MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by try_the_bass | 2025-06-20 19:37:14+00:00
I disagree about what we failed to respond to, but fully agree that this is the fault of the population at large: if you refrain from putting forth your opinion, your opinion by cannot be counted in the democratic process.

The problem with democracy, more generally, appears to be that the population is wildly susceptible to apathy and complacency, meaning we've reduced the voting set to only this who care enough to vote. This turns politics into a game of disagreements between the most extreme voices.

In my opinion, in order for a democracy to work, voting must be compulsory.
by ramses0 | 2025-06-20 19:37:18+00:00
I'd forgotten about that one... cosmo/ape (and *.zip) opens up a few interesting use cases for portability, but the in-place editing with web-dav and ability to use the browser as an IDE (file->save) would have to be built-out with something like redbean.

Seriously, if you haven't, go check out the "zen" of tiddlywiki: https://tiddlywiki.com/#GettingStarted

You download "blank.html", make changes, then save it as "mine.html" and you're off to the races. It's pretty wild!
by anonymars | 2025-06-20 19:37:18+00:00
I am in no way saying "the idea guy" is doing 80% of the work, that's probably less than 10%

Put another way -- genuine question to which I have only a guess: who does more coding during an average day? A junior developer or a senior developer? Broadly I'd posit the junior developers do a lot more coding, and the more senior you get the more important "English" becomes over any programming language. Maybe I'm in an aberrant bubble. But I doubt it.

> This is why people who actually have skills to build things are made to sign NDAs and Non-competes when hired or before being pitched projects.

So what I'm getting at is, my version would be: "this is why senior developers code less than junior developers"
by edwardbernays | 2025-06-20 19:37:32+00:00
Malicious AI seams are merely the tool wielded by the actual danger, which is the threat actors directing them towards a particular goal.

I'm spreading the message because I want more socially conscious people to engage in this. Look into Curtis Yarvin and The Dark Enlightenment. Look into Peter Thiel's (the CEO of Palantir aka America's biggest surveillance contractor) explicitly technofascist musings on using technology to bulldoze democracy.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-06-20 19:37:38+00:00
> library in any existing language

An example of this is APL.jl [1][2]

It seems more of a proof-of-concept than a real implementation though - at least, the APL wiki calls it a "toy dialect of APL" and says that it "works on a minor subset of APL". [3]

[1] demo: https://nbviewer.org/gist/shashi/9ad9de91d1aa12f006c4 [2] repo: https://github.com/shashi/APL.jl [3] https://aplwiki.com/wiki/APL.jl
by ilaksh | 2025-06-20 19:37:41+00:00
Stop blaming technology for the way humans misuse it. AI, like any technology, is a lever. Like a big metal rod. You could use that to move stones for building a structure, or to dislodge a boulder to roll down a hill and destroy someone else's building.

The pre-AI situation is actually incredibly bad for most people in the world who are relatively unprivileged.

"Democracy" alternates between ideological extremes. Even without media, the structure of the system is obviously wholly inadequate.

Advanced technologies can be used to make things worse. But they are also the best hope for improving things. And especially the best hope for empowering those with less privilege.

The real problems are the humans, their belief systems and social structures. The status quo may seem okay to you on most days, but it is truly awful in general. We need as many new tools as possible.

Don't blame the tools. This is the worst kind of ignorance.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-20 19:37:46+00:00
Dubious origin, lots of other copies:

(17 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44316114

(30 points, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44318192

(12 points, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44320243

(26 points, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44321381

(9 points, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44322204

(11 points, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44322288

(10 points, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44322588

(10 points, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44328038
by pxc | 2025-06-20 19:38:11+00:00
> I think he was already well aware at that time that keeping the driver interface unstable is his moat.

Does Linus have/want a moat? He's not a tech startup founder. He's a kernel hacker who has had success beyond his wildest dreams, and whose needs will be met for the rest of his working life no matter what happens.

It seems like projection to talk about this aspect of the kernel as if it's some intentional strategy for preventing certain kinds of competition.
by devilbunny | 2025-06-20 19:38:33+00:00
Can't edit so replying to myself. The campus itself used a 56k leased line for internet (1993-4) and their dialup pool of eight (!) modems for ~3000 students ran at 2400 bps. It was far faster to walk over to the labs with a stack of disks.

They were almost never all busy. Then in summer of '95 or so, they installed 100 Mbps Ethernet.

That was a big jump. And security was a huge afterthought at the time; many, many people shared their entire hard drive with no password. If only it had been a few years later with MP3's and affordable CD burners...
by slg | 2025-06-20 19:38:34+00:00
I'm sorry, it's not debatable. People who don't like sports tend to really struggle to actually consider the larger ecosystem that exists around sports and sports fandom. For example, there is a widely studied phenomenon that a successful sports team leads to increased applications, which in turn allows a school to be more selective and thereby increases the school's academic standing[1]. You can make all sorts of debates over how strong this impact is or whether it is a particularly efficient way to raise a school's standing, but there is clearly some value here being generated "beyond the money people pay to watch it."

[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/04/29/...
by kdrvr | 2025-06-20 19:38:43+00:00
I honestly like his perspective around vibe coding. I feel like his original tweet has been taken misunderstood by the mainstream. (Proof-of-concepts churned out over the weekend will usually die or be mostly rewritten, anyways.) For programmers dipping their feet into new areas, I believe it can be useful.

Though, I do not see it being useful as a "gateway drug" (as he says) for kids learning to code. I have seen that children can understand langs and base programming concepts, given the right resources and encouragement. If kids in the 80s/early 90s learned BASIC and grew up to become software engineers; then what we have now (Scratch, Python, even Javascript + something like P5) are perfectly adequate to that task. Vibe coding really just teaches kids how to prompt LLMs properly.
by krferriter | 2025-06-20 19:38:52+00:00
Americans have a weird thing with government agencies (or government-owned companies, e.g. Amtrak) simply hiring people to do a thing the government is tasked with doing, or buying things the government needs in order to do that thing. So instead our governments at all levels rely heavily on contracting it out to private companies to do the exact same thing but with higher cost and turnover and no long term expertise built in-house in the government agency which is now tasked with managing and overseeing all this contracting.

The MBTA in Boston also suffered from this and is now undergoing an effort under the new management to hire more in-house staff to do routine maintenance and other work that had previously been contracted out to a variety of private firms.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-20 19:39:27+00:00
Even if there are some new entrants who become remarkably successful, it still means that for the vast majority of humans that aren't AI experts that the "spoils" will still accrue primarily to these "AI winners" while making it much, much, much harder for many, many, many more people to sell their labor. And many of the investors in these companies that are poised to make bank are the usual suspects.

And even then, many of the biggest winners of AI so far (Google, Microsoft, NVidia, etc.) are already some of the biggest companies on the planet.
by tatersolid | 2025-06-20 19:39:58+00:00
A passkey never exposes a secret to the website, so neither malicious scripts (e.g. via ad networks or analytics “partners”) nor malicious browser extensions can scrape the password.

Plus passkeys are inherently phishing resistant, and don’t rely on the end user being wary when autofill don’t work. Autofill doesn’t work a lot, due to broken sites blocking paste as well as stupid sites that have you enter your creds to into multiple domains. (Yes, I’m looking at you, United Airlines…)
by alephnerd | 2025-06-20 19:40:14+00:00
> Stop blaming technology for the way humans misuse it

> Don't blame the tools. This is the worst kind of ignorance

"Stop blaming [guns // religion // drugs // cars // <insert_innovation_here>] for the way humans misuse it"

There is a reason regulations exist. Too much regulation is detrimental to innovation, but some amount of standards is needed.
by kulahan | 2025-06-20 19:40:42+00:00
This actually makes a lot of sense to me. My wife is disabled, so I’m probably one of those customers he would lose along with his parking, but there are probably 1.5x as many homes in my neighborhood (of condos) than there are vehicles actively parking here. It would likely be a huge boon for the places I frequent now. It might even have an effect of slightly countering market downturns as people in trouble sell/lose cars and move to public transit temporarily

One extremely promising change I’ve been seeing a lot of lately: the most undesirable parking spaces in large lots are being ripped up and replaced with small businesses. I’ve seen a new coffee shop and gas station with 4 pumps go up in my town so far. Love it!
by const_cast | 2025-06-20 19:40:56+00:00
I don't think this is true, cars truly only make sense in places where every single detail is built to accommodate cars. In an absolute sense, public transit is wildly more efficient.

The reason we don't really see this is that in the US 99% of cities are built exclusively for cars. Of those that have transit, those are very obviously an afterthought.

For NYC, it's not that having a car sucks. It's that the city isn't built for them. So you're going to be stuck in traffic.

Prior to congestion pricing, a lot of people were driving because they're, well, stupid. Often it's faster to literally walk alongside the cars than be in them, because that's how severe the traffic was/is in lower Manhattan. But they didn't want to take the train for whatever reason, so they drove instead. And wasted time and money.

At the end of the day, cars take up way more space, and they're wildly expensive. Many of the cost of cars are actually subsidized, not the other way around. Consider free parking - that parking spot actually costs thousands of dollars a year. But drivers aren't paying it.

In regards to congestion, that costs money. It's not free to have thousands of cars essentially idling for hours of the day. But that's a cost everyone pays - even though most people commute by subway. That's a problem. That's going to break a lot of incentives.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-06-20 19:41:00+00:00
Enforced regulation has become impossible for at least the last 25 years or so. Anyone can just build a datacenter in some foreign country, and that software still affects the people in your country.

Back when they were complaining that Russia was interfering with our elections (2016ish?) I wondered what it would take to completely cut Russia off from the Internet. Granted, the Soviets still pulled stunts with less technology, but it was still a manageable problem then. Now? Well, we couldn't cut them off if we wanted to, could we? Even if we bullied Europe into severing all the fiber backbones there and elsewhere, China and North Korea and a dozen other countries would still keep them connected. And we'd still face the problems we face now.

Not that we would try that. Though it might be a sane and even a reasonably good policy, you'd have jackasses here and elsewhere (and not just Russian shills either) talking about how we can't possibly disconnect the friendly Russianerinos, they're good people even if some of their oligarchs aren't.

So we'll get some performative regulation theater that changes nothing. And everyone will just wonder what went wrong, quietly.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-20 19:41:33+00:00
Seriously. I wrote about it in March and have been banging on this particular drum since my first client demand to move wholesale into AWS.

https://green.spacedino.net/software-is-not-the-service/

For what it's worth, said client could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price, only that it had to be done. I've seen dozens more moves since, blindly surrendering sovereignty over their own enterprise in the process.

Best of luck with the EU in their migration journey. I'd love to help (and get me and my loved ones out of the US), but at the very least I'm eager to see more competition from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights.
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-20 19:41:41+00:00
Weird way to blame the victim and not the organization pushing scams on people. I vaguely recall that 20 years ago, Google served things like nonprofit or government PSAs when they didn't know what to serve (or thought you were botting), not financial scams.

Speaking of PSAs, the US federal government issued a PSA a couple years ago recommending use of an ad blocker to avoid becoming a victim of financial scams/fraud (purged now for some reason). Why they don't prosecute the ad companies for being the ones to select and deliver the mark is anyone's guess.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221221123349/https://www.ic3.g...
by WalterBright | 2025-06-20 19:42:25+00:00
Democracy cannot adapt efficiently to crises. For example, we elect a President every 4 years. You've got a long wait. A company can adapt overnight.

> capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.

Absolutely correct. And competition is what drives prices relentlessly downwards.

The democratically elected government in the 70s that tried to manage the nation's gas prices and allocations with the best of intentions failed miserably.

Democracy also created the FAA, which used to regulate airline schedules, routes, and fares. Having lived through that era, too, I can attest how costly and inefficient that was. Air fares are amazingly low since, and the scheduling is very tight and efficient at placing airplanes where the people want to use them.

> this is not because central planning is inherently bad

Nobody has ever managed to make it work. Consider rent control. Endless variations of it are implemented, and all produce the "unintended" side effects of higher prices and shortages.
by vinoveritas | 2025-06-20 19:42:48+00:00
The math doesn't math when the city grows around car-centric design. All the extra space taken up to separate people from unpleasant high-speed roadways, all the huge parking lots, the extremely-wide roads, it pushes travel times up so much that between the extra distance between everything, and the time spent earning money to pay hundreds a month to have a car (insurance, depreciation, maintenance, gas) ends up significantly exceeding the benefits of car ownership.

They're wildly nice if only a few people have them. The more do, and the more parts of a city cater to cars, the worse they get, even as they also become totally necessary (so, not having them also gets far, far worse, even untenable).

I was introduced to this notion reading an analysis from some French social-philosopher and was initially like "that... can't be right, surely?" so ran conservative numbers on my own situation, with an average-or-better commute distance for my city, a cheap paid-off car, and nearly double median individual income for my city, and... yep, dude was right, living in a city designed around cars was costing me time, not saving it. It'd be a ton worse for people with worse commutes and lower-earning jobs. They were getting totally screwed on the deal.
by scoofy | 2025-06-20 19:43:02+00:00
>Not sure anyone said this

It's literally what the person I was responding to said:

>>But here in California every state law deregulating real estate development has been abused by developers to build more $2M-$3M houses.

>>This does NOTHING to help homelessness...

Given the Prop 13 tax environment. Building expensive homes is a necessary condition to facilitate local tax revenues necessary to build public housing.

I would never argue that just allowing high-end homes is enough. I'm saying that allowing high-end homes is also part of the holistic solution. OP is the one saying that it does nothing. It does not do nothing. It's not a "one or another" thing... we need to build more homes at every income level, and there is no way to do that without largely deregulating the housing environment so that developers cannot simply all target the luxury market.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-20 19:43:07+00:00
These disinformation tactics via bots are used to vocalize BOTH the fringe left ("kill the rich") and the fringe right ("great replacement").

Most organizations and teams who have been investigating automated disinfo at scale have highlighted how fringes on both sides of the spectrum are being manipulated via automated engagement - often with state backing.

Power and Politics is completely orthogonal to ideology.
by codingdave | 2025-06-20 19:43:34+00:00
Step back a few more steps. Maybe the web has run its course, and we need to engage with each other in other ways. Even aside from the obvious IRL options, maybe voice and real-time interaction should gain traction again. Maybe we need completely new inventions to help us share content and thoughts. Maybe the web can go the way of gopher and become the subject of future story-telling: "Man, remember back when that was how we interacted? Crazy, right?"

We should move forward, not sideways.
by Manuel_D | 2025-06-20 19:44:08+00:00
The Cass review was not, in fact, rejected by most reputable medical institutions. Unless, if course, your criteria for "reputable medical institution" includes support for puberty blockers and hormones treatment in minors.

The UK, Italy, Denmark, and Sweden all stopped prescribing puberty blockers to gender dysphoric children following the Cass review. Other countries, like Finland, has stopped earlier. It's not possible to continue insisting that this is settled science, when much of the developed world has broken with the US's approach towards gender care in minors.

> Why the undue focus and criticism of trans healthcare over treatment of other rare medical conditions, which also tend to lack RCTs?

Such as? Furthermore, there were RCTs conducted studying the effects of puberty blockers. They didn't decrease gender dysphoria.

Also, put the evidence (or lack thereof) in the context of the certainty and urgency that proponents of gender medicalization were conveying: People were claiming that gender dysphoric children were going to kill themselves if they don't get blockers. Doctors like Joanna Olson-Kennedy repeatedly claimed that parents had the choice of a dead son or alive daughter, a statement parroted by politicians.

This was all total BS. That very same doctor sat on data showing zero improvement with puberty blockers [1]. And now she's trying to argue that no benefit is actually a good result because the patients would have fared even worse absent blockers. But of course, without a control group there's no substance to that claim.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-...
by techpineapple | 2025-06-20 19:44:48+00:00
> I’ve been hearing about the dangers of influence campaigns like Russian bot farms, deep fakes, and LLMs for the last ten years now. While these sorts of papers go out of their way to use the word “democratic,” it always seems to be motivated by a (not-very-compelling) idea that right wing populism is an essentially artificial creation rather than an organic backlash to the excesses of the Obama era.

I think it can be both. There's part of me that has become, maybe sort of Bernie Sanders MAGA over the past couple of years. Like I certainly identify with the people who want their lives to be better, and America to be simplified, and I don't think that underlying this is an idea that without Russian influence, we would all be Democrats. But to me the problem with Russian bot farms and other influence campaigns to me isn't the direction of the beliefs, it's the degree, and by the way, this is on both sides.

Right, classically, there's the study that says gun violence is down, but portrayal of gun deaths in the media is up, and I think social media has taken this idea into overdrive. So like, instead of thinking we're one nation with people who disagree, now we're two political parties, and if we don't eliminate the other evil political party, it's the end of America.

Maybe something from the other side I've been trying to figure out:

To a matter of degree, again not binary, to what extent was the woke movement organic, vs constructed re: social media algorithms and capitalism. I'm not saying that nobody organically cares about social justice and etc. But to what extent were certain practices - announcing pronouns at the beginning of meetings - bottom up from activists or the people who cared, or top down via diversity consultants? To what extent did BLM or MeToo grow organically, vs being promoted by social media algorithms?

If there's this big complaint that progressive change was happening too fast, was it really progressive activists driving the change? Or other institutions and influence campaigns.
by Spivak | 2025-06-20 19:44:59+00:00
> the excesses of the Obama era.

Thank you, I needed a laugh today. I mean you're not wrong that it started with Obama but like come on-- I lived through that era, you probably did too. It was a visceral emotional response to the most powerful man on earth being a black man. That spawned The Tea Party and birther movement the Venn Diagram of which was a circle. The Republican party noticeably changed to a tone of burn it all down while Obama was in office. Being one of the most outspoken birthers what was put Donald Trump into the public sphere as a political figure. This is where the MAGA wing of the Republican party traces its origins.
by ilaksh | 2025-06-20 19:45:01+00:00
Guns, drugs and religion are not equivalent to AI.

I did not say there should not be regulation or standards.

The point is that the whole diagnosis is wrong. People point at AI as creating a new problem as if everything was okay.

But everything is already fucked and it's not because of technology it's because of people, their social structures and beliefs. That is what we need to fix.

There are lots of ways that AI could help democracy and government in general.
by andrewla | 2025-06-20 19:45:09+00:00
I don't know what to tell you if you still believe that political contributions or spending are a determinative factor in politics rather than a trailing indicator (and a poor one at that).

Even in terms of corruption, this is by far the smallest concern and barely worth noting in the scheme of things. Besides the obvious revolving door for lobbying and legal firms, there is so much money at play in the ex post facto bribery industry, between speaking fees and bulk book sales and low interest and forgiven loans that Citizens United might as well be dust in the wind.