MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by recoup-papyrus | 2025-04-03 01:33:26+00:00
We're not unswayable, I was swayed.

8 years ago, I was a left-libertarian living in SF and trying to convince Trump people to vote for Hillary because Trump was dishonest.

Then I was swayed because people provided information to me that changed my views. Now I view what Trump is doing now as FAR too moderate.
by xnx | 2025-04-03 01:33:41+00:00
> 1. Where to put them? In Chicago these cameras unfortunately end up being a regressive tax.

Everywhere. Starting with highest volume intersections.

> 2. What to do with the money? Anytime we give the government money from things like this, we create weird incentives.

Good concerns to have. I'm less concerned with bad incentives (e.g. vs. civil asset "forfeiture") because the enforcement is automated. There can still be bias in roll-out of the cameras, but this wouldn't be the same degree.

> I've been wondering lately what it would be like if we required all the fees to be returned to the federal treasury / burned... no incentives!

I like that thinking. This makes everyone's money worth ever so slightly more. (which is also minusculey regressive)
by huitzitziltzin | 2025-04-03 01:33:52+00:00
I don’t agree that it doesn’t make sense. It’s a good approximation a lot of the time.

Also: from your comment I’m pretty sure you don’t have the background (correct me if that’s wrong) and so don’t know what it really means in practice to make an equilibrium assumption in a macro model: Markets clear, on average people have reasonable beliefs about the evolution of aggregate variables, firms maximize expected profits. That’s all pretty harmless.

I definitely don’t agree that we are “using mathematical tools which aren’t suited for that.” We aren’t treating the economy “like a steam engine.” The entire revolution in macro from the 1970’s on involves optimizing agents. There is no useful analogy to a steam engine.

I suspect you have been reading criticism by people who are misinformed about what macro actually is and how it is practiced.
by jackthetab | 2025-04-03 01:34:01+00:00
WARNING: Old man about to say "Back in my day..."

As a child, we were taught that "America is better than the USSR because $REASONS." One reason given was we didn't need identification to travel around the country (this included flying). And when I saw "taught" I mean "this was taught to us in a public school."

Back in my day (There it is!), you would see newspaper want-ads like "Vegas bachelor party canceled. Two airline tickets avail this weekend. $200 OBO." You'd meet the guy, buy the tickets and get on the flight. ID was more for proving you were old enough to fly alone than anything. Tickets were not made out to the buyer, they were just assigned seating. Airlines were losing money and they knew it but couldn't figure out a way to stop it cheaply enough.

Metal detector screenings started in the 70's because back then airplane hijacking was a thing.

Then, 9/11. Metal detector screenings became mandatory. The airlines got the government to do the identity checks (TSA) and tighten the security the airlines did/could/would not pay for. State IDs (driver's licenses, for example) were sufficient. No more want-ads for a Vegas bachelor parties! The buyer might get a refund, might not, and the airline got to resell the seat either way. And we still take our shoes off to get on a plane decades later.

Fast forward to today, you (will) need a federal ID to travel on airplanes domestically, either a REAL ID or a passport. Sure, it's not hard to get, and there are ways around it if you forget or lose yours. Besides, what's the harm, right?

And every step along the way, it was a perfectly cromulent thing to do.

Now excuse me, I need to change the onion on my belt. That's still the fashion, right?
by mindslight | 2025-04-03 01:34:53+00:00
Yes, I went to a few of those protests. Despite the popularity of opposition, there were still plenty of people arguing in support of attacking Iraq. In fact I'd say that most people were in support of it. "They hate us for our freedom", "fight them over there instead of here", and general reflexive arguments supplicating to power. That's the dynamic I'm talking about.

Whether invading Iraq would have still happened without that popular support is besides the point. The point is there was full-throated support from many people, who would reflexively reject dissent while parroting corpo media talking points, and who then only came to see what a poor idea it had been over time.
by glenstein | 2025-04-03 01:36:35+00:00
I think a lot of that was just an out-of-control spiral of self-confirmation happening in comments sections that was at best loosely connected to actual facts.

I think that finally along last there's been some real push back against it and it's no longer acceptable to just say it as if it's going to be the presumed default narrative because it really depends on what you mean and a lot of the criticisms were kind of nonsensical and without any sense of proportion.

I still basically trust Mozilla, they're a force for good, and I'm happy to use their services and do what I can to contribute to them being profitable and a successful counterpoint to Google.
by huitzitziltzin | 2025-04-03 01:36:49+00:00
There are plenty of people working on the application of ML in economics, including NN methods, and including in macro.

That’s a totally different class of model to this agent based approach. People in the (small) agent based modeling community have been pushing their stuff for decades to no effect.

Sure it’s possible that there’s some amazing advance I can’t see coming in the future but as of now I would not recommend anyone pursue ABM.
by freen | 2025-04-03 01:38:00+00:00
Neither the Nazis, nor Stalinists even remotely approximate the modern left in the US, or elsewhere.

The debate is effectively between classical Liberalism, and authoritarianism/patromonialism/fascism.

Forget what people called themselves: the peoples republic of North Korea certainly isn’t a republic.

Socialist Left/Capitalist Right is an outdated dichotomy that is only in service of authoritarians.
by satori99 | 2025-04-03 01:39:02+00:00
I recall reading Kay Cottee's account of her solo unassisted circumnavigation in 1988. She was the first woman to do so.

Part of her preparation was removing the labels from all tinned food, and then re-writing what was in the can with a permanent marker on the lid, before fully immersing each can in laquer. Presumably this was done to help deal with corrosion problems.
by glenstein | 2025-04-03 01:40:11+00:00
Exactly. I just feel like a point that originally was reasonable (around 2016 or so) became the spiraling echo chamber that became increasingly nonsensical and increasingly divorced from rhyme, reason, causation, logic, or proportionality. Case in point, Google Chrome has pushed web standards to consolidate its control over the web, but Firefox hid a cheeky reference to a TV show in its code one time! Those are incredibly different scales of offense.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-04-03 01:40:18+00:00
thats HP and no one should buy HPs printers anymore until they stop their doings. Their aggressive behavior towards the customer and lurkin' into paying monthly subscription, data & update politics, mandatory always-on-internet-connection...

Thats on top. So, as an informed individual being, one should avoid HP. The other printer producers do not insinst on registration or wifi-before-first-use politics. But, who knows.

.. again, how can the government find out who you are by having just a code? If there's no mandatory registration (f.e. not HP)? If one knows how to poisen the tracking code? If one use a new/used printer and dispose afterwards? If one use the "neighbor from the first floor" printer?

There is no possibility to find out who printed that, if one takes a little bit caution and have little bit of knowledge. Even print-out-once-copy-many would make the code unreadable (f.e. normal quality and/or black & white) ...

spread the word! W00t W00t! :)
by brigandish | 2025-04-03 01:40:44+00:00
I live in Japan, and I can tell you that I'm worried about Japan. There are constant murmurings among politicians to repeal article 9 of the constitution, the one shackling it from war; you talk about racism but the xenophobia here is visceral and constant; and there's still bad feeling that is also noticeable regarding WWII and towards other Asians and their countries.

I've met some lovely, kind, and outward looking people in my time here, but I'd have to be as blind as a bat to miss the dark undertones running through society. If the Americans didn't have their bases here I think we'd be back to a pre end of WW2 Japan quite quickly.
by kristianp | 2025-04-03 01:40:55+00:00
One benefit of rc is this[1]:

> The most important principle in rc’s design is that it’s not a macro processor. Input is never scanned more than once by the lexical and syntactic analysis code

I worked at a unix shop that deleted most of a working drive because a shell script was modified while it was running. Luckily they kept daily backups on tape. This was about 17 years ago.

[1] https://www.scs.stanford.edu/nyu/04fa/sched/readings/rc.pdf
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-04-03 01:40:55+00:00
In some ways I feel sad for all the linguistics and NLP people, though the Bayesians had their day too.

However after 20 years in RL I’m glad that RL (MDP solving) is finally coming into view as the primary generalist intelligence framework.

People made fun of us RL people because the data/compute overhead but now that every robotic controller and system is becoming RL tuned it’s just going to chew its way through the whole computing stack eventually.

I see so many people in AI burning out because they see all these narrow methods failing to generalize.

Exciting times ahead.
by atrettel | 2025-04-03 01:41:49+00:00
I was about to post largely the same thing. There is a saying in design: "Good, fast, cheap --- pick two." The default choice always seems to be fast and cheap nowadays. I find myself telling other people to take their time, but I too have worked jobs where the workloads were far too great to do a decent job. So this is what we get.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-03 01:42:36+00:00
How is it theater?

When customers give you money, they expect a date.

When investors give you money, they want to see whether or not you are investing in the right initiatives.

When you open a company, the IRS, SEC, and other regulators expect some amount of financial compliance.

Do you want me to come to you and give you an ultimatum to give me an exact date, calculate amortization, and defend existing investments, and if any of those slips you are the fired? And do that with all the hundreds and thousands of initiatives on a daily basis?

That's the alternative.

Welcome to the industry - you're paid to make purchasers happy, not you. Purchasers don't care if you DuckDB or OracleDB - they care if the product they paid for will be delivered on time and meet the needs stipulated in their contract.

If you want to be happy and only deal with engineering problems, you sadly have to deal with the poopshow that JIRA is.
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-03 01:44:08+00:00
Reminds me of the "ugliest color"[1], the brown Pantone 448 C, selected for use on tobacco products in an attempt to dissuade purchase. However it turned out to be quite nice looking on packages[2], and at last here in Norway lead to no measurable decrease in sales[3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone_448_C

[2]: https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/ddB3zq/designekspertene-elsker-d...

[3]: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/fhi_-ny-design-pa-roykpakker-og-...
by _fat_santa | 2025-04-03 01:44:13+00:00
These types of mice are just not for me but I looked at some of their other products and honestly the thing I like most about them is how everything is open source.

Ironically I think the fact that they open source their designs probably helps sales. My first reaction is to scoff at the $144 price tag but I know that if I go look at what it will take to build one myself I’m sure the $144 price tag will become much more reasonable.
by decimalenough | 2025-04-03 01:44:44+00:00
Spicy take: hooved ruminants like cows and sheep are singularly unsuited to the Australian bush. No longer rearing them for the sole purpose of exporting to the US would probably be a good thing.

https://www.bushheritage.org.au/what-we-do/our-challenge/gra...

On the upside, maybe Australia can keep selling horse and kangaroo to the US as beef and they won't even notice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_meat_substitution_s...
by jraph | 2025-04-03 01:45:06+00:00
Nope, sometimes I would have a rebuttal but flagging is the better option (constructive discussion is hard without mutual respect, and/or don't feed the troll). Or, the comment doesn't even have anything to refute, it's just disrespectful or it's spam, or both.

I have flagged a few comments but I'm rarely mad.

And if one is mad because of a disrespectful comment, the flagging is probably appropriate too.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-04-03 01:45:20+00:00
> > Now I hire local professionals, even if they cost more. Their experience and trustworthiness save me time and frustration.

> I've found the exact opposite. ... My local upholsterer is a pleasure to work with compared to any tire and alignment shop.

I'm confused, isn't your local upholsterer exactly an example of a local professional?
by throwaway422432 | 2025-04-03 01:45:23+00:00
This is actually a good lesson in communication.

Question 1, are you fine with the chicken in with the bread? Question 2, would you like the drain cleaner left separate rather than with the food items.

They either don't care or would suggest leaving the bread or chicken separate, same for the drain cleaner.

The worst grief you'll get is why they can't have 3 bags.
by alexjplant | 2025-04-03 01:47:38+00:00
There's at least one plan [1] that specifically addresses this problem called FairTax:

> The proposal also specifies a monthly payment made to all households based on household size. Called a "prebate," the monthly payment offsets the regressive nature of a sales tax up to the poverty level.

Of course nobody agrees [2] on how effective this would actually be:

> Sales taxes are normally considered regressive though the FairTax provides a rebate that supporters argue would create a progressive effective rate on consumption. However, the Fairtax would also eliminate the EITC and CTC, dramatically reducing this benefit.[58] Additionally the FairTax would be applied to goods that are currently not subject to sales tax. These include all food, all prescription drugs and other health care products and services (such as doctor’s visits and laboratory tests), purchases of new homes, and utility bills. These goods make up a substantial share of low income families expenses

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicted_effects_of_the_FairT...
by scarecrowbob | 2025-04-03 01:48:29+00:00
I like the book quite a bit, and it's been formative in my politics.

That said, I am not sure if the take-away is that managers need to account for these factors by allowing for illegibility- I am not reading you claim that, but contextually that's how the discussion feels to me.

I do agree with Scott that enforcing perfect legibility is impossible and even attempting to do so can cause immense problems, and I agree with his analysis of these modernist efforts and have found that it's a useful lens for understanding a lot of human enterprise.

I find a lot of hope in that view: nothing actually gets done without some horizontal, anarchist cooperation.

But I also find hope in the fact that it's structurally a issue with authoritarian organizational strategies which can't be accounted for and surmounted.
by chneu | 2025-04-03 01:49:51+00:00
The wikimedia foundation spends a ton of money on nonsense stuff. Look it up, a lot of people don't like the wikimedia foundation for very valid reasons.

The constant calls for donations are to support the foundation, not the website, but they make it look like Wikipedia could disappear at any moment.

Their cost for bandwidth is a rounding error vs their salaries and other costs that the foundation racks up.

https://youtu.be/MpeOFvxor_0
by glenstein | 2025-04-03 01:50:16+00:00
I feel reasonably confident at this point, declaring this a myth. Mozilla absolutely made missteps and lost browser market share, but it had almost nothing to do with spending on side bets, if you look at the budget and you look at the numbers of these things. Most of the sidebets already happened after they lost the market share and did not happen at such prohibitive costs that they prevented them from investing in browser development. And there's no such thing as a missing browser feature they could have developed that would have recovered all of the market share, which they failed to develop because of a side bet.

Nobody who repeats this has even looked at Mozilla's budget, or checked to see whether the side bets overlap with the time where Mozilla lost market share. The one exception to this is Firefox OS, which does appear to have used significant resources and happened during a critical time where they lost market share. And while that one at least would be a fair criticism where there's real data behind it, I actually respect it as a bold strategic move and personally deeply wished it worked out. But for whatever reason, a complete disconnection from factual reality has never stopped people from claiming that the VPN or the Mozilla Foundation or whatever was the problem.
by jimbosis | 2025-04-03 01:51:03+00:00
I had the same frustration as you with finding the pricing information. With some serendipitous clicking, I managed to find it!

https://pico.sh/plus

It does also mention there is a $0 "Starter" tier.

(I found that link on this page:

https://pico.sh/pgs )

EDIT: Mention the Starter tier.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-03 01:52:21+00:00
I guess all you'd need is evidence.

Biden being the President and the DOJ charging Trump does not imply "Biden went after Trump."

There's actually no evidence Biden played any role in DOJ's decision to prosecute either for the stolen classified documents or for the election fraud. The brazen criminality was sufficient for an independent DOJ to take up the matter.

inb4 "DOJ didn't make that decision independently" which is another way of saying "I'm willing to believe things without evidence."
by esprehn | 2025-04-03 01:52:51+00:00
This is really cool, I love seeing folks use CSS in clever ways. :)

My one feedback would be to avoid using attr selectors on the style attribute like [style*="--lqip:"]. Browsers normally lazy compute that string version of the style attribute [1], but if you use a selector like this then on every style recalc it'll force all new inline styles (ex. element.style.foo = bar) to compute the string version.

Instead if you use a separate boolean attribute (or even faster a class) it'll avoid that perf foot gun. So write <div lqip style="--lqip: ..."> and match on that.

[1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:thi...
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-04-03 01:53:13+00:00
One of the consequences of WWII was that everyone's plans, ideas, and work cultures were turned into direct results very quickly, in the real world. Sometimes fatally.

The people who lived through that had their feet on the ground.

Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible.

Things that really, really matter - like ecological, political, and social stability - were devalued in everyday experience and replaced with economic abstractions that are more mystical than practical.

It's very culty, and the disconnect between how things should be and how they really are is getting more and more obvious to everyone.
by jhancock | 2025-04-03 01:54:26+00:00
thanks for the good read.

I used Amsterdam BSD two years back to scratch my itch. It was a no nonsense, perhaps perfect way to try out OpenBSD.

The thing keeping me from using OpenBSD/FreeBSD on my new production app is I don't know what kinds of issues I may run into compared to Debian stable on a fairly beefy dedicated server.

My new app has dependancies:

a) http reverse proxy. No problem

b) Java 21 / Clojure 1.12. JDK 21 virtual threads is a must. Unclear what level of support/quality can be expected on OpenBSD or FreeBSD.

c) Postgres 17 (TimeScale)
by fn-mote | 2025-04-03 01:55:18+00:00
> they're paying me a ridiculous amount of money to do a job I enjoy

> It's a deal that 99% of the world is envious of, and I don't think it should inspire bitterness and cynicism

First of all, I think it takes a lot of guts to continue to have this attitude in the current economic climate. Or, in your case, immense skill, but not everybody - not even everybody in the big tech companies - has that.

I think the bitterness and cynicism stems from not enjoying the work. As crazy as this sounds - it's the intangibles as much as the cash: for example, knowing the company will fight your efforts to improve things.
by danaris | 2025-04-03 01:56:10+00:00
Unfortunately, around here, most of the self-checkout "lanes" are explicitly marked as "X items or less" express lanes. If you're doing a full shopping, they don't want you using them. (This seems particularly stupid at one of the stores, where they have about a dozen self-checkouts, half marked 14 items or less and half marked 20 items or less, and literally every time I'm there, at least half of them are unused. Fortunately they also have a lot of manned regular checkout lanes.)

Furthermore, because the expectation nowadays is that the cashier will bag the groceries, too, the checkout infrastructure is very much set up to support that and only that model: rather than having a short belt after the cashier to send the groceries to a bagging area, the cashier has a couple of bag slots right in front of them, and a tiny island behind them to put your bags on, along with any items that they need to hold onto to bag later (eg, chips, eggs—things they don't want to put under other things). So even if you wanted to bag for yourself, it would make it much less efficient and more awkward for the cashier.
by bayarearefugee | 2025-04-03 01:56:58+00:00
I'm guessing other potential sources are smart enough to realize if any of this speculation is what happened, Goldberg's hand was basically forced by Waltz to reveal as much as he did (which wasn't an admission that Waltz was a source of his, but very heavily suggested).

What's he supposed to do, go to jail for hacking to protect his previous source who is actively throwing him under the legal bus?
by jsenn | 2025-04-03 01:57:01+00:00
This doesn’t answer your question, but one thing to keep in mind is that past the very first layer, every “token” position is a weighted average of every previous position, so adjacency isn’t necessarily related to adjacent input tokens.

A borderline tautological answer might be “because the network learns that putting related things next to each other increases the usefulness of the convolutions”
by grg0 | 2025-04-03 01:57:13+00:00
How isn't this the breaking news story of this and future weeks to come? The government likes to spread a lot of FUD about how foreign nation states can interfere with citizens, but when there is an actual vulnerability in such corporate turds as Verizon that actually allows the foreign nation to spy on you, nobody in the media bats an eye.

Of course, the answer is that the corporations own both Congress and the media.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-04-03 01:57:51+00:00
> had to sit through 5 soap related commercials

Not the skin-lightening kind, I hope? Those ads were... odd.

I spent the late-1990s in Manila, for me it was Jollibee ads, and an oddly recurrent anti-corruption PSA which, I think, made corruption look quite appealing, actually.