MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kfk | 2025-04-07 14:40:48+00:00
I run a small IT consultancy in EU mostly for companies with factories, so I have some biases. I have a few issues with the way IT leadership in EU has been running things the past 20 or so years:

- Absolutely 0 care for having a de-risked supply chain. In fact, IT leaders are extremely happy to have fewer and fewer suppliers, I think it is even one of their goals! And look at it now, what to do when 70% of your company runs on Microsoft and this happens?

- Buy always, no matter what the process is, just buy more tools. So what could have been 1 Python script now is a 5 years contract with yet another US supplier, all data stored in proprietary formats locked under complex APIs of course

- Bundle everything, and I mean everything, in the ERP. Make the ERP so big and complicated that adding anything to it requires tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of euros and multiple months of "development" (as an aside, did you know SAP ABAP code is stored in a database???)

- Lock yourself up completely with whatever Cloud provider you decide to use. Using AWS? Let's do everything with lambdas! Because, who cares about being Cloud agnostic and de-risking your AWS investment?

- Never invest in your internal tech talent, always go after shiny new tech solutions that deliver at best 20% of what they promise, while good motivated employees could have delivered 80% at a fraction of that cost

- Never push back on business asking for specific tools just because the vendors of such tools are amazing at marketing. 90% of manufacturing companies could replace Salesforce with much simpler tools (who knows, maybe even EU based?) and save millions. But no, let's go after brands and never consider the actual 1) business process we are trying to improve; 2) the reference architecture; 3) the underlying data we want to do CRUD on

The re-thinking of the tech stack is not a US tariffs issue, it is an IT leadership problem, and a serious one. The overwhelming lack of understanding of simple risk management strategies has gotten us here, EU companies should never, ever, have put themselves in this position in the first place.
by hijodelsol | 2025-04-07 14:41:21+00:00
Yes, there are ways to buy up existing “empty” companies with a bank account, commercial registration, etc. If you want to found a new one, there are also services that will prepare all paperwork and set up appointments with notaries, etc. for you for affordable prices Day to day operations do generally not require much else than bookkeeping and accounting which you can almost fully outsource (though accountant fees are not cheap, however, doing it yourself is also not to hard if you have the right software and do not sell thousands of different products) unless you are in specific industries There are a few unnecessary fees and it takes longer than it should to get started but for most businesses it does not really matter and is limited in scope when it comes to time and money needed
by beeforpork | 2025-04-07 14:41:25+00:00
So: was anyone hurt? What about the women: what will happen now? Will they be deported? Or were they really students who just wanted a bit of pocket money? Nothing in the article.

OT1H, sex is super good and 90% of movies are about how to get laid (strong men!), and it is essential for human survival, but OTOH, once you pay, it is super bad (weak men!). Morality even manages to override capitalism here. Weird.

And it is really nasty to conflate consensual sexwork with human traficking and not even mentioning what this was. OK, there is: 'allowed women to ... decline to perform services' -- whether it's force or consensual should be the primary information to distinguish 'OK' from 'crime'. But this is under the label of 'the madan was even a bit nice to the women'.

So, more stigma. Money spent on this police work was probably a lot -- it would be interesting to know the balance. The public money could have been spent on support for women instead, like regular free STI checkups, maybe support for office supplies (condoms), maybe medical insurance, legal advice and support.

https://www.who.int/teams/global-hiv-hepatitis-and-stis-prog... https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/POL304...
by snozolli | 2025-04-07 14:41:29+00:00
I mean, I've never worked with a project manager who generated one iota of business value... Just stirring up drama, inserting themselves into decisions that they can't understand, and calling unnecessary meetings with management that they should be handling on their own. I think there's a lot to be said for simple visibility to management. Also, ignorant overconfidence seems to be something that management loves.
by cpitman | 2025-04-07 14:41:52+00:00
I was looking for a more direct measure of this, how often a model "leaked" private state into public state. In a game like this you probably want to sometimes share secrets, but if it happens constantly I would suspect the model struggles to differentiate.

I occasionally try to ask a model to tell a story and give it a hidden motivation of a character, and so far the results are almost always the model just straight out saying the secret.
by ebiester | 2025-04-07 14:42:16+00:00
Let me take the opposite point - it isn't that management does or doesn't respect engineers, but that it does not respect them more or less than sales, or product, or marketing, or legal, or any other part of the system.

If all of sales says "I am losing these deals because our competitors have X, and I cannot make my quota without X, and you do not make your numbers without X." - how do you balance that against a department head who says, "I cannot give you any features this quarter because we've been focusing on features over codebase health for too long?"

Someone who says no for too long doesn't last.
by dtagames | 2025-04-07 14:42:18+00:00
None of this is terrifying and seems overblown. I read the patent grant you linked to. It makes sense that one would not grant the right to make incompatible versions. That would confuse the user. Also, the right of revocation only applies if the DNG implementor tries to sue Adobe. Why would they do that?

Occam's razor here suggests that the camera manufacturers' answers are correct, especially since they are all the same. DNG doesn't let them store what they want to and change it at will -- and this is true of any standardized file format and not true of any proprietary format.
by fransworst | 2025-04-07 14:42:27+00:00
China has lower levels of extreme poverty than the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentag... (percentage living off of less than 2.65USD a day).

They also have lower per capita emissions than the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
by orwin | 2025-04-07 14:42:32+00:00
I'd say racial profiling is probably around the same everywhere, but rule of law is not, and while you have a lot of corruption at the top level in France, bureaucratic processes makes it hard for low-level public servant to ignore said rule of law, which isn't the case in some Eastern European countries (i've heard that Romania made _huge_ improvement though, so maybe my only first-hand experience wouldn't happen these days anymore)
by davidmurdoch | 2025-04-07 14:42:38+00:00
This seems to imply that someone can be "curious about the US, and might like to explore" but that they also already know the value of "what you get as a tourist".

I don't think that is valid. While my monoculture question came of as loaded, judging by the backlash of commenters, and I should haven't asked it, I don't think the OP understands the diversity of the US, and I don't think a judgement on value of travel in the US without experiencing it first can be made; even by US residents.
by tokonoma | 2025-04-07 14:43:13+00:00
A recent study in Germany concluded that permanent electric fences are an effective long-term solution for protecting livestock from predators. granted - the upfront cost is significant. In regions where the wolf population has returned. Rather than placing blame on the wolves, there is a need for policy change that allows for coexistence where the return of wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological benefits. These policies should include livestock reimbursement programs for farmers and subsidies for installing these fences.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-04-07 14:43:13+00:00
> Kafka is out. It's all about Iggy! What do you mean it's different language? Learn it!

Are people really using Iggy/hyping it already? TIL it's now an Apache project[0], that's awesome, it looks impressive!

Sure, most reasonable people are definitely not ripping out Kafka for Iggy yet, but I'm certainly happy to hear it getting more usage/at least being considered.

[0]: https://blog.iggy.rs/posts/apache-incubator/
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-07 14:43:25+00:00
See now, that's quite unrelated what I'm envisioning, or the topic of the OP's article, but that's definitely the way we're headed in terms of file handling.

"File-type strictly associated with app" is good for security and it's good for people's mental organization. Unfortunately you're referring strictly to local file storage, I assume, and practically nothing on my phone is in local storage but "in the cloud". The only local storage I use is for ringtones and certain audiobooks/prayers which I enjoy listening whether or not I'm connected to a network.

It would seem that data centers and cloud services are a long way from "file types strictly associated with app" and also the sort of behavior you describe would be really horrible and undesirable in a typical data-center setting. I mean, I can't even imagine how it'd be implemented, given that data storage is often remote or at least decoupled from the "application server", and it's definitely never a 1:1 relationship between those abstracted components.

Can you imagine needing to "delete the /bin/tar application" in order to purge every file ending in ".tar" or ".tgz"?

But it's true that the new mobile OS paradigm has advantages for cleanup. If you've got a 3rd-party app and you've created some big crap files with it, and you uninstall that app, then it's a clean sweep when it takes along all the crap and you don't need to worry about lingering loose ends, or files you simply can't open, because their handler's gone.

Scoped storage is way more secure; it's also wonderful on my Androids that I can selectively grant access to files and media, rather than giving "the keys to the kingdom" to all these Social Media apps. I definitely never want to post my bank screenshots to Facebook and the possibility no longer looms!

These days I am sort of nonplussed when a web app demands an all-access pass to my Google Drive, because permissions can be appropriately scoped now, and the app can play in its own Drive "Sandbox" without having access to my spreadsheets and medical records. I just wish that there were some really good "cleanup" apps. Remember those "cleanup" programs that would come with antivirus for your PC, or Regclean, or whatever freeware utility would purport to liberate your 10MB HDD? Those were good times.

It's the same with social media posts--I often wish to really scrub my account, delete all posts and all comments and basically all activity, and while that's possible on Facebook it's arduous and it takes me weeks to scrub the major stuff after 4-5 years. But I only think of it on Shrovetide Monday or Fat Tuesday, and then I spend 3 weeks in Lent doing scrub, scrub, scrub. Sometimes the mouse/keyboard gestures are more repetetive & physically demanding than cleaning the toilet. Way too difficult, and that's by design.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-07 14:43:30+00:00
> Are you sure? How it comes reddit implemented this differently?

User data removal requests are handled separately from user initiated account deletion. On Reddit you can find old threads where all of one person’s posts are removed.

> but on the other hand the user creates the issue at a "foreign" project and knows that they don't "own" this conversation.

Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what you, I, or the user thinks is right at time of creation.

The only thing that matters is what the law says or implies. Users who invoke these laws often no longer care or even feel like they’re doing a good thing by hurting the original site in removing something they created.
by ashenke | 2025-04-07 14:43:52+00:00
From the article, it looks like they have multiple teams working on multipe animals at the same time. But the dodo team is going slower than the mammoth and the wolf :

> Keyte added that her team was still a long way from bringing back the dodo. For one thing, the methods for growing and manipulating the embryonic precursors of avian sperm and eggs in a lab setting have been developed for only two birds: the chicken and, recently, the goose. Keyte said, “It’s been almost twenty years since culture conditions for the chicken were established, and those culture conditions have not worked for other bird species, even ones that are really closely related, like quail.” She added that, despite the dearth of related research, her team was getting better at growing the sperm-and-egg precursors in birds: “We’ve gotten to the point where we feel like we can start doing some migration assays”—a technique for studying how the cells in an early embryo begin to differentiate. Once the researchers got the basic method for growing bird cells down, they could use the technology not just to develop a dodo but also to help replenish populations of endangered birds. The team had already identified some species that could use the help.
by sceptic123 | 2025-04-07 14:43:55+00:00
I mean, <edit: previous poster is> saying it's not free software if you don't have rights to modify and redistribute

Free as in beer, as in the software is free if you are giving it away.

> I think new definitions should have new terms.

The point of the article is that we already have terms that sound like they fit. You're saying you don't agree with that as new definition and the article is saying they don't agree with your more strict definition.

Isn't that the way with everything when there's a difference of opinion on the internet. The ones that have the most funding/largest platform end up winning the argument.
by chiffre01 | 2025-04-07 14:43:59+00:00
Considering that software is entirely artificial, I would argue that disciplines in the physical sciences are likely much more difficult when it comes to breaking new ground or discovering novel technologies and solutions to longstanding problems.

Just think about how little progress has been made in solving complex issues like climate change, curing diseases or securing sustainable food supplies. These are incredibly challenging, real-world problems.

In contrast, software engineering often comes down to rearranging data—it’s powerful, but not always as fundamentally complex as tackling the physical world's hardest issues.
by toxik | 2025-04-07 14:44:04+00:00
You don't have to repeat 4 billion years of evolution, an RL agent lives inside a strange universe where the basic axioms happen to be exactly aligned with what you can do in that universe.

Its actions are not muscular, they are literal gameplay actions. It is orders of magnitude easier to learn that the same action should be performed until completion, than that the finger should be pressed against a surface while the hand is stabilized with respect to the cursor on a screen.

One of the most interesting (and pathological) things about humans is that we learn what is rewarding. Not how to get a reward, but actually we train ourselves to be rewarded by doing difficult/novel/funny/etc things. Notably this is communicated largely by being social, i.e., we feel reward for doing something difficult because other people are impressed by that.

In Castaway, Hanks' only companion is a mute, deflated ball, but nonetheless he must keep that relationship alive---to keep himself alive. The climax of the movie is when Hanks returns home and people are so impressed, his efforts are validated.

Contrast that to RL, there is no intrinsic motivation. The agents do not play, or meaningfully explore, really. The extent of its exploration is a nervous tic that makes it press the wrong button with probability ε. The reason it cannot hold down buttons is because it explores by having Parkinson's disease, by accident, not because it thought it might find out something useful/novel/funny/etc. In fact, it can't even have a definition of those words, because they are defined in the space between beings.
by neogodless | 2025-04-07 14:44:10+00:00
Just hop on over to Fox News web site. There's nothing about stock markets in the news. If you dig into Economy / Markets you'll find an article talking about how the national debt is poised to destroy the U.S. Still nothing about tariffs having any downsides, or any negative things happening in the U.S. or global economy.

Eventually some Trump voters will notice on their own stock market fluctuations, which of those, what percentage will learn that it is actually Trump's decisions that caused it?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-07 14:44:20+00:00
The main reason is that image Quality is the main coefficient of their corporation. They felt that it was a competitive advantage, and sort of a "secret ingredient," like you will hear from master chefs.

They feel that their images have a "corporate fingerprint," and are always concerned that images not get out, that don't demonstrate that.

This often resulted in difficulty, getting sample images.

Also, for things like chromatic aberration correction, you could add metadata that describes the lens that took the picture, and use that to inform the correction algorithm.

In many cases, a lens that displays chromatic aberration is an embarrassment. It's one of those "dirty little secrets," that camera manufacturers don't want to admit exists.

As they started producing cheaper lenses, with less glass, they would get more ChrAb, and they didn't want people to see that.

Raw files are where you can compensate for that, with the least impact on image quality. You can have ChrAb correction, applied after the demosaic, but it will be "lossy." If you can apply it before, you can minimize data loss. Same with noise reduction.

Many folks here, would absolutely freak, if they saw the complexity of our deBayer filter. It was a pretty massive bit of code.
by kypro | 2025-04-07 14:44:29+00:00
I don't think I am, and for context here I have built my own DQNs from scratch to learn to play games like Snake.

I'd argue if you consider the size of the input and output space here it's not as complex you're implying.

To refer back to my example, to tell the difference between four legged creatures is complicated because there's a huge number of possible outputs and the visual input space is both large and complex. Learning how to detect patterns in raw image data is complicated and is why we and other animals are preloaded with the neurological structures to do this. It's also why we often use pretrained models when training models to label new outputs – simply learning how detect simple patterns in visual data is difficult enough so if this step can be skipped it often makes sense to skip it.

In constrast the inputs to Minecraft are relatively very simple – you have a handful of buttons which can be pressed and those buttons can be pressed for different durations. Similarly the output space here while large is relatively simple and presumably simply detecting that an action like holding a button results in a state change shouldn't be that complex to learn... I mean it's already learning that pressing a button results in a state change so I think you'd need to explain to me why adding a tiny bit of additional complexity here is so unreasonable. Maybe I'm missing something.
by moduspol | 2025-04-07 14:44:37+00:00
100%, although also:

Try to be as objective as possible when evaluating that tech debt. It's possible (in many cases, probable) that the tech debt actually isn't as bad for the business as an engineer perceives, and it's quite possible there are other engineering efforts that are more worthy of development time and resources.

Being willing and vocal about acknowledging and accepting that reality is also quite helpful.
by graypegg | 2025-04-07 14:44:42+00:00
(For good reason) Language is a picky thing in Canada, it's very important (when selling to the federal government or Québec) that both English and French localizations have equal footing.

To open a en-US XLSX file in a fr-CA copy of Excel, you will need the en-US language pack. If you make this a requirement for a Québec government entity... you will not get that contract.
by pseudalopex | 2025-04-07 14:44:46+00:00
> Why should US citizens deeply care about Canada?

You don't have to deeply care about Canada to oppose annexation threats.

> Don't tell me Canadians lose sleep thinking about the well being of US.

A Canadian prime minister said Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.[1]

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pierre_Trudeau#1969
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-07 14:45:52+00:00
>"This is a bit of a meta-comment, but reading through the responses to a post like this is really interesting because it demonstrates how our collective response to this stuff is (a) wildly divergent and (b) entirely anecdote-driven."

People having vastly different opinions on AI simply comes down to token usage. If you are using millions of tokens on a regular basis, you completely understand the revolutionary point we are at. If you are just chatting back and forth a bit with something here and there, you'll never see it.
by jasode | 2025-04-07 14:46:13+00:00
>Companies like Mailchimp and Atlassian (in their early days) clearly qualified as startups even though they hadn't raised VC.

Even the Paul Graham essay defining "startups" the way he saw it said "VC funding" wasn't required: https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

It's just that many mentally associate "startups" with VCs and software tech because that's often how rocket-ship growth happens.
by summarity | 2025-04-07 14:46:26+00:00
SA, links are below.

Berlin has different programs. An equivalent scholarship is available through ESF+ funds: https://www.foerderdatenbank.de/FDB/Content/DE/Foerderprogra...

I've also been part of HTGF and bmp funded startups in Berlin, and those two are the most active players in seed funding, if more traditional capital-for-equity is what you're looking for. Both are also experienced with augmenting their investment with EU and state (IBB) funds.
by hobofan | 2025-04-07 14:46:26+00:00
There are already services that do that, e.g. firma.de[0]

But in general, not really. I also just founded a GmbH in Germany, and the paperwork really isn't that crazy, and for the more complicated parts you'll generally will want to have a tax advisor you are going to have a long-term relationship with (rather than a one-off founding service). I considered using a founding service, but ultimately, most of the "hard parts" about the process is in understanding what agency you have to talk to for what parts, which you'll have to learn anyways if you want to run a business in a way that doesn't land you in jail, so the benefits of such a service are marginal.

The only real way to streamline it would be to deregulate the process (e.g. getting rid of notary requirement).

[0]: https://www.firma.de
by tristor | 2025-04-07 14:46:49+00:00
It's, in many ways, the same problem as having too many "yes men" on a team at work or in your middle management layer. You end up getting wishy-washy, half-assed "yes" answers to questions that everyone would have been better off if they'd been answered as "no" or "yes, with caveats" with predictable results.

In fact, this might be why so many business executives are enamored with LLMS/GenAI: It's a yes-man they don't even have to employ, and because they're not domain experts, as per usual, they can't tell that they're being fed a line of bullshit.