MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arcastroe | 2025-09-25 17:16:43+00:00
I don't know anything about the Iliad. I asked generative AI how the name fit in, or why it was appropriate for the project. Adding the response below, in case it helps others.

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The name “Project Iliad” is almost certainly a reference to Homer’s Iliad, the ancient Greek epic poem about the Trojan War.

The connection works as a kind of corporate in-joke or metaphor:

The Iliad is long, complex, and arduous — much like the cancellation process Amazon designed. By naming the project after an epic full of prolonged struggle, the team was signaling (perhaps ironically) that customers would have to endure an "epic battle" just to cancel.

Conflict and attrition are central to the Iliad’s story. The war drags on, wearing down opponents. In Amazon’s context, Project Iliad’s design was to wear down users’ will to cancel through friction.
by bccdee | 2025-09-25 17:16:43+00:00
> Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization.

The comment you're responding to specifically indicates private organizations. Public organizations are publicly accountable.

> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters

Accountability, not legitimacy, is what's at stake here. If the local mining company is polluting the river, there's nothing you do anything about it. What, are you going to take hostile action & organize a global aluminum boycott? No. But if the local government is polluting the river, you can vote them out, at least in theory. Not every democracy is healthy, and failed democratic states are certainly little better than private organizations. But a healthy democracy is substantially different from any other institutional framework, and democratic governance is the only real alternative to private oligarchy.
by toast0 | 2025-09-25 17:16:58+00:00
> It’s a good deal on shipping and then a bunch of second-rate other stuff tacked on.

It is and it isn't. The cost of shipping is built into the price of most of the items. You get a good deal if you buy things where pricing is more or less fixed, or if you buy things one at a time, but if you purchase several items at the same time, you can often save money if you purchase from a vendor that has better unit prices and charges shipping, or offers free shipping with a minimum order.

I see this all the time with my hobby purchases. Amazon has everything (mostly), but it's more cost efficient to put together orders of multiple parts at other vendors. Sometimes just one part at another vendor works too, if it fits in an flat envelope and they charge appropriately for envelope shipping.
by mahdiyar | 2025-09-25 17:16:58+00:00
Example usecase:

Prompt: ``` The user dashboard is randomly slow for enterprise customers.

Use Gemini SubAgent to analyze frontend performance issues in the React components, especially expensive re-renders and inefficient data fetching.

Use Codex SubAgent to examine the backend API endpoint for N+1 queries and database bottlenecks.

Use Claude SubAgent to review the infrastructure logs and identify memory/CPU pressure during peak hours. ```
by everdrive | 2025-09-25 17:17:14+00:00
>'Hate is neither intrinsic nor is it inevitable... it's constructed,' says political scientist

It's very nice that he believes this, but he couldn't be more incorrect. The fact that there are _nurture_ reasons that hate gets reinforced does not actually mean that its basis is not in _nature_.

As a comparison, imagine something much less controversial: mothers deeply loving their babies. The mothers are told that they must love their babies, they're shown examples of loving their babies by all of their peers, their own mothers. The hospital just _expects_ that mothers will love their babies! Clearly this is just a social construction, and tabula rasa mothers might have a 50/50 chance of loving their babies.

This is an intentionally absurd example, but I hope it paints a clear picture; there are lots of ways in which the expectation that mothers love their babies is socially reinforced. But the fact that there are social components to this psychological state does not actually tells us anything about whether or not it's innate.

This doesn't mean that everything is nature, but people seem to be exceptionally bad at figuring out how nature and nurture might interact. Now, it's clear that nurture can either inhibit or reinforce our innate traits, and with something like outgroup hate it's clear that we'd need to acknowledge that it is impossible to extinguish, but possible to minimize.
by fillmore | 2025-09-25 17:17:23+00:00
Replying to echo this, I also read every commit message, and review PRs commit by commit. This was common practice at my last job (a small, experienced team), and the expectation was that commits were atomic.

Yes, we griped that GitHub would not allow us to merge individual commits, but if it was ever urgent or helpful to do so, we cherry-picked a commit into a separate PR.

Everyone's workflow is a bit different, and it can be hard to redirect organizational inertia. But without a doubt, reading a clean commit history is a pleasure.
by Timwi | 2025-09-25 17:18:18+00:00
> I see that this has got some downvotes, but I'm having trouble figuring out why. If you read this and didn't like it, I'd be very grateful if you let me know what problem(s) you see. Thanks!

Sure thing, I'll try. Your comment does not contribute to the discussion. It appears that you completely missed the point the comment you replied to made. The point was that “used to” has no inherent meaning and would seem odd to someone who is very new to English, and your response was just to explain what it means. You argue that it's not actually that odd but then basically prove how odd it is by highlighting how much obscure/obsolete knowledge is required to fully explain it.
by oldsklgdfth | 2025-09-25 17:18:18+00:00
Studied EE and went into software after college. Started out system programming and now I work on high level backend services and frontend SDKs.

I've been drown more to engines and power generation. Specifically, control systems that are able to maintain stable operation despite changing conditions.

Few pieces of software I've worked on operate as "control systems". Most have been business logic.

Lately, I've been viewing "keeping the lights on", more important that "keeping engagement up".

Maybe I'll try to get into embedded/FPGA programming. Last time I applied I got passed up due to lack of experience.
by otikik | 2025-09-25 17:18:33+00:00
What do you think should governments get involved with?

I think it is the government's responsibility to protect those who can't defend themselves. Women beat by men. Employees being abused by their bosses. People getting robbed or conned.

I happen to be a somewhat big guy, at least compared to the average around where I live. Partially as a result of this I have never been mugged in my life. But that doesn't mean that I think that when someone gets mugged they don't need "government meddling". I know that other people are not like me. I don't call them "wimps" and say that "it's their right to be small" or that "they should have hit the gym more often".

Mental health issues are a bitch. Compulsive behavior issues suck. You sound like someone who doesn't have them. That's great! But hopefully you can understand that other people can have them. Calling them "idiots" is just a trick your brain does so that it can put a label on a problem so you don't have to think about it more deeply. I invite you to spend the 2 calories that it takes to look behind that label.

Hopefully you will find that gambling companies are naturally be incentivized to predate on people with mental health issues, who are a vulnerable group.

And that is why gambling needs to be heavily regulated, if not banned outright.
by seec | 2025-09-25 17:18:44+00:00
I think they don't realize how many users they can potentially lose. And they are very arrogant but those who will switch are often advisors for other people precisely because they are tech oriented. Since people who don't know much about tech always buy stuff they can get support from their entourage, it can have a snowball effect much bigger than anyone can anticipate.

I know for a fact that I converted A LOT of people to Macs back in the early 2000s. Like the number of friends from high-school who switched to Macs because I could teach them and help them choose is in the double-digits. And those also influence others, teaching what they learned in turn.

Of course, it is never the sole reason to choose a particular device/brand but it is a very significant reason for many "normie".
by mandevil | 2025-09-25 17:18:49+00:00
I used to think this sort of thing too. Then a few years ago I worked with a SWE who had experience in the trucking industry. His take was that most trucking companies are too small scale to benefit from this. The median trucking operation is basically run by the owner's wife in a notebook or spreadsheet- and so their ability to get the benefits of leader/follower mileage like that just doesn't exist. He thought that maybe the very largest operators- Walmart and Amazon- could benefit from this, but he thought that no one else could.

This was why he went into industrial robotics instead, where it was clear that the finances could work out today.
by skinkestek | 2025-09-25 17:18:50+00:00
> Taking your post at face value (which nobody should),

The crimes of Hamas are well documented, not only by Israel who admittedly might have some bias, but also by several in the OSINT community before Hamas realized their mistake and started deleting.

You questioning it only tells us you don't know much about what happened.

> the argument would be to punish Hamas, and not run around shooting children in the head,

Exactly like we dealt with the nazis and not a single child was hurt, right?

Or maybe take "war 101" and "war 201" and learn a thing or two about both why the laws of war explicitly bans using civilians as shields and also explicitly point out that human shields can be ignored. (Yes, it does. Feel free to look it up, and as homework, consider why the laws of war points this out ao explicitly. Here is a link, I don't expect you to have tje laws of war bookmarked: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/arti...)
by eagleislandsong | 2025-09-25 17:18:53+00:00
I suspect it's a mix of many Danish politicians' own authoritarian tendencies/ambitions and corporate lobbying, though I have no proof of the latter when it comes to ChatControl specifically.

Generally speaking, there is a lot of dark money in Danish politics, and the EU has repeatedly flagged Denmark as a country lacking in transparency with regards to corporate lobbying: https://www.altinget.dk/artikel/eu-kritik-af-danmark-puster-...

Generally speaking, the Danish government also tends to behave in authoritarian ways. E.g., Denmark has wilfully violated EU regulations on data retention for many, many years. In 2021, a Danish court ruled that the Danish Ministry of Justice could continue its mass surveillance practices even though they were (and still are) illegal under EU law: https://www.information.dk/indland/2021/06/justitsministerie...

Currently Denmark is also trying to leverage its position as the President of the Council of the EU to legalise, on a EU-wide level, the form of data retention that Denmark has been illegally practising: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
by keeda | 2025-09-25 17:18:55+00:00
What are people's experiences using their current Email Routing service? Mine wasn't great -- right after I set it up I could not get a single test email through to my recipient account despite multiple attempts. No delivery failure emails or any responses at all. Nothing on their dashboards either.

Searching their community threads turned up several other folks who had encountered similar silent failures that were never reported on the dashboards or any status page, leading them to question the company's interest in supporting this feature. I tabled that idea at that point as it was not critical.

A few months later, I randomly tried sending a test email again and it just worked. However, the initial experience left a bad taste in my mouth. Could I trust it to start routing critical emails?

Wondering what other folks here have experienced...
by ModernMech | 2025-09-25 17:19:12+00:00
Because the myth is gone. Presidents have always been restrained by their own willingness not to abuse their power. This willingness was based on two beliefs that Trump has proven mistaken over the last 10 years:

1) Congress will come together to impeach and remove a rogue president, even if he is from their party. This is not true anymore, the impeachment clause is inoperable due to party polarization.

2) The President is liable for any crimes committed in office after he leaves. Merrick Garland proved this wrong after he failed to prosecute Trump for the crime of fomenting insurrection, and then SCOTUS gave Trump and all future presidents an almost impossible shield for future prosecutors to overcome in the form of "presidential immunity".

So unless something changes, the next and all future presidents will have carte blanche to wield the DOJ and FBI to attack his personal political rivals. He can impound and reallocate any Congressionally allocated funds toward implementing his ideological goals, and he can defund any programs he doesn't personally like. He can withhold funding and clearances for companies, lawfirms, and universities unless they implement his agenda. He can send the US army into US states to enforce his agenda. He can withhold disaster relief from areas he deems not politically loyal enough. He can take huge equity stakes of companies he deems nationally critical.

These are all powers POTUS has now, and they will remain powers POTUS until he's prevented from using them.
by trymas | 2025-09-25 17:19:14+00:00
> What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.

How doge isn't a plain dictionary definition of corruption? A private citizen given a power to destroy organisations that overlook that citizens businesses?

It used to be that in such cases that private citizen then must give up their rights to their businesses (or some other way of avoiding conflict of interest).
by jodrellblank | 2025-09-25 17:19:25+00:00
> "In German, to breathe is just a verb: atmen"

There's an interesting rabbit hole to go down for English words from Latin "spirare" - to breathe, and how it connects air and breath of life, spirituality. We get respiration (re-spire, re-breathing), inspire (blowing on something, figuratively breathing life/fire into it), expire (breathing out the last breath of life), spirit (a vital substance of life), conspire (to breathe together, speak similar thoughts).

https://www.etymonline.com/word/respire

https://www.etymonline.com/word/inspire

https://www.etymonline.com/word/spirit

etc. Words that were almost literal Latin that are now more figurative English based on a sort of French / medieval version of the Latin version. [edit: just remembering that the rather Germanic and plain "Breathe on me breath of God" used to give me the image of someone going "huuuhhh" on their spectacles before polishing them. The next bit is "till all this earthly part of me Glows with thy fire divine" so it is supposed to be exciting and soul-sparking. I only feel the poetic imagery of "fill me with life, blow on the embers of my soul, oh life giving wind-deity", through Romance *spire* words not Anglish *breath* words. "inspire my spirit(2) through respiration, you spiritual spirit(1)"]
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-25 17:19:26+00:00
You will still be required to hand it over, or sit in jail while your confiscated, inventoried equipment is processed by forensics. If I want to be subpoena proof, I’d host the subject system outside the jurisdiction with an org having no connection or nexus in the adversary jurisdiction. Admittedly, this is up to your threat model. Do you want to know, but still be legally required to provide access? Or do you want to be out of reach entirely? The answer to that will guide your implementation and operating model in this context.
by westurner | 2025-09-25 17:19:32+00:00
"GDPVal: Measuring AI model performance on real world economically viable tasks" (2025) https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/d5eb7428-c4e9-4a33-bd86-86dd4bcf1...

GDP? GlobalGoals ... The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include 17 goals, 169 targets, and over 230 indicators.

For strategic alignment,

Strategic alignment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_alignment

Sustainable Development Goals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals

To produce the SDGs, IIUC they clustered the world's problems as an international collaborative exercise; to succeed the MDGs (2000-2015).

Each country voluntarily produces an annual SDG report on their progress on their Targets according to the Indicators.

IMHO, Priorities should include clean energy and AI efficiency, given the growth projections for energy use of AI (and our electrical bills given continued expected supply shortages of energy)

Which real-word SDG tasks can be AI eval'd?
by TimTheTinker | 2025-09-25 17:20:22+00:00
I'm immediately thinking of all the ways this could potentially affect people in negative ways.

- People who treat ChatGPT as a romantic interest will be far more hooked as it "initiates" conversations instead of just responding. It's not healthy to relate personally to a thing that has no real feelings or thoughts of its own. Mental health directly correlates to living in truth - that's the base axiom behind cognitive behavioral therapy.

- ChatGPT in general is addicting enough when it does nothing until you prompt it. But adding "ChatGPT found something interesting!" to phone notifications will make it unnecessarily consume far more attention.

- When it initiates conversations or brings things up without being prompted, people will all the more be tempted to falsely infer a person-like entity on the other end. Plausible-sounding conversations are already deceptive enough and prompt people to trust what it says far too much.

For most people, it's hard to remember that LLMs carry no personal responsibility or accountability for what they say, not even an emotional desire to appear a certain way to anyone. It's far too easy to infer all these traits to something that says stuff and grant it at least some trust accordingly. Humans are wired to relate through words, so LLMs are a significant vector to cause humans to respond relationally to a machine.

The more I use these tools, the more I think we should consciously value the output on its own merits (context-free), and no further. Data returned may be useful at times, but it carries zero authority (not even "a person said this", which normally is at least non-zero), until a person has personally verified it, including verifying sources, if needed (machine-driven validation also can count -- running a test suite, etc., depending on how good it is). That can be hard when our brains naturally value stuff more or less based on context (what or who created it, etc.), and when it's presented to us by what sounds like a person, and with their comments. "Build an HTML invoice for this list of services provided" is peak usefulness. But while queries like "I need some advice for this relationship" might surface some helpful starting points for further research, trusting what it says enough to do what it suggests can be incredibly harmful. Other people can understand your problems, and challenge you helpfully, in ways LLMs never will be able to.

Maybe we should lobby legislators to require AI vendors to say something like "Output carries zero authority and should not be trusted at all or acted upon without verification by qualified professionals or automated tests. You assume the full risk for any actions you take based on the output. [LLM name] is not a person and has no thoughts or feelings. Do not relate to it." The little "may make mistakes" disclaimer doesn't communicate the full gravity of the issue.
by jkestner | 2025-09-25 17:20:29+00:00
Amazon is bad, but as others note, it’s insultingly transparent more than anything. But the worst in my recent history is Duolingo. Constant pestering to upgrade your subscription, fine, but once you do, it frequently “forgets” the subscription (through the App Store) and goes back to nagging you, only fixed by digging a few screens into the profile and tapping “restore purchases”. Bigger issue when your family is using it and doesn’t understand you’re already subscribed. Paid for two family subscriptions this way.
by ajkjk | 2025-09-25 17:20:34+00:00
I see the general philosophy that people should not protest their indignities as leading to a culture where it is weird to do so which is why it is so hard for everyone to do it---nobody around them does it.

There is supposed to be a baseline amount of respect in an organization that dissolves most of the need for bitterness and power struggles. Tech companies I have worked at and heard about mostly do not have this. The more hypermodern the company, the less they have it. It's the principal reason why modern tech is so dystopian: because whatever happens to you, you are just expected to take it, and you're paid a lot so shut the fuck up. I've worked at several famous tech companies and I have very little respect for any of the management there because of the amount of "shut up and take the money" attitude there is. The organization rots, culturally, and everyone's life is devoid of meaning, and success is proportional to how much you can cope with a life that's devoid of meaning or just bask in the money, but the whole thing is hopeless and at some level doomed. Also, a leaderless organization has no morality, which is why every big tech company just gets progressively more evil, because who would stop them?

It's a horrible equilibrium, and the incentives (public stocks, short-termism, a taboo against conflict). Now I don't think any old person is going to stand up and fight it off singlehandedly. But the first step of doing something about it is normalizing the understanding that people should be doing something. You may not be able to stand up yourself, or maybe not yet, but you should at least agree in principle with doing so.

My feeling is that at an organization where people and leadership don't have mutual respect, everyone lives a hollow and soulless and unfulfilled existence. Maybe that is good for certain psychopaths, I don't know, but everyone would be happier if it was not this way. And almost certainly the company would be more stable and healthy and less short-termist, as well. It is astounding how bad the decision making that comes out an unaccountable organization is. Thing is, money in tech has been so free that even an organization run by inhuman idiots can still be profitable. It shouldn't be; competition should be destroying anything that is done with such mediocrity... but it is, because the whole system is broken as hell right now.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-09-25 17:21:08+00:00
It’s amazing how many discussions I’ve had in the past decade about how people are supposed to “properly” protest (I.e. in a way that commands as little attention as possible) and how few I’ve had discussing the merits of what people are protesting about.

Except of course Jan 6th, which somehow normalized the belief that the 2020 election was stolen AND gaslit a ton of the country into thinking the violence that occurred did not and therefore doesn’t need to be critiqued.

This admin is truly adept at labeling all forms of dissent or disagreement as unacceptable actions that make discussing the issues at hand impossible.