MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kordlessagain | 2025-06-06 13:41:56+00:00
I must respectfully challenge this interpretation on phenomenological grounds.

To presume knowledge of another's mind's eye is to commit a fundamental epistemic error. Having conducted extensive interviews with hundreds of subjects, I've discovered that visualization manifests along a vast spectrum of human experience, each with its own unique phenomenology and nomenclature. For some, the mind's eye is void; for others, it blazes with such intensity that it eclipses physical sight itself.

The bicycle-drawing analogy fundamentally misconstrues the relationship between mental representation and motor expression. These are orthogonal cognitive faculties—one need not be a sculptor to possess perfect proprioceptive knowledge of one's own face.

The eyewitness testimony example actually undermines the original argument. The critical factor isn't visual recall but temporal-causal sequencing—the who, what, and when of events. My research suggests that aphantasics demonstrate superior accuracy in reconstructing factual sequences, unencumbered by the distortions of visual reconstruction. Indeed, one might argue that the ideal witness would be someone who processes experience without the intermediary of visualization.

This points to a deeper truth about cognitive diversity: what some dismiss as deficit may in fact represent an alternative—and in certain contexts, superior—mode of engaging with reality. The visualizer's mind performs an act of creation with each recall, reconstructing and thereby potentially corrupting the original experience. The aphantasic mind, conversely, may preserve information in a more pristine, unrendered state—accessing facts without the degradation inherent in repeated mental imaging.

This is not merely a neurological curiosity but a profound philosophical distinction: between those who remember through representation and those who remember through direct apprehension. Each mode carries its own epistemic advantages, and our insistence on privileging the visual may blind us to entirely different ways of knowing.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-06-06 13:42:16+00:00
The following is from a link given by nikcub 12 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44080640):

Engineer.ai says its “human-assisted AI” allows anyone to create a mobile app by clicking through a menu on its website. Users can then choose existing apps similar to their idea, such as Uber’s or Facebook’s. Then Engineer.ai creates the app largely automatically, it says, making the process cheaper and quicker than conventional app development.

“We’ve built software and an AI called Natasha that allows anyone to build custom software like ordering pizza,” Engineer.ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal said in an onstage interview in India last year. Since much of the code underpinning popular apps is similar, the company’s “human-assisted AI” can help assemble new ones automatically, he said. Roughly 82% of an app the company had recently developed “was built autonomously, in the first hour” by Engineer.ai’s technology, Mr. Duggal said at the time.

Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and several people familiar with the company’s operations, including current and former staff, suggest Engineer.ai doesn’t use AI to assemble code for apps as it claims. They indicated that the company relies on human engineers in India and elsewhere to do most of that work, and that its AI claims are inflated even in light of the fake-it-till-you-make-it mentality common among tech startups.

Original link (by nikcub):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-startup-boom-raises-question...

Arxiv:

https://archive.ph/R3nMZ

Note the article is from 2019. "Engineer.ai" is the same company as "Builder.ai".

To summarise, my reading of the article is that the founder of Bulder.ai (at the time "Engineer.ai") promoted the company's technology as mostly AI, assisted by a few humans; and that WSJ saw documents suggesting otherwise.

dang, why do you say the claim is "lurid"? Is it because of the racist undertones of "Indians not AI"? That's fair, there's severe racism against Indian coders in the West, but scams and fraud absolutely happen and it is inevitable to be disgusted when they are revealed. There has to be a more balance stance than dismissing all fraud claims as "lurid".
by TheDong | 2025-06-06 13:42:18+00:00
There's a number of companies out there, like "brightdata", which pay a small amount to app developers to install a native "sdk". That SDK mimics a browser, and makes requests as if the user's device is doing it.

Since it's using a large number of real user's devices, and closely mimicing real web browsers, it ends up looking incredibly similar to real user traffic.

Since twitter allows some amount of anonymous browsing, that's enough to get some amount of data out. You can also pay brightdata for one large aggregated dataset.

https://bright-sdk.com/

This is part of the AI revolution, user's devices being commandeered to DDoS small blogs and twitter alike to feed data to the beast.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-06-06 13:42:22+00:00
I wouldn’t use ‘harm’ as the moral delineator, depending on the context it’s very much ok to do harm. It isn’t sufficient context on its own.

I think it’s the attempt to be moral by a simplistic definition of ‘doing no harm’ that leads to the contortions to the definition of harm. In this context we’re talking about if it’s ok to harm a small set of cells, and again it depends on context. Consider the act of assaulting a pregnant woman to harm the fetus, it’s the same fetus that has come to the same harm the only thing that is different is who made the choice.
by flkiwi | 2025-06-06 13:42:22+00:00
All good advice, and I follow much of it. I should note that due to addiction issues in my family, I tend not to be an absolutist about these things, nor to stigmatize things (I don't have a 'cheat day' or 'sneak' a treat, for example; sometimes I just want a snack, and that's ok). But there's actually an interesting challenge I've dealt with at points in my career: you say _only_ eating 3 meals per day, but I have seen people struggle mightily with obesity because they were only eating 2 or 1 meal per day regularly, which threw their entire metabolism out of whack. "Don't do that" was simply not a viable response for them because at times they simply couldn't afford more food. (To be clear, that's not my experience, so I can't speak to it directly, but it's an interesting challenge to "eat 3 square and you'll be good".)

Coming from a family of alcoholics, I'm also very familiar with the moral judgment issue with addiction. It _must_ be a lack of control that makes that man drink, etc. There's been quite a lot of success destigmatizing alcohol addiction in the last half century, so it's even more stark to see exactly the same thing play out with so many conversations about food and weight. It _must_ be that fat man's lack of control that makes him fat. Often it is. But there are so, so many other factors. I actually think that's part of OP's larger point.
by nis0s | 2025-06-06 13:43:09+00:00
Please bear with me, I read it a long time ago.

I don’t think there’s any distinction between sentience resulting from organic or digital processes. All organic brains are subject to some manner of stochasticity which determines emergent behavioral properties, and I think the same will be true of digital or hybrid brains.

So if you clone me in digital form, it’s not me anymore—it’s not even my twin, it’s something which was inspired from me, but it’s not me. This is now a distinct individual because of the random processes which govern behavior or personality etc., a different person, so to speak. So I never appreciated why MC felt any attachment or responsibility towards his images, other than perhaps the kindness you’d exhibit towards other persons.

The images, or persons as I’d like to think of them, in the story were shown as sentient. But sentience is only one part of consciousness, and the images in the story Lena seem incapable of self-determination. Or maybe they’re some equivalent of a stunted form of animal consciousness, not human consciousness. Human consciousness is assertive about its right to self-determine by nature of being an apex organism.

But even cows and sheep get mad and murderous when you’re unkind to them. Donkeys will lash out if you’re being a jerk. So I think two things: 1) simply creating an image of behaviors is not creating consciousness, and 2) human consciousness possesses a distinct quality of self-determination.

The main thing I’ve noticed about conscious beings is that they have a will to assert themselves, and those that don’t possess or demonstrate that quality to an appreciable degree in animals or humans are usually physiologically damaged (maybe malnutrition or trauma). I don’t expect consciousness born out of digital processes to be any different.
by kkfx | 2025-06-06 13:43:21+00:00
Do see NGI Taler (GNU Taler by EU/ECB) and Tourbillon project vs the recent https://www.biometricupdate.com/202506/mastercard-halfway-to...

It is clear that with digital money the sole way to make people trust them is being open and it's clear that those who reign in moneyland do not want to loose their comfy position.
by bell-cot | 2025-06-06 13:43:24+00:00
I'd replace "some analysts" with "some alarmists". And unless you're in the hyped-up headline business, the attack fell well short of "devastating".

Plus, the pre-attack triad cred of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95 bombers was pretty limited. Notice that they are turboprops. From the 1950's. Hitting hard against the western nuclear powers (US/UK/France) ain't in their talent set.
by vorpalhex | 2025-06-06 13:43:25+00:00
You lack accountability to yourself. Read this comment you wrote:

> People should also talk about the volition trap. I'm 40 and it feels like I've had more than a life's worth of people talking about how "you can do it if you just try!"

"People should" instead of "I'm going to". "It feels like" instead of making a direct statement.

Nobody here knows your situation or why you formed the way you did. But also, it doesn't actually matter. We always want some deep explanation but understanding is often just a way of dealing with impotence.

Just do it. No excuses.
by andyferris | 2025-06-06 13:44:18+00:00
I found the line about Tigerbeetle's model assuming entire disk sector errors but not bit/byte errors rather interesting - as someone who has created error correcting codes, this seems out of line with my understanding. The only situation I can see it works is where the disk or driver encodes and decodes the sectors... and (on any disk/driver I would care to store an important transactional database) would be reporting tonnes of (possibly corrected) faults before Tigerbeetle was even aware.

Or possibly my mental model of how physical disks and the driver stack behave these days is outdated.
by bilbo0s | 2025-06-06 13:44:42+00:00
I mean, hindsight is 20/20, but that's probably why it's a bad idea to give a gaggle-load of inexperienced tech sisses/bros the ability to do stuff like this.

Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. Drawdowns of the federal government should be measured and deliberate and done by grey haired people not given to rash action. Not by a kid with a python script he thinks is kind of cool.
by maketheman | 2025-06-06 13:45:01+00:00
Given the current balance of the court, I'd say it's about even odds we end the entire century without ever having had a liberal court the entire time. Best reasonable case we're a solid couple of decades from it, and even that's not got great odds.

We'd have a better chance if anyone with power were talking about court reform to make the Supreme Court justices e.g. drawn by lot for each session from the district courts, but approximately nobody is. It'd be damn good and long overdue reform, but oh well.

And the thing is, we've already had a fairly conservative court for decades. I'm pretty likely to die, even if of old age, never having seen an actually-liberal court in the US my entire life. Like, WTF. Frankly, no wonder so much of our situation is fucked up, backwards, and authoritarianism-friendly. And (sigh) any serious attempts to fix that are basically on hold for many decades more, assuming rule of law survives that long anyway.

[EDIT] My point, in short, is that "we still have [thing], we just have to wait for a liberal court that'll support it" is functionally indistinguishable from not having [thing].
by ant6n | 2025-06-06 13:45:10+00:00
As somebody who is working on exactly this problem, I’d say the problem can be solved technically if one can get a high density of passengers, while providing privacy and comfort.

Most of the sleeper startups basically just work with renderings, we work with iterating on full sized mock ups. We did ergonomics/market testing with hundreds of test users. We have evidence that with the right cabin technology, you can be profitable, even produce a margin, and significantly disrupt air travel.
by timcobb | 2025-06-06 13:45:57+00:00
> Just do it. No excuses.

This just sounds like you got brainwashed by Nike ("advertising signs that con / you into thinking..."). I'm not a person who makes excuses, and I'm not making excuses here. I'm not even obese.

I'm just observing phenomena. And the question I want to know is how is it that so many humans, who came this far evolutionarily, are all of a sudden so messed up? I mean, literally every single person alive today stands on the shoulders of giants. We are progeny of the winners, the tenacious, the survivors, the killers. What happened??
by AstroBen | 2025-06-06 13:46:13+00:00
I don't think you need to do the things the author says. Based on their definition I'm in both a physical and mental fat trap.. but I've maintained ~12% body fat and a healthy BMI my entire life. I also:

- can gain weight, and fat, easily. I've intentionally done it when weight training

- have gone through periods of years where I exercised very little. Certainly not daily exercise or even their prescribed 7500 steps. No weight gain

- can't really trust myself with food. Put a bunch of snacks in my house and they'll be gone very quickly

I think the things that are really making a difference is simple, and more strategic: I know how many calories the foods I eat have (was very into weight training in the past), I cook 90% of my own meals (usually 4-5 days worth at a time so I'm not tempted to order - I can just reheat) and I don't keep junk food in my house

That last point is huge. They sent me a free pizza with my grocery delivery the other week - I threw it out. I've thrown out countless bottles of coke/pepsi I'm sent for free. If I keep it around I'll eat it
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-06-06 13:46:20+00:00
> Imagine if a policeman came to your house every time you played the piano to fine you for nonexistent copyright infringement. That cop would be unemployed in very short order. You could take all sorts of against them, and there are protections in place to prevent such abuse of power.

The legal concept of qualified immunity prevents taking personal action against civic officials for actions they perform in the course of their civic duties. So, assuming the policeman is coming to your house because BMI called 911 to report (non-existent) copyright theft, the policeman is simply doing his thankless job, and is immune from suit.

If the policeman is just showing up without being called, then - while he would not benefit from qualified immunity - 1. it makes no sense to label him as a "policeman" since he's no longer performing the job of a policeman - you might as well just say "brown-haired guy" or "rollercoaster enthusiast" or "guy who prefers Pepsi to Coke" as those traits are just as relevant; and 2. it's a very poor analogic fit, because in the situation you're comparing it to, YouTube (the cop) is being called by BMI.

Note that qualified immunity is, strictly speaking, only applicable to government/civic actors, not private enterprise. However, the general principle still applies throughout the legal canon (usually lurking between the phrases "duty of care" and "assumption of risk" - you can't sue Kevin McCallister for causing you to cut your foot when you stepped on haphazardly-placed Christmas ornaments, because you were trespassing on private property and the McCallister family owed you no duty of care; and you can't sue We Throw Pies At Your Face For Five Dollars Inc for throwing a pie at your face, assuming you went there and paid five dollars, because you knew what you were getting into and they were just doing their job). In the case of copyright, legal immunity for content providers is actually hard-coded into the DMCA, mostly via the OCILLA safe harbor (Title II).

Also, please don't confuse an explanation of the process for an endorsement of the process. The DMCA is bad law that only looks good if you compare it to hypothetical laws that would be worse, copyright in the US has been ridiculous for generations and trying to emulate Europe in the late 80s only made it worse, and I wish YouTube could find a way to take a stance against rightsholders who abuse the process. But their status as a large multinational monopolist isn't why you can't sue them - it's baked into the law, because that's how the DMCA works.
by afavour | 2025-06-06 13:46:21+00:00
IMO this is indicative of the kind of questions anyone with DOGE on their resume will need to answer at their next interview.

- why did you do it?

- why did you not quit as soon as you realized how dangerous this was going to be?

"I did what I did, I knew there were mistakes, I don't really know what was done with the output of my work and I never tried to find out" are absolutely disqualifying statements for anyone above associate level engineering.
by imglorp | 2025-06-06 13:46:27+00:00
Not surprised, but is there a source? I guess hiding your electronics from The Man is subversive.

And front page today, Jeff discovered that media servers are also verboten: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-own...

Is someone keeping a list of all the various censorship triggers on YT?
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-06-06 13:47:05+00:00
To clarify in case of insult: by "but unqualified" I mean "but, without qualification as to which type of bagpipe". I had no intention to insinuate that "unqualified people" are the only ones who talk about the Scottish Great Highland Bagpipe! I myself will say that I "play the bagpipes" or "am a bagpiper" when referring to the GHB, even though I also play Ceilidh pipes sometimes (a different, smaller sort of Scottish bagpipe with a different drone tuning). I don't play the Irish Uillean Pipes, Galician Gaita, Northumbrian Smallpipes, any of the German, French, Italian, Greek, or other sort of bagpipes. Unqualified, bagpipe usually means Great Highland Bagpipe.
by like_any_other | 2025-06-06 13:47:26+00:00
> Ofcom refused to give any specific guidance

But, short of such an obvious breach, the rules regarding what can and can't be said, broadcast, forwarded, analysed are thought to be kept deliberately vague. In this way, everyone is on their toes and the authorities can shut down what they like at any time without having to give a reason.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-41523073
by tuckerman | 2025-06-06 13:47:47+00:00
You would have to gag a huge chunk of the engineers and I just don’t think that would work without leaks. Google’s infrastructure would not make something like that easy to do clandestinely (trying to avoid saying impossible but it gets close).

I was an SRE and SWE on technical infra at Google, specifically the logging infrastructure. I am under no gag order.
by somat | 2025-06-06 13:48:02+00:00
but bf is nothing like c, bf is a stack language, I would say it's closest real language analog is forth.

Anyhow, This is far too clear and straightforward, the bf analog to scheme would probably be unlambda, an implementation of the lambda calculus without lambda forms.

http://www.madore.org/~david/programs/unlambda/
by washadjeffmad | 2025-06-06 13:48:27+00:00
You left out one of the biggest providers of high (and low) quality VOD services: porn.

My intuition is that they're only left alone because they very explicitly don't step on any content and delivery trusts' toes.

I hadn't really thought about it until I did a crawl for a round of DMCA takedowns for a friend and was surprised by how many platforms apparently use the same few CMSes. It turns out, there are some fantastic, affordable options if you want to start an independent website and VOD service beyond the corporate fray.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-06 13:48:59+00:00
Let me tell you something from first hand field experience with faraday cages...

They attenuate signals, they do not block them. The common verbiage is to say "faraday cages block EM radiation", so people naturally assume that it blocks EM radiation. But I learned the hard way while doing compliance testing that no, they do not block EM radiation, they just weaken it (and it's highly frequency dependent on top of that.)
by piva00 | 2025-06-06 13:49:24+00:00
> For those who are obese, in 99% of cases, they are the problem, not genetics. A lack of discipline is attributable to the individual, rarely external factors alone.

If the environment doesn't nudge the individual to be more disciplined, whose fault is it? If it's the individual, how exactly do you think this can be solved? Any solution that starts with "if everyone just did X then Y would be solved" is a non-solution, people respond to nudges, and incentives.

There needs to be something systemic happening for so many individuals across many different cultures to be lacking the will power to change something that the majority of the sufferers are not happy with, just brushing this into the "personal responsibility" bucket is a cop out, it's a non-solution, and not even wrong.

It might make you feel better but it doesn't provide any path to a system-based solution.
by ivape | 2025-06-06 13:49:28+00:00
Did you see how two billionaires "leaders" feuded yesterday over disagreements (one was the President of the US and the other was the world's richest man)? They were the ones behind DOGE. That was the leadership behind it. We are in the fucking Twilight Zone. It's surreal.

There was a epic book about the whole Iraq situation that had the most apt title:

FIASCO

Then there are these military terms:

FUBAR - Fucked up beyond all recognition

&

TARFU - Totally and Royally fucked up

&

SNAFU - Situation Normal: All fucked up

It's the people that have been to war that seem to have the words for what's going on, no one else.
by flkiwi | 2025-06-06 13:49:46+00:00
I've seen statistics that ~64% of my state's residents are obese or significantly overweight. That's a pretty stark number.

I honestly don't know how I feel about things like sugary drink bans. Objectively they're part of the problem, but I feel like emphasizing urban rather than suburban development would be a more effective tool. A bit hard to put the genie back in the bottle where I live (the next county over has 0% undeveloped land, and most of it is suburbs). I would rather destroy the market for things than ban the thing. Personal lifestyle changes play a role in that, as others in this thread have gleefully noted, but health education does too. Vice taxes are probably one solution, but only if the money is actually going to be used for effective programs, which is almost certainly not going to happen in the political environment where I live.
by lapcat | 2025-06-06 13:49:49+00:00
> So the "free rider" claim was even more misleading

The Apple Developer Program is $99. Note that this is not just for the App Store but also for distribution on the Mac outside the App Store, as well as access to other developer resources.

I didn't mention it because it's a drop in the bucket, totally negligible compared to the billions of dollars per year in App Store commissions that Apple collects from developers. If $99 were the only fee, then hardly any developers would complain, except perhaps hobbyists. For professional developers, and for Apple's overall revenue, $99 is practically nothing.