MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by greenie_beans | 2025-07-11 15:14:30+00:00
> But lower-income/wealth individuals would also benefit because they'd get access to more affordable housing in the areas that they need to live.

how does this create affordable housing? taxes are only one piece of why housing is so expensive. the landowners would need a return on their investment, which they would get by raising rent. this is the core problem imo -- costs for construction and labor and permitting and taxes requiring higher rent in order to make the investment worthwhile.

the offset of lower taxes will absolutely not pay for the cost to "fully utilize" the property.
by jordanb | 2025-07-11 15:14:36+00:00
My entry-point was listening to this podcast, it's pretty long but it goes into the fact that the purpose of horizon was to detect fraud and reduce shrinkage, that the leadership and their consultants were coming up with outsized estimates for the amount of fraud and using that as financial justification for the project.

They also talk about postmaster's motivations for buying a franchise and how sitting behind a retail desk in a small town with a modest but steady income is actually one of the best outcomes available to the type of working-class Briton who was buying the franchise.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j
by hearsathought | 2025-07-11 15:15:11+00:00
> It's curious how megafauna extinctions coincide with human arrival... Native Americans, Australian Aborigines

Native americans and australian aborigines arrival coincided with drastic climate change. Or put another way, climate change was a major driver of human migration.

> were just as deadly as later European settlers.

Unless natives and aborigines had guns, railroads, mass farming, etc, I highly doubt it. Not to mention the population boom due to modern medicine and mass migration.

If you consider the relatively small native american and aborigine populations, the technology involved and how gigantic america and australia is, it's absurd to think natives or aborigines wiped out the megafauna.

Species extinction has two major causes - climate/environment change and loss of habitat. Were the natives and aborigines sophisticated enough to cause climate/environment change or develop farming to a degree that deprived the megafauna of their habitats? I highly doubt it.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-11 15:15:42+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castoroides

> Stable isotopes suggest that Castoroides probably predominantly consumed submerged aquatic plants, rather than the woody diet of living beavers. There is no evidence that giant beavers constructed dams or lodges. The shape of the incisors of Castoroides would have made it much less effective in cutting down trees than living beavers. It was likely heavily dependent on wetland environments for both food and protection from predators.
by johngossman | 2025-07-11 15:15:42+00:00
A good, nuanced piece, especially if you read the footnotes. I'd add that some businesses aren't set up for seasonality as well as others. Pretty much every country has beach towns full of shops and motels that close in winter. But a lot of the small businesses the article is talking about are open year round and depend on locals. If you can't get into your local 4 months out of the year, it probably isn't your local anymore
by rossant | 2025-07-11 15:16:02+00:00
Yes, many scandals stay under the radar until a good book, film or series reaches millions at once. I hope the same happens with another subject close to my heart [1, 2]. A Netflix film on a related topic a few years ago already had a huge impact [3]. It focused on one case, but by the end of the movie it is clear that many others are similarly affected.

[1] https://cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-shaken-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Care_of_Maya
Show HN: CNET – a C++/CUDA framework for researching complex valued NN
by almaya | 2025-07-11 15:16:05+00:00
CNet is a C++/CUDA framework for building and researching deep complex valued neural networks, as well as for optimization of complex valued functions using gradient descent with Wirtinger derivatives. In the current version it should be relatively straighforward to implement new CPU-only functions / layers. In subsequent releases will add support to easily implement CUDA layers, too.
by k310 | 2025-07-11 15:16:09+00:00
Tried with Firefox on the mac.

Secure connection failed and Firefox did not connect

Someone could be trying to impersonate the site and you should not continue.

Websites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust pixdrop.com because its certificate issuer is unknown, the certificate is self-signed, or the server is not sending the correct intermediate certificates.

Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER
by meroes | 2025-07-11 15:16:10+00:00
> arithmetic (why would use LLM for that ?)

Because people ask LLMs all of these things, including arithmetic. People were saying the same about the number of r's in strawberry. Why ask and LLM that!?!? But the big AI companies want LLMs to be better at these questions, probably because people ask them to LLMs. The big AI companies want this because there is no other explanation for the money poured into RLHF'ing these types of problems.
by gnfargbl | 2025-07-11 15:16:32+00:00
Governments don't do get source code for the same reason as every other customer doesn't get source code: software vendors are incentivized to refuse the request.

Why are the vendors so incentivized? Well, coming back to Fujitsu and the Post Office, the answer is that refusing to share the source was worth about a billion dollars: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgm8lmz1xk1o
by spjt | 2025-07-11 15:16:42+00:00
As someone with an incredibly "addictive personality", I've always seen it much more simply. I become addicted to things when there's nothing else I'd rather be doing that is incompatible with the addictive behavior. Like if I'm sitting on the couch scrolling on my phone, if there was something else I'd rather do (not something that I'd "ought to" rather be doing but don't actually want to) then I would be doing that instead.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-11 15:16:45+00:00
> Primary residences pay a lower % of the value than 2nd and 3rd homes.

I think it's funny how every LVT discussion eventually comes back to some inclusion of other factors to adjust the taxes or provide exemptions, which starts to defeat the claimed purpose of a Land Value Tax.

LVT is a concept that sounds amazing and novel in a vacuum, but starts to look less ideal in the real world. The people who think about it enough start to include factors like structure value and different exceptions for how the land is being used, which starts to look a lot like existing tax code in most places.
by dfee | 2025-07-11 15:16:56+00:00
> Accepting that we are just the result of random thermodynamic processes in a cold and uncaring universe that provides no evidence that there is any form of "higher power" than uncaring entropy could very well be the definition of modern atheism.

and then your further rejection of the response:

> The person I am talking about chose their child's well-being and safety as their "higher power".

i understand you see the universe as uncaring, but there is care right in front of you. i hope the sunshine breaks through and you find it, too.
by adrianwaj | 2025-07-11 15:17:09+00:00
Had an idea to combine Thunderclap ( https://luminouspr.com/goodbye-thunderclap-how-social-media-... ) with Polymarket but people get paid to get involved in a campaign, as divided up from a bounty that the founder offers to contribute once a certain threshold of support is attained. The payment can be subject to the results of their fans' involvement. Maybe use signup codes, count retweets, check for multiple posts and unique hashtags, etc.
by jordanb | 2025-07-11 15:17:14+00:00
Yes at some point it turned into CYA. When the leadership started realizing that there were problems with the software they started doubling down, getting even more aggressive with prosecutions, because they were trying to hide their own fuckups.

But when the ball started rolling, as the software rolled out and was finding missing funds everywhere, you'd think a normal person would have asked "are we sure there are no bugs here?" That was never done, I believe, because the software was matching the leadership's priors.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-11 15:17:28+00:00
Chomsky is closer to Foucault than he will ever admit. Even critiquing critical theory/pomo shit from a position of "well you're relevent enough to talk to me, a god at CS" makes them seem like they are legit.

All the pomo/critical theory shit needs to be left in the dust bin of history and forgotten about. Don't engage with it. Don't say fo*calt's name (especially cus he's likely a pedo)

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/16/reckoning-with-...

Try to pretend like you've never heard the word "Zizek" before. Let them die now please.
by cgriswald | 2025-07-11 15:18:07+00:00
Your post sort of hints at it, I think, but I'll state it clearly: Misalignment is the main threat when it comes to AI (and especially ASI).

A self-preserving AI isn't meaningfully more dangerous than an AI that solves world hunger by killing us all. In fact, it may be less so if it concludes that starting a war with humans is riskier than letting us live.
by hollerith | 2025-07-11 15:18:09+00:00
Most things that are highly pleasurable or that provide relief can become the focus of an addiction.

I had chronically-high cortisol. The flow state provided a profound but temporary relief from the cortisol. There are better responses to high cortisol.

DHEA (which is available over-the-counter in the US) is a better response because it allows me to dispense with the hour or 2 of intense concentration necessary to get into the flow state (freeing up the time and the mental energy for more productive uses).

Starting a friendship with a person who gets me and doesn't trigger my trauma triggers was a better response because the cortisol-lowering effect of such a friendship has lasted for years whereas the effect of being in the flow state ends as soon as the flow state ends.
by 7bit | 2025-07-11 15:18:24+00:00
> We are going to have to give our IDs and biometrics to untrusted 3rd parties just because some people don't like the idea of other people's kids using the internet.

Depends on the implementation. Germany has digital passports already and for age verification the only data you transmit is your date of birth.

I don't know anything about Ozzy passports tho.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-11 15:18:31+00:00
I can’t read the site it requires subscription. But I and many other researchers disagree. George Hinton for example, massive disagreement.

It’s not just LLMs that were a leap and bound. For the past decade and more ML has been rising at a breakneck velocity. We see models for scene recognition, models that can read your mind, models that recognize human movement. We were seeing the pieces and components and amazing results constantly for over 10 years and this is independent of LLMs.

And then everyone thinks AI is thousands of years away because we hit a small blip with LLMs in 2 years.

And here’s the thing. The blip isn’t even solid. Like LLMs sometimes gets shit wrong and sometimes gets shit right we just can’t control it. Like we can’t definitively say LLMs can’t answer a specific question. Maybe another LLM can get it right, maybe if prompted a different way it will get it right.

The other strange thing is that the LLM shows signs of lying. Like it’s not truthful. It has knowledge of the truth but the things purpose is not really to tell us the truth.

I guess the best way to put it that current AI sometimes behaves like AGI and sometimes doesn’t. It is not consistently AGI. The fact that we built a machine that inconsistently acts like agi shows how freaking close we are.

But the reality is no one understands how LLMs work. This fact is definitive. Like if you think we know how LLMs work then you are out of touch with reality. Nobody knows how LLMs work so this article and my write up are really speculation. We really dont know.

But the 10 year trendline of AI in general is the one that has a more accurate trendline into future progress. Basing the future off a 2 year trendline of a specific problem with a specific model of ML of LLMs hallucinating is not predictive.
by cryptonector | 2025-07-11 15:18:34+00:00
You're reaching the wrong conclusion, probably because of confirmation bias. Certainly this LISTEN/NOTIFY problem does not lead to your conclusion, nor does it support it. After all if you were relying on LISTEN/NOTIFY you could instead rely on logical replication decoding / CDC instead. And heck, you could even have a client connected to the same database that uses logical decoding to pick up events worth NOTIFYing about and then does just that, but without burdening any other transactions.
by anarbadalov | 2025-07-11 15:18:47+00:00
As I just wrote to the author of this piece (who also happens to send out one of the best weekly roundups of weird and wonderful articles I get), her experience captures what so many authors I’ve worked with over the years in publishing have struggled with. When i can, i try to disabuse them of the idea that social media is somehow a reliable or necessary tool for promoting a book. As Caroline writes, if you already have a platform and it comes naturally to you, great, but I’ve personally never seen an author join social media in order to promote a book and actually succeed. And that’s before you even get to the exploitative dynamics she lays out so clearly here (aptly described as a pyramid scheme). Anyway, it’s all articulated beautifully, and I wish every author, especially those just starting to consider it, could read this and know there’s another way.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-07-11 15:19:04+00:00
There wouldn't be any evidence that these groups, specifically AA have embedded themselves into the government and law system of the united states in particular and have used their influence to force non-religious people to join their little cult meetings, right? It's all optional of course!

Anyway, here's a list of court cases/news articles where it wasn't:

https://www.courthousenews.com/atheist-fights-court-ordered-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/08/alcoholics-ano...

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/1995/jul/15/aa-probatio...

https://aaagnostica.org/2014/10/17/atheist-punished-for-reje...

I'm sure you can find 20 more easily. Glad i'm not american.
by thow58406 | 2025-07-11 15:19:11+00:00
The incentives you've presented are correct. However, my friends from rural areas always complain about rich outsiders moving in, buying everyone else out, and raising the cost of living. If LVT is just a way to "[incentivize farmers] to sell for a profit", why would people in these areas support LVT? I'm afraid it would just turn into another partisan issue, regardless of merits. And I like LVT!
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-11 15:19:17+00:00
Dang being an ass and the moderation on HN being bad doesn't mean that suddenly the disappearance of leprosy from europe was a socially constructed thing. Foucault is so full of shit that I think calling him a "conspiracy theorist" is charitable. He's a full on anti-scientific charlatan.

Biopolitics/biopower is a conspiracy theory. Most of all of his books, including and especially Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization, and a History of Sexuality, are full of lies/false citations, and other charlatanism.

A whole lot of others are also full of Shit. Lacan is the most full of shit of all, but even the likes of Marshal Mcluhan are full of shit. Entire fields like "Semiotics" are also full of shit.
by brightball | 2025-07-11 15:19:18+00:00
Agreed. I used triggers frequently for things like incrementing/decrementing count fields for dashboards because it's the only way to guarantee those numbers are correct while ensuring something in the application hasn't bypassed a callback or handler to modify the data.

You only need to cover three scenarios and it's very simple to implement. Recorded added +1, Record removed -1, Record moved +1 & -1.

If you have counts that are more complicated, it doesn't work but this solution easily beats semi-frequent COUNT queries.
by anonzzzies | 2025-07-11 15:19:53+00:00
I am in Spain (where people, imho wrongfully, think tourism is ruining everything) and I dont see the issue; my wife and myself make enough in the summer to not have anything to do the rest of the year. I have IT businesses which I scale back to run the pub in summer for 3 month. I don't really care about whatever they do as long as it is not fighting: the more drunk and loud they are, especially guys with girls, the more they will just basically order anything of whatever price. And many of them. And yeah, some drinks and food locals would never ever buy so we mark them up 10x. Do not see an issue with that: it is not hidden and locals dont pay less for the same product: it is on the menu, everyone can see it, it's just not popular while for some groups of foreigners it's the first they ask. Welcome please!
by shkkmo | 2025-07-11 15:19:57+00:00
> Trauma only appearing in super-deep going therapy sessions can often be False Memory Syndrome, which is an entirely different can of worms and extremely problematic

It is problematic, but not in the way that you think. While memories can be suggestively altered or created by questioning, the evidence for doing so for traumatic childhood sexual abuse is anecdotal and those anecdotes were pretty heavily cherry picked by the clearly biased FMSF, which was run as a support and advocacy group for parents accused of abuse.

That said, my understanding is that in general, dwelling on traumatizing experiences isn't beneficial to recovery. There are times they may need to be confronted and processed, but generally if it isn't causing a problem, don't go digging it up and spending a lot of time thinking about it unnecessarily.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-11 15:20:08+00:00
BTW: I guess I should be a bit more forthcoming about the way that I work. I know that we are always looking to ding others for not working the way that we do, but I find my way works for me, quite well. I won't tell other people that they are wrong, unless they are working for me. I am constantly learning new techniques and approaches, by staying open to, and observing, how others do things. I learn from the examples set forth by others; even ones that do things in a way that I may initially disapprove of.

"Experimenting" is a vital part of my process. I call it "Evolutionary Design,"[0] and it involves a lot of iteration. I have found that it's vital to UI[1], because I can almost never predict how UI will act, when actually presented to the user. The same goes for a lot of communication workflows. I have to "run it up the flagpole, and see who salutes." I almost always find that my theorized approach has issues, and I need to make changes. The old "Measure twice; cut once" approach to software development has caused me great trouble, over the years, and I have found that I need to adjust to new tools, and new contexts.

For example, right now, I am revamping one of my UI widgets[2]. It started as a minor tweak for iOS26, but I realized that it's a bit "long in the tooth," and that I can make it more robust, simple, and usable. I have been running the test harness all morning, seeing issues, and going back to the code, and tweaking.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/evolutionary-design-specificati...

[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/the-road-most-traveled-by/

[2] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Checkbox
by cryptonector | 2025-07-11 15:20:54+00:00
One can replace LISTEN/NOTIFY with logical replication / CDC. And it's funny because somehow, somewhere, PG must be serializing the writing of the WAL to some degree. So it's not clear to me why LISTEN/NOTIFY needs additional serialization. Perhaps PG should turn NOTIFY into INSERTs on a special table that a worker process watches and turns those inserts into notifies (and deletes the inserts).
by Aurornis | 2025-07-11 15:21:01+00:00
> especially the section "an LVT implicitly taxes improvements to nearby land" which is often overlooked or glossed over in these discussions.

The claim, which I disagree with, is that spreading those taxes across nearby land incentivizes those property owners to sell their land to someone else who will improve it.

Which gets at another LVT problem that is glossed over in discussions: Everything assumes that selling properties and moving is cheap and easy. If grandma's forever home is surrounded by apartment complexes when she's 85 years old, her taxes would become unaffordable because she's paying her share of those apartment complex value taxes. She would just pick up and move, which we're supposed to assume is cheap and easy.

It can all be fixed by making the tax structure a combination of land value and structure value, which happens to be how existing property taxes are constructed in most places.
by acquiesce | 2025-07-11 15:21:02+00:00
By pointing out the obvious you miss out jumping on the bandwagon of everyone writhing in pain over how devastated they are for the environmental impact. Whenever AI is brought up you have to remind people how unsustainable it is and how it’s all about to fall apart and how the value isn’t there, among other topics. Off topic/on topic I’m reminded of death reports during COVID for particular states. When I went to go and look at the statistics of years prior to compare, they were at par if not less than the few previous years. Just an example of uncontrolled (mostly manipulative) outrage in action. I’d like to expect better of HN but I don’t: I’ve lost all respect for the moderation (dang and now tom) here over the years.
by interpol_p | 2025-07-11 15:21:11+00:00
You missed my point. My point is that if Apple wants to add this now, it's going to cost them engineering resources.

You think side loading on Android cost Google "nothing" to implement and maintain? No, it costs them engineering resources to support that feature. It's a good feature to support and it's beneficial to users. But it's not free, it doesn't magically insert itself into the Android codebase if they "comment out an `if` statement" as the GP suggested.

Also, Android is gradually adopting many iOS-like permissions and security models. We recently updated our Android apps related to reading and writing to the file system. Why is that? Because the free-for-all they shipped with was heavily abused by developers.
by daxfohl | 2025-07-11 15:21:26+00:00
> I am of the opinion that Flix is strictly worse than Idris2

That seems irrelevant to my original comment. Idris is a fully dependently-typed language that compiles to native code, and seems to be in maintenance mode. Flix is built on JVM, uses effects rather than dependent types, which I think makes an 80/20-rule sacrifice of type safety for ease-of-use, and seems to have a more active community (for now).

But yeah, the datalog thing feels unnecessary. Like the SQL built into Linq/C#, cute, but doesn't really scale for real-world use cases, so there's still a need for independent ORMs. I see a similar thing here. No need for building this into the language. There are plenty of logic libraries, services, persistent stores, etc that can do datalog, so let users use them the way they want. Building it in just feels gimmicky at best, potentially troublesome at worst.

It gives me a similar feeling as the old language / web platform, Opa. It was a really cool language for the time, and had client-server functionality (similar to meteor) built into the language itself. But as web client-server frameworks fell out of favor, so went the language itself.

Here, I think the built-in datalog makes it seem like a language that's hinging too much on a gimmick, and takes away from the impression it gives as a serious language.