MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imiric | 2025-04-09 22:16:18+00:00
Has anyone found the output at these large context windows usable at all?

IME the quality of all models goes down considerably after just a few thousand tokens. The chances of hallucinating, mixing up prompts, forgetting previous prompts, etc., are much more likely as context size increases. I couldn't imagine a context of 1M tokens, let alone 10M, being usable at all. Not to mention that any query is going to come to a crawl just to move that amount of data around (which still annoyingly happens on every query...).

So usually at around 10K tokens I ask it to summarize what was discussed, or I manually trim down the current state, and start a new fresh chat from there. I've found this to work much better than wasting my time fighting bad output. This is also cheaper if you're on a metered plan (OpenRouter, etc.).
by notahacker | 2025-04-09 22:16:54+00:00
This belief seems to disregard the fact that the billionaire crowd hates markets being spooked far more than it cares about 10 year Treasury yields (which in any case went up precisely because markets were spooked; if you wanted to do something about reducing long term bond yields, committing to just about any other economic policy would be more credible). Even some of the most sycophantic billionaires were evidently furious about the tariff policy.

Also, Trump has been obsessed with the idea of tariffs since the 1980s.
by csdvrx | 2025-04-09 22:17:36+00:00
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?

Secondhand stores offer in general "better" products because of the double curation:

- someone found the good interesting enough to buy it in the first place (1st curation)

- the store found it good enough to buy it again from the first owner (2nd curation)

> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?

No, it's even better because of the limited space they have to display the goods they want to sell: while online stores can show their full inventory, brick-and-mortar need to select what's most likely to sell.

This adds yet another level of curation: the store found the good valuable enough to be exposed to buyers, instead of keeping it in the back (3rd curation)

I find great music by randomly buying second-hand CDs from brick-and-mortar secondhand stores, thanks to this triple-curation,
by throwup238 | 2025-04-09 22:18:08+00:00
It looks like the other blog post linked to about the photos of the Russian Empire is behind a paywall, but the original Prokudin-Gorskii collection is available for free at the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/collections/prokudin-gorskii/about-this-...

Unlike these photographs from Japan, the ones from the Russian Empire were made with colored photographic plates and they were reassembled into true color photos and restored in the last few decades.

Sadly the photos from the Monsen American west collection seem to be guarded closely by Princeton and are not viewable to the public without requesting physical access. https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/C1539

Edit: Looks like much of the Monsen Ethnographic Indian Photographs Portfolio can be found in the Huntington digital library: https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll2/se... - content warning!
by palmotea | 2025-04-09 22:18:13+00:00
> The (as yet unproven) argument for the use of AIs is that using AI to solve simpler problems allows us humans to focus on the big picture, in the same way that letting a calculator solve arithmetic gives us flexibility to understand the math behind the arithmetic.

And I can tell you from experience that "letting a calculator solve arithmetic" (or more accurately, being dependent on a calculator to solve arithmetic) means you cripple your ability to learn and understand more advanced stuff. At best your decision turned you into the equivalent of a computer trying to run a 1GB binary with 8MB of RAM and a lot of paging.

> No one knows if that's true. We're running a grand experiment: the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E.

It's the latter. Though I suspect the masses will be shoved into the garbage disposal than be allowed to wallow in ignorant consumerism. Only the elite that owns the means of production will be allowed to indulge.
by diggan | 2025-04-09 22:20:35+00:00
I think both makes sense, different times/contexts require different solutions. Maybe when the project started, the idea was loosely defined, so being able to change large parts quickly are favored over ideal performance.

But as the idea and project cements itself, you start to see exactly where the biggest flaws are, and you might draw the conclusion that a lot of problems could be fixed at the ORM layer, so you opt for working on that.

Maybe it would have been obvious from the beginning, but chances are the people working on the codebase initially had a very different idea of what exactly is the ideal design, compared to later on in the lifetime of the project.
by jdietrich | 2025-04-09 22:20:41+00:00
It's a symptom of the decline of high street retail and high long-term vacancy rates for many retail properties.

For commercial landlords, a charity shop paying little or no rent is usually better than no tenant at all - the property is less likely to be smashed up by vandals, burned down by arsonists or occupied by squatters if it's occupied. The landlord would be liable for business rates after three months of vacancy, but not if there's a tenant.

Charity shops get an 80% relief on business rates, pay nothing for their stock and get some or all of their staff for free; obviously this allows them to operate profitably in circumstances where no normal business could.

As I understand it, the landlords are holding on mostly in the hope that their properties will either be compulsorily purchased as part of a regeneration scheme, or granted planning permission for redevelopment as housing.
by sipofwater | 2025-04-09 22:20:48+00:00
"DHS to screen social media of visa applicants for 'antisemitic activity'": https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/dhs-screen-social-media-visa... (abcnews.go.com/Politics/dhs-screen-social-media-visa-applicants-antisemitic-activity/story?id=120642944)
by OptionOfT | 2025-04-09 22:21:43+00:00
The problem with GPS is that you never learn to orient yourself. You don't learn to have a sense of place, direction or elapsed distance. [0]

As to writing, just the action of writing something down with a pen, on paper, has been proven to be better for memorization than recording it on a computer [1].

If we're not teaching these basic skills because an LLM does it better, how do learn to be skeptical of the output of the LLM. How do we validate it?

How do we bolster ourselves against corporate influences when asking which of 2 products is healthier? How do we spot native advertising? [2]

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/531573a

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00016...

[2]: Example: https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/netflix/women-inmates-separ...
by frankvdwaal | 2025-04-09 22:22:09+00:00
The parent comment is not making a causal claim. They're pointing out a double standard: "Anyone arguing this is about childhood IQ and wouldn’t similarly ban (not stop mandating, ban) soft drinks, chips and fast food for kids, they’re signalling this is about something other than kids’ health."

In other words, if these people are anti-fluoride because it's supposedly bad for children's IQ, they should also oppose bad food for the same reason. If they don't, the supposed (unproven) health effects are not the reason. That's the point that is made, at least.
by lr4444lr | 2025-04-09 22:22:34+00:00
Sorry if this offends, but I am deeply skeptical that the effect of UBI is independent of common culturally influenced behaviors of where it might be implemented. Try it in an opioid epidemic stricken rust belt town in the American Midwest, or an urban ghetto (I'm not totally sold that the selection criteria for the Stockton study were unbiased) and let us know how it goes.
by immibis | 2025-04-09 22:23:19+00:00
Which raises the question of why they need chroot if they have the VM.

Another semi-related but equally odd view: Docker is an operating system and containers are processes.

The difference between Docker and chroot, by the way, is that Docker does a bunch more system calls to ch the root of several other things that are not the filesystem. It also sets up things inside those roots for you by default, so your containers can access the internet, for example.
by jacobgkau | 2025-04-09 22:23:24+00:00
To be fair, government cheese (from what I understand) was actually created in order to save extra milk the government bought up as part of a price control effort. In other words, there was an abundance of milk (because the government subsidized it, causing more to be produced than the market needed).

Once it was already sitting around, it's been used to address citizens in the country not having enough resources. Which is kind of the same thing your semi-universal basic provisions would address.
by iLemming | 2025-04-09 22:23:32+00:00
Oh, so you think Emacs in 2025 doesn't know what a "completion" is? Just because it started over forty years ago doesn't mean it's stuck in the past, you don't need to "type half a freaking" nothing.

You know, I can too, play this game - in VSCode, the method of inserting an em-dash is different for all three platforms; IntelliJ, and Sublime don't even have the built-in feature like that - you gotta use 'snippets' or something. In contrast, Emacs and Vim knew how to do it probably before you even learned how to type, and the method has been consistent since then - you'd just learn how to do it once, and that knowledge is guaranteed to stay relevant even decades later.
by 9283409232 | 2025-04-09 22:23:51+00:00
> Meta says it regularly discloses the fact that it generates advertising revenue from advertisers based in China but says that doesn’t mean that it operates services in China. It says its services are banned in China.

This is phrasing is very weaselly. All foreign companies in China either partner with or are operated by a domestic company like Alibaba or Tencent. Saying "we don't operate our services in China" is like saying water is wet to people who know what that really means. It doesn't in anyway invalidate the claims made against them.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-09 22:23:59+00:00
God no. I know I sometimes get verbose, especially when sunk cost fallacy kicks in, and I do use LLMs for researching things, but I'm not yet so desperate to have them formulate my own thoughts for me.

The act of writing a comment on HN forces me to think through the opinions and beliefs in it, which is extremely valuable to me :). Half the time, I realize partway through that I'm wrong, and close the window instead of submitting.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-04-09 22:24:13+00:00
I wonder if anyone's studied family connections of colonies vs old regions?

Like for Americans, at some point all of their ancestors significantly detached themselves from their place of origin and relocated. For e.g. Europe some people definitely did that but not all and maybe not even most?

I would expect Americans to have less of a familial social network in general, which could affect health and lifespan.
by jemmyw | 2025-04-09 22:24:36+00:00
What the fishing industry in the UK wanted out of Brexit was pie in the sky though. It's not like the plan was to saw the British isles off the continent and set sail into the Atlantic, so they still had to deal with the fact of fishing in commercially contested waters.

It seemed like their plan was to be able to do more fishing of the kinds of fish that are available around coastal Britain that aren't popular in the UK and sell them to the Europeans. I say plan, I mean "barely thought out idea". Because the reality is that the ships that do that fishing already exist and already have agreements with the processing businesses, which are already in the EU. And fishing is such a tiny part of the UK economy in comparison to some other countries that access was just traded away.
by sevensor | 2025-04-09 22:24:58+00:00
Ooh, I was in semiconductor manufacturing too! As a junior ion implant engineer, I was looking into yield problems. Some of the tests were flaky and I traced the issue back to one of the transistors not delivering enough current. Great, we know how to fix that! More arsenic! I proposed a small scale experiment, those wafers tested great, and we started rolling out the process change. Those wafers tested great too.

Until we got word back from packaging post test. Every single die failed for excessive current draw. Several hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of scrap. I was correct, but I wasn’t deeply correct.

What surprises me in retrospect is that everybody signed off on this. It’s not like we didn’t have processes, I just somehow managed to talk a bunch of people who should have known better into doing it anyway.
by _diyar | 2025-04-09 22:26:45+00:00
You're suggesting businesses B and C would just absorb the tariff cost by reducing their margin percentage to keep the same dollar profit. However, as Cerium noted earlier, many business costs do tend to scale with the price of goods, making this difficult without impacting profitability.

For financial costs, higher inventory value due to tariffs increases the cost of capital (interest on loans/tied-up funds), insurance premiums, and potentially transaction fees.

For operations costs (handling and labor), increases due to indirect effects: As the price of the average consumer basket increases due to tariffs, the average citizen either demands and receives higher wages or has to reduce spending; this means that the per-item variable cost of processing goes up, either because the wages of those employees increased (higher wages) or because the sales volume decreases (reduced spending).

Of course this does not mean that every business will have exactly this outcome. And absolute size of these effects is also dependent on the actual demand elasticity.
by floxy | 2025-04-09 22:27:52+00:00
I wonder if we could tease out differences with rates of psychiatric medication usage.

Good use of anti-depressants -- It's all hopeless there's no point to going on -> Eh, it's not so bad.

Questionable anti-depressant effect -- "Your diabetes is out of control" -> Eh, it's not so bad. Why worry?
by pfannkuchen | 2025-04-09 22:27:54+00:00
It definitely would if they are in place for a long time. The big issue is how discontinuous American leadership is. This forces more drastic moves in a shorter time frame if one wants to shake things up. I'm not advocating for Trump personally to have a longer term, but if an American leader was guaranteed to be in power for say 25 years then they could implement a slower and more strategic set of changes.

It's almost as if removing leadership incentives to plan for the long term of the country (such as by preserving it for their children to govern) might be a bad idea...
by MrMember | 2025-04-09 22:28:09+00:00
Roman dictators have always fascinated me. It worked (for a while at least) because both sides agreed it was necessary and temporary. The people who appointed the dictator knew extreme measures were needed to navigate them through some crisis. The dictator knew if they tried to hold on to power longer than was necessary they would simply be removed or killed, their supreme power only extended through the crisis in which they were needed.
by hermitdev | 2025-04-09 22:28:48+00:00
> Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers has gone down:

Uh...excluding the very recent cuts this year under Trump; the number of civilians in the US Federal work force has gone up fairly steadily. [0]

We had 23.592 million civilian employees in Jan 2025. 21.779M in Jan 2021, after being largely stagnant overall the previous 10 years. That's a net change in excess of 1.8M employees under Biden.

I do find it interesting that it appears that employee count was flat, or even down under Obama, but until COVID, there was a steady increase under Trump v1.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT
by ilamont | 2025-04-09 22:29:35+00:00
> I do think there is a pretty good chance that SCOTUS will rule these tariffs unconstitutional.

Unlikely. SCOTUS is cowed, as shown by the latest batch of rulings (https://www.npr.org/2025/04/08/nx-s1-5351799/scotus-probatio...). They want to avoid his ire, and interference.

Possibly, they are saving dry powder for a bigger fight.
by sipofwater | 2025-04-09 22:29:45+00:00
"With more than 300 student visas revoked, international scholars worry as the government expands reasons for deportation": https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/us/us-immigration-student-vis... (www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/us/us-immigration-student-visas-revoked/index.html)
by pedalpete | 2025-04-09 22:30:29+00:00
The study only compared Americans to Europeans. Of course diet and access to healthcare, even for the wealthy, is part of the issue here.

We have to ask "earlier than who"?

Of course, the majority of Americans are descended from Europeans, but the American diet is significantly worse than most European countries, and the healthcare system is not as accessible. Americans lack the levels of exercise Europeans get, and a host of other factors.

The less wealthy in America die earlier than the wealthy, but being richer in America buys more years, but not more years than one would live if in Europe.
by kenjackson | 2025-04-09 22:31:00+00:00
"From the beginning, I’ve believed the executive branch's real goal was to push down the yield on the 10-year Treasury. Why?"

None of leaked conversations or prior discussions indicate anything like this. Peter Navarro has no even slightly nuanced agenda. He's been on record for years about this. I think their position was much more that they'd drive foreign tariffs down and would be able to make other demands against other countries, and they underestimated the tolerance even their base would have.
by dekhn | 2025-04-09 22:32:48+00:00
Yes, as practiced, as well as in principle, sociology is less scientific than physics.

Some systems- human social behavior being one of them- are simply not amenable to modern science because the systems have far too many uncontrolled variables, and the ability to create hypotheses which can't be falsified (because running the experiments would be impossible, unethical, or ambiguous) is far larger.
by tasuki | 2025-04-09 22:32:57+00:00
> I don't offload my brain to Kagi, because I don't prompt it until it gives me something I like.

Similarly, I don't offload my brain to LLMs.

> I do the hard work of synthesizing and understanding the answer. Not reading some slop and accepting it at face value.

Again, it's not necessary to accept LLM output at face value.

Use tools, think for yourself, sure. This applies to various tools: Kagi, LLMs, and others. None of these give you "accuracy guarantees". You usually have to think for yourself.

My favourite example of a situation where you don't have to think for yourself is asking an LLM to implement a function in a very strongly typed language. There only is one implementation of `a -> a`. For `(a -> b) -> List a -> List b`, you could return an empty list instead of performing map. There aren't that many implementations of `(a -> b -> b) -> b -> List a -> b` (three as far as I can see: left/right fold and a function which just returns the accumulator). It's easier to verify the LLM solution than to implement it yourself!
by offmycloud | 2025-04-09 22:33:47+00:00
> PSA, everyone should be getting the HPV vaccine, regardless of age and gender.

This is false, please don't take medical advice from an HN post. CDC guidelines do include quite a bit of discussion of patient age. [1]

1. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/recommendations.htm...
by bdcravens | 2025-04-09 22:34:02+00:00
I admit, this comment did a lot better at Buzzword Bingo compared to my attempt in ChatGPT: ("Give me a two sentence marketing pitch for Firebase Studio")

"Firebase Studio is a powerful visual development platform that lets you build, customize, and deploy full-featured apps with the speed of low-code and the flexibility of Firebase. Whether you're prototyping or scaling to millions of users, Firebase Studio streamlines your workflow with real-time data, seamless backend integration, and built-in hosting."
by yibg | 2025-04-09 22:35:06+00:00
With the whiplash of tariffs, upping tariffs, pausing tariffs, I don't know how companies can do any planning.

A lot of earnings are coming out next couple of weeks. Take Apple for example, how would they forecast Q2 numbers? They have 125% tariffs on all imports from China. Maybe it'll go up more as China increases their own. Or maybe it gets paused. I feel for the FP&A team there.
by fritzo | 2025-04-09 22:35:11+00:00
From scratch it's also easy dress up a quoted Y combinator as in Löb's theorem. Start with the usual Y combinator

Y = \f. (\x.f(x x)) (\x.f(x x)) : (p -> p) -> p

which can produce a thing of type p from a function f : p -> p.

Now Löb's theorem states that []([]p -> p) -> []p, which can be read, "if you have the source code to transform (the source code of a thing of type p) to a thing of type p, then you can produce the source code for a thing of type p". Let's embellish Y using {} to denote the quoting comonad.

Y' = \{f}. (\{x}.{f{x{x}}}) {\{x}.{f{x{x}}}} : []([]p -> p) -> []p

To get there, just add quotes as needed: f must be quoted, f's result must be quoted, and f takes a quoted input.
by kevingadd | 2025-04-09 22:35:57+00:00
There are plenty of graphics researchers not in NVIDIA's pocket cooking up stuff that doesn't require vendor-specific features, so I'm not worried that graphics research is being suppressed, if that's your theory.

Intel and AMD are both big players with a vested interest in promoting the capability of CPUs and promoting the capability of non-NVIDIA GPUs, since they sell both. They're big and well-capitalized, so if they wanted to they could be operating big graphics research teams (whether they are is unclear to me, and it's obviously not a 'snap your fingers and you have a big graphics research team' situation, but they have the resources)

In some cases if you see CUDA being used for a demo or a research project it's just because the alternative stacks kinda suck, not because only NVIDIA hardware is capable of doing the thing. Researchers aren't necessarily concerned with shipping on 99% of consumer machines, so they can reach for the most convenient approach even if it's vendor-locked.

I won't be surprised if we see some researchers start targeting Apple's platform-locked Metal API in the future since they have compelling unified memory offerings with capacities exceeding everybody else's.
by jcmfernandes | 2025-04-09 22:36:05+00:00
I understand what you mean by being able to fully sandbox things and guarantee determinism, a must for the workflows and not the activities (using temporal lingo).

When you say that the runtime handles, for example, retries, doesn't that require me to depend on your HTTP client component? Or do I also need to compile activities to WASM and have obelisk running them because they are essentially background jobs (that is, you have workers pulling)?

Finally, do you see the component's interface as the right layer for capturing IO? I'm imagining people attempting to run managed code (Java, python, ruby, etc.). The VMs can do thousands of syscallls before they start executing they user's code. Logging them one by one seems crazy, but I also don't see an alternative.

EDIT:

I RTFM and found the answers to my first two questions in the README :)