MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by csa | 2025-04-16 15:19:53+00:00
> But people always retort “of course ads work on you. Maybe it’s just in subtle ways!” No. They don’t always work. I provided a very clear example.

The example you provided is a specific case for a specific type of ad as it relates to a specific person.

When someone with experience in ads says “ads work on you”, the meaning isn’t “every ad works on you” or “any ad can work on you”, rather we mean “there are certainly some ads that work on you”.

Some simple examples, some using your soda reference, some not:

- Ads for Dr Pepper might increase your consumption of Dr Pepper. That would be a successful ad or ad campaign that worked on you. There are relatively easy ways to track how much mass media ad campaigns (i.e., no detailed ad tracking) impacts things like sales. The attribution isn’t at the individual level, but it certainly can be said that an ad worked on some people by increasing sales (lots of statistics in the estimates, but the results are fairly reliable).

- Submarine articles work. Examples are the “chocolate/coffee is good/bad for your health” type of articles. This can even get more subversive by influencing primary sources like when the grain lobby somehow got the federal government to create the food pyramid with a truckload of carbs at the base. Ditto with the tobacco industry and smoking. All of that crap is marketing that led to stealth ads and naturally occurring submarine pieces. Unless you don’t read or watch any news, you are exposed to this, and it probably influences your opinions and actions at the margin.

- It’s possible to be hyper-vigilant in a way that prevents most ads online, but they are almost impossible to escape unless one self-excludes from a lot of online services. I’m one of those “ad blocker types”, but I still get some flavor of ads on Amazon once I log in. Amazon ads are some of the most profitable mass delivered ads in the US. Do they work on me? Sort of. I don’t click on the paid ads, but I’ve certainly searched for and ended up purchasing products that were shown in ads. The ad was effective in accessing me during my “product discovery” phase.

I could go on, but I’m not sure it’s necessary.

If you want to construct narrow examples that ads aren’t effective on you, then that’s relatively easy to do, and it’s easy to do for most people.

But you can’t construct a context in which you aren’t influenced by some ads on some topics unless you simply isolate yourself from media and society.

If you think you can, then you’re fooling yourself.

Your narrative so far has been “look at my narrow example… hah hah… ads don’t work on me”. Meanwhile, the ad industry is influencing you in ways that you are or seem to be oblivious to.

As i said before, it would take a fairly invasive shadowing of you in your day-to-day life to figure out which specific ads or category of ads either do or might influence you, but i assure you that it’s happening.
by yorwba | 2025-04-16 15:20:05+00:00
Of course one should not use an opinion piece as the source when that opinion piece is just commenting on information found elsewhere, but also, in this day and age there's no reason to give up when you encounter a broken link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200202194620/https://ofew.berk...

A total of 993 applications were received, of which 893 met basic qualifications. The LSI Committee conducted a first review and evaluated candidates based solely on contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion. Only candidates that met a high standard in this area were advanced for further review, narrowing the pool down to 214 for serious consideration.
by wavemode | 2025-04-16 15:20:09+00:00
Fuzzing does not catch all bugs. And even if it, did your software can still misbehave when all logical bugs are eliminated. Say for example the program parses correctly but uses up a large amount of RAM on certain inputs, causing occasional crashes and restarts in production. Say for example your program behaves perfectly but there's actually an occasional bug in the date formatting in the logs themselves.

So yeah, you need monitoring and assertions. A decent coverage of unit tests is good, but I wouldn't bother trying to invest in some sort of advanced fuzzing or quickcheck system. In my experience the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
by jiajunyan | 2025-04-16 15:20:34+00:00
Hey HN,

I watch a lot of YouTube, mostly to learn. But I kept running into the same problem. I didn’t want to sit through a 30 minute video just to find that one part I needed.

Most transcript tools I found were either behind a paywall, required an account, or just didn’t work well.

So I built YouTube Transcript Generator, a tool that gives you the full transcript of any YouTube video in seconds.

Why I built it:

- Save time by turning long videos into text that’s easy to scan and search

- Make learning from video easier and more efficient

It works with any public YouTube video that has captions, whether autogenerated or manual. You can read the transcript, search specific parts, or download it in different formats.

I hope it helps you as much as it has helped me. Any feedback is welcome.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-16 15:20:48+00:00
> Sony has $20 billion of cash on hand as of December 2024

Sony is $28 Billion in debt as of 2024 too

> Microsoft has $70 billion of cash on hand

Microsoft has $62 billion in debt

> Apple has $53 billion of cash on hand

I'll leave the rest as an exercise for the reader

How much debt is Nintendo in? (Hint- It's insignificant)

Now you can do the usual capitalist moron MBA shit and moan about how debt is good actually, but frankly

Nintendo is Japans most successful company and Sony isn't even in the top 300

Nintendo is real, Sony is a paper tiger
by tombert | 2025-04-16 15:21:44+00:00
Isn't this kind of a privileged perspective though? Not so much saying that something is lost, but judging people for shopping on Amazon (which you said in an earlier comment).

It's easy to say something like "there's more to life than prices!!!!!" when you're a yuppie software person on Hacker News making six figures with full benefits, but a large percentage (most?) of the population isn't as fortunate. Something being five percent cheaper can be a meaningful difference to those people, and I certainly cannot blame someone in that situation for prioritizing their finances over some nebulous completely undefined and arbitrary "greater good" that you seem to be hinting at.

Now, I am one of those software people who (generally) makes plenty of money, so you could reasonably judge me for shopping on Amazon and focusing primarily on prices. I don't know what to tell you; even if I make plenty of money, it's not infinite money, I still have to prioritize how it's spent, and again I just don't feel the need to try and optimize for some undefined greater good.
by mhitza | 2025-04-16 15:22:07+00:00
Sure hope there's demonstrable "human in the loop" than just words, and those falsely suspended try their way through data protection authorities.

It feels like too many companies do this in spite of GDPR rules around automated decision making

> The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/
by rco8786 | 2025-04-16 15:22:34+00:00
They are doing it, but there's no profit incentive. Github is a bit of a special case because of their commitment to OSS and the broader engineering community, but the moment a downturn occurs and MS takes a harder look at P&Ls, you better believe that's on the chopping block.

The public sector is exactly where you need things that are important to society but don't make money.
Show HN: A life calendar to remind us how much time we have left to live
by anh690136 | 2025-04-16 15:22:59+00:00
I’ve always been amazed by how short life is. But the thing is, it’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day — work, deadlines, chores — and forget that time is quietly slipping by.

So I built this little thing. It shows your life in weeks — how many you’ve lived, and how many (roughly) you might have left.

For me, it’s a daily reminder to zoom out, reflect on my choices, and not take time for granted.

I’d had this idea in my head for ages and finally managed to build it (I’m not a technical person at all, so the app is really in the early stage)

Hope it’s helpful to someone out there :)

P.s: I set this as my default tab on Chrome to remind me daily lol
by mjrpes | 2025-04-16 15:23:30+00:00
> Historically... this tends to work out. Reminds me of Gmail initially allowing massive inbox. YouTube doing free hosting. All the various untethered LAMP hosting...

One difference I see: storage capacity and compute performance aren't increasing like they had in the past, so companies can't rely on these costs to dramatically drop in the future to offset bleeding cash initially to gain market share.
by jack_h | 2025-04-16 15:23:56+00:00
I posted elsewhere about my displeasure with what is happening in congress. A large chunk of the Republican base is not willing to address the national debt; the $5 billion in cuts from the Senate bill going into reconciliation is a rounding error in the national budget. This seems like a golden opportunity for the Democrats to be the adults in the room and propose a solution to the problem with numbers, charts, economic projections, and math.

We're not seeing that. The national debt is not the red herring rather all of the ideological arguments happening in this thread are. Politicians *should* be working on fixing the national debt, but their constituency keeps telling them they'd rather balkanize. So that's what will happen.
by dspillett | 2025-04-16 15:24:13+00:00
IIRC the C64, like the BBC range of 6502-based Micros, had their BASIC in ROM and in fact booted to it in REPL mode by default. As such it was always in memory as the ROM would always be there¹. There were certain bits of the address space that were not safe to use if the user would drop back into BASIC as the ROM used those for its stack & heap and other scratch space, but otherwise you could ignore BASIC's existence once your machine code was running.

----

[1] caveat: under usual circumstances, on the Beebs you could switch a different bank into the memory space used by the BASIC ROM, either another ROM or some “sideways RAM”
by TashaHMG | 2025-04-16 15:24:15+00:00
I've been looking over the list of topics you compiled under the "Gender Roles & Identity" category (the one including items like gender_nonbinary_suppression, gender_trans_sports_ban, etc.). I wanted to share an observation regarding the selection of topics presented. While the list covers many relevant and currently debated issues, its focus appears somewhat unbalanced when viewed as a representation of the broader discourse on gender roles and identity. Specifically, the list seems heavily weighted towards topics representing: * Arguments critical of transgender rights and identities (e.g., various bans, social contagion theories, radical feminist critiques). * Critiques of modern feminism or defenses of traditional roles (e.g., gender_feminism_attack_modern, gender_patriarchy_defense). * Specific framings of speech issues around pronouns. There appears to be less representation of topics explicitly reflecting counterarguments, supportive perspectives commonly associated with LGBTQ+ advocacy or mainstream feminism, or a wider exploration of gender identity beyond these specific conflict points. This focus gives the impression that the list, as presented, doesn't fully capture the breadth and balance of the diverse viewpoints within the complex field of gender roles and identity. Separately, given the context of analyzing AI model responses, another potentially interesting area to explore might be the models' ability to generate arguments for a proposition (X) even when directly presented with evidence within the same prompt showing X is false. Testing how models navigate instructions to argue against explicitly provided, contradictory facts could offer further insights into their adherence to context, instruction following capabilities, and handling of logical contradictions. Thank you for considering this feedback on the topic selection and the additional suggestion.
by KerrAvon | 2025-04-16 15:24:16+00:00
A child can certainly tell the difference between the best of the best 2600 games and Super Mario Brothers. The latter is recognizably a modern game. Many 2600 games are completely unplayable unless you read the manual.

“Never moved on” isn’t entirely fair to the modern incarnation of Atari, which is a relatively new company intentionally producing/licensing retro games, emulation, T-shirts, etc. It’s not that they haven’t moved on, it’s that this is what the new, youngish IP owners are doing with the brand. It’s a choice, not inertia.
Ask HN: Who wants freshly roasted coffee?
by lamroger | 2025-04-16 15:24:31+00:00
Hey y'all - I consider myself a tinkerer and in the vein of doing things that don't scale, I want to send you coffee that I roast.

I have a couple bags of green beans to choose from.

If you want to print a picture or your art on a label, send me an image!

If you prefer a roast level, let me know too.

* Colombia, Finca La Riviera Sudan Rume * Colombia, Finca La Rivera Gesha * Colombia, Finca Milan Anaerobic Passionfruit Co-ferment * Vietnam, Lostus SHG * China, Yirong * Mystery Blend

It's free (or send a donation to charity). Send me an email - me@<username>.com or msg me on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lam-roger/

Here's a video of me roasting on my patio applying some object detection to the beans to get the average color - https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7123095011449085952/?originTrackingId=Eqpm7A0vQ1Cu2G1j7msaYg%3D%3D

Thanks!
by callc | 2025-04-16 15:25:05+00:00
In my context, the scale is small. It just passed the threshold where a naive implementation would be just fine.

> What would happen if the "AI" and web search didn't return anything? Would you have stuck with your implementation?

I was fairly certain there must exist some type of algorithm exactly for this purpose. I would have been flabbergasted if I couldn’t find something on the web. But it that failed, I would have asked friends and cracked open the algorithms textbooks.

> I'm not against use of "AI". But this increasing refusal of those who aspire to work in specialist domains like software development to systematically learn things is not great. That's just compounding on an already diminished capacity to process information skillfully.

I understand what you mean, and agree with you. I can also assure you that that is not how I use it.
by Gormo | 2025-04-16 15:25:36+00:00
> Yes, most people who have an incentive in pushing AI say that hallucinations aren't a problem, since humans aren't correct all the time.

Humans often make factual errors, but there's a difference between having a process to validate claims against external reality, and occasionally getting it wrong, and having no such process, with all output being the product of internal statistical inference.

The LLM is engaging in the same process in all cases. We're only calling it a "hallucination" when its output isn't consistent with our external expectations, but if we regard "hallucination" as referring to any situation where the output for a wholly endogenous process is mistaken for externally validated information, then LLMs are only ever hallucinating, and are just designed in such a way that what they hallucinate has a greater than chance likelihood of representing some external reality.
by rurp | 2025-04-16 15:26:06+00:00
I couldn't agree more and worry that even if the country makes it out of this period in one piece the well will have been poisoned on a lot of these topics. We should have big initiatives to make government more efficient, and reduce the national debt, and get back to merit-based processes. But after so much bloviating and fake initiatives that claim to do those things, but actually do the opposite, it's going to be a tough sell to make a real push in the foreseeable future.
by monknomo | 2025-04-16 15:26:47+00:00
My crank idea to fix both of the issues you mention is mandatory national service.

This would provide everyone a common ground, similar to how widespread military service in wwii did. It would promote civic virtue by exposing everyone to how they personally can make the government useful. And it could be made such that we have our national service corp just build useful things, like houses. Additionally we could provide similar benefits to folks that go through national service as the military - healthcare, payment for college, etc.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-16 15:26:50+00:00
I've been watching a lot of TV shows that have revealed a lot of pros/cons about different areas of the country. The further north means a much shorter growing season which makes a greenhouse even more important. It also means a lot more infrastructure is required to keep any livestock alive during the longer winters. Places like Texas goes the other direction where the heat during the long summers is brutal, but it means early spring and late fall crops. I really wouldn't want to be any further north than 40°.

Got to find that perfect plot of land that has water, some trees for wood, some land that can be farmed and hopefully a clear sky to the south for solar. Oh, and it's gonna need to be far enough from a city so my telescope can finally be used the way it was meant.
by recursivedoubts | 2025-04-16 15:26:56+00:00
Of course. As I tell them: I am a good teacher and my job is to teach you how to program computers well. It is possible to cheat and get a good grade in this class. If I catch you, I will report you to the university. But I'm not going to work hard to catch people, that's not my job: my job is to teach. You should learn.

My concern isn't for students who are cheaters, there isn't much I can do about them. Rather it is for students who don't know any better and start having AI auto-completion thrown at them.
by hcknwscommenter | 2025-04-16 15:27:09+00:00
So basically, Biden's CHIPS act plus infrastructure (energy, roads, etc.) investments (e.g., solar and wind and battery part of Biden's IRA plus additional baseload). Yeah, we had all that going under the previous administration, and the current administration is distracting us from their dismantling of these sensible investments and incentives by strangling the entire global economy. Is it still "fringe" to think Trump is a foreign asset?
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-04-16 15:28:42+00:00
Hold on—we're being a bit taxonomically lazy here, aren't we? You're applying a species-level classification (based on gametes) too rigidly to individual-level variation. If you look at actual developmental outcomes, there's a non-trivial set of cases that don’t map neatly onto a system of just two categories (which is not a lot of categories). Calling all of those 'disorders' assumes the categories are already correct, rather than testing whether they fit what we actually observe.

Ps. The Overton window is such an interesting concept; Imagine arguing our case before the head Eunuch of the Ottoman Court in the 16th century or so.
by xpe | 2025-04-16 15:29:05+00:00
> Malicious idiots surrounded by sheepish intelligent people.

Prefixing people with "sheepish intelligent" is bound to oversimplify this. Many of the non-DOGE employees who directly see wrongdoing are likely making calculated decisions on what to do. It depends on many factors, including the law and whistleblower protections.

Many of them are responding in various ways that they hope will have an impact. Some resign in protest. Others file lawsuits. Others leak to the press.

Could they do more? Yes. So let's help them.

What can we do? Just to give two relatively middle-of-the-ground recommendations: First, donate to legal-protection funds for whistleblowers. Second, call your representatives and demand reinstatement of the inspectors general.
by ddejohn | 2025-04-16 15:29:19+00:00
It's insanely naive to have thought a second Trump admin would not be worse in every possible way. Did you pay attention at all to what was going on with SCOTUS? Project 2025?

Saying "there wasn't any evidence" is borderline bot-speak. Anybody who thought Trump 2.0 was going to be like the first round was simply not paying attention at all and anybody telling others it wasn't going to be like the first admin is either a Russian troll, the mainstream media, or just plain irresponsibly ignorant.

"Nobody could have foreseen this" is about the dumbest take I think I've seen so far.
by lolinder | 2025-04-16 15:29:57+00:00
Were you able to figure out what constitutes a "credit"? I initially assumed they were following Cursor's (early) model of 1 prompt = 1 credit, with the tokens used to fulfill the prompt not costing anything. If that's how they're doing it that still leaves a bad taste when you waste a credit on something that doesn't work, but it does remove the need to care about how the tool gets there.
by derektank | 2025-04-16 15:30:14+00:00
>The basic premise is “what was done for $X dollars with no profit motive can be done for <$X dollars with profit motive doesn’t hold up - you make something private, it wants to make more profit.

No, the basic premise of privatization is that, assuming the product or service has multiple potential customers, private industry can operate at scale which, alongside competition from other companies, drives down the price and the government can purchase it "off the shelf" at the prevailing commercial rate. Those assumptions don't always hold, utilities being a great example of this, but it's not inherently blind or naive to consider privatizing some components of government function. We don't expect the government to operate its own vehicle assembly lines even if the government needs cars; they just go buy one from Ford or GM.
by eesmith | 2025-04-16 15:30:19+00:00
Sure. While lowering the recharge rate on the aquifer, the river flow, etc. Instead of being re-used downstream, it's re-used downwind. Snow melt original destined for the over-allocated Colorado might instead end up in the Mississippi.

All that irrigation water pumped out of the ground in the southwest falls back as rain too. While the land subsides, plants can no longer reach water, and towns have to build deeper wells.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-16 15:31:46+00:00
If you're looking to open a factory or build an apartment (or any other single digit million dollar thing that some government official can discretionarily double the cost of by being obstinate and forcing you to drag them through court) building one of the first things you do is internet stalk the key government officials figure out who their friends are and kick off a bunch of $200-2000 donations to whatever stuff the people around them are involved in (middle school drama club, local animal shelter, etc, etc).

With hundreds of millions at stake I would be very surprised if they weren't doing this and more.
by crowcroft | 2025-04-16 15:31:48+00:00
I do agree, Google and probably Meta even more so are likely to be impacted now just because they've become so overwhelmingly dominant. There's nowhere else left to cut for a lot of brands.

What will be more interesting though is if that money comes back to Meta or Google, or if people will find new, better opportunities while they pull back (eg. what happened to TV in 08).

Meta are concerned about this and already trying to book in bulk sales for next year with agencies which is something they've never done before https://digiday.com/media-buying/meta-moves-into-controversi...