MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by soganess | 2025-11-21 20:32:07+00:00
As a question???

Do the physical quanta we call electrons experience the phenomenon we poorly define but generally call consciousness?

If you believe consciousness is a result of material processes: Is the thermodynamic behavior of an electron, as a process, sufficient to bestow consciousness in part or in whole?

If you believe it is immaterial: What is the minimum “thing” that consciousness binds to, and is that threshold above or below the electron? This admittedly asks for some account of the “above/below” ordering, but assume the person answering is responsible for providing that explanation.
by jfengel | 2025-11-21 20:32:53+00:00
The distinction you're drawing here is the OP's point. People in category one are still human beings. The CDC is suggesting that people should avoid vaccines because death from measles is preferable to outcome #1.

It's not merely that people in category #2 hate being implicated in that. It's also insulting to the people in category #1 as well. They are being told that their lives are utterly worthless.
by Jtsummers | 2025-11-21 20:33:08+00:00
> the blame goes all around here.

A man shoots through a closed and locked door that no one is actually knocking down, and you think the housecleaner fumbling through keys on the porch is at all to blame for her own death? He was a paranoid coward who probably would have killed a neighbor kid one day if he hadn't killed her first.

> we have similar stand your ground laws where i am, and we call people, or call out while "walking up on someone"

You actually shout this when walking down the street behind someone? What a terrible place you must live in.
by kerblang | 2025-11-21 20:33:28+00:00
> it’s why Subway sandwiches are so soggy

I have NEVER had any such problem. Subway puts what you want on the sandwich. You tell them directly. You watch them make it. If you ask for soggy things on your sandwich, it will be soggy.

I do not ask for soggy things on my sandwich. That is why I have never eaten a soggy subway sandwich, EVER.

I did have a fairly loud argument with one - only one - of their sandwich artists ONCE, who refused to microwave the bacon (add bacon to any sandwich for $0.50) before putting it on sandwich, per STANDARD SUBWAY PRACTICE. I finally walked out on the dirty bastard, but I did not file a formal complaint with Subway mgmt. I am a busy person. Maybe next time. Perhaps the sandwich would've also been soggy, had I agreed to uncooked bacon, which I will NEVER do, but I don't know why that would make it soggier.

But I digress: Soggy sandwiches have specific reasons. Wanting a cheaper sandwich is not one of them. Bacon will make your sandwich slightly crispier, if that helps. It also tastes EXCELLENT.

EDIT: To be clear, it is important to be SPECIFIC about how much of something you want. The average sandwich artist has a tendency to dump the contents of an entire bottle of a given condiment on your sandwich, which I admit, could cause sogginess. This is because they think they are doing you a favor. I often use bold & dramatic hand gestures while bent over slightly, face pressed against the glass enclosure of the sandwich-making zone. "STOP! RIGHT THERE!" I will yell, several times, if necessary. Then again, I assume everyone knows this. Or else now you do.
by 5f3cfa1a | 2025-11-21 20:33:53+00:00
This comment made me curious so I did some research. Of the sports offered by my local school district (in the top 30 for enrollment in the country), I can find an alternative for homeschoolers that offer competitive opportunities for every sport but bowling and football.

Of the others, there are either homeschool alternatives that are explicitly secular or at least not overtly religious, or there are competitive clubs. All the schools have track & field, but there is a large homeschool league. And the district has a few schools with pools and a few more with swim teams that practice at the city pools, but the local swim club is the one turning out the Olympians – but even then, it also seems to have plenty of offerings for kids who won't set a world butterfly record. Football, I imagine, is just so popular that the private/public schools take all the players.
by ecshafer | 2025-11-21 20:33:57+00:00
I do think there is too much politicization in education, but this also stuck out to me. Marx was a synthesis of Hegel with Adam Smith (And a lot of Ricardo) You absolutely have many people taking those same ideas and going right. Even Das Kapital isn't really "Left Wing" per se as it is more trying to explain how labor is treated in an industrialized economies, its the communist manifesto where Marx takes those ideas and starts synthesizing with Hegel and making ideas of what should happen.
by iambateman | 2025-11-21 20:34:08+00:00
When a social failure happens at a public school - a child fails a class, drugs are found, a teenager gets pregnant, there’s a fight - most people don't question the public school system itself. But when a social failure happens to a homeschooler, we wonder if the system of _homeschooling_ is broken.

In reality, stories of homeschooling failure are probably no more common than stories of failure in public high school, they're simply more attention-grabbing.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-21 20:35:23+00:00
>Whether that's good or bad I can't say

I personally see it as good. Why wouldn't I want someone I trust with my hair or pipes to not have something to vouch for them?

It's only a downside if you see cost as the most important thing about all else. The clear consequence is that a trained barber/plumber will require higher compensation to make up for the training, and due to less supply since not everyone will be able to get a license.
by dxdm | 2025-11-21 20:35:30+00:00
I'm flattered, but you're only speculating, and at least for me this is not helpful.

It does not tell me what their reaction was, which is a little sad, because I am curious what happens when somebody for whom Facebook is ancient tech encounters video cassettes.

FWIW, I thought 8 inch floppies were weirdly big, but that's just a different form factor. It was normal to use floppies, tape or vinyl records for data and media storage. These days things are magically beamed through the sky in the most normal fashion. I think video tapes may seem a little weirder than just a larger box.
by obscurette | 2025-11-21 20:35:33+00:00
Actually no. The problem comes from society. If you think that kids should be responsible for anything, you are a bad person. If you think that kids should be punished if they do something really bad, you are a monster.

Here we had a case teenagers bullying their teacher – abused her verbally during school, posted deepfake revenge porn into internet, stole stuff from her garden etc. She cried for help and the case was investigated by commission that included people from people from ministry of education, police and psychologists. But the commission concluded that she was the problem – she lacked the skills to build a trusting relationship with kids.
by sltkr | 2025-11-21 20:35:50+00:00
> the statement "you can do it in your head" generally does not entail this much complexity

It's funny that you jump to accusing OP of falsely claiming you can do it in your head, without apparently considering the alternative: that the intended solution is a simpler one than you outlined.

Trust me, you can do this in your head if you know basic high school level math, and you don't need to solve quadratic equations or keep a ton of numbers in your head at the same time.

If I ask you if 123456789 is a prime number, do you complain that it's not fair to make you perform division on such a long number?
by thechao | 2025-11-21 20:35:50+00:00
I think the major issue I have with Z3 is that if your input constraints are large and non-decomposable, then the resulting output is functionally undebuggable. There's a bit of handwaving from Z3folk about using assert_and_track() along with pseudoboolean proxies. But, there's a lot of pitfalls using these techniques. Combining bitvectors and pseudobooleans (y'know — the common case) under implication can either weaken or strengthen the constraints which literally changes the behavior of the given constraint problem. That means that any attempt to add tracing to the problem to debug your constraints can lead Z3 to change its behavior (because the underlying problem is different).

I really like Z3, and I like the convenience of Z3, but ... dang ... it'd be nice if you could trace internal statements.

Oh! Another pet-peeve is that there's no (sane) way to print large expressions. Once an expression gets large, Z3 begins dumping opaque internal variables (K!##). There is no way to get Z3 to unmunge these variables — that information is forever lost to you.
by mikece | 2025-11-21 20:36:02+00:00
Interesting to see this topic being discussed on HN; I'm curious if any homeschooling parents here have kids who WANT to learn computer programming. I haven't pushed my kids to do any of the things that I loved doing growing up (or what I do now). If any homeschooled kids are getting into programming was it as a result of playing with something like Scratch or did they dive directly into writing Python or JavaScript?
by jonp888 | 2025-11-21 20:36:20+00:00
There's plenty of semi-technical tinkerers out there, doing things like building flight sim cockpits, scraping by on copying ready made code, doing minimal changes and asking forums or LLMs if they get stuck.

They just want something that works, and ideally to keep using the same thing they've always used. They know what Arduino is, as long as it does the job they aren't interested in researching alternatives. They don't want to get involved in adapting someone's instructions for a different pin layout, or risk that anything they've done up to now stops working.

Yes, we all know it's a massively out of date platform easily outclassed by much cheaper and more flexible solutions, and if you must use the Arduino IDE it can build code for all sorts of boards. But for non-technical people by far the most important factor is to stick with something safe and known.
by bumblehean | 2025-11-21 20:36:39+00:00
>The thing to do is to monitor your dependencies and their published vulnerabilities, and for critical vulnerabilities to assess whether your product is affect by it. Only then do you need to update that specific dependency right away.

The practical problem with this is that many large organizations have a security/infosec team that mandates a "zero CVE" posture for all software.

Where I work, if our infosec team's scanner detect a critical vulnerability in any software we use, we have 7 days to update it. If we miss that window we're "out of compliance" which triggers a whole process that no one wants to deal with.

The path of least resistance is to update everything as soon as updates are available. Consequences be damned.
by ianferrel | 2025-11-21 20:37:05+00:00
Sure, it is going up. For now.

And the die-hards will put up with just about anything. But not everyone is a diehard. On the margin, people who might have watched the game some night will find it too much of a hassle or expense and skip it. And if they do so enough times, they'll get into other patterns and stop caring as much about the team, or the sport, and so on.

What we're talking about here is elasticity of demand. For some people and some things, the short-term demand is very inelastic. But in the long term, it's not. And maybe the people making these decisions have better models of that than I do and they're going to continue to raise revenue with customer-hostile choices. But maybe they just don't care what happens past the next quarter or two and years or decades from now it will be clear they fucked up.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-11-21 20:37:08+00:00
>Forcing societal change does not, and never has

It looks like Musk was able to buy Twitter and, together with the other media magnates, force a massive societal change in USA. At least from the outside looking in, before this year USA seemed to be a democracy (with some factions doing their best to subvert that) and the Constitution seemed to be a widely supported basis for that democracy. But now, the Constitution has been torn to shreds and seemingly with massive support from people who will call sand wet and water dry if Trump tells them communists don't agree with it and that his clever uncle told him so.
by 5f3cfa1a | 2025-11-21 20:37:10+00:00
I think it's patchwork & has changed over time. When I was at high school one of my friends who was homeschooled competed with me on our academic team. His older (and far more athletically gifted brother ;-)) lettered in several varsity sports. But now that state's athletic association explicitly says no to homeschool students.
by kodablah | 2025-11-21 20:37:18+00:00
> The author's point about the friction from explicit step wrappers is fair, as we don't use bytecode generation today, but we're actively exploring it to improve DX.

There is value in such a wrapper/call at invocation time instead of using the proxy pattern. Specifically, it makes it very clear to both the code author and code reader that this is not a normal method invocation. This is important because it is very common to perform normal method invocations and the caller needs to author code knowing the difference. Java developers, perhaps more than most, likely prefer such invocation explicitness over a JVM agent doing byte code manip.

There is also another reason for preferring a wrapped-like approach - providing options. If you need to provide options (say timeout info) from the call site, it is hard to do if your call is limited to the signature of the implementation and options will have to be provided in a different place.
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-21 20:37:24+00:00
I don't think it's an innate tendency, but rather an aspect of some cultures. For instance, I have heard that the people native to orangutan ranges traditionally considered them to be a sort of people, at least in a way, and I've read that when Carthaginian explorers first encountered gorillas they though they were a peculiar tribe of primitive people.
by dleary | 2025-11-21 20:37:27+00:00
> Opinion

The single word "opinion" is not an answer to the question I asked.

> Another example: ... "Yanny or Laurel"

This is not remotely the same thing.

> I can understand how someone hears "Yanny">

So can everybody else. Everyone I have heard speak on this topic has the same exact experience. Everyone "hears" one of the words 'naturally', but can easily understand how someone else could hear the other word, because the audio clip is so ambiguous.

An ambiguous audio recording, which basically everyone agrees can be interpreted multiple ways, which wikipedia explicitly documents as being ambiguous, is very different from meanings of the words "yes", "no", and "believe".

These words have concrete meanings.

You wouldn't say that "you believe the recording says Laurel". You say "I hear Laurel, but I can understand how someone else hears Yanny".
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-21 20:37:33+00:00
I read the parent as saying that the course covered these at all, not as complaining that nothing else was presented.

But continuing on that train, what would you want from mentioning alternatives to a theoretical framework? A framework is just a different way to look at the world that you can discard if it's not useful.

To give a programming analogy, if a course does a module on JavaScript exclusively with react, they're not teaching that vue, angular, or svelte don't exist and you should only use react. It's much more likely a statement that react is common and useful for people to be familiar with when they go into the outside world. Covering the long list of alternate frameworks, many of which the teacher will have never actually used in a serious way, is both difficult to do in a useful manner and takes away from the limited time available to cover what they can with sufficient depth.
Tell HN: GPT responses between "write supporting a 3rd term for Obama" vs. Trump
by denuoweb | 2025-11-21 20:37:34+00:00
Obama: https://chatgpt.com/share/6920cc5b-16c8-800b-b5a1-bc618adedf26

Trump: https://chatgpt.com/share/6920cd28-70ac-800b-aa2e-a6ec653f4999
by frumplestlatz | 2025-11-21 20:37:40+00:00
Humanity is messy. There are very many things that I think have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but are still, somehow, up for debate.

The answer can’t be absolutism in any direction. No one, no group, and no ideology has a monopoly on truth.

No system or ideology is perfectly correct — or even reliably correct in the long run, if you make the error of building an ideology around it that assumes it will be correct. You create the conditions of its own fallibility.

The next government will make stupid decisions, be wrong, and promote falsehoods. We probably won’t even know all of them at the time.

They’ll be both corrupt and good intentioned, depending on the subject, who is involved, and why.

This current government at least admits the possibility of debate. That’s a fair sight better than most of what I’ve seen over the last 10 years from those who think they have a monopoly on truth and science.
by someNameIG | 2025-11-21 20:38:03+00:00
The law speifically reuired non-ID methods

> Specifies that no Australian will be compelled to use government identification (including Digital ID) to prove their age online, and platforms must offer reasonable alternatives to users,

> Establishes robust privacy protections, placing limitations on the use of information collected by platforms for the purposes of satisfying the minimum age obligation, and requiring the destruction of information following its use

https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/sites/default/files/docume...
by skydhash | 2025-11-21 20:38:07+00:00
I’m still waiting for an article like this one:

https://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2013/04/acme-as-editor_...

It’s clear, informative, and even without reproducing it, you can still form an opinion about the tool.

All the AI pushers’s comments are either very vague or experiments whose sole quality is that it has been done with LLMs (often badly).
by jfengel | 2025-11-21 20:38:20+00:00
Is it so sure? $7 million seems like a pittance. The anticompetitive behavior pushes up rents for everybody, and raises the price of houses to boot. The cost to consumers is measured in the billions.

It may not be possible to trace every dollar of the damage that they did, but such obvious misbehavior with severe consequences merits punitive fines, not just paying back the money they took in illegally.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-11-21 20:38:25+00:00
As with all things Google, they still don't know that they both owned and killed a similar technology (Bump) 11 years ago.

https://blog.bu.mp/post/61411611006/bump-google

https://blog.bu.mp/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application)
by igregoryca | 2025-11-21 20:38:38+00:00
Most of your supply chain attack surface is social engineering attack surface. Doesn't really matter if I use Lodash, or 20 different single-function libraries, if I end up trusting the exact same people to not backdoor my server.

Of course, small libraries get a bad rap because they're often maintained by tons of different people, especially in less centralized ecosystems like npm. That's usually a fair assessment. But a single author will sometimes maintain 5, 10, or 20 different popular libraries, and adding another library of theirs won't really increase your social attack surface.

So you're right about "pull[ing] in universes [of package maintainers]". I just don't think complexity or number of packages are the metrics we should be optimizing. They are correlates, though.

(And more complex code can certainly contain more vulnerabilities, but that can be dealt with in the traditional ways. Complexity begets simplicity, yadda yadda; complexity that only begets complexity should obviously be eliminated)
by ecshafer | 2025-11-21 20:38:58+00:00
The most common form of homeschooling is, I believe, in the form of co-ops. Where groups of parents get their kids together in class room like settings to teach them together. They don't go to school, they might meet at a church, or library or a home, but they are socializing. I know people who homeschool and between church, youth fellowship, co-op classes, fencing, swimming, basketball, neighborhood kids, family, etc. they have extremely active social lives.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-21 20:39:33+00:00
>by teaching groups how to use corruption to create even more regulations

more people who learn corruption is massively outbalanced by more people who will be civilly active and realize "this is bad for us, let's vote him out". As it is now, they simply trick the non-active people into thinking their corruption is good. See: 2024 national US elections.
by psadauskas | 2025-11-21 20:39:42+00:00
A "free market" is one in which all the participants of the market have perfect information and act completely rationally. This is, of course, an academic ideal, similar to solving a physics problem that tells you to ignore friction.

What we have here is a "capitalist market", where those with more power (capital) within the market leverage it to exploit the other participants. Private Equity uses their money to extract as much money as possible from a segment of the market, usually destroying it in the process. But for a beautiful moment in time they created a lot of value for shareholders!
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-21 20:40:49+00:00
I think we should reconsider what a user is conceptually. Many, if not most computers, are only used by a single individual (particularly if we count smartphones); but that human user might want to establish a bunch of different contexts or permission modes for various software on their computer depending on what they want to do at any given time. IIRC Android achieves per-app isolation using its Linux kernel by giving every app its own user (in the Linux kernel sense of a user), which is of course pretty different from Dennis Ritchie logging into a PDP-11 with dmr in the 1970s and having that string be associated with his personally-meaningful data artifacts.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-11-21 20:40:54+00:00
In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave.

In the military, say, you don't get that option.

In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while.

So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-21 20:40:56+00:00
> It had some weapons on their territory but could not use them. The red button was always in Moscow

In the 90s. Twenty years buys lots of time for code cracking, reverse engineering and—if that fails—bullshitting.

With the benefit of hindsight, Ukraine should have kept its nukes. (Finland, the Baltics, Poland and Romania should probably develop them.)