MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whodidntante | 2025-07-12 20:57:29+00:00
The first few areas are easy,since budgets are known and there are actual comparative measurements that have been done.

Health. We spend $5T a year on our "health", which is 2X the per capita amounts spent by western European countries, yet we have poorer outcomes. We have poorer outcomes not just among lower income classes, but also poorer outcomes when comparing upper class incomes between the US/Europe

Education. We spend 1.5X per capita compared to western European nations, and we have poorer outcomes

If we would simply match the budgets for these two areas with European budgets, and even accept the fact that they would have better systems in place, we would save $3T a year. This is a fairly direct measure of how much more efficient Europe is with their resources. They are either that much better/smarter than we are, or we have a corrupt system, or a combination of the two.

Public construction costs. It costs 50% to 200% or even more to build public projects in the US than in Europe. That is, if we can even complete our projects. One of many reports and analysis: https://www.constructiondive.com/news/us-rail-projects-take-...

Other areas are difficult to have direct comparisons, and it is difficult to compare results. The US solution to everything is to pour money into it. And it seems that any cut, any type of cut at all, portends doom.

Military. We spend $1T a year. We have something like 1200 military bases, over half are international. We have massive cost and time overruns all the time. Yes, we may have the best military in the world, but it certainly feels like the taxpayers are being taken advantage of. You may feel differently. I do not think we need 1200 based. I do think that the military industrial complex profits way beyond what is reasonable.

Science research. We spend about $1T in R&D, almost triple of Europe. We pay our researchers 2X-3X what researchers make in Europe. Yet it seems that any type of cut to science budgets is met with the proclamation that we will lose all of our researchers to Europe. Our major research centers need a 70% incidental budget on top of their grants otherwise they will go out of business. CEO's of major non profit medical research centers need to make millions and millions of dollars per year. There is something wrong here.

Space. We spend 2X what China spends, and 4X what Europe spends. One example is the costs of space telescopes: China spends 9 figures, Europe spends 10 figures, and we spend 11 figures. NASA's SLS rocket is a case study in how to literally brun up billions and billions of taxpayers money. We can, and need to do better.

Corruption is not always the simple graft of the CEO and board. Corruption also comes in the form of a system where too many people make too much profit to want to make the system better.
by jorvi | 2025-07-12 20:58:17+00:00
Don't let everyone responding gaslight you. YouTube Premium is absolutely stuffed with ads[0] (sorry, 'promoted content' / 'sponsorship'). The only probable explanation I have for this is that Google has successfully boiled the frog and people mentally don't even register these things as ads anymore.

And that's not to mention pretty much every single creator stuffing sponsored sections into their videos now. We have Sponsorblock for now, but I imagine Google will try to introduce random offsets at some point which will render Sponsorblock mute. Maybe an AI blocker will rise up in the future?

At any rate, fight fire with fire. Just use every bit of adblocking on desktop, Revanced on Android and hope that Revanced or Youtube++ comes to iOS 3rd party stores at some point.

[0]https://imgur.com/a/3emEhsF

Edit: since people are too lazy to click on the link and instead ram the downvote button in blind rage, image 1 and 4 contain straight up ads, unconnected to creators.
by thunky | 2025-07-12 20:58:41+00:00
> We've seen this before in 1983 and 2000. Many companies will fold, and those that don't will take a substantial hit.

Makes sense, but if the negative effect of the bubble popping is largely limited to AI startups and speculators, while the rest of us keep enjoying the benefits of it, then I don't see why the average person should be too concerned about a bubble.

In 2000, cab drivers were recommending tech stocks. I don't see this kindof thing happening today.

> Yeah, these people are full of shit.

I think it's fair to keep LLMs and AGI seperate when we're talking about "AI". LLMs can make a huge impact even if AGI never happens. We're already seeing now it imo.

AI 2027 says:

- Early 2026: Coding Automation - Late 2026: AI Takes Some Jobs

These things are already happening today without AGI.
by segmondy | 2025-07-12 20:59:19+00:00
I do deepseek at 5tk/sec at home and I'm happy with it. I don't need to do agent stuff to gain from it, I was saving to eventually build out enough to run it at 10tk/sec, but with kimi k2, plan has changed and the savings continue with a goal to run it at 5 tk/sec at home.
by card_zero | 2025-07-12 20:59:39+00:00
I don't use Youtube at all, but I keep thinking I'm missing out and should make the effort to find a way to circumvent tracking. I can't see that the morality points to an obligation to absorb adverts. There can be no contract on the basis of what your mind must do.

Edit: let's step through this. If I use a towel placed over the computer to block ads, that's morally the same as using blocking software, I think? If I block the ads by putting my fingers in my ears and staring at the ceiling, also the same thing, morally. If I block them by watching them in a negative frame of mind, saying that I dislike ads and won't do what they suggest, I'm still doing the bad thing, the same as using an ad blocker - if it is a bad thing. My obligation, if it is an obligation, is to be receptive. Otherwise what, it's a sort of mind-fraud?
by peteforde | 2025-07-12 20:59:41+00:00
While the author has very different aims and intended scope, I have been able to leverage both "traditional" (lol) LLMs and Cursor to design and program for novel device design. The results have been pretty incredible to me, and all of the salty comments about the utility of AI to assist with electronics are fully missing the mark.

It's been my direct and many-times-repeated experience that o3 is an incredible electronics engineering wingman, so long as you follow good LLM hygiene; basically, verify all important assumptions, actually read the datasheets, err on the side of too much detail.

The time spent crafting prompts is the time I would spend planning and iterating on designs anyhow. Unlike a human, I don't have to pay them by the hour to patiently explain the nuances of different diodes or suggest alternative parts. o3 is remarkably good at rapidly grokking intent and making suggestions that have unblocked me.

For the camp of armchair quarterbacks on this site who demand specific "evidence" that we're not all just hallucinating the value of these tools, here are two things that happened just this week:

I was blowing my brains out troubleshooting a touch IC, IS31SE5117A. No matter how good my reflow or how many units I tried, I could not bring up an I2C connection. Based only on the fact that Cref refused to rise above ~0.1V when it's supposed to be about 0.7V, it suggested that it seemed likely that I had units from a batch that had no firmware. After going back and forth with their lead engineer for a week, I ordered a few IS32SE5117A - automotive/medical spec, same chip - and it worked immediately, prompting a product recall.

I'd managed to implement galvanic isolation on my USB connection to eliminate audio hum, but it turns out that touching a capacitive pad on a device that has no outside ground connection means that static has nowhere to go but to reboot the microcontroller. I'd been chasing my tail on this for a while, but o3 suggested that instead of isolating my whole device, I could just isolate my MIDI OUT circuit. This is one of those facepalm moments that only seems obvious in hindsight. I told my partner that abandoning weeks of effort was first very hard, and then very easy.

Finally, last night I had Cursor generate both sides of an SPI connection between two ESP32-S3s, something I had never done before. I obviously could have figured it out in 2020, but it would have taken me 1-2 weeks and it wouldn't be nearly as clean or cover as many edge cases.

My hottest take is that LLMs are already (far?) more valuable for engineering tasks than coding. That's kind of unfair because by definition, these tasks involve coding. The speed at which I've been able to iterate has been kind of nuts.

Also: any claims that people who tackle complex domains from a cold start somehow aren't learning fundamentals from a mentor with infinite patience and awareness of every part and circuit design pattern are simply wrong.
by bowsamic | 2025-07-12 21:00:10+00:00
I don’t think that free software is an unserious hyperbole, actually. (It really does exist, even though big tech wants you to think it does not). But yes of course the hardware must be free too, at least insofar as it does not impede on our freedom to understand what it is doing to the software we run on it, and the firmware must also be free software
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-12 21:00:46+00:00
> Compare that with hearing stories of a vast and utterly mysterious dying sweeping towards all that you know, only to suddenly hear one day of inhabitants in the outermost parts of your city falling like flies in the most disgusting of ways, and then being forced to watch the same thing you'd feared from rumor unfold before your very eyes to those you love, taking each of them in turn so terribly that you can barely bring yourself to even approach (let alone try help) these same people that you'e cherished since birth.

My partner did his medical internship at UCSF in 1994. Your quote pretty perfectly describes what happened in gay communities in cities like NY and SF in the 80s and early 90s due to the AIDS epidemic.
by const_cast | 2025-07-12 21:01:25+00:00
Cancel Culture is actually just the free market, the invisible hand, at work.

What is a boycott but cancel culture? The idea of the free market is that good behaviors and products emerge because consumers "vote" with their wallet. If a company has bad values I don't support then I don't shop there. Enough people do that and the company collapses. So, what remains is an economy where every company acts virtuously.

Theoretically. Then enters propaganda and the GOP. They tell you this invisible hand is bad, and companies should be able to do anything. At a glance this appears to be free speech, but it's not - it's the exact opposite.

You see, they can say anything they want, but we can't. We may not criticize them. Our opinions are not valid, they're "Cancel Culture".
by qnleigh | 2025-07-12 21:01:29+00:00
I'm still wrapping my head around the consequences of this, which almost seem too big to believe. It sounds like there are hundreds of millions if not billions to be made on filing these kinds of lawsuits, which means change is coming hard and fast. What if anything prevents the following?

1. Lawsuits against content "normalizing LGBTQ+ identity," which many conservatives claim is harmful to minors. This creates opportunities for conservative groups to file frivolous but expensive-to-defend lawsuits targeting LGBTQ+ advocacy online. Will this sort of thing get sued out of existence?

2. Lawyers will first go after the largest targets. Does this mean that e.g. large health websites will have to take down articles on sex education? Might they even do do preemptively?

3. Relatedly, will all major US porn websites go behind age gates soon? Has this already happened?
by crinkly | 2025-07-12 21:01:34+00:00
Signed up to complain about this. YT is no longer worth watching ads for. Anything that is worth paying for, the money needs to go via Patreon so the publisher isn't demonetized at a whim. The rest is brain-rot, utter shit and a lot of damaging misinformation. I hope it dies. While it remains easy to do so, I will "steal" with yt-dlp and proudly watch it ad-free on VLC on my computer. If they break that then I'm no longer interested.

When this became adversarial, which was a battle that lasted the last year of inconvenience I ended up dumping every Google thing I have. So the Pixel is GrapheneOS now with no Google crap. Browser is Firefox. Email has moved from Gmail to Fastmail with a domain.

My Google account is closed after 20 years. The relationship is dead. They can do what they want. I don't care any more.
by soulofmischief | 2025-07-12 21:01:55+00:00
I'd love to disagree, but every other language's ergonomics just seem so clunky or too magic, whereas with TS and the standard web APIs you have so much room to code how you see fit. Sure, I'd rather a LISP for purity but I'm a realist. If only Brandon Eich had really gotten his way, we'd have Scheme.
by giantrobot | 2025-07-12 21:02:56+00:00
> I'm jealous of your memory capabilities,

Thanks. Learning web development back then left some deep scars and lasting lessons. I can no longer imagine all the other stuff I haven't retained because I remember stupid browser quirks from nearly three decades ago.

Getting many designs working consistently between IE and Netscape was impossible. The 640px wide left-aligned table layout was popular for years because it was the easiest common denominator that looked acceptable in both browsers.
by const_cast | 2025-07-12 21:04:51+00:00
The internet is already blocked by age. In order to order internet service, you must be an adult, and you must prove it by showing papers, such as residence and pay stubs.

Once the service or good is sold, all bets are off. The clerk at the corner store might ask for your ID to buy alcohol, yes. But they do not follow you home to ensure you don't give wine to your kid.

And, if they did, would you be comfortable with that? I think no. Why not? Privacy. I don't want a random clerk watching me every time I decide to drink or smoke. It's a violation of my privacy.

So, privacy - there's your answer, that's the difference.
by cgibson2025 | 2025-07-12 21:04:52+00:00
This is the world's AI agent marketplace. App store for intelligent agents for any task. I take coding and complexity out of deploying AI agents. Just click 'launch' on a free agent, go to 'my agents' and chat with your agent. Free user get routed to Gemini, Pro users get routed to GPT-4o or Claude 3.5. I am a master electrician and built this entire full stack AI app by myself while working a full time job, with no investor backing....YET. This is only the beginning, I am rolling out voice features for all agents. Great for The Therapist, Mental Wellness Coach, etc...Stay tuned as we unleash AI to everyday people.
by stego-tech | 2025-07-12 21:06:28+00:00
This - among many other reasons - is why I’m increasingly throwing my opinions behind shoving these roles onto the United Nations instead of nation states or private companies. Global needs should have global support, such that the failure of one hegemony doesn’t fuck up everything for the rest of humanity

A UN program for weather forecasting and satellite tracking, complete with open data sources and REST APIs, would be a boon. Unfortunately, the current organizational structure makes that impossible due to the vested interests of the respective Security Council members. We’re more likely to see the EU take up those mantles.
by landl0rd | 2025-07-12 21:07:41+00:00
No, some of them are. More evangelicals than my crowd.

Morality bears directly on what we consider to be a just society, so I don’t care if you don’t care. You’re broadening the scope beyond this particular issue, where I’m guessing I agree with you.

It’s not virtuous to act right because the state makes you, but the question of what we require and preclude is defined by our moral frameworks at some level.

I’m not sure with whom you’re arguing about the homosexuals point. I view a lot of things of degenerate I wouldn’t ban. Most adults I see are fat, thus gluttons, thus are committing a sin. It’s just not particularly my business to meddle in what’s between them and God and Satan. I didn’t suggest we “retvrn to Comstock” or something.

I don’t see how you can ignore the massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men, particularly if you think about the marijuana analogy and how it’s increased in strength and availability. Novel hyperstimuli are a big issue. Just like supernormal stimuli tend to increase obesity and cause metabolic dysfunction.

A ton of lawmaking is moralistic. Eg the way I grew up I think it’s fine for two guys to settle something with a fight provided it’s clean and nobody’s kicking someone when he’s down. A bunch of people with different morals (“all violence is wrong”) told the cops to start arresting people for that sort of thing. I think stealing is wrong and vote to tell the cops to arrest people for that, while others (because of their morality) say that “it’s systemic factors” and turn people loose for sub-$1k or so, or sometimes don’t believe in property rights the same way I do. I don’t believe that income tax is just, nor federally-administered welfare, but a ton of people voted to tell the feds to take money and do just that.

I’m not sure how you can suddenly flip to “moralistic legislation is wrong actually” in such a selective sense just because it’s movitated by Christianity or right-wing ideology for once.
by kenmacd | 2025-07-12 21:07:44+00:00
<cough> SponsorBlock (https://sponsor.ajay.app/) <cough>

It works amazingly well provided a video's been out for at least a half hour or so. It also has the option to skip the "like and subscribe" parts too.

I also tried the https://dearrow.ajay.app/ extension to replace clickbait titles, but decided I'd rather know when a channel/video is too clickbait-y so I can block/unsubscribe.
by crinkly | 2025-07-12 21:07:56+00:00
Initially the increase in frequency of the advertising on Android youtube app. Followed by uBlock being broken in Chrome. Followed by uBlock being tarpitted in Firefox. Followed by FreeTube client getting 403 IP forbidden requests and DRM content shovelled down which could not be rendered.

They just did everything to make sure I watched the ads and burn all my bandwidth, which can be somewhat limited and expensive as I travel a lot.
by poly2it | 2025-07-12 21:08:00+00:00
A bit of a rant on the topic of digital supervision and age verification:

Speaking personally, parent supervision was detrimental to my development as a child. I recently reached the liberation of legal adulthood. While my parents are often sweet, their intents did not always have the desired consequences given how they were enforced. Until I was around 15, I didn't have any computer I was able to freely tinker with, which wasn't constantly supervised and constantly logged my every action. I wasn't allowed to touch a shell. This was troublesome for me, because I was a computer science enthusiast, and my parent did not want me to learn about programming. If I had developer tools open, or if it seemed like I was running a script, I would get questions. I was pretty much restricted to using Scratch (which has a fantastic underground community!). Yes, I spent quite a bit of time on my computer. In my defense, I didn't have any friends where I lived. Not that I didn't want any, I had tried, but at this point I was torted by bad experiences. My computer was my safe haven and where I had my friends. I did try to explain this, but my parent wasn't sympathetic. Expecting a joyous and present individual who should be out playing with friends, I was a failure. My parent never understood my need for digital freedom, even as it in hindsight was all I craved. This is the type of scenario I see playing out again every time I am reached by bills/news/opinions like these. If my parent had put half of the energy they use to keep me bound into supporting my personal development and our relation, things could have been very different. Instead, I became very good at avoiding filters, supervision and going unnoticed. It's quite a sore to me. I sympathise deeply with all the children who had a similar upbringing, who are going to suffer under the regulations in development, both in the US and in the EU.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-07-12 21:08:19+00:00
And I value FF way more than an hour of battery.

All day every day my computer works fine.

That difference in battery, if it exists, doesn't actually materially manifest anywhere. But the difference between FF and anything else matters basically every minute all day.

On top of that, even if I ever did actually run into the difference, needing to plug in before I would have anyway, it's an annoyance vs a necessity. The ability to control my own browser is frankly just not negotiable. It doesn't actually matter if it were less convenient in some other way, it's simply a base level requirement and anything that doesn't provide that doesn't matter what other qualities it might have.

You might say "a computer that's dead doesn't work at all" but that never actually happens. I'd need an 8 hour bus ride with no seat power to get to the point where that last missing hour would actually leave me with no computer for an hour, and that would need to be a commute that happens twice every day for it to even matter.

For me that's just not the reasonable priority.
by peteforde | 2025-07-12 21:09:10+00:00
I'm not saying you're wrong, or that I know better.

Yet I have to say that if you are correct, the term is no different than eating tide pods or dry swallowing cinnamon. Why tf would anyone impose such an absurd artificial constraint on themselves, on the tool, or on whatever they are trying to build? Good faith question, I promise.

Constructing detailed prompts to ultimately pair program impressive, complex outcomes is what I assumed vibe coding was. After 35 years of not being able to tell a computer to write the code for me, even getting an 80% coherent first pass of a sophisticated refactor was already radical enough.

If that's what vibe coding is, then nobody should be using that term because it might be the perfect example of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".
by istjohn | 2025-07-12 21:09:20+00:00
No, but it is endemic to American colleges and universities which are government or government-funded institutions.

Furthermore, spend a little time on BlueSky and you will find huge support for the hate speech laws found in other countries.

Finally, the distinction between government regulation of speech and private regulation of speech is key in the court of law, but it is almost irrelevant from the point of view of a philosophy that values open inquiry, debate, and dissent as indispensible to human dignity and progress.
by tolerance | 2025-07-12 21:09:35+00:00
I have a feeling that this is going to turn into one of those exchanges where we capoeira around theory and definitions and what "real" is and what "real" isn't in a way I have to think that either you've lived a sheltered life, or are in denial or have some kind of resentment toward the disgusting, vile and immoral things that you've witnessed that were "harmful" to you (I'm not a therapist).

Moral reasons are stupid and you don't trust them.

Go find a ten-year-old and show them the video yourself. Then see if they feel up to letting you stick around them long enough for you to figure out whether there were any real-world, tangible effects.