MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sofixa | 2025-07-28 12:20:52+00:00
> There's no crisis of messed up kids or young adults

This is objectively not true. Not to say that a porn ban combined with age restrictions would help, but it's just objectively not true.

* Rise of incels as a thing, and even violence committed by them

* Various loneliness epidemics

* Rise of movements such as the 4B in South Korea, where women flat out refuse traditional relationships with men

* the rises in STDs and teen pregnancies can probably be explained by other factors

* The rises in various diagnosis (ADHD, etc) and rates of sexual assault can probably be explained by just having more rigorous reporting and testing, as well as higher awareness, but the rise of specific types of sexual abuse (like a popular one, choking without consent, which can easily lead to brain damage) can be directly linked to its prevalence in porn

* significant differences in opinion on equality and general political leanings between boys and girls

That's not to say that porn is a problem, and removing it for <18 will magically make everything fine. But things are decidedly messed up for a lot of teens and young adults, and parts of that messed upness can be potentially inspired by porn, and "the manosphere". The second one is more important IMO.
by antonvs | 2025-07-28 12:22:02+00:00
It's good that there are strong reactions to dystopian work like this.

It's solving a problem that doesn't need to be solved using a solution that's fraught with risks.

The authors chose to spend their time helping governments censor information, removing choice from individuals, and the solution they choose to work on is a bad one. Any criticism they receive is well-deserved.
by ufo | 2025-07-28 12:22:09+00:00
I disagree. When writing recursive descent by hand, it's easy to miss an ambiguity because of miscomputed FIRST and FOLLOW sets.

In practice most recursive descent parsers use if-else liberally. Thus, they effectively work like pegs where the first match wins (but without the limited backtracking of pegs). They are deterministic in the sense that the implementation always returns a predictable result. But they are still ambiguous in the sense that this behavior might not have been planned by the language designer, and the ambiguity may not have been resolved how the programmer expected.
by nemomarx | 2025-07-28 12:22:54+00:00
Get the websites blocked too, some kinda minor fine if you're identified as using one, make it seem scary in the public eye to discourage it, ban advertisements?

You can't really stop it, but you can start treating it like Piracy. Maybe ISPs could snoop and report traffic that seems to be going to a VPN even if they can't inspect it.
by dijit | 2025-07-28 12:23:07+00:00
I see you’ve never been anywhere that blocks VPNs.

First they will make it seem like only criminals would use VPNs, then they’ll target some actually shady VPN services to use as a scapegoat, then they’ll apply punitive measures to them specifically; then they will use the fact that they have already used punitive measures as a reason to use them blanketly.

Technically: it’s pretty trivial to block almost all VPNs at an ISP level. I think only anyconnect/openconnect is difficult (not impossible) to block.

That this would affect businesses is of no consequence.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-28 12:23:17+00:00
Every meeting can be put in a category:

1:1s. Not really skippable, necessary part of work..

Update meetings: team update, all hands, demos, etc. Record and share out a link . Let people watch in their own time. Optionally do the meeting live (in person, online, etc.) for whoever wants to be physically/digitally present and "watch at 1x speed"

Decision meetings. Adhoc only and only when more efficient than taking a decision async (Slack, shared document, etc.) - shouldn't be skipped as these can be crucial for maintaining alignment

Planning meetings. Backlog grooming, retro, standup. Pare these back to their component pieces. Make more of the component pieces async over time. Can you groom the backlog purely async? Can standup be a Slack bot? Can retro be part of 1:1s, or another Slack bot? Other teams have found ways!

And then call out meetings' categories so your team can cull certain types of meetings.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-28 12:23:25+00:00
> "Real Doctors" seem to want to shove pills down your throat because "they work", or give things like steroid shots which have negative long term effects. Whereas "Functional Doctors" are willing to try more traditional things because historically they have seemed to produce good results and are typically less intrusive (but may require more effort from the patient).

This is the functional medicine fallacy: That “real doctors” are “shoving pills” that are secretly bad for the patient, while functional medicine doctors are also “shoving pills” but they’re a laundry list of supplements and traditional remedies.

In my experience, the functional medicine practitioners push far more pills and unnecessary tests than anyone else, but they’re given the benefit of the doubt because they’re operating under the alternative medicine fallacy that primary care doctors are the ones doing the bad things.

> (but may require more effort from the patient).

This is another concept used to justify the ineffective alternative medicine treatments; If they don’t work, it’s the patient’s fault for failing to do some effort. Another common explanation for when they don’t work is to “discover” yet another thing that needs to be treated. The additional demands of the patient are also designed to create buy-in which amplifies any placebo effect. The more rituals and supplements you can get a patient taking, the more they believe it’s going to work.
by audinobs | 2025-07-28 12:25:05+00:00
I don't know or really care what other people are doing with LLMs.

I have learned so much the past 2.5 years it is almost hard to believe.

To say I am getting dumber is just completely preposterous.

Maybe this would be leading me astray if I had the intelligence of Paul Dirac and I wasn't fully applying my intelligence. The problem is I don't have anything like the intelligence of Paul Dirac.
by motorest | 2025-07-28 12:25:15+00:00
> Please reread tbe comment you replied to and address its points. It has already countered the "but it's replacing fossil fuels!" point.

It doesn't counter it. At best, it plays on a fallacy that burying the lead only leaves the red herring as argument.

But corn-based biofuel is a red herring. Try to understand it.

Your blend of argument is the same type of strategy used to denigrate electric cars, where complaining that the fact that electricity can be generated from coal is this major gotcha. It isn't. It's one of many ways to generate it. There are others, and the end result is always better for the environment.
by fpoling | 2025-07-28 12:25:47+00:00
There is always a limit. An explicit value versus implicit depending on memory size of the system have a big advantage that it will be hit sufficiently often so any security vulnerabilities will surface much earlier. Plus it forces to use saner interfaces to pass big data chunks to a utility. For that reason I would even prefer for the limit to be much lower on Linux so the commands will stop to assume that the user can always pass all the settings on the command line.
by ben_w | 2025-07-28 12:26:50+00:00
I suspect we're not in strong disagreement here, because you recognise that not all humans are equal, and that some are indeed worse than LLMs. But:

> because by definition LLMs tend towards the mean

This part is false: the mean human can't write code at all. Also, as per your own point:

> They may excel at solving very narrow problems with decent results, like in that programming competition recently.

LLMs are often in the top decile of coding challenges, which are already limited to better-than-average developers. Now, these same models that get top decile scores in challenges are still not in the top decile overall because the role of software developer is much broader than just leetcode, but this still demonstrates the point: LLMs do not tend towards the mean.

> But those are indeed very narrowly defined problems, and while they may solve it decently in limited time, that is roughly their overall limit, while a human, given more time, can excel to a much higher level.

Except "code" is itself not narrowly-defined even despite what I just said. Even within one programming language, comprehension of the natural language task description is itself much harder and more general than any programming language, and both the programming language and all the libraries are described in a mixture of natural and formal language. Even just the ability to recognise if it's looking at examples of C or JavaScript is something it had to learn rather than being explicitly programmed with knowledge of.

Now sure, I will absolutely say that if the working definition of "intelligence" is about how few examples are needed to learn a new thing, then transformer models are "stupid". But, to a certain degree, they're able to making up for being very very stupid by being very very stupid very very quickly and very very cheaply — cheap enough and fast enough that when you do hit their skill limits, there's many cases where one can afford to boost them a noticeable degree, and it's affordable even though every m-times-n-quality-points you need to boost them by comes with 2^n increase in their cost in both time and money.

Not always, and it's an exponential cost per linear improvement, but often.
by criley2 | 2025-07-28 12:27:31+00:00
Even if the impenetrable human code was translated to English by AI, it's still useful for every future AI that will touch the code.

Perhaps to get that decent documentation it took a decent bit of agentic effort (or even multiple passes using different models) to truly understand it and eliminate hallucinations, so getting that high quality and accurate summary into a comment could save a lot of tokens and time in the future.
by pfdietz | 2025-07-28 12:27:51+00:00
The energy for fertilizer is mostly in the nitrogen fertilizer. The energy input here is to make hydrogen for the Haber-Bosch process. This hydrogen can come from renewable sources ("green hydrogen"), and this would be an excellent way to counter long term variability in renewable output.

That the hydrogen currently comes from natural gas is no argument it must come from natural gas, any more than cars currently using petroleum derived fuels would imply they must use petroleum derived fuels.
Blowing the whistle on domestic (family) court
by kylebenzle | 2025-07-28 12:27:59+00:00
The US domestic (family) court system, in Ohio in particular, has become functionally corrupt for two reasons.

1) Judges are elected and can now receive unlimited campaign contributions, vacations and gifts, the vast majority coming from the lawyers and "family" law firms they are ment to be judging objectively.

2) All records are "sealed" so judges and courts have zero accountability to anyone other than their own club of lawyers (bar association) and of course the very people that paid to to get them where they are.

The Ohio bar association has co-opted the domestic court system and made it their own $billion/year revenue generating stream. The judges profit from kickbacks in the form of campaign contributions every four years from the very attorneys they are supposed to be judging against This is not just the appearance of corruption it is a system built on corruption.

This means the judges only incentive is to judge in a way that is most in line with their best interest. In practice this means that what little data we have shows that almost every time the judge finds in favor of whichever attorney donated the most money to his campaign and is why unlike states around it that have 50/50 default custody Ohio remains 100% default custody to the mother in over 85% of divorces and with sole custody to just one parent.

This has been going on for the better part of 20 years and continues for one simple reason despite it being a horrible in every way, the judges are getting paid off.

I'm blowing the whistle, working on websites, printing signs, sending out mailers, court watching and taking notes on these corrupt attorneys, doing anything and everything I can to get the word out that the Franklin County Ohio domestic court system in particularly has been corrupted by a small group of judges, mainly Judge James Brown. I'm doing everything I can to get the word out about these evil and corrupt judges, the biggest hurdle seems to be how much money they are making and that people believe that once a lawyer gets rich and powerful enough they're uncorruptible, which is the exact opposite of the truth. The judges are the ones running a corrupt, pay to play, system of kickbacks with themselves at the top. The judges are the top lawyers and the lawyers are pieces of shit.

They are literally horse trading children like they're chips at the casino and what they've done to a generation of young people and millennial fathers is pure evil.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-28 12:28:04+00:00
https://archive.is/I53tT

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-online-hate-speech-pros...

https://extremism.gwu.edu/fighting-hate-speech-germany

https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/06/german-fined-e6000-for-vio...

https://www.dw.com/en/german-man-receives-fine-after-insulti...

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/german-woman-fined-faceboo...
by OldfieldFund | 2025-07-28 12:28:43+00:00
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."

-- Smedley Butler, a United States Marine Corps Major General and, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history.
by kashunstva | 2025-07-28 12:29:54+00:00
I play the piano professionally. The issue with these unorthodox keyboard layouts is that the repertoire of the Common Practice Period (“classical music”) is written in a way that assumes the conventional keyboard geography. I can imagine certain reaches, for example, that are manageable only because the relationship between keys is just so. I’d be interested in seeing the Schumann Symphonic Etudes played on this piano. The last variation has running passages in chords that span over an octave. If the keys are monospaced, I don’t see how such intervals would be played by humans.
by tetha | 2025-07-28 12:30:11+00:00
I'd say, pure SQL gives you a higher performance ceiling and a lower performance and security floor. It's one of these features / design decisions that require diligence and discipline to use well. Which usually does not scale well beyond small team sizes.

Personally, from the database-ops side, I know how to read quite a few ORMs by now and what queries they result in. I'd rather point out a missing annotation in some Spring Data Repository or suggest a better access pattern (because I've seen a lot of those, and how those are fixed) than dig through what you describe.
by furyofantares | 2025-07-28 12:30:39+00:00
I read all your dead replies and it's a little wild that you think I'm an OpenAI employee (I'm not) trying to do damage control (is the article damaging to OpenAI?) by hijacking the comments (is my comment not a HUD-like idea?).

I don't really know where that's coming from, I'm just a dude who connected the idea in the article to an old idea that I haven't seen tried yet. The only thing I truly don't appreciate is you made one comment saying the text of my post had changed. It didn't.
by const_cast | 2025-07-28 12:30:44+00:00
The problem is you're not explaining how this would be a preferable situation. Youre mistakenly assuming that if employers don't provide things like 401K match or whatever that instead you would pocket that money.

I have no reason to believe that to be the case. In fact, everything I've seen in my life makes me confident that is not the case. This reads like self-sabotage.
by lazytitanic | 2025-07-28 12:30:52+00:00
> Forests sequester carbon through forest fires producing charcoal

Forgive me if I misunderstand, but the carbon in the charcoal resulting from forest fires isn't sequestered any more than the same carbon in the forest when in its un-burned state. The only difference is that, once you have a forest fire, a lot of the carbon is also just released into the atmosphere as CO2 in smoke.
by lambdaone | 2025-07-28 12:31:08+00:00
Not all solutions are going with just 64 bits worth of seconds, although 64 bit time_t will certainly sort out the Epochalypse.

ext4 moved some time ago to 30 bits of fractional resolution (on the order of nanoseconds) and 34 bits of seconds resolution. It punts the problem 400 years or so into the future. I'm sure we will eventually settle on 128-bit timestamps with 64 bits of seconds and 64 bits of fractional resolution, and that should sort things for forseeable human history.
by immibis | 2025-07-28 12:31:18+00:00
I've heard of expansion fetish before; my immediate hypothesis was that it's about mental wiring normally related to pregnancy (the same way foot fetishes are hypothesized to be related to wiring meant for your genitals). I've never heard of someone specifically wanting to be a giant blueberry but it's not hard to guess that once the general pattern of a fetish exists, specific details could be impressed by various conditioning processes.

I can't think of an analogous reaso someone might like chocolate rivers or pneumatic tubes. There probably are people out there who really like little orange people but by a totally different mechanism.
by watwut | 2025-07-28 12:31:25+00:00
If the "rightie libertarians" from sibling is correct, then it actually describe the dynamic I have noticed.

It is free speech as long as you are politically right, no matter how far extreme right you are or what you are saying. But, if you are left or oppose the far right, then criticizing those is not free speech, but rather a restriction on it. Suddenly you should shut up, all sorts of additional rules apply to you. It is wrong to argue with far right, to say things that are uncomfortable for them or call them names, call them nazi even when it is clearly the case. But if you are just a little radical feminist, you are valid target for any amount of abuse which suddenly counts as free speech. Your leftist or feminist speech does not count as valid free speech.

Eventually, it started to look like "free speech" is tactically used expression to create an asymmetry and applies only to certain ideas. Or certain people ideas.
by Andromxda | 2025-07-28 12:31:30+00:00
I was able to confirm that NetGuard actually uses the IPinfo API. See https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard/blob/master/FAQ.md#:~:text=... and https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard/blob/31652781967a70efaee2eb....

I agree that it would be a more privacy-friendly solution for them to host their own API, but that got me thinking, wouldn't it be possible to just let users download the IPinfo data and use it locally? Does IPinfo offer database downloads? That's also how the Server-Status Firefox extension (https://github.com/tdulcet/Server-Status) works (but it doesn't use IPinfo). Also asking for potential personal use: How does the quality of IPinfo data compare to MaxMind, DB-IP, etc?
by wonjunhwang | 2025-07-28 12:32:04+00:00
I am working on a world model for computer systems (world).

Do LLM Agents really understand Linux?.

"Understanding" meaning.. can they predict the outcome of their actions before executing them? Computer system is irreversible.

World model for computer systems is crucial next step for computer use agents to reliably plan their actions over long horizon.

Links to draft: https://open.substack.com/pub/disastermanagementtechnologies...
by const_cast | 2025-07-28 12:33:15+00:00
That's not what I did, please read more carefully.

The power dynamic and information dynamic is that of a child compared to a sorcerer. The sorcerer knows all, and does not need the child. They can turn the child into a frog, and the child cannot perform any magic in retaliation.

You must realize your leverage is close to non-existant in negotiations. You are, frankly, irrelevant, and of the negotiations you can attempt you must do so with just a tiny fraction of the information required.

You hold none of the cards. I'm not even sure how this could be controversial - its just plainly true. Denying reality is one thing, aspiring to something that harms you is another.
by bjord | 2025-07-28 12:33:29+00:00
samsung is the only smartphone manufacturer that still makes phones (though not many) with all the features I want: microSD slot, dual physical sim, side-mounted fingerprint reader, headphone jack, nfc, and regular (long-lasting) security updates

they also have service centers pretty much everywhere in the world, so I can always get my phone fixed (for a reasonable price, as a result of their ubiquity) if and when I inevitably break it

would I also prefer the option to unlock my bootloader? yes. if I'm honest with myself, is it a deal-breaker? sadly, no, I no longer use custom ROMs
by bell-cot | 2025-07-28 12:34:12+00:00
Your line of argument relies on this -

Axiom: While, in the past, gov't organizations were quite capable of performing the largest, most complex, and most critical technological tasks that society faced, things are somehow Different Now - and only non-gov't organizations (very preferably for-profit corporations) are now capable of such things.

But what is actually Different Now is this: Our ruling classes de facto decided to reduce the gov't's core competency in a part of national security - because outsourcing those capabilities to for-profit org's was far more lucrative for them, and the nation seemed secure enough that they didn't much care about the downsides.

Humans are very responsive to their social environments, and its structure and unwritten rules. Setting the "Non-corporate" bit on the org that a human works for does not magically reduce what they are capable of. Linus Torvalds actually is the creator and BDFL of Linux. Even though he is an individual human - not a corporation, nor a secret front for one. The mathematicians who completed the classification of finite simple groups ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simpl... ) over decades and centuries completed that massive task while generally working individually or in small groups, for wide array of colleges and universities.
by Neurrone | 2025-07-28 12:34:24+00:00
Edit: typo

I didn't post this onto HN, so I only just found out about this thread.

Thanks for mentioning the margin issue, I've tried fixing it now. Let me know if its still an issue.

> I wonder how quickly ChatGPT replaces much of the customized tools here?

Probably not many. It is prone to Hallucinations, and the latency involved for getting a response means that I only use it when I have to.
by const_cast | 2025-07-28 12:35:26+00:00
So? You're one of millions, and many people are ideologically opposed to the public sector. Obviously, I cannot trust you, so I won't.

What I've said isn't up for debate, it's just true. If you find yourself disagreeing, please feel free to look up salaries and probationary periods. You will see you are incorrect. From there, you can decide whether to change your mind or continue to believe in lies.