MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pkal | 2025-10-18 13:55:50+00:00
Transient is the worst part about Magit IMO (the best parts are how you can prepare a commit to just include the right changes, or the functionality bound inside the transient menus that make complex operations such as fixups or rebases trivial). Transient UIs are consistently uncomfortable to work with, and could usually be replaced by just using a regular special-mode keymap in a custom buffer. The fact that Transient hooks into the MVC and breaks elementary navigation such as using isearch or switching around buffers has irritated me ever since Magit adopted the new interface.

The real neat thing about Emacs' text interface is that it is just text that you can consistently manipulate and interact with. It is precisely the fact that I can isearch, use Occur write out a region to a file, diff two buffers, use find-file-at-point, etc. that makes it so interesting to me at least.

A far more interesting example than Magit is the compile buffer (from M-x compile): This is just a regular text buffer with a specific major mode that highlights compiler errors so that you can follow them to the referenced files (thereby relegating line-numbers to an implementation detail that you don't have to show the user at all times). But you can also save the buffer, with the output from whatever the command was onto disk. If you then decide to re-open the buffer again at whatever point, it still all looks just as highlighted as before (where the point is not that it just uses color for it's own sake, but to semantically highlight what different parts of the buffer signify) and you can even just press "g" -- the conventional "revert" key -- to run the compile job again, with the same command as you ran the last time. This works because all the state is syntactically present in the file (from the file local variable that indicates the major mode to the error messages that Emacs can recognize), and doesn't have to be stored outside of the file in in-memory data structures that are lost when you close Emacs/reboot your system. The same applies to grepping btw, as M-x grep uses a major mode that inherits the compile-mode.
by motorest | 2025-10-18 13:56:03+00:00
> Python was used as an example because people know Python and reader can compare it to something known.

I don't think you understood the point I made.

My point is that Python supports conditional expressions for years.

Support for conditional expressions already means that in Python indeed "if is just a function".

Therefore, the whole premise of the article is null and void, and the article is thus pointless.

This is evident to anyone who is familiar with Python. If you have any experience with Python and you are familiar with idiomatic Python and basic features such as list comprehension, you are already widely aware how "if is just a function".

> I wasn't trying to make Python look awkward. I was trying to write equivalent Python (...)

Except you didn't. You failed to even acknowledge that Python already supports "if is just a function" with basic aspects such as list comprehension.

This basic aspect of Python is covered quite prominently in intros to Python, but somehow you failed to even acknowledge it exists, and proceeded to base your argument on a patently false claim.
by fragmede | 2025-10-18 13:56:35+00:00
No mention of Visual Studio, as distinct from Visual Studio Code. No mention of JetBrains, PyCharm. The author didn't mention that Borland cost $99.95 in 1987, back in the day. Now, Visual Studio costs $499.92/mo. Yeah, the free versions aren't as fully featured or as well integrated as the thing you paid for, what else is new?
by davydm | 2025-10-18 13:56:39+00:00
"If he'd hired a less senior developer with no domain understanding I think getting to the point he got to with Claude Code would have actually been quite challenging."

I think this is the foundation of the muppet-think I see there. If you honestly believe this, you've never met a senior engineer. Good luck for the future, as the cracks start to show.
by naasking | 2025-10-18 13:56:46+00:00
It makes perfect sense to say that the database understands your query. It also makes sense to say that the database's factorization of domain knowledge + domain queries exhibit at least a static domain understanding (which still isn't general ala AGI). This is the standard systems response to the Chinese Room.

The "general" part comes from whether that static aspect can be made dynamic and extensible. In what sense is a system that can be arbitrarily extended to "recite" or "apply" knowledge not AGI?
by fwipsy | 2025-10-18 13:57:01+00:00
I'm not talking about the Cintiq. Around 2015 I was daily driving an HP elite book 2760p which couldn covert to a tablet and had Wacom EMR tech integrated into the display. It worked fine for drawing and I did a lot of it. Along with Fujitsu and Lenovo they'd been making them since the core 2 duo era at least. When the surface pro came out it was building on these, and then the Apple pencil competed with the surface pro. These products sold then and still sell today. At my current company, the default windows laptop is a Thinkpad yoga with a stylus. I'll take your word for it when you say that the Apple pencil was an improvement and sold better. But Apple didn't invent this. There were absolutely successful products that came before.
by uecker | 2025-10-18 13:57:31+00:00
I don't think there are many new ideas in Rust that did not exist previously in other languages. Lifetimes, non-aliasing pointers etc all certainly existed before. Rust is also only somewhat ready for industry use because suddenly some companies poured a lot of money in it. But it seems kind of random why they picked Rust. I do not think there is anything which makes it particularly good and it certainly has issues.
by socketcluster | 2025-10-18 13:57:42+00:00
My understanding is that this is essentially a hub for MCP servers?

The current and potential benefits are:

- Consistent authentication mechanism for all tools.

- Ease of tool registration/deregistration.

- Tool discovery.

Main drawbacks are:

- Trusting WebMCP npm package to run on your users' computers.

- Trusting WebMCP with access to your site or platform's functionality. Kind of like OAuth?

Does this sound right? Any other pros and cons versus integrating MCP server directly with specific LLMs?
by MagicMoonlight | 2025-10-18 13:57:56+00:00
Nobody cares about Elon. It's like saying Coca Cola's share price is being determined by children at american universities. It's just delusional.

The reason they are getting killed, is because their products are now worse than the competition. They had a huge lead on everyone for years, then everyone caught up. Now you can get a car with the same range, with a HUD, with massaging chairs, with swivelling 360 seats... or you can get the same tesla car they've been making for 10 years.
by XorNot | 2025-10-18 13:57:57+00:00
I agree, though I would argue the issue is closer to no one's trying to measure how close we should be.

If you take the materialist view - and in this business you obviously have to - then the question is "do we have human level computational capacity with some level of real-time learning ability?"

So the yardstick we need is (1): what actually is the computational capacity of the human brain? (i.e. the brain obviously doesn't simulate it's own neurons, so what is a neuron doing and how does that map to compute operations?) and then (2) - is any computer system running an AI model plausibly working within those margins or exceeding them?

With the second part being: and can that system implement the sort of dynamic operations which humans obviously must, unaided? i.e. when I learn something new I might go through a lot of repetitions, but I don't just stop being able to talk about a subject for months while ingesting sum content of the internet to rebuild my model.
by haskellshill | 2025-10-18 13:58:15+00:00
> half of the tone marker diacritics don't correspond to the Pinyin tone markers

Yeah, they are different languages. What'd you expect? First you didn't even know that the Vietnamese alphabet was their actual alphabet, and now you're criticizing it for not being similar enough to some other random alphabet. Whatever your point is, you're failing at making it terribly.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-18 13:58:17+00:00
Why not?

What's the fundamental, absolutely insurmountable capability gap between the two? What is it that can't be bridged with architectural tweaks, better scaffolding or better training?

I see a lot of people make this "LLMs ABSOLUTELY CANNOT hit AGI" assumption, and it never seems to be backed by anything at all.
by OJFord | 2025-10-18 13:58:25+00:00
> All we know is that LLMs cannot become AGI.

A part of it, perhaps: I think of it like 'computer vision'; LLMs offer 'computer speech/language' as it were. But not a 'general intelligence' of motives and reasoning, 'just' an output. At the moment we have that output hooked up to a model that has data from the internet and books etc. in excess of what's required for convincing language, so it itself is what drives the content.

I think the future will be some other system for data and reasoning and 'general intelligence', that then uses a smaller language model for output in a human-understood form.
by Noaidi | 2025-10-18 13:58:29+00:00
Thank you, unfortunately, I don’t have such a network. And I actually have schizoaffective disorder, not schizophrenia. I often say schizophrenia to make it simple for people. But my family the ones who were not ill were not really helpful to those who were ill. And hence my current position.

And can I just say that YouTube video and the demonstration with the magnets? Wow. I don’t see how any physicist can look at that and not have a total change of mind. That it’s the fields that are the formative function of what we call the universe well when you see it, so much more seems to make sense. I knew when I was in ninth grade that materialism had its end because the infinite aspect of cutting something into just did not sit right in my mind and therefore, I just intuitively thought that everything was really made up of nothing.

Thank you for that and now I have a whole new series of videos to watch!
by Balgair | 2025-10-18 13:58:36+00:00
> Something else is going on.

The brain 'stores' data without using power. Under classical synapse structure, it modifies the butons to modulate the charges and neurotransmitters passing and being received. This is memristance.

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

It's very low energy to do this and it keeps for decades (probably). It's not a quantum effect.

Be aware though, this is a 'classical' synapse understanding. The neurons are doing all kinds of other things too, they are alive after all. And the glia, the glia and astrocytes affect memory too, but we're still trying to understand how.

Look, don't jump to quantum stuff with the brain.

It's just really hard to get data, low sample sizes, and desperate need of grant funding.

It's not quantum.
by _fat_santa | 2025-10-18 13:58:41+00:00
While Gary is very bearish on AI, I think there's some truth to his claims here though I disagree with how he got there. The problem I see with AI and AGI is not so much a technical problem as an economic one.

If we keep down our current trajectory of pouring billions on top of billions into AI then yes I think it would be plausible that in the next 10-20 years we will have a class of models that are "pseudo-AGI", that is we may not achieve true AGI but the models are going to be so good that it could well be considered AGI in many use cases.

But the problem I see is that this will require exponential growth and exponential spending and the wheels are already starting to catch fire. Currently we see many circular investments and unfortunately I see it as the beginning of the AI bubble bursting. The root of the issue is simply that these AI companies are spending 10x-100x or more on research than they bring in with revenue, OpenAI is spending ~$300B on AI training and infra while their revenue is ~$12B. At some point the money and patience from investors is going to run out and that is going to happen long before we reach AGI.

And I have to hand it to Sam Altman and others in the space that made the audacious bet that they could get to AGI before the music stops but from where I'm standing the song is about to come to an end and AGI is still very much in the future. Once the VC dollars dry up the timeline for AGI will likely get pushed another 20-30 years and that's assuming that there aren't other insurmountable technical hurdles along the way.
by OutOfHere | 2025-10-18 13:59:01+00:00
Let's not make it more complicated than it is. Hetzner is a scammer that gets off on people that use it lightly. You too are one because you reject all assertions that you don't like without regard to their truth. That you are down to gaslighting makes it clear you're not prepared to engage in good faith. It is obvious that you have much to lose with Hetzner being exposed for the fraud that it is. This has been one of the most dishonest conversations I have witnessed on your part, all so you can continue to peddle it to clients without telling them of the risks.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-18 13:59:18+00:00
"AI effect" is long known and pretty well documented.

When AI beat humans at chess, it didn't result in humans revising their idea of the capabilities of machine intelligence upwards. It resulted in humans revising their notion of how much intelligence is required to play chess at world champion level downwards, and by a lot.

Clearly, there's some sort of psychological defense mechanism in play. First, we see "AI could never do X". Then an AI does X, and the sentiment flips to "X has never required any intelligence in the first place".
by AnonymousPlanet | 2025-10-18 13:59:35+00:00
I'm curious, could you be more specific as to what exactly you mean by "schlock"? The ads? Product recommendations? Political content? Opinions?

For something that has a massive amount of videos added to it every minute, it's a surprisingly sanitised place.

They could introduce a kids friendly subdomain that would make it easier to filter at a proxy level. But then parents all over the world will be pulling their hair out about what is deemed to be kids friendly. The staunchly atheist might balk at content that is open towards Religion, the religious extremists will balk at content that is open to things like homosexuality, and the dietary extremists will complain about endorsements of the wrong choice of food. Humans like to make up lists of purity rules. But those lists rarely match.

So I'm curious, what does your list look like?
by codethief | 2025-10-18 14:00:14+00:00
> the idea that we are a standalone complete source of truth for an IDE

So that XML-like tree would become the source of truth?

> where Tree-sitter only wants to be half the story: it expects to sync with a text buffer where the text buffer is the source of truth.

There are probably a ton of reasons for this, e.g. 1) The source of truth at the file system level is actually the bare text. 2) Performance reasons. 3) Stuff like git diff is easier to implement.
by willyxdjazz | 2025-10-18 14:00:15+00:00
Totally agree with you. It makes me think that the wheel is a tool—technologically simple yet incredibly powerful—that helps humans overcome their limitations. Similarly, predictive inference is also a tool that extends our cognitive capacity by connecting all human knowledge. This tool is built upon other tools, all designed with the fundamental purpose of facilitating and empowering humans. The refinement of these aids is such that sometimes it evokes a mix of awe and a certain unease, due to how closely and powerfully these tools can influence our world and decisions. It is natural for such intensity to generate suspicion because the assistance becomes extremely sophisticated and gives the illusion of something “intelligent.”
by nabla9 | 2025-10-18 14:01:27+00:00
Similarly Samsung has canceled its thin smartphone (Galaxy S26 Edge) https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-galaxy-s26-edge-can...

You don't get any benefit from a thin phone if it's not thin all the way. Both the iPhone Air and S26 Edge phones have a thick, ugly bulge at the camera end. They are neither thin nor elegant.
by bombcar | 2025-10-18 14:04:48+00:00
One thing about the "professional" DOS software (and you can see it in things like Emacs - eight modes and constantly shifting) was you were basically expected to live in it - it had the full attention of the computer and the user.

You were also expected to learn it; which meant you became "one with the machine" in a way similar to an organ player.

I remember watching Fry's Electronics employees fly through their TUI, so fast that they'd walk away while it was still loading screens, and eventually a printout would come out for the cage.
by fragmede | 2025-10-18 14:04:56+00:00
The convenience is the point. Instead of having to go and find the file that lists a class's functions, an IDE can list them and you can just click on the one you want. As the author points out, LSPs do that function in the modern era, but the point is, it's useful. Doesn't have to be your cup of tea, but you should at least be able to see the point.
by OutOfHere | 2025-10-18 14:04:58+00:00
Stop right there. It is completely false that major cloud providers in general prohibit crypto activities. I was not running any endpoint. I was not even serving or mining anything. Hetzner terminated me simply for high CPU usage. No other cloud provider does this.

The heuristics you note are of garbage quality, full of errors in classification, with a faulty classification being their default case. It's when someone is first found guilty of being a witch, then a dumb association is noted to label them as such.

If a user is using a shared CPU all of the time, then it's the job of a good cloud vendor to throttle the user when resources are needed for other users. Hetzner simply does not have this technical capability which goes to show how weak it is.

The sheer number of blatant lies in your comment go to show that it is you who has extremely bad faith all around. You are a bad person who has much to lose with Hetzner being exposed for what it is, a fraud.
by chadcmulligan | 2025-10-18 14:04:58+00:00
I did the math some years ago on how much computing is required to simulate a human brain - a brain has around 90 billion neurons with each neuron having an average of 7,000 connections to other neurons. Lets assume thats all we need. So what do we need to simulate a neuron, one cpu? or can we fit more than one in a CPU, lets say 100 so we're down to one billion cpu's and 70 trillion messages flying between them every what? mSec?.

Simulating that is a long way away - so the only possibility is that brains have some sort of redundancy and we can optimise that away. Though computers are faster than brains so its possible maybe, how much faster? So lets say a neuron does its work in a mS and we can simulate this work in 1uS, ie a thousand times faster - thats still a lot. Can we get to a million times faster? even then its still a lot. Not to mention the power required for this.

Even if we can fit a million neurons in a CPU thats still 90 million CPU's. Only 10% are active say, still 9 million CPU's, a thousand times faster - 9,000 cpu's nearly there but still a while away.
by astatine | 2025-10-18 14:05:01+00:00
Nostalgic! Turbo C was my preferred IDE over many years in the late 80s to mid 90s. What an amazing tool! Those key bindings, used in so many other IDEs since, are burned into muscle memory. Even after decades of not using them, they bring a smile back. CodeWarrior, the debugger, helped me understand what happens when you run a program more than literally anything else I read or was taught.
by zz3 | 2025-10-18 14:05:49+00:00
Also one more thing of note before you go into "but intersex is just error":

"Errors" are important in models. Look up Type 1 and Type 2 errors. If I had a model for hair color, and it couldn't explain red hair, it would be a pretty terrible model. As I mentioned earlier, red hair and obviously, visibly intersex are about on the same order of magnitude.

To further illustrate this concept, consider humans and horses. You'll notice there aren't human-horse hybrids. We can come up with a criteria or a model to separate humans and horses with 1's and 0's and there's nothing in the middle. That's an example of a binary system. We could come up with a bunch of terrible models too that can't differentiate between the two ("mammals"). But ultimately, I could disprove your argument about transgender in sports even ASSUMING a binary model in sex because it's pretty fundamentally irrelevant. If we can't measure the difference between two things (sports performance between ciswomen and transwomen after 2 years of hormonal therapy), then the difference doesn't really matter. The fact that there's transMEN regularly playing in the Olympics is also fairly revealing.
by middayc | 2025-10-18 14:06:00+00:00
If Python has special syntax for `if` and so makes if an expression, it doesn't mean that `if` is a function.

If `if` is a function why don't you call it like other functions in Python?

if( .... )

Functions are first class in Python now AFAIK. Can you assign `if` to a variable?

Also, blog-posts is not just about `if`, is `for` a function in Python, `def`, `return`, `class`?
by imglorp | 2025-10-18 14:07:12+00:00
PKI by itself is not enough because of key distribution.

In the old days, we had "signing parties" where your friends in meatspace would sign your key and that was robust. At least you know by N degrees of separation, if your friend had signed someone's key, then that someone was probably OK trust wise. Repeat for N degrees of separation on your keychain. That's "pretty good" trust with poor scalability.

We also had public key servers which would somehow link an email to a public key. I guess a key server could validate the email, so at least you know that email went with that key. And by reputation on the intertubes, you might infer a frequent committer (email) to some project seemed ok, so maybe you could trust them. Less trust with better scalability: keyservers and emails can always be pwned.

A blockchain is an immutable, global, ledger. Everyone knows what old entries were added by what key signing whatever payload; they're all cemented in there for the world to read. There's no way to un-publish an old entry. So I can put my pub key on there, then sign commits in my project with it. Now, you don't have to trust any email server or any keyserver: you can look at a new commit in that project, see who signed it, and then go find my key and earlier commits on that blockchain. You still don't know if I'm evil or not, but at least you know I'm the same signer of all the other commits.
by haskellshill | 2025-10-18 14:07:23+00:00
That is nonsensical. You could make the same argument by taking any English word, tracing its origins to Greek or Latin, calling it a loan word, and therefore arguing that it doesn't matter if you spell it correctly or not. Clearly misspelled words are "good enough" to be understood, but wouldn't you be disappointed if a newspaper contained a bunch of misspellings?
by Noaidi | 2025-10-18 14:07:34+00:00
I didn’t say you were silly, I said you were being silly. And I was actually being nice because what you said was actually demeaning.

“Careful around magnets my friend, your consciousness will change a lot if you're right.”

That was just flat out ridicule with no scientific or philosophical rationale and was not useful to the conversation whatsoever.

As I pointed out before consciousness as well defined. I’m not defining consciousness. I’m explaining how consciousness arises. Or what consciousness is. Consciousness does not arrive from matter, but instead matter arises from consciousness. Consciousness, or fields, are the driving force of the formation of matter.