MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fn-mote | 2025-04-04 02:26:15+00:00
>> Is there anything they could have done differently in the past decade or two to have broader sympathy now

> not used race to discriminate on certain out groups ( https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/issue/discriminatio... )

Since we have documentation of discrimination in university admissions for over a century, I don't think this particular issue produces "broader sympathy now".

In fact, I will be speechless if I ever learn the new administration policies do not lead to even higher levels of, but I suppose different, discrimination. Check back in 6 months.
by Apreche | 2025-04-04 02:26:41+00:00
As the old saying goes if you aren’t paying for the service then you aren’t the customer. You are the product. All of these things make money by selling your attention to advertisers and vendors.

Advertisers are paying them to have themselves be shown to you. Their interests factors into the search results as much, if not more than, your query. They are paying to make it happen, so it’s going to happen.
by h0l0cube | 2025-04-04 02:26:44+00:00
TFA refers to 'non-trivial compositionality' as what's novel about how humans communicate (and how it's perhaps not as novel as we thought):

> However, the team also found examples of non-trivial compositionality, the first such discovery outside of humans.

> The first non-trivial combination was high hoot-low hoot that was translated as a distress call. But it was also used to stop other individuals’ display behaviors—dramatic, exaggerated actions or gestures bonobos perform to assert dominance or attract attention. The second was either peep or yelp in the “join” meaning paired with high hoot to form a structure used for coordinating with others before traveling. Finally, the “I would like to” peep followed by “let’s stay together” whistle was used for initiating more romantically inclined interactions bonobos are famous for indulging in.
by karaterobot | 2025-04-04 02:27:36+00:00
> In my experience, the people who outsource their thinking to LLMs are the same people who outsourced their thinking to podcasts, news articles, Reddit posts, Twitter rants, TikTok videos, and other such sources

He's talking specifically about OSINT analysts. Are you saying these people were outsourcing their thinking to podcasts, etc. before AI came along? I have not heard anyone make that claim before.
by nradov | 2025-04-04 02:29:00+00:00
OK? What does that have to do with pop culture IP rights?

If you're building an LLM for management or technical consulting then the valuable content is locked up behind corporate firewalls anyway so you're going to have to pay to use it. In that field most of what you could find with a web crawler or in digital books is already outdated and effectively worthless.
by shirro | 2025-04-04 02:29:03+00:00
> The golden prize for America's enemies is to remove the US dollar as a global reserve currency.

I think it is misleading to speak in terms of enemies even if that plays to the fears of US isolationists. It is good rhetoric but I think it obscures the truth, There was a time when the stability and strength of the US made the dollar a good choice for friends and enemies alike. The world is changing and the current US administration is accelerating some of those changes. China is going to play an increasing role as the US turns inward but I doubt they will ever replace the US dollar as a reserve currency. The Euro is the second most held currency after the dollar and there are probably a few others ahead of China.
by azemetre | 2025-04-04 02:29:08+00:00
It is interesting, especially in the context of Gates childhood upbringing and his extremely rare access to computers and computer training.

Something that maybe one or two other dozen children had access to in the entire country during that time (60s/70s).

You have to also remember that computers were also seen as a public good for a large swath of users during this time too.

Makes you wonder how different this industry would be if we replaced Bill Gates singular childhood privilege with that of Bill Joy's (which looks like your typical middle class experience)? Only instead of one child, you could probably help thousands of children.
by danpalmer | 2025-04-04 02:29:44+00:00
The other reply has better info on covid specifically, but also consider that this refers to "immortality drugs". How long do we have to test those to conclude that they do in fact provide "immortality"?

Now sure, they don't actually mean immortality, and we don't need to test forever to conclude they extend life, but we probably do have to test for years to get good data on whether a generic life extension drug is effective, because you're testing against illness, old age, etc, things that take literally decades to kill.

That's not to mention that any drug like that will be met with intense skepticism and likely need to overcome far more scrutiny than normal (rather than the potentially less scrutiny that covid drugs might have managed).
by marcusverus | 2025-04-04 02:31:23+00:00
>Gabbard

Tulsi isn't Trump.

> Zelensky

Trump quite reasonably called Zelensky a dictator. Ukraine can legally skip elections while under martial law, sure. But seeing as Zelensky has the power to end martial law at any time, he is single-handedly preventing Ukranian elections, depriving the people of Ukraine of their voice during what is potentially the most pivotal span of time in Ukranian history. Surely you still call Putin a dictator, even though he attained his status without directly violating the constitution?

> Trump also said Ukraine started the conflict.

Are you referring to that time Trump uttered the words "you never should have started it" in one of his word clouds while speaking to a journalist? That is evidence that he is in thrall to the Russians?

> In his last admin he said that "Crimeans want to be Russian".

The vast majority of them are Russian, ethnically and linguistically. All polling prior to the 2014 invasion showed that a significant majority would support annexation by Russia. Don't worry, you can know this fact--and even repeat it out loud!--without the bad men in the Kremlin gaining control over your mind.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-04-04 02:31:37+00:00
This does seem to work for writing. Feed your own writing back in and try variations / quickly sketch out alternate plots, that sort of thing.

Then go back and refine.

Treat it the same as programming. Don't tell the AI to just make something and hope it magically does it as a one-shot. Iterate, combine with other techniques, make something that is truly your own.
by KnuthIsGod | 2025-04-04 02:32:17+00:00
"Well, yes.

I just like that they made up the numbers to get an exact negative 1.

Again, I am a financial columnist, and I have a patriotic appreciation for the US’s export industry of finance, and two of that industry’s most popular products are:

Sprinkling some Greek letters on your work to add visual interest, and

Making up parameters to solve for the result you want.

Even in this tariff announcement, you see the US leaning into its comparative advantage."

Matt Levine at his delicious best !
by imadethis | 2025-04-04 02:33:25+00:00
I've found the same effect when I ask the LLM to do the thinking for me. If I say "rewrite this function to use a list comprehension", I don't retain anything. It's akin to looking at Stack Overflow and copying the first result, or going through a tutorial that tells you what to write without ever explaining it.

The real power I've found is using it as a tutor for my specific situation. "How do list comprehensions work in Python?" "When would I use a list comprehension?" "What are the performance implications?" Being able to see the answers to these with reference to the code on my screen and in my brain is incredibly useful. It's far easier to relate to the business logic I care about than class Foo and method Bar.

Regarding retention, LLMs still doesn't hold a candle to properly studying the problem with (well-written) documentation or educational materials. The responsiveness however makes it a close second for overall utility.

ETA: This is regarding coding problems specifically. I've found LLMs fall apart pretty fast on other fields. I was poking at some astrophysics stuff and the answers were nonsensical from the jump.
by gmoot | 2025-04-04 02:34:29+00:00
The welfare state is predicated on a pyramid-shaped population.

Also: people deride infinite growth, but growth is what is responsible for lifting large portions of the population out of poverty. If global markets were repriced tomorrow to expect no future growth, economies would collapse.

There may be a way to accept low or no growth without economic collapse, but if there is no one has figured it out yet. That's nothing to be cavalier about.
by bfc765 | 2025-04-04 02:34:31+00:00
Simple answer - too much Content chasing too few Eyeballs.

Content (Supply) keeps growing but Eyeballs (Demand) is fixed by the number of people and time available.

This is an unstable State in an Attention based Economic system that doesnt acknowledge the massively growing difference between those 2 curves.

We have seen this in Cash based Economic systems where cash is printed faster than products entering the market. People in the market spent centuries attributing the consequences to everything other excessive money printing cause it was non obvious to them that money supply was increasing too fast. This is why central banks emerged.

Same story here. People will talk about everything other than Supply massively overshooting demand because there is no Central Attention Bank monitoring the divergence. So we just get huge amount of cannabilism and everyone shocked and suprised by it.
by Barrin92 | 2025-04-04 02:34:46+00:00
What stands out to me about Gates and Allen is the serious technical chops. Writing an emulator for the PDP-10 and then an interpreter, line editor, I/O system all in 4KB of memory. The code is worth reading and in addition to that they had a very solid business sense and pretty serious work ethic for people who were 20 years old.

It stands to me in real contrast to the "fake it till you make it", "if it works you shipped too late" hustle culture that took hold of the industry, with entire products just being API wrappers. Really hope we see more companies that start out like Microsoft again.
by Henchman21 | 2025-04-04 02:35:06+00:00
You know, things looked off to me, but thinking it was the output of an LLM just didn't seem obvious -- even though that was the claim! I feel ill-equipped to deal with this, and as the enshittification has progressed I've found myself using "the web" less and less. At this point, I'm not sure there's much left I value on the web. I wish the enshittification wasn't seemingly pervasive in life.
by tourmalinetaco | 2025-04-04 02:35:55+00:00
China, for one, has state-enforced labor of Uyghurs and other minorities: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/against-their-will-the-sit...

And, while Mexico is trying to limit forced labor, they’re still one of our bigger exporters of forced labor: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/resources/reports/child-la...

So it’s hardly a hypothetical. As for balancing benefits and costs, slave labor intrinsically weakens the value of labor to any country that imports, so ideally the US would tariff goods that are labor intensive from countries that practice slave labor. In general, taking China off of the UN Human Rights Council would be a good show (for what little the UN does), and countries that oppose slavery should tariff the countries that do it as well. I don’t want a blood diamond on my wife‘s finger, why would I want a blood apple in my mouth?

As for Trump, I believe he does so in part, not from an ethics perspective however. I imagine he views slave labor as undercutting US labor value, just as illegal immigration does, and that it plays some part in wrestling manufacturing away from China.
by sheepish | 2025-04-04 02:36:05+00:00
I'm a CS and ML major at Northeastern University in Boston looking for part-time ML roles and internships. I've built battlebots and multimodal assistants, previously interned at IBM, and I code artificial life and videogame translation projects in my free time.

Location: Boston, MA Remote: Yes, or on site

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, FastAPI, Pytorch, Numpy, Javascript, NextJS, PostgreSQL, Supabase, TailwindCSS

Résumé/CV: https://bensenwang.dev/resume.pdf Website: https://bensenwang.dev Email: bensenwang8@gmail.com
by leonidasv | 2025-04-04 02:36:27+00:00
> Do we really think things will move this fast? Sort of no - between the beginning of the project last summer and the present, Daniel’s median for the intelligence explosion shifted from 2027 to 2028. We keep the scenario centered around 2027 because it’s still his modal prediction (and because it would be annoying to change). Other members of the team (including me) have medians later in the 2020s or early 2030s, and also think automation will progress more slowly. So maybe think of this as a vision of what an 80th percentile fast scenario looks like - not our precise median, but also not something we feel safe ruling out.

Important disclaimer that's lacking in OP's link.
by madrox | 2025-04-04 02:36:30+00:00
As a supervisor I didn’t resonate with this until I remembered in some jobs I have communicated the company attendance policy but didn’t enforce it unless someone was a poor performer. I trust adults to manage their own time until they give me a reason to believe otherwise.

For my part, I’d rather trust people’s judgment and intrinsic motivation than enforce the rules. Enforcement is annoying, tedious, and distracting to my mission. However once I decide their judgement can’t be trusted I use rules to extrinsically motivate them.
by voidspark | 2025-04-04 02:38:38+00:00
You're muddling up some technical concepts here in a very confusing way.

Generalization is the ability for a model to perform well on new unseen data within the same task that it was trained for. It's not about the training process itself.

Suppose I showed you some examples of multiplication tables, and you figured out how to multiply 19 * 42 without ever having seen that example before. That is generalization. You have recognized the underlying pattern and applied it to a new case.

AlphaGo Zero trained on games that it generated by playing against itself, but how that data was generated is not the point. It was able to generalize from that information to learn deeper principles of the game to beat human players. It wasn't just memorizing moves from a training set.

> However my next objection would then be, sure, it can learn a new turn based board game, but if I explain these other five tasks to it that aren't board games and vary widely can it also learn all of those in the same way? Because that's really what we seem to mean when we say that humans or dogs or dolphins or whatever possess intelligence in a general sense.

This is what LLMs have already demonstrated - a rudimentary form of AGI. They were originally trained for language translation and a few other NLP tasks, and then we found they have all these other abilities.
by ryan_lane | 2025-04-04 02:39:02+00:00
Increasing cost of imported goods will increase demand on equivalent domestically produced goods, which are also often supply constrained. Locally produced goods will increase their prices as much as the market allows (which is somewhere around the cost of the imported good with the tariff). Tariffs cause inflation as a whole.

When the tariffs are dropped, do you think the price of the imported good is going to go back to the original price? If the domestically produced version is priced near the tariff price, they'll reprice slightly lower than the domestic price, ensuring prices stay high.
by musicale | 2025-04-04 02:39:37+00:00
> terrible at virtually everything it tries

Microsoft things I think are pretty OK and don't really mind using:

Xbox, especially Game Pass; Azure; BASIC (particularly classic Microsoft BASICs and SmallBASIC)

Microsoft things that I think are not completely terrible and sometimes kind of useful:

Hyper-V; WSL; VSCode; C# and .NET; Visual BASIC; Excel and PowerPoint
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 02:40:31+00:00
Some tariffs are fine. These tariffs are a disaster. There are some companies that could eat the increased costs (or at least a large percentage of them) and still make a healthy amount of profit overall, but they won't. They'd rather import less and/or jack up prices until people are priced out of things they'd normally buy. Some companies are fine with turning what used to be common purchases into luxury items available only to a small number of people.

If these tariffs continue for long, it'll mean many more people needing to put up with having a lot less.
by schumpeter | 2025-04-04 02:41:32+00:00
Activision CoD uses EOMM, engagement optimized match making. They’re optimizing for your to stay on, much like a gambler playing slots. You allow one win where the player is matched with lesser opponents, and then the next X games, you’re the lesser opponent.

It’s all tuned to keep you playing and want that dopamine hit of a win that’s always just around the corner.
by iLemming | 2025-04-04 02:42:52+00:00
> despite being terrible at virtually everything it tries to do

Oh, MSFT ain't even "terrible" compared to some other players. Try Salesforce. Or ADP. Or even Atlassian. I can't believe we're actually paying money to use them and OMG, the software... I feel like when going to conferences, I'd be like that guy from the cigarettes ad in Idiocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzUcoZdfCOY ... "You work there? Fuck you!" :)
by jjani | 2025-04-04 02:43:38+00:00
I can call something "purple" and then give a specific explanation I mean "computer" by it, but I just shouldn't be using purple like that in the first place. The word "moderate" is too entrenched, gives people an immediate instinctive, emotional reaction based on the established meaning of the word. This is not the word to repurpose here.
by tourmalinetaco | 2025-04-04 02:43:52+00:00
It’s not hypocrisy to remove the cancer from my phone, tumors like Google Services exist to be removed. I use an Adblock, I download all the videos I like to personal storage after watching them on YouTube via a shared Indivious frontend me and my friends use (meaning Google takes the data hit twice), and I always fill up my GDrives. This way I can slowly do my part in removing evil from this world.

There is absolutely evil in doing business, unless you view things such as slavery as A-OK. And trust me, I fucking hate subscriptions and view those who fall to forcing them onto their users as less than scum. They are just as evil as Google or Apple are.
Fact-Checking Lottie Comparisons in Rive vs. Lottie
by hermet | 2025-04-04 02:44:36+00:00
I happened to come across the following page recently: https://rive.app/blog/rive-as-a-lottie-alternative I found it interesting that Rive officially compared itself to Lottie based on fairly recent information. However, I was quite surprised by the many vague or inaccurate statements made about Lottie. As a developer familiar with Lottie, I'd like to offer a different perspective on a few key points.

1. Responsiveness

The claim that Lottie "regenerate animations" to scale for different screen sizes is puzzling. In most GUI environments, responsiveness is handled by standard layout and scrolling systems. Since Lottie animations are vector-based, they naturally scale according to their aspect ratio within the assigned layout. There is no need to regenerate the animation—rendering scalable vector graphics in real time is already built into the design.

2. Dynamic Data Integration

It’s inaccurate to describe Lottie as strictly static. Event Lottie supports scripting and allows runtime updates of animation properties, enabling dynamic behavior driven by external data or user interaction.

3. Blurs and Shadows

Lottie fully supports vector-based effects such as Gaussian blur and drop shadows. These are rendered as scalable vector effects— How this specifically increases file size. Doesn't make sense.

4. Masking

Lottie has multiple types of masking, including at least four distinct modes. One of the most powerful is the Matte feature, which goes well beyond basic alpha masking and allows for advanced compositing techniques.

5. File Size and Rendering

Relying solely on a binary format for production use can be limiting in terms of flexibility. Lottie's text-based JSON format is easily readable, editable, and compressible during the build or packaging process. It allows for streamlined workflows where designers and developers can collaborate effectively before optionally converting to a binary format for optimization.

6. GPU-Accelerated Rendering

GPU acceleration is available in many Lottie runtimes, moreover, Lottie's lightweight and flexible architecture enables it to run on a wide range of devices, including low-power IoT hardware. This level of adaptability is a key strength, not a weakness.

7. Asset Management

Whether to embed assets or link to them externally is entirely up to the developer. Lottie offers flexibility in this regard—it is not restricted to embedded assets only.

8. Platform Support

Lottie already supports a broad range of platforms. There are 3rd-party user plugins integrated into major engines like Unity and even Godot has upcoming support for Lottie integration officially. Even Lottie is is capable on on MCU-based chipsets, IoT, or RTOS devices.

IMHO, Publishing incorrect or false information as if it were true on an official company page is something that should be approached with caution.
by ecshafer | 2025-04-04 02:45:22+00:00
I really don't like Microsoft products (notable exceptions include: F# and Age of Empires). But they are really good at getting companies to spend large amounts of money on their products. Slack is strictly better than Teams, however a company that already has Windows, Outlook, and Office really needs a good reason to spend $20/user (or whatever it is) for Slack over Teams. Azure I don't think is as good as AWS or GCP, however for a lot of business its we are already on Azure with Office 365 so why not?
by 0hijinks | 2025-04-04 02:45:36+00:00
It sure seems like the use of GenAI in these scenarios is a detriment rather than a useful tool if, in the end, the operator must interrogate it to a fine enough level of detail that she is satisfied. In the author's Scenario 1:

> You upload a protest photo into a tool like Gemini and ask, “Where was this taken?”

> It spits out a convincing response: “Paris, near Place de la République.” ...

> But a trained eye would notice the signage is Belgian. The license plates are off.

> The architecture doesn’t match. You trusted the AI and missed the location by a country.

Okay. So let's say we proceed with the recommendation in the article and interrogate the GenAI tool. "You said the photo was taken in Paris near Place de la République. What clues did you use to decide this?" Say the AI replies, "The signage in the photo appears to be in French. The license plates are of European origin, and the surrounding architecture matches images captured around Place de la République."

How do I know any better? Well, I should probably crosscheck the signage with translation tools. Ah, it's French but some words are Dutch. Okay, so it could be somewhere else in Paris. Let's look into the license plate patterns...

At what point is it just better to do the whole thing yourself? Happy to be proven wrong here, but this same issue comes up time and time again with GenAI involved in discovery/research tasks.

EDIT: Maybe walk through the manual crosschecks hand-in-hand? "I see some of the signage is in Dutch, such as the road marking in the center left of the image. Are you sure this image is near Place de la République?" I have yet to see this play out in an interactive session. Maybe there's a recorded one out there...