MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jfarmer | 2025-07-22 17:34:42+00:00
CS Peirce has a famous essay "The Fixation of Belief" where he describes various processes by which we form beliefs and what it takes to surprise/upset/unsettle them.

The essay: https://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html

This blog post gestures at that idea while being an example of what Peirce calls the "a priori method". A certain framework is first settled upon for (largely) aesthetic reasons and then experience is analyzed in light of that framework. This yields comfortable conclusions (for those who buy the framework, anyhow).

For Peirce, all inquiry begins with surprise, sometimes because we've gone looking for it but usually not. About the a priori method, he says:

“[The a priori] method is far more intellectual and respectable from the point of view of reason than either of the others which we have noticed. But its failure has been the most manifest. It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have never come to any fixed agreement, but the pendulum has swung backward and forward between a more material and a more spiritual philosophy, from the earliest times to the latest. And so from this, which has been called the a priori method, we are driven, in Lord Bacon's phrase, to a true induction.”
by readthenotes1 | 2025-07-22 17:35:04+00:00
'rituximab, the immunosuppressant. “I have a new working theory,” she texted Angie, in May, 2024. “Theoretically her chemo could have incidentally cured” her. Christine found a handful of recent case studies that documented drastic psychiatric recoveries after people were treated with drugs that dampen immune activity. '

The part I cared about, buried deep
by themgt | 2025-07-22 17:35:19+00:00
i never saw anybody been against migration of population out of war zone to safety.

I can't think of any comparable historical example of declaring a people's entire territory a war zone and migrating a substantial/majority of the entire population out. Can you? The reality is they'd be unlikely to ever be able/allowed to return, and as such the actual purpose of such a project would be ethnically cleansing the territory.
by Uehreka | 2025-07-22 17:35:57+00:00
> Robert A. Sungenis

I wish Hacker News would let me use emojis so I could put three red sirens after this man’s name.

Sungenis isn’t a good-faith investigator trying to shed light on nuances around Galileo’s argument. He’s a tradcath (old-school Catholic who rejects Vatican II) hack who wants to cast shadows on Galileo from as many directions as possible in the hopes that he can soften people up on the idea of Geocentrism. His approach is very cautious and incremental and relies a lot on innuendo; he makes it difficult to really pin him down on the things I just said about him. But if you look up the things this guy’s written and the kinds of people he hires to “write the dirty work” when necessary, it’s pretty clear what his project is.

Edit: I will note that I am not familiar with Paul Feyerabend and the book mentioned in the top comment, it’s totally possible that those are from a different school of thought more interested in good faith discussion about the scientific method (or not, I don’t know). I would just advise taking any “turns out” argument about Galileo and the Church with huge grains of salt, given that this topic attracts some very slippery people with ulterior motives who intentionally appeal to contrarians like many of us on this site.
by exe34 | 2025-07-22 17:36:25+00:00
Do you have a link to a recent picture of this Bashar Taleb? I've found the Gaza famine to be very different from any other famine I've ever looked into - people seem to go from healthy to "died from starvation" without ever getting thin.

If you google for "famine yemen", you see very thin children, with just skin on bone - all the fat and muscle is gone. If you google for "famine gaza", they just seem a lot healthier.
by gruez | 2025-07-22 17:36:25+00:00
>Means testing requires someone to do the means testing along with additional bureaucracy to enforce it. It's, in fact, more expensive than just having an open program. Why would I actually care, for example, if we paid extra money for a billionaire's kid to get healthcare if that meant the 99% of the population that isn't billionaires got healthcare?

How is means testing (ie. reviewing some paperwork) going to be cheaper than running an actual public works program where you need to decide what needs to be done, plan the thing that needs to be done, recruit people to do the thing, procure equipment/material so those people can actually do the thing, supervise/train those people to do the thing, inspect their work, and remit payment for them? Sure, a public works program might produce beneficial outcomes that justifies some of the costs, but the hassle of herding a bunch of casual workers (compared to having full time staff) and paying them is probably going to take orders of magnitude more money than means testing. If your argument is just that the government should tax more and use that money to spend on full time government jobs, that's just a generic "tax and spend" argument, not a "small jobs board" or whatever.
by woodpanel | 2025-07-22 17:37:29+00:00
Agreed.

we live in an unhealthy place in time, if everybody claims they‘re more democratic than the other side of the spectrum, yet conveniently traverses the agreed-upon boundaries of a level playing field and utilizes foreign or supra national support.

The EU’s core function is essentially that. While the Brussels institutions are hated almost unanimously by all Europeans, it’s virtually impossible to get rid off the EU, because it represents the chance to circumvent the local democratic process for all domestic parties. Its institutional undermining of domestic democratic institutions.

Imagine you being a pro-gay-rights activist inside the deeply catholic Poland: Would you go through the slow process of convincing the Polish citizenry or would you rather skip those decades and do it via the EU-Bureaucracy?

Same is true for dissidents whether in Brazil or EU which depend upon representation via media, yet need foreign media platforms to have a say at all.

Thus as much as I despise the Brazilian government and its autocratic judges, fundamentally it is morally improper to utilize foreign help.
by Guid_NewGuid | 2025-07-22 17:37:41+00:00
Study link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00029...

I really struggle to take dietary and nutritional science seriously. It seems impossible to control other variables sufficiently to make any statement with any kind of certainty. Plus it's something the media love to seize on and report without context. We've had hydrogenated fats, non hydrogenated fats, sugar, fats, sweeteners, E numbers, eggs, red meat, cholesterol, seed oils, salt, etc.

That's not to say we should stop researching or trying to quantify it, after all we can only know the true impact of salt, cholesterol, different types of fats, by doing more, better, research. However in the meantime you probably shouldn't jump on every new finding to shape your diet. The salt myth has been around for 50+ years and refuses to die.[0]

I'm sticking to eating mostly fresh vegetables, butter, some sugar, some junk food when I feel like it and lots of salt. Plus an inadvisable level of alcohol consumption that makes the rest irrelevant.

Edit: since I just had a rant about lack of faith in climate science elsewhere I'd like to clarify that what I think this area of science struggles with is lack of settled consensus. For every study showing one thing to be bad, you can just as easily find studies showing it not to be bad, or the real picture to be far more complex.

[0]: though more recent sources seem to back up salt's impact on blood pressure and cardiovascular disease - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26997359/ , https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7384997/ at this point it feels like something of a 'poisoned well'.
by meowface | 2025-07-22 17:37:42+00:00
Some of the core ideas here seem good, but the node/edge distinction feels too fuzzy. The node "Climate Change Threat" is a claim. Is the node "Efficiency" a claim? Can one challenge the existence of Efficiency? If one instead challenges the benefit of Efficiency, isn't that an edge attack?

I could give a bunch of other examples where the nodes in the article don't feel like apples-to-apples things. I feel less motivated to try to internalize the article due to this.
by darksaints | 2025-07-22 17:37:58+00:00
To add to your second point, those algorithms are extremely easy to game by states with the resources and desire to craft narratives. Specifically Russia and China.

There has actually been a pretty monumental shift in Russian election meddling tactics in the last 8 years. Previously we had the troll army, in which the primary operating tactic of their bot farms were to pose as Americans (as well as Poles, Czechs, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Brits, etc.) but push Russian propaganda. Those bot farms were fairly easy to spot and ban, and there was a ton of focus on it after the 2016 election, so that strategy was short lived.

Since then, Russia has shifted a lot closer to Chinese style tactics, and now have a "goblin" army (contrasted with their troll army). This group no longer pushes the narratives themselves, but rather uses seemingly mindless engagement interactions like scrolling, upvoting, clicking on comments, replying to comments with LLMs, etc., in order to game what the social media algorithms show people. They merely push the narratives of actual Americans (not easily bannable bots) who happen to push views that are either in line with Russian propaganda, or rhetoric that Russian intelligence views as being harmful to the US. These techniques work spectacularly well for two reasons: the dopamine boost to users who say abominable shit as a way of encouraging them to do more, and as a morale-killer to people who might oppose such abominable shit but see how "popular" it is.

https://www.bruegel.org/first-glance/russian-internet-outage...
by RajT88 | 2025-07-22 17:38:30+00:00
Exactly what I was getting at.

There are several ways to view the story.

Another commenter mentioned failing to design cars for women (totally fair! Volvo famously had a botched attempt at this)

What I have come to appreciate is how vulnerable women feel in the world. It is hard to appreciate how that plays into car choice if you are a man. Most men will never be able to understand, imo.
by cwmma | 2025-07-22 17:38:36+00:00
A while back I saw a comment here that was basically like, we don't need to worry about copyrights because they won't matter once LLMs are able to create an OS from scratch for the cost of tokens. Which is just a batshit insane not thought through stance to have.

But then I think about the real actual planning decisions that were made based on the claims about driving cars and Hyperloop being available "soon" that made people materially worse off due to differed or canceled public transportation infrastructure.
by agentultra | 2025-07-22 17:38:50+00:00
Yes, I was responding to the concluding paragraph of that section as a clarification:

> But my guess is that AIs claiming spiritual awakening are simply mirroring a vibe, rather than intending to mislead or bamboozle.

I think the argument could be stronger here. There's no way these algorithms can "intend" to mislead or "mirror a vibe." That's all on humans.
by dmix | 2025-07-22 17:39:13+00:00
According to Gallup the majority of the US public supports Israel over Palestine, just as it has for decades. It's now "at it's lowest in 25 years" but it's still 46% vs 33% for Palestine, down from around 60% pro Israel in prior years.

https://thecradle.co/articles/us-popular-support-for-israel-...

About 10% of Americans identify as evangelical protestants

https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/how-many-evangelicals-...
by throw0101b | 2025-07-22 17:39:15+00:00
> There are true facts, but a human observer can never be sure of them

See:

> Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called "the theory of knowledge", it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of justification, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony.

> The school of skepticism questions the human ability to attain knowledge, while fallibilism says that knowledge is never certain. Empiricists hold that all knowledge comes from sense experience, whereas rationalists believe that some knowledge does not depend on it. Coherentists argue that a belief is justified if it coheres with other beliefs. Foundationalists, by contrast, maintain that the justification of basic beliefs does not depend on other beliefs. Internalism and externalism debate whether justification is determined solely by mental states or also by external circumstances.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

A philosophy joke:

> When I talk to Philosophers on zoom my screen background is an exact replica of my actual background just so I can trick them into having a justified true belief that is not actually knowledge.

* Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed, https://old.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/gggqkv/get...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem
by gruez | 2025-07-22 17:39:15+00:00
>I don't know what you mean by that.

The whole point of the thread is that AI companies are getting away with piracy but individuals aren't. But the reality is that AI companies aren't getting away with it (a judge ruled that Anthropic must face trial over their use of pirated books).

More specific to this thread is that claim that "ONLY downloading" hasn't resulted in fines for anyone. So far as I can tell, this is true. People are just quibbling over how someone who's torrenting somehow counts as "only downloading", even though their client is uploading.
by mpyne | 2025-07-22 17:39:24+00:00
> You could push this all as six commits on one branch.

No, I'd probably put them all as individual branches to be reviewed, assuming they're truly independent changes. As long as they don't actually conflict it's not very hard to do this in git.

But this is kind of what I mean when I say that git fits my needs, because I wouldn't come across 4 unrelated tasks like this in the course of implementing a single commit's worth of features, unless I was having the world's biggest attack of ADD.

And if these things did need to get done to properly implement the feature to our team's quality standards, it would be appropriate to be included in that feature's PR as well.

I'm sure it's a nice tool, especially for those who work in domains where it takes a long time to land your commits into the main branch of development, but a lot of this sounds like solutions to problems that we don't all have.
by retrac | 2025-07-22 17:39:54+00:00
What we think of as schizophrenia today is almost certainly multiple underlying disorders.

Historically autism was lumped under schizophrenia and before that they were both lumped under dementia. Symptomatically similar with insufficient diagnostic precision or theory to differentiate.

Many things cause psychosis. Drugs are a good example. When first discovered LSD was often characterized as causing temporary chemically-induced schizophrenia. A useful metaphor but not accurate.
by daxfohl | 2025-07-22 17:40:09+00:00
I see axiom of choice, and really LEM, as logic's equivalent to limit points in calculus. No, you can't calculate 0/0, but here's what the answer would be if you could. No, you can't prove the truthiness of this statement, but here's what it would be if you could.

I guess one could work in a brand of math whose axioms make defining and using limits impossible, which, maybe if formalization came before the invention of calculus, would make some 17th-century mathematicians feel more comfortable. Though I imagine it would make progress in physics challenging. I think the same about LEM/AoC. Given that almost every element in the power-set of reals is non-measurable, maybe stuff like Banach-Tarski is actually fundamental in real physics: it can't be predicted or computed, but it can be observed.
by dkarl | 2025-07-22 17:40:20+00:00
There's no claim to expertise or empirical support. There isn't even a claim that it applies an existing framework. Why would you think it was anything other than opinion?

I get tired endless unnecessary invocations of "I could be wrong" and "this is just my opinion" as if every author needs to actively steer readers away from the mistake of assuming the author's omniscience and infallibility.
by barrkel | 2025-07-22 17:40:24+00:00
There's a lot of tacit knowledge in trades that was not documented, and in many ways can't be easily documented. You can't really document how to swim or play an instrument; you need to practice and train your body. Would you brilliant person from the 17th century be competent as a member of a tribe in South America or as part of a steppe clan in Asia?
by timr | 2025-07-22 17:40:27+00:00
I used to live near Kyoto Sanjo pre-2020, and was just there a month or so ago. I wouldn’t characterize it as “dead” at all - on the contrary, I was shocked how many new restaurants, stores and cafes were there now.

Maybe the Showa vibes are dying, but my impression is that it really is gentrifying.
Show HN: Any-LLM – Lightweight router to access any LLM Provider
by AMeckes | 2025-07-22 17:40:40+00:00
We built any-llm because we needed a lightweight router for LLM providers with minimal overhead. Switching between models is just a string change : update "openai/gpt-4" to "anthropic/claude-3" and you're done.

It uses official provider SDKs when available, which helps since providers handle their own compatibility updates. No proxy or gateway service needed either, so getting started is pretty straightforward - just pip install and import.

Currently supports 20+ providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and AWS Bedrock. Would love to hear what you think!
by tavavex | 2025-07-22 17:41:12+00:00
> 15-year-old amendment mandating a complete cutoff of American financing to any United Nations agency that accepts Palestine as a full member

As a non-American, doesn't this seem a little ridiculous to some people in the US? This screams of a kind of melodramatic, overdone theatrics that the US doesn't seem to do to anyone else. I get that the US has a lot of Israeli money/investments/customers and extremely religious people, but even then, why is it going this far to enshrine their relations to specific states in their laws? It ends up coming off as the US bowing on their knees to relatively minor nations on the other side of the world.
by alterom | 2025-07-22 17:41:21+00:00
So, after all the optimization, they're using 6% of the CPU to display what amounts to a tiny animated GIF that 1990s PCs would have no problem with.

But it's vector graphics!, you might say. Yeah, like Flash, which ran fine on Pentium II, with plenty CPU cycles to spare.

Pardon me, and I don't say it lightly, but... WTF?!
by alexchamberlain | 2025-07-22 17:41:23+00:00
The first thought that came to my mind reading the DaisyUI website was "Is this an April Fool's joke?". I wouldn't normally post something like that, as it's entirely unfair to the hard work and dedication that someone has put into this. However, I think it captures my surprise by how smack on the nose this is in terms of the spiral of tech abstractions - this is exactly what CSS was designed to solve, and things like tailwind appear to be leading to people forgetting that.
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-22 17:41:30+00:00
A fun way to put this in perspective as well, is that sign languages don't align exactly with spoken languages: American Sign Language and British Sign Language are very different. American Sign Language is much more closely related to French Sign Language than to British Sign Language. An ASL signer and FSL signer, despite not being able to mutually read the same language, are going to have an easier communicating than an ASL signer and a BSL signer even if they both read English. (That becomes the fallback, as I understand it, write it down in English.)

Similarly, BSL is signed throughout Britain (and I think some of the former Commonwealth?), so Welsh and Scottish "native" readers share BSL with English readers.
by PhasmaFelis | 2025-07-22 17:41:39+00:00
This reminds me, some years ago as Google was expanding its translation service, someone tried translating text into and out of an obscure African language (don't recall which) and it always came out as weird Biblical-sounding semi-gibberish.

My revelation was that machine translation needs a corpus of bilingual documents to learn from, and if the language is sufficiently obscure, there may not be any bilingual documents except for the Bible, which missionaries have translated into just about every language on Earth.
by gyanveda | 2025-07-22 17:41:42+00:00
As LLMs become increasingly integrated into real-world applications, scalable and rigorous safety evaluation is essential. This paper introduces Aymara AI, a programmatic platform for generating and administering customized, policy-grounded safety evaluations. Aymara AI transforms natural-language safety policies into adversarial prompts and scores model responses using an AI-based rater validated against human judgments. We demonstrate its capabilities through the Aymara LLM Risk and Responsibility Matrix, which evaluates 20 commercially available LLMs across 10 real-world safety domains. Results reveal wide performance disparities, with mean safety scores ranging from 86.2% to 52.4%. While models performed well in well-established safety domains such as Misinformation (mean = 95.7%), they consistently failed in more complex or underspecified domains, notably Privacy & Impersonation (mean = 24.3%). Analyses of Variance confirmed that safety scores differed significantly across both models and domains (p < .05). These findings underscore the inconsistent and context-dependent nature of LLM safety and highlight the need for scalable, customizable tools like Aymara AI to support responsible AI development and oversight.
by Asraelite | 2025-07-22 17:41:50+00:00
> By Galileo’s era, the Catholic Church was well aware of this scientific truth and actively engaged with astronomy and natural philosophy.

I'm confused. Are you saying that the Church knew the Earth was round or not? If they knew, then it doesn't matter what arguments were made, it was all in bad faith and therefore wasn't scientific.

EDIT: Never mind, I misread
by ackfoobar | 2025-07-22 17:41:51+00:00
>> FP ZIO/Cats world

> I don’t think it’s worth all the trouble

Once you see the bijection between imperative programming and imperative programming in a monad, you'll be angry for all the wasted hours.

Then again, you'll be able to understand this satire piece, so who's to say if the time was wasted.

http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functio...
by landl0rd | 2025-07-22 17:42:14+00:00
I didn't say out of its remit, I said outside its original scope. The plain fact is these programs are newer and I don't believe in funding them.

UNESCO was previously a body that did some social justice stuff and a bunch of heritage work. Now it's a body that does a lot of social justice stuff and heritage work hijacked by chinese agitprop. The case for withdrawing previously was decent but these days it's pretty clear.