MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by happosai | 2025-04-16 06:08:54+00:00
Because USA was a superpower that can afford it easily. Taking the leadership in everything is quite cheap price to pay when the other end of the bargain is everyone else has to follow you.

Now of course USA is ceasing (voluntarily, by stripping down every international soft power effector in government) to be a superpower, to the great glee of dictators all around the world.

The "we can't afford being great" is a direct admission that USA is no longer a superpower. And is not going to become great again, just another nation again (at whims of China).
by pjerem | 2025-04-16 06:09:28+00:00
> 1) Once you get it to output something you like, do you check all the lines it changed? Is there a threshold after which you just... hope?

Not op but yes. It sometimes takes a lot of time but I read everything. It still faster than nothing. Also, I ask very precise changes to the AI so it doesn’t generate huge diffs anyway.

Also for new code, TDD works wonders with AI : let it write the unit tests (you still have to be mindful of what you want to implement) and ask it to implement the code that run the tests. Since you talk the probabilistic output, the tool is incredibly good at iterating over things (running and checking tests) and also, unit tests are, in themselves, a pretty perfect prompt.
by seanhunter | 2025-04-16 06:09:32+00:00
Interesting. I'd not heard the term Markov Chain used to describe a path so I checked my copy of "All of Statistics" by Larry Wasserman and he (slightly) disagrees with both of us and says

"A Markov chain is a stochastic process for which the distribution of X_t depends only on X_{t-1}."

So he doesn't need it to be a discrete process but he also doesn't think it's a path. I guess the terminology is not 100% standardized. But anyhow thanks for making me think about this. Always interesting.
by musicale | 2025-04-16 06:10:08+00:00
> the store manager kept putting those PCs up at the front of the store. The district manager would come back and make him put it in the back

It's interesting and sad that RadioShack somehow managed to succeed and fail at least twice in computing, first in the 8-bit microcomputer era and second in the Tandy PC era. It seems like they failed in the build-your-own-cheap-PC era as well.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-16 06:10:29+00:00
The system isn’t really designed to be perfectly efficient at funding research. The inefficiency typically corresponds to scientists doing weird un-proposed research that produces new breakthroughs in other areas.

It’s not surprising to me that this post ends with an unsupported “so many reports” coda about research fraud. Research fraud is not zero but it’s extremely rare. It’s unsurprising to me that the “we really care about research integrity” crowd has joined forces with the “let’s defund all research institutions with no replacement” crowd, because it was always obvious that was where this would end.
by protocolture | 2025-04-16 06:10:33+00:00
Had a similar game when I was in a weird role. 2 separate lines of business had their own internal IT functions. However, thanks to a weird set of accountability/responsibility we maintained the hardware/platform of the public webserver while they maintained the website.

So we had 2 pots. The meaner pot was internal to our own team, where we would bet on both how many users would connect to the webserver before it crashed, and then what the other team would blame as the fault. It was always ~3200 and it was almost always RAM.

One of us would sit in on their publicity events, and present the other team with live readouts on hardware usage. The server had umpteen processors with eleventy Jigahertz, and all the RAM that could fit in the chassis (~128GB from memory). 3000 odd users would connect simultaneously, RAM usage would spike to 2%, processor usage would spike to 3% and the website would crash. We would cash in on their pot as to the number of successful simultaneous connections. Then we would go back to our team, and cash in on users AND whatever they were blaming.

After which our IT managers would have their monthly duel where ours would send them a quote to build a better website and they would send us a strongly worded email about how they felt the hardware was the bottleneck.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-16 06:12:35+00:00
Nothing. Nothing qualifies several of them; the photo of Filippa Hamilton is noted in the blurb as immediately drawing ridicule from the public.

Or take this description of the edited image of Elvis:

> the United Press agency decided to create a mock-up of what the king of rock’n’roll might look like with the typical GI hairstyle, retouching a photo of the singer to remove his quiff (and leaving him with a somewhat disfigured head). “Not all manipulated photographs are intended to deceive,” notes Mia Fineman, a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art

Only the headline says "images that fooled the world"; the article is about something different.
by ajb | 2025-04-16 06:12:45+00:00
There are orders of magnitude more patents in the private sector, but most are either not licensed or are licensed as part of huge 'pools' as private sector patenting is driven by the arms race between companies to have a large enough patent portfolio to retaliate if sued (there is a lot of patent 'slop'). And that's not even counting fake (troll) innovators. Whereas uni patents are probably more likely to be licensed out on an individual basis. So it's really hard to know the significance of counts alone. You'd have to look at a random sample of uni Vs private patents and assess each one.
by solardev | 2025-04-16 06:12:50+00:00
I usually work for small and medium sized organizations and Cloudflare is very often used for those. Although they started as a CDN and security product, their serverless stack is probably the best in the world (Workers, KV, Durable Objects, etc.) and R2 has some of the cheapest S3 storage for sharing files.

Their developer economics (ease of use) are amazing compared to the legacy clouds, especially AWS. What would take a dozen services and hours of config on AWS takes a few minutes on Cloudflare and probably one or two services. It's all highly abstracted and optimized for developers instead of managers. That's probably the same reason they're not as big at the large scale enterprises. AWS and Azure benefit from the kind of corporate billing and administration system that only large enterprises use and want.

They're basically the Vercel of the network infra space (or rather, Vercel is the Cloudflare of web hosting). Both take traditionally hard to manage networked microservices and package them into simple APIs that are highly abstracted, relatively cheap, and easy to scale. But they don't really make money from you until you're huge. So the small and medium customers are probably loss leaders for them, and by the time you get into enterprise territory, you're too locked in to switch.

They both typically have low startup costs and higher enterprise costs than the legacy clouds. But even then, some particular services like Workers and R2 are just awesome in their own right. IMHO Workers is the coolest thing to have happened to the web in the last like 20 years.
by hliyan | 2025-04-16 06:13:26+00:00
This is the first thing that struck me. Dangerous to weave narratives where large scale phenomena are elegantly explained by a single cause. It's always a confluence of multiple factors: influx of Nazi scientists, the policy mentioned in the article, the fact that Europe was recovering from a war, and perhaps others we're failing to notice.

A favorite example of mine is the idea that World War 1 would not have happened if only Duke Ferdinand's driver had been told of the route change during the Sarajevo visit.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-16 06:13:42+00:00
>Nobody is evil, they just have different interests and viewpoints.

If your interest is in killing me on account of how I look and nothing else, I would indeed consider you evil. Your "viewpoints" end where my rights begin.

as for the admin, I don't care about their views. They have a constitution to follow. Which is specifically aobut what the government cannot do to its people. We tolerated KKK and Neonazi rallies under those principles of freedom of speech and assembly. While citizens can counter protest, the government stepping in to quash either of those people is illegal here.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-04-16 06:13:45+00:00
> you're allowed to reside and work.

False on both counts and contradictory to the source you cite. There is no right to reside, and you could only work if you were additionally authorised.

> "Withholding of removal" is a form of legal status.

In the same sense as trespassing is a legal status. The way in which it is not a legal status is that he does not have the status of legally residing in the US.
by lolinder | 2025-04-16 06:13:51+00:00
> In truth they voted for him because he was the Republican on offer and they're die-hard Republican. The Republican party has made no secret of its agenda for decades.

This is actually simply not true. The Republican party before the Tea Party looked nothing at all like this. Trump won the presidency last year riding a wave of distinctly not-your-typical-Republican lower class voters. As he rose the old guard Republican establishment formed the anti-Trump wing of the party until they were forced out one by one.

To put some numbers to this: Bush won the upper income brackets by 5+ points in 2000, with a lead that widened as you went up the income ladder. Trump lost the equivalent brackets in 2024 by 5+ points, a 10 point swing away from what Bush won them by. The lower brackets are even more stark, with a whopping 18-point swing towards Trump in the $30k-$50k bracket (inflation adjusted to $15k-$30k).

These numbers show that Trump is not a Republican in the George W Bush sense and he's certainly not a Republican in the Ronald Reagan sense. He's a populist and won on a populist agenda by putting together a coalition of rabid social conservatives (who probably really did go Bush in 2000) and poor people (who largely did not).
by philwelch | 2025-04-16 06:14:36+00:00
> I have no idea how you read that and interpret it as "taxing billionaires will pay the entire debt."

It’s the direct, logical implication of the statement and you are obviously moving the goalposts after the fact. The truth is, any tax increases will have to affect just about everyone who pays taxes in order to make any real difference. There is no possible way that taxing billionaires more is even a significant chunk of the solution.
by kassner | 2025-04-16 06:15:23+00:00
I feel the article could have ended after Step 1. It makes the point that you don’t have to follow REST and can build your own session-dependent API endpoints, and use them to fetch data from a component.

I don’t see a point in making that a server-side render. You are now coupling backend to frontend, and forcing the backend to do something that is not its job (assuming you don’t do SSR already).

One can argue that its useful if you would use the endpoint for ESI/SSI (I loved it in my Varnish days) but that’s only a sane option if you are doing server-side renders for everything. Mixing CSR and SSR is OK, but that’s a huge amount of extra complexity that you could avoid by just picking one, and generally adding SSRs is mostly for SEO-purposes, which session-dependent content is excluded anyway.

My brain much prefers the separation of concerns. Just give me a JSON API, and let the frontend take care of representation.
by laggyluke | 2025-04-16 06:15:25+00:00
If you're asking an LLM about a particular text, even if it's a well-known text, you might get significantly better results if you provide said text as part of your prompt (context) instead of asking a model to "recall it from memory".

So something like this: "Here's a PDF file containing Being and Time. Please explain the significance of anxiety (Angst) in the uncovering of Being."
by Ferret7446 | 2025-04-16 06:15:39+00:00
4chan will always be superior than modern social media to me, for one very simple reason: all posts are anonymous and there is no voting/ranking.

Each and every post must stand alone and be judged alone. You do not know if it was posted by someone you hate or adore. It doesn't get hidden or promoted based on what a bubble voted. You see the post and you must judge it alone.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-04-16 06:15:52+00:00
Exciting - the article implies it came from a collection of improvements. Best of all they’re claiming the improvement is observed across platforms!

2 questions the article didn’t address:

1. What were the changes, and what was each one’s contribution to the total?

2. How much - if any - of this improvement be observed in other Chromium browsers?
by prolly97 | 2025-04-16 06:16:58+00:00
This might more be a European thing, but over here some of the sellers on marketplaces like Amazon, are linked with organised VAT/Tax fraud. While I can't say it's all, it'll all things being equal, be baked in to the competitive dynamics. Thus undercutting legal operators, or destroying their profit (incentive) to provide good or domestically produced wares. There's a podcast episode from some ML (money laundering) specialists, that make mention of it. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/trigger-warning/id1448...
by jokoon | 2025-04-16 06:17:01+00:00
Those agency can do their security work as long as there are laws and mandates about that.

But those agencies cannot do anything if an elected/named official decides to work for an adversary, since those agencies are under command of the elected/name official.

That's why democracy is beyond the scope of those agencies.

Those agencies are "fences" to protect a teenager from doing mistakes. But it cannot protect the teenager from setting himself on fire.

In my view, democracy was always vulnerable if the people or elected official can be convinced of whatever.
by bhawks | 2025-04-16 06:18:14+00:00
Implicit parameter smuggling by any mechanism is just too much magic in my experience. Golang's context.Context solves the same problem, but explicitly in a way that has been widely adopted through their language ecosystem.

That said - in Java I do think it would be near impossible for the ecosystem to adopt a similar mechanic, so from a practical standpoint this may be the only way to reliably propagate context.
by arkh | 2025-04-16 06:21:04+00:00
The USA is not the whole Western world.

And in most of the Western World the main culture accept trans people. They may differ on who can take pills at what age or if the state should pay for surgeries (is it cosmetic, is it vital) but people who'd beat up transgender people for who they are would be shunned.

If I watch or read modern cultural product, there are huge chances some character will be officially transgender or the theme will be present (shout-out to wildbow). That's being part of The Culture. So being against it means being against the culture. Culture changes over time thanks to people against the status quo (counter-culture). You may have been counter-culture in your youth but once your cause has been accepted you're not counter-culture anymore. You won: celebrate. A meme is how Rage Against the Machine has been Rage for the Machine for a long time already.

Now once you accept you're older, you won, you're for the current status quo you may feel some dread about two things: are you still relevant? (hence why many groups will always try to prove their fight is not won); and: what are parts of the status quo which the new generations of counter culture want to see change (and surely for a good reason). What's the "lobotomy for everyone" of our generation?
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-16 06:21:55+00:00
In fact Comcast is one of the few cases where I've had a customer service rep commit outright fraud. Validated my problem, responded to my questions, told me they did X when in fact they did Y (which I would not have found acceptable and they were fully aware of this).

It's the alternative option that most people don't realize is in the table. Validate, pretend to have solved, don't actually solve.
by infoseek12 | 2025-04-16 06:22:23+00:00
There is a time and a place for everything. Software development is often about compromise and often it isn’t feasible to work out a solution from foundational principles and a comprehensive understanding of the domain.

Many developers use libraries effectively without knowing every time consideration of O(n) comes into play.

Competently implemented, in the right context, LLMs can be an effective form of abstraction.
by computerex | 2025-04-16 06:22:34+00:00
Why use a high level language like python? Why not assembly? Are you really proud of the slow unoptimized byte code that’s executed instead of perfectly crafting the assembly implementation optimizing for the architecture? /s

Seriously comments like yours assume, that all the rest of us who DO make extensive use of these AI tools and have also been around the block for a while, are idiots.
by bjornsing | 2025-04-16 06:23:19+00:00
Not all Markov processes have stationary distributions, and of those that do not all correspond to a non-normalized probability function.

It therefore has some merit to think about MCMC as a random walk on a graph rather than Markov processes, because the “graph” needs to have some properties in order for the Markov process to be useful for MCMC. For example every “node” in the “graph” needs to be reachable from every other “node” (ergodicity).
by thinkingemote | 2025-04-16 06:24:50+00:00
I've always wondered how Reddit can make money from these companies. I agree they are literally everywhere, even in non-company specific but generic subreddits where if it's big enough you might have multiple shadow marketing firms competing to push their products (e.g. AI, movies, food, porn etc).

Reddit is free to play for marketing firms. Perhaps they could add extra statistics, analytics, promotions for these commercial users.
by solardev | 2025-04-16 06:25:40+00:00
Turn off recommendations and personalized results. Don't use social media or TikTok. Read only wire service news (Reuters and the Associated Press) and maybe a local paper.

It gets boring pretty quickly this way since you're just kinda stuck in your own little bubble, but you drastically cut down on the propaganda. Downside, I have no idea what trends are anymore or what normal people care about. But it's a lot less stressful being out of the loop than wrapped up in it.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-16 06:25:43+00:00
>But I don't understand why 14%? It should be the same as you, 20%.

Taxing donations is really thorny. If people realize that the government is taking money they want to give away... they stop giving away money. It's a self-terminating cliche in action. So you either leave it alone if you want to encourage people stimulating charities, or you make the tax very small.

>Same goes for religious organizations,

I don't fully know. Some attempt at separattion of church and state. The government tries to maintain that except when other boundaries are crossed.

It does sort of fall into the same umbrella though, when regarding tithes.
by hamiecod | 2025-04-16 06:26:09+00:00
But bandwidth is extremely cheap in 2025 to the point that I do not even check my bandwidth usage and I have never reached my 2TB/month bandwidth cap in the last 3 years.

Secondly, the p2p system will be advantageous for the videos that most people watch, i.e., popular videos. This implies that the "popular" video will have a large number of concurrent users who are transmitting a small part of video to just 3 other peers who are then transmitting the same part to 3 other peers.

This way, the bandwidth usage for uploading is reduced.
by visarga | 2025-04-16 06:26:27+00:00
The idea is to let humans be humans, make a mess, debate, have their opinions, and AI comes after that and removes the herp derp from the useful parts.

As a test of concept copy paste this whole page, put it in a LLM and ask for an article. It will come out without junk, but will reflect a greater diversity of opinion, more arguments, will do debunking, and generally have better grounding in our positions than the original content.

So it's careful synthesis over human chats that is the end value. Humans provide that novelty and lived experience LLMs lack, LLMs provide consistent formatting and synthesis. The companies that understand that users are the source of entropy and novelty will stop trying to own the model and start trying to host the question.

Wondering why reddit doesn't generate thousands of articles per day from comment pages. It would crush traditional media in both diversity and quality. It would follow the interesting topics naturally.
by a_e_k | 2025-04-16 06:26:30+00:00
There's a famous anecdote about C.S. Lewis saying much the same thing:

> On the way to an Inklings meeting, he gave some money to a street beggar, and I made the usual objection: "Won't he just spend it on drink?"

> Lewis answered, "Yes, but if I kept it, so would I."

https://web.archive.org/web/20210717220213/https://www.ncron...
by mlsu | 2025-04-16 06:27:11+00:00
I can give an enthusiastic recommendation for this museum.

This sounds uncultured, but for a long time I thought of Dali as just like — “le random funny guy” who had the thin mustache and painted the clocks. But this museum totally changed that.

His body of work is huge, varied, immensely original, and technically excellent. The theatre itself is a whole space that really lets you take it in. I suppose you could count me as a Dali fan now because of this museum and I look for his work now wherever I can find it.
by atoav | 2025-04-16 06:27:48+00:00
Not everybody is from the US, a country which appears to be culturally split in two (in reality it is probably three, with one third that can't be bothered to care).

Where I am from it is totally normal that one of your friends is left of you on the issue of housing while having a greens position on energy and being slightly conservative on migration. So instead of tribal symbolic ideas (party lines) you discuss the actual ideas and their merits.

Ideas can be discussed best when you detach them from those proposing them. It is better to let ideas die than people. If you judge people on how strong they tow the party line the only ones losing are the voters as they throw away their agency.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-16 06:29:02+00:00
I think the point is that money for many was taxed before the paycheck ever came in. And you have no control over it. Part of your W-2 goes to fund social security, part of it to fund the federal, part of it to fund the state.

Taxing donations is just double dipping on your money. That's how you discourage donating.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-04-16 06:29:23+00:00
Yes, QAnon is a joke, as was the white power hand sign and microwave charging iPhones, among hundreds of others.

There is no "baby filter" on 4chan. You are solely responsible for believing and/or not being offended by anything. Well, that is true everywhere on the Web, but there is zero veneer of it on 4chan vs the partial safety bubbles you get on other sites.