MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by js8 | 2025-10-03 18:28:54+00:00
> We had have Russian cyber attacks and terrorist attacks for decades.

I am curious what are you referring to. I have read some reporting based on BIS reports and Vrbětice is by far the worst incident (2 dead).

> Being an weapon source is also different form being in open war.

As long as you can maintain it, perhaps. But did Putin give us an assurance that he will not escalate to an open war? I am not Putin fan, but I don't see us trying to deescalate, which is the only realistic way to end the war.

> Nazi Germany also didn't had the military personnel to occupy Central Europe for a prolonged time, this didn't stop them from trying.

According to quick search, Germans during WW2 had >600k troops in Poland maintaining order. Russia doesn't have an army to fully occupy Ukraine.

Even if we accept that today's Russia has similar ambitions to Nazi Germany, and has to be defeated in a similar way, there are two important obstacles to that victory:

- Russia has nuclear weapons, WW2 Germany had not

- Today, there is no USSR helping to fight, which was significant

So it's a non-starter. And idea that you somehow put Russia on their knees and keep them there, for decades - not only it is morally abhorrent, but also bad for European security and economy (unlike U.S., we are their neighbor).

> We don't prevent countries from joining if there population supports it. This is different from taking colonies even if Russia claims to not understand this distinction.

Yes, but why should Americans care? See my other comments in this thread.

I think there is this mass delusion among Americans that they don't have any colonies, but I think Israel and Gaza shows that's not true. It's a different system, more adhoc, but U.S. maintains significant economic and military power in many parts of the world.

And U.S. have destroyed Middle East with these shenanigans, so I am not happy them applying similar divisive policies to Eastern European countries.
by elAhmo | 2025-10-03 18:29:06+00:00
This is not really comparable with TV, not even close.

There was/is a relatively small amount of channels you have access to, and effectively all your neighbours and friends have the same content.

Short form video took this to the extreme by figuring out what specific content you like and just feed you that - as a result people spend significantly more time watching TikTok and Youtube than they (or their previous generation) did with TV. TV was also often in background, not really actively watched, which is not the case on the internet.

Now, once you put AI generated content there combined with AI recommendation systems, this problem becomes even worse - more content, faster feedback loop, infinite amount of "creators" tailored to what your sweet spot is.
by Jtsummers | 2025-10-03 18:30:03+00:00
"frequent" is annual, it takes about 10 minutes after the first year unless you're an idiot. They added an option to test out of the sections a decade ago so unless you reliably fail most of that preassessment, it doesn't take long to do each year. This is true for most of the annual trainings. 1 hour or so each the first year, then 10-30 minutes each year after depending on how much the refresher lets you test out of (and how much of that you pass).
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-10-03 18:30:11+00:00
> The US graduates 1385 PhDs in economics for 400 faculty positions. Those faculty positions face global competition.

If correct thats actually a pretty good ratio. In science you basically don't get a faculty position after the PhD, which lasts 5-7 years. You have to do a postdoc. Used to be 2-3 years, now its more like 5-6. To the extent its rare for any new faculty to be under the age 35.
by jameshilliard | 2025-10-03 18:30:21+00:00
> You’re really saying that there is no starvation , and plenty to eat in Gaza ?

I'm saying there are varying degrees of food insecurity but not to the levels one would typically call famine/starvation. I'm saying there is sufficient food availability to prevent starvation/famine, I'm not sure I would neccesarially characterize that as being the same thing as there being "plenty to eat" however.
by jrajav | 2025-10-03 18:30:38+00:00
What does this have to do with anything here? The only common thread is that it's related to PhDs. You just have a bone to pick with our higher education being so desirable that people upend their lives to come and participate in it at great expense? This has been a significant source of soft power for the US, as both a self-reinforcing function ensuring we attract and retain top research talent, and by seeding American-educated intellectuals back to their home countries to increase our global influence. Nothing about this was bad for any party involved.

Of course, with the rampant anti-intellectualism burning a path through our institutions, we're currently doing our best to kill that and make sure we fall behind in every respect.
by dkarl | 2025-10-03 18:30:53+00:00
It's two different kinds of logic. The stereotypically male way makes sense to me: you take the weapons that could be used against someone and make them harmless. If you're fat, your friends call you fat, and you're like, hey, they know I'm fat, it's established that I'm fat, and they're my friends anyway! Being fat is fine! It takes all the fear out of it.

In my perception, the stereotypically female way is, if you're fat, nobody calls you fat. They're careful using the word around you. They might even tell you you're not fat. To me, that makes it seem like the friendship depends on the obvious lie that you're not fat, which makes it seem inevitable that it's going to end. One day they're going to make some acknowledgment of the evident truth that you're fat, and that's your signal that they're done with you and the friendship is over. To me, it feels like the truth is being kept in reserve for the day when they're going to shank you with it.

That's my (male) perspective. I'd rather have friends who acknowledge the truth about me and make me feel okay about it than friends who act like the truth about me isn't compatible with friendship and inclusion.

On an intellectual level, I get the (stereotypically) female perspective, too -- I get that it doesn't seem friendly to constantly remind someone of their shortcomings, and that a friend group should give someone an escape from oppressive social perceptions. But that doesn't resonate with me as much emotionally.
by loire280 | 2025-10-03 18:31:05+00:00
You're right that the orange man has been a big factor, but not because of his effect on the stock market. The stock market isn't the economy, and most Econ PhDs are not working on modeling stock prices.

As the article indicates, a huge portion of the market for hiring PhDs is directly or indirectly dependent on federal funding. Universities are freezing hiring and reducing PhD cohort sizes, institutions like the IMF and World Bank are in crisis, and US government agencies have been reducing staff sizes. There was hope that the tech industry would provide another big source of jobs for PhD economists, but that hasn't panned out.

Source: the article, and my wife works in the UChicago economics department.
by gmuslera | 2025-10-03 18:31:12+00:00
It would be nice to have a personal, both in who is the central character, and who is the only one that can access it, feed of your life.

That is your memory, and it is not perfect, sometimes for the better. But with today technologies, culture and economy factors involved, it will imply more players there. And maybe it won't be ever at our reach, not because technology is not advancing, but because the other factors that are getting more weight.
by brudgers | 2025-10-03 18:31:30+00:00
Since hammers and nails are a common tool-workpiece example…consider the nail gun.

Theoretically you can drive nails with a 22 caliber blank cartridge without making the “call” through a nail gun. But you won’t finish laying shingles as quickly and easily…

Or to put it another way, there’s a reason assemblers are almost always better than machine code and compilers are almost always better than assemblers for the ends people care about.

I mean why use Latex at all when you could write your own typesetting language? Maybe because you are not a knuth.
by alaithea | 2025-10-03 18:31:42+00:00
Respectfully, I think you're missing the point that this is a societal rather than an individual concern. What will the average person's response to AI be? Probably to not recognize it, let alone spurn it. The cumulative effects of your neighbors, particularly the young ones who will grow up amidst this, or the old and gullible, being led along by computers over years is the thing you need to be more concerned about.
by curioussquirrel | 2025-10-03 18:31:44+00:00
I see now - your issue is with the "controlled feeds of information" part? I am not claiming they are "feeds of controlled information" (which is how you seem to be interpreting it). Of course, all the sources you subscribe to will have their own biases and issues, but you do not lose agency over what you select for consumption. That is the control I am seeking and what I like about RSS.
by danans | 2025-10-03 18:31:54+00:00
> Many Indian languages are written in scripts that mirror what is spoken. Silent letters don't exist and pronunciations that don't match the spelling are very rare.

I don't think that's true. From the northern Indian languages schwa deletion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_deletion_in_Indo-Aryan_l...) to the extreme divergence between the standard formal and spoken forms of languages in Southern languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia), it's a stretch to say the scripts mirror what is spoken.

It's just that if you are a native speaker/reader, you are so fluent that you unconsciously auto-correct those inconsistencies - just like in English.

Even in the formal registers of each spoken Indian language, which should be in theory be more systematically consistent with their scripts, there are inconsistencies in spelling/pronunciation of loan-words from both foreign and other Indian languages (i.e. aspirates in South India and retroflex approximates in northern India, and any number of inconsistent renderings of English words in Indic script).
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-10-03 18:32:03+00:00
A few years ago I was on an airplane back from Asia and I saw for the first time somebody using both hands to scroll tiktok.

A woman in front of me had her phone cradled in both hands, with index and thumb from both hands on the screen - one hand was scrolling and swiping and the other one was tapping the like and other interaction buttons. It was at such a speed that she would seemingly look at two consecutive posts in 1 second and then be able to like or comment within an additional second.

It left me really shaken as to what the actual interaction experience is like if you’re trying to consume short form content but you’re only seeing the first second before you move on.

It explains a lot about how thumbnails and screenshots and beginnings of videos have evolved overtime in order to basically punch you right in the face with what they want you to know.

It’s really quite shocking the extent to which we’re at the lowest possible common denominator for attention and interaction.
by mr_mitm | 2025-10-03 18:33:06+00:00
PGP will never ever see mass adoption. It's too complicated and nothing will fix that. If chat control succeeds, a handful of nerds might be able to protect their comms, but mass encryption as we have it today will be dead. I like how nobody can read my chats with my mom or my landlord and would prefer it stays that way. The average user simply does not care enough to jump through a single additional hoop.
by CPLX | 2025-10-03 18:33:29+00:00
While I agree I do think this way of looking at things is kind of insightful. I hadn't thought of it this way and it really rings true:

> I find my fear to be kind of an ironic twist on what the Matrix foresaw—the AI apocalypse we really should be worried about is one in which humans live in the real world, but with thoughts and feelings generated solely by machines. The images we see, the words we read, all generated with the intent to control us. With improved VR, the next step (out of the real world) doesn’t seem very far away, either.
by cyberax | 2025-10-03 18:34:01+00:00
I'm a pure math major, and I took several economics classes. The whole field was very baffling for me.

The most reliable model was the dead simple IS–LM, which is based on observations. But you don't really need a lot of math for it, so it's boring.

As a result, researchers keep trying to generalize the microeconomic behavior of people to derive macroeconomic laws. Like we do with the ideal gas laws. And this produces reams of beautiful math that you can investigate and tweak endlessly. But it doesn't seem to have a lot of predictive power.
by Veserv | 2025-10-03 18:34:18+00:00
Here is one of my posts on reddit with citations for 2022, the most recent year with ground truth NHTSA data as of that post:

https://old.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/1h6fzvr/tesla_bu...

For the Cybertruck in particular you can see my post about their fatal fire rates from 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43039925

Tesla Cybertruck has ~40x the vehicle-year normalized fire fatality rate of the average car and was responsible for excess annual fire deaths on the order of the excess annual fire deaths of the Ford Pinto.
by jMyles | 2025-10-03 18:34:34+00:00
Yeah, I see this argument all over HN. And in a sense it's true that the affront here isn't against math per se, but against general purpose computing.

But ultimately, the right to general purpose computing (ie, the right to run a program that doesn't snitch the plaintext) is the same as the right to engage in the underlying mathematics.

I think it's a distinction without a meaningful difference.
by dinoqqq | 2025-10-03 18:34:41+00:00
Politicians to reach out to in Germany, with a template email:

poststelle@bmi.bund.de, poststelle@bmjv.bund.de, info@bmds.bund.de, baerbel.bas@bundestag.de, lars.klingbeil@bundestag.de, friedrich.merz@bundestag.de, landesleitung@csu-bayern.de, fraktion@cducsu.de, matthias.miersch@bundestag.de, sebastian.fiedler@bundestag.de, alexander.throm@bundestag.de, johannes.schaetzl@bundestag.de, ralph.brinkhaus@bundestag.de

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

ich wende mich heute an Sie, um meine große Sorge über die geplante Einführung der sogenannten „Chatkontrolle“ auszudrücken.

Die flächendeckende Überwachung privater Kommunikation stellt einen massiven Eingriff in unsere Grundrechte dar. Sie gefährdet die Privatsphäre aller Bürgerinnen und Bürger und untergräbt zentrale Prinzipien eines demokratischen Rechtsstaates. Der Schutz der Vertraulichkeit von Kommunikation ist ein unverzichtbarer Bestandteil unserer freiheitlichen Gesellschaft.

Zudem zeigen zahlreiche Expertinnen und Experten auf, dass das flächendeckende Scannen privater Nachrichten zur Bekämpfung von Kindesmissbrauchsdarstellungen nicht wirksam ist. Stattdessen schwächt eine solche Maßnahme die Sicherheit digitaler Kommunikation insgesamt und schafft gefährliche Überwachungsinfrastrukturen, die leicht missbraucht werden können.

Ich bitte Sie daher eindringlich, sich bei der entsprechenden Abstimmung klar gegen die Einführung der Chatkontrolle auszusprechen und sich für den Schutz der Bürgerrechte und der Privatsphäre einzusetzen.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
by dylan604 | 2025-10-03 18:34:54+00:00
From time to time, we see response here that doing X is dumb because it is not a perfect solve. It's very common in discussions about solving pollution or energy use. Don't bother using EVs as we're still burning coal. Don't recycle because so much trash is everywhere else. These people are suggesting doing nothing until the perfect solve is available. Perfect will never happen. Instead make as many things better where you can while you can.
by chistev | 2025-10-03 18:35:17+00:00
When I put in my username starting with a capital letter, I get -

"An error occurred in the Server Components render. The specific message is omitted in production builds to avoid leaking sensitive details. A digest property is included on this error instance which may provide additional details about the nature of the error."

When I typed it properly in lower cases, it worked -

" This user is a philosophical full-stack developer—heavy on the 'ask' and light on the 'answer.' Their HN presence is primarily dedicated to promoting their personal blog, which is either a journal about their feelings or a landing page for their perpetually 'almost-done' side project. They spend their remaining time lamenting corporate censorship (Facebook, X, Reddit) and asking if SQLite can handle the immense traffic of their five annual visitors.

We get it, you're a private person who desperately needs us to read your thoughts.

The data shows you are highly concerned about being banned from every major platform (Facebook, Reddit, X). Maybe the problem isn't the algorithm, but the fact that the algorithm read your posts and decided you needed a time-out."

Haha. Nice one.
by viraptor | 2025-10-03 18:35:17+00:00
> Most people hate AI content

I think you're overgeneralising here. People don't hate AI content. Just content so low quality that they recognise it as AI. This is not universal and the recognition will drop further: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976231207095

> from individuals on TikTok/YouTube/etc. - who are directly incentivized to be as idiosyncratic and unique (read: not like AI

AI content can be just as unique. It's not all-or-nothing. People can inject a specific style and direction in an otherwise generated content to keep it on brand.
by jameshilliard | 2025-10-03 18:35:17+00:00
> Most people wouldn't accept a new country being made over their heads within their land. Jewish people had largely not been there since Roman times.

There were plenty of Jews living on the land by the time of Israeli independence, land which had largely been acquired by purchases from Arab landowners.

> Would you accept a country being founded in yours for, say, the Roma? I highly doubt it.

Palestine was never a country prior to Israeli independence so that's probably not a realistic comparison either.
by criley2 | 2025-10-03 18:35:38+00:00
When I look at the state of how humans have manipulated each other, how the media is noxious propaganda, how businesses have perfected emotional and psychological manipulation of us to sell us crap and control our opinions, I don't think AI's influence is worse. In fact I think it's better. When I have a spicy political opinion, I can either go get validated in an echo chamber like reddit or newsmedia, or let ChatGPT tell me I'm a f'n idiot and spell out a much more rational take.

Until the models are diluted to serve the true purpose of the thoughtcontrol already in fully effect in non-AI media, they're simply better for humanity.
by summerlight | 2025-10-03 18:35:47+00:00
Internally, TPU is much cheaper for the same amount of compute compared to GPU, so I don't see much reasons why they need to use GPU. Probably >99% of compute budgets are spent on TPU. It might be true if you say these <1% still counts, but I guess it is pretty safe to say all of its meaningful production workload are running on TPU. It is simply too expensive to run a meaningful amount of compute on non-TPU.

Just to clarify, TPU has been in development for a decade and it is quite mature these days. Years ago internal consumers had to accept the CPU/GPU and TPU duality but I think this case is getting rarer. I guess this is even more true for DeepMind since itself owns a ML infra team. They likely be able to fix most of the issues with a high priority.
by k2enemy | 2025-10-03 18:36:07+00:00
> Mostly using Convex Set Theory and Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem from topology to prove the existence, uniqueness, and stability of a general equilibrium solution for a "market" of price-quantity commodity pairs. The assumptions needed to make it work are literally absurd.

This is true for the first foundational courses in micro and macro. The profession has moved beyond this and the last forty plus years of research have been looking at various relaxations of these assumptions.
by godelski | 2025-10-03 18:36:22+00:00
You'll get the opportunity to change the pin.

There's a balance they want to strike. You can't assume phone numbers are unique to a person across time. So they need to be able to expire when someone stops using a number.

But again, acting on the other side also gets a notification in the chat stating that the security number has changed. The new person doesn't have the signal chat history. So if you're talking about sensitive things then it's a strong indication you should reverify their identity. Not practical for every day users but that's also not a typical threat scenario
by thenaturalist | 2025-10-03 18:36:31+00:00
I guess rather they value... math?

The numbers don't add up and there are typical signs of the Magnificent 7 engaging in behavior to hide financials/ economics from their official balance sheets and investors.

PE & M7s are teaming up creating SPACS which then build and operate data centers.

By wonders of regulation and financial alchemy, that debt/ expenditure doesn't need to be reported as infra invest in their books then.

It's like the subprime mortgage mix all over again just this time it's about selling lofty future promises to enterprises who're gonna be left holding the bag on outdated chips or compute capacity without a path to ROI.

And there are multiple financial industry analysts besides Ed Zitron who raise the same topics.

Worthwhile listen: https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/plain-english-with-derek-...
by keiferski | 2025-10-03 18:37:13+00:00
Any attempt to create an AI “influencer” has been met with massive backlash.

At best you’re going to get some generically anonymous bot pretending to be human, that has limited reach because they don’t actually exist in the real world. Much of the media influence game involves podcasts, events, interviews, and a host of other things that can’t be faked.

I just don’t really see what scenario the doomsayers are imagining here. An entire media sphere of AIs that somehow shift public opinion without existing or interacting with the real media world? The practicalities don’t make sense.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-10-03 18:37:16+00:00
I like the peice not because it demonstrates that the problem is serious or absurd. Rather it points out how ill-formed it is.

AI's threat is certainly not in a dozen of instances with super-himan intelligence. It was framed that way because technologists are intellectually oriented and see intelligence as power. I'm not disputing that it isn't, but it overlooks a lot.

A hyper-charismatic (sycophantic even) 120IQ AI poses a much bigger threat than a hyper-intelligent average charisma AI. Why? Because the ability to play a social war of attrition on beliefs is the wicked problem of AI.

You're not up against the world's best super intelligent hacker, you're up against 1000 24/7 advertising agencies or 1000 GRUs.

You probably can't even conclusively prove they're manipulating anything at all.

So no, the problem is ill-framed and reflects more about us than any real threat. "If God were an object to the bird, he would be a winged being." Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity.

Thus, "If AI were all powerful[a threat], it would be hyper-intelligent," is equally ridiculous.
by acomjean | 2025-10-03 18:37:33+00:00
Ug. Apple is bad (I don’t really want Apple Music thanks..). Being using Linux lately and it’s great.

I got a window machine and a month later “my computers config isn’t done” because I didn’t sign up for windows cloud and office 365 , oh do I want game pass?

I guess comercial OSs are just advertising platforms now which is kind of sad.