Hacker News Reader

Herringon The mental health of young men is declining. Experts warn it could get worse

The article is right. You're missing the key point, which is that democracies generally tend to do better economically than autocratic states.

What does democracy have to do with the economy? Well concentration of power in a subgroup is generally pretty bad for overall performance. That's true whether it's concentrated by gender, age (gerontocracy), race, monopolies etc. Even one sector of the economy getting too strong is generally bad (resource curse). There are exceptions of course, but that's the trend.

Since the end of WW2, and especially since the end of the Cold War, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations. https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...

Young men swung hard for "grab them by the pussy" Trump. I recommend not doing that. If you care about jobs, you need to start caring a lot about DEI and abortion and welfare and trans people. It's not "political bullshit" vs "real issues". The two are inextricably linked, and that jobs chart will keep happening until American society finally understands it. There's a reason Blue states are (generally) richer than Red (ex-slave) states: they have better teamwork.

Herringon Apple sues OpenAI, accusing it of stealing company secrets

Actually, I think I'm pretty much done here. Cynicism is a symptom https://alexriosme.substack.com/p/engineers-cynicism-is-a-sy... Requesting a full ban please!

Herringon Star Just Ate a Planet, and It's Not Done Yet

This is like your typical 2-story US house "eating" a baseball. Completely trivial occurrence, cosmologically speaking, unless you're specifically looking for it.

Herringon AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn

Oh yeah I can't wait for the next election. Things get so toxic when money/power is involved.

Herringon Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding fr

> If you're using randomized testing as "extra credit", to catch a few more bugs, or to replace traditional software testing processes, you can just tell an LLM to look for risky areas of the code and find invariants that might be violated and fuzz them. This works ok. When I've convinced people to try some randomized testing, they usually start here and find quite a few bugs they're happy to have found. Due to the nature of who's interested in trying out novel-to-them test techniques, this is often from people who've worked on some of the most well-tested and reliable code at the company and they can find bugs in their own relatively well-tested code.

Counterpoint: I just tried a few rounds of LLM-generated fuzzing on my current side project and couldn't find a single bug. Maybe try coding more defensively?

Herringon Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

America is like a trust fund baby given all the advantages and then the baby goes "fuck it, life is too hard, I am just going to do coke and die early”.

Herringon New AI tutor achieves 0.71-1.30 SD effect size in Dartmouth course [pdf]

America is like a trust fund baby given all the advantages and then the baby goes "fuck it, life is too hard, I am just going to do coke and die early”.

Herringon 'There Is No Going Back': The Inside Story of Europe's Rupture with America

So many people have to get burned before they realize working with a rich sociopath is a bad idea.

Herringon New AI tutor achieves 0.71-1.30 SD effect size in Dartmouth course [pdf]

Hmm, it might be better to just go straight to what leading countries currently do (Finland/Estonia/Japan/Singapore/etc). Other factors probably play a bigger role, like school funding, school autonomy, teacher professionalism (high education level + continuing education + good pay), free school meals/healthcare/transportation etc

Herringon New AI tutor achieves 0.71-1.30 SD effect size in Dartmouth course [pdf]

The story around Bloom's two sigma is a bit complex https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/

Herringon The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker

I hope you're right.

Herringon Knowledge Should Not Be Gated

This comment is another example of "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened."

There's a massive push to add unnecessary complexity to everything out there, because complexity pays all our bills.

Herringon The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker

I don't know how much I really trust polls when it comes to Americans and socialism. Look what happened in 2008

https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx (first graph)

Democrats saw what seemed like a massive opportunity, took it, got punished very hard for 20 years.

Issues of culture are sticky. I think it could take many decades for Americans to unlearn their brand of toxic individualism. Maybe centuries.

Herringon The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker

Yes it was, by constantly rejecting the only cures: redistribution and unionization as socialism. Unregulated capitalism always trends towards concentration of wealth/power.

Another thing I’ve noticed is Americans are extremely non-self-aware about this topic. Go ask your favorite frontier LLM to tell you about notable moments in American history when they rejected socialism, explicitly or otherwise. Overall in history, and over just the last 30 years specifically. Institutions, and the electorate itself.

Herringon The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker

It’s not like Americans were invaded and forced to accept this. They repeatedly voted for it. Obama tried to work on healthcare, then had the largest electoral losses since Eisenhower, all up and down the ballot. Instead they voted for the real-estate billionaire. Trump has zero healthcare during a major pandemic - crickets. This country doesn’t want anything labeled “socialism”, and will hurt itself repeatedly to prove it. Last time it took a Great Depression to change their minds.

Herringon Healthy but sedentary people show early decline in cellular energy production

Ok that probably explains it. We're just talking past each other. You're doing really good work, and Seattle is one of the top transit cities in the US, but those three cities I mentioned before are in a whole different league as global outliers. Best practices in an American historical/political context are completely different than best practices overall. You can find lots of examples historically and today (eg in developing countries) where density outpaces good transit and the result is gridlock/pollution/etc. Seattle is just not that dense (yet).

Herringon Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

The problem is not AI. It's an excellent technology. The problem is there's an underlying power grab (e.g. layoffs). When humans do that to each other they inherently dehumanize/invalidate/insult each other. Implement strong labor protections or basic income and a lot of this dog-eat-dog toxicity goes away.

Herringon Healthy but sedentary people show early decline in cellular energy production

I see what you're getting at. That's not going to work. Public transit falls into multiple well-known market failure modes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure

You need considerable govt intervention, just aimed properly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit-oriented_development

Try this: go to your favorite frontier LLM (I like Gemini pro - free in aistudio), paste this entire exchange we're having, and ask it to carefully analyze it and assess who seems more correct. It's a long story.

Herringon We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

Try discussing this issue with a LLM. I'm getting some pretty good responses from Gemini pro. Just as a first pass. It can help you avoid major errors.

Herringon Healthy but sedentary people show early decline in cellular energy production

But then you'll run into traffic/parking issues unless you have a good public transit and land use policy (e.g. bikes, trams, mixed use development, etc). That requires such good design skills few cities have mastered it (Tokyo, Copenhagen, Singapore).

Herringon Healthy but sedentary people show early decline in cellular energy production

Yeah pretty much the only way to scale exercise to entire populations and over entire lifetimes is to design it directly into the cities.

Herringon Healthy but sedentary people show early decline in cellular energy production

I'm confused. The study doesn't mention "Zone 2" even once ...

Herringon Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

The poor and rich alike have a deep-seated cultural aversion to poor people. It's no use warning about inequality when a sleazy billionaire wins the popular vote. Nobody is listening. They have to experience the bad results first-hand.

Herringon The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party

Yeah. This discussion is hilarious. Some people just can’t wrap their heads around generosity. “Why don’t you just let them die in the wars?”

Herringon HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88

That's probably a good litmus test for political capture by elites. The Netherlands introduced a weighted lottery for medical schools in 1972, abolished it in 2017 for basically the same reasons, studied the (worse) outcomes for a bit, then put it back in 2024.

Herringon OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

It kind of was. I really hate gaslighting, but GP is not inaccurate. Google claimed it did not meet their bar for publication because it ignored recent research on how to reduce the environmental and bias-related risks of LLMs. On the other hand, a large org is unlikely to subsidize high-profile research that makes it look bad. And Gebru was critical of Google’s internal culture and diversity efforts…

Herringon Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

Is that you Musk? Twitter lost half its revenue, more than 80% of its valuation.

Herringon Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

Americans are very confused when it comes to societal/collective issues. We saw this during the pandemic.

Herringon Ask HN: What has been bothering you lately?

Yeah I’d go even further. Singapore-style public housing is pretty high on my wishlist. But it’s a long wishlist.

Herringon Ask HN: What has been bothering you lately?

Well yeah. Key policy choices in housing/healthcare/education/banking/etc have financialized basic human necessities, forcing the working class to give up a growing percentage of their income to the asset-holding class.

I'm not saying "all government interference is bad". For example plenty of countries prove that if you want to control healthcare costs, you need more government intervention in drug pricing, not less.