MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danans | 2025-08-15 15:00:10+00:00
Our brains reason in many domains depending on the situation.

For domains built primarily on linguistic primitives (legal writing), we do often reason through language. In other domains (i.e spatial) we reason through vision or sound.

We experience this distinction when we study the formula vs the graph of a mathematical function, the former is linguistic, the latter is visual-spatual.

And learning multiple spoken languages is a great way to break out of particularly rigid reasoning patterns, and as important, countering biases that are influenced by your native language.
by hehetrthrthrjn | 2025-08-15 15:01:16+00:00
I don't even know what the law says in my own country, instead I use a country where is it not illegal to download (but is to upload) and has excellent global connectivity and got a VPS there. I installed Transmission, disabled uploads, and a few other tools and now I just click the magnet link on a torrent site and the media shows up in my download folder after a few minutes or sometimes hours. For anything a bit popular I get 300Mbps downloads on average.

The country in question is left as an exercise for the reader.
by thefaux | 2025-08-15 15:01:34+00:00
When I was a kid in the 90s, I knew multiple kids who were severely injured by cars. For whatever reason, this did not seem to have any impact on my mother's parenting and no new limits were placed on my freedom as a result. For the record though, one of the kids I knew who was hit was leaving the property of their school with plenty of adult supervision around at the time of the collision (and received a large settlement from the school).
by vidarh | 2025-08-15 15:02:37+00:00
There are quite a lot of approaches you can take to reduce the cost of this, e.g. sharding by search term, so the number of shards hit for any specific search term is a subset of the total set.

You can also certainly broadly cache the "top" of the hit lists for very common searches, so you don't need to fan out unless you're doing less common searches or going beyond the first "page" of results.
by raphman | 2025-08-15 15:02:57+00:00
Actually, the German copyright law explicitly allows people with limited vision or with limited reading ability (not defined precisely in the law) to use assistive technology in order to transfer a work into a more accessible version¹.

So, ad-blocker companies might argue that they are just providing assistive technology to people with diagnosed ADHD. Copyright holders would then need to go after the users of such software. (IANAL)

¹) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__45b.html
by martin-t | 2025-08-15 15:03:33+00:00
"Democracy" boils down to choosing one point ("candidate") in a highly dimensional space to express your entire preference (actually a high dimensional vector). This is _obviously_ stupid.

You can see the effects in how people love simplifying things into the left/right spectrum, sometimes adding a second axis for conservative/liberal. Because if you do PCA, those are probably the most important factors for many people.

But they fail to generalize this realization to openly discuss the other "less critical" dimensions.

It's a failure of the education system and it perpetuates learned helplessness.
by tovej | 2025-08-15 15:03:43+00:00
You can reconcile these points by considering what specific context is necessary. The author specifies "outside" context, and I would agree. The human context that's necessary for useful summaries is a model of semantic or "actual" relationships between concepts, while the LLM context is a model of a single kind of fuzzy relationship between concepts.

In other words the LLM does not contain the knowledge of what the words represent.
by assimpleaspossi | 2025-08-15 15:03:47+00:00
I was at a gathering of distant relatives I had never met before. I struck up a conversation with the 15-year old daughter of a cousin whose aunt came running on up with a stern look on her face that made me feel like she thought I was a child molester.

That this was a family gathering I was invited to for honoring my close relative who passed away just made me very sad.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-15 15:03:48+00:00
I don't think that the concept of "real reasoning" vs simulated or fake reasoning makes any sense... LLM reasoning can be regarded as a subset of human reasoning, and a more useful comparison would be not real vs fake but rather what is missing from LLM reasoning that would need to be added (likely in a completely new architecture - not an LLM/transformer) to make it more human-like and capable.

Human reasoning, and cortical function in general, would also appear to be prediction based, but there are many differences to LLMs, starting with the fact that we learn continuously and incrementally from our own experience and prediction failures and successes. Human reasoning is basically chained what-if prediction, based on predictive outcomes of individual steps that we have learnt, either in terms of general knowledge or domain-specific problem solving steps that we have learnt.

Perhaps there is not so much difference between what a human does and an LLM does in, say, tackling a math problem when the RL-trained reasoning-LLM chains together a sequence of reasoning steps that worked before...

Where the difference come in, is in how the LLM learned those steps in the first place, and what happens when its reasoning fails. In humans these are essentially the same thing - we learn by predicting and giving it a go, and learn from prediction failure (sensory/etc feedback) to update our context-specific predictions for next time. If we reach a reasoning/predictive impasse - we've tried everything that comes to mind and everything fails, then our innate traits of curiosity and boredom (maybe more?) come to play and we will explore the problem and learn and try again. Curiosity and exploration can of course lead to gain of knowledge from things like imitation and active pursuit (or receipt) of knowledge from sources other then personal experimentation.

The LLM of course has no ability to learn (outside of in-context learning - a poor substitute), so is essentially limited in capability to what it has been pre-trained on, and pre-training is never going to be the solution to a world full of infinite ever-changing variety.

So, rather than say that an LLM isn't doing "real" reasoning, it seems more productive to acknowledge that prediction is the basis of reasoning, but that the LLM (or rather a future cognitive architecture - not a pass-thru stack of transformer layers!) needs many additional capabilities such as continual/incremental learning, innate traits such as curiosity to expose itself to learning situations, and other necessary cognitive apparatus such as working memory, cognitive iteration/looping (cf thalamo-cortical loop), etc.
by vel0city | 2025-08-15 15:03:50+00:00
McDonald's regular hamburgers don't cost anywhere near $4 for most people. A hamburger at the McDonald's down the street from me costs $1.59. A cheeseburger costs $1.79. A double cheeseburger costs $2.79. A Quarter Pounder w/Cheese meal today is ~$8 today, in the 90s it was ~$3.

I remember you could get two cheeseburgers for a dollar in the late 90s, so ~$0.50. The inflation rate for something to go from $0.50 to $1.79 that's a 4.5% inflation rate, still quite a way off from people's arguments of 10%. And for the QPC meal comparison, that's ~3.3%. Higher than 2% for sure, but its also a single restaurant comparison on a single item here where its highest cost component (beef patty) has experienced overall higher rates of inflation compared to most other things. A restaurant that many people feel has gone up in price more than expectations of the rest of prices.

Link for the $3 90's price for a QPC: https://wealthgang.com/mcdonalds-prices-throughout-the-years...
by odo1242 | 2025-08-15 15:03:57+00:00
They are. Debtors prison is illegal with one exception - if you already went to prison due to a crime and then completed your sentence, many states will charge you for the full cost of your prison stay (often upwards of thousands of dollars). And since a lot of sentences involve some amount of parole after the prison sentence, you’ll be sent back to prison under a parole violation if you fail to pay back the fees by the due date.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-15 15:04:14+00:00
> This is why capitalists dislike unions so much, beca[us]e they know this.

No, the reason why capitalists hate unions so much is that it is another layer of incredibly annoying bureaucrats that you have to get along with.

What you describe might rather be the reason why people who have dark triad traits don't like unions; these people often are not "convinced capitalists", but rather people who use capitalism (or whatever the current system is) to their advantage.
by bunderbunder | 2025-08-15 15:04:28+00:00
Presence in the courtroom is kind of a red herring. It's uncommon for cases to get that far.

The real costs come from the US legal system being originally designed by and for agrarian villages of Saxons arguing with each other about who stole whose sheep, with the process handled in a more-or-less ad-hoc manner by village leaders for whom it's mostly a side responsibility, and the whole mess serving double duty as a source of community entertainment not unlike modern reality television.

A lot has changed over the past 1,000 years, but at it's core it's still a system that puts an incredible amount of focus on people arguing about Every. Single. Damned. Thing. No. Matter. How. Trivial. The really expensive parts of a lawsuit are the parts that create the most opportunity for this kind of bickering. Which is typically the parts that don't happen inside a courtroom. For example there's the discovery phase, which all by itself is so unusually complicated and expensive that it's spawned an entire multibillion dollar industry that basically only exists in English-speaking countries. And all the ancillary litigation over nitpicky procedural matters. And maybe other things, but those are the two that are the worst for being inherently expensive, easy to weaponize, and peculiarly Anglo-Saxon.
by uoaei | 2025-08-15 15:04:52+00:00
I encounter similar sentiments constantly across the internet. One thing we as humans have a lot of trouble with is understanding the scope of experience that isn't commented on in public forums. When we consider comments on the internet to be a representative sample of reality, we get a very warped view of what might happen to us when we step out the door. This paranoia and anxiety is evident in the proliferation of surveillance technologies, etc., and is completely contrary to the obvious decline in crime rates pretty much everywhere.
by smokel | 2025-08-15 15:05:23+00:00
> what does anything matter at all if the sun is going to explode

It would not surprise me if this is the exact reasoning that underpins decisions made by leaders of these big companies.

It's terribly hard to convince some people that this is not a sound argument.

In fact, I think it's mostly an evolutionary trait that most of us have, but looking at other species, I don't think it's universal to help others.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-15 15:05:35+00:00
If you pirate you used someone’s work without their permission and you caused them to foot the bill for the creation of your product. That is fundamentally immoral. It is logistically impossible to support any industry with your logic here.

That is why axiomatically your justifications are wrong. It’s just not sustainable. On the other hand the owner of a certain IP can make his product as inaccessible as possible and EVEN then if he gets money and the infrastructure is sustainable then the system works and that’s what points to a system that is not morally ambiguous.

I’m capable of admitting my own faults and seeing my own immoral tendencies. Unlike you. I think in your eyes you must be morally perfect because even piracy isn’t wrong to you.

Why the fuck are you so afraid of being accused of pirating? Why do you have to justify to yourself by buying games and then pirating occasionally? I pirate every fucking IP I own. I don’t give a shit. Call me what you want but I’m also not blind to what I do.

People like You pay for all my games and movies. Thank you. If you feel piracy is moral then what I do is moral to you. Thanks for paying for my shit. I don’t think you’re making a smart move for doing that but to each their own… if you think it’s moral it’s not my problem.

Does that make your blood boil? That geniuses like you pay for me to enjoy all my entertainment for free because it’s moral? Then maybe pirates like me should be arrested. Or maybe pirating should only be legal for people who do it if it’s convenient and illegal for me.

Piracy is legal when convenient! Well it’s convenient for me to live a life where you pay for my shit. So why arrest me? We need to define convenient. Or maybe it’s just wrong all together? How about that? What do you think makes the most sense? Obviously all rhetorical questions.
by tonfa | 2025-08-15 15:05:55+00:00
I think one key point why things are this way for CH, is that they decided to move to Takt scheduling (clock face scheduling) in the 70s. Integrated country-wide scheduling, makes doing those long term planning much easier.

(e.g. you know there's no point making some connection faster, because the lines still have to sync at 15m/30m/1h points. So you can focus on the places where you can go from a trip taking 40m to one taking 30m, because those are the one that will have a massive impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock-face_scheduling

(iirc that video covered it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y9hGofgy9c )
by tines | 2025-08-15 15:06:15+00:00
> Are we simply getting old and bitter?

No, we are getting wiser. It's not bitterness to look at a technology with a critical eye and see the bad effects as well as the good. It's not foolish to judge that the negative effects outweigh the positive. It's a mark of maturity. "But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil."
by xoa | 2025-08-15 15:06:21+00:00
>He is not, nor am I, but I don’t see a reason you and I shouldn’t get the same legal protections as other groups

But what ARE those legal protections? That's the really complicated bit isn't it? ADA does not simply mandate anything anyone could imagine at any price, and there still isn't a huge amount of caselaw when it comes to the web. FWIW in this specific case I think there is some basis, but it doesn't seem clearly established either. The natural starting point is the government ADA site's own guidance [0], and that in turn cites the W3's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as helpful. In turn, that has section 2.3 covering "Seizures and Physical Reactions". But that's specifically about physical effects, does mere distraction count, and at what threshold? Like, it says no more than 3 flashes per second, but if a site ensures it's just blinking once per second, you might still find that distracting but it's not clear there's any case under ADA unless you can point to some other precedent (or establish one yourself). Would offering a pay option that eliminates all ads be a reasonable accommodation or not? Did they make a good enough effort if they pick a major ad network that promises compliance? I don't know, but it doesn't seem cut and dry.

And all of that is about the website owner's responsibilities, not 3rd parties. Like, it doesn't seem clear to me there is any legal requirement for a given web browser to create/maintain APIs for ad blocking under ADA, and any such case would run into complex speech and other considerations particularly in the case of an open source browser (the same challenges also protect from the US government ever trying to ban them).

I think you have a decent moral/political argument which is important, but I guess just realize the legal aspects are complex. And that's before touching on the practical ones.

----

0: https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/

1: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#seizures-and-physical-reaction...
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-08-15 15:07:11+00:00
I have not found the records online (a lawyer can probably find it) but I was involved with some of the people in 1997/1998. There were multiple lawsuits going for years as Apple held 5% ownership.

The original team ended up founding Intrinsity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity) and being involed with the Samsung A8 and Apple A4 designs. Apple ended up buying the company and many of those people are the ones designing their current chips. (https://touchreviews.net/apple-intrinsity-implications/)
by CyLith | 2025-08-15 15:07:26+00:00
> Everyone ... outside of China is forgetting and losing capabilities.

To me this is the fundamental problem with the notion of intellectual property and its protection: so much of it is trade secret and undocumented (let's be real, we disclose as little in patents as we can get away with). Companies come and go, and in the process, institutional knowledge of how to do things is lost because there is no incentive to make it public for others to replicate. This also means that once lost, it must be rediscovered later.
by wasabi991011 | 2025-08-15 15:07:54+00:00
>are you proposing to know the physics of why entanglement can cause information to seemingly travel instantaneously over a distance when this seems to contradict what we know about the speed of light?

I guess, in the sense that we know _it doesn't_. First of all, I'm pretty sure you are confusing superposition with entanglement. Second of all, entanglement doesn't transmit any information, it is purely a type of correlation. This is usually shown in most introductory quantum information or quantum computing courses. You can also find explanations on the physics stackexchange.

Superposition is just another word for the linearity of quantum systems.

Anyway, it's a hard question to figure out the limits between math, physics, and philosophy. A lot of physicists believe physics is about making useful mathematical models of reality, and trying to find better ones. Newton might disagree, but he's also been dead hundreds of years.

Anyway, please don't fall for the Dunning-Kruger effect. You clearly are only slightly familiar with quantum physics and have some serious misconceptions, but you sound very sure of yourself.
by MegaDeKay | 2025-08-15 15:08:08+00:00
I bought my Voron Trident as a kit (from a Chinese company) and it is wonderful. As you say, there is an almost complete dependence on components made in China, but at least I can swap out / fix / upgrade parts as much as I like. I've also been able to make use of the schematics on the controller boards to troubleshoot issues myself and other people were having.

Very happy I went this route vs Bambu. This printer is "mine" and I don't need to worry about some company suddenly taking features and capabilities out from under my feet as Bambu has done. For anyone that feels strongly about this kind of thing, dive in and build a Voron.
by dizlexic | 2025-08-15 15:08:17+00:00
I'm sorry but this false equivelency is insane.

Online is not in person.

The standards for in-person are higher for a very solid reason. Direct, physical access has an infinitely higher potential for abuse.

Echoing another comment, ROBLOX should do their best, but the idea that it should be an equivalent standard is impractical and bizarre.
by tombert | 2025-08-15 15:09:08+00:00
Which “conservative media” are you referring to? I don’t watch Fox News, I don’t watch Newsmax, I don’t listen to Alex Jones, I don’t watch CNN, I don’t watch MSNBC, I don’t listen to any political commentators.

The fact that the ETF is outperforming the regular market demonstrates that there’s some shiftiness going on. I am pretty sure that was the point.

I didn’t say it was comparable to the Trump admins misconduct, read my comment again. I said that democrats aren’t immune from shittiness.

Pretending to not understand what I was saying is extremely irritating.

ETA:

I reread my comment and I realize that I said “not categorically better”, which can easily be interpreted as an equivalence.

That wasn’t what I was trying to say. I was just trying to say like we shouldn’t act like there isn’t some level on shittiness on the democratic side.
by alexjplant | 2025-08-15 15:09:14+00:00
> Because privatized prisons are a thing in the US, they need product... You'll be charged $4/day - $80/day while you're there.

"I hereby inform you under powers entrusted to me under Section 47, Paragraph 7 of Council Order Number 438476, that Mr. Buttle, Archibald, residing at 412 North Tower, Shangri La Towers, has been invited to assist the Ministry of Information with certain enquiries, the nature of which may be ascertained on completion of application form BZ/ST/486/C fourteen days within this date, and that he is liable to certain obligations as specified in Council Order 173497, including financial restitutions which may or may not be incurred if Information Retrieval procedures beyond those incorporated in Article 7 subsections 8, 10 & 32 are required to elicit information leading to permanent arrest notification of which will he served with the time period of 5 working days as stipulated by law. In that instance the detainee will be debited without further notice through central banking procedures without prejudice until and unless at such a time when re-imbursement procedures may be instituted by you or third parties on completion of a re-imbursement form RB/CZ/907/X..."
by btown | 2025-08-15 15:09:16+00:00
It's an interesting philosophical question.

Imagine an oracle that could judge/decide, with human levels of intelligence, how relevant a given memory or piece of information is to any given situation, and that could verbosely describe which way it's relevant (spatially, conditionally, etc.).

Would such an oracle, sufficiently parallelized, be sufficient for AGI? If it could, then we could genuinely describe its output as "context," and phrase our problem as "there is still a gap in needed context, despite how much context there already is."

And an LLM that simply "shortens" that context could reach a level of AGI, because the context preparation is doing the heavy lifting.

The point I think the article is trying to make is that LLMs cannot add any information beyond the context they are given - they can only "shorten" that context.

If the lived experience necessary for human-level judgment could be encoded into that context, though... that would be an entirely different ball game.
by john01dav | 2025-08-15 15:09:25+00:00
The driver of cost isn't paper or physical presence -- I'd be willing to print a few pages and show up downtown in my city where the court is much more if not for the real costs. It often costs hundreds of dollars to file in court (even for small claims in some states), which is a problem because misconduct under a few hundrs dollars is common. It is also almost always useful and often requied (such as when an LLC is a party) to hire lawyers. The law is so complex, and the court procedures too, that we need highly trained professionals to effectively represent people.

The model of paying these professionals from the salary of the average person who themself probably makes way less or from a cash strapped startup doesn't add up. Therefore, to fix the issue we either need to pay lawyers less, pay them from some other source (I'd like to see that in a court case either party can spend any amount on representation, but they must pay into a common pot that's split in half for the opposing party to hire their own representation of a similiar quality), or make them less needed (i.e., simplify and document law and court procedures then legalize pro se representation in all cases including LLCs such that anyone can effectively argue in court).