uselesswords

The problem is what happens if an incompetent person stays on forever. There are many examples in history of great countries and empires that were lead by one person only for it all to come down when one idiot became the person in charge. An important idea behind term limits and democracy is sacrificing the ability to have an amazing leader for life so that an incompetent leader doesn't serve for life.

Its a fundamental safeguard and a hedge against tyranny. Its why, in general, countries that are lead by one person for life can be very impressive in the short term but inevitably fall apart once the wrong person eventually takes charge. Because the odds are that eventually the wrong person will take charge.

Ok I'll bite, name one vendor that has built flawless secure software of any comparable scale

The computational theory of mind is the leading theory for pure cognition. There is no leading theory of consciousness, although some people also favor the computational theory of mind for that as well but this is far less popular.

At best trying to scale this understanding from what you have stated might (gratuitously) get you to a multi-layer percepetron. Add a few ideas and you would hit a convolutional neural net which represented the frontier a decade ago. However this is still so far divorced from the modern frontier of AI, transformers, because the leaps are more focused on attention mechanisms than anything else. And even just understanding a transformer is merely a building block.

This is basically understanding a building block (A) of a building block (B) of a building block (C) that builds D and purporting that you can understand D from the building blocks of A. The equivalent is saying that knowing Newton's laws is enough to understand how we get to the moon. It might be fine for a hand-wavy idea, but its just not enough.

Can someone explain the waste water thing to me, because unless they’re separating it into H2 and O2 how is it possible for water to be wasted?

Its the inevitable result when you allow politics to enter a forum. It used to be posts that were overtly political were considered off-topic, but that has become more normalized. Hell ignoring this post, the top story right now is "American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis" which is just another political post masquerading. I wish we would just ban politics or maybe find a middle-ground like allowing overtly political posts one day a week. It's probably too late to save HN though, the community has already normalized these posts.

Yes exactly, if the exporter is not absorbing the cost, and the consumer is not absorbing the cost (for the most part), the importing company must be absorbing the bulk of the cost.

You are getting downvoted quite heavily but I do wonder what percentage of people are growing more and more accustomed to the latter.

I say this someone who was dedicated to (neo)vim for a decade. With AI I spend a lot less time writing/editing pure code these days, and all the VSCode based IDEs have become so essential to my workflow/productivity that using vim only would be masochistic. I still enable the vim binds in my editor and while they’re never a perfect 100% replacement I get so much value out of other tools I can’t see myself going back.

How can it be possible that consumers are paying 96% of tariffs that range from 25-100%. Yet inflation has only risen by 0.5 points? Consumption would have to be less than a fifth of what it was a year ago. And why haven’t there been such equally drastic price changes on shelves if whats functionally the entire cost is being passed to consumer?

I agree with everything you said, but the news organization's decision to include or not include a quote or speculation from someone is fundamentally a narrative choice. And every news organization makes those choices at their own discretion and it can result in uncritical reporting.

Pick a few frontpage stories from any news site you like, then see how its covered one a new source you don't like/leans the opposite way politically (short of the crazy outlets) and see how the same stories are reported. You'll see different quotes, different speculation, different choices of what to include or not include. Hell even the choice of what is covered on the frontpage will obviously vary if you just compare them. Saying that what a news outlet is reporting is "not the opinion of the news organization itself" may be technically correct in a legal sense, but that's worst kind of correct.

> most responsible outlets don’t speculate on motives until there’s some evidence of a connection

That is simply not true, every single news outlet without fail speculates, uncritically quotes a speculator, or leaves out warranted critical speculation at their own discretion. Pick a news site that you think doesn’t do this and I will happily find an example from their front page.

Technical point here but opinions are not illegal to have.

Besides that your point is missing the fact that you are dealing with outside services that provide a contract for their usage (GPS, GSM). You should be free to program your own devices but if you use an external service, then yes they can specify how you use their service. Those are contractual obligations. Cars on the road have clear safety risks and those are legal obligations. None of those obligations should govern what you do with your device until your device interacts with other people and/or services.

Feels a lot more like the reporter already had a problem with Meta and chose the examples most favorable to their anti-Meta slant to report in the article. Of course on HN we're all just to happy to eat it up as it aligns neatly with our little bubble. Here's some still publically available posts from Sex Talk Arabic who they directly quote in the article complaining about these shadow bans. It makes it a lot harder to trust the reporting here when these examples were so easy to find.

[1] https://imginn.com/p/ClT7Cufrk0k/

[2] https://imginn.com/p/DCmnH4WPbXa/

[3] https://imginn.com/p/C-dBMzXRqnu/

[1] https://imginn.com/p/ClT7Cufrk0k/

[2] https://imginn.com/p/DCmnH4WPbXa/

[3] https://imginn.com/p/C-dBMzXRqnu/

> Fatma Ibrahim, the director of the Sex Talk Arabic, a UK-based platform which offers Arabic-language content on sexual and reproductive health, said that the organisation had received a message almost every week from Meta over the past year saying that its page “didn’t follow the rules” and would not be suggested to other people, based on posts related to sexuality and sexual health.

If you're getting a warning every week for a year, I would like to see the other 51 non cherry-picked examples that they didn't give to the guardian. Based on a quick look at some of their posts that are still publically available, I think Meta is completely justified in restricting visibility of some of these posts.

Yes there are. It is well documented in other countries such as Venezuela or Argentina and some vendors even prefer cryptocurrency because compared to their national currency it is more stable. In addition, there are significant remitance and cross-border payments done in crypto where banking or FX controls make dollars hard to access in countries like Venezuela and certain regions in Africa.

Day-to-day transactions at the street level may not be dominated by crypto or even a majority, but it is a growing nontrivial minority in a lot of places especially emerging markets.

[1] https://www.trmlabs.com/reports-and-whitepapers/2025-crypto-...

[2] https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2025-global-crypto-adoption...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1362104/cryptocurrency-a...

There are multiple countries in the world where issues like hyperinflation have pushed day-to-day transactions to crypto for everyday people.

Technically right is the worst kind of right

I think you are disagreeing.

Comments like this are snarky, shallowly dismissive, and do little to add to a discussion all of which are against HN guidelines.

Some would say we killed the word "engineer" when we started applying it to programmers...

Yea but he’s not exactly going around randomly punching people in the face is he? Lot of moral grandstanding in this thread.

He’s a human being and he’s not perfect but some of these comments calling him a psychopath or sycophant are going way too far. My psychoanalysis of everyone psychoanalyzing Mr Beast would be to turn the screen off and get some fresh air

It’s modern tech sycophancy. Meaningless change that serves no one, but the ones pushing it. They get to say they did something to “fight” some sort of inequality when it’s all just performative. Worse, in the examples you gave, it draws attention away from real issues to fight a culture war that was kind of already won years ago.

Sure context and audience matters, but even outside of that the article is rather poorly written. This part in particular should really emphasize that she disproved the conjecture, as it stands it almost sounds like she proved it:

> Cairo solved the so-called Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a problem first proposed in the 1980s that had kept the harmonic analysis community had been working on for decades. The conjecture was widely believed to be true — if so, it would have automatically validated several other important results in the field — but the community greeted the new development with both enthusiasm and surprise: the author was a 17-year-old who hadn’t yet finished high school.

Not everyone has mullvad, corporate VPNs can’t be run concurrently with mullvad, not all networks allow a VPN, not all sites can be accessed through a VPN like mullvad, not all countries allow VPNs, etc.

Have you found it has better accuracy or scales with larger models? Or are the improvements, if any, marginal compared to the 3B VLM model?

Sorry, I was definitely snarky in my comments and if I could edit my comments to remove the snark and change the tone I would.

However, your "It's great that you're in medical school and very aware" is very patronizing and pointedly dismissive. Its a superficially polite acknowledgment that feels sarcastic rather than genuinely complimentary. I don't really mind, and I acknowledge the point you're trying to make. But if your goal is to curate a curious discussion and avoid snark you should model it too.

Since no one wants to explain and you I just got downvoted, Barry James Marshall is ironically an example of EBM and is HIMSELF an active proponent of EBM.

He had a biological hypothesis that the scientific community disagreed with and tested it on himself for a case study to get data. That case study was successful and then became a clinical trial. That trial was replicated and shown to work. He then won a Nobel prize for that work and the risk he took. This is an evidence-based process. EBM doesn’t mean you disregard a N=1, it means you expand N=1 into N=10, then N=100,… before you apply something to the general population. This is loosely how phase-1,2,3,4 trials work in the US.

Dismissing EBM because of Marshall is like dismissing all of math because someone disproved a popular conjecture like the local-to-global conjecture. Sure the community sentiment had it wrong, but the systematic logical approach of Math got it right. In Marshall’s case the community sentiment had it wrong, but the EBM approach eventually got it right. Half this thread doesn’t even know what they are arguing against.

I think you are misunderstanding a couple of things. The label for Cedarcure doesn’t have timed dosing, just says take it during the day. Furthermore this research article would actually indicate it’s better to take it in the afternoon for your particular drug, if there really is any connection. Which is still a crazy connection to make because you are complaining about a specific immumotherapy regimen finding not being applied to an allergy-style medication. Why not apply this logic to every drug that interacts with the immune system (which is all of them)? Furthermore as other comments pointed out, you’re mad your doctor didn’t know about a brand-new study that didn’t exist when they made a recommendation?

Doctor’s have a wide discretion and often get things wrong. But in your case, that’s not what happened. If anything your doctor actually got it right either by chance or intuition.

“You are not aware of this issue”

I’m in medical school and very aware, thank you for your condescension. Less important than my practical experience, I also have an academic degree in medical, health, and societal systems alongside my other more technical degrees. And none of my background even matters. This thread is just complaints all the way down with no actual practical solutions being mentioned. Frankly almost everyone in this thread has a fundamental misunderstanding of how the scientific process works in practice and isn’t even ready for a discussion about evidence based medicine. I’m not even a die-hard supporter of EBM, I think it has several apparent failures some of which are in this thread, but I do believe it is the best approach we practically have. I also don’t believe a collection of N=1 anecdotes means we should dismantle everything the past century in medicine has brought.

If you want a real conversation, every other alternative system of medicine has failures far worse than EBM. Which is why you don’t see practical solutions being offered anywhere in this thread just anecdotes and feelings about how the system has failed X or Y.

People don’t understand EBM is a consolidated approach to prevent anecdotal data from a single person destroying the lives of millions. Other non-scientific systems like Ayurvedic medicine are particularly susceptible and fail in multiple ways due to anecdotal data. Any holistic approach to medicine will necessarily include EBM such as an MBE or personalized approach, because holistic approaches cannot generalize research at scale. But nowhere in this entire thread do I see even a single named mention of an alternative or holistic system. Just anecdotes all the way down.

And you still didn’t answer my question. At least explain what an alternative would look like or give me a paper or link to educate my ignorant self. Instead of just saying “read some literature” like a conspiracy theorist and calling me ignorant.

Thank you for context.