MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abeppu | 2025-08-02 16:42:31+00:00
You're basically saying that people who aren't social mistakenly view the rest of the world as not social because of their specific experience, but doesn't that effect also cut the other way? You're seeing people being social because you're going to those situations.

But there are time use surveys etc which provide a quantitative view of a lot of people. Because they're voluntary, they can't be a perfect representative sample of the overall population. But I think the broad, systematic view is still the best view we have of the overall trend. Also note that the scale and pace of the trend is slow enough that any individual _can't_ really provide an anecdotal view of it, because their own life is in a different place.

E.g. one source [1]:

> Atalay reports that, between 2003 and 2019, people spent an increasing amount of time alone. Over this 16-year period, the portion of free time people spent alone increased, on average, from 43.5 percent to 48.7 percent, representing an increase of over 5 percentage points.

Any given individual's time-use would probably change over 16 years regardless of what the population-level trends were just because that duration might also be the difference between e.g. being in school vs being married with young children or from being a busy professional to being a retiree.

[1] https://www.philadelphiafed.org/the-economy/macroeconomics/h...
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-02 16:42:56+00:00
I did that as a kid and I loved it, but it made sense when everyone was in bicycling distance.

Then one by one, we got cars and the friend groups shuffled from "Who is in bicycling range" to "Who is in driving range", and driving range is so big that it's not practical to drive 4 miles to my closest friend, knock on her door, hope she isn't having sex with her husband, and ask if she wants to chill
by haswell | 2025-08-02 16:42:58+00:00
Despite often being against the rules this is absolutely a thing all over Chicago during the warmer months.

Boozy picnics at the beaches, wine in plastic cups at the parks, etc. And fully sanctioned alcohol at the dozens of neighborhood street fests held throughout the year.

And it’s also a thing in suburbia, where backyard coolers full of beer are common at weekend gatherings.
by elicash | 2025-08-02 16:43:22+00:00
This post linked to a different article (former Bloomberg reporter) that said it expected this round to be at $750 million ($50 million above the previous valuation).

And so yes, that's significantly less than it ended up being, $1.1 billion, but I'm not sure it impacts the argument being made. Except that the multiple would be even greater!
by 9rx | 2025-08-02 16:43:25+00:00
You are seeing an environment that is highly conducive to a wage spiral, but so far wages haven't shown reactive enough to find that a spiral has set in. Comments like the above indicate that it wouldn't take much of a spark to see it ignite, though.

Granted, like a lot of things in economics, you can only tell in hindsight long after it has played out and the data is collected and analyzed, so it is also possible that the spiral is already underway and we just don't know it yet.
by Tade0 | 2025-08-02 16:43:53+00:00
The closest that I've gotten to this sort of arrangement was in a large cabin in the woods without electricity or running water where, signified by two shot glasses with rounded bottoms and a jug of moonshine passed around, there was always someone awake and tending to the property.

My task was to carry water so that it could later be heated for drinking/bathing (sponge-bathing really).

The location and (lack of) amenities served as a filter, so it's not something I think could be easily reproducible.
by monktastic1 | 2025-08-02 16:43:54+00:00
My assumption here is that FAANG employees are not fundamentally different from the rest of the populace along that particular dimension (desire to inflate lifestyle). I chose them in particular to demonstrate that even when we have the choice, we can easily opt not to take it. Of course many do not have that choice.

And yes, I agree with your second paragraph. "The culture" celebrates it — but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches. We all participate in our own little ways — and the more of us that step off the treadmill, the less those messages find footing, in a virtuous cycle. Again, it's not about blame. But for those of us who have the capacity and desire to decondition ourselves, it's very much worth doing. It can affect the feedback loop more powerfully than we think.
by DrillShopper | 2025-08-02 16:43:59+00:00
This is highly regional.

I live in the Midwest US. The city government sponsors floating (as in they move around, not that they're in water) beer gardens across public parks in the summer, and our local Lutheran and Catholic churches will run outdoor beer gardens and barbecues as a way to enjoy the nice weather and bring in a little money. The various state fairs also sell beer, and a local outdoor, public music festival goes through a staggering amount of alcohol consumed in public.

People are out in public, often with the authorities around, drinking beer and mixed drinks out of clear plastic cups (usually) and nobody cares. It's just a summer thing.
by Krasnol | 2025-08-02 16:44:03+00:00
It didn't become unacceptable. The general public does pay already.

What becomes more and more unacceptable is the way those who already have a lot avoid to participate in this collective maintenance.

Besides that, there are things you can't solve with money. Sure you can sand "a few people" to clean up a place but the fact that people didn't use the trash bins (if the community was able to afford some) won't go away. It will create more and more costs while the collective money to patch over this will get less and less.

There will be a point when it snaps and some will be surprised it did because their bubble was kept clean all the time. They paid extra for it and your kids are not allowed on the loan.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-02 16:44:26+00:00
You might be surprised to learn that many people in public parks are not, in fact, drinking water out of their water bottles or La Croix out of their La Croix cans.

Also, drinking in public is not allowed in much of Europe. Don’t go there and assume it is.

There are also many US locations and parks where alcohol is allowed.
by searls | 2025-08-02 16:45:34+00:00
I appreciate that Orta linked to my "Full-breadth Developers" post here, for two reasons:

1. I am vain and having people link to my stuff fills the void in my broken soul

2. He REALLY put in the legwork to document in a concrete way what it looks like for these tools to enable someone to move up a level of abstraction. The iron triangle has always been Quality, Scope, Time. This innovation is such an accelerant that that ambitious programmers can now imagine game-changing increases in scope without sacrificing quality and in the same amount of time.

For this particular moment we're in, I think this post will serve as a great artifact of what it felt like.
by bastawhiz | 2025-08-02 16:45:39+00:00
This neglects a few pretty fundamental problems.

First, it only works for APIs where a user is present. This doesn't work for APIs where your server is the client. Otherwise there's nobody to visit the "payment URL" that the author describes. If you did this on the server, you need to share the keys with all the machines in your fleet (so each machine doesn't get a payment URL when it boots), which feels just like an API key. And if the payment URL could be completed programmatically, it requires the server to provide a value given to you by the API vendor to note your identity as they understand it, which feels exactly like a bearer token.

But this is just OAuth in reverse. Instead of authing and getting a token, you generate a key and then auth. Either way you need to store a sensitive value. It's questionable where there's material benefit to not sending a bearer token over the wire (TLS works well).

Another problem is key management. Where in the flow do I tell the API what my device is? "This is my Pixel 9 Pro" isn't going to be a thing I'd expect to answer when going through the payment URL. So now I've got a public key registered and I lost my phone. I have to log into this API and tell them "yeah don't trust that key anymore." Which one? I suspect the best ux you can do is to just show the last time a key was used, which is unhelpful for users with multiple devices.

The B2B2C note at the bottom is just clown shoes. The servers simply aren't authing to each other (the payment URL has to go to the end user), as I noted above. And if a user needs to auth to every back and API that the app uses, that's kind of wild. Yes, you can do clever things with ZKPs but you can't solve the real UX problems here with more crypto. And that's assuming that all the back end APIs you're using fully support this scheme.

The last problem is an issue with invalidating key material. If I log into the vendor and say "My device was imaged while going through customs, don't trust this public key anymore", the server needs to remember that key forever to know that it's banned. You can't just delete the key. Consider: I mark the key as invalidated, then open my phone and use the app. It sends the bad key, which isn't recognized. I go through the payment URL and re-auth. That key is now active again on both my device and the image that was taken going through customs.

The only way to avoid this is for every key ever used is remembered until the end of time. If someone tries to use an invalid key, a separate response needs to be sent telling them the key is no longer allowed and to create a new one. Without that, the device can't possibly know if the user didn't auth in the payment URL yet, or if they authed and the key was invalidated (and a new one should be created).
by mikepurvis | 2025-08-02 16:45:51+00:00
I’m surprised there’d be a benefit to doing this in the JS vs having your database just return all the cases with the name and then you select which one you need at display time — basically in the same layer that’s populating your localized language templates.

That said I’m curious how this manifests with cross-language situations. I guess the Icelandic UI displaying French names would just always use the nomitive case, and likewise for the English UI displaying Icelandic names? I assume this all mostly matters where the user is directly being addressed, or perhaps in an admin panel (“user x responded to user y”).
by proof_by_vibes | 2025-08-02 16:46:06+00:00
Finally I find this argument. Agreed, and I'm baffled that people think that AI is what's going to "solve loneliness." Loneliness has already been solved by YouTube/Twitch. The brain is easily tricked into thinking that it is "being social" when it is subject to the effects of the parasocial relationships that are formed by these platforms. People's afternoons are rapidly becoming consumed by hours of YouTube where they come out of it with a brain telling them: "boy, that's enough social interaction for today!" Introversion has become an epidemic as a result.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-02 16:46:24+00:00
I don't understand why VSCode itself doesn't already have this, since it is silly to have to install 100 extensions to add this behavior to every different possible place that a string literal with an interior language could appear

I also suspect that unlike the JetBrains feature that does this (Language Injection), VSCode doesn't understand the code it just syntax highlights it. Meaning if we take the cited example and change it to the following, would VSCode turn it red?

example3: | # js console.ogl('wat")
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-08-02 16:46:45+00:00
She specifically talks about what happens next after raising that $100m. The higher valuation creating more urgency to be profitable, which could lead to a descent into Twitter-style outrage engagement stupidity, influencers, etc.

If she's wrong about anything, it's that you can assume enough people will leave a declining platform to keep it from staying alive.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-02 16:46:47+00:00
HN commenter: "On one hand I don't think you can apply a price to a human life, ... "

There was only one fatality

The "price" was $59M not $329M

"433465224","533","2025-08-01","","","2025-08-01.001","PAPERLESS Minute Entry for proceedings held before Judge Beth Bloom: Jury Trial completed on 8/1/2025. Deliberations continue. Jury verdict reached. Jury verdict published and polled. Verdict in favor of Plaintiffs.Total in compensatory damages as to Neima Benavides a Personal Rep. of the Estate of Naibel Benavides Leon: $59,000,000.Total in compensatory damages as to Dillon Angulo: $70,000,000.Total in Punitive Damages as to Neima Benavides and Dillon Angulo: $200,000,000. Total time in court: 5 hour(s) : 30 minutes. Attorney Appearance(s): Adam T. Boumel, Douglas Fredric Eaton, Brett Schreiber, Todd Poses, Thomas P. Branigan, Joel H. Smith, Wendy Frank Lumish, Hilarie Bass, Court Reporter: Yvette Hernandez, 305-523-5698 / Yvette_Hernandez@flsd.uscourts.gov. (ego) (Entered: 08/01/2025)","447817730","PACER Document","","","","533","","","","","","","","","","",""
by Aurornis | 2025-08-02 16:47:16+00:00
> You're seeing people being social because you're going to those situations.

No, I’m saying the same social activities are more popular now than they were 10-20 years ago.

I’ve been doing some of the same activities and going on some of the same hikes, bikes, runs, trails, and parks on and off for two decades. The popularity of these activities has exploded.

Even previously hidden trails and hikes are now very busy on Saturdays and Sundays because so many people are discovering them via social media.

If you’re just staying home and consuming doomerism news you’d think everyone else was doing the same.

> Over this 16-year period, the portion of free time people spent alone increased, on average, from 43.5 percent to 48.7 percent, representing an increase of over 5 percentage points.

That’s hardly equivalent to the claim above of a collapse of socialization.
by Nathanba | 2025-08-02 16:47:16+00:00
Real humans are also fake and they are also traps who are waiting to catch you when you say something they don't like. Then they also use every word and piece of information as ammunition against you, ironically sort of similar to the criticism always levied against online platforms who track you and what you say. AI robots are going to easily replace real humans because compared to most real humans the AI is already a saint. They don't have an ego, they don't try to gaslight you, they actually care about what you say which is practically impossible to find in real life.. I mean this isn't even going to be a competition. Real humans are not going to be able to evolve into the kind of objectively better human beings that they would need to be to compete with a robot.
by downut | 2025-08-02 16:47:23+00:00
Yeah, this is how you do it. Everybody pulls but the protected one. I've been in team time trial situations where we had to protect one (it me, but we won), even two, and goddam that pull through could be hard but I made it.

CFD simulation indicating leader is assisted by followers: http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/epn/2013102

Ah I see your cite shares the same lead author. Likely a better paper.
by _the_inflator | 2025-08-02 16:47:25+00:00
The article branches out to Glen Fisher and Dave Dixon, who were the first to develop a demo using this effect in 1980.

While modern demos easily outperform the early usages of retro tricks on any system, and this in itself is highly impressive and a feast of its own, I share the author's homage to the early discoverers.

My background is the C64, and I had my share of high-profile participation as a member of groups like Beastie Boys, X-Rated, for example.

To this day, I remember talking to first-time trickery explorers like Einstein of Upfront and Honey from 1001 Crew or Radwar back then and later on.

Especially Einstein was a nice chap. It seems so far away compared with today, but back then it was pretty normal to hang on a low-level computer like that with a TV CRC as a monitor, destroying your eyesight for 8 hours or longer with no interruption.

There was plenty of time, especially during the holidays. And the Scandinavians had an "unfair" advantage: hard winters with few sunny hours, so what else could you do than do stuff on a "breadbox"? ;)

We all had some schemes or sketches of effects on paper. It was pretty normal, what today is perceived as weird: having plenty of guilt-free and blame-free time, and utilizing pen and paper.

There wasn't any other option. Stuck? Well, no Google, etc. Calling someone else? Whom? And even then, at the time (80th), telephone calls were expensive, and especially calling someone in a different country was kind of novel and cost a fortune. So resort to - pen and paper. This was cheaper, but express delivery also costs you dearly.

Also, you had to come up with something in exchange for a bargain. And exactly this information sharing and this special mix of curiosity and need for discovery was a topic I remember fondly talking and marveling about with Einstein and some other coders.

Different times, easier times despite the Cold War, which loomed as background noise.
by LeftHandPath | 2025-08-02 16:47:41+00:00
The discussion of how the medium affects what you build reminds me a bit of The Beginner's Guide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginner's_Guide). If I recall, it had a bit of dialogue about how the game-creation tool made it easy to build straight, square corridors... And so the map had a lot of straight, squared corridors.

I don't really remember much of that game, but for some reason that part stuck with me. It's a good bite-sized insight into creativity (to be aware that constraints, while limiting, will also guide you).
by rahimnathwani | 2025-08-02 16:47:45+00:00
You said this in an earlier comment:

There are many paths to college, and they require neither membership in nor adherence to ideals professed by the Democratic party.

I have examples to show why I believe that to be incorrect.

I'm not saying that people have had to show adherence to (or loyalty to) the Democratic Party. But they have had to show support for positions and ideologies that are part of the Democratic Party's platform.

In your last paragraph, you dismiss Colin's complaint, without acknowledging the wrongness of the process that I outlined. Instead of seeking the best person for the job, the school made a list of people using race as one of the filtering criteria, and went down the last until someone accepted the job.

The fact you didn't engage with the major point I made here suggests you're more interested in winning an argument, than in furthering your or my understanding of the truth.

I am not interested in trying to win an argument. Your replies are not helping me to develop my thinking. So this will be my last reply.

Have a great day!
by lisper | 2025-08-02 16:48:40+00:00
No, I don't think that test-time compute is the same thing at all. It's a little challenging to find a definitive definition of TTC, but AFAICT it is just a fairly simple control loop around an LLM. What I'm describing is a merging of components with fundamentally different architectures, each of which is a significant engineering effort in its own right, to produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Those seem different to me, but to be fair I have not been keeping up with the latest tech so I could be wrong.
by dimal | 2025-08-02 16:49:28+00:00
They need to fix bugs first. For fucks sake, predictive text on the iOS keyboard regularly predicts non-grammatical words, and dictation is terrible. It’s ridiculous that AI is good enough to write sonnets and coherent code, yet Apple can’t even do autocomplete. Whisper has been available for forever, yet it’s still painful to enter text on iOS without a third party app.
by dguest | 2025-08-02 16:49:33+00:00
Our current economic model around AI is going to teach us more about psychology than fundamental physics. I expect we'll become more manipulative but otherwise not a lot smarter.

Funny thing is, AI also provides good models for where this is going. Years ago I saw a CNN + RL agent that explored an old-school 2d maze rendered in 3d. They found it got stuck in fewer loops if they gave it a novelty-seeking loss function. But then they stuck a "TV" which showed random images in the maze. The agent just plunked down and watched TV, forever.

Healthy humans have countermeasures around these things, but breaking them down is a now a bullion dollar industry. With where this money is going, there's good reason to think the first unarguably transcendent AGI (if it ever emerges) will mostly transcend our ability to manipulate.
by soulofmischief | 2025-08-02 16:49:34+00:00
You have to take into account the fact that rent and other necessities have exploded in relative cost.

In the eighties I might save up months or even 1-2 years for a nice television set, but my rent/mortgage, food, etc. was relatively inexpensive. Now, I can go buy 15-20 decent televisions a month for the same amount it costs me to pay my rent or mortgage here on a 0-2 bedroom place, and I live in a shithole backwoods state, not San Francisco.
by tomsmeding | 2025-08-02 16:49:59+00:00
The article describes that a government body is using this library to generate indictments. In that situation, you do not want something that is mostly usually correct. Indeed, they asked the author for a strict version that does not try to guess the declension of unknown names based on their suffix, presumably so that they can just not decline them, which is better than picking the wrong declension 0.05% of the time.
by LexiMax | 2025-08-02 16:52:41+00:00
> I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.

Were you and I reading the same thing? The post I was replying to was a pithy one sentence sentiment, which was a reply to another pithy one-sentence sentiment.

If anything, I wanted to elevate the conversation thread beyond that, and based on the size of the replies I got, I succeeded.
by mindwok | 2025-08-02 16:52:51+00:00
We, humanity, are on the verge of a question we’ve never had to answer before: what does it mean to be human, and do we even want to be? Because for the first time in history, we might be able to answer “no”.

In many major facets life we’re about to transcend the boundaries that have limited us since we started talking to each other. Health with ozempic and CRISPR, relationships with AI companions, entertainment with social media and AI generated content.

It’s a very interesting time to be human.
by godot | 2025-08-02 16:52:52+00:00
One thing that not enough people realize is that the gap between haves and have-nots widen in almost everything when technology advances, and I don't mean just wealth (that is one too), but also knowledge (LLM/AI widens knowledge gap between the curious and not-curious by a lot), and in this case socialization -- the availability of technology (in both organizing activities like your example and in AI loneliness like the article) widens the socialize and not-socialize people.

In the old days, not-socialize people tend to be forced to socialize anyway; but techonology enables them to not-socialize 99% of time now. Likewise, socialize people needed to put in more effort to socialize in the old days, but now it's easier than ever.

When more people realize this, the discourse should shift from "technology creates this trend" to "technology widens the gap between X and not-X".