MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lutusp | 2025-12-07 16:28:07+00:00
> But it is divided into more specific diagnoses with distinguishing diagnostic criteria

The criteria are based on effects, not causes. They lack depth.

Let me put it this way -- if a trained actor can acquire a diagnosis, then it's not based on causes, only effects. This would be like gathering rocks from a field and classifying them based on their color or shape, but without a science of geology to inform the classifications.

A trained actor can't pretend to have cancer, because we know what causes it, and we have meaningful clinical tests that categorically exclude anything but a specific biological source. Psychology doesn't have this property, and it may never have it.

When Thomas Insel resigned as director of the NIMH, he frankly said that the agency hadn't "moved the needle" in terms of knowledge or treatment, in spite of 13 years of effort and a 20 billion dollar outlay (reference: http://blog.stevenreidbordmd.com/?p=1615). I greatly respect Insel's candor and willingness to report facts in a field seemingly driven by illusion.

> Also, I want to point out that calling ASD a "mental condition" doesn't have a scientific basis

Sorry, but since the entire field has no scientific basis, it's unfair to single out a specific example without acknowledging this fact -- the elephant in the room.

> ... it is classified as a developmental disability.

That also has no scientific basis, it's a response to a fad, a transitory response to fashion (as were all the classifications that went before it). In point of fact, ASD has a biological cause, but we have no idea what it is.

> These terms matter ...

No. They don't. This is proven by the fact that they keep changing, but without any change in evidence or science.

Neuroscience will change all this, but not any time soon.
by tmtvl | 2025-12-07 16:28:12+00:00
Perl was developed in 1987, the first Common Lisp standard was released in 1984, 3 years earlier. Common Lisp allows arguments like so:

(defun frobnicate (foo &key (bar (Vector 1 2 3)) (baz 'quux)) (declare (type Foo foo) (type (Vector Integer) bar) (type Symbol baz)) ...)

Not only normal arguments like we get in C or Pascal, but there's keyword arguments, you can have optional arguments, and a rest argument, which is most like Perl's @_. And that's not even getting into destructuring lambda lists which are available for macros or typed lambda lists for methods.
by kachapopopow | 2025-12-07 16:28:32+00:00
Georgia is from personal experience, everywhere I went was crypto accepted even the small coffee shops accepted crypto (none accepted btc tho) and just to clear it up: you don't rely on crypto for everything, small amounts via some kind of systematic b2b laundering to cover the bases and crypto for larger purchases (you can buy a car!). There are also people who will exchange thousands of crypto for cash in one go, the criminal infrastructure for crypto is massive.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-12-07 16:28:38+00:00
It doesn't even have to be there, you could state what the license is on a website or in an e-mail. Sometimes you can find it in the header of source files (as seen here as well). Having a "LICENSE" or "COPYING" file in the root of the repository is just a common pattern made even more common by all the tools that can consume it automatically (including GitHub's UI).
by teddy-smith | 2025-12-07 16:28:48+00:00
Citations in various formats,

> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

> https://codepen.io/tag/citation

footnotes

>https://codepen.io/SitePoint/pen/QbMgvY

references to automatically numbered figures and tables

> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25869906/table-auto-numb...\

> https://codepen.io/MikeKelley/pen/GpXmEd
by swatcoder | 2025-12-07 16:28:55+00:00
We might also acknowledge that a pretty significant share of people do know that already and just shrug their shoulders to it, convinced that it's better to allow for that than do anything about it.

There's been a lot of work put into distilling "free market" into its most radical interpretation, and lots of people just aren't open to bringing much nuance or pragmatism to bear upon it any more. Many lessons learned painfully in late 19th and early 20th century have been forgotten and the counterweight and containment policies that they earned now tend to get ignored or dismantled.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-07 16:30:05+00:00
> I find it weird to not be able to find linux source code and commentaries

That one statement is a great concise explanation/motivation for "literate programming".

Explanations with code, that explain code design choices, in a way that enables the code to be understood better, and the ideas involved to be picked up and applied flexibly to reading and writing other code.

Another way to view it is: Developers are "compilers" from ideas to source. Documenting the ideas along with the "generated" source, is being "open source" about the origin and specific implementation of the source.
by adrr | 2025-12-07 16:30:06+00:00
Have you ever been to a dollar store? Its much cheaper for the same items than a regular grocery store. Also not everyone needs a Costco sized tub of mayo. You test it yourself go by a standard sized candy bar at safeway/alberstons and then at a dollar store. Bottle of coke. Birthday card. Better yet compare the cost spices. Try to buy bay leaves at regular grocery store for under $5.
by dcminter | 2025-12-07 16:30:33+00:00
Look, like Humpty Dumpty you can mean whatever you want with the word, but the unless you're talking about football or something the dictionary meaning is: "The object of one's ambition; a desired end or result."

You can't have the goal without the personality trying to achieve it.

This notion that evolution has an opinion is exactly why there are a lot of companion misconceptions about it - not least of which is the notion that humans are somehow at the top of the landscape it has produced.
by parpfish | 2025-12-07 16:30:38+00:00
an interesting contrast that i think about a lot:

- in rural america, there are dollar stores everywhere that overcharge for small items. people treat them as a necessary evil and begrudgingly shop there.

- in nyc, there are corner bodegas everywhere that overcharge for small items. they are generally seen as beloved neighborhood institutions.

so... what's the difference? corporate owned vs family owned? length of time in community? presence of cute cat at the register?
by dmix | 2025-12-07 16:31:10+00:00
In something like Cursor if it messes something up your can click 'undo'. I'd imagine a small snapshot would only persisted to the memory if you keep it's output and even then it's mostly just a summary.

There's probably lots of small signals of "the user is happy with the output" plus the longer the history the more it will converge on the middle of being what you want. Including when the user says "don't do [x]" which override past stuff.
by bobajeff | 2025-12-07 16:31:34+00:00
I've been keeping an eye on Mojo/Max as it's one of the only things out there that doesn't depend on the Cuda library.

Blockers for me right now, are:

1) still closed source

2) it doesn't support my low-end hardware (just because I don't have a 5090 or whatever doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to do GPU compute things)

I'm guessing if those barriers are ever removed it'll probably be years from now. But hopefully it'll inspire other languages/ecosystems to take on their own Cuda replacement.
by somenameforme | 2025-12-07 16:32:09+00:00
The big difference between agrarian and nomadic populations is that the latter is decentralized. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is generally very leisurely, but it's strictly limited in population viability. A tribe of some tens of people? Sure, no problem. A city of 5,000 people? It just doesn't work, because you'd end up wiping out the resources in your region faster than nature could replenish them.

So you're never going to see a massive hunter-gatherer population, essentially by definition. It doesn't say anything at all about their standards of life, which by most accounts were (and are) exceptionally high. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
by tialaramex | 2025-12-07 16:32:13+00:00
The problem Cloudflare had, and from what it seems, still have is that they don't actually test software at small volumes before global deployment. I would guess that two outages in quick succession means the voices saying "You need to test everything properly" might win, but perhaps not.

The Billion Dollar mistake is about not even having the distinction shown in the commit you linked. In languages with this mistake a Goose and "Maybe a Goose or maybe nothing" are the same type.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-07 16:32:47+00:00
Sounds like jj just simplifies the interface of some git commands, mainly. After talking to some jj enthusiasts here, I think we just have a different perspective about what needs to be simple and even what constitutes simple. There is probably some lingering unfamiliarity with git among jj enthusiasts as well. I don't want to teach git to people who are not programmers, but I wouldn't want to teach any programmer's VCS to them honestly. If you are a programmer, I think git is the best.
by OptionOfT | 2025-12-07 16:33:12+00:00
> Wherever LLM-generated code is used, it becomes the responsibility of the engineer. As part of this process of taking responsibility, self-review becomes essential: LLM-generated code should not be reviewed by others if the responsible engineer has not themselves reviewed it.

I think the review by the prompt writer should be at a higher level than another person who reviews the code.

If I know how to do something, it is easier for me to avoid mistakes while doing it. When I'm reviewing it it requires different pathways in my brain. Since there is code out there I'm drawn to that path, and I might not not always spot the problem points. Or code might be written in a way that I don't recognize, but still exhibits the same mistake.

In the past, as a reviewer I used to be able to count on my colleagues' professionalism to be a moat.

The size of the moat is inverse to the amount of LLM generated code in a PR / project. At a certain moment you can no longer guarantee that you stand behind everything.

Combine that with the push to do more faster, with less, meaning we're increasing the amount of tech debt we're taking on.
by inglor_cz | 2025-12-07 16:33:15+00:00
Once upon a time I lived near the Prague city centre, and if the intent of such a corner shop is to rip off tourists and one-time visitors, the locals don't mind - at least as long as cheaper alternatives off the most notorious areas exist and are usable for them (Lidl etc.)

Quite to the contrary, the locals are sometimes happy to have such overcharged options at hand, for example if they are throwing a party and find out that they are short on vodka+cigs, and it is 1 am and all the regular shops are closed.
by hinkley | 2025-12-07 16:33:16+00:00
On the terraform comment, things that change together ship together is a good mantra.

If you keep having to make edits in two independent systems every time you want to make one change, something is wrong. If you’re leaving footguns around because changing one thing affects two or more systems, but you aren’t at liberty to change them both in production, that’s also something wrong.
by netsharc | 2025-12-07 16:33:22+00:00
Huh, with eInk prices, how do customers prove "Wait, the price on the shelf was different!", the store can just change the price as they go to double-check. As a customer you can take a picture of the price, but then it'll be an argument of "This picture is old/doctored/AI".

Of course the chances of this sort of scam happening are probably not that high, but hey, considering the country is rotting more and more, from the top...
by grayhatter | 2025-12-07 16:33:54+00:00
I disagree you could do that and claim to be reasonable.

But I agree, because I'd rather discuss the pragmatics and not bicker over the semantics about an analogy.

Introducing a token error, is different from plagiarism, no? Someone wrote code that can't compile, is different from someone "stealing" proprietary code from some company, and contributing it to some FOSS repo?

In order to assume good faith, you also need to assume the author is the origin. But that's clearly not the case. The origin is from somewhere else, and the author that put their name on the paper didn't verify it, and didn't credit it.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-07 16:33:55+00:00
Alan Kay said something similar back in the 90s, framing it as ants living on the "pink plane" and the "blue plane". What he said at the time was an ant crawling on the pink plane can do a lot of pink plane things, but he won't think about the kinds of things he can do on the orthogonal blue plane, because he's never been there so he doesn't have those thoughts. Innovation in PLs comes when someone from the pink plane travels to the blue plane and brings back all they have seen, which causes people in the pink plane to start thinking new (bluer) thoughts.

I'm going to use a metaphor for this talk which is drawn from a wonderful book called The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler. Koestler was a novelist who became a cognitive scientist in his later years. One of the great books he wrote was about what might creativity be.—Learning.—He realized that learning, of course, is an act of creation itself, because something happens in you that wasn't there before. He used a metaphor of thoughts as ants crawling on a plane. In this case it's a pink plane, and there's a lot of things you can do on a pink plane. You can have goals. You can choose directions. You can move along. But you're basically in the pink context. It means that progress, in a fixed context, is almost always a form of optimization, because if you're actually coming up with something new, it wouldn't have been part of the rules or the context for what the pink plane is all about. Creative acts, generally, are ones that don't stay in the same context that they're in. He says, every once in a while, even though you have been taught carefully by parents and by school for many years, you have a blue idea. Maybe when you're taking a shower. Maybe when you're out jogging. Maybe when you're resting in an unguarded moment, suddenly, that thing that you were puzzling about, wondering about, looking at, appears to you in a completely different light, as though it were something else.

https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Alan_Kay_at_OOPSLA_1997:_...
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-07 16:34:04+00:00
Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap.

It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who:

1) Have tried lisp and clojure

2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness

3) Have read through SICP and done most of the exercises

4) Would still choose plain old boring easy-to-read always-second-best Python for 90% of use-cases (and probably Rust for the last 10%) when building a real business in the real world.

The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced.
by Majromax | 2025-12-07 16:34:12+00:00
> I do too, but this is a conference, I doubt code was provided.

Machine learning conferences generally encourage (anonymized) submission of code. However, that still doesn't mean that replication is easy. Even if the data is also available, replication of results might require impractical levels of compute power; it's not realistic to ask a peer reviewer to pony up for a cloud account to reproduce even medium-scale results.
by alyxya | 2025-12-07 16:34:47+00:00
The hardest part about making a new architecture is that even if it is just better than transformers in every way, it’s very difficult to both prove a significant improvement at scale and gain traction. Until google puts in a lot of resources into training a scaled up version of this architecture, I believe there’s plenty of low hanging fruit with improving existing architectures such that it’ll always take the back seat.
by qingcharles | 2025-12-07 16:35:02+00:00
I lived for an entire year out of just Dollar General and Dollar Tree. In some rough areas they are the only stores where you can buy groceries, so they have very clear monopolies. There are good value products, and like everything these days you have to use their apps to get the best offers. Also, the Dollar General app lets you check the price of everything before you take it to the counter. They regularly have items marked up at 1 cent.
by thenewwazoo | 2025-12-07 16:35:18+00:00
Bodegas charge you a little bit more because a real human owner accepts the risk of serving a small community in exchange for being part of that community, and you pay that extra in order to make their existence possible.

Dollar Generals charge you a little bit more because a huge chain has driven out all the competition and you have no choice. The people who work there do not benefit from the extra you pay, and the owners are not members of the community.
by concinds | 2025-12-07 16:36:10+00:00
I use those LLM "deep research" modes every now and then. They can be useful for some use cases. I'd never think to freaking paste it into a paper and submit it or publish it without checking; that boggles the mind.

The problem is that a researcher who does that is almost guaranteed to be careless about other things too. So the problem isn't just the LLM, or even the citations, but the ambient level of acceptable mediocrity.
by listic | 2025-12-07 16:36:10+00:00
I doubt there will ever be a market for a device with this specific (or many other kinds of other specific) set of requirements, especially if one insists on that 'last bit of polish'. Short of fully developed molecular nanotechnology or similar, allowing economic manufacturing of bespoke hardware in single copies, which is another world from the one we live in, I don't see such wishes come true, so the author (and others like him) will have to settle for something else.
by kakacik | 2025-12-07 16:36:36+00:00
If that would not be enough, any lack of medical care could be another. 10% chance of dying for every birth for the mother. Flu, any tooth ache, appendix inflammation or any more severe cut would be easily deadly for young and old.

Everybody had tons of parasites and smelled horribly including royalty, think working out hard daily and wearing the same cloth, bathing once a year (maybe). Freedom we consider a basic human right was basically unheard of, everybody was a prisoner of some form of somebody else.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-07 16:37:32+00:00
> When they audit the company for SOX, PCI-DSS,

Maybe I am missing something, but that seems orthogonal to ensuring host integrity? I didn't argue against logging access and making things auditable, by all means do that. I argued against working against the OS.

It is not like integrity protection software doesn't exist for Linux (e.g. Tripwire), it is just different from Windows, since on Windows you have a system where the default way is to let the user control the software and install random things, and you need to patch that ability away first. On Linux software installation is typically controlled by the admin and done with a single file database (which makes it less suitable for home users), but this is exactly what you want on a admin controlled system.

Sure, computing paradigms have changed, but it is still a good idea to use OS isolation like not running programs with user rights.
by VerifiedReports | 2025-12-07 16:38:06+00:00
"Lossy compression inevitably throws away information to make the file size smaller."

So? That fact only emphasizes the absurdity and loss potential here:

1. Acquire "clean" digital footage.

2. Add fake grain to said footage

3. Compress the grainy footage with lossy compression, wasting a bunch of the data on fake detail that you just added.

4. Analyze the footage to determine the character of the fake grain, calculate parameters to approximate it later with other fake grain

5. Strip out the fake grain, with potential for loss of some original image details

6. Re-add fake grain with the calculated parameters

If you don't see the absurdity there, I don't know what to tell you.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-07 16:38:36+00:00
Whether in the 1970s or now, it's too often the case that a paper says "Foo and Bar are X" and cites two sources for this fact. You chase down the sources, the first one says "We weren't able to determine whether Foo is X" and never mentions Bar. The second says "Assuming Bar is X, we show that Foo is probably X too".

The paper author likely believes Foo and Bar are X, it may well be that all their co-workers, if asked, would say that Foo and Bar are X, but "Everybody I have coffee with agrees" can't be cited, so we get this sort of junk citation.

Hopefully it's not crucial to the new work that Foo and Bar are in fact X. But that's not always the case, and it's a problem that years later somebody else will cite this paper, for the claim "Foo and Bar are X" which it was in fact merely citing erroneously.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-07 16:38:49+00:00
About 15 years ago I tried xmonad, a tiling window manager, and I was hooked. I moved to awesome a few years later and that has been my desktop ever since. I still pretty much use only emacs, terminals, and a web browser in my daily work, and that goes back even further than my use of tiling window managers.
by judofyr | 2025-12-07 16:39:11+00:00
> If a carpenter shows up to put a roof yet their hammer or nail-gun can't actually put in nails, who'd you blame; the tool, the toolmaker or the carpenter?

I would be unhappy with the carpenter, yes. But if the toolmaker was constantly over-promising (lying?), lobbying with governments, pushing their tools into the hands of carpenters, never taking responsibility, then I would also criticize the toolmaker. It’s also a toolmaker’s responsibility to be honest about what the tool should be used for.

I think it’s a bit too simplistic to say «AI is not the problem» with the current state of the industry.
by michaelt | 2025-12-07 16:39:47+00:00
> Surely there are tools to retrieve all the citations,

Even if you could retrieve all citations (which isn't always as easy as you might hope) to validate citations you'd also have to confirm the paper says what the person citing it says. If I say "A GPU requires 1.4kg of copper" citing [1] is that a valid citation?

That means not just reviewing one paper, but also potentially checking 70+ papers it cites. The vast majority of paper reviewers will not check citations actually say what they're claimed to say, unless a truly outlandish claim is made.

At the same time, academia is strangely resistant to putting hyperlinks in citations, preferring to maintain old traditions - like citing conference papers by page number in a hypothetical book that has never been published; and having both a free and a paywalled version of a paper while considering the paywalled version the 'official' version.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04142
by Kapendev | 2025-12-07 16:40:04+00:00
Don't use betterC as a global @nogc attribute. This flag does more than just remove the garbage collector and adds extra checks that can sometimes be overly restrictive. If writing GC-free code is important and compiler assistance is really needed, then add @nogc: at the top of every file. But even that is a bit extreme because the @nogc attribute is just a hint to the compiler, telling it to check that called functions also carry that hint. It is not essential for writing GC-free code.

My library for example is not using the GC, but I don't put @nogc on every function because it does not make sense. Here is the link to the library: https://github.com/Kapendev/joka