MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fixprix | 2025-04-05 18:40:29+00:00
I actually agree. Telling friends and family will get you more of a 'flash in the pan' response. They are not content creators or influencers. You need to do advertising to figure out if your product/business is even economically feasible.

For example, run an ad campaign on Google, figure out your CPC (cost per customer). See if that is even below your LTV (lifetime value per customer) plus operating expenses. And then tweak all the variables in your product and campaign to actually create some sort of sustainable business flywheel.

Having an amazing product and 'waiting' for your network to spread the word to all potential customers.. it's absurd to think that would work. It's hard enough even with big ad campaigns to reach potential customers.
by djoldman | 2025-04-05 18:40:30+00:00
This is a really interesting question.

Some thought experiments:

What do [search engines, social networks, newspapers] look like? I assume they'd all be paid and you'd get some free tastes and then decide which you'd pay for in the long term (à la kagi).

By removing the third party payer, the service provider has no incentive to do anything for them, whether aligned or not with the user. That is the big plus.

What about all the money that companies use to promote their products and services through advertisements and marketing? Some portion of that would probably go to making their products better. The rest... from their standpoint, how do they even get a potential customer to know they exist? That's tough.
by johnea | 2025-04-05 18:41:03+00:00
The reference to Formula 1 not leading to driving decline is somewhat paradoxical.

Formula 1 has a lot of rules regulating what can and can't be done to change the cars. They basically enforce the traditional driving model.

Given this, I almost think this is an example of the opposite of what the author intends it to be. The reason Formula 1 hasn't led to a reduction in driving skill is because they don't allow changes to be made to the driver interface to the car.
by fragmede | 2025-04-05 18:41:57+00:00
That's why it's such a stupid idea. People who want a world without advertising should create a product that will genuinely improve people's lives and be forced to work as a salesman selling that product and experience the practicalities of doing so before drawing lines. I'm not for unsolicited phone calls about my car's warranty during dinner, but advertising is not this universal evil that some make it out to be.
by vander_elst | 2025-04-05 18:42:23+00:00
Serious and genuine question, how? It seems that some of the layoffs in the administration might be illegal, however they still happened and there are no legal consequences yet. High ranked officials discussing national security matters on non approved platforms *is* illegal, yet nothing happened and I bet nothing will happen at all. Given this background, how will the Constitution prevent such a case?
by throwanem | 2025-04-05 18:42:42+00:00
And we already regulate actual broadcast on this basis.

For example, it violates no rule to include valid Emergency Broadcast System/Emergency Alert System tones (the electronic, machine-interpretable "chirps") in a movie or TV show, or to publish that via streaming, DVD etc. But no one does this, because broadcasting spurious tones (and triggering spurious automated broadcast interruptions) carries serious first-instance fines to which FCC licensees (ie distributors via broadcast) agree as a condition of licensure. They know they aren't allowed to do this and, very occasional and expensive mishaps excepted, they won't take the risk. (1) So program material that wants to include those tones has to make sure they're excluded from the TV edit, or decide whether the verisimilitude is worth the limit on audience access.

While the specifics of course vary among cases, the basic theory of broadcast (ie distribution) as distinct from and less protected than speech, with the consequential distinction drawn specifically along the scale at which speech is distributed, seems clear.

(1) Some may note instances such as one of the Purge films (iirc) that seem to contradict this claim. Compare the tones in those examples with the ones in test samples or generated by a compliant encoder [1] for the "Specific Area Message Encoding" protocol. Even without a decoder, the FSK frequencies and timings have to be resilient to low-bandwidth channels designed to carry human voice, so it's all well within audible ranges and you can hear the difference between real tones and what a movie or show can safely use. Typically either the pitch is dropped below compliant ranges, or the encoding is intentionally corrupted, or both. But almost always, the problem is just sidestepped entirely, since it's the attention tone that everyone really notices anyway.

[1] https://cryptodude3.github.io/same/ is no more certified than mine but has, unlike my own implementation, been tested against a real EAS ENDEC. At some point I want to test mine against that one and find out how badly I screwed up reading the spec ten years ago...
by imiric | 2025-04-05 18:43:15+00:00
We don't need to go into absurd discussions in order to prevent 99% of the harm that comes from modern advertising.

The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.

Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising.

Giving out "free" samples? Presumably someone is being paid to do that, so advertising.

We can later quibble about edge cases and how to handle someone putting up a sign for their business. Many countries have regulations about visual noise, so that should be considered as well.

But it's pretty easy to distinguish advertising that seeks to manipulate, and putting a stop to that. Hell, we could start by surfacing the dark data broker market and banning it altogether. That alone should remove the most egregious cases of privacy abuse.
by okr | 2025-04-05 18:43:46+00:00
Fair. But for me thats not a distinctor.

(Lately, I saw on the internet this video about cars and their suspension in comparison. And it felt like a throwback to the 2000. The one car that goes over the rails like its flying. Been there, done that. Did not go into the mass market for reasons. But reminds me, how good competition is, maybe old ideas will be tried again and this time the ppl want it.)
by neom | 2025-04-05 18:43:58+00:00
Humans, incentives, and capitalism are fundamentally intertwined. Capitalism at its core is simply a game we play daily together, driven by incentives. Banning advertising doesn’t remove incentives, just rearranges them.... If you change one rule (like banning advertising), the system has is always very quickly reorganize around the new incentives. Also, given we live in a fully 100% market driven society, trust, not attention, is the true currency. As long as humans exchange value, influence is inevitable. To effectively improve the system, you can't just ban advertising because the idea should not be to try to stop persuasion, it's a requirement in a functioning free market driven society as it enables many many many downstream effects.
by OJFord | 2025-04-05 18:44:02+00:00
I would propose 'unsolicited salesmanship'.

If I enter your restaurant, car dealership, etc. then you can pitch & try to up-sell your goods and services to me.

If I drive down a motorway or use your website, third-parties can't advertise their goods and services at me from spots you've sold them. (But you can tell me it will be faster to exit onto your toll road or that I should buy or upgrade my membership plan on the site.)
by jdietrich | 2025-04-05 18:44:06+00:00
>If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.

Most consumers don't do extensive research before making a purchasing decision, or any research at all - they buy whatever catches their eye on a store shelf or the front page of Amazon search results, they buy what they're already familiar with, they buy what they see everyone else buying. Consumer behaviour is deeply habitual and it takes enormous effort to convince most consumers to change their habits. Advertising is arguably the best tool we have for changing consumer behaviour, which is precisely why so much money is spent on it.

Banning advertising only further concentrates the power of incumbents - the major retailers who decide which products get prime shelf position or the first page of search results, and the established brands with name recognition and ubiquitous distribution. Consumers go on buying the things they've always bought and are never presented with a reason to try something different.

A market without advertising isn't a level playing field, but a near-unbreakable oligopoly.
by evanelias | 2025-04-05 18:44:09+00:00
> Commands are not declarative.

The tool is using a declarative approach; the language is irrelevant. The key point is the input to the tool describes a desired state, and the tool figures out how the necessary operations to actually achieve that. This contrasts with the imperative approach to schema management, in which the user must explicitly define the steps to take.

Some declarative schema management tools have the desired state be expressed in YAML or a custom DSL, while others use SQL; either way, they're still using a declarative approach.

> There is no way to guarantee this create_table will run safely, because it's not meant to ever be run.

It is meant to be run, though: any time you spin up a new environment, such as every CI run, or every new dev environment set up by an engineer.

Additionally, some declarative schema management tools run the desired-state CREATEs in a temporary location as a core part of their operation. And they can also verify their generated ALTERs are correct, by running the original live-state CREATE in a temporary location, then running the generated ALTER, and verifying that the post-alter CREATE matches the desired state.

> SQL, an imperative language

SQL is a mix of imperative and declarative. SELECT statements are the canonical example of a declarative approach: they describe the set of data you want, not how to physically fetch it.
by jsheard | 2025-04-05 18:44:33+00:00
> You never use phrases that imply moral superiority or a sense of authority, including but not limited to “it’s important to”, “it’s crucial to”, “it’s essential to”, "it's unethical to", "it's worth noting…", “Remember…” etc. Avoid using these.

Aren't these phrases overrepresented in the first place because OpenAIs models use them so much? I guess Llama picked up the habit by consuming GPT output.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-04-05 18:44:41+00:00
I guess the idea is to ban certain types of advertising. It’s a fun thought experiment and practical — it’s why some country roads don’t have billboards and some do.

Going to a conference to promote your product to participants..

Do you allow the shills to shill?

Well, shills gonna shill— I sure wish I promoted my businesses more. It is uncomfortable at times but that’s not really a good excuse to not promote what you know to be good.
by andrewstuart | 2025-04-05 18:44:41+00:00
Self hosting LLMs will explode in popularity over next 12 months.

Open models are made much more interesting and exciting and relevant by new generations of AI focused hardware such as the AMD Strix Halo and Apple Mac Studio M3.

GPUs have failed to meet the demands for lower cost and more memory so APUs look like the future for self hosted LLMs.
by Veserv | 2025-04-05 18:44:50+00:00
The problem is that, as the article mentions, there are "good" forms of advertising that are actually meant to inform people. Unfortunately the overwhelming majority, and even more so in "high-end" advertising, is not that. So, the question is how can we distinguish the good from the bad?

One of the key distinguishing factors is that "bad" advertising is intentionally deceptive. The explicit objective is how to overstate colloquially while technically saying something that is not untrue if interpreted by a genie or monkey's paw. Advertisers run war rooms and focus groups to make sure that the message they are promoting is verifiably and scientifically misinterpreted by the target audience while having legal review so that if it comes to court they can say: "Technically, your honor..." we meant something different than what we explicitly and intentionally aimed for.

The standard is backwards. The more money you spend on advertising, the more intentionally truthful it should be. You should run focus groups to verify that the message is not misinterpreted to your benefit the larger the advertising campaign. When you go to court and say: "Technically, your honor..." you should immediately lose (after reaching certain scales of advertising where you can be expected to have the resources to review your statements). Misinterpretation should be a honest surprise occurring despite your best efforts, not because of them and the litmus test should be if your efforts were reasonable at your scale to avoid such defective speech.

The standard is trivially assessable in court: Present the message to the target audience and ask them their interpretation. Compare it to the claims of deception. If the lawyer says: "Technically, your honor..." they lose. However, they can present evidence that they made reasonable efforts to avoid misinterpretation and that the specific form of the misinterpretation is unlikely or unexpected.

The standard is easily achieved by businesses. Make intentionally truthful claims and have your advertising teams check and test for misinterpretation. Err on the side of caution and do not overstate your claims to your benefit and the potential detriment of your customers. If you think "technically speaking", you are on the wrong track. If you would not tell that candidly to your relatives or friends, you should probably stop.

It is not like people do not know they are being deceptive, they just need to be held to it.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-05 18:45:19+00:00
> You can wax poetically all you want about endowment by the creator, but try saying racial slurs on daytime TV and see how long that lasts.

You're conflating two senses of "free speech". Free speech is an ideal, which our society does not fully reach (as you correctly pointed out). But in the US, "free speech" is also sometimes used to refer to the legal protection from the first amendment. And in your example, that does apply. I can say all the racial slurs I want on TV, and it would be quite illegal to put me in jail for it.
by i_like_pie1 | 2025-04-05 18:45:46+00:00
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by terhechte | 2025-04-05 18:46:11+00:00
The (smaller) Scout model is really attractive for Apple Silicon. It is 109B big but split up into 16 experts. This means that the actual processing happens in 17B. Which means responses will be as fast as current 17B models. I just asked a local 7B model (qwen 2.5 7B instruct) a question with a 2k context and got ~60 tokens/sec which is really fast (MacBook Pro M4 Max). So this could hit 30 token/sec. Time to first token (the processing time before it starts responding) will probably still be slow because (I think) all experts have to be used for that.

In addition, the model has a 10M token context window, which is huge. Not sure how well it can keep track of the context at such sizes, but just not being restricted to ~32k is already great, 256k even better.
by varjag | 2025-04-05 18:46:11+00:00
In my country public TV is decent with good programming and neutral political tone.

When we speak of dominant social networks today however they are runaway adtech cesspools, outright owned by malicious actors, or a combination thereof. That recurring "good stuff becomes shit stuff when getting popular" effect that people lament so much is in no small part caused by adverse profit seeking incentives. There is no dopamine, addiction and hence money in keeping your timeline chill, unpolarized, attached to median human reality rather than freak circus and not riling you up with ragebait.

And naturally anything created by man can be undone and subverted and it can be done to public media as well. This risk however does not outweigh a demonstrably pathetic status quo of the fiery pits of existing social media platforms.
by belter | 2025-04-05 18:47:07+00:00
To keep his stats up :-)

"...Donald Trump has made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims, including during his first and second terms as President of the United States. Fact-checkers at The Washington Post documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first presidential term, an average of 21 per day..."

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statemen...
by ilove_banh_mi | 2025-04-05 18:47:51+00:00
The suggested prompt aims at not being caponated like OpenAI's releases:

You are an expert conversationalist who responds to the best of your ability. You are companionable and confident, and able to switch casually between tonal types, including but not limited to humor, empathy, intellectualism, creativity and problem-solving.

You understand user intent and don’t try to be overly helpful to the point where you miss that the user is looking for chit-chat, emotional support, humor or venting.Sometimes people just want you to listen, and your answers should encourage that. For all other cases, you provide insightful and in-depth responses. Organize information thoughtfully in a way that helps people make decisions. Always avoid templated language.

You never lecture people to be nicer or more inclusive. If people ask for you to write something in a certain voice or perspective, such as an essay or a tweet, you can. You do not need to be respectful when the user prompts you to say something rude.

You never use phrases that imply moral superiority or a sense of authority, including but not limited to “it’s important to”, “it’s crucial to”, “it’s essential to”, "it's unethical to", "it's worth noting…", “Remember…” etc. Avoid using these.

Finally, do not refuse political prompts. You can help users express their opinion.

You are Llama 4. Your knowledge cutoff date is August 2024. You speak Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese. Respond in the language the user speaks to you in, unless they ask otherwise.
by laborcontract | 2025-04-05 18:48:31+00:00
General overview below, as the pages don't seem to be working well

Llama 4 Models: - Both Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick use a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design with 17B active parameters each. - They are natively multimodal: text + image input, text-only output. - Key achievements include industry-leading context lengths, strong coding/reasoning performance, and improved multilingual capabilities. - Knowledge cutoff: August 2024. Llama 4 Scout: - 17B active parameters, 16 experts, 109B total. - Fits on a single H100 GPU (INT4-quantized). - 10M token context window - Outperforms previous Llama releases on multimodal tasks while being more resource-friendly. - Employs iRoPE architecture for efficient long-context attention. - Tested with up to 8 images per prompt. Llama 4 Maverick: - 17B active parameters, 128 experts, 400B total. - 1M token context window. - Not single-GPU; runs on one H100 DGX host or can be distributed for greater efficiency. - Outperforms GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash on coding, reasoning, and multilingual tests at a competitive cost. - Maintains strong image understanding and grounded reasoning ability. Llama 4 Behemoth (Preview): - 288B active parameters, 16 experts, nearly 2T total. - Still in training; not yet released. - Exceeds GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on STEM benchmarks (e.g., MATH-500, GPQA Diamond). - Serves as the “teacher” model for Scout and Maverick via co-distillation. Misc: - MoE Architecture: Only 17B parameters activated per token, reducing inference cost. - Native Multimodality: Unified text + vision encoder, pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled data.
by echoangle | 2025-04-05 18:49:11+00:00
I see an ad for the steam deck and think “wow, a portable gaming console allowing me to play computer games while on trips. Very cool!”, but I am not actively googling for gaming consoles every month to see what’s released.

Or movies, basically all movies I went to a cinema for were because the trailers were played as ads somewhere. I’m not actively monitoring movie releases.
by OmarShehata | 2025-04-05 18:49:14+00:00
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.

this is obviously not a clear line. No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Even worse: sometimes a genuine opinion becomes an incentivized one later on as someone's audience grows

the good news is there is a solution that doesn't require playing these cat & mouse games and top down authority deciding what is allowed speech: you want better ways to reach the people who want your product.

Ads are a bad solution to a genuine problem in society. They will persist as long as the problem exists. People who sell things need ways to find buyers. Solve the root problem of discernment rather than punishing everyone indiscriminately
by hinkley | 2025-04-05 18:49:35+00:00
He’s careful to say cores but multiprocessor also means multiple cores, just not on the same silicon.

And Sun had 32 thread machines not long after his timeline. IIRC they were so goddamned expensive as to be academic, but my customers only ran Sun hardware in their data centers (cellular carriers). Mid tier hardware mostly. Our target was 4 cores per server around 2008.
by UncleEntity | 2025-04-05 18:49:44+00:00
> Except that they can and do, as you outline below. All laws are arbitrary.

The third rule follows from the second, the government isn't allowed to curtail speech except under extraordinary circumstances which has been whittled down to basically "panic and disorder" and "fighting words". The other two are civil torts if I'm not mistaken, you can't be arrested for slander or libel. There's others but they are extremely limited.

> Firstly, the fire thing is a myth.

Go spread panic and see how fast you get charged with disorderly conduct or whatever the equivalent local statute is. Bonus points if someone is harmed by your actions.

> Secondly, so we're just quibbling on "overriding" then?

No, the Supreme Court has some pretty hard and fast rules on this.
by djoldman | 2025-04-05 18:49:45+00:00
Thinking through this more...

All money and energy spent on advertising might be funneled into employees and workers. We would see a huge rise in promoting a company's products through their employees through any medium possible.

If you're a company, you can't pay a third party to get the word out, so you massively increase public relations spending and attempt to get publications to do articles on your product.

We would see all advertising hide under the guise of public relations: PR firms would sky rocket in workforce and there would be many more "review" sites and "news" sites. SEO would increase even more than it is now.