MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brailsafe | 2025-04-04 14:36:24+00:00
I don't really think that matters at all, it's just an old tenuous bragging point, he's just a guy with a tough looking face and maybe has an elementary understanding of economics that relies less on being accurate and more on the viewer agreeing with him about why everything feels broken. (not that everything isn't broken, or that those reasons aren't ever accurate, but it's just a classic grifter move to pull on the thread of truth till it unravels, like asmongold)

Crashcourse economics likely provides much more value to anyone really looking to learn.
by Nextgrid | 2025-04-04 14:36:52+00:00
UK is the most expensive third-world country I've had the displeasure of visiting (and before that, living in).

If you want the extreme of "cheap and run down", some Eastern European countries fit the bill. If you want the other extreme of "expensive and well-kept", Switzerland.

But Britain is in a unique place of both "expensive and run down".
by axegon_ | 2025-04-04 14:37:03+00:00
OSINT is a symptom of it. When GPT-2 came along, I was worried that at some point the internet will get spammed with AI-crap. Boy, was I naive... I see this incredibly frequently and I get a ton of hate for saying this (including here on HN): LLMs and AI in general is a perfect demonstration of a shiny-new-toy. What people fail to acknowledge is that the so called "reasoning" is nothing more then predicting the most likely next token, which works reasonably well for basic one-off tasks. And I have used LLMs in that way - "give me the ISO 3166-1 of the following 20 countries:". That works. But as soon as you throw something more complex and start analyzing the results(which look reasonable at first glance), the picture becomes very different. "Oh just use RAGs, are you dumb?", I hear you say. Yeah?

class ParsedAddress(BaseModel):

street: str | None postcode: str | None city: str | None province: str | None country_iso2: str | None

Response:

{

"street": "Boulevard", "postcode": 12345, "city": "Cannot be accurately determined from the input", "province": "MY and NY are both possible in the provided address", "country_iso2": "US"

}

Sure, I can spend 2 days trying out different models and tweaking the prompts and see which one gets it, but I have 33 billion other addresses and a finite amount of time.

The issue occurs in OSINT as well: A well structured answer lures people into a mental trap. Anthropomorphism is something humans have fallen for since the dawn of mankind and is doing so yet again with AI. The thought that you have someone intelligent nearby with god-like abilities can be comforting but... Um... LLMs don't work like that.
by xaxis | 2025-04-04 14:37:04+00:00
While I was writing my recent fever dream inspired article, "Optical Micro-Particle Shield Array (OMPSA) for Advanced Spacecraft Protection in Orbital and Deep-Space Environments", which deals with the application of photon traps to manipulate lattices of micro particles in order to create force fields, it occurred to me that the same underlying technology could just as easily be applied to other core "Sci-Fi" technologies:

- Force Fields - Tractor Beams - Cloaking Technology - Reconfigurable Matter

Freaking lasers solve for basically 4 out of 5 Star Trek technologies!!! Basically the only thing that is missing is the transporter. And I wouldn't be surprised if lasers somehow solve for that too, but for now I wanted to write an overview of how these foundational technologies are imminently possible.
by wtcactus | 2025-04-04 14:37:11+00:00
I'm not sure if you realized, but you are not any kind of intellectual authority in any matter related to art. The idea that all artists are leftist is just imbecile, to say the least.

You are just part - probably only a satellite - of the self pleasing circle of modern art critics that ultimately live on the backs of the working man.

People that write stuff like this about a urinal on a wall:

"Arensberg had referred to a 'lovely form' and it does not take much stretching of the imagination to see in the upside-down urinal's gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance Madonna or a seated Buddha or, perhaps more to the point, one of Brâncuși's polished erotic forms."
by vladms | 2025-04-04 14:37:26+00:00
It is about choices. You gain a certain amount of money and you can do various things with them. You can choose to eat 100 burgers I can choose to eat 100 carrots and buy a TV.

Antibiotic resistance implies "killing most of people faster" which in my book is worse than "decreasing quality of life for meat eaters".

I do eat meat occasionally, but I generally I am not able to eat all that I like each day (think: different cuisines, deserts, etc.) so maybe people just did not try enough stuff to enjoy more than one/two dishes... which in itself sounds sad to me.
by miros_love | 2025-04-04 14:37:27+00:00
I’m building an AI chatbot for businesses to handle sales and lead qualification via WhatsApp and Telegram — https://ziriusai.xyz/en

Doing it completely solo — built the product, run the ads, do the outreach, everything. Struggling with sales now. Thinking of narrowing focus and solving a more specific pain point.

Curious if anyone else here is grinding through early-stage B2B SaaS — would love to hear how you're tackling this.
by jmclnx | 2025-04-04 14:37:31+00:00
I know people who had to retire (via IBM) last year. Their biggest worry when Biden was elected in 2020 was "Biden will destroy my 401k".

Now that their retirement account has fallen +10% thanks to Trump, I will have to find out what they think. Could be a risky question if I decide to ask them.

Also I am surprised Wall Street is not revolting against the GOP. My guess is they are praying for the big tax cuts first.

Between this and the tax cuts, Zimbabwean Dollar is looking good /s
by vonneumannstan | 2025-04-04 14:37:41+00:00
>>But he looked around. “We were surrounded by people that were in their late 20s or 30s all day. And I realized that if I didn’t go to college, this is what life would be like.”

Its just a marketing stunt. They complain about not getting into Harvard but he could literally rent a penthouse in Cambridge, hang out on the campus throw big parties and get 90% of the experience while supposedly running a 30M ARR company. Absolutely no benefit to actually enrolling except ego.
by epmatsw | 2025-04-04 14:37:45+00:00
And yet, per the spec, new syntax features are allowed to break ASI:

> As new syntactic features are added to ECMAScript, additional grammar productions could be added that cause lines relying on automatic semicolon insertion preceding them to change grammar productions when parsed.

So really, the rules are “there are currently 2 exceptions and an infinite number allowed to be added at any time”. To me, that’s worth letting prettier auto-insert semicolons when I hit save.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-04 14:37:52+00:00
> They should stand or fall on their own merit.

And they do. They stand on the fact that they save time, raise productivity, and assist in learning. That's the merit.

Demanding absolute perfection as the only measure of merit is bonkers. And if that's the standard you hold everything in your life too, you must be pretty disappointed with the world...
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-04 14:38:05+00:00
Your analogy between copyright infringement and bread theft is interesting, given how "stealing bread" has traditionally been used as a shorthand for systemic inequality.

Copyright is why Disney can ruin someone for doing something with Goofy they don't like. Yes, it protects smaller, less profitable artists too, but make no mistake: it's a tool of mass control and cultural capture.

Perhaps it's time to seriously ask whether copyright is actually doing its job of "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts." "...but generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrasment than advantage to society" [Jefferson].
by graemep | 2025-04-04 14:38:24+00:00
> Seems like one of the dangers of empire is that losing it, which is inevitable, leads to a hard-to-shake condition of feeling like a has-been society. It makes it hard to just be a good nation, a good place to live.

I think you are right, but I also think it afflicts the ruling class a lot more. In particular, politicians, who are power seekers by nature, feel the loss more than ordinary people do. IN their minds, not being a super power equates to declined, even if life improves for ordinary people (which it did).
by lotsofpulp | 2025-04-04 14:38:43+00:00
The only benefit of health insurance purchased via employers is that you can use pre-tax income to pay for it. Otherwise, it has all the same deductibles and out of pocket maximums as policies purchased on healthcare.gov, except for government employees and some unionized businesses.

The answer is that most Americans still have pretty decent lives, and they like those in power (whether or not they are actually benefiting).
by sofixa | 2025-04-04 14:39:11+00:00
> That doesn't change the raw GDP figures though

That's assuming they're relevant, and spoiler, they aren't for the topic at hand.

How is any individual's life better because they work at a café selling $20 coffee vs £5 coffee? Because if you measure GDP, person one is drastically more productive, but in reality, it doesn't matter, really. If both are earning minimum wage, the person in the UK with the cheaper coffee has higher income (outside of a few US states). But what is their quality of life? That's highly dependent on where they live, what are their housing costs (which are quite high in the UK in most desirable locations), etc. In any case, GDP doesn't evaluate that, and it's probably the main thing people care about and what they mean by "poor".
by ffsm8 | 2025-04-04 14:39:20+00:00
Esp. considering how they've always got someone to blame for the issues that they cause. It's an ancient playbook

1. Identity a problem

2. Blame $group of people for the issue and rally citizens to you

3. Oust previous administration/rulers with rallied citizens

And then to stay in power

1. Create or identity a problem

2. Blame $group of people for the problem

3. Rally citizens to ostracize the new group of ppl

4. Back to 1

The issues never need to be resolved, as long as the citizens blame someone and feel empowered to lash out against someone (the people getting blamed).
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-04-04 14:39:41+00:00
> Probably because ~50% of that budget was being wasted.

Crazy how you just made this up.

> There's likely still a big buffer before anyone runs out of meds.

And this.

> 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).

Now you're just being absurd.

You're literally describing the tax system that was funding it before it was axed by the guy who can't stop making mistakes.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-04 14:39:44+00:00
Parties don't change by the individuals within them changing their minds, they change by replacing the individuals. People are absolutely livid about the things you're mentioning, which is why their approval ratings are low, which is why they're going to be replaced.

> then they must actually be completely bought by corporate interests.

This is a non-sequitur. I know it's an easy out to avoid thinking through the actual mechanics at play here (one of which is certainly corporate interests), but it's worth being more curious about this stuff and the individuals' motivations.
by financetechbro | 2025-04-04 14:40:24+00:00
Excerpts from Project 2025. Godspeed, America. We’re all toast, and while we can compliant all we want about it, are we really doing anything to stop it?

> The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.

> Break Up NOAA. The single biggest Department of Commerce agency outside of decennial census years is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components. NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department's $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department's personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures).

> This industry's mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful func-tions. It should be broken up and downsized.

> NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.

> Focus the NWS on Commercial Operations. Each day, Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by local radio stations and colleges that are produced not by the NWS, but by private companies such as AccuWeather.

> Studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS.

> The NWS provides data the private companies use and should focus on its data-gathering services. Because private companies rely on these data, the NWS should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.
by mapt | 2025-04-04 14:40:24+00:00
The cultural emphasis HN has on original commentary and not doing low-effort link posting has its costs. Sometimes an FAQ model is just a superior line of inquiry.

The most plausible models for UK decline that I've encountered come from a Youtuber named Britmonkey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5aJ-57_YsQ

He talks about housing as _ongoing existential crisis_, contra widespread apathy on the subject, and about how since Thatcher, the political rule has tended to integrate the worst aspects of center-left and center-right governments.

Ezra Klein's _Abundance_ has been in the news lately, and there are some very similar arguments made there, focused on the US context.
by throwaway89201 | 2025-04-04 14:40:42+00:00
This is not how "responsible" works for companies like Lego and Disney. They consider everything around their brand to be 'theirs'. An interesting story in that area [1] is the one time that Disney did try to build something resembling chat into a game of theirs (spoiler: it didn't go well).

[1] http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...
by gruez | 2025-04-04 14:41:03+00:00
>The big 5 providers have enough money to hire/poach some scraping/indexing experts. [...]

>I get that it could be incompetence in one or two places, but as far as I know all the big providers fail here...

Is there any indication that the scraping traffic is from the "the big providers"? The article doesn't mention this.
by Lerc | 2025-04-04 14:41:20+00:00
consider this

for (let i=0;i<3;i++) { i+=10; setTimeout(_=>console.log(i),30); i-=10 }

Capture by value would print 10, 11, 12 that's the value when it was captured

Capture by reference would print 0,1,2

It's much easier to conceptualise it as

for (const i=0;i<3;i++) { setTimeout(_=>console.log(i),30); }

which is fine because i never changes. It is a different i each time.

fancier example

for (let x = 0, y = 0; y < 2; x=x++<3?x:y++,0){ x+=10; y+=10; console.log("inline:",x,y); setTimeout(_=>console.log("timeout",x,y),30); x-=10; y-=10; }
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-04 14:41:56+00:00
I don't think they have a strategy.

These aren't people who care about the national debt. Trump has not only stated, but bragged publicly, that he does what he can to pay as little in tax as possible. He's had an appeal in front of the IRS for probably over a decade now for writing down the value of a business loss (the casino in Atlantic City, IIRC) that he received monetary gain from.

That's not what you do when you see a financial issue as a threat to the nation you supposedly love. They are too short-sighted to have a strategy.

If there's a depression or major recession, I don't think the government bailout would be the main concern. Civil unrest would be. I'm in my early 30s and I've seen four major financial crises (2002, 2008, 2020, and now 2025) in my lifetime. I'm doing alright because I come from a place of privilege. There are literally millions of people my age who aren't going to be doing alright in the situation you describe, and there's a good chance they would see that as the death knell of their hopes and dreams, all because of the shareholder and political classes in this country.
by skydhash | 2025-04-04 14:42:08+00:00
Let's ignore the hype and marketing and truly consider LLM as the first stage of "something". The truth is that I've heard a lot of speculation, but no inching towards any of the speculated objective on a practical scale.

For anything else, any such first stage was usually constrained on a very small scale while the glaring issues were ironed out. Now a lot of us are being forced to tolerate what is essentially a prototype or toy in tools and systems that were fine before.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-04 14:42:34+00:00
"In large cities" is very much a sweeping generalisation. What you're describing sounds a lot like it's caused by broken window syndrome; people put rubbish everywhere because there's no good trash collection system (I know in the UK people have to pay for it, so they just dump it in nature instead. Collect it from people's doorsteps for free and fly tipping wouldn't be nearly as big an issue anymore.

Vandalism is a difficult one. But it's likely because the people doing it don't have anything better to do, no hobbies, jobs, families, responsibilities, etc. And also, broken window syndrome.

But then you look at e.g. east or southeast asia and they have things like neat closed off bus stops with heating and you're like, "Why can't we have nice things?". We're stuck with glass booths with a beam for leaning against at best. Glass so that people in there are visible and don't use it as a public toilet, uncomfortable seating so people don't use it as a hang-out or sleeping spot. But the design adapts to a problem, one which the government has little interest in fixing - or which would infringe on people's rights.
by zelon88 | 2025-04-04 14:42:55+00:00
My favorite quirk, which they recently did away with, was in Google docs and sheets. They made a custom right click menu that had it's own Copy and Paste buttons. If you tried to use these "Copy / Paste" options, a full page popup would appear telling you to "Use Ctrl + C / V instead".

So someone at Google was unsatisfied with the system right click options, so they remade them. Then someone else at Google probably thought that was dumb and put the popup to remind people that Ctrl + C / V is better? I don't know, all I want to do is move data. But now I have to confront this issue, which takes me away from my actual problem and makes me process some new information that is completely irrelevant. And besides, I already pressed the button. Why didn't you respect that button press? Why did you give me the option to press that button if you didn't want me to use it?

Thanks Google.
by busterarm | 2025-04-04 14:43:01+00:00
Maybe if China was willing to buy anything else but opium, that never would have happened. China's exports were in hot demand and they would only transact in silver but wouldn't buy anything to return that silver supply to global markets. It was causing massive problems in the silver market with over 40% of the yearly global supply going directly to purchasing Chinese exports.

Trade imbalances like that always lead to war. historically.
by wtallis | 2025-04-04 14:43:10+00:00
The "tables" feature supported by Google Sheets and Excel is similar, but definitely not the same thing. Tables in those programs just ascribe special meaning to specified ranges of a single shared row:column space (what one would otherwise be tempted to call a "table") that defaults to behaving as effectively infinite.

In Numbers, you have multiple tables that are entirely separate row:column spaces that can be resized and positioned arbitrarily and independently, with small finite extent by default such that they fit on screen. That UI makes the capability to have multiple tables on one sheet more discoverable, and easier to comprehend what it's doing. When you drag and drop a CSV file onto a Numbers sheet, it creates a new table rather than populating cells in an existing table. When you resize column A in one table, it doesn't affect the column A of any other table.

That finite vs seemingly-infinite distinction is a fundamental difference in conceptualizing what a spreadsheet is, which can have pretty far-reaching consequences. I've encountered programs with a "CSV export" feature that generates a CSV file that's more or less what you'd expect to get if you wrote a report in a single Excel sheet, and then exported that to CSV: you get a file that contains tabular data embedded in it, but so polluted with unrelated text and unstructured metadata that having it as CSV format barely helps with parsing and you'd be better off trying to extract data from HTML.
by Hikikomori | 2025-04-04 14:43:12+00:00
Trump 1 also had no plan and most there were for their own gain in money or power, so they were ineffective and got barely nothing done. Trump 2 has the Project 2025/Curtis Yarvin plan and plenty of competent people to execute it. They prepared a shitload of executive orders and set up a system where sycophants can upload their CV to take government jobs when they fire people.

After he won I started reading more about who these people were and what they were planning to do and sold all my stocks after the inauguration, there was no way it was going to be a normal presidency, even compared to the last one.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-04 14:43:13+00:00
>It seems like the tech industry has become just like any other industry that has gotten entrenched, and today’s tech leaders simply don’t inspire me like how the leaders of previous eras did. Today’s Web media companies are far scarier than 1990’s Microsoft ever was.

Three letters: MBA

When the MBA's came into the tech industry everything got stale, 'safe' and unexciting as they want to leech their fucking hands over everything in the name of maximal profit.

Private Equity follows MBAs so you see more PE firms getting into tech during the same period. Same story, fucking leeches leeching makes the leeches happy at the expense of society. In fact, it seems PE firms and MBA grads love making the world an actively terrible place

I hate business bros. They ruin god damn everything.
by spacebanana7 | 2025-04-04 14:43:14+00:00
Don't the numbers speak for themselves?

£80k a year works out at £4,166.14 per month (assuming plan 2 student loan and 0 pension contributions).

Full time minimum wage works out at £25,397.00 per year or £1,819.48 per month (assuming no student loan or pension contributions).

That works out as a difference of £2,346.66 per month. It's plausible the cost difference between social housing and private rent for a 3 bed in Westminster could make up that difference alone.

Westminister social housing is obviously a favourable case, but we also have to consider benefits:

In the scenario of 2 kids on that min wage salary it seems like you'd get £34.15 per month in universal credit.

Whilst small on its own, the universal credit status unlocks many other benefits and perks. Potential discounts of up to 100% of council tax could be possible depending on local authority (avg council tax in London is £157.75 per month). The NHS low income scheme can be accessed: getting free prescriptions and support with health travel. Another big thing would be getting access to social tariffs on energies and utilities. Together these could add up to hundreds of pounds per month.

The min wage worker would also child benefit at £187.17 monthly.