MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-07-29 14:48:18+00:00
If every person in Norway is worth $100M - who's going to wait the tables and bring them coffee and service their boats and clean their houses while they sail around and be leisurely all day?

Who's going to tend to the ski lifts and the golf courses? Who's going to take care of their polo horses? Who's going to clean the streets and work at the police stations? Who's going to keep the grid running? Who's going to work the ports to import everything? Who's going to drive the delivery trucks and put everything in it's place upon arrival?

It's blatantly obvious that you can't have a society where everyone is "rich", unless you have a second class of citizens to wait on them.

Robots aren't advanced enough yet.

While in some ways Norway is laughably far from this scenario, in other ways, their sovereign wealth fund is less about a decade away from everyone being a millionaire - which, theoretically, should allow everyone to not work and have a decent life - but obviously will not (unless they import second class citizens, that aren't ever allowed access to the wealth fund, and have to do all the work).
by oceanplexian | 2025-07-29 14:48:29+00:00
The USA surpassed Norway's median income some time in the 2020's. And it's VASTLY cheaper to live in the United States.

The Nordic petro states were never really that impressive to me personally. I'm sure someone will come out of the woodwork to talk up their healthcare and social services, but again, if you were being fair we would compare them to a State like Massachusetts instead of Mississippi or Alabama and you would find our healthcare systems here are equally if not more accessible.
by alias_neo | 2025-07-29 14:48:43+00:00
> The law is effectively forcing companies to spend millions re-scanning the same books over and over for no reason

Would anyone agree if you replaced companies with people in that argument?

Why shouldn't a company follow the same rules as everyone else just because the scale at which they're doing it is so large?

I'd argue a company doing something like this should be forced to buy the books NEW and benefit the authors, and if they're found guilty of copyright infringement they should be punished at a scale a few orders of magnitude larger than an individual would be.

> Before you can train an AI, you must light 1 million dollars on fire

If I want to train an AI, I probably need to spend a larger part of my budget as an individual to do so than an org, should I be given the resources for free or severely discounted because I want to make money out of it?

I suppose one _could_ argue in favour of such a practice if it was going to benefit society as a whole, but is it?
by gnabgib | 2025-07-29 14:48:58+00:00
Related:

Tea app leak worsens with second database exposing user chats (112 points, 16 hours ago, 11 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44716529

Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan (555 points, 4 days ago, 777 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44684373
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-07-29 14:49:10+00:00
It could be much worse. Usually resources subsidise billionaire lifestyles where one person consumes massive resources to support their lifestyle. At least Norway spread that around a bit even if limited to their own country.

Ideally the world would be one with equity and all but short of a benevolent alien invasion or AI takeover we’re not getting that. At least Norway’s doing well at wealth distribution at a local level.
by 93po | 2025-07-29 14:49:21+00:00
In 2024 they had a $5 billion loss. About $3b of that was training. $1.5b was employees. I'm sure there's at least another $0.5b of costs associated to building out rather than just serving inference. In reality it's probably several times that. So if you cut employees to just maintaining what they have, fire all researchers etc, stop expansion, and stop training, you'd be profitable. Which is dumb and they wouldn't do that, but my point isn't that it's realistic, but rather that they could sell what they have at a profit if they wanted to.
by alankarmisra | 2025-07-29 14:49:32+00:00
I see the value in showcasing that LLMs can run locally on laptops — it’s an important milestone, especially given how difficult that was before smaller models became viable.

That said, for something like this, I’d probably get more out of simply finding an existing implementation on github or the like and downloading that.

When it comes to specialized and narrow domains like Space Invaders, the training set is likely to be extremely small and the model's vector space will have limited room to generalize. You'll get code that is more or less identical to the original source and you also have to wait for it to 'type' the code and the value add seems very low. I would rather ask it to point me to known Space Invaders implementations in language X on github (or search there).

Note that ChatGPT gets very nervous if I put this into GPT to clean up the grammar. It wants very badly for me to stress that LLMs don't memorize and overfitting is very unlikely (I believe neither).
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-29 14:49:55+00:00
>You can be against x, but if x will continue unless you do the hard work to provide an alternative, simply reiterating "Not X!" is unserious.

To be clear, "x" here is short for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. An alternative to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was provided here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718080

Before you respond there, please remember that while you and israel likely have opinions regarding alternatives, neither of you are the judge of them.
by aikinai | 2025-07-29 14:49:57+00:00
You absolutely can tell from looking, and you don't even need to be trying. Whenever I show people photos from trips or of my kids or whatnot, they immediately notice the quality ask "You took this on your phone!?" (since I'm showing the photo from my phone library and that would be the default assumption). Sure, people are used to phone photos and they're fine, but even laymen who aren't thinking about judging photo quality immediately notice and appreciate the quality of a real camera photo.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-29 14:49:59+00:00
> because they're pointing out that the tools are still the most useful for patterns that are extremely widely known and repeated

I agree with you, but your take is much more nuanced than what the GP comment said! These models don't simply regurgitate the training set. That was my point with gpt3. The models have advanced from that, and can now "generalise" over the context in ways they could not do ~3 years ago. We are now at a point where you can write a detailed spec (10-20k tokens) for an unseen scripting language, and have SotA models a) write a parser and b) start writing scripts for you in that language, even though it never saw that particular scripting language anywhere in its training set. Try it. You'll be surprised.
by RUnconcerned | 2025-07-29 14:50:09+00:00
Whereas devices made in the west are, of course, entirely trustworthy[0][1].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwal...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...
by throwawaybob420 | 2025-07-29 14:50:20+00:00
Yes it does matter!!!

How can you expect your politicians to “lead” if they have such an inability to not only see the actual facts on the ground, but lack the elementary foresight to see what’s going to happen?

This shit wasn’t something that’s been kept a secret, it’s been widely widely documented for nearly 20 months. The base the politicians claim to represent have been literally screeching about this for over a year, and yet nothing?

If a politician can’t even denounce genocide, how can someone expect them to fight for them?
by boston_clone | 2025-07-29 14:50:26+00:00
Isn’t this answer easily findable? It’s a clear response to the aggressive US/IL foreign policy in the area. Here’s an excerpt from an article in late ‘23 -

“The Houthis […] say they are targeting Israel-based ships or vessels headed to Israel. They are attacking ships as they cross the strait of Bab el-Mandeb, connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. The Red Sea hostilities are part of a pattern of Middle East attacks from Iranian-backed groups against the U.S. and Israel in response to the Israel-Hamas war.”

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4382064-houthis-force-car...
by dctoedt | 2025-07-29 14:50:29+00:00
> This is a reward for taking risk in R&D and for sharing the result with the public via patent disclosures, not a tax.

You say potato .... The "reward for risk-taking and sharing knowledge" is a nice story, and sometimes it even matches the reality. But all too often it's a malign fantasy. That's especially true given that it's been a long time since patent filings were a significant channel for disseminating new knowledge. (How often do people look up patent filings when researching how to do something?)

Source: In an earlier career phase, I was a partner in one of the U.S.'s biggest IP-litigation boutique law firms. I spent a good deal of my time representing tech companies you've definitely heard of, busting bullshit patents that were being asserted against them by people who naively imagined — or cynically insisted — that they'd come up with Something Really Great and had their hands out looking for a huge, undeserved payday. "Nice little business you have there — it'd be a pity if a court granted a permanent injunction that put you out of business."

The incentives and legal structure are all in favor of filing patent applications on everything you can think of and seeing what you can wheedle out of an overworked patent examiner — then after your patent is issued, you go hunting to see what you can get from companies in the way of settlement deals to pay you to go away. By no means are all patents this way, but it happens often enough to be a problem.

That's why Congress passed legislation such as the amendment establishing "IPRs," inter partes reviews. Those are essentially a way to have a three-judge panel within the USPTO take a fresh look at a challenged patent's validity. They're contested proceedings where the challenger gets to introduce evidence and make arguments.
by benrutter | 2025-07-29 14:50:38+00:00
Hmm, assuming you're not just being imflamatory, I definitely wouldn't identify as supporting authoritatianism. Perhaps that's not for me to say, we live in a world where environmental protesters are often labelleed authoritarian, and people who I'd have thought would identify as facists call themselves libertarian.

I think the bit that I don't understand yet, is: - Most people are not arguing that all pornography should be accessible to all ages - Most people seem horrified that online pornography isn't accessible to all ages

I think that the second point is a miscategorisation from me. Reading the rest of the comments, people seem more up in arms about the introduction of government tracking into a space where it previously wasn't (obviously commercial tracking already happens a lot in that space, but I don't think that justifies having even more).

I think I need to read some more on the implications of these kind of laws, I suppose I don't really understand too well what the relationship between government tracking and age checking is.
by oa335 | 2025-07-29 14:50:45+00:00
>Hamas bombed the peace process to death (alongside with hundreds of random civilians) and also directly cause the rise of the right in Israel and the change of opinion in the Israeli public from accepting the idea of a two state solution to a belief that Israel can not accept that solution. Dividing the Palestinians as a strategy came after the Palestinians showed Israelis that living side by side is impossible.

Why would the Israelis support Hamas if they were the faction that was attacking them? Wouldn't it have made more sense to support the PA even more?
by machinemusic | 2025-07-29 14:50:54+00:00
Hey sugabush, thanks so much for sharing this!

I'm the creator of Memory Weaver. It was a huge honor to be selected—it's such an incredible community of builders.

For anyone curious, Memory Weaver is a web-based tool that transforms a written memory into a personalized soundscape. It uses psychoacoustic processing and emotion analysis, and the fun part is that it's 100% client-side. All audio generation happens in your browser with the Web Audio API.

Web App: https://memoryweaversoundscapes.lovable.app/ GitHub: https://github.com/ShaliniAnandaPhD/Memory_Weaver (with details and future roadmaps)

The project is still evolving, and I'd love to hear any feedback or ideas from the HN community. Happy to answer any questions about the tech!
by harperlee | 2025-07-29 14:51:10+00:00
It does - it is easy to see when answering a new card, where the default times for the different options are <1m, <6m, <10m, 25d.

On the other hand, people do have a circadian rhythm and schedule, and learning is dependent on sleep - so it makes sense that learning plans of a given spaced repetition system do consider a day step (even if there is more resolution underlying the higher level planning).
by dostick | 2025-07-29 14:51:25+00:00
It is sad that Norway is not taking advantage of their unique situation. They could start making steps on redesigning capitalism and democracy. It is a combination of two flawed and never reviewed systems that together amplify their faults.

Capitalism has been tried in 100 countries over the past 100 years. Not a single country has reported a harmonious society without suffering and inequality. Failure over and over. Countries are running this program that is unfit for human society. Capitalism wasn’t scientifically researched nor updated according to the modern scientific knowledge in sociology, anthropology, economics, and human biology. In humans, it amplifies greed and materialism. It forces all humans into labour with less than 50% of jobs and occupations being useful, and another half is there just to employ people. Capitalism does not accept you for who you are, it will only accept you into system if you provide economic value, regardless if there’s already enough goods and food for everyone. And neither alternative to capitalism has ever been seriously researched. Not socialism/communism, but actually a professionally, scientifically researched and designed system? There were no serious attempts. We have institutions for physics, biology, construction, logistics, and every other science. And all of them make discoveries and move science forward. Except for this one. Why there’s no effort to research and design the social economic system to replace capitalism? Why is only this specific science in a standstill? And democracy is similarly assumed by everyone as some perfect system. Yet we use electoral democracy designed literally for 100 persons per representative. In Ancient Greece elected person knew every one of people they represented personally. And it grew now to 50,000 and more people per representative and nobody ever asked if that should be allowed. It wasn’t designed for this many, and it shows. Electoral democracy was the transitional system until we have computers capable of dealing with this amount of data. Elected officials were, and still are flawed human computers representing groups of people.
by ta1243 | 2025-07-29 14:52:09+00:00
Its bad in both cases.

Lets take the extreme, lets assume that Norway is an island and has a $50t wealth for 5m people. $10m each. Assume 2% return on that wealth, $200k a year income. Great, everyone is happy.

Who empties the bins? Or repairs the road?

You end up importing those people from elsewhere, just like the wealthy parasites do. Oil countries like Qatar are like this. It's not a good thing.

A centi-millionaire, in Qatar, Norway or New York, can live for free without doing any work, and will see their wealth grow about $10m a year off the backs of other people, people who won't earn anywhere near $10m in a lifetime.

Other people who aren't as wealthy do the work.

Imagine you are on an island with 10 billionaire CEOs and 10 people who have no net worth but know how to fish, cook, build etc.

It doesn't matter how rich the billionaires are, their wealth is worthless, the person with the skills is whats valuable.
by runarberg | 2025-07-29 14:52:14+00:00
This description of Israel’s interest in Gaza does not match their behavior. They have spent millions even billions of dollars terrorizing the population that lives there. They wouldn’t do that if “[t]hey were content with the Palestinians keeping to themselves in that corner of the land”. At the very least Israel saw that land valuable as a place to keep a population oppressed and terrorized, in other words, as a concentration camp or a ghetto.
by benrutter | 2025-07-29 14:52:20+00:00
Yes, I think you're right. Some of these other comments seem to imply that age-verification would involve taking a photo of your face, giving your full name and having that stored permanently in a database.

I have no idea if that's true, but if it was, I'd be massively concerned about that (compared to non-phased about the general idea of age-verification)
by timerol | 2025-07-29 14:52:22+00:00
This article seems to be a good argument for a school that's 3/4 project based learning and 1/4 classroom instruction. The author then tries very hard to pretend that Alpha school does not follow that model, and is instead something else - a boogeyman of blitzing through lessons without any opportunity for application or reflection, as opposed to the reality of a mix of classroom instruction and project-based learning to struggle with the concepts learned.

> And some readers may ask: if schools like Alpha accelerate the basics and then give students space to explore—what’s wrong with that?

> The problem isn’t the intention—it’s the architecture. You can’t optimize one part of a child and expect the rest to unfold naturally. Learning isn’t modular. Once efficiency takes hold, it doesn’t stay in its lane. It reshapes what matters.

The argument, if I'm following it, is that the Alpha model is going to do well, and therefore the model will change to remove the current 3/4 of the curriculum used for exploration, which will make the model worse. But Alpha won't care, because teaching students worse in the name of efficiency is the natural end point. I am not convinced.

I think the article would have done a much better job starting with Asian cram school culture and how AI tutoring is being "fueled by state incentives and parental anxiety", instead of having that as a throwaway thought in the middle of an article otherwise focused on Alpha school.
by fny | 2025-07-29 14:52:45+00:00
It's far simpler. All you need is KYC to generate anon tokens, and then make it illegal to store any linking information and illegal to use any such information in court.*

The issue is no one in government would buy into this. You'd prevent them from catching bozo criminals who can't use a VPN.

*For example, you get up to N anon tokens a day you can use for anoning online. Only a count is stored daily to limit generations.
by mandmandam | 2025-07-29 14:52:54+00:00
> Only poor people care about test scores as they imagine high test scores is how one can pull themselves out of being poor.

Bashing 'poor people' aside, it's safe to say that on a national level, declining test scores are a warning sign that merits investigation.

> When you are rich you can also do pointless things just for the fun of it like build bridges to nowhere

You can, but there's no small amount of broken window fallacy there.

> None of these are problems unless you try and look at it through a poor man's lens.

I might be too poor to see the joy of building of bridges to nowhere, but there are still 'problems' with declining test scores, government misuse of funds, and pointless infrastructure projects.

> statistically, only poor people like having children

Yeesh. There are at least three reasons why this is completely wrong, but what's more important is that you seem to have a weird bone to pick with "poor people". You really might want to sort that out for yourself.
by recursivedoubts | 2025-07-29 14:52:58+00:00
oligarchy appears to be the natural state of affairs in most human systems and, despite that, tends not to be discussed much (instead we hear about democracy, fascism, communism, etc)

i think the best solution to this dynamic is many smaller units (states, companies, etc) so that oligarchies compete with one another, but this requires a type of system design and a vibe largely out of favor in todays world (e.g. secession & trust-busting for governments & corporations, respectively)
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-29 14:53:22+00:00
Those places are too accessible and too easy for major existing powers to lay claim to if a new settlements there start to thrive. This is especially true for any place on dry land (you really think Russia would allow independence of an economically healthy and growing city-state in Siberia? Fat chance).

Basically every square inch of Earth has effectively been spoken for already save for the oceans, but nation states will still happily invent reasons why they actually control the plot you’ve put your city on (“some tiny island in the vicinity is under ours, thus so is your city!”) or maybe just won’t bother with pretext at all and threaten military action unless you comply.

All that becomes much less practical in space, and the further out you go the less likely it is that Earth based powers will bother you (especially if we never invent the efficient significant-fraction-of-light-speed engines that enable the plot of The Expanse).

Now of course going out there introduces all sorts of other problems, but existing power interference is not among them.
by lurkshark | 2025-07-29 14:53:29+00:00
It doesn’t have to be the case that everyone who supports age verification has the same reasons.

In the US however, this campaign came from the same think tanks and strategists associated with Project 2025 (taking cues from folks like Enough Is Enough), who are pretty upfront with their Christian Nationalist views. In Project 2025 they include a bizarre connection of porn with transgenderism that tips their hand on the religious bent to all this, but elsewhere in the plan outright state their Christian Nationalist ideals.
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-29 14:53:29+00:00
no, it isn't egocentrism. Egocentrism is to think you're special when in fact you're not and thinking that empathy requires, rather than understanding, constant affirmation of your point of view.

I can certainly understand the confusion of someone being faced with a diagnosis like this, that's empathy, but to pretend this means I need to affirm their insecurities even if grounded in nothing is not just not empathy, it's callous behavior to the detriment of the person involved.

If someone were to learn after 50 years of life, they've been adopted, and they voice something like "my life's a lie, are my parents even my parents?", you can voice empathy for their disorientation, but the actual answer as to the question is obviously, yes they're still your parents. It would in fact be sociopathic to advice anything else just out of "kindness".
by endoblast | 2025-07-29 14:53:32+00:00
Author is clearly not a happy bunny.

Some people may be motivated by a wish to escape other people, but many will want to go to space because it's so cool. In other words: for adventure, romance and blazing a trail for other people to follow.

Having the right spirit and the right motivation creates mental well-being, not material or social conditions. By those standards, medieval life was far worse than today, but I don't think the people then were less happy or less motivated than people today. Quite the reverse.