MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrandish | 2025-09-18 01:49:01+00:00
> Sorry but people are entitled to pressure other private citizens when they say disagreable things.

I said

> I'm 100% supportive of disagreeing, debating, peacefully protesting, ignoring and even mocking ideas we don't agree with but I draw a hard line at shouting down, deplatforming or canceling them.

So we agree. What's there to be "Sorry" about?

> What First Amendment is trying to protect

My post doesn't mention the First Amendment or the troubling matter of the FCC chair comments about individual speech. I chose not to post about those because I wanted to focus on the other kind of free speech which doesn't involve the government or the First Amendment and isn't even a matter of law. It's about the morality and ethics of how consistently we as private citizens actively support fellow citizens we disagree with in being heard - even when they're offensive, hateful and wrong. It's about whether we should support or oppose private citizens canceling other citizens.

Frankly, I can't tell if we agree or not. I suspect it depends on exactly what you mean by the word "pressure". If "pressure" is limited to "disagreeing, debating, peacefully protesting, ignoring and even mocking" then we are in total agreement. If "pressure" includes "shouting down, deplatforming or canceling" then you're a canceler and we disagree. If it includes wiggle room which might lead to silencing viewpoints you oppose, you're a closet canceler - in which case the vagueness of the term "pressure" and being "sorry" make more sense. On the other hand, if "pressure" includes opposing even those you agree with most the moment they want to silence those you disagree with (instead of debating and countering their bad, wrong ideas) - then we're soulmates.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-09-18 01:49:14+00:00
I know Israel sees its future as a regional, and perhaps global, kingmaker. The fulcrum upon which the multipolar world balances and that this is an attractive proposition to them. But it’ll be entering into a world with a combination of circumstances that have never happened before, which I think is one hell of a risk, a risk that has a good chance of ending disastrously for them, let alone the rest of the world. And what should happen to them if they fail.

It’ll be like singing ‘we’ll be home by Christmas,’ or ‘King Cotton,’ often many of the assumptions that underpin these beliefs do not pan out. I guess it’s now ‘free beachside real estate.’
by GuB-42 | 2025-09-18 01:49:32+00:00
Small caliber, lots of plastic, short lifespan, unreliable.

Most serious 3D printed guns have at least a metal barrel. Often, 3D printed guns are just a lower receiver, that is the part you hold in your hand, the parts that actually fire the bullets (barrel, pin, slide, etc...) are bought off the shelf from real gun manufacturers.

This is a workaround for some laws that considers gun parts to not be a gun. For example, outside of a gun, a barrel is just a metal pipe and can be traded freely. The part that makes a gun a gun is the lower receiver, and you can 3D print that in plastic and still get good performance. In fact, Glock makes this part in plastic and these are some of the most popular and proven guns in the world.
by tfvlrue | 2025-09-18 01:49:41+00:00
I have been using a Core One at home for the past six months or so, and have not had this experience at all. For me, it just works. I can send prints to it and it completes them, hands-off.

It sounds like there may be a hardware problem with your printer. Did you buy it assembled or do it yourself? You may want to contact Prusa about this, because I can confirm this is not normal behavior for this printer.
by DangitBobby | 2025-09-18 01:49:57+00:00
You're just ignoring reality in a couple of paragraphs. Condemning Israel or extending a fig leaf to Palestine alienates the moderates. Not doing it alienates the single-issue-on-Palenstine voters. I don't understand why I have to keep saying that, or why you haven't addressed this fundamental fact of their voting base. They had to tiptoe around everyone's big feelings because not electing a dictator wasn't important enough.

My main issues are actually vote reform, climate change, and single payer healthcare (voted for Bernie in the primary) so I'm no stranger to being ignored politically; my issues are not even remotely on offer.

And FWIW I would strongly support sanctions against Israel for its disgusting treatment of Palestinians, and support aid for Palestine. I just knew that wasn't on offer.
by nicholast | 2025-09-18 01:50:27+00:00
I hereby present Book 7 of the essay series from the Diaries of John Henry, "Inevitable". I used to publish these every year, took a little more time on this book featuring a self-authored collection of essays published over last three years around subjects like AI, technology policy, investing, and entrepreneurship. One of inspirations for the journey arose from essays of Paul Graham so sharing to the Y-Combinator community as a courtesy. No language models were used or harmed in the making of these essays (unless otherwise disclosed). Cheers! - Nicholas Teague, 9/17/2025
by asadotzler | 2025-09-18 01:50:48+00:00
In case you think Braille is old tech from the paper books era, you should check out a modern refreshable Braille display connected to smartphone or laptop. They're feats of engineering that work hand in hand with screen readers to make content readable to blind and low vision people, and others who use them. The screen reader gets its data from the OS and apps and outputs that as either audio announcements, speech, or as Braille for a refreshable display. Single line displays are often 40 to 80 cells wide, each cell a little set of servo-controlled pins that pop up and down to form the Braille characters, but popular displays can also be had as short as 12 characters and others are multi-line slabs. Braille reading is a super power and more people should learn.
by defrost | 2025-09-18 01:50:53+00:00
It's a constant part of history wrt autocracy and securing power.

If, for example, I call you out for being a fascist (or even falsely accuse you of such) then I must be anti fascist and therefore a terrorist, an enemy of the state, someone that can be seized from the streets and cast into a black hole somewhere.

The particulars don't matter, be it Red Scare (and under the bed), Yellow Peril, Anti-Fa, et al. the playbook is familiar.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-18 01:51:05+00:00
It's not so much the hardware, it's the lack of software to use with the hardware. Nobody wants to wait until real hardware exists and risk losing consumer interest, yet they risk losing consumer interest with these half baked products. Sibling comment claims a killer app, but there hasn't truly been a killer app that makes people willing to use the product all the time. The new wears off, and then the use just craters.
by adolph | 2025-09-18 01:51:31+00:00
Yes, it seems like there was or is a region considered the "Assyrian homeland" [0] of the people for whom the empire was named (Assyria being named for the home city of Assur). Wikipedia's map makes it look the same as the Kurdish territory and when I look up differences between them, Reddit threads describing contemporary accounts are front and center. [1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_homeland

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Assyria/comments/u8c324/relationshi...
by afavour | 2025-09-18 01:52:26+00:00
> First Amendment ‘coercion’ requires a concrete threat backed by government power and a causal link to the station’s decision.

Yeah. How about this direct quote from Carr?

> I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.
by paxys | 2025-09-18 01:52:42+00:00
People keep saying this, but it is absolutely not true.

Apple was first to the personal computer. First to the smartphone. First to the tablet. First to wireless earbuds. The vast majority of the company's revenue comes from segments where they had a multi-year head start over their competitors.

In fact products where they play catch up are more prone to failing (Vision Pro, Airpods Max, Homepod, Maps, MobileMe, Ping, Music Connect, AirPower, Airport).
by thatswrong0 | 2025-09-18 01:53:24+00:00
Donald Trump also openly mocked Nancy Pelosi and her husband after the attack on them, which was done by a Trump supporter who believed Pelosi was trying to steal votes from Trump (which, for the record, was a FAILED assassination attempt). He did nothing to condemn this violence:

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/29/trump-mocks-pelosi-...

Which left wing politician in recent memory has said anything even REMOTELY as violence endorsing as this?

I'll be waiting for ANY sources besides just calling what I'm saying "misinformation"
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-18 01:53:38+00:00
This feels like an overreach, maybe. The FCC does have the strange task of regulating "false information" [1], but in practice I don't think that gets invoked very often (I'm sure morning DJs would be fired en masse if they were actually held to the standard of proven, objective truth!)

I'm hoping that this is just the high watermark, and not the new standard.

[1] - https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/broadcasting_false_i...
by apstls | 2025-09-18 01:53:40+00:00
Should Fox, Newsmax, OANN, Alex Jones, Tucker, Bannon, the deputy director the the FBI (in a prior gig, to be fair), the president of the United States (current & prior gigs), members of congress, MAGA influencers like Tim Pool, the company paying Tim Pool, the people paying the company that pays Tim Pool, etc, etc, etc, and etc, be allowed to?
by da_chicken | 2025-09-18 01:53:49+00:00
The issue is one that's been stated here before: LLMs are language models. They are not world models. They are not problem models. They do not actually understand world or the underlying entities represented by language, or the problems being addressed. LLMs understand the shape of a correct answer, and how the components of language fit together to form a correct answer. They do that because they have seen enough language to know what correct answers look like.

In human terms, we would call that knowing how to bullshit. But just like a college student hitting junior year, sooner or later you'll learn that bullshitting only gets you so far.

That's what we've really done. We've taught computers how to bullshit. We've also managed to finally invent something that lets us communicate relatively directly with a computer using human languages. The language processing capabilities of an LLM are an astonishing multi-generational leap. These types of models will absolutely be the foundation for computing interfaces in the future. But they're still language models.

To me it feels like we've invented a new keyboard, and people are fascinated by the stories the thing produces.
by 0000000000100 | 2025-09-18 01:54:03+00:00
I agree (not OP). The difference in addictiveness between the three big boys (Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, TikTok) grows smaller with every passing year as their back-catalog of content grows.

Pretty much everyone I know consumes TikTok style content these days. I personally have blocked myself from this stuff via deleting the Insta, YouTube and I even wrote a TamperMonkey script to block myself from getting trapped down the rabbit hole.

Self shout out: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/534969-begone-youtube-shor...
by aacook | 2025-09-18 01:54:14+00:00
It seems like there are a lot of negative comments about Meta's glasses which is surprising to me as a regular user. I bought these both in clear and sunglasses and I love them. I've recorded some of the most amazing videos of my baby with them. Listening to music is fantastic as it's different from regular headphones since you can still hear the world around you — I've even done a few longer bike rides with them and it's been great. I haven't enabled any of the AI or smart features on the glasses, although I've been meaning to give it a try. Some things I don't love about them is the proprietary charging cases, the battery life seems to degrade over time (not totally certain though), and they're sensitive to sweat. Overall I think they show a ton of promise.
by acdha | 2025-09-18 01:54:23+00:00
> Actually it was a couple of big ABC affiliate owners that started the avalanche, and ABC followed…not any government pressure.

This is highly misleading: those affiliates were responding to government pressure. The FCC is currently making key decisions for at least one of them[1], following recent decisions by the same government to attack other media organizations, install government political officers at other companies, or forced other companies to provide money or ownership. There’s absolutely no way those decisions were not made without factoring the current environment in.

1. https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/nexstar-tegna-fcc...
by jjk166 | 2025-09-18 01:54:40+00:00
No it didn't. Epicycles were from the get go nothing but an attempt to fit a mathematical function to observed data to predict future positions of planets. It's a geometric method of curve fitting which is a weaker form of the fourier series, and the system was developed by greek mathematicians trying to improve upon Babylonian computations that didn't even have a geometric model. There is a reason that the moon, the only thing in the cosmos that does in fact orbit the earth, has the most complicated series of epicycles to describe its motion.

Ptolemy rejects Aristotle's cosmology which relied on perfect spherical motion. Ptolemy really did believe that the planets moved according to his model (ie it wasn't just a pure computational tool) but he was very clear that his model was based purely on mathematics. Not only did he not give a reason for why the cosmos should take this form, he openly speculates that the answer is unknowable, and works under the assumption "maybe they can move wherever they want and they just like moving this way."

Further, cycles were not added over time [1]. On day one there were 31 cycles and circles, and these were exactly the same ones being used at the time of Copernicus. You also don't need many epicycles to accurately produce a path identical to keplerian orbits. Completely arbitrary orbits can be described with finite epicycles. [2] Indeed the problem was that Ptolemy didn't fit the data by adding more epicycles, but instead through the Equant, which moved the positions of the centers of the epicycles, which meant adding more epicycles would not make it more accurate. The story of ever more epicycles being added to a bloated old theory that was streamlined by heliocentrism is a modern myth.

[1] https://diagonalargument.com/2025/05/20/from-kepler-to-ptole...

[2] https://web.math.princeton.edu/~eprywes/F22FRS/hanson_epicyc...
by stonogo | 2025-09-18 01:55:10+00:00
Yeah, that's probably true among developers. Among other classes of users, providing a deb or an rpm (or some combination of package manager formats) has been pretty normal. Enterprise software like Slack has been doing this for ages, Microsoft distributed Teams that way for years, the CUDA stack is rpm/deb, etc. Outside of the dev world, docker is basically a signal that your devops people should be on the project. The most common question used to be "why no installer" but nowadays users just use the "app store" (Gnome's Software or KDE's Discover) to Get Stuff, and wouldn't be able to tell you if asked whether what they just installed was a native package or a Flatpak.

I do agree that Docker is ubiquitous in the development world, but I think the fraction of people even aware enough of packaging to have an opinion is vanishingly small.
by cflewis | 2025-09-18 01:55:11+00:00
I think it's a "yes but" here. AI is the first transition point since the smartphone. Apple knows how to make hardware, and knows how to make software. I am extremely unconvinced Apple has a clue about what to do with AI.

You can't just jump in, the lead up to getting this stuff going is a 5 year+ horizon, and Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic are still moving exceptionally fast. Apple has shown they are nowhere near. They missed the boat on buying Anthropic, OpenAI was never going to sell with Musk behind it. There's no path forward for them, let alone catching up.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-18 01:55:28+00:00
network traffic and machine load aren't deterministic. I think for the near term, getting full determinism (e.g. for auditing) is going to only be feasible for batch jobs that are not cost sensitive.

A google search isn't deterministic. Neither is loading upvote count on social media.

It's common advice in distributed systems to have a graceful degradation state instead of becoming unavailable. That wouldn't be possible in a system that's completely deterministic.
by neilv | 2025-09-18 01:55:32+00:00
"At least it's not faked" was my main reaction, too. Some other big-tech AI-related demos the last couple years have been caught being faked.

Zuckerberg handling it reasonably well was nice.

(Though the tone at the end of "we'll go check out what he made later" sounded dismissive. The blame-free post-mortem will include each of the personnel involved in the failure, in a series of one-on-one MMA sparring rounds. "I'm up there, launching a milestone in a trillion-dollar strategic push, and you left me @#$*&^ my @#*$&^@#( like a #@&#^@! I'll show you post-mortem!")
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-18 01:55:44+00:00
I don’t think FCC pressure was what led to this. Nexstar, which owns stations that are affiliates of ABC, made a choice to remove the show from their stations. Their reasoning has nothing to do with the government or first amendment. Here is what they said:

> “Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located,” said Andrew Alford, President of Nexstar’s broadcasting division. “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue.”

This decision and their public statement about it, coupled with social media pressure, led ABC to making a decision afterwards about the show.
by com2kid | 2025-09-18 01:56:31+00:00
One of my internships was preparing Bill Gate's demo machines for CES. I setup custom machine images and ran through scripts to make sure everything went off w/o a hitch (I was doing just the demos for Tablet PC, each org presumably had their own team preparing the demos!)

Not doing it live would've been an embarrassment. I don't think the thought ever crossed anyone's mind, of course we'd do it live. Sure the machines were super customized, bare bones Windows installs stripped back to the minimum amount of software needed for just one demo, but at the end of the day it sure as hell was real software running up there on stage.
by adrianmonk | 2025-09-18 01:57:21+00:00
From https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/brendan-carr-abc-fcc-jimmy-... :

> Appearing on Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday, Carr suggested that the FCC has “remedies we can look at.”

> “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

An absolutely unmistakable direct threat from the chairman of the FCC.
by blackqueeriroh | 2025-09-18 01:57:37+00:00
Simple answer: there are two separate processes here, training and inference.

As you discuss, training happens over a long period of time in a (mostly) hands-off fashion once it starts.

But inference? That’s a separate process which uses the trained model to generate responses, and it’s a runtime process - send a prompt, inference runs, response comes back. That’s a whole separate software stack, and one that is constantly being updated to improve performance.

It’s in the inference process where these issues were produced.
by wklauss | 2025-09-18 01:58:03+00:00
To be fair, Meta is also not the first company to launch smart glasses with a display.

But the reality of it is that it's probably still to early to say if these devices will have mainstream appeal. I see a lot of people saying "well, i no longer need to take the phone out my pocket", but that has been the case for a couple of years with smartwatches, for example, and it has not meaningfully changed our dependency from the smartphone or the smartphone market dynamics that much.
by zhyder | 2025-09-18 01:58:33+00:00
Neural band is huge, glad they're shipping it already rather than waiting (years?) for a production version of Orion (the full AR glasses they demo'd a year ago together with this neural band). TheVerge found the controls great, even tried an alpha of handwriting for text input: https://youtu.be/5cVGKvl7Oek

These glasses are just "annotated reality" rather than full AR, with just 1 small display; think Google Glass but 100x more discreet. So discreet input and output on a device with a camera.
by AstroJetson | 2025-09-18 01:58:42+00:00
In the 80’s I lived in SE Pennsylvania. In the King of Prussia Mall was Gene’s Books. They had ALL the titles. I worked for a tech company that wanted people to learn things. I wrangled $300 per month budget and a small office that we turned into a tech library. Gene’s was a regular bi-weekly stop to get the lates editions. Computer Shopper was the only magazine that we got 3 of every month.
by gertlex | 2025-09-18 01:59:04+00:00
Something called Nexstar, which owns a subset of ABC whatevers was maybe first? I stopped trying to understand it after a while; notably, the yahoo article which (I skimmed/searched before I came to HN) doesn't mention this I guess?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/fcc-jimmy-kimme...

So yes, seems there was a middle step between Brendan Carr on a podcast, and top level ABC decision making.
by anigbrowl | 2025-09-18 01:59:23+00:00
Relatedly, Sinclair Media (which owns several ABC-affiliated broadcasting stations and has long been regarded as skewing very conservative) issued a statement suggesting that Kimmel could only be rehabilitated by apologizing and making substantial donations to Kirk's estate and to Turning Point USA.

https://x.com/WeAreSinclair/status/1968474667049525634
by refurb | 2025-09-18 02:00:01+00:00
I mean the FCC has rules around the content that can be put on public airwaves. It has been held up in court.

Whether the FCC’s actions are also legal here I don’t know.

But it goes to show the insanity of US politics that one can make an argument yesterday then argue against the same point the next.

But then again, I get the sense it’s all one circus with everyone well aware of what’s going on. It’s basically a performance where the audience knows the performer doesn’t believe it themselves.
by AraceliHarker | 2025-09-18 02:00:02+00:00
It's completely unreasonable to believe that ABC's decision to cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live! was an independent one, especially given that Trump has publicly criticized Jimmy Kimmel on Truth Social and has a history of threatening people and organizations he dislikes with lawsuits and legal penalties. It's much more likely that ABC canceled him because they feared retaliation from Trump.