MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AndyKelley | 2025-04-26 20:17:04+00:00
It's quite simply growing wealth inequality, and economists don't know what's going on because they use mathematical models that don't account for this. Recommend this video if you are curious to learn more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CivlU8hJVwc&list=PLXuOBKrmFY...
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-04-26 20:17:07+00:00
People certainly seem to be much pickier the past few years about only being friends with those that have matching political views. I try to avoid political discussions for this reason... though as someone that doesn't belong to either "camp" it's easy enough for me to find common ground with both sides on some issues so I can chat in a way that avoids major conflict.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-26 20:17:13+00:00
> every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.

To be fair, you and I are involved. I'm on vacation in Mexico. You're presumably also doing something comfortable. We've had, in the span of days, a judge arrested in her court room and multiple U.S. citizens--children, no less---illegally detained and deported.

It's blowing my mind to say this. But the right is clearly using violence as a political tactic. That means there is not only legitimacy, but necessity, in the opposition to begin deploying violence as a political tactic as well. (By this I mean disrupting infrastructure, interfering with law enforcement, disrupting lawmaking, et cetera. Break their cars. Hack their systems. Block their streets and maybe cause damage to their buildings. Under no circumstances do I mean causing physical harm to anyone.)

ICE "abruptly terminated" a phone call with the detained mother "when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number". The brown shirts [1] are here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
by remarkEon | 2025-04-26 20:17:28+00:00
Maybe you are misunderstanding. A single cop deciding "okay today I'm letting you off with a warning" is quite different from the President directing the entire Federal bureaucracy to not enforce existing immigration law. If for some reason a large jurisdiction, say maybe the state of California, decided that it was policy to let everyone off with a warning for speeding infractions, then, if I squint hard enough and ignore a wide range of second and third order effects, then yeah maybe they are similar.
by skrebbel | 2025-04-26 20:18:07+00:00
Because generally, in broad strokes, a good economy causes good everything else. If it's easy for people to get a decent job, then people lead happier lives, fewer homeless, lower crime etc. If goods are accessible and affordable, everybody goes yay. Diseases get treated, lower suicide, etc.

Obviously when you zoom in it's not black and white at all, eg the US has incredible GDP but also lots of abject poverty. But even in some imaginary proto-USA where the inequality is 10x worse, if the economy shrinks, fixing that is going to be harder than when it expands.

I agree with your objection that it's ridiculous to do "everything" for the economy. But wanting the economy to be healthy should be a thing everybody can get behind, from far left to center to far right, even if they violently disagree about how to take it from there. So a paper called "the economist" worrying about the economy sounds pretty sane to me.
by boulos | 2025-04-26 20:18:16+00:00
(Disclosure: I work for Waymo)

While there is plenty of classical robotics code in our planner, I wouldn't want people to assume that we don't use neural networks for planning.

Just because we don't deploy end-to-end models (e.g., sensors to controls), but have separate perception and planning components doesn't mean there isn't ML in each part. Having the components separate means we can train and update each individually, test them individually, inject overrides as needed, and so on. On the flip side, it's true that because it's not learned end-to-end today that there might exist a vastly simpler or higher quality system.

So we do a lot of research in this area, like EMMA (https://waymo.com/research/emma/) but don't assume that our planning isn't heavily ML based. A lot of our progress in the last couple of years has been driven by increasing the amount of ML used for planning, especially for behavior prediction (e.g., https://waymo.com/research/wayformer/)
by HDThoreaun | 2025-04-26 20:18:29+00:00
Voting for the sake of voting is a horrible idea. Voting as a celebration seems bad too. Voting is a privilege that has a lot of responsibility entwined and it is ok to bow out if you arent sure. Politics these days is fully maximizing for psychological tricks so I dont think theres any shame in feeling overwhelmed.

The issue with complaining about non existent problems is that it leads to everyone ignoring you. My issue with that is that when you hijack my political movement with this non issue now my movement is being ignored because of your dumb non issue. So basically Im ok with you feeling this way but dont hijack the democratic platform
by rsynnott | 2025-04-26 20:18:39+00:00
There's a third way; coming for some peoples' jobs due to false advertising and almost unthinkable levels of hype.

Like, there are actual companies who have stopped hiring junior developers or even laid off junior developers in favour of our robot overlords. This is, obviously, a terrible idea, and will hurt those companies, because the output of these things is pretty much crap, but meanwhile some people _have_ lost their jobs.
by kubb | 2025-04-26 20:18:42+00:00
When common people talk about the economy doing well, they mean that it's easy to make a good living. You can get a job, a house, a car and food. Maybe you can even have leisure and a bit of luxury.

When economists refer to the economy doing well, they talk about a bunch of indices being in a range they consider good. These indices are constructed in a way that is supposed to make them correlated with desirable outcomes on a large scale, but what's considered desirable is ideological and the indices themselves are often useless.

When capitalists talk about the economy doing well, they mean that they're getting richer at a satisfactory rate. People are buying their products, and can afford to pay a lot for them. Their assets are appreciating.

You probably guessed that these aren't the same things, but they're being conflated.
by jzb | 2025-04-26 20:18:56+00:00
Having an ID is a high bar when it can take a day or more at the DMV to get one. Right now in NC you either have to book an appointment - none are available for months - or show up like you’re queuing for concert tickets in the 80s at 6am before the office opens, get a number, come back at one, and hope they get to your number. (Source: daughter just did this procedure last week for a learner’s permit.)

The GOP has also closed polling places in predominantly D areas, fought drop off boxes, etc. It is intentionally hard to vote for minorities and people in D areas.

Yes, it’s going to get worse. But it isn’t good now.
by looping__lui | 2025-04-26 20:18:56+00:00
Do you know how to grow vegetables, how to produce antibiotics, how to diagnose and treat diabetes, how to operate a farm, how to build up and run an electrical power grid, how to build a fridge, a TV, a car or a motorcycle?

No?

The “economy” allows you to trade something that YOU are capable of into an imaginary representation of currency which you can trade in return for things you need but are incapable of doing yourself.

And it does that so well and so effectively, that mankind has achieved a quality of life unseen in human history. Children don’t randomly starve to death during a winter, your mom doesn’t just randomly die from an infection any more and we have a pretty chilled live compared to our ancestors 10 thousand years ago I believe.

Yeah, I don’t know what the economy has given me in return either.
by roywiggins | 2025-04-26 20:19:03+00:00
It's stuff, but most importantly, food and shelter. It's the thing that builds places to live and claws calories out of the ground. When the economy grinds to a halt people start to go hungry.

(People do go hungry anyway. We often do kind of a bad job feeding everyone, considering the enormous technological and logistical resources available now, but that's a historical anomaly)
by overfeed | 2025-04-26 20:19:16+00:00
> The good news is that I don’t think that the illiberalism of identity politics will endure much longer.

That's a weird thing to say in 2025 , considering what the US government is deporting people for having the wrong opinions domestically, and attempting to export the identity politics of the current administration via tarde deals with the UK. I suppose one might be blind to it because of their own political persuasion, suggesting that identity politics peaked in 2021 says more about the author's biases than the present reality.
by smitty1e | 2025-04-26 20:19:46+00:00
> As you read these words, you are uniquely yourself, different from who you were a moment ago and who you’ll become in the next.

By extension, a "culture" is a snapshot of a subset of the human population. To be clear, copious physical artifacts outlive people, so the state of the State is more than my reductionism.

But, in keeping with Barlow' Pronciples[1]

[1]
by mindslight | 2025-04-26 20:19:57+00:00
> wage increases have reduced fast food employment, shortened the hours worked, compelled fast food franchises to use more automation

This sounds like all around progress to me. As always, the trick is getting the political will to take care of those displaced by progress rather than stiffing them with hard knocks until their resentment builds into support for more destructive policies like the current Great Leap Backwards.
by drdaeman | 2025-04-26 20:20:11+00:00
> I don’t understand how you can do this and not feel horrible about it.

I don't understand why you think one should feel horrible about generating images in some visual styles. What's the problem?

Demonstrably, it's not something that's generally considered protected - it's not in the laws, and I've got this impression that the request of "$artist/$studio-style art" was generally considered socially acceptable. AFAIK it's also a part of academic courses, where artists practice various styles.

Patron requests, homages, pastiches - all this stuff existed for a long while and was generally accepted (or so I think), the only difference is that a machine does it now, incredibly fast and cheap. People used to hire artists for this kind of stuff since times immemorial. Nowadays, if a machine can do a passable job, then why waste human's most valuable resource (time) for it.

It would be interesting is to hear Studio Ghibli's opinion on the matter. Not someone who thinks they might be wronged somehow (no offense meant, I do not intend to invalidate your opinion) or someone who rather thinks they might be even benefiting from this - I'm sure it's likely to be a multiple-edged sword, as life is rarely simple - but their own actual thoughts on the subject. I wonder if they already published something...
by Der_Einzige | 2025-04-26 20:21:04+00:00
I’m so tired of how when fascists operate in the open, the attempt to throw back their rhetoric to them is always perceived as “weak”, “beta”, and incompetent from the public at large. Feels like some SCP object of right wing reaction exists in this country.

There’s never any kind of “extreme” movement designed to stamp this shit out in the USA. It ends up being kids wearing red who have never done pushups or other hard exercise before, mixed with a healthy dose of spooks making absolutely sure that these organizations never gain any real power.

A whole lot of authoritarian bootlickers in this thread who are ready to sell out their countrymen to CECOT themselves deserve to spend some time in a torture prison like that - because there is nothing else in this world that will convince them of the utter inhumanity of such a place.

But you know, “so much for the tolerant left” and all that. Fuck this stupid, tyrannical, authoritarian, reality.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-26 20:21:11+00:00
> phrasing here should be that non-citizens were deported and chose to bring their US citizen children with them. The children themselves were not deported

This is what ICE alleges. They're a uniquely uncredible witness among government agencies [1][2].

A judge found the father's allegations worthy of meriting "strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process," an act which is itself illegal [3]. That is far more credible.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/court-cases?issue=ice-and-border-patrol...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/ice-immigration-arrest-trial-cont...

[3] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
by throwaway314155 | 2025-04-26 20:21:23+00:00
Right but the reasoning/thinking is _also_ explained as being partially or completely performative. This is made obvious when mistakes that show up in chain of thought _don't_ result in mistakes in the final answer.l (a fairly common phenomenon). It is also explained more simply by the training objective (next token prediction) and loss function encouraging plausible looking answers.
by GeorgeDewar | 2025-04-26 20:21:57+00:00
That writing isn't the only "thinking" though. Some thinking can happen in the course of generating a single token, as shown by the ability to answer a question without any intermediate reasoning tokens. But as we've all learnt this is a less powerful and more error-prone mode of thinking.

So that is to say I think a small amount of secret reasoning would be possible, e.g. if the location is known or guessed from the beginning by another means and the reasoning steps are made up to justify the conclusion.

The more clearly sound the reasoning steps are, the less plausible that scenario is.
by dkh | 2025-04-26 20:22:07+00:00
When you learn of a situation that a lot of people care about and feel very strongly about, it would be wiser and more respectable to not immediately dismiss it. Since you admit to only finding out about the situation five minutes ago, you might not have a firm enough understanding of the nuance to reduce everyone involved to haters without valid concerns. If you dig into the subject a little more, the answer to your question will become apparent, even if you disagree it.
by Joker_vD | 2025-04-26 20:22:07+00:00
Why, again, software in the Linux world has to be packaged for multiple distributions? On the Windows side, if you make installer for Windows 7, it will still work on Windows 11. And to the boot, you don't have to go through some Microsoft-approved package distibution platform and its approval process: you can, of course, but you don't have to, you can distribute your software by yourself.
by Avicebron | 2025-04-26 20:22:22+00:00
This probably exists or maybe it's impossible to measure. But is there a widely adopted quality of life index? Or "fulfillment index"?

Like if someone is commuting an hour working full time in a LCOL area and can't afford a house, that would be scored lower than if someone is working remotely for a huge salary from a various resorts around the world, which would be a higher score.
by benator | 2025-04-26 20:22:26+00:00
On the first point, ok sure - it may be the case that most aren’t but one is. So… what’s the reader supposed to take away from that? What’s the problem we’re looking at here - malpractice or corruption? Just both but maybe one more than the other? Seems like bad writing to me.

Second point - ok, great. Let’s actually structure the article around that. “We think that cuts in statistical departments, coupled with lower and more complicated survey engagement, have made it harder to rely on the data those departments produce”. Great, nice, coherent argument.

I’m totally not trying to get at you, I just think TFA did a pretty bad job of explaining the problem it’s trying to highlight.
by leereeves | 2025-04-26 20:22:48+00:00
When someone complains about "the economy", they aren't complaining about the abstract idea of an economy, they're complaining about a particular economy (usually the one they live in). One could literally be a "slave to this economy" in a slave-based economy, or figuratively in an economy where other people own the land (for example) and force them to work.
by wutwutwat | 2025-04-26 20:23:00+00:00
Negotiations are made because each party is trying to gain as much as possible while losing as little as possible. In order for that to happen each side lies about their standing, their offer, their range, and uses a bunch of dishonest and manipulative tactics to reach an agreement.

If all parties were honest then a negotiation wouldn’t need to take place.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-26 20:23:17+00:00
Comparing a small project like that with the vast cyberstalking industry we call advertising today isn't going to yield similar results if the conspiracy theory is true. I can make a full tracker that drains the battery like crazy but that doesn't mean the smartypants who know when women are pregnant weeks before they do themselves can't come up with a system that's more efficient with acceptable data granularity.

Worst case scenario you succeed, and you've built yourself the torment nexus. If you publish your results, you'll have to publish the torment nexus to prove you don't have anything up your sleeve, making the world slightly worse for everyone else now that there's an accessible torment nexus ready to go. If you don't publish your torment nexus, nobody will believe you. Hell, if you succeed, you might've actually invented the thing! At best, the result of your success is knowing for sure you _could_ be spied upon any time, anywhere.

There's probably a much easier method to know for sure: work for advertising companies and learn their secrets.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-26 20:23:27+00:00
This sounds a bit like it involved those glow vials that people use on torches? But those contain tritium. Not plutonium. And it's beta radiation not alpha.

I can imagine that some officials had some concerns when they heard of plutonium to be honest. Besides radiation hazards it's also very toxic. But yeah they should have just taken it away and left it at that, considering the tiny quantity.

Ps this whole story reminds me of back to the future :)
by Aloisius | 2025-04-26 20:23:33+00:00
> there were few non-British foreigners in the US

People born in the Germany made up about 3.5% of the US population (1.11 million) in 1860. While they were one of the largest groups, many states/territories had large percentages of other non-British people like California, where 9% of the population was born in China. Then you have territories like New Mexico where most of the population had been born in Mexico.

Regardless, the debates for the 14th Amendment make it absolutely clear they understood they understood a child born to, say, Chinese parents in the US would get citizenship.
by JackYoustra | 2025-04-26 20:23:42+00:00
You're fundamentally misunderstanding both the economic research and my argument. No one is claiming wages are "the only thing in economics where positive supply shocks don't matter."

The research shows that labor markets aren't simple supply-demand curves because of complementary productivity effects and gains from specialization, selection effects, and, of course, demand generated by the immigrants. If you have general labor size increase, in general equilibrium with a responsive central bank interest rates will lower to keep employment tight.

This isn't about "long enough time horizons" - studies find positive or neutral effects in the short and medium term too. The fundamental issue is that your model assumes a fixed economic pie that immigrants simply divide into smaller slices, when in reality immigrants help grow the pie overall.
by jdiff | 2025-04-26 20:24:12+00:00
Definitely matches my experience as well. I've been working away on a very quirky, non-idiomatic 3D codebase, and LLMs are a mixed bag there. Y is down, there's no perspective distortion or Z buffer, there are no meshes, it's a weird place.

It's still useful to save me from writing 12 variations of x1 = sin(r2) - cos(r1) while implementing some geometric formula, but absolutely awful at understanding how those fit into a deeply atypical environment. Also have to put blinders on it. Giving it too much context just throws it back in that typical 3D rut and has it trying to slip in perspective distortion again.
by rflrob | 2025-04-26 20:24:26+00:00
To tag on, the economy gives us more than just physical "stuff" (though that's one of the easiest things to measure). Do you enjoy travel? How about clean water, yoga classes, or therapy? What about the ability to post a message to complete strangers over the internet? As much as we could, in theory, do all of those things without having an economy to support it, money is a shockingly good way to give you whatever it is that you value.

Yes, some people have more money than they know what to do with (and, I would argue, than is good for them or us), but I've seen no reasonable suggestions that as many of us can have what we want without a reasonably open market economy. I don't think we're at a local optimum in the fine details of the rules for that economy, but I don't think moving to a whole different part of the possibility space is likely to be better than where we are now.
by alejohausner | 2025-04-26 20:24:26+00:00
This work by Gat and Gornish gives a great explanation for prostate enlargement. There's an article by Donaldson [1] that suggests a connection to vitamin K2:

A large study from 2014 by Nimptsch et al found a strong inverse correlation between intake of vitamin K2 and prostate cancer [2]. Dairy foods with K2 had the most effect (K2 is soluble in butterfat).

Vitamin K2 helps remove calcium from the elastin in artery and vein walls, reducing their stiffness. Donaldson hypothesizes that K2 improves venous flow, and hence might reduce the varicoceles that lead to too much free testosterone getting to the prostate and causing enlargement.

So eat more grass-fed butter, or take a K2 supplement. At worst, you might also improve your bone strength. At best, men might prevent prostate cancer.

1: DOI: 10.1016/j.mehy.2014.12.028

2: DOI: 10.1093/ajcn/87.4.985
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-26 20:24:36+00:00
Um but smoke detectors don't contain plutonium. Usually americum 241.

Edit: ah so it was a soviet one. They also played loose and fast with nuclear safety. We still have 30+ nuclear reactors hanging over our heads in space that will come down one day. One already did and contaminated a big area in Canada, though luckily a very remote one.
by ronsor | 2025-04-26 20:25:01+00:00
I don't. There is no "we," and it's a relatively small but extremely loud contingent of people that have meltdowns over AI-generated images and video.

As for the why, it's primarily ego and fear.

And you told your wife to skip the video because most AI-generated content is, quite frankly, garbage. It's not garbage because it's AI though; it's garbage because the person making it probably doesn't care much about quality.