MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by observationist | 2025-12-08 23:26:24+00:00
Not quite - just because an infinite variety of things are allowed to happen doesn't mean that they will. You will never have been born with all your cells suddenly swapped out for pure gold. Your brain will never spontaneously spark a fission chain reaction and detonate, in all the infinite variety of outcomes through all time. The universe as we know it will also end long before any meaningful notion of infinity applies to the possible outcomes of various configurations of atoms.

The best science can estimate, for now, is that heat death will occur in around 100 trillion years, probably closer to 1, and other universe ending outcomes can happen long before that. For the solar system, there's a few billion years before the inner planets get devoured by the sun.

In those timeframes, the only outcome you have is the one occurring now. There's no eternal endless reset waiting at the end of everything where things endlessly repeat - the number of things that occur and near infinite variety of outcomes means that even if there's a big crunch and a restart long after the heat death of the universe, there will never, ever, in any meaningfully cognizable period of time, be another universe where Earth exists, or even the Milky Way. Tiny perturbations at the beginning of time across the sum total of all particles and energy defined the state of all the things that could ever be within our universe. Across an infinity of infinities, a multiverse in which all things exist, there's no meaningful differentiation at the level of thinking about everything, so I don't think it brings anything to the table.

You get the one life - if science progresses to the point where we reach longevity escape velocity, or if they can guarantee preservation of your mind until such a time as they can revive or restore or fully emulate your embodiment, that's worth pursuing, even if somehow some weird mystical configuration of "you" traverses the eternal multiverse.

We're closing in on really weird changes in human technological trajectories, it's going to be one hell of a ride.
by omnibrain | 2025-12-08 23:26:24+00:00
I have fond memories of Publisher. We used it to layout our school newspaper back in the 90ies. I even considered going into the DTP field as a career and did a small internship. But I soon realised that while I can easily master the technical aspect and learn all the rules, my "design work" just doesn't "pop".

Nonetheless, for years after, I was the goto layout guy if a relative needed something done. I soon stopped using Publisher after I "found" a copy of QuarkXPress.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-12-08 23:26:43+00:00
Well. Good that you were revived and shared your experience with us!

Being born can be compared to a one in billions lottery win. We're given this time. "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us". I hope you get to feel more positive about being around.

My belief is, when you're gone, you're gone. All this religion and quantum mechanics speculation about coming back is wishful thinking (it's one reason religion is so powerful. It's very hard and scary to comprehend our non existence. Religion provides a nice candy wrapped solution to all that.)
by ncruces | 2025-12-08 23:26:55+00:00
> I -think- SQLite with WAL falls under this

No. SQLite is serializable. There's no configuration where you'd get read committed or repeatable read.

In WAL mode you may read stale data (depending on how you define stale data), but if you try to write in a transaction that has read stale data, you get a conflict, and need to restart your transaction.

There's one obscure configuration no one uses that's read uncommitted. But really, no one uses it.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-08 23:27:01+00:00
The problems with #2 and #3 are they are equally, if not more, valuable points to those wishing to hide their identity for nefarious reasons instead. I.e. that nameless "just makes you think, doesn't it" kind of farming. Identity (as in an account history) provides not only a community here, but easily rules out a lot of malicious wordsmithing concerns. Not that I place any of that on you in this case, just the general use of throwaways as perhaps not as net-good for the site as advertised above.

Nothing wrong with #1 on its own of course, but if we're talking about what we'd like to see here then I'd lean more towards the value in discussions with individuals in the community than the value in the prose of the articles/comments.
by kbenson | 2025-12-08 23:27:24+00:00
That was my immediate thought as well, under the assumption the lazy fsync is for performance. I imagine in some situations, delaying the write until the write confirmation actually happens is okay (depending on delay), but it also occurred to me that if you delay enough, and you have a busy enough system, and your time to send the message is small enough, the number of open connections you need to keep open can be some small or large multiple of the amount you would need without delaying the confirmation message to actual write time.
by Maxatar | 2025-12-08 23:27:35+00:00
That's precisely the argument I'm making. A company's stock price can be undervalued, which exactly means that the stock price can increase without any change in the company's revenue or profitability. The stock price can increase strictly because the actual value of the company has not yet been fully realized without any material change necessary on the part of the company.

As an investor, that's the ultimate goal of your investment.
by ErrantX | 2025-12-08 23:27:44+00:00
I meant that frame very deliberately. Use of the word AI is misleading people that LLMs are intelligent.

They model what looks like intelligence but with very hard limits. The two advantages they have over human brains are perfect recall and data storage. They are also faster.

But the brain is vastly more intelligent:

- It can learn concepts (e.g. language) with an order of magnitude less information

- It responds in parallel to multiple formats of stimuli (e.g. sight/sound)

- LLMs lack the ability to generalise

- The brain interprets and understands what it experienced

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Don't get me wrong: I use AI, it is by far some of the most impressive tech we have built so far, and it has potential to advance society significantly.

But it is definitely, vastly, less intelligent than us.
by sleepyguy | 2025-12-08 23:28:31+00:00
These robots would be a significant improvement over the current electric bike and scooter riders who not only drive recklessly on the roads but also take over the sidewalks. The situation has become lawless in the city, with many delivery drivers disregarding traffic rules entirely, they are a menace to pedestrians and vehicle drivers. I would like the city council to outlaw fast food delivery entirely, accept for the disabled. Young people need to get out more and should pick up their own falafel.
by Kwpolska | 2025-12-08 23:28:37+00:00
Icons in menus do follow the 2025 HIG: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

The author is criticising 2025 macOS for not following the 2005 HIG. This is not reasonable criticism, the HIG are not set in stone and they have changed many times in the past 20 years.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-08 23:30:07+00:00
> Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact.

Possibly so, possibly not.

I think this gets into a fundamental (and common) misunderstanding of what infinity implies.

I think the best way I could illustrate it is the concept of infinite non-repeating numbers. A fair number of people will think "Oh, because it's infinite and non-repeating, it must contain all possible number combinations". However, consider a number like `1.101001000100001000001...` This is a number that's infinite, non-repeating, and it only contains 1 and 0.

With that in mind, it becomes trivial to imagine an infinite non-repeating number where `7` occurs only once.

Said another way about time and the infinite. It's entirely possible that ultimately the universe decays into a proton vapor and once that happens, that's it. It stays infinitely as such a vapor cloud with none of the protons ever meeting one another.

All that's to say is infinite doesn't imply that all possible states will be created once again. It could happen, but it's not guaranteed to happen.
by jjk166 | 2025-12-08 23:30:19+00:00
It wasn't propaganda and rhetoric which eroded the public's trust. It was repeated attempts by authorities to argue based on their authority, instead of using their knowledge to actually make compelling arguments. When inevitably these experts and institutions got things wrong, they lost credibility because they staked their credibility.

We were never supposed to listen to experts because they were experts, experts were supposed to make good points people would listen to. It's shocking that we've grown so accustomed to crappy institutions that we've forgotten what a properly functioning institution even looks like.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-12-08 23:30:22+00:00
Your first paragraph insists that "the presence or lack of accent does not as a rule change the meaning of a word." While your second insists that "[the same word without an accent] is simply misspelled as all words with the strong syllable being last will always have an accent mark if they end in a vowel."

But your accent rule also isn't followed by the language you claim uses it as a hard and fast rule: in the case of the single syllable Catalan word ma (my, femenine) and mà (hand). Please square that with your declaration that " all words with the strong syllable being last will always have an accent mark if they end in a vowel." Seemingly ma is breaking your rules, as well as your assertion that missing the accent is only a spelling error. In this, and many other cases, the accent completely changes the meaning of the word which also contradicts your assertion I highlighted in paragraph 1. Maybe "as a rule" isn't the correct phrase given the multitude of words that can change meaning with an accent mark.

The broader thing you missed is that Catala is the last name of a person working on the project, and is not missing an accent. That is how the person's name is spelled. Even in Catalan. Català is a Catalan word refering to a different thing. In this case the accent is incredibly important since it helps us differentiate between a man's name and a language.

In both the figurative and spelling sense we must therefore conclude that, in reality:

Catala != Català
by wrs | 2025-12-08 23:30:48+00:00
Your overall point is certainly valid, but there's no "dichotomy" there. I'd say "sidewalks are for people, not X" where X is pretty much anything that's not people (including scooters and bikes, even though there are people on them).

If those delivery drivers were parked on the sidewalk, it would be a different discussion. Or if the robots were in the bike lane, we'd be saying "bike lanes are for bikes, not robots".
by CharlieDigital | 2025-12-08 23:31:28+00:00
Of course this is not the same as Kafka, but the comment I'm replying to:

> Ah yes, and every consumer should just do this in a while (true) loop as producers write to it. Very efficient and simple with no possibility of lock contention or hot spots. Genius, really.

Seemed to imply that it's not possible to build a high performance pub/sub system using a simple SQL select. I do not think that is true and it is in fact fairly easy to build a high performance pub/sub system with a simple SQL select. Clearly, this design as proposed is not the same as Kafka.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-12-08 23:32:26+00:00
Taken literally, your statement said that [non-pro] DTP died because it had good tooling. I don't know what tooling for DTP is, but it seems unlikely so good that it would kill the software it supports, so your comment seems like nonsense. Why bother posting it if you're perfectly happy with that?

The real truth is more boring: DTP didn't die at all, it just merged as a category of software with word processors because computers got powerful enough to run programs with a union of their features. Whether the programs in this new combined category got called one thing or the other mainly depended on their history: Word and InDesign today have a lot more in common with each other than either does with programs from the early 1990s that are nominally in their respective categories. Whatever you were saying, it didn't seem to be that, so it was wrong anyway! But I asked nicely because I was curious if there was some substance there.
by dabockster | 2025-12-08 23:32:40+00:00
> Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.

I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now. And even then, I just listed four specialties that historically have been specialized by a single person for each field - something like this would require a given person having a sufficient breadth of knowledge in all of them at the same time. It's a very tall order.

And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder.
by mmooss | 2025-12-08 23:32:52+00:00
Plenty of white supremecists and their supporters are not white. Plenty are, and say they aren't.

> it just happens to be fairly well documented that some people run faster hardware than others for a wide variety of nature and nurture reasons.

Vague statements like that are unfalsifiable. Of course there are variations in performance - that's absolutely undeniable; mostly likely I type faster or slower than you do. The questions are, how big are those variations and how much are they dependent on what the person is conceived with biologically. If you want to claim anything, you need to be much more specific about those issues.
by incrudible | 2025-12-08 23:33:17+00:00
Yet another author who does not understand the meaning of reserves vs resources. Reserves are are deposits that can be recovered at cost at current market price. Increase the price and miraculously, reserves increase. Like with most commodities, price spikes are followed by price drops as supply catches up. Remember when we were running out of lithium? Prices are down 90% from that peak.
by toomanyrichies | 2025-12-08 23:33:51+00:00
Mark Twain put it pithily (and perhaps apocryphally): "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

Apparently there's a name for this: the Lucretian symmetry argument. And I recently learned there are philosophers who argue the asymmetry in our attitudes is actually rational, and that fearing death while not fearing pre-natal nonexistence makes sense [1].

I find comfort in treating the two as being equal, and I'd be lying if I said I'm not a little hesitant to read their case.

[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-9868-2_...
by araes | 2025-12-08 23:34:08+00:00
Thanks. Saw this, thought it looked cool. Just could not find what it can do other than "popover" "popovertarget" without using JS.

The examples provided for custom events all seem to use JS anyways. Ex:

<button commandfor="the-image" command="--rotate-landscape"> ... if ( event.command == "--rotate-landscape" ) { image.style.rotate = "-90deg" }

Agree it would be cool, it just doesn't seem to do a lot. Generalized "popovertarget" except that basically means +modal <dialog> in most of the examples. And all the modal dialogs are almost always "popover". And you can already make "popover" appear over "popover" with multiple onscreen. Maybe there's something with looking. [1]

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/command-and-commandfor

Edit: Here's an example of the overlapping popover functionality. https://araesmojo-eng.github.io/

Main Page -> General Tests Menu -> Open Popover 1 | Open Popover 2

Should both open popovers simultaneously on top of each other while dismissing neither, and also change the state of elements on the page at the same time.
by thangalin | 2025-12-08 23:34:20+00:00
> pneumatic tubes or underground trains

Brilliant. See Tom Scott's video about Vancouver's Rabbit Line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMTZvA8iFgI

Speaking of Vancouver and trains, the Broadway Subway Project is currently under construction, extending an existing line nearly 6 km for $3 billion.

https://www.broadwaysubway.ca/about/stations

In my hard sci-fi novel (beta readers wanted, see profile for contact), delivery bots play key roles in the plot. For local deliveries, a community of 1,000 people was constructed with no overhead cables, allowing food delivery by drop-drones.
by vinipolicena | 2025-12-08 23:34:27+00:00
> Software engineering has got - in my opinion, often needlessly - complicated, with people rushing to very labour intensive patterns such as TDD, microservices, super complex React frontends and Kubernetes.

TDD as defined by Kent Beck (https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/canon-tdd ) doesn't belong in that list. Beck's TDD is a way to order work you'd do anyway: slice the requirement, automate checks to confirm behavior and catch regressions, and refactor to keep the code healthy. It's not a bloated workflow, and it generalizes well to practices like property-based testing and design-by-contract.
by x______________ | 2025-12-08 23:34:28+00:00
A bit fluffy of a piece.

>Unlike trading money for food at the supermarket where you and the supermarket both know for certain you each benefit

There was a boycott movement in Canada for due to price gouging by the grocers and I've seen 100-200% price increases in certain items in the last 4 years where I'm at (while 0% on others). Someone may be benefiting more..

>You wouldn’t wager money on your ability to beat Djokovich in tennis or Lebron James in basketball, why would you wager money on your ability to beat Citadel?

I don't believe this closing statement is accurate or relevant: you are not directly up against anyone except for yourself. Your strategy and decisions will lead you to profit or peril; against, and just like everyone else.
by jamesrom | 2025-12-08 23:34:57+00:00
> It's significantly more wicked to pretend that tests, treatments, and more aren't done by healthcare workers (yes, even private ones), and to inundate them with unimportant medical procedures while truly sick people are dying.

Strawman+ad hominem. No one is suggesting to pretend _anything_. Charge premiums for these tests based on how "unimportant" they are. Use market forces to move money from those willing to pay, to those who cannot.
by SpaceManNabs | 2025-12-08 23:35:20+00:00
> If something seems off, I can just regenerate and hope the next version is better. But that’s not the same as actually checking. It feels like a slot machine—pull the lever again, see if you get a better result—substitutes for the slower, harder work of understanding whether the output is correct.

What a great point. In some work loops I feel like I get addicted to seeing what pops in the next generation.

One of the things i Learned from moderating internet usage is not fall prey to recommendation systems. As in, when I am on the web, I only consume what I explicitly looked for, and not what the algorithm thinks i should consume next.

sites like reddit and HN make this tricky.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-12-08 23:35:23+00:00
Waymo’s cars are, statistically, an order of magnitude safer than human-driven cars.

It sounds like your real MO is that you think SV tech doesn’t care about safety or its customers… which is fine, I guess, but it’s muddying the point you were trying to make as your comment kind of devolved into a strange rant.
by enobrev | 2025-12-08 23:35:55+00:00
I had this exact same experience in ravenswood this weekend. I was walking to breakfast and one of these bots was blocking the entirety of the shoveled part of the sidewalk. I had to make may way into the snow to inch around the bot just so I could continue to use the sidewalk.

I had guessed it was stopped because it came to an unshoveled portion of the sidewalk. If it can't traverse that, it's not made for this city

I'm not fundamentally mad as these bots. But if they don't figure out how to make them work with other pedestrians, then I'm going to start cheering on any vandalism delivered upon them.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-08 23:36:49+00:00
Yeah, but imagine the first engineers at ChatGPT back in 2021, some thrown together group of people who knew frontend the best from OpenAI, a research lab, to create a quick prototype UI for chatting with a text generating ML model. Of course they'll take some shortcuts, that's to be expected. All of this is just guesses though, but seen similar things play out many times. Of course, at one point someone needs to step in and pause for a moment to plan ahead for a bit, but depending on the leadership, it isn't always so easy to do.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-08 23:36:50+00:00
Well, because no self interested decision maker in any company of size is going to ever trust their business to an unknown company run by a one person operation.

And why would the benefits of being able to code faster accrue to a small independent developer over a large company that already has an established reputation and a customer base?

“No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce”.

I once had influence over the buying decision to support an implementation I was leading. I found this perfect SaaS product by a one man shop who was local.

Working with my CTO and lawyers, we made a proposal to the founder. We would sign with him and be 70% of his post signing revenue if he agreed to give us our own self hosted instance and put his latest code in escrow with a third party (Green Mountain) and we would have non exclusive rights to use the code (but not distribute it) under certain circumstances.
by mvkel | 2025-12-08 23:37:28+00:00
That's a generous interpretation.

The deal allows OpenAI to purchase up to 6GW of AMD GPUs, while AMD grants OpenAI warrants for up to 10% equity tied to performance milestones, creating a closed-loop of compute, equity, and potential self-funding hardware purchases. Circular.

From the announcement per se, AMD's stock rose to a level that effectively canceled out whatever liabilities they were committing to as part of the deal, so it was all gravy, despite it being a press release
by wvenable | 2025-12-08 23:37:56+00:00
I wrote a blog post about this. There is literally no end to the amount of software that could be produced for businesses. My job right is to write software for particular niche; we purchase all the major software and yet I will still never run out of software to build internally.

Literally everything sucks right now because all industries are running a massive software deficit. It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck. We are making do with the scraps we have.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-12-08 23:39:18+00:00
I default to statistics a lot more now, even if ballparked and made up in my head.. and it all stemmed from a different gf asking me "how dangerous do you think that was???!!?!" while giggling and high off adrenaline after taking her to around 155 mph on a Yamaha R1.

I thought for a second and said "idk, probably like 1 in 100 we would have died... Maybe even worse than that.. I don't think I could pull that off 100 times"

And that weird realization made something click and I've stopped doing stupid things.

The new me would have thought "hey, if 100 65 year old obese men with gout go hiking, at least one of them isn't making it back". 22 year old me thought "eh, he's just going to be slow".