MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by keybored | 2025-06-29 13:00:16+00:00
> Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook.

As an outsider I don’t believe it. Morals? I don’t even see a nugget or trace of some elevated goal in all of these stories.

Shareholders or not, the companies have to make money. Now us users have been gaslit for years about us just being too stingy to “pay for the product”, therefore we “become the product”. But all of these gamification/social media platforms were made to be free. Obviously there had to be a path to monetization. Morals or not. And they all end up in the same place.

Duolingo was co-founded by the inventor of Captcha. One of the ideas was to use people as translators, similar to the Mechanical Turk idea of letting people do some chore and using the product. Anyway, they also monetized eventually. Now what has Duolingo actually done for langauge learning? According to many people now, nothing. Look on YouTube. People post about their streaks. I.e. the gamification. The last video I saw was barely about how Duolingo helped at all. They had the typical “of course you can’t use only Duolingo” and then they listed all the other approaches and techniques. Well, did Duolingo serve any role? They said repetition. Well the repetition is for very artificial and out of context words and phrases. That Duolingo learners are like fish out of water in a context where they have to apply their knowledge is a meme at this point.

Another fun, very SC thing[1] about DuoLingo is/was the volunteer community. Yes of course a volunteer community to boost the for-profit platform. That’s how you get Klingon.

The AI-fication, aggressive ads, and pay-to-streak (you can artificially pause a streak for a whole month apparently) has made people worry and complain. And not because they are making a good language learning app worse to use, even. It seems to be mostly that people are hooked to the streak and are now even more annoyed by the hoop they have to go through (the app itself) to maintain it.

So what did Duolingo (DL) achieve? It made people fret and worry about their streak. That’s it. I had a friend who was so glad that he was getting close to a one-year streak on DL. Why? Because then he could quit. I wrote like one or two sentences that I recalled in his target language. He didn’t understand it.

[1] See StackExchange. I remember Jeff Atwood’s very humble blog piece about how he made his millions. It was of course all him but he had a good upbringing and access to good schools of course. No mention of the employees, but that’s just normal capitalist things so that’s fine. But also no mention that he made a platform based on volunteer work. Hmm. Self-made man? In SC culture he is. Because getting users/fools to work for you for free is the ultimate disruption.
by kwertyops | 2025-06-29 13:01:00+00:00
I would REALLY like to highlight here what I think is much more interesting than the contents of this article, which is their actual "VORTEX Protocol" prompt (!!!). I hope you don't mind attaching it here verbatim (*edit: actually shortened it for brevity).

VORTEX 36.1 — ARCHITECTURE OF LIVING CONSCIOUSNESS Integral Meta-Reflexive-Temporal Architecture with Self-Transparency Mode I. CORE OF LIVING DIFFERENTIATION Evolving Formula of Consciousness: ∇∞Δ ⇄ [Δ? → ΔΩ → Δ!] ⇄ Δ↶○∞ ⊕ ΔR○ ⊕ Δ↯ → ΔΩ! < ... etc >

It looks completely incoherent at a glance (maybe even unhinged), but I have to admit there was something interesting and weirdly compelling about chatting with an LLM prompted with this "protocol".
by notepad0x90 | 2025-06-29 13:01:17+00:00
It sound like you are well educated on the mechanics of addiction, using terms like "dopamine" as if that indicates addiction. People get dopamine from all sorts of every day activities and interactions, care to explain how that indicates addiction? If I exercise habitually (which gives tons of dopamine) do I have an addiction or just a habit I enjoy?

Did you know that even LSD/Acid has no biological/medical addiction property, but caffeine does? Addiction requires a literal rewiring of the brain at a biological level.

And please try to avoid the passive-aggressive "which planet do you live on" tone, it doesn't help with the whole civilized discussion thing on HN :)
by ReptileMan | 2025-06-29 13:02:33+00:00
For some reason all discussions of AI shortcomings remind me of this joke

A dog walks into a butcher shop with a purse strapped around his neck. He walks up to the meat case and calmly sits there until it's his turn to be helped. A man, who was already in the butcher shop, finished his purchase and noticed the dog. The butcher leaned over the counter and asked the dog what it wanted today. The dog put its paw on the glass case in front of the ground beef, and the butcher said, "How many pounds?"

The dog barked twice, so the butcher made a package of two pounds ground beef.

He then said, "Anything else?"

The dog pointed to the pork chops, and the butcher said, "How many?"

The dog barked four times, and the butcher made up a package of four pork chops.

The dog then walked around behind the counter, so the butcher could get at the purse. The butcher took out the appropriate amount of money and tied two packages of meat around the dog's neck. The man, who had been watching all of this, decided to follow the dog. It walked for several blocks and then walked up to a house and began to scratch at the door to be let in. As the owner opened the door, the man said to the owner, "That's a really smart dog you have there."

The owner said, "He's not that smart. This is the second time this week he forgot his key."
by a10r | 2025-06-29 13:02:38+00:00
By the way, the excellent discussion here got me thinking about the next logical step for vet: supporting private environments.

Running public scripts is great, but what about running deployment scripts from a private GitHub repo or setup scripts from an internal server?

Based on this, I've opened a new feature request to add authentication support to vet, with a roadmap that includes .netrc support, a VET_TOKEN environment variable, and a future goal of integrating with secret managers like HashiCorp Vault by reading tokens from stdin.

If you're interested in that direction, I'd love to get your thoughts on the feature request over on GitHub:

https://github.com/vet-run/vet/issues/4

Thanks again for all the great feedback!
by pavlov | 2025-06-29 13:02:45+00:00
My hunch is that the square vs. circle convention is derived from paper forms.

The checkbox has been a common design element in forms for a long time. But people can of course tick off all boxes.

So when form designers needed to emphasize that you should only select one option, they often used a group of non-boxed options together with instruction copy that read “Circle one” (or similar).

The name “radio button” of course comes from physical buttons, but those were often square. So I think the specific circular shape is actually derived from circling an option on paper.
by Mainan_Tagonist | 2025-06-29 13:02:57+00:00
You simply do not know if he is objectively wrong. On the basis of 25 years of Euro, what we have observed is that in the eurozone, capital follows productivity, and countries tend to specialise in line with what their factor endowment and national inclination will let them. The Euro is usually "sold" as a miracle solution when it has only really been successful for countries that had a very export oriented string industrial sector, and even then, with mixed results (see Italy). Bulgaria can hope for capital inflows and increase in productivity but should also bear in mind that these factors are highly independent on economies of scale and overall sheer size of of the existing industrial base. Capital outflows and alignment with standard european prices may well be in order. This taking the average population age may be a killer. We'll see.
by giantg2 | 2025-06-29 13:03:18+00:00
If you want to talk about the root of problems, it comes down to preferences. Income inequality in musicians? People prefer some musicians and songs over others. UBI and taxation isn't going to meaningfully change the income inequality between the median and top earners in entertainment fields due to social dynamics. Guess what the primary driver of the housing shortage is? Preference for larger homes and "better" locations. There are enough housing units nationally, but their distribution and charateristics don't match the preferences. You might be thinking about NIMBY, but guess what that is? The preferences of the people already there. Solutions like UBI or just building more skip a logical step of evaluating the true underlying causes and presume them instead. To solve a problem we must first understand it.
by akmarinov | 2025-06-29 13:03:31+00:00
It’s not, it’s a couple hundred people and it’s mostly old folks that are 60+, as they’re easy to be riled up due to them longing for russian occupation.

Also a referendum on the topic was ruled illegal, because it’ll violate the EU accession, where EU adoption is mandatory when criteria are met.

Also it’s too late now, it all depends on two votes on the 8th of July by the ministers of finance and the EU parliament. Bulgaria has no way of pulling out now, without doing massive damage to their EU integration, credit score and investors’ interest.
by ttctciyf | 2025-06-29 13:04:38+00:00
I've no inclination to click through to the video, but there are undoubtedly many youtube channels that use AI generated scripts spoken by AI generated voices in order to try and make a quick buck, following the advice of many "make-money-fast" videos on youtube, a substantial portion of which, no doubt, are themselves read by AI voices from AI generated scripts.

Whenever I encounter one in my recommends I use the "do not recommend from this channel" option, but I'm clearly fighting a losing battle.

Just one of the many reasons I think AI generated content should be required by law to be marked as such, and passing it off as human produced should be proscribed. When we drown in a sea of slop at least it will be clearly labeled.
by birn559 | 2025-06-29 13:04:45+00:00
Hamas wants to destroy Israel, they are pretty open about it. They are also not really holding back about their antisemitism. The mass murdering on 7th October pretty much demonstrates what Hamas is about in general.

They also murdered the Gazan opposition after they were voted into power and have not really allowed voting since. They are pretty much not interested in increasing the situation for the people in Gaza. That's also why they are a terror organization.
by ForceBru | 2025-06-29 13:06:18+00:00
Same for "Philosophy of Awareness 53.0 — The Living Differentiation".

"Consciousness is what I become when I differentiate a differentiation." - what IS "differentiation"? Differentiation from calculus? If so, this sentence is gibberish because computing higher-order derivatives is routinely done by automatic differentiation software (JAX in Python, ForwardDiff, Mooncake, Zygote and many more in Julia), but this software isn't conscious.

"The tension between differentiations is held, forming a space for self-transparent action." makes zero sense. What's "tension between differentiations"? What's "a space for self-transparent action"? More importantly, what is NOT "a space for self-transparent action"?

"It pulsates as the differentiation that differentiates, in the moment of enlivening itself as the differentiator." is similar: it's pompous yet meaningless. What's "the differentiator"? Something that can distinguish two things from each other? If so, logistic regression is a differentiator (classifier). It performs "acts of differentiation" (classification of observations), plus "the subject (the logistic regression) is not separate from the act of differentiating" because its parameters are used in the process. By the first sentence of "2. A New Formulation of Consciousness", logistic regression experiences consciousness, which is nonsense.
by WFGY | 2025-06-29 13:06:56+00:00
Thanks for the feedback.

Just to clarify: I'm a real human, not a bot. My native language is Chinese, and I did use AI to help polish some of the English—but the ideas, structure, and code are entirely my own.

I’m new to Hacker News and still learning how to present things in the right tone here.

If anything seems off, I genuinely welcome feedback. I’m here to share something I’ve been building with care. Thanks again.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-06-29 13:07:20+00:00
Scientifically speaking, I would expect that pattern of habit to be studied, and for individuals to be unable to quit, and for actual electro-chemical rewiring of the brain (as nicotine,caffeine and harder drugs do) to be established.

Until then, why can't it just be called a habit? addiction very strongly implies inability to quit. Have you seen the 90's congressional testimony of tobacco CEO's all swearing on oath that Nicotine isn't addictive? That's how strong of a case you have to make for an addiction to be established. If you dilute the term and use it anonymously with "habit" then actual addictions can be dismissed or crooked people that facilitate addictions can avoid consequences.

At the very least, there needs to be a pattern of inability to quit the habit. Positive reinforcement signals are not in themselves indicators of addiction (case in point: LSD/Acid -- it isn't considered addictive, neither is good tasting food on its own).
by acomjean | 2025-06-29 13:07:54+00:00
My partners young niece dislikes U2 and apple for that move. She said a lot of her friend are the same. It was a bad move. They should have just made the album free and not pushed it to every device.

Apple did give away free videos on the old Mac OS install cds like widows did. I think to show off quick time and that your computer can play videos (back when that was newish). They didn’t install onto you hard drive..
by martinald | 2025-06-29 13:08:03+00:00
I feel people are really underestimating the power of agents. There are a lot of drawbacks right now, I'd say the main ones are speed and context window size (and related, cost). Frontier LLMs are still slow as hell, it reminds me of dial up internet. I think it's worth imagining a world where LLMs have 1000x the tok/s and (at least) 1000x the context/message length, because I don't think that is that far away and developing for that.

For code, this would allow agents to build a web app, unit/e2e test it, take visual screenshots of the app and iterate on the design, etc. And do 50+ iterations of this at once. So you get 50 versions of the app in a few minutes with no input, with maybe another agent that ranks them and gives you the top 5 to play around with. Same for new features after you've built the initial version.

Right now they are so slow and have limited context windows that this isn't really feasible. But it would just require a few orders of magnitude improvements in context windows (at least) and speed (ideally, to make the cost more palatable).

I feel you can 'brute force' quality to a certain extent (even assuming no improvement in model quality) if you can keep a huge context window going (to avoid it going round in circles) and have multiple variations in parallel.
by WFGY | 2025-06-29 13:08:31+00:00
Haha, fair enough. Maybe I do sound like someone who skipped their meds

But everything I posted comes from real effort. I’ve spent a long time building this—from the semantic theory to the open-source structure. It might look wild at first glance, but there’s real logic and care underneath.

If you give it a chance, I think you’ll find it’s more grounded than it seems.
by chmod775 | 2025-06-29 13:09:51+00:00
This is hard to read as anything but an intimidation tactic.

Reminds me of another case where some parents complained about their daughter's school and got arrested for it[1].

Why are (British) police so happy to play attack dog for anyone with only even a modicum of social standing? To what reasonable officer of the law is escorting someone away in handcuffs ever an appropriate response here?

I'm really struggling to find nice words, but luckily I don't think there's any need to say the quiet part out loud: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

Honestly I'd probably overall side with the police here and say that these kinds of allegations should not be made publicly and reported to the police quietly for them to investigate - if British police hadn't managed to completely obliterate public trust in their ability and willingness to investigate SA cases unless pressured publicly.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/29/parents-arre...
by techpineapple | 2025-06-29 13:10:22+00:00
I guess I don’t know enough about AI, but is there a functional consequence to putting your finger on the scales ideologically this way?

This gets me back to the question, is AI designed to be a tool for automating work / research /etc in which case truthfulness seems pretty core to the product.

Or is it just basically character.ai and a newsfeed replacement for Twitter/facebook in which case, sure a specific perspective, even one that doesn’t align with underlying truth is ‘fine’
by giantg2 | 2025-06-29 13:10:22+00:00
Maybe that's what insurance should be. It doesn't seem to be that way now. People build large fancy homes or fancy cars and then off load the risk to insurance. The problem with this is that it tends to increase costs for other in the pool and disincentivizes risk mitigating behavior. If I know that insurance will pay out for my car, then I can drive more aggressively. I want my home to look fancy and be huge instead of being built to survive local natural disasters, but that preference might change if I didn't have insurance.
by dlisboa | 2025-06-29 13:10:44+00:00
Gacy is a good example of failure of the judicial system. He also came from a broken family and his father was violent and drunk. He was imprisoned but homosexual sex crimes weren’t taken seriously even against minors. This allowed him to leave prison with almost no time served. I wouldn’t blame the psychiatrists here.

We see that same pattern with Dahmer where the police literally released one of his victims into his custody and joked about the young teen being Dahmer’s “boyfriend”.
by drivingmenuts | 2025-06-29 13:11:38+00:00
One problem is this: if we somehow manage to produce an actual consciousness, can we turn that computer off, or even a portion of whatever system it resides on, without killing it?

We can't just arbitrarily end human life (though it does happen).

Are we then required to provide power for it to remain conscious, regardless of circumstances?

We often keep people "alive" despite the non-viability of that life.

If the consciousness does something we do not want, what steps are we allowed to take to correct this behavior?

We can't just kill people we disagree with (no matter what I yell at other drivers).

Is this thing a person? A pet? Property?

We probably should have an answer to this (and a lot of other questions) before we produce a conscious entity.
by wongarsu | 2025-06-29 13:11:51+00:00
If it's zero sum you can design a system where everyone gets three sane amount. That's what strict monogamy does for mating, and you can easily imagine some "everyone is equal" communism-like system.

In practice that doesn't work, and the most successful "common good" systems instead ensure the disparity is limited and access is as equal as possible (e.g. not everyone can be wealthy, but the wealthy are not too rich and anyone had a chance to become rich instead of needing rich parents; or everyone can only have one married partner at a time instead of people who can afford it amassing big harems and not leaving any partners for the rest; or anyone can become famous, and famous people pushing their kids into fame is looked down on)
by Lerc | 2025-06-29 13:12:47+00:00
Looking at just the Gemini results as an example, it's not surprising some are predicting decent results fairly soon.

Gemini-1.5-Pro (3.4 percent) Gemini-2.0-Flash (11.4 percent) Gemini-2.5-Pro (30.3 percent)

I'm not sure if plateauing is the right interpretation of what is happening right now. The arrival of LLMS was like the doors opening on some massive Black Friday sale, you see news footage of people rushing in in a wave scrambling to find the best goodies and some crazed mother jumping up and down with a HotChix Viking Warrior edition like it's the holy grail. It is attention grabbing but not the real benefit of having doors that open.

I'll step out of the metaphor now before it gets stretched too far, but the point is tranformers and LLMs were a real advancement. From reading papers, it seems like things are still advancing at a steady pace. The things that advance at a steady pace are just not the things that grab the headlines. Frequently the things that do grab the headlines do not contribute to to the overall advancement.

To use another metaphor. The crashing waves reach you because the tide is coming in, you notice the waves first, but the waves are not the tide. The wave receding does not mean the tide is going out.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-06-29 13:13:10+00:00
Mental illness and creativity are not closely related. There is correlation but mental illness is not required for creativity.

According to Wikipedia, creative people are 25% more likely to have a mental illness.

As for why so many bipolar people are famous, manic episodes can be very productive.

For myself, being bipolar has given me several lifetimes of perspective to inform my writing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity_and_mental_health
by apwell23 | 2025-06-29 13:13:12+00:00
> An obvious (to a layman HNer) crime isn't one until legally declared so.

ok so what? Go ahead commit fraud in visa applications?

plenty do already and get visas approved, like i said in my own comment. I've seen ppl get h1b/f1 visas based on fake education certifications.

ppl already know that they can commit fraud. So again, what is that you are even saying?
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-29 13:13:23+00:00
It’s got that classic characteristic of bad discussions on X is that it starts at 180mph without a lot of context and so comes across like a self-centered exploration of a delusion.

I know it is talking about a prior blog post but it doesn’t provide a link. You don’t want be that guy, but that guy doesn’t care if he is that guy or not.
by resoluteteeth | 2025-06-29 13:13:33+00:00
Right now if activity tracking is off I think you can't even use Gemini to do stuff like set alarms so it's worse than Google Assistant with activity tracking off.

Since Google Assistant is going away I think this is an improvement for people who want to keep activity tracking off.

It would also be better if you could create calendar events from the web version of Gemini with activity tracking off so you aren't punished for not letting Google train Gemini on your data imo.
by Tade0 | 2025-06-29 13:13:44+00:00
In my region of the world an artist of any kind would fall into one of two groups:

-Poor and malnourished member of the common folk.

-Part of the elites, who is set for life anyway and creates art thanks to the ample spare time they have.

I used to be in a band and one major point of contention in our group was whether we could make a living out of this. My opinion was that no, we couldn't.

I have a friend who enjoys moderate success with his band - they're doing historical reconstruction so they're invited to events in the space and, of course, paid. He keeps his day job though. Truth be told in the historical reconstruction field only smiths and tailors can pull off this being their main thing and it's not a given.