MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PathOfEclipse | 2025-09-04 21:30:37+00:00
You're not trying very hard to see a side that's different from yours, are you? You are responding to a comment saying "leftist != realistic", yet you seem to be pretending my intent was to say "here's proof Wikipedia is left-leaning." Neither of my links were given to "prove" bias, either, only to show that accusations of leftwing bias are accusations that Wikipedia is valuing propaganda over truth and objectivity.

Anyways, to get off-topic from my original comment, here's some evidence for you to ignore:

https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...

https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/is...

https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased

https://stophindudvesha.org/the-myth-of-wikipedias-neutralit...
by munificent | 2025-09-04 21:30:37+00:00
> is distributed among all users of that currency.

Right. What you propose is that you take government's hand off the lever and a million users will all equally get to gently rest their pinky on it and distribute the power equally.

I have never seen anything in the history of the world or my understanding of sociology to indicate that such a power structure has any stability. If you give out power in a free-for-all, what tends to happen is:

1. All of the participants already have some unequal distribution of power going in.

2. Those who have more are able to use that to claim a little more of the new resource.

3. Once they do they, they are able to use the increased inequality to claim even more.

4. Go to 2.

The natural tendency is towards increasing inequality. It takes a ton of work to build and maintain structures that encourage any level of egalitarianism.
by wubrr | 2025-09-04 21:30:50+00:00
> People who play professional sports basically sacrifice the first 20 years of their life for a lotto ticket to get, on average, 2-4 years of playing time.

Everybody who studies and works towards a career/goal 'sacrifices the first 20 years of their life' as well by that logic. And playing lottery is a pointless and practically useless activity, which only results in negative results for the vast majority of participants.

> I do also have to remark on the irony of someone on the "250k a year to type prompts into a AI to get the wrong answer" website complaining that athletes are overpaid and don't contribute anything to society

I don't see the irony at all. But I guess your point is that posting 'on the "250k a year to type prompts into a AI to get the wrong answer" website' makes your comments somehow irrelevant and/or meaningless? Is that the point you're trying to make lol?
by Aurornis | 2025-09-04 21:31:27+00:00
> For college, having students get together and “cheat” by doing their homework together is… victory! You’ve gotten the students to network with their peers. That’s… like, the main value proposition of a university, to some.

This is a far too charitable interpretation of the problem. Students who cheat in these circumstances aren’t working together with their peers or LLMs to understand the subject matter.

They’re using the LLM to bypass the learning part completely. Homework problem gets pasted into ChatGPT. Answer is copied and pasted out.

This is analogous to a student who copies a peer’s homework answers without trying to understand them.

This isn’t “learning to collaborate” or networking. It’s cheating.

In practice, it catches up to students at test time. This is the primary problem for my friend who teaches a couple classes at a local community college: Students will turn in LLM work for the assignments and then be completely blindsided when they have to come in and take a test, as if they’ve never seen the material before.

One time he assigned a short essay on a topic they discussed with a generic name. A large number of the submissions were about a completely unrelated thing that shared the generic name. It would not be possible for anyone to accidentally make this mistake if they were actually parsing the LLM output before turning it in. They just see it as an easy button to press to pass the course, until it catches up with them later and they’re too far behind to catch up to people who have been learning as they go.
by postmodern100 | 2025-09-04 21:32:09+00:00
> There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category.

My thought is that math (broadly speaking) possesses correctness because of axiomatic decisions. The consequences of those decisions lead us to practice math that can't express everything that we can imagine (e.g., see axiom of choice/ZFC).

The math humanity practices today is a result of tuning the axioms to be: self-consistent, and, useful for explaining phenomena that we can observe. I don't believe this math is correct in a universal or absolute sense, just locally.
by lupusreal | 2025-09-04 21:32:38+00:00
It's not simple; with large bombs the lethal blast radius grows faster than the lethal prompt radiation radius, but the thermal damage grows fast too. You can duck and cover to survive flying glass and falling roofs, but if you're in line of the thermal pulse you're cooked.

In any case, massive bombs being used in "counter-value attacks" (euphemism for targetting civilians) aren't the most likely way for a nuclear war to start. Both the Soviet Union/Russia and America invested heavily in tactical nuclear weapons, designed for battlefield use (e.g. "counter force".) Additionally, other nuclear powers like France have counter-force first strike as part of their nuclear doctrine. Any semi-rational way to start a nuclear war would be to target the oppositions ability to respond in kind, not to attack cities right off the bat. Strikes against cities are a reaction, a threat meant to deter, but starting the war out that way is just an elaborate form of suicide. Point is, it's a good idea to assume that civilians will have at least some period of disturbing escalation as warning to get the fuck out of urban areas. When you hear about the US military setting off nukes in the Fulga Gap to stop Soviet tanks, that's when you GTFO.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-04 21:33:13+00:00
I don't know if it's as "advanced" as empathy. I think it's "reptile-brain" level stuff. Herd/Pack instinct.

Anyway, that's not my wheelhouse. I've spent a lot of time, around a lot of pretty damaged folks, and this is just an observation that I've come up with, on my own.

I've just noticed that direct, realtime communication, has a lot more emotional connection (for both good and bad), than ones where there's a "handshake," so to speak.

It's not always bad. I think we've all been told to "Think about what you're going to say in response." "Count to ten", etc.

If we want to be angry, then the pause allows us to ramp it up, but if we want to be reasonable, it gives us the chance to defuse it, but, at the same time, maybe leach some of the emotional warmth from it.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-09-04 21:34:11+00:00
I think it's important to edit early and often, but it certainly can't hurt to also explain your edits on the talk page. Bonus points if the other side makes no explanations, you get to "rv unexplained edit, see talk page". Just look in on the article every couple of days for a while to see what sticks and what doesn't. Originally when I started editing, more often than not people would have improved and built on my edits, rather than fought them. But you may need to be a bit (un)lucky these days?
by mullingitover | 2025-09-04 21:34:15+00:00
> If it's cheaper to produce, then there's no point in doing anything special, because it'll just take over via market forces.

It is taking over via market forces. New utility-scale solar+battery capacity is already cheaper than building a new coal plant.

The only reason it's not doing it more quickly is because of government intervention in the markets in the US to nerf it.
by DaSHacka | 2025-09-04 21:34:28+00:00
You may be happy to learn that all of us who learn best like this are living large right now.

We can just GPT all our busywork assignments and get back to working on our personal research and projects.

I do feel a bit bad for the professors teaching the classes absolutely no one wants to take though (like "Global Issues" or "Gender Studies", the two most hated gen-ed courses at my uni). Everyone does the bare minimum to skate by with a C, so I imagine the professors probably revceive more GPT essays than not.
by snet0 | 2025-09-04 21:35:08+00:00
I've not followed any evolutions in this area, but there's a cool paper from 2014 about using WiFi channel state information to detect 87%(!) of falls in an experimental condition[1]. It's been a while since I read the paper, and I no longer have access, so caveats aplenty, but it's one of those things that pops into my head sometimes and I wonder if it's seen any real-world deployment.

[1] - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6847948
by postmodern100 | 2025-09-04 21:35:54+00:00
My brain (the one in my head) can only interpret red or green, given its makeup and the rest of the state of the universe including the display that I'm looking at.

Therefore, it's a fact that my brain interprets red instead of green, or vise versa. It's a fact for someone else's brain that they interpret it as green instead of red.
by jacobx | 2025-09-04 21:35:57+00:00
Yeah there was definitely some back and forth about it before we were eventually approved.

In a sense, this isn't very different from what React Native does (run interpreted code that calls out into native code), just with Swift instead of JavaScript. There used to be JavaScript-specific requirements in the guidelines, but that has been loosened since Swift Playgrounds was released. Now there are Python IDEs, Jupyter Notebooks, and other apps running arbitrary code in the App Store.
by vkou | 2025-09-04 21:36:12+00:00
I assure you, people and VIPs and their desires are more or less the same the world over.

Othering and ascribing alien ambitions to the enemy only fools yourself.

Why do you think their goals differed from those of someone like, say, Kissinger? Or any of the other people who have spent the past century and a half grooming and growing the empire?
by wombatpm | 2025-09-04 21:36:24+00:00
Walgreens is really pushing the AI phone system these days. It lies and says it can handle most requests, which I make and it tries to pawn me off on the website. The website which I had already been to, which recommended I speak with a pharmacist. I swear by the time it’s passed my call through it sounds like exasperated when it says “Just so you know, the pharmacy is open. . . .”
by jltsiren | 2025-09-04 21:36:28+00:00
24/7. There was enough hydro and nuclear in the grid, and even more in the connected grids in Norway and Sweden. Most of the time, carbon-free power was no more expensive than generic power, which emphasized how meaningless the entire idea was.

It was a byproduct of the EU habit to create markets and competition where they don't naturally exist. You can buy electricity from any power company, and that company can then generate it itself or buy it from the market. Once you have a market like that, it's easy to add requirements such as carbon-free power. As long as the fraction of the market buying indulgences is lower than the share of the power generation meeting the requirements, fulfilling them is essentially free.
by djoldman | 2025-09-04 21:36:51+00:00
Unfortunately, this kind of story will continue to be a popular one in newspapers and magazines, garnering lots of clicks. It feeds into the "everything is different now" sort of desperate helplessness people seem primed to adopt with respect to AI sometimes.

Obviously the answer to testing and grading is to do it in the classroom. If a computer is required, it can't connect to the internet.

Caught with a cellphone, you fail the test. Caught twice you fail the class.

The non-story beatings will continue until morale and common sense improve.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-09-04 21:37:38+00:00
AFAICT, Sun’s underlying vision was more on the side of pervasive RPC and/or downloadable code, i.e. closer to DCOM or NeWS than HTTP.

(We have in fact ultimately ended up layering downloadable code on top of HTTP. I don’t think I like the results, yet some of the things I don’t like seem inherent to downloadable code in general.)
by darth_avocado | 2025-09-04 21:37:41+00:00
My investments weren’t yolos and not everything was held to where it is today. Things were obviously bought/sold and diversified

Btc $2k -> $120k (60x held)

ETH 200 -> $4k (20x held)

Tesla 20 => 400 (sold), then bought back in on its recovery at $150 when it went to $100. Sold again at $300.

FB => DCAd my cost down to $120 in the late 2022 (6x now, all holding)

Nvidia => $5 after accounting for splits, now $170 (34x)

Infamous FAANG: Netflix is 8x, Microsoft is almost 10x, Amazon and Google are 5x, apple 7x

Those weren’t my only investments and I’m not pretending to be a genius but even SPY is 3X and QQQ is 5X. But just a little prudent investing would’ve gotten you a lot of money.

If you just held $100k of Microsoft you’d be a millionaire and it won’t need a magic well of oil.
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-09-04 21:37:51+00:00
So the way I’m understanding the conversation is that

1. We all desperately need a sane digital instant means of transferring money between “institutions” that just works

2. No-one believes that a third party solution would not end up with that third party holding everyone over a barrel (Visa but on steroids). So any simple “use Postgres” is out

3. So it’s either a trustless, open blockchain (bitcoins blockchain or possibly this Tempo). But there are huge drawbacks to The Blockchain - apart from the ratty reputation it has so far, there are problems with making a reversal of payment of both parties don’t agree, and other issues as nauseum.

I don’t get how well tempo solves any of this.

4. We end up with what I think is likely to be the solution(s). Islands of “trust groups” that replace SWIFT and its like with blockchain in a piecemeal fashion, but the cost benefit ratio is totally subsumed by the massively high costs of replacing the towers of process, regulation and software balanced on top of SWIFT etc

4.a. Or the central banks introduce their own “stablecoins ” - and people punt all the complicated bits of law and regulation and reversals over to the existing legal regulatory frameworks.

In short the ultimate problem is that sending a signal moving 1 million dollars from Kenya to Kansas is simple (wooden sticks did this a millennia ago).

The problem is a legal, cultural, social framework that all parties can trust and believe will fix their grievances. That’s basically … the global Legal framework we have now, with the solutions we have now including following court orders.

If the electronic system cannot follow the current frameworks requirements (ie the old lady did not mean to send her life savings to that wallet, get it back) then the electronic system still needs overlays that can - and there is not just a lot of complexity - there is an incredible amount of complexity

I get the feeling I’m yet again talking myself out of thinking we can have a sane digital currency for similar reasons to why we can’t vote electronically.

I’m paying for my round at the bar in cash.
by balamatom | 2025-09-04 21:38:00+00:00
...and on the other side Mary's agent would summarize your greeting as part of her regular notification digest. There would be no gradient. You and your correspondent would continue to pay equivalent proportion of available attention to each other; thus you would remain equally human as before.

At least relative to each other (and to each of the rest of your contacts.)

It's one's idea of humanness that will be substituted piecemeal by a "doppelganger concept", as a result of the perceptual decoupling provided by ever-thicker interfaces. That concept would continue to fulfill the exact same function in one's life that formerly would've been fulfilled by one's previous opinions on "what it means to be human" (if any).

Happens all the time, things changing people's minds. Happens surreptitiously, too. Of course, it's more comfortable to consider at least our inner lives remain inviolate to the vagaries of technocapital - but where could all their content come from, other than entirely from the outside world, same one that software was proclaimed to be "eating"?

Subjectively, you'd hardly (if ever) experience that kind of "world model spoofing" as anything close to a distinctly recognizable perceptual phenomenon (since it's language-based anyway). Rather, you'd continue to experience everything as the usual "being a person comprehending a world" bit - and, as ever, flavored by whatever life-scripts you've been allocated.

On average, however, the substitution would result in effects as simple as the population allocating that much more of its resources to, say, the organization representing the machinic quasi-intelligence in question - the one that has interposed itself as normative communication medium by providing useful summaries.

Or, not as simple.

It's already ended up very much like that "isn't there someone you forgot to ask" meme. Except the 3rd party pictured as JC, should rather be labeled "VC".
by gamblor956 | 2025-09-04 21:38:57+00:00
It's left unsaid because the truth is that businesses are not finding crypto easier, faster, or better. In most cases, it's the exact opposite. But crypto excels at one thing: obfuscation.

A regular log or ledger file could accomplish the same thing as a blockchain for significantly less technical debt or ongoing expense.

And note that the best use cases Stripe could find for "real world" use cases were a company trying to complicate its FX cash management, and a cash transfer app with fees higher than most of their competitors.
by gus_massa | 2025-09-04 21:38:57+00:00
My suggestion is to take one or two weeks and try it (logged in/unlogged in/a few test account/ ...) and show it to a few friends.

Give to one of your friends. Don't explain anything. Sit down like 3 foots behind your friend to avoid the temptation to help your friend. Watch what they do, what fails, where they get stuck ... Then thanks the friend, fix everything, and get a new friend to try ...

And then post again. If this get's popular in HN you will get a of of requested and unrequested feedback. But it's better when most of the main features are already working.
by bawolff | 2025-09-04 21:39:00+00:00
Scientists are trying to make predictions about the future based on past experiences (inductive reasoning).

Philosophers aren't necessarily trying to do that.

You can't get to capital T truth via inductive reasoning like science uses. Just because the apple fell from the tree every single previous time, does not necessarily imply that it is going to fall down next time.

But if you are after other forms of reasoning its possible. 1+1 will always equal 2. Why? Because you (implicitly) specified the axioms before hand and they imply the result. Talking about capital T truth is possible in such a situation.

So its perfectly reasonable for philosophers to still be after capital T truth. They are doing different things and using different methods than scientists do.
by vayup | 2025-09-04 21:39:24+00:00
Good time to remind everyone that Article 5 does not really commit the member states automatically into a war. It will be insane for any country to sign such a treaty. The language in Article 5 permits each NATO member to decide for themselves what action they want to take when Article 5 is invoked.

This is what it says:

"The Parties agree that an armed attack against one .. shall be considered an attack against them all and ..that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, ...will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."
by Ukv | 2025-09-04 21:40:02+00:00
> The world isn't new and the obviously unacceptable behaviors have all been forbidden for thousands of years.

I don't think this checks out at all. Slavery was only outlawed in the US ~160 years ago, and marital rape only ~40 years ago.

Some detrimental behaviors have significant money/power behind them, some detrimental behaviors are new - only enabled (or only enabled at scale) by modern advancements, and some otherwise-obviously-detrimental behaviors intentionally obfuscate their harms.

> That's why when people talk about stuff that's detrimental to "society", they are usually trying to claim that their personal preferences are more universal than they actually are.

I'd argue that pretty much regardless of what someone's belief is of which actions are detrimental, it includes at least some actions that are "rationally" in the acting person's/company's self-interest - i.e. "selfish" actions.

Since we're not oracles, it's true that any statement we make on what we believe to be true about the world is ultimately prone to human error/bias (and disagreement over terms/frameworks/etc.) but I don't think that necessarily makes it just a statement of personal preference. Disliking the taste of steak is different from arguing steak production to be a net-negative.

> Clearly, advertising is nowhere near detrimental to society, it's the opposite

If Pepsi doubles their marketing budget to push flyers through every door and take some market share, then Coke does the same to reclaim that market share, it's unclear to me what has really been gained for all that resource wastage.

Largely it seems to just be pouring resources into a zero-sum game. There are incidental secondary effects (maybe now more people drink sugary drinks, and people have spent more time reading about/trying out sugary drinks instead of something else) but it seems fairly questionable as to whether those are even beneficial in a lot of cases, and they're not in proportion to the resources spent either way.

I believe at least that marketing spend would optimally be a tiny fraction of what it is now, with resources directed towards more productive forms of competition (improving the product) rather than just repeatedly persuading the potential customer base with increasingly manipulative/invasive techniques.

> Many, many people benefit from advertising, which is why it's such a big industry.

I feel this is again conflating being profitable or in the rational self-interest of a company with being beneficial. Sneaking a JS crypto miner in the background of your website can be profitable, for instance.
by menzoic | 2025-09-04 21:40:39+00:00
>At that point, a shared ledger implemented with traditional databases / protocols would be faster, easier, and more transparent.

This is missing the fundamental idea behind blockchain. You need a consensus mechanism and immutable ledger in order for it to be secure and truly transparent. Once you add those boom you have yourself another blockchain :-)

>So what are stablecoins really trying to do? Circumvent regulation?

No, stablecoins have less regulatory burden because of the public ledger removing the need for manual review and verification by various intermediaries. They are still compliant with regulation.