MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mytailorisrich | 2025-11-06 17:14:38+00:00
HN is supposed to foster discussion and curiosity. I presented arguments to attempt to show that what Musk wrote is a least a plausible scenario (and the LSE link shows that this is taken seriously), whatever will actually happen (so "inevitable" is probably the interesting aspect to debate), whatever I think of Musk, and whatever I think of those issues in general. You keep being dangerously close to simply trolling...
by martinpw | 2025-11-06 17:14:47+00:00
I keep hearing this argument (that China does not care about climate change or the environment so it must be doing it for other reasons) but I just don't understand it. Why would you think they don't care about these things?

The Chinese leadership understands several things very clearly:

- The country has experienced multiple catastrophic natural disasters in the past.

- Such disasters often lead to regime change (losing the mandate of heaven via natural disasters leading to social unrest)

- The leadership is comprised of smart people (and a lot of engineers) and they don't play dumb political games like denying the reality of climate change.

- Climate change will bring far worse problems in future, which threatens the country's economic growth and therefore their hold on power.

So they have massive incentive to care about the reality of climate change and do everything they can to mitigate it and protect their environment.
by thinkingemote | 2025-11-06 17:15:33+00:00
A good observation. Of course medieval people worked harder and died earlier and they had more days off working. The focus of my comment was on time and not energy and specifically about festivals on which people took time not to work and to take part in the festival. Or at the very least took time to notice more than not noticing or said "meh" to :-)

"Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's" https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

"Historians Explain: Medieval Peasants Took More Leisure Time Than Today’s ‘Wage Slave’ Workers" https://tlio.org.uk/medieval-workers-short-days-long-holiday...

However, Snopes gives the theory a mixed rating: Medieval Peasants Only Worked 150 Days Due to 'Frequent, Mandatory' Holidays? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medieval-peasant-only-work... worth a read if you are interested, dear reader, it's thorough.

----

Interestingly it seems like some socialists and Anarchists also point to the theory and use it to show that Capitalism has vastly increased work on people. Can certainly see the green anarchism application with a non-exploited rural country with people with more personal and communal freedoms. I have not come across a capitalist historian refutation where the Capitalists and urbanisation lead to less exploitation, but I'd be happy to read one. Ideas promoting labour-saving technology could be adopted by any ideology.
by parsimo2010 | 2025-11-06 17:15:51+00:00
There's a distinction that you either didn't recognize or willfully excluded.

It's not that the US is simply "claiming" the vessels belong to a drug cartel, it's that nobody is denying that they were drug vessels. Not even Venezuela [1]. Maduro has denied that he is involved with the drug cartels, and Venezuela has claimed that the one or more of the strikes occurred within Venezuela's territorial waters, but they haven't made the argument that those boats were actually innocent non-criminal vessels.

And once you make that distinction, then yes. The world is fine with blowing up vessels that belong to drug cartels, even if China did it. They probably wouldn't be fine if it was actually refugees, but this does not appear to be the case.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdjzw3gplv7o
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-11-06 17:15:53+00:00
Depends what you mean by deep in the hole. Given how liberal Gemini is with free access it hardly seems like moneymaking is the end goal. Amongst AI labs, I've personally found Deepmind to be consistently the least sensationalist and least concerned with marketing. I think they're doing a great job of commoditising their complement.

https://gwern.net/complement
by lproven | 2025-11-06 17:16:36+00:00
Really happy to see a new version. I wrote about 3.1, 18 months ago:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/07/dillo_browser_v3_1/

I don't know if you saw that, but I asked a question in there I am still curious about. In the long time period that Dillo was largely idle, there were various forks.

I know of 2 that seem to be dead now...

DilloNG

https://github.com/w00fpack/dilloNG

D+

https://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-browser/

But two others seem to be active...

Dillo-Plus

https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus

<- active as recently as September 2024, i.e. since my article.

Mobilized Dillo:

https://www.toomanyatoms.com/software/mobilized_dillo.html

<- active last month -- and the page links to an article of mine. Nice. :-)

I wondered if you were in communication with any of those developers, and if you have managed to bring in any of their code or improvements?

FLTK is now up to 1.4.4, released in July.

https://github.com/fltk/fltk/releases/tag/release-1.4.4

Are you using the latest FLTK?

Just curious, not challenging or anything.
by arjie | 2025-11-06 17:17:03+00:00
You know, it's been decades and all I remember is the functionality rather than the implementation. It can't have just been some built-in Wake on Ring because I knew I had to do quite a bit of work to make it function (all just a matter of putting things together not that I wrote any code).

But an amusing follow-up is that I remember going to the Red Hat offices in Raleigh for an interview for an internship and actually describing the implementation as one of the things I'd done with a computer when I was much younger. It can't have been anything impressive because it didn't land with the interviewer. Silly naïveté of a child to think that's the kind of story you tell.

Probably all for the best in the end.
by jimt1234 | 2025-11-06 17:17:22+00:00
It gets even crazier. Latest: he's got a lawyer that says if he plants trees on a certain percentage of his property, it can be classified as a farm, and then exempt from the power utility hook-up requirement. But that comes with its own requirements, like a well to get water and certain fencing. But yeah, keep in mind, this is all so a dude can generate his own power on his own property.
by anon721656321 | 2025-11-06 17:17:27+00:00
yeah, for a moment I was reading it as being a holomorphic encryption type setup, which I think is the only case where you can say 'provably private'.

It's better than nothing, I guess...

But if you placed the server at the NSA, and said "there is something on here that you really want, it's currently powered on and connected to the network, and the user is accessing it via ssh", it seems relatively straightforward for them to intercept and access.
by lenerdenator | 2025-11-06 17:17:58+00:00
I think a lot of the groupthink in conservative circles around letting Trump do whatever the hell he wants is based on the myth that he is a good businessman and won't screw with the money, so it was fine to let him do what he wanted without any real judicial or legislative review.

Well, as it turns out, he will screw with the money, so they're going to have to now review all of the crap he does and check off on each item one-by-one.
by vitaly-pavlenko | 2025-11-06 17:18:32+00:00
Fair point.

In my approach I got very dense yet readable information density on the screen. Eg. the entire Mov. 1 of Moonlight sonata is a single screen on my 16" Mac, yet all tonal effects are there, visible: https://rawl.rocks/f/Sonate_No._14_Moonlight_1st_Movement
by hereme888 | 2025-11-06 17:18:32+00:00
Dove a bit into this topic superficially out of curiosity. Maybe not shut it down but greatly limit reach:

- Domain Name Seizures via ICANN and registrars

- Political/legal pressure on CDNs, SSL certificate providers, bandwidth providers.

- Propaganda and legal labeling ("malicious actor", "foreign agent", "terrorist")

- There are technical workarounds to keep the page up within Russia's sovereign internet (Runet).
by lxe | 2025-11-06 17:19:17+00:00
This was the only recent model that provided a human solution to the stacking problem on the first try. https://medium.com/@nathanbos/gpt-4-may-have-general-intelli...

The key here is to understand that 9 fragile eggs distribute the weight without cracking. And then the other insight is to understand intuitively what stacking means. Where arranging things around certain objects doesn't make any sense.
by mothballed | 2025-11-06 17:19:49+00:00
They don't. The people paying them and the schleps on the drug boats are two different people. They're putting their worthless peasants on the boats; Venezuela is chalk full of them so blowing up a few here and there makes no difference in the incoming bribe money nor to the drug trafficking organizations.

No one cares that they are dead. Not their employers, not the Venezuelan government, not the police who can now exploit the families of the dead even more, nor the Americans bombing them. They are mere expendable flesh in a game of politics, a token blood offering to the kings and princes of prohibition.
by studmuffin650 | 2025-11-06 17:19:54+00:00
Also important to remember that Google is years ahead of most other AI shops in that they're running on custom silicon. This makes their inference (and maybe training) cheaper then almost any other company. People don't realize this when compared to OpenAI/Anthropic where most folks are utilizing NVIDIA GPUs, Google is completely different in that aspect with their custom TPU platform.
by protimewaster | 2025-11-06 17:19:59+00:00
This is, to me, one of the absolute biggest selling points for ZigBee and Z-Wave.

I can get some random, vendor I've never heard of, ZigBee sensor, and I know it won't do anything rogue on the internet because it doesn't have any way of getting to the internet.

Also, ZigBee is extremely power efficient compared to WiFi. With ZigBee, I don't mind putting a sensor in the crawlspace or somewhere a pain to get to. It won't need the batteries changed for a year or two anyway.

I know Matter can work over more efficient means than WiFi, but most of the cheaper devices I find are WiFi. A cheap ZigBee device is still ZigBee.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-11-06 17:20:10+00:00
I suspect there's a strong correlation between people who are motivated by harming others, especially organised hatred of specific groups, and people who self-harm through poor modelling of consequences.

Harming others correlates with personality disorders. Personality disorders - especially Cluster B - correlate with poor impulse control, an emotional rather than a rational orientation, addictions, unreliability and dishonesty, and general inconsistency.

Disordered people with high IQ and EQ tend to get away with disordered relationships for longer. But it's rare to live one of these lives with zero consequences. So these types are at least as likely to go through catastrophic collapse as to get away with their chaos and dysfunction.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-11-06 17:20:33+00:00
As is typical for this sort of piece, it talks about “diabetes” but really means “type 2 diabetes”. Anyone with type-1 diabetes (the auto-immune variety) can benefit from some of these techniques to control blood sugars, but will still absolutely and unconditionally require insulin injections/pumps or they will die.

I really wish the media would spell this out. I’ve lost track of the number of people who think I just have to “eat right” and I’ll be just fine. No, I’ll die. And I probably know more about it than you who just read a misleading article, just saying…
by devsda | 2025-11-06 17:21:08+00:00
Trusting institutions is fine but you have to trust people or institutions for the right things, blind trust is harmful.

I'll trust my doctor to give me sound medical advice and my lawyer for better insights into law. I won't trust my doctor's inputs on the matters of law or at least be skeptical and verify thoroughly if they are interested in giving that advice.

Newspapers are a special case. They like to act as the authoritative source on all matters under the sun but they aren't. Their advice is only as good as their sources they choose and those sources tend to vary wildly for many reasons ranging from incompetence all the way to malice on both the sides.

I trust BBC to be accurate on reporting news related to UK, and NYT on news about US. I wouldn't place much trust on BBC's opinion about matters related to the US or happenings in Africa or any other international subjects.

Transferring or extending trust earned in one area to another unrelated area is a dangerous but common mistake.
by StarGrit | 2025-11-06 17:21:56+00:00
> If you're never seen it used to be helpful, I don't know that to tell you. I have, all the time, and it seems entirely normal and unremarkable.

I suspect that you didn't understand the subtext of the conversation. If you aren't used to dealing with it, you will take the comment on face value, if you are like me that had to deal with it most of my life, you won't.

> That saddens me. It seems like you've worked at some rough places, I'm sorry. But they're not all like that, and I wish you could see that.

I got paid well enough. I prefer to be a gun for hire and deal with the reality. I actually prefer these environments, I can assume everyone around me is a snake.

> I don't see how it's going to work as damage control. Can you explain how? Either it helps resolve things (good), or it doesn't and people keep complaining in the thread. I don't see any scenario where it controls damage. Damage control is things like locking a thread or shadowbanning. Not offering to call.

I am sure other people have explained this to you. However it is extremely simple.

1) Feign concern. This fools enough people so it gets quieted down.

2) Call up, pretend to care, person calms down as they feel like things are being addressed.

3) Do nothing.

4) It gets forgotten about, person that initially instigated complaint doesn't bother following up.

> I'm really sorry you see everything through such a cynical lens.

I don't see everything through a cynical lens. I see communications of this type as cynically because they have almost always been disingenuous.
by argamd | 2025-11-06 17:22:05+00:00
Over the past few months, I’ve been building and deploying real Voice AI agents for businesses — everything from booking calls to customer service to healthcare intake.

What I learned was kind of shocking: once you ship a voice agent, you basically fly blind.

You can’t easily tell why calls fail.

You can’t measure whether a prompt, voice, or model change improves performance.

There’s no Mixpanel or Datadog for conversational AI — just logs and vibes.

We built Convolytic to fix that. It’s an analytics and optimization platform for voice and chat agents — a way to actually measure, A/B test, and improve performance in production.

It answers questions like:

Did latency or tone cause this call to drop?

Which LLM or TTS stack performs better for this workflow?

How much revenue are we losing because the AI didn’t follow up or upsell?

In one real estate pilot, we found agents booked one showing but never suggested a second — a missed 40% revenue opportunity hiding behind “successful” calls.

We started out just needing observability for our own agents, but other teams building with Vapi, Retell, Synthflow, and custom STT/TTS stacks asked for access, so now we’re opening it up.

If you’re building or running voice/chat agents, I’d love feedback — what metrics would you track if you could? We’re early, but the core platform already supports multi-model benchmarking, A/B testing, and call-level analytics.

https://www.convolytic.com/
by phantasmish | 2025-11-06 17:22:50+00:00
Seconding this, I somehow managed to avoid encountering the coverage of COVID that people say shook their faith in institutions, despite following the news pretty closely. Like to the point that if not for others' reactions it'd never have occurred to me to regard the coverage as notably bad (unlike, say, the lead-up to the war in Iraq). I'd love to know what people are talking about when they bring this up, because I truly have no idea.
by cma | 2025-11-06 17:22:59+00:00
When there are survivors we've just been sending them back. Likely some haven't been smuggling drugs at all, and even less to the US given the distance and the range of the boats. In 25% of coast guard drug suspicion induced stops near the US, the coast guard fails to find any drugs. Would you be ok with the US national guard going into Appalachian cities and killing doctors suspected of running pill mills without trial, by aerial bombardment, and with high rate of mistakes?
by carderne | 2025-11-06 17:23:20+00:00
Is it absolutely necessary to have a base/gateway? This Verge article[0] seems to imply not, but it's not at all clear to me what I lose.

If I just want a smart switch that controls a smart light, can I do that without a hub? Can I use my phone to control that light/switch in a pinch? I'm not averse to spending $100 or whatever, but it's just more _stuff_ that I'd rather not think about.

[0] "Apple now lets you add Matter devices to Apple Home without a hub" https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/18/24246581/ios18-matter-sma...
by xnx | 2025-11-06 17:23:36+00:00
> Also important to remember that Google is years ahead of most other AI shops in that they're running on custom silicon.

Not just the chips, Google's entire datacenter setup seems much more mature (e.g. liquid cooling, networking, etc.). I saw some video of new Amazon datacenter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnGC4YS36gU) and it looks like a bunch of server racks in a warehouse.
by michalwarda | 2025-11-06 17:24:22+00:00
We’ve spent a while trying to generate a very specific, complex, multi‑turn conversation dataset. Most tools pushed us toward glue scripts and one‑off pipelines that were hard to review or reuse. Torque is our attempt to make this boring and predictable: a small, MIT‑licensed framework that treats dataset generation like building a UI. You define small, declarative “components” and compose them into pipelines. The goal is clear code and repeatable runs, not another heavy DSL. It’s early and open source. We’d love feedback on the API design, examples you’d like to see, and rough edges we should fix first. Docs and code: https://github.com/qforge-dev/torque
by vitaly-pavlenko | 2025-11-06 17:25:02+00:00
It's rainbow if we skip coloring 1 and 5 and color them with grayscale instead.

Here's the question. If we can allow one color not to be "colorful" (chromatic), what pitch would that be? It's the tonic (pitch 1).

If we allow two such colors? 5 is a good candidate, it's present in almost all popular scales. (Locrian isn't very popular.)

The rest 10 colors go in rainbow by thirds, as you proposed.

So, using two grayscale colors, I've reduced the demand to make distinct enough color palette from 12 colors to 10 chromatic + 2 grayscale.

Which (10), in my experience fighting with different screens and projectors, is almost the limit of having something stable, distinguishable, nameable and memorable.

Funny enough, those 10 can be further split into 5 brighter and 5 darker pitches. Exactly as they turn from bright to dark if we go from bright to dark modes: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dku7jezn00yltb607j2un/Screens...
by dtagames | 2025-11-06 17:25:40+00:00
While strangely unpopular here, Yasha Levine's[0] well documented premise is that the entire existence of the internet is designed for surveillance and content control, down to the chip level, and this is mandated and enforced through laws as well as more covert agreements.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-...
by neilv | 2025-11-06 17:25:46+00:00
> There are also indications that the operator(s) are based in Russia.

That's long been my assumption.

What I haven't known was whether this was good Russian people (culturally valuing literature and intellect) wanting to be able to access articles that they can't afford.

Nor whether it was or could become something sketchier (e.g., feeding spy databases, or one nice Chrome zero-day and strategic timing away from compromising engineering workstations at most US tech companies where an employee reads HN).

But what actually bothers me about the misc `archive.*` sites is how HN routinely uses them, for US tech company workers to circumvent paywalls for struggling journalism organizations. This piracy practice seems to have the unofficial blessing of the US tech investor firm that runs and moderates HN. Besides whatever laws this is breaking, subjectively, it feels to me like crossing an ethical line, and also (economically) like punching down.
by xaedes | 2025-11-06 17:25:50+00:00
> It puts a name to a considerate consensus-based way to approach change

When reading about nemawashi I immediately thought about its usage in software refactoring.

This is something you often intuitively do when making bigger refactors. Lay the foundations before actually doing it. Affected code parts and stakeholders should not be surprised by one big change. Instead they should be consulted before hand, building consensus, modify the planned big refactor itself and preparing the individual parts for it by small changes. Otherwise you will encounter a lot of friction, introduce bugs, etc.

It is very nice to have a proper term for this.
by rapatel0 | 2025-11-06 17:25:55+00:00
OP was specifically talking about the 20s, 30s, 40s but just to add a complete picture.

Just to add some empiricism to the conversation

Fiscal Year Tariffs/Customs Individual Income Corporate Income Top Marginal Rate Receipts (% GDP)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1928 14.0% (approx) DNF DNF 25.0% DNF

1935 8.4% 14.6% 14.7% 63.0% 5.1%

1940 6.1% 13.6% 18.3% 81.1% 6.7%

1944 0.9% 45.0% 33.9% 94.0% 20.5%

1952 1.2% (approx) 42.2% 32.1% 92.0% 19.0%

1960 1.3% (approx) 42.0% 23.0% 91.0% 17.8%

1970 1.1% (approx) 46.0% 18.0% 71.8% 17.9%

1980 0.8% (approx) 47.0% 12.0% 70.0% 18.9%

1990 1.3% (approx) 45.0% 9.0% 28.0% 17.8%

2000 1.1% (approx) 49.0% 11.0% 39.6% 20.0%

2010 1.2% (approx) 41.0% 9.0% 35.0% 14.6%

2015 1.3% (approx) 47.0% 10.0% 39.6% 17.6%

2019 2.0% (approx) 50.0% 7.0% 37.0% 16.3%

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DNF=Did not find

- Tariffs fell from ≈14% of receipts in 1928 to <1% by WWII -> income taxes replaced trade duties.

- Individual income taxes overtook all other sources after 1943

- Corporate shares peaked during war mobilization (~⅓ of revenue in 1944–52).

- Top marginal tax rate was surprisingly not too corrilated to government revenue.

(REALLY wish HN did basic markdown formatting)
by FarmerPotato | 2025-11-06 17:26:17+00:00
In 1991, I used Inside Macintosh for inspiration, but a much broader view of interface was distilled in the MITRE Corporation user interface book.

MITRE successfully conveyed how to have keyboard-operated GUI with plenty of power user modes --all with discoverability. You might call it "fallbacks for every mode".

Its principles combined TUI (then known as CUI) and GUI as well as DSL (domain specific language).

A fully architected program having a DSL (domain specific language) had a console much like a macro recorder: as you used the menus and icons, the console would show the commands you could otherwise type in to get the same effect.

You could edit the console line and re-execute it.

In the 1990s, DSL was a buzzword but if you got it right, your GUI was a power tool.