MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigbadfeline | 2025-09-03 23:16:12+00:00
> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money. That leaves only one logically possible version of your statement and the correction looks like this: "A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where big money isn't big money"

In that form, your statement is perfectly logical, if somewhat tautological, but there is another problem with it and it's a real huge one: No textbook has anything like that and no school teaches it either, even the media is vary shy of talking about it.

At a first glance, that's not your problem but it definitely has to be, meaning, you and the people who gold similar views, should become loud public proponents of Speaking Truth to the Powerless (tm).

We can no longer have this cognitive dissonance economics that teaches that money is means of exchange, unit of account, etc, but skips the most important truth: that big money is, first and foremost, a tool of power over small money.

Only after this educational task is complete, your explanation will have the right to exist and be heard.
by charleshn | 2025-09-03 23:16:18+00:00
You can have a look at the DeepSeek paper, in particular section "2.2 DeepSeek-R1-Zero: Reinforcement Learning on the Base Mode".

But generally the idea is that it's, you need some notion of reward, verifiers etc.

Works really well for maths, algorithms, amd many things actually.

See also this very short essay/introduction: https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-...

That's why we have IMO gold level models now, and I'm pretty confident we'll have superhuman mathematics, algorithmic etc models before long.

Now domains which are very hard to verify - think e.g. theoretical physics etc - that's another story.
by Seattle3503 | 2025-09-03 23:16:45+00:00
> My manager told me that the time to deliver my latest project was cut to 20% of the original estimate because we are "an AI-first company".

If we can delegate incident response to automated LLMs too, sure, why not. Let the CEO have his way and pay the reputational price. When it doesn't work, we can revert our git repos to the day LLMs didn't write all the code.

I'm only being 90% facetious.
by tomrod | 2025-09-03 23:17:13+00:00
Exactly. It quickly builds a lot of technical debt that must be paid down, especially for people writing code in areas they aren't deep in.

For tight tasks it can be super helpful -- like for me, an AI/Data Science guy, setting up a basic reverse proxy. But I do so with a ton of scrutiny -- pushing it, searching on Kagi or docs to at least confirm the code, etc. This is helpful because I don't have a mental map about reverse proxy -- so it can help fill in gaps but only with a lot of reticence.

That type of use really doesn't justify the billion dollar valuations of any companies, IMO.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-03 23:17:28+00:00
Nagel's question "What is it like to be a bat?" is about the sensory qualia of a bat, assuming it has consciousness and ability to experience quales, which he assumes it does.

The question is not "What would it be like (i.e. be similar to) to be a bat?" which seems to be the strawman you are responding to.
by dumbledoren | 2025-09-03 23:17:32+00:00
> The way they store data in a key/value system really hurts the performance

It doesnt, unless your site has a lot of post/product/whatever entries in the db and you are having your users search from among them with multiple criteria at the same time. Only then does it cause many self-joins to happen and creates performance concerns. Otherwise the key-value setup is very fast when it comes to just pulling key+value pairs for a given post/content.

Today Wordpress is able to easily do 50 req/sec cached (locally) on $5/month hosting with PHP 8+. It can easily do 10 req/sec uncached for logged in users, with absolutely no form of caching. (though you would generally use an object cache, pushing it much higher).

White House is on Wordpress. NASA is on Wordpress. Techcrunch, CNN, Reuters and a lot more.
by dabockster | 2025-09-03 23:18:10+00:00
Because the only place where "free" AI is viable is when the model is running on your own computer. It's not sustainable at all, from a business perspective, to let millions of connections absolutely slam a huge AI model 24/7 for free - even with usage limits and throttling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Better to write a solid inference engine, tell people to run it themselves, and externalize that cost.
by AIorNot | 2025-09-03 23:18:34+00:00
Do you mean the bat has no subjective experience? If so - That’s a pretty extraordinary claim to make there and one that risks great ethical concern on the treatment or animals

If bats have no subjective experience it’s ethical to do anything to them but if there is than they deserve to (as all animals) be treated ethically as much as we can do so

IMO considering Bats to be similar to Mice -we’ve studied mice and rats extensively and while cannot know precisely we can be pretty sure there is subjective experience (felt experience there) ie almost our scientific experiments and field data with so called ‘lower’ organisms show evidence of pain, suffering and desires, play etc - all critical evidence of subjectivity

Now I don’t think bats are meta-conscious (meta cognitive) because they can’t commiserate on their experiences or worry about death etc like humans can but they feel stuff - and we must respect that
by JohnFen | 2025-09-03 23:19:19+00:00
Yeah, this was either a terrible study, or terrible reporting on the study. Hard to tell without the actual paper. I'm inclined to write this off as nonsense as reported either way.

> People who consumed the most sweeteners experienced declines in their thinking and memory skills 62% faster than those with the lowest intake, the researchers found.

It's not possible to understand what that percentage is supposed to mean because we don't know what dose rates they're talking about. On the face of it, the percentage makes no sense at all, but if the study is real and of good quality then there's very likely some lost nuance that changes the meaning of the figure.

This sort of thing, by the way, is why every scientist I've ever worked with really hates popular reporting of their studies. Nuance and detail are almost always lost, so they're rarely reported correctly and people end up thinking the results were something very different than what they actually were.

Then "science" gets blamed for being silly, when in fact it's the reporting.
by heavyset_go | 2025-09-03 23:20:09+00:00
As the rate of profit drops, value needs to be squeezed out of somewhere and that will come from the hiring/firing and compensation of labor, hence a strong bias towards that outcome.

99% of the draw of AI is cutting labor costs, and hiring goes against that.

That said, I don't believe AI productivity claims, just pointing out a factor that could theoretically contribute to your hypothetical.
by lazide | 2025-09-03 23:20:12+00:00
Eh, I’ve dealt with enough people to say nah - people really should not be doing their own structural engineering, or electrical.

It isn’t due to ‘complexity’ either - rather indifference, laziness, or just plain stupidity.

I’ve seen people almost burn down their places multiple times - and at least one family actually die from an electrical fire. Also, partial building collapses.

The reason you don’t see it more often is because people generally don’t actually try.
by frankenstine | 2025-09-03 23:20:29+00:00
> The path forward: data alchemists (high-variance, 300% lottery ticket) or model architects (20-30% steady gains)

No, the paths forward are: better design, training, feeding in more video, audio, and general data from the outside world. The web is just a small part of our experience. What about apps, webcam streams, radio from all over the world in its many forms, OTA TV, interacting with streaming content via remote, playing every video game, playing board games with humans, feeds and data from robots LLMs control, watching everyone via their phones and computers, car cameras, security footage and CCTV, live weather and atmospheric data, cable television, stereoscopic data, ViewMaster reels, realtime electrical input from various types of brains while interacting with their attached creatures, touch and smell, understanding birth, growth, disease, death, and all facets of life as an observer, observing those as a subject, expanding to other worlds, solar systems, galaxies, etc., affecting time and space, search and communication with a universal creator, and finally understanding birth and death of the universe.
by glenstein | 2025-09-03 23:21:05+00:00
>Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem.

I think we've made extraordinary progress on things like brain to machine interfaces, and demonstrating that something much like human thought can be approximated according to computational principles.

I do think some sort of theoretical bedrock is necessary to explain to "something there's like to be" quality, but I think it would be obtuse to brush aside the rather extraordinary infiltrations into the black box of consciousness that we've made thus far, even if it's all been knowing more about it from the outside. There's a real problem that remains unpenetrated but as has been noted elsewhere in this thread, it is a nebulous concept, and perhaps one of the most difficult and important research questions, and I think nothing other than ordinary humility is necessary to explain the limit an extent to which we understand it thus far.
by larve | 2025-09-03 23:21:30+00:00
I have linked my github above. I don't know how that fares in the bigger scope of things, but I went from 0 opensource to hundreds of tools and frameworks and libraries. Putting a number on "productivity" makes no sense to me, I would have no idea what that means.

I generate between 10-100k lines of code per day these days. But is that a measure of productivity? Not really...
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-03 23:22:13+00:00
>people like you who are old enough to remember what it was like before modern public health measures.

They weren't born in Florida though.

For centuries before the arrival of modern medicine, Florida was already known as the only hotbed of tropical diseases in the US.

In the 1950's and 60's as students we were vaccinated in school, assembly-line style. This was during the "cold war" with something like the apparatus used for draftees headed for Korea or the jungles of Vietnam. Not hypodermic injection in the classical sense. Well, syringes were still made of glass and had to be individually sterilized since plastic disposables were not available yet. For us the space-age vaccine "medicine" was in bulk containers and pressurized through tubes to the hand-held injector, where it was all metal and there were multiple needles only a couple millimeters long in a circular pattern. We were told that the puff of air pressure was doing the job beneath the skin and we were so lucky not to be facing a long needle. Kids who already had the shot were not whining at all, so there was no real excitement and it was pretty much of a non-event. You waited in line and when you got up to the nurse, they looked at your eyes, ears, and throat, and cleaned your arm with alcohol. The injector was sanitized between students too, I can only imagine that the alcohol was enhanced with Thiomersal or some other form of "trace" mercury. After all everybody in Florida had always kept Mercurochrome and Merthiolate in their medicine cabinets since they became available.

Like anywhere else, most schools in Florida didn't have air-conditioning yet, nobody went to school in the summer anyway.

That was normal, almost no homes had A/C yet either. But it existed widely, mainly in banks and supermarkets, plus some office buildings. Sensitive people still go back up north all the time in summer.

Everybody, native or not, always just had the "feeling" with the heat & humidity that disease germs survived on surfaces there more so than up north, and there was always an abundance of ammonia, bleach, and Lysol treatments in classrooms compared to today too.

Hey, thanks for the compliment, I take pride as almost no one ;)
by guyzero | 2025-09-03 23:22:22+00:00
I generally like Doctorow's writing and agree with a lot of what he says here, but:

"Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too."

I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.
by hinkley | 2025-09-03 23:23:37+00:00
Hype cycles affect funding. When the Trough of Disillusionment hits anything that's being started will take years to finish due to a more difficult funding terrain.

The arrival of the Trough is predicated by the amount of lies and utter bullshit that have been shoveled out during the earlier parts of the cycle. So while it's unfortunate that the real goods don't get delivered for years and years after they might have been, it's typically and often entirely the fault of the people on the train that this has happened.

There's an awful lot of utter bullshit in the AI hype.
by perihelions | 2025-09-03 23:23:45+00:00
Some HN threads on this topic (meaning the "Eel-Rents Project" organized by John Wyatt Greenlee),

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35997727 ("To Pay Rent in Medieval England, Catch Some Eels (atlasobscura.com)", 42 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25543802 ("Paying Medieval Taxes Using Eels (historiacartarum.org)", 14 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34284363 ("English Eel-Rents: 10th-17th Centuries (historiacartarum.org)", 12 comments)

> "One enormous transaction shows that Ely Abbey, now known as Ely Cathedral, paid Thorney Abbey 26,275 eels to rent a fen (similar to a wetland),"

Your article left out a neat twist: the name "Ely" is actually derived from the word "eel"!
by gamblor956 | 2025-09-03 23:23:55+00:00
Still waiting for the one.

Madrid's "heat waves" don't compare to anything in the American South or Southwest. It gets warmer in San Jose than it does in Madrid. The Midwest gets colder than Oulu; you have to go to the northern remote reaches of Europe to get comparable temperatures or snow.

So basically, what it boils down to is that you're comparing cities with temperate weather to cities with extreme weather and not understanding that weather makes a huge difference.

NY, Montreal and Toronto are the partial exceptions, and Toronto only because of the best bus system in North America.

This is false, and betrays a fundamentally poor knowledge of America's public transportation systems. LA, SF Bay Area, Chicago, and DC also have good bus systems; LA's bus system has the most geographic coverage of any metropolitan bus network in the world.

You'd need a moderate to severe death wish to routinely walk or bike outside your little bubble of a subdivision in the majority of North American suburbs

This is false. You appear to have formed your understanding of American geography based on movies and television. Millions of people routinely walk and bike in North America. Most of us don't live in suburbs.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-09-03 23:23:57+00:00
I think this hits at the heart of why you and so many people on HN hate AI.

You see yourselves as the disenfranchised proletariats of tech, crusading righteously against AI companies and myopic, trend-chasing managers, resentful of their apparent success at replacing your hard-earned skill with an API call.

It’s an emotional argument, born of tribalism. I’d find it easier to believe many claims on this site that AI is all a big scam and such if it weren’t so obvious that this underlies your very motivated reasoning. It is a big mirage of angst that causes people on here to clamor with perfunctory praise around every blog post claiming that AI companies are unprofitable, AI is useless, etc.

Think about why you believe the things you believe. Are you motivated by reason, or resentment?
by jryio | 2025-09-03 23:24:01+00:00
Yes and this is the placid version where lazy programmers elect to lighten their cognitive load by farming out to AI.

An insidious version is AGI replacing human cognition.

To replace human thought is to replace a biological ability which progresses on evolutionary timescales - not a Moore's law approximate curve. The issue in your skull will quite literally be as useful as a cow's for solving problems... think about that.

Automating labor in the 20th century disrupts society and we've see its consequences. Replacing cognition entirely: driving, writing, decision making, and communication; yields far worse outcomes than transitioning the population from food production to knowledge work.

If not our bodies and not our minds, then what do we have? (Note: Altman's universal basic income ought to trip every dystopian alarm bell).

Whether adopted passivity or foisted actively - cognition is what makes us human. Let's not let Claude Code be the nexus for something worse.
by Yizahi | 2025-09-03 23:24:07+00:00
It is theoretically and practically impossible that free market could exist. Every unregulated market will be quickly monopolized by a biggest player and it will stop being free by definition.

It's like saying that humans can fly unassisted. Sure, we can jump in the air and for a few milliseconds remain completely in the air. But we can hardly call that process a flight, if it can last for extremely short period of time. Same with free market.
by DaveZale | 2025-09-03 23:24:12+00:00
Running ads on news sites for "Israel-US friendship"charities works great! Then the news site won't report the brutal facts, and ching-ching the organization gets readers to pay for it all. Diabolically clever approach. Same with US aid to that country, some of which comes back as lobbying money for AIPAC. These are proverbial perpetual motion machines, bringing in money to spend some of it for influence and control. All perfectly legal, almost the whole US Congress is in their pockets.

Big tech is way too cozy with this wartime regime. This will work until it doesn't.
by wrs | 2025-09-03 23:24:13+00:00
Maybe if you have a business where the need for software is a constant, so it’s great to get it for 90% off. (It’s not clear what business that is in 2025, maybe a small plumbing contractor?)

But if your business is making software it’s hard to argue you only need a constant amount of software. I’ve certainly never worked at a software company where the to-do list was constant or shrinking!
by kelnos | 2025-09-03 23:24:13+00:00
> Since its FOSS you can presumably just compile it yourself if you wanted to bypass the paywall (the ethics of this are left as an exercise for the reader).

Why would this be unethical? If the licensing -- that they explicitly chose to release it under -- allows this, then what you are really paying for is the convenience of someone else doing the build for you, and getting automatic updates. If you don't value that enough to pay, then it's perfectly reasonable -- and ethical -- to build it yourself and get the paid features for free.

(Not saying I'd do that; I do value someone else building and updating for me, and also appreciate the difficulties in funding open source enough that I'm fine parting with some cash for useful stuff. But I wouldn't look down on someone for doing a self-build.)
by nielsbot | 2025-09-03 23:24:27+00:00
I say "see ya!" and wave goodbye.

You think people living in NYC, for example, the financial (and one of the major cultural capitals) of the entire world (not to mention all the other benefits of US residency) are going to bother with packing up their lives and moving overseas because the taxes are too high? Not to mention these people will still have obscene wealth in all likelihood.

Some might, but I don't think we should wring our hands over it.

Rather than worrying about "capital flight" let's instead imaging all the good that could come of us having a more more equal wealth and income distribution.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-09-03 23:24:48+00:00
> https://portal.ice.gov/immigration-guide/check-ins

So, one can check in with ICE because they are already supposed to be deported, and were released before the actual deportation had happened.

In this case it is safe to assume that is very likely that they were in the country illegally, or their status is no longer valid.

> Google it.

> Google the long series of events for the most up to date and accurate info.

Very informative.

> The folks already here have the right to due process.

They do have due process: immigration hearings are part of said process.

Expedited removals are part of the due process, too. I mean it's how the law is written.
by dabockster | 2025-09-03 23:25:44+00:00
1. Disable Face ID/fingerprint unlocks and go back to using a alphanumeric pass code (letters and numbers). It's fine once you're actually in the phone, but you absolutely don't want to unlock your phone from the lock screen with biometrics.

2. Watch what kind of app permissions you grant to what apps. This is way easier to do on iPhones vs Android phones.

3. Understand that Google Apps (gApps) on Android phones are essentially a rootkit anymore. Especially with that recent news that Google is going to try to end sideloading APKs. Apple isn't that much better but they're more "out of the way" when you try to work.

4. Apple's SDK for its devices is more private than Android in certain ways. The IceBlock app's explainer is really good about this: https://www.iceblock.app/android
by glenstein | 2025-09-03 23:26:17+00:00
Whoheartedly agree. I think what they're stressing though if I'm understanding correctly, is we do kind of start in a Cartesian space, and branch out via inferences to the presumption of an external world. And, from a certain philosophical perspective, one could point to that and insist that at any moment that connection could be the weak link that brings all of epistemology crashing down. We could get unhooked from the simulation, so to speak, open our real eyes, and witness a new world with new bedrock alternatives to our notions of causality, qualia, and so on.

I don't believe any of that to be true, but I think that's kind of the point of that argument. I do think we start from that Cartesian starting place, but once we know enough about the external world to know that we're a part of it, and can explain our mind in terms of it, it effectively shifts the foundation, so that our mental states are grounded in empirical reality rather than the other way around.
by nielsbot | 2025-09-03 23:26:44+00:00
> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money

That's not true. Depends on your wealth bracket of course, but money certainly is the power to compel.

Let's say you have a neighbor whose dog is a nuisance barker. With money you can hire an attorney to go after them. If you don't have money, you have to suffer. There are millions of examples... this is just one not-particularly-good one.
by daxfohl | 2025-09-03 23:26:55+00:00
This seems to be a common thread. For personal projects where most details aren't important, they are good at meeting the couple things that are important to you and filling in the rest with reasonable, mostly-good-enough guesses. But the more detailed the requirements are, the less filler code there is, and the more each line of code matters. In those situations it's probably faster to type the line of code than to type the English equivalent and hand-hold the assistant through the editing process.