MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ReaperCub | 2025-07-18 00:20:46+00:00
The problem with inheritance tax is that the person pays taxes all through their lifetime and then when their significant others inherit that wealth (which already has been taxed once at least) it gets taxed again. The issue isn't the amount, the issue is the principle of it.

I suspect BTW the very rich won't ever pay these taxes as there are always ways to restructure the wealth or simply move it elsewhere. I know this is done in the UK. So what it does is punish the middle classes the most.
by Jedd | 2025-07-18 00:21:10+00:00
> That might be true for maybe 5-10% of 20-somethings. The rest will blow it.

It feels like everyone that has an anti-UBI position has access to a lot of research that no one else can see - or they're just unwilling to read or accept the results of every study / bit of research actually done on the topic.
by majorchord | 2025-07-18 00:21:20+00:00
I agree with you... I think a big issue right now though is that not everyone agrees on the same definition of "tyrannical" and whether or not this counts.

You can't just say "all republicans are dumb and things should be MY way instead", because they think the same about the democrats, and that doesn't make you any better.

You can try educating people, but if they never learn, well... history has a funny way of repeating itself. Every advanced (for their time) civilization has gone through the "stupid period" also known as Machiavelli's paradox.
by sneilan1 | 2025-07-18 00:21:38+00:00
As a follow-up, I've gotten much much faster at modeling code in my mind and directly translating it into prompts. It really changes how you code! For each task, I'm extremely specific about what I want and depending on how closely claude does what I want, I change my specificity. Sometimes like with the lambda function, I can be high level and with my react.js codebase, due to it's lack of types (I know...) needs extra attention.

To be effective with agentic coding, you have to know when to go high level and low level. And have to accept that sometimes agentic coders need a lot of help! It all depends on how much context you give it.
by JohnFen | 2025-07-18 00:21:59+00:00
I don't see how anything is made safer by having everyone and their dog able to access the same information about me that the government has. It's terrible that the government has it and unsiloed it. The rest of the world having it as well doesn't improve that situation. It only exposes me to more threats.

But let me ask you: how would everyone having access to my data improve the situation? I genuinely don't see the upside to that.
by steveklabnik | 2025-07-18 00:25:08+00:00
Automotive is the first industry that’s really taking up Ferrocene! They’re adding more stuff as more industries have demand for it.

Ferrous and AdaCore were originally collaborating, but then they parted ways. In my understanding they’re both largely the upstream codebase, I know that the Ferrous folks religiously upstream almost everything, no clue if AdaCore does as well.
by Jedd | 2025-07-18 00:26:05+00:00
> It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible ...

This feels like a bizarre take on quite a different arrangement.

That demographic has planned for ~40 years for tha transition, and in many cases is strongly encouraged by their industry / government / superannuation scheme, etc - to stop working at that age.

Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position?

All the research we're seeing - in very small, time-boxed, precarious trials - indicate that we'll probably get a positive result out of implementing this more broadly, without a drop-dead date attached.

The counter-argument always seems to be 'Oh, but we might not...' (and then some opinions).
by sandspar | 2025-07-18 00:26:07+00:00
I like that Brian Eno quote. If I recall correctly, he was also referring to nostalgia. Like, once the technology improves, you begin to miss the old rough edges. I know that I love seeing old images of Google DeepDream, for example.* It's the same reason why young people miss Playstation 2 blocky graphics, or why photographers sometimes edit their images for unreal Kodachrome color. The things annoy us today are the very things that we'll miss the most.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream
by interroboink | 2025-07-18 00:26:51+00:00
The thing I like here is that it runs locally. I use Vim keyword completion[1] a lot for next-word completion. It does a broadly similar sort of "look at surrounding code to offer good suggestions" thing (no LLM stuff, of course). It's wrong often, but it's useful enough that it saves me time overall, I feel.

So, this sounds to me like an expanded version of that, more or less.

I think I'd prefer an AI future with lots of little focused models running locally like this rather than the "über models in the cloud" approach. Or at least having such options is nice.

[1] https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Any_word_completion

There's also omni-completion, a bit more advanced: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Omni_completion
by gnabgib | 2025-07-18 00:27:44+00:00
https://archive.is/Z1jOB

Paper: [SACN and COT assessment of the health benefits and risks of consuming plant-based drinks: summary](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/plant-based-drink...)

.. note there's some UK specific aspects of the study:

> Plant-based drinks in the UK that are labelled as ‘organic’ are not allowed to be fortified with any nutrients.

> Most plant-based drinks would be classified as ‘ultra-processed’ according to the NOVA classification.

The findings also conclude:

> Replacing cows’ milk with almond, oat or soya drinks would result in potential benefits and risks from both a nutritional and a toxicological perspective.

.. so hardly a slam dunk.
by the_af | 2025-07-18 00:27:59+00:00
> the very same prompt that triggers a mediocre book today will trigger a good book tomorrow

"Good" in which sense? That people read it and/or pay for it? But people already did, before LLMs: they read and paid for the most terrible, cliched, trite stuff. I mean, there are whole genres that are basically trash, before anyone even dreamed of AI (I'm pretty sure 90% of mainstream Hollywood script writers can be replaced by an LLM; they already feel like they were written by one anyway. This is not praise of LLMs, it's criticism of Hollywood!).

Surely, then, a "good" book is not merely something people will read or pay for. So why would AI become "good" at it, in which sense?

Reading/writing is a human activity. If you cut humans from a big part of the loop, how can the result ever be good?

This isn't the same context as writing code or building apps.
by strken | 2025-07-18 00:28:53+00:00
I see being an advocate for UBI as advocating for solid answers to those questions.

I would also point out that there's a difference between a full UBI, a modest partial UBI, and the kind of "basic income" that's not universal and goes away at a rate of 50c on the dollar when you earn more, like in this study. You can't slowly roll out a full UBI, but that's definitely possible for a partial UBI or a means-tested cash payment. You can dial the amount down as far as you want and still study the impact.
by steveklabnik | 2025-07-18 00:28:59+00:00
International standards have nothing to do with formality in the computer science sense.

US corporations also have massive influence on the C and C++ specifications, just look at the brouhaha around Bloomberg and contracts for C++, for example.

And the Rust Foundation does not author the specification, the Rust Project does. So in many ways, companies on the Foundation board have less direct influence than the companies who send their employees as representative to WG21 or similar.
by floam | 2025-07-18 00:29:06+00:00
Per the PDF in this post:

> “Adapters produced by the toolkit are fully compatible with the Foundation Models framework. However, each adapter is compatible with a single specific model version, meaning that a new adapter must be trained for each new version of the base model.”

Any changes should require retraining any LoRA adapters that has been built & distributed by third party developers, so they wouldn’t update the models outside OS updates at the drop of a hat I don’t think.

LoRA adapters can be distributed via Background Assets, but the base model itself should be version-locked to the OS build (e.g. iOS 26.0 → 26.1) and updates only when Apple ships a new OS image.
by clutchdude | 2025-07-18 00:30:58+00:00
> After two excruciatingly long years, likely voters are beginning to question the federal government’s handling of the pandemic,” said Chris Talgo, senior editor and research fellow at The Heartland Institute, which commissioned this poll. “First and foremost, likely voters are beginning to sour on Dr. Anthony Fauci, who seems to have lost credibility after countless flip-flops.

I mean, you kinda tipped your hand here.
by david-gpu | 2025-07-18 00:31:05+00:00
> For those fortunate enough to have made absurd amounts of money, think of what you did when you had it.

I quit my job. A handful of my coworkers did the same.

Most people, when given the chance to stop working, they stop. Just look at pensioners, including those who get a pension at 50. The vast majority simply stop working.
by positron26 | 2025-07-18 00:31:34+00:00
Distinguishing whether a problem is 0.02 ^ n for error or 0.98 ^ n for accuracy is emerging as an important skill.

Might explain why some people grind up a billion tokens trying to make code work only to have it get worse while others pick apart the bits of truth and quickly fill in their blind spots. The skillsets separating wheat from chaff are things like honest appreciation for corroboration, differentiating subjective from objective problems, and recognizing truth-preserving relationships. If you can find the 0.02 ^ n sub-problems, you can grind them down with AI and they will rapidly converge, leaving the 0.98 ^ n problems to focus human touch on.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-18 00:31:36+00:00
> The problem with inheritance tax is that the person pays taxes all through their lifetime and then when their significant others inherit that wealth (which already has been taxed once at least) it gets taxed again.

Yes, because that's a transfer to different people. That's not a problem.

The problem is that it's not just treated as income to the recipients—which it manifestly is—with the income tax then being modified to include both advance recognition and windfall spreading options to allow taxpayers to deal with irregular income in a fair basis with more regular income.

This is also the problem with capital gains tax. And its not th people who have the kind of income that avoids regular income taxation that are getting screwed by that.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-07-18 00:31:41+00:00
I wish models which we can self-host at home would start catching up. Relying on hosted providers like this is a huge risk, as can be seen in this case.

I just worry that there’s little incentive for bit corporations to research optimising the “running queries for a single user in a consumer GPU” use case. I wonder if getting funding for such research is even viable at all.
by IceDane | 2025-07-18 00:32:24+00:00
I think all this focus on degrees in your response as well as the others is misguided. I think the real problem is just that they don't give a shit. Giving a shit is the first step towards becoming competent.

This isn't really surprising and can hardly be unique to our industry. I think you can ask anyone in any industry if they have to deal with chronically incompetent colleagues who, despite of all external indicators (degree, education, background, etc) saying they shouldn't, still just suck at their job. They will all reply that of course they have to deal with such people.

For a lot of people, this industry is just a job like any other. They and their brain clock out at 5 immediately and do not think about programming or software engineering at all until the moment they are forced to.

And obviously, that's fine. I can't rewire their brain. I just wish I didn't have to work with them.
by Jedd | 2025-07-18 00:33:05+00:00
> Someone who knows they'll have guaranteed income for the rest of their life is more likely to stop working than someone who is told they will receive guaranteed income for a few years.

Is that true - or is that your belief?

I feel like if UBI guaranteed that I wouldn't be homeless and starve to death - but did not guarantee me avocado for my toast - I wouldn't stop working.

I can't say that for sure, but a lot of the subjective concerns expressed by people about UBI seem to think that it provides the proverbial four-bedroom-house-in-suburbia-with-two-cars-and-an-overseas-holiday-each-year, which might in fact reduce the eagerness for someone to travel two hours a day to sit in a small box and bang away at a keyboard for a third their waking life.

The B in UBI stands for Basic.
by david-gpu | 2025-07-18 00:33:20+00:00
> Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position?

Quite the opposite. I basically retired at 40. A few of my coworkers did the same. Most people, when given the means to quit working, choose to retire.

Most people don't retire at age X because they have reached age X, they do it because they finally are eligible for a pension.
by zdragnar | 2025-07-18 00:33:48+00:00
There isn't research done on UBI.

Either it is never universal, and / or participants know that it isn't going to last long (limited duration study) so they have different motivations than someone who will actually receive UBI.

Every study basically has the same (obvious and not useful) conclusion: people like getting money. Any conclusion beyond that (specific to UBI) isn't supported.
by genghisjahn | 2025-07-18 00:34:20+00:00
When I was hiring back in maybe 2020, I used a basic FizzBuzz test. Yep, the FizzBuzz test you've all read about. About half the people (all college grads) who took it could not pass in the allotted hour. Yup, an hour to do FizzBuzz. Whatever language you want. Whatever you want to Google. I'd say 40%-50% could not do it.

A common error was not being able to get the first number evaluated to be 1. They had written(copied) for loops as `for i:=0;i<100;i++` so many times that they couldn't understand that setting i to 1 was all they needed to do. They didn't see the code. Just the "loop line" and it wasn't doing it right. Then it was making it stop at 100 instead of 99. All that before even trying to test mod 5 and mod 3 first.

The people who did pass it would have written it before I'd even finished describing the problem and they would all but sneer (in a professional manner) at the rest of the code "challenges." We made offers to those people and they worked out great.
by bloomca | 2025-07-18 00:35:42+00:00
I fully agree with you, I have similar insights (deep technical texbooks are also great), but I have to say that the value you extract is not equal depending on how you approach it.

If what you are learning is purely theoretical and you see zero application, you likely won't be super invested, might skip a few things and will likely forget a lot of them soon.

However, if the problem is relevant for you, or even better if you are working on something related, all of the sudden it quickly moves from pure theory to a very applicable thing.

I think that's why people who tinkered for years before university if they keep the passion can build insane things during/shortly after the university.
by lxgr | 2025-07-18 00:36:00+00:00
Same here (although from Omnivore, not Pocket).

I still miss Omnivore, but Instapaper is absurdly far ahead of Pocket. For example, Pocket could never figure out how to store paywalled content (for which I have a subscription to), despite having deep Firefox integration (although an extension with page access should be enough) and iOS having an API for the share sheet that allows injecting JavaScript into the page being shared.
by dumbledoren | 2025-07-18 00:36:03+00:00
Aside from half of those who stopped working going back to school, there is a simple reason why a lot of people will stop for a while when universal income or a similar scheme first starts:

People are burned out. They are overworked. Over-stressed. Most of them were just hurled into careers by the system without much choice because they had to make a living. Most of them didnt even have time to think about their choices. A majority has spent decades struggling for survival amidst financial insecurity. When universal income starts for the first time, all of these people will stop for a while and start revising their lives. Something which they needed to do way before, but were not allowed by the system. Its natural.

When they get over the burnout and do their reflection, they will go active again. We see this in the case of the privileged minority who are able to retire early or take sabbaticals. They rest and do random stuff for a while, then they go back to doing something they want to do. Especially in tech, that has been the case.

People dont like staying idle for long.
by spiralcoaster | 2025-07-18 00:36:19+00:00
> The amount of cognitive overhead in this deceptively simple log is several levels deep: you have to first stop to type logger.info (or is it logging.info? I use both loguru and logger depending on the codebase and end up always getting the two confused.) Then, the parentheses, the f-string itself, and then the variables in brackets. Now, was it your_variable or your_variable_with_edits from five lines up? And what’s the syntax for accessing a subset of df.head again?

What you're describing is called: programming. This can't be serious. What about the cognitive overhead of writing a for loop? You have to remember what's in the array you're iterating over, how that array interacts with maybe other parts of the code base, and oh man, what about those pesky indices! Does it start at 0 or 1? I can't take it! AI save me!
by biskquickest | 2025-07-18 00:36:25+00:00
Thanks for your reply, funnily enough the system design / previous project portions of interviews usually go much better for me. This last interview I did I got a very high score on the system design conversation but failed the coding portion miserably.

I’m not sure why that is the case for me, it’s almost like because it’s supposed to be more of a conversation I loosen up more instead of what I usually get during my live coding interviews which is “here is the link, good luck!” then silence from the interviewer for 45 min.

I have observed in the past that I’m worried about not communicating enough and communicating too much during the live coding portions, so that is definitely an extra hoop to jump through that’s hard for me to not think about during the interview
by Aurornis | 2025-07-18 00:37:14+00:00
This is a 2020 news article and should have the (2020) tag added.

The study has also been picked apart for the methodology issues and the enormous amount of spin applied to the results. From what I recall, the link to the results didn’t lead to an academic paper, it led to something more like a pamphlet or advertisement with a lot of graphic design, dozens of pages, and lots of spin.

Even this news article shows the amount of spin happening. Read this section and think about what it really means:

> The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income

In other words: Over one quarter of people who received the checks stopped working, despite knowing that the program was temporary. This is actually a wild result when you think about it. Contrast this with the title that claims “people kept working” without qualifiers.

The better studies have included a control group that gets a nominal payment but much less than the basic income checks. Something like $50 or $100 per month to fill out the same questionnaire. Giving a single group some checks for a short period of time without any control group doesn’t tell you much.

The entire world of UBI studies is wild. Every time I read the actual data I come away with a completely different interpretation than the news articles and graphic design heavy reports that are produced by the UBI proponents.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-07-18 00:38:39+00:00
To be honest, making a business out of this might be the best way to convince regulators to close the loopholes. You could even devote N% of the revenue to closing the loopholes. There’s DEFINITELY a large moral hazard though, it would be very easy to lose your soul, or to be kicked out by the board in favor of a more malleable leader :/

Edit: after reading the article, I realize most of the “loopholes” to be changes are in disparate countries, not the _source_ country. This makes the whole idea less attractive. I suppose you could potentially still get rid of the anonymous-representative option by which people conceal their connection to different assets.
by jwpapi | 2025-07-18 00:38:49+00:00
We couldve easily build all these features a year ago, tools are nothing new. Its just barely useful.

Most applications now are more intuitive than our brain can think fast. I think telling an AI to find me a good flight is more work than to type in sk autocomplete for skyscanner having autocomplete for departure and for arrival allowing me to one way or return, having filters its all actually easier than to properly define the task. And we can start executing right away. Agent starts after texting so it will increase more latency. Often modern applications have problems solved that we didn’t even think about before.

Agent to me is another bullshit launch by OPENAI. They have to do something I understand but their releases are really grim to me.

Bad model, no real estate (browser, social media, OS).
by justusthane | 2025-07-18 00:38:56+00:00
It more or less is. It was purchased[0] by the one man operation Pinboard.in (by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords), which has most of the same functionality.

I was a Pinboard user and fan for many years, although I now have some concerns over the current health of the project, and have since moved away in favor of self-hosting Linkding.
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-18 00:39:02+00:00
We already have really strong models that run on a consumer GPU, and really strong frameworks and libraries to support them.

The issue is (1) the extra size supports extra knowledge/abilities for the model. (2) a lot of the open source models are trained in a way to not compete with the paid offerings, or lack the data set of useful models.

Specifically, it seems like the tool-use heavy “agentic” work is not being pushed to open models as aggressively as the big closed models. Presumably because that’s where the money is.