MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voidhorse | 2025-12-16 15:15:56+00:00
> Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives.

That's not how mathematics works. "it's just math therefore it's a true theory of everything" is silly.

We cannot forget that mathematics is all about models, models which, by definition, do not account for even remotely close to all the information involved in predicting what will actually occur in reality. Game Theory is a theory about a particular class of mathematical structures. You cannot reduce all of existence to just this class of structures, and if you think you can, you'd better be ready to write a thesis on it.

Couple that with the inherent unpredictability of human beings, and I'm sorry but your Laplacean dreams will be crushed.

The idea that "it's math so it's inevitable" is a fallacy. Even if you are a hardcore mathematical Platonist you should still recognize that mathematics is a kind of incomplete picture of the real, not its essence.

In fact, the various incompleteness theorems illustrate directly, in Mathematic's own terms, that the idea that a mathematical perspective or any logical system could perfectly account for all of reality is doomed from the start.
by shishy | 2025-12-16 15:16:23+00:00
The idea that the future is architected by our choices (or lack of it) is the crux of one of the opportunity spaces at the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) in the UK.

Worth getting on your radar if this stuff is of interesting: https://aria.org.uk/opportunity-spaces/collective-flourishin...

(full disclosure: I'm working with the programme director on helping define the funding programme, so if you're working on related problems, by all means share your thoughts on the site or by reaching out!)
by JeremyNT | 2025-12-16 15:16:26+00:00
> Perhaps Bitcoin as proof-of-work productization was not inevitable (for a while), but once we got there, a lot of things were very much inevitable. Explosion of alternatives like with Litecoin, explosion of expressive features, reaching Turing-completeness with Ethereum, "tokens" once we got to Turing-completeness, and then "unique tokens" aka NFTs (but also colored coins in Bitcoin parlance before that). The cultural influence was less inevitable, massive scam and hype was also not inevitable... but to be fair, likely.

The only way I can get to the "crypto is inevitable" take relies on the scams and fraud as the fundamental drivers. These things don't have any utility otherwise and no reason to exist outside of those.

Scams and fraud are such potent drivers that perhaps it was inevitable, but one could imagine a more competent regulatory regime that nipped this stuff in the bud.

nb: avoiding financial regulations and money laundering are forms of fraud
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-16 15:16:37+00:00
> In interviews with Vanity Fair, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” called JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist” and concluded that Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the early handling of the Epstein files.

This, mind you, is the current WH Chief of Staff. Not a disgruntled ex-staffer.
by kibwen | 2025-12-16 15:16:38+00:00
This is AI slop in a pretty dress. It's fascinating that space-based datacenters are such a catastrophically bad investment that even limp apologia like this can, at best, argue that maybe it's not quite as bad as you think, as long as you still manage to ignore half the costs because you're a loser who delegated your thinking to a chatbot.
by cj | 2025-12-16 15:16:41+00:00
“Over-applied clever idea” is a good description of the essay IMO. I used to write like this in college. For me it felt good to take an idea and take it as far as possible to create logic around why the world is the way it is.

At a certain point I realized that the most complex intellectual explanations for why things are is very often no better than the simplest and least intellectual explanation.
by yawpitch | 2025-12-16 15:16:58+00:00
> Christ is the anti-antimeme because He does the one thing the system cannot tolerate. He voluntarily becomes the victim: innocent, condemned, killed, risen.

If, that is, you’ve already swallowed the meme. Once you’re infected you’ve got to invent the anti-meme to justify the meme so the anti-anti-meme can defeat the anti-meme… which will lead to yet another claimant to meme-hood, leading to the anti-anti-anti-meme and the anti-anti-anti-anti-meme, and so on, and on, and on, until you finally hit the recursion frame limit error in the human’s delusion-generating stack machine.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-12-16 15:17:03+00:00
> Is that what posting the quote in full with a link to the original source means? Certainly not.

I based my claim that all he had was speculation on exactly the quote you gave. Nowhere in that quote does he say that he saw the devices set up to spy on Americans. Instead, he assumes it. He assumes something that directly contradicts the documents that Snowden released specifically about Stellar Wind. https://www.theguardian.com/nsa-inspector-general-report-doc...

You claim that I've chopped up a quote in order to come to my conclusion, but you're the one who gave that chopped up quote my conclusion is based on to begin with.

> The court documents, already posted, clearly explain the reason for the ruling as “impermissible disclosure of state secret information". If no data were collected, there would be no state secret information to disclose. Ipso facto

Utter nonsense. The government wouldn't say specifically how they selected foreign data in the initial Pearl case. Afterwards, Snowden's leaks showed that they only contained foreign data.

> Attempts to portray otherwise at this point amount to willfully misleading.

You're the one making conspiracy theories out of whole cloth. Instead of trying to use ChatGPT to dismiss my claims, why don't you spend your time looking at what Snowden's docs actually claimed like a reasonable person who doesn't wear tin foil hats?

Let's get back to the original comment I responded to. Do they have access to anybody's FAANG data or not? Snowden's docs say they do not. Nothing Binney said disagrees with that, even if his wild assumption is correct.
by phpnode | 2025-12-16 15:17:13+00:00
> you need one person to work by themselves really really quickly to ship and create the foundations

This is literally the secret of every successful project I've worked on. An individual, with high agency and low communication overhead has either been trusted to take the task on themselves, or they've done it secretly to side-step the approval process and organisational overhead. When the foundations are in place it's relatively easy to add engineers, but starting something from scratch with a bunch of people? doomed before it starts in most cases imo
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-16 15:17:25+00:00
> Moreover, I’m not sure Germany, France, etc., voted to join the EU under the promise to sacrifice their own growth—they have significantly underperformed the U.S. over this time frame—to facilitate the development of eastern europe.

Can you provide evidence that Germany, France, sacrificed their own growth? Unless you know something that I don't, what I see is that you're imagining a zero sum situation which is well known doesn't apply to things like markets. That they underperformed the US isn't not evidence of that. Germany and France underperformed the US in the time period, and in the last 100 years too.
by pietz | 2025-12-16 15:17:50+00:00
People buy F150s because they find them cool and not because they actually need the space. Your Corolla could make deliveries around town in roughly the same time, while being cheaper and easier compared to introducing a new expensive car. In situations you need more space (which most of us won't), you can add a trailer instead.

Interesting, I guess we're on the same page ;)
by maxloh | 2025-12-16 15:17:59+00:00
> List one normal decent democracy without NSL law. You will find the answer is none.

The problem is not about the law itself. It is about how the law is defined, and moreover, the system of checks and balances. In a decent democracy, the national security law does not override the people's rights written in the constitution. The government is bound by the law to uphold due process and to respect people's basic rights, even if the suspect may have broken a law. While in authoritarian states, the constitution is basically just a joke. Don't you know China's absurd history of human rights violations?

> Lai gettign 3 judge speedrun because he's simply an obvious comprador traitor.

A quick search states otherwise. He was prosecuted by three government-picked judges, and there was no jury, which violates the standards of a fair trial.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/12/15/asia-pacific/po...

> And let's not forget this NSL dalying was an failure of HK making, i.e. basically failed state behavior that HK incompetence generated. Frankly that's demonstration HK isn't ready for democracy at all.

Democracy means the people are in power, not the dictator. If the Hong Kong people can only vote for someone that Beijing favors, then that is not democracy. It is not possible to have a democratic system that a dictator has control over, by definition.

> ...that's what PRC did, protect 1400m people from HK traitors...

If they really wanted to protect their people, they would create a true democratic system for the city. There is no reason any western country would put sanctions on a democratic entity. And don't forget the fact that they fought really hard to gain control of the city, only to later claim it is a "huge risk to national security".

> You're conflating disset (speech) with collusion (treason), Lai colluded, which is unprotected speech anywhere.

There are no normal countries that would put people into jail for mere political speech as "treason." Such laws are only applied to acts like espionage or leaking classified information, and even those cases are bound by checks and balances.
by rixthefox | 2025-12-16 15:18:04+00:00
Unfortunately this is not unexpected because Mozilla needs to continue receiving money to survive and unfortunately nobody wants to have the tough conversation about paying for a browser so when whoever is funneling money into Mozilla (Google) says you need AI in your product you have no choice but to jump.

I think their logic is a bit wrong here. Microsoft is a "trusted" entity. Trust doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and even they had to roll back their AI ambitions after seeing the lackluster adoption rates of people using their AI features. The trust part just doesn't matter. It's the principal that we've had browsers for over 20+ years and we never needed AI in our browsers. I would quickly abandon Firefox for an alternative in a heartbeat that doesn't include AI in it.

The uncomfortable truth for all these companies though is that most people simply do not need AI in the places they are shoving it into. Like why does notepad need AI?
by zkmon | 2025-12-16 15:18:16+00:00
I went to IKEA store last weekend, to return something I never needed. Felt happy when I got the money back. But then made the mistake of going into the maze again. The maze led to the checkout counter and I ended up spending all that. Got back home, looked at what I bought, and couldn't find a thing which I don't want to return again.
by vdupras | 2025-12-16 15:18:35+00:00
That "consumption" is such a difficult thing to do is a preposterous idea, since you can always set things on fire. These theories are all make believe.

I mean, what makes american so special in their ability to consume? An african can watch football on their 54" TV just as well as an american. Just ship this crap there instead of in the US if you're so concerned about consuming it.

It's trade imbalance! You ship stuff, and the IOUs you get in return are never claimed. It's no better than shipping stuff in Africa and getting Zimbabwean money in return. Everyone knows that it can't be claimed for anything tangible, except from other countries who also owe fealty to the US and are forced to give this currency value. If everyone "asked" for something in return of those IOUs from the US itself, they'd get nothing of tangible value in return. These IOUs only have value insofar as the US is the world police.
by ben_w | 2025-12-16 15:18:41+00:00
The industrial revolution was pushed down the throats of a lot of people who were sufficiently upset by the developments that they invented communism, universal suffrage*, modern* policing, health and safety laws, trade unions, recognisably modern* state pensions, the motor car (because otherwise we'd be knee-deep in horse manure), zoning laws, passports, and industrial-scale sewage pumping.

I do wonder who the AI era's version of Marx will be, what their version of the Communist Manifesto will say. IIRC, previous times this has been said this on HN, someone pointed out Ted Kaczynski's manifesto.

* Policing and some pensions and democracy did exist in various fashions before the industrial revolution, but few today would recognise their earlier forms as good enough to deserve those names today.
by viega | 2025-12-16 15:18:48+00:00
You can use a 64-bit CAS if you want to use a 32-bit epoch and a pointer compression scheme of any kind, or just a 32-bit index into regions that are thread specific. I think I did the later when I did the original work, using the core primitive to build ring buffers that have arbitrary sized slots instead of 64-bit slots (which requires a bit of additional gymnastics, but the basic trick is to have the ring index into a bigger ring that you can FAA into, where the bigger ring has more slots by at least the max number of threads (I use this primitive heavily still for in-memory debug logging). Maybe at some point I'll do an article on that too.
by devwastaken | 2025-12-16 15:18:56+00:00
1. reskin chromium, or webkit. firefox is dead tech, cannot be used for anything other than firefox, and is no longer a testing target. it is insane to continually play catch-up with companies 1000x the size of your team. V8 is now the standard JS engine, spidermonkey is an insecure time bomb and again not modular.

Brave got it right and then got it wrong with pushing crypto and its buggy.

2. Push for local AI. local tooling is going to get big when we get past the current drought. We need fast reactive systems not dependent on servers. Chatgpt is like gaming on the cloud - its still bad even when its good. Need to learn the meta and understand why people are buying 5090’s just to run agents.

3. Remove everyone that wont follow good engineering or otherwise is using your cashflow as jump. This means no diversity hiring. No h1b’s, no cultural or ethnic political warring. Ignore the fake resumes go for git history only. If its mass firing so be it theres no shortage.

4. youre going to make everyone very upset to get anything of value done.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-12-16 15:19:02+00:00
There are lots of reliable science done using EEG and fMRI; I believe you learned the wrong lesson here. The important thing is to treat motion and physiological sources of noise as a first-order problem that must be taken very seriously and requires strict data quality inclusion criterion. As far as deep learning in fMRI/EEG, your response about overfitting is too sweepingly broad to apply to the entire field.

To put it succinctly, I think you have overfit your conclusions on the amount of data you have seen
by charles_f | 2025-12-16 15:19:17+00:00
> it put price pressure and competition on providing the service

This is simply not true. Healthcare in the US is comparatively much more expensive than countries offering subsidized healthcare with comparable or better outcomes(1).

> it's largely due to regulation and third party payer system

Capitalism can't work in a market that's completely consolidated, and where people can't offer to not buy your service. Healthcare in publicly subsidized countries is much less expensive because it's regulated. Compare the price of simple drugs like insulin or asthma medicine if you need an easy example. Pharma companies still happily sell there, which is to say that the difference is pure profit on the back of sick people who don't have a choice.

My biggest grief against this individual payment system is moral though. I don't see the virtue in a system where kids have to put on a show to receive care. Or anyone for that matter, you'll give to a kid because they're cute and generate empathy, does it make someone ugly with no family less deserving of getting cured from cancer?

1: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
by JamesSwift | 2025-12-16 15:19:44+00:00
Agree 100%. I dont see how this is any different than PR review. There is nothing wrong with "no, thats out of scope for now". If the argument is that this answer causes problems, then yes thats an organizational issue. But fundamentally, those kinds of questions are exactly what you should hope to get out of this process by looping in others. A higher level and greater diversity of perspectives.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-16 15:20:30+00:00
A few deprecated characters, including the Kelvin and Ångström symbols, are in fact canonically equivalent to their replacements and not just compatibility equivalent, so plain NFC/NFD is enough. (It’s generally better to avoid NFKC/NFKD normalizations unless you fully understand the implications, as they do lose meaning and at the same time do not account for all possible confusables.)
by chaidhat | 2025-12-16 15:20:54+00:00
Hi, I’m running a 4-person startup based in Bangkok, Thailand and we differentiate code quality based on priority. We try to ship only clean code on master but when we talk with clients and they want a demo of a new product/feature, we use AI to rapidly create an MVP to see if it aligns with their needs. If they are happy, we then refine this MVP until we are happy with the code through manual review and refactoring, or we even rewrite it. We make sure our data is shaped correctly, hot paths are tested and things are well separated by domain (Domain driven design). DDD ensures us that if the code is shitty, only that part of the project is shitty. Only when the code is acceptable, we rebase to master. I try to let engineers talk to clients so that they learn the most from them first hand and then let them dictate smaller tasks for AI to do —- they are more product managery than what a typical engr would be ten years ago. Do you think this is a good approach? I’m also curious what other startups do too.

tldr we aren’t confident of the code we write quickly but we then take time to make sure we’re confident before we merge to master
by boscillator | 2025-12-16 15:21:18+00:00
I wouldn't be so sure that writing those toolboxes is cheap. You need an aerospace engineer to write the aero toolbox, or you are going to miss subtleties. I assume you need a biologist to write the biology toolboxes. All of these domain experts are really expensive, and I would not trust a toolbox that hadn't been review by them.
by chengchang316 | 2025-12-16 15:21:24+00:00
Found this relevant as we increasingly rely on LLM agents. The key finding—that models lose 60-80% of debugging capability within 2-3 attempts due to context pollution—challenges the current UX of 'chat-based' coding. It suggests we need tools that prioritize 'fresh state injection' over 'conversation history'."
by doodlebugging | 2025-12-16 15:21:44+00:00
In the same way it will be true that one day most of us will wake up unaware that all of our tomorrows will have become yesterdays except one and that when we lay down to rest on that day, we will only have part of the next day to wrap up any loose ends in our lives. Perhaps treating every day as if it could be our last is not an unreasonable plan.
by dale_glass | 2025-12-16 15:22:20+00:00
Individual specific things are not inevitable. But many generic concepts are because of various market, social and other forces.

There's such a thing as "multiple invention", precisely because of this. Because we all live in the same world, we have similar needs and we have similar tools available. So different people in different places keep trying to solve the same problems, build the same grounding for future inventions. Many people want to do stuff at night, so many people push at the problem of lighting. Edison's particular light bulb wasn't inevitable, but electric lighting was inevitable in some form.

So with regards to generative AI, many people worked in this field for a long time. I played with fractals and texture generators as a kid. Many people want for many reasons. Artwork is expensive. Artwork is sometimes too big. Or too fixed, maybe we want variation. There's many reasons to push at the problem, and it's not coordinated. I had a period where I was fiddling around with generating assets for Second Life way back because I found that personally interesting. And I'm sure I was not the only one by any means.

That's what I understand by "inevitable", that without any central planning or coordination many roads are being built to the same destination and eventually one will get there. If not one then one of the others.
by kace91 | 2025-12-16 15:22:21+00:00
>If you've only ever used this type of debugging, you should really try out a real IDE debugger once.

It's the opposite, I learned to program with java for android so a full IDE was my first experience. As I moved to node and then go and ruby I just gradually used it less and less as I generally 'debug' creating tests to check/reproduce behavior.

I do think I should improve my debugging, but mostly in terms of profiling. I very rarely feel the need to see a codepath run line by line.

I'm not saying my system is better or worse to be clear, I've just naturally gravitated to not using the debugger - I couldn't tell you why.