MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blenderob | 2025-07-30 14:00:52+00:00
I don't believe they claim causality either... unless I overlooked something. Their conclusion advocating for public health measures feels over the top!

The paper does explore the possibility of a linkage and attempts to justify why the observed relationship may be more than just a simple association. They even go a step further by presenting arguments against the likelihood of reverse causality. That they need to consider reverse causality and prepare a defense against it is sort of admitting that they are far from proving causality.

Here are some excerpts from the paper that illustrate this:

A sensitivity analysis excluding cases at the first follow-up was conducted to examine whether the observed association reflects a possible reverse causality." Our results, showing the attenuation of the association of ASB with type 2 diabetes after adjustment for body size measures, were consistent with obesity being a confounder of the association." In addition, to rule out the likelihood of reverse causality, we interpreted appropriate models and conducted sensitivity analyses, which strengthen the robustness of our findings."

The authors also include three pages of data, though I neither have the time nor the statistical expertise to evaluate it in depth.

What's frustrating is that the paper never explicitly states that causality is NOT established. While they argue against reverse causality, the absence of reverse causality does not, in itself, imply causality. It may still be a case of correlation. So your point is completely valid.
by resource_waste | 2025-07-30 14:01:12+00:00
What about the area that isnt part of the circle, is that a property of the universe?

What about when I drop crumbs on a table and they scatter, is there something special about their location?

Is there something more special about a circle than a triangle? Or a square?

And when you say its a property of the universe... what shape is that property? What color is it? If I give you a microscope, can you point me to the property? If it the same kind of property as gravity? Is it the same kind of property as when I say 'Capitalism is the most efficient economic system'?

Anyway, this is a question of ontology. You have an almost religious view of mathematical existances, but so do most non-philosophers. Plato corrupted us.

For further reading, Ontology is the greater branch, but William James's Pragmatism is only a 2.5 hour audiobook and basically caused the divide between your traditional Ontology, and analytical philosophy.
by dizhn | 2025-07-30 14:01:23+00:00
> their customers are probably not very privacy focused.

Maybe. I think it's more like they are not tech literate (and also this Lovense thing is like google or microsoft for them. They can't not use it if they want to remain competitive.) If people go doxing a few high profile users, I am sure people will worry about their privacy a lot more.
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-07-30 14:01:24+00:00
Completely agree, I expressed that poorly - that Mist didn't just get rolled back into Cisco seems like an aberration given Cisco's spin-out culture, and I'd be curious to find out some day what happened for them to get scooped up by Juniper instead.

"Normal" startups in this space that aren't just spin-outs designed to come back to the mothership if they're successful are incredibly rare.
by carefulfungi | 2025-07-30 14:01:36+00:00
Collective punishment and mass starvation of children violates my morality and is not an action I want my government to take in any circumstance.

I also speculate that it will be ineffective at preventing future violence.

Feelings like yours work in both directions - the residents of Gaza, by your point of view, are equally justified to kill more Israelis to avenge the violence being done to them today.
by LanceH | 2025-07-30 14:01:58+00:00
I think of this as the "garage band problem". Imagine a bunch of teens deciding to make a band. They come up with a name, make t-shirts, even get the cover for the bass drum -- but how much did they actually play?

Personally, I'll snag a domain if it's really good -- like one word or a proper combo of words, spellable, etc... I won't set it to renew, though.
by sailingparrot | 2025-07-30 14:02:02+00:00
> We'll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source.

Here we go, predictably pulling the oldest trick in the book, just two weeks after it was reported [1] that the Superintelligence leadership was discussing moving to closed source for their best models, not for any risk mitigation reason, but for competitive reasons.

Also,

> As recently as 200 years ago, 90% of people were farmers growing food to survive. Advances in technology have steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose. At each step, people have used our newfound productivity to achieve more than was previously possible, pushing the frontiers of science and health, as well as spending more time on creativity, culture, relationships, and enjoying life.

Yea about that... Sure Mark can choose to just fly on his private Hawaiian Island, or is Tahoe bunker and mess around with metaverse and AI and whatever he chooses. 99.9% of the population has an old regular job that they go to for subsistence. Michael from north dakota has not been doing bookeeping for SMEs because this was always the pursuit of his dreams. I also see no reason at all to believe we spend more time on creativity, culture, relationships or enjoying life than before. Especially that last point is in free fall over the last 50 years by the look every single mental well being metric around.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/technology/meta-superinte...
by rmah | 2025-07-30 14:02:13+00:00
Isreal proposed international peacekeeping forces in Gaza, but Hamas has rejected it. If I may quote Izzat al-Rishq, a member of the Hamas political bureau, "We stress our people's rejection of the presence of any non-Palestinian actors on our land." [https://www.anews.com.tr/world/2024/04/02/hamas-says-no-to-i...]. They only accept aid organizations.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-30 14:02:29+00:00
>people could use its research facilities to create capital

This is just survivorship bias. Of course most people choose the employment route since very few people are gonna become good researchers with valuable ideas, and even fewer of those have the ability to become successful business owners, being a good researcher is not enough.

And money doesn't just rain from the sky, you still need money to make money.
by whatamidoingyo | 2025-07-30 14:03:10+00:00
Of course. I had like 50 domains at one point. There's nothing worse than an auto-renewal hitting your bank account on a project you gave up on.

In 2025, with new vibe-coding projects being pushed every second, I think it's not even worth the time unless you have $$$ upfront for marketing (and/or a massive audience). Otherwise, you're wasting your time.
by aeon_ai | 2025-07-30 14:04:07+00:00
I read Careless People recently.

I don't think the author of that book is unbiased, and after some healthy debate with friends, imagine there are a number of different perspectives on the facts. But it seems clear that, well before it was public knowledge outside of the company, there was clearly visibility of and ignorance over harms being caused by the platform inside of it.

Facebook (now Meta) turned human attention into a product. They optimized for engagement over wellbeing and knew that their platforms were amplifying division and did it anyway because the metrics looked good.

It's funny, because I aspire to many of the same things cited in this vision -- helping realize the best in each individual, giving them more freedom, and critically, helping them be wise in a world that very clearly would prefer them not to be.

But the vision is being pitched by the company that already knows too much about us and has consistently used that knowledge for extraction rather than empowerment.
by acrion | 2025-07-30 14:04:15+00:00
This is an excellent summary. We've had great success using Sparrow6 for the Ditana GNU/Linux installer because it allows for an agent-based, declarative approach. Shifting complexity from static configurations, such as Dockerfiles or linear installation scripts, to a dynamic agent that continually adjusts the system to the desired state is a powerful approach. This pattern works just as well for a full OS as it does for containers.
by barrell | 2025-07-30 14:04:19+00:00
Man I built an app a while back called Kanji Plus. The idea was to build a small side project to generate an income, then use that to fund my magnum opus, Phrasing [1]

I built the prototype in a weekend. I spent the next 8 months turning it into a product people cared about. As soon as people started using it, I realized I was going to spend the next 10 years beating around the bush on a product with a very low ceiling.

I eventually decided to build Phrasing [1]… and kanji plus just kind of disappeared. Dependencies updated, subscriptions expired, service providers went offline. I feel bad because I sold some lifetime memberships - genuinely expecting to just leave it on the internet forever - but man, apparently websites don’t do that out of the box anymore.

Luckily the entire product of kanji plus will fit nicely as a feature in Phrasing, and it’s written with the same front end tech so it should be a very simple copy paste. 2 weeks of work max (famous last words).

Still, I feel really bad that people paid me money and the service just went offline. I didn’t know I was being so naive just expecting things to work for more than 6 months unattended.

If any old kanji plus subscribers are reading this, please feel free to get in touch. I’m planning to give all my old supporters a free lifetime membership to phrasing once it’s ready to go! (a membership tier that will not be available to the general public)

[1]: https://phrasing.app/
by JohnFen | 2025-07-30 14:04:36+00:00
Don't do it. It makes about as much sense as performing surgery on yourself.

> I just got an insane bill from a lawyer for drafting an agreement.

If you feel you were overcharged, find a lawyer who has more reasonable rates. They're out there. For simple contracts, you could even make use of low cost legal aid outfits.
by MarkusQ | 2025-07-30 14:04:58+00:00
Not at all! It's great when a language (or anything) gets an active community that's working to identify and ameliorate its pain points.

My point is that these occasionally break out of their bubbles and become more "mainstream" than you might expect from the raw population-of-interest numbers. It's not all that uncommon (e.g. for a while there were more "how I cope with the difficulties that come from living off grid" stories out there than "how to live off grid" or even "why live off grid?") but I still find it noteworthy.
by 9rx | 2025-07-30 14:05:19+00:00
> This is just survivorship bias.

It was forward looking, so survivorship bias doesn't fit. But it may be fair to say that it was unrealistic to think that it was tenable. Reality can certainly give theory a good beating.

> And money doesn't just rain from the sky

If you are going to college to do anything but create capital, the money must be raining from the sky. It would be pretty hard to justify otherwise given that there has been no economic benefit from it. As before, the promise of higher incomes never materialized (obviously, they were promised on the idea of people using college to create capital) — incomes have held stagnant.
by gruez | 2025-07-30 14:05:24+00:00
>In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited.

As patio11 would say, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". Fraud is bad, but if fighting fraud involves so much red tape that it costs more than whatever petty corruption could ever cost, it's bad.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
by shazbotter | 2025-07-30 14:05:40+00:00
I'm a lefty, but off the anarchist stripe, if you start calling for communist revolution I'll be there to oppose you. ;)

But more seriously, I think we could do a lot more with local governments and our capacity to build things. Part of that is regulatory, but a I think a majority of the problem is we focus too much on getting a thing built and not enough on continuing to run it. Whether it's housing, transportation, bridges, whatever, everyone is excited for opening day then we immediately start paring back funding and support for it. Which results in loss of quality, which makes people go "why are we even paying for this", which leads to loss of funding.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-30 14:06:07+00:00
>There's a bunch of people who want a large income (wealth) disparity

Apart form you of course, so I'm sure you'd be ok if the government would tax your higher than average tech wage till your take home pay would match that of a train conductor's or bus driver's, like in Western Europe, and therefore fix the wage gap you hate so much. Would you like that solution?

Caption this: It's only a problem when the people who earn more than me are greedy, but my greed is fine, it's OK for me to out-earn others because "I've earned it", not like Zuckerberg, he didn't earn it.
by echelon_musk | 2025-07-30 14:06:11+00:00
Deuteronomy 9:4

> After the Lord your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, “The Lord has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.” No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is going to drive them out before you.

I think there is a common belief that Israel was "given" the land beyond the Jordan because they were God's chosen people based on their merits.

Deuteronomy seems to imply Israel were just the least bad people.

Israel seems wicked to me now.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-07-30 14:06:16+00:00
I've changed my mind: this isn't very good feedback, because you had to misrepresent what I wrote in order to criticise it.

I said "if porn sites had the kind of stuff": your paraphrase adds an implication I vehemently disagree with. The impersonal nature of a website (or magazine, or whatever) is important. Children shouldn't be looking at porn on social media sites, because they should have neither social nor parasocial relationships with sex workers qua sex workers (lumping amateurs in with professionals, here): this is a (non-central) special case of "adults should not have sexual relationships with children". We can't ignore the power dynamics.

That's one of the things I think the OSA got right: if you read between the lines, each measure does seem to be motivated by an actual problem, some of which aren't obvious to non-experts like me. I'd love to get access to the NSPCC's recommendations for the OSA, before it got translated to this awful implementation: that'd make it much easier to try to design alternative, more effectual implementations.

Note also, the queer/disabled techies I mentioned? They take pains to ensure that minors do not interact with them in a sexual context: some of them explain why, and others make blanket prohibitions without explanation. It is generally understood that consent and boundaries are respected. And, from what I can tell looking at public social graphs, this works: nobody I know to be a child is interacting with nudes, risqué posts, erotica, or accounts dedicated to that purpose, even if they're otherwise quite close in the social graph. (Maybe I should do a study? But analysing people's social graphs without their consent doesn't feel ethical. Perhaps interviews would be a better approach.)

There is the occasional post from a child (youngest I've observed was 16) complaining about these policies, because they think they don't need protection. That they're complaining, rather than just bypassing the technical barriers (as everybody in my school knew how to do), is perhaps another indication that this approach works.

(I'm a degree separated from the communities that post sexy stuff online, so my observations may not be representative of what actually happens. I'm also seeing the situation after moderation, a few minutes delayed due to federation latency: I know that "remove the consequences of a child's foolishness from the public sphere as quickly as possible" is a priority in online moderation, so this selection bias might be quite heavy. Further research is needed.)
by DanHulton | 2025-07-30 14:06:23+00:00
> The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.

Oh, is it now? So you know for a fact that intelligence comes from token prediction, do you, Mark?

Look, multi-bit screwdrivers have been improving steadily as well. I've got one that stores all it's bits in the handle, and one with over three dozen bits in a handy carrying case! But they're never going to suddenly, magically become an ur-tool, capable of handling any task. They're just going to get better and better as screwdrivers.

(Well, they make a handy hammer in a pinch, but that's using them off-spec. The analogy probably fits here, too, though.)

My POINT, to be crystal clear, is that Mark is saying that A is getting better, so eventually it will turn into B. It's ludicrous on its face, and he deserves the ridicule he's getting in the comments here.

But I also want to go one step further and maybe turn the mirror around a bit. There's also an odd tendency here to do a very similar thing: to observe critical limitations that LLM tools have, that they have always have, and that are very likely baked into the technology and science powering these tools, and then to do the same thing as Mark, to just wave our hands, and say "But I'm sure they'll figure it out/fix it/perfect it soon."

I dunno, I don't see it. I think we're all holding incredible screwdrivers here, which are very impressive. Some people are using them to drive nails, which, okay, sure. But acting like a screwdriver will suddenly turn into precision calipers (and a saw, and a level, and...) if we just keep adding on more bits, I think that's just silly.
by rorylaitila | 2025-07-30 14:06:39+00:00
12 years into my graveyard of side projects and making a modest income, nothing has ever "taken off", but I have survived. I yearn to be "pulled" by the market inextricably, but that is unlikely. The reality is almost every business (and I mean almost every one) is "pushed" up the hill, interminably, like Sisyphus. Even my most successful clients never feel "ahead". Something always breaks in the business model, given enough time.
by ijk | 2025-07-30 14:06:46+00:00
I asked, just now:

> How many 'r's are in strawberry?

> ChatGPT said: The word "strawberry" has 2 'r's.

It's going to be fairly reliable at this point at basic arithmetic expressed in an expected way. That's pretty baked in. Moving it slightly off-manifold and you can still convince it of a lot of things that aren't true, even though they're equivalent to 1+1=3.
by wonderwonder | 2025-07-30 14:06:53+00:00
So to be clear because I want you to say it: There is a line at which you would tell the government to stop and let your children die and allow the rape and murder of your wife to go unpunished.

Or is it safe to assume you are unmarried and have no children?

If you do have kids then every time you look them in the eye you should acknowledge that you would let them die due to your morality.

Which if true, that's fine. We are just looking at life and family from 2 completely alien perspectives. There is literally nothing I would not do to get my kids back.

"the residents of Gaza, by your point of view, are equally justified to kill more Israelis to avenge the violence being done to them today"

Sure, and then the Israeli government should punish them to an even greater extent. Or the people of Gaza should rage against the group that unleashed this punishment on them, Hamas. the same group they voted on to lead them.
by mc32 | 2025-07-30 14:06:53+00:00
The problem is that until a few hundred years ago, you could stand your ground and either win or lose (happened a lot) or you sought uninhabited land elsewhere )or a weaker party to kick out) That also happened a lot. Back then borders were defined by what you could actively defend, though treaties also existed.

These days though, there is no unclaimed land or unpopulated place to move in to. Practically speaking anyway. No one would want to move into the Yucatan jungles or Boreal Siberia even if the host countries invited them in to settle land.
by WaxProlix | 2025-07-30 14:06:57+00:00
Do you feel that way about the last time Israel broke ceasefire in operation Cast Lead, which resulted in similar civilian vs combatant deaths? Maybe no amount of punishment is enough for the evil on the other side?

It's not a helpful frame to think in tbh, because now you get to look at the considerably more evil thing done by Israel and justify - what - a chemical weapons attack or something against its citizens?

Let's just stop the killing first
by donatj | 2025-07-30 14:07:23+00:00
I created a rule almost ten years ago that I won't buy the domain until I actually have something to host, and it's done me reasonably well.

I however have a similar but more expensive problem, I develop side projects to an MVP and leave them up for literal decades with no one but myself using them, paying for the domain and hosting. I can't let things go.

I rewrote a number of things in Go recently so they could scale down to zero on Fly.io and save me some money.

For example though I have been developing a note keeping SaaS for fifteen years. It fits my own needs perfectly and I use it every day, but everyone I have ever had try it has bounced in a couple minutes. I literally removed the sign up after GDPR scared me in 2018 and never put it back. I should put it back, everything is client side encrypted and I don't keep any PII.

I have an ad free emojipedia-esq tool, a tool for making API controlled README badges, a tool for converting MIDIs into print outs of colored sheet music for children's keyboards, a joke API, so much more.

I did accidentally let the domain expire for my Wordle knockoff where you guess the soup based on the ingredients. It never worked very well anyway.
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-07-30 14:07:43+00:00
> So I guess their target audience is the "we don't want to touch cloud" organisations that have a good IT spend that are willing to change vendors?

Companies do modernization/migration projects from time to time; I guess one way to solve the audience issue is to find companies that have such a planned event and try to market a “better” alternative.

While I’m also a fan of Oxide; my primary concern is whether they can actually get companies to ignore the marketing that comes out of cloud services.
by dcminter | 2025-07-30 14:07:50+00:00
Oxide, at least for an outsider, looks like a company that channels some of the spirit of early Sun Microsystems (I'm aware of the connections of course). I'm quite envious of those who work there - I hope the demands of big money don't crush any of that spirit.

Sadly when I look at their jobs posted I don't see much that would line up with my skillset, but I keep an eye on them just on the offchance.
by junon | 2025-07-30 14:08:08+00:00
Phil-opp's posts were instrumental in getting the boilerplate of my kernel up and running pretty quickly, mostly due to the unusual build config that is required.

I've since grown my own sense about it but it always tickles me when I think of a better way to do X, search for X on the cargo or rust issue trackers, find a ticket also looking for that, and more often than not Phill-opp either present or the one requesting it.

Hats off and kudos, it's a great series :)
by yujonglee | 2025-07-30 14:08:13+00:00
There are only 2 api keys that is required to build (POSTHOG, SENTRY), and also not required to build in dev, only in release build.

I made it required to prevent accidentally ship app without any analytics/error tracking. (analytics can be opted out)

For ex, https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/blob/327ef376c1091d093c...

EDIT: Prod -> release