MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by coldtea | 2025-08-13 15:30:47+00:00
>The "they" you are describing is a large body of disparate people spread around the world.

And that "large body" has a few hundred core major figures and prominent adherents, and a hell of a lot of them seem to be exactly like how the parent describes. Even the "tamer" of them like ASC have that cultish quality...

As for the rest of the "large body", the hangers on, those are mostly out of view anyway, but I doubt they'd be paragons of sanity if looked up close.

>Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people

-isms include fascism, nazism, jihadism, nationalism, communism, nationalism, racism, etc, so not exactly the best argument to make in rationalism's defense. "Yeah, rationalism has groups that murder people, but after all didn't fascism had those too?"

Though, if we were honest, it mostly brings in mind another, more medical related, -ism.
by spacebanana7 | 2025-08-13 15:31:16+00:00
There's a persistent pessimism - almost to the point of paranoia - in tech from the trauma of the dot come bust. People fear waves of mass layoffs and 99% reductions in the value of their companies.

In reality most things go in an S curve and the excitement fades in a rather boring way. People were worried about bubbles in 2016, but they never really happened.

There was never a mobile bust, or a social bust, or a big data bust. These things just got boring after a while and the valuations stabilised. Sometimes companies went bust and sometimes they kept growing, but the super exponential growth in validation stopped. And we moved on to talking about the next thing.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-08-13 15:31:27+00:00
> [0]: Met's claim was 1/33,000 false positives, actual 1/40 according to this article from last year https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945

The article does not claim this:

"The Metropolitan Police say that around one in every 33,000 people who walk by its cameras is misidentified.

But the error count is much higher once someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive"

These are 2 different metrics that measure 2 different things and so they are both correct at the same time. But I must say I am not clear what each exactly means.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-13 15:31:31+00:00
My father-in-law operates a "small farm" in Saskatchewan with no employees. The average farm size is pushing 10,000 acres, his is 2,000 acres. (2,000 acres is probably close to the median size, though. Really large farms skew the average).

He's got autosteer on a couple of pieces of equipment. His combine-harvester "only" cost $400,000 (used) compared to the $1M+ ones his neighbors use. As a fraction of $300,000, autosteer isn't particularly significant.

But it's massively useful. During a field operation, there are dozens of things the operator should be monitoring and adjusting in parallel. Pretty much all of these are automated with "idiot lights", but a good farmer is closely supervising. Less attention spent doing trivial things like steering results in more attention spend on deck levelling, rotor speed, pick-up speed, et cetera.
by metadat | 2025-08-13 15:31:39+00:00
The skip-to-the-end answer: Context7 MCP is so good it seems like magic, even to many well-informed, highly capable hackers. Simply wildly good for libraries and SDKs. All it takes to start using it is to add the MCP provider to your agent config and save your arms, "Use Context7 for this".

https://context7.com/
Ask HN: How do you get Leads (DM)?
by dontoni | 2025-08-13 15:31:52+00:00
Do you put ads, DM your network, cold outreach through email or LinkedIn DMs for B2B, post content if you have an audience, or what else do you do?

I'm more interested in the DM experience, as starting an inbound channel when you only need 1-4 customers to get started testing your idea seems an overkill.

How do you approach people through DM? Do you first try to simply make more friends and then DM those people? Do you get into the careers listings and try helping them with a demo of your product?

What else do you do?
by treyd | 2025-08-13 15:31:59+00:00
Yeah this is exactly the stuff that you'll have to reinvent yourself on an ad-hoc basis in any sufficiently large project.

I would argue it's sorta related to Greenspun's tenth rule: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

Of course, you'll probably retreat and say "Go is better for small projects", but every large project started as a small one, and it's really hard to justify rewriting a project in a new language in a business context.
by Telaneo | 2025-08-13 15:32:02+00:00
> It's the responsibility of the maintainer to read the subset of docs relevant to the package(s) they're contributing, not the user's.

I agree a lot with this. You're supposed to trust your distributions packages. If you can't trust your distro, who can you trust? If you don't, find one you do trust, as that's a viable alternative. If none are trustworthy to you, then the only real option is to become your own package maintainer and have fun with Linux From Scratch.
by chaseadam17 | 2025-08-13 15:32:23+00:00
Here's another possibility:

1. There are fewer new products normal people want to buy, especially in tech.

2. Inflation is making the everyday things people need more expensive.

3. VC money for the most popular products ran out and companies are jacking up prices.

4. Concerns over tech's impact on health is limiting tech use and more negative sentiment.

All of this is causing a slowdown in tech and AI could be the perfect fix:

1. Shiny new product for people to buy.

2. Reduce costs and increase margins right when it's most needed.

3. Justify more investment in the space (super intelligence = best VC investment ever).

4. Solve bread and butter problems in health, education, etc. if safety is prioritized.

My guess is that this need for AI is causing a lot of the tech sector to overestimate how quickly AI will revolutionize things, similar to getting "flying car" predictions right at the top of the automotive s-curve.

I believe AI will have a big impact in the long-term but no where close to as quickly as most people believe, and that the short-term impact will be limited to more narrow use cases. I also believe we're going to see a big rebound to people doing work in the next few years.

Many here likely disagree with me and it will be interesting to see how everything plays out.
by Saline9515 | 2025-08-13 15:32:27+00:00
I was referring to when the political systems were set in place. When the UK became a parliamentary monarchy, no one could dream of becoming "a nation of immigrants," while in the case of the US, it was obvious that it was and would be for the next century, at least.

The US political regime was designed for stability by lawyers, which has worked quite well for the country so far. In the case of the UK, the lack of a constitution can also be quite dangerous as it allows abuse and doesn't guarantee any protection of basic rights or even democracy. This can work well if the country is mono-ethnic, with elites and plebeians sharing a common culture. It can also easily derail in pluri-cultural settings where ethnicities compete against each other to impose their standards or acquire resources from the state. This is what happens in Africa, for instance, and one of the reasons for the weakness of the state there.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-13 15:32:30+00:00
Folk need to work to justify their existence to themselves. Just yesterday, there was an article here about why people feel bad about themselves when they aren't being productive.

Our own psychology aside, people need to work because at present robots cannot make all the stuff we want. So if we (society as a whole) want all this stuff, then we need to work.

We have a duty to treat our fellow humans with dignity and humanity. I'm not sure that extends to providing for those who can work but won't, though - not when there's work that society as a whole needs done.
by duxup | 2025-08-13 15:32:33+00:00
A lot of talk goes into how Facebook or other social media use algorithms to encourage engagement, that often includes outrage type content, fake news, rabbit holes and so on.

But here's the thing ... people CHOOSE to engage with that, and users even produce that content for social media platforms for free.

It's hard to escape that part.

I remember trying Bluesky and while I liked it better than Twitter, for me it was disappointing that it was just Twitter, but different. Outlandish short posts, same lame jokes / pithy appeals to our emotions, and so on. People on there want to behave the same way they wanted to on Twitter.
by t-3 | 2025-08-13 15:32:43+00:00
It's a newer problem IME, so I'd guess it's cause by people using auto-transcription/translation tools to generate subtitles. For eg. Chinese content, I'll see stuff on Viki where the OG Mandarin subs are formatted sanely and the English is piecemeal follow-the-audio style. I can't imagine this happening in any other way than use of a transcription+translation tool without review.
by righthand | 2025-08-13 15:33:06+00:00
I am senior developer and have easily and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years. Nothing has changed for me and my team mates who do use it are slower than me and often don’t know what the Pr actually does.

You chose to invest in the downward career slope. That’s why your opinion has changed. If you continued to resist it you wouldn’t be looking to remove yourself from the auditing/coding position.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-13 15:33:35+00:00
self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls. Wow. I didn't realize there was a ban and that it's from 1977. Btw, we had an almost autonomous Case tractor ("AutoSteer") at Trimble in Sunnyvale (department since moved to Colorado) in 2000 without an operator at the controls (so it was possibly illegal), but it's surprising that it's a blanket ban rather than a selective one like human-overseen. Perhaps it was written to protect jobs or there was subconscious fear over killer machines later epitomized by the film Maximum Overdrive (1986).
by gabeste1n | 2025-08-13 15:33:36+00:00
In AI, context is king, that's why Slack restricted API access to your own conversation history, they want to lock you in.

We built Pager, to give you that control back. It's a simple team chat, with a great DX and AI that actively learns from your conversations.

Would love to get everyone's feedback! And possibly see a PR or two ;)
by johnisgood | 2025-08-13 15:33:42+00:00
What is the point if there are people on many streets with CCTVs doing drugs openly. I saw a cop simply walk by someone overdosing. Nothing will happen.

Again, what is the point exactly? Can anyone tell me?

(Again, what is the point of the down-vote? I am asking for people's thought and opinions in the hope of a fruitful conversation).
by IAmGraydon | 2025-08-13 15:33:54+00:00
This is something I immediately noticed when ChatGPT first released. It was instantly called "AI", but previous to that, HN would have been up in arms that it's "machine learning" not actual intelligence. For some reason, the crowd here and everywhere else just accepted the misuse of the word intelligence and let it happen. Elsewhere I can understand, but people here know better.

Intentionally misconstruing it as actual intelligence was all a part of the grift from the beginning. They've always known there's no intelligence behind the scenes, but pushing this lie has allowed them to take in hundreds of billions in investor money. Perhaps the biggest grift the world has ever seen.
by jshaqaw | 2025-08-13 15:34:03+00:00
I love the spirit of this so believe me I’m not here to denigrate it. Just sharing anecdote of building one of those “retro style” Linux/pi kits with my kids some years ago. I thought having a bare metal style machine would get them entranced by computers like it did in the early 80s. But you can’t roll back the clock. Kids today live saturated in a computerized and digital world no matter how much we may try to shelter them from it. When I saw a bare DOS prompt at age 7 it felt like all the magic in the world at my fingertips. But not for my kids. What once was science fiction to me is no more amazing to them then the fact that we have 24 hour indoor electric lighting at the touch of a switch. It’s just a different world today.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-13 15:34:20+00:00
Intersex has nothing to do with gender roles, classic or otherwise: the term refers to abnormal sexual development. Intersex rights issues include non-consensual surgical interventions on perfectly-healthy infants, which can cause pain, infertility, and other issues. Norway has not banned this.

If you object to "medical interventions on underage people", then I'd suggest campaigning against this would be a better use of your time than railing against trans rights. Banning consensual, requested gender-affirming treatment that provides clear benefit to children, while allowing injurious cosmetic surgery on literal babies, is doing things the wrong way around. (Even if you turn around and get consensual gender-affirming treatment banned afterwards, that'd still better than the status quo.)

> There’s not that much of a focus on gender because it’s ok to be a feminine male or a woman with masculine traits.

Excellent! I approve. However, that doesn't have very much to do with transgender people.

> this obsession with making new categories

Is a compromise, because in other cultures that have much more rigid conceptions of gender, cultural factors prevent us from abolishing the gender system: drawing new categories around observed clustering and calling them "genders" is somewhat of a hack. (Though not without precedent: many cultures throughout history have taken this approach, usually with 3–5 genders and a lot of them ascribe spiritual significance to the non-binary genders. Orthodox Judaism is an outlier: they have unusually-many genders but ascribe negligible spiritual significance to them.) What you're seeing is probably a side-effect of multiculturalism: in this case, exporting your culture's gender non-conformity more intensely will alleviate it.
by wpm | 2025-08-13 15:34:36+00:00
I don't really care about portability as I do "how much shit do I need to install to actually get work done on my workstations and servers"

Maybe it's because I was a sysadmin in a former life, but overmanaging is almost always a mistake. If I had one single computer and only one, sure, who cares. But I have a homelab full of servers and a constant churn of VMs and I don't need to add in another step of "oh shit X isn't installed yet". Maybe it's also because of that that I don't really give a shit about how "bad" sh/bash/zsh are.

Yes, I can sync dotfiles and crap to git (which I also have to install to use), but it's just a small weight off my shoulders to not have to worry or think about that shit before I can use a server or workstation. I don't want to have to unlearn normal shell to learn fish and then have to switch back when I'm trying to get some thing online so that I can install fish. I'm just not fuckin interested.

(inb4 someone is like nix solves this, i don't give a shit about nix either)
by kevindamm | 2025-08-13 15:34:49+00:00
It's system dependent but Linux will generally speed up or slow down the time advancement until the delta from adjtime(...) matches up:

https://linux.die.net/man/2/clock_gettime

This clock is not affected by discontinuous jumps in the system time (e.g., if the system administrator manually changes the clock), but is affected by the incremental adjustments performed by adjtime(3) and NTP.

https://linux.die.net/man/3/adjtime

If the adjustment in delta is positive, then the system clock is speeded up by some small percentage (i.e., by adding a small amount of time to the clock value in each second) until the adjustment has been completed. If the adjustment in delta is negative, then the clock is slowed down in a similar fashion.
by grepnork | 2025-08-13 15:35:01+00:00
All positives are verified by humans first before action is taken, all the system does is flag positives to an operator. Once verified, then the action movie starts.

Match quality below 0.64 is automatically discarded >0.7 is considered reliable enough for an enquiry to be made.

So far ~1,035 arrests since last year resulting in 773 charges or cautions, which is pretty good when you consider that a 'trained' police officer's odds of correctly picking a stop and search candidate are 1 in 9.

In the UK you don't have to provide ID when asked, appropriate checks are made on arrest, and if you lied you get re-arrested for fraud.

The system has proved adept at monitoring sex offenders breaching their licence conditions - one man was caught with a 6-year-old when he was banned from being anywhere near children.

Before anyone waxes lyrical about the surveillance state and the number of CCTV cameras, me and the guy who stabbed me were caught on 40 cameras, and not a single one could ID either of us.
by rootnod3 | 2025-08-13 15:35:09+00:00
Hot take, but the amount that people try to go and make an LLM be less sycophantic and still have it be sycophantic in round-about ways is astonishing. Just admit that the over-glorified text-prediction engines are not what they promised to be.

There is no “reasoning”, there is no “understanding”.

EDIT: s/test/text
by bluGill | 2025-08-13 15:35:11+00:00
I can't figure out how to link, but if you search me you will see elsewhere that I explained that bigger is better for the soil.

Most small landholders should sell and move to the city. You need a fair amount of size to make a decent living selling something cheap. Though my biggest worry is the medium sized farmers - wasting $10/acre in extra chemicals when you have 600 acres is only $6000 - you probably won't even notice it and in any case not wasting it costs investment too. When you have 6000 acres though that $10 is a larger number and you can afford to put a lot of money in better whatever to not waste it.
by simonw | 2025-08-13 15:35:16+00:00
Why would medical professionals mislead on this though?

It seems factual that this person decided to start consuming bromine and it had an adverse effect on them.

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.
by westurner | 2025-08-13 15:35:22+00:00
What about CDATA; which XML and XHTML support? HTML5 does not support CDATA.

CDATA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA

<![CDATA[ ]]>

This would work for XHTML but not HTML5 IIUC:

<script> <![CDATA[ x = {"<!--":""}; ]]> <![CDATA[ {{json.dumps(["<!--"])}} ]]> </script>
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-13 15:35:32+00:00
I work in survey research and I'm rather appalled at how many people would rather survey a sample of AIs than a sample of people and claim they can come to some valid conclusion as a result.

There are many ways AIs differ from real people and any conclusions you can draw from them are limited at best -- we've had enough bad experiments done with real people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Int...
by microtonal | 2025-08-13 15:35:37+00:00
They might lose entirely (search, social media, etc.) if users are more likely to direct their eyeballs to "AI" services.

Sorry that I wasn't clear enough. That was what I was trying to imply - in that case the ad purchases that currently go to Google etc. will go to a new AI company. This is why both Google is investing so heavily in LLMs, they know that LLMs can kill search + website visits and thus cause them to lose their ad income.

But either way, it's questionable if it will increase all ad spending. So either AI companies collapse and a lot of VC money is burned or Google et al. collapse and a lot capital is burned (pension funds and whatnot).
by stockresearcher | 2025-08-13 15:35:37+00:00
It's an unintended consequence of a very old law. Getting worked up about it is extraordinarily counterproductive.

It's very hard and time-consuming to repeal/replace a law. It's at least 10x easier to make a "technical fix"/"clarification" that preserves the original intent while removing the unintended effects. That's what should be done.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-13 15:36:18+00:00
Calling them fond memories is not a way I would have characterized them. Regardless, the same strategy regarding home ownership worked for me.

Of course to your point there's no telling if I had been renting and putting every extra dollar into the stock market if I might not have come out ahead. But realistically how many people "invest" in that manner with their income? I can tell you my blue-collar background had not raised me to be investment savvy. (I would have no idea what capital gains were until I was probably in my forties.) I suspect that for most people with similar upbringing an investment in their home is their only significant investment in their lifetime — or it was once that way.

(Who knew they were killing this country.)

I guess that one's out the window now as well then if they can't even afford that.

Unexpected repair and upkeep cost — you're suggesting the landlords just eat that?

(In my case I have learned to do repairs myself. That has been very liberating, FWIW.)

If I am following, your alternative is that we all become renters for life — using any extra money we have to invest in the stock market?
by quesera | 2025-08-13 15:36:24+00:00
I think this is probably correct.

But I'm not sure that 40hrs is the sweet spot. Other countries have chosen differently (with comparisons difficult to draw).

There are several competing influences here: inflation, AI productivity gains (TBD but nonzero), existing legislation around health insurance obligations, social/economic inertia, etc. And definitely others I'm not smart enough to think of!

It'd be interesting, if it was possible, to ramp down the 40hrs by an hour or two every year, keeping other components (esp healthcare) in step, to see where the inflection point is. I feel confident that we could get down to 32hrs without major negative drama. I agree that 18hrs (suggested elsewhere) would be violent.
by cpfiffer | 2025-08-13 15:36:32+00:00
I agree. Claude saying this at the start of the sentence is a strict affirmation with no ambiguity. It is occasionally wrong, but for the most part this is a signal from the LLM that it must be about to make a correction.

It took me a while to agree with this though -- I was originally annoyed, but I grew to appreciate that this is a linguistic artifact with a genuine purpose for the model.
by dexwiz | 2025-08-13 15:36:32+00:00
I view AI like a gas pedal. For an experienced driver it can really help. For someone new, straight into a wall. For some code you go straight for hours and barely touch the steering wheel. For some code it's all wheel and too much gas is a mistake.

That said, we will need less coders overall. Just like you don't need human drafters or calculators in the same way. It will cut the bottom out of the industry, and entry level will be expected operate like a senior from 10 years ago.
by beala | 2025-08-13 15:36:35+00:00
I'm not sure what aspect of smart locks you don't trust. If it's reliability, most also accept a physical key as a backup. As far as security, I'm under no impression that the firmware is free of vulnerabilities, but any hack is likey to be at least as hard as lockpicking the average lock, which most people can master with a 10 minute YouTube tutorial. If you're a lock nerd and have upgraded all your locks to some Fort Knox style Medeco model, then sure a smart lock will probably be a downgrade, but for the average person I don't think it's substantially worse than what they already have.