MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daseiner1 | 2025-04-25 15:58:44+00:00
Yes, I would absolutely consider Zuckerberg as one of the top 5% most talented people in the world. Frankly, that isn’t a particularly high bar whatsoever. Haven't you ever been amongst the general populace?

You’ve committed the typical sin on this site of overrating technical prowess and underrating business acumen. There’s a reason so many founder CEOs from his era ended up getting sacked while he’s maintained control and Meta has become the behemoth it is. Next you're going to tell us how Steve Jobs was a charlatan and a cheat.

Is the act of buying a lottery ticket a "rounding error" when it comes to winning the powerball?
by whoknowsidont | 2025-04-25 15:59:09+00:00
I stated a position and viewpoint, GP said "no that's not the only option." but didn't elucidate anything.

So yeah, state something affirmative that can be responded to. And again, don't be disingenuous about how effective those options would be, this is not the same America we were in even 4 months ago.
by openasocket | 2025-04-25 15:59:23+00:00
At the moment we don't have a lot of the facts. All we seem to have at this moment is a (since deleted?) post from the head of the FBI. There's a ton of context that is missing. Like what does "intentionally misdirecting" mean? Does that mean saying "he went that way" when he really went in the opposite direction? Does it mean not answering questions about this person, or being obtuse? I'd also like to know more of the circumstances here. Did ICE agents literally walk into court and question the judge while sitting on the bench?
by incanus77 | 2025-04-25 15:59:29+00:00
I love this. We have a Fiat 500 EV that we got for $8k used that’s a fantastic city / small hauling car, and this beats it in many qualities in a way that’s still minimalist, reasonably affordable, and low maintenance (if as promised). We also have a 1986 4WD VW camper van which gets the big jobs done but is still manageable in the city. This truck is like the DIY marriage of the two.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-04-25 15:59:42+00:00
Protesilaos in this piece https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2019-08-11-why-emacs-switch/ has the following closing paragraphs:

"The gist is that you should be learning by doing. It takes patience and dedication. Study and reuse other people’s code, but do not blindly copy-paste things: patterns of behaviour you do not understand will quickly accumulate, resulting in a potentially fragmented, frustrating experience. The key is to not expect instant gratification. I know, this is how most of the world works these days. Thankfully, Emacs runs contrary to the zeitgeist: it caters to the user who cares deeply about the quality and functionality of their tools."

From my reading of the computer history books, it seems like there was a time when this sort of dedication to taking things slow and investing time into your tools and moving steadily towards mastery of all aspects of your craft were seen as de rigueur, part of the game.

Moments like this, you want to imagine that some people will turn back to that. I guess when the next big thing comes along with the hype and marketing and "ease-of-use", we'll be off on the same cycle again, though.
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-25 15:59:57+00:00
EULAs and TOS are not legal agreements. It is not unlawful to break them.

The TOS is purely a thing that the owner can point at as a legitimate reason for banning you.

There is no law anywhere binding you to the terms of an EULA or TOS. It's even less binding than a verbal agreement and a handshake.
by ldoughty | 2025-04-25 16:00:03+00:00
It's exactly what I think a lot of techies want.

Highly technical people tend to come in two varieties when it comes to electronics in their personal life:

1. Absolutely nothing smart that's not under their direct (or highly configurable) control.

2. Sure just take all my data I don't care. I'll pay subscriptions fees too.

Modern cars mostly do #2... to the point we potentially faced a subscription being required to enable seat warmers [0]. There's basically no cars on the market that do #1 anymore.

And with #2, you're bound by what the vehicle manufacturer decides. They are ending up like forced cable boxes - minimum viable product quality. They can be slow to change pages/views and finicky in touch responses... which I think are actually more dangerous... but this is our only option if this is the car we pick... and almost no one decides on a car for it's infotainment, so it's not a feature that gets much love or attention.

Additionally, technology moves too fast. My first car had a tape deck. The next one had a CD Player.. then I had to get an mp3-player-to-radio dongle, then I replaced my infotainment system with a bluetooth supporting one... and so on.. Even Android Auto (early versions) integrated directly into the infotainment system and needed potentially proprietary cables (USB-to-proprietary connector), and the systems did not look designed to be upgraded/replaced.

This model here allows you to upgrade your infotainment system every time you upgrade your phone (or dedicated tablet)... or simply by changing apps.

Also, Android Auto has mostly solved that UX issue (It's the same UX on a tablet as on an equivalent built-in infotainment system).. Though iPads probably (?) don't have a similar feature.

So I think the 'bring your own infotainment' idea is awesome.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23718101
by TuxSH | 2025-04-25 16:00:20+00:00
> this would be unacceptable for os kernels

Depends on the boundary. I can give a non-Linux, microkernel example (but that was/is shipped on dozens of millions of devices):

- prior to 11.0, Nintendo 3DS kernel SVC (syscall) implementations did not clear output parameters, leading to extremely trivial leaks. Unprivileged processes could retrieve kernel-mode stack addresses easily and making exploit code much easier to write, example here: https://github.com/TuxSH/universal-otherapp/blob/master/sour...

- Nintendo started clearing all temporary registers on the Switch kernel at some point (iirc x0-x7 and some more); on the 3DS they never did that, and you can leak kernel object addresses quite easily (iirc by reading r2), this made an entire class of use-after-free and arbwrite bugs easier to exploit (call SvcCreateSemaphore 3 times, get sema kernel object address, use one of the now-patched exploit that can cause a double-decref on the KSemaphore, call SvcWaitSynchronization, profit)

more generally:

- unclearead padding in structures + copy to user = infoleak

so one at least ought to be careful where crossing privilege boundaries
by RetroTechie | 2025-04-25 16:00:23+00:00
> It seems unlikely that collapse would ocurr in a sequence conveinient to the use of tech toys for survival.

That's a common misunderstanding:

Our 'installed base' of technology / equipment would not disappear or disintegrate in most types of collapse. Your gadgets would keep working just fine (hardware-wise, that is).

What is susceptible to failure: communications (internet, cell networks, electronic payment systems, etc), power grid, logistics chains (supermarket supply, postal services etc), social structures, law & order (riots, looting), 3rd party-provided services, and probably more.

Also: unless a km+ sized meteor hits, truly large-scale collapse is more likely to happen gradually rather than overnight.

So: think power out, internet cut & riots in the street. With off-grid solar, and software (+data) that works offline, you can enjoy your tech toys just fine.

The tricky thing here is the degree to which daily-used tech requires external services to do anything useful.
by pphysch | 2025-04-25 16:01:00+00:00
> You know, there are systems that know what they want to be (Amazon S3, Postres, etc), and then there are systems that try to eat the world (Kafka, k8s, systemd).

I am not sure about this taxonomy. K8s, systemd, and (I would add) the Linux kernel are all taking on the ambitious task of central, automatic orchestration of general purpose computing systems. It's an extremely complex problem and I think all those technologies have done a reasonably good job of choosing the right abstractions to break down that (ever-changing) mess.

People tend to criticize projects with huge scope because they are obviously complex, and complexity is the enemy, but most of the complexity is necessary in these cases.

If Kafka's goal is to be a general purpose "operating system" for generic data systems, then that explains its complexity. But it's less obvious to me that this premise is a good one.
by dvorack101 | 2025-04-25 16:01:02+00:00
Indeed a severe case of paranoia?

1. Create a new post. 2. Include an Image, set filter to All File types and select "/etc/hosts". 3. You get served with an weird error message box displacing a weird error message. 4. After this the Substack posts editor is broken. Heck, every time i access the Dashboard, it waits forever to build the page.

Did find this text while browsing the source for an error (see original ascii art: https://pastebin.com/iBDsuer7):

SUBSTACK WANTS YOU

TO BUILD A BETTER BUSINESS MODEL FOR WRITING

https://substack.com/jobs
by jkrems | 2025-04-25 16:01:05+00:00
Could this be trivially solved client-side by the editor if it just encoded the slashes, assuming it's HTML or markdown that's stored? Replacing `/etc/hosts` with `&#47;etc&#47;hosts` for storage seems like an okay workaround. Potentially even doing so for anything that's added to the WAF rules automatically by syncing the rules to the editor code.
by foxyv | 2025-04-25 16:01:13+00:00
Now is a very good time to be a vegetarian. I can only imagine how much worse meat is going to get with the gutting of federal regulations.

Before I stopped eating meat, I would be poisoned every other month by some restaurant or another. I know that I can get poisoned by non-meat products, but they seem to be the most common culprit. Since I stopped eating meat I haven't had nearly as many problems.
by dudeinhawaii | 2025-04-25 16:01:16+00:00
That's a fair point. What I find interesting (and perhaps didn't articulate properly) isn't confusion about the LLM's behavior, but the question of whether human cognition might operate on similar principles at a fundamental level - just via different mechanisms and with better calibration (similar algorithm, different substrate), which is why I used human examples at the start.

When I see an LLM confidently generate an answer about a non-existent thing by associating related concepts, I wonder how different is this from humans confidently filling knowledge gaps with our own probability-based assumptions? We do this constantly - connecting dots based on pattern recognition and making statistical leaps between concepts.

If we understand how human minds worked in their entirety, then I'd be more likely to say "ha, stupid LLM, it hallucinates instead of saying I don't know". But, I don't know, I see a strong similarity to many humans. What are weight and biases but our own heavy-weight neural "nodes" built up over a lifetime to say "this is likely to be true because of past experiences"? I say this with only hobbyist understanding of neural science topics mind you.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-25 16:01:27+00:00
Depends a bit on your politics.

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/20/nx-s1-4966725/a-decade-after-...

> Ten years after staging an armed standoff with federal agents on his Nevada ranch, Cliven Bundy remains free. As does his son Ammon, despite an active warrant for Ammon from Idaho related to a harassment lawsuit.
by conradev | 2025-04-25 16:02:15+00:00
I'd recommend folks watch the video – it's fascinating.

The truck gets OTA updates through your phone and not some LTE modem. It doesn't have one. They moved all car management including OBD-like functionality to the phone, too, which I think is awesome.

This is how I want the interior design philosophy of manual controls to be digitized – with digital control. I'd pay $10k more for physical buttons, though.
by cityofdelusion | 2025-04-25 16:02:22+00:00
Agreed. The U.S. market had a very long run of both large expensive and small cheap pickup trucks, and people consistently have bought the big luxury pickups. It is why all the small trucks were axed to begin with. Even back in their prime, I saw many more F-150s than Rangers. Its an easy up-sell as I'm sure any car salesman will say: well for only a few more thousand you get into a full-size, and from there, add some options and its over.
by soared | 2025-04-25 16:02:23+00:00
Does this strategy even make sense? You can charge $20k for a car. Why wouldn’t you add options that cost you nearly nothing but some amount of buyers will opt in for a meaningful revenue increase.

Charge $1k for paint. Even if 95% of people don’t do that, 5% of orders just increased their revenue by 5%. Paint doesn’t take engineering time.. just spend $500 and let some other company do it. This is why trims exist, having a single low price point means people who want to spend more either produce lower revenue than possible, or are disappointed.

IMO this one trim, one price is almost certainly a prelaunch marketing gimmick as from a business perspective there is literally no benefit.
by taintegral | 2025-04-25 16:02:31+00:00
> 'AI safety' is a meaningless term

I disagree with this assertion. As you said, safety is an attribute of action. We have many of examples of artificial intelligence which can take action, usually because they are equipped with robotics or some other route to physical action.

I think whether providing information counts as "taking action" is a worthwhile philosophical question. But regardless of the answer, you can't ignore that LLMs provide information to _humans_ which are perfectly capable of taking action. In that way, 'AI safety' in the context of LLMs is a lot like knife safety. It's about being safe _with knives_. You don't give knives to kids because they are likely to mishandle them and hurt themselves or others.

With regards to censorship - a healthy society self-censors all the time. The debate worth having is _what_ is censored and _why_.
by danans | 2025-04-25 16:02:36+00:00
> By reformulating prompts to look like one of a few types of policy files, such as XML, INI, or JSON, an LLM can be tricked into subverting alignments or instructions.

It seems like a short term solution to this might be to filter out any prompt content that looks like a policy file. The problem of course, is that a bypass can be indirected through all sorts of framing, could be narrative, or expressed as a math problem.

Ultimately this seems to boil down to the fundamental issue that nothing "means" anything to today's LLM, so they don't seem to know when they are being tricked, similar to how they don't know when they are hallucinating output.
by bicepjai | 2025-04-25 16:02:38+00:00
I love the take on fandom, this is how I would want it. While this article portrays fandom as a pure, innocent and positive force, my experience shows it can have a darker side. In places like South India, fandom often evolves: fandom becomes factions, factions become gangs, gangs become political groups, and political groups become dynasties or kingdoms. This cycle limits leadership diversity and negatively impact governance and society. IMHO fandom isn’t always innocent; it can wield significant social and political influence, for better or worse. Note: written with gpt4o
by anonym29 | 2025-04-25 16:03:03+00:00
Would it not be better to have a peaceful, civil, lawful, separation of the two different Americas than for us to rigidly cling to an idea of a "United" States that no longer represents reality?

We're clearly living in two different realities already, brought about the partisan media (on both sides) willfully and deliberately misrepresenting reality to serve the interests of their shadowy trillion-dollar corporate conglomerates, amplified by the digital echo chambers brought about other secretive, manipulative trillion-dollar corporate conglomerates.

Is it seriously better to let the entire federal government collapse, leaving a power void in it's wake, than to have two Americas with freedom of movement, free trade, etc?
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-25 16:03:09+00:00
To be fair, a lot of farms need a big-ass pickup truck because they are always towing horses to go to shows or trailheads. We have 70 beautiful acres and a network of trails my wife built that were inspired by Het Vondelpark in Amsterdam. [1] If everything goes right we trailer in a horse once and never have to trailer it out although some horses don't fit in or have to go to the vet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vondelpark

The Fit, however, is really genius. It's got the utility of an SUV in the body of a compact. I can't believe Honda's excuse that it wasn't selling -- in my area it is a running gag that if you have a blue Fit somebody will park another blue Fit next to you at the supermarket or that it makes a great getaway car, if somebody catches you doing donuts in their lawn you can say it musta been somebody elese.
by taylorius | 2025-04-25 16:03:22+00:00
I would dispute that what is happening with AI music is well described by the phrase "expand and grow". In my view "democratzation" s a weasel word, meaning the removal of skill and effort from the process of production. The operator of such a system inevitably becomes more like a client, choosing between options served up to them. You could plausibly replace the human with a random number generator, and an external observer would not tell the difference.
by armedin | 2025-04-25 16:03:36+00:00
I'm delighted to hear you like the library! The 'coming soon' components mean they haven't been packaged yet, and specifically the text-blur-reveal is tricky to do. You can, however, access the raw code on GitHub. Essentially you have 2 ways, either via the npm package, or copying the raw code. There are more components coming, one being the Matrix-like effect. I haven't worked with Astro before, so cannot give an input on that.
by alistairSH | 2025-04-25 16:04:18+00:00
The problem isn't deporting illegal immigrants.

The problem(s) are... - lack of due process (Constitution doesn't distinguish between legal and illegal residents) - leading to deportation of legal residents (Garcia case from MD) - sending illegal immigrants to a jail that's hosted abroad is NOT deportation in the normal sense of the word - it closer to our holding of detainees at Gitmo post-9/11.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-25 16:04:53+00:00
Tesla played with model of electric car in his younger school years. All parts were invented and built by people from Austro-hungarian empire. Long before he was even thinking about going to america. And stationary electric motor is just transformer if you think about it ...

Jozef Murgaš also chaplain, invented and was first person to transmit modulated radio waves (voice), few months before vacuum tube was even invented. Marconi was morsecode, Bell was wired phone.

Clergy was essentially what army is nowadays, they gave you education and thus enabling you to rise in socio economic pyramid.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-25 16:04:57+00:00
It's applying reality to your abstract question.

Almost no one disagrees with enforcing federal immigration law. The pushback has to do with the illegal manner in which it's happening in reality.

One of the most pernicious memes among the pseudo-intellect crowd is isolating an event from its context and then saying "see, not a problem in isolation!" But these things are not happening in isolation.

With high enough levels of motivated pseudo-intellectual dissection, you can portray a fatal car crash as a series of mundane procedural details and then just say "what bearing does the fatality have on it?"
by Ericson2314 | 2025-04-25 16:05:12+00:00
> not a world where all programmers not functioning at a PhD-candidate level are evicted from the profession because they can't handle proof languages.

Well, to be fair, I would not cry if this happened.

> Or, to put it another way, there is no dependently-typed language I can even consider saying to my manager "Hey, you asked me to do X and I think I'll use language Y which is dependently typed", and as far as I can see, the problem isn't just that "nobody has built the standard library for it yet" or any thing else, the problem boils down to, they just aren't easy enough to use to call them practical.

I wrote a tic-tac-toe in Lean. https://github.com/Ericson2314/lean-tic-tac-toe/. Yes, it took me far longer than I would have in Haskell, but that is just because:

1. Unfamiliarity with the standard library, tooling etc. I didn't expect Applicative to be in mathlib not batteries, for example.

2. I tried to prove things I wouldn't have in the Haskell version

If I knew the standard library, and did plane old arbitrary-length lists and partial (bounds-checked) indexing with arbitrary nats, I would have had less fun, but also done things way faster.

I am excited for the latest Machine-Learning tactics or whatever too, but the idea that "everything is going to do something they didn't before (proofs) and it will be no harder" is not a goal I am aiming for. Proofs will always be a trade-off between up-front costs and fearless refactoring on an ongoing basis. That's OK! I don't expect magic, I just want my programming language to give me the full spectrum of options, and then I can make my own economic decisions.
by peanut-walrus | 2025-04-25 16:05:20+00:00
So it's cheaper *on AWS*. Any cloud provider where cross-AZ traffic is not $$$, I can't imagine this architecture being cheaper.

Engineering solutions which only exist because AWS pricing is whack are...well, certainly a choice.

I can also think of lots of cases where whatever you're running is fine to just run in a single AZ since it's not critical.
by hodder | 2025-04-25 16:05:24+00:00
Yeah I work for a large oil company. Companies like BP, Shell, Marathon, Valero etc all have oil traders/marketers doing refinery supply. There are also intermediaries like traders at midstream companies, producers (selling the oil), or trading shops like Trafigura, Glencore, Mercuria who are slowly accruing more physical assets. Some hedge funds operate in the phys space as well.
by rkagerer | 2025-04-25 16:05:43+00:00
It's an "I wrote a letter" blog post - which I suppose may be novel for some in today's audience.

TLDR: To save space, some old GPLv2 software didn't include the full license text, instead just a short notice with an address you can contact to obtain it. Blogger did so (glad the address still worked after 30+ years), included return postage (some nifty US stamps bought off eBay), but the reply received was version 3 instead. So they did so again, and received the correct version.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-25 16:05:58+00:00
>Even back in their prime, I saw many more F-150s than Rangers.

I think you're misremembering. The streets were flooded with Rangers and S10s back in the day. Full sized pickups have been the most popular class of vehicle for decades but that number is grossly inflated by the amount that are bought as fleet vehicles or work vehicles.
by kemayo | 2025-04-25 16:06:25+00:00
I updated my post with new information from the updated article, and in the context of that I think you're pretty much right. It sounds like the judge basically said "you need permission to arrest someone in the middle of my hearing, go get it" and then didn't change anything about the process of their hearing while that permission was being obtained.

This was definitely not them being helpful, but I'm incredibly doubtful that they could be successfully prosecuted for this.
by _dark_matter_ | 2025-04-25 16:06:26+00:00
I lived in Iowa City for several years while my kids were young. It is an amazing city. Everyone is lovely, the restaurants are great, home of an active local grocer, tons of activities by the university, great schools, low CoL, completely walkable, and nothing was ever more than 5 minutes away (yes, when we moved, I had to reorient myself on what "far away" was). I think my kids were lucky to grow up there!