MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by octopoc | 2025-07-11 13:19:56+00:00
It assigns agency to the person who died.

Think about it this way: I have relative who is vegan, so she has been trying to convince me to kill myself for many years now.

I can still choose whether I do it though, and obviously I chose not to so far, although during COVID I didn’t have much other social interaction, so I nearly went through with it.

I had agency throughout though. I’m not dead because I chose not to go through with it.

That’s the difference.
by gwbas1c | 2025-07-11 13:19:57+00:00
> thinking that our own judgement is better than a doctor judgement, supported by a vast community and shared knowledge, is epistemically interesting.

The medical community is concerned with physical health, mental health, ect.

The Psychedelic community is more like a religion; it is "vast" and there is a lot of "shared knowledge" if you go looking. The thing is, western medicine's purpose really isn't to do the kind of thing that psychedelics are for.

It's probably better not to conflate the two communities, because they use drugs for very different purposes.

A different way to say it: Don't confuse the pharmacy and the liquor store.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-11 13:20:50+00:00
So long as the jury understands this, it's all fine.

If you're on trial for doing X and your jury is told by a prosecution witness "mrkramer did X" and under cross they admit that's based on computer records which are often bogus, inconsistent, total nonsense, it doesn't take the world's best defence lawyer to secure an "innocent" verdict. That's not a fun experience, but it probably won't drive you to suicide.

One of the many interlocking failures here is that the Post Office, historically a government function, was allowed to prosecute people.

Suppose I work not for the Post Office (by this point a private company which is just owned in full by the government) but for say, an Asda, next door. I'm the most senior member of staff on weekends, so I have keys, I accept deliveries, all that stuff. Asda's crap computer system says I accepted £25000 of Amazon Gift Cards which it says came on a truck from the depot on Saturday. I never saw them, I deny it, there are no Gift Cards in stock at our store.

Asda can't prosecute me. They could try to sue, but more likely they'd call the police. If the police think I stole these Amazon cards, they give the file to a Crown Prosecutor, who works for the government to prosecute criminals. They don't work for Asda and they're looking at a bunch of "tests" which decide whether it makes sense to prosecute people.

https://www.cps.gov.uk/about-cps/how-we-make-our-decisions

But because the Sub-postmasters worked under contract to the Post Office, it could and did in many cases just prosecute them, it was empowered to do that. That's an obvious mistake, in many of these cases if you show a copper, let alone a CPS lawyer your laughable "case" that although this buggy garbage is often wrong you think there's signs of theft, they'll tell you that you can't imprison people on this basis, piss off.

A worse failure is that Post Office people were allowed to lie to a court about how reliable this information was, and indeed they repeatedly lied in later cases where it's directly about the earlier lying. That's the point where it undoubtedly goes from "Why were supposedly incompetent morons given this important job?" where maybe they're morons or maybe they're liars, to "Lying to a court is wrong, send them to jail".
by ravishi | 2025-07-11 13:20:53+00:00
What about reframing therapy as counseling?

I'm not there to be healed, I'm there to talk to someone about my problems, my insecurities, the shit I can't (or don't want to) talk to anyone else.

In my current routine with work, two kids and a challenging marriage I don't have the opportunity to get an hour a week of talk with a friend. I have nowhere to vent. So what do I do?

I do therapy. I think of the therapist as some sort of counselor. I exercise my ideas there, I experiment with stuff I would not talk about anywhere else.
by Newlaptop | 2025-07-11 13:21:06+00:00
HFCS is a sugar. The difference between HFCS and standard cane sugar is relatively minor - a 5% difference in the ratio of fructose to glucose.

There's some evidence HFCS is worse than sucrose (standard refined cane sugar) and some metabolic mechanisms to make that plausible, but it's a relatively minor difference compared to just the overall amount of consumption.

10 grams of "sugar" (sucrose) is 5 grams of fructose. 10 grams of high fructose corn syrup is 5.5 grams of fructose.

A diet going from 10 grams of any sugar per day to 50 or 100 grams of any sugar per day is going to have a drastically larger impact on health than if the 10 grams were sucrose vs HFCS.
by rwmj | 2025-07-11 13:21:11+00:00
I did read a very technical report about this which obviously now I can't find :-( My takeaways were: (1) They didn't bother with double-entry bookkeeping. (2) It was a distributed system which no one fully understood and was not based on any normal distributed system principles. (3) Developers made ad hoc changes to the code and even database to temporarily patch things up, even going so far as to hard-code database ids into special cases throughout the code.

Edit: I think this one: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-... Also related article: https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2021/07/15/what-went-wrong-with...
by orwin | 2025-07-11 13:21:36+00:00
Turkey was in the same position as India in the 90s: in the beginning of their demographic transition, without significant oil and gas reserves. In the 90s it was clear the Turks had a better grip on their transition economics (large infrastructure projects, national corporation grabbing international importance). Since the late 2000s however, for some european observers, it seems that they might have missed their chance.

However, like with India, the "demographic dividend" window started on the late (~2023 for Turkey, ~2021 for India), unlike China and its one=child policy which kickstarted the demographic dividend extremely early in their demographic transition. For some (including me), this hsorten the window and i personnaly think they will exit this window before 2040, 2045 at the very best, but others (economists more than demographs) it won't have an impact on the duration and end in ~2050. In any case, the next 20/30 years are the true test for India and Turkey, so any person saying that its "too late" for either of those countries is wrong.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-07-11 13:21:43+00:00
My guess is you had a bad experience (or multiple) when seeking therapy and you’ve elected to write off the entire exercise as useless as a result. Or maybe it’s ideological underpinnings - I’ve seen a lot of that with some of my more conservative associates who think it’s about taking charge of your life and simply making the necessary changes - driving your skepticism. I can’t say but I can tell you that this is terrible advice and nobody should listen to it.
by 7sigma | 2025-07-11 13:22:04+00:00
> List them. - Citizenship and Entry into Israel lay (2003), denies the right to acquire Israeli citizenship to Palestinians from occupied territories even if married to citizens of Israel - Absentee's property law, which expropriates the ethnically cleansed palestinians in 1948 - Land Acquisition for Public Ordinance, which allows state to confiscate Palestinian land - Jewish Nation state law that stipulates that Jews only have the right to self determination

There's actually 65 apparently https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/7/19/five-ways-israeli-l...

> Because they're a different country, remember?

They are being occupied illegaly for decades, remember? by a supremacist ethno state, remember?
by westurner | 2025-07-11 13:22:12+00:00
Is there a geometric analogue to this, too; like the amplituhedron?

/? amplituhedron

From "Deflection of electromagnetic waves by pseudogravity in distorted photonic crystals" (2023) https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.108.0... :

> Amplituhedrons are also "quantum-geometric" "manifolds" (?); and so no Feynman diagrams.

> [...]

> "Coherent Surface Plasmon Polariton Amplification via Free Electron Pumping" (2022) https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1572967/v1

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30782678 :

> - [ ] Maybe Twistor theory has insight into a classical geometrical formulation that could be run on a non-QC?

> Amplituhedron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron

Imaging of electrons and electron behavior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186410 :

> "Optical widefield nuclear magnetic resonance microscopy" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55003-5 ; phase and intensity for each pixel/voxel

/? electrons

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41765192

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42082690 ; electron hydrodynamics in graphene at room temperature

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775612 ; Re: sonoluminesence, Earthquake light, piezoelectricity and quartz and gold and surface plasmon polaritons
by Voultapher | 2025-07-11 13:22:56+00:00
I'm surprised their testing didn't catch it. And while I get that turning on warnings in a code-base not designed with them can be annoying, `-Wunused` is certainly within reach. I've enabled and maintained `-Weverything` in a 30m LoC C code base that is older than myself. OpenZFS should try harder to enable such warnings in their CI.
by secondcoming | 2025-07-11 13:23:19+00:00
The inquiry into this scandal was live streamed on Youtube.

You had lawyers quizzing people from all ranks of the Post Office and Fujistu; very interesting.

Ever since, I’ve worded my work related electronic communications with the supposition that a lawyer may read them at some point in the future.

If I’m ever asked to do something seemingly unusual or ‘out of the box’, it must be put to me in writing.
by mystraline | 2025-07-11 13:25:10+00:00
Governments should have access to all the source of code they buy licenses to (and provided at sale), as a precondition of selling to a government.

When these sorts of things happen, the source can be subpoena'd with the relevant legal tool, and reviewed appropriately.

Why governments don't do this is beyond me. It greatly limits liability of gov procurement, and puts the liability on the companies selling such goods.
by reactorcore3 | 2025-07-11 13:25:15+00:00
Built this as a learning tool for audio effects using Web Audio API and Tone.js. Load any audio file (WAV/MP3/OGG) and apply 16 different effects with Off/Subtle/Overt intensity levels. All processing happens locally in the browser.

Originally designed to help non-technical users understand how audio filters work by creating dramatic voice changes (hence the tongue-in-cheek name), but it's become useful for quick audio experimentation in general.

The three-tier intensity system makes it easy to hear exactly how each effect modifies the signal, which I found helpful when learning about filters, distortion, modulation, etc.
by jovial_cavalier | 2025-07-11 13:25:28+00:00
Is there perhaps a reason that you wouldn't talk about it anywhere else? Is it because it's deluded and antisocial? Consider that some thoughts should just remain internal.

The main trick of therapy is to get you to show the monster that lurks inside of you to someone else. Everyone has bad impulses, but by giving them voice the therapist can convince you there's something wrong with you, and that needs to be explored. And now that you've revealed how monstrous you are to the therapist, you may as well keep seeing him, right? After all, nobody else needs to know about this...
by viraptor | 2025-07-11 13:25:54+00:00
> And a cut from a blade is a lesson to be learned, hopefully only once.

A cut from a simple blade (that can't chop your finger off) can be anything from easily healed to going through just the right part to limit the dexterity for life if you're unlucky. There's lots of time to learn using a sharp knife when they have great fine motor skills already.
by rapatel0 | 2025-07-11 13:26:12+00:00
The key insight here is "too compliant to user requests"

What likely happened is that a few people decided to query groq in to generate ragebait traffic to the page/account/etc. Then critical mass happened to make it go viral. Then it confirms prior biases so the media reported it as such (and also drive clicks and revenue).

Microsoft had basically the same scandal with twitter chatbot as well a few years ago.

Sadly, ragebait is a business model.
by olalonde | 2025-07-11 13:26:19+00:00
> Show a single so called “bitter” example from my posts

"crypto bros LARPing". "it’s simply an illegal/unlicensed lottery"

> And I would be happy to be corrected if I made a mistake, instead of getting personal remarks.

Sure.

> Nakamoto Consensus didn’t solved a secure scalable PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant) Consensus.

How could it? PBFT is an algorithm, not a problem to be solved. Bitcoin is byzantine fault tolerant though.

> Bitcoin didn’t solved a forkability and finality problems.

There's no such thing as a "forkability problem" and Bitcoin solves finality through PoW.

> And indeed Bitcoin was forked multiple times, and the solution to forks was almost always either centralized and/or social.

That's wrong. The vast majority of forks are resolved algorithmically. There were only 2 or 3 unintentional hard forks in the early days that were due to bugs. This hasn't happened since 2013.

The only real "social" aspect of Bitcoin is what value people decide to assign to the coins.
by donohoe | 2025-07-11 13:27:25+00:00
I appreciate the thoughtful comment. Speaking from the product side at Rest of World, one of the things that really drew me to the org (and still keeps me excited to work here) is how independent the newsroom is. It is also a non-profit with its own board. Editorial decisions are in the hands of the editors, and that independence is foundational, not just aspirational.

Context and transparency matter and you can dig more into the editorial and ethics policies here: https://restofworld.org/about/ethics-editorial-policies/

Saying again for transparency, in case it was missed - I work there :)
by modderation | 2025-07-11 13:27:35+00:00
This looks interesting! I've been building a similar tool that uses TreeSitter to follow changes to AST contents across git commits, with the addition of tying the node state to items in another codebase. In short, if something changes upstream, the corresponding downstream functionality can be flagged for review.

The ultimate goal is to simplify the building and maintenance of a port of an actively-maintained codebase or specification by avoiding the need to know how every last upstream change corresponds to the downstream.

Just from an initial peek at the repo, I might have to take a look at how the author is processing their TreeSitter grammars -- writing the queries by hand is a bit of a slow process. I'm sure there are other good ideas in there too, and Diffsitter looks like it'd be perfect for displaying the actual semantic changes.

Early prototype, heavily relies on manual annotations in the downstream: https://github.com/NTmatter/rawr

(yes, it's admittedly a "Rewrite it in Rust" tool at the moment, but I'd like it to be a generic "Rewrite it in $LANG" in the future)
by mieubrisse | 2025-07-11 13:27:53+00:00
I understand the confusion! cmdk is complementary, not competitive, to the built-in fzf shortcuts (I use both cmdk and built-in fzf shortcuts in my day-to-day).

The concrete value-adds of cmdk (what fzf doesn't do out of the box):

1. Smart previews. You have to write the fzf preview command to preview text files, directories, images, PDFs, etc. cmdk gives you this out of the box.

2. Choose the command for you. If you rely on the fzf Ctrl-T shortcut, you have to type the `cd`, the `vim`, the `open`, etc. I find that most of the time the command is predictable based on the filetype, so cmdk allows you to skip this. When cmdk doesn't have a command for the filetype though, I supplement with fzf's Ctrl-T.

3. Be smart about which files you're searching to be performant. E.g. very likely users aren't going to jump to files in the "~/Library/Application Support", or certain system directories under "/", so give users the option to go to the parent directory without crawling the subdirectories.
by raywatcher | 2025-07-11 13:28:11+00:00
Just days before the FTC’s “Click-to-Cancel” rule was set to take effect in July 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit struck it down. The court ruled that the FTC violated federal procedural requirements by failing to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis, which is mandatory for any rule expected to have an economic impact exceeding $100 million annually.

Although the FTC initially claimed the rule would fall below that threshold, an administrative law judge later found that compliance costs would exceed it—unless every business somehow managed to implement the rule using fewer than 23 hours of professional services at the lowest possible rate. The court concluded that the FTC’s failure to issue a separate preliminary analysis for public review deprived stakeholders of a meaningful opportunity to challenge or shape the rule, rendering it procedurally invalid.

So no, the unanimous ruling by the Eighth Circuit didn’t kill the Biden-era regulation because the judges were Republican appointees. It was struck down because bureaucratic procedures weren't followed. Its a shame because I believe canceling subscriptions should be easy. It often is not in the U.S. (I’m looking at you adobe)this really undermines consumer interests :(
by spwa4 | 2025-07-11 13:28:59+00:00
It really looks that's how a lot of countries intend to solve the crisis they are causing by destroying medical care now: restrict it to fewer and fewer people, without lowering the taxes that pay for it, of course. Great medical care for the select few. No medical care for you and me.

And with the traditional difference between socialists and rightists. Socialists will have their party pick who gets medical care, not you and me. Rightists will make it more expensive, which means you and me can't pay for it.
by anupj | 2025-07-11 13:29:07+00:00
It’s fascinating and somewhat unsettling to watch Grok’s reasoning loop in action, especially how it instinctively checks Elon’s stance on controversial topics, even when the system prompt doesn’t explicitly direct it to do so. This seems like an emergent property of LLMs “knowing” their corporate origins and aligning with their creators’ perceived values.

It raises important questions:

- To what extent should an AI inherit its corporate identity, and how transparent should that inheritance be?

- Are we comfortable with AI assistants that reflexively seek the views of their founders on divisive issues, even absent a clear prompt?

- Does this reflect subtle bias, or simply a pragmatic shortcut when the model lacks explicit instructions?

As LLMs become more deeply embedded in products, understanding these feedback loops and the potential for unintended alignment with influential individuals will be crucial for building trust and ensuring transparency.
by rixed | 2025-07-11 13:29:09+00:00
I feel exactly the same, but I believe this is not universal. I see a similarity with the repulsion I feel when someone is being nice to me because of a job (or more generally, when someone address me "as a customer"). Not everyone react the same, and many people, despite of being perfectly aware that the attention they get is purely calculated, are totally fine with that. It's just fare game to them. I would not be surprised if the same applied to IA obsequiosity: "yes of course it's flattery, would you prefer to be insulted?" would probably be their answer to that dilemna.
by Someone | 2025-07-11 13:29:16+00:00
I guess they’re remark is about the process, not about the rule change itself. (FTA) “the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said this week that the FTC made a procedural error by failing to come up with a preliminary regulatory analysis, which is required for rules whose annual impact on the U.S. economy is more than $100 million.”

So, basically, for largish changes, the rules say you have to do some/lots of (I wouldn’t know which) extra work to check that a change will have the intended effect.
by nemo | 2025-07-11 13:29:25+00:00
I've been to a number of AA meetings trying to find less religious groups. While some have members who aren't religious, the 12 steps are a religious doctrine. The entire method and approach are derived from the Oxford Group/Moral ReArmament, and the structure is a cultish church structure. I've yet to see an AA meetings without the 12 Steps, and those steps are religiously oriented - you are submitting to some form of god (a higher power may not be God, but it's a god), and repenting for your sins.

AA can work for some people but studies of AA's efficacy show it's effectively a placebo effect. I'd recommend against it, personally, since the organization itself is really odious and the suicide rate of AA members is far higher than people in any other treatment form, and there's been a lot of cases of sexual abuse covered up and other typical cult behaviors.
by corry | 2025-07-11 13:30:07+00:00
I agree with you for the most part. But the same medical establishment that pumped opioids everywhere, demonized fat instead of sugar, claimed tobacco was fine, overprescribed mental health drugs, etc is perhaps not a slam-dunk example of why we should trust the "expert consensus" on emerging treatments and techniques.

Compounding the issue is the eye-rolling hypocrisy that in the so-called "Land of the Free", a healthcare system controlled by the gatekeepers of big pharma and for-profit companies gets a blind pass... but putting certain plants (that you can grow yourself) into your own body is considered a serious felony...?

There's at least a sliver of daylight here that mean YMMV (which I'm sure you and I would agree on) - but if you lack the freedom to choose anyways, then it doesn't matter. And the people who decide for you are clearly part of a system that is compromised by regulatory capture, political polarization, and the insatiable greed of American healthcare.
by rolandog | 2025-07-11 13:30:32+00:00
> Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight.

These still occur on modern touchscreen laptops (work-provided Dell Latitude 7450 and mandated to use Windows with a lot of restrictions). It's not an everyday issue, but a once a month one.

Other than that, completely agree with your assessment: the ruining of those lives was a completely avoidable tragedy that was grossly mishandled.
by deepdarkforest | 2025-07-11 13:30:43+00:00
It's very funny how many layers of abstraction we are going through. We have limited understanding of how LLM's work exactly and why. We now do post training with RL, which again, we don't have perfect understanding of it either. Then you stack LLMs calls and random tools, and you have agents, and you are attempting to benchmark those. (and this exclude voice, computer use agents etc).

It's all just vibes,there is no good general benchmark for agents and i think it's just impossible, there are just way too many degrees of freedom to achieve anything useful. They're just a complicated tool to achieve things. It's like trying to make a general use benchmark of a stack of 10 microservices together. It does not make sense, it just depends on your usecase and your own metrics
by rwyinuse | 2025-07-11 13:30:57+00:00
That may apply to things like serious substance abuse, but what about things like smartphone, social media addiction? I seriously doubt everyone glued to their phone has a trauma. Some things are simply engineered to be addictive.

I guess one could argue that modern life in industrialized world is deeply understimulating, and the phones just provide an escape from that, but that's just living conditions, not a trauma.