MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by N_Lens | 2025-12-08 01:20:55+00:00
I remember reading this book called 'The Losers' (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2114133.The_Losers) about a privileged man who has a car accident, becomes disabled and comes to rely on government support. The book looks at the lives of the working poor and actually poor, who rely on welfare cheques and other subsidies and highlights the social and psychological impacts of these systems of support. It was very disempowering and psychologically enslaving for the people living on these systems of support.

I know it's probably not intentional but I believe welfare in the US absolutely is rife with negative outcomes and negative incentives for people receiving support, it doesn't uplift and enable success, it keeps people trapped in poverty and a mindset of helplessness.

I come from Australia where the social welfare system has similarly degraded (Though not as bad as the US), and there are increasingly more dehumanizing aspects in engaging with the system just to receive a below-subsistence amount.

This article highlights one aspect of such disincentives, but I believe the problem is deeper and more systemic.
by zozzle | 2025-12-08 01:21:31+00:00
Not coherent how? I addressed your claim about three different definitions and provided context as to why Banda being withdrawn in anticipation of failing sex verification falls into the pattern seen previously with Semenya, Khelif, etc.

I skimmed over your hypothetical about sex testing of family and friends because it didn't really add anything to the discussion. If any were found to have testes and male levels of testosterone (which in this scenario would not be a "hormone imbalace", as you put it) then yes, they would be male.
by bpt3 | 2025-12-08 01:21:52+00:00
Yes, people keep linking to the agile manifesto as if it's some sort of amulet protecting software developers from any sort of accountability or responsibility for their work product in a professional setting.

It seems like you acknowledge some amount of estimating is needed and I agree that there is an overemphasis on estimation in many places, but I'll ask you the same thing I asked others, which is:

How do you do either of the following without spending any time at all on estimates?

"Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale."

"At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly."
by monerozcash | 2025-12-08 01:22:31+00:00
> Were the alternatives any better? I don't recall any telecom companies committing to warrant canaries or the like.

Well, no. But Google does significant business in foreign countries and doesn't really want to give an excuse for foreign governments to start aggressively pursuing their own alternatives.

> And speaking of, whatever happened to those?

Cloudflare still has a warrant canary on their transparency report page, Reddit deleted theirs in 2016.

They were never very common.
by underlipton | 2025-12-08 01:23:22+00:00
Okay. They all suck. I want a list of websites that are likely to refer to my search query. Google is terrible at understanding my intent and even more terrible at displaying information in such a way as to facilitate my task.

As an example: I was searching for an item to purchase earlier. It's a very particular design; I already know that it's going to send me a bunch of slightly-wrong knockoffs. The first thing I want to see is all of the images that are labeled like my query, as many as possible at once, so that I can pick through them. Instead, it shows me the shopping UI, which fills the screen with pricing and other information for a bunch of things that I'm definitely not going to buy, because they're not what I'm looking for. Old Google would have had the images tab in a predictable place; I'd be on it without even thinking. Now? Yet another frustrating micro-experience with Nu-gle.
by rtp4me | 2025-12-08 01:23:37+00:00
Resources to read the receipt? Are you saying poor people can't do math? Honestly, how much effort does it take to look at your receipt and look for errors? If you are really on a tight budget, I guarantee you will be looking over your receipt.

I have watched countless people shop with a calculator or pen/pad to make sure they stay on budget. It is not hard.
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-08 01:24:24+00:00
They'll virtualize the ink jet printer ink model: Totally Transparent Liquid Glass UI is free, DRM'ed dye is an in-app purchase that fades over time, or subscription that you don't actually own.

User defined colors not possible, only expensive premium licensed Pantone, Disney Princess Pink, Barbie Pink, Tiffany Blue, Coca Cola Red, Cadbury Purple, UPS Brown, Target Red, Home Depot Orange, John Deere Green & Yellow, Vantablack, Stuart Semple Black 2.0, 3.0, etc.
by morshu9001 | 2025-12-08 01:25:00+00:00
This explanation with angles makes this seem more complicated than it is. Two adversaries think of two numbers 0-11. Both say one aloud, add the other person's number to the one that wasn't said, then subtract 12 if it's higher.

As a bonus, the other person doesn't know what you "rolled" unless you tell them, which was important for the game I was making.
by roxolotl | 2025-12-08 01:25:22+00:00
Yea bag of words isn’t helpful at all. I really do think that “superpowered sentence completion” is the best description. Not only is it reasonably accurate it is understandable, everyone has seen autocomplete function, and it’s useful. I don’t know how to “use” a bag of words. I do know how to use sentence completion. It also helps explains why context matters.
by bcantrill | 2025-12-08 01:27:57+00:00
For those looking for context, this is a regrettable response of mine from nearly three decades ago, resurrected because people disagreed with the way my handling bad community behavior well over a decade ago. And for whatever it's worth, my explanation of all of this from a decade ago still stands[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041086
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2025-12-08 01:29:08+00:00
By submitting to the contest and especially winning money, you made a contract with the contest organizers. In this case one part of that is agreeing to allow the organizers to publish and distribute your copyrighted work.

> my games were public, free, and accessible for judging during the entire competition period.

But the rules didn't say anything about this being limited to only the competition period.

> Submission will be published and kept online for free on the competition website, while you are free to keep working on it (and eventually charge for it/make commercial usage).

It seems that under US copyright law, the license is by default irrevocable if the contract terms did not specify any conditions for revocation. So in this case unilateral revocation of the license is not possible. I can also see courts taking the words kept online to imply long term or perpetual distribution.

Anyways if you look at the situation logically, this sort of contest almost always has all the past submissions and contest results as a resource for future contestants as well as something to browse interested people. If all that's left after the contest is over is the ranking of the winners, then I think that would be quite sad.

> they threatened to retroactively disqualify my games (which they did) and demanded reimbursement of the prize money I had won in 2023, claiming my games were no longer “available online.”

In fact this feels to be almost opposite of a threat, but actually a courtesy. The contest organizers are offering to basically undo the contract (basically erasing the contest submission) without any penalty, something they aren't obligated to do at all. They could just as easily just say "pound sand" and keep hosting the rom forever.
by antonymoose | 2025-12-08 01:29:24+00:00
I’m telling you from living “here” - you see just as many stories of major chains getting popped as you do the ever so scapegoatable DG chain.

I have no stock in the firm, this is just lazy feel god torch wielding here.

Here’s Target getting popped all the same: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article289980944....
by faidit | 2025-12-08 01:29:40+00:00
Boots was a UK court case. The Wikipedia article you linked has a note at the top that it mainly refers to British law.

In the US, local laws generally side with the consumer and legally entitle you to the displayed price. There are also federal laws from the FTC act against deceptive pricing.

See some US state laws here: https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/us-retail-pricing-laws-and-regu...

a few summaries from https://www.braincorp.com/resources/the-price-must-be-right-...:

>Michigan requires a bonus of 10 times the overcharge amount.

New Jersey’s Retail Pricing Laws mandate that most retail stores clearly mark the total selling price on most items offered for sale. Retailers must also verify the accuracy of their checkout scanners and may face fines of $50-$100 per violation for noncompliance.

Connecticut law requires stores to charge the lowest of the advertised, posted, or labeled price for an item. Customers who are overcharged are entitled to a refund of the overcharge or $20, whichever is greater
by foxglacier | 2025-12-08 01:30:05+00:00
Good on you for admitting it, but this popular way of being intentionally wrong just because some baddies have stuck their flag in the hill of truth is anti-scientific. Everyone's trying to protect their personal image at the expense of honesty. I'm constantly encountering people who have wrong beliefs about this stuff because the scientific conclusions are so well hidden from mainstream writing on the topic. Even the person replying to you seems shocked to hear that intelligence is innate. Blank-slatism and everybody's-a-winner has infected popular understanding of intelligence.
by lasersafetyguy | 2025-12-08 01:30:10+00:00
I think there are some misunderstandings in this thread about the IEC 60825 laser safety standards, and laser safety in general.

IEC 60825 is applicable to safety of laser products emitting laser radiation in the wavelength range 180 nm to 1 mm. So it does not just cover wavelengths that present a retinal hazard.

IEC 60825 is not a regulation, it is an international standard that governments may use to inform regulations. For example, in the US, laser products are regulated by the FDA through 21 CFR 1040.10 and 21 CFR 1040.11. These regulations are well aligned with the US national standard ANSI z136.1 and the international standard IEC 60825-1.

Emissions from lasers that present a retinal hazard are in general not additive. This is because beams coming from different directions focus onto different parts of the retina and any effect they have on the retina is localized. Thus the claim that 20 cars at an intersection all impinging on a viewer presents a 20-fold retina hazard is ill-founded. Emissions from beams that are primarily absorbed by the cornea, before they are focussed by the eye, do present an additive hazard to the cornea.

Regarding operation under faulted conditions, in particular a scanning failure, if the system's scan-failure shutoff latency is too long to prevent hazardous emission then it is a faulty product that has not been correctly classified. IEC 60825-1 explicitly requires evaluation of emissions under every reasonably foreseeable single point of failure. Generally speaking, a scanning failure is reasonably foreseeable.

While some lasers used for example in industrial processing are extremely powerful, the sort of lasers used in automotive lidars are quite modest in power. Low power lasers like traditional supermarket barcode scanners have been in common use since the 1970s and millions, probably billions, of people have been exposed to them without the dire consequences some posters seem to predict from automotive lidars.
by komali2 | 2025-12-08 01:30:28+00:00
That's not as random as letting me choose them! They had to be allowed onto the range, show ID, afford the gun, probably do a background check to get the gun unless they used a loophole (which usually requires some social capital).

I'm proposing the true proposal of many guns rights advocates: anyone might have a gun.

So let me choose the 50 and you give them guns! Why not?
by tkgally | 2025-12-08 01:31:28+00:00
I am unsure myself whether we should regard LLMs as mere token-predicting automatons or as some new kind of incipient intelligence. Despite their origins as statistical parrots, the interpretability research from Anthropic [1] suggests that structures corresponding to meaning do exist inside those bundles of numbers and that there are signs of activity within those bundles of numbers that seem analogous to thought.

That said, I was struck by a recent interview with Anthropic’s Amanda Askell [2]. When she talks, she anthropomorphizes LLMs constantly. A few examples:

“I don't have all the answers of how should models feel about past model deprecation, about their own identity, but I do want to try and help models figure that out and then to at least know that we care about it and are thinking about it.”

“If you go into the depths of the model and you find some deep-seated insecurity, then that's really valuable.”

“... that could lead to models almost feeling afraid that they're gonna do the wrong thing or are very self-critical or feeling like humans are going to behave negatively towards them.”

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/team/interpretability

[2] https://youtu.be/I9aGC6Ui3eE
by grafmax | 2025-12-08 01:32:03+00:00
So-called property rights are a legal construction that protects the wealth of the wealthy from the working class utilizing the justice system to maintain the domination of the wealthy over the working class, classifying expropriations of their wealth as theft. Capitalist states have always been subordinate to the wealthy, and the justice system is one branch of that apparatus.

> once you are in a contract you need to fulfill them, however you can make any contract you like and are free to terminate them at any time (with a notice period).

This is a bankrupt notion of freedom that ignores the power differences between the parties in the contract. Those with less money have fewer choices available to them and are thus less free. That’s why relationships of exploitation continue to exist such as between the Amazon worker who pisses into a bottle to boost their metrics while Bezos retains the freedom to sit on his billions and pay politicians to do his bidding. These relationships wouldn’t exist if the parties were on equal footing.

> It is true, that some people are born rich, and most don't, but this is unfair not unfree.

Wealth differences are power differences. The power differences give rise to exploitative relationships. Wealth differences aren’t a fact of nature. They are a result of how we as humans have organized our societies. We have made this and we can unmake it. Sucking our thumbs and saying “that’s just the way things are” is part of the ideological apparatus that maintains the power of the capitalist class over the working class.

Wealth differences are power differences and as such impinge on freedom since those with less wealth have their choices subtracted in relationships of capitalist exploitation.
by strcat | 2025-12-08 01:33:53+00:00
GrapheneOS did not attack you or your project. The same goes for the people you're supporting who chose to attack us for years and then feigned being victims when we finally began defending ourselves. We'll defend ourselves from the libel from your project too. You're choosing to make manipulative attacks on it without an actual basis to try to pile on the existing ones, while feigning ignorance of all of that. The chat logs show you aren't actually ignorant of it.
by epsteingpt | 2025-12-08 01:34:01+00:00
While most comments will be negative toward Dollar General, in many areas Dollar General or Family Dollar or Dollar Tree are the only places you can get access and distribution to a wide range of products and brands in areas which are otherwise underserved.

You can dislike it, but they've evolved and expanded in part because they are very good at serving these areas profitably, where other businesses aren't.

People wanting bank branches and grocery stores and brunch spots here clearly have never lived or worked in many of these areas. The reality of theft, low spend, and employees - though not universal - is hard to fathom if you're not trying to 'run' the business. Good will does not pay your suppliers or rent.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-08 01:34:05+00:00
There are viable alternatives to Internet access, notably offline resources as provided by projects such as Kiwix. I'm not sure to what extent the projects described in OP actively leveraged these efforts with any real effectiveness. If it didn't, those OLPC mini-laptops would've been functionally equivalent to glorified calculators, and the results would be quite unsurprising.
by martin-t | 2025-12-08 01:34:32+00:00
And this is just the stuff you notice.

1) Verbatin copy is first-order plagiarism.

2a) Second-order plagiarism of written text would be replacing words with synonyms. Or taking a book paragraph by paragraph and for each one of them, rephrasing it in your own words. Yes, it might fool automated checkers but the structure would still be a copy of the original book. And most importantly, it would not contain any new information. No new positive-sum work was done. It would have no additional value.

Before LLMs almost nobody did this because the chance that it would help in a lawsuit vs the amount of work was not a good tradeoff. Now it is. But LLMs can do "better":

2b) A different kind of second-order plagiarism is using multiple sources and plagiarizing each of them only in part. Find multiple books on the same topic, take 1 chapter from each and order them in a coherent manner. Make it more granular. Find paragraphs or phrases which fit into the structure of your new book but are verbatim from other books. See how granular you can make it.

The trick here is that doing this by hand is more work than just writing your own book. So nobody did it and copyright law does not really address this well. But with LLMs, it can be automated. You can literally instruct an LLM to do this and it will do it cheaper than any human could. However, how LLMs work internally is yet different:

n) Higher-order plagiarism is taking multiple source books, identifying patterns, and then reproducing them in your "new" book.

If the patterns are sufficiently complex, nobody will ever be able to prove what specifically you did. What previously took creative human work now became a mechanical transformation of input data.

The point is this ability to detect and reproduce patterns is an impressive innovation but it's built on top of the work of hundreds of millions[0] of humans whose work was used without consent. The work done by those employed by the LLM companies is minuscule compared to that. Yet all of the reward goes to them.

Not to mention LLMs completely defear the purpose of (A)GPL. If you can take AGPL code and pass it through a sufficiently complex mechanical transformation that the output does the same thing but copyright no longer applies, then free software is dead. No more freedom to inspect and modify.

[0]: Github alone has 100 million users ( https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/github-statistics/ ) and we have reason to believe all of their data was used in training.
by faidit | 2025-12-08 01:34:40+00:00
The hard part is talking to the cashier and waiting for a manager, potentially having to argue with both, and looking like a cheapskate.

If you've ever shopped at dollar stores they are often understaffed with a long line, no self-checkout, and a single cashier on duty if at all. If you argue about pricing you will hold everyone up in line, maybe get dirty looks and possibly wait an hour for someone with the authority to come and clear it up. Another person in this thread also mentioned that they got screamed at and chased out of the store for "causing a problem": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182451
by whatyesaid | 2025-12-08 01:34:50+00:00
If you've got a prompt, along the lines of: given some references, check their validity. It searches against the articles and URLs provided. You return "yes", "no", and let's also add "inconclusive", for each reference. Basic LLMs can do this much instruction following, just like in 99.99% of times they don't get 829 multiplied by 291 wrong when you ask them (nowadays). You'd prompt it to back all claims solely by search/external links showing exact matches and not use its own internal knowledge.

The fake references generated in the ICLR papers were I assume due to people asking a LLM to write parts of the related work section, not verify references. In that prompt it relies a lot on internal knowledge and spends a majority of time thinking about what the relevant subareas are and cutting edge is, probably. I suppose it omits a second-pass check. In the other case, you have the task of verifying references, which is mostly basic instruction following for advanced models that have web access. I think you'd run the risks of data poisoning and model timeout more than hallucinations.
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-08 01:34:53+00:00
Gruber: Apple employees ‘giddy’ about Alan Dye’s departure

https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-...

Bad Dye Job

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

>The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. [...]

>It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. It was a big problem inside the company too. I’m aware of dozens of designers who’ve left Apple, out of frustration over the company’s direction, to work at places like LoveFrom, OpenAI, and their secretive joint venture io. I’m not sure there are any interaction designers at io who aren’t ex-Apple, and if there are, it’s only a handful. From the stories I’m aware of, the theme is identical: these are designers driven to do great work, and under Alan Dye, “doing great work” was no longer the guiding principle at Apple. [...]

>That alone will be a win for everyone — even though the change was seemingly driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to poach Dye, not Tim Cook and Apple’s senior leadership realizing they should have shitcanned him long ago. [...]

>My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.”

https://x.com/8hipulin/status/1996318006335401997

"Dye [...] get[ting] squeezed out" of Apple is such vividly technicolor imagery!

I too hope he makes Meta curl up and dye.