MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by munificent | 2025-04-08 17:49:31+00:00
Some species have properties that seem way beyond what would be necessary for evolutionary success. For example, an inland taipan has enough venom in a single bite to kill 100 people. There is no imaginable situation where a taipan is going to need to bite an entire village and take them all out. Why on Earth did it evolve such insanely strong venom?

When you dig into it, these outliers are often the result of an evolutionary arms race [1]. In teh case of the inland taipan, they are often prey for mulga snake and perenties, who have evolved immunity to their venom. So you've got a feedback loop where the taipan keeps evolving stronger venom to fight back against predators, who continue evolving stronger immunity to the same venom. Run that loop a million years and you get a snake who can kill a busload of people.

Human intelligence is another such outlier. I know it's popular to talk about how animal intelligence is underestimated but even so, human intelligence is just astronimcally greater than any other species. Sure a squirrel can find a bunch of nuts it buried. Humans have built machines and landed them on other planets. Our intelligence is orders of magnitude greater than any other species.

My pet hypothesis for years is that this must be the result of an evolutionary arms race within the species. Humans are a profoundly social species. We are mostly too fragile to survive in the wild on our own. The functioning survival unit of humans is a hunter-gatherer group. We are sort of like eusocial animals like ants.

But unlike ants who can mostly rely on simple chemical signals to tell which other ants are part of their anthill, we have to rely on social cues. There is a very strong incentive to be able to deceive humans in other groups and infiltrate or sabotage their group. If you're smart enough to sneak in, you can steal a lot or do a lot of damage. Likewise, there's an equally strong incentive to be able to suss those bad actors out to prevent them from doing that. The smarter you are, and the better you're able to remember people and describe them to others, the harder it is to get taken advantage of.

Turn that evolutionary crank a few hundred thousand years, and you get a species so smart that the only other animals that can possibly hope to compete with them in terms of intelligence are other Homo sapiens.

If we weren't so deeply social, I don't think we'd be so smart. We have these huge brains in order to navigate the fantastically complex social world which we have in turn created by having these huge brains.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race
by wyldfire | 2025-04-08 17:49:49+00:00
If you look at it instead like a 1D version of a crossword puzzle, then it's not skipping to the end so much as just filling out one of the other words.

I see it as a UI limitation that you can't fill it in (how would you show it?). But it's fine as is, I'll just use it to help me solve the adjacent ones.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-08 17:50:02+00:00
"promoted, or transferred within the last year"

You normally want to keep the people you promote. You also normally want to keep the people you transferred to that new important project you spun up.

They reason they fired this specific classification is because it was easier to, not because there was any justification to fire them. I thought above you said it's hard to fire people without reason?
by timewizard | 2025-04-08 17:50:05+00:00
> This may be true, but because there's basically no on ramp to running on a mainframe

You can get a partition of IBM Z to run in the cloud. The cost is about $5/hr for the smallest configuration.

> Splurging on network infrastructure with multi-chasis redundancy is an easier step to take to get to a more reliable system than building against a totally different system architecture.

Yes and no. If you truly need that redundancy than the mainframe is going to provide a much better version of it. SYSPLEXs and LPARs are some insanely powerful technologies.
by WinstonSmith84 | 2025-04-08 17:50:11+00:00
> Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance.

Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil - it's not even used in other Mercosur countries, what's the chance of having that adopted in other countries... And, that's problem #1.

How much do you trust your government with your money? A system like Pix don't stand a chance to get a worldwide adoption - maybe people are naive but governments won't unify to adopt a common system controlled by just a single entity / country.

What we may however end up with, are dozens of systems like Pix, one for each country, union, etc. Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant (see point 1)
by jeffwask | 2025-04-08 17:50:24+00:00
Considering I have been using different search engines since Excite and Alta Vista, the state of modern search is worse than when crawlers were in their infancy. It is so front loaded with SEO, a search for a simple doc reference gives you ten pages of links back to the sales and marketing pages for 12 applications that do something similar.

AI is a better search for now because SEO and paid prioritization in search hasn't infested that ecosystem yet but it's only a matter of time.

I dropped Google search years ago but every engine is experiencing enshitification.
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-08 17:50:27+00:00
If you look closer at Studio, you might find that its frontend was based on an older version of GT :). Luke did a nice job on it and he learnt the environment by himself when it was rather crude.

How you create contextual tools is secondary. Emacs' ability to create extensions is certainly interesting. But here are some questions to consider: - how many contextual tools do you have for your system? 10s, 100s, 1000s? - or, for how many and what kind of questions don't you have contextual tools? and why is that?

At the extreme, when practicing Moldable Development, we tend to address dozens of questions per day per developer through contextual tools :)
by not_your_vase | 2025-04-08 17:50:40+00:00
Okay, so being on this site, I imagine that you have seen a computer at least on TV - most likely you know the answer.

If you were Reddit, how would you try to recognize that an unwanted user is trying to register? Email address, IP address, browser fingerprint.

1. Use a brand new email address. 2. Use an IP to visit reddit that you haven't used yet. If you don't have such an IP, then it's time to go and get a new mobile subscription. Never use other IP to visit reddit from that account - it shouldn't be associated with any of the previously flagged addresses. You switch to wifi accidentally while being logged in, and that account is done. Also, the IP that you used to register is tainted too at the same time. 3. Use Firefox, just to be sure.

Of course there can other factors too, but especially the first two are the bare minimum.

Happy trolling.
by shrubble | 2025-04-08 17:51:02+00:00
To add to this: they had $750 million in 1963 dollars, in parts and no shipping computers; inventory control was so bad that they had to have guys with clipboards to physically go into the warehouse and count parts.

They announced it and started getting a huge number of orders; IBM hired 1000 people a month and kept up that pace of hiring for 5 years.
by tmpz22 | 2025-04-08 17:51:50+00:00
If they had taken just say $40 million would they be able to sustain their project for the foreseeable future and perhaps not yield as much future product direction and equity?

I honestly don't know how this big dealmaking works but it strikes me that when you take out this big of an obligation that the obligation has a gravity that may drag you in a direction you (or consumers) do not want to go.

Love Tailscale as a product (as does everyone I talk to) but genuinely want to learn more about the trade-offs as usually when we see big dollar signs all we do is celebrate.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-08 17:51:53+00:00
cali is the butt of half the jokes in America for a reason. i'm glad you like your view though. i'm glad you like your government insurance but my private health insurance is also very good and i don't have to pay much (if anything) for things like that. i'm also alive today thanks to good private insurance and the level of care it afforded, the range of specialists i could see, which most government-run systems would not have covered.

if y'all are content, fine i guess. but it is true that the current european model is sustainable. the FT ran a good piece recently discussing how America reducing or ending the indirect european defense subsidy, combined with slowing growth and an ageing population, means that model must come to an end. i don't begrudge you the years you enjoyed it but certainly not for me.

you were saying you think no GMOs, smaller vehicles, banned guns, and less money are worth this. i think that's a terrible way to live and would hate doing so. my objection was precisely to you applying your lens and values to America, American values, and our way of life.
by jjani | 2025-04-08 17:52:20+00:00
> They cant produce new things, and so meta and google are struggling to compete when actual merit matters, and they cant just brute force the solutions.

You haven't been keeping up. Less than 2 weeks ago, Google released a model that has crushed the competition, clearly being SotA while currently effectively free for personal use.

Gemini 2.0 was already good, people just weren't paying attention. In fact 1.5 pro was already good, and ironically remains the #1 model at certain very specific tasks, despite being set for deprecation in September.

Google just suffered from their completely botched initial launch way back when (remember Bard?), rushed before the product was anywhere near ready, making them look lile a bunch of clowns compared to e.g. OpenAI. That left a lasting impression on those who don't devote significant time to keeping up with newer releases.
by codedokode | 2025-04-08 17:52:20+00:00
> I have a feeling those older user would do just fine if Windows behaved like Windows 95 to Windows 7 and Office behaved like Office 95 to Office 2003. And I don't really think it's the users' intelligence that is the problem.

Desktop UI is too complicated and over-engineered. Compare desktop UI to phone for example, people have less problem learning it.
by Taek | 2025-04-08 17:52:21+00:00
Exposure has value! The meme around trying to pay artists with exposure is because some people think their "exposure" has meaningful value when they are offering to expose the artist to 100 people, 99 of whom aren't likely even target customers.

Studio Ghibli on the other hand had exposure to millions of people (maybe hundreds of millions), and probably >5% of those were potential customers.

So yes, being paid in exposure makes sense, if the exposure is actually worth what the art is worth. But most people offering to pay in exposure are overvaluing their exposure by 100x or more.
by sailingparrot | 2025-04-08 17:53:01+00:00
> This is because in the workflow that is one of the steps that is naively applied without consideration of multi edit possibility.

Unconvinced by that tbh. This could simply be a bias with the encoder/decoder or the model itself, many image generation models showed behaviour like this. Also unsure why a sepia filter would always be applied if it was a workflow, what's the point of this?

Personally, I don't believe this is just an agentic workflow. Agentic workflows can't really do anything a human couln't do manually, they just make the process much faster. I spent 2 years working with image models, specifically around controllability of the output, and there is just no way of getting this kind of edits with a regular diffusion model just through smarter prompting or other tricks. So I don't see how an agentic workflow would help.

I think you can only get there via a true multimodal model.
by GodelNumbering | 2025-04-08 17:53:07+00:00
This was the result of almost a year long effort and hundreds of prototypes :)

It currently auto-publishes for 1000 ish US companies by market cap, relies on 8-K filing as a trigger. Hallucination note: https://www.signalbloom.ai/hallucination-benchmark

e.g. https://www.signalbloom.ai/news/NVDA will take you to NVDA earnings
by int_19h | 2025-04-08 17:53:30+00:00
I'm actually pro-AI and I use AI assistants for coding, but I'm also very concerned that the way those things will be deployed at scale in practice is likely to lead to severe degradation of software quality across the board.

Why the hand-wringing? Well, for one thing, as a developer I still have to work on that code, fix the bugs in it, maintain it etc. You could say that this is a positive since AI slop would provide for endless job security for people who know how to clean up after it - and it's true, it does, but it's a very tedious and boring job.

But I'm not just a developer, either - I'm also a user, and thinking about how low the average software quality already is today, the prospect of it getting even worse across the board is very unpleasant.

And as for things taking care of themselves, I don't think they will. So long as companies can still ship something, it's "good enough", and cost-cutting will justify everything else. That's just how our economy works these days.
by codingwagie | 2025-04-08 17:53:36+00:00
gemini 2.5 pro isnt good, and if you think it is, you arent using LLMs correctly. The model gets crushed by o1 pro and sonnet 3.7 thinking. Build a large contextual prompt ( > 50k tokens) with a ton of code, and see how bad it is. I cancelled my gemini subscription
by echelon | 2025-04-08 17:54:09+00:00
GPT 4o images is the future of all image gen.

Every other player: Black Forest Labs' Flux, Stability.ai's Stable Diffusion, and even closed models like Ideogram and Midjourney, are all on the path to extinction.

Image generation and editing must be multimodal. Full stop.

Google Imagen will probably be the first model to match the capabilities of 4o. I'm hoping one of the open weights labs or Chinese AI giants will release a model that demonstrates similar capabilities soon. That'll keep the race neck and neck.
by fidotron | 2025-04-08 17:54:59+00:00
Yeah, I honestly couldn't get Tailscale to work reliably at all. DNS, routing, firewalls etc. My overall impression was it will work if either you go for it on your entire local subnet, or you have a very simple local network topology. Having local nodes inexplicably talking to each other via a cloud relay basically all the time just isn't acceptable. (And webrtc could always find the local candidates when doing ICE, so it's not that).

It's interesting because they have clearly demonstrated a demand for such a thing, but the "just works" pitch is a fantasy, at least today.
by bokohut | 2025-04-08 17:55:05+00:00
The long game pattern and cycle is obvious for those with the vision to see beyond the horizon. Politics obviously has a foundation in the choice of countries to control and operate their own payments systems given the value of the data and the social connections it reveals, aka national security. All security starts at the foundation and without financial security one is indebted and controlled by another. As the world enters a new cycle around those changing patterns the basis of the control they seek is founded in individual continuity without exterior influence by their adversaries. This can be seen today with the financial controls that can greatly impact an entire country filled with individuals that have no association with the reasoning of why the restriction was placed to begin with. We have many options today for instant cross border payments and as more and more countries move to own and operate their own payment platforms so too will those cross border payments methods grow in adoption foregoing an adversaries oversight and control.

I speak from direct experience in these words as the architect and founder of multiple acquired payment systems over the decades because this past December I was contacted by an African country seeking to build, own, and operate their own payment platform backed by their energy reserves. The concerns and threats around a country's monetary system are real and in time we will see more and more countries taking up this initiative to cut out the middlemen.

As a bonus over and above countries moving in this direction we can also see businesses doing the exact same thing over the last decade. Thee who controls the money also has induced influence over the users of that money as we see this more and more through 'progress'. Feel free to replace the word "money" with the word "data" in my previous statement as well.

Stay Healthy!
by AlotOfReading | 2025-04-08 17:55:10+00:00
We have very different priorities. Because I work on safety critical systems, language semantics are very important in order to enable things like formal executable semantics and certified compilers. When I sign my name to an inspection, the inspection is relative to the language semantics. Things like exploitability and even performance are pretty far down the list of concerns, unless they happen to impact functional safety.

In many scenarios you have to use "unsafe"

I don't agree, because unsafe is a part of the language. It's widely accepted practice in C & C++ to only use carefully chosen subsets of each language and this is enforced with linters and coding guidelines. You can straightforwardly ban unsafe the same way, or review uses more carefully, etc.

The question is how difficult it is avoid writing such overflows.

It's nigh-impossible as far as I can tell. I already use formal methods, sanitizers, testing, static analysis, careful design, valgrind, intensive reviews, MISRA, etc. I can still quickly find new issues by firing up the fuzzer or looking at another team's code. Other large projects like Chrome and Linux have thousands of competent eyes on them and still deal with these issues too. What is everyone missing?

e.g. signed overflow is not an issue at all because you just tell your compiler to turn them into traps.

Leaving aside the unnecessarily hyperbolic point enabling traps for my systems might literally kill someone, traps usually aren't a well supported operational mode. GCC's ftrapv is broken for example, ubsan isn't recommended for production, and GCC doesn't implement ubsan-minimal. MSVC doesn't support overflow traps at all, nor do most certified compilers. "Just use clang" obviously isn't what you're intending here, so I'm unsure how to interpret this.

In regards to memory safety being the biggest issue, I'm referencing the "70% of high severity bugs" numbers that have been put out by Microsoft and the Chrome teams and repeated by CISA in their memory safety roadmaps.

It's great that you haven't experienced large numbers of memory safety issues, but I can only speak to the lived experience of heartbleed and others. I see memory safety issues daily. I don't see supply chain attacks frequently and given how much publicity accompanied the discovery of the XZ attack, I suspect that's true for others.
by homebrewer | 2025-04-08 17:55:40+00:00
Most of this was successfully done 20 years ago by tinc, which is a project written by a couple of European guys in their free time. It even supports routing traffic through other peers and does peer discovery just like BitTorrent (but before BitTorrent even existed) — there is no need for a central server.

What tailscale has over it is hype, lots and lots of hype. Also a much more well thought out, and arguably more secure VPN protocol underneath, which is why GP's comment is on point.
by ignoramous | 2025-04-08 17:55:47+00:00
> they should be a good steward

Tailscale did make a donation to WireGuard. They have regularly contributed to wireguard-go, including the complicated GRO/GSO bits.

"Tailscale made a donation during September 2022, as part of their business centered around WireGuard." https://www.wireguard.com/donations/ / https://archive.vn/MMAXO

> Tailscale is pretty much Wireguard with a GUI on top.

Well, isn't PUBG a GUI on top of Unreal?
by rebanevapustus | 2025-04-08 17:56:12+00:00
It's cool that "we" have a payment system, however, I would never be comfortable using something whose people in charge are those that keep us (not me particularly because I've gladly left the country almost a decade ago) in this misery.

I use Crypto for everything you've mentioned. It's instant, almost free, and alexandre(he deserves a lowercased a) can't take my money if he feels that writing his name in lowercase makes me unworthy of my civil rights.
by luqtas | 2025-04-08 17:56:16+00:00
more than 50% of the rural brazilian population doesn't hav internet access (that's 36 million people) [0]

the central bank admin. director says physical money is still the base of brazilian transactions [1]

[1] https://exame.com/economia/dinheiro-em-especie-ainda-e-a-bas...

[0] https://www.ecommerceupdate.org/noticias/brasileiro-esta-dei...
by a4isms | 2025-04-08 17:56:19+00:00
For those who haven't heard of it, "The Hawthorne Effect" is the name given to a phenomena where when a person or group being studied is aware they are being studied, their performance goes up but as much as 50% for 4-8 weeks, then regresses to its norm.

This is true if they are just being observed, or if some novel new processes are introduced. If the new things are beneficial, the performance rises for 4-8 weeks as usual, but when it regresses it regresses to a higher performance reflecting the value of the new process.

But when poor management introduce a counter-productive change, the Hawthorne Effect makes it look like a resounding success for 4-8 weeks. Then the effect fades, and performance drops below the original level. Sufficiently devious managers either move on to new projects or blame the workers for failing to maintain the new higher pace of performance.

This explains a lot of the incentive for certain types of leaders to champion arbitrary changes, take a victory lap, and then disassociate themselves from accountability for the long-term success or failure of their initiative.

(There is quite a bit of controversy over what the mechanisms for the Hawthorne Effect are, and whether change alone can introduce it for whether participants need to feel they are being observed, but the model as I see it fits my anecdotal experience where new processes are always accompanied by attempts to meet new performance goals, and everyone is extremely aware that the outcome is being measured.)
by dandersch | 2025-04-08 17:56:38+00:00
>The 1880 queen and her daughter were drowning but no one could save them because looking at or touching the queen was forbidden by commoners. So they drowned while screaming for help.

Seems to be a myth: "There is an often repeated myth that the many witnesses to the accident did not dare to touch the queen, a capital offense—not even to save her life. However, this was not the case; the King's diary records that boatmen dived into the water, pulled the queen and her daughter from the entangling curtains, and carried them to another boat, where attendants worked in vain to resuscitate them."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunanda_Kumariratana
by _heimdall | 2025-04-08 17:57:04+00:00
Yeah you can customize them a bit.

What I've always wanted to be able to do though is restyle the actual DOM element as it animates from one part of the screen to another. Unless this changed pretty recently, my understanding is that the browser is basically grabbing a screenshot of the DOM element before it navigates and animates the snapshot itself across the screen.

I've also run into random issues related to having to tag the element targets. I don't remember all the details now so I can't give a great example, but especially when using libraries like HTMX I was having issues trying to make sure the right elements were tagged to animate correctly.

Conditional animations can be done, though its a little odd to wrangle and you can end up with code mixed between HTML, JS, and CSS to work with it.