MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by red-iron-pine | 2025-04-17 15:59:43+00:00
* entirely self driven, which is hard for a lot of necessary but often dry courses

* taught mostly via online videos; impossible to ask questions on the spot or explore concepts

* interaction with peers and professors is almost entirely forced or inorganic and often terrible

* limited networking options; no real community; hard to build bridges and get references when your professor is an automated test system (i.e. Canvas, et al)

* often limited screening; U Phoenix or WGU takes anyone, and now I have 100+ semi-literate applicants who somehow pulled a 3.3 via online schools blowing up my applications

* difficult to assess value proposition; you generally need to register to take part, while I can just drive to VA Tech or Dartmouth or even the Naval Academy and walk around and see (mostly) what it's like
by xnx | 2025-04-17 16:01:00+00:00
Can't speak for anyone else, but my own AI chat history has low/no relevance to the quality of response to the next question I ask. This is not a moat any more than search history is.

My email and work documents are obviously important if I'm querying for information about them, but that is self evident and also not a moat (I could grant another tool access to these things).

Computational efficiency is a moat. If Google can provide an AI response for $0.05 of infrastructure and electricity, but it takes OpenAI $0.57, that's bad news for OpenAI.
by Asraelite | 2025-04-17 16:01:19+00:00
How true what I said is depends on the domain. It is less applicable to subjects which involve simple facts with lots of rote memorization, and more applicable to subjects with difficult to grasp concepts.

You are comparing a subject near one of the spectrum (learning a language) to one that is probably as far as you can get to the other end of the spectrum (learning mathematics).
by Neywiny | 2025-04-17 16:01:39+00:00
That's the extent of my understanding of the article but keep in mind Microsoft, maker and direct distributor of Windows Server, also fully owns and operates Azure. So, I believe it's the first option, it's a direct discount. They could even give it away for free. Or pay you to use it. It's their product, they can charge whatever they want. AWS is Amazon (Web Services) and is a competitor to Azure. Microsoft has no incentive to have people who pay Amazon for servers instead of Microsoft to get cheaper software.

Your second option is actually a continuation in a way of the first. Likely the marketers did the math on what they need to charge to keep Server afloat. Then, when Azure came in, they did more math to work out the minimum amount they could tolerate where the hosting fees can make up the difference. It's actually a very smart move and makes perfect sense. Like cheap printers expensive ink. Make the upfront (OS license) low, recurring (server hosting) high. Seen across all industries since the dawn of time.

My guess is that people aren't willingly choosing to run Windows and complaining it's expensive on AWS, but rather are needing to support software that can only run in Windows Server (I think outlook exchange servers are like this?), and feel like they'd rather be on AWS instead of Azure if not for the cost.
by jajuuka | 2025-04-17 16:02:27+00:00
TV, video games and rock and roll music is just as ubiquitous as TikTok. All of these things are on the same mobile device. They are also designed for compulsory use and can expose them to harmful material as well. Nobody writes a song you only want to listen to once or a game you only play for 10 minutes then never again.

This type of hyper fixation on TikTok is pop science and self soothing. It springs from the generational anxiety that the kids are not okay and something must be wrong with them. TikTok can be that boogey man for boomers, gen x and millennials. Same as older generations felt about TV, video games, rock and roll music, and D&D.
by keiferski | 2025-04-17 16:02:55+00:00
Absolutely, to the point where I don’t know if I’d use AI tools at all without memory. It is critical for working on long-term projects whose complexity I don’t want to repeat every time I ask a question or explore an idea.

But I am using ChatGpt mostly as a way to flesh out ideas, question my assumptions, and do similar things, so YMMV.
by Teever | 2025-04-17 16:03:11+00:00
You misunderstand.

I am concerned that the United States does not have the industrial capacity or institutional knowledge to make relatively simple but essential things for war.

In a protracted conflict with China will the US have the industrial capacity to produce enough ammunition? Does the US have a sufficient stockpile of ammunition to buy enough time to scale up the industrial capacity to manufacture more ammunition? Are there enough skilled people in the US who can teach more people to become skilled in this endeavour in time?

Does the US even have enough industrial capacity to produce enough iron, aluminum, nickel, copper and other such things to do this?
by netsharc | 2025-04-17 16:03:50+00:00
The FBI has been doing a lot of prodding people to say they hate the country, and then telling them to do a bombing, and then providing them with a (fake) bomb, and then telling the public "We caught another terrorist!": https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/07/21/illusion-justice/human...

Also reminds me of the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/02/gretchen-whitmer...
by joncrane | 2025-04-17 16:04:35+00:00
This is interesting because about 20 or so years ago when I was super into bodybuilding, you couldn't talk about a "cycle" on a bodybuilding forum without talking about a "post cycle protocol."

I know that's different than permanent TRT but I feel like you couldn't get very far researching that stuff without understanding that you natural test production (and sperm production) would get "shut down" as soon as you started adding exogenous androgens.
by spacechild1 | 2025-04-17 16:04:49+00:00
Yes, yes, yes! There is no way my 5 year old daughter gets access to apps like YouTube. Occassionally, I let her use a drawing app or we watch some photos or music videos together, but that's about it regarding mobile devices. She may watch kids shows/movies on DVD while I'm preparing dinner, but not more than 30 minutes.

She spends her time with toys, puzzles, drawing, painting, crafting, Legos, books, playing outside, playing with friends, playing with her little brother, etc. She can easily do Origamis for one hour. I hope I can sustain this as long as possible. I know it will get harder and harder once she goes to school.
by xorcist | 2025-04-17 16:05:45+00:00
Not only would that set a questionable precedent if users learn to casually add new trust roots, it would also need support for new certificate extensions to limit validity to that device only. It's far from obvious that would be a net gain for Internet security in general.

It might be easier to extend the URL format with support for certificate fingerprints. It would only require support in web browsers, which are updated much faster than operating systems. It could also be made in a backwards compatible way, for example by extending the username syntax. That way old browsers would continue to show the warning and new browsers would accept the self signed URL format in a secure way.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-17 16:06:04+00:00
> In the sense of the Sherman Act [...]

> This isn't what Google does [...]

Odd, then, that this is the second case within a year where Google has been found, in fact, to have violated the Sherman Act. This suggests that your description of what the Sherman Act means, or of what Google does (or both) are wrong in significant ways.
by nmilo | 2025-04-17 16:06:10+00:00
Isn't this NP-complete? The "solution" here would be the steps to take in the path which can be found by brute-force

Wikipedia:

> 2. When the answer is "yes", this can be demonstrated through the existence of a short (polynomial length) solution.

> 3. The correctness of each solution can be verified quickly (namely, in polynomial time) and a brute-force search algorithm can find a solution by trying all possible solutions.
by cynicalpeace | 2025-04-17 16:06:12+00:00
Yes, you should prohibit it.

You should have never introduced them to it in the first place.

Not trying to be mean- just trying to be frank.

Our kids get almost no screen time. We watch a movie once a week as a family. That's it. We have no problems because we have never introduced screens to them beyond that.

Our kids like playing outside.
by ogogmad | 2025-04-17 16:06:14+00:00
Is the problem mentioned in the article equivalent to deciding whether there exists a solution to a system of linear equations in the positive integers?

I think no, because the vector additions are considered in sequence, and at no point are you allowed to leave the positive quadrant.

[Edit] Yeah, it's more than just solving positive integer linear systems: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_addition_system
by pdimitar | 2025-04-17 16:06:15+00:00
I was in a co-dependent relationship as well. I have to admit it was extremely uncomfortable to "part ways".

> * I envy your brain's ability to excise editor-induced trauma.*

That's a really funny way of putting it, thanks. I am simply one of the people who never truly settles and if something irks me for long enough, I ultimately cut the toxic element. And yeah it's often painful.

But that also gave me my amazing wife. If I stuck with my toxic ex I would be absolutely nowhere in life right now.
by burningChrome | 2025-04-17 16:06:21+00:00
Even worse, when the local exchange carriers were renting their infrastructure and trying to compete on the thinnest of margins, it allowed the baby bells to see who could survive and who couldn't. Those who didn't survive went under. The successful smaller CLEC's, were then bought by the baby bells for their customers.

They essentially created a test market for their competitors, then simply acquired the ones who presented any kind of competition or had decent enough management to properly manage the very thin margins they were working at.

So yeah, even when the govt thought they had leveled the playing field and allowed competition, all it did was give those baby bell companies another competitive advantage.
by taeric | 2025-04-17 16:06:29+00:00
Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) were not really a secret. And they often have many many tricks that we are constantly relearning. Some of this relearning, of course, is by design. A lot of what they do are things we teach. How to calculate different functions and such. Repeated squares and such are fun topics.

A lot of the current new set of learning is that we have the compute power to do these things in more places. It is also something that has been long done in expensive environments that many of us just don't have access to.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-17 16:06:31+00:00
The consumer harm standard is an outgrowth of the work of Robert Bork, who was Solicitor General for Nixon and Ford, respectively.

It was not established by legislation but rather as a matter of conservative legal doctrine. Before Bork the commonly held evaluation standard was based on the Rule Of Reason.

The Sherman Antitrust Act didn’t establish any guidelines for how it was suppose to be interpreted (the whole thing is only a few pages in length) and the Clayton Act only expanded upon what actions could be considered as part of an Anti trust case.

The consumer welfare standard has no basis in legislation, only legal doctrine.

It’s unfortunate we haven’t codified anything more concrete, as the consumer welfare standard has a number of flaws, as admittedly did prior legal doctrine.

The Rule of Reason was more rigorous, though not flawless, as far as market competition goes though, my view is it is a better legal doctrine overall and could be updated to better address todays and future concerns, particularly with digital goods and technology.
by jt2190 | 2025-04-17 16:06:33+00:00
Yeah I’m listening to a legal analyst on Bloomberg radio and there’s a lot of detail that’s getting lost under the headline. It’s not yet even clear yet that Google would need to divest from anything in order to address this.

Bloomberg Radio April 17 2025: https://www.youtube.com/live/iEpJwprxDdk?si=9WaFIJENUwyIJvpk
by cedilla | 2025-04-17 16:06:35+00:00
The only reason why we can't out sentient protons folded out of 28 microdimensions into our 3 macrodimensions is the same reason we can't rule out that our universe is actually the works of a giant hand puppet player called Zquaarx.

The problem is just - if any of what happens in 3BP was to actually happen, we would not have to be a little wrong (like Newton was in regard to celestial mechanics) but so wrong that it doesn't even make sense to apply what we know at all.

This is, by the way, the exact point of the first part of the first book: physicists discover that all off the known physics are completely wrong.
by DrillShopper | 2025-04-17 16:06:50+00:00
The real reason that tobacco advertising ended on television is the fairness doctrine.

After the FCC agreed that the fairness doctrine applied here every station was required to run one PSA for every 10 tobacco ads. The industry, realizing that nobody would stop advertising without being forced to, actually lobbied Congress for the passage of the law banning it. One reason total revenue went up was that stations were no longer required to run anti-smoking PSAs.
by gruez | 2025-04-17 16:07:07+00:00
>Now the government is rolling out fully-automated entrapment bots.

Are we reading the same article? Hand wringing about slippery slopes aside, I skimmed the article and the actual messages that the AI sent are pretty benign. For instance, the "jason" persona seems to be only asking/answering biographical questions. The messages sent by the pimp persona encourages the sex worker to collect what her clients owe her. None of the messages show the AI radicalizing a college student activist into burning down a storefront or whatever.
by hn_acker | 2025-04-17 16:07:09+00:00
> It reminds me of Plato's Apology. It is the dialogue where Socrates is on trial for corrupting the youth.

Plato's Apology was not meant to be a wholly accurate account [1]. It's a partially fictional, philosophical account meant to demonstrate Socrates' intended message. But I digress.

> The end result is the citizens of Athens convict him and his options are to drink hemlock poison or ostracization.

My understanding is that Socrates chose death where he had the option of requesting legal exile, which in the context of "cancel culture" is not nearly the same as social ostracization.

As for why Socrates would choose death, a superficial search gave me possible explanations (e.g. "death is not so bad" but more formal [2] or moral integrity toward family/friends [3]) that didn't center on the personal suffering or cruelty of exile or ostracization. I would add "moral integrity toward sticking to the truth" as another possible explanation (though I'm not entirely sympathetic to choosing suicide for any of these explanations).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apology_(Plato)#The_text_of_Ap...

[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-classical-...

[3] https://www.britannica.com/question/Why-didnt-Socrates-try-t...
by photonthug | 2025-04-17 16:07:19+00:00
It sounds like you're agreeing that context matters and just underlining my point for me. Comparing chemical poisons to media is every bit as ridiculous as comparing pre-algorithmic media to social media.. I think everyone who is interested in serious conversation with nuance already knows that.

Forgetting the adults in the room who still want to lean into all kinds of disingenuous what-aboutism for a moment, and just considering kids who are understandably self-interested in defense of their addictions.. really now. How could a generation of people who grew up wanting to be influencers actually be ignorant of the effectiveness of algorithmic manipulation? It's a contradiction. So why the insistence on some absurd comparison to old media? I'm all for nuance but there's not much of that to be had. I'd settle for a little reflection, sincerity, and logical consistency.
by ionwake | 2025-04-17 16:07:20+00:00
Sorry for the noob question but I think finally someone in this thread can answer this for me. Sometimes when I see a youtube short video it looks like its HDR is whacked up by like 500% as per the image in this page, but Im confused how this could be done. Is video processing on the video before it is uploaded somehow giving it some sort of encoding which chrome just wacks up? Or is it the hardware doing it and encoding it a certain way?

I am not talking about a slight brightness increase, I am talking Ill be scrolling youtube and suddenly this video is like a portal into another dimension its so bright.

Can anyone explain how its done?
by vonmoltke | 2025-04-17 16:07:52+00:00
> The US hasn't declared a war since WWII since executive privilege allows the President to pursue war without Congress declaring war.

That's not correct. Congress no longer passes declarations of war, it passes authorizations of the use of military force (AUMF). The change was made starting in Vietnam because a declaration of war can only target a recognized sovereign nation, while an AUMF can target any state or non-state actor. The President is still heavily restricted from employing the US military without an AUMF.

I think the confusion about this stems from Congress having passed several, a couple of which are pretty broad, and never repealing them. This has allowed various Presidents to use one of the active AUMFs to justify actions, but for those who don't know or pay attention to the details it seems like the President is going around Congress.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-17 16:08:40+00:00
>I have sympathy for people because I, too, found it hard to eat healthy and exercise enough when I was an executive with an 11 hour work day

So you were overweight and/or ate poorly..But you wanted to be healthy?

This analogy, along with the drug addict one, doesn't work because 1. They don't believe they are doing something wrong 2. Aren't trying to fix the issue.

>nuanced

Then let's get deeper here. Offer up an argument with some nuance. My viewpoint isn't (I hope) contingent on ignoring the complexities of the situation
by aaronbaugher | 2025-04-17 16:08:49+00:00
Yes, that's big. When we have a family reunion, outdoors in a park, half the family (and all the kids) are staring at their phones, effectively alone. That didn't really exist even 10 years ago. We had phones and social media then, but only the most addicted needed to be active on them so consistently like that.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-17 16:09:13+00:00
Testicular atrophy and HPT axis suppression is a thoroughly documented side effect of TRT and steroids. Even beginner bodybuilders know that taking steroids will crush their natural testosterone production. They can kind of bring it back by taking short courses and using certain medications after the cycle, but most discover that some permanent damage is being done with each cycle.

There are two problems with framing it as an infertility problem:

1 - It reduces fertility but many users retain some fertility. The bigger problem for most is that natural testosterone production won't come back to the same level if they ever discontinue, so they're on it for life. Managing testosterone injections every week or multiple times per week for the rest of your life is doable but a pain, especially if you have to travel or you're not the best at keeping up with prescriptions. There are also ups and downs and side effects that come from artificial testosterone dosing. Many people are surprised to discover that after the first year or two they don't feel "great" any more and it's just back to where they started, but with a lifetime dependency now. Others get serious side effects like Gynecomastia (breast growth in men, possibly requiring surgery) or secondary hormonal alterations that negatively impact mood, cognition, or libido.

2 - Many young men in their 20s or even teens see infertility as a positive rather than a negative. It's very common for people of this age to think they've made up their mind for life, but they have yet to even have a serious relationship or even know any peers with kids. People who work in fertility fields are starting to see a lot of men who went into TRT or steroids when they were young because they thought the consequences would never be a problem for them.

> Plenty of those "alpha male" guys on social media are shooting blanks.

Honestly, they don't care. I skim the testosterone subreddits occasionally and many people brag and joke about how small their testicles are.

It's crazy to me to see this shift happening. TRT clinics that advertise on the radio, TikTok, and everywhere else will entice people to come in for "free tests" but the trick is that it doesn't matter what your numbers come back as, they'll always find a way to prescribe you TRT because it's easy recurring revenue for them with lifelong dependence attached.
by doesnotexist | 2025-04-17 16:10:06+00:00
Rodney Brook's keynote at Stanford HAI earlier this month.

Some interesting points right at the beginning relevant to recent on-stage demos by companies including like Nvidia and Tesla.

- Product lifecycle has a realistic timeline on order of decades going from research lab demo to a realized commercial product. He first saw demos of driving cars arriving in 1979, yet we still don't have Full Self Driving in 2025.

- @2:35 "Humanoids they're everywhere and what is it doing. The form of a humanoid is promising that it's going to be able to do everything that a human can do. And it completely fools VCs. A lot of people's pension funds are going into all these robots and its not going to end so well."

Rodney Brooks states he's built 4,500 humanoid robots in his lab.
by bdcravens | 2025-04-17 16:10:18+00:00
Large companies, even monopolies, aren't the problem. Unfair leverage to suppress competition is. Those products without the subsidizing revenue of ads, and ads without the information flows of those products, is the goal.

Who gets what part of the company is the wrong question to ask. The org chart would get split along those business units. In all likelihood, the company called "Google" would be the software side, since that's where search lives.
by discardedrefuse | 2025-04-17 16:10:24+00:00
It has less to do with the availability of portable audio tech and more to do with the insane amount of media people feel compelled to consume.

Back then, if you rocked a Walkman, you carried 1 tape (about 60 minutes of music) that you listened to on repeat all day. That's very different from today's never ending stream of new media. A more interesting discussion would be about how we interact with media today vs back then.
by cynicalpeace | 2025-04-17 16:10:35+00:00
To all the people saying- "but there are benefits!":

Well of course, numbnuts, or else no one would use this stuff.

There are benefits to caffeine, nicotine and other drugs that we still agree we shouldn't expose to children.

Because the harms outweigh the benefits!

Simply don't give your kids a screen. No iPad, no iPhone, no video games, no nothing until they reach a more appropriate age.

What that age is might vary from child to child, but it's certainly not 3 years old!
by codingdave | 2025-04-17 16:10:58+00:00
> especially from VCs and CEOs

That is the key phrase. People who do not do the work want to replace people who do the work with cheap alternatives. This is not new, they just see a new way to accomplish it.

So it will go the same way as all the other ways they try to reduce personnel costs. They will evaluate your cost and the value you bring and compare it to the value they can get using someone/something else that has a cheaper cost. If you deliver equal or better value for the same cost, you keep your job. If you do not, you lose your job.

Same old story, new AI flavor.