MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eightysixfour | 2026-02-10 19:16:35+00:00
I think not talking about it skews the conversation towards incorrect remedies - the discourse is about what has changed about the economy, communities, family life, etc, that makes people want fewer kids and then trying to derive solutions from those things as the assumed problem. It makes too much of the discourse a question of “how do we go back to the previous conditions?”

If instead we say this is a biological imperative that we have interrupted and many people don’t rationally want children no matter how perfect those conditions are, then instead of looking back to previous states, we can ask what new conditions must occur to change this behavior.
by jbeam | 2026-02-10 19:16:52+00:00
> They menace and threaten "people just out and about in the neighborhood"? It is hard to engage in good faith when you are baldly making statements that are completely unsupported.

There are no shortage of videos showing ICE agents on roaming patrols in Minnesota -- and elsewhere -- menacing anyone they come across who appears undesirable. All you have to do is not look away.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/880/what-is-your-emergency
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-10 19:16:56+00:00
Similar reports have been ongoing about Metformin (another medication used for diabetes that causes weight loss and improves metabolic profile).

It's the simplest explanation that we have been underestimating just how unhealthy we are?

There's a synergy here, eat healthier, reduce blood sugar spikes, lose weight. And you are healthier than each individual effect alone would cause.

Maybe we're just ruining our bodies even if we don't put on weight by eating sugary foods that spoke our blood sugar. Or big meals that constantly make us switch into sit down and digest mode.

I'm open to something more happening but this isn't just GLPs. It seems we have uniquely attacked our bodies in a way that diabetes is the ultimate result but the entire journey is exquisitely toxic to our physiology.

Maybe fasting helps. Maybe keto helps. But this is similar to people who live off McDonalds suddenly go vegan and become healthy, is veganism that great? Or was the alternative for you just so awful for you?
by bluescrn | 2026-02-10 19:17:01+00:00
The most surprising effect of Mounjaro, at least initially was that it drastically reduced by desire to drink beer, and when I started, my drinking was at a very unhealthy level (beer calories being a major factor in my weight problem). But maybe I'm an odd case, as I had a real beer habit but don't like wine and very rarely touched spirits.

Actually losing some weight as well as cutting my drinking down, helped me with depression far more than SSRIs (which had previously led to even faster weight gain)

Unfortunately, the effects started to diminish somewhat after about a year on it, as if I was building up a bit of a tolerance to the drug. And then I switched to Wegovy (=Ozempic) after big UK price hikes to Mounjaro, and found it much less effective, started gaining weight again (winter/xmas didn't help). Switching back to Mounjaro at the moment, but having to slowly step back up from a lower dose. Not expecting to see the initial near-miraculous effects again, expecting to have to combine it with some actual willpower and more exercise going forwards.
by yodon | 2026-02-10 19:17:12+00:00
If you could actually detect AI content with high accuracy, you would sell it as a service and print money, but you can't, so you force all the rest of us to wade through posts like yours, claiming to tell the rest of us what is and isn't AI, which are FAR more annoying, disruptive, and low signal than the post you're commenting on, which is intelligent, adds to the conversation, and is, by my read, almost certainly actually human authored, just written by someone who knows how to write.
by jujube3 | 2026-02-10 19:17:16+00:00
Being able to hook up with random strangers on apps might be fun in your 20s and 30s. When you're old and wrinkly, it's not going to be the same. I hate to say it, but this is especially true for women entering their twilight years. A lot of childless people in our generation are headed to a very sad and lonely future.

COVID was exceptionally hard on these people. A lot of the weirdness of the COVID years was just people going crazy in isolation. Trading random stocks, or ordering crazy nonsense off of Amazon. Being alone is literally psychological abuse and a lot of them were subjected to it for months at a time.
by shawnmfarnum | 2026-02-10 19:17:33+00:00
Great question! It's honestly still imperfect, but here's what helps:

1. Context signals: Emoji ratio (too many often = sarcasm), account age, previous comment sentiment in the thread

2. Corroboration: If someone says "to the moon" but options flow shows puts, or there's no volume spike, it gets weighted down

3. Cross-subreddit divergence: If WSB is bullish but r/stocks is bearish on the same ticker, it's often a meme pump

4. Keyword patterns: "bagholding", "loss porn", "wife's boyfriend" = usually ironic/sarcastic context

5. OpenAI sentiment with ticker-specific context: passing the post + surrounding comments helps vs. analyzing in isolation

The bigger challenge is that WSB uses sarcasm TO BE sarcastic but also ironically serious sometimes. So I don't try to be 100% accurate - instead, I show confidence scores and let users decide.

Would love feedback on better approaches if you've worked on this problem!
by rglover | 2026-02-10 19:18:01+00:00
Naive, semi-related question: what is the state of stuff like Mistral when compared to OpenAI, Anthropic, etc?

Could I reasonably use this to get LLM-capability privately on a machine (and get decent output), or is it still in the "yeah it does the thing, but not as well as the commercial stuff" category?
by nine_k | 2026-02-10 19:18:22+00:00
If you replace "taxes" with more general "investment", it's everywhere. A good example is Amazon that has reworked itself from an online bookstore into a global supplier of everything by ruthlessly reinvesting the profits.

Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA.

If you're looking for periods of high taxes and growing prosperity, 1950s in the US is a popular example. It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it.
by alibarber | 2026-02-10 19:18:22+00:00
Is it? Can’t say I’ve really noticed it.

In fact just today I read this article in my EU country that sounds almost identical to what this comment describes:

https://yle.fi/a/74-20209419

“ If, for example, the payment was made by credit card and the product has not been delivered, the consumer can contact their credit card company directly and request a refund.

Credit card firms can usually refund the money quickly, Beurling-Pomoell noted, whereas consumers who paid by debit card must try to claim their money back from the bankruptcy estate.

"Unfortunately, [reclaiming money from a bankruptcy estate] is usually a very long and difficult process. Consumers are generally in a relatively weak position when a company goes bankrupt," he said.

Beurling-Pomoell added that consumers should always consider using a credit card when purchasing a product that they do not immediately receive.”
by 5G_activated | 2026-02-10 19:19:10+00:00
it was clearly bad enough for everyone else to decide that they didn't want to put up with him anymore. which is what happens in the real world.

online, everyone considers themselves a public figure. and because we can't seem to get shot of public figures, whether they be rapists, homophobes, or just arseholes, alleged or proven, they believe, logically, you shouldn't be able to be rid of them.

offline, if you have someone who makes your life a misery, you tell them to fuck off.
by FatherOfCurses | 2026-02-10 19:19:41+00:00
To quote you from an earlier comment of yours: "This is exactly the sensational take (devoid of nuance and information) that we should collectively push back against."

The left has been traditionally anti-capitalist and in favor of improving rights and living conditions. Who on the left is gaining financially from distorting the truth to the level of someone like Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the Koch Brothers, or Jeff Bezos?
by FillMaths | 2026-02-10 19:20:08+00:00
Of course everyone agrees that this is a nice way to construct the complex field. The question is what is the structure you are placing on this construction. Is it just a field? Do you intend to fix R as a distinguished subfield? After all, there are many different copies of R in C, if one has only the field structure. Is i named as a constant, as it seems to be in the construction when you form the polynomials in the symbol i. Do you intend to view this as a topological space? Those further questions is what the discussion is about.
by kazinator | 2026-02-10 19:20:16+00:00
> s sending you more blue light than the background level.

The background level is black! No air, no scattering.
d
> A cloud that isn't between you and the sun is getting its light from the sky background, which is blue. Why is the cloud not blue?

The cloud is bathed in intense, direct sunlight which is slightly yellow, and it is exposed to a small amount of scattered blue light. It could be that this mixture whitens the color, essentially reconstituting the light.

Why does white paint look pure white? Or snow on the ground? Same reason. It's reflecting the sky blue in a small amount, plus the yellowish sunlight.

If you are in a dark enclosure like a cave or barn, and sunlight is streaming in through a small aperture, if you hold some white object up to that light, it doesn't look the same as if you do that outside because it's not illuminated by the blue sky, only by direct sunlight.

Moreover, the shadowed parts white object sitting outdors, exposed to sunlight. tend to be tinged with blue.
by bee_rider | 2026-02-10 19:20:25+00:00
This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument.

I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination depends on understanding what everybody believes, but I wish it would go away.
by bryan_w | 2026-02-10 19:20:26+00:00
I don't know, I just went to find an ad in my feed and the first one was for a house plant that was easy to take care of. I'm not saying I'm the smartest cookie in the shed, but I didn't detect any manipulation. Seems like it was a person who just wanted me to know about their product.

Let me know what I'm missing.
by bumby | 2026-02-10 19:20:30+00:00
Methodology is THE main criticism of research; it’s the most important piece. It’s more important than nit-picking results or anything else. Unless your the type to believe in starting with a conclusion and working backwards, but that’s bad science.

And that doesn’t mean the method has to be perfect. But if it doesn’t reflect the true problem, or if is too weak to drawn conclusions from, it’s just story-telling.

The point I’m making is we should acknowledge the model assumptions. If we’re saying, for example, a living wage is expected to provide the average car, we need to acknowledge it now becomes the floor and is no longer the “average”. That’s a fine point to debate, but it requires some data literacy that is absent in this discussion.

And, as an aside, if you think snark is somehow justified because someone is criticizing a tool or method in legitimate way that you don’t like, you need to revisit the HN guidelines.
by usefulposter | 2026-02-10 19:20:51+00:00
I'm not affiliated with it in any way, but you might want to check out the leading model https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14873 and the mixed authorship detection https://www.pangram.com/blog/pangram-3-0-technical. LLM detection has come a long way since the first GPTZero.

Human heuristics - I've prompted millions of tokens across every frontier model iteration for all manner of writing styles and purposes - also helps greatly.

Concerning to me are long-time posters who (perhaps unknowingly) advance the decline of this human community by encouraging the people breaking HN guidelines. Perhaps spending a few hours on Moltbook might help develop such a heuristic, since "someone who knows how to write" is just a Claude model with a link to the blogpost.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Thanks for your comment!
by abdullahkhalids | 2026-02-10 19:20:56+00:00
The Canadian government has been trying for about 4-5 years now to get Canadian banks to embrace Open Banking, which will allow these sorts of products to be built quickly.

The banks have consistently refused to do anything, because they don't want any change that threatens their oligopoly. Canadian bank services are more or less the same as they were a decade ago.

The current government will have to show that it can resist rich people lobbying in this regard, before any real change can happen.
by socalgal2 | 2026-02-10 19:20:57+00:00
The single thing I find most addicting in my life for the last 5-6 years is HN. I feel like all the same criticisms can be applied here. HN chooses their algo and how quickly upvotes degrade and how much they are worth for keeping something on the front page. It works to keep me checking multi times a day. As an example, they could instead pick to only update the front page once every 24 hours and my addition would disappear because I'd know "no updates until tomorrow". As it is, I get that random reward addiction of "maybe there's something interest now". I guess HN is an evil company engineering addiction.
by tadfisher | 2026-02-10 19:21:04+00:00
Google does not provide those products (not in the US, as far as I am aware), but they are a money transmitter in the same vein as Square/Block, Stripe, and Venmo [0]. They won't be directly subject to the Bank Secrecy Act, but they partner with the major payment networks (who have their own rules and their own partner programs with banks) as part of Google Pay and customer payment profiles.

But I don't think this matters much for this case, as DHS is not investigating financial crimes. This is about what discretion Google has to comply with administrative warrants, which is not settled law and isn't clearly spelled out in their own policy.

0: https://support.google.com/googlepay/answer/7160765?hl=en
by arjie | 2026-02-10 19:21:27+00:00
If I'm being honest, this is the same as other times I've encountered people talk about community. I've noticed that a lot of people talk about this in a very "other people are like this" sense. I have noticed the opposite. Other people are not like this. In fact, the normies are out there living normie life in a way that is perfectly community oriented and not at all problematic.

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community

I think the explanation for lack of children is much simpler, but one that most cannot really admit: there is an opportunity cost to having children. An entire class of lifestyle will no longer be available to you realistically. Children are not expensive for the value they provide, but there are things you cannot spend a large amount of your time on.

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-14/Fertility_Ra...

My experience having kids is that we walk around with our baby and people love her. Random people will look over and say "oh my goodness, what a cute baby"[0], people will hold doors for us, airlines let us transport car seats for free and discount a seat for the child. In fact, I'd say the actual reason for a lot of things is more structural.

e.g. home regulations like double-staircases, or height restrictions, and so on constrain the form factors of homes that can be built; car regulations and market demand in a few-child world emphasize form factors that constrain family size; things like that.

Besides there is a great deal of social contagion in this subject. A friend of my wife's texted her saying (paraphrased) "to be honest, after seeing how cute your baby is I changed my mind on wanting kids"[0].

0: And as the father, I definitely think my baby is exceptionally cute, but in reality this is likely everyone else's experience.
by dismalaf | 2026-02-10 19:21:31+00:00
Be outside the US and/or don't use products from US companies?

Believe it or not, tech companies must comply with the authorities of countries they operate in. They're also not required to tell you, sometimes they're compelled to not tell you.

The idea that a tech company can outright oppose the state is pure fantasy... They still must operate within laws.
by iparaskev | 2026-02-10 19:21:31+00:00
> Biggest risk I've found building solo with AI isn't bad code — it's accepting plausible code without interrogating it

Totally agree. While I am aware of the danger, sometimes I become lazy and something slips.

> Adding AI to the mix might make it a harder sell, not easier.

100%. I think teams that already pairing could try something like this.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-10 19:21:45+00:00
Oh, this is the "Gandalf Corner" guy[1], who has a lot of videos of himself blocking people trying to drive on the wrong side of the road to skip the queue at an intersection. What always gets me is how smug and entitled the people are, even when they realize he's not going to back down. That and the silly "I'm going to get away with this because I always have" grins his subjects alway seem to have. Good job to this guy.

1: https://www.youtube.com/@CyclingMikey/videos
by apparent | 2026-02-10 19:21:49+00:00
Obviously it is safer to have longer follow distances, all things equal. But you don't accomplish that if you leave a long follow distance that is cut off a few seconds later by another car trying to get ahead. You end up with a constant stream of cars cutting your follow distance to less than what it would have been if you had just stayed slightly closer to the car in front of you.

We don't live in an ideal world, and having a bunch of cars merging in front of you definitely makes you less safe than having a static situation. I try to make sure I can see through/around the car in front of me, so that I have advance notice of what's happening down the road.
by jaggederest | 2026-02-10 19:21:55+00:00
The really beautiful thing now is that, with the evidence from GLP-1 drugs as a class, we're seeing 3 things: new targets for all kinds of things, that were previously discarded as "too difficult to make into medication", and in addition, injectable treatments - for a long, long time anything that required injections was just ruled out at the mechanism level. The third thing is that pharmaceutical industry has learned how to hit multiple targets with a single drug - previously most drugs were formulated to hit at most one or two receptors, and now we're seeing work on quad or 5-way drugs.

I'm super optimistic, the pipeline for future medications in these classes and other related ones are enormous. Huge effects both for me personally but for the world as a whole, a world in which obesity and other chronic behavioral conditions are treated more like cancer than smoking - even smoking itself!
by throwway120385 | 2026-02-10 19:21:56+00:00
It's more nuanced than "the federal government is too powerful." I feel more like non-law-enforcement agencies like ICE are too powerful right now, but I also believe that the FBI and the DOJ had a good mandate that should be preserved. And I also believe that antitrust needs to be a high priority. Please don't lump me in with people who just want to tear it all down so they can live in a fiefdom. There are good people in the US government, and there are good things about it. It's just not all of it is good and none of us can agree at all times on what's bad here.
by phil21 | 2026-02-10 19:22:00+00:00
These are historically called “charge cards” in the US and are common for corporations who give employees “credit cards” for travel and the like.

American Express is big in this market - what looks like a normal Amex Business Platinum card can very well be a charge card that needs to be paid in full at the due date every month.

There are minor differences but the big one is no carried balance between months is allowed. Payment in full due each month.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-10 19:22:00+00:00
I've said it simply, much like you, and it comes off as unhinged lunacy. Inviting them to learn themselves has been so much more successful than directed lectures, at least in my own experiments with discourse and teaching.

A lot of us have fallen into the many, many toxic traps of technology these past few decades. We know social media is deliberately engineered to be addictive (like cigarettes and tobacco products before it), we know AI hinders our learning process and shortens our attention spans (like excess sugar intake, or short-form content deluges), and we know that just because something is newer or faster does not mean it's automatically better.

You're on the right path, I think. I wish you good fortune and immense enjoyment in studying compilers.
by dTal | 2026-02-10 19:22:14+00:00
>In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common thing to follow a question.

No it isn't. Type a question into a base model, one that hasn't been finetuned into being a chatbot, and the predicted continuation will be all sorts of crap, but very often another question, or a framing that positions the original question as rhetorical in order to make a point. Untuned raw language models have an incredible flair for suddenly and unexpectedly shifting context - it might output an answer to your question, then suddenly decide that the entire thing is part of some internet flamewar and generate a completely contradictory answer, complete with insults to the first poster. It's less like talking with an AI and more like opening random pages in Borge's infinite library.

To get a base language model to behave reliably like a chatbot, you have to explicitly feed it "a transcript of a dialogue between a human and an AI chatbot", and allow the language model to imagine what a helpful chatbot would say (and take control during the human parts). The fact that this works - that a mere statistical predictive language model bootstraps into a whole persona merely because you declared that it should, in natural English - well, I still see that as a pretty "magic" trick.
by detritus | 2026-02-10 19:22:50+00:00
I walk around North London a lot and after a recent day of various hijinx involving careless drivers, I looked into bodycams with an eye to just having one run as I walk around to capture the various dangerous transgressions and then report onwards to the relevant authorities.

But, the more I looked into it, the more self-conscious I got that a) I would be a sad curmudgeon to do such a thing and, b) I'd be sleep-walking into some horrid authority-complicit sousveillance that raises uncomfortable questions.

Still, I'd really like to report those [expletive deleted]s who skip over pedestrian crossings at speed, on their phone. Gits.