MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bender | 2025-08-13 16:59:39+00:00
This could have been avoided, at least technically. Laws could have required any site or service that has adult or user generated content to simply add RTA [1] headers and require clients to make a best effort to detect the headers and trigger parental controls if enabled. That's it. Not perfect, nothing is. All the liability could have gone to the parents where it belongs. Politicians will regret taking kick-backs when those third party sites doing adult checks sell or accidentally leak what sites they visit and what referrer URL's and query strings sent them to the 3rd party sites. It won't be worth it.

I suppose one could make lemonade out of the lemons by getting a start on websites that track which law makers are into what kinks. I predict those most outspoken against a thing are indeed into that thing. CDN's already have some of this. 3rd party ID sites will have more complete ID details.

[1] - www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
by gottorf | 2025-08-13 16:59:59+00:00
> Amazon HQ2 is in Arlington

It's in Arlington because... lobbying! Bezos wanted to absorb more defense spending in AWS and chose to be physically nearby to rub shoulders and get deals.

> us-east-1 is in Northern VA. There's also a videogame company called Bethesda that you might have heard of.

I doubt us-east-1 employs more than a handful of people. Datacenters are primarily hands-off. Bethesda supposedly has ~650 employees across 6 continents.

But I think you're missing the point: am I to understand that having datacenters and game developers in the area leads it to having the highest median household income in this fantastically wealthy country? Not New York with Wall Street, or Los Angeles through whose port the two largest economies in the world trade, or San Francisco with its own world-class port and all of its software industry?

Do you really think suburban DC would be so rich if it wasn't for people wanting to pay to be near the seat of a globe-spanning empire, to be better positioned to peddle influence and get rich off of the taxpayer's back? Do you not find that to be at least a little disgusting?
by dathinab | 2025-08-13 17:00:03+00:00
This is how Germany ended up with a ton of organized crime.

The organized crime organizations just mostly focus on crime which mainly hurts immigrants and people racist police personal might not see as German even if they have a passport, and also mostly only crime which isn't publicly visible.

In turn a mixture of corrupt and racist police/politicians and having other more visible problems lead to there not being any large scale actions against them hence why they could grow to quite large size.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-13 17:00:11+00:00
The worst problems with people these days seem to be they don’t pick up the phone. Probability-based polls are still pretty good about most things unless they involve Donald Trump —- it seems some Trump supporters either don’t pick up the phone or lie to pollsters. Some polls correct for this with aggressive weighting but how scientific it really is is up in the air.
by westurner | 2025-08-13 17:00:17+00:00
I think we're talking like 100% of everyone gets a new power saw!

Compare traditional woodworking with modern carpentry on quality, longevity, and marginal efficiency.

From "Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18965964 :

> Which universities teach formal methods?

> Is formal verification a required course or curriculum competency for any Computer Science or Software Engineering / Computer Engineering degree programs?

> Is there a certification for formal methods? Something like for Engineer status in other industries?
by Xmd5a | 2025-08-13 17:00:26+00:00
>the kind of bias it will creep into with just "stroking your ego" -

>[...] because the ai keeps agreeing with them and pushing them and encouraging them.

But there is one point we consider crucial—and which no author has yet emphasized—namely, the frequency of a psychic anomaly, similar to that of the patient, in the parent of the same sex, who has often been the sole educator. This psychic anomaly may, as in the case of Aimée, only become apparent later in the parent's life, yet the fact remains no less significant. Our attention had long been drawn to the frequency of this occurrence. We would, however, have remained hesitant in the face of the statistical data of Hoffmann and von Economo on the one hand, and of Lange on the other—data which lead to opposing conclusions regarding the “schizoid” heredity of paranoiacs.

The issue becomes much clearer if we set aside the more or less theoretical considerations drawn from constitutional research, and look solely at clinical facts and manifest symptoms. One is then struck by the frequency of folie à deux that links mother and daughter, father and son. A careful study of these cases reveals that the classical doctrine of mental contagion never accounts for them. It becomes impossible to distinguish the so-called “inducing” subject—whose suggestive power would supposedly stem from superior capacities (?) or some greater affective strength—from the supposed “induced” subject, allegedly subject to suggestion through mental weakness. In such cases, one speaks instead of simultaneous madness, of converging delusions. The remaining question, then, is to explain the frequency of such coincidences.

Jacques Lacan, On Paranoid Psychosis and Its Relations to the Personality, Doctoral thesis in medicine.
by standardUser | 2025-08-13 17:00:42+00:00
> They then tested six different intervention strategies...

None of these approaches offer what I want, and what I think a lot of people want, which is a social network primarily of people you know and give at least one shit about. But in reality, most of us don't have extended social networks that can provide enough content to consistently entertain us. So, even if we don't want 'outside' content (as if that was an option), we'll gravitate to it out of boredom and our feeds will gradually morph back into some version of the clusrterfucks we all deal with today.
by root_axis | 2025-08-13 17:00:42+00:00
> Well, I want you to visit my website. I want you to read an article from a search result, and then discover the other things I’ve written, the other people I link to, and explore the weird themes I’ve got.

An AI will do all that and present back to the user what is deemed relevant. In this scenario, the AI reading the site is the user's preferred client instead of a browser. I'm not saying this is an ideal vision of the future, but it seems inevitable.

There's more information added to the internet every day than any single person could consume in an entire lifetime, and the rate of new information created is accelerating. Someone's blog is just a molecule in an ever expanding ocean that AI will ply by necessity.

You will be assimilated. Your uniqueness will be added to the collective. Resistance is futile.
by didibus | 2025-08-13 17:01:00+00:00
If you observe the failure modes of current models, you see that they fail in ways that align with probabilistic token prediction.

I don't mean that the textual prediction is simple, it's very advanced and it learns all kinds of relationships, patterns and so on.

But it doesn't have a real model and thinking process relating to the the actual problem. It thinks about what text could describe a solution that is linguistically and language semantically probable.

Since human language embedds so many of the logics and ground truths that's good enough to result in a textual description that approximate or nails the actual underlying problem.

And this is why we see them being able to solve quite advanced problems.

I admit that people are wondering now, what's different about human thinking? Maybe we do the same, you invent a probable sounding answer and then check if it was correct, rinse and repeat until you find one that works.

But this in itself is a big conjecture. We don't really know how human thinking works. We've found a method that works well for computers and now we wonder if maybe we're just the same but scaled even higher or with slight modifications.

I've heard from ML experts though that they don't think so. Most seem to believe different architecture will be needed, world models, model ensembles with various specialized models with different architecture working together, etc. That LLMs fundamentaly are kind of limited by their nature as next token predictors.
by Karliss | 2025-08-13 17:01:13+00:00
Those are two completely different things. Nothing to do with UV fluorescent inks. UV printers use special inks which are cured by UV light instead of relying on solvent evaporation like most inks. A bit similar to UV cured resins used by SLA printers or UV cured glues. This makes it easier to print on various materials like metal, glass, and ceramics. UV printing can be done in multiple layers to add 3d texture or using bottom white layer as primer thus providing better colors regardless of base material color.
by ch4s3 | 2025-08-13 17:01:15+00:00
This is a really disingenuous comment. I have correctly pointed out that Assage, who was not a US person or residing in the US and not jailed int he US was credibly accused of illegally accessing government data. I have also noted that I do not like the US government prosecuting journalists, which is the opposite of what you are claiming that I am saying.

This is wholly different from locking someone up for political speech. The US factually is not disappearing citizens for political speech.
by kstrauser | 2025-08-13 17:01:41+00:00
That's a challenging comparison, though, as Instagram never had to do fundamental research. They wrote an app. One that has to scale to enormous traffic, to be sure, but that came after they were a 10-15 person company. Meanwhile, Kodak was inventing lens technology and film chemistry and manufacturing processes and distribution channels.

Similarly, Ford has more employees than Gran Turismo, but they're not in the same industry.
by Applejinx | 2025-08-13 17:02:06+00:00
That's what's worrying about the Gemini 'I accidentally your codebase, I suck, I will go off and shoot myself, promise you will never ask unworthy me for anything again' thing.

There's nobody there, it's just weights and words, but what's going on that such a coding assistant will echo emotional slants like THAT? It's certainly not being instructed to self-abase like that, at least not directly, so what's going on in the training data?
by creatonez | 2025-08-13 17:02:26+00:00
Why would nginx ever need support for the DNS-01 challenge type? It always has access to `.well-known` because nginx is running an HTTP server for the entire lifecycle of the process, so you'd never need to use a lower level way of doing DV. And that seems to violate the principle of least privilege, since you now need a sensitive API token on the server.
by GuB-42 | 2025-08-13 17:02:40+00:00
> WD-40 isn't a lubricant

WD-40 is a lubricant. The WD-40 company says it is [1], the Wikipedia article says it is, attempts to reverse-engineer the (secret) formula have found compounds typically used as lubricants and it is rather obvious to anyone who has used it.

It is the best lubricant for you application? Probably not, and that includes fans. It is probably not the best at anything unless you have an Atlas missile lying around. It is not the best lubricant, penetrating oil, water displacer, rust protector, etc... but it does all of it to some extent, and it is cheap and convenient.

Anyways, thank you for the suggestion of using gear oil, I didn't try this one and it sounds like a good candidate. I don't have marine grease but what I understand is that it is similar to basic lithium grease but formulated to resist the harsh marine environment (so maybe with some corrosion inhibitors).

[1] https://www.wd40.com/how-to/faqs/
by RiverCrochet | 2025-08-13 17:02:44+00:00
If enough users are destroyed, advertisers (social media's real customers) won't have sufficient markets for their products, and profits will fall. Social media can't destroy its users and survive.

Seriously though, I disagree. Social media in a profit-seeking system can work if the users are the ones who pay. The easiest way for this to work-now that net neutrality is no longer a thing-is bundling through user's phone bills. If Facebook et al. were bundled similarly to how Netflix, Hulu and other streaming apps are now packaged with phone plan deals, then the users would be the focus, not the advertisers. This might require that social media be legislatively required to offer true ad-free options, though.
by bananapub | 2025-08-13 17:02:45+00:00
no you don't, you can just run https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns anywhere, and then CNAME _acme_challenge.realdomain.com to aklsfdsdl239072109387219038712.acme-dns.anywhere.com. then your ACME client just talks to the ACME DNS api, which let's it do nothing at all aside from deal with challenges for that one long random domain.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-13 17:03:06+00:00
That's right. But I'm not sure how that is supposed to lead on from the point I made above.

It's not a requirement for interacting with them, but if you want them to behave a certain way then it's helpful to ask them to behave that way.

It's not necessary to ask a human to behave like a clown but if you want them to behave like one, say for the clown movie you're shooting, then helps to ask them to.

It's not necessary to ask an LLM a question, but if you want an answer then helps to ask one... Etc etc.

Maybe I'm missing your point but it seems a bit absurd, could you clarify?
by EA-3167 | 2025-08-13 17:03:11+00:00
You say "on its way" as if it hasn't been at the forefront of this for decades. Until China and post-9/11 US ramped up facial recognition and CCTV projects MASSIVELY, the UK didn't just have more CCTV units per capita than anywhere else on Earth, they had the most in absolute terms. Even now last I checked the UK has about 1 camera for every 11 people.
by rkomorn | 2025-08-13 17:03:16+00:00
> so something like that really shouldn't be happening

I don't disagree, yet here we are. It's got race condition vibes.

I don't know if it's related to the TV OS (LG WebOS in our case) but I guess that would be the common factor since it happens across multiple apps and languages.

Anyway, it's quirky and occasionally annoying, but that's about it. :)
by yieldcrv | 2025-08-13 17:03:18+00:00
People talk about physical goods and differences in scaling needs, one thing that bothers or excites me is noticing what the market tolerates.

Many companies employed (and still employ) orders of magnitude more people than necessary just to be taken seriously. The executive team and board is stacked and diluting ownership just to get in rooms for more support and investors.

This was arguably never necessary, and in many markets people still believe they need to stack the deck and print employment numbers for any incorporated idea they have. The market reality changes far faster than the culture and I love seeing evolution of markets where individuals test a theoretical reality and do it.

I'm glad that people noticed and tried to keep ownership with parallel voting classes, and smaller personnel. I think there are some negatives and that exchanges can go back to enforcing listing guidelines which factor in ownership structure. But even amongst private companies and family offices, I think its interesting when people approach wealth acquisition in ways that match the liquidity of the markets more than the culture, for example, most billionaires stop trading or trying anything because they are afraid of losing money. While the liqiudity from the central bank and market reforms has gotten so much higher over just the last 10 years, that it was only a matter of time before someone tried to trade up to a $60bn portfolio size in the public markets (Bill Hwang). Its still only a matter of time before someone does it successfully and takes it to far larger amounts. Elon Musk sold nearly $40bn of Tesla shares in his court forced acquisition of Twitter, and that's just one stock ticker. Just a matter of time before someone leverages the liquidity in a more diverse portfolio of momentum stocks and has hundreds of billions without any personnel around them. I'm excited to see this capability.

Being able to convert assets to another asset at this speed and scale is something state actors and even Mansa Musa could never do. And the goal isn't done until everything can be valued within milliseconds and its value transferred to another owner, fractionally, with derivatives for future delivery on top.

Liquidity is the game. Just move to the next idea if liquidity isn't there as companies like Kodak from days of old are not necessary.
by superkuh | 2025-08-13 17:03:23+00:00
They don't need to shut off Anubis, they just need to configure it beyond the defaults. If they turned on the meta-refresh based challenge then all browsers could access it while still keeping most of the bots away. But few people ever configure these things and just accept the broken defaults.

With the current broken default config my browser can't even run the JS challenge due to it using unsupported bleeding edge JS features.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-13 17:03:45+00:00
>I am building a therapy bot and I need help with developing it

Best of luck, no doubt something needed. Many other big teams working on it.

Check out: https://developers.google.com/health-ai-developer-foundation...

Or you can look chatgpt and their 'safety' stuff around people using chatgpt for therapy and friendship.

There's obviously many literal therapy bots: https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AIoa2400802

https://www.trytherabot.com/ is the above one that's funded by microsoft.

Personally? I wouldnt even consider trying to go down this path to compete against these folks.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-08-13 17:04:03+00:00
I have no idea how people end up on the magic quadrant but I had a good chuckle recently when I saw Vercel advertise that they are Visionaries in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ and when you look at the infographic [1] you become a visionary by just executing worse than the leaders.

[1]: https://vercel.com/gartner-mq-visionary
by permo-w | 2025-08-13 17:04:05+00:00
> It seems factual that this person decided to start consuming bromine and it had an adverse effect on them.

certainly

> Why would medical professionals mislead on this though?

I'm not suggesting it's intentional, but: to get credit for it; or because it's something they'd been consciously or subconsciously expecting and they're fitting to that expected pattern

>When asked why, they said ChatGPT told them it was a replacement from chloride. Maybe the patient lied about that, but it doesn't seem out of the realms of possibility to me.

of course it's not impossible, it's not even particularly unlikely, but, if we're going to use a sample size of 1 like this, then surely we want something a bit more concrete than the unevidenced claim of a patient recently psychotic?

more broadly though, this isn't so much a chatgpt issue as it is an educational dietary issue. the patient seems to have got a funny idea about the health effects of salt, likely from traditional or social media, and then he's tried to find an alternative. whether the alternative was from ChatGPT, or Wikipedia, or other, doesn't seem very relevant to me
by rented_mule | 2025-08-13 17:04:10+00:00
> And why is pointing out anti-Western agenda posts always met with multiple simultaneous downvotes

Maybe because acknowledging flaws in "y" is not necessarily "anti-y"? In fact, it is often "pro-y". I want to improve things I care about. A critical part of that is identifying flaws so they can be learned from and sometimes fixed.
by Someone | 2025-08-13 17:04:23+00:00
f addAndSubtract(first:I, second:I) addAndSubtract => (first + second, first - second) sumResult:I; diffResult:I [sumResult, diffResult] := addAndSubtract(10, 3)

Weird choice to create a tuple with (a,b), but destructure it with [a,b], even more so given

f calculateStats(values:[I]) totalSum:I := 0 values.x(f(item) => totalSum += item) calculateStats => {sum: totalSum, count: values.l()} {sum: totalUsers, count: totalCount} := calculateStats([2,3,5,7])

There, creating and destructuring a hash use matching syntax {}

I also don’t like single character names for length, iteration, and don’t understand the type system. :I is an integer, but :I-R? I can’t figure out what that means from this example.
by ggreer | 2025-08-13 17:04:31+00:00
The RF spectrum is a common good, not a public good. Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. The RF spectrum is non-excludable (anyone can transmit on any frequency, given the right equipment) but rivalrous (transmitting on one frequency prevents others from using that frequency).

Requiring the winner of a spectrum auction to use it is a way to prevent anti-competitive tactics (since the government is granting a monopoly to the winner). The goal is to incentivize productive use of limited resources, not necessarily to benefit everyone. In theory, the winner could use the spectrum for entirely internal purposes. Though in real world spectrum auctions, the government usually has stipulations such as requiring interoperability or using open standards. This reduces the value that the government captures, but likely increases the value that is created overall.

Before spectrum auctions, the government simply mandated what frequency bands were used for what, and by whom. Getting access usually meant lobbying and back room deals. Sometimes the FCC used lotteries, which caused speculators to enter lotteries and then license access (basically capturing revenue that would have gone to the government had the spectrum been auctioned). In practice, auctions are the worst form of spectrum allocation, except for all the others.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-13 17:04:38+00:00
> And “nobody” is shorthand for “no technology professional”, right?

Yeah, I would say so - I've spoken to people that are genuinely excited for things like Recall. Like it or not, we (tech people) are in the minority in our disdain for it, and disdain for shoving "AI" everywhere.

And that's OK, we aren't the market for these features, but that doesn't mean a market doesn't exist for them.
by CyLith | 2025-08-13 17:04:40+00:00
The library only solves up to cubic equations, and the comments have a link to the following page: https://momentsingraphics.de/CubicRoots.html

For general polynomials, it matters a great deal in what basis it is represented. The typical monomial basis is usually not the best from a numerical standpoint. I am aware of some modern methods such as this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.02435

For polynomials expressed in e.g. a Bernstein basis, there are often much faster and stable tailored methods working solving for the eigenvalues of a companion matrix of a different form.
by mooreds | 2025-08-13 17:04:53+00:00
> But I'll also add the wrinkle that a substantial increase in bandwidth is due to AI harvesters. They are becoming an existential threat to projects like these.

Hmmm. I looked at one site with a fair amount of traffic that I have access to and the user agents that identified as AI crawlers were not significant in terms of traffic. Low single digits.

Curious what percentage of AI crawlers your site is seeing?
by workethics | 2025-08-13 17:05:07+00:00
> That said ... putting part of your soul into machine format so you can put it on on the big shared machine using your personal machine and expecting that only other really truly quintessentially proper personal machines receive it and those soulless other machines don't ... is strange.

That's a mischaracterization of most people want. When I put out a bowl of candy for Halloween I'm fine with EVERYONE taking some candy. But these companies are the equivalent of the asshole that dumps the whole bowl into their bag.