MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pas | 2025-10-19 13:20:50+00:00
Google+ already enforced their real-name policy in 2011

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

Of course the ultimate cause is that the Internet changed from this mysterious third place full information to where we live our private and public life, where there's an unending torrent of things that affect us.

Smartphones and low-latency high-bandwidth ubiquitous wireless networks with large enough data quotas are the vector that facilitated this.

The nature of content changed from funny image macros with silly cats to weaponized out-of-context news videos (and reports, and studies, and data). From mostly boring IRC chatrooms full of cold quasi-autistic greybeards (or sometimes neurotic drama queens and kings) enforcing their idiosyncratic rules that allowed fun little interactions that were collection worthy on now almost forgotten websites (bash and qdb) to public Facebook posts and now to private group chats.

All this in front of the backdrop of global economic growth in its downturn. (The upsides of the China shock - and of globalization, in general - already reaped and now we're left with the boiling resentment coming from those who feel they were defrauded, who are attracted to narratives that dish out blame to elites and everybody close and far away in space and time.)

Previous presidents, infamous and obscure international organizations, and of course vague shadowy groups and half of the population all at once. Beancounters, the MBAs, real estate developers, private equity, CEOs, big pharma, WHO, toxic masculinity, LMBTQAI+, MAGA, and of course the DNC that caused all this by not letting Bernie became the nominee.

When people grow up with expectations that they'll live better than their parents and then that doesn't happen, we don't take it well.
by n_kr | 2025-10-19 13:20:58+00:00
"The best hifis are professional equipment"

This is gold. I wish so many people understood and used this. Pro equipment is more robust and more versatile. And if you know some people you can get amazing used stuff at bargain prices from your local musicians or sound engineers. Lot of times, people I know (and I too, though I'm not a pro sound engineer) will help you choose and setup just because you showed interest in the things we are interested in. Beers are assumed.

One drawback is that pro audio stuff may look ugly to non pro people. I made my wife listen to the cheapest studio monitors I could find on amazon, equalized with the same pink noise method in this video, and compare it to her bose and marshall speakers. She liked the sound better but my speakers are "yuck ugly" :(
by berkes | 2025-10-19 13:21:07+00:00
The whole "AI revolution" feels distopian opposite from what I'd naively thought it would do.

My ideal would be a world in which boring, heavy, dangerous, etc work is replaced by machines. Giving humans time and opportunity to pursue creative, fun, stimulating or intellectually challenging tasks.

In which only legit people, and never spammers or scammers get me on the phone. Where I don't have to juggle appointments, pdfs, portals, dossier-codes to have my drivers license renewed. In which I can write software and all the boring stuff is taken care of so I need to only do the creative and fun parts. In which I can go surfing, and AI takes care of my taxes, my home, my income and my dishes.

In which tasks like labelling art, driving a taxi, or annotating pdfs is done by machines. So that the humans have time to make art, get transported anywhere for virtually free, or write stories.

But alas, it's the complete opposite. AI companies promise to replace the people that make art, demand ever more humans to stare at screens in order to "generate useful training data" rather than those humans spending time with each other, or spend time in inspiring surrounding. AI increases robo calling a hundred fold. AI generates more email, content, slop, and other noise that I manually have to wade through to get the actual info.
by baconbrand | 2025-10-19 13:21:36+00:00
I just started talking back. I started about 3 years ago. Every time I heard that critical voice, I would summon a different voice in response, of someone who loves and supports me unconditionally. Like an ideal mother, or just the way I talk to my friends.

Example: in my head, “You’re so fucking lazy, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why can’t you just-“ etc, would be answered by, “You are human. You are doing your best. The modern world asks too much of all of us. You deserve to rest. I’m proud of you. I love you.” Consistently in my head, sometimes out loud if I was alone.

Along with forgiving myself, sometimes I would think through and list out my accomplishments. The voice in my head told me I was a failure, but I built up an entire list of the things I had achieved to prove it wrong, every time.

At first it felt weird and fake. I didn’t have any reason to believe “myself.” But then, I didn’t have any reason to believe that criticizing voice either.

Slowly, the responding voice became more and more “real.” To the point where I was easily scoffing at and brushing off my self criticism. And then, for reasons I really don’t understand, that critical voice started speaking up less and less.

After over two years of this, I have stopped hearing that critical voice entirely. I’m in my mid thirties, which isn’t old but is old enough to still be startled by how night and day different it is now to live in my head. It is so much quieter and more peaceful. And a lot of the stuff I used to struggle with, actually isn’t a struggle anymore. I don’t procrastinate hardly at all now. In most cases I recognize “I’m not ready to tackle this yet, let me put my energy elsewhere and I’ll get back to it when I’m ready” and shockingly enough, when I’m forgiven and allowed to walk away, I do find myself “ready” later on to come back and tackle it.

I think what I did falls under the umbrella of “reparenting your inner child” if you want to research more.

Caveat that I also pulled this off while working at the least toxic workplace I have ever worked and being surrounded by the best friends I’ve ever had. Set and setting might be really important here.

Good luck to you. I hope you can also break free.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-19 13:23:07+00:00
> An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years

Well, not by itself, but isn't that risk based on how many numbers of objects there are in space? And since we're launching more stuff into space than falls out of it, the numbers used for the calculations may be changing?
by foofoo12 | 2025-10-19 13:23:13+00:00
> folks still win the lottery

Yep, and:

"In 1998, Bill Morgan, an Australian man from Melbourne was captured on film winning a AU$250,000 scratchcard while re-enacting his previous scratchcard win for a news report. The video of the event has since been widely shared online."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Morgan_lottery_win
by dathinab | 2025-10-19 13:24:09+00:00
not all eastern bulk vendors are fake/involved in some form a illegal action

there is some (small) money into taking Lego sets apart and selling the parts (1), but only if the sorting and for used sets taking apart, cleaning, damage/quality assessment are cheap enough. So countries with lower wages(2) are better suited. At the same parts people from less-wage countries have more motivation for "clever"/unusual business ventures weather legal or not.

(1): Naturally not for all sets, but every session there are some badly selling sets you might be able to buy both with large Rabatt and in bulk and have enough "good" parts to be worth it. "mini figure only" collectors and sometimes being able to buy for retail prices can help, too.

(2): While especially Poland has been catching up Europe in general still has the lowest wages in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
by MattGaiser | 2025-10-19 13:24:11+00:00
> People keep spouting this, but I don't see how the AI bubble bursting would be all that devastating.

Well, an enormous amount of debt is being raised and issued for AI and US economic growth is nearly entirely AI. Crypto bros showed the other day that they were leveraged to the hilt on coins and it wouldn't surprise me if people are the same way on AI. It is pretty heavily tied to the financial system at this point.
by bell-cot | 2025-10-19 13:24:34+00:00
Sounds like the developers felt that being "true to" their 1400-foot-tall artistic vision trumped any mere engineering realities. And churned through engineers and consultants 'till they found ones were were willing to tell 'em what they wanted to hear.

> ...and new cracks are appearing in its load-bearing facade.

No bets on whether it'll survive the next https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Sandy_in_...
by phatfish | 2025-10-19 13:24:36+00:00
Because trust in governments and their ability to execute has been successfully eroded by the holders of private wealth. There are also plenty politicians that simply work for private wealth and deliberately sabotage government from the inside.

The current situation is that even a government that wants to work for the majority of people is too scared to go against a corporation like Uber, or simply doesn't have the means (means being political capital as well as skills within the civil service).

Building that means is a project that lasts beyond election cycles, and needs one elected government to not immediately undo the work of a previous one.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-19 13:24:58+00:00
>in most regions Uber drivers are being paid an hourly wage so yeah I think this makes sense.

I did not know this. Is this verifiable? I thought the whole reason Uber and other “gig” businesses work is because they can pay piecemeal and not have people classified as employees. There were multiple high profile court cases and even attempts to legislate that Uber drivers are employees, but I believe in the US they are still independent contractors, hence they can work for whoever they want, whenever they want.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-10-19 13:25:40+00:00
Sometimes all I log in for is to upvote the underdog.

I hope people are not dismayed because because they know different microprocessors actually do require different machine code. They've got to look deeper than that :\

As an ex-CEO myself I do appreciate a good executive overview without getting into every little bit & byte ;)

Fortunately it was good to learn from a time when you could expect every dissimilar device to have its own unique higher-level language so you wouldn't have to do any assembly code.

This time I want people to think about what it was like when no choices appeared to be on the horizon yet.

For a while there, without a mainframe, you weren't going to have any choice of language anyway. Most of the time not even then. For early microprocessor devices (like scientific instruments), the language was part of the "firmware" in ROM. Except they didn't call it firmware yet because it was permanent and that's a lot more solid than merely firm. Everything burned into ROM at the factory really did need to reach a level of completion requiring no further updates, of course. To be worth money to begin with. That was table stakes too.

For the foreseeable future. It wasn't supposed to bother you that there were no choices of language.

Not like there was only one mandated language that everyone must adhere to all the time.

Just the opposite, you never knew what kind of syntax and logic chain you might need to get involved with before you could get a new device to fall in line.

You, the programmer, were expected to be agnostic from the get-go so you could program all kinds of equipment using whatever language each manufacturer had come up with.

Hardware can be hard, and at the beginning it was completely incapable of being agnostic itself because the demands were so great.

You were expected to be able to sit down, power up [0] and begin programming, using a particular hardware's single inbuilt language along with the reference manual for syntax, no IDE or anything.

The device as a whole was programmable in whatever language it was supplied with. Otherwise not at all.

Some people were fine only learning how to program one series of hardware device, others could program just about anything that came along. It takes all kinds.

Even if it's a high-level language, if it's the only thing you've got to work with it's by nature the "machine's code", with some of the same strengths and limitations of the unique machinecode that underlies different processor architectures when you have no choice there. If you do zoom in.

[0] No booting involved for the ones that ran from ROM, basically just initialization.
by markus_zhang | 2025-10-19 13:26:07+00:00
It is so frustrating that I’m not good enough to create software for myself. Maybe I should just buckle up and start working on that.

I use an iPhone and found a lot of usability issues. Some apps such as Stock are perhaps not too difficult to recreate in Obj-C. I’m kinda old timer so prefer Obj-C even that I don’t know anything about it.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-10-19 13:26:10+00:00
The simplicity and efficiency of Visual Basic UI programming relied on several assumptions that became obsolete in 2000 when LCD and high-DPI displays became widely available. Everything in the VB UI editor was based on a fixed layout. There was a fixed font size, fixed DPI-density display expectation, and fixed button sizes. Every dialog assumed fixed sizes and was non-resizable. Adding a translation to such an application was pure hell. Typically, you needed to add a lot of buffer space for English strings to ensure that German strings, for example, would not break the layout too much. UI frameworks that solve these problems with a proper layout management system are obviously more complicated, but they address issues that VB6 never touched.
by BoredPositron | 2025-10-19 13:26:33+00:00
None of that happened in 2007. I'm not even saying the Internet didn't change, but you are both at least three years too early to make it ground zero for the overall societal change like seen in OP's data. I would even say it's the opposite the 2000s had a lot of vigilantism and political activism that started on the net. Key examples include WikiLeaks, the Pirate Party movement in Europe, and everything surrounding torrents. BarCamps and LAN parties grew exponentially. Most corporations hadn't started enshittification yet. Fringe sites still had hosters. 4chan launched, and Anonymous played games. This was the height of the blogosphere, the Creative Commons movement launched, and RSS was omnipresent. For the normal user, the Internet was probably the freest at the time. I don't know why you wanted to ignore that time and replace it with something that followed years later just to ramble on a forum...
by Topfi | 2025-10-19 13:26:33+00:00
> What good is your open problem set if really its a trivial "google search" away from being solved. Why are they not catching any blame here?

They are a community run database, not the sole arbiter and source of this information. We learned the most basic research back in highschool, I'd hope researchers from top institutions now working for one of the biggest frontier labs can do the same prior to making a claim, but microblogging has and continues to be a blight on any accurate information so nothing new there.

> GPT-5 was still doing some cognitive lifting to piece it together.

Cognitive lifting? It's a model, not a person, but besides that fact, this was already published literature. Handy that a LLM can be a slightly better search, but calling claims of "solving maths problems" out as irresponsible and inaccurate is the only right choice in this case.

> If a human would have done this by hand it would have made news [...]

"Researcher does basic literature review" isn't news in this or any other scenario. If we did a press release every journal club, there wouldn't be enough time to print a single page advert.

> [...] how many other solutions are out there that just need pieced together from pre-existing research [...]

I am not certain you actually looked into the model output or why this was such an embarrassment.

> But, you know, AI Bad.

AI hype very bad. AI anthropomorphism even worse.
by rsynnott | 2025-10-19 13:27:06+00:00
> Moore’s law is “dead”, but the AI boom is being built on GPUs that get faster, smaller, and cheaper every year?

Moore's law doesn't mean that things get smaller, faster and cheaper every year. It is specifically that number of transistors doubles about every two years. That ceased to be ~reliably the case about 15 years ago, becoming more modest.

> So much faith in solar panels…and the mention of ship power as a metric, but no mention of the nuclear power plants that actually power modern (or heck, even aging) fleets for shockingly long periods of time.

Eh? Nuclear ships are a rounding error. There are effectively none of them, versus oil-powered ships.

> They are however trying to build or restart their own nuclear power plants…

I'm endlessly fascinated by this, because, based on real-life nuclear build-out times, it _has_ to be a scam; if you're building a data centre now, there's just no point talking about nuclear, because building a nuclear plant will take 15 to 20 years, by which time the data centre will be obsolete. But it's unclear what the scam _is_.
by the_duke | 2025-10-19 13:27:50+00:00
Sure, but all of the above have solid businesses that rake in lots of money, revenue based on AI is a small percentage for them.

An AI bust would take the stock price down a good deal, but the stock gains have been relatively moderate. Year on year: Microsoft +14%, Meta +24%, Google +40, Oracle +60%, ... And a notable chunk of those gains have indirectly come from the dollar devaluing.

Nvidia would be hit much harder of course.

There is a good amount of smaller AI startups, but a lot of the AI development is concentrated on the big dogs, it's not nearly as systemic as in dot com, where a lot of businesses went under completely.

And even with an AI freeze, there is plenty of value and usage there already that will not go away, but will keep expanding (AI chat, AI coding, etc) which will mitigate things.
by andrepd | 2025-10-19 13:28:37+00:00
> 1) What good is your open problem set if really its a trivial "google search" away from being solved. Why are they not catching any blame here?

Please explain how this is in any way related to the matter at hand. What is the relation between the incompleteness of an math problem database, and AI hypesters lying about the capabilities of GPT5? I fail to see the relevance.

> If a human would have done this by hand it would have made news

If someone updated information on an obscure math problem aggregator database this would be news?? Again, I fail to see your point here.
by FredPret | 2025-10-19 13:29:43+00:00
In addition to your very good points: an economy of people who take this live-and-let-live view is going to be far more flexible and efficient in different scenarios.

An economy made up of people who think it proper to make entire classes of employment like gig work (or work that pays under a certain minimum wage) illegal is not only interfering in the decisions of adults, but can only prosper under the exact set of circumstances those people consider ideal.
by cookiengineer | 2025-10-19 13:30:16+00:00
> Should your employer tolerate you working another job while you are being paid to do yours?

That argument goes both ways:

Should your employer be able to have you on an exclusive contract with a salary so low that you cannot pay your own bills?

Probably not.

The fallacy in your argument is that you're assuming that people like to work. They don't, they do it out of necessity.
by rsynnott | 2025-10-19 13:30:52+00:00
... I mean, to be clear, there wasn't a no-deal Brexit. There was some confusion between a soft Brexit (ie Switzerland solution), a hard Brexit (what eventually happened, though in practice it increasingly seems to be tacking towards the softer end of hard, with the UK, well, not retaining EU laws so much as replacing them with can't-believe-they're-not-EU-laws), and a no-deal Brexit (which was averted; that's the apocalypse one), but to be clear a no-deal Brexit did not happen.
by byryan | 2025-10-19 13:31:01+00:00
I think the author is more saying that no political party (whether or not they like them) should be able to control it. I don't see anywhere in the article that would suggest they don't want certain people to use it. Just that they don't want people in positions of political power to be able to spy on users of social media and/or take their data at their will.
by ben_w | 2025-10-19 13:31:25+00:00
My guess is that your framing presumes the opposite of the evolutionary reality. I think this time of day probably wasn't a big risk for us, that we were often the hunters and not just the hunted, and that the sense of beauty comes from — as the previous poster suggests — us having evolved to find it so.

That said, I'm discovering from living very close to a lake for the last year that mosquitos are a right pain around sunset…
by alphazard | 2025-10-19 13:31:27+00:00
A whole generation has come up thinking that it's normal for the direction of the product to be guided by the dumbest, least competent people in the room. Pretty much every tech company has, or aspires to have a product org.

The best intuition pump I have for product managers is the analogy of hedge fund managers. There exist people who can predict the market, just like there exist people who can predict how a product or feature is received by the market. Most people claiming to can't. The people who can are expensive. You can't reliably train white collar workers to be hedge fund managers, and you can't reliably train white collar workers to lead product development.

That mostly encapsulates all of the "but this guy at Apple" objections that get thrown around by people defending product orgs, as if they were a business insight that most of us don't yet understand.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-10-19 13:32:40+00:00
I try not to lose sight of the first time that I heard (some years back) that people were using this new LLM thing for DM'ing ("dungeon mastering", leading) a game of Dungeons and Dragons. I thought, this must be bullshit or some kind of witchcraft.

Definitely not anti-AI here. I think I have been disappointed though, since then, to slowly learn that they're (still) little beyond that.

Still amazing though. And better than a Google search (IMHO).
by pcthrowaway | 2025-10-19 13:32:41+00:00
I'm not inclined to do a bunch of research and I'm not claiming to be the best to interpret the studies, as I don't have a background in biology, but a cursory search shows many results like this https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10545-017-0063-1

I didn't claim I was certain of this however, only that I'm under the impression that amino acid synthesis doesn't work as well for all people, for all amino acids.
by youngtaff | 2025-10-19 13:35:30+00:00
As a Britain…

I don’t think we wanted to leave the single market and I’m unconvinced that people actually wanted to leave the EU — mainly because they didn’t know what it meant and even the Brexit promoters said a Yes vote wouldn’t mean leaving the EU

What they wanted to do was give the Establishment / Tories a black eye but ended up enabling the people what who were pushing for a hard Brexit that worked against most people’s interests