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dira3

Democracy isn't supposed to be two wolves and a sheep voting on who to eat for dinner. There are supposed to be checks and balances.

One reason we are in the current situation is because we have discarded these checks and balances, allowing for the president to behave more like an autocratic monarch. If the other branches of government were performing their constitutional function, and if the executive observed the norms it's supposed to that's when you would have a democracy not just in letter but in spirit.

(Ironically I myself am an immigrant and a naturalized citizen, yet I find I know more about American civics than most US-born.)

Re:AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America on Wednesday September 03, 2025 @11:06PM (#45123066)
> safely walk around anywhere in my city after dark

For that use case, the crimes to worry about the most would be speeding or distracted driving. But people are usually more focused on e.g. someone doing drugs on the sidewalk than speeding cars; in fact speeding is hardly considered a crime at all despite the danger to pedestrians.

Re:Why I'm all-in on Zen Browser on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @02:36PM (#44954761)
So what is their monetization model? What can one expect from this product or company in the future? Can't find answers on their About page: https://zen-browser.app/about/
Re:Syncthing 2.0 Released on Wednesday August 13, 2025 @06:20PM (#44894563)
Looks like there isn't yet a (non-RC) 2.0 integrated version for macOS, as of today: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-macos/releases
The flagging of any coverage of this incident on HN is relentless!
Re:PhD Timeline on Monday April 28, 2025 @12:28PM (#43823241)
I see HN has gotten to the point where xkcd gets flagged.
BTW, on the topic of the fading of genetic algorithms, here is an interesting recent take: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/04/17/what-happe...

Ask HN: What are the hottest areas of *non*-LLM AI work currently?

10+ years ago, "AI" would likely refer to work in RL, evolutionary/genetic algorithms, etc.Nowadays most of the spotlight seems centered on LLMs, CNNs, and other methods that are either human-labeled or at least reliant on human-created data, and have a static separation between "learning" and "inference".I know that there are still non-LLM, non-CNN, non-anthropocentric topics of AI development...

( Read More... | 5 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Ask HN: Cursor, but for Data Exploration?

If I am trying to read/explore/join/ETL deeply nested tables in PSQL or Spark, Cursor doesn't seem to work very well for me.Which LLM-assistant tools have worked for you to expedite data exploration? Whether in a notebook format or otherwise.Or is there simply a better way to use Cursor for this purpose that I haven't thought of?

( Read More... | 1 comment | on HN )

Ask HN: Did bandits go out of fashion?

About 10 years ago, multi-armed bandits (and especially contextual bandits) were really important for optimization and business use cases.But nowadays you hardly hear about it, despite optimization continuing to be a need. The only major open source library continues to be Vowpal Wabbit - and even that is not very robustly maintained or documented.What are people doing for bandits or...

( Read More... | 4 comments | 5 points | on HN )