MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EGreg | 2025-06-20 15:46:08+00:00
And keep in mind that The Economist is traditionally neoliberal.

Yet they stay true to economics principles even when they are more lefty and collectively enforced :)

Now imagine what else Pigovian Taxes can do to help solve collective action problems, if we had a UBI and local city currencies: https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-basi...

To quote: Finally, as taxes and fees are introduced in the local economy, the community can start to issue a Universal Basic Income in its own currency, without causing inflation.

Various taxes can be organically introduced, including sales taxes, land taxes 1, and pigovian taxes 3 on things like pollution, fossil fuels, meat or cigarettes. By redistributing taxed money equally to everyone, this can align public incentives with taxing these negative externalities, and avoid them falling disproportionately on the working class, as happened with the yellow vest protests in France.

As demand for the local currency (and thus local real estate and services) grows, so does the town’s ability to tax various transactions. The town’s citizens could be given the ability to democratically vote on the level of taxes, and thus the level of UBI, they want to receive.

Thus the town can have both sound money and true democratic control of its fiscal and monetary policies, all the while becoming more self-sufficient and stronger. Any town will be able to introduce a local UBI to end food insecurity, improve health outcomes, reduce dependence on means-tested welfare programs, and so on.

PS: Why all the downvotes? Why always silent with no reason?
by dmarcos | 2025-06-20 15:46:12+00:00
And contact lenses and lasik are popular because many don’t want to wear glasses. I see head mounted displays useful in constrained scenarios (e.g construction site and tasks where you already wear safety glasses and need free hands). I have a harder time seeing a world where people ditch phones and start voluntarily wearing glasses which is often uncomfortable and inconvenient. Just finished 5 miles run on treadmill, went to sauna and did bouldering. There’s no room for glasses but can occasionally check my phone.
by accrual | 2025-06-20 15:46:44+00:00
Great article. I love ledgers too. While I've only used one for personal accounting, this makes it clear there are a lot of other practical use cases.

Other commentor brings up a good point though - how do we efficiently get the balance of a certain account at a certain date time? Does using a ledger require constantly summing up columns? What happens when we have 1M, 10M, or 100M+ records?

Maybe the ledger would need to be broken into separate "completed" or "sealed" groups once we verify the balance is zero, so like the other commenter mentioned, we could have "checkpoints" where the balance is known to be zero and can calculate from that point forward, instead of from record 0.
by sheepolog | 2025-06-20 15:46:45+00:00
What term would you prefer he use? "Offspring"? "Biological children"? I agree that he is in no way a father in the same sense as others who have actually helped raise children, but I also don't think he's claiming to be, and his phrasing makes sense to me. He is literally their father (in the most uninvolved way possible), and they are literally his children.
by lisper | 2025-06-20 15:47:13+00:00
> why should one have to follow darwinian evolution

That depends on what you mean by "follow". You have to "follow" Darwinian evolution for the same reason you have to "follow", say, the law of gravity. That doesn't mean you can't build airplanes and spacecraft, but you still have to acknowledge and "follow" the law of gravity. You can't just glue feathers to your arms, jump off a cliff, and hope for the best. (Actually, rationalists aren't even gluing feathers to their arms. They are doing the equivalent of jumping off a cliff because they just don't believe gravity applies to them.)

[UPDATE]

> unnatural sex is wrong

The problem with that argument is that homosexuality is not unnatural. Many, many species have homosexual relations. Accounting for this is a little bit challenging, but the fact is undeniable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals
by fragmede | 2025-06-20 15:47:26+00:00
At the extreme end, with absolutely zero zoning restrictions, you could build capsule hotels for people to live in, driving the price for a tiny tiny room to, say $300/month. With a minimum wage of $15, you'd need to only work 20 hours a month to afford that. Double it to account for taxes. Figure they have EBT for food. Assume they're able to use a platform like Reflex to pick up retail shifts (like driving for Uber but for retail).

With zero zoning, there's no telling how bad the capsule to bathroom ratio would be, which would make them unlivable, but as a thought experiment, it says that there is some price point where it's possible, so the real question is to find what's practical. If the choice is between a plastic tent exposed to the elements with no water, sewage or heating/AC, electricity, and an uncomfortably small hotel room with a shared bathroom, I'd rather the hotel room.
by philipkglass | 2025-06-20 15:47:49+00:00
It's related to how long ago the uranium was formed:

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

We can calculate the abundances of U-235 and U-238 at the time the Earth was formed. Knowing further that the production ratio of U-235 to U-238 in a supernova is about 1.65, we can calculate that if all of the uranium now in the solar system were made in a single supernova, this event must have occurred some 6.5 billion years ago.

This 'single stage' is, however, an oversimplification...

The really interesting thing is that phrase "the production ratio of U-235 to U-238 in a supernova is about 1.65"; the now-rare U-235 is actually more abundant than U-238 in the fresh debris of a supernova. Prolonged aging has preserved more U-238 (half life 4.47 billion years) than U-235 (half life 0.704 billion years) to the point that U-238 is now much more terrestrially abundant. If Earth had been formed with uranium that rich in U-235, there would have been Oklo events all over the place. Uranium wouldn't need isotopic enrichment to be used as fuel in light water reactors. Nuclear fission would probably have been discovered early in the 19th century, soon after the element itself was recognized, because any substantial quantity dissolved in aqueous solution would have reached criticality.
by dingnuts | 2025-06-20 15:48:55+00:00
since models can't reason, as you just pointed out, and need examples to do anything, and the LLM companies are abusing everyone's websites with crawlers, why aren't we generating plausible looking but non working code for the crawlers to gobble, in order to poison them?

I mean seriously, fuck everything about how the data is gathered for these things, and everything that your comment implies about them.

The models cannot infer.

The upside of my salty attitude is that hordes of vibe coders are actively doing what I just suggested -- unknowingly.
by LurkandComment | 2025-06-20 15:48:58+00:00
1) Everything beeps now. Phones, cars, machines etc. It gets a bit much and I just turn things off

2) On computers, so many notifications pop up and block elements of an interface. Popup that blocks what i'm reading. Popup that blocks system clock. Everything that piles up in bottom right. There are times where I have to close 2 things to get to the thing I want. I disable as many as I can.

3) Requests from websites about notification. I'm just about to read something and then all of a sudden i'm asked if I want to enable notifications.

4) Constantly asked to change default settings. This is not your default X, would you like to make it default X.

My god. I went back to non-smart watches, physical books, I unsubscribe and turn off notifications.
by Dusseldorf | 2025-06-20 15:49:35+00:00
I was thinking about this last night while walking the dog around our neighborhood. We're frequently hanging out in our front yard during the day in the summer, so it's not unusual to chat for a bit with the mail carrier as they're dropping stuff in the mailbox at our front door. Just one street over, the houses were built about 20 years after ours, and instead of having mailboxes on the houses themselves, they're out at the curb. The mail carrier just drops the mail in right from the mail truck, and keeps driving. It's probably a small thing, but it's yet another little human interaction that has been "optimized" away for the folks living on that street.

Same deal with the self checkouts at the grocery store. I know people love to hate on small talk or chit chat, but I think those little interactions can really help build community cohesiveness and reinforce the idea that the world is made up of humans, rather than uncaring automatons.
by lisper | 2025-06-20 15:49:40+00:00
> it's MWI in disguise

That's kind of like saying that GRW is Copenhagen in disguise. It's not wrong, but only because it's making the word "disguise" do some pretty heavy lifting.

> MWI is quantum realism

No, it isn't because it can't account for the Born rule. See:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-wo...
by ta12653421 | 2025-06-20 15:50:07+00:00
>"Helles" 0.5l+ is the only allowed beer and you have to meet a "Trachten" quota (traditional clothing)

Well, the thing is: 0.5L is considered to be too much today for most, lots of locations are switching to 0.33 longneck bottles (esp. the ones with younger folks, also you can price it cheaper)

Regarding trachten quote: Do you have a link here?
by modeless | 2025-06-20 15:50:08+00:00
The problem with Google's robotics acquisitions was that they fired Andy Rubin less than a year after he made them. They floundered after that.

It's clear that Google's management simply didn't have the patience to continue putting money into hardware development before the software was ready. They forced premature commercialization on BD and then dumped them on SoftBank. Strong top-level executive support could have changed that. I wonder what Google robotics could have been.
by darth_avocado | 2025-06-20 15:51:50+00:00
> A research tool used to monitor news alerts found that the New York Times averaged 10 a day, Tagesschau in Germany averaged 1.9, NDTV in India sent 29.1, while BBC News averaged 8.3 a day.

I’m sorry but in an environment where everyone requires you to install a separate app, is it really acceptable to send 10 notifications a day? Just a single notification a day per app would end up resulting in 40-50 notifications for a user.
by EGreg | 2025-06-20 15:51:54+00:00
Fair enough from a pedantic point of view, but I was using the term in this sense, as it is the most recognizable modern term to describe serious economic positions of this kind:

Neoliberalism is a political and economic philosophy that emphasizes free markets, reduced government intervention, and individual liberty. It's often associated with policies like deregulation, privatization, and free trade. Proponents believe these measures foster economic growth, efficiency, and individual prosperity. However, critics argue that neoliberal policies can lead to increased inequality, social instability, and exploitation

And my point was here they were applauding policies involving clear government intervention.
by madcaptenor | 2025-06-20 15:52:46+00:00
On November 5 my wife had surgery, which meant that I had to hang out in a hospital waiting room. I did not want to have to see a TV, but there was nowhere in that room where that was an option.

I ended up positioning myself near the TV that was showing college football news, because I have no rooting interests in college football and that was much easier to tune out.
by zeta0134 | 2025-06-20 15:53:12+00:00
This came up in the anti-cheat thread, and honestly it's a really good point that counters my initial security reaction. Accessibility features *can* break the security model if, and only if, the user permits them to do so. That's not a broken system, that's a feature working as intended. Powerful features can always be misused, but if this is being done in service of the user, with that user's informed consent, then the features can certainly still exist. Whether something is an "exploit" largely comes down to intent.
by holowoodman | 2025-06-20 15:53:19+00:00
Compositors are incompatible with one another and have totally different levels of functionality. Most compositors don't do any proper kind of security and permissions and just limit data flows in the most primitive and restrictive way possible. Using something with existing security but the possibility of cross-communication like DBUS is just easier here. Although I expect a lot of confused deputy type of exploits there...
by FeepingCreature | 2025-06-20 15:54:37+00:00
> the participants are always going to know whether they've been drilling IQ tests.

I'm not asking you to actually do this, but the participants (and experimenters!) don't necessarily have to know what you're testing. Maybe get one to drill IQ tests, one to drill Latin, one to drill chess and one to drill the piano.

Does your ability extend to IQ tests with other patterns? Also, does it extend to logic puzzles?
by casey2 | 2025-06-20 15:55:07+00:00
I never understood these posts as if the average homeowner has any power at all over zoning laws. You are just scapegoating the people who show up to townhalls and the hypothetical voter that will vote out politicians who lower property values.

In reality it's always the fault of the politician who refuses to make necessary change because it will hurt their personal career. This entire article reeks of christian self flagellation.
by digikata | 2025-06-20 15:55:09+00:00
You can use hurl in this way. I have projects with a test directory of hurl files, one hurl file per test case. The cases can run one or more http requests. The hurl file can reference external files, capture values from responses for subsequent requests, validate status and outputs. Hurl has various test runner modes and will optionally output overall test results in various parsable formats if you have a larger reporting framework that you would like to hook into.
by lysace | 2025-06-20 15:55:24+00:00
It’s great for the very wealthy.

See also: Singapore. When I first visited I was amazed at how little traffic there was. Turns out they had imposed so severe costs on car ownership that the vast majority can’t afford to own one.

Why Driving in Singapore Is Like 'Wearing a Rolex'

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/world/asia/car-certificat...

(https://archive.is/X6dpP)
by matt-attack | 2025-06-20 15:56:34+00:00
I find it really bothers some, when I see it on new car, brake lights and nighttime running lights. As I dart my eyes back-and-forth, I can just plainly see the flicker. It’s such a shame that engineers don’t know how to select the right parts for these used cases. It makes the car look really cheap, and I’ve seen this on very expensive vehicles.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-06-20 15:56:35+00:00
I think the idea is nice, but I am struggling for why I should use it. I write using Django, which has plenty of hooks for testing within the framework. Why switch to a tool which is blind to my backend and is going to create more work to keep in sync? At minimum, I lose the ability to easily drop into my debugger to inspect why a result went wrong.

There is probably something to be said for keeping a hard boundary between the backend and testing code, but this would require more effort to create and maintain. I would still need to run the native test suite, so reaching out to an external tool feels a little weird. Unless it was just to ensure an API was fully generic enough for people to run their own clients against it.
by tome | 2025-06-20 15:56:39+00:00
I have no interest in proving anything to you. It's you who seems to have an interest in proving something to me. Your message suggests you _can_ do so, so please go ahead. I would particularly interested in your answer to my question above: how is what's happening in Gaza materially different from what happened to Germany and Japan during WWII, or to the Vietnamese during the Vietnam war?
by anshumankmr | 2025-06-20 15:57:07+00:00
Would love to contribute. I have made a fork, will try and raise a PR if contributions are welcome.

Question, how are you testing this? Like doing it on dummy data is a bit too easy. These models, even 4o, falter when it comes to something really specific to a domain (like I work with supply chain data and other column names specific to the work that I do, that only makes sense to me and my team, but wouldn't make any sense to an LLM unless it somehow knows what those columns are)
by woodruffw | 2025-06-20 15:57:10+00:00
This post is interesting, but it also commits the cardinal sin of supply chain security publicizing: it doesn't communicate the magnitude of impact, only the magnitude of malicious activity.

This is the same pattern that recurs with breathless reporting on malware in the NPM, PyPI, etc. ecosystems -- the fact that an actor has uploaded hundreds of malicious packages (repos, etc.) means very little if nobody actually downloaded or executed the code from those packages.

That isn't to say that that's what's happened here, but I think this post would be much better if it went beyond 2,400 malicious repositories and gave an indication of how many downstreams were actually affected.
by reaperducer | 2025-06-20 15:57:15+00:00
I was in Texas earlier this year and there was a big hullabaloo over some lone dispatcher in some tiny flyspeck town in some rural county that sent out an alert to every single phone in the state.

Tens of millions of people were woken up to be told to be on the lookout for someone 600 miles away.

My observation is that it's too easy for police to send out an alert. And in Texas it seems that alerts go out for every little thing that involves a cop. They don't even have to be searching for someone who killed a cop. It could just be someone who took off from a traffic stop, and suddenly every phone for 500 miles goes Bleep! Bleep! Bleep!

But when a chemical plant splurts out the largest chlorine leak in a decade, and a cloud of deadly gas sweeps over a few cities, it gets announced in a closed Facebook group.†

†This was in the Houston Chronicle earlier this week.
by FeepingCreature | 2025-06-20 15:57:25+00:00
The ability of humans to get used to progress is amazing to me. We have a computer system that you can describe, in conversational English, the requirements for a program, including style, conventions and programming language, and this system will then synthesize this program from thin air, even if it's a novel idea with novel requirements, it will autonomously test it, make improvements and take your feedback into account. It will do this using a vast (if imperfect) knowledge of programming frameworks, far outstripping in breadth any individual human programmer.

And knowing this, you think that the only reason we could have to expect to create intelligence in a machine, even surpassing a human... is "Asimov-inspired, stimulant-fueled philosophizing"? That seems deeply unserious to me.
by meheleventyone | 2025-06-20 15:57:26+00:00
The cost goes beyond the mere material cost of the house itself but if you have a sizable new development how does it fit within the infrastructure where it would be built. Everything from providing services to having adequate road infrastructure. No doubt there is some wonky things in planning but it's also not a case of YOLO'ing up a bunch of cabins. Not to mention that small single homes aren't a very efficient use of new builds.
by rdtsc | 2025-06-20 15:57:36+00:00
> Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 79% of people surveyed on the subject around the world said they did not currently receive any news alerts during an average week

Having constant news alerts sounds like a sure away to live in perpetual state of anxiety and live in whatever "manufactured consent" bubble that news outlet is pedaling. It's hard to believe people do that to themselves. But, again people engage in self-destructive behaviors, so overall it's not surprising if we think that at level.

> “If they send too many, people uninstall the app, which is obviously a disaster.

Is it a disaster? I'd call that a win for people! Maybe the answer is to trick these news app to drastically increase their notification rate, to nudge people to uninstall them? /s
by anovikov | 2025-06-20 15:57:43+00:00
In a democratic society, it is natural that building new houses becomes incredibly hard once a bit more than 50% of voters are happy with their housing situation. In a way, it may be a sign of democratic backslide when housing is still built in large quantities then: capitalism (developers' profits) trumps democracy (people wishing to keep and increase value of their homes).
by Bender | 2025-06-20 15:57:54+00:00
This is just my opinion but these look even worse that the 1940's+ military issued BC glasses. BC as in birth control. [1] At least it will be easy to spot the glassholes [2] for now at least.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GI_glasses

[2] - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=glassholes
by _fat_santa | 2025-06-20 15:58:47+00:00
One thing I've noticed apps doing is they will now build native looking notification request popups. When you open the app you will see a window that looks just like the iOS notification window asking if you want to show notifications, if you click yes then you get the "official" notifications window.

They do this because if you click no on the "official" window, Apple will not let the app request notifications again, but if you click no on the app's version, they can keep asking you again and again.

IMHO Apple needs to start cracking down on these shady notification UI's
by Tangurena2 | 2025-06-20 15:59:22+00:00
Last year, in my state, the legislature outlawed being homeless by defining it as the crime of "unlawful camping" [0]. It allows for sleeping in your car if and only if the registration and insurance are current AND you move the car every 12 hours. You can also use violence to defend your property against "unlawful campers" and/or squatters and/or people whose lease/rental period has expired.

0 - https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/24rs/hb5.html the 2024 "crime bill".
by lotharcable | 2025-06-20 15:59:31+00:00
DRM is literally the 3D acceleration driver framework for Linux. It has been around for decades and is same set of drivers that are used for any sort of accelerated graphics in X.

If you want to get rid of DRM you have to start over and rewrite all graphical drivers for Linux from scratch.

DMA is part of the basic architecture of modern computers. It is how you can do things like have fast USB devices or network devices because it allows device hardware to by-pass the CPU and write things directly to memory.
by nyrikki | 2025-06-20 15:59:46+00:00
> I use NixOS. And NixOS isn’t a problem — it’s a solution.

> The past ten years saw a big shift in how we are writing software: baseline level of “interactive static analysis"

While I am making no judgement on what is 'better', the author's choices have impacts, and sometimes not all projects can work within the costs imposed by static analysis.

For example, remember that Rice's theorm generalizes HALT, and that you always have to under or overestimate with SA. Either introducing over constraints or missing things.

It is horses for courses, sometimes the added friction is worth it, other times it is damaging.

The question of if Nix is a problem is a context specific question.

Be careful about making default assumptions and patterns more than what they are, no matter how sensible they are as a default.