MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-03 20:08:26+00:00
>do mundane things there before you can really gauge what you're up against.

I do agree completely but all it takes is one good person who is capable of making even a passing stranger feel welcome and you've got the example for cross-cultural co-operation. Even within an overall society dominated by cultural antagonism.

>You have to live in a place for a while as a normal person

This would be semantic to the extreme, but what if the only place you could live as a normal person is the place you are indigenous from? Like it was nobody's fault but it had always been that way and there was not very much you could do about it [0].

Of course everybody is indigenous to somewhere, but what if that very culture was lost or very nearly completely lost during your own lifetime? And you could see it coming from a young age because when it happens that fast it's obvious in ways that very few would be able to perceive otherwise.

[0] Your only choices would narrow down to; not doing very much about it vs not doing anything about it :\
by stickfigure | 2025-08-03 20:08:42+00:00
I think you're right that there needs to be actual competition between park services, but I am doubtful it will make that much of a difference. The public appetite for attendance absolutely dwarfs the capacity of the park. To meet demand you'd have to build a whole city.

I've given up on Yosemite. There are lots of other places to go in California (and beyond). Although they are starting to get crowded too...
by treetalker | 2025-08-03 20:09:09+00:00
I read the article (and the real-life situation) differently than you do, I think.

As I see it, the core issue is not whether the agency's numbers are right or wrong or need to be fact-checked. Nor is it whether the administration is making policy without evidence (although that would be / is problematic.)

The core issue is that Trump is purporting to dismiss a nonpartisan public servant because he doesn't like that the nonpartisan data coming out of the agency make him look bad. This is something one would expect from Stalin's regime; or North Korea; but not the White House (under any other circumstances).
by msgodel | 2025-08-03 20:09:43+00:00
Someone I know who's very "homophobic" justifies it for this reason. He argues that by accepting homosexuality men end up having to think of eachother the way they do women: either just potential enemies or people who might be upset about romantic interests.

I'm not sure that's right but there seems to be something too that idea. It might very well be that at least in the sense we do now widespread acceptance of homosexuality and platonic friendships just aren't compatible.
by onion2k | 2025-08-03 20:09:56+00:00
Having spent a long time in tech and worked with a lot of people I've realised there are two sorts of people who are "imposters". There are those who have BS'd their way up and are in a role where they're out of their depth, and there are those who were lucky to have landed a role that's a bit beyond them (often because they have deep experience elsewhere.)

The first type don't ask questions. They know they're imposters and don't want to be called out.

The second type do ask questions. They also know they're imposters but they're trying to learn so they're not.

Judge people on their actions else you'll only spot the second group, and often with a bit of support those ones can go on to do great things, especially if they're experienced at one thing but they're not learning a new thing. When they get enough knowledge to connect the two things they can be absolutely brilliant.
by pstuart | 2025-08-03 20:09:57+00:00
I agree they're in a horrible bind.

In a different timeline, we'd have a "master plan" of how to ensure industry (and the populous) is able to thrive in the future. I believe it's technically a solvable problem but it requires adults in the room, who value the the country as a whole. We do not have that, and I'm afraid it's possible we never will.
by ronsor | 2025-08-03 20:09:58+00:00
The vast majority of users have had no problem.

The installer consists of a "Yes (to accepting the license agreement)", waiting on a progress bar, and a "Yes (to starting the program)." It is like almost every installation wizard ever seen on a computer, except simpler and no bundled adware.

When I've asked the ~5-10% of people who are confused, they've done at least one of the following:

* Admit they clicked at random, and somehow closed the installer.

* Gave up immediately and exited.

* Complained there was no video tutorial for a sixty-second process.

This kind of stuff has me at a loss for words, and overall, it makes me more jaded when producing software for the "average" end-user. There's only so much magic I can put in, and I already do a lot of work to make sure most stuff I make is as user-friendly as possible. Plenty of people don't actually read explanations, even a few words; you can't really help them at that point.
by Sniffnoy | 2025-08-03 20:10:01+00:00
> One problem which is perhaps more interesting now than ever before is to get from Junius St. to Livonia Ave. [...] There are two plausible solutions staying in Brooklyn, but they each involve four transfers (five trains again).

This is now doable with only 3 transfers (4 trains). I wonder what was different then that it wasn't? (Whitehall St to Hoyt-Schermerhorn, meanwhile, presently requires only 2 transfers (3 trains). Edit: Actually it's even fewer, see below.)
by godelski | 2025-08-03 20:10:02+00:00
You're pretty spot on. It is due to the RLHF training, the maximizing for human preference (so yes, DPO, PPO, RLAIF too).

Here's the thing, not every question has an objectively correct answer. I'd say almost no question does. Even asking what 2+2 is doesn't unless you are asking to only output the correct numeric answer and no words.

Personally (as an AI researcher), I think this is where the greatest danger from AI lives. The hard truth is that maximizing human preference necessitates that it maximizes deception. Correct answers are not everybody's preference. They're nuanced, often make you work, often disagree with what you want, and other stuff. I mean just look at Reddit. The top answer is almost never the correct answer. It frequently isn't even an answer! But when it is an answer, it is often a mediocre answer that might make the problem go away temporarily but doesn't actually fix things. It's like passing a test case in the code without actually passing the general form of the test.

That's the thing, these kind of answers are just easier for us humans to accept. Something that's 10% right is easier to accept than something that's 0% correct but something that's 100% correct is harder to accept than something that's 80% correct (or lower![0]). So people prefer a little lie. Which of course this is true! When you teach kids physics you don't teach them everything at once! You teach them things like E=mc2 and drop the momentum part. You treat everything as a spherical chicken in a vacuum. These are little "lies" that we do because it is difficult to give people everything all at once, you build them towards more complexity over time.

Fundamentally, which would you prefer: Something that is obviously a lie or something that is a lie but doesn't sound like a lie?

Obviously the answer is the latter case. But that makes these very difficult tools to use. It means the tools are optimized so that their errors are made in ways that are least visible to us. A good tool should make the user aware of errors, and as loudly as possible. That's the danger of these systems. You can never trust them[1]

[0] I say that because there's infinite depth to even the most mundane of topics. Try working things out from first principles with no jump in logic. Connect every dot. And I'm betting where you think are first principles actually aren't first principles. Even just finding what those are is a very tricky task. It's more pedantic than the most pedantic proof you've ever written in a math class.

[1] Everyone loves to compare to humans. Let's not anthropomorphize too much. Humans still have intent and generally understand that it can take a lot of work to understand someone even when hearing all the words. Generally people are aligned, making that interpretation easier. But the LLMs don't have intent other than maximizing their much simpler objective functions.
by shivasaxena | 2025-08-03 20:10:05+00:00
I'm 36, but to be fair even in late 90s when we were kids we had

1) Forums like askanexper(can't remember the exact name) 2) great books like sams teach yourself in 24 hours and a habit to spend time in library 3) most importantly not as much competition as we have today. There were like a 2-3 kids in my schools of 2k who were into programming. Today that would be approaching half.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-08-03 20:10:26+00:00
His another tweet from just 2 hours ago:

"Teslas can drive themselves!"

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1952057897694937451#m

This is less than 3 days since the judgement where a jury found Tesla liable to pay $243 million to victims of a 2019 fatal crash in a Model S that was on Autopilot.

"This is the first time that Tesla has been hit with a judgment in one of the many, many fatalities that have happened as a result of its Autopilot technology." Alex Lemann said.

Autopilot and FSD per se are not bad, they are among the best in class and would be safety enhancers, if not for Tesla & Musk trying to convince people that the cars actually drive themselves, killing quite a lot of people in the process.

Also, how is 'Robotaxi' prediction checked as Met ? The 'service' launched more than a month ago, and it's not available to the public - it's Tesla influencers only. They 'expanded' the area twice already to pump the stock price, but there are maybe like 3 'clients' using it and the fleet it still ~10 cars... It's a PR move, not a real service.
by scripper | 2025-08-03 20:11:26+00:00
Thank you for replying. Totally makes sense that it helps people do a lot without having to spend a lot of time learning to code. Similar to Wix allowing you to have a cool website without years of learning web languages. I guess I enjoy coding at least partly to solve problems but I’m not sure what the next type of problem is for me. I don’t necessarily like juggling 20 things at once which is one new problem allowed by it being much easier to do things with code.
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-03 20:11:51+00:00
I am not trying to start any sort of political discussion. However, I do not think many of the layoffs that have hit healthcare workers are due to maximizing profits for hospitals nor due to the lack of demand for healthcare.

If I am not mistaken, the current administration has enacted changes that have caused a significant reduction in federal grant funding for hospitals. So, many of the layoffs, as I understand it, are to make up for the coming losses in funding.

I live in a state with plenty of rural areas. There are growing fears of some rural hospitals being forced to completely shut down due to funding cuts.
by saaaaaam | 2025-08-03 20:12:12+00:00
Honestly not sure why this is any sort of surprise. I very occasionally read UN reports for work. I very frequently see journalists covering those reports using the press release, clearly not having read anything else. And then I see low quality media reporting on the topic clearly having read only the third party reports. When journalists - whose job it is - don’t read them, it’s expecting a lot for anyone outside of the political/lobbying establishment to read them.
by pfdietz | 2025-08-03 20:12:45+00:00
Fission plants are expensive because malfunctions cannot be tolerated. Malfunctions cannot be tolerated because the government would not give them a liability cap if there was a significant chance of serious accident.

Guess what? Fusion reactors also can't tolerate malfunctions. Not because of public safety, but because large (DT reactors being 40x the size of a fission reactor for a given power output) complex devices that are too radioactive for hands on maintenance are unrepairable.

Helion is claiming they can go with materials with very low beyond short term activation, and that the cylindrical geometry would make swapping out hot components easier. Whether that is enough remains to be seen, but IMO DT approaches are complete dead ends.
by Spivak | 2025-08-03 20:13:02+00:00
It's a student project with a ToS that's basically "don't use this for anything that could get us in trouble." I don't find that particularly unreasonable especially when honor codes at schools are usually stricter than "whatever is legal is allowed."

I know it's programmer-brain to naturally probe the edges of things but at the same time as adults we're expected to understand and navigate fuzzy concepts like inappropriate behavior without having to have it spelled out like you do with young kids.
by ronsor | 2025-08-03 20:13:18+00:00
I mean, this isn't consistent with the usual definition of public, especially on sites that let you share content:

* YouTube uses "public" for viewable by everyone and discoverable; for something that should only be accessible if the URL is shared, then YouTube uses the term "unlisted"

* Facebook uses "public" similarly

More generally, "to publish" (related to the adjective "public") means to make something generally known, as opposed to simply sharing with a closed group (even if they can share it too).
by rsktaker | 2025-08-03 20:13:19+00:00
(Not sure if this is just me, but) I find this truck so aesthetically displeasing?

Somehow, most EVs have curves and "bounciness" (and why such odd headlights??) in all the right places to make it look childish. I find the Tesla sedan extremely aesthetic though, that might be the one exception. The bigger Teslas (especially in color white) remind me of pandas for some reason.
by toast0 | 2025-08-03 20:14:57+00:00
> How can a product core to people working remotely, be so trash and still have such a large contingent of users?

As others said, the people using it aren't choosing it.

> Where's face time for android/Linux/other? Apple is too stubborn to recognise other platforms

Apple had said at one point they were planning to make it available on other platforms. But that was before they got patent lawsuits against them for it... My guess is they don't want to deal with codecs on a platform they don't control.
by therealdrag0 | 2025-08-03 20:15:13+00:00
Huh? Thats just not true. We have channels for gamers, pets, golf, home automation, “lounge”, “memes”, etc. I’ve been at this company 4 years and can only thing if 3 times I’ve seen a dispute, and even that was very civil. It’s really not hard to leave politics at home.
by const_cast | 2025-08-03 20:15:40+00:00
When it comes to healthcare, we didn't used to have so much regulation.

And, well, it sucked. People died, black people got injected with radiation, and we experimented on humans.

Ultimately, I don't want poor people to just... die. Because that's bad. So we need some sort of guarantees.

Or, we don't: in which case, I hope you're content scraping bodies off the freeway for free. Someone has to do it if we're not paying for their healthcare and disposal costs. Hope you're not busy next weekend!
by fardo | 2025-08-03 20:15:53+00:00
This feels like it should be a non-controversy.

Even being uncharitable, a big off-by-default checkbox saying “make this discoverable in web searches” is roughly as explicit as you can possibly make this feature textually, assuming your users will be applying any reading comprehension.

If they’re not, no further warnings were going to save them, so short of removing the feature or gating it behind increasingly elaborate “if only you knew better!” emails or pop-up modals they also presumably would not be reading, this was the likely outcome.

At some point, I don’t feel bad saying this is a user-side PEBKAC, and that more alerting would be a waste of time.
by varispeed | 2025-08-03 20:16:39+00:00
> Admit they clicked at random, and somehow closed the installer. > Gave up immediately and exited.

Seems like someone with ADHD.

> Complained there was no video tutorial for a sixty-second process.

Could be someone with Dyspraxia.

These behaviours might be puzzling to neurotypical people, but they exist and are reality for many users. It's also not connected to that person intelligence in any way. Their brains just operate differently.
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-03 20:16:56+00:00
I'm glad to see that politicians recognize that working from home is beneficial, and hope that they work to incentivize it, or at least not disincentivize it.

Unfortunately, as described, this regulation could backfire and disincentivize it. By setting minimum standards for working from home, and allowing exemptions for when it isn't possible, any business that otherwise could allow working from home, but couldn't do so in a way that meets the regulations standards, will be better off exempting itself and completely prohibiting working from home.
by nuancebydefault | 2025-08-03 20:17:37+00:00
The parallel with boredom that is revealed in the article is apt. Boredom and loneliness are like physical pain. Today we have extinguishers for all three of them. Computer games, LLMs, aspirine.

If we want to up the effectiveness level of the painkiller to that of morphine, we need a prescription, for good reasons: Pain is a (quite heartless but effective) solution for survival provided by evolution. So are boredom and loneliness as explained in the article!

I'm not against computer games and virtual psychologist per se but there is a big concern: For games and LLMs there's no such prescription-based regulation possible and the consumed dose is virtually unlimited.
by daft_pink | 2025-08-03 20:18:25+00:00
I think that people and countries not wanting to purchase 30 year long term debt in a zero interest rate environment is perfectly natural. There is far more potential downside than upside and not evidence of demise.

Reality is that there is little motivation to invest in long term debt under 3%, normal motivation to invest in debt between 5-10% and huge appetite for debt above 10%.

Debt with a sub 2% interest rate can only be achieved with significant government intervention. We were living in an unrealistic economoic reality and now we’re going back towards something realistic with interest rates between 5-10%.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-03 20:19:06+00:00
Now this is getting scientific, but it helps.

Plenty of people are just fine without wanting to do any equations or even take any temperature readings sometimes, and that's OK.

It can still be fully grasped that there "exists" a state of Thermodynamic Equilibrium, it's just usually not well achieved.

I would say when people wish for it, even with all their might, it usually fails to come true ;)
by rickyhatespeas | 2025-08-03 20:20:05+00:00
That's part of the dangers of using them for software engineering. Writing more code does not make things better, just like hiring more devs does not make projects complete faster. I've already witnessed devs who are overwriting code for solutions, while at the same time some devs responsibly use it as needed.

It's literally the same pain point with low code solutions like WordPress page builders/plugins. Adding more becomes a hindrance, and even models with long context that can fit whole codebases will try to make up new functions that already exist. Just a couple weeks ago I had o3 continually try to write a new debounce function, even when I told it explicitly I had one.
by classichasclass | 2025-08-03 20:21:04+00:00
Yes, that's all true, but I blame HP more than the others because a large part of what went into Itanium came from HP. They thought that with their simulation results they would eclipse all other architectures with Itanic, and they were way off base, junking an architecture that had room to grow in the process. Even so, PA-RISC was still competitive at least into the days of Mako, though they kind of phoned it in with Shortfin (the last PA-8900).
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-03 20:21:17+00:00
In the period they mention, I've gone from heavy socializing to nearly none.

It's a lot of reasons. My kids are grown. My need for new customers is sharply lower.

I've decoupled my self-esteem from societal expectations. This killed the carrot for a lot of my social behavior - like the need for small talk.

My resistance to things fades with age. Like the ever increasing heat. My tolerance of traffic. My tolerance of crowds - especially when it's enhanced by cluelessness (eg:conversations in choke points).

Plus I live with my 5 adult sons (thanks 4-income economy!) and we get on well.
by ronsor | 2025-08-03 20:21:45+00:00
> Seems like someone with ADHD.

Perhaps it does, but it begs the question of "how did they operate the computer at all?" These same people seem to have no trouble accomplishing other tasks they want to do on the computer--tasks which require more focus.

> Could be someone with Dyspraxia.

Fair.

In any case, as only one person developing a program for free in my spare time, I don't have the time or ability to cater for every scenario.
by const_cast | 2025-08-03 20:21:59+00:00
The problem is we're already doing that, just worse.

Insurance is just risk-pooling. The most effective risk-pooling requires a bigger pool. That's why we have big insurance companies and bigger companies offer better employer healthcare plans.

Well, the biggest pool is the entire US population. So, we should just do that.

We already have socialized medicine. If my coworker smokes, I pay for that. If we're going to do socialized medicine, we should do it right.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-03 20:22:02+00:00
Twenty years ago, as a tourist in Scotland, the wife and I stopped at the Camera Obscura in Edinburgh. Very cool. It was periscope-like — projecting a circular image down onto a circular table beneath. As you panned the periscope around the image too rotated such that you had to work yourself around the table to keep the horizon "level" — relatively speaking.

A few months ago, in Edinburgh again on vacation, and it looks like they turned what was a quaint oddity into a whole "family experience" with all kinds of other things for kids and such. I passed on it this time.
by farkin88 | 2025-08-03 20:22:05+00:00
Even though tokens are getting cheaper, I think the real killer of "unlimited" LLM plans isn't token costs themselves, it's the shape of the usage curve that's unsustainable. These products see a Zipf-like distribution: thousands of casual users nibble a few-hundred tokens a day while a tiny group of power automations devour tens of millions. Flat pricing works fine until one of those whales drops a repo-wide refactor or a 100 MB PDF into chat and instantly torpedoes the margin. Unless vendors turn those extreme loops into cheaper, purpose-built primitives (search, static analyzers, local quantized models, etc.), every "all-you-can-eat" AI subscription is just a slow-motion implosion waiting for its next whale.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-03 20:22:55+00:00
>TANSTAAFL

Well you can't expect 100-year-old memes to die any time soon ;)

Famous saying coined by those who prefer a dog-eat-dog rat race and whose life's work often consists of urging things to grow closer to making this more universal.

When you do the math about the USA, there's been nothing free ever since the end of WWII. Any "giveaways" were already paid for well in advance by the sacrifices that were made back then.

The government could be providing gourmet cuisine to schoolchildren across-the-board by now, there would be far fewer underprivileged anyway if the "war dividend" would have been invested halfway wisely instead of being squandered mindlessly, or maliciously as the case may be.