skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This is a cliche you hear from right winger in any country that has a progressive tax system

Not a cliché - a fact. I'll explain to you.

The incentive structure of progressive taxation is wrong: it only works for the few percent that are extremely money hungry: the few that are willing to work for lower and lower percentage gains.

Normal people say "enough" and they give up once they have the nice house and a few toys (and some retirement money with luck). In New Zealand that is something like USD1.5 million.

I'm on a marginal rate of 39% in New Zealand. I am well off but I literally am not motivated to try and earn anything extra because the return is not enough for the extra effort or risk involved. No serial entrepreneurship for me because it only has downside risk. If I invest and win then 39%+ is taken as tax, but even worse is that if I lose then I can't claim my time back. Even financial losses only claw back against future income: and my taxable income could move to $0 due to COVID-level-event and so my financial risk is more than what it might naively appear.

Taxation systems do not fairly reward for risk. Especially watch people with no money taking high risks and pay no insurance because the worst that can happen to them is bankruptcy.

New Zealand loses because the incentive structure for a founder is broken. We are an island so the incentive structure should revolve around bringing in overseas income (presuming the income is spent within NZ). Every marginal dollar brought into the economy helps all citizens and the government.

The incentives were even worse when I was working but was trying to found a company. I needed to invest time, which had the opportunity cost of the wages I wouldn't get as a developer (significant risk that can't be hedged and can't be claimed against tax). 9 times out of 10 a founder wins approximately $0: so expected return needs to be > 10x. A VC fund needs something like > 30x return from the 1 or 2 winning investments. I helped found a successful business but high taxation has meant I haven't reached my 30x yet - chances are I'll be dead before I get a fair return for my risk. I'm not sure I've even reached 10x given I don't know the counterfactual of what my employee income would have become. This is for a business earning good export income.

Incentive structures matter - we understand that for employees - however few governments seem to understand that for businesses.

Most people are absolutely ignorant of even basic economics. The underlying drive is the wish to take from those that have more than them. We call it the tall poppy syndrome down here.

(reëdited to add clarity)
> That said, I do not think AI weapons are a reasonable thing to build for any war, for any country, for any reason - even if the enemy has them.

So you're in favor of losing a war and becoming a subject of the enemy? While it's certainly tempting to think that unilateralism can work, I can hardly see how.
We need network societies, not network states (2024)
I think having nations competing against each other is a good thing. Governments become corrupted and collapse: it would be a shame if the only world government fell into the hands of a dictator.

That being said the only way I could imagine we'd get a single world order is one country dominating everyone else, just like superpowers and regional powers dominate their respective parts of the globe.

Never ever ever are people just going to give up their control out of some form of "enlightenment" that has never existed among the human race.
You want to take control away from the board and give it to employees? https://ai-ceo.org has a plugin for that!
It hasn't and it isn't.
Turncoat Zuck's Meta had posters on the wall in every building: a picture of a rocking horse with the caption: "Not all motion is progress."

The fourth estates' and the masses' blind faith in and compliance to self-righteous, egotistical billionaires, one of whom may be a Nazi, is what is both disappointing and frightening.
Which begs the question of if we can escape the Red Queen hypothesis.

Personally I don't think we can as a species.
Yeah it's a more involved discussion than we could really have in a form like this but I truly believe that the cloud is a better solution than self-investment and infrastructure when it comes to universities. I spent plenty of time working with closet clusters and grad students is admins when I was at the University and I just don't think it's a good investment of time or money.

When I advise the NIH to do was to do a large bulk group buy on behalf of many thousands of scientists that use the scale of the NIH to negotiate in extremely large concession. My experience with Amazon is that you can basically get them down about 50% just by asking.

I work for a well-funded company now and we use the cloud and we have on-prem infrastructure. The on-prem infrastructure is extremely hard to change sometimes just asking for a GPU will take 6 months or more. Storage is always highly limited and slow. Let the cloud hyperscalers do what they're good at and focus on doing the science
The Beej books are awesome. I remember reading these and watching the 3DBuzz video tutorials when I was first learning how to program.
You probably should stop buying your favorite brand Palo Alto Network then.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1283...
> understands how tax brackets are structured should know this. Yes, tax avoidance/efficiency shenanigans abound, Trump himself has admitted to using them, but why not? Noone is going to leave money on the table. The law allows for them. The tax laws should be rewritten if it's a problem.

It IS a problem and they SHOULD be re-written, so why isn't it?? Saying "change tax laws if its a problem" when its structurally almost impossible to get through congress IS the problem people are talking about & its disengenuous to handwave that away.
Yes, because this is crossing the line…
Thank you for writing this in such a polite and erudite manner. You saved me from posting an obscenity laden ad hominem.
> Speaking as a Japanese-Americann, equity initiatives like DEI and Affirmative Action have always left me a bad taste. They are racism, sexism, and all the other forms of discrimination. I 300% support Trump's mandate to judge everyone strictly based on merit, it's MLK's dream given new life.

Congrats on buying into the propaganda. Do you really believe that these initiatives push anyone to hire the unqualified?

When you have ten candidates who are all qualified, and your entire workforce is white, or asian, or black, or male, all that DEI asks is to maybe consider not just hiring more of your ethnic group/gender/etc. Maybe branch out a bit. What it does not say is that if you have 1 qualified candidate from the majority ethnic group and 9 who are unqualified minorities, you have to lower your standards. That's the lie that the reactionary groups are pushing, and it's received readily without the burden of even slight scrutiny.

The people pushing falsehoods about DEI are, shockingly, not enlightened progressives in any other regard. They are not the philosophical heirs of Dr. King.
Seems more efficient to have one reference book rather than generating entire new 20 chapter books for every person.

I also think if you are at the “don’t know what you don’t know” point of learning a topic it’s very hard to direct an AI to generate comprehensive learning material.
This is hopelessly naive.
> Affirmative action is illegal in the USA,

It was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court (for college admissions, at least) in 2023. Don't pretend like it didn't exist before that. It had to be exist before it was able to be challenged in court.
Companies already are just profit maximizers and they already have done a lot to realign the government.

Of course it's not that as bad as you describe because it's not as simple as you describe.
You traded ease of writing for ease of long term ease of debugging, I don't think we agree.
I was actually pretty excited about this until so read it was iCloud+ only. I think it is maybe a long-term strategic mistake to lock this behind iCloud+ and also a bad omen for the direction Apple is going in. In the past this would have been a free app.

If Apple did not lock this behind iCloud+ I think it would have quickly become a standard for a lot of users and been another feather in Apple’s cap of why a user might want an iPhone. Maybe they could have added upsells like gift an Apple Card or something or made money through affiliate gift giving links or something.
You’re right, interviewers will still care about whether you come up with a solution, and they care about the quality of the solution. The part you might be missing is that what I said and what you said aren’t mutually exclusive; they are both true. Interviewers do have to compare you to other candidates, and they are looking for the candidates that stand out. They want more than a binary yes/no signal, if at all possible. What I was trying to say is that the interviewer doesn’t need the solution to the problem they ask you to solve, what they need is to see how well you can solve it. I hope that’s stating the obvious, but it’s worth really letting it sink in. It’s super common for early-career programmers to be afraid of interviews and complain about them. Things change once you start doing the interviewing and see how the process works.
This is ridiculous, just don't use a network of any kind or you'll be tracked by someone somewhere. Simple as that. Misleading people into thinking they can use these tools and be safe is dangerous. I suppose the only way to be safe is to assume you're being tracked somehow and use burners or throw aways that don't matter.
That's another thing: nobody got the beavers to make this dam, they just happened to do it coincidentally. You might as well say that waiting for a landslide to block the river is better than hiring human engineers and builders. In most cases, a landslide is not going to come along at just the right spot, but if does, you can say "see? we saved money"
There are various methods. A lot more around preventing dam building where it would be problematic. Things that block preferred locations either become part of the new dam, beavers destroy them, or sometimes a dam is created elsewhere.

It's probably not worth it if you want a specific dam location though. For general water retention we already trap and relocate beavers and just let them do their thing in the new place.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsm9_032447.p... - Working with Beavers
I agree. I don't think there's really a case for the US developing any offensive weapons. Geographically, economically and politically, we are not under any sort of credible threat. Maybe AI based missile defense or something, but we already have a completely unjustified arsenal of offensive weapons and a history of using them amorally.
I can't tell if you're intentionally misunderstanding, or not. So I'll spell it out: public non-biased research is a public good.

Oil companies weren't going to publish research saying leaded gas was bad. Tobacco companies weren't going to publish research saying cigarettes were bad. Have fun being healthy when you inhale leaded gasoline every day.

Forget about things like, you know, the internet. Or any medicine.

BTW, private companies are not paying for basic biological research. Good luck making a drug when no one knows what target to drug. VC firms will park their money in the bank instead. The value from biotechs is already marginal - investment basically vanished when interest rates went above 4.
> There were 5 separate shootings.

Most of the shootings had no known relation to the protests except police broadcast they had abandoned the neighborhood. It was predicted this would lead to violence. Protesters did not ask for this.

The 1st shooting was outside the protest area. The killer and victim had a history of conflict.

The 2nd shooting was outside the protest area. The victim said he was attacked by white supremacists.

The location of the 3rd shooting was unclear. The victim refused to talk to police.

The 4th shooting was outside the protest area. The victim refused to talk to police.

The 5th shooting did involve protesters. The 2 boys drove through the occupied park and at a group of protesters. Protesters working as security guards shot at the vehicle in defense.
Why? I've personally seen more news articles about Tor users getting de-anonymized than I have VPN users. Purely anecdotal, I know, but the point being Tor is obviously not foolproof, so I am curious why recommending one over the other is apparently enough for you to call the entire article into question.
US scientific research funding is largely driven by nepotism and favoritism. Insiders know but don't talk too much about it. They have a few options: a) just quietly stay in the system trying their best to do good work b) join the gravy train through social climbing c) quietly leave and move on with their careers.
"Harmonic Loss Trains Interpretable AI Models" (2025) https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01628

Src: https://github.com/KindXiaoming/grow-crystals :

> What is Harmonic Loss?

Cross Entropy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-entropy

XAI: Explainable AI > Interpretability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explainable_artificial_intelli...

Right to explanation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_explanation
People do these same sock puppet studies on Twitter/YouTube/etc. and find biases there as well. There's a lot of literature out there.

Here's a recent study on YouTube from the same author as this TikTok study finding left-leaning bias in US recommendations: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/8/pgad264/72424....

Here's a somewhat older study from Twitter itself where they determined that their recommendations were biased toward right-leaning accounts: https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com/content/dam/blog-twitter....

IMO the interesting question is not whether an individual platform is biased and what its biases are, but rather how we might regulate recommendations given that there is always a risk of bias.
I'm not a lawyer, but I have a few trademarks myself, and I believe it's possible to apply for a trademark even if the language or term predates it. However, if there's a significant gap between the language's release and the trademark application, that could raise other questions. For example, if JavaScript was created in the '70s but Oracle applied for the trademark in the late '90s, when the language became popular, that could be a more complicated case. In this instance, though, there's only a one-year difference! It's quite common for businesses to file for trademarks after they see value in protecting a term.

By the way, when I filed my first trademark application, Sun Microsystems filed an opposition. What a coincidence! This was before Oracle acquired them.
Problem with Discord is you have to enforce real names otherwise you have to limit it to people you know.

Young people I know (except for gamers) find Discord a bit sus because you don’t have any baseline with regard to name or profile pic. Also who already knows who. Discord doesn’t expose any social network outside of the specific server.

You would think Discord would be the community of choice for Gen Z but in reality it’s limited to gamer and gamer adjacent folks.

Turns out identity and known social network are still things people look for to achieve a base level of trust for real time chat.

Reddit and HN are more topic driven, but chat somehow feels more personal.
Zero!
neoliberalism
We allow them to live. Never forget how much we outnumber them by.
I’d agree that’s one definition of learning, but there exists entire subsets of learning that don’t require you to be stuck on a problem. You can pick up simple, and related concepts without first needing to struggle with them. Incrementally building on those moments is as true a form of learning as any other I’d argue. I’d go as far as saying you can also have the moments you’re describing while using an LLM, again with intentionality, not passively.
It took the use of poison gas to get countries on board, and some will still use it. Just more carefully.

Would China, Russia, or Iran agree to such a preemptive AI weapons ban? Doubtful, it’s their chance to close the gap. I’m onboard if so, but I don’t see anything happening on that front until well after they start dominating the landscape.
Except for people that live near research libraries, which is a lot of people. I use sci-hub and don't like Springer, but it's hard to see how most government [research] institutions haven't advanced our knowledge in decades. That just seems like another statement which is not so. (BTW, when you go to math conventions, at least, there are multiple open access tables in the exhibit hall, to reduce the cost of the free sharing of knowledge that is so essential).
I think models will have to some kind of internal training to teach them they are agents that can come back and work on things.

Working on complex problems tends to explode in to a web of things that needs done. You need to be able to separate these in to subtasks and work on them semi-independently. In addition when a subtask gets stuck in a loop, you need to work on another task or line of thought, and then come back and 're-run' your thinking to see if anything changed.
If you read dang's admonitions (as I have, for many years) you'll find that his viewpoint and official HN policy is that tone matters immensely, and is often read as diminished / positive by authors and amplified / negatively by recipients.

Searching for "personal attacks" and "swipes" will turn up many such examples:

"personal attacks": <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>

"swipes": <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
Where did I get the definition of the militia? The US Code: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246

As far as I know that’s been the definition at least since the 50s though I’m pretty sure at least the “able-bodied males 18-45” part has been around even longer
In that respect it is astonishingly successful by every measure. Musk got his global political shift and becoming co-president of the US for a causal $40 billion.
You are making an excellent argument for nuclear proliferation.
If it gets bad enough that most people are starving, rather then just struggling, we'll see action, but I doubt it'll get there anytime soon.

It's mostly too late to do anything at that point. People won't even have money for ammo.
> The idea of using a smaller version of the same (or a similar) model as a check is interesting.

I built my chat app around this idea and to save money. When it comes to coding, I feel Sonnet 3.5 is still the best but I don't start with it. I tend to use cheaper models in the beginning since it usually takes a few iterations to get to a certain point and I don't want to waste tokens in the process. When I've reached a certain state or if it is clear that the LLM is not helping, I will bring in Sonnet to review things.

Here is an example of how the conversation between models will work.

https://beta.gitsense.com/?chat=bbd69cb2-ffc9-41a3-9bdb-095c...

The reason why this works for my application is, I have a system prompt that includes the following lines:

# Critical Context Information

Your name is {{gs-chat-llm-model}} and the current date and time is {{gs-chat-datetime}}.

When I make an API call, I will replace the template strings with the model and date. I also made sure to include instructions in the first user message to let the model know it needs to sign off on each message. So with the system prompt and message signature, you can say "what do you think of <LLM's> response".
TL;DR “big government influence in everyone’s lives is ok when big government influence serves my narrative.”
> That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.

Except that it’s the opposite of a lottery.

It’s almost entirely based on your skills and the decisions you make.

There are right-place right-time effects, but it’s still your decision to be in the right place for the current time.

Europe’s economy is badly lagging the US economy, and it’s because culturally they hold these types of incorrect, fatalistic, zero-sum views towards success and innovation.
The climate crisis is set to erase $1.47 trillion in US home values.
Fascinating that there existed just the perfect geology for this to occur, and that there was also a uranium source.

Here is how the paper explains how Uranium concentrations of 15% occurred:

> In areas affected by intense hydraufracturing resulting in
brecciation of the rock, uranium content may reach values
as high as 15%. In such cases, mineralization is closely
related to oxidation-reduction fronts with the development
of Fe-oxides. In the brecciated, oxidized ores, uranium forms
1 to 10 cm size irregular patches in the matrix and fills the
microfracture networks. It is thought that fission reactions
started in this type of ore when the uranium content reached
the critical mass and the other conditions for chain fission
were met. To model the criticality of the reactors, various
parameters have to be taken into account such as the contents
of B and REEs which are poison for neutrons and the content
of U which allows it to reach the critical mass, the porosity
of the sandstones which controls the amount of water (which
acts as regulator of the fission reaction), the mineralogical
composition of the ore (which controls the amount of ele-
ments having different cross section values) and the temper-
ature which acts on the density of the water which is assumed
to be the moderator for neutrons. Naudet (1991) has com-
puted that at Oklo, the criticality could happen under two
main conditions: (1) the mineralized sandstones must have
been fractured in order to have an open porosity ranging
between 10 and 15% and (2) fission reactions could start
only in area having the highest uranium content ranging
between 10 and 20%. Criticality was easily achieved in ore
where sandstones had already lost some silica which at Oklo
could have been in volume of around cubic meter of sand-
stone with a 10% uranium content
Future? The present day tech industry belongs to China unless you narrowly define it as software or pharmaceuticals.

https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be...

For example the most advanced batteries in the world are designed and manufactured in China.
not disagreeing with anything you wrote, well, except that very last line.

he won because many groups of people were promised exactly what they wanted to hear. majority of america is very dumb. to the point it seems intentional. they reject any attempt to be informed about this subject. people routinely having abortions voted trump. people on SSI voted for trump. unemployed people voted for trump. disabled veterans voted for trump. literal nazis trump -- and i'm not saying HE is one, i'm saying that his campaign made sure they see him as one, and it absolutely worked ... over and over again against many of these groups whom are just frothing for fellow haters

i get really upset trying to figure out how to resolve this. but i can't even talk to the couple of relatives i have who are in this cult. if they detect you aren't praising the leader, things get hostile fast.
Had to manually go to the App Store and update the apps so it took some doing even after opting in but I managed to get this working on my iPhone and iPad. It's only till March 5th though, but usually the more popular experiments end up becoming features later so hopefully they cement it in! Thanks!
Yeah of course haha just ranting
DOGE is staffed precisely by the tech elite. Like 20 year old grads who are elite programmers winning competitions, that type.

Are they not part of the tech community now? You highly overestimate the political homogeneity of the tech community, because opposing voices were previously so shut down. You would be surprised by what your co-workers are thinking deep down.