MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kgwgk | 2025-08-02 22:28:46+00:00
https://philarchive.org/archive/ELLWDC

Why Delayed Choice Experiments do NOT imply Retrocausality

David Ellerman

University of California/Riverside

October 16, 2014

There is a fallacy that is often involved in the interpretation of quantum experiments involving a certain type of separation such as the: double-slit experiments, which-way interferometer experiments, polarization analyzer experiments, Stern-Gerlach experiments, and quantum eraser experiments. The fallacy leads not only to flawed textbook accounts of these experiments but to flawed inferences about retrocausality in the context of delayed choice versions of separation experiments.
by nine_k | 2025-08-02 22:29:17+00:00
This is a good illustration of what's wrong with American not politics, but, I'd say, psyche. Every little (an not so little, like a truck) thing is used to signal allegiance to one of the two irreconcilable warring factions. No union, no values, no common cause, just us vs them, doubtless virtue vs doubtless vice.

It's really, really disheartening to see; not in the parent comment, but generally in life.

I wish an electric truck could alleviate even a small bit of that.
by spiralcoaster | 2025-08-02 22:29:23+00:00
The amount of self-aggrandizing and lack of self awareness tells me this author is doing to do all of this again. This post could be summed up with "I should have had backups. Lesson learned", but instead they deflect to whining about how their local desktop is a mess and they NEED to store everything remotely to stay organized.

They're going to dazzle you with all of their hardened bunker this, and multiple escape route that, not realizing all of their complex machinery is metaphorically running off of a machine with no battery backup. One power outage and POOF!
by akerl_ | 2025-08-02 22:29:53+00:00
The post suggests that even if AWS’s policy had been to hold the data for a year, the same thing would have happened, because they deleted the data early due to operator error.

Similarly, a physical storage company can totally make a mistake and accidentally destroy your stuff if they mix up their bookkeeping, and your remedy is generally either to reach an amicable settlement with them or sue them for your damages.
by dkh | 2025-08-02 22:31:22+00:00
You know, for someone who clearly is a bit triggered (reasonably) by dealing with whatever stereotypes and judgements people make about trucks and truck owners, their post is quite positive and respectful. Your reply to it is not. It seems like your argument is “the data indicates a statistical likelihood that someone judging, assuming, or stereotyping will still be accurate.” The factual inaccuracy of prejudice is not the problem with prejudice, the prejudice is
by pessimizer | 2025-08-02 22:31:22+00:00
I don't get around to using plenty of things for the first time a year after I've purchased them. That policy in my life would be a nightmare of constantly rebuying stuff, or failing to rebuy stuff that is now gone forever.

Almost everything that has become indispensable in my life took years to integrate into my life to any significant degree.

"Need" is a weasel word. You don't need anything.
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-02 22:31:26+00:00
They lowered the speed limit by 5mph (8 km/h) throughout the entire town I live near. As far as I can tell, it just means that people now drive 15mph over the speed limit when they previously were driving 10mph over.

The last fatality on the major road closest to my house involved someone driving over 60mph in a 45 zone.

There was also a near-miss of a pedestrian on the sidewalk when a driver going over 100mph lost control of their vehicle. That driver still has a license.

I don't think lowering the speed limit to 40 (as they recently did) would have prevented that.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-08-02 22:31:29+00:00
How to play:

As fast as possible, find three-way matches by selecting tiles which:

Are all the same color or are unique colors

Are all the same shape or unique shapes

Are all the same style (stroke, filled, masked) or unique styles.

---

You can practice on the home screen, or start a game and go for a high score.
by apparent | 2025-08-02 22:32:44+00:00
Yeah, this is why I said "(most)". But regardless, I think it's pretty uncontroversial that not all companies currently pursuing AI will ultimately succeed. Some will give up because they aren't in the top few contenders, who will be the only ones that survive in the long run.

So maybe the issue is more about staying in the top N, and being willing to pay tons to make sure that happens.
by jasonvorhe | 2025-08-02 22:32:45+00:00
True. I get that you can blame someone for having no backups and yoloing their thing. But OP did so much right if the threat model doesn't involve "corporate behemoth anti-user automation nukes everything including backups".

Everyone saying "you should've had offsite backups" certainly has a point but 99% of the blame lies with AWS here. This entire process must've crossed so many highly paid "experts" and no one considered freezing an account before nuking it for some compliance thing.

It's just baffling.

Hope these cases will lead to more people leaving the clouds and going back to on-prem stuff.
by ProofHouse | 2025-08-02 22:33:32+00:00
I don’t really get the purpose of this broadly, because doesn’t YouTube keep videos online unless the creator took them down which is probably not the case 95% of the time? That said for a niche or a high likelihood of a video being removed, or if you really want to be 100% certain it makes sense, but would I be accurate in that statement or am I missing something?
by enaaem | 2025-08-02 22:33:53+00:00
They did the same thing in Amsterdam. There were a lot complaints at the beginning, but the city became much nicer in the end. Immediate improvement was the reduction of noise. Studies have shown that there was only a 5% increase of travel time. For example, that would be 1 minute on a 20 minute trip. That is because the largest determinant of average speed are the intersections and not the maximum speed limit.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-08-02 22:35:12+00:00
Dutch system and original Romney care (and early versions of Obama care) had a lot in common. Health care providers are private, insurance companies private, gov dictates a basic list of treatments which count as "basic care" and must be covered by insurance, sets max deductible / copay etc, insurance companies are not allowed to refuse any customers, everyone must have insurance, if you can't afford it gov will pay for your insurance.

Afaik that's the gist of it. The ACA has been maimed on various fronts (e.g. the mandate "everyone must have health insurance" is no longer practically in effect), but it originally started out very similar. Far more than to, e.g., the UK's NHS which is fundamentally quite different.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-02 22:36:53+00:00
I have a 5 year old daughter who learnt to read through the phonics system. I was initially fairly skeptical but actually I think it's great. It's just explicitly teaching the pronunciation heuristics that we all learn implicitly.

They have a pretty good way of testing too - they show a list of 40 real words and made up words ("alien words") and the kids have to pronounce them. They only include words that closely follow the normal English pronunciation heuristics and are unambiguous. E.g. "glot" and "bime" would be ok but "sough" and "gow" would not.

> Critics say phonics training only helps children to do well in phonics tests – they learn how to pronounce words presented to them in a list rather than understand what they read – and does nothing to encourage a love of reading.

If this is the best criticism of it then.. that's pretty dumb. The entire point is to learn how to pronounce words. It isn't intended to teach them to understand words - they can already do that. And it isn't meant to instill a love of reading. That's basically innate.

I'm not too surprised it makes no difference to overall reading levels. It's not really that different to the previous method of teaching reading, and a very large component of reading ability is innate... But to say it's been a disaster is absolutely ridiculous.
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-02 22:37:01+00:00
Nope. They used a fake vaccination drive to obtain DNA samples [1], which led to serious distrust in anything "public health" even up until Covid [2].

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

[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/06/1034631928/the-cias-hunt-for-...
by dang | 2025-08-02 22:37:44+00:00
Related. Others?

Mezzano on Librebooted ThinkPads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28880888 - Oct 2021 (46 comments)

Mezzano: Operating system written in Common Lisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26051255 - Feb 2021 (68 comments)

Mezzano (LispOS) Release Demo 5 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23950558 - July 2020 (2 comments)

Mezzano – An operating system written in Common Lisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20210227 - June 2019 (136 comments)

Common Lisp OS Mezzano – Demo 4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17633626 - July 2018 (1 comment)

Mezzano – Common Lisp OS: Demo 3 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14072121 - April 2017 (22 comments)

Mezzano – An operating system written in Common Lisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12358177 - Aug 2016 (63 comments)

Mezzano, an operating system written in Common Lisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8955140 - Jan 2015 (15 comments)

Mezzanine: A Common Lisp-based 64-bit OS for VirtualBox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8943709 - Jan 2015 (63 comments)
by cyberax | 2025-08-02 22:37:45+00:00
> At the same time NYC and Toronto, we are removing protected bike lanes. In North America the acceptable amount of lives per year to sacrifice for a little convenience for drivers is above zero, and apparently rising.

BTW, what do you think about the 5-10 extra lifetimes that people in NYC collectively waste _every_ _day_ in commute compared to smaller cities?

A well-designed car-oriented city will have commutes of around 20 minutes, compared to 35-minute average commutes in NYC. So that's 30 minutes that NYC residents waste every day on average. That's one lifetime for about 1.2 million people commuting every day.
by gblargg | 2025-08-02 22:38:23+00:00
The author doesn't grasp what putting all your eggs into one basket means:

> Before anyone says “you put all your eggs in one basket,” let me be clear: I didn’t. I put them in one provider, with what should have been bulletproof redundancy:

That's one basket. A single point of failure. "But it should have been impossible to fail!" Backups are to handle the "impossible" failure (in reality nothing is 100% reliable).
by exasperaited | 2025-08-02 22:39:05+00:00
This is IMO a comical, absurd, Beeple NFT type situation, which should point us to roughly where we are in the bubble.

But if he's getting real, non-returnable actual money from Meta on the basis of a back of envelope calculation for his own startup, from Meta's need to satiate Mark Zuckerberg's FOMO, then good for him.

This bubble cannot burst soon enough, but I hope he gets to keep some of this; he deserves it simply for the absurd comedy it has created.
by twothreeone | 2025-08-02 22:39:09+00:00
Yeah that's also possible.. my reading was more on the SSBN side, which would be equipped with SLBMs and have a range similar to ICBMs. But "nuclear sub" could also just mean "nuclear-powered" attack sub (SSN), though how those would credibly counter the nuclear threat is less clear to me. The article does mention this as well:

> Trump did not say whether he is positioning conventional or nuclear strike-capable submarines
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-02 22:39:38+00:00
Here's a quote from your link:

> Arguments of this form may or may not be fallacious depending on the probabilities involved in each step.

In other words, it depends on the premises being correct. But all arguments depend on their premises being correct.

The fact that something is widely parroted doesn't mean it's correct -- that's just this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-02 22:40:02+00:00
Medicare provides a long term benefit as well, anyways the LTC is insolvent and is mostly a ploy to get everyone to pay for expensive unhoused neighbor care (well, the homeless industrial complex gets most of the money, it probably isn’t being used to help many). It doesn’t transfer if you ever leave the state, and doesn’t pay out very much if you ever need it.
by duhast2020 | 2025-08-02 22:40:09+00:00
These tunnels are blocked by so much of the v6 world, its not worth using in most cases.

- Cloudflare won't route to them. - Streaming services, such as Netflix, block them - They trigger extra validation all over the Internet

I used to have these on select hosts on my network and it was never a good experience.
by qayxc | 2025-08-02 22:40:37+00:00
I don't agree with that assessment. The problem is that, staying with your analogy, the fire alarm goes off every time someone has to use the toilet. Plus it's not just the alarm going off, it's the entire fire department showing up and doing a forced rearranging of the furniture throughout the entire building each time.

And no, requirement changes don't have to cause that to happen and they don't have to wreak havoc throughout your application due to poor design decisions.

It's fine to encode rules directly into the type system, but only for rules that are known to be fixed (or at least not likely to ever change) throughout the lifetime of the project. For many business rules, however, this unfortunately doesn't apply.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-08-02 22:40:40+00:00
CTO explaining that to the CEO when your source code is completely gone:

CTO: "I know our entire github repo is deleted and all our source code is gone and we never took backups, but I'm hoping the developers might have it all on their machines."

CEO: "Hoping developers had it locally was your strategy for protecting all our source code?"

CTO: "It's a sound approach and ticks all the boxes."

CEO: "You're fired."

Board Directors to CEO: "You're fired."
by godelski | 2025-08-02 22:40:55+00:00
I don't think he gave up on the metaverse. Isn't AR glasses a stepping stone towards that? Or rather LLM voice assistant a stepping stone towards AR glasses? And the metaverse being a stepping stone towards a holodeck?

I mean I'm with you, I think these things are pretty far away and are going to cost a lot of money to make and require a lot of failure in the mean time. But then again, it looks like they spent ~$18bn on Reality Labs last year. So if he was funding it all on his own dime, his current $260bn of wealth would give him a good 14 years runway if we ignore interest. It would be effectively indefinite if he earns about a 5% interest on that money.

I guess I'm just trying to say, it's hard to think about these things when we're talking about such scales of wealth. I mean at those scales, I'm pretty sure the money is meaningless, that money (and the ability to throw it around) is more a proxy for ego.
by nsriv | 2025-08-02 22:42:08+00:00
I agree with you, and think we are in the heady days where moat building hasn't quite begun. Regarding 1) and 3), most models have API access to facilitate quick switching and agentic AI middleware reaps the benefits of new models being better at some specific use-case than a competitor. In the not-so-distant future, I can see the walls coming up, with some version of white-listed user-agent access only. At the moment, model improvement hype and priority access are the product, but at some point capability and general access will be the product.

We are already seeing diminishing returns from compute and training costs going up, but as more and more AI is used in the wild and pollutes training data, having validated data becomes the moat.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-08-02 22:42:14+00:00
Also Kiwix[1] is an excellent app for browsing websites offline. You can use warc2zim[2] to convert the WARC files to ZIM files for use with Kiwix.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the DWDS (digital dictionary of the German language) app is actually Kiwix!

[1]: https://www.kiwix.org/

[2]: https://github.com/openzim/warc2zim
by gerdesj | 2025-08-02 22:42:46+00:00
I would suggest your CTO needs some gentle reminders about risk management and how the cloud really works.

If your boss is that daft, its probably a sign to bail out. Remember to do your own personal due diligence. Due dill is not something that you just do for someone else: do your own! Do your own personal risk assessment. If code was lost, who would be found accountable? You or them?

EDIT: PS - I am a CTO ...
by netsharc | 2025-08-02 22:42:52+00:00
Makes me think humankind has been enshittified too: crappy parents/educational system creating more crappy humans, instead of "high quality" ones.

But then again, I always realize how far civilization has come when I enter a public toilet: not far at all.

I look around my messy apartment and realize I'd also be a not-great flatmate.
by throw0101d | 2025-08-02 22:42:56+00:00
> January (in Latin, Ianuarius) is named after Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions in Roman mythology.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January#History

> The Roman month Februarius was named after the Latin term februum, which means "purification", via the purification ritual Februa held on February 15 (full moon) in the old lunar Roman calendar.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February#History

> The name of March comes from Martius, the first month of the earliest Roman calendar. It was named after Mars, the Roman god of war, and an ancestor of the Roman people through his sons Romulus and Remus.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March#History

etc
by luckylion | 2025-08-02 22:42:59+00:00
The payer is the owner of the account? I doubt that is AWS' default stance, because their contract is with the account holder, not the payer.

Me paying your bill doesn't give me ownership of your stuff - as far as AWS is concerned, your bill is paid, and that's the extent of their involvement, everything else is between you and me.

If what he writes is true, he remained the account holder and even had a backup billing method in place - something he probably wouldn't have if he wasn't the account holder.

I don't know if he's completely honest about the story, but "somebody else paid, so we decided they are now the owner" isn't how that works.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-08-02 22:43:00+00:00
Hmm. I think the overarching theme of the article is sound. Although somewhat obvious, the idea that individuals who are exceptional in a narrow aspect of intelligence (ie. coding) can carry over their prowess to other fields is valuable to discuss, especially in the current context of Silicon Valley thought leader billionaires who believe they have the answer for all of societies issues. However the article quickly turned into a low-brow political hit piece which turned me off of it. Most egregious was the assertion that those who cut funding for aid are morally culpable for the deaths associated with said cuts, the absurdity of which should be immediately obvious to all readers as it implies that individuals are not only murderers for donating less to charity, they are also murderers for not donating the theoretical maximum. Some charities claim that it costs $3000 to save a life, so anybody with more than that in their savings is a de facto murderer if you follow this line of thinking to its logical conclusion. There were other moments where the author cheapened their article by resorting to cheap political shots but this was the most egregious.

And it's a shame because I think the article would have been much stronger if it stuck to it's original premise; There is an increasing tendency within the en majorité culture in Silicon Valley to dramatically overestimate one's own abilities (cracked, 10x, etc), especially outside their domain of expertise, and even more so with the rise of AI tools providing a facade of proficiency in completely different fields. I would imagine it not uncommon for an aspiring "cracked, 10x founder" straight out of school to find the legal domain of their venture non important, as they along with their superior intelligence and favoured AI model can do the job of a legal team - this kind of hubris appears to be taking over with parts of Silicon Valley and I do wish the article had been more focused and less political. Ah well.
by crote | 2025-08-02 22:43:18+00:00
That's exactly the problem, isn't it?

AWS is not responsible for what you do with your data. AWS, on its own, is not going to make backups for you so you can recover from a failed DB migration you did yourself. AWS cannot be held responsible for your admin fat-fingering and deleting the entire prod environment.

However, AWS is responsible for the underlying infrastructure. The website you linked clearly shows "storage" as falling under AWS's responsibility: your virtual hard drives aren't supposed to just magically disappear!

If they can just nuke your entire setup with an "Oops, sorry!", what's all the talk about redundancy and reliability supposed to be worth? At that point, how are they any different from Joe's Discount Basement Hosting?
by godelski | 2025-08-02 22:43:51+00:00
I wouldn't call 7-10 years a scam, but I would call it low odds. It is pretty hard to be accurate on predictions of a 10 year window. But I definitely think 2027 and 2030 predictions are a scam. Majority of researchers think it is further away than 10 years, if you are looking at surveys from the AI conferences rather than predictions in the news.
by foundry27 | 2025-08-02 22:44:16+00:00
Editorial comment: It’s a bit weird to see AI-written (at least partially; you can see the usual em-dashes, it’s-not-X-it’s-Y) blog posts like this detract from an author’s true writing style, which in this case I found significantly more pleasant to read. Read his first ever post, and compare it to this one and many of the other recent posts: https://www.seuros.com/blog/noflylist-how-noflylist-got-clea...

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I could imagine a blog post almost identical to this one being generated in response to a prompt like “write a first-person narrative about: a cloud provider abruptly deleting a decade-old account and all associated data without warning. Include a plot twist”.

I literally cannot tell if this story is something that really happened or not. It scares me a little, because if this was a real problem and I was in the author’s shoes, I would want people to believe me.
by interstice | 2025-08-02 22:44:30+00:00
I've seen people I work with become rich, and what I noticed about some of them is that they don't care about being 'nice', they are happy to treat everyone like they owe them something. Being nasty in business works, better and for far longer than it should. I always felt that if I was to succeed or fail, It will be on my own terms and my own thoughts about how to operate ethically, so I became my own boss. 15 years or so later I'm not rich by SV standards, but I did manage to buy a house as a 35yo millenial near the peak of the market off the back of doing what I thought was right. And I'm proud of that. I don't know if I'd call myself smart, but I would suggest that intelligent people are aware of what being ruthless in the pursuit of money will do to those around them, and many will choose not to abuse their intelligence knowing that it would hurt others. Or at least I'd like to think so.
by omnee | 2025-08-02 22:45:19+00:00
Zuck made him and offer that couldn't be refused. But neither salaries or hype or hope are what AI should be measured against. LLM based AI should be measured against previous technological revolutions, in terms of sustained real income growth and ideally real income growth per person.

Right now capital expenses are responsible for most of AI's economic impacts, as seen by the infrastructure spend contributing more to GDP than consumer spending this year.