skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In a quick skim, I couldn't actually find the complaint.

I agree (I think) with what you're getting at, but then I reread TFA and I've come to see it from the author's point of view.

That is, reading between the lines of what you've written, I think you're saying that TFA doesn't actually talk in specifics about (a) what Ellen Langer's research purports to say, and (b) what the particular objections to the conclusions of her research actually are. And I totally agree that I think talking in specifics, giving real examples (and beyond just links to dense, 18-page studies and research where the point is buried somewhere within), etc. makes it much easier for the reader to actually figure out why I should care about this in the first place.

But on the other hand, I think the author of TFA is purposefully trying to refrain from "getting into the weeds" as he puts it because his main point is really along the lines of "extraordinary results should require extraordinary evidence". That is, he gives quotes from Steven Levitt about how Langer's research is completely contrary to what he would expect, but then Levitt barely even challenges how she got such unusual results to begin with. I.e. his point is rather than give an unfiltered bullhorn to a researcher with questionable (or at least controversial) results, why aren't you pushing back by at least asking how she would respond to her critics?

So the article is really about "How and why you should be skeptical of unexpected results", and much less so about any singular instance of unexpected results. That said, again I agree that going into more detail of a singular instance would have helped the author's argument immensely.
From my last comment in August 2024 [1], I have made progress!

The project I'm developing is called Your Commonbase, a self organizing scrapbook built around Personal Library Science.

The big updates are:

1. From Fleeting Note to Connected Note with The Entry/Comment Model - An entry has its own marginalia (comments), which are also embedded as first class data. These comments allow your search model to improve over time, and create surprising clusters. See this video to see an example of the Entry/Comment model in a d3 graph [2]. All the connections are created automatically! Entries go from "fleeting entries" inbox (not linked or commented on) to "main entries" which spread and connect ideas from across the space.

2. Using yCb as a creator - I created a Google Docs extension and have been using it to create Zettelkasten's for my blogs. On average each blog references 12 or more books. This is a real use case of a PKM system outside doing it for the love of the game [3].

There's so much more including mobile upload, [[links]], audio upload, and more, but you can explore the Notion page in [2] to see the features I've added.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41347206

[2] - https://bramses.notion.site/Your-Commonbase-BETA-10b034182dd...

[3] - (blog: https://www.bramadams.dev/issue-59-are-inboxes-evil/ | zettelkasten: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-eW-hfRxHEMXE70JO7_PC3Lf...)
The constant stream of CVEs caused by even experts failing to use those languages correctly on the one side, and the much better developer experience on the other. C++ isn’t horrible but it’s harder to use, harder to find good developers, and there are relatively few cases where there’s something easier to do in C++ than Rust which would warrant picking it. In most cases, it’ll be both faster and safer if you use a modern language with good tooling instead and take advantage of the easy C bindings if there’s a particular library you need.
Interestingly, all these examples (except maybe driving/cars) are activities associated with numbing oneself.

Maybe the youth just have better mental health than in yesteryear.
I think text vs. link used to be XOR, but isn’t any longer.

It’s still outside the hn mainstream to use both in the same submission, so that might be biasing the model in strange ways.
When I was in Tokyo in ‘97 they were already testing these subway displays. The ones I saw just showed fancy test patterns not ads, and were smaller.
This author is a very good and entertaining writer. You're really missing out if you don't take the time to read every word. Make yourself a drink, find a nice place to sit, and enjoy.

I was introduced to his work through an HN post last year. I was hooked by that first piece, and I've often gone back to his archive whenever I've had the time to read something long-form for leisure.
I heard a thought recently that went something along the lines of "if any outcome requires 'everyone to just X' then it is not a realistic outcome because everyone will not just X"

I've started to apply this line of reasoning to things like this. "If everyone would just be nicer" sounds great, but we can't expect it to happen.

It sounds defeatist but I think it can also be used to try and reframe things to find real possible solutions instead of wishful solutions

For example: "We know that everyone will not just spontaneously start being kinder. Is there a way we can incentivize people to be kinder when using our platform?"

Yes you can argue that people should just be kind, that we should not have to go out of our way incentivize good behaviour, but unfortunately everyone will not just, so we do have to give them a reason to

Edit: to your "how is cyberbullying real" comment, this sort of thing is an observation that we cannot control other people, we cannot expect them to just, but we can control our own reactions to things.

It's a good thing imo to point out to people that they do not have to take the ire of a random internet user very seriously

Edit2 of course we should not expect people to just stop taking the ire of random internet users seriously either ...
GenAI is set to create a mountainous increase in e-waste
Maybe he's a helicopter mechanic or a million other things you can't just do at home.
> I think that if you're honest with yourself - you just don't want kids, and everything else you've written is an attempt to rationalise that rather than simply standing firm in your choice.

Attempting to rationalize to who? Respectfully, I care very little what you or anyone else feels about my decision whether or not to reproduce. I made this decision 15 years ago. I was adding my perspective to this article's. And:

> There's nothing wrong with that, but it comes across as being a bit holier-than-thou, as if you're asking for people to debate with you, but there is no debate to be had.

Comments like this are almost certainly projection. There is nothing "holier than thou" about my comment that you aren't injecting into it based on your own biases. I'd challenge you personally to consider that your response to my post, perhaps, is a rationalization of your own decision to have kids.

This type of response is an insanely common refrain from people with kids, almost like it's offensive to state your decision not to have them - and is a perfect example of the kind of stigma my post briefly mentions.

I will state definitively that I do not see myself better or worse than people who have kids. Re-reading my post as critically as possible, I don't really see where this could be coming from, either. It's a decision based on my own rationality and evaluation of my values/fears/dreams/etc. Just like presumably, someone with kids may or may not have calculated as well. Both are reasonable.
You're totally right about the root veg (and I assume peanuts counts as a root veg in this context).

I meant to say cereal instead of wheat which would have caught oats and barley and some specialty cereals. Beans/pulses generally use the same machinery as cereals.

Definitely didn't mean to include tomatoes, lettuce & spinach, though. I know those are partially mechanized, but don't they still include a large unskilled labor component? Or am I out of date?
That's fine, but personal anecdotes are also a hugely misleading source of information too. In the time since the iMac redesign was released, I've seen 10x more of the old models than I have seen of the new ones. My local barber even uses an Intel iMac in Target Display mode to run their Windows small-form-factor PC.

HN is disillusioned, but so are a lot of the west coast product designers that expect businesses to buy these on day 1. The majority of businesses are going to buy whatever is cheap and effective - their realistic choice is between a Chromebox and a Mac Mini.
Do graphical games with text parsers count?

The Crimson Diamond is a recent release that is beyond the stellar.
I think the most important part at all ages is to connect it to something they actually want to do, and remove as many of the "artificial" barriers to that as possible like tooling configuration, anything beyond rudimentary command line operations, C-style memory allocation and type finessing. It's easier to come back on that stuff once they have some confidence & context for it.

With kids you kind of have to tease out their motivations. A lot of them default to "make a game" because it's something they know and it's tangible, but once they start to see the potential they reorient. For example I've had multiple "game dev" classes devolve into "pull live sports scores and text it to me" once they realize how possible that is.

I've had discord bots brought up before by multiple kids, so that is a good one too. Generative art is another, or like I've seen really academically-focused kids get excited about just using jupyter to make graphs. The younger they are the bigger the swings between excitement and frustration, and the more your value shifts from technical prowess to emotional nurturer.

When I taught adults it was the "fundamentals of programming" module of a web dev bootcamp, the first thing they encountered there. For the most part these were disciplined motivated professionals and the thing they actually wanted to do was learn web development. So it was pretty easy to connect to their goals by just saying like "trust me you need this."

I haven't done a specific goal-oriented focused class like that for adults. But I think the main thing is still just keep it pointed towards the target and don't get bogged down in configuration or tooling. The great thing about an environment like roblox or I assume excel is that you have the total runtime & dev env right there without having to deal with external tools.
Yeah but you can’t adjust coupling constants so it’s not as generically useful.
Hello from The Land Of Perverse Incentives :( https://support.apple.com/en-us/108047#nasalac
RTP: One protocol to rule them all?
I'm afraid that no current config language is an obvious fit for Mill. That's because Mill is fully reactive and doesn't distinguish between build configuration and execution by design.
People also don’t get the idea of an appliance.
When you study the old AI programming you eventually realize that non-determinism rules and recursion drools. Recursion is great for certain things that would be hard otherwise (drawing fractals) but it shouldn’t be the first tool you reach for. It’s known to be dangerous in embedded systems because it can blow out the stack. Turns very simple O(N) problems into O(N^2) but unfortunately a generation of computer science pedagogues taught people that recursion > iteration because BASIC was the teaching language of the 1970s and first half of the 1980s and they couldn’t get over that Lisp, Forth, UCSD Pascal and other contenders didn’t make it to the finish.
Show HN: Use prompt": Compile-time code generation
Inspired by Next.js' announcement of the "use cache" directive, I spent a weekend building the next big thing: "use prompt".

Compile-time code generation using directives.
Transformers combined with transforms.
A workflow like never before.

(/s)
---

It works by using a custom plugin to transform the AST and substitute function bodies with generated code. More info on the GitHub readme.

GitHub: https://github.com/preyneyv/swc-plugin-use-prompt
Demo: https://codesandbox.io/p/devbox/swc-plugin-use-prompt-m73dsf...
> Ever since reading Heir to the Empire (Timothy Zahn), I’ve been fascinated by science fiction stories with amazing characters and intriguing concepts.

Did an LLM write this? "Amazing characters" and "intriguing concepts"? This sentence says nothing.
> You are trying to force the definition of evolution to be "speciation-by-random-mutation"

How did you infer that? I specifically said in another comment that I'm not negating evolution, just the part about speciation-by-random-mutation.

> Why does the lack of gene flow from end to end disqualify them

This has to do with the technicalities of ring species. I recommend this article by an evolutionist himself, which explains it extremely well: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2014/07/16/there-are-no-ring-...

In short, the hypothesized ring species don't solve the issue I raised because, let me quote that article:

> The authors [...] found, contrary to previous information, that there are indeed some hybrids (fertile ones, since they backcross) produced where the ring closes at the top, so they aren’t really acting like full biological species.

So we cannot be certain that where the ring closes, inter-breeding is impossible, because it has been shown to occur. Further:

> In the end, the authors conclude [...]: there are no good examples of ring species in nature

It was an interesting point about ring species that you raised however, and I learned something myself. So thanks.
Java AOT has come a long way, and is not so rare as it used to be. Native binaries with GraalVM AOT are becoming more a common way to ship CLI tools written in JVM languages.
DRY is a terrible, terrible, principle because it’s correct but requires programmers to make this decision. Which they won’t because DRY has thought them that all duplication is bad. The flip-side is what you’re saying, where there are simply things it wouldn’t make sense to duplicate. I’m a strong advocate against basically every Clean Code principle, really anything, which isn’t YAGNI. That doesn’t mean I think you should create datetime services every time you need them. It doesn’t mean I don’t think you should make a “base” audit mixin/abstract when you want to add “created_at”… to your data model in your API.

I think a better way to look at it than “third time - consider refactor” is to follow this article and ask “will this ever need to be extended?”. If the answer is yes, then you should duplicate it.

This way you won’t get a flying dog in your OOP hellscape but you also won’t have to change your holiday service 9 million places when your shitty government decides to remove one of them (thanks Denmark). Between the two, I would personally prefer working on the one where I have to do the 9 million changes, but I would obviously prefer neither.
Four chars too long, though.

And it's "Section 230", if you were not parsing the integer value in the title.
Perhaps there is just much more utility per dollar in electricity and water subscriptions. People don’t feel bad about them because it’s a reasonable deal.

Let’s say you had to cut a $15 subscription. Is it going to be water or the oomphteenth Netflix clone? There is almost no value in the latter compared to the former.
> The number of rapes in Germany nearly doubled between 2013 and 2023.

Number of rapes that occurred, or number reported?
Note that those are revenue figures, not unit sales. That is why the Mac Pro comes out so high. the unit cost is so much higher that even with low volumes, the revenue is noticeable.
For a long time the best Apple display you could get was in the iMacs. An iMac with nothing used with it besides a wireless keyboard and mouse, where you can even hide the ethernet port in the power brick, makes for a nice clean desk.
I don't like it, but it seems the internet always reacts more to inherently negative posts. That seems to be common across the entire internet, I think that's why the internet doesn't seem as fun as it did 10 years ago.

I'm sure it's just human psyche but I'm trying to overcome it and make my life more positive again
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Nights_at_Freddy%27s and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms ?

Personally I liked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(video_game) whose setting was largely inspired by imagining what goes on inside the windowless skyscraper at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street
Degree Confluence Project
Borrow Checking, RC, GC, and the Eleven (!) Other Memory Safety Approaches
It’s not a conspiracy theory, at least not in the UK.

Conservatives massively cut funding to public services, private insurance for healthcare also increased in that time and private premiums have also increased.
>It doesn't make sense for a whole group to become risk averse to avoid triggering one person who comes in with a default "unsafe" prior.

Sometimes people just need therapy, which is not something management is equipped to provide.
Working on building a modern API management and monetization platform. https://useultrance.com/
Port workers are at war with automation. Can they win?
>The profession as a whole has lost its personal agency to the administrative class.

This has happened all across the American economy, in every business, every industry, every company.

My father was a grocery store manager for decades. He retired and went to be a contractor for a decade. The grocery chain recently tempted him back, by offering him top position (over other candidates, who kinda deserved the position, but that's just how much this company loved my dad, he was literally legendary in the company) in their "show off store" which they had purchased to scoop up the location from a competitor that they want to keep out of the market (yay capitalism) and spent millions to completely re-roof, rebuild, redesign as their premier location, to be used exclusively to lose money in a busy market, to show off for the C-Suite, and to shoot commercials in. My father was clearly super excited to get back to the company, to get back to management which he is very good at, and to get stable health insurance.

He gave up after a few months. Everything is that kind of awful "automated" that any software developer could immediately recognize, with KPIs and useless metrics created by someone inexplicably above you who has zero familiarity with what those KPIs even measure.

No more agency for lower management. Just shut up and follow the whims of the useless nepo-baby who runs your division as it continuously fails to do anything.
Since none of the options there are tangibly more upgradeable than the other, you can reduce your point to "The iMac is not portable."

I bet that iMac M4 sales meet their target, which is probably on par with the iMac M1 sales. And those were apparently good enough that they finally released an updated model.
Warning sign right here:

> "I’ve got a model in my head of how the world works — a broad framework for making sense of the world around me. I’m sure you’ve got one, too."

Anyone with scientific training should know that you should have multiple working hypothesis, you shouldn't wed yourself to one preferred model (which leads to idee fixe, rejecting evidence that doesn't fit your model and even inventing evidence which does). People who fall into this trap start seeing their mental model in the world around them, thinking they're engaging in pattern recognition when they're really doing pattern projection. Their emotions, ego and pride all converge at this point - there are dozens of examples throughout scientific history of people falling into this trap, who end up shaking their fists at experimental data that upsets their apple cart.

It's not that hard to hold two conflicting models in your mind at the same time, or more, without ending up emotionally attached to any of them.
I would be very interested in the results of that as well
Using a large 8K display for productivity is underrated. I wrote a blog post about my experience: https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/y2023m12d15/
A quote of the article quoting the interview:

"How do you know whether you should believe surprising [scientific] results?"

The article comes back around to that question a couple of times, in trying to describe that Levitt should not trust Langur's results because either there's not enough evidence, or the evidence doesn't support the conclusion
Did you dictate this? It looks like you typo'd/brain I'd "centered" into "censored", but even allowing for phonetic mistakes (of which I make many) and predictive text flubs, I still can't understand how this happened.
Set e-graphs apart from e-matchers. An e-graph is a vector-of-sets, where each set contains equal representations of the same thing. What makes it space efficient is that your representation refers to things by index number in the vector, so if you have "3 * (x + 1)" as an expression, you store "x + 1" in vector #1 and "3 * #1". That way if "x + 1" is also known to equivalent to "load ptr" then you add that to #1 and don't need to add anything to #0. In e-graphs, #0 and #1 are e-classes, the sets holding equivalence classes. There's no limit to what transforms you can use, and let the e-graph hold them efficiently.

E-matchers are an algorithm over e-graphs to efficiently search for a pattern in an e-graph, for instance if you want to find "(load ptr) * (load ptr)" then you have to find "#x * #x" for all x in all e-classes, then check whether "load ptr" is a member of e-class #x. This is where you get limits on what you can match. "Pattern matching" style transforms are easy and fast using e-matchers, things like "x * 2" -> "x << 1", but beyond that they don't help.

There's an optimizer problem where you have "load ptr" and you solve ptr and figure out it's pointing to a constant value and you replace the load instruction with the constant value. Later, you get to code emission and you realize that you can't encode your constant in the CPU instruction, there's not enough bits. You now need to take the constant and stuff it into a constant pool and emit a load for it. If you had stored them in an e-graph, you could have chosen to use the load you already had.

Suppose you wanted to do sparse conditional constant/constant-range propagation but your IR uses an e-graph. You could analyze each expression in the e-class, intersect them, and annotate the resulting constant-range on the whole e-class. Then do SCCP as normal looking up the e-class for each instruction as you go.
Great stuff! What tech stack did you decide on? Also what sort of jobs are you gunning for?
I'm not convinced that current generative AI is a good fit for this kind of game. IMO, the heart of the text adventure game is the world model, and LLMs are notably lacking here. It's hard to believe the game is simulating a real place when it doesn't even have object permanence.

That said, my favorite human-authored text adventure game (I prefer that name to "interactive fiction" because I'm primarily looking for entertainment, not literary value) is Lost Pig:

http://grunk.org/lostpig/

Playable online with a Javascript-based interpreter at:

https://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A//mirror.ifarchive.org/if-...

It's a comedy, and just as with graphical adventure games, I think the whole adventure game concept works best with comedy. Even human-authored world models are inevitably flawed, and the resulting absurdity best matches the tone of comedy. I also recommend another comedy, Brain Guzzlers From Beyond!:

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=f55km4uutt2cqwwz

Both these are relatively modern games, written after the commercial collapse of the genre. They were the winners of the 2007 and 2015 Annual Interactive Fiction Competitions respectively. More information about this:

https://www.ifwiki.org/The_Annual_IF_Competition