Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | tock's commentslogin

Perception is reality! Its great as long as it doesn't hurt others.

They were scientific in spite of being religious. Not because of it.

> that I don't think are matched by atheism at its best

There are plenty of scientists including Feynman and Hawkings. These are unrelated things.


I do science and mathematics, and I am 'religious' - I believe in God, which I define simply as the universal consciousness - in other words, I believe the universe has a soul.

Much as how Erdos talked about 'proofs from the book', I believe that mathematical and scientific truths exist 'in the mind of God', ie, the universal consciousness, which, by definition, is aware of everything, already knows the truth that we seek, and the process of mathematical and scientific discovery is therefore simply a process of learning more about God. The flow state that one enters into when working is, in my mind, a sort of communion with the divine, which leads to the creation of great work.

This is similar, in my mind, to Michelangelo's quote about "seeing David in the marble and setting him free" - the statue already existed in the universal consciousness, and this consciousness guided Michelangelo into bringing it into being.

The proof of $THEOREM exists, your job is to find it, and the universe will gently nudge you in the right direction.

But obviously, that's just my opinion/point of view.

You could just as easily believe that the universe is not conscious, and truth is discovered simply by a combination of luck and effort, and that would probably work just as well ^^


>> They were scientific in spite of being religious. Not because of it.

Can you justify that claim?

>> plenty of scientists including Feynman and Hawkings.

Feynman is a good example of that. He was raised in a religious family and went to synagogue every week. His dad challenged him to continuously challenge the orthodox knowledge which I suspect the father himself saw within the talmudic tradition etc.

As feynman rejected Judaism and religion in general he nonetheless hung on and hugely benefited from the approach his religious father instilled on him. Similar to what I said about Einstein above I am not trying to claim feynman for religion but I think he's very far from "today's atheists" if that makes sense. If feynman didn't have his father (for whom religion was integral) I doubt he'd turn out who he was.

>> These are unrelated things

As per above I don't see it that way.


> Can you justify that claim?

Can you?

> Feynman is a good example of that.

"Do you call yourself an agnostic or an atheist? Feynman: An atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this."

> > If feynman didn't have his father (for whom religion was integral) I doubt he'd turn out who he was.

Right. If we are just gonna reach for stuff like this then I'm gonna say Feynman wouldn't turn out to be who he was if he believed in religion.

> As per above I don't see it that way.

Belief without evidence. Hey I get it now!


> Can you?

How could there have ever been religious men of science?

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you. - Werner Heisenberg


God is waiting but not the God of any organized religion - I personally believe if their is a God, we do not know him and never will

An interesting postulate.

Brilliant response. Thank you!!

Turing, Higgs, Curie. All atheists. Religion has no bearing on whether or not someone achieves greatness in their life. In the past, people often were "religious" simply just to get the public to listen to them. They almost threw out Newton's life work just because he didn't believe in the "trinity" of the christian god (note: he was very deeply religious/spiritual and believed his work was proof of intelligent design.) Bottom line, we're moving away from religion in our world because it provides increasingly less social value and causes more and more issues. The way I see it, religion is a terrible curse on our world that only brings war and distrust. If you can't keep it in your chapel then you're an evangelist and your morals are fundamentally no different than the colonizers of old.

> If you can't keep it in your chapel then you're an evangelist and your morals are fundamentally no different than the colonizers of old.

disagree.

Colonization is done by force, evangelism is, in theory, consensual.

If I tell you "hey, have you tried the Emacs text editor? It's great, I love it, I recommend it to everyone looking for a great text editor, if you'd like I can show you how to set it up", that's not the same thing as saying "I claim your computer in the name of King Stallman, use Emacs or die".


The decline of religion is happening in lockstep with declines in happiness and mental health and increases in loneliness.

Also you somehow skipped over the track record of the atheist regimes of the 20th century.


Large sections of China, Japan, etc are atheists. Why do you think it hasn't worked?

Well for one obvious example is both of those societies are only recently atheist (<100 years) and that they both have an absolute dismal birth rate that makes it hard to imagine how they will look like a hundred years from now.

Every society has had gods at some point in the past. Why didn't every society improve then? And China's growth has been very recent(after the 80s). And birth rates have absolutely collapsed across the world. It's not some unique Chinese/Japanese situation. Before their silly 1 child policy change China had insane population growth. As non religious people. Almost like these aren't really connected at all.

[flagged]


> This is your second post in this thread insisting things are unconnected which is of course a commendable attempt to validate the atheist religious belief that everything is random and pointless. I don't subscribe to your religion.

I am not an atheist. Nor do I think everything is random and pointless. You have 11 comments on this topic. Discussion is the point of this forum.

> religion and lack thereof correlate almost perfectly with birth rate

No arguments there. More religious people absolutely do have more kids. I want to point out that poverty/development and lack thereof also correlate almost perfectly with birth rate. Check out the countries who still have very high TFR.

But I was pointing out that non religious countries still had tons of kids before. Birth control and more choice for women have certainly brought down birth rates. India's birth rate is down to 1.9; And its a very religious country. There has been incredible progress in women's rights and they choose to not have 6 kids.

"There's a reason no atheist society has historically arisen and thrived in the way that you are suggesting. If it was possible why hasn't it happened. The idea of atheism is ancient - why has it not worked?"

Your words. I am saying its not connected to society being great. The population being religious isn't why America or Europe grew to be super powers. If your entire argument is that population is correlated with religion then I agree. I disagree that happiness and the state of a country is tied to that.

> I'll give you one data point about birth rate collapse. In the US atheists have fertility rate of 1.2 (half of replacement) somewhat religious people have the rate of 3.3 and "orthodox" closer to 6.

PS. can you post your sources for those TFR numbers? Because they seem wildly exaggerated. Maybe I am looking at the wrong sources? "Data on religious fertility differentials for the 2020-2025 period in Pew Research Center projections shows a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 1.9 for Christian women, 1.6 for religiously unaffiliated women, and 2.0 for women of other religions."


Buddhism is an atheist philosophy. It has been around longer than Christianity. It has hundreds of millions of adherents.

Do you disregard it because you don't think they are successful, or numerous enough?


Technically with Buddhism I'd say god itself it's the Tao, which perfectly maps to the concept of Logos in the Western world.

Counterpoint: I know plenty of very religious families with multiple kids who are deeply unhappy.

In my experience friends and family are the primary contributor to happiness. Provided they are good people. Else its a train wreck. It doesn't matter if they are religious or not.


I also know many religious families who have disowned their kids for being gay - it is not a one way street of great benefits. Let alone the mental gymnastics required to claim to know the creator of the universe

The Neo changes things. Only $600.

It is 800 euros for 8 GB device, no thanks, especially in coutries where many dream of getting 1000 euros a month.

Dozens of youtube video reviews showing that the 8GB is not really a limitation for what most people need to do with the laptop. Heck I saw a review where the guy played minecraft on it with 20 rather hefty tabs in safari open, without any stuttering.

So what is the actual limitation of a neo, and how to they apply to users in that price class?


How much Electron crap did they tested with?

It's surprisingly fine. Not the fastest though.

It's a computer released at the peak of the RAM crisis. Even Raspberry Pis are expensive now. That's just life.

Its $600 in the states. $500 if you are a student. What is a cheaper but good enough alternative in your opinion?

I don't live in the states.

What is a cheaper but good enough alternative in your opinion?

Here is one with 512 GB SSD, 16 GB, DirectX 12.1, Vulkan 1.3, under 500 euros, and enough connections without dongles.

https://www.auchan.pt/pt/tecnologia-e-eletrodomesticos/tecno...


Interesting. You save 200 euros(in germany) but lose significant CPU performance. As long as its not a chromebook its usable.

Maybe you don't need a laptop then, if your dream is 1000eur.

Ah, too poor to play kind of argument.

It's conditioning. We cannot be happy idle because society deems idleness as bad. Just like people cannot be happy with a balding hairline because society has deemed it to be ugly. If the trend changes in a century and balding is suddenly hot then the same people would be happy.


It’s all about sex. Being idle typically means being poor. Try being in the dating market when you’re poor. Being bald means being middle aged which is also a big negative in the dating market.

The people who are lauding the virtues of being idle probably have money, and are of the age where they’re past measuring success by body count.


I have a few unemployed hipster friends who get laid a fair amount because their idleness enables them to go to hipster parties where they meet other idle hipsters to have sex with.

I'd argue that overall, having a job, unless it's a job that can easily get you laid (barman/barmaid, working in a shop, especially if you're a heterosexual male working in a clothes shop with an 80+% female clientele, music/artistic performance) is a net negative for your sex life. Working 60 hours/week in a tech company office, if you're a heterosexual male, is probably not as conductive to your sex life as being an unemployed bum who spends a couple of hours a day wandering the streets of a large city talking to strangers. Obviously, if you're a heterosexual female, being paid to be around a bunch of males in a tech office is probably going to massively help you get laid, but I think the key variable is just "number of potential partners encountered", not employment status.


Yeah poor people don't have sex. Neither do middle aged people. Lmao.


Huh what moronic failure did Anthropic do? Every Claude Code user I know loves it.


I don't know if the comment was referring to this, but recently, people have been posting stuff about them requiring their new hire Jared Sumner, author of the Bun runtime, to first and foremost fix memory leaks that caused very high memory consumption for claude's CLI. The original source was them posting about the matter on X I think.

And at first glance, none of it was about complex runtime optimizations not present in Node, it was all "standard" closure-related JS/TS memory leak debugging (which can be a nightmare).

I don't have a link at hand because threads about it were mostly on Xitter. But I'm sure there are also more accessible retros about the posts on regular websites (HN threads, too).


Ah I believe codex has similar issues. Terrible code quality but goes to show it doesn't really matter in the end.


Yes that was pretty much my own takeaway, too.

After some experience, it feels to me (currently primarily a JS/TS developer) like most SPAs are ridden by memory leaks and insane memory usage. And, while it doesn't run in the browser, the same think seems to apply to Claude CLI.

Lexical closures used in long-living abstractions, especially when leveraging reactivity and similar ideas, seems to be a recipe for memory-devouring apps, regardless of browser rendering being involved or not.

The problems metastasize because most apps never run into scenarios where it matters, a page reload or exit always is close enough on the horizon to deprioritize memory usage issues.

But as soon as there are large allocations, such as the strings involved in LLM agent orchestration, or in non-trivial other scenarios, the "just ship it" approac requires careful revision.

Refactoring shit that used to "just work" with memory leaks is not always easy, no matter whose shit it is.


> it doesn't really matter in the end

if you have one of the top models in a disruptive new product category where everyone else is sprinting also, sure..


Code quality never really mattered to users of the software. You can have the most <whatever metric you care about> code and still have zero users or have high user frustration from users that you do have.

Code quality only matters in maintainability to developers. IMO it's a very subjective metric


It's not subjective at all. It's not art.

Code quality = less bugs long term.

Code quality = faster iteration and easier maintenance.

If things are bad enough it becomes borderline impossible to add features.

Users absolutely care about these things.


Okay, but I meant how you measure is subjective.

How do you measure code quality?

> Users absolutely care about these things.

No, users care about you adding new features, not in your ability to add new features or how much it cost you to add features.



There’s a sample group issue here beyond the obvious limitations of your personal experience. If they didn’t love it, they likely left it for another LLM. If they have issues with LLM’s writ large, they’re going to dislike and avoid all of them regardless.

In the current market, most people using one LLM are likely going to have a positive view of it. Very little is forcing you to stick with one you dislike aside from corporate mandates.


Recently there was a bug where CC would consume day/week/month quota in just a few hours, or hundreds of dollars in API costs in a few prompts.


The people who don’t love it probably stopped using it.

You don’t have to go far on this site to find someone that doesn’t like Claude code.

If you want an example of something moronic, look at the ram usage of Claude code. It can use gigabytes of memory to work with a few megabytes of text.


I've used and hate it, it's garbage.


There is right now another HN thread where a lot of users hate Claude Code.

To be fair, their complaints are about very recent changes that break their workflow, while previously they were quite content with it.


It's entry-level obscenely rich club.


What do you think is a valid doomer warning that came true? Or do you think literally everything that is pessimistic is doomerism?


You're asking the wrong person. I haven't seen a single example of a doomer warning that came true. Can you provide one? It seems like society still exists when I look out the window and the impact that doomers assert are greatly exaggerated in every instance.


So are disingenuous or just stupid? Of course society exists still, but what society?

Only the very dumbest think “doom” is some apocalyptic scene from a Hollywood film in which humans are nearly wiped out.

“Doom” is instead when swaths of Roman citizens with rights amidst a powerful, civically and technologically impressive hegemony, over time find themselves reduced to unfree serfs. They and their descendants would remain in that position for centuries until a horrific disease came through and killed so many of them that the serfdom became untenable.


> Only the very dumbest think “doom” is some apocalyptic scene from a Hollywood film in which humans are nearly wiped out.

So you're all just out here telling everybody they should stop what they are doing because of the doom, but the doom isn't that impactful in the grand scheme of things?

That checks out with my understanding of doomers. Just a bunch of useless whiners that produce a bunch of meaningless noise for everybody else.

> “Doom” is instead when swaths of Roman citizens with rights amidst a powerful, civically and technologically impressive hegemony, over time find themselves reduced to unfree serfs. They and their descendants would remain in that position for centuries until a horrific disease came through and killed so many of them that the serfdom became untenable.

And look at where we are now. Rome has been surpassed many times over. The quality of life for the average living person is FAR SURPASSED anything that anybody in Rome could dream of. Seems like it wasn't worth worrying about what happened in Rome. If you make "doom" some kind of local event that affects a small group of people in a short window of time while trying to tell everybody they should hit the brakes and pause - maybe you should reflect on how these two things contradict each other.

In other words, if the doom isn't that doomful in the grand scheme of things then your argument is just again, moving goalposts. There are clear examples for every doom scenario you're talking about where the world moved on and built bigger and better. I guess it's on you to wait until that's no longer true but until then the ball is in your court. Just realize that you should at some point reflect and realize that every swing and miss is just more evidence that doomers are consistently wrong about the impact of their observations.


How is China bad? Their education system did take them from absolute poverty to #2 superpower in a few decades.


Oh, no it is very impressive.

I mean from a moral and "care about me" perspective.

Yes Trump bad but USA has done more for EU than China.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: