MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-04-16 12:28:22+00:00
Ironically, this entire article is AI generated slop (presumably with some editing). The author admits it:

> This article was written in collaboration with AI.

If you didn’t catch on, this is a newly created HN account posting a link to a newly created Substack which has newly created LLM slop. It’s ironic that the content is about children getting immediate satisfaction from LLMs telling them what they want to hear, because that’s what’s happening in this article.

I suspected it was AI generated because it followed the pattern I see from LLM-promoted debate arguments: It puts forward a conjecture, treats it as fact, provides no evidence or support, and then circles around the conjecture for paragraph after paragraph in hopes that the reader will accept it as true.

This content is effective for hooking people who already believe something to be true because it mirrors the result they want to see. Do any critical thinking on the article and you see that the arguments are effectively circular: They only make sense if you presume the premise to be true from the start. It’s as though the LLM has become good at taking a belief and doing a style transfer to rewrite it in the form of an argument, but it can’t actually fill in the parts of the argument.

The suggestion in the middle that we start deliberately training AI to be imperfect should have also been a giveaway that this article wasn’t serious
by nyeah | 2025-04-16 12:29:30+00:00
Fine, we underestimate the difficulty. But we can make a detailed plan like other countries do. The US has massive advantages. Just no longer so massive that we can expect to win on sheer awesomeness.

I feel like we in the US have a horrible split evaluation of ourselves: either we're supreme or we're doomed. Both sides of that split are emotional states, not useful facts.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-04-16 12:29:31+00:00
I’ve posted this before, but I think the reason house prices are expensive in the UK is that they are an asset. If the rich can buy that asset and make a return, they will buy it. So price equilibrium is where rents are at an absolute maximum that can be born by tenants. As the price is determined the potential yield, the price then rises as high as possible.

Building more houses won’t change this situation until the number of houses is greater than the number of tenants. At the point where the number of tenants equals the housing supply, the returns can still be made and prices will be bid up.

The problem is that is a competition between the rich buying as an asset vs the rest of us buying as a home. The only solutions are to reduce or eliminate the possible returns for the rich.

And as posted if the prices are then allowed to fall, the whole economy is in danger, because it is based on the creation of illusory wealth via asset inflation. Remortgaging a house that has risen in price feeds money into the economy, despite no wealth actually being created. And the entire economy is based on this, because the rest of the economy has been destroyed by neoliberalism.
by chongli | 2025-04-16 12:29:46+00:00
This process began long before AI was a consumer thing. For example, I’ve long preferred text messages over phone or video calls.

I think a lot of it has to do with the attention economy. Our attentions are so occupied by social media and we are so accustomed to its rapid feedback and endless stream of novelty that we get frustrated and annoyed by the slow speed of communication with other people. So often I find my attention wandering while someone slowly explains something to me and they will often notice and be offended or hurt by it. These interactions make relationships difficult to maintain and I don’t really know what to do about it!
Show HN - Twirly AI – Instant AI email replies, in one click
by TwirlyAI | 2025-04-16 12:29:53+00:00
Twirly AI is a Chrome extension that saves you hours of email time. It reads your incoming emails and generates instant replies you can send in one click. You can also customize responses to sound more formal, technical, or detailed—no typing required.

I built Twirly out of frustration with repetitive emailing at work. I found myself rewriting the same kind of responses over and over. Twirly uses AI to write responses that actually sound human—like something you’d send, not robotic templates.

Whether you're handling client communication, internal updates, or just clearing inbox clutter, Twirly makes the whole process way faster and smoother.
by schmorptron | 2025-04-16 12:29:57+00:00
Don't have kids myself, but as a source, I was once a child. Isn't the big problem then even if you do limit the time, it then becomes an even bigger want because we always want what we can't have? What's your experience with this?

I've seen a twitter thread where a woman described conditioning her son to find screens boring at an early age by only showing slow train riding footage on screens around the house at all times when the kid was around, which is interesting. I wonder if that'd work well in general or just for that one specific child. It'd probably fall apart as soon as the child gets introduced to the fact that cool dopamine hacking content does exist on screens?
by djoldman | 2025-04-16 12:30:06+00:00
I looked for a source for this statement in the article:

> Granting permission takes the median hectare of land from £20,000 to £2.4 million - a 139x uplift.

I couldn't find one. However, I did run into some interesting viewpoints by a certain Paul Cheshire, Professor Emeritus of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics... "one of the world’s pre-eminent housing economists"

He has this to say about "Green Belts":

> Britain imposed its first Green Belt in 1955 and now, if re-zoned for building, farmland at the built edge of London has an 800-fold mark-up. There was no secular trend in housing land prices in Britain until the mid-1950s, but after Green Belts were imposed real prices increased some 15-fold. More than houses because you can substitute land out of house production. There is a similar pattern in Canada, New Zealand or the West and East coasts of the United States where policies restrict land supply.

https://www.newgeography.com/content/006358-lse-economist-pa...
by bitexploder | 2025-04-16 12:30:27+00:00
What the cows eat matters for how milk tastes too. Cows can get sick. Udders can get infections. Milking processes (machinery) and its ease of cleaning can vary. Bacteria is everywhere. Pasteurization is a cheap, effective and has no real drawbacks. This whole raw milk thing is just silly and has become political for some silly reason.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-16 12:30:29+00:00
>Authoritarian - leaves people alone in general as long as they stay out of politics.

Directly, yes, but their policies still affect people.

For example, if an authoritarian leaders enacts economic decisions that damage the economy everyone is affected.

If I pay more for goods and services due to Tariffs aren't I being forced to participate in the leader's political goals?
by lm28469 | 2025-04-16 12:31:18+00:00
You're essentially talking to yourself while the GUI make it feels like you're talking to a anthropomorphised third party. That's why so many people with mental issues absolutely love these LLMs, they tell you what you want to hear, or something vague enough that you can interpret it your way, and it'll never every judge you, because it can't. But does it actually solve anything or pushes you deeper in your hole ?

> if machine is better?

Define "better" ? What are we measuring ? Instant self gratification ? Long term emotional independence ?
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-04-16 12:31:18+00:00
The tech industry is going through a difficult time now with neurodivergent people. They really want to make use of the gifts of neurodivergent people to make them money but the neurodivergent often struggle to deal with the ever changing social rules of the modern workplace. Training programs tend to be ineffective because the rules are in constant flux and are often non-specific as to allow them to be interpreted in whatever way benefits those enforcing them.

Companies are slowly discovering that their ability to produce and operate is decaying from the inside by these types of policies. Rather than course correcting, many instead want to enshrine their hostile policies into law so all companies will be similarly hobbled. There have even been attempts to get companies delisted from stock exchanges for not going this route. It seems like there is some awareness in companies that this is harmful to the ability to function but there's no desire to undo the errors, with spreading the errors to all being the preferred solution.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-16 12:32:04+00:00
I find it annoying that you think the other choice was “offshoring is great.” Spending on US factory construction surged under Biden. This was largely due to stuff like the IRA and the CHIPS Act. If voters had made different choices in November 2024, in Congress as well as the Presidency, I think we could have had even more aggressive industrial policy — instead of this absolute shitshow that will permanently damage the US’s economic position.

On the other hand, I am a believer in the idea that voters get the government they deserve. So maybe we deserve this.
by loudmax | 2025-04-16 12:32:22+00:00
Viktor Orban's Hungary is illiberal. North Korea is a dictatorship. One is bad, the other is worse.

The danger of conflating the two is that you're setting people up for false expectations. If you go around telling people that Hungary is a dictatorship just like North Korea, and then they visit Hungary, they might away with the notion that Orban is not so bad. Nobody is starving, and they won't happen to notice the reporters in prison. You run the danger of undermining your own credibility.
by FiddlerClamp | 2025-04-16 12:32:23+00:00
As a kid, the main thing that never occurred to me was 'why' - why were they holding this contest? Why offer this service for 'free'? Etc. Once I realized that generally businesses don't do things out of the goodness of their hearts, it was a lot easier to find the business reason and incentive behind their behavior.

The question is whether this can be taught without turning kids into cynics.
by agomez314 | 2025-04-16 12:32:24+00:00
I love his statement about trade-offs - there’s never an end all solution to things and we must be vigilant to what the tradeoffs are in the technologies we use. My belief is that our (including myself) instinct is to rush ahead with what’s shiny and new, monetize it and forget about the wake of destruction you’ve just left in your path. Looking at the results of social media, online shopping and AI makes me believe this is the case for them too. With the exception of say, 20% of its applications where it has made things genuinely “better” (there can be a whole different discussion what better means). It’s strange to me that this message about trade-offs is not discussed more often by engineers, who are trained to look at these as a habit. If this were true, it would be engineers who would be the first to assess what are the disadvantages of applying AI - either to the product or perhaps to society. Can we have a broader discussion about the things we lose out when we use AI in our cars? As our educators? As our girlfriends/boyfriends?
by maratc | 2025-04-16 12:32:25+00:00
> what’s bad about this?

What's bad about this is when these children would need to fit inside a certain circle with other people, who don't behave like machines do. Circle like school, work, or family. These children might have issues accommodating there.

You may then ask, "maybe humans don't need schools, work, or families," but that would be a different conversation.
by bluGill | 2025-04-16 12:32:31+00:00
I think the main difference is fresh. When I was in high school I stayed with a dairy farmer who brought in a jug of milk from the tank for breakfast after milking the cows. After that I can't drink regular milk.

Pasteurization does affect taste though. Around me there are two different dairies, one does regular pasteurization and one does vat pasteurization and I can tell the difference. There is ultra pasteurization which is just gross. I've never put unpasteurized head to head against equally fresh pasteurized though, and given what I now know I'm not going to.
by thowaway7564902 | 2025-04-16 12:32:39+00:00
CAREFUL - it could very well be an attempt to get you to download malware.

- As pointed out by constantcrying, this was published by Trendsnewsline, "an Indian right wing conspiracy news website": https://archive.ph/8RGAb

- New account Sonnigeszeug encouraging downloading of the archive

I'd recommend you avoid downloading anything unless you understand the potential consequences. Ideally do so in a sandboxed environment.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-16 12:32:49+00:00
No it isn't. I have plans to meet people I originally connected with on Bluesky in person. I have received physical mail from people on the other side of the world that I connected with on Bluesky. I connected a person I met on their with my mother due to related personal struggles. Making this claim is really weird when you don't know anything about me or my friends.
by simiones | 2025-04-16 12:33:13+00:00
That is irrelevant. All TCP connections start as a TCP SYN, that can be trivially intercepted and MITMd by anyone. So, if you don't have an out-of-band reason to trust the server certificate (such as trust in the CA that PKI defines, or knowing the signature of the server certificate), you can never be sure your TLS session is secure, regardless of the level of encryption you're using.
Show HN: Landing Lab – A growing collection of landing page templates
by drdruide | 2025-04-16 12:33:15+00:00
I've gathered the landing pages I've built over time and am adding new one every week.

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by phdelightful | 2025-04-16 12:33:39+00:00
The article goes on to say what the author thinks is bad about this:

> We’re not raising emotionally intelligent kids. We’re raising kids to navigate human unpredictability as if it’s a design flaw. Because when you grow up with a machine that always gets you, messy human behavior feels broken. We’re not preparing kids to handle people.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with escaping into fantasy in the right time and place, but young kids (and even well-adjusted adults) can have problems self-moderating and letting fantasy substitute for engaging with reality.
by spacephysics | 2025-04-16 12:33:46+00:00
My theory is it’ll make children more anxious when the cookie-cutter nearly perfect schema is broken.

We need rough edges, we need some level of inconsistency.

If a child is grown up on machine, they’ll prefer machine for friends, dating, colleagues.

We’re already seeing a subset of the population who are less physically social turn to AI to fill the gap. Not necessarily a bad thing for adults, but preferring machine over humans in place of friends during a childs most formidable years is a recipe for societal disaster.
by futureshock | 2025-04-16 12:34:27+00:00
This is a great moment to go read one of my favorite Neal Stephenson books, Diamond Age. Most of the book’s theme deals with nanotechnology, but a very significant element is The Primer, a book that has enough AI to raise a child. The Primer is benevolent and is a good depiction of what AI driven education might be capable of. Stephenson’s book is a product of the 90’s and there’s a lot of techno-optimism. I always hope for the optimists to win the day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
by wavemode | 2025-04-16 12:34:31+00:00
This is kind of bug unit tests don't catch. The only way to exhaustively test that you're handling every possible input, is to loop over every possible input (which may tend to infinity).

Therein lies the importance of runtime assertions (so we can sanity check that parsing actually succeeded rather than silently failing) and monitoring (so we can sanity check that, for example, we don't ever go 24 hours without receiving data from the parsing job).
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-16 12:34:50+00:00
> And what’s bad about this? Maybe humans need to rethink their behavior if machine is better?

What is bad about this is that we exist in a real world, with other imperfect humans that we need to learn to interact with, and sometimes very tough social situations we will have to learn to navigate

Children who are overly coddled and never challenged grow up to become insecure, entitled adults. They expect everything to continue coddling them forever

> A calm voice that never judges

If you are never judged, you never improve
by tialaramex | 2025-04-16 12:34:57+00:00
Not really desperation, it's just easier. Sometimes this is where perf doesn't matter, any choice would be fine, a linked list of the up to 4 Doodads won't be meaningfully worse or better than a growable array of the 4 Doodads, or I dunno, a HashMap from index to each of the four Doodads. Stop worrying about it and focus on the real problem.

In larger C software sometimes a use of linked lists is costing meaningful performance and a growable array type would be a huge win - but the other side of the coin is that sometimes in these perf critical environments a linked list actually is the right choice, and a C programmer might luck into that since it was the first tool to hand while say a C++ or Rust programmer might take longer to realise that this data structure is the best option.
by pama | 2025-04-16 12:35:12+00:00
This smells like a quick attempt to enable phishing for vulnerabilities, and not a legit way to make progress. The comment is from a person that runs a security startup and the site is a google site that people can report to google as a scam. (Edit: downvote as you like it— perhaps my language was too harsh to help make the point clear. It is interesting how easy non-sec people fall for names and quotes and authority.. building trust does not come overnight, in fact it is never fully there, and infosec experts would not fall for such supply chain redirections with questionable future. Hopefully we will not have to test this idea soon, though some level of reliability and long-term automation would be welcome. We need technical, generally agreed upon systems, not a “foundation”).
by rckt | 2025-04-16 12:35:31+00:00
For me the bigger elephant in the room is how aggressively the AI is being pushed into every service. And it's always a money-drive decision, because those who push it have a clear understanding of the current state of the AI and how really unreliable it is. But they still push it, because of the investors and trends.

As for the kids, I think it doesn't matter whether it is a TV, a tablet or an AI something. It's simply either an educational/developing interaction or not. You just need to have control over it and have limits for things like this. It's the same challenge, but simply in a new form. Kids love doing interesting things, so parents just need to stop being lazy and find good ways for their children to spend time.
by cjs_ac | 2025-04-16 12:35:36+00:00
I started my teaching career in 2015 and ended it in 2021, and I saw all the same things then. This phenomenon has little to do with AI, and is a consequence of societies and economies becoming ever more systems-oriented.

The Rationalist and Dark Enlightenment movements are just the start of what will become an ever-increasing wave of people claiming to have solved all of society's problems from first principles, and we're going to have to spend ever more energy explaining that reality has a surprising amount of detail.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-16 12:35:43+00:00
I'm not convinced that you can have one without the other.

A dictatorship is when you have a leader or group of leaders with almost no limitations on their power. That would seem to apply to both Hungary and North Korea (and also the U.S. if the courts are powerless to enforce law abidance by the leader).

I suppose that I consider illiberal "democracies" to be a flavour of dictatorships.
by jp57 | 2025-04-16 12:35:43+00:00
This is a plausible narrative, but whether it is actually happening is a completely unsupported assertion. It doesn't even have anecdotal examples of cases showing this happening in the real world.

Also: This article was written in collaboration with AI. The tool helped shape the words—but the questions, the direction, and the discomfort it carries are human. Oh the irony.
by Blikkentrekker | 2025-04-16 12:35:47+00:00
> This is a pretty good take! It's because you could verbally attack and fight the 4chan idiots with a swarm of common sense and be lauded for doing that job.

This is actually a big reason why 4chan never messed with my sanity and blood pressure opposed to say Reddit or Twitter. It feels like on 4chan there are some people who are completely off the rails, but they can be insulted and called out. On Reddit or Twitter, it feels like almost everyone is “somewhat of the rails” and they all concentrate among each other, as in almost every Subreddit has some collectively held belief that simply appears as nonsensical to people outside of it, but as much as politely disagreeing will get one blocked by that specific user in many cases, or just banned from the subreddit so it's far more obnoxious. Also, it feels like arguing against an endless current whereas at best on 4chan it's two waves that clash into each other of even size.

4chan is “arguing against an idiot”, Reddit and Twitter becomes “arguing against idiots, being surrounded by them, and very often not even really being allowed to argue lest one be banned”. It's a very frustrating experience that makes one's blood boil.
by littlestymaar | 2025-04-16 12:35:52+00:00
> The US debt is starting to become an existential problem.

It is not existential except for the financial markets, because they need safe securities: remove US bonds and modern finance grinds to halt.

US debt is high just because the US government decided in the 80s that they will start borrowing money from the rich instead of taxing them. The money exists, and it doesn't have to be borrowed just because Laffer draw a cute curve on a restaurant napkin.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-16 12:36:03+00:00
Probably not just kids. One of the more recent-ish trends in social-media feminism is a negative view towards an unequal distribution of "emotional labor" in a relationship. But even the current generation of AI is great at that type of "labor". It acts compassionate, is always available, isn't judging, won't rat you out or use your weaknesses against you in the next argument. And the ability to make appointments for you, keep track of social obligations, birthdays and your grocery list is mostly there too, even if it still comes with challenges.

Of course the downsides are just as myriad as the upsides. People used to care how much Google knows about them, now they willingly tell their private thoughts to ChatGPT or Gemini. Also AI is great at mimicking compassion, but it doesn't actually feel anything, it's closer to a calculating psychopath mimicking emotions (without even going into the whole debate whether current AI can reason or just does something that to us looks similar to reasoning). And of course most importantly, everyone "connecting" with AI instead of real humans is pretty dystopian on its own, even if we ignore all the ways this can be abused by bad actors