MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by icegreentea2 | 2025-08-04 12:33:38+00:00
The article mentions two reasonable reasons for allowing the program (which is about gambling on bases outside of US) to continue.

1. The classic, "people will want to gamble, we may as well control the supply". I think this is generally true. In the US, service members can go off base (when allowed) to gamble in a more or less controlled manner. This program provides the possibility of more or less uniform, controlled access across the globe, regardless of host nation.

2. Revenue funds morale, welfare and recreation activities.

I honestly think point 1 is fair enough. The corrosive element is that it's used for aspect 2 (an alternate approach might be to simply to redistribute money back to the soldiers directly... or just let it go to waste). The challenge is that once someone's funding is coupled to gambling revenue, it compromises its ability to pursue task 1 (which is basically a risk mitigation strategy).
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-04 12:34:03+00:00
The problem with subsidies is society does not benefit from kids simply existing. Society benefits from well raised kids. Kids not raised well end up costing society.

As “well raised” is not possible to measure, this is not a feasible solution.

One work around has been to bet that those with earned incomes are likelier to raise their kids well, so the subsidies can be non refundable earned income tax credits.

But I doubt sufficient people have sufficient tax liabilities that offset the costs of the minimum quality of life many people require for their kids and them to have.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-04 12:34:25+00:00
I suppose you're being ironic, but I think most scholars have (unironically) said as much. Obv. example, yelling "Fire" in a crowded movie house.

In most of the cases you mentioned we all wish that people were better people — showed some self-control. (Might as well add fire-arms to your list as well.) And hoping that all people can behave with all out interests in mind, we give people those freedoms (as we do) and then the rest of us are left to endlessly grouse about how fucked up our society is because of those people and their poor choices.

So how do you win?

Some people have concluded that we might, as a society, actually be better off without "Thing X" as one of our freedoms. I'm willing to entertain those arguments.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-04 12:34:46+00:00
These jobs are not going to return. 'The system' is too profitable in its current form. What will happen is tariffs will cause prices to rise as companies pass on this tax to consumers (which is inflationary). In fact, they may go up more than that, same way as they did during covid. Even if say two years from now a new congress and senate remove these tariffs. The prices will not go down. Companies will not build new factories here because it is easier, after they get the new higher prices locked in, to just lobby to get the tariffs removed and then keep the difference as sweet sweet margin.
by _mlbt | 2025-08-04 12:34:49+00:00
I really don’t believe that’s the motivation here. Bad credit is one of the most common causes of losing your security clearance and failing to pay your debts can result in disciplinary actions. The military has no issues throwing money at retention when they need to.

I do honestly believe it is just a misguided attempt to fund Morale, Welfare, and Recreation.
by tempay | 2025-08-04 12:34:50+00:00
According to the article that seems to be the case:

> The ARMP’s earnings go back into each branch’s Morale, Welfare, and Recreation (MWR). Some of it pays for entertainment on bases, such as golf courses, bowling alleys, and libraries. “Proceeds that are returned to MWR are decided and allocated by the garrison commander at each installation,”

Though it still feels questionable to me.
by 2000UltraDeluxe | 2025-08-04 12:35:17+00:00
Rural Finnish driving culture is insane, to the extent that drunk driving often is considered socially acceptable, and something every kid does. Luckily, the bulk of the incidents dont involve drivers hurting others.

The country road rally drivers are rarely as bad as busy hatchback-drivers on a main road though. Especially the ones with kids in the back and on their way home during rush hours.
by __s | 2025-08-04 12:35:26+00:00
In the Year 2525 hypnotism has been confirmed. Brain protheics have amplified the effect for anyone who can afford it. With a healthy diet & conscious focus the effects can be warded off, so regulators want to wait & see if the market can solve hypnotism abuse

For the past 6 weeks I have stayed in & meditated, as last time I went out I broke my focus between taking a sip of beer & getting distracted hearing Heart of Glass, & in a moment of weakness someone in the crowd convinced me to buy everyone a round & leave a fat tip. Next time I'll have to try harder to stay focused
by reactordev | 2025-08-04 12:36:20+00:00
True, but instead of saying “cruise ship bad” how about instead offer those alternatives. I get that cruise ships pollute but out of the couple cruises I’ve been on, I would say it’s less carbon than if I owned a truck. Or a car at all. So to NOT do things simply because of some moral stance on something entirely unrelated is bogus to me. I’m a fan of saying yes, not no, to new things.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-04 12:36:25+00:00
That's where it gets disgusting. They don't tolerate that solution, which is a proof that this has nothing to do with brand protection or chargeback rates or anything of sorts.

So either those poor games need to be kicked out, or everyone has to switch to cash/app overnight. The transition process has to be easy enough that the dumbest addict you have seen in worst fast food restaurant place can complete in few clicks. That has proven difficult for many, and sadly the former options are usually taken.
by lupusreal | 2025-08-04 12:36:31+00:00
The government shouldn't be in the gambling business at all, neither this nor state lotteries. It creates a perverse incentive where the government starts promoting gambling instead of what they should be doing: promoting services to help gambling addicts recover.

I'm absolutely sick of seeing billboards promoting the lottery as a sound investment, and not only that but suggesting terrible ways people could waste all their winnings instead of putting it away and being financially responsible. It's sickening.

And yes, I know the argument about state lotteries outcompeting "numbers games" run by organized crime. I don't buy this argument, I don't think we're getting any net gain for society. Having connections to organized crime to participate in their gambling schemes is far less accessible than buying lotto tickets at any gas station in the country. This casual accessibility sucks far more people into gambling addictions..
by lesuorac | 2025-08-04 12:36:53+00:00
Naw, some of the fools are flipping [1]. Honestly, if the election happened today I could very easily see him losing.

The problem being that they wanted things like a balanced budget (pretty achievable if you believe Musk could remove 2T from the budget like he claimed) or prices to go down (which Kamela was part of an administration with record inflation). And then they didn't bother to check if Trump 1st term has a track record of either of those things ...

[1]: https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...
by ramraj07 | 2025-08-04 12:37:04+00:00
It looks like you make a lot of valid points, but also have an extremely visceral reaction because theres a company out there thats using AI in a way that offends you. I mean fair still.

But im a guy who's in the market for a pdf parser service, im happy to pay pretty penny per page processed. I just want a service that works without me thinking for a second about any of the problems you guys are all discussing. What service do I use? Do I care if it uses AI in the lamest way possible? The only thing that matters are the results. There are two people including you in this thread ramming with pdf parsing gyan but from reading it all, it doesn't look like I can do things the right way without spending months fully immersed in this problem alone. If you or anyone has a non blunt AI service that I can use Ill be glad to check it out.
by scotty79 | 2025-08-04 12:37:17+00:00
I know how it works because connecting your bank account to your phone can be crappy and fiddly as it goes through Visa/Mastercard. But it works that way just to ride on customers of legacy systems. It doesn't have to work that way if you bring your own customers. It would have to start online of course and eventually move through phones to the real world.

I don't trust Paypal, at all, because its brand is damaged beyond repair, but I would put enough money on Valve account to do all of my online shopping with it if Valve did even just what Paypal does (even without connecting Visa or Mastercard directly).
by mcsolutions | 2025-08-04 12:37:28+00:00
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by Molitor5901 | 2025-08-04 12:38:02+00:00
I get the concern bout Palantir but this is not new: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, AWS, have all been extending their reach into government for over a decade. Palantir is the boogey man right now, and it's under a lot of scrutiny because of its work and its political ties, but let's try turning some of the ire to all of the other tech companies empowering the government against people. The others shouldn't get a pass just because of their perceived political leanings.
by __s | 2025-08-04 12:38:42+00:00
& it's fair to regulate these. Nobody cares about regulating free slots with no reward, or Balatro

I don't want PornHub ads on billboards & commercials

I was at a bar, coming out of the bathroom I walked into a wall. They stopped serving me alcohol. I went to the liquor store after & they refused to sell me a bottle of jaeger since I wasn't walking straight. The casino won't stop serving you games until you're broke or winning
by durumu | 2025-08-04 12:39:02+00:00
Even if most of the code you write is solving repetitive plumbing tasks, today's models are incredibly bad at API design taste. IMO designing software in a way that minimizes side effects and is easy to change and test is more than 1% of software engineering.

Lately most of the code I write has been through LLMs and I find them an enormous productivity booster overall, but despite the benchmarks they're not expert human level quite yet, and they need a LOT of coaxing to produce production quality code.

As far as things LLMs are bad at, I think it's mainly the long tail. I'm not sure there's one singular thing that >1% of programmers work on that LLMs suck at, but I think there are thousands of different weird sub-specialties that almost no one is working on and very little public code exists for, thus LLMs are not good at them yet.
by chnsh | 2025-08-04 12:39:14+00:00
Logistically speaking, is there a good hosting service for design docs but have google docs-like functionality to be able to comment and share feedback? I increasingly use tools like cursor to iterate on design docs that are in markdown format and currently I move things over to google docs manually and when there is feedback, I need to go back to cursor which creates a slow and weird loop. Have people identified better structures/processes for this?
by ben_w | 2025-08-04 12:39:23+00:00
Sure, but "For certain situations" is a strong barrier here.

So, the example with most saliency for me (which may not be the hardest to deal with) is:

Imagine a hotel that is hosting a convention, and is fully occupied for five days. On day one, a norovirus infection event gets everyone, on day four everyone's digestive tracts are voided from both ends with about 40 seconds' warning. How well do the automation systems cope?

This example is probably quite close to the top of the list of things I expect cleaning staff to be hoping someone can automate/has already automated, because noro is hella infectious like that and who on earth would actually want to be the one who has to clean up after such incidents, but has this kind of cleanup actually been fully automated yet?

I had to clean up after a relative (which is why it's salient for me), and I think I caught it from them because I'd missed the inside of a cupboard door handle before removing my gloves.

> How about automatic cleaning of a clean room?

Positive air pressure, air filters, and requiring occupants to wear stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom#/media/File:Cleanroo...

Would be one of the easier cases, given they are work environments and by extension there's an expectation of reduced scope of things for the automation to be doing, though even then I'd expect some unplanned incidents require human intervention.
by BeauNer | 2025-08-04 12:39:36+00:00
This is the kind of tech that gives me chills. Synchron has just released a public demo showing something that used to feel impossible. A man with ALS is now using his iPad with nothing but his brain. No hands. No voice. No eye-tracking. Just thought.

The man in the video is named Mark. He’s part of Synchron’s COMMAND clinical study and has an implant called the Stentrode. It sits inside his brain’s blood vessels and picks up his motor intention. Those signals get sent wirelessly to an external decoder, which then tells the iPad what to do. It’s all made possible by Apple’s new Brain-Computer Interface Human Interface Device protocol, which lets iPadOS treat brain activity like an actual input method.

Apple’s built-in Switch Control feature makes the whole thing work on the software side. The iPad even sends back screen context to the BCI decoder to make everything run more smoothly and accurately.
by echelon | 2025-08-04 12:39:42+00:00
I'm on the image and video side of AI.

I see the claims being levied against LLMs, but in the generative media world these models are nothing short of revolutionary.

In addition to being an engineer, I'm also a filmmaker. This tech has so many orders of magnitude changes to the production cycle:

- Films can be made 5,000x cheaper (a $100M Disney film will be matched by small studios on budgets of $20,000.)

- Films can be made 5x faster (end-to-end, not accounting for human labor hour savings. A 15 month production could feasibly be done in 3 months.)

- Films can be made with 100x fewer people. (Studios of the future will be 1-20 people.)

Disney and Netflix are going to be facing a ton of disruptive pressure. It'll be interesting to see how they navigate.

Advertising and marketing? We've already seen ads on TV that were made over a weekend [1] for a few thousand dollars. I've talked to customers that are bidding $30k for pharmaceutical ad spots they used to bid $300k for. And the cost reductions are just beginning.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/nx-s1-5432712/ai-video-ad-kal...
by westpfelia | 2025-08-04 12:40:24+00:00
Well in the case of the person in the article by "funding morale, welfare, and recreation" the military lost an officer. Not something cheap considering the wild amount of money that gets pumped in to training. He lost his family/friends, nearly his life, and financially ruined. But hey at least the VA was able to find a old dusty pamphlet a few years later.
by CalRobert | 2025-08-04 12:40:43+00:00
I’m pro choice but when I was at a catholic high school my peers and the adults seemed genuinely convinced that abortion was literally killing a human - akin to infanticide. I think many of them indeed opposed abortion based on this. It’s part of why the debate was intractable - it even brings in the hard problem of consciousness, and we don’t have an answer to that.
by grafmax | 2025-08-04 12:41:32+00:00
I wonder if the VCs have given up on growth. AI isn’t really profitable. Unless you can get government to pay for it (“socialism for me, capitalism for thee”). That means military contracts. So we have a top heavy system with a perverse incentive to justify itself with war. Unsurprisingly, I guess, the US is gearing up to do just that in 2027 with China.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-04 12:41:35+00:00
> 1. The classic, "people will want to gamble, we may as well control the supply".

Of course, anecdote, but the example they give — sounds like the guy never would have thought to gamble had there not been a slot machine on base. At the same time, he was so easily and thoroughly adsorbed into it, perhaps he was dry kindling — just waiting for any spark to come along.
by bko | 2025-08-04 12:41:55+00:00
Regarding people living in Tornado Alley because they can't afford to live anywhere else, insurance costs are much higher there, so not exactly a bargain. And plenty of wealthy people love high risk areas. Pretty much anything by a sea is high risk. And again, they pay for it with higher insurance rates.

It's hard to get a good measure of damage caused by climate change. There are much touted statistics that say billion dollar weather events are more common than ever, but that's mainly due to things being more expensive and increased development (i.e. beach front properties)

A more objective measure, although no perfect, is deaths caused by climate events. If climate events were more catastrophic over time, you would expect deaths to go up somewhat proportionally. To my knowledge, there haven't been major advances in rescue technology in the last 50 years or so.

But we see this number has come down pretty drastically over the last 150 years. In the US it has also come down or stayed about the same

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1269715/global-reported-...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatality-rates-in-the-us-...
by Herz | 2025-08-04 12:42:50+00:00
I disagree. The need for regulation in this case stems from a lack of competition.

Regulations are empirical decisions, based on a very limited amount of data, whose implications can be endless. Regulations are a shortcut capable of poisoning the market and competition. Just look at what's been done with energy, automobiles, AI, GDPR, etc. Bureaucrats are not gods; they often make mistakes and don't predict the future. Regulations should be the last resort.

Furthermore, we're talking about a US monopoly here. The goal would be to grab a share of the pie through honest competition, not to enstablish golden collars.

Regulation should facilitate competition, not legitimize the status quo.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-04 12:43:16+00:00
> The grounds for the lawsuit are the broadcasting of atrocity videos live on Facebook on October 7, and that some of the plaintiffs discovered their relatives were murdered and kidnapped through broadcasts on Facebook and Instagram.

This should be thrown out on the grounds that it would render all forms of live streaming illegal -- or extremely dangerous to provide.

Nor does it serve a security function. Facebook live-streaming provided first responders and military/police personnel with valuable intel, and may even have provided them with a partial list of perpetrators.

In the US, this would fall under section 230, anyway. If Israel doesn't have an analogous law, it's possible that they look to US law and common practice, in which case the lawsuit will fail.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-04 12:44:00+00:00
It's mostly just the way things turned out without government intervention.

American Express' card started in 1958, as a pivot of their then already 100-year-old business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Express#1920s%E2%80%9...

Visa also in 1958 as a Bank of America (and friends) card, which quietly expanded into the mid-60s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.#History

Mastercard in the mid-60s from banks who BoA wouldn't invite into the Visa clubhouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastercard#History

And Discover in the mid-80s because Sears was big enough to be its own financial services firm: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discover_Card#History
by pjmlp | 2025-08-04 12:44:51+00:00
I guess having a big fat guy for A/UX advertisement kind of says how Apple saw UNIX even then.

Jobs were also not that keen into UNIX, around this time NeXT was already going on, and some of the surviving remarks including his presence at USENIX, was similar to Microsoft's tatics, in the sense of bringing UNIX applications and custmers into NeXTSTEP, and then offer them tools unavailable in any other UNIX.

OpenSTEP effort, and collaboration with Sun only started after the sales not going that well as expected.

Nonetheless, I only saw A/UX live in 1994 at Lisbon's IT conference (CEBIT in miniature), and it looked kind of interesting.
by ecocentrik | 2025-08-04 12:45:05+00:00
Kids dress in drag when exploring comedy, theater, themselves... You might have a kid that's really into drag for any number of reasons and you might love them enough to want them to be the best version of themselves without imposing psychological trauma or making them feel like they need to hide parts of themselves from you. You still need to be a good parent, whatever that means to you but most parent don't want to limit their kids potential with distracting hang-ups. So I wouldn't say "absolutely no reason".

In typical DeSantis fashion, he's not signing any laws limiting this entertainment to "adults only" restricting access to anyone under the age of 18. And he's not passing laws to ban all drag shows across the state. This is political theater, in the same way that his two year presidential "grooming in schools" campaign resulted in zero arrests of teachers or librarians and the removal of completely unrelated books. And lets not forget that the panel to remove books was lead by a political opportunist that was later implicated in a sex scandal that included allegations of rape.
by NohatCoder | 2025-08-04 12:45:09+00:00
Reminds me that I found an alternative way of sampling an SDF:

First take a sample in each corner of the pixel to be rendered (s1 s2 s3 s4), then compute:

coverage=0.5 + (s1+s2+s3+s4)/(abs(s1)+abs(s2)+abs(s3)+abs(s4))/2

It is a good approximation, and it keeps on working no matter how you scale and stretch the field.

Relative to the standard method it is expensive to calculate. But for a modern GPU it is still a very light workload to do this once per screen pixel.
by merelysounds | 2025-08-04 12:45:09+00:00
If you want to try solving a nonogram on an iOS device, I made a show hn about that yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766657

Direct link to the app: https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6... (free, no ads).