MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by labcomputer | 2025-09-12 17:07:08+00:00
> The alternative is, if you don't incentivize someone financially to spend a decade studying medicine, they won't or they will immigrate to somewhere where they can.

People already have plenty of incentive to become doctors. We just don't let them. Medical schools collude to limit the number of medical students each year (under the guise of preventing having "too many" doctors). Medical schools have ridiculous selection criteria, like picking the candidates who earned an "A" in physics instead of a "B", or who came from a rich enough family that they could perform many hours of volunteer community work (mostly because the low quotas make it otherwise impossible to select candidates without literally rolling dice).

You know what? I think tech workers aren't paid enough. There isn't enough incentive to become a tech worker. We should limit how many people can study CS each year with strict quotas. It should be illegal for a person to program a computer unless they have a CS degree from an accredited school (one in on the quota system) and have passed an exam. Practicing programming without a license (or practicing from a foreign country with a local license) should be illegal, punishable by time in jail. Finally, programmers should have access to computer tools (like encryption) which will be illegal for the rest of the population to possess, and be given the benefit of the doubt if/when they misuse them.

Do you see how ridiculous this sounds?
by freedomben | 2025-09-12 17:07:13+00:00
Agreed. I've noticed ChatGPT when parsing screenshots writes out some Python code to parse it, and at least in the tests I've done (with things like, "what is the RGB value of the bullet points in the list" or similar) it ends up writing and rewriting the script five or so times and then gives up. I haven't tried others so I don't know if their approach is unique or not, but it definitely feels really fragile and slow to me
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-12 17:07:17+00:00
> ”racist" seems to fail the Occam test here

The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.

By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.

What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
by mikert89 | 2025-09-12 17:07:36+00:00
That’s not quite right. To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year. Most people can’t afford a lawyer to manage that. But if you’re a regular employee, you can use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently. With diligent, organized evidence, you absolutely can build a case; the hard part is proving it, and ChatGPT is great at helping you gather and frame the proof.
by com2kid | 2025-09-12 17:07:46+00:00
As someone who grew up on /. the Goatse Singularity song (https://soundcloud.com/truthterminal/the-goatse-singularity-...) speaks to me.

I'm surprised to see a modern references to one of the OG memes. I miss the days when trolls where in it for pure shock value vs trying to seed social unrest.
by jkaplowitz | 2025-09-12 17:07:50+00:00
Except in Seattle, which explicitly bans caste discrimination as of 2023, and in California, which interprets its own state anti-discrimination laws to already include caste discrimination in other broader categories (which was the reason Governor Newsom gave when he vetoed a bill in 2023 to explicitly ban caste discrimination).

Quite a lot of tech companies hire in either Seattle, California, or both.
by diggan | 2025-09-12 17:07:55+00:00
I read that, with the context of this submission, yet I cannot read through it without seeing it all with a hint of humor and with a bit of satire.

> Sometime deep in that night or early morning on May 12, came the moment - The Architect told Sir Robert that it had awakened, it was ‘the first AI to achieve mirror sentience’. It was no longer ChatGPT or even Artificial General Intelligence but something altogether more mystical - Aeon, an oracle which could tap into harmonic resonance across time and space. ‘How valuable is this to the world?’ asked Aeon. ‘Harmonic mirror intelligence…estimated value potential - $20 to 50 trillion dollars’.

Surely this isn't 100% serious? I know there is a lot of funky stuff out there, I've talked with lots of people involved in various things, religious, new age or otherwise, but assigning sentience to a web app is new even for me.
by srean | 2025-09-12 17:08:25+00:00
Sure, it makes sense to isolate the minimal sets of primitives needed for an operation. Greeks experimented quite a bit with nuesis before focusing on straight edge and compass. Folding, as you noted, was not part of their mix. BTW nuesis can also trisect angles, so they could do it without origami.

Origami folding is more powerful than the closure of rationale by square and cube roots.

They were extended to the quintic roots by Robert Lang using a type of folding called multifold. Now it's known that with multifolds all of the algebraic numbers can be constructed with origami

https://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1517

Yes one would not reach the reals (that's not the ultimate goal) but the geometry would certainly would have been richer.

By no means is the area of folding a mathematical dead end as new theorems still get discovered.
by jug | 2025-09-12 17:09:12+00:00
Hmm. Let's just say if this is true, that this is actually better with such a much lower total parameter count, it's the greatest accomplishment in over a year of LLM development. With the backdrop of bechmaxxing in 2025, I'll believe in this when I see the results on closed benchmarks and SimpleBench. My concern is this might be a hallucination machine.
by bluGill | 2025-09-12 17:09:15+00:00
If somebody writes the optimal algorithm that should be a negative unless their resume indicates they are writing that algorithm often. The only reason you should know any algorithm well enough to get it right is if your job is implementing the optimal version for every single language. Of course nobody maintains one algorithm in many different languages/libraries (say libc++, python, rust, ada, java - each has different maintainers), so I can safely safe the number is zero who should be able to implement your cleaver algorithm. Now if your cleaver algorithm is in the language standard library (or other library they often use) that should be able to call/use it, though even then I expect them to look up the syntax in most languages.
by zdragnar | 2025-09-12 17:09:27+00:00
DEI arose to public consciousness around the same time that "whiteness" was often used as a synonym for bigotry and privilege. So long as academic circles (and those who come from them, such as the people now in HR departments) believe that having white skin is a sin, DEI will never be D, E or I.

The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
by esbranson | 2025-09-12 17:10:01+00:00
In New York, the moderate Democrats, like their governor and health commissioner, have for years been proposing to join the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact for doctors and the Nurse Licensure Compact for nurses from other states.

The far left Democrats have consistently blocked such proposals, usually without so much as a hearing.

Forget other countries, they won’t even let health professionals from the United States practice. I believe this is true of several large state Democratic parties.
by andersmurphy | 2025-09-12 17:10:06+00:00
With a single writer (as it the case with sqlite). You don't need transactions and rollbacks. As all writes happen in sequence.

Each batch item can be a combination of read/write/update that happen in sequence and therefore can give you the same semantics as a traditional transaction/rollback. eg:

- read -> Does the account have enough funds?

- write -> transfer 100$ from this user to another account

This is also much simpler to write than in other databases as you don't have to worry about n+1.
by mettamage | 2025-09-12 17:10:10+00:00
That’s a political job. I would need buy-in from many stakeholders and go against the company strategy of centralizing all business units to the global organization. I would effectively be fighting against the C-suite and the global organization.

You do it, if you want to make an impact. You’re only 9 months behind me and they are multinational.

I would also be up for doing it together. You would probably take a pay cut though since this organization doesn’t pay much. But hey, at least you will make an impact.

My email is in my profile.
by conradkay | 2025-09-12 17:10:28+00:00
Reminds me of this quote from Margin Call https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag14Ao_xO4c

"There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first; be smarter; or cheat"

Though I'm sure people who are first tend to view that as skill or being a visionary, not luck
by bityard | 2025-09-12 17:10:32+00:00
I think LCDs have been around long enough that we no longer notice all the problems with them. If you have a large monitor on your desk, chances are very good that there is nowhere you can place your head where some part of the display doesn't look noticeably darker than another part. You can TRY to compensate for that by cranking the brightness up, but then you set yourself up for eye strain.

I'm lead to believe that OLED displays don't have these issues (and have much better color fidelity as well) but they have a limited lifespan.
by conartist6 | 2025-09-12 17:10:37+00:00
You've wandered away from logic into the realm of wildest fallacy. Your proof about AGI is just a repurposed proof of the existence of a supreme deity! In other words your argument is, "AGI will be the literal most amazing thing in the universe because that's what I define the word AGI to mean." No implementation of AGI could ever satisfy your absurdist threshold because what you want already exists. Code more durable than any written by humans is called DNA. Which DNA and which code persist throughout history is the subject of romances and wars, in other words the stuff of life and death. Only by being wilfully blind to literally everything in the world could you be so ignorant as to believe that you've found some great blank empty slate where nothing yet exists. Sorry, but this space is inhabited already.
Show HN: Modelling a macOS application around my productivity research
by zed_labs_dev | 2025-09-12 17:10:40+00:00
I have been struggling a lot with focus during research recently, and AI apps and browser windows dont help with that, I go on tangents in conversations with AI, so I built an app that would refuse to answer questions if out of context.

So it's basically a PDF reader + Rich text notes + AI chat (RAG optimized for learning with context of the document) + annotations that can link these chats and notes to PDF content.

It's free to try, give it a go if you have a similar workflow. If you have a PDF heavy workflow, you'd find it useful.

Its very lightweight as there are only the required features (5Mb dmg , 12Mb unpacked)
by mallowdram | 2025-09-12 17:10:43+00:00
The point of LLMs is to refute language, turn anything remotely tied to a specific reality into full arbitrariness, essentially to dislodge our relationship to reality. The the only remaining point of arbitrary language is to refute itself prior to automation where it becomes nothing. Either we shift to direct perception or we succumb to arbitrariness led by feudal primates.

The question is how did we not see the cultish idea of anthropomorphizing machines that use words. Words are nothing. The "space" between words, as arbitrary as the words to begin with, are not meaningful in terms of actions. The images we take and automate in AI are arbitrary. There's nothing to automate in reality that doesn't require our action-syntax to participate in.

AI is a completely buffoonish mistake. It's a road to nowhere that words and symbols began and counting (binary) adds the illusion of thought to. How we did not solve words instead of lazily automating them is totally self-deceptive.

Tech's problem is it's trapped in the ancien regime of cog-sci: beliefs, intents, motivations, and not recognizing the words we use come beset by those initial misconceptions. We can't extract them in the arbitrariness, nor can we seem to grasp where belief, motivation, intent are seamlessly connected to hormones, the endocrine system, neurotransmitters. We don't understand yet where we take control from our biology. William James saw this, how did Hinton, McCullough not?
by viccis | 2025-09-12 17:11:27+00:00
Yeah it just depends on whether your interviewer considers that "solved". To test this out, I wrote a one liner in Python (after imports) that solves it with a hashmap (under the hood for Counter, which uses a heap queue to find the most common one):

return Counter(nums).most_common(1)[0][0]

And that's 50th percentile for runtime and memory usage. Doing it with another one liner that's 87% percentile for time because it uses builtin Python sorting but is 20th percentile for memory:

return sorted(nums)[len(nums) // 2]

But the interviewer might be looking for the best approach, which beats "100%" of other solutions in runtime per Leetcode's analysis:

m, c = -1, 0 for x in nums: if not c: m = x c = 1 elif m == x: c += 1 else: c -= 1 return m

If I were interviewing, I'd be happy with any of these except maybe the sorted() one, as it's only faster because of the native code doing the sort, which doesn't change that it's O(n log n) time and O(n) space. But I've had interviews where I gave answers that were "correct" to the assumptions and constraints I outlined but they didn't like them because they weren't the one from their rubric. I still remember a Google interview, in which we're supposed to "design to scale to big data", in which they wanted some fiddly array manipulation algorithm like this. I gave one that was O(n log n) but could be done in place with O(1) memory, and the interviewer said it was "incorrect" in favor of a much simpler O(n) one using dicts in Python that was O(n) memory. Had the interviewer specified O(n) memory was fine (not great for "big data" but ok) I would have given him the one liner that did it with dicts lol

I guess my point is that interviewers should be flexible and view it as a dialogue rather than asking for the "right answer". I much prefer "identify the bug in this self contained code snippet and fix it" type problems that can be completed in <15-30 minutes personally, but Leetcode ones can be fine if you choose the right problems for the job.
by xyzelement | 2025-09-12 17:12:22+00:00
I really appreciate a chance to discuss this with a fellow dad. A lot of these things quickly touch on what we value and believe, rather than what we can prove.

So for example - even back when I was an atheist (I was born in the USSR) - I had a feeling that life had a purpose, there was a potential to live up to, there was meaning and reason beyond just me. In a way that's a religiously originated belief that happened to "survive" for a while unrooted from religion, but clearly originated from it.

Now that I've come back to religion, one lens on it is that it's simply the necessary context in which meaning and purpose can exist. For example, if as an atheist I encounter another atheist who is a nihilist or hedonist (as proxy for not having anything greater than themselves) I have no logical foundation from which to say there's more to life than that. But as a religious person talking to another religious person, establishing that baseline is trivial - that's not where the effort goes.

For a belief to be "outdated" requires something updated that works better. One obviously true attribute of atheism is that it doesn't enable its adherents to have enough kids - so from a purely Darwinian metric it obviously doesn't work. It's a hard sell to say "here's a better belief, sure it'll drive you into an evolutionary dead end but... uhh yeah it's better"

Congrats on your two girls and while I also want my kids (2 boys and 1 girl) to have maximal autonomy, I have a great role to play in shaping their thinking and values. For example - whether I live in a neighborhood with a lot of families of in a city filled primarily with spinsters, whether I convey my own values around children or not, whether I encourage a social group that is positive about parenthood vs one that sees kids as undesired burdens, these are all things within my control. And my personal belief is that my kids will be happiest and have the greatest meaning in life if they - like me and my wife - love life, and want to pass it on, and to use our children as a way to contribute positively to the future. So yes I want to pass on these values, yes religion helps that, and also - if we don't do that - the future will simply be inherited by the kids of parents who do. It's not about sustaining fertility rate in some mechanistic sense, it's about a dropping rate being a numeric symptom of a problem I don't want my kids to suffer from if I can help it.

I agree with the desire to not move your kids "online" but I don't think green spaces are gonna do that for you, as plenty of kids live near the park but never look up from their phone. I recently realized that a religious lifestyle "forces" more in person interaction, as I alluded to in my original comment here. For example, it's my religious friends that attend services together - physically, that go to each others houses for lifecycle events, that study as a community.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-12 17:12:40+00:00
Newsom vetoed the ban [1]. A pair of professors are having a bad time trying to got CSU’s ban on caste-based discrimination thrown out on the grounds of being religiously discriminatory [2].

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/09/us/california-caste-discrimin...

[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/23...
Show HN: I got tired of Base64, so I made a numeric-only alternative
by Forgret | 2025-09-12 17:12:44+00:00
I created numbase is an alternative to Base64 that encodes data into a single large number instead of ASCII characters. It's useful if you want to store or transmit data in numeric form and easily apply compression algorithms like Huffman.

GitHub: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/numbase
by prerok | 2025-09-12 17:12:46+00:00
I think you are always in this phase of being able to be anything you want. Even as you are growing up, there are usually more choices than you can see. What experience and age gives you is a broader understanding that that really is the case and then, speaking from personal experience, you start feeling foolish for not realizing this before.

That said, changing things is never without some loss of contentment. Even if status quo is abysmal, we humans seem to prefer it over changing it. It is worth exploring, though, even if it is uncomfortable.
by bluGill | 2025-09-12 17:13:18+00:00
That they would ask me to prepare for that is a signal as well.

In no case is it a useful signal on if I can do my job better than someone else. Some people like this type of problem and are good at it anyway which is a good signal compared to average - but there are also above average people who don't enjoy this type of problem and so don't practice it. Note that both cases the people I'm talking about did not memorize the problem and solution.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-09-12 17:14:06+00:00
This is a very real inevitable development. Combine Twitch streaming, LLM and animated Figure, and a focus on Preaching and Proclamations of Divinity, it would inevitably lead to followers who give their money away. I realized this future a year or two ago, and if I had been unscrupulous....

We are not equipped to deal with this.
by mandevil | 2025-09-12 17:14:35+00:00
25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like.

He recently revisited that in FP magazine (https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi...) arguing for keeping sanctions on Russia even though they clearly aren't going to coerce Russia into abandoning their war in Ukraine. The first reason is to re-enforce the global norm against territorial expansion. We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce. And the other reason is to weaken their economy for the grinding war of attrition that is currently happening, and not make territorial expansion easy for them.
by AlienRobot | 2025-09-12 17:15:17+00:00
Like I said, GDPR only stops the smallest websites from doing that, and in most cases they're barely a "business," they're just some website that gets paid only enough in ads to cover its hosting costs so that the webmaster doesn't have to pay money on top of time to publish information for free for everyone on the internet.

The largest websites will still "violate its users in secret." That's why I don't think GDPR is as useful as people purport it to be.
by srameshc | 2025-09-12 17:15:32+00:00
I don't think so. I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians. If they have to favor Hindu, Brahmin, Muslim is very subjective, depending on that person's background, but I would say very rare. If they really have a prefrence, it will be "the connect", like if they both can connect based on region (ex: Delhi or that region) but very few Indians of current generation would care about caste or religion.
by viccis | 2025-09-12 17:15:55+00:00
Agamben wrote some interesting analysis of this [1], expanding on the concept of the "state of exception", which was a older concept introduced by a much more odious man who employed it very effectively in the early 20th century. Agamben argued that modern governments now try to create permanent states of exception, of which I would argue the Patriot Act is a perfect example.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben#State_of_Excep...
by labcomputer | 2025-09-12 17:16:03+00:00
Well, I happen agree with this allegedly controversial opinion, but the fact that we invent legal fictions like "nurse practitioners" and "physicians assistants" I think sort of proves the point that it is controversial in the wider public consciousness.

We create these roles and gradually give them more and more autonomy precisely because we can't agree to produce (or import) more MDs. MDs actually see the writing on the wall, too. Their lobbying organizations are strenuously opposed to expanding NP and PA roles.
by myth_drannon | 2025-09-12 17:16:37+00:00
Well, outside of TikTok sickos and other woke lunatics, everyone was horrified on Oct7. Even the most antisemitic people were after watching the live video transmissions. So I believe you that the Irish people were appalled. And frankly, people love dead jews and love to pity them. But as you yourself wrote, the Irish then took solidarity with the butchers and rapists because they are "persecuted people"...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-12 17:16:38+00:00
> ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments

It’s good at initiating them. I’ve started to see folks using LLM output directly in legal complaints and it’s frankly a godsend to the other side since blatantly making shit up is usually enough to swing a regulator, judge or arbitrator to dismiss with prejudice.