MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-06-29 07:17:34+00:00
Okay let's speak of the far distant future. Would I want them if they were contact the size of contact lenses? My opinion is secondary there because there's approximately a 100% chance that they would end up banned. I, like many if not the overwhelming majority, would absolutely refuse to interact with anybody wearing them. And it wouldn't be out of protest of the technology itself, but simply out of privacy issues. What people say face to face should remain between them.

On top of that I have little interest in discussions in real life turning into internet discussions where it's two people searching "proof my view is right [and his is wrong]" and then repeating arguments they oft have little to no understanding of. And there are also practical issues - girls would probably not enjoy the fact that there'd 100% be insta-strip apps. And then there's the dystopia of surveillance and all that stuff. Nah, not gonna happen.

More generally I think smartphones changed the world hard in one direction but, at scale, are starting to change it back in the opposite direction. They enabled great convenience, but it turns out that the nature of 24/7 tech connectivity are also quite unpleasant in many ways. And speaking of things being banned it's already quite obvious that many apps today are already working, intentionally, to function as digital drugs that will, almost certainly, also end up being treated as such in the future.

I think the one and only reason that we're stalling control of these 'digital substances' is because intelligence agencies have tremendous back-door influence and we've created a sort of global honey pot. There's probably still some fantasies of pre-crime and the nonsense belief that if you just control the message you can make people believe whatever you want (really worked well for the USSR, North Korea, and everywhere else that's tried such...). Once we get over the myopia, these things are on their way out.
by aurareturn | 2025-06-29 07:17:46+00:00
Less programmable, but more throughput/power efficiency?

I also wonder the same. It'd make sense to sell two categories of chips:

Traditional GPUs like Blackwell that can do anything and have backwards compatibility.

Less programmable and more ASIC-like inference chips like Google's TPUs. Inference market is going to be multiple times bigger than training soon.
by ost-ing | 2025-06-29 07:18:36+00:00
Im not saying that any of this excuses the nationalist movement Israel is today, im just stating a fact that semitic descendants in Europe have heritage to those lands. Just because someone appears white and blue-eyed doesn't necessarily negate that.

Judaism is an ethno-religion, so while some people may have no connection to semitic people, others will have a closer connection and its discriminatory to simply say “they are not native” which my original post was critical of.
by esseph | 2025-06-29 07:19:20+00:00
Early Block I was mostly used for testing.

If you're just concerned with the first satellite launch, ehhhh, sure. As a useable global system it was much later.

"The GPS project was launched in the United States in 1973 to overcome the limitations of previous navigation systems,[15] combining ideas from several predecessors, including classified engineering design studies from the 1960s. The U.S. Department of Defense developed the system, which originally used 24 satellites, for use by the United States military, and became fully operational in 1993. Civilian use was allowed from the 1980s. "

Here's the current list, marked by launch date and Block:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GPS_satellites
by krstffr | 2025-06-29 07:20:04+00:00
My friend had a very similar episode with a psychosis, but turned out to be bipolar, not schizophrenic. Sounds very similar though!

He was smoking a lot of weed leading up to and during the psychosis.

Ended up in psychiatric ward for a month, which was followed by a couple of years of depression/introspection/therapy, but is now doing great with lithium.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-06-29 07:20:19+00:00
In Jan, my son ordered a mystery box from ... I dunno who. It just showed up. Evidently it was someone connected with King Gizzard because it was recently released KG vinyl, inc a test pressing. Also a sealed cassette of another band that we don't recognize. Also stickers.

Connect with fans, treat them well and stay creative - and they'll buy your stuff. Often a lot of it.
by defrost | 2025-06-29 07:20:41+00:00
Aside from Thiel's employment of JD Vance in various roles and Thiels record breaking donations to Vance's campaigns?

Forbes did a run down on their connections 12 months ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/07/16/jd-...

perhaps they missed a few things.
by joshdavham | 2025-06-29 07:21:54+00:00
> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns.

Realistically, this is the most likely solution to reducing addiction on online platforms in my opinion. I’m not sure how likely such regulations will be in the US, but it’s quite telling that the Chinese regulate their version of TikTok, while the US doesn’t regulate theirs.
by atoav | 2025-06-29 07:22:35+00:00
That is what you would think. Yet scandinavian countries which many US observers would (wrongly) call "socialist" countries fare quite well, while the US is currently falling apart in a fractal fashion where even the big issues have smaller issues attached to them.

It is maybe time for people like you to realize that the current crisis in the US is a direct result of this zero-sum worldview, where you think you can only win if someone else loses. Some turned that around and infer someone else losing will make them win, which is where a lot of the worse-than-soviet cruelty in US society comes from. Where producing win-win outcomes should be prefered, part of the US seems to be craving for lose-lose.

It is hard for the fish to perceive the nature of the water they have been swimming in their whole lives, but trust me: from an European standpoint the frequency soviet-style stories emerging from the US is rising.

People don’t call ambulances because they’re afraid of the cost, they die in the back of rideshares or sit bleeding out waiting for someone to Google the cheapest ER.

People drink poisoned water in one of the richest countries in the world, not as a one-time scandal but as a structural outcome, in Flint, in Jackson, in places the cameras moved on from.

Housing is a market, not a right, and so entire cities now feature tent villages under highways while luxury units sit empty, protected not by need but by capital.

In parts of Louisiana, California and Iowa, the air you breathe and the water you touch can kill you, but only if you’re poor enough or Black or unlucky enough to live near a chemical plant, a battery smelter, a lake no one bothers to save. In these sacrifice zones, life expectancy drops like it’s wartime. In urban centres people film others burning alive on the subway (NYC) and call it content.

There are cemeteries of Black Americans being paved over for parking garages, with courts hesitating to intervene. These aren’t edge cases—they’re the shape of the thing. This is not the freedom that was promised. This is the bureaucracy of cruelty operating not as failure, but as design. And the worst part is: many still think this is the price of success.
by eru | 2025-06-29 07:23:01+00:00
What do you define to be 'truly livable'?

Let's have a look at Scandinavia or Germany. They have reasonably generous welfare systems, but they are means tested. So for the sake of argument, declare them to be 'truly livable'. Especially by global standards.

Now I claim, that you can get pretty much the same net payments (of means tested welfare - taxes) that these countries have today with a system of (UBI - taxes). Basically, at the moment both taxes and welfare are means tested; you could move to UBI by moving all the means testing from welfare to taxes.

Because net payments would be pretty much the same, all incentives would stay pretty much the same as today.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax which is one way to implement something like a UBI.

Of course, if you want to go much beyond what Germany and Scandinavia are already paying, you'd need even higher taxes or a stranger economy.

Btw, per capita the US is one of the world leaders of social welfare spending. They spend more than France. (Mostly because while France spends a higher proportion of GDP, American GDP per capita is much higher.)
by Voultapher | 2025-06-29 07:24:21+00:00
Just curious what does fighting for freedom legitimately look like in this context for you?

> For Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, the colonizer's presence in Algeria is based on sheer military strength. Any resistance to this strength must also be of a violent nature because it is the only "language" the colonizer speaks. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon
by foxglacier | 2025-06-29 07:25:42+00:00
No because the whole first world has protections against starvation and homelessness, while social exclusion is usually for social behaviors rather than not working. However, what does drive people to be productive in those countries is the unbounded upward mobility offered by doing productive work. People strive to be richer than each other in a virtuous cycle that has the side effect of benefiting everyone. People, especially men, love and often need to be better than their peers to attract better partners, and that's a powerful driving force for many. For others, it's just feeling successful or gaining the power to by what you want. You can't do that if you're not rewarded for higher performance than your competitors (socialism).

Homelessness in the west is mostly not because people can't afford a house but because they'd rather spend their money on other things (drugs) or don't want a house at any price, or can't avoid losing their house because of their behavior.
by freddie_mercury | 2025-06-29 07:26:21+00:00
I think "what happened" was that Anderson's long tail theory was

a) just a theory not a proven thing and

b) based on flawed assumptions that were quickly disproven. See the 2008 paper "Should You Invest in the Long Tail?" finding that consumers don't like niche products and the bottom 80% sold $0, contrary to the theory's prediction.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=32337

Had nothing to do with merchandising or whatever. The Long Tail was never correct.
by agent86 | 2025-06-29 07:26:24+00:00
For anyone interested, ESPN has a HAM Radio club - WE1SPN[1] - and they are live streaming some of their Field Day operations on YouTube[2]. They're not operating overnight, but should be back in the morning eastern US time. If you'd like to make contact the operators are actively monitoring the chat.

[1] - https://we1spn.org/

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYZxmubVjd0
by burakemir | 2025-06-29 07:27:37+00:00
A definition of memory safety without data race freedom may be more precise but arguably less complete.

It is correct that data races in a garbage collected language are difficult to turn into exploits.

The problem is that data races in C and C++ do in fact get combined with other memory safety bugs into exploits.

A definition from first principles is still missing, but imagine it takes the form of "all memory access is free from UB". Then whether the pointer is in-bounds, or whether no thread is concurrently mutating the location seem to be quite similar constraints.

Rust does give ways to control concurrency, eg via expressing exclusive access through &mut reference. So there is also precedent that the same mechanisms can be used to ensure validity of reference (not dangling) as well as absence of concurrent access.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-29 07:28:45+00:00
This has happened to many past professions, and will continue to happen. Can one really make a career out of woodworking craftsmanship? Making custom furniture? Maybe a small number of people in the world can, but the rest just do woodworking as a hobby because it doesn’t pay the bills.

Software development will go this way, too, as we are all starting to learn.

The problem is people are ok with corporate, mass-produced slop—whether it be music, furniture, or (soon) software. Fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for human craftsman-produced product.
by yzydserd | 2025-06-29 07:29:56+00:00
TL;DR

In the Women’s 3-set match, where there are 735 possibilities, these scores have never eventuated:

6-0 0-6 7-5, 6-0 0-6 6-0, 0-6 6-0 7-5

Meanwhile, in the 5-set format of Men’s matches, only 8.5% of the more than 100k result possibilities have occurred.

Then add on a huge UI.
by imiric | 2025-06-29 07:30:10+00:00
This opinion will inevitably be seen as pessimistic tech doomerism, especially on forums like this.

And yet, for all the glory and benefit that we were promised modern technology would bring, the average person only enjoys a small sliver of it, while the rest is enjoyed by the 1% of humans in control, or corrupted by those who seek becoming part of the 1%.

We can access a world of information, but most of it is corrupted by (m|d)isinformation. In fact, most mainstream media is corrupted by it. We can communicate with family and loved ones around the world, at the expense of our data being exploited. We can buy and consume easier than ever before, but have to navigate a sea of poor quality products and scams. We have miraculous drugs, most of which are only accessible to the wealthy. We have self-driving cars and high-tech gadgets to entertain ourselves, which is great until the companies start exploiting us. And so on. The latest wave of AI tech is another step in this same direction, ramped up to levels we have never seen before.

I challenge anyone to steel man the argument that technology has been a net positive for humanity on a global scale, or that it will ever get better. I sure can't.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-06-29 07:30:27+00:00
> What economic inequality would you deem small enough?

I'd like the one small enough that I won't die from my (treatable) first major medical event due to being unable to fund 100% of treatment costs.

I'd also like one small enough that me and the kids didn't spend most of the 2010s in hunger-level poverty.

That'd be a start.
by demaga | 2025-06-29 07:31:36+00:00
Beautifully written article about an interesting man. Hats off to Amanda (article author) for her determination!

But this story is also a great reminder on the importance of readability. I can't name Putnam a genius if his works were so incomprehensible, that even best of the best had trouble deciphering them. Just like you wouldn't call programmer a genius if he wrote his best work in brainfuck.

I guess he never intended his works to be read. So I won't.
by seanhunter | 2025-06-29 07:32:13+00:00
But really, so what? We already have specialised chess engines (stockfish, leela, alphazero etc) that are far far stronger than humans will ever be, so insofar as that’s an interesting goal, we achieved it with deep blue and have gone way way beyond it since. The fact that a large Language model isn’t able to discern legal chess moves seems to me to be neither here nor there. Most humans can’t do that either. I don’t see it as evidence of lack of a world model either (because most people with a real chess board in front of them and a mental model of the world can’t play legal chess moves).

I find it astonishing that people pay any attention to Gary Marcus and doubly so here. Whether or not you are an “AI optimist”, he clearly is just a bloviator.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-29 07:33:01+00:00
It would be morally reprehensible to push that button, because the button would also cause prices of everything to inflate by the average increase (more than 2x). So you’d be making the 1% richer, relative to inflation, and the 99% poorer.

Ironically, our society is basically continuously pushing that button today, much to the glee of the 1%.
by luckylion | 2025-06-29 07:33:14+00:00
Is instagram really primarily "computer technology", or is it primarily a social phenomenon? Yes, the technology broadly enables that social phenomenon, but it doesn't drive it. I don't think instagram was engineered to be what it was today, users used it that way and Facebook happily picked that up and optimized.

But it's not like they somehow created a demand in people to compare their lives with others', present themselves as happier/more successful/better than they really are etc; it just gives them the tools to use it.
by rwyinuse | 2025-06-29 07:33:28+00:00
Many EU countries are pretty nice places to live, and didn't need a violent revolution to make it happen. All it took was democracy, a population willing to stand for its rights, and an elite which understood that building a welfare state is preferable outcome over having a violent Communist/Fascist revolution.

A capitalist system with right amount of social democracy to prevent worst concentration of wealth is the best model there is, at least for the well-being of its citizen and survival of its democracy.
by mulmboy | 2025-06-29 07:34:07+00:00
We operate a saas where a common step is inputting rates of widgets in $/widget, $/widget/day, $/1kwidgets, etc etc. These are incredibly tedious and error prone to enter. And usually the source of these rates is an invoice which presents them in ambiguous ways e.g. rows with "quantity" and "charge" from which you have to back calculate the rate. And these invoices are formatted in all different ways.

We offer a feature to upload the invoice and we pull out all the rates for you. Uses LLMs under the hood. Fundamentally it's a "chatgpt wrapper" but there's a massive amount of work in tweaking the prompts based on evals, splitting things up into multiple calls, etc.

And it works great! Niche software, but for power users were saving them tens of minutes of monotonous work per day and in all likelihood entering things more accurate. This complements the manual entry process with full ability to review the results. Accuracy is around 98-99 percent.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-29 07:36:26+00:00
The Geneva Convention does not provide carveouts to particularly angry personnel. You can try to define fake conditions to justify it but the hearing hasn't happened so you're just speculating.

And you know what? You can document the torture, sexual assault and murder of innocent prisoners without getting a proper investigation from the ICC. Many US citizens will remember that from Abu Ghraib! Lord only knows how much the CIA is shielding Israel from the fallout of SAVAK. You might as well drop the moralizing pretenses and admit that you don't think a fair trial would be desirable.
by spit2wind | 2025-06-29 07:36:49+00:00
> Design won’t save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck

So things like the cotton gin or Ford's use of interchangeable parts don't count as design or somehow didn't change the world?

How is volunteering at soup kitchens more effective at changing the world than interchangeable parts?

And still yet...are you wanting to change the world for the better?
by pjmlp | 2025-06-29 07:37:58+00:00
Doesn't change the fact that isn't on ISO C.

At least WG21 eventually did the correct thing and placed those extensions into the standard, even if due to governmental pressure.

Also while enabling bounds checking has been a common configuration option in all C++ compilers, clang and GCC aren't all C compilers.

This kind of discussion is also quite telling that nothing will change on WG14, maybe eventually who knows, C2y might finally get fat pointers if voted in, and then we will see during the following decades whatever fruits that will bare.
by hn_throw2025 | 2025-06-29 07:39:17+00:00
UBI means giving money to people, which means that money has velocity because it would be promptly spent.

We did this during Covid as furlough payments, and the result was high inflation. Wages didn’t significantly increase to match, so in my country anyway people feel that the cost if living is significantly worse post-Covid.

Anywhere that implemented UBI would also have to implement rent controls, otherwise Landlords would just see it as money on the table. But you couldn’t have controls for all prices, so inflation would still result.
by anovikov | 2025-06-29 07:39:54+00:00
Indeed this is the big reason of why economic growth rates in rich countries and especially those of them with low inequality, is slower. Because the primary factor that pushes people to work, is much weaker. It's not the only reason (another big reason is that poorer countries are playing a catch-up adopting technology invented by rich ones which is always easier than inventing it first), but yes, one of the big reasons.
by woodpanel | 2025-06-29 07:41:01+00:00
Interesting article. Also a good amount too high above the paygrade for me to decipher all concepts in it, but as someone who had close contact with schizophrenics a lot, I was missing one aspect in particular:

All schizophrenics I know didn’t start as obvious psychopaths, but rather have their personal „cliff“ usually around an age associated with hormonal changes (eg early twenties, menopause).

So in other words the negative selection effects aren’t there until after reproduction.
by valenterry | 2025-06-29 07:41:01+00:00
> Because net payments would be pretty much the same, all incentives would stay pretty much the same as today.

Nope, in Germany you are required to work. If you can't find a job, you still have to try (and prove that), you need to stay at home / be available (and notify the state about your vacation or you might be punished by receiving less welfare) and of course you have to use up all money or wealth you have and state, in written, that you have no other sources of wealth.

So UBI would absolutely change incentives here.
by masswerk | 2025-06-29 07:41:03+00:00
It may be important to note that all of Austen's novels are set up and kept going by an essential flaw in the hero characters. And Fanny Price is the ultimate anti-hero: indeed, she is hardly a heroine, she doesn't act, at all, she has no arc, she just clings to the first thing she encounters. While the world is moving and swirling around her, she doesn't move at all, not for lack of opportunity, but as a character trait (and, at times, by sheer luck, as in the theatre episode, thus earning her uncle's regard). And, in the end, it's all for nothing: while she got everything, she may have wanted to embrace, and even more, she is untouched by it and (quite literally) still where she started. It's quite literally about first attachments, not just in the domain of romance (like in Sense and Sensibility), but to about everything. Or, rather, first possessions, as in the first room, she may call her own, the first person, she talks to, etc.

How Austen constructs a plausible environment for such a character and what she does with this world and its characters is quite astounding – and hilarious. And, as you said, there are actually serious topics discussed.

Even more astounding is maybe how modern adaptations try to render this as "how our quick and cunning girl stirs up that lame family and wins everything."