MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by azinman2 | 2025-07-22 15:55:14+00:00
I think this view is very myopic and needlessly ubiquitous.

I do agree that worse but cheap will be used a lot right now. But we also have it already with outsourcing, and not everything is outsourced.

Signaling theory provides a useful perspective here. If everyone has access to the same tools for thought, then everyone can arrive at the same output independent (mostly) of skill. That means the value of any one computer generated output will crash towards an average minimum. Society will notice and reward the output that is substantially better and different, because it shows that someone has something far better than the rest of access to or are capable of doing. This is even more heightened when the markets are flooded with AI slop. It’ll become obvious and distasteful.

Those with skills and ability to differentiate will continue their existing ascent.
by gnabgib | 2025-07-22 15:55:19+00:00
Discussions:

Replit AI deletes entire database during code freeze, then lies about it (137 points, 2 days ago, 53 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44625119

Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database, faked data, told fibs (112 points, 1 day ago, 68 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632575

Replit's CEO apologizes after its AI agent wiped a company's code base (137 points, 3 hours ago, 136 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44646151
by S11D336B | 2025-07-22 15:55:22+00:00
It's a symptom of too much information. Each individual has to determine how to spend their time. A summary is one of the best tools we have now for doing that. Also, people are just lazy. We need better ways to filter. AI will be able to do this. Probably already can, someone just needs to build it and let people fine tune it to their tastes.
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-22 15:55:47+00:00
Depends on the research. For some areas such as gender science, they swooped in and literally burned decades worth of research [1]. And fwiw, even medicine was considered political - the term "Schulmedizin" was popularized by the Nazis who preferred esoterics, homeopathy and other quackery.

IMHO, it's more than warranted to call out parallels between events back then and events happening right under our noses today [2], not to mention the increasing and worrying trend of book bans [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ohio-man-accused-burnin...

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-school-library-book-ban...
by scosman | 2025-07-22 15:56:01+00:00
Yes! I often add a CI check that TODOs are removed before merging a PR. Have them all you want in your branch, but do one of the above 3 things before merging (sometimes any `TODO`, sometimes `TODO_P0`).

I find CI integration also makes TODOs more helpful. You can use them to track a genuine TODO in a working branch, but CI will make sure you don't miss them.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-22 15:56:14+00:00
> Leah Phillips, of Pewee Valley, Ky. Doctors first mistakenly diagnosed her with asthma and then anxiety. Later, they said she had pneumonia. When an oncologist finally told her in 2019 that she had metastatic lung cancer, he gave her six to 12 months to live. “Go home and get your affairs in order,” Ms. Phillips remembered him saying. She was 43, and her children were 9, 13 and 14.

(One of many cases mentioned in the article.)

Before you head for the lab, to start researching "why" - maybe you should tighten up the standards for diagnosis and testing? That could enormously improve the qualities & quantities of life for a huge number of patients.
by stouset | 2025-07-22 15:56:14+00:00
Yep! And it makes it convenient even when you need to make changes or add new commits onto A. B is constantly stitched up to remain a child of A and incorporate its fixes.

It also makes it simple and easy to split B and A apart such that both their parents are `main` if they’re unrelated.

You can also go hog-wild. I was working on a big refactor recently. I made independent changes A, B, C, and D (each one to three commits). I then wanted to work on code that assumed all of these commits were available, so I made a merge commit E that combined them. I then made changes F that depended on that refactor, so was a child of E.

Managing this was simple. If I needed to make updates or tweaks to A-D, E and F were updated to incorporate them automatically. `jj absorb` even meant that doing these types of changes was almost zero work: I could make a bunch of changes and the tool would know in which parent commit they belonged.

None of this was merged in yet. When I was ready, PRs went out for A-D. When they each merged into `main`, E became a no-op and was discarded. F became its own PR. This is something I never would have done in git because having multiple threads of unmerged code is a colossal hassle.
by bArray | 2025-07-22 15:56:19+00:00
Could have been simpler still. You can read the internal temperature of the ATiny85 [1]. You can also get the ATiny85 to speak USB and even be flashed via USB via the micronucleus bootloader [2].

[1] https://andrey.mikhalchuk.com/2011/06/20/reading-attiny85452...

[2] https://github.com/micronucleus/micronucleus
by trealira | 2025-07-22 15:56:36+00:00
Because he talks like them, and they know he's a scumbag, but he's their scumbag, which they sic on the people they hate most: the vermin liberals, the immigrants poisoning the blood of the country, the parasitic federal workers whose lives they want to make miserable, the trans people they deem as all predatory groomers, the academics and scientists they're defunding because it's all woke. It's about taking their lump of flesh. They excuse the open corruption as at least being open corruption, since they assume everyone else is ten times as corrupt behind closed doors. That's why they were fine withholding disaster relief from blue states in 2020.

It makes me angry as hell. They hate us and you can't say anything about it because if you're not nice enough to them, they act like you're being mean to them and the personal reason they'll continue to vote for people that demonize and hate you.
by moralestapia | 2025-07-22 15:57:00+00:00
>Eh, the most believable conspiracy is gain of function research accidentally escaped a lab because of poor controls and then was covered up.

Four years ago you couldn't even remotely mention this as a possibility; even, and particularly, among "the most educated"™ and "the most tolerant"™.

Now plenty of them believe that was the case.

Don't know if Overton window is behind or if there was some sort manipulation involved, but it's definitely something I've noticed.
by codyb | 2025-07-22 15:57:08+00:00
I know no one's ever going to change their ways cause of the increasingly evident ravages of climate change but I swear I feel like throwing rocks at the big SUVs rolling by with exactly one person in them during the heat domes here in NYC.

Just, so, gross.

And it truly is the _vast majority_ of cars going by with exactly one person in them. So wasteful, so much pollution, so hot... frustrating.
by redasadki | 2025-07-22 15:57:14+00:00
At the Paris summit, Eric Schmidt shared what he calls the “San Francisco Consensus”—a convergence of belief among Silicon Valley’s leaders that within three to six years AI will fundamentally transform every aspect of human activity.

Whether one views this timeline as realistic or delusional matters less than the fact that the people building AI systems—and investing hundreds of billions in infrastructure—believe it. Their conviction alone makes the Consensus a force shaping our immediate future.
by Zak | 2025-07-22 15:57:25+00:00
Other mitigations are possible, such as a battery compartment designed for cells that are 69mm long, as is typical for protected cells instead of 65mm. I'll admit I complain about this when reviewing a flashlight (use longer springs so it's not picky), but it's likely the right choice for many applications.

It's not the right choice for all applications of course. Products intended for children and that are particularly demanding in terms of electrical power require greater caution than speakers or most flashlights.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-22 15:57:33+00:00
The ground truth reality is nobody knows what’s going on.

Perhaps in the flicker of processing between prompt and answer the signal patter does resemble human consciousness for a second.

Calling it a token predictor is just like saying a computer is a bit mover. In the end your computer is just a machine that flips bits and switches but it is the high level macro effect that characterizes it better. LLMs are the same at the low level it is a token predictor. At the higher macro level we do not understand it and it is not completely far fetched to say it may be conscious at times.

I mean we can’t even characterize definitively what consciousness is at the language level. It’s a bit of a loaded word deliberately given a vague definition.
by rekoros | 2025-07-22 15:57:33+00:00
I've been using daisyUI for a couple of years and really love it - it's a quick, reliable way to rig up a nice looking/functioning UI with minimal work, while making things appear reasonably uniform across pages/workflows.

The combination of Tailwind and daisyUI made it possible for me - a backend developer - to pretentd to be somewhat competent in frontendland, which has been incredibly handy, work-wise.
by 90s_dev | 2025-07-22 15:57:56+00:00
I've been writing CSS manually since it came out. The latest additions make it less difficult, like & and nesting, variables, etc.

But overall, CSS is just really difficult to scale well properly. I should probably learn Tailwind at this point, instead of continually rolling my own CSS.

So now I have DaisyUI bookmarked since the site is excellent and looks so useful.
by onetimeusename | 2025-07-22 15:58:16+00:00
I am not sure it was ever very functional. I am not an expert on it at all but it seems like it had two purposes for the US. 1) prevent Nazis (i.e. another world war which metaphysically it seems people believe Right wing views are responsible for war which leads to very specific outcomes we see today) and 2) prevent countries from becoming communist by opening discussions with them.

This article makes the case that the 1965 Immigration Act happened not because anyone in the US wanted it but because the State Dept. pressured Congress to pass it in order to make more allies with Third World countries https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/geopolitical-origins.... Basically the UN was used as a forum by countries to trash the US which it still is. The USSR propagandized against the US in the Third World.

So honestly the whole UN experiment seems like it was kind of a foreign policy wonk experiment that didn't really serve the interests of US citizens especially now that the USSR fell. But I think the philosophical ideas behind it run very strong in elitist thought in the US. These are that 1) Nationalism is an ever present threat to global peace 2) social engineering should be used to prevent Nationalism/Nazis/etc. 3) Immigration is a tool for statecraft and limiting Nationalism in certain countries. 4) an enlightened class of smarter, educated people should be used to counter Nationalism.

If any of these goals or assumptions are false the whole thing becomes useless.
by jmclnx | 2025-07-22 15:58:23+00:00
Money wins all the time and the GOP is happy to take it for supporting fossil fuels. But the climate change fix party (democrats) is more than happy to open up new Oil Fields if they think high gas prices will hurt their election chances. That happened under Biden.

So here we are, seeing heat records being broken every year and storms causing more and more damage. Everyone knew this would happen 60+ years ago, but the bribes kept the gov. kicking the can down the road.

At least by closing Mauna Loa the facts can be denied going forward.

The next kick will probably "melt" the can.
by swyx | 2025-07-22 15:58:23+00:00
if you used this in earnest sufficiently, you'd know yt default transcripts are not good enough because youtube often (ok say 5% of time) fails to transcribe videos particularly livestreams and shortly after release.

youtube also blocks transcript exports for some things like https://youtubetranscript.com/

retranscribing is necessary and important part of the creator toolset.
by dang | 2025-07-22 15:58:25+00:00
A small number of reposts is ok if an article hasn't had significant attention yet. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#reposts.

In this case, we invited the author to redo his Show HN along with a sample chapter, since that is the Show HN convention for "sharing one's work" (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) when the work is a book.
by turtlesdown11 | 2025-07-22 15:58:26+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Peace

> The "Long Peace" is a term for the unprecedented historical period of relative global stability following the end of World War II in 1945 to the present day

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_econ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_globalization

I hope you learn something today.
by it_citizen | 2025-07-22 15:58:28+00:00
It is not a opinion article about the current admin. It is the direct statement from the state department on a topic that doesn’t belong less here than many other general interest topics found on hacker news. A few post below, there is a petition against pesticides in France.

UNESCO stands for international cooperation in education, science, culture, and communication. That seems well within what HN can cover in my opinion.
by Liftyee | 2025-07-22 15:58:33+00:00
I wonder if there is some conservation of effort / "vibe matching" at play. The classic books which another commenter mentioned probably had a lot of thought put into the choices made in each sentence, while shows/YouTube videos/cooking articles etc. today definitely have less effort per second given the amount of filler.

If the creator has "diluted" the amount of thought and information per unit content I don't see why it shouldn't be compressed to reach previous "densities".
by convolvatron | 2025-07-22 15:58:36+00:00
you could say historical reasons, in that dynamic libraries are generated using relocatable position independent code (-pic), which incurs some performance penalty vs code where the linker fills in all the relocations. my guess is thats somewhere around 10%? historical in the sense that that used to be enough to matter? idk that it still is

personally I think leaving the binding of libraries to runtime opens up alot of room for problems, and maybe the savings of having a single copy of a library loaded into memory vs N specialized copies isn't important anymore either.
by nluken | 2025-07-22 15:58:40+00:00
The author doesn't touch upon it here, but you can compress experiences along two axes: time, or what I'll call depth. This second type of compression drives the proliferation of overly long TV shows, documentaries, and podcasts. Most of these works are not meant to be watched or listened to alone, but instead present information of limited depth so people can digest them (or at least grasp them at surface level) using only a portion of their attention while they spend the other portion on something else.

You may be spending more time on these kinds of things, but I would argue you're really not much better off than the person reading the headline, and at least giving it their full attention for a tiny bit of time.
by vitalredundancy | 2025-07-22 15:58:50+00:00
> Throughout much of its history, the US has been conservative and isolationist

Even if this were true - and Commodore Perry, Manifest Destiny, and our zealous pursuit of trade among other skeletons of history fly in the face of this - why would we want to return to a status quo when we are so far removed from it now? The global landscape has changed, and we were the primary motivator of that change. After decades of assassinations of political leaders abroad and shock doctrine economic policies, we are to pack up our bloody toys and go home? The moral objections aside, this is a foolish and shortsighted policy that leaves only chaos. We will not preserve anything about our way of life, because it's been spliced with the genes of a globalized, post ww2 administrative world we created.
by Calavar | 2025-07-22 15:58:59+00:00
> In many tailwind projects, you inevitably end up wanting to standardize how a button looks, how a field looks, etc., rather than copy+paste the same 20+ tailwind classes that you need to implement a nice looking button in tailwind.

CSS classes already support this natively.

The whole point of CSS was move up a level of abstraction, so you could collect related styles into a class and reference that class everywhere you need that same grouping of styles instead of copy/pasting your HTML2 attribute-based styles all over the place.

But then we got Tailwind, which uses CSS classes to emulate the pre-CSS behavior of specifying styles at a hyperfine granularity everywhere.

And now we get DaisyUI, which emulates class based styling on top of a toolkit that emulates attribute based styling on top of the class based system of CSS.

After while we have to admit that this tech stack contortion is the result of picking a tool because of familiarity and not because it is the best fit for the problem.
by nonethewiser | 2025-07-22 15:59:09+00:00
I think the author is basically arguing for #3 but not addressing the difference between a `TODO` comment vs. a non-`TODO` comment.

I guess the `TODO` terms has a certain visual flair that makes us immediately understand the class of comment. I guess that would be my best argument for keeping it a `TODO` comment instead of a regular one. But when you see the author arguing that `TODO` comments dont mean you need TO DO anything, it's kind of a smell, isn't it?

I find myself generally agreeing with the article's sentinment but think your option #3 of just making it a non-TODO comment an improvement.
by lbrito | 2025-07-22 15:59:13+00:00
Isn't the diminishing attention span the more conventional term to express the authors point, rather than "compression"? I think it was in culture of narcissism, a book from the late 1970s, that the author (Christopher Lasch) showed some research that the American attention span was rapidly diminishing since the 1960s or something. Its an old phenomenon and has predictably gone much worse the more attention-sucking tech we get.

I see people of all ages saying stuff like "I don't have the patience to watch a full movie uninterrupted". I think its the same thing.

PS. didn't have time to read the huge article, can you summarise?
by strangecasts | 2025-07-22 15:59:37+00:00
> Generative AI produces work that is voluminous and difficult to check. It presents such challenges to people who apply it that they, in practice, do not adequately validate the output.

As a matter of scope I could understand leaving the social understanding of "AI makes errors" separate from technical evaluations of models, but the thing that really horrified me is that the author apparently does not think past experience should be a concern in other fields:

> AI both frustrates the producer/consumer dichotomy and intermediates access to information processing, thus reducing professional power. In response, through shaming, professionals direct their ire at those they see as pretenders. Doctors have always derided home remedies, scientists have derided lay theories, sacerdotal colleges have derided folk mythologies and cosmogonies as heresy – the ability of individuals to “produce” their own healing, their own knowledge, their own salvation. [...]

If you don't permit that scientists often experiencing crank "lay theories" is a reason for initial skepticism, can you really explain this as anything other than anti-intellectualism?
by ethbr1 | 2025-07-22 15:59:37+00:00
> Why would China want to wreck Taiwan?

For the same reasons most wars have been fought: belief (primacy of CCP), resources (uncontested access to the Pacific), and the economy (don’t worry about that, ra ra flag).

> [Russia and Ukraine] not a genocide

One of the definitions of genocide is forced relocation of children and eradication of culture, both of which Russia is doing in the Ukrainian territories it occupies.
by ksec | 2025-07-22 15:59:52+00:00
There are books and post that we should sit down and read for hours and hours, and even reread it from time to time.

There are blog post that is simply not worth my effort.

Unfortunately the first one is rare and the second one is literally everywhere. There is also the difference when one has accumulated enough knowledge on a subject, most of the article are a refresh of those knowledge rater than bringing anything new. The major problems lies with people who dont have those knowledge and fundamentals but jumped to summary and conclusion.
by gnabgib | 2025-07-22 15:59:56+00:00
(2024) Past articles noted Shimano patched it (pro teams) or will (everyone else) that year

Related Want to Win a Bike Race? Hack Your Rival's Wireless Shifters (19 points, 2024, 14 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41253198
by lupusreal | 2025-07-22 15:59:59+00:00
This reinforces my belief that legalizing and incentivising casual labor would be immensely helpful to the lowest rungs of society. The money they make from selling their plasma cannot add up to much, getting a job would give them much more money, but regular employment is beyond the capabilities of people who have very irregular lives due to drug abuse, mental illness, etc. Making it easier for people to work even just a few hours, on short notice whenever they can muster the energy and willpower, would allow them to have a much better source of income than is available to them currently.
by nobody9999 | 2025-07-22 16:00:00+00:00
>Sure, but if you are the only one holding up (funding) the table then the whole thing falls apart when you leave.

Since the US accounts for ~13%[0] of UNESCO funding, you're making GP's point for them. the US is giving up its seat at the table and UNESCO retains 87% of its funding.

[0] https://core.unesco.org/en/sources-of-funding
by colechristensen | 2025-07-22 16:00:22+00:00
On one hand there's the lack of ability to process nuance, on the other there's nearly content free blathering for length. Most everything these days is 5 times as long as it needs to be because there's only that much actual information, not for lack of attention.

>And in doing so, we've accidentally engineered away the most essentially human experiences: the productive confusion of not knowing, the generative power of sitting with difficulty, the transformative potential of things that resist compression.

Here's the example:

* the productive confusion...

* the generative power ...

* the transformative potential ...

The author did not add anything, they just said the same thing three different ways instead of one. It continues throughout the essay.

The reason everything is tl;dr is that it's too long and not worth reading, it's never worth reading. Write properly. Say the most important things at the top that cover your topic entirely and then go into further depth. If it's worth reading people will read it, if it's not they won't.
by eapressoandcats | 2025-07-22 16:00:29+00:00
I think it’s reasonable to conclude that Israel is more willing to continue to commit atrocities against the Palestinians than the US was against the Japanese.

Like, I genuinely think Netanyahu is perusing a “ Lebensraum” strategy with Palestine. This is evidenced by their support of right wing Israeli settlers in Palestinian territory.

I’ve come to this realization as a Jewish person who was brought up on “Israel has a right to defend itself” during the second intafada. Israel has genuinely changed for the worse in a way that’s hard for a lot of people to see.