MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nicoburns | 2025-08-02 23:32:30+00:00
Big doesn't necessarily mean that consumers will be worse off than small. Just like having a dictator doesn't neccesarily mean that citizens will be worse off then in a democracy. What it does mean in both cases is that if the powerful entity decides to abuse their power for their own gain, it's very difficult (albeit not entirely impossible) to do anything about it. It's therefore better in the long-run to preempt this and bias towards smaller entities that are each less powerful.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-02 23:33:06+00:00
> How does your dhcpd server get its address?

It’s hardcoded. For IPv4 it doesn’t need to be dynamic because NAT allows you to hardcode private address ranges. But that whole concept of networking doesn’t translate (no pun intended) to IPv6

This is the problem I’m running into with deploying IPv6. I don’t know what address ranges to allocate because the dhcp server doesn’t perform any handshakes with the ISP. And I’m a bit reluctant to rearchitect the network topology for IPv6 because everything already works really well without IPv6.

So ideally I’d want a way of sliding in IPv6 without having to break what’s already working.

Every solution I’ve explored thus far hasn’t achieved that. But there’s lots of good information shared here today so I’ll have another read and maybe they’ll offer up an insight I’d previously missed.
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-08-02 23:34:51+00:00
Same here. I’m autistic and so is my best friend. When I had to move out of the dorms after graduation I knew it was a bad idea to live alone. I’m very comfortable being alone and if I wouldn’t share a home I would probably end up completely isolated. We’ve been sharing a house for two decades and it’s working for us.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-02 23:35:08+00:00
> Argumentum ad populum [0] is itself an informal fallacy, as described on both of our links.

Which gets to the difference between one and the other.

"This is correct because everybody says it is" is a fallacy because it can be true or false independent of whether everybody says it is or not. Even if the premise is true, the conclusion can be false, or vice versa.

Whereas if the premises that X likely leads to Y and Y is bad are both true, then the conclusion that X likely leads to something bad is not independent.

> What I said wasn't an argumentum ad populum anyways: we're discussing definitions, and definitions do not have truth values.

Categories have definitions. Whether a particular thing fits into a particular category can be reasoned about, and a particular miscategorization being common doesn't make it correct.

> But not all incorrect premises are formulated in a reasonable manner. There are degenerate premises that have telltale signs of being misguided. These would be what make informal fallacies. In a way, you could think of them as being incorrect about the premises of what counts as sound logic.

The general form of informal fallacies is that they take some reasoning which is often true (e.g. if everybody believes something then it's more likely to be true than false) and then tries to use it under the assumption that it's always the case, which is obviously erroneous, e.g. the majority of people used to think the sun revolved around the earth.

The category error with slippery slope is that the probability is part of the argument. If 60% of the things people believe are true, that doesn't tell you if "sun revolves around the earth" is one of those things, so you can't use it to prove that one way or the other.

Whereas arguing that taking on a 60% chance of a bad thing happening is bad isn't a claim that the bad thing will definitely happen.
by kacesensitive | 2025-08-02 23:35:17+00:00
I did this for a couple days when Comcast's DNS was fucking up when I moved into a new place and was stuck with their modem/router/AP for a bit (which was locked to like 6.6.6.6 or whatever it was).

Tried explaining it to several customer support techs but they all just gave up eventually.

Was fixed when I ended up getting my own modem and router/AP.

But those were an interesting few days. My partner was annoyed they couldn't use Pinterest but YouTube loaded fine. Google search worked but our local pizza joint's site didn't.
by vira28 | 2025-08-02 23:35:42+00:00
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by simoncion | 2025-08-02 23:36:08+00:00
How does your backwards-compatibility dream handle ASICs built to handle only IPv4 and shitty middleboxes hard-coded to drop or -worse- mangle any IP traffic that doesn't fit a particular subset of what's permissible for IPv4?

Google and other big players go to huge lengths to build new Internet protocols on top of UDP because enough of the internet drops or mangles anything other than TCP or UDP that it's effectively impossible to use anything else on the Greater Internet. IPvNext by way of backwards-compatible IPv4 was (and continues to be) no easier than doing something that's backwards-incompatible.

As a bonus, doing the backwards-incompatible thing bypasses all the bad behavior of existing shitty middleboxes and crummy ASICs.
by hollerith | 2025-08-02 23:37:11+00:00
>Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option

To be the least bad option, Apple would need to publish a plan for keeping an AI under control so that it stays under control even if it undergoes a sharp increase in cognitive capability (e.g., during training) or alternatively a plan to prevent an AI's capability from ever rising to a level that requires the aforementioned control.

I haven't seen anything out of Apple suggesting that Apple's leaders understand that a plan of the first kind or the second kind is necessary.

Most people who have written about the topic in detail put Anthropic as the least bad option because out of all the groups with competitive offerings, their leadership has written in the most detail about the need for a plan and about their particular (completely inadequate IMHO) plan.

I myself put Google as the least bad option -- the slightly less awful option, to be precise -- with large uncertainty because Google wasn't pushing capabilities hard till OpenAI and Anthropic put it in a situation in which it either had to start pushing hard or risk falling so far behind it wouldn't be able to catch up. Consequently, I use Gemini as my LLM service. In particular, Google risked finding itself in a situation in which it cannot create a competitive offering because it doesn't have access to enough data collected from users of LLMs and generative AIs and cannot get enough data because it cannot attract users. While it was the leading lab, Google was proceeding slowly and at least one industry insider claims credibly that the slowness was deliberately chosen to reduce the probability of an AI catastrophe.

I must stress that no one has an adequate plan for avoiding an AI catastrophe while continuing to push capabilities, and IMHO no one is likely to devise one in time, so would be great if no one did any more frontier AI research at all till humanity itself becomes more cognitively capable.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-02 23:37:32+00:00
I think VR is a great example of a technology we are currently choosing to stop, very similarly to AI, all evidence suggests we’ll hit a cost/benefit wall before we get to superintelligent AI similar to the abandonment of VR progress currently in the works.

Contradictorally though - I am near certain we will declare victory on AGI much sooner than 10 years from now. OpenAI’s contract with Microsoft nearly requires it, and Sam Altman recently said that by reasonable measures of 5 years ago, ChatGPT 4 is AGI. In some sense that may best evidence things are stalling.

But really 10 years from now, either one of us could declare victory, and we’d probably be right.
by deathanatos | 2025-08-02 23:38:07+00:00
> I think IPv6 should have been 8 bytes instead of 16

You don't state why you think this, but this is almost always due to the flawed thinking that the IP address is a simple identifier, and then looking at "how many IPs does the world need?" → "64 bits is enough". (IPs are like street addresses, in that they're routing instructions. Having the space not fragment — like v4's space is doing — is part of it, and helps things like routing tables remain small.)

> and somewhat backward compatible with IPv4.

The pigeon-hole principle makes backwards compatibility impossible. No matter what concrete scheme you might propose, it is effectively equivalent to IPv6.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-02 23:38:49+00:00
Look at days listed. Any property will sell at the right price. After 90-120 days, it obvious the price is too high and the seller is not motivated to sell. The listing realtor will try to provide market guidance and advise to cut the price if needed, but humans can be emotional and irrational. Prices take the elevator up and the stairs down.

It’ll take time, but those who must sell will, and they’ll set the downward price momentum with comps.
by elefanten | 2025-08-02 23:39:37+00:00
Doesn't have to be a perfect success rate... how about just something other than abysmal failure rate?

Asserting a sloganized refrain is not very convincing. Make a real argument. Here are some counterpoints to "big is bad" Neobrandeisianism: -Scale enables better economics for certain businesses which consumers and other businesses then benefit from. -Large size allows additional speculative cutting edge R&D funding which the whole world benefits from even if it never pays off. -Being big on its own is almost never a cheat code to permanent monopoly / monopsony lock-in, especially in the technology business. That comes from actual anti-competitive behavior or regulatory capture (which ARE the parts that should be regulated, rather than targeting or preventing size for its own sake).

The S&P point is more than a bit overstated and it also doesn't really matter? The subset of the S&P that's performing well will naturally get weighted higher over time, until the performance changes. It doesn't really matter if the S&P is driven by 5 enormous companies or 500 equally-sized ones. Whatever works at the moment is what gets rewarded with capital -- that's the point of the system and it's been more effective than any alternatives. Besides, it'd be poor investing practice to be literally all-in on the S&P.
by bix6 | 2025-08-02 23:39:52+00:00
I’m unclear what your first point is saying

FTC under her blocked Kroger/Albertsons, blocked Tapestry/Capri, ended non-competes, enacted click to cancel, made major strides on right to repair, etc. in addition to all the “prejudice against big tech” which are the titans of industry right now…
by sealeck | 2025-08-02 23:39:56+00:00
> especially her preexisting prejudice of Big Tech should have disqualified her from any position well before she took the wheel.

The purpose of the FTC is literally to take regulatory action to prevent unfair competition. Your argument is that you shouldn't appoint a commissioner on the basis that they think large tech companies are engaging in anti-competitive behaviour?? Note that this position isn't playing dictator; the FTC is subject to judicial oversight.

> Meanwhile local and state utility and cable tv monopolies continue to _flourish_ without so much as a peep.

How do we know this isn't just your preexisting prejudice of cable companies? Maybe you've just got an obsession with "big [cable] is bad"? On a serious note – it seems that you _do_ agree with antitrust regulation, just not against Facebook/Amazon for some reason (and only against Comcast)??
by Rapzid | 2025-08-02 23:40:27+00:00
Yeah I noticed the issue with more Junior developers right away. Some developers, Junior or not, have yet to be exposed to environments where their PRs are put under HEAVY scrutiny. They are used to loosey-goosey and unfortunately they are not prepared to put LLM changes under the level of scrutiny they require.

The worst is getting, even smallish, PRs with a bunch of changes that look extraneous or otherwise off. After asking questions the code changes without the questions being answered and likely with a new set of problems. I swear I've been prompting an LLM through an engineer/PR middleman :(
by jact | 2025-08-02 23:40:37+00:00
I think that many of the problems of this are solved by abstract types and good module interfaces to interacting with those types.

If the business logic changes, the internal type representation can be modified or a new module that fills the same signature but uses a different internal type can be written.

Modularity matters most. If you have to do massive refactoring of code because of a change in type representation, there’s an issue with the modularity of your design. Good modularity prevents refactoring from impacting the rest of the system unless you need to change your module — that’s something that’s true even if you have no static typing.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-08-02 23:40:50+00:00
Jon didn’t actually deny the claims though. The accusation is that someone had sex with him and then regretted it and tried to end the relationship but he creeped on her. He said he didn’t think his actions were creepy but that doesn’t mean they weren’t and it certainly doesn’t mean they didn’t make the accusers uncomfortable. Losing his job over this is a bit much but after reading all the evidence I would not invite him to conferences either. He clearly has awful social skills and habitually makes people uncomfortable. The lack of anyone standing up for him points in that direction as well although there are many other possible explanations so I won’t hold that against him.
by woodruffw | 2025-08-02 23:41:00+00:00
You've sort of given it away with the "smaller cities" thing. People who live in NYC don't want to live in a smaller American-style city with suburban sprawl.

(You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC. That number, already terrible, would be far worse without the city's mass transit -- you simply cannot support the kind of density NYC endeavors for with car-oriented development.)
by Eggpants | 2025-08-02 23:41:49+00:00
Ah yet another attempt to push the “$200/month is a bargain!!!” narrative. Sad.

I get it. No one is really making any money yet, including openAI.

As the VC money dries up this is only going to get worse. Like ads in responses worse.

this_variable_name_is_sponsored_by_coinbase bad. Which these vibe chuckleheads will claim is no big deal because only losers read code.
by palata | 2025-08-02 23:41:52+00:00
The problem I see with chat protocols is that it's all about network effect.

How do you get people to leave WhatsApp for something better? - You don't. They just stay on WhatsApp.

One problem being that if you want better security (Signal), you lose a little bit in UX. If you want better UX (Telegram), you completely lose the security aspect. So WhatsApp seems like a local optimum: relatively secure, and you can find your friends there.

Then we can discuss all we want about the merits of Discord/Slack/Matrix/Zulip, but the truth remains this: if you ask someone who mostly uses Discord what they want you to use for your new community, they will say Discord. If they mostly use Zulip, they will say Zulip. People don't want the better solution, they want the least effort.

I have seen multiple open source communities (who spend a fair share of their time complaining about how people don't support open source instead of using the proprietary alternative) choosing their chat system: people were fighting between Slack and Discord, nobody gave a damn about using an open source system. How hypocritical...
by elefanten | 2025-08-02 23:41:52+00:00
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...

She got boosted by an insurgent group of law professors who spearhead whats called the Neobrandeis moment. Their theory is that anti-trust should be preemptively enforced against size for its own sake.

This is the article she wrote for her law review as a law student which put her on their radar and they started calling her a "rising star" etc etc, which snowballed into the performative appointment by the Biden admin.

Feel free to read through it.
by PseudoComputer | 2025-08-02 23:42:03+00:00
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We built this because we're students, so we constantly used these PDF WebApps to convert, and compress PDF Files, files that contained very sensitive information like names, financial information, etc. We were so frustrated with current WebApps because they required logins, had restrictions if you were on their free plan, were closed source etc. So we built LuxPDF to try and solve the problem of bad PDF WebApps in 2025.

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by simoncion | 2025-08-02 23:42:13+00:00
Oof.

Yeah, because you're gonna have to have a DHCPv6 client running on your router (and because your ISP is almost certainly using DHCPv6-PD the router is where you're pretty much going to have to first learn about your LAN-side DHCPv6 prefixes), it's probably going to be a bit tricky (but probably not impossible) to do what you want.

Best of luck. If you figure out how to do it within the HN comment freeze period (I think it's 14 days?), please do leave a follow-up comment. I'd be very interested in hearing what you come up with.
by davidbanham | 2025-08-02 23:42:47+00:00
That resonates for me. I spend lot of time teaching volunteers. Early on, I encourage them to learn the skill from me, but also take any opportunity to have others explain and demonstrate the same thing to them. I tend to work from first principles, explaining how the pump functions and why that means water goes in here and out there, and what different configurations of valves are therefore valid and which ones will never do anything useful. Others often explain it in terms of which valves to turn in which order to achieve a given outcome.

Neither is right or wrong. Most people will be left pretty cold by one explanation while the other will land neatly into a hole in their brain shaped perfectly for it. Which one is which will be different for each person.

I think that there’s value in gearing educational settings towards having a plurality of instructors available on each subject and letting students gravitate towards the ones that work for them.
by cyberax | 2025-08-02 23:43:34+00:00
> especially in terms of door-to-door time

So in other words, your city made it extremely inconvenient to use anything BUT bikes to get around. Which is exactly my point.

Do an experiment, drop 10 points randomly within your city. Now plot routes between them using various transport modes. I bet that transit will be 3-4 times slower than bikes.

> I have basically zero reason to buy a car: even if there was zero traffic on the road it's not worth the quite substantial cost.

I guess you have zero kids, and your country has a collapsing population? The absolutely telling metric is the number of families with two or more kids, because it's the point where bikes become utterly inconvenient.

> But it is certainly possible to make road layouts that make safe cycling basically impossible, and American city planners seem to have mastered that

Oh yeah. I know that firsthand.

My neighborhood just got bikelaned. Now I have a traffic jam outside of my house half of the day, delaying thousands of people for at least 10 minutes every _day_. The local bus now takes 10 minutes more on average for the roundtrip. And all that for 30 meters of bike lanes. That is almost entirely unused because it ends up against the bottom of a steep hill.

But good news, everyone. Our new housing units are the smallest in the nation and our housing prices are growing fast despite the slowing economy!
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-08-02 23:45:09+00:00
> Because memorizing 0 18 * * 1-5 is harder than understanding every day between monday and friday at 6:00pm

Really? Does “Every day between Monday and Friday” include Monday and Friday? One could think the days between Monday and Friday are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Why people don’t just learn cron syntax is beyond me.
by overfeed | 2025-08-02 23:45:27+00:00
> My question is "how many months need to pass until they realize it isn't months away?"

It's going to persist until shareholders punish them for it. My guess is it's going to be some near-random-trigger, such as a little-known AI company declaring bankruptcy, but becoming widely reported. Suddenly, investing in AI with no roadmap to profitability will become unfashionable, budget cuts, down-rounds, bankruptcies and consolidation will follow. But there's no telling when this will be, as there's elite convergence to keep the hype going for now.
by garciasn | 2025-08-02 23:45:41+00:00
1. I don't commute; I work from home.

2. I would use a truck as it was intended to be used--as a truck.

3. I have a lake home 150 miles from my primary home and I don't want to have to drive 4 kids and 2 adults in two separate cars every time.

4. There is no charging infrastructure near my lake home.
by cyberax | 2025-08-02 23:46:00+00:00
Ah yeah. It's no wonder people keep mentioning Copenhagen without telling its dirty little secret. It stayed liveable _despite_ the scourge of urbanism because a third of its population was forcibly (via economic forces) displaced during 1970-s, and it _still_ has not reached the 1969 peak: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope...

So it was able to avoid the effects of the density-misery spiral. But it'll get to experience them soon. The transit will become more crowded, traffic more jammed, the crime will go up, and the housing costs (of course) will skyrocket.
by parineum | 2025-08-02 23:47:34+00:00
The milestones your citing are all milestones of transformers that were underestimated.

If you think an incremental improvement in transformers are what's needed for AGI, I see your angle. However, IMO, transformers haven't shown any evidence of that capability. I see no reason to believe that they'd develop that with a bit more compute or a bit more data.
by 986aignan | 2025-08-02 23:48:49+00:00
At some point, I would imagine the distinction between capital and land becomes blurry, though. Economic rent can be had from either if the barrier to competition is high enough.

Domain names are a good example, because as skissane said, you could just make another DNS root. The trouble is convincing people (browsers) to use it. The problem in attempting to overturn Facebook isn't mainly the coding, either, but having a critical mass care. Those barriers don't seem like absolutes the way land is; they're just very high, high enough for those who control them to extract economic rent.