MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aunche | 2025-09-08 20:52:55+00:00
> Telling the poor/weak to use the tools designed for rich/powerful is just obscuring the reality.

Lobbying is not a tool designed for the rich/powerful. It is literally just communicating with to politicians your interests. Corporations spend a lot on lobbying, but that's because they have to pay "corporate rates". Grass-roots organizations only need to pay for the basic expenses of their lobbyists. The NAACP successfully lobbied for multiple Civil Rights Acts with a much smaller budget than nonprofit organizations today.

> What do you mean by that? People willing choose to be poor and powerless?

Yes. People's reactions to corporations getting better at lobbying was to act like it's something only evil people do, so that they could feel better about themselves. As a result, grassroots lobbying has declined and knowledge of how to do so has been lost [1]. This is a gift to billionaires that they never could have dreamed of.

> institutionalized looting

Sure, but that is a central plan.

> No, the worst part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of power

The CCP has unlimited power, which was why they could arbitrarily silence Jack Ma, without even formally accusing him of anything.

> by the way of wealth buying/subverting the state

This is a way bigger problem in China than the US. China does not collect enough tax revenue to fund its local governments, so many departments are essentially funded by corruption.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/nonprofits-lobbying-less-survey-1...
by axiolite | 2025-09-08 20:52:57+00:00
> Can you attribute it directly to tariffs?

All economists and financial analysts seem to say so:

“It will be difficult for the U.S. to avoid a recession if the tariffs stay at the level that’s been announced,” Claudia Sahm, chief economist at New Century Advisors.

"Fong says that could lead to changes in businesses’ cost structures, such as downsizing operations and laying off workers."

https://time.com/7275987/trump-tariffs-global-economy-recess...

"J.P.Morgan ratcheted up its odds for a U.S. and global recession to 60%, as brokerages scrambled to revise their forecast models with tariff distress threatening to sap business confidence and slow down global growth."

https://www.reuters.com/markets/jpmorgan-lifts-global-recess...

"industries impacted by tariffs have shed tens of thousands of jobs."

"Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, observed job growth in tariff-impacted sectors is negative, while those not affected by tariffs have seen slower growth but remain in positive territory."

https://fortune.com/2025/09/08/tariff-job-losses-trump-trade...

“Tariffs represent a negative supply shock, which hurts production and raises prices – a much smaller scale of what we experienced in the pandemic,” Nationwide economist Kathy Bostjancic wrote earlier this year.

https://thehill.com/business/5488614-us-economy-adds-22k-job...
by theologic | 2025-09-08 20:53:15+00:00
First, I am not trying to object to your point, but I do wanna point out this is a classical problem with the medicinal field. In that they show an outstanding inability to understand how to actually process data in light of survivorship bias. Do we know survivorship bias is here in your large study? Obviously not, but it is a strong concern. And one of the classic reasons these studies are very poor at establishing clear causation.

So, lets start by framing the study differently:

1. 10% drop out 2. 6-7% in the non-Omega3 get depressed, which is now down to 90% of the population 3. 6-75 in the 0mega3 depressed, which is now down to 90% of the population

My first question is, "Do we think that depressed people are more likely to follow a rigorous protocol for making sure they are highly adherent to taking their Omega-3s, or do we think that this group would tend to drop out of the study?

To me my hypothesis is clearly that depressive people tend to be less adherent. This seems intuitively obvious to anybody that knows anybody with depression. At the very least, this should be a massive red flag. The study assumes those missing participants are “missing completely at random,” rather than systematically related to the key outcome: depressive symptoms.

If participants who developed new or worsening depression were more likely to leave the study (a real possibility in mood research), the results would disproportionately reflect those who stayed well—not those most at risk. The study does acknowledge in its methods that follow-up missingness was treated as random and that participants administratively censored were presumed “missing completely at random.” However, this assumption ignores the real-world possibility that depressive symptoms themselves most likely drives dropout. Without targeted analysis of why people left, the null results risk underestimating any true link between omega-3 and depression prevention, making this a textbook example of unaddressed survivorship bias in clinical trial design and reporting.
by nataliste | 2025-09-08 20:53:17+00:00
>I must admit I’m a little unnerved with how gleefully people enjoy using a fake slur. I realize it doesn’t harm anyone but I just don’t get the appeal.

I think there's a clear sociological pattern here that explains the appeal. It maps almost perfectly onto the thesis of David Roediger's "The Wages of Whiteness."

His argument was that poor white workers in the 19th century, despite their own economic exploitation, received a "psychological wage" for being "white." This identity was primarily built by defining themselves against Black slaves. It gave them a sense of status and social superiority that compensated for their poor material conditions and the encroachment of slaves on their own livelihood.

We're seeing a digital version of this now with AI. As automation devalues skills and displaces labor across fields, people are being offered a new kind of psychological compensation: the "wage of humanity." Even if your job is at risk, you can still feel superior because you're a thinking, feeling human, not just another mindless clanker.

The slur is the tool used to create and enforce that in-group ("human") versus out-group ("clanker") distinction. It's an act of identity formation born directly out of economic anxiety.

The real kicker, as Roediger's work would suggest, is that this dynamic primarily benefits the people deploying the technology. It misdirects the anger of those being displaced toward the tool itself, rather than toward the economic decisions that prioritize profit over their livelihoods.

But this ethos of economic displacement is really at the heart of both slavery and computation. It's all about "automating the boring stuff" and leveraging new technologies to ultimately extract profit at a greater rate than your competitors (which happens to include society). People typically forget the job of "computer" was the first casualty of computing machines.
by usefulcat | 2025-09-08 20:54:15+00:00
I used to watch YT pretty frequently, though I've never bothered to sign in. This is via the Roku app, as opposed to via a browser.

Starting sometime within the past month or so, they changed the interface so that instead of having many rows of suggestions, now it only has a single row, making it more work for me to find something I want to watch. As a result I watch it much less now.

Prior to this change, I was considering paying for it to skip the ads. You could argue that since I've already given them lots of info about myself (I'm watching it over GFiber after all) I may as well just sign in, but this level of intentional enshittification really rubs me the wrong way.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-08 20:54:21+00:00
>a big movie scene blender file with lots of constraints, scripted modifiers and stuff

Not really what I would call an "asset", but fine.

>It's not that you wouldn't worry about them if you had unlimited budget and could have people audit the code etc.

Hell, I was thinking something way simpler, like your cat climbing on the case and throwing up through the top vents, or you tripping and dropping your ass on your desk and sending everything flying.

>But I can see why people working on gigantic CAD files for nuclear reactor design, etc. tend to have workstations with ECC.

Yeah, because those people aren't buying their own machines. If the credit card is yours and you're not doing something super critical, you're probably better served by a faster processor than by worrying against freak accidents.
by ajross | 2025-09-08 20:54:50+00:00
> Most Youtube viewers watch on mobile or smart TVs, so adblockers aren't an issue there.

I continue to find it amazing just How Big the impact of "advertising" is in the brain of a median HN commenter vs. the attention paid (almost none) to it by citizens at large.

Like, that Liberty Mutual Duck is just weird to most folks, but to us it's somehow the greatest assault on our freedom imaginable?
by franga2000 | 2025-09-08 20:54:52+00:00
> Unfortunately, I am wary of browser plug-ins and have no good way to build a trust model with the 12 different plug-ins this behavior would require. This is the fault of firefox and the bad decisions they continue to make.

I see so many people paranoid about browser extensions and I really don't see the point. It's like any other software. If you trust the author, install it. If you don't trust the author, check the source code, install it (ideally from source), disable automatic updates and subscribe to the changelog. Is this any different from any other thing you install on your device?
by bigyabai | 2025-09-08 20:55:48+00:00
Apple is perfectly well equipped to sell datacenter products. They've done it in the past, even supporting Nvidia's compute drivers along the way. If they have the staff to design consumer-facing and developer-facing experiences, why wouldn't they address the datacenter?

Money is money. 10 years ago people would have laughed at the notion of Nvidia abandoning the gaming market, now it's their most lucrative option. Apple can and should be looking at other avenues of profit while the App Store comes under scrutiny and the Mac market share refuses to budge. It should be especially urgent if unit margins are going down as suppliers leave China.
by robocat | 2025-09-08 20:55:50+00:00
It also selects dishonest people for honest jobs.

Some of the questions as part of entry requirements for the police in NZ are too strict.

The article touches on this:

anyone who admitted to using marijuana — even if it was many years before — was considered “unfit” for federal employment. These laws also had a long-standing workaround: Most people who had used marijuana in college simply lied about having ever done so. But the administration, it seemed, was saying that this was no longer necessary. Some staffers then disclosed that they’d used marijuana. Then, at least five staffers who disclosed were fired, and others were reassigned to remote roles. The problem, apparently, was that while the administration was thinking about relaxing rules about past weed use for federal employment, it was still regarded as a barrier to a security clearance. [abridged]

In general our society asks us to be dishonest all the time.

I especially notice it with friends that make it extremely hard to be honest with them so everybody lies to them because indirectly that's what they are asking for.
by joe_the_user | 2025-09-08 20:56:18+00:00
The thing that's also worth saying is that everyone speaks vaguely about CUDA's "institutional memory" and investment and so forth.

But the concrete qualities of CUDA and Nvidia's offerings generally is a move toward general purpose parallel computing. Parallel processing is "the future" and approach of just do loop and have each iteration be parallel is dead simple.

Which is to say Nvidia has invested a lot in making "easy things easy along with hard things no harder".

In contrast, other chip makers seem to be acculturated to the natural lock-in of having a dumb, convoluted interface to compensate for a given chip being high performance.
by measurablefunc | 2025-09-08 20:56:36+00:00
If you use non-constructive reasoning¹ then you can argue for basically any outcome & even convince yourself that it is inevitable. The basic example is as follows, there is no scientific or physical principle that can prevent the birth of someone much worse than Hitler & therefore if people keep having children one of those children will inevitably be someone who will cause unimaginable death & destruction. My recommendation is to avoid non-constructive inevitability arguments using our current ignorant state of understanding of physical laws as the main premise b/c it's possible to reach any conclusion from that premise & convince yourself that the conclusion is inevitable.

¹https://gemini.google.com/share/d9b505fef250
by Chinjut | 2025-09-08 20:57:01+00:00
Ordinary floating point calculations allow for tractable reasoning about their behavior, reliable hard predictions of their behavior. At the scale used in LLMs, this is not possible; a Pachinko machine may be deterministic in theory, but not in practice. Clearly in practice, it is very difficult to reliably predict or give hard guarantees about the behavioral properties of LLMs.
by NotAnOtter | 2025-09-08 20:57:02+00:00
Not gonna keep going back and forth when you seem to agree but are choosing to be difficult. We agree SO was falling before LLM's hit the market. We agree LLM's accelerated SO's demise.

You seem to think they weren't failing before LLM (simply rapidly losing member activity), which is a narrative that I won't follow.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-08 20:57:12+00:00
> Remember when they told us in CS class that it's better to design more efficient algorithms than to buy a faster CPU?

No? The tradeoff is entirely one between the value of labour versus the value of industry. If dev hours are cheap and CPUs expensive. If it’s the other way, which it is in AI, you buy more CPUs and GPUs.
by Yizahi | 2025-09-08 20:57:30+00:00
It's only recently when consumer software has become truly multithreaded. Historically there were major issues with that until very recently. Remember Bulldozer fiasco? They bet on the parallel execution more than Intel at the same time, e.g. same price Intel chip was 4 core, while AMD had 8 cores (consumer market). Single thread performance had been the deciding factor for decades. Even today AMDs outlier SKUs with a lot of cores and slightly lower frequencies (like 500 MHz lower or so) are not a topic of the day in any media or forum community. People talk about either top of the line SKU or something with low core count but clocking high enough to be reasonable for lighter use. Releasing low frequency high core count part for consumers would be greeted with questions, like "what for is this CPU?".
by warkdarrior | 2025-09-08 20:57:42+00:00
If you follow the link for "Chat Control" in the first sentence, and then scroll down for a while, you will find a subsection titled "What Is Chat Control". Probably they assume that if you do not know what it is, you should not care about it.

From that section:

> "In 2021, the EU approved a derogation to the ePrivacy Directive to allow communication service providers to scan all exchanged messages to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Although this first derogation was not mandatory, some policymakers kept pushing with new propositions.

> A year later, a new regulation (CSAR) was proposed by the European Commissioner for Home Affairs to make scanning messages for CSAM mandatory for all EU countries, and also allow them to break end-to-end encryption. In 2023, the UK passed a similar legislation called the Online Safety Act. These types of messaging mass scanning regulations have been called by critics Chat Control."
by samhclark | 2025-09-08 20:57:53+00:00
I really like this setup. I think it balances friction and usefulness in exactly the way I've been aiming for.

Still, I have a couple questions about it, since I don't own an iPhone but am considering buying one soon.

1. How does this affect backup and restore? Could I still restore from a backup on a new phone, if needed? I've lost my phone while traveling before and buying a replacement was pretty seamless.

2. Is the ability to disable the profile bound to the Mac you use Apple Configurator on? I don't own a Mac, but if I could use a friend's Mac when I need to make changes this could maybe work.

Great writeup, thanks for posting it!
by Figs | 2025-09-08 20:58:01+00:00
> I'd assume most adblock users on web would disable it to continue watching.

This is not a safe assumption. Personally, I've stopped using YouTube entirely for entertainment; the level of annoyance dealing with it vs the value I get out of it is just not worth it any more. I'm doing other things with my time now instead of watching YouTube. Some of that is watching video on other platforms, and some of that is spending time on other hobbies instead.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-09-08 20:58:08+00:00
The wildest thing to me is that reputation in the form of goodwill is an item on the balance sheet. Doing the right thing is very frequently something that can be claimed to be in the long term interest of the shareholders.

We let far too many people get away with the fiduciary duty defense for abhorrent behavior.

Acting in the interest of shareholders is an incredibly broad set of behaviors, up to and including foregoing profits for social and moral causes.
by anon84873628 | 2025-09-08 20:58:30+00:00
I agree that Facebook could have continued to become something better, and the failure to do so is a direct result of Zuck's own personal flaws and failures and the culture he spawned.

And, they were especially insulted from competitive threats thanks to the huge advantage of network effects!

But businesses are always going to fuck up and have flawed leaders! And I think that was the general point. Social media has turned out to be a major educational moment for society in a lot of regards.
by kristopolous | 2025-09-08 20:58:32+00:00
I'll sound off more on this.

Formatters also value consistency over clarity.

I break formatting all the time for the sake of clarity.

Sometimes my comments are paragraphs long with citations and things are carefully broken down with interstitial comments and references and then the formatter fucks it all up and the linter says "wah this oblivious pedant rule isn't followed"

The problem is it doesn't treat me like an adult And I'm not in this industry for dumb Nanny tools that scold me because they don't understand things
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-09-08 20:58:33+00:00
Your definition of Socialism is pretty narrow. The traditional definition basically just boiled down to "a system where the workers are in charge of their production", which encompasses a lot more ideologies and economic systems than just "everything is owned by everyone", Marxist style.

On the other hand, you're applying a much broader definition of "means of production" than is typically discussed in Socialist circles. Most Socialists don't have any significant issue with personal possessions, or the presumption of exclusive use of things that you consistently are using. The bigger concern for Socialists is rent-seeking on said right of exclusive use.

Basically, only a small subset of Socialists would have any issue with "that's Bob's hammer, don't use it without asking". Most Socialists would be opposed to "that's Bob's hammer, you can't use it unless you toss him a fiver".

An Anarchist commune is approximately peak Socialism, everything else is an (arguably) necessary compromise with the complexities of large scale society.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-09-08 20:58:36+00:00
A bit of a scroll past the probably justified but still alarmism is the actually bad proposal.

> The most recent proposal for Chat Control comes from the EU Council Danish presidency pushing for the regulation misleadingly called the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR). Despite its seemingly caring name, this regulation will not help fight child abuse, and will even likely worsen it, impacting negatively what is already being done to fight child abuse (more on this in the next section).

>The CSAR proposal (Chat Control) could be implemented as early as next month, if we do not stop it. Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."
by dkdcio | 2025-09-08 20:59:00+00:00
right and if you read that subsection, it does not tell you what Chat Control is. which I find odd. it just goes on about how bad it is (after making an analogy earlier about police entering my home every morning). am I missing the explanation in the article of what Chat Control actually is?

the article also explicitly says it affects non-Europeans. I’m interested! I just can’t figure out what it is
by JustExAWS | 2025-09-08 20:59:07+00:00
Dropbox as Steve Jobs says is a feature not a product. For the price of 2TB of storage from Dropbox, you can get the entire GSuite or Office 365 or a slew of services from Apple including 2TBs of storage. In the case of O365, you get 1TB of storage for each of 6 (5?) users and Office on an unlimited number of devices for multiple users.

What BigTech company would it have made sense to get into the AirBnb market?

Gitlab has never been the industry standard for hosted Git. It was always GitHub. Even then, I guess it would have made sense for Microsoft to compete better. They did have Team Foundation Services and after many name changes Azure DevOps (unrelated to Azure. It was more of a git compatible hosted version of TFS).

Also none of the BigTech companies are in payments aside from Apple Pay/Google Pay and Amazon mostly cares about internal payments.

Deel is also a company that wouldn’t have made sense for any of the large tech companies.

I know AWS has its own orchestration service and I’m assuming GCP and Azure have it also. What motivation would they have to offer a product that works outside of their cloud platform?

I wouldn’t be surprised if AWS Step Functions get more usage than Zapier (which I had never heard of before today).
by adolph | 2025-09-08 20:59:30+00:00
> It’s not user friendly at all.

Evaluating a return to it from some time in pfSense--it is wonderfully simple. At the same time, its the wrong abstraction for most people who want to manage childrens' devices and iots because it is no abstraction, the operator must know many implementation details that aren't worth knowing outside the system.
by cheema33 | 2025-09-08 20:59:58+00:00
> Most of the biden job growth was: > 1. From money printing

A US president is allowed to print money? Please cite your sources that Biden printed money.

> 2. From the federal government employing some huge percentage of the usa population.

Federal govt. employee count has stayed relatively stable since the 1960s at 1.5% and 2% of the total US workforce.

Here is the share of US Federal Civilian Workforce Compensation as a Percentage of GDP (2016–2024). If you look closely you might notice that the cost of federal workforce compared to GDP actually went down in the Biden years.

Year Share of GDP (%)

2016 1.49

2017 1.49

2018 1.46

2019 1.36

2020 1.42

2021 1.42

2022 1.37

2023 1.31

2024 1.27

Furthermore, federal govt. employee count remained steady under Obama. And grew during Trump's first term. And then shrunk under Biden.

If you are voting based on your incorrectly held beliefs, you are doing us all, your fellow countrymen, a disservice.
by crinkly | 2025-09-08 21:00:14+00:00
The one company I really want to see involved in dangerous things with clean up and serious environmental risks is the company that has serious production QA problems, an attention span of about 2 minutes, regular bouts of corporate schizophrenia and a policy of forcing half the planet to abandon working hardware.

Nothing good can come of this.

Microsoft needs to start asking if it should do something before it does it.