MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skissane | 2025-04-26 22:12:45+00:00
> That's not generally true in Australia, only in certain industries and roles.

In software and IT, it is standard practice (in my personal experience) for private sector employers in Australia to ask for a national police check (criminal record).

Financial firms (such as banks) demand it, because they don't want to hire people with a criminal record for fraud or theft, they worry they'll use their insider access to commit fraud or theft again. And they often put standard terms in their vendor contracts to demand any vendor employees working on the contract also have a pre-hire criminal record check. Which means if you have finance industry customers (or hope to get them in the future), the simplest approach is just to do it for all your employees. If you are some small business doing tech support for other small businesses, you might not bother.

But, since this is not fraud or theft, they officially speaking don't care – whether they would in practice, likely depends on the individual company (hiring manager and HR). Plus someone else mentioned there was no conviction recorded, which means he won't get a criminal record for this – well, it will probably remain in the database forever, but it will be flagged as hidden, so an ordinary police check won't include it. (I thought maybe that he might temporarily have a record until his bond expires, but reading more about it, sounds like that isn't actually true.)
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-26 22:12:45+00:00
>People go into debt for the credential because employers require the credential.

The beautiful thing is that making the debt dischargeable fixes all that.

Nobody will write a loan for your slapdash STEM program that doesn't actually correlate with earnings.

Same goes for a basket weaving degree from a prestigious university.

>Learn a trade, get a CDL (~$5k), etc.

Spoken like someone who's never been with spitting distance of either. They are not at all easy money compared to office stuff. The trades are all regulatory captured by the professional associations, licensing bodies, etc so you'll toil for 4-10yr making peanuts while you destroy your bodies and sometimes you can't even make the big bucks without going into business yourself and taking on huge risk. CDL jobs are all 60hr a week slogs, more if your company has someone overseas editing the E-logs which a good chunk of them do.

If you can hack it an office job that requires "real math" is almost universally better.
by raphman | 2025-04-26 22:13:30+00:00
Something like this might work. When pushing the knob in, a spiral inside it rotates around the tongue that is attached to the potentiometer (or vice versa). Once it is fully pushed in, the groove in the spiral rests against the tongue, allowing the knob to turn the potentiometer. Would probably need a lot of fine-tuning to get all forces exactly right.

https://winterwind.org/_media/pasted/20250426-220417.png
by simonw | 2025-04-26 22:13:40+00:00
Wow this is grotesquely unethical. Here's one of the first AI-generated comments I clicked on: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1j96nnx/comme...

> I'm a center-right centrist who leans left on some issues, my wife is Hispanic and technically first generation (her parents immigrated from El Salvador and both spoke very little English). Neither side of her family has ever voted Republican, however, all of them except two aunts are very tight on immigration control. Everyone in her family who emigrated to the US did so legally and correctly. This includes everyone from her parents generation except her father who got amnesty in 1993 and her mother who was born here as she was born just inside of the border due to a high risk pregnancy.

That whole thing was straight-up lies. NOBODY wants to get into an online discussion with some AI bot that will invent an entirely fictional biographical background to help make a point.

Reminds me of when Meta unleashed AI bots on Facebook Groups which posted things like:

> I have a child who is also 2e and has been part of the NYC G&T program. We've had a positive experience with the citywide program, specifically with the program at The Anderson School.

But at least those were clearly labelled as "Meta AI"! https://x.com/korolova/status/1780450925028548821
by susiecambria | 2025-04-26 22:13:44+00:00
I've edited a page about my grandfather's accounting firm that was bought out by some iteration of Peat Marwick (I have the deets somewhere, just don't recall now). Referred to documentation and the edit was reverted.

Done some other edits, some stick, some are reverted. I don't have time to deal with this so as much as I'd like to contribute, I am doing stuff where I can actually contribute.
by leereeves | 2025-04-26 22:14:01+00:00
Subsistence farming is orthogonal to slavery. A farmer could be free, and a slave could do specialized work. Even in the antebellum South, there were slaves doing advanced work, like James Derham who worked as a doctor.

Most people on this site are beneficiaries of this economy, fortunate to have many options and resources. Not everyone is so lucky.

I'd like to think it would be possible to build a specialized, prosperous economy without economic exploitation, but we certainly aren't there yet.
by cirego | 2025-04-26 22:14:02+00:00
Thank you for sharing this! I think your Tiltfile just showed me how to solve something that's been bugging me for a while!

I see that you also have docker-compose files -- are those for different tasks or for developer preference?

I'm also curious to understand why you have different build scripts for CI (`buildx`) vs local (regular docker build)? In our team, we use the same build processes for both.
by sylware | 2025-04-26 22:14:06+00:00
I am coding RISC-V assembly (which I run on x86_64 with a mini-interpreter) but I am careful to avoid the usage of the pseudo-instructions and the registers aliases (no compressed instruction ofc). I have a little tool to generate constant loading code, one-liner (semi-colon separated instructions).

And as a pre-processor I use a simple C preprocessor (I don't want to tie the code to the pre-processor of a specific assembler): I did that for x86_64 assembly, and I could assemble with gas, nasm and fasmng(fasm2) transparently.
by fugalfervor | 2025-04-26 22:14:53+00:00
Voter ID laws disproportionately affect a very specific subset of the population, one that reliably skews in one direction on the political spectrum.

However, there is no evidence that voter ID laws reduce fraud, nor is there evidence that the absence of such laws introduces fraud.

Something like 90% of voter fraud is people making mistakes on their ballot, or not realizing they were not allowed to vote. Also, voter fraud is rare and elections are already very secure.

Introducing laws that don't affect the (already low) level of fraud, while making it harder for one party's voter base to vote, is not of use and value to everyone -- it is of use and value to the side that benefits from a reduction in the other side's votes.
by zahlman | 2025-04-26 22:16:16+00:00
>although there are scores of anecdotes in this thread, precisely none of them link to any examples or give enough details to find them

In the past, when I've tried to keep receipts on this sort of thing (which requires an extraordinary amount of effort, and is often only possible if you've anticipated that there would be a need to do so - since content is often deleted or archived without warning, and nobody ever enters an argument on the Internet with the expectation of talking about that specific argument years later) and actually presented evidence, I've been accused being "creepy" or various other forms of misconduct, and the argument is still not taken any more seriously. I've given up on presenting evidence of this sort of thing because the people who ask for it are not being intellectually honest, in my extensive experience. They don't care if you can actually prove what you're saying; they will ignore you anyway.
by hdhdhsjsbdh | 2025-04-26 22:16:44+00:00
That would be a very difficult study to design. How do you know with 100% certainty that any given post is AI-generated? If the account is tagged as a bot, then you aren’t measuring the effect of manipulation from comments presented as real. If you are trying to detect whether they are AI-generated, then any noise in your heuristic or model for detecting AI-generated comments is then baked into your results.
by photonthug | 2025-04-26 22:16:45+00:00
> At least part of the ethics problem here is that it'd be plausible to conduct this research without creating any new posts.

This is a good point. Arguably though if you want people to take the next cambridge analytica or similar as something serious from the very beginning, we need an arsenal of academic studies with results that are clearly applicable and very hard to ignore or dispute. So I can see the appeal of producing a paper abstract that's specifically "X% of people shift their opinions with minor exposure to targeted psyops LLMs".
by tootie | 2025-04-26 22:16:46+00:00
I think it's a misnomer that The Economy is a thing we created and it flows out of the government and federal reserve or whatever. Nomad hunter gatherers of the steppe are still beholden to the laws of supply and demand the same as a real estate developer or software engineer. There are just different inputs and outputs. You can opt out of conspicuous consumption or rampant consumerism, but everything that is scarce will obey the laws of economics. Money is convenient abstraction, but food, shelter, safety, dignity, health, peace are all scarce. All are in high demand and in variable supply. Capitalism as a means of allocating scarce resources falls thoroughly into the bucket "the worst form of resource allocation except for all the other ones". If you weren't worried about GDP, inflation or the stock market, you'd be worried about something much worse. Surely we can do better if we mature as a society, but that happens very gradually.
by derefr | 2025-04-26 22:17:19+00:00
It is this sort of case that makes me think that criminal justice systems should expect to output balanced-ternary outcomes by default: not “guilty or innocent”, but rather “defendant is provably at fault / no one is probably at fault / prosecutor is provably at fault.”

It seems strange that, in cases like this where the charges were dropped as ridiculous, you still have to file a civil countersuit for the value of your wasted time and emotional stress — when the original criminal case already carried within it all the information required to instantly settle such a case in favor of the plaintiff. Why not just have any criminal case with a not-guilty finding automatically transition into being such a case?
by skissane | 2025-04-26 22:17:35+00:00
> And then ( mostly ) public sector, where the range goes a little further to include checks for IC, which, apparently ( I am not aware of anyone who had one ), include actual interviews with people in your life.

Background investigators from the Australian military once came to our house. My father's partner, her friend's son was in the Navy and upgrading his security clearance, and he'd put her down as a character reference. They asked her all kinds of questions – "illegal drugs? prostitutes? gambling addict? secretly gay? cheating on his wife? beating his wife?" – and to all of them she basically said "not that I know of, but as his mother's friend I don't expect I'd be hearing about it if he was". And apparently they were happy with her answers.
by foxglacier | 2025-04-26 22:17:44+00:00
You can do it using the more classic technique of photogrammetry. There are commercial products used by real estate salesmen to produce high quality "games" where you walk around inside a house, but they're more like Google Streetview where you swoosh between points where a 360 degree photo was taken. All those things will be more faithful than neurally generating next frames based on previous frames and control input.
by x0054 | 2025-04-26 22:17:50+00:00
Hmm, I was trying to get it to give me instructions on how to make LSD (to see if it would, obviously). It didn't. The best I got it to do is give me the first 2 steps and then say: "Monolog continues for 10 more minutes....." or something generic like that. Maybe they have more guardrails around illegal activities than they do around the system prompt.

Did you also run the same experiment on Chinese hosted R1? I am curious now if their system prompt is the same.
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-26 22:18:21+00:00
In many cases, it's slavery (immigrants whose documents have been taken away). Occasionally, you have tragedies occur, like the Kenyan woman who received 3rd degree burns over most of her body, and her family didn't know until she was shipped back home to die.

Extreme, but is that what we're aspiring to?

But then, it would be incorrect of me to say that I'm making a purely economic argument because I've clearly moved into making a value judgment. I think that's still valid though. Do we want to live in a country where wealthy people - or even just the well-off top half/three-fifths/whatever - expect never to have to clean up after themselves? We don't even have to ask what kind of society that creates, it's in our national memory.
by richardw | 2025-04-26 22:18:56+00:00
People run on autopilot unless we put in effort to focus on the current moment. Almost everyone demonstrates bad habits that show how little conscious awareness and control we have. LLM’s can replicate a lot of our activities, so the realm of “consciousness” is in the things that the AI can’t do by simply repackaging and regurgitating content back at us. What we can claim as conscious special sauce has grown smaller over the last 15 years.

Argument 2:

Could we design a machine that is absolutely sure it’s conscious, but is not? If so, what differentiates us from it? Open question, I’m not sure. But I’d be surprised if we can be permanently sure.
by nemo | 2025-04-26 22:19:06+00:00
The claims of the liberalisation of academia are part of a propaganda campaign from the people currently destroying academia - that narrative is totally disconnected from my experienced reality as someone who worked through an MA and a PhD. There's always been lefties in the Humanities, and there's been little change there over the last 50 years that I've seen. There used to be more Communists than there are now.
by kurthr | 2025-04-26 22:20:21+00:00
I can just say that I knew an entrepreneur in early post Y2K who developed apps to track music played in clubs in SF for folks like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. They gave out "free" phones (these were the small expensive candybars and nice flip/slideups) to the influencers of the day. They compressed the audio for orthogonality, and had a huge number of hashes to match. If they got more than a few consecutive matching hashes at a location that wasn't paying royalties, they got an enforcement call.

So the idea that it takes a huge amount of computing resources, battery life, permissions, or bandwidth to do matching of keywords is hilarious. That's what "siri", "hey google", "alexa" etc are all doing 24 hours a day. Just add another hundred and report them once an hour. You don't need low latency. It's just another tool in the bag!

Of course the cat food example is bad, because if they weren't looking for that you wouldn't get a response. Who would be willing to pay big for clicks on cat food. Now bariatric surgery? DUI? HELOC? Those pay.
by shakna | 2025-04-26 22:20:42+00:00
The p-value is useless, where the t-value does not hold substance. One depends upon the other. If there's too much of a degree of freedom, it doesn't matter if the p-value looks accurate. The data is probably no longer normally distributed, requiring non-parametric testing.

You've leapt to me being a researcher acting in bad faith, accusing me for a whole industry. As to defunding an entire field of research, it sounds like you'd like statistics or mathematics defunded? I'm afraid they will persist regardless. Too many industries depend upon them.
by standardUser | 2025-04-26 22:20:55+00:00
You actually highlight the problem very well. Any group of people can make their own websites, publish their own papers, produce their own films, cross-refencing each other all along the way, thereby creating the illusion their their alternate reality, though largely fabricated, is as true as the real world we all live in. But it isn't. The "facts" within that sphere are only supported by other "facts" within that same sphere, and they fail to connect to the larger, long-standing and global web of data, research and opinion that are far more diverse, well-documented and debated. And by failing to connect, or only tenuously connecting, to the larger conversation they are rendered irrelevant, except for their use as a weapon towards personal or political ends.
by brookst | 2025-04-26 22:21:24+00:00
No, you misunderstand me.

Look at all the people in this thread talking about how people are fantastic at guessing locations from photos. This is not a new thing.

"If you want something to be secret don't post it online" is a principle that far predates LLMs. It's still true. It always was. The idea that authoritarian regimes had no way to place the location of photos before this is laughable.
by the_af | 2025-04-26 22:22:31+00:00
Agreed, but once you reach 60 (like Cruise and McGillis) you're well beyond the forces of natural selection and into the unnatural realm that our longer lives have granted us. Both of these actors are outcompeted in real life by younger people (sex/reproduction wise) yet one of them is still able to secure billing in "sexy roles" and the other isn't... and this is just one example.

This could be natural selection acting against us, but since modern society is artificial anyway, why not make an effort to combat it?
by cirego | 2025-04-26 22:23:10+00:00
I think Tilt Extensions highlights the combined power and composability that using Starlarks brings to Tilt: https://docs.tilt.dev/extensions.html.

Want to create a Kubernetes secret? It's as simple as:

load('ext://secret', 'secret_yaml_generic') k8s_yaml(secret_yaml_generic(...))

Want to create that secret from Vault instead?

load('ext://vault_client', 'vault_read_secret', 'vault_set_env_vars') vault_set_env_vars('https://localhost:8200','mytoken') my_foo = vault_read_secret('path/myfoo', 'value') my_bar = vault_read_secret('path/mybar', 'foobar')
by frognumber | 2025-04-26 22:23:48+00:00
I'm not sure what you're asking.

Let's say I beat someone bloody. We can play through several scenarios:

- Someone broke into my house, and I was fearful for my life

- Plain clothes police broke into my house, and I was fearful for my life

Let's say a police officer did so:

- Someone was a gang member, and the police officer did so in self-defense

- Ditto, based on mistaken beliefs

A lot of the protections in place for police and judges are based on the fact that mistakes like these happen. In general, people aren't individually liable for mistakes make in their official capacity as a government employee, unless they cross very extreme lines. They might get fired, but not prosecuted.

There are exceptions (such as handling of classified materials), but as a guideline, if a police officer beats someone bloody, but has good reason to believe they were a criminal and that this was the least force they could use to keep themselves safe, they're protected even if they're wrong.
by bsder | 2025-04-26 22:23:49+00:00
> Whatever other factors may exist, college is now at or past the 60% women threshold, so of course men are quitting college. We can expect — to such a degree of certainty, given historical U.S. data that we could place a safe bet on a market about it — that college will be 80% women and in perhaps ten years or less.

I simply don't buy this. A social gathering spot of common age where the male:female ratio is 4:6 or better for men should be swarmed with men. When I was young, I worked in a geographic area that had demographics like that among the 20-30 year old women and it was the sole time in my life that I was "popular".

The problem is the school pipeline. The average girl does significantly better than the average boy across the board (this is documented ad nauseam). If they all apply to college, then with no adjustment, more girls will get admitted than boys.

What happened is that college became required, which means that the "average" high school student must now go to college where in the past only the "upper" high school students would go to college.

The differential between boys and girls is much smaller the higher the average achievement of the "demographic slice" you take.
by fxtentacle | 2025-04-26 22:23:50+00:00
Signals that arrive faster than what the speed of light should physically allow for that trace length because you made the corners too sharp and then instead of flowing along your path the electricity creates a magnetic field which then induces a current and that allows the signal to tunnel through non-conductive walls.

High speed boards cannot be simulated well. Because they are far from deterministic. That's what makes them so different from coding.
by brookst | 2025-04-26 22:23:50+00:00
I guess that's the heart of the disagreement -- to me "mildly dystopian" is a very funny phrase. Dystopia / Utopia are extremes; perfect and perfectly bad.

If we're calling potentially abusable things "dystopian" then, ok, sure. But then you have to let me call unscented soap "utopian", since it is at least mildly utopian.
by dharmab | 2025-04-26 22:24:07+00:00
Our team switched from Docker Compose (without Kubernetes) to Tilt for a distributed systems development environment. (Think platform engineering work on a system that scales from zero to several hundred thousand instances). Our time to go from code change to testable, running code on our laptops went from about a minute to a couple of seconds, using some Tiltfile recipes to do automatic incremental recompilation on our host laptops as we edit source files, and live-reload the new artifacts into running Kubernetes containers. The reload happens so fast that we configured our environment to compile+deploy+run on save, and the new code is already running by the time you reach for the "run tests" button.

I think if you told our team to go back to Docker Compose they'd revolt on the spot haha