Hacker News Reader

panarchyon Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

The more dangerous people they can get on the street the more fear they can generate and the more they can whip the public to their bidding. Getting rid of the few people trying educate the public on these matters goes hand in hand.

panarchyon U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism with American Characteristics

Which is a reference to "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" by Deng Xiaoping

panarchyon U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism with American Characteristics

State Capitalism? Is that like the Mussolini thing?

panarchyon New executive order puts all grants under political control

I'm glad someone gets it. The level of dumb, missing the point pedantry people do on this site would be impressive if it wasn't so sad.

panarchyon GPT-5 leaked system prompt?

Interesting those instructions sound like the exact opposite of what I want from an AI. Far too often I find them rushing in head first to code something that they don't understand because they didn't have a good enough grasp of what the requirements were which would have been solved with a few clarifying questions. Maybe it just tries to do the opposite of what the user wants.

panarchyon New executive order puts all grants under political control

Interesting. How about we replace the USA (I mostly highlighted the US because that's where this site and the population that use it is based) with the Allies. And being authoritarian isn't about having secretive or highly controlled group (which makes sense given what they were working on and the stakes), but rather the general cultural interpretation of freedom perceived by those who are likely to be doing research. And while you can argue that the USA had authoritarian overtones then as well, the key point is that they weren't as overt as having to greet everyone with good tidings for your supreme leader and keep all your opinions strictly in line with the party's. Notes released from the German scientists (I think Heisenberg comes to mind?) revealed they weren't highly motivated by the regime's philosophy despite supporting it outwardly while those who were the most invested into the Nazi ideology never published much of note.

panarchyon New executive order puts all grants under political control

Yeah it probably isn't the best project to highlight the sentiment, but it was well known one and immediately came to mind in a period that had the contrasting factor.

I don't particularly think that the secrecy or control of a single group really reflects on the overall culture however. We wouldn't call phreakers authoritarian just because they weren't publishing their exploits in the newspaper or letting any new person fully into their circle.

Also the prosecution and harassment of communists/leftists and minorities in the US during that era is why I stipulated less oppressive rather than unoppressive.

panarchyon New executive order puts all grants under political control

It also does this so that when intellectuals call out their bullshit they can more easily dismiss it as hysteria.

panarchyon New executive order puts all grants under political control

There's a reason the Americans discovered how to make atomic weapons first and it's because their researchers were living under a less oppressive state that wasn't motivated by anti-intellectualism and dumb ideology.

panarchyon New executive order puts all grants under political control

What biased incentives does a government have that isn't even worse than a corporation or an individual who has large sway in corporation? How exactly would Dow Chemical funding research for understanding cancer effects on chemicals they produce not be extremely biased? Why would other rich people who are friends of the CEO of Dow fund that research? How exactly would a private donor fund something like the Apollo missions? Why would they bother when they could just reinvest their money to make more money? These billionaires could be donating billions right now and in large they aren't.

panarchyon Congress Just Deleted Habeas Corpus from the Constitution on Its Website

"You should be grateful we're getting a free vacation to a nice country with lovely weather. Do you libs ever stop complaining?" /s

panarchyon AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks

And they're searching more than ever because Google is failing to actually serve useful content that the user was looking for.

panarchyon AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks

Okay now compare it back to when Google search used to be good in like 2006 before it would serve you barely tangentially related crap and before being optimized to prioritize spam garbage and that could have been written by a monkey on a typewriter with a finite amount of time.

panarchyon Constitution.congress.gov/constitution 6/8/25 –> 8/4/25 Diff

Yup "It's just a software bug! Don't be dramatic!" Yeah. A software bug that just happens to cover the part of the constitution the current administration has been criticized over violating and other parts that just happen to be in line with the war (like "war on drugs"-- well until it potentially escalates) on the blue states they've been alluding to? As if the current regime wouldn't be so blatant as to point to a website version of the constitution and then go "See it's not in the constitution. We did nothing wrong, all the media outlets reporting the constitution has been illegally altered are spreading fake news." Then there will be a flurry of articles "Trump is in shock at what people are saying he did" for two weeks and then the next disaster will have arrived where the same fanfare will be repeated and nothing will actually be done.

panarchyon Lyon Is Replacing Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and OnlyOffice

Working together doesn't have to mean anything more than providing funding for individual developers.

panarchyon Lyon Is Replacing Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and OnlyOffice

I hope these governments moving to open source can work together and assist in making a more modern and featured open source office suit that has a better UX. I say as someone that almost exclusively uses LibreOffice, it's still a pain to use for anything but the most basic (or esoteric/extreme, like CLI stuff) use cases.

panarchyon Earth Has Tilted 31.5 Inches. That Shouldn't Happen

But that's where all the sand is to put my head into!

panarchyon Earth Has Tilted 31.5 Inches. That Shouldn't Happen

This doesn't make sense I only applied 0.01n of force to this balanced inverted pendulum that took a whole 1n to get into place why did it fall over?

panarchyon Earth Has Tilted 31.5 Inches. That Shouldn't Happen

Thank goodness the microbes will probably survive and maybe be able to try again in a few thousand to million years!

panarchyon Earth Has Tilted 31.5 Inches. That Shouldn't Happen

But this implies it could be the fault of human influence. Humans are incapable of making any sort of change to the planet! That would be inconvenient.

panarchyon It's rude to show AI output to people

Just get an AI to do it for you

panarchyon Voting age to be lowered to 16 by next general election

https://www.bath.ac.uk/publications/the-age-divide-in-uk-pol...

This being the first thing I found says the closest age bracket 18-34 turnout was 53.6%

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/UK_Popul...

16-17 for each gender looks to be a little under 400K for each

So (4)(400,000)(0.536) = 857,600

So thousands.

Either way it's not like they're all going to vote one way and it's not like they can seize the government with their own special interest party that only caters to 16-17 year old even if they all managed to vote one way. So really as far as results it will mostly be a wash, but has the benefit of potentially creating some more engaged and politically active citizens which is a win for democracy.

panarchyon How I keep up with AI progress

AI research was so interesting pre-transformers it was starting to get a bit wild around GPT2 IIRC but now the signal to noise is so low with every internet sensationalist and dumb MBA jumping on the bandwagon.

panarchyon Voting age to be lowered to 16 by next general election

Does that include people that fell into anti-vax nonsense and got hospitalized?

panarchyon Voting age to be lowered to 16 by next general election

I don't get why letting a few thousand extra people participate in politics gets people so worked up. I think it's good to get people involved in politics while they're still learning about it. You can tell them the importance of democratic participation and also let them actually engage in it instead of it falling to the back of their mind and being forgotten years later when they can actually vote.

Also I was more politically aware at 16 than most adult I know now.

panarchyon Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser

How do we know it isn't just Vomet making comments about itself?

panarchyon Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S. honey bee die-off

I actually think this is where smaller more "organic" type robots and AI will play a role. We can do more restorative and mixed farming and then have a legion of robots doing all the picking. The way agricultural automation is currently with equidistant rows all with the same type of plant because it's basically impossible to make a machine that can take apples off a tree and pick blueberries but you can make a very optimized machine that can do either. Kind of like 10,000 cheap drones or 1 fighter jet.

panarchyon Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

Hopefully people that use these AI language tutors don't end up being clowned on by native speakers because they sound like robots.

panarchyon Google is burying the web alive

The web has been a walking corpse for about a decade now.

panarchyon Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

AI Studio as well, but I haven't played around with the temperature too much and even then I only lowered it to like 0.8 a few times. So I'll have to try this out. Thanks.