MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by d-lisp | 2025-04-11 16:05:08+00:00
That is not what is implied here, OP seems to dislike the speech aesthetics produced by the model. I feel the same; the sugar-coating provided before and after any actual valuable information is (to me) : - not succeeding in awkwardly trying to achieve an experience that would be comparable to talking with a human person - not efficient, not enjoyable - perfectly matching the experience of talking with an highly standardized and gimmicky version of human_v0.01.

Now, that being said, I don't really care about all of this.

The USA population is equivalent to approximately 4% of the total world population.
by barbazoo | 2025-04-11 16:05:13+00:00
Personally I wouldn't even bother with old shows on netflix since they could go away, and do, all the time. I download and put on my local plex instance, especially with bangers like The Office, there's no harm done.

Netflix et al are good for those high profile miniseries you want to watch once and then never again. The rest, download and enjoy without ads, without dark patterns, especially content that kids watch (youtube).
by killjoywashere | 2025-04-11 16:05:15+00:00
I do think there's an interesting conversation to have here though about workforce management, as someone who lives in adjacent worlds.

If you are long term greedy, like China, a great strategy to capture dominance of a discipline would be along the lines of how to boil a frog. Start by sending grad students to the top universities, ensuring they work for the PIs for cheap, bring as many of them back to China as you can, but tolerate a leaky return path so as not to stir up notice. Advertize their high post-training employment rate back to the universities to keep their valves open even as you start developing your universities internally, and eventually throttle down the outbound grad student pipeline. At some point after it's too late, the top universities, and their countries, look around, bemoan the lack of people in their discipline, and then just give up because by now they're old and tired.

Seems like something that has happened in chemistry, physics, and EE for sure. Once you start thinking this way, all sorts of things start making sense. Like maybe they looked at solar as a cheap, low threat point of entry for developing silicon fabrication capabilities. Software engineering, being a relatively soft skill, comes along for the ride.

Not sure about other fields, but if AI can take on a rapidly increasing set of fields, you start seeing this as how China primarily harvests not IP but workforce training from the global West, then technologies happen to fall out, then one day China has solved for their own graying work force at the same time they've solved for global economic dominance.

And a non-trivial contributor was the US governments (I blame the states too) defunding education.
by leguminous | 2025-04-11 16:06:10+00:00
Part of the reason the US government needs to use consultants is because they can't actually pay enough to hire senior developers directly due to the constraints imposed by the GS pay scales. Often times the top levels of the pay scale aren't even available because there is some rule about how people can't be paid more than someone else. So instead they pay for consultants and all of their overhead.

(Of course there are more reasons as well, but this is a popular one that some of my friends in government agencies complain about.)
by Apocryphon | 2025-04-11 16:06:18+00:00
My guess is that Netflix is tried to cultivate a semi-premium brand (but not premium in an Apple TV+ way), which means getting rid of the long tail in favor of what's hip, sexy, exciting, etc. Whereas while Amazon is making expensive boondoggles like Ring of Power, they are also comfortable with keeping dozens of conspiracy theory documentaries on. I guess that's in line with the identity of their main store, and the concept of Amazon being a series of warehouses.
by lynx97 | 2025-04-11 16:06:35+00:00
Yes, what you are describing is how BeMyEyes started, and it still offer that feature.

However, somewhere around 1 or 2 years ago, they added a OpenAI vision model based way to send in photos and have them described.

In general, its a very nice feature, if it works. For instance, I do use it successfully to sort laundry.

But the deposit logo test I did gave horrible results...
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-11 16:06:42+00:00
> With any "normal" president (including Kamala Harris), the federal government would likely be expanding spending and gov't programs right now

Perhaps, and in such a case, the american economy would not be cratering like it has been lately, and americans would be suffering less, and america would be stronger on the international stage. In fact, all things considered, more spending would have been better for america than the current state of things.

> the debt is so huge that interest payments on the debt now eclipse the defense budget

There's always taxing the rich, but the plan by the american ruling elites in the republican party currently seems to be to increase the debt sky-high via tax cuts for rich americans, only partially paid for via increased taxes on non-rich americans, with the rest piled onto the american debt burden.
by ferguess_k | 2025-04-11 16:06:45+00:00
He is a greybread.

He bagged a lot of system admin experience before he went into DevOps, Data Ops and such.

He always pointed me to a tool and encourage learning.

He is always there to explain if I need help.

He can talk hours about things he knows about so I listened to him a lot but sadly didn't absorb much as he went back to an IC shortly.

However, maybe it's just because he gave me a lot of interesting things to do. So knowing what your team likes to do is also important.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-11 16:08:31+00:00
Then the EU will have to make visas easier to get. Immigrants flocked to the USA for high wages and accessible visa or open enough border that they knew once they made it 100 miles in there was only 1% chance they get locked up to die in an immigration camp in central America.

The EU still has both those barriers, that many of their countries guard their work permits more fiercely than their own balls, and their wages are lower than places like Dubai with far easier to get work visa. If the EU isn't careful their cake will be stolen by authoritarian places like Singapore and Dubai that have comparatively free trade and easy work permits.
by dogma1138 | 2025-04-11 16:08:55+00:00
No single person on this planet can know everything about a product as complex as a phone or any other modern device, and the expectation of some people form execs even ones who were engineers is simply unrealistic.

If you know everything about your product down to the most low level technical detail your product is either a brick (and I think that even that is too complicated) or you greatly overestimate what you actually know.
by w10-1 | 2025-04-11 16:09:11+00:00
Yes, and more importantly...

Strengths are weaknesses because they create a bias to use the strength rather than developing a weak alternate, and you only get better at what you do - creating a virtuous cycle that can quickly turn vicious.

This will happen whenever growth is mediated mainly by feedback loops. (Think hard about that!)

The solution is instead to have a model of what you're trying to grow, whether it's a company or a positive presence in the world, and be willing to sacrifice to make that happen.
by raincole | 2025-04-11 16:09:27+00:00
> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain

They want to take the bargaining power from creators (and old IP owners).

They don't want the customers to search for a specific show. They want the customers to watch whatever is shown to them. This way Netflix will have tremendous power over show creators - if our algorithm doesn't favor you, it doesn't matter how good your show is or how much money you spend on marketing outside Netflix.
by AStrangeMorrow | 2025-04-11 16:09:31+00:00
Yeah. Also might be a bias from my school, but for the software engineering specialty, in average the worse a student was performing the more likely they’d end up working for a consulting company after graduation. A few exceptions (student with a goal of moving into management positions) but none of the students that were either very good or passionate are working in the consulting world now. I am sure there are some skilled consultants, and these companies have their use, but I am always shocked to see how much governments spend on them.
by ipython | 2025-04-11 16:09:37+00:00
There are plenty of examples of abuse of power. This is clearly just yet another one of them. DEI is in full display with this administration, except for them DEI stands for division with egregious ignorance. Even if it was a mistake, good luck getting the government to do anything about it - see Abrego Garcia. The administration just up and put the DoJ lawyer who admitted to the court that they made a mistake in sending him to El Salvador on administrative leave [0]. There's no way they will back down, as it would be a sign of weakness. Heck, even the Supreme Court majority ruled that the government must make an effort to return him to the US [1], so we will have a major showdown between two of the branches of government shortly.

We've whipsawed so far away from any norms that the majority "normal" people in the center are just left stunned at how we got here. And the ones who voted for this shitshow are fed a constant diet of lies and propaganda to keep them in line - things get bad? Refill the rage canister by rolling out Kristi Noem with some more made-for-insta reels in front of the "bad" people locked up in CECOT.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-sidelines-doj-lawyer-aft... [1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
by hyperhello | 2025-04-11 16:09:55+00:00
The problem with this is that many areas of the law, such as immigration, are very much gray areas by design, or to put it more nicely, gentlemen's agreements. The understanding is that someone is making a major personal investment in coming to this country and living and working here. It's up to both sides to be reasonable and stick to the plan. Here, one side is viciously and vocally breaking all the agreements because they aren't personally benefiting by the terms of their office.
by spikevv | 2025-04-11 16:10:01+00:00
I’ve put a lot of effort into the product I developed, with the intention of helping people understand and learn a specific field more efficiently through AI-generated mind maps. However, what’s frustrating is that I still haven’t figured out what exact problems it can solve for people. I’m increasingly questioning whether I’m heading in the right direction with my efforts. I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on AI-generated mind maps, and what specific problems such a product could solve for people.
by mellosouls | 2025-04-11 16:10:10+00:00
They still don't generally need to use consultants. Even at the poor rates of pay in many government teams, there are still some decent technical staff who don't just chase the dollar. Bear in mind the salary standard is normal market, not FAANG/SV.

Consultants are nearly always used so that managers can say "we went with BigCo, its their fault" when things go wrong.

ie. they are generally a political choice rather than technical.
by mariusMDML | 2025-04-11 16:10:23+00:00
"Don't mean to be negative" and manage to say it's garbage in the same sentence... A lot can be accomplished by a pen and a paper but a lot more with a computer, otherwise Notion and Evernote and this type of app will be a total disaster, but it's not. There is actually an example of a path to learn excel in screenshot on the main page. The back-end of my solution is quite complex but it DO give customers a complete guided path to practice every type of skill. It also include some ressources like youtube video/blog article to read etc to help. But the program is really a plus, what really help to practice is the notion template I spent days making and adjusting which help to have a clear path of what to do and keeping an eye on the progress which also help to keep the motivation of doing. Our customer are real but anonymized and I did a lot of others template in notion :)
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-11 16:10:27+00:00
I'm not talking about programmers using LLMs.

I'm talking about people talking in english to an AI on one screen, and compiled functioning programs appearing on the other. An "app playground" where you just tell your phone what you need an app to do, and a new bespoke app is now in your app draw.

Forget about UIs too. They won't be that important. You don't need a tree of options and menus, tool bars and buttons. You would just tell the program what you want it to do..."Don't put my signature on this email"..."wrap the text around this image properly"(cough msword cough)..."split these two parts and move the red one to the top layer"...or even "Create a button that does this and place it over there".
by mediaman | 2025-04-11 16:11:28+00:00
Agreed. Many people I know who work in state government are always on or planning their next vacation, or in the middle of another home renovation, and lightly joke about their “work from home.”

It’s just incredibly clear that there is no inventive to actually perform, and combined with environments such as WFH that need to be outcomes-based, it starts just looking like a fairytale life paid for by other people.

This happens in the private sector as well, but tends to correct over time - hence big tech’s layoffs, especially of managers and nontechnical staff, after the excesses of 2021-2022.

I don’t think this is true of all state employees, but it seems to happen more with the educated professional class with more abstract work.
by djha-skin | 2025-04-11 16:11:31+00:00
It's very, very complicated. It's so far past the maximum effort line of most linux users as to be in its own class of tools. Reproducibility in the imperative package space is worth a lot. Lots of other tools are built on RPM/DEB packages that offer similar advantages of Nix -- Ansible, for one. This is more of a "rising tide raises all boats" situation.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-11 16:11:32+00:00
The tourist experience does not accurately reflect the attitude of a country's policy towards foreigners or its racial minorities. Every country wants to have tourists entering the country, spending money inside of it, and leaving; it's one of those economic benefits that's so strong that even countries with huge overtourism problems find it difficult to manage the demand.

First, let's talk about immigration. This tends to be a better barometer of a country's attitudes towards foreigners and integration. East Asia in general tends to be extremely restrictive, but China is harder to get into by orders of magnitude. For context:

- Japan has 3.41 million foreign residents out of a population of 123.7 million (2.76%)

- China (PRC) has 0.85 million foreign residents (excluding HK/Macau/TW) out of a population of 1,411.78 million (0.06%)

This data is sourced from 2020 and 2024[0], which means it could have been lowered by COVID; so let's talk about permanent residents. Japan has about 900k permanent residents[1] compared to China's... 12k[2]. That's two orders of magnitude lower.

Ok, but who's trying to get into China? I mean, Americans would never want to emigrate to China, right? Well, sure, I'll give you that, but China borders plenty of countries that would consider moving to the PRC to be a material benefit (e.g. North Korea and Myanmar).

China has an immigration policy that would make Donald Trump blush. But so what?

Second, let's talk about the one atrocity Mao wasn't willing to commit: Han chauvinism.

China has a particular concern for territorial integrity. That's why they obsess over getting back control over Taiwan, an island full of people who want nothing to do with the mainland, and why they absorbed Hong Kong into themselves 20 years ahead of what they'd agreed to. The problem is that, especially on China's more ambiguously defined eastern borders, nobody there wants to actually be part of China. This terrifies Xi Jinping.

And what does Xi do when he's terrified? He builds concentration camps. The eastern part of China, Xinjiang, is full of concentration camps where the Uighur population was rounded up, enslaved, indoctrinated, and sterilized; in the name of "anti-terrorism". This alone is enough for me to slap the "ethnofascist" label on Xi regardless of what political ideology he claims to subscribe to.

[0] The Chinese data comes from the 2020 Chinese census, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Chinese_census and this article: https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2022/number/5/ar... via Wikipedia

For Japan's 2024 statistics, Wikipedia sourced them from:

https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/publications/press/13_00047.html

https://www.stat.go.jp/data/jinsui/new.html

[1] https://www.jcer.or.jp/english/japans-immigration-policy-de-...

Note that this excludes "special permanent residents", most of whom are victims of Imperial Japan's brutal occupation of Korea and Taiwan who got permanent residency in Japan as part of WWII peace treaties.

[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3234679/chi...
by karmakaze | 2025-04-11 16:11:34+00:00
> "This is not achievable," one commenter named Monocasa wrote. "There is not enough rewritable microcode to do this even as a super slow hack. And even if all of the microcode were rewritable, microcode is kind of a fallback pathway on modern x86 cores with the fast path being hardwired decode for x86 instructions. And even if that were not the case the microcode decode and jump is itself hardwired for x86 instruction formats. And even if that were not the case the micro-ops are very non-RISC."
by pugworthy | 2025-04-11 16:11:45+00:00
There is an out of print book from the 50's that's a great resource for bow making.

The full title is, "The Archer's Craft; a Sheaf of Notes on Certain Matters Concerning Archers and Archery, the making of archers' Tackle and the Art of Hunting with the Bow" and the author is Adrian Eliot Hodgkin.
by miltonlost | 2025-04-11 16:13:05+00:00
> One of my laments is that there is no automatic equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow, projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the agency's mission.

There was. It's the GAO and the inspectors general of the agencies, both of which have been gutted by this administration.

> I'm not defending the specific actions of this administration (for which I simply don't know enough), but it is refreshing to see the government rummaging through its mess and cutting stuff that is irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission.

LMAO, you're not defending the specific actions, but you know enough about the actions to know that they are "cutting stuff that is irrational". This is a defense of DOGE but with the "no, i'm NOT defending Musk" veneer that doesn't pass muster. You're giving this administration the benefit of the doubt and a large amount of good faith that they have not earned.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-04-11 16:13:20+00:00
I guess my point is that you actually have to write the impure code somehow and it's hard, external world has tendencies to fail, needs to be retried, coordinated with other things. You have to fake all these issues. In your web server examples, if you need to a cache layer for certain part of the data, you really can't without encoding it to the state management tooling. And this point you are writing a lot of non-functional code in order to glue it together with pure functions and maybe do some simple transformation in the middle. Is it worth it?

I have respect for OCaml, but that's mostly because it allows you to write mutable code fairly easily.

Roc codifies the world vs core split, but I'm skeptical how much of the world logic can be actually reused across multiple instances of FP applications.
by UncleEntity | 2025-04-11 16:13:28+00:00
I think the premise of the argument is you don't need to compete in the marketplace because you can just tell the robots what you want and they will happily produce it.

The fallacy that people are making is they look at the current state of things as 'the way it'll always be' while the AI companies, and I mean all the AI companies, are looking to corner the market so have no moral issues with taking out a whole swath of skilled jobs.

The cost to compete with another business's software is a high-end GPU.
by blagie | 2025-04-11 16:13:39+00:00
Typically, the customs declaration is filled out on the airplane. This can be done through a mobile app (which most frequent travelers do), in which case, customs might have it before you've even left the plane.

If it's done on paper, this is done at the passport check, before you've picked up your checked luggage, and well before picking a customs lane.

I've certainly been randomly chosen for a screening, and when that happened, a customs agent went up to me (deliberately) shortly after I got my luggage. I forget why, but they have flags for suspicious behavior. I think it might have been because I came back with one more bag than I left with, or some intermediate destination.

There are also, in some airports, customs dogs sniffing things between luggage pickup and customs who can also flag for screens.

So none of this sounds too unusual to me, except for the final step: being shipped off to a detention center. I've never brought in anything improper, but I know people who came to the US with illicit food. The outcome was:

1) A rather serious fine

2) Being screened literally every time they passed into the US

The second was more obnoxious. Every time they came into the US for at least the next half-decade, customs would unpack their bags.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-11 16:13:59+00:00
>I think this is placing the blame on the victims rather than the policies that are actually allowing these things to happen.

If you're a fisherman on a lake and a fish just jumps in your boat, is it your fault or the fish's fault? You were just doing your fisherman job.

You(individually) can't change the bad policies of the country you emigrated to because you're not a citizen with voting rights, right? But you can adapt your behavior to not fall in the trap of those bad policies, right?

All you have to do is lay low and not break any laws or do things that attract attention of the authorities, like you know, travelling with undeclared embryos, which is not something average travelers usually do.

"Yeah but your country's laws are stupid, so give me a break" is not a defense that ever works for immigrants, which means they're at the mercy of trigger happy border enforcement agents who are just following the law, which says they can deport anyone for any reason they see fit.

I think many western people with powerful passports don't realize, that when you're a guest in a country (especially with a weak passport) you really need to be a lot more paranoid than the locals on the rules and regulations of the host country since you'll have no local rights and no embassy to bail you out if you fuck up. The speed limit says 100? Well, you drive at 90 just to be sure. Yeah, it sucks, but that's life.