MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dullcrisp | 2025-04-10 13:20:58+00:00
I think Trump hosting million dollar dinners deserves to be called out more than the concept of consulting, which I’m sure is used for both good and nefarious purposes.

If you’re referring to actual instances of former politicians being paid exorbitant consulting fees by corporations that they helped regulate, though, I’d be interested in better understanding what’s going on there too.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-10 13:20:59+00:00
I don't think "most economists" have a favorable view of it. It is a fringe theory from the 1800s that has never been implemented.

It is super regressive and effectively replaces everything with a housing tax and food tax.

It would be a massive tax break for the rich. IP, stock, and service income would be tax free.

It is primarily popular with a narrow band of white collar technology workers because it would benefit them immensely as their 500k SWE salary become tax free to be picked up by some poor school teacher living next door.
by minihat | 2025-04-10 13:21:15+00:00
How is it possible that text-to-score/notation is lagging text-to-audio in music generation? Generating audio seems wildly more complicated!

Since you are working in this space, I wonder if you could comment on my pet theories for why this is true: 1. Not enough training data (scores not available for most songs), or 2. Difficulty with tokenization of musical notation vs. audio
by moltude | 2025-04-10 13:22:10+00:00
My brother wrote about this (and I won't pretend to understand the nuances).

This project explores the changing meaning of hunting in American political and cultural life from 1945 to the present by mapping the evolution of the ideas, vocabulary, and values legible on the pages of nationally circulated outdoor magazines. These sources suggest that huntingÆs public significance transformed in both character and intensity over the second half of the twentieth century. In the immediate postwar decades, the political culture forged and propagated in these magazines reflected a faith in government, in collective engagement, and in public life. However, in the 1970s, the ideas and principles articulated by many hunters and outdoor writers increasingly privileged individual rights, questioned the utility of state action, and defended private prerogatives. Concurrently, the degree to which hunting gave shape to the identity of American sportsmen heightened dramatically during this pivotal decade.

https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/4613/
by hackyhacky | 2025-04-10 13:22:36+00:00
> It's almost like people are complicated and when you are forced to choose between two parties you almost always go for the stronger male person

That seems like an unfair conclusion not rooted in empirical evidence. How do you explain the numerous democratically elected female heads of state? What does "strong" mean here? Do you think that current US leadership is "strong" or merely "loud"?
by miltonlost | 2025-04-10 13:22:59+00:00
These Benchmarks are asinine to determine the quality of "creative writing", all chosen by engineers without a single artistic bone.

Length

Slop Score

Repetition Metric

Degradation

Moby-Dick has chapters as short as a page and as long as 20. According to this benchmark, the book would score lower because of the average length of its chapters.

These aren't benchmarks of "quality". A chapter's length is not indicative of a work's quality. That measurement, on its own, is enough to discredit the rest of the benchmark. So so so so so so so misguided.
by viraptor | 2025-04-10 13:23:01+00:00
I'm not sure where you've seen left maximalism in the government so far. You get a choice between right and "let's not disturb the status quo" centrish party. There were barely any strong left-ish opinions for quite a while. That whole idea of a conflict seems really artificial, looking at the news from the outside. Let's hear about the left once someone actually manages to force through things like: more residential buildings overriding nimbys, progressive tax without trivial loopholes, wealth tax, kill gerrymandering, federal level build-out of trainlines, etc.
by dwringer | 2025-04-10 13:23:05+00:00
It's just one pretty trivial example, but many months ago I had to develop some backstory for my character in a D&D campaign. I had some character background and some paragraphs I wrote to start off with, but I wasn't sure what direction to go exactly and was trying to come up with different ideas. I dropped what I had into a prompt built to setup a pseudo-text-adventure-game using a local WizardLM model running through KoboldCpp, then I ran through it interactively to the point of getting incoherent about 100 times in a row. This yielded some new ideas, some old ones, and overall an interesting distribution of outcomes; where 2 or 3 happened most commonly, and all 100 were basically variations on about 10.

I won't argue that any of what the LLM came up with would stand on its own as particularly interesting - often quite the opposite - but it showed me examples of all the "obvious directions to go" as well as some other RPG cliches that I could either adopt or choose to avoid, and ultimately served as an excellent brainstorming assistant with interesting ideas and the ability to carry through and embellish them with enough detail to get a sense for either what works or what doesn't.
by Twirrim | 2025-04-10 13:23:18+00:00
Leverage erasure encoding for durability and avoid both the tripling and local parity. You'll get better durability than 3x while only taking up significantly less than 2x the space Backblaze open sourced their library and talk about it here, https://www.backblaze.com/blog/Reed-Solomon. They use a 17:20 ratio that'll get them 3 drive failure resistance for just 1.17x stretch (ie a 100mb file gets that resilient while taking up 117mb of space)
by lttlrck | 2025-04-10 13:23:21+00:00
I have had a Kinetic since 1999; a millennium birthday present to myself.

It's a bit of an oddity.

The lithium-ion power cell needs to be replaced every 5-10 years, and it's relatively expensive part.

It has more mechanical complexity than a quartz plus the same maintenance.

But it works really well. It's a hybrid.

I love it despite this, it's unusual looking and the quirkiness makes it fun to talk about.
by muzani | 2025-04-10 13:23:37+00:00
There's cost based pricing and there's price based costing.

Food and clothing, anything with complex supply chains tend to be cost based pricing. As a rule of thumb, it's x3, maybe x4 for a well-branded item like Nike or Calvin Klein. Most innovations are on supply chain. E-commerce was such a big thing because it could cut out one middle man and lead to 30% price cuts or profit margins, and yet all these online shops ended up appearing in malls anyway.

Software is price based costing because there's no fancy supply chain. iPhones may be somewhere in the middle, hardware tends to have the worst of both worlds - high fixed costs and lots of middle men.

A McDonald's may have franchises and may own some restaurants internally, but they don't want to lose money, so they may base it on the lower profit margins - it makes no sense for a burger in one spot to be $4 and a burger in the franchise to be $5; both need to be $5.

Generally luxury brand do use more expensive parts, whether or not those parts add to the quality. And they do have higher profit margins. But the retailers, distributors, etc still take a 30% cut or so. And in the end, Louis Vuitton is still probably making lower margins than Plants vs Zombies.
by thebruce87m | 2025-04-10 13:24:15+00:00
If anything that argues in the other direction since an equivalent US appliance at the same wattage will draw almost twice the current as a UK one. If we’re talking about the risk of overheating then current is the big factor.

In the UK we can put a fuse of e.g. 3A in the plug of a device that is suited for the devices expected draw, but if I understand correctly this could be 15A for the same device in the US?
by immibis | 2025-04-10 13:24:48+00:00
I've been hearing internet rumours of theories that for a lot of people all of this has something to do with fragile masculinity, a desire for dominance, sexual insecurity, something like that. I don't really understand it fully, but it's something like they want to bring back old sexual hierachies so they can be at the top of them. Machoism. They want to bring the manly jobs back and give them to white people. The reason they hate black people is they have some insecurity about being sexually out-competed by black men. The reason they hate gay and trans people is that nontraditional sexuality devalues the whole traditional sexual hierarchy. The reason they want to crash the economy so there won't be as many jobs available and women will have to depend on men for money which will make it easier for them to get women - some of them have actually said this out loud! And so on.

It's just one of many possible theories, but it's consistent with itself and the evidence...

Not sure where exactly I've seen the idea. It might have been: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn6b8GRAXgo or its source material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID8Xq3chNi4
by dtagames | 2025-04-10 13:25:24+00:00
Thanks for this timely post! My mother is going to Paris next week and asked me the very same question.

I concur with Rick. In my experience travelling and living in Europe, Americans are well liked despite whatever politics the country as a whole may take on. As he says, it's extremely important for us to be good ambassadors -- deferential, open, and keeping it light.
by dysoco | 2025-04-10 13:25:48+00:00
My university solves this quite easily.

There is no graded homework, the coursework is there only as a guide and practice for the exams.

So you can absolutely use LLMs to help you with the exercises or to help understand something, however if you blindly get answers you will only be fooling yourself as you won't be able to pass the exams.
by vanattab | 2025-04-10 13:25:54+00:00
I mean there is a LOT more to life then fishing and hunting that people might care about? And even if we want to restrict ourselves to fishing and hunting there are more issues then just polution that may sway peoples minds. Gun control? Most of the anti hunting groups and extreme environmental groups that want to shutdown any form of hunting are often composed of far left leaning people. But the biggest reason is probably these people tend to live in more republican leaning areas and care about the same issues their friends and neighbors do.
by sitkack | 2025-04-10 13:26:16+00:00
If you know all of your queries ahead of time, then compiling them efficiently has already been shown to be effective.

Noria

https://github.com/mit-pdos/noria

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVv9Pik6QGY

https://thesquareplanet.com/research/

Materialize/TimelyDataflow

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=YYJ3aycAAAAJ...
by trchek | 2025-04-10 13:26:38+00:00
Re France listen the French are super duper proud of their language and rightfully so, it’s still practical to communicate to your residents important information.

Re San Antonio, they actually are counting the metro area which brings in a lot of white suburbs and throws the numbers off a lot but in the interest of being balanced, let’s say I’ll concede the point.

There are still a lot of US citizens in San Antonio that speak Spanish primarily, I think you’d be surprised by this, I know I was the first 200 times I met someone like that, lots of people there with roots back several generations still speaking with English with an accent.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-04-10 13:26:39+00:00
>But you are likely consuming media that tells you everyone is going to draw and quarter you if you mess up a pronoun. This is not the case. .

You can say that because you live in a privileged country where compelled speech is illegal.

https://www.eurasiareview.com/20062017-canada-law-makes-it-i...

>Trans people just move on, they're used to it. It literally happens all the time

Or they try to cancel you and get you fired

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/15/i-was-fired...

https://www.newsweek.com/christian-teacher-says-she-was-fire...
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-04-10 13:26:44+00:00
They typically don't.

I had to take company training in interviewing. The trainer started out by acting out a fake interview. Then he asked us how we felt about him as a candidate. Pretty much everyone agreed that he nailed the interview. Then he began to list all the things he said and how he answered questions, and it slowly became clear that it was all bullshit, and he never said anything that was a direct answer to any of the interview questions. By using deflection and redirection he was able to completely control the interview and give a glowing impression of himself.

I wish I could remember what company was hired to do that because it was one of the best corporate training experiences of my life.
by em-bee | 2025-04-10 13:26:55+00:00
Why should singles and childless people subsidise people with children?

children are the future of our society. even in today's system, children will be the ones paying your pension when you retire. putting that burden on parents alone is what is unfair. how would you like your pension to be measured based on the number of children you raised? maybe if you have no children you shouldn't get any pension at all?
by globular-toast | 2025-04-10 13:27:51+00:00
You don't translate it, that's the point. Train à grande vitesse means high-speed train. There is no "of", "at" or "with" there.

Similarly, pain au chocolat does not mean "bread of the chocolate" or anything silly like that. "Chocolate bread" would be the closest translation but since this is ambiguous in English we just use the French word as a loanword.

You won't learn anything by trying to find an English analogue for words like à in French. It will probably actually set you back. You just have to learn it how natives learn it. It's French because it's French. There is no other definition and you can't draw on any other language for guidance. This goes for all natural languages.
by bpt3 | 2025-04-10 13:28:02+00:00
I hate to break it to you, but people working as gas station cashiers as adults aren't going to produce much innovation no matter what. They work those jobs because they need resources to survive and they can't make more money elsewhere.

Like I said, the people you're talking about just had a significant period of time where they were effectively paid to stay home and had ample time to pursue their personal interests, yet no meaningful innovation was produced by that cohort that I'm aware of. What am I missing?
by pllbnk | 2025-04-10 13:28:33+00:00
I also see this as spreading FUD. I have led quite many remote interviews recently with European candidates and I can guarantee that not one of them was an AI generated pretender. Also, since LLMs is a popular topic nowadays, it was easy to have candid conversations about their use. I have also seen recorded videos of these AI-generated candidates and with two brain cells working it's easy to identify them. It's also easy to see and feel if a candidate is having a genuine conversation with you or is trying to use AI-assistant tools.

Maybe in the future it will be a more significant problem but not this year, not next year and probably not even this decade.
by yCombLinks | 2025-04-10 13:29:33+00:00
MAGA is level 10 on it. They went from the hardcore Christian party to supporting the biggest crook American politics has ever seen, that isn't even capable of basic kindness. Same with veterans. A draft dodger, that has called our fallen soldiers losers, and skipped out on ceremonies honoring them, that presidents traditionally attend. MAGA jumped from deficit hawks, to supporting huge tax cuts that will explode the deficit. It's not even close who is worse here.
by card_zero | 2025-04-10 13:29:58+00:00
It's not the most enticing thing. If the prompt is nicely crafted, you get more intentional results, and maybe that's interesting. Seems a tough sell. I suppose there are authors like Simenon and Pratchett who would churn out books at the rate of at least one a year, and fans might wish for increased output, so maybe there's a niche for a slop-assisted author.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-10 13:29:59+00:00
> what's the point of the teacher then?

Coaching the student on their learning journey, kicking their ass when they are failing, providing independent testing/certification of their skills, answering questions they have, giving lectures, etc.

But you are right, you don't have to wait for a teacher to tell you stuff if you want to self educate yourself. The flip side is that a lot of people lack the discipline to teach themselves anything. Which is why going to school & universities is a good idea for many.

And I would expect good students that are naturally curious to be using LLM based tools a lot to satisfy their curiosity. And I would hope good teachers would encourage that instead of just trying to fit students into some straight jacket based on whatever the bare minimum standards say they should know, which of course is what a lot of teaching boils down to.
by alkonaut | 2025-04-10 13:30:21+00:00
The .NET 4.X runtimes baked into Win10/11 are OS components just like Win32 is an OS Component.

That's first of all brilliant if you want to ship apps that run on those systems, because you don't need to ship the runtime. But it's painful when you want to write server software. Because you don't want your deployment story to be dependent on the server having some particular system level software (or it being windows). So it's completely inevitable that 4.X will never die. Win32 won't die either.

And making the ship to a completely separate runtime that runs on Linux, and isn't an OS component (but in return requires deployment) was just natural. It's not completely unthinkable that the .NET Runtime will be shipped as part of Windows, but even that woulnd't mean that they can stop shipping the .NET Framework 4.X runtmes.

I just ported a 20 year old 200+ man year desktop app from 4.8 to 8.0 and it was pretty smooth. Even things like old binary-only proprietary winforms controls actually work, which was a huge surprise.

If you are making a web app or any kind of server side app, then the migration is usually straightforward. For client side software it's not as easy, and in some cases it's also not clear whether it's a win. If you are shipping some small Windows-only utility it's probably better to ship on the "old" runtime because your deployment will be smaller when you can use the OS runtime.
by zmgsabst | 2025-04-10 13:30:52+00:00
Why would it “give them pause”?

Your question (as phrased here) is clearly provocative rather than curious and represents your biases (eg, “openly wants to mess up your pastime”). You don’t consider the two obvious answers, in that they see it differently or they have higher priorities, and are using extreme language.

Are you really surprised people are annoyed by that behavior?
by duxup | 2025-04-10 13:31:07+00:00
I'd really like to see some opponent AI in games more.

Games like Civilization (a game I loved) pretty much ended for me at Civ VI as the computer is completely incapable of making good decisions. It declares war and builds no units or simply does nothing, it even seems to rage quit the game at times.

I'd like to see some level of AI that can adapt to me to provide a reasonable challenge but still be fun.
by LegitShady | 2025-04-10 13:31:15+00:00
Exactly. Also depending on what kind of work you do organizations have to be aware of capacity - if there are operational times when I'm going to be handed emergency tasks but I'm already completely inundated with work because I was given the work for doing good work, then we lack the capacity to manage our heavy load times.

It's one thing if you don't work in any area with operational requirements that change over the course of a year but if you do then you need to have reserve capacity for new workloads even if the people involved are good at work.
by thrance | 2025-04-10 13:31:19+00:00
Republicans have gone full doublethink. Remember when egg prices was the single most important issue of the election? Now when you ask those same people about rising inflation and the catastrophic economy they'll tell you to "get over it" or "stop being so materialist".

The same people that described themselves as "hard-core free speech absolutists" are perfectly fine with innocent men getting deported to El Salvador with no due process, or foreign scientists getting detained at the border for having criticized the president on social media.

This country is fucked, half of its inhabitants now live with Fox News induced cognitive dissonance and are literally "ride or die" with the GOP. There's nothing Trump or his administration could do that would make them reconsider their support.
by megous | 2025-04-10 13:31:41+00:00
Actually, Pinebook Pro users benefited from a lot of upstreaming work done/encouraged by Google/Chromium team for these devices. Upstream support for Gru Chromebooks predates Pinebook Pro exactly by 3 years.

And I did not do much on Pinebook Pro, except for Type-C port support. ;) Greetings, to you, too.
by MisterTea | 2025-04-10 13:32:08+00:00
> Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.

When I visited Japan last year most of my pictures were of old "crummy" looking buildings and older homes. They had character vs the modern flat buildings popping up all over. I even snapped pictures of the overhead wiring, utility poles and building connections. I now understand the prevalence of overhead wires and utility poles in manga/anime. I even read a white paper on Tepco's commitment to move as much of these old overhead wires underground.
by asoneth | 2025-04-10 13:32:11+00:00
> I think we're making different assumptions around magnitude.

I don't think so. I used an extreme example to make the effect obvious, but a 20% tax will have a similar effect at a smaller magnitude.

> Products would just cost a little more

The point is that this increase is not uniform. Consumer product advertising budgets already vary by an order of magnitude from less than 5% of sales revenue to more than 25%. This already results in price disparities e.g. between white-label products and brand-name products. Therefore, brand-name products for which advertising is a nontrivial fraction of their budget will experience an increase that is an order-of-magnitude larger than generic products. This will alter consumer purchasing decisions and force companies to respond.

Every brand considers advertising ROI carefully e.g. at what point will an extra dollar spent on advertising yield less than an extra dollar of income. Taxing ads simply shifts this equilibrium point.
by wpietri | 2025-04-10 13:33:13+00:00
I think everybody has this sort of cognitive dissonance, albeit perhaps in different amounts; we just allocate it differently. And I think society is set up to help that. For example, I like animals and I eat meat. Would I kill a cow? No, but I'm happy to eat a burger. I've worked to get relatively comfortable with unresolved cognitive dissonance, so I can at least recognize my hypocrisy here. But I think it's way easier for people to refuse to think about it.

As with distributed systems, coherence is hard and expensive. Being rational about something, as opposed to just rationalizing, is long, slow work. We don't live in an age of patience. But perhaps one will come again, and until then we can at least try to be exceptions.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-04-10 13:33:49+00:00
Both of my grandpas (who have passed away long ago), would beg to differ. People, especially when taking photos wasn't basically free, don't take photos of ordinary things. If you see 1 rose among 500 tulips, that will catch your eye. And vice versa.

Poor people were not hidden away, it's just their lives weren't that beautiful to be shown and paraded around.