MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antasvara | 2025-06-22 19:19:17+00:00
>Lots of literary fiction is perfectly readable for normal humans. Lots of what isn’t accessible is just not that enjoyable to anybody.

The PIAAC surveys, while imperfect, indirectly address what percentage of adults can read and appreciate "literary fiction."

The first part of the definition of level 3:

>Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing.

The first part for Level 4:

>At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents and sources across multiple processing cycles. Adults at this level can infer what the task is asking based on complex or implicit statements. Successful task completion often requires the production of knowledge-based inferences.

The full definitions can be found here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp

Based on the full definitions, understanding the use of metaphor in a longer text probably sits in Level 4. A simple metaphor might sit in Level 3.

Based on the recent survey results, only half of US adults read at Level 3 or above. Around 15% read at Level 4 or above.

I invite you to look at this PowerPoint of sample questions for each level: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjJ...

Based on that, what level of literacy do you think indicates someone capable of reading and enjoying literary fiction? I think the hypothetical cutoff is somewhere between Level 3 and 4.

Based on all of this, let's use Sally Rooney's book "Normal People" as an example. If we're being super charitable, at most 50% of people would be able to read and comprehend that book. If we're being less charitable with our definition of "comprehension," I think we're probably looking at closer to 30% of people really understanding it.
by jopsen | 2025-06-22 19:19:57+00:00
Ukraine just demonstrated how to mess with long range aviation parked in the open.

I'm not saying it's easy, but there are many soft targets in America.

But yeah, who knows. The wise choice here is to go home and not play. The US and Israel are not about to invade with ground forces.

And if they were it'd be without support from European countries.
by IshKebab | 2025-06-22 19:20:27+00:00
Yeah I think that's a pretty big issue. Not going to be fun using git notes for code review if they get lost every time you squash or recreate commits.

One thing that would be really useful though - if you could somehow use git notes to tell Git not to download some blobs by default that would be great. It would solve the "someone added 100 MB of binary files to this project 5 years ago and then deleted them" problem.

That would be too useful though so I wont hold by breath.
by viralsink | 2025-06-22 19:20:27+00:00
If I understood correctly, this is about finding solutions to problems that have an infinite solution space, where new information does not constrain it.

Humans don't have the processing power to traverse such vast spaces. We use heuristics, in the same way a chess player does not iterate over all possible moves.

It's a valid point to make, however I'd say this just points to any AGI-like system having the same epistemological issues as humans, and there's no way around it because of the nature of information.

Stephen Wolfram's computational irreducibility is another one of the issues any self-guided, phyiscally grounded computing engine must have. There are problems that need to be calculated whole. Thinking long and hard about possible end-states won't help. So one would rather have 10000 AGIs doing somewhat similar random search in the hopes that one finds something useful.

I guess this is what we do in global-scale scientific research.
by perihelions | 2025-06-22 19:21:00+00:00
> "You walk against red light and your face gets plastered around billboards as named criminal."

I'm unsure if you were obliquely referring to this, or if you were intending to suggest a fictional idea. But what you described is already a thing that's happening in mainland China,

> "In the southern city of Shenzhen, Chinese authorities have launched a new surveillance system loaded with facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and a big database to crack down on jaywalking as well as other crimes."

> "As a result, photographs of pedestrians caught in the act, along with their names and social identification numbers, are now instantly displayed on LED screens installed at Shenzhen road junctions."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/china-deploys-ai-came... ("Chinese authorities use facial recognition, public shaming to crack down on jaywalking, criminals")
by ryan-duve | 2025-06-22 19:21:27+00:00
I only spent a minute on the trainer, but my recommendation is to change the user experience from "type M 5 times in a row" to something like "get to the target with a single keystroke". Without any expertise is making a Vim training program, I feel like showing someone a goal and having them think of what keystrokes gets them there will be more effective than telling them the keystroke and having them type it 5 times consecutively.
by lnsru | 2025-06-22 19:22:06+00:00
I am the 12887 too. Luckily applied at the place in emergency mode and was perfect fit. Negotiated +6%. Yeah! In the second year it was reduced by 3% coupling my bonus to unachievable goals. As someone wrote on HN: it is not their first rodeo. HR knows how to attract and get to the right salary level afterwards. What can I do? Swallowing is the only way. There are no job ads in my area.
by mort96 | 2025-06-22 19:22:07+00:00
Of course we can't simulate the universe (or, well, a slice of a universe which obeys the same laws as ours) right now, but we're discussing whether it's possible in principle or not.

I don't understand what fundamental difference you see between a thing governed by a set of mathematical laws and an implementation of a simulation which follows the same mathematical laws. Why would intelligence be possible in the former but fundamentally impossible in the latter, aside from precision limitations?

FWIW, nothing I've said assumes that the universe is a simulation, and I don't personally believe it is.
by reillyse | 2025-06-22 19:22:32+00:00
I've worked at startups that have had exits and the employees got zilch. I think even in the startups with exits the probability of an employee having their equity turn into cash money is very low (also I doubt 50% of startups have exits - I hear a number of 10% more often and even that seems high, I'd imagine 10% of YC startups have an exit and they are the most likely to succeed so I imagine when you add in all the other startups that percentage gets far far lower).
by em-bee | 2025-06-22 19:23:47+00:00
Gmail doesn’t require TLS

according to this article it does:

https://www.valimail.com/blog/the-new-requirements-for-email...

and for one i think this is a good thing.

otoh, according to this it doesn't:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6330403

but https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview shows that by now almost all emails sent and received by google go through TLS which i believe can be used as a proxy to assume that most servers out there now support TLS.

signal fixed their phone number problem, so that is no longer an issue.

matrix is not reliable enough. the encryption can break in the sense that messages can no longer be read. i am basically required to have a second unencrypted backchannel (or use a different app, but then why even bother) to make sure i can reach someone. (the issue i experienced could be due to a misconfiguration of a matrix server, but that's a bug in itself. it should not be possible to change the configuration of a server in such a way that my messages arrive but can not be decrypted anymore.)
by mylons | 2025-06-22 19:24:25+00:00
is the destruction of gaza awful? yes. is it a genoicde? no. flippantly tossing words around devalues them and debases the conversation. https://worldpopulationreview.com/cities/palestine/gaza

the 20 years leading up to trump, calling every republican a nazi, has completely destroyed the meaning of the word. trump is actually doing a lot of fascist leaning stuff this time around, and you could possibly use that word appropriately but it is currently meaningless.
by sanderjd | 2025-06-22 19:24:36+00:00
The problem with this is that there is now absolutely no reason for anyone to think that any treaty or other agreement made with any US administration (of either party) will remain in force after the next administration takes power.

Rebuilding any credibility internationally will require concerted effort by the legislative and judicial branches (and maybe states ratifying amendments) to rein in the currently out of control power of the executive.
by rawgabbit | 2025-06-22 19:25:05+00:00
#5. The US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia will look for a proxy to fight Iran. China to determine if it should back Iran or not.

Timeline of previous events 2006 – Hezbollah–Israel War: Iran arms Hezbollah during the 34-day conflict with Israel. 2010 – Stuxnet cyberattack: U.S. and Israel deploy malware against Iran’s Natanz uranium centrifuges. 2020 – Assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani by Trump who orders drone strike that kills the IRGC Quds commander 2021 – Houthi–Saudi Escalation: Iran-backed Houthis use drones and missiles against Saudi Arabia. 2022 – Iran supplies thousands of Shahed-136 kamikaze drones to support Russia’s war in Ukraine and transfer technology to Russia 2023 – Iran-backed Hamas conducts large-scale attack against Israel who responds with major military operations in Gaza. 2025 – Israel and the US bomb Iran’s nuclear sites
by swat535 | 2025-06-22 19:26:30+00:00
As an Iranian, I want it clear: the Islamic Republic has destroyed Iran. For 46 years, they held our country hostage, suppressing us, dictating what we can wear, say, or believe, while chanting death to the West and chasing nuclear power. They’ve brutalized peaceful protesters, raped, imprisoned, and killed our people. Now, their so-called enemies have walked right in, understandably. A regime that has no mercy for us citizens can't be trusted with nuclear power. This is why we’re here: a paper lion with no real strength beyond the people it oppresses.

More to it, I've had personal experience with this brutal regime, they arrested my old cousin during the Mahsa Protests(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahsa_Amini_protests), she was taken to the Evin prison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evin_Prison) and was tortured for 6 months. We had no news from her. When she was finally released, she was so skinny that you could see her rib bones. We managed to bring her to Canada and it took her over a year of medical care until she began to recover. She was only 20.

No one hates this regime more than Iranians.

With all that out of the way, Iranians have no choice now but the defend their homes against hostile forces. They will not simply sit back and watch Israel and United States bomb their land to oblivion and then demand unconditional surrender.

This attack will inflict more pain on Iranians and only serves to grow the regime stronger.

We wanted a regime change, but not at the hands of Israel and US.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-22 19:27:13+00:00
What I’d like to see is hard separation of roads and bike lanes. As a cyclist, nothing but a line painted on the road makes me feel unsafe, as a driver it’s difficult to not get nervous when passing a cyclist in the lane, and culturally drivers are generally favored over cyclists which results in things like parking in bike lanes not being adequately enforced. All these things would be solved by bike lanes being fully independent from the road.
by collinsmuriuki | 2025-06-22 19:27:23+00:00
This is fantastic! Love the automation and structure behind it, especially the .parquet approach and GitHub Actions pipeline. Super inspiring.

On my end, it’s a bit frustrating that our Parliament still only shares pdf reports weeks after sessions happen, likely compiled manually. No API, no transcript archive, and no structured metadata around bills, speakers, or topics.

That’s partly why I started building Bunge Bits: to sidestep the bottlenecks and make the information usable.

Appreciate you sharing zijwerkenvooru.be, bookmarking it for inspiration as I figure out what’s next.
by sanderjd | 2025-06-22 19:28:27+00:00
You don't have to speculate like this. We can just look at how North Korea is treated, now that they do have nuclear capability. From the Iranian (or Ukrainian) perspective, the conclusion can only be "better than us".

In your hypothetical, we're sending B2s to drop bombs on their production sites. In the reality, we would not do that, for the same reasons that we are not sending B2s to drop bombs on North Korea's production sites.
Show HN: Extract Tables from Any Website – Images to JSON via OCR
by valliappanr | 2025-06-22 19:28:34+00:00
built a two-step open-source tool that extracts tables from any website, even the hard ones that rely on dynamic rendering or CSS.

Step 1: Capture tables as images using a headless browser Step 2: Run OCR to convert them into structured JSON

This works well when traditional HTML parsers fail, like for complex styles, merged cells, or JS-rendered content.

GitHub: https://github.com/enterpriseqa/extract_tables_from_websites Examples included. Feedback and contributions are welcome!
by 827a | 2025-06-22 19:28:49+00:00
Yeah; I also tend to feel that nukes are vastly overstated in their sovereign defensive capability. Definitely non-zero, they help, but at the end of the day having strong normative political and especially economic ties is vastly more powerful.

Ukraine didn't have nukes. Would they have been invaded if they had nukes? Unclear. Maybe. Maybe not.

Taiwan doesn't have nukes. China wants to control Taiwan so, so bad. But, they're staying at a distance for now. Why? Taiwan is an extremely valuable economic ally of the rest of the world. No one wants to disrupt the status quo. We're too interconnected.

Iraq was reported to have nukes back in the 00s, and this was a reason why the US invaded them. We now know, they never had nukes. Maybe there were leaders in the US who knew this at the time, and just outright lied. But, if not: nukes did not protect them from being rubbleized by the US military industrial complex.

Poland doesn't have nukes. Russia isn't going to touch them, despite bordering deep Russian ally Belarus. What makes them so different from Ukraine? NATO. Political alliances. Ukraine didn't make political alliances. No one gave any thought to Ukraine before and even after Crimea; they were always just a weirdly dysfunctional and corrupt ex-Soviet country that no one cared about. Poland is different; they played ball with the west.

North Korea does have nukes, but they don't really have any significant or interesting way of using them. They could hit SK and Japan, but that's about it. We leave them alone. Why? Well, maybe nukes. But moreso: they're chill. They don't have external ambition. They can barely take care of themselves. They aren't calling for the rubblezation of their enemies anymore. Its not the nukes that keep them safe; its the reality that they're kinda playing ball with the rest of the world, in their own way.

Nukes probably help, but the far more likely guarantor of sovereignty is to be valuable to the rest of the world. Have a democratic government. Communicate. Trade. Address corruption. The main thing that Ukraine, Iran, North Korea, 1950s Vietnam, Syria, Libya, etc all have in common is that they're all backward, isolationist countries that never wanted to join up on the global stage, for either side. NK is the only one that's really managed to stay that way mostly unscathed.
by paulgb | 2025-06-22 19:28:53+00:00
I see where you’re coming from, but the alternatives are either that the law isn’t enforced, or the state ramps up its own surveillance, which is more dystopian to me.

I see this as in the same vein as SEC whistleblower awards, which I’ve never heard described as dystopian. Businesses just don’t have the same expectation of privacy that individuals do.
by sterlind | 2025-06-22 19:29:05+00:00
the IR-6 centrifuges are each the size of scuba tanks, and they double as little storage tanks. you can stuff several centrifuges full of 60% heu in a shed. Iran will have squirreled some away in dozens of sites. to resume enrichment they can connect a much smaller cascade than they needed back when they were at 3.62%.

plus they can actually make bombs even with 60% heu, they just have to be fatter and use more energetic explosives.

the time to have bombed Iran's nuclear program would have been months ago. or to have, you know, kept the original nuclear deal.
by ICBTheory | 2025-06-22 19:29:59+00:00
Thanks — and yes, Penrose’s argument is well known.

But this isn’t that, as I’m not making a claim about consciousness or invoking quantum physics or microtubules (which, I agree, are highly speculative).

The core of my argument is based on computability and information theory — not biology. Specifically: that algorithmic systems hit hard formal limits in decision contexts with irreducible complexity or semantic divergence, and those limits are provable using existing mathematical tools (Shannon, Rice, etc.).

So in some way, this is the non-microtubule version of AI critique. I don’t have the physics background to engage in Nobel-level quantum speculation — and, luckily, it’s not needed here.
by whiplash451 | 2025-06-22 19:29:59+00:00
The main thing that changed since when this article was written is that companies are much less in a rush than they used to to hire people, which means that a lot of mechanics described in the article fall apart.

In particular, companies don't really look at how much they spend to hire someone. They'll just wait for the hiring committee to be "really excited" about a candidate before making an offer.
by reillyse | 2025-06-22 19:30:02+00:00
as an aside, I got to reading some lottery winning tips (https://www.smartluck.com/free-lottery-tips/california-fanta...). A real interesting hodge podge of statistical fallacies and other wishful thinkings but at the same time it does pull at our brains somehow. Like for example even though I know a run of numbers in a row are just as likely to happen as any other number I'm really unlikely to actually pick it as my guess - I suppose my brain just thinks I need some "balance" or the likelihood of this pattern happening is low. Randomness is hard.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-22 19:30:07+00:00
Presumably a government operated email, video, or conferencing platform would also exist for the purpose of providing communication to every citizen, no? Again I ask what point you are trying to make here?

> if you watch the tracking you'll see that they just hand off to USPS in Anchorage.

Because it's cheaper to do so. They can't offer a competitive rate because USPS is eating the cost in that case. To be clear I don't think that's a bad thing it just needs to be pointed out that if USPS didn't exist Fedex (or whoever) would deliver but would charge a much higher price to the person shipping the package.

You are the one who brought up natural monopolies and I'm not sure why. Private couriers exist yet the government still finds it worthwhile to run a public one. I asked why the same should not be true of digital communication platforms for email and video. Recall that the context of my original reply was a government operated youtube.
Show HN: Context file manager with MCP integration
by ananddtyagi | 2025-06-22 19:31:20+00:00
The context file manager package now comes with an MCP! This tool was made to make it easy to transfer your documentation files, large context files, instructions for claude, github workflows, etc amongst your projects. Lots of context files get reused amongst different projects, so this tool was designed to make it easy to store and share those between different projects.

The new MCP allows you to hook it directly into Claude Code, Claude Desktop, and Cursor, making it simple to save, fetch, and update those documents. Give it a try and let me know what you think!
by elbear | 2025-06-22 19:31:49+00:00
> Why would you pay a high salary for a SWE when your business teams can just generate whatever app they need without having to know anything about how it actually works?

It depends on how good the AI is. The advantage of an SWE is that they have a systems thinking mindset, so they can solve some problems more efficiently. With some apps in won't matter, but with others will.

One potential positive outcome is that we will be able to solve more and bigger problems, since our capacity for solving problems has been augmented with AI.
by MrSkelter | 2025-06-22 19:31:49+00:00
FYI every credible expert agrees that Iran aren’t making bombs yet. They are enriching to 60%. Far from what’s needed for a weapon. They have been capable of making bombs for decades and have chosen not to. They even adhered to the JCPOA when Trump tire it up.

It’s odd to have a country that illegally proliferated treating a neighbor who isn’t doing that yet as the greatest threat to world piece. Backed by the only country that’s used nuclear weapons in anger.

It’s very possible that in a decade the Us will be at war in Iran. Trump and Netanyahu will be off the world stage. The cost to the US will be thousands of lives and several trillion and China will have taken Taiwan while we aren’t capable of stopping them.

These wars always seem to start well because destroying things is the easy but.

We don’t know if we’ve done much damage to the buried facilities. Bunker busters don’t dive very deep, they can be deflected via engineering, and concrete is cheap.

Conflict like this are what will definitively end “The American Century” and we are currently witnessing that.

You cannot bomb your way to peaceful coexistence.
by Retric | 2025-06-22 19:32:16+00:00
It’s not about delivery systems just appearing, the logistics of tossing around nuclear weapons in the Middle East using modern technology allows for a vastly larger bombs without significant issues.

Little boy was a logistical issue at the time but only 4,400 kg. You can buy a used A380 for a few 10’s of millions. Convert that to a drone is fairly cheap, and you end up with a vastly cheaper system than the cost of producing a nuclear bomb.

Obviously a subsonic aircraft isn’t ideal, but historic ICBM’s ended up being designed for multiple bombs that’s a lot of leeway if you use the same system to deliver a single bomb. What the US considered weapons grade in the 40’s through the Cold War is based on assumptions that simply don’t apply here.
by downvotetruth | 2025-06-22 19:32:46+00:00
I already saw that video and my comment reflects what he states that underpasses usually cheaper than overpasses like this (9:10); given that fact more (culverts - 9:30) could be built for the more numerous non-apex species that do not lend well to being diverted miles to such a monstrosity. Of the listed species expected to benefit from this crossing including bobcats, coyotes, gray foxes, birds of prey, skunks, rodents, American badgers, American black bears, fence lizards and mule deer only the mule deer have may be having herding behavior causing carelessness to not use such an underpass.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-22 19:33:14+00:00
I will grant you that the ideas are complex. But if words are not a sufficient medium, then we can't think clearly about the ideas.

Original philosophers have the right to define their own terms. If they can't define them clearly, then they probably aren't thinking clearly enough about their ideas to be able to talk to the rest of us about them. (Unless they consider it more important to sound impressive and hard to understand. But if that's the case, we can say "wow, you sound impressive" and then ignore them.)