MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-14 22:37:30+00:00
The thing that makes something a competitor is the ability to act as a substitute. That means grocery stores that are 1000 miles away don't count. For photo sharing, what makes something a viable substitute is having a sufficient network effect, so photo sharing services with hundreds of users aren't a substitute for ones with millions.

This implies that mergers between large services that have a network effect should always be prohibited, but why is that even a problem unless your goal is to thwart competition?

It would also create a useful incentive: Federated systems (like email) have a single network that spans entities. If Microsoft wants to buy Hotmail, they're not buying a separate network so you don't have to be worried about it even if they each have 25 million users as long as that's not too large a percentage of the billion people who use email. So then companies would want to participate in federated systems instead of creating silos like modern social networks do, because then they would be as strictly prohibited from doing mergers.
by xerxes901 | 2025-04-14 22:38:39+00:00
I don’t know what you’re basing this on. Good psychiatrists absolutely “call themselves doctors” and definitely seek to exclude or treat organic causes of psychiatric symptoms. All the psychiatrists I know absolutely understand there’s a link between the immune system and mood disorders and will involve immunology/rheumatology for these things.

Your ideas about how psychiatry is practiced might have been correct in the 1950’s but they’re a world away from how it’s done in the 2020s.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-14 22:39:05+00:00
Judge Thacker's opinion was citing it. They are reflecting a contract based on evidence since the government has failed to properly record it. It just doesn't exist in the form you'd like, such as a written formal contract entered into the record.

Quite often contracts are never 'seen' and instead prosecution surrounding them involve gathering evidence, in this case including 'memos' and direct statements of heads of state.
by amluto | 2025-04-14 22:39:49+00:00
It’s unclear how much is residual anti-mask sentiment from the pandemic and how much is related to events like this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68923528

One might reasonably interpret events like that as protestors engaged in activity that is not protected by the First Amendment, is criminal and/or violates other student’s civil rights and/or improperly interferes with the activities of others. And one might credibly imagine that some of the protesters knew this and were wearing masks to hide their identities. And one might further credibly argue that, in 2024, these students were not likely to be wearing masks outdoors for health reasons.

Of course, the letter to Harvard doesn’t really explain what kind of mask ban is imagined or why it’s appropriate to ban masks when students are merely going about their ordinary business.
by tim333 | 2025-04-14 22:39:51+00:00
It does seem to me that if for example OpenAI suddenly could raise no more money they could drop the free tier and raise the paid price and make a profit, if with far fewer users. The Zitron article seems to assume they are forced to provide free service to millions but it seems to me it's a choice to grab market share that they could step back from.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-14 22:40:06+00:00
No clue about the FDA. But for DOE, I know two people who were laid off and asked to come back. I coached them to refuse and counter with a consulting contract at about 4x their prior wage (about 120% above what they could make in the private industry out the door). The idea is make them pay for the chaos they caused, and raise your baseline for when you step out into industry. And tobacoo has a lot more private-industry potential than nukes.
by peterbecich | 2025-04-14 22:41:32+00:00
I'm not a lawyer but my reasoning is this:

- as far as I know, double taxation by any given entity (Federal Gov) is unconstitutional

- a given dollar is taxed once as income. A federal wealth tax on the remainder of that dollar would be double taxation.

That does not prohibit the Federal Gov from taxing once, and your residential state from taxing you a second time.

There are other arguments about "direct taxation" I don't fully understand.
by varispeed | 2025-04-14 22:41:57+00:00
Seems quite cheap. If I was a state I'd buy it. Possibly give stake to the suitable university and then create internships and other learning opportunities. I would also subsidise products to SMEs and then invest more to ensure company can supply defence and other industries, decoupling the country from dependence on other countries from crucial tech.

I mean it's a pipe dream, but why not.
by mikestew | 2025-04-14 22:41:58+00:00
Gives an investor a chance to invest.

It gives the unwitting a chance to lose their money. “Do your homework” against professionals whose job it is to make your homework as difficult as possible, including the very tactic you seem to be arguing for.

Meanwhile, if things such as SPACs are such solid investments, why are they pulling such weasely stunts to begin with? (A rhetorical question, at least it is to me.)
by nkrisc | 2025-04-14 22:42:26+00:00
Ok, that makes a bit more sense, especially since I have not owned an EV.

> Pre-heating an EV cabin before departing

Cars have been doing this for a years now with a keyfob. But I suppose over network/cell gives you greater range.

> Turning charging on and off via lets you take advantage of low electricity rates.

I would have thought that'd be a feature of the charger, not the car, but not an EV owner so maybe I'm just wrong here. That does make more sense for an app, but also sounds like a feature that could work fine without one too.
by byoung2 | 2025-04-14 22:42:47+00:00
Consider the two following ideas:

An AI powered grocery shopping app where you put in all of your favorite recipes, and AI will break it down into grocery shopping lists and send it to Instacart.

An AI powered concierge that will plan an entire night out (e.g. dinner reservations, ride share, concert tickets, etc., and the whole time it works in the background automatically, like paying your restaurant bill and requesting your next Uber, and even requesting a Taskrabbit tasker to deliver flowers to your constantly updating location) or even a whole vacation (e.g. hotel, tours, restaruant reservations, and Uber rides that magically show up just as your tour ends).

The first idea is easily copied by Instacart because the secret sauce is just AI, the second is more complex because you need to partner with all of the various on demand apps like Uber, Taskrabbit, Opentable, or whatever, so the secret sauce is not just AI but the integrations. It will be harder to copy this one
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-14 22:42:50+00:00
Without rule of law no other issue matters.

You think you are a citizen today because you've always been a citizen, you have papers to prove it. It's never even been questioned. What if those papers get destroyed? What if the officer interpreting your papers is employed by someone who doesn't like you because you're disobedient. Without rule of law your status as a citizen doesn't protect you. Without a functioning judiciary capable of providing consequences to those who violate rule of law, you have no one to appeal to.

This administration complains about single judges restricting their actions. That should literally terrify you. The judges are not stopping the administration, they are ruling that the law is stopping the administration. When the administration says it is judges stopping it, it is claiming that there is no law, only the actions of loyal or disobedient men.

We are in a constitutional crisis. We are effectively lawless. Right now, we cannot depend on the law to restrict powerful people's actions. We have no predictability about what is possible, and therefore no way to act as if the law protects us.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-04-14 22:44:20+00:00
> My first amendment right not to be forced to support causes I disagree with is being harmed. I don't want my tax dollars going to support discrimination against Asians and others.

This is absolutely NOT what the 1st amendment is about, you are confusing tax and speech but they are treated separately in the Constitution.

The reason for that is simple, if every taxpayer could deny the funding of everything they didn't agree with, we'd have a very different Constitution. The ability to FULLY defund something YOU don't agree with requires the powers of a king... If you scale that ambition back a little and ask only for the power to decide where YOUR own money goes, you'd be speaking of something other than a tax because this isn't the way taxes work.

I'm not explaining this because I see much good coming out of Harvard, in fact I don't, but that's a different conversation. Both political parties, as well as certain private organizations have their hands deep in students' brains - it's the ultimate cookie jar after all. The real problem is the attempt to legitimize overt government meddling in the "cookie jar" instead of focusing on transparency and examination of the current forces involved in that process.

BTW can you elaborate on your assertion about "discrimination against Asians"? Neither the government letter nor Harvard's response mention Asians! Were you trying to comment on another post? Maybe something about the tariffs?
by rstuart4133 | 2025-04-14 22:44:28+00:00
> "removing power from non academic activists"

That sentence (from the letter) makes no sense. An activist isn't someone with power to do something. If they had that power, they wouldn't be advocating it, they would do it.

What that insisting the University do is shut down people talking and protesting with viewpoints they disagree with. They list those viewpoints in their letter: "..., Students for Justice in Palestine, and the National Lawyers Guild". The pro Israeli protests that happened aren't mentioned. If they get away with this, I'm sure a lot more viewpoints will follow.

This isn't about powers. It's about controlling what people can and can not say on a University campus.
by Tainnor | 2025-04-14 22:44:46+00:00
> Otherwise, I think simple, procedural programming is generally a better default paradigm.

I think this is almost the opposite conclusion from the one TFA (and in particular the longer form article linked elsewhere here), which is more like: most standard imperative programming is bad and standard (pure) FP is at least slightly better, but people generally don't draw the right conclusions about how to apply FP lessons to imperative languages.
by Arcuru | 2025-04-14 22:45:12+00:00
I also want an OSS framework that lets me extend it with my own scripting/modules, and is focused around being an assistant for me and my family. There's a shared set of features (memory storage/retrieval, integrations to chat/email/etc interfaces, syncing to calendar/notion/etc, notifications) that should be put into an OSS framework that would be really powerful.

I also don't have time to run such a thing but would be up for helping and giving money for it. I'm working on other things including a local-first decentralized database/object store that could be used as storage, similar to OrbitDB, though it's not yet usable.

Mostly I've just been unhappy with having access to either a heavily constrained chat interface or having to create my own full Agent framework like the OP did.
by linuxandrew | 2025-04-14 22:45:17+00:00
Podman doesn't have a dependency on systemd. e.g. it is packaged in Void Linux.

Podman has a better architecture than Docker in that it can easily run on a non-privileged user.

Quadlet (aka podman-systemd.unit) is a podman-systemd integration which can make it easy to launch and orchestrate podman containers via systemd. You can get all if the systemd dependency handling, require other units to run after a container finishes, and all sorts of other useful things. Systemd "user" units (systemctl --user) also works here with the containers running as a non-privileged user in a non-root systemd context.

Just to be clear, Quadlet is just an integration and you can still run podman without it. You can still run podman on non-systemd systems as well.
by mjamesaustin | 2025-04-14 22:46:11+00:00
Joe Biden did nothing remotely comparable to what Trump is doing now.

And unlike Trump, Biden faced constant criticism from within his party. He would have faced outrage if he tried to, for example, cancel all federal grants containing the word "conservative" in them.

Meanwhile we're heading towards a future where Trump can deport anyone he doesn't like to an El Salvadorian prison without so much as a trial, regardless of whether they broke any laws. Why doesn't this terrify people on the right?
by sottol | 2025-04-14 22:46:33+00:00
I doubt it's going to be weeks, the months were already turning into years despite Nvidia's previous advances.

(Not to say that it takes openai years to train a new model, just that the timeline between major GPT releases seems to double... be it for data gathering, training, taking breaks between training generations, ... - either way, model training seems to get harder not easier).

GPT Model | Release Date | Months Passed Between Former Model

GPT-1 | 11.06.2018

GPT-2 | 14.02.2019 | 8.16

GPT-3 | 28.05.2020 | 15.43

GPT-4 | 14.03.2023 | 33.55

[1]https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BWMKzBunEhMGfpEgo/when-will-...
by tim333 | 2025-04-14 22:48:17+00:00
A lot depends on where you think AI will go. Zitron is obviously skeptical and calls the AI 2027 article "a truly offensive piece of fan fiction." That article starts:

>We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.

And if that happens investing a lot will make sense. If not I guess OpenAI will have to scale back and drop much of its free service. Or maybe go bust. I'm not sure it's as doom and gloom as Zitron makes out. Maybe a bit of an over allocation of capital to OpenAI and LLMs but things will go on. Even if OpenAI folds Google and others will probably do fine.

(HN on AI 2027 - generally skeptical - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43571851)

I figure the reality is somewhere between Zitron's skepticism and AI 2027's over optimism.
by vunderba | 2025-04-14 22:48:22+00:00
> The workflow reminds me of programming 30 years ago - you did something, then waited for the compile, see if it worked, tried something else...

Well sure... if your compiler was the equivalent of the Infinite Improbability Drive.

I assume you're referring to the classic positive/negative prompts that you had to attach to older SD 1.5 workflows. From the examples in the repo as well as the paper, it seems like AudioX was trained to accept relatively natural english using Qwen2.
by priyadarshy | 2025-04-14 22:48:44+00:00
The wildest thing I read was:

> Harvard will immediately report to federal authorities, including the Department of Homeland Security and State Department, any foreign student, including those on visas and with green cards, who commits a conduct violation.

Conduct violations at Universities are a pretty broad set of rules at universities and don't necessarily line up with what's legal or not but more with the university's cultural and social norms.
by bangaladore | 2025-04-14 22:48:48+00:00
Agreed. Even simply I'm sure a service like this already exists (or could easily exist) where the workflow is something like:

1. User provides information

2. LLM generates structured output for whatever modeling language

3. Same or other multimodal LLM reviews the generated graph for styling / positioning issues and ensure its matches user request.

4. LLM generates structured output based on the feedback.

5. etc...

But you could probably fine-tune a multimodal model to do it in one shot, or way more effectively.
by jrockway | 2025-04-14 22:49:12+00:00
This seems to be common for corporate America in general. I used to work at a YC startup. We kiiiiiinda maaaaaaaybe ran out of money (not my department) and happened to get bought by a large investor that also happens to be a US-based hardware manufacturer. Two years and countless reorgs later, they laid everyone off and as far as I know, are no longer in the business of selling the software products they bought. They never figured out how software worked, never had anyone managining the division for more than 6 months, and got bored. I think they thought by moving everyone over to Microsoft Word and Windows laptops (peppered with a half-hearted threat about RTO), they would just magically make billions of dollars the first month. It didn't happen.

I am beginning to think M&A are just some sort of ego thing for bored megacorp execs, rather than serious attempts to add efficiency and value to the marketplace. (Prove me wrong, bored megacorp execs. I'll wait.)
by thrance | 2025-04-14 22:49:57+00:00
You should really read those articles that you linked instead of ignorantly pointing at them in outrage, against something you clearly never engaged with other than through conservative media. At least read the Nature one, damn. It's directly addressed to people like you, who might think they have issues with this stuff, for reasons.

No one is out to cancel theorems or whatever other bullshit. Also those concerns over the freedom of science are rich coming from the party that's actually defunding labs, arresting researchers on ideological grounds and burning books.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-14 22:50:07+00:00
> You think you are a citizen today because you've always been a citizen, you have papers to prove it. It's never even been questioned. What if those papers get destroyed?

An opening scene of The Handmaid's Tale paint this vividly: two characters' marriage licenses are simply not recognized.

What gives papers power is the powers that recognise them. If authority just stops recognising your citizenship or homeownership or bank account, for that matter, your papers go back to being shitty kindling and bits in a void.
by nativeit | 2025-04-14 22:51:05+00:00
> Intel soon discovered the obvious, which is that customers with applications well-suited to FPGAs already use FPGAs.

So selling FPGA's was a bad move? Or was the purchase price just wildly out-of-line with the--checking...$9.8B annual market that's expected to rise to $23.3B by 2030?
by anon84873628 | 2025-04-14 22:52:10+00:00
Nitpick in the article conclusion:

>Heat flows from hot to cold because the number of ways in which the system can be non-uniform in temperature is much lower than the number of ways it can be uniform in temperature ...

Should probably say "thermal energy" instead of "temperature" if we want to be really precise with our thermodynamics terms. Temperature is not a direct measure of energy, rather it is an extensive property describing the relationship between change in energy to change in entropy.
by greatgib | 2025-04-14 22:52:24+00:00
Probably yes, foreign money flowing to a bank account used to fund a political party will blink in all colors in the corruption and money laundering dpt of any bank.

I don't know in Canada, but in a lot of other countries, all accounts and money used by a candidate to an election is tightly limited in income and expenses. Not just anyone can use that as a current account or send in any money from random individuals.
by saghm | 2025-04-14 22:53:15+00:00
Amazon is the one performing the experiment; if the sample size isn't big enough to be useful, that's a mark against their experimental method, not the feedback of the people on this forum. The claim that this is actually valuable in some way should be the one with the burden of proof, and it's unreasonable to argue that flaws in an experiment showing one result somehow imply that the opposite is more likely because of it.
by NHQ | 2025-04-14 22:53:30+00:00
This trial is but a showcase for the berg zucker.

Legal proceedings focused on "social networks" and "browser market shares" and app stores. These are ridiculous, superficial, and meaningless.

If there was really such a thing as a monopoly on social networking, you would have to kick people off the networks, not just stop the companies operating them. What would change if instagram had to become its own company again? The same people would own it. And that is why antitrust is a joke, it does not prevent the true monopoly of who controls what.
by Rohansi | 2025-04-14 22:53:32+00:00
Serial execution makes the most sense from a database perspective because they work off a transaction log. Parallel execution may require separate transaction logs (basically durable queues) to accomplish sharding but that introduces a whole new set of issues because tables can only be mutated from a single transaction log. Code that needs to access multiple suddenly gets a lot more complex. There was actually a post on HN the other day about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43661181
by mikestew | 2025-04-14 22:53:44+00:00
The post is bordering close enough to “unhinged” that I’m not taking this woman’s word for it. There’s a story here, but we aren’t going to get the whole of it from her.

But given enough extrapolation, I think your explanation is probably close. To add further by reading between the lines, the handling of a political campaign account was probably loosey-goosey enough on the details (“no, you CANNOT spend it on…”) that something got triggered.
by protocolture | 2025-04-14 22:53:51+00:00
In my experience DND has a very thin edge where the good experience exists. Outside of that its quite variable.

I cant comment on Warhams but other RPG's I have played dont really care about encounter difficulty. And I am not even talking about narrative only stuff. But even savage worlds I can go and find 10 wild cards or 20 wild cards or come up with almost any Ace, and its just a matter of player approach as to whether the encounter is difficult or simply deadly. To really create a TPK situation you would need to design enemies specifically to do that.
by hirvi74 | 2025-04-14 22:54:45+00:00
Based on your knowledge and experiences, do you think the benefits are worth the potential side-effects?

I fully understand that after a certain point of disease severity, the right choices tend to become more apparent. However, I have been offered such medications in the past, but I have always refused.

From what I understand, many of the serious side-effects are rare. However, once Pandora is out of the box, it's not always easy to get her back inside.
by steeleduncan | 2025-04-14 22:55:07+00:00
> Running individual services that would have been RPMs?

Essentially this. Rather than adding anything on top of systemd (which is almost certainly running anyway) quadlets are a way of turning containers into systemd units, and directing systemd to run them

I think it is the lightest weight, but still convenient, way of running a container as a daemon, with all the pros and cons that implies
by bjourne | 2025-04-14 22:55:56+00:00
Apparently, the FPGA industry wasn't large enough for two major players. Maintaining an extremely specialized developer ecosystem for a relatively small niche can't have been cheap. Almost zero cross-over too, since FPGA tooling is much too foreign to be repurposed for other architectures. I suspect this move will make it a bit harder for Intel to collect "developer mindshare" for their other hyped up stuff because no one likes having the rug pulled out from under them. Hope AMD can make a better job with Xilinx than what Intel could with Altera.
by sevensor | 2025-04-14 22:56:42+00:00
> you still can't really rely on it for much

And yet, type annotations in Python are a tremendous improvement and they catch a lot of bugs before they ever appear. Even if I could rely on the type system for nothing it would still catch the bugs that it catches. In fact, there are places where I rely on the type system because I know it does a good job: pure functions on immutable data. And this leads to a secondary benefit: because the type checker is so good at finding errors in pure functions on immutable data, you end up pushing more of your code into those functions.