MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scarab92 | 2025-04-13 23:52:17+00:00
The default subs are filled with left-wing conspiracy theories these days.

A consequence of years of reddit allowing its mods to shadow ban centrist voices.

It’s hard to see how reddit escapes this mess. They need more normal people and less political zealots, but the site is already so far down the echo chamber path that its overt political partisanship scares off potential new normal users from participating.
by megous | 2025-04-13 23:52:29+00:00
You're assuming too much. I'm not obfuscating/masking anything. I'm just using Firefox with some (to the user/me) useless web APIs disabled to reduce the attack surface of the browser and CF is not doing feature testing. It's not just websites that need to protect themselves.

Eg. Anubis here works fine for me, completely out-classing the CF interstitial page with its simplicity.
by aetherson | 2025-04-13 23:53:17+00:00
I've worked at 8 companies, 3 have resulted in value from equity (all granted pre-IPO), all of them in certainly much larger than "a decent holiday" level.

I think people have updated to be much too negative on the prospect of equity paying out. It's obviously much better than 1%, at least if you work at anything other than extremely early-stage companies.
by int_19h | 2025-04-13 23:54:14+00:00
By the same token, being async doesn't color a function since you can always blocking-wait on the returned promise. But then the callers of that function can't use it async.

Similarly with Context, if your function calls other functions with Context but always passes in Background(), you deprive your callers of the ability to provide their own Context, which is kinda important. So in practice you still end up adding that argument throughout the entire call hierarchy all the way up to the point where the context is no longer relevant.
by alwa | 2025-04-13 23:54:26+00:00
I'm not sure they're much less expensive. To pick an arbitrary weeklong Tuesday-to-Tuesday trip in May, between New York and Chicago, the cheapest direct Amtrak fare—in coach, not in first class as you mentioned—is $336 (and 19 hours each way), whereas the same trip on Spirit Air is $96 (and 2 hours 30 minutes each way).

The cheapest first class train fare is $1,621 for the round trip, vs $385 for first class airfare.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-13 23:54:45+00:00
> First-class passenger trains are much more comfortable, roomier, and less expensive, but as long as they're so wildly slower, they have a hard time competing with air travel.

Maybe, but around a third of all tourism spend in the US is business travel related [0]. You cannot justify spending an overnight train ride from NYC to Chicago when you can reach there within 2 hours by flight.

The US is MASSIVE - much larger than most countries, and population centers are extremely spread out once you leave the Northeast. Outside the NE, the math (time wise or financially) doesn't play out well for rail based public transit.

You see the same dynamics in China as well - the overwhelming majority of medium-long distance public transit is along the extremely dense coast.

Expecting a French style TGV is unrealistic as long as San Francisco to Los Angeles is the same distance as Paris to Berlin - except with almost no major population centers in between, and plenty of massive mountain ranges. Same for the rest of the US outside of the NE. Similar extent with NY to Chicago as well (roughly the same distance as Berlin to St Petersburg)

[0] - https://www.statista.com/topics/1832/business-travel/#topicO...
by phire | 2025-04-13 23:55:04+00:00
I'm basing my "still growing" assessment off google trends, nobody thinks to bot that. The trends for Slashdot and Digg [0] more or less match up with when they died. While reddit [1] is still growing (at least up until 3 months ago, but that's most likely noise). You really have to zoom into the right date range to not have Reddit dwarf Slashdot/Digg [2].

The new users aren't exactly high quality, but they seem to exist. Or at least advertisers think they exist.... shrug.

For some other fun trends, checkout Facebook which has been clearly declining since 2012, or Instagram which appears to have been declining since 2023... not entirely sure why.

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=slashdot...

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=slashdot...

[2] Zoomed: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2004-01-01%202...
by jackcosgrove | 2025-04-13 23:55:47+00:00
> I've had equity in most of my jobs and the job sucks then I'll leave before my stock vests which I've done twice.

Sometimes you can't tell how it will be from the outside. You only know whether you'll like the job, or whether it has prospects, after trying it.

Bouncing isn't a bad move. In fact it's smart from a diversification perspective. Once you realize a company has no future, just get out and try again. As an employee, choosing whom to work for is one of the few ways you can diversify against risk.
by whartung | 2025-04-13 23:56:42+00:00
It’s going to be interesting to see. What they’ve done (as I understand it) is they’ll use common (UP, BNSF) right of way to get up Cajon Pass and out to Barstow.

From there, they’re laying new rail to LV.

The clever part is that they’re laying the rail down the middle of I-15, which is a divided interstate. This lets them built rail to their specifications, a dedicated rail, and also bypass no doubt a huge amount of approvals and things such as environmental studies.

Most of that simply doesn’t apply to the middle of the I-15.

So it’s a bit of a perfect storm that’s enabling this project.

The big question is whether they can get schedule priority getting out of the Inland Empire and over the pass to Barstow. Most passenger traffic is second class on the freight lines (which is where much of the delays and low quality of modern train travel stems from).

But, yea, eager to see this. Supposed to be ready for the ‘28 LA Olympics.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-13 23:57:03+00:00
It's obvious to anyone who is familiar with both.

(f x y)

vs

f(x, y);

Note the extra comma and semicolon. The only place this breaks down is for simple arithmetic expressions like (+ a b) vs a + b, which is trivial enough to ignore (and also goes back in favor of Lisp when you start having more operands).
by tokioyoyo | 2025-04-13 23:57:17+00:00
>Then you can go make the case for an even faster train for 2050.

I'm very sorry, but such timelines are extremely disheartening and sound like a joke. The problem is, factually, other countries can build out HSRs within 5-10 year horizons, from planning to finishing a route. If it takes 2+ generations to even get a single line... I'm not sure what I can say.

I understand bureaucracy and problem solving processes work differently in our countries, but incredibly sad to see how a person can't see a significant progress within their own lifetimes. I'm not sure when I became such a defeatist, but it is what it is.
by sroussey | 2025-04-13 23:57:33+00:00
It should have followed the 5 and by passed the towns in the Central Valley. The republicans there felt that was a terrible idea and should instead go through where there was much more built out. But stuff would have been built out from the stops, they didn’t need to swing in like that. And so many more landowners as you approach cities and the need to slow down. Such a cluster.
by pohuing | 2025-04-13 23:58:00+00:00
There's this funny instance[1] of someone afraid their their gf might see them and think they're into anime. But anyhow using an image and the image itself is up to the site since Anubis let's you configure it.

[1] https://discourse.gnome.org/t/anime-girl-on-gnome-gitlab/276...
by JohnMakin | 2025-04-14 00:00:25+00:00
Have mostly heard this kind of talk before about the cannabis plant - by all indication it has existed alongside mankind for much of mankind’s history, seems uniquely suited to many of man’s needs, even practical ones like rope - grows easily alongside anywhere humans will typically habitate. It’s toxic to lots of other animals humans domesticate with, which is why it seems uniquely “targeting” humans as an evolutionary adaptation.
by simonw | 2025-04-14 00:00:27+00:00
I'll make an excuse for PostgreSQL lacking that feature: it's a transactional relational database with extremely well understood performance characteristics and a reputation for robustly delivering new reliable features without breaking backwards compatibility.

They have added horizontal scalability in the form of built-in replication: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/high-availability.ht...

Adding sharding-style horizontal scaling to that while maintaining the characteristics of PostgreSQL that make it so popular is a very tall order. My suspicion is that handling sharded horizontal write scalability through external systems and extensions is a better architectural fit than trying to bake that into core.
by jumploops | 2025-04-14 00:01:01+00:00
Agreed, this has been happening since long before LLMs existed.

I did a quick search for the affiliate tag noted in the blog post, and found another Redditor complaining about that same affiliate tag, but from three other accounts[0].

My fascination is that, with LLMs, the line between obvious bot regurgitation and seemingly human posts is now much thinner.

The fact that the Reddit post was an affiliate link for Edward Bernays' Propaganda is just the cherry on top, in this case it's like selling ice to eskimos.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/TheseFuckingAccounts/comments/1giyl...
by MichaelZuo | 2025-04-14 00:01:58+00:00
Well it’s even more dismal in reality.

Gather enough parrots on a stage and at least one can theoretically utter a series of seemingly meaningfuly word-like sounds that is legitimately novel, that has never been uttered before.

But I doubt any randomly picked HN user will actually accomplish that in fact before say age 40. Most people just don’t ever get enough meaningful speaking opportunities to make that statistically likely. There’s just too many tens of billions of people that have already existed and uttered words.
by beloch | 2025-04-14 00:03:38+00:00
Moderation has become a real weak-point for reddit. They expect anonymous and unpaid volunteers to do the hard and thankless job of keeping large numbers of passionate strangers, malicious bots, trolls, etc. under control while being impartial, honest, etc.. In reality, their mods are usually either power-tripping, pushing their own agenda, or state-sponsored propagandists. There's absolutely no recourse if you see shady moderation going on. Reddit doesn't care so long as everybody keeps clicking.

I recently decided to take a break from reddit, and may yet make that break permanent. There is still some good stuff there, but it's getting rarer and harder to find in a sea of spam.
by xeromal | 2025-04-14 00:04:11+00:00
Yeah, using the median is pretty sweet and should hopefully bypass a lot of environment review which is the bane of building anything in CA. Even if it doesn't bypass average car speed, just the comfort of not having to drive that nasty stretch will be a godsend.

My only concern is pricing. It's gonna have to be about 50$ each way to be worth it in my opinion. You can get a flight to a fro for about 150$ and that's out an airport like burbank which is very low security and easy to navigate.
by pwmtr | 2025-04-14 00:04:15+00:00
I read something similar on Yuval Harari's Homo Sapiens, where he suggests wheat domesticated humans not the other way around. An excerpt can be found here [1]. Whole essay is great but I especially liked this part:

> The word “domesticate” comes from the Latin domus, which means “house.” Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

[1] https://www.ynharari.com/topic/ecology/
by DistractionRect | 2025-04-14 00:04:17+00:00
You're already 99% of the way there, you're just have the order of operations wrong.

What you're doing is sRGB -> linear perceived luminance space -> sRGB (greyscale, where R=G=B) -> dithering

When you should be applying dithering in the linear perceived luminance space, then covering the dithered image back into sRGB space.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-14 00:04:44+00:00
Yup. Basically supply contraction puts people out of work, which requires lowering rates by selling bonds, but exporters under duress are also dumping their bonds, which means you need to print more money than you otherwise would to push rates down. Those dollars create inflationary pressure whose solution is raising rates. But you can’t because of the supply disruption. Basically, Trump and Musk have engineered stagflation.
by simonw | 2025-04-14 00:05:00+00:00
Do you mean this one? https://github.com/mysql/mysql-proxy

It let you do all sorts of clever tricks with Lua scripting, though oddly enough it looks like the repo was archived back in 2024 (and the last commit to it was 11 years ago), and the linked docs on https://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-proxy/en/ are a 404 now.
by jfengel | 2025-04-14 00:05:17+00:00
The way I see it, the argument comes down to an assertion that as impressive as these technologies are, they are a local maximum that will always have some limitation that keeps it from feeling truly human (to us).

That's an assertion that has not been proven one way or the other. It's certainly true that progress has leveled off after an extraordinary climb, and most people would say it's still not a fully general intelligence yet. But we don't know if the next step requires incremental work or if it requires a radically different approach.

So it's just taking a stance on an unproven assertion rather than defining anything fundamental.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-14 00:05:19+00:00
And the region between Beijing to Shanghai is fairly flat and densely populated (Tianjin, Shandong, Jiangsu, Hebei), which makes it easier to justify and build out the associated infra, as plenty of other slower lines can also be run concurrently - specifically by connecting Tianjin (one of the most important cities in China)

Meanwhile, the only major population centers between NY and Chicago are Pittsburg and Columbus - both of whom combined have a fraction of the population that Jiagnsu or Shandong have.

Furthermore, land acquisition is different in a country like the US versus China. Mass expropriation or eminent domain of land is politically untenable in the US, but something that is easier to implement in China as a significant amount of land remains under local municipal ownership instead of private ownership.
by babyshake | 2025-04-14 00:05:43+00:00
One other trick I learned about and should warn others about - getting an offer for shares (an employee level %) where there is in fact no options pool and existing shares will be diluted for every new employee who joins the team. I got such an offer, and not only was this information not given to me until I asked about any events aside from funding rounds that would be dilutive, but it was presented as standard operating procedure.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-14 00:07:13+00:00
> personally seen it happen multiple times from inside, it happens all the time

I’m not saying it doesn’t. Just that founders having a separate class of stock is very, very rare.

> happened in the largest medtech acquisition in history (at the time) its Public knowledge

Supervoting stock is absolutely a thing with companies. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about start-up founders.
by jltsiren | 2025-04-14 00:07:40+00:00
It made choices that turned out to be good in retrospect. And it's young enough that it hasn't turned into a stagnant bureaucracy yet.

Technology is not magic. If you can do something, others can do it as well, if they want. Established organizations often fail at that, because they don't want to be successful. They might want to be successful in principle, but in practice, the personal interests of the people in charge override the interests of the organization.
by pm90 | 2025-04-14 00:08:03+00:00
> but I also know that there are a couple local technology centered private Slack groups in my area where people will eagerly try to evaluate and possibly buy your options for local startups. They don’t buy everything, obviously, but there is demand for the few cases where contracts allow transfer of the resulting equity.

isn’t this illegal? private stock ownership needs approval from company/BoD to change hands, no?
by jackcosgrove | 2025-04-14 00:08:18+00:00
Wall Street pays cash. Trading firms pay cash. Cash is the best form of compensation because it's the most fungible*. If you really believe your employer's stock will double in value, you can take your cash bonus and buy shares of it. Of course if you're that confident in your market prediction power you're in the wrong line of work. Wall Street pays cash because it gives employees the power to invest it however they wish (read: no one knows the future so they invest in a diversified basket of assets).

The only downside of all cash compensation is it attracts mercenaries. Personally I find believers and missionaries more pleasant to work with.

* All else being equal, such as the payout schedule.
by skybrian | 2025-04-14 00:08:41+00:00
There’s still a lot to learn about how LLM’s do things. They could be doing it in either a deep or a shallow way (parroting information) depending on the task. It’s not something to be settled once and for all.

So what’s “dead?” Overconfidently assuming you can know how an LLM does something without actually investigating it.
by linebeck | 2025-04-14 00:09:06+00:00
Cool post. I'd be interested in seeing models likes this deployed to the satellites themselves.

Typically, data gathered from satellites needs to wait for the satellite to do a pass over a dedicated ground station before it can be processed, which is probably somewhere in the US. If you move the processing from the ground station to the satellite, then you 1. Don't have to transmit as much data, 2. Can transmit actionable intelligence much faster. It can be upwards of 90 minutes before a satellite passes over it's ground station. If you could get that down to a few seconds, I could see some serious applications in disaster response.
by MilnerRoute | 2025-04-14 00:09:09+00:00
They probably gamble more than Donnie and Marie fans (and probably order more drinks).

But I think you have to think of whales as high-bankrolled foreign tourists who want the opportunity to see big international superstars. (Celine Dion "gained international recognition by winning the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest," Wikipedia points out, and has sung "in several other languages including Japanese, Italian, German, Mandarin, Spanish, and Neapolitan...")
by Guvante | 2025-04-14 00:10:09+00:00
Let's be real in most situations it doesn't matter. One "statement" per line is bog standard. Whether that statement is surrounded by parens or ended in a semicolon isn't impactful for reading.

LISP is only better when you add source code transformation (which is way easier with its source code looking like the transformed code). But then you introduce "everyone can write their own syntax" which is good and bad given the history of DSLs...
by cratermoon | 2025-04-14 00:11:09+00:00
"Authentication is tricky and so it was very fair that the designers chose not to include it in the first version of the protocol."

No, it's not fair at all. You can't add security afterwards like spreading icing on baked cake. If you forgot to add sugar to the cake batter, there's not enough buttercream in the world to fix it.
by alganet | 2025-04-14 00:13:14+00:00
"ESSE É UM ESPERTO", or, "this is a smart one", in portuguese.

So far, LLM models have not demonstrated grasp on dual language phonetic jokes and false cognates.

Humans learn a second language very quickly, and false cognates that work on phonetics are the first steps in doing so, doesn't require a genius to understand.

I am yet to see an LLM that can demonstrate that. They can translate it, or repeat known false cognates, but can't come up with new ones on the spot.

If they do acquire that, we will come up with another creative example of what humans can do that machines can't.
by ein0p | 2025-04-14 00:13:26+00:00
This is the way. Options aren't really worth much for the rank and file startup employees after about 7-10 hires. That fraction of a percent is just not going to be life changing unless it's the next OpenAI or something. For very early employees it's different, but even for them some founders will assign far too little equity to really make a difference.
by Const-me | 2025-04-14 00:13:51+00:00
> OpenAI doesn't have a business model

It seems their revenue in 2024 exceeded $3B.

> they will sell your data to make ends meet

I’m not sure they can do that without breaching the contract. My employer pays for ChatGPT enterprise I use.

Another thing, OpenAI has very small amount of my data because they only have the stuff I entered to their web service. Google on the other hand tracks people across half of the internets, because half of the web pages contain ads served by google. Too bad antimonopoly regulators were asleep on their job when google acquired DoubleClick, AdMob, and the rest of them.
by mdcallag | 2025-04-14 00:15:32+00:00
But the thing that doesn't get much discussion in public is the drama that happens from upgrades when behavior changes WRT file systems, kernels, device drivers, CPU frequency governors, etc.

It took a few weeks to figure that out for several of my servers. So I am slow to upgrade things once that gets stable -- and it has been stable for my servers for about 6 months.
by nopinsight | 2025-04-14 00:15:47+00:00
For the skeptics: Scoring just 10% or so in Math-Perturb-Hard below the original MATH Level 5 (hardest) dataset seems in line with or actually better than most people would do.

Does that mean most people are merely parrots too?

https://math-perturb.github.io/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06453

Leaderboard: https://math-perturb.github.io/#leaderboard

Anyone who continues to use the parrot metaphor should support it with evidence at least as strong as the “On the Biology of a Large Language Model” research by Anthropic which the article refers to:

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...
by thfuran | 2025-04-14 00:18:20+00:00
Novel utterances happen all the damn time. See https://venturebeat.com/business/15-of-all-google-searches-a... for tangential evidence.

Edit: actually that looks like it's just an offhand mention of Google's initial report, but I don't really feel like spending more time tracking down details to rebut so silly a claim.
by dalemhurley | 2025-04-14 00:19:16+00:00
AI commenting on AI commenting on AI commenting on AI...

But yeah, X, LinkedIn, and the rest all feel like the bots and content farmers have taken over.

I believe the pay for engagement incentives make people be as controversial as possible just to earn money. Imagine you are in a low-income nation, you pretend to be from the USA, you could earn a higher daily income by posting engagement bait. It is in your interest to upset as many people as possible and then set up counter bots to argue with your fee earning bots.
by robterrell | 2025-04-14 00:20:02+00:00
Yeah, I get that this is a re-creation of an existing title focused on C64 (also published out of the same office as the one I worked in). What's odd to me is that there's no connection to the original magazine -- no IP rights acquired, none of the old writers or editors involved, just name-squatting on something people feel nostalgia for. But maybe it'll be great.
by prawn | 2025-04-14 00:20:31+00:00
Tried a couple and didn't mind the concept, but agree that summing things gets tedious enough that I wouldn't continue, return or recommend it.

If the interface doesn't present an obvious way to add the current totals, it could be colour-coded in a way that experienced players possibly learn how far off they are. Use cool colours for under, and warm colours for over?