MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derektank | 2025-07-29 22:19:34+00:00
I don't understand why any business would endeavor to not benefit all people. Like, we should expect grocery stores to benefit bad people. We should expect payment processors to benefit bad people. We should expect clothing retailers to benefit bad people. The goal shouldn't be to prevent bad people from benefitting, the goal should be to prevent bad people from leveraging your business toward their malicious aims. Even the worst people have completely neutral or even benevolent objectives some of the time.
by WalterBright | 2025-07-29 22:20:06+00:00
Why did Lasik machines decrease in cost, while increasing in efficacy?

Drugs were far cheaper before the 1962 FDA Amendments, after that was a massive increase in costs. See "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman.

https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-...

See also:

How American Health Care Killed My Father https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...
by melenaboija | 2025-07-29 22:21:01+00:00
I validate models in finance, and this is by far the best tool created for that purpose. I'd compare financial model validation to a Master's level task, where you're working with well established concepts, but at a deep, technical level. LLMs excel at that: ithey understand model assumptions, know what needs to be tested to ensure correctness, and can generate the necessary code and calculations to perform those tests. And finally, they can write the reports.

Model Validation groups are one of the targets for LLMs.
by o11c | 2025-07-29 22:21:32+00:00
Quite a few bytes can be golfed out of that still:

python3 -c 'while I := __import__: I("time").sleep(0.01); print(I("random").choice("\u2571\u2572"), end="", flush=1)'

My reasoning including most failures:

Whitespace is mostly trivial and not worth mentioning, except that the space between "or" and "print" can be eliminated by moving the `time.sleep` to before a string literal. Alternatively, using `!=` works almost anywhere (though not with some alternative ideas), or `;` with the `while` version.

There are several shorter ways to get an infinite loop:

itertools.repeat(None) # for reference itertools.repeat(0) itertools.count() iter(lambda: 0, 1) # also removes the import, so 10 chars shorter iter(''.upper, 1) # same length when spaces removed, shorter if not removed iter(int.mro, 1) # spooky, but one char shorter still range(9**99) # much longer than the age of the universe range(9**9) # 44 days # but it turns out we can skip it entirely

The loop itself:

any(expr for x in it) # theoretically prevents the memory leak [expr for x in it] # wastes 800 bytes per sec, 69 MB/day, 1 GB per 14 days while 1: expr # breaks one-liner unless longer `__import__("")` is used, but worth it since it eliminates the entire iterable, even before doing I=__import__ while I := __import__: # 2 chars shorter than doing the assignment inside the loop

I looked into alternatives to calling sleep at all, but computers are too fast (and variable in speed) nowadays. `os.sync` looked promising but is only slow the first time. Trying to pass its return value as an argument also failed.

`flush=1` is shorter than `flush=True`. Otherwise ... I tried `sys.stdout` but hardly anything was even close:

any(time.sleep(0.01) or print(random.choice("\u2571\u2572"), end="", flush=True) for it) any(time.sleep(0.01) or print(random.choice("\u2571\u2572"), end="", flush=1) for it) sys.stdout.writelines(time.sleep(0.1) or random.choice("\u2571\u2572")+"\0"*8191 for it) # can avoid the flush by filling the buffer manually, but requires several more chars to import sys as well

Random:

random.choice("\u2571\u2572") # UTF-8 b"\xe2\x95\xb1" doesn't seem useful chr(9585+random.randrange(2)) # sigh chr(9585+(random.random()<.5)) # nope chr(9585+(os.getrandom(1)[0]&1)) # + has tigher precedence than & # that last would save 1 byte with normal `import` (since the identifier is repeated), but loses with `__import__` # is there a way to eliminate parens? Is >> or | or - useful? What about *splat?
by rs186 | 2025-07-29 22:21:37+00:00
The moment I saw nytimes' reporting that a dad lost access to his Google account because of "nude" photos of his baby and couldn't get help, I de-Googled almost completely and am now using fastmail as my main email account. My other inboxes are only kept just in case someone reaches me via those old addresses.

I knew that if I didn't do that, the same thing would some day happen to me.
by mandmandam | 2025-07-29 22:21:51+00:00
> There’s a very high chance that if we wait for those things to be solved before going out, we’ll simply never go out.

I think the opposite is true.

Right now, humanity is unable to solve genocide, nuclear proliferation, starvation, incredible inequality; or even airplane food.

If we go out as this privatized mess, there's not a good chance of a positive outcome. Space is too vast - far, far, far, far, far too vast*. And far more dangerous than most people think, as this article scratches the surface of.

If we come together as a species and fix our major problems before we kill the planet, then we have thousands of years to get space right; and when we do, we won't be bringing our massive problems with us.

* - "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."
by jibal | 2025-07-29 22:21:54+00:00
"Just because ... I can't be ..." [strawman] -- of course it doesn't mean you can't be ... you simply weren't.

"In 1991 it was almost universally referred to as the Internet (capital I): I met only one person between then and now who called it ARPANET."

What "it"? Again, the ARPANET and the Internet are (were, since the ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990) different things.

The Internet is called that because it was formed from interconnected networks, one of which was the ARPANET. The ARPANET did not become the Internet in 1983, it simply adopted the protocols that would later be the basis of the entire Internet.

This isn't worth pursuing further.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-29 22:22:13+00:00
When I grew up I would spend hours looking through all the plastic model kits at the local hobby store. I just loved building plastic models.

I never mastered painting them. The most advanced I got was rattle-can style spray paints — maybe masking a bit for a camouflage or what-have-you. Only when I got older and got back into plastic model building did I make the leap to air-brushing and really finishing models correctly.

So many YouTubers (Aztec Dummy comes to mind) have since showed me that assembling the model is more or less nothing. Painting, lighting the model is everything.

I can't complain though. There was a joy putting together the models when I was young. The smell of the glue of course — the spatial reasoning it fostered... It was like sculpture to my young mind — forms, shapes in three-dimensions. I grew to love the lines of certain cars, planes, spacecraft…

I think too it fueled a kind of designer mindset in me. I would soon draw cars, spaceships, etc. of my own design.

What a great hobby.

I'm saddened that it kind of seems like another hobby, like R/C planes or model rocketry, that has fallen by the wayside. I mean I feel like most boys when I was growing up had a model or two hanging from their bedroom ceiling. Right?
by prmoustache | 2025-07-29 22:22:17+00:00
I think the true reason is that onñy a small fraction of people are interested in convergence and most people are fine, or even truly desire, to have different devices and experiences.

Millions (billions?) of people are happy to leave their phone in another room when working on their computer and vice-versa. Sure you could use a do not disturb button but it would be a major PITA to have enough granularity to allow or disallow certain app/services to notify you and you would be certain to forget to activate/deactivate it when you really want.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-29 22:23:21+00:00
> read your #2 source. That one says competition is fine in rural areas because carrying capacity is still sufficient

Do you mean No. 3, the Oregon State University article?

No. 2, the USGS article, explicitly says "honey bees are also significant competitors of native bees and should not be introduced in conservation areas, parks, or areas where you want to foster the conservation of native plants and native bees."

(As for the Oregan State University article, the word rural never appears. It's focussed on urban areas, where honeybees have a smaller foraging radius and native bees are largely extinct. The carrying capacity argument only applies "during periods of abundant pollen and nectar.")
by achierius | 2025-07-29 22:23:21+00:00
> I generally will respond to stuff like this with "people do this, too"

But why? You're making the assumption that everyone using these things is trying to replace "average human". If you're just trying to solve an engineering problem, then "humans do this too" is not very helpful -- e.g. humans leak secrets all the time, but it would be quite strange to point that out in the comments on a paper outlining a new Specter attack. And if I were trying to use "average human" to solve such a problem, I would certainly have safeguards in place, using systems that we've developed and, over hundreds of years, shown to be effective.
by ost-ing | 2025-07-29 22:23:32+00:00
Although I am younger than you, I feel somewhat similar. The never ending treadmill of technology seemingly makes things worse rather than better. I’m working in robotics, and I think is this actually the right thing to be doing? - but if I dont, then I wont eat and afford my future.

Really feels like society is burning the candle at both ends.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-07-29 22:23:34+00:00
> "Is it existential discomfort around intelligence no longer being uniquely human? Is it anxiety about potential job displacement? Or is it perhaps a concern about intelligence itself losing its perceived special status? Or are people simply trolling?"

Am I the only one utterly tired of the LLM boosters who write derisive things about LLM skeptics like this? The question has already been sincerely been answered by many people over and over yet they insist it is because skeptics are "scared of LLM". This baiting is not worthy of a response.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-07-29 22:23:41+00:00
Not so technically, your business needs customers and efficiencies. Big tech strategically positions themselves at those choke points.

But realistically , if Google and Apple both for whatever reason banned you from all their services, idk why, then you would not have access to a phone. So then you say, well, it was just one person in ten million, and they probably did something wrong-- and now you share the same perspective as Big Tech on this specific issue.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-29 22:24:05+00:00
The problem is they get good in that specific disaster. They can only plug a hole in the dike after the hole exists, then they look at the hole and make a plug the exact shape of that hole. The next hole starts the process over for it specifically. Each time. There's no generic plug that can be used each time. So sure, the get very good at making specific plugs. They never get to the point of making a better dike that doesn't spring so many leaks.
by wahern | 2025-07-29 22:24:32+00:00
I think the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is an example where studying the history is in some sense counter-productive. There's more than a century of atrocities that justify each subsequent reaction; the veritable cycle of violence. And whichever atrocity grabs you first (partly based on present cultural narratives) will color how you perceive everything else.

Moreover, the conflict is unfolding. What matters isn't what happened 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago, but what has happened recently and is happening. A neighbor of mine who recently passed was raised in Israel. Born circa 1946 (there's black & white footage of her as a baby aboard, IIRC, the ship Exodus 1947), she has vivid memories as a child of Palestinian Imams calling out from the mosques to "kill the Jews". She was a beautiful, kind soul who, for example, freely taught adult education to immigrants (of all sorts), but who one time admitted to me that she utterly despised Arabs. That's all you need to know, right there, to understand why Israel is doing what it's doing. Not so much what happened in the past to make people feel that way, but that many Israelis actually, viscerally feel this way today, justifiably or not but in any event rooted in memories and experiences seared into their conscience. Suffice it to say, most Palestinians have similar stories and sentiments of their own, one of the expressions of which was seen on October 7th.

And yet at the same time, after the first few months of the Gaza War she was so disgusted that she said she wanted to renounce her Israeli citizenship. (I don't know how sincere she was in saying this; she died not long after.) And, again, that's all you need to know to see how the conflict can be resolved, if at all; not by understanding and reconciling the history, but merely choosing to stop justifying the violence and moving forward. How the collective action problem might be resolved, within Israeli and Palestinian societies and between them... that's a whole 'nother dilemma.

Using AI/ML to study history is interesting in that it even further removes one from actual human experience. Hearing first hand accounts, even if anecdotal, conveys information you can't acquire from a book; reading a book conveys information and perspective you can't get from a shorter work, like a paper or article; and AI/ML summaries elide and obscure yet more substance.
by noident | 2025-07-29 22:25:03+00:00
I've run a private server with my friends since the Riot days (2018? Earlier?)

Here's how I made it work:

- No federation. You click an invite link I send you and make an account on my server. Therefore, no spam.

- Encryption disabled in the main group chat room. The encryption experience was very poor in Riot and remains inexplicably baffling to non-technical users in Element. Supposedly Element X fixes these problems, but it doesn't support the type of SSO my server uses yet. I decided to just turn it off. DMs are still encrypted.

- Use Synapse.

- $5 tier digital ocean droplet. I plan to move it to my homelab soon.

For the most part, it has been pretty smooth. Dealing with encryption UX issues was the low point.

I wish that there were custom emoji packs though :(
by mkipper | 2025-07-29 22:25:07+00:00
I guess "often" is relative, but this happens to me pretty regularly.

I live in Canada, and it's not always obvious if an American company ships here or not. If the answer isn't trivial to find, I'll do this:

1. Add something to the cart 2. Start the checkout process as a guest 3. Fill in the boxes that pop up during the checkout process 4. Close the tab when I see that the country dropdown only has USA available

On most websites these days, you're asked for your email before your mailing address. And after I abort the checkout, I'll get an annoying "Psst...you forgot something in your cart" email a few hours later even though I never made an account or placed an order with my email.

Stores built with Shopify do this so consistently that I have to assume it's an out-of-the-box feature you need to opt out of.
by palata | 2025-07-29 22:25:23+00:00
> which is largely what is happening when people reject jj in favour of arcane git incantations

JJ is interesting, though I find some things worse than git (no email workflow, and nothing that does what `git add -p` does. In the article, it shows the limitation of the TUI for `jj split`).

But what I don't get is seemingly all those people who seem to believe that git is rocket science. Yes, JJ seems in a good position to become nicer than git. But git is not hard. I don't get that part at all. So many comments saying "I have been using git for 15 years, yet I don't understand what detached HEAD / stash / git add -p / some not-so-complicated concept means".
by 9rx | 2025-07-29 22:25:57+00:00
> You say that like its purely due to AB gov's conservative bullshit.

What suggests "conservative government bullshit"? The NDP held power in Alberta when these regulations were coming into force elsewhere. That is about as far away from conservatism as it gets in Canada.

"Of course" no doubt refers to the fact that Health Canada found the culprit to be dust-off from pneumatic planters. Whereas the crops in Alberta are almost exclusively seeded with drills, which are quite different in design to a planter and don't exhibit the same dusting characteristics. In other words, they never had the same problem Ontario and Quebec had. — Not to mention that Health Canada had already updated regulations to require technical changes to planters to minimize/eliminate dust-off, so for what little planter use might be found in Alberta, Health Canada was already on top of it, leaving little reason for the province to step in.

Calling it a ban in Ontario and Quebec is what is misleading. Farmers had to become licensed to use them, but they were never banned. It was mostly theatre.
by fmajid | 2025-07-29 22:26:08+00:00
Funny, Google just announced the Linux Terminal now supports graphical Linux apps. It's closer to WSL2 than a regular app, implementing a fully vrtualized environment.

https://www.androidauthority.com/android-linux-terminal-futu...

Unfortunately, even the text-mode-only Android Terminal is incredibly buggy and crashes on GrapheneOS if you have the audacity of typing Ctrl-D to close your session, requiring a full reset (and losing your data in the process). I am not brave enough to try a non-degoogled Android.
by ben_w | 2025-07-29 22:26:20+00:00
Nah, trillion dollars is about right for "ok". Percentage point of the global economy in cost, automate 2 percent and get a huge margin. We literally set more than that on actual fire each year.

For "pretty good", it would be worth 14 figures, over two years. The global GDP is 14 figures. Even if this only automated 10% of the economy, it pays for itself after a decade.

For "Ahura Mazda", it would easily be worth 16 figures, what with that being the principal God and god of the sky in Zoroastrianism, and the only reason it stops at 16 is the implausibility of people staying organised for longer to get it done.
by kingstnap | 2025-07-29 22:26:53+00:00
"Context engineering" + "Prompt Engineering":

1. Having clear requirements with low ambiguity. 2. Giving a few input output pairs on how something should work (few shot prompting). 3. Avoiding providing useless information. Be consicise. 4. Avoid having contradictory information or distractors. 5. Break complex problems into more manageable pieces. 6. Provide goals and style guides.

A.K.A its just good engineering.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-29 22:26:56+00:00
if you have a web based SaaS, everyone gets the updates. if you have a "simple app", then you are dependent on all of the users being up to date which you just cannot guarantee. also, what is a "simple app" that does not care about differences among various OSes found in the wild? how large of a team do you need for each of those OSes to support as wide of a user base as a web only app?
by graemep | 2025-07-29 22:27:08+00:00
If you have a possible very high return for taking that risk (as the unicorn businesses do) then do it in full knowledge of the risk.

I am not convinced those businesses are good examples. Could they have redeployed elsewhere if they had to? Where they tied to one supplier? Did they have backups else where?

Most businesses and individuals do not have to take that risk and can avoid it.
by cs_throwaway | 2025-07-29 22:28:08+00:00
I agree. We are talking about technical, mathy stuff, right?

As long as you can tell that you don’t deeply understand something that you just read, they are incredible TAs.

The trick is going to be to impart this metacognitive skill on the average student. I am hopeful we will figure it out in the top 50 universities.
by mollymoffit | 2025-07-29 22:28:31+00:00
You missed out the housing!! How local authorities who issue notices of bankruptcy while in the background buying up properties at full retail market prices. Knocking up rental prices beyond affordability. Shoplifting increasing costs of living on top of the large supermarkets profiteering since covid. Slum lords offered a guaranteed rents for a 5 year Contracts including the maintenance and any works required to bring it up to standard of conditions. To house illegal migrants, while these previously extremely poor housing our citizens was and still are forced to live in. Well not for long as no fault evictions are forcing these tenants out of their home. So shady and greedy slum lords can take full advantage of this home office offer , LL are rubbing their filthy hand's together
by roughly | 2025-07-29 22:28:41+00:00
My rule with LLMs has been "if a shitty* answer fast gets you somewhere, the LLMs are the right tool," and that's where I've seen them for learning, too. There are times when I'm reading a paper, and there's a concept mentioned that I don't know - I could either divert onto a full Google search to try to find a reasonable summary, or I can ask ChatGPT and get a quick answer. For load-bearing concepts or knowledge, yes, I need to put the time in to actually research and learn a concept accurately and fully, but for things tangential to my actual current interests or for things I'm just looking at for a hobby, a shitty answer fast is exactly what I want.

I think this is the same thing with vibe coding, AI art, etc. - if you want something good, it's not the right tool for the job. If your alternative is "nothing," and "literally anything at all" will do, man, they're game changers.

* Please don't overindex on "shitty" - "If you don't need something verifiably high-quality"
by p1necone | 2025-07-29 22:28:47+00:00
Imo trying to make a single UX that just changes a little bit to suit different device types is a misguided approach. Using a large screen with a mouse and keyboard is a fundamentally different thing to using a phone with a touch screen.

Using the same hardware for both would be super useful, but the software stack from the desktop environment upwards should be entirely different (yes, including most of the applications!)

There are some fuzzy boundaries - e.g. imo Gnome 3 has proven that a single experience can feel good on both a tablet and a single screen laptop with a good track pad. But I think paradoxically you need to take different approaches on different use modes if you want to provide true unity.
by oddb0d | 2025-07-29 22:29:22+00:00
I'm not sure I fully understand - whilst I agree there's been useful legal work, we now have such a plethora of licenses I ended up having to back what I'd call basic common sense when someone was suggesting using a highly restrictive "community" license that had ridiculous intents such as saying you can't use it in this particular industry because that industry is "bad".

The reason Free/Libre Open Source Software wins - and always will do in the long run - is because the four freedoms are super-simple and they reflect how the natural world works.
by kemotep | 2025-07-29 22:29:28+00:00
Half of your points sound like museum trips, that plenty of non-homeschooled children go to on a regular basis. Additionally why can’t a non-homeschooled child be taken to a grocery store and demonstrated how to make change on a Saturday or after school?

That’s my problem with your specific examples. None of them seem unique to homeschooling.
by thih9 | 2025-07-29 22:30:13+00:00
> Change controls are tighter, and we’re investing in long-term performance improvements, especially in the CMS.

This reads as if overall performance was an afterthought and this doesn’t seem practical; it should be a business metric, it is important to the users after all.

Then again, it’s easy to comment like this in hindsight. We’ll see what happens long term.