MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rottc0dd | 2025-04-24 12:32:00+00:00
You are right. I should have looked it up.

> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.

> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-24 12:32:25+00:00
It's also particularly awkward to land on, as it has just enough atmosphere to be annoying, but not enough to be particularly helpful. Most Mars landings have involved some sort of ridiculous Rube Goldberg machine or other (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_crane_(landing_system) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Pathfinder#Entry,_descent... ) which would not be viable for humans (and were only arguably viable for the probes they were used for; the risk of failure was high).
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-24 12:32:32+00:00
Porridge with prunes, pears and cinnamon in the winter.

Fresh fruit or high-protein granola with kefir, fruit and a tiny drizzle of honey in the Summer.

Sometimes it'll be very high on protein, but also on fats: bacon (back, UK-style), sausage and egg.

The key is to get away from ultra-processed food, and I'm Type 2 diabetic so I want to reduce the amount of sugar and carbs I have. For me, I normally feel fructose > lactose > carbs > sucrose > desxtrose, and often replace lactose (dairy) with non-dairy equivalents, or make sure it has some other benefit (like kefir).

I want to make sure I feel full through to lunchtime, so protein is useful. I don't mind some carbs, if it means I have something I enjoy and don't feel I need to snack mid-morning.

TLDR: I avoid breakfast cereals (other than some high-protein granolas), add fruits like prunes, pears, maybe banana, and I don't have bread or other ultra-processed foods.
by motorest | 2025-04-24 12:32:33+00:00
> I immediately wondered if this individual had a family, friends. (...)

The saddest thing I ever witnessed in a FANG was a participant of one of those workplace empowerment events. Even though her interview was focused on her bending over backwards to praise their employer's health insurance, the devil was in the details.

The interviewee was praising her employer for providing a nice health insurance, but she mentioned as side-notes that throughout her career she felt so much pressure to perform that she postponed having children until a point where her fertility doctor warned her that she might risk not be able to have children. When she finally felt her job was secured, she decided to not focus on her career anymore and finally went ahead with having children. Except that she was already in her 40s. She had to undergo a couple of years worth of fertility treatments until she finally managed to get pregnant, which was supposedly the focus of her intervention because her employer was so awesome for allowing her to seek medical treatments.

Everyone decides what's best for themselves, but being robbed of having children because you want to bend over backwards for your employer sounds like an awful tradeoff.
by pdimitar | 2025-04-24 12:33:35+00:00
A super necessary context here is that I barely use LLM at all still. Maybe I should have said so but I figured that too much nuance would ruin a top-level comment and mostly casually commented on a tradeoff of using or not using LLMs.

Where I use LLMs:

1. Super boring and annoying tasks. Yes, my prompts for those include various coding style instructions, requests for small clarifying comments where the goal of the code is not obvious, tests. So, no OSS license restrictions. Libraries I specify most of the times I used LLMs (and only once did I ask it to suggest a library). Logging and telemetry I add myself. So long story short, I use the LLM to show me a draft of a solution and then mercilessly refactor it to match my practices and guidelines. I don't do 50 exchanges out of laziness, no.

2. Tasks where my expertise is lacking. I recently used an LLM to help me with making a `.clone()`-heavy Rust code to become nearly zero-copy for performance reasons -- it is a code on a hot path. As much as I love Rust and I am fairly good at it (realistically I'm IMO at 7.5 / 10), all the lifetimes and zero-copy semantics I still don't know yet. A long session with an LLM after, I emerged both better educated and with a faster code. IMO a win-win.
by pc86 | 2025-04-24 12:33:45+00:00
Well the analogy falls apart because (among many, many other reasons) the people eating at Michelin rated restaurants, especially 3-star, are completely insensitive to the price. It will cost whatever it costs and there will still be a long wait to get a table, if you even can.

So rather than pretending we're talking about truffles, let's just talk about fonts directly without strained analogies. Fonts, which the majority of people don't even recognize. 90% of people don't even know what a foundry is. Your average person can't tell the difference between any two fonts if they're both sans-serif or serif.
by _1tem | 2025-04-24 12:34:24+00:00
We all have personal quirks which would appear silly if publicly known. But most of us are not billionares, so these quirks do not come to light, or do not seem that strange in ordinary people. "Not wanting to lose at board games" is actually quite a mild personal quirk compared to some of the things I know about myself or about my close friends. I know a guy who spends 20 minutes picking out tomatoes.
by DrillShopper | 2025-04-24 12:34:38+00:00
> But none of those make him as much money as Tesla which is in the dumps with all the shenanigans.

Give Musk a year or two out of DOGE and it won't matter - Tesla will be back up after Musk isn't in the government spotlight. The voters in the US (who by and large are good little consumers) have the memory of a goldfish for things like this.

You can't even get progressives to not eat at Chick-fil-A despite their founders blantent homophobia. This incident is not going to keep people from buying Tesla in the long run.
by paulcole | 2025-04-24 12:34:44+00:00
Your trees are not someone else’s trees.

Is someone who climbs snowy mountains for a living (but who loves working on spreadsheets) trading too much of their one lifetime for money?

Different things enrich different people’s lives.

Can you not imagine that what you call “work” is the experience that gives this person enrichment?

To be honest from what I can see it seems like you are the person with a narrow worldview.
by hylaride | 2025-04-24 12:34:57+00:00
> You are being deliberately obtuse

You’re giving vague responses with no data to back it up, so that’s a rude statement.

> The argument is that you cannot make a apples-to-apples dollars-to-dollar price comparison to see how much it will cost your country to outsource production of hardware

Yes you can. The F-35 flyway costs ($82m) are similar to the Saab Gripen ($85m) despite the F-35 being superior in almost every way (the one notable exception being the Gripen is good at flying off of more rustic environments). The simple reason is scale. There are similar numbers for French planes and they’re finally giving up for their next-gen planes and working with the rest of Europe. Sweden is all but throwing in the towel going forwards, too.

You’re essentially saying Canada should pay more for less to support jobs and expertise that will produce less and cost more.

Canada has been a net contributor in the F-35 program (as have most of the other countries that have purchased it).

> With the benifit of hindsight, we know that Diefenbaker's decision spelled the death of Canada's aerospace industry

Canada has the third largest aerospace industry after the EU and USA (though we go toe to toe with Brazil). Your argument is invalid.

> The cost to Canada of buying American jets was considerably more than the sticker price of those jets

This is not true, though the numbers are fuzzy depending on if one includes R&D and number of planes built - so we could spend all day arguing on this. But the engines were languishing in development hell, so we ultimately didn’t know what the final bill would have been (the TV series show them as “this close” to being done, but that wasn’t the case in real life).

The Avro arrow was a really good long range interceptor, but that was about it. The CBC miniseries made it out to be this amazing plane that was better at everything, which it was not. The Voodoo that was bought instead was arguably inferior in policing Canada’s north, but was much better suited for all the other roles the Air Force participated in, especially European NATO commitments. We would have had to buy another plane anyways, but the one plane already stretched Canada’s resources. We’re just not big enough to do that.

> Their engineers moved to America or left their careers behind. The cost to Canada of buying American jets was considerably more than the sticker price of those jets

There absolutely was a brain drain to the US for many of the engineers. As I mentioned in another post, cancelling the Arrow was arguably the right decision for the wrong reasons, but because it was done for the wrong reasons there wasn’t any thought put through on focusing on another project. A huge chunk of the blame lies with the executives at avro canada, who over-extended trying to do everything (plane, engine, etc) and then got burned playing with politics.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-04-24 12:35:08+00:00
Maybe my intuition is wrong, but to me this sounds like a violation of the principle of least power.

"Soft deletes" is just a name for a regular write operation, with specific semantics.

Adding a layer of magic to the DB for this doesn't seem right to me.

And applications could have many different requirements for soft deletes, like the article points out. For example, the simplest version would be just a boolean "deleted" column, but it could also be "deleted_at", "deleted_by", etc.

All of these cases require an bunch of code changes anyway, and the more complex ones could interfere with an implementation of this feature at the database level: such a transparent implementation couldn't access app-specific concerns such as user data, for example.

Adding soft deletes to a legacy app that knows nothing about it would only work for a boolean flag and a maybe date-time value, unless the DBMS would also offer triggers for soft deletes etc?

Seems to me to that this capability would make a DBMS much more complicated.
by preommr | 2025-04-24 12:35:14+00:00
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?

All the other comments are about Zuckerberg being an out-of-touch egomaniac, but I think this is a reflection of people.

We want our leaders to be infaliable and we use the stupidest metrics to judge people. Remember how Ed miliband eating a sandwich became a scandal? For every one person that would see losing as not a big deal, there's like ten people that will think "this guy can't win a game of settlers of Catan, and he's running the company???".

I am reminded of that joe rogan clip where he's just in awe of Elon Musk because of his Diablo rankings or something. People feed into the mythology.

It's all stupid and insane, but I don't see how anyone can look at the current state of politics or the stock market and not say that the world is full of crazy things that just run on vibes.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-24 12:35:18+00:00
> Maybe with big enough batteries that can capture this energy, it could become a viable solution?

No, it could not. The problem is that lighning strikes are so short, that their middling amount of energy still results in an insane amount of electrical power (for a very short time). And electrical power is the primary driver of cost in most components here.

Capturing lighning is like building literally a hundred electrical substations just to run them for 50 microseconds a day, 10 days per year. Our planet simply does not have the lighning density for this to ever work out.

All that (very expensive!) capture infrastructure would basically sit uselessly for almost all the time (even in the middle of a lightning storm!).
by kibwen | 2025-04-24 12:35:25+00:00
> Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.

There are far, far fewer of these people than you think. Lance Armstrong was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Barry Bonds was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Tom Brady was the best, and he cheated to win anyway.
by mcphage | 2025-04-24 12:35:47+00:00
> Sophie Lloyd says she disguised herself as a man to fool examiners into letting her join the elite society in 1991, at a time female magicians were not allowed to be members.

> When the Circle announced it was permitting women to join later that year, Ms Lloyd revealed her deception, prompting the society to expel her at the very same meeting it admitted its first female magicians.

> But the Magic Circle did not take kindly to the news. The duo got a letter saying that Raymond had been expelled, and in October 1991, at the first meeting accepting women into the society, Ms Lloyd was kicked out.

Interesting—there was a fantasy novel with much the same premise that came out in early 1992—The Lark and the Wren. Just with bards, instead of magicians. I wonder if these real events were an inspiration?
by tialaramex | 2025-04-24 12:36:15+00:00
Some ETFs can't go negative because they're moving say, stock in oil refiners, oil research, etc. and they've got a model to try to follow the motion of oil futures based on investments in those stocks. So for them this sort of chaos is not good of course, but they don't have scary red numbers everywhere and people who might jump out of a window.

In some cases there is basically a bucket shop (hopefully not literally, those are illegal) and so you're betting against somebody with lots of capital, but in that scenario it can definitely go very bad and it's important to read your fine print. I believe in 2020 some funds pointed out that in their fine print it said they get to choose not to follow a month's oil delivery if they need to, so, you expected $15M for the June oil because it went negative as you'd hoped, but too bad we've decided to roll that over to July oil, and that's going to lose you money as you have to wait a month longer and get worse results.

That sort of thing is obviously infuriating for an investor, but as with gambling firms who won't pay (and this happens a lot if you win serious money gambling, e.g. Oops, when you gave us $100 we forgot to ask for valid ID, but now that we owe you $150 000 because you got lucky we've remembered - without ID actually the bet was illegal, so here's the $100 back and no hard feelings) they get a reputation for not paying and that does eventually hurt them.
by KeithBrink | 2025-04-24 12:36:23+00:00
I was interested in this anecdote about the board games, but it seems like there's at least some dispute about how true or inflated this story is:

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-board-game-c...

I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly being watched and evaluated.

Given the inevitability of those bad moments being observed and reported, I don't think it's a good foundation for evaluating someone's character. In this case, it's mostly useful for confirming an already negative point of view.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-24 12:37:06+00:00
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?

I don't think _all_ the superrich _are_ this insecure. Like, the obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are Trump (golf, in particular), Musk (video game nonsense), Zuck (this). But all three of those are very obviously fucked-up, socially maladjusted people in _other_ ways, too. Potentially the issue is more that being very rich allowed them to _get away_ with this behaviour; poor weirdos have more incentive to suppress it because people will only accept it from rich weirdos.

Though the phenomenon of "adult manbaby gets upset when not allowed to win game (especially by his partner)" is _absolutely_ out there, even for non-absurdly-rich people; see any subreddit about relationships for examples.
by dangus | 2025-04-24 12:37:55+00:00
1. Deep Research (if you are talking about the OpenAI product) is part of the base AI product. So that means that everything building on top of that is still a wrapper. In other words, nobody besides the people making base AI technology is adding any value. An analogy to how pathetic the AI market is would be if during the SaaS revolution everyone just didn’t need to buy any applications and directly used AWS PaaS products like RDS directly with very similar results compared to buying SaaS software. OpenAI/Gemini/Claude/etc are basically as good as a full blown application that leverage their technology and there’s very limited need to buy wrappers that go around them.

2. Image/video creation is cool but what value is it delivering so far? Saving me a couple of bucks that I would be spending on Fiverr for a rough and dirty logo that isn’t suitable for professional use? Graphic designers are already some of the lowest paid employees at your company so “almost replacing them but not really” isn’t a very exciting business case to me. I would also argue that image generation isn’t even as valuable as the preceding technology, image recognition. The biggest positive impact I’ve seen involves GPU performance for video games (DLSS/FSR upscaling and frame generation).

3. Medical applications are the most exciting application of AI and ML. This example is something that demonstrates what I mean with my argument: the normal steady pace of AI innovation has been “disrupted” by LLMs that have added unjustified hype and investment to the space. Nobody was so unreasonably hyped up about AI until it was packaged as something you can chat with since finance bro investors can understand that, but medical applications of neural networks have been developing since long before ChatGPT hit the scene. The current market is just a fever dream of crappy LLM wrappers getting outsized attention.
by pc86 | 2025-04-24 12:38:05+00:00
Maybe "this font is offensively priced to the point where I immediately think the person selling it is a criminal using this for money laundering, or clinically insane" and "it's hard to sell enough fonts to live off of" are related?

Maybe if charlatans didn't say with a straight face that a font should be sold on a subscription model they'd sell more? Maybe if it didn't cost as much as a car they'd sell more?
by jerrygoyal | 2025-04-24 12:38:20+00:00
Hey, I've built one of the most popular AI Chrome extensions for generating replies on Gmail. Although I provide various writing tones and offer better model choices (Gemini 2.5, Sonnet 3.7), I still get user feedback that the AI doesn't capture their style. Inspired by your article, I'm working on a way to let users provide a system prompt. Additionally, I'm considering allowing users to tag some emails to help teach the AI their writing style. I'm confident this will solve the style issue. I'd love to hear from others if there's an even better approach.

P.S. Here's the Chrome extension: https://chatgptwriter.ai
by NoboruWataya | 2025-04-24 12:38:58+00:00
Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Granted I don't send them very often but I wouldn't think much of it if I had to. But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason to send a letter (or, it seems, write an address by hand).
by ang_cire | 2025-04-24 12:39:29+00:00
This is really interesting to me.

Do you love coding, or do you love creating programs?

It seems like the latter given your metaphor being a microphone to make you seem like you could sing well, i.e. wanting the end state itself rather than the achievement via the process.

"wanted to sound like him" vs "wanted to sing like him"
by pdimitar | 2025-04-24 12:39:32+00:00
Then don't use it? Nobody is making you.

I am also barely using LLMs at the moment. Even 10% of the time would be generous.

What I was saying is that I have tried different ways of interacting with LLMs and was happy to discover that the way I describe stuff to another senior dev actually works quite fine with an LLM. So I stuck to that.

Again, if an LLM is not up to your task, don't waste your time with it. I am not advocating for "forget everything you knew and just go ask Mr. AI". I am advocating for enabling and productivity-boosting. Some tasks I hate, for some I lack the deeper expertise, others are just verbose and require a ton of typing. If you can prompt the LLM well and vet the code yourself after (something many commenters here deliberately omit so they can happily tear down their straw man) then the LLM will be a net positive.

It's one more tool in the box. That's all there is to it really. No idea why people get so polarizing.
by jmye | 2025-04-24 12:39:36+00:00
> You personally know the conditions?

You think I can only understand the conditions if.. what? I've directly worked at the factory? Published a peer-reviewed study?

> You know that the workers would be better off not having the option of working in the Zara factory?

That’s not the only other option and presenting it that way is intentionally dishonest.

This entire line of thinking, as presented, is absolute sophism and bad faith.
by motorest | 2025-04-24 12:39:54+00:00
> If you try to redact a part of the past, it can also affect the present, as any time traveler knows.

That's not how snapshots work. You record the state of your system at a point in time, and then you keep all events that occurred after that point. This means you retain the ability to rebuild the current state from that snapshot by replaying all events. I.e., event sourcing's happy flow.

> User B was able to send a message to user C, and thus start a long thread, because user A had introduced them. With user A removed, the message replay chokes at the attempt of B to communicate with C.

Not really. That's just your best attempt at reasoning how the system could work. In the meantime, depending on whether you have a hard requirement on retaining messages from removed users you can either keep them assigned to a deleted user or replace them by deleted messages. This is not a problem caused by event sourcing; it's a problem caused by failing to design a system that meets it's requirements.
by netsharc | 2025-04-24 12:40:21+00:00
I suppose for a few billion dollars (or even a smaller sum), I'd let a lot of things happen to me.

Well OK, the difference would be, would it be just affecting me, or my daughter (already quite gross), or affecting the lives and freedom of millions of exiled Uyghurs, Tibetans and other dissidents around the world by creating a spying apparatus against them.

There's also the difference that the few billion dollars being a sum of money I don't already have, compared to Zuck already having dozens, and wanting another few...