MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by porridgeraisin | 2025-04-18 17:52:35+00:00
> Are users prepared to pay for the difference?

If a service cannot be offered at a certain scale without such practices, it should not be offered at that scale. Before you start talking about how this enabled google's innovations, remember that the path we have taken to our current innovations is not the only path that could have been taken. By correctly squashing out immoral avenues like today's ad tech, we lay the path for the same innovations to happen taking a different, more ethical path. Sure, it could be that that would take more time and certain innovations would be delayed by an entire era[1], but note that we could also be going 5x faster than today w.r.t TPUs or whatever if we enslaved and forced enough people to work for Google's ML infrastructure team and nobody/nothing else. But we don't do that, do we?

[1] on the flip side, certain innovations may also come an era early
by enahs-sf | 2025-04-18 17:52:42+00:00
Leadership has been pushing AI in my company for a while. Just had a massive outage because someone asked copilot how to deal with some data and it broke prod for 2 hours. Was actively asking copilot for help during the remediation. The lost revenue was probably equivalent to 20 engineers full-time. Explain to me how AI saves more money than it costs.
by l72 | 2025-04-18 17:53:07+00:00
> I really miss Napster letting you browse people's music when you found someone who was also into things you liked - pure gold mine only second to a LAN party where you could dig through the file server.

If you are a bandcamp user, find people with similar purchases to you and follow them. It is a good way to browse for new albums based on people with similar tastes.
by cestith | 2025-04-18 17:53:29+00:00
I know quite a few people who use old form design software, old contact managers, old email clients, old text editors, old spreadsheet packages, old CAD software, and yes even old word processors because they prefer the interface. Of course “old” is subjective. There are WordStar, MS Word, MS Works, and WordPerfect for DOS. There are early Windows versions of Word and WordPerfect. There’s 1-2-3, Excel, and others for decades or one could go all the way back to VisiCalc. I know people who still use Mutt or Pine for email.
by malkia | 2025-04-18 17:54:20+00:00
I didn't know much about Jai, and started reading it, and it really has (according to the article) some exciting features, but this caught my eye:

"... Much like how object oriented programs carry around a this pointer all over the place when working with objects, in Jai, each thread carries around a context stack, which keeps track of some cross-functional stuff, like which is the default memory allocator to ..."

It reminds me of GoLang's context, and it should've existed in any language dealing with multi-threading, as a way of carrying info about parent thread/process (and tokens) for trace propagation, etc.
by rglover | 2025-04-18 17:54:26+00:00
This is a great deal. Switching to Kagi was like getting OG Google search back. I'm also blown away by how good it is. I used DDG but was never really happy (always had to go back to Google for certain things).

Love that for $25/mo, you can get access to GPT 4o, Sonnet, and other models along with high-quality search.
by alxlaz | 2025-04-18 17:54:31+00:00
> There is a large distance between “removed from curriculum” and “banned”. I suspect that it’s not in the current school graduation requirements either.

Not necessarily, early on things got dropped from the curricula all the time because the GUKPiW had banned them, either specifically or by topic.

Blanket bans on general topics or activities make it extremely difficult to discuss censorship post-factum. For example, Juliusz Slowacki wasn't banned, but while some of his works could be freely published in some media they were fully or partially banned in other media (notoriously, Television Theatre got in trouble over parts from Kordian). Lots of cultural activities or works weren't banned directly, or not in all forms.
by skizm | 2025-04-18 17:54:34+00:00
The "anit-DEI stuff" is the same as the DEI stuff from before this administration: performative. Originally DEI was because the people demanded it of companies, now the anti-DEI version is because the administration will make your life hell if you don't fall in line.

Personally I fully agree that building a diverse workforce is more profitable in the long run than ignoring diversity (unless your company will die in the short term because of political pressure).
by itishappy | 2025-04-18 17:54:46+00:00
> People can rant and rail about America's car-centric culture, or they could just accept that the culture is what it is and work to mitigate the negative aspects of it.

Honest question: What's the difference? Mitigating the negative aspects involves making others aware of the negative aspects, but many people see that as ranting and railing. What does a productive conversation look like?
by sumtechguy | 2025-04-18 17:54:53+00:00
> but are deals really being closed while taking people for motorcycle rides?

Oh I see you have not hung out with 'the sales guys'. That they did it on a motorcycle ride does not surprise me. There are some seriously shady dudes out there that will do anything to close the deal, "always be closing". If closing out a million dollar contract means the CEO's daughter wants to goto a water park? Magically there are the tickets aplenty. Bars, race tracks, sports games, horseback riding, Caribbean cruises, on and on.

Is it ethical? Not really. In fact many places have training specifically on vendor relations. How much, how little, etc etc. In a small startup environment? There are going to be basically no guidelines from the business to do anything either way. Larger companies tend to have guardrails. But many of the sales guys know how to work that system.

In technical roles we usually do not see this mess. Because we have a sense of follow the rules and logic. The sales guys are 'always closing no matter what it takes'.
by the_snooze | 2025-04-18 17:54:53+00:00
To bring it down to a real and concrete case, we can do so much better than each family ferrying their children to school/activites, then driving everywhere in single-occupant cars. That's a world where children and senior citizens have greatly reduced independence and community.

How would it look like if there were reduced day-to-day car dependency? Maybe something like this: a "walking schoolbus" where senior citizens and schoolchildren connect with one another as they get exercise on the way to school. Who wouldn't want that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeYBL5u97c8
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-18 17:55:18+00:00
The anti-DEI argument is that modern racial disparities are predominantly caused by economic circumstances, e.g. black people are more likely to be poor and then less likely to have to startup capital to start their own business or be able to afford to attend a high status university. The same applies to white people who don't have affluent parents. "White people who grew up poor" are under-represented at the top of society.

So the underlying problem here is economic opportunity, not race. To fix it you need to e.g. make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities. That allows both poor black people and poor white people to get ahead without discriminating against anyone, but still reduces the racial disparity because black people are disproportionately poor.

It's basically Goodhart's law. Because of the existing correlation between race and poverty, continuing racial disparities are a strong proxy for insufficient upward mobility, but you want to solve the actual problem and not just fudge the metric through race quotas etc.
by OneLeggedCat | 2025-04-18 17:55:20+00:00
> but no doubt other times it’s changing behavior in the app itself, OS decided to wipe cache, app has bad info, whatever

GaiaGPS, which advertises is offline capability, after an update (but not immediately after the update) recently required users to login to continue using the app. Which was impossible if you happened to be out of cell phone range 10 miles from a trailhead when this login popup happened. Incredibly bone-headed move, and dangerous for hikers that aren't smart enough to carry backup map sources. But Gaia has been trending this way for several years.
by EA-3167 | 2025-04-18 17:55:27+00:00
I'm not in favor of it either, but this is hardly the first flight of this exact type. It's also a trivial waste in the face of far more egregious and systemic ones, so I'm left feeling like this is the usual left-leaning autophagia and distraction from the grim news.

Besides, we have whole industries that offer humanity nothing and waste far more resources, and people routinely give it a pass. Hell, quite a few people here work in those industries, yes I'm looking at you ad tech guys.
by soulofmischief | 2025-04-18 17:55:46+00:00
I want my AI support rep to have access to data and documents that it can vector/text search and forward to the user.

I want my AI support rep to create tasks to engage my team, with all the relevant data linked to it. It should be able to automatically schedule things and ask a human for confirmation.

It should be able to elevate communication to a human in the loop, using whatever mediums of communication makes sense given staff availability and workload.

At no point is it allowed to answer any questions unless the answers are constrained and probably directly quoted from a cited and linked section in our documentation.

In general, it should never confirm or deny things, it should never try to close things or acknowledge the content of any of the user's communication other than to call tools and surface public information which might be relevant to their request.

Most of this is a software architecture problem. The LLM is just there to provide an intuitive and extremely powerful natural language interface for search and tool calling. A little bit of glue between different systems, both internal and external.
by oceanplexian | 2025-04-18 17:55:52+00:00
Actually it does have something at stake: its singular goal of minimizing the loss function on its training data. AI is therefore designed to convince you it's right, which is a different optimization than actually being right. For example, I code a lot with agentic code editors, you’ll quickly learn they love to modify broken tests to superficially pass, rather than fixing the underlying failure. All the folks on the Vibe Coding hype train don't have enough experience to spot this and therefore think the AI is a lot smarter than it actually is.

This has scary implications if extrapolated out to extremes, because a sufficiently advanced AI would do exactly what you’re describing, manipulate power dynamics to get to a superficial outcome.
by 0rzech | 2025-04-18 17:56:44+00:00
And yet, this is exactly how it's been called in Poland for years. [1] Unsurprisingly, you can find "polonez" on gov.pl too. [2]

"a deformation from the actual name" in this context is called a loanword.

Regardless of etymology, an article talking about a national treasure being put on UNESCO list absolutely should mention that, IMO. Can be next to "chodzony". No problem with that. Even better, TBH.

AP didn't write even "chodzony", btw. Only "the «walking dance»".

[1] https://sjp.pwn.pl/sjp/polonez;2572042.html [2] https://www.gov.pl/web/kultura/wpis-poloneza--tradycyjnego-tanca-polskiego-na-liste-reprezentatywna-niematerialnego-dziedzictwa-kulturowego-ludzkosci
by ageitgey | 2025-04-18 17:57:18+00:00
As a co-founder at a company, I get more outbound sales spam than you can imagine. I just checked my spam folder and I get at least 30-50 "personal" sales outreaches a day.

So many of them are obvious AI to anyone who has used LLMs. The emails are always like "Hi, I really like how <general fact about company mission> and how you used to <old job on LinkedIn>. We can 10x your business..."

Another fun one is they say they care so much about our business that they recorded a personalized video of them exploring our website. But the video is a person gesturing at their computer screen that only shows a Cloudflare bot blocking page because their AI video generator got blocked by our site as a bot.

It's so lame. It feels incredibly off-putting and dishonest that I am having my time wasted by a machine pretending to be a real person spending their time on me.

The problem is that this automation leads to the death of the entire sales channel. If 99% of "personal" emails I get are computer generated and the volume of emails keeps increasing because it's now so easy to send them, I'm going to stop reading any emails. I feel burned.

This is the problem with AI sales. It can automate the current average sales process. This in turn makes the average sales process really easy, so it gets saturated by everyone and then it no longer works for anyone.

If anything, you should do the opposite of whatever the AI sales people are currently doing. That's the way to make a mark.
by ashvardanian | 2025-04-18 17:57:27+00:00
You can always get more accuracy by expanding those 3 lines to handle more of the Taylor components… but it’s important to remember that this is still educational material.

You can find more complete examples in my SimSIMD (https://github.com/ashvardanian/SimSIMD), but they also often assume that at a certain part of a kernel, a floating point number is guaranteed to be in a certain range. This can greatly simplify the implementation for kernels like Atan2. For general-purpose inputs, go to SLEEF (https://sleef.org). Just remember that every large, complicated optimization starts with a small example.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-18 17:57:43+00:00
I really like the Barcelona Superblocks model [1] for existing urban environments, but subsidizing families to relocate closer to schools is also an option imho. You have to find the intersection of what is politically palatable and the resources available; the next 100 years is going to see structural demographic decline, declining working cohort participation, less growth and productivity, continuing rapid fertility rate decline, declining household sizes, etc so creativity and flexibility will be required (imho). I am also a fan of what Culdesac [2] is doing, and is a pattern to be scaled.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” got us cars, and I think the new question is "How do we deliver locality and mobility for quality lives without cars, when possible?" Cars are not going away, but we should not build for them specifically as if they were the default option, as this cost burdens the future with potentially unnecessary and expensive personal mobility and infrastructure obligations. Even today, they are unaffordable for a substantial population of people, based on the evidence in my comment above.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=barcelona+superblocks

[2] https://culdesac.com/
by mythrwy | 2025-04-18 17:57:46+00:00
If the deal is made or influenced BECAUSE they both like motorcycles and shared a personal bonding moment (rather than objective business related factors) it is a form of cronyism or corruption.

`This is the way business has been done in the first world for 100 years.`. Yes, I am aware cronyism and low level corruption exist in the first world. In other places you probably just give the person an expensive gift or briefcase full of money and save time. But it's not optimal.

Point being, this story sounds like an argument in favor of AI to me.
by thegeomaster | 2025-04-18 17:57:47+00:00
Is it possible that a community of people who are constantly pushing LLMs to their limits would be most aware of their limitations, and so more inclined to think they are junk?

In terms of business utility, Google has had great releases ever since the 2.0 family. Their models have never missed some mark --- either a good price/performance ratio, insane speeds, novel modalities (they still have the only API for autoregressive image generation atm), state-of-the-art long context support and coding ability (Gemini 2.5), etc.

However, most average users are using these models through a chat-like UI, or via generic tools like Cursor, which don't really optimize their pipelines to capture the strengths of different models. This way, it's very difficult to judge a model objectively. Just look at the obscene sycophancy exhibited by chatgpt-4o-latest and how it lifted LMArena scores.
by redserk | 2025-04-18 17:58:05+00:00
I’m disputing your claim that I am invoking a logical fallacy here.

Revoking access to life-critical medical care that is specific to one’s sex is indisputably making the people of a given sex less safe.

Threatening to persecute people who wish to assist women in pursuing life-critical medical care is making women less safe.

If medical care specific to one’s sex cannot be considered protecting the safety of someone on the basis of their sex, what is?
by seabit | 2025-04-18 17:58:10+00:00
Agreed that these are almost antipodal design requirements, but there is also a category in the middle - described as either 'performance cruisers' or 'racer/cruisers' designed for either dual use, or for sailors like me who believe that speed combined with good use of modern forecasting techniques are safer at sea than a traditional slow heavy cruising boat. Basically, be comfortable enough to be livable, and fast enough to avoid the worst weather. The design tradeoffs in that category are really interesting IMO. See most X-yachts designs, some of the larger J boats (for monohulls) or Gunboat, HH, and Outremer in the multihull space
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-18 17:58:10+00:00
> More often that one would like, enterprise SaaS sales isn't about having the best product - it's about convincing the CTO he's going to feel like a king whenever your sales reps are in town

As far as I can tell, selling B2B security products is mostly about making C-suiters feel like they're in a political thriller. They even build (and, at least when needed for these purposes, staff!) fake and useless "war room" sets to walk the guys through, inefficient dashboards that nobody doing the actual work uses because they suck but they look cool, stuff like that.
by lelandbatey | 2025-04-18 17:58:30+00:00
You do not need to scan a QR code via a physical camera in your hand directly; any general purpose computer can run a QR code parsing program which accepts arbitrary images as input. It's so easy to do that there exist web pages which implement said QR code scanning in JS. Thus, the parent poster has recommended that you save the QR code .png file to your disk and then use such a piece of software, such as the website they linked, to extract the data encoded in that QR code.

That is how you can use nearly any general-purpose computer to scan a QR code.
by swyx | 2025-04-18 17:58:53+00:00
i mean okay but also it makes it impossible to have an open source ecosystem with shared libraries because suddenly things dont mean the same thing in one system vs another. i was interviewing at Jane St and realized their OCaml completely doesnt work with the rest of the world - and its fine if you're Jane St i guess but that really sucks for the "health" of a language ecosystem.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-18 17:58:58+00:00
>Your arguments don't form a rebuttal. Alimony does make divorce easier, and child support makes it easier for the children to go to the mother; courts predominantly assign children to her, which is indeed sexist. And there are still quite a few families with a single provider, so it does contribute, and when you go back in time, that effect is more pronounced, which contributed to the social acceptance of divorce.

Not a rebuttal to any of this, there are some real issues with divorce laws and that deserved to be talked about, namely around family equity. The laws often can tilt toward some very outdated assumptions and be manipulated as well, but that doesn't mean alimony and child support don't have their place, they absolutely do.

Divorce is often hard and messy, no doubt, but I think the original statements missed the mark by a long shot as to why.

>I do not share the GP's opinion about divorce, implied in terms like "cash out"

This is what I was addressing at heart, is this mindset.

Unfortunately, many divorce laws are not based on research but on prevailing culture norms at the times they were passed (as what they were attempting to address and/or redress), and trying to unwind that hasn't been easy.
by HelloMcFly | 2025-04-18 17:59:27+00:00
Critiquing the actions and policies of a political movement—especially when they have clear, documented consequences for marginalized groups—is not attacking the person, it's addressing the substance. There’s ample evidence that recent anti-DEI efforts are not grounded in merit-based reform but in resentment and exclusion. A few examples:

* Executive Order 11246, which prohibited discrimination by federal contractors, was eliminated.

* Civil Rights investigations in schools and colleges were dropped or deprioritized.

* Investigations into racial and gender discrimination in banking were quietly shelved.

These are a few structural, documented actions, not just rhetoric. Their impact falls disproportionately on people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and immigrants. That’s not an ad hominem, it’s observable policy.
by pitaj | 2025-04-18 17:59:29+00:00
> If you think copyright shouldn't exist, you're free to ignore any rights afforded you for your work, "the state" is not going to enforce anything unless you bring a case to a court.

That doesn't give other people who would like to use my work any useful guarantee, though. Without a license, they would be taking a lot of risk, even if they knew my views on copyright.

> Much of common law is specifically about property, upon which a good portion of modern day governance is founded. So your objection to copyright seems somewhat misinformed.

Physical property has exclusive use. Multiple people cannot use 100% of something at the same time. "Intellectual property" has no such trait. Multiple identical copies of the same work can be used by multiple people at the same time.

Ownership defines who has exclusive use of a thing. Copyright actually defies common law by requiring state power to enforce monopolies on certain information, even on property owned by parties with no association to the originator of a work.

> What is it about copyright that you think is a negative in today's society?

Copyright is sold as "promoting the arts" but in net slows innovation and decreases artistic freedom. Especially in its current form with extremely long lifetimes, it primarily enables rent-seeking by publishers at the expense of the public. There are other ways for artists to make money, and many artists already make most of their money by performing live shows, working on commission, selling early access subscriptions, etc.
by wcfrobert | 2025-04-18 17:59:39+00:00
> "The CEO was wavering until Tom found out they both owned the same obscure Italian motorcycle. Tom took him for a ride along the coast. Contract was signed the next day."

As a junior, I often wonder how many deals are signed in exclusive country clubs, on golf courses, and at the dining table with endlessly flowing Maotai.

For a successful career, is it better for one to prioritize network over skills? It seems to me that the latter can be commoditized by AI, while the former can not. Rather than learning Lisp, maybe it's time to pick up golf. I'm only half joking.