MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lloydatkinson | 2025-11-22 21:54:23+00:00
TypeScript codebases I've seen generally seem to have the widest demonstration of skill gap versus other languages I use.

For example, I don't ever see anyone using `dynamic` or `object` in C#, but I will often see less skilled developers using `any` and `// @ts-ignore` in TypeScript at every possible opportunity even if it's making their development experience categorically worse.

For these developers, the `type` keyword is totally unknown. They don't know how to make a type, or what `Omit` is, or how to extend a type. Hell, they usually don't even know what a union is. Or generics.

I sometimes think that in trying to just be a superset of JavaScript, and it being constantly advertised as so, TypeScript does not/did not get taken seriously enough as a standalone language because it's far too simple to just slot sloppy JavaScript into TypeScript. TypeScript seems a lot better now of having a more sane tsconfig.json, but it still isn't strict enough by default.

This is a strong contrast with other languages that compile to JavaScript, like https://rescript-lang.org/ which has an example of pattern matching right there on the home page.

Which brings me onto another aspect I don't really like about TypeScript; it's constantly own-goaling itself because of it's "we don't add anything except syntax and types" philosophy. I don't think TypeScript will ever get pattern matching as a result, which is absurd, because it has unions.
by oezi | 2025-11-22 21:54:33+00:00
I think your examples aren't that much censorship but rather individuals/politicians asserting their rights not to let anybody smear them on social media.

The rules which made e.g. insults illegal haven't changed but society stopped allowing anonymous people online getting away with it.

Maybe some background for non-German readers on Pimmelgate (Dick gate):

Pimmelgate happened when a secretary of state in one of the German states was called a 'dick' on social media and the politician had the guy who posted this swatted by state police. The state minister lost the resulting legal battle and was ridiculed online for his short fuse.

Not pretty certainly. Certainly an abuse of power by a politician leading the police in that state, but also widely reported and criticized. In my mind it doesn't compare for instance Donald Trump going after Comey or suing public broadcasters.
by kashyapc | 2025-11-22 21:54:52+00:00
> where people passionately project the term consciousness onto LLMs

They have all drunk too much AI cool-aid. I doubt these people have any meaningul education in fields such as biology, neuroscience and related life sciences.

Quite simply, we don't yet understand how consciousness arises. There are a lot of theories, but they are just that—theories.

Related reading: Antonio Damasio wrote a book in 1994 with the spicy title, Descartes' Error[1] to rebut his famous quote that you cite.

Also look up "Somatic Marker Hypothesis" by Damasio.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes%27_Error
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-22 21:54:55+00:00
"It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P "

Well, the Neanderthals cooked, so it is not exactly a rocket engineering skill ... but it is probably acquired better from other people than alone, and equipment matters as well.

If you learn to cook from your mother in a well-equipped kitchen, you will probably enjoy the process a lot more than alone with Youtube in a cheaply rented flat with one pot, one dull knife and two dented plastic plates. And if people don't enjoy some learning process, they are much more likely to drop out and resign. Especially if fast food alternatives lurk at them from their smartphones.
by Waterluvian | 2025-11-22 21:55:11+00:00
I’m so frustrated by satisfies because it eliminates optional properties.

I want an object of ‘LayerConfig’ elements where each key is the name of a possible layer. Without ‘satisfies’ I have to name every layer twice in my config. But with it, I can’t have optional properties (eg. Half the layers are fine with the default values for some properties).

The best I’ve found is a hack that uses a function. But this whole thing where my key literals widen into “string” is a constant annoyance to otherwise very elegant code.
by iammattmurphy | 2025-11-22 21:56:07+00:00
I’m immediately reminded of John Siracusa’s rant about Wikipedia on his old Hypercritical podcast. This is a lengthy rebuttal from (presumably) a Wikipedia lover that includes a link and timestamp to the original podcast segment [0]

I agree, verifiability makes sense, and truth can’t really be claimed without verification, and so it’s a confusing argument to say: truth should be above verifiability; but I must admit: I find it very strange that some people have information about them on their Wikipedia pages that they’re not able to correct despite _being the person_ because one can only cite a source.

The problem of circular citations exists as well, where an article is cited which itself only cites another article, and it might loop back on itself.

0 - https://www.thewikipedian.net/p/verifiability-truth-john-sir...
by tombert | 2025-11-22 21:56:45+00:00
I wish Apple had made a point to support Vulkan. I know about MoltenVK and all that fun stuff, but for a time, there was a graphics API that worked on all of the major platforms: OpenGL.

Vulkan was meant to succeed OpenGL, and despite my annoyances with the API, I still think that it's nice to have an open standard for these things, but now there isn't any graphics API that works on everything.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-22 21:56:52+00:00
My one embarrassing moment was that when I was working with a team in India that spoke perfectly clear English was that they asked me was I native English speaker (I am). They had never heard anyone with a southern accent.

I’ve learned to modulate my southern accent and speak slower over the years as I’ve worked in more customer facing roles and even more now that a large part of our company is Latin America and Brazil.

As far as idioms, I did introduce my former CTO who was Indian to the term “sausage making”. Any time he would get into his “geek mode” and want to know the technical details I told him he really didn’t want to know how the sausage was made.
by serf | 2025-11-22 21:57:05+00:00
>My first thought was the comment in the thread from the other day about Zork and hooking up an AI image generator to that.

I have done this in the early GPT days with 'Tales of Maj'eyal' and to a lesser extent RimWorld.

It works great for games that have huge compendiums of world lore , bestiaries, etc.
by jaccola | 2025-11-22 21:57:57+00:00
This is potentially a lot more useful in creation pipelines than other demos (e.g. World Labs) if it uses explicit assets rather than a more implicit representation (gaussians are pretty explicit but not in the way we are used to working with in games etc...).

I do think Meta has the tech to easily match other radiance field based generation methods, they publish many foundational papers in this space and have Hyperscape.

So I'd view this as an interesting orthogonal direction to explore!
by tstrimple | 2025-11-22 21:59:11+00:00
The last paragraph for me is critical. I've got pretty severe ADHD. I know the things I want to do and the steps to make them, but the executive function to do them just doesn't seem to exist anymore for personal projects. CC has made that sort of work possible for me again. One of my immediate needs was to be able to share screenshots with CC securely. I one-shotted a paste service similar to imgur, but far more simple in design just for this use case. I can share documents and images/text/documents with CC just by pasting into a browser and CC can share files with me by uploading to the underlying services /uploads directory and sending me the link. The whole service took us 5-10 minutes to build and deploy in a split horizon DNS configuration that pretty much just worked as expected on the first try.

Now don't get me wrong. It's a stupid simple app and would have been quick to build personally as well. It just takes a post with clipboard contents and guesses the file type based on data provided. Saves the content into the service /uploads directory with a randomized 6 character name and provides a link. When accessing a link, the service finds all pastes older than pasteTimeoutSetting and deletes them before trying to serve the content. But all I had to do was describe the use case and make a couple small suggestions before the entire thing Just Worked.
by viktorcode | 2025-11-22 21:59:21+00:00
I mostly agree with your points, but there’s one form of censorship that exists in Germany today: internet censorship driven by the commercial interests of right holders and implemented by the major internet service providers. In short: illegal streaming sites can be blocked for access.

Some people might disagree that it isn’t a form of censorship, but it fits the bill: blocking access to information on the sole discretion of 3rd party pursuing its own interests.
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-11-22 21:59:31+00:00
> but Tolkien was born in pre-war England where lifetime bachelors who weren't gay were a part of the usual society

Suure those bachelors were all straight, there certainly weren't any gay ones who didn't dare to come out. Nothing to see here ;)

IMO Sam & Frodo are at the very least intensely good friends, though I do have the strong impression that Sam is way more sacrificial than Frodo. Afair it's always Frodo who needs Sam to progress or save him - but Frodo's story doesn't have him do big efforts to accommodate/help Sam. It always felt a bit like a count to peasant relationship to me in this regard (as probably Tolkien would have idolized it). Definitely not one on equal footing.

Another dimension/reading I find exciting is that Sam & Frodo are a split up character, where Sam represents the physical part of existence and Frodo represents the mental/psychological part. Even above the regular "hobbits obsessed with food", Sam brings the seasoning packet to make roast chicken to Mordor which cracks Frodo up, does the cooking along the way. Frodo's journey on the other hand is marked by "suffering from inside" - the witch kings spiritual wound and the pull of the ring. Frodo's intellect affords him shrewdness and planning, but in the end Sam has to carry him to the forge, because Frodo is too weighed down by his inner life. Does make for a nice metaphor I guess.

Anyway that was some thoughts of mine
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-22 21:59:48+00:00
I agree, that this discussion isn't based on proper economic terms, but on laymen understanding.

The claim isn't that it is exactly like central planning like a state, but very similar through the view on the whole society. You have a powerful caucus, no longer bound by reality (competition), making decisions, that they think are good, which effectively set the pace for the whole economy field. Whether this caucus formed through rigged elections or by inheritance of companies isn't all that relevant. It would be quite a different story, if the state would enforce its monopoly on (political) power and governing, but it refuses to do so now-a-days.

> The relevant questions for oligopolies (strategic behavior, barriers to entry, tacit collusion) are completely different from central planning questions (calculation problems, information aggregation, incentive alignment).

The observation on these oligopolies, that are now larger than some states is, that they seem to lack in their strategic reasoning and are more built on vibes of their leader, which is subject to blindness due to sycophants, much like in an authoritarian regime. Also they tend to treat the whole market as their internal planning problem.

> but here in the case of economics, we don’t need to bend words when other fitting concepts are readily available and battle-tested.

I think a majority of commenters on HN are not as well-versed in Economics as you, so would value elaboration on modern monopolies. I think they differ a bit from classical monopolies in their amount of ties to the government and interference into elections. Not that lobbying isn't typical for monopolies, but modern monopolies seem to not need to lobby anymore, but simply do and dictate.
by conradev | 2025-11-22 22:00:33+00:00
I use it primarily to categorize spending to know things like “how much money did I spend on electronics doodads in the last year”.

The double-entry part is a fanciness for checking that all money in (paychecks) equals all money out (spending, taxes). You can selectively disable it by “padding” balances.

I have it on for my checking account and it catches duplicate postings for transfers between my Venmo and my checking account. I can also put the initial/final balances from the bank statements as “guards” to verify that it all adds up.

This sort of structure is really helpful for a human or language model. You can break the translation work down into subunits with fast correctness checks.
by mrlonglong | 2025-11-22 22:00:45+00:00
I've a NEC V30 sitting somewhere on a bookshelf, and I was thinking of building an emulated chipset around it to emulate an Amstrad PC1512/PC1640, but with HDMI output. Or maybe DisplayPort since that's not encumbered with patents or royalties. I have an Amstrad PC1640 working perfectly in PCem on Linux. But it'd be more satisfying to actually build something that would make use of the NEC V30.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2025-11-22 22:01:00+00:00
what about duck duck go? We need a simple chart: 1. What browsers are good at resisting finger printing 2. tell for each browser, does it work on android ad ios and apple and windows and linux 3. what setting are needed to achieve this

for bonus points, is there no way to strip all headers on chrome on control it better?
by gfiorav | 2025-11-22 22:01:29+00:00
What could possibly be my source for such a claim? Who is funding studies on this topic?

My source is my upbringing in Europe and my subsequent long-term residence in two other countries, which provided me with a unique perspective on people’s feelings and beliefs.

My source is my diverse life experiences, during which I actively engaged with people from all walks of life as much as I could. I am not making any claims about science or indulging in conspiracies. For such claims, I would require concrete evidence.

What I am saying is that a majority of the Europeans, particularly the youth, has become disconnected from the fundamental principle that to distribute wealth, you must generate it first.

I hope that helps.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-22 22:01:40+00:00
I don't know if I have ever met someone in the ~40% of Americans who don't pay income tax, complaining that their government benefits are going too far.

The people who complain most about government spending are the people who pay a lot in taxes while only directly getting a fraction of it back in useful services. Taxes for roads and police? No Problem. Taxes for rent subsidies? Icy.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-22 22:01:44+00:00
> Uranium is so damn energy dense and abundant enough that there's little need to set up these complicated recycling systems

Uranium is abundant, but not homogenously so [1]. (China has some. But not a lot. And it's bound up expensively. And it's by their population centres.)

For the Americas, Europe, Australia, southern Africa and Eastern Mediterranean, burning uranium makes sense. For China, it trades the Strait of Malacca for dependence on Russia and Central Asia.

[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf
by jaccola | 2025-11-22 22:01:46+00:00
There are a bunch of different approaches. Many are very expensive to run. You can play with the World Labs one, their approach is cheap to explore once generated (vs an approach that generates frame by frame).

The quality is currently not great and they are very hard to steer / work with in any meaningful way. You will see companies using the same demo scenes repeatedly because that's the one that looked cool and worked well.
by KaiserPro | 2025-11-22 22:01:54+00:00
> society was much less religious overall and there was less reason to keep homosexuality illegal.

I'm not actually sure it was an entirely religious thing. It seems like it was an amendment tacked onto a bill that would protect girls from sexual exploitation by this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Labouch%C3%A8re

specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labouch%C3%A8re_Amendment

The conflation of sex and religion I think its probably a mistake in this instance.
by geor9e | 2025-11-22 22:02:18+00:00
Thanks for finding a steel‑man way to interpret it. That is such a bizarre narrative choice I didn't even consider it. So they used that arrow notation consistantly to refer to the headings, representing the order of magnitude of money, the entire article, which was a great idea. Then for some baffling and unknowable reason, they decided to inform us that a count of people can also be expressed as a power of ten using the same notation.
by droideqa | 2025-11-22 22:03:05+00:00
After we have Smell-O-Vision[0] we should work on the next big step for the internet:

<[SA]HatfulOfHollow> i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-O-Vision
by fragmede | 2025-11-22 22:03:08+00:00
> How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform better?

If you don’t want to be tracked, you shouldn’t be, but how could it not? At a very simple level, an ad targeted towards a 50 year old woman isn’t going to be the same ad to show a 14 year old boy. Different people like different things and ads targeting you as an advertising profile are going to be better than ones that aren’t. You may not like the targeting and think it's invasive, because it is, but let's not pretend the tracking doesn't do something.
by orionblastar | 2025-11-22 22:03:43+00:00
I used MSDN and the MSDN blogs to keep up to date with Visual BASIC 6.0 updates. Things would change in the language, and I wouldn't know that unless I read MSDN docs. I got in trouble for using the Internet, as the Management couldn't see the difference between MSN and MSDN. It was like reading a book, only books go out of date in three months from publishing.
by stopbulying | 2025-11-22 22:04:23+00:00
Is owning a smartphone more or less dangerous than owning a cat?

"Cat Ownership Linked to Increased Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests" https://www.sciencealert.com/owning-a-cat-could-double-your-...

> "After adjusting for covariates, we found that individuals exposed to cats had approximately twice the odds of developing schizophrenia,"
by philipwhiuk | 2025-11-22 22:04:35+00:00
> If you're writing a quick README or a short-lived doc, Markdown is fine. It's fast, approachable, and does the job. If you're building a developer documentation site that needs some structure, reStructuredText or AsciiDoc are better choices.

This is dumb. If I'm writing developer documentation I'm not writing it for a machine. And if the aim here is to expose it to a LLM, then the LLM needs to get smarter about semantics, not force us back to formats that are more technically complex to write and maintain in order to re-create 'the semantic web' - a flawed concept that has failed to catch on.

If the LLM needs context on content that humans don't need, the LLM needs fixing, not the content.

> With Markdown as your source, you can't easily go to another format.

File->Print->PDF.

Was that hard? (I admit it's still bizarre that Chrome puts 'Save As PDF' under Print).

(Apparently you can also go via LaTeX if you love a CLI)
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-22 22:04:46+00:00
When an individual stalks a person without their consent, it is considered unlawful. Why is it ok for websites to do this?

Perhaps what is missing is a criminal law that forbids deliberate non-consensual tracking of a person's activity. Even in public.

Recording someone as you happen to be recording something in public (including CCTV) is not deliberate or targeted towards an individual. But even in public, if someone followed you around tracking what you're doing (even without recording you), that shouldn't be lawful. Public figures and law enforcement activity based on probable cause being the exceptions.

Can anyone think of any reasonable counter-arguments to this?
by willyxdjazz | 2025-11-22 22:06:15+00:00
It's funny, I don't know if I see a use for it, and this feeling surprises me. Just as procedural maps bore me, I feel this will be similar in any use case I can think of. What I like is the perceived care behind every action. After the initial "wow" of the care put into that research, I don't think it will end up being a "wow" that scales—I don't know if I'm making myself clear.
by thethirdone | 2025-11-22 22:06:24+00:00
In this paper both the diffusion and the auto-regressive models are transformers with O(n^2) performance for long sequences. They share the "Exact KV Cache" for committed tokens.

Diffusion just allows you to spend more compute at the same time so you don't redundantly access the same memory. It can only improve speed beyond the memory bandwidth limit by committing multiple tokens each pass.

Other linear models like Mamba get away from O(n^2) effects, but type of neural architecture is orthogonal to the method of generation.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-22 22:06:25+00:00
> I mean that to protect the proverbial technology-challenged grandma it should be the default.

Yes, I agree.

> And that it should even s,http://.*,,g them out.

No. Links are very useful and constantly present in conversation and manually written into messages. Do you seriously propose to basically ban them by default? Also I don't want the MUA to censor messages, that would also lead to a lot of confusion.

If anything, they could not render them as hyperlinks by default, but stripping them out, no.
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-22 22:06:43+00:00
Looking at the relative burdens and tasks of Frodo and Sam, we might be underestimating the toll of the Ring-bearer, which, for 99 per cent of the time, is Frodo.

The Ring is slowly poisoning him and invading his mind, more so that Sauron has risen again and his strength in the world is waxing. Plus, the terrible wound from the Morgul knife in his shoulder. Bilbo never faced anything quite like that, and Sam only for a short time.

I don't think Frodo is in any condition to help others much. He has enough problems rising up every morning and walking again.

BTW I just love nerding out on HN.
by hilbert42 | 2025-11-22 22:07:13+00:00
And Tektronix equipment is absolute delight to work on. And I defy anyone to find better handbooks and maintenance manuals anywhere, they're absolutely marvelous. They should be held up as the quintessential examples.

I look at the shit tech manuals around these days (that's if they exixt at all) and can't help but feel how much tech companies have screwed users in recent decades.
by globalnode | 2025-11-22 22:07:15+00:00
Firstly, I looked up panopticon, and it does indeed seem like that is how modern societies are being structured now, and secondly... It is true that people generally seem to display a lack of imagination regarding all of this. The whole "ive got nothing to hide so what do i care if they surveil me" attitude comes across as selfish and naive in this light.

I wonder what ad-tech or whatever org would do if we got to a state where they just couldnt track or id people. Would we still have free entertainment on the net? would the net even still be mainstream?
by theragra | 2025-11-22 22:07:20+00:00
I think this perfectly describes huge percentage of ADHD people. I always laugh when I am told: "But you don't sound so bad". Yeah, not sound so bad when I can be so deeply focused into something trivial like reading a blog, that I can miss a flight. And I KNOW I am that close of missing a flight, and still engage with something interesting right now, not something hugely critical to my life.