MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reaperman | 2025-04-19 00:21:18+00:00
There have been many periods in US history where sets of laws were purposefully created that criminalized activities that nearly ~100% of the population engage in. The intent of those isn't to stop those activities, and there's no intent of prosecuting everyone. The intent is to be able to prosecute any individual person or someone close to them, at any arbitrary point in time.

Many of today's lawmakers no longer have that intent, but the system as a whole still keeps running in a manner that allows tools of that nature to be used against targeted individuals and populations.
by sqs | 2025-04-19 00:21:29+00:00
What a shallow, negative post. "Hype" is tautologically bad. Being negative and "above the hype" makes you sound smart, but this post adds nothing to the discussion and is just as fuzzy as the hype it criticizes.

> It is a real shame that some of the most beneficial tools ever invented, such as computers, modern databases, data centers, etc. exist in an industry that has become so obsessed with hype and trends that it resembles the fashion industry.

Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"?

Or, if the author would have considered those over-hyped at the time, then they should have some humility because in 10 years they may look back at AI as another one of the "most beneficial tools ever invented".

> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. ... 10% of the AI hype is based on useful facts

The author ascribes malice to people who disagree with them about the use of AI. The author says proponents of AI are "greedy", "careless", unskilled, inexperienced, and unproductive. How does the author know that these people don't believe that AI has great utility and potential?

Don't waste your time on this article. I wish I hadn't. Go build something, or at least make thoughtful, well defined critiques of the world.
by k-i-r-t-h-i | 2025-04-19 00:21:33+00:00
Seems like that might be close to 25% of their alt investments. This sounds rather serious.

> the endowment’s value increased to $41.4 billion on June 30, 2024, up from $40.7 billion on June 30, 2023

https://news.yale.edu/2024/10/25/yale-reports-investment-ret...

> Yale’s investment strategy depends heavily on alternative investments. As of 2019, they made up about 60 percent of Yale’s portfolio.

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/10/24/yales-endowment-ex...
by commandersaki | 2025-04-19 00:22:29+00:00
> If Signal works, as was pointed out during the recent scandal, it only protects messages in transit. The application on your phone is not especially secure and anyone who can access your phone can access your Signal messages (and thus any of your correspondents' messages that they share with you).

Device compromise is outside the threat model for Signal or any software for that matter.

> Why do you say that? Very often the vulnerabilities are not in the mathematics but in the implementation.

This is why we use primitives that are well understood and have straightforward implementations. I'm no expert but you can look at design of say Salsa20 or Curve25519 -- it was designed for straightforward constant time implementation. Yes NIST suite has implementation subtleties such as constant time implementations, but those ward off issues that are of pretty low concern / infeasible to attack (i've yet to see a timing channel or cache side channel be exploited in the wild except for the XBox 360 MAC verification). Also CFRG has been publishing guidance so we know how to properly implement KEMs, (hybrid) encryption, PAKE, hash to curve, signatures, ECDH, ECDSA, etc. Compound this with a lot of footgun free crypto libraries such as Go crypto, libsodium, monocypher, BoringSSL, Tink, etc. and these days you'd be hard pressed to make a misstep cryptography wise.

In my opinion, NSA advantage is not that it has a virtually unlimited budget, it's that they have better vantage point to carry out multi-user attacks. So does the likes of FAANG, Fastly, Cloudflare, etc.
by janalsncm | 2025-04-19 00:24:05+00:00
I think some people should get subsidized housing, but when I say build more housing I’m talking about increasing the supply and putting it on the market so that regular people can afford it.

As it stands now housing is completely unaffordable. The median income in San Francisco is $120k which means half the people there don’t even make that. I would like my kid’s elementary school teacher to be able to afford not to have roommates.

Also for what it’s worth 70% of the homeless in SF are from SF.
by corytheboyd | 2025-04-19 00:24:19+00:00
I’ll do whatever shit the industry wants me to do, I don’t particularly care if it’s dumb. I mean, it doesn’t FEEL great to work on dumb things, but at the end of the day, I’m around to help implement whatever the paycheck writer wants to see. I genuinely don’t mean that negatively either, I feel like I’m just describing… employment?

Software just isn’t a core part of my identity. I like building it, I like most of the other people who write it, and I like most/some of the people paying me to build it. When I’m done for the day, I very much stop thinking about it (not counting shower thoughts and whatnot on deeper problems)

So what if I end up fixing slop code from AI hype in a couple years? I have been cleaning up slop code from other people for 15 years. I am painfully aware of slop I left for others to deal with too (sorry).

So yeah anyway, your comment resonated. Hype is annoying, but if it sticks around and becomes dominant, my point is, whatever, okay, new thing to learn.
by jpleger | 2025-04-19 00:24:23+00:00
This year, I started actively day trading S&P 500 because of all the volatility. Maybe its biased because I have been staring at charts more diligently than in the past, but IMHO you can almost feel the tension in the charts right now.

2023/2024 would have small swings of like $2-$4, with $5-10 movements on a maybe 1 out of 20 days. Since Trump took office, it has been almost daily $6-$10 moves, with the rare day of only $3-$5.

Its great for day trading, but I don't know how I feel about it in general. I almost feel like this is the oscillation before the car starts to shake itself apart.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-19 00:25:48+00:00
The differences such as A: vs SY0:, are differences only in detail. The unix command line is fundamentally different, not just different in detail. BTW, RT-11 used PIP.

> The page you link to just says "Sign in to Twitter". For the sake of courtesy, I'd rather not go into how I feel about that invitation.

It goes to my profile page. Of course, I am logged in to twitter. I had no idea that it was necessary to sign in to twitter to see my profile page. There was no nefarious intent. I am not aware of any benefit that may accrue to me from you signing up for a twitter account.
by keernan | 2025-04-19 00:25:51+00:00
I've never been completely comfortable with the concept of potentially freeing criminals because of wrongful conduct by the police.

The argument is there must be a way to protect society against the use of illegal methods by the police. I'm not confident, however, that the Exclusionary Rule actually accomplishes its purposes. I suspect the police 'roll the dice' all the time in their investigations, knowing full well they are unlikely to pay much of a personal price if their illegality gets discovered.

I've always thought charging police for their illegal conduct in a special federal system that handled all cases of wrongful conduct by police nationwide; with high conviction rates and penalties that start with termination and loss of pension and move on from there to add long prison terms. A system with special judges and prosecutors and civilian oversight.

Not likely to happen, so I guess we are stuck with letting criminals and the cops walk free.
by dlivingston | 2025-04-19 00:25:55+00:00
This strikes me as curmudgeonly and unnecessarily contrarian.

While it's true that investors, entrepreneurs, corporations, etc. have a vested interest in AI to the tune of trillions of dollars, the impulse to dismiss this as 90% hype (as the author does) is insane.

We're only three years into this, and we have:

- LLMs with grad student-level competency in everything

- Multimodality with complex understanding of photography and technical documents

- Image generators that can generate high-quality photos, in any style, with just a text description

- Song generators that make pretty decent music and video generators that aren't half bad

- Excellent developer tooling & autocomplete; very competent code generation

This is still early and the foundations are still being laid. Imagine where we'll be in 10 years, assuming even a linear growth rate in capabilities.

Think of what the internet is today, and its permanence in everything, and where it was just 30 years ago.

By all means, resist the hype - but don't go so far in the other direction that your head is in the sand.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-19 00:26:03+00:00
Are you referring to the 5 or 9 digit variant? Presumably not the 11 digit one as that corresponds to your unique address. (It follows that the 9 digit variant corresponds to at most 100 mailboxes.)

I've never tried inputting my 11 digit code in an online form but at least the 9 digit one is readily accepted. In my experience the last 4 will usually be completed for me based on the street address and if it can't find a match it gives me an error.
by ianpenney | 2025-04-19 00:26:09+00:00
Oh thank you for showing up. I reckoned you’d probably see a referrer in your logs or something and clue in on this!

Ever have any crazy RF interference stories on your personal gear up there!? I heard from someone that their camera LCD went wild. Tape was fine though.

And, also, those BNC connectors on the combiner… are they spicy?
by Zambyte | 2025-04-19 00:26:25+00:00
They've been around for years now. Obviously not as long as the others, but years nonetheless. What makes you think the years so far may not continue into the future?

The only pattern I can see is it being potentially unsustainable, but I find it hard to believe that, considering I can run an LLM that is more capable that SOTA from 2 years ago on a single box in my living room.
by imtringued | 2025-04-19 00:26:33+00:00
If LLVM can target AMD GPUs what exactly prevents AMD and ROCm from supporting all the damn GPUs?

At this point I'm convinced that the real problem with AMD GPUs isn't necessarily the compilers (although they do produce mediocre code) or even the hardware itself, but some crappy C++ driver code that can't handle running graphics and compute at the same time. The datacenter GPUs never had to run graphics in the first place, so they are safe.
by tmnvix | 2025-04-19 00:27:07+00:00
I think the 'culture wars' are made much worse by a feedback loop that is amplified by social media. It's sad to watch this slowly bleed into the opinions of real people in my life (whether of the left or right). Ten years ago this wasn't the case. I could rely on real people to be more tolerant and less set in their opinions - much more open to meaningful discussion about society, culture, and politics.
by andrekandre | 2025-04-19 00:27:28+00:00
> Why is there competition in the open marketplace? You have just validated my suggestion that internally companies operate like communists.

i am not an expert, but i think the theory of competition leading to better outcomes in a marketplace is the availability of alternatives if one company went bad (in addition to price competition etc)

inside a company you are working for the same goal "against" the outside, so its probably more an artifact of how our economy is oriented

i'd guess if our economy was oriented around cooperation instead of "competition" (while keeping alternatives around) that dichotomy might go away...

just some random thoughts from an internet person
by chubot | 2025-04-19 00:28:34+00:00
I almost think deep learning and mobile phones had an analogous and surprising applicability

Deep learning failed to solve self-driving. In 2012 people said self driving would probably be ubiquitous by 2018, and it definitely would be by 2020

Instead we got chat bots in 2022 - that turned out to be the killer app, certainly the most widely adopted one

Likewise, instead of mobile phones being used as an aid in the physical world, they became the world

For example, the media they transmit seems to be how elections are won and lost now. It’s the device by which people form impressions of huge parts of the world
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-19 00:29:00+00:00
It's one of the stupidest concepts on the face of the earth and tons of people ascribe to it unknowingly: hype = bad.

AI is one of the most revolutionary things to ever happen in the last couple of years. But with enough hype tons of people now think it's complete garbage.

I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI, only to be bored of it in two years when a rudimentary version of it is finally realized.

What especially pisses me off is the know it all tone, like they knew all along it's garbage and that they're above it all. These people are tools with no opinions other then hype = bad and logic = nonexistent.
by rileymat2 | 2025-04-19 00:29:46+00:00
Why would we assume linear growth in capabilities and not a logarithmic growth rate? It seems time and time again, it gets harder and harder to make progress.

I think back to using Dragon Natural Dictation in 1998, there seemed to be exponential promise and a ton of excitement in my young mind. But the reality was more logarithmic improvements so it is finally pretty good 25 years later.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-19 00:29:48+00:00
> One possible explanation here: as these get smarter, they lie more to satisfy requests.

I feel there's some kind of unfounded anthropomorphization in there.

In contrast, consider the framing:

1. A system with more resources is able to return more options that continue the story.

2. The probability of any option being false (when evaluated against the real world) is greater than it being true, and there are also more possible options that continue the story than ones which terminate it.

3. Therefore we get more "lies" because of probability and scale, rather than from humanoid characteristics.
by manquer | 2025-04-19 00:30:19+00:00
Having a good ethos before significant funding rounds is one thing , it is lot harder once you raise a ton of external money.

It is not big bad VC either, VC funding while demanding is still lot more forgiving than Private equity or public markets . It is nature of a free economy to be as efficient as possible which in turn makes it affordable and accessible to class of users who would not have been do so before .
by 0hijinks | 2025-04-19 00:30:19+00:00
As all eight Ivy Leagues collectively received this amount in funding in 2024, it would appear that Yale is planning for a longer-term drought.

Aside, I tried to copy the title to search for context about this elsewhere:

>> To be able to copy & paste content to share with others please contact us at subscriptions@pei.group to upgrade your subscription to the appropriate licence

Well, that's... something. No ma'am, I don't think I will.
by Uehreka | 2025-04-19 00:30:47+00:00
5 years after Dijkstra’s algorithm was invented, could non-tech people look back and see a huge impact on their everyday lives? No.

Of the things in your list, WiFi is the closest to rising to this level, but even WiFi can’t claim to be as big of a deal as the Internet (unless you’re being extremely cute).

Your list is all A- and B-Tier stuff. Definitely important, but not on the level of like, the personal computer. LLMs are likely on the S-Tier with the other things GP mentioned. Within a month of its release ChatGPT had 100 million users. Everyone in my life can tell me a way they’ve been affected by LLMs.

We can argue about whether LLMs are/will be good for humanity. We cannot argue about whether they’re a big deal, they are undeniable.
by mcdeltat | 2025-04-19 00:32:43+00:00
Yeah I guess my point was there's a lot of opinion involved, especially at the moment. Which can play into the hype cycle. Full disclaimer I am an LLM semi-doubter so of course my opinion skews in that direction. We should see what the future evidence shows for the value of LLMs. Part of what the article touched on is historically the evidence often doesn't back up the hype, hence their disappointment.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-19 00:36:18+00:00
I have been in some type of team lead/architect position for almost 10 years now. 4+ years at product companies and 5+ in consulting companies. At any given time, I might have needed a decision to be made by my CxO, the client or another team.

On the other hand I might be preparing for a meeting, in a meeting, on a plane, at a customer’s site etc. On the opposite end, there is always a list of things I need to get done. I put that item as “blocked” and move on to my next item. If it is a downstream dependency as a developer, I mock it out and keep going.

If you are dependent on one person to answer a question, what happens when they go on vacation or if they are otherwise unavailable? I make it a point to not be a single point of failure.

Also, I keep my calendar up to date, including time I need to do “deep work”, when I’m traveling for business, of course meetings automatically show up. Anyone is free to put a meeting on my calendar if they need to interact with me synchronously.
by uoaei | 2025-04-19 00:37:19+00:00
If you had more to say on the topic at hand, you would have said it by now. I'm not interested in trying to educate someone so comfortable in promulgating assertions informed by nothing but amateur-level vibes.

We could list the logical fallacies you're displaying in the spirit of "debate and reasoning" but I have no faith this would go anywhere productive.

Report me instead of complaining about guidelines if retaliation for being exposed for your ignorance is so important to you.
by TheJoeMan | 2025-04-19 00:37:19+00:00
Not OP, but have you heard the craziness of Indian Creek Village in Miami? [1].

Their police force is 15 for a community of 41 homes[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Creek,_Florida [2] https://www.indiancreekvillagefl.gov/police/police-staff-dir...
by kevmo314 | 2025-04-19 00:39:11+00:00
I first noticed this with DeepSeek R1. For some really hard questions (some not even answerable), it would come up with a line of reasoning that convinced me that it had the right answer. If I read the answer without the reasoning, it was clear it made no sense.

We might be incentivizing answers that sound right with reinforcement learning as opposed to answers that are actually right.
by scotomafascia | 2025-04-19 00:39:21+00:00
Where are the equivalent for young men? Literally all of the other hackathons ever. Girls who Code arose because of toxic men chasing girls and women out of those spaces. Women worked tirelessly for decades to make these spaces happen. Men just want to whine about it because to actually address the issue is too “woke”. I’m sorry you created your prison, but don’t look to us to bail you out while you’re punching us down for not helping.

It reminds me of the white supremacists raging about Black Miss America pageants for existing. But they were ignorant of the fact that the official Miss America pageant had a rule that said “no negroes” up until 1972-73.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-04-19 00:40:46+00:00
https://thefederalist.com/2018/12/07/thomas-sowell-explains-...

It still has to do with economic circumstance, but here, according to Sowell it's about the cost of employing empirical discrimination (judging each specific case through complete knowledge of the individual) instead of a proxy for empirical discrimination (like likelihoods based on a non-arbitrary characteristic such as income or neighborhood).

The solutions that follow from that conclusion are to find ways to make empiricism less costly, or to change the stereotype (such as people from a poor neighborhood are likely to be a bad risk for a loan).

Systemic racism tends to apply so much economic drag to the system that any form of capitalism won't allow it to stand. Apartheid in South Africa was systemic racism, and businesses were violating those laws long before they were abolished just out of profit-motive. It became obvious and common-sense for the system to be ended. Thomas Sowell, in that same work, points out that Type II discrimination (discrimination based on arbitrary characteristics like race, ethnicity, belief... etc.) always ends up being economically unfeasible.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-19 00:42:23+00:00
Fentanyl is an illegal drug. There is an Analog Acct that makes it so that close analogs to fentanyl are illegal. That was done because people were making analogs and getting away with it.

Drug dealers then went to their lawyers and asked if certain formulations fell under the Analog Act. Their lawyer said no and wrote out how they were legal and didn't fall under the analog act. They sold the drugs and went to prison even though they thought they were in the clear (so good faith should apply, right?).

This is a real case that I have experience with so not sure why I'm being called out as acting in bad faith or making up a ridiculous scenario. This is a real scenario with the people sitting in prison still (for another 5 years).
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-19 00:42:56+00:00
Driving it full speed is how you drive these things. They are safer when the speed delta is minimal between you and the rest of the traffic and you are charged by the minute so the incentive is full speed short of obligatory stopping for traffic lights or stops (really blown through) or slight slowing for turns.

Battery estimates fwiw are very optimistic on the app in my experience. Assume error of 1/3 in range to be safe.
by parpfish | 2025-04-19 00:43:08+00:00
One of my more tin-hattish ideas:

higher ed has drifted toward more of an “all inclusive resort” model over the last 50 years where students get to live in a “parallel” version of the city with their own police force, medical center, dining halls, entertainment venues, etc. this is an intentional move to let them live in a utopian setting that pacifies them to prevent widespread student activism like the 70s
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-19 00:43:24+00:00
The issue is that it's not an athletic competition. If someone is better at heart surgery, it doesn't matter if it's because their parents could afford books and someone else's couldn't, that's still the person you want doing heart surgery.

If you then want to buy books for people who can't afford them, that's an entirely different proposal than giving the job to someone who isn't as qualified.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-04-19 00:43:36+00:00
A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul...
by latexr | 2025-04-19 00:44:26+00:00
> I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI

It was never this level of AI. The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about. No one ever fantasised about AI which couldn’t accurately count the number of letters in a common word or that would give you provably wrong information in an assertive authoritative tone. No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything.