MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-06 23:49:33+00:00
> The unrealized value is notional, not actual.

No, its an actual thing, measurable by some mechanism. Otherwise, this would be a non-discussion, as taxing it would be impossible, not a possible thing that we can argue about the merits of.

> The notional value is often not remotely realizable.

Whether it is or is not immediately realizable is immaterial to the desirability of taxing it; it may be material to designing the forms of taxation that should be acceptable. E.g., if the difficulty of realizing the value is, across the tax base, likely to making collecting the tax in cash or equivalents difficult, it would argue for permitting a fallback option for the tax to be collected in-kind, e.g., by the taxing jurisdiction acquiring a proportional interest in the asset equal to the share of the value of the asset represented by the taxes not paid by other means.

> A tax on unrealized gains is in effect a way of laundering a steep tax rate so that it looks “small” and therefore reasonable to the unsophisticated.

If you allow carry forwarded losses, even just by the simple method of adjusting basis values, and include taxes on realized gains (and carry forward, offsetting against current income with perhaps a negative net, etc., for realized losses), then taxing unrealized gains is identical to taxing realized gains if the gains are eventually realized, but simply avoids the ability to find maneuvers to benefit from leveraging the value of the asset without paying taxes by avoiding realization. It doesn't make a "steep" tax rate look small, it makes the tax rate look like exactly what it actually is, unlike taxing only realized gains, which makes an effectively non-existent tax on capital gains look like something more, when people can benefit from assets without realizing the gains.
by dmurray | 2025-06-06 23:51:36+00:00
Really we just need more labels than "left" and "right", "liberal" and "conservative".

Or to accept that political discourse has moved on. For the first 2500 years of democracy, the dominant topic of discussion was economic - how to distribute society's material resources - so it made sense for 18th century French journalists to categorize politicians based on their policies on that topic. Now we have a post-economic democracy where the dominant topics are along the lines of what bathrooms trans people should use, so we've repurposed "left" and "right" to categorize people based on their opinions on that topic.
by smitty1e | 2025-06-06 23:52:09+00:00
If a fraction of the lurid tales of corruption prove valid, then this is not a bad thing.

The SSA was never anything other than a Tenth Amendment violation to begin with, as shown by FDR's court packing threat[1], so a bit of external review seems in order.

Some sort of sane transition plan off of these socialized programs would be of great interest to a super-majority of voters, one expects.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Procedures_Reform_B...
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-06 23:52:13+00:00
> The unrealized values are a fiction.

Then instead of taxing the gains, you'd accept the government nationalizing the assets by eminent domain and paying fair compensation that was significantly less than the "fictional" unrealized value?

Or if someone unlawfully deprived you of the asset, you'd accept as restitution or seek as civil damages for the loss something significantly less than the "fictional" value?

Or, when it was no longer an excuse to avoid fair taxation, would that "fiction" suddenly be a lot more real to you?
by Tor3 | 2025-06-06 23:52:37+00:00
I didn't consider that - my eyesight wasn't checked before I was nearly five years old, then my father started suspecting something (I still remember him asking if I could see a crow a couple of hundred meters away, between two slanted poles. I couldn't separate the slanted poles). So, I got glasses, for astigmatism and hyperopia, and I could see. Finally. If that's related to how I so easily recognize gaits (better than faces) I will never know. (It's not that I don't recognize faces, it's just that I may have problems if they're in places I don't expect or if they change a bit - getting older, or a haircut etc).
by bitwize | 2025-06-06 23:52:44+00:00
Hand-drawn animation, whether for video games or television or other media, is one of those artistic fields where I can see AI being a huge win for everybody. The reason why is because drawing the in-betweens in an animation is tedious, time-consuming, costly, and, in most 2D animation productions, outsourced to sweatshops abroad. And yet it's most of the work that goes into an animation. I think most animators would rather just do the keyframes and leave the tweens in the hands of the machine. It'd make traditional animation as easy and fast as Flash animation, and create a flourishment of even more indie animations from solo creators with even higher quality.
by xnyan | 2025-06-06 23:53:16+00:00
> Because it's not their preferred service.

Right. What's your point? Virtually all media is available for free via consequence-free piracy, but generally at the cost of quality and convenience. I don't see that ever changing. Legitimate venders can provide a better quality product. That's how you sell, you become the preferred service by offering a better version at a price the customer is both willing and able to pay.

Customers don't have a problem, they can always get a form of the media they want if they are willing to pay in price or convenience.
by reisse | 2025-06-06 23:53:35+00:00
Oh the real fun thing is when the select() is not even in your code! I remember having to integrate a closed-source third-party library vendored by an Australian fin(tech?) company which used select() internally, into a bigger application which really liked to open a lot of file descriptors. Their devs refused to rewrite it to use something more contemporary (it was 2019 iirc!), so we had to improvise.

In the end we came up with a hack to open 4k file descriptors into /dev/null on start, then open the real files and sockets necessary for our app, then close that /dev/null descriptors and initialize the library.
by jihadjihad | 2025-06-06 23:53:37+00:00
Mansa Musa is totally worth reading about, as are philosophers etc. like Ibn Khaldun and others (Ibn Khaldun wrote about Mansa Musa's pilgrimage, wealth, etc.).

There was a lot going on in medieval Africa, I wish I had some good sources, if anyone knows any I'd be interested in expanding my knowledge as well!
by Kon-Peki | 2025-06-06 23:54:40+00:00
I took the undergrad computer security class he taught in the 90s, and it’s easily one of the most memorable I’ve ever had.

At that time, he was involved with national/cybersecurity with the Clinton white house and had to go to DC multiple times. Each time he lined up a speaker from government to talk about real security fails that happened at DoD and/or various 3-letter agencies. Those talks were the best!

Congrats, Spaf!
by csnweb | 2025-06-06 23:54:57+00:00
But if you happen to have n=2^c, then an algorithm with logarithmic complexity only needs c time. Thats why this is usually referred to as exponential speedup in complexity theory, just like from O(2^n) to O(n). More concretely if the first algorithm needs 1024 seconds, the second one will need only 10 seconds in both cases, so I think it makes sense.
Ask HN: Is synthetic data generation practical outside academia?
by cpard | 2025-06-06 23:55:15+00:00
I keep seeing synthetic data pipelines powering the latest LLM “breakthroughs”: • TinyZero’s $30 fine-tuning workflow • Sky-T1’s $450 reasoning-model build • Meta AI’s Llama 3 herd (2024 paper detailing their synthetic-data training) • Berkeley OpenThoughts (“Data Recipes for Reasoning Models”), published yesterday

There are also open-source toolkits you can experiment with:

https://github.com/meta-llama/synthetic-data-kit https://github.com/bespokelabsai/curator

But it still feels very research-oriented. I haven’t found many examples of these pipelines running in real-world products.

I’m curious:

1. Who is using synthetic-data pipelines in production today?

2. What tasks does it actually improve. E.g. fine-tuning smaller models for specific tasks?

Any real-world stories, pointers, or further reading would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!
Ask HN: What would you do if AGI were coming in 2-4 years?
by atleastoptimal | 2025-06-06 23:55:35+00:00
It seems that there is a general bearishness with respect to AI progress on this site. I feel that skepticism is warranted, but it seems that every few months a new AI development completely undoes many assumptions about what AI will "never" be able to do.

There is a universe where AI models continue to improve until they eclipse humans at all cognitive tasks, with fine motor tasks (via humanoid and other types of robots) soon to follow.

In this universe, assuming we are still alive after that point, what would have been the best thing to do if we could go back in time to mid-2025 and tell our past selves exactly how to live life optimally, given that this happens?

This post isn't about whether AGI will happen soon or is possible or not, I'm just wondering that, given the hypothetical, what would be the best course of action based on what we know?
by roenxi | 2025-06-06 23:55:40+00:00
They can't actually do that at a mass scale - they don't reliably know how much crypto any given person owns.

Ditto, if someone beats me with a wrench and I give them a password accessing $500 of crypto, what % of my stash have they just claimed? Do they stop or continue with the wrenching? What is the stopping condition here?
by alphazard | 2025-06-06 23:55:46+00:00
The author tries to pidgin hole an institution into left-right and it doesn't work. Mental gymnastics ensue.

The sentiment of most professors and new grads is left leaning. It's been that way for decades, maybe forever. Numerous polls show this to be the case. Anyone who's been on the internet or on a college campus knows this is true.

Higher education is funded by public dollars, which means taking them away from taxpayers (socialism, a leftist idea).

In order to offer something of value to the students, the professors have to be legitimate. They need to know what they are talking about. It wouldn't work as well for everyone in town to take turns being a professor, or to vote who is a professor, or some other egalitarian leftist method. And so by absolute necessity, a market is allowed to function, in which the school chooses the best professors, so it can attract paying students.

Apparently that single point justifies the title.
by catlifeonmars | 2025-06-06 23:55:56+00:00
I think we’re talking past each other.

I was not talking about file descriptors; rather I was talking about the fact that it’s common for Go libraries to do interesting and useful things when you call the `Close()` method on a type. `Close()` is idiomatic go for resource cleanup.

You might wait until close to populate a length and or checksum field in a message header. Or close could submit a buffer of log events to a remote aggregation endpoint.

I’m not saying I agree with APIs that are designed that way, but it’s common enough that you should assume the error return value is significant unless you know otherwise (for Go)
by Terr_ | 2025-06-06 23:56:38+00:00
> cretins proclaiming that LLMs aren't truly capable of reasoning

> Reasoning is not difficult to define

> Reasoning exists on a spectrum

> statistical processes [can] scale into reasoning

It seems like quite a descent here, starting with the lofty heights of condemning skeptics as "cretins" and insisting the definition is easy... down to what sounds like the introduction to a flavor of panpsychism [0], where even water flowing downhill is a "statistical process" which at enough scale would be "reasoning".

I don't think that's a faithful match to what other people mean [1] when they argue LLMs don't "reason."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-06-06 23:56:52+00:00
That might sound mercenary and spineless, but usually that's how politics works. You shop around for your best shot for getting your policy chosen. This isn't Political Simulator where you play the Political Compass game to figure out your ideology and then join a movement.

That's exactly how Labor in the US defected to Trump too btw. Politics isn't political science.

This is also my problem with online discussions in the US Left. Politics is more than just policy positions, it also needs to focus on strategies, solutions, and coalitions. But online the only thing that folks seem interested in talking about is why the US can't implement some EU policy.
by bluGill | 2025-06-06 23:57:01+00:00
I know how to do drywall as well as a pro - it just takes me 6x as long. It is easy to do, but you can't do what the pros do without a lot of practice. By planning on 6x longer you can slow down, do thiner coats and such (pros do 3 coats of mud, I do 6 for the same thickness). Which falls into the do or hire.
by Huuuze | 2025-06-06 23:57:02+00:00
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by teleforce | 2025-06-06 23:57:24+00:00
Fun facts, Mansa Musa (Musa Keita) who's king in Mali Empire in Western Africa is the richest person ever lived [1].

It's reported that he unintentionally disrupted Eqyption economy for at least ten years. He did that by spending and giving charity in gold enroute to pilgrimage or Hajj in Mecca while staying about 3 months in Egypt. Allegedly he had hundred camels in towing, each camel carrying hundreds of pounds of pure gold. Pilgrimage to Mecca is the journey that every Muslim has to make once in a lifetime if they can afford it.

[1] Mansa Musa: The richest man who ever lived (105 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350951

[2] Mansa Musa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350951
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-06-06 23:58:08+00:00
If you have a very large CPU count, then I think you can dedicate a CPU to only process a given designated privacy/security focused execution thread. Especially for a specially designed syscall, perhaps

That kind of takes the specter meltdown thing out of the way to some degree I would think, although privilege elevation can happen in the darndest places.

But maybe I'm being too optimistic
by FireBeyond | 2025-06-06 23:59:14+00:00
Exactly. Which is why they typically cost $1-2B. And why the "Oh, definitely less than $400M" for a retrofit sounds entirely like garbage.

Trump just wants a private jet, and he'll take a little government-funded upgrades to it, but let's not pretend the man with the golden toilet wants a functional, practical AF1 versus the flying palace the Qataris offered. They knew exactly his weakness.
by whatever1 | 2025-06-06 23:59:16+00:00
I think he started with online available info (I believe Reddit has a good identity theft community), but the thing is that notices keep coming long after fraud has been committed. So every week he would find out there are more things he was on the hook for.

Eventually he hired a lawyer to help him out, there are so many reporting agencies (for subprime loans etc) that you need to reach out to.

Long term a new SSN will be issued for him, but there is a lot of cleanup before that.
by phonon | 2025-06-07 00:00:13+00:00
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
by api | 2025-06-07 00:01:09+00:00
People also think they’re the party of small government and fiscal discipline when a glance at the last 50 years of history shows that they are at best no better than the Democrats on these things. That’s being generous.

I think the GOP is way better at marketing itself. Of course part of the reason for that is that they have a more well defined demographic. The democrats are “everyone else” at this point and it’s hard to affinity market to a party that is actually three or four parties in a trenchcoat.

In the past 10 years the far right wing of the party has done an insanely good job marketing itself to young men too. Of course part of that is filling a cultural void. If you’re the only one to show up you win by default.
by mkl | 2025-06-07 00:01:39+00:00
With tools like Ollama, self-hosting is easier than hosted. No sign-up, no API keys, no permission to spend money, no worries about data security, just an easy install then import a Python library. Qwen2.5-VL 7B is proving useful even on a work laptop with insufficient VRAM - I just leave it running over a night or weekend and it's saving me dozens of hours of work (that I then get to spend on other higher-value work).
by captainbland | 2025-06-07 00:01:54+00:00
That makes even less sense, sounds like they made some jump from - "oh we've got to get the hacker community off Facebook, they're a risk"

"hackers are all Linux enthusiasts"

...

"Let's just ban Linux talk to get rid of the hacker community, we don't need that nerd talk on here anyway, it doesn't sell any ads"
by bayindirh | 2025-06-07 00:04:01+00:00
This is why I said "We are discussing (mostly) tech here". I don't agree that creating a throwaway for every comment is "superior". It's basically spamming and it's even noted in the guidelines.

Nazi Germany & Jews issue is different. There's an aspect of forcing, and this is unethical and wrong on so many levels, and I'll just leave the subject here.

OTOH, from my perspective if you're afraid that you're writing a sensitive comment, you can create a throwaway. That's justifiable IMHO, but creating three accounts to discuss maps vs. loops, now that's different.

If we're talking about being ridiculous, bringing up Nazi Germany vs. Jews issue to a technical discussion is more ridiculous than the alleged ridiculousness of me asking the OP about their fears. To close, my questions was not to belittle or shame the OP, they were genuine. I'm not that person who jabs for giggles.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-06-07 00:04:16+00:00
useActionState (which had questionable design to begin with) was botched right before 19 release by nextjs devs. bug reports are all "left on read".

edit: it's also a great source of laughs if you enjoy AI hallucinations. eg. ask it to generate a use action state solution which updates a select element.
by roenxi | 2025-06-07 00:04:39+00:00
I mean, ok. Everything is connected to everything else, true enough. That seems a bit vague. Do you have a specific example to illustrate what you are talking about? Because the 'disinformation' that I saw being banned was typically people with PhDs in vaguely related fields talking about scientific papers. Disagreeing with them seems like a fair play, deplatforming them seems actually damaging. If I can't listen to people with PhDs to learn about academic papers because everything is interconnected then something has gone rather off the rails.
by nosefurhairdo | 2025-06-07 00:05:18+00:00
This is not aligned with how most Americans view higher education:

- Democrats have a more positive view of how colleges impact the country

- Democrats have higher confidence that professors act in the public interest

- Republicans are more likely to view higher education as moving in the wrong direction

- Democrats are relatively unconcerned about professors bringing political/social views into the classroom, compared to republicans who are very concerned

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/the-gro...

> If "left" and "right" have any meaning at all, "right" describes a worldview under which civilized society depends upon legitimate hierarchy, and a key object of politics is properly defining and protecting that hierarchy.

Hierarchy is a natural consequence of variation in skills, experience, and work ethic. Meanwhile, the author's definition provided for "left" is so squiggly as to be nearly meaningless. It almost sounds like the mythical, non-totalitarian brand of communism that just hasn't quite worked yet:

> "Left", on the other hand, is animated by antipathy to hierarchy, by an egalitarianism of dignity. While left-wing movements recognize that effective institutions must place people in different roles — sometimes hierarchical, sometimes associated with unequal rewards — these are contingent, often problematic, overlays upon a foundational assertion that every human being has equal dignity and equal claim to the fundamental goods of human life.

In other words, "left" has hierarchy, but only begrudgingly, and other than that we're very virtuous.

It's truly difficult to get past this opening argument. If you're going to make a shocking claim (higher ed is right wing), you can't start with such a shaky foundation. What would a non-hierarchical University system even look like? Harvard being more prestigious than my local community college does not make higher education right wing.
by echelon | 2025-06-07 00:05:23+00:00
> My personal anecdote: I've used a diffusion model to generate a short video based on a 50 year old photograph, the only photo my dear friend has of his late father that he never got to know. The 10-second video showed the man lifelike, happy and smiling, generated from a photo on which he looked morose. My friend was brought to tears when I showed it to him.

That's beautiful.

These tools will help people find more meaning in our short lives.
by shakna | 2025-06-07 00:05:47+00:00
Novavax COVID-19 vaccine never targeted specifically the spike protein, and instead focused on boosting the creation of various different antibodies. It is also the least effective.

The current breed of mRNA vaccines targets the spike protein, and the TRIM21 gene. Some of them also attack the S protein directly.

All of them work to boost various antibodies. The "targets" are in addition. By targeting the spike protein, the attack hits the RNA of the virus, not just the protein. The entire cellular structure of the virus breaks down. The same with TRIM21 targets.

The bodies natural defences never targeted the spike protein, and instead focuses on the N-layer, not "all parts of the virus". These natural defences rarely manage to cause the viral cell to decay, they tend to work by slowing reproduction instead.