MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spwa4 | 2025-08-27 20:11:28+00:00
Ever notice how socialists ... never discuss real-world socialism? They only discuss what goes wrong with others (and of course all gets lumped together, when of course it is absolutely forbidden to draw the connection between western socialism and Soviets, or especially North Korea or Iran. But that the Saudia Arabian and the US economy work the same way, and have the same level of authoritarianism, that you can just state as gospel)

But here's one stat I think illustrates how well it goes in practice: the Taliban in full-blown war caused less victims in Afghanistan than communists did in peacetime (in fact less than half. This, incidentally, is the actual reason the Taliban started fighting the west, not CIA support. Communism is STILL one of the western influences that they state they try to eradicate, and I doubt that part of their agenda is very controversial in Afghanistan. And, of course, western socialists never mention this, and especially don't discuss why or how socialism came to Afghanistan, and how it is the direct cause, not CIA support, of the current situation in Afghanistan and Iran)

And this is not an exception in communism. For instance: "peace" in the Soviet Union killed more people than WW2 did worldwide, including the holocaust, hell, include all conflicts the Soviets ever had and it's still true. Hell, include all conflicts in Europe of the entire 20th century and it was still more. Same in China.

So I feel all rational people can honestly say "even if you're right, capitalist authoritarianism is still better", and given that authoritarianism is almost a basic principle of socialism, certainly in practice, I don't understand where they're coming from in the first place.
by tim333 | 2025-08-27 20:11:36+00:00
> OpenAI began this hype cycle [...] and its death (or, as mentioned, some other kind of collapse, such as acquisition) is the sign that we’re done here, in the same way that FTX signaled the end of the cryptocurrency boom..

The collapse of FTX sent bitcoin from ~$20k to ~$17k. It's now $110k. I imagine the AI boom will 'collapse' in the same sort of way.

A lot of the economics depends on whether you think human level intelligence is coming or not. Zitron kind of assumes not in which case his economic doomerism makes sense. But if it does come you could effectively double gdp which is a lot of financial upside.
by mihaaly | 2025-08-27 20:11:56+00:00
I did delete many years ago.

They blocked me claiming suspicious activity occurred in my account (just a low traffic personal account). Ignoring me wanting to know what suspicious activity was it and if it needed, or actually already was, reported to the authorities.

Unluckily this deletion does not hold well, occasionally with weird merchants only offering PayPal payment - credit card through PayPal - the paying fails using my old email used in the purchase and was used with PayPal before. They keep forcing me to log in. But can't! It is deleted!

I did not trust their sloppy ways then, the feeling is stronger now.
by tensor | 2025-08-27 20:12:07+00:00
Very few of them, if any, are true.

Firstly, the author doesn't even define the term AI. Do they just mean generative AI (likely), or all machine learning? Secondly, you can pick any of those and they would only be true of particular implementations of generative AI, or machine learning, it's not true of technology as a whole.

For instance, small edge models don't use a lot of energy. Models that are not trained on racist material won't be racist. Models not trained to give advice on suicide, or trained NOT to do such things, won't do it.

Do I even need to address the claim that it's at it's core rooted in "fascist" ideology? So all the people creating AI to help cure diseases, enable technologies assistive technologies for people with impairments, and other positive tasks, all these desires are fascist? It's ridiculous.

AI is a technology that can be used positively or negatively. To be sure many of the generative AI systems today do have issues associated with them, but the authors position of extending these issues to the entirety of the AI and AI practitioners, it's immoral and shitty.

I also don't care what the author has to say after the intro.
by the_duke | 2025-08-27 20:12:30+00:00
The resistance against instant payments mostly has to do with technicalities around bank balance sheets and inter-bank settlement systems.

It's a bit complex for a comment, but the TLDR is:

* funds in transit (called "positive float") are held in the banks account, and can be used by the bank to earn interest

* liquidity management - there are a bunch of considerations here, but the longer settlement periods enable banks to do "deferred net settlements" (just paying each other the difference between all transactions in a batched way) and also helps balance sheets in other ways, making it easier to meet reserve requirements, smoothing out intra-day liquidity, etc

The delay also means systems have more time to catch fraudulent transactions, and to block them before they happen.
by hudon | 2025-08-27 20:12:41+00:00
The environmental problem is enough for us to pump the brakes. By the end of this year, AI systems will be responsible for half of global data center power demand… 23 gigawatts. For what? A more useful search engine, a better autocomplete, and a shit code generator. Is it worth it? Are we even asking that question? When does it become not worth it? Who’s even running the calculus? The free market certainly isn’t.
by nikolay | 2025-08-27 20:13:07+00:00
In my childhood, when the movie BMX Bandits (1983) [0] was super popular, helmets and any kind of protection did not exist. We did all kinds of crazy stunts, influenced by the movie. I don't recall any harmed kid among tens if not hundreds. Scaped knees and elbows - sure, but that's all!

[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085204
by tnolet | 2025-08-27 20:13:21+00:00
Wait till you learn about iDeal. Basically flawless online payments for 10+ years in the Netherlands. Dominates the entire online and offline markets. No cards, no signups, just your normal bank account.

P.S. lives in Germany 5+ years and can attest its banks and online banking are generations behind its neighboring countries. A travesty.
by rcxdude | 2025-08-27 20:13:26+00:00
>The contention that our models systematically underestimate reality is incorrect, and defies logic: if it were true that we were systematically failing in one direction, we’d make the models bias in the other direction.

It's possible for such biases to persist for a long time: In general, older climate models tended to overestimate the amount of CO2 that would be emitted but underestimate the effects it would have. The latter especially tends to persist because climate scientists are under a lot of pressure to not overstate their claims, given the very well-funded and active work to discredit claims about climate change (as well as a very human desire, given the lack of action, to be optimistic).

(You can also see a similar effect with the growth in adoption of solar power: even the most optimistic sources have and likely still continue to underestimate how much new solar will be installed in the next few years, because it's just growing so mind-bogglingly fast)
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-08-27 20:14:26+00:00
The "global" is the problem here.

Each country had a local solution. Direct transfers, or better direct debit, was the common way in Germany. You literally just entered your bank account number and that was payment, the seller would debit it from your account. Zero authentication, and it worked - never had a fraud issue (in the background, I assume sellers checked the delivery address against some database before accepting this, as the seller would ultimately be on the hook for any fraud).

Aside from manual bank transfers (seller ships when the money arrives 1-3 business days later) there were also two systems based on direct bank transfers. One (Sofortüberweisung/Sofort) was essentially institutionalized phishing - you give a third party your banking credentials, they log into your account, snoop around a bit, wire the money to the merchant using your credentials and confirm to the merchant that your account has enough money and the wire is happening. The other was a similar service but by the banks, so you'd log in directly at your bank to authorize the transfer.

Most other European countries had other local systems that covered this need, but there was nothing global. Globally, your best bet for small amounts is unfortunately likely still PayPal unless your counterparty accepts crypto. For bigger amounts, there is Wise and similar services (note that I've had a horrible experience with Wise - KYC asking for things that didn't exist, luckily before they had my money to hold hostage). Wiring directly to accounts with Revolut also works reasonably well.

For transfers within the Euro zone, a regular SEPA bank transfer is easiest, with the only "downside" that you need to ask for the destination IBAN rather than just a phone number or similar that some of the other systems support.
by MisterTea | 2025-08-27 20:14:31+00:00
I have so far used AI a total of 4 or 5 times to ask it programming questions that I really didn't need answers to, only curious.

I can see it being useful as a teaching aide but to use it to write my emails, letters or whatever is something I would never consider as it removes the human element which I enjoy. Sure writing sometimes sucks but its supposed to - work is hard and finishing work is rewarding.

Very soon we will see blog posts about AI burnout where mindless copy-pasting of output and boring prompt fiddling sucks so much joy out of life people will begin to loose their sanity.

If I want "AI" I want a model I have full control over, ran locally, to e.g. query my picture collection for "all pictures of grey cats in a window" or whatever. Or point a webcam out of my window and have it tell me when the squirrels are fucking with my bird feeder and maybe squirt water at them but leave the birds alone. That would be cool. But turning programmers into copy pasters, emails into soulless monologues, media with minimal/no human input and so on is something that can die in a fire. It's all low effort which I have no respect for.
by epgui | 2025-08-27 20:15:36+00:00
Oftentimes in psychiatry the treatments are just as important as anything else in establishing a diagnosis.

There’s a well-known concept of “diagnosis by treatment” because unfortunately that’s often the best we can do in practice. It sounds backwards, and yeah, it is backwards, but oftentimes it’s the best we’ve got.

At the same time you want treatments and clinical presentations to be somewhat coherent, and you don’t want practitioners going totally rogue and deviating from the standard of care in a way that could harm people, so yeah the conditions and their potential treatments are associated.

Most discussion of treatments in the DSM are various forms of therapy. Most pharmaceutical treatments that are mentioned are about broad classes of medications, and they’re all old drugs with generics on the market. It’s not a book you consult for pharma info.
Show HN: An AI productivity assistant to help you focus
by yumingh | 2025-08-27 20:15:44+00:00
I made a MacOS app that uses AI to help keep distractions off your desktop when you're working on something important, and to help get more focused work done.

It's paid right now because cloud/AI costs are expensive but if you want to try it and don't have the means to pay, then please DM me and maybe we can work something out.
by tpurves | 2025-08-27 20:16:36+00:00
Arbitraging fraud has always been PayPal's game. For the mass market of small-scale sellers there's a threshold, whre the cost of onboarding, verifying, underwriting and eating fraud exposure is greater than the revenues you could ever expect to make from them at their low volume. So these segments went un-served, same with many other segments of transactions or transactors. PayPal's model has always been to accept a higher risk tolerance, then to have just-enough compensating controls and/or liability-dodging to make that work. At least just well enough to have net-revenues bps exceed their fraud-loss bps.

And when that balance is working, it kinda works, but when it doesn't...

And incidentally, it's not just PayPal with the fraud problems these days. It's everybody in the banking and payments space. AI is so far quite asymmetrically helping the bad guys more. It's bad out there.
by hinkley | 2025-08-27 20:17:15+00:00
I believe we have a new generation of supercapacitors in R&D stage. There were some experiments done in the last year that showed that some assumptions about what makes supercaps work so well turned out to be wrong. I can’t recall the details but it turns out the foamy structure of charcoal is not the optimal structure. So that should result in higher energy density per unit volume.
by Mallowram | 2025-08-27 20:17:19+00:00
Even Shannon knew the limits of information late in career. AI is not information, it's signaling. And it embeds without decipherment or segregating dominance, bias, control, manipulation. The dark matter of language we can't extract.

"Shannon warned in 1956 that information theory “has perhaps been ballooned to an importance beyond its actual accomplishments” and that information theory is “not necessarily relevant to such fields as psychology, economics, and other social sciences.” Shannon concluded: “The subject of information theory has certainly been sold, if not oversold.” [Claude E. Shannon, “The Bandwagon,” IRE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 2, No. 1 (March 1956), p. 3.]"
by kccqzy | 2025-08-27 20:17:43+00:00
React is a good idea compared to having to do SPA's without it. Try doing a SPA with only jQuery.

VDOM is also a good idea that simplifies the mental model tremendously. Of course these days we can do better than a VDOM. Svelte in fact doesn't use a VDOM. You can say that VDOM is a terrible idea in comparison with Svelte, but that's just anachronistic.
by Arwill | 2025-08-27 20:18:08+00:00
I think what is relevant here, is that there is a separation between the inside and the outside of the black hole. Since there is no communication between the two, on the inside it could be anything. And its not just the matter and space, even the laws of physics might be completely different. If it weren't so, then there had to be a "super-space" that communicates how ordinary space behaves on both the outside and the inside the black hole.
by kenhwang | 2025-08-27 20:18:21+00:00
Think of it like how Zuckerberg only owns 13% of Facebook but has >60% of the voting power.

Japanese law allows corporations to only require 1/3 of voting shares present for quorum, and then a majority of those present to pass resolutions. It also allows cross-shareholders (like Toyota) to have special privileges over regular class shareholders (typically right of first refusal over any resolution).

In practice, nothing much will pass without the largest shareholder's approval.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-27 20:18:51+00:00
I'm going to disagree.

I have years of experience at Boeing designing aircraft parts. The guiding principle is that no single failure should cause an accident.

The way to accomplish this is not "write quality software", nor is it "test the software thoroughly". The idea is "assume the software does the worst possible thing. Then make sure that there's an independent system that will prevent that worst case."

For the Therac-25, that means a detector of the amount of radiation being generated, which will cut it off if it exceeds a safe value. I'd also add that the radiation generator be physically incapable of generating excessive radiation.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-08-27 20:19:04+00:00
I'm not terribly interested in emotional reactions. This is too common of a problem: we think emoting is a substitute for reasoning. Many if not most people believe that if they feel something, then it must be true; the disagreeing party just doesn't "get it". We must learn to reason and make arguments.

I am interested in the intelligible content of the thing.

Also, AI does not reason. Human beings do.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-08-27 20:19:08+00:00
Also protect themselves (or rather, PayPal's bank). These were almost certainly SEPA debits. Consumers could reverse unauthorized transactions (think "chargeback" but on steroids - customer says to revert, it gets reverted, no discussion) and their bank would then have to try to get the money from PayPal's bank, which would then have to get it back from PayPal.
by porphyra | 2025-08-27 20:19:26+00:00
By the way, out of pure curiosity, why does it seem that there are a disproportionately high amount of super talented trans programmers? I mean, trans people make up for a relatively small percentage of the general populace so it would be unlikely for half of any random group, even if it's only 7 people, to be trans. There are even memes like programmer socks etc. I also personally know several very proficient programmers who are trans.
by wahern | 2025-08-27 20:19:48+00:00
That seems a little too cynical. It matters how a customer might use a chip, such as the type of cooling that would be expected in a typical system using that model, and that's informed by the advertised specifications. Base clocks and the amount of SRAM also figure into TDP. No doubt there are completely arbitrary aspects to TDP driven purely by profit-focused market segmentation, but it's not just that.

That said, it's definitely very frustrating as someone who does the occasional server build. Not only does TDP not reflect minimum or maximum power draw for a CPU package itself, but it's also completely divorced from power draw for the chipset(s), NICs, BMCs (ugh), etc, not to mention how the vendor BIOS/firmware throttles everything, and so TDP can be wildly different from power draw at the outlet. The past 5 years have kind of sucked for homelab builders. The Xeon E3 years were probably peak CPU and full-system power efficiency when accounting for long idle times. Can you get there with modern AMD and Intel chips? Maybe. Depends on who you ask and when. Even with identical CPUs, differences in motherboard vendor, BIOS settings, and even kernel can result in drastically different (as in 2-3x) reported idle power draw.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-08-27 20:20:15+00:00
I don't think the author hates AI, but rather the people developing AI, and in particular the CEOs and others of those companies. This is particularly clear in this paragraph:

> And to what end? In a kind of nihilistic symmetry, their dream of the perfect slave machine drains the life of those who use it as well as those who turn the gears. What is life but what we choose, who we know, what we experience? Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it. Blissful ignorance and total isolation, warm in the womb of the algorithm, nourished by hungry machines.

There are legitimate uses for which AI (or any other technology to be clear) would relieve everyone. Chores that people HAVE to do but nobody WANTS to do.

If GenAI allows you to build automations for those tasks, by all means it will make you life more meaningful because you will have more time to spend on meaningful things. Think of opening the tap to get water instead of having to carry a bucket home from the well.

It's fine to hate the people who build AI, it's fine to hate the people who push for AI use, it's fine to hate the people who release garbage built with AI, etc. But hating "AI" is nonsensical. It's akin to hating hammers or shoes, it's just a tool that may or may not fit a job (and personally, like the author, I don't think it fits any job at the moment).
by johng | 2025-08-27 20:20:19+00:00
Some of our sites have been getting absolutely hammered by the AI bots -- so much so they are taking down the sites. Even with cloudflare protection and caching. The only thing We've been able to do so far is tell Cloudflare to block all AI bots, modify the robots.txt and even then we've had to manually identify IP addresses and bots that ignore all of the above and block them specifically or at the ASN level.

Cloudflare makes doing this kind of stuff easy but I would hate to have to do this manually on a webserver. And I don't like the idea of how much of the internet already relies on Cloudflare.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-27 20:20:26+00:00
To honor the "spirit" of OP's post:

I looked up Picasso's Guernica now out of curiosity. I don't understand what's so great about this artwork. Or why it would represent any of the things you mention. It just looks like deranged pencilwork. It also comes across as aggressively pretentious.

What makes that any better than some highly derivative AI generated rubbish I connect to about the same amount?
by myhf | 2025-08-27 20:20:59+00:00
> the useful things it does

It's weird how AI-lovers are always trying to shoehorn an unsupported "it does useful things" into some kind of criticism sandwich where only the solvable problems can be acknowledged as problems.

Just because some technologies have both upsides and downsides doesn't mean that every technology automatically has upsides. GenAI is good at generating these kinds of hollow statements that mimic the form of substantial arguments, but anyone who actually reads it can see how hollow it is.

If you want to argue that it does useful things, you have to explain at least one of those things.
by Mallowram | 2025-08-27 20:21:07+00:00
Aristotle: There are no contradictions.

Cassirer: “Only when we put away words will be able to reach the initial conditions, only then will we have direct perception. All linguistic denotation is essentially ambiguous–and in this ambiguity, this “paronymia” of words is the source of all myths…this self-deception is rooted in language, which is forever making a game of the human mind, ever ensnaring it in that iridescent play of meanings…even theoretical knowledge becomes phantasmagoria; for even knowledge can never reproduce the true nature of things as they are but must frame their essence in “concepts.” Consequently all schemata which science evolves in order to classify, organize and summarize the phenomena of the real, turns out to be nothing but arbitrary schemes. So knowledge, as well as myth, language, and art, has been reduced to a kind of fiction–a fiction that recommends its usefulness, but must not be measured by any strict standard of truth, if it is not to melt away into nothingness.” Cassirer Language and Myth
by rs186 | 2025-08-27 20:21:13+00:00
I'd argue that the average Linux user likely knows how to use vim for the most basic editing but isn't necessarily motivated to learn vim. Intermediate users will be able to name a few modes in vim and navigate somewhat efficiently, that's about it. Only advanced users and those who really want to master vim (in other words, hardcore nerds) will try to make the most out of vim and use as few strokes as possible to navigate/edit, which is what these tools/sites are for. That's a few "niches" there.
by siliconsorcerer | 2025-08-27 20:21:49+00:00
I really appreciate the tone of this article, and honestly I was an "AI hater" as well. I honestly just don't think it makes sense any more. Almost everything in this article is making a valid point, AI is being pushed by the powers that be that have absolutely no regard for the masses and how this is going to affect society. But I fail to see how that is different than any other time or any other technology in history. People that are declaring that "AI is harmful to society" are ignoring the fundamental brokenness of society that is the underlying reason why AI development is moving forward with reckless abandon. AI is a problem because our society doesn't have a solid moral compass.