MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thisisit | 2025-08-15 18:50:15+00:00
I know it is a cliche at this point but there are clear parallels to what happened in Nazi Germany.

Many people don't know is that the Nazi party was voted democratically into the government. They didn't win the majority but got most votes. They were majority in the Reichstag (Congress). One of the selling point was that Weimar Republic had lost World War I and the reparations paid to the Allied powers was a slap in the face and the country has fallen (aka country was no longer great, people were laughing at them etc ). Hilter wasn't even elected, he was appointed by the Nazi Party.

The Nazi Party then went on a spree - twisting arms, illegal detention etc to get what they want. Lot of people were complicit in their rise. As Martin Niemöller wrote:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

At this point there is no dearth of fools who think because they are above the "left" because their party is in power. If they continue to align or voraciously defend these intimidation tactics and tariffs etc they are going to be better off.

If there is a big learning to had here - History repeats itself. Mostly because people think they are better than people who came before them. People believe that the can get along with a person who cares nothing but for power. At this point, there is nothing which can be said or done to help them because they believe their enemies being better off is the win.
by mtalantikite | 2025-08-15 18:50:15+00:00
Violent crime by all measures are at generational lows. It's just the truth.

I was being hyperbolic because OP was being ridiculous too. To say "your country opened the doors to rapists and violent murderers" is a very specific right wing scare mongering talking point that is easily debunked by any semi-serious human that can read an x,y plot of the data.

Also, events that are occurring today indeed are interdependent with events of the past [1] -- the crimes of genocide and slavery affect all humans that descend from it [2], and those humans interact with all of us in the here and now. And we are all of course affected by events that are occurring today. Both are true.

It's not that hard to see when you open your mind and look a little deeply. Or in the words of a great sage, "free your mind and your ass will follow". [3]

[1] https://www.lionsroar.com/buddhism/interdependence/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zZfbkUkodY
by ARob109 | 2025-08-15 18:52:07+00:00
I've been seeing "that's vibe coded" comments a lot lately on posts. Comments that call out code that may or may not be vibe-coded. At what point should these types of posts start getting down-voted? It's not constructive, and IMO imparts a negative connotation.

HN: Show HN Awesome New LLM can Code!! Also HN: TFA is vibe coded angry pitchfork or ugh
by nonethewiser | 2025-08-15 18:52:25+00:00
I mean, it's definitely a sales pitch, but it its a rational one. The GEICO one for example:

>I estimate that about 40% of all auto drivers in the country can save money by insuring with GEICO. The figure is not 100% because insurers differ in their underwriting judgments, with some favoring drivers who live in certain geographical areas and work in certain occupations more than GEICO does. I believe, however, that GEICO more frequently offers the low price than does any other national carrier selling insurance to all comers. You can quickly find out whether you can save money by going to www.geico.com or by calling 800-555-2756.

And it is the Berkshire Hathaway website. Pitching their services seems like something you would expect.
by ramesh31 | 2025-08-15 18:52:51+00:00
>My suspicion is that Grok won't be a long-term player in the AI market.

What would make you think that? Is it the fact that Elon is burning diesel generators to power it all? Or that his average employee tenure is about as long as a Taco Bell crewmember? I can't imagine that the few hundred people in the world qualified to work on this stuff at a frontier level wouldn't want to be a part of that.
by at-fates-hands | 2025-08-15 18:53:26+00:00
Good point.

Another highlight of the woeful US health care system:

By early this year, Bue had begun suffering bouts of confusion. Linda booked him for a dementia screening, but the first available appointment was three months out.

Three months for a dementia screening is insane. Had he gotten the screening and been made aware what was happening, this might've been avoided. Tragic that our health care system is a joke for the most vulnerable.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-15 18:53:44+00:00
If we make the underlying mistake in Rust (actually I did last week for unrelated code) by defining an operator implementation as simply calling itself rather than calling some concrete implementation, the compiler warns us, this is infinite recursion which probably wasn't what you wanted.

G++ has to emit code here to recurse infinitely, so it's not as though there's no opportunity to say "Huh, that probably won't be what they meant"
by saghm | 2025-08-15 18:53:58+00:00
I get as exasperated at C++ as anyone else, but IMO there's another takeaway here, which is that smart contracts are an absolutely terrible idea. Relying on code as the source of truth for a transaction just completely disregards the reality that code is always going to be buggy. For those who might not be aware, this is the same smart contract framework where someone accidentally killed $300 million of transactions because a function in a library for setting the wallet associated with a private key was defined as public instead of private: https://medium.com/cybermiles/i-accidentally-killed-it-and-e...

Yes, you can fix issues like this with a "hard fork" if you have a large enough consensus, but at that point, does the system of having smart contracts actually improve anything over the one where the software is downstream rather than the source of truth, or are you just replacing one form of "human intervention required" with a different but worse one?
by ben_w | 2025-08-15 18:54:21+00:00
They're less unified than the UK. Also less unified than just England, which is where HS2 is entirely located, much to the annoyance of Wales who still has to pay for it.

> their population is 6X smaller and GDP per capita is twice as high

2x per capita * 1/6 the population = 1/3 the available money

Gotthard is longer than all the tunnels in HS2 combined. Total cost: CHF 9.560 billion as of December 2015 (it opened 1 June 2016), about £6.5bn at the exchange rate at the time.

As of 2020, the budget envelope set out by the DfT is £98 billion. HS2 is not fifteen times longer than GBT, it is (currently) four.
by derf_ | 2025-08-15 18:54:41+00:00
> > Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.

When I was in grade school, I took notes for my classes using Tengwar (elvish) runes as a way to alleviate boredom and force myself to pay attention (just taking the table in Appendix E from Lord of the Rings and transliterating English letters into them). I could do this at a speed sufficient to keep up with a teacher talking, so pretty fast. I cannot read any of these notes today, much less write them.

If you don't use this stuff for a few decades, you do forget, even when it's just an alphabet.
by xwowsersx | 2025-08-15 18:54:46+00:00
Something I heard recently on some podcast which really resonated was (paraphrasing): "Inertia is the biggest issue for a startup. The world doesn't like you, doesn't think it needs you... and you've got to invert that. You have to create momentum by scratch and the most important thing a founder does, by an order of magnitude, is invert inertia. Literally, in a physical sense. Like the world stays at rest and you've got to create momentum." With that in mind, it makes sense to do things that don't scale... because in the beginning, you're not trying to optimize a machine that's already running. You're trying to get the engine to turn over at all. PG's point is that scalable growth comes later; first, you have to manually crank the thing into motion. You do manual stuff not because it's efficient, but because it's the only way to get traction when no one's looking for you in the first place. And that's how you learn what actually works, how you build momentum one user at a time, and how you prove there's something worth scaling at all.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-08-15 18:55:08+00:00
I love the art aesthetic of occult texts, but browsing through all these books just to find any hidden gems or interesting artwork seems really tedious. At least browsing through the list with the title pages visible shows a few interesting designs. Can't really get much more out of this because most of the texts are unreadable to me. This might be a good use case for agentic AI, to browse through the books and highlight any artwork that's hidden beyond the first page.

For alchemy, I was recently learning about alchemical symbols and sigils, but quickly found out that pretty much all the interesting material from this era and category has been preserved, while all the ugly or uninteresting variants tend to get dropped. Unicode has a category for alchemical symbols and they just preserved what seems to be the best parts. Shout-out to U+1F756, the Alchemical Symbol for Horse Dung 🝖.

Whenever I visit a major news publication with dedicated artists handling the creation of hero images, I often end up taking a bit of time to contemplate each design decision and exploring any symbolic interpretation. The best publications have a way of perfectly communicating the underlying tone and message of an article just from the hero image. The Atlantic tends to have the most creative hero images, while The Economist has the most interesting cover designs. And yet, despite this expertise, I never see people remark on those little delights, which in a way makes it occult while hiding in plain sight. It feels a bit connected, seeing the artwork in the first page of these books; maybe an invitation with the whispers of the kind of message the authors wished to convey.
by biomcgary | 2025-08-15 18:55:23+00:00
I use a TENS unit with an almost identical setup to the paper (ear clip is the same, duration is the same, frequency is 30hz instead of 25hz).

My use of vagus stimulation is for managing anxiety and promoting digestion / gut motility. I have neck issues that probably impinge on this nerve, contributing to these symptoms. Evidence suggests that the effect isn't purely psychosomatic; when laying on my back with TENS, I observe an increased frequency of GI tract "gurgles" relative to off. The observable product of my GI tract has also normalized somewhat.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-15 18:56:00+00:00
My CS college told us bluntly: 'We're training you for the last job you'll ever have. Pick up the stuff you need to know for your first one on your own or while doing class projects.'

Worked out pretty well in my case. There's plenty I don't know about the Java Enterprise Edition standard libraries, but I can still walk through computing in decent depth from transistors to algorithms.

(And to the article's point, have probably gotten more CS jobs from my interdisciplinary skills than my CS-only skills)
by teleforce | 2025-08-15 18:56:14+00:00
Alphabet is such an underrated invention. It's probably higher in significance compared to the invention of wheel. It's the original "bicycle of the mind". For example, Korea pivoting from Chinese characters to its own alphabet or Hangul is very well documented including the positive effects it has in the much improved Korean literacy and civilization after the conversion. Fun facts anyone can learn Hangul alphabet in a single day if they wanted to but the same cannot be said to Chinese characters. If your mother tongue is Korean (e.g Korean American) that only just started learning, it only take one day turnover from illiterate to literate.
by yibg | 2025-08-15 18:56:33+00:00
Scale in this case isn't just about software scalability though, in the sense of RPS it can handle. It's:

- Don't build some automated support system until you get enough customers

- Don't build a fully automated provisioning system until it becomes a problem

- Don't build some fancy multi-region failover setup

- Don't worry about designing for some future feature that may or may not be needed

This doesn't mean write bad code though.
by spwa4 | 2025-08-15 18:57:39+00:00
> It is for example about trying to reduce harms to children from pro-suicide and pro-anorexia content as well, and about compelling the Category 1 services to provide mechanisms so children can report bullying, grooming and online sexual exploitation from other users.

Except ... if the government really wanted to improve children's and teenage mental health in the UK, they could easily increase the budget for treatments and youth services. That would be the first thing to do, and they're doing the opposite.

Which shows that they just don't care. Taking needed money away from the most vulnerable children on one hand and claiming that new legislation protects children ... does not sum to protecting children.
by thanhhaimai | 2025-08-15 18:57:46+00:00
> Imagen 4 Ultra: When your creative vision demands the highest level of detail and strict adherence to your prompts, Imagen 4 Ultra delivers highly-aligned results.

It seems that you may need the "Ultra" version if you want strict prompt adherence.

It's an interesting strategy. Personally, I notice that most of the times I actually don't need strict prompt adherence for image generation. If it looks nice, I'll accept it. If it doesn't, I'll click generate again. For creativity task, following the prompt too strictly might not be the outcome the users want.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-08-15 18:57:54+00:00
A problem they've never seen before, of course. A problem that requires a solving strategy or tool they've never seen before (above and beyond synthesis of multiple things they have seen before) is another matter entirely.

It's like the difference between teaching kids rate problems and then putting ones with negative values or nested rates on a test versus giving them a continuous compound interest problem and expecting them to derive e, because it is fundamentally about rates of change, isn't it?
by pc86 | 2025-08-15 18:57:59+00:00
Pretty much everything out of Giffords is a complete lie[0], for some context. I'm sure there are gun control advocacy groups not as blatant as they are but that's the one I'm most familiar with, in part because they're the most egregious. They command decent power in Washington still.

I think your examples make a good point though. There are absolutely times and places where someone's right to gun ownership can and should be suspended or even outright denied - the same as we do with freedom of speech, voting, or any other right. But it's already illegal in every state for recently released felon to own a gun - only 12 states have some sort of automatic renewal of gun rights and most of them are 10 years after release for non-violent offenses only.

It depends on your definition of "mentally unstable" but there are several mental health questions on the form you have to fill out for the ATF if you buy a firearm. Paradoxically in the 50s-70s there was a huge push to deinstitutionalize mental health treatment, close the vast majority of mental asylums, and make it much harder to involuntarily commit someone, but that's also the primary mechanism by which you prevent someone from acquiring a firearm on mental health grounds.

It's been a while since I've done a deep dive on background check requirements as they tend to vary by type of firearm but you cannot buy any firearm from a dealer without a background check. Honestly I think this is the one gun control advocates could make the most ground on, and the one that people can most reasonably disagree on. Quick AI math tells me that 32 states allow the purchase of a rifle from a private individual without a background check, which covers about 48% of the US population.

[0] https://x.com/GIFFORDS_org/status/1953570096443510896 claims nearly 1,000 people die from gun violence in Colorado in a year when the average is less than 300 and it's never been more than the low 400's - in fact numbers have only drastically increased as Colorado has passed more and more restrictive gun laws
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-15 18:58:26+00:00
>Most graduates of first and second tier law schools are able to pass the bar exam and find gainful employment as lawyers,

You believe this to be the case, because you're relying on the statistics provided by the office I described.

>But going to a "third tier toilet" law school seldom pays off, at least not financially.

This is a solid T2 school. But if you were working at Subway whatever hours they'd give you, they marked you down as employed for the purposes of saying their graduates get jobs.
by saltcured | 2025-08-15 18:58:48+00:00
In the earlier post about apple trees, I'm assuming what they mean is that the neighbors have decimated the local pollinators so their trees are not fruiting. It is still frustrating, even if they are not having direct exposure to the poison.

I'm actually back in the same California neighborhood I grew up in, which has adjoining open space. In the 50 years of cumulative time my parents or I have been there, we've never needed exterminators. At most, a can of ant spray from the supermarket was sufficient to treat around a door or window in a problematic season. I'm talking about such events once every 5-10 years. Meanwhile, exterminator vans are seen in the neighborhood quite frequently. I think some folks just see a bug, absolutely freak out, and want to nuke it all from orbit.

I think it's nearly a mental illness, how people want to detach from the natural world. As if their self-image is not that of a complex animal but of some sort of sterile abstraction.
by xg15 | 2025-08-15 18:59:33+00:00
The example is a bit of an unfair comparison though. It takes questions already posed in natural language and, as far as I can tell, expects results in natural language, too.

This means that whatever system is evaluated in this challenge necessarily has to deal with natural language. And indeed, a big part of the AlphaProof system was a neural network to convert from natural language to Lean.

None of this has anything to do with reasoning ability.

I think it would be interesting to present an inverse challenge, where the problems are already posed in a formal language. Would a network that first converts them into natural language, then does chain-of-thought on that, then translates the result back into formal language still be better than a simple symbolic reasoner that could operate on the formal language directly?
by holowoodman | 2025-08-15 19:00:16+00:00
Philosophy split off mathematical logic 200 years ago. Boole and Bolzano lived around 1800 to 1850 or something. There were no contributions from philosophy after that.

Chomsky is one I grant you, he was influential in both computer science as well as linguistics. But his success in linguistics was even more revolutionary than his influence on CS, exactly because he introduced abstraction, rigor and various ideas from computer science and mathematics into linguistics.
by throwway120385 | 2025-08-15 19:00:17+00:00
This tracks, because the entire system reduces to a sophisticated regression analysis. That's why we keep talking about parameters and parameter counts. They're literally talking about the number of parameters that they're weighting during training. Beyond that there are some mathematical choices in how you interrelated the parameters that yields some interesting emergent phenomena, and there are architecture choices to be made there. But the whole thing boils down to regression, and regression is at its heart a development of a canon from a representative variety of examples.

We are warned in statistics to be careful when extrapolating from a regression analysis.
by robomartin | 2025-08-15 19:00:49+00:00
@Prusa. I want your company to survive. We have Prusa printers and our own self-made high-speed printers.

I use the Prusa's all the time. They just work. Not the fastest, but that's not a problem. When we need fast we use our own brushless servo-driven stationary table beast.

Build a good MK3/4 style 350 x 350 x 350~500 printer and I will likely buy it. Not interested in the other stuff. Don't even care about multi-material. We use 3D printers for design validation and to explore concepts. Don't need the complexity at all. Don't need crazy speed. Just a good solid printer that works reliably and I don't have to think about. This isn't a hobby, it's a tool. I want it on the network and don't need (can't have) external connectivity (ITAR).
by bdcravens | 2025-08-15 19:01:27+00:00
They couldn't match Creality on price either, but for a time, Prusa was still the printer with the best quality. As in many industries, there was dependence on the idea that non-Chinese products supposedly had better quality, so you were willing to pay the higher prices. However, in 3D printing, and in other industries, that barrier is falling.

Obviously state support can lead to "unfair" price advantages, but in the example of the A1, even at an equivalent price, the A1 still holds the advantage (larger print bed and additional functionality, for example). This isn't the single-dimensional disadvantage that Josef Prusa is making it out to be.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-08-15 19:01:43+00:00
>Buyers of new luxury stock are increasingly just leveraging prior housing equity to fund the new purchase and renting out old stock at “market rates”, which doesn’t actually increase supply or decrease pricing

Ok, but they have finite leverage and financing. The market can easily overwhelm their access to capital, no investor class has anywhere near enough access to capital to fully corner the behemoth that would be a healthy housing market.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-15 19:01:45+00:00
The problem isn't one of "we shouldn't build new housing", but rather the one of "are we going to see prices really fall after 10,000 new units of housing are built?"

It is only controversial if you really expect prices to fall when new housing is built (or to say, if you think the only solution is to build new housing and nothing else). Otherwise, the "building new housing" part isn't controversial at all.
by tkel | 2025-08-15 19:01:58+00:00
Yes, I'm really tired of the propagandized "ghost cities" talking point. Having spent time in China, it's clear that they just put a little bit of planning into their development, where as in the US there is little to none, and the resulting infrastructure + development is far below China's.

And like you said, the capacity and capability is there, but the money gets disappeared into some DoD contractor instead. As well as there being thousands of failed projects, ghost towns, and empty neighborhoods across the US. But the propagandized talking point isn't there. Some wealthy anti-planning capitalists obviously made a successful media push about it. Much like other "enemies" of the US, nearly all reporting is loose on facts and biased negative.