MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gradientsrneat | 2025-04-06 01:09:31+00:00
Which three major gaming companies are you referring to? The ones that make walled garden consoles?

At the end of the day, I boycott not just from an ethical standpoint, but from the perspective of a customer. Nintendo is a first-party game publisher. They are uniquely litigious toward their own customers and community, and they don't innovate. Money toward Nintendo directly encourages that.

Any sufficiently large company does lots of unethical things, so boycotting the entire company is harder and sends a less clear message economically. But YMMV.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-06 01:09:57+00:00
I agree. I also think this is a false dilemma.

Just because some corruption always will exist, doesn't mean that there aren't societies which have enforced laws that are more or less effective.

This binary thinking doesn't need to happen in a policy discussion. We don't need a perfect set of laws or rules to make things better. We don't avoid having a law just because someone will violate it. For example, a speed limit is still valid to have even though most people will break it, some egregiously so. DUIs laws are useful even though people still drink and drive.

It just so happens that with advertising we can be particularly effective at curbing the worst offenders. That's because advertising is most effective when it's seen by the largest number of people. I don't really care if a company tries to skirt an anti-ad law by paying an influencer millions to wear their product, so long I'm not forced to watch 20 minutes of ads in a 20 minute video. An anti-ad law would force advertisers to be subversive which is, frankly, fine by me. Subversive ads simply can't be intrusive.
by lucaspm98 | 2025-04-06 01:12:14+00:00
I agree with you within the scope of top tech jobs. The tech interviews process is fairly uniquely grueling because it's both very high paid (so a costly mistake to hire poorly) while lacking much professional certification.

In many other careers the interview process is, if not shorter, at least more behavioral and less mentally draining because you're already pre-screened by licensure or rigid advancement structure of some sort.
by parpfish | 2025-04-06 01:12:23+00:00
I wish I could take this advice, but my imposter syndrome is just too strong and you cant just turn it off with logical explanations.

By the time I get an offer, I already feel like I’m already uncomfortable about all the bragging I’ve had to do to hype myself up. Asking for more in a negotiation is just a recipe for even worse guilt during the onboarding process (which is already a fraught time for feeling like an idiot).
by bluGill | 2025-04-06 01:12:24+00:00
at my company the dollars are what they are - take it or leave it. However you can often get an extra week of paid vacation if you ask. You don't eken have to know it is exactly what we can give - the hiring manager wants you and has been told $x by hr but know vacation is an option and will offer it if you just don't say yes instantly.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-06 01:12:31+00:00
Yea, I kind of think a lot of these "Just negotiate, bro" posts are from people who are extremely strong candidates already, like they invented the entire field that the company plays in. Or their PhD thesis was on the exact thing the company is trying to do. For the rest of us, companies can take us or leave us--they aren't going to get into some bidding war for some generic, but strong senior skilled candidate.
by kragen | 2025-04-06 01:12:46+00:00
I have found test-first development valuable sometimes. It's a proper subset of the times that automated testing in general is worthwhile; there's fairly strong empirical support in the academic literature for automated testing improving productivity and quality, but test-first seems to be a wash overall.

Test-first development has some advantages in my experience:

- You know the test isn't vacuous because you saw it fail when you first ran it.

- You know you have thorough test coverage because you stopped adding code to the implementation when all the tests passed (at least temporarily).

- You know the interface you're implementing isn't a huge pain in the ass to use because you would have noticed that halfway through writing the test case and redesigned it.

- You have a shorter feedback loop between writing the implementation and seeing a test start passing, which can be a useful motivation hack and can also speed up your learning of the language and libraries you're using to build the implementation.

But there are also disadvantages:

- You can't use snapshot testing. I didn't know about syrupy, but doctest is also very amenable to snapshot testing.

- The rapid feedback loop can be a motivational trap, getting you lost in tactical details (as Ousterhout famously worried in his debate with Martin) at the expense of attention to more strategic concerns that are ultimately more valuable.

- Sometimes it's a bigger concern to define an interface that it's feasible to implement than one that's a pleasure to use. Test-first development backfires in that case, since first you wrote a test that's impossible to pass, then an article implementation that doesn't pass it, and then a second test that are tests the actually feasible implementation. A common case of this is where you left some necessary resource or information out of the interface.

With respect to your piece about snapshot testing, which is excellent, I actually disagree about using tests to verify security properties. I mean, you should definitely have automated security tests, yes, but you should never rely on them. Code reviews, logical arguments, and ideally formal proofs are much better. Attackers can be counted on to try things you didn't think about when you were writing the tests. Randomized testing like Hypothesis or AFL can help, but not enough.

But, at the other extreme, there are some programs for which automated testing itself is of no value.
by vo2maxer | 2025-04-06 01:13:03+00:00
Por esa misma razón, un LLM te habría funcionado perfectamente: desplegando tus pensamientos tal como querías, pero sin las distracciones causadas por la mala ortografía o los errores gramaticales. Los LLM son herramientas —como bien sabes— que ya son esenciales y lo serán aún más con el paso del tiempo. Que algunos en esta plataforma se irriten por su uso solo significa que, eventualmente, se convertirán en los dinosaurios del futuro.

For that very reason, an LLM would have worked perfectly for you: laying out your thoughts just as you intended, but without the distractions caused by poor spelling or grammatical mistakes. LLMs are tools—as you well know—that are already essential and will become even more so over time. The fact that some people on this platform get irritated by their use just means they’ll eventually become the dinosaurs of the future.
by N2yhWNXQN3k9 | 2025-04-06 01:13:29+00:00
There is very little evidence for this. IMO, it is feel good advice that sounds right.

Try background noise of any sort, until you find a fit.

I can't pay attention to anything anymore without noise. A little rumble in thy ears does wonders.

I severely question anecdotes that pair programming does anything other than motivate you to not look like a moron wasting time in front of someone else (in the context of ADHD -- there are other uses for it).

That isn't a viable strategy for growth, imo.

Also, if you are new to taking stimulants, you might be surprised how much worse it gets later in life, especially if you have been taking them since youth. There is a non-zero cost (I would say a sacrifice) to treating ADHD with amphetamines or other dopamine reuptake inhibitors / dopamingenics.

If you doubt this, there is very little mention of body doubling in literature outside of blogs:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%20%22Body%20Doubling%...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22Body%20Double%22%20...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22Body%20Double%22%
by shash7 | 2025-04-06 01:13:32+00:00
Those "magic variables" have caused more pain than being helpful.

- Added 8 variables inside docker-compose, only 7 get recognized

- Why my docker-compose works locally and not on Coolify? Oh yeah it has its own network stuff. Then tell me beforehand!

- Error messages like "Oops something is not okay, are you okay?" 0% helpful information, 100% condescending crap

I'm not sure why this software keeps getting recommended. Even in videos like these, the guy admits its not ready yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taJlPG82Ucw&t=3126s
by defrost | 2025-04-06 01:14:13+00:00
This is an Indian rehosting of Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong's April 4th address to the nation by the Dehli based Hindustan Times.

The Straits Times (Singapore paper) article on this is here: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/spore-must-b...

and their hosting of the PM's address is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOUbUxa3PVk

The written article covers the main points made in the video address.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-06 01:18:00+00:00
Any law would need enforcement but also a mechanism to punish not only the creator of the ad but the distributor as well.

It isn't that we couldn't get rid of memecoin ads, but rather that twitter simply doesn't have almost any incentive to crack down on and prevent these sorts of ads. Attach a fine with some grace period and I can guarantee you'll end up with twitter looking into ways to block spammers to avoid being penalized.

I also don't personally mind shill reviewers mainly because they are often exposed anyways and become easy to ignore. Doesn't mean you couldn't enforce an ad ban still, but it might only catch the bigger names.

I'd also posit, though, that ad mediums would be far more effective. For example, banning commercials in videos would be and easy enough law to craft and enforce that would make video sites a lot more pleasant to visit.

A ban wouldn't need to be perfect to be very effective at making things better.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-04-06 01:18:04+00:00
The 1st amendment of the US Constitution may have been informed by previous government censorship and fear of totalitarianism.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. "
by globnomulous | 2025-04-06 01:18:59+00:00
That's a terrific point, and I agree completely. This also explains my most recent sci-fi misadventure: a novel by Christopher Paolini, Fractal Noise, that earned glowing praise from Tschaikovsky. It is a dreadful novel -- wooden, stilted, repetitive, unimaginative -- but, hey, the concept is mildly interesting, so I guess it gets the Tschaikovsky seal of approval.

Peter F. Hamilton doesn't get a ton of praise for characterization (and I found his latest novel strangely, uncharacteristically vulgar and puerile), but I think he has a lot of the chops that Tschaikovsky lacks -- especially when it comes to language. Tschaikovsky's writing is at times awfully clunky. Hamilton's prose, by contrast, in my view at least, is in its own category among living sci-fi writers for its polish and effective use of the countless tools the language offers.
by ses425500000 | 2025-04-06 01:20:16+00:00
Yeah, hallucination part was also one thing I was worry about. So I make LLM only run after OCR step, and I put simple check to not change correct text. I will try to show real examples and hallucination rate too. Thanks for feedback!

This project was just hobby and my first time posting something. I didn’t imagine people would care this much… Next time I will prepare better before sharing.
by gpsx | 2025-04-06 01:21:12+00:00
If you are a new company starting out (suppose aluminum siding), you have to market your product or else nobody will know about it. I'm not sure what all parts of marketing are counted as advertising here, but generally in marketing you pay to get word out about your product. Wihtout that, starting a business might be tough. And then, as a consumer, there are lots of free products I have gotten my entire life by virtue of the fact that one of those companies offered to pay for it for me. If you turn that off I'm not sure how that all would work. I don't think the OP goes into too much detail.
by atrettel | 2025-04-06 01:21:17+00:00
And even if you receive two or more offers at once, many organizations don't bother negotiating. One time I received two offers at once, and neither organization was willing to change anything substantive about their offers.

In this case, one organization had an onerous IP policy and that other did not. I asked for some carve-outs, and the first organization came back with a single line added to the IP policy that did not change anything meaningful. I told them that I could not accept that offer as written and wanted more changes, but they refused further negotiation and told me to take it or leave it. I waited a few days, rejected their offer, and accepted the other offer.

(I think that they were willing to add the single meaningless line to make it appear they were willing to change things without actually changing anything substantive.)

The morale of my story is that you may not be able to negotiate a better offer, but at least you have a choice when you have multiple offers.
by ncann | 2025-04-06 01:21:18+00:00
Troubleshooting sleep is an exercise wrapped in pain.

Figuring out which program prevents sleeping is the easy part - there are tools that show that, and you can also usually just brute force it by killing programs one by one.

Then comes figuring out why a system claims to be sleeping but isn't (e.g. the fan is still spinning). Usually this is because of the Modern Standby/S0 crap and in many cases there isn't a solution because the BIOS removed support for S3.

The other class of issue is after sleeping the system won't wake up, or wake up randomly, or wake up with random glitchy graphics/sounds/etc.

Sleep is easily Windows's most bug-ridden area.
by lordswork | 2025-04-06 01:21:23+00:00
MOE as an idea specific to neural networks has been around since 1991[1] . OP is probably aware, but adding for others following along, while MoE has roots in ensembling, there are some important differences: Traditional ensembles run all models in parallel and combine their outputs, whereas MoE uses a gating mechanism to activate only a subset of experts per input. This enables efficient scaling via conditional computation and expert specialization, rather than redundancy.

[1]:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6797059
by whall6 | 2025-04-06 01:21:53+00:00
Having worked in investment banking (a job where your only true value add is your network and ability to negotiate) I would like to say two things:

1. I second everything in the article.

2. You would be surprised to learn how important rule #7 is. We would build entire presentations that we would provide to the other side of the table in negotiations just to reinforce our points. Basically putting ourselves in the position of “hey we’re on your side, but look at the numbers; our hands are tied!”. Having a non-confrontational attitude and providing specific reasons for why you are asking for things makes a big difference in negotiations.

(Definitely don’t need to be building presentations for potential employers though… unless it’s for contracts large enough that you’d need a lawyer and wouldn’t need OP’s advice anyways!)
by defrost | 2025-04-06 01:24:05+00:00
The article closes with that note.

The American Cancer Society says that in order to meet the definition of a cancer cluster, occurrences must be the same type, in the same area, with the same cause, and affecting a number of people that's "greater than expected" when a baseline for occurrences is established. “Nearly 4 out of 10 people in the United States will develop cancer during their lifetimes," the society said on its cancer clusters webpage. "So, it’s not uncommon for several people in a relatively small area to develop cancer around the same time."

The unstated numbers that matter here are many, how many people were thoroughly investigated here, was it the entire staff of the hospital (as many as a thousand, perhaps)? When X many people are thoroughly scanned how common is it for five people to have benign cancers that aren't doing anything, aren't growing, are just there?

If (for example) twenty percent of the time 500 people were scanned, five at least had benign brain cancers, would this report be unusual or suspicious in itself?
by Henchman21 | 2025-04-06 01:24:39+00:00
Well, I'd argue that all stories don't fulfill the same purpose, and that such a small story doesn't have enough importance to the broader public for there to be an "exchange for money" of the type I've described.

But also, it seems pretty clear that political stories specifically generate massive cash flow for media, through clicks and "online engagement", the spectacle of debates, video of gaffes, and so on. I'd assume that is why the political "season" lasts longer and longer? The politicians certainly take advantage of this and use it to their ends. The media seem not to care as long as they continue to get "paid", in their way, and have access.

This is a disgusting arrangement, IMO.
by settrans | 2025-04-06 01:25:15+00:00
No, you're dodging the point. You're basically saying Jews deserved self-determination only if they could pull off the impossible: either magically prevent fascism, or create a homeland without upsetting anyone. That's not how history works. Zionism wasn't a luxury ideology, it was a response to existential threat. Jews didn't have the option to stay in Europe: Europe made that brutally clear. And yes, the land was inhabited, but so what? Every nationalist movement has had to contend with messy realities. The alternative you're proposing amounts to telling the Jews: stay stateless, stay vulnerable, or wait for miracles. That's not a serious moral position; at best it's an abdication, at worst a double standard against the Jews (i.e. antisemitism).
by grues-dinner | 2025-04-06 01:27:03+00:00
> I don't need the same ad repeated 20 times to know that Ford sells cars and trucks.

Not only that, but the Ford ad of a vehicle driving cinematically across a landscape before disgorging a laughing and implausibly photogenic family does nothing to inform you about the relative merits of the vehicle. Anything specific mentioned in the advert is as likely to be flimflam or only technical truth as not, so nothing mentioned in the advert can be taken as useful purchase-informing fact without further research.
by bch | 2025-04-06 01:27:15+00:00
> Mach’s virtual memory (VM) system was influential beyond the project – it was adopted by 4.4BSD and later FreeBSD as their memory management subsystem.

…and NetBSD[0], OpenBSD[1], but apparently not DragonFly BSD[2].

[0] https://netbsd.org/docs/kernel/uvm.html

[1] https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-3.0/uvm.9

[2] https://www.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2011-04/msg0...
by Marsymars | 2025-04-06 01:28:42+00:00
Link seems broken? From what I’ve seen of what Powell has said, it seems to track with my post, e.g. “Our obligation is to keep longer-term inflation expectations well anchored to make certain that a one-time increase in the price level does not become an ongoing inflation problem,”

i.e. It’s not the price increases directly caused by a tariff or sales tax that they’re trying to prevent, it’s any knock-off effect in price expectations that causes additional inflation.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-06 01:28:58+00:00
My understanding of most optimizing compilers is that this is an extremely common "last step" sort of optimization. A lot of the optimizing work is beating the code into a canonical form where these sorts of templates can be readily applied.

It was also my understanding that that's also the point of "super optimizer"s [1] which look for these common patterns in something like LLVM IR to generate optimization targets for the mainline optimizer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superoptimization
by simonw | 2025-04-06 01:29:26+00:00
I find test-first development useful for very specific things. If I'm building a Markdown parser for example, where the inputs and outputs are very clear, I may break out test-first development.

In place of test-first for test verification I'll often deliberately break my new test (either in the test or the implementation), run it once to make sure it fails, then fix it again.
by gus_massa | 2025-04-06 01:30:47+00:00
Nice article, horrible title. The video is very nice, and it's worth reading the article even with the horrible title.

This does not break the laws of thermodynamics. This is just and unexpected result of minimizing the energy. In a usual case, you may get the oil on top, the water at the bottom and the particles in the middle. I guess the particles are too dense and cause the deep until they reach and cover all the bottom.
by kulahan | 2025-04-06 01:30:54+00:00
BMW offers hundreds of colors, as do (I assume) most vendors. It’s not that they aren’t offered, so much as salesmen are simply pushing everyone towards black/white/gray because those colors are least likely to turn off a consumer. Can’t find red? Well black is very common and also looks mean!

Still, I think we’re seeing a LOT more color. From the cool khaki blue Subaru color that was so popular, to the M2 BMW in baby blue, to the Audi e-tron in purple, to the corvettes and mustangs that I rarely see in monochromatic colors.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-06 01:31:44+00:00
> Disclosure should be a matter of well-informed discretion. As the clinician is responsible for patient care, and that disagreement with an AI tool could end up worrying the patient, it should be at the clinician's discretion, depending on context, whether to disclose to the patient that their decision has been informed by an AI tool.

I really hate this recommendation.

As someone who doesn't actually want AI recommendations to play any substantial role in my health care, the idea that my doctor may be keeping such a thing a secret from me disturbs me quite a lot. It would mean that I'd be more suspicious about diagnosis and treatment plans being presented to me.
by shalmanese | 2025-04-06 01:31:45+00:00
Not the OP but I tell everyone on the market that one of the highest ROI things you can do is just go through your own past career history with a fine toothed comb and simply remember all the different things you did and be able to tell the story of each concisely and informatively (if possible, recall actual numbers and quantifiable impacts etc.).

When in an interview, when you're asked a question about your past experiences, the larger the library you have to draw on, the more likely you are to find an example that's relevant and persuasive. Even questions of the form "How would you deal with [hypothetical scenario]", I encourage applicants, if possible, to answer it in the form of "Oh yeah, that's interesting, we had to deal with a very similar case at [one of my previous jobs], here was my approach towards it".

After each interview, do a "l'esprit de l'escalier" retro, write down all the questions asked, what your answer was at the time and what you would have ideally answered now given the fullness of time to think about it. If there's a significant delta, that's a sign to go back and prepare more until your "real time" performance approaches your retroactive performance.