hliyan

Perhaps this is where the question of "what is a human right?" becomes important. A human right is not where you are automatically entitled to the thing in question (e.g. food, water, education), but where no entity can prevent you from your pursuit of the thing. Whether the thing qualifies as a human right depends on whether a human can function in society without it. In the earliest, most basic societies, food and water qualified, but not necessarily education, clothing or even permanent housing. Fast forward to the twenty first century, I think now electricity, internet and access to the financial system qualifies. Perhaps in the future, access to machine learning models would qualify too.

Did not realize Pascal is alive and well!

For those of us who are outside of the US, can someone explain why we see things like a judge ordering a 7 year old without legal representation to file legal paperwork? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/15/us/lawyers-unaccompanied-...

I'm not a lawyer, but I always associated (perhaps wrongly) common law with common sense. I don't see much of the latter here.

Once the responsibilities of creating a UI is divvied up between a visual designer and a domain expert, I doubt there is much for a UX designer to do. At least not at each product/application level. Perhaps at an industry level, there may be a need for a small number of these roles to advance the state-of-the-art of human-computer interaction, but it is not a problem that needs to be re-solved at the level of each product. In the 80s and 90s, these roles existed within the operating system companies and they came up with things like scrolling, pull-down menus and tabbed interfaces.

I wonder whether this type of situation is an artifact of the US system of law being focused on codification / literalism / textualism, as opposed to the UK and similar systems where common law or judge made law has more weight, which permits the injection of some level of common sense into situations where a literal interpretation of the statutes would lead to ridiculous outcomes.

I think there was an internet meme somewhere, that suggested something along the lines of: if you consider pain to be an essential learning signal, and that beyond a certain level of wealth, you can more or less eliminate pain, then the cognitive effects of such wealth is like being kicked in the head by a horse on a daily basis.

I always thought that the great filter would be the "lotus eater" scenario -- that species always eventually discover that the entirety of their happiness lies in their brains, and once physical dangers are eliminated and base physical needs are met reliably, they can spend their entire lives in either an electronic or chemically induced simulation of a world of their choice, thus ending all exploration. But now I wonder whether they discover that all creativity can be emulated through matrix math, and they simply stop trying to do anything, or lose ability to do anything after a generation of delegating to machines.

Agreed. It is impossible to make an interface that works well for smaller screens with touch input, and larger screens with pointer input. You will always end up sacrificing information density and precision on the larger screen.

This adds to a belief that I have that UI design undergoes cycles like fashion, just that we haven't yet seen a complete cycle.

What would be dumb is to not discontinue an unsafe product because there are more dangerous products out there.

I feel now there's growing support behind the idea that advertising that (a) bypasses a person's volition and (b) consumes a significant amount of their daily attention quota, should be illegal. I think the boundary is crossed somewhere along this progression:

1) A sign atop a storefront

2) A merchant yelling at a public marketplace

3) A prominent display by the roadside

4) A flyer delivered to your home

5) An advertisement alongside a news article

6) An advertisement that interrupts a radio and television broadcast

7) An advertisement alongside a digital written content (analogous to (5) but somewhat more intense)

8) An advertisement that pops up while you read content (analogous to (6) but more intense)

9) An obvious product placement within written/audio/visual content you consume

10) A non-obvious placement of an an idea, thought or bias toward a product within the content you consume

11) Content that evokes intense emotions that are presented to you alongside an advertisement

12) Content that activates involuntary addictive pathways in your brain, presented to you alongside an advertisement

Whatever it is that you're writing this comment on, runs on something that is written in C. Whatever that is responding to your posted comment on the server side, runs on something that is written in C.

Thank you for this. Incredibly simple.

I was just having a similar debate with someone whose point boiled down to "but the GDP", to which my reply was: what is the purpose of GDP if it does not translate into quality of life of the population? This should not be a controversial position, but apparently it is, and it has been the case at least since the 80s or 90s, which is when I think the word "society" began to get replaced with "economy" in popular discourse. I could be wrong.

Used to do this sort of thing for computations that needed to run in the 10 microsecond range (HFT stuff), circa 2008. Had very predictable results because:

a) language was not garbage collected (C++)

b) we avoided heap lock contentions in critical paths by pre-allocating object pools at startup

c) I/O operations were offloaded to separate threads, connected by mutex locked linked lists

d) processing thread was bound to its own CPU core

That's about as deterministic as we could get.

Was this a glass test tube? I understand why glass is probably the best material for the inner lining of containers that hold biological material, but I'm surprised that there aren't better solutions for hazardous material (e.g. an unbreakable, transparent polymer outer coating).

Does it? I thought only semantics survive the embedding process, i.e. token conversion to vectors.

Somewhat related, but probably more fascinating: a time lapse animation of stars orbiting the blackhole at the center of our galaxy (Sagittarius A*) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF8THY5spmo

In the modern world, to deprive someone of access to the banking system, internet connectivity, or access to their digital identity, is similar to depriving someone of housing or clothing. They're necessities for participation in modern society, so this amounts to a civil death sentence or civiliter mortuus.

The problem with "engineers will review" is: Critical review requires expertise. Expertise requires experience. Experience comes from building. Builders build because they like to build. So when builders are asked to do nothing but review, they will eventually tire of their jobs and leave, sometimes not just the job, but the industry entirely. The lower the quality of the agents' output, the faster this will happen.

In a world of continuous population growth, there is some excuse (but not justification) for running governments at deficit, which is essentially a bet that future generations will produce enough to meet their needs and fulfill debt obligations from past generations. When population growth halts, so should deficit spending. Smith himself, in The Wealth of Nations: "What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom."

Another important story hiding in there:

> Six weeks before my daughter was born, my employer of 13 years laid off my entire division. Ramses had just put up the down payment on a bigger home for our growing family. My unemployment meant he was facing the mortgage payments and managing a remodel on his own, while we prepared to welcome another child.

Does anyone remember a Windows game called Yoda Stories? I had such fond memories of it that I tried to find the game or an emulator version multiple times. No luck. It was an elegant game from a more civilized time where resolution, shading, texture and frame rate did not define how good a game was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJT4sdifLXM

Yes. The user of a machine is responsible for due diligence before the decision to use the machine. Unless the operational limitations and fault rate of the machine is withheld from the public.

I feel for you. We didn't know how good we had it. Wooed by multiple companies right out of university, good salary, comfortable, fulfilling work (some nights though), fast path to car and home ownership and long term financial security. Few rules/restrictions more perks compared to other professions. We were spoiled. Perhaps this is why the current crop of tech leaders are behaving like spoiled brats.

I was about to post this thought on the latest "We're moving from tech/architecture X to Y" post on the HN front page today, but now I feel it belongs here.

I was recently chatting with a friend about how we used to do so much more with so few developers: 20 years ago, we developed mission critical, real time software (trading systems) in C++ with team of a couple of dozen developers. The core trading kernel team was four people. An in-house distributed process orchestration tool (both front end and back end written in C++) were two guys. I myself once managed to produce an entire post-trade risk management system for futures contracts in a couple of months, working alone. Today, I see teams of 60-80 working on web and mobile applications where the vast majority of operations are CRUD, with some transaction/queue complexity at the extremities.

I think the difference is tech churn. Back then, what few dependencies we had in terms of either runtime libraries or development time tools, were stable: the standard library, compiler, unix commands and bash scripts, and some internal libraries. Much of our time and focus went into figuring out the right algorithms and data structures, with coding coming in second. Very little time was spent on selecting, configuring, updating, rearchitecting or replacing tech stacks and tools.

Inclined to agree. I think what we call "car brain" is just one manifestation of hardwired circuits in our brain that detect any (even temporary) power differential and leverages it for maximum survival advantage. There is no way to put nearly 200 horse power at the disposal of one man, without triggering at least some part of those circuits.

(1) As I understand, the first modern copyright law was in 1700's Britain, which broke a printer monopoly and shifted control of works from publisher to author. It also meant that an author and their family would not starve while their work was still generating revenue for the publisher (who would have outright purchased and owned the work).

(2) This probably led to an proliferation of authors and new works, motivated by the prospect of royalties. In some cases, it enabled talented authors who would otherwise languish in obscurity. In other cases, it produced works of little value beyond revenue generation, by catering to whatever immediate demands for consumption that existed in the market.

(3) Obviously, intellectual pursuits, invention, creative writing, art all existed before the 1700. But as per (2), it probably greatly accelerated them, while also diluting quality.

(4) Mass production and distribution led to economies of scale, which meant a larger portion of the population now had access to such works.

If these four propositions are true, then it follows that abolishing (or severely curtailing) copyright will not outright eliminate any creative human output, but will probably mean that as a whole, humanity will take longer to produce the same output. Since the cost of production and distribution of digital media is now a negligible fraction of the cost of the creation process, this is unlikely to negatively impact availability.

Given that the world could probably afford to slow down a bit, perhaps some sort of curtailment of exclusive ownership of intellectual output might be a good thing.