MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2025-04-27 18:53:30+00:00
Consider these examples [1]. There's absolutely no way to spin this:

> As an example of the evil nature of Palantir’s work, it appears that Palantir has been working with the Israeli military in so-called ‘targeted killings’. Reports have suggested such that these murders, probably in the thousands or tens of thousands, utilised social media information and cellphone tracking. According to a range of sources, over 150 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza and in numerous cases they appear to have been directly targeted. Using social media information to murder journalists using drone strikes is already dystopic, but this is likely to just be the beginning of the evil Palantir will facilitate.

More on Lavender [2].

[1]: https://politicaleconomist.substack.com/p/palantir-the-world...

[2]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
by mvdtnz | 2025-04-27 18:53:54+00:00
I dealt with this exact issue and went with that exact solution in my browser based geography game[0].

What the author is looking for is administrative divisions and boundaries[1], in particular probably down to level 3 which is the depth my game goes to. These differ in size greatly by country. With admin boundaries you need to accept there is no one-size-fits-all solution and embrace the quirks of the different countries.

For my game I downloaded a complete database of global admin boundaries[2] and imported them into PostgreSQL for lightning fast querying using PostGIS.

[0] https://guesshole.com

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_administrative_divisio...

[2] https://gadm.org/data.html
by toast0 | 2025-04-27 18:54:48+00:00
In the beginning of cell phones, security was too expensive. Telcos also like to do their own things, so GSM encryption wasn't built on best practices. And some countries forbid use of even GSM encryption.

Early mobile phone networks suffered from cloning, so work was done to improve verification of clients, but verifying the network wasn't seen as required. Telcos have been historically light on authentication and verification; so it's not surprising.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-27 18:54:57+00:00
What would those probabilities mean in the context of these modern LLMs? They are basically “try to continue the phrase like a human would” bots. I imagine the question of “how good of an approximation is this to something a human might write” could possibly be answerable. But humans often write things which are false.

The entire universe of information consists of human writing, as far as the training process is concerned. Fictional stories and historical documents are equally “true” in that sense, right?

Hmm, maybe somehow one could score outputs based on whether another contradictory output could be written? But it will have to be a little clever. Maybe somehow rank them by how specific they are? Like, a pair of reasonable contradictory sentences that can be written about the history-book setting indicate some controversy. A pair of contradictory sentences, one about history-book, one about Narnia, each equally real to the training set, but the fact that they contradict one another is not so interesting.
by CaptainFever | 2025-04-27 18:55:37+00:00
I use both and celebrate both.

I suspect it's due to programmers being more familiar with being automated (e.g. compilers, website builders, libraries) as well as a more FLOSS-friendly culture, while art communities have a more "do not steal" culture and are generally more skeptical towards automation.

Therefore the former complains less, and so you perceive it as being less hated.
by timewizard | 2025-04-27 18:55:56+00:00
> This is like saying:

I highly doubt the difference between current staff management and adding this thin layer is equivalent to difference between a bike and a rocket. It's more like saying "we get to the moon just fine, but if we strap this extra booster on, we will get there 2% faster than before but with all kinds of additional risks to the payload!"

> What's wrong with attempting to better understand a given organization

You can alienate your employees and lose your skill base as a result. I'd like to be evaluated based on upon my work and dedication, not what some LLM thinks it sees in my resume. I've worked for my current company for 17 years. My resume contains none of that work or any skills gained in that time.

I also like to take on new challenges and learn new skills. The LLMs "extractions" cannot see this or attend to it.

> Ofc, great managers will try as hard as possible to talk face to face as much as possible.

That's not the problem being discussed here. The question is "can we use technology to make better organizational decisions particularly when it comes to the efficient use of human resources." If I have a bad boss, I'm going to quit, and you'll never even have this opportunity. If I have a good boss, and you interfere with his decisions using LLM driven logic, I'm going to quit, and you're never going to get the benefit of that labor anyways.
by anal_reactor | 2025-04-27 18:56:32+00:00
Social dynamics in the digital world are completely different from anything known to man before the internet. Imagine someone from 2090 coming over and saying "aren't you afraid that your friend will literally take a knife and stab you in the back during your birthday party". Technically he's not wrong, but come on, it doesn't happen really. And then you learn that in 2080's something similar was a major societal problem.
by goku12 | 2025-04-27 18:57:08+00:00
> As a parent of two autistic children, and uncle to many more in my family, I can say that it is clear their minds develop differently, and many high-functioning autists successfully mask it and make it later in life. And these are quite often extremely gifted intellectually and academically, to the degree that while life is a struggle for them socially, they are far better than their 'norm' peers in other areas.

This is one of the most uplifting thing I have heard in a while! Your children and the autistic kids in your family are very lucky to have such insightful, empathetic and caring adults like you around. Your presence make a huge difference in their lives. And as they grow up, they'll gift you a lot of unexpectedly sweet and proud moments. Good Luck!

> And if he thinks he is going to make them victims, I can assure you he will find myself, my family, and the community at large ready and eager to destroy him.

That's a very heartwarming and empowering statement! Some people argue that high-functioning autistics shouldn't talk for low-functioning autistics. But the autistic and the medical communities doesn't hold that distinction. Only 3 levels of disabilities exist. When I see the 'low-functioning' autistic people, I recognize in them the intense versions of the emotions and feelings that I'm all too painfully familiar with. That's why I decided to make an impassioned stance here. Yes! I'm seriously concerned about the safety and welfare of my peers - the only people I could ever understand.

All this dogma, greed and misinformation threatens the lives of millions of kids, a huge number of very innocent individuals and the very roots of the knowledge and profession we held dear throughout our lives. I don't know why some people hold on to false promises and rhetoric. But the final result of that is recorded very clearly in history. If only they did a bit of research on that too. It's very disturbing that many still can't see the very obvious danger signs. However, the stakes are too high to just watch and worry. Now is the time our voices and actions matter!

I'm bowing out of this debate. I have no illusions of being able to break people out of their artificial realities. But I think I made the point I wanted to - to record a sample of the false information about autism out there and its hollowness. Thank you again for being a decent and awesome human being! I hope we will have more allies like you. Thanks!
by xg15 | 2025-04-27 18:57:50+00:00
Weird. Wasn't there a similar post recently about the new Llama 4 having a similar style?

I wonder if this over-the-top style could be a first symptom of overtraining on AI generated training data. It feels a bit like the standard slightly clickbaity social media posting style but drawn up to obnoxious levels.

Maybe instead of spontaneous Carcinisation, we get spontaneous Redditification.
by yorwba | 2025-04-27 18:58:13+00:00
On this list of Chinese cities by population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop... #100 is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiujiang with a total population of 4.6 million, of which 2.8 million live in urban areas and 1.1 million in the metropolitan area, i.e. the fact that cities often administratively subsume neighboring towns is already taken into account.
by dimatura | 2025-04-27 18:59:20+00:00
The "non-intrusive" part is interesting. I've bit the bullet with AI assistance when coding - even when it feels like it gets in the way sometimes, overall I find it a net benefit. But I briefly tried AI in the shell with the warp terminal and found it just too clunky and distracting. I wasn't even interested in the AI features, just wanted to try a fancy new terminal. Not saying warp might not be useful for some people, just wasn't for me. So far I've found explicitly calling for assistance with a CLI command (I've used aichat for this, but there's several out there) to be more useful in those occasional instances where I can't remember some obscure flag combination.
by ujkhsjkdhf234 | 2025-04-27 18:59:25+00:00
This is not entirely right. Palantir is a company that pitches surveillance and AI everywhere in government. From their own product page, they want "AI-Powered automation for every decision." I think this is a poor idea in general but especially in policing and government. Palantir has been caught creating a "pre-crime" algorithm[0], because they seem to have thought Minority Report was an inspiring movie. You can read a former Palantir employee talk about all of the delightfully fun stuff they get involved in like using AI in autonomous warfare[2].

On top of that I have a severe distaste for the founders. Peter Thiel is a psycho who, among other things, is a big fan of Curtis Yarvin and wants to bring monarchy to the US. Creator of smash hits like "I no longer think freedom and democracy are compatible."[1] You may be familiar with his protege, JD Vance. I wouldn't want this person running a police state company. Do not mistake Palantir as Tableau but for government.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...

[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump...

[2] https://zigguratmag.substack.com/p/the-guernica-of-ai-c4b?tr...
by jmyeet | 2025-04-27 19:00:54+00:00
I would encourage anyone to familiarize themselves with the "banality of evil" [1]. Interestingly, there's this quote that's very apropos today:

> “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” she also says, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds”

Anyway, the idea of this is "evil" is an accumulation of small, otherwise inocuous actions.

Consider the recent movie "Zone of Interest" that was set outside Auschwitz and never showed any of the atrocities. The whole point was that even on the steps of mass murder, life still appeared in many ways "normal" [2].

[1]: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/hannah-arendts-less...

[2]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/18/the-zone-of-in...
by no_wizard | 2025-04-27 19:00:56+00:00
> Far better than database per tenant

The better isn’t clear here, why is it better?

Database per tenant - barring configuration errors to a connection string or something along those lines - means you won’t ever accidentally leak over other customers data

With Row level security, as good as it is, there is always a chance of leaking happening, due to bugs, user error or the like

Database per tenant also makes migrations safer, and allows easier versioning of an application, for example if you run a SaaS you may put your V2 application into permanent maintenance mode and allow existing customers to use it in perpetuity, while upgrading customers and new customers are put on the V3 platform. This is infinitely easier in practice when the database is per tenant
by up-n-atom | 2025-04-27 19:01:17+00:00
Proprietary software is a valid point but why did it need to be the cliche of Photoshop? This smells LLM gen. I say that because outside of professionals, no 1 is using Photoshop anymore. Normies are not subscribing for software; Serif Suite and Clip Studio are the defacto today or Procreate, as you’re more than likely to use an iPad.
by nis0s | 2025-04-27 19:01:28+00:00
There seems to be a relationship here, as shown in this paper, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5837358/

I am skeptical of the idea that a CS itself produces any conditions for ASD. But it would make sense that those who would have otherwise died during child birth and survive are now likely to change present health demographics.

Honestly, a lot of autistic people are doing well in life, and in fact many are doing better than their neurotypical peers. Autistic traits need to be understood better because they provide better understanding of human cognition and its functionality.
by homebrewer | 2025-04-27 19:02:42+00:00
SQL 2011 defines temporal tables, which few FOSS databases support. I used it in mariadb:

https://mariadb.com/kb/en/temporal-tables/

and if your schema doesn't change much, it's practically free to implement, much easier and simpler than copypasting audit tables, or relying on codegen to do the same.
by adrian_b | 2025-04-27 19:04:01+00:00
That project is interesting, but it just proves my point, because that is not a software project for some concrete application intended to be run on some embedded computer, but it is a tool chain, i.e. an alternative for commonly used tool chains such as gcc + binutils + newlib.

For its intended purpose, i.e. as what must be added to gcc and binutils for obtaining a complete tool chain usable for the cross-compilation and linking of executable applications for any embedded computer, newlib works fine, with minimal headaches.

If instead of using it as intended, you want to integrate it as a component in a new and different tool chain, then I completely agree with what you have found out, that it is not a good choice.

I have reacted to your first comment because that seemed to imply that newlib is not fit for its purpose of being used in embedded programming applications, which is definitely false.

You have tried to use if for something very different, and in that context you are right, but you should have explained more of that in order to avoid confusions.

Your project seems interesting, but like in most such projects you should add on the initial page some rationale for the existence of the project, i.e. which are the features where it attempts to be different from the better known alternatives based on gcc or clang.

Following the links, one eventually reaches this succinct explanation:

"The Eigen Compiler Suite is a completely self-contained collection of software development tools. It exists to be recognized and adopted as a free development toolchain which is hopefully as useful and easy to use as its source code is intended to be approachable and comprehensible for developers and students wanting to learn, maintain, and customize a complete toolchain."

This does not mention any attempts of being better than alternatives in any direction, except for being much easier to modify if someone desires to implement some kind of compiler/linker customization.

This recommends it mostly for experimental projects, not for production projects. The former are important too, but it is good to know for what it is suitable.
by interroboink | 2025-04-27 19:04:09+00:00
From "Plenty of Room at the Bottom"[1]:

What would happen if I print all this down at the scale we have been discussing? How much space would it take? It would take, of course, the area of about a million pinheads ... All of the information which all of mankind has every recorded in books can be carried around in a pamphlet in your hand — and not written in code, but a simple reproduction of the original pictures, engravings, and everything else on a small scale without loss of resolution.

Need a good magnifying glass, though (:

[1] https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf
by ActorNightly | 2025-04-27 19:04:44+00:00
When talking about Java, the question that anyone should ask is how was log4shell even allowed to happen? Like in what world would giving permission to a logging library to a) fetch code from the internet and b) execute it, by default a good decision? This wasn't a bug, it was an intentional design that passed code reviews.

Java hasn't focused on developing the standard libraries to keep up with the modern world. There is no standard http server or API libraries. A lot of the "standard" libraries in software projects are from 3d party sources like Apache, which obviously can't be trusted if they make decisions like above.

Lombok is still heavily used, and its almost a sin to write getters and setters manually instead of using it, but it works by hacking the AST, and the language maintainers never thought to include that as part of the language features.

Furthermore, the biggest use of java in android app development has shifted to use Kotlin instead, because Kotlin aims to address a lot of the pain points of Java. Yet language maintainers of Java don't seem to care.

So overall, if you look at the java ecosystem, its clear that the people working in it have no connection to use in the real world, and are taking the language into some direction that fits their convoluted ideas of what a language should be.

From a more functional perspective, in the modern age of the cloud, ARM chips, and cheap memory, developer cost outweighs infrastructure cost by orders of magnitude. If you write your service in python for MVP, you end up saving a shitload of time, through things like massive amounts of 3d party libraries, not having to wait for compile step, being able to develop during debugging session, much more flexibility in how you write code, and so on. Then as you move from MVP to a product, its much easier to refactor the code with MyPy type checking, convert collections of functions into Classes if need be, and so on. Finally, with PyPy running your code much faster than than CPython, you still will on the average be slower than Java, but not by much, and the added infra cost will be much less than a single developer salary per month.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-04-27 19:04:54+00:00
Hard to believe this comment could be serious, but nonetheless, for the impartial observers, there is a healthy ecosystem of Common Lisp implementations, from "permissive" open source all the way to (expensive) commercial, proprietary ones.

https://common-lisp.net/implementations

I think a full-featured GPLv3 implementation would be very cool, personally.
by bionhoward | 2025-04-27 19:04:59+00:00
the whole point of AI companies right now is to suck up as much data as possible and figure out what the AI can do with that later.

If, later, that capability level reaches a point where they can take people’s jobs, then the data which noobs PAY to give to AI right now, will absolutely help them do exactly that.

And the paying noobs, agree to the terms, which say they aren’t allowed to use their own chat logs to compete with AI — literally the worst, most retarded deal in history, and millions of idiots think NOT taking it is dumb?

“If you’re not skillmaxxing with ClosedAI hours every day, ngmi” is the manipulation du jour for these assholes
by T3OU-736 | 2025-04-27 19:05:30+00:00
I am assuming/hoping this incorporates something like an nVidia Jetson.

I am, however, quite pessimistic, that this NAS stays ub-enshittificated. (Un-shittified?).

A neat possibility would be to (notwithstandkng the privacy implications) is to use the NAS-level checksumming of files, something like SHA-256 or even MD5, and cross-check with known kaka files to detect backups of infected things.

Buuut, sunce this reminds me of the whole apple CSAM fiasco, so not likely.
by PoignardAzur | 2025-04-27 19:07:08+00:00
I get the point that the author is making, that any given employee's work is more complex and difficult than you might guess from a short summary, but... Well, that's the case for everybody? At the end of the day the company still needs a way to judge how valuable any given employee was.

The article complains that managers end up competing on who plays the calibration game better, yet a lot of suggestions at the end boil down to "managers should play the calibration game harder".

I'm not sure there's a systemic solution to this.
Anomaly detection: business metrics vs. system metrics?
by chipfixer | 2025-04-27 19:08:43+00:00
Recently, I ran into someone at a conference who had a major incident: a config change caused a revenue drop. Their RED/system metrics didn’t catch it because they were all static-threshold alerts and siloed from the business signals, so engineers didn't discover the actual revenue impact until much later.

What may have been helpful is anomaly detection directly on their business metrics — with system metrics helping explain root cause but only when real customer/business impact is detected.

Curious to hear: How much does your org prioritize monitoring business metrics (not just System metrics)? If you do, what tools do you use?
by frogperson | 2025-04-27 19:10:00+00:00
I am 100% sure this us just another bullying tactic to garner favors and support. It's typical mob boss behavior just like the tarrifs. You kiss the ring, or you get nothing. So disgusting and predictable.

The most frustrating part of this situation is that I am not allowed to truly speak my mind about how I feel about all of this. We all just have to silently watch it happen and keep quite and stay civilized.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-27 19:11:10+00:00
Computing history is rife with examples of API designers who get attacked for building walled gardens and denying user power when they ask such questions. There was a time, for example, when "data portability" was widely understood to mean that Facebook should let Google programmatically extract your data and forward it to fourth parties (https://techcrunch.com/2008/05/15/he-said-she-said-in-google...).

Today we know that there's no genuine question of user control here, because virtually every user has a mental model that a "webpage" is something different and much more scope-limited than a "program". I don't expect that steampowered.com should be able to launch the game I just bought, even though that capability is easily available from a similar-looking interface by the same developers I have installed on my computer. In 1995 it wasn't so obvious that people in 2025 would think this way.
by lxgr | 2025-04-27 19:11:11+00:00
Agreed – it's not really a personal concern I have (I have no illusions about the chances that none of the apps I grant location access to are selling it to the highest bidder), but I'm still curious. I can also imagine some legitimate use cases, such as pinging the location of somebody that had an accident and is possibly unable to call 911 themselves.

And same here – I've read a few of the 3GPP specs, but they make legalese sound like plain English, and of course never tell the full story including actual manufacturer decisions.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-04-27 19:11:18+00:00
GPS coordinates do not account for tectonic motion. It is a synthetic spheroidal model that is not fixed to any point on Earth. The meridians are derived from the average motion of many objects, some of which are not on the planetary surface.

The motion of tectonic plates can be calculated relative to this spatial reference system but they are not part of the spatial reference system and would kind of defeat the purpose if they were.