MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tensility | 2025-10-25 15:32:03+00:00
I'm surprised nobody else has gone meta yet, so I suppose I must. Anyway, "ChatGPT said this" ... about this thread.

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In many of the Hacker News comments, a core complaint was not just that AI is sometimes used lazily, but that LLM outputs are fundamentally unreliable—that they generate confidently stated nonsense (hallucinations, bullshit in the Frankfurtian philosophical sense: speech unconcerned with truth).

Here’s a more explicitly framed summary of that sentiment:

⸻

Central Critique: AI as a Bullshit Generator

Many commenters argue that: • LLMs don’t “know” things—they generate plausible language based on patterns, not truth. • Therefore, any use of them without rigorous verification is inherently flawed. • Even when they produce correct answers, users can’t trust them without external confirmation, which defeats many of the supposed productivity gains. • Some assert that AI output should be treated not as knowledge but as an unreliable guess-machine.

Examples of the underlying sentiment: • “LLMs produce bullshit that looks authoritative, and people post it without doing the work to separate truth from hallucination.” • “It costs almost nothing to generate plausible nonsense now, and that cheapness is actively polluting technical discourse.” • “‘I asked ChatGPT’ is not a disclaimer; it’s an admission that you didn’t verify anything.”

⸻

Philosophical framing (which commenters alluded to)

A few participants referenced Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit: • The bullshitter’s goal isn’t to lie (which requires knowledge of the truth), but simply to produce something that sounds right. • Many commenters argue LLMs embody this: they’re indifferent to truth, tailored to maximize coherence, authority, and user satisfaction.

This wasn’t a side issue—it was a core rejection of uncritical AI use.

⸻

So to clarify: the strong anti-AI sentiment isn’t just about laziness.

It’s about: • Epistemic corruption: degrading the reliability of discourse. • False confidence: turning uncertainty into authoritative prose. • Pollution of knowledge spaces: burying truth under fluent fabrication.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-25 15:32:12+00:00
I'm not sure I agree. We had all these complaints about TV going back to the 1970s (the earliest clear memories I have). It was called "the plug in drug" and "the boob tube."

Homebound and housewives used to watch hours of game shows and soap operas all day.

If a kid liked to read, some parents would tell them to "get your head out of that book and go outside."

It's just something to do to fill the boredom.
by moefh | 2025-10-25 15:32:45+00:00
It seems like you're trying to fix a social problem (programmers don't care about doing a good job) with a technical solution (change the programming languages). This simply doesn't work.

People who write C code ignoring warnings are the same people who in Rust will resort to writing unsafe with raw pointers as soon as they hit the first borrow check error. If you can't force them to care about C warnings, how are you going to force them to care about Rust safety?

I've seen this happen; it's not seen at large because the vast majority of people writing Rust code in public do it because they want to, not because they're forced.
by ggregoire | 2025-10-25 15:33:32+00:00
This illustrates greatly why React got so popular.

If you look at the React code, it's 99% "just" JavaScript and HTML. The only proprietary function is `useState`, and even the people who have never touched React probably understand what `useState` does in this code without having to open the docs.

Also, in the Backbone code, half of the application relies on the string selector `.space-y-2`. So if someone in your team changes this class (or add it on another element), and forgets to ctrl+F `space-y-2` and change the string everywhere else, half of the application is broken. Also the layout/style for the checks list is repeated twice (in `render` and `updatePassword`), so if someone forgets to change both, the UI will be inconsistent once the user enters their password. And this a 50 LOC app… imagine now the same problems in a 10k+ LOC app. Maintenance hell.

I don't understand how the author wrote those two examples, didn't see the problems with the Backbone version and conclude there is no differences between both frameworks. React solved the problems present in the Backbone version.
by Rochus | 2025-10-25 15:33:51+00:00
I was actually surprised to see nearly a factor ten between C99 and LuaJIT. In previous measurements (on x86, see e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/Are-we-fast-yet/blob/main/L...) there was rather a factor five. So either GCC 12.2 produces much faster code than GCC 4.8, or LuaJIT 2.1 got much slower, or the C99 version of Are-we-fast-yet is much better supported by the CPU cache of the T480 than my previous EliteBook 2530. I don't think that the x86 vs x86_64 makes such a difference (at least I didn't observe this in many other experiments).
by RRWagner | 2025-10-25 15:34:22+00:00
I have had the same suspicion. I can propose a new kind of ongoing Turing-like test where we track how many words are suggested on our phones (or computers) as we type. On my phone it guesses the next single word pretty well, so why not the next two? Then 3... imagine half-way through a message it "finishing your sentence" as close friends and family often do. Then why should it wait for halfway? What are the various milestones of finishing the last word, last 5 words, half the sentence, 80%, etc?
by realo | 2025-10-25 15:34:52+00:00
Electronics is still not so bad, but today's chemistry sets have definitely lost a bit of their "fun" parts ...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-rise-and-f...

"... Sodium cyanide can dissolve gold in water, but it is also a deadly poison. “Atomic” chemistry sets of the 1950s included radioactive uranium ore. Glassblowing kits, which taught a skill still important in today’s chemistry labs, came with a blowtorch."
by photonthug | 2025-10-25 15:35:00+00:00
The capital was better fortified and the French wanted food and loot. So softer target sounds nice, especially if you think this crushes morale immediately and don't believe the opposition will go scorched earth (but they did).

> If I would take S.P., I would hold Russia by the head. If I take Kiev, I will hold Russia by legs. If I take Moscow, I will reach right into its heart!"

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/27588/why-did-na...
by mrtksn | 2025-10-25 15:35:23+00:00
> One article that I enjoyed is this: https://archive.is/YieBg

The corruption in EU is indeed happening through local governments(EU allocates money for projects, local governments who actually end up getting the money to execute these projects siphon that to their cronies or to spice up the local economies), as per this article and the articles in ftm.eu
by benzible | 2025-10-25 15:35:24+00:00
This isn't 'business as usual' on multiple levels.

First, I never claimed Cook "supports" Trump - as I said, I suspect he personally loathes him. The point is that corporations are making unprecedented concessions to avoid Trump's wrath.

Second, companies push back on government constantly when it serves their interests. Apple previously fought the FBI over privacy, but more typically companies push back or evade the law for financial benefit, not principles. When penalties are low enough they accept them as the cost of doing business, e.g. Meta's consistent, willful FTC consent decree violations.

Third, openly bribing a sitting president with a 24-karat gold gift is not normal corporate behavior. The Trump administration has used state power to control private enterprise in a completely unprecedented way: tariff threats as extortion, DOJ investigations targeting companies over DEI programs, prosecution of high-profile figures who resist - mostly political enemies so far but Zuckerberg faced threats of "life in prison" before he showed sufficient fealty.

I'm waiting for the whataboutism replies here, and executive overreach was a thing in the past, but Trump has fundamentally changed the character of the US system of government. The enabling environment is unprecedented: a Congress with zero interest in oversight and a Supreme Court granting immunity for official acts. When you combine unlimited executive power with no checks, corporate capitulation isn't "just business" - it's rational fear of an authoritarian using every lever of government to punish dissent.
by Nifty3929 | 2025-10-25 15:36:05+00:00
We live in a temperate climate and installed a heat pump / mini-split system to replace our central AC and furnace and get rid of all the ductwork.

It's awesome in many respects and I don't regret it, but it's also MUCH more expensive in the winter vs our gas furnace. Electricity is just so much more expensive than the gas equivalent for heating. Overall this is costing us a lot more money per year.

But the upside is that it maintains the temperature in each room much more effectively, and it's a LOT quieter, both inside from the air handlers and outside from the ... loud outside fan thing (compressor?).
by btbuilder | 2025-10-25 15:36:22+00:00
This is fantastic progress for CPython. I had almost given up hope that CPython would overcome the GIL after first hitting its limitations over 10 years ago.

That being said I strongly believe that because of the sharp edges on async style code vs proper co-routine-based user threads like go-routines and Java virtual threads Python is still far behind optimal parallelism patterns.
by gruez | 2025-10-25 15:37:04+00:00
Your expectations are entirely unreasonable. Apple already provides a way for businesses to lock their devices through a web interface, which might require 1-2 hours for a non-technical person to figure out but doesn't exactly need a whole IT department to operate either. It's certainly not out of reach for "Small business (<5 people)". On the other hand you want Apple to get into the business of locking phones on demand, which is both labor intensive (you need people to manually validate each case) and prone to abuse (eg. in the case of second-hand sales). This is like expecting you should be able to walk into any Apple store and request any iPhone you "own" to be remote wiped/locked, just because you're too lazy to set up a pin/iCloud on your phone.
by whateveracct | 2025-10-25 15:38:01+00:00
I think the comment was saying below 30F and below 10F. Much warmer than you're saying.

Also..

> It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).

If my heat doesn't work for those days, I'm kind of boned. Four days per year without a working heat pump? That's a mess.
by lynx97 | 2025-10-25 15:38:17+00:00
It's an attempt to whitewash the issues, and not use words which imply real problems. I prefer visually impared, however, in the US, legally blind basically says the same thing.

My gf (blind herself) recently met a teacher on a train, who told her she is working with her class to find a new word to replace "disabled". IMO, just so that she doesn't have to deal with reality. And, mind you, no disabled person around... It is just sad what some people are doing on "behalf of us", just so they don't have to grapple with the fact that some people have a harsh life.

It is hard to explain the sadness, as I also have a language barrier, english being my second language. However, believe me, I virtually know no disabled person who likes these language games. If we are amongst each other, we all agree this patronising is sad and should stop.
by antasvara | 2025-10-25 15:38:27+00:00
Nope, fully accredited Montessori school and trained Montessori teachers.

I'm actually a huge fan of Montessori schools, including the one I went to. It was a great experience.

But in my experience and the experience of a lot of others I've talked to, Montessori schools aren't perfect. The method does really well fostering natural curiosity and harnessing it for learning. Essentially, it develops internal motivation super successfully.

But, as I've seen and heard from plenty of parents and at least one teacher, the method struggles with students that can't find that internal motivation. The sort of freedom a Montessori classroom gives you is not ideal for everyone. I think it's okay to admit that.
by tim333 | 2025-10-25 15:38:39+00:00
There are some Amazon reviews https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Intelligence-Evolution-Computi...

The main thesis seems to be "the brain evolved precisely to predict the future—the “predictive brain” hypothesis."

Which I guess is ok although we can do other stuff - write stories, play the piano and so on. Also:

>What Is Intelligence? argues—quite against the grain—that certain modern AI systems do indeed have a claim to intelligence, consciousness, and free will.
by wslh | 2025-10-25 15:39:46+00:00
Is there a TL;DR version? Even the preface and introduction feel unnecessarily long.

I also think some statements are plainly incorrect. For example "humanity is already collectively superintelligent" in Chapter 10. The term superintelligence isn't one we have a shared definition for, but it's usually understood as an intelligence that surpasses all prior forms of intelligence(s), not one that merely aggregates them. In that sense, superintelligence could represent a qualitatively new level of cognition limited only by the physical computational capacity of the universe. Once you have a superintelligent entity you can imagine a future one surpassing it.
by numpad0 | 2025-10-25 15:40:01+00:00
I'm starting to think this brewing anti-goon sentiment might be less about gooner contents, and more about foreign(from US perspective) contents.

Social media had opened a new floodgate, and the water level near the US turned out to be not higher at inside than outside. People aren't so happy about that, some trying to close it, but it's all too late, so they argue there are risks and hopes, while adoption goes on.

Doesn't that make more sense than like, "kids these days are addicted to porn and it's new"? It's not like there were any point in time they were not.
by immibis | 2025-10-25 15:40:15+00:00
This is the person who reverse-engineered the Apple M1 GPU so Linux on M1 could have graphics. People like this are the real 10x developers, and you want them on your side if you want working software. Otherwise your project dies and the people who are actually doing the work continue the same work under a new project structure, like what happened to PolyMC (-> Prism Launcher), GZDoom (-> UZDoom) and one other project I can't remember.
by phatfish | 2025-10-25 15:40:43+00:00
I have a book "The Montessori Toddler".

We read a lot with our son who is almost 3 now. In the book it is recommended not to introduce fantasy in books until 6 (when apparently children suddenly understand the difference between fantasy and reality). I assume this is an original Montessori teaching.

Anyone who knows childrens books knows they are around 95% fantasy stories containing anthropomorphized animals (and some cars/trains/planes).

As far as i can tell our son knows the difference between what we read in books and the real world, and has done for a while. The things we read in books we discuss while reading. In the real world we discuss real world things. He has never shown behavior that would suggest these are mixed up in his head.

Maybe I misunderstand their point around fantasy/reality. But the seems so obviously wrong to me that I would be cautious about the rest of their teachings. Which does seem to contain some good advice.
by immibis | 2025-10-25 15:42:11+00:00
AFAIK network operators are no longer required to know their customer, but may still choose to do so. They're required to cooperate with law enforcement investigations. This doesn't seem like "cooperation" in this case, but rather "police just barge in and take all your stuff" and they probably could win a civil case against the police to get their equipment back or its monetary value, as well as lost revenue. Europe generally has higher rule of law than USA, so there's less chance a judge could say "your business sounds shady so you don't win this case."

The recent EU-wide Digital Services Act has generous liability protections for "mere conduits". A mere conduit is anyone who is just getting traffic from A to B, unless they are A or B themselves. Even though in this case their cellphone operator may think they are originators of traffic, if they are a relay business (and not spammers themselves) then they are mere conduits and protected from liability*. Of course they must still cooperate with law enforcement to track down the source of the spam, but they are not required to pre-emptively KYC. Having their office raided and all their equipment stolen doesn't sound like "cooperating" to me.

* their cellphone company probably has the right to terminate these SIM contracts, and may also sue for damages, but I suspect the damages would be something like the difference between their actual cost of SIM cards and the EU-prescribed maximum wholesale rate for sending texts, which is likely a negative number.
by Barbing | 2025-10-25 15:42:45+00:00
I wouldn’t be upset to see a disclaimer that this was done as a proof of a technical concept and not to save a buck.

For readers, I totally understand trying at once but it would be odd if e.g. someone I know who makes six figures told me they exploited this on every leg of their journey.

We wouldn’t want to fill our water cups with soda even if it only costs the restaurant a penny.
by throwup238 | 2025-10-25 15:42:59+00:00
That’s true for most mass market crap but that’s a low bar because it’s all just escapism in a different format. Books still have a much higher signal to noise ratio and information density than all content short of academic textbooks or courses (and I’ll die on that hill).

Sapiens is a good example of that kind of mass market crap. I’m currently reading After the Ice by Mithen and The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow which are much better attempts at pop-academia takes at early human history. Even just the notes section of those books is a goldmine for sources that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else outside a dense textbook.

Now with AI it’s easier than ever to stick to the good (nonfiction) stuff. Ask it for book recommendations and then ask it to search online for criticisms/reviews of their accuracy. I used to double check the sources for the reviews but never found any broad strokes inaccuracies.
by tensility | 2025-10-25 15:44:14+00:00
Actually, my criticism was the result of my own misunderstanding of what you were claiming. My apologies for that, although I'm still unlikely to use these tools based upon the example when my own personal counterexamples have shown me that it's often as much or more work to get there via prompting than it is to simply do the thinking myself. Have a good day.
by acdha | 2025-10-25 15:44:30+00:00
In this case it’s much simpler: the question was minority rule and you can see that power in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches is held by Republican politicians representing less than a majority—Trump is arguably the best claim they have on plurality since he is come very close to winning the popular vote since so many Democrats stayed home—and enacting policies which are very unpopular, in most cases policies which are unpopular even among registered Republicans.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-10-25 15:44:44+00:00
I agree it makes me very nervous. Though as I understand it, it's mostly open source (edit: not the build tool tho).

Their transpiler solution at least results in maintainable Kotlin code that one could begin working in directly without needing Skip. But the transpiler way is more limiting than the native Swift SDK on Android.

I'm considering using it just as a way to bootstrap as my main focus has been iOS/Mac. If I can use it to generate enough of a new revenue stream on Android, I could then afford to hire an Android developer to take care of doing it without Skip, too.
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-25 15:44:45+00:00
It's popularly claimed to be a Navy SEAL saying. I have no idea if that's true, but I think it has some broad merit to many things, almost anything which benefits from careful planning or training. In this context, throwing a big lump sum of money all at once could pressure the developers to spend money / hire too fast without careful planning. Spreading the payments out could be the donor's way of saying they don't want radical hasty changes, they just want to help out in a way.
by motorest | 2025-10-25 15:45:13+00:00
> What about debugging.

With source maps configured, debugging tends to work out of the box.

The only place where I personally saw this becoming an issue was with a non-nodejs project that used an obscure barreler, and it only posed a problem when debugging unit tests.

> Just feels like an extra layer of complexity in the deployment process and debugging.

Your concern is focused on hypothetical tooling issues. Nowadays I think the practical pros greatly outnumber the hypothetical cons, to the point you need to bend yourself out of shape to even argue against adopting TypeScript.
by SR2Z | 2025-10-25 15:45:31+00:00
Government regulators have NOT failed. The CEO already pointed this out - hitting the front windshield on a corner at cruise speed is the worst possible case for a collision like this.

Once pilot got some light shrapnel and the airplane successfully landed with zero deaths. This is such a rare collision that people attributed it to SPACE DEBRIS initially.

The only fix I'd like to see the government make is allowing lightweight objects to broadcast transponder data. Even if they don't do that, another 50 years will probably pass before the next collision of this type.
by neevous | 2025-10-25 15:45:40+00:00
> Operating systems have become MUCH more stable.

While restarting some versions of Windows servers in the 2000s and 2010s to workaround memory leaks was normal, old OSes through history have been stable.

Linux has been around for decades and has been very stable.

Windows 3.1, 3.11 for workgroups, NT 4.0, Server 2000, XP, Vista, 10 & 11 have all been fairly stable after patches.

Win 95 and 98 after patches were stable enough. Win ME and 8 were crap, but Win 8 was more just crap experience.

Really most of the problems with Microsoft, Apple, Linux desktop environments and package systems could be categorized into being related to increases in complexity, many unnecessary changes, and just poor design or experience.

IBM chose macOS years ago because of the reduced cost to maintain them, while most IT professionals continue to choose Microsoft because the barrier to entry cost is low and because of familiarity, likely because younger people have Windows because it’s cheaper, they can play more games on it, and that’s what they grew up with, but Linux continues to be the primary server OS.

Little of that has to do with stability, and just because Windows 10 & 11 are stable doesn’t mean that things weren’t more stable 40-50 years ago. Linux admins for years prided themselves on the uptime metrics back then.
by tensility | 2025-10-25 15:46:47+00:00
For whatever it's worth, this is exactly the kind of awful that I never want in any code base that I'm working on:

<https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/473e89edfebc27781b43443...>

At least run a pretty-printer on the code so that it can be reviewed by anything but a robot.

Part of developing a good software system is about exercising taste in vendored-in libraries and, especially, the structure around them.

P.S. I've gone to look at other chunks of Javascript and see that I was unlucky to grab this steaming pile first.