MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-04-12 15:39:05+00:00
"Name literally any other technology that works this way"

Since you don't like my animal examples, how about power tools? Chainsaws, table saws, lathes... all examples of tools where you have to learn how to use them before they'll be useful to you.

(My inability to come up with an analogy you find convincing shouldn't invalidate my claim that "LLMs are unreliable technology that is still useful if you learn how to work with it" - maybe this is the first time that's ever been true for an unreliable technology, though I find that doubtful.)
by tmcb | 2025-04-12 15:39:16+00:00
> So will the government mandate that 50% of stay at home parents be men?

Well, obviously not. But there is always the caveat that suggesting government providing adequate child care to working women is communism of whatever. Is it feasible to have some compromise here?

> And if 50/50 is the goal, where is the government push for more men in places where they're underrepresented, like university students, nurses, teachers?

This sounds like a perfectly legitimate ask if young men do really care about it. Why not contact your local representative and explain the issue in an articulate manner?
by flebron | 2025-04-12 15:39:22+00:00
Perhaps this chapter can help? https://jax-ml.github.io/scaling-book/tpus/

It's a chip (and associated hardware) that can do linear algebra operations really fast. XLA and TPUs were co-designed, so as long as what you are doing is expressible in XLA's HLO language (https://openxla.org/xla/operation_semantics), the TPU can run it, and in many cases run it very efficiently. TPUs have different scaling properties than GPUs (think sparser but much larger communication), no graphics hardware inside them (no shader hardware, no raytracing hardware, etc), and a different control flow regime ("single-threaded" with very-wide SIMD primitives, as opposed to massively-multithreaded GPUs).
by AIPedant | 2025-04-12 15:40:40+00:00
I don't use Deep Research or NotebookLM myself (or any other generative AI product). But every example of a NotebookLM audio overview I've seen was actively misleading and ignored critical context. However the voices were very personable and entertaining! Likewise Deep Research uses terrible sources and often gets things wrong, I have yet to see a single example that holds up to scrutiny...but it sure goes down smooth compared to reading a bunch of disparate papers!

I suspect Deep Research and NotebookLM aren't used to get information so much as to provide extremely low-quality infotainment. I read Wikipedia recreationally and I can definitely see the appeal of having a Wikipedia-like article/podcast for anything you can think of. But they seem miserably bad for actually learning stuff (especially the stupid podcasts).
by gruez | 2025-04-12 15:41:32+00:00
>but it's still an attempt to prime a would-be subscriber to focus on the annual, billed monthly and play on their understanding of the word "monthly" by using it in both options.

Do you think "$500 biweekly" car ads, or "$2000/month" apartment rentals are the same?

>"Annual, billed monthly" is set in smaller italicized type right under the actual price of US$59.99/mo on the main pricing page[0].

I might be sympathetic to this reasoning if this was a $2 coffee or something, but $60/month is nothing to be sneezed at, and I'd expect buyers to read the very legible text under the price tag. Otherwise, this makes as much sense as complaining about supermarket price tags that show "$4" in huge font, and "/lb" in small font, claiming that it misled buyers into thinking an entire package of ground beef costs $4, because the $4 price tag "primed" them or whatever.

>While it mentions a fee for cancelling after 14 days, you'll find nary a mention of what that fee actually is until you track down a legal page[1] that isn't linked to any point during the payment process up until the sign-in prompt (I didn't bother creating a new account to look beyond that). At the very least, it's not present during the stage when you're still relatively uncommitted and somewhat more likely to notice any more onerous terms were they present.

Okay but if you read most complaints, it's clear that they're not even aware that such early termination fee even existed. There's approximately zero people who were aware the termination fee existed, found it too hard to figure out what it actually was, but somehow still went with the "Annual, billed monthly" option.

>Finally, there's an option for a 30-day free trial of Adobe Stock. I'd have sworn it was pre-selected a few years ago, but I may be mistaken on that. If it was, then at least that's a change for the better. Anyhow, did you notice how it's on a 30 day trial period whereas the normal plan has a 14 day cancellation window? Let those deadlines fall to the back of your mind for a week or two, and will you remember which is 14 days and which is 30? There was no reason why Adobe had to use 30 days for Stock or only 14 days for their other offerings. But it adds to the confusion, and that's the entire purpose of a dark pattern. Stock is also an "annual, billed monthly plan," but nowhere in the checkout process is it mentioned that Stock also has a large cancellation fee. That's hidden in a separate part of the Subscription Terms page.[1]

This feels like grasping at straws. If we're going to invoke "people might get two numbers confused with each other", we might as well also invoke "people can't calculate dates properly, and therefore a 14 day cancellation window is misleading because they think 14 days = 2 weeks, and set up a cancellation reminder for the same day of the week 2 weeks afterwards, not realizing that would be just over 14 days and thus outside the window".
by gsibble | 2025-04-12 15:42:00+00:00
Do people not realize 80% of companies are self-insured, which means they are the ones actually paying for procedures? Not insurance companies.

Insurance companies are just doing what their clients, our employers, want which is reducing cost at every possible angle. Just like how companies cut every possible cost everywhere these days.

It's all the same problem: cost cutting across the board, at any price, by American businesses.
by brookst | 2025-04-12 15:42:08+00:00
I don’t think it works. Search is the perfect place for ads for exactly the reasons you state: people have high intent.

But a majority of chatbot usage is not searching for the solution to a problem. And if he Chatbot is serving the ads when I’m using it for creative writing, reformatting text, having a python function, written, etc, I’m going to be annoyed and switch to a different product.

Search is all about information retrieval. AI is all about task accomplishment. I don’t think ads work well in the latter , perhaps some subset, like the task is really complicated or the AI can tell the user is failing to achieve it. But I don’t think it’s nearly as could have a fit as search.
by AlexGrothen | 2025-04-12 15:42:13+00:00
Well, there is a difference with Russia, actually. One of Palestinian professors, who studied freedom of speech, shaped it this way: The difference is that people from Russia, Arab countries etc DO know that their media is lying - but also they know the Western media is lying, because they read all that nonsense the westerners write about their countries.

Good for you that you started to realize how corrupt the Western media is.
by osigurdson | 2025-04-12 15:42:57+00:00
My issue with eventsource is it doesn't use standard auth. Including the jwt in a query string is an odd step out requiring alternate middleware and feels like there is a high chance of leaking the token in logs, etc.

I'm curious though, what is your solution to this?

Secondly, not every client is a browser (my OpenAI / fine tune example is non-browser based).

Finally, I just don't like the idea of things failing all time with something working behind the scenes to resolve issues. I'd like errors / warnings in logs to mean something, personally.

>> I don't understand the advantages of recreating SSE yourself like this vs just using SSE

This is more of a strawman and don't plan to implement it. It is based on experiences consuming SSE endpoints as well as creating them.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-12 15:43:26+00:00
Common people across the board have been sick and tired of the establishment since 2000ish. First it was the tea party, then they voted for Obama because a younger black guy talking about change seemed credible, then occupy wall street, then Maga, then 2020/BLM, then Maga round 2. While these movements have all been coopted to various extents by various bits of the establishment power structure the underlying trend and common theme that is minting these (at least initially) grassroots is very clear and with each round the movements seem to gain a broader base. People of all political positions seek an alternate to the establishment.

If people could pull their heads out of their partisan asses they'd see this. The color of the dictator may as well be the result of a coin toss. This is the result of a long term trend.
by netsharc | 2025-04-12 15:44:00+00:00
I learned that "4D chess" just means, "I see the 3 dimensions, I can't explain what's happening, but I guess they can, because they have that extra dimension.".

At this point it's something like 100D chess, because 99 levels of "Why?" have been explained by "because they're morons" but the defenders keep believing there's an extra dimension...
by DannyBee | 2025-04-12 15:44:02+00:00
First off, you won't convince me these folks don't belong in jail. I just dont' think anything less than serious criminal penalties is going to get us anywhere anymore.

But at the same time, i guess i'll be contrarian and say the other notable bit to me is that the person wants the absolute best doctors working on her, at the absolute best place possible because they pioneered the technique. I get why. But it's not necessarily reasonable. Obviously, if her cases needs that, she should get it. But it's really unclear from the article - is her case one that any competent surgeon could do, or only these surgeons can do. It does say they pioneered one technique, but that doesn't mean they are the only ones who do it or are good at it. She just says "i want the people who teach other people working on me", which certainly resonates with lots of people (i'm sure that's why it's there), but also, probably too high of a standard?

In the end - the absolute best of everything is expensive. Very expensive. I doubt a system can afford to have that happen for everyone, even if the insurers were not evil fraudsters. So even if we ever fix the insurer side, I think we will also have to fix the patient expectation side around standards of care.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-12 15:44:10+00:00
They're usually a bit more expensive here than a taxi. It can be beneficial because sometimes they have deals, and I sometimes take one when I have to book it in advance or when I'm afraid there will be delays with a corrsponding high cost. Though Uber tend to hit me with congestion charges then too. At least with a taxi I can ask them to take a different route. The problem with the uber drivers is that they don't know any of the street names here, they just follow the app's navigation. Whereas taxi drivers tend to be much more aware and know the streets and often come up with suggestions.

This also means that they sometimes fleece tourists but when they figure you know the city well they don't dare :) Often if they take one wrong turn I make a scene about frowning and looking out of the window and then they quickly get back on track. Of course that's another usecase where uber would be better, if you don't know the city you're in.
by bjourne | 2025-04-12 15:45:19+00:00
> You're technically correct of course.

That's the "correct" that matters. Not the "I'd like to put words in your mouth and pretend you meant something you don't". Israel is legal abstraction, not human life and as such has no "fundamental rights" whatsoever. Humans have fundamental rights, however, and those rights always trump the non-rights of state entities.

You do know that the reason Zionists harp on about "Israel's right to exist" is to deny the victim's of that state's violence legal redress, right?
by culopatin | 2025-04-12 15:45:33+00:00
It’s not “completely “ false. Otherwise this sentiment wouldn’t exist and .NET 4 would be a nice memory like Windows 2000.

Opportunity cost? Sure, but you can’t deny that small teams that just wanted some stuff to please a business itch were able put the shitty code in whatever Win server they had at the time and forget about it. They didn’t have to ask IT to evaluate any installs, it was right there. And today in win 10 servers, that code still runs, returning ugly aspx.

We have some equivalent 2.1 stuff laying around and no one wants to go through the trouble of updating that.

You’re probably going to say something like “well that’s what you get when you just let your code rot and no one cared to document it and maintain it”. Yes, true, but that’s not the on topic point, one of those constantly comes up in vulnerability reports and one doesn’t.
by sfx77 | 2025-04-12 15:46:36+00:00
Correction a two state solution is never possible when your neighbors are a terrorist organization backed by Iran, who coordinates with other terrorist organization who are also funded by Iran. This word play of calling Israel will not work. Unfortunately not everything is relative and words have actual meanings. When an organizations policy is to kidnap, torture, rape, and murder civilians with impunity, that is a terror organization, unlike the defense force of a democracy.
by netruk44 | 2025-04-12 15:46:41+00:00
> Name literally any other technology that works this way.

The internet for one.

Not the internet itself (although it certainly can be unreliable), but rather the information on it.

Which I think is more relevant to the argument anyway, as LLM’s do in fact reliably function exactly the way they were built to.

Information on the internet is inherently unreliable. It’s only when you consider externalities (like reputation of source) that its information can then be made “reliable”.

Information that comes out of LLM’s is inherently unreliable. It’s only through externalities (such as online research) that its information can be made reliable.

Unless you can invent a truth machine that somehow can tell truth from fiction, I don’t see either of these things becoming reliable, stand-alone sources of information.
by bradleyy | 2025-04-12 15:47:14+00:00
The alternative would be something like "making you log in to save cookie preferences". There are legitimate reasons to do this, but most would oppose it. Would you provide some market feedback?

Would you rather log in to preserve your settings? Can you think of any other way to (semi-)anonymously identify you and preserve your settings across different sessions?

Note: this is actually a problem I'm thinking about, and really do want to find a workable solution.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-12 15:47:18+00:00
> First off, you won't convince me these folks don't belong in jail. I just dont' think anything less than serious criminal penalties is going to get us anywhere anymore.

Agreed.

Company wise, I’d like to see these things handled like the FDIC handles a bank failure. The Feds come in, wipe out upper management, and have another org take over as caretaker.

Otherwise these fines just get paid out of increased premiums. Which probably makes the folks responsible giggle as they immediately go and do the same thing again.
by netsharc | 2025-04-12 15:47:24+00:00
Thinking the status quo will return so easily is like Putin pulling out of Ukraine and saying "So we're back to 23rd January (Edit/Correction: February) 2022, right, friends?".

The trust in the US (dollar) hegemony has now been eroded, and will probably continue until a purge of the regime of idiots (not just the oust of one idiot...).
by obviyus | 2025-04-12 15:47:32+00:00
I tried this for a while with ErsatzTV and really loved it. I don’t have cable anymore but I remember fond memories of cycling through channels as a child.

I set up a food channel that would cycle through Masterchef and a few travel cooking shows, one for anime and one for Bollywood movies.

It was incredibly enjoyable. I could just put on a channel after work without having to consciously make a decision on what to watch. Just watch whatever’s on the channel and switch over to something else if it didn’t click!

Definitely going to try this out on my NAS.
by mxuribe | 2025-04-12 15:47:32+00:00
Thanks for making me feel good knowing that i'm not the only one feeling that there's too much cruft in some areas nowadays! :-)

Simiarly, i either hear no discussion about tradeoffs, or they tend to be so vauge or weak...and it eventually boils down to "Ain't no body got time to figure out the 'right way', and this new $thing is popular, so this new way is the right way everyone...".

As far as why it went away, i frankly don;'t know...but i imagine for the same reasons other good stuff goes away: maybe contributors stopped working on it, or there is money to be made in the new ways, or the zeitgeist of the new way (due to management consultants whispering in the ear of IT senior leaders) takes over the attention of the everyday devs, etc. Then again, i suppose if one were to preserve certain local infra. in a way to use old stuff, i guess one may still be able to run things the old way...but that's an uphill battle, and likely not worth it.
by y33t | 2025-04-12 15:47:47+00:00
I'm a bit of a nerd for hand tools and I've the same book for axes, and another for hand files lying around somewhere. Around this time these tool companies had a huge array of designs for their tools. It seems like almost every region of America had their own pattern of ax head with a range of sizes to choose from, and their own preference for style of handle, of which there are probably more than you'd expect, and users had their own preference for the style of cutting edge too. You had axes for just about any type of wood cutting job you can imagine. The land was conquered by these tools and the people using them put a lot of care and consideration into them, and it showed.

Nowadays, you still have some regional patterns available, but they're almost all swamp axes (a general purpose axe, not good at any one thing -- the head is too thick for very effective falling, but too thin for very effective splitting). You could thin them out, but filing the cheeks down messes up the temper of the steel. Handles have about two styles to pick from, and they all come clearcoated, which is awful on your hands, unlike linseed oil. Sure you can go boutique, like Gransfors of Hult Bruk, or Tuatahi, but you're looking at spending hundreds, which may actually be more in line with what you would have been spending for a quality tool 100 years ago, if you adjust for inflation.
by feross | 2025-04-12 15:48:10+00:00
Hi, Socket founder here.

Running AI coding setups in containers (or even just VMs) seems like a solid default, and I’d love to see tooling move in that direction by default—less as a hard security perimeter, more as a safety net for people trying to move fast.

Re: the article’s conclusion—I get the skepticism. For what it’s worth, the product came after years of trying to solve the problem of package security and maintainer funding in the open. At some point, it felt like the best way to make a dent was to build something dedicated to it.
by wruza | 2025-04-12 15:48:15+00:00
Solid advice, but choosing good hw for the rig is already a challenge. Tick the virtual "linux" checkbox and you often get an empty list. That is, if you have that checkbox, in any sense. How the hell should I know if a mobo/laptop is supported? Googling "<model> linux issue" always yields hundreds of threads regardless. Even when <model> is Thinkpad: https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+thinkpad+issue
by TheDong | 2025-04-12 15:48:58+00:00
Let me give a small anecdotal story of american wait times.

My doctor wanted to give me an MRI for a pain near the heart, and insurance told them they wouldn't cover it until they did various other forms of cheaper treatment, including taking antacids for one month, and 5 months of physical therapy. Which of course didn't work. The waiting time for the first appointment was 3 months.

It took over 9 months for my doctor, the only person to actually properly know the details of my case, to be able to give an MRI that he thought was necessary because someone at the insurance company, who I never met, who had less medical expertise than my doctor, wanted to save the insurance company money.

Anecdotally, all the people I know who live in countries with socialized medicine haven't ever had a wait time as long as that, and haven't ever had a simple MRI be delayed by their socialized insurance.
by shay_ker | 2025-04-12 15:49:13+00:00
Unfortunately, there's massive drift between WebRTC implementations. The status quo is Google's, which is used by Chrome: https://webrtc.googlesource.com/src/

And everyone else has to play catch-up.

A big source of the drift is having a common library for SDP parsing, but also necessary features like BWE, different encodings, etc.

For example, aiortc, python's WebRTC implementation, isn't quite at the level most would want. It isn't necessarily easy to tell, without clear benchmarks, which implementation is at-par with Google's.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-12 15:49:27+00:00
This was my chief critique when my company forced us to use their AI tooling. I was trying to stitch together our CMDB, two different VMware products, and the corporate technology directory into a form of product tenancy for our customers. At one point I was trying to move and transform data from our CRM into mongoDB, and figured "eh, let's knock these mandatory agent queries out of the way by asking the chatbot to help." I wrote a few prompts to try and explain what I was trying to accomplish (context), and how I'd like it done (instruction).

The bot hallucinated a non-existent mongoDB Powershell cmdlet, complete with documentation on how it works, and then spat out a "solution" to the problem I asked. Every time I reworked the prompt, cut it up into smaller chunks, narrowed the scope of the problem, whatever I tried, the chatbot kept flatly hallucinating non-existent cmdlets, Python packages, or CLI commands, sometimes even providing (non-working) "solutions" in languages I didn't explicitly ask for (such as bash scripting instead of Powershell).

This was at a large technology company, no less, one that's "all-in" on AI.

If you're staying in a very narrow line with a singular language throughout and not calling custom packages, cmdlets, or libraries, then I suspect these things look and feel quite magical. Once you start doing actual work, they're complete jokes in my experience.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-12 15:50:49+00:00
It's not a good short term strategy at all. If that's really the goal, their left and right hands need to have a chat because one of them's going to make the deficit way worse, so if the other's goal is to "free up operating budget" by reducing debt service they really ought to get on the same page, because anything "freed up" is going to be eaten by the other bullshit they're doing.

Besides, this is a wildly expensive way to go about it. The harm to receipts from the economic uncertainty will blow a hole in the federal budget and leave states reeling (to say nothing of the "other hand" making cuts at the IRS, which will also be a net cost)
by simonw | 2025-04-12 15:51:35+00:00
It looks like that's the data behind figure 3.7.4 - "LLMs implicit bias across stereotypes in four social categories" - on page 199 of the PDF: https://hai-production.s3.amazonaws.com/files/hai_ai_index_r...

They released a separate PDF of just that figure along with the CSV data: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/fig_3.7.4.pdf

The figure is explained a bit on page 198. It relates to this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04105

I don't think they released a data dictionary explaining the different columns though.