MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-08-25 07:46:22+00:00
The free flow of information isn't driving extremism, it's echo chambers. People have a tendency of surrounding themselves with only those who already agree with them on some topic, so that a heavily partisan position suddenly becomes 'moderate.' This is how you have people simultaneously claiming, for instance, that the US is becoming more liberal than ever, and that it's becoming more conservative than ever.

You can also see this with the perception gap [1]. Those who are most involved in politics tend to be the paradoxically least knowledgeable about what 'the other side' thinks and believes. Typical contemporary examples would be republicans thinking democrats want to defund the police, or democrats thinking republicans are against immigration.

When you have contrary ideas bouncing against each other, poor ideas are easily demonstrated to be such - and you get a more realistic view of what people 'on the other side' actually think and believe. It naturally tempers against radicalism. But when you start to control information, you get the opposite. This is made even worse by the sort of people that find themselves on a life trajectory to go work, let alone volunteer, for the 'Ministry of Truth'. They tend to be the exact sorts that want to create information bubbles and echo chambers.

----

In general I think the truth tends to trickle up, even if it might get a bit dirty on the way there. I'd appeal to places like the USSR on that. They not only directly controlled absolutely all published information, but strictly controlled migration in and out of the country, informers everywhere making people terrified of speaking their mind, and just generally had a rock solid grip on information. The result? People still knew they were all full of shit. There's a great series of jokes from the era here. [2] On of my favorites, "Why do we need two central newspapers, Truth (Pravda) and News (Izvestiya) if both are organs of the same Party? Because in Truth there is no news, and in News there is no truth."

[1] - https://perceptiongap.us/

[2] - https://johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm
by fhd2 | 2025-08-25 07:47:33+00:00
> however, the core infrastructural asset of GPUs tends to become rapidly obsolete after about 5 years.

Is it all about the actual GPUs though, is that the only "infrastructure" being built? A list from the top of my head of things that I'd say do last:

1. Data center buildings (take a while to build, contents completely aside).

2. Organisations and processes for running operations and procurement in said data centers - doesn't take decades to build for sure, but it's something worthwhile to already have.

3. Advances in the actual chips, i.e. more powerful processing units.

4. Advances in chip fabrication.

5. Chip fabrication facilities and organisations (similar to #1 and #2).

So sure, GPUs are highly temporary. But a lot of the things being developed and built around them much less so.

I do think one possible bubble burst scenario is that we'll have cheap compute available for decades but not a lot of great ideas of what to do with it. That is not unlike the 2000s I suppose.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-08-25 07:47:56+00:00
It's not going to be able to see anything at the closest approach that we can't see from earth. So there are no gains to be had, so no risks are worth it.

And even the 27Mkm number requires very optimistic assumptions, including that the main engine that has had huge problems during its mission would work perfectly for one continuous burn to exhaustion. Realistically, that's not going to happen.
by tsuyoshi_k | 2025-08-25 07:48:07+00:00
Thank you — I really like that phrasing too.

“Gentle digital environment” definitely captures the feel more precisely. I used “OS” a bit poetically, thinking of it as a space that supports small, mindful digital routines — journaling, reflecting, and letting go.

Still evolving, so I’m grateful for the nudge toward clearer language.
by satisfice | 2025-08-25 07:48:24+00:00
More to the point: AGI is a testing problem. And it’s the kind of testing problem that can only be solved by hiring incompetent or corrupt testers.

Since there is no possibility of an uncontroversial specification of intelligence, there is no possibility of an honest and competent tester coming to the conclusion that sufficient testing has been performed on a candidate AGI to certify it.

Similarly, you won’t get any security professional to say that system is guaranteed to be secure.

Moreover, you can’t get any honest psychologist to swear that any person definitely has no mental illness.

How companies are dealing with this is to bet that they can fool enough people so that the remaining skeptics can be safely ignored.
by raffraffraff | 2025-08-25 07:48:36+00:00
Except they can't choose for their kids, or at least, not easily. Google basically own the android ecosystem and they don't want to provide any controls that could be used to limit their ability to generate as revenue. Look at Chrome's extensions. Try blocking domains. Your only hope is to use the god-awful Google Family controls AND NextDNS AND an adblocking mobile browser. These days some parents are trying to get schools to ban phones, because individual parents can't, "or my little Tommy will be the only one without a phone". So you then have to worry about what other kids have access to. Porn in private WhatsApp channels etc.
by layoric | 2025-08-25 07:48:48+00:00
> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did.

I read quotes like this and reminded that it is common that people forget money is just a competitive resource we use to outbid each other for _real_ things. Money moves around, it isn't lost or "Completely vaporized", someone receives it at the other side of the transaction. It is still in circulation, it can still be used to outbid people for real things, just by different people.

Also, pets.com still exists, it just forwards to petsmart.com.
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-08-25 07:48:56+00:00
I'll have the black pudding.

My cat has a black tail.

The top of my desk is black.

I have several pairs of black shoes.

Every single computer in my possession has a black case.

My phone and its case are both black.

Black Power![0][1][2]

I will put you on my personal blacklist.

Which I'm sure you won't mind since I'm a huge bigot, right?

[0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Black-Power-Movement

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_power_movement

[2] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/black-power_n?tl=true
by omnicognate | 2025-08-25 07:48:58+00:00
Atmos on earphones is done by manipulating the waveform that reaches the eardrum to reproduce the distinctive impulse response due to the sound bouncing off different parts of the ear as it arrives. (Come to think of it I guess that's really also a form of convolutional reverb.) I think it's cool that it can be done on earphones at all, and with head tracking the effect can be noticeable at least, but I don't think it really adds much. I find earphone listening sort of envelopingly directionless in a special way of its own that I enjoy anyway.

On a multi-speaker separates system, though, I think it's done simply by attenuating the signal to each speaker. Whether it's just that or something more sophisticated, the effect is much stronger and adds a lot more to the experience. A good system can place sounds clearly anywhere within a full dome enclosing the listener. The problem is that very few people have such a system, so the audience isn't huge. (That said, Apple Music heavily promotes spatial audio, so an Atmos Spem in Alium might reach more people just from search placement...)

What Atmos adds beyond surround sound (which itself offers untapped opportunities for Spem in Alium) is:

* It carries independent position data for up to 100 tracks, which can be edited (so you could experiment with the placement).

* It adapts to the set of speakers available at playback, rather than having a fixed track per speaker.

* It works on earphones, to some extent at least.

* It has vertical as well as planar positioning, so the "balconies" would work.

If you want to hear the results, a listening room would be the place. If you're in London, maybe here: https://tileyard.co.uk/stories/tileyard-london-dolby-atmos-s...

I don't know of any renaissance choral music available in Atmos. Most of Deutsche Gramaphon's new recordings use it, so there might be some good classical examples there. A listening room should have general demos that would show the effect off.

I think the Nonsuch Palace thing is just a suggestion rather than anything strongly historical. Wikipedia mentions it [1]:

> This account is consistent with the catalogue entry at Nonsuch Palace: Arundel House was the London home of Henry FitzAlan, 19th Earl of Arundel; Nonsuch Palace was his country residence. Nonsuch had an octagonal banqueting hall, which in turn had four first-floor balconies above the ground floor; on this supposition it could have been the case that Tallis designed the music to be sung not only in the round, but with four of the eight five-part choirs singing from the balconies.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spem_in_alium
by boris | 2025-08-25 07:49:32+00:00
Yes, I've seen this one in our logs. Quite obnoxious, but at least it identifies itself as a bot and, at least in our case (cgit host), does not generate much traffic. The bulk of our traffic comes from bots that pretend to be real browsers and that use a large number of IP addresses (mostly from Brazil and Asia in our case).

I've been playing cat and mouse trying to block them for the past week and here are a couple of observations/ideas, in case this is helpful to someone:

* As mentioned above, the bulk of the traffic comes from a large number of IPs, each issuing only a few requests a day, and they pretend to be real UAs.

* Most of them don't bother sending the referrer URL, but not all (some bots from Huawei Cloud do, but they currently don't generate much traffic).

* The first thing I tried was to throttle bandwidth for URLs that contain id= (which on a cgit instance generate the bulk of the bot traffic). So I set the bandwidth to 1Kb/s and thought surely most of the bots will not be willing to wait for 10-20s to download the page. Surprise: they didn't care. They just waited and kept coming back.

* BTW, they also used keep alive connections if ones were offered. So another thing I did was disable keep alive for the /cgit/ locations. Failed that enough bots would routinely hog up all the available connections.

* My current solution is to deny requests for all URLs containing id= unless they also contain the `notbot` parameter in the query string (and which I suggest legitimate users add in the custom error message for 403). I also currently only do this if the referrer is not present but I may have to change that if the bots adapt. Overall, this helped with the load and freed up connections to legitimate users, but the bots didn't go away. They still request, get 403, but keep coming back.

My conclusion from this experience is that you really only have two options: either do something ad hoc, very specific to your site (like the notbot in query string) that whoever runs the bots won't bother adapting to or you have to employ someone with enough resources (like Cloudflare) to fight them for you. Using some "standard" solution (like rate limit, Anubis, etc) is not going to work -- they have enough resources to eat up the cost and/or adapt.
by divan | 2025-08-25 07:50:20+00:00
I used the "map is not a territory" to describe this context in the article about visual programming [0]. Code is a map, territory is the mental model of the problem domain the code is supposed to be solving.

But, as other commentators mentioned, LLMs are so much better on reading large codebases, that it even invalidates the whole idea of this post (visualizing codebase in 3D in a fashion similar how I would do it in my head). Which kinda changes the game – if "comprehending" complex codebase becomes an easy task, maybe we won't need to keep developers' mental models and the code in constant sync. (it's an open question)

[0] https://divan.dev/posts/visual_programming_go/
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-25 07:50:48+00:00
The current theories use continuous space and time. However, we can't encode information into space itself. We would have to use some configuration of matter, and then there are limits to how well-defined a particle's position can be coming from the uncertainty principle.

On the other hand, general relativity implies that if you put enough matter in a small enough space it becomes a black hole, and then we can't access the information in it.

IANA physicist but I think this line of thought is probably speculative at the moment because it involves both general relativity and quantum mechanics and it isn't known how they should work together.
by rhdunn | 2025-08-25 07:51:07+00:00
Podcasts tend to be available from different sources to extend their reach YouTube and Spotify don't offer RSS feeds, however other services like redcirle.com, megaphone.fm, anchor.fm, and audioboom.com all offer RSS feeds. Even Apple should as it has a set of iTunes extensions for RSS to annotate things like the episode number.

I've been able to find RSS feeds for all the podcasts I listen to.
by considerdevs | 2025-08-25 07:51:25+00:00
You got a point, though I am not sure which things you are referring to. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi tried to have tight control in east Berlin but eventually failed. China is doing currently the full scale automated information gathering and control against Uighur Muslims. Not sure how China is using propaganda for the Chinese themselves. Also NSA uses mass surveillance already at the moment for foreigners and internal political opponents.

But propaganda as a weapon is not a thing to underestimate. As investigated e.g. Jessika Aro https://www.igpub.com/putins-trolls/ and some might argue about the role of election interference for the Trump election and re-election as well.

Even highly educated people are susceptible to propaganda eventhough they consider not https://www.mpg.de/24132917/0205-bild-online-misinformation-...

So, if the leaders are dictators and hates people, it wont be good with or without new surveillance laws as there are already existing ways to do that.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-25 07:51:41+00:00
> Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did.

OTOH all the VR headsets gathering dust now didn't turn out to be quite as useful as those fiber optic cables. And I'm not sure what will remain after the AI bubble pops except for a massive matrix multiplication overcapacity ;)

I also wouldn't call all the money being funneled into a single technology a "Cambrian Explosion", it's the opposite of that, an organism being propped up that wouldn't survive on its own in a competitive environment.
by miki123211 | 2025-08-25 07:52:04+00:00
This is the "witch hunt" problem.

If you have two networks, one encrypted and one not, and the unencrypted network is significantly easier / cheaper to use or has better network effects, that's where most people will naturally flock. The only ones who will put in the effort to use the encrypted one are criminals and a few principled technologists / civil libertarians. In such a world, the mere fact of using the encrypted network is suspicious in itself.

We define "criminals" here as "anybody the government doesn't like." In the US, this is mostly child predators, drug traffickers, thieves, and maybe a few (legal) sex workers. In other places, this is mostly homosexuals, human-rights activists, journalists and the opposition.

The way to fix the "witch hunt" problem is to make all networks encrypted and secure.

While cryptocurrency is mostly used by criminals, as the traditional financial system is just good enough for most people, TLS is used by everybody, as it is just the default way to do things on the internet nowadays. This is despite the fact that TLS makes wiretapping criminals' communications much harder.

The US and Europe[1] should use the influence they have over standards bodies to make prosecuting the latter group of "criminals" much harder, recognizing that this comes at the expense of also letting some criminals in the EU/US sense of the word run free. It is just the morally right thing to do.

[1] I mostly mean American and European companies and organizations which participate in the process of standard setting, not governments, which mostly cannot do things for complicated political reasons.
by marliechiller | 2025-08-25 07:52:11+00:00
I cant help but feel this analogy misses the mark. With the information people are consuming being guided by algorithms, its extremely hard for people to realise theyre being herded towards a specific viewpoint these days. It kind of reminds me of one of those mirror houses at the fairground - its extremely hard to get the correct signal in all the noise. You are what you consume and if everything you consume is of a misguided point of view, very quickly you're sliding towards being assimilated into that point of view.
by Ekaros | 2025-08-25 07:52:16+00:00
There is places and things that work for 3d printing. Very small scale manufacturing. Prototypes. But actually selling those is somewhat hard and not scalable market. And home printing... Yeah that sounds like hobbyist to me with corresponding market.

On other side you get to complex topologies and very specialised parts. Again pretty hard to scale and limited demand.

In the end it is manufacturing and manufacturing is huge. But also generally does not have great margins. It has lot of competition. So 3D printing would end up there with others say makers of CNC machines, various presses and so on. Multi-billion dollar industry, but not tech.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-08-25 07:54:12+00:00
It appears to have something to do with CGS units.

1 Jy = 10-23 erg s-1 cm-2 Hz-1 (cgs)

only their figure: L9.9 GHz < 2.1 × 10^25 erg s−1 Hz−1

leaves out the cm-2. (So not a density, like Jy. Perhaps 'L' is luminosity? ... As in: "The solar luminosity unit is a measure of the Sun's radiant energy and is equal to 3.828×10^(26) Watts." -(NRAO)

While groping, I found this helpful page called Brightness in Radio Astronomy: http://physics.wku.edu/~gibson/radio/brightness.html
by coreyh14444 | 2025-08-25 07:54:17+00:00
As someone in the midst of transitioning to Linux for the first time ever, the thing is: I still kinda hate Unix, but my AI friends (Claude Code / Codex) are very good at Unix/Linux and the everything is a file nature of it is amenable to AI helping me make my OS do what I want in a way that Windows definitely isn't.
by jstummbillig | 2025-08-25 07:54:19+00:00
There is hubris, but calling it a bubble simply does not check out, for one reason alone: If AI did absolutely nothing from here on out but give maybe a somewhat better version of current claude code (and it confuses me to no end that some people still refuse to see what is going on there, which admittedly are increasingly few of those who try, which makes sense because stuff gets better) that leads to, say, a ~2x dev speed up it, given the size of the market and how much software is missing still, AI as a whole would still be undervalued.

Of course, assuming that this would be the only thing where economic gains come from is already such a laughably bearish vision. It's just that that's all you need for the bubble-thesis to fall flat.
by hnbad | 2025-08-25 07:54:55+00:00
> Most people do that to obtain one suitable mate, and have a few offspring.

I'm not sure most people get a medical degree to "obtain one suitable mate and have a few offspring". I think most people do that to be a medical practitioner.

You could say people want to be medical practitioners because they want to find love and start a family but you could also say they want it because they want to be comfortably wealthy and financially secure.
by fhd2 | 2025-08-25 07:55:11+00:00
Much like wheelchairs vs exo skeletons, the simpler (and cheaper) tech tends to win. I'd imagine in a future where robots are everywhere, they'll use whatever cheap locomotion is appropriate for their tasks, probably predominantly wheels. It's a fun vision to imagine bipedal robots everywhere like in old sci movies, but I'm not convinced that's how it'll play out, the economics don't make that much sense.

Bipedal robots are more expensive to develop, build and maintain, more limited in their payloads, and because of the additional complexity, less reliable.
by miki123211 | 2025-08-25 07:55:35+00:00
This makes me feel like games will be the last bastion to fully fall to AI.

In traditional business apps, your goal is to make your app work and look intuitive enough for a human to use. When developing a game, you have a few extra goals, it also has to be fun, rewarding and different enough from other games that came before. It feels like the former group will be much easier to judge by non-humans than the latter.
by seanwilson | 2025-08-25 07:55:49+00:00
You can pick colors that pass both APCA and WCAG contrast checks though so it's not a problem to use APCA recommendations now.

I find APCA is a little stricter than WCAG for light themes, and APCA is much stricter than WCAG for dark themes, to the point where you really shouldn't use WCAG for dark themes. So most of the time APCA is giving you stricter contrast that easily pass WCAG also.

I keep seeing mentions that APCA will let you finally use e.g. white on orange, or white on vibrant blue that pass APCA but fail on WCAG, but my feeling is there's not a lot of examples like this and most of these pairings only have okay contrast anyway, not great contrast, so it's not ideal to be stuck with WCAG's false negatives but not that big of a deal.
by aorth | 2025-08-25 07:56:07+00:00
I have an ad hoc system that is similar, comprised of three lists of networks: known good, known bad, and data center networks. These are rate limited using a geo map in nginx for various expensive routes in my application.

The known good list is IPs and ranges I know are good. The known bad list is specific bad actors. The data center networks list is updated periodically based on a list of ASNs belonging to data centers.

There are a lot of problems with using ASNs, even for well-known data center operators. First, they update so often. Second, they often include massive subnets like /13(!), which can apparently overlap with routes announced by other networks, causing false positives. Third, I had been merging networks (to avoid overlaps causing problems in nginx) with something like https://github.com/projectdiscovery/mapcidr but found that it also caused larger overlaps that introduced false positives from adjacent networks where apparently some legitimate users are. Lastly, I had seen suspicious traffic from data center operators like CATO Networks Ltd and ZScaler that are some kind of enterprise security products that route clients through their clouds. Blocking those resulted in some angry users in places I didn't expect...

And none of the accounts for the residential ISPs that bots use to appear like legitimate users https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/vulnerabil....