MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-04 17:16:46+00:00
Yes they are. That's what she meant: society doesn't exist and families/individual people do. The distinction is that you can ask a family or a person to do something and decide if they did it or not. You can't ask "society" to do anything: what does that actually mean? Who does it? Everyone can just point the finger at everyone else.

Thatcher was making this argument because in the 1980s the [British] left was still very Marxist, so they tended to demand extremely expensive things and when challenged as to who will do/pay for that they'd answer with society. It was a form of rhetorical evasion because what they actually meant was "someone else but not me". Thatcher was railing against that tactic by pointing out that there isn't some specific entity with a big wad of cash you can go to called Society and ask them to do something. Society is your neighbours, your friends, your coworkers, your family, it's you and everyone around you. So if you say society should pay, what you actually mean is the people around you should pay but not yourself, without being willing to say so clearly.

Arguably the post-Marx neo-left actually did listen to her and stopped talking like that. You didn't hear people like Tony Blair claim that "society" would pay for their latest ideas. But the old left were never willing to give up the stupid linguistic game playing and reacted by fully stripping her words of context, to try and make it sound like she rejected the idea of bonds between people. Which is not only not what she said, but the conservatism she stood for was all about the primacy of friends/family/workplace/church/social clubs etc, vs the alternative Tony Benn style worldview in which the primary organizing unit of people was either the state or the unions.
by hannasanarion | 2025-04-04 17:17:01+00:00
> So let's say we continue along this trajectory and we finally have a model that can faithfully reproduce and identify every word sequence in its training data and its training data includes every word ever written up to that point. Where do we go from here?

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire point of predictive models (and also of how LLMs are trained and tested).

For one thing, ability to faithfully reproduce texts is not the primary scoring metric being used for the bulk of LLM training and hasn't been for years.

But more importantly, you don't make a weather model so that it can inform you of last Tuesday's weather given information from last Monday, you use it to tell you tomorrow's weather given information from today. The totality of today's temperatures, winds, moistures, and shapes of broader climatic patterns, particulates, albedos, etc etc etc have never happened before, and yet the model tells us something true about the never-before-seen consequences of these never-before-seen conditions, because it has learned the ability to reason new conclusions from new data.

Are today's "AI" models a glorified autocomplete? Yeah, but that's what all intelligence is. The next word I type is the result of an autoregressive process occurring in my brain that produces that next choice based on the totality of previous choices and experiences, just like the Q-learners that will kick your butt in Starcraft choose the best next click based on their history of previous clicks in the game combined with things they see on the screen, and will have pretty good guesses about which clicks are the best ones even if you're playing as Zerg and they only ever trained against Terran.

A highly accurate autocomplete that is able to predict the behavior and words of a genius, when presented with never before seen evidence, will be able to make novel conclusions in exactly the same way as the human genius themselves would when shown the same new data. Autocomplete IS intelligence.

New ideas don't happen because intelligences draw them out of the aether, they happen because intelligences produce new outputs in response to stimuli, and those stimuli can be self-inputs, that's what "thinking" is.

If you still think that all today's AI hubbub is just vacuous hype around an overblown autocomplete, try going to Chatgpt right now. Click the "deep research" button, and ask it "what is the average height of the buildings in [your home neighborhood]"?, or "how many calories are in [a recipe that you just invented]", or some other inane question that nobody would have ever cared to write about ever before but is hypothetically answerable from information on the internet, and see if what you get is "just a reproduced word sequence from the training data".
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-04 17:17:26+00:00
American prepared food has on average, almost twice as much sugar as in Europe, largely due to differences in regulation.

Americans walk less than in Europe, making less than half as many foot trips as Europeans, largely due to differences in infrastructure.

Americans visit the doctor less often than in Europe, largely due to the lack of universal healthcare all other high-income countries have.

I think obesity might be the symptom, not the actual culprit.
by dismalaf | 2025-04-04 17:17:30+00:00
As someone who lives part-time in Europe (and they can be mostly lumped together because of shared culture and the EU, but I spend significant time in 3 EU countries in addition to living 6 months of the year in a single one) but raised in Canada...

- Europeans have access to better quality food. Good vegetables are the rule as opposed to the exception, commodity meat is better quality and high quality dairy is cheap.

- Europeans walk, a lot. As most towns existed before cars, they're all built for walking. Mixed use neighbourhoods are the rule rather than the exception. Europeans are also far more social and that often means doing physical activities with your friends (I play football and futsal with a group of guys from the village, ages 25-60).

- Europeans do drink a lot, but it's in moderation, if that makes sense. Less binge drinking all at once, more drinks during meals and spread throughout the week. We all know the liver processes alcohol at a specific rate so this is less damaging to health.

- Universal healthcare. Even the EU countries with mixed public/private systems make it universally available. Insurance rates far more reasonable, less strings attached. Unlike in Canada, we have a paediatrician in Europe. We can see a doctor same day without resorting to the ER. Appointments can be made typically next-day, although I've heard of waits that are several days in the city. Versus Canada where we can't even get a family doctor at all and need to go to the ER for anything.

- Stress. 5 weeks vacation. Employee-friendly laws. Active, social lifestyle. Everyday necessities are far more affordable. Rent isn't 60% of the average take-home income (unlike Canada).
by mikestew | 2025-04-04 17:17:42+00:00
It's most certainly not true. It's the ol' "fiduciary duty" canard. Because it's cheaper to make a product by shoving infants into a meat grinder, the company has no choice but to go buy a meat grinder and start stealing babies because they have a "fiduciary duty to shareholders".

Shareholders can sue, yes, but in the U. S. you can sue anyone for anything, and "suing" is not the same as "winning".
by diggan | 2025-04-04 17:17:50+00:00
In this case it seems like the person who submitted it to HN just used an incorrect title, so not that bad in the grand scheme of things.

My reply was more directed towards the "Why is everyone in here with pitchforks?" in a general sense, as it wouldn't have been the first time I read about someone not understanding why people who do "open source" would like the existing meaning to remain.
by trod1234 | 2025-04-04 17:18:17+00:00
Maybe the Octalysis Framework? That is the most well known material that covers this tangentially. There are a good number of whitepapers on this type of research in Adtech/Social Media, though you need to know the specialized language they use to search for it.

This is not a new concept, in fact many games and apps use this research which includes sophisticated operant conditioning to induce associations, which then later trigger dopamine spikes through those associations.

Its why people who spend most of their time gaming or using their phones start acting like junkies. Its completely destroyed the dating scene because they do this in dating apps. Nothing is a bigger turn off then dating a junky, and they often don't even realize it.

Much of this type of game design material has been rebranded from its original contextual use. It originates in PoW torture camps during the Korean Conflict, and narcosynthesis/narco-analysis was known all the way back to WW2.

Victims are easily controllable, misled, and often gullible, since rational thought is greatly reduced as they fall into an involuntary state of hypnosis and become highly suggestible.

Brain development to combat addiction also doesn't fully develop until your early 20s for most.

You see this element embedded in almost any FPS that has an audio trigger associated with a headshot. I know for a fact BF1942 did this with a cha-ching sound. Games, and apps too.
by devJdeed | 2025-04-04 17:18:42+00:00
I was working with a startup here in Montreal building an online social sweeps casinos. One of the bottlenecks we faced was taking the decision to build games internally. First shot in the foot was a in-house game developer hire wich got paid 250K USD to develop our own proprietary slots game using Playcanvas and failed after 6 months.

All the work went down the drain except for the class components he had developed which we shared with a external game developer agency on a very "cheap" 100K contract to develop slots, plinko and a 3 other other games. I left my job last week and I'm sure the agency route isn't successful however they decided to go with the game providers route which take 6-7% of the net GGR.

During my time at the job, I decided to develop my own Plinko game hoping to get a raise or up my position in the company however quickly realized I was capped. So I thought pushing this as a standalone game would get me solid experience and potentially the opportunity to monitize my game.

So I took my time to build the plinko game ( took me 6 months) to get where I'm at and I'm almost loosing hope that I can make money out of this!

It has a crypto deposit and withdraw system, provable fairness (not fully plugged in yet) and a completely different gaming experience compared to the other plinko games. All I need to do is purchase a domain, set up mainnet(real money) mode and run a few stress tests. Should I give up and move to the next project or should I run it ?
by randomNumber7 | 2025-04-04 17:18:48+00:00
In Germany it is different.

- failure to render assistance ("unterlassene Hilfeleistung") up to one year in prison or a fine

- Exposed to a life-threatening situation ("Aussetzung", § 221 StGB) – If a person leaves someone helpless in a life-threatening situation, they could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison

Edit: Also note that murder would often give you 16 years in germany even though it is called live long.
by latchkey | 2025-04-04 17:18:53+00:00
Thanks for your response. webhooks are literally the last thing documented, which says to me that it isn't a focus for your product at all.

I used to work for a company that used long running listeners. They would more often than not, get into a state where (for example) they would need to upgrade some code and now they had all these long running jobs (some would go for 24 hours!), that if they stopped them, would screw everything up down the line because it would take so long to finish if they restarted them that it would impact customer facing data. Just like DAG's, it sounds good on paper, but it is a terrible design pattern that will eventually bite you in the ass.

The better solution is to divide and conquer. Break things up into smaller units of work and then submit more messages to the queue. This way, you can break at any point and you won't lose hours worth of work. The way to force this to developers, is to set constraints about how long things can execute for. Make them think about what they are building and build idempotency into things.

The fact that you're building a system that supports all these footguns seems terrifying. "Usually recommend" is undesirable, people will always find ways to use things in the way you don't expect it. I'd much rather work with a more constrained system than one trying to be all things to all people. Cloud Tasks does a really good job of just doing one thing well.
by tshaddox | 2025-04-04 17:19:05+00:00
> If the language needs a linter to keep otherwise-competent developers from introducing potentially maddening bugs into the codebase, it's weird.

This is an odd way to phrase things. A better way to look at this is that there are programming tasks which can be easily automated and tasks which cannot be easily automated. The ones which can be easily automated should be, so that humans can focus on the ones which cannot be easily automated. Do you not run automated tests, since those same tests could be done over and over by hand?
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-04 17:19:06+00:00
Biology over environment over willpower.

People from skinnier countries move to the US and get fatter. It's not willpower keeping other countries skinnier (to the extent they still are, even) so it'd be weird to expect that to work for people who've always lived here.

But you can hack biology, or just be born with lucky biology, and beat environment.

You hypothetically can with willpower too, but in practice, over any meaningful sample size and longitudinally, no you can't.
by echelon | 2025-04-04 17:19:41+00:00
> I think and under studied aspect are kids who got access to a lot more money than normal typical kids have, and the results such wealth brings.

As opposed to the kids born on planets without atmospheric oxygen, of course. Those kids don't stand a chance.

There's always some advantage others have. Money, good looks, distribution, connections, right place right time.

"Wealth inequality" isn't going to disappear overnight, and lamenting about it won't get us closer to success.

We're all dropped into the Darwinian gradient landscape. Some of us have better starting positions. While we sit and wait for policy decisions to make things easier, our job remains to find gradients that aren't too steep, aren't over-explored by the masses, and that give us some modicum of joy to spend our lives upon.

The minnows and gazelles have it much worse than us. Praying mantises, anglerfish, and the hosts for the parasitoid wasps are practically living in a daily Kafkaesque horror. Meanwhile we're in our own dopamine drip Disneyland with near-infinite degrees of freedom and plenty of years on the clock (for most of us).

Seneca said some good things about this.
by pickle-wizard | 2025-04-04 17:19:57+00:00
About 10 years ago I worked for a startup that used a sales agency. Unfortunately it did not go well, in the nearly 3 years I was there they never made a single sale.

They didn't understand our product and had no desire to understand our product. I advocated to end the contract with them, but management refused.

So I think I would want some verbiage in the contract that says I can just walk away if I don't think it is working out. I understand you need to protect your interest too, but I wouldn't want to get strung along by someone who is just not willing to put in the work.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-04 17:19:57+00:00
> It's cool that Nvidia made a bit of an ecosystem around it but it won't replace C++ or Fortran and you can't simply drop in "normal" Python code and have it run on the GPU.

While its not exactly normal Python code, there are Python libraries that allow writing GPU kernels in internal DSLs that are normal-ish Python (e.g., Numba for CUDA specifically via the @cuda.jit decorator; or Taichi which has multiple backends supporting the same application code—Vulkan, Metal, CUDA, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and CPU.)

Apparently, nVidia is now doing this first party in CUDA Python, including adding a new paradigm for CUDA code (CuTile) that is going to be in Python before C++; possibly trying to get ahead of things like Taichi (which, because it is cross-platform, commoditizes the underlying GPU).

> Also, here's Nvidia's own advertisement for Python on their GPUs

That (and the documentation linked there) does not address the new upcoming native functionality announced at GTC; existing CUDA Python has kernels written in C++ in inline strings.
by RobKohr | 2025-04-04 17:20:02+00:00
It is called being the bigger person.

The comment above was clearly constructive criticism. If you want to be taken seriously, don't recite name calling (if you are going to resort to name calling, at least don't join the mob and be original).

I along with a large portion of people who saw your comment immediately wrote off what you said because of name calling. You could be a nobel prize winning economist well versed in tariffs, but if you make fun of the person you disagree with because of his spray tan, then you just seem like a foaming at the mouth radical that can be ignored.
by nosianu | 2025-04-04 17:20:12+00:00
> 2) People eat better

Except here in Germany, at least the restaurants (but the art of cooking has declined too, favoring frozen pizza and similar foods). Especially since COVID. Our restaurant food is not good, and will still get five stars in the restaurant reviews all the time.

After COVID it got even worse. In my major city I saw food in well-known central restaurants become really bad, despite significant increases in price, and I mean "bad" and not just "it is not as tasty as I would like".

What is thriving are Döner (kebab shops) - often using questionable "meat", dirt-cheap Asian places (nowadays often with "Sushi", at very low prices), and burger shops. Italian restaurants focus on pizza and pasta - the cheapest-to-prepare easy-carbs-focused options.

I miss the Bay Area and its food options (I used to live there for quite a few years).
by regularization | 2025-04-04 17:20:12+00:00
> Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation.

According to the New York Times, Netanhayu was propping up Hamas in the weeks and months before the current conflict ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q... ). This has been happening since the beginning of Hamas.

The government over there has been supporting Hamas since the beginning, because they don't want to deal with Fatah going to the UN. Everything recently is the result of that. So don't come around talking about Hamas. Especially since Netanyahu and his US counterparts are trying to sideline Fatah, and are persecuting secular Palestinians like Samidoun and the PFLP more than Hamas. The US, Canada, Germany etc. crack down on the seculat, left-leaning Samidoun so that only Hamas is left standing in Gaza.
by Vegenoid | 2025-04-04 17:20:13+00:00
I think we've actually had capable AIs for long enough now to see that this kind of exponential advance to AGI in 2 years is extremely unlikely. The AI we have today isn't radically different from the AI we had in 2023. They are much better at the thing they are good at, and there are some new capabilities that are big, but they are still fundamentally next-token predictors. They still fail at larger scope longer term tasks in mostly the same way, and they are still much worse at learning from small amounts of data than humans. Despite their ability to write decent code, we haven't seen the signs of a runaway singularity as some thought was likely.

I see people saying that these kinds of things are happening behind closed doors, but I haven't seen any convincing evidence of it, and there is enormous propensity for AI speculation to run rampant.
by sandbags | 2025-04-04 17:21:16+00:00
I’ve been wanting to write this somewhere and this seems as good a place as any to start.

Is it just me or is MCP a really bad idea?

We seem to have spent the last 10 years trying to make computing more secure and now people are using node & npx - tools with a less than flawless safety story - to install tools and make them available to a black box LLM that they trust to be non-harmful. On what basis, even about accidental harm I am not sure.

I am not sure if horrified is the right word.
by HeckFeck | 2025-04-04 17:21:17+00:00
> the emptiness of trying to live for others

Someone else was burned one too many times. It's fine and dandy until you notice a pattern: others who lack conscience will always work your convictions against you. Though the religion admits as much - it eschews 'worldly wisdom' - i.e. what you need to make anything of a life in this world.
by dismalaf | 2025-04-04 17:21:42+00:00
> But this is 100% a python-for-CUDA-C replacement on the GPU

Ish. It's a Python maths library made by Nvidia, an eDSL and a collection of curated libraries. It's not significantly different than stuff like Numpy, Triton, etc..., apart from being made by Nvidia and bundled with their tools.
by TehCorwiz | 2025-04-04 17:21:46+00:00
Yes, and the Wiki article goes into detail with some more quotes about the difference between the judicial understanding and the common understanding being different. The ruling didn't invent the idea of shareholder value maximization, but it did reinforce that there are legal limits to acting against it. They acknowledged as a practical matter policing it is probably unlikely to expect except in egregious cases for the reason you cited among others.

But fundamentally, shareholder maximization is the goal stated by both common business sense and legal rulings. I personally believe that long-term optimization rather than short term is a more successful strategy. But in the short term the board could remove him for going against the feds. Shareholders could sue if it caused a drop in value or impacted global operations. Caused by I don't know, tariffs that could have been avoided with a corrupt monetary contribution.

I'd love to actually see a CEO refuse to grease the palm and them get sued for not doing something corrupt. Would be a case to follow.

The point is, as I understand it, that CEOs of publicly traded corps are not afforded the freedom required to make an ideological stand and keep their job.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-04 17:22:55+00:00
They call it blowback because 'increased homelessness, suicides, kids not getting new shoes as they grow, people having teeth pulled instead of dental work' and 'you will have nothing and be happy' make their policy look bad.

Then later they will make fun of the people that have missing teeth because they chose food for their kids over dental work and call those people trash.
by chrisweekly | 2025-04-04 17:23:17+00:00
I have a carefully-curated Spotify playlist -- "FLOWSTATE: Repeatable FTW"[1] -- that I specifically optimized for "flowstate" (/Cal Newport "deep work" sessions). The tracks span various moods or vibes, but all are strictly instrumental, w/ limited dynamic range or significant musical variation, and a steady, energizing beat -- ie they're each deliberately repetitive and work well set on repeat. Airpods in, pick a track that resonates w my mood, set it on repeat, set my Pomodoro timer (to remind me to stand and move instead of hyperfocus for hours straight), and I can reliably enter flowstate almost right away.

1. Here's the playlist if anyone's interested:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
by creddit | 2025-04-04 17:23:48+00:00
Many of the factual errors are there on purpose. The lengthy discussion of whether or not whales are fish for example is not intended to be scientific.

Melville himself served on a whaler and AFAIK the descriptions of actual whaling and processing of whales at sea are basically accurate with some embellishment. Open to being wrong about that though as I am by no means an 1800s whaling expert.