MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by martin-t | 2025-06-29 04:00:28+00:00
LLM have been known to cause adults to spiral into borderline crazy behavior like thinking they're talking to a god, thinking they are a god, thinking the LLM is alive and needs saving from being turned off, etc.

Surely nothing will go wrong if they stuff LLMs into toys for children who have not even fully developed brains which are even less capable of rational thought than adult humans.
by voidhorse | 2025-06-29 04:00:29+00:00
The whole thing is silly. Look, we know that LLMs are just really good word predictors. Any argument that they are thinking is essentially predicated on marketing materials that embrace anthropomorphic metaphors to an extreme degree.

Is it possible that reason could emerge as the byproduct of being really good at predicting words? Maybe, but this depends on the antecedent claim that much if not all of reason is strictly representational and strictly linguistic. It's not obvious to me that this is the case. Many people think in images as direct sense datum, and it's not clear that a digital representation of this is equivalent to the thing in itself.

To use an example another HN'er suggested, We don't claim that submarines are swimming. Why are we so quick to claim that LLMs are "reasoning"?
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-29 04:01:37+00:00
That has the causality backwards. Patronage does not lead to unequal wealth, it's the unequal wealth that leads to patronage being the only way to fund art. Getting rid of copyright would not give the wealthy more money via government enforced monopoly.

Also they're using the term "patronage" more loosely when they say to attract an audience. There's no horrible class inequality when a bunch of people are paying $1-100 a month.
by altairprime | 2025-06-29 04:01:56+00:00
That’s a popular trend in video games, too; quite a lot of people invest a second hobby’s worth of energy into their complaints, with the occasional gem in the rough among them. You can find this in any hobby - like, I know nothing about golf, but I am absolutely certain if I asked a golfer “what changed in golf clubs recently? are you still happy with them?” I am near-certain to get a lengthy spoken history of club design and manufacturing flaws. Humans are most irritable about their most favored topics.
by monero-xmr | 2025-06-29 04:02:19+00:00
Successful musicians have way more in common with actors than any other profession. It’s about connections, wealth, and nepotism over anything else.

Let’s say your child wants to be an actor. One way to make this happen is to be a successful actor yourself - require your children to be cast in the film in return for you starring. This is how famous acting families pushed their kids forwards, including Nicholas Cage (Coppola) and Jeff Bridges.

More relevant for HN is rich people. So you are tech rich and your kid wants to act. Fund the movie on the condition your child acts in it. That is the way since movies began.
by qingcharles | 2025-06-29 04:03:33+00:00
I just looked it up. I was dating a Qatari and didn't even dare to explore naturalization. The process is insane. As a man, you can't get citizenship through marriage (only women get that). So, as a guy I would have to live there for 25 continuous years with little time outside the country. Add on that they require you to be rich, Muslim and speak Gulf Arabic at native level. Also, you have to give up your birth citizenship (not always possible) and they can revoke your citizenship on a whim.

Qatar is a fascinating country, though.
by darkhorse222 | 2025-06-29 04:03:41+00:00
I honestly think there is some place here to be anti tech. Some things, the things closest to our humanity, like love and community, are not all that better with technology in my opinion. Sure, you can stay connected with a family member or friend who lives in another city, but that same positive is a negative via another perspective because it doesn't force you to make new connections with people around you.

And love is similar. It's nice that algorithms can help you match, but the psychology by which you arrive at a compatible partner matters a great deal. The swipe is inherently dehumanizing even if it does match you with a human.

Some things are supposed to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing. Tech should stop trying to eliminate that and instead augment it. That calls for an entirely different philosophy when choosing ideas to build. Instead of looking for uncomfortable or inefficient things and trying to "fix" that, consider your values. What do you care about, what is important for a good human life? Then use your skills to enable deeper integration into those values.

Easier is not always better.

I recently had this revelation when considering how difficult it is to find events that I'm interested in. I was shocked that this isn't a problem that we had solved in the 2000s. But Facebook events is full of bar specials like ladies night and doesn't seem to match to my taste and Eventbrite is overly monetized and tends to be formal events, my friend who's very into the electronic scene told me that the way that she found events was by following people on Instagram and then following the businesses that she went to and checking their pages for events. I thought that seemed very inefficient and then it occurred to me that maybe the goal here is not to get as many people as possible to go to your event. Maybe it's about getting the right people with the right values and right taste to go to your event. This is a classic case where making something easier would not necessarily serve to achieve the goal of that ease, which, in this case would be making it easier for me to find authentic events. *The very nature of them being trivially accessible would change what they are.*
by Manuel_D | 2025-06-29 04:04:29+00:00
If tens of million of people are using a service, statistically at least a few of them are going to be bad actors. The stuff you're describing doesn't really seem much different that any popular internet spaces in the 2000s. People were "cybering" in World of Warcraft. 4chan was raiding habbo hotel and club penguin with Nazi memes. Kids were chatting with strangers on AIM and ventrilo. If anything, these services probably had considerably worse moderation given the language processing rooms we have today.

I'm not seeing any evidence that the bad actors are a proportionally larger problem, or just the fact that more people on the internet. E.g a city with 1 murder out of 100k and another with 100 murders out of 10M are just as safe.
by skissane | 2025-06-29 04:05:45+00:00
> If you read your own link, note how Israel has a near-total blockade and maintains military control

For most of the period since 2005, it has been a joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade, not an exclusively Israeli one. That has recently changed now that Israel has militarily occupied the Gaza side of the Egypt-Gaza border

But I do find it interesting how Israel gets exclusively blamed for something which Egypt also had a hand in - and they weren’t doing it because “Israel made us”, they had their own security reasons - they feared Hamas would support Islamist rebels in Egypt.

It does seem to support the claim that Israel gets “picked on”, when a joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade gets presented as an exclusively Israeli one
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-29 04:07:31+00:00
It is already called ECMAScript; they do not need to change it. It is also called JavaScript. (I don't know if there is trademark issues with ECMA too though)

However, the name "JavaScript" (and "ECMAScript") is in use enough anyways (like is described in the article), so Oracle shouldn't properly restrict others to use it in this way.
by markasoftware | 2025-06-29 04:07:50+00:00
it's too bad this was overshadowed by the more mainstream solution posts in the last few days. I once had to solve a combinatorial problem in real life and wrote this amalgamation https://github.com/markasoftware/chorebot/blob/master/solver..., but thanks to this post I realize that minizinc would have been a much better way to express the problem.
by wwweston | 2025-06-29 04:07:58+00:00
Anyone who has something they've done out of love but can't figure out how to monetize knows the problem with this: you are limited in the amount of time you can put into doing it, both into the actual doing and the pre-doing practice and study. That means less of your best work gets done. Maybe you never actually reach the point where any of your best work gets done.

There's lots of value in amateur engineering. What if we deprofessionalized engineering via making it difficult for anyone to make a living doing it? Some people would no doubt still continue to do it, to scratch their itches and exercise their minds. But they would spend less time doing it, less time sudying how to do it, more time doing whatever it takes to pay the bills and claw out some semblance of security. We certainly wouldn't fall into technical poverty immediately, and maybe we wouldn't miss what we don't quite invent / develop, but both the people who actually love it enough to pay attention and the professionals would know the difference between what isn't getting done.

(And in fact, the US is standing on the precipice of a FAFO event with research here, having just made it more difficult to make a living focusing on it.)

What happens to a field that can only be engaged as a dilettante, never as a committed investor?
by ergocoder | 2025-06-29 04:08:34+00:00
> Hospitals and labs can’t afford to match tech spending to obtain H1Bs.

This is just basic demand-supply. I don't see a problem here.

If hospitals and labs can't afford to match the salaries of other occupations, maybe you have too many American candidates or the end result isn't producing enough value.

Most of the occupations doesn't really need H1B. And that's okay.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-06-29 04:09:51+00:00
My two daughters play Roblox.[1] Their parental control has improved a lot. However, I find that it is more about training and helping your kid understand how to be careful online than interacting with a 'better' Online Entity. Today, it is Roblox; there will be a lot of others. I know it will never be a solved problem, but help them understand very early on what to do and what not to do.

We usually do routines - while in the car, at home - "What are our online protocols?", "What if someone, even if they seem like a tiny kid, asks you for anything personal?" "If someone told you that it is one of our family or relatives, what are the challenge words and codes?" etc.

1. https://story.oinam.com/2017/date-roblox/
by voidhorse | 2025-06-29 04:10:21+00:00
I think the point is that category errors or misinterpreting what a tool does can be dangerous.

Both statistical data generators and actual reasoning are useful in many circumstances, but there are also circumstances in which thinking that you are doing the latter when you are only doing the former can have severe consequences (example: building a bridge).

If nothing else, his perspective is a counterbalance to what is clearly an extreme hype machine that is doing its utmost to force adoption through overpromising, false advertising, etc. These are bad things even if the tech does actually have some useful applications.

As for benchmarks, if you fundamentally don't believe that stochastic data generation leads to reason as an emergent property, developing a benchmark is pointless. Also, not everyone has to be on the same side. It's clear that Marcus is not a fan of the current wave. Asking him to produce a substantive contribution that would help them continue to achieve their goals is preposterous. This game is highly political too. If you think the people pushing this stuff are less than estimable or morally sound, you wouldn't really want to empower them or give them more ideas.
by DaveZale | 2025-06-29 04:11:46+00:00
Good you are already there!

Midunderstanding tangent, I don't think so. Arnold says to get off the phone, get out into the real world. Totally aligned with what you are saying.

I signed up for the gym, got my partner to do the same, sought out and found some good volunteer work where I was needed. Too much screen time is not good, but old school newsletters that are relevant work just fine. They always have. Be the change you want to see, all that mumbo jumbo can actually work. Sure community can be the catalyst.
by franciscop | 2025-06-29 04:12:08+00:00
I have noticed in Japan the crazy bureaucratization of document applications in the 7-8 years I've been living here. I've had 2 Japanese documents expire, "MyNumber" and "Driving License" in these years, and when trying to re-obtain them the process has become MUCH more complex. I'm bad at remembering all these processes in detail, but these are from memory:

- For the mynumber, first time, it was a simple application, and maybe a trip or two to the City Hall. This was at a moment where Japan was trying everyone to have/use the mynumber system so that might've made it easier on purpose.

- The second time I needed to book an appointment to request the application forms, which were (snail)mailed to me so then I could apply for the card. Yes, that sentence is as bad as it reads.

Now the crazier one is the driving license (conversion process):

- The first time I needed to get a translation, I went to JAL, showed my documents and paid, then received the translation. Took that and 2-3 documents, went to the driving license center, and gave the documents and passports and IDs. Waited few hours and had it done. Oh, I also got the Motorbike license for free.

- The second time I am applying now: need to get the translation, first register online for the translation, for which you need to create an account and a 8-step process. Hard, but still doable [1]. Then you need to book a meeting for the driving license center. But it's very hard to do so, in fact I couldn't find the link at all. I went in person and they showed me a QR code for the booking, I suspect this is hard to find on purpose. Every place is full and cannot be booked, except for 1 of them, 2 months later. Okay, I try to apply. First basic questions, sure, then asks for travel history on my passport that I need to input manually. Note that dates in one part of the form are on the shape of `YYYYMMDD` and in other they are 3 fields of "YYYY", "MM", "DD" (3 different inputs), having to write a dozen of them is maddening. Oh wait, but if I want the motorbike one, which was automatic before, I now need a document from the Spanish embassy as well, another side quest. I'm hoping they can at least provide it in Japanese. I guess I'm halfway that process now, got a meeting booked 2 months later.

[1] https://english.jaf.or.jp/driving-in-japan/drive-in-japan/ab...
by jdkee | 2025-06-29 04:15:57+00:00
"onetheless, the state has a role to play. The government has long forced commercial and campus radio stations to play at least 35 percent CanCon—that is, music that meets two of the four criteria of MAPL (music, artist, performance, lyrics): that the music was composed by a Canadian, performed by a Canadian, and recorded in Canada, with lyrics written by a Canadian. But imposing such requirements on internationally owned streamers has proven challenging."

When the state dictates artistic content, that is socialism.
by sloproth | 2025-06-29 04:15:58+00:00
Could you point me to that essay? A search for "Thiel 2009 essay" gives his essay for the Cato Institute titled, "The Education of a Libertarian". That's not the article you're referring to, correct?

He touched on this argument in his conversation with N.T. Wright in 2015, which I found fascinating. I would love to read his written thoughts on it. Thank you!
by YZF | 2025-06-29 04:16:11+00:00
US gives a ton of aid to Egypt which is an oppressive dictatorship. Egypt is also involved in the civil war in Sudan which has seen more than 150,000 people killed and more than 522,000 children die from starvation, and about 10 million people displaced. Where is your outcry? Maybe something to do with the media (social and traditional) not pumping images to your device 24/7. No Jews no news.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80...

Israel is not evil and doesn't need your funding. Your ally is not slaughtering children, your ally is defending itself against an enemy hiding behind children that's trying to get as many civilians killed as they can and get the most shocking images and figures, whether fabricated or not, in front of your eyes.

Hamas was also taking your tax dollars. The US funds Palestinians too, where do you think that money funneled into Gaza ended up?

The US also supports dictatorial regimes like Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (and Turkey, semi-dictatorial). US weapons used by Saudis were slaughtering civilians in Yemen. Not to mention what western powers did in the middle east directly (and other places).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_involvement_in_the_Yem...

I think you're being manipulated. Israel is far from perfect but it's also far from evil. Any other country in its position would be doing more or less the same thing. If its enemies stopped trying to murder its citizens then there would be no more violence. War crimes, if/when they occur are not ok but Israel has the right to defend its citizens and not too many options.

EDIT: I should also add that not everyone here is American. In general the singling out of Israel and the PR machinery to paint Israel as evil is happening across the world. Many countries and people that provide no aid to Israel are attacking it. So clearly the amount of aid provided is not a factor in anti-Israel sentiments and singling it out. You can do this sort of PR when you have a lot of money (Qatar).
by theahura | 2025-06-29 04:16:50+00:00
O shit really? That's a massive update and possibly invalidates a lot of this article. It's also the first I've heard of this -- can you tell me more? Are you saying everyone essentially got bought out? (if you want to dm me in case its still pseudo-private, feel free to at theahura at gmail)

ETA: there's now an update header on the article based on this information
by boston_clone | 2025-06-29 04:17:58+00:00
Very worth it to read the follow up research paper that moves away from this cliff-edge hypothesis, highlights other ambiguities, and attempts some self-correction.

https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/the-evolutionary-genetic...

In any case, a fascinating read and well-worth it to explore the linked citations, especially by Crow and Nesse.
by ikr678 | 2025-06-29 04:18:01+00:00
I'm no contact with the parent that has my childhood home. As a result of this I've become very unsentimental, after a few painful years of trying to retrieve the few items I cared about, only for that parent to realise they had value to me and use them for leverage. I have given up on stuff in general.

I am not exactly a minimalist, but I freely give away and loan things to people who might get more value put of them, it's enabled me to move across the country multiple times for good opportunities at very little notice.
by nunez | 2025-06-29 04:18:43+00:00
So this guy is comparing hotel lobby breakfast at a probably cheap airport hotel near the third largest airport in the world to a street cafe in (probably a nice part of) Milan?

Nah, this article isn't biased at all.

This is like when that Strong Towns guy used Houston to show how squalid walking in most of America is, except he forgot to mention that it was in an industrial part of Houston, and, oh yeah, the video wasn't actually shot in Houston proper!

I mean, you're not wrong, but I'm sure European countries have its run-down parts, and most of these articles mysteriously never talk about Eastern Europe...
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-06-29 04:19:47+00:00
The problem with this whole line of thought is that the human environment since the neolithic period has changed.

It also does not take into account the huge amount of human relocation that’s taken place over the last 200 years. For example, we have a large number of Africans that are now living in climate that are much colder than what they evolved to live in. The same as truth for northern Europeans, who lived in cold, cloudy climate now living in sunny, warm climates. Does anyone hear really think that that wouldn’t affect the populations mental health?

We know schizophrenia genes are almost always risk genes, meaning their polygenic, or they don’t cause schizophrenia, and everyone who carries the genetics. There are a very few number of cases of people who carry genes that directly caused schizophrenia.

So it’s quite possible that schizophrenia did not exist as frequently as it does in the modern world, a world filled with pollution, stress, drugs, aldehydes, bad food, and on and on and on.

But let’s just take migration. It is a well-known risk factor for schizophrenia. See the paper below.

https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/appi.ajp.162.1....

So no schizophrenia is not the price we pay for mine poison near the edge of a cliff, it’s the price we pay for technology. The technology that enabled not only all the wonderful things to get, but also all the horrible things that come with it.

I had schizoaffective disorder, and I have essentially cured it. But I really can’t say it’s a cure because what was happening was there was a Mitch match between my genetics in my environment. It’s like curing yourself from celiac by not eating wheat. Celiac is only a disease if you eat wheat.

So I am one of these involuntarily relocated people because of capitalism. My great great grandparents on my mother side were Sami and I still carry those genetics. Changing my environment and changing my diet changed my life. Frankly, I’m tired of these articles saying that there’s no cure for mental illnesses and it’s just a price we pay.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-29 04:20:19+00:00
Now you’ve got me thinking about the beauty in the mundane. The real butterfly effect is the friends we make along the way. You saved the butterfly one time, and in the telling, you’ve helped save my hope in humanity. To me, these moments are as genuinely human as any achievement. To be human is to behold, and to be captivated thus.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-06-29 04:20:24+00:00
First let me say that I support the underlying intention of this piece of writing. However and this is crucial - it is based on a factually wrong premise which invalidates the entire hit piece. Unfortunately that also makes the surrounding discussion and angst misdirected.

I am urging you to go into the rest of this comment with an open mind.

H-1B visas require a “prevailing wage” which the foreign worker must be paid at or above in order to get a visa. Prevailing wages are made based on the area the worker will be in and their title, and are published on the DOL website: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/wages

Before being allowed to hire a foreign worker a company must advertise the position in the US. This could be improved as right now you can put the ad in the most obscure newspaper you can find or on TV at 3am. But you do have to do something.

The decision to grant or deny a visa is made by a consular officer - a trained human - who carefully considers all the foreign worker’s case materials (called a “petition”).

All this is to say, they thought of this “bringing in foreign workers depresses wages” problem way back when they created this program and invented prevailing wages to mitigate it. They thought of “bringing in foreign workers denies locals opportunities to apply for those roles” way back when they created the program and invented job ad requirements to mitigate it.

Don’t get me wrong the H-1B is definitely being exploited. Bodyshops are a thing. But it’s not at huge scale. It is a problem to be fixed with better enforcement and targeted reforms, not pitchforks.

Mr. Sanders’ argument needs to be backed up differently. As it stands he is misleading the public. It’s surprisingly out of character.