MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toss1 | 2025-08-14 14:09:28+00:00
Got it. So in your world, everything where you don't get the best service for the cheapest price is extortion because you think you are entitled to that.

Paying extra for expedited service is standard almost everywhere. Next you'll be telling us FedEx is extortionist because they charge 5X to deliver a package before 10AM tomorrow instead of before 8PM three days from now. "They're still just putting the box on a plane and truck and dropping it off...". And because UPS and USPS also charge more for faster service, they are a colluding cartel extorting everyone, along with your states' Business Bureau (or whatever it's called), and the US Passport service which also charges iirc $150 extra for an expedited passport.

Due Process is not extortion because 1) it is a standard process based on fairness to arrive at the cost or penalty, and 2) it is THE SAME for everyone. The legislature decided on a process, presumably with input from their bureaus that it required X extra work to expedite, and came up with $200.

If it was extortion, it would be the worker at the desk saying" I'm the only one on duty today, and you need it today, pay me (sticks finger in wind) $450 for expedited service".

Learn the actual meanings of concepts before you use them Sheesh
by ghaff | 2025-08-14 14:09:30+00:00
One can come up with plenty of criticisms of Kodak. But they did sell off their chemical business when the selling was reasonably good and they did do a fair number of things that anticipated digital.

But you can't just yank out the carpet from a massive consumables business that basically underpinned a company's revenue and profits almost overnight and reasonably expect them to deal with it.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-14 14:09:56+00:00
> Does that make it a sin?

Yes the ten commandments are very much what defines sins.

> "One protestant preacher said" is not proof of what the Catholic Church believes.

Yes. From the Catholic Catechism: https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/secti...

> 2125 Since it rejects or denies the existence of God, atheism is a sin against the virtue of religion.
by nirui | 2025-08-14 14:09:57+00:00
Interestingly, or rather disappointingly, it looked like the "Fear-Mongering Marketing" is actually working.

YouTube creator ColdFusion recently uploaded a video titled "Gen Z Graduates Are in Crisis" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVc2ZhECTMg), which is about the impact of AI against Gen Zs. In it he talked about how AI is worsening job market.

I'm thinking, since the AI marketers are hyping up AI tools, maybe it has created an illusion that worker might not be needed in the near future, then it propagated outward like that. Considering how sluggish the job market already was, it's not surprising things could went on like this.

My guess is, it will continue the trend, until the moment the bubble pops, if the bubble is not just a joke.

But then I looked at how many people are paying for AI tools right now...

HR paying AI tools to read resume, job seeker paying AI tools to write resume; teacher paying AI tools to review homeworks, student paying AI tools to write homework; Academic journals paying AI tools to scan for cheats, paper factories paying AI tools to "optimize" their "paper"... Oh, and people vibe coding their project on GitHub, etc etc.

Well, at least for now it's fun to watch how things are panning out. Give yourself some laughter before the pain comes.
by pessimizer | 2025-08-14 14:10:08+00:00
Joining lwn makes you a gatekeeper for lwn (and allows you to browse and comment on lwn), it doesn't simply allow you to be a reader of lwn. I'm sure their traffic has almost no relationship to their number of subscribers. Subscribers are just the people actively marketing the journalism. It's like a two-level pyramid scheme - you're spreading their journalism and looking smart, and 1/500 of the people you send it to become new subscribers.
by mlyle | 2025-08-14 14:10:14+00:00
> but it beats paying $50 per month for the service OP's post links to.

I used this with my kids.

The $50 a month to make it easy is worth it for many people, and is downright cheap compared to many approaches.

Now, there's other options-- Khan is also great and free. But always having a bite-sized chunk to do, immediate feedback, spaced repetition, etc-- it's pretty good.
by LargeWu | 2025-08-14 14:10:33+00:00
I think that what they're saying is because inflation numbers are typically presented as an annual number (3.3%), when you hear a number like 0.9% it sounds lower to somebody who is not economically literate.

"Prices increased 0.9% in July, which would translate to an annual inflation rate of 11.3%" is one way to say it with more clarity.

Also, Trump has a habit of picking numbers out of context when they suit his personal narrative. For example, not long ago he said something like "The price of gas is down to $1.98 per gallon" when in fact that that number was something along of the lines of the wholesale price. So it's no wonder people are misinformed when they get misleading economic information.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-14 14:10:39+00:00
Are you asking about open problems? Here are a couple:

There are strong arguments that deep learning generalization (and robustness in a slightly different sense) can be successfully explained in terms of PAC-Bayes theory, for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02113

This requires a strong understanding of the appropriate prior, which effectively quantifies implicit bias in the training setup / architecture setup. Early analyses suggest the bias is that of a minimal gradient norm (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.12176) but this is almost certainly not the case, e.g.(https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06398). There are good empirical arguments that models are trained to achieve maximal compression (https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13609). But we only know this in a vague sense. How are deep learning training procedures and architectures implicitly exhibiting this form of sparsity and compressing information? Why is this more effective for some optimizers/architectures than others? Why would minimum description length circuits be so effective at mimicking human intelligence? How does this form of regularisation induce the exponents in the neural scaling laws (so we can figure out how to best optimize for these exponents)? If we don't know the implicit bias and how it relates to the training procedure, we're just doing alchemy and effectively got lucky. Change the standard approach even slightly and things easily break. We only really know what to do by process of elimination.

Then there are the LLM specific questions related to in-context learning (https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.00297), to help explain why next token prediction through transformer designs works so well. Does it implicitly act as an optimization procedure (with bias) relative to the context? What are the biases here? What is the problem being solved?

These may sound specific, but they are just examples of some approaches to answer the big question of "why does this standard procedure work so well, and what can we do to make it work better". Without this, we're just following the heuristics of what came before without a guiding framework.

Post-hoc, we can do a lot more with interpretability frameworks and linear probes and the like. But without the implicit biases, we are only getting a local picture, which doesn't help us understand what a model is likely to do before we run it. We need global information.

These are just a few, and don't include the philosophical and theory of mind questions, and others from neuroscience...
by atmosx | 2025-08-14 14:11:03+00:00
The European Union has, in practice, lacked genuine free movement of people across internal borders for some time (I went through complete and very aggressive border control entering France via airplane three years ago). Schengen arrangements have been curtailed in Germany[^1]. Part of the challenge is that Europeans appear out of touch with rapidly changing realities (I say this as a European). Additionally, some argue that the European Parliament is operating under an unofficial coup[^2].

The rearmament initiative is particularly concerning. Over the past three years, communities in Italy, Spain, Greece, and Germany have been devastated by flooding, wildfires, etc. Rather than prioritizing investment in resilient infrastructure, leaders are channeling resources into rearmament to confront Russia and China (or so they say - since they are acting as clowns anyway no one really pays attention). My concern is that these weapons may ultimately be used by Europeans against one another; It happened twice already.

[^1]: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/temporary-border-controls-to...

[^2]: https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-europe-...
by Ukv | 2025-08-14 14:11:07+00:00
> AI might replicate human decisions without improving on them, carrying forward the same biases

Definitely true that by default models have the same biases as the data they're trained on, but I think one nice property is that you can directly test counterfactuals. If you have a case with a Black defendant, you can check if the judgement would've been different had the defendant been white.

That's not the be-all-and-end-all cure for bias/discrimination, but it is something useful that we can't really do with human decision-makers.

> He claims that human consciousness enables us to perceive certain truths – such as those Gödel showed to be unprovable within formal systems – in ways that no algorithmic process can replicate.

To my understanding it's not that there are some fixed statements which we can see are true but no formal systems can, but rather that Gödel statements are constructed for a specific system and can be proven fine by other systems. Humans aren't immune to the same trick: can you prove "You cannot prove this statement" or its inverse? You have to give up consistency or completeness (or both) in your reasoning, which silicone-based systems can just as carbon-based systems do.
by vel0city | 2025-08-14 14:11:14+00:00
Also, the list prices for tuition and what the average student actually pays out of pocket in the end can be two very different figures after grants and scholarships come into play.

And yes, absolutely, $80k a year in tuition is a massive outlier. Average in-state university tuition is closer to $12k-13k/yr, before grants and scholarships. The extreme majority of US undergraduates aren't shelling out $80k/yr for tuition payments.
by stripe_away | 2025-08-14 14:13:15+00:00
> in "medieval" times people also went to church a lot where someone lectured you from a book,

The idea of church as "someone lecturing you from a book" describes only a few christian denominations, few of which were active/existant in medieval times.

I agree that many churches in the US are "20 minutes singing followed by a 1 hour sermon", which is what you describe, but there are also many denominations where the focus is on the liturgy and the sermon is a side note.

liturgy is basically a spiritual practice you do as a group.

say that week's prayer (from the prayer book)

read the psalm, call-and-response (so the congregation is talking half the time)

say the confession of sins

say the Lords prayer

someone reads 1-2 sections from the bible

a quick sermon

eucharist/communion
by mlinhares | 2025-08-14 14:14:18+00:00
I'd take the people over the work anytime, the best places i've ever worked at are the places where the people are great to work with, even the slog/bureaucratic work is still good when you have people that are great at what they do and are fun to be around.

Varies a lot where you are on your career as well, i'd never take a job that pays less or is "startupy" at this point in my life, i'm here to make money now and not dream about some future that will likely not happen (worked at multiple startups that led to nothing).

So i'd recommend people to mostly forget passion and think about what you want in your life and your job. I find passion in all things extremely overrated, what you need is love, steady, consistent and reassuring. And don't forget sentiments don't pay bills, money does.
by faangguyindia | 2025-08-14 14:14:19+00:00
this is something people do not understand.

If model trusts the users, and if user is dumb model will "weigh" user's input much higher and end up with flawed code.

If the model is more independent, it will find the right solution. If just want a dumb model which says yes to everything, and follows you when u are not at smart enough then you'll never end up with good solution if not by luck.
by mlyle | 2025-08-14 14:15:45+00:00
IMO it's scaffolded and explained a bit more than an average mathematics lesson, though teachers vary a lot.

There's a whole lot of "here's the formula" and not so much "here's the derivation" in most classrooms.

The math classes that I taught: I tried to do a lot more of the why, either rigorously or using proof by gesticulation. But there were still absolutely times that I just handed something over and was like "do this, for now."
by bluGill | 2025-08-14 14:15:52+00:00
There is a difference between how you meet your future spouse and how you live after you have a family.

though even then work is the worst place to meet someone even though it often happens (and often works). Your company doesn't hire for the values you demand to share as a family. If your company has problems you both are in the same worry at the same time. And your company is very limitied as to the number of people you could meet.
by bigfishrunning | 2025-08-14 14:15:55+00:00
I think the problem with these laws is that they're too general. I think we can all agree that there are topics that should not be in elementary school libraries -- I don't think my 7 year old needs to be reading about oral sex for instance, regardless of the gender or sexuality of the participants. The real problem is the nature of the wording of "pornographic", which is poorly defined as "I know it when i see it", and stretched by disingenuous people with an agenda.

As a "Free Speech Absolutionist", I think as much material as possible should be in public libraries, including material that some people object to. I also think that school libraries should be curated to what is appropriate for the audience. The rub here is defining what is "appropriate". Silencing minority literature is bad. Also allowing my elementary school kids to check out "the turner diaries" is bad. There needs to be a balance.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-14 14:15:55+00:00
Well, I mean, there is the option of, hear me out here, just not allowing the chatbots to do 'erotic roleplay' with children. That would, er, seem like the fairly obvious option to most reasonable people, I would think. Facebook appears to have instead opted to affirmatively permit it (though note that they reversed course on this once called out on it).
by brunohaid | 2025-08-14 14:16:14+00:00
Maybe that'll help them hire someone who can at least respond to S2 API key requests...

Being open is great, but if over the course of 6 months 3 different entities (including 2 well known universities) apply and send more than a dozen follow ups to 3 different "Reach out to us!" emails with exactly 0 response, the "open" starts sounding like it's coming from Facebook.
by qwertylicious | 2025-08-14 14:16:39+00:00
Sure, when applied thoughtfully and judiciously.

Look back. At no point did I suggest AI should be banned or outlawed. My remedy for washing machines burning down houses isn't to ban washing machines. It's to ensure there are appropriate incentives in place (legal, financial, reputational) to encourage private industry to consider the potential negative externalities of what they're doing.
What is the learning curve for using generative AI effectively?
by eimrine | 2025-08-14 14:16:40+00:00
I've never used this tool other than the demos, but I want to buy an account. I'm going to implement ideas for software products that I've been dreaming about for a long time. What should I consider before buying? Maybe there is already some literature or at least block posts on this topic? I heard that it generates great code, but on the condition that the TOR will be several times longer than the generated code.
by rkomorn | 2025-08-14 14:17:02+00:00
I'm certainly not challenging anything you're writing, because I only have a very distant understanding of deep learning, but I do find the question interesting.

Isn't there a bit of a defining line between something like tic-tac-toe that has a finite (and pretty limited for a computer) set of possible combinations where it seems like you shouldn't need a training set that is larger than said set of possible combinations, and something more open-ended where the impact of the size of your training set mainly impacts accuracy?
by ogkai | 2025-08-14 14:17:02+00:00
I am building a project tracking tool. Users needed. Much love.

SHIPSTREAKS_PRO_2025 (100 uses) - Expires Dec 2025 BUILD_IN_PUBLIC_PRO (50 uses) - Expires Jun 2025 EARLY_BUILDER_PRO (25 uses) - Expires Mar 2025 CREATOR_PRO_ACCESS (75 uses) - Expires Sep 2025 DEVELOPER_PRO_2025 (100 uses) - Expires Dec 2025
by sleepyguy | 2025-08-14 14:17:28+00:00
>Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc.

Ask Ukraine how that worked out for them. While your at it, tell the Baltics they should focus on society and not the Russian world that is coming for them.
by apwell23 | 2025-08-14 14:17:38+00:00
When you land at O’Hare from an international flight, you are physically and legally already in the United States the moment the aircraft touches down on U.S. soil (or waters).

U.S. law applies in the airport terminal, on the jet bridge, and in the customs/immigration area.

The idea that you’re in “no country” until you pass through immigration is more of a metaphorical or procedural concept, not a literal legal one.
by bananapub | 2025-08-14 14:17:46+00:00
not very on topic, but for those who missed one of the more surreal reddit threads in history:

- [MA] Post-it notes left in apartment [0]

- and the update from OP a while later [1]

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34l7vo/ma_post...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/49zfvb/what_is_t...
Show HN: Eternal Vault, E2EE Estate Platform Using Shamir's Secret Sharing
by ghostfoxgod | 2025-08-14 14:17:52+00:00
Built Eternal Vault to solve a widespread problem of digital assets being lost or inaccessible with proper cryptography.

Technical approach:

- Client-side AES-256 encryption (plaintext master key never leaves device)

- Shamir's Secret Sharing for access control (3-of-3 threshold)

- Zero-knowledge architecture

- Trust levels distribute key shares to family members

Security model:

- Everything encrypted before network transmission

- Can't decrypt user data even if we wanted to

The problem: Over $200 billion in inaccessible assets worldwide¹, including $140+ billion in lost Bitcoin alone². Government data shows billions in dormant accounts unreachable by families across multiple countries³. 76% of people have no digital estate plan.

What it does:

- Secure storage for wills, passwords, photos, documents

- Smart family access controls with trust levels

- Gamified legacy building with guided checklists

- Business continuity features

Would love feedback on the cryptographic design and threat modeling from the HN community.

Try it out: https://dash.eternalvault.app/register

Sources:

1. https://eternalvault.app/citations

2. https://www.ibtimes.com/lost-bitcoin-wallet-passwords-make-1...

3. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/01/how-to-check-if-youre-owed-a...
by zeroc8 | 2025-08-14 14:18:02+00:00
It must be the diet and proably the general more stressy life style. Anytime I'm coming back from a business trip to the states, I feel bloated like a hot air baloon. Not sure what they put in their food. Generally, you get this fast food crap everywhere and it's almost impossible to have a normal (what a European would consider so) meal during lunch break. It even starts at their high schools with super unhealthy ham and cheese sandwhiches and what not. But it's not only that. Last time I bought some apples in a grocery store and holy shit, those apples tasted like some chemical bomb. They looked really nice though....
by Joker_vD | 2025-08-14 14:18:25+00:00
> you can't use strict equality with floating point numbers because they are somehow fuzzy. They are not.

They are though. All arithmetic operations involve rounding, so e.g. (7.0 / 1234 + 0.5) * 1234 is not equal to 7.0 + 617 (it differs in 1 ULP). On the other hand, (9.0 / 1234 + 0.5) * 1234 is equal to 9.0 + 617, so the end result is sometimes exact and sometimes is not. How can you know beforehand which one is the case in your specific case? Generally, you can't, any arithmetic operation can potentially give you 1 ULP of error, and it can (and likely, will) slowly accumulate.
by leogiertz | 2025-08-14 14:18:38+00:00
This is actually quite interesting. I ran into Stefan Ingves on the street in Stockholm, the former Governor of the Swedish Riksbank, and asked him why the Swedish inflation calculations did not include housing prices.

The short answer is that they're waiting on a harmonised EU wide system for that will include housing in some measure, but that has been taking longer than expected and they didn't want to change the system in Sweden before the new system was finished...

Quite frustrating given the massive increase in housing prices since '08. Would probably have been much lower with a higher interest rate.
by MurkyLabs | 2025-08-14 14:18:41+00:00
It's less about raising taxes on people making less than 250,000 a year and more on getting people who make over 1,000,000 pay taxes at all. Sure there's plenty of people who aren't rich that commit tax fraud but the IRS is pretty good at getting them. Getting the millionaires who can throw lawyers at them to waste time makes it not worth it. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
by arethuza | 2025-08-14 14:18:43+00:00
"society has fallen"

In the real world things seem to be pretty much the same as they have been for most of my life (and I am 60 in a few months).

Online, yes some people behave like monsters and occasionally some of that bleeds across into the real world - but overall I think we are pretty far from saying that "society has fallen".
by FinnKuhn | 2025-08-14 14:18:44+00:00
Licensing fonts is just such a headache that I would never want to deal with it. They are usually based on metrics that are pretty cumbersome to track.

If you want a custom font where no OFL licensed alternative would work I'd rather hire someone to design a new font. I guess that is also the reason so many companies now have their own custom font (e.g. Spotify, Adobe, etc.).
by jfengel | 2025-08-14 14:19:09+00:00
The White House denies the quote; it does not appear to come from an official source. So let's set that aside.

Is this reasonable? In some ways it's better than the situation at the start of the war, where Russia had simply annexed that area. The world didn't get especially exercised over Russia's prior invasion, and I don't think it wants to support Ukraine in re-conquering that territory.

If that was all they wanted, they could have had that three years ago. Instead they have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

Ukraine will not be happy about getting zero reparations for that. But they might accept it if it means ending this pointless war.

It will have to include some kind of reassurances that Russia isn't just going to gear up and try again in a few years. The best solution for that would be joining NATO -- which Hungary won't allow. But if they can be cajoled into letting Ukraine join the EU, it would depend on whether Putin could spin that as a win.

Ukraine could also just reject this out of hand, for having been done without their involvement. The US can threaten to pull all support, but the US is an unreliable ally anyway, and Ukraine would rather forge on without it.