MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whacko_quacko | 2025-04-06 17:31:16+00:00
Kudos for providing a somewhat sensible definition. This helps by addressing the free speech issues (at least to an extent^[1]), but I think there are other problems as well.

The economical fallout would be extensive. Google's and Meta's business model (and that of many others) would basically disappear overnight. While I'm not a fan of either, and think there should be much stricter regulation for (very large) tech-companies, this would make financing of a lot of important products infeasible. But not just in tech. Think about product placement in movies or television, banners in big sporting events etc. Who'd pay for that? The state? With whose money?

Also, it would make entering markets much harder, if you're not a household name already. If I read your definition correctly, you couldn't even give a complimentary account for your SaaS product to a reviewer ("by way of other agreement") to enable them to test your software (and hopefully write favorably about it if they're convinced). This would definitely hurt consumers.

I think you should be allowed to try to change minds. If anything, we should outlaw the massive tracking effort involved in advertising.

[1]: What about a political party publishing a newspaper and paying their staff? Is that okay? I could construct more examples, and life is even messier. On the other hand, I have to admit, that the focus on the payment aspect makes this much more palatable to me.
by nailer | 2025-04-06 17:32:32+00:00
> character assassination by screenshot

You mean 'judging people by their own published thoughts'.

> A quick google doesn't support your assertion that he made those comments on "their" (BBC's) social media.

That wasn't the allegation in the comment you are responding to. Rather the allegation was that someone the BBC hired hates Jewish people, as shown on the person's social media.

> making an account on a Nazi website...

I thought really hard about engaging with you after you discussed this conspiracy theory but thought I may as well correct your post in case anyone didn't see what you were doing. This will be my last post in the thread. Seek help.
by BeetleB | 2025-04-06 17:33:00+00:00
Find me a car with autonomous capabilities (e.g. adaptive cruise control) that never does it, and I'll consider it.

As all car manufacturers point out: A prerequisite to enabling any safety mechanism is that the driver overrides when it fails. This includes blind spot detection, lane drift detection/correction, and adaptive cruise control. It is understood that when I enable it, I'm responsible for its behavior given that I can override it.

But that's all an aside. The point isn't that I continue to drive it, but that this is not something special about Teslas.
by piva00 | 2025-04-06 17:34:24+00:00
A bit of background: I grew up in Brazil between the years transitioning from full protectionism (import substitution) to a more freeing trade economy.

When I was around 9 I discovered that the videogame my dad had, a Gradiente Expert, could boot into some kind of BASIC REPL. The machine was a clone of the MSX re-branded in the Brazilian market to be allowed within the import substitution policy.

I had barely learnt to read but I got very, very excited seeing the command line pop-up. My dad worked in the telecom industry, and I had seen him many times working on a command line. I flipped through the manual and eventually figured out how to make the computer write characters on the screen.

From then on I spent years obsessed with learning how to program on the MSX, then on the 386 running MS-DOS at home, eventually Win95 appeared, and since my dad worked in telecom we were some of the first ones I knew to get an internet connection.

On the web I learnt HTML, CGI, then ASP, and later PHP. I think I was about 12-13 when I tried to learn C/C++ for modding games, some 3D modeling, etc., eventually culminating with me getting a job as an intern/youth apprentice scheme at 15-16 to help programming a factory's intranet systems to comply with ISO9001.

My dad never really pushed me to work with computers or anything, I think I was just a very curious kid who loved science, and also tinkering and building stuff. I realised only later in my 30s how it all connected, building with coding was probably immensely satisfying for me as a kid, very fast feedback on what works or not, many puzzles to solve, and virtually free of expenses that I couldn't afford.
by grandempire | 2025-04-06 17:34:37+00:00
> employers don't want generalists with generic CS knowledge

That's not true. Like I said, this is more of a problem if you are trying to break in.

> people they can immediately slot in and start crushing Jira tickets.

This is representative of the only the most precarious software contracts.

> They wouldn't get hired at all in real life.

I have hiring capability and I would hire them.

The poster said their skills would be out of date. I think you're confusing a sales problem for a skill problem.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-06 17:34:47+00:00
Most of these companies are absolutely total bullies. They’ll go to your board, CEO, governor, senator, mayor, audit firm, wherever. Punish your friends and elevate your enemies.

A big part of being a CIO or CTO is having and maintaining relationships with key suppliers. This is especially true with SaaS/IaaS, where your business is valued based on whatever bullshit churn metrics the company cooked up. Your $2M deal may have way bigger impact on a Sales VP bonus than you think. You have to be a different kind of asshole to maintain control of these guys than in the old software world.
by candiddevmike | 2025-04-06 17:35:15+00:00
It's starting to matter. Trump's downfall will be his base seeing him as anything but a successful, smart businessman. He's struggling to control the narrative with how many gaffs and scandals have occurred, and it's starting to hit his base and his brand:

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-update...

The tariffs are probably going to be a historical "turn of the tide" moment.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-04-06 17:35:29+00:00
Our math teacher in UK high school c.1976 asked us if anyone want to join him for an adult education programming class being taught by the local university (Durham), and a bunch of us did. This was batch mode (punched card) PL/1 programming - submit job to operator and an hour later get a fanfold printout of the result. A couple of us (incl. me) had parents that worked at the University, and got the computer dept. to agree to allow us high school kids to go in on weekends etc to use the Unix system (online access) there, after the initial adult education class had ended. We spent a lot of time there, taught ourselves to program in C, and caused some amount of trouble by messing with the unix system - brute force password cracking, and on one occasion accidentally deleting the /etc/passwd file, which luckily they had backed up - they were surprisingly tolerant of all this and didn't kick us out!

In March 1978 the first issue of "Personal Computer World" magazine came out, featuring the just released NASCOM-1 kit computer on the front cover. I'd just inherited 200 UKP from my grandmother, so sent it off and got myself a kit. This was a 1 MHz Z-80 system that came with 2 KB of memory (1KB for user, 1KB for system), and a built-in monitor program that let you enter programs as hex machine code. The computer itself came as bare board, bag of components to solder, and no case. It used a TV for display and cassette recorder for program/data storage. You'd hand assemble your program on paper, then enter the codes and run it. There wasn't a whole lot you could do in 1KB, but I remember coding things like a hangman game, and memorizing the op-codes well enough to program short things directly in hex.

I then went to college, taking Math & Comp Sci, graduating in 1982, and lucking into a dream job at Acorn Computers, which started my career as developer.
by tasuki | 2025-04-06 17:36:02+00:00
I hope lenerdenator didn't just lose everything and isn't seeking revenge on the tech bros - more likely he's a tech bro!

It's not pedantry though. It really makes no sense to compare earnings per unit of time to accumulated wealth. They are entirely different things.

Compare the wealth of Elon vs wealth of average person on the Earth, or average US citizen. Those are also mind-boggling numbers and it makes sense to compare them.
by maest | 2025-04-06 17:36:20+00:00
> According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.

I'm sorry, how is that knowable? Is there a log of iPhone users interactions that shows this?

Or is it the case that investigators pointed to the wrong number being saved in Waltz' phone and Waltz replied: "Oh, the only explanation is that I must have misclicked when my phone asked me to update my contacts."
by BeetleB | 2025-04-06 17:36:39+00:00
> Yeah, there may be many more FSD miles on Tesla, but if that leads to a bunch of motorcyclists getting hit, then maybe that’s exactly the problem.

I'd wager far more motorcyclists get hit by humans driving non-Teslas in non-autonomous modes. I could rephrase your comment to:

"Yeah, but if humans drive cars without safety features, and that leads to a bunch of motorcyclists getting hit, then maybe that’s exactly the problem."

... to make the (faulty[1]) argument that driving with FSD turned on is better for motorcyclists.

[1] Faulty not because it's false, but because it is a logical fallacy.
by const_cast | 2025-04-06 17:36:41+00:00
This is a classic case of perfect being the enemy of good.

We don't need to 1984 listen to every conversation for any hints at product endorsement. We can start with obvious things - for example, prohibiting a company from spending money on marketing. Banning ads on the air, whatever.

There's levels to this. There's really evil slot machine marketing. You know, try to get people addicted to your social media and use that addiction as a way to generate profit. And then there's not so bad marketing. Like my friend telling me he likes his new pair of pants.
by graemep | 2025-04-06 17:37:05+00:00
Yes, that is stupid. Why not apply that to the big economies that the GP comment said was 90% of the deficit. Exempt small low income countries - save a lot of people a lot of paid at little cost.

On the other hand this is a bargaining tactic. I do not think these tariffs will last.

> Instead, recall that President Trump views tariffs as generating negotiating leverage for making deals. It is easier to imagine that after a series of punitive tariffs, trading partners like Europe and China become more receptive to some manner of currency accord in exchange for a reduction of tariffs

https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...

And look who wrote it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Miran "
by api | 2025-04-06 17:37:19+00:00
I don't agree with how it's being done -- it makes Biden's Afghanistan exit look well planned and executed -- but the trade stuff is one of the few areas where I have some overlap with MAGA. My preferred approach would be more careful, gradual, selective, and, well, well-executed, but it's very clear that blanket free trade with no standards and no reciprocity has hollowed out the country.

I mean... if we are going to have the EPA and environmental standards, then it stands to reason that we must tax imports from countries that do not. Otherwise we are just moving the pollution elsewhere while burning even more fuel to ship products here. Right? It kind of shows that a lot of environmentalism is just NIMBY-motivated. It's fine if we trash other peoples' back yards. But a lot of our big environmental problems are global, so not only is this hypocrisy but it doesn't work.

It's good that we have workers' rights and OSHA, but the same logic applies. Otherwise we are just exploiting workers elsewhere.

On a somewhat tangent... I find it kind of disturbing that the one area where I have some agreement with MAGA is the least popular and most roundly criticized MAGA policy, and the one most likely to result in an electoral defeat.

Most of the other stuff in MAGA -- isolationism, a love for strongman rule (at home and elsewhere), authoritarianism, cults of personality, misogyny, racism, etc. -- is stuff that I find horrific, but the only thing people really care about is short term economic outcomes.
by wrs | 2025-04-06 17:37:26+00:00
What? No. If my team has gone to the effort of a full interview loop with you, and we think you’re a good candidate, we’re not going to start over to save $10k. This isn’t one of those periods when companies are having trouble hitting their hiring quotas; if you got that far then they must be serious.

(Note that if is one of those crazy periods, they still won’t quibble over the salary, but for an entirely different reason!)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-06 17:37:46+00:00
> If you think "I mostly follow the law except for this one rule I don't like" you didn't get it, you are just not a civilized person

You’re really calling the likes of Rosa Parks uncivilised [1]?

If the law is illegal or wrong, there is no higher calling than getting it overturned. There are two ways to do that in America: through the legislature and through the courts. To access the latter, you need a violation. (There is technically a third: not enforcing it. But that actually is a breakdown in the rule of law.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks
by hiq | 2025-04-06 17:37:54+00:00
I'd accept the negotiation angle if the tariffs had been only threats with clear demands to avoid them. Trump could have demanded that your 3) be fulfilled by June, otherwise tariffs would apply. Instead we get tariffs with quick retaliation e.g. from China, and I still see no negotiation in place.

The problem in general is that we are all, the US Congress included, guessing what the goal is.
by vessenes | 2025-04-06 17:38:51+00:00
This blog post and results were very surprising to me. Featherless AI has been doing some pretty in depth research around using existing model weights but throwing away the transformer and replacing with RWKV. Which is lighter on memory, better at long context and a fundamentally different architecture - it does not scale up quadratically with context length.

Their method:

* Keep the old model as a teacher * Copy it, freeze all layers * Rip out the transformer layers * Inject new RWKV layers there * Train against og model as a teacher * Unfreeze entire new model, train against teacher * Train for long context

Their tests were done with a tiny number of tokens for training, like 200-500m total. Results: interesting! It’s definitely better than QwQ on some tasks, and worse on a few.

The super interesting result here is that it seems as if most of the knowledge and intelligence is kept in the feed forward part of the network, not the transformer, since it can be replaced, and the replacement can be trained relatively quickly. That’s super super fascinating.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-06 17:38:56+00:00
And I'm saying a ton of those "incorrect decisions/errors of judgement" would no longer exist if we had superhuman LIDAR abilities.

You're using existing human vision as your baseline, which is not the right comparison here. The question is a baseline of superhuman abilities. So there's a ton of accidents we wouldn't get into if we had those superhuman abilities.

Basically everything involving a collision with an object we weren't aware of in time because it wasn't in our limited field of view and wasn't well-lit, that could have been avoided if we had been. Which is a decent proportion of accidents.

But the bigger, original point is that LIDAR is better than cameras, and better for avoiding accidents.
by grandempire | 2025-04-06 17:39:07+00:00
> "We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is

You are describing the ability of good engineers to deal with vague and ill defined problems.

> "We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway..

Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.

> It's so transparent to me now

Hope I cleared up the confusion.

> "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization"

I am not - and did not make the claim. I am explaining why you are seeing engineers care more about vagueness in one context than another.

I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.
by dguest | 2025-04-06 17:40:12+00:00
The CERN experiments and CERN IT have contributed quite a lot to open source. Part of this is necessity: when your experiment draws thousands of collaborators from hundreds of institutions and dozens of different funding agencies it's really difficult to deal with licensing fees.

Scientific Linux is discontinued, though. A few experiments went to CentOS and (when that was moved to CentOS Stream) to AlmaLinux. But practically speaking the OS the experiments are using is a RHEL-like base with almost everything important overwritten via LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PATH, etc. and pointing to a fuse-mounted file system called cvmfs

https://github.com/cvmfs/cvmfs

For better or worse this allows O(weekly) releases that change what would normally be core components of the OS.

It's kind of weird how all the interesting stuff at CERN is linux and open source, and then all the IT infrastructure is outdated MS services and Windows.
by renewiltord | 2025-04-06 17:40:17+00:00
This is absolutely incredible: surprising amount of consistency and the whole thing live-generated. It’s incredible how quickly we can get inured to technology that would have been sheer magic when I was younger.

I recall being blindingly excited about Windows 98 and a gradient title bar but these days everything new I see is incredible and everyone is bored with it. I don’t get it. The game is being generated frame to frame!
by vindarel | 2025-04-06 17:40:42+00:00
> first-class IDE

Atom/Pulsar, or Portacle (portable Emacs with SBCL + Quicklisp), or plain-common-lisp (2 clicks install for Windows), ALIVE for VSCode is getting there, also the newer Intellij plugin. And vim. LispWorks. Sublime, Lem, Jupyter notebooks, and more.

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...
by r1chardnl | 2025-04-06 17:41:25+00:00
I wonder whether it'll be possible to compress enough of the game to make (almost) every possible scenario that you could encounter in the game be playable. Same issue that the previous AI experiment for Minecraft and others had is that objects and enemies seem to pop in and out of nowhere. Could the "learned" probability be high enough for this never to be an issue? You ever think you're seeing something in real life but it's just an optical illusion, it kinda feels like that to me. Obviously this still requires an entire game to be made before you can train on it, but could maybe open up other development and testing of games.
by wredcoll | 2025-04-06 17:41:37+00:00
Thank you for highlighting the salient point: this list has a reason for existing. It's not just a set of books chosen at random or some such, it's a small group explicitly selected.

As such it's entirely valid to question both the selections themselves as well as the purpose for creating the list in the first place.

As an example, I find it very difficult to imagine the world being improves in anyway whatsoever by requiring people to read fountain head.
by const_cast | 2025-04-06 17:42:00+00:00
> Human attention is scarce. Demand for that attention is endless. Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely

This logic is just bad, plain and simple. You know what else has a high demand? Drugs.

So I guess fuck it, right? Sell heroin in Walmart, who cares. It's a "natural market". Of course people want to shoot up, it feels fucking amazing and humans are hard-wired to do shit that makes them feel good.

So let's just give up and do nothing. Yeah, in fact go ahead and advertise heroin on TVs. Yeah, go ahead and give it to infants too, let's get them young. After all, it's a natural market or something.

Please, I am begging you, stop bending over so severely for "markets". Sit back, and think about consequences.

If something ONLY HARMS PEOPLE, why are we doing it? Seriously, if everyone is a loser then why are we here? We don't have to make life hell just because capitalism would like it! That's a choice!
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-06 17:42:02+00:00
> Lisp was truly unique in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, but it required expensive hardware to run. It would be hard to conceive of a Lisp running well on a 6502 or an 8086.

You'd be surprised. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11192/wha... Of course something like FORTH was perhaps more suited to these smaller machines, but LISP implementations were around. Many users of 6502-based microcomputers were familiar with LOGO, which is just a LISP with different syntax.
by ssttoo | 2025-04-06 17:42:34+00:00
Exactly, you do get approval before you start, as step 4 says: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...

In my case I picked a title from the project’s wishlist and almost started but searching the mailing list showed that someone has just started. I found another title by the same author: https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/IP0emhSQ6Bw/m/B...
by jsheard | 2025-04-06 17:42:34+00:00
Funny you should say that, because the AI Doom demo was 8 months ago and in that time we seemingly haven't got any closer to making novel games. This Quake 2 demo is yet again just a wonky version of a pre-existing game, attempting to be a 1:1 copy of the original, rather than extrapolating something like Quake 2 that isn't literally Quake 2 again.
by outer_web | 2025-04-06 17:42:59+00:00
It is comparable but not similar. Clinton had a private server for handling diplomatic emails. The vast majority of traffic was unclassified, the classified material was later deemed to be improperly marked (except three documents iirc).

This case is a single incident (that we are aware of) where a clearance holder manually bypassed security and tracking by transcribing attack plans to a commercial chat platform.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-06 17:43:33+00:00
Using an HP 3000 at a local college via teletype terminal during summer gifted & talented program.

The school eventually got some TRS-80s, and I did a summer program where we passed an Apple ][ off as a robotics program, and I mowed grass summers and eventually bought a Commodore Vic-20 and later a TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1 (in retrospect, should have waited and gotten the Model 100).

Got Inman's book on Apple Machine Language, and a couple of other programming books, and lots of magazines (including one which had the ad "We See Farther" ad: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_11970... ) and typed in lots of program listings for games and so forth, and used Scripsit for my senior term paper.

Bought a 128K Mac and pretty much one of everything in the store, then switched to Windows 'cause I wanted a portable device, until the NCR-3125 and Go Corp.'s PenPoint came out --- paired that w/ a NeXT Cube which got me through college and was pretty much the high-water mark of my graphical computing experience.