MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by martin-t | 2025-09-06 21:22:27+00:00
There's two interpretations of the parent comment:

1) China will get ASI and use it to beat everyone else (militarily or economically). In my reply, I argue we shouldn't race China because even if ASI is achieved and China gets it first, there's nothing they can do quickly enough that we wouldn't be able to build ASI second or nuke them if we couldn't catch up and it became clear they went to become a global dictatorship.

2) China will get ASI, it'll go out of control and kill everyone. In that case, I argue even more that we shouldn't race China but instead deescalate and stop the race.

BTW even in the second case, it would be very hard for the ASI to kill everyone quickly enough, especially those on nuclear submarines. Computers are much more vulnerable to EMPs than humans so a (series of) nuclear explosion(s) like Starfish Prime could be used to destroy all of most of its computers and give humans a fighting chance.
by trod1234 | 2025-09-06 21:22:29+00:00
The two are unconnected, one is used as a pejorative which is racist, the other isn't. This is not a hard distinction to make if you aren't a bot.

<Victim> "I'm ricing my Linux Shell, check it out." <Bot> That's Racist!

<Bot Brigade> Moderator this person is violating your rules and being racist!

<Moderator> I'm just using AI to determine this. <Bot Brigade> Great! Now they can't contribute. Lets find another.

TL;DR Words have specific meanings, and a growing number of words have been corrupted purposefully to prevent communication, and by extension limit communication to the detriment of all. You get the same ultimate outcomes when people do this as any other false claim. Abuses pile up until eventually in the absence of functioning non-violent conflict resolution; violence forces the system to reform.

Have you noticed that your implication is circular based on the indefinite assumption (foregone conclusion) that the two are linked (tightly coupled)?

You use a lot of ambiguous manipulative language and structure. Doing that makes any reasonable person think you are either a bot, or a malicious actor.
by iLemming | 2025-09-06 21:22:42+00:00
It took me a minute to realize that you're talking about code formatting on HN, and it has nothing to do with Clojure.

I was like: "What formatting are they talking about? It's darn Lisp - there's no 'formatting gripes' here..." The only thing Clojure devs have to agree on - to align or to indent, and that's all the formatting rules and conventions you need to know about.

Inexperienced newbies say: "Lisp is hard to read", which I think is completely overblown and in fact is the opposite - Lisp is so nicely readable, that even on a narrow screen of a phone it remains readable - the code simply wraps around - a trick Python and Haskell programmers especially hate.
by stefan_ | 2025-09-06 21:22:59+00:00
I thought this was an Australian scandal?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gzl41rpdqo

The original CHOICE investigation names brands & products:

https://www.choice.com.au/health-and-body/beauty-and-persona...

There are brands like Neutrogena that have passing & failing products, suggesting a process issue.
by gertrunde | 2025-09-06 21:23:01+00:00
Such things have existed for quite a long time...

For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

(Not a unique thing, merely the first one I found).

And then there are the more exotic options, like the stuff that these folk used to make: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Memory_Systems - iirc - Eve Online used the RamSan product line (apparently starting in 2005: https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/a-history-of-eve-databas... )
by tolien | 2025-09-06 21:23:04+00:00
> Ford was really big here at one point but it's a shadow of what it used to be.

Speaking for the UK at least, it's not like we were really getting US-originated models from Ford: it used to be the Mondeo or Fiesta but now it's the Kuga. Similarly GM (AKA Vauxhall/Opel, now Stellantis) pushed the Corsa/Astra and so on rather than, say, the Chevy Suburban.

A majority of them are made within Europe (if not necessarily the EU, between the UK and Turkey) so should avoid tariffs.
by nirava | 2025-09-06 21:23:41+00:00
This is not true. "Switch your DNS" hasn't worked for while. It didn't work for the TikTok ban. The ISPs are not incompetent.

If the DNS change solution ever works, because they are half-assing it for whatever reason. And this time they apparently aren't.

And in any case, this is a really bad way to look at this situation. Your response to the government taking the next step in what looks like a very well planned power grab and move towards authoritarianism shouldn't be "well the ISPs suck here".
by b112 | 2025-09-06 21:23:48+00:00
People said "the Earth is too big, human activity can't change the climate". Now look at where we are.

I wonder, if we draw enough heat out... would the core cool enough to shrink? And if so, would the crust collapse to the new size?

Pure speculation of course, but did the first guy burning coal know the outcome?

Anyhow, I love geothermal, think you're right, but just got tweaked on the word "infinite".
by 3np | 2025-09-06 21:23:55+00:00
GitHub Support tickets are private and not publically sharable.

I did mention it in this Discussions thread a while back (which the support agent at one point in July hilariously linked me to asking if I had read, making it clear they hadn't done so themselves).

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/147437#discuss...

Initial support response mentioned here:

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/147437#discuss...
by johnfn | 2025-09-06 21:23:56+00:00
It seems to me like we have the answers to all those questions.

- Do we know which projects people work on?

It's pretty easy to discover that OP works on https://livox.com.br/en/, a tool that uses AI to let people with disabilities speak. That sounds like a reasonable project to me.

- Do we know which codebases (greenfield, mature, proprietary etc.) people work on

The e2e tests took 2 hours to run and the website quotes ~40M words. That is not greenfield.

- Do we know the level of expertise the people have?

It seems like they work on nontrivial production apps.

- How much additional work did they have reviewing, fixing, deploying, finishing etc.?

The article says very little.
by pixelatedindex | 2025-09-06 21:24:24+00:00
> This is the same argument about how when a company is remote anyone is still free to go into the office.

This seems like a straw man. Where you work from is different from how/how much you work. You’re hired to do the job, what if you do the job in 8 hours?

It also seems like a given that when you work at a startup that work life balance will be at a minimum. What more do you want?
by vunderba | 2025-09-06 21:24:24+00:00
I'm VERY familiar with Synthesia. In order to generate those animated videos of falling notes, a corresponding MIDI file for the song has to exist. I would think it'd be better in most situations to build the purported "piano tablature" off of that instead.

While neat from a technical perspective, this seems like a solution in search of a problem.

EDIT: On the other hand, a cursory search did not find any midi/piano sheet music for "Hi Nanna: Samayama" - so maybe only having this "falling note video" is more common for certain music.
by steve1977 | 2025-09-06 21:24:26+00:00
This was my thought as well. I’m likely on the spectrum (as I have learned recently, because of my kids) and I would consider myself hypersensitive. To a variety of sensory inputs - noise, smell, touch, heat, cold, tickling and probably also pain. The latter being hard to quantify of course.

But I could certainly imagine that a mother with autistic traits could be someone who takes painkillers more often than the average person.
by RobinL | 2025-09-06 21:24:38+00:00
This provides a lot of interesting info on geothermal: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/watt-lies-beneath/

And more: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/fracking-aust...

One interesting point made here is that the cost of turbines puts a floor price on any form.of generation which uses them, whether renewable or not, meaning in the long run solar has a big advantage: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/casey-handmer. I don't know how accurate that is
by Scoundreller | 2025-09-06 21:25:22+00:00
Somewhere a gritty warehouse in a developing country is receiving shipping containers of old books, massive teams manually flipping each page as a 2nd hand Canon digicam takes a pic of each page, to be OCR’d by the same AI being trained.

Once the book is done, 99% of them go into the furnace at the district heating boiler next door. The other 1% back to a developed country for resale.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-09-06 21:26:02+00:00
> "Whether the Japanese surrendered when they did or surrendered a couple months later, though, Japanese surrender was largely expected at that point."

By whom? In actuality, both the US and Japan were planning for a long campaign on the Japanese home islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall. The Japanese intended to prolong fighting as much as possible to force the US to abandon the invasion because of mounting costs and casualties.

Even the night before the surrender, some among the Japanese military attempted a coup to prevent it and continue the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
by didibus | 2025-09-06 21:26:02+00:00
The word "hallucination" mis-characterizes it.

LLMs predict the likely tokens to follow the context. And they can make incorrect predictions.

LLMs therefore don't have perfect accuracy of prediction. When their predictions are incorrect, people say they "hallucinate".

Nobody questions why predictive weather models aren't perfectly accurate, because it makes sense that a prediction can be wrong.

Marketing and hype has tried to sell LLMs as "logical rational thinkers" equal to human thinking. A human doing actual thinking knows when they are making stuff up. So if a human truly believes obviously false things to be true, it tends to be because they are hallucinating. Their thinking isn't wrong, they've lost track of reality to ground their thinking.

We've anthropomorphized LLMs to the point we wonder why are they hallucinating like we can offer a diagnostic. But if you stop anthropomorphising them and go back to their actual nature as a predictive model, then it's not even a surprising outcome that predictions can turn out to be wrong.
by contingencies | 2025-09-06 21:26:04+00:00
This is the force keeping India trapped in poverty. Turns out indoctrinating a caste system at all levels of society fundamentally dissuades young people from engaging in objective thinking about social outcomes for others and normalizes self-first thinking.

China has adopted capitalist egoism wrapped in a reinterpreted Confucian family-unit ideal but has the guiding party to ensure stability (read: political security) and economic function remain on the agenda. Anyone attacking infrastructure will be dealt with severely (this was the leadup to the Xinjiang crackdown post 911, a small Uyghur group had been bombing the rail lines). That said, I did have a fiber optic line to one of my offices in China disconnected by a copper thief ~2008. Unheard of recently.
by Spivak | 2025-09-06 21:26:21+00:00
I think the stronger point of what you're saying is if you can set yourself to avoid addiction—you have a time limited dose, you have no means of acquiring more—then opiate painkillers are the safest option in terms of potential damage to your body.

There's no avoiding it when it comes to some people's chronic pain but it's a tragedy we've ruined the reputation for opiate painkillers because they were prescribed for long periods which all but guarantees addiction. Folks in US hospitals have to unnecessarily suffer short term acute pain because squeamishness around prescribing effective painkillers in a situation where there's virtually no risk.
by ben_w | 2025-09-06 21:26:21+00:00
> Are these basically an indication of who will win the race for market share by burning money and who will sit it out and become irrelevant?

I think so, yes. An all-pay auction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-pay_auction

> There’s no way these companies can be profitable unless they charge more or go vertical by building their own chips or apps.

Disagree. Available evidence strongly suggests that they make money on inference, it's just that each model has a lifetime measured in (at most) months before it becomes obsolete, and training is expensive.

Until better hardware becomes a normal consumer item and everyone goes to local models, a singular winner can keep making a profit, as SaaS and at current prices… if, and only if, they can slow down on obsoleting their own models.
by jrm4 | 2025-09-06 21:26:38+00:00
Yeah, no, count me in with those who think that "All they do is hallucinate" is the correct way to say this and anything else dangerously obscures things.

More than anything, we need transparency on how these things work. For us and for the general public.

"Hallucination" introduces the dangerous idea that "them getting things wrong" is something like a "curable disease" and not "garbage in garbage out."

No. This is as stupid as saying Google telling me a restaurant is open when it's closed is a "hallucination." Stop personifying these things.
by rsingel | 2025-09-06 21:26:58+00:00
The blog post got taken down in response to a bullshit DMCA claim filed by a YC-funded company called Cyble

DMCA screenshot https://infosec.exchange/@bobdahacker/115158347003096276

Cyble announcement of YC funding in 2025 https://cyble.com/press/cyble-recognized-among-ai-startups-f...
by downrightmike | 2025-09-06 21:27:19+00:00
In a few years seniors will be getting 7 figures to deal with tech debt and juniors easily mid 6 figures because they are cheaper than the seniors, and there will still be fewer of them. Not everyone burned by the learn to code/get a difficult degree only to have nearly all jobs go to india, especially STEM jobs, will be around, and if they are, they will want compensation for this bullshit.
by dse1982 | 2025-09-06 21:28:01+00:00
I don't know what she is doing now, since we lost contact many years ago. Basically after school when I moved away to study. So no happily ever after with her, but it was absolutely worth the effort. It would never have worked out, since we were way to different, which she knew, but I – as always – took longer to understand. However it was such an important thing for me, since it was the first time that I was really confident and brave enough to be really open about my feelings and my interest. Of course it took me some time and overcoming, but in the end I was able to openly communicate to her and also not trying to play cool or hide it from my friends. I think it really was the first conscious experience for me in regards to that: to really just do the jump, be open about my feelings, take my shot and in the process make myself vulnerable. As I said, she gave me a clear "no" and I think that was for the better – not only because we came from quite different worlds but also because I still had so much to learn. However she handled all this so perfect, gracefully and appreciative: actually for me the perfect experience to learn and grow from. We stayed friends, continued to do stuff together and it never was much of a topic after a while. I still remember how after I was a bit petulant in the first time after her rejecting me and refused her offering me some of her lunch. She told me in the most respectful way that just because she said no to one thing I didn't have to say no to everything else now. Which was exactly what I needed to hear. It showed me that I hadn't lost any of her respect and that relationships with people do not have to be all or nothing, can have so many facets which can (almost) all be valuable and should be appreciated – just as she still appreciated our relationship. Although there was no happily ever after, I still like to remember all that. Today I am having my happily ever after with a very wonderful someone else. But to become the person who is having this, the whole experience with that girl was so important. I was making myself very vulnerable for the first time and it was the best fail-scenario I could ever think of and it helped me become more brave and open about myself and my feelings.

Thanks for making me remember this experience.
by mgh2 | 2025-09-06 21:28:30+00:00
Avoid (from other 3 articles/studies): Neutrogena, Banana Boat, Bondi Sands, Cancer Council, Aldi, Nivea, Estée Lauder, iPSA, Anessa, Shiseido, Curél, Sofina, Laneige, Dermacept, Bio-Essence, Fancl (Japan), Purito (Korea)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45145624

[2] https://labmuffin.com/purito-sunscreen-and-all-about-spf-tes...

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-04/questions-over-lab-th...
by jraph | 2025-09-06 21:28:34+00:00
What I understand from RMS's answer is that he recognizes that the solution of using the AGPL + a CLA for allowing to sell exceptions creates an imbalance/unfair situation where only one entity can engage in the activity of selling exceptions, but ultimately he cares more about user freedom, and finds the solution of using the GPL to avoid the imbalance worse because anynody could modify the SaaS code without redistributing it, which means that the users freedoms are not respected. Basically, the GPL doesn't protect much the SaaS code and is somewhat similar to a permissive license in this setting. The AGPL protects the code better.

RMS doesn't like the GPL for SaaS software for exactly the same reason they created the AGPL in the first place, and developer inconvenience is less of a concern than potential user freedom breach.

The entity to which the exception is sold could itself close the software for its own users. But so could it if the code was released under a permissive licenses and this is, critically, why RMS finds this acceptable: he doesn't want to consider releasing software under permissive licenses unethical. This is a limit he doesn't want to cross. After all, one can't be blamed for all the sins in the world and it's the company closing the code that would be doing non-free software, not the original authors.

AGPL+CLA doesn't enable more cases of users losing freedom than a permissive license, so this is okay for RMS.

Now, it is a view strictly focused in terms of user freedom outcome and that's probably how anything RMS says should be interpreted by default. Nothing prevents you from considering that there are other aspects to consider and that the imbalance AGPL+CLA creates is unacceptable.

On a side note, it makes me think of the Qt business model.
by churchill | 2025-09-06 21:29:09+00:00
I'm just assessing your claim logically and it still doesn't make sense. For locals who live in the countryside, surrounded by fruit trees, it doesn't make sense paying for fruit when you can just walk over to your neighbor's tree, collect as much as you want and walk away.

The tradeoff is that your neighbor can also do to the same to your tree when it's ripe. This is not an African or third-world thing. In any farming community, whether in the US, Europe, or China, some even pick fallen fruit and put them in baskets for passersby; if you don't, it decays where it fell.

Given this is a low-income, agrarian community, this makes sense. It'd be unwise to spend money buying fruits when trees are (maybe) communally owned. So, the locals are not shortsighted ghouls who believe in just taking what they want. They see your sister as a member of their community and they're telling her, "Gee! help yourself. Stop acting like an outsider, lol."

Regarding gravel: anyone (relatively) wealthy enough to embark on building a concrete home in a third-world country won't have the energy/time to break up concrete to harvest aggregate. And when you break it up, you can't extract it perfectly. This is concrete we're talking about, no? So, it'll be clumpy. Again, the effort-to-outcome ratio is insane. Doing your boring day job and buying gravel from bulk suppliers is more reasonable.
by bobthepanda | 2025-09-06 21:29:27+00:00
there's a bunch of problems with the setup but a major one is that employer health plans are tax deductible. employees don't really get market choice, and employers really only care about reducing their own expense in regards to healthcare. ending this would be very expensive and disruptive for both employer and employee in the short term, and people have a strong preference for the devil they know vs. the devil they don't (either a public option or fully market-based healthcare)

it's worth noting that the healthcare system has a couple of antagonistic components and right now probably insurers are the only group actually fully happy with the situation. medical providers, pharmacists, and patients are all getting shafted.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-06 21:29:30+00:00
Well... we let people drink alcohol in excess, even though that often causes significant negative outcomes. We let people eat garbage overprocessed food, even though in quantity that can cause significant negative outcomes.

So we're not regulating every possible negative outcome. We're only blocking some that are "too" negative. Where's the line? It moves over time, and it changes from area to area. Food, for example, is regulated as to poison, but not as to just being junk.

We have the freedom of not living in a nanny state. Not everything that can cause harm is forbidden.
by kldg | 2025-09-06 21:29:31+00:00
Agreed. I met my late wife on social media. You could definitely make friends on things like forums, but the people on modern social media platforms are different; there's a complete, pervasive lack of trust among today's users.

In the 90s and into the mid-aughts, we would give out our names, phone numbers, and addresses no problem. It's a world where cryptocurrency could sprout because it was built around chat rooms and forums with like-minded individuals, or individuals working/playing in particular niches. Today, most people seem to assume giving your address is something only an idiot would do, or that times have changed drastically so it was fine then but stupid now.

I think we live in a world now where people are conditioned to no longer speak to each other. This is a world where Jesus would be very strange indeed, even if we do find ourselves under a nominally Christian nationalist government. Imagine letting a stranger into your house, or even talking to a stranger in a parking lot. There will, for sure, be no kind of foot-washing.

I agree this is largely conditioning coming from the gamification of socializing brought on by social media and other websites to drive engagement. I don't think the average Internet user would be like this without conditioning by big technology companies. I think it can be beaten by recognizing it as a harmful addiction, and an addiction that can be pretty tough to beat. Government and tech companies aren't going to fix it; it's something you have to want to fix for yourself.
by martin-t | 2025-09-06 21:30:58+00:00
Funny that you say that because at some point I started dividing people in my head into what I call builders and redistributors:

- Builders produce food, mine resources, build houses/machines, do research, provide essential services, etc.

- Redistributors take a cut from builders, by providing a non-essential service like salesmen or assistants who call themselves managers, by getting themselves into a position of power where they have many builders work "under" them or simply by holding and "renting" limited resources like housing

I feel like this division is at the core of inequality (money per unit of work only as long as you work vs money for no work in perpetuity). Yet at the same time it's not talked about at all.