Hacker News Reader

gr_normon Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

The EA community is generally incapable of self-awareness. The academic-but-totally-misinformed tone is comparable to reading LLM output. I've stopped trying to correct them, it's too much work on my part and not enough on theirs.

gr_normon Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

An absolutely terrible and tone-deaf way to phrase that thought, but the fact of the matter is that most of the world (you and I included, in all likelihood) will not get access to this sort of thing in our lifetimes. Not because modern medicine won't have been there yet, but because our lives (and those of our children) are simply seen as being worth significantly less than a rich person's desire to become richer.

How many people can even afford to get multiple opinions for a weird lump on their back? Or go to the dentist for a strange toothache? How many people can afford to get consistent exercise and eat healthy? How many lives would be saved or at least massively bettered? We already have the means to extend the life expectancy of the average person, and it's not being used. Obviously this is a wonderful medical advance, but it's depressing to wonder who it's for.

gr_normon University of Texas-led team solves a big problem for fusion energy

I'm guessing they relied on an LLM response. That was my thought, and having tried it they indeed generate lots of garbage for this topic. I got a ChatGPT A/B test for this and both options were incorrect (one obviously and the other subtly, due to misinterpreting a bond rating page's discussion of the PUF and just blindly regurgitating the number from there).

gr_normon University of Texas-led team solves a big problem for fusion energy

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=73

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_univers...

Doesn't seem to be true? The LLM response claims 47.5 billion but I have no idea where it got that number from after looking through its sources.

edit: Oh, and if you're talking about the Permanent University Fund that's split between the UT + A&M systems. And the ChatGPT response is way off here as well.

And as the others have noted, even if what you said was true it has very little to do with what you're replying to.

gr_normon Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

You do understand that state of things is metastable, right? If the productivity gains truly are as claimed, then they will become the _expectation_, and you'll be back to working the same amount. Probably more, because management won't understand that having solid abstractions instead of LLM generated slop is worthwhile for scalability and maintainability. Or less, because you'll have been laid off and will need to do something else to make money. We all know where most of the profits will go if any of this stuff pans out.

gr_normon CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

I wouldn't say they are angry about it, just disappointed that there's another mass media misinformation source to add to the pile. It's much harder to debunk poor quality material than it is to generate it, and I suspect many of them are busy enough as it is + would rather do something more productive with their time. Nobody gets into science to have low-grade spats with talking heads on the internet.

I have found that academics invite criticism--- indeed, peer review is founded on it--- but well-done scientific debate rarely generates the same click-through rate. It's hard, technical material rather than something to idly watch while you're eating, which is the caliber of the content here. Just compare it to, say, literature reviews from the field or comparisons with prior work in publications. It's not remotely as rigorous or well-founded.

gr_normon CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

I have repeatedly heard from people who work in physics research that she's optimized her content for maximum rage/anger/emotional response rather than accuracy, particularly as of late. The tidbits of truth and warranted skepticism lend the rest of it undue credibility. Sadly, good science reporting doesn't get the advertising revenue that manufactured-scandal tabloid-style reporting does. I think her critical perspective can be useful, but it's important to keep in mind while considering it that you're being presented a warped telling of reality.

gr_normon Deep Research is now available on Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental

It doesn't have a confidence interval. We can only dream...

gr_normon LLMs understand nullability

Indeed, science is a process of discovery and adjusting goals and expectations. It is not a mountain to be summited. It is highly telling that the LLM boosters do not understand this. Those with a genuine interest in pushing forward our understanding of cognition do.

gr_normon Open-Source Is Just That

Yes, agree with the rest of the article but "open source" most certainly does _not_ include "source-available". This is true regardless of which side of the permissive-vs-copyleft issue you fall on. Being obtuse about things like this dilutes the term, which I suspect is the desired outcome. To be clear, there's nothing particularly wrong with source-available programs; they simply do not rise to the level of benefits offered by open source programs.

gr_normon Entire staff at federal agency that funds libraries and museums put on leave

Israel and its *genocide in Gaza, according to Amnesty International[1]. Let's call it like it is, so that the funding may be stopped sooner rather than later.

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-inter...

edit: To those who disagree, do feel free to explain why. Being against genocide is apolitical, for any reasonable definition of the word. I promise you cannot guess at my voting patterns from this opinion of mine.

gr_normon Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

There are indeed always exceptions to generalizations, as you've pointed out. Though pulseaudio always trudged along fine for me (not like audio had always worked for me on other systems), and pipewire works perfectly.

gr_normon Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

That isn't the denotation of my post; I was not characterizing Linux as a whole, but only responding to your specific (unsound) analogy. It works better for me, for a number of reasons including that above. Perhaps it will work better for you, as well. :)

The second part of your post is incoherent to me, I can't tell what you're trying to say.

gr_normon Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

The difference: in Linux it is a usability issue to be fixed, whereas on macOS it is a feature and explicit design goal to make it that way. In general, I have found that things which are difficult on Linux are so because the problem is difficult, not because the people who make my computer have paternalistic attitudes about my usage of it.

gr_normon Nvidia Dynamo: A Datacenter Scale Distributed Inference Serving Framework

It is, in my opinion (as an avid Rust user!). The type errors from most of the major web frameworks/ORMs (diesel, sqlx) are just awful, more often than not. Usually some inscrutable thing involving Send/Sync. Or some hilariously complicated type/trait hackery on the part of the library, attempting to save me from the former, that I'm never going to figure out.

Great language in many other settings, but not this one. At least not right now, but given my experience with async Rust in general, I'm not sure it ever will be.

gr_normon Falkon: A KDE Web Browser

I removed the Pocket button from the toolbar with 2 clicks when I setup Firefox a couple months ago and haven't thought about it since. It takes me about 5 minutes to change the Firefox settings to my liking from a fresh install. Firefox sure isn't perfect by a long shot, but the constant haranguing makes me a bit sad

gr_normon Falkon: A KDE Web Browser

Yeah, Firefox is quite good. It's fast and gets good battery life. It has the occasional bug, but so does Chromium, with any nontrivial usage. I wish Mozilla would focus on Firefox and on their messaging/what their users want (I don't want another chatbot, personally...). The Mozilla management is the only really bad thing about Firefox, but I'd take them over Google's any day.

Even the privacy preserving ads stuff is like... fine to me. I wish they would do other things, but I'm glad they're trying to make an internet monetization framework that's less awful for privacy. I don't have any inherent beef with ads, besides the surveillance apparatus around them. Whether they'll be able to stick to their core mission with the financial allure of ads lurking around the corner, though, I'm not sure.