MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Apreche | 2025-06-23 13:09:00+00:00
The logic follows that if experts are in charge, and experts are correct, then we will see positive outcomes from following expert advice. The US, and other parts of the world, has seen some decades where experts have been in positions of authority, but there have not necessarily been positive outcomes.

Does this mean the experts are wrong? Nope. It’s for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the largest is that experts are handcuffed by corruption.

A real doctor knows best, but there are negative outcomes because of the insurance industry. A climate scientist knows best, but corruption and fossil fuel industry prevents implementation of the correct policies. Some financial advisors are scam artists and others are legit, leading people to trust neither.

For experts to gain trust they have to deliver visibly positive outcomes, and they have to greedily take credit for those outcomes. When people experience a good result, they have to make the connection that it was the advice of smart, correct, educated people that got them there.
by Nifty3929 | 2025-06-23 13:09:13+00:00
I think people greatly overestimate the importance of gold. Gold cannot feed your people, or win a war or cure a disease. And in a crisis likely won't be useful for buying things that do.

Gold is maybe just a bit better than fiat currency. Even in terms of inflation, what would happen to the market value of gold (not in Dollar terms, but in terms of what it can buy) if the government decided to spend down $200B in gold to buy stuff with?
by noelwelsh | 2025-06-23 13:09:56+00:00
I think there are a bunch of assumptions behind your statement that I believe are not true:

1. Latex is sufficient for all document publishing needs. E.g. converting Latex to HTML is bad to non-existent, while Typst has HTML export.

2. LLMs are sufficient for solving all problems one can encounter.

3. Things that are easier for humans are not also easier for LLMs.

4. New releases of LLMs will not learn more about Typst

At the end of the day I'm not trying to migrate anyone. Use whatever you feel is best. For my use cases I'm convinced Typst is a better option than Latex.
by thih9 | 2025-06-23 13:09:57+00:00
> I don’t understand how people have the time to play things by mail in realtime

It's not via mail, it's via discord; there are more details in the submission:

"I set up a channel on a reasonably-popular RPG discord server I’m on, then each commander gets their own thread, using discord’s thread feature. Each commander then gets a little doc with their character writeup and a sheet with their army numbers. They write messages to me, I reply and notify them as events occur, and I keep track of everything on a big spreadsheet and a running Photoshop map file. (...)"

---

Also note that in early wargames writing down orders was part of the game, e.g.:

"Players do not speak to each other. Instead, they communicate with their teammates and the umpire through written messages. This is so that the enemy team cannot hear their plans. This is also so that the umpire can delay or block messages if he feels the circumstances on the battlefield warrant it. In the early 19th century, officers in the field communicated over long distances through messengers. There was no radio in those days. Messengers needed time to reach the recipient, and could be delayed or intercepted by the enemy. The umpire can simulate this problem by holding on to a player's message for a round or two before giving it to the recipient, never giving it, or even give it to the enemy."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel
by Bnichs | 2025-06-23 13:10:12+00:00
>If our institutions can communicate their work better, supernatural beliefs will dry up a bit. We’ve seen this historically.

I feel like this article misses the reason why people distrust institutions. Being "kicked out of the tent" is no doubt part of it, but it's more that the institutions themselves have stopped trying to communicate in good faith.

In the past 50 or so years we've seen almost every institution (in USA at least) get caught in a massive scheme of lying and manipulation. The church was caught harboring pedophiles, the education system told us trades were bad and we needed to spend $100k+ to have a good job, the Healthcare system leveraged our own wellbeing against their profits, the government sided with insurance companies, banks, etc over its own people at every turn then proceeded to lie us into war after war after war, and all the the while the news has been proven to support almost every lie happily if the ad dollars go their way. Not a single institution hasn't failed us.

Asking why people distrust institutions is the wrong question. Any partner that lied to you that much would never be trusted again, distrust is a defense mechanism that comes from years of betrayal. But still there's some implication that we should still trust them, despite the lies, and along with it a sense that distrusting them makes you crazy (paranormal/alien beliefs are a good example). This problem does not originate from the people, it's the result of a world where truth only gets in the way of profits and power and actual people are the lowest priority.
by NalNezumi | 2025-06-23 13:11:03+00:00
Not just a problem in US but I'd say one of the issue is that we have expert inflation, and not all expertise are equally valid.

We have some insight from Decision theory. Klein and Kahneman have both identified required properties for valuable expert intuition (or knowledge, tacit or not) to be available to aquire. (here's a simplified version of this by Veritasium [1])

Most people would see through the conartist claiming "I'm a roulette expert. I've done roulette for 10 years, I have 10 years of roulette expertise, you should listen to me when it comes to what number you should bet on a roulette!" Yet we all fall for other form of expert where their problem domain follow similar structures that makes expert knowledge acquisition either hard or impossible.

But every expert with a PhD want to claim their expertise to be as valid as the actual valid expertise. Combine that with internet, short form (tweet etc) communication, we tend to dumb down the conversation using "expert" to cover all the domains, to the fraud-experts advantage.

Certain fields, you should probably trust the expert almost blindly (Emergency Care, firefighters) but others, maybe not (clinical psychologist, policy maker, economists). Problem is that if we just bundle them all up, people will end up not trusting either.

"bundling up" is a recurring tactic by conartists of all kind (subprime mortgage anyone?)

If we would "rate" different field on their expertise validity (or scientific validity etc) easily understandable by layman, we might regain some institutional trust.

But that would cause a crazy amount of resistance from certain fields (macro econ, psychology, nutritional science, etc) and in real term wouldn't happen

[1] Vertiasium https://youtu.be/5eW6Eagr9XA?feature=shared
by Apreche | 2025-06-23 13:12:12+00:00
It proliferated in America because of a law in the 1990s called the DSHEA which greatly loosened regulations on what could be sold and advertised. Before then, all this was illegal. Once it became legal it became a multi-billion dollar industry. So now even if a politician is against it on moral grounds, they are afraid of harming the economy and eliminating all those jobs.
by tt726259 | 2025-06-23 13:12:21+00:00
After seeing the Docker image for vllm jump +5Gb (to 10Gb!) over the past five months, I grew suspicious of vllm's development practices [1]. It's not easy, for sure, to deal with all those flaky python modules [2].

But having the CUDA packages four times in different layers is questionable! [3]

Yet again, as a college mate of mine used to say, "Don't change it. It works."

--

[1]: https://hub.docker.com/r/vllm/vllm-openai/tags

[2]: https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/issues/13306

[3]: These kinds of workarounds tend to end up accumulating and never get reviewed back:

- https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/commit/b07d741661570ef1...

- https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/commit/68d37809b9b52f4d... (this one in particular probably accounts for +3Gb)
by lan321 | 2025-06-23 13:12:47+00:00
> Everybody is stupid but me!!!!! How tireing. Idling is allowed for running a piece of equipment.

No. More so, along the lines of, random people should not be given financial incentives to regulate things they don't understand, especially not without a long checklist. A 2,01m video covers only the most basic thing.

> And this law isn't there for fun either.

Yeah, it's driven by the hippies who made OEMs write in manuals that you should immediately go after starting your car or bike. Scrape the cylinders real good while they're bone dry..
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-06-23 13:13:23+00:00
Awww. I was just about to gloat about Slackware avoiding another round of security holes due to its long avoidance of PAM, but it got introduced in 2020. :-(

It looks like some software projects are now entirely reliant upon PAM for authentication and don't support shadow passwords anymore. What a travesty. It's sort of like what happened with Systemd, where so many apps now entirely depend on Systemd, you can't run a Linux desktop without a "fake Systemd" to make things work. (see: Alpine Linux desktop, Slackware desktop)

All of this seems to be due to a kind of creepy crawly takeover of the system components, with new ones designed by enterprise companies and a few highly-opinionated software developers (who work at those companies). They design these components to do a million different things, but they also make them highly coupled and interdependent (which is terrible software design, but standard for enterprise products). This then results in a much more complex system with many more moving parts, and makes breaking it easier.

Since these companies hold sway over the most popular Linux distros with the most users, when they make a radical change, everybody else has to adopt it, just like with the browser world. Powerful incumbents exert an unfair (and unhealthy) amount of influence on our environment.

If you went back to a distro from 20 years ago, there really should only be a couple components: The X ecosystem (kernel drivers, userland drivers, rendering libraries), a console login program, a tty manager, a wifi manager, and, well... i'm struggling to think of anything else you need [after the system has booted]. Kernel drivers used to make up 90% of the hardware interfaces. Originally you just wrote to a device file for things like sound, printing, etc. It was an extremely simple system and it worked very well.

Today you have 80 different daemons all running at the same time in order for the system to work at all. Event buses, policy engines, management frameworks, a couple dozen libraries, and multiple layers of components to do something as simple as run a graphical app in a windowed environment. Is this all necessary? Clearly not, as we did without all this crap 20 years ago. Somebody screwed the pooch on system design.

Luckily, it's Linux, so nobody is forcing us to use all this shit. We can just start over with a new, much simpler system (and try hard as hell to avoid second system effect)
by btown | 2025-06-23 13:14:38+00:00
I think an important wake-up call is that bounties now exist in an ecosystem where people who would normally be indifferent to wanting/knowing how to collect bounties, could be driven by techniques from the predatory-gambling-app world into becoming gamified enforcers.

We’re already sliding down the slope, to be sure, but this is an acceleration that we should expect with our eyes wide open.
by SoftTalker | 2025-06-23 13:14:49+00:00
Yes I buy household stuff on Walmart's website quite often, but only stuff sold and shipped by Walmart. They have a lot of third party listings on the site also, which many people may not realize, or if they do, they don't understand that Walmart only facilitates the transaction for these, you cannot do returns or get support at a Walmart store.
by johnisgood | 2025-06-23 13:15:07+00:00
> This is incoherent no matter what two programming languages you are talking about.

Yet everyone talks about performance when it comes to programming languages. Why? And what does coherence have anything to do with it?

Plus I explained what I meant by that, there is a huge difference in the startup time of Perl and Python, for one, and you can check benchmarks. The implementation of the two languages are not identical. If they are not identical, there must be a difference in performance one way or another, I assume.

> This is incoherent no matter what programming language you are talking about. Of course it's a matter of opinion. Other people aren't going to like the same syntax you do.

I do not think anyone is going to argue that Brainfuck was made with easy string manipulation in mind, or Forth.

The point is that Perl helps you manipulate strings with relative ease. Assuming you know the language, yeah.

In fact, please read other comments, because I have already said this: "For the 100th time, I was responding to "[...] python and it is easy to do string manipulation with.".". It is easy to do so in Python, but even easier (and faster) to do on Perl. In both cases there is an assumption of knowing the language, and I thought that goes without saying.

I said nothing about liking the syntax or whatever you are trying to read into it. It is easy to do string manipulation, regardless of your like or dislike of the syntax. Thus, not an opinion.
by hermannj314 | 2025-06-23 13:15:09+00:00
It is very easy to say that people are dying of cancer because of anti-science beliefs during treatment, I do not refute the claim that the outcome would be better if this individual listening to the best medical advice available.

However, I do think the blaming the patient is a distraction. I see more anti-science from industrialists and politicians when their industries receive scientific recommendations for regulation.

There was more anti-science in the decades of poor policy decisions that lead up to a young woman getting non-Hodkings lymphoma than anti-science displayed by her in the moments when she had to choose how to respond to it.
by skydhash | 2025-06-23 13:15:15+00:00
When I see proposals for this kind of workflow, the one question I have is how will you manage your personal context. When I’m reviewing code by coworker, I’m not seeking to fully understand the code or checking that it’s correct. I’m mostly trying to get a high level understanding and checking for glaring mistakes (code styles, best practices,…). I can get through a lot of PR in a day that way.

For more important stuff, like if it falls under my supervision, I will test the branch and carefully check the implementation. And this for each PR updates. That takes a lot longer.

So I’m wondering, how do you context switch between many agent running and proposing diffs. Especially if you need to vet the changes. And how do you manage module dependencies where an update by one task can subtly influence the implementation by another?
by Asooka | 2025-06-23 13:15:31+00:00
There is no such API on Linux, it is accomplished by sudo having the setuid bit set, which instructs the kernel to start it as root regardless of the current user. It's probably one of the worst legacy designs still in use - if any binary has setuid set, it runs as root, no questions asked. Conversely, you also have no way of elevating privileges for a running binary. This really should have been solved decades ago with a robust API for authentication and authorisation of running processes to gain and lose privileges, like what Windows has. Having a filesystem bit grant root privileges to a program is insane. There are probably a dozen CVEs waiting to be discovered with silently corrupting the filesystem and setting that bit on your binary.
by skulk | 2025-06-23 13:15:36+00:00
> In fact such a 2-sphere can be wrapped around the core an arbitrary number of times.

This is really hard for me to visualize. What does it look like for a 2-sphere to wrap around the core multiple times? Also, I would have expected it to be able to wrap around in multiple ways since there are more dimensions here, leading to pi^2(b^3 \ {0}) = Z^2. How would one even prove that this isn't the case?
by lioeters | 2025-06-23 13:15:46+00:00
Fun article and project. I enjoyed reading and playing around with it.

My first run of `make release` failed with this error.

cc -std=c11 -Wall -Wextra -Werror -pedantic -O3 -DNDEBUG -c -o build/main.o src/main.c src/main.c: In function ‘main’: src/main.c:23:3: error: ignoring return value of ‘fread’ declared with attribute ‘warn_unused_result’ [-Werror=unused-result] 23 | fread(file, file_size, 1, fp); | ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ cc1: all warnings being treated as errors

It might have something to do with my local setup. It was simple enough to solve, to check the return value and exit with error code.
by IAmBroom | 2025-06-23 13:15:52+00:00
> While it's generally estimated that Israel has nukes, there's actually no evidence that they do. They've never tested one and you're never going to hold something in your pocket for defense that's untested.

That's one take.

It's really hard to say what the US has allowed as regards Israel. Locals near a particular nuclear facility can recall an Israeli "team of scientists" mysteriously visiting the facility, a year or so before Israel declared themselves a nuclear power. The assumption is that they "snuck" material out, while US officials were "distracted" - by prior agreement.

I believe the US nuclear-armed Israel directly.
by kccqzy | 2025-06-23 13:16:20+00:00
Here is an example: in the early days of Covid around February 2020, the messaging from public health authorities was that it was important to wash hands regularly but wearing masks wasn't important. This went against my non-expert intuition and thought, since news out of Wuhan was already clear that it was like a kind of pneumonia, so it affected the lungs. I discussed this with my mom who shared the same thought. I went on to buy masks when they were still readily available back in early February 2020. Later I learned that the reason public health authorities de-emphasized masks was because they thought they needed to prioritize masks for healthcare workers due to a foreseen supply chain shortage. This of course made sense from a whole population perspective but not from an individual perspective. Do you prefer to be selfless and do what's good for the whole society or do you want to be selfish and do what's optimal for yourself?

Here's another example: the various screenings with age cutoffs. For example colorectal cancer screening is only recommended for people above 45; statins are only recommended for the prevention of cardiovascular disease after age 40 with risk factors. I've had a few primary care physicians who follow these guidance like gospel and refuse to do screening because I haven't met the age cutoff. The reason why these cutoffs exist is mainly a cost/benefit analysis for the entire population, not an analysis tailored for an individual.
by Aldipower | 2025-06-23 13:16:49+00:00
As it is correct, that they are virtually not in power, framing them as pro-russia is some sort of false flag. Just because they are not anti-russia, like every other party, does not automatically mean that they are pro-russia. AfD and BSW together got more then 25% of all votes. So, you are correct, they virtually are not in power, but they have some real power just by being there. This HN post here is the best example for this mechanism.
by Kbelicius | 2025-06-23 13:17:13+00:00
This line of reasoning makes no sense. It's a slippery slope fallacy.

> An obvious thought is that it will come to be used by ICE to incentivize civilians to report on "illegal immigrants", as defined by Donald.

How would this program lead to that? If this didn't exist why wouldn't it be possible for ICE to make something similar for reporting "illegal immigrants"?

> In Nazi Germany, Anne Frank was betrayed, revealed to the Gestapo, sent to a concentration camp and died there, because two Dutch brothers accepted the incentive provided by the Nazi party, the reward for doing so, to hand in Jews.

Again, besides using money as a incentive what is the relevance here? Are you saying that using money as incentive is inherently bad?

> You do not use civilians for law enforcement because when misused it fundamentally and profoundly undermines civil society.

Everything can be misused. Are you saying that we shouldn't do anything about anything? Do you think that laws and rules would stop the likes of Hitler?
by bananapub | 2025-06-23 13:19:00+00:00
> I can't see an easy way to prove someone supplied an incomplete list of online handles though.

1. it doesn't matter - it's immigration, them simply asserting you lied is enough for them to decline your visa, and as of January 2025, enough for them to have masked goons kidnap you on the street and imprison you without charge or trial and/or deport you to some random country

2. the easy way is to just ask American Big Tech to rat you out - Elon obviously would do it for a kind glance, the rest will do it because they either support the actual end of democracy in the US or because they think it'll increase shareholder value
by twodave | 2025-06-23 13:19:09+00:00
This is a little skewed based on my understanding. What actually happened to precipitate this was some European countries intentionally attempting to destabilize the dollar, gold having been pegged to a specific dollar amount. Obviously (to me, at least) such an action, threatening a country’s solvency, can’t just be allowed to go on, especially from the position of strength the US had in 1944 (literally a physical presence in 100% of the developed world’s ports at the time).

And let’s not forget that part of the deal was that the US would guarantee maritime security, which they have fulfilled for nearly 100 years. I would say that’s worth quite a bit more than whatever gold is in dispute, given that it allowed for the rise of globalization in the first place.

What really caused the end of the BW financial system was the inability of a world economy to be backed by gold in the first place. This coincided with the US leaving the gold standard in 1971, and this was only ~5-10 years after the instability began. So the system still enjoyed 15-20 years of operating as intended.
Solo or Co-Founder CTO – Equity Post-MVP/Pre-Revenue
by cascadian99 | 2025-06-23 13:20:29+00:00
Hi folks,

I'm in need of enlightenment.

Decision: - Bring a CTO onboard from YC Cofounder Match who seems hungry and determined - Continue solo, win 5-7 $10k pilots + complete Pharma one and go for seed and find / hire a CTO (e.g. $200k + 5-10% and/or via founding engineers, same salary + 3-5% (since i have more equity to give for the hungry ones))

Current setup: - Solo founder, business + technical. Did both. - 2 years of 6-7 pivots, building enterprise agents and specialized niche tools. - 2-3 iterations of an MVP.

Traction: - 1 paid pilot with largest site of a global Pharma company. Another one in the making (all secured past 3 months) - Won an RFP with global chemicals - 110 locations (in the making, tariffs put it on hold) - Did 14 free teasers ~1 year ago that resulted in insights and data for the models but no follow-on production implementation. - 400+ discovery calls, 30-40 accounts in pipeline

I've been continuously up-skilling on sales / enterprise and making it faster to yes/no and account qualification etc.

My questions: - Is YCCM strong CTO profile reasonable at 15% standard vesting + 5% performance bonus + salary post fundraise, given my current stage? He expects 40%. I want a strong committed / hungry partner / partners, without spooking potential investors or getting scammed. - Should I wait for more progress? I want to move much faster (3x+ current speed, which is driven mostly by sales, but good product can help a lot)