MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by specialist | 2025-04-30 12:06:45+00:00
Yes and:

TLDR: Technology is intrinsically political.

I'm grateful that HN informed me about right-to-repair, EFF, privacy, cybersecurity, and so forth.

I was so upset I when the Clinton Admin promoted the Clipper chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip I can't believe we're still arguing about the issue (right to use encryption) today. That was probably the first time I realized that politics had real impact on my world.

Coincidentally, Neil Postman's book Technopoly was my gateway drug into criticism (Ted Nelson's Computer Lib, McLuhan, Chomsky, Donald Norman, etc, etc). Transmuted me from a naive optimistic technophile into a skeptic.

Then the (now evergreen) electronic voting and tabulation debacle radicalized me. I just couldn't believe that otherwise intelligent people supported that crap.

Then I tried (and failed) to protect personal privacy (electronic medical records, secret ballots).

It makes me crazy when people, like geeks and policy makers and bosses, who I think should know better, advocate for stuff that can't be true. I've tried to explain that perpetual motion machines simply aren't possible. Making me sound like the nutter.

(One of our local papers called me a "sweaty paranoid kook" for having the gall to correct their misunderstandings over how voting with postal ballots works. That was fun.)

(Workwise, I got a soft demotion when I/we tried to explain to the boss that the blackbox demographic database they licensed (without our knowledge) simply doesn't work. "How can that be true?! Everyone else is using this database." Ya, sure, believe the sales pukes over your own team. Terrific.)

So. I don't know how to separate technology from politics. It's unfortunate that everything swiftly gets coded as partisan. Whereas I see everything in terms of punching up vs down; our popular culture persists in making everything a team sport.

--

FWIW, Joshua Citarella (Do Not Research, Doomscroll, etc) is probably the most cogent contemporary critic I follow today.

Initially, Citarella just wanted to figure out how to be a working artist. As in "get paid to produce culture". He (and his community) ingested acres of knowledge and have synthesized a largely coherent worldview (criticism of platform economics, neoliberalism). Helping me to gel and articulate my own worldview, forged over the decades of working on the frontlines of technology and policy.

--

Absolutely, I'd rather spend my time programming, solving problems, tinkering, hanging out with my peers, talking shit. Alas, the real world continues to conspire to deprive me of these simple pleasures. Makes me cranky. I choose to fight back.
by lolinder | 2025-04-30 12:07:25+00:00
I'm not even sure what you're talking about. Is this a JavaScript complaint and they were meant to use a for..of? Are you an FP purist and think they were supposed to use map/filter?

This sounds like you have some very specific trauma around a very specific "foreach if loop", because I would personally never throw around such a specific-but-not-specific example of tech debt. Tech debt is extremely contextual.
by nickjj | 2025-04-30 12:08:04+00:00
Politics aside, how could they decide not to show it?

If something cost $50 yesterday and now suddenly it's $75 or $100 with no explanation wouldn't that make more people think it's inflation which in turn has its own set of negative impacts?

No one is just going to blindly forget a massive price hike on a wide range of things.

All this does is allow businesses to raise their prices arbitrarily and blame tarrifs on the side if anyone complains. Basically the same thing that happened with inflation after covid. I guess this explains why they are not showing it. If that's not the truth, that's ok. That's what happens when you're not transparent. People will make assumptions based on their beliefs.
by os2warpman | 2025-04-30 12:08:07+00:00
The first several years of school is indeed childcare. Childcare mixed with education.

I am confused by people who use this as a derogative.

I learned drafting, how to type, welding, library science, color theory, woodworking, BASIC programming, the internal anatomy of a piglet, resume writing, how to play the cello, calculus, and how to sing the names of all 50 US states in alphabetical order in middle school and high school.

That is not childcare.

edit: forgot darkroom photography, yearbook editing, extemporaneous speaking, and Robert's Rules of Order.
by im3w1l | 2025-04-30 12:08:38+00:00
GPG lost, TLS won. Both are actually webs of trust with the same underlying technology. But they have different cultures and so different shapes. GPG culture is to trust your friends and have them trust their friends. With TLS culture you trust one entity (e.g. browser) that trusts a couple dozen entities that (root certificate authorities), that either signs keys directly or can fan out to intermediate authorities that then sign keys. The hierarchical structure has proven much more successful than the decentralized one.

Frankly I don't trust my friends of friends of friends not to add thirst trap bots.
by jjallen | 2025-04-30 12:08:45+00:00
A thought I had is that they shouldn't show the "impact", they should simply show the tariff that was paid for a given product. Let the consumers develop their own facts, knowledge and biases about the actual effect.

They could also show the pre-tariff and post-tariff prices; that would be the most helpful thing. Or a price chart, which would be interesting ex-tariff.
by throw0101a | 2025-04-30 12:08:46+00:00
Someone made the observation that if the WH is proud of the tariffs and think they are good policy to bring back manufacturing (or whatever), then wouldn't they want their (according-to-them) awesome idea to be as widely publicized as possible?

If tariffs are a good thing why not allow them to be 'advertised' that much more? Don't you want credit for the good idea you came up with?
by myrmidon | 2025-04-30 12:09:02+00:00
My view is that schools purpose is teaching everyone not only a common baseline in language/math, but also how to deal with expectations/responsibilities and other people (teachers and classmates).

By doing "early segregation" you make this more difficult because that "common baseline" no longer exists; you'd expect to get significantly more people that struggle with language and basic math as a result (in exchange for better outcomes in your "gifted" track).

Furthermore, you are sorting people into social buckets in a way that is really bad for social cohesion (inevitable, all the white kids with rich parents are gonna end up in the "gifted" schools). Everyone is gonna grow up in a echochamber, basically.

Finally, this is going to lead to restrictions on a young adults options, that I find really unpalatable to blame on the affected children: Can you honestly argue that people don't deserve the chance to study medicine at university just because their parents did not tutor, push and mentor them sufficiently? Equality of opportunity as a principle is gonna be nigh impossible to preserve in such a system.

I do not dispute that you could teach children faster and better with individual tutoring and customized programs, but that would be cost-prohibitive, and I see currently no realistic way to get there without above consequences.

Maybe AI will solve it :P
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-30 12:09:47+00:00
all things being equal, if you fix all of those things and the hardware isn't buggy, you get the same results, and I've set up CI with golden values that requires this to be true. indeed, occasionally you have to change golden values depending on implementation but mathematically the algorithm is deterministic, even if in practice determinidm requires a bit more effort.
by dsr_ | 2025-04-30 12:10:00+00:00
It is not practical unless you already have all the devices.

Let's suppose that you are paying half the new price for the bottom-tier of each of these:

MBA: 500

iPad mini: 250

iPhone 16e: 300 * 4

Your budget is $1950. For that, you can get:

A 50" 4K TV, a Denon X1700H 7.2 receiver, 6 Klipsch R51M speakers, and a half-decent subwoofer, all new.

This will provide a far superior experience for you and a half-dozen friends, and each part will last longer, have no permanent battery to wear out, and be upgradable independently and without relying on a specific software product. I would estimate the lifetime of your proposal at about 3 years, and of my counter-proposal at 20 years.

Yours is much more portable.
by andyjohnson0 | 2025-04-30 12:10:24+00:00
> One thing I suggest, if you haven't done it, is working on software, but for companies that don't ship software or software services. Stay away from the big tech companies, look for something small and somewhat local.

This is good advice. I'm a dev in a manufacturing company (admittedly quite a large one) and the culture here is very different to pure software businesses I've worked in. There are deadlines, but they're realistic. People go home on-time. Little or no fashion-driven development practices and platform churn, mostly just pragmatism and an emphasis on stuff that works. I share a building with proper engineers (mechanical, electrical) as well as other devs and the culture is so refreshing. When you look around, there are lots of businesses like this just quietly getting on with things.
by watwut | 2025-04-30 12:10:34+00:00
That conservative argument is just an excuse. The price is not shown in full, to make it harder for customer to know how much they are spending before they are at the counter.

It is fully possible to show full price along with tariffs and taxes, if you want to show them. It does not necessitates misleading prices. This is just conservatives being pro-manipulation and against informed customers.

When I was ordering package to a country that had tariffs, an online store shown me item price, shipping, tariffs and total price. Nothing new or shocking about showing a full price along with its breakdown.
by goldsteinq | 2025-04-30 12:11:24+00:00
It’s kinda hard to find out from this website who do you trust in this model. I think the answer is that you trust the hardware manufacturer: the initial attestation uses private key built into the hardware, and NVIDIA could, in principle, have a copy of that key.

A bigger question is where is the source code for enclave containers. They have a lot of repos on their GitHub, but it’s really not clear how to use it to reproduce their images.
by david-gpu | 2025-04-30 12:11:25+00:00
During my tenure at NVidia I met a guy that was working on special versions of to the kernels that would make them deterministic.

Otherwise, parallel floating point computations like these are not going to be perfectly deterministic, due to a combination of two factors. First, the order of some operations will be random due to all sorts of environmental conditions such as temperature variations. Second, floating point operations like addition are not ~~commutative~~ associative (thanks!!), which surprises people unfamiliar with how they work.

That is before we even talk about the temperature setting on LLMs.
by piva00 | 2025-04-30 12:12:27+00:00
No, I don't think there's a way without regulating addictive feed-based content machines.

As much as we would like to tout some individualised solution for this, there's no way for all individuals to be trained to resist products designed for maximising its usage. There are armies of smart people being paid to think about ways that will make users be "engaged" with their products for as long as possible for it to be profitable, armies of experts in user behaviour, developers that can churn out good quality digital products, designers who can make the experience feel smooth. It's all geared to be addictive since the incentive is to capture as much attention as possible.

Is it possible to fight gambling addiction, alcohol addiction, nicotine addiction, drugs addiction, without banning them? Yup, it's costly, relies on a lot of regulation, control from the State on what kind of behaviour these companies can engage, and so on.

The addictive thing is not the smartphone but what it gives access to, without a conversation about what kind of regulations could curtail the addictive side of the real culprit, social media, there's no way out on an individual basis.

Banning smartphones in schools is akin to banning cigarettes' commercials, you aren't banning the stuff completely but at least trying to curtail its reach. We need more of this, social media has a lot of benefits so I don't think it should ever be outright banned, we do need more talk about its downsides and potential mitigations on a societal level.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-04-30 12:12:28+00:00
>That reasoning only makes sense if the scam callcenters DO cooperate with Indian police/court

Yes, or the obvious, that their ringleaders pay hefty bribes up the government food chain, as is common in many, many countries with organized crime activity.

Protonmail presumably didn't do any such thing, aside from also refusing to cooperate legally.

Either way, shame to see India going down this road of censoring X and Y or random snooping for reasons of political expediency.
by quotemstr | 2025-04-30 12:12:43+00:00
> I often wish there was a convenient way of doing such an operation in the shell: if path start with "/", leave it, otherwise prepend "./"

Both bash and zsh have enough functionality exposed via shell functions and variables for you to define a keybinding that does exactly this, interactively. Good idea.

Did you mean an interactive command? Or something else?
by immibis | 2025-04-30 12:13:37+00:00
This is one of those situations, like with cryptocurrencies or social media, where the old thing had certain problems for pretty fundamental reasons, and the new thing claims it won't have the same problems, but that's just because the new thing is new and hasn't gotten to the point of the problems being discovered yet.

If an operating system can run any program you want, then it can run malware if you want. Windows, Linux and Mac OS are OSes that let you run any program you want. Android and iOS are OSes that restrict which programs you can run. Different techniques end up placing the boundary in different places but they still either limit you from running lots of nonmalware programs or they allow you to run lots of malware.

Operating systems already completely sandbox processes. Then they poke a ton of holes in the airtight hatchway because holes are useful. Suddenly it's not airtight, but at least it's useful. Then someone make a new OS with a holeless airtight hatchway. In time, it too will discover which holes it needs, and won't be airtight.

Something similar happens with data diodes. A reply mentions punching holes in a data diode by allowing certain limited two-way communication. Fine, but then it's not a data diode. And someone will suggest putting a data diode on one side of your not-data-diode to make it airtight again. And you'll have the problems of a data diode again.
by close04 | 2025-04-30 12:14:17+00:00
> A telltale sign

Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is just seeing what you want to see especially if you're responding to a perceived personal slight. The people telling you they're having the time of their life also might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life choices.

I didn't read OP's comment as "every FAANG employee is miserable". That's uncharitable but easier to fight than the more realistic one that those people might be in a "golden cage". The "wolf and the dog" fable above is impressively accurate.
by tejohnso | 2025-04-30 12:14:20+00:00
In my experience and observation, as the age and school level increases, there's more actual learning going on.

By the time you're 16, I'd say a significant amount of school time is decently geared toward learning, and you're old enough to supplement that yourself during spares or downtime if you want to.

At younger ages though, it definitely seems like more of a daycare service than a learning focused environment. The free daycare is important, but I do feel bad for the kids who are stuck in that absurd environment. Someone can come up to you and stab you with a pencil for no reason and that's just par for the course.
by yalogin | 2025-04-30 12:14:45+00:00
I wonder if this “prostration” is a direct result of becoming too big as a company. I cannot imagine a company as big Amazon just succumbing to political pressure to their own detriment like this unless it benefits them somehow. The only way the government can help is through their kuiper project. If only Amazon was split into smaller groups then the store will not be beholden to the satellite internet group and AWS’ integrity wouldn’t be questioned, may be. Also if split each of them will be run by a different individual and so may be have more practical
by jorvi | 2025-04-30 12:15:06+00:00
It's not really smartphones by themselves that need to be discussed, but rather (simplified) the dopamine loop reward system.

Explain it to young kids as the smartphone giving you a 'treat' for doing nothing. Eventually you get lazy and won't do any work because you get a 'treat' from the smartphone for free whereas if you play sports or hang out with your friends you only get the 'treat' for doing something.

Then explain that very smart people have taught the smartphone how to make the 'treat' tastier and tastier until you spend most of your time chasing treats instead of doing and enjoying things.
by StevenWaterman | 2025-04-30 12:16:07+00:00
No, even if the benchmarks are private, it's still an issue. Because you can overfit to the benchmark by trying X random variations of the model, and picking the one that performs best on the benchmark

It's similar to how I can pass any multiple-choice exam if you let me keep attempting it and tell me my overall score at the end of each attempt - even if you don't tell me which answers were right/wrong
by api | 2025-04-30 12:16:15+00:00
I hate being right. I remember years ago predicting that if MAGA got back in they’d levy a huge tax increase they’d call a tax cut and a huge spending increase they’d call a spending cut.

My other big prediction for years has been that it’ll be MAGA that will do mass gun confiscation in defiance of the second amendment. Let’s see how that one does. Of course all the MAGA folks would be fine with it because it's not mass gun confiscation by the "new world order" if Trump does it.
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-30 12:16:29+00:00
You're missing the point. There's value in even simply knowing the names. I may not know the details of a given historical scientist's accomplishments, but if their name floats around the cultural ether, I can pluck it from the air and type it into Wikipedia. Most Americans - likely most Westerners - cannot do that with even a dozen or so non-European historical scientists, because we don't even know their names.

This massive gap in the common understanding of the way the modern world came to be is concerning; undermines most people's model of the development of civilization is, for example, one of the things that makes it easy to drop bombs on historical sites (and the descendants of those who built them), or to ignore when other parties do the same. "Ignore what the peasants think, only elite thought matters," has never preceded an era of sustainable peace and prosperity.
by kube-system | 2025-04-30 12:17:10+00:00
> I did not take me twelve years to learn to read and write.

It takes people twelve years to learn to read and write at a 12th grade level.

You could study it for another 4 or more years at university if you wanted to develop your skills further.

> What made me good at reading was reading books outside of school.

This is your personal experience. I learned to read and write quite well at school and was well-prepared for university.
by enriquto | 2025-04-30 12:17:23+00:00
> floating point operations like addition are not commutative

maybe you meant associative? Floating point addition is commutative: a+b is always equal to b+a for any values of a and b. It is not associative, though: a+(b+c) is in general different to (a+b)+c, think what happens if a is tiny and b,c are huge, for example.
by gosub100 | 2025-04-30 12:17:43+00:00
That's the moment we will realize that it's not the spam that bothers us, but rather that there is no human interaction. How vapid would it be to have a bunch of fake comments saying eat more vegetables, good job for not running over that animal in the road, call mom tonight it's been a while, etc. They mean nothing if they were generated by a piece of silicon.
by Uvix | 2025-04-30 12:18:19+00:00
How do you show the final price to someone when dining in and carrying out food have different tax rates? You won’t know the price until they complete the purchase.

How do you put the final price on an ad that will be broadcast over a large area or distributed in a newspaper that goes to same, with different tax rates in different parts of the area? You won’t know the price until you know which location they’re shopping at.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-30 12:18:25+00:00
This bill is likely based on the same sort of scientific knowledge that leads people to recommend drinking raw milk. The litmus test to use is if it is banning fluoridation, or if it is reducing the maximum allowable amount of fluoride in the water to something below 0.75 mg/L (the current EPA limit is 4 mg/L).

I haven't been able to find the bill text here, but I am virtually certain that it's the former case, which tells me that they're not actually motivated by the supposed harms of fluoride in the >0.75 mg/L range.
by m_fayer | 2025-04-30 12:18:26+00:00
Glossy magazines, handy-dandy mobbing tools, porn, a kiddie slot machine, a big stack of totally random niche zines that include yes the icky ones, a kiddie panopticon, their anxious parents, a gaggle of marketers and influencers grooming their income streams (this is a fun game) and interacting with them.
by kaibee | 2025-04-30 12:18:27+00:00
Yes, but sometimes asking dumb questions is the first step to asking smart questions. And OP's investigation does raise some questions to me at least.

1. Give a model a context with some # of actually random numbers and then ask it to generate the next random number. How random is that number? Repeat N times, graph the results, is there anything interesting about the results?

2. I remember reading about how brains/etc are kinda edge-balanced chaotic systems. So if a model is bad at outputting random numbers (ie: needs a very high temperature for the experiment from step 1 to produce a good distribution of random numbers) What if anything does that tell us about the model?

3. Can we add a training step/fine-tuning step that makes the model better at the experiment from step #2? What effect does that have on its benchmarks?

I'm not an ML researcher, so maybe this is still nonsense.
by johnbellone | 2025-04-30 12:18:42+00:00
If we're being honest, by your statements alone I wouldn't consider you a senior developer in my organization. I pay them to learn my business, understand the requirements, and plan/build a solution within the scope of my company's means. The value, for me, is in the intersection of the institutional and technical knowledge of the areas of business. A senior developer needs to be able to mentor business/product/technical juniors about much more than the code they're working on at the moment.

Please don't take it as me attacking you. I'd actually love to have this conversation with you on my podcast (link in description). I think it'd be a great one!