MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jfarmer | 2025-12-04 18:01:00+00:00
I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on.

Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis and the air.

Friction isn't fungible.

John Dewey described this rationale in Human Nature and Conduct as thinking that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." He concludes:

”It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.”

In "Mind and World", McDowell criticizes this sort of thinking, too, saying:

> We need to conceive this expansive spontaneity as subject to control from outside our thinking, on pain off representing the operations of spontaneity as a frictionless spinning in a void.

And that's really what this is about, I think. Friction-free is the goal but friction-free "thought" isn't thought at all. It's frictionless spinning in a void.

I teach and see this all the time in EdTech. Imagine if students could just ask the robot XYZ and how much time it'd free up! That time could be spent on things like relationship-building with the teacher, new ways of motivating students, etc.

Except...those activities supply the "wants and struggles whose consummations" build the relationships! Maybe the robot could help the student, say, ask better questions to the teacher, or direct the student to peers who were similarly confused but figure it out.

But I think that strikes many tech-minded folks as "inefficient" and "friction-ful". If the robot knows the answer to my question, why slow me down by redirecting me to another person?

This is the same logic that says making dinner is a waste of time and we should all live off nutrient mush. The purposes of preparing dinner is to make something you can eat and the purpose of eating is nutrient acquisition, right? Just beam those nutrients into my bloodstream and skip the rest.

Not sure how to put this all together into something pithy, but I see it all as symptoms of the same cultural impulse. One that's been around for decades and decades, I think.
by jpalmer | 2025-12-04 18:01:52+00:00
This looks great. Something I'd like to see in a recipe app is scale is not only reflected in the ingredients list but also in the directions.

The linked recipe is a great example. The 1/2 teaspoon in step 1 is never modified regardless of the scale of the recipe.

Also scale should go below 1 (like .5).
by cardanome | 2025-12-04 18:01:54+00:00
The more correct way is to think about it as a prisms. It is multi dimensional.

Also it is for autistic people. It grinds my gears when people say "everyone is on the spectrum", no, just no. Again it is only for autistic people and you need to have support needs to be diagnosed with autism. You don't get a diagnosis for being quirky and a little weird.

And no, just because someone is verbal and seems to be very articulate does not mean the person has low support needs or vice versa.
by evanb | 2025-12-04 18:01:55+00:00
I animated these and related 'proofs' some time ago

1/3 = 1/4 + 1/16 + 1/64 + ...

https://evanberkowitz.com/images/2014-03-15-quarters/SquareA...

https://evanberkowitz.com/images/2014-03-15-quarters/Triangl...

1/7 = 1/8 + 1/64 + 1/512 + ...

https://evanberkowitz.com/images/2014-03-16-eighths/EighthsA...

1/8 = 1/9 + 1/81 + 1/729 + ...

https://evanberkowitz.com/images/2014-03-17-ninths/NinthsAni...
by lalitmaganti | 2025-12-04 18:02:11+00:00
I'm very well aware of the privilege afforded to me by my company and the time I'm working in. I tried to emphasize in the post several times that this is not a "universal guide to success" and that in other companies or teams, a different approach and strategy might be needed.

The whole reason I wrote this post at all was, with the success of Sean's work on HN recently, I felt people were leaning too far into the direction of "you need to constantly move around and go where the exec attention is". I just wanted to show that, from my singular experience, it is possible to carve out a different path in some positions while still being ambitious and "successful" (for some definition of success).
by elpakal | 2025-12-04 18:02:29+00:00
> Since the data will always be flawed and the test set won't be blind, the machine learning engineer's priority should be spent working with policy teams to improve the data.

It's interesting to watch this dynamic change from data set size measuring contests to quality and representativeness. In "A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size" from Claude they hit on the same shift, but their position is more about security considerations than quality.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-04 18:02:54+00:00
Classically, not all jobs are considered "living wage" jobs. That whole notion is something some people made up very recently.

A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue, now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances... and if it does, the owner has a strong incentive to automate it away.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-04 18:03:12+00:00
Can we use the same argument for all of the businesses that are only surviving because of VC money?

I find it rich how many tech people are working for money losing companies, using technology from money losing companies and/or trying to start a money losing company and get funding from a VC.

Every job is not meant to support a single person living on their own raising a family.
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-04 18:03:17+00:00
The cloudflare date is incorrect.

The cell is based on making it up. It’s suggesting a number in 2035. We aren’t in 2035 yet.

I don’t think these points are good. They wildly extrapolate from some things that are technically correct, but miss nuance.

As one example, in that table, Rust is marked as “pay ferrocene” in red while C is marked as “yes.” Yet you’ll also pay for a qualified C compiler. These are equivalent.

It also pretends that an ISO specification matters specifically, as opposed to anything else. You’d believe that a C++ codebase will compile without modification indefinitely in the future simply because it has an ISO specification, but in the real world, both the specification and implementations have non-zero breakage, just like how Rust doesn’t have an ISO specification yet has very little real word breakage.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-12-04 18:03:25+00:00
If you use deno you can consume dependencies much more securely from arbitrary URLs, such as your own. You can also set permissions for the runtime, though that might not save you depending on the severity of exploits.

Arguably the safest approach is to embed all dependencies in your source, and vet all of them for each release. But I'm glad deno lets me choose which registry I use.

Bun also allows for this but it feels a bit more tacked-on and less like an early architectural decision based around security concerns.
by carlos_rpn | 2025-12-04 18:03:36+00:00
Take a look at https://old.reddit.com/r/FPGA/

Whatever people may say about reddit, it seems to be a good starting point to get started with pretty much any hobby (even if it's just to get a link to another community).

Edit: https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga looks interesting.
by PoisedProto | 2025-12-04 18:04:20+00:00
You put this through an LLM too, didn't you..

Want some advice? Do something NOT related to AI that actually contributes so society instead of just flooding the internet with more AI generated content. YOU are the kind of people that fuel the dead internet theory. The people that are responsible for me and many other people absolutely hating the modern internet. Use your skill on something meaningful and unique! AI spam tools are the last thing we want more of.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-04 18:04:37+00:00
Adding and subtracting Roman numerals is pretty easy because it's all addition and subtraction. A lot of it is just repeating the symbols just like with tally marks. X+X is just XX for example. You do have to keep track of when another symbol is appropriate, but VIIII is technically equivalent to IX. It's all the other operations that get harder. If the Romans had negative numbers, then the digits of a numeral could be viewed as some kind of polynomial with some positive and negative coefficients. But they also didn't have that.

>The notation itself doesn't really make a difference. We could call X=1, M=2, C=3, V=4 and so on.

Technically, the positional representation is part of the notation as well as the symbols used. Symbols had to evolve to be more legible. For example, you don't want to mix up 1 and 7, or some other pairs that were once easily confused.

>Why did the Romans not think of it?

I don't know. I expect that not having a symbol for zero was part of it. Place value systems would be very cumbersome without that. I think that numbers have some religious significance to the Hindus, with their so-called Vedic math, but the West had Pythagoras. I'm sure that the West would have eventually figured it out, as they figured out many impressive things even without modern numerals.

>But good notation is backed by a meaningfully different way of looking at things.

That's just one aspect of good notation. Not every different way of looking at things is equally useful. Notation should facilitate or at least not get in the way of all the things we need to do the most. The actual symbols we use are important visually. A single letter might not be self-describing, but it is exactly the right kind of symbol to express long formulas and equations with a fairly small number of quantities. You can see more "objects" in front of you at once and can mechanically operate on them without silently reading their meaning. On the other hand, a single letter symbol in a large computer program can be confusing and also makes editing the code more complicated.
by BadgerSlayer | 2025-12-04 18:06:11+00:00
If you struggled, why not start in the future, get Cursor with the basic plan and build with it. You can build full pages/applications/tools with it without coding one line. When you got into that start asking cursor to explain to you what he is doing, and he will help you understand wharever you want to know.

For example, I just built this page with cursor in one day: https://convertdrop.com/
by twoodfin | 2025-12-04 18:06:52+00:00
I was on the crest of this wave—I actually taught myself Java and Scheme the summer before my freshman year @MIT—so I’m fairly certain that’s not quite right.

The intro CS curriculum stayed on Scheme until it switched to Python something like a decade after the Java hype cycle.

What I believe did change was the intro software engineering lab (6.170) switched from CLU (?) to Java around that time.
by morshu9001 | 2025-12-04 18:07:00+00:00
Valid JS is often not valid TS. Any nontrivial amount of JS copied into TS will generally not work without tweaks. When people say TS is a superset of JS, it's just some academic definition of syntax supersets that isn't practically true.

Non-exhaustive examples:

let foo = 2 foo = "foo" // TS disallows type change let bar = {} bar.baz = 2 // TS disallows adding property
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-04 18:07:02+00:00
My favorite server which I think is dead by now, Dead Man Standing was a low gravity CS 1.6 server, no footstep noises, but there was a hook you could use to maneuver the low gravity, and the hook made noise, it was really something with those CS mouse maps. That was peak CS for me, I never saw anyone come close to the quality of that server. DMS I will always miss you.
by mattcantstop | 2025-12-04 18:07:16+00:00
It's great to see other people working on this. It's a problem that needs solving, and you've solved it in a meaningful way. I have been building https://spoonme.kitchen/ for a couple of years now (but with a different focus) to help solve this problem and a few others that are meaningful to me.

One aspect that I've been really wrestling with is how can we make the end user experience of seeing a recipe better, while still providing meaningful income to the recipe creators who labor so much to share their stuff with us. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. That to me would be the very meaningful, positive change: that end users get a better experience, and creators get paid. That's been my overarching goal and motivation.
by fthiesen | 2025-12-04 18:07:25+00:00
The P2996 definitely provides a way to work with reflection, the syntax can be a bit weird at first, but it gets more and more familiar. They have some cool examples here (https://isocpp.org/files/papers/P2996R13.html)

This idea of using C++26 compiler just for codegen sounds interesting. Will definitely give it some thought, thanks for the suggestion (:
by wjrb | 2025-12-04 18:07:32+00:00
Congratulations on the work.

Some nits/notes:

- Browser history seems to go in a circle (at least in Chrome); try use the browser's native "back" arrow a few times after clicking through the link you shared from HN.

- Transition animations and element "load-in" animations make the whole thing feel slow and hard to use. As it is, I'm frustrated trying to look through recipes or moving through pages.
by mopsi | 2025-12-04 18:08:20+00:00
The other day I saw Judge Napolitano calling for Hegseth to be prosecuted as a war criminal for ordering a second strike on the survivors of a boat strike. This happened on Newsmax, which is ultra partisan and very pro-Trump. And even they are not always following the party line.

Nothing of this sort happens in Russia anymore. The Kremlin has full editorial control over all media outlets. What they want published gets published; what they want suppressed does not. That's it.

If you can find a single instance of the Russian minister of defence being accused of war crimes in the Russian media, then we can discuss further how the two countries compare. Until then, even the US corpo-infested media landscape remains leagues above Russia's.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-04 18:08:25+00:00
I think this explains at least some of it. In my childhood (1970s) as best I recall, these kids were hidden away. They went to separate special education schools or a separate classroom in the main school and didn't really mix with the rest of the kids. Today the attempt is made, for better or worse, to mainstream everyone as much as possible.

It still feels like there is more autism today compared to then though. I would guess that it's some combination of more people waiting to have kids until they are older, environmental factors, mania about cleanliness and sanitizing everything, maybe social factors such as putting more kids in daycare at a very young age, IDK. I'd say the same thing about asthma and food allergies too, seems that half the kids today are allergic to something, need inhalers, etc. It was unusual among my friends as a kid, at least I don't remember it being common.
by arcticbull | 2025-12-04 18:08:46+00:00
> Most of the products on the market today were discovered by accident and have serious side effects.

Topical minoxidil / finasteride has roughly zero side effects (due to the limited systemic exposure) and has something like a 90% efficacy rate. With 90%+ efficacy it's not a case of "this might work for you" it's "this will almost certainly work for you." It's cheap and it works.

Even oral 1mg finasteride has basically the same side effect profile after 1 year as placebo, side effects always* stop whether you stop taking it or continue taking it. And as an added bonus it significantly reduces your risk of low-grade prostate cancer (30% ish) while not increasing your risk of high-grade prostate cancer. Many of the side effects reported are in people taking 5mg doses for prostate hypertrophy, and the incidence of side-effects is dose dependent. Studies show that sexual side effects are primarily nocebo, if participants were told to expect them the rate was 3X higher than placebo, if they weren't told, they were about the same.

* the category of persistent side-effects has been defined primarily for data collection purposes, there's very little evidence for persistent side effects at all let alone a high incidence thereof. Many of the side effects people claim are related are things that would otherwise happen to you at the age you start to lose your hair regardless. It's good to collect more data though.

> As someone with thinning hair, it's horrible how little study/research is being performed to understand how hair grows and treat hair loss.

Given the size of the market I'd say there's a ton of research being done. It's just a tough nut to crack. There's some good data on PP405, for example.
by mystraline | 2025-12-04 18:08:51+00:00
I immediately started with 'Aspergers was folded into autism spectrum disorder'.

I dont think they ever should have did that.

If the doctors say that "someone is nonverbal, pisses their pants, and needs spoonfed at 17yr old" is somehow the same as "someone who is a professional engineer who can hyperfocus but misses social cues and says weird stuff" - the doctors are completely wrong.

Those are demonstrably NOT the same thing.

And yes, my Aspergers is a super power. Those abilities (many positive, some negative) have gotten me far.
by brightball | 2025-12-04 18:09:04+00:00
Numerous people don’t realize this or that there’s not some simple consistent blood test to say “yep, he’s got autism.”

Moreover, people have no idea how difficult this makes it to properly test anything related to it because control groups are so difficult. It’s why any type of study that claims something does or does not, definitively “cause autism” is highly unlikely.

You can identify potential contributors, but that’s about as good as it gets.

People in absolutes about this stuff can’t be taken seriously.
by deadbabe | 2025-12-04 18:09:09+00:00
It’s not really a big deal to be worth spending so much effort on. Baldness doesn’t affect your quality of life.

The only reason men care so much is because long hair was often associated with nobility and power. Ancient gods or classical royalty were usually depicted with long luscious hair. Society has conditioned men to feel like less of a man if they lose their hair.

But that’s BS, bald is also a good look for men. Just embrace it. Isn’t it crazy that even if we came up with a “cure” for baldness, some men would still choose to be bald anyway?
by fragmede | 2025-12-04 18:09:19+00:00
Hanlon's razor is stupid and wrong. One should be wary and be aware that incompetence does look like malice sometimes, but that doesn't mean that malice doesn't exist. See /r/MaliciousCompliance for examples. It's possible that DOGE is as dumb as it looked. It's also possible that the smokescreen it generated also happened to have the information leak as described. If the information leak happened due to incompetence, but malicious bad actors still got data they were after by using a third party as a Mark, does that actor being incompetent really make the difference?
by rprend | 2025-12-04 18:09:35+00:00
Which brands lose money on ads? Why are they still in business?

> consumers have a lot of money that they dole out. More ads wont increase the cut of money

Consumer spending is not a fixed pie chart or a zero sum game. US consumer spending has grown from $14 to $19 trillion since 2020. $5 trillion in new pie!!

Your model of ads is: “I, a consumer, have decided to buy a bluetooth speaker, and the ads push and pull me towards particular brands”. But that’s not how ads work! Ads don’t just compete for fixed spending, they induce NEW spending. An ad can give a customer the idea of buying, and grow the market.
by QuercusMax | 2025-12-04 18:10:12+00:00
I guess it depends on whether you consider RGB(0,0,0) to be on the same spectrum as RGB(100,0, 100) or RGB(100, 150, 100).

RGB(10,10,10) may be awfully dark but it's definitely not black. On the spectrum doesn't necessarily mean you have clinically relevant difficulties.
by kazinator | 2025-12-04 18:10:19+00:00
Example of open recursion: add a new object type into a low-level language run time.

You implement a garbage traversal routine for it, which recurses over traversing the child objects.

The system is open to extension; the garbage collector doesn't just have a switch statement to handle all the known objects. It may have that too, but for some object kinds, it dispatches their method.
by mrob | 2025-12-04 18:11:15+00:00
There is no scenario where AI is a net benefit. There are three possibilities:

1. AI does things we can already do but cheaper and worse.

This is the current state of affairs. Things are mostly the same except for the flood of slop driving out quality. My life is moderately worse.

2. Total victory of capital over labor.

This is what the proponents are aiming for. It's disastrous for the >99% of the population who will become economically useless. I can't imagine any kind of universal basic income when the masses can instead be conveniently disposed of with automated killer drones or whatever else the victors come up with.

3. Extinction of all biological life.

This is what happens if the proponents succeed better than they anticipated. If recursively self-improving ASI pans out then nobody stands a chance. There are very few goals an ASI can have that aren't better accomplished with everybody dead.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-12-04 18:11:16+00:00
Official posts: https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-neptune/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146149)

https://neptune.ai/blog/we-are-joining-openai (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46145759)
by torginus | 2025-12-04 18:11:34+00:00
> I use to write video games and it took months (yeah, months of hobby-time) to put a sprite on a screen.

I'm not sure how that happened - in DOS you could copy things to the framebuffer. There were libraries like Allegro which came with a million features including sound/UI/sprite rendering/animation/effects etc. out of the box.

But anyways copying a sprite to a screen is not hard even if you don't use a single piece of foreign code - you can read in a BMP file and just copy it row-by-row to the screen.
by dontwannahearit | 2025-12-04 18:11:42+00:00
I think a lot of it is peverse incentives.

There are social (cut me some slack, I'm autistic) and in socialized medicine systems, financial benefits to an autism diagnosis. So yeah, why wouldn't you claim to be autistic, what's the downside?

Add to that Gen-Z, socially awkward, isolated and poisoned by their obessive phone addictions frantically searching the internet "Why do I feel socially awkward?" and a million "Take out autism test!" links later get their answer. Yes indeed, they have autism, the test proved it.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-12-04 18:12:24+00:00
> At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics

Isn't that the whole mythos of these corporate leaders though? They are the ones with the vision and guts to cut against the fold and stand out among the crowd?

I mean it's obviously bullshit, but you would think at least a couple of them actually would do something to distinguish themselves. They all want to be Steve Jobs but none of them have the guts to even try to be visionary. It is honestly pathetic