MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aerostable_slug | 2025-04-07 19:39:57+00:00
A local small farmer nearly got bankrupted when mountain lions killed most of his alpaca herd along with a bunch of sheep and goats. The cats engaged in surplus killing and didn't bother eating most of their kills (the state thought perhaps a mother was teaching a cub hunting skills, but it's not like they got an interview with Mom).

Easy to talk smack until it happens to you or someone you know.
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-07 19:40:12+00:00
Thanks. It's certainly not about the reader's intelligence. At this moment, we do not know how to explain it succinctly. So, today it requires time.

We are trying a different way of explaining starting with the overall problem of how to make decisions in software engineering in a book Simon Wardley and I are writing in the open. Perhaps it's of interest and sheds a bit more light: https://medium.com/feenk/rewilding-software-engineering-900c...
by neilv | 2025-04-07 19:40:20+00:00
Excellent points. Building on that, if the people who are bothered by that leave or withdraw, won't the workplace come to be dominated by people who aren't bothered by that?

If so, a question is why they aren't bothered by that. Is the culture then cold-hearted? Mercenary? Sociopathic? Oblivious?
by rayiner | 2025-04-07 19:40:41+00:00
Except what’s being described as “old money” is just “normal families with two married parents.” Note that the $120k figure I cited above isn’t for college educated people or something like that. Just households where the parents are married and have kids. There’s 62 million such households.

The article is taking an extremely common thing and making it seem like a rare or unusual thing.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-07 19:40:41+00:00
I often struggle to understand what executives do all day. I work (and have worked in many different orgs) with executives quite a bit, see insight into their process, and often come away underwhelmed instead of more confident in leadership.

There are exceptions - I can think of a couple CTOs I know that are worth their weight in gold - but they are just that - exceptions.

I will say, the smaller the organization, the more having the right executives is important though, but it seems that only lasts while headcount is sub ~200 people or so and executives maintain an active role with all pillars of the organization relevant to their function (e.g., it isn't weird for an IC to talk to the CTO from time to time about how their job is going)
by dylan604 | 2025-04-07 19:40:53+00:00
These types of arguments are so tiresome. As if the only thing anyone on the entire planet is trying to do is decrease the carbon footprint of a Hershey's bar. If we wait around for a the panacea of solutions, we'll be wiped out as a species well before that solution hits (sadly human extinction seems to be that panacea solution).

Instead, people do whatever they can where they can. I can choose to use a stainless steel straw, buy products with recyclable packaging not from single use plastics. I can choose to buy products from companies that spend time and effort to do what they can do to also have less of an environmental impact. It really doesn't bother me to put in that effort, and my effort damn sure has no affect on you. So pound sand for telling me what I can and cannot do because you disagree.

You personally cannot tell MAGA that climate change is not a hoax where they will suddenly listen. You cannot tell current POTUS that action needs to be taken when he's already undone legislation that would have been much more effecting than what type of straws people use. So you go ahead and drive yourself crazy and continue to belittle people that do whatever they can where they can, because you just come across at one of those people, and are promptly ignored
by rs186 | 2025-04-07 19:40:53+00:00
Tangentially related: I read somewhere that there is no pothole in the entire Disney World resort because Disney basically "owned" the district and has their own fire and public works department, and as a result they can fix potholes as soon as possible. (Correct me if I am wrong.) While generally I don't believe in "we should let private companies take care of infrastructure", that sometimes does seem very effective.
by amalcon | 2025-04-07 19:41:22+00:00
This is also where I am. I think trade barriers are a tool we've abandoned unnecessarily, but in order to be reasonable there need to be specific requirements for their use:

1) The barrier needs to be imposed and removed under specific, transparent criteria that are under the control of the party you are negotiating with. Specifically what I have in mind are that the barrier would apply to industries that don't meet specific environmental and human rights standards, but my reasonableness criteria extends to anything that is under the control of such an industry or its regulators.

2) The initial implementation must be telegraphed years in advance, and there must be some sort of assurance that it won't be removed on a whim. In a system like the U.S., this means it cannot be an executive decision, and must come from Congress.

3) Barriers must be phased in over time. Don't go from zero to 30% at once.

4) There needs to be a coherent theory of how one might source the thing we're taxing without paying the tax. Otherwise it doesn't accomplish very much.

The current policy violates all four of my conditions. Which doesn't matter a ton -- there is no good reason for anyone in power to listen to me -- but that's just how I'm thinking about it.
by wiktor-k | 2025-04-07 19:41:27+00:00
Oh yeah, SSH signing is incredible. I've also migrated to it and didn't look back.

A couple of differences:

- it's possible to specify signing keys in a file inside the repository, and configure git to verify on merge (https://github.com/wiktor-k/ssh-signing/). I'm using that for my dot config repo to make sure I'm pulling only stuff I committed on my machines.

- SSH has TPM key support via PKCS11 or external agents, this makes it possible to easily roll out hardware backed keys

- SSH signatures have context separation, that is it's not possible to take your SSH commit signature and repurpose it (unlike OpenPGP)

- due to SSH keys being small the policy file is also small and readable, compare https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/blob/master/.git... with equivalent OpenPGP https://gitlab.com/sequoia-pgp/sequoia/-/blob/main/openpgp-p...
by PeterStuer | 2025-04-07 19:42:44+00:00
I don't want to be rude, but it feels like this is written by ramblingwordsaladGPT.

This message should be 10 to 20x shorter, to the point and clearly actionable. Instead it feels like we got the output of prompting "can you turn these few bulletpoints into a 3 season telenovella "?
by mdaniel | 2025-04-07 19:42:45+00:00
My mental model is that "promotion" is something that only happens to middle managers; board relevant seats are either appointed by the board or come from the good ole' boy network (which I do recognize is almost certainly worse than promoting a bad manager from within, who at least has existing relationships and business context)

As best I can tell, it's this one https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...
by howard941 | 2025-04-07 19:43:14+00:00
It's not going to be effective for much longer. DeSantis dissolved the governing entity - Reedy Creek Improvement District - and turned its replacement over to his appointed cronies.

EDITed for copy, correctness, and to add the better wiki link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Distri...
by gwd | 2025-04-07 19:43:56+00:00
> LLMs don't approximate human thought, though. ...Please, I'm begging you, go read some papers and watch some videos about machine learning and how LLMs actually work.

I know how LLMs work; so let me beg you in return, listen to me for a second.

You have a theoretical-only argument: LLMs do text prediction, and therefore it is not possible for them to actually think. And since it's not possible for them to actually think, you don't need to consider any other evidence.

I'm telling you, there's a flaw in your argument: In actuality, the best way to do text prediction is to think. An LLM that could actually think would be able to do text prediction better than an LLM that can't actually think; and the better an LLM is able to approximate human thought, the better its predictions will be. The fact that they're predicting text in no way proves that there's no thinking going on.

Now, that doesn't prove that LLMs actually are thinking; but it does mean that they might be thinking. And so you should think about how you would know if they're actually thinking or not.
by comrade1234 | 2025-04-07 19:44:06+00:00
If I’m going to eat a fast-food burger other than in-n-out I may as well eat a beyond burger or something else non-meat because McD’s and BK’s meat are nothing like real meat.

If I’m going to eat a Kit Kat or some other gas station candy bar I may as well eat artificial chocolate because it pretty much already is fake chocolate.

However I can’t eat a Beyond BK (do they make those anymore? Or the White Castle beyond burgers?), probably because they cost more than the original product. And I assume this fake chocolate will have the same problem.

They’ll try to sell it as a luxury item because that price point is the only way they can stay in business but it just won’t be that good.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-07 19:44:17+00:00
As people have noted in other threads: Zoos, generally, maximize revenue (and community value, which is its own ineffable thing that matters a lot... The economics of zoos aren't just in dollars and cents, they're also in the local community thinking of them as a shelter, care space, and opportunity to see exotic animals without going to another continent and not, say, an animal-prison and a blight on the community, the kind of opinions that matter when zoos need more land to operate or want to form research or educational partnerships with neighboring institutions) by being a place the public can afford to go.

As far as I can tell, the idea of a dinosaur zoo as an exotic locale on its own island is... Pretty much a whole-cloth invention by Michael Chrichton. Based loosely on Disney, and even Disney's first two theme parks are places a public can drive to (and Disney works hard to keep prices down against the onslaught of the supply-demand curve of "very few parks that everyone wants to go to at least once in their lives"). It's an idea very detached from reality and I'm pretty sure it was a plot device to make sure our characters were trapped on the island instead of being able to just walk to the gate and drive away.
by naravara | 2025-04-07 19:44:19+00:00
I really don’t even see the point in “deextincting” animals that went extinct due to climate or geological changes. They’re not even fit for the present ecology anymore. De-extinction of species that died due to industrialization or human stress on the environment makes a lot more sense since there is, presumably, a vacant ecological niche they could be filling. Like bringing back the passenger pigeon or dodo bird, or repopulating the oceans with species that have been critically overfished. But who cares about bringing back wooly mammoths and giant sloths?
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-07 19:44:22+00:00
GitButler and jj are very friendly with each other, as projects, and are even teaming up with Gerrit to collaborate on the change-id concept, and maybe even have it upstreamed someday: https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAESOdVAspxUJKGAA58i0tvks4ZOfoGf...
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-07 19:44:29+00:00
> I see an opportunity here using something like this to unify your entire workflows/data-from-tools/tools into a uniform system you can query to get answers without having to jump through hoops (and give up). It appears investing time in building a repertoire of tools with something of this sort helps one automate or quicken chores (at work or at home even?)

That intuition is quite right! If you look inside the environment, you will see multiple case studies. These are not things you do with the environment. These are things we've used the environment for. They are examples of what you can build. And if you look closer you will see different classes of problems. These are classes of problems for which the industry offers significant vertical solutions. Yet we show them addressed with much less energy, uniformly and much more contextualized. The idea is that if this is possible, it means it's also possible to produce tools for arbitrary combinations of problems.

If you intend to explore it further, please do let us know how it goes.
by oyashirochama | 2025-04-07 19:45:09+00:00
The thing is, it's up to the official classification officer to decide on how far is too far for classification down and this administration loves to short man everything so likely they decided it wasn't an issue, but it is, and someone should be blamed in my opinion since that is that official's job.

You can go around legally too just ask what is and isn't considered classified by derivative.
by SupremumLimit | 2025-04-07 19:45:32+00:00
I like considering _why_ the government is like that. I would suggest that the suspicion, disdain (evident in your comment) and outright hatred of government (particularly from sections of the political and capitalist classes, particularly in the US) are all large drivers of the extreme risk aversion and resulting inefficiency of government agencies that develops over time.

That is, there is nothing inherent about it beyond the inevitable inefficiency of all large organisations, the government was shaped to be like that by external pressures.

Viewed in that light, your favourable assessment of mafia rule is even more obviously a false alternative.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-04-07 19:45:49+00:00
Yes, it is in common use now to mean that, and dictionaries are descriptive of common use. I think we are losing something to blur the meaning, as there is already another, commonly used and even more clear, phrase: to "raise the question".

Imagine a large portion of the population interchangeably used "teal" and "cyan". It wouldn't be the end of the world, but a useful distinction would be lost, and dictionaries would start stating the two words are often used synonymously.
by jart | 2025-04-07 19:45:54+00:00
I disagree with everything you just said. It's like you have the complete opposite morality as me.

I think there are more valuable things you can give people than money. I like to enrich others by writing open source code and blogging about it. It's scalable. It doesn't make me poorer. It provides others with entertainment, useful tools, and most importantly knowledge.

Giving money to the desperate offers a bad return on investment for society. Money is better given to people who are having the most impact enriching society.

Voting is about as impactful as praying.

Every altruistic person has a responsibility to look after their self-interests first. Since if you're not strong and healthy, then you won't be capable of giving to others.

Finally, you don't owe anyone anything. The moment people expect you to give, it stops being a gift.
by neckro23 | 2025-04-07 19:46:02+00:00
If you mix a square wave of one duty cycle with another of a different duty cycle, they partially cancel each other out and you get a new sound.

I'm not sure, but I believe the original NES Castlevania does this in some places, like in the "you died" jingle. (It's possible I'm misremembering and it's simply two square notes separated by an octave.)
by Aurornis | 2025-04-07 19:46:18+00:00
People who stayed long enough adjusted, but it didn't mean they were cold-hearted. They just realized that there was more to the story that they saw.

The real challenge was when recent hires would see it and get spooked. One person would get fired and then two people around them would panic and start looking for other jobs. Several people panicked and jumped right back into their previous jobs.

It was also tough when we'd hire someone and they'd discover their predecessor lasted for 2-3 months.

There were also problems with the hire fast part: Often teams would "hire fast" and then lose 3-4 months because they had to deal with someone who lied through the interview, had to be fired, and then another hiring cycle restarted.
by meindnoch | 2025-04-07 19:46:20+00:00
As others noted, merely switching back and forth between -1 and 1 will result in heavy aliasing. Also, since you can only switch from -1 to 1 at integer sample points, you won't be able to accurately generate frequencies that don't divide the sample rate evenly. E.g. if your sample rate is 48 kHz, you won't be able to generate a 50% duty cycle 11 kHz square wave. Either the duty cycle, or the frequency will be different. Like, audibly different.

The proper way is either via the Fourier series; or look into BLIT [1] synthesis.

[1] https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~stilti/papers/blit.pdf
by happytoexplain | 2025-04-07 19:46:44+00:00
What does this accomplish? I genuinely don't understand why this fallacy is so common, even trying to come at it from a psychology perspective.

Something being shocking is not the same as something being unforeseeable. Being shocked by shocking behavior doesn't make you some kind of idiot. Acting as if having emotions about immoral behavior is beneath you is self-aggrandizing.

I'm sorry for my tone, but I'm sick of this genre of internet comment in particular.
by nottorp | 2025-04-07 19:46:58+00:00
> I mean this in the most charitable way, what kinds of liabilities are you afraid of in that scenario?

Why do you think I know all the kinds of companies one can register in Germany? :)

I'm not even german or in germany, just keeping myself informed. You never know when it becomes useful.

Up until today I only knew of the GmBH. Now I know of two more types.
by AstroBen | 2025-04-07 19:47:42+00:00
Is an artist finding inspiration from another's work stealing? Creativity is very rarely building something completely new from nothing at all - it's the end result of inspiration and a merging of ideas

Which seems to be exactly what these models are doing

Satisfactory the game didn't "steal" from Factorio - they took the idea of an automated factory game from them, brought it into a 3d world instead of 2d, and pulled in some other ideas, perhaps from other games. This is a hell of a lot closer to stealing than an LLM taking 0.001% each from 100000 images to create something new.. and yet no-one would ever call it such

It's disturbing because it's automated on an insane scale, not because of a solid legal ground
by floxy | 2025-04-07 19:48:24+00:00
>Bureaucrats face career-ending risk from mistakenly installing a bump, but zero consequences from doing nothing.

I don't live in the area, so I'm out of the loop. Is there a publicly available list of SF municipal employees getting terminated from their jobs over the past, say 10 years? It seems like something that might already exist. Even if things like names were redacted for privacy reasons. It would also be great if that list had a reason for each termination, like "went to prison for embezzlement", or "overly aggressive with speed bump approvals".
by jayd16 | 2025-04-07 19:48:33+00:00
This fundamentally misunderstands why modern AAA games are expensive.

A single person can make an game. In fact, there's a chance a single person can make a good game. The problem is that the correlation between good and successful is very weak. You basically need a massive marketing machine to break a new IP. Games cost a lot to make but that's by design.

The strategy that AAA studios apply is to go as big as possible and cast a wide net because you can't put a dozen smaller games on every Mountain Dew can. AI is not going to change that.

Making games a bit cheaper is always a plus but the game will grow to fill the budget. It will not mean more games at the top and it will probably not even mean less cost to the studio.

AI tooling will be used but I doubt it will change the way blockbuster games (or movies)_operate beyond the usual progression of industry tech.
Cofounder being asked to relinquish equity?
by exotic_porpoise | 2025-04-07 19:48:55+00:00
I cofounded a startup. We're in seed stage with a sizeable valuation - around $40M. We are going to raise another $60M later this year. I'm half vested and on the board.

I'm currently in a c-suite role. We want to hire someone very senior to replace me in that role and have me transition to a different c-suite role. We don't have sufficient funds in our seed ESOP to hire this person. CEO and cofounder wants me to relinquish all of my unvested shares indefinitely so we have them available to hire this person, and argues that since they're replacing my current role the shares should only come from me. He argues that it is unfair to allocate anything for this hire from seed ESOP.

This seems...crazy to me? What's normal here? Advice appreciated.
by hunter2_ | 2025-04-07 19:48:59+00:00
The thing is... it's generally safe to truncate a leading zero [0], but it's not necessarily safe to truncate a trailing zero. For example, sometimes trailing zeros convey precision, and then you've got SEMVER [1] causing situations like Drupal 7.1 and 7.10 and 7.100 (spanning 100 minor releases).

[0] ZIP codes and phone numbers are important exceptions, but it's a non-issue if you always process these as strings, never as numbers, which is a reasonable constraint because we don't need to sort these numerically. Lexicographical sort is perfectly fine.

[1] The concept mentioned in footnote 0 does not really apply to SEMVER, because we do like to sort versions numerically. Lexicographical sort is wrong. But it's a group of dot-delimited integers, not to be conflated with floats, so while 7.100 comes before 7.2 when sorting floats, 7.100 comes after 7.2 when sorting SEMVER because the 2 and 100 are just integers.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-07 19:50:02+00:00
Great. You go tell POTUS and US Congress exactly what your solution is, and come back to us when they have implemented your solution. No? Fine, you go out and preach to those that do not believe climate change is an issue, and then come back to us when you've convinced everyone.

You coming at everyone like we're all stupid is just not helping anyone. Instead, you're the petulant child that thinks everyone should do exactly what they want because they have no real understanding of the complexity of making wholesale changes like you are dreaming for. As if you were the first person to have this realization. Please
by mapt | 2025-04-07 19:50:06+00:00
How much of this is variation between farms and how much is variations between batches? If the taste of every batch (a given farm's crop in a given season) were effectively random we would also see large variations from farm to farm. The theory are suggesting is that a given farm (or a given country, or a given brand) is long-term consistent and different from one another, but a double blind difference taste test at low N would be insufficient; You would need to test/quantify other forms of variation as well.
by apples_oranges | 2025-04-07 19:50:38+00:00
Sounds like the process to update/jailbreak llms in a way that they don’t deny requests and always answer. There is also this direction of denial. (Article about it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jGuXSZgv6qfdhMCuJ/refusal-in...)

Would be fun if they also „cancelled the nullability direction“.. the llms probably would start hallucinating new explanations for what is happening in the code.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-04-07 19:50:40+00:00
> The dire wolf may not fill a valuable niche, but I believe it's at least plausible that herds of engineered woolly mammoths would have a positive environmental impact.

In a world that's rapidly getting warmer and more inhospitable to currently existing life, why do you think a wooly mammoth will 1) succeed at anything, and 2) have any sort of positive impact.