MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ineedasername | 2025-12-08 04:38:31+00:00
It’s not bad faith argument. It’s an attempt to shake thinking that is profoundly stuck by taking that thinking to an absurd extreme. Until that’s done, quite a few people aren’t able to see past the assumptions they don’t know they making. And by quite a few people I mean everyone, at different times. A strong appreciation for the absurd will keep a person’s thinking much sharper.
by 3oil3 | 2025-12-08 04:39:43+00:00
It lost the formatting, I meant it as a list of what out-of-reality decisions led to. I mean the macPro sux, when the macbookproM3 came out it was slower than the previous mode. I meant that 'Apple-Inteligence' sux, that macOS26 doesn't help working better. That opening console on a fresh macOS can show thousands of entries per second and that entries like "User <private> result: <private>" are not helpful. That what happened to Nokia can happen to Iphones, and finally that listing emojis among top features is yet out-of-reality. And I didnt mention the vision pro because I wanted to make a joke about it, in case someone said I forgot that on my list.
by fluidcruft | 2025-12-08 04:39:54+00:00
It's now got everything close after adding this final prompt:

We are very close. The footer is positioned in roughly the correct location but the fonts, font sizes, font color and line spacings are all slightly off.

This took quite a while and it build a few more tools to get there. And this was fine from a distance but it was using a san-serif when the screenshot has a serif etc. So I decided to push. From here it got very messy...

One of the issues is that Claude's text detection was getting tripped up by writing scripts using RGB space instead of something more hue-aware. It knew the text was red but was trying to isolate it by just looking at the red channel. But the grey dots from the background show up bright in the red channel so Claude would think those were center dots between the links that needed to be reproduced in the text. I gave it a hint:

I think dots from the background image are causing issues. Are you detecting the text by looking only at the red channel in RGB space? The red channel will be bright on white pixels in RGB. You could try using hue to separate text from background or use distance from the target RGB value.

Claude decided to switch to HSV space. But it took quite a bit of effort to keep Claude remembering to use HSV because tools it had already written were still RGB and not updated (as were intermediate images that were not updated). Then it would try to step back and get a big picture as a sanity check and "discover" it had missed the dots that are obviously there. And when you would tell it there are no dots, you get the "You're absolutely right! They're vertical bars!" So it was a struggle. This is the closest I got:

https://imgur.com/a/79Iv1jO

Again, the top image stuff was done in the first shot with the prompt in the first one. Everything else has been about the footer. Claude has been writing a lot of clever scripts to measure font metrics and pick fonts etc, but it keeps falling over those dots. I could probably get it to work better with adding directives for text handling to CLAUDE.md and nuking context and some of the scripts it created.
by mattbettinson | 2025-12-08 04:40:17+00:00
I used to hate remote, especially being single. But then I started absolutely JAM packing my evenings with dates, run clubs, time left dinners, harassing friends to get drinks with me, playing magic the gathering commander (4 player), music lessons, etc. it has been way better but I do think a day or two in office a week would be amazing for me
by jimbokun | 2025-12-08 04:40:43+00:00
Best quote from the article:

> That’s also why I see no point in using AI to, say, write an essay, just like I see no point in bringing a forklift to the gym. Sure, it can lift the weights, but I’m not trying to suspend a barbell above the floor for the hell of it. I lift it because I want to become the kind of person who can lift it. Similarly, I write because I want to become the kind of person who can think.
by drekipus | 2025-12-08 04:41:38+00:00
I usually get downvoted on any of my commentary on poverty or welfare, despite my lived and continued experience in it, but I'll punt again.

My family, from grandparents downwards (siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, across 3 family lines) have all relied on government handouts for a majority of their lives, and had their character destroyed by the system. All rely on a meager amount of welfare to stay alive, not healthy, not productive. Just kicking along and in alcohol and drugs just to feel something. Most have died of some form of cancer from their vices.

I joke (with a semi serious tone) that my drug-induced psychosis was the best thing for me because it broke me out of the system (tied in with a move interstate) - I lost all my old friends, family was quasi-cautious of me, and I was in a new town and had to completely rebuild myself. I had a mental health nurse nurture me "back on my feet" within 6 months and it was the first time I was actually on my feet since birth.

Governments and society, in the large part, think "something is better than nothing" - but I think it's actually the opposite. Maintaining a status quo is what makes people "comfortable in misery" and not have any way out. Most can't even get a job, because the job (which might be temporary) knocks out the welfare (which is permanent, as long as they don't get a job).

I would love to see modelling or examples on my theory of the way out of this mess: reinvest the welfare system as mental health services, only give welfare to those who are in the mental health service. Incentivise for how many people transition out of the welfare system. keep it at the same dollar amount, just reallocate that money to the people who really need it.

Some cases are almost too tragic to mention and there's no positive outcome; others have "learned" behavior and can come out of it with some help (or sometimes just some positive messaging)

I also largely blame a lot of societal/government programming. I call it "poverty programming" -- the idea that people cannot do ANYTHING without help. You absolutely will not make it on your own, you NEED support you NEED this label, medication, service, benefit.

I strive to message the opposite: you can do it, release the chains. the world is not that scary. embrace the chaos, there is a lovely world out there ready to be explored.
by pezezin | 2025-12-08 04:41:39+00:00
CERN is the biggest scientific facility in the world, with a huge IT group and their own IXP. Most places are not like that.

Heck, I work at a much smaller particle accelerator (https://ifmif.org) and have met the CERN guys, and they were the first to say that for our needs, OpenStack is absolutely overkill.
by MrJohz | 2025-12-08 04:42:29+00:00
I quite like the technique of adding a kind of "microtoast" right next to the element that's just been clicked/updated. So you'd click a button, and then directly above or below the button (or even on the button, depending on the notification), you add a bit of text saying the action has been completed. That disappears after a short delay, just like a toast. It's still got some of the accessibility issues that always come with popping up random elements in the UI, but at least it is directly next to where the user is interacting, so they can easily see that what they've done was successful, or failed, or whatever.

This works well for the last category, because it provides feedback but it doesn't need to be dismissed. But it also typically needs to be implemented afresh in each place it's used, which means more fiddly developer work.

All that says, I've lost this battle plenty of times and a lot of the stuff I've worked on ends up getting toasts in the end because they're just so much easier to implement than anything else.
by majormajor | 2025-12-08 04:42:32+00:00
> The economy is not a charity, nor is it a person. But if we're going to personify it, then it exists for the benefit of those who actively participate in it. It is indifferent to those who do not participate in it.

> Most humans do not see themselves as existing to provide for others who either cannot or won't provide for themselves. As stated above, the economy is not a charity, it is about equal exchange. Those who have nothing to offer will receive nothing in return.

The problem that this has run into throughout history has been the existence of those who don't take kindly to rules that appear to be there just to push them aside.

An economy that chooses to exclude the majority of the population as "no longer needed" as so much dystopian AI-true-believer babble these days does is going to lead to some major issues when the excluded decide they don't want to simply be excluded.

Society historically does not help those that the economy leaves behind exclusively out of the goodness of its heart - it also does it for self-preservation.
by ikt | 2025-12-08 04:43:10+00:00
I duno, I still can't make a payment on the net without Visa or Mastercard, still a problem to be solved to me

Looks like other people still trying to solve as well:

> Earlier this year, Coinbase changed online payments forever with a new protocol called x402. But could this technology really usher in a new age of 'machine to machine' payments? Let's run it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6wc6yvoZLY
by bruce511 | 2025-12-08 04:43:30+00:00
All the above. Plus it is absurdly simple to manipulate profit up or down.

For example, as an owner, I can be paid a bonus, or not. Crumbs, I can be paid a salary or not. If I want profits high, I simply take a low salary and no bonus. Or vice versa if I want profits low.

But that's the tip of the iceberg. Buying an asset this year, depreciated over the next 5, means higher profit this year, and 4 years of lower profit.

Marketing expenses this year, benefits next year, and so on. Drop the head count to juice profits for a couple years, raise head count to drop it, and do on.

Profits are the easiest thing to manipulate and hence the worst metric for fines. Which is why you see Europe use Revenue (not profit) as the measure for some fines.
by fractalbits | 2025-12-08 04:43:56+00:00
Yes, people usually consider "S3 is files, but not a filesystem [1], and complaining about the missing features comparing to filesystem. But nowadays, the line between them is becoming blurred. S3 express one zone explicitly called their bucket as "directory bucket", and try to support atomic rename (even only for single object for now) [2]. GCP also has the same move ([3]). Posix fs APIs have its own pros and cons, and we are also considering to extend our metadata engine to support that in the future if it is needed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39656657

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/06/amazon-s3...

[3] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...
by epsteingpt | 2025-12-08 04:44:13+00:00
What are you arguing then? That a growing asset class that increases prices, destroys communities because of lack of ties, and shifts wealth from builders to owners that doesn't outperform public markets in aggregate is a good thing? Hard to argue this is 'good for society!'

> VC returns as an asset class (outside of a handful of firms) have underperformed in the past 20 years. I don't even count it here.

> PE as an exit for small builders Agree. But again, it's the builders who have built over multiple decades who profit (great!) one time. The employees - typically - don't. Search can help this (because searchers are usually more dependent on employees) so this is a good example of "micro-PE" being generically better than larger scale PE.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-08 04:45:09+00:00
The post isn't about Clojure or Lisp, it's about the author's journey as a programmer, and the mind-bending effect learning a Lisp had on their development. They're still in the midst of figuring it out, but a lot of people have been on this path before them. TFA has been written over the years by various authors about Prolog, or Haskell, or Smalltalk. In my case I would have written it about Lucid.

The interesting bit here isn't related to Clojure or Lisp, that's what people are chewing on because it's the surface level topic of the essay. The thing that interests me about this post is how it touches on the psychedelic nature of learning programming languages and what that does to one's perspective as a programmer.

So when you ask "what business thoughts can you express in the language", my response is it's not about what you can express, but more about "what new thoughts / ways of thinking has the experience of learning the language caused you to become aware of?".

Few people can go their whole lives writing Python and think all the possible thoughts there are to think about the shapes and forms programming can take. It's hard to develop a good sense for your own practice of programming if you never step outside and see it from other perspectives. It often takes exposure to completely new languages with different design points and abstractions to really give one perspective about their own practice.

The easiest one related to lisp is just the form of the syntax, which is surprising to many students. Most programmers don't even consider you can write (+ 1 1) and that's the same thing as (1 + 1). They don't think about the pros, or the cons, or why one might be better than the other, because every language they've used and ever will use writes it as (1 + 1). But as soon as they see Lisp, they immediately see something that changes their perspective about everything they have previous learned, and therefore will reshape how they approach programming in the future. It doesn't have to mean they will use Lisp going forward, but it does mean they will program in their language of choice with greater purpose. That's how we each hone our craft.

Add on homoiconicity, read/eval, programming as manipulating an AST, and meta programming, and you've got yourself a righteous trip.

Now, can people learn about those things from other sources, without encountering Lisp? Of course. Can you express those ideas in mainstream languages? Yes. But the point is many devs don't think those thoughts until they've had a psychedelic experience, it's very common, that we need to consider that it's part of one's growth journey as a programmer to have these experiences, so we should encourage it. The author of TFA doesn't have experience enough to make that point, as they are on the journey, which is why I brought Alan Kay's talk into context, since his perspective is from the other end of the journey.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-12-08 04:45:22+00:00
I'm certain it wouldn't, and you're certain it would, and we have the same amount of evidence (and probably roughly the same means for running such an expensive experiment). I think they're more likely to go slowly mad, degrading their reasoning to nothing useful rather than building something real, but that could be different if they weren't detached from sensory input. Human minds looping for generations without senses, a world, or bodies might also go the same way.

> Also, I think there is a very high chance that given an existing LLM architecture there exists a set of weights that would manifest a true intelligence immediately upon instantiation (with anterograde amnesia).

I don't see why that would be the case at all, and I regularly use the latest and most expensive LLMs and am aware enough of how they work to implement them on the simplest level myself, so it's not just me being uninformed or ignorant.
by sublinear | 2025-12-08 04:45:55+00:00
LLMs merely interpolate between the feeble artifacts of thought we call language.

The illusion wears off after about half an hour for even the most casual users. That's better than the old chatbots, but they're still chatbots.

Did anyone ever seriously buy the whole "it's thinking" BS when it was Markov chains? What makes you believe today's LLMs are meaningfully different?
by acdha | 2025-12-08 04:46:18+00:00
He did, along with a lot of earlier decisions. The underlying problem is that neither he nor Jony Ive had experience doing user interface design—Ive was a hardware designer, and Dye was the packaging guy—so they kept making things which looked good in demos and the screenshots on boxes, but aren’t usable and flagrantly violated Apple own Human Interface Guidelines in ways which weren’t just “we tried to do something innovative” but more like “I never knew this concept in someone else’s field existed”.

There’s a bit more here but I think this opens the possibility of actual UX professionals fixing decisions without the problem of having to avoid saying their boss made a mistake.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/12/in-a-major-coup-for-someo...

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

I would worry if I worked at Facebook since their VR work is likely to get the same “looked awesome in the demo” demands which will push the hardware budget and lower usability.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-12-08 04:46:22+00:00
That's a completely incorrect mischaracterisation of the analogy.

I'm not talking about replacing a block of time with nothing, people will still have 24 hours in the day. My worry is about replacing income with nothing, because most people don't have the power to seize any income that isn't freely available.

The public takes what they're offered and can't have anything that isn't on offer. If the offer of access to food is withdrawn, the public has no recourse.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-08 04:46:38+00:00
There's zero evidence that Microsoft could shut down computers across a nation. Zilch. Nada. None.

Meanwhile, OP asserted they are "sure" Microsoft could do it at the "flick of a switch". Under orders from the US government.

That's absurd. If that's not conspiracy thinking, I don't know what is. A literal conspiracy between the two entities. When something is actually conspiracy thinking, you're allowed to label it as such, you know? You're trying to police ideas here, and that's entirely inappropriate. Be better.
by sbinnee | 2025-12-08 04:46:40+00:00
I actually believe that the era of lives will come. But I can't wait for UBI. Nobody can't. Even if the era of jobs ends, for us who are living in this era, the event is not going to be a period but an ellipsis. I can't wait to see how it unfolds. Yet, I doubt that I would see the end happening in my lifetime.
by majormajor | 2025-12-08 04:46:56+00:00
A whole shit-ton of people in developed countries would not be happy with that, demonstrated by those:

1) choose not to simply coast on the social safety net, and seek out jobs for status and additional things than those. why do they do those when by historical standards they could be wildly comfortable without the bullshit work?

2) do coast (opting to just go on disability, say) but are generally extremely unhappy about it in ways that frequently cause problems for the rest of the people

3) opt out entirely from the social safety net and chose to try to live on the streets instead, whether for a desire for some sort of freedom or because of poor impulse control caused by addiction or similar (which also frequently leads to problems for the rest of the people)
by BobbyJo | 2025-12-08 04:47:01+00:00
> The economy is not a charity, nor is it a person. But if we're going to personify it, then it exists for the benefit of those who actively participate in it. It is indifferent to those who do not participate in it.

I think this completely ignores the role of government in the economy. By virtue of being born today, you are forced to participate in the economy. The government spends tax dollars in the economy, which it either collects from you, or spends on you, and the voting body has decided that, to some degree, the economy is indeed a charity.

> Most humans do not see themselves as existing to provide for others who either cannot or won't provide for themselves.

I'd disagree with the first part of that statement. Most people see themselves as good, and therefore see some level of responsibility for helping those that cannot provide for themselves.

> As stated above, the economy is not a charity, it is about equal exchange. Those who have nothing to offer will receive nothing in return.

Again, this ignores that the economy is, at least partially, structured by a government.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-08 04:47:41+00:00
> But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits

After a couple of generations watching my government become increasingly captured by the lobbyists funding elections - I'm fairly skeptical that your optimistic assertion will come to pass.

Doubly so now that capture is rapidly accelerating into a hostile, fascist takeover.
by sirponm | 2025-12-08 04:48:24+00:00
I'm so glad that you mentioned railroads because there is a great book, Railroads and Regulation by Gabriel Kolko about the capitalist anti-competiton regulation of the railroad industry that caused their concentration. If you wanna read about it, an essay about it is called "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism" inside of Markets Not Capitalism (freely available online). I'll summarize what it says tho:

Every time big railroad magnates tried to form a cartel to fix prices, a smaller competitor would lower rates and steal all the customers; freight rates went wayy down in this time period. The big railroad owners (like JP Morgan's clients) lobbied for the ICC not to regulate them, but to regulate their competitors. They wanted the government to make price-cutting illegal (calling it rebates or discrimination).

Regarding sanitary packages, the essay _also addresses this_: the big Chicago meatpackers supported regulations because the compliance costs were so high they drove small local butchers and slaughterhouses out of business. The "sanitary" laws were a weapon to kill local competition, not a way to keep food safe
by necovek | 2025-12-08 04:48:56+00:00
I am complaining about the language (phrasing) used: a Python, TypeScript or Java program might be truly portable across architectures too.

Since architectures are only brought up in relation to dynamic libraries, it implied it is otherwise as portable as above languages.

With that out of the way, it seems like a small thing for the Go build system if it's already doing cross compilation (and thus has understanding of foreign architectures and executable formats). I am guessing it just hasn't been done and is not a big lift, so perhaps look into it yourself?
by susam | 2025-12-08 04:49:15+00:00
A few years ago, I wrote an esoteric, minimalistic turtle graphics language called CFRS[]: <https://susam.net/cfrs.html>.

This was an exercise in making a turtle graphics language that is as minimal as possible. It is closer to Brainfsck than JavaScript and it is not Turing complete, by design.

To see some demos, go to <https://susam.github.io/cfrs/demo.html>.