MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sanderjd | 2025-04-17 14:09:05+00:00
You're probably right about that, but I don't think that's the criterion? I think "considered to be non technical" is quite a bit different than "has at least once been dismissed as insufficiently technical".

I work with a number of women who are clearly "Technical" in the sense of this article, even if they have been dismissed a number of times as you say.

I'm totally with you (and presumably the author) that this kind of dismissal is really toxic. But I also feel like there's a no true scotsman thing going on here; if you say "actually I know Technical people who fit the author's description" the retort is "well the article isn't talking about those people!".
by coldpie | 2025-04-17 14:09:21+00:00
> The whole idea we allow “safe levels” of anything toxic is a concession to industry at the expense of the environment and consumers

You are conflating hazard and risk. A thing can be hazardous without being a risk. If you eliminated everything hazardous, regardless of its level of risk, we would not have cars or airplanes or electronics or plastics or most food products. That is an extreme position to take. The correct thing to do is decide on an acceptable level of risk, and enforce that (either personally, or through the gov't; there are pros & cons to each).

I wrote about this a while back in the context of the black plastic brouhaha: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471665
by AngryData | 2025-04-17 14:09:23+00:00
My area has a similar density and a co-op did it for $80 a month 1 gig fiber to the home. We couldn't even get DSL, and the local telecomms even gathered funds locally earlier to build it, but then just kept the money. I am extremely skeptical of claims that rural areas can't get fiber, fiber is even cheaper to hang than copper is, and yet every rural area has telephone lines and power that were put up many decades ago with even less equipment available.
by owebmaster | 2025-04-17 14:09:47+00:00
> I think the problem I have is that it still doesn't feel like society has really caught up to the impact that The Internet and Smartphones have had, and we keep getting disrupted faster and faster it seems

Indeed. For the past 30 years, every 10 years people were raised in a completely different environment. TV -> Internet -> Smartphones and now the next 10 years of people growing up influenced by LLMs.
by Y_Y | 2025-04-17 14:10:12+00:00
> whether a data structure is an immutable or persistent data structure or merely an unmodifiable data structure...

This hurt my brain. It seems that in some places (e.g. Java land) unmodifiable refers to something that you can't modify but could just be a wrapper around a structure that can be modified. In that case they use immutable to mean something that is nowhere modifiable.

I may be misrepresenting this idea, but I think the terminology is so poor that it deserves to be misunderstood.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-04-17 14:10:18+00:00
I wouldnt go as far as saying it means nothing, but I agree that the story certainly isnt simple. Was just pointing out that "catch terrorists" isnt a purely emotional argument. Would the terrorists be caught anyway? We'll never know, but theres no way you can say they would for certain. Personally I dont think catching a few terrorists is worth giving up privacy but other people disagree.

> Without knowing these variables then there is no way to say if these systems are particularly good at catching terrorists.

I dont think we can ever figure this out since no one is willing to run an rct when it comes to counter terrorism
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-04-17 14:10:21+00:00
You can (and probably should) add a threshold to recursive algorithms like mergesort so that they don't end up doing recursive calls on very small arrays.

For arrays smaller than the threshold, insertion is faster than bubble sort. And if you really don't want recursion for large arrays to begin with, you have heapsort or Shell sort.

I don't think there is any practical case where using bubble sort makes sense, except "efficiency doesn't matter for my use case and this is the code I already have".
by andrewflnr | 2025-04-17 14:10:35+00:00
Also:

> his retainers and farmers chose to see the best in their lord and were fiercely loyal to him. During Ujiharu’s early campaigns, some of his men did defect to the enemy, but a few raids to protect or take back Oda Castle later and you apparently could not threaten or pay off anyone in Ujiharu’s service to move against him.

Personally, I have to respect someone who earns that kind of loyalty.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-17 14:10:41+00:00
The idea of abundance vs scarecety makes sense on the outset. But I have to wonder where all this alleged abundance is hiding. Sometimes the assumptions feel a bit like “drill baby drill” to me without figures and projections behind it. One would think if there was much untapped capacity in resources today it would get used up. We can look at how agriculture yields improved over the 19th century and see how that lead to higher populations but also less land under the plow and fewer hands working that land, vs having an equal land under plow and I don’t know dumping the excess yield someplace where it isn’t participating in the market?
by whatevertrevor | 2025-04-17 14:10:44+00:00
I wouldn't really call this academic style, at least none of the research I read uses this sort of tone, let alone personal language (completely fine in an essay of course).

My main issue is how circuitous and rant-y it comes off as. Honestly the rhetoric style of argumentation and no qualifiers or even attempts to define terms makes it a really hard read.
by hwayne | 2025-04-17 14:10:52+00:00
To be in NP, witness must be verifiable in polynomial time with respect to the size of the original input. In this problem (VAS Reachability), the solution can be `2^2^2^...^K` steps long. Even if that's linear with respect to the witness, it's not polynomial with respect to the set of moves + goal.
by kstrauser | 2025-04-17 14:10:54+00:00
Suppose it were somehow possible to prove that alien life exists. Like, we get a radio signal saying "hey, Earth! We see you looking at us!" that's conclusive and undeniable.

That would upend a lot of religious teachings which say we're unique and that the world was given to us, as the unique creations of a creator, to consume for our own benefit.

It seems like there could be many practical benefits to showing that's not true. Hey, maybe the concept of infinite exponential growth is a bad idea. Maybe we shouldn't burn the skies and boil the seas. Maybe we should be nice to other intelligent animals, at the very least.
by throwanem | 2025-04-17 14:11:25+00:00
Yeah, in 2022 acquired by some kind of sketchy rollup of lots of legacy/web-1.0 firms or what remained of them, it looks like.

Oh, well. It's been a long time since I was so naïve as not to do a quick informal trademark/brand search before I register a new domain, so I don't really expect to hear from them again any time soon, either.
by Nevermark | 2025-04-17 14:11:31+00:00
What a well reasoned stance!

They note that they don’t expect their view to address challenges without additional material, but one challenge struck me.

Slow diffusion, which gets bottlenecked by human beings learning to adapt to significant new technologies, drops considerably if a technology juices startups in other areas than the tech itself.

I.e. existing organizations may not be the bottleneck for change, if widely available AI makes disruptive (cheaper initially, higher quality eventually) startups much easier in general to start and to scale.
by pogue | 2025-04-17 14:11:38+00:00
You'd want to do a deep dive on lead and it's negatives. The human body sees it as calcium and it can accumulate in the body and brain over time and cause a variety of health problems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead#Biological_effects

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning

In an ideal world, we would want no lead in our food and toothpaste (etc). But, I'm sure it's not economically possible for manufacturers/farmers to completely eliminate it, but it would be wise to avoid products that contain high levels of it.

Recall the Flint, Michigan lead pipes environment disaster, for example of a worse case scenario https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-y...
by voxic11 | 2025-04-17 14:11:41+00:00
UTM requires jailbreaking/sideloading to install on iOS because it violates App Store policies so it can't be distributed via the App Store.

On macOS the Mac App Store has much less restrictive policies so UTM is actually approved to be installed via the Mac App Store. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-virtual-machines/id1538878... Also macOS allows you to install and run applications which aren't approved by the Mac App Store. So using UTM as described in the article doesn't violate any Apple policies.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-17 14:11:42+00:00
If by quacks you mean doctors with 30+ years of experience, well, I love those doctors especially those with a passion for biology and chemistry. They are starting to awaken and write books now that they can not be cancelled for no longer blindly following dogmatism that has caused the medical industry to stagnate for decades. By this point in their career they have paid off all their debts and are no longer required to bow to the master. My most recent purchase was "Disolving Illusions" by Susanne Humphries, MD. It's a great read. Mainstream doctors refer to her as a quack but in reality they see her as a threat or they would just ignore her.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-17 14:11:54+00:00
> the attempt to totalise control of universities

What, exactly, do you think the left has been doing for the last ~10 years? The universities are basically captured by one party and their ideology and I suspect Trump's hamfisted attempts to counter that will only make a small dent.

Universities are at a point where getting a job often requires including a DEI statement in your CV[1]. In my opinion, this is not compatible with academic freedom.

The overall feeling I get is one of despair. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are fundamentally interested in "freedom". They just choose to nibble away at different corners of the constitution.

[1] https://freebeacon.com/campus/study-diversity-statements-req...
by tstrimple | 2025-04-17 14:12:14+00:00
We used to have free public pools in this country. They were built out during the 20's and 30's. Most of these were replaced with paid pool access or closed outright during integration to prevent black families from being able to enjoy them as well. There's a racist stereotype around black folk not being able to swim which has been the multi-generational result. Poor white families were negatively impacted as well. But I guess it was worth it to keep the "wrong types" from being able to enjoy things.
by huntaub | 2025-04-17 14:12:56+00:00
I think that the author is spot on, there are a couple of dimensions in which you should evaluate these systems: theoretical limits, efficiency, and practical limits.

From a theoretical point of view, like others have pointed out, parallel distributed file systems have existed for years -- most notably Lustre. These file systems should be capable of scaling out their storage and throughput to, effectively, infinity -- if you add enough nodes.

Then you start to ask, well how much storage and throughput can I get with a node that has X TiB of disk -- starting to evaluate efficiency. I ran some calculations (against FSx for Lustre, since I'm an AWS guy) -- and it appears that you can run 3FS in AWS for about 12-30% cheaper depending on the replication factors that you choose against FSxL (which is good, but not great considering that you're now managing the cluster yourself).

Then, the third thing you start to ask is anecdotally, are people able to actually configure these file systems into the size of deployment that I want (which is where you hear things like "oh it's hard to get Ceph to 1 TiB/s") -- and that remains to be seen from something like 3FS.

Ultimately, I obviously believe that storage and data are really important keys to how these AI companies operate -- so it makes sense that DeepSeek would build something like this in-house to get the properties that they're looking for. My hope is that we, at Archil, can find a better set of defaults that work for most people without needing to manage a giant cluster or even worry about how things are replicated.
by wulfstan | 2025-04-17 14:13:27+00:00
Well that's your view - but these demands aren't going to go away, and what I think is sensible is for us a technical community to consider reasonable alternatives. Every society is a compromise between anarchic freedom and authoritarian tyranny, and this is another discussion about how a (relatively) new set of technologies can fit into that compromise in a way that is acceptable and reasonable.

I acknowledge the problems you raise, but it does seem to me that we have a good set of systems in place in the form of PKI that has a remarkable amount of flexibility.

It's frankly a bit of an article of faith in our community that encryption == unalloyed good and I think we'd be right to think more critically about that position.
by sidrag22 | 2025-04-17 14:13:36+00:00
ive often thought about a happy middle ground product that would make me consider coming back to spotify... a version of the subscription model, somewhat similar to ebook stuff, where if you are subscribed you can choose X amount of songs that month to "own" forever.

so if you decide you cant pay their monthly fee, you still have full access to your library of songs that you chose to own over the years, and are not subjected to the feeling of being a prisoner to their subscription model if you decide you cant afford it for x amount of time.

this feeling of being a prisoner is the absolute main driver of why i prefer non spotify solutions. i love the actual product otherwise. if i had not experienced the non subscribed version of what my account feels like, i think i would still happily be paying for spotify today.
by xpe | 2025-04-17 14:13:38+00:00
> The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it.

A question for the author(s), at least one of whom is participating in the discussion (thanks!): Why try to lump together description, prediction, and prescription under the "normal" adjective?

Discussing AI is fraught. My claim: conflating those three under the "normal" label seems likely to backfire and lead to unnecessary confusion. Why not instead keep these separate?

My main objection is this: it locks in a narrative that tries to neatly fuse description, prediction, and prescription. I recoil at this; it feels like an unnecessary coupling. Better to remain fluid and not lock in a narrative. The field is changing so fast, making description by itself very challenging. Predictions should update on new information, including how we frame the problem and our evolving values.

A little bit about my POV in case it gives useful context: I've found the authors (Narayanan and Kapoor) to be quite level-headed and sane w.r.t. AI discussions, unlike many others. I'll mention Gary Marcus as one counterexample; I find it hard to pin Marcus down on the actual form of his arguments or concrete predictions. His pieces often feel like rants without a clear underlying logical backbone (at least in the year or so I've read his work).
by spprashant | 2025-04-17 14:13:41+00:00
Tyler Cowen is someone I take seriously. I think he is one of the most rational thought leaders.

But I have to say, his views on LLMs seem a little premature. He definitely has a unique viewpoint of what "general intelligence" is, which might not apply broadly to most jobs. I think "interviews" them like they were a guest on his podcast and bases his judgement on how they compare to his other extremely smart guests.
by palmotea | 2025-04-17 14:13:44+00:00
>> If attending these classes was even just free, this wouldn't be a problem. Giving out student aid for online classes is just ridiculous.

> Giving student aid beyond just free classes enables students who would otherwise need to spend time working to support themselves to instead attend school to get a better life. Generally that's considered a good thing, not worthy of the disdain you're displaying.

I think the idea would be if someone's getting paid to go to school so they don't have to work, then they should go to in-person classes. Online classes probably shouldn't be an option.

If there's profit available and no personal cost (in either time or money), scammers will exploit the program as described ("fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds").
by bluGill | 2025-04-17 14:14:22+00:00
BBSes were a thing back then, and while it wasn't the interest you did have large discussion. If you could afford compuserve (which charged by the minute!) you had a nationwide audience on a platform that was bigger than the internet of the time. A few people also had access to the internet (via their university), or at least usenet (via their work or the internet) and so there was discussion that way - but compuserve was where it was at.
by boomskats | 2025-04-17 14:14:28+00:00
Yeah, mcp-go is a pretty well known project (i know it from godoc-mcp), but I don't know whether 'better' is the right word.

It looks like it's a case of builder pattern/runtime validated vs codegen/typed. The readme doesn't reference mcp-go by name, but it does lead with 'type-safe, intuitive', which could be a poke at it?
by threeseed | 2025-04-17 14:14:37+00:00
> Consistency is hard to achieve and seems to have no use here

Famous last words.

It is very common when operating data platforms like this at this scale to lose a lot of nodes over time especially in the cloud. So having a robust consistency/replication mechanism is vital to making sure your training job doesn't need to be restarted just because the block it needs isn't on the particular node.
by w4rh4wk5 | 2025-04-17 14:14:44+00:00
We've transitioned all of our Bash scripts over to Ruby and are pretty happy with it. We almost exclusively use only Ruby's standard library. 'fileutils' and 'rake' have a bunch of nice functions to replace Bash scripts.

See, FileUtils for things like rm_rf, rake provides sh which can execute commands, then there's FileList and Pathname. It even comes with its own template engine (erb) if you need that. Regexes as first class citizens are awesome for shell scripting.

I can also recommend using optprase + ostruct for commandline argument parsing.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-04-17 14:14:53+00:00
ID laws are the end goal, the children and porn are just an excuse to get ID laws, which would give the governments a lot more control over the internet and social networks. Just imagin someone like Trump/Ursula requesting full list of names of everyone criticizing them on eg reddit (because reddit has porn, and you'd have to show your ID to be able to use reddit, because of your reasons). This is objectively bad for the people and for the internet.

Parenting is a good solution, not just giving the kids tablets so they stay quiet. Yes, kids are curious, kids will still find porn, ID laws or not, but parents should teach them and limit their access, not IDs on discord.

And of course porhub is making a fuss, are you, an (assuming an) adult going to go to your telco with your ID and say "hi, i'm John, i want to watch porn and jerk off, but you need to see my ID first"? Or will you find some other alternatives, where pornhub doesn't earn that money?
by bitbasher | 2025-04-17 14:14:59+00:00
The problem is the average person doesn't care very much or understand it.

If you ask anyone if privacy matters they will of course say yes. If you ask them why they use software with telemetry or websites with Google Analytics they will simply shrug.

If you ask them if it's alright for the NSA to collect and analyze data from everyone they will say yes and they have nothing to hide.

People don't know what privacy is. They don't know what they are fighting for or where the fight is taking place.

If you take that and then add encryption to the mix... and you have politicians and agency plants talking about "saving the children from online pedos" by banning these "encryption apps and technology"....
by epolanski | 2025-04-17 14:15:15+00:00
You're misinterpreting the role of the vote/downvote button I fear.

The upvote/downvote should serve the utility of promoting/suppressing relevant/irrelevant content to the discussion. It's a "vote what's relevant", not "vote what you agree on" button.

Also, if you disagree with someone you can just move on, you don't have to answer.

From HN's guidelines:

> Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion.

From Reddit's Reddiquette:

> If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it doesn't contribute to the community it's posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.
by gruez | 2025-04-17 14:15:24+00:00
>Put more simply: the modern internet doesn’t work without encryption, it is a fundamental part of the technology. Without it, anyone could log into any of your accounts, take your money, messages, photos, anything.

I'm pretty pro encryption, but even this is pretty dishonest. Phones (ie. PSTN, not iPhones) aren't "encrypted" by any means, but there's plenty of sensitive information sent over it. Lawyers fax each other important documents, and doctors fax each other medical recorcds. There was (is?) even telephone banking where you could do basic transactions over the phone. Even today, some banks/brokerages require you to phone in to do certain high risk operations (eg. high value transfers or account resets). All of this happens without encryption. While that's less security that I'd like, it's safe to say that "anyone could log into any of your accounts, take your money, messages, photos, anything" isn't true either.
by woodrowbarlow | 2025-04-17 14:15:53+00:00
yup, and this gives the ability to look up per-citizen location data.

sidebar: i've been trying to raise awareness about "joint communications and sensing" wherever i can lately; many companies involved in 6G standardization (esp. nokia) want the 6G network to use mmWave radio to create realtime 3d environment mappings, aka a "digital twin" of the physical world, aka a surveillance state's wet dream.

https://www.nokia.com/blog/building-a-network-with-a-sixth-s...
by 1659447091 | 2025-04-17 14:16:04+00:00
OIDC4VCI(OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance)[0] is what I think has the most promise.

My understanding is that an issuer can issue a Credential that asserts the claims (eg, you are over 18) that you make to another entity/website and that entity can verify those claims you present to them (Verifiable Credentials).

For example, if we can get banks - who already know our full identity - to become Credential Issuers, then we can use bank provided Credentials (that assert we are over 18) to present to websites and services that require age verification WITHOUT having to give them all of our personal information. As long the site or service trust that Issuer.

[0] https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-credential-issu...
by raincom | 2025-04-17 14:16:36+00:00
How do glp-1 drugs such as semaglutide, terzepatid and retatrutide impact apoptose?

"Tirzepatide promotes M1-type macrophage apoptosis and reduces inflammatory factor secretion by inhibiting ERK phosphorylation" [1]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15675...