MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imiric | 2025-04-10 05:44:40+00:00
A whistleblower is not required to determine that Meta, and all adtech companies, have been severely damaging not just to the US, but to all governments and societies where these platforms are used. They don't need to collude with any adversarial government for this to be true.

The same tools built to manipulate people into buying things, are used to manipulate them into thinking and acting in ways that could be beneficial to someone. Advertising and propaganda use the same tactics, after all. When these tools are accessible to anyone, including political adversaries, it would be naive to think that they're not being used for information warfare.

The Cambridge Analytica leak was just the tip of the iceberg. These companies and agencies are still operating at a global scale, and business is booming. Why adtech companies weren't heavily investigated and regulated after this became public is beyond me. These are matters of national security, which anyone sane would consider more important than any financial or practical value they might have.

Banning TikTok was a step in the right direction, but that's far from the only service that needs to be heavily regulated. And even that decision is flip-flopped and very controversial, so the idea of going beyond must be unthinkable. Yet not doing so will lead to the eventual downfall of the US, and the current western hegemony. The instability we're seeing now is just the beginning, and my only hope is that it doesn't escalate to a major global conflict.
by magic_hamster | 2025-04-10 05:44:56+00:00
"Asia" is not about making shoes, but any company will manufacture where it makes the best economical sense. Currently if that's somewhere in Asia, so be it. It doesn't take anything away from Asian countries if they can offer lower labor rates. Some Asian countries are so big and has such staggering class differences that they might be able to continue offering cheap labor while being competitive in technology, because the people involved in both areas live in totally different ecosystems.
by lolinder | 2025-04-10 05:44:59+00:00
No, they're not. The Chinese have never been especially unified until very recently and they're internally quite diverse on all the key measures of ethnicity: their languages are mutually unintelligible, their religious belief systems span the entire breadth of world religions plus a wide spectrum of home grown ones, and their value systems are very different.

One China is a convenient fiction invented by an authoritarian regime, not a day to day reality on the ground.

Westerners buy into it through some combination of propaganda (coming from the Chinese state and our own, both of which benefit from an exaggerated sense of Chinese unity) and our inability to distinguish the various ethnic groups because we're overly fixated on skin color as the primary physical marker of ethnicity.
by code_biologist | 2025-04-10 05:45:31+00:00
Agreed! The Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald G. Reinertsen[1] is one of my favorite product management books because it's very conceptual, but man the concepts hit home fast. This summary has a lot of great details [2] and the third chapter is entirely dedicated to the properties of queues.

After, Little's law, he introduces the First Queue Size Control Principle (Q13): Controlling queue size rather than capacity utilization offers a more effective way to manage cycle time and process efficiency. — No mister business stakeholder, adding items to the dev team's to-do list and making sure they are working 110% isn't going to get stuff delivered faster.

Diffusion Principle (Q15): Random processes can lead to queues spinning out of control; these high-queue states can last long and cause significant economic damage. — No mister business stakeholder, we can't fix this one little thing right now, it's bigger than you think and is going to make it harder to deliver the big important project.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development-Flow-G...

[2] https://www.joecotellese.com/posts/principles-of-product-dev...
by k310 | 2025-04-10 05:46:09+00:00
> President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday night directing the Justice Department to investigate former top cybersecurity official Chris Krebs and mandating the head of every relevant federal agency revoke his security clearance.

> Krebs, who served as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s director in Trump’s first term, made headlines at the end of his tenure for contradicting baseless claims from the president that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Who falsely claimed that Biden "weaponized" the DOJ? In fact, Biden nominated a milquetoast Chamberlain, most of whose work was undone in one day.

The projection, always a prime M.O., has reached astronomical levels, and those who said "every accusation is a confession" have to live with the madness and destruction, like everyone else.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-10 05:47:48+00:00
The writing will improve too.

I actually don’t get what happened with Hong Kong. Stuff was good then it went bad. But in general it’s expected that stuff will be bad. Generally writing and story telling is the hardest to improve while production and special effects are easier.

The great story telling from China comes from its mythology and I feel China hasn’t yet found a method to depict this on screen without being too cheesy, fakeish or over the top.

I think this is why animation and video games work here temporarily. China will eventually get its act together.
by philjohn | 2025-04-10 05:48:39+00:00
It is not the "policy of this country" you need to actually read how things work, what bodies have what power, and who is doing what.

The sentencing council is an independant body, they are not the government, and the government has said "no, that's not right" so they're passing a bill to stop the new guidelines coming into effect: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-introduce-l...
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-10 05:49:06+00:00
None. There’s no equivalent Chinese show. Just like how a while back there was no equivalent industry. It will get there. Follow the trendlines of all the industries and if it matches what happened with the entire manufacturing industry, solar industry, and various other industries it will eventually surpass the US. Right now it’s quickly becoming on par with a lot of stuff in the west. Eventually it will surpass the west.

But you also have to note there’s a shit ton of propaganda against China. I’m not even sure where it comes from given that we have freedom of press. you likely have no interest in the good stuff coming out of China likely because you don’t even know about it.

Think of it like this. You probably don’t think of BYD at all. Most Americans don’t. But to the rest of the world it’s a superior car to Tesla. And cheaper. It’s like Americans have some propaganda veil pulled over their eyes and I have no idea where it’s from. This absence of consideration of BYD is very similar to what Americans think of China. It’s just a very inaccurate perspective and full of holes.

Also a side note. Nobody inside China or Asia really gives a shit about Seinfeld, Sex and the city or friends. I love Seinfeld and friends but that's because I'm American. Outside of this culture those shows are just garbage. You need to look at the things with true world wide appeal across all cultures. Something like Avengers End game, which was an international phenomenon. (I know there's a lot of snobbish types who don't like it and I can understand why as it's not very sophisticated and it is a little too popular)

Anyway, China has yet to have something like Avengers End game. Or Star wars even. But out of all the countries in the world, it has the most chance of producing something on par with what America has done.
by 1659447091 | 2025-04-10 05:49:17+00:00
> The goal should be to minimize reconstruction error of excluded facts.

I agree that the job of an investigative reporter is to minimize reconstruction error of excluded facts.

The above is not investigative reporting, it is simply news reporting. Emotive speculation and nudging should be kept to a minimum, preferably not included at all to prevent the emotional speculation the second option is nudging people toward (it is not trying minimize reconstruction error of excluded facts, as all the facts of a crime at the time of reporting on an arrest are not known).

Using the second one for news reporting is polluting the jury pool by stirring up emotions before facts of an investigation are presented.
by ars | 2025-04-10 05:49:24+00:00
> many of the most anti-Zionist people are... Orthodox Jew

There's like 6 of them, and they are called Neturei Karta. The other several million Orthodox Jews do not share their views.

On top of that they are only against having a specifically Jewish government (they refuse to vote), but they do NOT agree with not allowing Jews to live in Israel.
by voxic11 | 2025-04-10 05:50:20+00:00
That isn't how the IRS defines it though. Essentially anytime software is being "developed" they will let you classify it as "R&D" (well you can claim the 174 R&D expense deduction but not the R&D Tax Credit under Section 41 which requires activities closer to what you describe).

> Section 5 of Rev. Proc. 2000-50 provides, “The costs of developing computer software (whether or not the particular software is patented or copyrighted) in many respects so closely resemble the kind of research and experimental expenditures that fall within the purview of section 174 as to warrant similar accounting treatment.” As a result, “the Service will not disturb a taxpayer’s treatment of costs paid or incurred in developing software for any particular project, either for the taxpayer’s own use or to be held by the taxpayer for sale or lease to others,” where the taxpayer either treated the costs as currently deductible expenses under former Sec. 174(a) or capitalized and amortized them under former Sec. 174(b) (id.).
by foxglacier | 2025-04-10 05:51:35+00:00
Your child perhaps shouldn't learn things that computers can do. But they should learn something to make themselves more useful than every uneducated person. I'm not sure schools are doing much good anymore teaching redundant skills. Without any abilities beyond the default, they'll grow up to be poor. I don't know what that useful education is but I expect something sort of thinking skills, and perhaps even giant piles of knowledge to apply that thinking to.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-04-10 05:51:47+00:00
> moving production to low cost environments just moves costs from business costs into external costs

[Citation needed]

Of course that can happen, but it's hardly guaranteed. If a company in the US moves a call center to a lower cost city, that's hardly foisting externalities onto anybody.

> people generally avoid the answer to the why question.

What does that even mean? What "why" question?
by jrflowers | 2025-04-10 05:53:02+00:00
Intention can be nebulous and difficult to nail down, and can also be lied about. Purpose, as an answer to “Why is this happening?” is easier to reconcile by just looking at outcomes. In the particular instance that this thread is about, the purpose of dismantling a system that saves lives is semantically obvious.

For an analogy, if somebody is driving a car and slams on the brakes, the intention and the purpose of slamming on the brakes is obvious: to stop the car.
by mrtesthah | 2025-04-10 05:53:28+00:00
MacWhisper does realtime system-wide dictation on your local machine (among other things). Just a one-time fee for an app you download -- the way shareware is supposed to be. Of course it doesn't use MoE transcription with 6 models like Aqua Voice, but if you guys expect to be acquired by Apple (that is your exit strategy, right?), you're going to need better guarantees of privacy than "we don't log".
by wenc | 2025-04-10 05:53:40+00:00
I love Advanced Voice Mode except it's so unreliable in my experience. I can't have more than a 5 minutes of conversation without it getting stuck and me having to restart it.

I believe it's partly due to it doing Whisper processing remotely (correct me if I'm wrong), which introduces lag and slows things down.

Gemini does voice processing locally through text-to-speech and voice conversations with Gemini are soo much smoother.

The downside is Gemini does much more poorly than ChatGPT at uncommon words and when I code switch between languages. ChatGPT is just excellent at understanding uncommon words and in different languages.
by klank | 2025-04-10 05:54:27+00:00
Small correction, Windows CE and Pocket PC weren't Windows so we didn't "bring it over". That mess didn't come later until windows phone.

In the defense of ce/ppc, we weren't really thinking about the fs as user visible so didn't give it much thought. Also, while I'm not shifting all of the blame, lots of that cruft was driven by OEMs as well. Our internal images were pretty clean on the fs from what I can remember.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-10 05:54:27+00:00
I freakin' hate telephones, and I always have, and the Dowager Countess of Grantham was correct in surmising that they are torture devices of the highest caliber.

I always try to prefer virtual meetings with video and all the trimmings, especially screen-share capability. If not, in-person. Telephoning is like a last resort. I've pondered using TTY/TDD even though I have no physical impairments, but most agencies seem hostile to that sort of barrier and most of the time, I find myself needing to pass voice-recognizing gatekeeper AIs first.

When I was promoted to "sysadmin" in my first job they set me at a desk with a computer and a PBX telephone. (It was an office at a gov't defense contractor...) The computer I could relate to on an intimate level; the telephone scared the living bejesus out of me, and I prayed it never to ring.

A disembodied voice in your ear, especially one that interrupts everything you're doing and demanding a real-time conversation across space and time, that's incredibly rude, yet normalized for 100 years. I have PTSD and other disabilities, and I can get completely rattled and downright hostile/aggro when someone calls me and I'm not prepared, I'm not at my desk, no notes in front of me, even if I'm relaxing at home I just can't deal. I may answer the phone while on a bus or train, but I certainly won't sustain a conversation that way. Outgoing calls are sometimes OK but often end in disaster as I become increasingly frustrated.

Now it's not uncommon for someone who's standing at my front door to telephone me. What the hell, I'm less than 3 yards away in here, please don't send me across Cyberspace when you're manifesting in meatspace...

On a phone call I have no idea what office I've reached, what is a person's job title or role with a company, what their face looks like, when they may be taking a breath or using other physical cues to aid the conversation. So much metadata is lost in phone conversations that they are wholly dehumanized and require a revolution in etiquette, just to keep the peace.

Here's your uptalk origin: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb21lsCQ3EM&si=3j3bYd_0rPa... "Valley Girl, she's a Valley Girl!"

I'm not autistic and I can read expressions and body language, but perhaps autists are the evolutionary result of disembodied telephone conversations taking out the human element from verbal communication. It is simply amazing that even with apps and ubiquitous Internet and website portals that I still require the telephone to get important business done (and I'm always, always ticking "it's something else/other/Live Agent/Oh god this is an exception to all your rules please send me a human being").
by 9rx | 2025-04-10 05:54:44+00:00
> To illustrate, let's pull some query code [3] from Java's Hibernate, a prototypical ORM.

ORM and entity manager – which, in turn, is a query builder combined with a few other features. Your code is really focused on the latter. While the entity manager approach is not the same as active record, that is true, the bounds between query building and ORM, I think, are even clearer. In fact, your code makes that separation quite explicit. I can at least understand how ORM and query building get confused under active record.

> We can stop speaking of Active Record

While I agree in theory, since we are talking about ORM only, if we go by Wikipedia we cannot as is ends up confusing active record and ORM as being one and the same. That is a mistake. But as my teachers, and presumably yours too, told me in school: Don't trust everything you read on Wikipedia.

But we don't need to go to Wikipedia here anyway. Refreshingly, ORM literally tells what it is right in its name. All you need to do is spell it out: Object-Relation Mapping.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-04-10 05:55:04+00:00
>He was no longer the priority

Paying him was legally no less a priority than paying any other owed employee wage. Maybe it was indeed a major priority to him.

>and, no, I wouldn't take a cash advance to pay him his last 2 weeks in arrears. He did eventually get paid.

So al though there were options available to you that would have caused you some temporary economic pain, you did indeed decide to fuck him over for a long while anyhow.
by necovek | 2025-04-10 05:58:06+00:00
Good engineering skills are transferable to being a good PM: you need to break down problems, scope them to fit a particular time allotment, estimate an effect on user experience (stats, tracking, what is a good signal and what isn't) and have the agility to react to changing requirements as things are getting built.

Why it makes sense for them to be a single person? Often, "changing requirements" really comes from an engineer learning new things (this framework does not provide this, this external dep is going to be late, I'd need to learn 2 new things so will need more time...), and really, an engineer is the first one who'll know of some of the challenges and what's even feasible!

Now, the skills an engineer needs to develop to be a good PM is good communication and ability to document things at the right level, and lots of empathy for a customer and a business person (so they can "walk in their shoes"). Arguably, all things that will make a great engineer even better.

I've been in teams where we've had a very senior, experienced PM tell us that he's looking for another position in the company because our team does not need them: we already did the stuff they were hired to do. That was a sign of a great PM who did not try to actively wrestle control out of our hands when the team was chugging along just fine.
by yurishimo | 2025-04-10 05:59:25+00:00
And look at how much effort our industry goes through as a whole to work around it! Managing people is harder than wrangling machines, even if the upfront cost to "train" and build the machine is multiples higher. Once a deterministic system works, it will keep going until a variable changes. The "problem" with humans is that our variables change like the weather and it takes a lot more effort and resources to keep everyone on track.

"If you just get out of people's way, then they'll do a good job and the right thing!" - yea, perhaps. But how much of "getting out their way" is more a product of providing meaningful ownership and compensation in the workplace? See the paragraph above. Good employees are expensive and as time marches on, their compensation will need to continue to increase at least with inflation, while the machine will likely become cheaper to operate over time as societal advances bring down the cost and complexity of operation.
by jug | 2025-04-10 05:59:54+00:00
The most fun way I’ve seen users explore its origin is to give it a single period (”.”) as your first query. Only OpenAI answers in this way with a smiley at the end, and it’s probably a more certain way to check it than asking about its arch, because many will incorrectly answer OpenAI and GPT-4 due to (?) tainted training data as ChatGPT has been so much in the news and became a de facto LLM early.
by Tainnor | 2025-04-10 06:00:11+00:00
> But that's not always the model we pick, often we just assume that arithmetic is O(1) and sweep length considerations under the rug.

So, I only have rudimentary undergraduate knowledge about complexity theory, but my materials (e.g. in theoretical CS, cryptography and computational algebra) were always incredibly clear about the fact that arbitrary integer arithmetic isn't constant - this is why complexity classes such as weakly vs. strongly NP-complete exist. Do you have any examples of where people would treat arbitrary length integer arithmetic as constant? (I think most people just never have to use arbitrary precision arithmetic, so that's why they'd not talk about it explicitly.)

You're right that computational complexity depends on the model and that this makes it nontrivial to use in practice. The theoreticians would sweep this under the rug with "these models are all polynomially equivalent to Turing machines" (which lets us formulate a conjecture such as P=NP precisely), but of course that doesn't in practice help you distinguish between a constant, linear or quadratic algorithm.
by drwiggly | 2025-04-10 06:01:47+00:00
This looks to be an in memory db, with a wasm runtime to host domain logic. The hand wavy part was how do they handle scale and clustering? Are we sharding the data our selves (atm it seems so.).

This is nice and all but the hard part is replication and consistency in a distributed database. In memory has its uses, also disk backed tables can have their uses. Pretty much normal databases already do this, just writing domain logic in stored procs is kind of annoying.

I'd imagine embedding sqlite in your binary using memory tables is equivalent at the moment. Well you'd have to write code to publish table updates to clients. I suppose it has that going for it.

I've seen some hand wavy docs about clustering but nothing concrete.
by defrost | 2025-04-10 06:02:25+00:00
> the intention and the purpose of slamming on the brakes is obvious: to stop the car.

Not always, often it's to slow down or to control or initiate a drift.

Hard braking can be done to warn a tail gater to back off, it's also done to sharply reduce speed when headed for a kangaroo or other road hazard .. even though the car can't be stopped in time the aim is to shed speed while staying straight before a probable impact and to increase the time for the animal to move.

If someone is racing on tarmac or rallying on dirt they might practice BLAT - Brake Late, Accelerate Turning.

When driving heavy or articulated vehicles drivers will brake and downshift on down grades to shed speed and not lose control to mass and gravity.

Perhaps purpose is harder for outsiders to deduce.
by mock-possum | 2025-04-10 06:02:53+00:00
Even if you use a tool to do work, you still have to understand how your work will be checked to see whether it meets expectations.

If the expectation is X, and your tool gives you Y, then you’ve failed - no matter if you could have done X by hand from scratch or not, it doesn’t really matter, because what counts is whether the person checking your work can verify that you’ve produced X. You agreed to deliver X, and you gave them Y instead.

So why should you learn to do X when the LLM can do it for you?

Because unless you know how to do X yourself, how will you be able to verify whether the LLM has truly done X?

Your kid needs to learn to understand what the person grading them is expecting, and deliver something that meets those expectations.

That sounds like so much bullshit when you’re a kid, but I wish I had understood it when I was younger.
by svcrunch | 2025-04-10 06:05:46+00:00
Various frontier LLMs were evaluated on their ability to interpret handwritten proofreading marks in printed literary text, using a small benchmark based on Charles Dickens's "Little Dorrit". Results are modest at best, and surprisingly variable across repeated runs, even on the same pages, underscoring the challenge in building reliable, structured-document systems with current multimodal LLMs.

Curious to hear thoughts from others working on similar problems.