MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 999900000999 | 2025-08-18 02:09:31+00:00
Paying taxes in America is like taking out a high interest loan on a used car. And not a particularly reliable one.

Why exactly am I paying taxes if college is still unaffordable and health insurance gets more expensive every year ?

I probably pay a higher percentage of my income in taxes and health insurance as I would in Germany, and get much less in return.

Unemployment insurance is a joke for higher income people.

College in particular is a bit complex. In my Mom's time State College was tuition free. The State of California, assuming it's residents are stupid, claims it's state schools are tuition free for residents. It's just a 15k fee !

https://admission.ucla.edu/tuition-aid/tuition-fees

State College should be free. Particularly if you go to community college first, this is where the vast majority of students should start. Unless you get a full ride, it's better to drop out after 3 semesters of community vs 3 semesters at USC.

I think the 10k in forgiveness would of been reasonable. That was a very moderate plan, but it didn't happen.

Some type of long term reform is needed though. Maybe allow for a discharge after 15 years ?
by ericmay | 2025-08-18 02:10:31+00:00
> As I mentioned, the unemployment rate is already low. Looking at total population numbers is a fools errand since not every single person is able to work (or willing)

Similarly looking at the unemployment number (which is rising) doesn’t give you the full picture in this context, because full employment != efficient employment. Something like yea maybe we just have fewer Starbucks baristas or web developers and instead they go into manufacturing and construction. Starbucks responds by automating or closing some borderline profitable stores, or people stop buying Starbucks but spend more on an espresso machine or a TV made in the USA.

To rephrase maybe, I don’t disagree with your broader point, but I’m just not sure our population’s work efforts are being efficiently allocated. They’re focused on service sector economy generated positions (dating apps, coffee shops, clerical work - contrived examples), but we can change the mix-up and orientation of our economy. So you get less of some jobs and folks switch around some.

> How does that fare against the anti-immigration i.e. "only Americans should work these jobs" sentiment?

Idk, doesn’t seem to bother my neighbor having a new garage built with very clearly immigrant labor. I don’t care either, though I support secure borders and fair paths to immigration. I think how people generally feel about immigration is similar, though Trumpistan is just -particularly loud about the worst and dumbest aspects of it, whereas the vast majority of people aren’t that crazy. At least that has been my experience living in Ohio.

> That's pretty hand wavey and doesn't address the very price sensitive culture that the US voter base has

Well if both parties supported the approximate same position, voters would go to the ballot box and either pick the Republican version of it or the Democratic version of it. People can be lead to believe anything. War is peace, freedom is slavery, inflation is deflation, etc.

I won’t say it’s not hand-wavy, but politics is kind of hand-wavy sometimes isn’t it?
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-08-18 02:10:31+00:00
> This example is a great illustration of why booleans are usually a mistake.

It is not. You are ignoring hypothetical constraints to bolster your own hypothetical argument, which is apparently some permutation of, "tell people they are wrong, and do some imputing of imaginary data. repeat until you have ideal 'system design'"
by hyperadvanced | 2025-08-18 02:10:37+00:00
I also think that just having “an idea” isn’t exactly the same as increasing net creativity. Oftentimes with art, the impact of something truly creative results in changing the parameters of the medium or genre itself, not merely sticking to the script and producing a new work in the style of X. If you take, for example, J Dilla and his impact on hip-hop, the fact that there’s an entire subgenre or two focused on some of his hallmark innovations (micro-rhythm/wonky beats, neo-soul, lofi sampling/creative use of samples) speaks to that kind of “real” creativity. I frankly think that kind of genre-bending is possible with the use of LLMs, but if you just say, “here’s my story idea, make it so”, without any eye towards the actual technique or craft, you won’t be getting the next Blood Meridian out of it.
by linsomniac | 2025-08-18 02:11:21+00:00
I'm sure you're right that there are situations where mypy or ty or LSP give false positives/negatives, but in my use of them over the last ~6 months I really haven't run into many of those situations, or at least none come to mind. Libraries without type annotations do reduce the effectiveness to just what can be inferred by the type checker.
by charcircuit | 2025-08-18 02:12:20+00:00
>I would OK with advertisements which push the whole category, that is positive-sum.

This doesn't get rid of people buying what is most well known. In fact without the possibility of being exposed to more niche options people will just go with the incumbents. Advertising allows new competitors in a space to be able to acquire customers based off their value for customers instead of being a wellknown thing.
by rendaw | 2025-08-18 02:13:29+00:00
I made something similar! https://github.com/andrewbaxter/malarkdowney - The main difference (I think) is that mine applies h* style changes and isn't visually separated from the rest of the page. I.e. it's not just syntax highlighting, it's a more fully-blown output preview.

The text overlay approach doesn't work if you want width-affecting/height style changes (I assume) since that'd cause the overlay to stop matching. The downside is contenteditable cursor movement is broken for inexplicable reasons.
by aeonik | 2025-08-18 02:13:59+00:00
I understand they don't have a logic engine built into them, ie no deduction, but I do think their inference is a weak form of reasoning, and I'm not sure about world model.

I suppose it depends on the definition of model.

I currently do consider the transformer weights to be a world model, but having a rigid one based on statistical distributions tend to create pretty wonky behavior at times.

That's why I do agree, relying on your own understanding the code is the best way.

It's amazing seeing these things produce some beautiful functions and designs, and then promptly forget that it exists, and then begin writing incompatible, half re-implemented non-idiomatic code.

If you're blind to what they are doing, it's just going to be layers upon layers of absolute dreck.

I don't think they will get out of cul-de-sacs without a true deductive engine, and a core of hard, testable facts to build on. (I'm honestly a bit surprised that this behavior didn't emerge early in training to be honest).

Though I think humans minds are the same way, in this respect, and fall for the same sort of traps. Though at least our neurons can rewire themselves on the fly.

I know a LOT of people who sparingly use their more advanced reasoning faculties, and instead primarily rely on vibes, or pre-trained biases. Even though I KNOW they are capable of better.
by theshackleford | 2025-08-18 02:14:07+00:00
> As I am retired, I can assure you beyond any doubt I cannot be replaced by an LLM in the workplace.

That makes sense. Being removed from today’s workforce makes it easier to believe the narrative that AI is causing these shifts, when in fact they’re really the result of the end of historically low interest rates and other broader economic conditions.

> If you don't realize that's going to happen you don't realize just how many people come to work shuffle proverbial paper from one side of their desk to another, making sure forms are filled out correctly or this month's TPS cover sheets are attached

These people are not the entirety of the white collar market.

> And didn't someone high up in Microsoft say 95% of the programming in the future will be done by LLMs?

Moronic Microsoft executives have said a lot of things. It doesn't make them right.

> 'Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer scoffed at Apple's glass-and-metal gadget, telling USA Today that "there's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."'

> Do you expect Microsoft intends to keep the 95% of programmers it doesn't need anymore?

I expect like most things that come out of their mouth, it's obvious bullshit because they are involved in peddling AI and would desparately love you to buy some.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-18 02:14:10+00:00
Therapy is a bit different though. It's meant to make you think. Get your mind unstuck from the loop or spiral it's in. Generally you will know what's wrong but your mind keeps dancing around it. There's a lot of elephants in the room. In that sense it doesn't quite matter that much if it tells you to do something outrageous. It's not like you're going to actually do that, it's just food for thought. And even an outrageous proposition can break the loop. You'll start thinking like oh no that's crazy. Maybe my situation isn't so bad.

The problem is when you start seeing it as an all knowing oracle. Rather than a simulated blabbermouth with too much imagination.

In general it's been very positive for me anyway. And besides I use it on myself only. I can do whatever I want. Nobody can tell me not to use it for this.

Even if it just tells you (sometimes incorrectly) that nothing is wrong and just sides with you like a friend, even that is good because it takes the pressure of the situation so reality can kick in. That doesn't work when stress is dialed up to the maximum.

It also helps to be the one tuning the AI and prompt too. This always keeps your mind in that "evaluation mode" questioning its responses and trying to improve them.

But like I said before, to me it's just an augmentation to a real therapist.
by leentee | 2025-08-18 02:15:29+00:00
I think the new UPDATE implementation is great, however its impact is limited. As a heavy CH user, our typical use case is inserting rows with some columns are missing, then backfill these columns later on (and I've seen such pattern in many places). In my previous company (big Chinese tech), we developed a customized solution for ingesting partial columns (that's long time ago when FINAL is still a pita). Our current solution is using aggregating merge tree with anyLast and nullable columns. UPDATE == INSERT and that's it. Imagine doing it with millions of UPDATE queries, that'll be nightmare.
by ggnore7452 | 2025-08-18 02:16:27+00:00
I’ve done a similar PDF → Markdown workflow.

For each page:

- Extract text as usual.

- Capture the whole page as an image (~200 DPI).

- Optionally extract images/graphs within the page and include them in the same LLM call.

- Optionally add a bit of context from neighboring pages.

Then wrap everything with a clear prompt (structured output + how you want graphs handled), and you’re set.

At this point, models like GPT-5-nano/mini or Gemini 2.5 Flash are cheap and strong enough to make this practical.

Yeah, it’s a bit like using a rocket launcher on a mosquito, but this is actually very easy to implement and quite flexible and powerfuL. works across almost any format, Markdown is both AI and human friendly, and surprisingly maintainable.
by waste_monk | 2025-08-18 02:16:36+00:00
It's an open access book, you should have a "open full book pdf" button (a couple down from the blue "export citation" button).

I haven't the time to read it myself at the moment, but the gist appears to be about "attention economy" and how technology affects our lives. There's a blurb and some discussion on goodreads [1].

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38364667-stand-out-of-ou...
by fennec-posix | 2025-08-18 02:17:15+00:00
>“One moment, you’re financing your Coachella outfit; the next moment it’s groceries.” And indeed, this is happening more and more frequently—a quarter of “buy now, pay later” customers say they use an installment-payment service to shop for food.

This is the kicker for me personally. I don't know if it's cost of living increases driving people to start using these services for daily essentials, or if it just becomes a habit through putting all spending through services like this. Either way it's scary.
by tombert | 2025-08-18 02:18:00+00:00
Leiningen and deps.edn shield you a bit from the awfulness of Java project management. They feel a lot more like something you'd see in Node.js or something, but it still gets dependencies from Maven Central.

Debugging and profiling is still somewhat Java based, and yeah that's can be irritating, but you get used to it.

Personally I do think that it's worth it; Clojure is a very pleasant language that has no business being as fast as it is, and core.async is an absolutely lovely concurrency framework if you can convert your logic into messaging, and you have Haskell-style transactional memory for stuff that can't be. So many problems become less irritating in Clojure.
by KnuthIsGod | 2025-08-18 02:18:11+00:00
Sub-2010 level OCR using LLM.

It is hype-compatible so it is good.

It is AI so it is good.

It is blockchain so it is good.

It is cloud so it is good.

It is virtual so it is good.

It is UML so it is good.

It is RPN so it is good.

It is a steam engine so it is good.

Yawn...
by hliyan | 2025-08-18 02:19:41+00:00
Smith's book sits on my bedside stand as I write this. In the hypothetical society he uses in the book (the one with the butcher and the baker), the flow of market information is indeed interpersonal (though he never explicitly states this, to my recollection) and therefore not only carries some level of trust, but is generally peer-to-peer. The state of 18th century news papers and marketing actually supports my point, which is a point that applies to any society with a high level of economic power asymmetry, not just to the modern era.
by pseudo0 | 2025-08-18 02:19:46+00:00
It's bad optics to build their own Hadrian's Firewall, so they are trying to bully foreign companies into compliance instead. If they want to go after the ad revenue, they would have to try to identify and prosecute the UK-based companies doing business with 4chan, and they will struggle to do that when they have no ability to subpoena 4chan for their business records.
by xanth | 2025-08-18 02:20:55+00:00
I was asking the same question today after investigating XTDB¹ (a Clojure centric bitemporal DB) and went looking for a batteries included WebAssembly framework like Blazor²

1. https://xtdb.com/

2. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...
by exmadscientist | 2025-08-18 02:21:37+00:00
Perhaps on a relative scale "most" fiction doesn't carry any sort of deeper meaning, but if you look at things like "Hugo or Nebula Award nominees" (to pluck out the SF/F genre as a category), I'd say that almost every single one of them, going back all those decades, has something more to say than just their straightforward text.

And unless reading is your day job or only hobby, that's a massive, massive corpus of interesting text. (In just one genre! There are more genres!) So on an absolute scale, there is so much fiction to read with more-than-surface-level meaning that I personally just don't understand why anyone would have the least interest in reading AI slop.

(I also don't have any real interest in most Kindle Unlimited works, probably for similar reasons. Though I am quite certain there are diamonds there, I've just not had particularly much time for/good luck at finding them.)
by tombert | 2025-08-18 02:22:47+00:00
I still use it. They finally fixed my biggest complaint about it a year ago, which is that you couldn't use vanilla Clojure lambdas for the Java functional interface, and so you'd have to reify that interface and it was bulky and ugly. Now it works fine so long as the interfaces actually have the @FunctionalInterface attribute.

Not every project uses @FunctionalInterface, but I've been trying to add it to places [1] [2] [3], and now I'm able to use Clojure in a lot more places.

[1] https://github.com/LMAX-Exchange/disruptor/pull/492

[2] https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/19234

[3] https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/19366
by x-complexity | 2025-08-18 02:24:37+00:00
> Isn’t that basically what the ARC tests are?

Reductively, yes.

IMO, the ARC tests & the visual pattern IQ tests (e.g. Raven's) have little difference, especially if the Raven tests require the taker to draw out the answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
by smelendez | 2025-08-18 02:27:54+00:00
We have an enormous K-12 administration level partly because we have so many local school districts, each of which typically needs to separately buy textbooks, serve food, apply for state and federal funding and handle compliance, run HR and physical plant operations and janitorial and IT, manage transportation, respond to inquiries from the public, etc.

It’s very hard politically to merge school districts because even beyond labor considerations, people have a sense that their district is superior to the one next door and think a merger will create immediate chaos and long term harm to their kids’ educations and their property values.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-08-18 02:28:19+00:00
You'd have to check specific models but for most of the existence of DSLRs China's been a bit player. High end bodies and lenses are typically still made in Japan, low end stuff got moved to Thailand and Taiwan.

If you're buying jet engines

Less efficient stuff is absolutely made in China and Russia. But high end engines for e.g. airliners are pretty much only made in the US and UK/France.
by raspasov | 2025-08-18 02:30:26+00:00
That’s a common misconception. JVM toolchain is way better than the hellscape that are most other language ecosystems. Maven, for example, works reliably and is rock-solid. The only unsolved problem is if you get two libraries/frameworks requesting another dependency, but with different incompatible versions. But I don’t think most other ecosystems solve that painlessly either.

Debug specifically is state-of-the-art. Look at YourKit, or any debugger included with common IDEs.

None of those tools has a shiny Visual 2025 aesthetic, but again, they work reliably and are going to work the same way a year from now.
by mvsingh | 2025-08-18 02:31:56+00:00
Hey you can try NextBunny.co - It’s a Visual UI builder that exports real Next.js code.That means if you’re building a Nextjs desktop app you can design your UI visually in our builder, export clean code, and drop it right into your project. You own the code no hidden runtimes, no lock in. And It's free to use.
by thedevilslawyer | 2025-08-18 02:32:29+00:00
We're at a key milestone in the IP wars; IP was inducted into our civilization to protect the few who had the ability to create.

This idea is well past it's due date. We should move to a liberal IP regime, with copyright strictly reduced to 7-10 years, with all works then entering public domain. Our society will universally thrive with the abundance that will come.

I understand and empathize that a class of vocations today will go away, but so did lamplighters. The roles may become extinct; but we will endure as a people.
by klodolph | 2025-08-18 02:34:16+00:00
I think of it less like the middle ground, and more like the best of the three

asciidoc > rst > markdown

It’s just that the available tooling goes the opposite way,

markdown tooling > rst tooling > asciidoc tooling

I end up using HTML for anything serious instead, because it has better tooling support than any of the three, and is also more flexible. It’s just more verbose, which is fine.
by WheelsAtLarge | 2025-08-18 02:34:24+00:00
This is good advice in general when it comes to decluttering. I'm one who has a hard time getting rid of stuff but I've yet to deal with any real problems because I got rid of it. The bottom line is that you can replace or ignore most clutter and no, most likely, you won't fix broken stuff or use clothing that does not fit and have ignored for years.

I know of a guy that had a bunch of boxes in the garage that sat unopened for a very long time after a move. He got all of them and sent them to the dump without opening them. He was better for it, got rid of a mess and never missed it.

The best thing you can do is hit delete.
by exmadscientist | 2025-08-18 02:34:31+00:00
Yes, the human-written stories that I guessed wrong about were the ones that seemed to have nothing to say. When the plot's stereotypical and trite, there's no subtext (difficult to do in flash, but not impossible; some can do it well), and it scans like anyone could have written it anywhere or anytime, well, that looks like AI.

(In that vein I am baffled how anyone could think the fourth story, especially, was anything but AI.)

(And, as well, the seventh story is interesting because it reads, to me, exactly like someone who's used to writing something longer trying to write flash. It doesn't land anything, it doesn't conclude, but it looks like if it had about twice the length it might be interesting. And it's got some dissonance from breaking with the usual demon-bargaining template. So I pegged that as human. Oops!)
Ask HN: RT video chat app with transaltion that works between the US AND China?
by iatemykindle | 2025-08-18 02:34:38+00:00
I'm trying to find an app that let's my daughter in the US speak with her grandparents in China. My daughter, who is only 4, only speaks English and her grand parents only speak Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese). Her grandparents aren't super tech savvy, so we've mostly tried video calls through we chat (with awkward very basic chinese/english).

If anyone has any recommendations on apps that work across the great firewall, recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
by phil21 | 2025-08-18 02:34:57+00:00
> PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid

Sounds low to me. What would the payment be on a multi-day (week?) capacity battery for your power draw if you financed it over it's useful lifetime?

Relatively wealthy homeowners using the grid as a subsidized battery are going to actually have to pay a proper amount for the privilege or the grid simply breaks.

That said, I am all for people being able to disconnect entirely from the grid if they so choose. But this means literally cutting the wires to your home. I don't agree with places that effectively outlaw this.

But if you want to be grid-tied, then you need to be paying for its upkeep and the amount of "idle" power generation on standby 24x7 in case you end up needing it with zero notice due to the sun not shining or your equipment failing. The only thing you should be saving money on is fuel costs, which is a fraction of the total price per kWh.

Backup power is expensive. The grid being so reliable for so long has made everyone forget this fact it seems.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-18 02:36:43+00:00
I agree and for reference I am a proponent of Trump-style tariffs convinced with Biden-style industrial policy.

I think rebuilding domestic capacity is critical, but we should not oversell the amount of jobs that can potentially be created.

Light manufacturing will never return to America - it's already begun leaving China and half of India by 2019, and left Mexico in the 2000s.

"Manufacturing" is a very broad and overloaded term, and the type of manufacturing matters, and the kind of high value manufacturing needed for the US is both highly automatable AND high skilled.