MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mdaniel | 2025-04-26 17:48:31+00:00
> The real problem with AI is that you will never have an AI.

I wanted to draw attention to Moore's Law and the supercomputer in your pocket (some of them even ship with on-board inference hardware). I hear you that the newest hottest thing will always require lighting VC money on fire but even today I believe one could leverage the spot (aka preemptable) market to run some pretty beefy inference without going broke

Unless I perhaps misunderstood the thrust of your comment and you were actually drawing attention to the infrastructure required to replicate Meta's "download all the web, and every book, magazine, and newspaper to train upon petabytes of text"
by pas | 2025-04-26 17:48:47+00:00
Ceph has a very stable EC feature. And lot of companies use Ceph as a storage backend. Unfortunately I cannot find any straightforward statement about a commercial offering, but I would bet that DreamHost's DreamObjects does use it.

While it's not "commercial", but CERN uses it and many other institutions.

https://indico.cern.ch/event/941278/contributions/4104604/at... --- 50PB

...

ah, okay, finally an AWS S3 presentation that mentions EC :)

https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/Summits/reinvent2022/STG203_...
by rsync | 2025-04-26 17:48:52+00:00
"I recommend worrying about any service where you don’t pay a fee that scales with usage."

This is the issue and it is a heuristic that people need to develop.

Your provider especially your backups provider needs to have interests that are aligned with your interests.

The non-B2 portion of Backblaze has a financial incentive to keep you from using their product and to use as little of their space as possible. This is a bad, misaligned set of incentives.

On the B2 side, all of our suspicions about the (well timed) "me too" IPO have been confirmed with each and every quarterly report showing increased debt load and the classic "losing money but making up for it on volume".

Now that money isn't free anymore it's just a matter of time.

The sad part is they don't use standard, commodity JBOD enclosures so there won't even be anything useful in the fire sale :(
by cromulent | 2025-04-26 17:48:56+00:00
If the point is that bringing items into Australia could have a negative impact as they are not present (such as cane toads, rabbits, etc) then sure.

However, Australia already has much uranium. The mine at Rum Jungle has quite a lot left. Multiple nuclear explosions have taken place there.

This is not equivalent to keeping rabies out, nor a cultural issue.
by nickff | 2025-04-26 17:49:42+00:00
Prosecutorial discretion hasn’t meant much to me since the Bond got prosecuted for violating a chemical weapons treaty, and Yates got prosecuted for fish-shredding.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_v._United_States_(2014)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yates_v._United_States_(2015...
by chasd00 | 2025-04-26 17:50:56+00:00
Young kids are a different story but that doesn’t last forever. My kids are older, 13 and 15, and there’s a lot more time for personal interests and friends. Also, as kids get older you begin to have mutual interests. I’m watching/helping my 15 year old play an Indiana Jones game on his ps5 while typing this and have no desire to do anything else.
by rsync | 2025-04-26 17:51:08+00:00
"I’d make the exception for Google Drive, OneDrive and whatever the AWS one is."

No - no exceptions.

We must, as sophisticated 21st century actors, insist that providers (especially providers of critical services) have financial interests that align with our own interests.

I don't care how big the parent is or how much money they have to burn - if it makes financial sense to keep you from storing your backups you need to go elsewhere.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-26 17:51:16+00:00
Note that it's advised for a single parent traveling internationally with their children to carry an letter from the other parent granting permission, because it may otherwise be interpreted as an attempt at international kidnapping and you may be prevented from traveling. The US government itself says this: https://www.usa.gov/travel-documents-children

Yet here they are deliberately moving a child internationally against the express wishes of at least one of the parents.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-04-26 17:52:49+00:00
>but the truly damned are all the Americans who know and sense better but do not or cannot act properly.

MLK said it best: "the moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"

And even now you have people that think showing up with clever signs around the downtown parks / public areas on the weekend when all the government offices are closed are somehow going to get their message across. It's not enough. It was never enough. It wasn't enough for Vietnam or Iraq. It's definitely not going to be enough now. Americans are going to have to choose to do some uncomfortable and maybe even risky things to demonstrate our disapproval.

Or we have to admit that for many of us, this is who we actually are as a country. It certainly is a good bit of the voting public. I don't think it's a mistake that in basically one generation we lied to the world about Iraq then elected a fascist twice. And at that point I don't think stern dissent is an effective or even morally correct course of action.
by mikemcquaid | 2025-04-26 17:53:25+00:00
You’re on HN because it’s Saturday and you’re relaxing. I’m in an Uber to go see some gym friends because my kids are in the bath and almost ready for bed. Another night this week: I’ll do the same for my wife.

Zero judgment here, genuinely, but: I keep hearing people say my life is impossible and it doesn’t seem like it.
by rsync | 2025-04-26 17:53:49+00:00
"Yeah do NOT do iDrive if you use git or care about symlinks, I learned the hard way. Backblaze doesn't backup symlinks either for that matter..."

Gosh, if only there were a cloud storage provider that gave you an empty UNIX filesystem you could do anything you wanted with ... maybe something built totally on open standards that could handle hardlinks and symlinks and such ?

If only ...
by ajross | 2025-04-26 17:53:53+00:00
I think the steelman version would be that the rights in question shouldn't exist. In that world view, the birthright citizenship granted by the 14th amendment is an inconvenience to be worked around; and the business here about forcing a "choice"[1] where the parents will "deport" their own citizen children is in fact the desired policy result and not a humanitarian horror.

[1] Which of course isn't one, thus the Orwellian point upthread.
by jajko | 2025-04-26 17:54:05+00:00
What was the last time those uranium rounds were fired adequately, cca 1992 from A10 on iraqi tanks? Or 2003?

Abrams tanks on Ukraine dont need uranium munition, thats a fact. Everything russia puts against them up to and including T90 can be destroyed by regular AP rounds, no armatas running around requiring some special toxic munition. Suffice to say 98-99% of those abrams shootings are aimed at much worse armor than T90 has.

Sure you can try to have the best weapon available for all cases and not give a nanofraction of a fuck about consequences on civilians, just like US did everywhere. Videos of ie Iraqi kids being born en masse with nasty radiation diseases is a worry for some subhumans far away, not most glorious nation in the world right?

Ie we could pretty effectively end current war in Ukraine easily by bombing moscow from the ground with some 10 megaton bomb, or 10x1 megaton ones, the russian state would be in total chaos. Yet we humans dont do it, even russians dont launch those bombs on Europe despite repeatedly claiming so. Moves have consequences, being mass murderer of kids aint something cold shower washes away.
by mikeyouse | 2025-04-26 17:54:34+00:00
In study after study, immigrants actually raise the wages of citizen workers by taking the lower paying jobs while citizens can then be more productive. The idea they suppress wages is just another form of the ‘lump of labor’ fallacy.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41426727

https://www.dagliano.unimi.it/media/12-Ottaviano-Peri-2008.p...
by geor9e | 2025-04-26 17:54:50+00:00
That's what they would have said about drafting tools in the 1880s, command line AutoCAD in the 1980s. Try to imagine the 2080s, or the most visionary sci-fi movie about that future - one of those movies where people look back and says "wow they were close!". Suppose a character wanted to get an idea for a three-dimensional form from their brain onto some medium. They're not going to be clicking a plane, clicking sketch, clicking some lines, tapping the dimension hotkey, twisting their spacemouse a bit with their left hand, clicking extrude, dragging, tapping into their numpad the height, etc etc. We use the clunky interface of our age.
by echelon | 2025-04-26 17:54:54+00:00
We've been talking about this for two decades at this point. Nothing is happening because too many people are willing to go in debt to get their degree.

Free loans & Easy admissions Loans carry no risk | v Ample money supply for universities & no pressure to cut costs | v Increase in budget and expenses University FOMO for not being competitive on shiny offerings (Admin, fancy facilities, etc.) | v Perpetually raising costs Students take bigger loans | v Student loan crisis

It's a perverse positive feedback system.

The easiest lever to pull is adjusting the student loan situation. Students need to be able to discharge their debt, which will put risk calculus back into the equation. STEM degrees, graduation rates, degree value, and student academic performance will be directly correlated with risk.

Under these changes, a student with so-so academics going to an expensive school for art history won't work anymore. STEM degrees at local community colleges will be affordable and abundant. That's what the country needs rather than a system that buys fancy academic buildings.

Our ancestors could make do with learning in decrepit old buildings. They didn't have staycation amenities. They turned that into incredible productive value and didn't go into debt. That's what we need again.

If we want to continue to provide access as a matter of policy, then we should make universities meet strict standards on budget and degree cost to offer non-dischargeable loans to students. Then universities can decide whether they want to meet those eligibility requirements or continue inflating their own costs. The market will fix itself.
by o11c | 2025-04-26 17:55:23+00:00
Supporting variable-width fonts is pretty easy on its own (if bit-packing, you might wish to store them vertically), but does complicate combining characters (remember, they go in different places and may need to make the new character larger).

For vector fonts, the interesting question is "if I render this at a different resolution and then scale it, will it line up?" which fundamentally has no answer that can satisfy everyone. Most other difficulties are merely a Small Matter of Coding (and providing appropriate APIs).
by jjmarr | 2025-04-26 17:56:11+00:00
There are little behavioural nuances in your writing or the timezones/subjects in which you edit. Using multiple accounts is mostly forbidden by Wikipedia policy, unlike most websites, so just proving the link can be enough.

Icewhiz is a bad example because a lot of the evidence is non-public now (there's a cabal of CheckUsers approved by the Wikimedia Foundation who deal non-public cases). A simpler one is Lieutenant of Melkor/CaradhrasAiguo. Lieutenant of Melkor was banned in 2014, CaradhrasAiguo was made in 2015, and in 2020 someone linked the two accounts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga...

> Editor interaction tool shows 2691 common pages. This is because both have been AWB power users in several same topic areas. However, there are numerous specific commonalities with extreme detail related to American cities, Chinese cities, weather templates and airports.

> Both used navigational popups to revert edits which resulted in a non-standard date format in the edit summary.

> LoM created many US city weatherbox templates. CA has been the only editor to do major updates in many of them.

> Both have done major work with pushpins related to Chinese maps. 'Pushpin' is found in many edit summaries of both editors.

> Both often removed bold text from non-English words. Both used edit-summaries with "debold" which I don't think is a real word.

> Both updated snow days and precipitation days in US city infoboxes with almost identical edit summaries.

> Both have an interest in classical music. CTRL+F for Beethoven, Mozart or Chopin in the editor interaction tool.

They're also both named after Lord of the Rings characters. "Caradhras" is a mountain, "Melkor" was the most powerful Valar and later went by the name "Morgoth". Sauron, the antagonist of LotR, was his lieutenant.
by AustinDev | 2025-04-26 17:56:23+00:00
I know, right? The incompetence is mind blowing. At least they stopped letting people in, but they'll never reach their stated goals. To be fair though 'due process' via a hearing isn't that common in deportations in this country.

"The Obama administration has prioritized speed over fairness in the removal system, sacrificing individualized due process in the pursuit of record removal numbers.

A deportation system that herds 75 percent of people through fast-track, streamlined removal is a system devoid of fairness and individualized due process."[1]

3/4 of Obama era deportations were 'nonjudicial removals' meaning that there was no hearing in front of an immigration judge before removal. People just didn't care as much then I suppose.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/speed-over-fairn...
by hinkley | 2025-04-26 17:56:46+00:00
Not to say he’s innocent, but insiders can also trigger market crashes just by selling their stock. There are public records of substantial holdings by company insiders and while I don’t think they’re made available immediately, they are updated periodically and people can and do read into it.

That’s part of why they usually deputize a brokerage to periodically sell a fraction of their holdings at intervals.

It’s been a long while since I paid any attention to this but I do believe I saw at least a couple of instances of an insider triggering weakness in their stock just by increasing the rate of sale of their holdings.
by afiodorov | 2025-04-26 17:57:00+00:00
Regarding the common analogy about GPS atrophying map skills, I have a slightly different take based on observation and experience. My dad, who learned to drive pre-GPS, struggles to simultaneously drive and follow navigation – it's too much input, too fast. He needs a co-pilot or pre-planning.

For those of us who learned to drive with GPS, however, it wasn't simply about foregoing maps. It was about developing the distinct skill of processing navigation prompts while simultaneously managing the primary task of driving. This integration required practice; like many, I took plenty of wrong roundabout exits before it became second nature. Indeed, this combined skill is arguably so fundamental now that driving professionally without the ability to effectively follow GPS might be disqualifying – it's hard to imagine any modern taxi or ride-share company hiring someone who lacks this capability. So, rather than deskilling, this technology has effectively raised the bar, adding a complex, necessary layer to the definition of a competent driver today.

I see a parallel with AI and programming. The focus is often on what might be lost, but I think we should also recognise the new skill emerging: effectively guiding, interpreting, and integrating AI into the development process. It's not just 'programming' anymore, it's 'programming-with-AI', and mastering that interaction is the next challenge.
by sightbroke | 2025-04-26 17:58:06+00:00
It could be if that yields more profit in the end.

For example,

It costs the company 10 dollars, and that 100 out of 110 people will purchase the upgrade for $20. That is $100 profit. Maybe the company also finds that 80 of those 110 people would also buy the same upgrade for $150 and yields like $11,200 in profit.

So it makes sense for the company, the persons running it, and the investors in the company to have the markup as high as it will maximize their profits.

> lack of profit when I said "anywhere near".

Sorry, to me I interpret markup to be assumed as double the cost but would not consider that "near" cost.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-26 17:58:08+00:00
People go into debt for the credential because employers require the credential. If employers provided training and did not require a degree, you’d see demand evaporate. Instead, they require a degree the role may not even need, which externalizes the cost onto the student and future candidate (who then goes into debt as a gamble to increase future lifetime earnings). A college degree was marketed as a ticket to a secure, middle class life, and that marketing has been seen through.

Why US Men Think College Isn’t Worth It Anymore- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788914 - April 2025

Pew Reseach: Is College Worth It? - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/05/23/is-coll... - May 23rd, 2024

There is some progress here on companies removing the credential requirement, and the situation should improve as labor supply continues to decline into the future due to structural demographics (forcing employers to loosen hiring requirements).

Learn a trade, get a CDL (~$5k), etc.
by Earw0rm | 2025-04-26 17:58:47+00:00
You can walk out of Canary Wharf, within a mile or two you'll see much the same.

Not that the Knightsbridge set ever do.

Heck, even from Knightsbridge itself you don't have to go that far. North End Road is what, two, three miles?

I don't know of anywhere in London that has quite the profound sense of hopelessness you find in Blackpool, but a lot of it's really not great.
by ultimafan | 2025-04-26 17:59:37+00:00
I've definitely noticed that there's a huge trend of technology at any cost apologists on HN that can't pause to imagine the real world impacts of how AI products they're championing will actually be used.

It's terrifying that people exist that have no problem making the world a shittier place and hiding behind a cover of "well it's not the technology that's evil but the people abusing it" as if each tool given to bad actors doesn't make their job easier and easier to do.

Seriously, what's the utility of developing and making something like this public use?
by astura | 2025-04-26 18:00:39+00:00
This doesn't make sense, the population has only increased.

Quick Google tells me 40 years ago, in 1985, there was 62.6 million children in the US. In 2025 there are 74.7 million. That is more children in 2025 than 1985.

Parents not allowing their children to play independently isn't due to lack of other children, it's a choice.
by grafmax | 2025-04-26 18:01:08+00:00
Not all laws are the same. Not all laws are just. It’s a wealthy minority that controls the laws in our country and opportunistically uses them to advance their own interests. The anti-immigrant sentiment Trump has stirred up is an example. Trump only cares about getting more power for himself and his billionaire friends. Surely you see that.

Attacking a whole group isn’t going to heal your mom. As a victim of injustice why don’t you consider working for justice yourself? Closing your eyes to the reality of what is happening in this country just perpetuates injustice. It spreads the suffering you’ve experienced to others.

I find it hard to understand your position. I can’t help but wonder if it might be some kind of coping mechanism you have built up to deal with the effect your mom’s injury has had on your lives.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-04-26 18:01:15+00:00
Prompt:

I would like a list of east Indiamen from 1750 to 1800 where you can find how many tons burthen and how many crew. Show as a chart and give me the wikipedia links to the ships. Do not include any ships that do not have wikipedia links.

Here's my customization:

What do you do?: Software Engineer What traits should ChatGPT have?: Show all the options Be practical above all. Anything else ChatGPT should know about you?: I’m an author of science fiction and fantasy. I like world building for stories.

I know there's hundreds of ways to phrase this and I could probably trick it into generating the chart first and finding the wikipedia links second. :)
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-26 18:01:35+00:00
Hn, as a forum for discussion, is fundamentally not equipped to rationally discuss America going this far off the rails.

It is far better suited for less difficult topics, like yet another web framework being developed or some 2% improvements in database access efficiency. For discussing real problems that impact human beings existentially, face-to-face conversation is vastly superior.
by simonw | 2025-04-26 18:01:47+00:00
"Seriously, what's the utility of developing and making something like this public use?"

An interesting question for me here is if these models were deliberately trained to enable this capability, or if it's a side-effect of their vision abilities in general.

If you train a general purpose vision-LLM to have knowledge of architecture, vegetation, weather conditions, road signs, street furniture etc... it's going to be able to predict locations from photos.

You could try and stop it - have a system prompt that says "if someone asks you where the photo was taken don't do that" - but experience shows those kind of restrictions are mostly for show, they usually tend to fall over the moment someone adversarial figures out a way to subvert them.
by xlii | 2025-04-26 18:02:45+00:00
Tried the same, results made me laugh.

Completely clueless. I've seen passing prompts 8 about how it's not in the city I am and yet it tries again and again. My favourite moment was when it started analysing piece of blurry asphalt.

After 6 minutes o3 it was confidently wrong: https://imgur.com/a/jYr1fz1

IMO not-in-US is actually great test if something was in LLMs data and the whole search is a for show.
by mdasen | 2025-04-26 18:03:06+00:00
It might depend on who you are. I think Backblaze is well known on here because they've been around for longer and their hard drive stats posts are well liked.

If you're a less technical CTO, Wasabi seems to do a lot more traditional marketing on things like sports games: https://ibb.co/21qNkM9b (NBA, NHL, Premier League soccer). I'm not saying that makes them better, but a lot of people with purchasing power are going to be seeing Wasabi around.

Wasabi has also been pushing value-add services on top of their storage with Wasabi AiR (https://wasabi.com/cloud-object-storage/wasabi-air). It's basically an AI-powered database of your content. If you're running a place generating lots of content, having a system automatically tag and make searchable all those images and videos is a really nice value-add. Being able to search for a video clip containing a specific person in your library junk pile of video can be nicely useful for a lot of organizations.

It could just be that different people get their brand awareness from different places.
by tessierashpool | 2025-04-26 18:03:20+00:00
If somebody wanted to be... not president, but authoritarian leader of a post-democracy, Musk would be well positioned technologically.

of course, that was his very explicit goal. Thiel backed Curtis Yarvin, who came up for the plan for this and called it RAGE. google it, it's all written down. they hoped to put in Bezos or Zuckerberg and have a more efficiently-run dictatorship replacing our democracy. because they didn't understand politics, they got the ketamine addict instead, who renamed RAGE to DOGE so he could also use it to power a crypto pump-and-dump.

*edit: and because it was never a realistic plan. because they didn't understand politics