MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dumbledoren | 2025-07-18 00:39:37+00:00
> It used to be the case, now the majority of the people in high-income countries and the high earners of medium-income countries can globe trot, it is a massive increase.

Except that is still a ~20% minority at the top. And worse, they can only trot by gentrifying cheaper locations - they can't trot in central London, Ottawa, or Japan, bar a few who are much richer.

> As for the "colonial" aspect, Japan is not exactly a poor country

This new colonization phenomenon doesnt have much to do with those. Foreigners who earn more than their peers of equivalent level come into a country and they eventually push those, even including the white collars, out of their own cities by gentrifying them through long term or short term rentals, and especially through buying properties to live in or for 'investment' (speculation, really). This happened in Lisbon, Barcelona, Madrid, and is now happening in Valencia. It will inevitably happen in Japan. The only reason it has not happened yet is that Japan's digital nomad visa is just 6 months. If it starts giving out a year or more, you will see how fast the colonization will happen. It took only 2 years for Spain. Japan would likely be a more popular destination, so it could happen faster.
by anitil | 2025-07-18 00:39:39+00:00
One of the youtubers [0] I follow uses a Delaunay triangulation pattern on points that I _think_ are doing a random walk as their intro screen. There's something very satisfying about this pattern. I'm not sure how the choice of colour for the triangles is made, but I could watch it as a screen saver all day.

[0] Sebastian Lague - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMEdHcKgM4
by mbesto | 2025-07-18 00:39:40+00:00
Two points:

(1) You are correct that you cannot test UBI in a petri dish. It has to be all or nothing to see the REAL effects.

(2) If you rework UBI to be a negative income tax and remove all of government subsidies and handouts then it would have much less potential for disastrous economic impact (see Milton Friedman[0])

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
by opo | 2025-07-18 00:40:17+00:00
>The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income.

1/4 of the people stopped working?? That is a huge effect, particularly since it was a short duration experiment. Unfortunately this is also seen in other experiments with basic income. The economist Noah Smith blogged about a large randomized basic income study done in the US where participants received about $1,000 a month for three years:

>...Just $1000 a month made 2% of people stop working! That’s a very large negative effect. It contradicts the results of earlier studies showing little or no effect of unconditional cash benefits on employment. And worst of all, the basic income recipients didn’t seem to transfer to better jobs or go back to school — two of the most powerful arguments for basic income. Instead, people just sat around at home.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-thin...
by blibble | 2025-07-18 00:40:26+00:00
but there's two new problems they didn't have to deal with when they parasitised the entire internet:

1. everyone with any content of value is now blocking the AI crawlers, because they suck up content and resources whilst offering nothing in return

2. the only people not blocking them are websites that are entirely AI slop

the high point may have be in the past...
by steveklabnik | 2025-07-18 00:40:50+00:00
Glibly, because they’re not the same language.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard Graydon comment on Ada specifically, but early Rust was very different than today’s Rust. Funny enough, I’d argue that early Rust was much closer to Ada than the Rust we ended up with.

One thing that makes Ada and current Rust different is that Ada does a lot more checks at runtime than rust does, and is more okay with features that have more of a runtime than Rust is.

Another is that Ada doesn’t guarantee memory safety at compile time, or at least, it did not at that time. I believe that with the new Spark features that are inspired by Rust that recently landed may bring parity here, but I haven’t had time to investigate those yet.

But really, they're just very different languages from each other. There's no reason they can't coexist.
by greyface- | 2025-07-18 00:41:07+00:00
PQ signatures are significantly larger than regular ECDSA signatures used today. This proposal builds on BIP-360, which suggests a witness discount increase to mitigate this (not precisely specified, but external discussions by the author have suggested 16-64x). A discount would mean larger blocks, while no discount would mean higher transaction fees and even lower on-chain throughput. Are we entering a new blocksize war? A 64MB block size, in exchange for defense against a vulnerability that at this moment remains hypothetical, seems unlikely to pass without some controversy.
by anon84873628 | 2025-07-18 00:41:19+00:00
Please, you didn't just ask genuine innocent questions. You assumed many things about the OP's mindset then passed judgment on it.

You refer several times to argument and debate but you're tilting at windmills. The OP didn't make an argument. The closest thing is "Such is the state of medicine for profit, I guess." which is more of a resigned, bitter observation than overt indictment of capitalism.

If you want to use that as a prompt to say why no other funding model is better, then ok fine. But there are polite ways to do it which acknowledge the legitimacy of the person's feelings.

What's different about my comments is that they address things actually in the text and are in the spirit of bystander intervention and setting the tone of the commons.
by abeppu | 2025-07-18 00:41:36+00:00
I dunno this seems like a not great program and a not great study.

> Its findings are the result of a 70-question, anonymous online survey made available to basic income recipients in Hamilton, Brantford and Brant County. A total of 217 former recipients participated, according to the report.

> Forty in-depth interviews with participants were also completed in July 2019.

> The project worked by recruiting low-income people and couples, offering them a fixed payment with no strings attached that worked out to approximately $17,000 for individuals and $24,000 for couples.

Earlier it mentions the program had 4k participants. So 4k participants -> 217 survey respondents -> 40 interviews. We don't know to what degree there was a selection bias in who decided to respond or was available to interview. Not great in terms of the data the study generated.

> Whatever income participants earned was deducted from their basic income at 50 per cent, meaning once someone hit $34,000 they wouldn't receive a payment anymore, Lewchuk explained while speaking with As It Happens.

> Lewchuk added that while some people did stop working, about half of them headed back to school in hopes of coming back to a better job.

And the program told people up front that it was temporary, and that the marginal benefit of their own work or income would be substantially reduced. If your earning power already wasn't great (which qualifies you for the program) and now your effective wage per hour worked is functionally reduced ... it's kinda shocking that most of them kept working! If the program wanted to keep people working, it wouldn't take away funds from them as they earn.
by YmiYugy | 2025-07-18 00:42:15+00:00
I think model providers would love to run their models on a single GPU. The latency and throughput of GPU interconnects is orders of magnitudes worse than accessing VRAM. Cutting out the latency would make the models much more efficient to run, they wouldn't have to pay for such expensive networking. If they got to run it on consumer GPUs even better. Consumer GPUs probably cost something like 5-10x less with regards to raw compute than data center ones. New coding optimized models for single GPUs drop all the time. But it's just a really hard problem to make them good and when the large models are still in the barely good enough phase (I wasn't using agents much before Sonnet 4) it's just not realistic to get something useful locally.
by slashnode | 2025-07-18 00:42:17+00:00
I think it's the right strategy for Apple.

They're not a model company. The risks of deploying something half-baked to their users is unacceptable. They're taking it slow and trying to do it in a way that doesn't damage/erode their brand.

Wait it out, let the best model(s) rise to the surface (and the hallucination problems to get sufficiently mitigated), and then either partner with a proprietary provider or deploy one of the open source models. Makes more sense than burning billions of dollars training a new foundation model
by strken | 2025-07-18 00:43:16+00:00
> Lewchuk added that while some people did stop working, about half of them headed back to school in hopes of coming back to a better job.

I believe previous UBI experiments have shown the same results: most people keep working, some people stop, but they usually have decent reasons. Education, extending parental leave, or being a caregiver aren't necessarily things we want to discourage if they result in a greater return.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-18 00:43:33+00:00
It's a fallacy to argue that a community can be any specific thing. No community is a monolith. There are factions here, just like everywhere else.

There are multiple factions. There's the people fearful of AI, the people who post everything anyone posts if it vaguely relates to AI, the people who love to complain about AI posts, and the people who left because they got sick of all the AI stuff.

If you want a description of the politics related factions, just apply `sed -e s/AI/politics/g`.
by theGnuMe | 2025-07-18 00:43:57+00:00
At some point mother is the necessity of invention which is a shift in perspective. You may have to make a market for yourself basically. It's not easy. This being a YC site, I would go through and apply to all of the interesting YC work at a startup places. There is an opportunity right now to understand AI and how to apply it to the digital workplace. Anyway, it is not easy and I wish you the best of luck!
by tho234i32242234 | 2025-07-18 00:44:23+00:00
Hardly surprising.

AWS Bedrock which seems to be a popular way to get access to Claude etc. while not having to go through another "cloud security audit", will easily run up ~20-30$ bills in half-hour with something like Cline.

Anthropic likely is making bank with this and can afford to lose the less-profitable (or even loss-making) business of lone-man developers.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-18 00:44:40+00:00
> As a former MAGA it's just mind boggling to watch all the supposedly freedom loving GOP base clamor for mass digital surveillance and gestapo immigration raids.

Both (sweeping away due process for mass deportation, and eliminating restrictions on law enforcement and surveillance in the name of “law and order” generally) were both major promises of Trump’s 2024 campaign and things that he made steps toward limited by institutional forces (courts, political resistance including in some cases from old-line Republicans, etc.), which Trump and the MAGA movement derided as deep state traitors, during his 2017-2021 term.

Kind of surprising to see someone who describes themselves as ex-MAGA who is surprised that the GOP under Trump supports these things.
by nvader | 2025-07-18 00:45:48+00:00
I'd like to consult the HN hive mind on an tangential point.

Does anyone else here dislike loguru on appearance? I don't have a well-articulated argument for why I don't like it, but it subconsciously feels like a tool that is not sharp enough.

Was looking for evidence, either way, honestly. The author is using loguru here and I've run into it for a number of production deployments.

Anyone have experiences to share?
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-18 00:45:50+00:00
This is very interesting as a workflow. How “big” are the asks you’re giving Claude? Can you give an example of the type of question you’d ask it to implement where it requires a discrete planning document that long?

Whenever I use it, I typically do much smaller asks, eg “add a button here”, “make that button trigger a refresh with a filter of such state…”
by 44520297 | 2025-07-18 00:45:51+00:00
The human body is simultaneously decaying and regenerating constantly, but calling it "rotting" mischaracterizes the process. About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, equivalent to about 1 percent of all our cells.

There is nothing particular to labor that changes this, people age at about the same rate whether they are engaged in "working" or not.
by gus_massa | 2025-07-18 00:46:02+00:00
Recent discussion of another article about Mel: "The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated (1996) (utah.edu)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44542408 (150 points | 2 days ago | 47 comments) in particular there is a comment by dang with a lot of previos post of different articles about Mel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44576608

(Note that most/all articles with the title "The Story of Mel" are from the original story form 1983, but this post is about another story about the original story written in 2023.)
by boricj | 2025-07-18 00:46:18+00:00
Sometimes, megacorp hits a problem and it doesn't have the right cog in the drawer. Maybe it's because no one in-house has the needed knowledge for it. Maybe because it's a genuinely hard problem. Maybe it's because everything's on fire.

I'm a hybrid of self-taught and formally trained developer, with a chaotic twist. Most of the time, I do normal work. Sometimes, the megacorp hits a problem that it cannot solve; when that happens, I'm summoned from high-up, summarily briefed and then air-dropped like a paratrooper into unknown territory.

I'm the one called in when there's no one else left to call. There's nothing I can't seem to solve under these conditions, but I tend to deliver Faustian solutions: I'll save the day, but it will cost you. I won't go into details here, but some of my unholy and heretical contraptions I've produced in those situations took years to subsequently defuse.
by ropable | 2025-07-18 00:46:39+00:00
I bet you wouldn't, at least not until your 70s. Here's my anecdote-based argument to the contrary: every single recent retiree I know (having $basicIncome as a pension) has taken 6-12 months off work and then started working again (where they are physically capable of doing so). The reasons vary from necessity, boredom or wanting to feel "useful". This seems to drop off sharply the mid-70s. I'm not saying that working is hardwired in humans, but it seems to be a strong part of our sense of self-worth.
by kindkang2024 | 2025-07-18 00:46:42+00:00
“Universal grammar” is a placeholder for the innate, domain-specific features of linguistic ability...

--— After looking up “Universal Grammar,” here are my thoughts: --—

Until we identify these features and prove that other species lack them, the concept of Universal Grammar remains uncertain. Only if we pinpoint what’s unique to humans and fail to help other species develop it can we confidently claim Universal Grammar is correct.

Personally, I think these innate features might not be entirely unique to humans. Even humans need sufficient social interaction and language exposure to truly behave like 'humans'. Feral children(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child), for example, behave much like animals. I also imagine early humans had only a few words and symbols and acted similarly. However, if feral children or ancient humans were exposed to today’s social environment, they could likely learn our complex language quite quickly, because those words, symbols, and pronunciations are well-suited to humans for expressing our wills.

Perhaps, we humans are just lucky to have found effective ways to express ourselves —- symbols and words as we know them now -— and to pass them down through generations. This has allowed language and cognition to grow exponentially, giving us an edge over other species.

P.S. Our failure so far to teach animals structured language is exactly why I admire projects like Google’s Dolphin Gemma. To succeed, we need to tailor teaching methods to their species-specific traits—starting by understanding how they express their intentions/wills, and then hopefully helping enrich their naming systems and overall communication. We might even adapt this to help them learn from human contexts, much like large language models do.
by snvzz | 2025-07-18 00:46:50+00:00
Note the 4GB boot issue is only an issue if you use the netbsd bootblock to boot.

If loading the kernel with "loadbsd" from AmigaOS, you can have your netbsd partitions above 4GB just fine.

The (only?) annoyance is that you need a copy of the kernel somewhere AmigaOS can read.

I run it on my A1200 in this manner :)

Also note the mandb task takes a long time (longer on my 030@50 A1200), but only needs to run once, on the first boot.
by JohnFen | 2025-07-18 00:47:07+00:00
I hear you, and I struggle with this exact problem when talking about this stuff. The issue, really, is that "silicon valley" is a convenient shorthand for a certain sort of company that is quite popular in the actual silicon valley. It's true that not all companies that happen to be in the actual silicon valley are "silicon valley" companies in this sense, and it's also true that Musk companies are very much "silicon valley" companies in this context. "Silicon Valley" in this sense is referring more to a kind of culture or philosophy than a geographic location.

But how else to refer to it? I tend to go with "SV-style" companies, but that's really clunky.
by existencebox | 2025-07-18 00:47:46+00:00
Chiming in with a slightly different perspective: I often bookmark things I see in passing that might not be useful now but may in the future based on things I know I want to do.

Case studies in certain engineering/programming tasks, something I read that I found useful and want to have handy to share with others in the future, project ideas or notes for long-running efforts I pursue and sometimes want a "bucket to pull from" for instance.

While it's certainly true that I probably _use_ 10-20% of what I bookmark, I don't think it would be possible to realize the same positive outcomes without the 80% that I don't. (Just last week I was able to braindump a large piles of 'examples/essays I found helpful learning about neural network optimization' to one of my engineers because I'd kept them handy after they helped me.)

I should say though, I sense this is a slightly different use case than the "I want to read this article just to read it" bookmarks where I know I never will, which is certainly something I've experienced but is a minority case in my life nowadays, so I wanted to vouch for productive scenarios too.
by Brybry | 2025-07-18 00:48:14+00:00
Would lying really lead to more used car sales and thus cause pressure for other to attempt this kind of fraud? And wouldn't people get in trouble for fraud (or at least false advertising?)

When I last bought a used car I found it in a classified newspaper ad: there was no picture.

I looked at every car I considered in-person.

When I found one I liked I paid for an independent pre-purchase inspection, discovered a crack in the radiator, and negotiated the price down to cover my post-sale expense fixing it.
by sothatsit | 2025-07-18 00:48:26+00:00
This "all breakthroughs are old" argument is very unsatisfying. It reminds me of when people would describe LLMs as being "just big math functions". It is technically correct, but it misses the point.

AI researchers spent years figuring out how to apply RL to LLMs without degrading their general capabilities. That's the breakthrough. Not the existence of RL, but making it work for LLMs specifically. Saying "it's just RL, we've known about that for ages" does not acknowledge the work that went into this.

Similarly, using the fact that new breakthroughs look like old research ideas is not particularly good evidence that we are going to head into a winter. First, what are the limits of RL, really? Will we just get models that are highly performant at narrow tasks? Or will the skills we train LLMs for generalise? What's the limit? This is still an open question. RL for narrow domains like Chess yielded superhuman results, and I am interested to see how far we will get with it for LLMs.

This also ignores active research that has been yielding great results, such as AlphaEvolve. This isn't a new idea either, but does that really matter? They figured out how to apply evolutionary algorithms with LLMs to improve code. So, there's another idea to add to your list of old ideas. What's to say there aren't more old ideas that will pop up when people figure out how to apply them?

Maybe we will add a search layer with MCTS on top of LLMs to allow progress on really large math problems by breaking them down into a graph of sub-problems. That wouldn't be a new idea either. Or we'll figure out how to train better reranking algorithms to sort our training data, to get better performance. That wouldn't be new either! Or we'll just develop more and better tools for LLMs to call. There's going to be a limit at some point, but I am not convinced by your argument that we have reached peak LLM.
by reactordev | 2025-07-18 00:48:59+00:00
Delone triangulation is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but you end up with triangles with odd lengths and vertices in weird places. Great for capturing approximation of detail, pack them verts in there!

Horrible for real-time applications. Often these meshes need to be simplified along the normals to reduce vertex count and produce a better topology (cleaner triangles that cover more space with less faces). The original meshes are still useful for normal baking.

Strictly speaking from a graphics perspective. It’s far more useful outside of this space.
by K0balt | 2025-07-18 00:49:10+00:00
Idk, it’s also confusing to me. “I have been told” by someone who knows a lot more about cryptography than most people (including me) that it should be possible to, but I can’t see how because I suppose if you could spend the coins it means you must have the private key? But maybe it is actually possible to spend the coins without reverse engineering the actual private key, but rather only by faking the signature?

IDK.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-07-18 00:49:52+00:00
>The computer science graduate will generally not even try to figure out a problem in completely unfamiliar territory. Of course this varies by personality, so this is probably only true for about 85% of the computer science graduates. They cannot proceed in the face of high uncertainty.

Generally, self-taught programmers make shit like this up to feel good about themselves. What are the odds that the article is also written by a self-taught programmer?

The truth is, most self-taught programmers don't actually learn enough to make it in industry. The ones that do make it pass at least some threshold of knowledge at some point to be able to stick with it.

There may be occasional gaps in "practical skills" like using particular tools and libraries among college grads. But these skills are easy to pick up on the job. The advanced stuff that really benefits from a bit of handholding is taught in school, which self-taught programmers skip entirely.