MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Levitz | 2025-09-10 12:38:43+00:00
>Is anyone forcing you to use a default?

Why don't you levy this argument against yourself?

>How are you excluded because other people can make different choices?

Because I cannot. By your own points, I can't express myself in a race-neutral way anymore.

>Maybe being disgusted by others choices for casual conversation is a personal matter. Something you could address with software to disregard whatever is so offensive, or a support group, or inward reflection.

This is, again, better levied against your position.
by tolerance | 2025-09-10 12:39:12+00:00
You know, whatever memory is or where it’s at and however the mind works, I’m grateful I’ve got mine in tact right now and I appreciate science’s inability to zero in on these things.

It’s nice to know that this sort of appreciation is becoming more common. Somewhere between tech accelerationism and protestant resistance are those willing to re-interrogate human nature in anticipation of what lies ahead.

A different blog post from this month detailing an experience with ChatGPT that netted a similar reflection: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/the-scam-called-you-dont-have-...
by tjs8rj | 2025-09-10 12:39:23+00:00
It’d be strange if they didn’t. All human organization should be expected to behave like this, especially as rates of communication become faster.

As much as our brains seem to be evolved to delude us about it, we’re not uniquely able to resist the continuity between physics and chemistry and biology.

As self-replicating chemical and physical systems, we exist only because our atoms, molecules, cells, organs, bodies, and cultures all follow these rules naturally selecting for least action
by wfme | 2025-09-10 12:39:27+00:00
Ah, fair enough! I read this as saying almost exactly that, but yeah, I get what you mean.

> but not appropriate for a mobile phone that you may want to operate untethered for hours at a time.

I do think this shifted a little when the first M1 Air came out. Anecdotally, many now associate it with being more than capable unless you’re an actual professional.
by xyst | 2025-09-10 12:39:43+00:00
What a shitty take.

> You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity.

This is what’s known as "fomo". Arguments driven on fear never sustainable.

Also apparently you have never been stuck in bumper to bumper traffic in the aftermath of a massive event. Or maybe county closes major roadway for repairs. Or a _single_ motor vehicle accident brings an entire highway to a halt for _hours_ (many people rubber necking as well …)
by lm28469 | 2025-09-10 12:39:55+00:00
Imagine having a brain so polluted by partisan politics that a thread about public infrastructure and cars is derailed into "france is being invaded by islam" in literally two comments...

Unplug your brain for the twitter matrix and go outside my dude, there is a whole life out there that isn't populated by grumpy terminally ill people who think everyone is plotting to slit their throat at the first opportunity
by abraxas | 2025-09-10 12:40:01+00:00
> Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities.

Is this a joke? I grew up in Poland, a relatively poor country (and used to be a lot poorer) and in most cities it has public infrastructure that flagship North American cities can barely dream of. It's not a question of money but of societal priorities.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-09-10 12:40:01+00:00
Probably not accountant mode but haven't they always had daily quotas that get used up? Like they don't want everyone hitting the service nonstop because they don't have enough GPUs to run inference at peak times of day?

So it could be a matter of serving more highly quantized model because giving bad results has higher user retention than "try again later"
by mark_l_watson | 2025-09-10 12:40:30+00:00
The VS Code ecosystem has too much complexity for my tastes. I do keep a copy around with a few code formatting plugins installed but I feel more comfortable with Emacs (or Vim for my friends who are on that side of the fence).

I am a consumer of apps using npm, not a developer, and I simply don’t like the auto updates and seeing a zillion things updated. I use uv and Python a lot, and I get a similar uneasy feeling there also, but (perhaps incorrectly) I feel more in control.
by LightBug1 | 2025-09-10 12:41:00+00:00
"too late to stop the attack"?

I'm calling absolute horseshit on that bit.

1) Either Trump should absolutely smack Israel down if this is true. Didn't happen. 2) Or it isn't true and this is Trumps' horseshit media massaging. "Oh woe is me, they didn't tell me in time, I'm a little annoyed with them". Rinse, repeat.

This truly is a disgusting episode in history ...
by mystraline | 2025-09-10 12:41:08+00:00
> We aren't going to fix problems we can't acknowledge. Urban public school districts are among the most impacted by bad public schools.

That problem is because school district funding is directly related to tax revenue in said district.

Tax revenue has to go to capital maintenance and repair, and also scholastic budgets (teachers, aides, equipment, books).

Due to 'White Flight' ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight) and historical segregation of black people, left primarily poverty in urban city cores. People who later move into empty residences do so with reduced rents, and general poverty problems like food insecurity, bad transportation, and higher crime. (Poverty is a disease and can be modelled as such.)

The poverty is directly related to low scholastic district funding, therefore poor schools.

And to further harm poor (monetary and educational outcome) schools, is Bush's plan in the 2000's to pull funding from underperforming schools. Better funded schools have better educational outcomes, so those schools were less affected, or not at all.

Even a local school in my area had federal funding reduced. I'm in a community with roughly 97% white people, so its not a legacy race thing. But it does turn out that it is a poverty thing.
by eldavojohn | 2025-09-10 12:41:24+00:00
What if you took those scripts that you have used to automate your life, dumped them into something like cursorAI and asked the model to refine them, make them better, improve the output, add interactivity, generalize them, harden them, etc?

Sometimes when I have time to play around I just ask models what stinks in my code or how it could be better with respect to X. It's not always right or productive but it is fun, you should try it!
by jsdalton | 2025-09-10 12:41:25+00:00
I’ve often thought this would be useful for version control and change review, since it allows diffs to be a lot less noisy. I’m imagining how much easier it would be to review a PR with significant README edits if the file was already structured with semantic line breaks.

I’ve previously had the above thought and applied it to the end of sentences, but the idea of introducing them at the level of semantic thought had not occurred to me. But if this is where we’re going I’d start to wish for indentation possibilities. I’ve do this frequently with SQL statements, introducing both line breaks and indentations to provide a visual structure that mimics the semantic structure of clauses and the details they contain.
by lilerjee | 2025-09-10 12:42:04+00:00
Good article. I am solving the similar problems in my product[1], which purpose is more practical and uses hierarchy (like file system) and keywords to organize and link information.

If you want to resurface them, you can show them in hierarchy(show children, or descendants in any level), search or filter by keywords, sort them by created time, URL, order, or other fields.

Resurfacing from current context can be very complicated, you should create some fields to track your activities, create many routines to handle these information automatically, and create relative UI. These are advanced features based on the current basic features.

[1] https://metaessen.com/
by miki123211 | 2025-09-10 12:42:21+00:00
Do we know how much of this decline is US-specific versus a global phenomenon? The article cites no data on that score.

This kind of thing is unfortunately pretty common in American publications, and it drives me up the wall. If you don't compare US statistics to global ones, it's hard to separate out political / local factors from global trends (and to be fair, this is exactly what some journalists want.)

In particular, I'd be interested in statistics from countries with different lockdown policies, as well as those that banned smartphones in school. Beyond US politics, lockdowns and Tiktok seem like the two most likely factors that may influence this.
by jszymborski | 2025-09-10 12:42:46+00:00
I never said they are the "most important", but simply they are "important". Your race or gender isn't the totality of who you are, but it is surely a part of you, your identity, and how people treat you. To ignore it also perpetuates racism, even among well-intentioned folks.

Here is some reading on the topic:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maiahoskin/2022/09/28/newsflash...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/color-b...

A great book I can recommend is "Racism without racists" by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

https://search.worldcat.org/title/Racism-without-racists-:-c...
by roelschroeven | 2025-09-10 12:42:51+00:00
> [...] the same 27 hours as the 16Pro. That’s pretty good for such a thin device.

Maybe pretty good for a thin device that they made so thin for no good reason at all. Making it so thin is not something to be proud of, and we certainly shouldn't let it slide as an excuse for bad battery life.

I mean, when did "remarkable all‑day battery life" become something to be proud of? I consider a phone that doesn't last a full day defective. All-day battery life is the bare minimum, not something to be proud of.
by joenot443 | 2025-09-10 12:43:12+00:00
Do you have a son? Does he read as much?

Some parents I know have suggested it's much, much easier to find newer books which interest daughters than books which might interest their son. They asked me to find some newer books he might find interesting.

Does anyone have suggestions on 2020s books aimed at adolescent boys? Ideally ones more focused on the real experience of boyhood, I think he'd be less interested in ones focused making adult commentary on social or identity topics.
by dbish | 2025-09-10 12:43:13+00:00
I spent a lot of time on ML driven dialogue and natural language understanding for games in the pre-llm days working with some folks building Xbox, PC, and VR/AR games, and I'm excited about the potential here. The major barriers to shipping in a production game though are still the same imho:

1. (predictability) Games like to have a clear arc and tend to use at least some of their NPCs to move that forward, it is harder to do this with a model that could make a choice you don't predict. They tend to have a set of items, quests, what-have-you that you need boundaries around.

2. (testing) Games like to test like crazy before launch, at least the AAA ones, so their QA folks just don't like a model that can have infinite responses/variants. Many then drop to a skeletal crew for maintenance and improvements after launch, where with ML models you actually need to keep improving the model, finding long tail bugs as more players interact with the system, etc.

3. (cost) Games are usually very cost aware, it's far cheaper to just have a set human-written dialogue path, then to run a model, even an offline one. Cheaper in both actual dollar costs if you're talking about a high end LLM service call, and CPU/GPU/memory costs if you're talking an on-box system.

4. (internationalization/localization) AAA games need to launch fast to many languages and locales, using a model for NLP and dialogue management/natural language generation adds added testing costs for each new language, that is just a very cheap translation normally that can be outsourced.

There have been some fun experiments in this space, and I expect to see this improve and become common use in the future, but it will take time and more work on how best to integrate a model into the flow of a game. I do love it for "presence" so talking to NPCs feels more human-like.

Nick and the crew at AI Dungeon (and related) have always done some interesting work in this space, trying out games where AI can be used in interesting ways.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-10 12:43:54+00:00
>That sounds rather sad... sure when I was 18 or 20 this would be cool, but then people eventually actually grow up and have adult lives.

What exactly sounds sad? That some people can occasionally enjoy a few drinks and socialization without a hangover? Don't jump to some silly puritanical conclusion that this simple statement makes one an alcoholic or childish.

Many people of all ages enjoy a few drinks with friends without being sad infantile alcoholics, and nothing about "adult life" precludes being able to enjoy such things in moderation. How about climbing down from that high horse of absolutist judgement about how others should live their lives.

Also, no, do a simple bit of checking, hard liquor general contains very little or no sugar.
by Nevermark | 2025-09-10 12:44:07+00:00
E-Ink’s brightness is naturally proportional to ambient lighting. From indoors to bright sunshine.

Their brightness can also be conveniently, even subconsciously controlled, by how they are held.

LCDs can be dimmed and brightened, but matching the E-Inks “response” in both brightness and contrast over a high range of ambient lighting would be difficult. Probably impossible without an LCD specifically designed to do that.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-09-10 12:44:49+00:00
Not sure what any of this means in relation to the comment I replied to. Keep in ming that public transport is built only on the busiest routes while roads are required (yes, actually required) everywhere.

Edit to @loloquwowndueo below: I haven't been shown any data, not has my point been replied to. Please guys let's try to have a grown-up discussion.
by estearum | 2025-09-10 12:45:08+00:00
As a straight, white, male I don't really feel that I'm a second-class citizen nor the enemy. Have you considered getting off Twitter for a while?

It's not clear to me the federal judiciary should match the composition of the population of lawyers as opposed to the composition of the people whom they judge.

In fact as you can see here, Obama appointed people largely similar to what you'd expect to see in the population (without bothering to look into specific geographies). It was Trump who was wildly aberrational. In fact even more aberrational than Biden, who at least has the believable rationale of trying to rebalance the courts after Trump took such a pro-male (76%!!) and pro-white (85%!!) approach.

For context, the US is <50% male, and about 60% white.

https://www.acslaw.org/judicial-nominations/diversity-of-the...
by djrobstep | 2025-09-10 12:45:08+00:00
> Public transit needs a lot of money and time

Public transport is far, far more cost effective than car infrastructure. And that's just direct costs - not even including the cost of sprawl (which makes all other infrastructure more expensive), road deaths and injuries, noise, pollution, storage costs for vehicles, the health costs of inactivity and social isolation, etc etc.

> build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals

This is a terrible idea because the numbers simply do not stack up. A typical metro train can carry roughly 1000 people. A large car park might fill half of a single train. At a station with good frequency, a train will leave the station roughly every 5 minutes.

A much better idea is to run good regular public transport to the station, build bike paths to the station and quality bike parking at the station, and build more housing at/near the station instead of a big parking lot.
by joseda-hg | 2025-09-10 12:45:23+00:00
For me that looks something like:

- N Banking Apps

- Whatsapp / Telegram

- Uber/Lift/ Whatever your local flavor of theses are, or even regular taxi apps

- Deliveries and Groceries (I don't have/need a car, I get most of my groceries delivered, and just but fruits and vegetables on a farmers market near my house)

- Some payments app

- Access control for my building

- Navigation

- Entertainment

- 2FA/OTP

Many of these are local apps that have 0% chance of getting built for anything outside of Android and iOS, and further, some would break on GrapheneOS / Plasma / A stock rooted device (I'm pretty sure at least one of my banking apps auto closes if it even detects Developer options enabled)
by frereubu | 2025-09-10 12:46:33+00:00
The Power Broker by Robert Caro, a biography of Robert Moses that's particularly focused on his long career in the government of New York, is, quite aside from a fascinating psychological portrait and a parable about how bad it is when someone has untrammeled power in a bureaucracy, an absolutely fantastic case study in how building more roads makes traffic worse. And it was published in 1974! For anyone that cares to find out we've know this for decades and have absolutely failed to do anything about it - pretty depressing.
by sevensor | 2025-09-10 12:46:58+00:00
The thing I like about recorded music is that the listener’s equipment is part of the performance; in a sense, it’s the actual instrument, being played remotely over time and space by an engineer who’s never seen it and musicians who made a different performance in a different room on different instruments, as well as here and now by the listener herself. Every person and piece of technology in the chain shapes the experience, and every performance is unique, even if it’s you listening to Gimme Shelter on repeat on a crappy mp3 player and cheap earbuds.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-09-10 12:48:12+00:00
This assumes that companies view their employees as individuals. At a certain scale, companies inevitably start viewing their employees as "resources" that behave more like robots than human beings.

There is no way for somebody like Nadella to have an understanding of most employees' performance, and the chain of management is so long that he doesn't trust anyone else's ability to ascertain individual performance. This leads to the introduction of "objective measurements" of performance, which further undermines trust, as everyone now starts trying to manipulate the numbers.

I think at some point, it's just inevitable that C-level management takes decisions based on the assumption that people are replaceable and that the difference between a great performer and a poor performer is essentially irrelevant.
by pama | 2025-09-10 12:48:21+00:00
Having the local LLM process sensitive data is a desirable usecase and more trustworthy than using a “trusted partner” [0]. As long as your LLM tooling does not exit your own premises, you can be technically safe. But yes, dont then click at random links. Maybe it is generally safer to not trust the origin of the local LLM, because it reduces the chance of mistakes of this type ;-)

[0] Trust is a complicated concept and I took poetic license to be brief. It is hard to verify the full tooling pipeline, and it would be great if indeed there existed mathematically verifiable “trusted partners”. A large company with enough paranoia can bring the expertise in house. A startup will rely on common public tooling and their own security reviews. I dont think it is wise to share the deepest darkest secrets with ourside entities, because the potential liability could destroy a company, whereas a local system, disconnected from the web, is technically within the circle of trust. Think of a finance company with a long term strategy that hasnt unfolded yet, a hardware company designing new chips, a pharma company and their lead molecules prior to patent submission, any company that has found the secret sauce to succeed where others failed—-none of these should be using trusted partners in favor of local LLM from untrusted origins IMHO. Perhaps the best of both worlds is to locally deploy models from trusted origins and have the ability to finetune their weights, but the practical processing gap between current chinese and non-chinese models is notable.
by nlitened | 2025-09-10 12:48:25+00:00
> 1 and 2 are about spending time with people

It is true, and spending time with people over video calls or text chats is a very low-bandwidth, rather thankless job which is generally demotivating long-term. Not that many people are actually willing to channel their emotions for hours daily into pixels on screen with no actual emotional human connection. This means that juniors remain isolated, senior employees feel that tutoring juniors is a waste of their time (which is true in this setup), and good managers either stop caring or burn out.

> 3 can't also be true, just look at all the innovations that OSS has created

Innovating in things you deeply care about is one thing, innovating for yet another work project that brings shareholder value is another. The only recipe that has worked for the latter so far has been "put multiple smart people in one room".
by nobody9999 | 2025-09-10 12:48:40+00:00
>If you group people by genetic similarity (which is of dubious usefulness) you essentially end up with three different black African races, one Australian, Pacific and Native American, and one everyone else.

There's only one sentient primate race: Homo Sapiens.

There absolutely are genetic differences between groups that were geographically isolated from each other (as you note). However, when genetic variation is compared both between and within those groups, we see more variation within those once isolated groups than we do between those groups[0].

What's more, even within such groups genetic variation is only around 0.5-1.5%.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics#Race_and_hum...

Edit: Cleaned up prose.
by jdbernard | 2025-09-10 12:50:00+00:00
The combination of these things you're mentioning is one of the main reasons, at least for me, that WFH is so much more productive. A lot of tech companies have evolved a culture and built offices that are in opposition to doing good work. Open plan offices have been the norm in my experience over the last 10 years (maybe more). Anytime interruption via Slack/Teams is the typical culture.

I was much more open to working in the office when I actually had my own office.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-10 12:50:09+00:00
Important to note is how most cities have two (or more) zones; the old inner city for leisure, tourism, shopping and going out, the suburban areas around it where most people live, and industrial / office building estates where most people work.

Amsterdam is a great example [0] and well-known for a lot of tourists, with the city center being the tourism hub, the zones around it for living, west/northwest for industry/shopping, south for highrise offices and football stadiums, etc. Most tourists won't go that far out though.

[0] https://www.amsterdamsights.com/about/neighborhoods.html
by CalRobert | 2025-09-10 12:50:33+00:00
For a period in my 20’s when I wasn’t well paid I lived in some nice places car free (San Luis Obispo, Santa Monica, Berkeley) but this was when rent was cheap and I didn’t have a family.

Even in Europe it’s hard to find a decent affordable home where you can raise a couple kids in places you can live without a car.
by mariocesar | 2025-09-10 12:50:40+00:00
Nice! I build something similar but without the checks and selection. my dotfiles include an idempotent install script and a Brewfile with all my packages. The selection and checks features you've added, that's a great touch!

Something I'm not able to do nicely is to sync browser profiles, I end up doing all the setup and login step by step, it takes me an hour or so