MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vasco | 2025-04-10 03:53:04+00:00
If you're a director of global public policy for seven years, who are you really whistleblowing, the company, or yourself?

I appreciate the information coming out, but in some of these situations I can't help but picture that "the worst person in the room" in regards to the offenses might also end up being the person that then becomes the most holier than thou when they get out of the company.

If you ever met someone who used to work in software ads and ask them about privacy you'll get what I mean.
by locopati | 2025-04-10 03:53:06+00:00
The intention? A country that is broken and looking to the fascists in charge to keep them safe from the same mess they created.

people keep trying to attribute a rationality beyond a selfish power/money grab... they are racist bullies looking to be the boot stomping on humanity's face forever while also looting the place six ways from Sunday along the way (just like Putin and his circle in Russia)
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-10 03:53:22+00:00
As a person currently working on a project that uses Firestore (the db component of Firebase), there is one thing - and only one thing - I want.

A web GUI for Firestore that lets me work on documents like, idk, any other DBMS GUI would: the ability to select multiple records, and operate on them.

That's literally it. I don't need AI, I don't need dark mode, I don't even need MongoDB compatibility. I just want to select multiple documents with my mouse and do things to them.
by strzibny | 2025-04-10 03:54:00+00:00
I am happy to see more Kamal posts, but I don't think the title is the best ;D

Kamal is relatively simple tool. If you understand a bit about DevOps and what Kamal can do things are pretty much smooth.

If you never did anything with servers and suddendly want to deploy with Kamal? Then it can be painful.

For those that want to take Kamal for a spin I wrote Kamal Handbook. No self-torture required.
by jfengel | 2025-04-10 03:54:39+00:00
Israel's direct enemies make it very explicit that they are antisemitic. Consider Hamas' charter, for example.

Those enemies have long used European allies that descend from a long line of antisemitism, from both left and right wings. They often use "Israel" as a cover for their anti-Jewish beliefs. Several United Nations agencies seem to exist for the sole purpose of condemning Israel, while ignoring much worse issues elsewhere -- and that's not because Israel is uniquely bad.

Israel's right wing government has taken advantage of this. So much anti-Israel sentiment is antisemitic that they can lump in all of the many, many valid criticisms. They believe, with some justification, that they will never receive fair treatment so they might as well do what they are accused of.

I don't wish to "both sides" this. I'm just explaining that Jews have experienced so much bad faith argument that even Jews who are disgusted by the Israeli government expect outside criticism to come from a similar malfeasance. Maybe you specifically want to have a good faith discussion, but statistically the odds aren't great. So the arguments get shut down by the most expedient means, not the most correct ones.
by noufalibrahim | 2025-04-10 03:54:45+00:00
The general opinion on the post seems to be justifiably negative. I have s few things where AI has helped and one where I'm not sure how i could have done it before.

1. It's great to cure "starting trouble"

2. A specific case is to brainstorm ways to layout libraries to handle cases.

3. When I code, using an AI completer is usually faster than looking up docs but with lsp and familiarity with the language, it's not that great.

4. When I'm setting up new software for the first time, i give the AI a few blog posts and books and then have it guide me through while explaining concepts.

5. As a Google substitute to look for things. I get clear answers for most things which aren't too complex.

6. I've used it to explain concepts to me. eg. the difference between ac and dc current.

7. I've used it to create throwaway apps which i don't care about maintaining.

8. I wanted to get a copy a proprietary program to integrate into my application. I couldn't get it. I had an LLM create s dummy version which produces the same output and did my integration. It more or less worked when I substituted with the real tool.

As for the hype, yeah.. Genuinely s problem but there's some meat in there.
by EasyMark | 2025-04-10 03:56:10+00:00
And China has no corruption or grifting in the government? I do not believe that at all. I reckon it's just as rife as any western government. What the do get right is long term planning and sticking to it, but giving it a time limit (5 years) and the reevaluate priorities. The American government literally has several founding documents and a purpose, I don't see how you think otherwise? Can cronyism happen? Sure, no one is denying that. However what set us apart during the recent downturn is we had some of the most free trade in the world. Now Trump is wrecking that with tariffs and short sighted "look a squirrel!" tactics.
by mlyle | 2025-04-10 03:57:56+00:00
> But do you assume that getting to n=10,000 is going to show little or no effect (e.g. having a level you define as little effect)?

I don't necessarily assume this, but even if you assume linearity, 0.7 * -0.32 is pretty dang small at baseline. I think if you generate n=10000 showing MLE=-.32 or +.05, few people are going to change their minds. I might, but I don't think it does much to shape the debate.
by jwilliams | 2025-04-10 03:58:26+00:00
That and because UK uses a ring circuit, which was seen as a solve for a copper shortage at the time.

Ring circuits generally way higher in power - and a lot more than a single appliance needs or could handle. Hence the need for a fused plug.

The upside is each socket can take a 13A plug (circa 3kW), whereas a standard US socket maxes out closer to 1.8kW.
by sureIy | 2025-04-10 03:59:05+00:00
CDC guidelines are nonsense here and I fail to see why they would give them. Is there a vaccine shortage?

The claim is that you're more likely to catch the virus early in your life and thus "lifetime efficacy" is reduced as you grow older. Duh, this is true of any vaccine. There are various strains of HPV and you can catch them one after the other. Having HPV at 50 is just as painful as when you're 18, if not more since your immune system is less effective.

The second part of I don't understand this advice is that they say there's no HPV test for men because the result is non-actionable. What? HIV is also nearly "non-actionable" but knowing one has it definitely reduces the chances of spreading it, does it not?

I don't get it.

I got the vaccine in my thirties against doctor's advice.

Please get the vaccine if you're sexually active with more than one person, regardless of your age.
by dbmnt | 2025-04-10 03:59:33+00:00
> Google's non-AI efficiency is not much better than Amazon or anyone else.

I don't think this is true. Google has long been a leader in efficiency. Look at the power usage effectiveness (PUE). A decade ago Google announced average PUEs around 1.12 while the industry average was closer to 2.0. From what I can tell they reported a 1.1 average fleet wide last year. They've been more transparent about this than any of the other big players.

AWS is opaque by comparison, but they report 1.2 on average. So they're close now, but that's after a decade of trying to catch up to Google.

To suggest the rest of the industry is on the same level is not at all accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness

(Amazon isn't even listed in the "Notably efficient companies" section on the Wikipedia page).
by kccqzy | 2025-04-10 04:00:06+00:00
The font is Times, not Times New Roman. The original PostScript standard only mandated three font sets: Times, Helvetica, Courier.

Personally when reading long man pages (or any long documents), I greatly prefer a proportional type face over a monospace one like in the terminal. These days, people's hand-written markdown also overuses the backtick syntax to make too many things monospace. Using a proportional font just feels right to me.
by breadwinner | 2025-04-10 04:00:14+00:00
From the story: "Last month, White House began to pressure Columbia over its handling of anti-Israel protests and other allegations of antisemitism at the university..." If anyone thinks this is about antisemitism please check out the links below.

John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, reiterated his assertion that Trump said, “Hitler did some good things, too,” in a story published Tuesday in The New York Times. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-said-hitler-did-...

Donald Trump dabbles in Nazi allusions too often for it to be a coincidence. https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/21/politics/trump-nazi-allusions...

Trump's re-election campaign that featured a symbol used in Nazi Germany. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53098439

Trump’s latest flirtation with Nazi symbolism draws criticism https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4677700-trumps-latest-...

Trump campaign accused of T-shirt design with similarity to Nazi eagle https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/11/fac...

Donald Trump's 'Star of David' Tweet About Hillary Clinton Posted Weeks Earlier on Racist Feed https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-...
by hattmall | 2025-04-10 04:01:04+00:00
I mean Nike didn't work to lower the price, the demand for Jordans is just different and most people buying Jordans today also bought them in the 90s and are comfortable at $120. If Nike could move them at $300 they would. Jordans remain popular but the reasoning is partially their price points, they don't at all have the power they did in the 90s when every kid wanted "to be like Mike".
by thwarted | 2025-04-10 04:01:10+00:00
> If someone can show me exactly what I am thinking of, won't that be amazing.

I suppose it would be amazing if someone could read minds, but is that what you're asking for? In an earlier comment, you opened with:

> I am waiting for when I could provide these a scene snippet from "Hitchhiker's Guide To Galaxy" (or any book) and it could draw that for me.

This is asking for an illustrator, not showing you what you're thinking. The illustrator, even if it is a machine, will show you their interpretation.
by umanwizard | 2025-04-10 04:01:12+00:00
I buy the claim that Hamas is an antisemitic organization. Their 1988 charter is quite explicitly antisemitic and although their more recent charter attempts to walk that back, it’s not clear how much sway the members who wrote it actually have within the organization or whether it was just written for Western consumption.

I already said that antisemitism is one reason one might not support Israel, so of course I don’t dispute that some anti-Israel organizations are indeed antisemitic.

But we’re not talking about Hamas; we’re talking about Colombia students. Is there any evidence that they openly supported Hamas? If not, why is it relevant?
by aabaker99 | 2025-04-10 04:03:43+00:00
I did a little digging because I haven’t followed the news on this. Through a chain of links from the article is https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Docum... which is a report from the Committee on Education lead by Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) detailing anti-Semitic activity on university campuses.

It seemed to me a lot of the key findings were framed in a political way. I was hoping to see more specific damages that might justify these huge cancellations of grant funding. For example one key finding was “Northwestern put radical anti-Israel faculty in charge of negotiations with the encampment.” I admittedly don’t have time to read the full report but how is the labelling of faculty involved in the negotiation a clear case of discrimination for the violation of Title IV of the Civil Rights Act? Shouldn’t the key findings be more about the harms that were experienced by Jewish students?

It’s a shame this report is being used to justify suspension of research funding.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-10 04:04:00+00:00
If you work for startups, especially boot-strapped startups, there will always be cash-flow constraints sooner or later.

Personally it came about a year into my first job. Fortunately my wife was working, and we had minimal expenses, so we could ride it out.

In lieu of salary, the founders made me a partner. We sank or swam together. And when cash came in we paid ourselves.

Make no mistake, deciding to stay was a very risky strategy. But a few years later things took off, we got back-paid all that missing salary, and we've gotten stronger since.

I was lucky. I didn't need the immediate cash, and could take a risk. The most likely outcome was we went under. But the upside turned out to be very strong.
by enjo | 2025-04-10 04:05:59+00:00
> it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that".

My wife is an accounting professor. For many years her battle was with students using Chegg and the like. They would submit roughly correct answers but because she would rotate the underlying numbers they would always be wrong in a provably cheating way. This made up 5-8% of her students.

Now she receives a parade of absolutely insane answers to questions from a much larger proportion of her students (she is working on some research around this but it's definitely more than 30%). When she asks students to recreate how they got to these pretty wild answers they never have any ability to articulate what happened. They are simply throwing her questions at LLMs and submitting the output. It's not great.
by ninjin | 2025-04-10 04:06:17+00:00
Maybe true, but BS 1363 dates to the late 40s and the Schuko illustration below is from the early 30s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SCHUKO-Patent.svg

Rather, I think the British decided to iterate (for better and for worse) on their earlier design that looks a lot like BS 1363.

Personally, having lived for an extensive amount of time in places with Schuko ("Europe"), NEMA ("US"), and BS 1363 ("British") plugs/sockets, I will take Schuko any day over the other two. Schuko stays in place, is grounded when it needs to be, is flexible when it comes to how it leads the cord out of the plug/socket, and so on. For all the touting of safety, "no sparks", etc. that we hear about BS 1363, I have never seen it out of a Schuko (NEMAs on the other hand...). Yes, BS 1363 improves upon NEMA, but that is a very low bar.
by motorest | 2025-04-10 04:06:56+00:00
> That is exactly how our ancestors built houses. Also a traditional wooden house doesn't look complicated.

The only homes built by our ancestors that you see are those that didn't collapsed and killed whoever was inside, burned down, were too unstable to live in, were too much of a burden to maintain and keep around, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
by fpgaminer | 2025-04-10 04:07:47+00:00
I ran an interesting benchmark/experiment yesterday, which did not do Quasar Alpha any favors (from best to worst, score is an average of four runs):

"google/gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25" => 67.65 "anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet:thinking" => 66.76 "anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet" => 66.23 "deepseek/deepseek-r1:free" => 54.38 "google/gemini-2.0-flash-001" => 52.03 "openai/o3-mini" => 47.82 "qwen/qwen2.5-32b-instruct" => 44.78 "meta-llama/llama-4-maverick:free" => 42.87 "openrouter/quasar-alpha" => 40.27 "openai/chatgpt-4o-latest" => 37.94 "meta-llama/llama-3.3-70b-instruct:free" => 34.40

The benchmark is a bit specific, but challenging. It's a prompt optimization task where the model iteratively writes a prompt, the prompt gets evaluated and scored from 0 to 100, and then the model can try again given the feedback. The whole process occurs in one conversation with the model, so it sees its previous attempts and their scores. In other words, it has to do Reinforcement Learning on the fly.

Quasar did barely better than 4o. I was also surprised to see the thinking variant of Sonnet not provide any benefit. Both Gemini and ChatGPT benefit from their thinking modes. Normal Sonnet 3.7 does do a lot of thinking in its responses by default though, even without explicit prompting, which seems to help it a lot.

Quasar was also very unreliable and frequently did not follow instructions. I had the whole process automated, and the automation would retry a request if the response was incorrect. Quasar took on average 4 retries of the first round before it caught on to what it was supposed to be doing. None of the other models had that difficulty and almost all other retries were the result of a model re-using an existing prompt.

Based on looking at the logs, I'd say only o3-mini and the models above it were genuinely optimizing. By that I mean they continued to try new things, tweak the prompts in subtle ways to see what it does, and consistently introspect on patterns it's observing. That enabled all of those models to continuously find better and better prompts. In a separate manual run I let Gemini 2.5 Pro go for longer and it was eventually able to get a prompt to a score of 100.

EDIT: But yes, to the article's point, Quasar was the fastest of all the models, hands down. That does have value on its own.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-04-10 04:07:49+00:00
Sadly not as uncommon as it should be.

The story you've told is that they are totally unreasonable. I'd accept that this position is a failure. Get a good night sleep—you can't fix it.

What to do? Well, I'd probably tell people to "back off," see if I(you) can help, and if not cruise through a paycheck or two before leaving. Depends on your situation of course.
by eru | 2025-04-10 04:09:07+00:00
> How is that supposed to read as a single expression in a pure functional language?

Well, in Haskell the following is technically single expression:

do with pkgs; [ foo ];

(Eg using 'let {with = pure; pkgs = 1; foo = 2}' makes the above type check and compile.)

But extreme nerdery and nit-picking aside, I agree that the choice of syntax in nix unfortunate here.
by adamesque | 2025-04-10 04:09:30+00:00
I was very delighted by Aqua v1, which felt like magic at first.

But I’ve noticed/learned that I can’t dictate written content. My brain just does not work that way at all — as I write I am constantly pausing to think, to revise, etc and it feels like a completely different part of my brain is engaged. Everything I dictated with Aqua I had to throw away and rewrite.

Has anyone had similar problems, and if so, had any success retraining themselves toward dictation? There are fleeting moments where it truly feels like it would be much faster.
by Fezzik | 2025-04-10 04:09:45+00:00
What makes one ‘the most health-conscious?’ Certainly all the fittest people I know drink… everyone in the triathlon group I swim with three times a week at 5:30 am drinks beer or wine, and all the people I go with and meet ski-touring, mountain biking, and backpacking drink. In fact, the city I live in, is regularly noted as one of the booziest towns in the states but if you walk around town there are few people who are not fit as can be. I can’t find good age stats for Bend, Oregon, but I drink and play cribbage a few times a month with some pretty healthy octogenarians. Obviously my sample size is limited.
by zzrrt | 2025-04-10 04:10:02+00:00
When the choice was between a current VP or an insurrectionist and convicted felon, anyone who thought Harris was less legitimate for candidacy has a funny definition. (I guess I don’t believe in protest votes or third parties in this climate.)

Maybe subconscious feelings made people not bother to get to the polls to vote for her, but I don’t think there’s a sensible conscious argument to ditch her on this basis. In fact, people often say she failed for a reason that is almost an opposite of her unfairly replacing Biden – they say she acted just like him and wouldn’t differentiate herself from him.

I get it was unusual and maybe offensive the way she got nominated, but if a principled voter is going to weigh informal notions of legitimacy, the obvious choice is hold their nose and vote for Harris.
by defvar | 2025-04-10 04:10:15+00:00
The game mentioned in this article reminds me of the story about heuristics told by Richard Feynman in a lecture: https://youtu.be/EKWGGDXe5MA?si=z9TdlWflOkY6b9Qk&t=4249

I was wondering then who was the guy he talked about.It is great that this article provides so much details of it.
by dang | 2025-04-10 04:10:26+00:00
That link doesn't work for me, so here's the relevant bit:

Rapid Storage: A new Cloud Storage zonal bucket that enables you to colocate your primary storage with your TPUs or GPUs for optimal utilization. It provides up to 20x faster random-read data loading than a Cloud Storage regional bucket.

(Normally we wouldn't allow a post like this which cherry-picks one bit of a larger article, but judging by the community response it's clear that you've put your finger on something important, so thanks! We're always game to suspend the rules when doing so is interesting.)
by AlotOfReading | 2025-04-10 04:10:31+00:00
WASM isn't quite deterministic. An easy example is NaN propagation, which can be nondeterministic in certain circumstances. Obelisk itself seems to allow nondeterminism via the sleep() function. Just create a race condition among a join set. I imagine that might even get easier once the TODO to implement sleep jitter is completed.

It's certainly close enough that calling it deterministic isn't misleading (though I'd stop short of "true determinism"), but there's still sharp edges here with things like hashmaps (e.g. by recompiling: https://dev.to/gnunicorn/hunting-down-a-non-determinism-bug-...).
by motorest | 2025-04-10 04:12:49+00:00
> I think removing pointless cognitive load makes sense, but the point of an education is to learn how to think/reason. Maybe if we get AGI there's no point learning that either, but it is definitely not great if we get a whole generation who skip learning how to problem solve/think due to using LLMs.

There's also the problem of developing critical thinking skills. It's not very comforting to think of a time where your average Joe relies on an AI service to tell what he should think and believe, when that AI service is ran, trained, and managed by people pushing radical ideologies.
by jumploops | 2025-04-10 04:13:17+00:00
I put your prompt into the vibe coding tool I'm working on (shameless plug).

The first version[0] looked good, but when I inspected it I found that it just picked an I Ching prediction at random on the back-end, instead of actually flipping coins.

I updated the prompt to the following:

> Create app where you input a question, then flip coins to generate an I Ching prediction (client-side). First show the standard I Ching prediction and it's hexagram, and then use AI to generate a fortune analysis based on the prediction and your initial question.

And the result was much more laborious[1] of a UI :shrug:

[0]https://iching.magicloops.app

[1]https://iching2.magicloops.app
by bpshaver | 2025-04-10 04:13:54+00:00
1000% yes, at least with the help of book scouts that cull #2 and sell what they find to #1 for ~40% of retail.

If you want a fun fictional take on this, John Dunning's Booked to Die is a biblio-mystery about a Denver detective / book-lover investigating the murder of a book scout within the 1980's Denver used bookstore scene.