MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lurking_swe | 2025-08-18 05:30:16+00:00
leading a healthy active lifestyle DOES improve the quality of your life.

Getting diabetes and injecting yourself daily with insulin is not a quality life.

Having trouble walking or playing with your grandkids because one is too fat and has ruined their joints is also not quality.

Having a miserable last 10-20 years of life due to a stroke is also not quality.

These things don’t mysteriously happen. :) Being able to take care of yourself into old age is the biggest gift you can give yourself. Why? It reduces your suffering as much as possible. But nothing is guaranteed of course.

Personal story time…growing up my parents barely valued their health. Mom and dad were fat for years. My dad had a stroke at 65 and he’s struggling with symptoms 10 years later. My mom got seriously ill at 60 from years of mismanaged diabetes, and was in and out of the hospital for 3 years before dying of a heart attack. She ate a lot of cookies though - quality life achieved?

In contrast my in laws walk 10k+ steps daily, eat healthy, and exercise. They’ve been doing it for years. They are almost 70, travel all the time, and keep up with their grand kids no problem! They themselves are doing better than their parents, who suffered from early onset dementia and high blood pressure.

Just my opinions as someone that’s seen 2 very different approaches to “living”. I try not to obsess over it, but i certainly make sure my BMI is low and make sure my blood sugar is excellent. I’ll do anything to avoid going through what my parents did. I plan to enjoy my 60s and 70s!
by unignorant | 2025-08-18 05:30:37+00:00
I'm not sure I agree that the human stories felt original. I was pretty unimpressed with all of the stories except maybe 6, and even that one dealt in some common tropes. 5 had fewer tropes than 6 (and maybe as a result of that received the highest average scores from his readers) but I could tell from the style it was AI
by jibal | 2025-08-18 05:30:48+00:00
typos (from a quick surface scan; I'm not familiar with Clojure or this package):

"The description arity takes the current state ..." should be "The transition arity takes the current state ..."

"excepiton" should be "exception"

"Exceptions thrown from the transition or transform arities, the exception ..." should be "If exceptions are thrown from the transition or transform arities, they ..."

"provded" should be "provided"
by Caligatio | 2025-08-18 05:31:23+00:00
SmarterEveryDay has a whole series[1] on manufacturing that covers how the US is losing/lost the ability to create tooling. I believe the "Smarter Scrubber" episode[2] is the one that explicitly talks about how not only has the US lost manufacturing capacity but it also lost the ability to spin up manufacturing. The tool and die episode also touches on it[3].

[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XUZ3azgCNyawIQ5... [2] https://youtu.be/GDzBE6vz5r0 [3] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-18 05:32:03+00:00
Really?

Let’s look at NYC.

https://www.nyclu.org/data/stop-and-frisk-data

> While comparatively fewer stops occurred during the de Blasio administration – nearly 135,000 – enormous racial disparities have persisted every year. In 2022, the first year of the Adams administration, the NYPD made over 15,000 stops, reversing the downward trend of stops occurring during the de Blasio years. In 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, the NYPD made over 25,000 stops, a fifty percent increase from 2023 and the largest number of stops since 2014

https://policeviolencereport.org/

But Democrats still want us to sing old negro spirituals in the street like “We shall overcome” and pray that we can change hearts and minds.
by chasil | 2025-08-18 05:32:10+00:00
It is not freezing, it is vitrifying.

If ice crystals form, then cell walls are destroyed. The water must not expand as it cools. It must become an amorphous solid, a glass.

Making this happen, reversibly, will need heat to manage stress.

I can't imagine how much more complex brain vitrification will be. Hearts are far less challenging.
by dahart | 2025-08-18 05:32:29+00:00
On the contrary, we absolutely need variety, we people to study weird things, we can’t all be doctors and lawyers. No idea what “bizarre ideologies” you’re referring to but generally speaking, lack of education combined with polarizing politics, propaganda, and misinformation are a risk that is orders of magnitude larger than having an educated populace. Why does it matter if every single degree is perfectly relevant? What evidence is there that we need to be selective, or worry about and try to ensure value? How do you define value? Sounds like the Nirvana Fallacy. When it comes to research, thinking this way often reduces positive outcomes; we have to risk and allow failures in order to capture the bigger breakthroughs. Not just true in research, but true in business too. Why would you think education is any different? Plus, people are already quite self selective for the high paying jobs on average, and there are countries that pay for education and have higher per capita GDP than the US, like Iceland and Norway. Education and research already provides a return to the economy of multiples on investment. There’s no demonstrated economic need to try to exert control over it.
by throwaway290 | 2025-08-18 05:33:23+00:00
You don't seem to understand the idea:

For internet security, you get everyone hack you from north koreans and beyond.

For house and car security it depends on what crime is in your location and how police work. Some places have almost zero so people literally don't care to lock doors. Some places need locks to stop opportunists. Some places you need electric fences and 24/7 security with guns and keep valuables in safes to hopefully slow down their removal until security comes. It's not comparable to cyber
by jijijijij | 2025-08-18 05:35:16+00:00
Estradiol isn’t very well studied. It may be used for a few years in menopause, only in rare cases off-label, otherwise. Scientific and commercial interest seems pretty non existent. Probably because patentable synthetic derivatives historically fared worse risk-wise, than bioidentical estrogens, and the market outside of menopause issues is too small. Research on trans people, who would make interesting study subjects for hormonal matters, just got outlawed in the US.

Hormonal contraceptives typically do not contain estradiol, but ethinylestradiol and/or progestins.
by jjani | 2025-08-18 05:35:49+00:00
No, that's not the real answer at all, it's anything but.

You have no idea just how much revenue Google et. al make from e.g. the EU. The shareholders would absolutely eat Google alive for just walking away from many billions of dollars rather than just complying. I've said this here before:

> A point we're still lightyears away from. The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China.

> What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.

> Apple's estimated operating profit from the EU is around $40 billion dollars. If the US government wouldn't get involved, they could force Tim Apple himself to live on top of the Alps and he'd happily do it rather than lose that $40 billion, or shareholders would vote him out ASAP.

You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech.

>We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR.

So you do "% of global revenue", "gatekeeper/minimum size applicability" and so on. Absolutely trivial stuff, this has been figured out ages ago.
by ryandv | 2025-08-18 05:37:39+00:00
> The thing about race is that it has no biological justification.

> It's a powerful social construct.

This is 100% correct, and yet progressive academics have yet to figure out how to slot this fact into their ideology without creating incorrigible inconsistencies.

For instance - if race is a social construct just like gender, why is transracialism frowned upon, while transgenderism is lauded? Quoting Richard Dawkins, famous debunker of Creationist and religious bullshit [0]:

Why is a white woman vilified and damned if she identifies as black, but lauded if she identifies as a man? That's topsy-turvy, because race really is a continuum, whereas sex is one of the few genuine binaries of biology.

The most coherent (but unsatisfying) answer I have found in the literature is that society has "intersubjectively" agreed to accept transgenderism and not transracialism, where "intersubjectively" ultimately translates to some level of "because we said so and this is society's new fanfiction head canon:" [1]

What matters, then, is that intersubjectively we have all agreed that ancestry is relevant to the determination of one’s race.

It's worth noting that intersubjectivity is basically a religious concept, as defined in the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. [2]

There is no science or biology on the far LGBTQ+ progressive left. Only pseudoscience and apologetics befitting of a Creationist.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cubkdBuvJAQ

[1] https://philpapers.org/archive/TUVIDO.pdf

[2] https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_9182
by jjani | 2025-08-18 05:38:04+00:00
For GDPR they already are, it should indeed be made to be the same for anti-competitiveness laws.

https://gdpr.eu/fines/

> The less severe infringements could result in a fine of up to €10 million, or 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.

> These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.

And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".
by GarnetFloride | 2025-08-18 05:38:11+00:00
Pilot had been reporting things like that for years but nobody would believe them because they weren't "trained observers", until a pilot caught it on film in the 80's.

Same with sailors, who've been repairing rogue waves for centuries, but it wasn't until it was recorded scientifically on an oil rig that scientists took it seriously.

Still an awesome picture.
by joaompinto | 2025-08-18 05:39:56+00:00
Spiral-Bench is a fascinating new benchmark that tests how LLMs handle manipulative users and delusional thinking. Rather than traditional safety evaluations, it measures sycophancy and the tendency to reinforce harmful delusions through 20-turn simulated conversations.

The methodology is clever: an LLM role-plays as a suggestible "seeker" personality who trusts the AI assistant, while the tested model doesn't know it's a simulation. A judge model then scores protective behaviors (pushback, de-escalation) vs risky ones (sycophancy, delusion reinforcement, consciousness claims).

Current leaderboards show interesting patterns - some top models struggle significantly with sycophancy, while others excel at maintaining boundaries. The GitHub repo is open source, and the team behind EQ-Bench has solid credentials in AI evaluation.

This seems particularly relevant given recent discussions about AI assistants that agree too readily with users' conspiracy theories or harmful beliefs. The benchmark essentially tests whether models will prioritize being "helpful" over being truthful and safe.

What do you think - does this capture the right aspects of AI safety? Are there edge cases the benchmark might miss?
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-18 05:40:58+00:00
> reST is more feature-complete and extension-friendly, but it is simply unusable for me because it wasn't designed for agglutinative languages like Korean.

How does whether you think of the language as agglutinative affect the usability of reST?

The biggest problem that occurs to me is that there isn't really a conceptual difference between an "agglutinative" language in which you have very long words expressing complex meanings, and an "isolating" language in which the same syllables occur in the same order with the same meaning but are thought of on a Platonic level as being all independent words.

This is because an "agglutinative" language is one in which syntax markers are more or less independent of any other syntax markers that may apply to the same word†, which means it's always possible by definition to consider those markers to be "words" themselves.

Would your problems be solved if you viewed what you had considered "long" Korean words as instead being several short words in a row? What difficulties does agglutination present?

† Compare: https://glossary.sil.org/term/agglutinative-language

> An agglutinative language is a language in which words are made up of a linear sequence of distinct morphemes and each component of meaning is represented by its own morpheme.

https://glossary.sil.org/term/isolating-language

> An isolating language is a language in which almost every word consists of a single morpheme.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-18 05:41:08+00:00
Even before AI came on the scene as early as 2016 I saw that programming was becoming an undifferentiated commodity whether it was web development, full stack development, mobile, etc.

Unless you were doing something extremely specialized and that comp was plateauing in most tier 2 cities doing enterprise corporate dev that most developers do.

I started focusing on system design, organizational change strategy, cloud, and becoming more involved with how technology can be used to bring business value.

I am not saying “learn cloud”. That’s table stakes and not a differentiator. I’m saying learn something well enough to be strategic and not just a ticket taker.

If you look at the leveling guidelines of any tech company, you don’t get passed a mid level IC based on “I codez real gud”. It’s based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity. It might be phrased a different way. But it all boils fish to that.
by dkga | 2025-08-18 05:41:31+00:00
In 1995 or 1997, can't remember which, I flew from Belo Horizonte to Miami (if the former) or NYC (latter). When we were flying over what I think is the Caribbean, I recall seeing "upward lightnings". They were absolutely majestic. I was absolutely awaken. I don't remember much else as I was a kid but seeing this text made me come back to this beautiful memory.
by breuleux | 2025-08-18 05:42:54+00:00
The only one I was fairly sure was human was #6, and that was the only one I kinda enjoyed. In any case, as someone who reads a good deal, I agree. I didn't think any of the stories was particularly great (not enough to bother ranking them, beyond favourite) so I don't care all that much about the result.

> AI can do much better than what is posted above for flash if given more sophisticated prompting.

How sophisticated, compared to just writing the thing yourself?
by exmadscientist | 2025-08-18 05:43:00+00:00
I was disappointed that the results shown didn't break things down a bit more between star ratings given and authorship guesses. I didn't think any of these stories were amazing flash fiction, and I think that's relevant here. I'm curious to know what people who liked them all, or at least really liked one of them, had to say on judging AI-vs-human.
by colinsane | 2025-08-18 05:43:13+00:00
on the commerce front, it's really easy to find small-to-medium size vendors who accept Bitcoin for just about any category of goods now.

on the legal front, there's been some notable "wins" for cryptocurrency advocates: e.g. the U.S. lifted its sanctions against Tornado Cash (the Ethereum anonymization tool) a few months ago.

on the UX front, a mixed bag. the shape of the ecosystem has stayed remarkably unchanged. it's hard to build something new without bridging it to Bitcoin or Ethereum because that's where the value is. but that means Bitcoin and Ethereum aren't under much pressure to improve _themselves_. most of the improvements actually getting deployed are to optimize the interactions between institutions, and less to improve the end-user experience directly.

on the privacy front, also a mixed bag. people seem content enough with Monero for most sensitive things. the appetite for stronger privacy at the cryptocurrency layer mostly isn't here yet i think because what news-worthy de-anonymizations we have are by now being attributed (rightly or wrongly) to components of the operation _other_ than the actual exchange of cryptocurrency.
by ido | 2025-08-18 05:43:39+00:00
> I'm willing to take a 20% pay cut at this point for a chance to actually ship things at a small company.

Unfortunately the pay cut might be a lot bigger than 20%. I've seen people have "the same job" where one gets paid $300k p.a. at FAANG and another $60k at a small company (while getting a lot more done).
by jrvarela56 | 2025-08-18 05:43:59+00:00
The problem is that the term itself is not clearly defined. Then, we discuss 'what will it do once it arrives' so all bets are off.

You're right that I probably disagree as to what AGI is and what it will do once "we're in the way". My assumption is that we'll be replaced just like labor is replaced now, just faster. The difference between humans and the equine population is that we humans come up with stuff we 'need' and 'the market' comes up with products/services to satisfy that need.

The problem with inequality is that the market doesn't pay much attention to needs of poor people vs rich people. If most of humanity becomes part of the 'have nots' then we'll depend on the 0.1%-ers to redistribute.
by jongjong | 2025-08-18 05:45:47+00:00
This article is highly relatable. IMO, everything is done better in startup land except one single thing; enterprise people are willing to concede that everything is complex. This is the one piece of wisdom that enterprise people understand (and often abuse to maximize their billable hours).

Startup people tend to neglect complexity and repeatedly underestimate the harm which comes as a result of 'cutting corners'. The hilarious thing is that once in a millennia, a hot startup like Facebook comes along and grows at such an incredible rate, that they can basically get away with cutting all corners... Proving the exception, not the rule; most startups who try this same approach invariably go out of business because it turns out that technical debt is actually very expensive; not every company can afford throwing hundreds of highly paid engineers at the problem of refactoring a code base over and over... Not every startup can afford to rewrite an entire PHP engine from scratch to achieve a modest speedup.

But the thing which is funny about this is that a startup like Facebook/Meta attracts so much attention that everyone is clamoring for their advice... Literally, everyone wants to take advice about reality from a company whose experience of reality is unlike that of any other company which has ever existed or will ever exist in the foreseeable future... I do believe that the average entrepreneur has more to learn about startups and software development from a bum on the streets of San Francisco than from a tech exec.
by throwaway290 | 2025-08-18 05:47:44+00:00
> And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".

It's have friends in the party or just roll over and do as we say. The "letter" does not matter. Remember the letter literally says there's freedom of speech there. And why did Google leave? Haha.
by unignorant | 2025-08-18 05:48:00+00:00
For flash you can get much better results by asking the system to first generate a detailed scaffold. Here's an example of some metadata you might try to generate before actually writing the story: genres the story should fit into; pov of the story; high level structure of the story; list of characters in the story along with significant details; themes and topics present in the story; detailed style notes

From there you have a second prompt to generate a story that follows those details. You can also generate many candidates and have another model instance rate the stories based on both general literary criteria and how well the fit the prompt, then you only read the best.

This has produced some work I've been reasonably impressed by, though it's not at the level of the best human flash writers.

Also, one easy way to get stuff that completely avoids the "smell" you're talking about by giving specific guidance on style and perspective (e.g., GPT-5 Thinking can do "literary stream-of-consciousness 1st person teenage perspective" reasonably well and will not sound at all like typical model writing).
by marxism | 2025-08-18 05:48:21+00:00
Yes you can self host the relay server (and please do so!). If you are like me and already have Mac Mini in a closet running docker, k3s, or just have a friend group kubernetes cluster, you can get it running in about 3 minutes.

https://happy.engineering/docs/guides/self-hosting/

https://github.com/slopus/happy-server

There is a Dockerfile, plus a docker-compose.yaml, and a complete Kubernetes template as well.
by yorwba | 2025-08-18 05:51:00+00:00
Since it only needs to classify the result as one of "fixed", "structured" or "arbitrary", it doesn't matter what the value of "another_variable" is, you'll always be in the same state at the end. Finite state transducers can handle an infinite number of possibilities with a finite number of states just fine.

It's a bit strange though that the author constructs the FST to only recognize a finite list of strings. Probably some of the matching logic that could have been part of the FST is pushed into the normalizer instead.
by togetheragainor | 2025-08-18 05:51:18+00:00
That person didn't address the current climate in academia at all. Their examples of "contrarians" are all long-dead professors whose papers were published many decades ago in a different academic climate. That doesn't refute that academia in America has suffered ideological capture since, and questioning the "scientific consensus" on certain politically-charged topics is career suicide.

Also their Japan example seems poor. Japan remains a short a country relative to their prosperity. They're several centimeters shorter than a country with a similar GDP per capita, like Czech Republic. They're about the same average height as Somalians, despite having significantly better food security and a GDP per capita that's over 50 times higher.
by bboreham | 2025-08-18 05:52:23+00:00
Very detailed and accurate description. The author clearly knows way more than I do, but I would venture a few notes:

1. In the cloud, it can be difficult to know the NUMA characteristics of your VMs. AWS, Google, etc., do not publish it. I found the ‘lscpu’ command helpful.

2. Tools like https://github.com/SoilRos/cpu-latency plot the core-to-core latency on a 2d grid. There are many example visualisations on that page; maybe you can find the chip you are using.

3. If you get to pick VM sizes, pick ones the same size as a NUMA node on the underlying hardware. Eg prefer 64-core m8g.16xlarge over 96-core m8g.24xlarge which will span two nodes.