MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gostsamo | 2025-10-28 18:13:03+00:00
Mass culture is educating people to a level which it wasn't possible before, pruning really bad examples, and suggesting attainable relationships with self and the world. Lead is maybe a big reason why it succeeds, but even before the 192x when the lead started, people and craziness were wide spread. What happened with the maturation of all the media channels is that old religious and religion-derived psychoses were pushed out of fashion and being yourself wasn't opposed by centuries old norms. Being creative is often correlated with suffering and we are actually happy right now.

I don't mean that we don't have problems and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few is maybe causing part of the uniformity, but generally, we call them creative solutions, because they are aimed at uncomfortable problems.
by zie | 2025-10-28 18:13:06+00:00
We transfer ACH files(i.e. paychecks) via SSH(SFTP) to several banks. You better believe I check keys. One of the banks forces key rotation every 2-ish years. I absolutely verify it every rotation and delete the old keys.

Occasionally it fails, almost always it's something unexpected happening, but occasionally we catch their errors(verified by connecting from various endpoints/DNS queries/etc). We used to call them all the time whenever that happened. Now we just auto-retry on failure in an hour and that fixes the issue all of the time(so far). We only re-try once and then fail with a ticket. Most of us like our paychecks, so we are pretty good about getting that ticket resolved quickly.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-10-28 18:13:07+00:00
There is a term for this, at least some people used to use it, I think it would appear as tied to certain kind of "ideology" to most though:

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

I also guess it is just a wordy description of the combination of commercial entertainment and industrialization.

I like your point, although I feel that in some contexts, it was probably _easier_ for people to create something they feel is valuable as art and also can earn them money, a few decades ago.

I don't think the tension has evaporated, it's just the difference between "art" and "entertainment". Sure, you can always say that entertainment is art. No matter if you're Christopher Nolan or a street musician who knows what to play to get some money.

The tension is still there, there's just a mass-scale production of commercial art that hasn't been there before.

But I'd say that probably, with these products that have giant budgets and are feeding thousands of people, there are just a few people involved who consider themselves artists in a sense that isn't the same in that a baker or sewer is also an artist.

No coincidence we're discussing this in a forum that has software development as a main subject.

Christopher Nolan's movies are "art" the same way Microsofts UI design is art, IMHO.

I didn't bring Nolan into this in order to be smug about him, his work just feels like it symbolizes this kind of industrial cultural production well, especially because many people might consider him a top-notch _artist_.
by cj | 2025-10-28 18:13:14+00:00
When employers do a reference check, the reference has a choice of:

1) Sticking to the legally safe answer of only confirming dates

OR

2) Confirm dates and share a few anecdotes about how the person was good to work with

If a previous employer chooses only to confirm dates, and refuses to answer any other questions, it's often a way of signaling something bad went down but you can't talk about it.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-28 18:13:20+00:00
There is a vast gulf between "GPT-5 can drive a car" and "a neural network using the transformer architecture can be trained to drive a car". And I see no proof whatsoever that we can, today, train a single model that can both write a play and drive a car. Even less so one that could do both at the same time, as a generally intelligent being should be able to.

If someone wants to claim that, say, GPT-5 is AGI, then it is on them to connect GPT-5 to a car control system and inputs and show that it can drive a car decently well. After all, it has consumed all of the literature on driving and physics ever produced, plus untold numbers of hours of video of people driving.
by hypeatei | 2025-10-28 18:13:41+00:00
> Can someone explain the angle here?

RFK (or maybe Trump) gave themselves an arbitrary deadline of September this year to "find the cause of autism" which obviously meant they had to find a scapegoat. Some speculate that they went after Kenvue/J&J because they weren't kowtowing hard enough to the administration and there was junk science around Tylenol/Autism links which made it an easy target.
by xwowsersx | 2025-10-28 18:13:41+00:00
Well, of course you're correct that SQL is text, but that's not what the article is arguing about. The point isn't whether SQL is text... it's about the kind of text it is.

SQL is a formal language, not a natural one. It's precise, rigid, and requires a specialized understanding of schema, joins, and logic. text-to-sql systems don't exist because people are too lazy to type; they exist because most people can't fluently express analytical intent in sql syntax. They can describe what they want in natural language ("show me all active users who registerd this year"), but translating that into correct, optimized sql requires at least familiarity, and sometimes expertise

So the governance challenges discussed in the article aren't about "oh SQL is too hard to type"...they're about trust, validation, and control when you introduce an AI intermediary that converts natural lang into a query that might affect sensitive data
by lopsidedmarble | 2025-10-28 18:13:44+00:00
Failing the smell test.

This feels more like someone trying to sell you something than help you find satiating foods.

There really is only one study in the field of satiety: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15701207_A_Satiety_...

Which to the articles credit, it links in reference '3', but then fails to use the data within.

The journal article cites potatoes as having a Satiety Index % of 323+-51. The next highest is Ling Fish with 225+-30, yet TFA omits mentioning potatoes and chooses rather to harp on about protein protein protein which is very faddy diet advice across all major social media platforms at the moment.
by Izkata | 2025-10-28 18:13:46+00:00
That's only the case where a usable generic core already exists. A great example where it didn't exist is python's "requests" library: https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

The example on the homepage is the "specific shell" - simple and easy to use, and by far the most common usage, but if you scroll down the table of contents on the API page (https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/) you'll see sections titled "Lower-Level Classes" and "Lower-Lower-Level Classes" - that's the generic core, which the upper level is implemented in terms of.
by tombert | 2025-10-28 18:13:47+00:00
I don’t have an issue with garbage collectors. Most code I write is GC’d.

The thing that actually convinced me to learn Rust was for something that I wanted to use less memory; my initial Clojure version, compiled with GraalVM, hovered around 100 megs. When I rewrote it in Rust, it hovered around 500kb.

It’s not completely apples to apples, and the laptop running this code has a ton of RAM anyway, but it’s still kind of awesome to see a 200x reduction in memory without significantly more complicated code.

A lot of the stuff I have to do in Rust for GC-less memory safety ends up being stuff I would have to do anyway in a GC’d language, e.g. making sure that one thread owns the memory after it has been transferred over a channel.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-28 18:13:47+00:00
> "Indoors" lets you store food without insects or other animals getting to it & stealing it.

This isn't true of human doors; insects are very small.

We've had the technology to keep things in wax-sealed clay jars for quite a while, but I'm not aware that this was done with grain, where preventing spoilage would have been most valuable. Granaries are open to the air. (And devote quite a lot of effort to slowing the spoilage of the grain.)

If you wanted food that wouldn't rot, instead of keeping it in an airtight environment, you dried it.
by baggachipz | 2025-10-28 18:13:50+00:00
Bearing in mind that I'm nothing resembling an accountant, I believe it has to do with getting them off the books by the end of the quarter before the statement goes out. That shows as less liability for the quarterly statement. The cost of severance and hiring is for the next quarter, so it doesn't affect the current quarter's numbers.

So:

- Company has 10 employees at an annual cost of 100k each. That's 250k (1mm / 4) of employee expenses for the quarter.

- Company lays off 5 employees right before the end of the quarter. That's only 5 employees on the payroll in the current quarter, because you account for the number of employees when the statement is issued. Re-hiring and severance payouts are going to be done sometime in the future.

Congratulations, your employee expense was only 125k for the quarter!
by purrcat259 | 2025-10-28 18:14:25+00:00
Maltese has been loaded with loan words since forever. 5 points if you can guess where bonġu, bravu and mappa come from. At some point there was some literary council for the language that decided that any new loan words should just be spelled phonetically. Computer became kompjuter.

Businesses do work in Maltese and English. Both are official languages. Its quite rare to encounter a business that deals near exclusively in Maltese. Many prefer Maltese but will fall back to english where necessary.

Regarding monolignual speakers, I think theres a lot of stereotypes for maltese only, english only and code switchers. I think its all a bit silly... So as long as communication can happen I don't fuss.

On Maltese music... There's a lot of low ish quality music then there's a few absolute gems. Look up The Travellers, Lapes, Jon Mallia on YouTube/Spotify.
by tensor | 2025-10-28 18:14:43+00:00
Much of the neural network work was funded by Canadian Universities, and commercialized by US companies. Even if you look just at the "Attention is all you need" paper, which is primarily by authors working at Google, most of those authors come from academia and are immigrants.

Vaswani is an Indian born computer scientist, Shazeer is US, Parmar was born in India, Uszkoreit was born in Germany, Jones was born in the UK, Gomez is British-Canadian, Kaiser is a Polish computer scientist, and Polosukhin is Ukrainian.

Almost all of these people have PhDs and Master degrees. The ROI on academia is vast for society, including European universities. The thing the US does well is capitalize on that education, and sadly also try to steal credit for it as "American exceptionalism." If Europe and other countries learn how to keep their academics and get them working in local industries, America's edge will evaporate overnight.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-10-28 18:14:57+00:00
Hmm, not really sure that’s what complecting is.

I think the stack traces comment is fair, but not really about complecting.

Complecting would be say if your source code had to be compiled at the same time as the JVM’s source code, and you put your type definitions inside the memory manager’s code. Otherwise I don’t have to think about the JVM memory manager to write a program (generally speaking).
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-10-28 18:16:20+00:00
> weaponizing the judicial system

To be fair to Trump, he was the target of lawfare after his election loss in 2020, for instance. He claimed later that he would have vengeance. Not a magnanimous move, but Trump is not magnanimous. He has stated before that he enjoys destroying his enemies, with relish and verve.

In any case, when we fixate on one political figure or party, we lose sight of the general picture. In sociological terms, Trump is not very important. He is more of an expression of the times than their cause. He may catalyze certain changes, but he's hardly alone in doing that. In the broad sense, the general historical trajectory is not really deflected by him.

A wiser perspective is to look at broad trends. One should read Plato's Republic. The decadence of society described in that book - degenerating into timocracy (rule by honor), then oligarchy (rule by wealth), then democracy (rule by freedom), ending finally in anarchy - are a good context for understanding how these processes tend to play out.
by zdragnar | 2025-10-28 18:16:24+00:00
RFK didn't make it all up. J&J execs have been concerned about a possible link for years, based on leaked memos: https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/bombshel...

The link isn't solid, so there's not exactly much of a case, and probably better to take it for high fever than taking nothing at all... we think.

The big deal is that it's yet another case of government and big corporations hiding evidence that things aren't what they want us to think they are. RFK's big deal is simple:

1- autism diagnosis rates have skyrocketed

2- food today isn't what it used to be, what with all the dyes and not-food things put into food

3- daily diet advice is wildly inconsistent and based on old data

4- things which we've been taking for granted, like "tylenol is perfectly safe" or "the covid vaccine is perfectly safe" when neither are strictly true causes people to have LESS trust in the government, not more. Rather than treating everyone like idiots, give them information to make informed choices. There'll still be idiots either way, but better (in his mind) to let the rest make up their own minds on what they put into their bodies
by torginus | 2025-10-28 18:16:36+00:00
I think delivery is horrible - it strains the infrastructure with these couriers dashing about, most of whom are paid terribly and have little prospects or job safety.

These middlemen delivery companies are abusive and rent-seeking, contributing very little to the product but taking an immense share of the profits.

It also destroys every restaurant's natural advantage of closeness - if you run a pizzeria and your food is not horrible, you can naturally expect people from about 2 city blocks over to eat there - now, they're competing with every pizzeria in the city.
by glenstein | 2025-10-28 18:16:42+00:00
>Regardless, the term “sideload” was coined to insinuate that there is something dark and sinister about the process, as if the user were making an end-run around safeguards that are designed to keep you protected and secure.

I also recall a time in the nascent era of web file hosts, like Rapidshare.de and Mega upload, and some others that came and went so quick that I don't even remember their names, some services offered the option to "sideload" (as opposed to download) straight to their file server.
by jethro_tell | 2025-10-28 18:16:49+00:00
Well, There's not going to be much because it would violate NDA, but, nothing is 'elastic'.

Somewhere, someone, has to buy a set amount of servers, based on a running capacity projection and build those into usable machines. The basis of a datacenter, is an inventory system, a dhcp server, a tftp server, and a DNS server that get used to manage the lifecycle of hardware servers. That's what everyone did at one point, and the best of them build themselves tooling.

What amazon has is built on what was available at the time both for tooling and existing systems that they'd have to integrate with. You almost certainly don't have to build anything that complex. Additionally, you can get an off the shelf DCIM that integrates with your DHCP and DNS servers and trigger ansible runners in your boot sequences that handle the lifecycle steps. It's considerably easier to do now than it was 15 years ago.

While they don't use AWS specifically for a lot of stuff, the internal tooling can still build thousands of boxes an hour though they don't really pay for UI work for that stuff.

You can put a host(s) in a fleet, tell it the various software sets you want installed and click go and you'll have a fleet when you come back, so don't think that what you're being asked to build is impossible or not being used under every single major cloud provider or VPS provider.

The slightly harder part is deciding what you're going to give to devs for a front end. Are you providing raw hosts, VMs, container fleets, all of it? how are you handling multi-zone or multi-region . . ., how are you billing or throttling resources between teams.

The beauty of this is you get a lot of stuff for free these days. You can build out a fleet, provide a few build scripts that can be pulled into some CI/CD pipeline in your code forge of choice and you don't really need to build a UI.

Provisioning tooling is hard, but it's a lot easier now that it was 15/20 years ago and all the parts are there. I've built it several times on very small teams. I would have loved to have 10 devs to build something like that, but the reality is that you can get 80% with a little glue code and a few open source servers.
by pixl97 | 2025-10-28 18:17:06+00:00
The original movies thing probably had more to do with ownership of theaters and IP spread over a much larger number of companies, as you say with the corporate consolidation. A huge amount of consolidation has occurred and it's not something instantly noticeable.

For anyone saying bring back the lead, most of the problems there weren't obvious or out in the open. You're bringing back even more abuse and dark things.
by anonu | 2025-10-28 18:17:09+00:00
The problem is the insurance+hospital industrial complex. The insurance companies will negotiate this down on your behalf. They basically operate on fear of walking into a hospital and getting a 6-figure bill.

My SO had to take a medevac helicopter once: we got a $65k bill just for the 20-minute helicopter ride which suddenly became under $4k with insurance. The discount made me feel like I was getting a deal, so I gladly paid.
by intrasight | 2025-10-28 18:17:10+00:00
Health Care Sharing Ministries (HCSMs) are an interesting loophole in healthcare regulations that excepts uninsured people that participate in an HCSM from paying the tax penalty.

HCSMs are membership organizations in which people with common religious or ethical beliefs share medical expenses with one another. They are not the same as traditional health insurance.

Because patients are considered "self-pay", they negotiate their own prices with providers and they are likely to get an 80% or more discount on "list price" for the service. They are reimbursed by the HCSM if the HCSM approves the reimbursement.

As of 2025, approximately 1.7 million Americans participate in Health Care Sharing Ministries (HCSMs), which amounts to about 0.5% of the U.S. population. In Colorado alone, HCSM enrollment (at least 68k) is equivalent to 30 percent of Obamacare enrollment.

Because HCSMs often exclude essential health services and are therefore more attractive to people who are relatively healthy, enrollment of this size, relative to marketplace enrollment, may increase premiums for marketplace plans.

I am not promoting HCSMs but I did research it when I lost my COBRA coverage a few years ago. I do find it an interesting alternative approach to paying for healthcare. We really do need to explore options in this country.

I can definitely see AI being applied in the HCSM context.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFetFqrVBNc
by tw04 | 2025-10-28 18:17:25+00:00
>TLS verifies that the URL matches cert through the chain of trust,

I think you need to point out that TLS utilizes the browsers cert store for that chain of trust. If a bad actor acquires an entity that has a trusted cert, or your cert store is compromised, that embedded cert store is almost entirely useless which has happened on more than one occassion (Chinese government and Symantec most recently).

https://expeditedsecurity.com/blog/control-the-ssl-cas-your-...

This is typically caught pretty quickly but there's almost nothing a user can do to defend against a chain of trust attack. With SSH, while nobody does it, at least you have the ability to protect yourself.
by ks2048 | 2025-10-28 18:17:28+00:00
From the paper:

As the aim of EuroLLM is to provide EU citizens with powerful and useful AI tools, it is critical that the model can also translate and answer questions in other European and non-European languages. With this in mind, we added support for 11 additional languages (Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Galician, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian).
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-28 18:17:48+00:00
Not really. The healthcare market is a very heavily regulated market, not an unregulated free market. The prices are not a result of there being a free market without regulation, but a product of what is and is not regulated. Both government and insurers take into account the "sticker price" of service in setting their reimbursement limits (they either have negotiated discounts from the sticker price, limit reimbursement based on the general charge to the public along with other factors, etc.)

As a result, the nominal general charge to the uninsured public is generally inflated, but also tend to be very easy to negotiate down.
by Galanwe | 2025-10-28 18:18:38+00:00
Seriously at this point who cares about US licenses ?

It has been abuduntly clear that AI companies can train however they want, and nobody will enforce anything.

Realistically speaking, even if you could prove someone misused your software as per this license, I don't expect anything to happen. Sad but true.

At this point, I don't care about licensing my code anymore, I just want the option to block it from being accessed from the US, and force its access through a country where proper litigation is possible.
by hackinthebochs | 2025-10-28 18:18:41+00:00
This argument is vacuous. Truth is always external to the system. Nothing goes wrong inside the human when he makes an unintentionally false claim. He is simply reporting on what he believes to be true. There are failures leading up to the human making a false claim. But the same can be said for the LLM in terms of insufficient training data.

>The lexical structure of the statement is highly congruent with its training data and the previous statements.

This doesn't accurately capture how LLMs work. LLMs have an ability to generalize that undermines the claim of their responses being "highly congruent with training data".
by cj | 2025-10-28 18:19:04+00:00
I took 10k iu via a multivitamin for a few months, and ended up with Vitamin D levels 5x higher than the maximum on the labcorp reference range. "Vitamin D toxicity"

It took many months to get the levels back to normal. Vitamin D is one of those things that once you overdose, it takes many months for the levels to slowly come down after you stop supplementing.

Be careful with Vitamin D!

The downside to having high levels is plaque/calcium deposits in arteries, if I'm not mistaken. Which can be mitigated by taking K2.
by rzerowan | 2025-10-28 18:19:13+00:00
Yep the big three plus Huawei with a bit of an edge on them with te standard essential patent , that they collaborate in a pool with.Although in the matter of mobile modems/radios Qualcomm has an edge over all the others - not so much in the backend/longhaul telco space. Additionally if i recall most of the 6G stuff is being pushed by Huawei since most of it rests on the current 5G/5G+ work.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-28 18:19:40+00:00
If there's a settlement, that's as good as a win for those that believe this. They will look guilty as hell to everyone that wants to believe. I don't see any way a settlement is a valid choice for the defense. This is one of those you want to end decisively. Any time it is brought up after, you just point back to the court case. If you settle, any time it is brought up after there will always be linger speculation on why did they settle. It will forever be an albatross around their neck.