MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pmags | 2025-04-09 00:49:50+00:00
As per the NY Times article:

On Tuesday, a study in The Lancet estimated that suspending PEPFAR could lead to about one million new H.I.V. infections by 2030 and could lead to nearly 500,000 AIDS deaths among children and the orphaning of 2.8 million more.

Here's details of the Lancet article referenced:

-- Cluver et al. 20205. Protecting Africa's children from extreme risk: a runway of sustainability for PEPFAR programmes. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
by Swizec | 2025-04-09 00:50:09+00:00
> How does this theory show that birds didn't first become intelligent, and then started cheating because they're now intelligent enough to do it?

I recommend reading the linked book from a bird expert who has been studying this for her entire career. I promise it is much better and deeper than my comment here.

It links to 266 references (papers) at the end. I just checked
by ConspiracyFact | 2025-04-09 00:51:06+00:00
AIs aren’t people. What we have is people using an algorithm to rip off artists and defending it by claiming that the algorithm is like a person learning from its experiences.

If I wrote a program that chose an image at random from 1000 base images, you’d agree that the program doesn’t create anything new. If I added some random color changes, it would still be derivative. Every incremental change I make to the program to make it more sophisticated leaves its outputs just as derivative as before the change.
by yellowapple | 2025-04-09 00:51:57+00:00
The bigger models avoid those mistakes by being, well, bigger. Offloading to a structured knowledgebase would achieve the same without the model needing to be bigger. Indeed, the model could be a lot smaller (and a lot less resource-intensive) if it only needed to worry about converting $LANGUAGE queries to Lisp queries and converting Lisp results back into $LANGUAGE results (where $LANGUAGE is the user's natural language, whatever that might be), rather than having to store some approximation of that knowledgebase within itself on top of understanding $LANGUAGE and understanding whatever ad-hoc query/result language it's unconsciously invented for itself.
by VaiTheJice | 2025-04-09 00:53:15+00:00
I think thats pretty reasonable tbf and probably at a more 'simpler' scale and i use simple loosely because Netflix’s container runtime is Titus, which is more bare metal oriented than, say, Kubernetes. It doesn’t always isolate workloads as cleanly in separate netns per container, especially for network optimisation purposes like IPv6-to-IPv4 sharing.

"I wonder if it is possible with ipv6 to never... re use addresses which removes the problems with staleness and false attribution."

Most VPCs (also AWS) don’t currently support "true" IPv6 scaleout behavior. Buttt!! if IPs were truly immutable and unique per workload, attribution becomes trivial. It’s just not yet realistic... maybe something to explore with the lads?
by lstodd | 2025-04-09 00:54:01+00:00
Norway is not "those kind of temperatures". They get a lot of snow, and maybe -5C and that is all because Gulfstream (the reason Murmansk does not freeze, and it's much farther into Arctic). Otherwise they get it easy.

Now when you move just a bit off the sea, the continental climate kicks in, and you have weeks of -15 -- -20C.

On discharging lithium chemistries at those temperatures or "easily overcame with resistive" let me say that: you just don't know what you are talking about.
by ksec | 2025-04-09 00:54:46+00:00
>6. Safari improvements

I often use Safari on my iPhone and iPad without any issues, but as soon as I open a few tabs on my MacBook Air, it’s a whole different story. Just three or four tabs and bam, I would experience slowdowns and performance issues in Safari, especially web pages with multimedia content. It displays that annoying significant energy message, and then I’m stuck in a lag loop. This happens every single time. As soon as I switched to Chrome, it loads all the web pages without any issues. I hope Apple finally notices this issue and macOS 16 offers a lag-free growing experience in Safari.

Safari on macOS has been absolutely appalling for the past 10 years. And yet most people dont say anything about it. And media dont cover it.
by cperkins | 2025-04-09 00:55:03+00:00
I always had my reservations about the whole AGI thing. And while I'm mightily impressed by Chat-GPT and friends, it's even clearer to me that AGI is not, and will never be, an emergent property of LLM, no matter how large the neural net. And that was likely true for Cyc as well.

I had a particular Cyc success story relayed to me years ago by a customer (not a Cycorp employee), the details of which I cannot divulge, but it was a pretty whopping success and the customer was quite happy with what Cyc had been able to do for them.

So while no AGI, it definitely seems like there was value to be had.
by taeric | 2025-04-09 00:55:52+00:00
The cascading aspect is mostly a big L. As is the dream of user style sheets. All the more so from the obfuscated style names so many tools saddle us with.

Don't get me wrong, there are smart people working on css. That we decided, as an industry, to treat layout as a Rube Goldberg machination of interacting rules on a growing number of elements is not something you can easily overcome.
by esperent | 2025-04-09 00:57:57+00:00
> The trust is completely gone

I mean, for everyone else it was never there to begin with. Hallucinations are constantly raised as the biggest issues with AI. According to the tests, and my experience, newer AI models are objectively better, not worse than the ones from a few years ago. They still have a long way to go/may never be fully trustworthy though.

What I have lost trust in, and what I and many feel has become much worse over the few years, is Google search, and all the other search engines that are based on it.
by throwaway422432 | 2025-04-09 00:59:21+00:00
Asking for a list of companies in a specific sector also gives you made up tickers, or at best a list it found on some blog.

Was a bit more useful at questions like "Rank these stocks by exposure to the Chinese market", as you can prioritise your own research but in the end you just have to go through the individual company filings yourself.
by reitzensteinm | 2025-04-09 01:01:17+00:00
I wouldn't expect much either. The potential for speedups would be if there's locality for data on either side of the multiplayer padding, or if the actors have contiguous layout and deleting the data plays better with the CPU's stride prefetching.

Significant performance degredation is also possible if at some point a smart (but not wise) developer positioned the data to eliminate false sharing on either side.

Agreed that you shouldn't be using this heavy weight paradigm with large amounts of entities. My intention was just to add a bit of color to the idea that saving memory allocations can have implications beyond just the number of bytes you ultimately malloc.
by bitmasher9 | 2025-04-09 01:01:21+00:00
It is really effective at increasing the amount of gold in your vault, but The Wealth of Nations (Admin Smith) made a strong case against that primary goal. Crucially for the HackerNews crowd, Mercantilism increases the value of physical goods relative to services, and services becomes a smaller portion of the overall economy. Most of us sell server-time wrapped in software that performs a service…
by pmags | 2025-04-09 01:02:05+00:00
I made a post about this earlier but it was just the raw data from NSF.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43624506

This article in Nature includes significant discussion about NSF GRFPs, their history, and trends over time. So hopefully this isn't seen as too duplicative.

EDIT: removed sentence about Research.gov data no longer available. New URL fixed in item above.
by SideQuark | 2025-04-09 01:02:11+00:00
But it provides a tool to see how and why the “nuanced, appropriate version” is actually wrong.

When one limits the choices for purchases or sales, one reduces efficiency, whether it’s limiting to products made at your home, in your city, in your state, or even in your country. It’s failed for so many centuries across hundreds of countries and attempts that it’s not even a question except among politicians stoking fear to gain votes.
by amrocha | 2025-04-09 01:02:15+00:00
You do see how discriminatory your statement is right?

Replace “wearing a suit” with literally anything else unrelated to programming skills. Wearing a dress. Having a particular speech pattern. Being old.

As soon as you start judging people for anything other than their performance you fucked up. People’s personality comes through in the interview process. By the end of an hour working with someone you should have a pretty good idea of what working with them is like, suit or no suit.
by chrisfosterelli | 2025-04-09 01:05:30+00:00
> The only thing that we seem to agree on, is that any sort of beverage containing sucrose is bad for you.

Oooh, I guess I get to throw the wrench in that one. Endurance athletes benefit from the intake of large amounts of sugars during activity. Most sports drinks are primarily a mix of maltodextrin and fructose but the science is increasingly pointing toward something closer to a 1:1 glucose:fructose ratio being optimal at large carbohydrate intake -- in other words sucrose!

Ingested in an appropriate context, it is an excellent and easy to digest fuel source. You get to throw a couple hundred grams of table sugar into a sports bottle and call it healthy.
by NiloCK | 2025-04-09 01:05:45+00:00
At the risk of piling on (others have commented), I'll go so far as to say that there really is more information here if you make the gentle assumption of a human observer.

In the animated version, a human observer here is allowed (forced) to occupy mental states of a real-time observer. They have the experience of "X has jumped ahead - I wonder if it'll last - oh, wow, Y is really surging".

The visceral experience matters, and is impossible to recreate post-hoc if all of the info is presented up front.

(edit: "more information" in so far is it informs more - leaves more impressions on the observer)
by onemoresoop | 2025-04-09 01:05:49+00:00
Sure, Im not saying they’re not useful tools but let’s not buy into the hype and pretend they’re some silver bullet. Im aware they’ll change how we do programming and other tasks but I don’t think they’ll completely displace human thinking. As for art, i’m not sure artists will cease to exist either. Unless we as a species cease to exist, but then what is all this progress for?
by aobdev | 2025-04-09 01:06:05+00:00
This is not my area of expertise so take this with a grain of salt, but my initial instinct was to question why you would need to store the tsvector both in the table and in the index (because the tsvector values will in fact be stored losslessly in a GIN index).

The PG docs make it clear that this only affects row rechecks, so this would only affect performance on matching rows when you need to verify information not stored in the index, e.g. queries with weighted text or queries against a lossy GiST index. It's going to be use-case dependent but I would check if your queries need this before using up the additional disk space.
by mgfist | 2025-04-09 01:07:19+00:00
Not necessarily. You hear plenty of stories of companies who raised money they never ended up needing to touch.

What matters is why. Is it because growth is so bonkers that your burn stays minimal/zero despite increasing costs? Or is it because you don't spend anything and thus can get by with stable revenue. VCs are very happy with the first, less so with the second.

VCs would always prefer you get to megascale with less money - the less you raise, the less they get diluted.
by adamredwoods | 2025-04-09 01:08:08+00:00
The Ghibli style took humans decades to refine and create. All that respect and adoration for the craft and artists and the time it took, is now gone in an instant, making it a shallow trivial thing. Worse is to have another company exploit it with no regard for the ones who helped make it a reality.

The threat of AI produced art will forever trivialise human artistic capabilities. The reality is: why bother when it can be done faster and cheaper? The next generation will leverage it, and those skills will be very rare. It is the nature of technology to do this.
by bn-l | 2025-04-09 01:08:21+00:00
I haven’t used 2.5 pro just 2.0 pro. It was inferior to OpenAI (which isn’t that good).

My ranking openai > grok 3 deeper > Gemini 2.0 pro. All have been terrible for the 100 or so times I’ve used them (all SWE / finance related in some way)
by pcwalton | 2025-04-09 01:08:49+00:00
> But, more importantly, the amount of cycles that would be needed to text-wrap most websites is effectively zero.

I've measured this, and no, it's not. What you're missing is the complexities of typesetting Unicode and OpenType, where GSUB/GPOS tables, bidi, ruby text, etc. combine to make typesetting quite complex and expensive. HarfBuzz is 290,000 lines of code for a reason. Typesetting Latin-only text in Times New Roman is quick, sure, but that doesn't cut it nowadays.
by pmags | 2025-04-09 01:09:01+00:00
NOTE added, 9pm EDT: This link to the award lists is currently broken. I don't know if this is simply an issue with research.gov serving up the data or if it has been intentionally removed from public view.

EDIT: Research.gov seems to have been updated/changed. Now available at:

https://www.research.gov/grfp/AwardeeList.do?method=loadAwar...
by derbOac | 2025-04-09 01:09:37+00:00
I had to wonder, with a call to eliminate the essay along with standardized tests, what's left? Grades and random selection?

Having said that I often felt like it is a better use of everyone's time to have specific questions for applicants, rather than an ambiguous statement for an applicant to guess at what the committee is looking for, while the committee interprets that guesswork as a stimulus-free projective test. The committee gets to be straightforward about the types of questions they want to ask, and the applicants doesn't have to play the guess-the-committee game quite as much.
by AIPedant | 2025-04-09 01:10:28+00:00
Even if they were subject matter experts, it's mentally exhausting to judge these things, especially if it's just for a RLHF contracting gig and you're not actually using the report for real work. Even honest and motivated testers would be tempted into relying on surface "vibes" + no immediately obvious whoppers.

OpenAI's Deep Research seems oddly restricted in the number of sources it uses, eg repeating one survey article over and over. I suspect it is just too draining and demoralizing for RLHFers to check Deep Research's citations (especially without a formal bibliography).
by defrost | 2025-04-09 01:12:34+00:00
The broad Australian Government ( the "they" of the above comment? ) didn't .. but the then Australian Prime Minister personally very much did so.

Initially in the public sphere he was forcefully calling for an independant body with "powers equivalent to those of a weapons inspector to avoid another catastrophic pandemic" while rumoured (ie leaked gossip) to be channelling the worst US Trump first term sinophobia in phone calls to world leaders drumming up support.

I separated Australia from the then PM Scott Morrison delibrately, in a number of ways he acted as a law unto himself not as a representative of the nation as a whole.

I accept that his off the record attacks on China are hearsay, but to those that followed the people and attitudes they make sense and account for the reactions of China that shortly followed when the off public record discussions made the diplomatic rounds and got back to Xi.

Even the Chinese got on board with an international investigation:

Last night the World Health Assembly (WHA) passed a European Union motion calling for a "comprehensive, independent and impartial" investigation into how the pandemic started and the international health response. A record 137 countries — including both Australia and China — ended up co-sponsoring the motion, giving it overwhelming international endorsement.

~ Wed 20 May 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-20/wha-passes-coronaviru...

that wasn't the cause of Australia - China falling out.

That was the public insinuation that COVID was an engineered weapon and the behind the scenes name calling and accusations from the Australian PM.
by Levitating | 2025-04-09 01:13:01+00:00
But RoR does support having node integrated and it was the default for a long time. tailwindcss-rails could've just used Node.

Instead your application is now packing a 100M binary just for your CSS framework. Even when you are already using Node.

I see no benefit, imagine if every component of your application shipped its own runtime. Imagine if erb in RoR packaged its own version of ruby. That would be crazy right?
by boh | 2025-04-09 01:13:47+00:00
This just sounds like cases of performative management. Very lazy implementation of what to them is just"productivity-future-tech" of the moment, so they can say "successfully transitioned into AI-driven development" on their CV's. AI is just software and it either fits your strategy or it doesn't. In the same way no company succeeds simply because it started using software, no company is going to succeed simply bcs they started to use AI.
by anon84873628 | 2025-04-09 01:14:54+00:00
Did you mean to respond to my comment? I didn't mention education so don't really understand how it connects.

No one is saying to get rid of the jobs you mentioned. The goal is to make it so people working those jobs can provide for their families, have health care, have appropriate time off, and generally work with dignity.

And I should clarify that most of what you mentioned fall in the "middle class" category, including building houses, driving trucks, serving food, and pumping septic tanks. Cost disease (especially in housing and healthcare) has made these less stable occupations than they should be.

College education should be accessible and affordable for people who want to pursue it. I agree that it has been way over-emphasized in recent decades and had a similar experience to you. "Get an education" was a cop out excuse to paper over the structural problems occuring underneath (while tuition costs ballooned). For sure the pendulum has already started to swing the other way though.
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by avelino | 2025-04-09 01:15:04+00:00
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by slg | 2025-04-09 01:18:09+00:00
>the gist is: When you can manufacture ships, you can also manufacture warships. When you can manufacture warships, you can protect your economy.

The counter to this thinking is that if you intertwine your economic wellbeing with your "enemy" to the point that neither side wants to sever the relationship, you won't need to build many warships. Reversing course back towards isolation in order to give yourself the option to build warships increases the odds that you will end up having to build those warships because you have now made it easier for both countries to go to war.
by histriosum | 2025-04-09 01:18:30+00:00
> Are you asking why a single point of failure is a bad thing? >To restate what you asked: “if the USA weapons manufacturing capability is compromised and cannot sell weapons to approved parties, and said parties also cannot manufacture their own weapons, how is this in the interest of the US?”

You can't equate weapons manufacturing to server uptime or data center diversity -- it's fundamentally different.

In terms of what is in the best interests of the United States -- yes, having a single point of weapons manufacture and having that be the United States would very much be in the US interests. It would allow the US to dictate, even more than we do today, how the rest of the world operates. Although we have not been a single source for weapons (Europe does make their own), our role as primary supplier would be (and has been) very profitable.

How is it that we can afford to create the advanced weapons that we do? F-35, Patriot, etc? It's because we can spread that research and development cost across other (allied) countries, because they buy our gear instead of developing their own. Reduce the market for our weapons, and you're going to reduce the quality of our weapons and increase their per-unit cost -- both things that are very much not in the interests of the United States.

This was sparked by the remark that this was all part of the "intention" of the policy. Since that intention would by definition be very contrary to US interests, both financial and strategic, it seems dubious that this was the intention.
by vharuck | 2025-04-09 01:19:01+00:00
Guaranteeing that families won't go bankrupt due to market forces beyond their control would make so many things so much easier. For example, in my state of Pennsylvania, fracking is a political issue. It's a fossil fuel industry, so ideally we'd be weaning off it. But we actually encourage it by having no severance tax on any extracted energy sources. The state is leaving money on the table, and voters seem to like it that way. But, in truth, they don't care about taxes for fracking companies. They care about not ruining towns economically dependant on fracking. They're terrified of those companies leaving, because a chunk of the town's workforce would fall into poverty and take the town with it. Very few people care about where their electricity and heat come from, as long as they can afford it. There's no good reason to oppose moving to renewables except household economics, which is a very good reason for individual voters. If we made sure they weren't going to freeze and starve if the one big employer left town, that employer wouldn't have such an outsized influence on state politics.

In a healthy free market, companies go bust. It just happens: better competitors show up, services or goods aren't needed, plans don't pan out. But we've created a system that keeps companies afloat ala Weekend at Bernie's, instead of what people actually want: keep families afloat.
by consumer451 | 2025-04-09 01:19:45+00:00
It tries to in a way that scales easily, and is also easily gamed.

I want a staff of human testers, each with domain expertise. If the goal is to replace humans, should there not be a real human metric?

I want a physicist asking their battery of physics questions, 4 different kinds of devs asking their battery of dev problems, a couple chefs asking for cooking techniques, etc.

Now on to "Deep Research," 6 different kinds of OSINT/secondary analysts who ask new problems each time, and compare it to their days of human work.

We really need this as a species, otherwise the brain dead C-Suites of the world are going to keep buying the hype, which is often very premature. This could have real consequences, and it apparently already has.

It's insane to me that we are investing, what, almost $1T into LLMs, and have not spent the ~$1.5M/year to do what I described above.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-09 01:19:46+00:00
My experience in unmanaged legacy code bases. If it's an actual one liner than sure. Use your ternaries and closures. But there is some gnarly stuff done in some attempt to minimize lines of code. Most of us aren't in some competitive coding organization.

And I know it's intentional, but yes. Add some mindfulness to your implementation

Map["blah"] = fooIsTrue;

I do see your example in the wild sometimes. I've probably done it myself as well and never caught it.