MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-01 01:44:31+00:00
I would say there are a couple different people that tend to dominate with their opinions on this subject in the techbro space, neither of which have any philosophical sophistication in the domain. These are the pop. sci. interloper and the scientific specialist. However, it is the former that are more numerous, and as Dunning-Kruger would help predict, more vocal on average.

The interloper believes in a more-or-less popularized version of atomic theory and confuses it with metaphysical atomism. He thinks science has demonstrated this naive atomic theory-cum-metaphysical atomism. When challenged, the interloper insists that while science doesn't know yet how these mysterious phenomena happen, it is absolutely certain that the explanation will fall neatly into the schema of his naive atomic theory-cum-metaphysical atomism, even when it has been explained to him that his naive atomism makes such phenomena impossible by definition. He stubbornly insists that since "everything is just atoms and the void, man", that all phenomena must be explicable in terms of this naive atomism. Furthermore, he will inevitably reach for some kind of hand-wavy appeal to "evolution" and the ever convenient "emergence" as a catch-alls to which, again, the burden of explanation is conveniently deferred.

Philosophically, most of this is ill-defined rubbish and a dumpster fire of confusion.

Where "souls" are concerned, sadly this is an area where many have been perpetually stuck in the 17th century mire of Cartesian dualism. The notion of what "soul" means to the techbro or even the specialist is no different than what it is to the average man on the street. Some vague ectoplasmic thing haunting a body, basically. But if we look at sophisticated notions like that proposed and analyzed by Aristotle within the context of hylomorphic dualism, we find that a soul is really just the form of a living thing, where "form" is the cause of what a thing is. So, for a ball of bronze, the "sphericity" is its form and that which causes the thing to be a ball of bronze. Negate that, and you negate the thing. Of course, balls of bronze are not alive, so we do not call their form their soul. Soul according to this understanding is not a thing, but the formal cause of a thing. It cannot explain per se what conscious is, as only some forms cause conscious beings. So no Aristotelian would look to soul qua soul for an explanation of consciousness. What he might do is look at an analysis of the kinds of souls Aristotle proposes (vegetative, sensitive, rational), where the latter two display their respective forms of consciousness. Of course, form provides a basis for resolving much more than just questions concerning consciousness.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-12-01 01:44:44+00:00
The exact same underlying software (Wine) that lets you run all of your windows games on Linux using Proton also works on MacOS using Crossover.

I haven't found anything in my steam library that Crossover (wine with a nice GUI) hasn't handled on my Mac yet. I'm sure a bad game exists, but for most games it is seamless.

I tend not to have unrealistic expectations like running AAA titles at high framerates on a mid-tier laptop, and tend to go for indy games, but the games I have run work great.

Native game selection is - in fact - pretty limited, but who cares if it is being run with a compatibility layer if it plays well.
by bigiain | 2025-12-01 01:46:28+00:00
We use 1Passwodr at work, at my suggestion from 10-12 years ago where it was an app on your device with an encrypted on device file you could chose to store on iCloud/Dropbox/GoogleDrive/wherever.

Then they changed to the web app and implemented teams, which is what we use today.

Work has decided the risk of 1Password going rogue is acceptable - but that's in the full knowledge that since they are serving the Javascript that's doing the client side encryption/decryption, there's no guarantee they can't serve (or be coerced into serving) malicious JavaScript that decrypts and exfiltrates all credentials and secrets any user has access to.

Pragmatically, I'm (mostly) OK with accepting that. If we have a threat model that realistically includes the sort of state level actor who could coerce a company like 1Password to launch an exploit against us - then we've lost already. Like James Mikkens said "YOU'RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD'D UPON!!!"

One of my hobbies is recreational paranoia though. So I use something else (KeyPass) for my personal stuff now.
by coaksford | 2025-12-01 01:46:40+00:00
BSD was mired in the uncertainty of a lawsuit over some of their code at the time that Linux was getting started, and the FUD around that gave Linux a head start that BSD had up until that point, so you can't infer much about the reasons Linux's early success over BSD through that fog. If Linux had been dealing with the same problem that BSD had instead, BSD almost certainly would be in Linux's place right now.
by kamranjon | 2025-12-01 01:47:09+00:00
I've been reading a lot of Don Delillo lately and so I wanted to see how Grokipedia page on him fares.

I found the "Critiques of elitism" section and noticed this sentence:

"Reviews of Mao II (1991), for instance, highlighted the novel's focus on a performance artist protagonist as emblematic of this tendency, with detractors accusing DeLillo of prioritizing esoteric concerns over relatable human experiences, thereby catering to an academic or literary insider audience."

But Mao II does not have a performance artist as the protagonist, that is the book The Body Artist. Which seems like an obvious failure of the AI model to properly extract the information from the sourced article.

Also strange is that the sourced article (from Metro times) just as a passing comment says: "DeLillo’s choice of a performance artist as his protagonist is one reason why some critics have accused him of elitism." - so it would seem that it is being used as a primary source though it is actually a secondary source (which itself doesn't provide a source)

Overall I'm not too impressed and found some pretty predictable failures almost immediately...
by anonymouskimmer | 2025-12-01 01:47:16+00:00
Mandatory sonograms aren't about harm prevention. (Though yes, I would agree with you if you said the government should not be able to compel them.)

In the US, commercial activities do not have constitutionally protected speech rights, with the sole exception of "the press". This is covered under the commerce clause and the first amendment, respectively.

I assemble DNA, I am not a programmer. And yes, due to biosecurity concerns there are constraints. Again, this might be covered under your "does no harm" standard. Though my making smallpox, for example, would not be causing harm any more than someone building a nuclear weapon would cause harm. The harm would come from releasing it.

But I think, given that AI has encouraged people to suicide, and would allow minors the ability to circumvent parental controls, as examples, that regulations pertaining to AI integration in software, including mandates that allow users to disable it (NOTE, THIS DOESN'T FORCE USERS TO DISABLE IT!!), would also fall under your harm standard. Outside of that, the leaking of personally identifiable information does cause material harm every day. So there needs to be proactive control available to the end user regarding what AI does on their computer, and how easy it is to accidentally enable information-gathering AI when that was not intended.

I can come up with more examples of harm beyond mere annoyance. Hopefully these examples are enough.
by Ingon | 2025-12-01 01:47:45+00:00
I am excited for having a new version of NixOS. Few days ago I realized that November is almost gone and went looking for when I can expect the new release. And right on schedule it popped out (was checking throughout the day). Big props to the release managers (and of course the maintainers)

I use nix via flakes on my own machines (via NixOS), in my projects (with direnv), on my infrastructure/servers (NixOS deploying with colmena) and at work (nix-darwin and projects). So far the upgrade have gone painlessly, the only change I needed to make is how git is configured in home manager. I continue to be amazed how well NixOS works.

Edit: The only place I still struggle in adopting nix is on my phone. Last time I tried nix-on-droid it didn't even run, but I plan to try that again. Still new to Android (and GrapheneOS)
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-01 01:48:23+00:00
What?

> knowledge actually liberates mind

Okay, sure, at least according to a certain interpretation, but...

> Imagine a mind which truly understands that it is embedded inside a vastness which spans from planck scale to blackholes. It would be humble or more likely amoral.

This is just gobbledygook. The conclusion does not even follow from the premises. You are question begging, assuming that moral nihilism is actually true, and so naturally, any mind in touch with the truth would conclude that morality is bullshit.
by RickJWagner | 2025-12-01 01:48:38+00:00
I’d like your opinion on something. What do you make of these allegations?

1) Romania: On September 28, 2015, Vice President Biden welcomed Romanian President Klaus Iohannis to the White House. Within five weeks of this meeting, a Romanian businessman involved with a high-profile corruption prosecution in Romania, Gabriel Popoviciu, began depositing a Biden associate’s bank account, which ultimately made their way into Biden family accounts. Popoviciu made sixteen of the seventeen payments, totaling over $3 million, to the Biden associate account while Joe Biden was Vice President. Biden family accounts ultimately received approximately $1.038 million. The total amount from Romania to the Biden family and their associates is over $3 million.

2) China- CEFC: On March 1, 2017—less than two months after Vice President Joe Biden left public office—State Energy HK Limited, a Chinese company, wired $3 million to a Biden associate’s account. This is the same bank account used in the above “Romania” section. After the Chinese company wired the Biden associate account the $3 million, the Biden family received approximately $1,065,692 over a three-month period in different bank accounts. Additionally, the CEFC Chairman gives Hunter Biden a diamond worth $80,000. Lastly, CEFC creates a joint venture with the Bidens in the summer of 2017. The timeline lays out the “WhatsApp” messages and subsequent wires from the Chinese to the Bidens of $100,000 and $5 million. The total amount from China, specifically with CEFC and their related entities, to the Biden family and their associates is over $8 million.

3) Kazakhstan: On April 22, 2014, Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstani oligarch used his Singaporean entity, Novatus Holdings, to wire one of Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca entities $142,300. The very next day—April 23, 2014—the Rosemont Seneca entity transferred the exact same amount of money to a car dealership for a car for Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden and Devon Archer would represent Burisma in Kazakhstan in May/June of 2014 as the company attempted to broker a three-way deal among Burisma, the Kazakhstan government, and a Chinese state-owned energy company.

4) Ukraine: Devon Archer joined the Burisma board of directors in spring of 2014 and was joined by Hunter Biden shortly thereafter. Hunter Biden joined the company as counsel, but after a meeting with Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky in Lake Como, Italy, was elevated to the board of directors in the spring of 2014. Both Biden and Archer were each paid $1 million per year ( note: I am quoting a source here. I’ve always seen this number at 500k, not 1M ) for their positions on the board of directors. In December 2015, after a Burisma board of directors meeting, Zlochevsky and Hunter Biden “called D.C.” in the wake of mounting pressures the company was facing. Zlochevsky was later charged with bribing Ukrainian officials with $6 million in an attempt to delay or drop the investigation into his company. The total amount from Ukraine to the Biden family and their associates is $6.5 million.

Are people that ignore these ‘feckless traitors’? Why or why not?
by Libidinalecon | 2025-12-01 01:48:54+00:00
I don't know if it is just the wealthy either.

The retired middle class boomers I know are completely outside the business cycle.

While I don't think they have enough to really be considered wealthy, they have no mortgage payment, a social security check, a pension and most have a 401k.

The business cycle will not change their spending one bit.
by rolph | 2025-12-01 01:49:09+00:00
there is a driving phenomenon, behind feeding a spurious correlate.

The Science Behind Superstition

https://www.thecolumbiasciencereview.com/online-articles/the... [2022]

The evolution of superstitious and superstition-like behaviour

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2615824/ [2008]
by gosub100 | 2025-12-01 01:49:12+00:00
I used Garuda linux, which was somewhat popular a few years ago (not sure what happened to it), and it was absolutely noticeably faster in the UI/UX. I think it's a combination of kernel parameters and other choices all tuned to reduce latency, that add up. sure you could do the same thing on a Fedora install but that would require knowing what all of them were. I'm talking settings like scheduling algorithm for threads, or polling rates. Whatever they did, it definitely seemed faster.
by Jupe | 2025-12-01 01:49:59+00:00
A few observations:

1. I saw the same headline - the article stated that there were record SEASON sales, not Black Friday sales. The headline did not match the content of the article. 2. Record revenue, not necessarily record units sold. To be expected with inflation. 3. Savvy online shoppers may be bundling purchases to reduce shipping costs. Waiting for a seasonal sale to buy holiday gifts as well as detergent, snacks and underwear may be quite prudent.

Finally, increased sales revenue does not necessarily equate to more jobs. It can, but by no means does it have to.
by listenallyall | 2025-12-01 01:50:03+00:00
I think it is more that a greater number of products were heavily marketed by a greater number of companies. My social feeds were flooded with single-product companies and online-only companies aggressively selling all kinds of gear and gadgets. Travel pillows (like 5 different brands), ski socks, luggage, exercise equipment, etc etc. Not gonna lie, I bought some stuff I likely would not have otherwise!
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-12-01 01:50:05+00:00
Yeah, that's kinda my point, increasing the complexity requirements counter-intuitively reduces, or at least doesn't change, the actual level of security provided.

It's a wetware limitation. Not that we don't have methods that could improve it, it's just that they're not yet implemented at this specific point of contact. Interestingly.
by keithnz | 2025-12-01 01:55:16+00:00
Stick with Github if it solves your problem. No particular reason to move off, only reasons I've seen so far is "don't like Microsoft" and "Don't like the UI". But overall, GitHub is the leading tech in this space. For FOSS, I can see why some may want to move off, but for commercial work, it's great. Seems to be a bit of a bandwagon of articles of people moving off hitting hackernews (which in reality represents a tiny percentage of users), no need to hop on the bandwagon unless you have some compelling reasons for something else.
by programmertote | 2025-12-01 01:55:20+00:00
I postponed all of my CPG and miscellaneous purchases (think AA batteries, socks, winter pants, skin lotion, body wash, etc.) until Black Friday "sales". I also stocked up on stuff like Ramen. I did NOT buy anything special for myself (e.g., I really wanted Switch 2, but I think it's too overpriced and decided not to pull the trigger).

I'd not be surprised if a good number of people did the same. PLUS, the prices rose by quite a bit between the start of the year and now. So we need to see if this increase is sales match up to inflation (which, unfortunately, would be more difficult to rely on knowing that that metric has become politicized.)
by adamwong246 | 2025-12-01 01:56:18+00:00
For me, it was the realization that scrolling simply wasn't fun. At least drugs are fun. But there really was no distracting app on my phone that brought me even a little bit of joy, so I purged everything that could be considered addictive. Now my phone is more like an old nokia. It's just a utility device now and it's great to be free on the scrolling. But you have to start by giving up the illusion that scrolling is fun.
by mikem170 | 2025-12-01 01:57:04+00:00
I'm using openbsd on a several laptops at the moment, a dell x55, a thinkpad x230, and a thinkpad x270. Everything works on all of them - sleep, hibernate, wifi, touchpad, colume and brightness buttons, cpu throttling, etc.

On one of them I use a creative bt-w2 bluetooth dongle for audio output, openbsd removed software bluetooth support due to security concerns. The latest wifi standards are not supported on these models, which doesn't bother me. It's not the size of your network, it's what you do with it! I don't mind not having the latest flashy hardware - been there, done that.

I have to pay attention when I purchase hardware, and am happy to do so, because openbsd aligns much better with my priorities. For me that includes simplicity, security, documentation and especially stability through time - I don't want to have to rearrange my working configs every two years cuz of haphazard changes to things like audio, systemd, wayland, binary blobs, etc.
by siliconc0w | 2025-12-01 01:57:07+00:00
It's illuminating to see how the Twitter Grok and the Web Grok differ. Twitter Grok clearly either has a different system prompt or some fine-tuning to effectively evade saying anything negative about the administration or Elon. To the point where it will say Elon is more athletic than LeBron (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...).

This is going to be a pretty big problem with both closed-AI and OSS AI where you don't see the provenance of its RLHF. If you manipulate your AI to deliberately push political preferences, that is your right I guess but IMO I'd appreciate some regulation saying you should be required to disclose that under penalty of perjury.
by coldtea | 2025-12-01 01:57:41+00:00
As per the comment about the book above, "she would use in front of him".

In any case, using drugs is something people do. Whether famous or not. Famous people, in fast paced professions, dealing with fame, use them 10x more.

People also cheat or end relationships and go with another person, often younger. Not even in small numbers, even above 50% of marriages end like that. Passion fades, another person might reignite the joy of love.

It is what is is. Nothing especially bad as far as things people do is concerned, except if one thinks like some kind of prude.
by klamike | 2025-12-01 01:57:41+00:00
Great to see optimization on the front page of HN! One thing I love about the book is it's full of really nice figures. If like me you love visualizations, you may enjoy this website I've been working on to visualize linear programming (LP) solvers: https://lpviz.net.

It's by no means polished, but it can be pretty fun to play around with, visualizing how the iterates of different LP algorithms (described in sections 11, 12 of the book) react to changes in the feasible region/objective, by just dragging the vertices/constraints around.

If you go to https://lpviz.net/?demo it will draw a polytope for you, and click around the interface to show off some of the features. I'm constantly chipping away at it in my free time, I welcome any feedback and suggestions!
by dabockster | 2025-12-01 01:58:17+00:00
> In my experience, distributions changing the defaults and customizations seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

Which makes each and every one of those totally different operating systems that can run similar code to each other. We need to stop thinking of these as Linux "distros" and start thinking of these as totally separate and distinct operating systems that are based around the Linux kernel. Sort of like a business cooperative model.
by Zerot | 2025-12-01 01:59:31+00:00
> Why is that good advice? If that thing is eventually supposed to do the most tricky coding tasks, and already a year ago could have won a medal at the informatics olympics, then why wouldn't it eventually be able to tell if I'm using 2 or 4 spaces and format my code accordingly? Either it's going to change the world, then this is a trivial task, or it's all vaporware, then what are we even discussing..

This is the exact reason for the advice: The LLM already is able to follow coding conventions by just looking at the surrounding code which was already included in the context. So by adding your coding conventions to the claude.md, you are just using more context for no gain.

And another reason to not use an agent for linting/formatting(i.e. prompting to "format this code for me") is that dedicated linters/formatters are faster and only take maybe a single cent of electricity to run whereas using an LLM to do that job will cost multiple dollars if not more.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-12-01 01:59:57+00:00
The beauty of "nobody knows you're a dog" was that the world would take seriously, for example, a precocious 14 year old so long as her ideas were brilliant enough.

The reality of "nobody knows you're a dog" is that the world takes seriously a precocious 14 year old even if her ideas are completely absurd, provided she has 100K followers.

Many of the world's most influential minds are dogs now; the masses have trouble distinguishing between reason and dog shit.
by csa | 2025-12-01 02:00:29+00:00
> I don’t understand this thing you do in the US of forcing you to do completely unrelated courses.

The framework for the current curriculum was developed when maybe 2% of the country went to college. The curriculum was meant to be broad, and it was meant to teach people how to think. It was not designed to train the students to do a specific job other than “lead” or “go to grad school and specialize”.

And the high school curriculum is just as bad. It was designed for a time when 4% of a cohort went to high school. Half of those went to a 4-year school and the other half went to 2-year schools. The other 96% didn’t go to high school. That’s why we have some oddities like required 4 years of literature in high school. Nothing wrong with literature, but it’s not really appropriate (at least as currently taught) for a mass audience, imho.
by aorloff | 2025-12-01 02:00:34+00:00
I gotta tell you man, if you can find someone in charge at the backend of the Home Depot and let them hire you as a systems uptime troubleshooter you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold.

I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week and let me tell you, they have a major systems problem that is making their operations look like a joke
by LexiMax | 2025-12-01 02:01:17+00:00
I have to interact with bitbucket on a daily basis. My advice is not just "no" but "heck no."

Bitbucket is slow to push to and pull from. From a reliability standpoint I have far more issues with Bitbucket than Github. The web UI feels completely off in a way that's hard to describe if you've never used it - it's like it was created as an afterthought or a skin on an older system, without any sort of craftsmanship behind it. There's also no source code search.

There's probably more, but quite honestly I try and stay out of the web interface of my bitbucket repos as much as humanly possible, so I shall stay happily ignorant of the rest. It's a shame, because I remember Bitbucket when it was the Github for Mercurial with a decent (if derivative) interface, and they allowed you to have private repositories without paying money.

Now, Bitbucket no longer supports Mercurial and Github gives you private repositories. Given those realities, why anybody would ever choose Bitbucket in TYOOL 2025 is beyond my ken.