MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Quarrel | 2025-09-21 12:42:08+00:00
Which is perhaps also why:

> An MP has claimed in parliament that Mark Zuckerberg’s company was trying to “silence and punish” Sarah Wynn-Williams

By doing so in parliament they have immunity (presumably the worry would be defamation) for pushing this, true or false.

I'm not much of a Meta fan, but there seems to be less to this story every paragraph you read of the article.
by microtonal | 2025-09-21 12:42:19+00:00
Not once do I remember thinking "I would like this phone to be thinner", yet I wish that this thing would have a bigger battery almost daily.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge was first with a thinner phone (and some Motorola that most people have probably never heard of?). But it is also quite misplaced, since they just released the 27 Pro, which moves the (stacked) logic board close to the camera to be able to fit a larger battery, going from 3582 mAh in the 16 Pro to 4252 mAh in the 17 Pro (both US eSIM capacities, 18.7% more!). But they also used the space to add a vapor chamber for better sustained performance.

The Air is just a different market. The Air and Pro optimize for almost the opposite:

- Thinness vs. battery life.

- Thinness vs. an additional GPU core.

- Thinness vs. sustained performance.

- One back camera vs three back cameras.

I like this year's line-up because there is much more choice: getting the absolute thinnest phone, getting an absolute performance monster with a large battery and plenty of cameras, or getting a great middle ground, which is almost as light as the thin phone, but has longer battery life, and one more camera, and no lousy 60Hz display this year.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-09-21 12:42:31+00:00
I wonder, is stating the truth qualifying as "disparaging"? According to https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disparaging:

> meant to belittle the value or importance of someone or something : serving or intended to disparage someone or something

Maybe it is not meant to belittle, but merely uncovering the truth. Who is to know, what her intention was, when releasing a book? I guess one would have to read that book and check how she formulated things, to know, whether it is intentionally belittling the "value" of Meta.

Also, subjectively speaking: How does one belittle the value of something that already has net negative value for society?

Maybe the waters are a little bit murky there.

But anyway, this goes to show, how these companies consume your soul. Trying to prevent you from ever revealing the truth about them and their illegal activities.
by HK-NC | 2025-09-21 12:42:41+00:00
I have a chinese friend who said something similar to this, she believes much of the culture in the modern west is influenced by some shady chinese government attempt at controlling the speed at which said wheel turns, through Tiktok and stuff. While Id normally dismiss her as a nut, we do have rioting in the street arguing over a miniscule group of people wearing clothes dsigned for the opposite sex.
by kiru_io | 2025-09-21 12:43:28+00:00
I developed a few utilities to help me track the words and expressions I know in a language (and also see which words in other languages are missing). Tried to port it to an app [0], but it's not perfect yet.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ai-anki-learning-fluentread/id...
by xg15 | 2025-09-21 12:44:31+00:00
The language learning premise in this post is a bit ridiculous - if I started with the goal of learning a language and ended up worrying about the asymptotic complexity of my automated k-book recommendation algorithm for arbitrary values of k, then I think I should worry about a serious case of procrastination.

But the algorithms are interesting, so I think a better title would have been "why submodular NP hard problems are cool" or something similar.
by fn-mote | 2025-09-21 12:44:44+00:00
> get ideology out of academia

This reads like someone who needs to take the time to understand the breadth of “ideology”. What will be left when what you consider ideology is gone?

As you note, even science has its ideology.

What about science itself? That too can be (is) considered ideology, although I assume you reject that position… that doesn’t make you correct (or wrong).

There is a lot of theoretical writing about this; it would be worth your time to understand.

In some ways we are already living in a world in which there are no restrictions on speech, certainly no privilege of truthful, factually based speech.
by parpfish | 2025-09-21 12:44:49+00:00
Rote memorization often gets a bad wrap.

It shouldn’t be the sole purpose of a class, but sometimes you have to drill people to memorize a bunch of stuff so they’re able to deal with the higher level material.

Imagine doing math if you never had somebody force you to learn multiplication tables. Or if you were doing medical programs but hadn’t been forced to learn the names of all the bones/organs.
by estearum | 2025-09-21 12:44:59+00:00
I don't think the peripheral costs are even the bulk of it. The real value of the company is problem selection, brand recognition, coordination, hiring, and elimination of non-value add problems (e.g. an early stage CEO spends a huge amount of their time managing government registrations, which is later managed elsewhere in the company but not by 99.999% of employees)
by CPLX | 2025-09-21 12:45:06+00:00
You still don’t have to like it or go on message boards advocating on behalf of the company.

There’s no principle saying that you have to be on the side of an organization being exposed for behavior that is horrible for society, just because they may have a legally sound argument in court.

Laws and rules and courts are fully arbitrary and exist in search of justice.

If the rules brought us to this place, of what use were the rules?
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-09-21 12:47:20+00:00
"voluntarily" is doing a lot of work there. I don't disagree with the facts here, but I do with this particular qualifier which implies a level of willingness to sign away rights was something that she (or anyone in that position) wanted. She was likely very strongly pressured to sign it with various threats and consequences if she didn't. So she did sign it, but lets not pretend her choices at that moment were many and/or equal when faced with the law team of a trillion dollar company.
by softwaredoug | 2025-09-21 12:47:29+00:00
In my experience reasoning and search come with their own set of tradeoffs. It works great when it works. But the variance can be wider than just an LLM.

Search and reasoning use up more context, leading to context rot, and subtler harder to detect hallucinations. Reasoning doesn’t always focus on evaluating the quality of evidence, just “problem solving” from some root set of axioms found in search.

I’ve had this happen in Claude code for example where it hallucinated a few details about a library based on what badly written forum post.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-21 12:48:00+00:00
Good call, I know what you mean, you never know when something like that will just fly over someone's head without them noticing a thing about it.

In my case I'll probably never know whether it was the subject matter or merely the weight of the books that made most of the difference ;)

It all just seemed to come together at the time, and the outcome was obvious.

With 20/20 hindsight of course, once I had experienced the weight loss, I went back over the equations and I should have known it would happen to begin with.
by firesteelrain | 2025-09-21 12:48:11+00:00
I think it is fair to say universities lean heavily on credentialing, but calling them only toll gates is too harsh. They also provide exposure to new fields, access to labs and mentors, and peer networks that are hard to replicate outside.

That being said, the essay itself wanders and sometimes repeats points instead of driving the metaphor home. Tightening the structure would make the message stronger.
by bjourne | 2025-09-21 12:48:39+00:00
Your calculations are completely wrong because what you need to charge your clients to survive is not your take home salary. The assistant has many expenses that needs to be covered. You'd need to double or triple that 10k figure. Besides, it may feel wrong because it is wrong. Hours you save not doing household chores is hours someone else wastes doing your household chores for you.
by estearum | 2025-09-21 12:48:55+00:00
"They came for..." in this comment refers to "the marketplace of ideas built a brief consensus against..."

The "they came for..." in the famous poem, and in reference to today's Trump administration, refers to "the government utilized state power to advance or suppress certain ideas."

These are not the same at all.

A few specific bullets:

* Universities (especially private ones) are allowed to have ideological biases. If you disagree with them, go to a different university, criticize them, or create your own university.

* At least in the US, the health institutions merely flagged low-quality information to social media companies. It was up to the social media companies as to whether they wanted to respond -- in many cases they did not. This went to SCOTUS who decided there was no evidence that social media companies were coerced by the health institutions, partially because the social media companies created and began enforcing their policies prior to any of the alleged coercion

Note: None of this applies to the UK which really does have a free speech issue, but also doesn't really have anything close to as strong a legal guarantee of free speech and maybe should.
by yunwal | 2025-09-21 12:49:43+00:00
I’m not sure that it’s possible to track this. Personally I went from probably thousands of dollars a year in 2017-ish to “only after I’ve checked every other store and never a large purchase” today (probably about $150/yr). I never explicitly participated in any boycott, but I’m sure the messages resonated with me and helped me realize I was routinely getting fleeced by Amazon and not the sellers.
by rwmj | 2025-09-21 12:50:08+00:00
Non-disparagement clauses (common for executives) are clauses found in contracts that just state you can't say anything bad about the company, doesn't matter if it's true or not. Some examples here: https://contracts.justia.com/contract-clauses/non-disparagem...

I think it's a case where the law should simply say such clauses are not enforcible.
by lukan | 2025-09-21 12:50:38+00:00
Mein Kampf was published 1924 and distributed broadly.

There was not much hidden, the goal of making a big war in the east to conquer new land for the Aryans was there in big letters in the open.

His views towards jews likewise.

So they knew. Maybe largely did not wanted to know. And they did celebrate the victories of the german army as their own. They only stopped celebrating after the victories stopped happening and it was more and more clear that the war will be lost.
by veidr | 2025-09-21 12:50:40+00:00
It is in many ways much like coaching a n00b, but a n00b that can do 10 hours of n00b work in 10 minutes (or, 2 minutes).

That's a significant difference. There are a lot of tasks that can be done by a n00b with some advice, especially when you can say "copy the pattern when I did this same basic thing here and here".

And there are a lot of things a n00b, or an LLM, can't do.

The study you reference was real, and I am not surprised — because accurately gauging the productivity win, or loss, obtained by using LLMs in real production coding workflows is also not junior stuff.
by roenxi | 2025-09-21 12:50:46+00:00
But, key difference, the people pushing green sky or flat earth narrative don't get deplatformed, fired, yelled at or called Nazis.

I still haven't seen anyone attempt to do a cost-benefit on whether the COVID lockdowns were a net good. I do note we had a big social and economic disjunction and since then it has been pretty much nothing but war and trouble. The part where they were shutting up people with PhDs on YouTube through COVID was definitely a net loss though; the censors weren't anywhere near as qualified to decide what to talk about as the censored were in my experience.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-09-21 12:51:34+00:00
> Wasn’t there a study that said that using LLMs makes people feel more productive while they actually are not?

On a tangent; that study is brought up a lot. There are some issues with it, but I agree with the main takeaway to be weary of the feeling of productivity vs actual productivity.

But most of the time its brought up by AI skeptics, that conveniently gloss over the fact it's about averages.

Which, while organizationally interesting, is far less interesting than to discover what is and isn't currently possible at the tail end by the most skillful users.
by rdtsc | 2025-09-21 12:51:43+00:00
> This is a blatant attempt to silence political speech the current regime doesn't like -- it was literally "cancel this guy or we'll make things hard on you."

If they thought it was so easy to defend and so obvious why did they buckle so quickly?

> They didn't even try to couch it in the terms you're using to defend this entirely authoritarian attempt to chill free speech

What did they couch it as?
by nenenejej | 2025-09-21 12:52:02+00:00
You can also run Weaviate in Docker with persistence e.g. me this: https://www.docker.com/blog/how-to-get-started-weaviate-vect...

However the "sqlite" approach is also cool. Docker while handy is another thing to fiddle with and sqlite is cool for it's simplicity of deployment. Single file for the executable (or use a driver library) and single file for DB.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-09-21 12:52:12+00:00
"They were educated and literate and knew what they were doing and what was happening"

can be hard, it's happening right now, and a lot of people are really all in, love it. or ignoring it, or sinking into streaming services to distract themselves.

Take your average house frau today, and they think Trump rounding people up is just good old law and order.

People aren't thinking everything through, that's how the overwhelming distractions work.
by Krasnol | 2025-09-21 12:52:22+00:00
What I've been witnessing in the recent time is that people who have no coding experience but great ideas, get into coding and due to the cheap and fast way of generating this code, have no issues with sharing it.

Other people who have more or a lot of experience with coding, help them and everybody profits in the end.

I understand that it becomes a problem with some businesses but others may profit too.

It's not all bad.
by oblongdefeat | 2025-09-21 12:52:24+00:00
I just went to Yakihonne while not logged in -- it took me to the Home "Global" feed. Scrolling down a bit to see what was there I was met with a link to "HD Porn Videos" and the preview image was essentially a frame from whatever video was being promoted.

I wasn't "blasted" with NSFW but it was definitely present (and not very far down the feed). And the feed seems to be chronologically ordered, so depending on your timing something like that could be front and center.
by Zanni | 2025-09-21 12:52:47+00:00
Why your [ultra-light hiker] friend suddenly has [the world's lightest] power bank.

I remember Colin Fletcher, years ago, writing in The Complete Walker about trimming the borders off his paper maps to save weight, which seemed like an insane over-optimization to me. But then, I'm not an ultralight hiker.

I am impressed folks are getting their loads down to 10 pounds though.
by Archelaos | 2025-09-21 12:52:56+00:00
East Germany definitly never was. And even West Germany was considerably behind the UK in per capita GDP in US$ after WW2.[1] It had catched up at around 1970. Since 1970 the two were roughly equivalent: some years one was ahead some years the other.[2] However, Germany is now considerably ahead of the UK in terms of per capita GDP measuered in PPP (ie. adjusted to local prices: aprox. 20% now, or 10 to 15 years (depending on your reference point).[3]

[1] https://i.sstatic.net/azSk3.png

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locat...
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-09-21 12:52:58+00:00
lol, gtfo

“We inherited a financial crisis unlike any that we’ve seen in our time,”

That's a fact of reality. Trying to compare what Trump is doing to simply stating that we were in a financial crisis when Obama took over is while every single argument with someone from the right should be done knowing they don't stand on principles and will literally redefine words and reality to try and make a point.
by roenxi | 2025-09-21 12:54:28+00:00
That is largely irrelevant, they weren't in control of their own destiny at that point. What we learned in the 50s/60s was that the US leadership in the 40s/50s had a really good idea of how to build a country up and score diplomatic wins. They did amazing things in Japan and Germany.

Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.
by anal_reactor | 2025-09-21 12:56:27+00:00
> I grew up with this belief that for all their loud, obnoxious quirks and faults, Americans do not fuck around when it comes to their principles of liberty and freedom.

This is exactly the problem. Americans see their own country as perfect example of freedom and liberty, and the idea that they might be wrong never crosses their minds. When you try to explain to them that their culture has elements actively hostile to personal freedom, you get a syntax error at best.

One of the things that Trump is doing is pointing to general "wokeness", "cancel culture", and so on, and labeling them as censorship. The trick is that he's not exactly wrong. Most Americans have their entire livehoods tied to their employers, which usually are emotionless corporations that can fire said Americans at will. This means that, if you express an undesirable opinion, you can and will be fired, and self-censorship is a vital element of American culture. Many Americans celebrated this as a feature that allowed them to maintain social cohesion. Now that the tide has shifted and the list of socially acceptable opinions has changed, same Americans are suddenly very upset because they cannot voice their opinions.

It's not that Americans suddenly stopped valuing freedom and liberty. They never did, but you never noticed, because you never tried to cross the boundary. You can interpret this in two ways - either be sad that your vision of America isn't real, or be happy that for all bad things that Trump is doing, it's not a fundamental change in American society.
by junto | 2025-09-21 12:57:21+00:00
That website is an absolute eye cancer on mobile. Actual reading content is curtailed to a third of the screen. Its defaulted legitimate interest cookies include a bunch of predatory firms including Facebook (and I’m in the EU).

In one hand these publishers have just cause in complaining about companies like Google and Apple stealing their content, but they really are not helping themselves either. Their website are completely user unfriendly.

With that said:

https://archive.is/mE44c
by NoiseBert69 | 2025-09-21 12:57:57+00:00
You can learn a lot from the ultra light dudes.

I replaced all my travel electronics to be powerable from USB-C. This saved me from a lot cables and adapters.

Even re-soldered the cable of my electric shaver to use a USB-C PD adapter PCB. As long it's somehow close to the standardized voltages (5/9/12/18/etc.) there will be no problems.
by deng | 2025-09-21 12:59:09+00:00
Yes, but is it even saving you any time, then? For complicated parts, maybe, but the example above is not complicated and the AI is already doing a pretty terrible job. Someone familiar with CAD is able to quickly do this in 15min or so, and then you have all the history and constraints to adapt the design simply by just changing parameters. I'm pretty sure I'd spent much more time fiddling with a rough approximation in the form of a step file.
by sieve | 2025-09-21 13:01:10+00:00
They are very good at some tasks and terrible at others.

I use LLMs for language-related work (translations, grammatical explanations etc) and they are top notch in that as long as you do not ask for references to particular grammar rules. In that case they will invent non-existent references.

They are also good for tutor personas: give me jj/git/emacs commands for this situation.

But they are bad in other cases.

I started scanning books recently and wanted to crop the random stuff outside an orange sheet of paper on which the book was placed before I handed the images over to ScanTailor Advanced (STA can do this, but I wanted to keep the original images around instead of the low-quality STA version). I spent 3-5 hours with Gemini 2.5 Pro (AI Studio) trying to get it to give me a series of steps (and finally a shell script) to get this working.

And it could not do it. It mixed up GraphicsMagick and ImageMagick commands. It failed even with libvips. Finally I asked it to provide a simple shell script where I would provide four pixel distances to crop from the four edges as arguments. This one worked.

I am very surprised that people are able to write code that requires actual reasoning ability using modern LLMs.
by shakna | 2025-09-21 13:01:23+00:00
> But, key difference, the people pushing green sky or flat earth narrative don't get deplatformed, fired, yelled at or called Nazis.

... You know that people show insane behaviour regularly get shadow-banned, right? And don't get called on by every piece of media for their position? That people wearing tinfoil have been regularly shouted at and harassed since it became a thing?

If you really want to not be called a Nazi... Don't make friends with people who call themselves that, don't attend the same parties as them, and don't make the same false claims as them.
by Dumblydorr | 2025-09-21 13:01:44+00:00
They’re so much more, sad the comments aren’t seeing it. Making lifelong friends, learning independence, true freedom to explore topics and interests, higher challenge and opportunity for scholars. The toll gate function only makes sense from a Birds Eye view.

If anything community colleges are more like toll gates. Pay a small fee to use a locally shared resource to then get your job.
by cjonas | 2025-09-21 13:02:28+00:00
Ya the early "studies" that said AI would benefit low skill more than senior never seem grounded in reality.

Coding with AI is like having a team of juniors that can complete their assignments in a few minutes instead of days. The more clear your instructions, the closer it is to what you wanted, but there are almost always changes needed.

Unfortunately it really does make the junior dev position redundant (although this may prove to be very short-sighted when all the SR devs retire).
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-09-21 13:02:55+00:00
The pattern I've seen repeatedly in real life is that a company does something they don't expect to be important and impactful, cutting every corner they possibly can to shovel out something that minimally meets the requirements. And then that software surprises everyone by actually being wildly successful, and now they have to support it and modify it to a state where they can build upon it. Which might be hard if the product is an unholy mess made by people who knew little of what they were doing and cared about it exactly as much as they got paid for it (that is, not much).

And cutting every corner to get the cheapest possible product out might not have even been the wrong call! Presumably most things made this way fare just as well as they were expected to and die quickly after being made, not spending scarce resources on making them better was probably the right thing to do.

It just sucks when you end up having to maintain strict backwards compatibility to something that was made in two weeks by one guy who took every shortcut on the way to duct-tape together something that technically does what was asked for. (Yes I'm thinking of you, javascript.)