of followers.

The problem is that the recommendation algorithms push their viewers into these echo chambers that are divorced from reality where all they see are these videos promoting misinformation. Google's approach to combating that problem was to remove the channels, but the right solution was, and still is today, to fix the algorithms to prevent people from falling into echo chambers.
by nthacker | 2025-09-23 22:09:15+00:00
Launching The State of AI in College Admissions - a survey of 166 American Universities on their stated policies for how much AI is allowed in college admissions, what should be disclosed and what enforcements exist.

Applying to college in 2025 cant get more stressful. Of the 166 top colleges:

55 have explicit guidelines of AI use.

40 require disclosure of AI use.

106 enforce policies by using tools and systems to detect AI use.

Built for Students, Parents, Counselors and Educators dealing with college admissions this Fall. Use our report to quickly search through policies or generate a disclosure in seconds using our free tool.
by modzu | 2025-09-23 22:09:27+00:00
this question reminded me of the poetry of terrence mckenna. "Technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space."
by kypro | 2025-09-23 22:09:29+00:00
I agree. Again the vast majority would have gotten the vaccine.

There's always going to be people for all kinds of reasons pushing out bad ideas. That's part of the trade-off of living in a free society where there is no universal "right" opinion the public must hold.

> They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects

Most people are not anti-vax. If "they've" "taken over public discourse" in other subjects to the point you are now holding a minority opinion you should consider whether "they" are right or wrong and why so many people believe what they do.

If can't understand their position and disagree you should reach out to people in a non-confrontational way, understand their position, then explain why you disagree (if you still do at that point). If we all do a better job at this we'll converge towards truth. If you think talking and debate isn't the solution to disagreements I'd argue you don't really believe in our democratic system (which isn't a judgement).
by creddit | 2025-09-23 22:09:38+00:00
Maybe but honestly your logic doesn’t really make any sense to me anyway. If my time is worth $10k/hr, why am I driving myself? That alone is a huge waste of money.

My only knowledge of significant parking ticket acquisition from upper classes comes from lawyers outside courthouses. I tried looking for reporting on this but it may have just been a hyper local thing to where I grew up.
by _aobj | 2025-09-23 22:10:16+00:00
Great article. I have been hitting on 'High School's levels including 8 dimensional , dual quaternion, Dirac's Eq. Algebra. On my website. Mainly as they give a view of the dynamics of non trivial unitary matrix expansions that can occur in such as Zeta Zero, element nuclei, prime numbers, energy levels. For light elements. For de located electrons in sync, the Markov chains are interesting, as they relate to cellular automata, the taking of limits for (relativity, electrons moving with charge potential).Having not done high school algebra, until latter years. I have learnt to not assume, a particular algebra fits all dynamic non trivial matrix process's. Ie quantum computing, long range sensors, gravity waves, pressurised plasma at phase, ECT. So great article as it shows a practical high school level of applied knowledge, that doesn't revolve around solely unitary matrices. In as much as its potential dynamic (linear expansion)evolved states ! To which the high school level of visualisation can become aware! (I just thought I'd add this on legal probabilities. There is a case involving a SASR trooper 'Schultz' that revolves around shooting a Mulha's spotter. In Australia magistrates seem to judge cases based on 4 dimensional probabilities. And this seems to tie in with Jeffery Epstein's management through cohesion of President Clinton's pattent attorney change from an solely engineer to a lawyer based pattent granting. Epstein's little girl problem wasn't solely sexual, but given stock market prediction dynamics, more like a dynamic non trivial unitary probability problem of visualising size. Something magistrates in Australia seem to have adopted in the determining of complex military cases.). Warren
by robenkleene | 2025-09-23 22:10:28+00:00
To me, the interesting conversation here is between these three workflows:

1. Recursive directory fuzzy-search

2. Searching history for `cd` commands

3. Zoxide-style matching visited directories

Which are all ways to make it easier to traverse directories.

For my part, the thrust of your argument seemed to be advocating for #1, so that's what I was responding to (since this is a thread on #3, I'm mainly focusing on why you'd use that instead of #1 or #2, but all three are workable).

All of these can be implemented in any of the common shells. I didn't see anyone making a case for a specific shell here, I think the mentions of a specific shell are incidental (e.g., what people happen to use).
by andreyvit | 2025-09-23 22:11:21+00:00
I’m not sure if you’re actually asking or not, but in case you want to hear an answer, it’s because Israel is considered to be defending itself after a horrible attack, not that dissimilar to Ukraine really in some people’s view (me included). This goes back to a worldview where residents of a country share a portion of the blame for their country’s actions. This view is not universal, but has a certain mindshare (again, myself included), and if you imagine it fair for residents of a place to share the fate caused by the cumulative actions of that place, it’s not a big stretch to see how Israel’s actions can be considered natural and just by some, and so can the sanctions against residents of Iran and Russia.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-23 22:12:11+00:00
"Shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" being used as an excuse for censorship is the surest way to know you are talking to someone who hasn't even started doing the reading. Even worse, they often (over the past very few years) self-identify as socialists or anti-war, and the decision was in order to prosecute anti-war socialists for passing out pamphlets.

If somebody says it, they not only don't care about free speech, they don't even care about having a good faith conversation about free speech. They've probably been told this before, and didn't bother to look it up, just repeated it again. Wasting good people's time.

edit: here's a copy of fire in a crowded theater, https://postimg.cc/gallery/q4PJnPh
by type0 | 2025-09-23 22:12:36+00:00
> By the time you get to my age, your list of potential Anna's will be in the high dozens. You simply cannot keep this up with all the Anna's.

By the time facebook has been used to plan events, your list of potential Anna's will be in the high dozens, because Anna doesn't use fb and it's too difficult to send sms's. You simply cannot keep this up with all the Anna's.
by pier25 | 2025-09-23 22:12:49+00:00
> I don't use Blazor, but your point is still about solving a "problem" that might not exist.

So you think a priori it's fine to shove MBs of code to a mobile user?

And, if you get into that situation with Blazor, what's the plan for solving the problem? Other than moving features to JS.

> Do you have examples of this?

I don't have any links at hand but the JS benchmarks I linked uses 4MB of uncompressed code (12MB with the AOT version) just for displaying a table and changing the data.

Here's a demo that's sending like 2MB of Blazor code for a button that updates some text:

https://blazor-demo.github.io/Counter

Here's someone using dotnet 9 reporting a 17MB download and 67MB with AOT:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Blazor/comments/1kse00c/blazor_wasm...
by shinecantbeseen | 2025-09-23 22:12:52+00:00
I commend your effort in eating the cat turd of trying to provide them a different perspective into life. Their resistance to even considering that you’re not saying something insane + inappropriate is a mark on them, not you.

For what it’s worth- I’ve been on a similar journey recently and it’s brought me to similar conclusions. I got there through learning more about Eastern Philosophy and trying to map it to modern Western life.
by iagooar | 2025-09-23 22:12:55+00:00
I 100% agree with the over-fitting part.

I tend to provide detailed PRDs, because even if the first couple of iterations of the coding agent are not perfect, it tends to be easier to get there (as opposed to having a vague prompt and move on from there).

What I do sometimes is an experimental run - especially when I am stuck. I express my high-level vision, and just have the LLM code it to see what happens. I do not do it often, but it has sometimes helped me get out of being mentally stuck with some part of the application.

Funnily, I am facing this problem right now, and your post might just have reminded me, that sometimes a quick experiment can be better than 2 days of overthinking about the problem...
by Nevermark | 2025-09-23 22:13:40+00:00
Nice little example.

Could add a "stop" token at the end of the fruit example, so when the little model runs it can call its own stop.

To generalize to ADHD, create another model that can quietly "Listen" to a speaker (token generator) until its Markov chain predicts a "Stop", and starts its own generating model running, regardless of whether the speaker was done.

Then two instances can have time efficient interrupty conversations with each other.
by Barrin92 | 2025-09-23 22:13:48+00:00
No, and this is a very philosophically confused post because it weirdly does not really give any definition of computation.

Computation really is a fancy word for calculation. What matters about computation is that its teleological. Computers are physical systems designed towards a particular end. A computer is, physically, no different than any other system. What differentiates it is that it's designed and we're interpreting its behaviour in a particular way.

Unless you're trying to make a grand theological argument in which "life" is taken to be some Hitchhikers Guide-like machination towards some end, it's not a computation. Life doesn't compute anything, the same way a falling pen doesn't compute gravity unless in a metaphorical sense.

The article is a pretty good example honestly of the problems of taking metaphors literally, common in the AI space where the author hails from. A similar case "artificial neurons" which are really metaphorical neurons. You have to be particularly careful when making comparisons between intentionally designed technological artifacts and biological and physical processes.
by rmoriz | 2025-09-23 22:14:40+00:00
The offensive statement from the 'rv' readme is clearly alarming. Shopify, as every other Ruby user, is highly dependent of a working rubygems infrastructure. I can fully understand their motivation, to clarify the situation and to implement rules and separation of concerns. However, it's clear, that the whole process was a disaster in communication, planning, execution by Ruby Central.
by zer00eyz | 2025-09-23 22:15:01+00:00
Well.

Don't try to write "good" go and it becomes easy too.

I would rather see clearly defined, readable, documented code that isnt optimal... than good code lacking any of those traits.

And good code often isnt clearly defined, it often isn't reader friendly and it often lacks documentation (this bit is fixable but ends up needing a lot more of it).

Bad code that works isnt bad.
by jcul | 2025-09-23 22:15:46+00:00
Tailscale works great, but it's annoying to have to have an always on VPN on android for it. I need to switch tailscale off if I need to switch to another VPN.

Also when I have it on my private DNS stops working, which to be fair I haven't put a huge amount of effort into solving yet.

I love it for things like ssh to a server at home, but for things like hosting a service I prefer something like cloudflare tunnel or a self hosted reverse proxy. Though tailscale funnel looks promising.
by logicchains | 2025-09-23 22:15:47+00:00
>where one of the only things that actually worked to stop people dying was the roll out of effective vaccines.

The only reason you believe that is because all information to the contrary was systematically censored and removed from the media you consume. The actual data doesn't support that, there are even cases where it increased mortality, like https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11278956/ and increased the chance of future covid infections, like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39803093/ .
by bradly | 2025-09-23 22:15:49+00:00
Straight from the Katz mouth via https://yehudakatz.com/2020/02/19/together-the-merb-story/:

> But not everyone felt so good about it. I worked for Engine Yard, and we had made our mark selling Ruby on Rails deployment to large customers like Groupon, Kongregate and Github. I got hired at Engine Yard in part because the company's founders were worried that Rails wouldn't make it long-term. They wanted to hedge against this possibility.

> Unfortunately for me, waging an all-out war against Ruby on Rails from inside of a company that makes its money selling Ruby on Rails deployment is a pretty bad life strategy.

> I don't know everything that went on behind the scenes, but Engine Yard's management eventually asked me to consider merging with Rails. If I'm being honest, they pushed me to consider merging with Rails.

I'm sure there were other reasons for the merge as well, and I don't want to take anything away from Yehuda and the decision he made at the time, but I was a volunteer at the first MerbConf just a couple months before the "merge" and it all felt very sudden and at odds with the direction the project was headed. I had my cynical take that EY was behind the move, but those were just my personal feelings. Honestly it was refreshing to read Yehuda's story 12 years later as it helped put some of the pieces together as to why.
by iagooar | 2025-09-23 22:16:02+00:00
Yes, I have over 2 decades of programming experience, 15 years working professionally. With my co-founder we built an entire B2B SaaS, coding everything from scratch, did product, support, marketing, sales...

Now I am building something new but in a very familiar domain. I agree my workflow would not work for your average "vibe coder".
by kelnos | 2025-09-23 22:16:07+00:00
> You're clearly not being very charitable in your interpretation of things I say so I'm just going to end the conversation here because I'm not interested in endlessly clarifying basic things like what I mean when I say "Ideally".

I agree that the person you're replying to is getting a bit testy, but I think it's a bit justified, as you're being a bit obtuse here.

"Ideally" is irrelevant. We're not talking about ideal cases in these threads, so to bring up that word feels disingenuous. Yes, ideally people in a country where their government is doing bad things can peacefully replace their government with another one that won't do bad things.

But in practice, where in the world does that actually exist? Basically nowhere? So what's the point in bringing it up?

> Though I also don't think we can completely rule out the possibility of a peaceful revolution.

That's a bunch of weasel-word language. Sure, you can't "completely" rule out anything. But for most (all?) of the places under discussion, there's something like a 0.001% chance of that happening, which is far below the threshold of not even bothering to bring up the possibility.