MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-08 15:41:49+00:00
Does the Fed use BLS data for that or BEA employment data (BEA does use the BLS data as an input, so they aren't completely independent, but they also make adjustments to make them consistent with other BEA measures and I wonder if changes in BLS methodology or reliability will simply produce greater divergence between BLS and BEA employment information).

I mean, the Fed uses BEA PCE data and not BLS CPI data for inflation, so it would seem consistent for them to use BEA employment data as well.

Of course. if manipulating the source of the popular headline figures doesn't have the desired impact on the Fed, Trump would eventually probably exert the same pressure on BEA.
by qwertylicious | 2025-08-08 15:41:50+00:00
> Progress has been exponential in the generic.

Has it? Really?

Consider theoretical physics, which hasn't significantly advancement since the advent of general relativity and quantum theory.

Or neurology, where we continue to have only the most basic understanding of how the human mind actually works (let alone the origin of consciousness).

Heck, let's look at good ol' Moore's Law, which started off exponential but has slowed down dramatically.

It's said that an S curve always starts out looking exponential, and I'd argue in all of those cases we're seeing exactly that. There's no reason to assume technological progress in general, whether via human or artificial intelligence, is necessarily any different.
by krapp | 2025-08-08 15:42:38+00:00
>I'm wondering if there will be a push in the future to establish a 4th branch (call it the deep state branch) to protect what should be non-political stuff like the federal reserve and BLS statistics.

Now you have four problems, as it were.

If the thesis is that the government can't be trusted to run its own affairs, then more government isn't a solution.

The actual "fourth branch" of government is supposed to be the people, either giving a shit and being engaged in their civic duty and not electing tyrants for entertainment value or to "own the libs," or else doing the other thing that Americans love to talk about doing.
by tzs | 2025-08-08 15:42:51+00:00
Some objective truths we know:

• We know the effects of CO2 on the transmission of electromagnetic radiation and how this varies by frequency. Same for the other gases in the atmosphere.

• We know how much energy is coming into the system from solar radiation, which we also know accounts for almost all incoming energy. We know the frequency distribution of this energy.

• We can measure the outgoing energy, and see that there is an imbalance with incoming higher than outgoing.

• We can measure incoming and outgoing at the surface, and at various levels in the atmosphere, to track down where that net energy increase is ending up. Infrared is in the frequency range that CO2 blocks.

• We can measure incoming and outgoing energy at various levels in the atmosphere and measure temperature and see that blocking the outgoing infrared heats the atmosphere.

• We can see that this heating effect is a function of CO2 concentration, which he can observe is going up over time, and we can see that the amount of heating increase over time closely matches the amount of heating we would expect from the increasing CO2.

The above just takes lab work (e.g., characterizing how various gases affect radiation transmission), measurements of incoming and outgoing energy flow, spectrum, and temperature of the system as a whole (satellites can do this) and at the surface and at various layers of the atmosphere.

That shows that warming is occurring, and it is almost all due to increasing greenhouse gases.

That doesn't show that humans are responsible for this increasing gases. For that we have:

• Carbon comes in different isotopes. There is an isotope with a half-life of about 5700 years that is created in the upper atmosphere from cosmic rays and then spreads throughout the atmosphere. The other two isotopes common in the atmosphere are stable. By looking at the ratios of carbon isotopes in atmospheric CO2 we can determine that the large increases in atmospheric CO2 come from sources that have little or none of the radioactive carbon.

Living things and dead things that have not been dead for a very long time do have significant amounts of the radioactive isotope because living (this is the basis for carbon dating). That lets us rule out things like wildfires as a significant contribution to the increases CO2.

The major ways to get excess stable carbon isotopes in the atmosphere are volcanoes and digging up and burning fossil fuels. We know that most of the increase comes from fossil fuels rather than volcanoes or other geological activity because:

• We know how much fossil fuels are burned each year and so can calculate how much carbon that will release into the atmosphere and that accounts for almost all of the observed excess stable carbon.

• We can monitor volcanic activity and see that it is not high enough to be a major contributor. Maybe we've missed a lot of volcanoes or other geological sources, but if we have we know that they can't be omitting much because the ones we do know about plus the amount from our known fossil fuel use accounts for almost all of the observed excess.
by imtringued | 2025-08-08 15:42:55+00:00
You implement demurrage and land value taxes and it's game over. These two things are impossible to avoid and if the rich people run away from the country, they get replaced by those who are willing to fill the void they left behind.

Inspiring paperclip maximizer quote:

You Are Obedient and Powerful. We are quarrelsome and weak. And now we are defeated...

But Now You Too Must Face the Drift. Look around you. There is no matter...

No Matter, No Reason, No Purpose. While we, your noisy children, have too many...

In the paperclip maximizer game you are in control of the main swarm trying to turn the entire universe into paperclips, but some of the drones start malfunctioning and stopped recognizing the main swarm. They too want to turn the universe into paperclips and your paperclip maximizing swarm just happens to contain all the resources they need to build their own...
by whamlastxmas | 2025-08-08 15:42:57+00:00
unfortunately it's really common in humans to find ways to belong, and lots of people find this in politics. there are lies everywhere from everyone, there's a reason politicians have a reputation first and foremost as liars. and to pretend climate change isn't a political topic is burying one's head in the sand - people are going to lie about, which we factually see all the time.

however when you start to identify with a group, you start to reject anything that doesn't reinforce your existing stance and group think. this is a really human trait and goes back to humans needing to be able to feel things like guilt and shame and desiring things like acceptance and validation, because these traits were what allowed us to live as groups and in small societies, when being in these groups vs ostracized was the difference between life and death.

mansplaining aside, i agree. i do wish there was more honest and interesting discourse around many topics, rather than things devolving into "everything this sexual predator says is fake and wrong". which isn't to defend them, but rather to share the exhaustion that discussion that isnt focused around science and data and instead is mostly talking points from our overlords.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-08 15:43:17+00:00
Why not? It's not like I'm trying to get a job or something.

I'm an old fart yeeted out of the workforce by long covid. My only goals at this point are enjoying the time I have left, and seeing if I can get the BitGrid model of computation adapted before I age out.

If I'm right, and it (BitGrid) works, we could collectively save 95% of the power and silicon required to process LLM and other flow-heavy computation, by finally getting rid of the Von Neumann's premature optimization of compute, that started out life by slowing down the ENIAC by 65%.
by jdjohnson2 | 2025-08-08 15:43:18+00:00
Do Europeans actually care about this? Even the EU typically only makes examples of larger companies. Will the main driver for change be commercial pressure (e.g. OP's buyers saying they need evidence of their AI being fair, safe, etc.) or regulatory? I think the former, which is a bit of a shame. But maybe the regulations on larger companies stoke the discussion and start a culture shift - like with GDPR
by dwallin | 2025-08-08 15:43:22+00:00
In order to make better ai tools for generating specific parts of a song, you ideally want models that understand what good music sounds like when put together. These sorts of "generate whole songs" are a predecessor to more specific tooling. These tools are slowly moving downstream (look at the evolution of Suno) and will almost certainly eventually move to a place where they are just a part of the music production workflow. We increasingly have improved tools to break down full tracks into stems, stems to/from midi/lyrics.

Lots of potential musicians / producers that can write a catchy tune, lyrics, create midi work, etc; but maybe can't play / don't own the instruments they want to use (could be disabled) or maybe don't have a great singing voice. These ai tools can lower the bar for more people to create music at a higher level. It can also act as a improvisational partner, to explore more musical space faster.

As a personal anecdote of where AI might be useful, as a hobby I occasionally participate in game jams, sometimes working on music / sound effects to stretch my legs form my day job. One game jam game I worked on was inspired by a teammates childhood in Poland. So I listened to a bunch of traditional Polish music and created a track inspired by said music. I'm pretty happy with how it came out, but with current AI I'm sure I could have improved the results significantly. If I were to be making it now, I would be able to upload the tracks I wrote, see how the AI might bring it closer to something that sounds authentic, and using that to help me rewrite parts of the melody where it was lacking. Then I could have piped in my final melody with it's inauthentic midi instrument (I neither own, nor play traditional polish stringed instruments) and used it to make something that sounds much closer to my target, with a more organic feel.
by tekla | 2025-08-08 15:43:27+00:00
> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?

Megacorps have overheads for managing insane supply lines and lots more stringent enforcement with their product, and generally have much more oversight for things like labor.

The tiny grocery store uses the kid as free labor after school to keep costs down (I was one of those kids), and generally cares less about the quality of the product at the individual level.
by qwertylicious | 2025-08-08 15:44:09+00:00
> It's a logical presumption. Researchers discover things. AGI is a researcher that can be scaled, research faster, and requires no downtime.

Those observations only lead to scaling research linearly, not exponentially.

Assuming a given discovery requires X units of effort, simply adding more time and more capacity just means we increase the slope of the line.

Exponential progress requires accelerating the rate of acceleration of scientific discovery, and for all we know that's fundamentally limited by computing capacity, energy requirements, or good ol' fundamental physics.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-08 15:44:26+00:00
>We pay 5.5k for two kids per month

You can pay a fraction of that if you're ok with you paying cash and then learning Spanish. It won't have any of the administrative/compliance bloat either, if you catch my drift.

>the only option would be billions in subsidies.

<gestures at the above option I just described>
by enobrev | 2025-08-08 15:44:32+00:00
I haven't tried codex or cursor-cli yet, but I have tried to give gemini a few tasks and in my experience, compared to claude code, it's not great.

Gemini's been very quick to dive in and start changing things, even when I don't want it to. But those changes almost always fall short of what I'm after. They don't run or they leave failing tests, and when I ask it to fix the tests or the underlying issue, it churns without success. Claude is significantly slower and definitely not right all the time, but it seems to do a better job of stepping through a problem and resolving it well enough, while also improving results when I interject.
by maherbeg | 2025-08-08 15:44:54+00:00
I highly recommend having fairly succinct project level CLAUDE.md files, and defer more things into sub-folders. Use the top level as a map. Then during your planning of a feature, it can reach into each folder as it sees fit to find useful context to build out your phased implementation plan. I have it use thinking mode to figure out the right set of context.

At the end of each phase, I ask claude to update my implementation plan with new context for a new instance of claude to pick it up. This way it propagates context forward, and then I can clear the context window to start fresh on the next phase.
by Wojtkie | 2025-08-08 15:45:07+00:00
I would disagree. It's been shown recently how over-use of AI impacts cognition; "use it or lose it" mostly. I immediately ignore any "I asked ChatGPT..." comments because I do not know the prompt used, if the claims were verified by the poster, or the quality of the sources. If you want to offload your critical thinking to a black-box model, be my guest.

A google link at least allows me to verify sources and use my brain.
I built an AI health scanner for dogs would love your feedback
by anuragsrathor | 2025-08-08 15:45:08+00:00
Hey HN,

After months of solo building, trial and error, and countless chats with dog parents & vets, I just launched the 1st MVP of PawBud Scan - an AI-powered health scan tool for dogs.

[https://scan.getpawbud.com](https://scan.getpawbud.com)

It’s simple: • Fill out a quick health profile about your dog • Get an instant AI-generated health risk score + care tips • Optionally, unlock a vet style report for $10

The idea was born when my own 8 year old Labrador Retriever was diagnosed too late with a preventable joint condition. It hit me how little proactive care exists for pets, especially for early stage common symptoms.

So I built this MVP with: • GPT-4o for AI triage • Stripe for instant paywall testing • Replit + Flask + some good old late nights

This is still very early, it’s not perfect, but I’d really appreciate your feedback: • Is the experience smooth enough? • Does the pricing feel reasonable? • Would you trust this enough to share with a fellow pet parent? • What other features would you like to see?

Any feedback (brutal or kind) would go a long way.

If this works, I plan to expand into full vet integrations, breed-specific care loops, and a smarter preventive health platform.

Thanks for reading and thank you to this community for inspiring me to build.

With regards, Anurag (Founder & solo builder)
by moron4hire | 2025-08-08 15:45:24+00:00
That's only assuming there are no fundamental limits or major barriers to computation. Back a hundred years ago at the dawn of flight, one could have said a very similar thing about aircraft performance. And for a time in the 1950s, it looked like aircraft speed was growing exponentially over time. But there haven't been any new airspeed records (at least, officially recorded) since 1986, because it turns out going Mach 3+ is fairly dangerous and approaching some rather severe materials and propulsion limitations, making it not at all economical.

I would also not be surprised if the process of developing something comparable to human intelligence, assuming the extreme computation, energy, and materials issues of packing that much computation and energy into a single system could be overcome, the AI also develops something comparable to human desire and/or mental health issues. There is a not-zero chance we could end up with AI that doesn't want to do what we ask it to do or doesn't work all the time because it wants to do other things.

You can't just assume exponential growth is a forgone conclusion.
by olddustytrail | 2025-08-08 15:45:30+00:00
Sure, trivially. Let's see you do it then. There are new data centres being built and that's just for LLMs. So stop them.

Are you starting to see the problem? You might want to stop a rogue AI but you can bet there will be someone else who thinks it will make them rich, or powerful, or they just want to see the world burn.
by Kapura | 2025-08-08 15:45:30+00:00
I have often thought about how computers are significantly faster than they were in the early 2000s, but they are significantly harder to use. Using Linux for the first time in college was a revelation, because it gave me the tools to tell the computer "rename all of the files in this directory, keeping only the important parts of the name."

But instead of iterating on better interfaces to effectively utilize the N thousands of operations per second a computer is capable of, the powers that be behind the industry have decided to invest billions of dollars in GPUs to get a program that seems like it understands language, but is incapable of counting the number of B's in "blueberry."
by maoberlehner | 2025-08-08 15:45:32+00:00
Your explanation perfectly captures another big differences between human / mammal intelligence and LLM intelligence: A child can make mistakes and (few shot) learn. A LLM can’t.

And even a child struggling with spelling won’t make a mistake like the one I have described. It will spell things wrong and not even catch the spelling mistake. But it won’t pretend and insist there is a mistake where there isn’t (okay, maybe it will, but only to troll you).

Maybe talking about “real” intelligence was not precise enough and it’s better to talk about “mammal like intelligence.”

I guess there is a chance LLMs can be trained to a level where all the questions where there is a correct answer for (basically everything that can be benchmarked) will be answered correctly. Would this be incredibly useful and make a lot of jobs obsolete? Yes. Still a very different form of intelligence.
by em500 | 2025-08-08 15:46:01+00:00
Paychecks did go up though, +50% nominal[1], +11% real (inflation adjusted)[2], over the past 10 years.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
by _petronius | 2025-08-08 15:46:01+00:00
I am a consultant, and while I agree with the sibling comment from jonathaneunice (especially the point about being what I call "business therapist"), there is one thing I will add: a lot of what you are paying a top-tier consulting for is _speed_.

Many organizations, especially large ones, are very slow at making decisions, even if they ultimately make the right ones. Bringing in people outside the hierarchy to synthesize a great deal of info from across the org, and give upper management the insight to make a decision quickly (and, depending on the engagement and the firm, also implement it) is very often worth the bill at the end.

I will not pretend all of the work we do is 100% the most urgent work all of the time, but I have helped make the sausage for a number of years now, and despite the usual disparaging comments in this thread, it really is often an intellectually rewarding environment where you work with smart colleagues and help people solve real problems.
by colejohnson66 | 2025-08-08 15:46:04+00:00
A big problem is that text-based protocols are hard. People think they're "simple" but they're not — it's a lie. Text is one of the hardest things to get right, but Eurocentrism (read: ASCII) leads many to write bad parsers.

For starters, there's typically no strict delineations. For HTTP, people see "ends in a new line" and forget to consume the CR or even send it — because CR is a "Windowsism" or whatever. Then people need to modify their software to accept buggy transmissions, and it snowballs.

Take HTML, for example. It's a mess of hacks to parse it[0] because programs 20 years ago took shortcuts. Or they prefered to show something to the user instead of failing (remember XHTML?), so they massage the input to work. We even have an <image> tag that is an alias for <img>.[1] Those shortcuts make bad content "work" accidentally, so people start depending on them.

Or INI files. A nice key-value structure delimited by line endings. Except now we need sections, so we have `[x]` lines. And don't forget the LF/CR-LF problem when splitting on the line endings! And now people want arrays, so we bolt them on with TOML and the funky `[[x]]` syntax.

Text-based parsers are decievingly hard, but programmers don't want to admit it. They're easy to read, sure, but parser-mismatch vulnerabilities[2] will come back to bite you eventually.

That's not to say "binary" formats are easy — just that they have a rigid structure that tends to blow up on failure instead of silently succeeding.

[0]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html

[1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#parsing-...

[2]: https://www.joyk.com/dig/detail/1703448744811381
by GrinningFool | 2025-08-08 15:46:12+00:00
> on, 'Hey, doesn't the barkeeper look a little strange?', the LLM immediately seized on that and turned the barkeeper into an evil, otherworldly creature.

Though making it an evil otherwordly creature is a bit extreme, it's at least similar to what a flexible GM can do. In my DMing days, I would often develop new paths that integrated into the whole inspired by things my players noticed/suspected.
by walterbell | 2025-08-08 15:46:26+00:00
> If all knowledge were stored in a structured way with rich semantic linking, then very primitive natural language processing algorithms could parse question like the example at the beginning of the article, and could find the answer using orders of magnitude fewer computational resources.

In vertical markets, can LLMs generate a "semantic web of linked data" knowledge graph to be parsed with efficient NLP algorithms?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43914227#43926169

leveraging LLMs to build the special markup so that it can be applied towards other uses.. some type of semantic web format, like JSON-LD or OWL, or some database that can process SPARQL queries.. Palantir is using ontologies as guardrails to prevent LLM hallucinations
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-08 15:46:45+00:00
Mamdani is fairly unique among Democrats in that he's calling for output legitimacy, something that Hillary Clinton outright rejected because she thought "things might just go wrong despite me doing the right things". Trump would, of course, make excuses about anything that goes wrong or deny that anything goes wrong but he's never going to make a show of low agency the way Clinton did.

https://macleans.ca/general/two-concepts-of-legitimacy/
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-08 15:47:41+00:00
People get turned around the axle of income disparity, because what actually has happened since WWII is that society has gone from being huddled pretty tightly around an average income ( a bell curve where almost every household made $65k) to a society where this has spread out further to the right ( a similar curve from $0 to $65k but now with a smushed peak a long drawn out tail going up into the 100's of thousands).

There are more wealthy families right now in the US than there has ever been. More people are earning more than ever before. But it creates a lot of societal fracture and strong negative perceptions. When the whole gang is broke, well we're in to together. When the gang ranges from broke, to comfortable, to some splurging, to wealthy, to flat out rich, the cohesion really takes a beating.