MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Voultapher | 2025-11-21 21:08:43+00:00
Because I've met several homeschooled adults over the years, and talking to them that's something most of them had in common when explaining the impact it had on their life. Looking for more objective data I found this one source that seems to be written by people not already convinced of the desirability of homescooling [1], forgive me for being skeptical of the objectivity of places called "national home education research institute". Overall it paints a more positive picture than I had expected, but also highlights it's limitations.

[1] http://hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Taubman/PEPG/conf...
by andai | 2025-11-21 21:08:45+00:00
>That is not how it works. You cannot scientifically test for consciousness, it will always be a guess/agreement, never a fact.

Yeah. That's what I said :)

>(My comment) And as far as I can tell, there's really no way to know right? I mean we assume humans are conscious (for obvious reasons), but can we prove even that? With animals we mostly reason by analogy, right?

And then you reasoned by analogy.

And maybe that's the best we can hope for! "If human (mind) shaped, why not conscious?"
by surprisetalk | 2025-11-21 21:08:53+00:00
Author here! Posting from phone while traveling so sorry for bad formatting.

It was outside of the scope of this essay, but a lot of these problems can be resolved with a mid-transaction COMMIT and reasonable timeouts

You can implement a lean idempotency system within the task pattern like this, but it really depends on what you need and what failures you want to prevent

Thanks for providing more context and safety tips! :)
by einpoklum | 2025-11-21 21:08:56+00:00
Indeed, Hamas is the governing party in the Palestinian authority following the 2006 elections. So, the ministry of health is "Hamas-controlled", similarly to how, say, the French ministry of health is "Rennaisance-party-controlled". (Yes, 2006 is a really long time ago and there should have been elections; the split between Gaza and the West Bank, and Israeli restrictions, have frustrated efforts to hold them again; and then came the last two years and now who knows what's going to happen.)

> have already been statistically dubious

No, they have not. You're citing an opinion piece in a pro-Israel publication, the author of which has never conducted any investigative work on the matter, and its arguments are rather frivolous.

For a discussion (and refutation) of that claim in the professional press, see:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

What _is_ certainy the case, though, is that the ministry is not counting deaths where the bodies do not reach its employees/representatives. And - it is not including deaths which may indirectly caused by the Israeli onslaught. For example, if you die of cancer and you might have gotten treatment had it not been for the destruction of the hospitals and the lack of water, electricity etc. - you are not included in the count.

The AP ran a story about how they count:

https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-health-mini...

which also includes their record from past Israeli military campaigns against Gaza, vis-a-vis the UN figures.
by workworkwork71 | 2025-11-21 21:09:03+00:00
Will shamelessly promote ours as well: https://www.fulfilledwealth.co/

We're entering the same market but with a tilt towards investment & actionable guidance. Same read-only capabilities on the account sync side (although our budgeting + spending side is still heavily in development) except we're an RIA that can provide professional advise (for free).
by igor47 | 2025-11-21 21:09:15+00:00
Ugh what an amazing example of poor science communication. Literally the only useful numbers for battery advances are: * Energy density in kWh/kg * Cost in $/kWh

Neither is mentioned in TFA. This is just PR fluff. Notably, the raw range of an EV is totally useless as a metric. We can already make an EV go arbitrarily far by stuffing it full of batteries, making it insanely heavy and expensive in the process
by pdabbadabba | 2025-11-21 21:10:04+00:00
> It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public.

I'm baffled by this. Many workplaces? Mass transit? Walking down the sidewalk? At a concert? Buying groceries? True, there don't all expose you to the full sweep of human existence at once but, in aggregate, it seems pretty similar to what you'd encounter at most public schools. What if they want a career in a hospital, or law enforcement, or social services, ... the list goes on.

You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble, but it seems to me they need to be prepared for a future where they encounter all kinds of people. I'm sure this can be compatible with homeschooling but I can't see how it's not generally a disadvantage. (Though perhaps onerous clearly outweighed by other advantages, depending on the situation.)
by surgical_fire | 2025-11-21 21:11:21+00:00
> It's only recently that doctors, dentist, veterinarian offices and other high margin social businesses are getting converted to PE

And this is the only logical consequence of unregulated capitalism.

Line must go up, always. No matter the damage it causes. Price will always go up, and costs are always cut down.

It sucks because it is supposed to, as long as profits increase.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-21 21:11:25+00:00
>Models should not have memorised whether animals are kosher to eat or not.

Agreed. Humans do not perform rote memorization for all possibilities of rules-based classifications like "kosher or not kosher".

>This is information that should be retrieved from RAG or whatever.

Firm disagreement here. An intelligent model should either know (general model) or RAG-retrieve (non-general model) the criteria for evaluating whether an animal is kosher or not, and infer based on knowledge of the animal (either general model, or RAG-retrieval for a non-general model) whether or not the animal matches the criteria.

>If a model responded with "I don't know the answer to that", then that would be far more useful.

Again, firm disagreement here. "I don't know" is not a useful answer to a question that can be easily answered by cross-referencing easily-verifiable animal properties against the classification rules. At the very least, an intelligent model should explain which piece of information it is missing (properties of the animal in question OR the details of the classification rules), rather than returning a zero-value response.

To wit: if you were conducting an interview for a developer candidate, and you asked them whether Python supports functions, methods, both, or neither, would "I don't know" ever be an appropriate answer, even if the candidate genuinely didn't know off the top of their head? Of course not - you'd desire a candidate who didn't know to say something more along the lines of "I don't know, but here's what I would do to figure out the answer for you".

A plain and simple "I don't know" adds zero value to the conversation. While it doesn't necessarily add negative value to the conversation the way a confidently incorrect answer does, the goal for intelligent models should never be to produce zero value, it should be to produce nonzero positive value, even when it lacks required information.
by joshstrange | 2025-11-21 21:11:43+00:00
Yeah, screw the teachers, they should just have a longer commute, who cares about them? /s

I always want to laugh when I hear people complain about finding near-minimum-wage workers in a HCOL area. They can't seem to grasp that commuting is not free, it may feel free to them at their income level but transportation costs money (gas, car maintenance, insurance or bus, etc) and time. I'm not saying teaching is a minimum wage job but it's not a high earning one either, paying them as low as we do _and_ also asking them to have a longer commute is just absurd.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-21 21:12:34+00:00
Apple does pose more private defaults, though they will easily steer your towards "make backups encrypted with a key we also know in case you lose your password", which isn't much more private than Google's proposition.

When Google announced their AI hardware features, I was hoping they they'd implement the same offline/encrypted photo indexing that iOS does, rather than shoving everything through the cloud. Unfortunately, Google Photos seems as bad as ever.

On the other hand, setting up automatic backups and photo sync towards a self-hosted Immich/Photoprism instance is a lot easier on Android than on iOS in my experience, despite Google's reluctance to grant storage permissions to apps.

Google does actually have a kind of extended protection (https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/advanced-...), but that feeds more data to Google rather than less: it basically has you trust Google to protect you, by having Google pre-scan your browsing and locking down your account. If you're American, that may be worth it if you trust Google enough. It's a combination of Lockdown Mode and Advanced Protection Mode on iOS.
by Gualdrapo | 2025-11-21 21:13:10+00:00
Not sure what you mean, and I'm not that versed in typography but as a graphic designer I'd bet people who actually know typography would appreciate something like this: laying out normal typefaces along a curve distort the space between letters and the top and bottom edges of letters won't follow the curvature they're being traced to until you do "manual" work (unless there's some auto-warping solution for fonts in something like Illustrator I am not aware of).

Of course this is not meant for prose texts or something, but for logo design this is a great thing to have.
by righthand | 2025-11-21 21:13:15+00:00
Sorry my point is that the Steam Deck is the only product of theirs that really supports beneficial open source in software and hardware. If you don’t think fossing the case is enough then you’re making my point for me that buying the machine, frame, or controller doesn’t do anything for foss.

It’d be like donating to Mozilla and expecting the money to go to Firefox development.
by buu700 | 2025-11-21 21:13:26+00:00
Sure, but that doesn't contradict the case for conservatism in adding new dependencies. A maximally liberal approach is just as bad as the inverse. For example:

* Introducing a library with two GitHub stars from an unknown developer

* Introducing a library that was last updated a decade ago

* Introducing a library with a list of aging unresolved CVEs

* Pulling in a million lines of code that you're reasonably confident you'll never have a use for 99% of

* Relying on an insufficiently stable API relative to the team's budget, which risks eventually becoming an obstacle to applying future security updates (if you're stuck on version 11.22.63 of a library with a current release of 20.2.5, you have a problem)

Each line of code included is a liability, regardless of whether that code is first-party or third-party. Each dependency in and of itself is also a liability and ongoing cost center.

Using AI doesn't magically make all first-party code insecure. Writing good code and following best practices around reviewing and testing is important regardless of whether you use AI. The point is that AI reduces the upfront cost of first-party code, thus diluting the incentive to make short-sighted dependency management choices.
by knowitnone3 | 2025-11-21 21:13:29+00:00
Americans have this thing called the Constitution which states citizens have the right to bear arms. Now, when you allow government to make subjective decisions about who can own and who can't, it's no longer a right and nobody can have guns but criminals somehow always find a gun. If you know anything about what happened, you will find the shooter is actually a very normal person and not some gun nut so any amount of psych testing wouldn't have found anything. What happened was wrong and both sides could have done better to avoid such a situation. Doesn't really matter because shooter is going to jail. And many state do background checks when selling firearms so it's not like a felon can just walk in and buy a gun. But when you're not a felon, how do you predict a person's future behavior by some magic questionnaire?
by Zigurd | 2025-11-21 21:13:59+00:00
Dislike AI? Or do they dislike hype intended to extract money from the government? Or do they conflate the surveillance state with AI because Palantir calls itself an AI company? Are they giving the techno reactionaries the side eye? Or maybe 80% of women can't identify with the weird women in Trump's government or have a few of them there are, and are just wary of anything Trump is doing? Or maybe they subliminally smell the slimy cryptoverse repurposing their GPUs for AI?

A lot of the tech industry looks pretty dark to people now. It's nobody's fault but those slinging TESCREAL jive.
by cyberax | 2025-11-21 21:14:10+00:00
> How the fuck would de-densifying cities help with housing costs?

That's the reality. The _only_ way to make housing less expensive is to reduce the dense population. Examples abound: Austin, Denver, etc.

> The denser housing is, the cheaper it is per unit.

Nope. The denser the housing, the MORE EXPENSIVE it gets. Even on a per-unit basis. That's why we have this drive to allow SROs. It'll push prices of all housing even higher.

> Also, remote work doesn't work like that. You, yes YOU, rely on actual real people to do stuff for your community to make your life worth living.

_Most_ of the modern post-industrial work is divided into two areas:

1. Office work. Can just as well be WFH.

2. In-person services (restaurants, childcare, hospitals, etc.). They work _better_ in suburban areas. That food truck owner in Manhattan can't afford to live there, so they likely spend hours every day to commute. In a suburban area, they can afford to buy/rent a house nearby.

There are some areas that will require specialized communities around them, like universities or large hospital centers. But they for sure don't need 4 million people monstrosities like NYC.

> Many rural areas are essentially subsidized by the cities around them - they couldn't afford to have roads or electricity otherwise.

It's vice versa. Most of the economic value in the US is created by people living in suburbia. This is easy to see if you look at personal income tax stats.

Cities receive the majority of _corporate_ taxes because corporation HQs are located in cities (duh).

> That means construction, food service, sanitation, etc.

Construction, food service, sanitation and so on are _cheaper_ to do in suburban areas. Why? Because of the planning overhead. Materials cost less than planning.

If you want to change a sewer main in Manhattan, you'll spend several years getting all the permits, creating temporary infrastructure to pump the sewage while you're working, then spending several months carefully digging through the streets to avoid severing unmarked pipes carrying who-knows-what.

In a suburban area, you just ask nearby houses to temporarily live in a hotel for a week, do the dig, and you're done. Even if you need more raw material, you end up spending less.

This is not a theory, btw. There's a study that shows that the city efficiency peaks at around 300k people.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-21 21:15:24+00:00
>Compared to its peers, EU's GDP has been growing very slowly for the past 20 years, I don't think it is a coincidence.

Meamwhile, US's GDP exploded and the bust cycles are more or less screwing over 2 generations from such gains. GDP is completely divorced from how the people are doing these days.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-11-21 21:16:42+00:00
> I never suggested this means anything at all about whether the system is conscious or not, GP did, and it’s a position I’m arguing against.

That's certainly not how I perceived anything you said. Let me get this straight.

u:yannyu's original comment (ironically, clearly LLM-generated) supposes that the barrier to LLM consciousness is the absence of environmental coherence. In other words, their stance is that LLMs are not currently conscious.

u:estearum, that is, you, reply:

> The consistency and coherence of LLM outputs, assembled from an imperfectly coherent mess of symbols is an empirical proof that the mess of symbols is in fact quite coherent. > The physical world is largely incoherent to human consciousnesses too, and we emerged just fine.

In reply to a comment about world incoherence as a barrier to consciousness, you suggest that humans became conscious despite incoherence, which by extension implies that you do not think incoherence is a barrier to LLM consciousness either.

u:yannyu replies to you with another probably LLM-generated comment pointing out the difference between textual coherence and environmental coherence.

u:estearum, that is, you, make a reply including:

> They [LLMs] sometimes get it wrong, just like all other conscious entities sometimes get their predictions wrong.

"All other conscious entities" is your choice of wording here. "All other" is definitionally inclusive of the thing being other-ed. There is no possible way to correctly interpret this sentence other than suggesting that LLMs are included as a conscious entity. If you did not mean that, you misspoke, but from my perspective the only conclusion I can come to from the words you wrote is that clearly you believe in LLM consciousness and were actively arguing in favor of it, not against it.

Incidentally, LLM output is not uniformly random, but rather purely probabilistic. It operates on the exact same premise as the toy script I posted, only with a massive dataset and significantly more advanced math and programming techniques. That anybody even entertains the idea of LLM consciousness is completely ridiculous to me. Regardless of whatever philosophical debates you'd like to have about whether a machine can reach consciousness, the idea that LLMs are a mechanism by which that's possible is fundamentally preposterous.
by cookiengineer | 2025-11-21 21:16:47+00:00
A stalebot marks it as inactive because you didn't take 2mins of your time to write a thank you, it's been fixed with commit xyz.

That's what the critique is about, lack of communication and lack of acknowledgement. Ghosting people when they took the time to file an issue/bug report, with providing a PoC and test case is just rude behavior.
by dxdm | 2025-11-21 21:16:58+00:00
"I didn't want to hurt you, baby, but what can I do? You divorced me, you looked at other men. Your friends poisoned your mind against me. What can a man do in this situation? You see how my hands are tied, and now your hands are tied. Has it crossed your mind to not provoke me by trying to defend yourself?"

Disgusting.
by atbpaca | 2025-11-21 21:17:03+00:00
Here the context is prozac FOR CHILDREN, not in general. Yet some people make a point in commenting that SSRIs are ineffective in general because they believe in some big pharma conspiracy. This is spreading misinformation. The truth is that SSRIs are modestly more effective than a placebo for approximately >> one third of the individuals << who try them. In other words, SSRIs are effective for more than 60-66% of adults. Moreover, there are a few different types of SSRIs. It takes time to find the one that fits you.
by uejfiweun | 2025-11-21 21:17:16+00:00
The Steam Frame shows a lot of promise in terms of letting people play games on a massive virtual screen. But with the hardware, even more is possible. I hope they are working on a compatibility layer that allows 2D games to be rendered in 3D, like the 3D TV of the 2010s. In my opinion that would be a killer app.
by jacobgkau | 2025-11-21 21:17:31+00:00
> Also you should try your SSRI prescription. They really aren't very strong drugs. You might get mild relief or if you're like me and the majority of people you will see no effect whatsoever. It's worth a try anyway.

Someone else in the thread's testifying with personal experience that there were significant withdrawl symptoms after only a few months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999622#46008522

Are they lying, or are you misrepresenting something?
by Modified3019 | 2025-11-21 21:19:08+00:00
This is a good thing to know, but should also be noted that the same thing can happen with simply naturally recovering from a depressive episode.

The phenomenon should not be considered a reason to not medicate (which I don’t think you are implying, but some may take that as the conclusion). Instead it’s definitely something important to explicitly make people aware of.

Depression or the feeling so much mental agony that the idea of escaping with death becomes comforting, is a signal that something is wrong.

Realizing this has been important with weathering my own occasional dealings with severe[0]depression, once I realize “something is wrong”, I can start the annoyingly slow process of trial and error making changes to correct things. This turns depression from “how reality is” into “this is just feedback on my body’s state”. It turns things getting worse into either a “this is either a transient state or the wrong solution”.

[0] Which I define as the point where any passive ideation (fantasies of dying) starts to enter the gradient of becoming involuntary. As opposed to regular negative thoughts which can (and should) be brushed away as easily as a fly landing on me. Curiously, once I noticed it also affected my ability to experience color. While I could technically see colors, it was like have a mental partial greyscale filter because there was no beauty in it, color was just a meaningless detail.
by thot_experiment | 2025-11-21 21:19:30+00:00
I have Qwen3-30B-VL (an MoE model) resident in my VRAM at all times now because it is quicker to use it to answer most basic google questions. The type of stuff like remembering how to force kill a WSL instance which i don't do that often is now frictionless because i can just write on terminal (q is my utility)

q how to force kill particular WSL

and it will respond with "wsl --terminate <distro-name>" much faster than google

it's also quite good at tool calling, if you give it shell access it'll happily do things like "find me files over 10mb modified in the last day" etc where remembering the flags and command structure if you're not doing that action regularly previously required a google or a peek at the manpage

i also use it to transcribe todo lists and notes and put them in my todo app as well as text manipulation, for example if i have a list of like, API keys and URLs or whatever that i need to populate into a template, I can just select the relevant part of the template in VSCode, put the relevant data in the context and say "fill this out" and it does it faster than i would be able to do the select - copy - select - paste loop, even with my hard won VIM knowledge

TL;DR

It's very fast (90tok/s) and very low latency and that means it can perform a lot of mildly complex tasks that have an obvious solution faster than you.

and fwiw i don't even think sonnet 4.5 is very useful, it's a decent model but it's very common for me to push it into a situation where it will be subtly wrong and waste a lot of my time (of course that's colored by it being slow and costs money)