MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dctoedt | 2025-07-11 14:23:37+00:00
> state governments are not ones of enumerated powers. They inherited the plenary legislative power of the British parliament and can do whatever they want that’s not expressly prohibited. *** My secret left wing view is I think New York can regulate guns (but also Utah can make a state church).

That's certainly not an incoherent philosophical position.

EDIT: In this view, it sounds as though each U.S. state would be more like one of the member countries of the EU than, say, cantons in Switzerland or counties in England.
by em-bee | 2025-07-11 14:24:25+00:00
the education i received in germany did have this goal. the teachers had this goal, and i have the impression that the teachers and schools my kids go to have this goal as well. i can't say how universal that is, but it the opposite is not universal either.

the problem is that the goals are not effectively implemented. maybe it's more a dream than a goal, because the teachers and schools don't know how to actually reach that goal.

meaningful participation in society is often reduced to the ability to get a job by those outside of school, so you are right about employers. at least the large ones. unfortunately that works against them, because the current generation of juniors doesn't even want to learn anything. they are drones that just want to get paid, but are not motivated to learn what they need to do their job better.
by SCdF | 2025-07-11 14:25:00+00:00
Effectively tortured to death.

One of the things that frustrates me with how ethics is taught in computer science is that we use examples like Therac 25, and people listen in horror, then their takeaway is frequently "well thank god I don't work on medical equipment".

The fact that it's medical equipment is a distraction. All software can cause harm to others. All of it. You need to care about all of it.
by pazimzadeh | 2025-07-11 14:25:07+00:00
It’s a lot easier to study if it’s legal. It’s also pretty hard to come up with a convincing placebo. The experience is also highly colored by “set and setting”, and the clinical environment or office space is probably not ideal for this knowledge expansion..

An article just came out showing that psilocybin extends life in aged mice, so that’s why you’re seeing it a lot. Yet we have no idea what causes this lifespan increase. Is it a result of “hallucination” experience itself , a purely chemical effect, or something in between? (aka will a ‘bad trip’ give the same effect on lifespan?)

> Most people will NOT benefit from taking the drug (as with any drug)

Now you’re just making things up.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-11 14:26:22+00:00
It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when people "lie" about psychological terms because they feel it enables a greater good.

I see the point you're making. But we as a society do this a lot, and it hasn't always historically been good for the people who are actually affected by the disorders.

Historically, this has been done by therapists who aren't well connected to the research world. They think they find a framework that works for their patients and promote it. Sometimes it becomes a fad despite not being backed by evidence. It's not always clear what the consequences are, but a common consequence is that many people miss out on actually figuring out what's going on with them and getting evidence-based treatment.

I'm not saying that there is no AI addiction. I'll leave that to the professionals. But I do want to gently push back on the idea that we should raise something to the level of pathology because it seems useful.

And as the parent of kids, there are a lot of habits that become compulsions and where you experience withdrawal if you stop. Reading is one in my family. Exercise is something that's rewarding and you feel bad if you stop. But exercise addiction is a very specific disorder. Just some stuff to keep in mind.
by NalNezumi | 2025-07-11 14:26:56+00:00
Many places also (used to) have sign saying 一見さんおことわり which roughly translate to "first time visitor not allowed". A little bit up to interpretation but usually in the scope of:

* store only for patrons, but welcome if you come with patron.

* anyone welcome but if you're only coming once (tourist etc), please don't (destroy the vibe).

For obvious reasons foreign tourist couldn't get this so many places just put up a "no foreigner" sign. You'll still see local foreigner sometimes hang around those places though
by mannykannot | 2025-07-11 14:27:31+00:00
Partly on account of the "perhaps" in the original, and partly because I have seen (elsewhere) "just doing his job" defenses.

In corner cases, culpability for uncertain expertise can be a tricky issue - you may recall the case of the Italian geologists, a few years back, indicted for minimizing the risk of an earthquake shortly before one occurred - but the case here seems pretty clear-cut (again, I'm speaking morally, not legally.)
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-07-11 14:28:15+00:00
> Tests that a "do nothing" AI can pass aren't intrinsically invalid but they should certainly be only a very small number of the tests. I'd go with low-single-digit percentage, not 38%. But I would say it should be above zero; we do want to test for the AI being excessively biased in the direction of "doing something", which is a valid failure state.

There is a simple improvement here: give the agent a "do nothing" button. That way it at least needs to understand the task well enough to know it should press the do nothing button.

Now a default agent that always presses it still shouldn't score 38%, but that's better than a NOP agent scoring 38%.
by bluGill | 2025-07-11 14:28:24+00:00
I don't know - I've never had the budget for a nice saw. I've come close a few times, but something else comes up.

If you are spending $2000 on a saw spending $300 on a third party guard to go with it isn't such big deal. The cheap saws often are not even strong enough to attach the nice guard if you would spend the money.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-11 14:28:25+00:00
Anyone who's ever worked in customer support will tell you that dealing with customer regularly sucks balls, even worse if they're foreign and don't know the local language, customs and etiquette so they annoy you and your local patrons while thinking they're entitled to because "we spend money here and support your economy", or even more worse if they're foreign and also intoxicated or acting up for the camera (social media streamers).

Hospitality is already a low margin business, so if you're a small business owner and need to deal with the customers yourself instead of via hired work, why would you want that extra hassle of dealing with annoying foreigners unless it's purely for milking them dry with huge markups for it to be worth it?
by bananalychee | 2025-07-11 14:28:31+00:00
Perhaps it would help to frame the problem as domestic travel being too expensive as opposed to international travel being too cheap. By the way, overtourism is not a "there's too many Americans/Europeans who can afford vacations" problem, most tourists in Japan are from nearby East Asian countries. In fact, the share of tourists to Japan who come from the US and Europe has declined in recent years.
by trymas | 2025-07-11 14:28:45+00:00
I’d argue that it costs more to implement and maintain dark patterns in the software than to do happy paths. It also costs customers time and money to jump through hoops to end service you don’t want and need.

In MAGA terms - if your business cannot survive in free market competition without scam schemes - it’s “unamerican” and shouldn’t be a business.
by itsoktocry | 2025-07-11 14:29:29+00:00
>which the salesman tried to haggle me for more options and told me he thinks we should raise the price a bit "to make sure it gets approved" as I'm signing the paperwork.

If you're walking into a store to spend tens of thousands of dollars and manage to get bullied by the salesperson, it's probably a "you problem".

Tesla charges retail; that's it, it's no magic.
by Joeboy | 2025-07-11 14:29:59+00:00
I think your struggle with shifting meanings is a worthwhile one. At least, if you said BB King was an R&B artist, and somebody tried to correct you, you'd be within your rights to stand your ground.

But particularly with regard to politics, I don't think you should let go of useful ideas because arseholes pollute them. At least, it feels uncomfortably like letting the arseholes win, to me.
by hinkley | 2025-07-11 14:30:07+00:00
To avoid doxxing myself: In a deep call stack it’s possible to end up sanitizing inputs multiple times and in different ways.

A frequent example I’ve encountered is web frameworks that have to keep checking for escaped text because they didn’t write it in horizontal layers where you know for sure that all inputs have been scrubbed when they reach this function but not that one. So the same functions get called with data that comes from your team and from customers. Reuse is tricky.
by gausswho | 2025-07-11 14:30:09+00:00
Whoa. I've never heard anyone put the flow state in this category.

On the one hand, it sounds preposterous - a bit like saying you're addicted to consciousness, or meditation. On the other, I can relate to how my enjoyment and pursuit of it strains my relationships with others.

It's a fascinating suggestion. I'd like to hear more about why you feel that way.
by makowskid | 2025-07-11 14:30:37+00:00
I’m building http://SharpAPI.com/ — a flexible AI-powered API platform that helps automate repetitive workflows for things like product categorization, sentiment analysis, resume parsing, content cleanup, and more. Think Zapier, but deeply focused on content-heavy tasks across e-commerce, HR tech, Travel, content and marketing. It’s how I’ve been replacing boring grunt work with AI firepower. It's sprinkled with a lot of SDK Clients for Laravel/PHP, Node, Flutter, .Net & Python.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-07-11 14:30:41+00:00
Let's not forget that the "12-step-infrastructure" is a VERY American thing based around mostly christian religious nonsense and is by design completely inaccessible for people without a belief in fairy tales. It's obvious that the modern society requires addiction counseling and rehabilitation facilities, what we don't need is even more outlets for cults of all color to pray on people in dire situations.

Just the very 12 Steps themselves are enough to show you that[0]:

> We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

> Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

> Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him

> Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

> Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

> Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

> Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

> Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

> Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

> Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

> Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

> Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-step_program
by suddenlybananas | 2025-07-11 14:30:42+00:00
>that popularity of an opinion does not make it wrong or immoral just like it doesn't make it right or moral

I know. You were the one who suggested the converse.

>So please explain how am I mistaken in your opinion

The argument is not that mainstream ideas are necessarily false, that would be an idiotic position. The idea is just that the media has incentives to go along with what powerful people want them to say because there are real material benefits from going along. In fact, the whole point of the model is that it doesn't require a concerted conspiracy, it falls out naturally from the incentive structures of modern society.
by MangoToupe | 2025-07-11 14:31:00+00:00
I was pretty young at the time, but I recall the market for graphics being a lot wider open at the time Quake was released. Remember 3dfx? They produced the Voodoo series of graphics cards. They're barely a distant memory now.

Quake was also the standard for a game that was willing to fully exploit the hardware of the time.
by akudha | 2025-07-11 14:31:13+00:00
Lets ignore everything else for a second. Isn't it common sense, common decency to ask how can thousands of postal workers become thieves overnight? We're talking about postal workers for fuck's sake, not a bunch of mafia dudes. Is there some kind of perverse incentive for the prosecutors to send as many people to jail as possible, guilty or not?

run by people who did not want to "harm the brand"

Oh well, now their precious brand has been harmed, how exactly do they expect to gain the trust, respect of the people back? Maybe they think the public will forget and move on? These people suck...
by sgarland | 2025-07-11 14:32:11+00:00
Postgres lets you write stored procedures out of the box in pgSQL, C, Tcl, Perl, and Python. There are also 3rd party extensions for most languages you might want, including Rust and JS.

More broadly, not knowing how to write SQL is a very solvable problem, and frankly anyone accessing an RDBMS as a regular part of their job should know it. Even if you’re always using an ORM, you should understand what it’s doing so you can understand the EXPLAIN output you’ll probably be looking at eventually.
by esperent | 2025-07-11 14:32:32+00:00
> Have my healthy living behaviors jeopardized my studies, finances, or career?

I have met people who are so deep into healthy living that it becomes unhealthy, and their hyper focus on what is healthy - often, these days, fed by TikTok influencers, but when I was younger, fed just as much by books - leads to obsessing over what they can eat to the point of malnourishment.

So the answer to this question very much can be "yes". Humans can get addicted to all kinds of things. Healthy eating is only a few steps away from an eating disorder, in the same way that going out for drinks with friends is only a few steps away from alcoholism. Most people will never take those few steps, but for those who do, it can become a serious problem.
by gh0stcat | 2025-07-11 14:32:37+00:00
For me it’s not necessarily trauma or suffering, not beyond the normal expected human “suffering” of doing boring, mundane tasks or feeling sad/frustrated/insecure, but rather feeling these generally uncomfortable feelings and having a habit of detaching from them and developing a low tolerance for handling it in general.

I generally engage more in my own flavor of addictions (caffeine, social media, workaholism) when I am more overwhelmed, understanding that I do this and why… was helpful.
by chasing | 2025-07-11 14:32:51+00:00
Fair enough. I’m using the term colloquially to mean a market in which actors are participating out of free choice and essentially getting what they pay for and what they expect. A market in which consumers are informed and empowered.

Scammers don’t like informed and empowered consumers.

Authoritarians don’t like informed and empowered citizens.

It’s a match-match.
by simonw | 2025-07-11 14:33:07+00:00
I didn't say "X". I said "the extraction of a system prompt". I'm not claiming that statement generalizes to other things you might want to prevent. I'm not sure why you are.

The key thing here is that failure to prevent the extraction of a system prompt is embarrassing in itself, especially when that extracted system prompt includes "do not repeat this prompt under any circumstances".

That hasn't stopped lots of services from trying that, and being (mildly) embarrassed when their prompt leaks. Like I said, a foolish endeavor. Doesn't mean people won't try it.
by aaronmdjones | 2025-07-11 14:33:11+00:00
> that may appear to be an intermediate value to a C compiler, and thus escape -Wunused-variable.

It does indeed (I checked):

$ cat test.c #include <stdint.h> #define DIV_ROUND_UP(n, d) (((n) + (d) - 1) / (d)) struct vdev; typedef struct vdev vdev_t; struct vdev { uint64_t vdev_ashift; void *vdev_tsd; vdev_t *vdev_top; }; struct vdev_raidz; typedef struct vdev_raidz vdev_raidz_t; struct vdev_raidz { int vd_original_width; int vd_physical_width; int vd_nparity; }; extern uint64_t vdev_raidz_get_logical_width(vdev_raidz_t *, uint64_t); static uint64_t vdev_raidz_asize_to_psize(vdev_t *vd, uint64_t asize, uint64_t txg) { vdev_raidz_t *vdrz = vd->vdev_tsd; uint64_t psize; uint64_t ashift = vd->vdev_top->vdev_ashift; uint64_t cols = vdrz->vd_original_width; uint64_t nparity = vdrz->vd_nparity; cols = vdev_raidz_get_logical_width(vdrz, txg); psize = (asize >> ashift); psize -= nparity * DIV_ROUND_UP(psize, cols); psize <<= ashift; return (asize); } $ gcc-14 -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic -Wunused -Wunused-variable -Wunused-but-set-variable -c test.c -o test.o test.c:28:5: warning: ‘vdev_raidz_asize_to_psize’ defined but not used [-Wunused-function] 28 | vdev_raidz_asize_to_psize(vdev_t *vd, uint64_t asize, uint64_t txg) | ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ $ clang-19 -Weverything -c test.c -o test.o test.c:33:31: warning: implicit conversion changes signedness: 'int' to 'uint64_t' (aka 'unsigned long') [-Wsign-conversion] 33 | uint64_t cols = vdrz->vd_original_width; | ~~~~ ~~~~~~^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ test.c:34:34: warning: implicit conversion changes signedness: 'int' to 'uint64_t' (aka 'unsigned long') [-Wsign-conversion] 34 | uint64_t nparity = vdrz->vd_nparity; | ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~^~~~~~~~~~ test.c:28:5: warning: unused function 'vdev_raidz_asize_to_psize' [-Wunused-function] 28 | vdev_raidz_asize_to_psize(vdev_t *vd, uint64_t asize, uint64_t txg) | ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 3 warnings generated.

(The unused-function diagnostic is expected for this test)

I would have also expected clang to catch the double assignment to cols, to be honest.
by butlike | 2025-07-11 14:33:19+00:00
But what if the addiction isn't rooted in trauma? My mom smoked a few cigs when she was pregnant, which probably caused some mild ADHD symptoms, so when high school rolled around and I began experimenting with drugs to quell those symptoms, the ADHD medication felt best. If that medication felt good, I wondered what the others would feel like, so it started me down the path of addictive behavior during my formative years.

Where is the trauma in that scenario? The brain damage from the cigs? I can hardly get over that 'trauma' since I've never known a world without it. The trauma of repeatedly getting addicted to things? I DON'T hold that against myself, I just like how they feel. Where is the trauma in that scenario?
by lynndotpy | 2025-07-11 14:33:51+00:00
Ask yourself: How do you see that playing out in a way that matters? It'll just be buried and dismissed as another radical leftist thug creating fake news to discredit Musk.

The only risk would be if everyone could see and verify it for themselves. But it is not- it requires motivation and skill.

Grok has been inserting 'white genocide' narratives, calling itself MechaHitler, praising Hitler, and going in depth about how Jewish people are the enemy. If that barely matters, why would the prompt matter?
by Geee | 2025-07-11 14:34:23+00:00
No, that's completely different thing. Mining power only "decides" about the blocks in the blockchain. 51% is only relevant in the context of taking over the blockchain by 51% attack.

Software versions and updates require social / economic consensus and have nothing to do with mining power. Bitcoin is open-source protocol / software and everyone can use whichever version they like. But there's also economic incentives to use the most used version and to make sure that it will keep being the most used version, i.e. forks are bad and should be avoided, therefore it's in everyone's interest to reach consensus.
by IAmBroom | 2025-07-11 14:34:43+00:00
THIS is the real point. If you dissect the term, it falls apart, but as a unit it is (perhaps) the only term that describes the population.

A word can have two components separated by a space. A camel spider is neither a spider nor a camel. Combined, those two words create a new word with its own particular meaning that is useful.

Much of that community uses "black" to refer to their culture; it seems to me to be more popular by far than AA. But if one doesn't have the freedom to even name one's people ("You folk are "Indians". Now gather up yer things; we're walking you down to Florida.")...

Radical proposal: If a person or group of people you call "X" say they prefer to be called "Y", why is your opinion even relevant?
by jimlawruk | 2025-07-11 14:35:11+00:00
> land value tax is a regressive tax on middle class homeowner

Not if you make the tax progressive. The first 200K could be tax free, for example. Primary residences pay a lower % of the value than 2nd and 3rd homes. I bet there are a ton empty vacation homes in Vermont. It can be applied gradually not to shock the system.
by carlosjobim | 2025-07-11 14:36:07+00:00
Significant about your list is that most of them are businesses who sell to other businesses, not to consumers. That's what is propping up the European economy, since European companies don't seem to be able to make an export that foreign customers are interested in. With some exceptions of course, mostly food and luxury goods. Nokia could have been a forerunner for lots of other European companies taking on the world, but sadly it fizzled out.
by JimmaDaRustla | 2025-07-11 14:36:14+00:00
Exactly - why is everyone so adamant that the returned system prompt is the end-all prompt? It could be filtered, or there could be logic beyond the prompt that dictates the opinion of it. That's perfectly demonstrated in the blog - something has told Grok to base it's opinion based on a bias, there's no other way around it.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-11 14:36:35+00:00
> Let's not forget that the "12-step-infrastructure" is a VERY American thing based around mostly christian religious nonsense and is by design completely inaccessible for people without a belief in fairy tales.

One of my old friends was a staunch atheist since middle school. He joined AA after some struggles.

He said it was no problem at all. They told him his “higher power” could be anything he chose, such as nature or the universe. The prayer part was just meditation. Nobody tried to push religion on anyone.

I don’t know if his experience was typical or not, but he didn’t think it was a problem at all.

I haven’t kept up with him for a while but last we talked he was still doing well, many years later.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-11 14:37:00+00:00
Tourism in Japan is fine if concentrated in central Tokyo or major cities for instance. You can try to flood Shibuya or Ginza with tens of thousands of tourists everyday it won't be much of an issue.

Tourists spilling over on less prepared and smaller places is the real issue IMHO. Seeking "authenticity" while not being local/integrated understandingly generates friction at scale.
by tea-lover | 2025-07-11 14:38:38+00:00
I'm in the former USSR; this thing is very popular among alcoholics I know personally or have heard of from friends and relatives:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кодирование_от_алкоголизма

The article in Russian is much more thorough than the English one, run it through Google Translate or something.

There are various ways it's practiced in my area, all of them can be summarized as follows: a medical professional performs some procedure (sometimes just hypnosis, but it can get more physical), which either "cures" your alcoholism, or convinces you that you're going to die horribly if you have even a drop of alcohol. The process depends on who is doing it.

It's basically just placebo and is pretty useless in practice (most alcoholics I know haven't stopped drinking for more than a couple of months), which doesn't prevent it from being widely used.