MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ivewonyoung | 2025-08-16 02:59:34+00:00
> This feels like the "only Democrats have agency" story

Because only Democrats had agency when the law took effect? The president can veto any bill. Democrats passed two bills in 2021 and 2022 with zero Republican votes, zero, they could've easily included the repeal in those bills if they wanted to. They didn't coz they didn't want to, their stated policy is to raise taxes on corporations, how is this even debatable? Meanwhile the Republicans at that time had no agency. Once they got agency, they repealed it immediately, with zero Democrat votes.

Would you similarly blame the Democrats for all voting against the repeal as part of the BBB that just passed? You wouldn't and your reason would be "but the BBB contained a lot of other things apart from this repeal that the dems didn't like". Why won't you apply the same logic to the non-clean bill you brought up?

> By your logic, Republicans didn't fix it because they didn't want to either! Why was that? Partisan vengeance against California?

Huh, they fixed it immediately after coming to power. They couldn't fix it before the BBB because it needed to go in reconciliation because the dems don't suppor the repeal. They didn't fix it in 2019 because it wasn't even in effect yet and IIRC dems had the house. So how does the partisan vengeance allegation even make any sense?
by cryptonector | 2025-08-16 03:00:47+00:00
To be effective to 100m it would have to have near rifle muzzle velocities, and that would _not_ be "virtually noiseless" because that would be mach 2 or higher, and anything supersonic makes a loud crack. So if it was subsonic then the bullet drop at 100m would be at least a foot and a half. Wind would make its accuracy terrible enough, but then consider how you might stabilize a bullet made of ice... (I know it was a "dart", but the whole thing had to be made of ice or else plenty of evidence would be left behind.) And being an ice bullet (or dart) surely it would be melting along the way and not have enough mass to penetrate the victim's clothing.

No, the point blank range of such a weapon would be very short, perhaps not even 20m, and presumably it was meant to be used in public, which would be weird because the gunman would be very conspicuous.
by more_corn | 2025-08-16 03:01:07+00:00
Don’t badmouth people. People who badmouth someone else will badmouth you. Imagine the kind of person you’d want to work with (capable, calm, reliable) project the persona of the person you want to work with.

It’s ok not to lie. But you can also not say something about someone that you wouldn’t assay to them.

I interviewed someone once who was technically awesome and not a single person in the interview panel wanted to work with him.
by sealeck | 2025-08-16 03:01:37+00:00
> with the courts of varying quality

You can usually pick the jurisdiction (e.g. many contracts are under jurisdiction of England & Wales/Switzerland/Singapore despite neither party being based there, or doing business there).

I think in general judges are quite considered, and the answers you get from courts tend to make quite a lot of sense, especially if you are aware of general legal principles and precedent.
by pj_mukh | 2025-08-16 03:01:56+00:00
Lol. Called it. Always with the moving goal posts.

Oh but remittances are high! Think of the short term effects.

I will mention my Indian coworkers parents use the remittances to buy Netflix subscriptions, Coca-Cola and American Corn but it won’t be enough. It’ll never be enough.

Constant-pie thinking is an all consuming identity not a rational viewpoint that can be reasoned with.
by gizmo686 | 2025-08-16 03:02:08+00:00
Manhattan and Apollo were both massive engineering efforts; but fundamentally we understood the science behind them. As long as we would be able to solve some fairly clearly stated engineering problems and spend enough money to actual build the solutions, those projects would work.

A priori, it was not obvious that those clearly stated problems had solutions within our grasp (see fusion) but at least we knew what the big picture looks like.

With AI, we don't have that, and never really had that. We've just been gradually making incremental improvements to AI itself, and exponential improvements in the amount of raw compute we can through at it. We know that we are reaching fundamental limits on transistor density so compute power will plateau unless we find a different paradigm for improvement; and those are all currently in the same position as fusion in terms of engineering.
by tstrimple | 2025-08-16 03:02:23+00:00
> the DEA now takes potential abuse of legal drugs much more seriously and adderall (an amphetamine- it's a cousin of meth) is at a high risk of abuse.

I know that I process Adderall differently having ADHD, but I still struggle to see how it's used recreationally. I took it somewhat consistently for over a year for ADHD treatment until I missed an appointment and couldn't get around to scheduling another before my prescription ran out. After that getting back on became more trouble than it was worth. Not once did I ever feel a high from Adderall. My best naps were on Adderall. Not once after dropping it did I ever feel withdrawals or the urge to take more. The only thing I felt while taking it was constant dry mouth and my brain no longer constantly jumped between topics outside of my control.

My brother abuses controlled substances. When I told him I was taking Adderall he warned me to be careful and talked about his issues with it and I just couldn't relate at all. I'm no stranger to addiction. I'm an alcoholic and am addicted to nicotine via fruity vapes. But Adderall? Nothing at all.
by throwaway20174 | 2025-08-16 03:04:33+00:00
Humans have a proven history of re-inventing economic systems, so if AI ends up thinking better than we do (yet unproven this is possible), then we should have superior future systems.

But the question is a system optimized for what? That emphasizes huge rewards for the few, and that requires the poverty of some (or many). Or a more fair system. Not different from the challenges of today.

I'm skeptical even a very intelligent machine will change the landscape of our dificult decisions, but will accelerate which direction we decide (or is decided for us), that we go.
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-08-16 03:04:55+00:00
While difficult, there are surely ways to make the scroll bar move more smoothly. For instance, you could demand that it can only change direction when the scroll direction changes. You can also use past scroll bar positions as stronger estimates of document height than text content and whatever else is being used, which would lead to more consistent (if inaccurate) scrolling as well. But as long as we're estimating things we might as well make them enjoyable to use; it's not like the user will be able to discern that the scroll bar is off by 5% anyway.
by intended | 2025-08-16 03:08:06+00:00
Could, if, and maybe.

When we discuss how LLMs failed or succeeded, as a norm, we should start including

- the language/framework - task, - our experience levels (highly familiar, moderately familiar, I think I suck, unfamiliar)

Right now, we know both - Claude is magic, and LLMs are useless, but never how we move between these two states.

This level of uncertainty, when economy making quantities of wealth are being moved, is “unhelpful”.
by alex1138 | 2025-08-16 03:08:41+00:00
Open letter to tech magnates:

By all means, continue to make or improve your Llamas/Geminis (to the latter: stop censoring Literally Everything. Google has a culture problem. To the former... I don't much trust your parent company in general)

It will undoubtedly lead to great advances

But for the love of god do not tightly bind them to your products (Kagi does it alright, they don't force it on you). Do not make your search results worse. Do NOT put AI in charge of automatic content moderation with 0 human oversight (we know you want to. The economics of it work out nicely for you, with no accountability). People already as is get banned far too easily by your automated systems
by serf | 2025-08-16 03:09:14+00:00
I stopped my MaxX20 sub at the right time it seems like. These systems are already quick to judge innocuous actions; I don't need any more convenient chances to lose all of my chat context on a whim.

Related : I am now approaching week 3 of requesting an account deletion on my (now) free account. Maybe i'll see my first CSR response in the upcoming months!

If only Anthropic knew of a product that could easily read/reply/route chat messages to a customer service crew . . .
by cedws | 2025-08-16 03:09:38+00:00
I’ve used PureGym before, as the author points out the app is terrible, even on a good signal it takes 30s+ to “warm up”, whatever that means. I don’t want the app to “warm up”, I want the QR code right now, I’m left standing outside the gym like an idiot waiting for the bloated app to call a REST endpoint.
by ivewonyoung | 2025-08-16 03:09:43+00:00
Republicans supported the repeal, so 60 votes in the Senate were possible if the Dems wanted to repeal it. They didn't want to, coz they passed two reconciliation bills with zero republican votes and could've included the repeal in either one of them. Their policy is explicitly to tax corporations more. They didn't even let the clean repeal bills have a vote.
by jmspring | 2025-08-16 03:10:17+00:00
I'm having a problem understanding are you saying it's white supremacy or parallel / similar too such?

If its the former, I am not sure what you are trying to convey.

For myself - seasoned engineer, european pursuasion, I want to work with people that are open and collaborative. I've worked with backgrounds like mine I would never work with again.

I do have an issue with employers find an excuse to bias towards the lower cost labor pool that is H1s. And when teams get saturated that way, it perpetuates the same.

These days, I have found large companies with a tech component and smaller companies within tech centers are more diverse/inclusive (as you will) than the FAANG type companies.
by al_borland | 2025-08-16 03:11:33+00:00
There are many websites and companies that have licensed song lyrics to be able to display them. This isn’t a new concept.

Billions of dollars are being poured into developing AI, and some of it can’t be spent on licensing to make it more useful and legal? The plan is just to steal as much as they can for as long as they can, then block it when they get called out? Is this really the future we want to build on if this is how it’s going to work?
by deepfriedbits | 2025-08-16 03:12:10+00:00
I am a relentlessly optimistic person and this is the first technology that I've seen that worries me in the decades I've been in the biz.

It's a wonderful breakthrough, nearly indistinguishable from magic, but we're going to have to figure something out – whether that's Universal Basic Income (UBI) or something along those lines, otherwise, the loss of jobs that is coming will lead to societal unrest or worse.
by londons_explore | 2025-08-16 03:14:46+00:00
> ML could be deployed on processing lines or handheld devices, reducing health risks and trade losses by ensuring that only safe, uncontaminated produce reaches consumers

Unfortunately current laws and regulations actually promote the reverse. It makes business sense to mix harvests with high mycotoxin levels with others with low levels to bring the total slightly below the legal limit. The more precisely you can measure the level, the closer you can get to the limit.

The end result is the consumer, who might previously have had some meals mycotoxin free and others near the limit, now has all meals right at the limit.

I suspect this industry shift is responsible for the huge increase in people who try to eat gluten free, simply because it's the mycotoxins in cereals making them feel unwell.
by eviks | 2025-08-16 03:16:30+00:00
> It’s not a bad standard just because you personally struggle to understand it.

I'm not as bad at this as you are, I've explained why it's bad several times without a reference to my understanding, but you fail to understand that primitive explanation, so now think others also can't.

> Lots of things have historical names, especially in computer graphics, that are now standard.

So? Lots of things also change. You forgot to finish your thought.

> How do you guarantee such a thing?

I don't, I use an API that does

> Please define one as such that accounts for all display types with appropriate verbiage.

Your favorite term doesn't do that.

> I’ll personally advocate for it in the film industry if you can come up with a term that is better than what the entirety of cinematic history has been able to think of.

Oh no, that's a recipe for disaster, please stick to worshipping historic standards, don't ruin a tiny chance of progress!

> Apple only claim that it’s unobstructed by their specific display edges and overlays but it doesn’t account for other display concerns. Hence safe area is still the most intuitive name.

Apple only claim that unobstructed API is unobstructed by their specific display edges and overlays but it doesn’t account for other display concerns. Hence unobstructed area is still the most intuitive name because it still is the closest to the reality, and because "safe" is still not safe, so offers no benefit.

> Would you also like to go and argue with people about alpha channels?

What, are they sacred?
by parineum | 2025-08-16 03:16:31+00:00
I'm not confused at all. Your own personal definitions just further my point that tech people have a much different classification system that the general populous and that the need for those excessive classifications is that way ambitious CEOs keep using the term incorrectly in order to increase share prices.

It's actually very funny to me that you are stating these definitions so authoritatively despite the terms not having any sort if rigor attached to either their definition or usage.
by philosophty | 2025-08-16 03:16:39+00:00
Funny how you applaud yourself for being correct but make no actual arguments.

What are you claiming? That immigrants do not actually remit significant percentage of their income? That all or most remitted money comes back to America? That short-term effects do not matter even if they're highly destructive?

You're claiming that I believe in a fixed pie which could not possibly be further from the truth. But I do believe that some pies are fixed, some of the time, in some places. Are you claiming the opposite? That pies are never fixed?

You're the one who isn't arguing in a rational way.
by kyboren | 2025-08-16 03:16:55+00:00
> [I] am hoping Canada will move closer to the EU for military partnership as well.

Have you ever looked at a map?

If the threat comes from Russia, EU would struggle mightily merely to defend themselves; they're not crossing the Atlantic to come to Canada's aid. And Canada already has existing military partnerships with many EU countries through NATO... which is a creature of the US. Canada's defense against Russia relies upon integration with the US and NATO.

If the threat comes from China, there is zero chance EU nations will declare war on China for Canada's sake. Even if they did, they have zero chance of projecting meaningful force across the world against China. Canada's defense against China relies upon integration with the US.

If the threat comes from the US, there is zero chance EU nations will declare war on the US for Canada's sake. Even if they did, they have zero chance of projecting meaningful force across the Atlantic against the US. And if they did, they'd probably end up getting double-teamed by both the US and Russia. Canada's defense against the US is hopeless.

No other nation has the geographical position or force projection capabilities to pose a serious threat to Canada's sovereignty. I'm sure you're very emotional about Trump's annexation comments and tariffs on Canada, but you can't base national security strategy on your fee fees. You ought to get real about Canada's position and options and act accordingly.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-16 03:17:19+00:00
> but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can

What makes you think that? Self driving cars have had untold billions of dollars in reaearch and decades in applied testing, iteration, active monitoring, etc and it still has a very long tail of unaddressed issues. They've been known to ignore police traffic redirections, they've run right through construction barriers, and recently they were burnt to a crisp in the LA riots, completely ignorant of the turmoil that was going on. A human driver is still far more adaptive and requires a lot less training than AI, and humans are ready to handle the infinitely long tail of exceptions to the otherwise algorithmic task of driving, which follows strict rules.

And when you talk about applying this same tech, so confidently, to domains far more nuanced and complex than driving, with even less training data than to go off, I find myself firmly in the skeptics camp, that holds you will struggle even harder to apply humanoid robotics in uncontrolled environments across a diverse range of tasks without human intervention or piloting or maintenence or management.

Unemployment is still near all time lows, this will persist for sometime as we have a structural demographic problem with massive amounts of retirees and less children to support the population "pyramid" (which is looking more like a tapering rectangle these days).
by alanbernstein | 2025-08-16 03:17:37+00:00
I have never understood "post scarcity" to mean the end of ALL scarcity, which is essentially impossible by definition.

Relative to 500 years ago, we have already nearly achieved post-scarcity for a few types of items, like basic clothing.

It seems this is yet another concept for which we need to adjust our understanding from binary to a spectrum, as we find our society advancing along the spectrum, in at least some aspects.
by dodos | 2025-08-16 03:17:42+00:00
I very recently was in the market for a 3d printer and was interested in making a voron or something diy, but even ordering parts from china it would've cost about double just getting a pre built with better software presets, less room for error, and about the same specs from a Chinese company. It's hard for me to comprehend how diy buying parts individually from AliExpress can be more expensive before shipping,but I guess that's what economics of scale get you.
by keeda | 2025-08-16 03:18:31+00:00
> As I said, we already had this conversation ages ago and your side lost.

Repeating that does not make it true.

> A lot of the rest use an informal (not legal, and highly subjective) definition of the word "theft" -- but you knew this.

Yes, all the examples I gave are exactly of that. I think we are in violent agreement here.

> It's exhausting to keep repeating this.

I do agree it's exhausting, because neither you nor the decades of arguments (where I have repeatedly brought it up, but well, the Internet is a big place) have addressed this point. Let me lay it out in more detail:

1. All society and trade is based on exchange of value. This is true since the oldest days of barter.

2. When somebody provides something of value and gets something they value in return, that is a fair trade. The exact amounts of value are negotiable (including zero, cf. creative commons, but again this is based on the provider's consent.) This is the fundamental basis of trade.

3. So when someone takes something of value -- physical goods or abstract things like services or TV shows -- without giving its provider something of acceptable value in return, it is considered unfair and morally wrong. Which is why society has decided to make it legally wrong as well.

So whether it's stealing a car or pirating a TV show, it is essentially taking something of value without giving any in exchange, for which the word "theft" is perfectly fine.
by poink | 2025-08-16 03:18:31+00:00
> It will undoubtedly lead to great advances

"Undoubtedly" seems like a level of confidence that is unjustified. Like Travis Kalanick thinking AI is just about to help him discover new physics, this seems to suggest that AI will go from being able to do (at best) what we can already do if we were simply more diligent at our tasks to being something genuinely more than "just" us
by hannah_creator | 2025-08-16 03:18:45+00:00
I recently came across a pretty interesting tool for AI art and storytelling: a consistent character generator.

One of the biggest challenges in AI art is keeping the same character recognizable across different scenes. This tool tackles that problem in a few clever ways: - Action presets – instead of rewriting prompts, you can pick from predefined poses and actions. - Character management – save and reuse characters, so you don’t have to rebuild them from scratch each time. - Flexible styles – works well across anime, semi-realistic, and other common art styles.

I’ve been testing it, and while it’s not perfect (character drift is still a thing), it makes the process much smoother compared to traditional prompt-only methods.

Here’s the link if you want to try it out: https://aicharactergenerator.app/

Curious if anyone else has tried similar approaches to solving character consistency in AI art?
by coffeeling | 2025-08-16 03:19:05+00:00
Scripts being the main driver of literacy is a pet peeve of mine. It's not the script, it's the schooling system. The high rates of literacy in modern states are just a result of the school system - Japan has a high literacy rate, for example, and their writing system is either the worst in the world or close to it.

That said, the characters are a whole boatload of unnecessary extra effort, and as a student of the two languages, the artificial illiteracy created by kanji, where I often just can't read words I've known for years, is simply maddening. Not having to wrestle with characters does free up a lot of time for both native and foreign students alike.
by cratermoon | 2025-08-16 03:19:51+00:00
This same link was submitted 2 days ago. My comment there still applies.

LLMs do not "understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base"

"LLMs are language models, and their superpower is fluency. It’s this fluency that hacks our brains, trapping us into seeing them as something they aren’t."

https://jenson.org/timmy/
by nikolayasdf123 | 2025-08-16 03:21:09+00:00
> what do displaced humans transition to?

go to any war-torn country or collapsed empire (Soviet). I have seen/grow-up myself in both — you would get desperation, people giving-up, alcohol (famous "X"-cross of birth rate drop and deaths rising), drugs, crime, corruption/warlord-ing, rural communities hit first and totally vanish, then small-tier cities vanish, then mid-tier, only the largest hubs remain. loss of science, culture, and education. people are just gone. only ruins of whatever latest shelters they had remain, not even their prime-time architecture. you can drive hundreds/thousands of kms across these ruin of what once was flurishing culture. years ago you would find one old person still living there. these days not a single human left. this is what is coming.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-16 03:21:31+00:00
> Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood ...

This is demonstrably wrong. An easy refutation to cite is:

https://medium.com/@akshatsanghi22/how-to-build-your-own-lar...

As to the rest of this pontification, well... It has almost triple the number of qualifiers (5 if's, 4 could's, and 5 will's) than paragraphs (5).