MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gmueckl | 2025-12-04 20:43:16+00:00
Not GP. But I read it as a transfer of the big lie that is fed to Ender into an AI scenario. Ender is coaxed into committing genocide on a planetary scale with a lie that he's just playing a simulated war game. An AI agent could theoretically also be coaxed into bad actions by giving it a distorted context and circumventing its alignment that way.
by windexh8er | 2025-12-04 20:43:24+00:00
> To add onto this, it is a characteristic of their design to statistically pick things that would be bad choices, because humans do too.

Spot on. If we look at, historically, "AI" (pre-LLM) the data sets were much more curated, cleaned and labeled. Look at CV, for example. Computer Vision is a prime example of how AI can easily go off the rails with respect to 1) garbage input data 2) biased input data. LLMs have these two as inputs in spades and in vast quantities. Has everyone forgotten about Google's classification of African American people in images [0]? Or, more hilariously - the fix [1]? Most people I talk to who are using LLMs think that the data being strung into these models has been fine tuned, hand picked, etc. In some cases for small models that were explicitly curated, sure. But in the context (no pun) of all the popular frontier models: no way in hell.

The one thing I'm really surprised nobody is talking about is the system prompt. Not in the manner of jailbreaking it or even extracting it. But I can't imagine that these system prompts aren't collecting mass tech debt at this point. I'm sure there's band aid after band aid of simple fixes to nudge the model in ever so different directions based on things that are, ultimately, out of the control of such a large culmination of random data. I can't wait to see how these long term issues crop and and duct taped for the quick fixes these tech behemoths are becoming known for.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33347866 [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/12/google-ra...
by Aurornis | 2025-12-04 20:43:28+00:00
The original article which is linked in this post goes into much better detail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit...

Schools and universities have made accommodations a priority for decades. It started with good intentions, but parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability and b) provides significant academic advantages if you do.

Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests. At many high schools and universities, getting more time than your peers to take tests is as simple as finding a doctor who will write the write things in a note for you. Some universities grant special permissions to record lectures to students with disabilities, too.

If you don't have a disability, you aren't allowed to record lectures and you have to put your pencil down at the end of the normal test window. As you can imagine, when a high percentage of the student body gets to stay longer for a hard test, the wheels start turning in students' heads as they realize cheating is being normalized and they're being left behind by not getting that doctors' note.

The rampant abuse is really becoming a problem for students with true disabilities. As you can imagine, when the disability system is faced with 1/3 of the student body registering for disability status the limited number of single rooms and other resources will inevitably get assigned to people who don't need it while some who actually do need it are forced to go without.
by scratchyone | 2025-12-04 20:43:30+00:00
FWIW, consider that some of these students may need the accommodation specifically because of the pressure of the final exam. Many mental health disabilities will become worse with stress. A low stress environment and a high stress final exam could trigger entirely different symptoms.

For example, I have OCD (real, diagnosed, not the bs "omg im so ocddddd"). I have extra time accommodations because I have to spend time dealing with my OCD symptoms. With treatment, they tend to fade into the background. They re-emerge only in high stress situations. I would seem like a perfectly normal student in class, but then clearly start struggling with these symptoms if you watched me take an exam. Consider, many other students you teach may have these same experiences.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-04 20:43:58+00:00
> A country may vet entrants according to any criteria it chooses…

Sure. But said country may have set rules for itself, like the First Amendment, that limit what's permissible beyond what international law and sovereignty alone permit.

(To extend the house analogy, you may not actually be able to "enforce any limits I wish unto who may enter my house". It is, for example, generally unlawful for you to evict your minor child. If you rent out a room, that tenant has rights you can't violate, too. You can't keep out a cop with a valid warrant, either.)
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-12-04 20:44:32+00:00
What is the motivation for killing off the population in scenario 2? That's a post-scarcity world where the elites can have everything they want, so what more are they getting out of mass murder? A guilty conscience, potentially for some multiple of human lifespans? Considerably less status and fame?

Even if they want to do it for no reason, they'll still be happier if their friends and family are alive and happy, which recurses about 6 times before everybody on the planet is alive and happy.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-04 20:45:04+00:00
Sure but 32GB DDR5 ram has just jumped from ~$100 to $300+ in a flash. The 2x16GB I have in my recent build went from $105 for the pair to $250 each. $500 total!

SSD’s are also up. Hell I am seeing refurbished enterprise HDD’s at 2x right now. It’s sharp increases basically across the board except for CPU’s/GPU’s.

Every PC build basically just cranked up $400-$600 easily, and that’s not accounting for the impact of inflation over the last few years weakening everyone’s wallets. The $1600 machine I spec’d out for my buddy 5 weeks ago to buy parts for this Black Friday now runs $2k even.
by ultrarunner | 2025-12-04 20:45:41+00:00
> Adderall and other amphetamines only have problems with long term usage.

My research was done a long time ago. I understood Ritalin to have mild neurotoxic effects, but Adderall et al to be essentially harmless. Do you have a source for the benefits giving way to problems long-term?

Regardless, your overall point is interesting. Presumably, these drugs are (ridiculously tightly) controlled to prevent society-wide harm. If that ostensible harm isn't reflected in reality, and there is a net benefit in having a certain age group accelerate (and, presumably, deepen) their education, perhaps this type of overwhelming regulatory control is a mistake. In that sense, it's a shame that these policies are imposed federally, as comparative data would be helpful.
by ux266478 | 2025-12-04 20:45:45+00:00
I'll disagree with that on a few points. Britain was inarguably the most diverse, with almost no attempt at creating cultural homogenity (and it really wasn't that great for anyone not Scottish or English.) Rome attempted it to some degree, with attempts to have a unified culture largely decreasing as time went on, being replaced with a Christian identity. China is extremely complicated in this matter and goes to extreme lengths to ensure cultural homogeneity. Minorities exist and the nature of the han ethnicity is also very obtuse, but it's highly rooted in an indivisible homogeneity that you discount. Hanhua is a very basic concept.

You also ignore the flagrant existence of powers that were not diverse. The Phoenicians interacted with a lot of cultures and influenced them very deeply, but Canaanite society was highly insular. Viet Nam was a powerful society that expanded continually, but it engaged in aggressive replacement colonialism of peoples it conquered.

Diversity in a real sense requires a collection of disparate, conflicting identities. There are no great societies that have any kind of lifespan with widespread diversity in this sense. Almost all of them move towards assimilation, and the ones that don't never last long.
by fovc | 2025-12-04 20:45:56+00:00
Łukasz Kaiser basically confirmed it in a podcast:

https://youtu.be/3K-R4yVjJfU?si=JdVyYOlxUbEcvEEo&t=2624

> Q: Are the releases aligned with pre-training efforts?

> A: There used to be a time not that long ago, maybe half a year, distant past, where the models would align with RL runs or pretraining runs ... now the naming is by capability. GPT5 is a capable model; 5.1 is a more capable model
by benlivengood | 2025-12-04 20:46:52+00:00
A major con of bedframes is annoying squeaks. Joints bear a lot of load and there usually isn't diagonal bracing to speak of, so they get noisy after almost no time at all. Fasteners loosen or wear the frame materials. I have yet to find one that stays quiet more than a few months or a year without retightening things; but I haven't tried a full platform construction with continuous walls which I expect might work better, but also sounds annoyingly expensive and heavy.
by eZinc | 2025-12-04 20:46:53+00:00
I've only been using AI for small editor tools or for common utils (math, physics, string manipulation) instead of importing libraries to reduce random dependencies.

I find that most LLMs hallucinate and write too much bad code.

However, with Claude Opus 4.5 it's completely shifted my entire day. I'm out here running 8 concurrent agents knocking items off our todo list like crazy. I've gone from 99% manual code to 1% over the course of the last 4 days.

Never thought this was going to happen until at least 2060...
by kelseyfrog | 2025-12-04 20:47:11+00:00
This is great, but it seems to be missing the requisite 5000 word backstory detailing the author's summer trips to their grandma's farmhouse where the recipe originated or the vacation to a foreign land where the author had a personal encounter with the dish's chef who, after much cajoling, revealed the secret recipe. Without the backstory, each recipe feels ungrounded and detached from time, place, and even reality itself.
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-04 20:47:45+00:00
> Under this ruling, it appears that any website that hosts any user-generated content can be strictly liable if any of that content contains “sensitive personal data” about any person.

Could this lead to censorship as well? For example you could go to a website or community you don’t like, and share information that could be seen as “sensitive personal data” and then file an anonymous complaint so they get into legal trouble or get shut down?
by awb | 2025-12-04 20:48:32+00:00
Exactly.

It’s the concept of a management chart as an inverted pyramid with each layer holding up and supporting the layer above them. If you imagine a promotion as working your way down the corporate pyramid, then it’s easier to see how the managers at the bottom are carrying more weight and deserving of higher pay.

As opposed to a pyramid where it’s visually represented as the broader management layers supporting the layers above them.

In a pyramid, it looks like the CEO has a cushy, overpaid job. In an inverted pyramid it looks like they have the weight and responsibility of the company on their shoulders.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-04 20:48:54+00:00
I didn’t talk about Vulkan compute.

> have observed that no alternative has stepped up to nvidia's CUDA from a usability perspective.

I’m saying this is a mindshare thing if you haven’t evaluated ROCm / HIP. HIPify can convert CUDA source to HIP automatically and HIP is very similar syntax to CUDA.
by bottlepalm | 2025-12-04 20:49:09+00:00
It doesn't annoy you that people are using your label for clout though? With all the adults focusing on LGBTQ+ trans, etc.. a label is a way to make yourself standout, and kids are desperate to do that. Especially with mental disorders and sexuality because takes zero effort to give yourself a label, and now you have something to talk about.
by hylaride | 2025-12-04 20:49:09+00:00
I don't disagree that there has been a huge issue with stagnant wages, but not everybody who works minimum wage needs to make a living wage. Some are teenagers, people just looking for part time work, etc. Pushing up minimum wage too high can risk destroying jobs that are uneconomical at that level that could have been better than nothing for many people.

That being said, there's been an enormous push by various business groups to do everything they can to keep wages low.

It's a complicated issue and one can't propose solutions without acknowledging that there's a LOT of nuance...
by xboxnolifes | 2025-12-04 20:49:37+00:00
Assuming an 8GB phone on average and 2x16GB DDR5 desktop sticks being ~$400, the average person then buys 0.25GB RAM per month at $3.125.

If you want, you can add in a 16GB laptop every 36 months, tripling the total to 0.75GB and ~$10 a month. Still, that's multiple times less than the increase in egg price compared to the average consumption.
by shetaye | 2025-12-04 20:49:44+00:00
True, but unfortunately the response from Stanford has been to introduce triple and quad rooms ;)

This is not entirely their fault. Stanford is subject to Santa Clara County building regulations, and those tend not to be friendly to large university developments (or any large developments for that matter).

I vaguely recall the recent Escondido Graduate Village Residences (EVGR) construction taking a while to get through the regulatory pipeline.

The true underlying issue here is just that there is not enough quality housing for the number of students Stanford admits.
by jotaen | 2025-12-04 20:50:04+00:00
Background story: https://www.heise.de/en/news/GlobalBuildingAtlas-3D-Models-o...

Data set: https://mediatum.ub.tum.de/1782307?id=1782307&change_languag... / https://github.com/zhu-xlab/GlobalBuildingAtlas
by mindslight | 2025-12-04 20:50:11+00:00
> But I've already put off some projects I was gonna do for 2026, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Let's be honest here - the projects I'm going to do in 2026, I bought the parts for those back in 2024. But this is definitely going to make me put off some projects that I might have finally gotten around to in 2028.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-04 20:50:25+00:00
I mean, see Windows Vista. It was eventually patched up to the point where it was semi-usable (and then quietly killed off), but on introduction it was a complete mess. But... something had to be shipped, and this was something, so it was shipped.

(Vista wasn't the only one; Windows ME never even made it to semi-usable, and no-one even remembers that Windows 8 _existed_.)

Microsoft has _never_, as far as I know, been a company to be particularly concerned about product quality. The copilot stuff may be unusually bad, but it's not that aberrant for MS.
by xg15 | 2025-12-04 20:50:34+00:00
> I am an unabashed supporter of the US’s approach with Section 230, as it was initially interpreted, which said that any liability should land on the party who contributed the actual violative behavior—in nearly all cases the speaker, not the host of the content.

I never really understood how that system is supposed to work.

So on the one hand, Section 230 absolves the hoster of liability and tells an affected party to go after the author directly.

But on the other hand, we all rally for the importance of anonymity on the internet, so it's very likely that there will be no way to find the author.

Isn't this a massive vacuum of responsibility?
by mrob | 2025-12-04 20:51:03+00:00
It's not a post-scarcity world. There's no obvious upper bound on resources AGI could use, and there's no obvious stopping point where you can call it smart enough. So long are there are other competing elites the incentive is to keep improving it. All the useless people will be using resources that could be used to make more semiconductors and power plants.
by reissbaker | 2025-12-04 20:51:09+00:00
This will probably be an unpopular reply, but "real median household income" — aka, inflation-adjusted median income — has steadily risen since the 90s and is currently at an all-time high in the United States. [1] Inflation includes the cost of housing (by measuring the cost of rent).

However, we are living through a housing supply crisis, and while overall cost of living hasn't gone up, housing's share of that has massively multiplied. We would all be living much richer lives if we could bring down the cost of housing — or at least have it flatline, and let inflation take care of the rest.

Education is interesting, since most people don't actually pay the list price. The list price has gone up a lot, but the percentage of people paying list price has similarly gone down a lot: from over 50% in the 90s for state schools to 26% today, thanks to a large increase in subsidy programs (student aid). While real education costs have still gone up somewhat, they've gone up much less than the prices you're quoting lead you to believe: those are essentially a tax on the rich who don't qualify for student aid. [2]

1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

2: https://econofact.org/how-much-does-college-really-cost
by munchbunny | 2025-12-04 20:51:24+00:00
You do need to expose your team to some of the shit that's getting flung or else your team gets used to operating under clean conditions and loses its tolerance.

For better or for worse, politics and randomization is just a thing in our jobs, and for at least some people in your team that means part of career growth is learning to handle it. If you, the manager, are the sole person capable of being the "shit umbrella" for the team, that's another way that your team gets a bus number of 1. (I learned this the hard way.)

In an ideal world you have some senior engineers who are more of the "don't bother me and let me cook" persuasion, and then you have at least one who is probably on track to become a manager, and they are your backup when you can't be in two places at once.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-12-04 20:51:25+00:00
> The admissions system is not effectively dealing with this type of fraud.

If I was the university I would prefer these types of disabled students. Why not:

1. They are not really disabled, so I do not have to spend a lot of many for real accommodations

2. No need to deal with a higher chance (I’m guessing here) of academic difficulties

3. Basically, I hit disability metric without paying any cost!
by btbuildem | 2025-12-04 20:51:26+00:00
Before I watched the video, my brain ran ahead and I imagined it would be one of those led "fans", except also rotating around it's base. It might be harder to sync the two rotations, but you'd have much less mass in motion that way.

The solid state ones are cool! The real mystery there is how the pixel volume was manufactured -- it doesn't seem like something easily DIY'd
by ryuhhnn | 2025-12-04 20:51:32+00:00
> No one says disabled people cannot attend elite universities

The author spent the byline and first half of the article trying to explain that these universities wouldn't accept people with disabilities because they're just too elite and highly-selective. The recent surge of disabilities is actually perfectly explained, even in the article. The diagnostic criteria for disabilities has changed over time, becoming more "relaxed" as some would put it. If the diagnostic criteria expands to include more people, we are going to see higher rates of disability.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-04 20:52:07+00:00
That's been a nice run through the arrogance of hypotheticals.

Over here in reality: It is that time of year again where the weather is shifting.

I think I'll stay where I am, park in whatever location it is that suits me, and start looking into remote starter kits for my Honda.

And I'm quite certain that I don't care at all what my neighbors may think of this.
by lischa | 2025-12-04 20:52:08+00:00
Location: California, USA

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: React, Node.js, Express, PostgreSQL, SQL, JavaScript, Python, HTML, CSS, Next.js, Flask, SQLAlchemy, Material UI, Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS, Jest, Vitest, Git, GitHub

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10lVpi7g5chewOH1tOZZA98Gj...

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-chan14

Email: lchan14@gmail.com

I completed a Software Engineering bootcamp at Springboard where I learned how to build full-stack web applications. I like learning new technologies and I enjoy working in a team setting. I’m currently volunteering at Hack for LA where I help the organization to update and maintain their website as well as review pull requests. I’m excited and ready for any job opportunities working as an entry-level developer.
by esafak | 2025-12-04 20:52:15+00:00
Haidt et al decompose moral foundations into several factors to explain how progressives and conservatives view morality differently by virtue of prioritizing different factors; cf. Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations https://fbaum.unc.edu/teaching/articles/JPSP-2009-Moral-Foun...

Moral diversity has always existed. What is new is that polarization between the two camps has been increasing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization_in_the_...
by Aurornis | 2025-12-04 20:52:15+00:00
> I understood Ritalin to have mild neurotoxic effects, but Adderall et al to be essentially harmless.

There is no conclusive research on humans, but you have these backwards. Ritalin (methylphenidate) is thought to have less risk for neurotoxicity than Adderall (amphetamine). Amphetamine enters the neuron and disrupts some internal functions as part of its mechanism of action, while Ritalin does not.

Both drugs will induce tolerance, though. The early motivation-enhancing effects don't last very long.

There are also some entertaining studies where researchers give one group of students placebo and another group of students Adderall, then have them self-rate their performance. The Adderall group rates themselves as having done much better, despite performing the same on the test. If you've ever seen the confidence boost that comes from people taking their first stimulant doses, this won't come as a big surprise. These early effects (euphoria, excess energy) dissipate with long-term treatment, but it fools a lot of early users and students who borrow a couple pills from a friend.
by konanekane | 2025-12-04 20:52:16+00:00
I'll echo the praise for rsync.net and especially the "expert" plans that are very economical. I often refer to rsync.net as a "no nonsense" service which is well run by highly competent staff.

I have scripts that do both borg and rsync backups; the borg backups are for preservation and the rsync backups are to keep multiple machines at a similar data state. I also am able to do a borg backup of my website by rclone mounting the website file system and then pushing to a borg repo on rsync.net. This has saved my tail more than once. Website backup is a bit slow (compared to local backups) but it works reliably.

I certainly hope rsync.net never shuts down as there is nothing else out there even close to comparable in both quality and value.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-04 20:52:35+00:00
It’s kind of obvious.

Netflix has co-CEOs. One for tech and one for content. They value both equally

Amazon is a tech company and pays their software developers tech company wages.

The rest are media businesses. HBOMax specifically are owned by Discovery who has always been interested in doing things as cheaply as possible.

While Disney/Hulu are also on the surface media companies. Disney bought BamTech who had the best streaming technology/people outside of Netflix and Disney has always cared about technology

But why for everything that is holy are you watching the ad tier of streaming services?