MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thyristan | 2025-04-27 13:55:34+00:00
I think that house size is a metric of convenience because it is archeologically simple. But there are modern examples of societies where house size doesn't correlate with wealth and wealth was stored in other kinds of assets, material or immaterial.

E.g. in the communist eastern block, living quarters were quite standardized, and while the very highest levels of society had special arrangements, a professor might have lived in the same quarters as a factory worker. The differences were in the "job extras" such as personal drivers and cars, travel permits, spots on the waiting list for goods and services and social prestige that translated to influence.

Certain early modern European societies, especially protestant ones, also frowned upon overt displays of wealth through bigger and more ostentatious housing. However, that might be detectable archeologically when using build quality as a metric.

Cities like Amsterdam also had very peculiar systems of allotting and taxing building spaces, thereby leading to the well-known equal-sized and narrow houses.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-04-27 13:56:43+00:00
Perhaps I’m not typical, but:

> How many people have actually read The Jungle?

It was mandatory reading in my high school curriculum.

> How many people have actually seen our rivers on fire?

I grew up with two family members who would tell us stories about exactly that. Since I was a kid, that has been my mental go-to on “why” clean water legislation.

> How many people remember corporations hiring private armies and literally killing their employees because they dared to strike?

The Pinkertons and so on? Alive and well in spirit unfortunately at places like Constellis (formerly Xe, formerly Blackwater). People haven’t forgotten about that, although it’d be nice if more people held the line against such things. FDR was spot on about the MIC/DIB.

> The people that benefit from so many of our laws are cheering their removal without understanding why they're there.

Indeed. I believe there is an old adage about how one shouldn’t tear down a fence without knowing why it’s there.
by montroser | 2025-04-27 13:57:43+00:00
> I think the reason I find this so upsetting is that, despite the risk of bots, I like to engage in discussions on the internet with people in good faith. The idea that my opinion on an issue could have been influenced by a fake personal anecdote invented by a research bot is abhorrent to me.

I like Simon's musings in general, but are we not way past this point already? It is completely and totally inevitable that if you try to engage in discussions on the internet, you will be influenced by fake personal anecdotes invented by LLMs. The only difference here is they eventually disclosed it, but aren't various state and political actors already doing this in spades, undisclosed?
by codingdave | 2025-04-27 13:59:29+00:00
I like the idea, but it being free is actually not great in this situation. If I am going to swap homes with a stranger, I'd rather there be some kind of gate to make sure they are serious. I'd also rather that you guys just handled the $25 insurance for every visit, so it is a constant, not an option I would need to deal with. I'd rather pay $50/visit and a membership fee to improve safety than have it be free. That still is way better for me than a hotel, and give you all a little bit of revenue.

I worry a bit about crime as well. With no vetting of the users, what stops someone from setting up a fake profile, getting someone to show up a specific time and place, and then doing who knows what to them? Even if that is an edge case, it is a really serious edge case.
by thebruce87m | 2025-04-27 14:00:11+00:00
> I believe they will still climb higher than ever before.

I think this expectation is already priced in. I invested when I saw LLMs kicking off with no reflection in the NVIDIA share price and made 10x when the market caught up.

Now with tariff uncertainty and trump signalling to China (via Russia) that there would be no repercussions for invading Taiwan I’m less convinced there is growth there, but the possibility of massive loss. In the days of meme stocks this might not matter of course.

Note that an invasion of Taiwan would have huge implications everywhere but any company that needs leading edge semiconductors to directly sell their products would be screwed more than others.
by paulcole | 2025-04-27 14:00:24+00:00
As a kid she was attacked by a shark. Parents took her to a local doctor who sewed up the wound. Turned out her bowel was punctured and she was going septic. Started complaining to her parents that she was feeling worse and worse. Parents brush her off and say to get some rest. Next morning she’s nearly dead, parents freak out, and rush her back to the doctor and eventually get her helicoptered to a real hospital. Surgeons clean everything up, she wakes up and mom says, “The doctors saved you.” And she goes, “No, I saved myself.”

I find the narrator to be trying really hard to make the Facebook/Meta people look bad and in a lot of those cases she herself just comes across as bad at her own job.

Nobody in this book comes across well.
by martin-t | 2025-04-27 14:00:49+00:00
I never said we didn't need rules, just that when they are too specific, people tend to follow the letter but break the spirit of the rule.

(Sidenote, one deeply ingrained idea is that the law is somehow special compared to other rules. The only real difference is that the law is enforced by violence while other rules are not.)

I was also talking about criminal law so the questions about minimum wage, contracts and voting are irrelevant regardless if you want specific or general rules about punishments.
by giantg2 | 2025-04-27 14:01:05+00:00
Not to mention, most if the wealth in a primary residence isn't really accessible/utilized. A house bought years ago might appreciate to the point you wouldn't be able to afford it today. But if you sell it, where else are you going to live unless moving to a cheaper area? Then you have people who are house poor vs rich people who live relatively modestly (eg Warren Buffet).

And thats all in the US. Other countries/cultures may have different practices that do not tie wealth to large houses.
by bawana | 2025-04-27 14:01:40+00:00
Finasteride was discovered because of a tribe in south america with a high frequency of a mutant allele in the gene responsible for protein that converts T to DHT. They had no BPH. This led to the search for a competitive inhibitor of that enzyme.While under patent it was extremely lucrative to big pharma. The incentives of fame and greed will continue to plague our civilization as long as we embrace aggregating structures like corporations, advertising, social media, and instant worldwide communication to amplify human traits that were useful in small scale tribes.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-27 14:01:55+00:00
If they say up front on every menu that the tip is included and the servers/bartenders are up front and you can actually remove it (I guess you can put less on the bottom line), what’s the issue?

Taxes also aren’t included in the menu price.

I can’t imagine any of the servers who don’t like the status quo or that would come out better even if they made $20 an hour.
by graemep | 2025-04-27 14:02:25+00:00
Singapore is not multicultural in the sense it is often used: different communities have to learn each others languages, as you said, for example. A huge effort was made to create a common identity.

This is very different from multicultural meaning groups having separate communities. That is de facto segregation.

" Compare this to Europe where it's often muslims who try to bring their Burkas and sharia law with them."

I think this is much exaggerated.

Its also not immigrant groups pushing Islamic fundamentalism as much as international funding and ideology that is global.

There are also groups (mostly white people!) who are politically committed to this multiculturalism vs integration.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-27 14:03:46+00:00
"high" or "low" functioning is not a constant. I'm autistic and I've been low functioning and high functioning. I can hold a job and had a wife at one point. But sometimes circumstances in my life change my ability to function. Sometimes I will go periods where I can't speak, and this caused me to almost lose my job... but for the fact they knew I was autistic and had compassion for me.

I understand that sometimes people want high needs autistic people to be the only ones who are visible, because it perpetuates the (false) narratives people have about autistic people -- that we can't function in society, we are essentially children, we need to be "cured" to "save the children", but people need to realize this is a) a spectrum and b) your place within the spectrum is always in flux. Low functioning autistic people can become more high functioning with support, and high functioning autistic people who are abused can become low functioning very quickly.
by TipsForCanoes | 2025-04-27 14:03:56+00:00
I know a few people who work in food service and make close to 6 figures with tipping. Without tipping they'd be at or close to minimum wage. Of course they are in favor of tipping.

One friend shared with me in detail how she plans and practices every customer interaction to maximize tipping. The more I learn about this the more the restaurant industry feels like a scam to me.

For example, if someone orders a mixed vodka drink, she will ask "do you want that with Absolut or Stoli?" two of the higher priced vodkas they offer. She won't even mention that you can also choose the well vodka for much less.

She also told me of another trick she often uses, especially with large parties on busy nights. When she first goes to the table she will ask "has anyone been by yet? No? Oh this isn't my section but I'll be happy to take care of you since you've been waiting..." Only it really is her section. According to her this always results in higher tips because it gives the impression that she is going out of her way.

My reaction to this and the escalating tip expectation has been to pretty much stop going out to restaurants. Instead, I've learned to cook and host dinner parties. I enjoy it so much more (and I refuse any attempt to tip me ;)
by nightfox1 | 2025-04-27 14:06:41+00:00
I am building an AI Chess Coach to improve.

When you are attacking, remember to use all your pieces. Your Knight comes to open squares. Your Bishop is great at targeting pawns. Rooks and your Queen start the checkmate.

Don't panic, when it gets complex, look for exchanges. Most likely your opponent will play naturally looking moves, and your attack can be finished with tactics.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-27 14:06:46+00:00
You don't have to lie to tell a lie. The media have honed well this skill over decades.

"Coffee study found that it TRIPLES, your chance of developing a terrifying form of colon cancer! A 300% increase!"

In reality the study had a sample size of 10 and the odds were for an extremely rare form of lung cancer you have a 0.0003% chance of developing anyway. But now most readers go tell their co-workers "they did a study and found that coffee actually gives you colon cancer".
by JdeBP | 2025-04-27 14:06:46+00:00
There are derivatives, too, like Adrian Siekierka's funscii: https://github.com/asiekierka/funscii

Which in turn has its own (albeit not up to date) forks like https://github.com/Wuerfel21/funscii .

Unscii itself has approximately 3200 glyphs of its own, some adapted or taken from various old home computing and arcade platforms. To that it supplements from FixedSys Excelsior, which itself has about 5800 glyphs (but where some overlap). There's a "full" version that then further supplements from (an old version of) GNU Unifont as well.

The adaptation of 8by8 characters is fairly systematic: https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/blob/2.1.1f/src/unscii.txt#L...

Unsung items in the source include font files for the old platforms, such as the Commodore PET for example. Amusingly, the Atari arcade font has no letter 'N': https://github.com/viznut/unscii/blob/main/src/font-arcade.t...

(For anyone wanting to fix that: https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/commit/d9c29ca59bfda4d72446c... )
by hyperhello | 2025-04-27 14:06:51+00:00
C is very much one level above assembly, the way dipping a jug in the river is one level above bending down to drink. It's a whole lot easier to mechanically translate *ptr++ = 0 to the corresponding machine code than to memorize and write those actual instructions. Neither is going to automatically check the security of your memory access through any more than the jug is going to test the water.
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-27 14:08:39+00:00
I can’t speak for where you are, but it’s the norm in the uk. Eg around 4:25 in this video https://youtu.be/WZizlnLfLks?si=LjRI1EWIHhn6Ktgx

When I bought the Ikea light, it was just hook and no way to fix the plastic surround to the ceiling.

Ikea might have updated the light since then though. As I said before, I got the light when it was new, long before it went viral, and ikea might have tweaked the design since.
by logicchains | 2025-04-27 14:08:53+00:00
All those societies studied were poorer than even the least developed nations today. We know it's possible to have wealth equality with poverty; Mao-era China showed this. The solution is simple: make it hard to accumulate wealth, so nobody has much wealth. The question is whether it's possible to have a wealthy society with no wealth equality, and empirically there's zero evidence this is possible.
by uecker | 2025-04-27 14:09:30+00:00
I do not see any serious contender to C. And considering that most people developing alternative languages that aim to replace C do not seem to have a good understanding what makes a good system programming language, I also do not see this changing soon. Tooling for memory safety will improve and I expect we will also have something complete in ISO C at some point. But already today, one does not have to write modern C as your parents did, e.g. there is no need to do unsafe pointer arithmetic and many other unsafe features can simply be avoided. Signed integer overflow can be checked at run-time. Only temporal memory safety is missing a good solution that ensures safety, but I do not find this is to be a major problem in my projects (with some discipline about pointer ownership)
by kgeist | 2025-04-27 14:09:31+00:00
We use "database-per-tenant" with ~1 mln users.

Database-per-tenant is great for read-heavy apps - most tenants are small and their tables don't have a lot of records, so even very complex joins are very fast.

The main problem is that release times can increase substantially, because you have to migrate lots of individual databases one by one, and sometimes schema/data drift can occur between DBs, and then your release stops midway and you have to figure out why in some tenants the feature works, and in some it breaks... So it's not free launch, the complexity just shifts to a different place.
by Fosowl | 2025-04-27 14:09:39+00:00
No it can't because we check the bash the AI try to execute against a list of pattern for dangerous command. Also all commands are executed within a folder specified in the configuration file, so that you can choose which files it has access to. However, we currently have no containerization meaning that code execution unlike bash could be harmful. I do think about improving the safety by running all code/commands within a docker and then having some kind of file transfer upon user validation once a task is done.
by misja111 | 2025-04-27 14:09:49+00:00
Well one of the comments is from Dr Wagner, a physicist.

> Dr Jenny Wagner, a German cosmologist, physicist and author based at the Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Helsinki, told The Irish Times Gough has developed “an interesting idea”.

It does read like science fiction, however, his theory did predict some of the recent JWST findings.

> The “JWST is smashing all existing theories” seems to be repeated a lot, is there anything at all behind that claim?

There definitely is. The early galaxies and super heavy black holes that JWST is discovering don't match the existing cosmological theories at all.
by Philpax | 2025-04-27 14:10:01+00:00
LLMs can infer a lot of details from "common sense" (i.e. statistical association). As a human, I can figure out what each field's types should be, so your frontier LLM could, too: https://chatgpt.com/share/680e3a90-8660-8003-998f-91ad98e32f...
by ahl | 2025-04-27 14:10:10+00:00
It's very amusing that this kind of legend has persisted! ZFS is notorious for *noticing* when bits flip, something APFS designers claimed was rare given the robustness of Apple hardware.[1][2] What would ZFS on iPhone have looked like? Hard to know, and that certainly wasn't the design center.

Neither here nor there, but DTrace was ported to iPhone--it was shown to me in hushed tones in the back of an auditorium once...

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/a-zfs-developers-ana...

[2]: https://ahl.dtrace.org/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/#checksums
by xtiansimon | 2025-04-27 14:10:54+00:00
Well, diverse situations summarized by the word “economy”, right?

In general a good economy has opportunities, and stability. A bad economy is filled with many pitfalls, perverse outcomes, and human suffering. What’s interesting is how the effects of a bad economy divide between people who are devastated and those who weather the storm and maybe even profit—smaller and smaller groups, which is an inversion of what we want from a good economy.

All common sense, no? I think you’d have a peculiar life if these things dont effect you.
by topspin | 2025-04-27 14:11:06+00:00
I think the diversity of platforms is a small factor in the cost: nearly all of the equipment and people involved in the various delivery modes would still exist if there were no nukes at all, and possibly in far greater quantity. Further, I don't believe the figure cited here is actually meaningful: the net cost of nuclear weapons isn't calculable thing. There are far too many indirections involved, and the depth of the thinking and planning and interrelationships can't actually be reflected in a ledger, never mind thinking about what the cost of not funding this arsenal might be.

But, to the extent that the bean counters can, somehow, draw a bunch of arbitrary lines in the sand and directly attribute some 11% of the US military budget to the nukes keeping the peace on behalf of the entire Western world, it doesn't appear excessive.
by zie | 2025-04-27 14:11:42+00:00
Basically it's that memory changes out from under you. As we know, computers use Binary, so everything boils down to it being a 0 or a 1. A bit flip is changing what was say a 0 into a 1.

Usually attributed to "cosmic rays", but really can happen for any number of less exciting sounding reasons.

Basically, there is zero double checking in your computer for almost everything except stuff that goes across the network. Memory and disks are not checked for correctness, basically ever on any machine anywhere. Many servers(but certainly not all) are the rare exception when it comes to memory safety. They usually have ECC(Error Correction Code) Memory, basically a checksum on the memory to ensure that if memory is corrupted, it's noticed and fixed.

Essentially every filesystem everywhere does zero data integrity checking:

MacOS APFS: Nope Windows NTFS: Nope Linux EXT4: Nope BSD's UFS: Nope Your mobile phone: Nope

ZFS is the rare exception for file systems that actually double check the data you save to it is the data you get back from it. Every other filesystem is just a big ball of unknown data. You probably get back what you put it, but there is zero promises or guarantees.
by _fat_santa | 2025-04-27 14:11:46+00:00
Oh no even now there is plenty of use for it outside of AI training. Just think of all the schools in villages all around the world that don't have access to the internet or have a very limited connection. I've worked with folks that would setup local "wikipedia servers" for schools so that kids could access Wikipedia via a local network connection. In other setups they just download all of wikipedia to a set of laptops and you use one of the offline readers to browse it.

This is essentially the modern version of having a library of encyclopedias.
by shakna | 2025-04-27 14:12:15+00:00
Its... Buggy. For example, fmt can currently break mutable handles. [0] Or you can modify immutable structures [1].

But there was a time where autofree was just a compiler flag and wasn't actually implemented, even though the author claimed that it was.

[0] https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/24271

[1] https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/23509
by JdeBP | 2025-04-27 14:12:32+00:00
One answer to that is to ensure that you accept plugged-in font files via some well-known format like FreeBSD's "vt" font file format, BDF, or GNU UniFont's HEX format; and then just let people get on with picking their own fonts. (-:

Such as https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html for example.
by ajuc | 2025-04-27 14:12:40+00:00
There's many ways to get low wealth inequality.

1. reset the accumulation every 50 years or more often. The reset can be a war, a dictatorship, revolution, whatever. It's how Eastern Europe has low wealth inequality despite no systemic measures. It's not a stable solution (if you leave them alone they will accumulate capital and become oligarchy unless other measures are implemented). That's why EU Eastern Europe is different from non-EU Eastern Europe by the way - EU is a huge regulatory force preventing oligarchies from arising.

2. taxation + welfare system that redistributes enough wealth to prevent runaway feedback loops. See socialdemocratic Europe.

3. other regulations preventing non-monetary runaway loops (lobbying laws, antimonopoly rules, electoral system preventing influence from money into politics, trade unions, etc.)

4. economy focused on activities that are less suitable for wealth accumulation. This is not a binary switch, more like a spectrum going from hydrocarbons to service based economy. It's also not a long-term solution, it just speeds up or slows down the accumulation. Even in service-based economy you eventually get oligarchy if you have no regulation (see USA).

IMHO the obvious choice is combination of 2 and 3, the others are shortcuts that happen by accident and you can't depend on them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...

BTW "invasive control" is a biased view. Unchecked unregulated capitalism is just as invasive if not more. The only difference is who is invasive towards whom. I prefer elected officials controlling my employers over unelected billionaires controlling their workers. Notice how in US it's common to have to explain to your boss why you want a day off. Like he owns you and it's his good will that you may be allowed to get sick or to rest.

In EU not only is this illegal - even if it would be legal - it would be a huge breach of etiquette for your employer to ask how exactly are you sick.

For someone from Europe it's USA that looks crazy invasive.
by gyesxnuibh | 2025-04-27 14:12:52+00:00
I'm not sure that's necessarily true. People still do embroidering even though there's crazy embroidery machines (though the cost barrier there is probably related). Maybe LLMs will be too cost prohibitive in the future (once we start paying the real total cost of LLMs).

You're right that a lot less people will be writing code like a lot less people are sewing these days but people still do it for fun.

P.S.: I really enjoyed reading moonbound :)