MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zestyping | 2025-04-07 16:45:47+00:00
I do think you're on to something.

What if we took the approach of creating a clear legal distinction between advertising companies and non-advertising companies?

For example, if you want to be an advertising company, there are limits on what and how you can publish (such as having to use pull instead of push channels), and you don't get to also try to be a product or service company. If you want to be a non-advertising company, then you can't publish advertising.

This seems effective and also a much easier scenario to envision for those who find legal restrictions on speech to be unpalatable or inconceivable. It is actually not that outlandish at all; rather it's well within the bounds of what we already do. We already categorize companies by function and apply all kinds of different rules (restrictions on where and when and how they can operate, requirements for licensing and registration, environmental standards, liability standards, taxation rules) to companies based on what they produce or what purpose they serve, and we already accept that doing so has societal benefits.

There is also plenty of precedent for regulations that discourage cross-category operations precisely to simplify enforcement and manage risk. Healthcare providers are separated from payers; drugs cannot also be dietary supplements; legal businesses can't combine with non-law businesses; and so on. Even if cross-category operations aren't completely banned, the rules create friction and deterrence that still has important effects.
by cess11 | 2025-04-07 16:46:25+00:00
It's more like Spacemacs. An opinionated, programmable interface to an operating system that allows you to edit and execute text, browse the web, play git and so on. Just that it has a fleshed out GUI toolkit you interface with, unlike Spacemacs which is heavily text oriented.

With the territory also comes that it's somewhat hard for newcomers to understand why the tool is important to longtime converts. The clear use cases seem mundane. 'You can edit text in it'. 'You can execute code in it'. 'It lets you debug programs'. To which one might respond: 'Yeah, so? Why do I need elisp/Smalltalk? My Electron app already does that and it doesn't come with weird Internet nerds.'

If you get into it and later find that it helped you out to be able to deeply inspect or reprogram your notetaking, program execution, feed reader, git environment, then you'll start to think that it has something special. But that might take a while, and most of the way there you could just as well have used some other tool instead.
by arrosenberg | 2025-04-07 16:46:31+00:00
I graduated in June 2009 from a UC just after the crash. It took me until September 2010 to find a job in the field I wanted and get my career going. I got super lucky and found that job off a Craigslist ad. Just remember the system isn't set up to support you, so you are going to have to be proactive, creative, try and network and be uncomfortable asking for what you want until you get it. These are core life skills. Grit 'n' Grind.
by palmotea | 2025-04-07 16:46:41+00:00
> a surprising amount of it seems to be predicated on starting a war with China in the near future.

Or more likely China starting a war, which is periodically threatens to do eventually over Taiwan.

And China will win, because it's successfully hollowing out the West, more and more every day: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/business/china-manufactur...:

> Recent data from China’s central bank shows that state-controlled banks lent an extra $1.9 trillion to industrial borrowers over the past four years. On the fringes of cities all over China, new factories are being built day and night, and existing factories are being upgraded with robots and automation.

> China’s investments and advances in manufacturing are producing a wave of exports that threatens to cause factory closings and layoffs not just in the United States but also around the globe.
by freedomben | 2025-04-07 16:46:49+00:00
Indeed. I found myself unemployed and having a very hard time finding work after the '08 crash. My newly minted degree turned out to be worthless in that environment. It worked out for the best as I took a low paying job as a technician that at least let me make enough money to pay the rent and buy food while I continued building up skills. It's a raw deal and it's not fair, but the only thing you can control is yourself. Try to keep a positive attitude and understand that it won't be this way forever.
by solardev | 2025-04-07 16:46:51+00:00
I think it's going to be terrible at that :( Separating SEO spam from useful products isn't a strength of LLMs.

Probably a normal prompt without deep research would be better for that (but less recent), especially for topics that humans previously discussed a lot in the past (like on pre-AI reddit). Signal to noise ratio is only going to go down, down, down from here... :(

I don't think you'll get useful results from deep research in a case like this, trying to distinguish between all the contemporary advertisers and cut through the spam. Deep research is good at summarizing sources, and it works well if you can tell it what kind of trustworthy sources to focus on. It's not so good at judging the relative merit of each source. And in this case, there are no trustworthy sources... it's all just spam. If you manage to get good results out of it for market research, you should probably just start a business and become a billionaire selling that functionality instead of whatever you were researching :)
by serial_dev | 2025-04-07 16:46:58+00:00
> We will add AI usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire

Not kidding, but I'm actually afraid people will check AI usage and start nagging us that:

> "You are slow because you don't use enough AI. Look at Tom (single 28 yo guy working every weekend on Adderall), he uses AI and he is fast. Gonna add a note to check up on your AI usage metrics in a month, hopefully it will improve".

Our company has Cursor, which I sometimes use, but 1. for lots of tasks, the most precise language is the programming language, 2. I don't love it, prefer other editors, and I go for in-browser search + AI.

If this letter was published by my CEO, I would either 1. ignore it, as CEOs are often out of touch when it comes to actual day to day work or they need to jump on the AI train to show how visionary they are even if they are aware of the limitations, 2. start looking for a job, because honestly, today it's a letter like this, in 3 months, you get a negative performance review because you didn't send enough queries to Cursor.
by johnobrien1010 | 2025-04-07 16:47:54+00:00
> Take whatever job you can now while continuing to look for your next role.

This. And by any job I mean any job. McDonalds, book store, what have you. A good friend of mine dropped out of Harvard sophomore year. She found work at the COOP, then CVS, etc. It was definitely better than going back to an unstable and abusive environment while continuing to job hunt.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-07 16:48:10+00:00
Seems like that already happened for industries susceptible for that. You don’t need ai to automate a factory. You could do that by 1950. Labor costs have been cheap elsewhere for a while too. Plenty of manufacturing already left for these reasons. What remains stateside probably has some sticking factor that is highly context specific and impossible to generalize.
by fsmith2003 | 2025-04-07 16:48:22+00:00
I was hoping someone would do this!

I have been researching/playing around with Macro-10 using the simh PDP-10 emulator just for fun recently. I have always been curious about the inner workings of the 8080 emulator Paul Allen developed for running this code on a "fake" Altair. Maybe this source code could provide some insight into how Micro-Soft went about getting to a fully working BASIC for the Altair step by step from the very beginning.
by waffletower | 2025-04-07 16:48:23+00:00
While I may be mistaken, but I don't believe that LLMs are trained on a large corpus of machine readable music representations, which would arguably be crucial to strong performance in common practice music theory. I would also surmise that most music theory related datasets largely arrive without musical representations altogether. A similar problem exists for many other fields, particularly mathematics, but it is much more profitable to invest the effort to span such representation gaps for them. I would not gauge LLM generality on music theory performance, when its niche representations are likely unavailable in training and it is widely perceived as having miniscule economic value.
by Rooster61 | 2025-04-07 16:48:48+00:00
It's hard to face this when fresh out of school, but one piece of advice I can offer is to network as much as you can. Talk to folks you know that graduated before you and have a job. Talk to professors who might have industry ties in their history. Talk to folks in the career center. Try to be as visible as you can. Yes, I know that seems trivial considering you don't have job experience, but even building relationships at school can pay off.

Those types of connections are CRITICAL in the age of scorched-earth AI centric hiring. I spent 9 months recently jobless after getting laid off, and its damned near impossible to get a job through the usual resume farm (LinkedIn job board and the like).

Also, look for jobs local to wherever you are that don't look all that glamorous. RTO is a big thing now, and smaller organizations struggle to hire locally without the brand recognition of the big guys. That might be your in for your first job.

And the biggest thing, keep your head up. Keep pushing. You just got a degree from an extremely difficult program, and you can hang your hat on that. The factors affecting the job market are not within your control, and your skills will outlast them.
by generalizations | 2025-04-07 16:49:03+00:00
That entire article just sounds like a collection of every naysayer argument they could find, compiled into an authoritative-sounding essay on why doing nothing is better than doing some very cool proof-of-concept genetic editing tech. Are they just reflexively against tech these days? Because when the arguments they bring are so scattered and miscellaneous, it sure sounds like they're justifying a preexisting opposition to the idea.
by overfeed | 2025-04-07 16:49:06+00:00
> No one except the utterly delusional would think a mom & pop restaurants, dry cleaners, new law practices, etc. would become a F500 company.

Do they fail at achieving F500 status at a higher or lower rate than "startups"? Who then is delusional - those who have realizable visions, or the strivers who dream of unicorn-status and still fail.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-04-07 16:49:15+00:00
> it will be something that is not an LLM

I think it will be very similar in architecture.

Artificial neural networks already are approximating how neurons in a brain work, it's just at a scale that's several orders of magnitude smaller.

Our limiting factor for reaching brain-like intelligence via ANN is probably more of a hardware limitation. We would need over 100 TB to store the weights for the neurons, not to mention the ridiculous amount of compute to run it.
by dmurray | 2025-04-07 16:49:23+00:00
Why would you favour "date plus a day" rather than "number plus a number"?

I agree Excel has to guess, and in isolation guessing that "1/2" should be parsed a date is not a terrible choice, and that parsing the individual components separately is simpler and more predictable than using the full context that it's about to be added to a number. But evaluating to 1.5 would raise few eyebrows.
by 9rx | 2025-04-07 16:49:28+00:00
The only real tech "freelancing", if we are to call it that, opportunities as it pertains to consumers is possibly in fixing someone's home computer/phone, and that is within the small set of things consumers are still willing to pay for. In fact, one's phone was explicitly mentioned. But it is unlikely that most "freelancers", within the tech sphere, are making a business out of that.

Maybe we all have a grandmother tossing a few bucks out here and there when she needs help. Is that what you mean?

But that's ignoring that freelancing itself is normally a business-to-business transaction by definition, so your assertion is a bit strange if we are to stick to general understandings. What is the pet definition you are trying to use here that should change our understanding?
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-07 16:49:39+00:00
This is really unwise of Trump.

For whatever reason, Trump is taking the stance that China must immediately accept these tariffs without retaliation. But politically, Xi cannot be seen as submitting to Trump's pressure. So either China gives, or Trump gives, or neither gives and China is seen as openly defying Trump. Only one of those is a "win" from Trump's perspective, and it's the one that will never happen.
by susam | 2025-04-07 16:50:00+00:00
> Even companies as well resourced as Microsoft made these mistakes well into the 2000s.

Indeed! As I just wrote in another comment on this page, Microsoft Outlook 2003 used CRC32 to "hash" the personal folder (.PST) passwords. Since CRC32 isn't a cryptographic hash, it was trivial to generate a collision and access someone else's Outlook personal folder. This flaw persisted until at least 2006! More details here: <https://www.nirsoft.net/articles/pst_password_bug.html>.
by sipjca | 2025-04-07 16:50:06+00:00
LocalScore dev here

Llamafile could certainly be released without the GPU binaries included by default and it would slim down the size tremendously.

The extra 70MiB is that the CUDA binaries for LocalScore are built with CuBLAS and for more generations of NVIDIA architectures (sm60->sm120), whereas Llamafile is built with TinyBLAS and for just a few generations in particular

I think it's possible to randomize weights with a standard set of layers, and maybe a possibility for the future
by jandrese | 2025-04-07 16:50:44+00:00
What an exciting time for the industry. Most of the companies are run by 20 or 30 somethings. Nobody has a plan for success. Everything is poised to explode once someone, anyone, figures out how to deliver product at scale. This also makes it clear how the software guys got so big so fast: making new copies of software is trivial compared to hardware manufacturing.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-04-07 16:51:12+00:00
Many student loans can be put on basically indefinite hold via income based repayment (if you make little enough, your minimum payment is zero, but the interest keeps accruing). This gives you some flexibility to take any job you can find, even something that doesn't require a degree.

You might also look into trades, depending on your engineering specialty. A machinist with a MechEng degree from MIT or a millwright with something related to manufacturing will be extremely valuable, especially if you're willing to move where the work is.
by maccard | 2025-04-07 16:52:30+00:00
I don't think I agree, entirely.

The problem is that up until _very_ recently, it's been possible to get LLMs to generate interesting and exciting results (as a result of all the API documentation and codebases they've inhaled), but it's been very hard to make that usable. I think we need to be able to control the output format of the LLMs in a better way before we can work on what's in the output. I don't konw if MCP is the actual solution to that, but it's certainly an attempt at it...
by OutOfHere | 2025-04-07 16:52:42+00:00
To the extent that the purpose of a liberal arts bachelor's education is to develop more tolerance, it will get you from a starting value of 1/10 up to 3/10. A combined technical liberal arts bachelor's degree may get you to 4/10. A technical master's degree to 6/10. A PhD to 8/10. The rest is up to your curious use of AI. Without tolerance in entertaining differing opinions and theories, the world can be a dark place.
by joe8756438 | 2025-04-07 16:52:54+00:00
there is no such bar.

We don’t even have a good way to quantify human ability. The idea that we could suddenly develop a technique to quantify human ability because we now have a piece of technology that would benefit from that quantification is absurd.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to measure the ability of an LLM. But it does mean that the techniques used to quantify an LLMs ability are not something that can be applied to humans outside of narrow focus areas.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-07 16:54:05+00:00
> Trump was taking about tariffs, but nobody thought he’d take them this far, this fast.

Stop saying "nobody". People predicted this. The people who are blindsided by this dismissed the people who predicted it as crazy, hyperbolic doom casters. Yet today, when their predictions come to fruition, they don't even exist.

Here's a wild idea: let's start listening to the people who had the foresight to predict this instead of pretending they don't exist because it soothes our own egos for having missed this.
by samspot | 2025-04-07 16:54:06+00:00
A lot of niche things I want cease to exist in this advertising-free world. If the interest isn't mainstream enough to get a word-of-mouth recommendation then it can't survive. The services we use to find these things, Google, Etsy, Fan sites, none of them exist without advertising. I'm sure you can think of something that was never explicitly advertised to you, that you wanted, that you wouldn't be able to find anymore if this came to pass.
by mmooss | 2025-04-07 16:54:16+00:00
They are owned by Axel Springer, whose CEO and part-owner is extreme neo-capitalist Mathias Döpfner, and their news follows his philosophy (or similar ones) as if they are fact, at least at times. The headline depicting privacy regulation as a 'bonfire' is not surprising; I think they were different before the recent corruption of professional journalism by similar people (there is some good journalism remaining!).

Regarding Döpfner, he tried to fire an editor at Business Insider (another Axel Springer publication) because Wall St power player Bill Ackman didn't like their coverage of Ackman's wife. [0] He's taken positions such as, "I am all for climate change"; and ""Free west, fuck the intolerant Muslims and all the other riff-raff." [1]

Politico has published articles saying, "Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He's Still Trying To Be a Good One.", claiming "The most consequential presidents divided the nation - before “reuniting it on a new level of understanding." (by founding editor and global editor-in-chief John Harris). [2] And another that claimed, as news and not opinion, that disinformation concerns were a "panic" and now outmoded. [3] At least some of their coverage of American politics assumes - again as news fact, not opinion - that anything the left does is ridiculous.

I actually want to know the reality of things, as much as possible, so I will hardly read them anymore.

[0] https://www.semafor.com/article/04/21/2024/axel-springers-tr...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/13/axel-springer-...

[2] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/21/harris-col...

[3] https://www.politico.eu/article/nobody-tricked-vote-donald-t...
by ttepasse | 2025-04-07 16:54:30+00:00
Further down on the page they rightly notice that strictly necessary cookies don't require consent. This mirrors the opinion of European Union's Article 29 Working Party back then: https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio...

gdpr.eu is by the way not an official resource of the European Union but by the Swiss Proton AG. They note down the page that gdpr.eu doesn’t constitute legal advice. Although they are correct in this case and your misunderstanding was in reading for future internet discussions I'd recommend not using private sources.
by Borg3 | 2025-04-07 16:54:42+00:00
Yeah.. and its annoying to read.. I always laught at people who try to make IDs with leading zeros. and then one day BOOM!! overflow.

Its especially common in namings like: THING-01 THING-02.. we will never have more than 100 of them.. and then BOOM.

I always say: leave it at fucking 1 and count up. Thats why we invented Natural Sorting to sort this out...
by bloopernova | 2025-04-07 16:54:48+00:00
The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James Hornfischer. The amazing courage shown by the US Navy sailors as their tiny 2,000 ton Destroyers and Destroyer Escorts faced a Japanese fleet of Battleships, Cruisers, and Destroyers at The Battle Off Samar. Inspiring and horrifying, the DDs and DEs of the US navy were protecting "Escort Carriers" which were smaller aircraft carriers made from cargo ship hulls. Warning, may inspire you to learn a whole bunch more about world war 2.

And 2 books that sort of go together:

Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway by Walter Lord, and Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully. Read Incredible Victory first, learn about the luck, good and bad, that led to a much-needed victory in the Pacific. Then read Shattered Sword and get a fuller picture of events, especially from the Japanese side. Learn about how hubris and dogma led to the Japanese Navy's defeat. Then learn about how saving face led to history not being accurately told by the witnesses on the Japanese side.

All 3 are great books that are well worth your time.

Others that I've enjoyed:

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (near future post-apocalyptic sci-fi).

The non-fiction Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (more WW2 non-fiction, nice details about North Africa through Italy, then France to Germany).

Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham.

Most Secret War by RV Jones (nerdy, funny history of one scientist's world war 2 experience).

The Discworld City Guard books, starting with Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett. Fantasy fiction satire, hilarious and comforting. Highly, highly recommended!!

Peter F Hamilton sci-fi adventure books: Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained are a duo of great space opera stretching across multiple planets and people. Don't spoil yourself by reading any descriptions of Judas Unchained before you read Pandora's Star. Also by the same author, The Night's Dawn Trilogy: The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God. Fantastic big canvas space opera with lots of threads, great world-building, and amazing situations. Both sets of books are highly recommended escapes from reality.
by rankam | 2025-04-07 16:54:55+00:00
To me, it sounds like you need professional experience on your resume so that should be your goal. However, professional experience != a full time software engineer role. Can you find something really small that pays from a freelance site? Maybe it's just a python script that takes 4 hours and pays $10 - but with that you are a professional software engineer. Do you anyone who owns a website for a business? Ask them if you can do some really basic work for $1 - because if you do that, you're a professional software engineer.

Once you have some professional experience on your resume, it should get a little easier - it's still going to take some time and grit, but it should work out.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-07 16:54:55+00:00
Key passages:

> The U.S. and EU came close to scrapping industrial tariffs a decade ago in their discussions of the TTIP — the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership — that was ultimately scuppered by Trump in his first term.

Ha ha ha. Sigh.

> The EU charges average tariffs of just 1.6 percent on U.S. non-agricultural products, on a trade-weighted basis. But it does charge a higher tariff of 10 percent on imported American cars — although the U.S. is the only G7 country that still pays it because TTIP wasn’t concluded.

Ditto.

> Von der Leyen also did not rule out retaliation: “We are also prepared to respond through countermeasures and defend our interests,” she said.

Yeah.

I've read on other sources that some of the EU officials commenting on this emphasize that it's not some new offer, but was already a point for negotiation before Trump's big event last Tuesday, though it's being framed in headlines as if it's new.