skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So... what happens if/when people discover that this is not in fact the solution to their problems?

It has been an article of faith for decades that the government is the problem. But the people who say that have never actually gone about cutting it. That has created a perpetual cycle of demanding to end the government, and then not doing it. That makes the government a permanent villain in their minds.

Now they're doing it. Probably, they're doing it harder than most of their supporters imagined. Some of it may be restrained by courts, but it appears that the government will be drastically cut regardless.

Maybe the government really is the problem, and we'll all get along better with a civil service in shambles. If so, yippee.

But conversely, suppose that things don't get better? I'm not even talking about the scenario where the economy crashes, international influence disappears, etc. I just mean that things just tick along as they always have -- just as in the past, Presidential administrations haven't actually had dramatic day-to-day effects on people's lives.

In that scenario, what will be the reaction of people whose primary goal was to purge the civil service? Will they continue to stress the same point? Demand even more punishment for their political opponents? Cooperate to build a new government more in line with their wishes?
That is partly true, but it's also true that vastly increased enforcement against the big guys would still be better than what we have now.
However, that stops working as soon as you have a biased coin with memory. ;)
This paper's title is asking if the UN and public are well-informed enough. I wish there's a more "sociology/anthropoligical look at what happens when things break down" research. Yeah, panic is surely coming, although I feel like desperate attempts at geo-engineering are better than doing nothing, although I suppose a "That thing we did 20 years ago? If we hadn't done that we wouldn't have doomed the entire planet." would be a massive oops.

The worsening climate is already causing conflict and displacing people, e.g. in Syria [1] or North Africa in general [2], now they're in Europe and the Nazis don't like them, causing a drift rightwards (a sort of understandable one, from the point of selfishness, in times of trouble (be it real or perceived) you want to keep yourself safe, and then your family, and then your tribe).

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-wa...
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
and are they hiring?
Right, I didn't mean to imply it was a US-only phenomenon -- plenty of countries have fundamental rights enshrined in their constitutions, with varying degrees of difficulty to amend. I was specifically responding to the claim about countries that instead have "hard to change" laws, since laws are typically much easier to repeal than constitutions.
Three-hundred-year-old Stradivarius violin sells for $11M in New York
That is -- it's hard for one to directly verify the IQ of a peer besides submitting them to an IQ test, since we're trying to assess whether an engineering peer is good by means of some proxy.
Here's a recent podcast about why ZIP codes are not great for analysis: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/1223466587/zip-code-history
The reality of the situation is that the economic value and utility of AI is going to cause the laws to be restructured around them.
It's a pretty good definition if for some reason you think Paul Graham is in a position to decide what's "performative".
They aren’t reliable correct actually. The boundaries that the Census publishes are called Zip Code Tabulation Areas which are approximations of zip codes and include overlaps.
One of my favorite videos of Louis Armstrong performing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_CnEotIqMKg
Go ahead and call someone from Ireland, British.
As a general rule, I'm not a fan of prosecutors. However, blaming a prosecutor for the suicide of a defendant, because they filed charges in a clear cut case, is just as unfair as blaming friends and family.
That entirely depends on local laws. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible for a democracy to pass a law granting such rights.
This assumes they’re trying to make government less effective rather than to render it impotent to resist their plundering.
Interesting to think about what the future could look like. What if breaker boxes were "smart" and able to negotiate higher voltages like USB-C does? It would avoid the problem of a kid sticking a fork in an outlet, or a stray wire getting brushed accidentally when installing a light fixture.

Time will tell!
Yes, I don't know that the original thought experiment is correct, but it was certainly very thought-provoking.
VirtualBox Guest Additions still supports Windows NT 4.0
I think a real challenge with trying to work on specifications first is error handling -- you often find that a truly sound model is quite difficult to explain to users. So some prototyping and iteration becomes necessary in my experience.

Like, rustc only recently gained the ability to explain that the borrow checker rejected a program because a lifetime parameter was invariant. And this isn't even an artificial bit of complexity -- if you have mutability you are required to think about variance. If you have a Cell<&'static str> you cannot just turn that into a Cell<&'a str>, the way you can turn a regular &'static str into a &'a str. (Java programmers might be familiar with similar issues around ArrayList<Object>.)
As the blog also mentioned, Santa Clara city charges 17c while in the neighboring San Jose I pay average 50c (time of use plan).

Half of 50c even if I believe you is 25c still higher than 17c.
It doesn't seem to work well for smaller sizes when shifting left by 1. I'm sitting in a waiting room, playing with this on paper with four-digit binary numbers, and so far it seems to rapidly fall into a loop of 1,3,5,15,1...

edit: they all fall into their own loops. I forget the term for it, but the pattern is, unless I've made an arithmetic mistake (likely!):

1,3,5,15,1...

2,6,10,14,2...

4,12,4...

7,9,11,(1,3,5,15,1...)

8,8...

14,7,9,11,(1,3,5,15,1...)
> which is why social media APIs usually have limitations on how broad you can go

Without paying, usually.
> Induction motors turn at a speed proportional to frequency, so a high frequency power supply allows more power to be obtained for the same motor volume and mass. Transformers and motors for 400 Hz are much smaller and lighter than at 50 or 60 Hz, which is an advantage in aircraft (and ships). Transformers can be made smaller because the magnetic core can be much smaller for the same power level. Thus, a United States military standard MIL-STD-704 exists for aircraft use of 400 Hz power.

> So why not use 400 Hz everywhere? Such high frequencies cannot be economically transmitted long distances, since the increased frequency greatly increases series impedance due to the inductance of transmission lines, making power transmission difficult. Consequently, 400 Hz power systems are usually confined to a building or vehicle.

* https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/36381/why-do-ai...
Unironically, what a great sales blog post!

It's so well written and informative that I completely didn't mind the "and here's how to do it in Carto" bit in the middle. Instead I thought they earned it.
As we all know, not a single book or work of art was produced before the creation of copyright.
> No discussion of this sort shall be allowed on hn

Here is the largest HN thread from the last 3 months (and the 3rd largest in all of the last year):

The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910910 - Feb 2025 (2954 comments)

Other recent large discussions include:

Elon Musk's Demolition Crew - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42968430 - Feb 2025 (304 comments)

DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42951458 - Feb 2025 (355 comments)

Onlookers freak out as 25-year-old set loose on Treasury computer system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936421 - Feb 2025 (130 comments)

In fact, this is probably the most-discussed topic of the last month on HN; I can't think of another, offhand, that would come close. (Edit: probably the Tiktok ban business?)
Fun fact, there are databases of the exact frequency vs. time and it can be used to accurately time stamp audio/video recordings by correlating the ~50/60hz noise in the recording with the database. Good writeup on the technique and how it has been used in court cases: https://robertheaton.com/enf/
I think the underlying assumption in this is an important question to consider. Should we treat agents as we would have treated bots over the decades. I do believe that treating agents like traditional bots of old misses an important aspect. Traditional bots are doing something with the intent to serve some external entities gain (scraping content, attacks, etc.). Agents, while leveraging similar systems, are serving a site's end consumer. When I use an agent to shop, I'm still the customer of the shop. As the shop owner, I want to give the best experience therefore it's in my best interest to provide an AX that supports them providing a good experience to the end user. Because my target customer is now using an agent to help make a purchase, if I shut my door to their delegated system, I'm telling them to shop somewhere else that does support this.

We are early enough in this evolution to help direct the ship in a way that serves the end user, web owners/creators, and the agent.
Very cool! This is nice when considering moving to a new area to narrow down neighborhoods that could work. One thing that I think could be useful is to also add criteria for things I want to be far from. Some people don't like living near airports for example.
The magnitude of the secret does not matter: if your company says "don't steal and leak our data" and you go ahead and do it, it's still wrong (the main exception I can think of is ethical whistleblowing).

Again, bragging you have access after being terminated is bad regardless of whether you exploited the access.

To me these are the sort of details that could prevent you from passing a security clearance process, although I am not highly knowledgeable about the process beyond talking to people who have (and they weren't forthcoming).
Apple needs China. It's a big market that still manufactures most iPhones, despite their efforts to change that. The surveillance bill the UK has passed is in some ways worse than China's (a UK shard would not satisfy it), and the UK is far less important.
I saw somewhere that a scientist explained it by saying "You don't want to appear like a kooky alarmist, so you report the numbers that you can be confident in, instead of the extreme numbers"...

As for the reaction, it's a tragedy of the commons, nobody wants to give up their fly-to-Europe-to-ski-because-it's-cheaper holidays/why do they have to give it up and see all those billionaire Instagram kids flaunting about doing that on Instagram?
Screenshot Reading Malware
Even if the technology of AI ends up driving a huge economic value there is no guarantee that will translate into NVIDIA stock performance. The expectation that NVIDIA will capture a lot of this value is already priced in to the stock, which is a major reason why the current price is so high.
Pretty standard actually. Affordable housing rarely has a definition or measurable success criteria, but if something gets built it isn't going to be built where their constituents or they themselves live. Similar to how superficially progressive people are all for drug liberalization or a less heavy-handed approach to crime, as long as it has zero impact on their lives.

These same people are ostensibly liberal, "we're all for people riding bikes, or getting a stupid little condo, whatever you kids like to do for fun" they say, but in practice will do anything in their power to prevent any impediment to their car commute, even if their fear is at-best specious.

Same thing in Toronto. In Vancouver Canada we're a fair bit better about the bike lane thing, though it's still fragile, but in the affordable housing issue they actually just subsidized the huge home owners that already owned land, so a majority of new units that have come on the market are in their basements or backyard and can't be owned, furthering
a class divide. They marginally upzoned, but now a duplex or small townhouse is over a million at the low end. There isn't an incentive to make housing less expensive except the vague sense that the municipal/regional economy will eventually collapse on someone else's watch.
They argued that they had seen a flying object that they were unable to identify? Is there a counter argument to this?
Economies of scale generate value
> The US is the only country with codified freedoms from the government.

This is not true, both because it’s not the only one[1], and because the constitution hasn’t prevented state censorship in the US[2-4].

> It protects us from governments like the UK that don't think they have any limits to control their citizens.

How would it do that? The US constitution has no power over the UK.

[1]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

[2]: https://journals.ala.org/index.php/jifp/article/view/7208/10...

[3]: https://historycollection.com/10-situations-in-history-when-...

[4]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Sta...
There are vanishingly few private companies of significant size. For example in the US most businesses with more than a few owners are government chartered corporations, LLCs, and the like. This gets them government granted liability shields, and so it makes sense for them to be proactively regulated to prevent causing foreseeable harm that they might otherwise escape responsibility for.
We've had effective weight loss drugs for quite a long time; smoking tobacco and various phenethylamines are well known to work, for example, methamphetamine being the oldest. (I suspect chewing coca may also work.) Unfortunately, those also turned out to have harmful effects which weren't noticed until they had been in use for decades or centuries. It wouldn't be surprising if GLP-1 agonists also turned out to do more harm than good.
We fully expect a paid ad model to appear - perplexity seems to be the first in that direction. That being said - we see this more about managing your reputation ala credit score per the other comment than the absolute ranking game that traditional search has become.
> The more people that call out

People, in general, need to stop being such fucking wusses about calling out bad behavior, as proven in DC right now. Thanks for the support.
> and improve the product

He gave a platform for conspiracy theorists and fascists, so they're probably happy.

But for everyone else it turned into shit.
These people have made the affirmative choice to join gangs that terrorize law abiding citizens. Their choke hold on El Salvador has prevented others from living safe, prosperous lives (not to mention the countless people they've killed). Removing them from society is progress. The amount of utils gained by the large majority far outweighs those lost by these criminals. And frankly, it's a false equivalence anyway bc they're, y'know, criminals.

> Would you have supported Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" too, at the time? Or sterilizing poor people? I mean, those are perfectly logical suggestions that would work, wouldn't they?

You have erected a startling number of straw men in your response. I'll ignore them.

We should do things that both work and benefit society. We should not do things that don't work. Here's a short an non-exhaustive list of "progressive" things that don't work: restorative justice, tolerating crime, allowing the destruction of the commons by the mentally ill and addicted, allowing criminals to be free and wreck society due to legal technicalities, bureaucracy, and corruption.

And thus, as I wrote previously, the word "progressive" seems to have fully inverted. Things that enable or create progress are called regressive, while things that are actually regressive and destructure are called progressive.
Somehow I don't think this question is being asked in good faith.

Remember, not everyone watches Musk like HN apparently does. I knew who he was, and wouldn't have bought one of his cars 5 years ago. But a 27 year old working outside tech and not invested in social media could easily miss the magnitude of his assholery.
Many children are unwanted. Consider adoption and neglect. Parents know not to admit these things broadly.

Social work is a very low paid existence and most of the social workers I know could easily have earned more elsewhere which they are pained to know but persist through regardless because they care more for living in a world with less total suffering even at the cost of their own.

I earned my MSc from the University of Edinburgh and interacted thoroughly with academics there and in the process of getting there. I know many people with their PhDs and have had personal friendships with professors, postdocs, and other researchers. I would agree that academic incentive structure have been made deeply dysfunctional and delusion abounds. Also that defection is common. I have known some of those evil actors (e.g. Sharon Oviatt) so I don't deny their existence.

The very premise of business is that it takes a profit from the excess efforts of labor. I'm not the ridiculous sort that fails to recognize that often workers productivity is both made possible and enhanced by the accumulated coordination and structure of firms and owners should capture some of that value. However, increasingly research is showing that the advantages of our society are being captured by firms. Meanwhile, too many owners are failing to responsibly reinvest in the population and have made religions out of not fostering true growth.

My claim is that multiple cultural norms live side-by-side and I'm trying to help you and others realize that different options are plausible and more advantageous. The cooperators learn self preservation and hiding while they are also harvested while and beyond doing so. My speculation is that the expanded belief holding of perspectives like yours decreases the size of that population which will be a downward spiral of inefficiency and impoverishment. I expect the bottom will fall out viciously if it gets to that.

My spending time on this conversation is altruism, what is it for you?
It's only the largest streaming platform. I think people just take it for granted. Like indoor plumbing.
> It is replacing jobs

Prematurely, in my opinion only. A lot of those will be coming back unless there's a major breakthrough soon.
Thanks, will take a look at the BIP
I suggest learning to use a slide rule and abacus.
YES! Corporations are FOR THE PEOPLE! Currently, the tail is wagging the dog.
This is fascinating, didn't know. Why does higher demand lower the frequency?
Does anyone have a windows code signing system they like? Something on GitHub actions ideally.

I’m distributing unsigned binaries not because I care about the $200 for a cert, but I don’t want to spend hours figuring out a signing flow.
This is an example of the well known Modifiable Areal Unit problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modifiable_areal_unit_problem In general, your statistics depend on how you define your areas and you will get different pictures with different definitions.
I feel like people really REALLY missed one of the central points of the Ringworld novels: a megastructure like that is a dead end. It's too big, it's impossible to effectively govern, even with near-magical tech and a hyperintelligent overlord it will eventually fail.

A Dyson Swarm is an interesting idea, but it also seems to imagine that a civilization capable of such feats of engineering won't have figured out some better alternative.
It's already there, Hibiki by Kyutai.org was released yesterday with speech to speech, french to english on Iphone:

https://x.com/neilzegh/status/1887498102455869775

https://github.com/kyutai-labs/hibiki
So... what part of the program stopped?
Let's recap the past: Taxis were borderline unusable in almost all American cities before Uber (except for NYC)

I certainly didn't love their ruthless business practices, but let's not delude ourselves and admit that Uber or Lyft wouldn't exist if they didn't break the laws around taxi medallions.

Sometimes laws do more harm than good (by limiting supply and slowing innovation) and it requires creatively skirting regulations.

Things were always possible to improve the taxi industry. Smartphones had been around a few years. But it would've taken the industry 20 years to implement it correctly. In the same way that rampant music and movie piracy in the early 2000s hastened the development of iTunes and Netflix's subscription model way of doing business.

Uber shows the driver's name, their photo, and has a process for flagging drivers. Public safety is important to their business. As someone who's driven an Uber and Lyft and been through their process, I've seen it firsthand.

It's not like "medallions" worked - I remember driving in multiple taxis in pre 2010 days where the photo DID NOT MATCH UP to the driver. My high school physics teacher who grew up in Brooklyn in the late 1970s told stories about how he learned how to drive by illegally working and driving taxis around as a 15 year old.

Right now, we're just going through the same thing with AI again, and Silicon Valley is applying it's ethos of the past few decades.

There are reasons why in various industries, China is "winning the race", so to speak.

Regulations exist, but sometimes people who creatively ignore the "regulations" can win the tide of the public. It's one of America's best (and incredibly divisive) cultural capabilities.
> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?

It seems a sizable number of people living in democracies would rather be living in non-democracies.
The Linux kernel is most definitely not developed for free by some college student in their bedroom for the most part. It's Intel and Red Hat and similar.

Edit: related email by Hector: https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/c5a49bcb-45cf-4295-80...
This seems to do roughly the same as the Universe Splitter [0]. (Which used to be free? Not sure.)

[0] https://cheapuniverses.com/

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30499169
> The GFF and Democracy Reporting International had argued that X had a duty under European law to provide easily researchable, collated access to information such as post reach, shares and likes - information theoretically available by laboriously clicking through thousands of posts but in practice impossible to access.

Read the last half of that. The court agrees.

> information theoretically available by laboriously clicking through thousands of posts