MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wsatb | 2025-07-20 18:25:19+00:00
It has not scaled, it has put more cars on the road causing more traffic and more accidents. [1] It has also over time made this type of travel more expensive once their VC backed subsidies stopped. They essentially destroyed an entire industry to make it less safe, more expensive, and more difficult to attain in some areas.

I also think it’s a pretty naive take to think they’re not trying to replace public transportation. The federal government is also cutting funding at the same time. [2]

[1] https://news.uchicago.edu/story/ride-hailing-services-may-be...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-04-29/us-mass-t...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-20 18:25:36+00:00
Certainly, I expect more of the UHC CEO’s outcome until the system moves towards success versus failure as long as the US for profit machine continues to squeeze the population for healthcare while public funding declines in the near term.

“We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of options.” seems to be the equilibrium we keep arriving at, despite it being unsustainable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZhCYisIQB8
by codegeek | 2025-07-20 18:25:44+00:00
This never ends. I am a lot more privileged than many in my 40s and I still feel like a loser because i didn't hit the goals I had for 40. You have to realize and accept that there always will be someone doing better than you not because they are but because you "think" so. It is human nature.

Btw, most people in America are living on credit. The fancy cars you see ? Most of them are leased or financed. Big houses ? A lot of people are house poor i.e. living paycheck to paycheck to keep up with the fancy house. And the real rich/wealthy people you see ? Those are built over generations, not in 1 lifetime.

So stop thinking about how everyone has got it bt you haven't. There are plenty of people worst than you and there always be people in better situation than you. It is called Life.

The only thing that matters is how you are living YOUR life, not others'. FOcus on doing what you want to do and go for it. Spend time on things and people you care about and who care about you.
by hvb2 | 2025-07-20 18:25:45+00:00
> Price shopping hospitals is a very much a thing

In the US, sure. Where else? Because it's so expensive that literally one admission can bankrupt you

Food is a more fundamental need. It's also available in many more places and easy to compare prices.

Say you need a knee replaced. And one place is 1000$ less expensive, that's where you go? Or do you now read reviews on the doctor etc etc.

When was the last time you read a review on a grocery store? The stakes are very different in cost and outcome
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-20 18:26:33+00:00
There are plenty of examples of invidiuals who do object. However, unlike in other countries, developers and the government are free to bully them and ruin their lives for daring not to sell their homes. Plenty of examples of houses in the middle of highways (one famously literally in the middle of the road), packed between huge flats, in the middle of active construction sites, placed on top of huge hills or pits when land height is altered, and other places where you'd never want to live.

That said, the Chinese state is also doing this by spending a lot of money on infrastructure. This isn't unlike what the west did when everybody got electricity, phone lines, clean water, sewers, heating, and things like bridges and infrastructure. Of course the government helped rollout of rail infrastructure in populated areas by creating the necessary laws and ordinances (less populated land was still cheap enough that companies could just buy land). That approach worked fine, until populations grew so there was less cheap land and property became a method of investment that drove up prices to a ridiculous degree.

My country's rail network has been reduced to the essentials, after several mergers and services that became unprofitable were shut down (despite them working fine as independent companies). Building new rail now takes decades of negotiations instead of a few years of laying tracks, if funding can even be secured, as politicians seem to hate the idea of investing in public transport when we could add Just One More Land. The entire system has been clogged.

The authoritarian system is one way to work around the problems of modern high-density society, but it's not necessarily the only way. The trouble lies in convincing enough people to accept the downsides, and to stop the greedy fraudsters from bleeding any development plan dry in any way they can.
by airstrike | 2025-07-20 18:26:35+00:00
You get a single year of work authorization on an F-1. Only STEM graduates get an extra 2 years for a total of three. It's called OPT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_Practical_Training

OPT is mostly only useful to give you extra tries on the H-1B, since the current system is a lottery. Since that lottery is once a year, OPT also makes it easier for employers to hire you at any given time so that you can wait for the next lottery. But no employer is hiring an OPT with an expectation that they will leave in 1 or 3 years, so the H-1B is still what everyone anchors on.

There's basically no way to get a green card straight after an OPT. There's also no way to extend an H-1B past it's 3+3 years.
by majormajor | 2025-07-20 18:26:44+00:00
> Many tasks have easier verifications than doing the task.

In the software world (like the article is talking about) this is the logic that has ruthlessly cut software QA teams over the years. I think quality has declined as a result.

Verifiers are hard because the possible states of the internal system + of the external world multiply rapidly as you start going up the component chain towards external-facing interfaces.

That coordination is the sort of thing that really looks appealing for LLMs - do all the tedious stuff to mock a dependency, or pre-fill a database, etc - but they have an unfortunate tendency to need to be 100% correct in order for the verification test that depends on them to be worth anything. So you can go further down the rabbit hole, and build verifiers for each of those pre-conditions. This might recurse a few times. Now you end up with the math working against you - if you need 20 things to all be 100%, then even high chances of each individual one starts to degrade cumulatively.

A human generally wouldn't bother with perfect verification of every case, it's too expensive. A human would make some judgement calls of which specific things to test in which ways based on their intimate knowledge of the code. White box testing is far more common than black box testing. Test a bunch of specific internals instead of 100% permutations of every external interface + every possible state of the world.

But if you let enough of the code to solve the task be LLM-generated, you stop being in a position to do white-box testing unless you take the time to internalize all the code the machine wrote for you. Now your time savings have shrunk dramatically. And in the current state of the world, I find myself having to correct it more often then not, further reducing my confidence and taking up more time. In some places you can try to work around this by adjusting your interfaces to match what the LLM predicts, but this isn't universal.

---

In the non-software world the situation is even more dire. Often verification is impossible without doing the task. Consider "generate a report on the five most promising gaming startups" - there's no canonical source to reference. Yet these are things people are starting to blindly hand off to machines. If you're an investor doing that to pick companies, you won't even find out if you're wrong until it's too late.
by deanmoriarty | 2025-07-20 18:27:00+00:00
I totally agree! Philips diamondclean toothbrush anyone?

The first one lasted literally 10 years, it was one of the best consumer purchases I ever made.

Ever since then each replacement has crapped out within a year or two, despite same usage pattern. I bought one at Costco on sale and after returning it broken after just six months, a record for a $100+ device, the clerk at the return counter said they have piles of those. Crazy.
by rapind | 2025-07-20 18:27:14+00:00
Not an issue and I'll tell you why.

If the gains plateau, then there's really no need to make productivity sacrifices here for the societal good, because there's so much competition, and various levels of open models that aren't far behind, that there will be no reason to stick with a hostile and expensive service unless it's tooling stays leaps ahead of the competition.

If the gains don't plateau, well then we're obsolete anyways, and will need to pivot to... something?

So I sympathize, but pragmatically I don't think there's much point in stressing it. I also suspect the plateau is coming and that the stock of these big players is massively overvalued.
by const_cast | 2025-07-20 18:27:45+00:00
It is, mostly, hysteria. The problem is that we're just assuming processed foods are bad period, but even if you don't eat processed foods you can eat a very poor diet.

Burgers aren't processed, fried chicken isn't processed. And, you don't need to process food to make it "addictive". People who think you need chemicals and additives to make addictive food are just stupid, frankly.

Take whatever food, douse it in salt, deep fry it in fat, and boom: you have a 2,000 calorie meal that sets off every dopamine receptor in your brain. All natural. No processing needed.

The real harm isn't processed foods, it's hyper-palatable foods. Foods that are extremely delicious, addictive, and easy to overeat. Some are processed, some are not.

Take, for example, high-fiber tortillas. Those are ultra-processed, those aren't from God. But, 98% of Americans do not eat enough fiber. Fiber can lower your risk of obesity and heart disease. The high-fiber tortillas can be a great addition to your diet. They're not hyper-palatable - you're not gonna sit there and crave them like a drug and then eat 2,000 calories worth of high-fiber tortillas.
by like_any_other | 2025-07-20 18:27:46+00:00
It was certainly not the vision of the founders: Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture. - Thomas Jefferson [1]

Even the lauded Abraham Lincoln advocated for the removal of freed Blacks, and made several attempts at it [2], and in the Douglas-Lincoln debates said: I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold oﬃce, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. [3]

(His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more opposed to the idea.)

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h490t.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln_and_slavery#Co...

[3] Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, pp. 235-236
by ath_ray | 2025-07-20 18:28:00+00:00
Author here. I understand the critique in the comments about not justifying the "why" part enough. The people who this was intended for and who benefited from it didn't need much of a justification, because they were already excited about AI (there was more justifying in the first draft, but I removed it because it made it tedious to read). I might consider removing the parenthetical from the title.

I don't intend to induce FOMO into anyone for keeping up. If you don't want to keep up, that's your prerogative.

AI has always been one of the most interesting parts of computer science to me, and watching its capabilities rapidly improve in recent years has been energising for the Hacker in me (the Hacker that this site is named after!). And also the sci-fi nerd in me. But there's a lot of sludge out there, and so this blog started as a list to give a starting point for enthusiastic colleagues and other folks in my circles.

Aside, I generally lament the general cynicism that has taken over this site, and in the industry in general. As technologists, we should be excited about technology. And I don't mean in a performative, uncritical way. It should be a joyful dissection, a desire to learn new things and be there for the breakthroughs. It's also on us to make sure we're trying to do Good with it. I also believe that knowledge is (some) power, and it helps us reclaim some agency that will help us steer technology into a Good place. It doesn't make sense to be anti-technology and anti-curiosity as a tech worker.

We really can make technology fun again. We just have to allow ourselves to be curious about it and I want to enable some of that :)

PS: I have a section in the article that mentions what "reading this list" looks like. It's usually 15-20 minutes of my time every day.
by aabhay | 2025-07-20 18:28:21+00:00
The main problem with the “Bitter Lesson” is that there’s something even bitter-er behind it — the “Harsh Reality” that while we may scale models on compute and data, that simply broadly inserting tons of data without any sort of curation yields essentially garbage models.

The “Harsh Reality” is that while you may only need data, the current best models and companies behind them spend enormously on gathering high quality labeled data with extensive oversight and curation. This curation is of course being partially automated as well, but ultimately there’s billions or even tens of billions of dollars flowing into gathering, reviewing, and processing subjectively high quality data.

Interestingly, in the time that this paper was published, the harsh reality was not so harsh. For example in things like face detection, (actual) next word prediction, and other purely self supervised and not instruction tuned or “Chat” style models, data was truly all you needed. You didn’t need “good” faces. As long as it was indeed a face, the data itself was enough. Now, it’s not. In order to make these machines useful and not just function approximators, we need extremely large dataset curation industries.

If you learned the bitter lesson, you better accept the harsh reality, too.
by kindkang2024 | 2025-07-20 18:28:39+00:00
> It made sense to make him compensate and protect the victim's family.

I don’t think that’s a good idea/practice—mainly because it underestimates the darkness within human free will. Wrongdoers can game such systems and kill without hesitation, which ultimately weakens the tribe even more.

Humans have all kinds of ideas and wills, but in the long run, only the fittest wills survive and prevail. And I believe that "life for life" wasn’t invented to hate and kill, but to love and protect. I hope it triumphs.
by yieldcrv | 2025-07-20 18:29:02+00:00
Additionally, many women are not mimicking their competition in how the career ladder is approached.

There is a fear of coming across as too assertive within the organization she is already employed in.

What’s understated is that plenty of men come across as too cocky too and get passed up within the organization and at other organizations.

But some men, with the societal incentive to get ahead, continues aiming higher at other organizations with the same playbook, and enough of them find the organization that is indexing for that attitude.

I dont have a way to quantify this behavior by gender, I frequently see women not considering it though, overindexed on getting the promotion in the org and navigating that.

The competition doesn’t care about their perception at the place they are already employed, and are aiming on getting offers all the time for leverage.
by _qbxi | 2025-07-20 18:29:21+00:00
> Women choose less lucrative careers

"Choose" is perhaps technically true, but misleading. Women are generally pressured out of lucrative careers.

Remember that programming started as a woman-dominated field (due to perceived proximity to typing as the fundamental skill), which is how so many pioneers and influential figures ended up being women (Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton). Women were ultimately pushed out as the field gained perceived prestige.
by hedora | 2025-07-20 18:29:33+00:00
The only solution I know of is just not buying stuff from brands Walmart (and, increasingly, Home Depot, amazon, etc) carries.

A new pair of Levi’s are $20 at walmart and $80 everywhere else (before recent inflation).

In theory, the $80 pair matches their previous quality, but in practice, they were forced to chase profitability with high-volume $20 jeans, so it’s all outsourced to the same overseas factories. The $80 pair are also crap being produced for sustenance wages, but with slightly thicker denim.

This is absolutely intentional, and is the cornerstone of modern retail in the US. Monopoly retailers drove prices below production wages or environmental impact, and their profit is driven by by the frequency with which stuff breaks and is replaced.

It all relies on information asymmetry. Look at the market for grifters discussion on HN yesterday. It talks about the economics of targeted advertising, but similar games are played by name brands. For instance most appliance manufacturers own many brands, and rotate which brand is garbage in a given year. That constantly tricks people into buying garbage from a “reputable” brand.

https://reclaimdemocracy.org/walmart-product-quality-durabil...
by 210far | 2025-07-20 18:29:42+00:00
Hello Mr Roberts, I appreciate you for doing this.

I am currently on OPT working in the US, and I got selected this year for my H1B visa for Consular Notify. I have to get a visa stamp from a consulate abroad after October 1st for the H1B to be valid. I am applying for the YC batch this fall, would I be eligible to attend the YC batch in time? And would I need to do a h1-b transfer for this process from my company to YC? And if I can't make the YC batch in time(my other co-founders would be joining the batch without me), what would be the best option for me?
by maxlin | 2025-07-20 18:29:50+00:00
"Consistent" comparing a video with a literal billboard of a road in the middle of a road to real life? With the entire FSD feature turned off in the video by the way :D ?

And one fatality with the most dangerous general form of transportation we have?

And an article about a fancy pants 5 miles a hour park retrieval feature bending a few posts as if it was relevant?

Dude I don't need luck, I could roll ten D12 ones in a row and win
by const_cast | 2025-07-20 18:30:04+00:00
It's not pointless pedantry at all, because whole foods are ALSO treated with chemicals.

When you grow a tomato, you use pesticides and herbicides. When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria.

Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?
by alt227 | 2025-07-20 18:30:10+00:00
We used to have a TonieBox but I found them incredibly restrictive.

Also I thought that the physical design was poor. Because the figures just sit on top of the box, you cant move it around whilst playing it or the figures just fall off and the audio stops. It was very frustrating watching my kid try to use it in the car on a long journery.

Scrapped that and invested in Yoto player, its pretty much the same thing but its so much better in every way. The cards push into a slot and so dont fall out, it has an app which enables full control of the player which Tonies didnt, and you dont have to hit it to change tracks (which we found incredibly violent). Also there are some nice extras like being able to tap the nfc cards against your phone to set the content.

I would encourage any prospective TonieBox buyer to check out Yoto before taking the plunge.
by hn8726 | 2025-07-20 18:30:14+00:00
> Before Compose took over as the new direction for Android app development, the Android Studio designer IDE had a very VB6-style designer where you could drag and drop components, while the underlying UI files were all XML based.

It's important to note that pretty much nobody used the visual designer though. The resulting xml was pretty terrible, writing the UIs manually (in xmls, while looking at preview) was infinitely better
by vivalapomy | 2025-07-20 18:30:15+00:00
Won't comment on the 24B model as I see no use for it personally, but regarding purely ASR tasks, I honestly can't see voxtral taking off. For personal usage, I've been running a quant of whisper tiny(for english), as well as whisper small(for spanish, as is my native language), and have never experienced major latency when using for globally available voice commands. Considering my machine runs an Ivy Bridge processor, using CPU inference, the pricing seems unreasonable.
by quickthrowman | 2025-07-20 18:30:19+00:00
Some tools are much easier to use if you spend more money, I’ve compared a Harbor Freight oscillating multi-tool against a Fein and the Fein is so much more usable due to less vibration in the tool body that the Harbor Freight version is almost useless in comparison.

Air compressors are another one where spending money vastly improves usability, the more you spend the quieter the compressor pump motor is.

Makita’s portaband only lasts ~10 cuts before the blade falls off, Milwaukee’s portaband blades don’t fall off ever. I run electrical work and my guys cost $100-130/hr, I’d rather have them spend time cutting conduit and strut with a functional tool than replacing blades on a cheaper version.

I’ll grant that professional tool and homeowner tool usage patterns differ greatly, but sometimes it is worth spending the extra money.
by adenta | 2025-07-20 18:30:25+00:00
Body I built Chuck, a Rust-based CLI tool that makes it easy to extract and contribute template-worthy commits from your project back to the upstream template.

I feel like we are heading towards a world with more boilerplate, and I built this to help me manage my boilerplate. See https://contexteng.ai/p/context-engineering-is-only-half for more thoughts on scaffolds and boilerplate!
by carefulfungi | 2025-07-20 18:30:36+00:00
The methodology is arbitrary and is mostly a measurement of average credit score.

Methodology: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-most-people-in-fin...

This Equifax article lists CA has having a better average credit score than Texas. I did't bother to sort the Equifax to list to see how closely to correlates to the article, though.

https://www.equifax.com/personal/education/credit/score/arti...
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-20 18:30:36+00:00
Also practice, most of Rust codebases are filled with `unsafe`, for interface with system libraries.

Also the argument of forcing a language onto a project based on the lowest common denominator of programmers never plays out - this is how you get insanely messy Java codebases. Language choice will never solve poor programming style.

>Like how string manipulation is so much simpler and easier in C compared to Rust? Hmm.

Plenty of libraries for C for this.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-07-20 18:30:41+00:00
The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking? It's not inherently bad to have wear parts in a device, after all. Shear pins are a great example where you need to replace them, but something more important would break if it wasn't the shear pin, so it's worth it.

IDK the design of the mixers well enough to know if that's true for them, but I do wonder if that is the case.
by codechicago277 | 2025-07-20 18:30:54+00:00
The fault lies entirely with the human operator for not understanding the risks of tying a model directly to the prod database, there’s no excuse for this, especially without backups.

To immediately turn around and try to bully the LLM the same way you would bully a human shows what kind of character this person has too. Of course the LLM is going to agree with you and accept blame, they’re literally trained to do that.