MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pl_trw | 2025-04-26 21:57:52+00:00
The strategy is to destroy an opponents centres of power. This is the result of the liberalisation of academia over the last 40 years.

The spread of opinions in a mathematics department on social issues should reflect the general populations. Yet the few foolish enough to express conservative views can expect to be terminated.

I hope the next generation of institution builders keep this lesson in mind: you need buy in from all tax payers when you're spending their money.

Edit: Responses in this thread give me little hope for American academia correcting course before it is destroyed. One can hope something better comes from its ashes.
by scoofy | 2025-04-26 21:58:06+00:00
> Consciousness is the only thing that can not possibly be an illusion.

It can be. Suppose consciousness is a series of infinitesimal snapshots, where existence flickers for a moment and then disappears, with a new existence birthed in the next moment. Like a motion picture, at each moment we do not have a sensible version of consciousness, merely a burst of sensation, but in aggregate, as a film, consciousness springs from nothing.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-26 21:58:16+00:00
Writing original software. For example: building a new tool from scratch to solve a valid problem that real people have. Most developers cannot do that without tremendous help and a bunch completely unnecessary abstractions.

Measuring things. For example determining performance harms and improvements from new features or determining trend shifts during a defined duration.

Accessibility, security, transmission, and operations.

Requirements analysis.

Visual design, user experience, and information architecture. I mean actual product design and not just using a tool/framework to put text on screen.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-26 21:58:45+00:00
The thing is, the magic robot's output can be wrong in very surprising/misleading/superficially-convincing ways. For instance, see the article we are commenting on; you're unlikely to find _completely imaginary court cases to cite_ by googling (and in that particular case you're likely using a specialist search engine where the data _is_ somewhat dependable, anyway).

_Everything_ that the magic robot spits out needs to be fact checked. At which point, well, really, why bother? Most people who depend upon the magic robot are, of course, not fact checking, because that would usually be slower than just doing the job properly from the start.

You also see people using magic robot output for things that you _couldn't_ Google for. I recently saw, on a financial forum, someone asking about ETFs vs investment trusts vs individual stocks with a specific example of how much they wanted to invest (the context is that ETFs are taxed weirdly in Ireland; they're allowed accumulate dividends without taxation, but as compensation they're subject to a special gains tax which is higher than normal CGT, and that tax is assessed as if you had sold and re-bought every eight years, even if you haven't). Someone posted a ChatGPT case study of their example (without disclosing, tsk; they owned up to it when people pointed out that it was totally wrong).

ChatGPT, in its infinite wisdom, provided what looked like a detailed comparison with worked examples... only the timescale for the individual stocks was 20 years, the ETFs 8 years (also it screwed up some of the calculations and got the marginal income tax rate a few points wrong). It _looked_ like something that someone had put some work into, if you weren't attuned to that characteristic awful LLM writing style, but it made a mistake that it's hard to imagine a human ever making. Unless you worked through it yourself, you'd come out of it thinking that individual stocks were clearly a _way_ better option; the truth is considerably less clear.
by matwood | 2025-04-26 21:58:56+00:00
Trump has always been a terrible executor even when getting the initial idea correct. See all his failed businesses. In this case, along with the tariffs, his frame of reference is 40+ years out of date. He thinks that people will do whatever they have to in order to work with US. That the best and brightest won’t leave. That other countries will bow down to his will. That’s not the world today, even if a lot of Teslers are made in the US.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-26 21:59:31+00:00
>Corporations lie all the time and the people running them are never punished.

Then why is the ex-VW CEO currently in court?

I did not deny that fraud exists in corporation, but it is not committed by the rank and file. Most employees actually perform their duties. Examples of fraud seem rare, the VW scandal maybe.

In science a good part of the rank and file is either incompetent and malicious.
by hdhdhsjsbdh | 2025-04-26 22:00:37+00:00
Bit of a motte and bailey. Stitching living people into a human centipede is blatantly, obviously wrong and has no scientific merit. Understanding the effects of AI-driven manipulation is, on the other hand, obviously incredibly relevant and important and doing it with a small scale study in a niche subreddit seems like a reasonable way to do it.
by photonthug | 2025-04-26 22:01:34+00:00
Wow. So on the one hand, this seems to be clearly a breach of ethics in terms of experimentation without collecting consent. That seems illegal. And the fact that they claim to have reviewed all content produced by LLMs, and still allowed AI to engage in such inflammatory pretense is pretty disgusting.

On the other hand.. seems likely they are going to be punished for the extent to which they are being transparent after the fact. And we kind of need studies like this from good-guy academics to better understand the potential for abuse and the blast radius of concerted disinformation/psyops from bad actors. Yet it's impossible to ignore the parallels here with similar questions, like whether unethically obtained data can afterwards ever be untainted and used ethically afterwards. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation#Mod... )

A very sticky problem, although I think the norm in good experimental design for psychology would always be more like obtaining general consent, then being deceptive afterwards about the actual point of the experiment to keep results unbiased.
by RetroTechie | 2025-04-26 22:01:56+00:00
Nice! From that comment:

"There were a lot of interesting versions of BASIC done for Japanese machines this article misses (..)"

Most likely referring to MSX-Basic. Which shows it's (c) Microsoft on the startup screen.

Not the fastest, but a very full-featured Basic compared to most Basics around @ the time. Iirc it does non-integer math on BCD coded values. Single & double precision, so users can decide RAM use/speed/precision tradeoffs.

Maybe there were other Japanese machines using MS-supplied Basics before that. But if so, likely few (any?) after MSX was introduced ('83), since that was big in Japan leaving little room for 8-bit competitors.
by DragonStrength | 2025-04-26 22:02:15+00:00
Or more: what ideology says I and my heirs deserve to continue to be wealthy and in control? Funny how we’re in a Social Darwinist moment as wealth inequality rises again. But I’m sure people couldn’t possibly be working backwards to justify their position. Certainly the wealthy, who fund research, wouldn’t twist a science as pure as economics like they did the soft science biology.
by skissane | 2025-04-26 22:02:41+00:00
> "Mental health issues" sounds like both a fig leaf for the prosecution and a last-ditch smear of the man involved.

Mental health issues shouldn't be seen as a smear though – is it a smear if someone has physical health issues (who doesn't, at least from time-to-time?)

A recent study carried out on behalf of the Australian government estimated that 43% of Australians aged 18-to-65 had experienced mental illness at some time in their lives, and 22% at some time in the last 12 months.

The same study estimates that in the 12 months prior to the study, 17% of Australians had an anxiety disorder, 8% an affective disorder (depression or bipolar), 3% a substance use disorder.

https://www.aihw.gov.au/mental-health/overview/prevalence-an...
by rufus_foreman | 2025-04-26 22:03:03+00:00
>> If my buddy is in my backyard blasting out Freebird 24x7 on a transmitter that can reach 201 feet instead of the unlicensed maximum of 200 feet and the FCC knocks on my door looking for him and I tell them to go fuck themselves, should I be arrested?

I don't know. Is an FCC warrant like an ICE warrant? If so, then you don't have to open the door. You can probably tell them to fuck themselves, but that's probably not a good idea.

You can't obstruct their investigation. You can't conceal what your neighbor is doing. You can't tell the FCC that your neighbor doesn't have a transmitter, or that it only reaches 200 feet when you know that that it reaches farther than that. Those are crimes, in my admittedly limited understanding of the situation.

An ICE warrant is not a search warrant. ICE did not need a search warrant in this case. They needed a warrant to arrest a named person they had probable cause to believe was in the country illegally. It appears they did in fact have that warrant. It was a real warrant. And if they facts in the ICE criminal complaint are true, this is a textbook case of someone obstructing that arrest.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-26 22:03:42+00:00
>You can directly weed out poor performers because you can watch them perform poorly.

Why don't we fire researchers who committed fraud or who are incompetent?

Some studies will fail replication, even though the researchers did everything right. But in many cases the methodology is flawed, statistics are misused or the data is massages. In industry this would be grounds of termination and this isn't even the outright fraud, which also happens. For most of these no serious punishment is expected.
by krackers | 2025-04-26 22:03:45+00:00
I don't understand why newer revisions of C don't work on fixing these small issues. Things that were previously "undefined/implementation-defined behavior" can easily be made to behave sensibly without breaking anything. Type punning, 2s complement overflow, 0-initializtion of unions, all of those should "just behave" sensibly how the programmer expects. And you can already get there with the right compiler flags, so why not just codify it. It's also not going to break anything since it was undefined behavior in the first place.
Show HN: Obsidian Plugin Sync – CLI tool for easy Obsidian plugin development
by jmdots | 2025-04-26 22:03:49+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this simple command-line tool to solve a specific pain point in Obsidian plugin development. As a new plugin developer, I didn't like the idea of manually copying files from my development directory to the Obsidian vault every time I made changes.

Obsidian Plugin Sync automates this process with a single command. It: - Detects plugin ID from manifest.json - Optionally builds your plugin before syncing - Copies the necessary files to your Obsidian vault - Provides a watch mode for continuous syncing during development

The tool has zero dependencies beyond Python for basic functionality (watch mode uses the watchdog package). I wanted it to be lightweight, easy to use, and solve just one problem well.

Would love feedback from other Obsidian plugin developers or anyone building CLI tools. What features would make this more useful for you?
by sanderjd | 2025-04-26 22:05:54+00:00
I agree that we should do those things. But what I've seen for the past couple decades that I've been voting is that Republican politicians pretend to want to do those things, but refuse to do them "until we've stopped the flow" or "but the border has to be step 1".

This is a classic political tactic to be able to say you want to do something, but never actually have to do it. Politicians use this tactic when they don't actually want to do the thing for some reason. In this case, it's because it's really unpopular with business owners, who like to employ illegal immigrants.

It's perfectly reasonable to say "we need to crack down on employers in conjunction with aggressive border and deportation enforcement". But I'm very skeptical of anyone saying "stopping the flow is step 1". I've heard that story before!
by turtleyacht | 2025-04-26 22:06:46+00:00
Another idea is adding a swimlane for Acceptance or Delivery. Even after a code change is merged, QA-certified, and deployed, stories can go here for release notes, training docs, or final intake.

Not sure if it works over a longer period, but that was one of the workarounds for too many Done stories to catch up on from a post-sprint perspective.
by cirego | 2025-04-26 22:07:20+00:00
I think that's a fair point -- you're making a tradeoff. And the best part is that you don't need to choose one or the other.

In my case, I find that I prefer having higher fidelity and simpler service code by using Tilt to avoid mocks. It's also nice for frontend development because, using a Kubernetes ingress, you can avoid the need for things like frontend proxies, CORS and other development-only setup.
by eqvinox | 2025-04-26 22:07:44+00:00
I was very confused by the title, expected someone writing their own printf — i.e. the part that parses the format string, grabs varargs, converts numbers, lines up strings, etc.

I'd have called it "Bare metal puts()" or "Bare metal write()" or something along those lines instead.

(FWIW, FreeBSD's printf() is quite easy to pluck out of its surrounding libc infrastructure and adapt/customize.)
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-04-26 22:07:52+00:00
At least part of the ethics problem here is that it'd be plausible to conduct this research without creating any new posts. There's a huge volume of generative AI content on Reddit already - and a meaningfully large %ge of it follows predictable patterns. Wildly divergent writing styles between posts, posting 24/7, posting multiple long-form comments in short time periods, usernames following a specific pattern, and dozens of other heuristics.

It's not difficult to find this content on the site. Creating more of it seems like a redundant step in the research. It added little to the research, while creating very obvious ethical issues.
by robocat | 2025-04-26 22:09:01+00:00
I thought about it some more but it is hard to explain.

I wonder if your mental model is that a $20k discount applies at all future prices - so that when the car is sold for $5k that it's "actual" worth is $25k.

My mental model is that when the car is sold at $5k it is worth $5k and the $20k discount has disappeared (the value captured by the early owners).

Background: I'm a top 5% earner but I have friends who are struggling financially.

My opinion is that the discounts is money paid for by our taxpayers into overseas pockets, that benefits a few well off people. Strangely enough the discounts were introduced by our more socialist party, and removed by the incoming less socialist party. I don't believe the discounts are an equitable use of government funds.

I am also extremely sceptical that there is enough environmental benefits: the policy appears green but perhaps it is not (greenwashed).
by drdaeman | 2025-04-26 22:09:08+00:00
Thank you.

I have watched the video but, sadly, it seems to be on a merely tangentially related subject (some zombie ragdoll movement), that caused an understandable disgust (as explained in the video). Then there was a comment about the desire to create a machine that can draw pictures - and I’m really not sure how that’s connected to anything that happened in the video.

The only thing I was able to extract from it is general disapproval, but that’s about all I can be sure of. Better than nothing but not something I was hoping for.

Upd: oh, I haven’t noticed this immediately, but it’s a 9-year old video. I was hoping for something more up-to-date, as a lot of things had happened since then.
Is Apple's Self-Repair Program Real?
by x0054 | 2025-04-26 22:09:50+00:00
Has anyone successfully used Apple's Self Service Repair Store recently? I've tried ordering a battery replacement kit and toolkit for an iPhone 13 mini this week. Despite multiple attempts using different credit cards (Visa and Amex), browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari), and accounts (mine and my spouse's), each transaction was declined due to an "information mismatch" at the bank's end.

I confirmed with both banks that all entered information is correct, and they have no issues processing the transaction if submitted properly. They even ran test transactions using the exact information I provided, confirming that they would approve the transaction if submitted correctly. This suggests the issue lies with the repair store's payment processing.

Has anyone else faced similar issues? Is this program still functional for consumers? I reached out to their support and was told that I can pay for just the battery via PayPal, but I am not able to rent a toolkit via PayPal. And they refused to help me any further.

Is it me or them?
by pcthrowaway | 2025-04-26 22:09:59+00:00
Well if you believe there's something magical about consciousness I could see why you'd believe the same person's consciousness at different points in time is the same consciousness.

If you believe consciousness is a function of sentience and self-awareness, and presumably that AI can one day be conscious (not saying it is right now), then I don't see how you can believe consciousness is persistent.

If the AI is copied/moved to a different server, is it the same consciousness? Or in Star Trek when you get beamed up are you the same consciousness?
by zahlman | 2025-04-26 22:10:55+00:00
On many occasions, right-wing Internet acquaintances have given me a link to a story in a conservative news source; I would try to look up other coverage with a search engine, and I would find exclusively conservative sources discussing what happened, even though it was clearly verifiable fact that the the thing in question had in fact happened.

During the Rittenhouse trial, I watched trial coverage live, then evaluated what various news outlets were saying about what happened. Unironically, Fox News was objectively far more truthful and accurate than every left-wing source. I caught left-wing sources trying to push disproven and dubious narratives - in particular, the "taking an illegal firearm across state lines" bit - long after anyone had an excuse, even after the basic issues with that story had already been debunked by other left-wing sources. Shortly after the verdict dropped, Al Jazeera Plus put out an absurd, naked propaganda piece trying to paint the DA as a hero unjustly thwarted, with imagery showing complete ignorance to and/or resistance of the proven facts of the case.

(As a reminder: this is a DA who didn't check a firearm personally before pointing it at the jury, in order to try to make a ridiculous point about how Rittenhouse might possibly have been holding the weapon, while clearly having no actual idea how to hold and aim it properly. Who then made a closing statement baldly asserting falsehoods about the basics of how firearms work that had been disproved immediately prior. Who had previously made repeated, blatant attempts to violate Rittenhouse's Fifth Amendment rights and introduce evidence that had been very clearly excluded from consideration in pre-trial hearings.)

I have witnessed supposedly respected, mainstream sources (with a rarely acknowledged left-wing bias and an axe to grind) smear people I've personally met, and movements and groups that include people I personally know and care about (especially movements that have nothing to do with the traditional left-right axis but which certain leftists have decided to label as "right-wing" for their own reasons).

The bias built in to Wikipedia's "reliable sources" policy is self-reinforcing. You can't get conservative sources added even if what they're saying is provably true, or "liberal" (an absurd abuse of the term, but that's the American jargon now) sources excluded even if what they're saying is provably false, because a) the latter agree with each other; b) a new source needs vetting, which generally involves agreeing with existing sources; c) there is no objective standard for accuracy or reliability.

You present your comment as though you imagine that "sources that aren't explicitly conservative" are, thereby, not also "overtly biased". A lot of people seem to believe this, but it's not at all true. The fact that you frame this in terms of "defending positions" is also telling, for me.

See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
by matwood | 2025-04-26 22:11:14+00:00
I’m not sure talking about guns in the US is proving what you want. The US has a much higher gun murder rate per capita than most other high income countries. It’s in fact near the top with active war zones.

When everyone has weapons, more people get shot. That’s a fact. When countries arm up there is a much higher chance of a conflict happening that can’t be rolled back.
by quantadev | 2025-04-26 22:11:18+00:00
My favorite AI term to ridicule is the recent "Test Time Compute" nonsense, which has nothing whatsoever to do with testing. It literally just means "inference time".

And if I hear someone say "banger", "cooking", "insane", or "crazy", one more time I'm going to sledge hammer my computer. Can't someone, under 40 please pick up a book and read. Yesterday Sam Altman tried to coin "Skillsmaxxing" in a tweet. I threw my coffee cup at my laptop.
by SamPatt | 2025-04-26 22:11:37+00:00
I'm surprised to hear that. I keep running tests and the results are incredible, not only in the US.

For example, here's a screenshot from a random location I found in Google Street View in Jordan:

https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04...

And here's o3 nailing it:

https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04...

Maybe using Google Street View images, zoomed out, tends to give more useful information? I'm unsure why there's such variance.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-04-26 22:11:59+00:00
> What's the state of the art for cross-compiling in $CURRENTYEAR?

Poopy garbage dog poop.

glibc is a dumpster fire of bad design. If you want to cross-compile for an arbitrarily old version of glibc then... good luck. It can be done. But it's nightmare fuel.
by twodave | 2025-04-26 22:12:06+00:00
In truth, rubber-ducking doesn’t even require anyone to listen. I find this practice of “step back and describe the system again” to be useful anytime an assumption changes, though I guess it isn’t limited to that. In my own work change of assumptions/requirements is pretty frequent, so I often find myself wanting to just step back and re-evaluate the system based on that new information. If you can take even a fragment of your problem space and go “end to end” on it logically, then you’ve in many cases given yourself a reference to work from, and now you can go off and make changes to align your work to that logic with confidence. And then you’ve also made yourself a decent test scope, so you can verify your logic and iterate on it.

If I get to the end of all that and still have questions then I’ll bring someone else in, usually just for a fresh perspective, though.