MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by epistasis | 2026-01-13 18:53:42+00:00
When thinking about an entire country, "good/bad" doesn't make sense as a category. In Iran, the people are protesting and holy hell are there a ton of people risking their lives for the chance for a better life with less oppression, without hyperinflation, with some sort of voice in their own governance. The ruling class can not be conflated with the populace. The populace can not be conflated with the populace for that matter, there's no "one" thing even under a shared culture. This is also true in the US, you can't conflate the ruling class with the people in the streets ringing bells and blowing horns and risking their lives and freedom against a tyrannical government seeking to arrest millions of people and deport some of them.

Nothing is completely free of politics, much less the existence of the Internet, and it's incredibly important to realize the impact that technology has on the fabric of society.

> oh the indignity of not having internet for 118 hours,

This is not even remotely close to the meaning or impact of the site that's linked. It's about the dignity of life, the gunning down of thousands of people by their government, and the governments attempts to continue oppression by hiding their actions behind a veil. Your comment viewed in its most positive light is crass, more realistically is heartless and cruel.

My guess: you're commenting on the US from a Russified country, or from China? That's the only perspective on the world that I can imagine generating your statements, and if I'm wrong I'd love to know.
by epolanski | 2026-01-13 18:54:05+00:00
People don't do politics anymore, they get their priorities the other way around (geopolitics before the politics of their own house, workplace or city), and the little they do is heavily misplaced (online instead of physically demonstrating).

On top of that add the huge boom of data in politics. No politician anymore has programs or language aiming at representing most of the voters, but it only focuses to get 50%+1, which in practice means that most politicians aim for the majority of the swing voters.
by Unfunkyufo | 2026-01-13 18:54:05+00:00
> This is a capability that makes sense to have to use when absolutely necessary.

I definitely disagree with this. Currently there is no reason to believe we'll ever have sentient AI, or AGI or whatever term you prefer, much less a runaway one. There is definitely reasons to worry about governments using this power in an era of increasing authoritarianism, I mean we're talking about this because it is literally happening right now to cover up a massacre.

I don't want the power to turn off all communications to exist, because I don't want my political enemies to have it if they win an election.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-13 18:54:13+00:00
> they should have lifted the sanctions in exchange for Iranian government easing some of the domestic laws...

No authoritarian regime wants to go down the same way Gorbachev, Husak, and Honecker did.

Most regimes learnt from how China cracked down in Tiananmen and how SK cracked down in Gwangju.

The current violent crackdown is similar to that which the Iranian regime used during the Green Movement back in 2009-10.

The IRGC has around 100k headcount, the Police 300k, and the PMF in Iraq (which have now been mobilized across Iran) have 200k. That's around 600k personnel who are ideologically aligned with the regime and have the means for a violent crackdown in a country of 90 million people.
by hearsathought | 2026-01-13 18:54:15+00:00
> Being able to completely turn off the Internet in your country seems to be a non-negotiable capability to develop for any non-democratic state.

Why just non-democratic states? I'd say it's even more necessary for democratic states like Iran as people in democratic states are more easily manipulated by foreign entities and more liable to protest their governments. It's far more important for democratic nations like iran to have a kill switch than for non-democratic states like north korea as north koreans won't be protesting the government.

> I think a lot of them took a look at how Twitter and Facebook were used for organising during the Arab spring and decided that it was by far the most dangerous non-military threat.

Everyone started wising up to the threat. What do you think the EU regulations are about? "Protecting the children"? It's about getting more control over what their citizens consume on the internet ( especially social media ).

What's strange is that after the US forced china to selling tiktok, I would have assumed most major nations would have demanded facebook, google, etc sell off their assets in these nations for access to these nations. And yet, not a single one has. It's like the only countries that take the internet/social media seriously are the US, China and Russia.
by inhumantsar | 2026-01-13 18:54:27+00:00
tbh this seems to me like it might be less about career advice and more about emotional support. it's not uncommon for people to slip into a mindset where an external bias is internalized so thoroughly that they start holding themselves back in situations even when nothing external is.

talking to someone, a therapist ideally but any honest, skilled active listener could do, about it can help you see things from a different perspective. might help you identify things you can do to counter the things you can't control.
by tdeck | 2026-01-13 18:54:32+00:00
> This isn't to diminish of course the plight of Palestinians or any group for that matter

Oh come now, must we play this game?

This whole subthread is just Israel supporters trying to use Iran for that old favorite hasbada tactic: try to shame anyone who shows any support for Palestinians.

It's not a really relevant comparison for the reasons that have been brought up many times in thread (e.g. scale, duration , level of US complicity) but that's not the point.

And whether pro-Palestine activist or organizations have yet said anything about Iran is actually immaterial to hasbarists as well. Because there's no amount of support for other causes that will unlock permission to oppose the genocide of Palestinians.
by taeric | 2026-01-13 18:54:34+00:00
But doesn't this just go to my point that you would more expect further adaptations from those that already have the plasticity? Fair that you could get them in either, but the point of evolution/adaptation is that often the mechanism is not a first class one.

To the peppered moth example, it isn't like there was a specific mutation that caused them to change color. Both colors always existed. The prevalence at the population level was essentially the result of external drivers to the species.

So, in plants, it is fair to say that those with more plasticity are able to change when they flower in response to environmental changes. Why is it not fair to expect that those most able of doing that are the ones you are likely to see further adaptations on to keep adjusting?

Yes, we can see individual mechanisms and we can focus on them. Such that we don't have to hope for random mutations that further advantage things. But, adaptation and evolution are not defined as only random mutations. (Or have they been somewhat redefined into that?)

I think more cleanly stated for my point, I am not arguing against the idea of plasticity. I am arguing that adaptation is not defined as only random mutations introducing novel characteristics. Specifically because the fundamental example for evolution that used to be taught was definitively not a novel characteristic of the species.
by reducesuffering | 2026-01-13 18:54:34+00:00
Adams: "I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off. I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying. I'm not saying start a war or do anything bad. Nothing like that. I'm just saying get away. Just get away."
by fidotron | 2026-01-13 18:55:22+00:00
> These solutions are priced well for commercial and industrial solutions at scale.

Translation: they're expensive, and getting them working involves jumping through hoops more complex than simply getting boards off Amazon and launching VS Code. They aren't equivalent, and the sneering isn't helping.

It is failing to understand this that opens the door to DJI and Bambu, who unsurprisingly prioritize user experience and predictability, which is a major factor in why in open competition they keep wiping the floor with everyone.
by hmokiguess | 2026-01-13 18:55:32+00:00
I have a maybe unpopular opinion to share.

We now sort of accepted the idea of “vibe coding”, and, even shared appreciation from people who are using it to resuscitate side projects and things they wanted to do but required a lot of work. (Heck, even Linus Torvalds is doing it).

Is “Vibe Music / Art” any different? For example, I am not a drummer, say I use Suno to program some drums for me so I can record my guitar on top, and finally release that track I’ve been procrastinating.

I think the analogy here holds. Not all vibe coding is good, and not all vibe art is bad.
by micromacrofoot | 2026-01-13 18:55:42+00:00
It sounds like a moral stance on its face, but honestly they probably wouldn't care if someone posted a reasonable amount of AI-generated music that was high quality enough to gain a following of listeners.

This is likely a stance to prevent an individual from producing thousands of AI generated tracks and attempting to flood the zone for anyone browsing and searching.

There's a lot of music on Spotify for example that tries to latch on to current trends in an attempt to get pulled into search results and recommendations.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-13 18:55:48+00:00
I am not arguing it is easier to destroy the world's industrial capacity than just the US industrial capacity. I am saying that in the situation where you have so utterly devastated the US mainland that it is incapable of producing drones, the war is over. If you defeat the US then you defeat the US.

Of course I am rather dismissive of the claim that this is a small feat. I accuse you of not fully thinking through what exactly it would take to fubar domestic drone production.
by xorvoid | 2026-01-13 18:56:00+00:00
"oh the indignity of not having internet for 118 hours, personally didn't have it for much of my childhood"

I understand what you're trying to say and I agree with that, but this is actually different. This is not an inconvenience as much a state censorship. It's the state literally disallowing people talking to each other. It's Orwellian: "we don't like what you're talking about, so we're going to make you completely unable to"

It's not the 80s or 90s anymore. The internet is rhe global backbone of how people communicate with each other. Shutting down access is a clear action of censorship and oppression.
by officeplant | 2026-01-13 18:56:27+00:00
Most human derived goods markets need to filter low effort attempts at monetization in general. I'm tired of going to Renn. Faire / Farmer Markets / Artist Alley Markets only to find they've started letting in "Joe Blow with a poorly configured 3d printer #35." These places have become infested with people selling the exact same piles of thingverse trash in a rainbow of colors.

It sucks that a lot of these types of markets are suffering from low numbers of shoppers. They open themselves up to these plastic peddlers in desperation only to drive away customers even more.
by intended | 2026-01-13 18:56:35+00:00
I'm not trying to beat you over the head with a dictionary, but I can understand when business models is used in places where it is not strictly accurate. I wouldn't personally say the Army or Government (providers of public goods) have a business model, but in the discussion of new agencies, there is enough overlap and history for the term to still hold its meaning.

Even then, using your definition, does not help us escape the point - there needs to be a source of funds for local news. I am perfectly fine with government money being used to pay for it.
by 9JollyOtter | 2026-01-13 18:56:43+00:00
There are Ethnic groups in England that have been present for several thousand years. Some people clearly mean this and can't articulate it better.

Rushi Sunak ancestry is obviously Indian. I don't really care about his ethnicity (he another politician in a suit to me), but I can understand what people mean when they say he isn't English without automatically assuming they are Racist.
by suriya-ganesh | 2026-01-13 18:56:45+00:00
This is true. But lately technology direction has largely been a race to the bottom, while marketing it as bold bets.

It has created this dog eat dog system of crass negligence everywhere. All the security risks of signed tokens and auth systems are meaningless now that we are piping cookies, and everything else through AI browsers who seemingly have inifinite attack surface. Feels like the last 30 years of security research has come to naught
by ericmay | 2026-01-13 18:56:46+00:00
I intentionally didn't do a whataboutism, but just asked why it seems that westerners care about what happens in Gaza, as bad as it is, more than they do other equally horrific injustices.

It's undeniable that our society cares more about Gaza and the future of the Palestinian people, so what makes them unique that's different? Or are you suggesting that Americans, for example, care equally about what's going on in other conflicts and humanitarian catastrophes? If so, why don't we see campus protests for example?
by stetrain | 2026-01-13 18:56:48+00:00
I think it’s interesting how many responses to this comment seem to have interpreted it fairly differently to my own reading.

There are many responding about “ignoring racism,” “whitewashing,” or the importance of calling out bigotry.

I’m not sure how that follows from a comment that literally calls out the racism and describes it as “unambiguous.”

Striving to “avoid the ugliness” in your own life does not mean ignoring it or refusing to call it out.
by bbor | 2026-01-13 18:56:56+00:00
that is its always Iran/China bad and at the same time they Kidnap a foreign leader and its all wow look how great we are.

I mean... I guess it depends on what you consider "the media"? I certainly don't consume any media that reacted with anything but shock and horror. With CBS under attack I suppose that's fragile, but I think it's important to appreciate the freedoms we do still have. When people say "all the media in AUTHORITARIAN_STATE supports the federal government on IMPORTANT_THING", they don't mean "a plurality of popular TV networks" -- they mean all.

oh the indignity of not having internet for 118 hours, personally didn't have it for much of my childhood

...I think you're coming from a good place, but you're failing to grasp the seriousness of a nation state shutting down telecommunications. Besides the immense power it shows, it also implies a level of desperation and/or severity-of-intent.

It's very, very different than a nation losing access to the internet because of technical issues (or, in your case, because it wasn't invented/popularized yet).
by alphazard | 2026-01-13 18:57:24+00:00
This isn't an AI problem, its an operating systems problem.
AI is just so much less trustworthy than software written and read by humans, that it is exposing the problem for all to see.

Process isolation hasn't been taken seriously because UNIX didn't do a good job, and Microsoft didn't either.
Well designed security models don't sell computers/operating systems, apparently.

That's not to say that the solution is unknown, there are many examples of technologies that do the right thing.
Plan 9, SEL4, Fuschia, Helios, too many smaller hobby operating systems to count.

The problem is widespread poor taste. Decision makers (meaning software folks who are in charge or making technical decisions) don't understand why these things are important, or can't conceive of the correct way to build these systems.
It needs to become embarrassing for decision makers to not understand sandboxing technologies and modern security models, and anyone assuming we can trust software by default needs to be laughed out of the room.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-13 18:57:31+00:00
It's a tricky term, but the definition given when "age-adjusted" is introduced in the text helps clarify - "But an aging population only partially explains the rise in these deaths. Deaths by falls have risen 2.4-fold on an age-<adjusted basis>. " The <clickable> part in brackets (easy to miss) expands to:

> Age-adjusted data helps to compare health data over time or between groups more fairly by accounting for the age differences in populations. For example, suppose Population A has a higher average age than Population B. In that case, age-adjusting ensures that Population A's naturally higher death rate due to age doesn't skew comparisons of overall health between the two. This measurement makes death statistic comparisons more accurate than crude death rates.

An "age group" might be "45-54" or "85+" but a "population" would be "all age groups in 2000" or "all age groups in 2023". Age-adjusted here means the differences in the distribution of age groups in each population (2000 vs 2023) is normalized to prevent it from obscuring the trends inside each age group.

Immediately after the definition, it clarifies the changes the changes are indeed weighted towards higher age groups:

> While they have fallen among younger people and only risen slightly among the middle aged, they have risen substantially within every age bracket of the elderly.
by freeplay | 2026-01-13 18:57:31+00:00
Couldn't agree more. Squash merges to main ONLY.

That way, I don't care if your branch contains 100 commits or 1 commit. I don't need to worry about commit messages like:

- fix 1

- fix 2

- dfljfdlkfdj

- does it work now?

Do whatever you want with your commits on your feature branch. Just make sure the title of your PR is clean and follows our formatting. Git history is always well formatted and linear.

It's the ideal solution.
by EA-3167 | 2026-01-13 18:57:33+00:00
I'd argue that Signal is trying to sell sanity at their own direct expense, during a time when sanity is in short supply. Just like "Proof of Work" wasn't going to be the BIG THING that made Crypto the new money, the new way to program, 'Agents' are another wet squib. I'm not claiming that they're useless, but they aren't worth the cost within orders of magnitude.

I'm really getting tired of people who insist on living in a future fantasy version of a technology at a time when there's no real significant evidence that their future is going to be realized. In essence this "I'll pay the costs now for the promise of a limitless future" is becoming a way to do terrible things without an awareness of the damage being done.

It's not hard, any "agent" that you need to double check constantly to keep it from doing something profoundly stupid that you would never do, isn't going to fulfill the dream/nightmare of automating your work. It will certainly not be worth the trillions already sunk into its development and the cost of running it.
by labcomputer | 2026-01-13 18:57:34+00:00
It is disappointing that it is so easy to bamboozle HNers with a straw man argument.

The original poster was clearly not making an analogy between professional soccer and only fans creators.

To be explicit, the comparisons were:

Cinematic actors -> TikTok creators

Victoria’s Secret model -> only fans creator

Pro soccer -> esports

I fail to see how the culture of our country will be negatively impacted by any of those changes. Comparing Cristiano Renaldo to OnlyFans is a straw man because that specific comparison was never suggested, except by the “rebuttal”
by tptacek | 2026-01-13 18:57:35+00:00
It's Signal's job to prioritize safety/privacy/security over all other concerns, and the job of an enterprise IT operation to manage risk. Underrated how different those jobs --- security and risk management --- are!

Most normal people probably wouldn't enjoy working in a shop where Signal owned the risk management function, and IT/dev had to fall in line. But for the work Signal does, their near-absolutist stance makes a lot of sense.
by olivierestsage | 2026-01-13 18:57:41+00:00
Funny to see this right now. Spotify's promotion of AI music bothered me so much that it has actually pushed me to Bandcamp and the practice of buying music again. It's really fun to build a collection knowing you're supporting the artists, download FLAC files, organize your little "collection" page ... Feels like a renaissance in my relationship with music, the most fun I've had since what.cd. Anyway, love this stance they're taking.
by firstplacelast | 2026-01-13 18:57:55+00:00
From a US perspective at least, you are right but also wrong. Like yes, it's cheaper to buy raw potatoes and dried beans and cook healthy food vs. ultra-processed "junk food." However, when most people attempt to eat healthy they do not opt for dried beans and potatoes every day. There is a huge time cost to preparing those ingredients.

And anecdotally, when I am eating healthier I am opting for a larger range of ingredients. Probably to keep my mouth interested as I am not getting the food that's been engineered to be perfect to my palate. While potatoes and beans are in my diet, I am also opting for a lot of vegetables that are more expensive, paying more for fresh herbs and interesting spices. I am almost always buying canned beans, sauces, and other foods with some processing to speed up prep time.

I think your analysis suffers from comparing processed food engineered to taste great to the blandest, driest raw ingredients. Factoring in the time and secondary ingredients to make those raw ingredients taste great adds a lot of cost. Add in the cost of more varied ingredients bc very few people want to eat beans, potatoes, rice, and bland chicken every day. And further, you're missing the savings processed foods add by being shelf stable. They can sit on a shelf or in a freezer for months or years vs. fresh produce with a much shorter lifespan.

So yes you can eat very cheap and very healthy, the vast majority of people will loathe that life over time. You can eat kind of cheap, very healthy, with a limited number of ingredients and have things taste great if you have a LOT of time to devote to cooking, this will still not satisfy many.
by JadeNB | 2026-01-13 18:57:58+00:00
> If that were true, how could it be anything but ok? Should I feel guilty because I evolved from monkeys and carry around the leftist equivalent of original sin?

I think that there's a gap between "how can it be anything but OK" and "should I feel guilty." There are plenty of things that aren't OK, but about which you don't need to feel guilty. Should you feel guilty that your body intrinsically craves foods that aren't good for you? I'd say that no purpose is served by feeling that way, but that doesn't mean that it's healthy to indulge those cravings.
by arjie | 2026-01-13 18:58:16+00:00
Do people actually find this kind of dunk content interesting? It's super popular but I wonder if people find it insightful or entertaining. I watched a little of Stephen Colbert and John Oliver and it's mostly boring stuff that is pretty much characterized as "This guy IS AN IDIOT!" and "They're LOSING" and whatnot. It seems like the equivalent of those "Charlie Kirk owns feminists with FACTS and LOGIC". If you go to /r/all you'll see that it's almost all dunk content.

I get the appeal in an abstract sense. I get a real kick out of watching yet another Manchester United manager cock it up. But all I do is see the scores and enjoy a bit of schadenfreude. The audience for these guys seems highly enthusiastic about their content. It's like if I watched every United game to get as much enjoyment out of watching them suck.

It's particularly annoying because people are clearly not posting this guy because he's right often or because he's good at predicting stuff. They're posting because he's dunking on people they dislike.