MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lateforwork | 2025-10-19 17:19:43+00:00
Quality of life has greatly improved since the 1970s.

Consumer goods have generally fallen in price (adjusted for inflation) while improving in quality relative to the 1970s, so we have become wealthier (using PG's definition of wealth):

Televisions, computers, smartphones, clothing (mass-produced apparel is cheaper due to global supply chains and automation), household appliances (items like refrigerators, washing machines, and microwaves are less expensive relative to income), air travel, telecommunications, consumer electronics, automobiles, furniture have fallen in price and gone up in quality.

Housing and healthcare are two items that have gone in the opposite direction. I think this is where AI and robots will make a difference. Houses can be 3D printed [1] and nursing and medical advice can be made cheaper using AI/robots as well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXUX6dv2_Yo
Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
by jwithington | 2025-10-19 17:19:49+00:00
In certain large industries it feels like there's more urgency to migrate off of VMware than there is to do genAI stuff.

Do others sense this? If so, what options do you see for folks to keep their servers but move off of VMware? Is it all RedHat?
by ako | 2025-10-19 17:19:52+00:00
Bosses should be able to make decisions about jobs or AI. That ok.

But as a society we have to ask ourselves if replacing all jobs with AI will make for a better society. Life is not all about making as much money as possible. For a working society citizen need meaning in their lives, and safety, and food, and health. If most people get too little of this, it may disrupt society, and cause wars and riots.

This is where government needs to step in, uncontrolled enterprise greed will destroy countries. But companies don´t care, they'll just move to another country. And the ultra-rich don´t care, they'll just put larger walls around their houses or move country.
by b112 | 2025-10-19 17:20:54+00:00
Please. I've definitely smelled off food, and of course don't eat it. The mayo in question was some weird spicy stuff, and it didn't smell or taste bad.

Note:

https://www.sciencealert.com/sniff-tests-wont-save-you-from-...

You cannot smell or taste all forms of bad food. At all.
by msephton | 2025-10-19 17:21:04+00:00
I use ripgrep to search file listings from my collection of 500+ vintage Macintosh Magazine CD-ROMs (1 million files; 30 million unzipped. I'm no database programmer but I could get anywhere near the same ballpark of speed as ripgrep and regex is good enough for querying plain text files. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43607153
by anjel | 2025-10-19 17:21:13+00:00
Todays appliances are built, by design, to break fast these days. So whether old (operating costs) or new (foreshortened lifespan) your appliances cost you more.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/modern-appliances...

(https://ghostarchive.org/archive/KGf2Z)
by brookst | 2025-10-19 17:21:21+00:00
Don't most of us know what's in our threat model?

Nobody spends energy worrying that the universe is an evil compiler that warps reality specifically to target us. Because 1) it's unlikely, and 2) if it were true there's no change in defensive posture that would help. It's the same for most individuals when considering being targeted by state actors. Unlikely, and not defensible, so no point hand wringing.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-10-19 17:21:26+00:00
That makes it sound like there was some sort of plan or strategy to try to end abuse of illegal drugs. There wasn't. First they propped up cartels in order to sell drugs. Then when our people got addicted to them, they passed draconian laws to punish the drug addicts (and marginalized communities that have no way to live except drugs). And finally they invaded and destabilized a country, enabling the mass production of cheap opium/heroin, which was sold to our citizens. The trillions of dollars and millions put in jail was to incarcerate our own citizens that we got hooked on drugs in the first place. The war wasn't on drugs, it was on communism and poor minorities.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-10-19 17:21:31+00:00
What scared me in that thread was the mention of the fake lubuntu site that is still up since someone took over the old domain last year(?). I downloaded and installed lubuntu just some week ago. Luckily I am pretty sure I downloaded it from the real site. The fake one only has downloads up to 19.04 or something.

Have not installed Lubuntu in a few years, so never noticed any of the news of the domain change and take-over. Did not really find anything more about it when searching today?
by cvoss | 2025-10-19 17:21:46+00:00
It's named that for a reason. It has to do with invariance under an arbitrary selection of parameters like scale, hence, choice of railroad gauge.

At least they tried to give a descriptive name! Most ideas are named after the people who are most closely associated with them. Yang-Mills. Newtonian. Euclidean. Planck. Many of those names invoke very specific ideas, even though eponyms are about as opaque as they come.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-19 17:22:00+00:00
That is what I wrote if I wasn't clear. Thanks for putting it in clear words I suppose

I 100% agree. I mean that was what I was trying to convey I guess if I didn't get side tracked thinking about govt regulation but yeah I agree completely.

It's sort of self sabotage but hey one thing I have come to know about humans is that judging them for things is gonna push them even further into us vs them, we need to know the reasons behind why people feel so easy to conform to llm's. I guess sycophancy is the idea. People want to know that they are right and the world is wrong and most people sometimes don't give a fuck about other problems and if they do, then they try to help and that can involve pointing to reality. AI just delays it by saying something sycophantic which drives a person even further into the hole.

I guess we need to understand them. Its become a reality dude, there are people already marrying chatbots or what not, I know you must have heard of these stories...

We are not talking about something in the distinct future, its happening as we speak

I think the answer to why is desperation. There are so many things broken in the society in dating that young people feel like being alone is better and chatbots to satisfy whatever they are feeling.

I feel like some people think they deserve love and there's nothing wrong with that but then its also at the same time that you can't expect any person to just love you at the same time, they are right in thinking about themselves too. So those people who feel like they deserve love flock to chatbot which showers them sycophancy and fake love but people are down bad for fake love as well, they will chase anything that resembles love, even if its a chatbot.

Its a societal problem I suppose, maybe internet fueled it accidentally because we fall in love with people over just texts so we have equated a person to texts and thus love, and now we have got clankers writing texts and fellow humans intrepreting it as love.

Honestly, I don't blame them but I sympathesize with them. They just need someone to tell their day to. Underputting them isn't the answer but talking with them and asking them to take professional therapy as well in the process could be great but so many people can't afford therapy that they go to LLM's so that's definitely something. We might need to invest some funding to make therapy more accessible for everybody I guess.
by massysett | 2025-10-19 17:22:05+00:00
Sort of. I took the argument in “The Paradox of Choice” to be that too many superficial choices can reduce happines: for instance, choosing between ten different varieties of toothpaste in the supermarket can overwhelm the consumer. I think a practical lesson from that book is that a company can boost sales by reducing the number of trivial choices it offers, making it easier for the customers to pick the “right one.”

This article on the other hand seems to say that people have equated choice with political or economic or philosophical freedom and, furthermore, that this equivalence is a false one. It’s a deeper and more difficult argument to make. I think “The Paradox of Choice” makes a lot of sense but this article leaves me unconvinced. For example I’m not understanding the argument this piece makes about the abortion debate. Abortion rights proponents are not arguing that the right to choose abortion is an empty promise. They’re arguing that women need to have real choices so they can in fact choose abortion if they wish. The arguments this piece makes to suggest choice does not promote freedom seem to me to support the opposite conclusion: that choice is an essential component of liberty and freedom.
by intended | 2025-10-19 17:23:07+00:00
The idea is that there will be newer jobs that come up.

The issue is that there will be no one earning money except the owners of OpenAI.

Take outsourcing - the issue in developed nations was underemployment and the hollowing out of industrial centers. You went from factory foreman to burger flipper. However, it did uplift millions out of poverty in other nations. So net-net, we employed far more and distributed wealth.

With Automation, we simply employ fewer people, and the benefits accrue to smaller groups.

And above all - these tools were built, essentially by mass plagiarism. They train even now, on the random stuff we write on HN and Reddit.

TLDR: its not the automation, its the wealth concentration.
by b112 | 2025-10-19 17:23:17+00:00
I have remote gauges with alarms in my freezers, but I'm in my fridge every day, and nothing beats a simple analog gauge.

In the freezers I also employ either the "freeze some ice cubes and put them in a baggy" or "freeze a small jar and put a coin on top" methods.

If you see the ice cubes have melted and refroze, then trouble. If the coin is not on the top of the jar -- same thing. Fail proof methods.
by Levitz | 2025-10-19 17:24:44+00:00
>I’m not sure why that’s relevant or why you responded to me about it.

Because while I agree that

>The pursuit of truth is difficult and has its pitfalls but it naturally leads to the dominance of certain viewpoints

I'm certain that demanding essays from which you could perfectly predict voting patterns is not the mark of viewpoints that prioritize the pursuit of truth.
by giardini | 2025-10-19 17:24:53+00:00
Any tree will eventually extend roots beneath your foundation and do damage. They will shift and crack the foundation (unless you use pillar construction), break pipes and structures and will penetrate your sewer lines. If you're lucky you will kill them before they do any severe damage.

Though it sounds absurd, rather than a tree, it might be better to put up a shade (i.e., two poles and a sail cloth between them) to block the lith/heat. It would definitely be cheaper than having a tree although your neighbors might not like it.

A tree must be trimmed annually once it reaches a certain size; eventually it must be removed. But then a new problem arises: the dying tree roots, which extend entirely across and below the land, and which had previously remained placidly underground and invisible, now begin to rot, swell and rise irregularly everywhere. They thrust upward at random ruining the lawn's former level appearance. You can no longer mow your lawn: the lawnmower strikes the rising roots and either breaks the blade or the lawnmower stalls. The surface is no longer level. You can let your lawn lie fallow for 20 more years until the roots rot completely or...

... you pay someone enough to remove all the roots and fill them in with soil, then re-level and re-sod the lawn. That likely triples the cost of removal.

Trees look great - from a distance.

It is a tribute to the old "pier and beam" construction techniques that their use evades these problems somewhat by allowing you to raise/lower the piers in response to tree growth/intrusion, thus maintaining a level house (so your grandkids can play marbles on the wood floor in the living room).

Root barriers may be a reasonable solution too, but they must be maintained. I am unfamiliar with their success rate.

I recently saw an 11-story high-rise whose foundation is endangered by the "nice trees" that were planted at its base to form a park for the building's inhabitants decades ago. The trees are moving everything: the building, the streets around the building, *everything!! Imagine having bought a condo in that buiding! What a disaster.
by Barrin92 | 2025-10-19 17:24:59+00:00
>Keep in mind Xubuntu is mostly a community effort, not a large corporation with seniors who know how to handle this "best".

which is why the whole distro zoo and "stick it to the man" theatre has always been a nightmare. Running some barely maintained operating system that is an nth-degree spin-off is like buying a pacemaker from craigslist. The people who go "I don't trust Canonical/Google" and then go download some binary blob browser fork/OS uploaded by an anonymous guy from the internet is way too large.
by motorest | 2025-10-19 17:26:03+00:00
> If `if` is a function why don't you call it like other functions in Python?

The whole point is that yes, you can call it like a function, because Python supports it as an expression.

I seriously recommend you take the time to go through a Python tutoria.

> Also, blog-posts is not just about `if`, is `for` a function in Python, `def`, `return`, `class`?

Python supports list comprehension, so yes it is also about `for`.

Once you discover that Python supports conditional expressions and list comprehension, do you honestly believe the blog post has any merit? The blog post even shows a failure to do basic homework to verify what Python actually supports and not supports.
by badsectoracula | 2025-10-19 17:26:35+00:00
I think you have that last part backwards, it is not the LLM driving the interaction, it is the program that uses the LLM to generate the instructions that does the actual driving - that is the bit that makes the LLM start doing things. Though that is just splitting hairs.

The original point was about the capabilities LLMs themselves since the context was about the technology itself, not what you can do by making them part of a larger system that combines LLMs (perhaps more than one) with other tools.

Depending on the use case and context this distinction may or may not matter, e.g. if you are trying to sell the entire system, it probably is not any more important how the individual parts of the system work than what libraries you used to make the software.

However it can be important in other contexts, like evaluating the abilities of LLMs themselves.

For example i have written a script on my PC that my window manager calls to grab whatever text i have selected on whatever application i'm running and passes it to a program i've written in llama.cpp to load Mistral Small with a prompt that makes it check for spelling and grammar mistakes which in turn produces some script-readable input that another script displays in a window.

This, in a way, is an entire system. This system helps me find grammar and spelling mistakes in the text i have selected when i'm writing documents where i care about finding such mistakes. However it is not Mistral Small that has the functionality of finding grammar and spelling mistakes in my selected text, it only provides the part that does the text checking, the rest is done by other external non-LLM pieces. An LLM cannot intercept keystrokes in my computer, it cannot grab my selected text nor can create a window on my desktop, it doesn't even understand these concepts. In a way this can be thought as a limitation from the perspective of the end result i want, but i work around it with the other software i have attached to it.
by roncesvalles | 2025-10-19 17:26:55+00:00
There's a bit of both. There' s a part of you that believes in yourself and wants to prove it, that's why you're even trying. But there's another part (or something external) that doubts your abilities. The "hatred" is from that part that believes you're capable to the part that believes you're incapable.

I think the better word here is contempt.

Bit of a corollary but I've just never been motivated by love. E.g. I don't feel driven to perform well because I love my teammates or love my company or love the world and want to do good by them. It's always a hatred-contempt of wanting to prove someone wrong or to prove that everyone else has been doing it wrong (whether on a team level or a world level). That's actually why I stopped being too chummy with my direct teammates. If you like someone too much, you lose the desire to brutally outshine them. Some part of you pulls you toward the group average so as not to become ostracized.

I don't think that a genuine love for humanity will give you the energy to do good for humanity. It must come from hatred-contempt, there is no other way. "Let me show you fucking animals...". It will never come from "I love you all so much let me build this for you."
by heyjamesknight | 2025-10-19 17:27:17+00:00
You are mistaking the map for the territory. The TERRITORY of human experience is higher dimensional. The LLM utilizes a lower resolution mapping of that territory, a projection from experience to textual (or pixel, or waveform, etc.) representations.

This is not just a lossy mapping; it excludes entire categories of experience that cannot be captured/encoded except for as a pointer to the real experience, one that is often shared by the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended cognitive beings that have had that experience.

I can point to beauty and you can understand me because you've experienced beauty. I cannot encode beauty itself. The LLM cannot experience beauty. It may be able to analyze patterns of things determined beautiful by beauty experiencers, but this is, again, a lower resolution map of the actual experience of beauty. Nobody had to train you to experience beauty—you possess that capability innately.

You cannot encode the affective response one experiences when holding their newborn. You cannot encode the cognitive appraisal of a religious experience. You can't even encode the qualia of red except for, again, as a pointer to the color.

You're also missing that 4E cognitive beings have a fundamental experience of consciousness—particularly the aspect of "here" and "now". The LLM cannot experience either of those phenomena. I cannot encode here and now. But you can, and do, experience both of those constantly.
by rednafi | 2025-10-19 17:27:22+00:00
People are reading human-generated text, blogs, and artisanal content more than ever before.

The whole point of consuming art is to appreciate the work that went into creating it. If something is generated without much effort, then what’s the point of looking at it?

Sure, LLMs can generate all the text and paintings in the world, but who’s knowingly consuming that? It’s garbage content, and people are already tired of this crap. That’s why I think writing blogs, poetry, and creating original work is more important than ever.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-19 17:27:28+00:00
> Yet universities continue to push it, despite all evidence, because it flatters a certain worldview

> So it is for many university programs

There should be a 'marketplace of ideas' which absolutely does not mean that your ideas should be the only ones you identify in universities. It doesn't even mean that you should see your ideas in any university. Just that, if you make suasive statements, you will attract followers—and maybe you can go ahead and make your own university.

The real problem that this sort of 'DEI-killed-all-intellectual-sophistication' arguments elide is that we're not educating our children (any of them, purple, green, or whatever race you wish), and instead are feeding them social media and other attention-grabbing things.

On top of that, those of us who follow right-of-center media now have this continual push to believe even more far-fetched things daily. So how can you possibly imagine that right-of-center thinking will have a place in the marketplace if one element of being right-of-center is rejecting truth?
by 010101010101 | 2025-10-19 17:27:46+00:00
You can buy thousands of lottery tickets and it won't meaningfully impact your odds of winning though. You can also go stand outside in a field with a metal rod in your hand during a thunderstorm. "You" isn't really the point, it's the cumulative probabilities that matter. For lotteries this is easy to calculate, for lightning strikes the best you can do is probably looking at past statistics.
by b112 | 2025-10-19 17:27:48+00:00
In Vancouver they charge more property tax if the building is empty.

https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...

Not sure if it's enough, but it's something.

I like this part:

False declarations

False property status declarations may result in fines of up to $10,000 per day of the continuing offense, in addition to payment of the tax.
by patagurbon | 2025-10-19 17:28:04+00:00
> universities pushing restorative justice

Universities? Can you point to a university whose explicit policy is restorative justice? That’s not how universities generally work. You’re probably taking issue with an individual department which naturally has a certain research and academic history.

Are you prepared to cite the works prepared and researched by individuals at a university or lab which counter the research on restorative justice?

If not then either it doesn’t exist and we’re operating on anecdata or it does exist and the research system is proceeding exactly as intended. You are also comparing the outcomes of policy to the work of scientists and philosophers without analyzing the specifics of imperfect policy meeting an imperfect world.

Research and knowledge work in general is often wrong. That’s not the point. For decades large parts of the genome were believed to be garbage. That wasn’t amended by the government it was amended by researchers following the scientific process. The politicization of the process doesn’t speed it up, it simply introduces an outside malignant influence to an otherwise slow but steady process of inquiry.
Show HN: CheckHN – A checklist for the most popular Hacker News posts
by adius | 2025-10-19 17:28:57+00:00
I realized that I'm more interested in the all-time top content on Hacker News than in whatever is popular right now.

To better keep track of which posts I've already read, I built a small web app that displays all posts sorted by popularity and allows me to check them off or save them for later.
by beeflet | 2025-10-19 17:29:50+00:00
It is. It's not something you can wave away with some new political system.

Automation results in centralization of power. It transforms labor-intensive work to capital-intensive work and reduces the leverage of the working class.

You could have a system that distributes wealth from automation to the newly-unemployed working class, but fundamentally the capital-owners are less dependent on the working class, so the working class will have no leverage to sustain the wealth distribution (you cannot strike if you don't have a job). You are proposing a fundamentally unstable political system.

It's like liebig's law of the minimum or any other natural law. You can try to make localized exceptions in politics, but you are futilely working against the underlying dynamics of the system which are inevitably realized in the long term.
by credit_guy | 2025-10-19 17:31:47+00:00
If I'm one of these universities, the rational course of action is to say no. Because you never know when this administration will change its mind, or try to change the terms of the deal and impose new conditions. I think the only reason for some universities to delay coming with an answer is that they have to first have a conversation with their biggest donors, and make sure they don't upset them.