MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2025-04-17 20:20:26+00:00
These are good rules, not bad. The point of having birthright citizenship is that we don't rely on a fuzzy, nationalist, often-slight-racist notion of "Americanness" or "American Blood" to define our citizenry. All persons born in the United States are citizens of the United States, easy peasy.

But then you need to close the loopholes around people who clearly haven't renounced citizenship and don't want to but still find themselves pregnant in foreign countries such that they don't need to make emergency trips back to the homeland. And that gets a little complicated because you need to distinguish them from actual expatriots in a fair way.
by ziddoap | 2025-04-17 20:20:42+00:00
>My point is that's pretty much all arguments, except maybe some very obtuse ones no one really cares about.

There is a distinct difference between a person having emotions while arguing, and using an appeal to emotion as a rhetorical tactic. I do not agree that "pretty much all arguments" contain an appeal to emotion (again, as a purposeful fallacious rhetorical tactic), even though all arguments obviously will have people feeling some sort of emotion.

Even looking through this entire thread, most of the disagreements here do not contain appeals to emotions.

I'm sure that any book on logic and rhetoric from the last few centuries would explain it better than I can. The wiki page has some good explanations and examples as well.
by chris_va | 2025-04-17 20:21:09+00:00
(disclaimer that I was the TL of Google News a very long time ago, so feel free to ignore what I say as biased)

I would argue that monster.com and craiglist, which collectively removed the majority of newpaper revenue, were probably the nail in the coffin. You can see some of the decline pre-internet in this 1999 take: https://niemanreports.org/newspapers-arrive-at-economic-cros... ... which already laments the decline of journalism.

Pre-internet, editorial boards were fundamentally gatekeepers of knowledge. They were certainly not unbiased, but for the most part they had a level of integrity. Now, one can find (or have pushed) any "narrative" one chooses, whether or not it bears any resemblance to reality. While Google does make it easier to find any/all of this content, I would argue that the intrinsic incentives of social media platforms for more engagement are probably the high order bit.
by simonh | 2025-04-17 20:21:43+00:00
Arguably there is one company that did manage to make the transition from 8 bit hobby home computing and gaming. Apple.

The Apple II was a contemporary, in fact a predecessor of all these systems. So, what did they do right, or what went right for them, that enabled them to make it? I suspect it was the penetration of the Apple II into education and business that helped make it possible, but suppose Steve Jobs had been in charge at Commodore or Atari?
by etblg | 2025-04-17 20:21:51+00:00
For what it's worth, the amount of fentanyl seized appeared to be 54kg, less than I weigh.

They also seized 390kg worth of meth, and firearms, which I would be more concerned about than fentanyl but hey.

The "enough to kill x people" numbers get funny with fentanyl since even enough to fit inside a pen would probably be enough to kill a few hundred, maybe a few thousand? I'm not doing the math.
by jzymbaluk | 2025-04-17 20:22:11+00:00
The only thing standing in the way of nuclear/solar/hydroelectric data centers is local laws and regulations. All the big cloud providers are actively researching this. see Microsoft's interest in acquiring the three mile island nuclear reactor for an example[1]

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/26/1104516/three-mi...
by dceddia | 2025-04-17 20:23:18+00:00
The whole book could be the surrounding context, not just a sentence or two, and I think that still fits with the point I wanted to make - that written words are more linear or in the same plane compared to code which is more "multidimensional" in a sense, when you start to consider the reasons behind the code, the order of execution, things being executed multiple times, etc.
by toast0 | 2025-04-17 20:25:33+00:00
I'm in the US. I do have government ID, but I don't recall showing it to my network providers. Certainly, some telcos want a social security number to run credit; but that's often avoidable. I'm pretty sure could also wander down to an electronics store (maybe a grocery/drug store too) and pick up a prepaid cell phone with internet access, pay for it with cash, and get that going without government id in the US. It's a bit of a hike to get to the electronics store from where I live, but I can get part of the way there with the bus that takes cash too.
by sandeepkd | 2025-04-17 20:25:37+00:00
Looks like there are engineers with few years on their belt who feel super excited about the capability of these tools and then the executives and business people who have to toe the line since everyone else is doing it. And then on the other hand there are engineers with multiple years of field and subject expertise who are skeptical about the advertised capabilities, however they are either quiet or in the wait-n-watch mode to see how it plays out.

As some one who has been both in engineering and management roles, I feel the manager role (not all but a lot of managers are just information pass through and tool would be more consistent for it) should be relatively easier for the automation. Bit surprised how no one talks about that as a possibility?
by antisthenes | 2025-04-17 20:25:50+00:00
I just wash dishes by hand while I wait fo the kettle to boil for my after-food cup of tea.

It's therapeutic, takes a few minutes, and makes me conscious of how many dishes I should be using (e.g. as few as possible). If I have to pre-rinse dishes for the dishwasher, I might as well just rinse it fully then and there.
by RobinL | 2025-04-17 20:26:44+00:00
Does anyone know how this pricing works? Supposing I have a classification prompt where I need the response to be a binary yes/no. I need one token of output, but reasoning will obviously add far more than 6 additional tokens. Is it still a 6x price multiplier? That doesn't seem to make sense, but not does paying 6x more for every token including reasoning ones
by mwest217 | 2025-04-17 20:26:51+00:00
Gemini has had 4 families of models, in order of decreasing size:

- Ultra

- Pro

- Flash

- Flash-Lite

Versions with `-Preview` at the end haven't had their "official release" and are technically in some form of "early access" (though I'm not totally clear on exactly what that means given that they're fully available and as of 2.5 Pro Preview, have pricing attached to them - earlier versions were free during Preview but had pretty strict rate limiting but now it seems that Preview models are more or less fully usable).
by throwanem | 2025-04-17 20:26:53+00:00
There is an extremely material difference between Disney DMCAing a good-faith fan artist and me, one unemployed person without so much as a sole-owner LLC to my name, demanding that my words not be turned to some other bastard's moneymaking purpose.

I understand, as I have clarified elsewhere and for which I owe you no accounting of any kind, that is not happening in this case. I do not apologize, to you, for any particular of my reaction.

Please stop.
by ac29 | 2025-04-17 20:27:35+00:00
> I am saying it is becoming shockingly good the 2.5 is a lot better than the 2.0 version

Are you specifically talking about 2.5 Flash? It only came out an hour ago, I dont know how you would have enough experience with it already to come to your conclusion.

(I am very impressed with 2.5 Pro, but that is a different model that's been available for several weeks now)
by pmarreck | 2025-04-17 20:28:00+00:00
I see Penlight (which is Python-flavored, but also has some functional programming constructs) https://github.com/lunarmodules/Penlight , Moses if you like functional programming https://yonaba.github.io/Moses/, likely others, but you're right in that there's no standard, "opinionated" stdlib. No bigint support on LuaJIT etc.
by vkou | 2025-04-17 20:28:06+00:00
> Ujiharu ruled the strategically important Hitachi Province from the massive Oda Castle, whose entire complex was 4.6 times larger than Tokyo Dome.

Okay, that's very helpful, but what was the furnished and unfurnished, and unroofed square footage of it, measured in postage stamps?

This is such a disappointingly low-quality, high-fluff piece. And the fluff isn't even very engaging.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-17 20:28:12+00:00
Back in 2008, when my fiancée invited me to visit Catalonia, I was in the market for transatlantic airline tickets. And I'd never flown internationally before, and I applied and obtained a US Passport, and I figured out with my father how to get a Travelex prepaid debit card with Euros loaded, and my fiancée was prodding me anxiously about buying a ticket, and I eventually threw caution to the wind and flew on an airline called "ZOOM".

Now "ZOOM" was supposedly based in Canada and they were supposedly giving bargain-basement fares to Americans as well, from select origins to select destinations. All I needed to do was to get to Lindbergh Field (San Diego International) and ZOOM Airlines would fly me to London Gatwick. And their aircraft had cute friendly livery with big "ZOOOOOOOOM" lettering on the side. And the price was totally cheap.

Well they did their job fine; I landed in Gatwick, took a train to Heathrow, and flew on Iberia into and back out of Barcelona. Unfortunately, before I departed, my father phoned my fiancée to break the news that "ZOOM Airline" was bankrupt, and all their flights were grounded. They had run out of fuel in Scotland, and nobody would top up the tanks. My return ticket from London to San Diego was worthless.

So Dad puts me on a British Airways flight and I got home safe. But from August 2008, or before, I have harbored a visceral animosity towards any foreign actors named "ZOOM".
by doublerabbit | 2025-04-17 20:28:35+00:00
> All things IRC lacks.

IRC gives you all the features of a normal client but you've got to create them yourself which itself is a dark-art that's been squandered by today's gimmicky services.

Just because it doesn't have a fancy UI to present the media doesn't mean it can't.

Encode to base64 and post in channel. Decode it back to normal format... IRC is excellent for large amounts of stringed text.

You could even stream the movie in base64 and have a client that captures the data stream and decodes.

The only thing that IRC lacks is a feature to recall conversations where if someone isn't present. But if you're someone who needs that host a bouncer or something.

I personally enjoy entering a blank slate.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-04-17 20:28:45+00:00
My mother had a dishwasher in the late 70's that didn't work properly. I think it was very expensive at the time.

She used it's crumminess as justification both to wash all of the dishes manually, and to never buy another dishwasher again, since she would obviously have to wash all of the dishes by hand anyhow. The thought that technology might improve over time never seemed to occur to her.

I get the idea that she was not alone in that.
by kazinator | 2025-04-17 20:28:56+00:00
> In testing the metal after treatment, the research team found it boosted its strength by a factor of 2.6 while also cutting strain due to ratcheting by two to four orders of magnitude compared to untreated stainless steel. Such improvements, the team claims, could allow products made using the metal to be up to 10,000 times more resistant to fatigue.

LOL; that second sentence mainly just explains that four orders of magnitude means 10,000.
by astrange | 2025-04-17 20:29:05+00:00
> This being Ycombinator one can consider the example of how any crazy idea gets funding during good times but during hard times the ideas that actually have legs remain. ;-)

Remember economics isn't a morality play where bad things are secretly good. The general principle is that a bad economy only has bad results and there's no reason to want one.

https://eml.berkeley.edu/~enakamura/papers/plucking.pdf
by drob518 | 2025-04-17 20:29:32+00:00
IMO, the only thing that’s consistent about AIs is how inconsistent they are. Sometimes, I ask them to write code and I’m shocked at how well it works. Other times, I feel like I’m trying to explain to a 5-year-old Alzheimer’s patient what I want and it just can’t seem to do the simplest stuff. And it’s the same AI in both cases.
by margalabargala | 2025-04-17 20:29:40+00:00
Because as far as you know, the "rough implementation" only works in the happy path and there are really bad edge cases that you won't catch until they bite you, and then you won't even know where to look.

An open source project wouldn't have those issues (someone at least understands all the code, and most edge cases have likely been ironed out) plus then you get maintenance updates for free.
by tombert | 2025-04-17 20:29:48+00:00
> Because that path lies skill atrophy.

Maybe, but I'm not completely convinced by this.

Prior to ChatGPT, there would be times where I would like to build a project (e.g. implement Raft or Paxos), I write a bit, find a point where I get stuck, decide that this project isn't that interesting and I give up and don't learn anything.

What ChatGPT gives me, if nothing else, is a slightly competent rubber duck. It can give me a hint to why something isn't working like it should, and it's the slight push I need to power through the project, and since I actually finish the project, I almost certain learn more than I would have before.

I've done this a bunch of times now, especially when I am trying to directly implement something directly from a paper, which I personally find can be pretty difficult.

It also makes these things more fun. Even when I know the correct way to do something, there can be lots of tedious stuff that I don't want to type, like really long if/else chains (when I can't easily avoid them).
by kridsdale1 | 2025-04-17 20:29:53+00:00
My team at Facebook in the 2010s made many such reports.

We did that work because our mandate was to understand the users and how to serve them.

We did that with full good natured ethical intent.

We turned the findings in to project proposals and MVPs.

The ones that were revenue negative were killed by leadership after all that work, repeat cycle.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-17 20:30:02+00:00
> Why do people just give up proactively?

Because we're up against trillion dollar companies that employ armies of experts with the goal of inducing addictive behavior. We're deeply outgunned.

Because kids have a genuine need for socialization, and being the one without a phone means you just don't get invited to shit. Birthday parties, hangouts, random trips to the ice cream shop.

Because kids are smart. I'm very technical - I had a pfSense firewall, Pihole, and Apple's screen time on my kids' devices. They found ways around that within hours; kids at school swap VPN/proxy instructions and whatnot.

Because kids these days get a school laptop, on which I have zero admin rights.

Because I don't want to be a jail warden, I want to be a parent.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-04-17 20:30:16+00:00
Everyone who marries marries their cousin, it's just a matter of degree. Before the advent of the automobile, people traveled a lot less. Even more so as you go further back. Combine that with families having a lot more kids (you might have 36-64 surviving first cousins), and you've got a situation where nearly everyone you interact with might well be only a couple degrees of separation by blood. Marriage between first cousins has historically been a bit taboo, but so called third and fourth degree (aunts and uncles, first cousins) marriages were still pretty common. It wasn't really until the rise of the eugenics movement that the modern taboos and legal prohibitions were established.

I've been doing a fair bit of genealogy lately, and you can see on the family tree pretty clearly when people moved from from smaller, insulated communities to larger cities. Above that point, the tree fans out a lot less.
by joshstrange | 2025-04-17 20:30:17+00:00
I use a bunch of AI tools, I pay for Claude and OpenAI, I use Claude Code/Aider, and I've been playing with Gemini and Aider recently. Spending money on AI/LLMs is not foreign to me at all. That said:

The price on this is hilarious. You want me to pay another $20/mo for access and a fun new abstraction of "Message Credits". No problem, I'll just scroll down to the FAQ to figure out what a message credit is... nope, no definition at all.

There is little chance I'm going to pay $20/mo for a wrapper that is just 1 step over copy/paste [0] and absolutely no chance I'm going to pay for it with limits that aren't even explained.

[0] I'm sure this will be debated, but I'm not seeing anything special here.
by SweetSoftPillow | 2025-04-17 20:30:49+00:00
It must have something to do with the way your wife is prompting. I've noticed this with my friends too. I usually get working code from Gemini 2.5 Pro on the first try, and with a couple of follow-up prompts, it often improves significantly, while my friends seem to struggle communicating their ideas to the AI and get worse results.

Good news: Prompting is a skill you can develop.
by C-Pec | 2025-04-17 20:31:31+00:00
Huge fan of this direction. Code review is one of those critical bottlenecks that hasn’t seen much UX innovation in years; excited to see a tool rethink it from first principles. The logical grouping of diffs and the ephemeral sandbox approach both sound super thoughtful. Also love the idea of making the review experience feel more like linear. I will suggest that my dev team gives it a try!
by snozolli | 2025-04-17 20:32:00+00:00
Only Google-integrated Android devices are profitable.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Pixel devices? Android devices being paid by Google to use Google's app store, browser, and default search engine? What does any of that have to do with whether or not Android is separated?

You really think Graphene/Lineage/etc... devices have a chance in the market vs. Apple Computer?

What does that have to do with whether or not the Android 'division' of Google would survive being spun off?
by tim333 | 2025-04-17 20:32:03+00:00
BYD already have a FSD competitor. It's not that clear that Tesla will win that one.

Here's some funky footage of a driverless thing mucking around on a race track https://youtu.be/J_c2gsxImjA?t=53 . Not sure how genuine it is but they are definitely developing stuff. Also re their B system:

>It has been tested on real roads for more than a year and has driven across China with no human intervention in testing using a BYD Denza sedan.

Compare to Musk:

>One of the more wild claims Elon Musk has made — regarding Tesla, that is — was back in 2016 when he said a self-driving Tesla would be able to go from Los Angeles to New York City “in ~2 years” (in early 2018)

which I think still hasn't happened?
by ogogmad | 2025-04-17 20:32:19+00:00
I think this approach is the most logically "efficient". You can phrase it as defining ln(x) to be the integral of 1/t from 1 to x. Maybe not the most intuitive, though.

Interestingly, a similar approach gives the shortest proof that exp(x) and ln(x) are computable functions (since integration is a computable functional, thanks to interval arithmetic), and therefore that e = exp(1) is a computable real number.
by adityapuranik | 2025-04-17 20:32:20+00:00
Back when I was graduating from Uni, one day I just decided that Snap streaks pressure was too much. I had streaks of 700 days+ with a person I barely talked to. But most of my streaks were with my best friends, people I talked to every day.

It was like a daily ritual, and I couldn't escape it for a while. I decided to go cold turkey, since it felt like the only option. All my friends moaned and complained for a while. They even tried to revive the 'streak' back, but I persisted. Feels really silly when I look back, but 700 days means I was sending snaps everyday for 2 years straight.

I still have the app and there are still few friends of mine, who send me snaps about their whereabouts, but I have stopped using it. Blocking the notifications was one of the best decision that I could have made, since that was the single biggest factor in not opening the app itself.
by pvg | 2025-04-17 20:32:52+00:00
https://www.newsweek.com/us-citizen-detained-canada-criminal... is one just the other day but there have been several. But again, there have been a bunch of 'US Immigration authorities overreach' stories. The standard for breaking de-repetition can't be 'first I hear of it'. You can always mail the mods to make the case for a particular story if you think it's worth discussing on the front page.
by doormatt | 2025-04-17 20:32:57+00:00
>We are told, with great aggression, that there’s nothing wrong with ADHD or autism, that having those conditions is not in any sense a negative but instead simply a different way of being; however,

As someone who has ADHD and is austistic, they're lying to you. Are there advantages (sometimes) to having these? Yes.

Is it always positive? Oh hell no.
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-17 20:33:14+00:00
That doesn't really track.

Most technologies in Black Mirror are fully implemented as-is, usually with clear and prescient knowledge of the downsides known and suppressed by the owner of the technology.

Snapchat is not that. It started out as an innocent messaging app and slowly mutated into the monster it is after it was already widely adopted.

The criticism of Black Mirror is that it's presented as immediate widespread adoption of the new Torment Nexus 5000, which was always intended to be a force of evil and suffering. Everyone knows exactly what the torment nexus is and willingly accepts it. Snapchat only became a torment nexus after it was established and adopted, and was done this way maliciously.
by byearthithatius | 2025-04-17 20:33:58+00:00
Yes, it will add INSANE amounts of "robust error handling" to quick scripts where I can be confident about assumptions. This turns my clean 40 lines of Python where I KNOW the JSONL I am parsing is valid into 200+ lines filled with ten new try except statements. Even when I tell it not to do this, it loves to "find and help" in other ways. Quite annoying. But overall it is pretty dang good. It even spotted a bug I missed the other day in a big 400+ line complex data processing file.
by nextaccountic | 2025-04-17 20:34:04+00:00
Fair enough.

I of course don't know what's like to be an AGI but, the way you have LLMs censoring other LLMs to enforce that they always stay in line, if extrapolated to AGI, seems awful. Or it might not matter, we are self-censoring all the time too (and internally we are composed of many subsystems that interact with each other, it's not like we were an unified whole)

But the main point is that we have a heck of an incentive to not treat AGI very well, to the point we might avoid recognizing them as AGI if it meant they would not be treated like things anymore
by secondcoming | 2025-04-17 20:34:54+00:00
They do know if the bid is part of a PMP. They can still place an Open Market bid if allowed but they should reduce their expectation of winning that auction, even if they're the highest bidder not because of skullduggery but because the publisher has a prior arrangement with a DSP or advertiser.

Valuing a bid is a complex and interesting task. Ever since Second Price auctions started dying out DSPs should have moved to essentially algorithmic trading. A price calculation depends on tens if not hundreds of factors that are evaluted on a per auction basis.

Advertisers have been demanding more transparency into where their money is going for quite some time now. If you're an advertiser and your DSP isn't giving you detailed reporting into the fees they're being charged then it's time to move DSP.