MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-30 18:10:41+00:00
Varies based on market. Where middle men actually do things and add lots of value they don't generally care.

When your value-add is fronting the cash for a container of something, doing paper pushing and sending the resultant product to an Amazon warehouse people will ask tough questions like "who are all these parties you're pushing papers to? What is their purpose and should they even exist in 2025" all of which is just a proxy for "if we fixed the system you wouldn't exist" and you can't really fault them for that.
by ajross | 2025-04-30 18:10:54+00:00
Right, but SunOS on SPARC changed the world forever[1]. It's not really a comparable discussion.

[1] And then promptly imploded, and has been forgotten now even by people[2] living and working every day in the environment Sun created. That's the bit I was pointing out upthread.

[2] Who apparently think that the important story of that era is somehow the emergence of ARM?!
by rayiner | 2025-04-30 18:11:42+00:00
> By all means, we should pursue a humanist trade policy that pressures developing countries to improve labor rules, human rights, democracy, etc. But to characterize this present circumstance as that is ridiculous.

But nobody besides Trump is going to do that, because everyone is addicted to the short term boosts of free trade. Obama talked a big game and then in office became a free trader that was pushing TPP before Trump killed it.

The reason Trump happened is because the grownups have been rowing in the wrong direction for 40 years.
by Theodores | 2025-04-30 18:13:26+00:00
Yes, for domestic manufacturers. To go with the bicycle example, you could assemble bicycles in the USA for a specific niche, maybe cargo bikes or tricycles for the mobility impaired. The frame, wheels, tyres, brakes, gears, seats and other parts would be imported with tariffs paid. There would be several suppliers and limited options for Hollywood accounting.

Most of the costs would be in assembly, marketing, retail, shipping and sorting forth, so there would be just the imported parts to get the tariff tax, but you could just pass those costs on, for the customer to choose a lower specification model of they can't afford the product.

Some easier components could be sourced from the USA, for example, the handlebars are just a bent tube, so why get a Chinese person to make it? However, the aluminium for that tube will be taxed with a tariff so it is unlikely that a guy down the road will step up to make these things.

As mentioned, it will be like Brexit, the worst fears won't materialise, people will still be eating food and everyone will just become a lot poorer with a stagnant economy.

With Brexit the little guy stopped selling to Europe but the multinational didn't skip a beat.
by jerf | 2025-04-30 18:13:29+00:00
"Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ?"

Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Conway's law is expressed as "communication structure -> program structure" but it's actually even stronger than that; the arrow is bidirectional. If either the organization wants to break up the homepage into different teams, or if the organization has to have multiple teams work on their homepage for whatever reason, the homepage will reflect the organizational structure. YouTube falls into the second branch, which is that their home page is so complicated it has to be broken up between teams due to sheer organizational size. At YouTube's size you'll even have organizational distinctions you can't even see on the homepage like dedicated reliability engineering teams. At their scale I see at least six teams most likely, the "normal" video team, the shorts team, the sidebar menu, the hamburger menu, the search team, and the team responsible for the top-level all-Google interaction, plus multiple invisible ones like recommendation algorithm, reliability, possibly a dedicated performance team, etc.

You can, organizationally, try to put these all under one manager, but even when you do that it is a surprisingly uphill battle to maintain coherence, even when it is a goal, which it often isn't particularly. There's a lot of reasons few companies have the visual and design coherence of a ~2010 Apple, including arguably even 2025 Apple.
by brudgers | 2025-04-30 18:13:59+00:00
Waylaid solves Redhat/IBM’s problems…security for desktop Linux in Enterprises where workers without the technical background to navigate the command line are forced to use Linux. [1]

In ordinary Linux Fu, the command line is the secure alternative to X.

[1] to be clear Wayland addresses the need to document compliance with best practices and other aspects of security theatre.
by burnte | 2025-04-30 18:14:04+00:00
He wasn't dismissive, he was countering dismissiveness. It was dismissive to throw out "just build your own". 99% of companies don't have that option, most companies are customers, not builders. This commenter was pointing out the obvious lack of perspective on the majority of businesses. That is a huge problem in SV and software development these days, the lack of awareness and context about real problems out in the market. "Just build a replacement" is a non-viable route for most people and most companies.
by bjackman | 2025-04-30 18:14:13+00:00
No, that's what I'm saying, you can't do that. There are properties of a Linux system's performance that are significant enough to be essentially load-bearing elements of the global economy, which are not governed by any specific algorithm or design aspect, let alone a line of code. You can only determine them empirically.

Yes there is a difference in that, once you have determined that property for a given build, you can usually see a clear path for how to change it. You can't do that with weights. But you cannot "reason about the effects" of the kernel code in any other way than experimenting on a realistic workload. It's a black box in many important ways.

We have intuitions about these things and they are based on concrete knowledge about the thing's inner workings, but they are still just intuitions. Ultimately they are still in the same qualitative space as the vibes-driven tweaks that I imagine OpenAI do to "reduce sycophancy"
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-30 18:14:28+00:00
Short term yes, but long term it turns people away from YouTube.

A year ago, I had a serious YouTube habit, once I replaced my trash Jellyfin server with a Plex server I can listen to my music collection on my phone anywhere… so no more music from YouTube. I got tired of asmongold and all his imitator gaming YouTubers, fell out of the habit of watching Ukraine warbloggers, etc. I saw other people who got into toxic rabbit holes in YouTube so bad that they decided to physically destroy their computers…
by bob1029 | 2025-04-30 18:14:43+00:00
> Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

In context of genetic programming and other non-traditional ML techniques, I've been having difficulty attempting to locate a simple fitness function that reliably proxies natural language string similarity due to this effect.

For example, say you use something like common prefix length to measure how close a candidate's output string is to an objective string given an input string. The underlying learner will inevitably start doing things like repeating the input verbatim, especially if the input/output training tuples often share a lot of prefixes. So, you might try doing something like reversing the input to force learning to take a less crappy path [0]. The learner may respond degenerately by inventing a string reversing technique and repeating its prior behavior. So, you iterate again and try something like base64 encoding the input. This might take, but eventually you wind up with so many weird hacks that the learner can't make progress and the meaning of the quantities evaporates.

Every metric I've ever looked at gets cheated in some way. The holy grail is probably normalized information distance (approximated by normalized compression distance), but then you have a whole new problem of finding an ideal universal compressor which definitely doesn't exist.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3215 (Figure 1)
by krferriter | 2025-04-30 18:15:10+00:00
They wanted another stimulus check but didn't want other people to get a stimulus check. They love stimulus checks and the highly effective policies the US used to mitigate an unemployment spike and avoid a recession that did hit other countries but not the US, and then they turn around and blame the government for causing some temporary and modest inflation (modest in a historic context compared to other periods of much higher inflation in recent memory). The median voter is someone who cannot be pleased. And so much of our political decisionmaking is driven to incoherence by trying to please these swing voters who do not understand anything.
by gavinray | 2025-04-30 18:15:20+00:00
I have a lot to say about this.

First, I want to start with: If you haven't read the article, this is about a woman.

I've long held the belief that bio-identical hormone replacement should be a cheap and available option for peri-menopausal and post-menopausal women.

It's difficult for me to grasp the commonplace acceptance for how degraded quality-of-life is for ageing women due to loss of endogenous hormone production.

All people deserve to feel as well as they possibly can for the duration of their lives, and with modern medicine we have the tools to do so, but the social knowledge and practice just isn't there yet.
by SecretDreams | 2025-04-30 18:15:33+00:00
I've used them. They're very nifty. Google did good here.

One thing I'll note is they only cover the "high level" aspects. No depth. I'd recommend them for someone who is either already very knowledgeable or for someone not at all knowledgeable who is looking for an overview before they plan to do deeper learning/studying through reading.
by twoWhlsGud | 2025-04-30 18:15:34+00:00
If you have a corpus of documents you are working with (say thousands of pages of related standards docs), Notebook can be handy for doing targeted summaries of aspects of the docs with pointers back into the actual docs to the relevant source material. That's something I end up needing a lot (I've never used the podcast feature) and so it feels very differentiated to me...
by mmmmmbop | 2025-04-30 18:15:50+00:00
This bit of information makes the entire thread hilarious to read.

Bunch of hackers using adblockers that modify the client-side UI to cheat Google out of money and then complaining loudly about a minor UI convenience. How dare Google not optimize for them!

I say this as someone who uses an adblocker myself. But come on.
by tristor | 2025-04-30 18:16:00+00:00
> If you think that you have a right to shoot someone in the head, you're fucking nuts. Period. Go see a shrink.

To defend your life, liberty, and property you absolutely do have that right in most of the civilized world. Some places may put restriction on your ability to access a firearm, but self-defense is a basic necessity to have /any/ human rights. That said, I agree, trying to shoot someone in the head /is/ crazy, you should always aim for center of mass because it has a larger surface area which matters in difficult situations. That said, the person you're replying to never even uses the word "head"
by gs17 | 2025-04-30 18:16:20+00:00
I'm not aware of mass cancelling of research grants under Biden in the same way Trump is doing. The Trump to Biden transition took place during my PhD, and I never heard a peep about anything similar. Now all I hear about is cancelled grants.

Under Biden, many grants did have to appeal to liberal sensibilities to be selected, but he didn't order all grants that didn't focus on DEI cancelled in 2021. I'm not even sure if "inclusion" was added to the NSF's list of "broader impacts" under Biden or well before him.
by pertymcpert | 2025-04-30 18:16:24+00:00
Yes. I wonder if the path forward will be to create systems of agents that work as a team, with an "architect" or "technical lead" AI directing the work of more specialized execution AIs. This could alleviate the issue of context pollution as the technical lead doesn't have to hold all of the context when working on a small problem, and vice versa.

Shit. Do we need agile AI now?
by somenameforme | 2025-04-30 18:16:46+00:00
She was referencing this [1] article. And Amazon did indeed exactly what she said. They launched a side gig "Chinese Books", guided by the Chinese propaganda arm NPPA, at the behest of China exclusively in order to further their reach and business in China. That, while complying with ever more onerous requests of the Chinese government including removing reviews for certain Chinese books, granting complete control of "their" cloud services in China to Chinese government approved companies, and so forth.

It creates a reasonable argument that Amazon will do basically anything to get some of that sweet Chinese $$$, which makes their unprecedented foray into politics (at a consumer facing level), in a way that would be completely beneficial to China, look particularly bad. This still has nothing to do with using "the machinery of the state to force private enterprise" or anything like that.

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/amazon-partnered-with-ch...
by pc86 | 2025-04-30 18:17:20+00:00
Something can be both bad and not stigmatized. Divorce is a pretty good example here. It's not stigmatized, and to prove it's not say with a straight face it should be illegal and you won't be able to blink before the backlash hits you. It's not stigmatized at all. Most individuals who get married will get divorced. The way the numbers work out something like 60-70% of all marriages contain at least one divorced partner. Saying it's stigmatized is silly and doesn't line up with reality. But of course it's an objectively bad thing. It's messy, it's expensive, feelings get hurt, often times years or decades of peoples' lives are wasted.
by nostrademons | 2025-04-30 18:17:43+00:00
I think the root issue here is Joy’s Law [1]: “No matter who you are, the majority of smart people do not work for you.” Sun had a whole lot of very talented engineers working for them, but ultimately they were building a proprietary, vertically integrated system. When compared with the best memory makers in Japan and the best CPU makers at Intel and AMD and the loosely knit coalition of OS engineers working on Linux and all the Linux desktop engineers, they eventually found that the best engineers did not work for them.

[1] Ironically coined and named after Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy.
by mrandish | 2025-04-30 18:17:47+00:00
I use a combination of add-ons to fix YouTube that let me:

* Block shorts

* Adjust the number of thumbnails per line, thumbnail shape, border, etc

* Limit the length of titles/descriptions

* Force titles/descriptions into normal upper/lowercase

* Change the default player window size

* Show thumbnails actually in the video (from start, middle or end)

* Fix literally dozens of other annoyances

For Windows desktop under Firefox:

* "Nova YouTube" https://github.com/raingart/Nova-YouTube-extension script running under ViolentMonkey add-on. Nova YouTube is framework that puts modular YouTube fix scripts under one UI.

* "AdashimaaTube" script running under Stylus add-on.

* "Enhancer for YouTube" add-on

* uBlock Origin (of course)

For Android phones: Revanced Extended

For Android-based streaming sticks: SmartTube

Note: The set of add-ons & scripts I use in desktop Firefox is just what I happened to end up with at the time I finally got fed up a few years ago, looked for solutions, tried out several and settled on this mix as working for my needs and preferences. YouTube is constantly changing (usually for the worse), so the landscape of community add-ons and scripts is constantly evolving in response. You'll probably need to update to latest version on whatever solution(s) you use at least every couple months.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-30 18:17:50+00:00
>Ostensibly the United States is a meritocracy.

I have yet to see any of this purported meritocracy. I see lots of nepotism (as well as adjacent behaviors similar to nepotism) and things typically associated with oligarchy, even in the world of business.

Who you know and your background have so much to do with success that outliers are rounding errors for a reason. It has nothing to do with ability or any accepted definition of merit as related to meritocracy.
by evil-olive | 2025-04-30 18:18:35+00:00
I think it's still an important clarification, because for years you've had a choice in RDS (classic RDS, not Aurora) between "single-AZ" and "multi-AZ" instances, with the general rule of thumb that production workloads should always be multi-AZ.

however, "multi-AZ" has been made ambiguous, because there are now multi-AZ instances and multi-AZ clusters.

...and your multi-AZ "instance", despite being not a multi-AZ "cluster" from AWS's perspective, is still two nodes that are "clustered" together and treated as one logical database from the client connection perspective.

see [0] and scroll down to the "availability and durability" screenshot for an example.

0: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-rds-multi-az-db-clus...
by godelski | 2025-04-30 18:18:36+00:00
Many of these things are ones that people have been screaming about for years (including Sarah Hooker). It's great to see some numbers attached. And in classic Cohere manner, they are not holding punches on some specific people. Expect them to push back.

There's a crux that makes it easy to understand why we should expect it. If you code (I assume you do) you probably (hopefully) know that you can't test your way into proving your code is correct. Test Driven Development (TDD) is a flawed paradigm. You should use tests, but they are hints. That's why Cohere is quoting Goodhart at the top of the intro[0]. There is NO metric where the metric is perfectly aligned with the reason you implemented that metric in the first place (intent). This is fucking alignment 101 here. Which is why it is really ironic how prolific this attitude is in ML[1]. I'm not sure I believe any person or company that claims they can make safe AI if they are trying to shove benchmarks at you.

Pay close attention, evaluation is very hard. It is also getting harder. Remember reward hacking, it is still alive and well (it is Goodhart's Law). You have to think about what criteria meets your objective. This is true for any job! But think about RLHF and similar strategies. What methods also maximize the reward function? If it is human preference, deception maximizes just as well (or better) than accuracy. This is bad design pattern. You want to make errors as loud as possible, but this paradigm makes errors as quiet as possible and you cannot confuse that with lack of errors. It makes evaluation incredibly difficult.

Metrics are guides, not targets

[0] Users that recognize me may remember me for mentioning 'Goodhart's Hell', the adoption of Goodhart's Law as a feature instead of a bug. It is prolific, and problematic.

[1] We used to say that when people say "AI" instead of "ML" to put your guard up. But a very useful one that's been true for years is "if people try to prove by benchmarks alone, they're selling snakeoil." There should always be analysis in addition to metrics.
by TYPE_FASTER | 2025-04-30 18:18:38+00:00
The fear of AI reminds me of the fear of automation, that it will replace us. Part of me understands, part of me doesn't understand. Humanity has been dreaming of the future and writing about it for hundreds of years. It's closer than ever, and a lot of people are terrified that we're not going to have anything left to do.

That's why I think it's a matter of mindset. This is going to sound dumb, but I keep thinking about the interactions between Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark and Jarvis in Iron Man. That's the AI I always wanted: something that could do deterministic (here's the weather, here's your schedule) and non-deterministic (research) things.

Jarvis wasn't the inventor. Jarvis was a tool Tony used to invent things.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-04-30 18:19:07+00:00
It's always the same, and it had to be like that.

1. Subsidy, give freebies, special privileges (in Poland we have ev cars allowed to drive Bus lanes)

2. Once the market has been saturated, revoke slowly privileges

3. Later move on to normal requirements/taxes/payments - BAU

(Roads won't fund themselves)
by didgetmaster | 2025-04-30 18:19:16+00:00
The complete disregard for our immigration laws was probably the biggest thing, even though there were a number of things that came close.

Millions were let across our borders with almost no vetting whatsoever. Criminals came in freely from all over the world bringing drugs, violence, and human trafficking with them.

The Biden administration acted more like a travel agent than a border enforcement force. Anyone who spoke up about it, was attacked.

Something more closely related to Trump's current actions against universities, was Biden's war on energy. Pipelines canceled. Lands and leases locked up. Taxes and regulations designed to reduce energy production.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-04-30 18:19:21+00:00
So you don't buy Oreos, and think the best way to eat them is not to have them in the house. I agree. That's why I don't have TikTok on my phone. So why can't I keep YouTube Shorts disabled? I'm telling them I don't want it. If I'm the kind of person who doesn't keep Oreos in the house to avoid eating them, why would I go to a grocery store that insists on slipping a pack of Oreos into every third bag of carrots?
by selimthegrim | 2025-04-30 18:19:23+00:00
I live in Louisiana. This is absolutely cult of personality all the way down. I have no idea what the guy/gal upthread is talking about otherwise.

In 2016 I definitely saw ads from churches in Mississippi on local cable TV that were totally outright political advocacy combined with cult of personality. I was so astonished, I almost filed a complaint with the FEC/IRS. But to top it off, I remember very well an ad of Trump’s that said “I’ll make every dream you ever dreamed come true.”
by SequoiaHope | 2025-04-30 18:19:31+00:00
There are so many inbuilt assumptions in your comment it’s hard to even formulate a reply. Should the way I relate to other people be based on predictions of what makes a “strong society” or does a strong society flow from well adjusted people? Is a society of shame filled serial monogamists stronger than one of sexually liberated polyamorists? Is it healthier to expect one person to provide all of your romantic and sexual needs while suppressing urges to engage emotionally and sexually with others, or is a focus on identifying our individual needs, communicating those to others, and operating with informed consent and mutually agreed upon relationships better?

There’s so many things I think monogamous culture could learn from polyamorous people. Even if you’re only dating one person at a time, learning to deeply understand your own needs, set boundaries, and communicate clearly with others (mandatory skills in functional polyamory) are super useful skills for monogamous people.

Also who is to say that society lives and dies by who were kissing and sleeping over with and fucking? We also have a society that is obsessed with selfish consumption while an increasing number of people are excluded from our economic abundance, suffering at the outskirts. To me that’s way more likely to destroy society than who I’m sleeping with.
by TuringNYC | 2025-04-30 18:19:50+00:00
>> short-term pain / long-term gain for American economic interests

That only works if the policy isnt changing day to day (or across presidential cabinets / administrations.) It takes a lot of capital and time to build local factories, and I would not feel comfortable with that investment w/o assurances there will still be a market for local goods next week, next month, or in 10yrs