MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robocat | 2025-04-24 22:50:47+00:00
> which aren't great odds

For others, here's the comment:

This YouGov poll, sourced at the end, notes that 9% of the male population is interested in complete nonmonogamy. US Government Statistics note that males that make >$200k/year comprise approximately 5% of the population. A Pew Research poll states that 51% of young men desire children. Approximately 10% of the population is males ages 22-40, which is a wider age range than I think she would be interested in, but I'm trying to make the numbers as generous as possible. Using a normal distribution curve, approximately 25% of the population will have an attractiveness of >5.9. I selected a generous 10% of the remaining population as being interesting enough for her to engage with on an intellectual level. 0.09 * 0.05 * 0.51 * 0.25 * 0.10 * 0.10 0.00057% 5.7 per million people There are 4.6 million people in the San Francisco metro area

I did a similar calculation for a friend who had a few "reasonable" expectations but the odds were less than 1 in 10 billion.
by arrosenberg | 2025-04-24 22:51:02+00:00
Nope, it almost certainly won't. If you want to make friends and meet a partner you need to join groups. Pick ones where you will see the same people regularly and make a lot of small talk. Small talk is where the magic happens, so have some hobbies and interesting stories to contribute. You gotta practice, that's the only way it gets easier.

I fully acknowledge society makes it hard, and it won't happen for you unless you make it. Join a coed sports team or start going to the same trivia night every week. The rest kind of figures itself out.
by charcircuit | 2025-04-24 22:51:35+00:00
Components that are not used, that almost always get replaced by vendors do not get much love. That the base AOSP should be optimized to use out of the box is a purist fantasy. In reality AOSP is made with the understanding that vendors are going to customize it. A lot of Android is designed to be modular, you can easily install a different keyboard app.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-24 22:52:35+00:00
The greater context is tariffs. Tariffs make foreign products more expensive. If everyone is willing to pay 1% more for the benefit of their own economy, then a 1% tariff probably wouldn't be very unpopular, it might even be responsible, especially if that money is then immediately invested in helping the given industry grow.

It's a measurement of the pain of tariffs or a measurement of how many people would "willingly" pay a tariff.

Of course that assumes a low corruption government with informed and forward looking policy, rather than past looking policy. Tariffs as they are frequently exist so that our own companies don't have to compete as hard and are able to spend their money on stock buybacks rather than investing into R&D, or to choose winners and losers allowing a tariff wielding king to reward loyalty or punish dissent.

I am absolutely a layman though, and this is my layman understanding.
by jltsiren | 2025-04-24 22:53:22+00:00
A postdoc is a training position, where the individual further develops their skills and tries to build an independent profile while being mentored by a more senior academic. PhDs who work in someone else's projects without focusing as much on personal development typically have other job titles, such as project scientist or staff scientist.

Receiving a doctorate does not mean that you have finished your training. Some countries have habilitations or higher doctorates, which can be understood as more formal versions of postdoctoral training. Medical doctors are expected to specialize and receive more training as residents. Other fields have similar arrangements, some more and others less formal. If a full career is 50 years and the job requires a high degree of specialization, it can make sense to use the first ~15 years for training.
by ndriscoll | 2025-04-24 22:53:24+00:00
High end discretionary consumer looking for Made in the US makes me think of something like Rogue Fitness or Room&Board. A normally Made in China/Vietnam brand specifically pointing out that they found some small third-party manufacturer that will provide the same quality you're getting from Asia (the implicit assumption is that this means low quality) is kind of priming people to not buy it.
by tialaramex | 2025-04-24 22:53:25+00:00
Not the paper, the stuff on the paper scales the same. Want a large poster and then also handbills to give out? They're identical. Got 15 full size sheets of colour information but now want to turn it into a pocket handout ? No problem, it's the same thing but smaller.

This feels obvious - of course it works like that, until your paper sizes aren't using this ratio (which the US ones don't) and then the frustration is apparent.
by Barrin92 | 2025-04-24 22:53:30+00:00
People want slop, they always wanted slop and there is no magical mind controlling powers in a Facebook feed. It was the case in the age of TV, magazines and when nobody had any idea how to even measure what people want.

If Mark Zuckerberg forcibly injected educational material and long form journalism into everyone's feed the average user would uninstall the app. People have been consuming crap since they were able to draw boobs on cave walls with chalk. Do you know why every belief system that claims people are ensnared by some false consciousness fails? Because they aren't, there's no such thing. Mark Zuckerberg is exactly right about one thing, he gave the people what they wanted, and if he's going to lose to a platform like TikTok it's because they're even better at it
Gate VR – Building a Non-Invasive Neural Interface for Full-Body VR
by GateVR | 2025-04-24 22:53:35+00:00
I'm solo-building a modular, non-invasive neural interface system called Gate VR.

It reads EEG and EMG signals and delivers synthetic sensory feedback through shaped EMF, focused ultrasound, and IR light — all in real time. No implants, no sci-fi claims, just hardware-driven neural IO using current tech.

The system is built around a personal neural stack (Veil, Tail, Pulse, Keystone), with multiplayer environments synced through standard game servers. Time dilation is handled by increasing perceptual "frame rate" via guided cognitive entrainment — aiming for 4:1 compression.

I’m pre-prototype, pre-funding, but the architecture and signal pathways are mapped, the site is up, and I’m looking for feedback from anyone who's tackled neurotech, full-body hardware systems, or immersion design at scale.

Ask me anything. Happy to trade ideas, insight, or even collaborate with the right devs or engineers.

Teaser: beyondgatevr.com Discord: discord.gg/n2UkEjQh Campaign goes live May 6.

— William
by fragmede | 2025-04-24 22:53:47+00:00
Lol "could". In my group of friends, one woman runs texts to and from her boyfriend through ChatGPT to analyze what he really says and means, and then she types out the unhinged (her word, not mine) response she would have sent and then she uses it to edit her response so she's not "that crazy chick" (again, her words).

The example conversation does suggest a chat UI where you could rewind and try saying something different and see how it would play out differently would be quite useful for this sort of thing.
by jumploops | 2025-04-24 22:53:48+00:00
This new model is autoregression-based (similar to LLMs, token by token) rather than diffusion based, meaning that it adheres to text prompts with much higher accuracy.

As an example, some users (myself included) of a generative image app were trying to make a picture of person in the pouch of a kangaroo.

No matter what we prompted, we couldn’t get it to work.

GPT-4o did it in one shot!
by loco5niner | 2025-04-24 22:53:54+00:00
I've been amazed recently by 2 shower heads. My grandmas shower has VERY low water output from the lower spigot, but flowing through the showerhead you would never know it. They replaced a showerhead at the gym recently and the flow/coverage is amazing. I want one like that in my next house, or maybe this one lol.
by tezza | 2025-04-24 22:54:02+00:00
For the curious I generated the same prompt for each of the quality types. ‘Auto’, ‘low’, ‘medium’, ‘high’.

Prompt: “a cute dog hugs a cute cat”

https://x.com/terrylurie/status/1915161141489136095

I also then showed a couple of DALL:E 3 images for comparison in a comment
by groby_b | 2025-04-24 22:54:19+00:00
In labor circles, the "subversive, incremental ways" are known as "work to rule".

You simply do as you're told. Orders are never completely without ambiguity, and the person giving the order has less direct experience with the subject than the person receiving the order. There's wiggle room.

Concrete example: The order is "Do X". The person charged with executing it actually understands that the consequences will be that Y and Z (which the person giving the order cares about) will actually be on fire if you do X.

In a functioning relationship, you speak up and say "Happy to do X, but here's what'll happen, maybe we should consider a different way to achieve your goals". If you're going the subversive route, you say "Sure thing. I'll get right on X. I'll overdeliver on it". Then you do X, and nudge it towards maximally bad impact on Y/Z.

Followed by "Oh, who could've foreseen! Y and Z are in ruins! What would you like me to do, boss?"
by jen20 | 2025-04-24 22:54:44+00:00
On the face of it, that sounds healthy. But dig in further, and you discover that only the top 10 or so contributors have enough activity to make their personal contribution graph anything other than a flat line on zero.

The vast majority of the work here is being done by a very small group of people - likely those paid by the commercial sponsor (a random sample of the top few suggest that well over half of those top contributors fall into that category).

If those people aren't paid to work on the project any more, it will likely die very quickly.
by christianqchung | 2025-04-24 22:54:46+00:00
No. Betteridge's law. More seriously, while this piece is ancient in AI terms (May 2023), I don't think genuine emotional and social intelligence is something that can be learned at an average level by talking to AI or reading. Using the voice models is a step up from this, but I still think they're too tuned to following your instructions without nuance for something like this. If reading was enough to pick up social and emotional skills, I'd think that people who read the right books would be masters at several trades if it gave even 10% of the experience that real world practice did.

I'm also not trying to be reactionary and dismissive, but how are you supposed to learn social cues from AI right now? In an optimal case, the LLM predicts accurately what would happen. Maybe you could say something awkward and the AI would say back <s/he lets out an exasperated sigh and turns away>; but in real life you have to notice these cues among a barrage of other factors. Would this really help anyone who is this desperate? Additionally, the tone of how you say words matters almost as much as the content, and this is missing from text.

I concede that in extreme cases, some people could learn stuff from trying this, and that's a good thing. I just don't really know how much, who exactly, how, and whether they'd learn incorrect stuff as well.
by sunshine-o | 2025-04-24 22:55:09+00:00
Thank you for pointing to those sources.

While I regret Synadia decision to change the license I have to admit just reading the CNCF reponse was very very misleading.

Ok Synadia says they were not happy with the CNCF collaboration. In the end they were paying for this membership and their services.

So I went and looked at the various member benefits and it doesn't sound really attracting to me [0] The most valuable thing seems to be in their "landscape". They are basically selling brand promotion.

Then you probably have a lot of politics dominated by their Platinium members: Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Boeing, IBM, Huawei, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc.

CNCF doesn't work for the community, they work for their (Platinium) members. Synadia works for its investors and they decided to change course (regrettably).

The code under Apache License 2.0 is available on the internet, if it is valuable some people will fork and maintain it. But it is not gonna be the CNCF and its staff.

- [0] https://www.cncf.io/about/join/
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-04-24 22:55:37+00:00
Not OP, but what typically happens: a large contraction.

Investors are already contracting the over-investment in AI because it’s so hard to turn an ROI. Satya Nadella was recently on the record as saying he doesn’t think AI has proven a sustainable ROI yet, and that it needs to in order to sustain the current levels of investment. As a matter of cause and effect he is of course right. But no one can predict the timelines and outcomes with exactitude.

Tomorrow Nvidia could be seized by a regulator and frozen, decimating the GPU market. SoftBank could decide they’re going all in on some new thing instead. (Incredible examples, of course.)

Personally I don’t think AI/LLMs/et al are going away. But the way that it’s getting bolted into -everything- is likely to eventually subside.

It’s been interesting to see companies rebrand around AI even when they don’t actually produce or integrate any of those technologies. That’s driving part of the overvaluation of AI at large.

AI and the collection of technologies that get called AI aren’t new. They’re just suddenly in focus and all the rage.

We’ve seen this cycle before in technology and we’ll see it again with something else.
by doctorwho42 | 2025-04-24 22:55:48+00:00
The system of economics that we use is quite new on the historical scale, using it in your argument to say that saving earth based life (which we are apart of) is not financially viable is the most absurd thing in modern society. Without the ecosphere, the economic system ceases to exist... So by the very definition, it is the utmost important and therefore not only viable but absolutely necessary.
by jjmarr | 2025-04-24 22:56:02+00:00
Most LLMs give very lengthy responses compared to user input and can carry a conversation on their own. They're too easy.

The winning dating sim for social anxiety will program a Dark Souls-level of difficulty dating sim in which the person is standoffish, hateful, and unstable, constantly rejecting you for social rules you don't understand.

I don't know if that'll be good for society but incels will play it.
by armandososa | 2025-04-24 22:56:13+00:00
Did you find the author/narrator very unlikable?

[mild spoilers ahead]

I was tempted to stop reading after the shark attack story when she wakes up in the hospital and declares "I saved myself". Ugh. But I think it makes narrative sense: why would a good person stay at the company after all she has witnessed? It also makes the company leaders seem so much worse in comparison.

One more thing: Is it credible that she had such a high profile job for so long and still be worried about money?
by kstrauser | 2025-04-24 22:56:40+00:00
I second all this. I'm using Zed today, but I was using Emacs for 20 years, then Sublime/VSCode/etc. for a few, and now Zed. If it disappears, I'm going right back to Emacs without a moment's hesitation.

And "Mastering Emacs" is brilliant.
by slewth | 2025-04-24 22:56:52+00:00
This post makes me pretty sad, dog.

This is not a simulation of a date. It's an interaction with an automated customer service representative. It's someone trying to game out how to be vulnerable and connect with somebody else by volleying stiff dialogue off Samantha Samsung. The idea that this is a "near miss" strains credulity.

I'm getting in a car with my spouse and driving into the hills.
by the_clarence | 2025-04-24 22:57:18+00:00
It started when they introduced the non chronological timeline. Everything from then on was about driving users to use the app more as opposed to being a tool to connect friends.

Thanks to facebook I have met many friends throughout the world, including my now wife, and have managed to keep in touch with them as I travel the world and land in my friends home countries.

It is so sad that the tool I'm describing doesn't really exist anymore.
by schlauerfox | 2025-04-24 22:57:23+00:00
There was a time that printed checks had to use special laser toner called MICR Toner that was magnetic so the magneto readers could machine read the check bottoms routing and account numbers, but that went away when the Fed just ran it all as ACH/ electronically and optically scanned checks around the time mobile deposit and well after OCR became a thing. Last I checked the rule was still present in the statues.
by mylons | 2025-04-24 22:57:59+00:00
you can be a great <insert w/e here> and be completely unknown. there are a lot of niche opportunities out there. you could be helping michelin star restaurant owners with a new booking website that just charges customers on their reservation and literally be set for life after that interaction.

the last anecdote is a true story. one of the original owners of Alinea (Chicago) did just that and the guy who developed the site is quite literally set for life if he doesn't do anything else but also has this incredible in within the fine dining world now.
by theshackleford | 2025-04-24 22:58:47+00:00
I've no doubt it may be the case in the US, I did not mean to suggest it's not. It simply doesnt have the same sway everywhere.

I don't know literally a single person who uses SMS/MMS/iMessage where I live. And it's been this way for years. It's easily 99% whatsapp/messenger/discord etc. It's pretty openly joked about that the only thing SMS is still for these days is spam/marketing/political messaging.
by ziml77 | 2025-04-24 22:59:15+00:00
Doesn't even have to be something obscure. I asked one about Futurama a couple years ago and got a made up answer on multiple models I tested. I think I originally asked something about the line "we're exactly the same. I know all her moves, therefore I have the upper hand" because I couldn't recall it exactly so normal web searches were failing me. Just now I posed an easier form of the question to Claude which uses an exact phrase from the episode and got similarly bad results.

===

Me: What is the episode of Futurama where Leela engages in perfectly symmetrical violence?

Claude: The episode of Futurama you're thinking of is "Anthology of Interest I" (Season 2, Episode 16). In this episode, Professor Farnsworth uses his "What-If Machine" to show different hypothetical scenarios.

During Bender's segment titled "What if Bender were human?", there's a scene where Leela confronts a group causing trouble. One of them challenges her, saying "What are you going to do?" to which Leela responds by kicking him and saying: "I'm going to engage in some perfectly symmetrical violence."

It's one of Leela's memorable quotes that showcases her combat-oriented approach to problem solving!

===

That's completely wrong. It's from S4E15 The Farnsworth Parabox. And the line is "now, now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything", said by parallel universe Farnsworth.

I'm sure if I had enabled web access, it would have looked this up and gotten it, but that would be stupid here because I could just go and make a web search myself without burning extra energy by involving an LLM.
by arghwhat | 2025-04-24 22:59:33+00:00
Indeed. Say, maybe a civilization didn't start out with trying to build the world of particles of progressively finer size, but started directly with a model of fields, waves and charges and therefore never had a concept of a discrete elemental particle, and in turn a system built around that to categorize elements.

Or to them, an atom is as large an arbitrary macro structure as proteins are to us, and so they would never consider two empty circles with a single line to represent something so big and chaotic. Or maybe they had the crazy idea of building everything of vibrating strings!

Who knows what the abstractions and approximations would be when the foundation of it all isn't "getting hit on the head by an apple".
by motohagiography | 2025-04-24 22:59:33+00:00
to me designers are the real architects of history, however, the cybertruck example as brash i disagree with for specific reasons.

it is a perfect example of what it does without any deference to other design languages. instead of po-mo symbolism, it really is just the sufficient metal and glass to do the thing. an essential truck is unsentimental working capital. its not a duck, its an undecorated shed.

i think the design will age very well because there's nothing to add to it.
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-24 22:59:38+00:00
I'm not familiar with the specific process. I've heard various claims that Android is not independently buildable, though existence of alternate Android builds suggests otherwise.

Taking the original claim at face value, viz "No they changed their development process to do it behind closed doors and release the code after final release" (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43778333>), then no, the process isn't Open Source.

The argument then becomes not one of definition (law) but of the facts of the case. Again: I cannot make a determination here, but your haranging wordofx appears misdirected and weakens your case. That's not saying you're not correct, but you're coming across poorly and unpersuasively.
by photonthug | 2025-04-24 23:00:12+00:00
Love Scott’s blog and respect his research and science communication efforts. I also think his political outspokenness is important and refreshing, regardless of whether you happen to agree with the guy.

But this was difficult to read, and imho way off the mark. Socially awkward people are very likely to go through life getting called a robot anyway, so I don’t think it’s very helpful to direct them towards robot therapists or robot girlfriends.
by nagonago | 2025-04-24 23:00:20+00:00
An easy trick is to take a common riddle that's likely all over its training data, and change one little detail. For example:

A farmer with a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage must cross a river by boat. The boat can carry only the farmer and a single item. The wolf is vegetarian. If left unattended together, the wolf will eat the cabbage, but will not eat the goat. Unattended, the goat will eat the cabbage. How can they cross the river without anything being eaten?
by gertlex | 2025-04-24 23:02:07+00:00
I'm sure there's more that could be shared about how "wants" were determined, which would counter my off-the-cusp thought here, but anyways:

Yes... my ideal would be for facebook feed to be a once-a-week addiction (maybe a bit more) where I go, see what's new, and clearly hit an end point where I know I'm seeing things I've seen before. But I'm also part of the "problem" in that I post myself maybe twice/year now.

I'd suspect the current doomscroll-y feed like we have now/you were working on reduces my likelihood of "interacting" with friends' posts. "Do I make the effort of commenting, or lazily keep scrolling to the next-often-good 3rd party content?"

A year or two ago, I copied some greasemonkey type script off reddit, and that nuked all the non-friend content off my feed, but that stopped working a couple months later and I haven't been strongly enough motivated to find an updated approach. I have little enough friend activity that I'd easily notice when I hit old content.

The current doomscrolling feed of algo content sure does manage to hook me, so that's a nice indicator of the current team being successful :P
by concerndc1tizen | 2025-04-24 23:02:08+00:00
Do you guys ever feel tired of 'sounding the alarm'?

I feel like I've been doing that for years on a wide range of topics, but every time it's like you're talking to cult members.

How do you break through to people? People say things like "you're overthinking it", "that's never going to happen", "I don't care because I like using VSCode and not alternatives".

Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?