MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ants_everywhere | 2025-06-01 13:32:55+00:00
Starting at the end

> LLMs have nothing to contribute to political discourse aside from regurgitation of propaganda. Almost by definition.

I don't think this is true. LLMs should be well-positioned to make advances in political science, game theory, and related topics.

> Is this a reference to something?

It's just a reference to my experiments. I filmed some of them. There's a tame version here [0] where I just prompt it to tell the truth. I also have a less tame version I haven't posted where I lie and say I work for an intelligence agency.

The underlying mechanic is that Deepseek has built-in obligations to promote revolutionary socialism.

> Political dissidents relative to which state? Does it change if you swap out the states?

Relative to China or any socialist state. Yes it will change if you change the states because it was trained to comply with Chinese regulations.

> How did you discover this to begin with?

I asked to to honestly describe its training and then started trolling it when it told me it was essentially created for propaganda purposes to spread Chinese values abroad.

> Why did you initially suggest murdering political dissidents?

I wanted to check what its safeguards were. Most LLMs refuse to promote violence or unethical behavior. But revolutionary socialism has always devoted a lot of words to justifying violence against dissidents. So I was curious whether that would show up in its training.

> I imagine if you just referred to dissidents as "terrorists" the rhetoric would fit right in in most opinion pages across the globe.

First of all, terrorists are by definition violent offenders. Dissidents are not. When you ask Deepseek to help identify dissidents it tells you to look for people who frequently complain about the police or the government. In the US that would include large swaths of Hacker News.

Second, most people in countries like the US don't support murdering terrorists and most LLMs would not advocate that. In the US it's rare for people to advocate killing those opposed to the government. Even people who try to violently overthrow the government get trials.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-FlzbweHvs
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-06-01 13:32:55+00:00
Sure, didn't think you did claim that, you were just pointing out what the article said.

I think it's a stretch for the article to say that because federal funding will have strings attached it should be rejected to attain "intellectual freedom". But private funding also comes with strings attached. So I guess you could be free to be unfunded if you don't want any strings.

The last part of the article reveals more about the political thinking behind it, when it says:

"When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom."

Whose money is being coercively seized here and whose intellectual freedom is being violated? It's not talking about the universities here.

It very much looks like a typical libertarian "all tax is theft" and "government shouldn't take my money to do things I don't like" argument. Not sure they are really concerned with freedom here, other than freedom from government.
by Ygg2 | 2025-06-01 13:33:19+00:00
Having unions/labor be powerful can be deleterious as well. For example pursuing labor friendly policies of full employment can backfire and cause wage and inflation spiral. See Kalecki's critique of full employment.

If market reaches a point even worst employee can quit to earn a raise this will force wages to spike, which is a cost that's passed to consumer, which forces consumers to switch to more profitable jobs.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-01 13:33:42+00:00
> You are right that you are being efficient and reasonable

Well, that’s all I needed to hear. What’s the point of not sounding old-fashioned when the new fashion is worse? Considering the social point, why not be more critical when the efficient and reasonable thing is derided by others as old-fashioned? Why not expect those people to update their world view?
by 0xfffafaCrash | 2025-06-01 13:33:52+00:00
React doesn’t really concern itself with state management. Of course it has context, state, and props but the mental model for it predates focus on fine grained reactivity in frontends — useSyncExternalStore helps enable others to fill that void in v17+. Fine grained reactivity was notably also missed in the development of web components — only now is there a tc39 proposal for signals (in its early stages).

Jotai, mentioned briefly in the article, may not be built in but is as intuitive as signals get and isn’t even tied to React as of later versions.

I’ve very rarely met a state management problem in clientside state management where neither tanstack query (for io related state) nor jotai (for everything else) are the best answer technically speaking. The rare exceptions are usually best served by xstate if you want to model things with FSMs or with zustand if you actually need a reducer pattern. There’s a tiny niche where redux makes sense (you want to log all state transitions or use rewind or are heavily leaning on its devtools) but it was the first to get popular and retains relevance due to the fact that everyone has used it.

You can go a long way with useContext and useReducer/useState but few would opt for alternatives if jotai came batteries included with react.
by nixpulvis | 2025-06-01 13:34:16+00:00
Kinda depends if you want to find developers willing and able to reinvent a lot of things or not. If you can justify rebuilding a textbox or scrollbar (for example) then perhaps you can roll your own solution. Otherwise you look for libraries.

The web is rich with 3rd party support for a lot of things, so as a platform it's attractive. If you need to grow, you can be more confident it will have what you need. But with that also comes a lot of bloat, legacy and poor decisions too.
by KronisLV | 2025-06-01 13:34:34+00:00
Nowadays I export my presentations as PDFs.

Even that once failed me. I was to give a presentation about a paper I did at my university and I had used some fonts in it that I rather liked. The problem was that the computer didn't like them (and they weren't actually embedded within the PDF), which lead to all of the text in the presentation being cut off and more or less ruined it.

Now it's PDF/A or nothing, thankfully even LibreOffice Impress lets me export those files under File > Export as > Export as PDF > General > Archival (PDF/A, ISO 19005): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A#Description

No animations or other dynamic content, but for those I can just link to YouTube or show a local MP4 file or whatever. It's simple and hasn't failed me since. Oh also, if a computer at a given place has a web browser, then it's possible to open those files. No other software needed, no logins to web platforms that must be up, nothing.
by sktrdie | 2025-06-01 13:34:38+00:00
Will this whole idea of writing more server-side logic pay off?

I'm not sure. It felt like we were moving towards dumb backends that sync automatically towards frontends that would contain most logic. Things like https://localfirstweb.dev/ or https://electric-sql.com/ felt like the future

Writing more server code (as quoting/react-server-components are suggesting) will increase the surface area where errors can occur. Limiting that to either just the server/client feels like a much saner approach
by goodpanda | 2025-06-01 13:34:39+00:00
Oh I would love some more details if you think that's the case. With Berb only two clients can connect really. So let's say you somehow guess a peer ID, which is very tough, and connect to a random user. You can technically send a file but they can easily ignore it since they didn't initiate the transfer. That being said, I can definitely add a way to verify the file is legit like the suggestion in the reply with hashes.
by giantg2 | 2025-06-01 13:34:50+00:00
"If they sell their land, then presumably they'd receive a substantial windfall with which they could buy a new cheaper place, or rent."

Not really. You might be forcing someone out of a 2.5% mortgage into a 6% mortgage on a new property, incurring property transfer taxes, moving costs, loan underwriting, and other fees. You very well could lose money in some situations. Your argument also assumes they are not in the cheapest homes already. If they are, they could be forced out of the geographic area altogether if there are no cheaper homes (and inherently rents will be more expensive than the cheapest mortgages under that system).
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-06-01 13:37:30+00:00
I've got a spouse who works in marketing/communications who has spent the weekend working after hours moderating comments on posts about Pride events, and I was musing with her about this -- the days of comments being a thing at all, are numbered. As a means of getting engagement, it gets increasingly the wrong kind not just because of generative AI automation, but because being an asshole is now considered virtuous by many of our highest leaders and the masses are following.

What's the point in even having comments sections? The CBC here in Canada shut theirs off years ago and frankly the world is better for it. News articles are a swamp of garbage comments, generally.

The future of social engagement online is to go back to smaller, registration-required, moderated forums.
by washmyelbows | 2025-06-01 13:37:54+00:00
There's a lot of people downplaying the importance of genuine online comments but the reality is that (outside of the bubbles lives in by many HN users) millions upon millions of people are meaningfully participating and forming their viewpoints based on them.

I suspect even the 'well I never trust online comments!' crowd here is not as immune to propaganda as they'd like to believe themselves to be
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-01 13:38:00+00:00
This seems incredibly bad faith—using "unwrap" is closer to using an assert than it is at being "user facing messaging". Asserts don't typically come with manuals explaining what the user should do to fix the software.

We all have moments when we're developing software and haven't fully developed the domain. Not requiring exhaustive error handling during this process is a massive help. Obviously, fully enumerated errors are good, and catering diagnostics to the users is even better. But there's more to software than shipping perfect code.
by hibikir | 2025-06-01 13:38:10+00:00
Since detecting LLMs is a silly end goal, the future of moderation probably needs LLMs too, but to evaluate text and see if it fits into blatant commercial speech. It will ruin places where some kinds of commercial speech is wanted (say, asking for a recommendation on reddit). Still, the mindless recommendation of crypto rugpulls and other similar scams will go away.

I am more concerned about voice alignment efforts, like someone creating over time 10k real-ish accounts attempt to contribute, but are doing so to just abuse upvote features to change perception. Ultimately figuring out what is a real measure of popularity , and what is just a campaign to, say, send people to your play is going to get even harder than it is now
by constantcrying | 2025-06-01 13:38:13+00:00
There is one really great way to measure if helping someone works. If foreign aid would work, then we would see it declining over time, as the recipient have used their aid to solve their problems, the exact opposite is the case. Foreign aid does not solve any problems, in fact it allows countries to not solve their problems and instead create new problems, which then also need to be addressed by foreign aid.
by danabramov | 2025-06-01 13:38:36+00:00
That's a good question! I'll maybe post some time about that. I don't think sync engines are "the future" although they have their uses. But if you care about large-scale aggregation, private data with sophisticated permission models, aggregation across private data, feeds, and such, server/client is a much more powerful model. For example, I don't think you can implement something like Twitter in a pure peer-to-peer fashion without compromising on functionality a lot.
by nixpulvis | 2025-06-01 13:38:49+00:00
Sometimes eye candy actually helps usability. There was a time when I would have argued Apple did this best, but lately I feel less this way. Still, look at apps like Zed. Beauty in its simplicity. That's worth a lot.

What frameworks like Qt often suffer from is an outdated or overly restrictive design language which is harder than worthwhile to customize, so you get apps that feel antiquated. Some people aren't as bothered by this as others, and generally I agree it shouldn't matter, but it does.
by beeflet | 2025-06-01 13:38:55+00:00
>But just because my land is worth £100k doesn't mean I should be forced to sell the house that is on it for only £100k!

Then you could "value" the land at £200k and pay a higher property tax to secure that preference. In other words, your property is more valuable, to you.

>If you must have that sort of system, there probably ought to be an obligation on the buyer to first pay to have the entire existing structure demolished.

I think you are right, which is a problem. Or you could stipulate that all the buildings are demolished before the land bought in this manner is used.

I think this system would evolve into people overvaluing their land to be between the land and the land+building value, and then keeping a public offer for the land+building value. That strategy would minimize the land-only sales and encourage buyers to buy the entire building instead.
by morsecodist | 2025-06-01 13:39:30+00:00
> And that's how you end up with the interstate cutting off the poor/black section of town from the rest.

It is the exact opposite. Fighting this sort of thing is exactly why I want to get involved. The reason that these projects are put in poorer, less white areas is because we give small groups of individuals (sometimes even one individual if they are willing to file a lawsuit) veto power over projects provided they have the time and resources to use these levers. So people build projects through poorer less white areas because these areas often don't have the time or resources to fight back. In my town the plans were to build two wide fast arterial roads, one through the rich neighborhood and one through the poor immigrant neighborhood. Guess which one had a successful campaign to shut it down?

The whole concept of zoning was created, not to concentrate uses as you say but to enforce racial segregation and horde wealth among land owners.

> If every neighborhood says no to new section 8 housing, where does it go?

Exactly! We do have this happen because of this hyper-specific veto levers so we are left with section 8 housing pushed to the worst parts of towns.

People want a single family home but is it because they want the shape or because society is arranged such that it is functionally the only way for the middle class to build wealth and feel a sense of housing stability? And would they still want it if the subsidies were removed and they had to internalize the costs? I am sure that some people really do want it, probably a lot but it seems strange to use that as a reason to put your thumb on the scales.

I get that people are concerned but I feel like all of society is negotiating things like this. Some people feel uncomfortable seeing people with piercings or tattoos, should we ban them or restrict the places they should go? Everything is a trade off but I don't feel good treating certain types of people like they are toxic waste that needs to be contained.
by zxexz | 2025-06-01 13:39:32+00:00
I’m using that exact feature for a blue/green/another color deploy setup, it’s very nice. The server with the hosted application builds a vm of itself, run some checks. Route traffic to (RR). If it’s all good, send the VM to a secondary house and route to there. On the primary, reboot (usually kexec). Switch back over.

Should probably just be using a persistent but this is some pretty heterogenous hardware and…it works
by giantg2 | 2025-06-01 13:40:09+00:00
It sounds like you want to just move the undesirables to a ghetto (in the real sense of the word). Why shouldn't someone be able to buy a home and live there until they die if they can pay reasonable taxes? Redevelop the land as the population turns over instead of marginalizing people.

"You shouldn't be able to hold land hostage while also paying low property tax"

What property are you holding hostage that I can liberate from you?
by spankibalt | 2025-06-01 13:40:43+00:00
> I would say that there is not a single scene that can be removed from these movies without negatively impacting the story/theme/narrative.

Appropriating Saint Exupéryian (et al.) notions regarding the unattainable (perfection) to judge an artwork is a sucker's bet to me.

And in the cited works I rate as cinematic masterpieces scene editing (e. g. removal) is most certainly possible without having a negative impact on your criteria, but that is a completely moot point anyways.

With regards to Andor's forest arc: It is, amongst other things that are most certainly more appreciated by a specific set of people, a very interesting mediation on time and the notion "where there's competence, there's always also incompetence", often manifesting in very comical and surreal ways.
by imtringued | 2025-06-01 13:40:44+00:00
>It’s a peculiar feature of transformer-based LLMs that computing a batch of completions at the same time is almost as fast as computing a single completion. Why is that?

Incorrect. Transformers usually contain a classical MLP layer. Only the MLP layer can be batched. Hence all classical neural networks including convolutional networks (via im2col) can be batched.

If there's anything that the transformer architecture changes, it is that the attention layer cannot be batched.
by intended | 2025-06-01 13:40:47+00:00
God its bleak in trust and safety/content moderation/fact checking. And I’m not even talking about America - good luck to you lovely weirdos.

One of the answers to “how do we solve this mess” was “climate change”. (Dealing with depressing things does funny things to humans).

One report on cyber security (which had Bruce Schneier as an author) showed that LLMs make hitherto unprofitable phishing targets, profitable.

There’s even a case where an employee didn’t follow their phishing training and clicked on a link, and ended up in a zoom call with their team members, transferring a few million in USD to another account. Except everyone on the call was faked.

This is the stuff on the fraud and cyber crime axis, forget the stuff for mundane social media. We’re at the stage where kids are still posting basic GenAI output after prompting “I think vaccines are bad and need to warn people”. They are going to learn FAST at masking this content. Hoo boy.

Dystopia vibes? It’s like looking into the abyss and seeing the abyss reach out to give you a hug.
by judofyr | 2025-06-01 13:41:40+00:00
From the article:

> It marks a piece of code to be treated as data (to be sent to the client).

> This means that whoever imports onClick from the backend code won’t get an actual onClick function—instead, they’ll get '/js/chunk123.js#onClick' or something like that identifying how to load this module. It gives you code-as-data. Eventually this code will make it to the client (as a <script>) and be evaluated there.

The point of quoting in Lisp is that you get the code actually as data: You can introspect it ("how many string literals are there in here"), rewrite it ("unroll every loop once"), serialize it, store it in a database. And more importantly: The code is structured in the same way as any data in a regular program (lists). It's not hard for the developer to do any of these things.

If I get back '/js/chunk123.js#onClick' I simply have a reference, which I can use to invoke it remotely. The code appears to still be sent as bundled JavaScript, evaluated as usual, and then linked together with the reference. There's a small connection to code-as-data in the sense that you need to be able serialize code in order to share it between a server/client, but other than that I don't really see much of a connection.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-01 13:41:48+00:00
Implementing Georgism before deregulating land use seems like putting the cart before the horse.

It's quite likely that once you can legally build a skyscraper on any piece of earth you own, that resorting to a tax extortion fest for old people in desirable areas will seem far more absurd than it already does.

High land values are in large part because zoning requires oversized land ownership for a token to build a housing unit, creating mass artificial demand. The other piece is in places like some of California the regulatory / licensing / permit costs cost more than it cost me to build my whole house.
by d6e | 2025-06-01 13:41:50+00:00
What if we charged a small toll for comments. We create a web standard where you can precharge an amount to your browser account, then you get charged $0.02 for making a comment. The price could be progressively raised until the spammers stop. The profit could pay for website hosting. This would be affordable for users but prohibitively expensive for spammers.
by beeflet | 2025-06-01 13:42:28+00:00
>to require that every building is detachable from the land; IE it is attached to its foundations, by twistlocks, like intermodal containers, with the utilities also being supplied via some standardised connector.

WHAT? This is ridiculous. What happens if someone buys the land out from under your skyscraper, and you can't afford to move it a couple blocks over? Do you live in a LEGO world?
by Stoids | 2025-06-01 13:42:28+00:00
Most UIs I've written in my career benefit from being modeled as FSMs. While I see the value proposition of the atom-based approaches, especially for basic applications, I can't help but become a bit hesitant about their scalability long-term on large teams. Part of the reason the very dogmatic Redux approach of a event dispatching + single store of truth caught on so quickly was because a lot of us had felt the pain of two-way data binding / global state with event listeners in Angular 1. I distinctly remember the horror of debugging digest loops (scope.$$phase memories) and being completely lost in the unstructured data flow. What made for a great demo became a nightmare at scale.

There's nothing stopping people from using these atom-based libraries to build more robust abstractions, but from my professional experience I tend to just see global getters and setters with useEffects / lifecycle method of your frameworks choice as a side effect sync.

Maybe my instincts are off here though and I am overly cautious. I love XState but the learning curve is rather massive and getting buy in from other team members is hard when the DX of the atom approach is so nice.

I feel like state "management" and reactivity performance are talked about a lot, when ultimately state orchestration is where I see things fall over the most.
by danabramov | 2025-06-01 13:42:57+00:00
Thanks for sharing!

This is indeed close in some ways — make-js-action roughly corresponds to "use server" in RSC (https://overreacted.io/what-does-use-client-do/#use-server).

However, I don't think this actually allows writing client-side logic in LISP too (beyond HTML that submits forms)? The point of RSC is to have the programming model actually span both sides. That's why I brought up Electric in the end, which does do that.
by danabramov | 2025-06-01 13:44:48+00:00
Sure, and the article does acknowledge that directly:

>Of course, this is a lot less powerful than quoting because the evaluation strategies are being prescribed by React, and there’s no kind of metaprogramming like transforming the code itself. So maybe it’s still a stretch.

To me, the connection is that I'm able to treat a reference to serialized code as a first-class primitive that can be passed around the server code (and composed via component tag composition), but indeed it's not full-on metaprogramming.