MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-04-18 02:50:06+00:00
I can write a program that is 1,000,000 lines of code, and a program that is 200 lines of code, and to the end user they would be doing the same thing.

Now, if you start establishing some rules about the type of code I'm allowed to write, then your statement becomes truer. But by no means do people actually follow that in the real world all the time.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-18 02:50:29+00:00
We can still have laws, e.g. that using someone else's certificate (or knowingly giving them your certificate) would constitute fraud.

We have laws against kids buying alcohol, even though kids can (and do) try to get adults to buy them booze, but I don't think that's a good reason to say we shouldn't have laws against kids drinking.
by Arainach | 2025-04-18 02:50:47+00:00
>I think the disillusionment will slowly sow the field for competency and compassion.

What do you mean by this, and why do you consider it plausible?

The mass media and way too many people continue to say "surely the Trump administration will see reason and admit failure" when they have NEVER ONCE done that in the last 9 years.
by Noumenon72 | 2025-04-18 02:51:45+00:00
I write my posts with a chisel and clay tablet because it makes me conscious of how many words I should be using (e.g. as few as possible). No, writing words is cheap now, so I can use more words.

Because dishwashing has made clean dishes abundant, we should use more of them than previous generations, opening up more pleasing recipes and more courses per meal.
by Nathanba | 2025-04-18 02:52:10+00:00
true and with AI I can look into far more subjects more quickly because the skill that was necessary was mostly just endless amounts of sifting through documentation and trying to find out why some error happens or how to configure something correctly. But this goes even further, it also applies to subjects where I couldn't intellectually understand something but there was noone to really ask for help. So I'm learning knowledge now that I simply couldn't have figured out on my own. It's a pure multiplier and humans have failed to solve the issue of documentation and support for one another. Until now of course.

I also think that once robots are around it will be yet another huge multiplier but this time in the real world. Sure the robot won't be as perfect as the human initially but so what. You can utilize it to do so much more. Maybe I'll bother actually buying a rundown house and renovating myself. If I know that I can just tell the robot to paint all the walls and possibly even do it 3 times with different paint then I feel far more confident that it won't be an untenable risk and bother.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-04-18 02:52:48+00:00
if by "vanishingly few" you mean absolutely standard then you are correct. The small PSU I have in my home PC is 1000 watts. I have multiple kilowatt class AC-DC power supplies sitting around for other purposes. There is nothing special about that power level.

For perspective my DC welder is rated at 10000 watts of input. The efficiency is really poor however so I'd only see something like 4000 watts out in the best conditions.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-18 02:53:17+00:00
>> Why should it matter how many times I "split up" my compounding

> It doesn’t, but the limit as the number of splits approaches infinity is obviously an interesting (i.e. “natural”) result.

Except that the limit as the number of splits approaches infinity is just the declared rate of interest. The computation that ultimately yields e is a mistake, not a natural quantity to calculate.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-04-18 02:53:28+00:00
This has already come up before the Supreme Court, with the argument that filtering was a less invasive technique to fulfill the government’s legitimate interests back in the early 2000s.

That ship has sailed. Even the opposition admits that trying to get everyone to filter is not going to work and is functionally insignificant. The only question is whether age verification is still too onerous.
by dluan | 2025-04-18 02:53:59+00:00
As a surfer, I've done a few breathwork classes even though I've never been close to being in conditions that really needed it. There is a tremendous amount of training that you can do to basically change your conscious thoughts in an instant. Going from 180bpm heart rate and anxious panic to a static breath hold for up to a minute while being ragdolled and disoriented, is basically ego death. If you watch some gnarly big wave surfers talk about breathwork, they talk about rapidly flushing out your air in 3-4 big breaths, calming your heart rate, and even laughing, all right before or in anticipation of a pounding. Plus the whole Gerry Lopez yoga and meditation era of the 70s made it clear how important breathing and mental state were.

In any case, this is something every single surfer beyond a certain level is required to master, so I'd love to see data from that kind of cohort. The old lady freedivers of Jeju Island would be cool too.
by viraptor | 2025-04-18 02:54:13+00:00
For military uses, if the us army doesn't have a much more precise, purpose built model, already trained on both private data and whatever they could get from google and others, I'd be extremely surprised. They will not be using chatgpt for serious things like that. (... or at least I'd be sure about that a few months ago - maybe a bit less now)
by Freedom2 | 2025-04-18 02:54:23+00:00
> I don’t understand why some people are searching for ways to dismiss and downplay this in these comments.

"I don't do it, therefore it is unusual for it to happen in the first place."

It's very hard to take dismissive, flatly stated comments like GP's in good faith. I usually expect better from this site, but a lot has changed in the last few years.
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-18 02:54:37+00:00
1) It wasn't mandatory so it's hard to take this argument seriously. If there was a concern about it being made mandatory, that could have been addressed by Congress and/or the courts (if there was a legal/Constitutional basis to make it only optional).

2) Amortized cost, it's still under development so the costs are going to be relatively high and has many restrictions which reduce who can use it to file (also publicity, it's still less well-known). Given 1-3 more years the cost per filing would likely have been much cheaper as the annual spending would have likely decreased (as the system matured) and the number of filers would have increased.

EDIT:

> Cheap open source tax assessment & preparation seems like an extremely good use case for AI Agents.

Please no. Why would you use AI agents for something that's really a complicated spreadsheet? Make the complicated spreadsheet that gives you the same results for the same inputs instead of an "AI" that might give different results on different runs.
by memset | 2025-04-18 02:54:50+00:00
The way this analysis, and the original dataset were created, makes no sense. This is, in part, not the author's fault, since the original data [1, 2] is flawed.

First, the original data was constructed like this: "...The next step was to format the raw HTML files into the full chord progression of each song, collapsing repeating identical chords into a single chord (’A G G A’ became ’A G A’)..."

Already this makes no sense - the fact that a chord is repeated isn't some sort of typo (though maybe it is on UltimateGuitar). For example, a blues might have a progression C7 F7 C7 C7 - the fact that C7 is repeated is part of the blues form. See song 225 from the dataset, which is a blues:

A7 D7 A7 D7 A7 E7 D7 A7

Should really be:

A7 D7 A7 A7 D7 D7 A7 A7 E7 D7 A7 A7

With these omissions, it's a lot harder to understand the underlying harmony of these songs.

The second problem is that we don't really analyze songs so much by the chords themselves, but the relationships between chords. A next step would be to convert each song from chords to roman numerals so we can understand common patterns of how songs are constructed. Maybe a weekend project.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22046 [2] https://huggingface.co/datasets/ailsntua/Chordonomicon/blob/...
by lightedman | 2025-04-18 02:55:58+00:00
"Stainless (e.g. AEB-L) is up to four times tougher than simple low-alloy carbon steel (e.g. 1095). See https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/10/19/knife-steels-rated-by... for example."

I'll guarantee my UHC 1080 cleaver will slam a good distance through your stainless steel knife edge-on. Your chosen steel has toughness but it lacks in actual strength.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-04-18 02:57:14+00:00
No; the Republicans argue that it is not in the IRS’s interest to do a good job, or offer the best tax strategies with their own tools. (Additionally, should the IRS tool contain a bug, does the IRS have the right to collect against their own mistake?)

This is a particular sore spot, as Republicans have still not forgiven the IRS in 2013 for admitting deliberately harassing conservative nonprofits without cause.

Call it a stupid argument, but at least it’s not a strawman like the above comment.
by CSMastermind | 2025-04-18 02:58:29+00:00
I played a round of Geoguessr against it and while it did a shockingly good job compared to what I was expecting, it still lags behind even novice human players.

The locations and its guesses were:

Bliss, Idaho - Burns, Oregon (273 miles away)

Quilleco, Biobio, Chile - Eugene, Oregon (6,411 miles away)

Dettighofen, Switzerland - Mühldorf, Germany (228 miles away)

Pretoria, South Africa - Johannesburg, South Africa (36 miles away)

Rockhampton, Australia - Gold Coast, Australia (437 miles away)
by Noumenon72 | 2025-04-18 02:58:37+00:00
"Pleasant task" sounds like an oxymoron to me. We have video games now, the spectrum for "pleasant" has shifted and household tasks are toward the bottom.

I don't believe cooking has spare moments, eg there is never a time when I could take out my phone and watch something for 30 seconds. I think that means I am filling the spare moments with efficient task scheduling (chop while sauteing) and washing dishes is just making it take longer.
by temporallobe | 2025-04-18 02:59:17+00:00
This may be confusing as e-file is not the same as DirectFile and it should have little or no impact to most taxpayers since you can still always file your taxes for free. DirectFile is just an in-house “competitor” to software such as Turbotax and is only available if you made less than $250k jointly. BTW I’ve been using FreetaxUSA for about 10 years with no issues.
by bawolff | 2025-04-18 02:59:23+00:00
I think the accusation was that that person was a member of a non-state armed group that the united states was in an armed conflict with. There is certainly a bunch of grey area with that (given we are talking about a trans-national "war" against non-state entity, which is a bit out there legally), but at the same time i don't think its exactly out there as far as presidential powers go. Shooting at combatants during a war is a very normal state of affairs. Generally we assume such combatants have not done any crimes. The relavent question is if this person was a legal target (is he really a combatant), not if he comitted any crimes.
by kllrnohj | 2025-04-18 03:00:28+00:00
I think you're confusing which HDR is being used. HDR photography, the multi-expose combinations, was probably iPhone 5S but that still results in an SDR image. That's a completely different thing entirely.

iPhones have not captured HDR images until much, much more recently. No earlier than iPhone 12 at the soonest (when they first could capture HDR video), although they keep fiddling with which format they use for the result. iOS 17 was when they added support for displaying these images in UIKit & Swift, which was only like 2 years ago give or take. WWDC '23 was similarly when they started talking about handling HDR images. And they just recently announced they'll be adopting ISO 21496-1 at WWDC 2024. ISO 21496-1 being the gainmap style approach that Google & Adobe adopted with UltraHDR in 2023.
by dang | 2025-04-18 03:01:42+00:00
There's no "non-political rule", as you'll see if you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and in fact HN hosted a huge frontpage thread about this issue just a few days ago:

Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684536 - April 2025 (1399 comments)

You guys should familiarize yourselves with how this site is operated, because it has been explained endlessly (to the limit of my patience, in fact) over many years, and the assumptions you're making do not match reality. If you want to do that, you'll find entrypoints into thousands of past explanations in my comment upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724590.
by wrs | 2025-04-18 03:01:50+00:00
If the IRS disagrees with how you prepared your taxes, they don’t just say “oh well, we’re not the preparer, we’ll have take your word for it”. They write you a letter and you have to convince them they’re wrong.

The fact they don’t have enough funding (or functional enough systems) to do this for everybody doesn’t change who has the final authority on how much tax you owe.
by zharknado | 2025-04-18 03:02:02+00:00
I played the demo of Craftomation 101 a while back. It was good! Had a good balance of watching emergent behavior and feeling the need to micro-manage/accelerate the process.

Graphical-only instructions were maddening, though! Especially organizing ideas by dragging them around in 2d space. I would have loved the ability to drop into written code.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-04-18 03:02:12+00:00
Well, to quote the Appellate Court Justice Learned Hand from the 1930s (at the time, he was often called the “10th Supreme Court justice”):

“Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.” Gregory v. Helvering (2d Cir. 1934)
by atrettel | 2025-04-18 03:03:11+00:00
Regardless of what happens to Direct File, I recommend people learn how to do their tax returns by hand. I do it by hand every year. Yes, it is tedious, but I am not beholden to anyone and I don't need a "product" (paid or otherwise) to solve it for me. It takes me between 10 to 15 hours per year for both my federal and state tax returns. That is all. Once you get a hang of it, it is not that bad.

(I recognize that not everyone can do this, but if you have the technical skill to handle the math, I do still recommend it.)
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-18 03:03:34+00:00
> the Republicans argue that it is not in the IRS’s interest to do a good job, or offer the best tax strategies with their own tools.

Yes, the rationalization offered to those who don't already subscribe to the ideology of privatization as an a priori goal to get them on board is usually that democratically-accountable public institutions lack a motivation to serve the interest of the public to whom they are accountable, while accountable-to-their-owners private interests do have an motivation to serve the public interest.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-04-18 03:03:56+00:00
> And why does YouTube ask me to verify my age when I’m logged into a Google account I created in 2004?

Yeah those checks are super annoying. The internet has been around long enough, mechanisms for this should exist.

And even in the smaller term, if I had to be 13 to make this account, and it has been more than 5 years, maybe relax?
by dang | 2025-04-18 03:04:52+00:00
Most probably the users who flagged it are tired of the repetition, because HN had a huge frontpage discussion about this topic just a few days ago:

Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684536 - April 2025 (1399 comments)

Avoiding too much repetition is a core principle of this place [1]. To get a sense of how repetitive these discussions are, just look at the comments in the current thread—they could just as easily have been posted to the previous thread.

The way HN operates with respect to political stories is clear and stable, and has been for many years: some stories with political overlap are ok [2], but there isn't room on the frontpage for all of them (not even 5% of them, really). Frontpage space is the scarcest resource that exists here [3], and HN is not a current affairs site [4].

If you, or anyone, will familiarize yourselves with the explanations in these links, and then still have a question that I haven't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by haberman | 2025-04-18 03:04:56+00:00
As I understand it, all of the allegations were investigated by Madame Justice Boyd who found that none of them were substantiated except for the affair, which I agree is far from advisable, but on its own seems unlikely to have ended his career so completely. There is no way to go back to 2015 and find out what would have happened if the affair had been the only accusation.
by Arainach | 2025-04-18 03:04:59+00:00
>2) Operating Direct File cost taxpayers $814/filing in 2024. This is a lot more expensive than commercial offerings - it would be cheaper to just give everyone TurboTax

It did nothing of the sort. This is counting the costs to build a system and then pretending to split them over the number of introductory users in the first few years. The marginal cost of an additional taxpayer using the system was essentially 0.
by tombert | 2025-04-18 03:05:01+00:00
To each their own, I found it made it really un-fun to cook anything that required more than two pots because I didn't want to do the dishes.

I just don't use dishes or cutlery or utensils that aren't dishwasher safe. I don't use wood spoons, I have a set of silicone ones that I like.

I agree that there will be some stuff that sticks on sufficiently enough to where dishwashing probably won't get it off even if you do everything correctly, but I find that those are outliers. In those cases I let stuff soak in the sink for awhile, scrub it, and then put it in the dishwasher to make sure it's sanitized (my dishwasher has a sanitize cycle). I don't run the dishwasher just for that dish, I just wait for it to fill up again and then run it.
by pmags | 2025-04-18 03:05:19+00:00
This discussion is flagged but in the interest of transparency and for anyone who stumbles across this thread it's good to know that this person has now been released:

https://floridaphoenix.com/2025/04/17/u-s-citizen-released-f...

and

https://bsky.app/profile/llanosjackie.bsky.social/post/3ln2a...
by vel0city | 2025-04-18 03:06:35+00:00
10-15 hours? Turbo Tax usually costs me like $50 or so after discounts through my bank and I can nail out my taxes in under an hour with all it can auto-import in my situations. If it saves me 14 hours of labor its definitely worth $50 to me, and I'd say I'm massively overpaying compared to the free filing tools out there!

It shouldn't be this hard.
by TZubiri | 2025-04-18 03:06:58+00:00
Doesn't that depend on how finely you want to break up the "parts"? Or on what dimension?

Google does search ads mostly, has competition with say, bing, amazon, chatgpt now.

On video ads they have competition with tiktok, netflix (even if they don't do ads I guess), and tv.

Maybe there's specific criteria that have legal precedent or sources, but I don't see it.
by kamranjon | 2025-04-18 03:08:55+00:00
Would love to read a blog post on this. 10 - 15 hours is probably too much but I bet if I learned how to do it I could figure out how to optimize it with all the tools that are available today. Would love if TurboTax just died because everyone figured out they could do taxes on their own with just a little supplemental help from local models or something similar.
by wyre | 2025-04-18 03:09:46+00:00
Gemini is just that good. From my usage it is much smarter than DeepSeek or Claude 3.7 Thinking models.

A lot of Google’s market share across its services comes from the monopoly effects Google has. The quality of Gemini 2.5 is noticeably smarter than its competitors so I see the applause for the quality of the LLM and not for Google.

I think it’s way too early to say anything about who is winning the race. There is still a long way to go; o3 scores highest in Humanity’s Last Exam (https://agi.safe.ai/) at 20%, 2.5 scores 18%.
by dvektor | 2025-04-18 03:10:16+00:00
fun fact. in federal prisons (and some portion of state prisons), books of stamps are essentially $5 bills. It's common to see people with huge wads of stamps in their pockets much like you would with cash. a few years ago, it became much more difficult to convert stamps back to cash, so a few companies popped up that would accept stamps in the mail for some value on the dollar and books of stamps are the currency of (most) US prisons to this day.
by anamax | 2025-04-18 03:11:02+00:00
A couple of months ago, I saw something about Temu paying the tariffs for all of their shipments to the US in bulk but still shipping them individually.

The basic idea was that they'd figure out the tariff on everything they shipped during a time period as if it was done in one shipment, pay that, and then do individual shipments.

I suspect that something like this will happen.

Of course, there will be auditing to ensure that companies don't pay tariffs on $10M worth of goods when the actual total is $100M, but that's doable.
by zoogeny | 2025-04-18 03:11:07+00:00
I think it requires a nuanced take but allow me to provide some counter-examples.

The first is CEO pay rates. Another is the highest paid public employees (which tend to be coaches at state schools). This is evidence that the market highly values managers.

Another is systemic failures within enterprises. When Boeing had a few very public plane crashes, a certain narrative suggested that the transition from highly capable engineer managers to financial focus managers contributed to the problem. A similar narrative has been used to explain the decline of Intel.

Consider the return of Steve Jobs to Apple. Or the turn around at Microsoft with Nadella.

All of these are complex cases that don't submit to an easy analysis. Success and failure are definitely multi-factor and rarely can be traced to a single definitive cause.

Perhaps another way to look at it would be: what percentage of the success of highly complex organizations can be attributed to management? To what degree can poor management decisions contribute to the failure of an otherwise capable organization?

How much you choose to weight those factors is entirely up to you.

edit: I was also thinking about the way we think about the advantage of exceptional generals/admirals in military analysis. Or the effect a president can have on the direction of a country.
by marxisttemp | 2025-04-18 03:11:18+00:00
Because seem like someone who might have an interesting answer:

A GeoGuessr player, GeoWizard, has done a few “straight line challenges”, where he attempts to walk across a country in as straight a line as possible, usually planning beforehand with Google Earth and PostGIS. This got me thinking of what could fairly be thought of as “crossing”, since obviously you couldn’t describe e.g. walking from one side of Florida to the other as “crossing the USA”.

My best thought was to set the ending point of the line by following the border of the country in each direction til they met on the other side. To avoid the fractal coastline problem, use the challenger’s stride length as the unit of measure for the border.

But perhaps there is a better, more rigorous way of defining the opposite point on the edge of an arbitrary polygon.