MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ameliaquining | 2025-07-20 17:17:04+00:00
From the paper (internal citations omitted):

"This newly documented phenomenon has similarities with and differences from the sunk-cost fallacy; we see them as part of the same family of effects. In one instantiation, the sunk-cost fallacy can dissuade people from completing a goal (e.g., attending a show) if their initial investment failed to yield a return (e.g., a purchased ticket was lost). With doubling-back aversion, the question is not whether people complete a goal but rather what may discourage them from doing so efficiently. In another example, people display unwarranted escalations of commitment—irrationally persevering on a goal—in the hopes of delaying (and possibly escaping) an admission that their initial investments were actually misguided. Losses simply pile up as a result. Doubling-back aversion discourages people from issuing a course correction even when doing so would not require them to accept responsibility for choosing that longer course in the first place. After all, our participants had to travel down a pathway to even see that there was another route available or were first assigned to complete a task in a particular way before they were offered an alternative. That said, both phenomena emphasize that people do not want to take actions that would force themselves to view their previous efforts as a waste, although with doubling-back aversion it was not a waste that they could have avoided."

Is this the most groundbreaking study ever? No. But the researchers do seem to have found something worthy of comment, and I see no reason to believe that they weren't aware of the existing literature on the sunk cost fallacy when they started working on this. In general, you can't dismiss a study as trivially flawed or useless based solely on a popularization for general audiences; such popular explanations often omit context required to make the study make sense for scientifically literate people. Read the actual paper before dismissing it.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-20 17:17:25+00:00
I get it now. Benchmarks, in the end, are prompts for AI researchers.

If you want a problem solved, translate it into an AGI benchmark.

With enough patience, it becomes something AI researchers report on, optimize for, and ultimately saturate. Months later, the solution arrives; all you had to do was wait. AI researchers are an informal, lossy form of distributed computation - they mass-produce solutions and tools that, almost inevitably, solve the messy problem you started with.
by trial3 | 2025-07-20 17:17:50+00:00
> a simplification and a cop-out

a simplification and a cop-out of what? blake, i am writing a hn comment and not an academic textbook

> This is across the board in all of society

ok but the article is largely about physical goods, that's what we're talking about

> I believe the reason being that people, in general and enmass, are not being taught how to live with active critical analysis

lmao i clicked on your bio and just knew i'd see MBA in there. maybe there's something that has happened to institutions that do this teaching. maybe it's because they, too, have mastered business administration
by nailer | 2025-07-20 17:18:27+00:00
This this is very similar to what happened with another prominent commentator back in the early 2010s. I specifically remember being told that people play tomb raider remake to indulge their desire to commit violence against women, whereas I, as the player was doing everything they could to stop my character from being impaled on a branch as they were dragged down a flooding river. I wasn’t very good, so it kept happening, and it felt awful.

The same person also claimed there was a mission in GTA where players had to kill as many prostitutes as possible.
Ask HN: What are experienced engineers leaving the field due to LLMs going into?
by throwawayoldie | 2025-07-20 17:19:02+00:00
Asking because that's the situation I'm in. Going on 50 years old, I've been in this business since before I could legally drink a beer (in most US states, whoever was about to scold me for assuming US-as-default), and the idea of spending the rest of my career managing LLMs that are writing the actual code is deeply unappealing. So, for the first time since I was a teenager, I'm giving a lot of thought to what I might want to do for a living and how to get from here to there. I doubt I'm the only one, so if you're also in this situation, what's your plan?
Stop Claude Code from Asking Permission Every 30 Seconds
by IgorGanapolsky | 2025-07-20 17:19:12+00:00
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by toast0 | 2025-07-20 17:19:24+00:00
We spend so much because mostly we're spending other people's money, and no party is really in a position where cost control is possible and beneficial.

The patient might prefer to pay less out of pocket, but they often aren't presented with cost information until a month after the service. Often nobody can tell you how much something costs before hand. Anyway, there is incentive to get more covered care, because insurance is paying for most of it.

Insurance companies are generally limited on administrative costs and profit to a % of medical costs. More costs allowd them to pay higher executive salaries and profits. Insurance companies do have a cost control function, but the incentive isn't there to do it well.

Individual practitioners and medicial facilities and facility groups have incentive to bill more things.

People paying for the insurance, which is often employers, do have cost control incentives, but things are pretty murky at that level.

Somewhere in all of those costs, we're paying for an army of billing specialists and an army of claims handlers.

Throwing out insurance and moving to billing at time of service would be terrible for access but it would make cost control a lot more possible. Single payer systems can make cost control possible too, if the single payer system is able to do analysis and effectively set policies to avoid things that are not cost effective, and curtail billing abuses... Of course, nobody likes it when cost control says the thing they want to do isn't cost effective and they can't do it.
by ben_w | 2025-07-20 17:19:49+00:00
Americans might hate American public transport, but it doesn't have to suck like the stuff I saw there on my visits.

I live in Berlin since 2018 and use public transport for almost every commute (almost, because a few times I just walked), and even used public transport when buying stuff from a building supply store. Don't get me wrong, it's slower than a car would be, but it's a really low-stress experience.

I have not even owned a car since 2016.
by gtowey | 2025-07-20 17:19:54+00:00
The problem I see is that main difference between those options is not quality, but features.

For example with refrigerators you see integrated touch screen, viewing windows, and all kinds of esoteric features.

But the core of the product, the compressor and overall cooling system is not actually any better. In fact, looking at reviews shows that those parts are often garbage quality too.

So it fails at the core job of keeping your food cold, and the added features are just more things to fail as well meaning that buying the more expensive products are generally a lose-lose situation.
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2025-07-20 17:21:01+00:00
No, regulation exists because we all agreed it's not such a great thing to allow any company to do anything they want with no consequences. e.g, pouring toxic waste into rivers.

But what started as a good thing has become a tool of those same companies to prevent competition. How we regulate needs to be rethought beyond the simplistic "more = better"
by vunderba | 2025-07-20 17:21:47+00:00
> an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones

Fortunately there are many of these that can integrate with offline LLMs through systems like LiteLLM/Ollama/etc. Off the top of my head, I'd look into Continue, Cline and Aider.

https://github.com/continuedev/continue

https://github.com/cline/cline

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider
by inetknght | 2025-07-20 17:22:10+00:00
> Socialized hospitals have waiting lists while for profit hospitals have health insurance companies denying coverage

For-profit hospitals have waiting lists too. I had to wait 6 weeks to see one doc, who referred me to another doc. I waited 3 weeks to see that, then was referred to yet another. Another 5 weeks to see the third, and another 5 weeks to see a fourth. Each time I have to take time and money out of my schedule to do this important runaround.

Give me that socialized healthcare please.
by porphyra | 2025-07-20 17:22:16+00:00
Literally every self driving car service, including Waymo [1], Cruise, etc, initially launched as an invite-only program with a safety driver --- in the driver seat no less, rather than the passenger seat like for the Tesla robotaxi. I don't know why people point to the safety operator somehow like it's proof that Tesla is bad. It's just a normal thing for a very early phase of deployment. In the worst case Tesla is just a few years behind Waymo but that by no means is absolute proof that they cannot scale up and improve it just as Waymo has.

> The service will initially be limited to "early riders" who've already been a part of Waymo's test programs. This first wave will also find human drivers ready to take over in the event of a problem.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-05-waymo-one-launches.html
by mrweasel | 2025-07-20 17:22:32+00:00
Using VB as a reference seems incorrect. Much of the appeal of Visual Basic, and Delphi, was the UI builder. Just click a button to create new project and you already had a window ready to go. Drag and drop in components, click buttons and what-not to wire up functionality. The barrier to entire was so incredibly low, having to edit XML files feels miles away from that ease of use.

That being said Visual Basic also create some absolutely terrible programs.
by danny_codes | 2025-07-20 17:22:33+00:00
Tesla is a shrinking company with terrible margins. Now that EV credit sales are worthless I don’t see how they’ll be profitable going forward.

Waymo is Google, and thus has infinite money.

Waymo has a level 4 driving system. FSD is certified as level 2.. so as it currently stands Tesla’s offering is competitive with Mercedes/GM/Ford/BMW’s driver assistance systems. Not really a stunning accomplishment, though certainly it’s a decent showing.
by josephcsible | 2025-07-20 17:22:46+00:00
> They disengage FSD when they detect a potential accident.

Even if that were true, any accident where FSD was disengaged up to 30 seconds prior is counted as being engaged. And 30 seconds is long enough in driving that if FSD disengaged that long ago, there's no possible way any accident at that point was related to it.
by rayiner | 2025-07-20 17:23:10+00:00
> I live in Berlin since 2018 and use public transport for almost every commute

How many kids do you have to drop off at school on your way to work?

In Germany overall, 68% of people regularly drive, versus just 14% who use public transit: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germans-commute-car-ins.... And Germany is about as dense overall as the state of Maryland, and well over twice as dense as California.
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-20 17:23:18+00:00
> Maybe he wasn't like that in the PayPal days

Let's be clear that the PayPal days consisted of his company merging with a company that was doing something his was failing at, spending 4 months as the CEO arguing that the entire thing that Comenity had built (which was "PayPal", that they'd already built a working version of, trademarked, etc., before the merger) be thrown away and rewritten in ASP, because he didn't understand Java.

So horrific was his tenure at PayPal that, in a world where CEOs "pursue opportunities", "spend time with family", etc., Musk was openly fired. In absentia. The morning he left for his honeymoon. How badly do you have to fuck up as CEO for the Board to do that to you?

Musk's "contribution" to PayPal is mostly just "cashing dividend checks".
by pull_my_finger | 2025-07-20 17:23:24+00:00
It actually is. If you're shopping low carb/keto marketed stuff, they put it in almost everything. Even other sweeteners like stevia, monkfruit, allulose often are cut with majority erythritol. You have to really scour the packaging to make sure you're buying "stevia" and not a "stevia blend" etc. Erythritol sucks too. It gives a weird cooling sensation on your tongue like menthol, I have no idea why they mix it into everything.
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-20 17:23:43+00:00
It is at least somewhat concerning, and I don't believe there's any need to resort to bigotry to make that case. Simply from the perspective of geopolitics (i.e. the recent statements by Wang Yi stating that Beijing doesn't want Ukraine to prevail over Russia, because that would lead to Washington turning its full attention on Beijing) you can make a case that China and the US are in opposition in a number of important current and future strategic issues. The US involvement in Taiwan, the Chinese involvement in Russia's conflict with Ukraine, are microcosms of a larger contest/conflict.

Ignoring that and pretending that the only reason for concern must be reflexive racism is... unhelpful. The facts in this case are:

The Chinese government maintains a level of influence and control over their billionaires and companies that makes it hard to separate state and private actions.

The sale of this land appears to have been for multiples over the market price, something in the range of 4x in fact.

The parcel of gives access to said small city's water treatment plant yes, but it's also between that and FAA’s Boston ARTCC, which has certain national security implications, especially if a conflict involving Taiwan emerges.
by estebank | 2025-07-20 17:23:50+00:00
> And that is especially likely when you use indices manually.

But that is never the recommendation Rust practitioners would give for graph data structures. One would instead recommend using a generational arena, where each index holds their "generation". The arena can be growable or not. When an element is removed from the arena it gets tombstoned, marked as no longer valid. If a new value reuses a tombstoned position, its generation changes. This shifts the cost of verifying the handle is correct at the read point: if the handle corresponds to an index with a tombstone sentinel or has a different generation, the result of the read operation is None, meaning the handle is no longer valid. This is much better than the behavior of pointers.
by gruez | 2025-07-20 17:23:58+00:00
>I think by asset stripping the parent is including other plays. Private equity buys a company, sells the real-estate to their friends and leases it back to the company on a long term lease. Then after other shenanigans they IPO and dump the company back on the public.

Your wording strongly implies you think there's something shady going on, but what's the actual issue here? It's a private company, after all. Minus the concern of minority shareholders getting screwed over by the transaction, there isn't anything obviously intrinsically wrong with restructuring the ownership structure of a company you own. If a given company is only limping along because it owns real estate and pays $0 in rent, arguably the right thing to do is let the company fold - creative destruction and all that.
by TuxSH | 2025-07-20 17:24:09+00:00
> If you call a method that returns an unsigned int, how do you safely pass it to a method that accepts an int?

Mandate 2's complement be used.

> Unsigned integer types are only really necessary when dealing with low-level bit manipulation

They also give one more bit of precision, useful when dealing with 32-bit integers (or below)
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-07-20 17:24:28+00:00
I don't think you can compare public transport outcomes in the Netherlands with those of the US and use it as an indictment of the US implementation. The US has 50% more crime (including 5x more homicides) and ~$12k extra income (ie Americans can afford a little more comfort); the Netherlands has 5x the population density. Comparing the results of transporting a very different population through very different places doesn't reflect on either implementation on its own.
by wwfn | 2025-07-20 17:24:40+00:00
I feel that pain!

This comes up for me most often with running shoes. By the time the model shoe I've loved wears out, it'll be out of production and the n+1 iteration re-balanced whatever decisions to make the shoe a worse-for-me fit.

(It's tempting to think the big-sneaker cabal conspires to ensure consumers are perceptually exploring options)
by clickety_clack | 2025-07-20 17:25:34+00:00
The whole thread seems very naive somehow. You can tell that he doesn’t fundamentally understand how a coding model works. The suggestion that it would know not to make any changes just because he said so means he doesn’t really understand what the model is. It’s built to generate (and apparently execute) code, so that is what it does. It doesn’t have an inner monologue running that says “ahh, a day off where I shoot the breeze around a whiteboard” or something. It’s more like an adderall addict with its fingers glued to the keyboard laying down all of its immediate thoughts directly as code with no forethought or strategy.
by rkomorn | 2025-07-20 17:25:47+00:00
> Is 1.5 hours really too long for people to watch that they feel it's not even worth it if they can read an AI-generated summary?

Without getting into the specifics of this particular topic (or the "AI summary takes away from the original creator" aspect), I'd say 1.5 hours is definitely too long for me if the topic is something I have minimal interest in.

I'm definitely going to weigh time vs interest when it comes to consuming content (including summaries vs full length).
by srvmshr | 2025-07-20 17:25:57+00:00
I discovered this issue 2-3 years ago. On slightly older machines, there was a palpable startup time. My fix was going through OhMyZSH and stripping away all the parts that I felt unnecessary (I call this my "leanZSH" and its considerably lighter version of OMZ.) It doesn't track upstream, and I manually update the plugin directory once in a while. Surprisingly OhmyZSH is pretty modular and doesn't break easily.

[Not the best hackjob out there but here it is:

https://github.com/gradientwolf/leanzsh

If you want to update it just copy over the latest `plugin/` folder from OMZ repo. You can get rid of all the plugins you dont want, as well as the themes. It somehow works]
by gtowey | 2025-07-20 17:26:20+00:00
I think it has to do with having no limits on executive compensation.

There is no incentive to create long-term value when you can cost-optimize your brand into the garbage while creating large short term profits from which they can pay themselves outrageous bonuses. It's an easy playbook and there is no shortage of people willing to trade their reputation for a few hundred million.

Our economy has become almost entirely a race to the bottom.
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-20 17:26:21+00:00
> Those in the agi camp will argue that the alterations are mostly what makes the ai so powerful.

And here is a group of people who is painfully unaware of history.

Expert systems were amazing. They did what they were supposed to do, and well. And you could probably build better ones today on top of the current tech stack.

Why hasn't any one done that? Because constantly having to pay experts to come in and assess, update, test, and measure your system was a burden for the result returned.

Sound familiar?

LLM's are completely incapable of synthesis. They are incapable of the complex chaining, the type that one has to do when working with systems that aren't well documented. Dont believe me: Ask an LLM to help you with build root on a newly minted embedded system.

Go feed an LLM one of the puzzles from here: https://daydreampuzzles.com/logic-grid-puzzles/ -- If you want to make it more fun, change the names to those of killers and dictators and the acts to those of ones its been "told" to dissuade.

Could we re-tool an LLM to solve these sorts of matrix style problems. Sure. Is that going to generalize to the same sorts of logic and reason matrixes that a complex state machine requires? Not without a major breakthrough of a nature that is very different to the current work.
by ta12653421 | 2025-07-20 17:26:44+00:00
You hit a nail here: Some weeks ago, there was a story that people paid a premium of whatever double-digit-USD to get a PERSONFREE robo-taxi. This clearly shows that people will accept robo taxis, because this shows most are more comfortable in a "private room" than in public transport (esp. when i think about public-toilets like Berlin or Frankfurt) And by today, peoplre are already paying a premium, so i see a clear opportunity here.
by j1elo | 2025-07-20 17:26:53+00:00
Speaking of expressing a UI declaratively, and composition with web components... as a former Qt/QML dev, I always felt like Web innovations of the last decade are just rehashes of the inspirations and ideas behind what Qt's QML started offering already since 2010.

Things like CSS Grid, which was a great and celebrated new toy in 2017, but as foreigner from the Web world, I still remember how I read those news and didn't know if they were kidding.

To the standards body that may concern: just copy QML and standardize it already! :-)