MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theptip | 2025-04-26 19:15:10+00:00
> The theory here is largely mechanical

I’ve long felt that the reliance on population-statistics (RCT) rather than individual diagnosis highlights how little we really know about medicine.

A mechanic wouldn’t try to fix a car based on a checklist of symptoms interventions that work X% of the time across the population of cars; they would actually inspect the pieces and try to positively identify e.g. a worn/broken component. Of course, this is harder in the human body.

I’m hopeful that as diagnostics become cheaper and more democratized (eg you can now get an ultrasound to plug into your iPhone for ~$1k), we’ll be able to make “medicine 3.0” I.e. truly personalized medicine, available as standard rather than a luxury available to the 0.1%.
by nopelynopington | 2025-04-26 19:15:36+00:00
In Imgurs case it's all left leaning. Lots of scaremongering about what project 2025 and how close we are to dictatorship and lots of alarmist ragebait.

I saw a post just over a week ago from a user who predicted that Trump would declare martial law on April 20th because that was the day such and such report would advise him to do so.

It made the front page with hundreds of upvotes and comments agreeing. it's an extreme example but the site is full of this kind of stuff, most often bringing your attention to some obscure ruling or decision, some new political depth plumbed that will mean x,y, and z will now happen.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-26 19:16:30+00:00
I think the most common of human mistakes is to think that because something is easy to say, it is easy to do.

Once you actually dig in to how to accomplish something you find the devil in the details and complexity in places you didn't realized it exists. I would not believe someone is an experienced programmer unless they understand this idea in their bones.

I think so many people here, with the benefit of hindsight, are accusatory, but they've committed this very same type of error themselves.

I am vehemently against this administration, but feeling like something must be done about border violations is reasonable and thinking there is a way to do that is reasonable. I personally don't think it's the best use of resources, but I think it is reasonable to want some kind of border with meaningful enforcement.

What is not reasonable is thinking this administration would do it in good faith, rather than as a means of power grabs against the legal system, but some people aren't capable of taking heed of warnings, and must experience consequences before they understand. Some people aren't able to think through "where is the public plan that explains this" and realize that if it's not there, if there is only the concept of a plan, then that's someone vying for power, not someone attempting to solve a problem.

When people come back to reality and choose to be grounded in it, that should be celebrated rather than persecuted even if they materially caused damage by their ignorance and lack of thought. Game theory requires punishment/defection against those who don't cooperate, but it also requires forgiveness for those who repent.
by martin-t | 2025-04-26 19:17:27+00:00
This is the kind of implicit lying that seems pervasive today and I am so tired of it.

This alone is sufficient evidence of their malicious intent and should be enough to punish the people responsible for trying to ruin an innocent person's life.

But it's not gonna happen because the law is not written to punish people using it maliciously against others and most people simply won't care anyway.
by tw04 | 2025-04-26 19:18:03+00:00
>2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product, resulting in the overpowered electric Hummer 2 and F-150 pickups with high price tags

They had to in order to build the manufacturing capacity without literally bankrupting themselves. As GM has shown, once they had the expertise and manufacturing capabilities, they could quickly move downmarket. By all accounts GM's entry into the space has been a raging success, moving downmarket with the Equinox being available for as low as $27,500.

They obviously aren't to Tesla level sales numbers yet, but they're growing rapidly and I would not count them out of the fight.

https://insideevs.com/news/746177/general-motors-record-2024...
by simonw | 2025-04-26 19:18:04+00:00
It absolutely does that - o3 knows your current location based on IP address etc. This means for a fair test you need to use a photo taken nowhere near your current vicinity - that's why I added examples for Madagascar and Buenos Aires at the end of my post: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/#up...
by derefr | 2025-04-26 19:18:42+00:00
A finer distinction might be between MLMs (where the multi-level part is very literal — everyone is being garnished by their upline and profiting from their downline), vs. flat marketing organizations that just give (centralized, corporate, one-time) recruitment bonuses to their salespeople.

Vector Marketing, for example — the company that sells Cutco knives door-to-door — might be incredibly scummy, sure. Their entire business model is to

1. talk college students into thinking they can make a continuous monthly profit by selling $800 knife sets (when really the profit is one-time at best, by tapping into each college student's family and friends — who are only sympathetic enough to buy the knives [if they even are], because it's their family/friend asking);

2. forcing those college students to "buy into" the company, purchasing a knife-set of their own to use in sales demos (which they can't return if they quit);

3. and also forcing those college students to recruit other college students on campus.

But, because every transaction is ultimately just lining Vector Marketing's pockets directly — without any revenue structure involving making more money as you recruit others whose sales "become your sales" — it's not Multi Level Marketing.

It's just sleazy.

(And yes, this is just me taking this opportunity to rant about Vector Marketing. I have half a Cutco knife set laying around, from when my college roommate attended a "job offer" and got essentially bullied into buying a set before they could leave. Every time I use it, I think of how tarnished the Cutco brand is by these awful tactics of Vector Marketing's practices. Which is a shame, because they're decent knives. But obviously not knives I'd ever recommend anyone buy, because I don't want to support a company that thinks it's a good idea to work with a company like Vector Marketing.)
by kurthr | 2025-04-26 19:18:52+00:00
Well, you don't need to tax the ethanol from corn or methane from waste dumps or wood pellets, or ammonia itself. You would tax the oil/gas/coal that came out of the ground that was used to fertilize the corn, process the corn, transport the corn, and distill the ethanol (otherwise it's double taxation). You don't need to tax the wood pellets or the stove they're burned in, or the electricity, just the carbon that is burned to make and transport them. So this is largely irrelevant.

A better question would be for imported items and services. How do you prevent tax shifting from carbon emission havens, which is no different from financial tax havens now. You tax them at entry using the most beautiful word, "tariffs". If an importing country doesn't tax carbon or carbon tariff their imports then you tariff them. Interestingly, it would then be a higher tariff for air transport than shipping. Where it actually get complicated is services, which people really don't like taxing. But if I run a LLM datacenter on coal in china or make bitcoin burning middle east oil, or consult on green projects on Indonesian gas those should be tariffed as well, and that's more difficult.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-04-26 19:19:17+00:00
The media really hypes the capabilities up, so if you're new to it and it spews out something that looks very detailed and plausible, you just think "wow it worked". They would have no instinct for the failure modes either. The reference points here would be like a paralegal or a computer search tool. You would only really expect errors of omission: the paralegal wants to keep their job, and search cannot find things that don't exist. In that frame of mind when you see that the returned document seems to cover the relevant points and makes sense when you skim it, it seems like job done. The public doesn't get that the LLM will just completely bold-faced make stuff up.
by 0xbadc0de5 | 2025-04-26 19:21:03+00:00
The only thing here I would take issue with is neglecting outcomes. The outcomes of our behaviors are what define them as good or bad, not the intent. Many atrocities have been committed by people who believed they had "good intentions." This wisdom is found elsewhere in phrases such as "the outcome is the intent," "the road to hell is paved with good intentions," and "you shall know a tree by its fruits."
Great Analytic Tools for Substack?
by data_yum_yum | 2025-04-26 19:21:50+00:00
I've been writing on Substack for 2 months about now and started to realize that analytics doesn't tell me much I need to know.

Like for instant, I can't really tell why people read what I write and there's no Substack native way to get feedback other than subscriber chats.

Is anyone using tools to do this? Need like a seemless way for me to understand my readers quicker.
by sjducb | 2025-04-26 19:21:54+00:00
Well done for changing your mind. Most people would find this post impossible to write.

The arguments that changed your mind are important information. If we want to change the minds of fence sitters then focusing on these arguments should be the priority.

You make an interesting “right-wing” case against mass deportation of immigrants.

> This approach diverts resources from pursuing violent offenders, erodes faith in the rule of law, and forces the whole country toward a “papers-please” surveillance culture, where everyone must carry ever-stricter IDs.
by ramraj07 | 2025-04-26 19:22:18+00:00
I actually don't mind if it's true, but your comment was the first time I got a tingle that this was AI generated but I still could tell it likely wasn't. Maybe used it to rewrite parts of your comment? Anyways i appreciate it and agree with you. I myself am gonna go check in the cancer cell line encyclopedia, which IME is the single cleanest large dataset curated in biology in decades.

For others who might be curious, this study is genuinely good (evidenced somewhat by it being published in Science, as a study that is not in humans but still showing actual cancer curing efficacy not just some pathway finding) is that they use difficult but necessary model systems that emulate real tumor environments - these are spontaneous tumors that show up in mice that have full immune systems. Literally 99.9% of cancer study papers don't use such systems and in my opin9on get fully invalidated for most interpretation.

Anyways I'm curious if the microenvironment will just evolve quickly to be EPO independent, as it typically seems to do something like that in real long term tumor environments you encounter in people compared to mouse models.
by mtalantikite | 2025-04-26 19:22:37+00:00
I think people give the cue of stopping urination to help others find the muscles that you need to engage. Otherwise, yes, you absolutely can just do them any time you want. In yoga it’s called mula bandha [1]. You’re often instructed to engage it while practicing asana or pranayama. I even focus on engaging it when I’m out for a run or lifting weights.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandha_(yoga)#Mula_bandha
by sashank_1509 | 2025-04-26 19:22:53+00:00
Recently I had a chance to listen to a set of talks powering Waymo Technology. I think the average academic roboticist will be shocked by the complete lack of end to end deep learning models or even large models powering Waymo. It’s interesting to me that the only working self driving car on the market right now, basically has painstakingly listed every possible road obstacle, has coded every possible driving logic to it, and manually addressed every edge case. maybe Tesla’s end to end approach will work, and that will be the way moving forward, but the real world seems to provide an almost limitless amount of edge cases that neural networks don’t seem great at handling. In fact the winning approach to humanoids, if Waymo is proven to be the right approach might be listing every possible item a humanoid can see an environment, detecting them and then planning for them.
by lucianbr | 2025-04-26 19:23:10+00:00
I wonder about the "never lie" bit. Any kind of negotiation comes to mind, where it might be best to not show your hand completely. You might be negotiating for your family, for your business, for your country even. Is it ok to accept a worse result in the name of honesty as a principle?

Sure the world might be a better place if everyone told the truth always. But this is advice for this world, not a hypothetical one.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-04-26 19:24:28+00:00
Interesting how so many people are answering that they've had trouble!

How about I look at some of those cases? Especially if it's relatively recent, I can take a look. Leave me a message here, or at my email address (see my HN info) , or on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kim_Bruning

I'm not very active anymore, but I'll check in the next couple of days and see what I can do. Really to be able to help I generally need links to revisions, but if you have a username, a page, and a reasonably short time frame (a concrete date) I might be able to figure out the relevant revisions from there.

To onlookers: When I investigate cases like this, there's often a "catch." Sometimes contributors really did break Wikipedia policies — and just don’t mention that part when telling their side of the story.

Now I'm certainly not saying every case is like that, so I will look, and if you don't get what the issue was, I'll try to explain. In some cases if it was recent and it somehow wasn't fair, I might even be able to'fix' it within the bounds of Wikipedia policy.
by bentt | 2025-04-26 19:25:00+00:00
One technique that I think needs to come back into fashion, which was familiar to us Gen Xers, is to drag your kids along when socializing for you. Instead of prioritizing their play dates and sitting in the corner on our phones, we should be bringing the kids to our friend's house and they can wander around and be bored while we sit and talk as friends.

The problem we have as a parenting culture is that we're not comfortable ignoring our kids. We need to teach kids that ignoring them is not the same as not caring for them. In fact, they need to feel the sensation of not being the most important thing for once. It's better to get some attention from a happy parent than all of the attention of a sad parent.
by slg | 2025-04-26 19:25:16+00:00
>Will you believe them in the future?

An underdiscussed frustrating aspect of this whole era is that there is never any true retrospection. There is no adjustment in the credibility of the people who predicted exactly how things would play out or the people whose predictions ended up being incredibly wrong. If there is a lack of consequence for being wrong, it ends up meaning there won't be any consequences for maliciously lying in the moment knowing it's only a matter of time until they are proven wrong because when that day comes, they have already moved onto some other lie and the cycle continues.
by godelski | 2025-04-26 19:25:19+00:00
I think the bigger problem is we filter for conmen. You can become a billionaire for vaporware and are less likely to if you actually ship something.

There are plenty of smart people who are highly passionate about things other than money. The problem is a large portion aren't at top name universities and doing don't have the connections. Problem is, they spent all their time learning their craft and not how to market their ideas.

I disagree that it's just because those jobs pay well. Look at what people are investing in and how it works. We throw tons of money at obviously bad ideas, obvious cons, and anyone that took a semester at Stanford. There are plenty of Bitcoin billionaires! There's tons who have made riches off the VR hype wave before that.

I agree that we put too much focus on finance and the like but I think more importantly we have a system where you can get ultra wealthy for producing vaporware. It's much easier to build hype than build a product. You still get people who become millionaires & billionaires by shipping things, but we created a system where we reward conmen. Ultimately, the con is easier than the actual job.

There's a lot of that tech can do but let's be honest, our industry has capitalized on the boom and bust cycle and accelerated it. We're not the only ones, but we're a big player and it's easier to hold our own community accountable than get others to change.
by clown_strike | 2025-04-26 19:25:37+00:00
> Often when someone, especially a comedian, complains about “political correctness”, what they actually mean is: nobody is laughing at the same joke I told 20 years ago

Don't rephrase others' sentiments to suit your own narrative. Soothsayers are bullshitters.

When comedians complain about political correctness, there is no alternate meaning. They are upset that they can't tell the same jokes they told 20 years ago, to the same audiences from 20 years ago that continue to enjoy them, because external forces mob, heckle, and harass them so they cannot serve their customers...

...which conveniently provides opportunities for those younger people to "build great careers," by eliminating all legacy competition.

In any other context it'd be driving the local kebab shop owner out of town because someone with influence wants to open a salad bar in its place.

It's mob rule, not "social justice."
by andrewstuart | 2025-04-26 19:27:08+00:00
Crime fighting will no doubt use these sorts of techniques.

In Australia recently there was a terrible criminal case of massive child abuse.

They caught the guy because he was posting videos and one of them had a blanket which they somehow identified and traced to the child care Centre that he worked at.

It wasn’t done with AI but I can imagine photos and videos being fed into AI in such situations and asked to identify the location/people or other clues.
by vunderba | 2025-04-26 19:27:49+00:00
> chatgpt doctors because we have actual in-person test proctoring that includes checking biometrics, taking photographs of the individual for posterity, oral examinations, etc

Yep. Related, but the software engineering industry did actually have (for a brief time) a PE Exam but it was sadly discontinued.

https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...

There's still a PE Electrical and Computer: Computer Engineering one but its definitely more focused on hardware.

https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/electrical-and-computer
by PoignardAzur | 2025-04-26 19:27:51+00:00
I strongly disagree with your framing. Yes, policies can have unintended consequences and immigration policy in particular is a minefield of obvious solutions having terrible results... But that's not what we're talking about.

When OP says "I was for wide-scale deportations until I saw people I like being deported", it's not a case of unintended consequences, it's a case of "When I voted for the leopard party I didn't think the leopards would eat the faces of people I like!"

Unintended consequences means things like "criminality increased because immigrant communities lost trust in the police".

But come on. "Families swept into jails, plain-clothes officers ambushing people on their way to work or school" is how deportations work. Being surprised by that is like being surprised that the death penalty means people get executed.

This isn't a failure of epistemology, it's a failure of empathy. OP just didn't think that the people getting deported would turn out to be people with moral value.
by warmedcookie | 2025-04-26 19:28:22+00:00
I think they will be in business, but don't pretend products will be supported. Wouldn't surprise me if Datastore / App Engine go away in the future. The number of APIs I have had to migrate over the past 5 years using GCP is shameful:

- could no longer do code deploys on internal WebApps that were on old Python 2/3 images. Had to stick with that revision until we migrated to newer versions.

- had to migrate to a newer firebase messaging API recently - search features mostly killed on GCP, which is ironic. I guess we're supposed to build our own search or use a 3rd party? Postgres/Spanner full text search it is then.

Looking forward to having to migrate my gen1 cloud functions too! Keeps me employed I suppose.
by derefr | 2025-04-26 19:28:27+00:00
For all of these reasons, audio snooping is much more likely to be something done by wired, stationary devices that maybe have a decent amount of RAM + a fair bit of usually-idle processing capacity (to run the transcription model locally and just push the resulting text), and which are expected to draw a decent amount of power and use the Internet at vaguely-arbitrary times.

Like a smart TV, for example.
by pyuser583 | 2025-04-26 19:28:32+00:00
When reading an article, how do I figure out what the “good reporter” is trying to say, and distinguish it from what the “bad owner” is trying to say?

The best way I know is to carefully parse the text in its most literal form. That is what the “good reporter” is saying. The “general idea” of what is being said is probably what the editor wants.

Owners and editors want “wow” articles. Journalists know most of what they report is just “somebody said something.”
by nobody9999 | 2025-04-26 19:28:59+00:00
>It doesn't mean everybody being arrested is guilty but if you have a say 20% accurate arrest rate and you run it over the entire population you're going to remove a large amount of criminals.

By that logic, why bother arresting anyone? Just shoot them dead. Who cares if they're guilty or not? That'll stop crime for sure, right?
by gpm | 2025-04-26 19:29:21+00:00
> The result is that the value of an American college degree is plummeting

This Canadian university run high school coding contest isn't part of an American college degree. In fact it has no relation to any of that description. It isn't American. It isn't relating to a college at all by the Canadian understanding of that word (we distinguish between college and university, and Waterloo is the latter). It isn't for university (or college) students or related to a university (or college) degree.

> Look at medical schools, we're not pumping out chatgpt doctors because we have actual in-person test proctoring that includes checking biometrics, taking photographs of the individual for posterity, oral examinations, etc.

Extracurricular contests for high school students do not have the same funding or standards as medical exams to become a doctor for obvious reasons (in Canada, where I participated in these, but presumably anywhere).
by _aavaa_ | 2025-04-26 19:30:46+00:00
Legally yes, but if you’d had to interact with large numbers of those entering university for the first time you’d know they very much are not mentally adults yet.

All of which is beside the point since this conversation is focusing on the most prestigious universities around. Most universities and colleges in North America don’t need such exams since they already accept basically anyone who applies.
by ivape | 2025-04-26 19:30:51+00:00
This will get down voted, but a lot of this is mostly cliff notes from things like Sermon on the Mount. We are mostly godless here on HN, so I suppose the message has to be carried via agnostic vehicles.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%205-7&v...

It's all kind of in there, here's a piece I like:

"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."