MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vintermann | 2025-09-03 14:22:26+00:00
The alcohol industry is very comfortable with age limits. The more the better (e.g. beer and wine at 18 but liquor at 21).

The reason is that they understand that this enshrines alcohol as a maturity symbol. It ensures that you're seen as immature for not drinking.

An alcohol lobbying group around here made posters with a huge foaming glass of beer and the text "over 18? Prove it!". Nominally it was about showing ID, but I think youth got the intended message, and it wasn't about showing ID. Alcohol advertising is forbidden, but profit finds a way.

I see no reason to think energy drink restrictions will be different.
by codyb | 2025-09-03 14:22:38+00:00
It comes and goes in cycles... I remember the hay days of MVC frameworks and oh my this one is MVVC! ad nauseum for... years lol.

I stopped coming here for a year or two, now I visit once a day or so and mostly just skim a couple threads.

Eventually, this entire field... just starts to feel pretty cyclical.
by krapp | 2025-09-03 14:22:43+00:00
Like Pandora's box, it's a just so story about why women are the source of all mens' problems and why patriarchy is just and necessary. And why women have pain in childbirth. And why people are afraid of snakes. And why we die. But mostly about why women suck (from the point of view of ancient Hebrew culture.)

And that attitude transfers to Christianity in 1 Timothy when Paul says women should not be allowed to teach or have authority over men, but should remain quiet because it was Eve who was deceived by the serpent, and who then deceived Adam.
by memco | 2025-09-03 14:22:54+00:00
It’s also worth noting that this was specifically about the effects of ChatGPT on users’s ability to write essays: which means that if you don’t practice your writing skills, then your writing skills decline. This doesn’t seem to show that it is harmful just that it does not induce the same brain activity that is observed in other essay writing methods.

Additionally, the original paper uses the term “cognitive debt“ not cognitive decline, which may have an important ramifications for interpretation and conclusions.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see similar results in other similar types of studies, but it does feel a bit premature to broadly conclude that all LLM/AI use is harmful to your brain. In a less alarmist take: this could also be read to show that AI use effectively simplifies the essay writing process by reducing cognitive load, therefore making essays easier and more accessible to a broader audience but that would require a different study to see how well the participants scored on their work.
by stackskipton | 2025-09-03 14:23:07+00:00
I agree they are challenging problems but as others have pointed out, most of infrastructure problems are political so AI is not as helpful. Not to mention depending on our setup, your system would need to be involved in EVERYTHING which InfoSec is going to brittle at.

Writing Terraform is not hard part for this Ops person, if I wanted to use AI, Copilot can easily write it no problem but I'm pretty fast enough these days. Devs of course could use to write Terraform but we are back to the problem of they have no idea what they are asking for.

Maybe my larger organization is not your target market, maybe it's places without dedicated Ops person but at that point, AI that can manage Kubernetes/PaaS for them would be more useful than another TerraForm AI bot.
by jibal | 2025-09-03 14:23:11+00:00
> I guess what I consider UB is when the compiler exploits UB for optimizations, like discarding code that could invoke UB, which as far as I know odin doesn’t do.

This statement is incoherent. UB is undefined behavior, and it existed long before any compiler exploited it and isn't (circularly) defined by whether the Odin compiler exploits it.
by prewett | 2025-09-03 14:23:16+00:00
I don't think you've lived in one of the countries you're talking about. I lived in Beijing for a couple years, and early on I wanted visit Tian'anmen Square and tourist. I wanted to see what there was to do, how to get there, etc., but any search term (in English, anyway) was blocked. So the CCP's inability to accept their past actions and their insistence on making up a false reality made a legitimate activity difficult. Last time I went you had to stand in long lines because they required you to show your ID card (passport, in my case). I worked for a tech company, and none of us could do our jobs without a VPN, because half of all tech blogs got blocked. (Partly because a lot of them blocked on fonts.google.com, which was blocked because google.com was blocked; probably those would time out if you waited long enough.) I couldn't read more than about three paragraphs of the People's Daily without wanting to throw it across the room because the fake reality and shoulds/oughts were so blatant. Maybe it's more subtle in Chinese, but I doubt it. Fortunately I was not there for the whole Covid disaster.

You could argue that the CCP is totalitarian, which is authoritarianism++. The problem is that since technology can be used for totalitarian ends, it will be. Putin is authoritarian (certainly by no means Communist), yet reports I hear from Russia make it sound much like China. There's the forced conscription bit for his war against Ukraine, too. Erdogan seems a little better, but his economics-denying policies caused rather large inflation, and life seems to be definitely impacted in other ways, censorship being one of them.

Well, how about just old-school kings? That's Trump, or MBS. Trump's changeability is a feature of kings: once you know where to look, you see it lots of places. Grimm's fairy tales have a number of cases of the king looking favorably on someone and then being influenced against them by someone else; it's practically standard if a king shows up. I saw Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale" last week, and it revolves around a king who is having a great time with a visiting king. He wants the other king to stay a while, and has his wife persuade him. But the king thinks he is too easily persuaded, decides this must be because he is sleeping with the queen, tries to murder his friend, and tries the queen for treason. It's a bit sitcom-y, but sitcoms don't work if the premise isn't believable. You see it in Reynard the Fox, where the king is quite easily swayed by smooth words. Darius in the book of Daniel gets manipulated by his courtiers into passing a law against Daniel. Trump does political "fire and motion" (see Spolsky's old blog), so he appears unusually changeable, but random decisions are just a part of kings.

So no, life is not just mostly the same as we have now in the US. What we have in the US is a historical aberration. Unfortunately, we have the authoritarian Left (which denies being authoritarian by redefining words), and we have a foolish authoritarian Right. If the rest of us don't get our act together we are likely to slide back to historical norms.
by LocalPCGuy | 2025-09-03 14:23:23+00:00
This is a bad and sloppy regurgitation of a previous (and more original) source[1] and the headline and article explicitly ignore the paper authors' plea[2] to avoid using the paper to try to draw the exact conclusions this article saying the paper draws.

The comments (some, not all) are also a great example of how cognitive bias can cause folks to accept information without doing a lot of due diligence into the actual source material.

> Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"?

> No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", "passivity", "trimming" and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it

> Additional vocabulary to avoid using when talking about the paper

> In addition to the vocabulary from Question 1 in this FAQ - please avoid using "brain scans", "LLMs make you stop thinking", "impact negatively", "brain damage", "terrifying findings".

1. https://www.brainonllm.com/

2. https://www.brainonllm.com/faq
by derefr | 2025-09-03 14:23:36+00:00
> The really difficult thing would be to write a new compiler backend with a coherent IR that everybody understands and you'll stick to.

But why would you bother, when with those same skills and a lot less time, you could fork LLVM, correct its IR semantics yourself (unilaterally), and then push people to use your fork?

(I.e. the EGCS approach to forcing the upstream to fix their shit.)

> This doesn's support the Fongulab Splox ZV406 processor made for six years in the 1980s, whereas LLVM does, therefore this is a waste of time.

AFAIK, the various Fongulab Sploxes that LLVM has targets for, are mostly there to act as forcing functions to keep around features that no public backend would otherwise rely on, because proprietary, downstream backends rely on those features. (See e.g. https://q3k.org/lanai.html — where the downstream ISA of interest is indeed proprietary, but used to be public before an acquisition; so the contributor [Google] upstreamed an implementation of the old public ISA target.)
by netsharc | 2025-09-03 14:23:48+00:00
Yeah, MS Flight Simulator with a world that's "inspired by" ours... The original 2020 version had issues with things like the Sydney Harbour Bridge (did it have the Opera House?), using AI to generate 3D models of these things based on pictures would be crazy (of course they'd generate once, on 1st request).

So if you're the first to approach the Opera House, it would ask the engine for 3D models of the area, and it would query its image database, see the fancy opera house, and generate its own interpretation.. if there's no data (e.g. a landscape in the middle of Africa), it'd use the satellite image plus typical fauna of the region..
by throw0101d | 2025-09-03 14:23:57+00:00
> Likewise, not counting Spaniards into white is weird too, but at least it does not betray complete lack of knowledge about what counts as Europe.

Not that they should actually be listened to about anything, but the KKK (and others) did not consider Italian (immigrants) to be white.

One of the reasons for Columbus Day was people of that background wanting to show their 'American-ness'.
by imchillyb | 2025-09-03 14:24:41+00:00
Socrates was correct. In his day memory was treasured. Memory was how ideas were linked, how quotes were attained, and how arguments were made.

Writing leads to the rapid decline in memory function. Brains are lazy.

Ever travel to a new place and the brain pipes up with: ‘this place is just like ___’? That the brain’s laziness showing itself. The brain says: ‘okay I solved that, go back to rest.’ The observation is never true; never accurate.

Pattern recognition saves us time and enables us too survive situations that aren’t readily survivable. Pattern recognition leads to short cuts that do humanity a disservice.

Socrates recognized these traits in our brains and attempted to warn humanity of the damage these shortcuts do to our reasoning and comprehension skills. In Socrates day it was not unheard of for a person to memorize their entire family tree, or memorize an entire treaty and quote from it.

Humanity has -overwhelmingly- lost these abilities. We rely upon our external memories. We forget names. We forget important dates. We forget times and seasons. We forget what we were just doing!!!

Socrates had the right of it. Writing makes humans stupid. Reduces our token limits. Reduces paging table sizes. Reduces overall conversation length.

We may have more learning now, but what have we given up to attain it?
by UncleMeat | 2025-09-03 14:24:41+00:00
What about 100? What about 10,000? 1,000,000?

"The government said that these people were bad so we simply killed them" is a bone-chillingly frightening statement. We've already got the US government saying that there are members of this gang in the US based on laughable evidence. Why not just simply have the army show up at Kilmar Garcia's house and shoot him in the head? Or bomb the building he happens to be in?

A horrifying future.
by jugg1es | 2025-09-03 14:25:06+00:00
All of the nay-sayers in the comments here are thinking about this from the POV of a person who reached intellectual maturity without LLMs and now use it as a force multiplier, and rightly so.

However, I think that take is too short-sighted and doesn't take into account the effect that these products have on minds that have not yet reached maturity. What happens when you've been using ChatGPT since grade school and have effectively offloaded all the hard stuff to AI through college? Those people won't be using it as a force multiplier - they will be using it to perform basic tasks. Ray-Ban sells glasses now with LLMs built in with a camera and microphone so you can constantly interact with it all day. What happens when everyone has one of these devices and use it for everything?
by b3lvedere | 2025-09-03 14:25:30+00:00
"You are encouraged to: (i) publish at least one technology introduction blogpost or one public statement expressing Your experience of using the Tencent HunyuanWorld-Voyager Works; and (ii) mark the products or services developed by using the Tencent HunyuanWorld-Voyager Works to indicate that the product/service is “Powered by Tencent Hunyuan” "

Is this the new 'please like and subscribe/feed us your info' method?
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-09-03 14:25:30+00:00
Cool, but most people will get brain rotted by this. It's the same way we constantly talk about how social media is probably bad for people then some commenter comes and says he's not addicted and there's no other way he could communicate with his high school friends who live overseas and know about their lives. Not everyone will only get the positives out of any technology
by native_code | 2025-09-03 14:25:40+00:00
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by mindslight | 2025-09-03 14:25:42+00:00
I never asked how the flavors are different. The flavors are obviously different. And on this, you haven't made any points that I wasn't already aware of.

What I have been asking you is why you are choosing to emphasize the differences between the flavors, rather than focusing on their overall commonalities.

You came into this thread, ostensibly about the right-flavored authoritarianism currently on the rise in the West, with a whatabout left-flavored authoritarianism. Your subsequent comments have been narrow critiques of left-flavored authoritarianism, indistinguishable from support/marketing of right-flavored authoritarianism. In terms of actually criticizing authoritarianism in general, you can see how that pattern might come off as a bit disingenuous, right?
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-09-03 14:25:57+00:00
This is a great conference talk, thanks for sharing!

To summarize, the authors enlisted a panel of expert developers to review the quality of various pull requests, in terms of architecture, readability, maintainability, etc. (see 8:27 in the video for a partial list of criteria), and then somehow aggregate these criteria into an overall "productivity score." They then trained a model on the judgments of the expert developers, and found that their model had a high correlation with the experts' judgment. Finally, they applied this model to PRs across thousands of codebases, with knowledge of whether the PR was AI-assisted or not.

They found a 35-40% productivity gain for easy/greenfield tasks, 10-15% for hard/greenfield tasks, 15-20% for easy/brownfield tasks, and 0-10% for hard/brownfield tasks. Most productivity gains went towards "reworked" code, i.e. refactoring of recent code.

All in all, this is a great attempt at rigorously quantifying AI impact. However, I do take one major issue with it. Let's assume that their "productivity score" does indeed capture the overall quality of a PR (big assumption). I'm not sure this measures the overall net positive/negative impact to the codebase. Just because a PR is well-written according to a panel of expert engineers doesn't mean it's valuable to the project as a whole. Plenty of well-written code is utterly superfluous (trivial object setters/getters come to mind). Conversely, code that might appear poorly written to an outsider expert engineer could be essential to the project (the highly optimized C/assembly code of ffmpeg comes to mind, or to use an extreme example, anything from Arthur Whitney). "Reworking" that code to be "better written" would be hugely detrimental, even though the judgment of an outside observer (and an AI trained on it) might conclude that said code is terrible.
by gamblor956 | 2025-09-03 14:25:57+00:00
There are dozens and dozens of cities, big medium and even small, all over Europe, which have some combination of sub-zero temperatures, regular 100+ degree temperatures

Name even one. You won't be able to, because unless the Atlantic currents change, the European climate simply doesn't have the same extremes as the U.S. does. To put it bluntly: if any European city had extremes from sub-zero to plus-100 on a regular basis, it would be global news. OTOH, Most of the U.S. Northeast and Midwest experiences this every year.

You're also overstating the degree to which people walk in Europe, by a lot. Yes, people walk and take public transit. But that's because they can't afford a car. And their economic counterparts in the U.S. similarly bike, walk, or take public transit.
by blackqueeriroh | 2025-09-03 14:26:12+00:00
I’d encourage folks to listen to this podcast[1] or read the transcript which is done by two incredibly respected people, Dr. Cat Hicks, a psychologist who studies software teams, and Dr. Ashley Juavinett, who is a practicing and teaching neuroscientist. They note the many flaws in the study and discuss what actually good brain research would look like.

1: https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/17378968-...
by dzaima | 2025-09-03 14:26:37+00:00
Matrix's federation already does result in redundancy of the entire chat history; users not on @matrix.org can currently communicate between each other just fine even on :matrix.org rooms despite matrix.org being down.

It's entirely just user accounts that are tied to a homeserver currently. There's a proposal to make it possible for clients to fully manage their account identity (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/408...) but that doesn't look particularly active.
by Jensson | 2025-09-03 14:26:46+00:00
> Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution

McCarthyism didn't have that much support from voters, so this isn't the issue, it didn't become law. The issue is that the elected representatives didn't do anything to stop it until it started having massive disapproval from voters.

Voters needing to massively disapprove of government abuse for the "checks and balances" to do their job means the democracy isn't working as it should, the government doesn't need to change the constitution they just need to keep disapproval low enough to continue with their illegal actions. In a true liberal democracy the checks and balances works, ministers who perform illegal acts are investigated and relieved of their duties without needing elected representatives to start that procedure.

I live in Sweden and I can't even find examples of a politician that blatantly ignores laws and procedures that get to stay for years here. I think the two party system is the biggest culprit, then you need support from both parties to remove criminal politicians, but that is very difficult to get when people have to vote against their own. In a multi party system each party is a minority, and allied parties are not friendly to each other, they gladly sink an ally to absorb their votes since the issue was the party and not the alliance, people wont move to the other block over such a thing.
by alnwlsn | 2025-09-03 14:27:13+00:00
I have, along with some other ones I created from different fonts. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kXnsvYfaF4&t=2160s (it was an aside to a longer Selectric project I did; this typeball project came out around the same time so I decided to make a few of them).

Watching this back, it partially works but some of the letters clearly need their positions adjusted, and some of them seem to have trouble imprinting fully on the page. That's besides the fact that the proportional fonts look pretty weird when printed monospaced.

I didn't really go further with this because the resin printed balls didn't hold up very well. A slot near the hole would always break open, and then the ball would spin freely instead of being indexed like it was supposed to. These days I've pretty much abandoned home resin printing entirely since it is extremely messy, and I've never been able to make parts with it that weren't ridiculously brittle, even with the supposedly "strong" or "tough" resins.

I've used commercial resin prints that Shapeways/Xometry/PCBWAY have and they are a lot tougher, so maybe they would work well.
by twoodfin | 2025-09-03 14:27:35+00:00
To be fair... the W3C at the time was only starting to recover from their fascination with all things XML and Semantic Web. To the extent a standards body has an innovation budget, theirs had been in serious deficit for a while.

In the meantime, innovation was desperately needed to catch web standards up to the "2.0" evolution of the web into a vaguely usable app platform.

That shift was largely developer-driven, not standards or browser vendor driven: The magic enabled by XMLHttpRequest was more or less a happy accident.
by okok3857 | 2025-09-03 14:27:45+00:00
GRASS v.generalize() has a lot of different methods: https://grass.osgeo.org/grass85/manuals/v.generalize.html. I can't personally speak to the differences but probably worth looking into.

The QGIS Simplify tool also has a Visvalingam method: https://docs.qgis.org/3.40/en/docs/user_manual/processing_al...

It may be interesting to combine a workflow with the QGIS Smooth tool: https://docs.qgis.org/3.40/en/docs/user_manual/processing_al...
by alephnerd | 2025-09-03 14:27:55+00:00
Not anymore sadly.

Most YC founders have been using BookFace for years now, and the most decisionmakers in the space have our own personal GCs or in-person meetups.

Also, take into account what time it is in the Bay Area - it's only 7.30am, and this post and most commenters before this point will have likely been in the East Coast or Western Europe.

HN's signal to noise ratio has dropped significantly over the past few years. Heck even I only use HN because of social media addiction the same way a chain smoker will smoke a cig due to oral fixation.
by jstummbillig | 2025-09-03 14:28:01+00:00
Is there any better model you can point at? I would be interested in having a listen.

There are people – and it does not matter what it's about – that will overstate the progress made (and others will understate it, case in point). Neither should put a damper on progress. This is the best I personally have heard so far, but I certainly might have missed something.