"flippantly tossing words around devalues them and debases the conversation." Agreed- and that's exactly what you are doing with the word, "no."
Soldiers are murdering an entire population- or as many of them as they can, seemingly- for political purposes that desire that population to simply not exist anymore. To say that is _not_ a genocide devalues the meaning of the word.
They're not "murdering an entire population"; although many thousands of Palestinians have been killed, it's still a tiny percentage of the total population.
But it's not necessary to murder an entire population for it to count as genocide. Any attempt to destroy a people counts, including forced sterilization, re-education, mass deportations, etc.
But it's also clear that Israel has explicitly targeted civilians, help workers, journalists, refugee camps, food distribution, and I've even read about them shooting people hiding in churches. None of those are valid targets.
* Hamas keeps its missiles, arms and other military equipment inside or underneath schools and hospitals
* UNRWA was functioning as an arms dealer by putting arms inside of bags of flour or other food items
* Hamas generally has its fighters not wear uniform, but instead wear civilian clothes or even niqabs (where only the eyes are visible). Making it extremely difficult for the IDF to determine who is a combatant and who isn't- and guaranteeing mistakes will be made.
* Hamas also uses child soldiers or orders children to throw stones at IDF soldiers - again ensuring IDF soldiers have to always be afraid the person in front of them is going to kill them and that they have to make split second decisions on what to do about it
Ah yes, the human shield argument. Like the "tunnels" and graphics provided by the IDF. Convenient isn't? Every hospital, apartment block, school and refugee camp has hamas in them, so everything is fair game.
ya it's pretty FUCKED UP that HAMAS does that, and Iran funds it, isn't it? or do you think Israel just wants to slaughter people weaker than them because they can? if that was their aim why did they wait until 10/8 to start doing it? they could have done it any time in the last 30 years.
> seemingly something happened by the democratically elected government of Gaza on 10/7
Gaza doesn't have a democratically elected government, and one of the reasons Palestine (of which Gaza is a region) does not have a democratically elected government is that Israel has exercised its power as an occupying power administering large parts of Palestine directly and controlling the rest indirectly to prevent elections which have been jointly agreed on by the two main factions.
And they’ve done that specifically to maintain the current violent and divided status quo, which they leverage as pretext to continue their long policy of genocide.
well that's not a very convincing argument. That's just a failure to recognize when the use of a tool- base64 decoder- is needed, not a reasoning problem at all, right?
A moderately smart human who understands how Base64 works can decode it by hand without external tools other than pen and paper. Coming up with the exact steps to perform is a reasoning problem.
That's not really a cop out here: both models had access to the same tools.
Realistically there are many problems that non-reasoning models do better on, especially when the answer cannot be solved by a thought process: like recalling internal knowledge.
You can try to teach the model the concept of a problem where thinking will likely steer it away from the right answer, but at some point it becomes like the halting problem... how does the model reliably think its way into the realization a given problem is too complex to be thought out?
Translating to BASE64 is a good test to see how well it works as a language translator without changing things, because its the same skill for an AI model.
If the model changes things it means it didn't really capture the translation patterns for BASE64, so then who knows what it will miss when translating between languages if it can't even do BASE64?
If the reasoning model was truly reasoning while the flash model was not then by definition shouldn’t it be better at knowing when to use the tool than the non-reasoning model? Otherwise it’s not really “smarter” as claimed, which seems to line up perfectly with the paper’s conclusion.
I don't know whether Flash uses a tool or not, but it answers pretty quickly. However, Pro opts to use its own reasoning, not a tool. When I look at the reasoning train, it pulls and pulls knowledge endlessly, refining that knowledge and drifting away.
I understand that the core similarities are there, but I disagree. The comparisons have been around since I started browsing HN years ago. The moderation on this site, for one, emphasizes constructive conversation and discussion in a way that most subreddits can only dream of.
It also helps that the target audience has been filtered with that moderation, so over time this site (on average) skews more technical and informed.
This sites commenters attempt to apply technical solutions to social problems, then pats itself on the back despite their comments being entirely inappropriate to the problem space.
There's also no actual constructive discussion when it comes to future looking tech. The Cybertruck, Vision Pro, LLMs are some of the most recent items that were absolutely inaccurately called by the most popular comments. And their reasoning for their prediction had no actual substance in their comments.
And the crypto asset discussions are very nontechnical here, veering into elementary and inaccurate philosophical discussions, despite this being a great forum to talk about technical aspects. every network has pull requests and governance proposals worth discussing, and the deepest discussion here is resurrected from 2012 about the entire concept not having a licit use case that the poster could imagine
HackerNews isn't not exactly like reddit, sure, but it's not much better. People are much better behaved, but still spread a great deal of misinformation.
One way to gauge this property of a community is whether people who are known experts in a respective field participate in it, and unfortunately there are very few of them on HackerNews (this was not always the case). I've had some opportunities to meet with people who are experts, usually at conferences/industry events, and while many of them tend to be active on Twitter... they all say the same things about this site, namely that it's simply full of bad information and the amount of effort needed to dispel that information is significantly higher than the amount of effort needed to spread it.
Next time someone posts an article about a topic you are intimately familiar with, like top 1% subject matter expert in... review the comment section for it and you'll find just heaps of misconceptions, superficial knowledge, and my favorite are the contrarians who take these very strong opinions on a subject they have some passing knowledge about but talk about their contrarian opinion with such a high degree of confidence.
One issue is you may not actually be a subject matter expert on a topic that comes up a lot on HackerNews, so you won't recognize that this happens... but while people here are a lot more polite and the moderation policies do encourage good behavior... moderation policies don't do a lot to stop the spread of bad information from poorly informed people.
There was a lot of pseudo science being published and voted up in the comments with Ivermectin/HCQ/etc and Covid, when those people weren't experts and before the Ivermectin paper got serious scrutiny.
The other aspect is that people on here think they're that if they are an expert in one thing, they instantly become an expert in another thing.
This is of course true is some cases and less true in others.
I consider myself an expert in one tiny niche field (computer generated code), and when that field comes up (on HN and elsewhere) over the last 30 years the general mood (from people who don't do it) is that it's poor quality code.
Pre-AI this was demonstrably untrue, but meh, I don't need to convince you, so I accept your point of view, and continue doing my thing. Our company revenue is important to me, not the opinion of done guy on the internet.
(AI has freshened the conversation, and it is currently giving mixed results, which is to be expected since it is non-deterministic. But I've been doing deterministic generation for 35 years.)
So yeah. Lots of comments from people who don't fo something, and I'm really not interested in taking the time to "prove" them wrong.
But equally I think the general level of discussion in areas where I'm not an expert (but experienced) is high. And around a lot of topics experience can be highly different.
For example companies, employees and employers come in all sorts of ways. Some folk have been burned and see (all) management through a certain light. Whereas of course, some are good, some are bad.
Yes, most people still use voting as a measure of "I agree with this", rather than the quality of the discussion, but that's just people, and I'm not gonna die on that hill.
And yeah, I'm not above joining in on a topic I don't technically use or know much about. I'll happily say that the main use for crypto (as a currency) is for illegal activity. Or that crypto in general is a ponzi scheme. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it really is the future. But for now, it walks like a duck.
So I both agree, and disagree, with you. But I'm still happy to hang out here and get into (hopefully) illuminating discussions.
Frankly, no. As an obvious example that can be stated nowadays: musk has always been an over-promising liar.
Eg just look at the 2012+ videos of thunderf00t.
Yet people were literally banned here just for pointing out that he hasn't actually delivered on anything in the capacity he promised until he did the salute.
It's pointless to list other examples, as this page is- as dingnuts pointed out - exactly the same and most people aren't actually willing to change their opinion based on arguments. They're set in their opinions and think everyone else is dumb.
> Yet people were literally banned here just for pointing out that he hasn't actually delivered on anything in the capacity he promised until he did the salute.
I'd be shocked if they (you?) were banned just for critiquing Musk. So please link the post. I'm prepared to be shocked.
I'm also pretty sure that I could make a throwaway account that only posted critiques of Musk (or about any single subject for that matter) and manage to keep it alive by making the critiques timely, on-topic and thoughtful or get it banned by being repetitive and unconstructive. So would you say I was banned for talking about <topic>? Or would you say I was banned for my behavior while talking about <topic>?
Aside from the fact that I highly doubt anyone was banned as you describe, EM’s stories have gotten more and more grandiose. So it’s not the same.
Today he’s pitching moonshot projects as core to Tesla.
10 years ago he was saying self-driving was easy, but he was also selling by far the best electric vehicle on the market. So lying about self driving and Tesla semis mattered less.
Fwiw I’ve been subbed to tf00t since his 50 part creationist videos in early 2010s.
I don’t see how that example refutes their point. It can be true both that there have been disagreeable bans and that the bans, in general, tend to result in higher quality discussions. The disagreeable bans seem to be outliers.
> They're set in their opinions and think everyone else is dumb.
Well, anyway, I read and post comments here because commenters here think critically about discussion topics. It’s not a perfect community with perfect moderation but the discussions are of a quality that’s hard to find elsewhere, let alone reddit.
Firstly, what we call a suit is a highly varied outfit of clothes that are designed to look good on a male silhouette. Deriving from that, yes, the suit is aesthetically better- to disagree is to discount both the entire field of custom tailoring and also the rest of wider society surrounding tech.
Most people off the street would agree that a suit is more dignified, and it's not without reason. Wearing a suit indicates a level of discipline, effort, and intention about the way that you look that simply wearing a t shirt with jeans does not.
To contrast, the historical reason for the t shirt / jeans combo is practicality and convenience; tech as an industry got away with it at first, because techies were not interfacing with clients directly or simply because they're working class.
You can argue about the elitism and class differences surrounding suits versus t shirts and jeans, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that suits aren't aesthetically better just because of the media image for hacker types.
Most of the popular outfits are "designed to look good" to a high degree, and then humans are quite bad at fitting the garments on average. Poorly fit suits that don't look good on a male silhouette are absolutely a thing, and I'd posit that an unkempt male wearing a poorly fitting cheap suit looks "lower status" than a fit and well groomed male wearing a stylish t-shirt/jeans combo.
So all we have is the tradition that "high status males" in the traditional power roles wear suits when in public, which is true and valid, but it does not translate into the inherent superiority of this garment.
100% agreed. I’ve seen way more than enough people in poorly-fitting expensive suits to last me a lifetime, and it is just painful to watch.
The main benefit of a suit is that it can be easily tailored to fit a person perfectly, which isn’t the case with tshirts/hoodies/jeans/etc. I mean, you can tailor those, i guess, but that’s very uncommon.
For non-suits, the pro-tip is to just focus on finding ones that fit your shape the best (or changing your shape; unless you are one of the unlucky few who has a non-conforming shape, e.g very tall), and that’s their main downside.
Well fitting casual clothing > poorly fitting suits any time. Beyond that, it is situational.
Question: is it depressing, or is it a wake up call for just how much the average American hates health insurance executives?
There seem to be a few people online who mirror your sentiments about being shocked, what defenders of the crime would call pearl clutching. I'm fascinated.
From my perspective, the idea of a vigilante being so burned by health insurance companies he tracks down and kills the CEO is not a shocking premise _at all_. Yet some (particularly health insurance industry workers / professionals on LinkedIn) are so shocked by this that it makes me wonder if there's an insulated echo chamber effect going on here.
It's a classic Robin Hood kind of hero, an established trope that everyone likes. I don't get how anybody can be surprised by this happening in a country which is obsessed with comic books and made hero movies it's main cultural export.
I mean - this is the country that literally has a whole Amendment in their Constitution dedicated to the right of the people to shoot other people, and which defines that capacity for popular violence as a necessity for a free state. The archetype of the hero patriot "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" goes all the way back to the guy who made that quote.
And I would bet money (if I had it) that a significant number of people expressing outrage over this were defending Kyle Rittenhouse and that guy who shot climate protestors in Panama, or making excuses for the killings of Jordan Neely and George Floyd, or gleefully hoping Trump would send troops in to shoot BLM protestors in the streets.
Because the "problem" here isn't the normalization of gun violence or the lionization of such violence as heroism - that's been normal for centuries, it's an intentional design feature of the American system. The "problem" here is that gun violence was being used on the wrong kind of people, and creating the wrong kind of hero.
In the full quote Jefferson argues that arms are necessary to preserve a spirit of rebellion. I wouldn't ascribe it as inherently linked to any particular cause.
I can give you an ex-insiders perspective. There tends to be a bit of a divide in the people who drift into staffing these companies. Most are highly intelligent, and at least have an appreciation for the logistics behind the business process. There's going to be a functional piece somewhere sitting in the midst of the datasets, and making the best decisions possible. The dividing line I personally witnessed though was the finance first vs. patient outcome first people. The patient outcome first people tend to congregate in areas like CS, clinical, QA, compliance, etc... They realize it's a complex space, a lot of data to sift through and learn from, but are constantly working to make sure people ultimately get what they need.
The finance first group are sort of the opposite. They're doing everything they can to target Fraud/Waste/Abuse, not necessarily to the exclusion of patient outcome, but the priorities are 100% different. The problem is the output of their analysis tends to turn into inputs for the Prior Auth, formulary management, and claim denial logic, which, lets call that what it is: population scale social engineering to the end of nudging people to save money for the company.
The "surprised pikachus" are probably the finance first/raw number crunchers who have never had a number bite back in their life. The people who are actually concerned with patient outcome already know exactly what's going on, and are completely unsurprised.
It's really Upton Sinclair's wisdom at work: It is hard to get a man to understand that which his salary depends on him not understanding.
> Question: is it depressing, or is it a wake up call for just how much the average American hates health insurance executives?
Americans dislike the American health care system as a whole, but actually tend to like their particular insurance company and doctors.
I checked United on the ACA marketplace in my state and United is rated 4 out of 5 stars, which is the same as pretty much every other offering except Kaiser (5 out of 5) and new plans that have not yet gotten ratings.
This is not actually surprising because most people only actually use their insurance for routine things like physicals, vaccinations, lab tests, common illnesses like flu, physical injuries like sprains and broken bones and household cuts and burns, and fairly common prescription drugs.
Even the most extreme cost cutting insurance company is usually going to pay for those without question.
(not American here, but curious about the situation because healthcare is broken in so many countries).
Money is a weapon of vote too, if you don't subscribe to UnitedHealthcare, in the long run the corporate should eventually disappear as a whole no ?
If you dislike Uber, then don't buy Uber.
In Switzerland they have such capitalistic system where you can pick your private insurance provider. So the most expensive / worse ones, gets less revenue.
In France, they have a socialo-communist monopoly, no choice, only one choice, and you have to be happy with it, no matter what.
I guess that's the main promise of capitalism; voting with your money (money that is supposed to come proportional to your efforts, though it is warped by crime, cryptos, inheritance, etc).
For example, if you stop buying meat, and convince others to stop buying meat, then there will less people investing into meat.
EDIT: Users explained (thanks!) that it was not really a free choice.
Voting with your money works in a fair market for competitive goods and services, but health insurance is neither competitive nor a direct service, and it's also not a fair market (in the USA at least).
In the USA, most health insurance plans are through private companies that have group plans with employers.
This is a terrible system, because many employers just want to check the box of offering plans, so do not negotiate good plans for their employees (the best / most profitable companies might have good health insurance, but most not so much).
It also very famously ties your health insurance status to your employment status, which gives a whole tone to the American discourse of labor laws. People are desperate to keep their jobs to keep their medical coverage.
The US gov is trying to make it more competitive with healthcare.gov, which really only highlights how bad the situation is (you're hard pressed finding a healthcare marketplace plan for less than 200$/month without income tax credits).
So the average American is stuck with plans they didn't negotiate for, with limited options for choosing better plans, and insurance very often deny coverage / include hidden fees / are generally inept at providing any type of service beyond taking your money.
There's no way to vote with your wallet, when everyone in the business seems to be a crook at worst and an uncaring suit at best.
I asked this one and it's not a choice many people get to make, it's an insurer provided through your employer. If you want to choose an alternative you wont be getting group rates and the emplyer contribution so you'll be paying much more (such that it is not a viable option for most people). They exist not because they are good, but because they're a cheaper option that satisfies some legal checkboxes.
> Money is a weapon of vote too, if you don't subscribe to UnitedHealthcare, in the long run the corporate should eventually disappear as a whole no ?
The problem is often that there is no really good option. And in places like Switzerland, there is often much more regulation to prevent all options from becoming bad. For example, the E.U. has many consumer rights laws that the U.S. does not have.
The problem is unregulated capitalism. At a large scale, over time, people will find ways to take advantage of the system and exploit the people due to their greedy nature. And insurance is an industry that naturally tends to that end without regulation.
In no place does unregulated capitalism give good results at scale.
I start to get it, reminds me of airline (delayed/late flight) regulations. E.U. is so much in advance in that (maybe sometimes too much, like the water bottles).
>In France, they have a socialo-communist monopoly, no choice, only one choice, and you have to be happy with it, no matter what.
It sounds very offending to my anarcho capitalistic world view, where poor people should suffer more than I do, but does it actually produce more suffering than US or less?
If you don't pay taxes it's an incredibly great value and offering.
This is why if you are poor France and can get state help is an excellent choice.
Once you start to pay taxes, or you fit in-between the criterias for eligibility to state help, the costs are much higher than in the neighboring Switzerland for example.
Two questions:
1) How would the feedback loop work from users who do not receive a response?
2) Are you concerned about a possible "chilling effect" for startups that don't want to post for fear of being spammed?
As an aside, been browsing HN for years and always wanted to say that you're doing the Lord's work.
Presumably you guys don’t want to create a report button for just this situation. I never know what to think when I see downvotes in the Who’s Hiring thread. There’s no way for me to tell if someone hates the CEO (eg, if Twitter posted job openings), or they’ve noticed the same position filed three months in a row. I’ve seen a few of those before you got around to detaching them.
This is like stating, "What are software engineers doing that's worth so much? There's plenty of free code courses online."
It reminds me of the old story of the plumber being called to a house that's leaking water out of a pipe, and the plumber looks around, finds one valve and gives it a half turn, and then writes a bill for 100$. The home owner is outraged he is charging so much for just a couple of minutes, and the plumber responds, "You aren't paying me to turn a valve, you are paying me to know which valve to turn."
Sure you could learn the law and represent yourself, but you can't expect results to be as good as anyone who practices law might do. It's a knowledge field, and experience matters.
> This is like stating, "What are software engineers doing that's worth so much? There's plenty of free code courses online."
Well, that’s not perfectly accurate comparison. When adjusted for nuances it’s much less clear what’s best. If a quick course is all you really need to get something done, and there are no e.g. maintenance concerns (so you don’t care if something is merely acceptable and not up to the best standards - as I get it, without any research, the case is effectively an one-off thing), and the professional services are notoriously costly, it makes me wonder why. In such scenario DIY approach looks very compelling to me.
Because I’ve heard the same thing about immigration and it turned out to be false. My current understanding is that there are a lot of immigration cases that may need a lawyer but a lot more where it’s a total waste of money.
Of course I can be wrong. There are always nuances and differences. That’s why I’ve asked what makes it so costly.
I am currently living in Japan after living my whole life in the United States. I have noticed Japanese Starbucks are much more generous with the space and seating, and generally are wonderful places to socialize/study/work. Additionally, I wonder if it is related to the prevalence of malls and their popularity. In the US, malls are almost universally graveyards, whereas in Japan every Aeon Mall I've ever visited has been full even on weekdays.
That's fascinating. As a novice to the problem, are there any resources you could link about this?
I'm new to studying AI- but I've been prototyping connecting GPT to a nonrelational database to serve as a stand in for long term memory. My problem so far utilizing GPT3 has been difficulty getting it to use any consistent schema, as it will write to the database in a generated schema but try to recall in another. This is the first I've heard about using vector databases for the task.
Soldiers are murdering an entire population- or as many of them as they can, seemingly- for political purposes that desire that population to simply not exist anymore. To say that is _not_ a genocide devalues the meaning of the word.