MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jqpabc123 | 2025-07-13 22:59:58+00:00
The "corporate mindset" struggles to see beyond next quarter's earnings report.

Eliminating human employees is like a wet dream. But they never bother to consider that their "employees" are known as "customers" or "consumers" to some other corp and vice versa.

Eliminating jobs shrinks the economic pie for just about every product with few exceptions (maybe food, clothing or housing).

If AI was actually capable of eliminating huge numbers of jobs, the end result would almost certainly be economic recession and long term decline --- which will shrink the bottom line for most corporations and their investors.

Capitalism is self limiting in the most brutal way possible --- it is it's own worst enemy.
by sp33der89 | 2025-07-13 22:59:59+00:00
I disagree with the author, but I also get the impression that their view of notes is fundamentally different than mine so there's that.

I like the way LogSeq implemented daily notes, UX wise. It's an infinite scrolling page where you can add and edit dailies, so I end up "doomscrolling" my daily notes and re-reading them a lot more often than in other apps.
by ebiester | 2025-07-13 23:00:08+00:00
I don't doubt it, especially when you have an organization that is focused on building the most effective tooling possible. I'd imagine that they use AI even when it isn't the most optimal, because they are trying to build experiences that will allow everyone else to do the same.

So let's take it on face value and say 95% is written by AI. When you free one bottleneck you expose the next. You still need developers to review it to make sure it's doing the right thing. You still need developers to be able to translate the business context into instructions that make the right product. You have to engage with the product. You need to architect the system - the context windows mean that the tasks can't just be handed off to AI.

So, The role of the programmer changes - you still need technical competence, but to serve the judgement calls of "what is right for the product?" Perhaps there's a world where developers and product management merges, but I think we will still need the people.
by jameshart | 2025-07-13 23:00:48+00:00
Because people seem to be raising a concern that this AI's summaries of police interactions would be relied upon as a substitute for bodycam footage, with people citing regulations absolving police of obligations to record interactions in the first place.

But this AI is being pushed by Axon, who sells bodycam systems. Do you think they would be touting this as a replacement for bodycams?
by djleni | 2025-07-13 23:01:09+00:00
I’m sure some people don’t like any deportations, but I think the reason the bulk of people are upset with the current administration’s approach is its insane militarization, lack of due process, refusal to identify, apparent targeting of normal hard working people, sending people directly to foreign prisons, and sending people to war torn countries they are not from with minimal notice and no opportunity to contest.

Not that deportations are happening.
by ClumsyPilot | 2025-07-13 23:01:53+00:00
EU Ebike regulations are the worst on the planet, our cities are dense and traffic is slow, but we've wasted an opportunity to replace half the cars in European cities.

First consider the 16 mph / 25 km/h speed limit - have you ever seen a road sign with such speed limit? Lowest 'normal' speed limit is 30 km/h. The result is, you are either impeding traffic, or a truck tries to overtake you, misjudges distance and kills you. The lowest speed limit and the ebike speed limit need to match.

Second, the 250W power limit is an ass pull. Imagine you are Cycling up a medium-steep hill - 15% incline. 250 watts gives you 3 miles per hour. Let's say 10 miles per hour is a minimum acceptable speed, that requires 800 watts of power. And god help you if you are overweight or carrying groceries or a child as a passenger.

And ebikes cost £2,000 and £4,000 for a cargo bike because we have imposed 60% tax on importing bicycle parts from China.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-13 23:01:56+00:00
There is a lot of behavior online which I'd characterize as "hearing the dog whistles and barking" that when confront folks they will characterize it as "objecting to things in passionate terms"

Like the Otaku described by Azuma [1] there is a definite regression in terms of the of use of language and ideology, essentially a reversion from a language-using animal which can create unlimited meanings by putting together a finite vocabulary in a grammatical system as opposed to words that have a meaning in and of itself.

For instance, anti-resilience activists will run you out of some communities because you use the word "snowflake" because this is a dog whistle that makes them bark. With their lexicon of triggering words in hand you can talk about the dangers of anti-resilience all day and you're talking right past them.

This style of communication is especially dangerous for marginalized communities because they create a bubble of false consensus that makes them think somebody agrees with them but doesn't do the hard work of explaining themselves and doing the even harder work of bringing about a change of heart across the society would be necessary to do something widespread and durable problems such as the mutual lack of respect between black Americans and the police.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Otaku-Database-Animals-Hiroki-Azuma/d...
by crinkly | 2025-07-13 23:02:27+00:00
We had a very naive version of this at a company I worked for about 25 years ago. It was called “asshole detective”. We captured about 200 user comments and dredged through them by hand and scored particular words and phrases. Then we summed up the scores of each post in a thread. If a user was more than a couple of standard deviations outside the mean it’d flag them as an asshole. After reviewing this over a few weeks we found it was surprisingly good at singling out persistent assholes. It did however never action anything - that was up to a moderator to do.

I imagine it’d be good at getting rid of a lot of modern plagues on social media as they seem to have a small, predictable and shitty vocabulary.
by jfengel | 2025-07-13 23:02:37+00:00
I don't consider myself to know enough to criticize.

Of course what little I do know is all negative. But I've paid only limited attention, and I get nothing from primary sources.

I expect the same from practically everyone -- perhaps excepting South Koreans who at least speak the language. I'd consider it good judgment to say that you just can't meaningfully answer the question.

I'd read a statement you hand me, if you thought that would suffice. But I'll admit I'd consider that weird and likely useless.
by Mithriil | 2025-07-13 23:02:54+00:00
Author writes about and formalizes "consciousness of an object". Like "[Person A] has more consciousness than [Person B] about the object being described".

This kind of consciousness is relative to an object. Shouldn't Consciousness be more about what separates the self and something else?

So, what author talks about should be probably named "instantaneous understanding of an object in consciousness", not "Consciousness".

Also, I disagree about limiting things with the first premise:

> Everything/object has a description, that is, everything has a definite state (no matter what it is).

"Objects" are not permanent. A definite state is hardly possible, except maybe for sub-atomic particles that are be indivisible (according to our current models). And even then, you should describe how they exist with relation to processes and interactions with other particles.

Consciousness of an "object" is thus, I think, not something that has to do with its definite state. Unless you speak of "consciousness of an object through an instantaneous snapshot".
by Aurornis | 2025-07-13 23:03:12+00:00
> You probably use CapCut and think your video editing is special. You think your fucking TikTok with 47 transitions and 12 different fonts is going to get you some viral fame. You think loading up every goddamn effect in their library makes your content better. Wrong, motherfucker.

I know this edgy style appeals to some people, but it’s a quick way to alienate most users. Nothing screams “this project is not for you” like copy that feels like it was targeted at impressing someone’s friends in an edgy Discord, not actual potential users.

Although I don’t think this project is trying to appeal to a general audience with the level of technical expertise required to even begin to use it.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-07-13 23:04:40+00:00
Split the world us/china/other and ignore minor players and there are 1/3/1.

In a given are there is competition but the local competition is likely to be pushed out by Uber Eats who could undercut them out of business for a while. Or just have better tech / customer experience due to scale (looking at you Menulog)
by fasterik | 2025-07-13 23:06:08+00:00
There's a George Carlin bit about politicians. The punchline is "the problem isn't the politicians, it's the people." His point is that nothing emerges from a vaccuum.

Politicians are people just like everyone else, they're just responding to incentives created by a majority vote. Tech companies are just like any other company, except a lot more people are willing to pay for their goods and services. If Carlin were alive, he'd say that the problem isn't the tech companies, it's their customers.

I'm actually far from convinced that tech companies are a net negative for society. Amazon makes billions because everyone wants competitively priced goods delivered to their doorsteps. Google makes billions because they provide free access to a large portion of humanity's information.

My theory is that if you're extremely pessimistic about technology or politics, you probably won't like anything that happens when large groups of humans make collective decisions. There's an air of let's go back to the good old days when we were hunter gatherers to the whole thing. Personally, I've accepted that it's always going to be messy and chaotic, but a lot of good things are going to come out of it as well.
by alvah | 2025-07-13 23:06:54+00:00
GLP-1 definitely doesn’t prevent you increasing your percentage of total calories from protein, and doing regular resistance exercise. That was the advice from my doctor, and while I’m only 2 months in, weekly scans have not yet shown any significant decrease in lean mass. I don’t see any reason why they would, as long as I continue eating protein and lifting heavy things.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-13 23:06:57+00:00
Simple: They charge because people pay for it.

It’s the back door way to collect money from content creators and businesses. Most of the people I know who were using CapCut either had their employers pay for it or had some way to tax deduct it as part of their creator activities.

Paying $20/month on top of an actual business is usually trivial, especially if it saves someone time or improves quality of the content.

The TikTok slop posts aren’t spending any time perfecting their edits. They’re mass producing content as rapidly as they can from phone camera to TikTok
by arp242 | 2025-07-13 23:08:31+00:00
There is no denying that the US has done great stuff over the last 100 years or so. I don't understand this weird flex from some Americans to always claim US is the best at everything at the exclusion of everyone else. Same with the second world war; there are Americans who seem to think they somehow single-handedly won that.

My American ex said she had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day at school. Apparently this is law in most states. I suspect it might be related.
by technothrasher | 2025-07-13 23:09:45+00:00
As a horologist, I want seconds. It annoys me not to have it. I wouldn't care if it isn't the default, as long as I can set it, similarly to how I currently have to set 24-hour time separately on all my machines because the US locale defaults to 12-hour time. That's fine, and understandable. But I'm constantly annoyed, for instance, by Apple's long running absolute refusal to allow the iOS clock to display seconds.
by spauldo | 2025-07-13 23:10:05+00:00
The US decision to abandon thorium cycle research wasn't particularly secret. It wasn't some conspiracy, just a policy decision on where to invest DOE money to get the most "bang" for the buck (literally, since plutonium production was part of the reasoning). It made sense at the time, but the decision was never reviewed after Carter's anti-reprocessing policies went into place.

And if economics were the only hurdle for SMRs, the arctic would be full of them. Flying in diesel or jet fuel to run generators is expensive as hell.

As far as the anti-atom lobby, they're like right there, out in the open, proud of what they do and vocal about it. It's no conspiracy.

Economics is a reason for the lack of nuclear after the 80s, but it's far from the only one.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-13 23:10:39+00:00
Even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts, study finds - https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-02/wealth-mortality-gap - April 2nd, 2025

Association between Wealth and Mortality in the United States and Europe - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259 | https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259
by timr | 2025-07-13 23:10:55+00:00
> The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant conversational environment and usually avoid things that would insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract political topics like it would be online.

It's an interesting theory, and I almost want to agree, but I can assure you that the same approximate percentage of extremist idiots exist in real-world NYC as online. If you doubt me, go to the fountain in Washington Square Park pretty much whenever, and you will meet them.

Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.
by terminalshort | 2025-07-13 23:11:23+00:00
Depends a lot on what the monopoly in question is.

1. How much room for innovation is there?

2. How hard is it to substitute the good / service provided by the monopoly?

In the case of food delivery apps there isn't much room for service improvement. A monopoly here probably isn't preventing much innovation. How much better can you get at delivering food from a restaurant?

And there is an easy substitute in terms of driving to the restaurant yourself, so if the monopoly tries to jack up prices too much they will steadily lose customers. The prices now are so high that they have already lost me. I use those apps < 5 times a year.
by jongjong | 2025-07-13 23:11:30+00:00
I suspect it could be worse than that. It feels like certain countries' tech sectors are being partly taken over by IT workers from foreign intelligence agencies or from foreign entities with ulterior motives. Especially when you consider countries with small populations and few natives in the tech sector.

For example, in Australia, it seems like at least 8/10 software engineers are foreign-born. Most of those are probably genuine (not from intelligence agencies) but Australia has such a tiny native population of engineers compared to that of most foreign countries in its vicinity that it wouldn't be difficult for a country like China or India to overwhelm our tech industry with a few highly-placed workers in order to gain political leverage. I was thinking that there might be more software engineers working for Indian and Chinese intelligence agencies in the world than there are native-born software engineers in Australia (of all kinds). It's a numbers' game.

North Korea seems like the tip of the iceberg there though it is an easy example to talk about because everyone understands how the North Korean government operates and everyone agrees about the threat they pose compared to more subtle threats from other countries which aren't seen as opponents (at least not to the same extent).

But also, consider a company like Facebook which hires maybe 20K or so software devs. A country like India which has a large number of software developers, if it wanted, could easily put together a task force to infiltrate and take over Facebook in a focused decade-long effort if that was its intent. They almost certainly do have some people inside every major tech company right now.

If a group can have a few highly placed people inside a target company, they could then recruit more of their group into the company and start promoting their own until they have full control over the critical systems. It's a weakness of our current highly centralized tech sector.

Something else that could happen is a foreign intelligence agency could wait for people to get promoted naturally and then reach out to dual-nationals which they have leverage over (e.g. because of family members or assets owned in the foreign country) and then use that to demand favors. Then they could help coordinate the engineers to recruit more of their own to achieve even more control. Different groups would form factions within the target company and every normal employee would be unwittingly pushed out because anyone trying to 'improve or simplify things' would be seen as a threat to various nefarious agendas which rely on complexity to hide backdoors or algorithm exploits.

Imagine how valuable it would be if you could hijack's Google's search algorithm or Facebook's recommendation engines to prioritize your group's businesses and/or agendas.
by mlyle | 2025-07-13 23:12:05+00:00
> So it all boils down to that you want a utopian communistic market where you decide what generation gets added and then averages the costs.

I want a market where we pay for things like stability or generation at certain times of day. And I want it regulated, so that we buy enough of these things. This, incidentally, is how well-functioning electric markets have operated for a long time.

> This does not work when the consumers can generate their own electricity through distributed renewables and storage.

Some consumers can, some can't. A lot of consumers and industrial users will be dependent upon a grid. It's reasonable for that common infrastructure to be regulated as a common good, and for it to be stewarded in a way that minimizes systematic risk.
by wyldfire | 2025-07-13 23:12:23+00:00
> Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usually on a much smaller regional scale.

At least in the US we had national monopolies that took serious regulation to solve. That regulation, strangely enough, is still in place. Perhaps early on there's fear to regulate a nascent industry and by the time regulators realize the problem they're too afraid of the power wielded by the monopolists.

In any case, it's never too late to break up these monopolies. The problem is that the Robber Barons are too far in the past to serve as a lesson for current generations. And some folks might remember AT&T but not understand why it was such a big deal.
by try_the_bass | 2025-07-13 23:12:33+00:00
I don't know that I agree with this. I think my information bubble is largely liberal-flavored, and my experience doesn't align with this. I've instead found that those who otherwise embody the most "political correctness" are often the least tolerant of having their views challenged. In fact, my experience has been that the more vocally "progressive" a user is, the more likely they are to resort to cheap zingers and gotchas (politically-correct ones, of course) when their views are challenged (even politely!), instead of engaging in a cooperative way.

I saw this the most in the pre-Musk Twittersphere, but it has metastisized since then. Of course, it's unclear if these types are genuine, trolls, or simply a product of the medium itself, so take it with a grain of salt.

> You're way underplaying the aplifying role of anonymity and connectedness

Fully agree with this, though. I suspect this draws out the worst behavior regardless of professed political/moral affiliation
by compumike | 2025-07-13 23:13:25+00:00
I appreciate the "How to monitor the monitor?" section. Always need a meta-monitor! :)

Hope you might give us a try at https://heiioncall.com/ and let me know if that fits. (Disclosure: our team is building and operating it as a simple monitoring, alerting, on-call rotations solution.) We have the cron job heartbeats, HTTP healthchecks, SSL certificate expiration, etc etc all in one simple package. With mobile app alerts (critical and non-critical), business hours rules, etc. And a free tier for homelabbers / solo projects / etc. :)

Edit: since you mentioned silencing things in your post, we also have very flexible "silence" buttons, which can set silence at various levels of the hierarchy, and can do so with a predefined timer. So if you know you want things to be silenced because you're fixing them, you can click one button and silence that trigger or group of triggers for 24 hours -- and it'll automatically unsilence at that time -- so you don't have to remember to manually manage silence/unsilence status!
by monkeyelite | 2025-07-13 23:13:41+00:00
> internal implementation of std::map > abusing the ordering function

That's the thing about C++. It's not abuse - any strict weak ordering is valid. You are follow the rules and it's guaranteed mathematically to produce correct results.

> capable of comparing any two elements of the key space

You get to define the domain of keys which is almost always a restriction of the possible bits of the key. For example, you can use floats as keys even though nan would break.

> Nor is it intuitive

Intuitive too often means "I haven't seen it before" which is a bias to not learn new approaches of programming. All sufficiently technical knowledge is unintuitive.

- it relies on understanding how balanced trees are typically implemented.

No it doesn't. It's documented API.

> exploit the transitive rule for total orders to avoid unnecessarily performing comparisons

Yes, the comparison must satisfy transitivity. This doesn't violate that.

> I know whining about downvotes is frowned upon here

I downvote low-quality, not to disagree (I did not downvote).
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-13 23:14:03+00:00
That's roughly what I'm planning. There are certain keywords and other signs (last time I looked 40,000 Bluesky users reposted and pinned a certain 'skeet') that I would say are "hostile" and with those I can seed a list of candidates of hostile/non-hostile people and then use active learning methods to expand and clean up the list.

... what I really need is a something that detects 'text in images', i mean, I don't mind if you took a photo of a sign in the real world but posting screenshots is a bad smell, only a tiny fraction are wholesome like this:

https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lseycg7nl22p
by Timwi | 2025-07-13 23:14:47+00:00
The government already decides how much to invest into public infrastructure such as water pipes and water reclamation plants; roads, bridges, traffic lights etc.; air traffic control; the emergency services and coast guard... the list goes on. All these things are indeed already centrally planned.

It's not about telling you what you should need or live without. It's about providing a service.
by ninkendo | 2025-07-13 23:16:16+00:00
There’s been at least 2 times I’ve turned my ignition switch while driving. (Luckily it was into the “on” position instead of off.)

Everyone in this thread thinking “these actions are temporally and physically distinct and therefore impossible for anyone to confuse” isn’t really thinking about the problem the right way. It’s not that I’m actually confusing two actions. It’s that I’m accidentally allowing my brain to perform one action when I meant to let it perform another action. “Allowing” is an important word here, because it illustrates that my brain is capable of doing this on its own without me thinking about it, and often will do it on its own, if I let it.