MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by naasking | 2025-09-12 18:13:45+00:00
> The collapse isn’t in the fields themselves, it’s in the layer of journalism that used to connect experts to the public.

Sure, but what do you do if the subject matter is the question of whether the experts are being myopic and the system in which they're operating is no longer fulfilling its intended purpose? Where's the expert for that?

If you just ask those same experts, well, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
by xienze | 2025-09-12 18:14:01+00:00
> Democrat politicians respect citizen referendums, even when they are stupid and against democrat policies, like in California where Uber is not an employer because that's how the people voted.

LOL what, apparently you forgot about Proposition 187, which California voters voted "yes" on, got tied up in the courts, and then when a Democrat governor came into power he let the appeals die.

Proposition 8: voters voted to ban gay marriage, courts said "nah we're not going to do that." Judges aren't technically politicians but that line is a little blurry at times.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-12 18:14:23+00:00
I'm not sure why the author is making digs at Joe Rogan so much... I mean, his podcast isn't really a deep dive into anything, its more conversations with generally interesting people from a number of different backgrounds. Sometimes MMA, sometimes conspiracy nuts... It's not a scientific podcast and I'm not sure that anyone is claiming it is.

Of course, this is quite a bit different than bought and paid for corporate media shills that currently represent "journalism" at large. In that space they do pretend to have the prestige of being about news, truth and information. For television in particular is pretty bad... MSNBC, CNN, Fox, etc. all are just not great between selection/coverage bias, misinformation, out of context contortions and opinions masked as news. I will separate Fox's written/web coverage as a bit better than their TV counterpart (and the others in general) though. I used to find BBC coverage decent, but they've slipped a lot in the past few years. Similar for Al Jazeera, at least for content outside middle east concerns.
by aduffy | 2025-09-12 18:14:44+00:00
QGIS is the shit. I absolutely love it, great for visualizing GeoJSON, GeoTIFF files, open data feeds, etc. My one gripe is that their macOS installers have been out of date for ages now, the best way I've found is to actually install from Conda Forge directly:

> brew install micromamba

> mamba install qgis

It's really crazy the number of open geospatial data feeds that exist out there from NASA, NOAA, and ESA. If you're interested in checking any of this stuff out, I highly encourage following Mark Litwinchik's blog, this guy is a legend and he does most of his work with open tools like QGIS and DuckDB

https://tech.marksblogg.com/
by davidw | 2025-09-12 18:15:23+00:00
The NYT has some pretty serious problems of its own, although they're subtler in nature.

This study of circular journalism at that paper was pretty eye-opening:

https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in...

The press has a lot of problems right now:

* Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs. See the decline of the Washington Post for instance.

* Local papers struggle to make ends meet. The paper in the city I live in keeps getting cut and cut and cut. There's little left.

* Social media suffers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law at the same time that fewer people read real news sources.

IDK how we fix those things... but they're all deleterious for our society.
by diggan | 2025-09-12 18:15:37+00:00
I'm not sure where you're based, but don't you have consumer protections that allow you to return goods you regret buying? I know that even in places with good return regulations, there are exceptions, but where I live, I could buy a monitor from Amazon to try it out, and if I don't like it, just return it within the 30 days and buy another one. I assumed it was like this in most of the western world? Maybe I'm a bit naive.

I know a bunch of people who do this for cloth shopping (which isn't a great idea considering everything else except themselves, obviously), where they don't know exactly what size will fit them, so they buy the same dress in 2-3 sizes, try them out at home then return the ones that didn't fit.
by jihadjihad | 2025-09-12 18:15:41+00:00
It's not just technical subjects, either. In the midst of the chaos of Charlie Kirk's assassination, they ran an article [0] yesterday titled (it has since been edited) "Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology".

It's just incredibly irresponsible reporting. One can only assume it is a symptom of a wider problem within WSJ and media itself.

0: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/charlie-kirk-shot/card/ammu...
by sigbottle | 2025-09-12 18:16:06+00:00
I mean right tool for the right job. Plenty of formulations and problems (our job has plenty of arbitrarily hard graph algorithms) that have 90% of the problem just being a very clever reduction with nice structure.

Then the final 10% is either NP hard, or we want to add some DSL flexibility which introduces halting problem issues. Once you lower it enough, then comes the SMT solvers.
by 76SlashDolphin | 2025-09-12 18:17:00+00:00
Those are really good points and we do have some plans for them, mainly on the first topic. What we're envisioning in terms of UX for our gateway is that when you set it up it's very defensive but whenever it detects a trifecta, you can mark it as a false positive. Over time the gateway will be trained to be exactly as permissive as the user wishes with only the rare false positive. You can already do that with the gateway today (you get a web notification when the gateway detects a trifecta and if you click into it, you get taken to a menu to approve/deny it if it occurs in the future). Granted, this can make the gateway overly-permissive but we do have plans on how to improve the granularity of these rules.

Regarding the second point, that is a very interesting topic that we haven't thought about. It would seem that our approach would work for this usecase too, though. Currently, we're defending against the LLM being gullible but gullible and actively malicious are not properties that are too different. It's definitely a topic on our radar now, thanks for bringing it up!
by nilkn | 2025-09-12 18:17:05+00:00
A couple thoughts:

- The author of this clearly disliked the WSJ article, but I don't think they did a good job of explaining why. I'm not saying they're wrong, but this article is very emotional without much concrete criticism. I assume 'woit' is someone famous I should know about but don't and he or she is assuming people will find this sufficient simply because they wrote it. But for someone like me who doesn't know who woit is, it doesn't land as a result.

- I enjoyed the WSJ article and (perhaps naively) thought it did an acceptable job shedding light on an interesting phenomenon that would fly under the radar for many readers. I'd be interested in seeing credible criticism of it, but the article in question declares that providing that information would be "hopeless". In the next sentence, they mention experiencing mental health issues.

- On theoretical physics, my thought, for whatever it may be worth, is that a verified theory of quantum gravity is simply one of the hardest scientific questions of all time. It's something that we should expect would take the entire world hundreds of years to solve. So I'm not at all unnerved or worried about what appears from the outside to be a slow rate of progress. We are talking about precisely understanding phenomena that generally only occur in the most extreme conditions presently imaginable in the universe. That's going to take time to unravel -- and it may not even be possible, just like a dog is never going to understand general relativity.
by bawolff | 2025-09-12 18:17:18+00:00
Presumably because WSJ is the one who wrote the article this person found objectionable. NYT did not write such an article.

They did say "The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal", so there is probably an element of attacking what is high quality though. [I dont follow us media landscape, i have no idea what the relative quality of various papers are or if you are correct about NYT]

That said, more generally when constructing arguments, you generally want to attack the strongest version of your opponents argument. Attacking a paper known for being higher quality is always going to be more convincing than attacking a paper that is less known.
by epolanski | 2025-09-12 18:17:22+00:00
Many interviews now involve automated exercises on websites that track your activity (don't think about triggering a focus change event on your browser, it gets reported).

Also, the reviewer gets an AI report telling it whether you copied the solution somewhere (expressed as a % probability).

You have few minutes and you're on your own.

If you pass that abomination, maybe, you have in person ones.

It's ridiculous what software engineers impose on their peers when hiring, ffs lawyers, surgeons, civil engineers get NO practical nor theorical test, none.
by mothballed | 2025-09-12 18:17:31+00:00
Marsh v Alabama found that private owners might not have the ability to refuse protected speech on their publicly accessible property, so it's not so simple as just being able to declare they're a private entity and that is that.

"In Marsh v. Alabama (1946), the Supreme Court ruled that a privately owned company town could not prohibit individuals from exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and religion"

I'm not saying bluesky is the exact same, but it seems pretty damn similar to the private sidewalk that the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation privately owned.
by labcomputer | 2025-09-12 18:17:31+00:00
And I think you're vastly underestimating the silliness of the requirements to get into medical school.

Medical schools care whether you got an A or B in your undergrad physics-for-life-sciences lab (I know this because I had to deal with annoying grade-grubbing pre-meds as a TA for that class). I would feel 100% comfortable with being treated by a physician who "only" earned a B in my undergraduate physics.

Medical schools also care about how many hours of volunteer community service you do. So, I guess all the applicants who had to work a job through undergrad can just go fuck themselves.

You might start by asking why medical schools care about such silly things. It's such a strange metric! The answer is that medical school collude to limit the number of doctors (so that we don't have "too many"!). Since the quota is so low, they have an enormous ratio of qualified applicants to seats. , So, they need objective criteria to pick some people over others. A or B in undergrad physics (or number of hours of community service) is an objective, quantitative way to cull the herd of overqualified applicants.

Personally, I always thought a better solution would be to have med school applicants roll a die. While I would be 100% comfortable being treated by someone who earn a "B" in my physics class, I'm not sure I want an unlucky surgeon operating on me.
by hrnnnnnn | 2025-09-12 18:17:57+00:00
By coincidence I just listened to the Decoding the Gurus episode on Sabine https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/sabine-hosse...

I also just finished a four-and-a-half-hour defence of modern physics by Sean Carroll which has some really good counterarguments in it, as well as a whirlwind history of the last century in physics. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-...

I am conscious of the irony of responding to this post by posting podcasts.
by no_wizard | 2025-09-12 18:18:48+00:00
The internet and many adjacent technologies were all created and iterated on inside the DoD and other wings of government research.

The world really benefits from well funded institutions doing research and development. Medicine has also largely advanced due in part to this.

What’s lost is the recapture. I don’t think governments are typically the best candidate to bring a new technology to marketable applications, but I do think they should be able to force terms of licensure and royalties. Keeping both those costs predictable and flat across industry would drive even more innovation to market.

What happens instead is private entities take public research and capture it almost entirely in as few hands as possible.

In short, the loss of civic pride and shared responsibility to society has created the nickel and dime you to death capitalism we are seeing in the rise today. Externalization of all costs possible and capture as much profit as possible. No thought to second order effects or how the system that is being dodged to contribute back to gave way for the ability for people to so grossly take advantage of it in the first place
by aerzen | 2025-09-12 18:18:50+00:00
My wife uses this a lot. ArcMap used to be de-facto software in her field, but QGis has overtaken that completely. It might not be as polished as ArcMap, it's missing a few guardrails that would prevent you messing up, but it has more features, extensions, better platform support and is free as in beer.

For folks working on QGis: thank you
by tpmoney | 2025-09-12 18:18:59+00:00
One of the big “ah ha” moments for me with respect to emacs customization was realizing that everything is a function call. Every time you press a key in emacs it’s effectively calling a function to find out what it should do next. Most of the time in most buffers the answer is “print the letter to the buffer” but it doesn’t have to be. It seems obvious said out loud like that but the mental model I had for the longest time made “typing” and “command input” two separate domains and that was a block mentally on using the key maps and various modes to customize the behavior
by yepitwas | 2025-09-12 18:19:09+00:00
They have to provide prices for various billing codes, but you can't really make them commit to which billing codes will apply. This is for both legitimate reasons (stuff might go wrong, they might find something is different than what they thought it was just because that unavoidably happens pretty often in medicine, et c.) and for illegitimate reasons that the legitimate reasons give them cover for (medical billing departments are the organizational embodiment of smarmy, lying assholes who are constantly trying to screw everyone)
by kragen | 2025-09-12 18:19:10+00:00
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c07vz1r0j3ro says he confessed, but the very meager information it provides on his political leanings suggests he was not right-wing; https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/12/us/tyler-robinson-charlie... says the shooter engraved antifa slogans and symbols on his bullet casings, and that Robinson criticized Kirk to his family for "spreading hate" and registered as an independent voter, not Republican.
by freedomben | 2025-09-12 18:19:13+00:00
Exactly. There are surely some people that will be stingy (as Mormons are humans after all) but there's a huge emphasis on being able to help out the neighbors and the unprepared in a bad situation. Depending on the area too, they even have rough distribution/response plans in place so they aren't starting from scratch during an emergency. You'll occassionaly see comments like "I'm stocked up so my family is fine while all the city people are eating each other" but (anecdatally having lived in heavily Mormom areas most of my life) the vast majority do not feel that way. Even some of the people who I've heard said that, I'd bet a huge amount they would not sit by and watch another human starve
by psunavy03 | 2025-09-12 18:19:14+00:00
The media has been failing at this since Columbine, if not before. They don't take the contagion effect nearly as seriously as they ought to, given that so many shooters have been documented now as idolizing previous shooters.

When you give a maladjusted freak a script that's basically "get your hands on this specific model rifle, go to this specific type of place, kill a bunch of people, and we'll make you famous," is it any wonder it happens over and over again? They show their photo, they name them down to their middle name, they write articles about whatever loony manifesto they wrote . . . none of this should be newsworthy, and it all feeds the social phenomenon.
by TriangleEdge | 2025-09-12 18:19:21+00:00
> Sorting through a pile of misinformation, trying to rebuild something true out of a collapsed mess of some truth buried in a mixture of nonsense and misunderstandings is a losing battle.

In short, I'm predicting port 80 and 443 as we know it today will see much less usage because of LLMs. Or that it'll move to more curated one off blogs like it used to be. Stack Overflow died because of LLMs. I'm not certain if other social media is next or not. Anyone want to guess at when HN will be a hot mess of bots and garbage?
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-09-12 18:19:26+00:00
If anything, "yellow journalism" has been the norm. Being a journalist used to be a step above parasite and ambulance chaser in popular opinion. You didn't need a college degree, let alone an Ivy league degree like today, to do it. Most papers were blatant mouthpieces of owners or certain political parties. Everyone knew that. "Objectivity" was laughed at by reporters.

That shifted with Watergate, which, afterwards, journalism began to have a certain prestige as "crusading truth seekers." Journalists doubled down on that view, cultivated it, and began to believe in it. Nowadays, journalism (at least in major markets) is more about prestige and access to power. Some journalists have a complex and believe that they have the access to the truth, leading to much handwringing about its "professionalism".

In reality, journalism is closer to writing in a journal after a party: they just offer accounts of events. That we expect better from them is, in part, a creation of their own making that is now starting to bite them in the ass.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-12 18:20:27+00:00
If I am understanding this correctly, this is pretty damn cool. I got 15 minutes of research on it, but no better way to get corrected than be wrong on the internet.

Essentially it seems that they can statistical magic "fuzz" the training set in such a way that it becomes very difficult for the model to leak information from the training set, while still providing the same output whether or not that exact info was in the training set. So I suppose the goal would be something like the ability to train on medical data, while making it so the model won't be able to complete the prompt "Workaccount 2 has a serious medical condition called ______" and would give the same response regardless of whether or not I was present in the database.
by Conlectus | 2025-09-12 18:20:37+00:00
I’m not sure if this is the point you mean to make, but Michio Kanu is one of the bigger cranks in physics communication. He said ion an (maybe the Joe Rigan interview?) that quantum computers would be able to act as a truth detector for AI. He wrote a whole book on quantum computing in fact despite clearly not understanding it at all[0].

[0]: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7321
by hn_throw_250910 | 2025-09-12 18:20:51+00:00
The focus on technical and scientific studies here shouldn’t dissuade anyone from questioning more approachable subject matters, namely anything involving studies or scientific inquiries should be placed under suspicion. Moreso when it relates to hot headed topics of the moment that drive clicks and engagement (outrage).

This all reminds me of the Gell-Man Amnesia which is an absolutely real thing, and this turn of events with regards to WSJs capability (if it can be called that) shouldn’t surprise anyone.
by jacobgkau | 2025-09-12 18:21:09+00:00
> I will separate Fox's written/web coverage as a bit better than their TV counterpart (and the others in general) though.

I regularly check Fox's website along with CNN and NewsNation, which gets me ostensibly right/left/center views on things. Having not seen much TV Fox, I assumed Fox News Digital put more spin on things. It could just be the stupid little quip taglines they put over all of their image thumbnails that made me think that, as opposed to the actual article content, though.
by xp84 | 2025-09-12 18:21:11+00:00
> starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc

Yes. Both are real facets of this type of tech. For all the handwringing about "but what if fascism" that we have here in the US, I'm pretty sure 90% of the actual worries American cryptocurrency users have in their hearts is either about tax evasion, money laundering, or using crypto to buy/sell something illegal (Granted, there are some things illegal to buy/sell that there could be an ethical argument shouldn't be illegal -- probably certain drugs for instance). If someone has made bitcoin transactions to say, donate to EFF, Planned Parenthood or ACLU, I would take a bet of 5 Bitcoin that he isn't going to be imprisoned for that fact in this country. Yes, even though Trump is President.

But I think we who believe in privacy make ourselves look bad if we try to pretend that there isn't a ton of that stuff going on.

It's a reasonable opinion to say that privacy is good, but I think the thing to argue and "prove" is that it outweighs the fact that this technology also enables all this bad stuff. Which is a value judgment and thus you need to convince people, rather than just point to the word "Freedom" and assert.
by jeffbee | 2025-09-12 18:21:16+00:00
I know it's hard to be this online, and I don't blame you for not being. Charlie Kirk was shot by a Nick Fuentes Groyper in the ultimate escalation of an online meme war that has been leaking into the real world for at least the last 6 years. The WSJ is unable to report on this effectively, because they are insufficiently online. They need a meme culture desk.
by space_fountain | 2025-09-12 18:21:30+00:00
I don't know if it's productive to talk on here, but I'm not the person you seem to think I am. I think Israel has a right to defend itself and I think it has a right to take in refuges if it wants to, but it doesn't have anything to do with your claim that Jewish israelis have some sort of claim to the land owing to ancestral history that isn't shared by the people they literally pushed out. You can read this wiki article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Palestinians), but my read is that the jews and palestinians both descended from a similar group of people. Palestinians are mostly just historic jews that converted

There are things that have moved me to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause over the past few years and I think if you haven't listened to Ezra Klein talk about this you should. I think he holds the right balance of pointing out the horror of what Israel has done while holding the context of the horrors Palestine seems intent on doing if given power
by cm2187 | 2025-09-12 18:21:51+00:00
From the WSJ article:

> The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory.

I don't agree with the second part of the sentence, i.e. about the reason, not that I disagree, just that I have no idea why that is. But the first part, about discovering little of importance, is true though.

Just look back at what theoretical physist has yielded in term of practical implications historically. XVIII century physics gave us gravitation, thermo-dynamics, and basically enabled the industrial revolution. XIX century physics gave us electricity, electro-magnetism, computers, etc. First half of the XX century gave us nuclear energy, lasers, etc. But is there any major technology that post 1960s theoretical physics has given us? I can't think of any example.