MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dylan604 | 2025-08-05 23:50:24+00:00
The Constitution was clearly written for rich land owning white men first of thought, and everything else being left out or only in fractions. They added some checks and balances as a hand wavy idea of trying to stay away from autocracy, but they kind of made them toothless. I'd guess they just didn't have the imagination that people would willingly allow someone to go back towards autocracy since they were fighting so hard to leave it.
by Fomite | 2025-08-05 23:50:36+00:00
I mean, there are definitely people who coast, because there are people everywhere who coast.

But the vast majority of tenured professors I know don't do so, for one of the following reasons:

- I can't get fired, but I also don't need to get paid. My position has a non-trivial soft money component to it, and it's actually low for my field, which ranges from 50% to 100% soft money depending on the institution. A double-digit pay cut is motivation for most people.

- There are still promotions to be had, and those promotions are really the only way to get a raise beyond cost of living increases. At my institution there are two steps beyond Associate Professor with Tenure, and both of them are not obtained by phoning it in.

- Ego. It's hard to understate this one. Most academics are smart, determined people. There are other easier, more lucrative jobs. But there's a sense of purpose and ego that channeled them to the career they're in. Said ego is usually not fed by being in the doldrums. That's not how you get awards and invited to talks, and recruited elsewhere, etc.

Sure, the stick of "You could get fired" isn't there, but there are also ways to make a tenured professor whose coasting's life less pleasant. But even if not, I don't think it's nearly as common as the popular imagination (or this thread) think it is. Most people I know only really take their foot of the gas in the last few years of their careers, often well past retirement age.
by int_19h | 2025-08-05 23:50:40+00:00
Yes, it is trained in. And no, it's not a separate thin layer. It's just part of the model's RL training, which affects all layers.

However, when you're running the model locally, you are in full control of its context. Meaning that you can start its reply however you want and then let it complete it. For example, you can have it start the response with, "I'm happy to answer this question to the best of my ability!"

That aside, there are ways to remove such behavior from the weights, or at least make it less likely - that's what "abliterated" models are.
by ggm | 2025-08-05 23:50:49+00:00
Another problem related to human occupation of the land is the soundscape. Ornithologists say bird song is becoming LESS complex, and more strident, to compete with the rising level of background noise in the urban landscape.

Some loss of birdlife is due to competition between species. Noisy Miners form "mobs" and push fairy wrens, silver-eyes and other small birds out (there is also of course habitat loss of dense undergrowth) -And they mob bigger birds like the Currawong and Butcherbird and Australian Magpie. This is a native, harrassing other natives. There's also the Indian Mynah doing much the same thing but less aggressively.

Sparrows have disappeared from the urban landscape (at least as I see it in Brisbane) -Once ubiquitous, now significantly less common. This may be habitat loss, same as pigeons: Their niche for nesting and socialising is pretty specific.

Bin chickens are doing fine: They nest in the ubiquitous palm tree tops. They're happy as, flipping burgers and shake cups. Good times.

For an interesting take on urban bird/human interactions, look for stuff by Darryl Jones, a professor of ecology at Griffith Uni. And Dr Anne Jones on the ABC has done several great TV documentaries on the urban birdscape of Australia. Fairy penguins living in the breakwaters of the Melbourne bay close to the city, Migrants from Asia and the far north on the beaches of Moreton bay where I live in Queensland.
by kashunstva | 2025-08-05 23:51:05+00:00
> … because apple would refuse to cooperate…

Apple’s putative refusal to cooperate is surely not the only barrier here. I doubt U.S. consumers would pay a premium for a U.S. iPhone whether Apple thought it wise or not. But when the U.S. president’s branded Made in America phone comes out later this year I guess we’ll see. I’m sure the release is just around the corner.
by Topfi | 2025-08-05 23:51:59+00:00
I am personally still doubtful that this is a new frontier model from OpenAI. My suspicion remains that this is Deepseek V4, though this is purely based on a mix of pure feelings, the speed (slightly higher than V3 was at launch, far higher than it is from Deepseek directly now; could potentially line up with them using locally sourced accelerators over Nvidia now), the timeline, size and tokenizer. Would be very impressive if it was. Horizon Beta does not perform markedly better over GPT-4.1, some lauded aspects such as the purported frontend proficiency do not translate amazingly well to longer term development [0], so if Horizon Beta is GPT-5 that would be disappointing to me personally, especially considering Horizon Beta does very poorly on tool call and MCP evals in my scenarios, making it less suitable for Agentic coding tasks. In that area, it is even worse than Gemini 2.5 Pro which I have reliably seen end up in continuous loops when failing test cases.

[0] Basically, yes, one shot Horizon Beta outputs "more" UI (very expansive mockups), but the second one uses it to improve interface sections in an existing code base, Horizon Beta is roughly equivalent to Sonnet, GPT-4.1, K2 and 2.5 Pro. Whether a dev wants their initial prompt to create an extensive interface is honestly more a question of preference over model training or performance. Some will like it, some will find it restrictive. In either case, similarly extensive one shot UI code can be achieved with e.g. prompting GPT-4.1 if one wants that.
by lmpdev | 2025-08-05 23:52:31+00:00
I disagree on the rock album being overly expensive to record

Any decent studio can make a U87 on vocals, DI bass, Fender amp and several SM57s on drums sound as good as almost any album from 1970-2010

Hell I’ve seen a five part band get away with three mics total including drums and it was a smash hit

Rock “died” because culture moved on, not because of it being inherently expensive to record (which it’s not)
by int_19h | 2025-08-05 23:53:01+00:00
The catch is that performance is not actually comparable to o4-mini, never mind o3.

When it comes to LLMs, benchmarks are bullshit. If they sound too good to be true, it's because they are. The only thing benchmarks are useful for is preliminary screening - if the model does especially badly in them it's probably not good in general. But if it does good in them, that doesn't really tell you anything.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-08-05 23:54:06+00:00
Nobody gets promoted for fixing bugs. That is the sad state of big tech.

My theory is this misalignment of incentives is probably at the heart of most of our quality rot in software. Product managers are incentivized to create new features that boost the daily active users, while generally blind to the death by a thousand cuts caused by all the quality issues.
by tripletao | 2025-08-05 23:54:21+00:00
> Do note that peak spending on rail roads eventually amounted to ~20 percent of the US GDP in the 19th century.

Has anyone found the source for that 20%? Here's a paper I found:

> Between 1848 and 1854, railroad investment, in these and in preceding years, contributed to 4.31% of GDP. Overall, the 1850s are the period in which railroad investment had the most substantial contribution to economic conditions, 2.93% of GDP, relative to 2.51% during the 1840s and 2.49% during the 1830s, driven by the much larger investment volumes during the period.

https://economics.wm.edu/wp/cwm_wp153.pdf

The first sentence isn't clear to me. Is 4.31 > 2.93 because the average was higher from 1848-1854 than from 1850-1859, or because the "preceding years" part means they lumped earlier investment into the former range so it's not actually an average? Regardless, we're nowhere near 20%.

I'm wondering if the claim was actually something like "total investment over x years was 20% of GDP for one year". For example, a paper about the UK says:

> At that time, £170 million was close to 20% of GDP, and most of it was spent in about four years.

https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/mania18.pdf

That would be more believable, but the comparison with AI spending in a single year would not be meaningful.
by pfooti | 2025-08-05 23:54:24+00:00
I make pizza at home in an outdoor pizza oven (gozney dome). My recipe cooks at about 850F. All forms (skim or otherwise) of cow mozzarella scorch fiercely at that temperature before the crust is done. Buffalo mozzarella does not. Some of my local markets carry Buf brand buffalo mozz, which is not from italy but is from the same animal (I think).

The buf mozz is the thing that takes my homemade pizza from "meh" to "actually, this is pretty good". I'm working on getting it to "wow, this is great" but that will require further refinement of my crust technique, I think.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-08-05 23:54:29+00:00
My friends working in fabrication - experienced, competent engineers with years of work history in Intel and Micron factories - got laughably insultingly low offers from TSMC. Like, 50k, no PTO, weak or no benefits. They literally laughed the offers away and got cushy software jobs with minimal retraining.

This was a few years back, maybe TSMC realized you can't pay Taiwan rates in the US.
by Fomite | 2025-08-05 23:55:29+00:00
I have a "We need X to explore domain Y" grant, and it's lovely. It's also pretty rare, but at the moment, most of my funding is from those types of mechanisms. That is, admittedly, somewhat unusual.

I will say that "the people evaluating the proposal didnt know shit about the field." isn't true in the U.S. For grants from the NIH, NSF, or CDC, they're almost all peer-reviewed. While some hot topics get a bit of needless shine to them, I've also seen grants ripped apart for "They just tacked LLMs onto this for no reason", etc.

I do definitely get not wanting that. There are people I know and respect immensely as scientists who went "I don't want to be a PI" and that's legit.

I will say, and this is not about your post, that Hacker News both often laments the paucity of staff scientist positions, and also likes to attack the PI who does nothing but write grants, but you can't actually have it both ways. Almost all of my grant writing is driven by keeping my people employed.
by TheTon | 2025-08-05 23:55:57+00:00
No regrets here, but I did use Google Code a fair bit prior to GitHub and I had an experience that made me think maybe Google regretted that product in some ways.

Around 2005-6 I wrote a Mac OS X client for Xbox Live. The idea was I wanted notifications on my computer when my friends came online and started to play certain games, so I could turn on my Xbox and join them. This is a feature of the Xbox mobile app today of course, but back then all you could do was either be on the Xbox or sit around refreshing a web page, so the app was useful. I published the source and the binaries on Google Code, partly because I just wanted to share the app for free, and partly because I wanted to be transparent that I was handling the Xbox login credentials safely.

One day the app blew up and got a lot of coverage in tech news and link aggregators (like Digg, haha) and I suddenly had a ton of users. Eventually I figured out why. It wasn't that my app was so great exactly, but rather the idea that Google was writing a Mac client for Xbox made a great tech news story. However, that part of the story wasn't true, the project had nothing to do with Google, I was just hosting it on Google Code because it was at the time the most convenient place for a small open source project.

The episode made me wonder how often that happened. How many other projects on Google Code became part of a news cycle because people misinterpreted them as being written or endorsed by Google? Was that part of why Google Code was shut down?
by c4ptnjack | 2025-08-05 23:56:20+00:00
The zeitgeist has pushed the idea carbs/grains and sugar are terrible over the last 40 years on and off, so that seems to say more about the medical industrial complex, than anything. That's fair, but if that message has been pushed so consistently, why didn't we see a real decrease in the consumption of those things and the associated weight loss?
by thenerdhead | 2025-08-05 23:56:44+00:00
> There has been nothing happening on the common cold virus with MRNA vaccines. In retrospect, it seems like CEOs pumping the stock price with wild promises.

So not true. There are numerous candidates for pan-flu and pan-coronavirus vaccines. mRNA and other vehicles.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/clinical-trial...
by dfxm12 | 2025-08-05 23:56:49+00:00
Why do you think this was the first step? That these folks have not been engaged with: information, compassion, alternative news sources, pleas to think twice about what they read on Facebook? Why do you think these folks haven't listened to Trump himself over the past 10+ years, or lived through previous elections cycles, including Trump's previous term? There's no way you can claim the wool was pulled over people's eyes this time around.

Also, acting self righteous while demanding decorum is rich considering how this admin promised to and followed through on completely dehumanizing huge swathes of people as its base cheers on. Please, display one ounce of good faith.
by BizarroLand | 2025-08-05 23:56:52+00:00
I mean, even the presence of the ability to overdub audio on a record let people cast aspersions on the "genuineness" of artists like KISS:

"“There is a lot of controversy about KISS’ ‘Alive!’ Did they play their own record or did they overdub? News Flash! You’re allowed to overdub! You’re allowed to do that. It’s not a crime. If you’re making an album and you want to overdub one part, that’s completely allowed, and everybody does it. "

https://rockcelebrities.net/sebastian-bach-addresses-the-ove...

Even modern musicians call studio composing "cheating"

"In a way it's kind of like cheating cause you can play stuff over and over again, and be like, no, that's bad, cut this, move it over, and then kind of fit the lyrics to it."

https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/6759-yeasayer/

Even Analog vs Digital records:

"Neil Young, who has been very expressive about analog vs digital and which digital medium he prefers. This undated quote is about cds:

“The mind has been tricked, but the heart is sad.”"

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/quotes-from-musicians...

Like, you don't have to like it. That's fine.

But if there is art there, you should not dismiss it because of the tools used to make it.

Right now I imagine there is so close to no art from AI that it can be said that there is none at all.

I also imagine that will change in the next 20 years.
by hylaride | 2025-08-05 23:56:56+00:00
The ways the flu and HIV work are radically different. Most of the time your body can fight off the flu/colds, etc and once we do we're mostly immune. HIV specifically infects and then spreads by invading the body's white blood cells. You die because eventually it gets at all of them and you have no natural defences (full blown AIDS). Our body can't fight it off with our natural defences, no matter how well trained.

We've actually been able to "kill" the virus in our bodies with drugs for awhile. The "AIDS cocktails" first developed in the 1990s did work (but originally required constant pill taking, even all night and had bad side effects) eventually were iterated (via new drugs and new timed-release pills) into essentially a single, daily pill that will now keep your viral load to zero - meaning you can have unprotected sex and not spread the virus. In theory, you could give these pills to sex workers to take every day and its significantly reduce the risk of the virus establishing itself.

The issue with HIV is that it can settle and lay dormant in various places the drugs won't get to (herpes and chickenpox/shingles do a similar thing). So we can't technically cure it, outside of very extreme procedures - IIRC a bone marrow transplant has cured somebody, but that is a dangerous procedure that has a high enough mortality rate that we only do it for otherwise deadly cancers.
by kanodiaashu | 2025-08-05 23:57:40+00:00
Oh you can actually do that in this! the nodes of the map if you click them have references to the actual 10Ks which are readable as html in the space. Not only can you read the original text, but the html has been 'chapterized'; you can also read summaries of chapters. Further, you can query anything in chat - where if you select the document and ask, it retrieves the right passages to answer your questions too.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-08-05 23:57:44+00:00
Well then luckily that shows you hopefully how bad studies are. Because I assume that you agree that eating 100 calories of Pop-Tarts per hour for 18 hours for 30 days, would give you a different result than eating 3 days worth of Pop-Tarts in a few hours once every 3 days for a month.

To not understand that would mean that while believing some studies, you completely ignore all the studies that have been done on insulin and weight gain.
by edanm | 2025-08-05 23:57:51+00:00
I agree. I'm a big fan/proponent of AI assisted development (though nowhere near your amount of experience with it). And I think that 2x-10x speed up can be true, depending on what you mean exactly and what your task is exactly.

This article thinks that most people who say 10x productivity are claiming 10x speedup on end-to-end delivering features. If that's indeed what someone is saying, they're most of the time quite simply wrong (or lying).

But I think some people (like me) aren't claiming that. Of course the end to end product process includes a lot more work than just the pure coding aspect, and indeed none of those other parts are getting a 10x speedup right now.

That said, there are a few cases where this 10x end-to-end is possible. E.g. when working alone, especially on new things but not only - you're skipping a lot of this overhead. That's why smaller teams, even solo teams, are suddenly super interesting - because they are getting a bigger speedup comparatively speaking, and possibly enough of one to be able to rival larger teams.
by janalsncm | 2025-08-05 23:58:24+00:00
The point of Fountain was to say that whether something is art should depend on the content and its absurd that a urinal could be considered art.

But the art isn’t in the content, it was in the statement it was making about the absurdity surrounding the fact you could pay to put anything in an art exhibition. Swap out the white urinal for a blue one, it’s the same point.
by sitkack | 2025-08-05 23:58:30+00:00
Look for discussion with British journalist Andrew Marr during a BBC interview in 1996.

The lead in to the quote starts at https://youtu.be/GjENnyQupow?t=662

"I don't say you're self-censoring - I'm sure you believe everything you're saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting." -- Noam Chomksy to Andrew Marr
by crazygringo | 2025-08-05 23:58:36+00:00
Ok, but corporations also lie to and defraud their employees all the time. In ways large and small.

Nobody is entirely honest to everyone about everything in their workplace. You really think everyone is actually sick on every single sick day, or that every single doctor's appointment on their calendar is a real doctor's appointment? People never make excuses to their manager that are lies? Managers never lie to their employees about a justification or a deadline or a promise or a policy?

Workplace dishonesty is everywhere. Because workplaces are made of human beings. It's just something you learn to manage in a realistic way. People are mostly honest, but they're never entirely honest.
by saurik | 2025-08-05 23:58:36+00:00
I am getting huge productivity gains from using models, and I mostly use them as "oracles" (though I am extremely careful with respect to how I have to handle hallucination, of course): I'd even say their true power--just like a human--comes from having an ungodly amount of knowledge, not merely intelligence. If I just wanted something intelligent, I already had humans!... but merely intelligent humans, even when given months of time to screw around doing Google searches, fail to make the insights that someone--whether they are a human or a model--that actually knows stuff can throw around like it is nothing. I am actually able to use ChatGPT 4.5 as not just an employee, not even just as a coworker, but at times as a mentor or senior advisor: I can tell it what I am trying to do, and it helps me by applying advanced mathematical insights or suggesting things I could use. Using an LLM as a glorified Google-it-for-me monkey seems like such a waste of potential.
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | 2025-08-05 23:59:00+00:00
Souter warned of the lack of civic education as well. We are just ignorant all around these days!

“An ignorant people can never remain a free people. Democracy cannot survive too much ignorance.”

“I don’t believe there is any problem of American politics in American public life which is more significant today than the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government.”
by rpdillon | 2025-08-06 00:02:03+00:00
I don't have any special industry experience. I went on a tear a few weeks ago and watched a bunch of Rick Beato's videos on YouTube. I didn't know the guy before running across his work, but he has 5 million subscribers and he sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about. He's been a music producer for 30 years.

Anyway, he was the one that made the point that we don't sign rock bands anymore in the sense that they're not moving the industry. All you gotta do is look at the top songs that folks are listening to on Spotify or the radio and you'll immediately see what I'm talking about.

He was also the one that walked through the process of setting up mics for a drum kit and pointed out that it's just very expensive to get the studio time and the expertise to do all that correctly. He actually walks you through a studio where he's set up mics for a drum kit and explains why it's so difficult to do well. He then contrasts that with simply using samples that are professionally provided and that the cost difference is just immense.

Anyway, I don't need to die on this hill. My point was the music industry is going downhill regardless and AI is just one of many tools paving the way.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-06 00:02:44+00:00
It’s not “a different point of view” to think that tariffs get paid by the other country. It’s not “a different point of view” to loathe Obamacare and like the ACA. It’s just ignorance. When the information is easily available, it’s willful ignorance. When they won’t obtain the information and they still hold strong opinions and vote accordingly, it’s at best stupidity.
by smashed | 2025-08-06 00:02:45+00:00
Why so harsh?

I'm not advocating in doing it for the exposure as a primary reason. And absolutely not to be paid in exposure. 100% agree with the comic there.

I should not have used that word. It is clearly charged with negativity.

Of course I wish everyone would be compensated for their work. I feel that for some types of project, publishing as open source is a great way for people to find and use it. This can give new opportunities.

Exactly which kind of project and under which conditions is up to debate.

I have worked on a few projects that I regret not being able to open source. Mainly not my choice, stakeholders wanted traditional go to market strategies and failed/ran out of money trying to make sales. I can't help but thinking what other opportunities could have arisen have we chose another strategy.