MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rimunroe | 2025-09-24 18:47:30+00:00
> I don’t think it does.

Let me know if this is an unfair summarization, but the way I see it: my comments discussed how charging parents additional fees to sit near their infants is bad. Your comment proposed charging people who wanted assigned seating for that feature and allowing people who don't need that flexibility a discount. How does that address my point rather than simply re-describe the thing I've already described as the problem?

> Why should we charge them the same amount as people who aren’t as flexible?

Because that flexibility is needed more by parents and we generally want to encourage parenting and reduce the burden on them by using the power of the state to spread such costs out. IMO we don't do nearly enough of this, like with family leave, daycare, or healthcare costs.
by ezfe | 2025-09-24 18:47:36+00:00
Regardless of the level a tutorial is given at, there is information that is missing. A well written tutorial knows its audience and contains all the information for that audience.

Sure, I will grant that someone who doesn't know what a computer is shouldn't be expected to follow a tutorial to install PostgreSQL on a headless linux server with proper security protocols in place.

The issue is more that it's extremely easy to assume someone understands what "primitive file operations" are necessary to accomplish a goal, and fail to describe what it is the user actually has to do.

Just because you understand how to navigate a file structure doesn't necessarily mean you have the domain knowledge necessary to make leaps that are frequently present in tutorials.
by simpaticoder | 2025-09-24 18:47:48+00:00
I like this framing. There is an analogy with industrialization and pollution, in that the side-effects of industrial production can be safely ignored, unless those effects are cumulative. Social norms function in the same way. There is little harm in a professor kindly giving a passing grade to one undeserving student; when this becomes common, the cumulative effect undermines the value of a college education itself.

Perhaps a more mathematical framing looks to game theory, a la John Nash. In the prisoner's dilemma two equilibrium exist, the "good one" where the prisoners cooperate, and the "bad one" where they both defect. Good and bad is determined by summing the outcome value for both prisoners. Social norms help stay in the "good" equilibrium despite the occasional defection. Once the defectors learn how personally profitable it is to defect, it becomes common practice, the norm changes, and the society as a whole has switched from one equilibrium to the other, and society is, overall, much worse off. The path from good to bad equilibrium is incremental, cumulative, just like pollution. It's less clear to me what the incremental, cumulative path is going the opposite direction.
by joezydeco | 2025-09-24 18:48:04+00:00
It allows U.S. iPhone users to add their passports to Wallet, with the digital passport able to be used in lieu of a physical passport for domestic travel at TSA checkpoints.

Not a real compelling use case, especially when TSA Precheck is going biometric.

I see confusion ahead when travellers go to airports for international flights and find out that the airline wants the physical copy in-hand before they'll be allowed to board.
by oblio | 2025-09-24 18:48:37+00:00
> For autoregressive token-based multimodal models, image tokens are as straightforward as text tokens, and there is no reason video tokens wouldn’t also be.

In classical computing, there is a clear hierarchy: text < images <<< video.

Is there a reason why video computing using LLMs shouldn't be much more intensive and therefore costly than text or image output?
by Symbiote | 2025-09-24 18:48:44+00:00
Many European (and other) airports now have self-done baggage drop-off.

At Copenhagen Airport, I usually get off the metro, walk to the luggage tag machines at the end of the platform and scan my passport (or boarding pass). That prints a bag tag (and boarding pass if requested), so after sticking that to my luggage I drop it off at the counter — I put the bag on the scale/conveyor, it scans the barcode, prompts me to press "Confirm" that there's no explosives etc, and I'm done.

I scan my boarding pass to go through the barrier into the security screening, walk to the gate, and very often scan the boarding pass again to get onto the jetbridge.

I can easily go from the metro to the plane without interacting with anyone. I understand this is Scandinavian bliss.

(Exceptions are trips to countries where I need my documents to be checked; e.g. to go to the USA a checkin agent has to see my ESTA visa waiver. Oddly, going somewhere like China which requires a printed visa in my passport does work on the machine, as the machine prompts me to scan it.)
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-24 18:49:07+00:00
Yes, that's been widely asserted by the Right.

Like, say, Ted Cruz being pissy over Harry Potter boycotts. https://x.com/tedcruz/status/1588271789247197186

Or Musk suing advertisers for not buying ads. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsu...
by ppsreejith | 2025-09-24 18:49:18+00:00
In the book "The Quest for Community" (1953), Robert Nisbet argues that social function is primary and natural and leads to true association which for man fulfils a core need. From the book:

> In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together”. To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a military unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society.

Going on a tangent, my current beliefs are that:

1. Social functions (i.e accomplished through association) has always had, and will always have high marginal utility, independent of and utilising any technology.

2. That there are political and not technological barriers suppressing it in our current age.

3. That humans are evolved to interact with large numbers of humans (probably seasonality), and that our evolved sociality is scalable even to the present day and beyond (i.e a rejection of Dunbar's number as an evolved constraint)
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-24 18:49:40+00:00
(1) "Blueskyism" is an unfortunate term for the phenomenon since it emerged on Tumblr and Twitter even if Twitter refugees brought it to Bluesky.

(2) It deserves a discussion which is entirely separate from "the river", whatever X is now, MAGA, etc. That is, it needs to be contrasted with what a healthy political culture of the left would be that would set us up to win.

(3) If you go looking at random Bluesky profiles you will find many that say something in the summary like "Blue Crew", "Always Vote Democrat", "No MAGA" and if you are unwise enough to click on it you will find they repost 20 items about Trump administration outrage a day. If you've got any sense you don't follow them or your feed will be nothing but that.

If you have a policy of not following that kind of account, blocking on the first hint of negativity, and blocking a few keywords, you can have a really nice feed.

(4) For me, the algo feed for Bluesky suppresses about 75% of that kind of content as opposed to the "following" feed. The thing is it has "More like this" and "Less like this" buttons which I use consistently... They work.

(5) Looking at random Bluesky profiles a lot of people have dropped out. I don't have real statistics that I wish I was keeping (if I did I could get my agent to accelerate things) but my impression is that scientists and other experts have a high rate of attrition -- I think the jerk users drive them away

(6) Folks like Silver, Yglesias and Noah Smith can most effectively create controversy by promoting this sort of antagonism, it's even possible they can peel a few people off to their point of view. Personally I think the future of the left is deliverism combining some of Ezra Klein and some of Matt Stoller.

(7) Even Silver is starting to realize that "The River" has aged poorly https://www.natesilver.net/p/one-year-later-is-the-river-win...
by kragen | 2025-09-24 18:49:46+00:00
Newly discovered potential antibiotics are actually pretty common, and they would be critical to solving the antibiotic-resistance menace. But no major new families of antibiotics have been brought to market since about 01962, although a dozen or so families were discovered over the previous 20 years. (Or, maybe one new family was.) That was when drug regulation changed dramatically in the US with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefauver%E2%80%93Harris_Amendm..., for example requiring clinical trials to provide evidence that drugs were effective, rather than just safe. It's also when they started outlawing recreational drugs; the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs wasn't until 01961, and it didn't cover amphetamines, downers, or psychedelics.

Because so much of 20th-century drug research happened in the US (because the US had capitalism) the clinical-trials requirement and the Drug War there had an outsized effect, and other countries copied them afterwards.

One particular case that I studied was Zasloff's "magainin": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magainin which was denied licensing even though the clinical trials found that it was both safe and effective. The problem was that it wasn't more effective than the existing standard of care; it was only equally effective.

It seems certain that the Kefauver–Harris Drug Act has prevented innumerable cases of useless or harmful drugs from being marketed. But, looking at the history of drug development, it also seems clear that the rapid drug development in the decades up to 01962 virtually halted at that time, and the absence of the drugs that would have been discovered since then has surely killed many more people than the inadvertent use of harmful drugs ever could have.
by logifail | 2025-09-24 18:50:15+00:00
It feels like "gold-plating" of regulations is and always has been a significant problem in the EU.

Regulations are written (at EU level) to allow X, Y and Z; somehow by the time it's implemented at member state level it miraculously only allows only X or Y, and once it gets to actual service providers (who've presumably been advised by their in-house lawyers that 'Y is bad') we end up with a choice of X or nothing.

Then if you ask anyone at EU level what's going on, they point to what the regulation says, and everyone shrugs.
by xnx | 2025-09-24 18:50:21+00:00
It's an arms race. Websites have become stupidly/unnecessarily/hostilely complicated, but AI/LLMs have made it possible (though more expensive) to get whatever useful information exists out of them.

Soon, LLMs will be able to complete any Captcha a human can within reasonable time. When that happens, the "analog hole" may be open permanently. If you can point a camera and a microphone at it, the AI will be able to make better sense of it than a person.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-09-24 18:50:38+00:00
> How can we not have debates about efficacy of medical products or about trustworthiness of the data?

We must be able to have those debates, but we must also guard against grifters selling 5g-proof underwear to the functionally illiterate or serving up vaccine skepticism based more on their desire to score political points than science.

The devil will always be in the details, and it's a tough balancing act. I personally suspect that the way we do this is by checking credentials.

Doctors and scientists should be allowed to offer alternative theories. Meth-addicts posting from labs hidden in the Ozarks, software developers, and unqualified politicians, maybe not.
by catigula | 2025-09-24 18:50:54+00:00
>I see lots of people worried that the aim of all of this is to ultimately have a robot do their entire job

Correct, this is the aim and tons of capital is being deployed to this end. Worse, it looks inevitable, not just plausible, if you look at the progress of the technology. To be more specific, though, a robot doesn't need to do their entire job to devalue their job. One senior engineer doing 10x work with an LLM is someone who has cut 10 roles.

>Let them know you’re still on their side

You're not and never have been. You're on the side of your company.

>This too shall pass

That's the problem. "This" is their gainful employment and possibly a host of other protections and dignities up-ended, such as privacy, enabled by AI.

The reality is that, even if people don't put it in these terms, we are all held hostage to this existential nightmare engine because a few billionaires want infinite power and eternal life and nobody is stopping them.

Anyways, yeah, you can't be ethical in this position because your role, as explicated here, is to attempt to alleviate natural and very understandable pressures that could harm the company rather than let them boil over, which they likely should. Framing what's good for the company as what's good for the employee is part and parcel of this mentality.
by bangaladore | 2025-09-24 18:51:17+00:00
> So you think a priori it's fine to shove MBs of code to a mobile user?

I think we have to consider whether or not that matters.

> Here's a demo that's sending like 2MB of Blazor code for a button that updates some text:

Okay, but then what is the size increase if you have a full app? Is it 2MB per button (obviously not).

My point is you are so focused on things that may or may not matter. So saying its useless for most usecases is a terrible position.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-24 18:51:23+00:00
> num1 and num2 are not default initialized

num1 and num2 are declared on the stack and not the heap. The lifetimes of the variables are scoped to the function and so they are initialized. Their actual values are implementation-specific ("undefined behavior") but there is no uninitialized memory.

> And a + b can invoke signed integer overflow UB. A program with more than zero UB cannot be considered memory safe.

No, memory safety is not undefined behavior. In fact Rust also silently allows signed integer overflow.

Remember, the reason memory safety is important is because it allows for untrusted code execution. Importantly here, even if you ignore scanf errors and integer overflow, this program accesses no memory that is not stack local. Now if one of these variables was cast into a pointer and used to index into a non-bounds-checked array then yes that would be memory unsafety. But the bigger code smell there is to cast an index into a pointer without doing any bounds checking.

That's sort of what storing indexes separately from references in a lot of Rust structures is doing inadvertently. It's validating accesses into a structure.
by tanin | 2025-09-24 18:51:58+00:00
At this point, PH is more for SEO because, once you hit the top, tons of other websites will link to your product.

FinFam looks amazing. It's an interesting take on personal finance because I never really have a view of my own net worth. And, because of that, I have been having a feeling for a while that it causes me to be "too frugal" most of the times.
by roughly | 2025-09-24 18:52:45+00:00
That's fair. I think a lot of reactions, mine included, are because most of the time when someone discusses the downsides of a large state, they're advocating for a small one from a libertarian lens, so I think I imputed motives to your arguments.

You're right about this generally, though. I've got two different theories for why this is happening.

First, I think the US is "individually nomadic" in a way that many other countries and cultures are not - it is unusual, at least in the populous areas, for someone to spend their entire life in one area, and doubly so for an entire family or community to stay geographically colocated long enough to really build durable organizations. I think this changes a bit as people get older, but it's quite normal for someone to move every 5 years or so between the age of, say, 20 and 60. Arguably this is driven by economics - job availability, especially for professionals, is a big reason for these moves.

I think there's something self-reinforcing about the trend, as well - notably, as, say, the focus in politics concentrates on the federal government, it becomes harder for people to really see the benefit in local politics. The repeal of Roe v. Wade, for example, is a policy made at the national level with strong impacts locally; similarly the recent change in policy around both trans rights and immigration are hard for people to look past towards local politics (I think this is a mistake - large politics are built on small politics - but I think it's a factor).

I'd also suspect impatience plays a part - it's hard to build an organization, it's hard to negotiate status and relationships, it's hard to keep something viable, and we've got a lot of easier routes to dopamine than bothering to meet up with other people now.
by orochimaaru | 2025-09-24 18:54:24+00:00
The problem with legal immigration is misuse rather than unfunded liabilities. My point is simply - put it to a vote that the US will accept a certain limited number of people who walk across the border every year and the states will be required to fund them. Codify it into law if that’s what needs to happen. Or maybe we just need better labor reform for transitory foreign labor like the Arabian gulf nations. Make it a law so that citizens are aware of impacts - socially and financially.

The US admits 1million legal immigrants every year. This is in addition to people on a valid work visa and folks who are illegally here.
by rimunroe | 2025-09-24 18:54:25+00:00
> It’s a distinction without a difference.

That difference matters quite a bit if you're specifically arguing about how people who are going to fly get to experience said flight.

[Edit] If you don't believe that parents have as much reason to fly as anyone else I don't think there's much point to further discussion. However if you do believe it then whether or not assigned seating specifically counts as a luxury matters quite a bit.

> You have to pay for all sorts of “necessities” because you have kids - just add that to the list.

Why should we accept increasing the relative cost of having kids? That's a very good way to make having kids prohibitively expensive and part of how we've gotten to the point we're at. I'm in my late 30s and most of my friends chose not to have kids. For quite a few of those friends, they decided not to have them specifically because of how expensive it's become. You might think that's acceptable or even good, but birthrates are declining and people don't seem interested in allowing immigrants to come in and fill the void so I'm not sure what the endgame here is.
by pseudalopex | 2025-09-24 18:55:01+00:00
> The 95% isn't a knock on the AI tools, but that enterprises are bad at integration.

You could read this quote this way. But the report knocked the most common tools.

The primary factor keeping organizations on the wrong side of the GenAI Divide is the learning gap, tools that don't learn, integrate poorly, or match workflows. Users prefer ChatGPT for simple tasks, but abandon it for mission-critical work due to its lack of memory. What's missing is systems that adapt, remember, and evolve, capabilities that define the difference between the two sides of the divide.[1]

[1] https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...
by neuronexmachina | 2025-09-24 18:55:09+00:00
Reading between the lines, my guess is something like this happened:

* some of the US government officials protected by the Secret Service were the targets of swatting

* the USSS found the swatting calls were anonymized by a SIM Farm in/near NYC

* their investigation of the SIM Farm found "300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites"

* it could have hypothetically been used for swatting officials at the UN General Assembly, but that seems to be conjecture by the Secret Service, rather than anything they actually have evidence of

Does that seem consistent with what we know?
by godelski | 2025-09-24 18:55:30+00:00
I think you've missed the point entirely.

The point is that if everyone is using a single browser (not just Chrome/Chromium) then that actor gets disproportionate control over the internet. That's not good for anyone.

The specific gripe to Chromium is that _Google_ gets that say, and I think they are less trustworthy than other actors. I'm not asking anyone to trust Mozilla, but anyone suggesting Mozilla is less trustworthy than Google probably has a bridge to sell you. Remember that being Chromium still means that Brave is reliant upon Google. That leads to things like this[0,1]. Remember, the chromium source code is quite large, which is why things like [0] aren't so easily found. I also want to quote a quote from [0.1]

This is interesting because it is a clear violation of the idea that browser vendors should not give preference to their websites over anyone elses.

That wouldn't be the first time people have found Google preferencing their browser and it is pretty known this happens with YouTube. Do we really want ANY company having such control over the internet? Do we really want Google to?

> https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity > https://brave.com/transparency/

I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me here. That Brave has 64% of the number of users as Firefox? That Brave users really like Gemini, Coinbase, and Uphold? That Brave users are linking their Brave account to sites like Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, GitHub, Vimeo, and Twitch? That Brave Ads is tracking via the state level? Honestly I have more questions looking at the Brave "transparency" report, as it seems to have more information about users than Firefox...

If you're extra concerned about privacy and that's your reason for Brave, then may I suggest the Mullvad browser[2]? It is a fork of Firefox and they work with Tor to minimize tracking and fingerprinting. You get your security, privacy, and out from under the boot of Google.

[0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/39660

[0.1] https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/9/hangout_servicesthunkjs...

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-to-kill-...

[2] https://mullvad.net/en/browser
by timeinput | 2025-09-24 18:55:34+00:00
I generally don't think about storage I/O speed at that scale (I mean really who does?). I once used a RAID0 to store data to HDDs faster, but that was a long time ago.

I would have naively guessed an interesting caching system, and to some degree tiers of storage for hot vs cold objects.

It was obvious after I read the article that parallelism was a great choice, but I definitely hadn't considered the detailed scheme of S3, or the error correction it used. Parallelism is the one word summary, but the details made the article worth reading. I bet minio also has a similar scaling story: parallelism.
by ninkendo | 2025-09-24 18:55:50+00:00
That’s probably one of those cases where they use two different statistics to assume a conclusion, e.g. maybe only 30% of students pass a particular profiency test, and then add to the fact that that test is the minimum level where fractions/percentages are expected to be known, and combine it to make a scary sounding headline.

You might be right but, citation needed.