MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dangus | 2025-05-28 15:50:42+00:00
What this article gets wrong about this situation is that it's not really about caring versus not caring, it's about desperation moves from struggling, declining businesses versus thriving, growing ones ones.

You won't find AI writing at The New York Times because their leadership has a sustainable business model. They have adapted well to the digital media upheaval, using their gaming, cooking, and product review businesses to drive up subscriptions to a point where subscriptions are contributing a larger share of revenue than they did in the print era.

The Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Enquirer are papers that have struggled financially in ways that better-managed media companies have not.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-05-28 15:50:51+00:00
First off, it's not like the block reward goes to zero overnight. It steps down over time.

The reward is currently 3.125 btc. It gets cut in half every 210,000 blocks, which is ~4 years. It'll drop to 1.5625 in 2028, 0.78125 in 2032, and so on. It won't hit 0 btc until the year 2140.

Secondly, even with 51% of the hashing power, a rogue mining org can't create fraudulent transactions. A block with invalid transactions will be rejected by the rest of the network.

Instead, it does allow a rogue miner to pick and choose which transactions it confirms in a block. Still bad, but it's not like they can steal bitcoin from people. And if they just sat and mined empty blocks, they wouldn't earn the transaction fees. The only way they could profit is to short the hell out of bitcoin, start mining empty blocks which effectively is a DoS on bitcoin, then cover the short after it plummets in value.

To do such an attack wouldn't just require immense money to buy the mining equipment, but also a ton of money to put up as collateral for the short.
by cbull | 2025-05-28 15:50:57+00:00
Agree completely. I got ownership of my domain before he started charging, but looking now there's only a summary and it lists 45 email addresses in breaches, which means I need to pay a substantial amount to get a report, and I'm the only user of the domain for email.

I wish there was a "I'm just one person, or a small family" tier for this.
by overu589 | 2025-05-28 15:51:05+00:00
A multi pronged approach may be necessary to achieve your ambition.

- identity. One aspect is establishing an identity. Once an identity is established a probability would be maintained.

- continuity. Always assume someone would convert a human validated identity into a {bot}. Maintain the probability through workflows. Include other presumed humans in the workflow for affirming the continuity of human identities.

- the grind. It seems you anticipate a certain amount of grind a human would go through for vetting, and from this a probability of human would be maintained.

- AI determiners. Are you ruling out the use of agents in rating identities? Algorithms for catching trending behaviors may funnel suspicions to qualified humans.

- accept everything. Reject nothing well formed. If the suspicion probability falls past a threshold simply black hole everything everywhere related to the account. Require a human to battle with admins over account restorations. An access controlled layer of notes and attributes could keep track of all of this.

Inevitably a human feedback loop may accomplish something with time and devotion.

Good luck with that one!
by twosdai | 2025-05-28 15:51:25+00:00
For the leaving files around case, isn't that an impossible thing to really deal with from the installer stand point for non containerized applications that have root/admin access?

Because they can just create and write to random directories whenever they want. And any Uninstaller, either provided by the app or Microsoft could just miss these files, because they aren't recreating the full program control flow.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-05-28 15:51:30+00:00
Take a look at the poor construction quality of new build homes too--there's an entire subgenre of social media where home inspectors find all sorts of horrifying and "hilarious" issues with newly assembled McMansions. This runs the gamut from beer bottles overturned in insulation to doors that don't fit in frames, fire hazards, etc.

I've seen the same in apartments I'd rented over the last few years. The owners (management co's in many cases) will perform the most quarter-assed repairs and the poorest paint jobs imaginable before renting the place to the next schlub, while charging you for "wear" on the cheapest model dishwasher on the market.
by paradite | 2025-05-28 15:51:39+00:00
Okay maybe I need to make myself more clear, and start from your claim:

> It has to do with mental capacities to "bring objects under a concept", partition experience into its conceptual structure ("conceptualise"), simulate scenarios based on compositions of concepts ("the imagination") and so on. These are mental capabilities a wide class of animals possess, who know no language; that LLMs do not possess.

Assume it is true that humans are capable of these capabilities, why do you think LLMs are not capable of them? We don't know if they are capable of these capabilities, and that's what explainable ai is.

Take a step back and assume that LLMs are not capable of these capabilities, how do you prove that these are the fundamental concepts in the universe, instead of projections of higher level concepts from higher dimensional space that humans and animals are not aware of? What if there exist a more universal set of concepts that contains all the concepts we know and others, in a higher dimension, and both LLMs and humans are just using the lower dimension projections of such concepts?
by yifanl | 2025-05-28 15:51:42+00:00
It's not just a political derail to bring up a highly-visible example of the described behaviour. People don't care if they aren't forced to care, and in a world driven by deadlines, we're only motivated to care a certain amount.

There used to be an intrinsic motivator of "well, my kids are going to suffer if I don't push for long-term relationships", but now we aren't having kids, so that carrot doesn't work, and that attitude is bubbling up into the corporate world.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-28 15:51:42+00:00
>We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of what most people consume and experience on a daily basis.

Eh, I disagree with elitist...

We're too capitalist. Lines must go up, that is all that matters. Well, lines for the capital holders, paying the workers less to the point they don't care is fine.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-28 15:51:47+00:00
What the author is describing is an inevitable consequence that happens when the cost of producing something falls dramatically.

It long ago happened with manufactured goods. We like to say "they don't make 'em like that used to", and we're right. Quality clothes (think "Sunday best") from, say, the early 1900s were incredibly well made because they were so expensive - they had to last for years, and people cared about the quality. A few years ago SNL had a skit about using Joseph A Banks suits as paper towels because they're so cheap as to be disposable.

With journalism, while producing journalism has been (until recently) still pretty expensive, the distribution became so cheap with the Internet that you saw a flood of low quality, "who cares"-type content. Now, with LLMs, even the production of stories is getting much cheaper, so you'll see this flood of "eh, good enough"-quality content.

The same thing is happening with software, which is why I'm glad to be leaving the profession. Before the Internet, it was so expensive to fix a bug in shipped software, so you really had to care about the details and making sure things were correct. With Internet distribution, fixing a big is super cheap, so shipping fast became the most important metric. Now, despite your view on LLMs, they should reduce the cost of making software, so you'll see a ton of "vibe coding, 'works well enough'" low -quality, "who cares" software.
by CMay | 2025-05-28 15:52:00+00:00
In terms of reasoning models like QwQ or Qwen 3 I didn't waste too much time trying to improve their results aside from coming up with various ways to constrain their reasoning token output with prompts.

Even though Gemma 3 27B QAT is not a reasoning model, it's so good at instruction following and being used in LLM chains/routes that it can be used for classifying/language optimization steps before instructing it how to reason about the prompt in the next step. You can even have it output intermediate answers interspersed between multiple think tags in the same response. In many ways for these models I just define thinking as any tokens that are helping the model arrive at the conclusion, but are not fully formed parts of the answer.

Instructing it to use certain words (tokens) and types of phrasing preferentially is something that is known to improve results in general, not just in LLMs and I've seen improved results by encouraging certain types of language to be used. AutoThink using the highest performing tokens out of a dataset _could_ be a nice way to optimize towards that in a more general way.

It seems like there's a risk of using so many pivotal tokens that it almost overfits responses to benchmark questions, though. So, while I have personally seen careful word/token selection improve result quality and also see it as a potential low cost high return optimization, I'd still want to see how AutoThink generalizes.
by grbsh | 2025-05-28 15:52:02+00:00
Knowledgework is AI that can actually save you time, make you better organized, and do better work. Knowledgework is the answer to question, “Why isn’t ChatGPT more useful for real-world work tasks?”

While ChatGPT is a better Google search, Knowledgework is like asking a copy of your own brain for help. Today’s chat interfaces are flawed because they require the user to micromanage: to not only know exactly what can and should be done, but to describe in detail all the specifics required to do it. Knowledgework fixes this with two elements that I believe create a new paradigm for AI enabled software: proactivity and omniscience. Without these two properties, you can’t delegate meaningful real world tasks to AI.

ChatGPT isn’t useful for this. Not because it’s not intelligent enough (it is), but because it lacks the right knowledge. When I speak to knowledge workers about how they use AI for work, they tell me they’d like to delegate more tasks to AI, but that they experience this frustration of needing to micromanage it, re-teaching everything about their project and their team every time.

How does Knowledgework solve omniscience and proactivity to create an AI assistant that’s useful for delegation of real-world work? It’s a desktop vision AI that watches you work, like an intern who is shadowing you, or a pair programmer. It learns the rich, internal (often unwritten) knowledge specific to your projects that's required to contextualize them. It organizes this into neat, understandable documentation of everything you’re doing: a hyperlinked wiki that connects all of your team’s concepts, decisions, definitions, acronyms, tools, etc.

This explicit representation of your knowledge powers the AI assistant to enable useful delegation — but it’s also really useful in it of itself. Curious as to how your team came to a decision on something? Click through the wiki to get context.

The other main feature is the Timeline. It’s kind of like a log or an objective summary of how you spent your time. While the wiki mirrors humans’ associative and conceptual memory, the timeline represents episodic memory. This enables you to visually search through your time: imagine you remember solving a similar problem a few weeks ago, but you don’t quite remember when. By going through the Timeline, you can quickly scan to find the specific work session and ask about what you did.

Together, these representations of your knowledge and experience along with the AI assistant running on top begin to feel like a sort of “digital second brain”. Since I started using it, I’ve had the experience where I’m hesitant to even do things on other devices, because it feels like anything I do there is ephemeral.

If you’re excited to upload your mind and see what the future looks like with this tech, sign up for the waitlist here: https://knowledgework.ai.
by quacksilver | 2025-05-28 15:52:07+00:00
I have considered that, though I was not sure that letting a spammer know that your address is active and being read by a human was the best strategy, so thought I could make a HN thread to get suggestions / discuss how to act first.

People here seem to be relatively smart and clued up on the whole, and could suggest some things that I hadn't considered yet / create an interesting discussion for others to read.
by rkozik1989 | 2025-05-28 15:53:00+00:00
There's more than just technical ability at play when comes to what to do with a bad performer. Because if you hired them, or pushed for their promotion, or whatever and it doesn't work it makes you look bad too. Hence its actually problematic for someone to complain about poor performers because it makes them look difficult and possibly as though they're not people-oriented enough to manage relationships.
by kinakomochidayo | 2025-05-28 15:53:20+00:00
Ethereum is doing just fine after going PoS, in fact, it’s much more secure than when it was PoW from a security budget standpoint while achieving less inflation compared to Bitcoin, and will continue to remain secure compared to Bitcoin’s critical security budget issue as block rewards go down. It’s also special compared to other chains in that it started out as PoW for at least 7 years.

Bitcoin has ASIC monopoly and conflicts of interest with core devs connected to companies dipping into mining.

Solana and other chains are VC fueled crap though, I agree.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-28 15:53:38+00:00
In principle International Law says that all heads of state get all the same affordances as Diplomats, which certainly makes sense if you imagine the Diplomats as just messengers - if Bill Smith can be here because Bill is King Steve's messenger, obviously King Steve himself could come instead and isn't subject to your normal rules, makes sense.

In practice however... power matters. Eswatini isn't going to pretend it has the power to arrest Putin, but I can certainly imagine if Russia wanted to arrest the King of Eswatini they'd just do it - what's Eswatini going to do about it? If they've got a halfway plausible rationale, nobody wants to start a war over that, at least nobody who might win.

Likewise under the same legal theory neither Ireland nor South Africa could currently arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the warrant for his arrest on a charge of crimes against humanity. But in practice I'm sure Natanyahu would rather not find out the hard way whether that theory holds up, in either Dublin or Cape Town. Israel has a substantial military force, and the Americans might back them, but, neither Ireland nor South Africa are defenceless and this sounds like a bad way to find out for sure.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-28 15:54:15+00:00
Unscientifically I always assumed that the pencil-and-paper was not really the important part, just the ritual of memorization that modern people have from however many years of schooling. I assumed the important part was the ritual.

I guess we have a large enough population of people who’ve always taken notes on their computers that a natural experiment could have occurred. But I wonder about the crosstabs—computers can be very distracting so I wonder if people who prefer them to notebooks will also just tend to be more distracted.
by munificent | 2025-05-28 15:54:23+00:00
I think you're right, but it's not just work. It's all organizations and social institutions.

We have relationships with other individuals, but we also have relationships with groups as a whole. And the way we tend to those relationships depends on how we believe the other party tends to us.

If you have a relationship with someone who treats you with trust, kindness, conscientiousness, and care, you will naturally reciprocate and feel good about doing so. But if the partner is thoughtless, callous, or cruel, only a fool would put effort into that relationship.

So it is with our relationships with all of the various organizations that make up society. If the company I work for is giving me the fewest possible benefits and is happy to fire me if they get the chance, why should I do anything but the bare minimum? If my government is being used as a tool for enrichment by cronies and oligarchs, why shouldn't I do everything I can to skirt paying taxes? If the giant store chain I buy my groceries from keeps jacking up prices and shrinkflating products, why shouldn't I slip a few extra apples in the bag without paying?
by maxdignan2 | 2025-05-28 15:55:03+00:00
The choice represents a trade-off between a "reliability premium" (consistent performance) and a "magic premium" (potential for exceptional solutions). Based on AI's historical pattern where general-purpose, scalable methods eventually outperform hand-engineered solutions, the recommendation is to use workflows for immediate reliability needs but invest in agents for long-term advantage as models improve.
by dangus | 2025-05-28 15:55:14+00:00
Even the phrase "world-changing" might be a bit too strong.

It's enabled some acceleration of product prototyping and it has democratized hardware design a little bit. Some little companies are building some buildings using 3D printing techniques.

Speaking as someone who owns and uses a 3D printer daily, I think the biggest impact it's had is that it's a fun hobby, which doesn't strike me as "world-changing."
by reginald78 | 2025-05-28 15:55:16+00:00
AI scrapping, bloated javascript pages that are mostly text, ads, existing captchas, etc also all waste energy for no gain to the end user and we mostly just accept it or maybe run an ad blocker. I see people complain PoW solutions make it hard for low power devices and are a waste of energy, which is true. But that is also true of the status quo which is also an annoying waste of human time and often a privacy nightmare.
by Balgair | 2025-05-28 15:55:25+00:00
> 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society

I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's take:

"in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please, dare dream of a 22nd century."

https://xcancel.com/DavidSHolz/status/1926775363801088191#m

Like, yeah, I'm not really thinking about the year 2125 and what that will be like. I just kinda assume it's beyond some tech singularoty or something that I can't imagine.

Part of it too is that the world seems 'solved' in a lot of ways. Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate of capitalism or communism. We know which works better. We don't care for climate change right now but are worried about it a lot, yet we all kinda know that we just have to get our act together to solve it and that's not going to happen until things get really bad. The gender and color barriers are broken. The trans barriers are like, something I guess. Sure light speed, but all the physicists say that impossible. Mars, yeah, I guess, but that's a lot harder than we thought it would be. SpaceX is doing cool stuff, I guess, sorta, when things don't blow up in the sky or with their boss. The AIs are here and they kinda just took our jobs and all the fun out of the world. Video games are cool, but we all know it's just coasting through time. You can order a pizza now at the south pole, it's hot when it gets to you. That dude fell out of a balloon for Red Bull, I guess. All the rivers are mapped, it's just people speed swimming them now. Poverty isn't a question of if, but which asshat to get out of the way.

I mean, this is usual with humans. Same goes for corruption and politics. It's all just muddling along without a lot of 'zazz' to it. We're just stuck waiting for enough bad to occur to get over that activation energy and get moving. Like a frat bro piling more garbage onto the already overflowing can, eventually it will get taken out, by someone, maybe me, but not right now.

Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet? It's all just oatmeal beige.
by Lazarus_Long | 2025-05-28 15:55:28+00:00
Problem is, paraphrasing Scott Kilmer, corporations are dead from the neck up. The conclusion for them was not that AI will help juniors, is that they will not hire juniors and will ask seniors the magic "10x" with the help of AI. Even some seniors are getting the boot, because AI.

Just look at recent news, layoff after layoff from Big Tech, Middle tech and small tech.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-05-28 15:55:37+00:00
>Based on my own experiences and observations, I think grading is a far larger issue than cheating. I am not convinced that good grades are necessarily reflective of enrichment nor how much material has been learned. If a person makes the a high grade in a particular class, what does that actually mean?

Exactly. Grades and learning have become decoupled.
by strawhatguy | 2025-05-28 15:56:39+00:00
Ugh, he had a point until he brought in cutting the government as a bad thing.

Seriously, DOGE is sweating the small stuff, trying to get cuts where they can, and that does NOT happen from people who don't care. There's a lot of care there. As an analogy, when I program, I'm always on the lookout for performance improvements, and that involves cutting non-performant code and doing less. It's the bro-coders that slap together dependencies to cobble together a monstrosity that don't care. Not the cutters. Cutting waste is caring.

The more accurate "Who Cares?" moment is the fact Congress refuses to codify any cuts and in fact spends more. Just paying off friends, the impeding doom of our debt, when seriously deep cuts of everything will be forced, is just shrug.
by miloignis | 2025-05-28 15:56:43+00:00
This is a bit of an aside, but I see this take a lot and I think it's subtly wrong.

Web client side encryption eliminates fully passive snooping on the server side, but of course does nothing for actively subverting the served encryption code. This makes things a bit more dangerous for the snooping party as it's possible that the backdoored encryption code will be noticed by someone, and it's at least possibly a legal defense - the government might have the power to compel you to hand over data on your server but not to backdoor your code.

This isn't a huge technical difference, but it is a difference, and especially with the legal angle I think it's an important one.
by danesparza | 2025-05-28 15:56:55+00:00
What a missed opportunity on the part of Waffle House. How disappointing (and dumb)!

I would have hoped that if they had the sense to send out a cease and desist (because somebody obviously knew that "the waffle house index" was in the cultural zeitgeist -- heck, it even has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index ) ...

that they would have the good sense to work with somebody on a web page WHICH COSTS THEM NOTHING, and yet can foster a sense of good will for their company??

Well, I guess Waffle House doesn't deserve them.

Good riddance. And I'll definitely be going to IHOP when making my next Hurricane escape.
by falcor84 | 2025-05-28 15:56:59+00:00
That's a strawman argument. We don't have to change the system just because "someone is going to claim it's too easy". I personally have been claiming a lot of things about a lot of systems and the're very persistent in not listening to me, even though I'm sure it would make them better. Anyway, if someone is annoyed by their (or their kid's) test being too easy, we can just give them bonus test