MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TomasBM | 2025-12-10 22:55:08+00:00
I looked at the original study [1], and it seems to be a very well-supported piece of research. All the necessary pieces are there, as you would expect from a Nature publication. And overall, I am convinced there's an effect.

However, I'm still skeptical of the effects or size of the change. First, a point that applies to the Massachusetts ballot on psychedelics in particular, putting views into percentages, and getting accurate results from political polls are notoriously difficult tasks [2]. Therefore, the size of any effect is faced with whatever confounding variables make those tasks difficult.

Second, there could be some level Hawthorne effect [3] at play here, such that participants may report being (more) convinced because that's what (they think) is expected of them. I'm not familiar with the recruiting platforms they used, but if they're specialized in paid or otherwise professional surveys, I wonder if participants feel an obligation to perform well.

Third, and somewhat related to the above, participants could state they'd vote Y after initially reporting X preference, because they know it's a low-cost no-commitment claim. In other words, they can claim they'd now vote for Y without fear of judgement because it's a lab environment and an anonymous activity, but they can always go back to their original position once the actual vote happens. To show the size of the effect with respect to other things, researchers will have to make the stakes higher, or follow-up with participants after the vote and find out if/why they changed their mind (again).

Fourth, if one 6-minute-average conversation with a chatbot could convince an average voter, I wonder how much did they know about the issue/candidate being voted on. More cynically for the study, there may be much more at play with actual vote preference than a single dialectic presentation of facts. For example: salient events that happen in the period up to the election; emotional connection with the issue/candidate; personal experiences.

Still, this does not make the study flawed for not covering everything. We can learn a lot from this work, and kudos to the authors for publishing it.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09771-9

[2] For example: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/polling-public-opinion-th...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
by willio58 | 2025-12-10 22:55:34+00:00
> but given their safety profile (terrible!)

I feel like there's kind of a cycle of unsafety with motorcycles on the social level in the U.S.

There's a societal understanding in the U.S. that motorcycles are unsafe, which results in an increased number of people purchasing motorcycles with the intention of showing off how unsafe (dangerous) they can be. And the cycle perpetuates.

Obviously, motorcycles are inherently less safe in certain ways, like your body is going to fly if you get into a high-speed collision, and that's pretty much unavoidable. But when I visit European countries, it seems motorcycle culture is _so_ much healthier. They are mostly seen as simple transportation tools, a far cry from what I regularly see in the U.S.
by standardUser | 2025-12-10 22:55:47+00:00
I agree about immigration, but the world has a large amount of very fertile land in places with very high costs of living. Bringing in large numbers of new immigrants at ultra low pay will have big consequences in most high-cost countries. It's worked well in the US, but that's because of our (former) identity as a nation of immigrants and the massive overlap between US and Latin American culture. In other nations, the outcome could very well be a racially/culturally incompatible underclass working the lowest paying and least consistent jobs, with little-to-no chance of fully integrating.
by drnick1 | 2025-12-10 22:56:03+00:00
> In the EU you don’t need to upload your ID anywhere, the service can use the government’s portal for ID verification. In the case of age verification they can get a yes/no response

The issue is that now the government knows what you are doing online, and that should never be allowed to happen.

I grew up when the Internet was truly free, before Facebook even existed. People shared source code, videos, MP3s, games, regardless of "copyright" or "intellectual property." To some extent, it is still possible to do all of this, but these freedoms are being eroded every day by making the Internet less anonymous. The endgame is obviously to force people to pay for things whose "marginal cost" is zero in the language of economists. "Protecting the children" is just a convenient excuse.
by ajross | 2025-12-10 22:56:08+00:00
> Calibri font has "I" and "l" the same, according to Wikipedia. A better font should avoid characters being too similar (such as "I" and "l" and "1").

Only when used in a context where they can be confused. This is a situation where HN is going to give bad advice. Programmers care deeply about that stuff (i.e. "100l" is a long-valued integer literal in C and not the number 1001). Most people tend not to, and there is a long tradition of fonts being a little ambiguous in that space.

But yes, don't use Calibri in your editor.
by mikasagindyk | 2025-12-10 22:56:10+00:00
Super excited to bring this into the world

You ship code, we make sure users understand (and grow with) your platform. All the docs, help desk articles, and guides now at your fingertips

We built this for people obsessed with building the best product, shipping fast, and needing a documentation system that keeps their community in the loop.

Lmk if you're excited to see this and we'll set you up!
by richardfeynman | 2025-12-10 22:57:09+00:00
Hi there, I see you too trust Hamas sources (the origin of the Hind Rajab sotry) and not Israeli sources, so you too are in the camp of "believe hamas" and "doubt israel".

1. Hamas used World Central Kitchen vehicles, according even to the head of World Central Kitchen, who initially condemned the attack and then later admitted Hamas used WCK vehicles. You didn't know this, did you?

2. A few questions on the Hind Rajab incident: Was the car stationary or moving? was it travelling north to a combat zone or south away from one? According to the original Arabic reports, did the family get out of the car or were they trapped inside? In the audio of this attack, was there any crossfire? When was Hind Rajab killed? Was it at 8:10am or at 2:30pm? What happened in those 6 hours? How can you be sure this was not a "fog of war" incident as opposed to a deliberate targeting of a civilian?
by roncesvalles | 2025-12-10 22:57:44+00:00
Pro tip: Sometimes refurbished printers have the actual full cartridge. I once bought a refurbished Xerox laser printer and used it for 12+ years and it was still printing when I threw it away despite the low ink indicator having come on for the last couple of years. I went through all of high school and university with the same $60 printer (and cartridge).

That means it's possible to make a printer that has a cartridge that outlives the life of the printer for typical home users. Getting people to replace the cartridge is mostly artificial and not some inherent technology limitation. If they really wanted to, they could make 50% of the interior space of the printer just one big laser ink cartridge that prints like 5000 pages, which in 2025 means it's going to last the rest of your life.
by twoodfin | 2025-12-10 22:57:50+00:00
That design introduces two kinds of overhead at runtime:

- You need a pointer to the allocator (presumably you’d want to leave room for types beyond arenas). That’s 8 bytes of extra size on every object.

- You need to dynamically dispatch on this pointer for every allocation. Dynamic dispatch is a lot cheaper than it used to be on modern architectures, but it’s a barrier for basic inlining, which is a big deal when alloc() for an arena is otherwise just a pointer bump.
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-10 22:58:21+00:00
1GW at 500kV three-phase AC is 1154 amps; 1 billion divided by 500,000 divided by sqrt(3).

You could handle that with one set of 1272kcmil aluminum conductors, or two sets of 300kcmil conductors, based off of this wire submittal: https://www.prioritywire.com/specs/acsr.pdf

The voltage drop will be higher than HVDC, but AC transformers are probably an order of magnitude cheaper than HVDC switchgear. That’s the main issue with HVDC, interrupting HVDC current is very difficult since there’s no zero point like with an AC sine wave. High voltage AC breakers use SF-6 to extinguish the arc at the zero point, which happens 120 times per second at 60 hz (100 times per second for 50 hz)
by LiamPowell | 2025-12-10 22:58:25+00:00
Yet it's still absolutely inundated with scams and occasionally links that directly download malware[1] that they don't action reports on. I don't think the process needs to be easier if they already can't keep up with moderation.

[1]: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR129387695568...
by tguvot | 2025-12-10 22:58:26+00:00
you are avoiding the actual topic in question and try to divert discussion into different direction.

flags are been abused and you don't do anything about it, short of "show me wrongly flagged comment and i'll unflag it if i think it was flagged wrong"

can you openly admit that flags are been abused and misused to silence opinions that people disagree with ?

if you can't agree with such a trivial statement, I don't think there is anything to discuss here.

ps. obviously after i made 3 comments i am throttled and cant post this comment
by pryce | 2025-12-10 22:58:43+00:00
To claim there are not really any other candidates for a skew (in that direction or the other) you would have to (like Shrier herself) go out of your way to not bother to talk to trans people, or their doctors, or their families, or sociologists, or talk to any of the people who spend their lives researching gender, what it means, how it affects us, what assumptions we make, whether those ideas stack up when confronted with empirical research, etc etc. I'm not really interested in discussing further with a 30 minute old account.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-12-10 22:58:44+00:00
What would you prefer? Israeli tanks blowing their way through families and bombing beirut to rubble to get at the Hezbolla terrorists? War was inevitable, the amazing actions of the mossad mitigated hundreds if not thousands of civilian casualties. What is your complaint, that they booby trapped the communications devices used exclusively by Hezbolla and not, i don't know, their kalashnikovs?

Don't hide behind technicalities of international law, tell me literally what else they could possibly have done with a better outcome. (please note in my world view, unlike many other people here, Israel rolling over and dying is not an acceptable solution)
by tomhow | 2025-12-10 22:58:45+00:00
That's not really true. The point is that there's a difference between how you feel about a topic and how you express it. People will have different feelings and different intensities of feelings about a topic like this. That's normal, understandable and valid.

As dang has said elsewhere in this thread and in other comparable threads, before you comment about a topic like this, there needs to be some processing or metabolizing of those feelings. HN is a place for learning, not venting or battling. And there is much to learn about these topics by discussing them curiously. I certainly do, and I see others doing that too. That's a significant reason why I think it's important for us to make space for these discussions here. But if the threads are overwhelmed by people expressing extreme emotions, there's less to learn, other than that people on both sides are angry about this issue, which we already knew.
by cortesoft | 2025-12-10 22:59:14+00:00
I have had way too many arguments over the years with product and sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I want to be able to just pay and go, without having to talk to people or wait for things.

I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer, but I am never going to sign up for anything that makes me talk to someone before I can buy.
by NoPicklez | 2025-12-10 22:59:34+00:00
That's exactly what its part of it.

So many people are looking at this from a technical stand point and how water tight or perfect its going to be.

But there is a large psychological part of this that helps parents and I know that part of it is what a number of parents I've spoken to like about it.

Its not just about the current generation, but the next wave of kids who have grown up under these laws, the psychology of it will have changed.
by tguvot | 2025-12-10 22:59:34+00:00
fruit picking robot (trees, tomatoes, berries) few years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uujse8pEvBk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp1KtHV9lTA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxF3Ok6Uf64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnyfX4LcAfU
by lovich | 2025-12-10 22:59:46+00:00
It would. Currently they and everyone else are getting deeply fucked because the signal to noise ratio on the internet has been obliterated and everyone is being manipulated all the time by misinformation from humans lying to bots.

I think the trade off for a lack of anonymity is worth it. This is crass and old but the penny arcade guys identified this decades ago

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theo...
by youngNed | 2025-12-10 22:59:48+00:00
> they need more than a sans serif typeface,

Agreed.

So... why are the administration going in the opposite direction?

> Official departmental paperwork shouldn't look clownish.

Oh. It's about looking clownish. Right. OK. Pull up a chair, this might take a while, and we will get to typefaces pretty late on, I'll be honest
by kingstnap | 2025-12-10 23:00:05+00:00
He has GLM 4.5 Running at ~100 Tokens per second.

Assumptions:

Batch 4x and get 400 tokens per second and push his power consumption to 900W instead of the underutilized 300W.

Electricity around €0.2/kWhr.

Tokens valued at €1/1M out.

Assume ~70% utilization.

Result:

You get ~1M tokens per hour which is a net profit of ~€0.8/hr. Which is a payoff time of a bit over a year or so given the €9K investment.

Honestly though there is a lot of handwaving here. The most significant unknown is getting high utilization with aggressive batching and 24/7 load.

Also the demand for privacy can make the utility of the tokens much higher than typical API prices for open source models.

In a sort of orthogonal way renting 2 H100s costs around $6 per hour which makes the payback time a bit over a couple months.
by 9rx | 2025-12-10 23:00:34+00:00
Newbies want a compelling catchphrase:

C: So powerful you can shoot your foot off!

Rust: Now that you've shot your foot off, let's not do that a second time.

Javascript: It runs on the server and in the browser.

Typescript: It runs on the server and in the browser, now with types!

In contrast,

PHP: Not sure if I want to be a templating language or general-purpose programming language.
by fpoling | 2025-12-10 23:00:43+00:00
Rust also suffers from libraries returning a newly allocated strings and vectors when the code should allow to pass a pre-existing string or vector to place the results.

Granted the latter leads to more verbose code and chaining of several calls is no longer possible.

But I am puzzled that even performance-oriented libraries both in Go and Rust still prefer to allocate the results themselves.
by phs318u | 2025-12-10 23:01:17+00:00
The "stuff" is already in the hands of authoritarians. When huge swathes of the world's "social estate" lies in the hands of a very small number of individuals with overwhelming incentives to tweak the "stuff" for their own benefit (exerting their authority over the estate if you will), then you're already in that territory. At least with elected authoritarians you have some theoretical influence. Good luck getting a Facebook/X policy changed.
by amiga386 | 2025-12-10 23:01:22+00:00
Per the State Department in 2023:

https://x.com/John_Hudson/status/1615486871571935232

> fonts like Times New Roman have serifs ("wings" and "feet") or decorative, angular features that can introduce accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities who use Optical Character Recognition technology or screen readers. It can also cause visual recognition issues for individuals with learning disabilities.

> On January 4, 2023, in support of the Department's iCount Campaign on disability inclusion (reftels), Secretary Blinken directed the Department to use a more accessible font. Calibri has no wings and feet and is the default font in Microsoft products and was recommended as an accessibility best practice by the Secretary's Office of Diversity and Inclusion in collaboration with the Executive Secretariat and the Bureau of Global Talent Management's Office of Accessibility and Accommodations.

In 2023, the US State Department signalled how virtuous it was, by moving from the previously-default MS Office font to the then-currently-default MS Office font. The current MS Office default font is Aptos, place your bets on what the State Department is going to switch the font to in 3 years time.

As far as I know, font choice has no zero effect on screen readers, which ask compatible software what words are on screen and read them out. There is evidence that serifs cause visual recognition issues for some individuals, but there's also evidence they aid recognition for different individuals.

It probably helped everyone to choose 14pt Calibri over 12pt Times New Roman, as the font is more legible on LCD screens.

The virtue being signalled by the current administration is that everything their predecessors did was wrong and they're literally going to reverse everything out of sheer pettiness. If anything, they should acknowledge the president's long friendship with Epstein and pick Gill Sans as the default. That would be the ultimate "anti-woke" move I think.
by sunshowers | 2025-12-10 23:02:06+00:00
I do actually have this setup going with a Cable Matters adapter [1] + a custom firmware I found [2] and

> chroma/RGB 4:4:4 + HDR + VRR/Freesync + 4k,120hz for their Linux PC on a TV

works great now on my LG C4 TV with Bazzite's gaming mode, though:

* 144Hz is unstable

* 12-bit color is unstable (10-bit works fine), and gamescope doesn't have a way to limit color depth (kwin does), so I had to put in place an EDID override

* in the EDID, limiting the FreeSync range to 60-120Hz (which should still allow frame doubling/tripling) seemed to be better -- the default 40Hz caused a bit of flickering because the AMD driver would drop the refresh rate down to 38.5Hz or so.

Should write about this in more detail.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B094XR43M5

[2] https://forum.level1techs.com/t/it-is-possible-to-4k-120-hdr...
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-10 23:02:07+00:00
No, it doesn't seem like that be a problem.

Say you're a parent, with child, living in country A where someone becomes an adult when they're 18. Once the child is 18, they'll use their own devices/browsers/whatever, and the flag is no longer set. But before that, the flag is set.

Now in country B or in country C it doesn't matter that the age of becoming an adult is 15 and 30. Because the flag is set locally on the clients device, all they need to do is block requests with the flag, and assume it's faithful. Then other parents in country B or country C set/unset the flag on their devices when it's appropriate.

No need to tell actual ages, and a way for services to say "this is not for children", and parents are still responsible for their own children. Sounds actually pretty OK to me.
by polalavik | 2025-12-10 23:02:08+00:00
holy hell google cloud is so confusing i just ended up using (a much more expensive) digital ocean droplet instead for a little project. I guess they only really care about enterprise customers who can burn tons of money figuring it out, but it made me never want to use it again.

Same with google ads - super fuckin shit UI/UX, super confusing to understand what is going on.

companies like digital ocean, supabase, etc can make money (from people like me) because they just circumvent the bullshit or wrap the dogshit experience (aws) into a much better experience. bless supabase.
by ignoramous | 2025-12-10 23:02:43+00:00
> Passes the smell test to me

Gotcha. Thanks.

> Does that preclude my having an opinion on the value and legality of a military strike?

Words mean things. "Perfectly lawful" means just that? And so, I was curious.

> Would you still have a bone to pick with my credentials if I said that I thought the Dresden firebombings

Felt the need to know whether I was mistaking an arm-chair opinion for an expert opinion, is all.
by mynameisash | 2025-12-10 23:03:54+00:00
> a motorcycle is not about efficiency; it's more about a hobby, fun.

It's also about fun, but for me, it's definitely about efficiency. My 600cc gets 50mpg versus 31 for my Honda Fit.

98% of my 30k+ miles on my bike are commuting miles. Bonus efficiencies: better parking, HOV lanes.
by lovich | 2025-12-10 23:03:55+00:00
> My face is not my identity

Nah, it’s infinitely more identity than a screen name. If you speak in person I know which human being had those thoughts. In the medium we’re communicating over right now neither I nor you could tell if the counterparty was just a computer program.

> Beyond that, what about the threat of violence for saying something? As another commenter points out, this is a real issue for marginalized groups, but also could easily become an issue for your average citizen sharing their political opinion.

If you’re in that situation then you already don’t have free speech, so honestly that tradeoff seems like it doesn’t matter

> While I agree it would be nice having some level of assurance that you're talking to a human, particularly going forward, the only way I could support such a system is if no party involved would be able to track what I visit or pin an actual identity to me as a user…

That’s a lot of words to say you don’t agree with the idea. Pinning an actual identity to you is what makes it non anonymous
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-12-10 23:03:56+00:00
Fair point. The farms also begun to produce exponentially more food. If LLM’s would prove as revolutionary as Spinning Jenny and mechanisation of farm labour (which I don’t believe for a second), we could provide a easier life for billions of people, cure illnesses and poverty, provide education for countless children… The farm hands and their families moved to cities into factory work, which at least in England was dickensian horror of poverty and slums, but in many other countries (Nordic for instance) created urbanisation and new meaning of life as well as upwards social mobility. Many computer scientis here had a farmer as a grand-father or great-grandfather.

But none of this chamged how food grows and that you need somebody who bloody well knows what they are doing to produce it. Especially how machinised it is today.

However, I do not believe LLM to be a tractor. More like a slightly different hammer. You still need to hit the nail.
by miltonlost | 2025-12-10 23:04:17+00:00
Is it "signalling" when the left's change was for an accessibility reason, to enable more people to be able to easily read? Signaling means there's no tangible benefit to the change, so the Blinken's switch to a sans-serif font would not be signaling.

Rubio, however, specifically pointed out the symbolic (and malicious) gesture of his whole switch back to Times New Roman.

The left didn't react pettily. Please stop thinking the left are the right are the same when the facts show they are not. The left's change was for a demonstrative benefit. The right is doing it so fuck over people. You think these are the same.