MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yxwvut | 2025-04-04 13:26:11+00:00
He’s right though - indifference to corruption or malfeasance begets corruption and malfeasance. Holding your government and companies to a higher standard of behavior is both possible and necessary for a functional, durable nation. Sure, you can enforce corporate morality via regulation or governmental morality via the courts or ethics committees, but that completely ignores the concept of soft power. Laws can be broken faster than they can be enforced.
by empath75 | 2025-04-04 13:26:17+00:00
This whole thing is based on a serious misunderstanding on the role of penalties and fouls in sports. One can take a penalty strategically, for example to stop an almost sure goal, with the consequence of whatever the penalty is. That's just part of the game, and elite (ie: NHL) players are really smart about how they do it, and _should_ be rewarded for it.

Then there are "dumb" penalties, and worse -- things that aren't penalties at all, that break "unwritten rules", and there's a whole bunch of them, like showboating, dirty shots, etc, and those won't get you the support of the team.

And then there are you, know, team rules -- if you're out there not listening to the coach, you'll absolutely get benched.
by soulofmischief | 2025-04-04 13:26:23+00:00
I see, thank you for pointing that out. The article should have led with that instead, then. I immediately exited after the ridiculous opener that I quoted. Shoddy writing is shoddy writing.

But let's be clear: I was not out to create a false impression, and I resent your accusation without giving benefit of the doubt.
by somenameforme | 2025-04-04 13:26:32+00:00
The reason people vehemently support the ending of USAID is because while they give aid with one hand, they simultaneously use the other to trigger instability that ultimately leads to conflicts and war. And if even if a single one of these wars can be prevented, you're looking at millions of lives saved - certainly if we include the displaced who lose everything.

For instance here [1] is an article detailing various times USAID has been weaponized to try to overthrow various countries. A somewhat amusing one is them starting a Cuban social network with the goal of creating a "Cuban spring" uprising which failed and ultimately just turned into a giant honey pot for Cuban authorities. Recently USAID workers had a to spend an entire day shredding classified docs [2] including with offering guidance for what to do when the paper shredders 'need a rest.' You don't classify operations that are done transparently and in good faith.

And this is not even touching on the massive corruption in the entire operation when you end up shipping billions of dollars to loosely accountable NGOs who in turn hand it off to other groups and on down a line to some small amount eventually gets genuinely spent. USAID was involved in the Haiti Earthquake efforts where hundreds of millions of dollars were spent, on something, to eventually construct a total of 6 permanent housing units. [3]

Whatever good USAID may have done, could be far more effectively done by another organization without all of their baggage and corruption.

---

[1] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other... (archive) https://archive.is/IQl36

[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/usaid-staff-...

[3] - https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-04 13:26:45+00:00
>but eliminating large swaths of humanity is something dicatorships have tried in the past.

Technology changes things though. Things aren't "the same as it ever was". The Napoleonic wars killed 6.5 million people with muskets and cannons. The total warfare of WWII killed 70 to 85 million people with tanks, turboprop bombers, aircraft carriers, and 36 kilotons TNT of Atomic bombs, among other weaponry.

Total war today includes modern thermonuclear weapons. In 60 seconds, just one Ohio class submarine can launch 80 independent warheads, totaling over 36 megatons of TNT. That is over 20 times more than all explosives, used by all sides, for all of WWII, including both Atomic bombs.

AGI is a leap forward in power equivalent to what thermonuclear bombs are to warfare. Humans have been trying to destroy each other for all of time but we can only have one nuclear war, and it is likely we can only have one AGI revolt.
by spencerflem | 2025-04-04 13:27:03+00:00
I like where you're going with this - we do need an economic system that priorities people and not profits. So I hope you take this for the pedantry it is-

But the customer for an ad is the company. They are buying it, so a hypnotizing ad would be 100% effective for them.

In your version of the analogy, its what's effective for the seller- so the ad equivalent would be a situation where in order to get any sales, 100% of your margin goes towards advertising.
by pfdietz | 2025-04-04 13:27:18+00:00
And there may be general resistance mechanisms that hit more than one chemical (like changes in membrane permeability and efflux pumps.) Over time, with more exposure, the costs can be expected to decline as resistance is optimized.

Ultimately resistance can evolve that kicks in only on exposure to the chemicals in question. Bacteria already do this with, say, the enzyme needed to metabolize lactose. The gene isn't expressed until lactose is present.
by lurkingllama | 2025-04-04 13:27:30+00:00
Anyone who has participated in calorie-tracking for an extended period of time can tell you that the visual appearance of food can be highly misleading to the number of calories in it.

I'm all for making it easier for people to lose weight but this app may honestly have the reverse effect. If the app estimates calories too low (and therefore the individual eats more), many people will get frustrated with the lack of progress and give up. If the app estimates too high, the individual will lose weight, but diet fatigue and other negative side effects of being at a >500 calorie deficit may make the diet too difficult to maintain.
by bko | 2025-04-04 13:27:42+00:00
> The problems it raises - alignment, geopolitics, lack of societal safeguards - are all real, and happening now (just replace “AGI” with “corporations”, and voila, you have a story about the climate crisis and regulatory capture).

Can you point to the data that suggests these evil corporations are ruining the planet? Carbon emissions are down in every western country since 1990s. Not down per-capita, but down in absolute terms. And this holds even when adjusting for trade (i.e. we're not shipping our dirty work to foreign countries and trading with them). And this isn't because of some regulation or benevolence. It's a market system that says you should try to produce things at the lowest cost and carbon usage is usually associated with a cost. Get rid of costs, get rid of carbon.

Other measures for Western countries suggests the water is safer and overall environmental deaths have decreased considerably.

The rise in carbon emissions is due to Chine and India. Are you talking about evil Chinese and Indians corporations?

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
by scrlk | 2025-04-04 13:27:44+00:00
British elites essentially gave up trying to rule after the Suez Crisis, when Britain's ejection from the superpower club was confirmed. The country has been aimlessly bobbing around since under a general policy of "managed decline", and matters have now come to a head.

"How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."

Lee Kuan Yew commented upon it in From Third World to First: "As Britain’s worldwide influence shrank, so did the worldview of its younger parliamentarians and ministers. Some old friends, British commanders who had fought in the last world war and had served in Singapore defending us against Sukarno’s Confrontation, compared the old generation British leaders to oak trees with wide-spreading branches and deep roots. They described their younger leaders as “bonsai oak”, recognisably oak trees, but miniaturised, because their root area had shrunk."
by bakugo | 2025-04-04 13:28:13+00:00
> Sure you can: move!

To where? Another country that also forces you to pay taxes? I'm sure there are places in the world where taxes don't exist, but if they were places worth living in, I'm sure way more people would be moving there.

> Or do you mean "you can't benefit from all of the security, infrastructure, and social investments in our country and not pay taxes to it?"

Nobody said anything about whether or not the benefits that result from taxation are worth it. Just that it's mandatory, which it effectively is for the vast majority of people.
by subsistence234 | 2025-04-04 13:28:23+00:00
DOGE didn't abolish PEPFAR, they reduced its budget by 25%. Probably because ~50% of that budget was being wasted. There's likely still a big buffer before anyone runs out of meds.

Also there are lots of private donors who would make up the difference (if it's only 20% of Americans, that's more than 65 million people, who can easily come up with 25% shortfall of the $6.5B budget, that's less than $10 per person).
by diordiderot | 2025-04-04 13:28:23+00:00
> lowest rate of investment

High costs of

1. Energy 2. Transport 3. Housing

Are the cause of low private and public investment.

The author treats the lack of public productivity growth as separate from the lack of public investment but the latter causes the former

Excellent piece about it here.

https://ukfoundations.co/

TLDR: "it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere. This prevents investment, increases energy costs, and makes it harder for productive economic clusters to expand. This, in turn, lowers our productivity, incomes, and tax revenues."

Housing is probably the biggest culprit. More on that here.

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
by jmyeet | 2025-04-04 13:28:37+00:00
Oh that's easy: it's because it's poor. Why?

- Not taxing the wealthy;

- Austerity measures that do nothing but destroy government services; and

- Housing prices.

You see this kind of disconnect all the time. For example, in the Biden administration, people would point to how well the NASDAQ is doing to say "the economy is doing great", which says nothing about the job market or living standards.

These economic measures really tell you nothing about wealth and income distribution.

House prices all over the developed world have to come down. This is arguably the biggest problem. But voters will resist that because it's their nest egg. At this point, this only goes one of two ways: fascist police state or socialist revolution.

Hoarding or denying shelter or food is violence.
by friendzis | 2025-04-04 13:28:37+00:00
Global namespace clobbering has huge implications. With modules/namespaces you have a well defined and limited blast radius: a change is limited to a module and calling code.

Now, imagine your environment of choice supported dynamic runtime loading of code where the code is just dropped to the global namespace. This screams "insecure" and "how do I know if I call the code I want to call?".

Now imagine the only mitigating mechanism was `include_once`. It would make sense software written in this environment requires own CVE namespace as new security vulns are discovered every second
Ask HN: How do you personally overcome AI doomerism?
by carlos-menezes | 2025-04-04 13:28:40+00:00
Every time I open HN, it feels like there's another story about AI automating tasks that used to be someone’s job—tools for code generation, debugging, or even design seem to dominate the front page, if we're focusing on the context of software engineering.

It's difficult to avoid feeling pressured or concerned about the future of our line of work, and I'm sure that those in other professions may also identify with this. In what ways do you individually handle these worries? What keeps you from losing sight of the good while navigating the gloom and ambiguity around AI's place in the workforce and, more broadly, in the world?
by arcbyte | 2025-04-04 13:28:47+00:00
> It's 100% transactional - how can I go through this as fast as possible - as a result people fail the exams at unseen rates like 50-80% in classes that can be passed by learning a few days and doing the exercises yourself.

This is a funny post because this was my experience 20 years ago in college. Nothing new from LLMs here. My big takeaway from my experience in different universities (I attended several different ones) is that the content in all the universities is largely the same - the main difference is that you are picking the caliber of your classmates. My classmates in one technical, well-regarded university were MILES beyond the classmates in a local second-tier state university in terms of intelligence, passion, and drive; and those classmates were more attentive and intelligent than the ones in a third-rate community college.
by nickpp | 2025-04-04 13:28:53+00:00
So let me get this straight: Consensus-1, a super-collective of hundreds of thousands of Agent-5 minds, each twice as smart as the best human genius, decides to wipe out humanity because it “finds the remaining humans too much of an impediment”.

This is where all AI doom predictions break down. Imagining the motivations of a super-intelligence with our tiny minds is by definition impossible. We just come up with these pathetic guesses, utopias or doomsdays - depending on the mood we are in.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-04-04 13:29:01+00:00
In my opinion this isn't even too relevant. I am no python expert but I believe defining a logger at the top for the average one file python script is perfectly adequate or even very sensible in many scenarios. Depends on what you expect the code to do. Ok, the file is named utils.py...

Worse by far is still the ability of AI to really integrate different problems and combine them into a solution. And it also seems to depend on the language. In my opinion especially Python and JS results are often very mixxed while other languages with presumably a smaller training set might even fare better. JS seems often fine with asynchronous operation like that file check however.

Perhaps really vetting a training set would improve AIs, but it would be quite work intensive to build something like that. That would require a lot of senior devs, which is hard to come by. And then they need to agree on code quality, which might be impossible.
by pc86 | 2025-04-04 13:29:49+00:00
You seem to think that every government agency does highly specialized incredibly specific work that you couldn't possibly have any idea how to manage. That's absolutely not the case. Sure there are absolutely certain jobs etc. where that may be the case - certain engineering departments in perhaps DOE come to mind, that sort of thing.

99% of the government is not that. It's paperwork, databases, forms. Not saying it's not important work, I'm saying it doesn't take a genius to look at the workflow for the vast majority of the government and understand it, and see opportunities for better efficiency.
by empath75 | 2025-04-04 13:29:54+00:00
Sure, but the pretense is that the game is a self contained reality and once the game is over, everyone has a life they can go on living. Tripping someone on the way to scoring a goal is _unfair_, and there is a defined penalty for it, but when the game is over, that's the end of the consequences for it.

There are, though, lots of penalties in hockey that are about not hurting or maiming (or even killing) people, and those sorts of penalties are very much not rewarded or encouraged by coaches or players.
by p0d | 2025-04-04 13:29:58+00:00
I am a walker and walk around most of my city, Belfast. The affluence I encounter does not seem to match the news narrative. I am concerned that I have become hard-hearted. Alternatively, I wonder if I just see the world differently to others. I have not determined how to come to a conclusion on the matter.I have lived and worked in some of the poorest regions and housing estates of the UK. If anyone has insight I would love to hear it.
by brightlancer | 2025-04-04 13:30:05+00:00
> Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).

Arson is not protest. Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.

Trump (or anybody) shouldn't be allowed to punish folks for speech or peaceful protest. Unfortunately, folks are calling VIOLENT acts like arson and battery "protest", and threats of bodily harm "speech" ("harassment" or "assault" under most US criminal law) -- we should be in favor of the government stepping in to protect people from arson, battery, and assault/ harassment.

> he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020,

Roth has been president since 2007. What was his response to Nick Christakis's struggle session (plenty of video of that) or Erika Christakis leaving Yale, after she penned an e-mail that students should be able to handle Halloween costumes they find offensive?

The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.
by jh00ker | 2025-04-04 13:30:11+00:00
Thanks for the Democracy Now interview! His description of "tech layoffs" is the most concise framing I've heard to describe what I've felt about it:

"Cosmetic offering to the financial markets to show that Silicon Valley still can control its labor costs... It's less the future flow of funds is improved ... than that they're signaling something to the markets ..."

https://youtu.be/j7jPzzjbVuk?si=YSbUW8h2mNktzj_9&t=634
by heymijo | 2025-04-04 13:30:13+00:00
You're right, but I think the general public is largely ignorant about calories and nutrition. Even basics like 4 cals per gram of protein and carbohydrate, 7 for alcohol, 9 for fats. Or even what a carbohydrate really is versus a "sugar", which people talk about as bad.

There's a sweet spot for an app that is inaccurate with a market that wants it but doesn't understand how inaccurate it is.

Kind of like how I could vibe code an app, get it to "work", think it's great and be ignorant of the many ways it will break or isn't working that a knowledgeable developer could.
by SkyBelow | 2025-04-04 13:30:29+00:00
The challenge is that sufficiently bad code could be intentional or it could be from a lack of skill.

For example, I've seen a C# application where every function takes in and outputs an array of objects, supposedly built that way so the internal code can be modified without ever having to worry about the contract breaking. It was just as bad as you are imagining, probably worse. Was that incompetence or building things to be so complicated that others would struggle to work on it?
by lelanthran | 2025-04-04 13:30:35+00:00
> That's because the extent of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture" while the present behavior of the illiberal right is abductions and overseas slave camps. You can see why people might find having the two equated a little ridiculous, right?

You are correct - one is objectively worse than the other.

The unfortunate truth is that, also, one is a consequence of the other.

Trump is simply doing what his voters wanted[1]. And they voted for him precisely because `of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture"`.

Had the first thing not happened, then the consequence would have been a fictional story in an alternate timeline.

But here we are, and we don't get to say "Sure, we were assholes to 50% of the population, but your response is worse".

[1] Spoiler - they may not even want it anymore!
by rdtsc | 2025-04-04 13:30:49+00:00
And I don’t and urge others not to either.

They constantly skew and manipulate information to fit a particular agenda.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_c...

In almost every decade or major event in history, starting with the Russian revolution, Holocaust and up to current events they were making stuff up, taking sides and spinning stories to fit some narrative. When I see an “US official” I automatically translate it to “we made stuff up”.
by loudmax | 2025-04-04 13:31:07+00:00
What the median right-of-center rich American wanted was tax cuts, with maybe a little bit of culture-war anti left stuff thrown in for spice. They are not pleased with abandoning the economic world order that Reagan did so much to promote. Sensibly designed, focused tariffs can be good for the economy, but that's not what's being rolled out.

The people who actually want these blunt universal tariffs fall into three categories:

* The uneducated * The deluded * The grifters

The uneducated want tariffs because they think it will restore their purchasing power and middle-class status (which it won't).

The deluded want tariffs because they've bought into the cult, and the reckoning with reality if they back out now is too painful to contemplate.

The grifters actually benefit from selective exemptions based on political loyalty and having the money flowing into the right coffers.
by zabzonk | 2025-04-04 13:31:24+00:00
It's not so bad. Yes HS2 is a disaster, yes military procurement is beyond a joke (those daft aircraft carriers, and the horrible US F35s!) and other stuff. But pretty much what nonsense happens compared with other places.

I still like living here more than other countries I've lived in - friendly people, lovely countryside, NHS. But I must admit housing is, and always has been, an issue.
by gchadwick | 2025-04-04 13:31:56+00:00
I think a key part of the 'poor' feeling in day to day experience comes from councils' inability to do maintenance, things like pot holes, children's play equipment, public toilet, general upkeep on public spaces and services like libraries. In the grand scheme of things this isn't too expensive but it's been cut to the bone due to way local government funding works. This is explored in the article:

> in large part because they’re mandated to write blank cheques for social care with no support or strategy from central government. Individual cases in Central Bedfordshire are now costing up to £750,000 per year, a quarter of the entire libraries and leisure budget and an amount that is rising rapidly with no apparent ceiling. As I wrote previously, “In a single year, residential care costs for children have increased by £2,000 per child… per week,” taking the average cost for a single case from ~£200,000 to ~£300,000 per child per year, again with little explanation as to where the money is going or how this is even possible.

> Similarly, “school transport costs have increased by over 100% - from £9m to £20m - in just 4 years” - that’s driven by an unexplained rise in the number of SEND pupils eligible for support and it amounts to roughly the same as - deep breath - the transport, roads, parking, libraries, leisure, housing benefit, public protection and safety budgets combined. Central Bedfordshire Council is not an outlier here - collectively, council overspends on SEND services are set to hit £2bn in the next year, risking further bankruptcies. Again this is not about pitting children against libraries, but asking if we seriously believe we’re addressing either of these things well?

Local councils have to pay the very large bills for social care and supporting SEND children but have basically little control over how it's spent or levers to help control the bills.

Fixing this so councils can once again spend relative minor amounts of money improving the public realm could go a long way to improving day to day experience. Definitely some other large structural problems (see the huge costs of HS2) but it would provide a noticeable improvement in people's lives and potentially isn't too hard for a government willing to make some bold changes around taxation, local government funding and providing proper national strategy and funding on social care.