MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Apreche | 2025-04-09 03:54:40+00:00
The seems to define impartial news as news that has no particular point of view. What does that mean to not have a point of view? Any news source is disseminating information. This always carries the point of view that the information being disseminated is factual.

If we’re talking about pure opinions, like movie reviews, I would argue that isn’t news.

Many people seem to think that impartial news is news that covers all sides. They share all purported and contradictory information from all sources without confirming which information is true, and which is not. This allows the audience to decide for themselves how to see the world rather than being forced to see the world as it is. The upside is not being forced to see only a false world as envisioned by others who may have unseemly motives. The downside is many are left confused and unsure what is true. This defeats the purpose of news entirely, as the audience is just as uninformed after reading as they were before.

The only truly impartial news source is one that will adhere to rigorous standards of evidence. Given all the available information they will take a firm stand in declaring what the facts are, and to what degree of certainty.

The problem is that in a world with vaccine deniers, climate denial, etc. a purely fact-based and impartial source of news would be branded as very extremist.
by ryandv | 2025-04-09 03:56:06+00:00
As one who is steeped in the language, culture, and thought processes of science, engineering, technology, and medicine (STEM) fields you may be forgiven for believing that facts still exist.

> I'm not ceding this ground. [...] The customer is not always right, and everything is not relative.

The humanities have long ago dispensed with facts since the advent of postmodernism; the ground has already been ceded. Yuval Noah Harari summarizes this eloquently in his latest work Nexus:

In the late twentieth century, for example, intellectuals from the radical left like Michel Foucault and Edward Said claimed that scientific institutions like clinics and universities are not pursuing timeless and objective truths but are instead using power to determine what counts as truth, in the service of capitalist and colonialist elites. These radical critiques occasionally went as far as arguing that “scientific facts” are nothing more than a capitalist or colonialist “discourse” and that people in power can never be really interested in truth and can never be trusted to recognize and correct their own mistakes.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-04-09 03:56:15+00:00
There are an infinite number of possible events to report, an infinite number of facts about those events to report on, and in most interesting cases the "facts" may not be known or objective. Take these two different summaries of the arrest of O.J. Simpson:

AP:

O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and friend Ronald Goldman are found dead in Los Angeles. Simpson is arrested after a widely televised freeway chase in his white Ford Bronco.

Alternate:

O.J. Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, 25, were stabbed and slashed to death outside her condominium in the trendy Brentwood neighborhood. The former football star was arrested after fleeing from police in a 90 minute chase along the 405.

These are both accurate descriptions of what happened, and they give the reader wildly different impressions.
by danielheath | 2025-04-09 03:58:18+00:00
“There was a time the news told you what had happened, and you had to figure out how you felt about it. Now, the news tells you how to feel about it, and you have to figure out whether or not it happened“.

I have been enjoying “The Continent” lately- not perfectly, but it does largely stick to reporting established facts with less emphasis on whether or not they’re a good thing.
by ryandv | 2025-04-09 03:58:41+00:00
> News outlets exist, in one sense at least, to serve their audiences. But they also exist to serve their advertisers. And their journalists exist in an uneasy symbiosis with a community’s institutions — government, police, schools, business, civil society — which are the subject of much of their work. Does “impartial” news represent a purity of audience service? Or some triangulation of all the various power sources and elite stakeholders that interact with it?

Not a new idea. Chomsky & Herman talked about the incident forces and special interests that act upon the government/media/advertising complex and the degree to which these forces influenced the content of mass media and television in the 80s in their book Manufacturing Consent. Similar considerations apply in the age of social media today.
by mrangle | 2025-04-09 03:59:18+00:00
You tell me what I supposedly implied, and then set that up as a shifted-goalposts straw-man argument.

Which in my experience is consistently the sign of someone who can't take the "L".

It's common with people who "argue in bad faith". In contrast with your "twice doubled down" accusation of me doing so, we have actual hard evidence of you arguing in bad faith.

Your argument consistently relies on gaslighting me as to what my unstated beliefs are.

Tactics of a scoundrel, or perhaps just a person unskilled in having "good faith" debates.

I more than understand the debate. I'm even being polite surrounding your general and clear lack of information on how the global monetary system works and its current state of affairs. That is, your lack of context for tariffs. Because if you had it, you'd realize how dumb this conversation is.

You can't keep the discussion on-track without needing to shift it, in order to feign superiority before telling me that you again won't be back. A shameful demonstration!

The original argument was whether tariffs were going to be applied or not, in any administration.

I stated that they were unavoidable. I didn't make any statements in regard to exactly equivalent tariff policies across administrations. You created a prior non-existent argument, blew it up, and stomped off.

Comparative intended granular tariff policy isn't even even an interesting discussion in my opinion. I don't think that the realized strategy would be predictable for either administration, whatever they said in the past. Nuance of tariff policy is too granular to predict. In spite of any prior statements. I don't believe that such statements are evidence of firm commitment, just direction.

But I'm glad you now admit that the Harris administration would have applied tariffs.
by motorest | 2025-04-09 04:00:28+00:00
> In my experience LLMs can't get basic western music theory right, there's no way I would use an LLM for something harder than that.

This take is completely oblivious, and frankly sounds like a desperate jab. There are a myriad of activities whose core requirement is a) derive info from a complex context which happens to be supported by a deep and plentiful corpus, b) employ glorified template and rule engines.

LLMs excel at what might be described as interpolating context following input and output in natural language. As in a chatbot that is extensivey trained in domain-specific tasks, which can also parse and generate content. There is absolutely zero lines of intellectual work that do not benefit extensively from this sort of tool. Zero.
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-04-09 04:00:30+00:00
>$6/user/m, but if you want to use ACLs to control anything in a workable way, it jumps 3x to $18/u/m.

It's market segmentation, needing ACLs is a sign you're at least an SMB, and to a business of nearly any actual size, the difference between $6/user and $18/user is 0.
by lyu07282 | 2025-04-09 04:00:51+00:00
The whole idea that there is such a thing as impartial or unbiased news is a deeply flawed idea that is itself a strong ideological position. Everyone is biased, ideological and partial, some may claim they aren't, but it's just a lie. The media has failed everyone miserably over and over and over again in the last decades and has consistently failed to take accountability.

I still vividly remember the media's disgusting mouth-foaming psychotic hysteria in support of the Iraq war and the ferociousness in which they barked at anyone who dares to speak the truth. Or the countless times they prevented leaks of the most disgusting crimes of the state to be published, or how they threw their own sources into the fire to protect the most vile warmongers.

I feel nothing but contempt for journalism.
by idiotsecant | 2025-04-09 04:02:32+00:00
That doesn't particularly address the point. Say the government decides that they don't like the political party you're supporting, or maybe you've been doing something they consider morally unclean like gambling or consuming pg-13 media. Let's say the government decides that your payments can no longer use the payment infrastructure. Now imagine it's effectively the only practical payment method.

It's a permissioned system.

Crypto is intended to be fundamentally different. Good crypto is permissionless. If you own it, you can spend it, regardless of what anyone thinks.
by beloch | 2025-04-09 04:03:30+00:00
In recent years, I've come to appreciate "Talking Head" panel discussions when it comes to topics of great partiality, such as politics. Specifically, those that gather heads with differing opinions. e.g. CBC Canada's "Power & Politics" panels.

If you take people from opposite ends of the spectrum and put them in a well moderated environment, the discussion that results often helps you to appreciate the different angles that people approach political issues from. Aside from in the U.S. during recent years, political issues are usually a matter of perspective and shades of grey. i.e. If there is a black and white scientific consensus on a given topic, it rarely becomes a political topic (except recently in the U.S.). It's when people with different opinions explain their position and try to sway each other that you're most likely to see arguments that actually have some merit. Even if you are not swayed by an argument, at least you can get a sense of why somebody with a different perspective sees the issue that way.

Unfortunately, at lot of people, and I'll leave it up to others to speculate on who those predominantly are, are not curious about or interested in views that don't align with their own. They may perceive exposure to such views as aggression. i.e. If you express a view they don't agree with, they may see it as an attempt to force them to align with that view. This perception of persuasion as aggression may explain why some scientifically black and white issues have become political.
by retakeming | 2025-04-09 04:04:47+00:00
I'm one of the pg_search maintainers. Hello! A few thoughts.

First, both strategies - the one outlined by the Neon/ParadeDB article, and the one used here -- are presented as viable alternatives by the Postgres docs: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/textsearch-tables.ht....

Second - as the article correctly demonstrates, the problem with Postgres FTS isn't "how can I pick and optimize a single pre-defined query" it's "how do I bring Postgres to Elastic-level performance across a wide range of real-world boolean, fuzzy, faceted, relevance-ranked, etc. queries?"

`pg_search` is designed to solve the latter problem, and the benchmarks were made to reflect that. You can always cherry-pick a query and optimize it at the expense of data duplication and complexity. The Neon/ParadeDB benchmarks contained 12 queries in total, and the benchmarks could have:

- Created composite b-tree indexes for each of the queries with boolean predicates

- Extracted the all the text fields from JSONBs, stored and indexed them as a separate columns for queries against JSONB

But that's not realistic for many real-world use cases. `pg_search` doesn't require that - it's a simple index definition that works for a variety of "Elastic style" queries and Postgres types and doesn't ask the user to duplicate every text column.
by lazide | 2025-04-09 04:05:06+00:00
Not arguing with you per-se, but….

The sky is also yellow, red, and purple in the mornings and evenings. It is also gray when there are storms, and black at night.

Covid kills people, but is it a lot? Or a little? Many things kill people, but I don’t get worried about lightning or sharks. Some people do. Relative to those, how dangerous is it?

Coal emits co2, but why should I care?
by disambiguation | 2025-04-09 04:06:56+00:00
I use both, but direct search is faster since I have to fact check the LLM's answer.

2 recent success stories:

I was toying around with an esp32 - i was experimenting to turn it into a bluetooth remote control device. The online guides help to an extent, setting up and running sample projects, but the segue into deploying my own code was less clear. LLMs are "expert beginners" so this was a perfect request for it. I was able to jump from demos to live deploying my own code very quickly.

Another time I was tinkering with opnsense and setting up VLANs. The router config is easy enough but what I didnt realize before diving in was that the switch and access point require configuration too. What's difficult about searching this kind of problem is that most of the info is buried in old blog posts and forum threads and requires a lot of digging and piecing together disparate details. I wasn't lucky enough to find someone who did a writeup with my exact setup, but since LLMs are trained on all these old message boards, this was again a perfect prompt playing to its strengths.
by lucasoshiro | 2025-04-09 04:07:08+00:00
You can see how it works in this video, after 3:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvz0Yiss4Go. It's in portuguese, but I think you will understand how the interface works.

Note that it is from a bank app (Nubank), Pix itself is not an app. Other banks have similar interfaces
by snowwrestler | 2025-04-09 04:08:49+00:00
The U.S. already manufactures warships, though, and we’re already by far the best at it. Not only do we already protect our economy, we protect pretty much all shipping on the high seas by all economies on the globe.

The John F Kennedy—built in the U.S.!—is in sea trials this year to become the 12th nuclear aircraft carrier in the U.S. fleet. No other nation has more than two carriers. The U.S. has more aircraft carriers operating as museums than other nations have in military service.

What about subs? Again, the U.S. has more than anyone else and Australia just cancelled a deal with France in order to buy subs built in the U.S. We build the best in the world.

I belabor this to make a point: a lot of what people think we need to do… we already have. Our nation and our economy is already the most secure on Earth. We are already the best in the world at making weapons. That never got outsourced, so we don’t need to dramatically reconfigure our economy to bring it back.
by mips_avatar | 2025-04-09 04:09:24+00:00
One problem with LLMs is that the amount of "thinking" they do when answering a question is dependent on how many tokens they use generating the answer. A big part of the power of models like deepseek R1 is they figured out how to get a model to use a lot of tokens in a logical way to work towards solving a problem. The models don't know the answer they come to it by generating it, and generating more helps them. In the future we'll probably see the trend continue where the model generates a "thinking" response first, then the model summarizes the answer concisely.
by neo1250 | 2025-04-09 04:09:40+00:00
Do we have any documentation of the "revealed preferences" of the major news publications today? You would imagine that this bias/preference is readily available for internal (national) news outlets just like they are for international news sources. So many employees of these major news outlets have spoken up on the recent forced biased coverage in politics, war-time, conflicts etc. It would be nice to have a live cheatsheet to refer to any active biases being introduced by these major news outlets (and possibly linking their editorial/ownership relationships as well)
Is Copilot good as an AI assistant?
by willowspice | 2025-04-09 04:10:09+00:00
I've been using Copilot at work for a bit now, mostly for drafting emails and summarizing documents.

So far it’s been helpful, but I’m curious how others feel about its capabilities compared to other AI assistants like ChatGPT or Gemini.

Is there perhaps an overall ‘best’ AI, or do they each have strengths in specific areas? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks!
by retakeming | 2025-04-09 04:10:46+00:00
The segments themselves being immutable doesn't mean that Tantivy is incompatible with Postgres - it just means that Tantivy needs to be made compatible with Postgres' concurrency control mechanisms (MVCC) and storage format (block storage). This blog post explains the latter: https://www.paradedb.com/blog/block_storage_part_one
by k310 | 2025-04-09 04:11:23+00:00
As Trump cracks down on immigration, U.S. citizens are among those snared[0] WaPo.

> For one man, it happened when he stepped out of a Chicago pizza shop after an afternoon of job hunting. For a 10-year-old girl and her siblings, it began at a Border Patrol checkpoint in South Texas as their family rushed to the hospital. For a man in Virginia, it started with immigration agents surrounding his truck, guns in hand.

> All those people are U.S. citizens who were detained, deported or otherwise swept up in immigration enforcement actions under the Trump administration’s intensifying crackdown.

> Although wrongful detentions and deportations of U.S. citizens aren’t unheard-of, recent news reports of at least seven alleged cases have alarmed attorneys, civil rights advocates and immigration scholars who say they reveal the dangers of a system accelerating with few safeguards. As the Trump administration pushes for mass deportations, expands federal enforcement and shutters oversight offices, experts warn citizens are increasingly at risk of getting caught in the dragnet.

> “As immigration officials become more indiscriminate about who they’re targeting — all while they’re pressured to deport people faster and to avoid immigration court proceedings — it creates a situation in which the possibility of illegally detaining and deporting a U.S. citizen rises immensely, because citizenship is not something that we can spot on people’s foreheads,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University.

[0] https://archive.ph/cK7Et
by wisty | 2025-04-09 04:11:32+00:00
Impartiality is a process to get closer to the truth. If something is contested, then seek statements from both sides. Trust that eventually the audience will figure it out, and things will eventually no longer be contested (beyond some "lizardman constant" that is ignored - you don't need to seek views that are totally insignificant).

The alternative is that people decide the other side is "false news" and now everyone drifts into polarised bubbles.
by illiac786 | 2025-04-09 04:11:52+00:00
I agree for people who can afford a Tesla. There’s a whole world out there that couldn’t care less because it was always way beyond their budget anyway.

I also think that people won’t exactly remember what he did but as usual, what will stay are emotions. And at the moment it’s simply embarrassing to be associated with Elon —Tesla owner bashing is irresistible for some, they make sure these owners will remember the embarrassment.
by ragtagtag | 2025-04-09 04:14:25+00:00
This is one area where richer countries can learn a lot from poorer countries, should they choose to listen.

When I lived in Liberia, there were about 10-15 different newspapers in the capital, from websites to print to one guy with a massive chalk board on the main road. This diversity of sources served quite a small population, but there was a massive appetite for news.

In such a situation, you don't expect impartiality, but each news organisation's perspective sites is more obvious, and reading about events from multiple perspectives gives, in my view, a broader and clearer window into what happened.

I think it could make sense to value in news, not impartiality, but diversity of viewpoints.

Conveniently, the internet does make this much easier.
by stephen_g | 2025-04-09 04:15:36+00:00
Some of those are pretty easy to separate -

Alchohol isn't really good for you - statistically you will probably get away with reasonably low intake but the observational studies showing a benefit were most likely confounding variables - like studies where the 'non-drinkers' category contained those who had been alcoholics and were forced to stop drinking, or demographic distortions where moderate drinkers had much healthier lifestyles in other areas (exercise, access to healthcare, etc.) than heavy drinkers.

Coffee seems to be good for you, as long as it's only up to a few (3-4) a day, and as long as it's not affecting your sleep. But I have read the fines in methods like Turkish coffees could be somewhat harmful, whereas espresso is fine and paper filtered better. Sweetening it with sugar isn't great for you of course.

One that gets me is dairy and milk, I get the ethical concerns, and one can make an argument that it's not super 'natural' to take another species milk and to drink it after infancy, but that doesn't mean it's unhealthy (almost all medicines are 'unnatural' too, while some poisons are fully natural!). There's some evidence of milk/dairy being protective against bowel cancer for instance, and inconclusive evidence of harms so I do wince a bit at the plant-based milk alternatives (which are highly- or ultra-processed, if you do care about that kind of thing!) being so trendy.
by maronato | 2025-04-09 04:15:56+00:00
Scams are a social problem that can't be solved with technology alone. That said, Pix includes several features to help mitigate them:

The recipient's name and part of their ID are displayed on the confirmation page. This allows you to verify their identity, as the name must be linked to a real ID.

Users must set transaction and daily limits, with any changes taking effect only after 24–48 hours.People are encouraged to maintain lower limits.

Since transactions are tied to real individuals, it becomes easier for law enforcement to track down the recipient after a scam is identified.
by cypherpunks01 | 2025-04-09 04:18:32+00:00
"If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society."

- HST

From "Song of the Sausage Creature" (for Cycle World magazine, March 1995) mentioned there, definitely worth the quick read!

http://www.latexnet.org/~csmith/sausage.html
by ggm | 2025-04-09 04:22:02+00:00
It's implicit in the Mar a Lago model: They will tell debt holders to re-negotiate to longer term debt instruments on low interest or risk losing their money de-facto by being put on some (soverign risk incurring, true) other path which pays out worse for them as the debt holder.

The risk of losing their profit is what I meant by repudiating the debt.

Chinese investor interests hold ~ $800b of debt. Thats not the state, but it is doubtful the state would bail them out: They pick and chose how to fix problems like this and I think the message "You invested in America not us, you wear the risk" would be beneficial to them.
by ggm | 2025-04-09 04:23:40+00:00
Nice. I think I agree, Size of the problem isn't same as "code complexity" or LOC or anything. If the consequences of the wrong solution being deployed are big enough even a 1 line fix can be a disaster.

I like surrender judgement. Its loss of locus of control. I also find myself asking if there are ways the AI systems "monetize" the nature of problems being put forward for solutions. I am probably implicitly giving up some IPR asking these questions, I could even be in breach of an NDA in some circumstances.

Some problems should not be put to an anonymous external service. I doubt the NSA wants people using claude or mistral or deepseek to solve NSA problems. Unless the goal, is to feed misinformation or mis-drection out into the world.