MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ffsm8 | 2025-05-29 13:24:33+00:00
Clicking on the article on that site gets me back to the HN link.

I guess that's just a landing page with links to articles he wrote, but doesn't host himself? Strange.

And it really is ugly right now with the spotted background and slightly rotated links.

Is he aiming for the "I just discovered a new feature and so need to use it" vibe? Like when someone makes a PowerPoint presentation and now uses the completely over the top transitions across slides?

But design is subjective, and if you're doing something in your free time, you better enjoy it! So if he has fun making that ugly thing, great ( • ‿ • )
by helsinki8 | 2025-05-29 13:24:44+00:00
This is all misinformation.

The vaccine significantly reduced severity of infection, likelihood to become infected at all, and likelihood of transmitting there infection.

The side effects impacting periods were incredibly rare, mild and fully disclosed.

Children's test scores are still substantially lower now than pre-covid, likely some of that is due to brain damage from the covid virus (remember that the "brain fog" was a common symptom for weeks or months, sometimes longer) and many children died or developed serious health issues like diabetes from the virus.

But needles are scary, so some people will claim anything to justify their aversion rather than admit they have a phobia of injections.
by jebarker | 2025-05-29 13:25:57+00:00
My phrasing was weird but I'm actually speaking from personal experience here. I haven't climbed Everest but I've pursued other activities to extreme limits, e.g. running 100 mile high mountain races. These activities are all fun and have intrinsic rewards, but a large number of people doing them (my prior self included) were really in it for the external recognition of having done it. Everest seems to be the epitomy of that. I'm sure there's lots of people quietly climbing Everest just because it's there, but there's certainly very many doing it because of the name Everest and because it's the highest.
by goric | 2025-05-29 13:26:08+00:00
IMO this climb doesn't really do much to prove of xenon's effectiveness (altitude researcher Dr. Peter Hackett says as much [0]).

The team used supplemental oxygen on the climb, with the starting altitude and flow rate not being reported [1]. This is speculative, but if they were using more oxygen than typical and starting at a lower altitude, that's a massive advantage.

Further, Andrew Ushakov traveled from NYC to the summit in just under 4 days this year without the use of xenon (but also with supplemental oxygen with unknown starting altitude and flow rate). He used a hypoxic tent to prepare as well, and depending on the accuracy of the reporting may have even spent less time doing that than the xenon team did [1].

[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/18/nx-s1-5398553/a-new-company-i... [1] https://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2025/05/21/everest-2025-fas...
by aiforecastthway | 2025-05-29 13:26:45+00:00
> why wouldn't the trump admin use the tariff act of 1930?

Probably because they knew it'd be a losing argument.

The court that authored this slip opinion would be unlikely to be persuaded by such an argument, for two reasons.

First, the opinion spends several pages applying the non-delegation and major questions doctrine. Based upon that discussion, I am pretty confident that this court would've found your interpretation of the Tariff Act of 1930 to be an unconstitutional delegation of congressional power. A similar question was asked in the Nixon admin; grep for "Yoshida II" in the PDF.

Second, even if your interpretation of the Tariff Act of 1930 were found to be constitutional by this court, the argument you suggest would still hit a brick wall.

Around page 35, the court cites the President's executive order in finding that the WaRTs are addressing a balance-of-payments issue. The court then notes that Congress specifically delegated narrower presidential authority for actions addressing balance-of-payments deficits. So even if the president were allowed broad emergency powers, and were allowed broad discretion in defining what emergency means, that finding would be irrelevant, because Congress has specifically curtailed the delegation of authority to the President in the case of tariffs addressing balance-of-trade issues.

Specifically, the opinion notes that Section 122 of Trade Act of 1974 limits Presidential authority to response to balance-of-payments problems, such as "a 15 percent cap on tariffs and a maximum duration of 150 days".

The conclusion also specifically addresses your question about emergency powers: "Congress’s enactment of Section 122 indicates that even “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits” do not necessitate the use of emergency powers and justify only the President’s imposition of limited remedies subject to enumerated procedural constraints."

(These are not my opinions; I'm just applying the legal reasoning in the slip opinion to your question.)
by danaris | 2025-05-29 13:27:14+00:00
> The 16 year old kid driving the F250 on bald tires, whose driving experience is grand theft auto 4 could drive into that school bus as well.

Or that 16 year old kid could take his parents' cache of assault weapons and shoot up a mall. (They're preppers, you know.) Or he could research making chemical weapons online and release a nerve gas through his whole school.

Humans have agency, and the kinds of things they can do and are likely to do are fairly well-known.

Also, even the biggest, most lifted overcompensation pickup truck is unlikely to be a match for a full schoolbus in weight. A semi truck is a different story. Crash a pickup truck into a schoolbus, you might kill a kid who's right there; crash a semi truck into a schoolbus, you might send the schoolbus flying 200m spinning top over teakettle, bashing everyone in it around until they're hamburger.

> Whereas you cant source a single story of any driverless vehicle crashing into a school bus.

Humans have also been around for, well...all of human history.

Driverless vehicles have, thus far, been around for just a few years, and only in very constrained circumstances. They have also, to the best of my knowledge, been exclusively passenger cars. Dangerous if misused, to be sure, but not on the same scale as a semi truck. If I invented a brand-new self-flying airplane, and you were (rightfully) concerned about its safety, and I said "you can't source a single story of my DanarisPlanes crashing into buildings!", I would be 100% correct—and it would still be bullshit, and the safety concerns would still be very real.

Putting driverless semi trucks on public roads without extensive safety testing done to the satisfaction of third-party regulators with no vested interest in anything but the public's safety is a huge difference.

The problem is not that there is a chance a driverless semi truck could cause a tragic accident. It's that I don't see any evidence that we have proper understanding of what the risks are—and with a Republican-dominated Congress willfully abdicating its responsibilities for years now, unfortunately we don't have any sane legislation or regulation to give us a common framework for handling this.

The problem is also that just making sure they are insured is not a solution. First of all, the insurance companies also don't have enough information to properly assess the risk, because that information simply does not yet exist. Second of all, as I implied with my earlier snarky comment, when the negative consequences of the self-driving truck failing to behave properly could very, very easily include many dead people, money just doesn't make that better.
by neepi | 2025-05-29 13:27:15+00:00
Well that's pretty funny, but is it really?

Most people within my circles don't use cloud storage any more, me included. This is a combination of being cheapskates, being fucked over on billing issues with no support (Microsoft), getting their account hacked (Google), actual tangible data loss (iCloud) or having genuine privacy concerns (all of them).

We all have USB sticks. Some of us use rsync :)
by Ukv | 2025-05-29 13:27:24+00:00
> About the bcrypt thing... yeah, so one way you can do it is write a program that generates all possible keys starting with the letter 'a', and tests them. Then you run your halting oracle on that, and if it returns true you know the first letter of the key is 'a'.

And you really can do that. For actual computers we have cycle detection algorithms that can tell you definitively if your program will halt or not.

Determining whether the program halts can still be complex or slow, which is the case here, but the halting problem does not make it undecidable (because it doesn't apply to real computers) nor place any lower bound on that complexity (nothing preventing a more advanced halt detector from finding better shortcuts).
by llm_nerd | 2025-05-29 13:27:28+00:00
It's similar to how many people clutch their pearls about abandoned gear on Everest.

Many of the neighbouring countries -- including Nepal, India, Tibet, Bangladesh -- are effectively open-air garbage dumps, where rivers and fields and cities are just awash with discards and garbage. In environmentally critical places where it massively impedes with the life of millions.

In a relative sense I just do not care about some infinitesimal amount of discarded air canisters on a lifeless rock at 10,000 feet. It seems like misdirected envy when people suddenly super care about that. In an ideal world they would leave only footprints, but in the grand scheme of things it just does not matter. Cue another "OMG look at these air canisters some rich guys left at 15,000 feet!" articles.

It's a bit like how the anti-AI cadre have taken to suddenly being incredibly concerned about the energy usage of AI. Despite everything else, it's AI that's going to heat the planet. They never cared about data centre power usage when it was serving their big tiddy goth anime GIFs, but if it's AI suddenly they lament this outrage.
by jghn | 2025-05-29 13:27:55+00:00
> First they were supposed to prevent COVID

This was never the case. That's not how vaccines work.

> There were tons of surprise side effects especially relating to women’s periods getting screwed up.

citation from an actual health study that this actually caused health risks?

> when children were not in any serious danger.

Again, citation needed?

> Anyone who investigated the origin story became spontaneously racist. But then later morality reversed and it was fine.

What does this have to do with mRNA vaccines?
by ty6853 | 2025-05-29 13:29:39+00:00
But there is a real magic that happens in the process there.

When two people make a deal, voluntarily, at least rationally (unless it is charity) both expect to be better off.

The magic of the businessman is to connive his way into getting the largest slice of the 'better off'. He generally can't legally make a deal without generating value, but if he can capture it to the point the customer is only one iota better off he is a good businessman and no one has been defrauded.
by sph | 2025-05-29 13:29:57+00:00
Reminds me of McVitie's challenge to get the Jaffa Cake on the zero VAT tariff for cakes, even if technically it's a biscuit (that carries a higher VAT rate).

McVitie's won with the astute argument that, unlike other biscuits, when a Jaffa Cake goes stale it becomes hard like a cake, not soft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes#Legal_status
by unsupp0rted | 2025-05-29 13:30:06+00:00
No, there's always going to be room for craftsmen who make things better than machines do.

In other words, there isn't always going to be room for craftsmen.

The 20th and early 21st century is the only time in human history when humans both 1) had machines that can make things and 2) the things machines made weren't better.

That's a blip. From now on, there'll be no comparison. The only reason to want something made by a craftsman is philosophical: "I want something markedly worse, but knowing it's been made by human hands".
by slowmovintarget | 2025-05-29 13:30:08+00:00
Ironically, they're not "good" at it because they're fighting their own privacy and security features in IOS and MacOS. Siri can't do everything because there isn't a full pants-down mode for OS features.

"Siri, adjust my schedule to work in a 30 minute walk this afternoon."

"Siri, find a photo of a Koala, turn it into a cartoon, and make a logo for my Github project."

Coordinated actions are what we're looking for, but they blow through all of the app security walls. Even if Apple's software could act like this, I don't think I'd use it. If it could do these things, it could also do things like broadcast my private files to everyone in my contact list... etc.

We have to get dramatically more sophisticated about security with agents than we are now.
by wat10000 | 2025-05-29 13:30:14+00:00
They're extremely qualified to write this kind of report. They'd be disastrously unqualified if the purpose of the report was to drive informed policy decisions, of course, but that's not what it's about. The purpose is to propagandize to the uninformed and to provide justification for dismantling the government, and they're very well qualified for this.

McMahon's previous claim to fame was co-founder and CEO of WWF/WWE. Her current position is just pro-wrestling kayfabe translated to a new context.
by FpUser | 2025-05-29 13:30:21+00:00
Example here in Canada and Toronto in particular. There were plenty of independent pet clinics and they used to charge somewhat reasonable prices. Now nearly all of those were bought by big companies / investors. Prices went through the roof, competition is down, and the only thing they want to discuss with the customer is how to squeeze the most money disregarding of results.

Yes I do want those assholes burned at the stake.

Similar story happens in many other areas. People are being squeezed from their money on all fronts. North American IT persons are rare exception of an ordinary person who can still make the ends meet and still have some healthy chunk left to enjoy life.
by horsawlarway | 2025-05-29 13:30:54+00:00
No - I picked it precisely because it's a machine that improved efficiencies but undeniably had negative impacts as well.

I think that's my whole point - I'm not saying that the person I initially responded to is incorrect in not liking the impacts AI might have. I think it's a perfectly reasonable take to be concerned about how AI might impact you, and to express that, along with negative sentiments.

I'm saying that the argument they are currently making

> "Maybe the discourse sucks because the reality of it sucks?"

and even the slightly better

> "Okay calling a search engine and retrieving a result has been possible for a while. Llm companies just slapped statistical response on top as the UI."

Is a guaranteed way to be ignored and dismissed because it's a low effort emotional response - not an actual argument.
by smjburton | 2025-05-29 13:30:57+00:00
Great article OP. This is exactly what made the "old web" so great: there were no defined standards so people were compelled to experiment. It was a little more chaotic, but it felt more rewarding when you came across a cool website with a unique design. The modern web on the other hand is very structured and formulaic, served mostly through the same templates and frameworks. Instead of being a place to explore, it's largely become a place to consume content in a predictable fashion.
by tinco | 2025-05-29 13:31:00+00:00
Back when I last used C#, which admittedly is over 10 years ago, .csproj files were written in XML so they were annoying to edit. It was difficult to understand the structure of them, and I'm not sure if they were documented very well.

Just compare a .csproj to something modern like a Cargo.toml and you'll see why someone might think .csproj is awful. It is immediately obvious what each section of a Cargo.toml does, and intuitive how you might edit or extend them.

Also, just talk to a C# developer, I bet over half of them have never even edited a .csproj and only use visual studio as a GUI to configure their projects.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-29 13:31:15+00:00
Note that these all of these Xenon-Everest stories come back to the same person: Lukas Furtenbach

Why? Because he’s launching a business that sells Xenon-assisted Everest tours: https://www.furtenbachadventures.com/

These stories are never about uncovering an underground world of Xenon performance enhancement or discussing the science (which is much less optimistic about Xenon’s benefits). They’re always lazily relaying the PR information that Lukas Furtenbach gives them.

So while it’s true that Xenon appears to have some possible performance enhancing properties, all of these news pieces about how climbers are using Xenon always come back to this one same guy who is, coincidentally, trying really hard to sell people on expensive Xenon-assisted Everest tours.
by blooalien | 2025-05-29 13:31:29+00:00
I can actually see this bein' one task that current levels of language models would excel at, honestly... Given the limited list of items on a typical fast-food menu, and the accuracy of even some of the lowliest modern language models and speech recognition, I see no reason why fast-food order-taking needs to be handled by humans at all anymore, especially if you confirm the final order with the human ordering before proceeding; I could honestly see that bein' much more accurate than a human doing that job. (I can't count how many times over the years I've had a human order-taker completely screw the order up despite them repeating the order back exactly as given. A well-designed LLM-based system likely shouldn't have that problem. What it repeats back should end up bein' exactly the order that the system pushes through to completion.)
by squidbeak | 2025-05-29 13:31:32+00:00
The reality is somewhere in the middle for now. Over long enough timescales, that reality will trend close to full automation (or all the way), unless society rejects AI and policy intervenes to stop it, or unless there's some hard final barrier that no amount of time, money, compute, ingenuity or labor could surmount. The latter seems improbable (are we at AI's vigil - or its nativity?) so Policymakers anticipating the former are only being responsible.
by exhilaration | 2025-05-29 13:32:33+00:00
If you're interested in Everest, I loved Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer - it's absolutely fantastic and available on Audible. Then last week I discovered Everest on Netflix, which isn't great but it's based on the book and they do a good job showing you the route and distances between the camps with CGI.

Anyways, after all that I have zero desire to ever go near Everest or any other risky mountain climb.
by noworriesnate | 2025-05-29 13:32:33+00:00
A female close to me experienced side effects from shedding of the vaccine. She was not initially an “anti-vaxxer.” These symptoms were absolutely not disclosed ahead of time.

I’ve seen with my own eyes people who tried to shame me for not getting the vaccine come down with COVID over and over again.

When you tell someone that their personal experience and that of their trusted friends is misinformation, you lose all credibility.
by oblio | 2025-05-29 13:32:59+00:00
LOL

It looks pretty nice and it's well written and I won't delve deep into the flaws, I'm sure others will.

However one big thing that climate change skeptics/deniers keep missing or handwaving about renewables is that they've never listened to Wayne Gretzky. None of them are skating to where the puck will be. Living in the past is worse for everyone.
by tndibona | 2025-05-29 13:33:38+00:00
I see your point, data is no good without actions and vice versa. Initially, I thought google couldn't possibly compete with perplexity because they are building a company from the ground up sans the surveillance ad-network.

If you skim the article this thread is about, It seems google is basically headed to create a monopoly on the answers being dished out to search queries. I.e, if they know the answer they'll generate & serve it up, but if they know the product that fulfills your answer, they will serve that up too. They will probably still continue to monitor you across the web to run their predictions for relevant ads. It will just be formatted and blended with the answer being doled out.

I think we are in the middle of this transformation.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-29 13:33:49+00:00
> but meta-analyses still doesn't show a real performance bump

I wish all of these news articles would discuss the actual studies instead of lazily parroting the claims of the one guy who is trying to sell expensive Xenon-assisted Everest hikes.

These articles are always PR pieces for Lukas Furtenbach’s expensive Everest tours. Every single time I see the words “Xenon” and “Everest” in a headline, his name is in the article as the source.
by Majromax | 2025-05-29 13:33:59+00:00
> First they were supposed to prevent COVID. That turned out to not be true,

In fact, the vaccines did a fantastic job at preventing covid's spread. The problem was that they were developed for (and had clinical trial results for) the variant-free covid-classic. By the time they were widely deployed, the virus in circulation was already one of several more-easily-spread variants.

Had covid not mutated into variants, it seems very likely that widespread vaccination would have given us true 'herd immunity'.

> That turned out to not be true, so then they were supposed to lessen the symptoms.

They were also always supposed to do this, by making infection less severe and more easily fought-off. Many vaccines operate this way, including the seasonal flu vaccine.

Remember that until clinical trial results came in, we weren't sure exactly what the vaccine was going to do. Something that "merely" helped keep elderly people alive would have been good enough, and by that standard what we ended up with was a fantastic success.

> Everyone I know who still frequently gets COVID had the shot.

As phrased, you've walked right into selection bias; perhaps those people you know choose to get the booster vaccines because they recognize they're more likely to be exposed to covid.

> There were tons of surprise side effects especially relating to women’s periods getting screwed up.

Treatments have side effects, but for pandemic covid the right comparison was "vaccine plus none-to-mild covid" versus "no vaccine plus unmitigated component."

Infection with covid has plenty of 'side effects', and women frequently report disrupted menstrual cycles from infections.

> The official story was that we were trying to make COVID die out before it mutated again, but to do that would have required vaccinating all animals as well.

As far as I'm aware, every circulating covid variant that we've traced has likely come from mutations inside humans, not zoonotic intermixing.

> Despite the above, there was tremendous pressure from left wing institutions to vaccinate everyone, proving that their values were about pharmaceutical profits instead of my body my choice.

Now you're just being disingenuous. "Left wing institutions" were at the forefront of vaccine equality among nations, arguing strongly for coordinated buying approaches to ensure access to developing nations. If anything, that contributed to early politicization of the vaccine as the counter-reaction was "if this vaccine is so good, we need to have it for ourselves first."

The values involved were simply that of the common/societal good against individualist freedom, the same ones at play in lockdown/distancing rules.

> Anyone who investigated the origin story became spontaneously racist. But then later morality reversed and it was fine.

Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with vaccines.