MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Intralexical | 2025-04-17 18:52:17+00:00
Cooperation only depends on anyone, in the history of ever, having at any point survived long enough to contact each other and form an alliance. Once a critical mass of parties that prefer cooperation has been reached, all future cooperative parties are at an automatic advantage over aggressive parties.

You can see shades this of this, e.g., in the difference between single-round versus iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas.

> MAD is utter bunk. It depends on rational actors that also believes the other actors are rational. Even Reagan realised the folly of MAD after Able Archer in 1983, and realising the Soviet leadership genuinely seemed to believe the US might be prepared to strike first.

What do you think the long-term prospects are of a species that goes around flinging RKVs at people? No more North America and no more Eurasia, if that happened. Maybe South America and Africa can pick up the pieces. Just because irrational hyperaggressive actors can briefly exist doesn't mean you're likely to encounter them. They won't survive for long.

MAD exists whether or not any particular participant believes in it, because it's just the cause and effect of competing powers each with their own agency. Or else we wouldn't be here. Even the Soviets knew that a possible US first strike was better than a guaranteed US retaliatory strike, which would happen if they struck first.

> Cooperation might eventually win out, but that won't help you if your civilization has long since been wiped out.

The whole "Fermi Paradox" arguments are based on an extreme form of "eventually, we should expect to see aliens, so why haven't we already?" This doesn't mean aggressive civilizations don't exist, but the reasons to think they're prevalent are overblown.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-17 18:52:31+00:00
An essay in the 1964 book Ideology and Discontent makes the case that the public isn't qualified to have an opinion and found that shockingly low numbers of people can define "liberal" and "conservative" but (1) that was when hardly anyone went to college and (2) the author had the structuralist view that ideology was a fight between "marxism" and "anti-marxism" and wouldn't really recognize, say, a black nationalist or an ecofeminist as having an advanced ideology.

It's a running gag that liberals don't liberate and that conservatives don't conserve but I think liberals who liberate and conservatives who conserve have something to contribute.

I think Jane's respect for existing institutions, places and organizations that arise out of markets and fear of centralized planning are conservative. It makes me think of how Petroski wrote a whole book about pencils that comes to the conclusion that central planning doesn't work because no individual knows how to make a pencil.
by godelski | 2025-04-17 18:52:33+00:00
> "...It matches the full-precision (i.e., FP16 or BF16)

Wait... WHAT?!

When did //HALF PRECISION// become //FULL PRECISION//?

FWIW, I cannot find where you're quoting from. I cannot find "matches" on TFA nor the GitHub link. And in the paper I see

3.2 Inference Accuracy The bitnet.cpp framework enables lossless inference for ternary BitNet b1.58 LLMs. To evaluate inference accuracy, we randomly selected 1,000 prompts from WildChat [ ZRH+24 ] and compared the outputs generated by bitnet.cpp and llama.cpp to those produced by an FP32 kernel. The evaluation was conducted on a token-by-token basis, with a maximum of 100 tokens per model output, considering an inference sample lossless only if it exactly matched the full-precision output.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-17 18:52:36+00:00
Rumors from yesterday were around $3 billion.

They had raised a Series C investment recently. Historically that puts ownership of founders and employees at around 40%. Could be a lot higher for a hot AI company though.

Given two founders, AI company, Series C, and a $3bn purchase price they could each have netted around $750 million in a good scenario. Less if they cashed out in secondaries in previous rounds (which would have been smart). Fantastic outcome for them, obviously. This is the 0.001% scenario that founders dream about.
by zonkerdonker | 2025-04-17 18:53:04+00:00
People knew smoking killed for decades. Do you think that with no policy change and no regulation, that Marlboro and Philip Morris would have let their market tank?

Advertising - banned, smoking indoors - banned, and most importantly, taxing the hell out of them (every 10% increase in cigarette prices results in a 4% decrease in adult consumption and a 7% decrease in youth consumption).

There isn't really directly comparable policy to taxing these free social media platforms., however, and the whole thing is a bit stickier. Before any policies can stick, the public needs to be aware of the issues. That is tough when most people's 'awareness of issues' comes directly from social media.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-04-17 18:53:33+00:00
They do indeed. Rosetta 2 is lightyears beyond Rosetta when it comes to performance and emulation overhead strategies and benefits from hardware support (and having to do less work just because of fewer differences between the host/target architectures) but still fundamentally relies on the emulation the entirety of the stack. There is almost zero information about its internals disclosed, but from what I understand it still revolves around fat binaries - and necessitates that Apple compiles their frameworks against both x86_64 and arm64. Unlike the MS solution, with Rosetta 2 you cannot call a native ARM64 library from an x86_64 binary, you can't port your code over piece-by-piece, and once Apple decides to no longer ship the next version of xxx framework as a fat binary because they don't want to maintain support for two different architectures in their codebase (wholly understandable), you'll (at best) be left with an older version of said framework that hasn't been patched to address the latest bugs, doesn't behave the same way that newer apps linking against the newer version of the framework do, etc.
by mingus88 | 2025-04-17 18:53:52+00:00
1) you don’t need to wash the dishes before loading the machine. There is a filter you can clear food out of but most people don’t know about it. Scrape off the solids beforehand leads to less gunk in the filter.

2) a cycle will typically be much hotter for much longer than whatever you do manually. So the dishwasher is what I trust to fully disinfect my dishes

3) a family of four cooking at home will need a full load every day so it’s a lot more efficient than manually washing and drying everything, especially when both parents work
by Frieren | 2025-04-17 18:53:56+00:00
> What's "legal" doesn't really matter.

It does, as much as always. A different thing is that elected politicians think that does not matter and stop enforcing the law.

But it will have consequences. Because just laws that apply to everybody create a very different society with very different capabilities than one that is just a feudal system.

The middle ages were not shitty because we forgot how to innovate but they were bad because feudal system kill innovation and creativity at the same time that increase suffering.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-04-17 18:54:10+00:00
this is true. the process is called flash freezing.

That said, this advantage gets completely undone if the frozen food is left in a pallet waiting to get into another freezer. the subsequent refreeze will introduce the very ice damage the original process was trying to avoid. you can certainly take steps to minimize thaw on the way to your freezer but you don't know if the entire supply chain was so judicious.
Show HN: HN Watercooler – listen to HN threads as an audio conversation
by sebastiennight | 2025-04-17 18:54:13+00:00
Hi HN, here's something fun to play with.

It takes any HN thread and turns it into an audio conversation so you can listen to the thread while doing other things.

I've seen many previous attempts to turn HN threads into podcasts, but they all shared a common issue IMO: trying to reduce the very rich back-and-forth into a single-thread single-reader boring podcast. Instead, I wanted to hear the actual debate from the actual thread!

So I asked Claude 3.7 to build this for me as a browser-only app. It just needs a thread URL and an Elevenlabs API key (this all remains in your browser, you can check the source code, it's only 3 files, there is no server storage of anything).

To make the resulting audio experience as natural as possible, each commenter has a different voice.

Commenters who appear multiple times in the thread have the same voice, and introduce themselves. A bit of context is also introduced when coming back "up" from deeply nested comments.

You can play the resulting audio or download it for later listening. I'm planning to later add the ability to load multiple threads so I can have a playlist generated for listening in the gym!

Any comments or improvement suggestions are appreciated!
by awkward | 2025-04-17 18:55:32+00:00
If you stuff something covered in egg yolk in there it's coming out with egg yolk on it. If you don't scrape whole chunks of potato off the plate, you're rolling the dice with whether you pull it out of a filter or out of the thin hose between the dishwasher and the drain. The dishwasher's not magic - if it takes a scrub to get it off, you need to scrub it.

I don't know about handwashing after it comes out though, that's crazy.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-17 18:55:58+00:00
It isn’t a good saying, in the sense that what the speaker means by “good times,” “bad times,” “strong men,” and “weak men,” is so open to interpretation as to be meaningless. I like your interpretation. But I think the expression is often interpreted with “strong” implying a certain sort of roughness/propensity toward violence.

Anyway, it is clearly not accurate—“good times” and “bad times” must at least be opposite, however we define them, right? But we see all sorts of countries in history that have multi-generational reinforcing stretches of excellency. And we see many countries that suffered from many-generation-long stretches of bad times. These good and bad men don’t seem to pop up anywhere near as reliably as the expression claims.
by rollcat | 2025-04-17 18:55:58+00:00
I'm still trying to wrap my head around why does FTL violate causality (even in the specific case of "space folding", a theoretical instant jump from one point in space to another).

Let's simplify the problem (take a spherical cow in the vacuum), say we have planets A and B, 100 LY away from each other, time flows at exactly the same rate near both, clear path in between them, they move through space at the same speed and relative direction, etc.

I'm on planet A. I send out a signal towards planet B. I jump to planet B and wait 100 years. I observe the signal.

Now my simplistic assumptions probably suggest that this isn't that much different from sending out a carrier pigeon while I take the train to its destination and wait. Very obviously I'm not Einstein. What am I missing?
by ch4s3 | 2025-04-17 18:56:01+00:00
No I got the context. As you said, there are trace amounts of lead and even arsenic in agricultural products for all kinds of reasons, some plants LOVE to fix heavy metals.

> If you look at how much lead and other toxins you're exposed to through a variety of sources it will add up over time

There's simply no evidence to support the broad claim that different toxic substances below their safe thresholds cumulatively are unsafe.

> Simply because it doesn't add up to the thresholds for lead poisoning doesn't mean it lacks any negative consequences

Sure, but you can't in practice prevent ever conceivable negative outcome. You have to think about tradeoffs.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-17 18:56:02+00:00
One huge problem with cancel culture is how mercurial it is. So we get to witness spectacles like an attempt to cancel Nike for selling products in Israel[1] or for hiring Colin Kaepernick[2] instead of for their ongoing record of labor abuses. And, in general, "cancelling" often seems to focus on topical, hot-button issues instead of deeper-rooted problems.

The whole phenomenon is ripe for manipulation and viral marketing - leveraging short-term outrage to build brand identity[3]. One could argue it's the commodification and commercialization of "real" protest. It's less democracy and more idiocracy.

[1] https://masjidalaqsa.com/boycott/nike-israel-bds

[2] https://www.vox.com/2018/9/4/17818148/nike-boycott-kaepernic...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06yy88tLWlg
by acdha | 2025-04-17 18:56:07+00:00
That’s like saying it’s entirely up to the restaurant to give you your food, so you have no control over what the kitchen does. The United States is paying them money for a service and has many other levers of considerable power, so it would be easy for an administration acting in good-faith to show that they made a request at a certain time and will cancel payment or escalate if it’s not honored.
by SR2Z | 2025-04-17 18:56:31+00:00
> My post was Thesis: Photos is not new

> Supporting evidence: everything else.

I am getting my number from Wikipedia, because that's when the actual "good" version of Photos launched. I don't know what the status quo was before the relaunch, because the app wasn't useful to me before it got the ML features that caused it to blow up and become a wild success.

The point I am trying to make is that Photos, on its own, would be a multibillion dollar startup. In the context of billion-user apps, even being 10 years old is still pretty recent.

My complaint with your take is that if you exclude anything younger than that, OBVIOUSLY there will not be as many (or any) wild successes. It takes time for a product to become successful.
by thefourthchime | 2025-04-17 18:57:28+00:00
Just open the root folder in cursor and it'll still do all the stuff for you. Just go build it in MSVC. This is how I build apps. I create an empty project in Xcode, and then I go over to Cursor and have it write all the code. And then I go back to Xcode to build and run it.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-04-17 18:58:56+00:00
The author evaluated their position, measured the situation, sought more information, adjusted their position, independently tested it and updated their position

Scientific method 101

They did it with intentional vulnerability, and took responsibility for themselves at the outset.

We need more of this and it’s rare to actually see someone document it. It requires the ability to be wrong, something that seems to be going extinct …curiously despite it being almost universally accepted as a virtue.

> Last week, I purposefully subjected myself to the real-life version of an anxiety dream. I stood in front of my boyfriend and my parents—three of the people who mean the most to me, and who have offered the most, uh, feedback on my dishwasher-loading abilities—and tried to do the thing. Plates on the bottom, don’t cram too much in there, think about the spray: Honestly, it wasn’t that bad. I thought about the hard work, and the help, required to keep a home. The dishes came out clean.
by xp84 | 2025-04-17 18:59:18+00:00
The frustrating part is that this is another area where the realities of capitalism seem misaligned with anyone's well-being. Nobody wants to be out of a job, but doing the opposite of the Shopify CEO's strategy, like severely restricting AI usage, looks like a great way to ensure your competitors catch up with you and eat your lunch faster. I don't see any answers, just different ways to destroy ourselves.
by hwayne | 2025-04-17 18:59:18+00:00
> Hmm.. I'd love to see a more formal statement of this, because it feels unintuitive.

The problem is called "Vector Addition System Reachability", and the proof that it's Ackermann-complete is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.13866 (It's actually for "Vector Addition Systems with states, but the two are equivalent formalisms. They're also equivalent to Petri nets, which is what got me interested in this problem in the first place!)

> Notably the question "given a number as input, output as many 1's as that number" is exponential in the input size. Is this problem therefore also strictly NP-hard?

(Speaking off the cuff, so there's probably a mistake or two here, computability is hard and subtle!)

Compression features in a lot of NP-hard problems! For example, it's possible to represent some graphs as "boolean circuits", eg a function `f(a, b)` that's true iff nodes `a,b` have an edge between them. This can use exponentially less space, which means a normal NP-complete problem on the graph becomes NEXPTIME-complete if the graph is encoded as a circuit.

IMO this is cheating, which is why I don't like it as an example.

"Given K as input, output K 1's" is not a decision problem because it's not a boolean "yes/no". "Given K as input, does it output K ones" is a decision problem. But IIRC then for `K=3` your input is `(3, 111)` so it's still linear on the input size. I think.
by ted_dunning | 2025-04-17 19:00:12+00:00
It is common for the backup of these systems to be a secondary data center.

Remember that there are two purposes for backup. One is hardware failures, the second is fat fingers. Hardware failures are dealt with by redundancy which always involves keeping redundant information across multiple failure domains. Those domains can be as small as a cache line or as big as a data center. These failures can be dealt with transparently and automagically in modern file systems.

With fat fingers, the failure domain has no natural boundaries other than time. As such, snapshots kept in the file system are the best choice, especially if you have a copy-on-write that can keep snapshots with very little overhead.

There is also the special case of adversarial fat fingering which appears in ransomware. The answer is snapshots, but the core problem is timely detection since otherwise you may not have a single point in time to recover from.
by dfxm12 | 2025-04-17 19:00:41+00:00
I used to be uptight about how to load the dishwater until I put away a load that was packed by my partner, "like a raccoon on meth", and noticed there wasn't a difference in the cleanliness.

Now I just worry about buying new bowls. Will the bowls fit nicely given pitch and angle of the of the dealies on the rack? The bowls I inherited from my grandmother fit so nicely in any dishwasher I've loaded them into, but now they're starting to crack...
by lelanthran | 2025-04-17 19:00:47+00:00
> It's a well written essay at least.

This is objectively wrong, going from the comments from the intended audience in this thread.

If half your intended audience had trouble understanding the author's goal or message, then it's a very poor essay. Barely a passing grade, if one were to grade it.

The whole point of an essay is to get your message across. If it can't do that, it's a failure.
by WillPostForFood | 2025-04-17 19:00:48+00:00
Why does this not work? I have the HN homepage open, and open Zuni sidebar:

Me: Can you identify which stories in the list are not "tech" stories?

Zuni: Please provide me with the list of stories you'd like me to review! I need the list to be able to identify which ones are not "tech" stories.

Me: The ones on the open hacker news tab

Zuni: I am sorry, I do not have the capability to access external websites or specific tabs within them, including the "open hacker news tab." Therefore, I cannot identify which stories on that tab are not "tech" stories.

Me: You can't see the content in my browser?

Zuni: No, I cannot see the content in your browser. I am a large language model running on Google's servers. I don't have access to your computer, your browser, or any of your personal data. My interactions with you are purely through text.

Me: Which emails in my primary tab seem like they are from cold emailers?

Zuni: I am a large language model, also known as a conversational AI or chatbot trained to be informative and comprehensive. I am trained on a massive amount of text data, and I am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions. For example, I can provide summaries of factual topics, create stories, and translate languages.

Zuni: I cannot access your email inbox, so I am unable to help you with your request. --

If it can't access content in the browser, it is pointless.
by Drakim | 2025-04-17 19:00:55+00:00
...don't get high on your own supply?

It's pretty obvious that these tools are not replacements for developers as of yet. I've tried them, and they are very nifty, and can even do some boring tasks really well, but you can't actually substitute actual developer skill (yet). But everybody is holding their breath because it looks like they might eventually reach that level, and the time-frame for that eventually is unknown.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-04-17 19:01:29+00:00
> who determines what is an emergency and if the expanded powers are needed?

Congress. But so far they're letting Trump declare emergencies left and right. All of his tariffs are being enacted under an "emergency" to bypass Congress (since under non-emergency situations, Congress sets tariffs).

Had the Democrats won control of the House/Senate, a lot of this nonsense wouldn't be happening (or even if conventional Republicans had control, which is why Trump 1.0, when conventional GOP held the senate, Trump couldn't go off the rails as he has now).
by mistrial9 | 2025-04-17 19:01:38+00:00
also a commitment to a robust library system, and Federal research being publicly owned.. tolerance for varying ideas outside the current government paternalism might be part of it..

sad to see the current crop of agitating political firebrands embedding into stable and tolerant education infrastructure. Also sad to see the reactionary care and feeding of authoritarianism by the Feds.. this is why we cant have nice things?
by nozzlegear | 2025-04-17 19:01:48+00:00
My wife is convinced that you need to hand wash dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, so she doesn't use the dishwasher (it came with the house). I actually thought the two types of people in this article were going to be A) people who hand wash dishes before putting them in the dishwasher; and B) people who just put them in the dishwasher and trust it will do its job to clean them.
by ApolloFortyNine | 2025-04-17 19:02:04+00:00
I'm confused how this is a monopoly, is it just the "if we define a market as Google ads, then Google has a monopoly problem"? Like defining iOS apps as a market (and somehow failed)?

Even if they play games with the auctions to keep the price up, at the end of the day X company is spending $5 per thousand clicks (or whatever) because they think it's worth it. Google can charge whatever they want, they run the platform, and it's not as if anyone is forced to use them.

I just don't see how you could in the same breath (how the government basically has) that the app store isn't a monopoly, but Google ads are. There's other ad companies, there is no other way to get an app on iOS.
by sharadov | 2025-04-17 19:02:54+00:00
It's hard for me to gain weight. But in my 30s, for a few months I was eating 3000 calories plus. My breakfast smoothie was about 800 calories - 2-3 scoops protein, a banana, almond butter. I gained about 5 pounds after 3 months. It was just too hard to eat that much while also eating healthy.
by da_chicken | 2025-04-17 19:03:19+00:00
Honestly, I'd just like web browsers to not complain when you're connecting to an IP on the same subnet by entering https://10.0.0.1/ or similar.

Yes, it's possible that the system is compromised and it's redirecting all traffic to a local proxy and that it's also malicious.

It's still absurd to think that the web browser needs to make the user jump through the same hoops because of that exceptional case, while having the same user experience as if you just connected to https://bankofamerica.com/ and the TLS cert isn't trusted. The program should be smarter than that, even if it's a "local network only" mode.