MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-26 01:09:51+00:00
The problem is that by the time some people encounter these shocking images and videos of mass human torture, their priors have already been developed to reject their eyes and ears in favor of what the people with whom they've entrusted their safety tell them.

These people think Charlie Kirk was on the frontlines of personal freedom, but look the other way when a man gets tackled and shot in broad daylight for trying to help a woman who's just been maced.

It's horrible, and inexcusable, but still crucial to understand through a framework that accounts for the effects of multi-generational propaganda peddled by the ultra-rich who have been shaping our thoughts and behaviors through advertisement and capital for hundreds of years.
by noosphr | 2026-01-26 01:10:12+00:00
Asbestos was pushed as a magical solution to problems of fire in homes without paying attention to the health effects. It took 80 years for the obvious to become law.

Leds are pushed as a solution to energy consumption by humans without paying any attention to the health effects. Hopefully it will be less than 80 years of cancers and metabolic disruption before the obvious is done.

But this time the regulation was captured pre-emptively, to the point that following best scientific advice for your health is illegal is most of the developed world.
by imranq | 2026-01-26 01:10:43+00:00
I really like Clawdbots safety gloves off approach - no handholding or just saying yes to every permission.

I set it up on a old macbook pro I had that had a broken screen and it works great. Now I just message my server using telegram and it does research for me, organizes my notes, and builds small apps on the fly to help with learning.

However security is a real concern. I need to understand how to create a comprehensive set of allowlists before expanding into anything more serious like bill payments or messaging people / etc
by tediousgraffit1 | 2026-01-26 01:11:11+00:00
> I am
also dealing with a number of emergencies, including a lockdown at the Minneapolis
courthouse because of protest activity, the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and
the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE (including, yesterday, a two-year
old).[1]

Federal district judges in mpls are releasing dozens of illegally detained individuals per day. You may not be hearing about it, but it is absolutely happening. Your not hearing about is part of the problem.

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca8.113...
by cauch | 2026-01-26 01:12:09+00:00
> I also don't think most people want illegal aliens to be deported for "justice". They (rightfully or wrongly) think they're taking their jobs, contributing to crime, facilitating drug trade, costing taxpayers money, etc.

That's my point and the reason of my first comment, which answered to a comment saying

> Immigration laws, like any other laws, need to be enforced, right?

I was reacting to that by saying that we should not pretend that the motivation here is "applying the law". It is not the case and it never was. (and also that "applying the law" does imply a balance between false positive and false negative, but that suddenly, trying to avoid the false negative is strangely not applying the law)

> If there were any evidence of widespread deportations of people who shouldn't be ...

Somehow, I doubt it. You are yourself saying "they think (rightfully or wrongly)". They are not interested in evidence, they don't really care to check if what they think has any evidence supporting it, it is just convenient for them.

If there are evidence of widespread false positive, they will just hold tight to the idea that "they were traitors anyway". It is more convenient for them. (and in fact, there currently is a lot of evidence of a high number of false positive, but they deny it exactly like that)

The proof of that is that there are already plenty of red flags everywhere showing that officials are incompetent. The officials say that there are plenty of bad illegal dangerous persons, and yet, the only people they manage to shoot just appear to be non-illegal with no history of extremism. Then, when it happens, they starts fabricating excuses that turn out are total lies. And then ... it happens again. Even if you buy into the idea that there are indeed plenty of bad illegal dangerous persons, you have to admit that they are awful at fixing it.

It is not technically a "widespread false positive", but it is already something that a neutral reasonable person will be incapable to deny that there is a problem. And yet, right now, these people who, according to you will totally "start to speak up", don't hesitate to bury their head in the sand and insist that it is all normal.

It is totally unrealistic to pretend that suddenly, when there is widespread evidence of false positive, they will not continue to find excuse and pretend that these evidences are fake news and lies propagated by traitors.
by QuiEgo | 2026-01-26 01:12:59+00:00
I grew up poor in the US. It was not super awesome, but not as bad as the article would make you fear. The public schools (and activities tied to them) were great, even in my "bad" district. Libraries were everywhere and very accessible, and the libraries in my schools were giant and frequently used. I never went hungry a day in my life, at times thanks to food stamps. It was possible to find cheap enough housing to survive on low income without government aid.

The biggest problem, by far, was medical care. I didn't see a dentist for the first time until I was in my 20s. Any medical problem felt like a disaster that could put us on the street if not managed carefully. I'm very envious of Canada on this front.

Interestingly, I have a similar feeling of gratitude to the US the author has to Canada. Food stamps, and eventually tuition wavers and scholarships, let me break out of poverty. I'm so, so grateful I had those opportunities.

Like the author, I feel we could do a hell of a lot better in a lot of ways (especially lately!), but the core we have is still pretty dang good and I still feel lucky for having access to it.
by arthurcolle | 2026-01-26 01:13:22+00:00
Thank you so much for sharing this excellent resource.

I'm watching this youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlD0C5CrWcA) and he apparently built this out to support his Master's research at the University of Maryland, where I went to school for undergrad.

The long arm of the DMV no-fly zone is no joke!
by tolerance | 2026-01-26 01:13:31+00:00
I just finished this response to a sibling comment of yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46760312

I think it inadvertently touches on some valid points that you raise, especially the one about criticizing people within earshot.

> Gwern seems to be onto something about how to engage readers. What do you think that is?

I think that people read for different reasons; there are different kinds of readers. I think that there’s a dissonance between the point that he makes in this article and my perception of the rest of his work. That’s all. Of course defending my opinion so that it is received in good faith reveals more than I want to be taken as an assumption about what I think about Gwern the person, but these assumptions are inevitable when we’re talking about writing to incite intrigue in other human beings and how writing is peculiar form of expression and exchange not just of ideas but also of personality.

Some people may read Gwern’s work and find that its informational depth satisfies their interests as readers. “Embryo Selection For Intelligence” sounds like an interesting topic to me, but not interesting enough on its own to make me 1) wait for the page to load because the entire page took approximately 13 seconds to to yield almost 12MB of data and 2) read it all, in the form what is self-described as a “cost benefit analysis” on the issue, which makes it seem like more technical/scientifically-driven piece of writing as far as what we can expect by way of style. [1]

Lots of people on HN, I assume, are of the sort who are indeed engaged by technically-minded expositions on a subject and if they are at all interested in narrative then they reach for fiction writing and may even find non-fiction books that attempt to wind narratives as wastes of time unless they are immediately entertaining. And entertainment is not something that I intend to advocate for. But I suspect that there are a lot of readers on HN who view reading as a means to an end—the information; and the more the merrier and merit-worthy the writing is thought to be.

Gwern discusses a lot of topics. I’m probably sharing my reaction to the stuff that I’ve read from him that I think lacks personality. If my impression of the dominant literary bloc on HN is accurate then maybe I’ve only come across the information-dense-but-stylistically-lacking prose served on a Xanadu’s sled of a web page sort of work of Gwern's.

It’s been 4 hours. I am yet to come across an "Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” in his oeuvre.

> If you crack open some of the mustier books about the Internet—you know the ones I’m talking about, the ones which invoke Roland Barthes and discuss the sexual transgressing of MUDs—one of the few still relevant criticisms is the concern that the Internet by uniting small groups will divide larger ones.

Loading in 6 seconds and serving a little more than 4MB of content, "The Melancholy of Subculture Society” seems like a good candidate. [2]

[1] <https://gwern.net/subculture>

[2] <https://gwern.net/embryo-selection>
by blainstorming | 2026-01-26 01:14:06+00:00
This is all starting to feel like the productivity theater rabbit hole people (myself included) went down with apps like Notion/Obsidian. It is clearly capable of doing a lot of stuff, but where is the real impact?

Like it’s cool that your downloads folder, digital notes and emails are all properly organized and tags. But they reason they were in that state to begin with is because you don’t inherently derive value from their organization. Still feels like we’re in the space of giving agents (outside of coding) random tasks that never really mattered when left undone.
by noxer | 2026-01-26 01:15:35+00:00
Many things do, mostly people on Twitter seem to get under his skin quite a lot lol.

If the goal was to "trigger" him I don't think the protests succeed in any meaningful way. Innocent Tesla owner where the primary victims followed by share holder, (damaged) property owners and people affected by insurances premiums due to the vandalism.

And then of course there are still a handful of people in jail for crimes committed in relation to the Tesla protest. Arguably not victims but still a negative effects that clear outweigh any perceived positive effect it all had on Musk.
by tombert | 2026-01-26 01:16:29+00:00
I think that's a bit reductive. There are plenty of economic, political, or familial reasons for not leaving.

Many people are trying to evade oppressive regimes where their prospects might literally mean death. The US can still be "terrible" while still not being quite as dangerous as that.

I mean, this kind of reads victim-blamey; hyperbolic example, when a person stays with an abusive partner for much longer than they should, does that imply that that relationship isn't terrible?
by torginus | 2026-01-26 01:16:36+00:00
I think you went for a socio-political angle, I was talking more about stuff in the tech domain.

Back in the mid 2000s, as a teen, I had a PSP, which was supported by the biggest studios and had amazing games - no equivalent device exists today (the steam deck and switch are much bulkier). Likewise, I had a Nokia smartphone that ran Symbian, and could do the vast majority of stuff my current iPhone does. It had a music player, a camera that was decent for the time, it could connect to various chat services etc. It also had nice physical buttons.

If you look at operating systems, both Windows and Mac UX hardly changed.

Since then we had a huge computing revolution, with exponentially increasing compute and a huge array of tools, but my personal opinion, is that a ton of things introduced in tech since the mid 2000s, was either not super impactful, flawed in some way, or ignored eventually. Some geniunely impactful and good stuff, simply disappeared (like Flash)

This is in stark contrast to the development that took place from the mid 80s to mid 2000s.

Considering nobody thought 'this is as far as we would get' cca 2005, I think we made some blunders, which I think are worth reflecting on, and possibly correcting.
by adrmonlj | 2026-01-26 01:16:54+00:00
Thanks! That was great feedback.

I’ve now added:

• Live progress % while reading in RSVP mode

• Progress saved and visible in History, so you can see where you left off per document

Also worth noting: the project’s been renamed to Cadence, with a bit more emphasis on focus and continuity rather than pure speed.

New home:

https://readwithcadence.com

I’ve seen ReadRSVP – their PDF viewer + live tracking is solid. I’m intentionally keeping Cadence very lightweight and browser-native for now, but that kind of contextual awareness is definitely the right direction.

Appreciate you taking the time to check it out.
by JeremyNT | 2026-01-26 01:16:58+00:00
HN like a lot of SV / VC culture was more libertarian leaning than right leaning. Low taxes, minimal oversight, etc. - true largely of workers and capital alike.

The open embrace of the fascist / nativist right in SV has been more recent, and it has empowered this second Trump administration. The calculation is presumably that they can curry favor and consolidate power.
by HorizonXP | 2026-01-26 01:17:22+00:00
I’ve been doing Vim + aider, and now Claude Code. Those tools I understood. I never got into Cursor because I’m too old to give up Vim.

Clawd.bot really annoyed me at first. The setup is super tedious and broken and not fun. That’s mostly because I’m too impatient to tinker like I used to.

However, once you tinker, it’s so-so. I don’t think it’s a lot better than Claude Code or anything, but I think it’s just a focused vector for the same AI model, one focused on being your personal assistant. It’s like Claude Code vs. Claude Cowork. They’re the same thing. But given the low cost of creating custom tools, why not give people something that Clawd.bot that gives them focused guardrails?

Anyway, I could end up abandoning all of this too. And it’s all a kludge around things that should really be an API. But I do like that I can run it on my Mac Mini and have it control my desktop. It’ll be a cold day if I let it message for me; I’d rather it write deterministic code that does that, rather than do it directly.
by hexsprite | 2026-01-26 01:17:52+00:00
Clawdbot finally clicked for me this week. I was renting out an apartment and I had it connect to FB messenger, do the initial screening messages and then schedule times for viewings in my calendar. I was approving it's draft messages but starting giving it some automatic responses as well. Overall it did 9/10 on this task with a couple cases where it got confused. This is just scratching the surface but this was something that was very valuable for me and saved me several hours of time.
by AshamedCaptain | 2026-01-26 01:19:31+00:00
I think you are describing how the entire world works. I have lived in 3 western European countries through my life, and they all work this way.

Never I had the pipes in my home inspected, even now that I live in areas where it freezes regularly.

Never has anyone (not even my insurance) forced me to follow any particular maintenance schedule (albeit I'm quite sure somewhere in the fine print it will read that if the accident is because of poor maintenance they'll just ignore the claim).

Here the city service to remove Graffiti is almost overnight, and works better than many other public services...
by nathan_compton | 2026-01-26 01:20:00+00:00
A good writer should be able to write a catchy hook.

A wise person should be able to read text that is flavored like cardboard. In general, one thing I dislike about this moment, is the incredible emphasis we place on the first five seconds of everything because everyone is thinking about all the other things we could be doing.

But many things are great because of how they feel 20 years later. The first five seconds of playing a musical instrument is horrible, but 20 years later and it is sublime. Emacs, Vim, are both notoriously forbidding, and yet, they are wonderful tools. Some things can be massaged to meet both criteria (I can imagine some emacs configuration that made it less painful and surfaced its true power in the first five seconds maybe), but other things are hard by nature and derive their value from how we have to adapt to them instead of how well they are adapted to us. I feel like the AI era is going to just accelerate this trend where everything we interact with is a slick surface and many people will never experience depth.

Read boring shit.
by throw0101c | 2026-01-26 01:21:40+00:00
> Eventually, we tried removing the dialogs altogether and the incident rate approached zero. If you take away the guardrails completely, it radically alters the psychology and game theory around user interaction. Imagine climbing a tall building with multiple layers of protection vs having none at all.

Documented phenomenon:

> Risk compensation is a theory which suggests that people typically adjust their behavior in response to perceived levels of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected.[2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation
by resoluteteeth | 2026-01-26 01:21:44+00:00
Suppose that we were able to develop a drug that would allow people to regrow lost limbs through gene editing.

Do you think that such a drug should not be given to anyone who lost a limb due in an accident that was partly due to their own poor judgement because it was "down to choices made"?

Also, is there something special about gene editing that means it should not be used for these situations? Or if you go outside when it's icy and fall and break a bone, should the hospital refuse to treat you since that was your own fault?
by gizajob | 2026-01-26 01:22:16+00:00
I felt like the movie Marty Supreme completely failed to make me care about the main character until the final act where the filmmakers had to pull out all the big easy stops to force me to care about him. A third of the way in to the movie I was wondering if it was going to be explained at any point why I should be interested in this guy or care about his difficult and fairly unremarkable personality. A lot of the time it seems as if creatives assume that if you’re watching/reading/engaging with their movie/book/artwork then you already care enough to care.
by wisty | 2026-01-26 01:23:18+00:00
So 6000 people cited a paper, and either didn’t properly read it (IMO that's academic dishonesty) or weren't able to determine that the methdology was infeasible.

No real surprise. I'm pretty sure most academics spend little time critically reading sources and just scan to see if it broadly supports their point (like an undergrad would). Or just cite a source if another paper says it supports a point.

I've heard the most brutal thing an examiner can do in a viva vocce is to ask what a cited paper is about, lol.
by KennyBlanken | 2026-01-26 01:23:23+00:00
Phillips, GE, Cree, and others sell high-CRI bulbs.

10 years ago you had to work to find high CRI bulbs but could still find Cree bulbs pretty easily. Now you can get high CRI bulbs at the grocery store.

High CRI bulbs generally have low or no flicker because high CRI is toward the premium end of the market.

IR emission is not a "feature", it's a bug.
by trinsic2 | 2026-01-26 01:23:37+00:00
Besides the quote, which I think is a good practice, having never read his stuff, he seems like he publishes his notes directly from his note taking app.

That's fine if you want to publish ideas in short form, but I don't think any of that is considered a piece of work that has been fully fleshed out. I don't really see any stuff that's designed to actually be a publication.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-26 01:23:51+00:00
> All such video has been third-person perspective, so no.

Do you think it is not worth considering?

> This is effectively intimidation.

I'd suggest reading it again more carefully; it is a call to be more thoughtful (I literally use that word). Again, you're not going to get anywhere with complaints about the responses to your comments.
by wvenable | 2026-01-26 01:24:38+00:00
> If I use my knowledge to produce code, under a specific license, then you take that code, and reproduce it without the license, you have broken the law.

Correct. But if read your code, produce a detailed specification of that code, and then give that code to another team (that has never seen your code) and they create a similar product then they haven't broken the law.

LLMs reproducing exact content from their training data is symptom of
overfitting and is an error that needs correcting. Memorizing specific training data means that it is not generalizing enough.
by mediaman | 2026-01-26 01:25:05+00:00
Some are complaining this letter is weak and generic.

Of course it is. You have 3M, Target, General Mills, Cargill, and US Bancorp on here, among others.

If you are looking for some revolutionary call to action, you're looking in the wrong place. And you're misunderstanding what's happening.

It is a really big deal for these very conservative, large, rich companies to be telling the federal government to cut it out, even if it is written in generic legalese.

The letter is not for you. It is for the administration. And it is extremely clear.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-01-26 01:25:09+00:00
Well not necessarily. That's the thing. It's not the timing attack that makes data leak for automated/noninteractive tunnels. Well technically there is still some potential leak but the issue is more about if the data being transferred is predictable then you have the plaintext.

So for a contrived example: Say I know a tunnel is transferring a sizeable dataset starting at a specific time before performing some other tasks (say a data sync before doing XYZ). I know when the connection started and I have snooped on the entire connection.

I know the initial handshake and I know the exact plaintext being transferred. That's a lot of information that can be used to grind the keys being used. That then risks that you can extract whatever information that follows after your initial dataset and potentially impersonate a participant and inject your own messages.

It's unlikely to be exploited in practice because it requires a very particular set of circumstances but it's essentially a modern, more expensive version of the attacks used on the enigma machines back in the day. It's unlikely to be exploited on random people but it isn't out of the realm of possibilities for targeted attacks on particularly juicy adversaries or between nation state actors.