MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by r0m4n0 | 2025-09-04 03:18:00+00:00
I think this writer focuses on the buyer side but on the merchant side, there are similar tradeoffs. People (employees, robbers etc) steal cash and it adds work to close out registers at the end of your day. Having no cash in your store solves those problems.

I run a non profit with membership dues and I have tried to just boot the 3% of our membership that pay w/ check or cash annually (I haven’t convinced the rest of the board so we haven’t done it yet). It takes so much extra time to follow it in real life, receive checks in the mail, and effort to deposit in the bank. It’s just not worth the time
by ameister14 | 2025-09-04 03:18:34+00:00
Basically it should be illegal per se but since the 70's the Court has really limited how they apply that and so courts generally prefer to do a competitive analysis/quick look first. In this case, the argument might be that since the cost to consumer doesn't increase, it isn't a naked price fix so it's not per se illegal.

As I learned it, since BMI & ASCAP v. CBS, in 1979, it's essentially been that the per se rule is applied when the courts have enough experience with an accused restraint to know that it is so plainly anticompetitive, and so often lacks any redeeming virtue, that further inquiry in any given case is almost certainly wasted effort

Bork and his acolytes really screwed us, basically, turning a half-baked understanding of economics into a justification to ignore legislation and 60+ years of jurisprudence, and that's carried the day since.
by pizzly | 2025-09-04 03:18:38+00:00
This time is different. A fact right now is that software engineers now can orchestrate LLMs and agents to write software. The role of software engineers who do this is quality control, compliance, software architecture and some out of the box thinking for when LLMs do not cut it. What makes you think advances in AI wont take care of these tasks that LLMs do not do well currently? My point is once these tasks are taken care off a CS graduate won't be doing tasks that they learnt to do in their degrees. What people need to learn is how to think of customers needs in abstract ways and communicate this to AI and judge the output in a similar way someone judges a painting.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-09-04 03:18:49+00:00
Tragedy of the Commons is bullshit. Just one pessimistic, selfish asshole penning out a manifesto on how everyone is just as miserable and awful as he is. It assumes that individuals, left to their own devices, will inevitably over-consume shared resources out of selfishness. But this narrative ignores centuries of evidence to the contrary: communities around the world have sustainably managed commons through norms, trust, and mutual accountability.

And he wasn't just wrong for the hell of it. He used it to argue against immigration and for coercive population control, not to promote environmental stewardship. His model erases the role of governance, culture, and cooperation, reducing human behavior to a simplistic race to depletion.

In reality, the commons don’t fail because they’re shared. They fail when they’re mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them.

I would go so far to say that the only way this concept has ever come close to being "correct" is the culturally inert modern Western world which has replaced everyone's souls with aimless desires for products and cheap dopamine hits, far from anything approaching our natural state.
by snuxoll | 2025-09-04 03:22:04+00:00
Many banks also charge fees to process cash deposits for business accounts, as well. It's still often a tenth of credit card interchange fees, but between that, labor to balance your cash drawer, and actually go to the bank to make the deposit, the difference isn't as substantial as you'd make it out to be if you only look at the direct surcharges to process the payments.

That said, while I default to using Apple Pay for basically...everything, I too do not wish to live in a society where large companies get to govern every transaction I make. Or, for that matter, every transaction I make being on a ledger that the government can monitor.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-09-04 03:22:18+00:00
> do you think all Arab households ... religious fasting

Assuming you mean Muslim households and not Arab households, since not all Arabs are Muslim (today is the day you learn about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Christians and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Jews and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druze and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%CA%BC%C3%AD_Faith and even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_Middle_East), everyone still eats during Ramadan, they just do it at night.
by fluidcruft | 2025-09-04 03:22:24+00:00
The Palma 2 doesn't have writing support does it?

I have been looking at the Boox Go 7... I have a Boox Note Air and generally like it a lot after the major software upgrade it got when Air 2 was released and also particularly running Android has been quite handy (for syncing journal articles with Zotero). But I am also very curious about Supernote Nomad and may go that way if I decide backlight doesn't matter. I do like backlight for reading in be without bothering my wife...

And so I keep spinning in indecision...
by FloorEgg | 2025-09-04 03:22:55+00:00
Wow. I really like this take. I've seen how time and time again nature follows the Pareto principle. It makes sense that training data would follow this principle as well.

Further that the order of training matters is novel to me and seems so obvious in hindsight.

Maybe both of these points are common knowledge/practice among current leading LLM builders. I don't build LLMs, I build on and with them, so I don't know.
by like_any_other | 2025-09-04 03:23:15+00:00
> Maybe they can allow AI for writing but raise the bar on quality so the blind copy-paste submissions still fail.

These are highschoolers, still learning to write - their output won't be the best. It won't be long at all until AI can write as well as the average (honest, pre-AI) highschooler, if we're not past that point already.
by rolph | 2025-09-04 03:23:22+00:00
"if the APOL1 mutation arises by chance, it should arise at a similar rate in all populations, and only then spread under Trypanosoma pressure. However, if it is generated nonrandomly, it may actually arise more frequently where it is useful."

Believe it or not, this is actually the premise used to suggest, directed mutagenesis vs random generation, and subsequent, selection dependent frequency
by umbra07 | 2025-09-04 03:23:23+00:00
I went from an A52 5G to a S25+ (3 years between the two models). The S25 is infinitely nicer to use. The screen is usable in direct sunlight. OneUI is noticeably smoother. The camera is way better (like, way, way better, in both good and poor lighting conditions). Background apps don't close as frequently. Heavy social media apps perform more smoothly.
TranscribePad – Mobile offline medical transcription and AI note structuring
by Intiser | 2025-09-04 03:23:40+00:00
I'm a healthcare tech guy who got tired of explaining to doctors why they can't use ChatGPT for their patient notes. Built this iOS app after watching too many clinicians either:

Risk their license uploading recordings to random AI services Spend 2+ hours daily on documentation instead of seeing patients

Everything runs locally on the phone - both the transcription AND the AI that actually writes your notes. Patient data never leaves the device, period.

It's not just speech-to-text. The on-device AI listens to your rambling patient encounter and structures it however you want - SOAP notes, sure, but also custom templates you design. Psychiatrists can get therapy session summaries, PTs can get treatment progress notes, specialists can get their own weird documentation formats. Takes about 45 seconds to process a 20-minute session and gives you back exactly the structure you need.

Works offline in clinic basements with terrible cell service. The AI pulls out symptoms, diagnoses, treatment plans from messy conversations and formats them to match your practice style, not some generic template.

The big AI scribe companies charge $200/month for cloud-based processing with rigid formats. This costs way less, adapts to how YOU document, and your data stays put.

Been testing it with different types of providers - family docs, therapists, specialists. Everyone sets up their own templates and the AI just follows their format.

Anyway, figured HN folks might find the technical challenges interesting or have thoughts on the approach.
by shmerl | 2025-09-04 03:24:00+00:00
Well, it might work for individual plugins, but it can't work for when you use plugins as extensions for other plugins. How would plugin A know it has to load B (which is an extension of A) as a prerequisite for [lazy] loading itself?

Basically, only plugin manager can have a sane graph of plugins dependencies and know how to load them because that graph is in the end defined by the user (for the plugin manager) and plugins themselves have no clue what user might want.
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-04 03:24:09+00:00
> In either case, the results are the same, he's eating cereal for breakfast. We can know this fact without knowing the underlying cause. Many times, we don't even know the cause of things we choose to do for ourselves, let alone what others do.

Yeah, no.

Understanding the causation allows the system to provide a better answer.

If they "enjoy" cereal, what about it do they enjoy, and what other possible things can be had for breakfast that also satisfy that enjoyment.

You'll never find that by looking only at the fact that they have eaten cereal for breakfast.

And the fact that that's not obvious to you is why I cannot be bothered going into any more depth on the topic any more. It's clear that you don't have any understanding on the topic beyond a superficial glance.

Bye :)
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-09-04 03:24:20+00:00
It’s kinda interesting that a simple generator that probabilistically generates a word based on the previous one (less than 100 lines of simple python code), when trained on a book or two, will fairly consistently capitalize the first word after a period and form somewhat reasonable sentences.

It’s not that it knows grammar, it just was trained on a dataset that applied proper capitalization.

Humans learn from seeing patterns. I suspect AI only repeats them, more like a parrot.
by textadventure | 2025-09-04 03:24:42+00:00
This take from a Hermione-type High School senior shed next to zero new light on the subject. Yes, we know AI is redefining school and jobs and daily life. The perspective of an obnoxious A+ type student isn't helping, especially because you kind of can read between the lines that she isn't friends with these kids using AI, which would give her a deeper perspective of why and how they are using AI.

Is this what The Atlantic has come down to, publishing a complain-y piece by the class president?

EDIT: For anyone struggling with my criticism of the article, I very much agree that there is a problem of AI in education. Her suggestion which is "maybe more oral exams and less essays?" I'm sure has never been considered by teachers around the world rolls eyes.

As for how to tackle this, I think the only solution is accept the fact that AI is going nowhere and integrate it into the class. Show kids in the class how to use AI properly, compare what different AI models say, and compare what they say to what scholars and authors have written, to what kids in the past have written in their essays.

You don't have to fight AI to instill critical thinking in kids. You can embrace it to teach them its limitations.
by noduerme | 2025-09-04 03:27:26+00:00
I'm very sympathetic to both the cash-as-privacy and cash-as-fair-access (for unbanked people, to goods and services) arguments, and I won't support any business that doesn't take cash.

Credit cards are a snare for the chronically indebted, to shake pennies from their pockets to transfer to the wealthy.

However, if you have no debt (which is enough to be considered "wealthy", IMO), you'd be a fool not to use a credit card for most transactions. Because the rewards they hand out are built into the prices paid for everything by people who pay with cash.

In my own case... I got my first credit card at 18, and by the time I was 22 I had racked up $20k in debt. I took drastic action and stopped using cards completely, and lived only on my income from multiple jobs, going without anything I wanted to buy for several years. Beans, rice, pasta, one pair of shoes, three shirts. Until I paid it off. By the time I was 24 I had paid it off waiting tables, driving taxi. Then I cancelled my cards. And so for reasons unrelated to privacy, I had no credit cards for 15 years after that, and only used cash or debit cards.

It was only in my mid thirties that I was put wise to the fact that I was losing 1% to 3% of my average spend by not having a card. So I got the most expensive card I could with the best payback ratio, and have never carried a balance on it at the end of a month. Over the ten years I've had it, it's paid me back somewhere around $30k, all siphoned from the pockets of people who don't pay their debt off.

Is this a vile and rapacious system? Absolutely. Would I be stupid not to take advantage of it after doing my time and learning the hard way? Yeah.

I still pay cash a lot, because I don't need a record of what I'm up to. And I'd support a ban on credit cards which would lead to merchants dropping prices for everyone. But here we are.
by jrk | 2025-09-04 03:27:48+00:00
eInk devices are very much not converging to 16:9 or wider aspect ratios. This device is intentionally the size and shape of a reporter's notebook, but there are virtually no other eInk tablets which diverge significantly from more common paper aspect ratios – they all (ReMarkable, Supernote, Boox, Kindle, etc.) are and continue to be exactly what you say you want.
by stere0 | 2025-09-04 03:28:51+00:00
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by Incipient | 2025-09-04 03:29:30+00:00
For me AI is a bell curve, and I'd expect the same for a lot of people. What needs to be defined is the measure by which to grade output. It should not be "lines of code" but "lines of good quality, maintainable, scalable, upgradable code".

When you consider this, "generate me a whole repo" is trivially garbage and not meeting the measurement metric. However having AI autocomplete "getUser(..." clearly IS productive.

Now is that a 0.1% increase, 1%, or 10%? That I can't tell you.
by babalark | 2025-09-04 03:29:48+00:00
I'm really looking forward to this. I hope it helps push the nvim plugin community into lazy loading plugins by default instead of relying on a complex plugin manager like lazy. The nvim docs have a little note related to this[1].

I'm quite a fan of the nvim-neorocks plugin best practices as well[2]. In fact it seems like part of them got merged recently[3] hahaha.

[1] https://neovim.io/doc/user/lua-plugin.html#lua-plugin-lazy

[2] https://github.com/nvim-neorocks/nvim-best-practices

[3] https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/29073
by ewoodrich | 2025-09-04 03:30:14+00:00
> Interestingly, Moravec also stated: "When the highest peaks are covered, there will be machines than can interact as intelligently as any human on any subject. The presence of minds in machines will then become self−evident

> We pretty much have those today so by 1997 standards, machines have minds, yet somehow we moved the goalposts and decided that doesn't count anymore

What you describe as "moving the goalposts" could also just be explained as simply not meeting the standard of "as intelligently as any human on any subject".

Even in the strongest possible example of LLM's strengths applying their encyclopedic knowledge and (more limited) ability to apply that knowledge for a given subject I don't think they meet that bar. Especially if we're comparing to a human over a time period greater than 30 minutes or so.
by breuleux | 2025-09-04 03:30:24+00:00
Note that wheels, steam engines, jet planes, spaceships wouldn't survive on their own in nature. Compared to natural structures, they are very simple, very straightforward. And while biological organisms are adapted to survive or thrive in complicated, ever-changing ecosystems, our machines thrive in sanitized environments. Wheels thrive on flat surfaces like roads, jet planes thrive in empty air devoid of trees, and so on. We ensure these conditions are met, and so far, pretty much none of our technology would survive without us. All this to say, we're playing a completely different game from evolution. A much, much easier game. Apples and oranges.

As for limits, in my opinion, there are a few limits human intelligence has that evolution doesn't. For example, intent is a double-edged sword: it is extremely effective if the environment can be accurately modelled and predicted, but if it can't be, it's useless. Intelligence is limited by chaos and the real world is chaotic: every little variation will eventually snowball into large scale consequences. "Eventually" is the key word here, as it takes time, and different systems have different sensitivities, but the point is that every measure has a half-life of sorts. It doesn't matter if you know the fundamentals of how physics work, it's not like you can simulate physics, using physics, faster than physics. Every model must be approximate and therefore has a finite horizon in which its predictions are valid. The question is how long. The better we are at controlling the environment so that it stays in a specific regime, the more effective we can be, but I don't think it's likely we can do this indefinitely. Eventually, chaos overpowers everything and nothing can be done.

Evolution, of course, having no intent, just does whatever it does, including things no intelligence would ever do because it could never prove to its satisfaction that it would help realize its intent.
by aammundi | 2025-09-04 03:31:31+00:00
What I meant by plans are time-bound is: The event is next week. But I get what you're saying about being "locked in". It's different for different people. I solo golf all the time and meet people in the process. Does the equation change the moment there is judgement involved ? conversely, if the focus is on the (self-chosen) activity, does that lighten the mood ?
by jachee | 2025-09-04 03:32:44+00:00
I know HN is gonna downvote me into oblivion for this, but… I’m a cis-het white dude, a this rings true for me:

“When you’ve been in the majority for a long time, equality can feel like oppression.”

Just because a system desires proportional representation does not mean it’s discriminatory against the majority. It just means it’s no longer preferential toward them.
by casey2 | 2025-09-04 03:33:02+00:00
The evidence it cites is that paper from 3 months ago claiming your brain activates less while prompting than actually writing an essay. No duh, the point is that you flex your mental muscles on the tasks AI can't do, like effective organization. I don't need to make a pencil to write.

The most harmful myth in all of education is the idea that you need to master some basic building blocks in order to move on to a higher level. That really is just a noticeable exception. At best you can claim that it's difficult for other people to realize that your new way solves the problem, or that people should really learn X because it's generally useful.

I don't see the need for this kind of compulsory education, and it's doing much more harm than good. Bodybuilding doesn't even appear as a codified sport until well after the industrial revolution, it's not until we are free of sustenance labor that human intelligence will peak. Who would be happy with a crummy essay if humans could learn telekinesis?
by AIorNot | 2025-09-04 03:33:29+00:00
well the hard problem of consciousness gets in the way of that

- I assume you as a materialist you mean our brain carries consciousness as a field of experience arising out of neural activity (ie neurons firing, some kind of infromation processing leading to models of reality simulated in our mind leading to ourselves feeling aware) ie that we our awareness is the 'software' running inside the wetware.

That's all well and good except that none of that explains the 'feeling of it' there is nothing in that 3rd person material activity that correlates with first person feeling. The two things, (reductionist physical processes cannot substitute for the feeling you and I have as we experience)

This hard problem is difficult to surmount physically -either you say its an illusion but how can the primary thing we are, we expereince as the self be an illusion? or you say that somewhere in fields, atoms, molecules, cells, in 'stuff; is the redness of red or the taste of chocolate..
by astrange | 2025-09-04 03:34:15+00:00
"Enshittification" is too twee.

You can tell it was invented by Cory Doctorow because there is a very specific kind of Gen X person who uses words like that - they have a defective sense of humor vaguely based on Monty Python, never learned when you are and aren't supposed to turn it off, and so they insist on making up random insults like "fuckwaffle" all the time instead of regular swearing.
by RestlessMind | 2025-09-04 03:34:15+00:00
> as long as your grass is not too tall or your house has approved color by HOA apparatchiks.

Freedom of speech, and overall first amendment, is about freedom from government restrictions. Doesn't apply to private organizations modulo some cases like civil rights.

> Or as long as you are not burning a US flag in USA, which will land you in prison.

Facts speak otherwise - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_v._Johnson

> And I dare you use words "Mexican Gulf", then your glorious leader will personally ban you from entering White House.

Glorious leader can ban you from entering White House for whatever reason he deems fit. It is his residence and his office. Nothing to do with free speech. I can organize a protest outside White House and he can't do anything as long as it's a peaceful protest (again, right granted by 1A).

Please research your facts next time.
by OutOfHere | 2025-09-04 03:35:48+00:00
Well said. There are kids who're struggling no matter how hard they try, because the teacher's explanation was miserable, or because they have to actually work part-time for a living. These kids need AI. Without AI they could risk being on the street when they turn 18.

Later in life, when their life is more stable, these same kids will be the first to actually use AI to learn the then necessary concepts properly.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-04 03:35:57+00:00
You can't imagine the revolution over anything arbitrary on the horizon? Kids will have to overthrow the lame Pleistocene technology we base AI on in order to survive. This tech is already DOA as a general tool, she's telling us this. If there's no excitement or joy in learning, the sector is moot.

The lack of imagination in CS is stunning and revolting. Symbols and causality are broken records, chuck them asap and move onto the next idea of what a PC is. It ain't binary.