MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by majormajor | 2025-07-11 15:56:10+00:00
> Discriminating good answers is easier than generating them.

I don't think this is true for many fields - especially outside of math/programming. Let's say the task is "find the ten most promising energy startups in Europe." (This is essentially the sort of work I see people frequently talk about using research modes of models for here or on LinkedIn.)

In ye olden days pre-LLM you'd be able to easily filter out a bunch of bad answers from lazy humans since they'd be short, contain no detail, have a bunch of typos, formatting inconsistencies from copy-paste, etc. You can't do that for LLM output.

So unless you're a domain expert on European energy startups you can't check for a good answer without doing a LOT of homework. And if you're using a model that usually only looks at, say, the top two pages of Google results to try to figure this out, how is the validator going to do better than the original generator?

And what about when the top two pages of Google results start turning into model-generated blogspam?

If your benchmark can't evaluate prospective real-world tasks like this, it's of limited use.

A larger issue is that once your benchmark, that used this task as a criteria, based on an expert's knowledge, is published, anyone making an AI Agent is incredibly incentivized to (intentionally or not!) to train specifically on this answer without necessarily actually getting better at the fundamental steps in the task.

IMO you can never use an AI agent benchmark that is published on the internet more than once.
by picture | 2025-07-11 15:56:47+00:00
The coming update has trains and factories! The game is mainly about managing compounding growth with discrete losses (having more land and cities increases you population cap, and your population follows a logistic curve, so you want to reserve an amount of population to maintain growth, and it's programmed so that you want to use a discrete amount for attacking instead of a constant trickle)

A good strategy that works well for me is to prioritize moneymaking and win by cleaning up a nuclear wasteland. Some tips for that strategy aka trademaxxing:

* The fastest way to make money is to get lots of ports and ally with people near and far. Boats give you more gold depending on their distance traveled

* Set up turtled-in bases on islands and have warships patrolling near them to shoot down potential land invasions. This combined with your small land area will make it less appealing for the big countries to focus on you

* Once you have enough funds for a MIRV, maintain strategic deterrence by having multiple missile silos - so you can launch the MIRVs any time

* Continue to trademaxx and wait for the big countries to nuke each other into oblivion

* Once the time is right (and you have enough funds for multiple MIRVs), move in to clean up the nuclear wasteland. Get some cities but don't spend too much money. If another country starts attacking you at this point, you can MIRV them again. You are also much more resistant to MIRVs since your assets are in money instead of structures and can rebuild quickly
by msgodel | 2025-07-11 15:57:00+00:00
Ah I forgot Apple advertises managing SSO as a feature of iOS and not an external service like sane people would.

Well. I guess they'll have to choose between opening it up like every other company does or acknowledge that it's a separate pay for service then.

They do a lot of that kind of thing and my answer for all of it is the same: Open it up to everyone or acknowledge it's a pay-for cloud service that has nothing to do with the actual phone OS. If people have root they can (and will) develop their own services that won't need that which would comply with the DMA.
by xhkkffbf | 2025-07-11 15:57:49+00:00
But why does it matter if you're on the fringe or not? Galileo was on the fringe, but he ended up wrong. Hitler was very popular and not a fringe person after he assumed power. Yet, he was pretty wrong.

Somehow I bet Kate Blackwood is certain that she's not on the fringe. She probably also thinks she's on the side of righteous change and history, something that already suggests she's not in the center of popular thought.

I'm sure she also feels that people who disagree with her are on the fringe.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-11 15:58:21+00:00
No. A facial expression that comes 0.5 seconds after it should can create a perception of inauthenticity as can the use of measured-seeming words. (Yet, an emotional expression that breaks gradually can be the most powerful of all —- Biden’s performance where he feels how “you’re fired” makes him feel or Pelosi’s tears at Trump inauguration 2 hit hard in a way that her usual mask never does)

If there was anything characteristic about Biden to Trump voters it was that they didn’t watch or read the news much at all

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/democrats-need-to-face...

Klein would say he got a huge amount of hate mail from people who said the Times was not putting up strident enough headlines (won’t use the F-word or N-word for Trump) but that the kind of people who read the Times weren’t that the kind of people who need to be persuaded.

Psychoanalysis has been out of fashion for 50+ years but I also think a presidential candidate who looks like your mom evokes feelings of helplessness you had a a child which has to do why I couldn’t stand Clinton II and many blacks couldn’t stand Harris. In two years of chewing on it and people coming around I will have emotional and factual truth reconciled more than I have it now.
by gspencley | 2025-07-11 15:58:27+00:00
Yes, these are often referred to as "Magic Links."

When it comes to the security implications, consider that email has long been a "single point of failure" for a lot of services in the form of the "forgot password" feature that emails you a link to reset your password.

When I'm talking to non-tech people in my life about how best to protect themselves, I usually tell them to think about priorities and disaster scenarios. What would suck the most if it got hacked? The two that are usually at the top of the list for pretty much everyone are email and online banking. Others might include Amazon accounts (hackers can order themselves gift cards with your CC if compromised etc.) Prioritize securing those with a strong password + MFA. The rest is case by case but make sure to use a password manager so you're not reusing passwords.
by prisenco | 2025-07-11 15:58:32+00:00
I want a social media website that barely ever notifies me, has no algorithmic feed, no ads and limits the amount of connections I can have to about the size of a large wedding party. Something like that would be for actual friends and family and would be useless for influencers, trolls and bots.

Bonus points if it doesn't have an app and is only a website.
by tombert | 2025-07-11 15:58:41+00:00
I just got declined for a job yesterday because I had a post on my blog talking about my history with major depressive disorder and medication to address that. That's not just a cope on my end, they actually said that. I don't think I'm ambitious enough to try and sue them for it, I might report to some department in NYC for it though.

But I think I learned that being candid about yourself on the internet is a mistake. I have no idea why the fuck it would be a good idea to be upfront about my mental health history; who the hell knows how many jobs I've been declined for where they were smart enough to not say that that's why they were declining me.

I had already deleted most of my social media, the only ones I use regularly are Hacker News and the aforementioned blog [1], and I think I should probably just stop mentioning anything that isn't purely technical on either of them.

[1] Not really social media, but it is a public-facing thing with my name on it.
by aswegs8 | 2025-07-11 15:58:53+00:00
I didn't know this story, but thanks for pointing this out. It's scary how people in this thread talk about hallucinogens like they could not ruin your life.

Citing Sam Harris:

“Ingesting a powerful dose of a psychedelic drug is like strapping oneself to a rocket without a guidance system. One might wind up somewhere worth going, and, depending on the compound and one’s “set and setting,” certain trajectories are more likely than others. But however methodically one prepares for the voyage, one can still be hurled into states of mind so painful and confusing as to be indistinguishable from psychosis.”

“This is not to say that everyone should take psychedelics. As I will make clear below, these drugs pose certain dangers. Undoubtedly, some people cannot afford to give the anchor of sanity even the slightest tug.”
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-11 15:58:56+00:00
You gotta snag yourself one of those awesome KEMAR dummy head and torso simulators, preferably the fully accessorized luxury edition that comes with the heavy duty portable travel case with lots of room for extra ears and microphones and wigs, which is so much fun to take through airport security.

They were great for taking to Grateful Dead concerts to record the music directly in front of the Wall of Sound, and to measure the response so you can play back all your Dead tapes with that same front row psychoacoustic perspective. ;)

https://www.grasacoustics.com/industries/kemar/applications-...

https://www.grasacoustics.com/products/accessories/product/4...
by alexpotato | 2025-07-11 15:58:59+00:00
In defense of social media, going to share a typical conversation I have with some younger (mid 20s) folks that I mentor:

Me: "Do you use social media?"

Them: "NO! Social media is so toxic!"

Me: "You mentioned earlier that you are trying to get a job in X field, correct?"

Them: "Yes, that's true"

Me: "Have you found the relevant sub-Reddit, part of Twitter etc where people in that field hang out and/or share ideas?"

Them: "Well, no."

Me: "So how about this: first find the online place where those people hang out. Second, why don't you write up a blog post or summary of something you've done in the field and post it there. If you haven't done something IN the field, then maybe talk about how you learned about the field or what you find interesting about it etc. Then post that in the sub-Reddit etc."

<few weeks go by>

Them: "I followed your advice and someone from a firm in the field I'm interested saw it, read it, commented on it and reached about having a conversation."

Me: "Excellent! I always say that the lifetime marginal benefit of going from zero to one social media post about you describing/writing about your preferred industry is ENORMOUS"

(We usually move on to another topic with the mentee after this)

Prior to social media, the only way you could do this was to do one of the following:

- go to college in that field

- hangout, physically, where the folks you wanted to interact with were

- physically send letters to people with your article/summary idea

- etc

I feel like a lot of folks forget this and are blinded by the downsides of social media (which, to be fair, there are many)
by Balgair | 2025-07-11 15:59:03+00:00
ACX had a good roundup on the science of sperm count decline here:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-...

TLDR: It's complicated, but the science seems to be decidedly up in the air. We don't actually know if sperm counts are declining, let alone the cause.
by simonw | 2025-07-11 15:59:04+00:00
I think it is possible that a developer, with or without Elon's direct instruction, decided to engineer Grok to search for Elon's tweets on controversial subjects and then either out of incompetence or malicious compliance set it up so those searches would be exposed in the UI.

I also think it is possible that nobody specifically designed that behavior, and it instead emerged from the way the model was trained.

My current intuition is that the second is more likely than the first.
by mNovak | 2025-07-11 15:59:05+00:00
>> I content that it is simply not possible to evaluate the "unimproved value" of a given parcel

There's a decent discussion on that topic here [1], as a starting point. Not saying it's absolutely conclusive, but gives some food for thought. I suppose where determining an accurate value might be most difficult is parcels that rarely turn over, so have little direct or nearby sales data.

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-c...
by spacemadness | 2025-07-11 15:59:47+00:00
You know, it’s ok to call it fascism. I know everyone is having a hard time coping and is still waving their hands wildly to call it something else. And just because the undesirables aren’t all dealt with in the first year doesn’t mean it’s not a fascist takeover. It happens in stages. But that’s what it is. Trump suggested that the federal government take over NYC if Mamdani wins the election. Step by step they’re trying to make it happen. It’s fascism.
by MarkMarine | 2025-07-11 15:59:49+00:00
I agree, my jointer has a guard but you need to pull a little Allen key out to put the guard on/off. That little extra friction is enough I think. Someone needs to rabbet and never puts the guard back on.

Personally I like my digits, but I’m not in a production shop where every second counts, I just do this for myself and I make my living typing. I would tolerate any amount of friction to keep my fingers in the same configuration they are currently in.
by VikingTechGuy | 2025-07-11 16:00:03+00:00
73% of Danish Business Websites Found in Violation of GDPR Consent Rules. After scanning 36,496 company domains in Denmark, we found that over 73% load trackers before consent - including Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Facebook, and even third-party CMPs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44533592
by WillAdams | 2025-07-11 16:00:27+00:00
I lived through the whole thing. Aldus Pagemaker was king for a long while, then Quark came along, then Adobe bought Aldus to get their nascent PageMaker replacement (codenamed K2), dethroning Quark.

There were a lot of other programs along the way, esp. if you consider platforms other than Mac OS (and later Windows).

I still think someone needs to create an office suite which just used .md and .csv and similar plain-text source files for file formats, then all design variations are done via theming --- then, when it's time to produce a document professionally, what is provided is a clear plain text file with sensible markup which is easily converted into pretty much anything.
by ordu | 2025-07-11 16:01:18+00:00
> I like it from the standpoint of kids not being afraid of power tools.

I'm personally cultivating my fear for power tools. I consciously work on it so I wouldn't get used to them and wouldn't stop being afraid. Fear makes me more attentive, more careful, it forces me to think first and to do next. To stop myself when things go not as planned and think again. It is almost impossible to distract me while I'm cutting wood or whatever I'm doing with a power tool. I'm afraid of the tool, I wouldn't let my attention to switch from it while it is powered.

It is funny, that psychologists believe that fears is a bad thing that must be eliminated. At least all I've talked about fears believed in that. But fears are good, they come with a danger detector included, and they are hard to ignore.

> Teaching kids that power tools don't need to be scary as long as they're used safely is a worthwhile output on its own IMO.

I believe, that either "to use safely" or "not scary". There is no middle ground. Though it maybe just my own way to the safety, maybe others know other ways.

> Plenty of adults would never do woodworking because the tools seem too scary.

The fears that stop you from doing are probably bad, but from the other hand, before using power tools you'd better learn how to do it safely. I learned all of them from experienced people, who demonstrated me how to do it properly, watched me and explained me what I'm doing wrong. So, maybe, they are right.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-07-11 16:01:20+00:00
A couple assumptions you're making here I'd disagree with: 1. Yudkowski is ever worth listening to. 2. That this is just some antecdotal experience (the whole world is having), that isn't backed by any scientific merrit. I don't have time in the middle of my work day to go find all that, but we all know this is something measurable.

How humans adapt remains to be seen, it seems like a lot of (young) people adapt by shoving the barrel of a gun in their... Maybe they would have done that anyways idk.
by wpm | 2025-07-11 16:01:37+00:00
Note that this isn't too long after Apple abandoned efforts to bring ZFS into Mac OS X as a potential default filesystem. Patents were probably a good reason, given the Oracle buyout of Sun, but also a bit of "skating to where the puck will be" and realizing that the spinning rust ZFS was built for probably wasn't going to be in their computers for much longer.
Show HN: TikTok-viral Soulmate Sketch – Find your "future partner"(just for fun)
by lcorinst | 2025-07-11 16:02:16+00:00
The soulmate drawing trend has been blowing up on TikTok, so I decided to build my own web app version. It generates a moody sketch of your “future partner” based on your birth details and preferences. Just a fun little side project—no sign-ups, free to try. Would love to hear what you think or see your results!
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2025-07-11 16:02:27+00:00
I am 40 and live in Germany. In my 20s I was too poor to start a family. Now I live with a woman who has no desire to go through pregnancy and become a mother. There are personal reasons for this, and I do understand them. I like children and would like to be a father. But I work full-time, as does my partner. I'm always busy after work: Riding or wrenching on my motorcycle, cycling, personal programming projects, gardening, etc. Yesterday I spent the afternoon cleaning a carburetor and pressing bearings into wheels. I spend the weekends doing sports or visiting friends. Becoming a father would be like a second full-time job.

I saw a homeless man lying on a patch of grass in a dirty sleeping bag on my way to work yesterday. The idea of bringing a child into the world and exposing it to the risk of ending up in a situation like that just makes me sad. We are currently buying a house. If I could have afforded this ten or fifteen years ago, I might have kids now. Looking back, I'd say I've had enough to do with growing up and providing for myself financially. I simply didn't have the capacity to start a family.

A friend of mine has two children. She barely has enough money and is trying to finish her university studies. Another friend is a chief surgeon and earns so well that his children are not a big financial factor for him. He is divorced from the children's mother and has another partner. Another friend is a pastor and has two children. I guess, for him it was always a matter of course to have children. He is now also divorced, so he no longer lives in the picture-book family world that he probably once dreamed of.

The other people around me are grown-up children like me, who for various reasons did not become parents. One friend of mine is a gay man. His sister is a lesbian. Both much to the annoyance of their parents, who would like to be grandparents. A couple at my office in their thirties mainly play computer games after work and have pets instead of children. One of my best friends is a woman who lives with a trans man. They are currently planning to become parents via in-vitro fertilization, which will cost a total of ~20,000 euros. The world is strange and apparently no longer properly calibrated for having children.

I am glad that there is no more social pressure pushing people into parenthood. But that has to be compensated for somehow and I don't see any socio-political willingness to tackle this. Raising children is a service to society! We cannot expect children to grow like grass in an unattended meadow. If society is not committed to guarantee healthy soil and to water the gras properly, then nothing will grow.
by timr | 2025-07-11 16:02:34+00:00
Yes, I agree that it's a better way to travel if you can do it, but most people can't [1].

That said, even for short-term tourists, Japan used to be kind of a miracle in terms of the quality and service you would get for the money. I know it sounds like hipster whining, but that time is in the past.

[1] My snobby hot-take is that if you can't travel this way you shouldn't do recreational international travel at all, unless it's to go to a luxury hotel and sit on a beach or something packaged like that. But I realize that this will not be a popular opinion.
by tombert | 2025-07-11 16:03:41+00:00
Yeah that's the one I was looking at.

I'm not sure if I want to do it, because this is a relatively small company, it would be very clearly me who reported them, and the leader of this company is sort of a known sociopath who would probably not be above blackballing me and making it very hard for me to be employed.

It's a little depressing, because I wrote that blog post so that I people searching for how certain medications affect them could know what they were in for, I didn't think it would be weaponized against me, but I guess that was a little naive on my end.
by esseph | 2025-07-11 16:04:05+00:00
I hope research with psilocybin, DMT, and other psychedelics continue and that some of these possible discoveries pan out.

Example that just came across my news feed: "psilocin, a byproduct of consuming psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, extended the cellular lifespan of human skin and lung cells by more than 50%."

https://neurosciencenews.com/psilocybin-longevity-aging-2942...
by epicide | 2025-07-11 16:04:10+00:00
You can think of it in terms of tolerances. Beej's (and others you mention) style is like a tighter tolerance: it fits to better effect at the cost of fitting in fewer places.

Personally, I'm in the audience that that style works well on, but I can also see how it might be harder for someone to follow that style. e.g. if English isn't their native language. Similarly, I imagine that style is also much harder to localize (not just translate).

I think both techniques are great and I don't think they're mutually exclusive. That is, you can still inject flavor and style within the confines of a technical style guide. You just do so in a way that's less... flamboyant?
by miningape | 2025-07-11 16:04:12+00:00
> I still don't understand why we see lower birth rates as a problem when overall the population of the planet is still increasing

This is like saying "I still don't see why gravity is a problem when the overall height of the ball is still increasing."

The problem isn't today, it's tomorrow - after the large population starts dying off and the population starts shrinking. People don't live forever.
by tetromino_ | 2025-07-11 16:04:25+00:00
In New York, you sometimes find unofficial community parks / third spaces on unused plots of land which for whatever reason (such as a strange shape) are difficult to develop. These are maintained by enthusiastic local residents, and the land owners turn a blind eye to it as long as there are no complaints.

If LVT is implemented, land owners will have a financial incentive to sell off the plots, and the spaces will be gone.